John Long - Co-Founder & CTO at Qwake Technologies

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to John, the CTO at Qwake Technologies, and we discuss the ways they are using augmented reality to save lives every day, how having clear responsibilities makes it easier to learn from your mistakes, and the lessons he's learned jumping from academia to startup founder. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(John at 00:00:25) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Dude, it's so cool. I was watching you on a documentary last night, and then now I see you here.

(John at 00:00:43) Yeah, man. Thanks for watching. That was a fun experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:47) It was great. It was just showing us the future in this amazing documentary, all these advanced technologies. It was sad. It was happy. It was amazing.

(John at 00:01:00) Yeah. No, thanks for having me on. When you all reached out to me, I looked up your podcast and heard about it before, but I hadn't listened to it, and it was really a great forum you've created here. I appreciate it. It's kind of nice to have a CTO space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:15) Yeah. Right? How did that documentary come up? Like, how did that happen for you?

(John at 00:01:21) Yeah, that came up as we were trying to figure out ways to make our business work early on. Working in the public space, there's a pretty big gap you've got to cross before private investment's really interested. So we were really pursuing corporate partnerships for a while, one of which was with Verizon. And we had the privilege of working with them at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a couple years back, and they had a film crew there that was documenting the events for Verizon under all of their 5G initiatives. And we had our C-THRU system there, and we were running over cellular, some video streaming, you know, some of our early deployment of our features. And the film crew really liked what we were doing, and they pitched to Verizon, "Hey, you guys actually collected a really interesting group of people, not just from the technology, but the spaces they're operating within." They asked Verizon if they'd be willing to fund and greenlight this documentary. They did, and that kind of started it off. And it was a great crew out of Montreal that just, you know, showed up and just kept bugging us. "Hey, can we show up with this test you're doing? Hey, can we show up and watch you solder things? Hey, can we—" you know? And that's kind of how it grew.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:41) Yeah. It was so cool in the documentary getting to see you go through—what do they call them? They're essential—well, first of all, I guess I'm too excited. We'll back up. What do you guys do?

(John at 00:02:51) Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. So at Qwake Technologies, we leverage all the great things that are happening in modern camera and sensor and, specifically, augmented reality technology to create tools that allow workers, first responders, specifically—we're working with firefighters a lot right now—to do their job better under stress. Right? That's kind of the key components: people who are working in teams, who are working in time-critical stressful environments, who can benefit from a visual interface to help them do their work more easily.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:31) Yeah. It looks like Iron Man technology for firefighters is what I took from it.

(John at 00:03:36) That is part of the reason we managed to get Robert Downey Jr. to do some work showcasing our technology, and that was fun. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:46) Yeah. You have him on the home page. How did you get that to happen?

(John at 00:03:49) That's my CEO, Sam Cossman. He's quite masterful at those kinds of marketing events. I, with my team, just make the technology work when it has to. And my understanding is that we've done really good at leveraging cool things that are happening right now. And we've been very lucky. I mean, Verizon was really pushing on 5G and really wanted some cool user stories, you know. And so that's how that happened. YouTube Red was launching, and this series with a feature—Robert Downey Jr. kind of as the narrator—was happening right when we were at a really exciting moment. So we reached out. They liked what we're doing. And in general, people love what we're doing, which really motivates us to do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) How can you not? You're building technology that makes it easier for the emergency people to save our lives better.

(John at 00:04:47) Yeah. That's the general plan. You'd think it would be a slam dunk from a business perspective once you get that main thesis. We don't have any trouble in the "what problem is your product solving" department at all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:01) Have you gotten to work with any of the—well, I'll back up. So my brother, he's a physician, and one of his best friends is actually one of the chiefs, I believe. I don't know. They have titles. I may be completely screwing it up. He's a higher-up at Lee County, which happens to be the largest fire department in the United States. And I was curious if you worked with them at all or if you want to.

(John at 00:05:28) No. But, hey, I'd love to make that connection. I mean, because right now we're at a really exciting but also challenging part of our business because there's obviously a hardware component to what we do. And I'm sure you know from all of your interviews with CTOs and your work in technology, hardware's a different game altogether versus when you have a pure software play that works on some existing hardware. And we're at the point right now where that device that you see in the documentary, that helmet-mounted device, we've built like 40 of those prototypes. Right? Those are not quite certified yet. Right? We still got to go through design for manufacturing. There's all these bars you have to hit before you can really sell at a wide base. But we have these advanced prototypes that are all working on cellular network, live video streaming, and all of our accountability system, visual communications. And we really need to be doing the roadshow on this right now, but you might have heard there was this plague that hit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:28) Just wear the mask at your pitches.

(John at 00:06:31) Yeah. Exactly. It's been a little bit tricky. Right? We were fortunate enough to do a really great pilot with the Boston Fire Department. Right? Another really historically significant and large fire department. And that was in the window kind of at the end of summer and going into fall when cases were really down. But then everything shut down for a while. Things are starting to open up again. We've been able to do some demos in California, but we're at roadshow stage. Right? The fire and emergency response businesses are very much understandably show-me cultures, you know, and we have a lot to show now, and we're just kind of held up a little bit because of COVID, obviously.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:16) Yeah. I'll definitely—after the show we'll make some notes, and we'll enter—his name is Darren. He's a really great guy, and they're super modern. And when I watched the documentary and I heard one of the firefighters say that they're receptive to technology, they are. Firefighters are surprisingly receptive to new technologies.

