The Inventor of the Onewheel | Kyle Doerksen

0:00Basically, the only self-balancing product before Onewheel was Segway. I think there's like a Paul Graham essay about what Segway should be. It should be like a board. When you see people, they should give you a thumbs up, you know, not like the middle finger. I think we kind of ended up building that. This is Kyle Dirksen, and he is the founder and CEO of Future Motion, which is the creator of Onewheel. Do you want to just start off with like what is Onewheel? So Onewheel is basically a skateboard with one giant wheel with a motor inside it in the middle and an active control system to balance you.

0:33So you just lean forward to go lean back to slow down Lean heel side toe side to turn like a snowboard. Yeah, I was on it for I think it was like 20 minutes just before this started And it was all a lot of fun. Yeah, it was a lot of fun How did you like come up with the idea in the first place? So I spent, you know my time growing up in Canada snowboarding and Then so that was like a major inspiration in terms of what it should feel like snowboarding on powder to me is just this kind of three-dimensional feeling right because the board's free to move in a number of different directions and then I studied you know mechanical engineering and computer science and some other things and then worked as a product design consultant for a company in the bay area and we designed all kinds of crazy products for different companies from kids toys to medical devices that would get implanted inside people's bodies to like you know you name it right so anything is possible but part of the way through that journey, I was, you know, just looking for a tinkering project.

1:36And I was like, Oh, I took one class in control systems in college, you know, and it was actually kind of funny. I don't know if they still do this way. I went to Stanford, but the, your control system, your budget for the sensor, the actuator and the controller, I think it was 20 bucks. So you had to make something really crappy. And that was the point, right that you could learn how to control things without you know very good sensors very good actuators and stuff like that but you know left me a little bit wanting to like dive back in and do more control system stuff so try to build like a basic cell um you know controller that could stabilize a single wheel um and it took about a year of nights and weekends tinkering um you know Is this like 2012-ish?

2:19No, this is actually like 2008. Yeah. So, you know, early Arduino actually had a chain drive motor because the hub motors didn't really exist yet. Lithium batteries barely existed, so I was still using lead acid batteries back in that era. But I got the first one going eventually and rode it around my neighborhood and was like, okay, this is pretty fun. And I put it back on the shelf because the technology wasn't here yet to achieve the experience that I had in my imagination, right? I was like no it needs to be lighter it needs to be more powerful smoother and all that stuff and then so yeah fast forward a few more years I helped spin out an electric bicycle company actually called Faraday bikes and you know got a sense to like wow these small vehicles are going to have a big impact on the world right but also you know e-bikes are gonna be a very competitive category like what's the sort of blue ocean where I can do something that if I don't do it you know No one else is going to do it.

3:16And so, yeah, around 2013, I took that prototype off the shelf, built the next generation of prototypes with hub motors, with lithium batteries, you know, and launched it on Kickstarter. And, you know, I had no idea whether anybody cared about this thing, right? You just like put this out into the world and hope for the best. Yeah, I just put it out in the world. You know, in the consulting work I was doing, we did a lot of user research and need finding and, you know, collecting the data and understanding where the white space is. This was just like, I didn't do any of that. I was just like, I built this thing.

3:46It's like a passion project. Yeah, it's a passion project. You know, in the early days, it was not commercial at all. I was just, it was just, I was just tinkering on it. Right. But I had a buddy of mine who was like, well, you build one for me. And I was like, you know, you don't want this weird contraption with like wires hanging at the bottom. You want like an actual product that will do the thing. And so, yeah, I launched it on crowdfunding and, you know, then successfully funded in a few days. And then it was time to figure out how to make these things. and get them in the world. Yeah, I know that like there's been very few like massively successful crowdfunding stories.

4:19Like there's not a whole lot because it's just like by the time, you know, by the time you're raising money, it's completely, you know, you may not even have the product yet. And I think this is kind of like that case where you like haven't figured out manufacturing and all this stuff. How did you think about that going and setting that up? That's a great question. So, you know, I'd been involved with this bike spin out and we actually had done crowdfunding for that too. and you know it was successful but not that successful and we didn't really have a good plan in place for like what we were going to do after the campaign um and so with with one wheel you know i had a few tricks up our sleeves in terms of how to get it you know launched with good momentum uh and then really a plan for like okay as soon as the crowdfunding like even before it's done we need to get going on the next stage and for us that involved raising a small seed round after that and then hiring the first couple people and you know waking up with manufacturing partners and diving into the last kind of productionization engineering and everything.

