Podcast: A Real Tech Startup: Postmortem and Lessons Learned (PuppTech)

In this episode of Incubate This!, we talk with the founder of PuppTech, William Loopesko, about the fate of PuppTech, how it got to where it is, and the lessons we all learned on the 6 year PuppTech journey. If you're building a startup with an IoT device or hardware component, you won't want to miss this.

Click here to listen to the original episode with PuppTech and William Loopesko, or click here to watch the original video.

Full Podcast Transcription
Cynthia: Welcome. Welcome. Welcome back. It has been a very, very long hiatus here on Incubate This! in case you didn't notice there's a pandemic happening. There is? and we have struggled all year with what are we doing? Who used this microphone last? You okay. Was it sanitized? No. Because it was his mic. So I do have a couple of episodes that are sitting in the can, uh, over the next couple months we will release some of those and we're going to start doing some more live interviews, but coming back from such a long break, I thought it was really apropos to start this out with our very good friend William from PuppTech. Hello. So if you recall our very first podcast episode, and it was a co-branded episode between Incubate This! and the right, the show was about the apptrepreneur program and the startup gap. What is the gap between having a really great idea and turning that into a successful startup? And William was our guest for that show talking about his experience, working with us and the kind of things that were going on in PuppTech. And now, and we said we would come back in a year, which would have been sometime in March and do, you know, revisit it and say, you know, what's going on? Well, if you were not living under a rock, then you know that a lot's happened since March. Yeah. It's a weird time. And so here we are in December and we thought if we're going to bring back the podcast and come back and start, you know, broadcasting again, what a perfect way to kick it back off with our friend William, again, a lot's happened with PuppTech in the last nine months, quite a bit had happened in the preceding three months before the pandemic and the lockdown. And so we're going to talk about all of that and just kinda, kind of get back to it. So lessons learned, yeah. Lessons learned and where are they now? Which sounds so funny. Cause it's only been a year and a half, but you know, apparently a lot can change in 10 months. So why don't we start out William, just give us sort of the rundown of what's going on with PuppTech where are things now what's happened in the last year and a half since we talked, maybe start at the beginning and sort of like walk us through the whole journey.

William: Sure. So I don't remember exactly that March, 2019 was when we talked. So we were at the time gearing up for our first run of production and it was very exciting. We were writing a lot of code. We were finalizing all of our manufacturing plans with our different engineers and suppliers. I was trying to build the supply chain we had just closed. It seems like so long ago we had just closed a second funding round with the owner of the largest dog training business in the country. So that was a very, very exciting new partnership. A lot of things were moving in the right direction and continued to do so for a long time. So through the summer, we just continued on all those things. We got closer to manufacturing. Uh, we did several different prototyping, runs, uh, set out some test units over the summer. We had a really exciting opportunity where we went to a big, the largest working dog show in the country, which was in Chicago. We had a booth there. We met a ton of people, including a company that's the largest distributor for working dogs in this country. They're like the Walmart of working dogs. And we signed a distribution agreement with them—

Cynthia: Sidebar, Amazon and Walmart. Two of the companies that have profited the most from the pandemic. Yes. But anyway, that's not what you meant. Go ahead.

William: These guys probably did find working dogs are always needed. So yeah, so that was really exciting. We had a distribution agreement with the largest distributor in our space. That was a huge deal. They actually, because we're a tiny little startup and we needed the money. They paid for our units upfront as opposed to the way they normally work, which has to pay for them on the backend. So that allowed us to buy some more components, uh, and get our units out. We opened up an assembly space in a warehouse just outside of Denver so that we could start putting units together that was through the fall. And then coming into October, like the fall, September, October, we were also starting to talk about partnering with other manufacturers and other distributors in different parts of the country, trying to specialize into different niches of the dock space. So everything was going really well until about October, November. And then we actually had to start putting things together, physically like units.

Cynthia: So your ideas are a little bit unique from a lot of the people that we work with because you not only have a software component, which was really the core of what you were trying to accomplish, but in order to do that, you also had to have a hardware component, an IOT device. So talk to us a little bit about what were the challenges that you faced and were you able to overcome them? How did you overcome them with regard to a device, which is a whole different skill set than writing software?

William: Yeah. And it's a lot harder. Devices are so hard. So we, initially, I think our biggest challenge was that we underestimated the complexity of what it was that we were building from a hardware standpoint. And that was probably our critical mistake. We just assumed, Hey, this is a temperature sensor connected to a cellular module. That's, you know, there are so many things out there that are so much more complicated than that, including probably this microphone that I'm speaking into, like how hard can this be? It's almost like a commoditized thing. Yeah. And it turns out that even just that is really hard, really, really, really complicated. So we had an amazing software team that I'm currently sitting in, you know, in this room with, uh, and speaking to, and some real software expertise on our team. And we did not have the same for hardware. Like we didn't have anyone on our team who knew about hardware to the degree that we needed. I was the biggest hardware expert on our team, or I had, I became that and I know nothing. And so like that, that was our critical mistake. We, we needed to have someone who actually understood hardware, understood the challenges, the complexities, because it's just, so hard.

Cynthia: When you say it's hard, what does that mean?

William: What I mean is that it's really expensive to iterate.

Cynthia: Um, and because you actually have to build a thing and do something with it.

William: And ship it and do all of those things. So this is where we started to run into problems, the time. And also the timelines are so long, so long because you, you know, you have to rely on hundreds of different vendors that are sourcing all of these different components. Everyone has different lead times and the lead times are often measured in months. So when you're trying to move quickly as a startup and you have these big looming deadlines and customers that are getting impatient, it's really hard to be able to iterate in the way that you need to, while still sticking to those deadlines, we would make a design change and then we'd have to reorder a new set of boards. And that could take two months. And during those two months, there's not much we can do. I mean, we can just keep writing software and we can keep trying to do stuff, but we're just waiting for those boards. We don't know if they're going to work. We think they're going to work, but you know, we need to get them back and then we test them and then if there's something wrong, then we need to make a design change. And then we need to wait another two months for the next set of boards to show up.

Cynthia: Got it. How many times did, was there iteration on the board and did this process take place? Not enough.

William: We probably went through, I don't remember exactly four ish iterations on the board, and this is why, you know,  this is why crowdfunding campaigns always run into problems, which we did too, is because you set a, you have to set a timeframe and then you don't realize how this schedule is going to work with these design changes and the supply to AEs and all of that stuff. And so things and that, you know, we're trying to maintain a certain quality of standard, a standard of quality, but in order to do that, it takes all of these different iterations, which all take time. And so everything gets pushed back. So, you know, we, in March, when we talked, we felt like we were ready to ship out a batch of units. And we got our units, I think in early may. So like six weeks later and they weren't ready yet. And it was like, well, we got to go out and make some more and test some more. And so all of the time, that's a lot of time. It's also a lot of money and it's, you know, time is money. So it's a lot of money, both in the sense that we actually need to physically order new boards, which could cost like $20,000. But then we got to wait another two months, which is also costing us money. Gotcha. And that's time when we can't be selling and we can't be doing anything. So there's the super high burn rate that I don't think a lot of hardware products or hardware company startups fully understand. And in that way, it's very different than tech. And then the other thing that is just impossible is that every board works differently, even though they're made the same with the same components, they can all work differently.

