ENGLISH 7_Q4_LESSON 2_ Employing a Variety of Strategies for Effective Interp...
Smart Monitoring at the Edge with nanoSense
1. Smart Monitoring at the Edge
nanoSense
Chris Young Daniel Villamizar Roy Nicolet Sophia Shramko Mindy Chang
Hacker
PhD, EE
Designer
PhD, EE
Hustler/Picker
MBA1, Bsc.EE
Picker
MBA2, Bsc. EE
Hustler
MBA1
Radhika Malpani Rekha Pai
Mentors
Interviews: 87
AI Hardware at the Edge
7. • Semiconductor
companies
• Emerging system
companies (e.g.
Oculus, Roomba, Nest,
Anki)
• Complimentary IoT
sub-components (NB-
IoT, MEMS, emerging
sensors, etc.)
• Early institutional
adopters (DARPA)
• Early-adopting
product giants (Apple,
Google, etc.)
● Consumer
technology giants
with in-house chip
design
● Automated
warehouse.
● Emerging systems,
application-specific,
wearables
● Semiconductor
industry
● Chip design IP enabling
front-end compression for
smart consumer systems.
● Packaged sensor modules
with interface API to
extend capabilities of
industrial/manufacturing
equipment.
● Smart sensing previously
unachievable at the edge
for wearable devices
enabled by our low-power
solution.
● Performance improvement
and additional feature to
interface with their existing
backend processing.
• High R&D cost: Engineering salaries; tools; silicon
prototyping
• High manufacturing cost (stand-alone channel)
• Design cycle time ~18 months
• Sales from stand-alone catalogue product (across all customer segments)
• Turnkey custom solution and ongoing support for aggressive performance
AV ML systems
• IP licensing (large volume customers segments)
• (Re)define market segment
based on MVP performance
• Determine specification
requirements according to
customer preferences
• Create support system within
targeted applications to win
and keep customers
• Sub-component
supplier __ __
• Licensing model for
current IP __ __
• Support for integration
and product shipping to
enable adoption
• Targeted proof of
concept(s)
• Engineering design tools
(CAD)
• Human resources-
engineers, product
managers, marketing, sales,
BizDev.
• IP license. __ __
• Chips/modules with
API included to
interface to arbitrary
backend processors.
__ __
8. Value Propositions
● Power
● Bandwidth
● Latency
● Memory
Customer Segments
● Electronic system
manufacturers
● Smart warehouses
● Chip
Manufacturers
9. Search for The Killer Segment
“Think broadly...”
- Steve Blank | office hour
Wearables
Smartphone
Drones
Medical
Devices
Surveillance
Smart
Homes
Smart Cities
Consumer Industrial
Commercial
Autonomous
Vehicles
10. Search for The Killer Segment
Wearables
Smartphone
Drones
Medical
Devices
Surveillance
Smart
Homes
Smart Cities
Autonomous
Vehicles
ResellerDistr.$
SGA
R&D
COGS
-
%
$
SGA
R&D
Tools
Manufacturing
-
%
11. Search for The Killer Segment
Wearables
Smartphone
Drones
Medical
Devices
Surveillance
Smart
Homes
Smart Cities
Autonomous
Vehicles
12. Search for The Killer Segment
Wearables
Smartphone
Drones
Medical
Devices
Surveillance
Smart
Homes
Smart Cities
Autonomous
Vehicles
13. Search for The Killer Segment
Wearables
Smartphone
Drones
Medical
Devices
Surveillance
Smart
Homes
Smart Cities
Autonomous
Vehicles
Full-stack → Value
14. ● Getting meaningful interviews for our market is hard
● Constant debate: where should we focus?
● Engineering from Mars, business from Venus
● Mismatch in expectations
Crisis #1: Team Dynamics
15. ● Team dynamics is very important
● Set clear expectations from all sides
● Admit mistakes quickly and move on
● Let people do what they are good at doing
Learning: Cross-Functional Team
16. Crisis #2: Value-Add
“For hardware startups, typically, the value-add
has to hit you like a hammer to the face ”
- George John | In-class presentation feedback
● No “killer app” for our technology
● Too much competition and substitutes
● Semiconductor business needs high revenue models
19. Learning: Get Stay Outside The Building
Value Propositions
● Sensing that was
previously impractical
or impossible
● Stack-rich solution
● High value-add
● Stay the course.
