Spreadsheets About Lettuce
This is the Nobel podcast where we talk about how to optimize your technology, life, and mind. We're joined by special operations veterans, entrepreneurs, investors, and others who have overcome difficulty to make it to the top of their craft by staying in the fight.
Sam Alaimo:What's your name? Where'd you grow up?
Tim Sulzer:Yeah. I'm Tim Sulzer. I grew up in Slattington, Pennsylvania, which is just outside of Allentown for up until about 4th grade, and then I moved and my family moved to Lehighton, which is right next to Jim Thorpe. Most people know Jim Thorpe when I talk about it, so I usually just say Jim Thorpe. So Go
Sam Alaimo:into the background, who is Jim Thorpe?
Tim Sulzer:Jim Thorpe was an Olympian, actually. He participated, I think, in more Olympic sports than almost anyone. The town name was actually called Machuang before, and Jim Thorpe's actually a pretty kind of a better name anyway, but they renamed the city to honor him as an Olympian. And I don't I don't remember the exact facts on it, but he actually took some money one one year as, like, a semi pro baseball player. And because he took money to do a sport, they yanked all of his gold medals from him.
Tim Sulzer:So they they stripped him of all his gold medals, which is, I think, a travesty because I think he's possibly one of the best athletes in American history.
Sam Alaimo:That's wild.
Tim Sulzer:At least he has a town named after him.
Sam Alaimo:A beautiful town. The woods are on there. Beautiful.
Tim Sulzer:My mom was actually a teacher at the the elementary school that I went to, which was it was pretty cool to have her pretty close by. She was always the one that taught me to be passionate about learning, which is something that's been really important for me throughout my career.
Sam Alaimo:That's gonna come back up, especially when it comes down to you basically teaching yourself how to code. But before we get there, I'm curious because I I know Mike's background was kind of interesting as a kid. Were you were you a troublemaker as a kid?
Tim Sulzer:No. I was a good kid. Yeah. I spent I spent a ton of time outside. My dad taught me to hunt fish and to love nature.
Tim Sulzer:I really value those experiences, and I still love nature. And that that kind of pushed my early career path, to
Sam Alaimo:be honest. Into veggie systems?
Tim Sulzer:I would say after well, veggie systems, for sure, I was really interested in farming. The idea of just, like, producing food, but also just, like, being able to work outside, living off the land, you know, putting your hands and feet in the dirt is something that, you know, has resonated with me my entire life. So, the veggie system is for sure though.
Sam Alaimo:When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up, and how does it basically compare to where you're at right now? CTO 0s. Never thought I would
Tim Sulzer:be a CTO for sure. I was always interested in technology a little bit, but my dad worked in a prison, and he he had a hard life. When I thought about what I wanted to do, I saw that all the sacrifices that he made for me and my family growing up, and I really wanted to do something around nature, and I wanted to do something outside. I did not wanna work behind a desk. That was that was like my main thing.
Tim Sulzer:So when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I went to college for biology and then ended up switching to environmental science because as an environmental science major, you didn't need to take comparative anatomy. And I was not big on, dissecting frogs and stuff for some reason, even though I have no problems, you know, gutting a deer, skinning a deer. So I really wanted to be, like, a park ranger. I think that was that was my ultimate goal. And funny enough, my brother actually does that now.
Tim Sulzer:So my brother kinda took my dream dream job and ran with it.
Sam Alaimo:Is it college biology and environmental science? Where did you go to college?
Tim Sulzer:I went to Delaware Valley College. It's now Delaware Valley University, but they, they upgraded the year after I left.
Sam Alaimo:So this is where I'm hazing your background. So walk me through basically step by step college timeline to Veggie Systems and and how that came into being. How was your first your first real startup?
Tim Sulzer:Yeah. So I went to college, and my 1st summer, I basically didn't wanna move back home. I was, I was really independent at the time. I was focused on my independence. And so I went out and I got a few jobs that kept me at college over the summer.
Tim Sulzer:One of them was working on a farm for a guy named Dennis Ryland. Dennis Riling turned out to be my first business partner. He was supporting his family from a roadside stand that was, you know, fueled by all the vegetables that were grown on his farm. So we got to the end of the growing season, and we're trying to figure out what to do next. I had a little bit of hydroponic background from a senior project in high school.
