When the Angel Investor Is You | Seth Patin at LogistiVIEW

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Seth Patin 0:00
I think the number one hurdle to overcome is you’ve got to understand what is their motivation. And if you don’t understand what their motivation is, you’re going to present them with options they don’t care about. We’ve done that a few too many times.

Alexander Ferguson 0:19
Seth Patin didn’t get an MBA at Stanford and lacked the connections in the world of venture capitalism. But he had the skills and the vision to start a new company. So he funded it out of his own pocket. The company is Logistiview, and they’re attempting to revolutionize industrialized work through the use of virtual reality and artificial intelligence. In the second part of our conversation with Seth, he discusses some of the challenges he’s met funding his own company, and how early feedback from potential clients caused him to refine his approach to the Product Development says I’m excited to continue our conversation now digging into this journey five years almost six years into logistic view but but even longer, close to nine years with AXA logics coming from a consulting firm with with AXA logics then saying, I’m going to develop a product company tech company, that interesting flow, tell me how did that process happen? What What kind of some major milestones and hurdles that you had to overcome to get to where you are now?

Seth Patin 1:23
Yeah, the The interesting part about I always wanted to develop software, that was always something I really wanted to do. I mean, I have my degrees in computer engineering. You know, I picked I picked Computer Engineering in eighth grade, I mean, I was always I was pretty much always going to be doing software. Oh, I should, if I, if I’m honest, I originally thought I was going to go to school and like, learn how to do like, you know, Intel chip design or something like that, you know, I thought I was gonna go do something awesome. Like that. And then I realized I’m not very good at Digital, like digital hardware design, I’m much, much better at software. And in software, I actually have a, I have a pretty good skill set. And so, which is still pretty cool. I mean, it’s just pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, it’s a good consolation prize. But yeah, software has been, you know, software has been in my life. So I got I got an internship at a company called Red prairie, which is, you know, since merged into a company called JTA, which since renamed itself to blue yonder. So, you know, but the company is still around, and the software that I started my career on in 2004 is, is still the same software that we use today. Ads obviously advanced a little bit since then, you know, we’ve changed the, the, the core of the platform has changed substantially since then. But they do, a lot of the features are very much still the same. So having the experience of implementing warehouse management software, and developing warehouse management software for the vendor. Then shortly after that, I was I was there for about 18 months, I moved to a company called Take Two Interactive, and take two was, was, say, the parent company of Jack of all games, which is the distribution waiting that I went, you know, that I worked for, but they’re also better known as the parent company of Rockstar Games. And everyone who’s ever heard of video games at all, probably recognizes that Rockstar is the producer of GTA. So we had an, you know, at the age of 22, I mean, I moved, I moved into this role kind of leading the warehouse, warehouse technology, and development team. And it was it was definitely interesting experience, but it gave me the perspective of being a customer, you know, the consumer of the technology was was it was a good experience to have. And then, you know, two years later, that, you know, that Job had, you know, that job changed substantially. The company was changing substantially because digital distribution was coming along. And it was shipped games back then, though. Yeah, no one actually ships games anymore. So that model was dying very quickly. And so the you take two sold off the business unit, and you know, and I ended up going elsewhere to become a consultant. And I’ve spent the last 13 years now doing or 14 years doing consulting, and implementing the same the same types of systems that I originally started working on at Red prairie and that I ran for, you know, as a customer for two years at it take two. So I had started exa logics two years prior to starting logistic view. I started X logics in 2012 and logistic in 2014. Had I not had access logic, so just you never would have been possible if you self funded this venture as of yet. Yes. And that has been a that’s been a process, you know, hurdle, as I believe you call it. That is a big hurdle. It’s a huge pile of cash or actually, it’s a huge hole in my wallet right now that you know that we are, you know, that I think is going to be an investment that absolutely pays off pays off really well. And I think we’re you know, we’re definitely going in the right direction to make that happen, but it’s it, it takes, it takes a lot of willingness to, to take that risk. And, you know, I say, Sure, if I was, you know, if I was maybe, you know, Stanford MBA or something, I could go to the venture capital route in Silicon Valley, I’ve actually spent a decent amount of time out there. I’ve talked to a lot of VCs, but it’s, you know, I’m not really the right, I’m not quite the right fit, so to speak. And this technology isn’t exactly the right fit technology, either. It’s complicated. complicated technology is complicated technology is hard to explain to people. And so you kind of have to have the right investor who understands the niche. And so I was the right investor who understood the niche.

Alexander Ferguson 5:41
Where did you start to see traction with first couple pilot clients and getting them on board? What were some of the tactics used to make that come together?

