S3 | E2 - Kathryn Zealand (Skip) on robotic exoskeletons, mobility for life, and spinning out of Google X

0:00 David Booth: You're listening to a Day One FM show.

0:04 Kathryn Zealand: Our first product is called the MoGo, and it's like an e-bike for walking, but it's just helping people move. The stories that I find most heartwarming is when we give someone a MoGo, you know, to rent for a day or two, and they can do an activity with their family or with their friends. Sometimes Americans who live in Silicon Valley end up feeling quite narrowly focused, whereas Kiwis, by definition of like having had to move here, often have either like a broader sense of what the world is or, you know, more like normal backgrounds and like a bit more grounded in reality, I think.

0:34 Speaker C: Welcome back to Diaspora.nz, where we're on a mission to seek out and profile the hidden gems, the best founders, operators, researchers, and emerging leaders of the great Kiwi expat community. Today we're chatting with Kat Zeeland, founder and CEO of Skip. Kat leads a team building what she describes as an e-bike for walking, a lightweight robotic exoskeleton called the MoGo that assists with mobility and helps people remain active into old age. It was a journey that began with a very personal challenge, trying to help her grandmother who'd had a tough fall, and discovering that the technology in the space was just shockingly behind the times. We dive into her time at Google X, the moonshot factory, where she built a team of world-class robotics experts before spinning SkipOut as an independent company. We talk about some of the technical challenges along the way, creating the device that could understand your intent, understand if you're gonna stand up from a chair or whether you're bending to tie your shoelace or pick up a parcel. We talk about the FDA approval process, the consumer hardware funding landscape, and how they're just building this company in such a tricky category, paving the path to market. Cat's had an epic run. Excited to get stuck in.

1:41 David Booth: Let's go over the episode.

1:44 Kathryn Zealand: Cat.

1:47 Speaker C: David.

1:48 David Booth: It is an absolute pleasure to have you on the diaspora.nz podcast. I have the pleasure of sitting here with you in San Francisco. Thank you for coming on firstly, and you're an aspiring person, you've built an aspiring company, you've got a mission of helping people remain mobile over time. That can mean a lot of things which we're going to find out about, but tell me about the moment that you, you worked your career to realize this was possible.

2:11 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, for me it was helping my grandmother. She was in her 90s. She'd had a fall and falls often have a follow-on effect of people breaking hips and struggling. And so I was like, surely there's good technology that can help with this, right? And at the time I was working at Google X, so surrounded by really inspiring people with expertise in robotics and other things. Mm-hmm. So I just kind of presumed that there would be a solution out there. And then the state of the art for fall prevention is that you wait until your loved one has had a fall and then you get a text message alert about it after the fact. And I was kind of horrified of like, how is that the best that technology can bring to, you know, a community where it's like life and death sometimes, these incidences, which felt in such contrast to like the very cool sci-fi work I was doing a lot of the time at X. And so it's a kind of example where it's not that I necessarily wanted to be an entrepreneur, before that, but I wanted a solution to this problem. And I looked around and I was like, well, if no one in Silicon Valley is doing this, then I guess it will have to be me.

3:16 Speaker C: Yeah.

3:16 David Booth: The desire to solve something out of necessity is one of the best drivers. You've gone through, I mean, years of research at this point to finally have a product to market, which is the robotic exoskeleton, lightweight exoskeleton. Talk us through exactly what, because I want to go forward and back into the future and into the past and the technology itself, but Pitch us the tech first.

3:36 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, so I lead Skip. We make, our first product is called the MoGo, and it's like an e-bike for walking. So it's not yet doing a lot of fancy things around fall prevention, but it's just helping people move. We'll do up to 40% of a healthy person's muscle forces around the knee. So this is not gonna walk for you, right? Like you still have to initiate the movement, but a lot like an e-bike where it can just help you get up those steep hills. This will help you get upstairs, stand up out of a chair, and hopefully bring people back to full activity levels. So the target user is someone who's maybe seen a recent decline in their ability to do the things that, that bring them a lot of joy.

4:13 David Booth: It's obviously accentuating muscle strength. Is it also supporting joint mobility or alignment? Or if some people have perhaps recovering from a, a broken bone, you're supporting in the same way?

4:24 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, so it's built around the knee and so it functions a little bit similar to a knee brace that's powered or has a motor attached to it. And so it will give all the benefits that a knee brace will provide around alignment and stability while also being able to give this boost. And you know, we're currently in FDA approval processes and in clinical trials, so I can't make any medical claims yet.

4:44 Speaker C: Yep.

4:44 Kathryn Zealand: But anecdotally, we have seen a huge response from people with knee pain, especially knee osteoarthritis.

4:50 Speaker C: Yep.

4:50 Kathryn Zealand: Where if you've got some like bone rubbing or cartilage issues, just offloading that joint and the forces across the joint.

