From Youth Racing Champion to Serial Startup Builder | Interview with Mitchell Goldman, COO at Edgify

Ryan Purvis 00:58:12
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather big now, in the series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines, the problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to grips with a digital workspace inner workings. Welcome to the digital workspace week's podcast, you can introduce yourself, please.

Mitchell Goldman 00:58:47
Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Ryan. So my name is Mitch, I guess. Tell them my background, somewhat of a very background, a little bit of nonlinear path I started off when I was a child as a racing driver and to go karting, moving through the ranks into Formula Three, and that being a British champion, but I didn't come from particularly well, backgrounds that was always a sponsored drive. And when the night happened, the financial crisis, the first thing they told was sponsoring fancy cars. So that dream came to a crashing end, pun intended move into the event management space and think at the age of 16. But my first business ultimately scaled up to about 30 individuals, and a full blown sort of Catch Me If You Can episode where a bunch of them were adults, and I had to almost conceal them how young I actually was with together my best friend, but nonetheless scale that up. My first accident were 20. And I guess because I was the way they mathematician, the school was told I had to go and be a banker. So that's what I ended up doing. And ended up working at the nation's favorite. So I say that in quotes with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Barclays. But all jokes aside, actually, it's possible, quite enjoyed my stint seven, eight years in investment banking. And primarily I was in the solutions group meeting, I had a kind of Black Ops mandate to really engage in any sort of asset class across 20 $30 billion financing deals and global jurisdiction and really got my weeds in my head into the weeds of how companies behave and how sovereigns institutions and how it's all very, very different. That in 2015, to co found my first tech startup, I guess, second business because the grass is greener, outside of the corporate, the corporate lens. And what can I do? Yes, can I protect that up in the resale tech space went very, very well went to five rounds of funding disappearing 1000 meu, had an ice hockey stick growth curve. And the whole business was essentially helping the High Street, get more customers on demand, and then give back the analytics for those customers ultimately, sort of digitize the high street play, like a Google pay clip of the offline space. And then Google came along. And having the best week of revenue going into the pandemic, we were gearing up to exit and went from our best week of revenue to zero and 27 minutes, which was pretty challenging. As a marketplace business consumers locked at home retailers and High Street closed down. And you know, with all these sort of negative evolutions, I think the bad makes way for good I started doing a lot of consulting work became a CRO Olio, which is a food waste company, trying to solve the problem of food waste at scale. We've sort of helped them close like a 40 million Series B ended up going to another startup that I co founded in the interactive entertainment space, less that world are left behind is and sort of stood down as a CRO back in January. And now I am a COO at a machine learning computer vision company specializing in applying computer vision to retail at scale. Wow. Long, long answer. I realize I'm hearing myself like I need to get the most succinct the nonlinear part

Ryan Purvis 01:01:44
as a problem I would say is you build cool shit. That's what you do this

Mitchell Goldman 01:01:48
Cool cool shit. I'm glad we can I can get some French and I can do some French really?

Ryan Purvis 01:01:55
Yeah, he's actually a very good character. It he has a better way with accents than I do. But he makes it sound really like a like a John Travolta kind of one liner, or even a Schwarzenegger kind of one line or one standard is great. I mean, it's quite funny, because I think we might have just missed each other JP Morgan. Yep. Because I think I started in 2012. And you left to go to Barclays around in not that we were doing the same space at all. That was in the back, you know, with the hamsters making all this? Sure the wheels were turning from a technology point of view. But I mean, so I'm curious. I mean, so you do so you said mathematician. So what made you start a business when you were so young? In when most people your age, like, you know, as you age, I was doing building my own stuff. But I was also playing sport and socializing and all that kind of stuff. I mean, what was the drive?

Mitchell Goldman 01:02:46
Great question. It's always hard to cast my mind back to the 16 year old version of me. But I guess, you know, on one hand, it was every single weekend was dominated by by racing from age eight or 16 to literally three days a week. So I think when, when that came to a crashing end, there was this void, but I just wasn't really sure what to do in that spare time. So I think that was probably one reason. Another one is a little bit of the school I went to that were very proactive. In teaching us hustler mentality, it was a very good secondary school. But it was very exactly all around empowering you to kind of think as a bit more of a half a mechanic and that, you know, when it's all in, you've got to make your own way. So I think, combination of upbringing. Also, my father came from nothing and kind of took himself from, from almost poverty and that kind of deep poverty to being somewhat well off. So I think it's having that kind of program programmed in me, along with the racing background, which I think as a racing driver, you're taught from a very young age, especially in karting, if you spin off, get back on and every single place, even if you're lost, and you make up one place that matters. So I think that kind of drive and push just instilled from a very young age.

