My Favourite Failure: Bombing on stage at a startup pitch final - AJ Keller

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0:43So if you're leading a small or medium sized business and want to spend less time and effort on HR admin, then book a demo at personio.com forward slash secret leaders. That's personio.com forward slash secret leaders. There's a link in the show notes. I definitely was pretty bummed out, definitely hit pretty hard. I think it's that whole like I'm in trouble feeling. I'm going to get in trouble with my teammates because I didn't do more than my fair share. In fact, I performed under my fair share. And at this time, I really had felt like the technology was my responsibility, the company was my responsibility.

1:16So definitely disappointed in the overall outcome. That's AJ Keller, the co-founder of Neurosity, who make brain imaging devices you can use at home. But we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about the epic failure that put him on the path to where he is today. AJ's first foray into brain imaging brought him to a point in the summer of 2017 when everything was riding on him and his teammates winning at an NYU startup pitch competition. If they won, they would get the funding they needed to turn their company into a real thing. Fail, however, and their venture would be over.

1:59You've probably seen a film which ends with a battle of the bands, like School of Rock, for example. It's the big goal at the end of the film, a competition on stage in front of hundreds of people where the protagonists can get what they want against the odds. This was AJ's reality, but in startup world. How had he got pulled into this? I went on down to NYU business school, which, you know, I was told had the best entrepreneurs in New York City and found, you know, found myself, you know, a business competition and sort of worked my way into this. And I was building technology at the time, you know, to image the brain at home.

2:38But what I didn't have was really the, you know, the funding from, you know, venture capitalists to be able to work on this full time. And that's really what I wanted. I wanted to build a team. So I saw this opportunity to go, you know, sort of plug myself into the NYU ecosystem, found a co-founder, found another teammate as well. And we all said, you know, if we can win this business competition, we could, you know, to start this company and we'll all start it together and, you know, we'll have, you know, it really formed this thing. Okay. So you get the stakes, one competition, which can make or break this seedling of a company.

3:13So what were they even trying to do? The biggest thing that we were pushing at this time and that I was really focused on was replacing the keyboard and mouse due to like ergonomic impediments felt by a lot of the knowledge workers in the world. You have, you know, radiologists who are just scrolling down on the mouse for like eight hours a day looking at radiology images. And we were doing this sort of user research and understanding that, hey, if we could create a device where they just have to think about scrolling instead of actually scrolling, their ergonomic impact will be dramatically reduced, their quality of life will improve, and all of a sudden we have a product that people are using every day.

3:53And so that was something we were calling Think to Scroll. So the system would actually go on top of your head. It was hidden under a baseball cap at the time. And there was software that the baseball cap would communicate with over a Bluetooth connection. That comes important later on in the story. But the hat was communicating through Bluetooth, sort of how like a speaker connects to your phone to play music. Same concept. It is susceptible to that clipping where if you walk too far away from your speaker, all of a sudden the music starts breaking up. And that's sort of what we would eventually go on to experience and that would derail us.

4:28But that was essentially it. It was a rudimentary brain imaging device built into a baseball cap. I'm standing on stage pitching this. I have spent the last year and a half working on software that essentially in real time is learning what the energy in your brain looks like when you're imagining moving your arm versus resting and relaxing and sort of in a baseline and being able to understand, well, what is the probability that this person is thinking to imagine this movement? And if that's a high enough probability, we scroll down to the next image the radiologist is looking at. So you think of moving your arm down, the page scrolls down.

5:12They'd sailed through the quarterfinals and semis. They were in the final and AJ decided they needed to get real. Having just talked about what they were going to build in previous rounds, in the final they were going to show the judges a working prototype. Expecting to show the audience, essentially have the audience or the judges at this time say scroll down on the screen and for me to be able to scroll down on the screen, then be able to say stop, me stop, and the scrolling stops and then be able to resume it again. But essentially that the judges had free control over the scrolling of the screen of the presentation in front of a room of 250 plus people and they could voluntarily control it just by telling me what to do during the live demo portion of the pitch.

6:02So AJ's future is riding on this pitch. He's hoping the next 10 minutes will unlock the rest of his career. Right before I'm going on stage, I'm like waiting for my turn to go up. There are, you know, literally I can hear people pitching in the background and I'm trying, standing right outside the room, trying to focus on imagining moving my left arm versus a baseline and imagining moving my left arm. And you have to also remember that when like people ask you to do these things, it makes me nervous. So I get nervous when people ask me to think to scroll because it's just a scary thing and I'm still new at it.

6:40I was learning and I was getting better, but it's scary. There's this whole human nature to it where if I can't focus and do the imagine movement the very similar way that I trained it on, then it's not going to work at all. So here I am standing very still. I can't move a muscle because if you move, then the signals go crazy. So I'm training the system up. I go on stage. It's our turn. We go up there. My parents are in the audience. My best friend, Austin, is in the audience, I think with his future wife. So definitely have a lot of support. I think it was definitely 200 plus people all packed into this little room.

