Podcast #9: How Augmented Reality and Blockchain Will Power IoT

Welcome everyone to our Momenta Edge Podcast. Our guest today is the CEO and founder of Augmate, Pete Wassell. Pete, it’s great to have you on. 

Thank you so much for inviting me. I love everything you’re doing at Momenta, it’s been great to connect at some of the meet ups and conferences recently in the IoT space, so very excited to be here today. 

Well, we’ve been a huge fan of you and the team at Augmate, and this is a great opportunity for us to really help some of our listeners understand a bit more context, and your background, and we’ll get a chance to dive into some of your views on the industry as well.  

First off Pete, it would be great to hear a bit of your background, what got you into technology, and what are the steps that ultimately led you to found Augmate and bring you to where we are today? 

My background is, I went to Engineering School, Clarkson University in upstate New York, and that really set the foundation for thinking about technology, and computers. Over the time from when I started in school I got picked up by IBM in my senior year of college, I also spent a number of years in Silicon Valley, and I think between both IBM from let’s say a scalability standpoint, just the sheer size and footprint, to then being in Silicon Valley and seeing start-ups and how they operate, really formed my thoughts about the company and technology, how technology is used to solve problems in the marketplace, and can become kind of an engine for capital. Those things ultimately led me to Augmate. 

I’d have to say that I’ve taken the advice of mentors and folks along the way, they say follow your passion, so when the right technology came along I felt I had the experience and the insights, and enough sense, enough naivety as well to start the company. 

It’s super-interesting that what you’re involved with at Augmate really touches on several, I think, really profound, and really consequential technology trends; one is wearables, the other is virtual reality or augmented reality, and the other is Blockchain. But I’d like to address each one and drill down a little bit into some of the dynamics around wearables, and just talk first about what you saw in the market when you were first looking at Augmate. How you looked at wearables early-on, because I think as we look back to the late eighties or early nineties, you’d have these headsets that were very bulky, couldn’t really work, and of course many of us had a Casio watch in our geeky younger days. Really, wearable tech has only in the last decade become a category where you would have these really single-purpose devices. 

I’d love to understand your perspective and your experience as you looked at the market evolve, and what you saw in the market that led you to identify some burning pain points out there. 

We’ve got a ton of technology at Augmate, disciplined approach to engineering and building product and everything, but in reality, often the things that inspire you and motivate you in the beginning come from fantasy, and early-on Sci-Fi pictures, whether it was Terminator, thinking about Terminator vision, that was one of the first thoughts I had about augmented reality, leaping further to Iron Man kind of thinking, that’s where it starts. Unfortunately, those concepts are great, there’s whole businesses hacked out, Sci-Fi ventures will come in and help you write a business plan that has to do with future technology! But the reality is, those concepts whilst designed by artists, CGI, and special effects in a way and what-not, they leave a lot out; there’s a lot of technology underneath that has to be built, in order to make that stuff a reality.  

It’s great that it plants the seed and inspires folks, but then the real work comes into building it. Oftentimes there’s a convergence of technology that has to take place. So, in other words you might have one piece of it, or two pieces of it, but a third – let’s say an unknown piece, and it’s only until that piece hits the market that you’re able to combine it all and, make some of these things a reality. 

The way I had started was, I took a disciplined approach, I started building out slides on the history of wearables, and I’ll send this over to you, it’s kind of amusing. It ended up being over 50, probably 60 slides, and each slide was an incremental part of the technology, and so I put a little blurb on it, maybe a picture that was a device or some sort of technology, and what I was trying to do was; you look in the past and then start making these points to figure out the future, the trajectory of where things are going. So, that was like a scientific approach to doing it, and what it’s good for is pointing the direction to technology, so oftentimes they’ll say, ‘You’ll know the direction of technology, but you may not know the timing’. So, market timing from an adoption standpoint and that kind of thing, that’s the part that’s tricky. It’s a little bit easier to figure out where things are going, but it’s the win that’s the challenge. 

