You're listening to Trade Show Live On the Road, featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors and trade show industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country in a wide variety of industries from healthcare to consumer products and everything in between. The podcast is a production of the Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. And now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live.

Janet (00:28):

We're at CES 2020 looking ahead to another exciting decade of innovation and consumer electronics development. However, you can't do it without money. So with me right now is the founder of Angel Launch, Zahava Stroud. Zahava welcome to Trade Show Live at CES 2020.

Zahava (00:50):

Thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

Janet (00:52):

Now we're on the first day of the show for us, which is Tuesday. However, Zahava you've been busy; you've already done a number of things at CES. So tell me a little bit about Angel Launch and what you were up to yesterday.

Zahava (01:06):

Sure. So our website is angellaunch - l a u n c h - .com and we are a leading producer of investment forums, summits and networking events in Silicon Valley. We produce events almost every week connecting startups to investors from around the world. They consist of networking receptions, hitch nights, demo showcases, venture forums, and one of our most popular ones is called backyard capital, where we do a monthly reception in a private home in a very elite area of Silicon Valley where we get 150 startups and investors for informal networking. The goal of these events has been to connect investors to promising startups through deal-making and many startups from around the world have received millions in funding. Yesterday we produced an annual conference at CES; we do every year for over 10 years, called Silicon Valley Funding Summit. And it's a one day conference where we bring in startups from around the world. We bring in investors ranging from millions to a hundred million in funds looking for promising startups. We do a full day of networking, pitching and a demo showcase was very successful. The startups met a lot of great investors and in fact serves told me that they now have been funded from our past events, which is very exciting.

Janet (02:26):

Oh, we love hearing about people getting money. Now she may sound like it's got a singular focus, consumer electronics, but really we've got everything here from the health tech to virtual reality to toys and games and all kinds of silly stuff to very, very serious things. I'm curious as a Angel Launch person putting together people who have ideas with people who can fund them, are you agnostic to, you don't really care what kind of business it is or are you in any particular area?

Zahava (03:01):

So the great thing is that what we do is we produce live events. We don't actually invest. We connect startups to accredited investors and we cover all markets. In the last two months we get a FinTech event. We did quite a few on health tech, life science and medical devices, automotive and connected cars, enterprise and consumer applications, AI, deep tech, machine learning. We cover all markets. And what we found is that there's such a huge community of people traveling to the Bay area who don't live there, that we can do events almost every week and we can get several hundred people, those startups and investors who attend, but at least 40% don't live in the Bay area. They're just traveling through for meetings or deals, so we're a great resource for them to meet other people.

Janet (03:49):

Tell me about the investing or the vetting of the investors. Do you require that ultimately they invest in something? How do you prove that they have the money they say they have to fund people?

Zahava (04:03):

so we don't do rigorous due diligence since we're an event producer. What we do is we ask investors and we rely on their self representation that they are accredited investors. If we don't know, then we ask them for some types of documentation such as websites, LinkedIn profile, angel list profile, or people that we know and then we rely on their representation. And so far we haven't had any issues with that because again, the events are free or low cost. And the whole point is to connect people to investors. Many of the investors also are syndicated, which is very common. Maybe they'll get 10 or 20 investors who invest a small amount in a deal. So we often find that angels come to our events, refer their friends to startups. In fact, I just met a startup that pitched at an event a year ago and then recently met an investor who was at a different event, but one of the investors he met knew of the startup and said they'd be great for you, connected them. And now he's a board of advisor and investor in this startup because they had all attended two different events in the Bay area. Networking is the number one place that startups make deals. So that's why it's important to go to as many events as you can.

Janet (05:10):

I'm curious about the startups themselves. Do they just come into it cold and learn by the school of hard knocks, how to pitch? They've come to you with that experience or is this a great place for them to learn those skills?

Zahava (05:22):

So we don't do any training or there are many resources that do and we have many partners that offer training. For instance, at our backyard capital, which is held on a Thursday, we offer a free training by someone who's a mentor on Wednesday nights for anyone who's pitching to come and learn. So if someone asks me for training, we have many other resources in the Bay area where you can go and learn about how to pitch. But one reason people come is to see other people pitch. Because of course when you live in the Bay area and you're pitching all the time or going to events, you have a much higher level of presentation and you know what investors inspect. So we find it's very helpful for people who never pitched to get an idea of what they should be doing. We use that as a learning process.

Janet (06:04):

You know, when I think about pitching, I think about it being elevator pitch, you know, tell me 30 seconds. But generally, how long do people have to pitch their ideas at your events?

Zahava (06:13):

So before my current life, I was a trial attorney and I was used to being in court with the judges who had a very limited attention span. I was used to pitching, you know, a lawsuit. That's where millions of dollars I had two minutes. So I tell all my startups, pretend that you are pitching for your life and you have two to four minutes to convince someone that they should invest in you because you're actually pitching for millions of dollars. So most of our pitches are three to five minutes because they're in front of a stage. We tell startups you need to learn to have, to have an elevator pitch so that when people want to meet with you, then you can do the extensive dialogue in the PowerPoint slides and the more extensive presentation. But you should have a very charming, with a short pitch to get their initial attention.

Janet (06:57):

You know, sometimes technology can be, uh, kind of boring or a little over people's heads. And yet those could be the billion dollar ideas. Do you find that folks that are successfully landing funding that they really do bring a presence to the stage?

Zahava (07:14):

Well, I would say it's not necessarily true. When you see the extremely successful startups that have raised millions and millions of dollars and you see their founders speak, they are usually very smart, very charismatic, great at getting along with the people and you can understand why they got to their position. But I don't deal with that level of a startup like an Airbnb, right? I deal with early stage startups who are on the path to growth. So they may have not developed their full persona yet. And oftentimes it's not necessarily the personality of the founder, but the value of their startup that people care about, such as their customers, how much money they've raised, how much money they've made, how unique are they to the industry, who's on their management team, who are their partners? That type of stage. So we find those are some of the qualities that investors look for for the initial investment opportunity.

Janet (08:06):

So some of these investments may be, you know, early in the low five figures, it might not be a huge amount of money. Chances are what they're going to get out of it. Aside from the money, is the advice and the input from these potential investors?

Zahava (08:20):

Well, you know, the dirty secret of Silicon Valley is most investors don't have a home run, right? You hear about a few who do, but most of the ones I talk to privately, maybe had one home run in 10 or 20 years of investing millions of dollars. And even then it's often not huge enough for them to retire. So most investors do it, number one, because they're intellectually curious. They want to be helpful. They often can be a board or an advisor to the company and they believe in the product. So most of them aren't doing it just for the money. But of course they like a rate of return. So it's not unusual for an investor to maybe have 10 or 20 startups hoping that one of them will be successful, but at the same time they're going to give you advice to help you grow your startup venture.

Janet (09:03):

Now you mentioned that you're doing events almost weekly and probably as soon, sometimes more than once a week or or larger scale events, takes a lot of names and email addresses to make that happen. How have you gone about building this network?

Zahava (09:18):

So I've been doing this for over 15 years. Number one, it's relationship driven. I attend many events in trade shows, so I constantly meet people. I get cards from exhibitors at trade shows, people call me up, we use social media, all the normal forms of marketing. Well, number one, I would say it's word of mouth, which is not unusual for people to contact us because someone else got their email and referred them to us. Unfortunately people have a great experience, right? So they tell their friends, Hey, we went to this event, we had a great experience, we think you would as well. So people just join our mailing list. And again, if you go to our website, angel, launch.com you can join our mailing lists, get our contact information. We're based in Silicon Valley and learn more how you could attend, participate, or even host your own events.

Janet (10:04):

Okay. Now I'm trying to sit down and think how are you making a living if it's very low cost free to very small amount of money for attendees. Gee, how are you making a living?

Zahava (10:16):

The event industry is a very transparent industry and there's three ways we all make money. We either charge attendees, we charge sponsors, or we charge startups to pitch, and I use a variance of that model depending on the event. For instance, I had several free events recently where sponsors underwrote the event. They were either foreign entities that wanted to reach an audience or they were a group of startups that were looking to reach investors. So that's one way. Another way is we charge a fee for startups to pitch, which covers our costs for the event. And the third way is for some events we charge a low cost attending ticket.

Janet (10:50):

I've been a part of startup weekend before. Now this is where somebody literally wrote down an idea on the back of a card probably while people in front of him were pitching an idea and I've had to sit through 60 or more people doing a 62nd pitch and I was exhausted. Just listening to that at the end. Do you really cut it off at a certain amount? What's the magic number of people pitching?

Zahava (11:14):

It really depends on the event. I've done all types of events. Yesterday we had a full day of, I'm not sure, maybe about 40 startups pitching than I do evening events with 10 startups pitching. I would say it really, it's not so much a magic number of pitching. It's the quality of the pitches. If you have a good quality, the investors will sit and listen because the Bay area is very competitive. Investors all want to be in early on the best deal and the best deals go to the highest profile venture capital firms, so all the other investors are competing to get the attention of the good deals. That's why people who produce events like myself can't get investors to attend, is they're always looking for deal flow.

