#394 – Jeri Ellsworth and the demise of CastAR

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released May 28th, 2018. Episode 394. Jerry Ellsworth and the Demise of Cast AR.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Jerry Ellsworth: And I'm Jerry Ellsworth of Super Stealthy Can't Tell You About It Startup.

Chris Gammell: She's back! Welcome back, Jerry. How are you doing?

Jerry Ellsworth: It's a pleasure to be back. It's been forever.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. How many years? You've done a couple startups since.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. I think I'm on startup two since the last time I was in there. Or three.

Dave Jones: Actually, three. Well, that's not many. Don't they average 18 months or something and then flop? And then, you know...

Chris Gammell: You're saying all startups, Dave, right?

Dave Jones: I'm sorry. And all startups in general. Like, you know, what's the average lifespan of a startup?

Chris Gammell: Right.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. A lot of early death, let's say. Especially here in Silicon Valley. A lot of infant mortality. Is that the... That's what I was looking for. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: Well, so what have you been up to? I saw you made a couple of videos with ham stuff recently. Has that been a big piece of the Jerry life lately?

Jerry Ellsworth: It has. I've actually... It's been a great distraction with all the other stuff going on. So I got into doing ham radio stuff a couple years ago. That was fun. Ham radio operators had been mentors in my life ever since I was, like, really small and young. But it took me 30 years to actually get a license. Oh, wow. Okay. Wow. It was pretty fun. I went to the local ham fest and blasted through all the three tests in one sitting. It was kind of fun because they were... The kind of old farts there were cutting up with me and, like, oh, you came late. And usually there's not enough time to make it through two tests. And I'm like, well, I'm going to see how I can do. And I was only intending to do two of the tests.

Chris Gammell: Right. So you did the... What's the technician, then general, then extra? Is that right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. So actually...

Chris Gammell: Nice.

Jerry Ellsworth: I blew the technician quite badly. Missed quite a few of them because I just didn't study any of the rules. Who cares about rules? Yeah, yeah. Probably got that. And then the general, I knocked it out of the park. I got 100% on it. And then the old farts had changed their tune. They're like, oh, maybe you should try the extra. And I'm like, well, I didn't even really study for that. And they're like, just do it anyway. And I went through it. It was a lot of head scratchings. It's like, oh, yeah, Smith charts. I look at those once every five years.

Chris Gammell: Right. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I pulled it off. I couldn't pull that out of my brain if I tried Smith charts. I don't think it would come back to me.

Chris Gammell: Dave, I don't think you'd be pulling it out of your brain, buddy.

Jerry Ellsworth: It was also kind of fun, too, because it was at this ham convention. So the rumors started going around like, hey, there's this girl that passed all of her tests. And then it grew. Like, she aced them all. And, of course, I didn't do anything to deny it. All right.

Chris Gammell: All right. Building the myth.

Dave Jones: Is the – how is the ham scene? Is it still crusty old graybeards? Is it like – or is it changing?

Jerry Ellsworth: That's about the same as I remember since I was a kid. You know, I remember, you know, back in the 80s, I'd go over to these ham radio guys' house, and they'd be like in their woodshed in the back that they converted into the ham shack so they could chain smoke and drink beer away from their wives, I think. But there were always like old farts, like complaining, like, ham radio's dead. It's going to be dead in like two years. Save these days.

Dave Jones: Right.

Jerry Ellsworth: Exactly the same. It's just like the same discussions. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Except they're all 30 years older. Yeah. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: Wow. Well, Jerry, I want to hear more about those builds too, but actually I should have stopped myself before I said that because we've had – you've been on the show many times, and we will link all of those things. But for people who haven't heard of you or heard us mention you –

Speaker ?: Oh, come on.

Chris Gammell: Seriously, Chris. Or reference you by first name, we get yelled at a lot where we just say Jerry. Could you tell us who you are? I'm just trying to do the listening audience here proper, Dave.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, how do I describe myself? That's interesting. I have a very unique background. I got into electronics when I was very young. I've always been a kind of maker-creator type. Got into a lot of trouble when I was an early teenager, like doing phone freaking and stuff like that and war dialing with my Commodore 64. Nice. Later got into – Yeah. A lot of fun stuff. Actually, some of those weird numbers I found as a kid are still active. I'll tell you about that later. Wow. And got into pirate radio. I got into like really pirate radio stuff with CB radios with big amplifiers and then got into racing later on in my teens and then opened a chain of retail computer stores in the 90s and continued to do electronics. Yeah. Everyone does in the 90s. That was a perfect time. That was, I know. That was the stereotype. Yep. And in the 2000s, I started coming to Silicon Valley and started doing engineering without any college degree. So I just brute forced my way into startup life here in Silicon Valley. Got a reputation of the person to go to if you want to get a design done. Did some toy design and did some chip design. Eventually went to Valve Software, which is a big video game company, and helped them start their R&D lab. And from there, started my own startup and then worked in another startup and started another startup. All right. I'm sorry. That was rambly.

Dave Jones: I'm sorry. That's three startups. I thought we only had two at the start of the show. No, I only started two, but I worked at one in between. Oh, you started. I didn't know you started one after Valve. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, I started Cast AR and then...

Dave Jones: Yeah, of course. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Cast AR. And then what?

Jerry Ellsworth: That one face planted big time, which we can go over.

Dave Jones: And then... It lasted quite a long time before it face planted.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Four years. Four years. And then I went to a rocket startup, which has been super cool. Can't talk too much about that. And then did another... I just started another startup.

Chris Gammell: Oh, actually. I did not realize that's what you meant at the super stealthy startup thing at the beginning. So that's what you meant.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Oh, okay. There you go. Right.

Chris Gammell: So we actually... Dave and I are actually not even in the notes. It's not like we got notes about that beforehand.

Dave Jones: We don't know about this third startup. Tell us about... Can you tell us about this third startup?

Chris Gammell: We're going to subtly, unlike Dave said there, we're going to subtly try and get at this over the show.

Dave Jones: Subtle's my middle name. What are you talking about?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Right. Dave, just tell me what you're talking about, Jones. The L stands for smooth. Great. Okay. That's a lot of stuff. Is that the last time... You were on here talking about Cast AR last time, probably, right? Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: I think last time I was on here, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to take over the world and it's going to be so easy and nothing's going to go wrong. Well, that didn't quite work out.

Dave Jones: I don't know. So, come on. Can you tell us anything about the new startup? No, we'll get into that later. Tell us about the new startup. How about the new stuff? Oh, new startup?

Chris Gammell: I'm not used to having Dave on an interview show with me, too. Sorry. This is the... I'm used to running the show here. I haven't been on many lately. I'm excited. I want to know. Jerry's special. Dave showed up, you know? Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, you know, it turns out when you implode a startup, you can actually buy the assets of the startup really cheap. And so... Really? A group of us got together and bought the Cast AR. Oh, you did? Penny pennies on the dollar. Big time cheap.

Dave Jones: Oh, penny pennies on the dollar.

Jerry Ellsworth: Amazing. Like, I'm going to start going to these company auctions all the time.

Dave Jones: Desi pennies. And pennies.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. So, a group of us got together and purchased the assets. And so, that includes, like, all the physical stuff, all the patents and source code and all the fun bits of the company. And so, we've been taking pieces of that and taking the good and throwing out the bad and working on a new startup. So, that's about all I can say about it. There's nothing much more to say. It's not bad. That's a good start.

Dave Jones: There's much more we can try and extract from you, I'm sure. Yeah. Like, is it going in a new vision? Or do you want, like, a new direction? Or do you want to sort of redo the vision you had before?

Jerry Ellsworth: So, it's definitely AR-based. It's a slightly different direction. So, you know, time has progressed.

Dave Jones: Is that because you realized that there wasn't a market for that? Or it wasn't as viable as you originally thought it was?

Jerry Ellsworth: No, I think the old product that we had was very viable. I mean, the reason cast failed was far more complicated than market fit. Which I can go into later. We will. Sure. Or now. Yeah. Or whatever.

Chris Gammell: Well, so maybe can you also tell people, so what is cast AR? And how did, just as a quick summary so people are caught up.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, when I was working at Valve, we were working on augmented reality. And part of the technology I actually purchased from Valve Software when Valve had this big layoff and I was part of it. It's kind of funny. Like, how many times can I buy the same assets over and over again?

Chris Gammell: It's like zombie tech, huh?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. The problem is it keeps going up in price each time. Oh, yeah. Like, I think at Valve I bought the rights to the stuff for like 100 bucks and a handshake. And now it was more. Right. Cast AR is AR technology. And so Rick Johnson and I started a company based on that technology we purchased. And it was based on this projection system where you project it out to a retroflective surface from a headset. And all the light that came from your two projectors on your headset would bounce back to each user. It was a very clever way to have this kind of holographic tabletop experience.

Chris Gammell: I tried the demo. It was fan-frickin-tastic. I liked it.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. To bet you didn't get to see some of the later stuff.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I remember you guys were working on that when I came by.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, did you make it to the office at Playground Global?

Chris Gammell: I did. I did. Yes. Oh, okay. And so I don't remember, like, at this point, my California travel starting to blur. But, like, I think we were there to see you guys. And then also, oh, we were there for, like, one of the happy hours, I think, as well. Because on Fridays, Playground Global did happy hours, right? Yeah. They were kind of quasi open to the public. Well, to friends, I think, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: I don't even remember that. It must have been a good happy hour.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah, it was. So you and Rick had spawned out and then kind of started to build up. And you went to Playground Global. But that's kind of where I stopped hearing about it. I mean, I don't actually know what happened there.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Some of the back story on it is, so Rick and I were in Washington. And we got the tech. We started working on it in his front room with all of his cats, like, jumping all over everything. It was just the two of us for a while. Cats aren't great for optics, by the way. Oh, yeah. Right. Hair. Yeah. Yeah. But that was pretty fun. We were working on the prototypes. Then we went to Maker Faire and another Maker Faire and a bunch of different events and showed the prototypes. We generated a bunch of buzz. And then we did a Kickstarter campaign where we raised a bit over a million dollars and had, like, 3,000 backers on it. And then we took that money. And that was our first money to, like, kind of outside of our own money out of our pocket to bootstrap the company. And we started hiring a few people. And we were still working out of Rick's house, which became way more stressful. Like, very stressful. Like, very stressful.

Dave Jones: Just because of the number of people? Why didn't you move out early? I mean, is office space that expensive or hard to get in that area or what?

Jerry Ellsworth: I think part of it was Rick and I were both, like, petrified of running out of money. Right. Okay.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: A million dollars sounds like a lot until you start paying people. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Like, it's... Yeah. Wait, those pesky wages. You can't pay people in pizzas, you know? No. No. You've got to pay them cash. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: And some of those early folks that worked with us, like, oh, my goodness, my heart goes out to them for working for us for so little. Because, I mean, we were barely paying people anything. We weren't... Rick and I didn't pay ourselves anything for a while. And...

Chris Gammell: Well, that million is really was supposed to go towards a build, right? I mean, like, that's the...

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's like... Yeah. That's like Kickstarter dollars are supposed to be for retail hardware, right?

Dave Jones: Yeah. So, did people get, like, stock options? Was that a, you know, a thing?

Jerry Ellsworth: No. No. Not at that point.

Speaker ?: Oh, really?

Jerry Ellsworth: Okay. Wow. Yeah. It gets very complicated if you have too many investors in your company. So...

Dave Jones: Yes.

Jerry Ellsworth: I didn't know any of this stuff. Like, I think it's the Federal Trade Commission, like, frowns on that because it's so close to the old scams that they used to have where people would go door to door and get grandma to invest in a movie or something or... Right. Right.

Dave Jones: You can buy stock certificates in this fictional company, you know? Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, but... Yeah, there's... In return, you're supposed to give a product or some kind of reward to the backers. Anyway, but we were petrified. I mean, having, like, 3,000 backers and Kickstarter, like, like a dark cloud over you is... Being there.