Early-on when it came to wearables I’d have to say, those early movies and those types of things got me thinking about really the end-goal, which was kind of a brain to computer interface. So, I started thinking about it, I thought to myself, ‘What’s the biggest bandwidth to the brain?’ what pipe is the biggest bandwidth, and it turns out to be your vision, your optic nerve, you already have a wire to your brain, your optic nerve. By placing the computer on your face in having smart glasses, is this way to facilitate it, it’s not perfect, they are not plugging into the brain, but it’s a way to get closer. I thought that was incremental, enough of a technology, and that made sense to start moving onto that kind of platform. 

It’s really interesting because the evolution of augmented reality or wearables, there was a lot of basis for flight simulators, but also smart goggles for airline pilots. You must have been familiar with Steve Mann from MIT, the guy who had really equipped himself with a constant recording device, it was pretty geeky but it was pretty amazing out of that vision back then. Were there any use-cases that struck you as particularly promising or viable at that point? Or some that just seemed a bit too much of a mismatch between where technology was say a decade ago, or when you first started looking at it, and the vision? 

Steve Mann is a friend of mine, we’ve actually worked on a lot together for wearables, and when he got started at MIT he actually wore the smart glass device he invented. Later-on the interviewer had commented and said, ‘This kid is either crazy or genius’, and obviously he’s more on the genius side. So Steedman was definitely an influence, and fortunately he would give me time early-on to pick his brain and talk to him about how things were going. 

Another guy early-on here in the city was Steven Feiner from Columbia University, so if you look at any of the academic research that’s out there, papers that were written, it’s Steve working with some of the earliest smart glasses. I’m talking like 1996-97, all the way through early-2000’s devices, and he still does it today. Steve Feiner and I got to be friends, he attends our Augmented Reality meet up each month, it’s ARNY – Augmented Reality New York, and he’s become a friend. Steve Feiner was great and again I would pick his brain, he would do things like maintenance on lets say a printer, or an automobile, figuring out instructional workflow with smart glasses, twenty years ago! I would pick his brain, and he’d again give me time, sit down and talk.  

Ori Inbar who’d actually started Augmented Reality in New York, he was an influence, and early meet ups had inspired me to get together with like-minded individuals, you start talking and thinking about how you can make certain things work. Christine Perry, she started a group called AR Standards many years ago, I was a participant in that group, then she later started AREA which is Augmented Reality for Enterprise Alliance. Some of these things are tough to do on your own, so when you get together in groups that have a similar passion, it just makes it a little bit easier, it gives you the confidence and support network in order to implement these things. 

It’s really interesting that you were able to collaborate with all of these cutting-edge thinkers at the time. What did you learn about this concept of collaboration and consortiums, with technology that at the time some of the enterprise wearable technology was quite cutting-edge, and you made a really key point I think which is this idea of collaborating. Are there some lessons that have stayed with you in that experience?  

I think it’s one of those things, emerging technologies are such that nobody has got all the answers, so people are trying to figure out, it’s almost the premise of a start-up. A start-up is trying to figure out the business model and technology model, and take it to market; people who know me and know my background with corporate in IBM, to be able to go back and forth and see the problems with a big company when it comes to things like process, bureaucracy, red tape, and those types of things, to the way you think in the start-up and being really agile, and navigating the space, and knowing 90 percent of what you try is going to fail. You have to iterate, and it’s not win or lose, or win or fail, it’s really win or learn, and you have to just get right back out there, its having that persistence and resiliency. In order to do that, you have to work with a group of people.  

I’m a big fan ot the meet-ups, conferences, and listening to others talk to collect information, and then go about it as a team. I’ve learned I might be the founder of the company, but I heavily rely on my team members for so much, that take care of me and get things done, and advisers as well; so listening to their guidance and advice, and when questions come up and decisions have to be made, really looking to get some other opinions in order to make really good decisions. 

That’s great insight. What’s so interesting too about wearables is, the market itself really took off, or gained a lot of public attention when you had the Fitbit IPO, and people were buying Jawbone fitness trackers, and of course the Apple watch came out, but how would you compare and contrast the evolution of what you saw on the consumer side with the enterprise side, on wearables?  

