Questions with Swupnil Sahai, Co-Founder and CEO of SwingVision, former Tesla Computer Vision Engineer, UCB Data Science Co-Instructor
Swupnil is the Co-Founder and CEO of SwingVision, a professional-grade mobile AI platform for amateur athletes, which was featured in the Fall 2020 Apple Keynote and 2020 App of the Day.
Validated by pros James Blake and Andy Roddick (who have invested in the startup), SwingVision is Tennis Australia’s Preferred Player and Ball Tracking Technology Partner.
Swupnil is also a Co-Instructor for Data 8: Foundations of Data Science, the fastest growing class at UC Berkeley, with 1,300+ students from across 40+ majors. Previously, he built patent-pending AI for 3D object tracking at Tesla Autopilot.
On March 13, 2021, Swupnil joined TeenTechSF and Bentley Design Thinking Engineering Club for the first event in their joint speaker series, answering questions about networking, establishing connections, Elon Musk, autopilot and more! Here is a transcript of most of this session:
Q: You talked about your work at SwingVision, but I want to bring this back to when you were growing up. So thinking back to that time, what were you interested in the most? And how did what you were interested in growing up and in high school lead into what you decided to pursue in college?
A: That’s a really interesting question! I’m not sure if you guys will like my answer. But when I was in high school, I wanted to do very different things. When I was a freshman, I was obsessed with biology. We had this intro bio class that we took, I was in Monta Vista High School down in Cupertino, and we had this super difficult teacher — she was notorious — and it was a really hard class…for a freshman class, but I did really well, I loved it, I loved pig dissection stuff that we did there, and everything at bio. And I was so good at it, I thought for sure I would be a surgeon, for sure.
But then what happened is when we did get to the pig dissection part, I always got kind of…feeling noxious…so I thought there was just no way of doing this. So that went away, and then I was a little still into art, so I just loved sketching and I took art classes in high school, so I was really into that as well. I thought maybe I might want to go to architecture someday, but then I kind of lost interest after a while. I realized it would be more of a hobby for me.
And then, as I got towards the end of high school, I started to realize that the thing I was really good at was math, and so I thought I probably want to do something involved with math, and I didn’t know what that was going to be. I didn’t know if I wanted to do engineering. Both of my parents, by the way, were engineers initially in Silicon Valley. Now they’re managers, but they started out as engineers, computer scientists, and doing pretty hard core engineering. Like, my mom worked at Intel for over 30 years and was working on compilers there, not just writing code but compiling it — they both have done really incredible work but I did not want to do what they did, and I wanted to do something very different. I didn’t want to become a coder, which is ironic now, I wanted to just do something else.
So, I knew I was good at math, so…let me figure out something I can do with math, so basically by the end of high school, I was certain I was going to major in math and probably something else, because just math alone — you can’t do that much with that. You can become a math professor, which is very hard to do, but besides that, you need to apply it to something. So my initial thought was…I got into Berkeley, and wanted to do business initially. So I was thinking I was going to apply to Haas, but then I saw the curriculum and there were a lot of accounting classes, which didn’t really interest me that much, so then I ended up majoring in economics instead. While those courses were a lot more quantitative, I would say, and I enjoyed those a lot more, and so that’s why I went that way. I took this upper division microeconomics class my first year at Berkeley, and that’s where I was like, okay, this class is kind of interesting. But that’s how I got there.
Q: When you were in high school, were there any specific colleges that you were looking at or were you attracted to UC Berkeley for some reason?
A: No, actually. I wasn’t that interested in going to UC Berkeley originally. I really wanted to go to a private school, that’s just what I was taught. My parents went to public schools in the US in college when they came from India, and their impression was that private schools would be better…and so that’s the thinking I had going in.