Dave Jones: It's scary. I'm currently there. Really? I'm currently fulfilling a $680,000 Kickstarter. Yeah. And it's four months late, you know? Yep. I know. We're 2,200 backers. So I know exactly where you're coming from.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. I mean, it would keep me up at night. I was just, like, petrified. Because we had to do not only, like, the production. We had to do all the research, too. Like, there's a difference between a hot glued together prototype and something that has real production plastics and passes FCC and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Well, see, that's the problem with Kickstarters like yours is that you didn't really have a finished product. You were getting money for R&D, essentially. Like, you had, as you said, like, some prototypes, some hot glued prototypes. But that's, you know, especially with this sort of technology is, you know, really so far from the final product that it's not funny.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. And most Kickstarter backers don't understand. No.

Dave Jones: But that's what you've got to do, right? You've got to promise a product.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. And you have to price it at a point that's so attractive that you can get lots of backers and get that buzz.

Chris Gammell: To get the momentum. Yep. Yep. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, you know, Rick and I had this dark cloud over us. And we, of course, we said we were going to deliver in a year. And the nanosecond after we were late, like, all the bad vibes started coming towards us. Right. And it made it even worse. And we're burning through the money fast, like, really fast. And so, and Rick and I were trying to do fundraising, like, the venture capital route. We had no clue how to do that. So, you're just going out, like, burning contacts with venture capitalists and not knowing how to actually raise the money. And so, we found a CEO that had done startups before and we brought a CEO on. And that was great because he knew how to do the mechanics of raising money. And so, we went out and we raised $1.5 million in seed funding from some wealthy individuals and some strategic partners. And so, that was great. That was a little bit of oxygen. And at that point, we're like, we got to get out of Washington. We got to get to Silicon Valley where the rest of the money is and the rest of the talent is. That's where they keep the money. Yeah.

Dave Jones: At that 12-month mark, were you close to potentially delivering something? We actually did. I don't know how late we... And then I know you changed course. Yeah. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. I don't know how late we were, but we actually shipped units to the Kickstarter backers, like 300 units or so. Oh, cool. And so, I'm pretty proud that out of the million dollars, we actually got tooling, we got a design, we got optics, like, and got it out there. And we raised some money to keep us alive and moved to Silicon Valley. So, as soon as we moved to Silicon Valley, then things started to accelerate quite a bit more. So, it was actually pretty traumatic on the company, though, because we had this, like, awesome group of people in Washington.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: But we didn't quite have enough money to, like, give them really big pay raises. So, not very many people from Washington could make the move down to Silicon Valley. So, it was kind of...

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing. Unless you're young and single, I mean, it's, you know... Yeah. Like, if you've got a family or something, you can't just pack up and move.

Jerry Ellsworth: And it was really rough on Rick, too. Like, Rick was really unhappy once we moved to Silicon Valley because he was away from his social network and he's, like, living in an apartment and not really part of the startup scene. So, a lot of empathy to him for, like, doing that. And so, yeah, we got the $1.5 million reset, hired some new people, and got going again. And then we raised $15 million from Playground Global, which at first looked like it was going to be amazing. And things went really well. So, we could actually start paying people. So, we moved into their incubator space where they had engineers that they would share with us to do some of the engineering. And then they had all these perks, like happy hour and food and stuff.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. And they had some sweet tools there, too.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: I mean, five-axis mills are only really useful for prototypes, in my opinion. You know, production level is like, okay, well, still going to China.

Jerry Ellsworth: I always thought it was funny. They had this, like, some of the state-of-the-art milling machines and titanium printers and stuff like that, but they had no manual tools. I was still going back to my garage. Yeah.

Dave Jones: No repair ploys, you know.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: No manual lays, no manual milling machines. So, like, my garage was better than their prototype shop for some of it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: A lot of times those places are for show. Yeah. They're for the tours more than the people working there.

Jerry Ellsworth: And there were lots of tours. Lots of tours. Yeah. It was definitely a playground, so the name was right. Yeah. And so, everything's going pretty good. Like, we made the decision, which I'm super proud of this, to give back all of the Kickstarter money. That was great.

Dave Jones: That made fairly big news.

Jerry Ellsworth: It was scary, though, because the night that I pushed the button or we pushed the button to send the email out, it could have went one of two ways. It could have been, like, everyone could have just, like, exploded on us, you know, and been pissed off. Or they could be happy. Luckily, everyone was happy. We spent a bunch of time thinking about how we were going to do that. And the main reason that we refunded the Kickstarter money was the Kickstarter glasses, again, time progresses. And, like, we wanted to make a different piece of hardware. So, instead of a PC peripheral, we wanted to make a self-contained headset that had its own processing built into it. So, you just hit the power button and you could play your game. And you didn't have to, like, have the right PC or cables and stuff like that.

Dave Jones: Right. And it helped that you offered free units to the Kickstarter backers.

Jerry Ellsworth: And we were so desperate to get developer units at the time. We started, like, reaching out the people that we sent Kickstarter glasses to. Like, please, please sell us back your old glasses. We need them so badly. Wow. Okay. Which I was surprised how many people are... And did people do that? No. People were like, no, I'm keeping them. No. Right.

Chris Gammell: There's no games. There's no applications. But I want them. They're mine.

Dave Jones: Yeah. We're starting on eBay in 10 years' time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I don't know.

Chris Gammell: Just like my Google Glass. There you go. Sitting right next to them. They're for sale if anyone wants them.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, everything was progressing really well. We were on the hardware side. We had a pretty good team. We had about 20 people. Like, we had great talent.

Chris Gammell: Jason Sarundelove, former guest of the Amp Hour.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yep. Jason was with us. So, we were kicking butt. We were making really good progress on the self-contained system. And then there was this weird, like, moment in time where the CEO that I brought on, let me back up a little bit. He told me, he's like, at some point, the investors are going to want to scale the company and make it grow really fast. And at that point, they're going to ask me to leave. And then they're going to bring in some, like, more high-power investors. So, that was...

Chris Gammell: Ask me. He's saying that about himself, the CEO? Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Our CEO that we brought on.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Okay.

Jerry Ellsworth: And so, that's what he told me before we even raised the $15 million. And so, we're just working on prototypes and getting ready to do, you know, some prototype builds. And then the investors come to me and they're like, it's time to scale. And I go back to our CEO. I'm like, well, it looks like time has come. And he's like, not yet. Not yet. Oh, my God. It's too early. Like, this is not the wrong time.

Dave Jones: That's like a noose, like, constantly hanging over your head.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Wow. And so, you know, Rick and I were convinced to bring in the professionals. And out goes the scrappy startup CEO and in comes the professionals. And so, a couple of Disney executives come in and a Sony executive come in. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: A lot of MBAs in that crowd, huh, Jerry?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. And unfortunately, none of them had really been at startups either. Oh, no.

Dave Jones: Yeah. And none of them understand hardware, probably. Yeah. No. And I found my – no. No, none of them were hardware. Not a single one. Yeah, I'm sure.

Chris Gammell: But they were great at scheduling meetings, I bet.

Dave Jones: Oh, boy. And raising capital. And – I wish.

Jerry Ellsworth: All right. Well –

Speaker ?: I wish.

Jerry Ellsworth: I'm going to be trying to –

Chris Gammell: Who sorts these people, then?

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, you know, the situation was – so, out goes our CEO. And we were going to get a replacement CEO right away. And before the previous CEO had left, they had started to parade a bunch of really amazing people through. And, like, there were some folks, like, had done a lot of –

Chris Gammell: Who's they? Is this – sorry, just they is the investors?

Jerry Ellsworth: The investors.

Chris Gammell: Got it.

Jerry Ellsworth: And so, like, this is some really amazing people coming through that had done startups before and had done hardware. I'm like, oh, this is great. But they just weren't sticking or they weren't good enough for the investors. And so, months went on. We were without a rudder for a while, without a CEO. And so, I found myself the minority on the board, just me and one of the partners from the investor. And no decisions were made. And we were just aimless for months. And then the professionals started to roll in. And then all kinds of, like, excessive spending happened. Like, we started acquiring game studios, like two game studios. Oh, wow. The company went from 20-ish people to 90 by – Whoa. Yeah, this was, like, summer. And then by Christmas, we were 90 people and, like, burning money, like, crazy.

Chris Gammell: Right. And these are Silicon Valley salaries, too. So, like, not a small amount of capital.

Dave Jones: I was in a startup like that back – well, it wasn't a startup. They weren't called startups back in the early 90s. But, yeah, I was in one that grew threefold in, like, six months, you know, crazy three or fourfold.

Jerry Ellsworth: It's nuts. At that point, none of the DNA existed in the company anymore. It was completely different. It was, like, we had layers of management. We had project manager on top of project managers. Oh, my God. We had gyro boards coming out of our asses. Oh, God. And I was still a minority on the board. So, yeah, like, I just found myself sitting in the corner being mad all the time.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Was there any focus on actually getting, like, prototype hardware? Or was it, oh, that's just petty stuff? You know, our vision's grander than this prototype rubbish. When we sent that to China, what's your problem? You know, like, was there any sense of, like, you know, just, like, having –

Chris Gammell: People trying it out.

Dave Jones: Yeah, demonstratable prototype hardware, as us hardware engineers like to do.

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, the engineering team remained around 20 people or so the entire time. And everything else was the video game studios and management overhead and marketing – Chief marketing officers and marketing firms and stuff like that. For a product you don't have yet.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Speaker ?: Right.

Jerry Ellsworth: We went through this, like, that fall, fall to winter, we went through this really strange period where first prototypes with some real plastics were created. And so we called them Proto-1. And so we did Proto-1, and then there was some bugs that we discovered as we were doing that little pilot run. And then instead of, like, figuring out all the bugs, like, the executive decision was made, like, three or four weeks later to do an entire Proto-2 build, just fixing, like, two or three of the bugs. And so –

Chris Gammell: Oh, my God. You didn't wring out everything. Right. So they didn't try and wring everything out of that Proto-1 as possible. No, no.

Jerry Ellsworth: It gets even better. Oh, God. So, like, they're building Proto-2, and we're still finding bugs in Proto-1. Oh, no. So then they kick off what should have been called Proto-3, but to make everyone feel better, they call it Proto-2. 2A. 2.5. 2.5. So, like –

Chris Gammell: 2.5 Rebs 3.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, like, pretty much all of Proto-1 got thrown in the garbage can. Proto-2 got, like, thrown in the garbage can. And then Proto-2.5, finally people came to their senses and, like, okay, let's just stop here and, like, take a breath.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: All I can do is laugh about it because it's – Right. It was just so surreal. Like – and there was nothing I could do about it. I was just stuck in the corner while, you know, our company ran off a cliff.

Dave Jones: Did the company at least have a vision of the exact product, end product they wanted, or was it kind of nebulous?

Jerry Ellsworth: So, when we started the company, we had a very clear vision of, you know, tabletop experiences, right, like games. And your family would come together and you would play virtual board games together in augmented reality. And that was our main focus for the first couple years. And then everything got really schizophrenic. So, you know, once the professionals came on board, then there were –

Chris Gammell: Can we give them a different name? Okay. You can't see the air quotes around professionals, you know?

Jerry Ellsworth: And I'm trying to be nice here, too. I'm going to get myself sued, probably, by the professionals. But then we had these firms that got hired to come in and to help us refine our vision. And so – Oh, really? Like a consulting firm? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow.

Dave Jones: Multiples. Multiple firms.

Jerry Ellsworth: Multiples, yeah. Oh, my God. At one point – so our company was called Cast AR. And so, no, even the original founders, us, we didn't really like the name that much. So every CEO that came on board kicked off a rebranding exercise. Oh.

