Latest / Behind the Founders / Revolutionizing Mobility for the Visually Impaired: Cornel's Journey
Transcript
- Carmen: Hi everyone, this is Carmen Durvat and I will be hosting today's episode of Behind the Founders. Today joining me will be Cornell. Welcome Cornell. Would you introduce yourself? Cornel: Thank you so much for having me. My name is Cornell. I'm the C and founder of Dot Lumen, where we build pedestrian autonomous driving, first showcased in the glasses for the blind. Carmen: Great, happy to have you here. Could you briefly walk us through what inspired you to start Dot Lumen? Cornel: Sure, sure, sure, sure. So, you know, we're we're famous for building glasses for blind people. And the story actually starts with my story. I was born in a family where everybody but me has a disability. I'm the only person without a disability in my family. That really showed me how much technology can help, but also how little technology exists. So after years, after current automotive space, I came back to my home country of Romania and I started this company which we call Dat Women, which basically we solved the lack of scalable mobility solutions for visually impaired people. Carmen: Okay, great. Yeah, I did have a chance to see, you know, your LinkedIn profile. And shortly before you were launching dot Lumen, you were also working in Continental for a few years. What was that like transitioning from the corporate world into the more entrepreneur c founding world? Cornel: That's true. Sure. first of all, yes, I was head of innovation at Continental. It was a it was ⁓ a place where I learned a tremendous amount of things. It's a place which had a lot of trust to make me such a senior position from a very, very young age. I was twenty-three when I became head of innovation. at the same time it was a very an entrepreneurial experience. So I cannot say that I'm the typical from the corporate to the to the ⁓ entrepreneur because I was an entrepreneur even there. but obviously are a lot of changes, especially responsibility in the end. end of the day everything as CEO and founder starts with you, you know, the box stops with you for everything that's happening. You are the one person responsible for everything that is happening. And obviously a a a bit bigger responsibility than having a very senior role in a corporation because there you still have su ⁓ support services which can help you in various things. the moment we started this company, everything was depending on us. And I think You know, a lot of people are thinking of leadership as being on the top of a pyramid and it's correct. What they're not thinking is that the pyramid is sitting upside down and all the weight sits on your very, very thin top on which R. ⁓ so yeah, definitely ⁓ I think I was always leaning towards entrepreneur entrepreneur and entrepreneurship because I do like to take very, very complex problems and split them into multiple people, multiple teams, multiple solutions, and as although I hate entrepreneurship. It's a bit of a Stockholm syndrome. I do hate it and I love doing it. Carmen: Okay, let's talk more about that. You said that you kind of hate entrepreneurship. What do you hate about it? Cornel: You know, it's ⁓ it's it's never something which you can just put a pause on. As an entrepreneur, as a founder, as a CEO, you can you can't simply say, Okay, my it's my job is finished at five PM and that's it. No, my job is non stop. and I publicly admitted that I work a lot. I work eighty hours a week on average. That is my that is my work time since I was fourteen. So it's just how I'm built, I'm how I'm used to. It's nothing ⁓ which I recommend to other people. I don't expect everybody to do this. I just what works for me. You can't turn as an entrepreneur, you can't like turn a switch and your job is done, your job is never done. problems are incredibly complex, especially when you're I mean, entrepreneurship is also a very, very large field. You it's a ⁓ wide spectrum of depending on type of business. What we do, we are in Deep Tech. Deep tech in Europe, in Eastern Europe, in Romania. None them work well together. And obviously the the the scale of problems is just is just is just incredible to the amount of stress and the amount of things which is causing. ⁓ but at the end I love doing it. I love solving very, very complex problems. I'm an engineer. That's what I know how to do is to solve problems. when I say hate, I see a lot of young people, especially, they come to me and to people in positions like mine and they say, Hey, I want to be an entrepreneur or I want to be a C or anything. I'm like, that's the worst possible thing each one of do. It's I this is a job I will never recommend to anybody. I will never go to somebody and say, We need more entrepreneurs. No. I think I think we have too many entrepreneurs on many on many things actually. ⁓ it's not a kind of job which it's a kind of career which I recommend to anybody, but I think some people are simply more ⁓ for maybe. On the other hand, I am an entrepreneur because I had no other choice. ⁓ Because to the kind of things which we're building, entrepreneurship was the only mechanisms to do mechanism to do it. And I think that's what I'm an entrepreneur, because I have no other choice and If I would have any other choice to build the things which we're building and not be an entrepreneur, I would choose that. Carmen: Mm-hmm. Okay. Well Let's talk a little bit about like your personal journey, right? Because you said that you are the only person in the family without a disability. So what do you say from your experience, what is the biggest challenge that you see the interactions of your family members that really inspired you to want to solve the problem? Because you said, you know, as