Welcome back to Cohort Nine’s Founder Friday Interviews series, where we check in with our startups on the journey thus far. Today we’re talking to Orbityl CEO Sean Kaiser and CTO Kristina Pearkes.
HWY1: What are you working on right now?
KP: This week we’re working on the layout for our new boards and prototypes. We’re planning them out so we can hopefully have a spin up in the next couple of weeks.
SK: We’re also collecting data simultaneously to be able to better predict when users are thinking of a specific word. I’ve been fine-tuning the algorithms.
What’s your biggest key learning been so far?
SK: You will never have enough information to make decisions. At one point, we were spending a lot of time in the middle zone trying to weigh our options, and the lesson we learned is that you have to choose a path and go down it: if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, reevaluate then, because time is out to get you.
KP: Indecision can paralyze you, and you just have to say “Let’s try this.” As long as you’re doing things, you’re getting new information and learning, rather than just trying to overanalyze what you have.
What’s your biggest surprise been?
SK: We thought we’d have a lot more hardware development done by this point; things just take longer than you think they will.
Has anything about your approach changed?
KP: Before, we were trying to finesse, to make the best decision possible, and we were taking too long.
SK: Aside from moving as fast as we can to make decisions a lot quicker than we would before, we also try to work more efficiently. When we got here, we’d both collaborate a lot on pretty much everything, and now we’ve definitely split up more. Kristina does all the electronics and hardware work, and I do all the machine learning and administrative tasks — all the emails and fun stuff.
What’s your biggest challenge been thus far?
SK: I would say work/life balance. We put in a lot of hours and we’re here every day pretty late; we have to take a step back sometimes and try to take a break.
KP: A lot of the challenge is balancing how much you progress on the technical side vs. the product-market fit side. Finding a balance between those is definitely hard. At the beginning, we were spending a lot more time on market and feeling like we weren’t getting very far on the product; now we’re shifting to spend a lot more time on development.
SK: Highway1 is great for where we are right now because of the hardware and technical expertise it’s brought, and we want to get as much out of it as we can.
In what ways has Highway1 been the biggest help?
SK: The biggest help is having an objective view of the company, and not in the sense of meeting someone who only has two minutes to think about your company. It’s nice to have people who can think about you for a longer period, see the progress you make, and give you their opinion from a removed viewpoint. That can sometimes be more valuable than advice from someone who’s very accomplished but has only been thinking about you for a short while.
The space itself has been awesome. We worked out of an apartment before and thought “This is the bomb,” and then we realized how productive we are when we’re actually in a space that’s conducive to working, filled with other people who are also working and keeping us motivated.
The alumni in the building have also been really helpful. It’s nice to have other people around who’ve done some of this stuff before or are doing it now. We knew about all the different types of investment or financing you could get, for instance, but we didn’t know the actual mechanics of how you go about getting them, not to mention the culture around talking to people about investing in you. There’s a lot of unwritten things in that world that can be costly if you don’t know what to do ahead of time, so it’s been very helpful having the experience of the alumni.
What are your goals for your time here?
SK: We want to be able to put the earplugs in your head and know if you thought of something specific: you’ll imagine yourself grasping your hand, let’s say, and we’ll be able to tell when you’re doing it.
Do you have any advice for beginning hardware startups?
SK: There’s a lot that can be done without you having to do everything; try to leverage that as much as possible. It’ll save you a lot of development time.
KP: Don’t be afraid to ask for help on things. You can spend a long time figuring something out yourself, or you can just ask someone a quick question that can clear things up so much more quickly, especially in scenarios where you’re starting to second-guess yourself. Finding someone you can just bounce questions off is really helpful in terms of giving you confidence, but also helping you move fast, so you don’t waste as much time.
SK: The cool thing about hardware is that you get to learn so much. In our company alone, we do some mechanical and electrical engineering, but there’s also firmware, software, machine learning —
KP: — Neuroscience, electrochemistry —
SK: — Materials science. There’s so many areas of knowledge you need, and you get to learn it all.
