My Walnut buddy Andy Bartlett, PhD brings great energy to the group and an expert’s perspective on computing. We talked about our favorite startups including Savran Technologies, evTS, and BioFeyn. He has interesting things to say about ChatGPT. We also had a great chat about his angel journey.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Andy Bartlett
Savran Technologies
"... three of the things I really love to see in startups is a founder like Çağrı that will go through walls, that's so important. Defensibility that they have a moat, so the strong patent portfolio..."
evTS
BioFeyn
"... We're talking about the University of Illinois Gies School of Business. I'm so impressed with the way the faculty is running that business school. They're running it like a disruptive business..."
"... They've gone ahead and they've kept this very affordable. The full program, it's 18 classes plus three capstones costs about $23,000 total..."
Andy's Entrepreneurial Background
"... My mother's family had entrepreneurship. My great-grandfather, Alonzo Dodge, started a Dodge Moving and storage company. I always thought my grandfather had founded it, but actually, it was his father. They always ran that. That was the family business..."
"... Eventually, I got my way into the electrical engineering department and I've embraced that for years and years..."
"... At Chrysler, I could draw a block diagram to model some algorithm I wanted to use for onboard diagnostic testing of the Chrysler vehicles. I could model it. I could simulate it. I could pull down a menu and immediately generate code that would run on a computer in the backseat of a test car. I would drive around and I could do my experiments and collect my data..."
Andy's Opinion on ChatGPT
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of “The Fun in Angel Investing”
Guest: Andy Bartlett, PhD
Sal Daher: Hey, this is Sal Daher. I'm delighted you found the Angel Invest Boston podcast, in which I interview people who know a lot about building technology startups. I now have a substack about losing and keeping off 100 pounds of body weight in my 60s. It's called AgingFit, and my goal is to build a community of people interested in keeping fit as they age. Look for Sal Daher on substack.com. Daher by the way is spelled Delta, Alpha, Hotel, Romeo. Enjoy the podcast.
Sal Daher Introduces Andy Bartlett
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. I am Sal Daher, an angel who is very curious to learn how to best build technology companies. Today, I'm really happy to be talking to my Walnut buddy fellow angel investor Andy Bartlett. Say hi, Andy.
Andy Bartlett: Hi, Sal. Thanks for having me on. Looking forward to this discussion.
Sal Daher: Andy Bartlett, PhD, works in engineering design automation at MathWorks. He's a software brain truster. Very humble, very understated, very smart, and very engaged. Whatever company Andy's doing due diligence in, I pay attention to because Andy doesn't do anything halfway. He puts a lot of effort into it and he has been a great, great addition to Walnut Ventures. I think very much at home because Walnut is a very software-centric place, although it does invest in the life sciences. Oh, Andy's also listening to the podcast so I love that.
Anyway, Andy, let's start this conversation by first talking about interesting startups that are in your in end. We have a very special startup we're going to mention that's not the usual thing but that is really interesting. Then some other types of startups. Then we'll do the usual promo where we ask for ratings and ask for reviews. Then the back end, we're going to go into your journey from high schooler in Wilmington, Massachusetts [laughter] through PhD program at UMass Amherst to working at MathWorks and then angel investor. Anyway, Andy, what's the first startup that you want to talk about here?
Savran Technologies
Andy Bartlett: I want to talk about Savran Technologies. It's one that you've talked about a lot, Savran.
Sal Daher: I'm on the board. I love Savran. It's a life science company. Outside your area of comfort.
Andy Bartlett: Yes, absolutely. It's not a software company, so it's outside my area. I had to do a lot of trying to get up to speed before I made that investment decision. It was my first investment. It was something I learned about through your podcast. I had reached out to you through talking about potential investors. I learned about it from you and it seemed like a great opportunity. One of the things that really motivated me, it was through a family experience. One of my children had an illness. There was very difficult decisions we had to make during that illness. Had a very dangerous form of cancer with only a 15% survival rate.
Sal Daher: Wow. A young person. Yes.
Andy Bartlett: There was a new medicine available that would increase the survival rate to 25%, but it carried a 1% mortality rate with it. That's a scary trade-off. Now, if you're in the 15% that's going to survive, you don't want to take this 1% risk. If you're not, then bring it on.
Sal Daher: Yes.
Andy Bartlett: One of the things that Savran brings you is these much-improved testing technologies, where they can find these rare cancer cells. Now, the type of cancer that Savran is targeting is not the same as what my child had, but the principle is the same. You could come and say, do you have one of these cancer cells circulating in your body or not? If you don't, then you don't want to take the risk of these side effects of some new medicine that's unnecessary. That type of mission of Savran to detect these rare cells, cells detect these rare cells and to help families make more informed decisions about their medical care is fabulous. That's one of the things that really motivated me to invest in Savran.
Sal Daher: Yes. That resonate. I mean, same with me. Someone very close to me who had probably the most treatable type of cancer. You can have a thyroid cancer. Nobody should have cancer, but if you got to have cancer, this is a cancer to have because you can treat it systemically very easily by just killing every thyroid cell in the body. It only grows with thyroid cells initially. If you do that successfully, it doesn't spread. It has a lot of complications, but she's fine, thank God. It's the same thing. Just the idea of being able to early, early on catch these one in a billion cells in circulating the blood will tell you, "Hey, cancer might be back."