Cynthia: Really? Why is that?

William: Because these things are so complex with hundreds of different pieces of other pieces on them. And if there's one tiny little soldering error, somewhere on the board or something that is, you know, some tiny little manufacturing defect, it can throw off the whole board.

Cynthia: This is why volume makes such a difference in manufacturing. Because if you have to waste 10%, if you have 10,000 units, that's different than if you have 500.

William: Right. So we ordered for our first run of manufacturing, we ordered 400 boards and we were only able to ship out about 303rd. We ordered 450 boards and we shipped out less than 400.

Cynthia: Wow, wow. Yeah. This is just my ignorance in the manufacturing process, but does the manufacturer of allowances?

William: Yeah, they do. And we got some of them back, but you know, sometimes it's very easy for them to kick the ball down the road and to say like, Oh, it's not our fault. It's this component makers fault. And then that component has five other components in it. And so it's very easy to just pass the blame. And in the meantime, again, you know, we're ways that all of those things cost us time and money that we don't have.

Cynthia: So sometime last, not, not 2020, 2019 in March, April, we were sort of like gearing up and ready to push out boards. That didn't happen. And now we're in like October, November. And we're, I remember there was like a, Oh, we'll make it a holiday kind of thing, right? Yeah. What happened?

William: Uh, December the worst month of my life.

Cynthia: Pre pandemic, or even including the pandemic?

William: Even including pandemic, high school, like any, like, it was awful. So we got sort of, all of the components, our 450 boards that we ordered, uh, the enclosures, the packaging, all of that stuff started showing up in the first two weeks of November. Except I knew that yay for everyone, except for me, because I'm the one who's going to put all these things together because we didn't have enough money to do it otherwise.

Cynthia: Got it. So now you have all the 450 things—

William: 450 times like 20, because every, you have to put all 20 different pieces at least, and you have to put all of those things together. Okay. And some of them are easy. Like we folded a 450 boxes in three hours.

Cynthia: Which, you know, so you could get a job at dominoes. Right?

William: I could get a job at dominoes.

Cynthia: Isn't that the one with the guy folding the boxes?

William: Yeah.

Cynthia: Tells everybody how old we are. You don't know the Noid. No. Oh God. You're so young.

William: But so even there, like we started running into problems, right? Like the boxes were not the right size that we thought they were real. And so they didn't, there was too much room in the box and the unit, once it was fully assembled would have jiggled in the mail. It would have been flopping around and being jerked around in there. Yeah. We had to order, uh, you know, sort of last minute, a bunch of foam. And then the foam came in these long sheets and you had to cut it, so we spent two days just cutting the foam and throw it all six squares, the stuff into the boxes, like with a ruler and an Exacto knife.

Cynthia: So you had not only all the challenges of a traditional tech startup with software problems and hardware problems, but you also had a lot of the same challenges as a CPG company with boxing and manufacturing and process and warehousing. And I mean, you had all of it and not the budget of a CPG company.

William: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's why it was me and my dad and some of our interns, you know, like people who I could recruit to help me, my mom came a lot just because she felt sorry for me. Uh, you know, like some of my friends came sometimes, but yeah, it's basically like the whole month of December was me waking up at 6:00 AM, driving to this warehouse, showing up at 6:30 staying until they would kick me out at like 6:30 PM, coming home, writing code till about midnight and then going to bed for a few hours. So I could do it all over again the next day.

Cynthia: And this was what, December of 2019, month looked liked.

William: Every day. I took Christmas off, but I did. Okay.

Cynthia: Pretty sure I had to yell at you to make you take some time off didn't I?

Cynthia: Yeah, you did. Yeah. It was a lot. I remember the mountains cause I would, I would drive home and call you and you're like, I had the worst day, but the other problem was that a lot of things weren't working. So we had some, as we talked about, we had some board, you know, we had some manufacturing issues with our boards. The boards were not designed perfectly for manufacturing because coordinating the way everything is going to fit together is a huge challenge. And so not everything was designed to fit together perfectly. And so we had to make a lot of modifications on the fly. So I spent a lot of time sort of filing and sanding and you know, to try to make things fit into each other. And then we also had, we had hired a company to develop our firmware for us. And firmware is a very different beast than software and the firmware wasn't working properly.

Cynthia: So for anybody who might not know about software is stuff that runs on a computer or on an app or whatever. Yeah, server. Firmware is what actually tells a device that has a little tiny computer inside or any kind of smarts in it to turn on or to, yeah, to start your microwave has firmware. Yeah. Yeah. Because there's, there's a program that tells it the turn for a certain amount of time. When you press a button, Alexa cut foam for the boxes. I wish I would have been. That would have been amazing

Cynthia: If only she were really useful instead of just spying on all of us. Right.

William: So we had these huge firmware problems and that we had sent out the firmware to our manufacturer prior to them printing the boards. So the boards all came preloaded with firmware, but that firmware was defective and it caused the boards to crash. So I had to reload all of the firmware, all of the boards and each board would take like 15 to 20 minutes. And I had to do that three times because they had, because this company that was developing our firmware, you know, this is where it's impossible to iterate. They screwed this up three times. So the first, so it was like once a week, for every week in December, we would reload all the boards and take all the, so in the first week of December, we put together something like 200 units that had firmware that were fully assembled in the box and then over the weekend they were like, no, we found a bug in the firmware. So you're going to have to reload it all. So all of those units that we had put together had to take apart and take them out of the boxes, take them out of their enclosures, plug them back into the computer, reload the firmware, put them back together, put them back in the boxes. And then the following week we had to do that again. Wow. And then it happened a third time after we had already shipped a bunch of units.

Cynthia: Oh no. And what do you do after? I mean, people have to send them back to you. What do you do?

William: One of the things that we had paid for that wasn't working, and this is, this is kind of a critical thing to not have work is the over the air updates. So over the air updates are where you can go onto the devices because these are internet connected IOT devices. They can in theory, talk to a server and receive data from a server. But it's actually pretty complex to be able for the machine to be able to receive data about itself and replace itself while still being connected to itself, it would be like doing heart surgery on yourself. That's kind of brain surgery or brain surgery on yourself, uh, while, you know, while not dying well, that's the end of the surgery, right? And so that was the problem is that we had paid for these over the air updates. We had paid this design firm to this development firm to do, to set up OTA updates on our devices. But the bug was in how the OTA updates worked. So when we would send out the updates, it would kill the machines. So we had tried to set out a bunch of updates. They all got it, bricked all the machines. And then of course our customers were furious, because we had waited a year to send them machines that didn't work. Right. So we had to of course pay to get everything shipped back to us, take everything back out of the boxes, take everything apart and put everything back together. Every time you touch a board, you've risk damaging it. So we ended up having some units that we could no longer that never worked again. And so, you know, every time you do this, you're losing incrementally more of your inventory. Even if it's just five units here, five units there, and it all starts to add up. And so, so yeah, hardwares.

Cynthia: All right. So December was a nightmare, but you did actually have some, some units out there that people were using. Right?