Tim Sulzer:Dennis was actually going to school for agriculture, and he had a background in hydroponics as well. We came up with this idea that we're gonna build a vertical indoor growing system in the barn of the farm that we're we're living on at at the time. We drove out to Michigan to one of the first hydroponic farms in America, and we saw what they were doing, how they were growing, got a bunch of ideas. I think we actually bought a system from them and had it shipped out and they came out and helped us set it up in the barn. So I was sleeping in the room next to this growing system for a few months while we were getting started with vertical farming.
Tim Sulzer:I don't think we really had an idea of, you know, turning it into a business at that point, but it just kind of slowly grew on us that, you know, if we wanted to make money doing this, it needed to be at a bigger scale. And we started bringing investors around, and we found this local incubator that was very into healthy food. And they came and they saw what we were doing. I spent untold hours building spreadsheets to try to figure out how to make a business model out of it, throwing lettuce, essentially. And so we we set about the task of, like, trying to prove this out.
Tim Sulzer:So they invested some money in us. We ended up scaling up into a commercial warehouse space in Doylestown. One huge benefit at the time was that Doylestown was huge into the healthy food, local food movement. Seeing that we had a fresh local product, you know, 365 year round was really exciting to a lot of people. And so we had, you know, a lot of success selling our produce in the very beginning.
Tim Sulzer:So we scaled up into a commercial warehouse, and that's actually where I got started with technology for real. So we we had to build all these different types of automated drawing systems, lighting systems, nutrient dosing, watering systems.
Sam Alaimo:You couldn't buy that off the shelf. You basically technically invented it in a way.
Tim Sulzer:I mean, some some of it was pieces that we that we bought off the shelf. Like, all all the sensors existed. We just had to combine it into a system. Right? And we also started working through our incubator.
Tim Sulzer:They had like a a development team that was working with us to build a seed to sale tracking platform. Because one of the biggest challenges with farming is like maximizing your profit per square foot. Now you throw vertical into the mix, and anytime you have to get up on a ladder or, you know, a rolling staircase to do work, it makes things 10 times more complicated. So we had to really optimize almost every step of the process, and it was was a really difficult thing to do. But, yeah, that's how I got started with technology.
Sam Alaimo:So part of the theme of what we're doing here on this podcast is is the trial and error process, the AB testing, the iterating in your life and the business and technology. So if you could look back at Veggie Systems, what what was the iterative process like? What were the things that worked, the things that didn't, and how did you figure that out over time? Talked about spreadsheets, talked about technology, but what what were the core lessons learned, and how did you get there?
Tim Sulzer:I made a million mistakes. We had, you know, environmental issues that we we were constantly trying to overcome. I learned from a very, very early time that people issues are, are one of the hardest challenges in business. Like, if it was as easy as, you know, just using technology or, you know, planting seeds to make a business, there'd be a lot more successful businesses out there. But having a team of people all working in the right direction, all with that same mindset of, you know, relentlessly iterating and learning from your mistakes and trying to improve.
Tim Sulzer:I remember, like, one of one of the hardest times I had at Veggie Systems was I ended up hiring one of my best friends, my college roommate, and at one point, you know, the business wasn't doing well and I hit the fire.
Sam Alaimo:Oh, that's rough.
Tim Sulzer:And that was that that broke my heart, you know, kind of ruined that relationship. And I'll never forget that. I still think about that guy today. So that was, that was one of the big challenges. Also, I mean, we just, we went through all these iterations on assumptions.
Tim Sulzer:Like, we made assumptions on how long it would take to grow a head of lettuce because that went into the amount of electricity you needed and how much time it needed to be under lights. And we're trying to optimize for, like, having the the plants under lights for the shortest amount of time. So we were, like, growing a plant from a seed and then transplanting it and giving it 3 inches of space until it maxed out that 3 inches of space and then touching it again and transplanting it to 6 inches of space and, like, really trying to, like, turn cycles in in our harvest process. And ultimately, like, there's too many touches. We weren't on a stage where we could automate it quite yet.
Tim Sulzer:That I think was one of the biggest challenges that we faced. We went through an iterative process for developing software too. We never got to the point where we could prove out that we could do this at scale. And that's ultimately what we were trying to do at Veggie Systems was to prove it out in one space so that we could sell the systems and grow that way. And, you know, I think I think maybe we had some competing ideas about how how the business should go, and I think, ultimately, we ended up just being farmers and growing lettuce, which, you know, that was a great thing to do, and that's ultimately what we got into it to do.
Tim Sulzer:But we saw this way bigger picture of let's build the systems, automate the systems, prove it out, and then sell the systems to people. Because, you know, that's that's how we could truly get to scale, not trying to grow all the lettuce or salad. A hell
Sam Alaimo:of a pivot.