7:21And I'm pitching and we introduce ourselves. And at the time we were calling ourselves Waho Wearables after Waffle House, because the first hat we built was a Waffle House hat. I don't know what we were thinking, but that's what we were thinking. And we're pitching and we're saying, hey, you're clicking the mouse a thousand times a day, you're scrolling miles. Wouldn't it be amazing if you could use your brain to control technology? and we go to give the demo and it just doesn't work at all. And the whole thing just crashes. And I can see the transmission light between my headset and the computer.

8:03It's supposed to be solid red, indicating like a great connection. And I just see this little red LED just like dying, just like lighting up and then fading, lighting up and fading. Every time one of those fading happens is like the clipping of the audio speaker I talked about earlier, where like you're too far away from the speaker, but it's clipping. And I'm standing right above the computer. Like I'm a foot away from it. It should be fine. I didn't know, but there's something called channels in Bluetooth. And there's a limited number of channels that Bluetooth devices can talk to each other on.

8:38And so what actually ended up happening was there's too much Bluetooth in the room and the connection failed. And we weren't able to stream the data continuously into the computer and the program crashed. And so I'm like, holy smokes, what am I supposed to do? But what I decided to do at that moment, you know, I mean, like, this is like the scariest thing, right? Like I'm trying to demo, the thing isn't working. My co-founder is standing on the other side of the stage, like looking at me because we had decided to also do a team pitch where like I pitch and then he pitches also a terrible idea, but like the switching back and forth and, you Everyone started staring at me.

9:17So I go, well, I can at least show you how to train a real time system. And so I was able to show I was able to restart the thing and I was able to show the system like learn in real time. But at that point, I had to like say I couldn't show it being applied. I couldn't do the demo of the judges, you know, telling me to control it and seeing the screen scroll down just like we ran out of time. And that was the second to last time I ever would go on to see most of those teammates. Wow. So it really was make or break for that company. What did the judges make of their pitch? Yeah, we got roasted by judges right on the spot.

9:55Yeah, for sure. Like right after, you know, asking questions as much as like, I mean, definitely one I remember, but was like, why would you like, how would you be successful against a company like Apple making the same technology? really hard questions to answer you know that have no real answer but they're almost like how many ping pong balls could you fit on a school bus type questions and i i think when you're in the moment when i was in the moment i didn't realize that that these are tests to see how you think as a leader not uh have you done the knowledge have you done the necessary like research ahead of time and there's yeah i didn't understand that as you know i've experienced my fair share of failure, but I wonder what it feels like to have such a public failure on stage in front of so many people.

10:46I get into this point, it almost feels like I'm in trouble. Like I'm in trouble from something I did wrong, like, and I've got to get scolded by someone who's in like a position of authority to me. So often it feels like the same type of emotion, scared, a stinking feeling in my chest, sweat forming on my back, heart racing, vision narrowing. And I go into this sort of fight or flight mode where I have to solve it. I have to come up with a solution. I have to try and work my way out of this, like if I was about to get in trouble or something to try and like preserve myself. His mate took him out for a commiseratory pint.

11:36AJ worried it would be the end of the company and it was. He also wondered how he'd make it as an entrepreneur but looking back he realizes he was taking the Silicon Valley playbook too much to heart. He found a new North Star, a new battle of the bands after he'd got his mojo back. I think the thing that gave me the confidence I needed was just the intuition that the problem that I had was so typical of what other people experience and that I was able to see a solution that was a better solution to the, you know, the problem I had. And I sort of let that be gravity for me. I let, I let that new idea pull me forward, pull me out of bed, you know, to, to start working on it.

12:26And so that was really like the saving grace, I think, was having, you know, one single idea to work on. I still had like a couple contracts that I was working on at the time. So I certainly like took a little bit of time off, but I really immediately started trying to go back to my roots, you know, which was the technology and not stress out as much about fitting this perfect mold that is a software startup, you know, in, you know, a seed stage, a pre-seed stage software startup is not my company. And I think I was really trying to fit my company into this 12 deck, you know, Y Combinator safe problem solution format.

13:08And it was just not the right way. You know, I think it was less trying to be like the next Mark Zuckerberg and really trying to be like the first AJ Keller and really trying to figure out, well, what I'm doing here is new and that's okay. And it's pulled by the product. It's product-led growth and really sort of transitioned into that. And that took a while. I mean, that whole summer, I was very defeated. I think this was like 2016. So it took me a while, but eventually by mid, or this was 2017. So by, you know, maybe six months later, seven months later, I had met back up with my current co-founder and, you know, things started to look a little bit better.

13:55But even getting my current co-founder on was a challenge. And, you know, it was still scary for me. Like, I remember being terrified if I was going to be able to get Alex, my current co-founder at Neurosity, to be able to join the team. And I thought he was going to want to go do his own company so it was that same trauma that same experience of like okay here we go again like am i going to be able to build a team you know but it turned out that alex approached me at the same exact time to build a team and it totally felt right and it was totally like night and day from me going and trying to find a co-founder versus having someone else trying to find me at the same exact time

14:36AJ Keller on letting the failures slide so the potential successes can pull you forward. Thanks for listening to this episode. I've been your host, Dan Murray-Surter. If you like this episode, please hit follow or subscribe. See you next time.