[MUSIC] >> Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders or in the front lines building it. In each episode, we'll speak with a visionary founder who's building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We'll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I'm your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines Media. Now, let's dive right into today's episode. [MUSIC] >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today, we're speaking with Barry Lund, CEO and founder of ProVizio, a vehicle safety platform that's raised over 11 million in funding. Barry, welcome to the show. >> Great to be here. >> Super, super excited for our conversation, and let's jump right in. Tell us about what you're building today. >> Yeah, so at ProVizio, we're building a radar-based active safety technology. The goal of that is to perceive and then predict and prevent automotive crashes, right? Because we see that as being the safe path towards autonomy. Rather than trying to solve autonomy first and working back, we're going the opposite direction. Let's solve the crisis on the roads, and eventually that will lead to a safe path to autonomy. >> Talk to us about what you were doing before this, because it doesn't sound like this would be the first company that you ever start in your life. It seems like a very niche problem that I'm guessing there's not a lot of people out there in the world thinking about. Talk to us about your career, everything you're doing leading up the point to uncovering this problem and deciding to launch a company. >> Yeah, sure. So, yeah, you're right. It's not my first baby. You wouldn't tackle this big problem, I think, first time out. I've started a bunch of companies, primarily I've worked in the high frequency electronic space, which largely means communications and radar, right? To be honest, most of my career, that was in the aerospace and defense industry, and then a number of years ago, I started working in the autonomous industry. Basically, the autonomous industry wanted this type of radar technology, imaging radar technology on vehicles to solve the problems they were having in making autonomy ubiquitous. And I guess it was in that space that I recognized how big this problem was, right? And I was used to selling, you know, tens and hundreds and thousands of units. But when you get into automotive, you're talking millions and millions, right? And also, I started to see how big the car crash problem was, right? We were brought in for the edge cases, as they call it already, the hard bit as I call it. And I kind of recognized this could be more interesting. So after I saw my last company, I think we were all focused on the round problem here in terms of autonomy. And I thought it would be a hell of a lot more interesting to focus on preventing car crashes, and autonomy will follow. And that was really the focus. I'm based in San Francisco, as I mentioned. And there was kind of a critical moment in life. A few weeks ago, that just made me say, wow. And that was when my default for how I get around went from Uber to Waymo. And now whenever I go anywhere, my default is to go in this self-driving car. And I feel totally comfortable with that. And it's an awesome experience. What are your views when it comes to the state of self-driving cars today? Absolutely. I love the guys in Waymo, right? I've known them for a long, long time. And I've known for a long, long time that they were kind of in a category of one when it came to actual autonomous vehicles, right? You've had that experience. When you have that experience, you realize the amount of work these guys have put in to get to there. Waymo weren't in a hurry. They didn't take any shortcuts. They weren't looking to raise billions and trick some investors into putting it in. They just went at it slowly, bite by bite. I think that was really important. But they also have the issue of, you have it in San Francisco, but it's not everywhere, right? So it's not going to-- Waymo isn't going to solve car crashes overnight, right? So what we're looking at doing is, we know what it takes, because Waymo have proven it, the level of perception that you need. And really, what we're looking at is the next generation. Now we've got to get that technology, which is obviously expensive and quite large on the vehicle, and making that ubiquitous, getting that into every vehicle. And I think that's the big thing we're focused on right now, delivering Waymo safety for everyone. And I think if we can achieve that, that's awesome. From a regulatory perspective, how do you think that should be handled? So obviously, there is that big situation, I don't know. I'll probably get it wrong, but it was three to six months ago, where crews had that accident. It really wasn't a cruise-related accident. I think a human drunk driver hit a person. They fell into Cruz's lane, and then the Cruz car hit them. And I believe the California DMV suspended them. And I don't see crews going around California, or at least San Francisco anymore. How should we be thinking about this? Or how should people be thinking about this from a regulatory perspective? When those types of things happen, should we shut everyone down? Or what are your thoughts there? Yeah, I think that case was almost why we set up the company. We could see that this was going to happen. Because the focus is, I mean, 1.25 million people are killed on our roads every year, right? 