I first had a beer with Chiu at a German themed bar near the bund in Shanghai
I’ve done all the classes at the biohacker space in Brookly and recognized his company.
The second time we had dim sum usually near the Pudong airport where my office was.
When my two years were up one of the first people I visited was Chiu as his house and played with his dog.
Chiu pitched me on some crazy idea of 3d printing parts for sleep apnea. I didn’t see how that could be a big business but it would be fun to do a project together.
Later he pitched me on the idea of pitching ideas for optometrists. Said it was a market with no competitor.
He came up with this sorting robot idea. I started to think about all the other industries that could use. Warehouses, Pharmacists. He thought Jewelers.
Eventually we realized it needed to sort a high value item or they wouldn’t care about sorting it. And it needed to something a highly paid person like an optometrist or pharmacist waste their time on or it less no sense to have a robot do it instead. The value of the time was crucial.
We have our first in. Line of site in Manhattan.
We went to our first conference with no robot but some 3d printers to attract attention. We got 10 emails. Only one followed up to even let us meet them.
They were in queens. They expressed no interest in buying but said we could test there. Okay so we had 0 leads.
Then we got to building. We had a working prototype robot for the second conference.
This time we got about 50 leads. 4 of which were all the major manufacturers as well as lenscrafters.
An optometrist who ran several very successful clinics came up to us saying Johnson & Johnson had been promising him they could make this very robot for the last 7 years and still had not even shown him a prototype! They kept saying it was too complicated to make.
An hour later the optometrist dragged over a second guy who looked at our robot in shock. The optometrist told us it was the same J&J guy who had been promising him the robot all these years.
But only 2 agreed to a meeting. Even the guy who draggged over J&J didn’t reply.
In the first meeting, the guy said he had no interest in buying or even testing but was happy to help / answer questions. Uh oh.
Started to realize our manhattan guy might be one of the highest revenue stores in the country for contact lens. was this not as big of a problem as we thought?
The 2nd was a paid of optometrists in North Carolina and Florida. They were both super interested.
One of them had a chain of 15 optometry stores. It turned out to actually be 31 stores and they were just bought by Luxxitica.
Time for a trial with our first manhattan one. Terrified this is not useful enough beyond a few stores.
We have a third conference coming up. We will bring a working robot.
But alas it was not meant to be. My interest was waning as my cofounder started more and more irrational.
He started making rookie mistakes like putting his kid on the board and spending money on a nice webpage instead of our MVP.
At one point he got so made at me for playing chess with our employee while coding that he threw it in the trash.
After that he was too difficult to deal with. When someone doesn’t like you, know when to move on.