Ryan Purvis 01:03:53
Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, I never drove cars but I played sport, as I mentioned, and I coach and it's amazing how little things in your in your sporting stuff teaches you for life. So I used them coach used to say we always recover, no matter what happens, just recover. And if you recover, then don't worry about mistake doesn't matter. Yeah. And, and I watched that with my son, he's five, and he's turning six, but he's a big boy. So he gets treated like a nine year old. And I see it. It got what I went through as a kid, but I was also quite a good kid. He's He's learning that resilience now that he has to figure it out to do something. And I don't think it's something that you can ever necessarily teach somebody without making them struggle. And you've got to step back and let them struggle.

Mitchell Goldman 01:04:39
Absolutely. Yeah, look, I see exactly that point. I think no one learns anything from success. People learn from failure, unfortunately, bad needs to happen to cause change. If everything goes dandy and rosy, you're not faced with adversity, and you're not faced to react or to proactive, anything. It's just everything's the status quo and fine. It's only in the face of adversity that people are forced to learn and to adapt and change. So exactly. Unfortunately, tenacity is born out of failure. And I think that's where Saudi have a really good job in celebrating data, so long as it's quick and inexpensive. Yeah, so that you can develop something new from that and take those learnings know

Ryan Purvis 01:05:18
for sure, for sure. And I mean, the various businesses you've been involved in all those businesses that have been something that's resonated with you, and you've kind of got to do this, or there's been something that you've kind of brought people together, or wangle people together to do something you've wanted to do. And it's kind of all join together, if you understand my question, but.

Mitchell Goldman 01:05:36
I think so. I think I get you, I think one thing that's always that I learned coming from, from me, like yourself from the investment banking world, or the corporate world, or like, into startup land, or at least being a founder was, you know, making a lot of money in the world as a 24 25 year old, it really taught me, you know, working 20 hours a day, I couldn't spend the money, my friends were at the same place, I didn't have time to see any of my friends and family. And I just thought that was the status quo, you know, working was a miserable endeavor. And to be honest with the team I was in, I actually was quite lucky, it was really very different. It wasn't particularly monkey see, monkey do as some roles can be in the corporate world, it was always very challenging and different. But nevertheless, I think, where I'm trying to get to where I left that while in 2015, and co founded my first tech startup, the first year, I had savings like me, and my two co founders ultimately were best mates from school. And the you know, we were, we raised a round of funding, which you put all into our employees into the product. And our assumption was, you know, we're gonna raise another round second year, and then we can start paying ourselves and in reality, I think that was naive founder by being naive at the first time founder, and it took a lot longer to raise a second round. The point here is, is that you know, after my savings kind of dissipated off the first year, in a second year, I was being paid to walk dogs, I was doing delivery orders, I was Airbnb my apartment out and staying in my parents' home, so all to make ends meet. And I was happier doing that every single day than I ever was a day and banking. I wasn't a miserable, and that taught me to follow passion and over index, a passion, and the money will just follow so long as you're happy. So I guess your question in terms of the businesses they've either founded or been a part of, it's always come from conviction, I can't get out of bed, especially the founder willingly your, your lower salary, even higher equity, I can't get out of bed and be hyper motivated. And I like to be quite an ambitious person in that respect, unless I really believe in what we're doing and genuinely, genuinely resonate. So you know, there's the first endeavor, it was my baby, it was my baby. And you know, it was a pure pursuit of passion. I must be honest, I have never been the one that's created the idea per se, I've often been bought into something so when you said you know that you kind of stitching people together. I've often been an operator as opposed to, you know, the CEO CEO title. I love that I love being executed and taking the division or the madness of the CEO and putting it into building blocks. For some reason, that's my jam. So if

Ryan Purvis 01:07:56
you ever read the book, rocket fuel?

Mitchell Goldman 01:07:59
rocket fuel?

Ryan Purvis 01:08:00
rocket fuel, it's a book,

Mitchell Goldman 01:08:02
so I don't think so

Ryan Purvis 01:08:03
yeah, so it's worth it's worth reading. And I'll distill it into into the two main things that I got out of it. What is there's two roles that every business is the visionary in this integrator. And you're an integrator, it sounds like, and I'm very similar, typically won't come up with the idea. But once, once you grasp the idea, you will make it happen, you will execute it. And it will bring people together to someone if someone else will do that visionary stuff, and whenever and, and it makes sense that you kind of jumped around message, I'm trying to obviously spend a lot of time and in different things, but but you've used, your trajectory has changed as things have changed. Because it makes sense, that would happen. And you've used probably all your knowledge from previous things, to feel the next thing. And you just found, you've just found somebody else that's giving you a new thing to be interested in to go Yeah. Okay, that means something to me, let me do it.

