Jonas Rinde
Making Technology Disappear
In this episode of Brave UX, Jonas Rinde delves into designing tech that doesn’t feel technical 🤖, the challenge of product-market fit 😅, and his relationship with risk and adventure 🪂.
Highlights include:
- How do you mitigate the risks of growing a startup?
- What can go wrong when you build a prototype too fast?
- How do you know what to pay attention to?
- Why do you want to make the technology disappear?
- Who gets to decide what makes it onto the product roadmap?
Who is Jonas Rinde?
Jonas is the Co-Founder and CEO of Nomono, the Norwegian company working to simplify the recording and management of immersive broadcast-quality field audio 🎙️, so that podcasters and journalists can focus on the stories being told.
Before Nomono, Jonas was the COO and then CEO of Huddly, the Norwegian technology company that creates AI-infused smart meeting room cameras 🎥.
In 2007 Jonas’ went to work for TANDBERG, the Norwegian telecommunications provider, as their Director of R&D 🧪. During his time there, the business was acquired by Cisco for $3.3B and Jonas became a Director of Engineering at Cisco and a Board Member of Cisco Systems Norway.
Wanting to scratch an entrepreneurial itch, Jonas left Cisco in 2014 to become the Co-Founder and CEO of Electric White. The business was acquired by Acano, which was in turn sold to Cisco for $700m in 2016 💸.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world class UX lab; enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals.
- My guest today is Jonas Rinde. Jonas is the co-founder and CEO of Nomono, the Norwegian company, working to simplify the recording and management of immersive broadcast quality field audio so that podcasters and journalists can focus on the stories being told after three years developing an integrated hardware software platform. Nomono's first product, Sound Capsule, is about to launch and it looks the business.
- Before Nomono, Jonas was the COO and then CEO of Huddly, the Norwegian technology company that creates AI-infused smart meeting room cameras.
- Winding the clock back to the beginning of his career, Jonas started working for the telecommunications company Ericsson as a product design engineer in the mid 1990s. He then went on to work as a project engineer at Sony and then as a project manager at Volvo.
- In 2007, Jonas's career really hit its stride when he went to work for Tandberg, the Norwegian telecommunications provider as the director of R&D. During his time there, the business was acquired by Cisco for 3.3 billion US dollars and Jonas became a director of engineering at Cisco and a board member of Cisco Systems Norway.
- Wanting to scratch the entrepreneurial itch, Jonas left Cisco in 2014 to become the co-founder and CEO of Electric White. The business was acquired by Acano, which was then in turn sold to Cisco for $700 million in 2016. Not a bad result.
- Jonas holds a bachelor of science and product and industrial design from Kristianstad University and a master of science and integrated product design from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
- As a design led technology company, founder, CEO and investor, I've been looking forward to exploring Jonas's story with him today. Jonas, welcome to the show.
- Jonas Rinde:
- Thank you Brendan. I'm happy to be here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It is very, very good to have you here and I did enjoy preparing for today's conversation and having a look at Nomono and also back through your career history. It's been a very impressive track record you've had there and I'm very much looking forward to exploring that with you.
- Now, I did want to start though with something that I noticed about you and one of the interviews that I was watching and it was on the Life on Mars podcast and you are actually sitting in your car now you live in Norway, which is very beautiful and rugged country. And the thing that I noticed in that video episode of that podcast was that your roof racks, you have to kind roof racks on your car. And that spoke to me of someone who leads a fairly active lifestyle. Just how much used to those roof racks get?
- Jonas Rinde:
- [laugh] That's a very good catch. I'm the first one to comment that, so I'm impressed. No, yeah, I have those on and that's for cause of my standup paddle boards because up here in the nor there's not much big waves. There are some wave surfers in the our Nordic arctics on Norway but I'm not that keen on that super cold water, so I'd rather be standing on a standup paddle board. So they get used like in summertime probably they get used like two times per week. Those the kind racks there. So it's a good way of keeping fit, especially with the upper body because I do a lot of mountain biking as well. So you got to kind of get the full body workout combining standup paddle board with some mountain biking.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was going to say you're not skipping leg day, so that's good to hear.
- Jonas Rinde:
- No, I'm not skipping, but I'm skipping the gym. It's too boring for me to be inside training. I need to be outside and get some salt water in their face or some dirt.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I definitely hear you. I do a bit of running and I prefer trail. Yeah, to road. It's just that much more interesting and I feel like you have to engage your mind and your senses more than you do if you're just plotting along on the concrete.
- Jonas Rinde:
- I totally agree. It gets a bit boring when they say on the concrete when you're running and trail running for me is also a good way of practicing for the winter. So especially behind my house here in the hills in the forest usually kind of take maybe the Lacey way of walking up but then running and usually running outside the trails as well because you get a good training of both balance and pretty aggressive for the legs. Kind of similar when you do off pace skiing in the winter. So I'm also, as you're a big fan of running in the forest as well, we're in the mountains,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're clearly a man of adventure and I suspect that your professional track record and career speaks a little bit to that as well and I definitely want to go into that. But just before we dive into all things business and noon, I wanted to talk to you about something else that I observed in that interview, which was you said, you actually said something, so not an observation, something you said that I thought was interesting. You've said, I have survived, I've done a lot of crazy things jumping off cliffs and stuff like that and you just said it so rela in a relax, such a relaxed fashion almost like, oh I just jump off cliffs, no big deal. But what on earth compels you to do things like jumping off cliffs? Where does the need to satisfy whatever you are trying to satisfy with that activity? Where does that come from?
- Jonas Rinde:
- So I think it's like you don't just start jumping off cliffs. It's like a step by step. You pushes yourself, you pushes the limit and when you get into that, this is also the way how you kind of learn a lot about yourself learning how you can control things. And I think I mentioned also in that interview about what I call calculated risk and finding that balance for me is about the adrenaline getting that sense of the rush. So I think that's where I come from and you always try to maybe sometimes find answer why I'm so intrigued by that and that's become a big part of my life especially on my private time. I think it also relates a little bit to my background from my father and my grandfather. So my father for example, he was building his own sailing boats and was racing them and was doing pretty good boat in the World Cup and et cetera.