Tim Sulzer:Yeah. And I mean, that that was the opportunity, and we just we'd we never got to the point where we could prove it to the point that we could sell it as a systematized thing to people. So I ran ran the business with my cofounder, my business partner, and we ran it for about 3 years before we got to that decision point of, is this gonna work or not? And we decided to close-up shop and move on.
Sam Alaimo:What year was that when you closed up shop?
Tim Sulzer:I think we founded Veggie Systems November 2011 and ran it to 2013, and then I graduated, and then, ended up closing up Shell and and moving on to the next thing.
Sam Alaimo:So before we get to that, I'm curious about the the mindset it takes. So you talked about your spreadsheets, talked about the amount of space lettuce needs, and then as it grows, it needs more space and ladders for different layers in the vertical architecture. What sort of mines it is that it takes to do it, and where does that come from?
Tim Sulzer:I think I always loved doing something new that hadn't been done before. Like, if I could read about how to do it online, it didn't really interest me that much. And, you know, I I grew up very interested in agriculture, but there wasn't many people doing this at the time, like indoor agriculture. And I saw this future of food shortages and growing population and everyone moving to urban centers and, you know, the the food scarcity, like food deserts, which exist in downtown Philadelphia, where you just can't get access to fresh produce. Like, that exists, and that was the problem that we were trying to solve.
Tim Sulzer:We, like, we thought that everyone should have access to this stuff. I think I was always drawn to a challenge like that, and anytime that there was something that I could just keep pulling the thread and learning more and more, I would get addicted to it. As soon as I started to realize that, for instance, Dennis introduced me to The 4 Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris. And that was like that was like the seed that the thread that I needed to start pulling to realize that you don't need to work a 40 hour a week salary job in order to make a living. Right?
Tim Sulzer:You could literally do anything. And if you're smart about it and figure out a way to add value to the world and get people to buy what you're selling, you know, you can unlock your time from the money that you make. If you're not locked into, you know, getting paid x amount per hour, then the sky is the limit in terms of what you can do with your career. Mhmm. So I love the idea of not working a 40 hour work week and being able to spend my time doing the things that I loved.
Tim Sulzer:And the ironic thing about that is when you get into a startup, you end up sinking all of your time into it.
Sam Alaimo:So you you talked about thread pulling, and, like, that's a great way to describe the sort of mindset you see in entrepreneurship. Where did your your desire to pull threads come from? Like, did you did you have that when you were a kid? You constantly tinkering? Was it something you learned as you got older?
Sam Alaimo:What's the drive there?
Tim Sulzer:I remember tinkering with watches when I was a kid.
Sam Alaimo:That's my core. That's no joke.
Tim Sulzer:I mean, when I say tinkering, I mean, like taking apart. And I never really was great at, like, putting things back together, but I wanted to understand how things worked. And so I had a box of just like, you know, old watches that I had pulled apart and just like investigated and saw the insides of. I have an awesome family that was always really supportive of me. And, you know, my mom taught me early on to love learning.
Tim Sulzer:So thankful to have parents that were invested and and, you know, did the hard things to provide for me and my brother. I was like, my brother, which I always looked up to, and he was always a great example for me. He always, like, drove me and challenged me to be on his level, which was cool. He's 2 years older than me, so he was like the perfect distance away that I always had, like, a goal to look up to. And, you know, the biggest example I would think of is, like, sports.
Tim Sulzer:Like, almost every sports team that I was on, I was bumped up into the next age group so that I could be on the same sports team as my brother. That always pushed me to work harder because I was always the youngest. And then also my dad. My dad is super analytical. I think that's, that's where I got a lot of my analytical drive from.
Tim Sulzer:He learned how to build houses from his grandfather, and he, he really passed that on to me and my brother. I remember we were constantly doing projects, carpentry type work. We built this like massive pavilion in the, in our backyard out of old barnwood one summer, this farm near us in Lehighton that, you know, that had an old barn on it that, you know, one big storm came through and, you know, the barn, for whatever reason, blew down. And we got in touch with the people there, and there was just, like, a big pile of old barn wood sitting there for the longest time. So we were like, you know, do you mind if we come and like pick through and see if there's any good bits?
Tim Sulzer:And they were like, yeah. Absolutely. Do it. So we spent a couple weekends just, like, going there and picking out these huge beams from from this old barn, all this different wood. And being able to look at that and say, you know, we wanna build x, y, and z, and these are the materials that we have and the tools that we have.