Obviously I wanted to go to the Ivy Leagues. And I did get into some Ivy Leagues…and private schools, but when I went and visited, I just didn’t like them that much. I think it’s more just more for me and my personality, the visit date that I had, talking to other students. I don’t know what it was, it’s hard to describe, but when I went to Berkeley, I just immediately felt motivated. And I was really surprised because I never thought I would have liked Berkeley. Just given the location, where it was, I just had some impression about it beforehand which was totally wrong, and then I went there and was just like, wow, this place is amazing. This is the place for me.
And I really felt at home there and that was why I chose it honestly.
I think in retrospect when I think about it, all these schools are all good schools. At the end of the day, especially when I look back now and I look at my classmates from high school and where they went to college, at a certain level it doesn’t matter that much. Everyone’s had different trajectories and different levels of success. I think the place you go to college plays very little correlation, honestly, with who is successful.
I think if I could go back, I’d probably tell myself that it’s not the biggest deal to go to private schools. There’s plenty of good schools out there. All these colleges are great, they’re all the best in the world. It’s very small margins, it’s not going to make much difference in your trajectory…Obviously you should still try to work hard and try to do well, you don’t want to just mess around. You shouldn’t stress yourself about it so much because it’s such small margins.
Q: Moving on to a different section, TeenTechSF is all about providing access to tech for all teens, and much of our audience is made up of people just getting into coding. Could you tell us about your experience getting into coding — did you start coding at a very early age?
A: I think the biggest mistake I made was not taking a single CS class at Berkeley, such a wasted opportunity, such a good school, but I didn’t do that. And I didn’t take a CS class until I was doing my PhD actually. I was doing my PhD in Statistics, and I think at that time I was looking for internships for my first or second summer, and most of the ones that seemed interesting to me were things that were quantitative, like using math but in interesting problems, and data science coming up. I kept seeing these data science positions, data science intern, data science intern.
I personally was obsessed with Tesla by that point already. I think I saw my first Tesla back in 2011, so this was already when I was a freshman at Berkeley at that time. I saw the Roadster at Santana Row, that was the first store that they had. And I remember just seeing it and was like, wow, these guys made an electric car that goes so fast? This is insane, like the coolest thing ever! So I really wanted to work at Tesla, just because of their mission. I didn’t care about what I did there, I just wanted to do something there, and I remember when I was in my PhD, I saw they had some Data Science position in Reliability Engineering, which I [didn’t] know what that was, but it was doing something involving math at a company I love, so I thought that’s cool, let me try that. And obviously I applied to other positions, but that was like, in my mind, that was the dream one. If I could get Tesla, that would be the dream thing.
But then I saw that all these Data Science positions required some sort of coding, and I learned to code a little bit with my stats undergrad, but it was very basic. And I just realized, I’m going to have to learn Python, learn how to code. So the first couple things was I took a couple intro classes on Data Structures at Columbia, and the biggest thing that happened to me, actually, was I started working on the first version of Swing when I was in the PhD program. My first year, I had already started working on it. Specifically, I was building the watch app, because the [Apple Watch] had just come out around that time,…and so I was building the first tennis app for Apple watch ever, and they just introduced this new language called Swift, which is now the most popular language for iOS development. That time was a brand new language that Apple invented. So I taught myself Swift on my own.
So I used Ray Wenderlich (I haven’t’ gone to that website in a while — https://www.raywenderlich.com/ios/videos), but that’s the one I used, and I just followed these tutorials on how to make an app. And again, going into this, I had no experience in coding involved. I just followed tutorials online on how to make very basic apps with XCode, and slowly as I built that and worked on that more and more, I became very adept at basic programming, I would say. I didn’t really become good at software engineering until I worked at Tesla, but I at least I got to the point where I understood the basics, I did a little bit of Python there on the side just because I knew that people were going to use in the actual industry, but I think that website itself hsa amazing tutorials for app development and probably other things to. That’s the one I used and there’s probably newer ones now, but there’s so many online resources and someone like me who [had] no coding background could pick that up.
