A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words: Especially for "Real World" Businesses

A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words: Especially for "Real World" Businesses

This is a follow-up to a recent article I posted to LinkedIn about the OpenSpace origin story. As I mentioned then, I don't believe that any company has one singular origin: rather, a strong company pulls together a few threads into a coherent whole.

That last article was about the intellectual underpinnings of OpenSpace. This one is more personal. It has to do with pains I experienced in my career that I then saw the men and women of the construction industry experiencing every day. Those personal experiences of mine, and the empathy I felt because of them, is one reason we started the company.

It was the "I feel your pain!" motivation -- the desire to solve something you see someone else struggling with, the desire to cure a pain you know all too well.


The first company I helped start (David Merrill and I were the co-founders) was a consumer electronics hardware company. It was fun! But hardware is hard, manufacturing is hard, and signing up to build a real, physical thing has some real risks and scary moments. Here's one story that sticks with me to this day, and one that ended up motivating me to help start OpenSpace.

In the world of consumer electronics, schedule is everything. You absolutely had to have your product ship in Q4 so that consumers would buy it as part of the holiday shopping season. Miss that date, and you are dead. Of course, if your product sucks, you are also dead. So every year, you are in a race to make something great under a totally strict, 100% unforgiving deadline. And the deadline really is unforgiving -- we sold our products in retail stores like Toys R Us. They have "drop dead" dates where your product must arrive at their warehouses, otherwise -- you won't be put on the shelf. And then you are dead.

All told: lots of opportunity to be dead.

In that consumer electronics world, if you are at any bit of scale, you are manufacturing your products overseas. At that time (2009ish?) that meant, usually, China. China, being very far away from the US, is in a very different time zone. So that means lots of late-night phone calls, difficult to decipher emails, and general craziness as you try to get your product finished and onto the assembly line.

One day, we got a sample in the mail of one of the pieces of our product. The way it (often) works is that the factory will send you a "golden sample" that you sign off on, and say, "OK, that's good, please proceed to mass production (or at least another phase in the road to mass production)."

We got our sample and it was ... not right. Not good enough. We had been back and forth with the factory about the potential issue, and they were essentially saying, "approve this, or we have to start over." Starting over, in that case, would have added 8-12 weeks to the schedule, which meant missing our ship date, which means: we are dead.

Here was the problem. We had a charging dock for our product -- a tray the devices would sit in to recharge.

This is is what it looked like when assembled -- it's the the black thing in the top left, with the six slots.

The charging dock is that big thing with the six pockets on top left.

Here's how that dock came together (pardon my crude drawings, I must admit I didn't spend a lot of time on them). The dock consisted of two main injection-molded plastic pieces, that would be screwed together with 4 screws, like this:

The dock was held together with 4 screws that went into 4 screw bosses.

When we got the sample, the top piece was bowing. It wasn't flush.

The bowing was on the actual sample was not as extreme as I am drawing it here, but it was bad.

It looked bad. It looked weird. It wouldn't fit nicely in our packaging. And it made the user have to "force" the devices into their charging slots. Could we accept it, and would the product still work? Yes, maybe, but ... I just ... thought it sucked.

But what we were supposed to do?

Rock, meet hard place.

Dave and I didn't know what to do.

Well, I was headed to the factory that week to deal with a bunch of other issues, and like a true pro, I ... punted on thinking about this issue for a few days.

Fast-forward, after a long flight, I'm at the factory, and I'm walking through what you can think of as a prototype assembly line: basically, a small set up where the factory engineers and operations people are showing the workers how to assemble the product, and in so doing, debugging and improving the assembly process so it's fast and issue-free for the actual mass production phase.

I happen to walk by the charging dock assembly area. I see that the workers aren't just screwing the dock together, they are actually using a little bit of adhesive to glue the the top and bottom parts together, after they place the screws. That adhesive takes a bit of time to cure, so the workers put the dock in a jig that has two clamps to hold it together while the adhesive sets:

Oh man. Well, that's why it's bowing! We're squeezing the dock on the left and right sides, which forces the top to pop out under the pressure!

I asked one of the engineers, "Uh. hey, can we just ... put a third clamp in the middle of the dock for this curing step?"

Well, guess what. Bowing problem solved. No need to redesign the injection molds for the dock pieces. No death-inducing hit to the schedule.

I did NOT feel great about this, by the way. Why did I need to be there, to happen to walk by this step, to fix this potentially lethal problem? I am not a mechanical engineer. It's not like I'm some genius, and only I could have thought of this solution. And it wasn't like the factory folks were bad: they were motivated and hard-working.

It's just that we lacked shared context. All those emails, calls about this issue -- we were talking past each other.

That night, I remember wishing to myself, "God, if I could just teleport into the factory -- if any of our team could do that -- this stupid bowing problem would never have happened. If we just had ... pictures of everything being done, like a really, truly complete set of pictures, so it felt like teleportation ... so much would be BETTER about this freaking industry!"


Fast forward a number of years. Dave and I had gone on to sell that company. At the new company, we began to serve the men and women of the construction industry. And man: I saw them experience that same pain I had, in spades, far worse than me: just lacking the ability to see what is going on their projects, from anywhere. So many issues being argued about in phone calls, lengthy reports, so much waste and conflict. If these disparate groups of stakeholders could just teleport into the project and see what was going on, I knew in my bones that their lives would improve. I felt their pain!


Fast forward a couple more years. Michael Fleischman calls me up one day to talk about a project he and Philip DeCamp are working on -- the ability to quickly and comprehensively visually document any space, indoors or out, with a 360 camera. I remember listening carefully to what they were building, and then telling Mike, "You know who could really use that. People who work in real, physical reality. People who build buildings."

"Trust me."

That idea went on to become OpenSpace.

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