Full transcript: Yonatan Raz on London Real
0:00 In London, technology is the silicone roundabout. Introducing a new talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. Silicon Real. Each week, interviewing entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, financial technology, accelerators and incubators in an exciting three-person format. learn about the people behind the innovation. Locally filmed, locally sourced.
0:34 Silicon Real. It’s about the people. This is Silicon Real, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I’m Brian Rose. I also host London Real. It’s in the same studio, similar kind of idea. We get some people in the room try to figure some things out. We just had Neil deGrasse Tyson the astrophysicist very cool, dude We’ve had Tim Ferriss here from the four hour everything and we just had an actual rock star in here last week His name is Rao Reynolds from this band enter Shikari, and I felt like saying to him You’re a rock star, but I think he would have been like yeah, whatever But he was like the nicest guy even though when he gets on stage She’s like screaming and things like that so if you want to check that out That’s at London Real TV, but we’re here today to talk about tech my co-host is Colin pile entrepreneur You’ve got a couple things going on you got lingos You got coffee company crew cafe talk to me. Yeah, things are going things are going bonkers, but all good the lingos We got a 20 pound voucher. So silicon lingos.co Yeah, yeah, so go get a free lesson and crew cafes Yeah, we’re going nuts. I’m off to Italy in about two weeks to develop four more blends for the coffee company So yeah, we’ve ton of new customers great feedback and yeah, just growing like crazy. So it’s good. Awesome, man
2:27 Okay, here we go. Our guest today is Yonatan Rasfridman, who is the co-founder of Kano, which is the first computer that anyone anywhere can make. It’s a computer and coding kit for all ages all over the world.
2:46 You guys pretty much famously raised, I think over a million and a half dollars in crowdfunding on Kickstarter. I think in January, you had over 13,000 people subscribe to that campaign. I think your kit retails for about $129 and you’re shipping in July. Let me just finish out your intro. You were just named one of the Silicon 60, which is like the 60 people in tech in London.
3:08 I don’t know, why weren’t we on that list? I’m really not that important, I guess. Really, we gotta work on that for next year. I gotta get there. It was cool, cause my girlfriend was reading through it.
3:16 She’s like, a lot of these people been on Silicon real and I’m like, and that guy is on tomorrow. So, um, I’d rather have the people on the list on our show rather than us on the list and no one on the show. Yeah, that’s true. That’s very true. Anyways, Yonatan, welcome to Silicon real. Thanks for inviting me. No, it’s so good to have you here. You know, on your Twitter, it says, uh, you took a flight from Tel Aviv to London, uh, to, uh, start Kano.
3:38 And, uh, that’s pretty crazy. I think you came 16 months ago, right? And I was just wondering if you could tell us about the phone call you got that made you decide to pretty much flip your life 180 degrees, move countries and come into this crazy community. Yeah, so it was actually a phone call. So I was back then talking to Sol Klein who became my co-founder, one of my two co-founders in Cano. And we’re kind of after a couple of months of talking about why education is changing and why it’s interesting looking at existing platforms like open source software And then we looked at the Raspberry Pi, which kind of took off and in a matter of six months sold 500,000 units of essentially a single board computer at $35 that anyone can buy off the shelf and do something with it.
4:26 And basically, we’re kind of talking on the phone and the idea was, well, let’s meet up in London after a couple of weeks of spinning around ideas on a Google Doc. up to London for a full day, sit together, you, me, and Alex, who is the second co-founder, and talk about what do we want to do and why it’s interesting. And at that same week, I was actually on a reserve duty in Israel. It was a time where south of Israel was being bombed by missiles from Gaza.
4:59 And I was on a reserve duty, you know, so I was like with uniforms and everything, and we were talking in the evening. I’m like, I don’t know, like, I don’t know if it’s possible, like I’m still in reserve duty, we scheduled to like to meet in London on Thursday, but somehow kind of in between the end of the incidents from with Gaza and kind of the plans of coming here for 24 hours essentially. I ended up coming, I took a flight, we met for a full day in London, the three of us, and by the end of the meeting, after about 12 hours of talking about what do we wanna do and kind of learning more about each other’s visions, we decided to basically launch this journey.
5:38 I came back to Israel, we’re talking about like mid-November, and after two months I landed back here and we started the company. What is the Raspberry Pi, just so we know the beginning of this story. I remember hearing about this years ago, when I was in the city still, someone was like, I’m getting a Raspberry Pi from my kid and I never looked into it. I think Yonatan’s got some props here with his hands. So what do you got and what is the Raspberry Pi?
6:01 The Raspberry Pi is a single board computer based on Linux that was developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation in Cambridge. It’s a great British invention at $35 and anyone can buy it today. You can buy it online. There are a couple of companies that are selling it. What year was that invented, roughly?
6:19 It was launched in February, I think April 2012. Okay, so fairly recent. Yeah, so about two years ago. It’s really recent. Yeah, really recent, and they sold until today 2.5 million units of this board.
6:35 Wow. Can you hold it up? Yes. Let me just say it. Okay.
6:40 So that’s the Raspberry Pi. That’s the Model B. Okay. A little printed circuit board with some other funny colored pieces on there, capacitors or I don’t know. A processor, you know, that basically turns this into something that you can turn into anything you want.
6:51 So some people turn it into their media server, into their media center or computer server, And you can do basically anything you want. You program anything you want. It’s open source, so you can basically turn it into any type of computer. Some people turn it into a supercomputer. Some people operate their garage doors and automate it.
7:13 So it’s something that anyone can buy and kind of start making technology. And when we saw the Raspberry Pi, we thought like, wow, this is really, really cool. it’s like a really small computer board that we can buy and what was interesting for us is that at a low cost and in a pretty powerful processor we can on top of it potentially build something that is going to make it more accessible to a wider audience make it more playful make it turn it into a toolbox that anyone at any age anywhere can build on top and make what they want and move from locked sealed magical devices like any tablet or iPhone and actually start creating with technology instead of just consuming.
