SPEAKER_02: even from the first time I put the first prototype, which was essentially toilet paper rolls and like, you know, just a baseball cap full of like electronics. And I realized this, well, that's when I realized these two worlds came together. One, like the comfort aspect of lying in bed reading. And then two, you know, this, this nicotine gum idea of like, well, where are we going to go with personal computing devices? And I really do think that this is better for humanity if we figure out how to provide other options besides just my iPhone for personal computing. And that's what, that's what drew me back in. This Week in Startups is brought to you by

SPEAKER_03: .techdomains has a new program called startups.tech, where you can get your startup featured on This Week in Startups. Go to startups.tech slash Jason to find out how. Crowdbotics, great ideas can change the world. And Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist. And issue is the all-in-one platform for creating and distributing beautiful digital content. Get started with issue today for free or sign up for an annual premium account and get 50% off when you go to issue.com slash podcast and use promo code twist. That's I-S-S-U-U.com slash podcast and use promo code twist.

SPEAKER_05: Hey everybody, welcome back to the program. I was on the Twitter and I saw a really creative idea go by

SPEAKER_07: and I said, get me this person for the podcast. And that idea was a pair of glasses that are essentially a Kindle in sunglasses format. And the company's name is soul S O L. And the founder's name

SPEAKER_05: is Ben. That's right. I got it right. Okay. Great. Um, and I see my, uh, friend, uh, Gary Chan shout out to poster, uh, led the $5 million seed round. I assume when he was at initialized back in

SPEAKER_07: the day. Yep. Before he went to a, uh, and he tweeted it and said, uh, that it was a really cool idea. So tell me, welcome to the program. Thank you, Jason for having me. Tell our audience what you're

SPEAKER_16: building and why we need an e-reader in the form of glasses. Yeah. Well, as you said, we are building

SPEAKER_02: the world's first wearable e-reader. It provides you a completely immersive reading experience. And the two pillars for that reading experience to be immersive, it has to be really comfortable and it has to be distraction free. So the, you know, I'd say the entry level, uh, you know, obvious pitch use case is you don't have to hold the book. You lie in bed, completely comfortable. You're on the couch, you're on the beach, whatever. You don't have to hold the book. You have a little remote in your hand to turn the page, much like you would turn the page with the big button on a presentation clicker. And, uh, it's a really comfortable way to read the, the other aspect of this, the distraction free aspect of this has to do with the bigger narrative that we think is happening in tech and specifically in personal devices. And namely the fact that we're distracted a lot, you know, you pull out your iPhone all the time, your smartphone all the time. You've got a bunch of notifications, maybe some of it's work, maybe some of it's social. It's just a cacophony of noise in our heads. And reading is essentially the act of reading requires a different kind of focus. So when we try to engage in a deeper activity, like reading, it's really hard to do that on our phones. And we argue it's even hard to do that on traditional e-readers because the phone is still right

SPEAKER_21: there in your pocket. Uh, you're tempted to pull it out. If there's a break in the action in the book, I'm sure you've experienced that. I'm sure your listeners have experienced this when you go to the

SPEAKER_05: movies, uh, and the movie theater, the, you know, the director's like, you know, what I would love to do is give you an incredibly beautiful shot, uh, that, you know, cost a million dollars to make. And you're like, oh, uh, you're not talking and nothing's blowing up. Let me check my Twitter feed and of course, or my iMessage or signal or whatever you're on. Um, so I guess, you know, a demo is worth a billion words. Sure. I'd love for you to demo this for us. And I, I don't know

SPEAKER_29: if you have a prototype there where you could show people the profile of it.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, of course. Well, I, I can hold up a, I can hold up the one I read on every night,

SPEAKER_32: which is, uh, my unit here is, is working. It's not a prototype. It's an actual product.

SPEAKER_33: It's a product. It's coming this fall. And, uh, but what I'll do and just show us, uh,

SPEAKER_05: yeah, of course a little bit. It looks for people who are watching looking at it. It's, uh, looks like a chunky pair of sunglasses, the stems or what do you call the things that go over your ear? Yeah. Temples. Temples. Okay. So those are a little bit thicker. I assume it has batteries in there or something. Correct. Yep. Okay. And each side. Great. And then the, instead of just having, um, glass there, they look a little bit more like goggles or binoculars, even. So what, what, what is that component, I guess? Uh, and then also there, it looks like there's buttons on the side. Is that left and right or something? Turn the page.

SPEAKER_40: No, no buttons on the device, but I'll describe a little bit of the features. And so you asked

SPEAKER_02: about the lenses, the lenses are what's called a pancake lens. It provides a lot of magnification in a very short, you know, Z axis throw, which is why we can get them to be thinner than, you know, say a full, uh, headset or, or a big thing that you would have to put a strap behind your head for, uh, the nose bridge is adjustable so that you can, you know, kind of mold it like Gumby style to your nose. And then what you see here on the top is, uh, adjustment for what's called the interpupillary distance or the distance between the pupils of your eyes to, you know, ensure maximum comfort. Got it. Now you also mentioned binoculars. They do have a, the functionality to turn each lens similar to a binoculars. Oh wow. For diopter adjustment. So that, you know, if you're, if you have a prescription that you need to adjust for, you don't have to wear your glasses or contacts or

SPEAKER_01: most people don't have to wear glasses or contacts while they're, while they're, uh,

SPEAKER_46: Beautiful. What is that going to cost? 500 bucks or something? 350. Oh, okay. Wow. That's a pretty

SPEAKER_47: low. So you don't make any money on the hardware or barely? Well, we, uh, at scale, we will make

SPEAKER_20: money on the hardware actually. And, and some of that has to do with the technical decisions we,

SPEAKER_02: we made to get really long battery life, you know, really light form factor. It's, it's much more, uh, we call it, it's closer to an IOT type device than it is a full computer on your face,

SPEAKER_05: like others are building. Got it. So because you're using an e-reader technology, it's not going to be playing a movie ever. You don't need to have some crazy OLED device. Right. And that

SPEAKER_52: would burn your battery out. You don't need to have a sick processor. What kind of processor

SPEAKER_01: do you run this off of? Get this dual core 240 megahertz processor straight out of the late nineties.