It’s totally fascinating, there are just different use cases, and I’ll even preface this by saying we’re not even all the way there yet. Augmate had started as a glass at work partner with Google, and that particular device they were marketing and positioning as a consumer device. I didn’t think it was ready, I was vocal and adamant about telling them that, I thought it was enterprise. There were other smart glass companies that said similar things, when I said I was going after industry they said, ‘Hey, this is really an entertainment and gaming, that kind of consumer device’, and the technology really wasn’t there yet, and I just didn’t think it was the right move.  

Later-on they came back and said, ‘Yeah, you were right about it’, And it’s only this year, so four years later we’re starting to see smart glasses hit the market, that are really discrete. When you think about the consumer backlash on the consumer side, there’s a camera on these things, so people were nervous and that, it scared them, and frankly the devices that are coming out this year that are really discrete, in fact you can’t tell that they’re smart glasses, if someone’s wearing smart glasses. I wonder if that would have even had a worse backlash at that time? Because then at that point there is no way of telling that someone’s got a computer literally in their field of view. 

Ultimately the technology is one of those things that it was gain adoption, and you can gain adoption in a number of different ways, but the premises add up, and the premises make sense, and that’s information in your field of view. What we believe here at Augmate is, digital information is not where it’s needed or expected. I want to be able to essentially right-click on the world to get more information about it, and I can’t do that, I’m trapped in a physical world, but yet I need digital information. The phone’s not good enough, I want to have it literally attached to physical world objects, especially in a worker’s setting; so, the folks we work with, the target audience or users of our technology, they’re kind of a mobile workforce, they’re deskless workers. So, if you’re in an office you typically don’t use this kind of technology, these are people on the factory floor, field workers, supply chain in a warehouse, the construction site, these other places who traditionally didn’t have access to this kind of technology but would certainly benefit from it. 

This information in your field of view, it’s such that you want to keep your workers in a state of flow, so if you have to reference a paper-based manual, laptop, or some other system, and then they come back to the task at hand, oftentimes they can make mistakes. Besides that, you need access to hands-free information, when you go from a mobile device someone can make the argument, ‘well, you could have an app on a Smartphone’. When you go from a mobile device to smart glasses, you know you double the amount of handset that you have to work with, and oftentimes these are people who need their hands to do their job. 

Can you talk about how you approached the management problem for glasses? You just mentioned that you’re doubling the number of devices that an employer may have; how did you approach the pain points or the business problems of some of the types of customers that you’re working with? What have you learned so far about the needs of businesses that are trying to harness this technology, and take advantage of the vision that you just articulated?  

Early-on we were doing the end-user applications on smart glasses, so we were doing the pick n’ pack application, or the workflow application, or teller presence, ‘see what I see’ applications. We would do phenomenal pilots, you’re bought into an 8 to 10-week pilot, you get baseline metrics on the first day, at the end of the project they want to see how well you’ve done. We would always do a great job, so we could improve work by saving a worker let’s say 30-minutes a day, we improve accuracy or efficiency rates by 8 or 9 percent, so these would all be really great when you’re figuring out the business case, that’s the metrics you need to apply to a workforce, in order to figure out is this a project we want to implement? 

That would all work out fine. The piece would be when you went over to the IT Department and you wanted to role out the technology, these IT administrators would say, ‘Hey we’re good at rolling out tablets, but not so good on the wearable side’. In other words, they didn’t really have the tools or processes to deploy a fleet of wearables. They needed the ability to remote wipe the base, or reset someone’s password, or install applications, all the typical things you do with some other piece of hardware, that just wasn’t available. So, we built out the product in order to focus on the base management, user management, policy, security, over-the-air updates, features that were needed at the time.  

Really, that’s become the basis of expanding into IoT, we wanted to get wearables down really well. We’ve had 25 security features build into our wearables platform, great functionality, essentially when we put our provisional software on those devices you can operate them from the Web, you could actually operate those devices from the Web. So, doing something small, very-very well, puts you in the right position in order to expand, so, that’s become the foundation and the basis of why and how Augmate is now expanding into all IoT, we believe wearable are a subset of IoT. 

