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**Ian Bernstein:** \[03:57\] Maybe... Where I grew up, our public school is 20 miles away. It was 120 kids, K through 12. The year that I dropped out, I basically just told my parents I didn't wanna go to school anymore. That year they combined fourth, fifth, and sixth grades into one classroom. That's how small it was... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow... Yeah. |
**Ian Bernstein:** So it wasn't like a big school, in a big city, where there's other opportunities, and after-school programs, and AP stuff... So I think for me home-schooling, and because of my parents being facilitators, I think it worked out really well for me and I got to experience a lot of things that I don't th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Interesting. And obviously, you've gone on to do some pretty cool stuff. Sphero is I guess kind of a big deal, right? |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, I mean... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it's a big deal. I'm just kidding around; it's tongue-in-cheek there. I think it's a real big deal. |
**Ian Bernstein:** I think it's really cool. Obviously, BB-8 was awesome... For me, it's a lot of the educational side of what we did at Sphero, a lot of kids now - I mean, since we started Sphero ten years ago, there's kids that got into Sphero and coding when they were kids, and they're now in college, and sometimes ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't know if this name will ring a bell for you, but Ron Evans - by any chance, does Ron Evans ring a bell to you? |
**Ian Bernstein:** Oh yeah, for sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Ron is a friend of the show. We've talked to Ron tons of times; I love Ron, he's amazing. And I actually learned about Sphero and some of the things he was doing with it at GopherCon several years ago. On the third day of GopherCon was always this community day. Originally, it was called "The Hack D... |
**Ian Bernstein:** That guy used so many Spheros... I remember Adam Wilson (my co-founder at Sphero) and I met up with him in L.A. one time, and I think he literally burned out a whole cardboard box of Spheros. There was probably 30 Spheros in there, just completely worn out. I mean, we test these things for over 100 h... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, let's move on to that then. I mean, let's not obviously gloss over all of Sphero, but let's move into where you're at today... And rewind as necessary. Misty Robotics is new; I think we're talking like 2017 you had founded this, is that right? Can you open up the story there? |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, so I've always thought about these more advanced robots, like robots in our lives, since I was a kid. I grew up with The Jetsons, and shows like that... Rosy the Robot... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's right. |
**Ian Bernstein:** ...and I've always had that in the back of my mind, like "How do we bring these robots for real into our lives?" ...not just movies and Star Wars and stuff. We had prototyped some stuff in the early days of Sphero, some more advanced robots, but it didn't quite make sense; the technology wasn't there... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow, so you could have been a leaker... |
**Ian Bernstein:** \[08:05\] Yeah, it was crazy. Just like a little side tangent - when Bob Iger first showed us the picture, you could barely see the picture. It had his name watermarked over it, so the whole screen... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Ian Bernstein:** But when we started working on it for real -- we had to work on it at night, when nobody else was there. When we started working on it as a company, emails and stuff would go out anytime people would come by our office, and everybody had to put them in their cabinets, in their drawers, and as soon as... |
We even did -- at CES we had kind of a back-room, we created this bookshelf where you literally pulled-open a book and the whole bookshelf swung open... And retail partners that were sort of privileged to view that product for their buyers would go in this secret backroom to see BB-8. Yeah, it was crazy... There was no... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. It's interesting too, because that was the first episode to bring Star Wars back from (I guess) the negative side of Star Wars - which we might be back to the negative side again, with going from episode 3, 4, 5, back to 1, 2, 3, and 1, 2, 3 is in many people's eyes not part of the canon, even... |
**Ian Bernstein:** Oh, yeah. It was amazing. And when we first heard about BB-8, too - Bob Iger was like "Hey, this is the new droid in the film", and honestly it really wasn't until the movie came out, and we were literally in the theater, that we really knew how big the BB-8 character was gonna be. We got a little bi... |
It was pretty nerve-wracking, because we put everything into BB-8, and it ended up working out very well, because BB-8 did become one of the main characters in the film. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How did you make that choice, to put everything in? What was the indicator? I suppose it was a gut feeling... Was it like "This is just super-cool. I can't help but do it"? Was it an economic thing? |