Mitchell Goldman 01:08:56
Ultimately, yeah, I think that's a very good way of putting it and yeah, I'm a massive, massive over index over momentum, you know, and having just even as tiny progress week or week, that's something that really fuels me. And yet until I'd be in stress side of it, it's yeah, I view it very much the journey, I know when my end goal or what I want to be doing as an end goal in life, and I know there's no, there's no one way of doing it is number of steps to get there. So yeah, my engagements have all, you know, four or five years that I'm in and it's, it's each engagement has been that huge step for next platform. And each of the startups I founded, you know, the way they've been founded, each time the backers that have joined us, the investors that have come on board, it's, it's been a huge step changes from each one. And I never for one, I never, you know, as a banker, I thought, you know, but and I was in solutions group. So a lot of my work was in derivatives and very, very niche skills, that there's going to want a derivative expert at the age of 24, that's on a steady salary, you can't replicate anywhere else, because that's what it does, it traps you in with a high with a high salary. And who's going to want my skill set, what have I got that is relevant, I really had a huge amount of identity crisis, I know lots of us suffer from it. And in truth, actually, you kind of see with each engagement I've had, you know, been a part of an operator, a there's experiences as an IB have become very relevant, not on a technical side, but it's off site, you know, being able to conduct that in any meeting and going into the deep end, which are you had as well, Ryan. But, you know, then even then, like my experiences at my first startup in Naz, which was helping the High Street, with a kind of a football driving machine on demand, totally different to my second startup, which was helping musicians make interactive experiences, couldn't be a world apart. But that experience and the first step taught me how to market like a wizard, and I've never been a marketer, they've never been trained, but it was a marketing business, because we were helping the High Street Market on algorithmically. So taking all of that piece into into bowls, there was a huge pardon, you know, brought with finance systems and systems architecture and stuff I just didn't think would be possible, but it all isn't. Every single time there's journey. Exactly, it's sometimes things feel like they, they won't, they won't get aligned or dot up. But in reality, it's, I find it quite remarkable how much stuff does join up in the long run, and how many things you realize over had to have happened, or it wouldn't have been this way. And it's quite beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful, when when you see light through that lens, I think

Ryan Purvis 01:11:16
I think it's a very important lens to have, I think a lot of people get very caught up in their failures. You know, I know someone that she didn't take a job, and, you know, the rest of her life is is a disaster, because he didn't take that one job five years ago. And the reality is about not taking a job, something else happened. And it might not, it may not have been a good thing at the time. But in hindsight, if you look, at five years later, or 10 years, I remember when this was but you know, she's done other things successfully. So, but you got to realize that you had to go backwards to go forward sometimes, and people don't like to think we trained via movies, and by TV series and others, you always have to be going forwards and upward. It's okay, sometimes to know there is either step up, step in or step out, and sort of the three things. So

Mitchell Goldman 01:12:01
Really, but lateral movement is exactly a still progress, you know, sort of for me, it's a long as you're learning that will pay them and that at some point continually learn, you know, dare to be different, dare to challenge. And as you said, you know, people people often very, very, very scared of failure, rightly so, I didn't see I remember sitting going, Oh, I can't wait to fail during the day, right? Over the years from, from moving into so many different sectors and often having to take a step back and going okay, you know, I you know, in between my first tech startup Naz and then it's about also that the interactive experiences while I mentioned it was during COVID. And I was a CRO for some time at a series B Series C Company, you know, on a much higher salary with UPromise and US backers, and consciously made a decision. I love music. It's been a hobby of mine and a passion of mine. I'm gonna take a step back to being a founder, again, starting from zero and going that whole piece because I appreciate it if I need to learn about this space, and it was very, you know, mixed reality where three AR VR that was their learning that kind of over index while they're in that period during COVID need to be done. Doesn't have even a tattoo to that effect, which is started with the clouds passing the idea being in the clouds will always pass no matter how cloudy day it will pass when that something comes through, it will be very abundantly clear as to why so yeah, I've almost now what's the point of something bad happened was failure. I'm like, good. I know in two or three months or a year or whatever, I will see why that had to happen. And it will be very clear. Yes, I have yet to find it not be a positive example. And there's some stories I can't go into in a in a podcast format. We can have a drink one day, but certainly an extreme elements of adversity have kind of come through and it's still proven to be a silver lining, it's still proving to be a silver lining in the tunnel.