4:57 David Booth: I mean, there's a physical piece and obviously offloading the forces forces across the joint. There's also the mental health piece, which I think you've talked about in the past, of like actually one of the biggest killers or, you know, one of the biggest problems in age is the mental health decline that comes from a loss of mobility or the loss of capacity. That'd be harder to measure, but—

5:13 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, huge influence. And I think movement touches so much of daily life. And the stories that I find most heartwarming is when we give someone a MoGo, you know, to rent for a day or two and they can do an activity with their family or with their friends or We had one couple where the husband was an avid hiker, but the wife, and they were in their 50s or 60s, couldn't go with them anymore, but she kind of always wanted to and was missing out.

5:37 David Booth: So the very first time I heard about it was the Muggo, and this is entirely unrelated to the introduction we had, was actually the Arcteryx hiking pants. And so the context was this partnership with Arcteryx, which is a prominent, renowned outdoor brand. And somebody told me that they had friend or a thirdhand story of somebody who had hiked to the top of a very difficult mountain in a much shorter space of time than they otherwise could. And it struck me that there is this, um, restorative medicine versus enhancement or human enhancement angle. You're obviously focused on the former for now, but tell me about that idea space, how you think about what this technology could do.

6:17 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, so there's a lot of interest in the enhancement as well, uh, But I actually think that that's a little bit more like the vitamin versus painkiller analogy. If you're someone who's already really healthy, then maybe you'd appreciate a bit of a boost on long hikes, but you don't need it. It's not like a desperate need. And so we can provide some benefit there, but potentially the willingness to pay isn't as high, or your willingness to put up with an early prototype is also not as high. Whereas someone who's seen a reduction in mobility, or they literally have knee pain, you know, it really is literally a painkiller. And so even this hiking is a good example. Like we work with our therapist, Arteryx for this first product. And I personally love Arteryx gear. Like I'm a backpacker, I do mountain climbing, and I think the outdoor space is full of people who are excited about new technology and new gear and how it can help them do the things they want to do and stay active. So it was one reason it was appealing. And hiking is a great place for us as a company because we get a diversity of movement and people of all kind of body shapes and sizes doing all types of very like variations on big steps, small steps. Mm-hmm. And so it was very kind of technically attractive. But then it does, we are skirting this fine line where, you know, Arterix sells a range of product to lots of people, including very, very fit people. And the use cases for the MoGo for them are slightly more limited. You know, they're there, but it's more limited. But they also sell to people who have that aspiration, you know?

7:44 Speaker C: Yeah.

7:44 Kathryn Zealand: So they may not any longer be climbing the really tall mountains, but they used to, or they want to, or their kids do. And so it's helping like get the right people in this big tent of our Taurus customer.

7:54 David Booth: So the conversation around that enhancement piece, or the people who want to climb the mountain far, there's been similar exploration of like the most elite cycling shoe, the most elite running shoes, or let's say the swimsuit, the sharkskin swimsuit that allowed Olympic athletes to swim faster and then was sort of the rules and regulations followed. I expect we won't be seeing the Mobo turn up in the Paralympics anytime soon. But there would be an angle for sort of recreational use, which would be really interesting to explore.

8:24 Speaker C: Yeah.

8:25 David Booth: Take us into the— so I want to go both ways, into the future and then back into where it all came from. And into the future first, you have the prototype out in the market, you've been taking pre-orders, you're delivering pre-orders next year, hopefully. Talk us through like what has to happen in the next 12 months and what's ahead. You're in the weeds of actually building and delivering this consumer hardware product. At scale?

8:48 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, you've caught us at a really interesting time because we currently have a small fleet, only 50 units or so, that was built for rentals because we wanted to validate that the experience is really useful. And we kind of built the fleet with that in mind. So when you're wearing it, you get a great experience. But we cut corners and we did some things in less scalable ways to make that happen as quickly as possible for 50. And that included assembling these units, included a lot of hand filing of carbon fiber and manual assembly and and prototyping processes which are expensive but fine for 50, but don't work when you—

9:24 David Booth: And you do all that yourselves in-house in the dog patch in San Francisco. You're not yet sort of contract manufacturing and—

9:30 Kathryn Zealand: Correct. I mean, we have a lot of our sub-assemblies are built with vendors, but it's such a specialized product that we'll have the world's best vendor for a particular kind of motor winding. So we'll work with someone who's an expert in that, but we do all the kind of final assembly and pull together. But yeah, that won't necessarily work at the kind of net scale. And so I'm currently talking to contract manufacturers.

9:53 David Booth: Yeah. How many units are you ideally delivering in 2027?

9:58 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, I think we are looking at a first run of like 5 to 10,000.

10:01 Speaker C: Wow.

