From Prototype to 200k Products: The Embr Labs Story with Sam Shames

Chris Whyte (: 00:00

Right. I've got it recording because I don't want to just keep standing up. So in terms of stuff we'll go through.

Chris Whyte (: 00:19

So what I'll run through is I'll do a little intro. So you're a mechanical engineer. Materials and science and engineering. Materials, science and engineering. Materials engineering. Okay, So you're a materials engineer and co-founder of Ember Labs. Am I right in thinking you started Ember Labs pretty straight after uni? Actually we started but I was still at MIT. Oh cool. Right, I'll mention that then. And you've been...

a company that's been building wearable thermal technology since your time at MIT. Excellent. It's a warm, isn't it?

Chris Whyte (: 01:06

Start there, see what I've got. Cool. So yeah, over the past decade, you've launched three generations of hardware. Two generations.

Chris Whyte (: 01:20

When I go through this, the way, feel free to interrupt me if I forget anything wrong. Sold over 200,000 units? right. That's right. And recently made the shift to subscription-based model, which we're going to say is rare moving consumer wearables. You've led product operations, fundraising, and more as the business has evolved. And these days, you're focused on scaling Ember in a way that's smart, sustainable, and grounded in real user value, whether that's adding AI features, building our circularity, or figuring out.

how to make a hardware company cash flow positive. Cool. We're going to go through hardware product market fit, designing for longevity and sustainability, switching from one-off sales to recurring revenue, building a lean mission-driven team, and realities of scaling a physical product business. Sound good? Yeah, the brief use of that was totally helpful. Cool. Clearly done this many times, and it shows. Well, it was.

Jordan's fault. Because usually I just send out a generic, just give me a breakdown of the topics.

Chris Whyte (: 02:30

So, um, yeah, we'll just get going. Sweet. It's gonna be fun. I'll do some kind of marker for Jeannie. We're gonna get started. Clap, right. Before I get going, your surname? Shames. Shames. Okay, cool. I didn't want to go into it and you go, first thing I'm gonna say is how you pronounce my surname. So, Sam, Sam Shames, welcome to Why Design. We're here in Boston, out in Needham Heights and recording the first...

Boston in person. So great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me. So I'm going to do my best at a little intro. Sam Shames you are a materials engineer, or you trained as a materials engineer, and you co founded Ember Labs, which is still at MIT. So 12 or so years ago. And Ember Labs is a company that's building wearable thermal technology.

There you go. Pleasure testing that out. Awesome stuff. So yeah, since you've launched the business, you've launched three generations, two generations. Third generation is hopefully coming sooner rather than later. Awesome. And you've sold over 200,000 units, recently made the shift to subscription-based model, which is quite rare in consumer wearables. You've had product operations, fundraising, and more.

businesses of all see kind of made the shift from material science to overall kind of business ops and today you're more focused on scaling ember in a way that is smart sustainable and grounded in value whether that's adding AI features building out circularity figuring out how to scale a hardware company and make it cash flow positive so when

Wonderful, yeah. Again, great to have you on the show. So in this episode, we're going to dive into your founders journey and Emberlabs evolution from early prototypes to launch in soon the Gen 3 wearable with some predictive AI and circular subscription model.

Chris Whyte (: 04:50

product market fit, designing for longevity and sustainability, switching from one-off sales to recurring revenue, building a lean or leading a lean mission-driven team, and realities of scaling a hardware product business. As we all know, hardware is hard. It certainly is. Thanks so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. You're very welcome. Very welcome. It's great to have you and thanks for making the trip. So, Why design? Where did it all begin for you? Obviously, your

of a mechanical materials engineer. But how did you get into engineering in the first place? So growing up, I'd say I always liked math and science. And actually, my grandfather, he was a mechanical engineer. And he had woodworking tools in his basement and was always building things and would kind of take us under his wings, so to speak. So had that exposure and I think saw how cool it was to be able to kind of

take an idea from your head and bring it into reality. And then, you know, was lucky enough to get into MIT for undergrad and just to be in an environment surrounded by incredibly smart people who are all passionate about different things and building. And I think when you're in that environment, it really inspires you. you know, our company, it started as a prototyping contest. my co-founders and I entered this prototyping contest with no plan of starting a company, just with the goal of