an engineer, you like to understand how things work. You really like to solve things. So what would you say is the the problem that you're really trying to solve? Cornel: Mm-hmm. So, ⁓ I think there are a couple of questions in what you say. So I'm gonna take ⁓ step by step. So my family obviously was a very important inspiration. I come from a family where again everybody has disability and also very disability, not the same disability. So regarding mobility, mental mental disability and other disabilities as well. So from a very young age, I I was the one which was capable of supporting everybody. Very simple example. My parents would send me to do grocery shopping when they were when I was free. I was the only one who could move in the family. So they couldn't. So I had to. ⁓ and you you grew up in this environment full of ambition because everybody in my family was incredibly ambitious, despite of their disabilities to actually make sure that myself and my sister have a you know food on the table and everything. So there was a lot of ambition. And I think I got a bit of that from my parents. At the same time, it was Growing up in this environment you it it set my mindset towards that it I'm capable of helping so I should help. So that's that's I think what comes from my family, my my family situation. On the problem which we're solving with Doc Lumen, it's a problem it's much more numerical and it's simple to explain. Today you have three hundred million people which are visually impaired. But if you check what solutions they use, they use the same two solutions for thousands of years. They use the guide and they use the white cane. And the guiding dog specifically, it's a great solution. But training and taking care of a guy dog, it's immensely expensive. On average, it's more than two hundred thousand dollars for a single guy dog. It's immensely expensive. And because of this, there are very few. In the entire world to 300 million people who are visually impaired, you only have 28,000 ⁓ guiding dogs. And to give example of my country, Romania, Romania we have 21 guide dogs to 85,000 blind people. Great solution, not a scalable solution. That's where we come in. What we did, we took self-driving technology and we built a self-driving car, but not one which drives on the road, but actually one which you wear on your head to guide you to the pedestrian world. Its purpose is to replicate what the guiding dog does. So, as an analogy, if a guide dog works by pulling your hand, avoiding you from obstacles, keeping you on the sidewalk, taking you to your destination, what we build, we call them the glasses, the dotlum and glasses, they do the same, but they don't pull your hands. They actually pull your head. We have a haptic interface on your forehead, you feel the device. How it pulls you, avoids you from obstacles, keeps you on the sidewalk, takes you your destination. And this is a technology now being which has been tested by over one thousand blind people and we have over one thousand and five hundred pre orders in Romania alone. Romania is not a big market. International is coming very soon. Carmen: Yeah. Yeah. And so tell me a little bit about what you're developing. I've seen a couple of articles here and there of what you have ⁓ sharing and working on. ⁓ I see that you also like build those VR glasses. Cornel: so we use the same technology as in a self-driving car, but we don't build a car. But it's the same technology. It's on the head of people. ⁓ it's used for for guidance. Just as the guide dog is pulling my head, we do exactly what the guide dog is doing, but by pulling your head. Carmen: ⁓ okay, gotcha. Okay. Mm-hmm. Okay. Cornel: It just happens the technology enabling this to be kind of the same with self-driving cars. do build the hardware, not we want to, we are a software company, but because we have no other choice. So we do build the hardware as well. but yeah, in the shape of a VR head, so it doesn't go over your eyes, it goes over your forehead, because the eyes are not really useful if you have a severe visual impairment. So ⁓ yeah, that's basically what we Carmen: Okay. Mm-hmm. Okay, cool. And in terms of the process of bringing those products to life, how long did it take for you to launch the first one in terms of also the testing phase and so on? Just walk us through the process of that. Mm-hmm. Okay. ⁓ Cornel: Five sure. Five years, fifty people. So if you if you if you do the math it took us I think I've done the math at some point, it took us a hundred and seventy work years. So it took us a s if you take all the people who were multiplied by an amount of time, it's a hundred and seventy years of work it took us to get to the first product. ⁓ but it's the first of its kind. And it's are a lot of things when you're building a product at this level of complexity, which has to be used by a population. Carmen: Okay. Mm-hmm. Cornel: which doesn't have visual ⁓ which ⁓ rely on their own visual feedback. So it's it's it's a medical device, it has to have very high safety, it has to be used by a population which cannot see. So there are a lot of complexities in what we built and we have solved them all. And now it's a absolutely great product which people are queuing a lot to get. And we I'm actually right next to the manufacturing facility. So this is where it's gonna be manufactured. So it's ⁓ it's it has a long, long battle to get here. Carmen: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. What would you see is the biggest challenge that you face while getting there in those five years? Cornel: No, there are many there are many great challenges which we had, but I think the number one challenge which we we had is not giving up. Because when it when things are so hard, any rational person