There’s a revolution underway. Deep within the Auckland Viaduct lurks the beginnings of our own tiny Silicon Valley. At GridAKL, more than 50 startups, in industries as diverse as medicine, robotics and augmented reality, are running the entrepreneurial gauntlet looking to build a high-growth business – or at least get a second funding round.

In On the Grid, a sponsored series with Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED), we tell their stories. In this, the sixth instalment, Tactile Astronomy co-founder Arturo Pelayo.

Despite the proliferation of high resolution cameras and powerful post-processing software, some photographers continue to shoot in black and white, producing emotive and iconic imagery without a single colour. At times, rules and limitations spark a shift in perspective which results in enhanced, not reduced, creativity and efficacy.

Co-founder of Tactile Astronomy, a firm developing 3D printed resources to teach astronomy to the blind, Arturo Pelayo experiments with such a philosophy. Rather than hacking existing systems for accessibility purposes, Pelayo demands his developers design for accessibility first, and the billion people around the world with accessibility needs, reasoning that a minimum viable product provides a foundation on which the rest of the user base can operate.

But Pelayo faces challenges. Operating in the precarious social enterprise space, funding Tactile Astronomy has been a series of frustrations, with Pelayo blaming an attitude towards risk incongruous with the national number 8 mentality.

That sounds like a Spanish accent. What’s your background? Where did you study?

I went to school in the United States and studied Physics. I’m originally from Mexico but I left when I was 17 and I’ve been living abroad for half of my life now. Basically I’ve been always interested in innovation and technology. About five years ago I went to Singularity University and I began my career in innovation and consulting – futurist thinking and that sort of thing. A part of that has always been for me about asking how do you find intersections between the human connection, the technology connection and how can you create a new reality based on that? A lot of people think the future is ahead of us, but I think it’s here now in pockets. We have pockets of the future, and one tends to dominate and that’s what becomes the future. It’s not that it’s a new idea that will eventually happen, it’s what dominates.

So I think of this project as a way to help begin a conversation in New Zealand around digital fabrication, and what it means to have local fabrication. If you can print the moon you can print the universe and you can also print a car or anything else. Local manufacturing can have a boom, and I think it will because you don’t need to have a massive supply chain to get prints delivered. People always say New Zealand is too far away, too remote, so things cannot get here, but things don’t need to get here. You can just print them. I think this project brings out the social impact angle, if you want to call it that, it has an approach around a new medium for students, be it blind or not.

Why blind students?

The blind student part is the minimum viable product. It’s who we interact with to get the best technology out. Rather than have a trickle-down approach that we then hack to work for accessibility, we start with accessibility and it will work for everybody else. We care about the texture, we care about how it feels, and we can worry about the colours later. That’s the intent, creating as a whole accessibility technology and do it with a frame of inclusion.

One of the things with the project is how can we teach astronomy to blind children as a start for any other science field, or any other artifact. We’re in conversation with the Auckland Museum and with Te Papa, I’m one of the mentors for an innovation accelerator that they have. It’s mostly around how do we categorise things together? What’s the metadata of objects? How do museums make materials? And how can we make it easier for teachers in New Zealand, and around the world, who have blind students or students with low vision have a more inclusive classroom experience? How can we make sure that students get the most impactful education with the human resource that they have, which is the most expensive part that the government has already paid for. How can you make life easier for the teacher?

My customer is the blind student, of course, but it really is the teacher. Because, if you think of it from an efficiency perspective, each teacher is working in isolation making a model for the student that is next to them, replicate that across the country, and then at the end of every week you throw away these models. That to me is highly inefficient. When you’re born digital that doesn’t make sense, because you think what if one single teacher made a really good model, we did a volumetric capture, and then everyone else in the country can just print that one. Then you don’t need to do 30 or 50 of each, you just get one really good one. You start to build up a library of things to download and print.

It’s interesting that the proliferation of 3D printing technology means that one idea can be printed in 100 locations around the world, instantaneously.