building something cool over the summer. And when we came up with the idea for a wearable that heats and cools, we never could have imagined that it would lead to 12 years later having the company that we have. That's a wild ride, isn't it? So where did that idea for the temperature regulation come from? So we entered this prototyping contest not really knowing what our idea was. The goal was just, hey, can we win $10,000? That would be a

huge amount of money, pay for all the beer we'd ever need for the rest of the year. And we were brainstorming ideas in an over air conditioned lab in June and we kept having to put on sweatshirts to stay comfortable. So we thought, this is crazy. Like, what if we could just heat and cool ourselves directly? Wouldn't that be a better way? So that was sort of the aha moment. And then we said, okay, well, let's try to make a wristband that heats and cools. We were familiar with, you the old live's tale of running your wrist under cold water. And

Chris Whyte (: 07:15

you know, we thought, well, surely that can't work. Surely that isn't a good idea. And it turned out we ended up, you know, coming up with some key technological breakthroughs to how we heat and cool that made it much more effective. And that ultimately led us to win the prototyping contest and start down this journey where we're still on. That's amazing. Do you recall kind of the other competitors what you're up against? Was it a case of there's one winner or was it

the so it was maybe four or five other competitors and you know I use that term pretty loosely it was all people from our department everyone was friendly but I think the the second one was something about like cooling for windows I don't remember exactly okay yeah it's a good question yeah it's interesting looking back isn't it because really I'm guessing you've known nothing else right in your professional career then

business that you started. So you've had to figure a lot of stuff along the way, haven't you? So, yeah, it's interesting. I wonder how many of those that started in a similar journey still going 12 years later. Very few. Yeah, I think we look at our, you know, quote unquote, vintage of startup companies and that very rare to be going as long as we've had. And I think especially even more so for companies that are really creating new categories and of course, hardware companies as well. Yeah, absolutely. I mean,

It's one of the biggest pitfalls I see from the recruiter's lens. It's the easiest way to burn money as a startup is by having a lack of experience in how businesses run, know, being taken advantage of by suppliers, especially if you're overseas, because you just haven't built up that experience and know what stuff should cost. So where do you haggle to? Where do you bargain? And we definitely

did not have that experience, we feel really lucky that we met a lot of really kind and generous mentors through MIT and other places who really helped guide us in those kind of early years. there were certainly some close calls, but thanks to all the support we got, we were able to find that narrow path. So if there's anyone listening or watching that's there about to embark on a similar journey or lyrics, they're

Chris Whyte (: 09:37

Considering kind of taking that prototype to the next level. Is there anything that you wish you'd have known? 12 years ago that you'd like to share with them now. Yeah many many things I think that the first thing that comes to mind is that it's never too early to start thinking about manufacturing that the difference between a prototype and a product that you can manufacture at an acceptable cost is vast and that is a mistake

people often make is they say, okay, we're going to work with a product designer and a great product designer does not necessarily have experience with manufacturing. And the earlier you can figure out who your manufacturing partner is going to be, validate that they want to work with you and then bring them into the design process. Ultimately, the faster you're going to get to market, the lower cost you're going to be and the more likely you're going to be successful. Fantastic. Thank you for sharing.

prototyping contest in summer: 2013

What happened next was the idea went totally viral. One news office story by MIT ended up getting picked up by bloggers. And next thing you know, I'm doing an interview with Wired. Wow. From all that media attention, we started to get emails from thousands of people around the world saying two things. One, temperature is the biggest pain point in my life. And two, when can I buy this? So that was the moment I said, OK, hey, people want to buy this. We should start a company. We did not know what we didn't know. And so we thought,

going to be six months we'll have the product launched and you know then six months later someone's going to buy us and you how hard could it be it ended up taking four years to get from when we won the contest to the kickstarter and we were really focused on on three things during that time one was understanding the market you know so of the people who emailed us who were these different segments of potential customers what were their product requirements and ultimately which one could we best serve

Chris Whyte (: 11:59

Second is really understanding the science. Why is it that just heating and cooling this one spot actually can have an overall effect? Is it real or is it just placebo? And then third was actually doing iterative prototypes. And it took probably a dozen different prototypes to actually get to something where we felt like, okay, this is what the product needs to look like. Now we can begin the actual product design. And then of course, manufacturing. So four years to get to Kickstarter.