50 million people are named by vehicles every year. This isn't a new problem, and it's certainly not home being caused by autonomous vehicles, right? But we knew that as soon as you turned on a level of autonomy, the focus in the scrutiny is going to be higher, and rightly so, right? Now there's a machine involved here. And I think those types of things have really brought the scrutiny into the regulator. So I'm a huge fan of regulation, right? I know that's not a popular thing to say in America, right? But when it comes to people's lives, I'm a big fan of regulation. What I'm really excited by actually right now is NHTSA, just very recently announced FMVSS127, it just rolls off the tone, right? But what's really important about that for the first time in history, right? In the United States, it's not, you know, whether you want to put something on or active safety is mandatory from 2029. You cannot build a vehicle and sell it in the United States without technology that would prevent an awful lot of crashes. That's an incredible development. And that almost comes from the focus because the fact that you have autonomous vehicles has pointed out to people, okay, here are where the issues are, but also that it's possible to have way less crashes. And so I'm really excited about that. Europe has done some incredible regulation as well. There's now robotics in every single vehicle that's sold in Europe right now that can recognize road signs, it's slowed down cars, all of that. So it's almost certainly been, so I guess as a guy who started a company five years ago, saying all this would happen. And by the way, this is at a time when, you know, as I was at the peak of the hype of what they're going to have autonomy tomorrow with vision only, this is really positive. I'm really happy to see, you know, regulation come in here and take control. This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. Now back to today's episode. And not to wedge you in a bad spot here, but my wife and I were recently having a debate. We just had our first child a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about, do we think that she's ever going to have a driver's license and she's going to be driving a vehicle? So that would be 16, 17 years in the future. Where do you stay in there? Do you think that youth today and people being born a day are going to be driving or is it going to be all autonomous? I think there's a combination of answers to that. I think it will be mostly autonomous, just purely because of ethics. Because I do believe we're going to get to a place where the machine is better at drivers than human drivers. And in that case, ethics will determine that human shouldn't be driving, right? So I think that's one part of it. But I also think there will be a hell of a lot less cars, right? Because as soon as you take away our love affair and our ownership of cars and you start to bring in autonomy, people will realize that cars aren't the most efficient way of doing an awful lot of things, right? And as a European, we see an Ireland is very car-dependent, very much like the US, but I've lived across Europe. And when you have really good fucking transport infrastructure and things like that, you discover very quickly that actually cars have a very limited space where they're really valuable. So I'm hoping that your child and my children as well will have far less car dependency and when they do that, it'll be a hell of a lot safer, probably not under a license that they got tested for. Well, we can wrap up this interview now. You just validated my point in what I was trying to say to her. So thank you for settling that. I'll now reference to you here as the expert that we brought in to settle the debate. Yeah, yeah. I've been solving marriage crisis for years. (laughing) Now, you know, normally we have companies on and they're building cybersecurity technology or they're building developer tools or retail technology. And we asked them, you know, how long did it take you from founding the company to the day you started generating revenue? And for a lot of them, it's fast. It's three months, six months, nine months. They have revenue coming in. Given what you're building, I'm guessing that's not the case. I'm guessing there's a lot of building that has to happen before you can never really start selling it. What's that look like for you? And can you just shed some light on that? Yeah, absolutely. Look, we're a detect company and it's pretty understood that if you've got to build some detect, it's going to take a while so you can add value, right? And to be fair, I've been building detect companies for quite a long time. With my last detect company, I was able to get revenue straight away because you can always offer service, right? If you do good stuff, you can always do things for people in your space. I was really keen to avoid that and for Visio because it's such a big, complex problem to solve. I didn't want to be chasing revenue, right? To go and solve that. So we basically took a decision, right? We are not going to take any revenue because you'd be surprised, you do get offered it, right? Because all those guys are trying to solve hard problems and we've got a really good scene, right? Shoot a stack from perception, AI, machine learning people, right to low level, shift design and things like that. So there's always people looking for your resources and we've resisted that over the years, which was really important. So I took about three years, I say, till we got to a place where we had a product, our first kind of POC type product that people could pay for. And then we got them paying, right? 