William: We, we probably, we shipped I think in the end with all of the sort of surgery on the circuit boards that we ended up having to do. And we shipped out almost 400 units, about a hundred to our distributor and then 300 to actual users. Okay. And there was another incident where we went to the show in Orlando to the AKC world championships with our distributor. We were in their booth.

Cynthia: That was in November, right?

William: In December, in December, we went, they paid for the booth. We had a hundred units there that we were trying to sell out of the booth. And we discovered during the show that none of those units were going to work. Why? Because of some firmware issue and possibly something in transport. And it's just, there was also a concern possibly that the foam that we had used to stuff in the boxes was not properly static protected. So it could have static shock to the board.

Cynthia: So all of these pieces.

William: Yes. This is why hardware is just so much harder than software. That's why I prefer to stay out of the physical world. That's right. That's right. Like in my mind, the digital world is just so much easier. So that was really bad because we had showed up in Florida with our distributor who had basically paid for us to be there with the goal of selling all these units. And then we had to tell him, you guys can't sell any of these. We're taking them back.

Cynthia: Wow. Okay.

William: So this is what they’ll look like when you, yeah. See what the box is free. But before we had figured that out, we had sold already several units to actual customers. So then we had to reach out to all of them and we had to get them to send their units. But it was just, it was such a nightmare.

Grant: God, what an exercise in humility through the whole process, huh?

William: Yeah. It, it was really un-fun.

Cynthia: So it's a good point though, Grant. Like you're the founder, this is your vision. This is your idea. I mean, what are you going through as a, as a founder, as a, as an entrepreneur?

William: Oh, it was horrible. As all this has happened, everybody's let me down.

Grant: What it's got to feel like when you're there on the spot.

William: It's partially that like, we paid all these people, all this money and they're the ones who are supposed to know what they're doing and none of this shit working. But that's what it felt like to be perfectly candid, but it also felt like I've let everyone down. Right. Cause I'm the boss, this is my thing. I'm supposed to make sure this all works. And you know, we've got these customers, they believe in us, they've waited for us. They gave us all this money. We're really excited and like touting PuppTech and like they were doing, they were potential brand ambassadors. Yeah. They were and here we are like giving them crap that doesn't work and that's potentially going to put their dog at risk. And we, and we felt the fury. I mean the, uh, well, this was the other part of the stress was our customers did not take this well and I'm not blaming them. I'm blaming some of them. Some, some of them were extremely rude, but so like our customer service team was getting buried under super mean super angry emails, sort of constantly. And I remember, cause obviously I was poignant to that. I remember like we got, you know, we, our first units went out three days before Christmas. And so my Christmas present on the 24th was a ton of angry emails of you guys sent me something that didn't work and this sucks. And then everyone took a break off from angry emails on Christmas. And then the day after Christmas angry, angry emails constantly. And it got so bad for me, sort of for my emotional state that our a CMO and customer, people are like, you are no longer allowed to read these emails. We are unsubscribing you from these emails. Cause it's just depressing. You so much to read. Like we will handle all of these emails. Don't read them.

Grant: Well, that's good. You're such a conscientious person. I think there's, you know, there's others that might react differently or not. It would slide off their backs so to speak. But you know, I think that you've been so calm and you've been so devoted to that whole thing for so long that you, you know, everything's personal.

William: We personally, every, every single one of those emails, it hurt, really hurt like a punch in the face. And there were so many, and it was all about the hardware. It was all about the hardware. It was all about. We didn't even get to the point where we got to have nasty emails about software not working. Oh, we did. I think so. Yeah. We had some, yeah, but, but the software stuff is like, there's a bug and then you guys would fix it.

Grant: I just wish that we had had that, that period of having 20 units out to different testers, all running and go in different places. And that was, that was the thing to me that, that I encountered was a lot of unexpected because it's interacting with the real world. It's not a, a software process where I can write a bunch of rules that are always going to work. It's like, well, it's not supposed to just disconnect like that. You know? And in, in the software world, if something like that happened, you'd go to that thing. And you'd rewrite it a little bit too, but you can't do that with a hardware. Like we're encountering things that, Oh, this wasn't couldn't really plan for. It didn't really know the other part. There's so many parts, but that, that is the other part. Yeah. So like, one of the big complaints was like, these units are disconnecting. And so we would go to ATNT and be like, why are unit 80? And he was our service provider and they were great. I'm not trying to trash talk at, at and T, but we were talking about me, like, why, like, why are these not working? It'd be like, we don't know, like our network's working fine. It must be on your, you know, the guy who designed your antenna. And then we'd go to the guy who designed the Anton and be like, why are you not connecting them that way? Well, it's probably because at and T network is dropping the connection. So it was very easy for everybody to blame everyone else, everyone else. And the truth was, it was probably a little bit of everything, but we had no way of knowing that. And, you know, we had never gone through the fully rigorous years of testing that something like this requires, and it's because we didn't have the money to do that. And we didn't have the time to do that. I mean, this is why I honestly don't know how any start hardware startup could do it because it requires so much money in so much time to be able to do it properly. And we, from the beginning underestimated how complex it was going to be to be able to do this. Yeah. We just thought it was a temperature sensor connected to an antenna. How difficult.

Cynthia: Yeah. Even that it kinda gives you, it's interesting because this process has given me an appreciation for the things that come out of the box and just work that I had never had before. And I wonder how much of, how much of our expectation of that plays into the amount of vitriol that you got from people when it wasn't that, because we just, you know, I opened up nest and I plugged it in and it just works. Now you have an added level of complexity with this device because it's not just wifi, right?

Grant: Wifi, at least there's something sort of consistent. And you know, where the dead spots for your wifi are in your house. And so you can sort of plan around that, right. When you're talking cellular, we all know you'll be driving along and all of a sudden your phone does something weird. And then it catches itself back up and you're back in your call or whatever. Or like the in-between where it's not, it didn't disconnect, but you just cut out a whole bunch.

Cynthia: Yeah. We're all garbled. And I heard an echo or you sound like a robot. Yeah. So what happened? Where, what what's, what, what happened?

William: Not good. So, so we had a lot of really, so, yeah, so that was December. Yeah, it was awful. And then by January, we were basically done. We had sent our units out, but a lot of them needed to be sent back. We didn't have any money. We were completely completely out of money. In fact—

Cynthia: We'd been doing fundraising efforts this whole time.