o basically the first half of: 2018

My co-founders and I looked around the table and we said, well, you we always thought, okay, you launched the product, dot, dot, dot, you get acquired. We're now in the dot, dot, dot. We don't really know ourselves what kind of the next steps are as clearly, but we do have a sense it's much more about building the business than building the technology. And, know, our expertise is more on the technology side. So that's when we actually made the decision to work with a recruiter and to hire an external CEO. cool.

interviewed dozens and dozens of candidates and we found Elizabeth Gazda who's still Ember CEO today and she's just been absolutely transformational in the company and one of the best decisions we ever made was to bring her on. that's really interesting. You know, I've recently started my founder's journey as well and I resonate with that you just get stuck in to let's just deliver something. But then actually at some point you need to step back and go what am I building? What does the future look like?

Is it a sale? Is it a big company, small company? And that's the kind of thing that you need to take a lot of time to step back and think about or bring in someone who has got the credibility there and the background to do that. So what do you think has been the biggest shift then since taking on the CEO? I think initially it was going from thinking of this as like a project to a real business.

Chris Whyte (: 14:20

And then I think second, was just really instilling that customer first mindset of saying, hey, look, at end of the day, if we do right by the customer and let them guide us, everything else will kind of follow. So I feel so fortunate personally to have really learned so much about actually building a business from Elizabeth. And I think our whole team feels the same way. When she joined, we had just shipped a few thousand units today. It's well north of 200,000 devices.

multiple generations of hardware product. And so much of that is from what we've learned from her. That's awesome. What would you think was kind of going off of script a little bit here, it's genuinely interesting. When you brought Elizabeth on, obviously you and your co-founders, you're ceding some control to someone else's kind of taking the baby, taking the business. how was that? What was the hardest?

challenging things about that transformation point with the business. Yeah, I think in some ways maybe the hardest part was admitting it was necessary because you by the time we realized that and then once we met Elizabeth after the recruiting process it was so clear that she was the right person to leave the company and you know that started in the way in which she built trust from us and in the way in which she brought us into all the decision-making processes and really tried to you know build consensus.

rather than just sort of... I knew there would be something.

Chris Whyte (: 16:07

able to go to do not disturb at some point.

Chris Whyte (: 16:22

Good thing this isn't live. And we're just like, oh, we didn't realize it's a call-in show. We're taking callers. The other thing I didn't do was I thought it still would be kind of time-out. cool.

Chris Whyte (: 16:41

Great. Still recording? He says. Test, test, test.

Chris Whyte (: 17:04

Test, test, test.

Chris Whyte (: 17:10

Sorry about that.

Chris Whyte (: 17:25

Reset. Talking about seating control, I think. Let me take that from the top. So I think in some ways, the hardest part was actually deciding that we needed to hire someone in the first place because.

It's that acceptance of, we really need this help. We can't do it alone. Then once we actually met Elizabeth, it was so clear through the recruiting process that she was the right person to lead the company. And she just really worked hard to build trust and especially early on to really build consensus and really show her thinking that, you know, sort of very obvious that we wanted to really, you know, kind of give up that control because we didn't really have a clear sense of direction of what we needed to do.

What was her background then? Is she launched or led hardware companies before? So she had a quite a varied background across multinationals and startups. Her career started at Philips in the Netherlands. Then she'd work doing mobile advertising startups, doing consumer web startups.

So a little less on consumer hardware startups, but both startup experience and multinational experience. Awesome. Yeah, I think having that exposure at the opposite ends and seeing kind of, because that's working with quite a lot of clients at the moment that are going from that transition from scrappy startup to let's just get something out to market to, OK, now we need to build a solid, credible revenue generating profit making business that's got legs.

Sometimes the people in the business aren't always the right people for the next level as well because Like it or not the culture is going to change business scales so But sounds like yeah, you've got a really good leader there. So let's talk about the hardware before it turns into a recruitment program and so

Chris Whyte (: 19:23

You've said shipped over 200,000 units coming up to launch in Generation 3. So we kind of understand the big picture concept for Generation 3. And we've talked about this publicly, which is that we've developed AI to actually predict hot flashes so that the device can start cooling automatically. That's kind one of our core use cases is today. It's manually cooling hot flashes with the push of a button or with the mobile app. We have AI that can predict that.