(John at 00:07:35) Yeah. Well, and there's a lot of interesting things happening. You know, they always say, be glad for the times you live in, because there's a couple different factors going on right now. One major one is there's kind of a generational shift in the fire service right now. No knock on the older guys and gals. But, you know, the reality is as we get older, a lot of times our embrace of new interfaces and new technology kind of diminishes. And the easiest way to get new adopters is to lower their age. Right? And it just turned out that there's a big kind of generational turnover in the fire service going on. So there's a whole new cadre of people who are just tech, tech, tech. But then also the people who are older and tend to be the higher-up members—maybe your relative is a battalion chief, if not the chief of the department itself—you know, fire service members are having to service more people with largely the same amount of staff. Right? You know, when you look at population growth versus number of firefighters, it's pretty flat on the firefighters. The population growth's going up. So they're really interested in using technology to increase efficiency.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:46) Yeah. So how did you even get started with this company? How did you even get into this?

(John at 00:08:52) Yeah. Yeah. No. That's kind of a funny story. So this is my first entrepreneurial venture in the business sector. I mean, I've been a behavioral neuroscientist and computer vision expert for most of my life. You know, I started doing neurophysiology in undergrad, but I always had a very strong background in mathematics and computer programming. And then in graduate school, I worked in a brain-machine interface laboratory at UC Berkeley, Dr. Jose Carmena there. And that's where I started really getting into what I kind of call a cybernetics motif, you know, where you have a piece of technology that is meant to integrate with the brain and behavior and that the joint system of the technology and the user, you know, do things they couldn't do before. In the case of brain-machine interfaces, it was about somebody's lost a limb—like that Luke Skywalker moment where he gets the new hand. You know, it was kind of motivated by stuff like that, working on sensory feedback. But really, the reason I kind of moved—or the reason I moved into more technology—was quite frankly, the experiments we were doing where you're doing implants in the brain, they're just, in my opinion, no knock to Neuralink and what Elon Musk is doing—I did that. I did those surgeries and that kind of technology for like ten years, and it shows great promise. But, you know, the analogy is like you stick a fork in a bowl of Jell-O where the Jell-O is the brain and the fork is those wires you put in, and then you run around a bunch, and your experiment and data quality is, you know, inversely proportional to how cloudy that fork and the Jell-O is. You know, there's a material interface problem there that led me to believe, "Hey, I'm not a material scientist, so maybe this isn't the best thing for me." But meanwhile, I had been building a bunch of camera-based systems for doing things like motion tracking, 3D reconstruction, behavior analysis. And with AR coming in, I was like, "Whoa. How about instead of putting things in the brain, I put them in through the—your eyes are just an extension of your brain. You know, I'm going to work in that space." So the combination of kind of a choice and a new direction for how I was kind of going in this cybernetics direction, and then also just wanting to work on stuff immediately impactful. Right? You know, I love doing research. I love being a scientist. But the horizon of like, you know, "Oh, where is this really kind of going?" is very far. And I believe in it in the median term, but, you know, my own ambition—I wanted to do something that I could be like, "Alright, this is something that works right now." So I started exploring stuff outside of academia. I never thought I'd end up in firefighting. I did some pro bono work for the Smithsonian and then a little bit for NASA through a consulting thing. And then just computer vision stuff, you know, taking shots of asteroids and 3D fusing them, or, you know, did a little brain-machine interface thing with a friend at the Smithsonian. And through that, I got in contact with my CEO or who became my CEO, Sam Cossman. He reached out to me, and he's like, "Hey, I heard about you through some contacts at NASA. I have this idea. Can I talk to you about it?" And he mentioned he'd been doing some volcano explorations, whatever, you know. And he wanted hands-free thermal. He looked to the fire service for it. They didn't even really have it, and that kind of got him thinking a lot about there's a niche here that needs to be filled. He linked up with one of our co-founders, Omer Haciomeroglu, who had done this advanced industrial design concept. And Sam was like, "I want four of these." And Omer's like, "It's just a design concept. It doesn't—you know, I don't know how to make it work." And so they started looking for people who could make this kind of thing work, and they found me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:45) Oh, that is so cool. So he was jumping into volcanoes, and he said, "It takes a whole hand to hold this thermal imager, and I need to jump into volcanoes, and I need better access to volcano-jumping-into. And so I need hands-free." And then that's how this thing got started.

(John at 00:13:02) Yeah. Initially. Right. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:05) I love it. Have you been into an active volcano? Any plans?

(John at 00:13:11) No. No. I mean, I've—you know, working with the fire service, you get all these really interesting opportunities because they have these—I didn't even know this—they have these incredible training facilities. Right? Some of them range from like one concrete house to some of them, like, in—I've seen in Savannah, Georgia, or outside Savannah, they have all these like containers from like shipping containers that they've made into like a multi-story maze. In Boston, they have this huge like four-story structure. And, you know, we go out there and, you know, they're like, "Oh, you want to throw on the gear and go in there with the fire and everything?" And I've done it a few times, and it sucks. It's cool. You get a real appreciation for the work these men and women do. Everything from like what it really is to be in absolute pitch darkness, and then absolute pitch darkness when there's smoke in the air, and you're wearing this big mask where you learn that you can't even hear that well. They're burning stuff. You learn that fires are loud. You know? It's cool. But I, you know, at a certain point, I've done it a few times, but then I'm like, "Alright, I'm just going to run the tech. You know? I'm not here to get all sweaty, guys."