10:02 Kathryn Zealand: Which, you know, and it's an expensive product. It's $5,000, which is expensive for pants, but actually in the scheme of—

10:07 David Booth: Very expensive pants, but— —expensive for mental health and mobility. No.

10:11 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah. Or similar, you know, we priced it similar to an e-bike, right? So again, people are willing to pay that amount of money for something that enables them to do the activities they want to do.

10:20 David Booth: When you think about the FDA process and the, I'd say like why, because it can be prescribed by a doctor and covered by insurance. Is it sort of a business motivation or is there like basically why does this space have to be regulated and approved under FDA trial?

10:34 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah. So our first product doesn't need FDA approval. Because we're not making any specific medical claims.

10:40 Speaker C: Right.

10:40 Kathryn Zealand: It really is like an e-bike. It's just helping you go further. But we've seen anecdotally that it also helps with knee pain, but we can't make that claim. We can't advertise and say this is gonna reduce knee pain unless we've kind of proven essentially that it will reduce knee pain. But you are correct that longer term, having FDA approval will also open the door to this being covered by insurance reimbursement.

11:01 Speaker C: Yeah.

11:02 Kathryn Zealand: And being, and it's easier for doctors to prescribe it or encourage, you know, people who are approaching them with knee pain.

11:08 David Booth: Longer term, you would be distributing through doctors and hospitals and sort of going down the more of a traditional medical sales route. Is that—

11:17 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, maybe I should back up. So I think long term, like, we imagine a future where anyone who struggles with movement, we have a solution for them, and there'll be the same platform that can help across these things. And by platform, I mean both software, right? So we can use the same processes and controls, but tuned for different requirements. If you're in rehab, that's different to if you have had a stroke, et cetera. And some of the core mechatronics components. So our most expensive component at the moment is a motor because we had to do a lot of designing to make this light enough to feel comfortable on the body while still being powerful enough to be useful. But you could have that same motor at the hip or at the knee or, you know—

11:56 David Booth: On an elbow or—

11:57 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah. Right. And so we might have a standard set of components, But a product line, or we made license, and we expect that different people end up needing slightly different flavors of this, right? So this first product, the Mogo, is really about outdoor accessibility.

12:13 Speaker C: Yep.

12:13 Kathryn Zealand: There'll be a very similar fast following product that's slightly more everyday living or slightly more medical gearing.

12:20 David Booth: Yep.

12:20 Kathryn Zealand: But functionally very similar, like Knee Assist, but for knee pain, knee osteoarthritis, knee rehab, et cetera. Then we'll kind of build into, you know, we've got HIP devices at the moment looking at Parkinson's disease, right? Mm-hmm. 'Cause we're trying to prove out that platform play in two very different places. Once we've kind of shown both halves of that problem, then you start thinking about, okay, like stroke, fall prevention, I mentioned at the start, cerebral palsy, like almost any neurological or neuromuscular condition you can think of could benefit from something like this. But there'll be some element of, for that population, we might need to, refine the controls a little bit because they might have a particular challenge that needs addressed.

12:57 David Booth: Which is the software piece. I recall you talking about, this is in a past podcast or somewhere, the quote paraphrase, there's a difference between somebody who's standing up off the chair versus somebody who dropped something and they're bending down to pick something up versus somebody who has had a fall and they're trying to get up. Basically, like, you need to be able to identify the motion and the intent of the motion in order to power the motor in the correct way. Is that right? Or how would you, how do you think about like the software challenge associated with the different use cases?

13:29 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, that's exactly right. So the challenge is with the minimal number of sensors on the body, how do we really understand what you're trying to do? And it's a very intimate product, like it's on your body. So that also means that we have to be right 100% of the time. We can't have any instance during the day where you try and go left, but your pants want to go right. Or if you're trying to tie your shoelace, but your pants think that you're picking up a heavy box and they try and force you up, right? Yes. Oh, that's interesting. In some of the early days, I would be at a meeting at a desk tapping my foot as I was thinking about a tune or something, and it would think I'm walking, turn on the whole desk, jump up.

14:11 David Booth: This is a little bit off of the expected path of this conversation, but is there a brain-computer interface angle on this? There are some very interesting technology coming through now. Other startups, other research labs doing like, we can predict based on this neural activity that your intent was that.

14:26 Speaker C: Yeah.

14:26 David Booth: Do you ever go sort of integrate into that level or is that maybe a bit science fiction still?

14:30 Kathryn Zealand: It's really interesting. It's not science fiction. It's just around the corner. I don't think it's our sweet spot. And part of the reason is we're trying to build devices that are really light and comfortable for all-day wear. And those people typically have some muscle function and some neurological function. Brain-computer interfaces are going to be really useful for someone who is, let's say, fully paralyzed. Like if you've had a spinal cord injury, but then you would also need not the e-bike, but the motorbike. Like you're going to need heavier motors because they need to be stronger because they have to do full body weight support. And so—

15:01 David Booth: That's a good metaphor.