Obviously it requires a lot of discipline and you need to be motivated to do it, and what helped me was that I was working on such a fun project building this tennis app, which I want to use when I go out on the court. So for me it was very, very, fun working on it. I would be up very late at night, I would push away my PhD research and just stay up coding because I had so much fund with it at a certain point.
App development in particular was really cool for me because you could see the results really fast. You can just write a few lines of code, run it on your phone, and wow, I’ve just created a brand new app that no one’s ever had before. And I just did that with a few lines of work, like it’s crazy. So I think it’s very powerful to be able to create your own thing, and I think, thinking of a project that you think is fun, that excites you, is always going to make it a lot easier. And of course, if you have a CS class in your high school, which many do now, then definitely take that. That’s a good way to do it because it’s a very structured environment. But I think beyond that, if you happen to go to a school where you don’t have access to that, there are a lot of online resources.
Q: We know that after you finished your PhD, you started out as a Data Science Intern at Tesla. Did you ever expect to get an offer back from Tesla? What was searching for a job like?
A: That’s a good question. I interned at Tesla twice, actually. At my first internship there, I was doing Data Science for reliability engineering. To explain to you guys a little bit of background, Tesla has a reliability team whose sole purpose is to test all the different parts that go into the car: whether it’s the door handles, mirror, the motor, all these thousands of parts in a car right? So there’s all kinds of testing that needs to be done in a lab, they go through all this stress testing, like they’ll run the motor really really fast for thousands of hours and then see when it burns out. So all these different tests that they do for all these different parts, there was one that was really fun was when they were making the Cybertruck they had that big glass in the front, the big windshield, so one test was to just throw heavy stuff at the Cybertruck. And as you saw when Elon announced it, he threw something and it kind of shattered the glass a little bit, but that was actually someone’s job, to throw stuff at the window and see what happens.
So I didn’t get to do those things, but my teammates did. So my job was more just like trying to figure out, can you basically make some understanding about the reliability of this part based on just a few tests, because you have limited time, you can only do limited tests for some parts, so can you almost extrapolate the lifetime of this part based on a few observations in the lab? And so I was building some…tools on that in Python. Anyways, when I was there, that was really fun for me to work on because I got to learn Python on the job, essentially, like I didn’t really know it and I kind of faked it on my way into the interviews, but they were really nice and they gave me the job, and then I learned it on the job. By the end of the internship, I was just so good at Python and the team saw that, swaw how fast I learned that, how fast I grew, that at that point they actually told me that if I dropped out of my PhD they would just hire me…full-time job. And then I almost considered it, but I was like, I really want to be a professor someday, I want to leave that option open. Thanks guys, but I’m not going to do that.
But one thing I heard about autopilot as like, that sounds really cool, and I’m sure there’s some stats involved in autopilot. I knew about Machine Learning, but didn’t know about Neural Networks, which is a specific subset of Machine Learning which is used for autopilot, so I networked — I somehow talked to an intern who was on the autopilot team, and then he introduced me of the VP of Autopilot at the time, who is now at NVIDIA, and I had a conversation with him, and basically based on that conversation he said oh year, sure, just come back to the autopilot team. Which was crazy, because I thought it would be way harder than that. But you never know what could happen, like just having a conversation can open up so many doors. And obviously I was super nervous. I was just like a little intern talking to the VP who reports directly to Elon, but he was really nice, he listened to me, he got feedback from my team about my performance as an intern, and he was just really impressed with my background, so he invited me to come back.
That following summer when I came to autopilot, it was crazy because then I was doing C++ and that was really hardcore, and I didn not know C++ as well. SO once again I had to learn everything on the job, and I also had to learn about Neural Networks on the job,…this is like Stanford course on Neural Networks on Convolutional Neural Networks, and it’s really popular now, and all the lecture notes are online, so I just read all those notes the first week of my internship — that was all I did, I just read the course notes for that — and by the end of the week, I thought I knew enough to at least get started. And obviously you learn more as you do it, as you actually do the actual projects, but certainly a lot of luck involved there. SOmehow I got up there and then I did very well in that internship in the autopilot team, so by the end of my internship Tesla gave me the offer and they waid, as soon as you’re done with your PhD, come back and we’ll hire you. So that was really nice so I already knew at the end of the summer that I would be going to Tesla the following year when I finished my PhD. That was the journey.