8:02 And this is how we started the journey. Is the Raspberry Pi marketed at children and is the Kano marketed at children or is it not that simple? I think the distinction between the age group is something that is very blurred. I’m not really aware of kind of the clear What’s the marketing strategy of the Raspberry Pi Foundation? I think a lot of people buying the Raspberry Pi from different age groups, from different places in the world.
8:29 It can be UK, US, other places as well. For Kano, we’re trying to build a computer kit that anyone can buy, any beginner, right? It can be a seven-year-old who just want to make, learn, and play with technology and hack into games, push some code into it, start creating. And it can be a 60-year-old in South Africa who never had a computer, but actually now we give them something that, you know, off the shelf with a great out-of-box experience, with an intuitive, simple, and fun operating system that we’ve created with simple documentation, all the components that they need.
9:09 They can make their own computer, and they can make anything they want with this computer. So it’s more about curiosity, beginners, creation with technology versus, oh, it’s just for kids or children. So we’re trying to make sure that our messaging and our story is driven by, this is a powerful toolbox that is fun. You can play with it, you can make technology with it, and it doesn’t matter what’s your age. Yeah, I guess it’s more skill set, less age, because yeah, like a seven-year-old picks that up and I pick that up, we’re probably going to have the same thoughts.
9:41 Yeah, or grandma picks that up. That’s a similar kind of thought process. Was Raspberry Pi ever, did they ever need to be on board, or are they just kind of an institution that’s happy for anybody to use the tech? Is that something you had to license for them? How does that work?
9:54 So the way the Raspberry Pi Foundation works, they’re working exclusively with two manufacturers who are actually manufacturing the Raspberry Pi boards, and then anyone can basically buy the board. You can log in today to a website and buy this board individually as you want. So they make it accessible to anyone to buy. The question is then, what do you want to create with it? And our relationship, we have a very good relationship with them.
10:22 We kind of introduced them from early on, from the beginning of Kano, what’s interesting for us and why we’re doing this. And we’re happy to buy the pies and build on top of it a whole new kind of computing experience that is powered by the pie. And we’re very proud of that because it’s a great British invention and we’re a UK company that is going to ship to global audience and it’s just great to use the Pi as a platform. Can you walk us through your story last year, 2013 was probably the craziest year of your life or I don’t know, maybe not if you’re on reserve duty.
10:55 I think that’s the first, going from reserve duty to board room. Yeah. In 48 hours. It’s a huge transition. You’re building a company from scratch.
11:02 I know, I think it was a year you guys shipped 200 units before the Kickstarter. I wanna come to that later, but what was that 12 months for? Like you, I know you left the Israel tech community and you came to the London one, and we’ll talk more about that later too, but what was the first 12 months like? A real rollercoaster combined by a personal journey moving from the country that I love that I was born and raised in, which is Israel. After 29 years of living there, I moved to a whole new world, right?
11:35 London, a global city, really kind of an epicentre of the world, very international, people from all over the world, very big, very exciting, very different culture from the one I’ve been part of in Israel. So there was a lot of kind of personal accommodation that I had to do and still doing. But for me, it’s more of a, you know, it’s kind of, I have a sense of mission by coming here to London. It wasn’t like I want to live in London, so I’m going to move to London.
12:03 It was, I want to build Canada together with my co-founders and build a great company and we’ve decided that London is going to be the place, so I’m just going to be there. I’m just going to go there. We’re going to start the company. It was kind of a rolling story. You arrive, okay, you need to work now on an entrepreneur visa, so this great institution that the UK government created, which is the entrepreneur visa, so we had to work on that, but it was pretty straightforward.
12:32 It was. Three months time, I got an entrepreneur visa after we showed all the documents we need. Got a great support from the UK Embassy and the UKTI. What are the details of the entrepreneur visa? Some of our audience may not understand.
12:46 It’s great to know how hard it was because we never know. First of all, I think it’s a phenomenal thing, the entrepreneur visa. It doesn’t exist in the States, right? It doesn’t exist, I think, anywhere in the world. I think maybe in Berlin to some extent because they’re also very promotional on getting entrepreneurs to build companies in Germany, but basically for me it was, you know, submitting an application and the key criteria for getting the entrepreneur visa were that I’m one of the founders of the company, obviously it’s a UK company, it has a bank account in the UK, so you need to prove that you have a certain amount of investment, it doesn’t matter where the investor is from, but you need to show that you have the money from investors in a UK you can, that belongs to the company where you need to be a director.
13:34 There was also kind of a four hours English test that I had to do in Israel, which was obviously exciting. And conversations with the UKTI or kind of the commercial team in the UK Embassy in Tel Aviv, and they needed to kind of, let’s say, approve the process and the application and kind of recommend for me to get an entrepreneur visa. So they ask for some business plans, prove that there is actually a business happening. So there’s like a very, very structured way of getting the entrepreneur visa, which you need to accommodate to.
14:11 But if you tick all the boxes, I mean, in three months’ time, I got an entrepreneur visa. Is it two years, or is it tied to the company? It’s three and a half years, and it’s tied to the company that I started. Did you ever think about starting this company in Israel? you pitch that originally? Can I? Yeah. No, there was no point of time where that was an option.
14:38 The idea was that we want to build a global company from day one. We knew that the Raspberry Pi are based in the UK, in Cambridge. Both Saul and Alex at that time were in the UK. Saul lives here and Alex was doing a master’s in Cambridge. So the whole idea was that London is the right place at the right time with the right, potentially the right story.
15:01 So we were very kind of fear on what’s going to happen in London. And you basically shipped those 200 units before your Kickstarter campaign in January. I think my numbers are roughly right. So that was the entire 2013. You have pretty accurate information, I have to say.
15:16 I have my sources. So what we’ve done, basically, when I moved here, you know, me and Alex, and so we started to work together on the first prototype. We said, well, we have the pie already, right, off the shelf. So the time to market can be shortened because there is already the most, let’s say, a critical component in the product that is ready, which is the hardware and the PCB. Were there other pie derivatives out there at this point, or anyone doing anything especially impressive?
15:45 Yeah. Yeah. There are a couple of others that we heard about, some of them we had conversation with just to kind of better understand the market. And since then, there are a couple of more companies and entrepreneurs that are building all kinds of single board computers. There are companies like Beagle Board that has a Texas instrument chip inside that are getting support from large corporates.
