My guest today is Heer Gandhi who is the founder of premier hardware design agency Dazzle Robotics in India. In this episode, we discuss Heer's experience of not clearing the IIT-JEE, meeting future cofounder via college robotics club, starting India's first online robotics store, going abroad for Masters, getting a job offer from Apple, dropping out of PhD at CMU, starting a company, going to China to manage hardware production, moving back to India, hiring women workers over men, high cost of hardware manufacturing in China, hardware design pricing models and much more! For show notes, guest bio, and more, please visit: www.designmba.show To learn how to launch your design side hustle, please visit my blog: www.blog.designmba.show Connect with me: https://twitter.com/jayneildalal www.linkedin.com/in/jayneil
Heer Gandhi is a hardware engineer and entrepreneur from Ahmedabad, India. He has a bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communications from Nirma University, Gujarat, India as well as a master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. After a small stint working at Apple, Cupertino on the iPhone in 2008, he ventured into startup roles as founder and first engineer at Invivomon Inc and Bossa Nova Robotics Corp, respectively. He is now a director and stakeholder at Dazzle Robotics Pvt. Ltd. based out of Gandhinagar, India where he manages product development and manufacturing for OEM clients.
WANT TO BRING YOUR HARDWARE IDEA TO LIFE?
CONNECT WITH HEER GANDHI:
LEVEL UP YOUR DESIGN CAREER (FREE EMAIL COURSE):
Namaste and welcome. This is Jayneil Dalal and you are listening to The design MBA. This podcast is a real-life MBA program for designers where we interview design hustlers and learn the skills, mindset necessary for a designer to launch a business venture. You can learn more. Find past episodes and stay updated at designMBA.show.
Why are you listening to this podcast? Think about it. Deep down you want to grow in your design career. And I’ve been in your shoes. I’ve pushed pixels for years without really knowing how the hell do I grow in my design career. So, I’ve created a free email course for you to help you level up your design career. The strategies I share in the seven-day email course are actionable and used by over 700 plus designers with success. So, head over to Levelup.designMBA.show or you can find the link to this email course in the show notes. Level up your design career today.
Jayneil Dalal: Today's amazing guest is Heer Gandhi. Here is a hardware engineer and entrepreneur from Ahmedabad, India. He has a Master’s degree in Electronics and Communication from Nirma University in India as well as a Master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. After a small stint working at Apple on the iPhone in 2008, he ventured into startup roles as a founder and a first engineer at In Vivo Mod Inc and Bossa Nova Robotics respectively. He is now a director and stakeholder at Dazzle Robotics Private Limited based out of India where he manages product development and manufacturing for OEM clients.
Heer, so excited to have you on the show, man. This is completely full circle for me, having worked with you, having looked up to you as my senior in college. Super excited to be chatting with you today, man.
Heer Gandhi: Thanks, Jayneil. Me too. I’m really happy to be here and happy to talk to you about some of my experiences and what I’ve gone through to get to where I am right now. And I hope it will inspire a lot of other engineers and entrepreneurs out there.
Jayneil: And I believe, since last we chatted, you have kids right now. Boy? Girl? How old are they?
Heer: I have a girl. She's seven. Her name's Prisha.
Jayneil: Oh, amazing!
Heer: My son is three years old now. His name is Risha. Yeah, I had them pretty much right after I moved back to India from the US. So, we were planning to have kids early and that was also one of the reasons to move to India with all the support structure and help that you have, easier to do it without really thinking about the support that you need. So, it's cool but having kids is a pleasure in itself.
Jayneil: Oh, I bet. And you've got the king's choice. You've got both the boy and the girl versus like having just two boys or two girls. So, it gives you both their perspective.
Heer: Yeah, that's true. Actually, you don't think of it like that. At least, I didn't think of it like that. What I’ve seen is everyone who's had a girl wants another girl and everyone who's had a boy wants another boy. The reason being they think it's going to be easy because they've already had one, it's easy to have another girl. So, they somehow end up being more comfortable with the second one being of the same gender but in my case, it was the same thing, I was also hoping for another girl. And when we had a boy, definitely, I thought about it twice, I was wondering. All my friends, obviously, logically said it's better to have both a girl and a boy and I understand that now because there's so much fun of having a boy and a girl compared to a lot of other friends and family that I have that have both girls or both boys. It's definitely better.
Jayneil: Yeah, I heard that a lot. I think it seems like to be the season of girls like everybody that I’m running into most recently in India and everybody I ran into, most of them were just having girls and, just like you said, they were also like “Oh, I want to have another girl.” And you're quite an ambitious guy. So, do you feel like when you're raising your kids, you have expectations from them that they should surpass you or follow your footsteps or stuff like that?
Heer: Frankly, I don't push them as much except for asking them to excel in whatever they are trying to do but at least understand the fundamental or the basics of what they are doing. And at the end of the day, you have to have fun, right? Luckily, I had a mom that pushed us and a father that always made us see the fun side of everything. So, I want them to understand that things have to be done, they have to be done well but at the same time, you have to have fun while doing it. So, I put my kids in sports and in music classes and extra curriculars. Obviously, these are ambitious expectations. Normally, you would just let them free play but the reason we do this is not only that they gather different intelligences. It's also important that they have fun. Once they learn to have fun with what they are doing, I think it will be easier for the rest of their life.
Jayneil: So, that is just phenomenal way to look at things here and now I’m trying to think about your journey. So, you're a Gujarati born in Ahmedabad. And for those people who don't know, Ahmedabad is, I hope I don't get this wrong, it'd be really funny, but it's the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi. We have the Gandhi Ashram there in the State of Gujarat. And you decided to go to Nirma University to do your undergrad. And from there you were, part of the prestigious Robocon team where I was also a member and you were heavily involved in robotics. So, now I’m trying to take a focus. So, Heer is about to complete undergraduation and then you decide to go to Carnegie Mellon. So, how did that come about?
Heer: So, as I told you, it all came about from my mother and my family. They always pushed us in academia. They understood the value of education. They understood the value of a skill. So, throughout school, we always had this thing that we should get a Master's degree or a PhD degree. There was always this hope that at some point we would either get into an IIT or an Ivy League college or one of the top engineering colleges in India or the US. Now, Nirma was something I wanted to do. My parents obviously wanted me to get into an IIT. They pushed me to do the JEE exams. I even appeared for the IIT exams and the results were awful. I performed extremely badly and I told my parents that “There's no way I’m getting into an IIT, there's no way I want to spend another year trying to get into one. I want to do engineering. I’m good at it. And I definitely think Nirma is the university that can help me.” So, they finally agreed and said “Okay, you've got the grades to get into Nirma University. So, you can go ahead and we won't push you to waste another year getting into the IITs. So, that's my story.
Jayneil: So, you managed to convince them eventually.