Janet (11:51):

Now I'm curious, are people sending you emails saying, "hey, Zahava, come on. Just hand me a good one. You know what's coming."

Zahava (11:59):

You know they don't do that. It's just not the way they do in Silicon Valley, but they attend events and that's why most of my events get 40 to 80 accredited investors, which is a lot if I'm doing them almost every week, but they know yesterday at my event, one of my investors said he'd been coming to my event for maybe 10 years that I've been doing it. He's from Michigan. He said, I come because I meet high quality startups continuously. It's fun. He said, I get to meet investors from around the world and I get to be exposed to a huge amount of startups the day before CES begins, so it's a great opportunity to kind of get a heads up on what's hot in the industry.

Janet (12:32):

I'm curious about Michigan or in this case, the North Carolina startup pavilion, but you're talking about predominantly doing events in Silicon Valley. Do you find that people from around the country come to Silicon Valley for this or is there a real need for your services in other locales around the country?

Zahava (12:53):

I would say that the reason I do them in Silicon Valley is because that's where the investors are. You could only produce successful venture forums if you have investors and the really the major cities in the U S are LA, New York, Silicon Valley and Boston. So I produce most of my events either during trade shows like this trade show at CES because you have investors in town or I did one at South by Southwest in partnership with the EU enriching the EU program. I've done them in other cities only as part of another trade show, but I do them mostly in the Bay area and I think you'll find most venture forms are done either LA or New York because that's where we have the highest concentration of technical investors.

Janet (13:34):

Even though there's only really three places where you can hold the biggest of the big trade shows, which would be Las Vegas, Orlando and Chicago. So I haven't heard. You mentioned Orlando and Chicago. What's your feeling about those two markets?

Zahava (13:49):

It's not so much the city. It's where are the tech trade shows? And the problem is most startup tech trade shows are either San Francisco or New York. An example is tech crunch, which does it in most cities. There are not a lot of trade shows for tech startups. Right? CES has developed Eureka Park over the last few years to fill that need. So we go to tech trade shows that have either startups or investors. There just aren't very many of them.

Janet (14:12):

Okay. So I'm going to put you in the hot spot here and say, okay, we've just crossed over into a new decade. What do you think is going to be coming up for us? And I'm only gonna ask you for like a couple of years, I'm not going to check back with you in 10 years, but next couple of years for the startup industry, for investors in this space, is a more happening, less happening? Is it more exciting? Is it getting more focused? Is it harder to be a startup?

Zahava (14:43):

I can tell you first of all, what are the hot tech trends? Because I go to events all the time and being that the Bay area is cutting edge and early adapters, I have a sense of what's hot and what's not. And I also talked to a lot of investors behind the seat. So some of the hot topics right now are anything to do with internet of things or sensors, anything to do with big data analytics and how retail users are using that type of data. Cyber security and privacy issues are huge. And also anything to do with how the internet improves your daily life. Health and wellness, MedTech, health and wellness, things like that. So that's kind of some of the topics. And of course AI robotics and machine learning, which is now being utilized. So investors are looking for those kinds of markets and market opportunities.

Zahava (15:33):

Yes, there will always be huge innovation. I think there'll be more and more of it because we have more access resources on the internet, more tools that help startups develop. So I think the market will continue to grow. The challenge will be that investors want to see a higher level of success before they invest in you and that's what I hear from a lot of startups in the early days of investing you could get by with 100,000 now investors don't even like to consider less than a million because they know how expensive it is to hire developers to do a marketing plan to do advertising, all that type of thing. So a lot of startups are using a lot more friends and family funds initially to get to the point of creating a product or are they using campaigns like Kickstarter, Indiegogo where we call proof of concept and then once they have that or they have a market traction, then they go out and seek investors funding.

Janet (16:28):

so you think they're going to be more successful if they already have customers and they already have revenue streams?

Zahava (16:35):

it's huge. The number one thing I tell startups is when they're doing a pitch, don't bury the lead. If you have customers, if you have a revenue stream, if you already have a product, if you have a loyal following, start with that. When you're pitching, because that's the most impressive thing is they call it traction. The investors want to know you have traction and that you're scalable and even if you have a small marketplace, it shows you have the room to grow and that's what they're looking for.

Janet (17:01):

So now let's look ahead to what's going on with Angel Launch. What are you predicting for yourself in the next few years?

Zahava (17:07):

Well, I honestly cannot tell you that far ahead. I live in the Bay area pretty much month to month for events because I'm all about what's hot and that's why I've been successful. I constantly change my business model, the theme of my events, the format, depending on what's happening in the event marketplace. We have a lot of events in the Bay area for venture capital, and so you have to offer features that make people want to attend. You have to have good startups, the networking, valuable information and education. So I'll probably keep doing what I do now, which is evening events. Venture for summits is a way to enhance the local ecosystem.

Janet (17:45):

Well, I wish you a lot of luck and I hope that 2020 and beyond is very good for you.

New Speaker (17:52):

Thank you so much. I appreciate being here.

Introducer (17:56):

Thanks for listening to Trade Show Live On the Road, a production of the Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. If you need innovative programs to engage attendees, exhibitors and sponsors, custom research or new solutions for your trade show, hot tech, the Trade Show Manager on our website, thetradeshowmanager.com.

Matt Kruea (00:00):

You're listening to Trade Show Live on the Road!, featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and trade show, industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country in a wide variety of industries, from healthcare to consumer products. And everything in between. The podcast is a production of The Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. And now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live.

Janet Kennedy (00:28):

Janet Kennedy: (00:28) Trade Show Live is on the road at CES 2020 we are in Eureka Park, which is where all the startups are and we happen to have a number of startups with us, with a very strong NC State tie. So we brought in one of our honor guests here today, Jennifer Capps, who's a leader in the entrepreneurship program at NC State to talk about her impressions of CES and where she feels NC State's ecosystem of entrepreneurship would fall. So Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.

Jennifer Capps (00:59):

Thank you so much for having me here today.

Janet Kennedy (01:01):

Okay, I bet you're sort of like freaking out at your first experience at CES.

Jennifer Capps (01:05):

I am. This is like the world's biggest playground for entrepreneurship and innovation. Nerds like myself. This is amazing. How can you just walk down an aisle and not be super inspired? You absolutely can't. I keep getting distracted.

Speaker 2 (01:19):

If I'm going to meet someone, I had to make myself pull away from some of these booths because the ideas are just phenomenal. You know, this is the ultimate shiny object syndrome issue except in Eureka park or think where it's like 2000 different businesses ideas, just amazingly overwhelming. Oh absolutely. But outside come coming from NC State and working with our students, they overwhelm me in the exact same way. I get the absolute privilege to work with students from all across the university and one of our intro level classes and these students are very new to this world of innovation and entrepreneurship in many ways, therefore is to go out and study markets and identify pain points that could become entrepreneurial opportunities. And then very quickly they proposed solutions. Well when I come to a place like this and I see so many of the ideas that students have proposed in the last few years, showing up at CES in some way, that is such a powerful tool for me to take back into the classroom to inspire them and all of a sudden this becomes something that's aspirational for them.

Janet Kennedy (02:27):

Do you feel like students are coming in a little more hardwired to think about themselves as entrepreneurs or owners of businesses?

Jennifer Capps (02:35):

I do. In many ways students are coming in knowing the word entrepreneurship and knowing that it sounds really cool. They're open to exploring the idea of entrepreneurship. What many of them don't understand is one, the work that goes into it, you know, in many ways they have sort of the shark tank view or they think, I just have to have a great idea and get up in front of national TV and people will fund me. So we about the steps that it takes and we talk about the fact that it's okay to fail as long as you do so for the right reasons. We talk about pivots, you know, it's so interesting that entrepreneurial pivot is a generally accepted principle here. We've already talked to dozens of companies represented here who talk about the pivots that they've made because of information they received at CES, but as individuals we often don't give ourselves the same permission to pivot in our career choices.

Jennifer Capps (03:26):

And I think that's one of the things that I work with our entrepreneurship students on. I think that's one of the interesting things too about coming even when you're not 100% ready, but you're still flexible enough to rethink. An example is NC State grads who founded brilliant soul came last year thinking this is a gaming thing. Now what they, what brilliant soul is for those folks who haven't listened to Jeff guard's podcast is basically an insole that has haptic technology in it and sensors that they envisioned using for VR and gaming purposes. Well, they got a ton of feedback from the biggest names in footwear last year and they haven't pivoted. They have expanded how they've developed their product. So now they're thinking about how does it apply to healthcare? How does it apply to other types of non-gaming functions? They even had a podiatrist who's a Colonel in the U S army stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina helped them with very specifically redesigning from some of her perspectives in a military environment.