So that's really going to be the key feature into Gen 3. We haven't talked publicly about the launch timeline yet. It's not something we can go into. But we are pretty excited about really the evolution of the product.

as we thought about just how much of a leap we're able to go from Gen 1 to Gen 2 and how much we've learned and then, you know, feeling like we can deliver a similar leap from Gen 2 to Gen 3. Yeah, it's also so, so it sounds like the leap from Gen 1 to Gen 3 is absolutely huge. Yeah, absolutely. And so you use case in terms of kind of helping alleviate the symptoms of hot flashes. I'm guessing it's still a pain point of, oh, I'm having a hot flash, I need to push a button to reduce that time then.

or to another board, lately. Absolutely. Yeah, so the, you know, kind of core experience for many of our customers is getting hot flashes five, six, seven, eight, 10 times a day, getting it at night and really just feeling very powerless and out of control. And so the ability to, with the push of a button, start getting that cooling relief. And what's amazing is not only is it just, you know, a cold sensation on your wrist, which just feels pleasant.

If you're too hot and you feel something cold, you splash water on your face, that feels good. But actually, the way in which we're cooling, which is in our patented waves of temperature, where it's not a constant sensation, it's waves, which you remember trying at CES, that application of temperature actually is signaling the brain to help balance the nervous system and actually stop a hot flash in its tracks. Because people don't realize that a hot flash is actually an

Chris Whyte (: 21:30

over activation of the nervous system. That's really interesting. So how did this all come about then in terms of the you know, because you sounds like you've done a lot of research into this, the science behind it. From that initial kind of, well, we know there's a thing, kind of let's build a prototype to countless user studies. Yeah.

Absolutely. So many user studies at this point, we've been fortunate enough to do some clinical studies where kind of it all began was in that prototyping contest when we were basically trying it out, we thought it felt good and we started to tell people the idea and even then we'd get the question like, it work for hot flashes? And of course, like our first answer is like, we don't know anything about hot flashes, but let's find out. So actually my mom and her friends are some of our first beta testers.

So we were just kind of giving them prototypes, having them try it out, asking them lots of questions, using that to really understand some of the key product requirements. So for example, one of the initial insights was that the design was going to be as important as the functionality, because this is a wearable. something that people are choosing to put on. It's visible. If it looks ugly or looks like a medical device, people aren't going to use it. And we saw that firsthand when we would give someone an early prototype and they'd say, well, it worked great, but I didn't use it.

and they'd say, they're like, have you seen it? I'm not going to wear that out to the grocery store or anything like that. So we realized the design itself was, and the aesthetics were going to be very important. We realized that although there's a mobile app, it's really important for users to be able to basically start cooling as quickly as possible. And that led to, OK, there needs to be physical buttons and one button for us to start cooling. So those are some of the key insights from those initial studies.

And at this point, now we're very fortunate to also just get user feedback in the field. So today, we're seeing customers use the product for about a million minutes every week. So we're really learning at a very rapid scale about how exactly the product is fitting into people's daily lives. Yeah. Yeah, because I'm guessing because you've got that mobile app, you're getting data constantly on you. So that's fantastic. But no, that's wonderful.

Chris Whyte (: 23:48

Is there a is the long term vision more medical bias then or more wellness or something else? Yeah, I think there's, you know, there's really elements of both, you know, broadly speaking, I think of temperature is a key tool for helping people feel their best. And it's incredibly safe. It doesn't have any side effects. So it doesn't need to be a regulated medical device in any way. It can be something that all of us just

have the moments in our day when we feel too hot or too cold, or we feel stressed, or we feel like we're having trouble sleeping, or we're feeling like hot flashes. And that, of course, is where we can be very helpful. At the same time, there are users with more serious medical conditions who are benefiting. So for example, folks with dysautonomia, which is a thermoregulatory disorder, or MS, or POTS, which is actually a symptom, can be a symptom of long COVID.

So all those cases where just the body has a much more challenging time actually doing thermoregulatory activities. And that's where perhaps a different version that maybe has some different features could be a medical device. But I think our heart in initial vision was always in the consumer space. We always thought, how do we get this as far and wide as possible? We can make the product at a price that works for consumers. It's very high quality. It's low risk, low side effect.

