Kenny Hawk, Mojio: Connected vehicle data, IoT, and automotive technology

welcome to another Co wisom bu we have Kenny Hawk with us today Kenny is COO of mojio huge uh experience uh very interesting experiences had a couple of exits I've been in the semiconductor realm has been in the uh self-driving realm nowadays traveled the world um lives in California beautiful California yeah Vancouver right um uh half the team is in Van half of the team is in

Vancouver and I'm just north of La in a cool place called Hidden Hills right must be a a gated community or something it is it's a gated horse Community good guess for kids well Kenny is really successful and yeah I'm checking his career here just super impressive um so we're gonna jump straight into it can you tell me a bit more about yourself your career in less

than two minutes and let's talk about mojo as well yeah yeah absolutely Charles so you I grew up in Detroit Michigan so uh cars I guess you'd say are in my blood but I never wanted to work inside a factory I studied electrical engineering was always tinkering around with transistors and building kits and wires and batteries and fuses and uh did electrical engineering at Michigan and then

started in the chip industry doing mixed signal chips and then eventually I got forced into outside sales funny story about that we could talk about in a minute um and then uh worked in Singapore for a a company that was spun out of HP Singapore and then got lucky and was accepted to Stanford and did my uh MBA there and really was focused on starting my first

company which I did right after uh Business School uh built a company called iigo from uh writing a business plan in a piece of paper to eventually raising Venture money going public in 99 um still owned almost 40% of the business when we went public and then I got acquired three companies and then we sold uh towards the end of the of the of the market crash

there and then um it picked up and moved to Switzerland to build a GPS chip company doing really low power GPS chips so they can go inside smartphones which we all take for granted today um and then um XL Partners uh who had been been known for a while had a early stage technology in Germany they wanted to commercialize to do active antenna arrays for big mobile

base stations you see the cell phone Towers out there and the concept was to steer the beam to where the users are and dial the power up or down depending on how many people were in a particular cell and so uh 60 Engineers 120 patents raised $80 million and my company eventually got acquired by Katrine and then later Ericson and then um move back to the States

so my kids can go to US schools in paloalto and and Las scus in Northern California and um knew a few of the investors in mojio which was focused on um basically connecting cars using all the data in vehicles to help people save money be safer or save time and the company was struggling and they wanted somebody to come in and and see if they could pivot

it and make something out of it supposed to be a two-year turnaround and eight years later we're almost there so that's that's a quick summary Charles and you know plenty of twists and turns in between and obviously made a lot of mistakes along the way that uh I'd be happy to help other entrepreneurs uh avoid but it seems that you started your career straight up as a

Founder as a CEO were you built that way didn't it ever occur to you to go get a normal 95 job you know it's funny my my grandfather was an entrepreneur um yeah I'd say a failed entrepreneur uh you know he tried a couple different things invented one of the first seat belts for cars you know in the car industry wouldn't adopt it um did a few other inventions and and eventually lost this company kind of a broken entrepreneur um so it was in our blood U my mom was an entrepreneur and I was always you know I sold skateboards when I was 12 it was always trying to find some way to make money to to kind of climb our way out of Detroit but yeah I was in my my first job out

of college though was I you know was you had no cash and no resources I did take a job as a design engineer uh in the chip industry did that until I was able to go back to to business school and start my first company but yeah it's been in my blood since I was a a little boy then your first and I can't imagine doing anything else today yeah sorry the connection cut here but um your first uh startup how hard was it uh what challenges did you face and what lessons did you learn out of it that's a great question so my first startup was Focus on uh Power Products so rechargeable batteries charging devices or mobile phones and laptop computers and my angel investor who is also an angel investor in Kinko's

copies which eventually got bought by FedEx um he you know he really liked the U the sector he liked the space he agreed to fund me he did 100% of my initial Angel funding and I had actually never met him in person but we would communicate every week by facts and about halfway through the startup Capital you know just everything was going wrong it just so difficult

