Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 42Be Tiny Until You Shouldn’t Be

Jeffrey Powers

Jeff Powers is a cofounder and CEO of Occipital, which created RedLaser computer vision software for smartphones (sold to eBay) and Structure Core Hardware for robots, drones, and AR/VR headsets. Occipital remains an independent company, and Jeff is still the CEO.

In December 2008, the situation for Occipital was dire. We had a $10,000 deferred legal bill, dried-up personal bank accounts, and no revenue. Seven months earlier we had flown out to Boulder to join Techstars with little more than a prototype piece of software that could recognize the logos on paper receipts. In the first week, we realized that everybody thought the technology was cool, but otherwise hated the idea.

We came up with a better idea that everyone loved. We were going to build a huge, multiplatform consumer application that used artificial intelligence to solve the world’s photo organization problems. There was a lot of buzz in our favor after we demonstrated an early prototype in September, but we failed to close funding for a number of reasons.

This failure gave us one major asset: a big chip on our shoulder. We didn’t need anyone else’s money. We already had what we needed, which was a core competency in computer vision, a technology area that we believed had incredible intrinsic value. We were borderline arrogant about it—we hypothesized that we could just hack off a tiny chunk of this technology and turn it into revenue. We tested this, stayed ...