Latest / Ben Taylor Podcast / David Rose | LOOKOUT | Founder Podcast
Transcript
- All right, let's rock and roll. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Founder podcast series, which is a collaboration between the Ben Taylor podcast, Yachting Ventures, and Marine Industry News as well. On this episode, we're talking with David Rose from Lookout. And just before we dive in, I've got to say thank you to Boatsters Black, who have provided the venue for us here at the Palmer International Boat Show. It is beautiful, Motoyot on time 34.1, lead to San Lorenzo with a wonderful crew. If you have a chance, look at it, be aware of Boses Black, they're an amazing company. So thank you to them. Without further ado, welcome to the podcast, David. Thanks, it's great to be here. Welcome, welcome, welcome. First time in Palma. What an exquisite place. It's nice, isn't it? You'll be back. So I'll pass it over to Gabi, let's get going. Yeah, of course. So, well, again. nice to have you here thanks for being here david it's great thanks for inviting me so the whole goal with this founder podcast series is to really build on the profiles of the entrepreneurs that are building the most innovative and interesting companies in this space in leisure marine so can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to found lookout and perhaps you know what led you on this journey beforehand sure well i've been a serial entrepreneur this is my sixth startup company um and Previously, I was at Warby Parker, which is a glasses company, and I was responsible for the online eye testing and the virtual try-on. So the key to virtual try-on, if you're buying glasses, is to be able to use the lidar that's in your phone to look at the terrain of your face and project glasses onto your face. And so I became really interested in, I have a background in physics, and so became very interested in kind of What other things could you do to kind of make the space either of your face or of other terrains kind of more understandable and digitized and legible? And I wrote a book. I wrote one book called Enchanted Objects, all about the Internet of Things. And then my second book is called Supersight. And it's all about how we will mix what we see in the world with virtual layers of information. And so my job as head of research at Warby Parker was to think about how we could take this form factor and embed more technology into glasses, which Ray-Ban has done exquisitely. But that's kind of my background is in technology. finding kind of what's the right fit between a customer need and a breaking new technology. And that's what led me to Lookout. And why the marine space? How did you end up going from glasses into yachting? Yeah, so I think one of the jobs for augmented reality is to help you find your way in the world, right? When you hold up your phone and Google Maps or Apple Maps now, kind of... show you they superimpose like a big arrow on like you pop out of the subway in new york and it's like you go you have to go because you're disoriented like you don't know exactly where you are now think about the marine space like it's a totally unstructured environment there aren't enough signs it's foggy it's at night like you really need some guidance um and you also need safety right so a lot of cars have now blind spots detectors, rear view cameras. You can't really buy a car without a backup camera these days. Boats really haven't evolved with the same pace to embed those safety technologies into the boat. And so it was actually a terrifying experience. I'm a sailor and I also have a motorboat on a lake, on a large lake in Boston, above Boston. And we nearly killed some people in a small craft one night. uh it was it wasn't purely dark but it was dusk and actually actually i was water skiing behind the boat and my brother-in-law was driving he has a ton of boating experience but he just didn't see the the profile of the dark boat against the dark water The fact that you just choked your brother -in-law under the bus there. He's going to see this and be like, what? He said that. No, but if it had been a car, like the car would have put up a warning, the car would have put on the brakes. He said it just happens. Yeah, but boats don't have that technology. So that's why we built Lookout. Wow. And so tell me about the experience launching the product. Like how many years ago did you launch it? And what were perhaps some of the challenges that are specific to this space that you perhaps didn't envisage? the hardest bits for you know prospective entrepreneurs say that are coming into the industry right so many challenges yeah well the first the first conception of the product was um to be able to use augmented reality to see the bathymetric terrain data through the water because the water is i mean except for here when the where the water is beautiful and clear most of the time the water kind of hides all of the danger below uh and so we thought it would be amazing to put a camera on a boat or even with a phone and project all of the terrain data over the world and spatially anchor it to the world. So the first thing we did, and this was over four years ago, was to file a patent for that spatial anchoring of information about the world for boating safety specifically. And I mean, I would say one of the things that we've learned is there's an incredible ecosystem of sensors that