I was ready to give up and I uh you know sheepishly called them on the phone instead of faing them and said hey this is not going to work feel terrible that we've wasted half the startup Capital already I'll send the other half back find a way to pay you back your initial capital and he's like what are you talking about you're making such great progress didn't

they teach you anything at Stanford I'm like what are you talking about all these problems he's like no no you're looking at the wrong way every problem means you're getting one step closer to a solution if it's this hard then it's going to be harder for somebody else to do it so if you figure it out it's going to be valuable so he said stop focusing on

the problems and just send me a a fact at the end of every week on Friday one good thing that you you know one problem that you knocked down or one thing you accomplished and did that for about 10 weeks and then I finally realized we've got something here and uh started to grow and things started to click and then he started to bump into New Opportunities

we bumped into our first OEM opportunity with NEC uh soon after that and you know he was right you know every startup has challenges um and you know depending on how difficult the problem is if you solve it then it's that much harder for the next competitor to come to come after you so you know don't be I guess the advice would be don't get discouraged by

problems try to figure out how to knock them down and just keep on making progress and say the other thing is you having the right kind of initial investor if that was a normal VC you would they have been that patient early on was that the right kind of investor for a company at that early stage you having an angel a patient Angel as the first investor

you know I got really lucky there um and he was you know his name is John Mel he was just incredibly helpful as an entrepreneur and and uh and an investor he also made a ton of money his 50 Grand I think he made a few Millions so he he he was very happy with his return there there you go and survived the do boom and bust uh and were acquired in around 2000ish how did that acquisition feel did it change uh your wealth your life and what was your mentality the days and the weeks after could you not like stand it place and when to start another startup yeah great question um you know I never I I did I grew up poor you know relatively poor we got to a nice neighborhood by

high school so you know you know when I was you I saw those numbers you you take the number of shares you go public you see the share price and you calculate that you you try just try not to spend too much time thinking about it because you're not liquid you can't sell everything day one um and you know you can only eat so many steaks a day so I didn't really think about it a lot um and I just it was focused on the team the business our customers and just kind of continuing to we felt like we were just getting started really ramping the business so it didn't luckily I didn't spend like that I had quite a few friends that exercised early to reduce their tax burden paid the tax bill and

by the time uh the the you know the the year was over their stock was below what they had paid in the early tax exercise so they actually spent their own money for something that was you potentially worthless so luckily I wasn't in that boat you know I did buy a nice car um and uh that was really the only extravagant thing I did what car was it uh Carrera 911 oh nice yeah the best um Driving Experience that is especially in these days then you went well when I went in to buy it the guy wouldn't uh you wouldn't spend any time with me I finally had to just talk to the owner who would like I'm buying it today like what do you mean to like I'm I'm going to drive out of

here with it uh already figured out which dealership had the one I wanted and it finally gave you know let me take it and I I did dry the hell out of that thing right just like Gates uh did in 93 in the Microsoft days 95 Gat speeding on the the highway risk young risk-taking Gates um very cool you founded other very significant companies after that but

I want to fast forward to Mojo because Mojo seems like a behemoth to me explain to us what Mojo does and the potential behind it sure so every vehicle uh produces a lot of data on what's going on with the engine where the vehicle is how it's driving how the how the driver is behaving as they're driving it a lot of that data is stuck in the car so what Mojo does is take that data from the vehicle pumps it up to the cloud where we analyze it and look for things where there might be action uh that needs to be taken so you know good example is something's going wrong with the engine um you know normally you just have a check engine light the the driver doesn't know what that means we have

you know lots of detail and and insights into what that actually means whether you need to take care of it yourself like a loose gas cap or it's a um problem that will become a bigger problem a good example would be a thermostat where if you take care of it today it's a $150 repair pretty much anywhere North America but if you ignore it uh you'll end

up blowing your engine even now you've got a $7,000 engine rebuild so you know the dumb check engine light doesn't tell you any of that it's just you know a lot of people ignore it because they don't know how how serious it is so that's a good example what's going on with your vehicle um the other is uh especially if you have family or employees that are