Exactly, and it’s not just about manufacturing and production and sales of goods and services, but it should really start in the classroom. We’re not designing for blind people, we’re designing with blind people. That ‘with’ takes a lot of work.

We started with Slack, and we’ve moved very quickly to tools that are open source. We’re working with seven developers and my challenge to them was ‘I would like a blind person to work with us on all phases.’ That means getting Slack to work with voice. You command everything with your voice. That’s become a part of the inclusion journey. Yes, we’re doing this initially for blind students with the specific topic of astronomy, but all the inclusion exercises that have happened before are very important because you need to listen to your customer.

The guys from 90 Seconds are sponsoring our videos, so all of the story telling, visual and otherwise, is important. They’re also starting a practice around VR which is very curious for them around blind people, because blind people have a very different spacial relationship. Even us, from a developer perspective – when you look at machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, how we design spacial relationships, blind people get it straight away and it’s for us to catch up.

The headline thing for me is not a product about disability, I don’t think disability exists. Accessibility is a word that is more progressive, but what I really think is happening when you think of digital manufacturing, 3D printing, robotics, mechatronics, that convergence of bio info and nano, is augmentation. You’re going to have people who can change their arm and they can have a flamethrower if they want, because it’s fit for the job and they can do it. You have people in the US at MIT that have 12 pairs of legs – if they want to go climbing, they put their climbing legs on. So it changes our mentality as plain old humans, born with bones and tissue.

What does it mean to create a space that is not only a makerspace for blind people but a makerspace for augmented humans? That really changes your perspective on things, and we should be thinking about that. Pockets of the future already exist. There are plants in South Korea building these huge ships, and all of the workers are wearing exoskeletons that can help them lift 300kg pieces of metal to weld, and by the way they weld them with their hands because there’s a welding device on their exoskeleton. So that is already happening. It’s not only for the elderly who fell down the stairs and need an exoskeleton, those are not going to be your grandparents, it’s going to be us. We’re getting to a point where we’re going to be those biomechanical grandparents.

VIDEO: TACTILE ASTRONOMY / 90 SECONDS

So you’re all in on the transcendence of the flesh?

I think it’s happening, and like I said, it’s not that there’s going to be an ‘on’ switch, I think that you’re going to see a lot of pockets where it’s going to become more prevalent, and we should aspire to that. We have a legacy of 200 years of war, where if you have a landmine you have a lot of children losing their limbs. What happens to them? It’s not going to be something that stops because war ends, there’s millions of landmines, unexploded ordnance, around the world. Asia has some of the highest rates of people missing limbs because of it. We need to think about it.

If you look at any accessibility need for any previously known disability, a seventh of the world, a billion people, you have a market of a billion people that you should serve. You don’t need a billion dollar market, if you can sell one thing worth a dollar and a billion people buy it, it’s the same effect.

Is that why you decided on the education space? There’s already this inclusion rather than something like gaming or entertainment as the platform.

What I found is that in two years nobody has said that it’s a bad idea to teach astronomy to blind people, because they understand the human, emotional connection. When you start with that, then it becomes easier to open Pandora’s Box a little wider. If you start with ‘robots will take your job’, a real dystopian future, people switch off. But if you tell them ‘I’d like to make your job easier, not to remove you from the role, but actually to enhance your role,’ then they’re a lot more receptive.

What advantage does teaching with a tactile experience offer over audio?

So we are doing a few things. For a blind person you need a kinesthetic approach. From the testing we’ve done with some of the volunteers – and it’s been difficult to get access to them – the advantage is the spacial relationship of an object. They can understand the trajectory if I show them a crater and then a crater with a mount and then a moon covered in craters, they follow along. They can scale it out in their mind. It’s very interesting.

They’re regularly building an entire model of the world in their minds anyway, right?

I think it’s quite interesting. We all have a visual cortex. It’s there and activated even if you can’t see. You get a different reaction from students who have gone blind, rather than being born blind, because they have seen at some point. You get the memory trigger and you get the visual cortex. But for blind students they still get that reaction.