And why not just try to really empower people to use temperature as a health and wellness practice? Yeah, well, and also why make it harder for yourselves? That's true, for sure. Awesome. Well, let's talk about subscriptions and circularity then. So you mentioned when we prepared for this that the move into a subscription model was a game changer for you, especially from cash flow and how you're building the product.

What pushed you towards a subscription model in the first place? So a couple of things. We had done very, very well selling devices. At the same time, we saw that when we sell someone a device, it's sort of a one-time transaction. We saw customers were continuing to use the product for multiple years. And there was a sense in which there's a bit of a misalignment between the value creation and value capture.

Chris Whyte (: 26:08

and doing so in a way that just structurally made it very hard to continue to grow the business that you have to get new customers every month. And second, also just sort of limited our ability to continue to invest and make the product better, especially on the software side, because without an ongoing revenue stream, you know, all of that is a cost center. So those elements together made us start to think about like, is there a model where we can really better have an ongoing relationship with customers that reflects how they continue to use the product?

that aligns incentives so that we want to continue to invest in that relationship. And subscription was a natural thing. And of course, we'd seen over the years more and more hardware companies are having a subscription component. Whoop, obviously, Aura Ring, even 8 Sleep. So we kind of saw that playbook develop. We looked at, of course, the software piece of the subscription. But we actually asked a question of, can we do something even simpler to start?

And that led us to the path of actually just a hardware subscription. So it's truly paying $20 a month to get ongoing access to a device with the ability to cancel and send it back. And when we started to reach out to customers and explore this model, we actually heard that the ability to pay a low monthly amount was a benefit of itself as opposed to paying upfront and the ability to cancel and send it back. And so those were actually two channel benefits that we could offer.

t fit. So we launched that in: 2024

And, really, as you said, started to not just see the benefits of this ongoing relationship with customers, but also the financial benefits of knowing that there's going to be predictable cash flows every month. That really helps us better make investments into R &D and into the just continued improvements of the product. Yeah, because if there's, you know, economic issues or if the product's not selling, you you've got less of a cliff edge with a subscription.

Chris Whyte (: 28:35

And you can see it coming, so you've got a longer.

runway to do something about it. It's fascinating. So your customers clearly responded well to this. And you've started to build in circularity too, which I guess the sheer fact that you're able to upgrade every two years, you're getting all the products back, you're able to recycle or refurbish products. But how does that kind of, how do you make that work logistically? Yeah, so

know, returns is something that people don't necessarily talk about in the e-commerce space. And it's something we initially learned the hard way after launching when you suddenly get packages sent back to your office. even if it's a small percentage, it can be a large number. And if you don't know what to do with them, they quickly pile up. you know, early on we realized, okay, we need to have a refurbishment remanufacturing strategy. We were able to adopt the test quality tests we did in the factory for

a refurbishment process and really saw some of the investments we made in product quality pay off in that we were getting devices back that could be refurbished and were fully functional and could of course be reused and resold at a discount. so we had that kind of muscle. And then obviously the subscription business takes it to the next level because there's churn, okay, obviously you wanna basically continue to leverage those devices.

And so we work to develop actually a tiered pricing model where that $20 a month price is actually for a refurbished unit. You can upgrade and pay $25 for a brand new unit. And so then as people cancel, it back, we can take those units and you bring them forward again. And what's great about that is it really just, you know, from a financial standpoint, maximizes the value of the asset. You know, we've worked hard to make a product that lasts three, four or five years, and now we can really start to monetize it over time.

Chris Whyte (: 30:36

And of course, you know as we start to think about in the future having a gen 3 the gen 2 becomes something that you can use at an even lower price point to help just get more and more folks in the system and say, know, you could imagine a future where at some point gen 2 is maybe available for $10 a month because they're fully amortized depreciated assets that you know are still working that you can really use to just try to you know get folks who maybe can't afford to pay 20 or want to try out something before they go to the latest model.

What's the rough split then in terms of kind of latest versus the refurbished? We see about a 50-50 split between folks choosing new versus refurbished. Do you get the choice to upgrade? You can just kind of switch up to the next subscription if you've had refurbished for a few months.