SPEAKER_57: Wow. I was about to say like, uh, can you still buy those? Yeah. Well, in the, in fact,

SPEAKER_02: yes, because of the, uh, you know, IOT, they're just tiny, tiny little packages, uh, that are, you know, seven millimeters by seven millimeters. And so, yeah, the whole, the whole thing's built around long battery life and really lightweight. And what would you get in terms of battery life

SPEAKER_00: here in terms of reading? 25 hours, continuous reading in low light conditions. So much more

SPEAKER_05: like a traditional e-reader. Wow. So if you were trying to read, uh, you know, a really long Stephen King book, you might even be able to do it with this reader. Uh, all right. So, uh, you were gonna demo a little bit when I saw, uh, I, I looked at your webpage before I invited John as a guest, it looked like the text was a little bit pixelated and I wasn't sure if that was a like, uh, stylistic choice or something, but what does it look like when you're looking at it? Am I looking at a giant page? Am I looking at a sentence? Is it wrapping with four words or 10? Yeah. I'm curious about how that visually look. Yeah. Would you like me

SPEAKER_20: to share that previous? Oh, sure. Let's do that. Yeah. Great. Um, so we, we talked

SPEAKER_02: about the glasses already, so I'll go straight to this navigation video and what, you know, for those who are just listening, this is a video that's zooming in on the text. It shows a bit of the navigation between the various books that might be on your device and then goes in and shows you a, a page of text at a time. And yeah, to your question, um, this is, this is a render. It is very accurate in terms of, you know, dimensionally and number of pixels, but what you don't get here is you don't get, um, what, what e-ink actually looks and feels like, which because it's, it's, you know, it is not precise pixels. Each capsule is what they call it. Each capsule essentially kinds of has a little bleed to it. So where you see sharper pixelated edges here, um, those are a lot softer when you're looking

SPEAKER_69: at it, you know, the text of the device. I had a feeling it was the emulator or whatever

SPEAKER_70: you're using that makes it look a little old school, right? Um, but, uh, yeah, you get

SPEAKER_34: about half as many. Am I correct though? When you went to the articles that you're pulling up, uh, you, you plan to pull up RSS feeds or something. Yeah. So we're working on integrations

SPEAKER_40: right now with those types of stuff. Right now we can use, um, part of my goal is to get

SPEAKER_02: people out of their inbox for a lot of these things that should be consumed in a different type of format. And so, you know, set up filters, auto forward your, um, you know, daily news drips, whether it would come from some stack or specific publications. Yeah. Thinking

SPEAKER_78: about how do you connect with other news feeds? And, um,

SPEAKER_47: So you could forward to an email address, uh, like you can do with your Kindle, like they'll

SPEAKER_05: give you a secret email address to send a PDF. So you get forward your favorite sub stack or axios or inside newsletter, whatever.

SPEAKER_82: And basically what I do every day now. Yep.

SPEAKER_05: Oh, wow. And then you have to, of course, figure out the formatting, uh, because you just need plain text and things are always coming in HTML now. So that's a little bit

SPEAKER_40: of a technical challenge you'd think, but guess what's happened in the last, uh, Oh, nine

SPEAKER_02: months. That makes that extremely easy for us. Uh, Apple's new product. Nope. It's all LLM processed. This is, it's like this, the LLM just takes everything and it does the right work. In fact, we get a couple of other great features from the LLM. For example, if you got say 30 minutes a day of your normal news drips, but you don't have 30 minutes. We also give you the five minutes summary that just got it summarizes all of it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So you can say, Hey, send me Casey Newton's, you know, thousand words, but give me a hundred word version of it. That's very nice. Exactly. Or like, say you're a few days

SPEAKER_02: away from the most recent reading session in your novel, and you've kind of forgot where

SPEAKER_21: you were. It just gives you the summary of your last reading session. It's like, the LLMs are so great for a reading tech company like us. Cause yeah, it's all text and processing.

SPEAKER_05: That's a killer feature. Catch me up feature. Yeah. I forgot where I was at. Give me a little summary of what I've already read. Well, let me ask you a question about that. Um, and about just generally eBooks. So you can get eBooks that are not protected. I guess there's like a easy, what is it? Esa ePub or something is the file format is a typical. Yeah. But a lot

SPEAKER_52: of these are owned by the Kindle and Amazon. So if I got a whole library on my Kindle and they DRM it up, I believe. So it's got all this digital rights management. I'm screwed.

SPEAKER_96: So you're gonna have another bookstore and you have to do all these deals with all the publishers

SPEAKER_02: all over again to get these to my device. Yeah. We're working on the content partnerships now. Now, of course we're, what is it? 16, 17 years into the e-reader world. So these, it is not as complicated as it was 20 years ago to kind of aggregate and build your own marketplace. And a lot of, uh, Amazon has their own, uh, DRM, but then, you know, there's an Adobe DRM that is kind of more generally used by a lot of different providers. So once you plug into that Adobe DRM system, so yeah,

SPEAKER_48: we're working through all those details, but we anticipate a marketplace very similar with some

SPEAKER_05: existing bookstore in the world and just get it all done. Yeah. Okay. So that's not announced yet. I take it. You're working on that. Correct. Got it. Okay. Uh, well, I mean, that'd be amazing if Amazon would just let you, uh, send my Kindle stuff over, um, but yeah, it'd be up to them. Well, and they also could be sharp elbowed about it. Cause they could see this as competition. Um, and I think, you know, this is why the justice department, not to make this a

SPEAKER_96: political thing or whatever, the justice department is looking at big tech and saying like interoperability.

