Rockwell Shah Transcript
Clint Betts
Rockwell, thank you so much for coming on the show. Means a lot to have you here. You're working on a really interesting problem, a very significant problem actually, trying to solve how to get better sleep, which is a big deal. Tell us about how you got to become the CEO of Ozlo Sleep.
Rockwell Shah
Ah, man, that's such a crazy story. So, what feels like a lifetime ago at this point, I graduated from Cornell with a degree in economics, and then I was a very lowly remote tech support agent for a company called 4PatientCare, which was a medical software company. And I was literally remoting into doctors' computers, fixing their software. I did that for years and slowly but surely worked my way up the corporate ladder and became president of that company, grew it, and scaled it. It was eventually acquired by Essilor and, after that, launched into the consumer app arena.So one of the things that kind of sucked about being in B2B medical SaaS is nobody ever says thank you. Doctors never call you, and they're like, "Oh, thank you so much for optimizing my revenue." However, one of the great things about working with consumers is that people say thank you almost every day. Every day, somebody's like, "Oh, you changed my life," or, "You really helped me with this." And that feeling, that feedback that you get, and that feedback loop is a lot more fulfilling. And so we launched a suite of apps that help people with sleep and anxiety, depression, and chronic pain. And we actually had a contract running with Bose where we were producing audio for a device called the Bose Sleepbuds.
Clint Betts
Really?
Rockwell Shah
Yes, yes .I have them here. So these are the Bose Sleepbuds, okay? They're these tiny little earbuds that play audio that help you sleep, help block out noise. And you know what? We like to joke around that it takes a company the size of Bose to make earbuds that don't stream audio. So these, they don't stream any audio. You can't listen to an audiobook or a podcast. They are fancy earplugs with white noise is effectively what they are.
Clint Betts
That's so cool.
Rockwell Shah
It was great. They sold a bunch. They were Oprah's favorite thing twice. They were Time Magazine's Best Invention Award. They really had quite a following. And we had a contract producing audio. And one day, I get a phone call from Bose, and they're like, "Hey Rock, I have some bad news for you. We're cutting the Sleepbuds. In fact, we're cutting our entire health division at Bose." So Bose had a reorg and long story short, a number of divisions got cut. Health was one of them. And that meant the Sleepbuds hit the scrap pile.
There were a number of us who were like, "Wait a second. What if we could revive this? What if we could actually acquire the IP from Bose, redevelop the product, add streaming, add a bunch of features that people wanted, and relaunch it to the world? What would that look like?" And so that is a lot of the long story, very short. This product first had Life under Bose. We saw its potential. When it was shut down, we acquired that IP, raised capital, re-engineered the product, and relaunched it.
I was also a long-time advisor to the company. I was an advisor to the company even before it was a company. It was started by three Bose engineers who left Bose and decided to do this. I came on as CEO last year, and I helped grow, scale, and commercialize the business. But there are so many interesting, exciting things about this product. But I have to ask you the most important question, Clint: Do you sleep next to anybody who snores or has ever?
Clint Betts
I don't, but here's the thing. I think I'm that person. I think I'm the person that snores. I actually think I'm the snorer. I'm the problem.
Rockwell Shah
Yeah, you're the problem. So you might buy this for your partner.
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Rockwell Shah
So, the number one reason that people buy sleep buds is that they have a snoring bed partner. The number two reason is that there's noise outside of the house, like they live in New York City or a loud cityscape. Number three is noise inside the house, like kids running around or their neighbors being noisy or whatever. The fourth reason, which is really interesting and actually is that the younger you get, the more popular this reason is, and it is just a fundamental shift in how people are consuming information and experiences around sleep. People want to listen to audio close to bedtime, either as part of their sleep routine or while they're sleeping. And if you've ever tried to use AirPods, AirPods are not comfortable to sleep in, right?
Clint Betts
Well, they're going to fall out, right?
Rockwell Shah
Yeah.
Clint Betts
Yeah. They'll fall out. There are a million problems.
Rockwell Shah
Well, yeah, and if you're side-sleeping, it's not comfortable. You can see it. It's popping out of my ear right now, like hard plastic, definitely not comfortable side sleeping. These are the Ozlo Sleepbuds. So if I take this out, take the AirPod and put the Sleepbud in, you'll see it sits flush right in my ear, right?
