Gadgetory

you know one of my favorite leadership mattress comes from Caddyshack right there's a point where Chevy Chase is see your future be your future right what I like about you know entrepreneurship is you know you walk into the office and you can have a real impact tomorrow and and you know you can have this vision and you can see what you want to achieve and it can actually it can happen I don't know how many times I watched Caddyshack when I was a kid okay paid up there you go I'm Stuart Lombard I'm the CEO and one of the founders of you could be Cermak we're in software development I went to work for a company called te electronics amazing company because they make flight simulators and what was really cool about that company is they made everything in that factory so they made you know they actually made nuts and bolts they like painted all the sheet metal they made all the wiring hi nurses they designed and fabricated all their circuit boards and I was fortunate that I had a horrible boss one day I decided like you know what I just I don't want to work in Florence Oh I remember walking into his office and I had a packet stack of papers and he was giving me a hard time and I just like threw the papers in the air and said I quit I did the totals like take this job and shove it and I thought okay I'll just you know spend some time looking to different opportunities and trying to figure out what I'm gonna do next so I think you know everyone has to decide what they want to do with their life right you know at that time I said like well you know what I would really like to reduce my environmental footprint so let me do a few things to see what I could do to reduce my environmental footprint so what I realized the insight that we had was that heating and cooling is 50 to 70 percent of your home's energy use so actually better managing your heating and cooling is probably the you know easiest best thing that you can do one of the things I like best is is his products right there's making products building products figuring out like you know how something should go together how to make a great user experience all those kinds of things it's what I like to do and so actually you know program my Honeywell thermostat that I had at the time which first of all takes like a PhD to do and that was kind of the impetus for like there's got to be a better way and that was really the sort of the founding idea which was you know how do we use technology to help people conserve energy save money reduce their environmental footprint and that because heating is such a big part of your energy use that if we can you know to the Internet if we can use Internet data we can put smarter processors in our thermostat so we can have better algorithms you know how much better can we do I would like to do something great I'd like to build a brand that opportunity to build something than to build something great people say like what did you do did you wake up one morning and decide you were going to start a thermostat company it was like pretty much what happened wasn't like you know we've been building consumer electronics products for years you know we saw an opportunity we were like we can figure this out and so we set out on this journey so we started calling up like heating and cooling company's in Toronto and like can we ride with your guys in the truck like who the heck are you guys talking about right we actually you know we went out and we we rode with heating and cooling service technicians was exciting there were all kinds of things that we learned you know I think first of all just what it takes to you know to do an installation you know what those heating and cooling service professionals care about you know how we could help them make the installation process easier well that's you know that's really how we you know how we started the business and you know it took us 18 months to get our first product into market this is like you know one of the first prototypes of what Ernie could be thermostat would eventually come to look like this is it right here at the time smartphones were just coming you know into reality and we had this idea what if we took a thermostat and kind of mated it with with a smart phone you know what what could we do what could it look like how it work and this is it it almost kind of looks like a phone in a way had a color touchscreen first Wi-Fi connected thermostat in the market right there was no other Wi-Fi connected thermostats in the market and and you know that was really around thinking about convenience you know how could I use one of this products how can I always make sure it's comfortable when I get home can we connect it to the data can we use Internet data to make smarter decisions for you and the answer is yes people were like oh it's awesome it's fantastic it's great it's you know it's amazing and we were doing high fives and all that kind of stuff and and then neski what we realized is that you know we thought we were playing in the NHL but we weren't really playing in the NHL we were the champions of the you know North Toronto minor Bantam hockey league but we thought we were in the NHL right it forced us to go back and retool and think about the business really carefully and that enabled us to release a whole new generation of products which was significantly better that you know we believe you know is the best in the market we have this vision for what we would call the help Lahoma if you think about you know the platforms you have today you've got like desktop you've got mobile we believe connected home will be another platform and so we're really betting on Barfield voice and really integrating far-field voice into all the products that we have so that we can extend Barfield voice to any room of your home where we are right now is is what we call the audio lab and it is our space where we can test our voice enable products in today's Unitec today update this is saying it and hear the stories that matter right now for every new software upgrade that we do on the system to ensure that we are still meeting the bar of good performance this is the space that we use for it the second is around sensors right and and really being able to put sensors into products so that they have more contextual awareness right so a good example was having our lights which have a temperature sensor in it so it can be a room sensor for your thermostat so this is rich glass our latest Dali it's also a temperature sensor in here so now every room that you'll put a switch plus in you'll actually get better temperature management because it will communicate the temperature of that room back to your it could be Thomas that you want to basically build Beauty and the Beast in your devices right so how would be your light switch become that smart endless day you give it eyes and ears and I would see in our devices we're adding you know a microphone and speakers those things are Alexa but also there are sensors that can understand the environment the key for us is not to try it out Google Google right we can't win by you know trying to do what Google is doing we need really a different playbook and I think you know when we look at our strategy our strategy is really built around focus and innovation and I think if you look at you know thermostats specifically you know we're delivering more innovations to the market faster than Google is it's taking Google three years to come out with room centers as an example you know in their room sensors don't have occupancy detection I feel like you know we're not even you know we're describing the surface we're just getting started and one of the things that I'm most proud of is it feels like you know we're just getting better like I don't feel like we're at that top end and we're like you know limiting now and I feel like wow there's just so much opportunity and the team is so much better and our ability to execute is so much better and it's not only is it better but it's also accelerating and getting even better which which is very exciting you