Unnecessary to expect a
killer app in 5 weeks
● So far we were looking for
markets where:
keep the product simple
20. Hammer #1: Johnson Controls
“Can your audio solution detect the sound of
leaking water?”
- Robert Locke | Mentor & Biz Dev - Johnson Controls
❏ Enabled by us
❏ Full-stack
❏ Simple
❏ Value-add
Other Similar Potential Applications
● Building occupancy
● Alarm broadcasting (from existing local sensor)
● Motor anomaly monitoring
25. Search for The Killer Segment
Wearables
Smartphone
Drones
Medical
Devices
Surveillance
Smart
Homes
Buildings
Smart Cities
Consumer Industrial
Commercial
Autonomous
Vehicles
❏ Enabled by us
❏ Full-stack
❏ Simple
❏ Value-add
26. Search for The Killer Segment
Wearables
Smartphone
Drones
Medical
Devices
Consumer Industrial
Commercial
Autonomous
Vehicles
Monitoring as a Service
28. UPDATED - Get, Keep, and Grow Customers
KEEP GROWGET
Target
- Largest number of
insurance claims.
- Devices with high cost of
failure.
Keep
- Subscription based
monitoring.
Next-Sell
- Same hardware, new analytics -
fast to change software!
- Iterate on hardware - board level
to chip level implementations.
29. “Providers are looking for enhanced data
collection. There is a move from analytics
to real-time decisions at the edge.”
- Cindy Maike | GM Insurance - Cloudera
“There are 50 million steam traps in
the United States”
- Sean Mankhen | Senior Engineer - PsiKick
Smart Monitoring
Value Propositions
● Real-time, always-on loss-
prevention and analytics for
building managers and
insurtech providers.
● Smart monitoring for failure
detection, analysis, and
prevention.
● New sources of data
collection for analytics in
challenging environments.
“Can you tell me which houses are
most at risk for water damage?”
- Chris Knievel | Strategy Dev. - CSAA Insur.
30. ● Early institutional
adopters (DARPA)
● Insurance providers
● Asset Managers
● Data Analytics (the
backhole for all the data
- C3IOT, Cloudera)
● Complimentary IoT
sub-components (NB-
IoT, BLE, MEMS,
emerging sensors, etc.)
• High R&D cost: Engineering salaries; tools; silicon prototyping
• High manufacturing cost (stand-alone channel)
• Design cycle time ~18 months
• Sales from stand-alone turnkey product (across all customer
segments)
• Direct sales to insurance companies, asset managers and industrial
facilities/machinery.
• Subscription for monitoring, hardware updates.
• Find early adopters.
• Determine specification
requirements according to
customer preferences
• Create support system
within targeted
applications to win and
keep customers
• Targeted proof of
concept(s)
• Engineering design tools
(CAD)
• Human resources-
engineers, product
managers, marketing,
sales, BizDev.
● Sub-component
supplier
● Software/Firmware and
integration support to
make a adoption
seamless
● Provide smart sensing
solution including data
analytics that is
compatible with current
infrastructure.
● Real-time, always-on
loss-prevention and
analytics for insurtech
providers.
● Smart monitoring for
failure detection,
analysis and prevention.
● Data collection in
constrained
environments.
● Direct Sales to
Insurance companies,
asset managers, and
industrial
facilities/machinery.
● Industrial IoT players
● Insurance companies
● Asset Managers
31. Chris Young Daniel Villamizar Roy Nicolet Sophia Shramko Mindy Chang
Hacker
PhD, EE
Designer
PhD, EE
Hustler/Picker
MBA1, Bsc.EE
Picker
MBA2, Bsc. EE
Hustler
MBA1
Radhika Malpani Rekha Pai
Where We Go from Here
Mentors
As you saw in our video intro, we designed and prototyped custom chips that would enable edge sensors in low-power.