William: We'd been doing efforts this whole time. Our one big investor who had signed the check in February, 2019, and who had promised a lot of follow on money, had fallen off the face of the earth. And I have not spoken to him since. No, it was the other guy, the big dog guy. Oh yeah. I was contacting him multiple times a week. I remember that. Uh, never heard from him. I haven't heard from him. I haven't spoken to him in over a year. Wow. Despite multiple, multiple, multiple efforts to do so. So yeah. We ran out of money in October and in order to get us across the finish line, we ended up taking out a $50,000 loan that I personally guaranteed. And because we just thought, okay, we need to get these units out. And once we get them out, we'll be able to get, we'll be able to have shown that we can do it and we can get more money. So that was the position we were in, in January. As we got these units out, they sorta work. Some of them work. Some of them don't work as well as they should, but we did it. We got them out. Now, like if this company is going to have any kind of future, we need to check because otherwise we can't do anything. We can't fix the units we have, we can't buy more units to sell more. We, we can't do anything. So we were starting, but you know, we had some very obvious concerns from our investors of like this stuff doesn't work. And you guys sent out things that, of course, one of the units that didn't work ended up going to one of our investors. So he had the experience of seeing it not work. And that was unfortunate as well. So in, so in January and February, not much happened, we were trying to raise money. Conversation was going very slow. We had a lot of really, really upset customers and that's it. We didn't have enough money to pay anyone. So most people stopped working. Cause they hadn't been paid since like October. And so we were, yeah, we'd started talking about trying to sell the business. And we actually had several different people that we were talking about selling the business to sort of in the end of February, moving into early March.

Cynthia: And we were trying to explore, I remember we talked about with you this notion of, well, maybe we can sell off the hardware side of the business and just develop the software side. And we could have some kind of like an API based integration platform that multiple devices could connect to and totally transformed the business model into like a B2B thing where we'd go out to all these different hardware events.

William: We clearly never wanted to be in the hardware business again, take away number one. Yeah. I agree. If you're going to be, if you're going to be in the hardware business, you better be an expert or you better have one on your team and have a lot of money and a lot of money. Yeah. So I, we where you have no business being in the hardware business at all. And I still believe that. And if I never touch a circuit board again, it'll be too soon. Well, yeah, I will to touch too many. So we were, yeah, right around the beginning of March, we were trying to have these discussions about let's become a software company, let’s totally revamp our business model. We had several people we were talking to that were interested in buying the hardware potentially. And then the pandemic came and everything stopped.

Cynthia: So for those of you have been living under a rock, the travel industry and the hospitality industries have been hit the hardest with the pandemic, obviously because people have been on lockdown, you're not allowed to go anywhere. Well, this is a device that's designed for you to travel with your dog—

William: And stop in stores and restaurants. Yes.

Cynthia: None of which are open. So the question and the thing that, you know, we can play the, what if game here for a couple minutes, do you feel like something different could have happened had 2020 not been the dumpster fire year that it's been from this perspective?

William: Possibly the other issue. And I think this is a really important one for your listeners to hear is, was my mental state, even before the pandemic, after December and how awful December was by January, I was pretty checked out from PuppTech, which was like, I don't want to do this anymore.

Cynthia: Well, and let's, let's be fair. This was year five or year six going into your site's

William: Going. It was let's see. Yeah, it was going to be the, it was the end of year five.

Cynthia: Yeah. So that's for anybody who is in the process of building a startup or, or you've done this before, you're hearing this tale, you know, by the time you hit year five, put up or shut up, right. And in terms of this, something's got to start paying off. It doesn't necessarily need to be money in my pocket necessarily, but it's got to start showing some kind of traction, some kind of a reward. Otherwise you start to question, why, why am I doing this?

William: And it had been for a long time, like when we talked last in March, 2019, it really was on that trajectory with that big check that we had just received. And a lot of things—

Cynthia: And the crowdfunding campaign went amazingly well, right?

William: Funding campaign, all of those, you know, we had a lot of enthusiasts. So I, at that point in year four, it was feeling like, God, this is awesome. Like this is going to work. But then after the debacle of trying to put these units together and having to go through that and running out of money, things looked very different. And so by, by January, I myself was pretty checked out from PuppTech, whether or not, you know, I don't have any money. The company doesn't have any money there. So there's no future, you know, like I just, I never want to touch a circuit board again. And like, that was awful.

Cynthia: And so this is your mindset going into the possibility of negotiating, selling or repositioning.

William: Yeah. And so the senior management team was like, you can not be out on any of these meetings because you are too negative.

Cynthia: Unfortunately, the thing that has always been the selling point of pub tech is, you know, you.

William: So this is where December broke me. You know, I remember very clearly there was a long stretch in December. It was like, I have nothing to look forward to. Like everything is bad, everything is negative. Like this thing that I spent the last five years working on is crumbling and just everything is bad. And that the hangover from that carried into January and February, and I was convinced that PuppTech had failed long before anyone else was. And I, and maybe it's because I'm the one that knew the most about it. And so I saw everything that had gone wrong in a way that nobody else had, but it's also possibly just that I was the one who had been in the trenches the most, and it just was the most beat up and ready to move on. And so a lot of like January and February, I just like went on vacation and the senior manager team was like, you need to just go quick. So I did a lot of skiing. I went down to our family's ranch in Texas and I built a deck. And so I did all these things to sort of just take my mind, this kind of hardware. I understand. Yeah, exactly. I'll have to tear it apart and put it back together four times. There's no formal deck. Doesn't have to talk to anything else. Right.

Grant: It doesn't, there's no firmware on it. There's no. And if, no, and if—

William: People don't like it, it's my deck. It's not being sent to anyone else. You know, something that I can do that I'm good at that. Like I can see it coming to life and it actually works. And it feels like I'm actually doing something productive after spending a whole month trying to do something productive and failing miserably and just feeling beat up. And so, so yeah, so by January and February, like even if I was ready to move on and I was possibly ready to move on into having PuppTech be like a software only kind of thing.

Cynthia: Right. We did, we spent quite a bit of time talking about how could we maneuver that and how could we figure out a way to infuse a little bit of capital to make that happen? Because it wouldn't, it wasn't going to take nearly as much capital to make that happen as it was to do another round of this hoopla with the boards.

William: Yeah. And I was pretty sure that, you know, even if an investor had materialized out of thin air, but I'm like here's a million dollars to do PuppTech. I think I probably would have turned it down for us to do PuppTech the way we were doing it with us, making the boards and us sort of being in charge of all the hardware, because I just didn't want to be in that business anymore. Yet, if you talk to my parents or anyone who knows me January and February were really bad. And then the pandemic happens.

Cynthia: So then what happens to your mindset and then only got better. Yeah. I want to ask you this question because I have talked to a lot of entrepreneurs who have gotten to this point and they keep fighting and they keep fighting and they keep fighting. And I'm never somebody who is going to, to make that decision for someone else and say, when is enough enough, but how did the pandemic, what I want to ask you without putting words in your mouth is did the pandemic give you an ironclad reason to let it go? And how was that for you? Was that better?

William: Yeah. Pre pandemic. You know, the reason that PuppTech had in my mind failed was because we had, you know, I had screwed up and we had run out of money. And like we had just, I had poorly managed the company and things hadn't worked out and I should have done a better job after the pandemic. And other reasons [inaudible] screwed up the read. The, the reason PopTech failed is because there's a pandemic and there's a pandemic. That's, you know, there's this global event that seems to be very specifically aimed towards PuppTech. Like our whole business is about going into stores and restaurants and people. We can't do that anymore. So we could not have picked something better to wipe out PuppTech, so it was very, very liberating.

Grant: I mean, that's got to almost give you a sense of relief of like, I can't fight, like no one would even expect me to, it would be weird.

William: Right. Right. So then, cause I had wanted—

Grant: It's like not being ready for a test tomorrow and then having a snow day.