16:06 So there’s many, many others, but the Raspberry Pi had a very distinct story. So they captured all of the attention and the numbers that they’ve sold were unmatched to anything else that existed. So at that point of time, we said, well, I mean, the first thing we need to do to do a prototype and then we need to take this prototype and do some customer development workshops and show and see if anyone likes it. So you know we incorporated a company End of January and then we started to work and we worked for three months on doing something very very simple.
16:36 We’re going to design a simple box white with a canon name on top of it. We’re going to put all the components that you need in order to work with the Raspberry Pi. We’re going to design a a couple of books just like a Lego book that takes you very simple stages with instructions on how you start to work with the Raspberry Pi and we’re going to start getting feedback from real customers. You mentioned Legos because it was Alex’s nephew or Saul Klein’s son, a seven-year-old who kind of gave Alex the idea or gave you guys the idea.
17:06 So we came to Mika which is Saul’s seven-year-old son and Alex’s seven-year-old cousin. Market research. research and we came to him and we showed him the pie and his request was well I’d love to work with it but can you make it as simple and fun as Lego? So we saluted and went to do the work. So how many shares does he get for that, seven year old?
17:31 He’s a co-founder. He looks pretty plugged in. He’s a co-founder. Well he’s on the Kickstarter video with the books and piling up so he’s definitely a big inspiration. There are a couple of other inspiring stories that we learned about throughout the development of the company that we’ll happily share moving forward.
17:50 So we’ve done that and by the end of April, essentially after three months, we had a full working prototype, a very basic one but very nice and simple and we went into a primary school, 20 kids at the age of 9 to 11 because we thought that if we can make something that is going to be simple enough for a seven, eight, or nine-year-old to do, anyone is going to be able to do that. So we went into this school, King Solomon Academy in Marleybone. Beautiful school, was very kind to offer us the opportunity.
18:21 And we did a workshop of about an hour and a half with these kids. Alex was running the workshop in a very storytelling way and kind of invited all the kids to make a computer by themselves. And after 90 minutes, one of the kids named Khalid, he stood up and asked to say something. And he said that adults treat them like they’re incapable because they’re young. But today they’ve made a computer, so they’re like super children.
18:45 And that was the first interaction we had with the prototype. So we were like, wow, what do we do now? So we decided to make 200 units, 200 prototype. So Alex was working kind of on the design of the books and writing the books and making sure that kind of the experience is going to be simple and powerful. Because the story is key.
19:05 I mean, you said storytelling, and the design is key, because if you get that wrong, then no one cares. It’s like Apple. You get it wrong. Well, that’s the power of Lego, right? They tell a story, and they’re using booklets in an era when everyone are like, why do you need physical books?
19:19 We want books. Well, you’d be surprised. It’s pretty powerful. People love books. They love kind of the feeling of doing the instruction process, and Lego is more relevant now than ever in terms of how many units they sell a year.
19:31 I took a flight to China, started to buy components, buy some pies, we bought 200 pies. Because you’re producing hardware. I don’t think we’ve had many hardware producers on this show, like that says a lot right there. But I mean, you basically, you got to go to China, right? Yeah.
19:44 Okay. So we went to China also to learn about what’s going on and kind of be closer to the place where mass manufacturing on a global scale is happening. So I went to Shenzhen, met some companies, talked with entrepreneurs. It was phenomenal. It was my first time in China.
20:00 You should do a documentary about your year last year. I mean, Jesus. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff that happened. But the interesting thing is that we’ve done all of that outside of an apartment in London where we started to pile up all the boxes that we’ve designed. We had a dispatch corner in the living room with a Royal Mail printer, which we do the labels.
20:18 There were all the components on a shelf in the living room. And we would literally stand and assemble the kits, getting orders from our very, very basic website. And we shipped and we sold almost roughly 200 units of prototypes in about 90 days without paid marketing. It was just still kind of the two of us and sold together. And yeah, and at some point we said like, well, we think we know what we wanna do next.
20:49 And the next big thing was about moving to a new office in shortage where we’re still at since last June, starting to build a team. So we’ve hired our first engineer and at that point of time we decided to really start working on what we envisioned earlier as the product that we want to ship to thousands of people. And then the next step was like, okay, so we’re getting ready. How do we tell the story to a broader audience? Because we had like almost 200 alpha customers, right?
21:19 People that got the product. Are those in UK based or Europe based? It was Europe, Israel, it was people we know, people who heard about us, people who were looking for something about Raspberry Pi, so they found our website, people from the US, all kinds of South Africa, a kind of very diverse geographic distribution for a company with like literally no operation almost. And at that point of time, we decided also that Kickstarter would probably be the right fit for us in terms of how do we want to introduce the product and build our first community.
21:51 Because that’s not obvious. I mean, in retrospect, it’s obvious, but you know, I mean, how many people on this show have done kickstarters it was like tribe sports and you and a few others but I mean most people might think okay let’s go raise a round and let’s get the manufacturing and everything I was wondering just talk about Kickstarter because I still don’t even know how to explain what Kickstarter is it’s like part marketing part advertising part investing part you know pre-sales pre-sales and it’s also like it’s a great testament to future investors because you have a community. I mean, it’s all these weird things into one. Indeed, it is. And
22:29 It really depends on what are you trying to achieve with your Kickstarter campaign. And there is a huge difference between doing a product design project, or doing a film, or an art project, or anything else. Because in a film, the type of supporters you would gather around you, it’s going to be a very different community than a community that, you know, that wants the product that you want to create. So the main thing at the beginning is to identify who do you envision coming to your Kickstarter campaign, and how do you build and prepare the campaign in a way that you’re going to be able, in the press of a button, to get to all of your audience, you know, the influencers.
23:15 And for us, the decision to do a Kickstarter was mainly about to show that people care about what we want to create, essentially building our first tribe. And on top of that, showing that there is real interest in the product that obviously, because it’s a product-related project, will drive pre-orders from the Kickstarter. And the money basically serves as working capital. This is money that is not about any investment. You don’t take the money and go and start hiring people for that.
