Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Incubation: Jeremy Conrad, Lemnos Labs”.
Hi everyone, my name, is jeremy conant, i’m one of the partners at limnoslabs, which is another startup incubator, we’re actually based in san francisco. To give you a little background to myself, i i come from a somewhat non-standard background, although not as non-standard as clergy. I actually spent five years active duty in the air force, and so i used to work on weapons grade laser for missile defense, coolest stuff. You could ever work on as a young engineer, making star wars real and about two years two and a half years ago. I moved out here with my co-founder helen and what’s interesting is when we got here. It’S there’s all this like lore about innovation in silicon valley, and what we quickly realized was that as hardware kids, there really weren’t especially 18 months ago. Anyone talking about it and for me this is actually a very personal kind of thing that i care about, because you know at mit all the best mechanical electrical aerospace engineers at some point, you’re left with this false choice and that choice is, do you want to Be an entrepreneur or do you want to be an engineer and a lot of the really smart kids who want to be entrepreneurs, learn to code and kind of go to the dark side and never come back, and so certainly at limdos labs.
Part of our goal is to show those students and those you know, adults, those engineers that you can start a company in your chosen field. So lymnose labs is a startup incubator and we invest up to 100 grand into really early stage companies and kind of just what makes us a little bit different is we’re pretty broad. So we do everything from aerospace, robotics all the way down to consumer electronics and for us, what it really comes down to is that different hardware takes different times, so we don’t operate on a class model. We invest currently about a dozen about 15 companies a year whenever we see them.
So we have a warehouse in san francisco people work out of and we want to spend six to 12 months with them and what it really comes down to is hardware’s complicated everyone. Here knows that everyone here has talked about it, but for us we’re a pretty hands-on group, so there’s three partners and what we do is we want to spend a couple hours a week with you and what we actually do is our entrepreneurs come from such diverse Backgrounds there are, you know, software developers who’ve done several startups, who are bedroom, hackers who know a lot about how to build a company and fundraise but know nothing about. You know the problems you might run into in china all the way to those people with really great domain expertise and aerospace. Who may not know much about how to do the first hire, and so when we actually bring our companies in, we have a rubric and we say rate yourself one to five. You know there’s no wrong answers and then we actually use that as a tool to work with them. You know several days a week to actually figure out how we can best apply, and you know we have a lot of similarities to dragon and bull or not drag to bolton accelerator as i’ve spoken.
You know we have connections with manufacturers, but kind of this is our core thesis in the first six months. You’Re gon na make a lot of design choices and they’re gon na play out over two to three years and unfortunately, by the time you realize that you have a problem. There’S no go backs. You might be hosed, as scott said, if you’re shipping 40 000 units a week, if you have to do a large recall, it may sink the company and really what we try to convey to our entrepreneurs is that the breadth of knowledge you need is probably more Than any two or three people are ever going to have at a big company. Typically, when a project starts, it starts with over a dozen people in a variety of disciplines and as a startup. That’S not what you have and our role is really to show you where the edges of the map are, and when we look at our entrepreneurs, we look at kind of a lot of different areas. Unfortunately, the fonts kind of screw up so one we look at the market, size and path to market. One thing that’s interesting, especially with consumer electronics.
Companies is, in some sense the valley got spoiled in single revenue companies. If you look at google, if you look at facebook, if you look at even instagram, there’s, possibly one source of revenue and it’s enormous, but if you’re trying to build a consumer electronics company, you actually need to have a breadth of product lines. If you look at jawbone so jawbone’s a speaker company and now it’s a quantified self company and when it gets really big, it will probably be several other types of companies as well and how you actually think through day.
One and the strategies employ are really important and these little decisions you make about who you partner with, or what what you give away versus what you actually keep proprietary can make or break the company. Later we also really look at is: what can they do for the amount of money we invest? So we invest 100 000, which is a lot of money. But realistically it’s not that much and we want to make sure that we can be good partners and then also that we think there’s a larger capital later in venture capital.
