 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in the Palo Alto studios for a CUBE conversation. Part of our Western Digital Data Makes Possible series, really looking at a lot of cool applications. At the end of the day, right? Data's underneath everything. There's infrastructure and storage that's holding that. But it's much more exciting to talk about the applications. We're excited to have somebody who's kind of on the cutting edge of a next chapter of something you're probably familiar with. He's Steven Webster and he is the founder and CEO of Asense. Steven, great to see you. Likewise, likewise. So you guys are taking, I think everybody's familiar with Fitbits is probably one of the earliest kind of iterations of kind of a biometric feedbacks for get more steps right at the end of the day, get more steps. And you guys are really taking it to the next level, which is, I think you call it connected coaching. So I wonder if you can give everyone kind of a quick overview and then we'll dig into it a little bit. Yeah, well I think we're all very familiar now with connected fitness and hindsight as a category appeared and emerged as, like you say, first it was activity trackers. We saw those trackers primarily move into smartwatches and the category's got life on it, life on it left to see companies like Flywheel and Peloton. We all know Peloton now, we're starting to make the fitness equipment itself, the treadmill, the bike connected. So there's plenty of growth in that category. But our view is that tracking isn't teaching and counting and cheering isn't coaching. And so we see this opportunity for this new category that's emerging alongside connected fitness. And that's what we call connected coaching. Connected coaching. So the biggest word obviously instead of fitness tracker to connected coaching is coaching. So you guys really think that the coaching piece of it is core and are you targeting kind of high end athletes or is this for the person that just wants to take a step up from their fitness tracker? Where in kind of the coaching spectrum are you guys targeting? I saw your shoe dog, Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, a book on the shelf behind you there. And his co-founder, Bill Burman has a great quote that's immortalized in Nike offices and stores around the world if you have a body, you're an athlete. So that's how we think about our audience is our customer base is anyone that wants to unlock their athletic potential. I think if you look at elite sports and elite athletes and Olympic athletes, they've had access to this kind of technology, going back to the Sydney Olympics. So we're really trying to consumerize that technology and make it available to the people that want to be those athletes, but aren't those athletes. You might call it the weekend warrior or just the committed athlete that would identify identify themselves according to a sport that they play. So there's different parts of coaching, right? One is kind of knowing the techniques so that you've got kind of best practices by which to try to practice. And then there's actually coaching to those techniques of people practice, right? It's practice doesn't make perfect. It's perfect practice. That makes perfect as we all know, right? So what are you doing? Are you or how do you observe the athlete? How do you communicate with the athlete? How do you make course corrections to the athlete to move it from simply tracking to coaching? Yeah, so I mean, it starts with you have to see everything and miss nothing. So you need to have eyes on the athlete. And there's really two ways we think you can do that. One is you're using cameras and computer vision. I think most of us are familiar with technologies like Microsoft Connect, where an external camera can allow you to see the skeleton and the biomechanics of the athlete. And that's a big thing for us. We talk about the from to being from just measuring biometrics. How's your heart rate? How much exertion are you making? How much power are you laying down? We need to move from biometrics to biomechanics. And that means looking at technique and posture and movement and timing. So we're all familiar with cameras, but we think the more important innovation is the emergence of smart clothing or smart apparel and the ability to take sensors that would have been discrete hard components and infuse those sensors into smart apparel. So we've actually created a reference design for a motion capture sensor. And a network of those sensors infused in your apparel allows us to recover your skeleton, but as easily as pulling on a shirt or shorts. So you've actually come up with a reference design. So obviously begs the question, you're not working with any one particular apparel manufacturer. You really want to come up with a standard and publish a standard by which anyone can really define, capture and record body movements and to convert those movements from the clothing into a mob. No, that's exactly it. We have no desire to be in the apparel industry. We have no desire to unseat Nike Adidas or Under Armour. We're actually licensing our technology royalty free. We just want to accelerate the adoption of smart apparel. And I think the thing about smart apparel is no one's going to walk into Nike Town and say, where's the smart apparel department? I don't want dumb apparel anymore. There needs to be a compelling reason to buy, digitally enhanced apparel. And we think one of the most compelling reasons to buy that is so that we can be coached in the sport of our choice. Right. And then you're starting out with rowing, I believe, is your first vote, right? And so the other really important piece of it is if people don't have smart apparel or the smart apparel is not there yet, or maybe even when they have smart apparel, there's a lot of opportunities to bring in other data sources beyond just that single set. And that's absolutely key. There's a, you know, when I think about biomechanics, that's what goes in, but there's also what comes