That’s a great lead in too, which I wanted to dive in a bit deeper, because this idea that a wearable device or a headset essentially is just another endpoint or another device, and of course we’ll start to see the number and complexity proliferate. Can you talk about your vision for how this platform that you’ve built, how will this extend from… you’ve worked with specialised devices, and you’ve had to work with different manufacturers; is it possible to have maybe a universal control platform? How much work do you have to do individually with different types of manufacturers, and different types of form factors to be able to have a common baseline of management capbilities?  

First of all, some of the things that shaped my way of thinking on IoT was the fact that the cost of sensors has gone down tremendously, so we’re getting to think about the point in time of when technology makes sense to really start jumping onboard and making things happen. The cost of storage has gone down tremendously, the rise in artificial intelligence, so when I talk about converging technologies that are needed, these are some of those fundamental pieces that underpin what’s needed, 5G is coming up right around the corner, so these kinds of things all come together that then you’re able to start moving in that proper direction. When it comes to the devices or universal management system on this stuff, there’s a couple of thoughts on that. 

We’re going from 10 or 12 devices to thousands of devices, and that’s the challenge. So, there has to be some ways to be able to tackle that effectively. You can narrow things down by industry, and by user case, you can focus in on pain points that make the most sense to solve those problems in the marketplace, and that can narrow your field. But one of the biggest things that’s really influenced us as far as the new technology is Blockchain, it’s the emergence of Blockchain and this is something we’re doing very uniquely within Augmate in our IoT Platform, that we think distinguishes ourselves and makes us not only unique but it’s totally appropriate for IoT. I’d say IoT and Blockchain is a marriage made in heaven. I’d be happy to talk about the details of why that’s the case, but essentially, we don’t have to have software on every device. 

We believe that in the next three to four years you won’t be able to buy a piece of equipment, a device, an appliance, any of these things that are not connected to the internet. So, that’s not going to be an option, and you could just imagine, one of the guys that influenced me a IoT was David Evans who was the CTO of Cisco. I’ve talked with Dave quite a bit, he did Cisco’s IoT strategy essentially, a brilliant guy. We’ve talked about this, and just the sheer volume of devices that are coming out, you know we’re talking 40-50 billion by 2020, a quarter-trillion by 2025, and about a trillion devices over the next 20-years, so it’s huge. We characterize this as the fourth generation of the internet, so this is really a distributed kind of intelligence, when you have these connected devices we’re building for the applications and services that ride on top of that infrastructure layer. 

Think back to 2006 and the kinds of phones we had, it was hard to imagine that your life would depend on these Smartphones, that you’d be glued to them, that they change your life; well that’s how people are going to feel about the fourth generation. When that generation of the internet really emerges, and that’s what we’re building towards, those applications and services are going to help humanity in such a way that it’s hard to fathom right now the impact it’s going to have on society. 

It is really just a level of scale and orders of magnitude that’s really hard to imagine. You made a comment about blockchain, and I wanted to follow up on that, why blockchain is so useful for IoT. I’d love to hear your thoughts about why is it important, why is it so suitable, and then why did you find the technology to fit so well with what you’re doing at Augmate? 

When I started thinking about the devices were going to add, our Chief Engineer had sent me a list of android devices because we were primarily an android shop at the time… I don’t know what the number was, 250 or 400 devices, looking through those and talking to Dave, thinking about all these different devices; I realized let’s say you play it out, we build for let’s say the next two to three year, what’s coming out within the next two to three years, and that’s how we target things, we try to envision what things should be like at that time and what we could build. But you play it out, so just billions of devices in that time, or a quarter trillion devices by 2025, realistically this sensors on these devices, they get pulled hundreds of times a second, so you think about the sheer volume of data that’s coming off of this stuff, you couldn’t centrally manage it, you couldn’t put it in a central location, you have to do it decentralized. So, you need a system in order to do decentralized data. 

