00:09:36 · Sebastian Johnson, Hugo da Silva
[00:09:36] S0: Why is it becoming difficult in Europe? [00:09:40] S1: It's not if I'm saying Europe because we are based out of Europe and a lot of things are happening outside Europe, right? If I only have my team sitting in Europe and the whole supply chain for certain market happens in Korea or in Taiwan, then being here is not really helpful, right? So obviously we do have a lot of partners in Europe, lot of ecosystem partners, but the market that we are in a global market, a global setting, right? So that's why we need to have eyes on the market and it doesn't work if you are just traveling back and forward all the time. If you are like two months away from a region, lots of things are happening and we are not capturing that dynamic. [00:10:18] S0: And you're working with companies from you know The US, Europe, China, are you noticing a difference in the regional attitudes to this technology? Are you seeing some regions move a lot faster?
00:10:30 · Hugo da Silva
[00:10:30] S1: I think in general, so I think the dynamics of our industry is very similar to any other industry in high-tech. There is you know major brands out of US or big companies out of Europe and a lot of the manufacturing happens in Asia somewhere it could be China, Taiwan or somewhere else in Asia and I think obviously there is the speed of the Asias that moves extremely fast towards finding a solution right, trying to use our technologies or whatever technology can suit because they are in a way committed to deliver a product on the market as quick as possible right and that's I think something we can really learn from it and we are trying to learn by also have people from their teams also here then a good enough is a good enough. Sometimes a perfect solution is never going to be achievable but a good enough solution can be achieved much faster and that's how we can learn especially we are in a startup. I'm not a huge company like have you know I can try things out and that's I think the nature of being in different locations so we can capture the learnings in each one of those rather than just be too much engineer minded where I would say it takes ten years to make something perfect but maybe takes a year to make something good enough and you go ahead and learn from the market, from the customers and then improve and do it again. A fantastic example, I always use those examples in the iPhone, right? The first iPhone was not really a great phone, but while we are now in the 17 I guess or 18 even, you know there's 18 generations of products, you are learning by using it. And that's I think the beauty, I think you can apply that obviously in a deep tech is slightly different, but you can apply the same concept if you will.
00:12:21 · Sebastian Johnson, Hugo da Silva
[00:12:21] S0: And you you just closed this to the ground. What gave the investors conviction? Was it the market opportunities or some of this new stuff that you're working on? Was it the AI glasses work that's going well? What was it that gave the investors the conviction to come on board? [00:12:35] S1: I think it's at the end of the day is a combination of our technology being mature and validated by customer, but the best validation you can have is by having commercial traction. And the last, especially the last twelve months we did quite a lot of commercial traction with sales, with filling the pipeline and honestly speaking now we don't need any new customer. Actually we cannot afford any new customer, we just need to convert what we have in the pipeline. That's our goal here is to convert the pipeline not really going after new customers. [00:13:05] S0: That's an amazing position to be in.
00:13:05 · Sebastian Johnson, Hugo da Silva
[00:13:05] S0: That's an amazing position to be in. [00:13:08] S1: Yeah, it's great to be right, but like I said, right, the market dynamics change, it can be that in six months from now the situation changed dramatically, but what we build over the last twelve months and also like I said by having people in the region, so we can really be very close to this dynamic change in the market, I think allow us to be in a way a bit of a luxury position that can play with pipeline we have today rather than go ahead and because it costs a lot to have new customers, right? So in our case we have already the big brands we work which are the owners of the devices as well as their supply chain and I think this is enough for us at this moment. So I think we can have fun and do a lot of business with the pipeline we have so far. [00:13:54] S0: How big do you think AI glasses are going to be and when can we start to see them everywhere that we go?
00:14:00 · Hugo da Silva
[00:14:00] S1: You know fundamentally I mean there's two lines of thoughts here. Some people believe this AI smart glasses will be everyone's device. So if you think about the population that wears regular glasses, about the thing, if I'm not mistaken, about 4,000,000,000 people worldwide. So if you think about like 10% of that population that's already you know quite a lot of devices right and the industry believe that the size of this market will be somewhere under 500,000,000 devices in you know five to ten years from now. But in order to get there I think everything is lined up to get there and one of the key challenge was a bit of still a bit on the cost like any other technology right. If you think about LCD TVs the first TVs on the market was about €10,000 now you can buy a TV 4 or €500 right. If you think about the cost of the funds in the past, so I think there is still a gap on the cost which has a lot to do with so what we try to bring to the market is a precise technology that can scale, but this industry suffered over the last five years with a lot of super highly engineered products that is not able to scale or to get the cost down or finding this good enough point. And I believe we are very much in that area or that neighborhood of a good enough product, so a combination of a good technology, good pricing that it can scale, which means a lot of people would believe in three, four years from now they will be in a range of 100,000,000 devices, which is a large enough market to start scale and get cost. So that would suggest then that dream of a lot of people would be that everybody that wear a glass could potentially add smartness to their glasses. I think that can pretty much come through in a few years from now.
00:15:53 · Sebastian Johnson
[00:15:53] S0: What are going to be the key bottlenecks that the industry faces as it tries to scale to that size?