Heer: It was difficult to convince them while I was studying for the joint entrance exam. Because I always had a good academic score in school. So, they assumed that would translate to cracking the JEE. At the same time, I knew that with the educational background I had, which was an SSC board, what you call it in Gujarat, compared to a CBSE board in Gujarat, I understood that there were a lot fundamentals that I didn't have in terms of Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry that would be able to get me through JEE. So, once I actually gave the exam and my results were terrible, at that point, they kind of understood that this is going to be a tough effort for me. So, when I tried to convince them, they got convinced at that point but, yeah, it would have been difficult to convince them without actually trying.
Jayneil: Wow! So, to everybody who's listening and if you are by any chance from India and you're wondering about if you're not going to crack into the MITs of India, then there's a lot of hope for you guys.
Heer: Yeah, definitely.
Jayneil: And then at any point, were you concerned about the debt meaning like if you're probably going to go to Carnegie Mellon, it's going to be an expensive endeavor, right? So, taking out the student loan and everything.
Heer: Again, I didn't really think about going to the US. It was obviously something my parents had planned at some point but my grandparents had always thought they had saved up and my parents had saved up. So, obviously, their next plan was that after Nirma, I should do a Master’s or a PhD in a US university or in a top 10 engineering university. So, obviously, they had the funds saved up. And once I was done with my GRE exams which, I think, a lot of the viewers should know that GRE is a requirement for all engineering universities, once I was done with my GREs and I had a good score, I decided that I would only go to the US if I got into one of the top 10 universities for Electrical and Computer Engineering at that time. So, I applied only to the top 10, to the MIT, Stanford, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon one of them, Texas A&M, Texas Austin.
Jayneil: Wow!
Heer: So, when I applied to these six or seven universities, I got rejections from all of them except from Carnegie Mellon.
Jayneil: Which is the best one.
Heer: I guess, for Computer Science, definitely. For Electrical, I think Stanford is good, even MIT is better but come to think of it for what I wanted to do, Carnegie Mellon was the best one because it's a small campus, we got to take a lot of courses in Robotics, a lot of courses in computer science and that helped build the foundation to actually be all-round hardware engineer and a robotics engineer.
Jayneil: And you were always fascinated with robotics since you were a kid or was it something that you just came along from college time and a little bit later on in life?
Heer: I actually broke up with my girlfriend in 2004 and I had a lot of free time on my plate. One of the professors in Nirma noticed that I had a talent for hardware and firmware and I understood programming and logic which was required for robotics. So, he pushed me to get into the Robocon Plan. So, Robocon was a team that professors in Nirma or a couple of professors who coordinated the Robocon team set up and they invited intelligent students or capable students to join the team and to try out to build the robots or the platforms that were required to compete in the Robocon competitions. This particular professor, K.D. Shah, he noticed that I had some talent and he said “Why don't you try out for the Robocon team?” So, he got me introduced to, at that time, the people that were leading the Robocon team. One of them was Siddharth Vaidya who's currently one of the partners or directors in the business that we are in right now, Dazzle Robotics. He is also one of the partners and also one of the reasons why I came back to India, and Mayank Verma who was a mechanical engineer who was a senior and leading the Robocon team. So, it happened by chance. Someone noticed that there was talent and he said “Why don't you join?” and I tried out and it was a good fit. I had a lot of time on my plate, as I mentioned, and in three months we were able to build something that was good enough to win the national Robocon event in Pune. And that was a big win because we defeated IIT Bombay who were chosen to win per se. They had much better robots. The quality and the finish of their robots was a lot better than ours but, in the end, we had the strategy, planning and the software that helped us win that Robocon.
Jayneil: So, you guys literally in the Robocon competition, for those of you listening, it's like an annual competition where all the colleges from India, I think more than 100 colleges, participate and they put in teams and they compete with each other almost like knockoffs and you go to the finals. So, here, you and the team, you guys literally defeated all the colleges to become the number one reigning champions in India and set forward a legacy. Then you represented India the international stage.
Heer: Yes, we did. We did represent and that was an unsuccessful attempt. We went with almost the same designs and our technology frankly was not up to the mark. We didn't have access to a lot of automation and robotic parts that could have helped us at that time build a better robotic platform. When we went to the International Robocon event, both Siddharth and I were part of the international team from Nirma. And as Electronic and Robotic engineers at that time, we realized that the reason we are failing at international events is that we do not have access to the kind of mechanical parts, the kind of automation parts, motors, actuators as well as the kind of electronics, the latest electronics that are used to actuate or drive those motors. That was a realization that we had when we came back from the international competition and that was what Siddharth and I always had in the back of our mind that if engineers in India have access to these kinds of robotic parts and tools, they can go a long way. That was the initial idea with which the Robokits online store. So, that started that back in 2007 right after graduating from Nirma University.
Jayneil: So, it's like two deviating tracks are happening between two best friends. You are deciding to go to Carnegie Mellon while Siddharth is deciding that “Okay, I want to empower all the future engineers in India, students and colleges with the best robotic parts that foreign universities have.” So, he starts off that business. So, did you at that point decide that you might just stick it out in India and help him in that endeavor or you said that “I have to go to the us to get that Master's degree?”
Heer: Frankly, there were a lot of things we were trying. Siddharth was not sure about the robotics online store. It was an idea that wasn't executed. Similarly, I had a job opportunity from Motorola that I had got in my sixth semester in Nirma. So, I always had a plan that if I didn't get into a good university in the US, I would accept the offer and I would join Motorola for a couple of years of job experience. So, I had a backup plan. So, Motorola was a plan. Going to US was definitely a plan. I didn't have any plan at that time to start my own business. I didn't have the kind of ambition that would be required to do that at that time. So, I had two plans – either go to the US or work in Motorola. And Siddharth, on the other hand, was more ambitious at that time, even now he is. He had the entrepreneurial spirit. So, at that time in 2007, just after graduating Nirma, he wanted to either join a startup which was in technology or he wanted to start something like Robokits which was an online store for robotic parts. So, his vision was more entrepreneurial at that time. My vision was more self-development.
Jayneil: That's an amazing segue. So, then you decide that, okay, you end up going to Carnegie Mellon, you're attending all these lectures there, fine-tuning your craft in Electrical Engineering and Robotics. So, then, I believe, you got the job offer from Apple, right?