23:46 This is money that you got from backers in order to manufacture the product to ship them. And in some cases, some projects, they don’t even do any margin on what they get from Kickstarter, which is fine because that’s not the purpose. So for us, it was about building our tribe, telling the story for the first time about what is Kano, what are we trying to do, what is the vision of the company, who are the people that are behind it, and where do we want to go, and hopefully inspire people to come and support us.
24:18 And the idea was, by asking $100,000 as a funding goal, it was, well, let’s build a certain tribe bigger than 200 people, and let’s make another 1,000 units, roughly, and show that there is a bigger audience that is interested about what we want to do. And we had a very, very diligent and serious preparation for the Kickstarter campaign of around 30 to 45 days, we had spreadsheets with people that we thought are influencers, with Twitter handles and their emails and who are the journalists that we think are gonna be interested. We got a lot of support from our people around Cano, the investors, the advisors, but we already had because at that point of time, we had a small seed round in order to build the initial team, a side of me, Alex, and so on.
25:03 And we ended up, after 18 hours, getting to the funding goal of $100,000 and half a million dollar after four days, and $1.5 million after 30 days, with almost 14,000 backers from 86 countries. It was just a beautiful moment. One of their best success stories. I think we would like to think so. And in terms of numbers, we are the biggest crowdfunded project that came from the UK, even though we We did a US Kickstarter, but we are a UK company.
25:39 We are today, I think, number five in product design, all-time. Number 31, I think, all-time in Kickstarter out of half a million. And number one in category that is related to learning. So those numbers, I mean, it seems like you could go out the next day and raise 20 million just on those numbers, like 86 countries, 13,000. I mean, like…
26:02 Yeah. It’s an amazing customer list. You don’t even need a business plan or a pitch book. You just need like those three three lines and okay, there’s there’s demand here for my product. There is definitely initial demand We identify there. There is a lot of hunger, you know from people around the world to What we potentially trying to build and but you guys crafted the campaign you contacted the media early You got everybody ready around this date. It wasn’t just let’s just see what happens and your video your video feels really homegrown, but I’m sure you thought long and hard about how you wanted to to show your product to the world?
26:36 It’s, the Kickstarter happened about 11 months after we started the company. So the messaging, the vision, the kind of, the why we do it was already very strong. What was very challenging and crucial to do in order to have a very successful campaign was to connect the pieces. And the video is a great place to do that, but also very challenging. It needs to be, you know, it needs to be short.
27:02 It needs to be precise. It needs to talk to the audiences that you care about. And one of the amazing things, I don’t know the numbers, but one of the great things we’ve seen is that we had a lot of backers that were first timers on Kickstarter. That was for us a great, great, great win. And that came- You were able to drive people to use Kickstarter for the first time.
27:21 Right, and that came from your other media concerts. I mean, if that’s the first time on Kickstarter, obviously your audience isn’t coming from Kickstarter. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we didn’t. Our only audience were 200 people that bought the alpha version. That was our audience.
27:36 So you raised the one and a half. I guess things were going pretty crazy. Did you know when it would stop? I mean, at one point when you got to a million, are you like, oh my gosh, what have I got myself into? It’s a weird feeling because you don’t really know what to expect when you launch the campaign.
27:58 Inside of you you feel there is something interesting that we’re building but you can’t really sit around and say we’re gonna cross the million for sure you know we would probably be satisfied and quite happy with 200 250 even just reaching the goal is great because it’s it’s a small victory to cross the million was absolutely remarkable moment for us it was wow there is true believe from more people than we anticipated from so many countries. Finishing at 1.5 was just a beautiful moment. For us, it was less 1.5 million.
28:38 For us, it’s almost 14,000 people who never heard about us, never heard about the company, and they’re supporting us with a product they didn’t even see. That was the most impressive feeling to have. And this is like the hidden value of Kickstarter. Now that person is probably gonna be a fan for life. They’re gonna tell all their friends about it.
28:58 They’re gonna show people the kano that they bought on the Kickstarter campaign that raised on it. I mean, Jesus, the press from that, I’m guessing, is just exponential. Yes, and I think what you said, by the way, about the people who supported us, the backers, this is where the focus at the moment lies from our perspective. We have almost 14,000 people who are waiting eagerly to get a product and a promise that is big. If you go to our Kickstarter campaign, we’re promising a very exciting, exciting experience, and we’re working really hard on delivering on time, on quality, and on the promise of the experience that we’ve kind of marketed on the Kickstarter campaign.
29:42 And it’s a great challenge, and it requires a lot of kind of iterating that this is what it’s important now for the company. And like any startup and any company in the world, Iterating focus and being radically more focused every single day. It’s not a trivial thing to do, right? Especially as you grow also with the team I just want to know what it was like say February 15 All the dust and the adrenaline settles and then you walk back in and you’re like fuck we have 14,000 You know people dissatisfied by July and I got to go back to China and all that stuff What is like the 2.0 phase like for you the hangover? Well, first of all, the kickstarter hangover Well, first, yeah, it’s a Kickstarter hangover to some extent, but first of all, after Christmas, it’s a weird feeling for me personally as an Israeli because we don’t have Christmas vacation in Israel.
30:31 I mean, it’s not a kind of an official thing. So the notion of like, there’s like 10 to 15 days that after the Kickstarter, we had no activity basically. It was kind of a pretty weird feeling. It was like, you know, we’re so up and then there is kind of silence, but there is a global silence. advocating. You can’t do anything. Yeah you can’t do anything and like you’re so eager to do but I mean I just had to accept it and it was perfectly fine.
30:56 Coming back there was definitely a feeling of there there was a lot happening and we need to kind of make sure that we land back and take everything into the right proportions and remember and remembering why we’re here and why we’re doing this. So that was the main challenge once we got back as a team and obviously there are a couple of people that we needed to add and understand where we’re going and and you know obviously there was traction of opportunities people from all over the world approaching us well we can do this together we can do that together you know so the best thing you can do is just put it in a folder which is someday maybe and keep being focused on what’s important and if you there were like two or three lessons that you learned in the last three months what would those be you know something like you know keep it simple you know don’t do all these you know these kind of handy pieces but what you know what have you learned in the last three months or say that what you were giving advice to someone who just raised you know a million on Kickstarter for a piece of hardware what would you tell them to do and not to do keep everything in the right proportions essentially don’t let the hype too much go above your head, that’s probably number one.