5:15And we tried to do that really fast. So we went from, you know, a Kickstarter in January to I think we started shipping in September. And, you know, from like prototypes with wires hanging out to like in, you know, under customers feet in, you know, nine months. I think that was pretty, pretty solid. Do you have do you have pictures of that like first prototype with all the wires and then also the first thing you shipped? Yeah. Yeah. We have them sitting over here in a little museum Yeah We can take a look at those but yeah I mean the first prototypes were crude, but you can definitely see the the family resemblance, you know kind of as it as it went Yeah How did you decide like at what point, you know You are writing this in 2008 and you're like this is clearly not the experience that you can like ship to customers What mental model went through your head on how to figure out?

6:03What like initial prototype you're willing to ship? yeah i don't think i exactly knew in 2008 you know i think it was kind of going through the whole uh e-bike experience and you know that's where really you know i got to use the some of the knowledge i already had about the supply chain and you know and what existed and what didn't exist from those early one-wheel prototypes but also kind of get access to cutting edge lithium-ion batteries and um in hub motors and you know also the the cost curve on the sensors so So, you know, 2008 to get a single axis gyro sensor, you know, was$90, something like that.

6:42And then, you know, in the intervening few years, it was like the Nintendo Wii and then the iPhone was really the truly high volume application of six degree of freedom sensors, which, of course, then led to drones and all these other things. But that drove the cost curve down to, you know, within a couple of years, you get a six degree of freedom IMU chip for, you know, three, four bucks. So it went from like extremely expensive sensors and extremely like dysfunctional batteries to like both of those work Yeah, both work or you know, we're we're maybe not like totally commoditized by the time that you know, I started commercializing it, but You know it was within sight so like our first a couple generations of products actually we used a one two three batteries Which were this MIT spin out very high power?

7:26Lithium iron phosphate batteries like nobody had them, right? We were one of the one of the only customers outside of probably like military and medical. But yeah, we shipped our first, you know, tens of thousands of units using these batteries, which were really cool. That company actually, you know, didn't really make it. But, you know, we used that. We used crazy motor technologies in our first generation commercial product. Because, you know, I think one of the challenges when you're a young company is, you know, if you try to partner with really big companies as suppliers, it goes poorly.

8:01Right. Like you're the you know, whatever it is, the flea on the elephant's back or something like they roll over and get squished. Right. So it doesn't really make sense for them to spend a lot of time working with you. Yes. You need to find these kind of smaller suppliers and partners. And so we found this small motor company that, you know, had sort of developed an e-bike motor, but then that didn't work out for one reason or another. But they had the IP. And so they made us the custom first generation one wheel motor, you know. with like an MOQ of a couple hundred, right? Which none of the big motor guys were going to even pick up the phone back in that era.

8:38So we used a transverse flux motor, which we're probably the only consumer product to ever use this very exotic motor technology. And it was expensive and it was hard to work with and stuff like that. But we really chose that because we found the right partner there. We would get the job done. Yeah, we'd get the job done and these guys would pick up the phone, right? There's a lot of just kind of pragmatism and starting early stage startup, right? So how many different suppliers or potential motor suppliers did you go through before you found that person? We talked to a lot and all over the world, right?

9:14And I think that was one of the interesting things about the early gen because if you want something that's in the catalog already, great. There's some suppliers, but if you want something different, well, that takes you very quickly into this world of defense and aerospace suppliers and stuff like that, where they can do it, but the cost quickly gets extra zeros added on to the back. And so it was really this challenge of how do we find a cost structure that works and also quality and flexibility to build something new. And so it was really an interesting exercise in talking to different companies, telling is what thing you're like oh yeah we're gonna build this self-balancing skateboard like what are you talking about like you know the the senior person in the room's like rolling their eyes right they're like we should bring an early iteration of it to those meetings or no yeah yeah some of them totally you know but it's like you know you have no volume you have no track record right you know why are they going to take you seriously and I think another thing that's kind of interesting is um you know it's like how do you learn the lessons of what doesn't work and so they're you basically the only self-balancing product before Onewheel was Segway.

