Seeing into the Future: Moving Beyond AI to Visual Intelligence with Oculi CEO Charbel Rizk

Founder Shares – Charbel Rizk

00:00:01 – Charbel Rizk

And the only reason I became successful as a CEO, at least up to this point, is I turned everything into a challenge, into a problem. I couldn’t put an equation to it, but I still said, okay, this is a problem. How do I go about solving it? That’s what I mean by the focus, is because the human nature, and I’m one of, I’m a typical example of that. We tend to migrate towards things that we enjoyed.

00:00:32 – Trevor Schmidt

Hello, and welcome to the Founder Shares podcast brought to you by Hutchison, a law firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, that helps founders and entrepreneurs, and technology and life science companies start up, operate, get funded, and exit. So whether you’re already an entrepreneur, or want to be one someday, or are just fascinated by the stories of how a business goes from idea to success, or not such a success, this podcast is for you. Today’s guest is Charbel Rizk, founder and CEO of Oculi, a cutting-edge visual intelligence company that is commercializing a new architecture for artificial vision that combines the best of both worlds, the efficiency of biology and the speed of machines. On today’s episode, Charbel breaks down just how groundbreaking Oculi’s vision sensors are and what’s next in the world of artificial and visual intelligence.

00:01:20 – Charbel Rizk

But unlike what you have in the cameras that are pointing at us right now, these are all based on imaging technology. They produce an image or a video that human processes very efficiently. The world is moving towards AI and autonomy, and yet we continue to use technology that was developed and optimized for humans.

00:01:40 – Trevor Schmidt

Charbel also discussed the limitations of traditional motion sensors, like their inability to distinguish between different objects or activities, contrasting them with the benefits of a more advanced visual sensor that can process information directly and provide intelligent outputs, like identifying if a person is present, proving just how useful visual sensors can be for automating tasks like controlling lights or doors.

00:02:03 – Charbel Rizk

Motion is just not an intelligent enough sensor.

00:02:06 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:02:07 – Charbel Rizk

Like the curtain can move and it will trip versus a person walking in versus a dog or a cat.

00:02:12 – Trevor Schmidt

Sure.

00:02:13 – Charbel Rizk

Even if you’re still in the room and you don’t move anymore, right. You’ve been in that environment where the lights go off, right?

00:02:18 – Trevor Schmidt

Yep.

00:02:19 – Charbel Rizk

There’s just not enough intelligence, right. It has one sensing modality, and it cannot see beyond that. We actually have a visual sensor just like your eyes. Okay. So we have all the information that’s available to your eyes and. But we’ll do. We do the processing on the sensor itself in a very efficient way. And so instead of outputting an image, we output. Trevor is in the room, which is the level of intelligence people want. Right. And most of the time, you’re trying to automate something like the lights or the doors. Right. And all you’re trying to do is figure out whether someone is there or nothing. Right?

00:02:56 – Trevor Schmidt

Yep.

00:02:56 – Charbel Rizk

Again, you may not want to turn the light on if a dog or a cat come in. Right. And so that’s really the. The significant aspect is that we are bringing a vision level intelligence to the edge.

00:03:10 – Trevor Schmidt

And you said this is kind of a chip-based product, so that.

00:03:12 – Charbel Rizk

Correct? Yeah, yeah. So I have samples here, right here. So, you know, look at it. These are tiny cmos chips. Okay?

00:03:19 – Trevor Schmidt

Yep.

00:03:19 – Charbel Rizk

So if you pop the lens off of one of these cameras, you’ll see a similar chip in there. The only difference really, is that that is an image sensor. It outputs just an image. This outputs vision. That means you program it and say, only bother me if someone is in the room or only if Trevor is in the room. That’s the level of intelligence we’re bringing.

00:03:38 – Trevor Schmidt

And that was going to be my question. So do you program the chip to, for whatever kind of outcome you’re looking for before kind of installing it in the device, or is it.

00:03:45 – Charbel Rizk

I mean, it depends on. Yeah, it depends on really the application. Like right now, we’re focusing on presence occupancy.

00:03:51 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:03:52 – Charbel Rizk

Okay. And so for that level, for that use case, you know, the customer doesn’t really have to do much. You know, you install it in your product and then it’ll just be, you know, doing things on its own and then sending out the signals that you want. Like some customer want to only know when someone is there or not. That’s the only information. Right. Others want to know how many people are, you know, where they are, what are kind of doing, but all of that, short of violating their privacy, that’s a big deal that we’re seeing in the market today.

00:04:23 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:04:23 – Charbel Rizk

Like you can put a camera here connected to a computer, that’s fast enough, and it will do that image processing function. But you have two problems there. You’re spending a lot of energy and time goes with that, and money, obviously. But more importantly, you are now capturing a whole image, sending it somewhere to be processed. And obviously, nobody wants that. In their homes, in their offices, in their vehicles, looking at you 24/7 camera. That’s another aspect of our technology. We’re interested in vision, not in imaging. So we know a person is there. We can tell you the person is moving, not moving, but we will never actually generate the data that someone can use to validate your privacy, if that’s the, you know, the requirement on the customer.

00:05:09 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. So, essentially, then the processing, or the image itself just stays on the chip, and it’s not being.

00:05:15 – Charbel Rizk

We don’t even create an image anymore. We don’t even create an image because, you know, we built this processing architecture where the process, a little bit of processing happens at the pixel level, you know, so when you buy a cell phone today and they’re advertising it as 40 megapixels, what that means is you got 40 million little dots that are sensitive to light.