Chris Gammell: Well, you were technical illusions before that, though, too, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. So we were technical illusions, and the product was going to be called Cast AR. And then our kind of scrappy startup CEO came in. He's like, ah, it's too complicated having two names. Let's just make it one name. Yeah. Well, that's reasonable. Yeah. He made the decision of drop the really long name and just go with the short one, even though we just didn't feel super comfortable with it. And that lasted for a while. And then he kicked off one to another rebranding exercise to rename the product again. I mean, these things happen in startups all the time.

Chris Gammell: Right. But that means you're also not working on prototypes. You're sitting in meetings having to be like, I don't care what you call it, just not Cast AR.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh. These meetings were, like, mind-numbing. Like, they were incredible. So it's like.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: But I did get a kick out of, like, the first guy that came to rebrand us. Like, he was pretty reasonably priced, like, for $50,000.

Dave Jones: For a rebrander. Only six. Are you serious? What?

Jerry Ellsworth: $50,000? Only $50,000 to come up with a new name.

Dave Jones: You're surprised, Chris. That's reasonable. That's reasonable.

Chris Gammell: No, no. I'm saying that's so cheap. Yeah. I have no reference point. Sorry. Oh, wait.

Jerry Ellsworth: Just wait until I get further into the story.

Chris Gammell: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Okay.

Jerry Ellsworth: And so, like, it was, like, multiple sessions. He came through, like, three times. And each one of these sessions was, like, two or three hours long. And he had a whole deck of probably about 20 names that the product could be.

Dave Jones: And were there logos, too?

Jerry Ellsworth: No. No logos. Just names.

Dave Jones: Oh, okay. Jeez.

Jerry Ellsworth: There'd be a logo treatment later. Right. For an additional $50,000.

Dave Jones: Which is cheap. I know. Cheap. Sorry. Sorry. I got it. It's so surreal. I know. It's so surreal. So, they've got names.

Jerry Ellsworth: They got these names. And he would go through them one at a time. And I was just so amused with the way that he'd present the names. So, I probably can't say any of the names. But I know I can't say the names because...

Chris Gammell: No, you probably can't because they're probably getting recycled right now in another presentation, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, actually, what's interesting, as soon as they presented a name to you, and if you were to use it any time in the future, you have to pay. Oh. So, he's presenting hundreds of names. Hundreds, yes, of course.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: We should do that on the show, Dave. We should be like, oh, well, we just came up with a new product named The BumbleBloggle. If you use that at any point, at any point. If you think about that name, at any point in the future, you owe us $10.

Jerry Ellsworth: But he would go through this presentation. Each name, he would say something like, the name of your product is Lime SDR. Lime SDR comes from... And I'm saying Lime SDR because I can see the Lime SDR box on my desk right now. It comes from the Greek origin of Lime SDR, blah, blah, blah, blah. And SDR has a warm feeling of sultry, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Dave Jones: It's software-defined radio, you dick.

Jerry Ellsworth: And then he would, like, say it several times in different, like, emotions.

Chris Gammell: Oh, my God. Seriously?

Jerry Ellsworth: This is great. And then he'd move to the next slide, and it would start all over again with the next name. And, like, it would take hours.

Chris Gammell: Wow. So, I will reference, so, the Startup Podcast, which was the, what's it called? Gimlet Media, rather. They did that, too. And they go through, like, their very low-end version of that, where they're just doing it themselves. But it is, first off, it is actually a hard thing to come up with a name. Yeah. But, like, everything sounds wrong at the beginning. And then, so, you just got to throw a dartboard, pretty much, and make sure it's not a swear word in another language, you know? Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: I mean, pretty much these guys, when they come in and they do their presentation, they tell you every time, like, come into this with an open mind, that even the silliest names work out really well. Like, Google and, you know, whatever. You know, there's a ton of, like, silly names out there. Yahoo. Yeah, once you own the brand, then, you know, no one thinks twice about it. Oh, gosh, now I'm trying to remember the name. We actually paid him for a name.

Chris Gammell: So, you're allowed to use it?

Speaker ?: Oh, shoot.

Dave Jones: I'm totally spacing the name. Wait, does that mean you own the IP on that name now?

Jerry Ellsworth: We totally own it, yeah. Right. The group of us that bought Cast AR own it.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, we know, we own a bunch of trademarks now.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. So, you were also saying, so keep thinking about what that name was, because I'd be interested. But you said that this was not the only time you did this.

Jerry Ellsworth: No, and then we, so then, then the professional, the professionals came on board. And they have higher, more expensive tastes. And so, the six-digit companies start to roll in the door.

Chris Gammell: Right. And more than once, it sounds like, too.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, multiple times.

Dave Jones: Oh, wow, really? Because they didn't like any of the first company's suggestions, so they just roll with another until they...

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, we had this other name, which I'm spacing, sitting there in the can that we could use. And they're like, nope, not good enough. Wow.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's not the technology. It's all the name. Oh, yeah, it's all the name.

Jerry Ellsworth: I mean, it's the currency of executives.

Dave Jones: Well, as much as we laugh at this sort of stuff, it does, if you want to get into the marking of it, it does matter, or it can matter. Yeah. It can matter.

Chris Gammell: So, it says EEVblog, right? Yeah, I know. It's a shit name, yeah.

Dave Jones: Because I couldn't come up in...

Chris Gammell: No, but Dave, it doesn't matter. I know. I own the trademark. It is a shit name. I know. Right. Right. It's you. And that's the thing. I get that there are implications on all this stuff, but at the end of the day, eh.

Jerry Ellsworth: Eh. Exactly. I don't know. Eh. It's much more important to folks that have worked their way up to big corporations than most of us that are in startups, I would say.

Chris Gammell: So, Jerry, I mean, if you don't mind me asking, is this all based on the fundraising that you did not retain more control? I mean, like, why... I had control. Why was that?

Jerry Ellsworth: I had control. So, when it was me, my CEO that I brought on, and a partner from the investors, we had control. So, in board meetings, we can make decisions, you know, and outweigh the investors.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: But... But... As soon as my CEO was gone, then I had zero control, because we are now only two of us on the board of directors. So, it was just a... Out of... It was just a standoff. Just two. Just two of us when the CEO was gone. Oh. And then when they brought on their preferred CEO, now I have no control.

Dave Jones: Is this Daniel Rodriguez? Was he the preferred CEO?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right. And he was...

Chris Gammell: I think she was trying not to say the names, Dave, if you weren't picking up on that one. But we can blank that out still.

Dave Jones: It's totally public. He's the former CEO of LucasArts. Right? And then there was another CEO after. Oh, really? We'll see. Okay. All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Wow. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, so, like, this... I mean, I've heard about this kind of stuff before of, like, losing control. And, like, I always assumed it was, like, based on, like, because they're fundraising, you get diluted, that kind of thing. Yeah. But I don't actually know how that works, you know?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah. So, you want to control your board. So, when you make tough decisions, like buying game studios, you can say, like, no, I don't want to buy a game studio. Right. And your CEO backs you up on that. But when it's... Right. You know, either it's a standoff, you know, it's just kind of a game of attrition. Or if it gets lopsided where your CEO is now aligned with your investors, then you're just totally screwed. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You know, just to say, our CEOs, like, all three CEOs that were in the company, like, I would love to hang out with them at parties. But, you know, there's different CEOs for different times in your business. Oh, of course. And what happened is the more professional CEOs came in when we were still scrappy startups. So, the notion that we were further along than we were by our investors was a mistake. And I'm sure they regret it, too, at this point.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, yeah. And naming continued. Oh, I remember the name.

Dave Jones: Did you ever settle on a name? Because you were still cast AR when it folded. Was all this for naught? Please don't tell me it was all for naught.

Chris Gammell: Well, she's going to tell us one of the names here, Dave. Come on.

Jerry Ellsworth: I remember the name now. It was kind of, it was odd. It was called Jillian. So, the first name was Jillian. That's a girl's name. Jillian. Yeah. Yeah. Or, like, a big number kind of thing. J-I-L-I-L-N. Oh, right. But spelt differently. Oh.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. They're trying to be Google, you know, which is Google. I was going to say, it's literally Google.

Jerry Ellsworth: Google. Google. I didn't think it was terrible. It was, you know, there was all kinds of, like, slogans they were working on, like, you know.

Chris Gammell: I mean, the thing is, you would have made it your own if that was the choice. It's like, yeah, you make it your own. It's hard to say without having seen it for, you know, a couple years, right? So, yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. And there were some logos that were kind of cute for it and stuff like that. So, it worked. I was indifferent. Like, I just wanted the meetings to be over so I could. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: At a certain point, you just start bringing soldering to the meeting. You're like, I'm just going to sit there and solder. And just, you guys, talk about what you need to. I'll look up when I need to.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, the last rebranding is, I think, the most interesting because at that point, I was so excluded from any of the executive meetings that they didn't even invite me to the meetings until the big reveal. Wow. Yeah. So, no, no. Let me back up because we got to hear about the second from the last rebranding. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Please. Oh, shoot. I don't know why I'm forgetting all these names. Maybe I just am trying to erase them from my mind.

Chris Gammell: That's healthy. Yep. Yep.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, crap. Now I can't remember that name. But they did the whole thing. They presented it to me. And I'm like, ooh, I don't really like that. And they're like, we're going with it. And then they did an all-hands meeting. And they brought the whole company together. And then the – oh, now I remember the name now. I remember it. Voyage AR.

Dave Jones: Right? Cast instead of voyage. Voyage instead of – like, you're cast off on a voyage. Okay. So –

Jerry Ellsworth: They do the big reveal to the company. And everyone in the audience is like, Voyager. Voyager. Voyager. Voyager. Yeah. That's great. We're Vikings now. Voyager. And so – so that's going around the office. And all of a sudden, the decision's made like, oh, geez, we can't go with Voyager. Because – and there's – so then the rebranding starts again.

Chris Gammell: Oh, my God.

Jerry Ellsworth: And the final one they came up with. And it hit me like a lead balloon when they told me. Again, I was excluded from the meetings. And so they reveal it to me before the all-hands. And they're like, okay, we're changing our name from Cast AR to Sightcast. And my response was like, that seems like the same thing. It's equally –

Dave Jones: It's just – wow. Right. Yeah. No, it's change for the sake of change. It's not mean because it's better.

Chris Gammell: I think I've heard about all this stuff before. I watched a documentary about it. It's called Silicon Valley. And it sounds like you went through all the same stages. It's almost uncanny.

Jerry Ellsworth: What's – I mean, as the shit was hitting the fan and the whole – the airplane was flying straight into the ground like a group of us, like the old-timers in the company would sit around and be like, we couldn't even sell these stories to Silicon Valley – the writers of Silicon Valley. They're just too over the top.

Chris Gammell: Right. Mike Judge would be like, bullshit.

Jerry Ellsworth: Actually, I have a Silicon Valley connection here, which was an exciting moment for me in the last days of Cast AR. So I'm sitting in my office, and our office manager comes rushing in, and he's like, the CEO of Pied Piper is here. I'm like, what?

Chris Gammell: What?

Dave Jones: Sorry, I don't know who Pied Piper is.

Chris Gammell: Oh, Dave, you don't watch the show. No, I don't. So it's a fictional company that is the basis of the entire Silicon Valley five seasons

Dave Jones: so far. I've watched like half of the first season, so I don't – yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Okay. So I go out into the demo area, and here is Middleditch, the actor who is the CEO of Hyde Piper, like playing with our demos. And apparently he had gone to a party that Randy Pitchford, who is like a big video game the president of Gearbox Software, had held and saw our stuff. And he's like, I'm just going to randomly drop in. And so he just like walked in our front door. Actors, right? Yeah. And our office manager didn't know what to do, so just like let him wander around our demo stations. It was pretty cool. Hung out with him. That's cool. And as we described – I was talking about the company in like positive light at the time, and he was like – he was drawing like all these parallels to Silicon Valley. He's like, sounds like you got your own Gilroy there, or Gilfoyle.