Ryan Purvis 01:13:43
Yeah, no, I can imagine. I mean, we have that personal conversation, I'll share mine as well. I can tell you about it from a professional point of view, there's been there's been jobs that I've left, which at the time, people have said, You're nuts to be going like, this is the thing, and I'm kind of going it's not not my thing. Like I just know, this is not this is not going to work for me. And six months later, I've done something else. And it's been, you know, three years of, of enjoying enjoying doing something altruistically, more important than what I was doing. And it's looking back and go, you know, what, actually, it was a good decision to do that. And then you're just gonna have that that sort of gut feeling or that confidence to do the right thing. As much as the the willingness to take a chance, I guess.

Mitchell Goldman 01:14:33
Absolutely. And yet to retort just to that, I had a very similar thing I stood down as being a full time COO, ultimately a co founder of my own business as well. So that I started in January, and a lot of it was over. The way the company's strategic vision was changing was just something I no longer could get out of bed for. So I just didn't get it couldn't wrap my heads around my mind around it, it became just whether right or wrong, it just became so far removed from from what I can't wrap my mind around as an integrator, the vision became out of scope with what I could even work on, and had to make a difficult decision. Yes, it was tough. Of course, it was it was the baby, you know, I've built with a bunch of you know, ultimately became a CEO as a best friend, right. And it's very difficult time. But now, here I am, and ultimately sitting at the COO at an AI company I love and it's, you know, huge progress. I've got other engagements and companies from, you know, supporting an NGO attack Fugees and powering refugees to work in a neurodiverse dating app. So it's like, I get to now really kind of give back in a way and help.

Ryan Purvis 01:15:37
So So all three of those things I wanted to bring up next anyway. So there's some other neurodiversity dating app, because that's that I'm curious about. So what made you get into that? Because I mean, you've been with that a year now. So you've got a bit of time with it. I mean, what started that for you?

Mitchell Goldman 01:15:53
Yeah, so again, I guess the title area is COO, it's it's a part time sort of COO mandate. So a lot of my sort of work now is being sort of new word of fractional, I'm having a kind of a number of different engagements. But yeah, I was the COO of that not as a founder at the time, but before that, even incorporated, ultimately, as neurodiverse himself had been diagnosed with ADHD, dyslexia, and more recently with with minor autism, and for him, it was a breath of fresh air, he kind of felt like, wow, I've always known that but felt different, but now understood as to why. And I guess the point of inspiration he had was, there is no safe space in the dating world, or even any matchmaking place for the neurodiverse it's almost a scary place, you know, where do people who are artistic or dyslexic or whatnot, go people, even extreme OCD have different needs and such to the, the mass market, I think, from his perspective, as it is the point of, he just wanted something that was inclusive, didn't have to be serving just neurodiverse, but it just a safe space doesn't matter what you are, and seemingly, you know, rightly so we've had huge, hugely issues, conversations with sexism and racism, you know, all the different ways. But in terms of actually neurodiverse, which is another marginalized category of individuals who feel like they are part of whatever you want to call it, society. That was the kind of point of jumping off and, it really resonates to me, it really really did in the sense of a lot of engagement, I has had a strong mission behind them, you know, voltar was very much the point we're trying to solve for was artists do not make enough money, the top 0.1% of artists command 99% of revenues and industry, it's more acute and music than any other sector. Now COVID just completely wiped off anyone who was in Kanye West or Justin Bieber. So that was a huge mission there Naz was all around helping the high street it was we didn't we delivery did not work with a major chain, like the McDonald's and whatever the wild it was, you know, the family run in these smaller chains. So, you know, with matter, it was a huge, huge, huge part of the mission to really empower those I've worked with a lot of neurodiverse previously I have personally seen and and helped them and been with those who've suffered from from various mental health conditions and disorders. But for me, it was a case of, okay, if I can use my experience again with what I've been I've done a lot of in the past as b2c marketplaces specially to have a geographic constraint. I People dating will only go a certain distance before it becomes too long of a trip to go and meet someone. So I thought, Okay, I've got tons of experience there. And I've done that successfully multiple times. And I love the mission. Okay, I can be effective here, I can add value, because there's one thing I hate any thats smells like consulting, personally, in the sense of I like to be on the inside as opposed to the outside. So for me, it's kind of alpha value, can I actually be useful? And do I believe in the mission? And can I go back for it? And that was the resonated from the get go? So yeah, I've been I've been alongside Jamie and the founders ever since ever since the start. And if the unit kind of going from strength to strength, just help me close another round of funding. So I guess Stay tuned on the progress of the matter team up?