00:05:35 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:05:35 – Charbel Rizk

Our technology will give you that kind of same millions of units sensitive to light, but we’re also providing millions of units that are processing at the same time, so we don’t create an image and move it somewhere else. The smarts start at the pixel level now.

00:05:53 – Trevor Schmidt

So once it’s installed, is it kind of static as far as what it can process, or is it learning throughout?

00:05:58 – Charbel Rizk

So we will have what we call. Again, I don’t want to disclose too much. Open. You know, early on in adventure, I was naive. I was more of educating the world kind of mode. And I’ve learned to hold my thoughts a bit. Nothing will be static. The whole point of our technology, it’s really a programmable and smart. It allows the outside world to go back and reprogram, repurpose, but also, it has enough intelligence on its own.

00:06:24 – Trevor Schmidt

Interesting. This is fascinating stuff. How did Ocula come about as a business? Was this a specific problem you were trying to solve, or did you get the technology and realize that you could create something commercial out of it?

00:06:34 – Charbel Rizk

No, no. Actually, I wasn’t in this space. My background, and that’s where I spent most of my career. Even when I was driving this particular technology, I was always into the developing mobile autonomous systems, and vision was always the limiting factor. My first entry point was a four-rotor drone. Okay? That was fully autonomous, but I couldn’t put a vision-based solution on there to make it autonomous, because even though the camera is small and not that heavy, the amount of power and processing that you need, you know, is just ridiculous.

00:07:13 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah.

00:07:13 – Charbel Rizk

And fast forward many years later. I’m teaching a robotics class at the university, and my students are realizing the same limitation that I realized, you know, and I’m like, you know, it’s amazing. The world has moved so much in technology in general, but vision is still so far behind. We’ve pressed on audio like, you know, you can talk to your phone now or your earpiece or whatever. Right. They kind of work. Okay. Right. But we don’t have that for vision today. And so I realized that’s going to be a bottleneck for autonomy. And I basically did a good bit of a research. And in fact, you may be shocked, but I wrote the white paper in 2002, and I said, if the world is going to move towards autonomy in any scale or AI, I don’t use the word AI now because I’ve lived in that space for most of my life, and I’ve seen it being used and abused over time, but just adding more smarts to the environment around us, to devices and systems around us, you know, I realize that unless you solve the vision problem, you’re not gonna, you know, you’re gonna continue crawling. Okay. A statement I made before and may sound harsh, but, you know, humanity would disappear if we all become blind. If we keep all our other senses, we won’t survive because most of our intelligence is visually based, right? And it’s kind of funny because we’ve been doing things backwards when it comes to machines. We’ve been pushing autonomy and smarts on things, but we’re still half blind.

00:08:45 – Trevor Schmidt

Why do you think that is? Why. Why is the approach been kind of backwards?

00:08:49 – Charbel Rizk

You know, it’s because of the world, the way the world is compartmentalized. Okay.

00:08:53 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:08:54 – Charbel Rizk

You know, you’ve got companies that build cameras or imaging sensors that feed into cameras. They’re not system people. They’re not the ones suffering. When you put that camera in a. In a robot, like I was doing, right? I’m like, what the heck? You know, why am I doing this? You know, it’s like you run the camera at 30 frames per second, which is a typical rate, right? And if you have a high-resolution sensor, which is, you know, what we have today, the amount of data that comes out every single second is tremendous. That data doesn’t vanish. It has to be captured by memory somewhere and a processor. All you’re trying to do in that example is, detectives, the person is there or not. You have to go through all of that above, right, to get to that fundamental, basic question. And so look at humans. What do we do when we walk around, when we go into places, the first thing we pay attention to, who’s there and what the motion is, right? We are most trained for these things, people, objects in general, and things that move. And that’s basically what we came up with. We came up with an architecture that pick up those things very efficiently because they are wanted and needed by just about everything around us. If they want to become more smarter like humans are.

00:10:09 – Trevor Schmidt

Was any aspect of a kind of a technical issue? Had there been advancements in chip processing or.

00:10:14 – Charbel Rizk

Yeah, yeah, good question. You know, so in 2002, when I wrote the white paper, I got a lot of skepticism. You know, I can name a lot of people that are still around today, but we predicted that, you know, that the technology is going to move in a direction to where our crazy idea back then will eventually materialize. And really what we depended on and counted on was the fact that Moore’s law, if you’ve heard of Moore’s law, will continue. And actually it did. If you look at your cell phone in 2002 versus today, there’s a tremendous improvement there. And then what we call 3d technology, which is the ability to build electronic chips with more than one wafer. If you’re familiar with the semiconductor business.

00:10:59 – Trevor Schmidt

Not a whole lot, but.

00:11:00 – Charbel Rizk

Okay, so, you know, today most electronics are made on a single wafer.

00:11:03 – Trevor Schmidt

Right?

00:11:04 – Charbel Rizk

Okay. So there’s that missing dimension. They call it the z dimension because you run out of space because you want your chip to be as small as possible.

00:11:12 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:11:12 – Charbel Rizk

Because it’s cost. Right. And so we predicted at the time, and with time, it did happen, is that they’ll develop the technology to have multiple wafers stacked.

00:11:22 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:11:23 – Charbel Rizk

And to where you, you’re still able to do a lot, but your footprint is nothing as big. And so those are two things that we were waiting for, and both of them really have materialized. And so this is why, you know, it makes sense now to commercialize the technology that we developed.

00:11:38 – Trevor Schmidt

Now, you were in, you were at Johns Hopkins, weren’t you, at the time that you were developing this technology?

00:11:43 – Charbel Rizk

Yeah. Correct.