driving you have you know really good drivers and you have some pretty risky drivers everyone thinks they're a good driver but the nice thing about um our platform is we could score every single driver on every single drive from zero to 100 100 is perfect zero means you could either in accident or you're going to have one soon and we can give you give that um you

know that family or that employee coaching on where they were driving wrecklessly and how they could reduce the risk which you know saves lives saves money you know reduces amount of time you're laid up in a hospital or not able to work and uh it's funny you know if you if you um survey people they will all say they're better than the average driver but if everybody

was better than the average driver that wouldn't be possible that's the whole definition of average some are above and some are below and what the insurance companies um you know found is that there's about 30% of the drivers are really bad and risky and the other 70% have to pay extra to cover all those bad drivers and so we've also been doing is you know working with

the large insurers to help them figure out ahead of time who's driver and who's a bad driver so they can price appropriately and for the bad drivers they could help coach them and encourage them to do things differently and you know the biggest predictor of an accident is Harsh breaking if you're doing a lot of harsh breaking it's just a matter of time before you're going to

hit whatever it is you're too close to the company does a progs 100 Mil a year nowadays uh what's percentage of that is in Insurance what percentage is uh helping companies get the car data itself and not the driving uh data but the the car data itself how do you segment that yeah um you we're not publicly stating our Revenue but one of our customers is uh

generated over a quarter billion in profit using our platform to connect up over a million vehicles and um they're doing that from a couple different use cases one is just where are my vehicles and are they ready to go whether you're a business or you know a parent thinking about the car being safe for the kid or and owner making sure that the uh Roofing um professional

is in the truck and out making money for them and we're at the job site versus maybe at the bar or some other place um the second is saving money on everything related to the car so you know there's a problem catching it early and and taking care of it early it's just like you know you're you you're a mountain biker staying fit you know if you don't put the effort in up front you try to solve the problem down the road when you haven't taken good care of your body the repairs are more expensive or you die same thing for a car you take care of it early it is much less expensive and then you know the third is um for insurance you know they're really looking at pricing right and reducing risk

and saving lives and U you know our data helps with all of that and one of the things that we do is also have uh OEM grade crash detection so we know that there's a crash you know the severity of the crash and then we use a company called rapid SOS to make sure we get help to the right location from the right um from the right emergency responder and what happens a lot of times you know especially in more remote areas or you know even in the US with some of the bigger highways there'll be a crash you have a phone call you say you're on you know I75 southbound well you're actually we Northbound uh they send the repair or the ambulance from the location uh that's in the north and they should

have sent one from the south so they got the wrong oh going to the wrong location and that's life and death kind of stuff especially for the serious crashes so um you getting that exact you where the car was headed where is it exactly which car is it how severe was the accident and then getting the right help to them um is is helping save lives every

week so that's it's cool when you can do something not only you know makes money saves money but also uh affects actual people's lives and say you want to have an auto maker um work with you what would be the nature of the deal because it seems like it's a s but yeah there's also like some uh Consulting work at place so give us a bit of a better view on the nature of the deal itself yeah great question and and when when we started we very much just focus on the consumer um you know to get real scale we went through T-Mobile to to be their provider for connected and that helped us really scale and to get to the OEM we thought you we need a big brother you know as as a

young startup you know how do you possibly do business with the OEM and they're notoriously difficult to do business with big slow lots of processes and you hate that as an entrepreneur but you know I'd also say I appreciate it because the OEM is making a life and death machine the reason some of those processes are so heavy and so so so complicated and why they care

so much about you know quality and reliability is that you know something happens and you're driving 80 miles an hour and uh you know something doesn't work you can it can go bad really fast so we we found a big brother so one of the first um strategic decisions we was was to find a big brother we picked Bosch they're the largest Cher One auto supplier in

the world convince them to invest in us uh give us access to some of their technology um and that really you know jumped us up to a whole another League when we're talking to the OEM and have you know the fact that Bosch had invested and chosen us gave us a lot more credibility um they also you know helped kind of show us the way of how to do business with the oems because that's all they do is business with oems and and then the second thing we did was hire a former CTO from General Motors who had been inside the big beast and knew all the things they were doing right and wrong and where they needed help so to have an Insider on our team um it was critical and it it helped

