YouSaid · the spoken record

Dhananja Jayalath

lines on the record
21
first
2016-08-05
most recent
2016-08-05
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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  1. “Really focused on capturing and really enabling high school athletes to perform at their best. How do we do that is going to evolve over time as we expand the market of all these high school athletes that really could use the best trainers training them, making sure that they're doing the right workouts, making them the best athletes possible, making sure that they're doing it as perfectly as possible. And for the next while, we're just going to be focused on going after that market. For me, it's like, how do I become a better and better CEO and how do I help lead this company to be a massive success?”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I would say that one of the benefits is that I get to do the thing that I love the most doing. I get to work on some amazing problems, get to create the future with some of the best people in the world. I can't imagine doing anything else. The cons are, it's a startup. You always have a lot of problems to solve, challenges that you're faced with every day. And learning to love the grind is the most important thing.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “The amount of times that you will have a right, you'll make the right decision is just about the average, the batting average of a major league hitter, so about 0.3% of the time. So it's okay to be run the most important thing is to not make the same mistake.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The seven loss of velocity by Stefan Olander and the CEO of AKQA. Just because I think they talk about the future and how interaction paradigms are changing and how people's behavior patterns have been. And I find it super fascinating as to how other people are thinking about just the world evolving and where that's headed.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Looking back through the history of things, I always feel like, wow, I can't believe somebody funded on that because we've gotten so much better over time. So I think for me, it's like always let's make sure we're getting much better and demonstrating real progress. For us, I think it's just been how far we've come on the technology, the customer validation, those things have been really useful. And for the next round, I want to make sure that we articulate that and then capture the vision and where that really expands to and how massive an opportunity this is better and better as we get better and better at understanding and discovering and validating that pathway at it.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I find it very hard to comment on how the fundraising process has been. I feel like this is the only company I've worked at and have started, so I've only been through our fundraising process, so I don't really know how to compare it per se, but I feel like we've been really fortunate in this whole process that we've had an amazing set of investors and we've been fortunate to pick and choose which ones we want to have with us on this journey. Really crafty in a way that can help drive the product and give us a lot of different perspectives on where the world is headed and how we should build the products for the future.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think lack of consumer loyalty is sort of a hard work to say. I think if there's a lot of undifferentiated products that have no reasoning for brand loyalty, then it's completely understandable when the switching cost is low. But at the same time, if you build a product experience that delivers value and you trust, I think that's where the most value of a brand comes in where you can capture somebody's trust, at which point I think, especially with things like health and fitness.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I think brand is an exceptionally important thing in this space, especially to really distinguish yourself and separate from everything that's going on. And I think brand is beyond just being aware of what you're doing. It's also building an experience that athletes and everybody associate with want to be, that want to have a belonging to. And that generates validation and trust and then helps you expand the market as well as capture the mindshare. So I think brand is a core element of things that you need to build to be successful in this space.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Honestly, I think everything we do is iteration. Let's figure out what are all the different things we can try and let's figure out what are the best things to be for us to try and take an approach and test and iterate on those things. And I think business model is also one of those things. There are so many different opportunities available with the product we're doing. There are almost three different aspects. There is the parallel itself. There's the hardware components as well as the software. very different combinations of ways you can think about generating revenue on that. We're really just focused on like right now it's like let's go through very traditional model where the clothing and the hardware you purchase the physical product and the software is completely free but over time based on how people are using and on what value they're getting and how they generate value will optimize to get the pricing model in a way that as many of these as”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I kind of don't think about it in terms of that. I think people buy experiences and people want to be part of experiences. And for us, we're really focused on delivering an exceptional experience to all of our customers, all of our athletes should be able to grab the gear and get a much better training experience with us than without us. And that's the only bar that matters. And to make that possible, you need to have exceptionally designed hardware that is simple, reliable, consistent, as well as software that provides a value, simplicity that everybody can have the same takeaways and makes their experience with us. Fantastic.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, I mean, there's just been a ton of things from, I think one of the earliest ones is that it's very important to disambiguate what you want for the product versus what the users want. Because I think one of the things that we definitely made the mistake of earlier was to think about what are the versions, what do we want from the product and just build that versus really listening to and looking through how are customers using it and then really addressing those needs and making the product really work for those customers. And then I think the other one is just simpler is always better. Like make it as simple and as targeted as possible to deliver the value they're expecting.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Make things better without waiting a three year cycle or one year cycle to make something new and try it out, you actually have a higher probability of being successful. You have to fail a bunch of times before you can get it right. The faster you can fail and the faster you can learn from those failures, the better, the faster you can make an amazing product.