Tim Sulzer:How can we do it? I think that was one big thing that really got me into, you know, pulling that thread, you know, understanding this is this is what you have to work with in front of you. How do you build it into what you need?
Sam Alaimo:So looking back as we wrap up Veggie Systems, knowing what you know now, could you make it work?
Tim Sulzer:Certainly. There's a lot of things I would do differently. I would try to retain more control of the company. Realistically, at the time, we were we were pressed that we needed money. We were desperate and and took a deal.
Tim Sulzer:But, in hindsight, I would I would wanna bootstrap it more, and there's probably a 1,000,000 things that I would do differently.
Sam Alaimo:So what happened then between Veggie Systems and the first moment you heard about 0 Eyes?
Tim Sulzer:I think that was, like, the defining time in my career because I was one of the only growers in America that had done vertical farming indoors under LED lights. So after Veggie Systems, I went and I sold LED lights to cannabis growers. And that's that's what I did for about 6 months. And I did not think I was a good salesperson. I did not wanna do sales, but what I loved to do was consult on the growing aspect.
Tim Sulzer:I loved to go to these farms where Mhmm. There was 1,000 and 1,000 of cannabis plants and, you know, get to work around the plants and see what was going wrong with the plants and try to recommend fixes based on what I knew about growing indoors under LED lights. After working for myself, I I didn't like working for other people. You know, I I could see the rest of the business, but I couldn't touch it. And I had a hard time adjusting to just doing my own little piece of it, which was, you know, selling.
Tim Sulzer:That got me into thinking about, like, what was, what was my true mission and purpose? Like what got me excited to work on a daily basis? And I wasn't selling LED lights. So I went through this, this period of my career where I would work a job for 6 months, save up a bunch of money, and then get fed up with it and quit and try to start my own business. My background, my passion was in the outdoors, and I learned a lot about sales and marketing from my time selling LED lights.
Tim Sulzer:So I tried to combine those two things and start building marketing companies for the outdoor industry. So one of my other close friends from college did a lot of the filming for Cabela's Northern Flight, which is their waterfowl hunting series. And so I got really tied up with that, and I wanted to, you know, do marketing and marketing automation for the outdoor industry. Sunk a bunch of time into that, but I couldn't couldn't get to the point where it was supporting me as a job. So after 6 months to a year, I then went back out and got a job.
Tim Sulzer:And I think I was doing, you know, data automation stuff for a real estate company. I had a background in financial analysis and business model analysis from Veggie Systems. And I really saw the future of big data and AI at that point. And so I really wanted to get into data science. I was doing so many manual data entry things that I was like, this sucks.
Tim Sulzer:Why can't I just automate it? You know? And then so I'd start to build scripts to automate the data entry web scraping, services.
Sam Alaimo:This is outside of the official job capacity.
Tim Sulzer:Yeah. Actually, I went back and I pitched this to them and they said, yeah, that's great, but just keep doing it manually. My time there was short lived after that because, you know, I wanted to I wanted to expand beyond doing things manually. Right. I didn't wanna be a data entry person.
Tim Sulzer:I wanted to do things that scale that that mattered to me. So I quit that job. I got really lucky too that I had a a partner, a life partner at the time that supported me in this because she never told me to my face that I was crazy, but I'm sure she was thinking it a bunch of times. But then, you know, I think the next idea I had was for a relocation business. I I saw a lot of future in people that were like my age that were going through similar things that I was in terms of wanting to be independent, wanting to travel, live in different places.
Tim Sulzer:This is, like, at the beginning of the tiny home movement and people living out of vans and stuff, which is really popular now. And I saw it was really difficult. Like, I had to move to Texas for the LED lighting job and moving to Texas was really difficult from Pennsylvania. And then after the LED job, I had to move back, and I had to figure that out again. And so I messed around with an idea to, you know, kinda automate the relocation aspects, like, you know, moving your stuff, scheduling movers, getting things shipped, all that kind of stuff.
Tim Sulzer:Again, it wasn't truly my passion, so spent a couple months doing it and ended up, you know, folding up shop and moving back to a job essentially so I could pay my bills. So at that point, I was back doing, like, marketing automation and I got back into the outdoor industry because that that was my foundation always. So I built an application at that time to use computer vision to detect wildlife in game cameras. Hunters use trail cameras all the time to try to pattern game animals to figure out, you know, when this big buck is gonna be in front of my stand. And I saw an opportunity there to detect the deer, identify them, and, you know, use analytics to just pattern them automatically based on all of these images.