us uh win our first OEM which is uh Audi uh you know great German brand that cares a lot about quality and the project in particular we did for them was as 3G networks were getting shut down around the world all the cars that had 3G connections would no longer work and so every every single system in the car that depended on 3G including your emergency SOS

would no longer work so imagine you know Charles you bought your grandmother Audi because it's safe Grandma's in a crash he's hitting the button and nothing's happening she's not going to be mad at tel cell in Mexico she's going to be mad at you know Volkswagen or Audi the company or Mercedes the company should bought the car from so that's the the first uh scale deployment we

did with an oem was to solve that problem and we were able to um do a complete endend system that was faster better half the cost of the original system and uh you know get that live um much quicker than they could have you know ripped and replaced the old system in the car and the second OEM we launched with a Volkswagen uh launched in less than six weeks so from go to launch was six weeks the second one and now we can do them in just a few weeks seems like a genius master plan one that would definitely require patients because it's multifaceted so yeah taking mental notes here um the wirel they also forc they also forced us to go to do ISO so in parallel with all that development we had to

go and get ISO certified and you we're happy that we did now because it gives you some good that's not easy man it was hard yeah the wireless carriers what's in it for them it's like more data is that what you suggest them or well you the wireless carriers um you know basically connected everybody you know North America Europe you know most of Asia everyone has at

least one phone some areas have more than one phone per per person you might have a a personal phone and work phone so you can't really sell any more phones and they're just stealing share from each other and you know they're hooked on that you know crack cocaine or heroin of subsidizing handsets every two years so it's kind of a you know they're running on a treadmill

and it's hard to grow just doing the same thing so they all have spent billions in spectrum and billions building a network including some of the equipment that we had uh built in my company in Germany um and so they were very interested in iot so internet of things and connecting things other than the phone uh but each of them had a lot of difficulty you know

really getting to scale and you getting going there it's just and you have such a profitable successful business in Mobile phones it's really hard you know it doesn't matter if you're T-Mobile or AT&T or or um or Sprint at the time or Verizon just had difficulty Verizon went and did a bunch of Acquisitions to to build that business spend a few billion to do that um and

T-Mobile had decided that of all the different things that connect probably makes sense to connect your car it's your second most expensive investment other than your house a lot of data it's moving around so the wireless network could be valuable there whereas a house is just stationary you could use a wire Network to do that and so the the concept was you see if you can help

jump start an iot business and we helped take them from zero to a quarter billion a profit in just uh two and a half years so it was super successful was the most successful iot launch we did the entire project we came up with the the use cases designed the the UI the ux uh built the platform built the app app did the helped the hardware manufacturer

with the firmware even helped uh the sales machine of T-Mobile which is our first carer we launched with figure out how to sell it uh at retail and um again super successful program you have 12 more minutes sure all right um the future of cars uh you have a self driving vehicle when are you going to partner with these folks what would be the implications for your

company yeah great question you know um you know the car companies are are spending all this money on autonomous connected and electric you know doing just one of those initiatives would suck a ton of R&D money um many of them are trying to do all three in parallel and and over the past couple years you've seen it you know there's overhype on autonomous everyone thought it'd be

here by now it's not quite here it's getting closer but not quite here here I mentioned our family we have a model X that my wife and I uh use um you know it's full self-driving is not quite here but it's getting pretty good and my guess is it's still another four or five years before I'd feel comfortable completely taking the hands off with the whole family

in the car with just me maybe I do it a bit more often but the whole family um I think we're still not there yet um so to do that you need great Maps you need real-time data you've got to have uh all the sensor information you need billions of miles of real driving so you see what real people did in specific situations you the one of the ma major challenges besides the sensors and there's the whole debate on lar versus radar versus cameras you know what is going to be the right mix of sensors at the right cost to get enough information in real time to make smart decisions and the second is you know how can you get your model uh good enough uh to handle you know all those crazy situations you