And lastly, we care a lot about culture fit so we’re going to spend six to 12 months with you several days a week. We want to make sure that we get along with you and the rest of the community. That’S, as i said, we’ve got this warehouse where one guy’s working on satellites, another guy’s working on baby tech. Not only can you guys help each other out, but that’s really part of the value. Add of bringing all these people together and i wanted to touch on this a little bit and it’s kind of scott certainly did a great job with the overview, but for us you know we talk a lot about shortening the stack when you really think about it. Google is actually afraid of what the guys down the street from here at starbucks are working on. You know people at facebook constantly buy up startups that might be encroaching on them. The reality is that ge and ford couldn’t care what anyone else is working on and that’s what’s starting to change. You know when we talk to these large corporations they’re starting to be really interested in what’s going on in the harder space, because the stack continues to get shorter. When you really think about it 20 years ago, you needed to have an entire logistics team.
Now, through things like fedex or amazon, prime or amazon fulfillment, now you don’t need quite as big of a team, and each of these areas has really started to come down and that’s where we see really exciting opportunity and then, as carl was talking about earlier, the Design tools, the design tools are enabling this hardware evolution the same things that let you open up that laptop and launch a site or launch an app in just hours or days at hackathon. Those same tools used to have entire teams of people with a hundred thousand dollars in resources just for the computers and really that’s one thing that we think is important to take advantage of now. But this is where hardware continues to be different. You know – and these are the numbers that i think matter so several people have talked about – you know what it takes to really get these companies off the ground and at the end of the day, harder companies are going to be bigger, they’re going to be bigger For the foreseeable future and there’s a variety of reasons, but when it comes down to it by the time you’re at your series a or the time you’re after your seed round you’re hiring quickly, and i would actually disagree with scott a little bit on this – is That we actually like our entrepreneurs to be a couple years older. I want you to go to apple and see what a really hardcore executing consumer electronics team.
I want you to go to lockheed and spend a couple years there not get jaded, which is the problem that a lot of people run into and then come out and see it when we work with these teams, how you hire your first 10 employees is going To happen quickly and it’s a variety of skills, if you look at a standard web startup, the first 10 employees a lot of times, they’re just clones of the founder, but in this case, when you want to find an expert in supply chain management for china, they’re, Probably not going to be a 22 year old or if you want to find someone, who’s launched several satellites into orbit, they’re, probably not going to be 19 year old dropouts and so the ability to grow these teams quickly and across the breadth of skills. We think having a couple years in industry can really help, and i just want to take you through a little bit of our portfolio, so we divide the universe into low volume, goods and high volume goods. So these are some of our and i’ll talk about ba.
You actually heard from yesterday some of you might have seen revolve at some of the more recent robotics conference. They do some telepresence, but sproutlane is one of our kind of archetypal entrepreneurs, so chris and matt have done several startups before. I can’t tell them tons about their first employee because they’ve done it several times, but when it comes to shipping something through china or when it really comes understanding.
What you look for in a design firm, that’s where we spent all our time with them and what it really comes down to is those first few choices make or break your company. You know cameron from lockatron always says that it’s about getting into the second version of your product ship, two and part of the way you do that is you can see where you have to go. You kind of cut the corners you need to hear, and then you can jump typically after crowdfunding and then this is our the other part of our portfolio. So these are all low volume goods and when we first started, i’m a space cadet. I love aerospace and everything about it and we found two aerospace companies.
We loved and we said, okay, we know some venture is interested. It’S probably going to be a little bit harder, but they’re great companies with great founding teams and then kind of the most bizarre thing ever they’ve, actually outraised. All of our other companies, so nanosatisfy you’ve heard from earlier raise 1.2 and this morning got announced that airware, which does uavs raise 10.7 million for andreessen. The reality is the appetite for these companies is there and it totally blew me away the amount of times, i’m in meetings with venture capitalists and they say bring me your high tech stuff.
Bring me your crazy, don’t bring me that next quantified self-device has just been stunning from our perspective and for us that’s one thing that really excites us is that the ability to have the larger ecosystem embrace it and then for us what we care a lot about Is how do you do that initial systems – engineering with these companies? How do you really make sure that they’re on the right track so yeah? So that’s! That’S us! That’S limnus! If you have any questions, please come feel to find me afterwards. .