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Rockwell Shah
If I look at you, you can see the AirPod. You can't see the Sleepbud. There's no pain or discomfort if you're side-sleeping. It forms a really strong seal in the ear, so it blocks out noise really effectively. And if I take this out, these little tips are squishy, and there are four different sizes of them so they can fit effectively every ear. And if I take the squishy tip size out, you can see that a size comparison between the AirPod and the Sleepbud. There's quite a big difference in size. There's a lot of engineering that goes into making something this small and this capable, so it really does take a world-class engineering team. In fact, 70% of our staff actually comes from Bose.
Clint Betts
That's awesome.
Rockwell Shah
Lots of incredible engineers. But yeah, that's kind of the short story of Sleepbuds.
Clint Betts
How has it been going since you've relaunched it? How's it going?
Rockwell Shah
I mean, traction has been phenomenal. So we are now the number one Indiegogo pre-order campaign of all time. So we have just crushed it on that front. We have around 30,000 pre-orders, most of which we have already delivered. We've done around $6.8 million in pre-orders already. We'll have our big consumer general availability launch a little bit later this year, but the traction has been crazy. It's pretty wild to be almost profitable as a company before you actually launch a general consumer product.
Clint Betts
That is kind of wild. Yeah. Let me ask you a few questions about crowdfunding. I'm super interested in it, and it seems like it's a great way for consumer product companies to test whether or not they have a product that consumers are going to want, whether there's even a market for it, whether people are, like you said, I mean, you have the highest one ever on Indiegogo, whether people are even going to open their pocketbooks right then for something that they might not get for six months to a year or something like that. I'm not sure what the regular timeframe is. What advantages have you seen from being on Indiegogo and going the crowdfunding route?
Rockwell Shah
Oh my gosh. Immense advantages, especially when you think about the backdrop of consumer tech launches that have happened more recently. In tech, we've had a string of very high-profile failures. So think about the Humane AI pin, the Fisker Ocean, and the Rabbit R1. When tech reviewers get this stuff, they basically say, "What is this? This is like fake it till you make it. This product barely even functions or works on any dimension. How could they possibly ship this thing?" When you're dealing with hardware, it's very hard to go on a journey to iterate on hardware and get it ready before it's into production, but going the crowdfunding route with Kickstarter and Indiegogo gives you a pathway to get that early audience who understands, "Hey, this is not a fully-baked product." You're coming on a journey with me to make this thing, and you're going to be part of this experience. You're going to be part of the journey of bringing it to life.
While that journey isn't great for every consumer, a certain section of the market thrives on it. They love it because they're like, "Wow, I got to contribute. I got to be part of this thing and make it a reality." And it's something a lot of those folks are really proud of, so when they look at their device, they say, "Hey, I'll give you a discount. You pre-ordered this device. You're going to get it first. It's going to have bugs, it's going to have kinks, but you're going to work it out with me. And by the end of it, we'll have a fully production-ready device." And for startups, this is a godsend because startups don't have the budget of an Apple or a Bose or a Microsoft where it's like, oh, you basically effectively have infinite money behind you. We don't have infinite money. We have real constraints.
And so we don't have the ability to just sit here for years tinkering and iterating on it, trying to get it perfect. We have to do all of that publicly. And sometimes it's painful. It's like, "Oh, we launched an update, and it didn't work out as well as we hoped." Or it's like, "Oh, we found this bug that is causing some issues in the field." But that's part of the process. That's part of the iteration process.
Now, I think one thing that a lot of consumers don't understand about the crowdfunding process is that the number that you see that people raise on crowdfunding is not how much money it takes to bring something to market. So, for us, if you go on our Indiegogo page or our Kickstarter page, you'll see that we've done $6.8 million in sales, but we're a venture-backed company. We had to raise $22 million to make this device a reality. We couldn't have just done it with the money that came from crowdfunding. What crowdfunding effectively was, was a pre-order campaign where we're actually judging demand of like, "Okay, do people want this thing? How much do they want it? What are the dimensions of that demand curve?" And so crowdfunding gives you a much better chance at selling that upfront and getting a really group of passionate people behind the product that will help you bring it.
Clint Betts
What went into your decision to be on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo? Is that normal? Is that the thing that a lot of people do?
Rockwell Shah
Yeah. So, these days, Kickstarter and Indiegogo work really well together. So I think maybe in the early times, people thought of them as competing platforms, but most of the playbooks today are those that you launch on Kickstarter. And Kickstarter is a defined window of time. It has a beginning and an end. Once you're done with Kickstarter, you can actually transition to Indiegogo's pre-order campaign platform, which they call the in-demand platform, so that you can continue to take pre-orders and generate sales. And that can go as long as you want until you're ready for general availability.