Savran's platform, what's exciting about it is-- Well, first let me say the thing that most excites me about Savran is Çağrı Savran. [laughter] He's the company. It's like typically when you invest in these startups, it is the founder. You better the founder, and then you look at the technology and so forth. Savran would be nowhere without Çağrı, the guy will walk through walls. He'll gnaw through iron with his teeth to get his company to move forward. He's just unbelievably energetic and positive and just goes for it. He's also a realist, knows the limitations of the capitalization of the company, knows the limitations of how far he can take it and he adapts his efforts to that.
He's a very talented and capable founder, a brilliant academic, and a very practical businessman. It's rare that you're going to find the combination. It's not like he had experience as a businessman, he's just self-taught. I should highlight as well that Purdue University, which sponsors this podcast, is highly, highly supportive of founders who come from there. Not every university is that supportive in transferring technology to a new enterprise. Purdue actually sends somebody around to your office if you're a faculty member and says, "Hey, nice academic career you have there. What do you say you think about a startup? You want to do a startup? We'll come to your office and we'll help you learn about being a startup founder."
They want to take their technology because they're a little bit landlocked, 500 brilliant engineering professors. It's one of the top engineering programs in the country. This is number five or something. All these people there and they're trying to get their technology out and the way to do it is by starting companies. Çağrı is a jewel on that crown. Anyway, getting back to the technology really what's cool about it is that my brother-in-law, Peter Fasse, who's a great patent attorney, put me onto Savran. He was so excited about the technology. He says, "The thing is that the design is just unbelievably simple and nobody had thought about it before, but it's brilliant."
It's a very simple design and the patent officer was looking at the application, he's like, "I can't believe they got to patent that at this day and age because it's so straightforward and brilliant and simple and yet it's extremely powerful." Like everything in biotech, it's the stack of technologies. It's a whole stack of technologies and this little twist that Çağrı invented makes it tremendously powerful and usable in detecting rare cells. It could be triple-negative breast cancer cells that they were able to validate in a major study in women who've had breast cancer and published in, I think, it's Nature Oncology. No, it's the JAMA Oncology or in other applications where rare cells come to play.
That's my favorite aspect of it, and of course, the cancer angle. The good thing about these biotech startups is that founders are much more mature than a lot of the software founders. You don't get to be a PhD and a full professor at Purdue University in your 20s. You're going to be there in your late 30s if you're smart enough and work hard enough. You're very mature and yet you still have this tremendous energy. Three cheers for Savran Technologies and its ultra-rare cell technology. Look up savrantech.com. Any other thoughts on that?
"... three of the things I really love to see in startups is a founder like Çağrı that will go through walls, that's so important. Defensibility that they have a moat, so the strong patent portfolio..."
Andy Bartlett: Well, yes, three of the things I really love to see in startups is a founder like Çağrı that will go through walls, that's so important. Defensibility that they have a moat, so the strong patent portfolio.
Sal Daher: Dozens and dozens of patents, very strong portfolio.
Andy Bartlett: Peter's analysis of that really helped support my investment decision. Finally, is it doing good for society? Love to see that double bottom line as Ben Littauer would call it.
Sal Daher: Shoutout to Brother Ben, our Angel investing colleague.
Andy Bartlett: I shouldn't leave your audience hanging, that we did end up choosing to do that new medication, and eight years in remission.
Sal Daher: That's awesome. That's great to hear, Andy. It's a real trial to have someone so close to you, a daughter, a young daughter. This is the marvel. That's what's so promising. Even if a company like Savran were to fail, and I've invested in some startups that didn't succeed, the technology ends up somewhere. Very frequently, it ends up being marketed by selling to a larger player and so forth. It doesn't go to waste. This is really worthwhile. Any other startups that come to mind?
evTS
Andy Bartlett: Sure. I'd like to give a shout-out to evTS that is run by our Walnut's own, David Solomon. They have one of their vehicles is called a FireFly. It's an electric vehicle that can be used for utility work. It can go places where a regular vehicle cannot. A department of public works could buy a fleet of these and take them up on the sidewalks, down the alleys, inside buildings, wherever they need to go. The cost of ownership is much less than a traditional internal combustion-type vehicle. They've got fleet management technologies that make it much more attractive.
If you go to the website, search for evTS FireFly. You can see their vehicle. What's really interesting is all the customized attachments they have, be it for this type of grounds work, be it for delivering hot food, all sorts of different attachments. They have many electronics add-ons that again help with the fleet management and other advanced features. I'm really impressed with David as an operator, that he's figuring out how to do all the things that a CEO should do to figure out how to make partnerships so they can manufacture it both here and over in Europe, how to get the supply chain in place, how to get those initial sales to departments of public works and other places.
I'm very impressed with David's ability as an operator and to drive this company forward and looking for the impact there both on a business side. Again, not having these internal combustion engines everywhere is a big benefit to the users of these vehicles and to society.
Sal Daher: That's great. [laughs] I see David coming to Walnut meetings in his three-wheeled vehicle. Is that the FireFly?
Andy Bartlett: That is, yes.
Sal Daher: Aftly David, three wheels. [laughs]
Andy Bartlett: He's very proud that this is road-certified. He can take it on the road.
Sal Daher: That's right. He used to drive from his house to the Babson campus. [laughs]
Andy Bartlett: He will even take it on to Route 128, also called Route 95, and drive it along the highway. I think he stays in the slow lane, but he can.
Sal Daher: It's a utility vehicle. It's not a pretty thing. It's wonderful that he's gotten all these resources together to do that.