- So I think he got a lot of adventure from that. And my grandfather, he was a fighting pilot during the second World war and at that time he was flying prototype planes because they didn't have the time during the war to really like we do today with all the different bills we tested, we do an m d MVP and what have you and quality assurance at that time in the second World war they would just get the plane assembled together and go fly there. So I think at least myself trying to find a red thread going back into my own kind of DNA or maybe just finding an answer to why. So I think that's, but yeah, it's a need for speed and thrills but as I mentioned for you it's on this kind of fine balance where you're not risking your life, you always risk your life in some terms, but at least do a bit though should I say humble calculation that is not too much risk, but I think humans are different there as well. What kind of interests us. Yeah, so I'd just like to challenge myself I think is the key thing here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Tell me about your grandfather. Was he's someone that when you were growing up that you spent a lot of time with or was this relayed to you through stor stories from your father about what his adventures were like during the war?
- Jonas Rinde:
- No, I was lucky enough, he got like 92 years old so we got some time together and what learned from him, he was a really good storyteller. He was really good on the kind of going back and telling details from these adventures. And the funny thing is when he's start to talk about the stories from the second World war, they all started and kind of similar story. So you thought he was telling the same story over and over again, but what you realize as soon it comes into the action in his story from what he kind of experienced, there's always different things and so he was also planning to write the book but he wasn't too fan of computers or he, so this is pretty fun. Back in the days he was on the bleeding edge of fighter pilot or planes the latest of technology, but then you fast forward being an old man computer wasn't like really his thing. So unfortunately he didn't get to write that book which is a p because at least I'm one of those who's been lucky enough to hear all the stories from that time.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's really interesting that you tell that story about your grandfather and also how he wasn't able to capture and fool his stories in terms of document them in a way that other people could read and consume and understand them. Yet there's a parallel to my own history there with my grandfather also being a World War II veteran and one of his friends, a photographer actually wanted to document some of his stories. But by that stage I think my grandfather passed away when he was 86 and this would've been around when he was 80. The Alzheimer's had started to kick in and so therefore there wasn't a hundred percent confidence that the stories being told would be recalled in the most accurate fashion. But so a precious personal memory to have those stories of those older gentlemen that lived through quite a f fantastical time quite a horrifying time as well.
- Jonas Rinde:
- There's so many stories and I mean after the second World war my grandfather want to help the Red Cross. So he moved with this whole family and this was back in 1948 into Africa to uca and he was helping them reestablish everything around landing strips for airplanes and what have you. And he was working for and together with Esti at the time. But just imagine at that time they were, I mean, taking a family and I'm not sure how many stops that need to do with the plane to refill just to go from Sweden to Ethiopia, Africa. Things today that would take, we can almost fly [laugh] pretty far. So it's pretty cool. So I dunno if you're going to buy a car at a time, you know need to go to Volkswagen in Germany to buy the car and then drive it back. So I mean still continue this kind of storytelling how you So I think yeah, there's a lot of adventure in the family sisters I would say.
- And I envy him because to get into the same kind of experience today, I think mean people are almost done everything people has been all around the world. So that's go a little bit back to are told you for me, I do my kind of local adventures. So that's where I live where live here in Norway I got the furor with the water we can just stand a paddleboard and sailing and then I have the hills and the forest behind me where I can do mountain biking, trail running or in the winter. This is pretty fun. Like yesterday I was doing some powder skiing just behind my house here. So you get this kind of micro adventures and I think I'd have kind of settled for that for now at least compared to my grandfather's amazing adventures and as yours as well, it's really great to hear that you have a similar experience as well with your grandfather. Nice, impressive.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You are a man of few words at least on your LinkedIn bio, which simply says, I like to build, I like to go fast. And having listened to you tell those stories of your father and your grandfather, your father building and racing yachts at speed and obviously the amazing adventures that your grandfather had with testing out these very prototype planes. There's a thread there a hundred percent. You're also only 45 and 46 years old or 46 years old. I think you may have just had a birthday.
- Jonas Rinde:
- Very true. Thanks for
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Saying is it 45 or 46?
- Jonas Rinde:
- Thanks for saying only 46. I feel like it's getting close to 50 now, sir. Getting off. But yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, it was beginning of December,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm approaching 40, I've got a couple more years to go. Yeah, so I know what you mean, but you are still a very young man and you've actually had quite a busy career. You've sold or been involved in the building up in the acquisitional sale of three businesses at this age. So you've been doing both of those things you've been building and you've been going pretty fast as far as what most people would look at you from the outside in and say wow, you've really put some runs on the board as we say here you you've said previously, and I want to quote something here and I wonder if there's a link back to what we've been discussing about adrenaline as well. You've said in the past, pain fosters creativity. I think pain is the best way of learning. So is that just an observation of yours that you've had as you've gone through life and the pursuits that you've undertaken? Or is this more speaking to a personal operating philosophy that you have adopted?
- Jonas Rinde:
- I think it's kind of both. And I can draw parallels both what you do in your spare time with different sport activities because back again, when you're getting close to the edge you hurt yourself. So I just going to take one good example is for example with mountain biking, I was doing BMX as a kid and you're full over a because it tests two things and maybe you're going to impress the cute girl in the neighbor house as well, you're going to go back wheeling and then they crash. But over the years you kind of learn a technique how to fall. So on mountain bike it was like you roll over and just roll, roll, roll. And I never broken anything but I, so I think the first place with that is you get some pain but you learn through that and you learn technique how to behave.