Jennifer Capps (04:34):

So I'm absolutely so proud of them for not thinking, Hey, people didn't want my product. They recognize that input that the product needed to evolve to grab the market. That was one of the most impressive things to me as well about that company, how open they are to making these adjustments and going where the market's need them. And I think that's such a powerful thing that we can show to our NC State students. It's something that I'd like to get our NC State alumni entrepreneurs involved with because I think they need those reminders as well. I could see NC State entrepreneurs having an entire wall representation at the next CES. That would be an amazing dream of mine.

Janet Kennedy (05:14):

So the program at NC State does involve mentorship, right?

Jennifer Capps (05:18):

Absolutely. In many different ways. NC State entrepreneurship offers a mentoring program where we bring people from the community in to interact very naturally with our students and we let the students and the mentors pair themselves off as they see fit.

Janet Kennedy (05:34):

One of the other things I found interesting at CES is the number of people who have come up who either are from North Carolina and they're so excited to see the state of North Carolina represented here or they recognize that we are a growing, expanding dynamic technology.

Jennifer Capps (05:52):

Absolutely. The NC State Alumni Association has done such a wonderful of creating an entrepreneurs affinity group within that association, so entrepreneurs can now get together, they can network, they can build relationships, find potential new clients, and let's not forget, NC State doesn't just produce entrepreneurs. We produce really great employees of startup companies so they can recruit for their first level employees as well.

Janet Kennedy (06:20):

You know, that's a really good point because if you have employees with an entrepreneurship mindset, they're going to be problem solvers. They're not going to expect you to hand over a fully written job description and it not change. They're probably going to push back a little bit and challenge the companies that they join to do better, to be better and to innovate.

Jennifer Capps (06:39):

That's absolutely true and that's a great point. That is one of the cornerstones of our educational process within NC State entrepreneurship. Instilling that entrepreneurial mindset and then helping students figure out where their best fit in that world is going to be. In some cases, that is going to be a startup. In other cases, it's going to be employee number five of a startup, and in other cases that's going to be joining a large corporation, but bringing that entrepreneurial mindset into everything that they do. Now, help me understand how the entrepreneurship program works within the ecosystem of NC State. So I come in as a student and I'm an English major. I'm a theater major. I'm a engineering major. Where does the entrepreneurship program, Paul, NC State entrepreneurship and the NC State entrepreneurship Alliance spans across the entire university.

Jennifer Capps (07:31):

NC State has so many absolutely amazing entrepreneurship programs. The Poole College of Management has many incredible entrepreneurship opportunities. You can get a major in business with a concentration in entrepreneurship. You can get a minor in business management with a concentration in entrepreneurship. They housed the entrepreneurship clinic, which is such an amazing program. But then in our other colleges, the college of engineering has an engineering entrepreneurs program that is absolutely spectacular open to any student on campus. We have a minor in arts entrepreneurship and a rapidly evolving arts entrepreneurship program that is just outstanding. We have a lot of work and social entrepreneurship. The design school has many entrepreneurial opportunities. Our College of Textiles has, I could go on for days and days and days. NC State entrepreneurship exists to support all of those communities in ways that help them grow without taking away the unique flavor that they were built on in the first place.

Jennifer Capps (08:39):

So we house like our entrepreneurs garage in partnership with HD rally where any student on campus can come, they can network, they can meet other entrepreneurs, they can actually build their businesses inside of the garage. You know, they can invite a client in a meeting or an investor in, which is a whole lot nicer than, Hey can you come and meet me at the Starbucks down the road and you know, I might be late cause I'm going to have to take a bus to get there. So we try to give them places that it's a professional work environment. We have our Albright living and learning village for students who want to live 24 hours a day in a community with other entrepreneurial thinkers. We have general education courses. I mean the list goes on and on and on. So I think one of the biggest things that we do as students are coming into the university, we want to help them find the lay of the land.

Jennifer Capps (09:30):

If they want to learn about entrepreneurship, there's numerous, all our cart services that they can take advantage of while they're there. And part of our job is to help them figure out what that looks like. I want to go back to school now. Oh my gosh, I'm, I'm ready to be an entrepreneur again. Well, you know, I've been a part of this since 2001 and I have been so [inaudible] about helping NC State build these things because they weren't there when I was there. And I think, wow, how much fun would this have been? But now I'm honored to get to work with these students and man they keep me on my toes. They are so smart and so creative and I absolutely adore getting up and working with them every single day.

Janet Kennedy (10:11):

All right, now I'm jealous too. So might have to bump you off at CES so I could move into your lower end.

Jennifer Capps (10:17):

Join us anytime you'd like. All right, awesome. So now you're going to get down to really go into C CS. So what's on your agenda for the rest of the event to see as much as we possibly can. You know, we've been really privileged to walk around this startup area and that's been cool and can't wait to go compare it to some of the larger, more established companies. I hear Google's here, I believe I heard Facebook might be here and there's Sony. So I'm curious to see where those companies are going and compare it to what our startups are doing. Cause you know in many cases I think our startups will have the edge. All right. I believe that totally. You have been visiting with Jennifer Capps who is member of the senior leadership over at the North Carolina state university entrepreneurship program and we're of course Trade Show Live on the Road at CES 2020. Thanks for joining me Jennifer.

Jennifer Capps (11:05):

Well thank you so much for having me. This has been a blast.

Matt Kruea (11:09):

Thanks for listening to Trade Show Live on the Road, a production of The Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. If you need innovative programs to engage attendees, exhibitors and sponsors, custom research or new solutions for your trade show, contact The Trade Show Manager on our website, The Trade Show Manager.com.

We continue our interview with Tom Miller, Senior Vice Provost at NC State University about entrepreneurship culture to innovate and programs fostering business-building environment at North Carolina State University.

Joining me on the Trade Show Live podcast is Colin Kaiser from the EDPNC, which stands for the economic development partnership of North Carolina. Colin works in the international business development group, focusing on foreign direct investments coming from Europe and India. His role is helping North Carolina develop business partnerships around the globe. The EDPNC will be at CES 2020. 

Jeff Guard is the Founder and CEO of Brilliant Sole. They are returning to CES 2020 as part of the North Carolina Startup Pavilion at booth #52318.  Brilliant Sole is a smart footwear platform for VR with multiple applications from gaming to health care.

Joining me on the podcast is Jeff Cameron. He's a partner in and also handles the business development for Logistimatics. Logistimatics sells GPS tracking devices and services for individuals and for businesses. They provide real-time GPS tracking for vehicles, fleets, assets and people.

CES 2020 on the Trade Show Live podcast! An interview with Tom Miller, Senior Vice Provost at NC State University about entrepreneurship culture to innovate and programs fostering business-building environment at North Carolina State University. 

Dr. Graham Snyder is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of SEAL Innovation. Graham co-founded SEAL Innovation to bring SEAL Swim Safe to market in direct response to the tragedies he witnessed while treating both adult and pediatric victims of drowning. Dr. Snyder joined Janet Kennedy on the Trade Show Live podcast to as part of our CES 2019 coverage.

This project received support from NC IDEA

Announcer:                      00:00                   You're listening to Trade Show, Live! On the Road, featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and trade show, industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country in a wide variety of industries from healthcare consumer products and everything in between. The podcast is a production of The Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. And now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live!

Janet:                                00:27                   Welcome to Trade Show, Live! On the Road. In January 2019, we are headed to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show with an amazing group of startups and business leaders from North Carolina will be in Eureka Park and displaying some of the best cool new ideas coming from the startup community here in North Carolina. Joining me is a fascinating product that is very close to my heart because I grew up swimming from an early age. It's still scary that drowning is a public health epidemic. Joining me on the podcast is Graham Snyder. He is an ER Doc, a physician-entrepreneur and CEO at SEAL Innovation and he's got a solution. Graham, welcome to the podcast.

Graham:                           01:17                   Thank you Janet. Great to be here.

Janet:                                01:19                   I was very interested in hearing about your company because I actually worked with a scuba organization where you did some of the early prototype testing of your product called SEAL Swim Safe and I think it is so needed and so important. Do you mind telling me a little bit about the history of SEAL Swim Safe and the company SEAL Innovation and and how you came to be.

Graham:                           01:46                   I'd love to Janet. As you may know, my background is as an emergency physician and so I work in a large trauma center taking care of sick and injured adults and children. It is a hard job where there is a lot of tragedy and loss of life and one of the things which really became a passion of mine was preventing probably the single greatest tragedy that I see in the emergency room and that's the loss of a child. Unfortunately, every spring and summer we have far too many children brought to us either on the brink of death or already lost who have drowned and these children, they look just like my children and their parents look just like me and are oftentimes doing the right thing. They are doing their best, they are paying attention, they are good, responsible parents, but they just miss it. I saw this again and again broke my heart and unlike many problems in life, this is something which is solvable. So I set out with my friends, some physicians and some engineers to come with a solution.