out. Good form isn't just aesthetic. Good form is in any given sport. Good form and good technique is about organizing yourself so that you perform most efficiently and perform most effectively. So yeah, you correctly pointed out, we've chosen rowing as one of the sports. You know, rowing is all about technique. It's all about posture. It's all about form. If you've got two rowers who essentially have the same strength, the same cardiovascular capability, the one with the best technique will make the boat move faster. But for the sport of rowing, we also get a tremendous amount of telemetry coming off the rowing machine itself, a force curve. We can, on every single pull of that handle, we can see how you're laying down that force. And we can read those force curves. We can look at them and tell things like, are you using your legs enough? Are you opening your back too late or too early? Are you dominant on your arms? Where you shouldn't be? Is your technique breaking down at higher stroke rates but is good at lower stroke rates? So it's a good place for us to start. We can take all of that knowledge and information and coach the athlete. And then when we get down to more marginal gains, we can start to look at their posture and form through a technology like Smarter Parlor. So there's the understanding what they're doing and understanding the effort relative to best practices, but there's also within their journey, right? Maybe today they're working on cardio, tomorrow they're working on form, the next day they're working on sprint. So the actual best practices in coaching a sport or a particular activity, how are you addressing that? How are you bringing in that expertise beyond just the biometric information? So yeah, I mean, we don't think technology is replacing coaches. We just think that coaches that use technology will replace coaches that don't. And so it's not an algorithm that's trying to coach you. We're taking the knowledge and the expertise of world-class coaches in the sport that athletes want to follow. And we're taking that coaching and essentially think of it as putting it into a learning management system. And then for any given athlete, just think about the way a coach coaches. If you walked into a rowing club, I don't know if you've ever rode before or not, but a coach will look at you, they'll sit you on a rowing machine or sit you on a boat and just look at you and decide what's the one next thing I'm going to teach you that's going to make you better? And really that's the art of coaching right there. It's looking for that next improvement, that next marginal gain. So it's not just about being able to look at the athlete, but then decide where's the improvement that we want to coach the athlete? And then the whole sports psychology of like how do you coach these improvement? How do you coach these improvement? Because there's the whole hammer versus carrot. That's another thing, you need to learn how the individual athlete responds, what types of things they respond better to. Do they like to get yelled at? Do they like to be encouraged? Do they like it at the beginning? Do they like it at the end? So you guys incorporate some of these kind of softer coaching techniques into the application? So our team have all coached sport. At the university level typically. So we care a lot and we think a lot about the role of the coach. The coach's job is to attach technique to the athlete's body. It's to take what's in your head and what you've seen done before and give that to the athlete. So absolutely we're thinking about how do you establish the correct coaching cues? How do you positively reinforce? Not just negatively reinforce. Is that person a kinesthetic learner where they need to feel how to do it correctly? Are they a more visual learner where they respond better to metaphor? Now one of the really interesting things with a digital coach is the more people we teach, the better we can get at teaching because we can start to use some of the techniques of having large data sets and looking at what's working and what's not working. In fact the same technology we would use in marketing or advertising to segment an audience and target content. We can take that same technology and apply it to how we think about coaching. So is your initial target to help active coaches that are looking for an edge or are you trying to go for the weekend warrior if you will? Where's kind of your initial market? So for rowing we've actually, we've zeroed in on three athletes where we have a point of view that essentially can be of help so I'll tell you who the three are. First is the high school athlete who wants to go to college and get recruited. So we're selling to the parent as much as we're selling to the student. That's an easy one. The math board, that's an easy one. Just show up and be tall. Well show up and be tall but also what's your 2K time? How fast can you row 2,000 meters? That's a pretty important benchmark. So for that high school athlete, that's a very specific audience where we're bringing very specific coaches. In fact the coach that we're launching with to that market, his story is one of a high school to college to national team and he just came back from the Olympics in Rio. The second athlete we're looking at is the person who never wants to go on the water but likes that indoor rowing machine so it's a crossfit athlete or it's an indoor rower. And again, we have a very specific coach who coaches indoor rowing. And then the third target customer is... What's that person's motivation? Just to get a better time? So interesting, in that community there's a lot of competitiveness. So yes, but I said I want to get good at this. I want to get better at this. Maybe enter local competitions either inside your gym or your box or this weekend in Boston we have just had one of the largest indoor world. It was the world indoor rowing championships, the Crash Bees. So there's these huge indoor rowing competitions. So that's a very competitive athlete. And then