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:22) That is awesome. If Elon Musk called you up and he said, "Hey, how you doing, bud? I want you to be a beta tester." And he wants to—he's already done with the pigs, right? The pigs are looking good. Right? And they've already been converted to ham. And he's like, "I want you to be one of the first team of beta testers." What would you tell Elon?

(John at 00:14:43) No. Not yet. I mean, it's still—oh, well, first of all, it's still an invasive surgery. Right? You know? And, I mean, I've done a lot of drilling in skulls before and, you know, it's a capsule. You don't want to punch a hole in there unless you really want to, need to. And that being said, I mean, his central thesis, though, about merging of human and machine intelligence through a biocompatible interface, I'm 100% on board with that. And the fact that he's using his extensive capital to advance those ideas and that research, it's the right way to go. Right? I just—this is for me, I think augmented reality technology is in the immediate term, both in terms of usability and learnings from actually figuring out how to create a compelling technological-biological user experience. You know, I think there's still a lot of value there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:45) Of course. I mean, you're able to save lives today. I even noticed when you talk, you constantly—I noticed in the documentary and then in your bio and reading and just talking to you today, you're always discussing how you bring everything together. And as a founder, I'm sitting here saying, like, "Oh, he probably had a lot of pushback from people thinking that they're manufacturing all their own stuff from scratch and not investing." Because, you know, I've raised capital before. And so when I hear people's refined pitch that got their business farther, it's usually a collection of all the objections.

(John at 00:16:20) For reals. I mean, you gotta figure out how to thread the needle, right? I mean, I know for us, the thing that has been very, very challenging, but also really focusing, is how do we close that gap between our customer, right, the firefighter, and the people who actually will buy the technology for them?

(John at 00:16:46) Because, and this is something I've learned a lot about along the way, both in terms of public service agencies and how they purchase things, and also how the investment community views this type of market. And it's not good in general. It's all bad because you don't have a consumer. The firefighters can't buy the technology, right?

(John at 00:17:09) They can be a little bit of a prosumer in the sense that part of the reason we're going out and doing all these demos is because if we go out there and we show this device, and so far the feedback has been really great, and the firefighters go, "We want this," we know that that goes up the chain of command, and we start getting buzz from the people that then are like, "Okay, let's sit down. Let's talk about how we do that," right?

(John at 00:17:35) But still, even there, it's still more like an enterprise purchase, right, where the agencies have to make the decision there. And then you run into, they can have restrictions upon how many they can buy before it has to go through the municipal government or through fire protection district. It has to go through the board of directors. If the purchase of a certain size, it has to be either put up for a competitive bid or if you're a sole provider, you gotta go through a whole—it's a lot. It's a lot.

(John at 00:18:09) And meanwhile, the investors are like, "When you gonna drive dollar one? I don't really wanna invest in anything that's still zero revenue," right? But the fact is, I think we have, after a couple years, figured out how to crack the nut. But this is a business where you can die while you've built all of this technology and you're showing, creating all this value, but you're not driving revenue yet. So private investment's, I mean—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:35) Even when you are driving revenue, it's still insanely difficult. It's so funny. I've pitched pre-revenue and got money, and then pitched post-revenue. And pre-revenue, everyone's excited about the potential, but they will think that it might not happen, right? And then you start generating revenue, like we grew 300% last year, right? And I was out there raising capital, and then it's just the same doubt. It's just, "I don't know if you're gonna continue to do that."

(John at 00:19:05) Yeah. That's good to know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:07) It will continue to happen. So the name of the game is just volume. You just have to have a ton of at-bats. If you get enough at-bats, you meet the right people, then it'll click, and everything's good to go.

(John at 00:19:21) That's the hope. I mean, so far, I think we have found a good target profile. We've been very fortunate that we got a contract with the Department of Homeland Security, and they've been a pretty good partner to us at this point. And we've been working with Verizon who's been good to us. And so we've done a pretty good job of getting some partners that aren't really taking any equity from us as we build out our technology and get closer to market, and it allowed us to get smarter too.

(John at 00:19:46) Learning things like, maybe your family members—you know, we've learned that big departments a lot of times have their chiefs will have discretionary budget where they can make a purchase order even on products that aren't certified yet, right? Because in the public sector, in the emergency response market, there's this really interesting dance around how regulations and stuff work. Because at first blush, it's like we all agree, we don't wanna put anything on anybody that's not safe, right? So there are standards for that, ranging from intrinsic safety, electronics can't blow up in gas-filled environments, you know, that sort of thing, all the way to National Fire Protection Association regulations around the heat and water tolerance. And those are just, you know, you could land a spacecraft on Mars in this technology—I mean, on Venus, I'm sorry—and the technology will survive.

(John at 00:20:13) But in between, that can make things very expensive, very challenging to get there. But then, you know, you look at the firefighters and they're bringing their smartphones in the fires and they're bringing their mounted flashlights, you know. So they make choices about when they're willing to, if the value of the technology is high enough, they're willing to compromise the regulations to a point, right? You know, to drive adoption and to bring this value in. And so, you know, we're kind of looking at these technology-forward agencies to try to get revenue as quickly as possible and also to get that network effect you're talking about. Because in the fire service, getting those at-bats is, "Oh, did you hear about this department?" It's really a social network, a lot of these first responders.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:20) Oh yeah. And I've often found that it's almost a better use of time just to go get customers than raising capital.