Ryan Purvis 01:18:54
I think it's such a great idea. I mean, I self have ADHD, probably with some other stuff. My wife definitely says I got a few other things. And it's like, we're all Yeah, no, it doesn't bug me at all. You know, it was one of those things, and I was diagnosed. So I grew up in a household where no one believed in that stuff. You just have to work hard and be disciplined. That was that was the answer to everything. And I struggled to varsity. And, you know, high school is easy. He just passed, you know, you just had to memorize stuff. But University was obviously not like that you had to practice. And I didn't have the sight and availability to practice, I and I started another job. And the job was interesting, because we're building really cool stuff. And you know, how your priorities go when you when you focus on stuff like that. And ironically, my mother in law, who was then at the pier getting married, she used to teach kids with all these disabilities, or challenges, or whatever it was. And she said to me, like, after one or two nights of drinking, she said, Have you ever been checked for ADHD? Or add or anything? Because you're pretty high on that spectrum? Like Kennedy is like, Well, no, never. Anyway, it was it was literally a flick of a switch from, you know, once I started being medicated, now went from Ritalin to Concerta. And it was just that ability to sit down and spend a whole Saturday going through examples, because you just couldn't be bothered. Like, I get this concept. I get it. It's easy. Like, why don't you want to practice this, this is easier, then you go to the exam, and you're like, dammit, I should have practiced this a bit more, you know, memory, because we're in my university, you weren't allowed to take in any formulas, like a cheat sheet of psychology, all the degrees of you to memorize everything, but there are practice, you don't have to repeat it. You don't use that anyway. So long story short, I mean, you know, going to where I am now. And I'm talking to people now in the sort of 40s and 50s, that are being diagnosed with whatever it is Asperger's, autism, whatever. And it's like this unveiling of a new identity. But also like, you know, for some of them, it's the reason why they haven't been able to do stuff like they couldn't understand why. And it's put them into depressions and put them into all sorts of situations. And just having a place to talk to somebody to talk to you this also gone through and I just realized that then because they are broken, they just got a different a different a different path. So that's why this one jumped out to me as as one of the things to chat about.

Mitchell Goldman 01:21:13
Just your point about not being broken. I think that's a huge part of it as well, which is people have different things to offer and different strengths. And you know, the poignantly with ADHD, the MFI, for example, in spy agencies are actively recruiting those of ADHD, improve reaction times, quick thinking, so on so forth. So exactly, it's just the rebalancing, or where one strengths are, as opposed to anything else. Have

Ryan Purvis 01:21:34
you ever read out called hunters and farmers?

Mitchell Goldman 01:21:38
No, and now you're testing me with my book knowledge, and you're picking up on the books that I have not.

Ryan Purvis 01:21:46
It's another good book to read. And basically, the guy who writes the book, his premise is that people with the new neurodivergent specifically ADHD, they, they were the hunters in the NFL, you know, the original times, let's call it and then you had those that were the farmers. And obviously, when we went into schooling, people, you know, 100 years ago and in the sunny Valley, so educate people like in the 1920s and 1930s it was a farmers that sort of education system. So that's why everything is where it is it's factory violence, it you know, you got to sit still, you got to listen, you got to do the subjects, you have to regurgitate what you know, etc. But the The hunters were those people that had to go and get the food. So they had to be hyper aware, they had to be able to focus they had to be able to go long periods with a lot of change and recognize patterns and all that kind of stuff. And it's a very interesting take on it because it kind of even reconfirmed that you're not broken, you just like it as adventure games, you get points for different capabilities and abilities. You're just one of those, you know, exactly. Exactly. So, so great. And the AI piece I mean so that's new that's a very interested in computer vision. So what what's going on you might be