are already on boats like this that we can leverage, right? So when we started off, we built this kind of pizza boxed flat thing that had a satellite heading sensor and an AIS inside. and a stereo camera system and rear-facing cameras and thermal cameras and kind of put it all in one box because we thought ease of installation would be really paramount but we've come to learn with the product is we can tie into the NMEA 2000 network and get the heading sensor data and the sonar data and the AIS data and the radar data but the really new novel sensor that we're that we're deploying is cameras so computer vision is just come such a long way in the last five or seven years. I had a previous startup that was looking at social media photos and trying to understand like you're into boating or you're into camping based on what's in the photo, not based on the text, but just based on the contents of the photo. But we've built, we've trained our own neural network in order to find everything that's not water. So it looks, it's called scene segmentation. It looks at the surface of the water and figures out what's not water and then finds things like small craft, swimmers, whales, kind of anything you don't want to hit, a container in the water, and then it classifies that, it tracks that, and it basically rebuilds a 3D scene around you of all of those things, and then casts that into the cloud like Waze. so that boats behind you can benefit from what this boat sees. Yeah, it's really interesting technology and so important from a safety perspective, as you kind of mentioned earlier. It really seems like it should be essential, right? Certainly for certain types of boats, in certain types of weather, in certain parts of the world, and we're going after trying to get it classified with insurance companies as something that they promote or... pay for yeah that makes total sense and so tell us maybe a bit about your because i know you've had quite an interesting um journey particularly on the fundraising side of things and tell us a little bit about that and the kind of stage also that you're at now are you going are you full in commercial mode commercialization are you still doing r d in the background and a little bit of context around all that yeah yeah so we officially launched about a year and a half ago um we have about 150 units out on boats today which we're very proud of The pricing for the product is $10 ,000 for the processor You can also pay 2,500 bucks and $99 a month if you want to lease it. But most people just are used to like buying components for their boats. And so they'd rather just buy the processor. So if you have any existing camera system, like a thermal camera, like a FLIR, we love the FLIR 360 4C because it has thermal and daylight and it's motion stabilized. So that plugs into the brain and then the brain plugs into the boat network. And then that plugs into the screens that you already have on the boat. and we also developed our own camera system that's kind of ideal for computer vision because it sits high on the boat like you really want a drone but the higher the better it has a coast guard certified nav light in it and it has a night vision full color night vision and a 4k camera and a 360 camera kind of like a gopro or insta 360 that sees 200 degrees up above the horizon kind of all the way around so we can spot things that are coming in aft uh as well or from the side um and that's you know that's the product offering today yeah awesome how's that gone so you you start talking about these i suppose established big players the ray marines the flurs and etc the how did you get into that conversation to say well essentially we can make your cameras and your hardware smarter here's our computer vision system why don't we collaborate how how did you open those doors and get into those i do really i mean my advice for any entrepreneur in this category is partner partner partner because establishing your own brand especially i mean i i think if somebody owns a boat they it's a very considered decision what you put on that boat and you really don't want like oftentimes it costs money to install things and run run and run cables so you don't want There's not the same kind of early adopter app ecosystem like, sure, I'll try this, I'll try that. So brands really matter when it comes to marine. So you actually go for a bit of a building the brand by association. Exactly. We've got a partner that everybody recognizes. We've got another one over here. And you naturally become, well, Lookout is inflated and becomes more known because of the affiliation of everyone else. I had a previous company that made a product and we got it in the Museum of Modern Art. in the MoMA and also in the MoMA gift shop. And then all other boutique-y gift shops were like, oh, you're in the MoMA? Like, we don't even have to talk. Like, we're taking the product. So what we've done is we've gone to Garmin and become part of their OneHelm ecosystem, which is more of a branding thing than a real integration because it's mostly we just... the HDMI cord into the back of the Garmin, and it works on the Garmin, and the touch out works with the brain as well. Right, so just the MFD integration. Yep, yep. We've also tried to kind of do this brand halo strategy. It's more of a marketing tactic with... rebates if you have other things like if you have a Starlink you might