William: Yeah, exactly.

Grant: And you're like, well, I was all psyched to do that too.

William: I felt like I owed it to you. You know, my investors, you guys, my team, everyone do I keep fighting as much as I could for PuppTech, even though I really didn't want to in January and February, but I, I just, you know, everyone was telling me like, you can't just walk away. Not just you, everyone has put too much into this. You would be doing everyone a disservice. If you walked away, even though I very much wanted to walk away. So I felt, you know, sort of handcuffed to this thing that I no longer want it to be a part of, but that I, that I had this moral responsibility to see to completion. Sorry, I starting a company is a lot like that. And I was ready for a divorce, but the other side wasn't

Grant: Other side, it was the family of the other side is everybody else. Wow.

William: And my family and why, you know, the investors and you know what your, your in-laws and yeah. And so in March, when the pandemic came along, I was like, well now I, you know, now I can actually leave and it's not on me. There's uh, it's the entire economy is collapsing. So it only makes sense for my startup to also have collapsed. And like, I can move on. This is a it's over, it's officially done and I can move on and do something else. And so the startup, the pandemic was very liberating in that sense for me.

Cynthia: Okay. So PuppTech is defunct. We've had some conversations about potentially selling off some pieces of it or licensing some pieces of it, mostly in the effort of getting you out of this $50,000. That is the only thing really hanging over your head as you personally signed for it. And so a company that we will not mention, they want their money, right?

William: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lender. That one, right.

Cynthia: For all intents and purposes, PuppTech is done. And so what the first question I want to ask is what are you doing now? And the second question I want to ask is what did you, what did you learn? How has that changed? What you'll do next? And the last question would be, will you ever do it again?

William: I am trying to think of the best way to best order in which to answer those questions. Lessons learned, let's start. Yeah. Lessons learned, lessons learned don't do hardware. You know, as I was going through PuppTech in the early stages and trying to raise money from this thing, I kept hearing from investors, why we don't invest in hardware because hardware is hard. And—

Cynthia: They're crazy. I brought you an investor who said that.

William: And I always thought those investors were crazy because if you look at some of the biggest, most successful companies in the world, Rachio make hardware. So like how hard, you know, lots of companies doing this and they're making tons of money, so how bad can it be? Right. And it turns out there are, those investors are right. It's really bad. And it's really, really, really hard. And I, frankly, I don't know how, I mean, you know, we would have needed in order to do PuppTech the right way. A lot of the problems that came in our manufacturing and the quality and all that stuff happened because we didn't have enough money. We didn't have enough money to test. We didn't have enough money to like hire the right people and the right engineers and all the right everything. And so in order to do this properly, you would need what I heard, the figure I heard was to bring a hardware product to market for a startup. You need like two to $3 million. And we did it for $700,000. So we had to cut corners. So I personally will never do hardware again, the only way that I would even consider doing hardware is if some hardware guy came to me and was like, I have this amazing idea and I will do everything related to the product and you never have to even work. And I have $5 million and I have manufacturing expertise. And like, you can just run the business and I’ll do all the hard work. Then I would think about it. That was the question. Number one is, don't be hardware. But what it left me feeling was I still really want to do a startup where I don't have to deal with hardware because I want to see, like, I think I could have made it if I hadn't had to deal with all this hardware. And if I didn't have that capital expenditure, was purported to work and was consistent, or if we'd had all the money or all of those issues are related to having hardware. So like I really, really, really want to do a startup that doesn't involve hardware, but I also am very poor and I've been living with my parents for five years. And so I should go out and get a real job. So this was all the feelings that were swirling during quarantine. So my family owns a ranch in Texas. And so we were very lucky in quarantine. We went down there for two months and we had a wonderful time not having to social, you know, you can't social distance when there's no one else around you. And so we, we had a great time and it was very, it was this very relaxing period in which I could sort of really think about what I wanted to do as a next step. But it was also a weird time for everyone else because the economy was crumbling and the world was on fire. So I was, I was applying to the job. The goal was, I need to make enough money. I need to make the right amount of money that I should be making at this stage in my life. And so I can move out of my parents' basement and buy a house and do all those things. So I started applying for those kinds of jobs, man, and you know, project software, developer, jobs, project managers, those kinds of jobs for tech companies. I got a lot of interviews, but as I was starting to interview for these jobs and really exploring what it would be like to have that job, I realized I would hate it.

Cynthia: Why?

William: Because I would hate working for someone else. And I remember when this hit me, I was, I was talking to, you know, yeah. This software development job. And I was asking him, you know, what? Their schedule is rising, where we work, you know this, and we do these monthly outings. And we take, I was like, that was exactly the job I had before doing PuppTech, different kinds. Like it wasn't software, but it was the same, like you work a regular schedule. And then we have these, we'd get together for lunch once a week. And we had, I don't want to do any of that crap. You get three weeks of vacation a year. And so, you know, the primary motivator for me financially, was to, uh, buy my own. Do I get out of my parents' basement so I could have a social life again, but having a social life during a pandemic is not something that you can do.

Cynthia: I haven't had one, Grant?

Grant: I didn't have one before.

Cynthia: So now everybody else knows.

Grant: Now the cashier at King Soopers just means that much more to me.

William: Uh, so, so very quickly it was like, well, actually I don't actually need to make this much money because, Oh, and also, you know, I, I have all these weddings and things I need to go to this summer and I want to be able to pay for all of those things. And I'd like to be able to travel. And you can't do any of those things during a pandemic. So all of these things that I was going to spend money on, that I needed a job for, I no longer needed to do, and I no longer needed that money. So I was offered, I was very fortunate to be offered a founding job at another startup here in Denver with a startup salary, which is very low. But just thinking about that, I was like, yeah, that's exactly what I want to do. I didn't. And so that happened in May. I went to meet with the guy that my other two who are now my other two co-founders. We did an initial meeting, a few weeks of trial period to see if we were a good fit. And then I was officially hired and invited to join this founding team and given a founding equity stake in the company. And so that's what I'm doing now. So I jumped right back in.

Cynthia: So my question, would you ever do it again? You are doing it.

William: I am doing it again, but not in hardware. I jumped right back in. I spent about a month trying to figure out if I wanted to get a real job, realized that I would never want to get a real job and then just jumped right back into the world of startups. And that's what I'm doing now.

Cynthia: Is the lure... I always ask myself this question, and I don't even know how I would answer it. But as the lure of the startup really about being your own boss, or is it the lure of something? I think something unknown. What is it?

William: Yes. If I had to put it in one word, it would be possibilities. And when you are in the very early stages of a startup, which is where my new company currently is, uh, you have the entire world ahead of you. You have all of this possibility of our company is going to be a billion dollar company, and we're going to do all these things and it's going to be amazing. And you have all of those things to look forward to that you would never have in a real job. And—

Grant: Next year I'll get four weeks vacation. Right?

William: Right. That's a possibility in a real job. It's like, I'm going to get a raise of 3% next year. And then if I work, this will, when I had a job, I was every year I'm going to got a 3% raise. And then if I worked for five years, I'll get another week of vacation

Grant: And I might get to use this special, the employee of the month parking spot.