(John at 00:21:28) Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what we're learning. I mean, you know, my job mainly is the technology side of it. But I've had to, to your point about people's presentation of their business being kind of responses to a bunch of objections, you know, that was something I had to learn coming out of the ivory tower in academia. You gotta get smart on that stuff really fast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:52) Oh yeah. But you'll adapt. I mean, you were called to do this, right? This is a passion. Inside of you, you didn't go off into this dark abyss and leave the comfort of the scientific research job because, you know, you're an adventurer, right? You're on this journey, and you're doing something super useful. One of the—my background, software engineering—and one of the things I was actually pretty curious about, because there was a lot of talk about the 5Gs, is this technology only possible because of 5G, or could it be run without 5G?

(John at 00:22:28) Yeah. The roadmap gets really exciting with 5G, but our system we've always developed along a two-pronged approach. We have to deliver an incredible amount of value to the first responder in the absence of any connectivity, right? Because while 5G is really quite impressive in terms of the bandwidth, the latency, and even things like what are called edge computing, which is basically integrating server architecture within some of the cell tower hubs so you don't have to do all these network topology hops, very exciting stuff, that'll make it to where our features like video streaming, visual communications, real-time playback of everything that's happening, that can scale really gracefully and maintain really low latency. But all of our core navigation features that range everything from real-time image processing—so taking that thermal camera imagery, which is not really like a grayscale image, and doing a lot of enhancements that are optimized based upon my background in computer vision for how human vision works—all of that, all of our navigation, we do real-time tracking and mapping on the system. So if they get lost, they can actually turn the system into what we call a breadcrumbs mode, and they'll see the path they came in on, right?

(John at 00:23:44) Things like compass orientation. They can set essentially a true north that tracks throughout. All that is happening on the device because we're actually using embedded GPUs. We're using NVIDIA's Tegra-class chips. Because of computer vision, I'm very specialized, or rather expert, at parallel programming on GPUs. And so we use those little machines to do a ton of work for low power.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:09) And it's happening right on the device?

(John at 00:24:11) Right on the device. Right there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:13) That is so—that's saving the firefighter's life right there. The breadcrumbs thing. You have to go watch the documentary because you get to see the little arrows on the floor, the augmented reality, the breadcrumbs. It is just such a fascinating thing.

(John at 00:24:29) Thanks. Yeah. I mean, that part is the thing. I'm getting gray hairs working on that and making it work in all the scenarios that it needs to work, right? Because a lot of the simultaneous localization mapping literature, you know, there's a lot of specs that the fire service needs. They can't wait for a map to initialize. They can't make special motions. All these things that had to be vastly improved, and I've been working a lot on under our DHS contract. And then also things like, you know, thermal cameras don't have textures. It's an interesting problem, but we're making a lot of progress.

(John at 00:24:57) And also, don't forget, a lot of it is, I remind the firefighters because I tell them about our tracking and mapping, and they're just like, "Oh yeah, that'd be great. It gets disorienting in a fire environment." You can turn it on and go. And I'm like, but remember, you now also can see, right? Because you have a hands-free thermal device. So you're not gonna get lost as much because you can see, you know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:24) Yeah. Once they put it on and get to go through their training environments, does it click in their eyes? After some—you've been there when a firefighter has put it on for the first time and gone through a training simulation. What is it like when they come out?

(John at 00:25:38) Yeah, yeah. So the general feedback we get, because there's a couple buttons and the mount on, so there's a little bit of, "Okay, how does this work?" You know, they're looking at the optic here, and it's not exactly where their eye is. So there's a little moment where they're just like, "Okay. What's going on here?" But then when they go into, say, a training facility building like we had at Boston where the lights are out and they have no choice but to figure it out, you know, then they're like, "Oh, okay. Now I get it," right? It's interesting because when they're sitting outside with the device out, they're like, "Okay," and it's like they're outside in the daytime and it's not really the use case, right? They're sitting out there and they're like, "Okay, I can see the screen. Okay, that's cool. That's cool. All right." But then you put them in there and they're like, "Oh, you know, I can move around. I can walk. I can do all these things now," right? And then they come out and they're like, "I get it. That is really exciting," right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:38) Have you recorded any of them experiencing it for the first time to use as promotional material?

(John at 00:26:44) Oh yeah, oh yeah. No, it's fun. It's fun. I mean, the rest of my business team has that, and we've been releasing parts of it. On our website, some of that footage you get when you come in, I mean, that was actually taken when we were at Boston, right? We hired a videographer, and the poor guy was on a mask taking video in there. And then he's like, "I can't." He's like, "I missed a lot of the good moments because I couldn't see with my visible light camera." And we're like, "Well, yeah." But then we have all the—because all the devices kind of have a black box feature, so they're natively storing the video and when available, they're also streaming. So yeah, we have a lot of stuff.