Janet:                                03:00                   I think the idea that physicians as entrepreneurs is really critical for solving a lot of health and safety problem. So often we have developers on the one side inventing something they think is a cool idea and physicians on the other side looking at the problems and they don't often get together. So when you have a physician who can look at both sides of the issue, I think you're going to come up with something really effective and it sounds like that's what's happened with SEAL Innovation.

Graham:                           03:30                   Thank you. Janet and I, I really feel like one of the reasons that I chose drowning as something which needed to be stopped was because it's the low lying fruit. If you were going to look at the risk of losing a child, if you looked at gunshot wounds or poisonings or bicycle crashes or ski accidents, none of those things even hold a candle to drowning in terms of their frequency. We lose 10 times as many children from or we lose 10 times as many young children from grounding as we do from bicycle accidents and is against the law to put a child on a bicycle without us bicycle helmet. If you think about what we can do to help the public health, we should start with the big problems and go from there.

Janet:                                04:24                   Well, I understand there's a lot of misconceptions about drowning as well, so I'm going to toss a couple of you out. One is that, well, if you've had swim lessons, you're fine.

Graham:                           04:32                   Well, unfortunately that's not true. Now, the reality is swim lessons are very important. Eighty five percent of children that drowned never had a single swim lesson, but by that number tells you a 15 percent have had swim lessons and unfortunately children that know how to swim technically can drown as well. Children by their nature are not that strong and do not have incredible endurance and frankly don't have the best judgment, and so children hit their head. Children swim until they're exhausted. Children choke on water. They get water up their nose and panic. One of the hardest cases that I had, and I'll never forget, this was a six year old girl who was in her backyard pool at a family reunion with loving parents, uncles, aunts, nephews, and one of the parents looked down and saw her pull her up and she was dead and what no one can tell me and what the parents will wonder for the rest of their life is how long was she underwater?

Graham:                           05:41                   They don't know. They don't know what happened. She probably got water up or nose panics, spun around in circles, gagged a little and then passed out. And if anyone had noticed, if anyone had happened to see her, they could have saved her, but it just didn't. The biggest misconception I feel about drowning. Drowning doesn't look like drowning. If you watch, you watch jaws or you watch a movie or someone's drowning, normally they're waving their heads and screaming, Hey, help me. I'm drowning. That's not what happens. If a person was strong enough to scream and yell, put their hands in the air and tread water without using their hands. They're outstanding swimmer. But when a person is drowning, they're exhausted. They can't breathe. All they can do is quietly bob up and down and inhale. And then they slip under and it's quiet. No one notices.

Graham:                           06:32                   Um, that's the, that's the thing that I'm trying to prevent. So what does your technology do? What is it when a person drowns? Normally they get exhausted quietly, bob up and down, and then slipped to the bottom. What we as human beings notice is not things that are quiet out of you. And still, that's what drowning looks like. What our device is as our device tracks a child, whether they're above or below the water, and when they're below the water, it monitors how long they're below the water. If they're below the water, beyond the threshold of pain than the device itself fires off a strobe light and siren that's too quickly warn a person who is holding their breath for a long time. Hey, you're really pushing things, but if you go beyond that limit, then it sets off an unmistakable strobe and siren on a hub, alerting everyone in the area., Hey, you got a problem! And you need to do that rescue now.

Janet:                                07:31                   All right, let me ask you a question. Is it a bracelet? Is this a necklace? What, uh, what are they wearing?

Graham:                           07:36                   This is a necklace. The genesis of the idea was that the YMCA for the last couple of decades, children have been given little necklace that have a color code to them. That Color Code simply tells the lifeguard whether they're allowed in the deep end or not. And they determined that by a swim test. This is a fantastic program and all commercial pools should be doing it. I was at the pool with a with some of the leadership of the YMCA and we were looking at that bands and I thought to myself, well, they're already wearing a necklace. Can't we just put a little tick in there that would tell us something more than if they've passed their swim tests, but tell me if that child is potentially in danger.

Janet:                                08:21                   Is this only for little children or would you put this on say, an older child who didn't have strong swim skills?

Graham:                           08:28                   It's very interesting that you say that. The reality of drowning is that there's a try modal distribution of drowning by age groups. There's the little kids, the two, three, four who can't swim, who fall in the pool and go to the bottom. Then there's the teenagers, the 13, 14, 15 year olds who are doing crazy things. They're jumping off and hitting their head. They're wrestling underwater. They're holding their breath until they pass out, and then there's also older people who have medical conditions like seizures, strokes, heart attacks, or maybe just passing out, which if they were on land are perfectly survivable but can be fatal in the water, so what that means is SEAL Swim Safe is designed for anyone who could potentially get in trouble in the water and drowned and that means little children who don't know how to swim or people who are just learning, but also people that have medical conditions that could potentially cause them to get in a situation where that medical condition could result in a fatality.

Janet:                                09:36                   So in the band they're wearing around their neck or the necklace, because this isn't a choker, it is something that's loose and shouldn't cause them any discomfort. Correct?

Graham:                           09:46                   Absolutely. The necklace itself is worn loosely. It drapes on the upper chest, like an annual it and it's neutrally buoyant. What that means is that when you jump in the water wearing it, the child cannot see it or feel it because it's floating and free space in the water. It's a comfortable enough to be worn for the entire swim day and not even noticeable until the sirens fire.

Janet:                                10:12                   And when they're wearing it. What exactly activates the siren? Is it? Is it water? Is it change in level?

Graham:                           10:20                   This was quite a technology to to develop. There are technologies out there that alert you if something gets wet and that is useful for a kid who's not supposed to be in the water, who falls in, but that's not what we're focusing on. What we need is we need four or five, six, seven, eight year olds to be playing in the water, even holding their breath for fun going down, picking up GI Joe's and pennies. We don't want an alarm in that situation. We only want the alarm if the child's head is completely underwater for too long. So the way we have designed the system is it detects the radio frequencies that are transmitted from the hub system itself and the way water modulates that radio frequency tells you whether they're substantially under the water or not. You know, if they're just up to their neck and you know, and standing still fine, but if they're completely submerged and there's radio frequencies change and alert you to start the timer and when this timer it gets to a critical level, that's when the alarms fire.

Janet:                                11:26                   So you would set a timer based on the age and skill level of the individual?

Graham:                           11:32                   Yes, and in the current setting, basically there's a beginning in advance, so we have a three seconds for a little kid who really is going to get scared if they're underwater for more than a second or two to a bigger child who could hold their breath easily up to 20 seconds.

Janet:                                11:50                   Oh, fascinating. Well you've had a to try this out in a commercial setting. So how many units have you had going at any one time and who did you work with to prototype the system?

Graham:                           12:02                   The largest deployment that we ever did was 400 swim bands and we did that at something called a polar bear swim. This was a event sponsored by the YMCAs were hundreds of children and their dads go for a swim in a pool in February. Now it's not really a cold pool, but because it's in February and it's very exciting. They called the polar bear swim. Um, that was a great event and I can tell you going to that event as a physician or as an advocate for the public health, it's a little scary to have hundreds of children's in a pool it at once because it's hard to see the bottom because of all this flashing. But with the system, it was a real relief to know that if anyone went under too long, we would have had a siren and a rescue.

Janet:                                12:49                   Oh, fascinating. Now that sounds like a great match for a commercial setting, which would be any really public pool, but what other kinds of commercial settings do you think this would work in?

Graham:                           13:00                   As a person who manages a pool? One of the hardest situations to monitor is what we call brown water. So if you've got a summer camp and a lake, when a child goes under, if they're under more than about six inches, you can't see them at all and that is a great opportunity for the SEAL Swim Safe to add an extra layer of protection. That being said, there are municipal pools. Many of the hundreds of cities in the state and tens of thousands in the nation have pools were swimmers, could be five years old and excellent swimmers or 13 and not even know how to tread water. So that's another great situation. There's also a swim schools throughout the nation where people are just learning to swim as well as the traditional swim clubs where people both compete and go to play.

Janet:                                13:52                   I think that's fascinating. Especially when you think about the kids who've never had any swim lessons at all and are getting to that age where it's kind of cool to be rough housing and they want to be out there and they don't want to ask for help. This is kind of a device that that gives them some backup.

Graham:                           14:10                   I agree. Now, one thing that you could do with a person who doesn't know how to swim, it's just put them in a life jacket and that does keep them safe while that life jacket is on. Unfortunately, you know kids don't really like life jackets that much, but much more important than that is if you're wearing a life jacket, you will never learn to swam and it's the learning to swim, which is the critical component. The great thing about the SEAL as you can go in the water and go under water, get maybe get a little water up your nose, learn how to hold your breath, but in a safe environment so that you can become a strong and active swimmer and both protect yourself and one day protect your children as well.

Janet:                                14:55                   Well, I'm glad you've had a chance to really test it out in a lot of large group settings, but what about the pool at Grandma's house? What about the your own backyard pool? What about taking it with you personally? When you go to the beach, is this affordable and accessible to the individual consumer?