00:11:44 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah. So at what point in time did it kind of move from, I don’t want to say an academic exercise, but kind of to something that you were like, oh, we can make a business out of this?

00:11:52 – Charbel Rizk

That’s a good question. Actually, it was a, it was a, you know, although I’ve, you know, I’m made for a startup, most of my career, I spent it in a non startup environment, you know, and for multiple reasons. But, so I’ve always had that in the back of my mind, I would say the technology really could have gone full commercial blast in 2016.

00:12:13 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:12:14 – Charbel Rizk

You know, because we had enough prototypes at that time on hand. And like I said, the commercial aspect of the technology was maturing as well. So it just for personal reasons and what have you, it just took me a little bit longer to, to kind of make the move. But, yeah, I mean, right now we have enough working silicon, like, I said, I’ve shown you here some samples. You know, these are samples that we’ve done. People are not questioning our ability to build, you know, something, the now the challenge is whether we can, you know, scale the company and then, you know, and then be able to meet what we expected to be, the volume to be pretty big. You know, talk to us a little.

00:12:51 – Trevor Schmidt

Bit about that because I imagine kind of being in the hardware space that scale is always going to be a consideration. So how do you think about kind of bringing this up to scale? What are some of the challenges there?

00:13:00 – Charbel Rizk

Yeah, I mean, the challenge is really, you have to find the right partners, you know, in that because, you know, we all remember what happened not long ago. Right. The whole semiconductor. Yeah. Post Covid challenges. And that can happen. Right. That’s the challenge of us for a startup. Right. Like big companies can combat the bullet wait longer. Right. For us, you have to be smart about who you partner with and your lifeline, who you depend on and stuff. And because you are still a small startup, you don’t get the front seat when you’re talking to big companies. We’ve been successful because we do have a technology that is intuitive. Once you explain it to people becomes intuitive, and it’s not hard for people to imagine that it can eventually take off. So that’s really the advantage that we have. And we’ve demonstrated something on silicon, so we’re not starting with a concept.

00:13:53 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:13:53 – Charbel Rizk

And so those are the factors that have enabled us to have serious conversations with big players in this space. But it certainly wasn’t easy.

00:14:02 – Trevor Schmidt

Now, you talked a little bit about what you’re thinking for the applications of the technology, but tell us a little bit more about what it could do and where do you see other opportunities for this technology to be used?

00:14:13 – Charbel Rizk

Sure. I mean, I’ll emphasize for you the presence occupancy deduction. Right. So today, motion sensors are used for the most part, and we’ve already, not to pick on them much, but they have limited intelligence. And so the market is already thinking of something. What’s next? The obvious one is camera technology. Right. But then, like I said, it involves a lot of cost, both in power and dollars. And, and then there’s the privacy issue. That’s not easily to solve, you know, and so that that’s, you know, where we’re finding a lot of interest because, you know, our first product, we can market it as a smart motion sensor. If you care about knowing, you know, whether people are present or pets or what have you, you know, we’ve got the technology for that. It’s smart enough. It’s still going to be, you know, competitive in cost and certainly is low power complexity, all of the above. And so that’s basically what our entry point is.

00:15:12 – Trevor Schmidt

Sure.

00:15:12 – Charbel Rizk

And then beyond that, you know, we can eventually get into everything that’s mobile. You know, like, I don’t want to pick you on, put you or someone else on the spot, but notice how your cell phone has a lot of sensors today, including camera based technology, right? But it has no visual intelligence. You can’t point your phone somewhere and say, hey, let me know if someone else is there. You can try. The reason for that is really simple, is that the power consumption would be ridiculous. In fact, I’ll give you a real data point I picked up recently in the market. But to finish my thought on where the technology can go, we could be the eyes for tomorrow’s mobile devices, whether it’s, you know, cell phones, tablets, laptops, you name it, okay, to where they have enough visual intelligence to know that, like right now, your screen should turn off because you’re not looking at it.

00:16:06 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:16:06 – Charbel Rizk

The only thing we have on the screens today is a timer. Five minutes you turn off and it’s obnoxious because you may be five minutes and 1 second now you need your laptop, and then you have to wake it up, right? These are basic things. You know, if I have my way, we’ll put the alkali eyes in devices and ceilings and spaces just to do that first function. Knowing when someone is there and wants to do something without actually having to do a lot of efforts, that would be our initial focus. And then beyond that, we have the architecture that will ultimately allow smart mobile systems, whether they’re robots in your house or cars on the road, to efficiently have vision. Today they don’t.

00:16:52 – Trevor Schmidt

And is that probably the biggest barrier right now to some of these autonomous systems is just the amount of processing.

00:16:57 – Charbel Rizk

Power that it would take is vision. It’s basically efficient vision. Today, they don’t have it.

00:17:03 – Trevor Schmidt

And the efficiency with the vision just comes down to the amount of processing.

00:17:05 – Charbel Rizk

And data that, the kind of data that they get and what they process out of it. Exactly. Our technology will solve that significant and fundamental challenge that I’ve lived in for all of my career. We call it data deluge. You’ve got a sensor that just pops a stream of data constantly, right, and has no intelligence.

00:17:27 – Trevor Schmidt

And then if you have 100 sensors.