SPEAKER_05: And this is one of the reasons I was critical of Lena Khan. Um, our new head, uh, over there,

SPEAKER_96: because she wants to stop, you know, Facebook from buying, you know, some, you know, uh, VR app, uh, when really interoperability and forcing Facebook or forcing Apple to allow a third party app store or forcing Amazon to allow other devices to get Kindle books. That's a much better use of her time. And I think it's like very ineffective what she's doing, um, in terms of

SPEAKER_73: blocking acquisitions. I think it's like, uh, it's futile and it's like skating to where the puck has already been. So there anymore, but, um, well, I'm sure you could appreciate

SPEAKER_69: it as a startup. We're not quite to the scale of, uh, having our lobbyists, uh, angle for us

SPEAKER_02: in the right direction, but we'll have these conversations and, you know, we'll hope that

SPEAKER_78: partnerships can emerge as it is a new category that, uh, you know, others haven't anticipated yet.

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SPEAKER_116: What a great domain name. Don't wait and go now to startups dot tech slash Jason today. Running a

SPEAKER_05: hardware startup is brutally hard to explain to people exactly how hard it is to run one of these

SPEAKER_119: companies and why and how you've mitigated against just the brutality of hardware startups. Sure. Sure.

SPEAKER_121: Yeah. So hardware is definitely startup on hard mode. Um, and then some, and, and a lot of it has to do

SPEAKER_02: with, uh, one, there's, you know, obviously a business model. You have to, you have to build a physical thing yet that has a certain cost to it. You don't necessarily get the same kind of margins as you would by, you know, doing enterprise SaaS, et cetera. Um, so that, you know, there is just some business model stuff that you have to think about and, and really be conscious of what is going to be my overall bomb from day one. Right. And so we're thinking about materials. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. The build of materials, the total cost of every little piece in part, whether it be electronic or plastic or optics or whatnot that goes into the final product. Yeah. And, um, so, so that's, that's one business model challenge. Then there's just the practical challenge of, of coordinating and, and examining the trade-offs between every software decision you make, every mechanical decision you make in our case, every optical decision you make in terms of lens technology, every electrical decision, you decision you make around the different chips that you pick and the different, you know, and everyone has a trade-off in terms of speed, performance, otherwise, you know, size, battery consumption, power consumption, you know, weight, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's, you know, it is a challenge. It is hard. Part of the reason I enjoy, and this is my first hardware startup, but part of the reason I enjoy it is it's like the best min, max optimization problem ever, right? Yeah. Because you have all these different, um, challenges coming at you and, and you get to sort through that now in terms of how you navigate it. Um, you know, my CT and I, we talk a lot about this. This is, um, starting at this type of startup is not something you probably want a bunch of people who are right out of college to do. Um, you know, this is, this is my third startup. I was an investor for a while in between there. Um, my CTO has been at a number of startups, our head of hardware, you know, he's been in his career for 30 years. Our head of manufacturing has been in her career for 30 years. So you, you assemble a team that has just stood up, you know, physical things many, many times. So in terms of having the relationships with the contract manufacturers who are making various aspects of the parts, figuring out, you know, how do you, how do you go from prototype to, uh, manufacturing? I think, you know, Elon Musk and, uh, the recent investor meeting talked about how hard or how easy it is to build a prototype, how hard it is to, you know, actually build a scale and then how impossible it is to build a scale profitably. Right. And so, you know, we're, we're, uh, we rely on that expertise of our team to be able to go from the prototype phase into this,

SPEAKER_34: you know, scaling phase as we're doing now. Yeah. And there's something about like,

SPEAKER_27: whatever component is the least reliable or the least available, the furthest behind in delivery that defines when you ship. That's exactly right. Yeah. It's so brutal. Yep. Um, which is why

SPEAKER_05: Elon, uh, I've met, I've had many conversations with him about it. So much of the model Y model

SPEAKER_27: three, he makes himself now. And so if you look at Mercedes, they were talking about their software

SPEAKER_05: issues and, you know, GM's talked about this before every single component in their car has its own software, whether it's the seats, uh, the heating and the HVAC, the, the entertainment, the navigation system, and then they have to figure out how to get all those things to talk to each other. Whereas in a

SPEAKER_27: Tesla, it's one set. And then they even make their HVAC. Now, if you bought the original model S it was the steering column from Mercedes, I believe, and the shifter. So if you were in a

SPEAKER_05: Mercedes and then you got to test, you're like, wait a second, this shifter looks exactly the same. And it was right. And Mercedes was an original investor. And so there he, I think he, and now the screen from the model three is the same screen in the model S and the model X. They move that screen over. So they have one screen for all cars, right? Instead of, uh, two or three.

SPEAKER_41: Is there a subscription to this thing? Um, because that's the other problem is it's a one-time

SPEAKER_27: purchase and the better job you do in making it, um, reliable and making it, um, sturdy and maybe having

SPEAKER_104: good, uh, specs, the longer people can use it, which is great for them, but it's bad for you.

SPEAKER_121: Yeah. Right. Right. So we decided, we, we debated this in the early days of, you know, what is the,

SPEAKER_02: what is the right model for getting in the market? We thought about maybe even just a lease model for the hardware itself. And we decided for V1, we're just going to go with kind of what's what people are used to, which is I buy the thing. I own the thing. Um, and so that's, that's what we're doing for V1. And we were able, because we were able to get that cost of, of goods down to what we felt was a reasonable place, um, to, to charge people $350 for it. Um, you know, that's, we felt comfortable doing that. Uh, you know, the, it's still an open question as to what we end up doing on the, you know, overall content side of things in year one, year two, year three, is that a purchase by purchase? Is there some subscription for, you know, connection to various news outlets or some aggregation or additional features like some of these LLM features that I'm talking about, you know, maybe, maybe there are ways to kind of add on from there. But honestly, as a, as a startup, you know, our focus, our first focus is how do we get this reading experience to be really, really great. And that has to do with the hardware and the form factor, but then also the software and then making it work. And we do that right. And people love reading on the thing. And then we'll have a lot of options from there.