We saw all kinds of benefits from these devices (click) so we assumed this was a good enough business model (click through) and that we would have no problems commercializing this technology
As an initial sample application we targeted smart home devices (click) that need always-on sensing
You might want these devices to be battery operated because you don’t always have a plug conventinet to where you want to place them. In that case, the battery would need to last for a long time because users would not want to replace the batteries or re-charge their devices regularly
So we concluded that our product could be a wake-up mechanism for these products
These smart home devices, however, have many other functionalities. They are complex systems and our product (click) would be a part of this system
So we built our initial business model canvas based on these observations and made some guesses on who our initial customer segments might be
Here is a simplified version if it. We hypothesized that our customers would be system companies like Amazon, Google, or Apple. Warehouse automation players and larger semiconductor manufacturers who might be interested in licensing our IP to add our functionality to their larger System-on-chips (or SoC)
During an office hour with Steve Blank we were encouraged to think big and go broad for a moment to make sure we wouldn’t miss an important market segment. We laid out key vertical markets that came up during our brainstorming sessions.
First, we consider portable electronics like smartphones and wearables. They surely require low-power and low-latency in their always-on sensing modes.
However, we found out that for a small semiconductor startup like ourselves in these segment we would have to compete with many established and low-cost players in a crowded space.
(click) In addition, we realized that we would have to rely on a distribution channel that was very cost-structured and would therefore require that we ship high-volumes at very low margins. This seems unfeasible for a small chip startup and was ultimately (click) an unsatisfying value-add for our team.
(click) For smart cities we found that city departments use a similar OEM model by purchasing from large integration vendors.
We also learned that the city decision-makers are not as tech-savvy as in other industries and sales cycles are slow and depend on long-term relationships with people like the chief of police and the office of the city mayor
In the drone and autonomous driving space we found out our solution wasn’t particularly well suited because the sensing system was not a significant portion of the energy or complexity bottleneck
In the Smart Home application space we had a mixed bag. The market segment is very concentrated and tough to break into. We would need a partnership with a large and established player (like Nest or Honeywell)
We did find promising partners willing to continue working with us to determine the value of our products.
We also found a key learning (click): that real value-add and therefore margins would not be as high unless we were able to provide a solution that was more full-stack
This brought us to our first crisis on our journey.
We were having a hard time getting enough interviews with relevant players and were debating about where to focus our efforts. We lost some hope that we had a compelling product. We could also see the stark difference between business and engineering and discovered we had different goals for the outcome of this project and the class. As these differences became clear (click) we had a team member decide to withdraw from the team.
From this experience we clearly saw the importance of having the right team dynamics for a start-up to be successful. We worked to…
This ultimately motivated our estranged classmate to return to the team since we had more clarity on roles and responsibilities and what each of us were able to contribute to the team
The second important crisis we hit was to define our value-add.
George John gave us sage advice after one of our team presentations (click), we needed a hammer
From our interviews until this point, we were getting a lot of responses that amounted to “you have some really compelling tech but we don’t have an immediate use for it”
As we examined our initial assumption about our value add we felt lost in a complex system with many moving pieces
We struggled to see the real value of our product
This crisis led us to our next learning: to continue grinding. We had some idea of what we had learned to far. Here is what our updated value proposition looked like
Also, in order to keep our product as full-stack as possible without undertaking a major engineering and logistic effort (click) we would look for problems that required simple solutions
This is when we came to an interview with Robert Locke, one of the class mentors. He told us about how one of the biggest payouts of large insurance policies is water damage from failed pipes. He also told us that the previous attempts at solving this issue hadn’t worked out because they were either complex and cumbersome to install or too simplistic and not accurate enough. It hit us that this particular application (click) checked off all of the boxes that we were looking for… (click through)
This piqued our interest and we continued to brainstorm (click) about other applications in similar segments that would be addressed by our solution.
The other hammer to hit us in the face was at the ISSCC conference we attended. Chris gave a great presentation on his smart imager research and later that night we attended an industry showcase event where several companies demonstrated custom silicon to enable interesting applications.
(click) This is where we met the PsiKick team. They are a provider of steam trap monitors that work without any batteries because they harvest the energy from the heat of the pipes to power their ultra low energy temperature monitors. Their business model is to essentially give away the monitoring hardware which is relatively low cost and instead charge for a monthly subscription fee
This model is working well for them and co-founder Ben Calhoun told us that if all they did was sell steam trap monitoring they could run a healthy business
This led us to an important conclusion about the value of disruptive sensing
We realized we can leverage the data that sensors collect to provide actionable value to our customers that they care about
We quickly iterated our MVP from a standalone chip to check that our algorithm could detect the sound of running water by writing a quick app.