**Ian Bernstein:** Kind of all of the above. Part of it was just like we would just want it to be a part of Star Wars, and doing something cool, which was maybe a little bit of blind faith... I mean, people at Lucas and Disney were telling us it was gonna be a big character, but we didn't really know... They were super... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Was there anything like -- any physics schematics that you had too, where you were like "Okay, this is how we operate it. This is the physics of BB-8"? Or did you have a hand in that even? |
**Ian Bernstein:** No, not really. But it was months of us asking before we finally got some video... Basically, some iPhone footage from the set, and a puppeteer pushing BB-8 around, so we could see what the movements actually looked like. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[12:01\] Yeah. Describe BB-8, for those who don't really have a perfect visual. I'm sure there's many out there who do, but for the few who don't, give us a visual indication of BB-8. |
**Ian Bernstein:** BB-8 is a 20-inch sphere - the actual BB-8 - with this half-spherical head on top. BB-8 is part of the Star Wars universe; its character is R2-D2. It doesn't have a voice, like C-3PO; it's more like beeps. The BB-8 has a lot of personality and character, and follows the Star Wars characters around an... |
We made a toy version of BB-8. Our BB-8 is maybe four inches tall, it connects to your phone over Bluetooth, and there's a lot of interaction and gameplay. You can program BB-8 in schools, and all kinds of different stuff. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's really interesting, looking back on Sphero - I guess you have said a couple times, the toy side of things, and Misty Robotics, and what you're doing with Misty 2 is toyish, I would say; not really toy, but more of a platform. We'll get into that, of course... |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's just interesting to use these things as gateways for not only young people, but even older people who are like -- I don't know, I'm just thinking like my uncle, who's now retired, and I think he's 65... I don't know, I can't recall his age. Maybe 70. I could be wrong, completely. It doesn't mat... |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah, absolutely. Going back to your original question, it was when we really started thinking about BB-8, out in L.A. - we were at Golden Road Brewery, which is right near Disney's creative campus... And we were thinking like "What's something potentially bigger we could do at Sphero?" And we starte... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Legit, yeah. |
**Ian Bernstein:** ...in our homes, our offices, that's really doing useful stuff for us? And of course, behind me right now I have a Roomba in the corner of my room. It is awesome, it vacuums my floor, it's gonna vacuum it at 3 o'clock today... But how do we get robots in our homes beyond just vacuums? And we started ... |
It was pretty early, but starting to get into place that we can navigate a home at a reasonable cost; things like computer vision, so we can give some context awareness to the robot... So that people who are curious, people who have seen these robots in movies - Star Wars, and The Jetsons, and Chappie, and Big Hero 6, ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What about iRobot? I say that one just because it's funny, because that one was a robot revolution. |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yeah. I mean, definitely iRobot? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right? \[laughs\] |
**Ian Bernstein:** You know, some of that stuff is a ways off, like crazy, humanoid robots, and companies like Boston Dynamics are incredible in working on some of those... But you know, for something at a price point that somebody's gonna have, that's affordable, it's still a long ways off. And you know, something tha... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[16:04\] Yeah, I guess -- let's just isolate it to just Star Wars. If you're just using R2-D2, or C-3PO or any of these -- maybe not C-3PO, because that one's more human-size... If you're thinking just robot, then you've gotta think that's personality, to some degree resourceful, I suppose... These... |
Most robots I think of, like your Roomba, for example... I don't have one, because I'm scared of them, but... Literally, I don't want the vacuum at my feet. I'm just kidding around, but... You know, you've got these robots in our lives today that aren't very smart. And you're trying to create something that's a platfor... |
**Ian Bernstein:** Right. And like you said, a lot of this stuff is really hard. Even getting a robot to follow you around your house is not a trivial task, from the engineering side. Just good voice recognition while the robot is moving, and making noises, and it's motors, and it's things like that. Fans... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Heat dissipation... Yeah, all these different things that really -- I mean, that much sophistication in that small of a package, with closed parts, small parts even... That's a lot of engineering. |
**Ian Bernstein:** Yup. So we went through a lot of really challenging times, trying to think of what this use case would be... Like, could it be a security bot? Yeah, probably it could patrol your house... But with all the technology, you need to have a good security bot; would people actually buy that? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Ian Bernstein:** We're trying to go more towards home and office. We didn't wanna be a specialized security bot. We really wanted to have something that could be more multi-purpose, So we didn't go in the direction of some of the other security robotics companies Knightscope, Cobalt, some of those. Even also like Roo... |
So every week it was something different. We could be like the companion robot, the security robot, we could be the kids' teaching robot, we could be just a programmable robot... But it always sort of broke down. Either the technology wouldn't be good enough, the price point would be too high, the tech would be too exp... |
Then we came across this idea of being more of a platform, thinking back to how computers started, how really smartphones took off. It wasn't Apple or Microsoft creating all the applications, it was people who were specialists in different spaces. So you could think about your phone - most of the apps on your phone are... |
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