SPEAKER_07: Be amazing for the New York times, uh, which is doing just gangbusters with their subscription

SPEAKER_05: business. They decided, Hey, we're going to get rid of advertising, not get rid of it, but at the peak of their advertising powers, they said, you know, what we should do is build a foundation here of subscriptions. And now they're a subscription juggernaut and consumers are pretty good with it. Imagine if you bought a three year subscription to the New York times in advance, you got one of these. So, you know, what does the New York times cost like 200 a year or something?

SPEAKER_27: If they said to you, you know, Hey, uh, give us 500 bucks. We'll throw in one of these. And then you just cut some deal with them. And then you had the whole New York times on there. What a great deal. So I think there's some option here for this to be very

SPEAKER_73: powerful or one of the book publishers, you know, your Harper Harper business. Uh, they have a great label of business books and they said, Hey, we'll give you 10 books a year. Uh, for three years, you get 30 books of 30 of our books and this for 500 bucks. I'd buy that, you know? Yep. Yep. Um, one thing that the Kindle has added, uh, which will be your number one competitor or they'll see you as a competitor, I guess, because if you use this, you're not going to use your Kindle. If you succeed, um, and you're only going to bring one with you when you go to Italy

SPEAKER_05: this summer. Um, if you succeed, um, they have something called whisper sync, I think. No, not whisper sync. There's something that connects the audio book to the, right. Yeah. To, to the words. And so I have dyslexia. Uh, I found out later in life. And so reading pretty hard for me,

SPEAKER_96: listening to audio books, really easy. Yeah. But if I buy the book twice, which I've done like a dozen times now where I buy the audio book and I buy the other books, I pay 30 bucks 15 each time, whatever. Um, and I don't know if that whisper sync is how you deliver it, but it will highlight the word and speak it to you. Have you considered, uh, adding audio here because it is over your ear and I have a pair of the Bose headsets, which I love and the Bose, uh, headsets, highly recommend them will, um, let you listen to music

SPEAKER_27: or an audio book, but your ears not covered. So I would love to have it, you know, do that, uh, syncing for me.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. So not a V one feature, but like top of the request list from most people that have tried it. If you said, yeah, we hear that one. It's, uh, it's almost the first thing that comes to people's mind is I'd love to be able to read and listen simultaneously. And, and, you know, the good news for us is, yeah, speakers are small, they're low power can some audios, low power consumption. So in terms of kind of meeting our, what we think are the core constraints that we want to hold throughout the life of this product line, it is, it is something that will absolutely be prototyping for V two. And one of the things that we're even putting in V one is a, an autopilot mode where you don't even have to manually turn the page. It can essentially walk your eyes through the, the text line at a time. And so we anticipate that, you know, that combined with audio in a, in a future version would be

SPEAKER_05: just a ticket, right? It is called whisper sync. It's called whisper sync for voice. It's got its own, uh, yeah. And they, they call that immersive reading. What I found is when you do that, you really increase your, um, really increase your, uh, retention. Yeah. Another possibility is, hey,

SPEAKER_27: you put this on and you listen to this week and startups are all in whatever your favorite pod is. And then it transcribes it and you see the text of what everybody's saying in front of you, that could be quite powerful too. Have you considered that?

SPEAKER_02: No, we haven't really thought about like the pod, you know, going into the transcription realm, but I like that idea. That's definitely something that we should put on list. And again, LLMs would probably be pretty helpful. Yeah. I would maybe in terms of, you have a table of

SPEAKER_05: contents, you could summarize the episode or, yep. And then it doesn't have a microphone in it yet.

SPEAKER_27: No, right. Correct. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, a 1.0 just reading, but you can imagine the 2.0, if it had a microphone in that, you could have voice commands. Um, pretty amazing. Uh, and now you're

SPEAKER_121: taking pre-orders for three 50 right now. Mm hmm. Yep. And there's a, there's a lot of demand. So right now we're taking wait lists. Um, but, but yes, when you do something like this, how big of a,

SPEAKER_174: of a, of a first batch do you do? And how does that work as a hardware startup? How do you optimize

SPEAKER_27: that? Do you try to order a hundred thousand or just a thousand because there could be mistakes and you don't want to put a bad product out there? How do, how do you think about that? That's right.

SPEAKER_02: You know, we're being very measured in our approach. We understand there's going to be a lot of demand for this, but we, we want to keep a really high quality bar too. So the initial runs are in the thousands, tens of thousands while we've, you know, ensure that everything from a manufacturing standpoint is spot on, um, as our head of manufacturing constantly reminds me, like, you don't want to make a mistake at scale a million. You want to make it at a scale, a hundred or a thousand first. And so that that's what this year has been all about. You know,

SPEAKER_158: we're shipping out our, our kind of final beta units to our, you know, beta folks, uh, in the next few

SPEAKER_180: weeks. Thank you for putting me on the list. I appreciate that. Um, we'll do what we can, Jason. Well, you always want to have an influencer with 700,000. I got more followers than Gary Tan. He's an

SPEAKER_184: investor. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. He doesn't have the two top podcasts in tech and,

SPEAKER_186: you know, just saying Gary's great, but. So yeah, that's, that's coming out pretty soon. And again,

SPEAKER_02: assuming, you know, we, you know, that that's been a great learning experience to, to dial in a lot of that manufacturing process. And then we roll right in from that into, you know, production later this fall and start to fulfill that wait list and, and pre-orders. You were, you said you were a VC

SPEAKER_29: before this for a little bit. Yeah. How long did you spend in venture capital? And then why'd you