Heer: So, the job offer from Apple came right after I started Carnegie Mellon. When I joined Carnegie Mellon and I moved to the US in august of 2007, I immediately applied to Bossa Nova Robotics. That was a robotic startup out of Carnegie Mellon. I also applied to Apple. Siddharth and I had worked on a major project that you can look up on YouTube. It's called chess station portable. This was a time when you didn't have smartphones. 2007 was a time when the first iPhone was launched. It was a secret product until then. So, about six to eight months before the iPhone was launched, Siddharth and I decided that we should do our major project in Nirma Labs. Now, Nirma Labs is an incubation center within Nirma University that funds startup companies with angel funding and mentors them to grow into successful startups. So, obviously, we didn't have an idea but Nirma Labs was open to us trying something out during our six-month major project semester in Nirma. So, we came up with a couple of ideas which were already done. So, a startup is something that there's something that's unique. Your offering has to have value and it has to be unique. We went with a lot of offerings that were of value. We said “We'll make an amplifier that's better. We'll make a home theater or a home automation system that's better than what's available today.” And all of the ideas were shot down by Nirma Labs mentors at that time. Mr. Thyagarajan was our mentor at that time and he shot down all the ideas saying that “You're only improving on something that's already done. What we want is something that hasn't been done so far.” That's how we came up with the idea of Chess Station Portable. Chess Station Portable was a touchscreen board game. So, it's flat large touchscreen on which you can play board games. And as our proof of concept, we developed a chess application on that platform so that you could play chess on a touchscreen board. That was a big success. Everyone in Nirma loved it once it worked. There were a team of three people at that time – Siddharth, myself, and another friend of ours Kushal Patel. We ended up building this. It worked really well. We got a lot of accolades for this project. We also got interviewed by a couple of newspapers once this was developed. And about three months after that, the iPhone was launched and all the board games that you wanted could be loaded on Apple through the App Store. So, when I applied at Apple, they immediately offered me something within three hours of the interview because they realized that I had worked on hardware that was applicable to the iPhone's platform.
Jayneil: And until that point when Apple came out with the first iPhone, that was the first time that capacitive touchscreen or like the smooth touchscreens that have become ubiquitous in all our phones, they were the first ones to do that and then you were literally working on that similar groundbreaking technology.
Heer: I had already worked on that at the time of the interview and I had a product on YouTube that did specifically what they wanted to do with games. Their eventual goal with the App Store was that any game can be developed, put on the App Store and people can play those games over the cloud or on the same phone for that matter. And that was a platform that we built. It was very simple but obviously, as a hardware engineer, the managers at Apple understood that I had experience with building a touchscreen-based platform. So, that's why I got an immediate offer from Apple. They asked me to come on full time but because I was in my first semester at Carnegie Mellon …
Jayneil: Oh my God! So, you hadn't even finished the whole course yet, the two-year Master?
Heer: No, I didn't. I had an offer at that point. Obviously, I had the option to finish my credits in two semesters instead of four. That was one way I could go and I could finish it in two semesters and then join Apple or I could do it in four semesters and then join Apple. They had given me the leeway to choose. I decided to do a co-op which is basically a longer internship for six months and then go back to school for maybe a semester or two and then come back and join Apple. They were obviously not happy with that plan but they were more than happy to offer me an internship for six months. That helps them understand whether I’m actually full of shit or I’ve done what I said I’ve done. So, they were more than happy to say “Okay, you can't come on full-time. You have to finish your credits. We understand. Join us for the internship program.” I said “Okay, great. I will do that.” I think, at that time, I was one of the first Master’s students to get an internship or a job offer within maybe a month or two months of joining Carnegie Mellon.
Jayneil: Wow! And did you think about just dropping out of Carnegie Mellon to join Apple full-time?
Heer: No. frankly, I did not. A lot of my family and friends thought it would be better to convert my Master’s into a PhD. So, they were like “Why don't you finish your Master's credits and apply for a PhD?” Carnegie Mellon offer PhD with scholarship. So, it's a completely paid PhD. On top of that, you get a stipend for your rent and your daily expenses. So, it's a pretty good offer. So, it was a tough thing to decide at that point. Getting a PhD from a prestigious university versus joining Apple full-time was a difficult decision for me at that time. Today, it would have been an easy decision. Today, looking back at things, I would have just chosen Apple and joined Apple but at that point, I thought that PhD, obviously, I didn't have as much experience in the field and I thought “Okay, it makes sense to do a PhD if Carnegie Mellon is ready to offer it.” Luckily, at the end of my two semesters at CMU …
Jayneil: Basically, here you're making this tough decision where you're deciding between either joining Apple full-time and quitting Carnegie Mellon or finishing your Master’s and then joining Apple. And, obviously, in 2007 when the first iPhone came out, they had a hit product in iPod but again, Apple was nowhere as ubiquitous as it's now. So, obviously, at that time there was a lot of pressure on you.
Heer: Right. so, Apple actually gave me the option to finish my Master’s. They didn't want me to do a PhD obviously because their requirement was immediate. In fact, at the end of the internship, they were pretty clear that there was some hardware talent that I had in manufacturing and managing the circuit design, hardware design and dealing with the vendors of the chips and components that go on the iPhone circuit. So, at that point, they did ask me to come on full time immediately. I couldn't because I hadn't finished all my credits. They asked me to finish them as soon as possible and join. And at that time, it was a difficult decision for me. I felt at that time that I did have a lot of hardware experience but I didn't have a lot of firmware or software experience which is also key to any product. Today, all products, IoT or otherwise, hardware and firmware go hand in hand. There is a limit to how much analog hardware can help. Eventually, you need some form of software that is written on microprocessors or microcontrollers if it's a small consumer product. Without understanding firmware or without understanding the needs of firmware, it's difficult to develop a product. I understood that at Apple because as much as we could improve on the power supply, on the touchscreen, on the audio systems which were all analog components, we couldn't solve or understand bugs in firmware. We could only help firmware with statistics on how their firmware was performing in terms of how much power a particular application was using versus how much noise a particular application might be generating on the PCB board but we couldn't actually pinpoint flaws in the application. As a simple hardware engineer, that was a limitation that I realized I would have if I joined Apple at this point. So, I took the hard decision and I said I might want to do a couple of more semesters at Carnegie Mellon, get my degree but get it properly with some Computer Science and Computer Engineering credits or I might want to do a PhD. Obviously, my manager at Apple wasn't happy with that decision. Nonetheless, he gave me a couple of months to decide. And when I went back to CMU with this decision in my mind, my professors offered me the PhD and they obviously pushed me into taking it, my family pushed me into accepting, my friends pushed me into accepting, I myself was confused and I accepted the PhD offer and informed my manager that I wouldn't be able to join Apple full time.
Jayneil: But did you end up doing the PhD or did you end up then rethinking that and joining Apple?
Heer: No. So, I definitely accepted the PhD. I was in the program for about six months. I went to India for my cousin's wedding, I came back and at some point within that semester, it kind of hit me that the PhD program was something that was good for certain people but maybe I’m more inclined to hardware design and product development, not really a PhD where you deep dive into a simple fundamental problem and try to solve that. So, I understood that there was a lot of depth that was required in the PhD program, a lot of depth within a single topic that was required. That was something that didn't interest me as much at that time and I didn't want to spend five or six years. I understood at that point that not only am I giving up good offers that are available in Silicon Valley but I’m also giving up five or six years of my life. And at that point, after six months into the PhD program, I kind of had to take a decision that I would rather not continue a PhD and instead I should focus on research that leads to product rather than research that is merely improving or trying to understand a fundamental physical limitation. So, I kind of dropped out from the PhD. I basically stopped my TA and RA duties and instead only switched my professors obviously to a professor that was more geared to research in product dev. And I worked with that professor for a year trying to develop products that would eventually lead to startups, cutting edge product that requires the kind of research that's done in universities and the kind of research facilities available in universities but not necessarily something that is fundamentally groundbreaking. So, I worked with two professors. One was doing something in sports technologies and the other was building products in medical IoT. The medical IoT professor got eventually applied for an SBIR. That's a grant from the government. And he got funded for it. So, he decided to start a company and he was ready to make me a co-founder of that company. So, that was a good opportunity at that time. We were funded, we had about a million dollars in free funding from the government. So, it was a good opportunity and at that point I decided to completely jump out of the PhD program and co-found the company with him.