We’re doing our token offering essentially to become the currency of data, and that’s what we see this emerging world becoming, a way to exchange data; you need a way to have trust in a trustless environment. Think about it, we’ve got thousands of use cases that we think are appropriate, and I’ll take one that may resonate with consumer layer, let’s say at home, you can do a health use case at home, so you step on your IoT scale at home, it’s connected to the internet, that’s connected to your Fitbit, it’s connected to your fridge, it’s connected to your Nest thermostat, its connected to your Health Mirror that’s giving you a readout of your vitals and information. You’ll take a pill that determines your blood-glucose and your hormone levels, and you start thinking, ‘Am I sharing this data with my doctor?’ ‘Am I sharing this data with my insurance company, to get a discount?’ ‘Am I selling this data to a pharmaceutical company? Because I don’t mind if they market to me, if they’ve got something that’s going to help me’.  

That’s like one of thousands of potential use cases, because the amount of data that’s going to come off these devices, humans won’t be able to sort through. You’re going to need an artificial intelligence layer on top of it, just to draw the insights between disparate data in different data sources, and you need this ability to be able to have smart contracts in order to pass data, have trusted a trustless environment. So, all the things that blockchain is good at is really appropriate to IoT. We’re using smart contracts as kind of a gatekeeper; so, you were wondering do we have to be on every device? Well, we can actually manage the data in-between devices, and when I say the smart contract is a gatekeeper, we can take a look at a device and say, ‘Did someone change the admin password?’ ‘Is the latest security patch on that device?’ and then make a decision about the health of that network in order to say, ‘Am I going to pass data to that, or not?’ So, just doing this securely. 

Everyone gets that IoT is a huge market and that companies are in a mad rush to get there, but the barriers have to do with this device management insecurity layer, everyone of those devices ends up being and endpoint for a hacker to get into, so it’s got to be done wisely, it’s got to be done thoughtfully, there’s got to be a process and system in place to make it happen. 

How do you think about the current state of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies, in terms of the scalability? I think there’s an enormous amount of promise, but right now we’re in the early stages of market, where do you see the opportunities and the challenges, are there certain approaches or ways that you might be seen to improve scalability, at least at this early stage, that had promise for you? 

Absolutely. I think there’s a lot of misconceptions on scalability, and I’ll give you an example; when you buy something with your Visa card, your credit card, whatever you buy it doesn’t matter, the manufacturer, the company that sold that, they don’t see that money for a couple of days, that’s the way it works. You get the item right away, but the backend processing that gets done takes a couple of days, that’s just the way it works. When you look at a transaction on blockchain taking 30-minutes, that’s actually incredibly fast. They often use these examples of transactions per second, and a lot of times the early protocols compared themselves to be, because they were also digital currencies, the early-on protocols. So, you want to obviously get into the area of tens of thousands of transactions per second, we know that. 

Certain protocols by design are different than others, so Bitcoin is linked list; let’s say you had seven fields of data that’s in block or something, just by the definition of a linked list you can imagine its single-threaded, and there’s inherent bottlenecks that are in that technology. You could say the same thing about Etherium, although there’s radon, bitcoin lightning, things that folks are working on. When you think about other protocols like IOTA, goodness, almost a year ago we did our integration with IOTA and that uses a tangle or a DAG – Directed Acyclic Graph, which allows you to have hexagons or different shapes, so that you have multiple vertices to be able to approve transactions. So, two points end up approving another transaction, making a triangle, if you could imagine this kind of tangled shape. Well, what that does is, as you add more transactions the faster it gets, because now you’ve got more vertices to be able to add transactions. 

We have to think fundamentally, almost mathematically to determine the right kinds of protocols for the right kinds of use cases. There’s only a subset of protocols that we can use, so we felt good about IOTA, Hash Graph, where you’ve got a similar structure, so these are the things that make the most amount of sense. Internally for let’s say off-chain, or OnPrem, within a company, private protocols are totally fine; you want the high volume, micro transaction, micro payment kind of protocols. We’ve been using Hyperledger internally for that, what’s great about Hyperledger is you can use Java, JavaScript. Our platform is based on Java, so it was just a natural way for us to do transactions, and smart contracts in Java.  

So yes, that’s how we determined those things, and our online platform that’s on AWS Access, we can set up a region very easily, we’ve got load balancing and all that kind of thing, so we’re designed to be highly suitable.  

That’s a really interesting point that you make about all those technologies.  Are there any disconnects that you see, or misperceptions in the market, particularly around IoT and Blockchain technologies, and the awareness of really how to apply them correctly? 