Q: What was the environment like working at Tesla? Were people super friendly or focused on their job all the time? Any funny stories you had you could share with us?
A: I still remember the first day at Tesla, the first internship that I did. I just remember being so surprised by the open floor plan. Everything was just flat, and what I mean by that is there’s no cubicles or anything like that, which I think a lot of tech companies are like that now, but it was just flat tables everywhere. And especially when I was interning at autopilot the first time, there were only 8 people on the team, and the VP’s desk was right in front of mine. He didn’t have a special office or anything, everybody was the same physically. And then I remember walking on the office, and I remember looking at the org chart and thinking let me find Elon’s desk. So I went and then walked around and then saw his desk and it was all still the same thing. It was a little bit bigger but it wasn’t like a special room for him or anything. So that was really cool that everyone was the same…I had worked at Apple before as an undergrad, that was my first internship ever,…and was very different. It was cubicles, more separation, the office has the manager, the team has their nice office with their own room , and you can close the door, so very different vibe. So that was one thing that stood out to me.
In terms of the culture, they were super hard. Everything’s about the work for suer, the culture’s like that, but everybody’s having a lot of fun too, because, it’s kind of what I described when I was first working on Swing, where I would stay up late at night coding because I was having so much fun, that’s how I describe the culture. Yes, they do work hard, I would say they work harder than most established tech companies, they don’t have lots of meetings, but everyone really loves it. It’s one of the coolest projects in the world, how could you not have fun? It’s just — you’re really enjoying it, people are there late hours, but it’s friendly. It’s not like it’s hostile or anything like that. I still miss my friends at Tesla so much and all the memories we had working together, and look so fondly at that time. It was really one of the best times in my life. I am very thankful that I worked there. So I think it was a great environment. And it is intense and it’s not for everybody, and certainly people who are younger probably do better there, once you have a family it’s harder to dedicate that amount of time away from your family. So I get it, I was very lucky to work there while I was in my twenties, and I think it’s a good environment and what’s cool is this shared mission with Elon’s other companies. I still remember that day so fondly that day he did that launch where the two rockets went up, and then they took the Roadster into space, and the two rockets came back down simultaneously. And everybody in Tesla was watching. Everyone was huddled around our little monitors, and we were all watching, and we were all cheering, even though none of us were at SpaceX. But it was just this common mission that we were working in these amazing companies that were making humanity better in some way, and so that was just so fun, that was one of the funnest stories.
And then, I have lots of good Elon stories, so if you want to hear those, I don’t know if you’re interested in those. Receives nods from moderators Ok, so Elon stories.
Firstly, when I worked at Tesla full-time, I was Elon’s desk was 15 feet away from mine. So autopilot was the central focus for him. We joked and said we were under the eye of Zara, like Lord of the Rings. But like basically, we’re all in his focus, he know what we’re doing all the tiem. So the entire autopilot team was right there in front of Elon’s desk. To him, it’s like the highest priority thing. My desk happened to be right in front of him, so I could see him literally every time he was there. He was in meetings all day, so there’s this big conference room right in front of his desk, so he would go in there meeting with the Product team, go back out, go back in meeting with the Model 3 team, and so on, he just has back-to-back meetings all day. I don’t know how he tweets so much because he was just in back-to-back meetings all day, it’s crazy. He’s really busy, and we had our weekly autopilot meeting. So the autopilot team had an hour slot once a week with him, and not everybody in the product team because there were hundreds of people, but I somehow worked my way into those meetings within the first couple months that I was there. So I was basically meeting with him on a weekly basis, and I was presenting my work all the time so all the work I was doing on the object tracking, any updates I had I was presenting that to him and showing him demos. Lots of funny things in those meetings, I think…there was one meeting which was really funny. Elon jokes a lot, he’s really sarcastic as you can probably tell. There was one meeting where someone made some reference to a robot servant, I don’t remember how we got to this, this was some weird tangent we went on, and he then he was like “oh that’s like the episode in Rick and Morty where there’s the little robot that passes the butter”, and many of you probably don’t watch Rick and Morty because it’s an adult show, but anyways, he thought it was so funny and then he had an engineer pull up that episode of Rick and Morty, and was like “does nobody get this reference?”, because a lot of people in the team didn’t watch the show so they didn’t understand what he was talking about, and a lot of the younger people like me got it because we were like, why are we talking about this right now? And then he’s like, “no no no no no. Everybody needs to understand this reference right now. Pull up that episode”. So then some engineer pulled up..that exact episode and we watched that…2 min segment of Rick and Morty in the middle of an autopilot meeting, and then we were all just laughing. So that was hilarious. It was just one of these fun memories.