Jayneil: And you’ve probably upset your parents and everybody.
Heer: Yeah, yeah, everyone was very upset.
Jayneil: Like “What is he doing? What's happened to him over there?”
Heer: Yeah. So, everyone was very upset but a lot of people understood what I was doing. A lot of people felt that I’ve wasted all the money that I’ve invested in education in the US. So, there was a lot of drama at that time but something in my mind said that it was a good decision at that time. I joined that professor with his SBIR funding. We co-founded a company. I ended up managing the electronics manufacturing and prototyping for the company. I ended up managing accounting because we had to submit reports to the government on what we were spending towards the research in this medical IoT product. So, I got into a lot of accounting, a lot of legal, a lot of compliance that was required to actually run a company and we ran that for three years. We did build a product that worked. At some point, we realized that building a medical product in the US with the regulations and with the kind of testing that had to be done, the kind of clinical trials that had to be done, it was going to be an expensive process. We all had to be certified to actually perform clinical trials on patients even though the product was non-invasive, non-invasive meaning it's outside. Layman term is that you're not cutting into someone's body per se. It's a device that measures something from the surface. So, that's what our product did and it was non-invasive but still the costs were too high. The grants that we would have to offer and get were either too long, too difficult or too expensive to apply for. So, after about three years, I realized that this would be something very difficult to achieve in the US with the limited funding and resources we had. At the same time, I also got an opportunity to be the first engineer on a robotics company, robotics which was always the skill that I have and a passion that I had, I also got an opportunity to be the first engineer for Bossa Nova Robotics that was building IoT robotic toys. So, it included fun because it was toy eventually. It was going to go on Walmart shelves and Radio Shack and Toys r Us. So, it was a toy eventually. We were building something for fun but it also had the robotics element, it also had IoT and I thought it was a good opportunity to be a first engineer in that company. again, Bossa Nova was a startup. They didn't have much funding. A lot of effort was put into building a POC. I built a POC for them.
Jayneil: A proof of concept.
Heer: A proof of concept, in my free time. They liked it. Bossa Nova got funding of about 20 million dollars based on that proof of concept.
Jayneil: And who were the investors?
Heer: There was a group called Invis in New York that invested at that time. We ended up building this robotics toy that connected to the cloud. All the toys were connected to each other. All the users could log in to their app or to their browser and check the points and the scores and the friends that they had in the cloud based on the toys that they were playing with in reality. So, it was kind of an online-offline kind of product that Bossa Nova had envisioned and we had envisioned.
Jayneil: And what year was this again?
Heer: This was back in 2011-2012.
Jayneil: Wow! Quite ahead of its time.
Heer: Sorry, it was 2010.
Jayneil: Wow! That is quite ahead of its time.
Heer: People didn't get it, frankly. We built the product. We spent a lot of money. We set up manufacturing contracts in China. Bossa Nova founders at that time realized that I had management skills to manage production in China. They sent me there for about three to four months in the year to help finish the end product in china and then to ramp up manufacturing. So, I did that in the mid and end of 2010. We shipped about 2,00,000 units to Walmart and Radio Shack and Toys R Us. It was a good product. It was well priced. We spent a lot of time bringing the price to a point where it could actually be a Christmas Gift for a lot of kids in the US in 2010. Unfortunately, we didn't sell as much as we thought we would. We didn't live up to the profits that the investors were hoping for. So, at that time, in early 2011 when I had understood that the medical company was maybe not going to go further than research and at that time, we got the news that the product in Bossa Nova Robotics hadn't performed up to expectations and the investors were worried.
Jayneil: So, you were doing both at the same time?
Heer: Yeah, I was doing both the same time for about a year.
Jayneil: So, you were a co-founder at the medical IoT device company and you were also the first engineer at Bossa Nova Robotics but yet dropped out completely out of the PhD program at that time.
Heer: I dropped out of the PhD mid-2009 and in 2010, I was fully working on the medical IoT product as well as this.
Jayneil: So, both of these were seeming that they may not have a favorable outcome that you had imagined when you started.
Heer: Right. By this point, there was a recession in the US and everyone knows about it. So, end of 2010, early 2011, there was an opportunity obviously to go back to Apple. I had a lot of friends back in Apple from Carnegie Mellon. They were ready to help me get back in Apple. There were a couple of friends in Google at that time. They were also ready to help me get a position in Google but after being involved with startups, I felt like that would be maybe mundane or the rate of growth would not be similar. And end of 2010 was also when I got married. So, I thought that whatever decision I should take should now be long term and should not be something short term.
Jayneil: And then your wife that you're married to now and have your two kids, that's the one you got married to.
Heer: Right.
Jayneil: The same girl. And she, at that point, was based in the US or India?
Heer: No, she was based in India but she had a visa. So, there was no issue as such.
Jayneil: Should you decide to stay here, I see.
Heer: Should we decide. So, we talked amongst each other and we had to decide whether we actually wanted to live in the US versus moving back to India. At that time, obviously, I was in touch with a lot of my friends back in India that included Siddharth. So, that's how Siddharth comes back.
Jayneil: I had an inkling that he's going to come back in the story.
Heer: Yeah. So, Siddharth told me that he and his brother Sandeep had eventually tried out this online store and they had a first mover advantage and they saw a lot of traction because there were so many young engineers that needed these robotic parts and they didn't know how to get it because Siddharth and Sandeep who had started Robokits back in 2007 and it actually picked up in 2009, at that time, they felt that this is only the sales and the growth is only going up. Every year they saw exponential increase in sales and in customer interest. So, they were very excited to have someone help them grow, something which they had already built. So, early 2011 was when I had to take a decision and I decided “Okay, I’m not going to continue with the current startups that I’m with because they're not really going in a direction that would be favorable.” Again, I didn't want to move to California, Silicon Valley if that was not something that was my plan for the next five to 10 years. So, I took a hard decision at that time and I decided “I’ll move back to India. I’ll try something. I’ll definitely join Robokits with Siddharth and Sandeep and we'll make it work.” At that point, I was pretty ambitious and optimistic. I felt that I’d already achieved a lot in the US, I’d got a lot of experience and discipline that was required to build something and do something entrepreneurial in India. So, I felt that some way or the other I’ll make it work. And Siddharth and Sandeep are great people. They are ethical and they come from a very simple humble but a very intelligent and knowledgeable background. They understand technology. They understand product. They understand value. At the same time, they understand how to spend money, where to invest in and where not to invest in.