would give up. Any rational person would give up knowing how hard this is. And the fact that we were irrational and we didn't quit, I think that's by far the biggest the biggest challenge we had. Not giving up was the biggest challenge. Everything else w was solved by this resilience. long as and you know I know a lot of entrepreneurs and I know entrepreneurs which are incredibly smart. I know some entrepr entrepreneurs which are incredibly stupid. and I was trying to find what what is like the common thing which all entrepreneurs have. What's that thing which makes entrepreneurs successful? And what differentiate the successful one from the ones which are not successful, successful? Because it's not ⁓ it's not how smart they are. I can promise you it's not how smart they are. but one thing which I found is resilience. They don't know how to quit. And that's the thing which I think also got us where we are. We simply did not know how to quit. Carmen: ⁓ So ⁓ following on to the next question, ⁓ tell us a little bit about your team setup because I can imagine, like you said, you it's very environment. You have A group of people support to be able to make all of this possible, right? walk us through your team setup, the operational aspect. Cornel: Sure. So we are sixty people right now in Datlumen, which is by far the biggest dip tech startup in this part of Rome, in Romania, basically, but not only Romania. It's it's it's it's huge. Unfortunately, big startups don't really happen in this part of the world, although they're common in other parts. So we're sixty people in Dotlumen. The company is split in two. We have business development and we have R D. Those are the two corners of of that lumen. R and D develops the products, business development make sure we have the mind to develop the products and make sure that The products are being sold. So th that's basically how we are set up. ⁓ directly under me I have a C level, which is Chief Operating Officer, Chief Business Officer, Chief ⁓ Investment Officer, Financial Marketing and Sales. That's what we have directly underneath. And that's kind of a new thing, because a year and a half ago, a year ago we didn't have it. We created the C level quite ⁓ quite recently actually, as we grew the company. I have a board which I'm reporting to, but I'm also part of it. And that's basically the the very very basic structure. But one thing which is very unique, especially in Romania, is very unique for what we do. we do is the result of some very pluridisciplinary people. So there are so many different things which together work in this building of so for so different people, such a variety of people which work. And to give an example of this, in the same building we have people for In the R and D side, we have electrical engineers, software engineers, machine learning ma machine learning, ⁓ mechanical development, prototyping, but then we have public health, then we have medics, then we have neuroscientists, then we have people on finance and marketing and all of that, and psychology, have a professor in psychology as well. And all of those, all of us are working together in the same place. And that's very unique, unfortunately very unique for Romania, because usually you know you get you find a software company, that's pretty much it. But we have everything. And it's in a very small group of people, ⁓ have such a diverse background. And ⁓ very, very unique ⁓ for what I saw in ⁓ in in my country at least. And it really puts a lot of interesting perspectives when you have a problem, there are many perspectives to solve it. And that's what allows us to create great things which were never created before because we have so such diverse people and so such amazing people also. Carmen: Yeah. And you mentioned that you have a team that are really diverse people. Where are they all from? What kind of backgrounds are they coming from? Are they all on site, remote, based in Romania or scattered all over the world? Cornel: Yes. So ⁓ they're not only Romanians, but they're all based in the same building. ⁓ I know I was listening to you telling me about ⁓ remote work and everything. I'm not a big ⁓ in what we do, I'm not a big believer of remote, and I can explain why. When I talk about research and development, ⁓ we manage solve is because people are meeting here in The coffee corner and discussing very tough problems which they have. It's something which we can't really know how to do remote in our case. On the business development aspects as well, I think we're so much better and much quicker if we are in the same place. Although we know that will not last forever because as we grow the company, now we're in Romania only and we manage from Romania everything. We know that we're gonna have people in other places and we know we're gonna have to work very, very well with them. Right now we rely on distributors and everything, but we see strategically that we need some boots on the ground in various places of globe and we're gonna have those those those places and ⁓ that's the next phase for the company which will follow. But right now we're all here. We have to have a few remote people every I mean there's some people which work more remote than on office. But overall we are an office team and we had a phase in which everybody was everybody was allowed to take as many remote days as they wanted and we were simply not that efficient. We were I would say very inefficient in that because Carmen: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. Mm-hmm. Cornel: You you know, when when it's about harder, but it's about putting harder and softer together. When it's about very tough problems that you have to solve, it's so it's so much easier when you're here. So much easier. Carmen: Yeah, definitely. It