15:01 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah. So it's almost like a different category of product. And I actually think there's been more attention paid on those recently. So to the extent that there are other exoskeleton companies existing, they're often working with spinal cord injury. And people who can't move at all, which is, I mean, that's a huge impact for those populations, but it's a tiny fraction of the people that struggle with, you know, 1 in 5 people struggle with movement in general.

15:22 David Booth: Everybody gets old.

15:23 Kathryn Zealand: Everyone gets old, but only a small fraction will be fully paralyzed. And so for those populations, brain-computer interface is amazing, but it's probably not gonna be our core product.

15:32 David Booth: Good opportunity to go back in time a little way because you at Google X, which is, you should explain what it is exactly. You were one of the people who was basically at the idea validation stage of the Google X. And I've heard you speak in the past about how there were lots of different threads of different expertise and different pools of talent. One of the reasons that Skip came to be as it has is that you had access to all of that different expertise. Can you start at the start of X? What is it? How did you get there?

16:02 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah. X is Google's moonshot factory.

16:05 Speaker C: Yep.

16:05 Kathryn Zealand: And it really started, you know, it was started by Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google, where I think these were kind of geniuses, started Google, Google was really successful and they started to say, okay, but what's the next Google? Like what's gonna be the next thing that's as transformational for the world as Google and search was? And that was the original mission of X or kind of the cluster of small projects that became X. So things like Waymo are in that category. Wing, the drone company, are kind of some of the larger examples. But they were trying to build essentially an incubator to find these, what they would call a moonshot. So particularly in the early days, they were differentiated from, say, VC funding, and they weren't looking for a 5 to 7 year return or an exit. They were saying, oh, it might take us 20 years to build out some of these technologies, but after 10 or 20 years, it's gonna have much more upside. Mm-hmm. And so they were trying to do lots and lots of rapid experiments or spin up small projects and investigations and wind most of them down very quickly. So if the VC looks at 100 companies and invests in one, the idea of X was that they would look at maybe 1,000 and only one of those 1,000 would go all the way through.

17:16 David Booth: I recall a friend of mine was also there at one point telling me that they quite regularly dismiss an idea because it's too soon. On the technology spectrum. It's too possible. It's not crazy enough.

17:29 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah. And I think that's particularly relevant because honestly, Alphabet's quite an expensive place to build a project, right? And so if you are competing with a startup, the startup is going to be faster. They're going to be able to do it more cheaply. They don't have to worry about as much regulation and overhead. Those are all just natural things that happen with a company the size of Alphabet. If you're competing with a startup, you're going to lose. Instead, they want to look at things that are one horizon further away.

17:56 David Booth: What are the counterfactuals? What are the other things that, putting aside Skip and what you've ended up working on, what's the next most exciting thing that you were working on or saw or could have ended up building today?

18:09 Kathryn Zealand: One of the projects I was working on in my early days at X is now public, so I can talk about it. I think it's now called Tapestry. But the idea is, you know, climate change is a problem. We wanna get more renewable energy on the grid. Lots of other startups building renewable energy solutions.

18:24 David Booth: Mm-hmm.

18:25 Kathryn Zealand: But one of the big problems is that the grid can't cope with like the amount of new demand coming online from new sources. And it's partly 'cause companies don't always really understand exactly what the grid infrastructure is, let alone be able to decisively model the impact of a new solar farm or a new wind plant. "some of these projects will be delayed for years just because we don't understand the impact on the grid." And Alphabet said, "Okay, one challenge that this is hard to do for a startup is that you also need to engage with a highly regulated industry, big utility companies, you know, like not the ideal customer for a startup, but like critically important for the shifts that we need, you know, in our energy infrastructure." Yeah. And so this project, which when I started it was really early days, they were looking at, is there enough information that we can get from existing sources to simulate the grid, to build them, end-to-end model of exactly the infrastructure that existed.

19:18 David Booth: A digital twin, they like call them these days.

19:20 Kathryn Zealand: Exactly, exactly. So that was one example that I worked on that's still around.

19:25 David Booth: How did that opportunity come onto Exasradar? Was it internal or external inspired? And how did you or your team validate that that was worth your attention?

19:38 Kathryn Zealand: So things come onto our radar in a variety of ways. Sometimes people will pitch us. But more normally, the team at X responsible for early stage work will have a problem space that they're interested in and then they just go and see if there is like new and emerging technologies often like on the forefront of like academic breakthroughs 'cause it's real research at that point.

19:58 Speaker C: Yeah.

19:58 Kathryn Zealand: Which would be a big unlock. And so you see some things come from like this problem-first perspective. Other times like it's just you're reading, you know, the latest coming out of the cutting edge field and thinking, you know, could we apply? Quantum levitation to this problem, et cetera, et cetera. This one, the problem is obvious, right? Like climate has been a huge issue for people for a long time. And so it was that very first principle thinking about what are the biggest barriers to a renewable energy future or a carbon zero future? Which ones are other people solving? Like the tech is almost not too easy, but not a good fit for Alphabet.