Chris Gammell: Gilfoyle, yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Anyway. Anyway, so yeah, Sitecast. That's amazing. Like the amount of money we pay – oh, all right. And the Sitecast story, like we paid this really expensive company to do Sitecast, and then they came up with a logo and a color. And I remember when they showed me the color, I'm like, oh, purple. And they're like, no, eggplant. I'm like, oh, eggplant. Okay. Right.

Chris Gammell: They have to quote you the – what's it called? The Pantone color, right? Yeah, yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So that was – I had put my foot in my mouth when I called it purple. And then the logo they came up with was so close to the Scopely logo that one of our employees was like, isn't that the Scopely logo? So then we had to go pay him more money to come up with another logo, which the one that they came up with was, I think, atrocious. It was like this vector art. It was supposed to be an eyeball with like the nerves hanging off the back of it. Right.

Chris Gammell: Because that's not creepy at all. That's not creepy. Yeah. How did you stay sane through any of this? Like this sounds terrible. Like knowing you, knowing how much you like tech, like did you just like disappear into the lab or what?

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, I went out and got my ham radio license and distracted myself a lot. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And it was the morale around the company like tanked really bad too. Yeah. So – Yeah. Which was just this death spiral we couldn't get out of.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. So what happened with – I mean, so you bought it – you ended up buying all the assets, but like you stopped at Proto 3 you told us about. I mean, did it actually get to a working position? I mean, like what was the latest – I mean, I know you're kind of – you bought that stuff. You might be taking it further, but like what was the latest that happened with it? Like the one I saw, I think I saw the Rev1 hardware or the Proto hardware still.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. So we were in EVT pre-production phase. We were going to do a small like 10 units of our EVT hardware the week that we shut down. So interesting story. I'm going to rewind from that. So we had Proto 2 hardware around December, which was – we called them the face crushers because we – prototype hardware, we didn't even try to do any ergonomics on it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. So super heavy, super constrained, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. It pinched your nose and stuff like that. And then like everyone got freaked out because we did three production runs of the janky prototype hardware and none of them got better. So there was an executive decision made that we weren't going to change anything on the Proto 2 hardware. We were just going to produce it, which I just flipped my shit on that. I was like, what? There's no fucking way. And so over the Christmas holiday, I went to the mechanical engineers. I'm like, give me all the models to the Proto 2 hardware. And so for the two weeks that I was visiting family, I just sat there and I just ripped apart the mechanical models. And I'm not a mechanical engineer at all. And I just redid all the ergonomics on the headset. And then I got home and then I used my Form Lab printer, printed them up, jammed all the electronics inside of it.

Chris Gammell: Nice. Nice.

Jerry Ellsworth: Sweet. At the beginning of the new year, I brought these prototypes back and like slammed them down on the engineer's desk and like, this is what we're going to build. And then, of course. Yes. That's great. I almost got fired for that because the executives came in and like pulled me aside and they had this intervention. Like, oh, the engineers are going to quit because you did that. Like, rah, really mad. And like, it was like this huge brouhaha. But what was funny is like later people came up to me like, thank you. Thank you. And then we went with that design basically.

Chris Gammell: And insanity.

Jerry Ellsworth: Anyway, but that's what we built for EVT. And what's great is I have a couple instances of the EVT hardware that... What's the EVT? Engineering validation build. Oh, I do. So it's... So before you go to production, there's... You'll probably do a couple little builds, the EVT and then some pre-production and then you go into mass production. So it was real plastic tooling with real circuit boards and real projectors and stuff like that in it.

Chris Gammell: At that point, you had said you had removed the computer from the equation and you had done like, like off the shelf, like the consumer level hardware, kind of like an Android phone kind of style?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. It all ran on Android. It had this little puck thing that you could clip on your belt and it had a little thin wire that ran up to the headset. And inside the puck was like six hours worth of batteries and the... Oh, nice. Yeah. It was... It's awesome.

Chris Gammell: I remember you were talking about going towards... So you were going towards the consumer market, right? With that?

Jerry Ellsworth: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Gammell: And like... But I remember you saying like $99 price point. Was that still the idea?

Jerry Ellsworth: Once we went to the fully integrated system, it was going to be much more than that.

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Jerry Ellsworth: And so the goal was $299. Okay.

Chris Gammell: So still console style code kind of pricing, but still doable. Okay. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. And reality where we landed by the time, again, back to like everyone wanting to be, you know, bigger than... What's the saying? Bigger than our britches? Right. Like we had to have the finest soft touch plastic and we had to have the fine...

Dave Jones: Oh, God, no. Yeah. Yeah. That reminds me of Altium and the hydraulic box. The box that our nanoboard hardware came in had to have this hydraulic feel as you... Like, you know, you actually dropped the lid on and it had to have the correct hydraulic feel as it just weighted down under its own pressure. And it's like, oh, my God. Are you kidding me? This is like a development board. And no, but the box, you know. The famous hydraulic box. I should do a video on that, actually. I've still got one.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Don't get me started on our $15 retail box. Like, oh, my God.

Chris Gammell: Oh, like packaging, you're saying?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, packaging. Oh, are you talking about like a real mechanical box, David?

Dave Jones: I know. No, it's like a cardboard box, but it had to have the correct material and the correct fit. So, like, it was a two-piece. It had the box, the base that it was in, and then this big lid, which went on top. But the lid had to be such a perfectly tight fit that it would hydraulically fall down slowly under its own weight and the internal air pressure.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, my God. Dave, I can empathize because I went through endless, you know, out-of-box experience meetings said cast, where the price of our box went from like a $2 corrugated box to $15 with magnets in it. Magnets in it, yeah, yeah. And like four-color printing, glossy, with foil embossing. Like, WTF, what are we doing here? Like, that costs more. Like, that's almost as much as our EE bomb in the headset. Like, what the fuck? Yeah, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. So, who were you trying to target that? I mean, like, was this like the executives came in and you're like, we're gonna get this in, like, Toys R Us. Rest in peace. Was that the idea, though?

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, that's a complicated answer. Like, I don't, I don't, with all the expensive contractors that came through to try to help us find a market, I don't think we ever landed on anything. I think our original idea of direct-to-consumers, enthusiasts that want to do virtual board games would have been a great launch. I think so, too. Yeah, totally. When, towards the end, we were so schizophrenic. Like, we were like, we went from targeting probably, like, the 12-year-old, like, girl to the, what we, at one point they called them the Mind Snappers. The Mind Snappers? What? What? Mind Snappers was the internal, like, dialogue around who we were targeting, which was like 12- to 18-year-olds that like Minecraft and Snapchat. Right.

Chris Gammell: Oh, wow. Okay.

Jerry Ellsworth: Made no sense. Absolutely made no sense.

Dave Jones: So, I mean... So, Mind Snappers. Okay. Was there ever a point where you would have Minecraft on it? Because that's so huge. Minecraft would be awesome. It would work well on it. Yeah. Right. And that's what I thought, because it's that blocky 3D world thing, right?

Chris Gammell: And you could sell the whole damn thing to Microsoft for billions of dollars, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: But we didn't have Minecraft, and there was no way we were going to get Minecraft for launch. So, it just didn't make much sense.

Dave Jones: Right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: So, yeah. But I thought, but wouldn't the executives see that surely as a massive target market?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Just the Minecraft people alone.

Chris Gammell: I mean, it's built for that. Like, yeah, that's crazy.

Dave Jones: It's almost purpose designed for that. Yeah. I mean... Yeah. It's so blindingly obvious. I mean...

Chris Gammell: Well...

Jerry Ellsworth: But you have to have a plan, right? That was the thing that we were lacking. Right. So, you know, it was fine that we had all this dysfunction. We were 90 people, and we were having trouble getting our prototypes built and getting to EVT. But really, it came down to fundraising. So, when we went out to raise a Series B, like, our first request from the investors was insane. It was, like, so overinflated that it was just a non-start.

Speaker ?: So...

Chris Gammell: Like, the new investors, you mean? Like, people you were going to pitch?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, most startups, you start out with, like, a seed round. You do a Series A, and then you do a Series B. And in Series B, that's kind of growth. That would be kind of where we're growing the business. And so, first of all, we went out. We had no market proof point. Right. And we had no prototypes that worked at the time. So, this is the fall of 2016. I forget the year now. So, the prototypes weren't working. And so, our executives went up and down Sand Hill Road and burned all of the potential investors with showing them our Kickstarter glasses. Wow. Which most of them had already seen the Kickstarter glasses before. So, that was not a good use of our time. And, you know, you get one chance to go in and pitch.

Dave Jones: I was going to say, you get one shot, you can't come back for seconds, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. So, like, most of the investors had been shot at that point. And then, so we got the prototype glasses working at the beginning of the year and then went out to raise money. But still, the ask was, like, such a huge amount of money that it was a non-start. So, the remaining investors, we burned those up asking for way too much money with no plan, no good plan to back it up. I mean, there were things in the plan like we were going to, you know, expand the number of people in the company. But there wasn't really a solid...

Dave Jones: Like, duh, that's like, you know, that's a given.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: But usually you'd go in with, like, we need to expand by X amount and these people are going to be doing this and that's why we need this much money. And it wasn't very clear in our pitch. And then by the time we shut down in the summer, we were so desperate to keep rolling back the amount of money that we were asking for.

Chris Gammell: So, like a down round or what?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, we never got to down round because we ended up in this situation. It was a zone of insolvency, I think is the official name. Zone of insolvency.

Dave Jones: Can you please explain down round? Because I haven't heard that one before. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, down round is so when you're raising money, you don't want your equity to get diluted in the company. So, typically when you do a series A, you give up about a third of the company for a certain amount of money, say $15 million in our case. And then you go for an up round, which is you give another third of the company away for, say, $25 million, an up round. But if you have to…

Chris Gammell: So, in that first round, you're saying that you would have been worth, quote, unquote, $45 million, right? Because you raised $15 million. Yep. And then the next time, you're saying you raised it for $25 million for how much?

Jerry Ellsworth: A third. You're always trying to get a third and third and third.

Chris Gammell: Right. Got it. Yeah. So, then $100 million, right? Or, sorry. No, $75 million.

Jerry Ellsworth: If you go out and you ask for like $5 million after $15 million, that's not a good indicator. No. And, yeah, it's bad. And you're kind of screwed at that point anyway.

Chris Gammell: Right. What do they call them? Like indicators? Not indicators. Trends. Like, yeah. Trending negatives. Right. I was thinking of like signaling. That's the one. They talk about signaling. Oh, this is bad signaling for your company.

Dave Jones: So, a down round is the…

Chris Gammell: They're a spooked bunch, you know?

Dave Jones: So, a down round is a signal of the end? Is it a… Lack of growth, Dave. Lack of growth. Is it like we're getting so desperate we need a down round? Is that… Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Which companies have pulled out of down rounds before. Right. Usually, if you have to go do a down round, the deal is so like heavy handed that, you know, the founders are like getting completely diluted. The previous investors are getting diluted and everyone's unhappy at that point.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Right. They would want to have to see something very special in the remains of your company in order to give you a down round offer.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Is that right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And in our case, so we were in this situation where we were taking bridge loans from our current investors.

Dave Jones: Oh, wow. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Ooh, yeah. Those come at a heavy cost. So, and they had drawn down some venture debt. So, they went to a bank and drew down a venture debt. And that's what caused us to go into the zone of insolvency. So, there's a point where in a company where you've like exhausted all your potential investors and at that point and you have no prospect of money coming and you can't pay back people you owe money to. Yeah. So, now you're in the zone of insolvency. And if you keep operating, now the board of directors is liable. Yes. It could be considered fraud at that point. Oh, boy. There was a situation where it was determined that we had no road forward to survive. So, we had to shut down like immediately and give all the money back to the bank, like as much as we could.