If you’re blind you only get audio books or raised braille paper. 3D printing might not totally replace them, but it’s another medium. It’s another medium that’s becoming price-competitive, very distributed. In New Zealand there are about 12,000 people who are blind, and of those 12,000 about 2500 live in the greater Auckland area. That’s important because if you think of the blind resource centre for those students, where you’d find any material you would need, there’s only one in the country. For 4.5 million people, there’s just one. There are more McDonald’s in New Zealand than that. There are more of a whole lot of things. When you think of that, when you think that you can print anything, anywhere, any time, your mentality has to shift from ‘we need more blind schools and resource centres’ to ‘Yes, maybe we can work on the 3D printers that are already distributed around the country and increase the value proposition.”

The audible part then converges on the 3D printing. We created these parts that also have beacons on them. They have a micro computer attached to the back of the plate, and there are buttons that trigger audio narration. Things that you would associate with museum exhibits – touch a button and things talk to you – we’re at a point where you can build something like that for $20. We’re trying to build that at scale, so we need to get cheaper even than that, and we’re working with a bunch of developers around what it means to have objects that you can print, and how do we catalogue them in a way that any museum could print and put on display? We’re working with the Auckland museum on that. They built an API around that. For us it’s celebrating open source and we’re also celebrating accessibility.

Isn’t it difficult to make money if everything is free and open?

It’s a different value ecosystem. My view is that I’m starting with a billion people. There are a billion people with accessibility needs. Anyone can make them but it really matters what your ethos is coming into the project. If you operate from an approach focused on money, this is not for you. Your return may take a while. You’re going to be looking at Excel tables for a long time. But if your currency is impact then you are actually going to do the opposite and you’re going to tell all of your potential competitors, ‘can we just agree on building this?’

Then you can build kits, and you can sell the kits. The Kickstarter approach does that. Any part that we use can be flashed so that the memory can be erased and it can be used for other stuff. It’s more of an approach taken from the maker movement, which is having kits you can build and configure for one application, but you could also do any other thing. When you’re bored with it you should be able to take it apart, figure out how it works and come up with something new.

There’s obviously great potential there. If you consider the original maker kits, imagine how many kids moved into careers in science because of it.

Exactly, and to me that’s the most interesting thing. How do you create that spark? I cannot design this as if I’m going to print the moon so that someone has an ‘a ha!’ moment and ten years later they become a scientist, but if you create enough interactions and interventions…. And that’s the thing with 3D printing. Braille has been with us for a very long time, and the dominant medium for braille has always been text. But what happens in a world of augmented and virtual reality is that a lot of these models that you can print can also be used in AR and VR.

What a lot of people forget is that augmented reality and virtual reality, those acronyms, do not say this is limited to a visual display. When you’re augmenting reality it’s all of your senses: temperatures, surfaces that change temperature, surfaces that morph, sense, it’s a whole lot of synesthesia. You have to use all of your senses, and I think that’s what this project starts putting the foot in the door to say ‘actually, don’t focus on the graphic user interface,’ and that’s what has gotten a lot of the developers interested.

To give you an example, with this project we begin with 3D printed parts and we thought ‘ok we need something to augment learning’ so we had the beacons. Now we’re moving towards having an AI assistant. I would really like having a 3D printer you could talk to and have it print anything you need. But how do we build from where we are to that? We’re getting there. There are a lot of very passionate people in New Zealand who would like to have a challenge and they’ve been working on it. The condition from their end, and from mine, is that it must be open source so that anybody can pick up the work if I cannot commit more time later.

That’s a generous proposition.

Generosity is a big enabler for this project, and it’s also why it’s taken three years. I cannot ask somebody who has an 8-5 job and a family and so on to commit a lot on a tight deadline. You have to create a distributed workforce and you need more than one person looking at it.

Recently I told a designer, “I’ve got a Christmas challenge for you,” because I’ve learned to give longer deadlines. I said “Can you build an MMORPG for blind people?” And he just went “I’m a game developer, I know how to do that, but everything is visual. Everything I think about and know how to code is visual,” and I said “Exactly.”