see a lot of in the news you know a fire truck is parked you know sideways in the road and you know the self-driving car doesn't recognize it because it's a it's something they've never seen before and you know a human can tell it right away but you know the intelligent systems um still a ways away from doing that so um where we could play and will play in that is you know we've got uh terabytes of data real world data from all kinds of cars all different year making years make and models in three different geographies around the world all that real world data what happened in the real world under conditions um we've launched our video telematics platform so we can process video now as well so what's the driver doing what's going

on outside the car what's going on inside the car um that will also help um you know as you figure out when to have the human uh interject there so it's you know it's exciting time um I think between connected electric and and uh autonomous connected has made the most progress so far electric is second just based on all the government incentives and all the uh push

on climate change and in having a more planet friendly uh fuel system and autonomous will come after that um unless it's things like airports and Robo taxis where you have a you can remove some of those extraneous variables and be on a simpler route but uh creates great opportunity and the reason it creates opportunity for growth companies like ours is every OEM cannot repeat all the investment

across all three of those things they have to decide where they're going to make the investment themselves where are they going to borrow or or partner and where will they you know buy companies to help them solve those problems I think there's so much more to dream about what we could do with that data right uh say you sell to a hedge fund what color is popular

right now what are people wearing in the streets I mean there would be some price privacy issues but what are the trends then if you're talking about governments the health of the roads um fighting crime you know if the camera spots like shady activity or uh Shady behaviors or alert someone of of alert the Police Force about something wrong happening um are you like more of a

data company and do you plan on crunching that data that data make good things out of it with AI and just uh I don't know fueling 80% of their compan any Revenue with that data yeah great question so you know there is a ton of data um the data is pretty messy so it takes some time to to really clean it up we're focusing on a couple different areas um one that we've publicly announced we now have a patent on is using AI to just take a simple picture of a tire with your smartphone and in just a couple seconds we could tell you whether you need to replace the tire or not and you I'm a car Enthusiast so I I I can tell tell when you need to replace a tire but more

than half the general public have no idea if their tires need to be replaced or not and all it takes it's just a simple picture that's a super hard problem uh to solve we had to take pictures of 65,000 individual different tires of all different shapes sizes different wear conditions dark lighting uh little lighting wet tires dry tires um and have you know humans working on building

the model and then AI to tune the model to get to be accurate enough and kind of like Alexa you know when when voice dictation was not quite there it was just a brutal painful experience even if it like 85% that 15% error it was so high people wouldn't use it was until got into the mid 90s it was good enough to be useful kind of the same thing uh we had to get into the mid to Upper 90% accuracy rate in order for it to be useful so that's one area that AI has been just awesome for it's great at things like that um we're also um one of the one of the things that um a partner asks us to figure out is when is somebody shopping for a new car and so

we know uh what you drive where you drive how you drive you we could predict where you're going to be on Sunday barbecue with your family what bar you typically go to where you go grocery shopping uh but you're driving what kind of car are you driving these days Charles zero none uh at digital Nomads and but I'm planning to buy linking Aviator perfect so pretend you're

in your linking AV uh Aviator and you've had it for three years uh and you've got uh 20 23,000 Miles because you travel so much you haven't put many miles on it and the Mercedes dealer now knows that you've been at the Audi dealer the Porsche dealer uh and you haven't been to Mercedes yet and you've gone to to Lincoln twice you're probably shopping for a car

you know you're not visiting friends or a ranger Raptor I visited that that place they don't have linkins in Waka but they do have uh Ranger Raptors here so imagine how valuable that data is so instead of just you sending know doing ads in the newspaper or blasting General spam we now know what how you drive that car we know that you go to the mountains uh

we know that you don't put many miles on it uh we know that your car is actually in high demand so we could buy that car from you and still make money by reselling it and we know you're probably going to make a a purchase decision soon how valuable is that is that lead and that data about you yeah that's huge and plus the Netflix that I watch your model X for example was in H I think it's called Vengeance the Netflix movie it's really good and the villain came around the the wings of the Tesla X I was like that's a badass car right there and and also obviously the cars that that are on the road right I get inspired by that if I see a cool model I'm going to look at

it and it's like oh that Range Rover Defender is really badass for sure the other area that we're applying AI to is not just using real-time fuel prices but where you drive uh which direction you're headed and the current fuel level in your tank so instead of just you giving you a a ass sorted list of the cheapest stations that's not as helpful as the prices when

you should fill up and where's the most convenient place to fill up based on where you're driving that's a hard problem to solve because the prices are changing dynamically the fuel levels changing dynamically and that's where again you know realtime data plus AI helps you save money and save time right because in Mexico uh for example the ranger raptor is 100k uh cads and in Canada it's