William: Correct. That's right. And eventually they might even give me my own office in a startup.

Cynthia: So I want to be clear because there, there are some people who may be listening to this. If you're someone who's going, actually, that all sounds pretty good to me. How do I get that? You are not an entrepreneur. Like, don't go down that road. You will not enjoy it. It will not be the thing for you because to your point, you have to be driven by something else.

William: Yeah. And you have to, you have to like thrive on unknown optimism and possibilities. Yeah.

Grant: And I'm like, you have to look at the unknown in the positive aspect of all the great things that can happen. Not all the unknowns. A lot of times in our personal lives, we feel are scary and all that, but you have to have that different mindset. I mean, that's what you have William that's, that's what brought, I think all this together and what made it so great work. And with you, you know, the attitude of looking at the unknowns and saying, we're going to make this be this—

Cynthia: And that, by the way, as part of the X-Factor, I mean, it's very difficult to put your finger on the X-Factor, but that is definitely part of it is the ability to look in the face of there's a bunch of stuff, not working or whatever, and be the guy who says, okay, great, what's next? How do we make it work? How do we make, how do we, how do we turn nothing into something?

Grant: Yeah. And I mean, the fact that, you know, you went and looked for a job for about a month, and then you jumped right back into a co-founding opportunity. You have that thing, this other.

William: So this just speaks to the power of networking. So I met my co-founder Mike. He founded his company five years ago, right around the same time I was founding PuppTech. And both of us were first-time founders and were completely clueless. And we joined a Denver early stage entrepreneurs mastermind group, where we would meet once a week and discuss the frustrations of being a first time founder. And then, yeah, it is it just like, everything is hard and I'm poor. Customer's expectations are too high.

Grant: They want shit that works, what's wrong with you?

William: By the way, just as an aside, I don't put any blame on that. Well, 95% of our customers are blameless and we didn't deliver. And then there were just a few of them who were extremely rude.

Cynthia: You know, I've been in some variation of my own business for a very long time. There's always that, that, you know, for the most part, the, the idea that the customer's usually right is pretty true, but there is always that 5%, it doesn't matter. You can never make them happy. And, you know, that's, that's one of the things that I tell business owners that I work with, that I coach or whatever, I'm like, you have to find that line where you're willing to say this isn't a good fit and this isn't my client and let them go. Now that's harder when you're talking about mass production and whatever. Yeah. When, when you're doing a service-based business where you have to interact with somebody and you ha you know, it's a, it's a relationship thing. It's a lot easier to identify that and a lot easier to make that decision. So, anyway, go ahead.

Cynthia: That's very true. Uh, well, and that's another tip. Another one is B to C businesses are also very difficult. I now understand why as well, and my new startup is not. Um, but so, yeah, so Mike and I, uh, met in this mastermind group five years ago, and at the time his company, uh, which is a company I work for now is called renew West. He was starting this concept around working with the owners of land forest land in the Western United States that has been destroyed by wildfires and planting trees to generate carbon offsets. So, yeah, that's a very different kind of business. And it's obviously like not tech and it's much more of this like finance fund management thing. And so Mike has been doing that for five years, and then he brought in a partner John, three years ago to help them do that. And then they were running into a lot of challenges trying to do that in a way that was scalable and that would make money. And so they started looking at opportunities and tech, and that's when they brought me in to sort of build out the whole tech side of their business. So, you know, there was, they, we have this, we, Mike and John have this existing business, but we're having a hard time sort of growing it in a way that will make us any money in the short term. And we'd like to be able to grow faster. And so we want to build this tech platform and can you do that for us? And it was like, well, possibly, but I'd love to try. And so that's what I've been doing since May.

Cynthia: Good for you. Yeah. Good for you.

William: And yeah, so it it's, it's, uh, it's absolutely a startup. They have a little of money, so it's, it's, you know, it's certainly more advanced than when PuppTech was when I started it from zero. We have a little bit of money. I'm getting paid a little bit, not enough to move out of my parents' basement,

Grant: But it's pandemics. So who cares for social life?

William: Yeah. I don't have to buy a car. I bought a car.

Cynthia: Where are you going in it?

William: Mush carwash. Yeah.

Cynthia: So I know there's people who are going to ask how's Clovis

William: Clovis has great Clovis. Clovis was the one who has had the best year of his life because, uh, our ranch in Texas is the best place is his favorite place in the world. And he has spent he's there now. Uh, he spent like four months there this year. So Clovis has had a great time and is really happy, uh, and is still in great shape. And yeah, he's, he's whether—

Grant: He doesn't hold any of this against you.

William: He doesn't hold any of this against me. Yeah. He's never, he never called into our customer service line to scream. So yeah, Clovis is great. Everyone's great. And you know, a year on everything is great, good. Like everyone's moved on, including me. And I think I am in a much better spot than I was a year ago.

Cynthia: So if there was a new entrepreneur who was thinking about getting into building a startup, you're now seasoned, you've had some success, you've had some failure, you know, you're onto your second venture. What's your, what's your advice to them?

William: Don't do hardware.

Grant: That was easy.

William: Uh, well, and, and that's, that's fairly serious. Like if you are going to do a hardware product that is in any way, if you're going to do like a water bottle or something, something not smart. Yeah. That's probably, it still has a lot of challenges, but it's probably easier, but don't do IOT, IOT should be reserved for people who really know what they're doing and, or have access to lots of capital.

Cynthia: Yeah. Lots of ability to iterate and make those mistakes.

William: Lots of ability to write secrets. A lot of money. I don't mean in secret. I mean like before a customer gets involved. Right.

Grant: Right. So it's like a lot easier probably to underestimate the resources that you will need when you get started getting involved in hardware.

William: Yes. Unless you're experienced with it. Like those investors who are like, Nope, not hardware. Yeah. Yeah. And if I ever was lucky enough to become an investor, I would not want to invest in IOT unless it was somebody who really knew what they were doing. They had the capital. Yeah.

Cynthia: Rachio decides to go build something else, then you're like, sure. Okay, he's done that

William: Like me trying to do PuppTech. I now know it's just too hard. There's just too many obstacles. As you were saying, it's like all the challenges of a startup plus all of the challenges I CPG being a manufacturer, dealing with logistics and all of that stuff on a startup's budget. So that, that would be my first answer. I don't do hardware B to C is hard and it has a whole lot of challenges, but if you're going to do a startup yeah.

Cynthia: How important do you think it is for the success of a startup to have it be in an area or an industry that you know really well, does it matter? Would it have made a difference? I guess I'm asking on either the pet industry side, if you had known more about that whole thing on the software side, on the hardware side, certainly on the hardware side, I think you've said.

William: But I think you need to know something about something. Okay. I don't think I like right. I mean, like, you can't just know nothing.

Grant: It's like one of those great godfather lines, you get to know something about something, buddy.