Dave Jones: Right. So, do you remember that day that it happened? Was there anyone in the company who was shocked?

Jerry Ellsworth: I don't think so. I mean, there was lots of tears and stuff. Like, let me back up. So, the decision was made on a Friday. Of course. We tried everything. No, no. The decision to shut down was made on a Friday. Oh, right. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: The announcement didn't come on a Friday.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: We tried everything. We were...

Chris Gammell: Did you try raising money instead as Voyagar?

Speaker ?: We should have.

Jerry Ellsworth: Voyagar to the rescue.

Chris Gammell: Hello, yes, I'm Jerry Ellsworth of Voyagar.

Jerry Ellsworth: I sure hope certain people don't hear this podcast.

Chris Gammell: No one listens to us anymore. Oh, man. Oh, man.

Jerry Ellsworth: I'm being probably more candid than I should be. But, you know, it's all learning lessons. So, I learned a ton. And hopefully, people can learn from my fuck-ups, too. But... I mean, I really...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I appreciate that stuff. Yeah, you know. It's great. I think that when people get into startup situations, like, what is... I mean, like, literally, the only thing I know about all this stuff is from Silicon Valley. And, like, maybe talking to some friends who do startups. But, you know, they're always cagey about it, too. Because they... You know, it's embarrassing. Or it's difficult. Or they're still, you know, struggling with things. It's like... It's a weird world.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, you... Okay. Let me back up. I think this is kind of a funny story. And I think Jason would be okay with me telling this. So...

Chris Gammell: Okay.

Jerry Ellsworth: Like, a lot of our engineers are going to China this Friday and Saturday to do the most important build of the entire company's history. Like, this is going to turn it around. We're going to raise money on these EVT glasses that they're building. They're so comfortable. So sexy. No investor is going to resist. Right? That's kind of like the mantra or whatever. The propaganda that's going around the office at the time. And so we're sitting at a happy hour. And I've been in these stressful meetings. I'm about ready to have an ulcer, like, eat through my stomach. Right? And I find out, like, okay, there's just no other options. And so one of our executives is like, okay, we need to recall everyone that's going to China and make sure that they don't get on that plane Saturday. And so they go out and they start running around the office and they come back to me and they're like, oh, everyone's gone. It's Friday at five o'clock. Except for one person, Jason. Jason's still here. And so they're like, Jerry, go sit next to Jason and make sure that he doesn't leave because we want to keep this very quiet. Like, we can't.

Chris Gammell: Wait, this is the shutting down thing?

Jerry Ellsworth: No, no. This is the Friday afternoon. This is Friday and we're not going to shut down until Monday. But we've got to keep it secret over the weekend, right? But you've got to stop people getting on the plane because that costs money. Right, right. You see the problem, right?

Chris Gammell: Right, right. So you'd basically be, like, committing fraud effectively because you're spending money and doing all that stuff, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah. So we've got to do everything within our power to, like, keep these people from going to China just for…

Chris Gammell: Secretly.

Jerry Ellsworth: Secretly. But we don't want to cause panic. That was what they were telling me. We don't want to cause panic. So we have to discreetly talk to these engineers and let them know. And so a couple of the execs ran off. They were starting to make phone calls to the engineers that had already left the building. And they asked me to sit next to Jason. And I'm thinking to myself, like, oh, yeah. Like, how many seconds until Jason gets a phone call from one of the other engineers? And so I'm sitting next to Jason. And I'm trying to be pleasant. And we're drinking and stuff. And then all of a sudden, Jason, like, looks down at his phone. And first look on his face is kind of, like, confusion. And then it's, like, panic. And then he looks at me, like, bewildered. And I'm, like, confirmed. You should go talk to the execs. And he walks off. It's, like, nothing travels faster than bad news. Bad news, right?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Like, insane that they thought that they could keep the secret. Yeah, right. So Monday comes along. We're all, like, we all roll in at noon or whatever. Super late. Hungover. Like, everyone knows. And we're all sitting there. And there was this last-ditch effort over the weekend. Like, I got on the phone and I tried to sell the company. And, like, there was actually a company considering buying us, like, that Monday. And then we got word, like, 2 or 3 o'clock in the afternoon, like, nope, they're not going to buy us pennies on the dollar. And then so it's, like, all right, everyone into the conference room.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Jerry Ellsworth: Here's your papers.

Chris Gammell: So, I mean, why weren't there just more protos that were shopped around? That's what I don't understand. Like, so I get the taking it to China for EVT, but, like, it had to be a production-level thing in order to shop it around?

Jerry Ellsworth: The problem was in the fall, the year prior, they'd burned through all of the Sand Hill investors.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh.

Jerry Ellsworth: Sand Hill? That is the— Oh, Dave doesn't know. Yeah, Sand Hill is the road where all the investors have their offices. So, when you say you're going to Sand Hill, that means you're out pitching. Got it.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Yep.

Jerry Ellsworth: I'm up with the— Dave, you need to watch this documentary, man. I'm just saying.

Dave Jones: I'm up with the hip lingo now. It's all right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Come on, Dave. Let's do a startup. Let's go to Sand Hill. Got it. Oof. Yeah, so, I mean, most of the investors had already seen what we had already shown. So, what our execs had done is take the Kickstarter glasses and went and shopped us up Sand Hill Road again with the same hardware and showed no progress. And, of course, 100% of them said no. And then—

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, that's what I mean. Like, so why not take—instead of the Kickstarter glasses, why not take the prototype glasses? Like, that's what I—like, it's— Oh, we tried. That's what I don't understand. Okay.

Jerry Ellsworth: We tried. Yeah. Yeah. Usually, when you say that you want to pitch for a Series B, you get one shot. And if you re-approach them and say that you want to pitch for a Series B again, they're like, we already saw it. No.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I see. It's terrible. Okay. So, it was just the fact that they took those other glasses in the first place, right? Yeah. So, even though you had prototypes, I see. Okay. That's some—I have strong words. Miscalculations. That's a nicer word. Yeah. I wasn't going to use that word. Wow.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. Valuable lessons that I learned.

Chris Gammell: So, Jerry, what are some of these—what is—what—okay. So, Dave, let's say the three of us were going to start a hardware startup tomorrow. What would—what's a good lesson for those people?

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, I think, first, make sure that you're really, really going to be able to work with your co-founders. So, I think, you know, you and Dave had—have a rapport for a long time. Oh, I'd kill Dave. No, I don't. No, I would kill Dave. No, no, no.

Chris Gammell: We would never—no, this is like pure theoretical.

Dave Jones: I'm sure within a week, they'd be fist-washed.

Chris Gammell: I love Dave. Like, yeah, we would—we would not work well together.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Because it's stressful. Like, Rick and I, like, were really stressed. Yeah. And we were really snippy with each other. And thank goodness we could work together. Yeah. The more people you bring on, the more you need to make sure you can work with them. So, I think that's important. And then I think it's also important to have, like, a really solid plan of how much money to raise. Like, I think we almost raised too much money because, you know, we raised $1.5 million in a seed round. Yeah. And we had, like, 10 people working for us, and we were making tons of progress. And then we raised $15 million. We only grew the team in the first six months to, like, 20-ish people. And we were still moving really fast. But the expectation was, after six months or so, it's like, you need to really be accelerating this company. And that's where you need to start burning this money fast.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Jerry Ellsworth: If we would have raised $5 million, I think the investors would have been like, yeah, you're more scrappy. You need to stay scrappy. You need to really make your product really solid before you start to scale. Third thing is, I would never, ever do an incubator again. Like, there were things in the incubator that just didn't work out. Raisins? So, one of the most frustrating things for me is you have so much drive-by opinions. Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. Like, our team was really skilled at manufacturing, probably more so than some of the folks that were in the incubator. And so, you'd have people walk through your space. And this literally happened to me one time. So, we are just a few weeks away from our EBT build. And we're doing a review of the schematics. And someone from the incubator walked through. And they looked down. They're like, oh, you're using a Texas Instruments switching regulator. I just read this blog about this new analog devices one. And it's just... Oh, my God. Yeah. What the hell? No, it gets better. It gets better. Because they're like, oh, okay, we'll take a look at that. You know, we'll consider it. And in our minds, like, for revision two. And so, a couple weeks go by. And this person comes back through and says, like, you're still using that regulator? Why are you using that regulator? Like, I feel like...

Chris Gammell: Oh, my God.

Jerry Ellsworth: Those are the kinds of things that happen when you're too close. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I would be so upset that they would not have found out about that regulator on the amp hour. And they just read it on a blog instead. That's all I have to say. Oh, my God. Wow. Armchair engineering from a rolling armchair, huh?

Jerry Ellsworth: Lots of armchair engineering. And then second guessing, too. I think there was one point where there was a piece of software that we were working on, which was complicated. And so, we were using some of their resources. And there was this notion that we weren't doing a good job in our team, which, you know, we disagreed. And they kicked off a competing effort. They pulled a lot of the resources that were helping us on our effort. And they kicked off their own software effort to create this piece of software. And then now we were in competition. So, they had two groups. Competition.

Jerry Ellsworth: And we tried to be very polite and nice and say, like, well, the reason we're doing X, Y, and Z is because we've already evaluated what you're doing over here. It looks more complicated, but we've already evaluated that in the past. And they just went on their own. And so, this was a couple months. And, you know, it was really stressful. And in the end, there was a shootout where they brought us over and like, okay, we're going to show you what we did. And we're going to prove to you that it's better. And so, we took a look at it. And everyone that looked at it, even their engineers, were like, yeah, yours is better.

Chris Gammell: Oh, my God.

Jerry Ellsworth: But there was weirdness.

Chris Gammell: So, was that like ego? What was that? What was that sin there?

Jerry Ellsworth: I think desperation, part of it. Like, you know, the...

Chris Gammell: No, sorry. I meant in that specific instance of like the people. Like, why did they do that? Like, that seems ridiculous that they would do a competing effort when they're supposed to be helping you.

Dave Jones: Yeah. You know, it's crazy. Well, they think they're helping because they think they have a better idea. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. So, was that ego?

Jerry Ellsworth: I think it came from a genuine place. Right. They're trying to help us, but it was actually very counterproductive. Yeah. Like, it would have been better to have those resources help us on our own path. But there was a lot of that second guessing. Like, if we were... Yeah. Like, on my new startup, we're an inconvenient drive away from our investors, and it's going to stay that way. And we're going to... Right.

Chris Gammell: So, Russ Hanneman can't stop by. And we're going to... Sorry.

Dave Jones: You can't run a technical company as a democracy. Like, it just... You know, you need to have a dictator at the top who says, no, we're going to do it this way.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: And the company lives or dies by that, pretty much.

Jerry Ellsworth: And so, when... Also, when your leadership is totally misaligned. So, here I'm a founder and one of the key architects. Right? And so, the architecture we're trying to build is based off of something that I helped architect. And then we have a CEO that came in late to the game who is now aligned with the investors who are second guessing. Yeah. So, you end up with this, like, riff in your organization. So, like, during this time where there was the two competing efforts going on, you know, our team was pleading with our management to do something, to stop this, like, chaos.

Chris Gammell: To fight for your team, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: And it just wasn't happening. Like, you know, a good leader... No, I shouldn't say... I don't want to say a good leader. I mean, a leader that understands startups, you know, needs to stay aligned with their team.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So... And that wasn't happening.

Chris Gammell: That's really frustrating.

Dave Jones: That's rough.

Jerry Ellsworth: But we learned a lot. What happened? Right?

Chris Gammell: Jerry, you keep coming back to that. You have collected a lot of learnings, you know?