Mitchell Goldman 01:23:01
I figured you might be. Yeah. So actually, I guess where to start with with Edgify it isn't my primary engagement I guess. I start with a proposition but well ultimately, which is. So what I was trying to do is to essentially apply computer vision at scale, and specifically within the retail market. So I'll start with kind of that use case and then didn't start with the use case and then kind of broaden from there, but ultimately, with supermarkets, so use case number one, sort of around circa 2012, sorry, 2012 2013, he would have seen a lot of supermarkets brought in self checkout tills removing employees from doing the checkout process. And the idea there was, you know, if we can save 20% unemployment costs, right. And we might have to forego some revenue, because people will do clever things around making stuff, whether it's, you know, not scanning items, or weighing a banana taking the barcode and sticking it on something else, you name it, there's been some, some very clever ways people, people would defraud supermarkets so much. So that is accounts for a $700 billion problem. 10%. Humongous, silent problem. But you know, the idea was, well, we're saving 20% on labor, and we're forgoing 10%. Now, we're still better off in the margin perspective. Obviously, as computer vision has been scaling as a concept, and it's hit the mainstream more and more and more, there's been a number of startups who have changed their attention to trying to use computer vision in supermarkets and in store scenarios. The problem there, though, with computer vision, or anything ML is you need training sets, huge data models, which in the context of retail, especially because shooting a customer data would mean that the data has to leave a store, go up to some central cloud, or do all the training model and go back down to the storm, which that's that was typically was the way in which enterprise is not like because there's a huge privacy concern GDPR customer data, you name it. So the early entrants into the market, quasi competitors ultimate took a hardware approach. And ultimately, we put in some server racks, data centers in each store does a little bit of the mining. and off you go. That endeavor is obviously a very expensive one, the hardware endeavor means a total cost of ownership, the solutions are expensive, where Edgify have done very, very cleverly is very intelligently rather, is taking a software first approach, and found a way to ultimately integrate to all the existing point of sale players in these different retail environments. Ultimately, meaning that edifies, a software layer that sits inside one of these self checkout cells, the camera that's already in the self checkout cells, all we need. And ultimately, what they've created is a system called federated learning or distributed, distributed, centralized learning on edge devices such that every single point of sale system, there's a little bit of a learning stitch the data together, keeps us data compliant. And off we go. And that has been a tremendous product decision. That's actually we're the only ones in market with that solution. Right now, at scale, having the accuracy levels we do, we are at 99 Point where she 100% on the rounding, but we can't quote that. So we're at 99.9, another nine to five decimal points. And ultimately have now seen that kind of escape velocity where we are literally, I guess it's a champagne problem. But nonetheless, firefighting to grow faster in the sense that we have so much client demand, it's just rapidly going and we're having that kind of, you know, huge escape velocity. And off we go. I think, you know, really, what I'd want to just call out there is it's the framework that's really, really a value, you know, framework of federated learning on edge devices, right now, the use cases and retail, huge amounts of data, consumer data, it's the highest datasets and much of any sector, but what we're spending time on and what we have to feel a lot of inbound interested in healthcare is a use case x-ray machines, again, legacy and legacy hardware that had a huge capex capex number over it to replace those systems. So can we apply a device to those those legacy pieces of expensive hardware, aviation, but you know, the list goes on, and the different use cases that are framework can be applied. And so yeah, I personally love it. It hits my retail experiences. I'm an AI enthusiasts for many years.

Ryan Purvis 01:27:06
And I must connect you up with a friend of mine in shipping.

Mitchell Goldman 01:27:10
Please do Yeah, but there's another. Yeah, because so

Ryan Purvis 01:27:13
there's actually a couple. And not nearly obviously a sophisticated is what you call zoom the vision. But I have built things where we used age learning to solve problems, and then feed that back. And then we follow the OODA Loop principle. So observe, orient, decide and act locally, and then they would come centrally. And it was very similar to what we did in shipping. So I'm very excited they are doing they'll have to get on the vision route for sure. Because safety on the vessels. And you'll need to do something that is distributed because you've got a vessel, you know, in middle of the ocean on a satellite uplink. With bandwidth, there's going to be at a premium, and not everyone has bandwidth. And everyone pays for the satellites. Unless Unless Elon Scott got satellites over them, I don't know. So I think it'd be interesting to introduce you to each other and he's also landed by so. Yeah, I mean, he's the guy that got me out of banking. And, you know, we just all had that sort of crazy CEO. He used to drive me absolutely insane. Um, because he used to what used to send me these WhatsApps with, like, all these ideas, and I'd be like, we haven't even bought this pocket and you want to build the rocket ship over there. You know, just just chill, you know, but But yeah, it was a good it was a good three years, good three and a half years because we learned a lot from him. So I think it'd be a good connection.

Mitchell Goldman 01:28:30
We'd love to, we'd love to hear Yeah, shipping makes a lot of sense. And, you know, I didn't really crystallize. Obviously, we're currently in retail is, given the given system we built it means that no one has to scan an item ever again. It's barcode lists, item recognition, or a suite of loss prevention stuff. So it's yeah, it's, I'm finding it very, very interesting. I think, you know,

Ryan Purvis 01:28:51
I remember when QR codes became, like, fancy in the sense that, you know, because of COVID, you couldn't have a menu. So you have to scan a QR code. And initially, I was like, Oh, this is a good idea. And then COVID kind of ended. And then you were still going to the same restaurants, the same place there was still saying, Oh, you don't need to scan the QR code. But now it's like, Yeah, but there's no, why it's like five seconds for this thing to load the menu. And then this menu is this crap thing that I can't even get, I can't even see what you've got. And like, I'm just gonna go somewhere else.