'Cause I think the big mistake that a lot of deep tech startups make is they never ask a customer to pay it, right? But I'm around too long to think that people have no money. And especially in automotive, 'cause the companies are so big, right? Like automotive car makers, but also the tier one suppliers, car makers are often bigger than the car maker, right? And so these guys are kind of used to getting whatever they want because people just give them samples, leave them all of that. But before we found them pretty good, they understand, we've got to survive. And one thing I've found is one great way of validating whether a customer really is interested in what you're doing or not if they actually put their hand in their pocket and pay for something. So we always expect something at this stage, right? 'Cause we add a ton of value when we do things. So even in POCs, for example, sometimes it's not randomly, sometimes it's data sharing, right? Like data is the new oil. And like we have some partners that we don't charge them for sensors, but we do charge them a data. They send us back the data to take the lag. And then we mine that and then we're able to sell that to other people, right? So we've learned how valuable that data can be. So I think we've got a good balance of kind of paying customers, but not being subservient to revenue. But of course that meant raising more money, right? - What about from a marketing perspective and a go-to-market perspective, what does that look like? What's the strategy there? - Yeah, so we licensed our technology to basically automotive suppliers and that allows them to deliver better performance in a smaller form factor, lower cost. So there's like a total wins in what we do, but probably the most important thing we have done in terms of that business model is adopting that licensed business model. And I think there's two aspects to that, right? It has meant that we've shown confidence in our IT, right? If you're going to license your technology, you got to believe in your IT, right? Because otherwise people can make it, right? So that was the important that we knew when we were adding a ton of value, a lot of startups try to cover stuff up and keep it to themselves and put it in a black box because they don't actually have anything unique. We're pretty confident in that. So that's why we licensed our technology. But the big thing it does, and that just opens up so many more customers, right? And it turns most of our potential competitors into customers, right? Because we're not saying, "Hey, you can only buy a perception radar from us." We're saying you can buy a perception radar from us or if you're already supplying radars to half the automakers in the world, you can license our technology and together we will provide radars to half the people in the world. So that's really our focus. That was a game changer once we identified that. - This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co. - What's your biggest challenge right now? If you think about from a go-to-market perspective, what keeps you up at night or what's top of mind? Maybe it's a better way to ask that, just in case you're a good sleeper. - Yeah, it's partnerships, right? It's making the right partnerships because we do have a compelling technology and you're always trying to find that space between the person who has the biggest share of the market and the person that could be the best for your company. And they're not always the same thing, right? And you have to be quite strategic here. A lot of those involve either knowing who you're getting into bed or knowing some of who knows them that can tell you what that's gonna be like. Because especially in automotive, it's a bit like getting into a marriage, right? Partnerships are long, right? Because time cycles are not a motive are long. So if you're holding up with a tier one, you wanna trust them, you wanna understand that they're gonna deliver not just for them, it's not just about them having selling millions of radars or selling lots of perception, but actually, they're gonna be the right match. And especially we're so aligned. At least the OEM is the car manufacturing, we're gonna have a good experience with these guys. You know what I mean? We don't want to get to a place where everyone loves pervisio, but the guys we partnered up with, they really don't like. And so we don't have the impact we want. So I said, that is the bit that keeps you away. It's a nice thing. We're very lucky in that really much all the top tier ones are talking to us right now, right? So we do have, we're having a bit of a pageant right now where we're kind of going, right? Who are actually the best partners for this long term? - It kind of makes me think about some of the conversations I've had with companies that are selling into pharma and life sciences. They say it's incredibly hard to get in, but once you're in, you are in, and it's very hard to take you out. Is it something similar it sounds like? - Absolutely, yeah, exactly. And very similarly, that also leads to hesitancy on the other side, right? And especially with a starter, they do wanna know you're gonna be around, right? And I think that's another important part of our licensed business model. We were lucky in that we just watched the LiDAR market grow. We started the company because we thought LiDAR was gonna fail, and now it's failing, right? So we got to watch what happens when startups think they can just be a tier one. They can be, you know, go toe to toe with a company with a 45 billion turnover. I'm sorry, like, I just don't believe that's slippery. You know what I mean? I don't care how much money is in the market. I just don't believe that. And that was a big thing. We got to learn from that and go, no, let's license. Let's partner with these guys. Let everyone be comfortable that we're gonna be here for the long term. - What about fundraising? What have you learned throughout this journey? And given that it's deep tech, it takes a long time. How do you attract investors and get investors on board to be in it for the long haul? - Yeah, fundraising's the usual thing with fundraising. If