Andy Bartlett: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. David might think it's beautiful.
Sal Daher: [laughs] It's very practical. I mean, it's for grounds maintenance and that kind of stuff.
Andy Bartlett: It is.
Sal Daher: Awesome. Any other thoughts that you wanted to have on startups, Andy?
Andy Bartlett: I can talk about one more I made an investment in, BioFeyn.
BioFeyn
Sal Daher: Oh, this is interesting.
Andy Bartlett: It's in the life sciences, biotech space. They're providing ways to deliver nutrients to animals, fish in particular, that's more effective than the other existing approaches. It is more cost-effective and more effective in terms of producing, for example, better salmon.
Sal Daher: I'm all in favor of better salmon. [laughs] I love Salmon.
Andy Bartlett: You can go to their website and see the publicly available information on it. I'm very impressed with the founding team. For example, Tim Bouley, the CEO, he's had a good background for this. Again, going through walls, doing what you need to do. He's up there living in the Arctic Circle at times trying to get this to work well with the fish farms in Norway. I have high confidence that Tim and his co-founders will do what needs to be done to make this a success. In a way, it's a platform that has applications to many other things.
Sal Daher: What's its competitive advantage? How do they create a moat against competitors?
Andy Bartlett: I have to be careful not to give any information that's proprietary to them.
Sal Daher: Trade secret stuff.
Andy Bartlett: Like many businesses, I believe it's a mixture. They definitely have a strong patent portfolio to protect their work. That's the big thing that will help protect them when they prove that they're successful and then other companies want to try to get into it, they'll be able to defend themselves with their patent portfolio and that they've made the early connections to these companies and proven themselves to be good partners will be a key advantage of those against competition. The experience of deciding whether or not to invest in BioFeyn was one of the advantages of being involved with other angels in an angel investing group.
One of the things about angel groups is they often work with other angel groups or other early investors. For example, when I was leading the diligence in BioFeyn for Walnut, I got to work very closely with Adam de Sola Pool and--
Sal Daher: Oh, he's been on the podcast. He's a tremendous guy.
Andy Bartlett: Absolutely. This is one of the things that makes it rewarding and fun is not only did you get to work with the other members of your Angel group, you get to work across organizations with other very experienced founders with experience in different areas. It's great to get to know them and you benefit from the combined knowledge to do a more thorough job of understanding, should we make an investment or should we sit out for now on this company?
Sal Daher: He was a green investor very early on, very, very early on, and now he's a blue investor. He is investing in ocean technologies. People should go back and listen to the two interviews that I did with Adam because his father, Ithiel de Sola Pool was one of the big theorists of communication and so forth. He predicted the melding of telephony and computing. Ithiel de Sola Pool was just a great, great thinker.
Adam is a very smart guy, but in a different direction from his dad. He's a very deep thinker and a very tremendous guy. I really enjoy working with Adam whenever I can. Now we're going to talk about two disruptive organizations. First, let's talk about this part of the podcast and then we're going to get into that in the other one, a more ancient one in the second part of the podcast. I understand that you are involved with this very disruptive organization that has players in it that are just upturning their field. Do you want to talk about that?
"... We're talking about the University of Illinois Gies School of Business. I'm so impressed with the way the faculty is running that business school. They're running it like a disruptive business..."
Andy Bartlett: Sure. We're talking about the University of Illinois Gies School of Business. I'm so impressed with the way the faculty is running that business school. They're running it like a disruptive business. They're very agile, they're constantly changing things to make it better. They made a decision several years ago to provide an online education for MBA. Part of their mission to be a land grant University, their job is to provide education, not to write research papers and get grants, which they do that. They're a world-class research organization, but the underlying mission of the University is land grant is this educational purpose. They said, "How can we leverage new technologies, new ways of delivering education to help educate more people?" With the advent of MOOCs and the internet technology, you could bring education out to the world. You weren't just limited to Urbana-Champaign.
Sal Daher: Just unpack for those outside of software and online learning world, MOOC.
Andy Bartlett: Oh, Massive Open Online Course.
Sal Daher: Yes. Please continue.
Andy Bartlett: They provided this. Decided that they were going to deliver their MBA online. In fact, they ended their residential program.
Sal Daher: Wow.
Andy Bartlett: They fully embraced the online program. They got all their best faculty to teach the courses online. They have this mixed delivery. They've recorded them on Coursera, which is where I discovered them. The course is on there. When you sign up for the course through the university as well, you do the Coursera portion, and then there's what they call the high engagement portion where you use Zoom to attend classes once a week. Every single class you'll be grouped with four or five other fellow students. You'll have group projects with them. Great networking opportunity. Great to learn about working with other people, dividing up responsibilities. It also makes you feel like you're part of a community.
You're not just looking at a video. What they've done is figure out how to very efficiently deliver this program to lots of people around the world. They have this very excellent delivery of the videos, educational material, they've got the engagement through this high engagement. You ask questions, you talk with the faculty during the class and so forth, you're engaged with your teammates on projects, and you submit your assignments online and they have an army of graders. That's probably one of the hardest parts for them right now is getting enough people because they've been extremely successful. They're one of the biggest MBA programs in the world.
Sal Daher: They're growing so fast. They can't get enough graders to grade all the students that are coming on board.
"... They've gone ahead and they've kept this very affordable. The full program, it's 18 classes plus three capstones costs about $23,000 total..."