10:29And after Onewheel, there were some other products, right? Like the hoverboards and whatever. But Segway was this case study example. There's books written about it, right? How they launched and they said, hey, we're going to change the entire world and this is going to be such a huge and high volume product that we should invest in building whole factories to build the gearbox and stuff like that. And so they invested tens of millions plus in standing that all up before they realized the consumer demand wasn't really there to do what they wanted. You know what I mean? So technologically, those early segues are kind of amazing, especially when you think that they used 1998 technology to do it.

11:16but you know we obviously they totally missed the market in terms of you know what the stuff should be and there's actually I think there's like a Paul Graham essay about how like what segway should be it's like should be like a board and you should like when you see people they should like give you thumbs up you know not like the middle finger and so I think we kind of ended up building that honestly the thing that Paul Graham always wanted didn't go through YC didn't go through YC Yeah, I interviewed for YC once yeah, I didn't get in it interview with PG. Yeah Wait, did it was this after the essay was published?

11:49Yeah, yeah, so they were you know, Y Combinator backed I think boosted boards which is an electric skateboard startup and like pebble the watch of course it Yeah, they funded a lot of hardware companies, but within this sort of you know mobility space You know and then Trevor Blackwell who is one of the other early partners there was interested in balancing vehicles and that kind of stuff. So there was enough synergy there to at least get an interview, but it didn't end up in the class. Do you know why they didn't like Backheed? I think it was just, like everybody, they're like, well, how big is this market?

12:25And I think that is an interesting thing when you're doing a product like this. I mean, the TAM is zero until you start building it, right? It's market creation. So if you can show people what it's like visually, experientially, like, you know, you got to experience like then you start building this thing. It's like, oh, maybe I should get one of those. And then you see someone riding around because because it's a product that people use, you know, out in the real world, you know, has their logo on the side. Right. People start selling. What is that? I mean, certainly in those early days, you go riding by and people be like, what is that thing?

13:00Right. So it had that kind of viral effect early on. But yeah, I think market creation is not easy and there is no real playbook. And it's not necessarily that investable. I think that's the thing, right? So we took a pretty capital constrained approach to building it. We did raise some outside funding, but we didn't just create a huge pitch and raise a series of giant rounds that then set the goalposts very far out there. To a point where you literally could not meet the expectations sort of thing. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I kind of studied what was going on with hardware startups at the time and shifted a little bit.

13:40But there were a lot of really high profile flame outs, you know. I mean, I so this is like 2014, 2015, right? I'm raising, you know, our Series A round. I go to Sand Hill Road. I'm talking to people. They're like, oh, man, you should have been here yesterday. We had these guys that were making this thing called Juicero. It's incredible. It makes fresh juice. I'm like, OK, I don't know. I'm not making that, you know. But I think in many ways like the the venture capital community has like there's like a flavor of the month You know and that that kind of you know, they were like if it's hardware there has to be a consumable Like it has to be razors and blades type model Like if it's not that like get out of my office, right?

14:19That that's what they're doing in 2014 and 2015 and of course Gisera raised like a hundred and was it 40 or 14 million? Yeah, I don't know between 100 200 million, you know didn't last very long People found out you could just squeeze the juice out of the pack on your own It was very strange machine I don't know how that ever got funded because it was it was literally just a pack of juice that you squoze Yeah, and it would just give you the juice I guess so but uh crazy. Yeah. Yeah, and you know I mean smart people that hardware if you've ever looked at a juicero hardware is really nicely done You know, but just the combination of you know the funding the business model like the expectations you know obviously they couldn't make that work and you know i mean i guess most heart most startups fail right but like even more hardware startups fail right because there's so many things you have to um triangulate and nail and there's like no margin for error um that i think you can survive more different mistakes as a software startup but hardware is pretty unforgiving it's pretty brutal yeah yeah for the actual you do the kickstarter and you how many like thousands of customers did you get off of that how many people I think we had like four or five hundred orders like during the Kickstarter yeah and then you know we opened pre-orders right after that and we had kind of that many more and so I was like okay we gotta build you know a thousand of these things basically yeah what so did you run into any situation I know when like Tesla and Elon started doing reservations for the Roadster and back in like way early 2008 ish um they basically ran into the situation where they pre-sold you know cars like 125 000 and then the cost after adding up yeah after doing all this stuff it was like 170 or something 150 um did you have any situation like that um well fortunately we didn't i mean i think all the ev startups do that exact same playbook right where whatever the car sells for you know they they have negative gross margins at the beginning.