Jayneil: So, quick fun fact for you here is that because the right at the time in 2011 when you are almost now going back to India to join Robokits, I was in Nirma from 2008 to 2012. And you could almost say that you were an inspiration to me and I was just following your footsteps. I ended up joining Robocon and we unfortunately did not win like you and we were knocked out of the quarterfinals but I think one of the things that just joining that competition for robotics, Robocon, taught me was persistence. One incident that comes to mind was I was kicked out a lot of the team. So, unlike you, in my whole life, I’ve had to rely on my networking skills more than my talent at times. So, me and this person who shall remain unnamed, we did not get along in the interview. So, he said that “As long as I’m here as the head of this team, you will not come into Robocon.” So, I went to the talent scout that you mentioned, Prof. K.D. Sir, that I also ran into at a wedding when I was in India recently. So, I kind of like made my case to him and he said “I’ll talk to the team lead and kind of put you in.” So, it kind of like went back and forth. And I think, at one point, I was kicked out of the team like 10 times and then every time I would go to Prof. K.D. Sir and then come back in and at one point, the team lead got so pissed off at me and then he was the electrical engineer, so he was like head of electronics there for the robotic side of things, and one time he got so mad that he took a screwdriver and then he was trying to throw it next to me and the screwdriver actually hit me and I think I have a mark somewhere on my shoulder. It just like stuck there. And this guy is like half in size to me height wise. So, I was watching a lot of Bollywood movies and I wanted to give him a piece of my mind but I couldn't say anything because then I would be kicked off and we were about to like go to the main competition. So, it definitely taught me a lot about patience if nothing else.
So, at this point, you move back to India, your wife is already there, and in your journey in robotics and in 2011, I remember that when you were going to IITs for the technical festivals and competitions, there were other upstarts coming in but Robokits definitely had the first mover advantage because every I went to Mumbai and there people from Delhi, everybody was like buying the hobbyist parts from Robokits like motors and servers, development kits, electronic components like LEDs. It was almost like, what they call it, the do-it-yourself DIY leader in India and it was just like homegrown. So, you joined them at that point in 2011, right?
Heer: Right. So, in 2011, I joined them. we decided that we would grow Robokits, the online store, but Siddharth and I always had a passion of building our own products like building stuff in India and actually selling it to businesses or to consumers. So, we had ideas of building medical IoT products. We had ideas of building high-end server systems or motor drives that were not available in India at that time. Even a lot of professional photography equipment was only manufactured in the US at that time and I thought that it would be a good idea to build these kinds of niche products in India so that companies in India could buy it at a lower price and that would give them an advantage because obviously they don't have the funds but they have the talent. So, we give them an advantage to actually compete in the international market. So, we had all these ideas. We started in 2011. We obviously decided to grow Robokits. We put in some more money. We bought some more stock. We made relations with more vendors. We hired a lot more engineers and employees, in some cases, to manufacture or to assemble some of the boards that were designed by us, in some cases, to manage inventory, manage customers and to manage our purchase.
Jayneil: So, what did you mean when you said that “We put in more money and buy more stock?”
Heer: So, the advantage of Robokits or the advantage of any company that is in the online sale is that you have the product in stock. A lot of companies in electronics, even today, do not stock components or parts in India. They're usually stocked in Singapore, China, Malaysia, Thailand because once you bring it in India, you pay custom duty.
Jayneil: Oh yes!
Heer: And once you pay custom duty, it's too expensive to send it back out. So, you only import when you know you're going to sell it. That's a big barrier to entry. You have to understand the market. You have to know what the needs are so that you can stock something that you know you will sell. So, the idea was to stock product which would definitely be sold in India and to be able to take that risk because we understood the online market and we understood the needs of roboticists in India. So, we definitely started a lot of more motor products, a lot of more motor drives, motor solutions, actuator solutions in 2011 and 2012. That was the time we started our brand of motion solutions or motor solutions that we named Rhino. So, Rhino Motion Controls is a segment of Robokits that focuses on motors and motor-based actuations.
Jayneil: So, for all those listeners who are kind of like “Oh, this is too much geeky talk about robotics,” essentially what here is saying that they were the one of the leading India's hobby stores for robotic parts but eventually they just kind of like started these small spin-offs where they were making those parts themselves, specific niche parts. And, Heer, one of the things I do remember when you guys were doing the Rhino, boards and platform, I was actually an intern there in 2012. And one of the things that fascinated me, and I would say that if they're doing business case studies in terms of intellectual property and how to maintain that, this should be definitely there. One thing I noticed that in India you know people employ maids to clean the factories or clean the offices and what I notice is that you guys trained these maids to actually do soldering work on the hardware boards and the PCBs, the printed circuit boards. So, what led to that kind of decision because this is genius, right?
Heer: It's not actually genius because this is something that China does very well. I was in China for six months in a year in 2009 and 2010 and I kind of understood how they manufactured and that was why I tried to bring those manufacturing processes to India. In China, what they understood that any kind of integrated soldering is like sewing a sweater. So, you need to be patient, you need to be precise. And that kind of mentality is found in women more than in men, at least in China. So, when I was in one of the factories and they had a huge floor with hundreds of male laborers building machining screws, bolting things down, fitting the plastic parts together.
Jayneil: Assembling the things, yeah.
Heer: Assembling, yes, but they had a room with 10 women who were only building prototypes. And the reason for that is that they were doing each and every prototype by hand. It was not being done on machines. It was being done manually. Anywhere in the US, if you had to build a proto, you would normally give it to one of these online companies. You'd upload your BOM, you would upload your PCB Gerber files and a company would send that data to either India or China and either a machine or a human would solder them for you and ship it via FedEx or DHL back to the US. So, you didn't normally do the soldering yourself in the US. You always got it outsourced.
Jayneil: Done by a human.
Heer: Right.
Jayneil: And then the PCB design, the Gerber files are basically just the design layout of how the board should look like.
Heer: Right. So, a lot of this prototypes were being done in China or in India either manually or on machines but if you needed something quick, if you needed a small change to a prototype, you had to swap out an IC, you couldn't do that on a machine. You had to have these maids who were able to do it without damaging the PCB board or without damaging the surrounding components.
Jayneil: So, if you had to change a chip on the board, you would have one of those maids just right very delicately with precision do that.
Heer: Right.
Jayneil: I kind of thought you guys did that because, from a business perspective, makes sense that nobody can steal your IP because I was like “Why not just hire electrical engineers?” but then they would understand the board, the layout and just copy and clone it but the maids, because they didn't have, I guess, the electrical knowledge or the engineering knowledge, they, I guess, couldn't do much about it.
Heer: Frankly, that could have been 10% or 20% of the reason but that's not the only reason. There are many reasons to have maids. One is because they're able to sit in one place and work for eight hours patiently. You don't see that with a lot of male labor. Number two, a lot of engineers in India think they are above manual work, right?
Jayneil: This is too menial for them, yeah.
Heer: Yeah. So, if they've designed the board and you ask them to solder it themselves, they don't like it. They think it's below them to do it.