Clint Betts
Oh, I had no idea. Yeah, I was still thinking of them as the competing platforms. That's actually really cool.
Rockwell Shah
It's super handy. And they actually, if you go to our Kickstarter page, they work together, they integrate together. It will say on, for example, Indiegogo, it will say how much money was raised from Kickstarter, another platform. And you can go between them. And if you go to Kickstarter, it'll actually forward you to Indiegogo.
Clint Betts
That's so cool. I love that. That's actually great for up-and-coming entrepreneurs. Hey, on the hardware piece, how hard is it? How do you go about building an earbud? This isn't something that anybody can just do and tinker with in their garage. How do you actually do this?
Rockwell Shah
This is extremely complicated. When you're talking about a device like Sleepbuds, the smaller that you build something, the harder it is, really and truly, to create. So, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Bose put a lot of money into R&D to build the form factor, building the buds, like the tips and the case. They did a lot of R&D development there. I think it's important to recognize that we didn't start from scratch, but it's also important to recognize that 95% of this device is different. So if I bring the Bose and the Ozlo cases, okay, they look similar. And if I open them, they look very similar. You would not necessarily guess that 95% of this device is different, but it is. And that requires a truly world-class engineering team to make it happen.
We have incredible masters of their craft from mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, system architecture, firmware, software, and every aspect of it that brings the device to life. And so it's a very time-intensive, resource-intensive process. And unlike software, the margin for mistakes is very low because God forbid you ship out a bunch of units and there's a hardware problem and you have to recall them, you might not survive as a startup. So, hardware is incredibly risky from that end.
Clint Betts
Oh, for sure. But you've also got to do software, right? It's not like you could escape that piece.
Rockwell Shah
Yeah, no. So we have to do hardware, we have to do firmware, and we have to do software because we have iOS and Android web apps. We also have to do content. So, we design noise-masking tracks that are very specific and specially designed to block out noise, especially snoring. And so this is not your grandma's white noise. This is not white noise, pink noise, green. All that is great, but when you're designing tracks specifically for noise masking, there's a target curve, and there are dynamics that you're trying to hit in those tracks that are just very different. So, we do everything in-house, including a full stack of hardware, software, firmware, and content.
Clint Betts
How does the actual manufacturing of it work? If somebody wanted, and not if somebody wanted to do the earbuds, but if somebody wants to manufacture something... I just want our audience to understand the difficulty of this, although it may seem easier than it is, just the difficulty of trying to mass manufacture a product. What all does it go into? Do you have to go to China? You got to go out of the United States, I assume. There are all sorts of things that go into this.
Rockwell Shah
Yeah. Oh, gosh. You triggered me to think like, "Oh, where do I even start with a topic so big?" So, we have a member on our team who has 30 years of experience in the manufacturing stack. She is an incredible, incredible mind in the hardware stack. She speaks both Chinese and English. She has worked for many companies that you would know their name, including Bose. She has produced many hundred million dollars worth of products in her career. Without her, it would've been next to impossible to try to make a device like that because, inside the Sleepbuds, there are over 370 parts. So you're talking about you have to set up a supply chain of over 370 parts, and if any one of those parts is not there, you don't get to build the device.
So you're talking about a very intense logistical path, even on the supply chain angle. Who are the suppliers going to provide these materials? Where can you get them? You have to negotiate with them. You have to build that entire pipeline. For your manufacturer, you have to set up the production line, all the equipment that you have to do, and the training. People don't realize. If I showed you a video of our production line, you would think that we were building Rolls Royce's with the amount of human touch points there are in building the product. It is mind-boggling when you first see it. You're like, "I can't believe there's that many human beings involved with creating a device this big." So you have to train all of those workers.
When you're talking about the actual creation process of the device, so you have to go through the prototyping stage. Once you get to the prototyping stage, you have a DV build, then a PV build, then a PQ build. In each one of these phases, you are iterating on the hardware to get it more and more ready for mainstream mass production. And at every single point in the process, there will be problems. I assure you there will be some problem that happens where you're like, "Oh no, we have to go back to the drawing board and do this thing over or this thing over."
From our own story, we have a number of chip suppliers. One of our chip suppliers, once we were functionally done with the device, we were ready to start gearing up manufacturing, they came to us and they said, "Hey guys, sorry, but turns out the chip that you're using in your device that's really important to the functioning of it, we're actually going to stop supporting that. So if you could just move to our newer chip, that would be great."