32:13 Number two, make sure that whatever happened with your Kickstarter doesn’t affect negatively on the focus of the company and what was the focus of the company when you started and what do you want to actually create. And three, maybe the most important is to make sure that the why you’re doing it is the same why. Right. That’s probably the hardest part. Yeah.
32:45 It’s almost like when a rock star gets famous, like why did you want to do this in the first place? Did you want to create and get your message and get your music or did you just want to party all night? There are many articles now with 20 years for Kurt Cobain, Suicide, where no one seemed to know exactly what was happening and what was the motivations. Did he want to be famous, did he not want to be famous, did he kill himself because he became famous or did he kill himself because he wasn’t famous enough?
33:11 The right motivation is something that is crucial in my view to the success of an individual or a business because at the end of the day there is always a reason to why we do things. The challenge is once you’re succeeding to some extent is to make sure that the why always goes across the board of what you’re doing. And on top of that, you need to make sure that the why is clear to everyone that is involved with the company, any stakeholder, the customers, the employees, the founders, investors, advisors, suppliers.
33:47 So everyone in the ecosystem needs to know what’s the why and to make sure that the why is consistent, just like a product needs consistency. I’m thinking Jeff Bezos, he’s like one of the guys that I say 60 Minutes has done a bunch of interviews him over the year, and his why seems to be constant. He’s like the lowest price for the customer and customer satisfaction, and his old office used to be this nasty old office, and he was just like, and it was already after the IPO, and he’s just like, no, no, no, no, it’s all about the price, and the customer, and the business model, and that’s it.
34:18 Yeah. And he’s still there, and he’s doing an unbelievable job with Amazon. It’s like unbelievable success, And it’s just inspiring to look at entrepreneurs like this and try and even learn something small from them. So will your units be delivered by July? And what happens the rest of the year for Farkana?
34:39 So at the moment, we’re very, very focused on building a DNA and a culture that it’s It’s about delivering on the promise of what we did in the Kickstarter, creating the wow effect on anything, the product, the way we communicate with our customers. That’s number one. Number two, making sure that we’re building a customer-oriented company. Customers are the most important thing, and if the customers are happy, it means we’re We’re doing something good as a team, as a company, that everyone around the company is doing a great job in helping us to delight the customers and this is at the moment the core focus of the company.
35:29 Everything else that will happen after that is going to be driven by how much we succeed with these targets. And you don’t want to think too much about July because that’s one customer cycle but You want to have many many more customer cycles and you want to you know, it’s I guess ideally you don’t want to stop at the Kickstarter Obviously, I mean you want to sell ten times those that minute of you and it’s yeah, absolutely I mean we want to build you’ve been having pre-sales. I guess on your website now Yeah So after a couple of weeks after the Kickstarter we enabled pre-orders on our website and you know It’s been going on on a daily basis basically. Yeah, how was that business been post post Kickstarter end?
36:04 I mean not numbers But just has it still been a steady pace or you find that you have to constantly still be out there there, to let people know you guys are doing what you’re doing? We’re not pushing too much, so for instance, we’re trying to create content around our company, around our culture, around our creation, communicate to the backers, constantly telling them where we are, what we do, support the community. There’s a very large Raspberry Pi community, right?
36:34 There’s 2.5 million Raspberry Pi’s out there in the world. There’s a lot of creations, a lot of creativity, a lot of people, and we’re trying to build relationships with all of them, with parents, with kids, with teachers, with makers, with people that are just curious and love what we do. So we’re focusing a lot about that and telling stories and sharing content through the different channels online. And obviously it kind of generates more traffic to our website by telling the story and again, what are we doing?
37:05 Why are we doing this? And we’re gearing up towards the time where we’re actually going to be shipping the product. So it’s an intersection of working kind of on the operational side of getting the product and making sure they’re ready. And on the other side, you know, constantly evolving, nurturing and building relationship with different audiences. What’s the difficulty of that task in six months to ship that many units, like on one to 10?
37:29 Is it like seven or is it like 11? I have no idea. Because you look at that thing, and you’re like, oh, just order a bunch from Raspberry Pi, get some keyboards, put it in a box, I mean, I’m guessing it’s not that simple, but how hard is it? It’s not that simple. Is a lot of it done off-site?
37:44 So your China manufacturers, are they actually putting together the whole thing and then sending you the finished product? So first of all, there’s several components on the product that are bespoke. We’ve designed on top of Linux DBN, so we took Raspbian, which was kind of an existing OS for the Raspberry Pi. And on top of that, we’ve built our own operating system, which we’re kind of privileged to have these giants building beautiful stuff like the Raspberry Pi, like these OS and build on top of it something that we want to introduce to our audience and customers.
38:15 We’ve designed a whole new keyboard that we’re going to introduce that people want to buy just individually as a keyboard, accessories, the packaging. There was a lot of product development that went on for about a year until you’re being able to start production and you have tooling, you need to align everything, there is consistence of design. I would say it’s pretty a lot of stuff once you develop software, web, content, packaging and hardware by yourself and you need to assemble and manufacture and work with suppliers.
38:51 So I would say it’s a pretty challenging task for any company, especially an early stage startup. or 11. I would say 10 is fair. Okay and the weird thing you don’t have like a soft launch really cuz like it’s July and you got to send all the products and like you can’t be like well let’s try sending out 50 or 100 or 200 I mean we’re gonna ship a thousand there is a target of shipping a thousand to our early birds early bird backers from geekstarters so get there I potentially are gonna get the product a month before everyone else. Wow, more deadline pressure and that should happen hopefully by end of June this is the target we’re working very hard to meet the target and I kind of you know meet the expectations of people you know the one question I have when I was learning about this company is I was thinking you know it’s such an interesting idea and a cool concept but if I was an investor I’m like okay what’s happening five years from now what are you gonna deliver are you gonna deliver you know like a buildable you know big computer or you know how does your product evolve it’s It’s a great question, one that we are being asked and asking ourselves.