William: I know, like I, wasn't an expert in the dog industry, but I, I became one. And I think, I think, you know, you could become one and in a lot of industry, obviously some industries are more complicated than others. So, you know, I don't think it, I don't know if the outcome, I don't think the outcome would have been that much different if I had been like a dog industry veteran because we made great inroads in that industry without that. But I think, yeah, not having that hardware expertise definitely screwed us. Um, and so, you know, and saying like, if you were to do a, a tech startup, a software startup and you didn't know anything about software, it would be really hard. So I think what I learned from this is you have to have, startups are not just ideas. You have to actually have something to sell and you have to be able to build whatever that thing that you're going to sell is, and you know, so like you have to know how to build, whatever it is you're going to sell, whether it's software or hardware. And I think a lot of, you know, we have this notion that like, Oh, I can just have this brilliant idea, like Facebook and people will throw money at me. And, and like that, that's just, that's just not true. Uh, Facebook was already built by the time people started throwing money at it. And you know, like you have to have some kind of, I don't think you need to necessarily have any industry experience in that particular industry. It would certainly help, but you have to always be able to build the product that you are going to sell.

Cynthia: Yeah. It's a great thing. I, and I did not pre-seed you with that, right? I mean, I didn't tell you to say that. So, so the thing that I say all the time, every entrepreneur who works with me has heard us say this, everyone who's listened to any number of episodes of Incubate This! or the Raika Show or, or any of the other, you know, broadcasting that I do. All my Facebook group. You've heard me say traction makes all the difference, because until you have traction, it's just an idea. And what you just said is they don't for ideas. Everybody thinks their ideas, the thing. And I spend a lot of time educating entrepreneurs, getting them to understand. It's not about the idea. It's about the execution of an idea. You have the idea now go execute on it. And when you can show a certain level of execution, now people start to get interested. If you're really excited about this idea, and you think it's great and it's like driving you passionately, just sharing that with others is not the step. The step is to let that passion drive you, to get something put together that you can show to others. Right?

William: Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I taught myself how to be a software developer in order to, well, I mean, I was working with you guys, but you know, a lot of the software from PuppTech was stuff that I just built because I, I knew that it needed to be done. And, and that's what opened the door for now me to be a CTO at this new startup. And, you know, if you really have this idea and you are really passionate about it, like maybe you need to go and you don't have money to pay for a developer. Yeah. You maybe need to go learn how to do it yourself. I mean, you, you have to do something to be able to show that your idea can actually be a viable business. And, and we wasted a lot of time at PuppTech trying to sell an idea—

Cynthia: And a lot of money, because if you had $700,000 that you spent, most of which was in hardware and the iteration through that, if you had been a, primarily a software company, that's a huge leg up for a software company.

William: And before that, like if we had just, we spent like the first two years, even before meeting you guys. Yeah.

Cynthia: When you were still trying to build an HVAC company.

William: And even for like the year between switching from the HVAC company, to what PuppTech became, there was like this one-year period, but first six, at least six month period before meeting you where we were trying to sell just an idea. And we at it was sort of right around the time that I met you separately for meeting you. And I was thinking like, all right, we need, I need to actually like, learn how to code and do this because nobody is buying this. Right. And so we wasted like a year and a half trying to sell an idea and that's just not realistic. So, so in this new startup right away, I was like, look guys, like, I'm going to start writing code now because we need to have something to show ASAP and let's not spend any money on marketing or any money on anything until we at least have something that we can show.

Cynthia: Right. I love it. See you learned. Yeah.

Grant: That's something I was thinking about a few minutes ago, was this process of the process that you went through was like a, a very accelerated learning setup. I mean, you are in such a different place now than you were a year and a half, two years ago, you know, I mean, just even like your confidence with software you're CTO now, and when we met, you were like, well, I kind of taught myself for the iOS to the Swift or whatever it was to, to put this together on, not, you know, I'm not really you, you were doing, I think, really good stuff, but you were always not confident about it. You were like, I don't think this is that good, but, and you know, you're sitting in a completely different place now in terms of that tech world where, you know, where you, where you stand from a knowledge point of view and a confidence point of view of what you do and don't know yet.

William: And that is one thing that I did get from PuppTech is this confidence. And you can ask, my girlfriend was a girl that that's the, that's the that's. The other part of the story is, you know, I wanted to, after five years of living in my parents' basement and not dating, like, it's very important for me to go out and start dating again. And I was a lot better at it, post PuppTech, because even though like I'm pouring, I live in my parents' basement. I just had so much more confidence from knowing, like from everything that had happened and also zero fear of rejection.

Cynthia: Yeah. Well, cause you spent five years being rejected by all the investors and partners like so many people.

William: Yeah. And so I think that is one of the things you will have to develop to be a successful entrepreneur is to what Grant just said is that confidence. And I think it's positioning me to, you know, for this new company to be a lot more successful because we now have that we don't have to, I don't have to waste all this time. Second guessing myself.

Cynthia: And what, what I'm hearing and what you're saying is your, your confidence is actually ground rooted in the ground now where there's a lot of first-time entrepreneurs there, their ideas of lofty, and it's it floats up here. And then all that experience sort of pulls you back down, but you, you know exactly what it's going to take to deliver on the next thing. And so that lets you have the strategic and the vision and the long-term, which can be very lofty, but also be back in the weeds and know, okay, there it takes execution to get there. And that's what I tell people. That's a successful entrepreneur. That's a successful CEO. That's what I'm trying to get people to get is you have to have that balance of the longterm and the strategic and the vision because you have to hope that nobody else is going to do it for you. But you also have to know exactly where you are right now and exactly what it takes to execute and exactly what the next step is. Because without execution, you don't have anything. And I, I would not be, I don't want to say I wouldn't be surprised. I'm actually pretty confident in saying that. I think at least one more, maybe two more times, William's going to go, you know what? I've got this idea and I know how to start putting it together. Whole new thing. I think you're going to, I think you're going to be back at, back in, you know, at home plate with a bat again, for another thing here in another couple of years that you're going to come up with because that's what, you know how to do this now.

William: Yeah. It's addictive.

Cynthia: You're a serial entrepreneur. Now.

William: I know. I, yeah, I guess I am. I guess too, I guess. Yeah. Right. Two, two counts as serial. I guess it's addictive. It's a, there's nothing else like the rush. Uh, but I think it's not for most people it's not, and that's true. Most people would hate it.

Cynthia: It's interesting. Cause you said that in our first session together, when we were talking about the startup gap and you, you know, I said anybody could be an entrepreneur and you were like, Whoa, Whoa, hold on. This isn't for everyone. Like most people can't. And I bring it back to the, the Ratatouille story, right? Where he's like, anyone can cook doesn't mean anyone can do it. It means that from anywhere could come the kind of talent and the kind of drive and the kind of ambition in that X factor. You never know where it lives. It doesn't, it doesn't, there's no demographic. That's right there, entrepreneur. It's not like you can go to a place. And you're like, Oh, here's the pool of entrepreneurs. It could come from anywhere. And part of the way that the startup program has always been designed, there's a reason now it's eight weeks. You get eight weeks to get all of the information that comes out of getting to a go no-go decision. That's not because you can't take it. It's not because you couldn't do it in 18 months or you can take as long as you want. But in that compressed timeframe, you learn a lot about yourself and your ability to focus. Hyper-focus become singular minded about getting the information that you need and getting those answers. That's what it takes. And so I crush people into this little tiny segment of time and kind of force that entrepreneurial experience in a microcosm because there's a lot of people come out of the eight weeks and they go, no thanks. No thanks. And then they go on with their lives and they know they never have it floating around the back of their head again. You and I will always be back there.