00:17:28 – Charbel Rizk

Or exactly if you have multiples, you know, like it’s music to my ears when they go and say, oh, you know, the cars now have twelve cameras. Great. You know, keep them coming, you know, but to give you a real data point, you know, again, without disclosing names, you know, I was visiting with customers recently and they have what the world is calling now, AI products. Right? So there’s a tv with AI features where you can actually use some hand gesture to do something with it. Okay. But you can’t turn it on except with the remote. And the reason for that is they just don’t have the technology to be able to have the tv look out all the time. They can’t put camera based technology on there. Besides privacy, the power consumption, which is huge. So that simple function to turn it on today is still manual. And you have to find the remote or the button on the back. Okay. Yeah, you know, you can put our oculi eyes on there and they’ll be looking all the time, not violating your privacy, but they’re smart enough to know someone is actually standing in front of the tv. You know, maybe they want to turn it on. So that’s kind of the what we’ll, you know, and again, I’m going back to our current focus. But when it comes to smart driving, I mean to autonomous driving and just really a robotic robotics in general, you know, I look at all of that as just simply mobile and autonomous systems, you know, and the speed may change, the size of the v, you know, the system may change, but they have the same kind of similar challenges.

00:18:51 – Trevor Schmidt

Now, is that the use case that most excites you, or is there something that you think.

00:18:55 – Charbel Rizk

No, no, no. Thank you for asking. And I actually want to solve simpler problems.

00:19:00 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:19:01 – Charbel Rizk

The comment that I make sometimes is that we’re trying to automate a, a car to drive in a busy street, but we can’t effectively automate a faucet today. Have you ever had a problem where you hand under the faucet and the soap dispenser just starts fighting? So you still haven’t gotten water on there, right?

00:19:20 – Trevor Schmidt

Yep.

00:19:20 – Charbel Rizk

Or the automatic doors. You know how much energy is wasted from automatic doors?

00:19:24 – Trevor Schmidt

I have no idea.

00:19:25 – Charbel Rizk

Well, here’s a data point. It’s real. University of North Kentucky did a study, and they realized that their automatic doors cost them $400,000 a year more in utilities. That’s one institution. And again, because these doors are not smart, they just open whenever they sense motion. You know, you have no intention of going out. Sometimes you’re just standing, talking to somebody and you end up having to move. Right. I’ve done that all the time, because the door just kept going, you know? So those are the problems that I’m personally more interested in solving. You know, is bringing really true intelligence, visual intelligence, to the environments around us. You can save a lot of energy. I computed that the amount of energy we wasted today, because we have imaging technology instead of vision technology, is more than 65 countries in the world. Like, if you were ranking the power consumption of countries, that data point will be more than the first 65 countries. That’s the amount of energy we’re wasting today. And that’s before we have twelve cameras on cars yet. Wait until that comes.

00:20:31 – Trevor Schmidt

Is that a conversation that kind of resonates with the people you’re talking to, or do they realize, no, I mean.

00:20:35 – Charbel Rizk

I can tell you at the high level, the people that, you know, they connect, that, you know, it’s just feeding them the baby steps. Right. Okay. This is how we’re gonna eventually change the world to the better kind of state that, you know, I tend to be kind of a big picture kind of a person, and then I fill in the details as needed. You know, some people, you have to go, you know, the reverse, you know, so I have to train myself constantly on aspect of it. Another data point I can share right now is actually, I’m sure you’ve heard of chat GBT, right?

00:21:05 – Trevor Schmidt

Sure.

00:21:06 – Charbel Rizk

Okay. It takes three watt hour each time you hit return with chat GPT.

00:21:12 – Trevor Schmidt

Oh, my goodness.

00:21:13 – Charbel Rizk

Okay. Three watt hour. Is one aa battery okay?

00:21:18 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah.

00:21:18 – Charbel Rizk

Our sensor can monitor a space 24/7 for a whole year with one aa battery. That’s the difference, really, between the AI that’s out there right now drowning the world. Right, versus really the edge AI application that we’re pushing. And that’s really the fundamental difference that we will eventually make.

00:21:41 – Trevor Schmidt

Let me ask you this question, as someone working in the space, you’ve mentioned a couple times the privacy considerations around this type of a technology. How do you think about the different potential use cases somebody might put this to? That maybe isn’t what you intended? Do you take responsibility for that? Or do you view it as like, we’ve got this technology that has such an opportunity for good, we can’t control how other people might use it?

00:22:04 – Charbel Rizk

Yeah. I mean, there’s no way you can control that. But just on the privacy side, though, you know, our product will, it’s up to the customer. So if the customer wants 100% privacy, nobody can undo that. You can’t do anything about it, you know, so it’s really up to the customer. Yeah. And on the privacy issue. Definitely. It’s a customer driven, and then we can guarantee that aspect of it. But that doesn’t mean that someone else can’t, you know, try to use the technology outside of privacy. You know, they can do it for other purposes, you know.

00:22:34 – Trevor Schmidt

Yep. Well, I think that’s true with most technology. I’m just always interested to know how, how people think about it.

00:22:39 – Charbel Rizk

Yeah, no, no, I mean it definitely, you know, it’s, it’s a double edged sword. I don’t think I would be an exception in that case. I’m sure one day I’ll look back and say, oh, man, did I make a mistake.

00:22:52 – Trevor Schmidt

The goods can outweigh the bad.

00:22:54 – Charbel Rizk

Hopefully that’s our hope. Most of the good people, anyway, you.

00:22:58 – Trevor Schmidt

Talked about the process of moving it out of kind of a research institution. What have been some of the challenges of just getting started as a commercial venture?

00:23:07 – Charbel Rizk

Yeah. So I think licensing the technology out of a university, I’m sure, you know, you’ll hear similar stories, and my story is not as bad as some others. Okay. You know, just to negotiate a license, you know, that’s reasonable for the university, but also allows the startup to, you know, you know, that was one of the better things I did early on because, you know, I was still in the institution when I was doing that.