(John at 00:27:20) But there's tricky parts to it. The optic is a micro-display projector through a beam splitter. So it's actually kind of tricky to film it because it creates a virtual image of the distance, whatever. And then otherwise, it is thermal. One of the coolest use cases is in the dark, so we're having to collect the data. But it's cool. You know, we've done scenarios where we will put one of our devices on a dummy, and one of the settings we have is a mayday state. So if the firefighter ever gets in distress or if their incident commander who's watching their video stream via the tablet, if they see, "Oh, Joel's in trouble," they can set you into a mayday state. Now there's a laser pointer on the device and lights that start flashing, and there's a Wi-Fi transceiver on there that will turn it into an access point and start broadcasting a wireless signal, which then devices nearby will actually orient their compass towards that, right?

(John at 00:28:17) It'll basically use the motion of the user and the detection of the Wi-Fi signal to try to triangulate on the person in mayday. And they love that. That was a lot of fun when we showed it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:27) That is so neat. I've got somebody you need to talk to. He's pretty cool. His name is Dave. He is, I don't know, his official title, I think, is Director of Innovation, but he's at QTS Data Centers. And I don't think a lot of people know the name brand QTS Data Centers, but they're the big five, like the Facebooks and the Amazons and all the names I shouldn't be using. Dave's gonna be like, "We don't use those names." I'm like, "I know. I know." But anyways, big, very big companies use the QTS data centers. They are the largest data center in North America by square footage, right? And when we were preparing for the interview, we were wondering, because we just talked to him, we were wondering, "Okay, you've already told me that a lot of the stuff gets processed on the chip, but for the stuff that doesn't, when you partner with a QTS Data Centers or an Amazon or something like that, when you partner with a data center, do you have some sort of special contracts so they know that the type of data you're processing is life-saving to get some sort of priority? Or how do you ensure that your partners that are helping transmit your data are—"

(John at 00:29:39) Great. Yeah. I mean, that works at multiple levels, actually. That's a good question because we've been dealing with that a lot. So there's a pretty heated competition going on right now between AT&T and Verizon with regards to cellular communications in the public emergency responder space. So AT&T has taken one route called FirstNet. They're actually building dedicated cellular tower architecture that is just for first responders. Verizon has gone another way of doing what's called network preemption, where basically if you have a cellular device that is registered as an emergency response device, when your traffic hits the tower, everything else gets shut out and gets prioritized. And so we're working with Verizon on that because we're betting on, you know, their network's just so big that going the software route of network preemption will get bigger scale across the country.

(John at 00:30:05) And then we're also working with AWS as our partner who we have our cloud-native services working. And part of the reason we're working with them, because it used to be just Microsoft Azure that had what's called CJIS, which is the Criminal Justice Investigation Standard, I believe that's the acronym. It's basically security protocols that they require. And the way a lot of times the government works is one major department, like the FBI, says, "We use this standard," then the police use it, then the firefighters use it. And so that made Amazon available, and they have a really good—we're part of a program called the AWS GovTech Start. So they're really trying to provide a lot of services and value to government public sector startups like ourselves. So yeah, there's actually, you know, as hard as it is right now in our company with hardware and all the things we're doing, we have a lot of great partners, and we're at a really interesting moment right now where some big players are putting some lean, their shoulder, into some of this stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:37) What were you like in high school? Were you interested in neuroscience in high school?

(John at 00:31:42) I was just an impossible nerd in high school. No. I mean, I had a good time, but I was actually really into classical guitar and mathematics. That was kind of my thing.

(John at 00:31:56) I came up playing classical and flamenco guitar from when I was like 10, 12 years old. And then I was really into that, and I was really into math. I had some really good math teachers. But then because I was into the guitar, I was kind of into the heavy metal for a while, so I had like the stupid long hair and the grotesque embarrassing t-shirts, like from Metallica and stuff.

(John at 00:32:16) But then I just got—I don't know. Somewhere around my like sophomore year of high school, I got really—I got introduced to the idea, largely through mathematics and literature, that there've always been these kind of amazing people who have been inventing and doing things. You know?

(John at 00:32:34) And it made me interested in history, you know, learning about the mathematics, everything from going all the way back to Euclid through more modern people like Descartes and Euler and, you know, all the way up to Gauss in modern times. And anyway, I just got—I became a horrible pretentious geek in high school because I was interested in the history of like mathematical and musical geniuses. And then so then I just felt like inferior for most of my life trying to live up to these things. But I got a lot of skills along the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:06) Yeah. I just go with the be better than I was yesterday. Because, you know, I'd read all these books of all these people who I wanted to become or were inspired by, and it just seemed impossibly far away. At the same time, the progress that I make, you know, over the course of a year or two seems to be pretty great. And so I've kind of—I'm 33, but I've kind of gotten to the point where I'm relaxing a little bit with as long as I live my life with these like really solid principles, do good work, and wake up every day and just move the ball forward, then I'll be very pleased with where I end up.

(John at 00:33:40) Yeah. I think that's really sound. I mean, exactly. I mean, whereas in high school, I was like, I want to be the best classical guitarist in the world. I want to like contribute to modern mathematics, and I was just like a complete overly romantic morose person at that time. As I've gotten older, I don't know. It's like, okay, so I'm not the best classical guitarist in the world. I'm not like a total mathematical genius.