makes sense, especially like when you're actually building like a physical product as well. It definitely makes a lot of sense that, you know, you have to be on site to be able to make this possible, also for efficiency, also for speed and everything like that. And for the ones who are remote, are they based in other countries outside of Romania or are they all Romania? Cornel: ⁓ we do have some people ab abroad. ⁓ we do have ⁓ some people abroad but a small number, one or two people depending on the time frame. ⁓ otherwise the people mostly in Romania. and even for those we do meet in the office quite quite often. So ⁓ we do there are some things which can work remotely, but there less than five percent of them. Less than five percent of things work well remotely in our case. that's just the reality of what works for us. I know that's not available for everything. I mean there are so many things which you can do remotely. Carmen: Okay. Cornel: This the level of collaboration which we need to build certain things here, however, requires us to be in the same place. The business development team is predominantly a lot on the road also. So them being a lot on the road, obviously they're more experienced working remotely because their work is ⁓ with the people to which we're we're selling what we're selling. but otherwise it's it's mostly in the office. Carmen: Okay. You mentioned just a couple of minutes minutes ago that you are recently growing the team and the marketing side and so on. besides that, what would you say is the next ⁓ operational that you're trying to solve? Cornel: Wow, there are many here. production is a big one which I think we kind of solved. that's an important one. And ⁓ a few other ones is the direction, the new directions which we're going. So what we created, we we call it pedestrian autonomous driving. So we created the algorithms which know how to do what a self-driving car does on the road, but we know how to do it on the sidewalks, on the pedestrian infrastructure. And we realized we're very good at guiding what we call a legged entity. So from point A to point B, we know how to guide something on legs. It happened that blind people were the first things on legs. ⁓ but we realized they're not the only things on legs which we can guide. And that's how we got into robotics. So basically now we're taking the technology from our glasses and applying it to robots so that when you order food, a humanoid robot or a quadruped robot will come to deliver it to you. And that's something which really got me excited. We have like a new eleven million dollar grant on it. and we are buying and building and robots a little all the time. and a new level of complexity which we're adding to our business. ⁓ not sure if I would call it operational complexity, but there are some operational things as well. ⁓ but you know, as we grew the team considerably to be allowed to be able to build that and we're gonna continue growing the team. you know, we we are we are very blessed. A lot of people wanna work here. We have over 1,000 applicants per month. Carmen: Yes. Cornel: in a company of fifty, sixty people, which is absolutely amazing. We have companies just next door which have three thousand employees and do do not get a thousand app applicants a month. So definitely there are a lot of small things, but I think we got so used with them and we optimized the process so well that it works quickly for us now. Carmen: Amazing. Yeah. Sounds like it's really taking off in a very positive direction as well. ⁓ now that we're talking a little bit about topics about robots and then also a little bit about AI, AI is nowadays a really hot topic. Everybody's talking about it, it's like surrounding us and so on. something I love to always ask whenever I have guests in this podcast is: ⁓ what your thoughts on AI? ⁓ Cornel: Mm-hmm. I love it. I mean I I love it for I love it for a long time because again, the technology which we built in the the glasses work on AI and we were working on AI before AI was the cool world world. Before well, before ChatGPT and everything were building a lot of things on AI. because that's the technology which enables the glasses and then robots in our case to work. So we're no stranger to AI. what happened is that it it it it got very d it got very accessible. The things which we had access before, even in some cases got very, very accessible. And now it's easy to have access to the greatest models and to do the thing which you do. I absolutely love AI. And everybody in this company is using AI, not only developing AI, but also using AI to help deliver AI. And it's on all levels. To give an example, we hold a bi-weekly training with all colleagues on different departments on how what challenge they have and how they can solve it better with AI, ranging from all kind of things from finance to recruitment to everywhere we see opportunities to optimize or to make a manual process faster we use ai for. But a very important rule which we have and which I'm really sticking to, we never let not that we don't let AI make decision because in the end we are making a decision, but we never build processes based on AI. We AI is supposed to help us automize things which are more manual. So we always have a manual process. Which we use AI to help us make it faster or better. But we never create a process because of AI. And that I think is very, very, very important and I unfortunately think there's too few people look at it that way because otherwise the the moment the server is down we're gonna die. and that's something which which I will never allow. Carmen: Mm. Yeah, definitely for sure. I think at the end of the day it's also about finding the balance as well. As you mentioned that, you know, with AI, it