Tim Sulzer:I built a prototype there and MVP and I, I went to I'll never forget. I went to the PA Outdoor Show and I was walking around with an iPad with this demo of detecting deer in trail camera photos. And I was trying to pitch it to people, and nobody was excited about it. Everyone was like, oh, that's cool, but why do I want this?
Sam Alaimo:What what was behind that reluctance?
Tim Sulzer:I think at the end of the day, hunters enjoy doing that. They like going going out collecting their child camera, their SD cards, downloading them, and spending their Saturday mornings filtering it through thousands of images. They get so invested in it to the point where they don't want an AI technology to do it for them. Right? So it was a solution without a problem.
Tim Sulzer:And after that, I didn't I didn't invest any more time in it, but that was my intro to computer vision and essentially the same technology I was using back then, we're still using, but we're using it to detect guns now. So after that, I worked for, fishing brand doing marketing automation again, and it was it was kind of exciting at first because it was kind of in the outdoor industry a little bit more. But there was it got to a point where I realized, you know, I'm selling fishing courses to people, and I don't wanna do this for the rest of my life. And I had a bit of a mental breakdown about it. And I ended up quitting that job about a month before Mike reached out to me with this idea for ZeroEyes.
Tim Sulzer:So I'd actually quit, and I was back in that period of trying to grind on a new idea. And Mike, out of the blue, reached out to me and said, you know, I wanna detect guns on security cameras. I was like, I can do that. That is the mission that I've been waiting for.
Sam Alaimo:So you literally have been iterating since college when you started Veggie Systems, job after job after job after job, what you liked, what you didn't like, you wanted more autonomy, you wanted more impact, and then you get that phone call. Yeah. And it's almost like that was preparing you for this this opportunity. So when when he called you and said computer vision guns, let's stop mass shootings in America. What was your what was your initial thought?
Sam Alaimo:Like, what what was your initial belief that we were actually gonna figure this out and make it work?
Tim Sulzer:I don't think I even wondered if we could make it work at that point. It was just, you know, a challenge. It was a new challenge, and it was a challenge that was backed up by a mission that was worthy. And that was all I needed to start pulling the thread. I hadn't been really touched by gun violence at all in my life aside from my dad working in a prison and, you know, telling me stories about, you know, some of the people that he worked with.
Tim Sulzer:But it was just that that challenge and having a mission. At that point, I had known Mike from Veggie Systems. So I've worked with Mike for, you know, 10 years before that. I actually worked with you and you and Mike on your search fund too a few years after Veggie Systems. I totally forgot about that.
Tim Sulzer:And I really trusted Mike. I'll never forget. There was a time when we were at your search fund and I walked outside and we were just having a conversation outside and Mike came up to me. He was like, what do you wanna do? What do you wanna do with your life?
Tim Sulzer:I was like, I have no idea. So I I I don't know what I wanna do. Like, I have these skills, but I don't know what to do. And then fast forward 5 years, it was like the mission that I was waiting for was just offered up to me. And that was all I needed.
Tim Sulzer:I needed that mission, and I needed a challenge. Basically, nobody's ever done this before, so figure it out, and I love that. Beginning of 0 eyes was, can we make a gun detection model? Right? So the first thing that we did, we didn't have a dataset.
Tim Sulzer:We took screenshots from the matrix and from other action movies and a web scraped bunch of images from Google Images and Open Image dataset and all the images from Coco and, ImageNet, all all these datasets that were publicly available and built a first model. So I put put together a basic model training environment. I think we're using cloud GPUs at the time. Figured out really quickly that that model would not generalize to working on security cameras. So what do we do next?
Tim Sulzer:We took the next tiny step. We had this methodology. I don't know if you remember this, the crawl, walk, run idea. So crawl was that first image dataset that was just, you know, web scraped images. If you imagine an AR 15 on a white background or somebody from the matrix holding a a Gok type pistol or or something like that.
Tim Sulzer:So then walk was let's use real guns and real environments. I remember images of you holding, holding the giant sniper rifle. I remember Dustin hanging pistols by their trigger guard from fishing line out in the woods. And that's the type of data that we thought might be valuable. I remember ARs sitting in Mike's basement just, like, leaning up against a wall or something.
Tim Sulzer:Or Did
Sam Alaimo:you know at that point how important organic data was, or was that an aggregate process itself?