There was another time when we were trying to shift a brand new update which would allow the car to take exits off the highway automatically, so the first time we ever did that. That was a big development push in the summer of 2019, and so, there was one weekend where he asked all of us to come in, because I guess the progress wasn’t good enough to his standards, he was afraid of the progress. So he had us all come in that weekend, and then he said he’s going to come by everybody’s desk on the autopilot desk, no matter if whether you’re an intern or a regular engineer….he’s going to come by every single person’s desk, ask what you’re working on, and then ask what help do you need, like “how can I help you work faster”. So we were all terrified, even those of us who meet with him on a regular basis were like “oh my God he’s going to come look at my desk and see what I do, and I have to explain to him my work, and I hope he doesn’t think I’m useless”. And so, he came by, came by each person’s desk, and despite us being so scared, he was so nice. He was very inquisitive and trying to understand what problems [we were facing] and was like, “what help do you need?”. For my team and my group of people, we needed some help with more servers, like GPU servers so you can train more machine learning models. Basically buying out more computers was essentially our problem. And he was like “oh sure, we’ll order a few. How many do you need? We’ll get them ordered for you”. He was just very helpful and it was very interesting. He cut throughout all the noise, you know — typical companies have engineers, manager, CEO — he went straight to engineers and was like “Tell me what’s wrong, I’m going to get it done for you, I’m going to make sure you can go 10x faster”. So it was very incredible, very inspirational to see that, and I take a lot of learning from that in my job now at SwingVision. Obviously our team’s way smaller so it doesn’t totally apply, but I think it was very cool to see that. Basically at the end of the day he ordered Chick-fil-A for everybody so we all had Chik-Fil-A. So that was a good day.
One other story that I should share is, after we had that launch, he invited the entire autopilot team to his house. At the time he had this really big mansion in Hillsborough, and it was ridiculous. Like the driveway was like a mile long, it was just his driveway a mile long to the top of the hill. I guess this is what billionaires do. So anyways, we go there for a party, we’re all there, and he’s giving us a tour of the house…and then he showed us this bar he had that was really cool because it would swivel around literally like a movie…and there was like a secret room in the back where he had his stash of all his drinks and stuff. And then he just had Tequila shots with us, it was just so funny. He’s a funny guy, but he’s awesome, and he was a good manager I think, I mean he was intense, but it was fun. And I could go on with stories, but I’ll stop there I think.
Q: In 2019, you made the decision to leave Tesla and co-found SwingVision. What made you go off to create SwingVision? What was your initial vision for the company?
To start with, the vision has changed many times. When I was originally doing my PhD, that’s when I built the first version of Swing, which was for Apple Watch. So, you put your Apple Watch on your dominant hand, it would track your tennis workout, it would track your strokes, it would count forehand, backhand, it could even detect the speed of your strokes, which was pretty cool. And so the initial vision at that time was I want a way to track my game somehow. And one thing that was really popular with that app was that you could keep score. You could swipe up and down on your watch, and it would mark who won the point. It seems like a very basic thing, but that enables all kinds of statistics about your game. You can suddenly understand which kinds of points you’re winning based on the score. That was the initial vision, I want everyone to experience that, but it turned out that not everyone wants to do that. Not everybody wants to keep score on their watch, it’s kind of annoying.