get a rebate we've run those before or if you have a C -Insure like if you have a CTO account and you're getting your insurance through C-Insure like you get it you might get a rebate yeah so we're trying to you know associate the brand with other brands of trust and integrate with other brands of trust yeah this is clever so I'm fairly familiar with CTO essentially and I'm gonna say AA of the water I think that's fair. Is AA worldwide? Or is it just UK? I'm not sure. You don't know AA. It's like, you know, something's gone wrong and they come and rescue and help you out. Yeah, it's a subscription service. Yeah. So in this movement to become actually an expectation on board a vessel is to have this kind of technology so that things don't go wrong. Yeah. That's a nice movement into that's the kind of space you want to be in and affiliated with. We just started working with another insurance company called Navinsure. I think they're called. They're down in Florida, and they do a lot of charters and boat clubs, which is kind of perfect for us because we're selling now to individual captains, to individual owner-operators of boats. Sometimes the more technology-driven people will love the product and say, for my vanquish, I want everything that's new and modern. And so we have a lot of kind of tech -forward early adopters. but we want to get boat clubs, people that charter boats. The system itself reads data in from all of the sensors, including the camera systems. You can do multiple cameras and then it stores all that data on the drive, on the terabyte drive that is on the brain. So you have kind of a perfect record of video and all the metadata. about how deep was it and what was the wind speed and where were you and all of the things that you would need in order to streamline an insurance claim so i guess it's a kind of a question to you guys like is it's not it's not obvious as an entrepreneur oftentimes whether you go after something that makes a lot of sense like the insurance companies or do you go after the fastest moving part of the of the glacier in the market which might be a boat brand like we're working with Hinckley and HCB these are really like tech forward boat brands and they always want to offer kind of the most advanced helm experience for their customers I'm not entirely sure if this answers the question but I'm a big fan of this I suppose the network effect that you're talking about so okay there's been that collection of data that was useful for that vessel But why can't other vessels that are also using Lookout also benefit from that? So actually, over time, you saw one unit that's a big investment for them. Okay, right, that's wonderful. But actually, by the time you're at the hundredth unit, you're at the thousandth unit, it's a bigger value proposition by getting involved in Lookout because you have so many already. Yeah, that happens for us in two ways. One is that every boat that we're installed on is gathering data. And so we improve the training. system. So we gather the, I call it the low confidence crops. So we'll take, not full video, but we'll take the, if we haven't seen a sea turtle in the Maldives, which is a real example, then we'll say like, oh, well, of course we can spot sea turtles in the Maldives. So we'll get enough training data and then we can build a classifier for that or whales or whatever else. So we're working with Noah on whale classification right now. And we're on a boat with Viking and Garmin that's out. finding that data every day was that a result of the regulation that nearly came in with the right whales is this one of the solutions that said actually there's probably a better solution to a really quite restrictive for the industry speed limit right where all the fishermen would just stop yeah quite important for employment and all that kind of thing but then the interesting question the ways question which is if you've spot if one vessel has spotted a whale what should the exclusion zone look like and what's the half-life of that exclusion zone because like as you've driven around in the world with ways it's like is the police still there yeah like you want you want people to confirm uh that something is still a risk and You also don't want to create magnets where everyone comes and looks at rare. Someone's seen a whale, let's go and see them. You don't want to crowd drive them. You want to draw a perimeter. I think of it like a sunny side up egg. Like we have an explosion zone that looks like a Buckminster Fuller dome where you say like this is the no drive zone. But then we also put a surface texture on the water surface in the aerial view that says that has kind of a whale tail and it says, you know, 10 mile an hour advised. And are you finding as you get more and more data and you kind of build up these, I suppose, opportunities and naturally find partners to those? opportunities self-perpetuate where you go, okay, well now we're really valuable to an insurance company as well as like a navigational assistant. These kind of pop up organically? They do. The one that just popped up that we announced at the Palm Beach show a couple of weeks ago is there are a number of companies that make really high quality navigation apps. Like the ones that come to the top of mind right now are Argo, which is just US-based right now, but they're kind of like Google Maps except... they really focus