39:57 It’s very early, we have dreams and desires, and obviously, again, there is a really strong why when one asks, what are we trying to do as a company? The company can evolve in different directions. The directions are going to be determined by what’s going to happen in the next six months, the next 12 months. We always try and shoot Beyond the Stars, but at the end of the day, we want to build a company that will build experiences and tools for a new creative generation.
40:30 What exactly is going to be the tools that might differ over time? But this is where we’re going. This is where we want to be. Because you could say you’re an education company, you’re not necessarily a hardware company, right? I would probably say these days that we’re trying to live in the intersection of hardware, software learning and entertainment.
40:53 We don’t position ourselves as one that is specifically in any of these four. We feel that we’re creating an experience rather than a specific product that sits in a specific market segment. It’s an opportunity, but also it’s a risk because people need to understand what exactly are you providing them. But I think we have kind of the confidence and we’re trying to work really hard in making sure that we’re providing something that on the one hand is clear and at the same time it’s flexible so you can make many, many things with it. For instance, you make a computer and then with this computer, you make more things, you build things. So that’s part of where we want to be moving forward.
41:35 Where’s the competition to sit in this? I know there’s quite a few people building cheap laptops for developing nations and stuff, but I don’t think they’re the same as you and that it’s actually, you make it yourself, so. Again, it’s a great question, and I think it’s something that is very driven by, a lot of people think on competition in different terms. My view would be that competition is all around us, right? Because if there was no competition, you wouldn’t have place.
42:04 It means there is no market, no one wants to buy, and basically the category is irrelevant to the world. And if you look at the different audiences that are kind of customers or potential customers, a competition can be about time and money. So a LEGO can be a competition, an iPad game, different other kind of DIY kits. It could be regular computers. So everything that takes attention and time and resources basically means that we are competing with many many many many offerings because we’re not living in a vacuum and I think it just kind of reiterates the challenge of in a world of abundance of experiences and devices where again we have like really beautiful consumption machines that everyone really wants to own. They don’t need it but they really want to own. It’s very challenging to create It’s something that is desirable, that people are eager to have, but it’s a great challenge to have.
43:12 You know, slowly breaks the spoken word artist who’s been on London Real a few times. He’s co-hosted with me for some cool guests. I know he’s a big fan of you guys. I know he does videos and talks about your product, and he has his Around the World and 80 Day Trip, and I know he went through Africa to go down there, and I know you guys followed him down to one of the countries and did a video about Africa, and I was I was just wondering, you guys do target a bunch of African countries for potential people to have condos, and I was wondering if that was a conscious effort you guys made early on.
43:44 One of the components that, let’s say, assembled the why of why we started is about building something that anyone, anywhere can make. And really when we started, we saw a video on YouTube about a kid named Kelvin from Sierra Leone. I don’t know if you’ve seen it, it’s basically a story of a 16 year old kid from Sierra Leone that from the age of 11 taught himself by kind of collecting electronic pieces from trash bins in his village. He taught himself to create battery packs and radio because he didn’t have that and he lives in a village where six days a week there is no electricity.
44:29 So, it came from a place of necessity, but for us, the Kelvin model exists all over the world because it’s about creation, it’s about experimentation. It can come from a necessity, it can come from curiosity, but at the end of the day, we believe that we have the power of creation and not just of consumption, and especially in a world where technology advances so rapidly, it’s very tempting to kind of let go and let the machine take over while we don’t understand how the machine works. So for us, this is an opportunity to build something that is going to be relevant for a 16-year-old in Lagos as much as for an 8-year-old in London, as much as for a 12-year-old in East LA, as much as for a 65-year-old in Zurich.
45:19 So that’s a critical component. I guess you can even understand your market better by making it for a product that someone in Ghana or Sierra Leone can open up and build just like anyone else, I guess. Yes. And I think one of the drivers and motivations for us to build this company is about tapping into what we refer to today as a majority world. It’s not about developed world versus developing world.
45:48 You can find developing world in developed world. If you go to East Palo Alto, this is not the other Palo Alto. This is majority world. These are people with no access to tools, sometimes with no access to education. Even in the UK, it exists.
46:05 It’s not Lagos versus London. It’s majority world that can be in the West, it can be in the East, it can be in the North, it can be in the South. It’s about the people. It’s not about the economy. And these people, we wanna tap wherever they are.
46:22 They can be in India where 95% of the people in India do not have a computer. Maybe they have a mobile phone, but they do not have a computer that they can create with, that they can work with. And China, and so I think the notion of people wanna make, learn, and play, it’s something that goes across the board, we believe, in many, many countries, and not just west versus east. And we wanna build a company, and again, I think in that respect, London is a great city to build a company like Cano because it’s the most international city.
46:56 You wanna build a global company or go outside of the street, go to the tube. You’re in a global village. We are today 17 people from nine different countries. Everyone’s sitting in the same office in London. It would probably be very hard for it to happen in any other city in the world.
47:13 Yeah, and you’re a one-way flight to Africa, Brazil, Asia, America, everywhere. You know, it would be a shame to have you here and not talk a bit about Israel startup Since that’s where you’re from. We it’s come up, you know here and there on a bunch of different episodes We had Garrett Davies from ad brain who had just spent Christmas or the holidays in Tel Aviv and I’m gonna think I might go to Tel Aviv by the way next year He was like on the beach in January having a great old time And I think it’s some crazy number like isn’t it the largest number of startups on NASDAQ come from Israel or there are some numbers I’ve heard that are crazy. I was wondering if you could tell us what’s the startup scene like there and how the community compares to a place like Silicon Valley or the roundabout here.
47:58 So Tel Aviv is a very vibrant startup community where entrepreneurship is something that you see all around you. You see people in coffee places, you see people sitting in offices, co-working spaces, sitting next to investors, working among themselves. It seems that there There is this desire to build, create, and ship new products and companies to the world. Some of the biggest success stories that came from Israel in the last few years were very exciting companies, like Waze that was sold to Google for a billion dollar, Prime Sense that was sold to Apple, Prime Sense did the technology behind the Kinect for Microsoft.