So we wanted to build…what we realized was, I want everybody to have that end experience of being able to get all that data and understanding exactly how to win, but I don’t want them to have to keep score on their watch. So I was like, how could we make it easier, how could I automate this? That’s when we realized, well, when we use the camera, we can see what’s happening. We know who won the point from the camera. If a human watches the match and can tell who won the point, then AI should be able to do it too, so we should be able to do it that way. So that was what the next vision was like. I actually wanted to just fully automate this thing, let’s keep score for you automatically, let’s call the lines for you automatically, let’s do all that stuff automatically. It sounds great in theory, it’s really hard to do right?
So we realized we could do it with a camera, and I didn’t know anything about how I would build that, I [had] no idea what that technology required, but then once I worked at Tesla for a couple years, I was like ok, I know exactly how to do this thing. I know this like the back of my hand, I know exactly how we’re going to do it. So I just got that confidence working at Tesla working on an even harder problem that I knew I could do it, and so that point it was basically getting to the point where I was still working on Swing — I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I was working on Swing the entire time I was working at Tesla, so it was not healthy.
I was working way too much. I was doing both things at the same time, and basically all my free time was going to Swing, my parents saw this and basically my parents were the ones who pushed me. They basically said, “you’re having so much fun working on Swing. This is your idea. This is a chance for you to do your own thing”. And so they actually really encouraged me to leave Tesla, and work on full time. First of all, it would be better for my health. Also, I had this awesome idea, no one else in the world was doing it, and like I know exactly how to do it, so makes sense — why would I not do that. For me internally it was very hard, I think for my parents it was easy, but for me it was hard because it was like, man, I love working at Tesla, there’s nothing wrong with this job. I absolutely love everyday I go in and I’m having so much fun working on such a cool problem. And I’m so lucky, this is literally my first job out of school,…I feel like I got the lottery.
So I felt so bad leaving Tesla because of that, but I think ultimately, I realized I had a chance to make this incredible company that no one else was doing. The more I thought about it, I am the perfect person to do this, there’s no other reason. Is it going to succeed if I do it? So I took that chance and the rest is history.
Q: How were you able to establish connections in order to get your company out there (e.g. Australian Ocean, Apple)?
A: All of those things happened over time, like I didn’t have those connections when I first started out. I think when I first started out, I just had connections to a few people in the Bay Area who have started companies before, so that helped obviously in terms of raising some initial money. The James Blake and Andy Roddick is actually a very good story — so that one, a friend of mine from high school went on to play professional tennis, he was really good. His physio was a doctor at Kaiser in San Jose has a company called CrampsAway, so CrampsAway is this solution that you swirl in your mouth and it takes away your cramps in 15 seconds. A lot of professional players use this and depend on it, and I got introduced to that doctor. That doctor was like woah, the face of CrampsAway is James Blake, do you want to meet him? So he was really nice, and he introduced me to James Blake, so I flew down to San Diego. This was while I was still working at Tesla by thew ay. So I flew down to San Diego and I met with James Blake, and then I pitched him my vision of SwingVision, which was using the camera to do everything. He just loved it right away, and he was our first investor actually.