16:18Right. So I, I believe, you know, Rivian, Lucid, beautiful cars and trucks, uh, probably awesome companies. I believe they're still, you know, negative on unit economics, which is pretty crazy. And they're, they're like many years in. Right. Um, and you know, a lot of kind of smaller scale consumer hardware startups took, took the same approach, but you know, I really felt like you have to at least break even, you know, on even that first batch. And then you got to, you know, start working on how do you, you know, improve your cost of goods? How do you improve? I think another big thing is just the cash flow and trade terms, right?

16:57Because unlike software, you know, there's there is cost of goods, right? If you have a box of parts sitting there, that's your money that's tied up until you can turn those parts into a thing and sell those to people. And so that kind of figuring out that part of the business, which I had never done before. I was an engineer, a product guy, but, you know, okay, cash flow, like enough people kind of use that terminology within the same month while I was getting things going. I'm like, okay, cash flow, we should figure out how to optimize that, right? Cash flow, that is the thing that I should probably have.

17:27And so one of the things that led us to was actually domestic manufacturing. So I think, you know, we've made a number of kind of contrarian bets, I would say, you know, not raising that much capital, building one-wheeled skateboards in the first place. But then to build them domestically was also, like, I would say very contrary in 2014. I think the default state of things is you basically go to China at that point in time. Absolutely. Now it's like, you know, much more colorful conversation. People have different opinions. And still the default case is to go build in China. But, you know, we decided to build in the U.S., originally with a contract manufacturer.

18:04so for the first four or five years we worked with a domestic contract manufacturer and you know one of the big things was just cash flow you know that we would you know get the order from a customer our cm would build it we'd ship it and then they'd send us an invoice that we needed to pay 30 days later you know that's very different than if you're you know buying a you know container loads from overseas as a as a hardware startup right i mean how much does a container load of your product cost right like you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars at least um and then it's you know it takes some you know a month or two to build it it takes another month to get here uh then you got to sell it to somebody so you're you're you know you're tying up all that cash and so i think that's one of my number one piece of advice to like especially consumer hardware startups but any hardware startups like figure that out so how why did you make that call you know back when you were just starting like yeah wasn't if the default state of things was go to China what was running through your mind to say no we should actually just build it here yeah I think it was just well there were a handful of things and you know with the e-bike company I'd done we we were manufacturing that overseas and you know kind of got trapped in this cash flow cycle where you needed to place bigger orders you're risking growing into death but you couldn't have yeah exactly the bigger you get you know you're you know throwing a few Benjamins in the box with every shipment, right?

19:29And you can't really do that. Or you can do it for a very short period of time, maybe. But, you know, you look, I mean, even Juicero, like, that we're kind of joking about, like, I'm pretty sure they sold that thing at a loss, right? And that's how you burn through, you know,$100 million, right? And so I think for hardware startups, they need to get to break even, they need to get to some, like minimum level of unit profitability. Otherwise, like you say, you sell more and you just have a bigger hole, right? But for us, domestic manufacturing was, I mean, that was one consideration in that, but intellectual property was another big one, right?

20:10Nobody knew how to build one wheels in the world because we came up with the form factor. So if we were, you know, we needed to learn those lessons, why teach someone else how to do that? You know, why not retain those lessons ourselves. And then the quality, of course, you know, because the product has to work, right? It's either balancing you or it's not. And if it's not, that's going to go poorly. So it really needs to work. And, you know, it's sort of a critical electromechanical system, right? You don't want to find out after you have, you know, container loads in the warehouse that they forgot to plug in this one connector or something, right?