is about ⁓ automation, it is about efficiency and so on. could you share ⁓ the listeners out there in a little bit more detail about what were some of the things that were really before ⁓ with the of AI you helped to make processes, make things smoother. Cornel: bunch of them. invoice invoice ⁓ registration now we do with AI. payroll we with AI. Some aspects of recruitment optimize with AI. I mean we train some agents to help us do all the bureaucratic stuff so we we are the ones talking with the people and no AI is talking to our our people. But then a lot of the the bureaucracy and a lot of the saving information everything now is done by AI. I think ⁓ so many reports and stuff we do ⁓ now with AI to to make it quicker. We built a lot of internal tools to optimize part of R D, a lot of parts of R and D which are optimized because of AI. Our entire production is made with tools which is optimized by AI. the development, development, software development is I mean, I would be surprised if I would be surprised if now more than I mean I would be surprised if ten percent of our code right now is written by hand at this point. It written by I but we are the one guiding it. Carmen: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think at the end of the day, ⁓ it is always really interesting to reflect on the role that AI plays, you know, in our day-to-day business as well. ⁓ and there's always about finding the balance of meeting it with the human element, creating creativity, thinking for yourself, and things like that as well. ⁓ I would say this, ⁓ I do have two more questions. And one of the questions is: okay, what is your next goal six months from now? Cornel: there are many ones and I wouldn't I w I don't want to put a time frame on it. So let's not say six months, because putting six months will really some information which I don't want to release yet. But to go a bit in the vision side, there are things which I'm thinking of. And the ⁓ one of is a very realistic goal, is the following. It took us five thousand years to train twenty-eight thousand guide dogs. So we know about guidogs for five thousand years and the best the world could do is twenty-eight thousand. Carmen: Course. Yeah. Cornel: The moment we ship more than twenty eight thousand of our devices, we have changed a paradigm which is millennia old. And I'm not sure many people can say that. So that's one of the first things which we want to do. there are ⁓ many other things. We're obviously working on the next generation of the glasses to make it even better product than what we have. We're working on the robotic side. We see so many opportunities of things which we can automate for production delivery. I want when I order food a robot to bring it to me. ⁓ Carmen: Mm. Cornel: from different restaurants. So there's so many great things coming and they're all happening and we see them here happening. Carmen: Yeah, definitely exciting to see like how you know what you're gonna be working on next. And I think what you're working on is definitely gonna leave a very, very huge impact as well. And I think it's also exciting to also give people who are visually impaired also the chance to be able to make their life, you know, easier and everything like that. And I think with the story that you have from your personal experience, it just blends in really well as well. So one final question. we did touch a little bit about this during the conversation, but I thought, you know, let's ⁓ it a space to revisit and elaborate that further. there's probably gonna be a lot of listeners out there listening in, thinking about starting a business, becoming an entrepreneur, but they might have reservations and so on. ⁓ If is one piece of advice ⁓ and you can think of, anything like that you can pass on to, what would it be? Cornel: my number one Don't do it. If the point of being entrepreneur is because you see a problem and you want to solve it, I think that's the only only good enough excuse to be an entrepreneur. It's one of the toughest jobs out there. Don't do it. mean okay, let me let go let me go in detail. If the point of being entrepreneur is because you see a problem and you want to solve it, you see how you can bring value to people. I think that's the only only good enough excuse to be an entrepreneur. Otherwise, I don't ⁓ many advantages in being an entrepreneur. It's ⁓ one of toughest jobs out there. And you know, as being a CEO, 99% of your time is bad news and you work for that 1%. So ⁓ you should that's an advice. Be ready for 99% of bad new of your time to be bad news and problems to solve, because that's what it is. be an entrepreneur if you really want to bring value in entrepreneurship is the only way you can. Otherwise don't there's so many other great things you can do. There's so many careers which you can have. entrepreneurship requires ⁓ in a field. So if you wanna start a business start because you have a deep passion in that because the moment it gets very, very tough and it will get very, very tough, you want you something to drive and passion is one of it. so yeah, think that that would be otherwise no, you have to be incredibly resilient. Incredibly resilient. Entrepreneurship is tough. Incredibly tough. Carmen: Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, definitely. I think at the end of the day, it really comes down to ⁓ being driven with a passion, being driven with solving a problem that hasn't been solved yet. And also, ⁓ as you mentioned, also making sure that having resilience and ⁓ dealing with multiple, multiple setbacks and to continuously keep on going what you gotta do. Cornell, thank you so much again for coming on. This is Behind the Founders with Carmen Durva. Be sure to stay tuned for the next episode. Cornel: Thank you.