Andy Bartlett: Yes. One of the things they do though, again, like a business, they're very smart. They go around to different parts of the country and they'll have meetups. They had one in Boston about a year ago. I got to meet many of my fellow students and alumni of the program and the Dean Jeffrey Brown came. That was one of the things I asked him was, "How do you manage all the TAs?" He goes, "Oh, that's our biggest headache, Andy." Got great dedicated people, but it's hard to get enough of them." They're not just there in Urbana-Champaign in Illinois. They've got them around the world supporting that.
They're delivering this. They've worked really hard to deliver with high quality and that was one of the things that the other faculty across the university demanded of them. They convinced them that they were going to do that. They've gone ahead and they've kept this very affordable. The full program, it's 18 classes plus three capstones costs about $23,000 total.
Sal Daher: Wow.
Andy Bartlett: If you were like me, the company where I work, MathWorks will provide me a little over $5,000 a year towards tuition. Over the four years I was in the program, my out-of-pocket was under $2,000 plus I was able to keep working. We have some fabulous schools here in Boston for MBAs. You could go to Sloan, a friend of mine did that but you had to stop taking salary for two years. You had to pay a pretty significant tuition.
Sal Daher: It's a very expensive model. It is tremendous, Andy, because you get to continue to work. You get your MBA and you get to keep both kidneys.
Andy Bartlett: [laughs] Yes.
Sal Daher: You got to sell a kidney to pay tuition. Awesome. How has an MBA from the Gies School of Business helped you in your work? By the way, Gies is spelled G-I-E-S.
Andy Bartlett: Some years ago, probably eight years ago, I was just total into the technology, the engineering. I was working with customers but thinking about it from the business point of view, my skills were not as honed there. I started reading some books like the classic Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm.
Sal Daher: Oh, that's such a great book.
Andy Bartlett: Christensen Clayton's Disruptive Innovation. Then I started taking the Coursera classes and that's where I discovered the University of Illinois and listening to podcasts such as yours started to make me thinking about the angel investing and so forth. That's what drew me into that area. This learning as I was getting to support my job and then later my angel investing has been really helpful. It's changed the way I think about things that work.
It's not so much what I think one of the professors of the Illinois program would call it "the curse of the engineer." You're thinking about the technology for technology's sake or, "Ooh, that's new technology or feature creep." Now it's thinking about it from the point of view, what is the value proposition we're delivering? How is it differentiated? How is it going to really help our customers be successful? When we're doing things, how are you going to get into those markets? What's a strategy for doing that? These things affect how I do things all the time. I'm trying to coach my teams on these sorts of things at work. Sometimes it's not always welcome because it's different. It's not how we usually did things, but I persist.
Sal Daher: People think that engineering is just pure tinkering, but engineering lives in the real world. Tinkering is the fun part of engineering, but it also has to be supported by reality. You have to be tinkering on things that are going to pay off for someone. Otherwise, your tinkering career is going to end very quickly. I think it really makes sense that your tinkering be directed by commercial understanding, commercial concerns, and really to understand the value and the proposition.
Those two books that you cited, Crossing the Chasm and The Innovator's Dilemma are just so basic books. Everybody should read them along with The Lean Startup and just to understand these are three really fundamental texts that are really important for early-stage companies, for engineering companies, for startups. You're talking about disruptive. The MBA program at the Gies school is disruptive. You've got to earn the right to talk about disruption.
Go read The Innovator's Dilemma to understand what disruption really, really is. Disruption has to do with somebody doing stuff, selling a product that is initially inferior but addresses non-consumption in the market. It is a process that the incumbent players ignore it initially and they say, "Ah, who wants to be involved in that? That's not a business." Then all of a sudden that thing grows and it takes over the whole market, then it disrupts.
Great. The Gies School of Business and their online, their MOOC program, but it also has an interactive part of it. I agree, it's really important for engineers to be informed of business side of things.
Andy Bartlett: One of their innovations was they also have some one-year degrees, like management science masters. One of the things they did was make these stackable degrees. You initially commit to the one year, you go through, you get your one-year degree. Now if you want to go for the two-year MBA, you can reuse all those classes and stack it upon it. They're out there looking at what the audience, how do they help their market, their audience, what would be useful for the people all around the world? It's just impressive. I loved, I met so many people around the world working together in these group studies or the capstones, and it was just fabulous.
They have very active online social groups as well. We use Workplace and there's all kinds of groups there. Not just for classes, but for other things. You get together to talk about product marketing or just getting together. I've made several connections where I've asked if those folks would have a career discussion with one of my children to look at possibilities and they agreed to that, super helpful. It's really great. I think once a year they have what's called i-Converge where people travel from all around the world to Urbana-Champaign and get to meet with your fellow online students. You don't have to go. It's a-
Sal Daher: Oh, wow.
Andy Bartlett: -lot of fun. They run the program really well. I had the opportunity to go last year, and it was really great. They did a good job. It was really great to meet fellow students face to face.
Sal Daher: What time of the year do they do that?
Andy Bartlett: That's in September.
Sal Daher: Oh, what a fun time. Awesome. If you are enjoying this great conversation with this brilliant computer scientist, and business-minded angel investor, you could have more people listen to it because this program is created for the purpose of helping people learn about angel investing, about building better technology companies. I learned tons from it. The listeners who listen to this could get more listeners to listen by simply leaving a written review on whatever platform they listen to the podcast on and also a rating.