00:23:32 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:23:32 – Charbel Rizk

You know, had I left, you know, it would, it would have been probably a little bit more challenging. So my advice is that if you are connected to the institution, negotiate first before you, you know, you leave. If you are coming out of a university, that would be a very important aspect of it. And then, you know, the next step really is to, you know, like, I had no experience, even though I was, like I said earlier, my DNA is a startup like personality and what have you. But I’ve never had the experience of working in a small company. You know, I worked in large companies before I went back to academia. So that’s another aspect of it that is extremely important, is to have the right people with you that if you don’t have the expertise, you kind of bring the right people on. And so that’s the next challenge, which are the people, which is ultimately, from my perspective, you can turn a mediocre idea to success, but you cannot turn even a good idea to success without the right people. And so people, people is my main lessons learned. I was going to tell you there are a lot of books and a lot of people that tell you what to do in a startup. What you don’t find as much is what not to do, which I think, in my humble opinion, is a lot more important because what to do is going to vary so much. And I’ve done, you know, I’ve read books, I’ve participated in a couple of accelerator programs, and they drill you, oh, this is what you need to do. But very few people put and emphasize what not to do. And in a startup, there are a few deadly mistakes, only there aren’t many.

00:25:13 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay, so do you have your top.

00:25:15 – Charbel Rizk

What? And I’ll eventually write a book. I already hinted, you know, people. People is probably by far, and I’ve always known that from my personal experience, independent of a startup, that success always depends on the people that get involved. But on a startup, it’s just deadly. You know, if you make a mistake there, it’s just, it’s hard to recover.

00:25:34 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah.

00:25:34 – Charbel Rizk

So that would, you know, that was kind of the learning that I had to go through because again, I’m, I tend to be a kind of a trusting individual. You know, if you tell me you can walk on water, I’ll, I’ll believe you until proven otherwise. You know, I was operating that way and that, that wasn’t, you know, very good for the early phase of the startup. So, you know, you learn the hard way and then afterwards is, you know, it’s just being focused. For our startup, these are the three major, you know, what I would say, getting the technology out of the university, finding the right people, and then staying focused would be the third challenge.

00:26:09 – Trevor Schmidt

So when you said, talk about being focused, what are some of the things that you found kind of can just distract that focus or pull you?

00:26:15 – Charbel Rizk

Oh, it’s very easy, especially for someone like me, that just like, you know, enjoys solving problems, you know, and the only reason I became successful as a CEO, you know, at least up to this point, is I turned everything into a, a challenge, into a problem. I couldn’t put an equation to it, but I still said, okay, this is a problem. How do I go about solving it? Right. And so that’s what I mean by the focus is because the human nature, and I’m one of, you know, I’m a typical example of that, we tend to migrate towards things that we enjoy, you know, not the things that we, that are necessary. Right. Necessary evil. Right. We kind of did, you know, try to dodge that and you have a plan, you know, you stick to it and you get everything done that feeds into that plan. And you don’t just keep jumping after the next shiny object. Like right now, we’re reaching a point where we made a decision as a company, we’re no longer going to chase customers. I think we’ve done enough engagement. The market knows about us and she seems to be interest. So we are now planning a path and, you know, and then if, if a customer comes and if, and our plan feeds into their plan as well that we’re aligned, you know, we’re happy to engage. Otherwise we’re just going to tell them, sorry, you know, that’s our course and that’s a risk you take as a startup, you know, but again, that’s part of the focus that you have to have in order to, because, you know, we only need r1 customer to get the product into the market. We don’t need ten initially, you know, and so that’s part of the focus.

00:27:49 – Trevor Schmidt

Space as you talk about kind of building out skill sets kind of around you and things that you may not know or something like that. What has been kind of the key for you or something that surprised you about building a team to kind of make this into an actual business?

00:28:04 – Charbel Rizk

Oh, great question. You know, as a CEO, you know, what I’m realizing was that it is still the number one priority. You know, again, that’s, this is part of what I’ve learned. Yeah. Just building the team and working with the individuals and stuff is still, is the number one priority for me. And it still consumes a good bit of time and energy.

00:28:27 – Trevor Schmidt

Yep.

00:28:28 – Charbel Rizk

And in a startup, every person, that’s what I tell my, you know, the team, every person is critical. If you’re not critical, you wouldn’t be here.

00:28:35 – Trevor Schmidt

Yep.

00:28:36 – Charbel Rizk

Because, you know, we really can afford people that just are not part of the critical path. So that’s another aspect I keep reminding myself of working with everyone and building up the team is, is critical. And so, but again, you know, this, this is part of the learning that, you know, that I went through personally and communication, you know, just, it’s an amazing, you’re an attorney, so, you know, probably have learned how important words are for sure, you know, not just in contracts, but then. Right. And so that’s another thing that, you know, it’s amazing, you know, like I send an email in a hurry and it causes enough confusion to where I realize, okay, I gotta jump back on that conversation before it takes off in a different direction.

00:29:21 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah.

00:29:22 – Charbel Rizk

And so that’s another thing that, you know, it’s a constant trade off. You know, do you write a longer message versus sometimes I cut corners and I regret it. So again, that’s part of the learning and the balancing act that you have to constantly do.

00:29:36 – Trevor Schmidt

I wanted to ask you, you mentioned that before you were involved in a startup, you had worked kind of in bigger business. Do you find that time that you had spent in bigger business to be valuable for where you are now? Any learnings that you took from that?