- And if you look into the working life similar things because most important thing for me building products, teams and company is speed. So setting up the culture and the company in a way that we always can keep the speed. So trying to avoid to have too many meetings, too much process, too much bureaucracy and what have you. But getting tech can also be painful because sometimes there's something slippery in between the chairs and when you do a company that can have impact on the financial situation of the company that you miss something need to be built, another prototype, it's going to cost you, delays you. So from that I think also you learn when things kind of slip between chairs or you miss something because you want to keep the high pace at high speed as
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well. I understand you had a fairly painful situation at Taberg working on immersive tele presence rooms and you were demoing a prototype maybe a prototype that you'd gone a little bit too fast on. Yeah, what's the story, what's the story there?
- Jonas Rinde:
- [laugh] a good one. That's a very good example as well. So we were building the first immersive person's room which means the product was the whole room including the walls, the lightning and what have you. But unfortunately when we had a very big customer visiting us, the CS prototype it catched on fire and that goes back maybe to high speed. So one of our engineers didn't have had time to have enough isolation between the PCB circuit board and the Alam NU chassis. So when the customer was testing the touch screen he was pressing too hard. So I would say, so he pressed the PC B behind the display through the cardboard that was used to the Mino chassis and that make start of a small fire. So we learn something from that, maybe don't rush it too much or take shortcuts to get them in time for that really important customer. And as I mentioned though, two years later I have bought several of these kits and this is pretty cool, it was a $300,000 product. And then again I realized that installing that in New York for example, it's going to be another $300, $300,000 on just refurbishing and creating their room where to put the product. So I'm still kind of impressed by looking back to that time the fantastic salespeople had that was selling this but also the customer who wanted to have these kind of tele presence, immersive tele person back in the days.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This situation is a good analogy for the risk that is inherent and going fast. We talked about the fact that you have to learn how to roll because you are going to hurt yourself if you're pushing yourself close to your limits. And there's been some commentary about certain technology companies where going fast may not have led to some of the best outcomes for a broad set of stakeholders. And while we don't need to specifically speak to that, I am curious to understand through your experience building pneumonia which is no longer, it's not just a physical installation, this is something that is AI infused. So there are other factors to consider as you build out the technology and what the technology might lead to. How do you balance going fast, which you need to in a startup because you have limited runway and you need to get things done and you need to try and find market product market fit as quickly as you can and the potential broader implications of the technology that you are building. How do you weigh if at all, those against each other and how does that affect your decision making if that is something that you do?
- Jonas Rinde:
- That's a very good question. So thing though, you want to keep speed, high speed push on, but what you also learn is that you need to do testing and verification. So that's a very, very important part of this. So we talk about test driven development, so that goes for the software side and that's super important in terms of creating very high stability and quality of your software. And that links of course to what is the most important is the end user experience of your solution. So they experience stability and quality also on the design on the UX side. Also important with the testing. So using user researchers, doing questionnaires, being out with the customers and the end users and testing early prototypes. And that is also a solution of keeping high speed because I also learned from experience, you shouldn't sit and work too long on your product or in solution before you start testing on actual users.
- And I can use myself an example because I remember as a kid developing designs, I wanted to finalize the design first and kind of show it a bit proud. Look what I've done. I hated when somebody came and interrupted me with doing a design work. They went like this should do that because there was like this. But well over the years, fast forward 20 years, what you learn is so important with the first concept, sketch, whatever you have idea, just test it, get feedback and then you kind of course analyze that feedback and start to do adjustment. And by doing that you shorten development time by doing that you're keeping speed and time to market. You see so many times you work on things too long, you come to the market, you come then you go like yeah nice but why should I use this or how should I use this?
- And I think I should talk a lot about when you add something to people's life, it should be something that reduce other things. And I think it's so important for us to work with technology and product development, we need to keep that in mind because sometimes when you work with something you can get into the possibilities you can do with the technology. So I think AI as you mentioned is also good example how L far should we stretch and work on the AI and algorithms because we got to keep in mind whatever we do with those, it has to be something that is understandable but also help the purpose for the end user. I think pneumonia is a good example there because we do recordings of audio we also with our own sound capsule capture metadata which makes our AI that we have in the cloud for the moment gets a very good understanding about what to talk about, where talk about the scenario.
- We do that from a purpose to enhanced audio quality but also the spatial audio effect when you put the listen inside the story. But you also got to be careful with all this data what to do with because it has to be a solution to the end user that gives them value that they understand we could leapfrog now with technology we have, but we also sense that the people we talk to and present it for, they're not really there yet. So one example is just using the AI for a podcast recording where we can take away all the pauses, the presentational things or you different sounds when you start thinking and the humming and et cetera. So we could kind of do a lot with the AI in terms of I improve it for end user, but the question is also this is a balance here to also take the user on the journey. So back to this stepping stones back to this learning. So I think that's I'll open up for more questions cause I can continue a long monologue here because it's like oh
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're clearly very passionate about the product and I am certainly thought a lot about what that experience should be and there's a number of points in what you've said that I could hop off to and I do want to cover product strategy and also human factors with you. I suppose what I want to do first is just take a seat on the balcony if you like and zoom out a little bit and consider the implications of the data that you are capturing. You are going to be processing data of conversations that are occurring across the globe assuming that the product will be successful and let's hope that it is and you are going to have the responsibility I suppose of being a custodian of that data. Now I've heard data described as the new oil and it's pretty clear that capturing a rich data set can enable many future possibilities for products and for companies, potential partnerships, other things like that become viable when you've got a rich data set.
- And so what I'm asking you I suppose is thinking about the second or third bouncers of the ball as far as where you project the company to be and the types of data and products and services it may have in 3, 5, 10 years. What consideration if any or safeguards have you put in place to ensure that the data that is being captured is being used in a wholesome, I don't know if that's the right word but that doesn't run foul a foul of any personal ethics you may hold or that society may expect from companies that are capturing data like this?