48:45 The combination of being a society that all the time is kind of very, very on spot because of the kind of political situation in the area makes people feel like they really want to do something meaningful and do something with their lives. If you couple that with the experiences that we gain at a very early age from serving in the military, especially if you’re in a technology unit, and then the fact that this is a small country where if you want to build something, you have to look outside to the world and look at kind of the global scene versus just like your local economy, which is eight million people. If you combine all that together, you get a place that drives a lot of innovation, a place where a lot of big corporates, global corporates buy startups and different companies to set their own R&D centers in Israel where technology and R&D is, in terms of percent of GDP, is the highest in the world, more than the U.S., with outside of the U.S., the largest country with publicly traded companies in NASDAQ is Israel.
49:55 So it’s only second to the U.S. But when you go to Tel Aviv, you feel this sense of community, of entrepreneurs that are really passionate about building new products and companies, really passionate about supporting each other. So the sense of community and belonging is very, very strong. And one of the results of that is entrepreneurs that are succeeding and doing an exit, selling a company or doing an IPO, one of the first things they do, they go back to the community and they invest in other entrepreneurs.
50:30 They do angel investing. So you see success stories that are repeatedly supporting the community of entrepreneurs. And if you walk in Tel Aviv, you see like many people working in a coffee place, trying this new product, like people working on a weekend, and then you have just a lot of startups that are trying to blossom out of the city. It’s not just in Tel Aviv, by the way, but it’s in Jerusalem and it’s in other cities in Israel, it’s in Herzliya, but Tel Aviv is definitely a focal point of startup innovation today.
51:02 And, you know, as Cana, we’re lucky to have the author of the Startup Nation book, Saul Zinger, on our advisory. And we have a couple of really exciting other people from Israel that are involved with Cana. But I think when you read Startup Nation, you get a glimpse of all the dots that connected over the last 60 years in Israel that brought about this kind of this rush of innovation and young people that are eager to make an impact. And what about the London community?
51:34 Are you feeling the love here? We’re kind of new to it. I mean, you’ve been here, what, a year and change? Yeah. Well, really kind of part of the tech community sort of the last year and a half, I guess.
51:45 Yeah. And we’ve been doing this for like 10 months. And so I’ve been getting to know it. And compared to the rest of the community, it does feel like everyone is supportive and that kind of thing. But how does it feel compared to Israel?
51:56 I think it’s, first of all, London is a very big city. And obviously, Shortage is one of the startup hubs in London, definitely. Maybe the more vibrant, the more condensed startup environment with several interesting success stories, you know, like Mind Candy and some other guys. And I think I definitely feel the sense of community. There is a lot of goodwill from entrepreneurs and investors to connect, to help.
52:27 There’s a lot of co-working spaces, a lot of meetups. We have the Google campus here. We’re sitting kind of a couple of minutes from here and being kind of in the heart of shortage. I definitely feel that it starts to build up and building this sense of belonging to something which is greater than just doing a startup. But it’s a process that I think it’s going to be interesting to see what it becomes in a few years’ time.
52:54 In respect to Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv is definitely the sense of belonging and community and support is embedded in the people, in the entrepreneurs. And I think that’s something that evolved over time because there are also many success stories and inspirations for other entrepreneurs. And I think the next big thing that can happen for the tech scene in London is more and more success stories, you know, companies like Just Eat that did an IPO or King that did an IPO or MindCandy that are doing great and other companies that are going to be inspiration both to show that you can do it and be entrepreneurs that are going to be very successful to serve individual is an inspiration, but also then go back to the community and invest in other entrepreneurs that want to spin off their ideas.
53:40 And Silicon Valley, do you feel that when you go out there? Do you feel a real sense of community and support? I mean, I guess they’ve been doing this for 30, 40 years out there. Look, I’ve actually haven’t personally been to Silicon Valley, but I have several good friends that are working out of the valley. Obviously, it’s the most intense, biggest startup hub in the world with some of the most famous and investors, entrepreneurs and companies.
54:06 So I think it’s probably one of the most exciting places to be in the world, but I haven’t personally been there to feel how they first or kind of similar versus London or Tel Aviv. Yeah, me neither. I’m driven by it. I’m driven by it on my motorcycle. My brother went to Stanford, that’s all I know, but I’ve never really hung out there.
54:26 Yanneton, we always ask everyone that comes on the show a couple questions at the end and I’m going to hit you with them. If you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Yonatan and give that young man a bit of advice, what would you tell him? Learn to code. Did you not know how to code then? No.
54:47 Okay. I’m not a coder. Okay. Which is interesting because the three founders of Kano, you know, were coming from humanities, which made the entire experience that you want to create about the people and not about the technology. But at the moment- So that’s an asset for you.
55:00 I’m taking lessons at the moment both on the Kano kit and also on Code Academy and And I’m trying to go back to the 20-year-old Yonatan, who is now 30, and getting to being able to, on a daily basis, create with technology and not just consume. And you guys are involved in the Year of Code initiative here in the UK, and you guys are all about trying to get young kids to start coding early, right? So we are trying to support virus initiative. One of them is the Year of Code, which is a great initiative that is about, truly about trying to get the message of skills for the 21st century, coding one of them to the mainstream audience and to parents all over the nation.
55:39 Another thing that happens, you know, they’re going to be a new computing curriculum going into primary schools and schools in the UK coming September. So we’re trying to see how we as a kind of, as a small startup, can we support this with our product or with the knowledge that we’ve gained by doing workshops in schools. I think moving forward, there are going to be more and more companies, small and big, that are going to try and empower the younger generations in the UK to become more creative.
56:07 It can be as entrepreneurs, it can be as programmers, but in our view, a lot of it is about the skills that you need to develop in order to make yourself relevant for a 21st century generation. And if we have time, there’s a small story that… So two weeks ago I had a chance, a privilege actually, to speak to 250 students from different Camden schools, 9 to 11 year old, and I shared with them the story of Cano and why we’re doing this. And at the end of the presentation I asked them to take three things from my presentation and it was one, that you can’t learn to swim by exercising at the beach, two, that you You’ve got to be able to dare and do things that you don’t think you’re capable of.