(John at 00:34:06) I'm probably not the best computer programmer or the best neuroscientist, whatever. But like, I'm really good at all of these things. You know? That's where as a CTO, I've really enjoyed this position because for lack of a better term, I kind of call it synthetic reasoning. I think that between all the work I've done in like mathematics and computer science and neuroscience—I studied philosophy as well—you know, I'm pretty good at putting things together. You know? I've really enjoyed—like one of the reasons I also kind of got into the business, was interested in it, was the people aspect of it. I was really enjoying as I was going from undergrad to grad school to postdoc. You start having more people beneath you who you're expected to mentor, and I really enjoy mentorship. I enjoyed it when I was studying classical music. I enjoyed it with my teachers. And as a CTO, I really enjoy it as well. I've enjoyed the experience of thinking about, okay, how do we scale our company to build the different technologies? We have the embedded device, the AR device on the helmet, which is more my specialized domain of real time programming and visual experience.

(John at 00:35:17) But then we have these cloud native services and figuring out, you know, okay, I don't know all this stuff, but I can learn it pretty quickly, and I've got to manage these people and having this tablet application. You know, that experience of working with and bringing in talented engineers, evaluating talent, building in systems to check people's progress, creating this so people don't hate each other along the way—I really enjoy that. And I think all of these endeavors where I've tried to be like the best at things and ended up, you know, second best have actually turned out to be like pretty good. If you're like second best in enough things, you're pretty good at whatever that is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:53) Have you surrounded yourself with a lot of other smart CTOs?

(John at 00:35:58) I've tried to as much as I can. You know, I definitely—LinkedIn's been a fun area there where I've met people. Also, the last scientific work I did was NYU, and they have a pretty good center for entrepreneurship here at NYU. Some of the alumni that I have from my old days at Berkeley have gone on to do careers, and that's really fun. Actually, a couple of my grad school colleagues have left academia to do ventures, and we all kind of chat, and that's really cool.

(John at 00:36:28) And then also like the AWS GovTech start program has been fun because one of the things I have is like a cofounder's or like a founder's roundtable where we sit down. And I've actually learned a lot about—like because there's some people who have done that and worked in the public space before, and it's really nice to kind of learn some of that niche, you know, particular information that'll hopefully help you succeed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:50) Yeah. It's incredibly important. I didn't get into it until, I don't know, the past year or so. And I met this guy—a Tim, well, I knew him, but I re-met him. Hadn't hung out with him in a while. And we started talking, and he has a company that basically does these seven groups. They get seven CTOs together, and they have these groups, but they're more expensive. They're more like an executive level thing. And he said, hey, we're doing like a lower price, like $150 a month type deal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:23) And I know you have the podcast and the listeners. And so we ended up doing this joint venture together called Elevate. And man, I'll tell you what. Like, after getting these people—it's like a weekly call, right? And it's a Slack. And after getting together and getting to have community and being around these people, I wish I would have done it like ten years ago. It's just—and so all these other people I'm talking to now because I do all these interviews, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:50) They're like, yeah, of course, dude. Yeah. You got to be in a group.

(John at 00:37:54) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:54) And I'm like, oh man, I wish I would have learned that a long time ago.

(John at 00:37:58) Yeah. I definitely want to build mine out more. I mean, that was one of the appeals of this forum is the opportunity to kind of learn from, and I've enjoyed listening to the episodes, you know, from the range of companies. I like that you got everybody from like people like GitHub down to more like niche technology firms, you know, myself included. And to get the range of experiences is really important.

(John at 00:38:23) And it's—you know, I think we're in such a golden age of technology right now. It's so much fun to be in tech. But the CTO and the technology department of a technology company obviously plays such a huge role, but there's like all these other factors around. And, you know, I've enjoyed the experience and would like to learn more from people like about the peculiar kind of—you know, the challenges that you hit as a CTO. Right?

(John at 00:38:51) Like, engineering versus product and like where do you put your foot down and don't. And, you know, it's tricky to, you know—especially when like in our case, we're making a hardware product and we got a lot of cooks in the kitchen trying to figure out how to make it work. And some of them know physics and some of them don't. You know what I mean? And that can—you know, if you're not right, if you don't really kind of make sure you're true on your decisions in terms of technical soundness, you know, it costs $100,000 to move a button. You know what I mean?

(John at 00:39:24) On hardware. You know? And it's—you know, learning strategies to kind of effectively communicate that sometimes technology constraints aren't nice-to-haves is one thing that's really tricky as a CTO, I think. You know, it's—what CTOs do for companies, particularly early stages, which I'm most familiar with, it's very challenging. You know? I know one of the things that I have wrestled with—as much as I do enjoy chatting with people and communicating about what we do, and I think there's a healthy space for debate—I'm still the lead. We're a small enough company. I'm still the lead engineer. Right? And so I think—and I've talked to some CTOs, and a common refrain I hear is, at a certain point, we need a quiet room and big blocks of time to work on stuff. Right?

(John at 00:40:17) And that workflow is actually very different from a lot of the partners you'll have in your company. Right? The biggest contrast being, you know, my CEO, Sam—you know, his job is much more multitasking on this call with this person, responding to this email here. You know, I'm checking in on, you know, this pitch deck, et cetera. And I'll have days like that.