SPEAKER_02: quit VC to go back to startups? Yeah. Um, it was about six years. Did one, basically one fund cycle, right. Um, which, which I loved. I'd done a couple of startups before that. Um, I loved the variety. I loved the, um, yeah, just, you, you get to interact with so many brilliant people with brilliant ideas and a lot of passion for it. And, and truly I didn't know if I would do another startup, but one of the things that I had been, have been thinking about pretty much that entire time is, is what our relationship with devices is and read a lot of books, like, you know, Sherry Turkle's alone together in terms of what, yeah, what our devices are doing to us. And, and, you know, the kind of traditional stuff, Cal Newport, deep work, like really thinking about how our brains have been rewired by these devices. How have they been rewired? Well, yeah, I think our attentions are shorter. I, you know, I think it's harder for us to concentrate on long form. Um, and, and, you know, I'm an optimist. I think there is a path through obviously, but, but I think one of the things that happens when I, when I pick up a device is my, my brain is wired to kind of be in this multitasking mode of like, you know, what's, what's the next input, what's the next, next dopamine hit. And, and so, um, it was, so I was just wondering what, what is the path through that with respect to our relationship with personal computing, if this isn't the best

SPEAKER_40: thing for our minds. And, and a lot of the, if you will, state of the art thinking on that is essentially just, well, be more disciplined, take a digital detox, put your phone somewhere else.

SPEAKER_201: Yeah. And, and I, I don't taking heroin. Here's how you can not be a junkie.

David Friedberg: Stop taking heroin. And you're like, that's right. But I love heroin.

SPEAKER_205: I love Twitter. I love my group chats, right? That's right. I love tick tock and YouTube videos.

SPEAKER_206: You know, one of the things we talk about is we think that there is like, there is broccoli on the

SPEAKER_02: internet. Like there are really good things in Twitter, but then it's, it's kind of also a wash and a lot of stuff is just not the best. And you don't necessarily want to be doom scrolling before bed or, or whatnot. And so we do think of ourselves a little bit as the nicotine gun, the nicotine gum for the digital age. All right. We all know the one thing that

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SPEAKER_211: So since I had been thinking about this problem for quite some time, this idea of building

SPEAKER_02: a wearable e-reader, kind of the origin story there wasn't my idea. It was one of my co-founders ideas and conversation with Palmer Luckey's, you know, the Oculus founder. Yeah, good friend of mine.

SPEAKER_206: Yeah. Right. Good one. Good one.

SPEAKER_214: I'll be here for three more nights. Try the wheel.

SPEAKER_20: There you go. There you go. So it kind of just discussing the state of AR VR and realizing that if you wanted a really satisfying

SPEAKER_02: form factor, it would have to be more specific purpose, more single purpose, less general, less trying to render 3D worlds or put an iPhone on your face. And that's where we got this idea of, wow, it would be really great to read, um, with a, with a headset if we could make it light enough and whatnot. And, and from the, you know, before I dove all the way into, to start the business,

SPEAKER_00: I did some prototyping. I did the tinkering in the garage, if you will, with some, with some friends. And even from the first time I put the first prototype, which was essentially toilet paper

SPEAKER_02: rolls and like, you know, just a baseball cap full of like electronics. And I, and I realized this, well, that's when I realized these two worlds came together. One, like the comfort aspect of lying in bed reading. And then two, you know, this, this nicotine gum idea of like, well, where are we going to go with personal computing devices? And I really do think that this is better for humanity if we figure out how to provide other options besides just my iPhone for, um, for personal computing. And that's what, that's what drew me back in.

SPEAKER_05: I mean, if you say, and, uh, Sherry Tergal talks about this in her book, but just the need for downtime, the need for solitude or reflection, it's kind of gone. And we're so addicted to these devices that, um, you don't have boredom kick in. And if you think about children, you know, sometimes what happens when you get immersed in a book is you kind of get into that world, you, you get transported and you get to live in that environment for a little while. I mean, when I would read Michael Crichton's novels, I had that experience of just being lost in them. Right. Um, or if you were to read Charles Dickens, you can just be transformed into, you know, intelligent cities or something like that. They don't get to have that experience and it's a lost experience. And then you also don't have to, you don't get to have, oh, it's a, it's August. There's nothing to do. And then your mind's like, here's something we could do.

SPEAKER_73: Uh, hopefully it's not, you know, I grew up in Brooklyn. We did some bad things, but hopefully

SPEAKER_96: you come up with something really creative. Um, but maybe you could talk a little bit about,

SPEAKER_05: since we're, we're going there, but what you hope to achieve in terms of maybe, you know, uh, those aspects that we're losing and maybe even talk, I don't know, do you have kids?

SPEAKER_158: Yeah, I do. And it was a big part of me thinking about starting something like this.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. So let's unpack that. When you see your kids and they're just like, give me my heroin, I'm sorry, iPad. And like, you know, you take the iPad away from them and they just literally act like a junkie who is been locked up in for 48 hours. Like, it's amazing. These kids

SPEAKER_27: like will, I mean, a temper tantrum, like you've never seen if they lose advice for two days. Yep. Yeah.

SPEAKER_121: So a couple of things come to mind here. One, you know, when my six year old was six and four are my kids, right? When my six year old says, Hey dad, I'm bored. I'm like, good.

