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Intro: It becomes quite frankly dizzying, and you really have to have the fortitude to try to separate what is meaningful feedback and something that is actionable and pertinent to you versus constantly trying to address everybody’s individual piece of feedback. Brett: Welcome back to Founder Vision. I am Brett Kistler, and I am here with Brian Gupton and our guest today is Debbie Fortnum. She is co-founder and COO of Macondo Vision. How are you doing today, Debbie?Debbie: I’m great. It’s great to be here. Brett: Where are you located right now?Debbie: Right now, I am in Charlotte, North Carolina. I split my time between Charlotte and New York City actually. Brett: Tell me a little bit about Macondo Vision. I have a very basic understanding of what it is, and I am very curious. Debbie: Macondo Vision is an artificial intelligence platform focused on improving safety, productivity and quality in the workforce. We utilize predominantly computer vision, but we will ultimately utilize many more sensors. We are looking at how to increase performance in largely industrial operations right now. Brett: Can you paint a picture of how that looks and what sorts of optimizations you are making?Debbie: We are looking for how humans work and how safe they are, how productive they could be if things were different for them, and if there are mistakes being made. For example, in one client that we have, when they are loading pallets onto a truck with a forklift, they actually make mistakes, and they put the wrong pallet on the wrong truck. Even though they have lots of systems that are operating currently in that facility, they are transactional systems. Transactional systems, while we have used those as a proxy for seeing for a long time, they can lie to us. With computer vision, you can actually see what’s operating and will note that pallet was actually loaded on the wrong truck and alert the forklift driver that something has gone wrong that he needs to correct. Brian: What inspired you to develop this particular idea?Debbie: That’s bit of a longer story, I guess. I wouldn’t categorize myself as the typical startup founder. I worked for over 25 years in technology and operations in CPG and retail spaces before deciding with a friend of mine, a colleague, to start our own company. In my experience, that’s a bit out of the norm. We are a little longer in our careers for this type of situation, but it’s good. I guess also I came by that a little naturally because my mother, also out of the norm, was an early female in technology. She is the one who really pressed me to take that on in my life. She also later in life started her own business, so I had a pretty good role model there. For 10 years, as a retail executive, I focused on transforming operations to support explosive growth in online sales. At first, we were really ill equipped to handle the significant paradigm shift of shipping boxes and/or pallets to stores, moving towards putting items in boxes to ship directly to consumers. The increased labor content and the pressure to ship quickly coupled with extreme demand variability had us chasing ever more capacity and productivity. This is actually when I met my co-founder, Frank. He came in as a consultant to help us build out the necessary supply chain to meet this demand, and honestly over a couple of years, we would spend many millions of dollars to automate existing and build new fulfillment facilities. This was a time of working harder, not smarter for honestly the whole retail industry. We were all sinking fantastic amounts of capital into operations that honestly generally failed to meet their goals, and at this point, we started thinking about how we could serve ourselves and our customers much better by leveraging all of our assets and our resources to fulfill customer demand. That’s the beginning of the omni-channel world, building out those capabilities to utilize store inventory, put more of that inventory online, make more of it available for sale, and really utilizing those assets, the stores and those associates, to help fill that demand. You get buy online, pick up in store or ship from store, lots going on that adds a lot more complexity. In order for retailers to really do this effectively and efficiently, they had to undergo a significant transformation. Brett: Something that’s curious there, how do you frame the initial problems you would solve with this product? AI is also notorious for making mistakes. If you have humans making mistakes, and then they are overseen by AI making different kinds of mistakes or optimizing for different things than the humans, how do you bring that into alignment in a way that is in the first instance actually helpful and then in the second instance seen as something that is not dystopianly surveilling and controlling but something that’s supportive and helpful?Debbie: I think what you are asking me is if we are Big Brother, and no, we are not. Yes, artificial intelligence makes mistakes, and certainly in the realm of computer vision, through machine learning, humans actually teach the machines what they are looking for. It’s actually a bit more simplistic in terms of what we are looking for in our environments, and not to say it’s without fault, but we are not landing people on the moon. But when you realize that what people are utilizing today, again, back to the transactional system conversation, somebody can scan a door and then scan a pallet and put that pallet in another door. Transactionally, the system would tell everybody one thing happened when in fact another thing actually happened. Cameras can easily see this, and the computer can infer what’s happening and in real time alert that driver to help them correct the mistake. I think where people get concerned about Big Brother is we are reporting you. You hear a lot about these conversations in Amazon warehouses you are constantly being monitored by all types of sensors and your productivity is being forced. But our philosophy is more of prevention and really intervening with the actual employee first to help them correct the situation or check in on them before there is any sort of supervisory action taken. Brett: It really sucks as an employee to have put the wrong thing on the wrong pallet and then discover it when it is in the wrong city and someone’s angry. There is a customer complaint. I’m still curious. Now, getting back into the technical aspect of this, you mentioned it can do this in real time. You have a transactional system. I imagine this