My mom always told me to ask for five-star ratings, because that really gets the algorithm's attention, and it helps us to be found. Anyway, Andy, so let's get to your journey. You grew up in Wilmington, Massachusetts. Tell me about the background of your family. I understand there was some entrepreneurship way, way back.
Andy's Entrepreneurial Background
Andy Bartlett: Bit of a brag, but I will claim that my family was one of the first angel investments in Massachusetts.
Sal Daher: Oh, wow.
Andy Bartlett: My ancestor, Richard Warren came on the Mayflower, and he was not a religious pilgrim, he was an investor and not only did he invest, but he had skin in the game.
Sal Daher: He got on the boat himself.
Andy Bartlett: He got on the boat--
Sal Daher: With his family.
Andy Bartlett: Not yet with his family. He came without his family. His family remained in England, and so in 1620, he came over on the boat. He was one of the fortunate few, 50% that survived that first year.
Sal Daher: Yes, that's the first year 50%.
Andy Bartlett: Fortunately as angel investors, many of our checks, there's a 50% risk it'll go to zero, but we don't die. That's a big advantage. In 1623 on The Ann, his wife, Elizabeth Warren came over with three of their daughters including one daughter Mary Warren, and a Robert Bartlett came on the boat as well.
Sal Daher: Oh, that's Bartlett connection.
Andy Bartlett: A Bartlett connection and some years later, Robert and Mary got married. The IPO version for the pilgrims was the dividing up of the property. That's how we know quite a bit about these folks because there's documents. It's like Mary Warren and Richard Warren got this many cows in the dividing up of the property, and Robert Bartlett got this and so forth.
Richard only lived about seven years in Plymouth before he passed away, but his wife lived 50 years there, and she was reported to be one of the wealthiest people in Plymouth Colony so I'd say they got a good return on their angel investment in the Mayflower Expedition.
Sal Daher: Now Richard Warren, what did he do in England?
Andy Bartlett: Not clear. The evidence was not clear on what he did there--
Sal Daher: But he had some capital to be a factor-
Andy Bartlett: He had some capital-
Sal Daher: -of expedition.
Andy Bartlett: -to invest. There's only vague evidence of what went on, but yes you can see a PBS documentary where they're talking about it and they mentioned Richard Warren as an investor, and that's how I know about this aspect of it.
Sal Daher: [laughs] This is in your blood, so to speak.
Andy Bartlett: Yes.
Sal Daher: This kind of stuff. Yes, because people forget that the Mayflower was a venture, privately funded venture. It had the religious aspects to it because the pilgrims who were-- they were not all the people on the Mayflower and the Puritans, although they ran Boston, they were not everybody, but attracted a lot of people because Puritans were very friendly to business.
They had this belief that if you were one of the chosen, they're Calvinists. If you were one of the chosen, it would be evident in this life that you would succeed. Commercial success was some indication that you were one of the chosen who was going to be in paradise. They wanted very much to have commercial success and to allow commercial success.
I wouldn't [laughs] have Puritans running my personal liberties and so forth, but commercial law in the hands of pilgrims, yes, sir. [laughter] That I hand it over to them immediately because it would've had very practical-minded. An important part of what you're talking about, this legacy of the pilgrims and the Puritans is the sense of volunteer work, community, getting together and doing these ventures.
This is a very Boston thing, and that's why angel investing is so deeply rooted in Boston, the volunteer thing. I see how you volunteer at Walnut, because Walnut doesn't have any professional staff. Walnut is all volunteer. Andy has become core of Walnut Ventures because of his civic spirit, of really doing his best. This is one of the wonderful things about this dollar-old Calvinists, they never did anything halfway.
Whatever they did, it went full tilt. Even when they're going off wrong. By the way, I say this as a Catholic. I admire that in the Calvinists, they did amazing things. Boston, just this city in a very rocky soil, just developed this tremendous commercial reach because of this sense of enterprise, a sense of identity, understanding who they were. It's just incredible.
A little vignette of how Boston reached to the rest of the world is that-- I live in Cambridge and there's Fresh Pond over here. There used to be butters in Fresh Pond. The people who lived around Fresh Pond. Each had a pie slice ownership of the ice on Fresh Pond, which was very clean ice. They used to be able to saw that ice in the wintertime.
There was a gentleman, Mr. Tudor, who came to Boston. Not an entirely admirable character, but a very important businessman. He would buy all that ice, pack it in sawdust in hordes of ships, and send it to the farthest reaches of the globe. Before they had artificial refrigeration, if you were putting ice in your drink in India somewhere, it was probably ice from some pond in Massachusetts, likely Fresh Pond here in Cambridge.
I've lived a good part of my life close to Fresh Pond, and I've always been astonished by this amazing, amazing detail of Boston entrepreneurship. Anyway, Andy, your parents were they entrepreneurial in any way?
"... My mother's family had entrepreneurship. My great-grandfather, Alonzo Dodge, started a Dodge Moving and storage company. I always thought my grandfather had founded it, but actually, it was his father. They always ran that. That was the family business..."
Andy Bartlett: My parents were not. My mother's family had entrepreneurship. My great-grandfather, Alonzo Dodge, started a Dodge Moving and storage company. I always thought my grandfather had founded it, but actually, it was his father. They always ran that. That was the family business. My mother would have tails of them running that out of the house, taking calls at all times about somebody needed storage, or moving, or whatever.