Clint Betts
You're kidding.
Rockwell Shah
Imagine you did all of this work to get to this point where you could start shipping this device out to people, and they tell you at the last minute, "No, actually, you have to switch to a newer chip," and all of the cascading headaches that are caused from that, which there are many. There are many, many cascading headaches that happen, including having to rewrite all of your firmware. All of your firmware, right? Yeah. I mean, we have so many war stories and obstacles at this point that we've had to overcome in order to get the product to where it is today. We're not even done yet. We're still in the pre-order phase. The general availability launch is still a couple of months away. There's still more for us to do, but the journey that we have been on in delivering the first 30,000 devices to the field, I mean, I can't even imagine people who are walking into it and don't have robust hardware experience.
At this point, we're a team of 40 people. There's an immense amount of experience on the team across every part of the stack. And I just feel so bad for those folks that they're like, "Hey, I really want this thing to exist. I'm going to go on crowdfunding. I'm going to go raise money, I'm going to go work with manufacturers and make it happen." There's a reason why the failure rate of crowdfunding is so high, especially for hardware. It's extremely complicated.
Clint Betts
What's the one element or part that's the hardest?
Rockwell Shah
Everything.
Clint Betts
Is it chips?
Rockwell Shah
I mean, no.
Clint Betts
Let me ask that a different way. What's an element or part that is the hardest to get? Like when there's a supply chain issue, it's going to cause major problems.
Rockwell Shah
Yeah, I mean, this is the thing. When you ask the question of what part is the hardest, the supply chain can certainly be difficult in times when there's low supply, or there's... For example, we had a supplier who was hit with a cybersecurity attack that shut down their production for 30 days, plus or minus. That means we're shut down. It's like there's only so much that we can do without that supply. How do you predict a cybersecurity attack on one of your suppliers? You can't. You can't possibly know that's going to happen. So that stuff is not hard in the sense that it's difficult to overcome; it's just hard because when it happens, it disrupts operations, and you have to figure some way out, some other way. It's like, "Can I find another supplier? Can I be first in line for the first shipments that are coming out of that supplier when they're operational again?" There are so many things that you have to try, but that's not hard in the traditional sense.
Hard in the traditional sense would be we operate at the edge of the frontier of this hardware's capability. Many of the things that we're using in Sleepbuds are just, they're exciting. They're new technologies. For example, we're using Bluetooth low energy as our streaming standard. Now, most phones do not support Bluetooth low-energy audio streams. So we have to stream from the phone to the case and then the case to the Sleepbuds. That really hasn't been done before, especially on the kind of hardware that we're using. And so it's extremely exciting. It's very technically challenging, and pulling it off means that you get these tiny little sleep buds that have 10 hours of battery life and can do biometric sensing and environmental sensing. They have all these cool superpowers, but it's hard. You don't get that stuff for free. You have to build it.
So that's where I would say the hardest part about this is operating at the edge of the frontier because you are the one laying the ground. You can't go to stack overflow and be like, "Hey, another engineer has solved this problem before. How do I solve this problem?" You have to invent the way. Whenever you are the one inventing the way, it is classically hard.
Clint Betts
What are you seeing from customers? Are they listening to audiobooks, podcasts, the noises? What kind of seems to be the most popular?
Rockwell Shah
We have two classes of individuals right now. There's the first class of individuals who don't care about streaming; they just care about noise masking. One of the cool superpowers that sleep buds have is that you can turn them off on Bluetooth. So all the Bluetooth radios shut off, and then it just locally plays back your sleep sound. So, a lot of folks, especially if they were coming from the Bose Sleepbuds 1 or the Bose Sleepbuds 2, care about that more than anything because that's how they're using this product. They're using it as an earplug that plays white noise. So that customer is about, I want to say half of the population.
The other half are brand new to Sleepbuds. They were never a Bose customer. They have no reference point to that. And for those people, streaming is really important. So they'll listen to podcasts, they'll listen to audiobooks. They'll even listen to YouTube videos. Now, for privacy reasons, we don't collect what people are listening to, so I can't tell you 30% of people are listening to Audible or something. There's a privacy layer between us and the customer. But just from what people write about online and what they talk about and user interviews, it's pretty clear. There's a lot of audiobooks, there's a lot of podcasts, and there's some YouTube.
Clint Betts
What does a typical day look like for you?