That's a very good question. guess theoretically not many people do but you could then say yeah I want to start paying $25 a month in a be a manual process email our support team but um, yeah, that's you definitely could I what most people find though is you know, refurbish are functionally identical, you know, there's we work really hard to make sure that they they look good, too So I think most of the time people like wouldn't necessarily remember after a couple months that it was even refurbished

Yeah, now just thinking, is it a, say they've got a refurbished Gen 1 as a, oh this one's cheap, I'll try it out because I'm little bit skeptical, I'm going, actually that's awesome, let's see how great the next generation is. Yeah, we did, we stopped selling Gen 1 after Gen 2 came out, but I could see a situation where with Gen 3 we do continue selling Gen 2, so probably more likely in a few years. Yeah, really interesting, yeah, interesting to see how that data kind of comes out. So,

So let's talk about the team and leadership and some lessons we've kind of touched on that earlier. But what does the team look like today? I think you mentioned, when we prepped it, was about 13 people. So for a, did you say a 4 million turnover? ARR. Yeah, ARR. So we do have also device revenue. So we do still sell devices or direct channels and wholesale. subscription business is just one revenue stream. Still, yeah.

Chris Whyte (: 32:54

Pretty good return on 13 full-time heads. So what does the team look like now in terms of the structure, the skill sets within? It's evolved over time. There was a period of time when we were very heavy in the engineering side as we were really focused on getting the second generation to market. More recently, we were much more focused on the go-to-market as the product was pretty mature and we...

really needed to drive sales, drive customer acquisition. So that's kind of where most of folks have been more recently, but obviously still keeping the key manufacturing personnel to produce the product, keeping the software folks to keep it fresh. Yeah, real. And imagine a fairly flat hierarchy as well. There's not too much leadership. Is there plans to scale that as the

next generation comes down the line? Not a leading question, obviously, but just curious. It's for businesses shipping so many units. Yeah, we hope to continue to be able to grow. And I think, you know, I've had a really interesting time right now with the AI agents and how that fits into headcount. But, you know, broadly speaking, there's benefits to scaling while also knowing that, you know, we do have

there's more market pressure on profitability. So we always try to say like, it's probably not necessarily hiring ahead as much of anticipated demand, but getting to it, we get to the point where, you know, we just can't keep up, then obviously you have to grow headcount. Yeah, absolutely. So what have you learned over the years then about hiring? Because you've started a business as a, whilst you're still a student, I suppose, you know, you haven't been through the

classic kind of route of working for someone else, seeing problems amongst your colleagues, and then maybe going up into team leadership and then seeing the problems amongst your team. You haven't had those good and bad experiences, I suppose. It's all been thrust on you. what kind of what have you learned over the years and about hiring and team dynamics? Yeah, so been through many different hiring cycles have made good hires have made less good hires.

Chris Whyte (: 35:20

yeah, I think probably the thing that I've taken away most of all is that sort of like

Actually working with someone for a small period of time is infinitely better than the most rigorous interview only process. I think it's especially true in roles where you have not done it before, right? Like being good at interviewing is a very different skill than being good at a job. And so we tried to air more and more towards, you know, take home exercises or more towards, can we pay you to be a consultant for a month? And you just get so much more conviction.

Alternatively, if you've done the role before and you know exactly what you're looking for, then it's much easier to screen. And I think the second piece is the importance of referrals and that you can hire within your network or from people you trust. That just leads to such a higher conviction that the person you're getting is who they say they are.

Massively. Yeah, I I did a talk at Loughborough University a few weeks ago and a bunch of soon to be grads and how they can help prepare themselves for the job market. And from my experience, and it's one of those stats that it goes around all the time. So there must be some truth in it. But, from my experience, you know, roughly only 10 % of roles are ever advertised. And then certainly when you get up to leadership positions, there's fewer of them anyway. And if only 10 % of those few are.

you haven't got any hope in finding them but most most are through recommendation because you don't really know what you get until someone's been in post a few months sometimes not even a year until they start having an impact in the team so it's yeah it's a really really tricky thing to get right and looking back

Chris Whyte (: 37:21

wish you would have done differently or any kind of, you know, when you talk about kind of giving people tests, has it been any...

Red flags there.

Yeah, things that you would reflect on. Yeah, I think.