That motivates people. In my traditional job I develop training programmes, and the software that I use is incredibly visual. Everything is visual. So when you shift the frame of reference, it changes what you would consider as best practice. It’s not like blind people are new, right? We’ve had blind people for the whole of human history. So how do we make sure that we design for everybody? What I always get is a big dose of empathy. We’ve done Skype interviews with a few of our friends in the US who are blind, and they have access to Facebook. Some are blind and some are blind deaf, andbraille is how they interact with us, but it was very interesting to hear the amount of sport and inclusion activities that they are involved with. They go skiing! Blind skiing. I’m so risk averse that I don’t jump off the bridge here to swim, but there are blind people who love skiing. That immediately puts you in a place where you realise you’ve been raised thinking that’s not possible for them, therefore they can’t do it, and you realise you need to open your mind a little.

It’s an interesting philosophy for creation, right? Limitations breed innovation.

Take the cameras that self-driving cars use. The sensor has come down in price from around $2 million to around $35. You can put it in a phone. By the time you have your iPhone 8, you’re going to have this sensor, and what it does is real-time obstacle avoidance. A blind person won’t need a cane anymore, their assistant will be able to tell them stop, move, left, right, navigate around this object and so on, because it creates a 3D model of your relationship to space.

So it actually makes sense for a blind person to wear a helmet or AR/VR glasses, because if you have all of your 12+ sensors, you’re better off than with a cane.

This project is not about having parity, it’s not about having the same ability, or a hack, it’s about augmentation. You’re going to have 15 different new sensors feeding you data to help spacial relationships and that’s the future of biology, electrical engineering, and miniaturisation.

Do these ideas get you out of bed?

It gives me motivation but the problem that I run into is how do you find the drive? Do you find it or do you make it? I’ve done both. There are people that immediately get it, they catch that spark, and they’re super keen to work on a project. They start thinking in a new way, about how to code, how to do any type of project. At the same time, it’s very hard to sell an analogy.

A year ago at MIT I was talking to Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ wife, and her first reaction to my idea was ‘how do you even begin to teach astronomy to blind people?’ so part of my struggle and hustle is to create those experiences and to say ‘here it is, play with it,’ and then to extrapolate out what I intend to do.

But also it’s difficult, particularly in New Zealand, where a lot of medium to large companies have specific charities that they give money to, and it’s almost like a blind horse, ‘We give to KidsCan, we give to this other charity’, which is great, everybody needs the money, but there’s no flexibility around ‘can we build an R&D project for this area’. It happened with the blind school. I said “I want to do this, I don’t know how, can we give it a try?” It’s the Callaghan approach – Mr Callaghan that is, not necessarily Callaghan Innovation.

So that’s the challenge, funding the thing. How are you going to do that?

It’s getting the buy-in and to me, it’s not charity. This is a billion customers. You’re creating an impact and if your currency is impact your value proposition changes, because yes you can apply it to blind people, but picking up something that talks to you and that you can interact with is applicable to, for example, any retail experience you have. You can put money towards the social impact approach because you care, but you can also get a benefit on the other end.

A friend of mine says I live in the time traveler’s dilemma. He says I’m not from the present, but I don’t think that’s the truth. I’m just not a salesman, and that’s a gap in my skills, convincing people this is a good thing that should exist. With some of the people and potential donors that I’ve seen, and even traditional funding sources like the Blind School, there’s a lot of people that are afraid of the future. There’s fear of the unknown, and how people react to it can be cumbersome. It’s difficult to fathom sometimes why they react the way that they do. Because I’m an independent person, and I’m not attached to an acronym, I’m seen as the crazy weird guy coming up with stuff that’s just spinning, but there’s a lot interesting markers that are popping up. I think we need that, and I think that’s the purpose of a Callaghan. “Let’s put $100,000 at this idea that even if it’s not commercially viable, it’s an accessibility technology that has helped locally.” There’s nothing wrong with that, as opposed to a product that flops or a company that goes to another country.