Tim Sulzer:I mean, that was the only option, really, because datasets didn't exist and they still don't exist. And just that's what has really driven 0 Eyes to invest so much in our data process because, you know, there's there's no publicly available data set of guns on security cameras. There's a lot of mass shootings that have happened, but the majority of that video is either closely held by somebody or it's pretty low quality because the video cameras over the past 20 years outdated technology. I mean, we still see some of that today in the customers that we talk to. It was partly through learning, I think, that we took this really, you know, small step iterative approach, fell forward fast.
Sam Alaimo:Go back to the crawl walk around and talk a little bit more about the iterative process. We had pistols hanging from fishing line and trees.
Tim Sulzer:Yeah. So then the next step from walk was run, which was, let's buy some cheapo security cameras from Amazon. Like Reolink cameras, I think, were the brands. And let's put them in Mike's backyard and walk around in front of, you know, these security cameras. I remember the 1st security camera we mounted was it wasn't even mounted on his house.
Tim Sulzer:It was mounted on a 2 by 4 that was leaning up against his house. Yep. You know? So the next version of our data set was we need data on actual security cameras to do this. So we had all of us walking around in front of the those cameras with all these different types of guns.
Tim Sulzer:Like every gun you can imagine that that you guys supplied, that was the one thing we had plenty of was Personal inventory. Yeah. Personal inventory. I also remember like Mike's family, like his kids walking around with lacrosse sticks and mops and strollers and all kinds of negative objects because we knew from early testing that we were gonna get a lot of false positives. And we spent an ungodly amount of time manually watching videos in order to see the the false positives that we would get and then ranking those models and then iterating on those models, the the ones that did the best.
Tim Sulzer:And that's still the process that we use today, but it's not manual anymore. That was the step that took us to a point where we had a model that could actually work on security cameras. And then I think it took us a year to get into our 1st beta customer school in New Jersey. That's still a customer today. I don't know, you know, what, what drove them to believe in us, but they believed in us and they gave us the opportunity to almost every weekend.
Tim Sulzer:We were there with, with guns walking in front of security cameras, recording data and testing models. We spent a long time doing that. I was actually living in South Carolina at the time, so it was mostly you guys. And I'll never forget being on those phone calls. And, you know, I knew you guys were investing a ton of time in going out there.
Tim Sulzer:And I definitely felt bad at that point because I was, I was just like sitting in front of my computer back in South Carolina. I was the one who felt bad because you were
Sam Alaimo:the one said, I had make in Mike's basement. I forgot knows how long living off of peanut butter. How much time did you spend in the basement? Seriously?
Tim Sulzer:I don't even know. Months, for sure. Yeah. Dustin too. Dustin spent a lot of time.
Tim Sulzer:There's, like, this sectional couch, and Dustin slept on one leg, and I slept on the other leg to the point where it just wasn't working anymore. So then I moved on to a hammock. And that was a smelly couch after a while.
Sam Alaimo:Literally started in the basement. Let's switch around to another thing. You talked about people issues at Veggie Systems having to fire a friend, which is like, a horrible, horrible challenge. When it came down to people issues, it was just us initially when we founded the company, and then we had to start bringing people on board. And there were some people kind of tangentially already involved.
Sam Alaimo:When you think about not just people issues, the people in general, which is the nature of building a company from nothing, From the very beginning, how did you think about competency and culture? Those two things. And how has that kinda changed over time from your from your lessons learned?
Tim Sulzer:That particular skill is something that I've worked on and developed more than anything else since starting ZeroWise by far. In the early days, I had no idea. Like, I I had this experience with veggie systems of what not to do, but I never really understood what good looked like there. And, I mean, the only thing I could do is look at examples of people around me, which was you guys. You guys were all incredible leaders.
Tim Sulzer:And so I tried to absorb and be a sponge as much as possible, and I tried to lead by example. Instead of really telling people what to do, I tried to dig in and learn and help. I had a, a development background at that time. Like I was self taught coder, but I had never really done any sort of Linux administration up until then. And so Kenny taught me everything I know about Linux sys systems administration.
Tim Sulzer:I learned really quickly spending time with him, and I just tried to apply what I was learning to make Zero Eyes better in the early days. So I I didn't I didn't really focus that much on trying to manage people. I just wanted to be one of the people that was making a difference in 0 wise. And I think that was that was a great approach from the start because what I learned from you guys is that you need to lead by example. Right?
Tim Sulzer:If if you want the people in your company to do something or be passionate about something, you need to do that thing and be passionate about it. You need to understand your business more than anyone else, which means you need to do every part of it. In the in in the beginning, that that's what I was obsessed with doing. I didn't think I was going to be CTO. I thought I was going to be like a marketing guy, you know, like more of what you do now.