Rockwell Shah
Oh, I go through different seasons of my life, and this is a very, very busy season of my life. My son was born about a year ago, little baby Cyrus.
Clint Betts
Wow, congrats.
Rockwell Shah
Thank you. It's my firstborn, so I'm going through fatherhood for the first time, and it's really interesting. When I was a kid, people always told me I was indoctrinated that children are a hardship. This is what I was told over and over again. It's like children are a hardship; children are a hardship, put off having kids for as long as possible. And yes, in becoming a father, like kids, there are hard parts, but nobody ever talks about the joy. Especially, guys, they don't talk about the joy of fatherhood. And I don't know, maybe it's just me, maybe it's my personal experience, but-
Clint Betts
No. Far and away, my favorite thing in life is being a dad. How is it not? It's the greatest thing in the world.
Rockwell Shah
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. So, about half the days of the week, I wake up at 5:30 AM because that's when he wakes up. So I woke up, and I greeted him in his room. I just spent from 5:30 to 7:00 AM with him. At 7:00 AM, our wonderful nanny comes in, takes over, and then I just go straight to work. So I usually work from about 7:00 AM straight till about 5:30 PM, and then at 5:30, I cut off. I go have dinner with Cyrus and my wife and spend a little bit of family time together. And then at night, sometimes I will go work out extra. I love playing tennis. I love playing pickleball. Those are my sports. If anybody's around to play table tennis, I will play some ping pong with them, too. Anything with a racket that's not badminton, I'm down. You'll find me playing. And then sometimes I'll get work done if I have a lot of stuff to do Monday through Friday, that very much is the way that I work.
I'm not one of these people who's like, "Oh, I wake up, and then I do 60 minutes of meditation, and then I do a cold plunge, and then I hang upside down." I don't do that stuff. I'm most productive in the morning. And so I know, I'm like, "All right, get at it. Get to work, get stuff done."
Clint Betts
What are you reading? What do you read?
Rockwell Shah
These days, the way that I structure my information and consumption... Books are amazing. Don't get me wrong. Books are incredible. The one part about books that I have a beef with is that oftentimes the first a hundred pages of a book is talking about why you should read the book effectively.
Clint Betts
Don't you hate that? I agree with you entirely on that. It's like, "I am reading the book right now. You don't need to convince me. I have the book in my hand."
Rockwell Shah
There was a podcast that I was listening to, and the author of the book Unstoppable was on this podcast. I was listening to him talk about it, and I was like, "Oh man, my wife loved this book. She should totally read it." So I texted it to my wife, and when she finally got around to reading it, she texted me. She's like, "When is he going to stop talking about how bad anxiety is? I know how bad anxiety is. That's why I'm reading this book. I want the techniques already. Tell me how to overcome the anxiety." So, generally, these days, I skip most books.
I consume information by using a number of long-form online sources. I love long form. I spend a lot more time with long form. That long form could either come in text, be in white papers, or be listened to in podcasts or YouTube videos that are long form. The way I usually do it is I try to find someone who is the best or close to the best in their industry, and I listen to them talk for a few hours because when you listen to somebody who's elite speak about this thing that they're elite at, they will drop all of these nuggets of information everywhere for you, things that you would've never even dreamt of. These are things that you won't get from reading the pop-sci version in a New York Times bestseller or something because those are the things that make them great.
And so what I'll do is, after listening to them for a while, I'll investigate the sources that they talked about. It could be papers, it could be scientific journals, it could be books, whatever it is. I'll go and read those things with a first-person perspective. And I can't tell you how crazy it is to me that people don't go read the source material. Just go read the source material. Whatever it is you're interested in, just go read it. Actually, read it, not filtered by somebody else's perspective of what that source material is. It will be life-changing for you to go read the source material.
I remember that in one of the phases of my life, I became very heavily interested in cryptography, cryptocurrencies, and various other things. If I said, "Go read the Bitcoin whitepaper," people would think I'm saying, "Oh, you're going to go read an encyclopedia of a thousand pages," or something. The Bitcoin whitepaper is nine pages long. Just go read the source material. It is not that crazy. People fight all the time over things like the Second Amendment. How many people who fight over the Second Amendment have never read the Second Amendment? Regardless of what side you're on, it doesn't matter. Just go actually read it. So yeah, I'm a huge fan of reading the source material and kind of coming to my own.
Clint Betts
What is the state of e-commerce and consumer products right now, given the state of the economy, the fluctuations in the market, to put it mildly, the uncertainty given elections both in the United States and throughout the world? What do you think? What are we looking at here from an economic perspective? I'm sure you're thinking about that a lot as you prepare to launch.