It’s about attitude to risk, then?

The appetite for risk in New Zealand is scarce. I’m going to get in trouble for this, but what I’ve been told by a lot of nonprofits and people who donate is that they want something that’s in a market, as ‘off the shelf’ as possible, and that has been proven somewhere else to be working and to not have any risk. That’s not innovation. I’ve been told specifically ‘We’re a fast follower and we’ll invest fully once we see proof of it existing in a market, it being bought and adapted’. You see the fast follower approach, which is ok but it makes you a commodity market and you will always be buying something. I think that’s counter to the number 8 mentality, which is strange because when I came to New Zealand 4 years ago it was all about number 8 wire, we can do it ourselves. But the funding sources are incredibly risk averse and I have that clash.

When you hear about New Zealand you hear about people making stuff in their garage. You hear it over and over, so I thought I’ll buy into that, I’ll commit, I’ll move into the country, but then you get here and you get ‘We’re not going to put in money because you need to not be risky, and you’re not established.’

Even looking at funding sources from New Zealand arts funding, 3D printing is not an art. Carving is an art. Making jewellery is an art. Doing something in a 3D printer, because it used technology – this is the actual justification that I got on the phone – because it’s a 3D printer it’s not possibly art.

So I don’t want to get too negative, it’s not that people need to get out more, but we need to take that Kiwi OE experience and apply it. We’re not remote anymore, we’re .6 milliseconds from the world. I’m in New Zealand, I’m a resident, I’ll be a citizen next year, and I want to create an impact. When you operate from a perspective of impact, it’s changes everything.

GridAKL is Auckland’s innovation precinct, located in Wynyard Quarter – powered by ATEED and run by BizDojo. New spaces are leasing soon – click here to find out more.

There’s a revolution underway. Deep within the Auckland Viaduct lurks the beginnings of our own tiny Silicon Valley. At GridAKL, more than 50 startups, in industries as diverse as medicine, robotics and augmented reality, are running the entrepreneurial gauntlet looking to build a high-growth business – or at least get a second funding round.

In On the Grid, a sponsored series with Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED), we tell their stories. In this, the sixth instalment, guerilla eyecare specialists oDocs.

Believe it or not, that 12 megapixel, optically-stabilised, six-lensed powerhouse of a camera on your iPhone is good for more than just Snapchat dog filters. In the right hands the iPhone can transform itself from vanity mirror to approved ophthalmological device with just a single, 3D-printed add-on.

Launched at TedX Auckland by founder and executive director Dr Hong Sheng Chiong, the visoClip and visoScope are lightweight, unpowered iPhone attachments capable of capturing sufficient detail to enable accurate eye assessment deep in the field. Considering the vast majority of the world’s preventable blindness occurs in the developing world, they’re potentially revolutionary devices for the millions of sufferers without access to treatment.

oDocs are currently based out of the GridAKL tech cafe, and I met CEO Hanna Eastvold-Edwins and her beautiful bear-dog Juno on a bench outside.

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The Spinoff: Your product ships in a couple of days. What emotion are you feeling as the product goes out? Getting to this point must have been quite the journey.

Eastvold-Edwins: I always think it’s great. I think most artists or musicians or anybody who’s doing work and then sees the product of their mind go out into the world feels that pride. Also with all the teamwork that was required to get something to that level, it was an Instagrammable moment. We took a few photos. I mean, you’ve gotta. You have to celebrate those times. We don’t have the time and money to put as much into as it probably deserves in terms of fanfare and things, but for me personally it was good.

It’s the same feeling when a magazine comes out. It’s one thing to have an idea, and think it’s a good idea, but then actually seeing it in the flesh is something else altogether right?

Yea, and that’s why you do it I guess. That’s why you work so hard. And it also makes the quality of the work go up, I think. Knowing that people are going to see it, and that it’s going to be a reflection of your work, it’s a good thing.

In terms of your business journey, in brief, what was the set-up? How do you go from nowhere to shipping this crazy-ambitious project?