20:46That's not going to work with this kind of thing. Um, and then to, to have, you know, the, the products physically somewhat big. So to, you know, have the finished goods, you know, here in the States, they can go directly to a customer, you know, um, on a truck instead of, you know, flying here on a boat for a long time. Um, that was a huge advantage. Um, so, and then about five years in, we actually insourced the manufacturing. So, um, we, um, yeah, that would have been like 2018 ish. uh yeah exactly 2018 2019 um 2019 is when we came out with our one wheel pint which is the first lower cost uh one wheel like under a thousand bucks um and so that was another moment where like okay do we take this to asia now you know uh people kept saying like oh yeah let us know when you're going to bring this to you know transition your manufacturing to china because that's what everybody does and we're like yeah i'm not too sure about that but you know spend a bunch of time uh china and other countries um you know costing it out and seeing like is it actually advantageous to do this and um were you like meeting with manufacturers and trying to figure that out yeah exactly met with a lot of contract manufacturers over there and um you know got you know costed uh quotes and stuff like that um but ultimately decided like at that point you know it was maybe slightly cheaper to build there but um the full life cycle costs um you know including getting it here and then if you have any rework or sending it back there is basically never going to happen.

22:14So that's going to be scrap. We decided it made more sense to vertically integrate basically and get the cost efficiencies from that rather than from offshoring. So yeah, definitely there were not that many people with that mindset at that time. And still now, there's almost nobody building, you know, bikes, scooters, you know, motorcycles, whatever in the U S that there's still the few domestic manufacturers there are, are still basically looking to offshore and are currently. So, um, it's pretty cool to be, you know, swimming upstream against that. And then, and then now to see, you know, this sort of reawakening of people like, Hey, we need to build things here for a lot of reasons.

23:00Um, you know, and one of the ones for me was like, okay, so you create a few engineering jobs, marketing jobs, you create a lot more manufacturing jobs if you have a hardware startup. And so why not create those jobs here? To me, it was kind of a no-brainer. So we're talking today in our headquarters in Santa Cruz. Our manufacturing logistics is in San Jose, California. And a lot of stuff gets made in the Bay Area. I know there's a reputation for not, but I mean, obviously Tesla's first factory was there right and they still make you know most of their cars for the U.S. market right yeah isn't it Fremont yeah in Fremont right and there's a lot of you know semiconductor and tech related manufacturing you know still in the maybe not like yeah not leading edge semiconductor nodes but integrating those things into systems and servers and all that kind of stuff.

23:58There's actually a lot going on in the South Bay. In that era, there was also LiDAR and all these other kind of complex electromechanical things getting built in that area. Tons of robotics, intuitive, surgical. There are technicians that know how to build electromechanical products. There are suppliers that serve that industry. It's not quite Shenzhen, but there are a lot of component suppliers, piece part suppliers, integrators, you know, automation firms, stuff like that, you know, in the Bay Area. And so it's pretty, you know, it's like, oh, it's four o 'clock on Friday afternoon and we need an oscilloscope.

24:41Like there's somebody that will like sell you one of those around the corner, right? So it's pretty, it's a pretty unique place to build products too. Yeah. For your like initial first few iterations, how were you like testing the board itself? Were you just like going out to the parking lot and just hopping on it? Or what was that like? Yeah, I mean, in the design stage, yeah, we're doing a lot of parking lot rides and, you know, having, you know, originally it was just us. And then we had to get, you know, some test riders that were like, you know, more highly skilled, shall we say. And yeah, just testing a lot of different scenarios.