Rockwell Shah
Yeah. I mean, yes and no. When you think about the macroeconomic cycle, it's very easy to fall into the bear trap of gloom and doom. Like, "Oh, the sky is falling, the world is falling apart. It's horrible. It's this or that." And we've lived through, even more recently in 2020, we had a very strong recession in 2020, and everybody thought the sky was falling. And then, on the back of that, you had a huge economic boom at the tail end of 2020 and 2021. It was huge and incredibly economical. And then, in the second half of 2022, things came back down and deflated a bit, and valuations got within the realm of closer to reasonable. And so you have to be really careful.There's a saying I really like, "Optimists get rich, pessimists get right." And so if you're constantly worried about what the future holds and you're trying to time the markets or you're trying to worry too much about how consumer demand will be affected by macroeconomic conditions, you fail to realize that 60% of the S&P 500 was created during the recessionary period. Most of the time, it's in times of economic turmoil that there is a great advantage and a great opportunity. And so those are often the times you want to seize the moment and really go after it quite hard.
And so, from a macroeconomic perspective, does it look like we're going into a recession right now? It's like, yes, a lot of the indicators would be pointing. It is like, okay, there's "trouble" on the horizon. Will that have some effects on e-commerce? Of course. Are those effects strong enough that they should kill promising companies that have a strong product-market fit of devices and services that people really want? No, it should be fine. If anything, it becomes easier in some dimension because competitors fall away. The people who raised a bunch of money but didn't have really good unit economics and didn't really understand their business really well didn't have a strong product-market fit, so those guys went away. Marketing budgets shrink a little bit, so it gives a chance for startups like us to compete against people who have much bigger war chests than we do.
So I don't worry too much about the macroeconomic cycle in regards to our particular company. I think we're pretty strongly positioned because of how deep the product market fate is. People really want this device, and if you suffer from a sleeping problem and you need this, you'll jump over all sorts of hoops to figure out how to buy this. So, I think it's less of a concern.
Clint Betts
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I can talk to you forever, but we end every interview the exact same way with the exact same question, that is at CEO.com we believe the chances one gives is just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Rockwell Shah
Oh my gosh. So many people. This is a very laundry list, Mr. Shockey was my history teacher who sent me to Boys State in Nevada. That was at 18 years old. That was a transformational experience. The guy who interviewed me to get into Cornell, I literally only ever met once and apparently left such an impression that when I arrived at Cornell, he had bought a sweater and a blanket and a vodka shot glass, and he had left it as a package for me in my dorm room on my first day. And I swear to you, he was a decent portion of the reason that I got in; I think he gave a really powerful testimonial for me.
The first folks in 4PatientCare took a shot at me when I was in my early twenties, the young and up-and-coming kid who wanted to make his waves in the startup scene. I grew in that company relatively quickly, and these were all guys that were in their forties, fifties, and sixties, who handed over their company to a twenty something-year-old to say like, "Hey, we took it as far as we can go. You take it. You see how fast you can grow it." The people who bet on me when I went to start my app company were a number of those folks who cut checks to build that company. And even with Ozlo, the founders of Ozlo, the employees of Ozlo, then the venture investors of Ozlo, the stakeholders of Ozlo, when I came in as CEO, they put a bet on me to say, "Hey, this guy can take us to the next level. Let's bring him on board."
You don't do this alone. It takes quite literally a village, not just in a single time and place but across your life, to make the realities and the dreams come to fruition. And so I have many, many thank-yous to many, many people, and there are so many people that I have left out, like my family, my friends, my mother, my best friend. I could go on and on of all the people. My wife. How many thank-yous do I owe to her? My sister. So many people took a bet on me, believed in me, and pushed me.
And I came from very humble beginnings. My mother and father were both from Iran, and they were immigrants. They came to this country with nothing. I grew up very much on the poor end of the spectrum and had to figure out ways to build my own life and make my own way. And you just don't do that. You don't pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I think it is true that the more you help yourself, the more people will be willing to help you, and there's a really important lesson in that, but it's a myth that you do it alone. You don't. You have a whole village.
Clint Betts
Yeah. Rockwell, thank you so much. Seriously, what an honor to have you on here. Good luck on the launch of everything over the next few months. I'm sure we'll have you back on to discuss how it went. Appreciate you coming on.
Rockwell Shah
Thanks so much. Pleasure.
Edited for readability.