Jayneil: It's like “How dare you give me this low-level job?”
Heer: So, that was another reason why we had to give it to them. Definitely, the third reason was you wanted to separate the design work and the manufacturing work so that each person didn't understand the full set of the requirements to a perspective that they could just leave the company and duplicate.
Jayneil: Start their own …
Heer: Right.
Jayneil: So, how on earth did you even convince all these maids who were coming there to just clean your office that “Hey, I’m going to teach you how to solder a circuit board and all these detailed electronic stuff” because they'd be like “Sir, we don't know how to do this?”
Heer: Well, it's all about money at the end. Money and convenience, right? So, we explained to them that “Okay, you make X amount, you work at eight different places or eight different offices cleaning things and you spend 15 minutes to get from one place to the other. You're tired at the end. You can't work eight hours. You work six hours a day and you still only make X amount but if we teach you a skill and we'll guarantee that you have a job here for the next five years and you only need to work eight hours a day sitting in one place and doing the same thing and you will earn more than that X amount.”
Jayneil: And it's less taxing on your body too.
Heer: Right, right. So, they actually thought that “If it's less taxing, I could work eight hours over here and I could actually work four hours early in the morning or late in the evening somewhere else. So, not only am I making X, I’m making X plus X,” right? So, to them, this was like a golden opportunity. And we actually have at least 15 employees today that have been working with us for the last five to seven years now. They didn't know anything. They didn't have any skill. They didn't go to an ITI. They didn't have any trained skill except that they had hands, feet, and eyes and we taught them how they should actually build circuit boards that would work.
Jayneil: That is amazing, man. So, now you've got the Robokits business that's selling all these hobbies robotic parts to all the students, engineers around India. And then at some point, you guys decide that “Okay, we need to pivot from this consumer model where we're just selling all these parts, electronic parts. We need to now have our own line of products. Maybe we need to just go from consumer side to business to business and sell to big businesses, maybe do manufacturing for them.” At one point, did you guys think about making this pivot or what led to that pivot?
Heer: So, a couple of things. Number one, we obviously tried with building our own brands and our own products and selling them online. There's a limit to how much you can sell online because not a lot of customers are online. You can't generate offline distribution and stores without a huge markup in price. If you expect someone to open a store and sell your product, they're looking for about 30% to 40% margin on the maximum retail price. So, we didn't plan our products to be that expensive. We planned our products to be inexpensive enough that people could use it and it could be a use and throw kind of product. If you had a project where you had to build the proof of concept, you should be able to do that in a reasonable price without breaking your wallet but at the same time proving that something can be done. So, it was important to maintain the price. And for that reason, it was important not to go with the distribution channel and to kind of sell it online in a way where obviously, we're making profit for the designs and the manufacturing that we're doing but at the same time, we're not pricing it at a point where it's impossible for them to buy these kinds of products. We realized though that selling these products online, the market is pretty limited. There are very few people who would understand the documentation online, who had the patience to understand documentation online or the knowledge to understand the documentation online and actually build things with our products. That was the time of when Arduino was launched and people then wanted everything open source ready and ready to use and “You just give me a sample code. I’ll load it on an Arduino board or a Raspberry Pi development board and I’ll be good to go.” People didn't want to make the effort to actually write any drivers or any [inaudible].
Jayneil: And for those people, Arduino and Raspberry Pi are just like do-it-yourself fully end-to-end platforms, open source where you can just build and tinker with your own hardware ideas.
Heer: Building robotic parts ourselves that didn't integrate with Arduino or that didn't integrate with Raspberry Pi and not having the sample code and the online support meant that the product wouldn't sell in huge quantities. So, we realized that if we wanted to grow, we needed someone who was able to manage … Again, we were not so good with offline sales. We were not so good with setting up distribution channels and making sure that everyone in the channel is happy. So, we realized that there are some people who have product ideas and people who have distributions channels already set up for medical devices, for IoT devices. The only problem is that they're buying their product from China or they're buying that product at a price that's unacceptable to their business. For example, we met with Equilibrium Energy back in 2012 as well as with Oakter. Oakter is a home automation company in Noida. We met with these guys and they said “We're building home automation or industrial automation products. The cost of our device is say X or 2X.”
Jayneil: Like 100 dollars.
Heer: Yeah, 100 dollars. And Siddharth and Sandeep and I look at these products and we understand that there is a huge scope to not manufacture these products in the US or in China and actually manufacture them in India and we could actually bring that hundred dollars to 50 dollars.
Jayneil: So, what's so expensive about China? I really don't know much about the manufacturing in China. So, let's say that I want to just develop a product, a simple camera module, just that, basically for security purposes at home. Why would that be so expensive in China? What are the costs that's driving that up?
Heer: The number one problem with China is the fact that assembled electronic board shipped from China or anywhere in the world attracts a duty. That duty and shipping cost, once you do the math, assuming you don't smuggle it into the country, ends up being somewhere around 10% to 12% on the base value. So, there's already a 12% margin that you can make if you manufacture in India. So, 12% is number one. Number two, new companies and startups don't really have the kind of quantities that can justify the fixed costs that a factory in china would need to bear to set up manufacturing in China.
Jayneil: For them like a custom one for them. I see.
Heer: Right. So, usually the cost in manufacturing, there is a fixed cost and a variable cost. The fixed cost is basically training engineers to understand your product, building test code, test processes, test jigs that will be able to validate each and every feature of the product.
Jayneil: Quality control, yeah.
Heer: And then repeat that process enough number of times in the test setup to validate that repeatability and quality is up to the mark. So, setting up those test jigs, having engineers who understand that test process and then someone at a managerial level who can make sure that all of these parts in quality and testing work seamlessly. That fixed cost is expensive and that fixed cost is something which inhibits startups that only have businesses less than maybe 50,000 US dollars a year. That would inhibit big Chinese factories from actually taking on those kinds of roles.
Jayneil: So, what you're telling me is that if I want to manufacture this camera module we talked about, the first component is the import duty I got to pay to get it from China to India in this case or US for that matter. The second cost is because I’m a startup, I’m just creating the design of the product, they're going to not only charge me for manufacturing that but on top of that another fee which is just to oversee the whole process.
Heer: Yeah. They usually charge somewhere around 10% of the product to oversee everything and to take responsibility in case something doesn't work out. And that's standard anywhere in China.
Jayneil: So, that's already 20% markup that I already can see there, 10% of that duty and then there's another 10% approximately we talked about just to oversee the process. I see.
Heer: The other advantage that we provide over getting it manufactured in China is when you're getting it manufactured in China, you are providing them a design. The design that someone in India has developed is usually done through consultants. Consultants in India, their business is only understanding what you need, building something that delivers what you need. They are not responsible for the cost to manufacture it.
Jayneil: Oh, I see. So, they are more like “They want a camera module. We'll take whatever off-the-shelf hardware that comes there regardless of how expensive it is and we're just going to give it to the client.”