(John at 00:40:38) But, again, like when I'm working on this contract, working on making our mapping and tracking system very robust, I'll put in like, you know, I'm at the whiteboard mapping things out and putting in ten-hour days. And so where that comes in is really challenging sometimes is when, you know, when we have a disagreement about something that we've got to figure out. And I'm trying to have as quick of a conversation as possible because I have work to do, and he's like down to hang out and chat at it at length because that's what he does for a living. You know what I mean? And, which is not a dig on him. It's just a different person. I think—

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:12) It's important to talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. But I get it. It's a communication difference as every CTO right now is like completely understanding—whether they've even been individual contributors, engineers, and have experienced that and then have since left that position and they're all they are kind of full-time social slash, you know, growth-type level because you have to adapt to your business and you'll get there too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:36) Or if they're still in that position like you're in right now where you're trying to balance the two as you progress out of it and the company grows, it's not easy, man. It's difficult. And the only thing we can do as people is get together and talk about it. Because, man, it feels good to be around other people who are experiencing what you're experiencing. And, you know, they'll like sharing tricks or tips or whatever it may be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:59) But I know the spot you're in right now and it—because I've had several business partners and I was the tech person building the product. And it's just tough, man. There's no way around it. You just have to—eventually, you'll find some really great people that you can trust to hand these things off to. But then, you know, that's dependent on when you raise money or when revenue comes in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:17) So you have to just play that role until the revenue comes in and then, you know, figure out how to get really great people on your team that can own it so that you can do whatever you want to do. Or some people even—this is actually one of the most common questions that I get when I do like public talks in front of audiences. It's like, what's the CTO's role?

(John at 00:42:37) Really? Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:38) Or yeah. Yeah. Like, what should they be doing? And this one guy in the Elevate community made this great thing called a CTO maturity model that shows where your focus could be throughout different stages of growth in the company. It was really fascinating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:53) I thought I need to partner with that guy to write my next book because I want to use that content.

(John at 00:42:57) Well, I'm curious to know kind of what you—you know, some of my observations have been—well, first of all, you know, as much as I was speaking a little bit to some of the challenges of the position that I am in, you know, one of the things that, you know, keeps me level-headed about it is I feel at a very privileged position in the world and in my life to be—these are very intriguing challenges and problems. Right? Like, my job, I don't—you know, one of the things I—and I admonish people. I like to think of myself as an ethical technologist. I like to promote this idea to people about, you know, hey, sometimes the hard work, the time, maybe in terms of pay, the sacrifice is worth it. Because like, I get up every morning, I know what I'm doing, and I don't really question that. Right? And as much as, you know, because—we're—I believe in what Qwake Technologies is building towards both now and into the future. And these challenges with the other members of my team, it's structural.

(John at 00:43:51) I don't think it's necessarily about them. It's just the nature of trying to bring together this interdisciplinary group. You know, in contrast, you know, one of the things I like about an entrepreneurial venture that I think academia could benefit from is like, anybody who's in academia who knows. You know, you go from postdoc, then you maybe get your own lab. The joke is that you go from being a top-rate scientist to being a totally mediocre manager.

(John at 00:44:17) Right? Because once you have your own lab, it really is a small business. You are a startup where the university and a couple federal agencies are your investors in determining your value. The problem is you don't have a CEO and CTO. You have one person that is both.

(John at 00:44:35) Right? And so I'm grateful for my CEO. As much as we might have challenges in figuring how to communicate, I'm not having to make all those phone calls and emails as much, and I can keep focused on the work. And I think to your point about what the CTO's role is, and I've been learning about this a lot myself. When I was managing, you know, the embedded tech on the device, the AR, which I was—I've written all the source code on that. That's my job. And then for the cloud portion of it, I wrote all the code for the endpoint working with the AWS services, working closely with the cloud engineer. The tablet, the iOS stuff, I didn't even really know Swift at all. Right? And I was like, okay.

(John at 00:45:17) I'm going to use Jira. I'm going to manage these through tickets. But I learned along the way, you know, the art, it seems, of the CTO is—because, ultimately, I think as CTO, I'm responsible for all the technology working, right, and fixing problems. Right? So if somebody's working on—and I learned this, like, the tablet, and something doesn't work, and then I'm like, oh, I don't really know Swift. I don't really know how to fix them or to get people to fix it. That's—I'm not doing my job. Right? So figuring out how to scale while still remaining enough knowledge or having people I trust to delegate that, it seems like that's a huge part of it. And I'm still at the stage where like, I learned Swift a little bit.

(John at 00:46:00) Right? So I can sit down with my iOS engineers. Like, I know programming and logic well enough to once I learn the syntax a bit, I could be like, okay. Now walk me through the code. Where's this problem?

(John at 00:46:11) You know, have those touch points. But yeah. Because I think one of the lessons I learned from a gentleman who worked at a company that we did a contract with is he said, responsibility without authority is blame. Right? You don't want to be in a situation where the people below you are responsible for things, but they don't have the authority to fix them, so they just get blamed.