on the water. So they have all the bathymetric data. They do weather -based routing. They respect the draft and the buffer of your boats. And so we just integrated Savvy Navi is another really, really nice one that I like. Orca is another beautiful one. And so you can plan your route ahead of time with those tools. And then you go into Lookout and you can share it with Lookout. There's a little... and it says share with Lookout and then you type in a very short code into Lookout and then it gets that route and superimposes it on the water and actually the future like what we're working on you asked about R&D so you know of course there's a long product roadmap of what we want to build this is not launched yet but we're working on auto dodge is what we call it it's kind of episodic autonomy so it's not full point A to point B. But if you have an autopilot, which boats like this all have autopilots, and they're all blind, they have no... They will keep going. If there's anything in the way, they will keep going. Yeah, that's right. It doesn't even respect radar or AIS. It's kind of crazy. The autopilots in this industry are really, really... You've got a radar there saying there's rocks ahead. You're still just carrying on. It's telling the skipper, telling the captain, but... we will just carry on why not combine that data and go let's be a bit more intelligent here exactly and and make decisions accordingly so we take the routes that you've planned with argo or with savvy navi or with the or with your um ray marine and then we will do and you'll see the magenta route on in the world but then we will do a safe path that goes around the whale exclusion zone or around the kayaker or around the um the other things that only uh that that only computer vision might have seen or that what data fusion sees because kind of the exciting frontier for what we're building is uh taking multiple uh inputs taking multiple uh sources of truth we think of them as and saying how do you fuse all these sources of truth into one coherent glanceable scene that your brain can like understand and a few seconds and then you can get your eyes back on the water yeah you only want to see the data that's useful to you forget everything else let's make that as intelligent as intuitive as possible right so so i want to i want to understand your your route to market so how are these being sold if you could be quite open on commercially what's really attractive to you like the distribution route or or straight directly to captains anything else sure i i mean somebody just brought in a camera so can i actually show it to you thank you thank you so much cheers so here's one of the cameras let's put those wires down there so um so i think one of the things we learned was to make it really easy to install right so that's that was one of the learnings so this is a cat6 cable um that plugs into the brain and the brain plugs into the the nmea network and to the mfd but if you talk to marine installer they'll say how exactly does it you plug it in and we say oh it's a c view pole they're like oh i know c view We could have not sold the $300 SeaviewPole and just built our own SeaviewPole, but this is a trusted brand in the industry, like ScanStra, Seaview, so let's not innovate in all dimensions, right? Yeah, and then you don't have to educate all the installers, you don't have to say, well, it's the same thing, it's just, no, no, they're used to it. Seaview, right, Seaview, check, right. And this is a NavLite that's made by another company. Oh, what's their name? can you help me lumitech sorry so lumitech so we partnered with a company that already has a coast guard certified two nautical mile nav light yeah and we're like we could have put an led and made it waterproof but why don't we leverage them with the partner exactly more credibility right so so this allows us to So we go to the boat shows and the first thing we do is we go by the Seaview booth and we say, oh, can we put a camera in your booth? We'll sell more polls for you. And they say, sure. And we talk to Lumatech and Lumatech has a booth and Lumatech is already embedded on 65 boat brands. And so we're like, oh, head of sales for Lumatech. Eventually. Can we... Here's a boat builder for you. I mean, honestly. i don't want to be in the hardware business at all like our expertise is ai and software so i think of this as a reference design so i don't know if anybody from garmin is going to watch but or any boat any consumer like i mean any um marine electronics maker i want them to make this like i don't like we're manufacturing this in in scandinavia right now we're not at scale, we're paying too much, we're having to do all kinds of testing to do, like these are Gore-Tex ports so you don't have any kind of flogging issues or anything like that. You essentially just have no desire to become an equipment manufacturer, not at all. And so just do that out of necessity and then focus on the software. But does it make sense to have camera systems on boats? Like absolutely, like it should be molded into all fiberglass on all of these boats and it will be. How many years do you think that's going to be? I guess, yeah, I was gonna say two to three. I don't know, I guess, yeah. I think the regulation side of it is a really interesting angle. It's difficult with the whole international law perspective, but I think that could be