I know. I guess it’s a bit of luck, a bit of hanging with the right crowd. You put out a dream and if other people believe in that dream and you can coordinate something then it snowballs from there.

What was your initial idea?

The original idea came from an ophthalmologist, an ophthalmology registrar called Dr Hong Sheng Chiong. He had an idea for a portable eye-care product, and so some of the designers with BizDojo and I sat down with him to try to get his idea out of his head and onto paper. I always start there, I always say ‘What is the idea? Describe it exactly.’ And that’s almost the first prototype. That’s not to say it’s the perfect prototype, but for inventors they want to see that that idea, how it works, and then to test it against how closely it matches with their dream. We did that with him and made some refinements from there.

He launched at TedX a year and a half ago, and got a lot of attention. We said “Hey, that’s a good validation that the product is worth pursuing.” We thought “There’s definitely a business in there.”

I think a scaled business, one that actually can grow and innovate and reach that many people – having a commercial business – is probably more impactful than just giving stuff away for free. That’s when we decided to make commercial models, and realised that we could get it to customers for cheaper than they could print it themselves. Plus if you’re wealthy enough to own a 3D printer, you’re not our target market.

When you’re working in the social enterprise space, it seems like there’s a big bridge to cross in terms of that target market not being the sort of people who can afford 3D printers. If it’s mainly people in developing countries who need this sort of tech, where does the monetisation come from?

It’s a fine balance. I mean, we spent about a month when we first started just wrestling over this question, this fundamental question – are we a charity or are we a business? We thought through that and at the end of it we decided that Plan A, if we get this big grant we’ll become a charity. Plan B, if we don’t get the grant, we’re going to become a business. Plan C, split off.

So I’m sitting there at BizDojo and I look over my shoulder, there are guys in the meeting room and I see on the whiteboard, ‘Are we a charity or a company?’ And I was like ‘Oh my gosh, so many other people are wrestling with the same problem’.

There’s no business structure in New Zealand that caters for this. It’s a brand new thing. There’s only a limited amount of literature and all the mentors are kind of learning how to do it as well. It’s been a struggle, I’ll say. But it’s been a very good learning experience. I guess that’s what happens with something new. You’re always struggling with “‘Is this right or not?”, and so you test it a little bit. I’m not a business person but I guess there are analogous stories to that in product design and so on. You have to test out the thesis on investors: “Hey would you invest if we did this? No? OK, well we’re not going to do that.”

I guess that’s the benefit of being in the position you’re in – you don’t have a warehouse full of stock you need to move, you’re testing before you enter production.

Yea, that’s what it was, it was a test and a validation. Even now there’s testing still going on, clinical validation which is kind of a form of testing so to speak. But yeah, eventually that might be the case. You gotta get to a point where you can sustain yourself before that happens. You don’t want to be mortgaging your house on a test. But you lower the risk with every test that you do and eventually you have to take a punt, you have to say “OK I’m going to take the risk here, because it’s worth it. It could be huge.”

You’ve taken another risk in releasing the CAD files for free. Is that because of the fact that anyone who has a 3D printer isn’t a customer anyway?

3D printing, although it’s awesome technology – it will revolutionise manufacturing, and already has to a certain degree – it’s still not there yet in terms of scale and refinement and precision. I always make the analogy with water. Water is free, but everyone still buys it in certain areas. We want everyone to have access to clean water, but you realise that people pay a premium for a nicely packaged product or nicely executed product. Can you take that, and use it to actually get everyone clean water? And that’s what I think social enterprise fundamentally is – democratising wealth and access to care.

Using that same analogy with water, you always find an evil Nestle-level dude who wants to monetise it entirely. Do you ever worry that you will come to a crossroads where you will have to make a decision around accessibility versus profitability?

Definitely. You worry about that every day. Decisions like that happen almost every day, but then the other contrary decision is that you just go nowhere. It is about balancing one versus the other, and even so, look at the people who are making an amazing impact on the world like Richard Branson or Elon Musk or Bill Gates. They made huge commercial empires and then used the money to go and do something.