transactional system is connected to this computer vision system. It recognizes which product was scanned because maybe there is some location in the video where the scan occurred or maybe it is recognizing the laser reflecting off of a QR code. Then it is recognizing where the door was scanned that it is supposed to go into. How much information does the AI register about what was supposed to have happened versus what did happen? That’s something I am really curious about. Debbie: It’s optional for us as to whether or not we are integrated at all with the transactional systems. We can through APIs get certain information or even update information back to those transactional systems, but we can be very standalone. We are not looking for what people scan. We are not trying to read barcodes. We know where things are spatially and where they were supposed to go based on that information. People are staging things on a dock in a warehouse, and based upon how they have mapped that out, we infer where it was supposed to ultimately be loaded. We are not really trying to pull out all of that transactional information. That’s why again a picture is worth 1,000 words, really seeing it is knowing. Brian: One last question on the technology side, how is this reported to the end user client, the insights that you are providing?Debbie: Two ways, again, the real time alerts, we can either put light sensors on the doors that light up. It’s not our preferred method because again it is sort of a beacon that shows everybody that something is wrong, or it can be a light up sensor on the forklift that alerts the driver instantaneously that an issue has occurred. Then we put together a dashboard. It’s a web based portal that they can go in, supervisor, lots of folks at the client, and understand larger metrics performance-wise in terms of what’s happening, pallet journeys, how things were loaded, how many things were loaded, which helps them when they go back to prove out at certain times that things really did get loaded on a trailer as they are having potentially some conflict down the line, so to speak. Our computer vision models are all on the edge, so we use edge inference and send that data back to my butt for putting out to dashboards and/or determining an alert needs to be made. Brian: You mentioned that both you and your co-founder, Frank, had a lot of experience in the industry before deciding to start the company. For other people out there in the audience that are coming from a similar situation where they have spent 10, 20 years in an industry, I’m curious what some of the hurdles were that you and your co-founder had to overcome when you were first starting out. Is there anything that you think you would have done differently?Debbie: Great question. I think we both thought that our industry knowledge and our own experiences in dealing with these problems would help the situation speak for itself, which has not been the case. We still get a lot of questioning from people, investors I would say, not just people but predominantly potential investors about if this is really a problem. Are you sure?They don’t understand the space. I think for us that’s been an unexpected situation, how much time we have had to spend defending our problem statement. That goes hand in hand with just the journey of capital raising. You get a lot of advice. You get a lot of people telling you early on that it is a journey. It’s going to be a process. It’s arduous, all these things, but you don’t really understand until you go through it. I think what we would do differently is just not take everything to heart and not react so much to all of the feedback we were getting. We would do these investor speed dating sessions where you would have 20 minutes with each group, and you might do 20 of those in a day. They are just back-to-back. We would get you are too broad, and right behind that we would get you are too narrow. You are Big Brother. Your tech isn’t deep enough. Why is your tech outsourced? Why would you not outsource your tech? It becomes quite frankly dizzying, and you really have to have the fortitude to try to separate what meaningful feedback is and what is actionable and pertinent to you versus constantly trying to address everybody’s individual piece of feedback. Brian: Just to dig into that a little bit more because I think that’s a very common issue that all entrepreneurs face. What I mean by that is you have spent a lot of time thinking about the problem you are trying to solve and how you are trying to solve it. Then you get in front of an investor or some sort of a gatekeeper who has spent no time thinking about these things. You have a very limited amount of time to distill all of those things down into something that’s digestible for that person. When you go into those conversations, do you have subconscious ability to feel the person out and try to figure out what’s going to resonate? Is it better to just have your pitch that is what you believe in and then just the faith that it is going to resonate with the right type of investor?Debbie: I will say a few things on that. One, I think it is super important that you do your homework up front and really understand who you are pitching to and if you even want to pitch to them. I think a lot of times founders get caught up in they are going to pitch to everybody because you never know who might be willing to invest in you. That ends up being a giant waste of time. I mean you really have to do the research up front to understand if these are people that have invested in your space, if they are people who are likely to understand better than others what you are doing, if there is a particular thing about what you are doing that resonates, whether you are a diverse founder, any of those kinds of things. It is really picking your spots, which can be hard to do, and it is just more homework you have to do. But it is absolutely crucial. With Frank and I, oftentimes we are pitching together. It is super helpful to have the both of us having known each other so long. We can help each other out. While one is reading the room or reading the situation, so much of this is over Zoom now, that way that person can jump and clarify. Because when you are pitching, you are kind of on a roll. Sometimes you don’t fully understand the questions, or you are not absorbing the blank stares for what they are. Brett: What’s the rejection you received that hurt the most? Or maybe just piece of feedback from one of these investors that was the most difficult to hear or receive but turned out to be the