I’ll tell you the hardest thing with misconceptions is, the fact that there’s bad actors out there, and what’s really happened, and I think about this, we had originally done our seed round through traditional venture capital. In the first year we operated we raised 3.5 million in a seed round that came from Silicon Valley and New York, that’s what got us started, and that’s what start-ups need the most, you need some capital, you have to pay people, pay engineers in order to get things done. Then through Blockchain you had a number of ICO’s, and some of those folks – because it was a new method, as they were bad actors that kind of took advantage of that, and I would say gave a bad impression of the space in technology, which is a shame, because it’s such a disruptive technology, it has so much potential and opportunity it should definitely flourish. What ends up happening is, you had all these companies, and you’d see these spikes in ICO’s and how much folks were raising. It’s interesting to watch how volatile the market is with this, but it’s very telling at the same time. 

You get to understand there’s so many start-ups that want to be innovative, that want to create new products and new things, and this was the method. The traditional method of raising capital was difficult, you had to pitch to a lot of VCs in order to raise the funds, in order to build this up that you wanted to take to market. So, this avenue came about, and it probably couldn’t have come about unless there were other methods along the way, there was Crowdfunder, Indiegogo, or Kickstarter, or whatever, that led up to this, certain crowdfunding stuff. It’s telling that so many companies needed the capital, and it exposed this whole area, and then you had unfortunately some bad actors. 

So, the misconception, I think there’s a little spill over from let’s say Silk Road, and that kind of thing when it comes to digital currencies, but I think its sorting itself out and I think the legitimate companies that emerge and shake this off them will be known, and that it will be a little bit easier for them to move forward. I’m excited about this space, it’s got so much potential to disrupt so many industries, I’m excited. 

Yes, I’d have to agree. Somebody made a comment that I thought was quite incisive, this whole Blockchain or Crypto market industry, you can see the extremes of the best aspects of human nature, as well as the worst at the same time. You can pick how you want to look at it, but of course there’s just an amazing amount of creative people. You alluded to this change in the funding environment, and I think what’s so interesting about your experience having worked at IBM, and worked in Silicon Valley, you’ve gotten a chance to see a lot of different sides of the industry, and this transition of funding. As we look back a bit, what are maybe some of the people or events that have really shaped your perspective as you’ve had this breadth of experience? I notice you’ve been working with Tim Draper and he’s got the Draper University as an example of somebody who’s doing some really valuable work in helping to educate the community. What are some standouts in your experience? 

I love Tim, Tim gave us our first half-million, he kicked off our seed round, so I owe him a debt of gratitude. By observing Tim and his portfolio of companies I came to understand what disruption meant. If you want to disrupt something you’ve got to feel comfortable with breaking things, and there’s so many things that were ripe for disruption. You look at something like the automotive industry, things that they’re building now, driverless cars, electric cars, and Tesla, that’s one of Tim’s prominent investments, in Elon Musk. That whole Silicon Valley way of thinking is what drives economies, you’ve got to innovate or fail, and it’s a real important lesson to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to wake up each morning, and we’re going to say to ourselves, ‘If we were the competition, how would we disrupt our company?’ and then go implement that. 

It’s been said, even in a company like let’s say Kodak, there were folks that brought digital imaging to the executives, and said, ‘Hey this is something that will be really great for us to pursue’, and they said, ‘Well, that will cannibalize or kill our film business’, well, it did! It did, it’s just they didn’t do it and they had the opportunity. There’re countless examples that show you’ve got to be disruptive, it’s like there’s Blockbuster and there’s Netflix, and so it continues to happen, and I’m always surprised that the companies who don’t learn that lesson. But that’s a lesson by spending some time in Silicon Valley, it gets beaten into you, innovate or die, go the way of the dinosaurs. 