finally we have what would be the master's roar or the person for whom rowing is. There's lots of people who don't identify themselves as a rower but they'll get on a rowing machine two or three times a week whether it's in their gym or whether it's at home. So your focus is strength, conditioning, working out but staying injury free and just fun and fitness. And that's I think Peloton have validated the existence of that market and we see a lot of people wanting to do that with a rowing machine not with a bike. And I think most of these people will or will not have access to kind of a primary coach in this augments it or does this become their primary coach based on kind of where they are in their athletic life? I think it's both. And certainly we're able to support both. I think when you're that high school roar that wants to make college you're probably a member of either your school rowing crew or your member of a club but you spend a tremendous amount of time on an erg the indoor rowing machine and your practice is unsupervised. So even though you know what you should be doing there's nobody there in that moment watching you log log those 10,000 meters. One of our one of our advisors actually is a two times Olympic world medalist from Team Great Britain, Helen Glover. And Helen, I have a great quote from Helen where she calculated that for the Rio Olympics in the final of the Rio Olympics every stroke she took in the final she'd taken 16,000 strokes in practice which talks to the importance of the quality of that practice and making sure it's supervised. So yeah. It's a bigger take on the old 10,000, 10,000 rocks. Right, it's 10,000 hours or 10,000 per stroke. So kind of looking forward, right? What were some of the biggest challenges you had to overcome? And then as you look forward, right? Sensors are getting more ubiquitous and there's 3D goggles and there'll be outside end sensors for that whole world. And kind of how do you see this world evolving in kind of the immediate short term for you guys to have success and then just down the road a year or two? That's a really good question. I think in the short term, I think it's incumbent on us to just stay really focused in a single community and get that product right for them. So it's more about introducing people to the idea. This is a category creation exercise. So we need to go through that adoption curve of find the early adopters, find that early majority. And before we take that technology anywhere towards a mass market, we need to nail the experience for that early majority. And we think that's largely going to be in the sport of rowing or with roars. The cross participation studies in rowing are pretty strong for other sports, a very large, typically somewhere between 60 to 80% of roars, weight lift, bike, run and take part in yoga, whether yoga for mobility and flexibility. So there's immediately adjacent markets available to us where the roars are already in those markets. So we're going to stick there for a while and really just nail the experience down. And is it a big reach to go from tracking to coaching? I mean, these people are all super data focused, right? They're all, like I said, the beauty of rowing, as you mentioned, it's all about your 2K period, right? It's one single metric. And they're running and they're biking and they're doing all kinds of database things. But you're trying to get them to think really more in terms of the coaching versus just the tracking. Is that been hard for them to accept? What do you have any kind of feel for the adoption or the other thing I would imagine? I always spend all this money for these expensive clothing. Is this kind of a killer app that I can now justify having? You know, maybe fancier connected clothes rather than just simply tracking my time. I mean, I think, talking about pricing in the first instance, what we're finding with consumers that we've been testing with is if you compare the price of a shirt to the price of a shirt without sensors, it's really the wrong value proposition. The question we ask is, how much money are you spending on your CrossFit box membership or your Equinox gym membership? The cost of a personal trainer is easily upwards of $75 to $100 for an hour. And now we can give you 24-7 access to that personal coaching. You'll pay the same in a year as you would pay in an hour for coaching. So I think for price, it's someone who's already thinking about paying for personal coaching and personal training. That's really what the pricing market is. That's interesting. We see that time and time again. We just, we did an interview with Nitescope. They have security robots. Basically, it's the same thing. Their price comparisons was the hourly rate for human counterpart. We can give it to you for a much less hourly rate. And now you don't just get it for an hour, right? You get it for as long as you want to use it. Well, it's exciting times. Do you have any, you guys in the market, in terms of when you go on GA, do you have a feel for? Any minute now. Any minute now. We have people using the product, giving us feedback. My phone switched off. It's the quietest it's been for a while. But we have people using the product right now, giving us feedback on a product. We're really excited. One in three people, when we ask the metric that matters for us is net promover score. How likely would someone recommend a sense to someone else? One in three athletes are giving us a 10 out of 10. So we feel really good about the experience. Now we're just focused on making sure we have enough content in place from our coaches. So general availability is anytime soon. Good, it was very exciting. Yeah, we're excited. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes of your day and I actually know some rovers, so we'll have to look into the application. Great, introduce us. All right, good stuff. You Steven West, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're having a CUBE conversation and we're talking about those studios. Thanks for watching.