There's an element of trusting your gut. There's also an element, of maybe over-weighting consensus that if you're hiring a role, obviously you want to make sure that you get your team members involved. But if ultimately they feel like the person who they would pick is not the person you would pick, you have to be willing to say, OK, hey, I actually think someone else is the right person. And then I think it's really being very thoughtful.

the initial onboarding and you know if there's red flags you got to correct that right away and then be willing to um you know to ultimately say hey this this wasn't the right decision and frank thankfully that that has not been the case many times um but certainly you know no track record is perfect yeah i think it's one of those you everyone needs to go through a few kind of failed highs um where they didn't quite work out you know you you have that kind of feeling that you got that

Chris Whyte (: 38:37

could go wrong, you know, things are, I've had it throughout my career where you've got other people in the hiring panel that think that the person's fantastic and you think, okay, I'll go with their gut. There's something negative in me, we'll give it a go and I'll do my best to make sure it works out. And then it doesn't, kind of sometimes, but I think those experiences, in my experience anyway, at least.

help you make better decisions going forward. I think without going through that pain, you are just riding your luck, think, when it comes to hiring. But lessons from your side of that? Yeah, no, I completely agree with that look at a certain point. You have to have some negative experiences to get the muscle memory. And you just kind of hope that.

you can kind of learn quickly and not make the same mistake twice. I will say that's probably another area where hiring Elizabeth made a huge difference is that she had just much more experience to really bring pattern recognition to areas and sort of help us. And she also just has an incredible intuition about people and emotional intelligence and is really like her snap judgments about folks are just incredible.

Yeah, there's some people like that. Just wishing a bottle that couldn't. Absolutely. So in terms of going forward then, know, just obviously, we're talking about design, we're talking about kind of careers.

Can you think of some of the moments where people have really impressed you at an or an application and the things that maybe stood out as to why? I'm guessing in the of advice for anyone listening or watching that these things are kind of top tier. Yeah, think, well, first off, if you can get a referral from someone who already knows, right? Like that's if someone who I really respect says, hey, you have to take a look at

Chris Whyte (: 40:46

Fred, Fred's amazing, then okay, great. You're already giving Fred the benefit of the doubt. They've done something well. Then I think you can tell in some of these take-home exercises, like how much effort someone's putting in and the quality of the ideas. And I think what I've really tried to do a better job of is going a little bit level deeper, right? Is to say, okay, ask the first question, follow-up question.

And then the follow up question there. usually by that third question, you can have a pretty good sense of the depths of someone's knowledge. Yeah, absolutely. The take-home tests are a little bit contentious sometimes because asking someone to do work before you employed them. I think it depends on how much time you expect them to put into it. And really, how else are you going to?

Yeah, absolutely. we, we, you know, I completely agree. We always try to be very clear to say, Hey, this is a one, we want you to spend one hour on this. Right. And to, you know, be clear about that time expectation. and you know, think the other thing that have taken themselves is, like, look, the best people who ultimately want to work for your company, I think they would, they want to have that type of experience, right? Cause it's any good interview is a bi-directional.

You're interviewing them and they're interviewing you. And so if you think about, a company that you're really excited about, they asked you to show your work, you'd say, great, I'm thrilled to have this opportunity to show what I can do because it's a way for me to really prove value. And so I think that really helps, reminding you that, okay, this also is a benefit to the person on the other side because that ideal candidate would want to do that work because they find your company so exciting.

Of course, if it's going to be 10 hours of work, you should pay them. But if you're asking someone to do one hour and you're clearly defined upfront what the interview process is, that I think really, really goes a long way. We always try to do that as to say, initial screening at the end of that, if you're inviting someone on, you say, here's what the process looks like. It's follow up interviews with my colleagues. It's a take home exercise. It's one more thing. So you don't want to just sort of like have a

Chris Whyte (: 43:06

Undefined open-ended process where you're sort of just like, you know dragging someone through I mean, that's the clear thing. It's a setting and managing expectations being clear upfront what the process is so you give people ample opportunity to either Agree to it Pull out and exit. It's not for them or challenge it, you know, but Just kind of one more one more step. I've seen that counts times over the years where you end up on an eight or nine step