20:29 David Booth: Mm-hmm.

20:30 Kathryn Zealand: What are the problems, you know, need a solution that Alphabet is well positioned to deliver?

20:35 David Booth: It seems there's a lot of paths from there outwards as well. I mean, Skip has been spun out. We talk about that. It's had its dreams spun out. And then you've got sort of Waymo and a few of the better known ones that are somewhat still part of the organization but have now been externally funded. Is there like a general principle that applies or is it really like case by case?

20:54 Kathryn Zealand: It's been a little bit case by case, especially in the early days. I think they're trying now to make it more systematic. A lot of it depends on how big the company is, right? Waymo, we would say it graduated almost. Alphabet had put a lot of capital in, it retains a large amount of ownership. We're very different because we spun out with 10 people. And so it wasn't really worth Alphabet's time to stay on our balance sheet. They were happy to sell us the IP in a much more kind of simple transaction.

21:20 David Booth: Yep.

21:21 Kathryn Zealand: And so I think every project has its own scale and nuances and also how far away it is from core business, right? I think X, At the same time we wanted to spin out, X was quite clear that consumer robotics was probably not in Alphabet's wheelhouse in the medium term. And so it's happy for us to go more simply.

21:40 David Booth: And you're right, the capital requirements lens is a good one. I rode here in a Waymo, and for anybody who probably the vast majority of the audience hasn't been to San Francisco lately, you can get a ride anywhere you want in a driverless car. It is like living in the future. But as you pointed out earlier, it's been a 20-year journey to here for Waymo. And there's, I don't know how many billions of dollars spent to get to here, and there's probably going to be some number of billions of dollars yet to spend. So living within of, you know, a Google infrastructure makes a lot of sense, Alphabet infrastructure. In your case, so you spun out, you were able to take some of your team members with you. How has the adjustment been from kind of the, I don't want to say comfort, but certainly like the financial stability and security of living within the beast to now you're a startup founder with a set capital in the bank and a set set of milestones and fire under your ass. So tell us about that transition to taking former Google colleagues in particular with you. How's the new reality?

22:38 Kathryn Zealand: So I think we benefited from being a small enough project within X and very specific. So actually most of my team within X were not lifetime Googlers, but were world experts in world war robots. That I had kind of poached almost individually to assemble this like rockstar team. You know, we had a mix of some Googlers in there as well, but I think as we spun out, it was notable that the people that were really passionate about the problem space and the technology were excited to come with and were almost more excited to have a little bit of equity upside in the startup. As you know, whereas at Google you get Google stock, so you know.

23:11 David Booth: But nothing tied to the specific project.

23:13 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, correct, correct. But you know, we did lose some people, so I think, some of the more traditional Googlers were maybe not as good a fit for the spinout. Either we didn't offer them to come with or they didn't want to. But I think we also benefited from doing this in 2003. There was a lot of incredibly talented people on the market. No, in 2023. So 2023.

23:30 David Booth: That's right. I was gonna say.

23:31 Kathryn Zealand: I know.

23:32 David Booth: 20-year journey.

23:33 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, just 18 months ago. So there was a lot of incredibly talented engineers on the market. So it was reasonably easy to kind of pull the right bits of the team together and fill in any spots that we had.

23:44 David Booth: As you ramp up to distribute a hardware product into market, you can fund it with equity and raising venture capital, or you can fund it with pre-orders. Speaking to other people who are out there with a bright idea for consumer hardware products, as a category, it's a very hard thing to do. How do you think about capital planning and funding it to the market?

24:04 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, it can be really hard 'cause it's just, you need an order of magnitude more capital than—

24:08 David Booth: It's not some software, it's not some, you know, quick AI, you know, game.

24:12 Kathryn Zealand: Exactly. So I think it is important to think about alternative sources of finance. Grants. So for us, we also have some non-dilutive funding. So we've got grants particularly for our medical work, but there's a lot of overlap between the projects, right? So again, it supports the whole company. A lot of hardware will have, if not a medical application, a military application or national interest. So they'll be able to get some government grants or similar non-dilutive funding. That can be a critical kind of—

24:36 David Booth: Is there a place that you go or a person you talk to, to understand the non-dilutive grant landscape? How did you find what you found?

24:44 Kathryn Zealand: Chance? Or like, it's all, I would say you need to talk to a founder who is in your field, but maybe further along.

24:51 Speaker C: Yeah.

24:51 Kathryn Zealand: Because it's a very different process whether you're going for a DARPA grant or an NIH grant or a private foundation grant. And so it really depends on what vertical you are in. But for almost any deep tech hardware vertical.