Mitchell Goldman 01:29:21
You have to track some experience. I agree. I agree. So how do you want to be on your phone in a restaurant with a friend or a partner or family member? Right, the point is to get off your phones. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis 01:29:31
And we, I mean, we spent the last couple years of the last couple years have been longtime us Africa. And it's the one thing we noticed every time we come back to the UK, is table service is just not there. And it's like the most important part of your meal. Yes, you can have a you can have some restaurants, we will have a table service. But like we went drinks for some friends the other night. And we were sitting outside and they're like, We don't serve outside. So you have to order to the app. But then if you want order food, you have to order from the bar. So it's like, so one person is always running in and out to orders. And it's just so messy, and table. So I mean, yes, I guess there's a guest as a wage thing to it. But it just say it's sitting on the phone. And now I mean, specifically with an emissary and with some of your friends. Some friends don't like it, when you pay for the drinks, or they, they always want to get the bill and you want to get the ball. So it becomes a little bit of a whose phone as fast as kind of thing, which distracts from the sort of conversation and then that opportunity to sneak off and pay the ball. Because that's already on the phone. So there's this, I mean, it's such such stupid things like these are not really problems in life. But the old thing of having an interaction with a human who's going to take this, take the take the older chat to tell you what's good, etc, you'd have to worry about finding the thing on the menu. On your little phone. I mean, I think it's just and then notification kicks off and you're like, oh, there's a text message from one of my clients. I gotta go with a megaphone. Yeah. Which has happened a few times today. Yeah. As you said, you're disengaged from your devices in most circumstances. So those cameras, I'm curious to we did something with the biometric thing a couple years ago. Does the camera have to be a certain spec, like HD camera or anything like that for the recognition

Mitchell Goldman 01:31:06
that you created Logitech USB camera?

Ryan Purvis 01:31:10
Well, that would be Yeah, that'd be an HD camera. Anyway,

Mitchell Goldman 01:31:12
that's true. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, exactly. You're right. But to be honest, most of the most of the tills and SEOs and POS is we're working with they already have cameras integrated. And, and to be honest, there's some projects where we're actually using just the CCTV cameras above them. Really, yes. CTO is and the team are always it's always a wizard, let's just call it that and are very, very well respected in the industry. And yeah, we've been battle tested to the nth degree. And I think so I think some of the some of the people we're working with, like I mentioned, a certain massive tech player that tried to do it themselves, they couldn't do it. And now using us in that exact same shop, I think is well in testament to the strength of the product already.

Ryan Purvis 01:31:56
No sounds amazing. It really does. And I'm curious how it has anyone have pushed you for the facial reading and facial recognition piece to happen for recognizing people and, and that sort of stuff all of you stay away from?

Mitchell Goldman 01:32:08
We've stayed away from that, I believe, ultimately, it's a much more sensitive area of consumer data, right, in terms of GDPR. Ultimately, we, you know, from our perspective, the most we might be able to identify an individual really, as a hand if it's going over the scanner or something to that degree, deliberately, we don't want to anything that's actually personally identifiable. It's quite a, it's quite a big piece.

Ryan Purvis 01:32:28
Okay. So that also is about other questions you're pursuing, you're pointing the camera at a specific area, so that you're not getting invalid objects,

Mitchell Goldman 01:32:34
correct? Yeah. So you know, whatever, where, where your hand will scan the object previously to run the scan, and you're just showing the object?

Ryan Purvis 01:32:42
Yeah, that's cool. Because that's one of the pain I mean, the self service shopping thing is, you know, you simply scan your barcode and then you put it on the scale and it doesn't recognize the weight and about

Mitchell Goldman 01:32:51
12 to one banana appends item it doesn't make any sense, let alone everything else, right.

Ryan Purvis 01:32:57
Yeah, yeah. So that biometric thing we did use the scan 4 fingers and used to identify you. I never use any penny cameras. I was HD. What what would be interesting with what you're doing is you can authenticate the person to do their payment as well. Using Same sort of concept. So you can also also do the age verification thing, which is also okay. Because you know, you've just bought your providers, and now they have to come and go, you know, check that you're old enough to buy painkillers.

Mitchell Goldman 01:33:24
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's an interest. That's actually yeah, yeah, I see what you're going with the age, the HR is very interesting, I think payments is to become very hard industry to break into the, you know, the NCR is and the POS guys of the world, that's an area they always very, you know, rightly so ring fenced. So yeah, we, you know, we're not having to traverse into the, the payment side of things. That being said, we're obviously all over transactional data, because we have to be, but yeah, the payment side, certainly something that would be of interest.

Ryan Purvis 01:33:58
Well, I mean, you know, you don't have to own the payments thing, but you could do the authentication for them. Yeah. Yeah. Example, or some part of the biometric validate part of the factor of authentication. That would be interesting. Yeah, we started enrolling now is a payment plan, we forgotten the new tagline, which is very bad on me, because I've only heard it yesterday. But we basically build a new tagline. That's exactly, exactly, I'll get in trouble. But basically, we build the UI on top of all the API's. So you can build your app, your FinTech app, using our platform to deliver your solution. And then all the all the API's are behind, you know, what we've already built for you. And I think that's, that's not a, you know, from what I've seen in the market, it's a nice place to be pretty much in the just bring, your own app. Direction, I think some things are constantly people want to build their own solution and deliver it. I mean, think about, you know, for examples, kids school, just keep encounter them with using computer vision, you know, for attendance records for safety situations, that sort of stuff. Again, you can't be looking at faces, but if you can recognize uniform size, and body shape, that could be useful in at least keeping Council on track of certain populace, I guess.