SPEAKER_02: Just sit there, be bored. And you know what he does it's, you know, within a few minutes, he's, he's making up worlds or building something new. It's like, like, you know, you just let them be bored. I mean, maybe this is maybe a little bit beyond the scope of what we're talking about today, but I'm with you. Let, let the kids be bored sometimes. And one of the touchstones we talk about at the company is trying to get people who, you know, didn't grow up with the iPads and whatnot, get, get back to that kid under a blanket with a flashlight kind of reading, you know, where you get lost in that that's, that is one of our touchstones is like getting, helping people get lost in a book again, a really good book. And, and so it's into your point about the, uh, the, you know, the device and whatnot. I like to talk about, you know, Steve jobs in the early eighties, he took out this spread in scientific American talking about the personal computer as the bicycle for the mind. Right. And that, that, that was his vision for what, you know, this type of technology should do. And, um, it was reported after he died, it was reported that before he died, he said, we don't allow the iPad in the house because we're afraid of what it's going to do to the kids. Yeah. So in, in these 30 years, we went from this beautiful vision of what personal computing devices can do for us to, I don't want my kids to touch it. And so I, I do think that for me, there's, um, you know, and, and we'll, we'll see where we go beyond just reading in the, in the years, assuming we're successful with this, you know, first product, but, um, tapping back into that beautiful vision of the bicycle for the mind, or we sometimes say the Peloton for the mind in the, in the modern era, so that people can do what's right for themselves mentally. Um, and, and, and again, to the discipline point, you're not going to get people to give up the heroin unless you give them something else and something better. And so that's why we're, we're, it's a replacement strategy. It's like make a new habit with the soul reader and that will get you to read more and, and that'll be better for your

SPEAKER_07: mental health. What's the thing they give people that little, like little thing they can sip and drink. I had to get them off heroin. I forgot what it's called. Oh yeah. Yeah. I know what

SPEAKER_229: you're referring to. It'll come to us in a second. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Um, so yeah, I know, yeah, it's method. Yeah. You give him a little method. Um, that's right. And I put it,

SPEAKER_40: so I put it on my nightstand instead of my iPhone and yeah, for example, when I first,

SPEAKER_202: Oh, I like that it's, oh, it's on your nightstand instead of your iPhone, because if you put this on,

SPEAKER_27: correct me if I'm wrong, the e-ing technology that you're using, I think it's e-ing they call it. Yes,

SPEAKER_73: that's right. Or e-paper, e-paper. It's not a stimulating, correct? Um, right now we have to,

SPEAKER_02: because we're putting it in the glasses, we do light it, but, um, the lighting itself is much more like what your phone is on when you put it in night mode and it's in that very reduced blue light mode. So that's, you know, we, we, we all get drowsy while we're reading with the device on it. It is that same. Yeah. It is a, it's a very warm kind of light that is pleasing to the eyes kind of, you know, the, the, the right, right for night. And an interesting thing happened when I did that switch, you know, I, I, sometimes I check my screen time when I'm, you know, feeling a little

SPEAKER_05: masochistic and God, it's so embarrassing, right? It's like shameful, but this is like, if we, we should force adults and the entire family should be forced to publish your screen time in the kitchen and like, just as a group, we, we have a collective number of minutes we can do as a group,

SPEAKER_59: or something. Right. Right. Yeah. No, I think this would be good. Yeah. Here's the interesting

SPEAKER_40: thing that happened to me is I was, I was in the like five to six hour a day territory before I

SPEAKER_21: started reading with soul reader. Yeah. You know, not, not amazing, but not so bad. Embarrassing, but not tragic, but I'm willing to mention it on a podcast.

SPEAKER_201: Yeah. And that means he's really at seven or eight, but yeah, yeah, could, could be, could be.

SPEAKER_253: I'm at like four or five now. I'm like, just, just, you know, I'm doing a little bit better than you.

SPEAKER_40: There you go. There you go. Here's what happened though. Here's what happened. I, I got the iPhone off the nightstand, um, a little bit less, you know, doom scrolling on Twitter, a little bit less

SPEAKER_02: binge watching. Yep. And, and I read, I, I would average probably reading about 30 to 60 minutes a day and kind of depending on how interesting the novel was I was reading or the news of the day or whatnot. Um, so you'd think, oh, okay, well, screen time must've gone down one hour because you were reading an hour a day, right? Yeah. Swap it out. No screen time went down two and a half hours a day.

SPEAKER_40: Oh, wow. Why is that? Why is that? You went to bed quicker. I went to bed sooner. I didn't kind

SPEAKER_02: of get stuck in that thing. Yeah. So, so I kind of magically found either, either I got to sleep a little bit longer or better, or I just, I kind of found an extra hour, hour and a half a day that

SPEAKER_00: I wasn't like this, you know, staring at my phone. Here's the thing with like getting rid of screen

SPEAKER_29: time I find with my kids. So when we're, uh, at the ski house and we're, you know, having ski days,

SPEAKER_05: I say, listen, uh, screens happen, uh, after dinner. Uh, and if you, if you're out on the mountain, you get in a little bit early, we'll make an exception and you go to the movie there and watch a movie or you can use your devices a little bit. But basically what I find is like, if no device,

SPEAKER_27: then activities, but then an interesting thing happens as well. My theory on why these kids are getting so weird and adults, let's face it. We've all got friends who are getting weird. They can't make eye contact anymore. Again, socially awkward. They don't know how to communicate. Then you have incels and just weird kids credit to Sherry Turkle on this, but there's just like thought that like,

SPEAKER_05: hey, because we're connecting with so many people all day long, whether it's on social networks and email and slack that we're like hyper-connected, but you're not getting face to face time with people.

SPEAKER_96: You're not hearing their voice. And so the social connections are not real, but we feel like we're being socially connected. In fact, we feel like we're overly socially connected. Yep. What happens in boredom? My theory is that you become more introspective. You're in your own mind. You start thinking about yourself and you also become more interested, um, and inquisitive like

SPEAKER_05: that, um, Ted Lasso speech when he plays darts. You ever see that speech when you know what we're talking about or not? Have you heard this? He's, he gives a speech. It's a really great speech where

SPEAKER_96: the guy challenges him to darts and, uh, um, he basically just, the guy was never interested enough in him to ask him if he'd ever played darts before. And then if he had been a little bit more inquisitive or interesting, um, he would have known that his dad would take him to the bar every Sunday afternoon to play darts since he was like 12 years old. Um, and then he hits like three bullseyes in a row and it's just like epic, but you weren't interested enough. You weren't inquisitive enough.