Tim Sulzer:Like I wanted to be on the sales and marketing side because that's why I'd spent a lot of my career doing. And I transitioned into the the technology role because we had this gap. We needed the AI built. We needed to connect the AI with our actual product, And I was I was the only one filling that gap at the time. And then we brought on Marcus to assist on the AI side.
Tim Sulzer:That was another really critical, addition to the team. So we you sat him down. We said, this this is the problem that we need to solve. And he did the same thing. He applied what he knew and learned really quickly.
Tim Sulzer:And that's what Xerox is founded on. Nobody's nobody did this before us. There was no playbook for us. Computer vision deploying computer vision at at scale is not something that was was done in the same way that we did it, so we invented it. That doesn't mean that, you know, the first solutions to those problems were perfect as, you know, the engineering and r and d teams can attest to today.
Tim Sulzer:There's been a lot of developments since since those early days, but the foundation was set that these are problems that can be solved. And even if they weren't solved in the optimal way, it moved us forward to the next problem and then the next problem. And eventually that was enough to get us to the point where the next problem was scale. And so we went out and we raised money and built a team and taught them all of these things that we had learned. A lot of it's tribal knowledge.
Tim Sulzer:It's not documented anywhere, really.
Sam Alaimo:So when it comes down to competency itself, I know how to define competency for sales, for marketing, for several of the functions and domains. But yours is so technical. It's so specific. How would you define competency for the other CTOs out there, the other entrepreneurs out there? What is the essence of competency in in the technical domain?
Tim Sulzer:I would say not shirking away from a difficult problem. It's really easy to look at doing the hard things and say, I don't wanna do it. Let's change the problem in a way that makes it easier. And some sometimes that might be valid, but you have to have a relentless desire to do the hard things, understand them, and not give up just because it's difficult. And I think that's something that I value in a lot of our team.
Tim Sulzer:I would say that that aspect of, you know, not giving up, being being kind of fearless when it comes to solving problems that aren't easy. And then the other aspect is learning. It doesn't matter if you have 25 years experience doing something. If you can't pick up new technologies, learn them really quickly and figure out how to implement them to make you and the people around you better, then you're holding yourself back. The world is constantly changing.
Tim Sulzer:There's constantly new technologies out there. We're using technologies today that I don't think existed when we started our company. Right? I think that's that's something that I value more than anything else on our team, and there's there are people on our team with 20, 25, 30 years experience working in engineering, and that experience is invaluable. But those people are also the same people that show that constant love for learning, constant love for tackling really big problems.
Tim Sulzer:So those things aren't mutually exclusive, but if you can find somebody with both of those things, that's that's pretty huge.
Sam Alaimo:So a lot of the people who look at ZeroEyes are quick to label why we were successful when it comes down to a cultural standpoint. But from the inside perspective, as a cofounder, as a CTO CTO, building a massive team where it currently stands, what do you think are the cultural attributes to ZeroEyes that made it successful knowing full well that you you helped orchestrate the core values? You know, one of which is don't be a jerk. Don't be an asshole. How do you look at the the successes of your eyes internally from the perspective of building a culture from scratch?
Tim Sulzer:I think the most important thing to do is figure out what what type of culture that makes you want to go to work every day. Because if you can build a culture that you want to be at every day, then then you're gonna invest the time to make it awesome, and that becomes the nucleus that you build a company around. And then more people come in, and the culture isn't pure. It's not something that is exactly the same as it was when we first started. You know, some some things are, like, early days, we had a whiteboard with the flywheel, you know, the flywheel.
Tim Sulzer:That hasn't changed. The flywheel is like the cycle of our business from incoming lead to handing off to operations, to handing off to customer success, which gives us feedback for the product, which then, you know, becomes the input for turning the wheel even faster. And Mike drew that on a whiteboard early days. And it's still something that we bring up on every yearly, quarterly, all hands meeting that we have. So things like that remain the same, but I truly think that as more people come into the company, our culture is shifting because more people add their input, and a lot of the same things still remain.
Tim Sulzer:Like, don't be a jerk. Like, if you can truly, build a company around people that enjoy working together, then you don't have to worry about communication. Communication is the number one problem that we face on a day to day basis. It's really easy to just sit behind your computer and not communicate, but communication, I think, is the root of 99% of problems that we face. You know?