25:04 David Booth: It feels like this must exist. If not, we've gotta build it. There's gotta be like a search engine for grants applicable to variety of of hardware niches or deep tech niches. Sure. Anyway, we'll come back. We'll solve that problem.

25:18 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah. So yeah, not that it's a big component. Pre-orders are interesting and pre-orders, so we take a $100 deposit for the pre-orders so that it's not a significant source of capital for running our business, but it's very helpful for building confidence in our ability to get working capital financing or venture debt because we can say, hey, we've had orders that people, it's equivalent of having an LOI from— a large company. If you're a consumer player, you can't do that.

25:41 David Booth: A little bit is going to be aimed, but not so much that a bad outcome would be you take the entire amount up front and ultimately can't deliver the product and you're in a tough spot. So $100 is sort of the balance of—

25:52 Kathryn Zealand: it's about right. Yeah, that makes sense. And I am worried, I think one challenge we might have is we had to promise people a delivery date before we had fully fleshed out exactly when that would be. And so the commitment we made is anyone who pre-orders, they'll get personal emails or phone calls from us. We'll keep them in the loop. Often we'll recruit them to be early testers, particularly the local community. They often want to do a rental or a demo anyway. And so it's a good way to both have us get feedback, but keep them informed around what might be different between the prototype and the product, how the ship date is evolving, et cetera.

26:25 David Booth: I'm intrigued by just sort of, there's so many interlocking threads with X in particular that we won't have time to do them all. Do you have much of a relationship today or when you, was it sort of, you're out of the nest now, we wish you all the best.

26:38 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, we have no formal relationship today. They're not on our board or anything like that, but Silicon Valley's a very tight community. I just had lunch with one of the ex-executives yesterday. We do collaborate a lot on PR 'cause I think that's one area where it's mutually beneficial, right? Like X wants to share in our wins when we have them. They have a lot more followers on our brand new Instagram account.

26:58 David Booth: Yeah, leverage, absolutely.

26:59 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, so we stay in contact with them, but—

27:01 David Booth: And other founders who, I mean, there's lots projects that spun out, there's probably friends and founders along the way as well. How did you wind up there in the first place? You've had a fascinating career. You have a physics PhD.

27:12 Kathryn Zealand: I dropped out. I feel like that's an important caveat.

27:14 David Booth: Okay, dropped out. You've obviously been following your interests into all sorts of different technical directions. Tell me, what was the pre-X life?

27:25 Kathryn Zealand: I was a massive nerd in high school. I can't emphasize enough. I was the Physics Olympics kid, read math books on holiday.

27:33 David Booth: So you're the definition of a nerd that everyone else is going to wind up working for.

27:38 Kathryn Zealand: Half of that is true. We'll see how we go. Yeah. So love physics, love learning about physics. I had a great physics teacher at high school. Shout out to Mr. Alanson.

27:47 David Booth: Seeing this podcast as well.

27:48 Kathryn Zealand: I will. But then I think when I entered university and the deeper I got down the research rabbit hole, right? Like into a PhD program, it became less learning fun science and more, you know, my entire PhD was about one term in one equation around like black hole gravity, which is intellectually interesting. But for that to be the whole focus of years of my life, it felt like the impact wasn't there. And it was obvious to me that I was missing things, but it's hard to know whether the problem was my particular PhD topic or like academia in general. You know, I'd never really worked anywhere else. Mm-hmm. And so I said, okay, I'm gonna quit and try and do a year of something that is as different as possible on every single dimension.

28:32 David Booth: Okay.

28:33 Kathryn Zealand: And then I'll maximize my learning, right? 'Cause I'll have experienced lots of different things. And so where the PhD was very individual, I was like, I want a team job. The PhD was very like long-term. So I was like, I want something with like weekly, like deliverables kind of almost stress. The PhD was very amorphous kind of impact over the long term. And I was like, I want something which feels like I'm helping people like every day. And through a connection, I ended up working for a humanitarian law NGO, mostly in like Sub-Saharan Africa.

28:59 David Booth: Wow. That's very different to astrophysics.

29:01 Kathryn Zealand: It's lit by design, as different as you can imagine. And I loved it, right? Like I loved all of those things. Like I was exactly right about the kind of environment and the kind of work that I wanted to do. So I was with them for a little while and they were great. At the same time, I had no relevant expertise, you know, so I was useful to them in like some data crunching and being the IT girl. But like there was no kind of sense that I was uniquely contributing there. Like I was very fungible to anyone else.

29:26 Speaker C: Mm-hmm.