- Jonas Rinde:
- Yeah, so for us it's very important Ron we'll talk about GDPR and privacy. It's all encrypted and for us the data is anonymous and that's also the good thing Back to the ai, it's the AI who kind of uses data and analyze it. We as company, we don't have any insight to what's being recorded. We can't listen into it either. So it's just for us it's a anomalous data that the AI can process for us. And I mean for us once again, the key thing here is to give end user humans and what we call superhero powers in terms of improving audio and focus on that. So I think for us it's a clear goal and we're also pretty clear on messaging that out as well and I think that's so important today.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So let's come back to the time before noon existed when it was just an idea and you were a C e O of Huddly, which is a successful Norwegian technology business that I mentioned in your intro and you left that role behind. So what was the insight that made you think that this is something pneumonia is something that I'm willing to stake my reputation on and perhaps dedicate the next five or so years to building?
- Jonas Rinde:
- For me, I like to start building things from scratch. When my co-founder Alden, who also is a former colleague of mine he has been researching for three years on how to capture spatial audio and meeting him in his lab down in there was a classic one down in the basement having this Frankenstein looking thing super ticky and they go like this is awesome [laugh] because what I kind of sensed user earl on something, but he has kind of studi the technology micro trends and from his perspective who is from my experience maybe a top 10 in the world on microphone array and microphone technology he has foreseen the spatial load you will come and that goes back to 360 video. All the XR like AR and vr, the way we as human will consume media going forward when he show the technology was working on, there was not really a business case around, there was technology, how to capture it but what to use war.
- And the first assumption was to use it for 360 video but at the time and still is no big market for 360 video. So we started to look into what other pieces could be valuable and that's where at least I saw the opportunity to be very early on a large surfing wave in terms of spatial audio because it all made sense when we talk about that almost now four years ago and we got some proof point along the way, which we of course are happy when you're betting so early on technology for example spatial audio at the time because at the time there were no spatial order in your iPhone or airports, there were no [inaudible] but for us it was such a proof point when Apple announced that they're going to support spatial audio. So we had those kind of proof point along the way.
- But honestly for me is was I was seeing the same thing as Al my co-founder was presenting for me. And that goes to my own experience of consuming audio. I've been working in a video conferencing industry for a long time and we always talked about audio was the most important part of video conferencing because if the audio breaks there's nothing, video can break, that's okay as long as you have the audio. And also me personally also a big interest in 3d. I've been doing 3D design back in the days before you got your 3D max tools, et cetera. So those things kind of just align and for me was an opportunity I didn't want to miss but I think it's a back tool. You mentioned about the risk taking cause why will you leave? I mean Hubley, fantastic company, fantastic team, be a part of Jonna has been a very good learning for me.
- But leave all those guys and girls behind and jump onto this new unknown territory outside the video conference industry. You going into the media industry maybe foolish, I don't know, we'll see, but at least there was some risk taking there and just seeing something in your crystal baller about the future. I think up to now at least we have the proof point we needed to continue building the company and of course also raising capital when we start working with the solution, realized pretty fast, just the most basic audio recording today, the workflow about capturing good oil is kind of broken and it hasn't happened much in the last 10 or 20 years. There are some application like the one we used new Riverside, which is really, really awesome and there are some other tools you can use as well. But if you look on the combined thing or combining especially on the preference side hardware together with software together with cloud, there there and there still is no solution except pneumonia from that perspective.
- So what we do now is we connect audio to the cloud seamlessly and with our physical device there's just one button to push to capture spatial audio. I think the listen should try to do that themselves or at least go onto the internet and try to find a solution how to capture spa audio. And you soon come into a territory looking like the Frankenstein lab equipment I saw back in the days where you need a very advanced ambisonic microphone, you need some other wireless love microphones, you need a eight, no sorry 12 channel recorder connected these ones. And then you need a lot of SD cards and you need to set up an environment that you're full control over the VIN noise acoustics and what have you and batteries. And then you're going to do all the capture which is very unnatural with all microphones.
- And then you're going to get those files into some kind of tool and try to mix those 12 channels into something and you get microphone bleeding. So I'm not going to paint a full complex picture here, but it's really, really complex. And what we have done is taken all that together with als patents and innovation and just pack it into a simple box let's say. And which is one bit to push you can do this and this is in the field so we replaces the need for studio because we have full control over what is being said but also what's the ambient sound? The am sound can be something to get some more color into your story or it can define as noise and you just want to remove it. And the cool thing with our solution, you can do that after the fact. So you do recording and then afterward you can decide do you want the ambient or do you want to adjust it? Is it too, yeah, so that's a long answer to your question but it's taking the risk because you see something and it's so compelling you just want to jump on it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And it's easy for people to look at entrepreneurs and product offerings that they see out there. Like P which currently has a price point I think of around 3000 U S D and to poke holes in that, right? You can sit there and you can go just like previous podcast hosts have done, they say I can't really see how this is going to have mass, mass appeal. And I believe even TechCrunch wrote an article about the price point and then gave you the benefit of the doubt though off the back of your track record. And there's famous examples also in the technology industry for the one that I'm thinking of is Steve Balmer scoffing at the iPhone launch. It doesn't even have a keyboard, just couldn't see the platform play that Steve Jobs was putting in place at Apple at the time. I am interested though in the challenge that entrepreneurs and anyone who's passionate about inventing or creating something, whether it's a business or a piece of technology, have with maintaining some form of objectivity about the business case, about the prospects for the product and clearly timing is important in a marketplace as well.
- And I got the sense that what you were describing there, you felt that the stars were aligning regarding the technology, the support from big companies like Apple to put it into their existing hardware, the trends around podcasting, all of these things start to line up and you've talked in the past about your approach to risk taking and I'm just going to quote you now. You've said I don't take on stupid risk and that is back to understanding your capabilities as a leader, as a person, but also the capabilities of the team. You want to build the capabilities that can come from the team to take on this challenge or opportunity. So how do you know thinking about pneumonia specifically, how do you know if something is starting to look like a stupid risk? Is this something that is obvious from the start or is this something that you continually have to pull yourself on and check in and just make sure that things aren't starting to go the wrong direction and you are falling victim to sunk cost as a result?