most valuable upon later reflection. Debbie: I would say they might be two different things. The one that hurt the most is actually from someone who is in the supply chain operations investing space that we have actually talked to several times and keeps kind of telling us that they don’t think it is a real problem statement. That’s challenging and frustrating. You just have to put that behind you. I think the thing that has been the most helpful is when people say, and we have heard a couple times, it doesn’t feel like you are being authentic. It feels forced or something, and that really is because, again, we had let our preponderance of feedback twist us around. After two years, we are back to the basic pitch deck or the essence of that pitch deck that we had two years ago. We have been through 1,000 versions. Brian: When you get into a situation like that with that kind of feedback, given that you do have so much industry experience, were you able to go and talk to other people in the industry and show you are thinking this is not really a big problem but here are some quotes from 20 different people in this industry who manage this particular area that talk specifically about the problem and the willingness to spend money to address it?Debbie: Yeah, I think what you find is generally when people have made up their mind about you for whatever reason, trying to convince them is probably not going to work. We have done what you have said, and even again, speaking to our own personal experiences and those of our peers across a wide network, but sometimes it’s just not meant to be. Undoubtedly, you are going to kiss a lot of frogs. Brett: I imagine as you were saying about the investors noticing authenticity or lack thereof. I imagine if you are shaping your pitch and your entire presentation of yourself based on the feedback you are receiving from everybody coming from all these different angles, when you have a conversation with somebody, they are going to have the sense they are talking to all of the investors you have ever talked to rather than you about your product. Debbie: Exactly. It is a bit of a Sybil moment, probably. I don’t know how many people who will get that reference, someone who has multiple personalities. We were definitely overthinking some of those aspects to be sure. I do want to say feedback and the ability to take feedback is very important, and not be defensive. I think it is interesting because having been in an accelerator and we know a lot of young founders, and they tend to get very defensive about their ideas. It is great that you love your idea, but you have to be open minded, and you have to be flexible, and you have to get to a place where you say thank you. Thank you for listening. I appreciate your feedback, and move on. Again, arguing with people and really trying to convince them of something if they have made up their mind and generally they do pretty quickly, it just isn’t going to serve you. Brian: Did you guys go through any accelerators?Debbie: We did. We were a part of XRC Labs. We are still a part of XRC Labs. I mean you are always a part of it, in New York, very focused on the retail space. Brian: Some of the challenges you mentioned here now, have they been at least due to the fact that you guys are trying to build cutting edge technology but for what some people would consider less sexy industries? Debbie: Sure, and less sexy and again just back to that understanding. I think when we start to talk about market size and the size of certain problems, people have no concept it could be that big. A couple things, I think most people believe that all warehouses in the world are very automated. Brian: Everything is like Amazon. It’s all run by robots. Debbie: The thing is even Amazon warehouses have a multitude of people. Last year they added half a million people to their warehouses and are on track to do so this year, and even their VP of Robotics last year said our technology is about getting faster and getting more out of the same space. It’s not about necessarily replacing people. I think that’s what people tend to lose sight of. Outside of the Big Brother, we get you are taking everybody’s job or robots are going to take everybody’s job. No, there are always going to be people working in warehouses. They may be working alongside robots, which is ever more the need for making sure it is a safe environment and monitoring those interactions. People are like the warehouse, you are just moving boxes, but the one thing that I would say as supply chain practitioners, we would say somewhat of a silver lining about what’s been happening recently, and they are very hard to come by. All day, every day, all that’s talked about is supply chain. Now I think pretty much everybody in the world is very informed on how important supply chain is, how complicated it can be, how bad it can be when things go wrong, and what the implications are. I think there’s a newfound appreciation and at least desire to understand what can make that better.Brett: As a final question to wrap this up, I am curious what you have learned about authenticity from all of those investor conversations and feedback and how all of that impacted the way you show up in the rest of your life. Debbie: Another great question. I think that it has been a personal journey of mine anyway as an engineer by trade and in my mind I’ve always been more focused on doing things and not thinking about the human side of things so much, which is quite frankly part of why we even started this, our own trials and tribulations in that space. I’ve come to understand really how important it is to empathize and cultivate the relationships and the trust with people because I’m not one that talks about myself very much, so I’ve learned to do more of that. Hence, I am here today. Being authentic, at the end of the day, somebody is going to get it. Somebody is going to appreciate it, and people are certainly going to recognize it. It will either work out for you in terms of investment or relationship or a customer or just a better life overall. Brett: Beautifully said, Debbie. Thank you so much for joining us today. Debbie: Thank you. Brett: Thank you for listening to Founder Vision. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please subscribe and share it with your friends. I am also really grateful for your five-star ratings and reviews as well as any feedback about what we are doing well and how we could make the podcast even better. To send feedback or to connect us with a potential guest, reach out to [email protected]