At that point, we were trying to think, can we get another professional tennis player on? And he was like, I’m good friends with Andy Roddick. So then he invited me to Texas, where he was doing this exhibition match in Texas, and it was probably the most surreal moment I’ve ever had in my life, but I basically walk in with James into the locker room, the locker room where they’re just hanging out before the exhibition match, and then Andy Roddick walks in, and then Jim Creer walks in, and then John Mackinroe walks in, and I met all of them and I was just starstruck, like oh my God, what is going on right now? Why am I this random dude with these four tennis players in a locker room right now? So I definitely felt the imposter syndrome more than I’ve ever had in my life. Anyways, I shook hands with all of them, John Mannecker was really funny, “Swupnil, I don’t hear that every day”…I actually pitched to all of them. John Mannecker wasn’t that interested, he’s just like “I don’t know about this tech thing”, and then Jim Creer was actually super nice,…he was actually very interested but ended up not investing because he doesn’t have that much experience with investing. But Andy was the one who was really interested, and he’s a really prolific real estate investor. He’s invested a lot around the country in real estate, he’s invested in other startups (I didn’t even know this, but he’s actually invested in this cookie delivery startup in TX and a bunch of different startups), so he was really impressed by us, really inspired by our team. And I think what sold him actually was really funny — so at the end of that day, he had to leave the locker room to catch his flight back to North Carolina, and he couldn’t find his phone….James tried calling it, it wasn’t answering, so his phone’s somewhere there in the locker room but he can’t find it and he literally has to catch a flight right now, and needs to leave right now. So I was like, wait, if you log into iCloud on my laptop, I can play a sound on your phone. And he couldn’t believe it. He was like, is that a thing that is possible? Because these are tennis players, they’re not necessarily tech savvy. So for me, this was obvious, because find my iPhone has existed for [a long time]. But anyways, he didn’t know that, so I logged in, he literally logs in — it’s crazy, I can see all of his devices, I can see Brooklyn Decker’s iPhone, it’s all on my laptop right now. It’s so weird, and then I ping it and it’s there in the corner of the room, and he finds it. And then he comes up to me, and he’s like, “are you on Venmo? I will Venmo you $50K right now. I’ll do the investment right now”. He didn’t literally Venmo me, but it was really funny, and then he went home, and we talked a little bit after that, and then he invested. But pretty funny story. My tech skills were useful for once, and I probably sold that investment. So yeah, that’s how we got to him.
Other things like with Apple, it’s really just been them reaching out to us. Apple does a really good job of going through the store and finding apps that they think really stand out, and so, again, this actually happened when I was in my PhD. When I launched that watch app, someone at Apple reached out to me and said, “hey, we’ve been looking for a really good application of the watch to sports and we love what you did with Swing, can we chat”? So at that time, that’s how we started that relationship. They actually featured us on the Apple website when the Series 4 watch came out, and since then, we’ve just been in touch and I’ve been telling them about the next thing that we’re working on. So they ‘ve been helping push that in. That same guy that I talked to back in 2015, he’s still my main point of contact at Apple, and every time there’s an update coming out, he just pushes it in Apple and pushes it to the marketing team, and see if anybody wants to feature it. It was really all them, they just reached out to us, we didn’t do anything. I think what caught their eye is we just focused on really good design from the beginning. Our first app was really nicely designed, and we’ve just focused on user experience, things like that, so I think that’s stuff that Apple likes. I think if you put in the work out there and you start to get some traction, Apple will notice. They have teams out there dedicated to finding the next best apps. Unfortunately that’s the only way, so you can’t just reach out and send them a bunch of emails, that’s not really going to work. They’re jus toging to have to find you. But I think if you put in the work, and you build a really solid app that a small community of people really really loves, and you have good ratings on the App Store, and you’re listening to them and improving it, then Apple will notice it. So that’s my advice there.
As for the Australian Open and all of that, we went through a startup accelerator, actually, this past summer, called TechStars. They’re an accelerator based out of Melbourne, so I was actually supposed to be in Melbourne last summer, but I didn’t get to go because of the pandemic. That accelerator was hosted in part by Tennis Australia, so that’s how we built that relationship with Tennis Australia. So now Tennis Australia is an investor in SwingVision, and so naturally it went to the Australian Open, so that’s how we did that partnership with the Australian open.
Q: You talked a lot about how you got some initial investment to SwingVision, and I was wondering if you could expand on as a startup, how do you raise funds? Have you talked to VC’s? How does all of that work?