25:18Right. And then as it's gone on, we've built more automated testing and stuff like that. But even to this day, like every single one wheel we make, we have a test rider in our factory, like go take it for a lap and make sure it's all working just just right. So, yeah. What was the biggest like issues from the prototyping stage? What went wrong while you especially during that first few months before you shipped the first 500 or a thousand? I think the main thing was really, you know, kind of envelope expansion. right so you know the early prototypes if you watch our launch video or whatever we're riding around the neighborhood it's flat you know it's paved it's slow you know but we knew people were gonna as soon as they got it they would you know ride up steep hill like the guy we gave our you know sold serial number one to he rode up Lombard Street the day he got it you know so pre-launch we're trying to figure out okay how do we make sure we've got uphill downhill performance like make sure that the vibration of riding off-road doesn't couple into the sensors and do something weird um you know so and then we have over the air firmware updates right so we had it um you know pretty constrained in terms of top speed and stuff at the initial you know launch but then a few months later we were able to like increase that top speed and that really unlocked like a lot more of what people could do and you know we've done that many times now over the years right um and and so that's a lot of what the testing is like the the easy stuff is easy you know but it's the people that are going to push it okay now they're going to ride a berm right there's going to be a significant roll angle like your gyros aren't going to measure the right orientation you got to compensate everything um you know so figuring out how to you know enable all that um knowing that we're trying to create a sport right so people are going to push it that's um yeah that that's what's taking a lot of the the testing for sure yeah and on the on the whole sports side like i know you said that there's an entire like competition every year now and that's why we have a massive hammer next to us because i guess that's the trophy for winning uh how did you come up with that what is it yeah so we we've had one wheel racing for a long time and the the culmination like the super bowl of one wheel racing basically is called race to the rail and the first one wheel racing we did um there used to be an event um called the gopro mountain games uh out in colorado and the first time we exhibited there we just you know got some caution tape and we set up a little zone with some cones and we had a couple of our guys ride around um and like people came to watch you know like because people are like kayaking and stand up paddle boarding and doing other kinds of competitions and mountain biking and stuff um but you know as soon as people were racing you know that there's an audience right um and so we built it a little bit bigger there the next year and then a little bit bigger the next year and then they were like you guys need to go get your own event like this is too much they started putting up like no one wheeling signs around the event because it was just like you know you've made it was out of control putting up signs saying don't do it here it was totally out of control i mean there were like hundreds of one wheels out there it was in vale colorado it was awesome um they're like okay this is kind of going somewhere so um you know we started producing standalone events for the um the race for the rail and then that's kind of led into now there's um you know community organized events all over the country and all over the world actually where people race and some of those are qualifying events for the race for the rail and then the the tradition um you know is every year we make a trophy out of a rail which is the of the one wheel so this one's thor's hammer but you know we've got swords and nunchucks and different things over the years um and you know that goes to the the top men and women riders how do you how do you think about marketing because i imagine you know i mentioned earlier that this is a little bit like the red bull stuff where you're kind of like selling an idea or a vision for this is the type of person that drinks or uses our product yeah and this is like this is the lifestyle of someone that would use a one wheel how did you think about that yeah that's a great question i think you know if you look at board sports right you look at you know surf snowboard skate like they all have this kind of um you know there's a competitive side there's like a professional there are professional surfers there are professional snowboarders right um but they're by and large participant sports right and so it's this kind of thing where you know the pros kind of define what it is and like the leading edge of what's possible, the most progressive riding and stuff like that.

29:49And they attract attention to it. But most people just want to go have fun. Right. And so, you know, but I think in making it a sport, you know, there's just a natural like people want to challenge themselves. Right. They see a little jump. If they can land that, they want to try the bigger jump. Right. They try an easy off-road trail. They think, oh, I'd love to try something a little more technical. Right. Right. And so, you know, that kind of progression, you know, I've always thought like, you know, what is or is not a sport? Like you think about electric scooters, like, do you think of anyone as like, oh, that person's a really good electric scooter rider?

30:25I don't. Not really. You know, it's just like they're utilitarian, you know, they're for riding around town. But with one wheel, like some people, we have a team of pro riders that work for us. They are amazing. Like you see them just jump on it and you're like, wow, they're just so effortless. They can hit crazy jumps and land every time they can ride, you know, unbelievable terrain, you know, can everybody do that? No, but they, they set the bar, you know, up here and they, they keep pushing on like what's possible. And then, you know, they, they bring feedback to us that shapes, you know, our product roadmap, right.

30:56To keep, keep building it out. So, um, you know, but I think it's one of the, the, the challenges of, you know, building a company like this, cause you want it to be aspirational, but you also want it to be approachable. Right. So we We have our entry-level products start at$750 for the pint, and they go up to the GTS Series XL,$3 ,500. It goes 30 miles an hour. It can take you on crazy mountain trails. It's amazing. All-terrain vehicle. It's all-terrain, right? But we have a broad range of customers, right? Some of them are never going to get on a trail. They're just going to ride around their neighborhood.