Tim Sulzer:It's easy to say, hey, everyone communicate, but that's not as powerful as building an environment where you as a leader are an example of that communication, and you show people that it's safe to communicate. It's okay to disagree. And, you know, as long as we leave our egos at the door and everyone in the room wants to do the best for ZeroEyes because that's our mission. Because the better ZeroEyes is, the more cameras we're on, the more chance we have of stopping a shooting. That's what everyone is here for.
Tim Sulzer:It doesn't matter if it becomes a heated discussion. Not being a jerk doesn't mean that we don't, you know, argue or yell at each other sometimes. Like, it gets heated sometimes. You know, I've been on in some engineering discussions where, you know, somebody has a really strong opinion, somebody else has a strong opinion, and, you know, they battle it out a little bit, but they're not jerks. And at the end of the day, they hug it out because it's making ZeroEyes better.
Tim Sulzer:So more people coming into the company, I'm learning more from every engineer that I interview and hire, and I use that to fuel making us better from a culture standpoint too. Like, doing little things like communicating little wins that we have across the team or communicating challenges that we have. Getting people together in the same room is a big one. Like, we we're really lucky here at ZeroWise that we have an awesome customer base, but our customer base are not our only users. We have a lot of internal users of our product, and so we have an awesome feedback loop there that helps inform us to, you know, improve things.
Sam Alaimo:I know you're huge on self optimization. You've been AB testing your personal life since I've known you probably well before that. So in the in the few minutes we have left, what are some of the rituals you have in your life right now that allow you to optimize with the insanity of 0 Eyes running a company and all the dramas associated with it?
Tim Sulzer:2 things. One, every morning I get up and I go outside, and I put my feet in the earth. And I sit I've got a big tree in the in my backyard, and I sit underneath that tree even if it's just for 30 seconds. And that's that's a really big centering thing for me. I love the outdoors.
Tim Sulzer:It's something I've always been passionate about, and the periods of my life that I've been most unhappy have been those when I was disconnected from nature. I don't have a really strong meditation practice, but I try to be really mindful and focusing on mindfulness and analyzing how I'm feeling. Even as I'm sitting here talking with you, I'm trying to analyze how I'm feeling, and that helps me to communicate more from the heart. And I'm just kind of now realizing that for me, it's more important that I speak from the heart, and I don't filter it through my thoughts. Because sometimes you filter it through your thoughts and you miss the things that you wanna say to people because you're afraid of how it's gonna be perceived or you're afraid of being wrong, and that holds you back in life.
Tim Sulzer:That has held me back in life. And so I've I've really been focusing on just, like, speaking from my heart, and that that gets to the second thing, which is communication. I spend 90% of my day communicating. Whereas in the early days, I was so tied into programming, coding on a daily basis, like trying to improve the technology. Now it's more important for me to talk to people.
Tim Sulzer:So I talk to people on my team. I talk to customers. I talk to partners. I talk to people in other departments. I love coming to the office and just walking around and talking to people and meeting new people and trying to remember names because it's grown to the point where it's difficult to even know everyone.
Tim Sulzer:But just having conversations with people, communicating is one of the most important things that I do know.
Sam Alaimo:If you could have one conversation with anyone dead or alive, who would it be?
Tim Sulzer:I think what I value in life is making a difference, and the person that has been most influential in my life toward pushing me to that goal has been Mike Mhmm. Mike Laff. So if I could probably talk to anybody, I'd have a conversation with them, which I get to do on a daily basis.
Sam Alaimo:If you had a billboard with an Aonik, what would it be? Keeping in mind, we already said a bunch, pull the thread, do the hard thing, scale smaller. What would you want on that billboard?
Tim Sulzer:I read this book recently called the 4 agreements. I'll summarize it right now, which is the first agreement is be impeccable with your word. The second one is don't take anything personally. The third one is don't make assumptions. And the 4th one is do your best to do the other 3 at all times.
Sam Alaimo:Nice.
Tim Sulzer:Even if you fuck up and you make an assumption and or you lie to someone, recognize it and stop. All you can do is start from today and be the person that you wanna be going forward. And if you've got the courage to do that continually, even if you mess up, it's okay. Just love yourself. Show yourself some love and some kindness, and don't have false expectations for yourself because you're not perfect.
Tim Sulzer:I'm not perfect. I make mistakes all the time. But the more that you show yourself that kindness and say, it's okay, but I wanna do better and try your best at the other 3. Over time, you're gonna be the person that you wanna be.
Sam Alaimo:That's it for this episode. If you wanna check out more from the podcast, head to zero eyes dot com slash Nobel, where you can see show notes, read more about our guests, and suggest guests or topics of your own. Until next time, stay in the fight. Don't ring the bell.