A: We haven’t really talked to VC’s too much yet, that’s typically when you’re trying to raise a larger sum of money. We have talked to a few — the initial impression I’ve gotten is that we’re not a traditional company that they’ve been investing in recently — they’ve been investing a lot in enterprise companies, which are companies building softwares for other companies. So we’re building software for individuals, not companies, so it’s less of an “interesting” market right now. Also, specifically in sports, which not a lot of people consider to be a very large market. I think this can be a venture-backed company eventually, but I think we need more data to prove it to them. So we’ve basically gone the route of getting angel money. Angel money means individual investors…First of all, it’s trying to figure out angel investors in your network, so I would maybe look through LinkedIn and see who’s an Angel Investor, who’s invested in sports, and how can I get to that. Do I have any contact who knows them? Is there somebody who can give me an introduction? Cold emailing almost never works with investing, it’s very rare. It’s this unique thing where, at least in Silicon Valley, you need a warm introduction from somebody. So I was really fortunate that I knew people already who were existing investors, like my dad’s friends, or just people who knew other investors. Certainly a lot of luck there — I think if I wasn’t based in the Bay Area it would be very hard. They made the right introductions to me and I basically told them, this is what I’m working on, we’re trying to raise a little bit of money, are you willing to do a small investment of $25K or $50K? That’s kind of how they did it — a bunch of different people, individuals investing $25, $50K each. THats’s been most of our funding so far. We haven’t really done a single large check of $1M or anything like that. I think we will eventually, probably this summer, because we’re starting to get some good traction now. The other thing that helped was that we had an existing product out there — we had the watch app — so they saw that we did something. We did something that some users liked, osme community users really liked it, Apple really liked it. It wasn’t the final product of what we’re trying to make, but it was at least something that showed that we know how to do: make a product that people love. And I think that’s always really helpful. Because the thing is, a lot of what we did, it didn’t cost us money to do it, I built the app myself. I just coded it in my free time, and didn’t just spend thousands of dollars to make that first app. So if you can get started, there’s a lot of things you can do…to build that first product, and get that initial set of people who like it and give you feedback. And that’s typically going to be enough to raise an initial set of money. If you want to raise a lot more money, you’re going to have to build it out, hire people, but you can go really far without hiring people, especially today with how accessible it is to learn how to code. Anybody can start a business now, which is really exciting.
Q: In terms of entrepreneurship, what would be your biggest piece of advice for someone looking to create their own company?
A: I think, don’t doubt that you can do it, even if you don’t know how to code. I think I should be a good example of this. I had no idea how to code, and totally wasted my undergrad not learning how to code, and it all worked out fine. I was able to pick it up later, I was able to build a company, now this is my life, this is what I do. This is literally my job, just working on this product app. There’s a way to get there, obviously there’s some luck involved along the way. I think the fact that you’re attending this conference means you’re already on the right path. Clearly already have access to good resources here, so you’ve already won the lottery, you’re in a good position. Now it’s just a matter of using that position, the power you have now to teach yourself and go out and do it. And I would say, I don’t know how you guys, I know some of you are working on this stuff in high school, which is crazy to me. But you have a lot of time in college. If you don’t do it now, it’s fine, you’ll have a lot of time then…I just had a lot of fun, but I could have also been working more too. So there’s a lot you can do, and you’ll have plenty of opportunities. I would also say that this isn’t a race — you don’t have to be the first one to do it at the youngest age. You literally have your whole life to do this. You have many times to make mistakes, fail, start again, whatever. I think you shouldn’t think of it in terms of a time thing. It’s just more of, I need to build that experience, I need to go out and do it, I need to have the ambition and motivation to get started. It’s always that initial getting started — once you get started you’re going to start rolling. Don’t hesitate, just try something.
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If you’re interested in downloading SwingVision, visit them at swing.tennis, check out their Intro Deck, or find them on the App Store.
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