Dave Jones: So, what happened financially? Were you left destitute or were you drawing a wage during all this time and you were doing okay or were you all in, so to speak?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. So, the first year, at least, I took no wage. And then... Wow. The second year, most of it, I think I took about 60K, which is nothing. Which is low. Right.

Chris Gammell: In Silicon Valley, that's like, maybe rent. Right. Okay.

Jerry Ellsworth: And then for the last two years, I took a reasonable entry-level Silicon Valley wage. So, a bit over 100K. In contrast, you know, the executives... Oh, no.

Chris Gammell: She's going to tell us executive salaries. Oh, God.

Jerry Ellsworth: In contrast, the people that came later than I did were a multiple of what I made. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, that's not uncommon.

Chris Gammell: Because you have to retain the talent as they crater your company. Yeah. Exactly. You know, that's talent, Jerry.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, it was really... And so, you know, I didn't... I went backwards this whole time financially. And then very backwards, because a group of us got together, and I pulled a bunch of my money to buy the assets. But, you know, it's worth it. I mean, I got the patents, got the IP. Hopefully, we can turn that into something non-zero. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Did... When that happens, just like... Do they allow other people to bid on it, or do they give you, like, first rights?

Jerry Ellsworth: No, it's a blind bid. So... Oh, really? Blind bid. Wow. Yeah, I hate that.

Chris Gammell: Just like in Silicon Valley. Yeah. I did that once.

Dave Jones: I tried to bid on the intellectual... I tried to bid on the trademarks of the old Dick Smith Electronics here in Australia when they went under. Oh, yeah.

Speaker ?: I remember, yeah.

Dave Jones: I... Because it had such brand recognition, that name, here in Australia. I teamed up with someone else, and we actually made a blind bid on the trademark name and the logo. He's, you know, the old face logo that he has. And no, we weren't successful. But yeah, that was basically a blind bid. So...

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, so, I mean, it was really tense. So... Yeah. And the companies that come through, like, because there was some venture debt, the bank took all of our assets, and they put it in a warehouse, and we had to bid on it. But the company they bring through to do that is very savvy at, like, keeping all parties isolated and, like, trying to drive the price up by, like, telling you. So, we put a bid in, and we had a pretty good feeling that we were going to get it. You know, we kind of assessed how much people would pay.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: And we put it in, and then they came back multiple times. And then they extended the bidding, which they were supposed to close on a day, and we were like, ah, we got it. We got it. And they kept telling us stuff, like, you know, you could be outbid. You should up your bid.

Chris Gammell: Man, this is like what eBay does. Jonesy 424 just bid another, you know, dollar.

Dave Jones: Yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: For that DMM, you know.

Dave Jones: And you don't know what their maximum bid is, you know.

Jerry Ellsworth: It could be anything. That's right. So, I don't know. You know, maybe we overpaid. Maybe we got to, maybe we're the only people that bid. We just don't know. That's what's really messed up, right. Yeah. Right.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Jerry Ellsworth: Good times. Yeah, I mean, it's just like the amount of stress I went through in the last year is just immense. Like, the bidding process, the closing down the company and saying goodbye to, you know, good friends. And, yeah, it's really, really interesting. Like, there was, like, the core team and, like, the nucleus of the company. You know, and on the last day, like, when we closed down, we just went to the local, like, fish market, they call it. It's just a restaurant. And it got totally blitzed. And it was really, like, everyone that was doing all the work really are the people that showed up there. And we were the core. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, there's a picture that we took. You know, we're all, like, red-eyed and teary-eyed. But I'm just, like, I look at that picture occasionally just as a reminder. And I just look through. I'm like, yep, these are all the people that were doing 90% of the work.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Right. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And those are the people you can call on.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Jerry Ellsworth: No, I don't know. That's friends. Our game studios, we bought the two game studios out in Salt Lake City, which we were distant from them, and they were working on game content. So I'm sure they went through a lot of rough, rough time, but. And they were probably had this.

Dave Jones: So do you technically own those game studios now? What's the deal with that?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, we own all that stuff, too.

Dave Jones: Right. So there's all kinds of interesting. So those companies folded as well.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Basically.

Dave Jones: Right.

Jerry Ellsworth: Mm-hmm.

Dave Jones: Okay. So you own all their game development, all their games in progress and all that sort of jazz?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, all the stuff that we got in the deal.

Dave Jones: Wow. And how does that, what do you get when you buy all that stuff? Do you get like a hard drive? Yeah. Do you get a huge USB stick with all the stuff?

Jerry Ellsworth: I mean, how does it work? It was a hard drive. It was literally a hard drive. Right. Seriously?

Chris Gammell: Man, the future's weird.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah. No, no.

Chris Gammell: So, like in the old days, it would have been like office chairs. Yeah, no, no.

Jerry Ellsworth: We got the physical assets, too. But I mean, the stuff that's the most valuable is like, all right, we got a hard drive. So that's all the source code.

Chris Gammell: I guess I'll back this up at Dropbox or something.

Jerry Ellsworth: As soon as we got that hard drive, we made multiple copies because-

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's good. Yeah, the click of death would actually be really expensive.

Jerry Ellsworth: Wow.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. It was actually kind of intimidating, like hooking this thing up to a computer and archiving it off because like, shit, if anything goes wrong. Right. Yeah. We got all the physical assets that were local to Silicon Valley. Everything that was in Salt Lake City got liquidated somehow. So we weren't part of that. Right. So we got like dozens and dozens and dozens of laptops and-

Chris Gammell: Scopes?

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, yeah. Oh, my gosh. Nice. Excellent. My home workshop- My home workshop-

Chris Gammell: I know someone who might buy those from you. I'm just saying, you know.

Jerry Ellsworth: My home workshop is really nice now. Sweet. Yeah, we got all the physical assets, tons of tower cases. And I don't know what we were doing in the last days. Like, I've got cases of unopened electronic gizmos in the garage. Like, my garage is just full of this stuff. Like, there's like wireless routers, but we didn't need wireless routers.

Dave Jones: You have to do a video going, like just going through and just opening random boxes.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but don't show where your address is. A little bit of- I know we can come on. You better show the address.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh. It's- It was fascinating going through the assets. Like, and I haven't gone through them all yet. Like, you got- I got everyone's notebooks. So, of course, I'm going to snoop around. Like, what's- Yeah. What did they say about me? Yeah, what were I- Little doodles in the corner?

Dave Jones: You opened it up. A little scribble. Jerry sucks. You know, I hate Jerry.

Jerry Ellsworth: And it's not- It's not too difficult to crack.

Chris Gammell: Jerry was like writing about how they really loved the name Voyajar. Voyajgar. Voyagar. Voyagar. If you see Bumblebloggle in there, they owe me five bucks. Ten bucks.

Jerry Ellsworth: Likely. Likely, by the number of names we went through.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, that'd be fascinating.

Chris Gammell: What about- What about- What about molds? So, like, you guys were doing tooling and stuff. So, did you get those?

Jerry Ellsworth: In theory. In theory, there's a bunch of stuff sitting in China, and I've been trying to maintain those relationships. So, it's questionable whether we'll be able to get access to everything. But there's inventory. Like, there's- We were doing EBT build, which was going to be like a thousand units or so. So, there's lots and lots of inventory. So, I've been able to secure some of the expensive sub-assemblies and make sure that those are safe. That's good. We also, like, complications of some people didn't get paid. So-

Chris Gammell: Ooh. Yeah. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, I need to work through that with them, and hopefully we can work through some of that and repair those relationships. So, as soon as it looked like we were going to get the assets, I was on the phone, like, talking to these people, saying, like, a thousand apologies. Let's see if we can work on some. He's a free headset.

Dave Jones: You know.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Dave Jones: I have a lot of wireless routers if you need them. Office chairs? I'll give you the name Jillian. That's right. It's all yours.

Chris Gammell: It's worth a Jillian. Wow.

Jerry Ellsworth: Like, the IP, the things, like, in the patents back, that was a- Yeah. That's a big one. Yeah. That's huge.

Dave Jones: That could be potentially huge. I mean, if anything is going to be huge, it's those, right? I mean- Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. But it was, like, complicated because, like, the process of going through this whole liquidation thing is, like, we owned them, and then they went to a secret company that owned them. Right. To, like, transfer them. But they were also being held by the banks. The bank had liens against them.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: And then we had to start a new company, and then we had to get the liens off of them, and then we had to get them transferred. Ugh.

Chris Gammell: Wow. Yeah. It sounds almost like someone died, and it went to, like, an estate. Yeah, very much. That's kind of what it sounds like. Yeah. Very much. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: I mean, Cast AR is very dead, so it's true. Right. Like, there is no, nothing left of it, essentially. Well, it has to be. Legally.

Dave Jones: Legally, it has to be dead.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. What happens if we search for it? There's a Wikipedia page.

Dave Jones: There is a Wikipedia page.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, we did lose the Cast AR website in this whole process. It took so long. It took us, like, six months to get everything sorted out. Oh, what?

Dave Jones: It just expired, and nobody renewed it?

Jerry Ellsworth: Someone picked it up. We missed it. We thought we were good. Right.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no.

Dave Jones: One of those scalpers. One of those squatters.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. The squatters.

Dave Jones: Squatters. Yeah. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: We're having a lot of discussion internally. Like, is there any value at all in the name Cast AR? Probably not. It's probably tainted and, you know.

Dave Jones: I had a premium domain name back in 2000 when I did my internet dating book, right? I had the domain name, like, internetdatingbook.com or something. Like, it was primo. And then I, for some reason, I let it lapse, and there's some autobot automatically got it. And I was furious for years that I, you know, because it was, like, it'd be worth a fortune now, that actual domain name. Would it?

Chris Gammell: Would it? Well. I mean, it was internetdating.com, maybe. It was something. I can't remember exactly. It changed a little bit, Dave. Yeah. Still, it was, you know. Now you can do internet.dating.

Dave Jones: Right. Anyway, it was pretty valuable at the time. Yeah, it was auto-snapped up because I didn't have a renew on it. Damn.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, looking at your last tweet from Cast AR Twitter. I've only been wearing AR shoes for the last five years. I don't know what that means.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, some of these things, like, trying to untwist who owns what or who has the login to everything is tricky, too. And half of the source code that we have is just, like, probably wasn't checked in on the last day.

Dave Jones: Yeah, and it probably means nothing, yeah, unless you have the original person and the original setup. And, you know.

Chris Gammell: I mean, that's kind of a nice thing for revision control, though, is that you could go to the last just known build, right? Yeah. You could have a few different builds.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, and so we've been going through that stuff and unsorting or untwisting all the stuff and trying to get stuff building again. Like, we're not going to do the same thing again, but there's definitely IP in there that's worth doing something with.

Chris Gammell: You keep saying we. Is Rick still working on this?

Jerry Ellsworth: No, Rick went off. I think he's working at Unity, last I heard. So he went back to Washington and is super duper happy to be away from startups, from I understand.

Chris Gammell: Right. And Unity is the engine that you were building on anyways, right? Yeah, yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, if anything, he got tons of experience in it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, I believe that.

Jerry Ellsworth: And so there's three of us.

Speaker ?: Cool.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: A secret crew for a secret project.

Dave Jones: Are you working in the garage? Are you in the living room?

Jerry Ellsworth: We splurged. We have an office. And it's so sexy. It has no windows. A bunker. It's a bunker. Just like my lab. It is classy. And we have new investors and super happy with investors. So we went with different investors this time, a different class of investors. So that's, you know, if you're asking for advice on doing a startup, you may want to be careful about what investors you get. So this time we chose a strategic manufacturer as an investor who understands hardware. Ah, yes. Wow, okay. Yes. Yes. Yes. They've been very, very helpful. And then on, we had two investors invest. So we have another investor who is in Asia who has distribution in Asia. So that is super duper exciting. So one of the most valuable lessons I learned is, you know, what can your investors bring more than money?