They managed this through the depression, which is amazing. Then my grandfather's oldest son, my Uncle John, took over the business and ran that very successful. There are still members of the family running the business, although they did sell primary ownership some years ago. Then my middle Uncle Noel, he said, "I don't want to work for my brother." He went out and started his own moving and storage company, and grew that to a very successful company. He sold that off in his semi-retirement, then he started making very fancy wrought iron mailboxes for rich people. He was doing very well with that.
He was always doing something like that. He did have that spirit. Unfortunately, they were out in Missouri and I was here in Massachusetts with the Plymouth roots but did get to interact with them and learn some of that from them.
Sal Daher: Oh, that is wonderful. When did you discover computer science?
Andy Bartlett: I discovered computer science in high school. I had the opportunity, this would've been back in the late '70s very early '80s. We had a few computer classes. They were quite crude.
Sal Daher: Wilmington High, right?
Andy Bartlett: At Wilmington High School, we had a remote connection to the technical high school in Billerica, and we could log into there and do basic programs. I took a couple of classes with that. I did have a plan that I said, "Well, gee, what are going to be the growth industries?" Electronics, computers, that seemed like it would be the growth industry. I actually took a typing class in high school because that's how I'm going to enter-- [laughter] I'm going to work with this thing.
Sal Daher: Practical mind. A practical Yankee here. Yes.
Andy Bartlett: Yes. I was the only male in the class. I was a bit of an odd duck in there. My mother had been a very good typist at one time, she was always very disappointed that I wasn't getting A's, needed to practice more but I got through the class, and being able to touch type really helped. I did have a plan for that and then when I was going to college, I said, I either want to do electrical engineering or computer science. When I applied to UMass Amherst, those were two different schools and they also had this other one, College of Arts and Sciences, parentheses undecided. I didn't know which one to do, so I put the undecided, which turns out that was the worst possible choice. It meant I was in neither school. I was an outsider not working.
Sal Daher: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Neither fish nor fowl. Yes.
"... Eventually, I got my way into the electrical engineering department and I've embraced that for years and years..."
Andy Bartlett: Eventually, I got my way into the electrical engineering department and I've embraced that for years and years. Still do lots of things related to that.
Sal Daher: Embraced it well enough to graduate summa cum laude and it's a top program. It's a public university. You've kept all your body parts, all your programs.
[laughter]
It is a highly-rated school. Literature, but then you swerved into computer science.
Andy Bartlett: The swerving came later. I then went linear with-- I went to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York to get my master's degree. Then came back. I had done some research as an undergraduate with Chris Hollet, who was the brand new faculty at UMass ECE department at the time and this turned out to be pretty interesting so I went back and did a PhD with Chris. He later went on to become the department chairman and the acting dean many times.
He's really changed the program out there in terms of providing these laboratories that the students can go, like Maker Labs, where they can go and get any electronic parts and they're really embraced, the students. When I was going through it was more about sometimes-- to put it, frankly, undergraduates were often treated like taxes. You had to pay them, but you didn't want to. You wanted to focus on writing your research papers, getting your grant money. Chris really helped change that and it's a fabulous program out there now. After I got my PhD, I then went and spent a year in Germany. The intent was to go do computer-controlled driving. We were going to partner with BMW.
I was going to be working at the DLR, which is the German aerospace establishment. I know automotive aerospace doesn't make sense, but that's what we were going to do. BMW was like the strategic, but then the lawyers got involved and the contracts couldn't be signed so that got put on hold. I ended up writing a book co-authoring with five other people. My boss Jurgen Ackermann was the primary author of the book and wrote a book on robust control. Included some work from my PhD research, so that was fun. Then I came back to the US, still no job in hand, and started looking. We were in a recession, the post-Cold War was over and things were tough, but automotive was starting to boom.
A friend of mine from graduate school was teaching out in Michigan so I went and stayed with him while I was searching for work out there. It turned out there was an opening at the same university he was at, University of Michigan Dearborn, so I applied for that and got the position. I spent four years teaching electrical and computer engineering.
I tried to teach just about every class I could because I thought I would love that practical knowledge, and one of the courses I was teaching a lot was programming of embedded system devices. That got me much more into the software side. One of the things I had been using all this time ever since my graduate school was a program called MATLAB and so I was using that pretty much every day to do all my numeric experiments and so forth.
Some of the AEs thought I was more of a computer scientist than an EE because of all that experience. That's how I got into that. Then I decided that faculty life wasn't for me. I really loved teaching, but I didn't like some of the other aspects of it. What I did like was the consulting with the industry that I had been doing.
Sal Daher: Ah, okay. That's how you ended up at MathWorks, which is where you work now.
"... At Chrysler, I could draw a block diagram to model some algorithm I wanted to use for onboard diagnostic testing of the Chrysler vehicles. I could model it. I could simulate it. I could pull down a menu and immediately generate code that would run on a computer in the backseat of a test car. I would drive around and I could do my experiments and collect my data..."
Andy Bartlett: Right. I left the university. I went to work for Chrysler. Then old colleagues from the University of Massachusetts started recruiting me to come to the MathWorks and come back to Massachusetts. It was still quite a small company. It was under 300 people. It was about 13 years old, but it had been a bootstrapped company. One of the things that was very interesting about it was that they were trying to cross the chasm in terms of the research department would use MathWorks tools. The production department, the ones making all the software to go control the engine and control the brakes and control the altitude of a satellite, whatnot, they were not using it for production.