- Jonas Rinde:
- So hiring people with the right mindset and the skills I learn over there is that the right mindset is the most important piece skills you can obtain or you can learn as you move along. That's the key thing. And then to give those people as much freedom as possible and responsibility and by doing that you ensure that you have a team that is capable of building their own culture then you have to make sure they are good on collaborating with each other in different across the company as well. But then you also in my role, you need to do follow up, but most important is especially as early founder and CEO E is being clear on the story around the company, building together the objectives the vision, the mission. I think that's the kind of, I wouldn't say I think it's easier for a founder starting from scratch building the store together with the team and being motivated by that.
- Because I think that's the key thing. I take my risk going into this, but the other people take their risk as well and we take different risks but we still take risk in doing this because there are, I think from the outside they could look, I'm not sure, but it maybe look easy because usually you show the positive results, you know, progress seeing, you get reviews, you get, but I don't think people who hasn't done this journey before realize how many factors, many risks you are taking and how many challenge there is. I will not kind of go through them all here right now, but those are the ones back again you need to balance. So you take a lot of risk in this risk on technology on the business side and the financial side of people and what have you. But then you need to balance and you need to get this kind of sense of feeling to always work on the top priorities at all time.
- But they also need to be linked to the biggest story of the company you're building. And the key thing with that story is the value you give to your end user. But there's so many threats there. I mean the world has been changing dramatically over the last [laugh] three years so to say. And building a company through those phases where you have component crisis, you have war in Europe you have all crazy things going on, you cannot plan for that. That's things to happen. But that goes back to the people they hire, the culture you're building, the store you're building together within the, and the vision you have. The good thing with the world being has been over the last three years you really get the stress test what you're building and how it's progressing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I imagine you also got to stress test yourself and your team because you started a mono I believe in 2019. So that was That's correct. Before Covid arrived and the premise of at least the initial product is recording audio. Mm-hmm Together in a physical space. And I know all about this because I launched my UX lab the month before Covid arrived, which is all again, it's about having designers and product people in a physical space. So my timing was terrible [laugh] like the worst timing, but it's all sunk costs and there's nothing I could have done to have prevented that. But I was wondering in terms of your mindset through that time, you've sunk your own money into this, you've raised investor money and funds as well, you've brought people on board and then Covid turns up. Were there ever moments where you got home and you poured yourself a glass of wine or a beer or whatever it is, a glass of water maybe, and you just thought to yourself, is this going to work out? Is there going to be light at the end of this tunnel? Will the world ever go back to being together in a physical place?
- Jonas Rinde:
- We used to say if failing isn't an option, but I think it goes to mindset wise as well. No, I never thought that. I do though have what I talk about kind of healthy paranoia and that goes a bit in a competition but also what you mentioned here, what will happen with the world going forward. But it's also back to take it day by day work and plan from what of course you do some thinking about the future. But I think for us who's been through now those last three years, we just realized there are some things you can't really plan for. And for us the solution is a field device is supporting four people in the same room. But you can flip it to the Postpositive side as well with the covid because the microphones we have, they're very clean in the design so they're very easy to clean in terms of bacterias and these things.
- But also people can sit with a distance between each other because they're up to 20 meters and it's not often you sit for people 20 meters from each other fine. But then again at least with the covid you can sit in almost the same room at least on a healthy distance or from that perspective I think. But of course it started, we have a roadmap of solution coming. The covid kind of also helped us to foster some of those ideas. So I will not go into detail here now, it will be too early. But then again you realize, yeah, it's not that everybody's going to be in the same room at the same time like you and me today. How can Mono do something that is really compelling in this scenario?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So it sounds like this is about responding to events as they unfold, a recognition that the future can't be known and yet being able to rely on previous scenarios that you've thought through or to be nimble enough to adapt and get your brain around the scenario that's unfolding and see how you can respond. You've talked in the past about being a CEO means you have to have an open mind when building a company. There's so many things going on though in the world and even at a company level, there's lots of stuff to think about. How do you personally and specifically how do you separate what signal from noise?
- Jonas Rinde:
- That's a very good one. I think it takes some stuff back into in terms of why did I jump on starting pneumonia taking on that risk. I think it's back to see a vision, do your own calculation about stars aligning. For me there were certain stars aligning and now they're aligning and it's getting so [laugh] compelling. I can't miss this chance, I just need to jump on this and I'm in a worst case, well maybe we failed, there's not an option, but fine at least to test it, at least you learn something. But building a company with Mr money and getting friends and employees and colleagues and what have you, of course, that's why I say it's not an option to fail because you take on so much responsibility in that then that's back again to all the noise around you. How do you find a signal in that?
- And I think for me it's just so in many things I'm just coping with congesting a lot of data in the world and through that at least for myself, try to find out what could be the clear signal in the noise. But then I have very good friends, colleagues, family and other people in my network that I open and discuss with and through them get some feedback gets and direct. And I think that's pretty similar. [laugh] back I, I've learned product development and I've probably used the same thing here as well. I early test my concepts on people I think in different places. Yeah, but I mean interesting now was the component crisis for example, the good thing with the mona, yes we have physical product that has dependency on components being manufactured and what have you, but we also have a cloud and a software.
- So when the C crisis came and we didn't know when and where we're going to get components because the big player was in prices, were skyrocket and still high. But we have other lake stand on. Yeah, we had the pneumonia cloud solution. Maybe we should look more into investing in that and see is that maybe the first product coming up because the hardware might be delayed, we don't know how much. So that's again, look on the options you have me personally, I like to develop portfolios of solutions, both soft and hardware. And by doing that you also look into many different scenarios, different price points, different use cases and scenarios. So that gives an opportunity also to adjust and balance or things that happens if you come to a point where you need to stop something or start something else. So I think for Ramona it's been interesting. And back to signal noise thinking here as well. Component is a good example. We have at least a software in the cloud. So if the worst would happened it didn't, but if it would had happened we didn't get a components we could build a business on what we have with AI in the cloud.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- How intentional was that much the original strategy or thinking when you founded the company was that ability to develop not just a hardware product but a hardware, software and platform like that. You spoke to the fact that you like to do this sort of stuff. Is this core to the strategy? Was this always part of it or was this you responding to unfolding events?