00:29:48 – Charbel Rizk

Yeah. Yeah. I could tell you the main lesson I took from that is I can beat any big company. I like that they become so constrained by their own bureaucracy, by their own kind of inertia, kind of, they’re, like, humming along, you know? And so when someone says, hey, can you compete with a company like this? I’m like, bring it on, you know, I will outmaneuver them in a heartbeat, you know? And now I don’t have their resources. That’s the only advantage they have over me, you know, but they have a lot more inertia, and they’re slow to move. And so that was really the biggest lessons learned, because the other lessons learned, which, you know, again, I don’t want to offend people, but I I’m giving you my honest assessment. There are very few true visionaries out there. And so in all the big institutions I worked on, they all lead by committee.

00:30:40 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:30:41 – Charbel Rizk

There are very few true leaders that can basically stand up and say, okay, I heard you, but I want to go this way. Every organization I worked at has always been leading by committee, which is not true leadership in my book.

00:30:54 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:30:55 – Charbel Rizk

And so that was the other really kind of amazing thing that I have seen in the world and I worked across in my previous path. And not only did I work with large organizations, I interacted with government, military. I always thought the military had a little bit more kind of a top down, not in technology development and developing programs. They operate just like the companies they work with. They reflect that same approach. You know, every decision requires 50 people. I mean, it’s like, really, you know, and so that was kind of the lessons learned there. Not only, you know, am I not afraid of big companies out there. I also, humbly speaking, I’ve learned few things that I think I am planning on building into the Oculi, you know, culture.

00:31:50 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:31:50 – Charbel Rizk

So if we become a big company, we don’t become the cruising, you know, I would like the company to remain kind of the thought leader as well.

00:32:01 – Trevor Schmidt

Do you have a few examples of what that would look like? What are the things you want to build into your company?

00:32:06 – Charbel Rizk

Yeah, I mean, I actually have philosophy in management. You know, I’m a big believer in distributed intelligence and decision making. It’s the most efficient way. Okay. I know I’m not the smartest guy in the room. And so I believe in that model, which I haven’t really seen practice. You know, you hear people talk about it, right. But, you know, I haven’t really seen it in practice, so. So that’s one thing I will definitely, you know, push for. I believe in giving people responsibility, but also authority.

00:32:38 – Trevor Schmidt

Sure.

00:32:39 – Charbel Rizk

So that’s one that, you know, that I would definitely build on and continue to. And then you have to take risk, you know, again, I repeat a lot of famous expressions, but people don’t practice them. No pain, no gain. You know, how many, how many times we’ve heard that, right? But then when it comes to risk, you know, people start counting, you know, it’s like, I took a lot of personal risk on this venture.

00:33:00 – Trevor Schmidt

Sure.

00:33:01 – Charbel Rizk

I don’t know of anybody else around me that would do it. Okay. I haven’t met that person yet, you know, but that’s how I am, you know, if I believe in something, you know, I don’t have, you know, I don’t like to be halfway. That’s why I resigned the university, because, you know, I realized the startup really needs 100% of me, and actually it’s getting now 300% of me, but I realized it’s not going to go, you know, where I’d like it to go without, you know, me kind of putting all, you know, the safe route is you put 1ft on land, 1ft on water. That was my dad’s famous saying, never go completely in one direction. I’m like, well, okay, you’re going to be moving slow the whole time, you know, because you can’t run and you can’t swim. And so I’m not, I don’t prescribe to that philosophy, you know, you know, you believe in something, just, you know, put all, you know, everything behind it and press on. So that would be the other angle of the, you know, so distributed decision making, and then, you know, take risks.

00:33:55 – Trevor Schmidt

That’s great. So you had mentioned the fact, you know, that these bigger business have resources, which made me want to ask the question, kind of as you think about fundraising for the business, is it harder to raise funds for a hard tech company like yours, or how are you thinking about that? And what are the investors kind of responded to?

00:34:14 – Charbel Rizk

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I can tell you it’s very hard. In fact, I would easily say it’s ten times harder for a company like ours, easily. I mean, it could be even 100. Because what happens is you got a wide pool of investors, the vast majority of them don’t do hardware.

00:34:29 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:34:30 – Charbel Rizk

So you already lost most of them. Right. And then even with those that do hardware, a very small percentage does deep tech semiconductor like we are. Okay, so you’re down to really only a handful of investors. So definitely fundraising is a challenge, you know, for a company like ours, for sure.

00:34:48 – Trevor Schmidt

And is it that made harder by geography as well? Are you finding, like, there’s more kind of hard tech investors elsewhere or.

00:34:54 – Charbel Rizk

Oh, no, no, no, thank you. I mean, it’s. I can tell you that most of the few investors that invest in our space are on the west coast. And the first question they typically ask me, when are you moving out here? And so there’s definitely a strong bias to the geography.

00:35:13 – Trevor Schmidt

So as you think about the opportunities for the company in the next year, next five years, what do you see as the biggest opportunities?

00:35:22 – Charbel Rizk

Well, I believe that, you know, in the next five years, Oculi has the potential to become the leader of visual AI at the edge. No matter what your product is as a customer, we can add eyes to them in a most efficient way. And when I talk about efficiency here, I talk about energy, I talk about dollars, and I also talk about time.

00:35:45 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:35:46 – Charbel Rizk

Okay. That’s really where I believe this company can reach that, you know, even that short timeframe, because the market is really eager for something like the technology we’re developing that has become so loud and clear from our engagement. The fact that they’re actually considering other solutions that are not that great is another indicative point that I have that the market really wants. When we go to a trade show, if I have samples, I only have a few. If I have samples to sell, they’ll all. They’ll all be gone.

00:36:21 – Trevor Schmidt

Oh, wow.