Dave Jones: Yes. Exactly. Yes. Capability. Right, like advice and connections. Not just that, but in this term, in this case, capability.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Hands-on ability to make it, right?

Dave Jones: It's a hardware company. Logistics is everything, you know, and manufacturing is everything. Yeah. Yeah, sourcing.

Chris Gammell: How did you find them? Did they find you or did you find them? Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So this, once it looked like we were going to get the assets, we put our pitch deck together. So it's your PowerPoint presentation, which there's a whole art to those. And then we came up with the theory of what we were going to do with the new company. And we hit Sand Hill Road and mediocre, you know, response from them, especially when we had to tell them we didn't actually have the assets yet.

Chris Gammell: But the value is, it's really in your heart. That's where the value lies. The value is people.

Jerry Ellsworth: And then we hit all of, there's a bunch of groups in Silicon Valley that are angel investors. So these are the kind of pre-series A investors.

Chris Gammell: Former rich people. Well, actual rich people, but former. Yep. They struck it rich, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. And through that, we actually got some traction, but we weren't really getting the terms that we wanted. So we had some terms. So you'll work with an investor and they'll say something like, we'll give you $100,000 and we want 50% of your company, right? And you should say no to a deal like that because you can't do anything with $100,000 and you don't want to give up that much of your company. So we were getting kind of like wimpy deals like that. And so for like four months or so, we were pitching to all kinds of investors and getting all kinds of like terms that weren't fantastic. But through a dozen little introductions, we got introduced into this strategic investor and they're like, we love what you're doing. It's great. We'll give you X amount with reasonable terms, but we don't want to manage the investment. We don't do that kind of thing. You got to go find an investor that will kind of manage the whole process and come up with an equal amount. And so then we had been talking to this forward investor and the terms weren't fantastic the first time around, but we're like, hey, we have this really amazing partner that if you two come together, you know, the value will be so great that we deserve better terms. And yeah, kumbaya, let's do this. And that's what happened. It's this weird game where you, you know, if you're deaf.

Chris Gammell: It's a confidence game, right? I mean, that's the whole thing.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. If you have no leverage, you're going to get screwed over. If you have something of value, which we somehow managed to get something of value, then it flipped the power a little bit. So we'll see how it goes. We're pretty excited.

Chris Gammell: So Jerry, I mean, like, you're an exceptional engineer, and I know that. And I talk to people who say the same thing about you. But the thing I always wonder about is people who come off of hardware startups or just startups in general, like, were you able to find work right away? I mean, was it like, was that hard at that point? Or was it just more of the mental strife of going out and finding something after having to deal with all that crap?

Jerry Ellsworth: It was, I couldn't keep people away from me. Like, I kind of wonder. Everyone heard in the news, Jerry's available now. Yeah. It was flattering. So I had all the big players like, oh, my God, we're doing augmented reality. You do augmented reality. We have a senior position for you. So I toured around to all the different companies and like, wow, this is pretty tempting. But it was kind of fun.

Chris Gammell: Getting paid again. This is new. Yeah, getting paid more, right? Right. Way more. I'm sure. Right. I mean, I could think about the people who are doing AR and say, yeah, I'm guessing they're big dollars.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. But it was also kind of fun to go in there and say, like, love what you're doing. But really, my heart is in doing this myself. And we're going to buy these assets. And we're going to do this thing.

Chris Gammell: And then we're going to crush you. Did you say that at the end? They love when you say that.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, that doesn't go wrong. I did.

Chris Gammell: No.

Jerry Ellsworth: I don't know if I should tell this story. But I did put my foot in my mouth. Here, I'll say the story in a way.

Chris Gammell: Tell it as an anecdote or as a parable.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Let's say that I'm talking to some big group at some big company and some leader at this company that I forgot had worked on an AR product in the past.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no. Oh, no.

Jerry Ellsworth: And so I get on the phone with them. And I'm super cocky and saying, like, yeah, yeah, with the attitude of I know everything about AR and that, yeah, I've seen all the AR products out here and said AR product was socially inconsiderate.

Chris Gammell: Oh, geez. I think I mentioned that one earlier in the show. Socially inconsiderate.

Jerry Ellsworth: And they said, like, you do know that I led that group, don't you? Oh, my God.

Chris Gammell: Oh, how's Astro doing these days? Oh, man. He's a good guy.

Jerry Ellsworth: No comment.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You didn't say anything. That was me. That was me guessing.

Jerry Ellsworth: No, but it was, yeah, it was really flattering. I considered a lot of opportunities, like, because it wasn't certain we were going to get the assets. It wasn't certain that we were going to get the investment. Because there was this period of time when we were trying to strike this deal between an Asian company and a domestic strategic partner that wasn't going well because of all kinds of reasons. So during that time, I also, I picked up a little side gig, started working for a company doing rockets, which I can't tell a ton about what they're doing.

Chris Gammell: As one does. It was, I didn't want to go do the job.

Jerry Ellsworth: Like, they bugged me for months. Like, they bugged me before Cast Air shut down to come work there. And after Cast Air shut down, they really put the full court press on me to come up there. And so, because I know one of the founders of the company. And he's like, I told him my situation. We're waiting for investment. He's like, you know, if you're going to wait, you might as well come up and see what we're doing. And I go up there. And he chose the day that they were going to test fire engines. So I go up there, being a total pyro.

Chris Gammell: Space, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: He's like, I'm glad you showed up today. Just a coincidence, we're going to be firing an engine off today. And so he takes me back to the area where they have this test cell. And they fire off the engine. The ground starts shaking. The loud noises, lots of fire. And I'm like, I'd love to help. Sold.

Chris Gammell: Got her. Yep. Oh, man.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. And so in about five months, I pulled off something I think was pretty amazing there. Like, they had a piece of their rocket that just hadn't been completed. And I was able to pull it together for them. So super proud. I can't wait until they're more public and I can talk about it. But there's some, if you do some searching around, there's a little bit that leaked out about the company. So if you look up Alameda and Rocket Company, you'll see something about it.

Chris Gammell: We're not even going to put that in the show notes. We're going to make people listen. Yeah. That way it's not even searchable. Here. Dave's looking now. Dave, don't do it. I can hear him typing. He'll look later.

Jerry Ellsworth: I, uh, well, I'm a child of the 80s, you know, and the space program was like super fascinating. So it was hard to resist.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. Like, that's, that's like a big, like a big deal, right? That's, that's like world, world changing type stuff. I mean, like, like you're saying, like you're thinking for your product too, right? But like stuff that gets out of the atmosphere, damn, like that's, that's.

Jerry Ellsworth: I never imagined I would work on that type of project. That's super cool. And there's so much money going into that space right now. There's.

Chris Gammell: Thanks, Jeff Bezos. And Elon Musk. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: I mean, I know of at least two rocket companies in the Bay Area here. And there's probably like five different like startups I know of that are doing CubeSats. And then there's a couple in Europe and Australia. And it's like, geez, it's all over.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think it's like the confluence of like data, but like, that's like the new frontier of data, right? It's like getting it from above.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. And then you have Project Loon from Google, which is really interesting.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Have a couple of friends that work over there. I mean.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Is that, is there any news on it? I haven't seen any news on that in a while. I know it's still going, but.

Jerry Ellsworth: Last I heard, they did some humanitarian stuff. Was it over? Yeah. With like Puerto Rico? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. I think.

Chris Gammell: Cool.

Jerry Ellsworth: I mean, the balloons, I think are pretty interesting if they can replace all cell phone and internet connections with that. And if they could lower the balloons or they fall out of the sky every year and they just put the latest and greatest cell technology up there.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting.

Jerry Ellsworth: Same with the CubeSats. I think that's the, the main like upside they're selling investors is like these things just go up. They last for five years and you can completely refresh the.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, yeah, they don't have the ability to stay in orbit either. Right. So they burn up and the future is weird. I love it. Jerry, I don't even know what to ask you anymore. I mean, like.

Dave Jones: Well, I have been going for an hour and 40 minutes, you know. I know.

Chris Gammell: I have stuff outside of, I have stuff outside of the business thing. I, I, and I think you said you were going to tell us about ham radio stuff a little bit more. Oh, yeah. Maybe we can bookend like that. But is there anything else about the business side that we should know?

Jerry Ellsworth: What's the record? What's the record that we have to break in this one? For length. Vincent Hempy is, is still the record. No, it was like four hours.

Chris Gammell: Three, three hours, 20 minutes. Oh, I don't have that much time. No, I don't have that much time. I was literally falling asleep at the end of that episode. It was 2 a.m. my time and I was asleep. So.

Jerry Ellsworth: I mean, so much about the business side. I mean, it's super interesting. I'm definitely going to be a better business leader now. And like in Silicon Valley, I think, you know, you would think that I would be like stained for failing. Right. Failing. But everyone forgets like that you screwed up. And you can just start over like a couple months later and try again, which is kind of a cool thing.

Chris Gammell: That's pretty nuts. That's, I mean, like, I mean, like the investors go for it too. I mean, that's, that's what I don't understand. Is it just based on the promise of the idea? Is it like, is it like glints in their eye of like promise of money or what?

Jerry Ellsworth: It's money, Chris. Yeah. They're looking, they're looking for the 10X return. Right. So it's what they want to hear and what you have to present to them is we're going to do these things and we're going to just dominate the world. And it just has to come across believable. And they'll take a chance on you. Like, yeah, we believe half of what you're telling us is bullshit, but, you know, but if they've got it, maybe. Yeah, exactly. That's why all these crazy startups can get funded. And I'm actually particularly bad at that. So I'm kind of bad at pitching because I'm too practical.

Dave Jones: Like, yeah. Yeah. Practical engineer.

Chris Gammell: You go in as an engineer instead of just pure dreamer like style, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. The worst thing to do is go in and say like, I've thought through all the problems. I have five backup plans. Like, if that doesn't work, I'll do this and then I'll do this. Yeah. Nah, nah. They want someone to come through like totally arrogant and saying like, nope, I'm going to do these three things and it's going to be trillions of dollars.

Chris Gammell: And, oh, that was actually something I wanted to ask you about before. Cause you said, you said, uh, you were talking about the 15 million you raised and you said you probably should have raised 5 million instead, but you said it was time to burn that money. And I've heard that like investors like expect you and want you to spend money and like be out of cash at a certain point because it kind of puts you on the hook. Was that something that you experienced as well?

Jerry Ellsworth: No, I don't think so. I think, uh, I think it was just the expectation is you're going way too slow. We were, uh, you know, we were $15 million. We had something like $8 million in the bank when this transition happened and we'd been going for quite some time on that money. And the plan was, you know, to be out of money in a year ish. Right. So like your cycle in a startup is raising money every single year ish. Right. And so we were behind schedule.

Dave Jones: So yes. Behind schedule going bankrupt, running out of money. I mean, it's just, it's, it's, it just sounds ridiculous.

Chris Gammell: Nobody freaks out because there's a plan though. Right. That's kind of the idea. Like that speech that the Joker gives in Dark Knight where he's like, nobody freaks out because there's a plan.

Jerry Ellsworth: So I've been told this and I believe it's true that, you know, one of the biggest nightmares for a, uh, investor is they have what's called limited partners. They're LPs that put money into the fund and the money's put into the fund to make money fast. Right. And they don't want what they call a lifestyle company in, uh, in their portfolio. Some company that's somewhat profitable, but never explosive. So that they'll encourage you to do super dangerous stuff just to, you're either going to make it or you're going to fail fast and get you off the books so that they can move on. And they only need one out of five or 10 to hit to get huge returns for their LPs. And so they're looking, you know, for the next Snapchat or something that can happen really fast. Or Airbnb or Uber. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Ugh. I think there's another question though. It's like, I, so like, I don't know if that exists in hardware, right? Like I always see these, so like Bolt publishes a lot of good stuff about, you know, hardware startups. I really like those, those folks like, but like the ones they always talk about are like Xiaomi, which is a Chinese hardware manufacturer or, uh, uh, Jawbone who is now no more. Right. Right. Or, uh, or what are some of the other ones? Uh, Sonos is another big one or Nest and Nest. I mean like, so Nest is an example, right? Nest sold to Google for a couple billion, but like, and, and they are somewhat commercially successful out there, but like their, their brand is kind of.