a, having it as like a requisite on an insurance policies or something like this could be an actually return. I mean, we would love for everybody to have any kind of camera on their boat. I mean, this we made so it goes high on the boat. It's like the highest, this is supposed to be the highest point on the boat. And... uh this is the full color night vision camera the day vision camera and the 360 camera which you've never really seen on not a lot of boats take advantage of this which gives you an a beautiful like an aft view for docking and then also seas out everywhere around the boat imagine it in the top of one of these you'll be like i can see all the crew i can see my crew on the ropes going out yeah it's a great view yeah but again like we don't want to be uh we don't be known as the camera peep as the color night vision camera people we want to be known as the uh we synthesize all the data on the boats and we make the future helm experience that makes it really easy to understand where you are and send any risks incoming that give you more confidence to go out in more days of the year and more types of weather yeah um so what's the end game here what are you looking to build over the next few years what's the goal ultimate I mean, I'm really proud of the user experience that we've built. So, I mean, I really, the Endgame firm is to be known as the company that makes kind of the best Tesla -like software experience for boats. And I think the dream, which we haven't been able to do yet, is to work with the best boat brands like Benetti or Azimut or San Lorenzo and work with them and do the bespoke... San Lorenzo version of the helm experience which might use a 3D boat that is a digital twin of their boats that might have destinations that they recommend or clubs that they recommend that that kind of speaks to the brand of the boat but then also has all the augmented reality uh and and 3d-ness that is very useful for for boaters yeah suppose you become an integrated part of the design phase so it's super early on it's then the production boat so commercially it's really attractive yeah and also you can make the best design possible when you're at that stage i mean if you shop for a car recently uh not particularly i mean all the differentiation is now coming from software and and so much from cameras like my mom was in in the I don't have a BMW. She has a BMW. But she was looking for a new BMW. And you go to the website about, well, what differentiates this BMW? Is it the fabrics and the leathers? A little bit. Is it the engine? No, they don't talk about the engine at all. But is it the, we will spot bikers that come up so you don't door someone? Can you see into your car when you're away from your car? um does it does it perceive things that you're not able to perceive to help you like make lane change more changes more safely does it does it give you a reconstruction of everything around does it help you path plan or navigate more easily like those are the differentiators and i think they should be for boats as well safety and security basically yeah in unstructured environments yeah so i've got a closing question for you I would like to hear your vision on over the next three years, what capabilities do you think AI will have that we don't really think of today, we don't know is coming, that you think is going to be really, really powerful and on pretty much every boat? That's a good question. I think there's so many jobs to be done for crew management and predictive maintenance. you know loyalty programs for the people that sold you the boat to level up to the next next version of boats to predict that um i mean there's so much data flying around boats that can be useful and i'm sure there's like a whole cluster of businesses i mean i really love sharing economy businesses i think uh you know i think it's it's We have a house in New Hampshire. It's a beautiful house. We actually love sharing it, not only because it makes a lot of money and helps pay taxes, but also it's just like a nice experience to be able to share nice things with other people, and boats are kind of an example of that. I think in terms of the helm experience, two things. One, if you've flown recently, every seat has a screen, and you can watch movies or you can learn about where you're going. And I feel like the helm experience should be in the salon. You should be able to see further out, see what landmarks you're passing, see the mammals or under seawater life. I have this vision for having every boat with a screen should be able to teach you a lot and make the voyage a lot more interesting because it shows you historical wrecks that are coming out of the water. the the history of this fort that's on shore or can you charter a boat that's over there and how much would that be like you could make the whole experience a lot more shoppable as well so i i mean i think the help the future helm experience will ever will be pervasive around the boats as well for the passengers as well david thanks for coming on the podcast yeah pleasure speaking with you thank you so much and thanks gabby for organizing this you're welcome everybody if you enjoy content like this make sure you're full in here to see plenty more of it all been well we'll see you next time thanks again to boasters black for hosting us on board the beautiful motor yacht on time see you next time bye for now