29:27 Kathryn Zealand: And I'd always been really good at science and kind of analytics. So I think my career journey since then has been trying to find something which has the feel of that work, you know, the sense of impact, the sense of teamwork, et cetera, but leverages science, which is like the one thing I was really, really good at. And so I spend a little bit of time doing like small businesses in Sub-Saharan Africa. But again, there was some element of getting, I was almost on the investing side, like getting investment for them, kind of doing the zero to one. That was really interesting. Not quite sciencey enough, but like one step closer kind of economically maybe. And then X felt like it was exactly in that overlap of really high impact, potentially like really rewarding work with a cool team, but also leveraging some technical skills, which is something I was perhaps uniquely good at.

30:10 David Booth: Do you, I'm sure you, mentor or advise others who are further down the path behind you? If somebody was considering a PhD today, what are your words of advice? It depends on the field and everything else contextually, of course, but perhaps the younger self.

30:24 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, I think try things. My entire career was shaped a lot by just doing that first year for this NGO. And honestly, it was obvious within 3 months that I enjoyed that work more than anything else. And so A PhD requires a ton of commitment and you need to, like, it's really hard. So you need to be really passionate what you're doing. If you are not sure that it's for you, then I think it's well worth doing internships, doing volunteering, like go work for a startup, things which at worst, you know, you'll work there for 3 months, then go back to the PhD and you'll know, you'll never doubt that like that was the right path for you.

30:59 David Booth: I find people are often sort of overthinking like the, how does this fit into my narrative? When actually like they don't tell you, you can just do things, you can just build things, right? You don't have to have the permission, you don't have to have everything perfectly pieced together. It's, uh, you know, what inspires you.

31:16 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, definitely.

31:18 David Booth: Are there any, any paths not taken otherwise? I, I feel like it's always fun to, you know, look at the inflection points. One inflection point would be the decision to join X. Where else might you have ended up if not for that?

31:29 Kathryn Zealand: I was briefly thinking about being an impact investor, um, because again, I I enjoyed that kind of quantitative evaluation. I enjoyed being able to see lots of different businesses. And so by impact investor, I think particularly on the kind of deep tech side, but with a view to maybe climate tech, something like that. But I did an internship, classic.

31:48 Speaker C: Right.

31:48 Kathryn Zealand: What I missed was that sense of building. So I was like, okay, I like the intellectual diversity. I like that I'm enabling like good work for the world, but I realized I'd rather be the person building the companies rather than the person kind of deciding which to fund. That's an obvious one.

32:04 David Booth: You're in New Zealand, obviously. You grew up in New Zealand?

32:07 Kathryn Zealand: I did. I feel like I should say I moved to Australia at some point.

32:09 David Booth: That's fine. We'll still claim you.

32:11 Speaker C: Thanks.

32:12 David Booth: It's like Pavlova, it's from New Zealand, even though they try to claim the other ones. How do you think, do you get back much? How do you think about your relationship with New Zealand or your sort of national identity as a New Zealander these days? And part of this question too is what could we be doing as the great Kiwi diaspora to be supporting you, they'll be getting behind you. What could New Zealand be doing to kind of support you better?

32:34 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah. Love New Zealand. My parents retired there, so I still go back every year. Great country. I'm constantly lobbying my husband that we should move there. So the minute that Skip fails, I'm on a plane, but annoyingly we keep succeeding.

32:49 Speaker C: Oh, I bet that's the post-op fear. Yeah, exactly.

32:50 David Booth: Take the optimism.

32:51 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah. So that's been great. The community in the Bay Area is really strong. And actually I think the Aussies and the Kiwis blend a little bit when you're out here. Absolutely. And so it's just wonderful, I think, to meet people who are similarly minded. I think sometimes Americans who live in Silicon Valley end up feeling quite narrowly focused, whereas Kiwis by definition of having had to move here often have either a broader sense of what the world is or more normal backgrounds and a bit more grounded in reality, I think. And so they end up building companies I find more interesting. So I think the Blackbird community is a great example. It's not just repeated enterprise SaaS. There's a huge diversity of different types of founders doing interesting things.

33:35 David Booth: I mean, it's why I love the first question of this podcast, which was the thing that inspires you. Quite often I find a Kiwi founder gets into it for the right reason. They get into it because there's a problem that they simply must solve or no one else is going to. And that is quite different to the scene over here these days, which is like being a founder is the cool thing to do. It's like all the kids that myself included want to be an investment banker, you know, last decade, want to be a founder this decade. And in fact, that can be a real problem. It's sometimes hard to separate the pedigrees, Stanford to Goldman to et cetera, starting a company from the person who's really in it for the cause. And, you know, New Zealand, there's much, I wouldn't say it's easier, but it's something we can really relate to and really see.

34:17 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, and I mean, it's so hard being a founder that I feel if you're not like really motivated by the problem.

34:22 Speaker C: Yeah.

34:23 Kathryn Zealand: You know, you've got so many opportunities to quit and you always have to do the harder thing. And so it helps to work on something which—

34:28 David Booth: Is there anything that you have had to unlearn or like personal skills, personality that you've had to develop in particular in your journey to now being a CEO, founder, running a company?

