Early Days of Eye-Fi by Ziv Gillat

1. Vision
The Founder Institute
Prepared by Ziv Gillat
http://About.Me/ZivGillat
Twitter: @gillat

2. What am I passionate about?
• photography in general, but specifically:
– making people look their best, especially:
• women. But:
– I'll shoot men as well, sometimes :-)
• love to capture moments in time
• love to be a "fly on the wall", and see and share moments of
those that I'm photographing
• BUT, extremely passionate about having people share their
images and videos with their loved ones, with their high
quality cameras, not just their camera phones

3. Some fun examples

4. Some fun examples

5. Some fun examples

6. Some fun examples

7. Some fun examples

8. Some fun examples

9. Some fun examples

10. Some fun examples

11. Eye-Fi -- a tiny revolution
memory card
with built-in Wi-Fi
make your
camera wireless

12. connecting a complex ecosystem
gadget?
system.

13. Eye-Fi -- the system
into the system from the moment of capture
wirelessly through home, hotspot, mobile networks
enhanced with cloud-based services
to all the devices and places for sharing and saving

14. Eye-Fi – today…
• From 4 founders to 45 full time employees + many that are
outsourced (manufacturing, support, operations, distribution)
• Raised 4 rounds, in excess of $50MM, ~ every 18 months (most
common)
• Sell in all major retail in the US, Europe (via Sandisk), Japan,
Canada and now A/NZ
• Multiple revenue streams, from cards & services
• 300MM photos & videos uploaded last year (~1MM per day)
• 85% across top 10 camera OEM’s – Eye-Fi Connected
• 2.5X sales YoY

15. What is your vision?
• My vision is Eye-Fi's vision. I couldn’t imagine
it any other way:
– help consumers share & organize their photos
and videos, effortlessly.
• photos have a lifespan, and if they're not shared
quickly, they become stale. This is bad for families, as
well as for business.
– stale images don't get monetized, printed, shared,
and could get lost easily

16. How do you translate your passion and
vision into a business idea?
• 4 of us started to meet in mid 2005, to discuss
the issues with the photo imaging industry:
– cameras are fun to use
– getting images out of them is a chore. It's not
rocket science, but people end up putting it off,
like any other chore.
– connecting cameras is key. Camera phones are
connected but have poor quality. Cameras are
unconnected, but have great quality.

17. How do you translate your passion and
vision into a business idea?
• the business evolved. We started with a totally
different idea, but the VC's didn't believe that 4
technical guys could pull it off, business-wise.
– we pivoted, and went to idea # 2 -- the Eye-Fi Card.
Formed the company with the name Eye-Fi, but didn't
think that we'll do Wi-Fi, until much later :-)
• Started by thinking that we'll only sell cards.

18. How do you translate your passion and
vision into a business idea?
• didn't know that:
– we will get into services
– rev share with printing sites
– geolocation
– open hotspots
– archiving and backups, storage
– charging OEM's, to put our software inside their cameras.
We're tiny & they're HUGE. Even today.
– smart phones will play such a key role in our future
strategy, i.e. Eye-Fi Direct, KDDI, Docomo cloud services

19. Quick timeline
• mid 2005  starting discussing the problem
• 1/1/06  started full time, and raised our first angel
• 4/1/06  “alpha” – the card uploaded the first photo over TCP/IP
• 9/1/06  paid “beta”
• 2006  raised $1MM from angels, about once a month
• Q107  closed A
• Q407  launched into online retail (Amazon, etc…)
• Q208  launched brick & mortar retail
• Closed B  X2  Eye-Fi Connected  closed C  closed Sandisk 
Japan, Europe, Canada  Eye-Fi Direct, Eye-Fi View Premium  closed D
 announced KDDI & Docomo (#1 & #2 carriers in Japan)  stay tuned 

20. How do you brainstorm ideas?
• insanely strong technical co-founders, very unique in
breadth.
• Sometimes, very passionate / argumentative, but
never lose the respect and friendship. Never
• put our ideas down on slides, debate, debate, and
debate some more
• then, we test them with consumers, or existing
customers

21. What are the tools for evaluating your
ideas?
• test them around eStaff and employees
• www.researchnow.com
• www.usertesting.com
• www.SurveyMonkey.com
• www.MailChimp.com

22. What are the makings of a good idea
versus a bad idea?
• Will people love it?
• Could it change or disrupt how they do
things?
– be careful from being too disruptive.
Technology is already hard to market. Being
truly disruptive will take longer to market.
– many ideas can be good, but are just
"solutions looking for problems"

23. What are the makings of a good idea
versus a bad idea?
• sometimes, you may be passionate about an idea,
but you're the only one that thinks it's a good idea.
TEST.
– Trust your friends, and ask them for their opinion
– don't worry about copying. No one is going to copy your
idea, and if they are, either it's too easy to produce and
you have no competitive advantage, or
– you now have validation that someone else takes your idea
seriously enough to attempt it as well (this is rare,
especially at your stage)

24. Should you pursue multiple ideas at once,
and when should you focus on one?
• no. You can't afford to work on more than 1
idea. Your size is your best weapon
• The fact that you're tiny, and can change on a
dime, is also a powerful weapon, against the
conglomerates. Have a LASER focus. It's the
only way you will stand a chance to win.

25. But, some parting words
• Don’t start with an exit strategy. Build a business,
and keep building.
• Being a founder essentially means that you have a
disease. It’s the toughest thing that you will go
through, but you’ll keep coming back for more.
• Make sure that you plan for 7 years of fun. Imagine
that now. Can you envision pursuing your idea, even
when it gets tough, for 7 years?

26. THE END
THANK YOU
About.Me/ZivGillat