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I think the key point in there is that it's very important to manage it properly, which is making sure you capture the right metrics and you do enough testing around things. Definitely things that we've learned over time. You need to test everything and keep structured logs about like what's going on, what's breaking, what are you iterating, what's the next version, why are you making that. But I think it's also very important to iterate really fast. And the speed is actually developing a manufacturing hardware development cycle that is very rapid and making the right trade-offs to make that fast is actually a crucial advantage. I think a good hardware company needs to have because you need to develop things like there's a lot of things that help software companies by because they are able to iterate fast. If you can take all the good things about being able to iterate fast, which means that you can test and try things out and get feedback.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Wants to know how was the experience for you and how do you approach iteration and tasting within product development for Athos? Yeah, so for what we're doing there is a ton of different challenges. One of the things that's very unique to us is that no one has ever integrated technology into clothing the way we've done it. There was no manufacturing process when we started doing it. We work with one of the best manufacturers in the world. They call MAAS based in Sri Lanka and they do work for Nike Lululemon even at a facility like that there was just no way of manufacturing this technology and how to do it. So we spent a lot of time actually dating”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Have the opportunity of a lifetime. Let's go do it. And so we kind of had to figure out how to write a rejection letter to this job that we hunted really hard for. What a fantastic founding and investing story that is. Intrigued because you said there about iterating, but going back a bit with the product and you said about kind of iterating and testing. and designing the products. Is often a sticky point for founders of hardware products. So most hardware founders like manufacturing. The biggest pain point. And so actually, Mamoon at Social, who's Chamas partner, obviously.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I was also executive at Facebook. I would love to talk to you about funding you to keep working on this. We're like, holy cow, this is amazing. We'd love to talk to you, but we haven't gone to school in the last three months. So we kind of need to cram for exams this week. How about we talk to you right after exams? And then we get a call with him two days after we finished our final exams. We kind of went on a Skype call and he's like, just come down here and talk with me. And so the next day somehow we were on a flight at six in the morning. We got here. I think we had a seed deal about three hours afterwards. It was an incredible, incredible day. And then at this point in time, Chris and I had already signed job offers to join. I was going to join Apple. Chris is going to be joining analog devices. The idea was like, let's just like make some money and work on this on the side so that we can make a better protop and figure out how to do everything else. So it's like, okay, cool.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Felt good and could go through a washing machine and dryer. So you didn't have to do any behavior change. Those kind of gave us a boundary conditions and we iterated towards it. We put a heads down and just created how to capture the signal in a very different way and then create the materials that can capture the signal without having to use sticky electrodes. We were doing this as our final design project at the University of Waterloo, which is where we went to school. And one of the requirements in fourth year is that you have to create something. It's very unbounded problem. And we thought that was the best opportunity for us work on this stuff and still get credit for schoolwork. We were presenting it at a symposium and this guy came by. He was better dressed than everybody else was and we didn't know who he was. We kind of talked at him for 10 minutes and he said really cool guys and he left. And then a week before final exams, he sent us an email saying, hey, my name is Chamat. I went to Waterloo. I'm a VC.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “$16,000, you got to roll them around. There's wires everywhere, sticky electrodes, a big mess. So we kind of had to, I would say there was a bunch of naive confidence that said, we can capture, take the same system and get the same signal, and we can build a product that everybody else could afford because, you know, if you can't afford $50 for a personal trainer, you definitely can't afford $16,000 for a EMG machine. So we kind of put our heads down and kind of went at it trying to figure out how do we capture the signal. And one of the things that was really important, and we recognized was that it's very hard to get people to adopt new technology if they had to build a new habit around it. But if you integrate the existing routine, they're much more likely to use it. We were like, okay, when you go to the gym, you always change in your gym codes. That's part of your routine. We should build the technology into the gym clothes so that you don't have to change your routine. This is just your new gym codes. And what that meant was we need to build something that looked good.”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “To figure out a way to capture information that could tell us all these things. To make that possible, we kind of started looking at what are the existing ways people were doing this, accelerometers, gyroscopes. They weren't really very good at understanding exactly what's going on. And for us, it was really important to be able to give feedback that actually we could take away and do something immediately and be meaningful and actually affect how we worked out. There was nothing that was accurate enough or gave us valid enough data that we could come to valid conclusions that would result in us being able to provide this information. So we started looking at what is the medical space used and that's where we came across the science of electromyography. It's been studied for about 60 years, being used in medicine and in research. So it was the most validated way of understanding what's going on with your body. So we decided that, you know what, we're going to use this science to give feedback and capture this information. The problem was that these machines cost”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “The technology out there wasn't really helping us be able to get better. And we couldn't afford a personal trainer. So we wanted to make something that could give us that experience where something could tell us how to do things right, how to get better, how to get more of that time we spend at the gym. We started looking around”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, so it's been an incredible journey just thinking about it from the history of things. The reason we started was because Chris, my co-founder, and I Went to the gym a lot and we wanted to find a way to get more out of the time we spent at the gym. How to get better? Are we doing things right? Are we doing the right things for ourselves? There was really no way of doing that”

    2016-08-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Turning Down Apple & Getting Funded By Chamath @ Social Capital with Dhananja Jayalath, Co-Founder & CEO @ Athos · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source