Graham:                           15:13                   This winter we're selling the commercial devices themselves and the residential device will be coming out in the spring and the pricing has not been set yet.

Janet:                                15:23                   All right, so, but it will be something that is available to individual parents and does it matter if you're going say to salt water versus a pool?

Graham:                           15:31                   No. The system can be used in a fresh water, a saltwater pool, or even in the ocean.

Janet:                                15:38                   Oh, that's exciting. I think your product is amazing and it's going to make a huge difference and I think we need to get the word out about it. So I understand you're joining us at CES.

Graham:                           15:48                   Yes. I'm looking forward to it.

Janet:                                15:50                   We're going to have an opportunity to talk to you in person. I assume maybe you're bringing a few bands with you to for a little show and tell.

Graham:                           15:58                   Absolutely.

Speaker 2:                        15:59                   Oh, that'll be excellent. Well, Graham, I look forward to seeing you next week at CES and for those folks who are listening after CES will have a link in the show notes to all the information that you need to know about SEAL, Swim Safe and how you can become more involved as a consumer. What are you hoping to accomplish at CES?

Graham:                           16:21                   Well, Janet, one of the things which is just so fascinating to me about living in 2019 is the amazing work being done in technology. Obviously there's excitement and entertainment, but there's also safety and the expansion of our horizons. One of the things that I am most interested in is seeing how the latest technologies from all around the world are working to help do what we do, make the world a safer, more fun place to live in and I couldn't be more happy to be there.

Janet:                                16:58                   Well, I look forward to seeing you in person, Graham, and we'll also be broadcasting another interview live during the event, so I look forward to hearing your observations next week.

Graham:                           17:08                   Thank you Janet.

Announcer:                      17:10                   Thanks for listening to Trade Show, Live! On the Road, a production of The Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. If you need innovative programs to engage attendees and exhibitors and sponsors, custom research or new solutions for your trade show, contact The Trade Show Manager on our website, thetradeshowmanager.com.

Myxx makes mom’s lives easier through creating a frictionless experience for shopping and eating healthier meals with families.

Joining Janet Kennedy on the podcast are COO Dede Houston and CEO Monica Wood, Co-Founders of Myxx.

Announcer:                      00:02                   You're listening to Trade Show Live! On the Road featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and trade show, industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country in a wide variety of industries, from healthcare to consumer products and everything in between. The podcast is a production of The Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm, and now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live!

Janet:                                00:30                   Welcome to Trade Show Live! On the Road. This podcast is a production of The Trade Show Manager and features an in depth look at the people, companies, and organizations that bring trade shows to life. In January 2019, we are headed to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show with an amazing group of startups and business leaders will be in Eureka Park and displaying some of the best new ideas coming from the startup community in North Carolina. With me today is the team that has co-founded Myxx. Myxx is spelled m y, x, x, and it is a platform designed to help you shop so much more intelligently so that you are getting healthy foods into your basket, designed to match up with recipes so you actually know what you're cooking when you get home. I think that is a brilliant idea. I'd like to welcome Dede Houston, who is the Co-Founder and COO and Monica Wood is the Co-Founder and CEO to the podcast. Welcome ladies.

Dede:                                01:29                   Thanks Janet.

Monica:                            01:31                   Yes, thanks Janet. We're excited to be here today.

Janet:                                01:34                   I love your platform and for folks who aren't aware of what Myxx is, this is a new and exciting thing. We have another podcast episode where we get deep into the details of what makes is all about and how it works. However, I would really like you guys to give us the high level. How do you describe Myxx in your elevator pitch?

Monica:                            01:55                   What Myxx is, we like to say, when you come to our site, it seems like a recipe sites, but we're nacho average recipe site. I will definitely not a comedian as a trained data scientists, but what we really do is we help you understand what items match to the recipes at your local store. You don't need to wait a week and have something delivered in a box for a recipe. You can do that using recipes you cook with today and product you love at your local grocery store.

Janet:                                02:29                   Oh, that sounds so easy. There's gotta be a challenge here. Like for instance, I'm a terrible cook.

Dede:                                02:38                   If I can do it, anybody can do it.

Janet:                                02:41                   All right. Is that what? What made you start Myxx?

Monica:                            02:46                   So if I go back to bed and I worked together at another startup and we always wanted to work together again and we really got along well and that was an exciting startup that we grew really, really bad and we worked with CPG brand manufacturer, so the product sold in grocery stores and marketing efforts, so digital ads. That was kind of our background. It always. We always thought about what we would do together and I had moved on to another startup out of Washington DC and I was flying there four days a week and I have three kids at home and I would call home and I would say, hey guys, would you have for dinner? And they would say, oh mom, it's so great. It's like Bojangles or burgers or pizza, and every time I called him I just felt like I failed.

Janet:                                03:31                   I mentally have a picture of you just cringing because you want to be supportive of your partner, but on the other hand you're like, why are you feeding them that?

Monica:                            03:39                   Absolutely, and I was calling home and really just feeling like I was failing them and that's really because eating healthy was something core to me in court to my belief because 14 years ago I lost 100 pounds and I did that through learning how to cook and cook by recipe and understanding what I needed to put into my body in order to be healthy. Before that I ate a lot of fast food and I didn't really understand the ramifications of that. On my health and I didn't want my children to ever have to face that because losing 100 pounds is not easy. It's hard and that's when I started with my crazy travel schedule that I am unable to feed my kids healthy food anymore. And Grocery shopping just seems like such a chore.

Janet:                                04:27                   I do have friends that will on Sunday meal prep for the whole week. And while that sounds really cool, that actually sounds like three or four hours gone on a Sunday that I wish I were doing something else.

Monica:                            04:40                   Yes. And that was my life too. I was spending a lot of time with meal planning and then going to the store and then you know, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and I was already traveling so often that I really wanted to have more quality time on the weekends and being in technology as I have conversations we started having one talks about how could we make this better because you're both single moms. The grocery challenge and one of those things was we already spent enough time doing chores and doing everything else around the house. How can we make this easier using technology and that's when we realized that wow, grocery, just moving digital and this is our opportunity to make our lives easier by taking away those hours of meal planning and making it like just minutes and just a few clicks. You can have all of these great recipes planned at your local store and it's such a relief knowing that you have a plan of what's for dinner tonight. I love to hear Dede talking about how she hates to hear that

Dede:                                05:43                   Monica, when she first approached me and it was about, you know, she wanted her kids to really understand the health and, and really eat more nutritiously and I just needed to feed my kids. I was like, I got tired of home and then being like, mom, what's for dinner? I'm like, I have no clue. What did you fix? You know, it was, it was kind of a pain point of like, you, you've got to feed your kids. And it's. I just wasn't comfortable. It wasn't that comfortable in the kitchen and I'm not a trained chef and all I could do to feed them anything, so this has been really a fantastic solution of being able to find recipes that actually fit my cooking style, but always now having an answer when my kids are like, Hey, what's for dinner? I know what's for dinner because it's not about spending, you know, hours of meal prepping on Sunday, at least not for me, but it's about just being planned out of like I know on Tuesdays that we're going to have tacos or whatever it is and I have all of the stuff ready to roll and I'm good. I know I have 30 minutes on Tuesday. I know I have an hour on Thursday so that I can even plan which type of meals accordingly based on our schedule. So it's been a real life saver for us.

Janet:                                07:00                   One of the cool things about your platform is that not only will it give you all the ingredients that you need for however long you're planning your meals, it won't duplicate things, which I think is really cool, but it will also tell you where it is in the aisle and now I'm envisioning that the all the partners out there that are like, I don't know, I can't shop. You do it so much better than me. Oh, no excuses dude. Yeah, it's Isle B. Go get it.

Monica:                            07:29                   Actually, I actually texted my boyfriend the list that we have, the print version of our list and you can print it and then you can text the URL so it tells you the quantity. That brand shopping,

Janet:                                07:45                   I think you should call this the no excuses.

Monica:                            07:51                   I love that. That's awesome.

Janet:                                07:53                   So it's great that you met in a startup and decided that you wanted to work together, but what you think's going to happen, it doesn't always work out. So what have you found is each other's strengths and weaknesses in working together as a team?

Dede:                                08:08                   That's a great question and I think every day we're blown away. We worked so closely, we spend so much time together and we still love and care about each other, both personally and professionally, so we have a really amazing relationship. So we're very happy about that. But I think really what it was is that when we both knew that we wanted to do this and we had backgrounds in being startups, so we understood first off of what we wanted from a consumer perspective. Second of all, we understood what it meant to be in a startup. We knew that it was roll your sleeves up. It is getting down dirty and in the trenches and really making this work and I think we both have that passion, that curiosity drive and determination that it worked out really well for us. I mean, we're definitely understanding where our gangs and gangs are, where we fit together, but we fit together so perfectly and understand when each of us have, you know, that section that we're taking off with Monica is very much entrenched in our fundraising and our business development and, and really getting out there and being the face of our, of our company, but also coming from a data perspective on the product perspective, which is great because that's not my background.