Dave Jones: They, they've gone down the toilet, haven't they? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right. I mean like, I mean, not that it's not recoverable, but like in terms of like growth and like actually getting stuff out there, logistics of growing with hardware seems kind of insane.

Jerry Ellsworth: I think there's, there's two types of hardware, hardware startups that are, uh, viable and they take different funding. So you have something like, uh, I don't know if GoPro quite matches this, but GoPro, it's something that can be cloned really easily, but it is more of a brand.

Chris Gammell: And yeah, right.

Jerry Ellsworth: And so you can take something that's relatively easy to develop. So there's not much R and D and make it explosive like overnight with a creative marketing. I think, right.

Chris Gammell: And that's, that's the, the competitive advantage is the marketing piece you're saying.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. Until there's so many clones out there. I think GoPro is really suffering now because you know, the marketing.

Chris Gammell: They're doing great as a content channel. I don't know if you ever flipped through their, on like a, like a Virgin, I guess Virgin isn't anymore, but they have like a channel, right. Where it's just, it's just people doing crazy tricks, but the cameras are inconsequential.

Dave Jones: They're in the toilet. They're worth almost pennies on the dollar now.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. I don't think they've been doing good, but I think that. The problem is like they saturated their, their market and there's a lot of clones that are just as good and the marketing isn't working anymore. And so, but I think.

Chris Gammell: The growth of parkour is flat, you know?

Jerry Ellsworth: But I think, I think that type of startup is very compatible with Sand Hill Road. So, you know, you can have explosive growth and they can flip it and they can make their money real quick. Now there's a second type of hardware startup, which historically used to be Silicon Valley, but there's no investors that want to invest this way, which is the long tail type companies, which are like, like, yeah. Like when I started going to Silicon Valley, I started working at chip companies, which many of those companies, many of those companies that I was working at were at like Series C or D fundraising before they actually saw revenue, which is almost unheard of. Like you just don't get investments like that these days, which there's, that's why ships are a terrible company to be in right now.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, unless you're getting bought by another big chip company. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: I mean, chip startups, like you almost never hear of it.

Chris Gammell: Well, we've had, oh God, what were they called, Dave? I don't remember. Oh, yes. Yeah.

Dave Jones: We did have one and they eventually folded.

Chris Gammell: Something Semiconductor.

Dave Jones: Yep. Yep.

Chris Gammell: I guess we had Triad on the show at one point, but Triad was also a sponsor, but it was not them. That's not who it was. It was Touchstone.

Jerry Ellsworth: Touchstone Semiconductor. Yes. Yeah. With those super low power op amps. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they were great. They were former Maxim folks, I think, and they did, it was a fabulous company. They did really nice stuff. Someone Fox, I forget his last name.

Jerry Ellsworth: They probably just couldn't raise the next round to get to revenue.

Chris Gammell: Right. And that's like not owning fab equipment either. That's not owning like any infrastructure. That was just enough, raising enough to, you know, make parts and get them out through TSMC. Right.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. I mean, Silicon Valley back in the 80s, everyone had a fab in the back of their building. Just like you, Jerry. Come on. Yeah. But, you know, I think, you know, where you go get to get money is what we're doing. Is you find the strategic investors that really want a market to exist because they need it. Right. And they'll do a little bit longer tail investments. So, I think that's like, you're going to do a hardware startup. You have to kind of think about whether you're going to be a marketing company or you're going to actually be doing R&D, which is going to take, you know, capital. And it's going to take a couple funding rounds before you can get to revenue or customer acquisition. You don't have to have revenue. You just have to have that customer acquisition.

Chris Gammell: It kind of feels like a lot of the tech stocks of your, right, like the chip companies, the TIs of the world and everything else. There was also confluence of factors of like coming off a lot of government research dollars. Right. So, the research was being done on someone else's dime. And then the marketplace was just like hungry for it too. Right. And so, you think about it these days, like if, you know, the DOD had paid you to do AR type stuff and, you know, there was some world event where AR was necessary. Right. And it's like, okay, that's a totally different market at that point, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, I've worked at a couple companies that took government money and it's a different cadence, like DARPA stuff. And it's hard to get away from it. You get addicted to it. So, a company I worked at ended up tanking because they had trouble moving away from that type of money. So, I guess that's something you have to be aware of if you're going to transition away. Like, what's that transition plan? Like, for DARPA money, you, it's very milestone driven. And usually, they're probably pretty savvy at creating those milestones that are really hard to get to. And so, projects I've been on like that, you're just like going from one dog and pony show to the next dog and pony show and the next dog and pony show. And you never really get your product fully developed. And so, it's this endless cycle.

Chris Gammell: That's crazy. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Which, I guess, maybe isn't that different than a lot of other startups. Like, I heard someone describe it recently as like a lot of startups is stunt-based funding. Stunt-based funding? So, you go for one stunt. Yeah, right.

Chris Gammell: Right. And now, I will do the trapeze with a blindfold and I will be on fire.

Jerry Ellsworth: In a startup, it usually means like you make some janky prototype and then you go like get Engadget and a bunch of companies to talk about it. And then you use that as a springboard to show like, look at all this. To get more meetings. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Well, Jerry, to bookend, like I said, with the RF stuff, what is the stuff you're building these days to keep sane? Because this other stuff was absolutely insane.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. So, ham radio has been great. So, I've been doing some magnetic loop antennas, which are pretty fun for really low frequencies. So, the 160 and 80 meter band, which is typically really hard to do with like dipoles and the kind of easy wire antennas.

Chris Gammell: Uh-huh.

Jerry Ellsworth: And so, that's been fun. So, I did one video on this loop construction, which is seven and a half feet in diameter and it's two loops of copper pipe because you need to have in these type of loop antennas, it needs to be very low resistance. So, you use copper water pipe. Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah. It cost a lot. It's still technically soldering, right? Yeah. Well, yeah. I did sweat some joints together with it. And then it has a capacitor to tune it. So, this loop resonates at the particular frequency you want to transmit.

Dave Jones: Uh-huh.

Jerry Ellsworth: And it has some really cool features. Like, if you're trying to do something in town, for instance, where there's a lot of interference on those low frequencies, since it's a very high-Q tuned tank circuit, it excludes a bunch of things like AM radio stations that are nearby and your neighbor's wall warts that are buzzing away. Humming. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Jerry Ellsworth: The downside is every...

Chris Gammell: Didn't actually put them through RF testing in the first place, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: I got stories on that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, but what's kind of cool about that is, and also a downside is, like, since it's so narrow-Q, you have to tune it for every single frequency you want to receive or transmit on. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Oh.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, you want to tune your radio up the dial, you have to actually tune the antenna as well. So, what I've been working on for a second video on that is how to build your own capacitors, because these capacitors have to be really high voltage. Yeah. So...

Chris Gammell: Wait, what's high voltage? Sorry. We should clarify this here, I guess.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, depending on how many watts you want to put into the antenna, and there's lots of equations to figure this out. Say you want to put 100 watts in, you need a capacitor that's, like, 6,000 volts, 10,000 volts, pretty high. Whoa. Because it's, you know, you have all this flyback effect in the antenna, so those voltages get really high. And if it's just a, you know, 10-volt ceramic capacitor, it's going to arc through instantly. Yeah. Yeah. So, I've been working on a video to show how to make your own high voltage capacitors out of, like, home improvement store materials, like these trombone capacitors. Cool. Because on my particular antenna that I built, I got some surplus, like, Jennings vacuum variable capacitors, which are super awesome. Yeah. But most people don't have access to those. So, I'm trying to come up with alternatives. So, I have a high voltage trombone that you can build. It's all motor driven. Nice. So, you tune it remotely. And I have your classic dielectric plastic and plate one that you can slide back and forth. It's kind of like sliding plates. And so, I want to show a couple options for people that can't afford or can't get those really expensive capacitors. And then, third video I'm working on, and is actually still more in the works, is I'm making an auto tuner. So, when you key up the transmitter, it does a frequency count, knows about how far to drive the capacitor. Oh, sweet. And then, it does a successive approximation to tune it the rest of the way.

Chris Gammell: So, it, like, hunts between different ideas? Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: It looks at the reflected energy back, coming back from the antenna. Nice. So, I've got the successive approximation stuff going. And it just takes forever, because you have to. Yeah. So, the next.

Chris Gammell: Does it have to, like, settle out or something, or what?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah. So, it's going to overshoot, overshoot, overshoot until it finally decides that it's within range. But my next improvement is I'm just going to add a frequency counter to it, and then it's just going to be adaptive and learn where it needs to go. So, that's one project. Correct. I built a stealth transceiver, which is kind of cool. I went on the Jonathan Colton cruise, which is this nerd cruise. Yeah. Where the performer, Jonathan Colton, brings all of these nerd performers on, and it's a week-long cruise out in the ocean. But I wanted to do some ham radio stuff, and they forbid it on this particular cruise line. So, I had to break the rules.

Dave Jones: Why? You're out in international waters. Screw that.

Jerry Ellsworth: That's what I said. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Literally. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, I built this little commutating mixer transceiver, which uses, it's called a TALO detector and modulator. And then I put it in this really clever anodized box and then laser etched a bunch of stuff on it to make it look like it was a guitar amplifier. Or actually, correction, correction, a ukulele amplifier.

Chris Gammell: Right, right. It's got to be island-based, right? Yeah, yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, for your video game players out there, I called it the Radiation King U amplifier. And then it had all the ports on it. One of them said MIDI. One of them had, like, audio in and out. And then I made a loop antenna out of audio jacks and cables. So, it's this whole thing that, yeah. That's great. That was fun.

Chris Gammell: That's amazing.

Jerry Ellsworth: Anyway, I've been doing tons of ham radio projects. It's super fun. I really enjoy the strange propagation you get on the HF bands. Like, you make a transmitter that's five watts and then you wait for, like, sun spots or the sun to just be going down. And then all of a sudden, you're, like, broadcasting to Australia for, like, a 15-minute window. And then it disappears.

Chris Gammell: That's awesome. Yeah. Well, Dave, did you get it? Did you hear what she said to you? No.

Dave Jones: Just the window slid out. Yeah, right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, Jerry, thank you for, uh... It's such a freaking crazy story. Like, I mean, I know that it was your life. And, like, for that, I am, like, very empathetic. But, damn.

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, I hope some of this is helpful to others. Like, one thing I don't want to come across is, like, I'm super, super bitter. Like, but I am. And...

Chris Gammell: But you started like that. Come on. Like, that's what engineering is all about, right? Yeah. Being a grumpy engineer doesn't stop just because you're in a startup.

Jerry Ellsworth: I'm much less bitter than I was six or eight months ago when it was all happening. Yeah. Uh-huh. So, moved on. Awesome. That's good.

Dave Jones: Well, thank you very much, Jerry.

Chris Gammell: Well, thank you. It's been great. Once again. We'll talk with you about the new company, hopefully, soon, and hear more about that, you know?

Jerry Ellsworth: Can't wait to tell you about it. Nothing is going to go wrong with a new company. No. Everything is going to go great.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Sorry, Jerry, but we don't have any money to give you. So, you can tell us the truth.

Jerry Ellsworth: I'm sure some stuff's going to go sideways. The question is, can we recover?

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yep.

Dave Jones: Awesome. All right. Awesome. Thanks, Jerry.

Chris Gammell: Thanks for joining us, Jerry.

Dave Jones: Thank you. See ya. See ya.