Seth Patin 5:52
The, I think the number one thing that the number one thing that started making it click for us, we went through all of 2017, doing demonstrations, you know, but we had a couple of public events, as well as demonstrations to cut you know, to prospects. And we originally had a fairly, you know, the MVP was very, you know, it had a very specific use case, it was very, you know, it was it was very limited in its flexibility. And, at that time, it was I was asking the company, I was asking my customers to change too much. Particularly, we, we started with smart glasses. So the difference between, excuse me the difference between logistic view and other mobile platforms, as we started with smart glasses, and then backed into phones, and tablets, and iOS, and Android, and browsers and everything else. So now we support everything, but we started with smart or with smart glasses. And we built the software for smart glasses. The cool thing about that is it allowed us to come up this the entire platform with a vision first attitude. You know, if you if you take a look at zoom, zooms, motto is is a voice first or I mean video first conference calling. And they say we optimized our conference calling for video. And then we, then we, you know, that’s how we’re different. And logist view is very much the same way we optimized, we built the software originally for video, visual input, and visual, visual communication to the end user. And that had a substantial, you know, it played a substantial difference into how our technology worked. But smart glasses were really hard to sell in the beginning. And they still are today, to be honest with you, some of our company, or some of our customers definitely do use them. They use them in production deployments, you know, on a regular basis. So it’s, it’s not like it’s unheard of, until we started doing all that we couldn’t get them over the hump. One of the one of the hardest conversations I ever had was with a, you know, one of the largest retailers in the world, I’ll let you guess which one who basically said, We love the potential of your technology, but it just you you need to, you need to have a broader range of support for various things. The the approach that you’re attempting to push, you know, is a great idea in theory, but it’s just it’s too far of a change. That caused that caused a lot of soul searching for me because I was like, wait a minute, I’m trying to I’m not letting the customer make the decision and trying to make it for them. And I really need to change, you know, that that drove a lot of roadmap changes, we spent one whole quarter, basically suddenly porting this thing to, you know, every device and adding in, you know, adding in more, you know, IoT capabilities to allow them the options that they were looking for.

Alexander Ferguson 8:56
Because you’re not you’re not going after this to the early adopters. You’re trying to get the main market to help all warehouses and realizing, wow, they need to have a they’re not there yet and being able to take a step back.

Seth Patin 9:07
Absolutely. Absolutely. And so some of that critical feedback from some of our earliest sales cycles, was what set us up in 2018. To start to get start getting pilot customers in 2018, we started acquiring a bunch of pilot customers to have those turned into production contracts by the end of 18. We then last year acquired for more production contracts, or for more production sites, I should say. And a number of additional pilot customers as well. And so now you’re now we are actually in production rollout mode for, you know, for one of the largest retailers in the world of a company called DB Schenker. So we’re we’re finding use cases there where they are systematically looking to put us in what do you see

Alexander Ferguson 9:50
then going forward some of the hurdles especially when it comes to communication and communicating the value and getting them to understand and remove any risk distance or uncertainty from from your, from your market target market, what do you see some of those hurdles to overcome?

Seth Patin 10:09
I think the number one hurdle to overcome is you’ve got to understand what is their motivation. And if you don’t understand what their motivation is, you’re going to present them with options they don’t care about. We’ve done that a few too many times. I mean, I always I always joke, I have a Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering from Milwaukee School of Engineering. And I have an MBA from the school of hard knocks, I’ve made plenty of mistakes, I mean, just in Learn, learn from learn from them. And, and still learning from them. I mean, by all means, we still have a lot of learning to do. But the number one thing that, you know, the number one thing that we’ve really had to do is understand what their objective is. And then back the technology into the objective, we are leading with the technology, the whole, the whole idea of leading with a solution without an understood problem is just a recipe for failure, it will always, almost always cause you, especially if it’s a complex solution. You know, it’s something that it’s one thing to say, you know, hey, you know, you might be thirsty, here’s a Coca Cola, you know, chances are, you’re gonna win with that one. But, you know, when if you say, you know, if you say, you know, you might need a vehicle, here’s a moped, chances are, you’ve missed the mark, you know. And so that’s, that’s where, you know, saying, You need warehouse technology, here’s a pair of smart glasses, was a bridge too far.

Alexander Ferguson 11:32
The journey that you’re on with getting this adoption, do you see the pandemic helping or hurting?

Seth Patin 11:40
Um, I think in the end, it’s going to help substantially in the short term, it kind of sucked, because all of our sales cycles basically froze. So for two and a half months, we did nothing, nothing at all. And so, you know, that was that was a bit painful. But our pipeline post pandemic is actually ramping up at a faster rate than it ever has. And, you know, and I mean, we’re not technically post pandemic yet. You know, we’ve reached the point where a few things are open again. And it’s already

Alexander Ferguson 12:08
out of people out of shock, maybe, and they’re like, now they’re slipped out of plan forward.