you don't need any money, fundraising's really easy, right? And the other thing I'd help with, you know, not being a first time founder also helps, right? So having delivered returns for investors, especially in the early stages, that really blows our course around, right? Like not every investor to come in quite like, believe me, because again, everything that we're reading was saying, hey, we're gonna have autonomy tomorrow. It's gonna be vision based and things like that. So it was quite interesting in that regard. But I do believe like you have to get the story and the validation, right? And then fundraising is fine, right? But if you're not ready, you're not here on your go-to-market, how it's gonna be. And the reason someone that you're doing it or someone at the other end of the line is gonna go, "Oh yeah, this is true, this is real." Then fundraising's gonna be really tough, right? And I mean, even at my stage, having the fundraising throughout like six different companies are that way so far right now. This took me a long time to recognize that. You know, going to the market a little too early and then just having a long and momentum close to funding rounds as you know, right? And so you don't want to have a long fundraising. So I think that's really it. And the other is obviously understanding the market, right? Like it was no point last year going out to market raise 50 million, right? So you do have to read the tea leaves and understand when and how. - I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, I believe I saw online that the first company you founded was in 2010. What's the biggest difference between the founding of that company and this one? Just in terms like the different environment, not just from a fundraising perspective, but from a technology perspective, all around, what's the biggest difference between those two experiences? - Yeah, no, it's interesting actually. And I do kind of look at these separate things quite a bit, right? Because I think as well, even with fundraising, right? Like people think it's tight now, but it was really tight back in 2010, right? Like a lot tighter than it is now. It's just people are only comparing it to more recent years when things were a bit frothy. I like where we're at now, right? I like these cycles in markets. I've been doing this since like 2000, right? So I'm 20 plus years building companies at this stage. I've never liked type cycles. I've never liked that part. Noting makes sense to me. You know, I like to keep things simple. I like to understand I add value, therefore I will make money and therefore my shareholders will make money. In frothing type environments, I think all that goes out the window and I'm really not comfortable in that. So we actually could have raised a ton more money two years ago. We had a very exciting story and we had a bunch of kind of partners coming in who were talking the hike cycle as well. And we chose not to. And it was because I don't know what I was going to do with the money. And that's really dangerous, right? Whereas now we know exactly what we're going to do with every penny that we raise and we have a very clear path. So I think that to me and economics, you know, when I hear startups complaining about like investors want to see revenues and I'm like, well, what the hell are we here for, right? Like, you know, what I want to build a company is, you know, make money and make a product that could be unique. And so yeah, I like where it is right now. Final question for you. Let's zoom out three to five years into the future. What's the big picture vision look like here? Yeah, so those are the exact time horizons you have to have in automotive, right? So we're in production in that time, right? So that's millions of units, right? That's where we're at. That's kind of how we're thinking now that's what we're preparing for and that's what we're getting into these partnerships for. So that's our technology in millions and millions of vehicles around the world, right? And growing from there, like, I mean, taking the 10-year time horizon, I want our technology to be ubiquitous. So in 10 years time, it will be as ludicrous for you to get in a vehicle without a safety belt as it would be getting a vehicle without provisio technology. And I firmly believe that's going to happen. I look forward to that day. Before I get into any vehicle, I'm going to ask for some proof here. Whose technology is behind this? Absolutely. And you know what? The regulators are going to do it for us. That's what I'm most excited by. The regulators have had enough. Once the genie's out of the bottle, you can't put it back in. Amazing. I love it. All right, Barry, this has been so much fun. Really appreciate you coming on and chatting and solving the debate between my wife and I about what the future of driving is going to look like. This has been a blast. And anyone who wants to follow along with your journey, where should they go? Are you active on LinkedIn? Should they just go to the website? Where's the best place for them to follow you and watch your experience or follow along with experience? Yeah, Brett, and thank you for having me. It's been so much fun. LinkedIn, I'm most active on LinkedIn, right? And we post up white papers and little sneak previews on LinkedIn, quite a bit. Of course, we have the website, which is provisio.ai. Obviously, you're updated as well. But yeah, LinkedIn is a great place to come and chat. Amazing. Well, thank you again, Barry, and wish you best of luck. Thanks, Brett. Really appreciate it. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Frontlines Media, Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. If you're a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]