Yeah, and you know, usually that's a sign that something's wrong at the company as well, right? If they can't make a decision about the interview, they probably also are not making decisions in a timely pace about key product features or about key marketing or about other things too, right? It's, you know, you have to ultimately to be successful at a startup, especially you have to be comfortable making decisions with some ambiguity. that includes hiring. Absolutely. it's, I think a lot of companies, they

They forget that when they're interviewing or when they're when they're hiring if you put an advert on indeed or LinkedIn, you know, there's potentially thousands of people see an advert and And every single person you interact with is getting some kind of exposure to your business and what and then making a judgment on the culture and the character of the business Yeah, having a poor experience. You'll never know how many people they share that or expensive and the more likely to

share their poor experiences. That's why you get lots of negative reviews on TripAdvisor, cetera, because it annoys people. You either review something because you're really, really annoyed, or you've had an excellent experience. You very rarely review a book out. 100%. But no, and then the other thing about advertising, if that advert's been up so long, that's always a bad sign as well, because it just...

those unanswered questions. Why is this role still open? been six months. Can I not make a decision? So yeah, it's a very complicated thing. But anyway, we're going off on a recruitment ramble. Let's bring it back to Ember. So 12 years in, Ember is still evolving. Got some really exciting stuff coming up. What are you excited about most about next? Whether that be

Chris Whyte (: 45:31

Gen 3 products or things further down the line or just generally business-wise? Yes, obviously the third generation is super exciting. the AI that we've developed to predict hot flashes, that's something that customers have been asking for for years. So to have kind of proven the technical capability, that was a huge milestone. That's the hardest part is to figure out, is this even possible? Obviously, productizing it is not easy, but...

you know, that's easier than just trying to say like, can we even do this? So that's exciting. You know, it's a, I'd say a broader piece of the just sort of overall goal of continuing to scale. like we were always motivated by the idea of how can we help as many people who struggle with temperature to get relief and control. And, you know, that's always been the North star. And it just feels like we're continuing on that.

that journey and it feels like with that, ultimately the third generation hardware, but even before then, we've got a real opportunity to just continue to just drive market penetration, drive adoption, and to find new ways to help people become aware of the Ember Wave and that it exists. Yeah, fantastic. And this is going to get a bit deep now, Sam, but what kind of founder do you want to be in the next chapter?

Yeah, I think the type of founder that I want to be in the next chapter is ultimately one that puts the customer first and that in doing so.

really creates the type of company that helps people bring out the best version for themselves, right? yeah, mean, fact that that's what the founders that I admire the most do is they bring out the best in people. And in doing so, they're able to really help kind of bring their vision for serving customers into the world. I love that. I very much kind of resonate with that. It'd be helpful trying to try and give people great experiences.

Chris Whyte (: 47:43

things happen for everyone involved in that kind of chain. And then final question, any reflections or advice for people building hardware companies in 2025? I think building a hardware company is going to take longer than you think and you're likely to take more capital than you think. what

seems to work best is if you can really focus on finding the market pull and letting customers really lead the process. I mean, when I think back to why did we make it this far and why have we been successful, we started as a completely unproven team with a completely new technology, with a completely new market. So it's like all of the risks. But what happened was just the market need was so strong that it kept pulling us forward.

that like it was so clear that when people with hot flashes found out about the idea of a cooling bracelet, they wanted it. And they wanted it so badly that we were able to take our first prototypes and prove enough demand to get capital and use that to launch the product. And they supported the first product. So if you can really find that customer segment that has that strong need for your hardware, that's going to really increase your probability of success. And then the second is to really build in the business model.

the world in which we had launched a subscription model in Gen 2 from the beginning or Gen 1, the company would look very different. And it's, I think, pretty clear at this point that hardware companies in the consumer space need some subscription component to build a sustainable business. So you can build that in from the beginning. think you'll have a much higher probability of success. That's awesome. Sam, it's been an absolute pleasure sitting down with you and going through your journey and just digging into that. So thank you again for.

Spending the time with me. My pleasure. This is so much fun. Thanks for having me. Wonderful. Yeah, we did about 50 minutes. So that's, yeah, it's gonna be great even with the little interlude. How was that for you? So much fun. Good. Yeah. I'd love to get a photo. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. You can post it on LinkedIn. Tease people over what's coming. Yeah. is so awesome.