Dede:                                09:29                   My background comes from, you know, being in startups and understanding the operations, the marketing side. And so it really. We really do make this, you know, powerful team together to learn thorns. But ...

Monica:                            09:44                   I agree. And every day I am so thankful that I had such a talented co-founder. I'm just extremely driven and motivated and positive and fun to be around hard. But it's also exciting and fun when you have a lot of other people to have joined us that we've worked with in the past. So we've been very fortunate in lots of different areas. But what I countered, we don't always agree in fact a lot of problems from different angles. And I feel like that has really given us a lot of strength because we can come up with the right solution instead of the fastest or the most superficial solution. We can come up with the solution moving forward and we respect one another and we don't really try to take any of what's happening personally, but we do support each other and not just each other, but I feel like our entire team feels that as well. We have a very small team. We're very proud of what we've been able to accomplish with just a few people and it really showcases the technical ability of the team. So we are just going over 10 people to over the next year we're going to double or triple that number. We've already started that hiring process for what we've been able to accomplish in a few years with just a few people. It's pretty amazing. I'm in awe of all of the people that work with us.

Janet:                                11:25                   I assume you're not doing the programming side yourselves?

Monica:                            11:29                   We are not. We actually have programs that we've worked with in the past that past that have joined us, which is great because we've worked together. You kind of know each other's ins and outs and you can move forward and make progress a lot better and you understand and trust one another. Trust is so big, especially in a small startup, being able to trust that someone's going to not only get work done, but understand the quality of work and where people's strengths and weaknesses are so you can come in and kind of help fill in the gaps where needed.

Janet:                                12:01                   Now you came to us through a partnership with NC IDEA, which is also a partner of North Carolina Startup Pavilion and in Las Vegas at CES. And I understand you've actually done some mentoring with them. What's your background and experience with NC IDEA?

Monica:                            12:19                   Oh Wow. We're so blessed and fortunate to be apart of the North Carolina startup community and it's really across the board. NC IDEA idea has been such a phenomenal organization and invited us to be a part of a program last year for building strong leaders in North Carolina. And I had the great fortune of being able to be a part of that program and collaborate with other leaders that are growing out of this area and the triangle and that was just such a wonderful experience where we got to understand new leadership and work collaboratively with one another. So that was our first experience with NC IDEA and since then we have done other programs through them and through others, mentoring upcoming startup people with ideas, how to formulate their business plans and write their pitches all the way down to being a part of a coaching and mentoring at classes out of UNC Chapel Hill and Duke. And it's just such a wonderfully collaborative community here that's really looking to support startups and growth in technology. Wasn't a genuine really appreciation for one another and I haven't seen that anywhere else and our travels and in my career to be a part of such a great team and community. Again, I hate to keep saying community, but it's the only word for it is it is a true community because we are supporting one another and we are all out for the greater good. Of what right and how can we do this together versus compete.

Janet:                                13:51                   Dede, what's your experience been like with NC IDEA?

Dede:                                13:54                   So we loved being engaged with them and doing stuff with them. They've been, as Monica mentioned, they've been such a great community, such a great support to us. It's nice being able to have people that you can reach out to get feedback, be able to share your ideas, be inspired by them and also hopefully inspire them as well. So it's just been a great group of people and it's something that, you know, I'm thankful that we have that ability to connect with these people that are kind of in here and all kind of rooting for each other to succeed and, and helping each other to succeed. So it's been all positive and we're very fortunate and excited about that.

Janet:                                14:36                   I had a great conversation with Thom Ruhe who is the executive director of NC IDEA and it is amazing how often he also brought up the word community that, that he is very, very engaged and very, very about this interpersonal relationships. And, and he mentioned something about alumni events where even if you've been in a program wants, it's not like it's over, that there is this community of alumni that have been through one of the NC IDEA of programs where they continue to pay it forward and give back.

Monica:                            15:15                   That's a great point. It is not just one program and we actually even have a Slack group where we can get on and exchange ideas and who's hiring for what, ask for contractor recommendations. It's really truly amazing what they have created.

Janet:                                15:34                   Now you're going to be attending CES and taking out to the public. Now you don't have a display there, but you are going to get to experience what it's like to be at CES through the NC startup pavilion. We're going to be in Eureka Park in the Sands. Eureka Park is 800 booths, all of brand new startups. And it is a high energy, fascinating place. And it, it really feels like the UN because the majority of the companies in Eureka Park are actually not from the United States. So just by being there, you're going to get a very interesting experience with a lot of different countries as a matter of fact, we're doing air quotes across the street from Singapore, so this is going to be a great event. But what do you hope to get out of CES for Myxx?

Dede:                                16:22                   I'm excited to one, just share that word of mouth and let everybody know what we're doing, what we've been up to you and, and just that were, that were around, but I'm so excited also to kind of look and see what else is going on and how can we again, I'm going to go back to that being inspired by, you know, all these other great ideas and these other great companies and great people. I'm just excited about seeing the future of technology and what's going on that consumer world and, and being able to be a part of that. I think that would, that's what makes me so excited. I'm such a curious person. So I like to see you know, what's going on and hopefully that helps spur and inspire some of our future opportunities are our features. And our roadmap for Myxx.

Monica:                            17:13                   Absolutely. And you know, taking that one step further again, just want to talk about how excited we are to release this to consumers this year. 2019 is going to be a big consumer focus for us. It hasn't really been a focus over the past couple of years while we are building our platform and our technology. So we're looking forward to really shouting it from the mountain tops or the showroom floor, I guess it's no longer a great idea. It's a possibility where you can actually shop and meal plan all in one spot for free for consumers. And it's. But what we also want to do is we want to be able to meet with our partners so we're meeting with a bunch of partners that were there that were going to be announcing these relationships over the next year as well as really engaging with what is new in our space, what is upcoming and how can we bridge new partnerships and new ideas to create in 2019 and 2020 and the future. So I really am excited for my first visit to CES and hopefully many more to come. Do you have any advice for us for us at CES that you think we should do since it's our first?

Janet:                                18:28                   Absolutely. Well first off know that it takes a lot longer to get from point a to point B, so plan a lot of travel time and then we tell the folks at our booth, so you probably would be wise to make sure you stash a few snacks and a water bottle in your bag because just whether it's food or suDedeenly you're starving and you seem to be about three miles from food. It's really helpful to have some of those things to rely on.

Monica:                            18:56                   Great advice! Have food and water water in my bag. Check.

Janet:                                19:03                   And the other upside to our booth is we're actually right near the food court and we're also near the elevators and the bathrooms. So we scored a great place in this booth, in this area. I would be remiss if I didn't actually allow you to tell people how they sign up for Myxx. Is it a free program and can they sign up right now?

Monica:                            19:30                   Go ahead, Dede.

Dede:                                19:31                   Yeah, you can go to Myxxed recipes.com. That's m y, x, x recipes.com. It is completely free. You just go on there, put in your eye, your email to create an account and you're off to the races. You're good. You can go in and select your retailers. You can connect your cart, so you're already set up as far as eCommerce retailers that you want to send your list over. Start searching. We welcome any feedback. We welcome if you have certain recipes you want to send us, but very free, easy, check it out today.

Janet:                                20:11                   I appreciate the fact that it's free and that's the way it is for consumers. You know, we don't want to pay for anything until we've tried it out and made sure it's important to us. But what is your monetization strategy?

Monica:                            20:21                   So we work with the brands that are on the site. So any of the food brands that sell into grocery stores, we work with them to help them activate their marketing spend. So we create landing pages that ensure that they have the product. So a lot of brands say, run digital advertisement for recipes and when you click on those recipes you can come to a landing page and that recipe is activated at a local grocery store for a consumer, so immediately that recipe as context and passed to the point of purchase with that product listed as the default item and then everything else that they need to make that as well. And then we capture the data and the analytics behind the decisions on that page and people purchase it. Did they purchase all of the items? Did they adjust the serving size? Did they change the retailer? Did they change out for dietary restriction? So there's a lot of rich analytics that happens behind the scenes, but no worries in the privacy area, we definitely protect consumer privacy and we do not share individual information with with brands. We do try to gather the trends so that we can better serve the brand and the consumers of the future.

Janet:                                21:36                   I am already signed up so I will test it. So by the time we get to CES and about two weeks, I will have some very good questions for you. So get ready.

Monica:                            21:46                   We are ready for your questions and we are excited for all of the people listening to sign up again with Myxxrecipes.com. And that's Myxx.

Janet:                                21:58                   All right everybody, we will see you at CES or if you're not going to CES, you can follow all the action in social media. Just pull up the Hashtag #CES19NC and all the folks who are going to be in the North Carolina Startup Pavilion will be using that Hashtag so you can kind of catch just our action along with the regular Hashtag.