00:36:21 – Charbel Rizk

Okay. At every show, that’s the norm, you know, where can we get this? Okay, sorry, we don’t have yet. So that’s actually why we did this, by the way. I haven’t talked about that.

00:36:30 – Trevor Schmidt

What is that?

00:36:31 – Charbel Rizk

This is our new eval program that enables our customers to quickly evaluate our technology before the chips are available in high volume.

00:36:38 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:36:39 – Charbel Rizk

So it will act and do things just like our chip would. And so we launched this only really a couple of weeks ago, and we’re seeing good signs to that.

00:36:50 – Trevor Schmidt

So how does that work as far as the demonstration then?

00:36:52 – Charbel Rizk

So they plug it basically, and we’ll provide the software, and they basically plug it into a computer, and then they program it to do something and it will do it.

00:37:00 – Trevor Schmidt

Fascinating.

00:37:00 – Charbel Rizk

Okay. And so initially, you know, we did this to be able to hand something in larger numbers because we only have a few of these chip samples.

00:37:07 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:37:08 – Charbel Rizk

And so we did this to hand out in larger volume. And then what I realized, it actually is helping our messaging now because now the customer realizes that customers are going to replace all of that with a single chip, which wasn’t really the intent, but it took this much to simulate what this chip does well.

00:37:28 – Trevor Schmidt

And you talked about marketing and the kind of visualization that’s created by having something physical.

00:37:32 – Charbel Rizk

Exactly. That’s what I mean. I’m new, I keep learning this. I have a team member who pushed for doing something like this. And I said, yeah, let’s do it. We had been seeing signs of that at trade shows where they just want something. So now we have something.

00:37:48 – Trevor Schmidt

So you talked about the opportunity for the company within the five years of being everywhere that the vision sensor is, what do you see as the biggest hurdles from keeping you from reaching that goal?

00:37:57 – Charbel Rizk

It really is just convincing either your partners in the supply chain or the investors that the opportunity is really that big and merits, you know, moving faster and faster. That’s the only hurdle. I mean, you know, I think we have a good team now. We’re attracting talent, you know, so that is, you know, that’s been a good, what I consider to be an excellent data point for us as a company. And so just having more resources and the right partnerships to move faster.

00:38:29 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah.

00:38:29 – Charbel Rizk

And that’s really what I’m going to focus on. But I want to show you something. You know, you asked me earlier, you know, what motivates me?

00:38:35 – Trevor Schmidt

Sure.

00:38:36 – Charbel Rizk

I want to automate my own house.

00:38:37 – Trevor Schmidt

Okay.

00:38:38 – Charbel Rizk

Okay.

00:38:38 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah.

00:38:39 – Charbel Rizk

So I developed this technology for my own use.

00:38:41 – Trevor Schmidt

Yep.

00:38:42 – Charbel Rizk

And so this is ultimately, you know, again, this is a sample, but this is ultimately something that you can buy online, you even not an engineer.

00:38:51 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:38:51 – Charbel Rizk

Okay. We’ll give you the software to program it and say, okay, I want to, I want to know when my dog comes to the kitchen. And it will only bother you when your dog comes to the kitchen, not when your child or when somebody else, you know. Okay, that’s the level of intelligence that we have already the technology for. Okay.

00:39:09 – Trevor Schmidt

And it can do it just on its own.

00:39:10 – Charbel Rizk

That’s it. We’ll give you what you need. And so this is what I mean by we want to be the leader in visual intelligence. There are companies that build the image sensor. They send it over to another company that builds a module, another company builds the camera. Someone else develops a software. Right. You know, for visual intelligence, alkali eventually will become it.

00:39:30 – Trevor Schmidt

Wow. And so for our listeners, he’s essentially holding up a chip that’s about the size of a dime.

00:39:34 – Charbel Rizk

Yeah, yeah. This is basically has everything that you can, you know, you know, probably as a wireless device on there and, you know, so. So you can duct tape it to your house, you know, in your ceiling. You know, that’s literally what I’m going, because I want to do my own house.

00:39:47 – Trevor Schmidt

Sure.

00:39:47 – Charbel Rizk

You know, without using legacy technology that’s been driving me crazy. And the example I always talk about is my mom passed away a couple years ago, unfortunately. But, you know, when we went on road trips, she. Most of the time she paused and said, did we turn off the stove? You know, I’m sure you have to. You know, when I take my own family on trips, you know, I’m making sure that the doors were locked, you know, the refrigerator is closed. My wife wants to make sure the trash is taken out. You know, these are basic things that you can implement in your, you know, long before you have a refrigerator that tells you you need milk. Tell me what you know. Yeah, exactly. You know, now they can do that. It’s rather easy, you know, detecting the doors closed. You don’t need a visual sensor for that. But the point is, once you have that level of eyes or vision intelligence in your space, you know, you could do a lot of the stuff. So that’s what ultimately I’d like to see.

00:40:45 – Trevor Schmidt

Now, you’ve mentioned a couple times that you kind of avoid the use of AI, the term AI, and that there’s kind of all of this talk around it and some of it’s not really AI at all. Tell me a little bit more about your thoughts there.

00:40:58 – Charbel Rizk

And experience, like I said, in the early nineties, is when I developed the four rotor drone and it had enough intelligence on there to be autonomous. AI stands for artificial intelligence, basically, the ability for non humans to make a decision to act on something basic way. Right. What it is AI today is really being used is driven by a lot of noise that comes from a chat GBT, you know, what they call the OpenAI company and Nvidia is behind them and whatever, where they have a particular approach. Generative AI is the term you probably heard as well. That’s a particular approach out of gazillion that have been around and will be as well. Right. And so that’s why I don’t use the term AI, because. Because of their marketing machine, they have made the two equal.