This was a great experience to come and get to work on that. It was the very early days of trying to cross into the production work. Came back to Massachusetts and started working with the MathWorks. Again, I had the right background because I'd been using MATLAB since before it was even a commercial product that I could get my hands on. Well, with teaching, I was using MATLAB and Simulink every day. Then at Chrysler, I was using the code generation. At Chrysler, I could draw a block diagram to model some algorithm I wanted to use for onboard diagnostic testing of the Chrysler vehicles. I could model it. I could simulate it.
I could pull down a menu and immediately generate code that would run on a computer in the backseat of a test car. I would drive around and I could do my experiments and collect my data.
Sal Daher: Have fun tinkering.
Andy Bartlett: Have fun tinkering. I would come back to my office with a floppy disk. I'd put it in there. I'd use a MATLAB tool to automatically create a report with all these data and the results. [chuckles] My boss didn't know what was happening. How can he produce this so quickly? It was all the MathWorks tools. I had that experience when I came. That was advanced research that I was doing at Chrysler. Now we wanted to go production. Just like the Geoffrey Moore book, we had several visionaries. One of them was Alex Ohada, who worked at Toyota. He was--
Sal Daher: Just a note here. Crossing Chasm is all about the chasm that exists between when you get your product to early adopters, like the researchers, and then trying to get it into industry. If something works with early adopters, it doesn't mean it's going to work at scale.
Andy Bartlett: Right, right.
Sal Daher: That process of crossing that huge chasm is really, really, really difficult. There are all sorts of reasons to it. That book is so -- don't reinvent the wheel if you're starting a company. Yes. Read that.
Andy Bartlett: Yes, thanks for giving that clarification, Sal. Everett Rogers came up with that model of the adoption where he had the enthusiasts and the visionaries, and then there was the early majority, it was a big chunk. Think of this as a bell curve and then there's the late majority, and then there's the laggards who come last. Geoffrey Moore's contribution was to say that there's this chasm between the enthusiasts and the early adopters, the visionaries, and this early majority, which is where the big money is.
He's talking about how to really get your product to win there and he would describe the beachhead analogy. Think of the D-Day invasion, which was the successful beachhead landing, or can't think of it right now. In World War I, there was an invasion near Turkey that was a complete fiasco.
Sal Daher: Gallipoli.
Andy Bartlett: Gallipoli, thank you, Sal. Everybody was just a nightmare. Total failure. That's the analogy they used with business is you can be D-Day or you can be Gallipoli and figure out how to do that. One of the things they talked about was finding a whole product that really allows these people to have a good workflow to do something that they want. What is the value proposition? It has to be complete and full. Alex Ohada was the classic visionary from Geoffrey Moore's book.
He had a vision of, this was really going to enable Toyota to be much more productive. They were facing a challenge where the software was getting so complex, the traditional way of doing it was just going to take years and years to develop and that was a failure. They needed something innovative, new, and more productive. He had a vision that where MathWorks was going would allow them to solve that problem and to be more competitive to outpace their competitors who hadn't caught up to this approach yet.
Working with Alex was great. I remember I'd get my first version of my product that I had developed to plug into the MathWorks, and I'm trying to sell, but we can do this and we can do this. Alex was perfect. He handled me perfectly. He says, "Yes, Andy, your product can meet all the technical requirements." I'm like, Ah. But it is no easier to use than the C language. Why would Toyota want to pay for your tools?" This was a figurative dope slap upside the head that said ,"Oh-
Sal Daher: Oh, geez.
Andy Bartlett: -this concept of value proposition."
Sal Daher: User experience to value proposition, duh.
Andy Bartlett: I'd never heard of Geoffrey Moore or knew any of these terms, but Alex Ohada had this way. I'm sure he did such guidance to 100s of other people-- [crosstalk]
Sal Daher: Very gentle upside the head slap.
Andy Bartlett: It really helped and it's perfect. He says, "Yes, Andy, everything." I'm like, "Yes, but it's no better than the competition," so a differentiated value proposition. Fortunately, Alex Ohada and many other users and visionaries helped smarten us up, and we were able to deliver a toolchain that is heavily valued across automotive and aerospace, and many other industries. If you go look at the MathWorks site and look at company info, you can see the logos of all the big players in automotive and aerospace electronics.
It's been really great to see that really broad adoption. We're living the MathWorks vision of accelerating the pace of engineering. We get to see all the cool things, many of the cool things, not all of them, but many of them, like the company Zipline, who's used our tools to--
Sal Daher: Oh, yes, I've had the founder on the podcast, the Zipline.
Andy Bartlett: Oh, you have? Yes. He was a great speaker. He came to one of our annual meetings and he talked about their mission delivering medicines to remote places.
Sal Daher: It's a robotics company, guys.
Andy Bartlett: It's a robotics. They have these-- The one we saw was this wing drone aircraft that would go out and fly over the place and drop the parachute with the medicine. Then when it would come back, and as an electrical engineer in specializing control theory, I was just blown out of my socks when they show the way they landed this thing. They have these two vertical arms with a wire across them.
Sal Daher: [laughs]
Andy Bartlett: There's a tail hook on it, like an aircraft.
Sal Daher: Yes. It's like an aircraft carrier.
Andy Bartlett: Like an aircraft carrier.
Sal Daher: Then it hangs from the -- It gets caught and it hangs there, bobbing up and down.