56:55 And three, just do it, like the famous Nike tagline. And then I said, what’s the worst case? And then the next thing I showed them was the slide of the unemployment rates of under 25-year-olds in Europe, which is, on average, 22%. So I think for a seven-, eight-, nine-year-old, maybe the question for Yonatan, who is an eight-year-old, would be like, you know, looking at the slide and saying, that’s your chance to actually do what you want. I said, you’re showing unemployment statistics to nine-year-olds.
57:19 I love it. I try we try to treat anyone as an adult, you know, and and I think kids really appreciate that and did they respond to that? Were they like uh-oh time to I look I try I was trying to find one One one kid in the audience that will tell me that the slide is an opportunity and not a worry. Well, not a worry statistic I’m putting money on that kid That’s a great presentation. Um, just the second part of that question is advice What’s the best advice you’ve received so far in your career or even at the Army in Israel?
57:53 I think it’s an advice that goes across the board of both professional life and personal is remember who you are and stay true to yourself. I just want to touch real quickly on the Defense Force because you said that’s part of the reason that keeps the community so tight. I know it’s mandatory for a military duty for everyone, it was a couple years. So men do three years and women do two years. And is it the fact that you said you were introduced to tech in that, but it must be more than that.
58:33 It must be because you’re pushed to the limits, you must form really strong relationships with everyone. What do you think it is, the most important component of that, that then spins off into entrepreneurialism? I think it’s three main things. It’s accountability. So at the age of 18, 19, 20, you’re already accountable for important things.
58:55 It can be tanks, it can be processes, it can be other soldiers, and actually get a sense of what is accountability at a very young age, straight after high school. You screw up and people can die. You screw up and people can die, you can create, let’s say, diplomacy conflicts. A lot of things can happen, and it’s a massive organization, which is very important in Israel, obviously. So the first one is accountability.
59:24 The second one is the network. So if you think about the network in Israel between people, it starts in the army, where you start building your first real adult life network between people that served with you in the same unit. And it’s very strong for people who are coming from technology unit, because one of the things that happen after the army, they reconnect and building startups together. One of the most biggest success stories in Israel in tech is a company called Checkpoint, is valued today I think at $9, $10, $11 billion and all the three founders they serve together in the army and straight after the army where they were developing firewall for the army they were the first firewall technology company to come out of Israel and they became the market leader until today because the company started 15 years ago.
1:00:10 So it was accountability, network? Accountability, network and the exposure. You find yourself suddenly exposed to amazing things at a very young age. Usually people in other parts of the world would only be able to see high-tech military equipment, building, managing and developing different processes that can influence people’s lives only at a really late stage, after a BA, maybe even after a master’s. Israel you get to taste that at the age of 19 and it shapes how you perceive what do I do when I don’t know something so already at a very young age you combine you know the accountability the network and the exposure and you’re starting to put yourself in a place of execution a place of learning a place of what do I do when I don’t know something not to mention what do I do when I when I don’t know something that I don’t know. So there is a lot of parameters that in other parts of the world you only discover later in life where in Israel you have the opportunity which is mandatory to get a sense of and for quite a lot of time, right? At the minimum it’s three years or two years for women and it’s pretty remarkable. Obviously it takes you to a different place in life where in other countries you find yourself after ice cream, going to university, having fun traveling in Israel it’s different but I think it’s something that we understand and we know from a very young age that there come a time where we’re going to join the military and we take it as kind of part of the
1:01:48 Package of being of being in Israel like a rite of passage last part of that question is to the 20 year old that’s listening around the world in any country just any country you can buy a kana which is you know Africa Asia everywhere who wants to you know grow up and be like an entrepreneur like you You know raise over a million dollars on Kickstarter that kind of thing What advice do you give to them? Like what are some of the things that they can do so they can later, you know be part of the tech startup scene I think the the number one thing that I would I would encourage them to do is to be really really curious. I Personally try to be all the time obsessively curious as if I’m still a five-year-old and that’s something about curiosity that but is being let go by us when we grow up, you know, because of all kind of educational systems and then, you know, we’re going to study a degree and we’re starting to work.
1:02:44 So I think this natural curiosity that we possess as human beings, nurture and kind of empower it, you know, moving out of your comfort zone, it’s very easy to keep doing things you think you know how to do. But the true learning curve happens when you do things you’ve never done before. And I personally can say everything I’ve done in the last 12 months I’ve never done before. Never started that kind of a company. Never built that kind of a size of a team.
1:03:13 Never shipped a product to 15,000 units. Every day that happens, I find myself with a learning curve that I’ve never done before. So that’s number two. Number three, make sure that you meet, surround yourself, and being exposed to inspiring people. Good advice.
1:03:35 Yonatan, how do people order their own Kano? How can they find out more about you guys, the whole nine? So first and foremost, do check our website, www.kano.me. There’s a lot of information there. We’ll take you to our forum.
1:03:52 Obviously, you can pre-order a kit. We’re kind of running out of stock. So if you still want to get the Canon kit by end of July, then please do try and pre-order by end of April. Okay, but I can get one now by July if I go now. If you go now and pre-order, you will get it by end of July, that’s true.
1:04:10 Okay, and 10-year-olds are good for 10-year-olds? It’s good for kids of all ages starting six. Six to 60. Six to 60, maybe 90. Six to 100.
1:04:20 Yeah. Awesome, we’re out of time, Yonatan, that was super cool. I was fascinated by everything, the whole story. I definitely wanna go to Tel Aviv and check out things over there. And nothing would make me happier than to see you guys just kill it this year and ship so many units and change everything.
1:04:37 So it’s a cool story, right? Amazing story. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for sharing the excitement about Kano and it’s great to share some of what we’re doing with the broader London community. Everybody sees these companies from the outside they’ll see the website but like our tagline here is it’s about the people and like everybody we have in here reminds us that it’s you know it’s really about the people underneath the website that are making the whole vision to making sure why is important and you know to keep that whole thing expanding so thanks for coming in here and telling us your story and all the best thank you all right guys take care there doesn’t seem to be any benefit anymore to to hiding away what you’re trying to do because it’s a little bit like you’re You’re closing down network effect, you’re closing down the opportunity for people to help you and support you.