34:41 Kathryn Zealand: Oh, so many things. I think I'm, I sort of have this allergic reaction to presuming that I'm the boss, you know, which I think is a very Kiwi thing around like, whether it's tall poppy syndrome or a preference for being very egalitarian. And I'm really lucky that at the moment my team is small and we do work in kind of a very equal way. But every now and again there are things where I'm like, oh, I probably should have been harder on this deadline, held the team to account a little bit more, or been more forceful, be more, like less. But my instinct is this very kind of collaborative decision-making.

35:13 David Booth: Yeah.

35:13 Kathryn Zealand: And I think that's something that has served me well a lot of the time, but as a founder, not all the time. So that's one thing.

35:20 David Booth: There's a tendency I've experienced personally and seen in other founders to, it's kind of a DIY culture. It's like, you know, I can do this myself. Something breaks, I'm gonna fix it. You know, I need to grow something, I'll figure it out. And to contrast with some of my most successful American founder friends, there's always a willingness to engage advisors or delegate or outsource earlier. Do you experience that?

35:42 Kathryn Zealand: Oh, 100%. Yeah. Yes. So everything from like, you know, another founder friend of mine was like, oh, I just pay an accountant or they just pay a recruiting firm. I was like, recruiting firms are so incredibly expensive. You know, I thought, well, I'll just do all the interviews myself.

35:55 David Booth: Yeah. It sells your time.

35:57 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah. And so it's a different mentality. And I think that also changes as you grow in stage, right? Like I think I'm at, I'm literally at that inflection point right now where we're gonna go from probably 10 people to 20 people. And I'll suddenly like, oh, I don't think I can do everything that I am currently doing with double the number of employees.

36:16 David Booth: So you are hiring, you're going to be engineers.

36:18 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah.

36:18 David Booth: Let's get some callouts out there. What should people come to you with if they're talented hardware engineers with XYZ experience?

36:26 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, passion for the problem space I think is one of our biggest things. 'Cause again, this is hard work. We've gotta be really motivated. So if you're interested in solving mobility, come to us. Experience in, robotics or drones, anything powered that uses motors, powered electronics. We're particularly interested in people with experience either doing design for manufacturing or getting to scale. I think we are going through that transition of 50 prototypes to 10,000. People who've done that before would be very helpful. And then software engineers.

36:58 Speaker C: Yep.

36:58 Kathryn Zealand: And in a similar sense of we need to go from manually uploading data to having a lot of more automated processes.

37:04 David Booth: Um, whole team's on the ground in San Francisco? Are you taking remote as well?

37:07 Kathryn Zealand: We're pretty much all on the ground. It's a physical product and we have a value around everyone on the team wears it as much as possible, participates in user tests.

37:14 Speaker C: Makes sense.

37:15 Kathryn Zealand: Um, so yeah, sadly you have to be here, but we will sponsor visas for the right people.

37:19 David Booth: Cool. That's good to hear. And if you have a loved one in your life who is struggling with mobility, they can go and sign up for pre-order.

37:26 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah. So skipwithjoy.com, like skipping movement. That's amazing. Yeah. Um, and put your details in for like a rental. We have to do application now because we were somewhat overwhelmed, but I'm picking out the best stories and would love to get some Kiwis.

37:41 David Booth: You told me before you're gonna go and find some people to hike some mountains in beautiful parts of probably Milford Sound sometime soon, so maybe they can sign up for that one.

37:51 Kathryn Zealand: Exactly.

37:52 David Booth: That's awesome. We'll bring it to a close there. I'm excited to follow this journey. This is gonna be a really fun one to do another interview in a year's time or year or two's time and see how it all unfolds.

38:02 Kathryn Zealand: Yeah, thank you for your time and thanks for building this community.

38:04 David Booth: Yeah, it's a lot of fun. I'm having fun here. Thank you to Founders Inc. for hosting us. We've got brilliant, you know, community down here in Fort Mason, San Francisco. If anyone's starting companies, we're here. Founders Inc., we'll see you soon. Thanks so much.

38:16 Kathryn Zealand: Great.

38:19 Speaker C: And that's a wrap. Thanks for listening. As a quick reminder, make sure you hit subscribe over on your favorite podcast player so you can keep getting stories like this landing in your feed every Friday to help power you through those weekend chores. For my day job, I'm an entrepreneur in residence and an investor at Blackbird Ventures. We're backing best Kiwi and Aussie founders no matter where they are in the world, back home with global ambitions or out there building generational companies. My personal sweet spot is pre-seed and seed. I like to say there's no check too early, so drop me a line anytime as dbooth@blackbird.vc. This episode was produced by Day One, The podcast network for founders, operators, and investors, and as part of the Day One Network. Thanks again. Look forward to seeing you back next week.