Heer: Right. So, the client obviously is happy at the end. A client comes in and says “I want a photograph of someone's eyeball or someone's retina. So, build that camera module, a specific lens.” So, people would use a readymade camera module and a Raspberry Pi and they would take and they would capture that image, put it on a server or put it on a USB drive and the customer would be happy like.
Jayneil: That's what I would do. I would use off-the-shelf stuff, existing code, not try to reinvent the wheel and just give you that basic something that works.
Heer: But now when you want to compete in the market and you want to actually build say 10,000 of these, unless and until it's an untapped market or unless and until you are exporting it, you need to reduce cost. You don't need something as expensive or as bulky as the Raspberry Pi to just capture a single image. Maybe for a video, yes, but for image, you don't. A simple 32-bit cortex M0 should be fast enough and powerful enough to capture an image from CMOS sensor. So, that's where the advantage is. If someone can design your product for you that's cost effective enough in manufacturing that eventually helps you make more money or reduce your end price to the customer so that more customers are attracted to your product, there's a huge advantage in that.
Jayneil: So, now, just to clarify, Robokits was the business that was selling all these parts online. And now, you guys started this new venture which is just dealing with directly business to business client which you guys are calling Dazzle Robotics, correct?
Heer: Right. So, we started the private limited company, Dazzle Robotics Private Limited, which basically bought over the Robokits online business. And under the same roof we're doing the Rhino brand of product which we are manufacturing which is also sold on the Robokits online platform and we're also supporting these B2B clients OEMs for them. So, maybe I can go over the process with the clients we have right now and with new clients that we on board.
Jayneil: Oh yeah. So, basically, Dazzle Robotics is the parent company and all these are the sub ones. So, just to agree to the previous part, the benefit of somebody coming to you to manufacture a custom hardware solution if they want to make a hardware product, and when I say hardware product, it could be anything from your nest at home to anything they have just an idea, they want to come to you if they're based in India because a) you guys have factories in India, so you're local, you don't have to smuggle anything in India or pay import duties. You guys are not going to charge the crazy amount of margin that's there in China just to oversee the whole manufacturing and stuff. And then you guys also will build something from scratch. So, this way there's not that additional off-the-shelf associated cost overall. Your client’s product is going to be very, very extremely competitive in the market in terms of cost.
Heer: On average, we are able to bring most of the products at 50% of the price than what it was before the customer came to us.
Jayneil: So, if I come to you right now, let's say, with a product idea, what does that onboarding process look like all the way from onboarding me to, let's say, the finished product across the world like at high level, the different steps involved and how do you guys interact with the clients?
Heer: So, when we onboard new client, the first and foremost thing that we look for is what is the product that they are trying to build. Are they building a product that is only going to be valid for the next one or two years or are they going to build a product and are they going to eventually set up a business that will for the next 10 or 15 years will have some regular business or will grow for the next 10 years, the idea being that whatever we do right now, whatever development we do for them right now, whatever efforts we make for them right now should not be limited to one or two years in the future but it should help them and help us grow for the next 10 years. So, understanding their business model, understanding their product, understanding that there is a possibility to reduce the cost or improve the efficiency by working with us, improving the cost or the efficiency at which they can do that business and whether that business will be a valid business for the next 10 years, these are the first and foremost things that we understand with the customer. I can give you an example of that. Recently in the last three or four years, there is a move towards street lights being LED based rather than incandescent bulb based.
Jayneil: Yes.
Heer: So, there are a lot of companies that wanted to redesign LED-based street lights with all these features and they wanted to apply for government tenders or smart city tenders and install new street lights in those projects. The reason we would not want to or would not take that kind of a project is because we know that whatever we design, number one, is going to be subject to competition from a whole lot of foreign companies outside India that would eventually import their product. And also, it's only a couple of years. Once all the streetlights are replaced, the requirement is not going to come up again.
Jayneil: This is not a recurring business, yes.
Heer: It's not a recurring business. You're just manufacturing something that's already designed efficiently. You're just helping the person manufacture it at maybe 12% or 15% lower cost than what it would cost them to import something that's already available in China or in Japan or Germany or the US. So, that's a business we would not get into. On the other hand, businesses that we would get into are physiotherapy devices. A lot of physiotherapy or consumer physiotherapy products, you can talk about muscle stimulators or nerve stimulators that help reduce pain or help increase blood circulation, these kinds of products are normally imported from Germany or China or the US. Number one, they're not cost effective.
Jayneil: Very expensive.
Heer: They're not for the Indian client because each region or each country, because of the DNA or the genetics of people, everyone has different kind of medical problems. A lot of people in India have arthritis or have diabetes compared to the rest of the world. So, if you're building a physiotherapy device, you want to build that device which is specifically targeting the ailments of the group of customers that we're selling it to. So, if arthritis is the main issue and we want to improve the lifestyle of people with arthritis or you want to develop a physiotherapy device or a nerve stimulator that helps people with arthritis specifically, so rather than buying an expensive physiotherapy device or hiring a technician to come home with an expensive physiotherapy device to give you therapy for a half hour or a day, we decided to partner with a company that wanted to develop a physiotherapy product that specifically targets diabetes or blood circulation issues or arthritis issues and giving a specific product that only targets that ailment. So, there's no requirement for a technician to specifically go. The user can learn how to use the product from the manual or from videos and self-serve themselves. So, those are the kind of business models, when we see those kind of business models where we're not just building something for a percentage price that's cheaper than other products but also changing the dynamics of the business which can eventually make that business grow exponentially, that's where we prefer to get involved with.
Jayneil: So, my uncle actually has both of those conditions and before leaving India to come back to the States, I actually signed him up with a technician to kind of like come and provide him that. So, I definitely will buy one of your products and give it to him to see how he thinks about that idea. You guys are almost operating in a way a typical investment firm or a venture capital firm will. You look at deals. You guys are looking at the future potential of the product. You guys want recurring business. So, one thing I’m curious about is now when you're dealing with these companies, one way of payment might be in all cash deals where they just pay you the entire thing and just money but maybe if it's a startup, they might just be like “Hey, we'll give you equity.” So, when do you guys decide that “Okay, we want to do a cash deal” versus a cash plus equity or something like a hybrid deal?
Heer: It depends first of all on who the promoter is. A lot of promoters who are cash heavy who have the money to spend would rather not give up equity because they would rather have full control on the product in the future. So, they would prefer an all-cash deal. And we understand the customer. There is value in his business. If we understand there's value in his business and we understand that there is going to be continuous business for the next 10 years with these customers, we would accept an all-cash deal. Again, an all-cash deal doesn't mean that we charge for design. We never charge for design. We never charge for prototyping. We only charge for manufacturing. All that we ask is that “Once your prototype works and once we've designed it to be at a price point where your business will be successful that you give us the contract for manufacturing.” That's all we ask for.
Jayneil: But what if it takes like 50 iterations to build that prototype? Isn't that expensive for you guys?
Heer: It is expensive but that's the cost that we readily accept.