Andy Bartlett: They would catch it in the most graceful way, the computer-controlled system, which they developed with Simulink and MATLAB would catch it and would release the wire, and it would bend the arms in just this most gentle, perfect way and in a couple sweeps, and it would just gently and then it's hanging there at the bottom. There's no destructive forces happening. It was just amazing. All their flight control software, or maybe not every bit of it, but a huge portion of it was developed with MATLAB and Simulink that's accelerating the pace of engineering where they could rapidly iterate on things. They could pull a menu, download the generated code, and then take it out and fly it.
Sal Daher: Oh, awesome. He's an amazing founder. Keenan Wyrobek is his name. Zipline. They're revolutionizing the drone delivery. Interestingly started out in Africa delivery, high value in a place where their technology could be of great value and low areas adoption, because they're flying in the countryside. They're not flying in the city and got to build their technology. Eventually, it's going to be delivering stuff everywhere. Andy, in thinking about our time here, I thought we would close out this conversation by getting your input on what is happening currently with generative AI.
ChatGPT, is the topic of every conversation. Literally, you can't get away from ChatGPT nowadays, what do you make of it all? What are your thoughts given your deep knowledge of software and business?
Andy's Opinion on ChatGPT
Andy Bartlett: I think it's extremely impressive. I believe it is going to change things radically. I've gone out and taken out my credit card and paid for a Copilot license and I--
Sal Daher: Ah, so you're Copilot. Okay.
Andy Bartlett: Yes, so I paid for Copilot. I'm in Visual Studio code writing and the things it's predicting--
Sal Daher: Copilot is the Microsoft version.
Andy Bartlett: Yes. It plugs into Microsoft Visuals Studio code, maybe the visuals--
Sal Daher: It has all the data in there past the training set, the September, 2021 that ChatGPT 4-- [crosstalk]
Andy Bartlett: I don't know the exact technology that's behind it, whether it's ChatGPT 4 or 3.5 or?
Sal Daher: My understanding is that Autopilot has basically the platform on Microsoft, they have updated the information, so it knows about stuff past that date.
Andy Bartlett: Oh, okay.
Sal Daher: It can recall stuff past that date, which is great. Anyway, so you took out your credit card.
Andy Bartlett: I bought a license for this and I started using it. The things it would predict, the code it would come up with was amazingly spot on to this. These were pretty simple problems, but still, it wasn't just helping me with the pattern, oh, this is a for loop or a wild loop. It was the body of the code of the different-- all the different operations it needed to do. It was absolutely amazing for such early days in this technology and given the description of how these generative AI's work, where they're just predicting one piece at a time, it's really amazing.
There's a lot of innovation going on. I was listening to another podcast yesterday. They were building these value propositions for folks where they would cobble together many of these things and put a front end on it, so the generative AI was a backend, and they had an intelligent front end where they would decide which was the most affordable but effective piece of this generative AI to use along the way, so they could make it much more cost-effective.
Sal Daher: Which podcast is that?
Andy Bartlett: It's either A16z or it's the one Kathy Woods, her podcast.
Sal Daher: Look, if it's the wrong podcast, either one of those two, you could do very well to listen to them anyway. You're going to learn something.
Andy Bartlett: I believe this was on the A16z podcast.
Sal Daher: A16z. Awesome. I would recommend people listen to Andrew Huberman interviewing Mark Andreessen. You might enjoy that one.
Andy Bartlett: I'll have a look at that.
Sal Daher: Anyway, so please complete your thought here.
Andy Bartlett: A key part of their theme was this would be supportive technology. There would be a human in the loop doing a portion of it, but a lot of the lower level stuff, lower level in quotes. It would've been high and stuff a few years ago, but now it's becoming a commodity just like who cares if you can do math calculations by hand anymore? It's been decades since the computer was your supportive technology.
These supportive technologies will just streamline so many workflows that this can radically change things. For a while, we've had the ingesting of information that people have been exploiting that, but now that you can generate the information, that really changes things a lot. I think there's just so many possibilities on what this can do that people can make other people much more productive.
Sal Daher: Well, in a way, Clayton Christensen would've recognized that because part of disruption is going up the value chain.
Andy Bartlett: Absolutely.
Sal Daher: This is what's been happening with generative AI. I was at a wedding this weekend and there was someone who runs an Airbnb and is using generative A, a bunch of Airbnbs, to help with his postings.
Andy Bartlett: Oh, nice.
Sal Daher: To the descriptions and all this stuff. I guess the best advice is if you're in business, roll up your sleeves, start tinkering. You've got the business side. Start tinkering into this tool and see what you can build with it. I think that's the advice from Professor Andy Bartlett. Awesome. Andy, I'm so grateful that you made time to be on the Angel Invest Boston podcast and I look forward, of course, to continuing my collaborations with you at Walnut. Thanks for being on.
Andy Bartlett: Thank you, Sal. Love your podcast. I'm really thankful to you for helping me get into angel investing and to learn about it. Every week I get to learn more about it.
[music]
Sal Daher: I just love doing it. I warn people if Angel Investing is not for the faint of heart, start small, start slow, don't invest alone. That's what angel groups are for. Join an angel group and find like-minded people to invest with. It is awesome fun, and people like Andy Bartlett are the people who make that so much fun. Andy, I really, really appreciate your collaboration, and you're just the core of Walnut dedication, your Yankee ancestors would be very proud.
Andy Bartlett: Thank you, Sal.
Sal Daher: Awesome. This is Angel Invest Boston. Thanks for listening. I'm Sal Daher.
[music]
Sal Daher: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.