SPEAKER_05: And you will become more interested in other people. When you're in person, you will become more interested when your device is put in thing. That's why I love a game I play with my friends

SPEAKER_166: when we go to dinner, which is stack the phones, stack the phones. Yep. And then whoever picks it up first. Have you played this game has to do dinner, but I, you stack your phones at dinner. I tried this at

SPEAKER_276: your next dinner, everybody. And you can reach for it anytime. I assume, right? You're, you're allowed to go

SPEAKER_05: for it. Whoever goes for it first pays for dinner. It's brilliant. Um, and then the other good thing is I, you know, got some famous friends and go to parties where they collect the phones on the way in

SPEAKER_27: no phone parties where they put your phone in a bag. Also amazing. Uh, so if you ever, uh, have a party, ask everybody to put their phones at the front. Hey, listen, if you're a parent and you need to check

SPEAKER_05: on your kid, just go out to the driveway and you do this. So a lot of the parties I've been going to, um, where there might be celebrities at it or other high profile people, they might just be like, Hey, click the phones. And I think, I think this is like really great that you're taking your time to do

SPEAKER_29: this, whether it succeeds or fails, we'll see in the market. I think it's guaranteed to have a level

SPEAKER_73: of success with bookworms, but I think you want to go a little further than that. So.

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SPEAKER_96: plan. How's the beta testing going? What's the feedback been to people who've read a book or two on it, right? So how many people have read two or three books on it? Um, a few dozen at this point.

SPEAKER_26: A few dozen. And what, what are they, I mean, you must have done some, do you do listening labs

SPEAKER_121: with them or how do you get information from them? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of, a lot of calls and, um, and whatnot, uh, the two, two anecdotes come to mind that are, um, well, maybe I'll, I'll do three. The, the first one is people are surprised at how well it works and how quickly it works with respect

SPEAKER_02: to this mindset shift. Um, and they're like, oh, I, I didn't like, it's, it's hard to imagine what it's like to put on a wearable e-reader because it's a new category. So yeah, there's a bit of that surprise and then kind of, oh, right. Okay. It actually works. And that's, uh, the first helpful piece of feedback is like, we're on the right track with the new category. Um, another one is one, one person put it on and they reported back. They said, I, I woke up early the first morning I had it. I put it on. I didn't think about the clock and I read for two and a half hours. And I can't remember the last time I read for two and a half hours straight. Wow. And so to me, like this point about being immersed in something is, you know, it matters him. Yeah. You know, they just, they kind of got lost in what they were reading and, um, and, and even just, uh, because this person was reading in bed and their reflection was, oh, if I had picked up a book, I might've, I might've shifted around a little bit as you do when you're reading in bed, exactly arm strength, neck strain, whatever.

SPEAKER_291: I didn't even think about that arm strain and yeah. Yeah. It's all that stuff. No back problems,

SPEAKER_02: no neck problems when reading this way. Um, and then the other, the other big piece of feedback that we got, um, from a person a couple of days after they started it is he was, he literally said that I think this is a 10 X improvement on reading for me and for him. And he's like, I felt, I felt the loss of optionality, meaning I, you know, it got rid of my options. I felt the loss of optionality almost instantly within a few minutes. And, and so, yeah, those are, those are kind of what, what we're keying into on, on whatnot. And you know, then there's, there's all the kind of normal user feedback in terms of, oh, okay. We got the mobile app. We, we think of the, the sole reader as your nightstand. You're going to have a few books on there. You're going to have the day's articles, your mobile, your mobile device, your computer, that's your full library. That's how you're going to, you know, curate content and decide what you're going to read next and all that. So a lot of the usual user feedback on how those interactions should work and, you know, how, how easy it is to sync the content, all that stuff. But, um, but those are some of the highlights of the feedback.

SPEAKER_73: I think, you know, uh, my friend, Doug Rushkoff, who is a media author, I don't know if you've ever

SPEAKER_119: read any of his books, but he, um, had this theory with MTV and the internet and video games that there was a S ADHD exists in his mind. Um, people debate that because when, I think you're

SPEAKER_05: gen X too, um, like a lot of people didn't have it. And then now everybody's got it. I think there's situational ADHD, which is you have to defend yourself against the onslaught of incoming, uh, you know, notifications as we call it now, but it could have been MTV when we were kids,

SPEAKER_27: which was it just moved quicker, right? You watch a three minute video and the video had so many cut

SPEAKER_08: scenes in it. Now you look at tick tock. It's you. ADHD is like a defense mechanism, right? You throw it up. Um, but then it has all these like downstream effects. So there's something

SPEAKER_73: that could be very healthy about this in terms of just giving your mind a break. Um, and, uh, I think it's really amazing what you've, what you've set out to do. So I'm, I'm glad you're doing it.

SPEAKER_27: I'm going to buy it. Um, are you hiring right now or are you just in sales mode? You got a full compliment team, or if you're hiring, I'd love to give a shout out. If you're got any open

SPEAKER_52: positions for people who might want to apply to work on such a noble mission.

SPEAKER_121: Yeah. Well, appreciate that. You know, like a startup, we're always hiring the best people we can

SPEAKER_02: find. Um, but also we're still a small young team. So we're very much looking for startup generalists, technically competent people who can cross over a lot of different, a lot of different stuff. So, so yeah, I appreciate a shout out that, that, um, you're willing to give.

SPEAKER_96: Um, the, uh, website is. Sol reader.com. Sol reader. Sol reader.com. And it'll ask you to put your phone number in, interestingly, not email. Yes. So phone number. I like that choice for growth.