Mitchell Goldman 01:35:18
That's exactly what China is. China has been using, right in educational systems, computer vision at scale across primary and secondary schools. And the point they're doing is ultimate, exactly measuring attendance measure engagement, looking at facial features as to emotional sets where they're happy, sad, so on so forth, but also to start applying prescriptive education. So it's exactly a use case there that I know is being employed by the Chinese state. And I think it's actually what it can feel a little bit Minority Report, I think prescriptive education is is attained education is would be a huge benefit for for any country. I think just right now the potential not politics, but framing around it is it can feel a little bit invasive.

Ryan Purvis 01:35:57
So when you say prescriptive, do you mean tailored to the individual? Or do you mean, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think has to go that way. I think it's this factory factory mindset of everyone must learn maths. Okay, Shaman rustling maths. Everyone must learn geography, we must learn history ever must learn biology. And these things, I don't think that this facility helps anybody other than to memorize things. That's probably the only skill you learned.

Mitchell Goldman 01:36:21
But I think it does there is forcing you to learn something you're not you're not inherently or innate or innately capable. It just makes you have confidence issues. Right? Like, yeah, I'm not a creative. I'm not a wordsmith. English is my weakest subject. It was a sort of school, and my being forced to do English all the way through to whatever 18 19 20 I just felt like I suck the languages. And it's, you know, it, whereas I'm, as I said, a mathematician, and that was always my thing. So I think, yeah, it's, it's, I would have been benefited more by spending, probably more education in he mathy fields.

Ryan Purvis 01:36:51
Although you say that I remember we had a subject in engineering called communication for engineers. That was a subject. And I would tell every college university, so you have to understand, you know, big Afrikaans guys who don't speak English very well, now having to go and do a course for an hour every week on communications in English, because they had to be able to speak to other people. And the resistance was there. Because when it was not so much, it was all the soft skills that we talked, we talked about soft skills anymore. Those are the soft skills you had to have, like how to disagree with somebody how to have conflict, how to be accountable, and also all that kind of stuff. And it was fascinating, because for a lot of these guys, they weren't the default language wasn't English, so it was hard for them to be English. But the other thing was, they couldn't get across because Afrikaans is quite a descriptive language and English is actually quite not a descriptive language, funnily enough, and I can't give you examples, a little bit off records, but I like maths in Afrikaans and it actually is a little maths in Afrikaans and was learning English, because it's like integration that isn't actually a word for integration in Afrikaans. So you have to explain it as change in an area of a of a shape. That's basically you have to have to explain it. And these guys had to convert from the network their home language I'm sorry, the mother tongue to English. And then it's explained stuff. And it was fascinating to watch how over six months how this developed, and how they actually did get those skills, because obviously they had to get them, but also how they were able to convey complex things that they struggled with to begin with, but all of a sudden became almost salesy. And how many of these guys actually moved into sales and marketing, not engineering, in the end of it, because they actually realized actually enjoyed communicating. But because they've grown up being clever and mathematical, and analytical, they've been stayed in that way. Like, you will be an engineer, you will go build bridges, you go build machinery. And then they realize that they actually found the spark by having the opportunity to go, Oh, he's just so fascinated, as you were saying that they was connecting the dots like I know, that's actually something I hadn't really considered that you need to have that prescribed things. They prescribed thing, but also to get people out of their comfort zone. Anyway, it's going to tell you that we're almost on the hour. So if you want people to reach out to you, do you want to check out do your companies? I mean, what's the best thing to do following this?

Mitchell Goldman 01:39:16
Absolutely, yeah, I'd say I'm very active on LinkedIn as well, and Mitchell Goldman please do check out the companies if there's any event or any of interest to explore the sale of my fingers in quite a few different pies these days. So always up for having conversations, where it's where it's where it's helpful and relevant. But yeah, Ryan, thank you very, very much for having me. Really enjoyed this today. And, yeah, please do please do reach out if it can be helpful.

Ryan Purvis 01:39:39
No, it's been great chatting with you. And I look forward to having that catch up at some point and we could share some of those stories.

Mitchell Goldman 01:39:46
So the redacted so Right, exactly. Yeah,

Ryan Purvis 01:39:49
yeah. Good.

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