William: I know it's kind of a curse cause my life would be a lot easier if I was just, you know, an engineer like I was, and I was making a comfortable salary and didn't have to worry about all this crap, but where would the excitement be? I would be so bored. Yeah. So it's a, yeah, it's definitely somewhat of the curse of being an entrepreneur. But uh, but I wouldn't want it any other way for me.

Cynthia: Yeah. See you. So when I met you, you and your dad were like, Oh, you guys, you got involved, Cynthia. Now everything shifted. And everything changed for PuppTech and our trip. And I'm like, I get you think that it's not got nothing to do with me. It's you and I still know that you will be successful at some point whether you know that now or not. I don't know.

William: I think I know that. I think I know that as long as that thing is not hardware, I will.

Grant: We're just gonna call that the H word.

William: Yeah, exactly. Hardware's a four letter word it's just really bad. I mean, hard is right there in the name. It's right there, and firmware it's you know, and yeah. It's also a nightmare. Firmware is all the complexity of hardware plus all the complexity of software combined. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole experience, you know, it, it didn't work out obviously the way we want it to. And that's been, that was really tough, but it's given me a lot of confidence for the future. You know, I know what I can do. I know who I am. And like, I know that, I mean, we came so close for PuppTech. We, we didn't miss by much there, if a few times $150,000 would have made all the different hundred thousand dollars. Yeah. Six months. There's a couple more, you know, like if, if, if our big investor had, had done half of what he said he was going to do, I mean, there were just a few pieces that were missing and we would be having well, and then there was a pandemic. But until that, like, we were so close.

Cynthia: I mean, the pandemic could have even worked in our favor if we had had enough to get through it enough to get through it because the pandemic could have been like, Oh look, we have a time delay that is going to give us. Now you throw in supply chain issues that companies have been dealing with. And maybe that makes it a problem. Maybe it doesn't, I don't know, but it was the perfect storm in one way or another.

William: Yeah. And you're right. It could have, like if we had, you know, if the, if the pandemic had happened in November, then it would have been, or, you know, at a time when we still had money, let's say, then it would have been this perfect opportunity for us to tell everyone, Hey, like you guys, aren't going anywhere with your dogs anyways. So give us, give us another six months to really get this right. And we'll be, you know, and, and then we'll do it. Okay.

Cynthia: When people would have been in the, the way that people are this year, where they're like, so worried about their microcosm in their own universe, they're not thinking about it.

William: Yeah. And they're not going out to restaurants with their dogs anyways. So…

Grant: PuppTech is the last thing, you know, on, on my brain right now. So yeah. Take all the time you need.

William: Right. Yeah. So it's just interesting the way things work out and yeah, it's, it's an interesting thing.

Cynthia: So thank you for taking the time. Thank you for bearing your soul, which is what we've asked you to do today. And I told you at the beginning, you know, you say anything you want to, and you don't have to say anything that you don't want to, but I feel like your journey and your experience and what you've come out of it with and what you shared and how that all contributes is immensely, immensely valuable to other entrepreneurs who will hear this. Not only because, you know, I, I work with a lot of founders who are in that place. You were last year where they're just they're threading the needle. They're just trying to get the needle threaded and they're struggling and they feel alone. I mean, it's one of the biggest things we talked about that a lot last year, every time you would call me, you know, that's, what we would talk about is it's a very lonely thing because you're the one holding all the vision and—

William: Your own in the warehouse, 12 hours a day, sorry.

Cynthia: Exactly. And people will show up to help and they'll give as much of themselves as they're willing to, or as they can, but they can't. And they will never give as much as you will.

William: No. Well, and, and that is, I guess, if I were to make a final point, the very, a very key difference between my company now and PuppTech is that I have two real co-founders and that has made all the difference, you know, sort of just in my mental, personal state. And I think in just our ability as a company to be successful, because it's not just all on me, Mike and John are in this as much as I am, if not more, because they've been doing it for a lot longer. And you know, I know that I can rely on those guys when I need to. And if I want to take a couple of days off to go camping with my girlfriend, I can do that in the whole. Company's not just going to collapse while I'm gone. And, and so like doing it alone is so hard and having real, cause I never had real co-founders at PuppTech and having that has been such a blessing.

Cynthia: Yeah. Okay. Good. Good to know. Thank you. So thank you for taking the time today. Thank you for bearing your soul. Thank you for being willing to go on the journey and come out the other side and you've discovered yourself.

Grant: Yeah. Thanks for picking us.

William: Thank you guys for picking me. Sorry. It didn't work out. Sorry. We're not doing this from our, uh, you know, beach resort somewhere and for selling PuppTech for, with all our dogs, our dogs and our hundreds of millions of dollars from selling PuppTech, that would have been, that was what we all wanted.

Cynthia: The, the thing about that is everyone likes the story of the overnight success. And it's never true every time I see the overnight success story. If you go and look it's 10, 12 years sometimes to get to that place. Yeah. And because people don't know all the efforts until you're successful. So exactly, exactly. And it's easy to see it on the news for the first time or be like, Oh yeah, I remember that company. Wow. You know, the Weedmaps just sold for $1.5 billion. Yeah.

Grant: Weedmaps I mean, literally they're like an online phone book for where you buy marijuana products, right?

Cynthia: $1.5 billion because they've spent the last 12 years developing the maturity of their company and the maturity of the data in the company that didn't happen overnight. But now everybody's talking about it as if it happened overnight. And that's one of the biggest frustrations I've had as a successful founder, you know, where I've successfully sold two companies. People were like, well, that was easy. And I'm like, It's what I want to say. No, without blue live in the same house as me think That's right. That's right. And so, yeah, so I'm just, I'm very grateful that you were willing to take the time to talk to us. And I'm really, really glad that you found the next thing and all the best. And if people to get in touch with you or, or had questions, are you, are you open to that? And what would be the best way?

William: Yeah, totally. Um, I'm always happy to talk to entrepreneurs and especially ones that are recommended by you guys. So the best way is probably on LinkedIn, unless you want to provide an introduction through my email. Perfect. That works too. Yeah.

Cynthia: Perfect. So either reach out to us through Raika Tech and all of our stuff, uh, you know, we always put that in the show notes, but I also add a link to your LinkedIn in the show notes. That way, if anybody wants to reach out directly, they can otherwise, uh, if you come through me, we can have a chat figure out what works and then I'll make personal introductions. So, all right, well, so we are back, uh, there's a lot of new stuff. That's happening. A lot of stuff that's coming up in 2021 out of Raika Tech and a brand new startup that Grant and I are working on right now that is going to address a lot of the issues that we talked about today for the average tech startup entrepreneur. We're really, really excited about it and you're going to be hearing a lot more. So however long you're in lockdown, uh, however long, all this, this weirdness continues. We're here. We're innovating, we're creating and we're doing it with you in mind. So we'll sign off on this one for now, but we will talk to you guys real soon.