To some degree at the end of the day, if they can affect not just a hundred thousand people but a hundred million people, is that worth it? I would say to some degree it is.

But in the same way that traditional investors think about financial return, social impact entrepreneurs need to think about impact return. What is the actual impact? You always want to achieve the biggest impact you can, you know? That’s what I think.

Your team is located across the country, right? You’re not all based in the same spot. So do you have these discussions around the rights of your customers and so on?

We catch up on weekends and nights and evening meetings over the phone, and then over Slack. A lot of those heavy discussions get filtered through me, but are had in meetings with other advisors, such as the Akina Foundation and impact investors or other investors and advisors.

I noticed in terms of start-up culture your team is relatively mature and qualified. Some people already have other things going – like being an established opthamologist for example. What advantages are there in having that experience and wealth of knowledge?

We’re a unique team I think. Part of it is because we’re from the Dojo. I think when I met a lot of the guys, BizDojo was very careful to bring in residents that had that level of expertise [which meant that] to some degree you always were able to talk to someone with ten years experience on something.

There’s a huge advantage to it. I guess also a lot of us are part-time, or were part-time, so you couldn’t necessarily have hired those people for that same amount of money, and you won’t be able to get 40 hours from them in a week, but that 10 or 20 hours you do get is really high quality, and that’s our strategy.

Did you have confidence coming into this, teaming up with these people and throwing your lot together, that they were switched on and suitable for the role they were taking?

Culturally I think it’s a beautiful thing that we’ve got. If people feel at home there then they stay, and if they don’t then they leave, you know? But I guess we’re still early on yet. We have a team with good energy, we’ve stuck together, but in the future… I’m an engineer to a certain degree, I’m not an HR person. I just try to work with people who I can trust, who I believe, and who seem capable and motivated. If you’re a contractor you do the same. You think, “If I give my work to this guy, if I refer this guy, is it going to damage my credibility?” It’s that same thing. I just try to work with good people.

How did being in a scene like BizDojo help you to develop the skills that are necessary in your position, skills that you may not have come to through a mechanical engineering degree?

It’s a good question. They definitely raised my awareness about start-ups. When I first came in I wasn’t thinking like that, but I guess my interests were kind of to help entrepreneurs and startups. At some point I came to the realisation that I couldn’t just make money working for big companies in New Zealand that are manufacturing goods, and that my chances were probably better focusing my efforts on a singular product and trying to launch that or commercialise that.

It never sat well working for these big corporations, and yet I hadn’t done it myself, so I had to find a good product to actually try to bring to market, and after Hong approached me it was the same sense of “Wow, this guy is really amazing, this is a good opportunity and it’s for a good cause which I also think is important, I can’t just pass it up.” I won’t get an opportunity like that again. That’s I guess how it started and how it’s gone.

I’ve learned heaps through this whole process. I was telling my husband I don’t think you could go through an entrepreneurship degree, which I considered doing eight or nine years ago, and get as many learnings as you do when you run your own startup. And then of course there are always sessions going on here, guest speakers and so on, too.

I was probably one of the only engineers that came out to BizDojo trying to do something like that. We started this group called the Popcorn Collective, it was me and a few designers, and I was always trying to group them together, saying “Let’s work on a program together!” because I knew we could just smash it. But the problem was always around how do you motivate them to discard their other projects and focus on one project. I think that Bizdojo actually helped just as a silent partner in the background because one of the guys, Gil, who was like an office manager at the time, heard us talking and he said “I read this book called Slicing Pie, you should read it.”

So I did, I read it, and I knew it was exactly what we needed. So when Hong started talking about trying to bring people in I said that I thought we should use the slicing the pie method. He read the book and he said “let’s do it”. It’s all about share allocation based on time input, and that was really what powered us through that first six months and even now. I think that without that we wouldn’t be where we are now. It treats everyone fairly, it motivates people, it leverages the cash that you’ve got. All the things that people need in an environment like New Zealand. So I definitely think there’s a huge role to play in this small ecosystem.