By re-examining the vertical segments we were previously addressing, we could see which of them would fit into this new model (click) and saw that with a small tweak to the smart home segment we could (click) group the three segments on the right into a new vertical that can be called...
… for the commercial and industrial segments that is uniquely enabled due to our innovative sensors
So how are we different than the rest of the market? We provide real-time monitoring in otherwise data-rich sensing modalities such as water leakage, alarm monitoring, and facility occupancy. We can provide this where others cannot (click) because we have re-designed the traditional sensors so that they don’t rely on heavy computation engines to make detections
Because the installation is easy (click) and the maintenance is very low, we can cover hard-to-reach application that may not have access to wired power
Finally, by having visibility into the signal of interest we provide relevant analytics (click) to our customers so they can make real-time decisions (click) based on the monitor signals.
In addition, we can re-think our customer funnel because the subscription model allows for application-specific hardware (click) so the specialization cost can be amortized over the lifetime of the subscription.
(click) We can also improve our customer retention and create an up-sell channel by providing new analytics based on the data generated by our installed sensor modules
This is our final value proposition box in the business model canvas (click) and here are a few interview quotes that support these value props
And this is our updated full canvas along with the boxes that changed significantly
Moving forward Chris and Dan plan to continue working on this venture to further explore the demand behind the updated market segment. Roy and Mindy will do an internship in the summer and keep a close eye on the project progress in case there is an intersection of needs upon graduation. Sophia is planning to take on a project management role at Amazon.
We would like to thank our amazing mentors Radhika and Rekha who believed in us and gave us advice and encouragement with plenty of war stories from their time as engineers in the Valley
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
Solves latency and memory problems
Solves latency and memory problems
Those devices do not have room for sophisticated heavy processors, GPUs
They don’t have the battery to do so
Those devices do not have room for sophisticated heavy processors, GPUs
This was validated in the PhD work of my teammates Chris and Dan
Those devices do not have room for sophisticated heavy processors, GPUs
This was validated in the PhD work of my teammates Chris and Dan
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
OEMs, Licensing, Defense, Safety
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
Describe what your team will do tomorrow and this week
Include anything else you feel is pertinent towards understanding the direction your team is heading
We predict the selfie of the future would look like this, using the imager of nanosense.
Dan and Chris at the Booth.
MVP is required this week. What did you change? What was it testing? What did you learn?
We optimize the complete smart sensor processing chain, not by accelerating the compute, but by changing the system to sense "smart features" - this requires cohesive algorithm/hardware co-design.
Our sensing methodology is to perform feature extraction in the analog domain before the digitization to allow power savings due to lower sampling and computation requirements
Our sensing methodology is to perform feature extraction in the analog domain before the digitization to allow power savings due to lower sampling and computation requirements
Those devices do not have room for sophisticated heavy processors, GPUs
They don’t have the battery to do so
Our sensing methodology is to perform feature extraction in the analog domain before the digitization to allow power savings due to lower sampling and computation requirements
We optimize the complete smart sensor processing chain, not by accelerating the compute, but by changing the system to sense "smart features" - this requires cohesive algorithm/hardware co-design.
The gap between what we were doing and what other groups in our class were doing.
The gap between what we were doing and what other groups in our class were doing.
We decided to pivot
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For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
*Update weekly
For [customer segment]
who [key need or opportunity],
[company name] is a [type of product or service]
that [key value proposition that solves key need or opportunity].
Unlike our competitors, we [differentiation].
More lucrative to focus on insurance and industrial IoT application to have a recurrent revenue model with a very self-contained technological solution that is managemeble for a startup, instead of selling 1-off chip to a startup.
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Each customer segment needs a matching value prop. Use a different color for each customer segment.
Order of Validation:
1. Customer Segments
2. Value Propositions
3. Channels
4. Customer Relationships
5. Revenue Streams
6. Key Activities
7. Key Resources
8. Key Partners
9. Cost Structure