70k you know so I just wish I would be a better uh car selling and buying platform out there with using AI where should buy this car but yeah that's that's for another one I want to ask you uh personal questions as a CEO a Founder what drives you nowadays after all of these exits you know what gets you out of bed Charles that's a great question so I'm a I'm a proud father of six kids uh so I will be working forever I love that I think I want to have four or five or something so I respect that yeah I I think we're done at six but uh you know my kids rain from six months to 26 so I've got a wide range and I love being a dad got a great

wife is very patient and you know supports my entrepreneurship she's an entrepreneur as well so she gets it you know I I saw her figuring out yeah it's Ashley Hawk she's in health and wellness has her master's in nutritional science and um she's just writing her her first book she's had a show on the Food Network so that also helps keep me healthy you talk about keeping

cars healthy my wife helps keep me healthy I still play a lot of sports but you know what drives me is you being able to pick a problem to work on choose the team that you work with it on and it's funny Charles I had um the pleasure of having Andy Grove as my technology strategy Professor the CEO of Intel Legend and Legend and he said you know all of you can go you know now that you're gonna graduate this great place of Stanford you can go do whatever you want pretty much but be careful if you go to a big company you know it sure will be safe and you'll make a lot of money and you have a lot of prestige but you'll be working in their culture on the problems that they

choose and the team will be mostly picked by them you would you know how much uh more enjoyable is life when you get to pick the problem you get to pick the team and you know if you win together you know it was because of you and not just because you're on a big ship that always stuck with me I mean I already knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur but he talked about the cost of not being an entrepreneur and people people underestimate that if you end up going to a big company for too long you get too used to that it's almost you too difficult to break from all those niceties it's like be you become fat and happy yeah it's very dangerous it's a point of no return I very much agree

with that last but not least your thought on the Cyber truck I uh I'm torn um I love my model X uh I like a normal pickup truck better because it's so odd right like you drive around the neighborhoods like oh here we go Weir Tech guy yeah it's like buying a Hummer you know I just you don't want to be that obnoxious but I'd also say like having the X we got 350 miles range but if I want go you know really far or go cross country yeah I'd like to have it's also nice to have a fuel vehicle we have horses and barn and kind of rural rural rural area so it's nice to have an electric car for every day and then have the truck if you want to go up to

the mountains or longer not have to worry about um you know range anxiety or you know wasting time recharging so for me it doesn't make sense to have a uh if you come to La anytime you got to come out here we'll take you out on the horses and we'll do a little mountain biking yeah let's let's do that in less than five i' I'd like to have my my black horse uh do you take your horse to the city can you do that or well should I say yeah well so Hidden Hills is a city and an HOA it's one of the two in the US that is that so we're our own City and a Community Association our horse is right here we have a barn and a Corral we just saddle up

right at the house go down three houses and around the trail and the trails go all the way out to Santa Monica preserve so yeah we the kids ride right from here and you know we see the horses hear the horses smell the horses every day so you really feel that country element and uh nothing like keeping kids outside even though I'm in Tech I don't want

my kids on in Tech until they're in high school love that man yeah the horses are beautiful creature where can we find out more about you Kenny so uh mod.io uh or Force Fleet tracking.com and I'm on LinkedIn love helping entrepreneurs I'm coaching a few right now and um you know always always like to be involved in the early days I also um do some early stage

investing uh for companies that um are you know trying to make the world a better place so again you know make the put make the world safer better um make money and have fun at the same time that's what I'm focused on now