Seth Patin 12:12
Well, the thing about the thing about the pandemic, that’s interesting is, at first, we all will froze for two weeks. We’re like, Okay, we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna flatten the curve. And then then hopefully, you know, I think a lot of people were like, well, hopefully it goes back to normal. Yeah, anyone, anyone who like thought about it real hard went, Yeah, that’s probably not going to happen. But you know, curious to see what the new normal is. Well, four weeks later, you know, four weeks more of extension, by the end of April, we were all like, this is probably going to be a while, then may roll around, and we’re like, Oh, crap, it’s really gonna be Oh, hell. And now, I think in June, we all recognize that this is pretty much here to stay. You know, this, this is this, you know, until we have a vaccine for this virus. It’s not, you know, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna stop doing this. We’re not gonna stop social distancing. We’re not going to stop limiting the number of people who go into grocery stores and restaurants. We’re not going to stop picking stuff up instead of going into the grocery store. It has changed our behaviors permanently. Truth is even after a vaccine, you know, okay, great. I don’t have to be scared of Coronavirus but I might have to be scared of the next thing after it. You know, what’s Coronavirus? Says younger meaner brother. That’s the kind of you know that’s that’s what the world is now wrecking your reckoning with and and that behavioral change is a simultaneously difficult for people to process but from a business perspective, it’s a profound opportunity.

Alexander Ferguson 13:34
Has there ever been any books or audiobooks that really stuck out to you and or podcasts?

Seth Patin 13:41
I don’t listen to podcasts all that much. You know, I’ve, I’m more of a I’m more of a book person, although I don’t read the books. I listen to them on Audible. But I think there’s there’s a couple of books that have just really had a profound impact on my, my mental, you know, my mental thought processes. The first one I mentioned is crossing the chasm. Fantastic book. Absolutely. If you’re if you’re a tech entrepreneur, and you haven’t made all the mistakes that I’ve made already read it. So you make fewer of the mistakes that I’ve made already. Fantastic book, another great book for a for leadership development, because I think that’s one of the things that entrepreneurs especially, you know, you can be a fantastic engineer and a really crappy leader, like really, really bad. And certainly we see plenty of examples of that in Silicon Valley. One of my favorite books about about it’s interesting, it’s not really explicitly about leadership, but it impacts how you think is a book called Mindset by Carol Dweck. It is a fantastic book and it talks about how it talks about how you should think about yourself and how you should think about your your team, your employees, your family members, etc. Great book. Obviously, you know, Everyone talks about, you know, books like good degrades, and you know, pretty much anything Jim Collins or whatever. I mean, I’ve read all of those. And yeah, they’re absolutely all good books.

Alexander Ferguson 15:09
Looking forward, what kind of technology innovations overall anywhere? do you predict we will see in the near term next year, so and the long term next 10 years?

Seth Patin 15:23
That’s a really good question. I think the I think near term tech innovation is going to be probably primarily focused on alterations to our life associated with Coronavirus. There’s, there’s there is a, there’s a lot of friction in the world right now, a lot of digital digital friction in the world that can be solved through. For example, one of one of the products that we’ve built during the pandemic, is a logistic view configuration set that we call curb connect. And the concept behind curb Connect is that if I go to a, you know, if I go to like a restaurant, and I order takeout all the time, and I put, you know, I either order on the phone, or you know, I order on the web or on their website, whether it be through one of the ordering services or whatever. Almost always the last step of the process is that, you know, in Coronavirus days anyway, you come and you wait for and you come outside the restaurant and you wait for them to bring out the food? Well, oftentimes, they don’t have a full month. And there’s no good process, there’s no simple process to help them know that you’re there, and keep you in your car without having to go into the restaurant. And so we actually built, you know, we built a solution that uses text messaging, and, you know, and, you know, basic order or basic, you know, order entry, you know, two pieces of information. And it is designed to help streamline that process. And so we’re we’re just now beginning to introduce that to a few folks. So it’s it’s very early in its lifecycle. But it was so easy. And it was so frustrating to me that every time I went to go do this, the you know, the restaurant workers were frustrated, I was frustrated, my food was cold, things like that. I mean, that’s not going to be a billion dollar idea or anything like that. But it’s you know, those types of ideas. The How can I solve those problems? That little incremental bit? How can I make my smartphone more useful for me? How can I make, you know, how can I have, you know, home devices to, you know, improve my, my life in this in this time, because now I’m spending more time at home. I think that’s going to be where most consumer focused consumer visible innovation goes.

Alexander Ferguson 17:40
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