SPEAKER_305: Early tip. We got it, you know, it does communicate a little bit more seriousness,

SPEAKER_02: which we like, but also when we don't have to worry about the spam bots as much, it's, it's really tough to get a, you know, email into somebody. You lose a lot of waitlist traffic. That's something

SPEAKER_00: we learned from some of our advisors and mentors pretty early on, on the consumer hardware thing. So yeah, name and phone number, get yourself on the waitlist, get on the waitlist and thank you

SPEAKER_27: for including me in the beta test. That's incredibly generous. I know you only had 30, 40 spots to

SPEAKER_05: include me. I'm not even an investor. What a great gift. No, I'm excited. Uh, I signed up in the, like I will be one of the first to buy it and, uh, go check, just go take a look at it. If you listen to the audio comes with a couple of different colors. Uh, I like the goal myself. Uh, and, uh, uh, I can't wait to see these in the wild. They're good looking. Uh, whoa, just as I let you go,

SPEAKER_02: what did you, uh, think of the Apple, uh, product? Ah, yeah. So first impressions, you haven't used it yet. I assume. No, I have not. I haven't had the chance. Um, first impressions is, uh, we love, we love kind of what they have validated because it's been part of our message for years now, which is general, you know, face tech, they call it spatial computing. I'll just say general face tech, AR, VR, whatever, general face tech. It's really hard. It's hard computationally. It's hard from a weight perspective. It's hard from a battery life perspective. And you know, the, the most

SPEAKER_00: resourced tech company in the world in terms of who could go after this just showed us exactly what

SPEAKER_01: it takes, right? It's still, it's big goggles. It's tethered. There's an external battery pack.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. By the way, it costs $3,500. Yeah. Right. And you know, to the soul reader.

SPEAKER_02: Add a 10 X, 10 X, right. And yet we're still, we're still left with the question. Do I want an iPhone on my face? Yes. I don't know if we do. I don't, I do. I'll tell you what I want. I want to

SPEAKER_05: be in a hotel or in a plane or in a cafe and have my full desktop while not feeling like somebody's going to murder me and I don't see him coming. Sure. Sure. Sure. I just, I want to be safe and I want to see that virtual desktop, but I, I think we're, what do you think three generations? You think are three revisions, like maybe three cycles of 18 months before it gets down to under a thousand

SPEAKER_52: or a thousand where you can, you know, and the battery is smaller or you think it's longer?

SPEAKER_305: Well, it's, it's a really, it's a really hard problem because you know, what's the hardest

SPEAKER_40: problem? Okay. Well, it depends on what you want. If you want the existing form factor with the tether and the battery, yeah, probably a few generations and they get that to a thousand bucks. If you want it

SPEAKER_02: to look like this and I'm holding my glasses for you listeners, if you want it to look like this, we're still really far away from that. So, so yeah, I think you put it at 20, 10, something between those two, 10 plus, 10 plus, 10 plus. Yeah. Yeah. And so we, we think that like this kind of, uh, if we constrain on the weight and the battery life first and, you know, kind of add a lot of value there and you, you mentioned it, we're going to get avid readers to like this, but we're also going after aspirational readers, everybody who at the end of the year says, you know, next year, I want to read more books. Yeah. You know, this is the perfect thing for them. And, and that will help us, you know, carve our own way to this more, you know, maybe general purpose, but focus purpose

SPEAKER_345: tech. Um, this is why Amazon needs to do a deal with you because I think you could sell this with

SPEAKER_05: 10 books. Um, I think people will buy this for $700 with 10 books included or a New York times subscription, the bundling because I buy, um, the platinum audible, which I think is 20 credits or 25 credits and I spend 200 a year and I've had it for 10 years. So I've spent 2000 on audio books

SPEAKER_27: and I like, cause I think one audio book, if I get one idea out of one audio book on a business basis, it's going to be worth hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars. Sure. 10 years, 200 audio books is $2,000. Like, are you kidding me? It's the greatest deal in the world. And that's, I think when you pitch these like pitching, what if you get that knowledge, that one nugget of knowledge that then as an entrepreneur, but I, I love your approach.

SPEAKER_05: That means, uh, like gym memberships, December, Jan, January is going to be your big new year's

SPEAKER_07: resolution. I love it. Are you a previous marketer? You seem to have a good marketer head.

SPEAKER_02: No, but I've been thinking about it a lot. And my first startup, I, well, I was in tech and then moved quickly over to sales and marketing. Cause I just found a love

SPEAKER_158: for the storytelling aspect of building businesses, right? So it is great. I can tell

SPEAKER_05: that you have the storyteller thing, because when you go to the website, it feels like an apple product and it, and the way you speak about it is just like, you really

SPEAKER_96: understand your customer, just the tagline on your website, just to, you know, like rate my landing page, experience the next evolution in reading the fact that it's an experience and that it's an evolution and it's only reading, right? Like this, whoever wrote this copy, somebody suffered over that sentence. I can tell. And it's probably you, um, and, and some of our great team team, but the fact that reading could evolve is a very evocative statement that makes you say,

SPEAKER_34: how is it evolving? And I want the answer to that. And immediately under that you get to click,

SPEAKER_96: learn more. That's right. You know, it's like a very well done. So shout out to the soul reader marketing team. Really well done. All right. Listen, loved meeting you. I hope you sell a

SPEAKER_21: million of these things. Well done. Thank you, Jason. Really appreciate it. We hope so too.

SPEAKER_27: Uh, listen, all you gotta do is sell 10,000 of these and you're still in business, right? That's, I think the mark is if you sell 10,000 of these years at 350, if you make a buck 50 off of them, you'll be fine as a company, you'll, you'll survive. And that's, you know, in the hardware

SPEAKER_05: business, surviving those first couple of years, as you figure it out is the most important. So I wish you continued success and we'll see you all next time. And this week in startup. Bye. Bye.