Janet:                                22:24                   You've been listening to Trade Show Live! On the Road. This podcast is production of The Trade Show Manager and features an in depth look at the people, companies, and organizations that ring trade shows to life. In January 19. We're headed to CES and we have a lot more episodes for you to listen to. Featuring somebody great ideas coming from the startup community in North Carolina. Thanks for listening.

The Consumer Electronics Show can be overwhelming for a startup but if you have an exciting product and a pro-active social media plan, you can make an impact. Wiser Systems attended CES in 2018 and had such a positive experience that they are returning in 2019.

Joining Janet Kennedy on the podcast is Stephen Taylor, Communications Director of Wiser Systems

Announcer:                      00:00                   You're listening to Trade Show Live! On the Road, featuring conversations with the people who bring trade shows to life, including attendees, exhibitors, sponsors, and trade show, industry thought leaders. We attend trade shows around the country and a wide variety of industries from healthcare consumer products and everything in between. The podcast is a production of The Trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm, and now let's go on the road with Trade Show Live.

Janet:                                00:27                   Welcome to Trade Show Live! On the Road. This podcast is a production of the trade show manager and features an in depth look at the people, companies, and organizations that bring trade shows to life. In January 2019, we are headed to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, with an amazing group of startups and business leaders will be in Eureka Park and displaying some of the best new ideas coming from the startup community in North Carolina and one of those happens to be why their systems. They joined us for our CES startup pavilion in 2018 and our back for more at CES with me, his director of communications, Stephen Taylor. Stephen, welcome to the podcast.

Stephen:                           01:13                   Thank you, Janet. I'm so happy to have Wiser back again. It validates that CES is viable even for a smaller startup and when I say smaller startup, we know that CES takes over the whole of Las Vegas and we're in a place called Eureka Park, which is where all the startup activity is and it's incredibly exciting, but there are 800 booths there, so the fact that you guys went last year and were able to make an impact in this arena is really impressive to me.

Janet:                                01:45                   Now. You weren't actually at the show last year, but we'll be this year, but as you were back managing the social media and a lot of the live communications, what was it like for you? What? What were you sensing about the energy and the activity at the booth?

Stephen:                           02:00                   Well, the first thing I noticed for sure was that just by virtue of being listed as an exhibitor at CES, we experienced a huge spike in web traffic, so I was monitoring that at home. We had more than 100 percent additional web traffic to what we expected for that month, which was amazing. And then seeing on social media, the amount of buzz we got there was also kind of very, really energizing and exciting. So even though I didn't get to talk face to face with new prospects, new potential customers, it was evident really quickly that we were getting some traction with something.

Janet:                                02:40                   Oh, that is exciting. Now you are of all the companies that we took last year, probably the one most vested in social media and communications and in really embracing the idea that you were going to CES. And thank you very much for that. as a social media person, I'm very pleased to see that and you are also doing it again this year. I appreciate that. But I'd love to talk a little bit more about last year. so you said your web traffic was up and you really feel it was because you were listed in the CES directory as an attendee. Did you see that before you even got to the show? Or was it a result during and after the show?

Stephen:                           03:18                   Well, we saw both. Well, are really all three before, during and after. We knew before that we already were getting some traffic specifically from the CES website and then during the show we saw a big boost after the show that continued for maybe maybe as much as a week or two while we did follow ups to people we'd met and things like that. So it really was from December when we first started tracking this through to the end of January, almost a few weeks after the show.

Janet:                                03:51                   And how does that compare to other shows that you've attended? Because you are one of the organizations in the Startup pavilion, the North Carolina's Startup Pavilion who did attend previous trade shows. You had been going to some trade shows. So kind of compare the two situations.

Stephen:                           04:09                   Trade shows are our main way of identifying leads and meeting potential customers and potential partners. So that's a big part of our marketing plan and I think it's fair to say we've never gone to a show where we didn't meet some potential customer or find some kind of benefit, in our sales process or our partnership process. But what was really unique about CES was, well, a, the size, it was five times as big as any show I had gone to, and then the breadth of different customers. A lot of the other shows are really specific, like manufacturing technology or Internet of things software. but from CES we had people coming to us from all kinds of verticals, a bunch of really different and disparate industries. and so that was, that was really cool because we're a kind of a technology kind of an industry agnostic system. And so we can, we can work in a lot of different verticals and it's hard to find a show where you can find people in so many different different industries.

Janet:                                05:17                   Oh, excellent point about CES. I do think that that's something that folks should realize is that while it's referred to as the consumer electronic show, what it really is, is the cool new idea show. And there are all kinds of people. They're looking for cool new ideas.

Stephen:                           05:32                   And we had consumers who saw something cool about our technology, but a lot of other businesses as well, a lot of professional groups that we crossed paths with their. So , it definitely is a gathering point for all kinds of technology organizations.

Janet:                                05:49                   I think people who are not familiar with Wiser might want to know a little bit more about what you do. So can you describe what the Wiser System is?

Stephen:                           05:58                   So Wiser Systems as a company, we deliver real time asset location and tracking in pretty much any environment. What we deliver to customers is a system of software and hardware components to create a wireless mesh. And then within that Mesh you can track our small asset tracking tags which you can affix to pretty much any physical asset. So a lot of companies, when they say asset tracking or management, they mean like digital inventories. We mean we're literally finding physical things and then showing you digitally where they are in a physical space. . So that's really what we do it how you use the data, how our end customers use the data varies quite a bit. Well, we really focus on is giving a system that can quantify the motion and the location and the movement histories of all these different physical assets.

Janet:                                06:56                   No, I can see a lot of applications for this, whether it is tracking high value items that you don't want to lose to internal issues as well as just being much more efficient about finding things in the warehouse.

Stephen:                           07:12                   We see also quite a variety of use cases. Some people that track kind of low value assets but that are really useful. For instance, something that could be that doesn't cost a lot of money but could be dangerous if it's left out or just could expire if it's left out. Then we have other people who who take the approach well we have really valuable things. Valuable pieces were manufacturing. A lot of our consumer kind of angles would be high value assets in the home, like laptops, safety boxes in jewelry, whatever it is that you want to know where it's located. All kinds of use cases that way.

Speaker 2:                        07:51                   Now with Consumer Electronics Show a lot of the things in Eureka Park, which is the startup part of cds, they're just about ready for consumers, so are you actually ready to go on the shelf in stores? Will it always be purchased directly from wise your systems?

Stephen:                           08:10                   That's a good question and that's one of the future will tell. We've talked about a few different ways how this might go forward. Our bread and butter has really been selling this to businesses B-to-B sales model. Putting this in the hands of companies that can use it, but one of our big advantages as a system is it's extremely easy to use. It's really easy to set up. You don't have to permanently install any infrastructure, you just deploy the devices and start running the software. It's really a matter of moments to get it going. So again, I don't know if this is going to be on shelves for consumers soon, but if it were, I think a lot of people could use it pretty quickly.

Janet:                                08:54                   I was at CES last year when you were demonstrating, and I have to say that the interactive live nature of your demo was really drawing a lot of attention, not the least of which, because you had a little mascot helping you out.

Stephen:                           09:09                   Yes. Wisely. The Hour, which I wish I could demonstrate through a podcast, but, this was one of Dr. Rideout our CEO's ideas was rather than just tracking our little tags that look pretty boring as they're intended to be unobtrusive and just be useful, she puts this tag on a stuffed owl. It's about a foot tall and we'll carry it around the show. And so people can see wisely the owl moving around. And then if they walk by our screen, they can see a colorful, kind of heat map of, where has the Owl, how long has it stayed there? And all of that. And we have found this kind of a approach of demonstrating the technology to work in virtually every show we've gone to. It does interest people to see, well, why are you walking around with an owl and what is that about? And so we move on Dr Rideout's part.

Janet:                                10:03                   Absolutely. Well, you know, and it's, it's interesting because there are definitely products that have a lot of buzz, you know, people who were doing things with robots and drones that got a lot of attention, but there's a ton of things at CES that are more, you have to visualize what is happening and you have to kind of picture in your own head what the value is because it is more technology behind the scenes. So by using wisely, you were able to immediately draw attention to yourselves and yet not be obtrusive to the booths right next to you, the partners with the North Carolina Startup pavilion or the booths that you are walking through and around. It was you were just passing through and yet all eyes were on you. It was a very, very cool way to demonstrate your product quickly and easily. Well done.

Stephen:                           10:53                   Well thank you. Thank you for that. We're excited to do that again in just a few weeks now.

Janet:                                10:58                   Well, now that you're heading to CES and you were doing live social media from back in Raleigh, North Carolina, do you have any different ideas of how you're going to approach your activity at CES because now you're on the floor talking to customers too?