- Jonas Rinde:
- I mean honestly we started with if you look back to the technology, we started with how to capture spial audio and we looked around and there were no microphones there was capable of collecting the origin in that high quality together with the positioning. So that pushed us into do our own hardware and that's why we call our microphones smart microphones because they have so much under more understanding of the whereabouts and surroundings and what they're doing there versus ordinary microphones. So that's one thing. So when we get into that then we start to see doesn't help the content creator or the podcast that the user, if you only do the smart microphones, that would just solve the scenario when you capture the analog world in to make it digital in the physical space. So we're looking at the workflow, there's so many other tools they use and from that we started to look in, okay, how can we make sure that the end result from using the mono is a high quality AutoFi that you can use for broadcasting.
- That's something well as we defined is the highest level in terms of audio quality. And that's where we realized that there's so many steps with SD cars, cable, you email people, you do so much things in that process. So that's where we saw the opportunity. While we still have the files in the cloud, we can then start to enhance them, but we can also open up for collaboration around the files and then do some easier lighter kind of editing as well. And you can do comments, stuff like that. So I think that goes back to what I said earlier about when you add something to people's you need to reduce the complexity. So if we just added the sound capsule, we reduce the complexity in the recording scenario in the field, but then you still would have the issues where to store the file, where to enhance, what to do with exactly. So it goes back to kind of take control over that piece of the workflow.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well let's talk about the human experience with the product and you've said about the hardware. So about sound capsule specifically, I believe you've said we focus on the human factor, we want to make the technology disappear. So why focus on the human factor? This is a industry that's full of technical specifications and advance this and advance that. Why is the human factor the thing that you've decided to focus on and why do you want to make the technology disappear?
- Jonas Rinde:
- It's goes back to what you mentioned earlier as well with the bomber hammering on the iPhone having not the keyboard and we get some, I wouldn't say a pushback, we'll get some comments, you know, said something about the price. We think $3 is cheap because if you compare to what you need to buy other equipment, that's one thing. But what you also add on complexity, on stress, on your mind, setting these things up the time, et cetera, et cetera. So if you take the whole of it, it's pretty pricey and stressful if you're going to use something else, then the mono solution today.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Jonas, I want to go into that with you to segue into this briefly and feel free to bring us back to my original question. You believing that is one thing convincing a marketplace to believe that is a completely different thing. And I'm really curious about this belief you clearly hold in the product and that it's cheaper than it probably should be for the benefit it's providing to the customer. But how have you thought about the fact that the industry, as you have described, hasn't really evolved in the last 10 to 20 years? Why is this? Is this because people are putting up, are willing to put up with bad technology and all these headaches, are they satisfying? Are they getting by with what they have because they don't know there's something better? But what is it that really underpins your belief that the product will fine market fit and that people will see $3,000 as a price point that represents excellent value for them?
- Jonas Rinde:
- I think number one, it's innovatives dilemma by the existing hardware vendors. I used to say the world milk the cow. I think that's what they do. The big players, they get new microphone, there's a new name on it, maybe it's a new color and new specific. Maybe it's improve a little bit on some part of the specification and that's it. Another thing is, which I respect though, is if you look on the professionals it's almost like a religion around different microphone manufacturers because the sound of the microphone, the way it captures, but also you probably have a lot of experience around that microphone. So how to set it up to get the best performance out of it. So you are also avoiding maybe changing it out and we get a feedback from our solution. It sounds too good to be true because we take away so much of this complexity that the professionals at least have been trained or learn over the years.
- But I think that's the key thing. And it is, I worked in big companies before as well and I know when you have legacy products and they bring in your revenue, it's so hard to do something that really distract yourself disrupt yourself, or compete with your own revenue streams. And I think that's back to inventor's dilemma that you know are kind of forced without will to continue do what you do and you incrementally. So it's hard to do something revolutionary new by the big players. I think that's one thing. And another thing is, well you have to be nuts enough to take the risk.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah,
- Jonas Rinde:
- But as you say, you know have to drink and there's no similar product in the market. And as I mentioned for as well, at least on the professional side, people have a religion around different microphones or even software to use how to fix the wood and what have you. So it needs to be in a studio because otherwise I don't control the acoustics and et cetera, et cetera. That's what we also get to work against. Let's say we need to, I wouldn't call have a convincing story, but that's where we kind of put our company into more human story. You can see on the tone and voice from the moment of the web pages on the messaging we have. And it's very different compared to the other big players. As you mentioned, the specifications data shade, and if you take away the logo type, most of those companies looks the same. Even the products looks the same. I'm not going to mention the names, but it's pretty funny where at least when we come in we're distinctive different, but we're not different to be different, we're different because we focus on the human factor.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. You've said about this, you've said a product that is easy to use is also easy to sell, but it's also easy to understand which is most important for the user, which is the key thing here because if the user can't understand how to use it, it has no value. So thinking about that, what you've said previously and thinking about what you'd said recently there about the religious following that some people in your target audience or target market have a preference for Mike's, things like that. The investment that they've made in wrapping their brains around the technology that's in front of them and the sense of pride that often people feel when they've mastered something that's difficult. What does that mean for your efforts to connect with people that may, may not be those zealots of technology? Are you looking to connect with people who really just need something to work and to work simply and ignoring those technophobes like, oh sorry, those, how are you conceptualizing your target market here? As far as I understand it's professional podcasters and broadcast journalists, but that's quite a broad definition. How specific have you got with just who you believe your users, your customers will be?