00:41:52 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:41:53 – Charbel Rizk

Which is not the case. You know, if our sensor is able to, on its own to this, to decide a person is there. That’s artificial intelligence.

00:42:02 – Trevor Schmidt

Sure.

00:42:02 – Charbel Rizk

There’s no human involved, you know, because in the nineties, AI was actually big. I don’t know if you remember or not. And the problem we all ran into that we were operating in that space is that we needed a cluster of computers in order to do basic inference. Right. And that that’s the only thing that has changed is now that we have a lot more computing power. But what has not changed is the power consumption.

00:42:29 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:42:30 – Charbel Rizk

That’s the formula that we have not really improved on as much. And forget about it. When you start doing visual stuff, things kind of become a lot more challenging.

00:42:39 – Trevor Schmidt

Yeah, because it’s interesting that you say it that way, because, I don’t know, in our space, kind of in the legal side and in fundraising side, everybody starts to throw AI around because that’s the new most recent buzzword that everybody wants to invest around. So it’s interesting to hear kind of a counterpoint to that. Like, yeah, it’s not really accurate of what you’re doing. If people are thinking large language models or something, that’s not what you’re doing.

00:43:00 – Charbel Rizk

Yeah, exactly. And so a couple years ago, the people told us not to use a world AI because it was toxic. Now it’s popular. Tomorrow is going to become toxic again.

00:43:09 – Trevor Schmidt

Well, now all of a sudden, the headlines were in an AI bubble. So now all of a sudden, we’re almost on the other side of that.

00:43:14 – Charbel Rizk

I mean, it’s because, I mean, I think these big companies obviously are making, you know, money right now in the stock market in the near term by generating noise. But you cannot avoid the reality. Eventually it catches up with you. You know, by then, maybe they made their money and they don’t care. We’ll see, we’ll see. I prefer to be more on the honest side, you know, but on the painfully honest side.

00:43:36 – Trevor Schmidt

So we are the Founder Shares podcast. And so I like to ask all of my guests, you know, if there’s one piece of advice that you could share with somebody who’s thinking about starting a company, what would that advice be?

00:43:48 – Charbel Rizk

You can do it alone. It takes team effort and, you know, spend all your time and energy building the network before you do anything else. I did the reverse. You know, I jumped into a startup where I had no network whatsoever, amongst commercial companies that I’m engaged with right now, and amongst investors, even less so. Right. And people that I can recruit. Most of my background was academic research, defense. Those are the people that tend, not necessarily the best for a deep tech startup.

00:44:20 – Trevor Schmidt

Right.

00:44:20 – Charbel Rizk

So spend your time and energy just building that network, and then that network will help you in multiple ways. It’ll help you refine what you really, what you want to do, you know, because when you’re in the midst of a startup, you don’t have a lot of breathing space. And that’s the unfortunate experience I went through. But so that’s my number one, you know, advice is just go volunteer if you don’t want to get paid. Be a technical, you know, that’s one thing I would have done had I known, because I was an academic, I was a researcher, I had the credentials, I would have helped VC’s on their technical due diligence.

00:44:59 – Trevor Schmidt

Interesting.

00:45:00 – Charbel Rizk

That would have given me the context, but also would have allowed me to understand how they think.

00:45:04 – Trevor Schmidt

Yep.

00:45:05 – Charbel Rizk

Because it was a. That was a hard lesson to learn. You know, I would have done, you know, these things. Right. You know, I would have worked in a commercial world before I jumped into it, you know, again, because the commercial world works differently than the defense world.

00:45:19 – Trevor Schmidt

Sure.

00:45:20 – Charbel Rizk

And so that’s my number one advice by far, is learn the environment and then develop the network and be extremely careful who you bring on board as co founders and key team members early on.

00:45:36 – Trevor Schmidt

That’s great advice. How can our listeners connect with you or learn more about Oculi?

00:45:42 – Charbel Rizk

Oculi AI. Again, we picked that website a few years ago, long before the AI buzz, and that’s typically where I would recommend people go. They have a way of contacting us there, but they also have a way of looking at what we’re doing and learn a little bit more about our technology and stuff.

00:45:59 – Trevor Schmidt

Very good.

00:45:59 – Charbel Rizk

And we’re always looking for exceptional talent because a startup really can only survive. And what I mean by exceptional is for the job they need to do within the startup environment. It’s not about your grades, it’s not about. It’s really a more wholesome assessment in my book, how well you do with uncertainty, because things change every week. So we’re constantly looking for people and, you know, so if anyone out there is interested in changing the world along the lines that I talked about, you know, and they think they, you know, this might be a good fit for them, reach out to us, and we’re happy to talk to you.

00:46:35 – Trevor Schmidt

I hope they do. And I can’t wait to see where the company goes. Charbel, thanks so much.

00:46:38 – Charbel Rizk

Okay, thank you, Charbel.

00:46:46 – Trevor Schmidt

That was Charbel. Rizk. Learn more about Oculi at Oculi AI. That’s Oculi dot AI. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Founder Shares podcast. If you’re a founder or business owner and need legal advice, be sure to check out our team@hutchlaw.com. that’s hutchlaw.com. we have the capacity to help you out with just about any legal need your company may be facing. We’re passionate about the innovation economy and ready to help you on your entrepreneurial journey. The show was edited and produced by Earfluence. I’m Trevor Schmidt, and thanks for listening to the Founder Shares podcast.