Jayneil: Oh, so you guys are designing a delightful experience like “Hey, nobody's going to go through such amount of pains to do that” and when somebody does this much for free, you're like “You know what, I want to go with that robotics because they are going above and beyond to help me.” I see.
Heer: Right. So, there's a lot of products that take maybe a year or a year and a half to get right. There's a lot of products where you start off with a prototype and you realize once you have the prototype that that's not exactly what you wanted. I’m pretty sure any product developer would understand that. You came up with a vision of a product and you made one judgment call which actually was wrong at the time you designed the product. And because of that judgment call which ends up being a stop, a no-go for the product, you have to completely redesign the product. It happens a lot that after three or six months of the product, it has to be completely redesigned. We understand that and we take that upon ourselves to redesign something and we keep working on the product until it's at a point where it can go into volume manufacturing.
Jayneil: But what if that period takes six months, Heer? Are you guys not worried about the fact that what if the startup cannot pay? Then that six months or seven months or however long that duration went, it's not resourceful for you guys in terms of money.
Heer: Yeah. Again, that's the risk a VC has. That's the risk we have.
Jayneil: Oh, I see.
Heer: There are many times where we've developed something for a customer and it hasn't gone anywhere. Maybe we've delivered a small batch of products and after that the customer hasn't been able to grow his business or he's changed his ideas or something else has come in the market or we made a judgment call on the product or something else has come up in the market and he doesn't think that it makes any sense to move ahead with that product which we worked on for a year. It's happened multiple times but that's part and parcel of business. There are going to be some bad decisions. There are going to be some things that are out of your hand and you have to take that in your stride.
Jayneil: So, I’m going to ask you for like a horror story right now. You don't have to name the client. You can keep it anonymous but what I’m curious to know is was there any horror story, I mean, not horror but a bad decision from your part in dealing with a client that just didn't go well but that failure later set you guys up for success? Is there any story that comes to mind?
Heer: So, anything that doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Any product that you work on, any new technology that you work on is going to build experience for yourself and the team. Everyone in the company, when we have a new product, they learn something new. If you're working today on optics, everyone will understand some basics about optics. If you're working on a motor, everyone will understand some basics about the motor if they manufacture even one prototype. So, there is no value that you can put on knowledge. There is no value that you can put on experience. And that is why any horror story will eventually end up being a success if you have the patience to wait it out. One of those experiences is in 2012, there was a huge push in India for smart metering and automatic meter reading. The idea was that these meter maids for all the power supply companies in India, they had to go door to door, they had to access the location where the electric meters were installed and they would have to read out manually or through a device they would have to read out the reading, the units that were used and accordingly they would have to bill the customer for those units.
Jayneil: These guys would come to your house and see how much electricity you've consumed in that meter outside your house and then report that to the electricity company and then the electricity company would send you bill based on that.
Heer: Yeah, that's how it's done everywhere. Anywhere in India, that's how you billed. Someone specifically comes, checks the reading of the meter and you're bill according to that reading. Now, there was a huge push in the power sector to reduce the effort that was made to take those readings and to be able to disconnect meters from the power if in case some customer wasn't ready to pay his bill or if in case they figured out that someone was tampering with the meters and bypassing the meters. In that case, you would want to somehow remotely turn off the meter or you would want to turn off power to the customer's site but without access to the meter, without access to the circuit breakers, you would not be able to do that. So, there was a huge push. All meter manufacturers and all power supply units wanted to build wireless communication into the meters and they wanted to build gateways or wireless readers that, if placed within a certain range of the meters, it could communicate with the meter and it could read out the meter the readings or the units from the meter and it could also command the meter to maybe turn itself off or to turn itself back on based on any customer that doesn't want to pay his utility bill. So, there were a lot of tenders that were being floated. There were a lot of companies from outside India as well as companies within India that wanted to get their hands on technology that could serve that purpose or solve that problem for these power companies. So, at that time, we developed a solution in collaboration with a couple of big semiconductor companies, they realized that we had some understanding of wireless systems and designing RF communication circuit boards. So, we had a joint venture with one of these big semiconductor companies and we actually built a module that was sub 3 US dollars that could be installed in the meter and also installed in the remote system or in the gateway and retrieve data from the meters. We spent about two years of our time, a lot of money and we realized at the end that the specifications that each meter manufacturer needed were different and the specifications and the needs kept changing every few months. And it seemed like there was a lot of politics and a lot of other drama happening which limited even a working solution to actually go into the final tendering process. So, it turned out that we spent a lot of money and two years in development to build a product that worked. Eventually, we realized that someone had taken our solution to China and duplicated it as well. So, that was a horror story for us where we spent two years of our R&D efforts, a lot of money and realized at the end that it was not going anywhere.
Jayneil: And somebody stole your research as well.
Heer: And someone might have duplicated our research, maybe not got there 100% but at least good enough to actually make that effort. So, we decided to eventually pivot to using that technology for home automation instead of a meter reading, wireless home automation in a sense where you have all of your electronic devices in your home or all of your switch gear in your home. Using our wireless technology or backbone, you can control all of your switch gear from a single location or at least understand the data coming from your switchgear. So, we worked with Oakter at that time in 2012. We were in initial talks with them but eventually in 2015, Oakter was able to build a successful home automation product and put it out in the market and they got a great response because our product was able to give a good indoor wireless range that usually is not available in Wi-Fi or Bluetooth systems. So, Oakter eventually sold at least 200,000 to 300,000 units of our product in the last four years. So, that definitely counts as a horror story gone right because eventually, it's been maybe seven years since we started that product but the horror which seemed to have happened in 2013-2014 eventually ended up being something that we could consider as a success.
Jayneil: A huge success. That is phenomenal. So, literally, this horror story that happened but the knowledge from that was useful for you guys down the road.
Heer: Right, definitely. This has happened multiple times and we've always grown. At the end of the day, we've realized that it's better to work for products that create value, it's better to work for products that have something innovative because the knowledge and the experience from them is more valuable than any kind of money or remuneration that can be paid for the services that we offer.
Jayneil: So, Heer, what advice do you have for budding hardware designers that want to enter the job marketplace whether they want to work in Silicon Valley companies, at Apple, Google or whether they want to go out on their own? What words of vision do you have for them?
Heer: If you're a hardware engineer, I would advise you to be patient with whatever you're working on. Try to understand the underlying physics or the limitations of the conditions that are preventing you from achieving what you're trying to achieve. And I would also advise that hacking a hardware or hacking software can only get you so far but if you can change the fundamentals of your product or if you can understand the fundamentals of your product, you can build something that's revolutionary.
Jayneil: That is deep. Wow! I need to write that one for my own book. So, I really, really want to appreciate, man, for just coming on the show, being so patient with me and sharing with me all your wisdom.
Heer: I hope that what we've discussed can inspire people to take tough decisions and hope for the best and eventually work hard to understand value versus profit when it comes to engineering.
Jayneil: Absolutely.
You can find show notes for this episode and all the others at designMBA.show. If you find this episode valuable, share it on social media and please leave a review.
Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.