It’s a really powerful lesson to see how the growth of exponential technologies can really up-end in industry in a very short amount of time. Some of the earlier guests we had on the podcasts like Tony Seba, and Nick Gogerty who are both authors, and they focused a lot on disruptive and exponential technologies, have talked about really what’s happening in the transportation industry, and we start to see that play out. But, as you’ve had experience in dealing with these disruptive technologies, and being at the cutting edge, how would you compare and contrast the challenges that small companies or start-ups face vs what your experience for a large company like IBM, we could really take any company, and certainly you have customers that are in the industrial space now that are adopting your wearables management technologies. How do you compare and contrast the thinking between the small and large, when it comes to embracing these disruptive technologies? 

You get to a certain size, and the processes, red tape, and bureaucracy take over. There’s a couple of companies that can do it, Google has seemed to have been able to figure it out, Amazon in a lot of respects, but a lot of companies in the past have had difficulty in making that transition. What I have noticed, what I’ve observed in Silicon Valley was, five people would start the company, the company would be started with a valuation of 5 million. I’d say technologies like fashion – every year there’s something new, even if it’s only incrementally better than previous technologies, that’s the way it works. Then these five people determine how to solve problems in the market place using that new technology. 

They’re able to be agile, and just move so much quicker, and figure out that business case, the technology side, and the business side, in order to solve problems in the marketplace, and create that engine of capital. This is what I’ve observed, companies like IBM would look at the landscape and say, ‘Here’s complimentary technology, potential aqui-hire to get engineers, and the way it would work is, it would take about five years. So, there’d be a growth play each year that a startup would have, one year might be a geography player where they’re selling their product in the US, but maybe they want to sell it in Asia, or Europe. Next year that might be a marketing play where they’re just pointing people to the technology, to get more adoption. 

And so, you do growth play to get your 5 million to 100 million, and then in that year five you get an MNA broker that sends quarterly reports, and a nice cover letter, and works with that acquiring company because not so many companies are IPOs, the vast majority are acquisitions. Your bigger companies can’t innovate because of all that bureaucracy, it’s easier for them to look across the landscape, and they always have a growth player, they can take that emerging technology and they can sell it to their 100,000 customers. So, it’s a formula I witnesses that was repeated – that’s why you have serial entrepreneurs, they understand it and they just execute that over and over, every five years. It’s just that’s the way it works. 

Now, when you’re looking back to the application of the Augmate platform for Blockchain, enabled wearables management, and device management, are there any industries that you’re particularly optimistic about where there could be real potential for transformative impact, from adopting what you guys are putting together which is really a next gen platform. Are there any industries or types of companies that stand out to you as areas of promise? 

The ones we see that seem to really make a difference that we’ve got numbers on for efficiency improvements, and productivity improvements, or accuracy improvements, supply chain are pretty significant, so the areas of logistics and distribution, those types of things. Field maintenance is also very relevant, anywhere where you have let’s say people with the expertise, this whole trend of boomers we’re hiring, and having millennials that go out into the field, but yet call back to the office and get guided walkthroughs on how to fix certain things and repair things, and that kind of thing in the field, that’s certainly an area. Workflow and instruction, we think are good.  

At the end of the day, a number of these systems, these industries, are only as good this technology as the content that’s available. So, there’s always this component of tying in a backend system to be able to deliver the information to people. That’s the kind of PC, start thinking about let’s say a WMS – Warehouse Management System, or a PLM type system, or ERP type system that you connect to in order to pull out the relevant and meaningful information to help workers. 

That’s great, I think we will see a lot of these really core industrial processes so enhanced, and of course the demographic challenges of that aging workforce. It was a conversation that came up, this idea that when you can provide that enhanced information to somebody who might be just training to be a field technician somewhere, you can add 10 or 15 years of training on somebody with just technology to backfill a lot of those shortcomings. So, it is pretty amazing. 

Yes, you can make someone productive on day one, make them an expert so to speak, hire people that have lower skills and provide them on the job training, literally. 

Yeah, it’s incredibly powerful. As you look out over the next decade, what is your vision of how ultimately the market for industrial wearables will evolve, and adjacent to that, or in conjunction with that, how we see the Blockchain space evolve as well? I’d love to get your thoughts on that. 

Absolutely. I started with the vision of a limited storage, when I started to see this trend of processors go down and cost, and storage go down and cost, I really started thinking, what would you capture if you had no limitations when it came to storage? What would you process if you had no limitations on process? I came to the determination of you capture everything, everything you could! So that really started to beg the question about our reliance on artificial intelligence. 