- Jonas Rinde:
- So content creators, storytellers is our main, when I mention professionals who are very professional in audio or technicians they're not our main customer, but we need to deliver solution that performs on a level that they expect because the content creator, the storyteller at the podcast, the journalist, he or she might go to somebody who is professional audio to get recommendation or get advice. And if they come with our solution and the professional audit listen ins to it, it also has to wow him or her. They go like, wow, interesting. It's not for me because I got my microphones, I got my studio, I got all my gear, but this was really impressive piece of kit. The order quality is, this is, yeah, so that's for ensuring the quality provided by the solution, but then the design of the product, the ease of use, that is what I call for anybody, especially for them who are not techy or tech interested.
- When you design something that is easy to use, you also reduce so much stress for the end user. So back again, content creators, we don't know about their daily life so to say, but we want to ensure whenever they're going to use our solution to capture audio, it's going to be as little stress as possible for them. That's why it's contained in a circle of box that you can carry with you the size of it, it fits into your backpack where you can have your other content. Creative tools might be a draw a camera or other things you have with you when you create content. But also the setup should be short, easy to use one button to push everything is better power. Everything is wireless. I mean doing wireless microphones, that is also kind of, some people are showstopper, are you guys crazy wireless.
- But we do smart things about, we do local buffering of the order inside the microphone. So for any reason they will lose connection. That's not a risk because the order is always being stored in the microphone as soon getting range, they start to buffer. So you have a lot of resilience in all the stuff that's nothing that this user thinks about because it happens in the background. That release also takes away some stress because it always works, it always captured my audio and a lot of things, when you're going to do recording audio, you need to get instruction to the people who's going to talk to the microphone. You need to think about where you're going because you need to prepare and bring things with you to ensure you get good or as possible. With our solution, you don't to think about these things, you just go out, drop it in record and you go home and then afterwards you can listen to FI and then you can decide what to want to keep with this or what I want to remove and the [laugh]. But on top of it, it's all spatial already. Nobody does that in the whole world.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is about making the technology invisible and putting that human factor in the foreground. And it's really easy to look at something that's been beautifully designed and underappreciate the investment in thinking through and evaluating what that experience is. It's often the unsung heroes, the people that work on these products that are actually able to get them to such a place where people don't even know or aren't even stressed when they're using it. So how do you, thinking about the team at Nomono, how does the team at Nomono, how did you get to a point where you feel that you've achieved that you've got something that is really easy for people to use? What involvement, if any, did the people that you're seeking to serve through this product play in helping you to shape the products? Design?
- Jonas Rinde:
- Here is the interest in balance here of design for me the users. So it starts with, you know, have a problem statement, there's an opportunity, you've see something happening there. You analyze the user behavior, the user research, trying to understand for our content creators. And through that you start to conceptualize then you start to find also technology that you can use for that solution. But here comes what I think is the most fun part, the balance of that. So what technology can you build in to give that user experience? But then you have the third one that's the business of it. So you have to make sure the technology you're seeing is, but also tire wise technology. There might come your chip set that you want to use, but it's too risky. There's an old chip set but that's not performing as so. And here comes to have this cross-functional team inside your company with all the competence on software, hardware design and also business.
- So you can balance these three things because when you balance these three things, that's when you get a successful product in the end. But of course me personally having the design background, I also have a strong belief in design because of the process you go through when you're designing things, that's where you need to balance this. And I think me personally, I think designers in general has the best likelihood of being able to get all this data in from the different and kind of find what kind of is the perfect balance there. But then we [laugh], if you look on a moon, we still take some risk in terms of having this very circle sound capsule product. It looks so different from any other microphone solution. But the circle of thing comes also into being a spatial audio and what have you. But then when you open up, you start to kind of recognize a more square shaped product. Maybe it looks a little bit more like in microphone at least you kind of get that connection to it. But yeah, no, it's finding the balance that is, that's the important thing here. So yeah, cross-functional work.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well let's talk about finding balance because something that keeps many product managers awake at night and also offends the sensibilities of many designers is feature creep and it's very easy to add things to your product. Yeah. Now you've said about this in the past, you've said there's always feature creep that asks to add more. It sounds so simple, but you need to find balance. So how do you find balance? How do you weigh in one hand what your customers are asking for or what different people within the organization are asking for within the startup versus what should make it into the final product, at least for this first version. So how have you approached that tension between adding things and deciding not to add things into the product? Yeah.
- Jonas Rinde:
- That starts when you start the company that start when you design your first concept. Because when you just in-house starting design a concept or start talking with the first potential users as well, you get you, yeah, I won't call it feature clip at the time because that is kind of data you get into understanding what you're designing, but a certain time you need to lab what are we designing? And that's where you start to get more focused and say no to things because that not true to the original concept. But the interesting thing here, there's always is dynamic balance along the way anyhow, but you need to settle on something that you really believe on, that you have a strong business case around is doable and it has a very good target market fit for that. But then along the way you need to adjust because there's always good ideas coming.
- And it could be from customers, it can be internally, but it can also be macro trends happening. Suddenly there's a new technology arising or a competitor for that matter that you need to adjust to. And the way also, at least one, one of my key tools is product roadmap because I notice although you have a team of very skilled people, you have very experienced customers and you have very good business people, it soon start to get pretty complex pretty fast. So to be able for everybody to keep everything in parallel and understandable, I think roadmap with a timeline is super important. So this is the first product, it has this m mvp, these are the key features. And this is something I learned back in Cisco. So back in that time we worked on what are the five key demo features that we can showcase this product?