31:35That's totally fine. They're going to have a great time, too. Yeah. I so I also know before we started this, I was out there riding it and Jack was basically showing me the entire app and everything. I imagine there's like a lot of one wheel customers that just want to basically get on the board and ride, you know, to the coffee shop or whatever. Yeah. And then there's people that are much more interested in like, you know, adjusting the tilt of the board and all these other things. how did you decide to basically design kind of a super intuitive experience for those people that don't really want a whole lot of manual controls while also enabling people that do yeah that's a that's an important question because you got some people that really want to noodle on everything right and the other people they're like i just want it to work right and i mean for lack of a better term they're the iphone people and android people right the iphone people just want to pull it out of the box and it works and the android people like they gotta compile their own kernel or whatever right so um yeah i think uh the you know so we make it out of the box it it works great and you know in the app you can select between some sort of pre-built we call it digital shaping settings but then over the years we've added a lot more ability to actually customize the control system so if you click the little customize button in there you now have all these different sliders that control different amounts of the angle you know forward and back how much it compensates side to side you know like the responsiveness in terms of how it accelerates and the braking performance and all this stuff um and also as the the systems get more powerful right like with our high-end boards like you probably don't want it running all at max because that's gonna be uncomfortable right so um yeah it's and but that's like you know way too much flexibility for the casual rider and they're you know they're on our Instagram being like what settings should I use you know and then some people are just exploring the perfect you know the perfect blend up out there in the high end so but you can always just set sliders all back to the middle and rides pretty well on the like iteration side I love this like line of all the different first what was it the first like 10 different iterations of the product yeah how did you kind of go through that iteration process all the way from the very beginning board to what like you have at the end of it yeah well in you know the very beginning boards those are the early prototypes that i built you know in my garage and that was you know chain drive lead acid batteries arduino there's no waterproofing there's no none of that stuff um but it's kind of like you have to get it going to understand what you need to improve right and then you start improving things um so you know some of those early ones um not that early but the next generation had like internally geared motors and you know that kind of revealed that you don't want an internally geared motor because um you know there's there's backlash so when you change direction it's like um and there's noise and there's reliability you know challenges and stuff like that's like okay we want a direct drive hub motor batteries obviously you want them smaller and lighter and more powerful um so that's pretty obvious but then just things like the foot pads so our you know First couple generations of products have flat foot pads and then it's like well skateboards all have kind of concave surface Why is that foot pads?

34:55It gives you more control and it keeps you sort of like more actively like your feet are flexed And so you're sort of attached to the board lightly when you're turning and stuff like that You know skateboard obviously it's also you can get some pop and do an ollie and stuff But with one wheel it's to get the side to side, you know control and really kind of lock your like your feet in So at first we did single directional, you know, curvature and then we did compound curvature. And now, you know, we even have optional like foot hooks that you can put on, which off-road riders want because they're riding over like really rocky terrain.

35:29And, you know, it sucks to have a line that they could ride, but they just get bounced off the board. Right. So that's why we came out with those. And now they're doing crazy progressive things with that, you know, hitting bigger gaps and things like that, which is wild. The craziest thing to me was how intuitive it was. Yeah. You get on it, and for the first probably 30 seconds to a minute, you're a little bit shaky. But then by the second or third lap around the parking lot, you're just chilling. Yeah. You continually accelerate speed, too. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's what keeps me coming back to it, right?

36:02I've been building these since 2008. How many years is that? A lot. It's like 20, what is it, 17? Yeah, 17 years, right? so but still when I hop on a board it's like oh wow this is a magical experience like that that's not gotten old for me you know in years of doing it and you know we still support you know our early products and we have spare parts and um you know repair services and stuff available for them and people are still riding them you know and then on up to the the boards we just launched a couple months ago which yeah they're super tuned up and they're way way better but you know the core of the experience is all you know the same so um yeah it's been really neat to to build that out over the years on the like company side what have been the biggest like scaling challenges from going from just a few boards to a whole lot like is it okay to say like 400 ,000 yeah so we we've sold um over 400 ,000 one wheels so far um and yeah i think you know when we launched the pint in 2019 that was like i said our first kind of lower cost board and it's a little bit smaller too um and that definitely expanded the um you know the market and the number that we needed to make a lot and that was also the same time that we brought it in-house so um you bring it in-house the the neat thing was you know we were in control of our destiny in terms of like how much we want to invest in in building you know more capacity and um you know automating things and things like that.