With the product being targeted at the disadvantaged in developing nations, when it comes to actually field testing, are you going on the ground overseas? Or have you been able to conduct most of your research in New Zealand?

We’ve been working with people that take the units around, and the people who are buying are optometrists or ophthalmologists that go and volunteer or do research overseas. So we hear back from them. In the future to some degree we’ll do more, because we’ll be working with distributors in those regions. That’s kind of the take. I think the main thing is that we aim the business right so that we become sustainable and then in the next year, financial year 2018, we’ll be looking at going into those regions and selling and giving discounts to those who need them so that they can use the product.

It’s a cool space when healthcare meets philanthropy, almost the Doctors Without Borders style. It’s an exciting space to me. Does it give your team more motivation knowing you’re literally giving people their sight?

I think that’s why a lot of people go into eye medicine to be honest. There’s a purpose. I think that if more people worked for companies with a purpose the world would be a better place. It’s cheesy for me to say it, but I just didn’t see it that often elsewhere. Companies have models based on disposables. They could make reusables, but they make disposables because it makes more money, as well as more waste. That never sat well with me. You can make money in other ways, you don’t have to create single-use devices to be tossed in a bin. I didn’t like that. So you choose to work for who you choose to work for. I knew I had value to add, but I didn’t want to add it to those projects.

If you’re an opthamologist, you don’t have to help people overseas. You can make seriously good money just doing what you’re doing. Same for you as a mechanical engineer, you could make good money working for a big corp, but there’s something extra that motivates you.

We get great volunteers and it’s a good thing. It depends who you’re talking to, if you’re talking to an investor you say “the impact thing is great marketing” and if you’re talking to your team you gotta be more realistic: “Look, I know this doesn’t make sense financially sometimes, but we said we’re going to do it this way and so we have to do it this way.” It’s all about keeping a balance.

You can’t just tell an investor that helping people is the right thing to do.

They know that, but you’ve gotta frame it up for them as “But it will also help the business, and help you make money too,” otherwise they won’t invest. And I do believe the people who make the most impact are the ones that make commercial profits. You have to keep up with all these other competitors who are just focused on profit, and if you don’t keep up with them, your R and D doesn’t keep up, you’ll eventually get phased out. So you have to think that way.

Did you think when you first decided to move into the startup space, did you view it as a huge challenge? Obviously you have to be clued on to be a mechanical engineer, did you expect this to take a lot of work?

I did. I said to my husband, “You sure that you’re OK with this?” I’ve got a young kid, she’s three now, and I had tried to start a business in the past and I knew it was hard. I had no idea actually how hard a startup was compared to a business, but he was like “Yep, it’s fine,” and I said “OK, well you’re in for it now,” and we still struggle with it sometimes. He’s having to take a lot of the burden at home and financially, and it strains everything, but you just have to try not to break, or to let it break you. That builds resilience and tolerance and all the things that you need and require to actually build a successful business.

Within your team, how do you spread that message? I’m sure everybody else has their strains as well. What’s the motivating message?

I guess everyone builds up their tolerance together. If your friend needs help you go and help them, and that’s kind of what I think it takes, right? Share the load, share the burden, even family. It’s not just me, it’s not just Hong, it’s all the people that are around us and in our circles. They call it the ‘beg, borrow and steal’ phase, and it sounds bad, but I’m sure Hong is asking his wife to help out more, and my family realises I’m not going to buy them great Christmas presents and stuff like that, but it’s just what you’ve gotta do.

Are there certain unseen benefits? For example the way that I’m thinking about it is that you start running for your health and get sick abs as a side benefit.

Totally, we’re building our entrepreneurial core. You always get smarter or more educated and you try to develop a positive attitude. You probably see all these people around here and they’ve got a similar culture, you bring your dog in for example. I worked in an organisation before where it’s a little bit demoralising, doing the same thing every day; it wears on your patience a little bit, but you don’t get that here. Every day you’re challenged, every day it’s fresh and you feel like you’re doing something. Plus you get to work with awesome people, meet new friends, and go to awesome parties.

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