- What are the five key demo features that we can go on stage for a 20,000 internal salespeople in Cisco and just wow them? And those five key demo features became the priorities of the product development. And those were the ones being most tested. So we know when we were doing demo most pitching this to the market, those was also the five key features that will work with the most ability. And that is so important because then you prioritize other things below that for that product, for that N V mvp. And then as we talked about, feature creeps inputs, that's also a balance from the customer. And then you put that on the roadmap, on the timeline on the same product or if it's too drastically different or interesting, you can put it on a facelift of that product or it's a total new product. And then you continue to collect that and at a certain timing you start to sense we should do that facelift of the existing product to adopted it, or we should do a new product. And that new product could be in the same market, vertical market, or it could be higher price, lower price, or it could, so but that's back again. So roadmap super important and get those, let's call it feature clip into that roadmap.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So two questions for you there and I'll ask them one at a time. The first is who gets to decide in your organizations what goes on that roadmap? So who gets to decide what those top five features should be?
- Jonas Rinde:
- It's a combined, so I have a leadership team where we have C E O, ct, O C P O C O, et cetera. But it's the seatbelt, the chief product officer. And that's a very talented woman. Silva. I'm so lucky I hired her. She's only been in the company I think for three months now. She's like, she's been there for three years. She's super talented, but it's her responsibility, it's her job to keep the road and be also the gatekeeper for what goes in to the backlogs or to the roadmap
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Even from you and the board.
- Jonas Rinde:
- So this is the funner thing. I'm also very strong believer always hiring people that are better than yourself because you can't cover all the topics. And in, for example, Sylvia, I found a C P O I think is better than me in keeping track of roadmaps and keeping this very good dialogue with the teams going and getting this systemized in a good manner so I can come in and have of course feedback to it and come with my ideas. And it's an open dialogue. And it's open dialogue also with Victor as the CEO who's a responsible design. So as of today looking into the roadmap we are now three people working on that. So there's me, the CEO is the C P O and the C. And we three together work on, but no question asked is owned by the C P O. What we have is, and that goes back to the open dialogue in the company, but also to play on each other's skillset and experience this.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And my second question was to do with your role as C E O, as c e o, and you've got skin in the game, not just bonuses or whatever else, you get an enterprise, you've got your own money invested and reputation invested. You have to make a lot of the biggest decisions that the company faces. And there are various people, investors, employees, your C-suite trying to influence you, not untoward, not with any mal intent, but trying to influence the direction that you take and the decisions that you make. You mentioned saying no, you have to say no to features at that level sometimes because they don't fit with what you've agreed and what's important as the ceo. How do you say no, whether it's directly or indirectly to people that want things from you or from the company that you believe are not the right things at the moment?
- Jonas Rinde:
- Wow, what I have learned at least or the way I do it is yes, I say no, but it's so important. Take the time also to tell the story behind why you say no, because then you have a dialogue. Because just saying no doesn't solve anything because when somebody's coming with an idea, they probably also have a story behind that. So what's most important is sit down. Cause I'm super interested if they come with that, awesome. Especially something we haven't thought of because then I'm all ears. It's something we have missed, something happened, what's going on here? And then you hear the story and go, and then you can answer back in a polite way. That's awesome. But you know what? We did some iteration of this back then and this was our result. And usually go like, ah, okay. So you have thought of that. So you have looked into it? Yes. Ah, okay. Thank you for that. And I also learn on most of those who comes with this is because maybe there were that we missed something or they didn't get the [laugh], they memo, they could get the story. But then because we do so truly work on what we do, we potentially almost have at least an answer or a description of why we're not doing that because we've been through the process ourselves. I think that's the key thing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I think that's a really important point that you've made and the willingness to be open to learning something new, even if the answer is still no. Jonas, I'm just mindful of time. I've got one final question for you before we bring the show down to a close. And this is tapping into something that I feel that we're all guilty of, which is talking ourselves out of doing something that breaks with the life that we've currently been leading, doing something new, doing something meaningful, something that might not work, like starting a company for example, or writing a book or making a career change. So what is the story that you've told yourself in those moments when you've faced those kind of decisions, whether to start no mono or not, what story has helped you to feel confident in embracing the risks that you've taken on?
- Jonas Rinde:
- Think for my, it's like I usually think what's the worst that can happen and usually not much I would say mean it goes back to mean we can be very philosoph, but it goes back to life and as long as you're healthy, you have your family, everything. I mean you can take a lot of risk. And I also see this is interesting, so on the private side took much more risk as a young gun versus an [laugh] old man now. But on the work related thing, I think I take more risk now than I took when I was younger. So for me personally, I see a shift and I think the risk taking I do now is I'm not saying I'm getting old and wise but at least you have learned a lot. I think over the years, I think more regret taking too little risk than taking two risk on the work life side.
- When I look back, there are certain times where I potentially would have taken bigger risk than I did and I never regret things, but there's certain times back in the time where I shouldn't have pay off the loan on the house, I should have used that money to invest in the company I was building because that would put me in a much more financial better position now. But that goes back to risk taking at that time, I would lower my life risk by having paid the loan on the house because if shit is the fan, I still can live in my house. I don't have to move with the kids and everything, so I know why I did that. Back to calculate risk and if, or it's always easy to look in [inaudible], go like I should have used the money investments then. But yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- The future is unknowable
- Jonas Rinde:
- And lucky that, I mean it would be pretty boring if you knew what was going to happen in the future. I think that's the key thing, the unknown,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's where the interesting stuff happens, right? [laugh], Jonas, this has been a great conversation, plenty of interesting ground covered and things for designers, researchers and product people to consider and budding entrepreneurs. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today and all the very best to you and your team as you build noon.
- Jonas Rinde:
- Thank you Brendan. Looking forward,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- All good. Now Jonas, if people want to connect with you or want to keep up to date with what you and the team at Nomono are doing, what is the best way for them to do that?
- Jonas Rinde:
- It's just to follow on Nomono's web page, Nomono.co.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Perfect. Thanks Jonas. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where to find Jonas, Nomono and all of the things that we've spoken about.
- If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management and the odd entrepreneur, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast. Those are really helpful. Subscribe and if you feel there's someone that you know that would get value from these conversations about business design, product management research at depth, then please pass the podcast along to them.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis. There's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes on YouTube and on the podcast platforms as well. Or head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz, that's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.