(John at 00:46:31) And then you also don't want to be in this situation where, you know, you don't have like the—you have the responsibility, but you don't even have the authority of knowledge about it. Right? You just don't want to be in a position where you're going, oh, this thing doesn't work, but I don't know why. It's like, you know, it's not good enough if you're the CTO, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:50) It's a tough thing. It's a tough balance. And the beautiful part about this is there's no book. There's no answer. There's just—you have to be in it and experience it and grow through it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:03) It's just a tough thing. You just have to talk it out, talk the details out with great people and handle each situation as it comes. Because I always like to like dig under the question. I'm like, well, why are you asking me what the CTO's responsibilities are? If you have the title of CTO, what do you do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:19) And it's always like something where there's like a disagreement underlying there. So they're looking for some third party thing that they can point to, or here's the responsibilities. Or there's just confusion. Like, maybe they got promoted and they're uncertain about what they should be doing or should be spending their time on. But you nailed it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:36) The CTO is a Chief Technology Officer. They're on the executive leadership team for the company, and the company dictates the responsibilities. That's like when people are talking about team structure, like, well, what's right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:53) Do we do two-pizza teams? Do we do Spotify tribes? Like, what do we do? What's your business model? Because your customers and your business model are going to influence the team structure.

(John at 00:48:06) Yeah, yeah. No, I think the responsibility bit is very, very important because I find that if you don't have clear responsibilities, you end up in a situation where the company means, oh, everyone makes mistakes, but nobody specifically is ever really admitting mistakes. And then you just get, if you can't learn from your mistakes, you can't move forward. And then also, I find that giving responsibility at the right level to people below me really empowers them. People want to own something. They want to feel empowered to work on something and to, if they have to make mistakes, but create a context where I have a review.

(John at 00:48:48) And I kind of adopted this a little bit from mentorship in academia where I have regular weekly meetings with the people immediately below me. And we just go to the whiteboard, we do demos, and we go to the code. If something doesn't work, we're like, well, I don't go, "Oh, that's too bad it doesn't work. Here's a high-level description of how you might fix it. Go and do it." If you have an hour of my time, I'll spend 15 minutes with you. Like, let's actually bang this thing out a little bit, right? And it creates, I think, a sense with my people that I work with, that I value their work, and then also a little bit, like, I'm watching. You know what I mean?

(John at 00:49:27) Like, there's there's a little bit of that responsibility. And then, and I think also really important, I find this is hard to do as CTO, is like, learning to admit when I don't know something. Because like, a CTO, I'm, like, supposed to know everything, right? And so it can make it hard to be like, "I don't actually know that." I've gotten better at that. And, you know, that's where you have confidence in your ability to learn quickly. That's one thing.

(John at 00:49:54) Your responsibility as CTO is to learn really fast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:58) Yeah. And you're never going to know everything. I think most people are cool with that. I think there, I don't know the better way to say it, but it would be something along the lines of, "I don't know the answer to everything, but I know how to get the answer." Right? Like, I don't know the solution, but I know the problem-solving scientific method of how we're going to arrive at this result. Right?

(John at 00:50:20) Yeah. That's one of the things that when I look back upon my education in going through academia, one of the skills that I acquired, I'm so grateful for the mentors and the disciplinaries who taught me, it was just learn quickly. Like, sit down and read a book if you don't know something, and figure out how to gain knowledge quickly.

(John at 00:50:44) That's why I donate to Wikipedia every time they ask.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:49) That's awesome. Well, we have a hard stop in five minutes. So I just got a couple questions for you that are actually from the community, from the Elevate community.

(John at 00:50:57) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:58) And so, let's see. Because we kind of tailored them to you because you happen to have a really strong understanding of IP because of all the stuff you're building over there. And I was curious, okay, here's a hypothetical situation. If you're hiring someone, you have this fantastic candidate. You really like them a lot. But as part of their portfolio, they sent over designs that are IP of their current employer, and they ask you to delete them after you review them. Is that, like, an instant disqualification?

(John at 00:51:31) Oh, yeah. They're not supposed to do that. That's, you know, I mean, that, yeah. I think so because I think character matters a lot, and that gesture would show two bad things. One, it would show that the person is insecure in their own abilities, which then led them to make an unethical move to try to bolster how they look. Yeah. That would not be okay with me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:02) Yeah. It's a tough one to pick apart. My producer, he said he goes, "Would you have looked at it?" And I go, I don't know. I mean, I don't know if I would've, if I did look at it, I would've realized an hour later that I should not have done that.

(John at 00:52:15) Yeah. I mean, if they sent it to you and you didn't know what it was and what are you going to do if it's a part of their portfolio. But if they kind of were like, "Hey. You've got to delete this after you show, you know, show it to me." I don't know, man. It's like, I get burned on this sometimes because I tend to play fair more than other people. But, you know, yeah, that's just how I would do it probably.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:39) I agree. I fully agree with that. You know, I love, that's why I love asking these questions because the way you articulated your perspective of the character flaw issue that, you know, in this question, it said, like, three times, "Even if the candidate is top-notch," and I can even read it in the question. They they know they shouldn't, but they're trying to justify it because they're, like, a top-notch. But what you did is you came in and brought this perspective that they aren't a top-notch candidate because they have these character flaws. So I like that. What KPI are you, you're early stage company, building your and taking your first product to market. What KPI are you measured on as a CTO?

(John at 00:53:16) Well, at the early stage, if we assume that the product-market fit's been kind of made, the business people have done their side, early stage, you just got to deliver. You have to make the thing work. And then the reality is early stage, there's going to be bugs, and you need to communicate with your team how you're going to do it because those early demos are super important, right? If you're trying to show stuff off. So then you've got to make it work. And whatever workarounds you need, you can work with the rest of your team to do a little bit of the Barnum and Bailey. Right? You've got to do the circus a little bit. Early stage, it's deliver and be tight with your team to work around the current challenges of the technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:02) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.