The reason why it’s important is because you can’t make changes on things that you don’t measure, and you need data to make good decisions; we don’t make emotional decisions, we don’t make knee-jerk decisions, we make decisions based on information, and there’s going to be a lot of information. I think artificial intelligence that rides on top of this layer of IoT is critical, it’s got to assist in the applications and services on this fourth generation of the internet, this layer. 5G will certainly be a part of that, and Blockchain that communicates across the devices, because here’s how things work; in anything in life or work, you take an action, you communicate the action, and then that action is somehow processed. So, last generation of the internet, we figured out the communication piece, let’s say you take an action and you communicate it.  

Then there’s TCP/IP, you get your text messages all the time, the communication layer that’s fine, what we needed was a universal way to take transactions and process them, universally, across different systems, disparate systems, that’s what Blockchain does, that’s what smart contracts do. This integration of Blockchain, and the fourth generation of the internet, its interwoven, this is the connection point. That’s why I said at the beginning of the call, there’s converging technologies that have to take place, that’s when the light-bulb moment happens, ‘Oh! This is what was missing’. ‘Ah! Now we’ve got all the pieces, I see what the picture looks like’. It’s that piece that you’re able to then take things to the next level. That’s what I’m excited about, I love working on emerging technologies, and at my level I put up the vision and then fortunately we hire good engineers to build it. But I’ve learned early-on, there’s hardly a problem that you could position to an engineer that they can’t figure out, given the time and given the technology. It’s exciting. 

Yes, this whole concept of convergence around these multiple technologies is really compelling, and you’ve highlighted the importance of AI, that gets layered on top of that unlimited storage on cloud computing, and then you have the cheap processing that will enable the visual rendering of data, and then of course Blockchain which creates that amazing trust layer, and it’s all happening together. It really is an amazing time to be alive. I share your optimism around that. 

Pete, this has just been a fantastic conversation, we’ve hit so many different topics. One of the questions I always like to ask of anybody that I talk to is, a recommendation, whether it’s a book or resource, something you would share with somebody who’s looking to get a little bit deeper, either into the technologies or just something that you would share with a friend. Is there anything that comes to mind? 

I still like, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’, by Daniel Kahneman. 

That’s a great book, yeah. 

I catch myself because we’ve got biases, and we’ve got quick thinking and I’ve learned sometimes even today it seems like… I’m an impatient guy but I’ll tell you what, I’ve made better decisions by holding off and thinking about my biases and thinking about oftentimes those knee-jerk instinct kinds of ways of thinking about something are so flawed. What he gets into is the way the brain works, and oftentimes you see the whole picture, and I’ve learned to ask questions, and I’ve learned to not send an email until I’ve maybe slept on it. I’ve learned a lot of different things, how quick thinking is often flawed, but he even goes into how deeper or slower thinking could be flawed as well, and just how to get past that. I absolutely love that book.  

There’s another one out there by Mark Manson, ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck’, that’s an interesting one, that’s about just being real, its saying we can’t just focus on the positives, whilst that would be nice and might make you feel better temporarily, but let’s just take an honest approach at things. Especially in this age with Twitter, Instagram, and all sorts of different ways that we communicate quickly, let’s get rid of ego and just have honest and frank discussions about things. We move so much quicker, and we can actually be happier if we’re just honest this way. So, getting rid of ego and just having good conversations. That’s where real relationships happen, real relationships in business, and real relationships in our personal life.  

I would recommend those. There’s so many, but at the top of mind those are two. 

Those are great recommendations Pete, I think our listeners will certainly appreciate them as well. Again, that was a terrific conversation, we really hit a lot of cool topics, and I was thrilled to get more of a chance to hear your insights. We’ll be including the links to the books in the show notes, but again I just want to thank you for taking the time Pete to share your thinking, as always, it’s a tremendously fascinating conversation, and hope we’ll do it again soon. 

Awesome Ed, my pleasure, any time. 

Thanks. This is Ed Maguire, Insights Partner from Momenta with another Edge podcast.