Stephen:                           11:15                   Yes. This will be a different experience for me for sure. Since I haven't gone to this show before and also we're. We're going to be demonstrating some some things that we haven't shown at CES. We haven't shown it other shows before, so it's going to require a lot of preparation. We've been spending a lot of time internally scheduling out meetings with companies we want to see with people we want to see there at the show, planning out our social media content so that you know, we're not trying to come up with it on the fly while we're there. I imagine we'll have a couple long and busy days there with the moving pretty fast paced. Especially from what I hear from my colleagues who went last year when we're really busy just talking to people on the floor.

Janet:                                12:01                   I will say that your bowl of chocolate also drew a lot of people, many of them just wanted chocolate and, and I think your team might have lived on chocolate. I think they might've lived on it for three days.

Stephen:                           12:16                   Oh, that is the trade show way. Sometimes that's been the case that other shows that I've attended as well.

Janet:                                12:22                   So the Wiser system is one that I think is really unique because you actually do it in real time and it isn't about last positioning. Right. So, the interesting thing is you can actually watch the items moving around as opposed to other systems aren't that in the moment? Correct.

Stephen:                           12:45                   That's right. I think a lot of, a lot of us probably assume this is kind of a common thing, you know, if you, if you watch a spy movie and you see some operative goes into an enemy base and their boss can see exactly where they are in real time or, something like that, that's really hard to do no matter how much we see that in the media. This is a really rare technology that hasn't really come to fruition and a lot of markets yet, but that is what we do rather than like a bar coding system or passive RFID where you have to manually scan and see where the item was at this time. We are showing where it is right now and doing it in inch level coordinates instead of just the proximity to the last weekend or anything like that. So it is unique for sure.

Janet:                                13:32                   Well, I'm. One of the ways that we watched it being set up is you actually use your technology to an essence, create a tracking zone. So obviously working with a manufacturing plant that's pretty straight forward. You got a big giant square box and you're putting these capture devices. I'm here's the layman's explanation of your system, but you're basically putting these data collection points around to define the area. How large an area can you actually define for your system?

Stephen:                           14:06                   Well, theoretically there's not a limit on that. The biggest areas we've done have been multi-hanger aerospace complexes and so those have been few hundred thousand square feet, all told. A lot of our areas are smaller, but all you have to do to grow that area is add a few antennas, a few points in the mesh as it were, and you can continue expanding again theoretically to no limit.

Janet:                                14:33                   Oh, that's fascinating. So it's really pretty straightforward and it just means mounting one of your antennas on something just a little above hand reach so they can't be pulled down. Or does it matter how high they are?

Stephen:                           14:46                   Depending on what you're tracking, the height will make a difference and it's a lot of times it's easier, especially if you can set them up high, high on the wall or above head level. Then you know there'll be less interference with crowds walking by or obstacles moving around. Like in our industrial applications, we try to set them up fairly high just so that we don't have forklift's driving in front of the antenna and obscuring it or potentially knocking it down or you know, or whatnot. But there's a lot of ways you can do that. You can do them lower and still get some, some good tracking results as well. In our office building, we can't put them very high because we have a normal size ceiling and that works fine as well.

Janet:                                15:27                   Oh, that's interesting. At CES, of course you're in a giant trade show, so you could go pretty high up in, in the Sands. The exhibition hall is very tall, so if I recall correctly, your team was grabbing one of those tall bar stools in walking around to fix them before the show opened. And honestly nobody even noticed they were there. They just blended into the background.

Stephen:                           15:51                   They are pretty unobtrusive, like you mentioned before with the demo. The hardware itself is like that too because it's really small and it's lightweight and again, they're, they're not permanent. We don't have to tear up a wall to put these in which, which is one of the things that makes the system so useful that we can deploy it. And then if we want to move it takes a matter of moments to do that.

Janet:                                16:13                   So speaking of deploying it, if you were to sign a new customer that had a really big warehouse system, how long would it take for you to get the system set up and would you be doing it yourselves or would you have the client do it?

Stephen:                           16:27                   We've done some of some of both. I guess typically one of our engineers will go on site to start that process and at the very least we'll teach some of their tech people, either it or if they have integration engineers, one of our engineers will teach them kind of how this goes, how to optimize the system. But we've had people go and do that themselves after getting some training from us all. A lot of times how long it takes will just depend on if they roll out the whole space, the whole facility at once. A lot of our customers end up doing small zones first, you know, we'll just do this part of the hanger first or we'll just do this part of the warehouse initially and then we'll add points as we go so we can optimize in stages rather than trying to troubleshoot all at once and that seems to work pretty well in all the cases so far.

Janet:                                17:17                   So in the case of a warehouse where you're just dealing with say boxes, what is the little item like that you are attaching to I guess the box?

Stephen:                           17:27                   So the the items are tracker tags. You can think of this as kind of like a little key fob. It's an inch long, maybe an inch and a half in the shape that we usually deliver them to customers. And you can attach this with the key chain with a zip tie. We've had people put Velcro tabs on them so they can stick them off and on quickly. You can affect some other, you know, if you're. If you're in a hurry, you can just tape them and fix them that way or even Superglue them. But then it might be hard to get off when you do want to move it, and most of our customers do it in a way that like the antennas is going to be flexible where they can put it on, take it off again. So again, a key chain, Velcro, or something like that. Sometimes they'll put them in pouches, you know, a lot of boxes have packing pouches on the outside for paperwork. And our tags are small enough that a lot of times that's fine just to slip on into those pouches

Janet:                                18:19                   And from a constant point of somebody inadvertently shipped it with the tag, it's no big loss?

Stephen:                           18:25                   Well, the, it'll be a bigger loss depending on how many tags, how many tags they have. I guess the tags are more expensive than something like passive RFID, you know, or bar codes where you know, you're talking a matter of sense with the tags were talking more in order of dollars in scores of dollars. If you buy them in bulk, that will go down. But if you just bought one or two, that'll be a little more pricey.

Speaker 2:                        18:51                   All right, so keep track of your tags.

Speaker 3:                        18:54                   The good. The good thing is as long as they're within your Mesh, you know where the tags are and some of our customers are using our data to create alert systems where they know, oh, this tag is not allowed to. We put room, so let me know if this tag does go out of it specified area and then they have a bread crumb trail, you know, they're Hansel and Gretel to follow. Exactly to where it was.

Janet:                                19:19                   Oh, that's fascinating. Okay, well I know you said you were going to preview some new things at the show. I'm not going to make you tell me about them now. I'll let. I'll let Elaine tell that story in her podcast, but is it going to be similar in that it's very interactive?

Stephen:                           19:35                   Yes. What are our demos that we're going to be doing next month are going to be really similar to what we did last year, so we'll definitely have wisely. The owl will will still be tracking other objects. Other tags in real time will allow people to come up and move them themselves and see how they work. Interaction is definitely going to be part of that demonstration, but we hope what we're showing will be actually a little more accessible in some ways than what we've been able to show before.

Janet:                                20:10                   Oh, I like that idea. People definitely want to really get their hands on things if they can. So I think that'll be good.

Speaker 3:                        20:17                   But again, I haven't been to CES, but from what I hear, that's one of the coolest things for people who just go to the show. It's like you said, Janet, to try out the coolest new check to see how it works, to play with it a little bit, see if this is something for them. And so we're, we're hoping we can give everybody who comes to our booth, a real sample of that to experience the system, see what they could do with it. Think about how they could apply it. Because again, it's such a flexible technology and we've come up with dozens if not hundreds of use cases ourselves. But we almost always get new ideas when we go to these shows, so we're hoping that'll happen again, that people will come up and try it out, try the system, move the owl around, and then come up with some of their own ideas of where this might be useful.

Janet:                                21:05                   Oh, excellent. Alright. So those of you who are attending CES, you can find Wiser Systems in the North Carolina Startup pavilion there. Booth number is 51847. We're in Eureka Park, which is in the Sands Exhibition Hall. We are across the street from Singapore. So that might help you find us a little bit easier since you will be coming in with a Wiser System in order to do that. So we look forward to having you there. Again, Steven, I really appreciate all the social media support you have given the North Carolina Startup Pavilion in the past. Why don't you tell folks where to find Wiser systems in social media?

Stephen:                           21:50                   Wiser Systems is most active on LinkedIn and Twitter. You can find us on those. We're also on YouTube. If you use Crunchbase, which I know is not technically a social media, but a lot of people use it the same way they use Linkedin. Those are our main platforms. Again, Twitter, Linkedin, Crunchbase and YouTube. We're always, always happy to see new visitors on our website. Wiser systems.com.

Janet:                                22:18                   All right, well we will definitely see people in person and just a few weeks and Steve and I look forward to talking with you again during CES 2019.

Stephen:                           22:28                   Thank you Janet. I'm looking forward to it as well.

Announcer:                      22:31                   Thanks for listening to Trade Show Live! On the Road, a production of The trade Show Manager, a trade show consulting firm. If you need innovative programs to engage attendees and exhibitors and sponsors, custom research or new solutions for your trade show, contact The Trade Show Manager on our website, thetradeshowmanager.com.