RAYMOND WU ON SHAKE THE COSMOS
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What should you consider before you jump ship to pursue your dream? What is the trade off when working for yourself vs a company? In this episode, Ray Wu of Wynd joins me to discuss air quality and how he traded a great career for the startup world.
Ray Wu, Founder and CEO of Wynd. Ray founded Wynd in 2015. Before that, he served as a technology investor at Silver Lake, consultant at McKinsey, and engineer for Bose and Broadcom. He was also the founder and CEO of Emporium Technologies, a marketplace platform for connecting students. Ray studied electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. During his time there, he co-founded the MIT Tech Fair (now known as TechX), an annual science and technology expo that is one of the largest student-run organizations on campus. He also currently serves on the board of Wu Yee Children’s Services in San Francisco. Ray’s favorite hobbies include playing basketball and singing karaoke.
If you use the code “WyndxCosmos” at checkout on his website (www.hellowynd.com) you can get 10% off!
Ray’s Medium post about why he founded Wynd: https://medium.com/@raymondwu/why-i-founded-wynd-an-air-quality-startup-a65e88847f22#.lsuefaquc
Find him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raymondwu8
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Also, did you know that you can get yourself a copy of the Shake The Cosmos Journal as part of the personal development course? Check it out here.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
ABHISHEK: Hi, everyone. This is Abhishek from shakethecosmos.com. My guest today is Ray Wu, founder and CEO of Wynd Technologies, where their mission is to bring clean air to people wherever they go. I’m really excited to talk with him about his journey from corporate world to startup world, and also the pivots, the stories, and the future for his company.
We met through a mutual friend and, again, this is one of those moments where I have friends who are doing amazing things that I still don’t know about their work life. So I’m excited for this conversation.
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Thanks so much for being on the show, Ray. I’m really excited to talk with you.
RAY: Super excited to be here, Abhishek.
ABHISHEK: Awesome. Can you just give a little bit of background about you, for the listeners?
RAY: Sure. Starting way back, I was born in another country. I was born in Beijing, and came here following my parents when I was five. They were coming here for a better life and to get their grad school degrees. And we moved around a lot. Started in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Twin Cities, all the winters and summers extremes. Did that for six years. Moved to California where it was much sunnier. Then went to school on the east coast, which was, I think, how we initially met.
I went to MIT. I wanted to be an engineer, scientist. I majored in electrical engineering and computer science. I had at the same time a fascination with business, and I started a couple companies while on campus, including, these were probably dumb ideas back then. Well I should say those failed.
When I graduated, I wanted to learn more about business. So I went to McKinsey for a couple years doing a management consulting route for Fortune 500 Companies, and then moved over to doing finance, doing technology investing at a company called Silver Lake.
It was really interesting. I got to see a lot of different industries in the technology landscape. I got to apply my technology hat, but also the business hat. And I did that for a much longer time than I thought, about five and half to six years. The reason why I quit a pretty great career track there was I just had this startup bug. I wanted to eat ramen and maybe torture myself. But I wanted that experience, I wanted to do something that I could completely control, which is why I started Wynd about five years ago.
ABHISHEK: That’s awesome. You mentioned that you switched from a great career to this world of ramen, the startup world. You called it hard. What was hard about that piece? What was that like?
RAY: When you’re working in a corporate world and a company that’s already got things pretty established, the path to success at that company in many ways, because people have done it before, it’s kind of mapped out for you in some ways. You know what you need to do to be a good mid level management, upper level management person, climb the ranks.
But at a startup, while there are other successful startups obviously, every startup journey is so unique. You can’t really recreate that path. It’s like living that hero’s journey where he meets this person, and then he sees this setting, and he comes up with this idea, and builds his team. Every startup journey is so different. I feel like the challenge is the uncertainty, maybe the number of different options you can go. Whereas in the corporate life it’s very stable. It’s kind of comforting, whereas startup life you have to be okay with that uncertainty.
In some ways it’s also mapped to the risk-reward. You could have great reward but you’ve got to take a lot more risks than you would at an established place.
ABHISHEK: Totally, and I’ve always thought about that switch also; how people are used to receiving a stable income every month, and then it could get disrupted with leaving that world.
What was the reward on the other side that you were potentially excited about? I’m sure it wasn’t the ramen everyday, eating the ramen in the startup world.
RAY: For me, I just had to quit a very good job because I wanted several things. I wanted a lot of ownership, I wanted ultimate ownership as my own company, my own baby. Obviously we still have fiduciary duties to our masters, and obviously our customers, and to my team that I eventually built. But I found it a lot more positive for me to know that whether I screwed up or I succeeded, it’s because I made those decisions rather than listening to a hierarchy.
And the second thing, I would say, is I wanted to get back into tech. I know there were tech companies, but I was working at an investment company, where we invested in the people who built things. I wanted to go back and build things.
When I think back to why I went to MIT, I went there because I like science, I like engineering. I programmed a lot, I built robots when I was in high school. I was getting further and further away from that path. And no matter what kind of money I was making I wanted to live that dream of having my own company that worked on building things. That was the second big aspect of it that I wanted to follow.
ABHISHEK: When you knew you had to follow this startup bug, what kinds of things you had to start thinking about that you had to put in place?
RAY: To be honest, when I jumped ship and decided to start my own company I had no idea what I was doing. I think I just decided to quit cold turkey. I had some ideas, I had some friends who I was talking to. We would do things on the side. I don’t think I really planned anything, I can’t say I necessarily had this big, grand vision of how it would go. I just thought I should probably quit so that I could start. Otherwise I can never pull myself away.
I think I was very driven to be responsible at my job. And I don’t think I could be full-timing it, and on the side really dedicating the right time to build something. I don’t know if that’s the right strategy, but that’s how I was thinking as a 28 year old when I made the decision.
ABHISHEK: When you were making this decision, you’re about to jump ship, were there supporters that came along the way that come to mind? Who were some of those people? Or resources?
RAY: Yeah. I think it’s always good to surround yourself with people who, they’ll tell you what they think, but in the end they love you and they support you. At the time I made, I think, two calls to people before I decided to tell my team that I was actually quitting.
One was my dad. My parents both care a lot about me, obviously, but my dad is more the career person. So I called him and I said, “I’m leaving this really nice career and I’m gonna do this thing where it’s very uncertain.” And he was very supportive.
The second person is my girlfriend, now wife, who also really cheered me on. After I talked to both of them, it was a pretty easy decision that I knew they had my back.
ABHISHEK: Yeah. Would you do it again?
RAY: I think at that time in my life was the perfect time. I didn’t have any people that I had to go take care of and think about. Like, “Oh, I’ve just got to make money for their livelihood,” or something. I was single, I mean I had a girlfriend, but it was about me, me, me. And I think it was the perfect time because you can actually make those decisions.
As I mentioned earlier before this discussion, with now a family, a daughter, I don’t know if I would totally make the decision as easily. It’s not that I can’t support her as a startup. I think you definitely can. That’s what we are doing. But you just think a little bit differently when you have to take care of other people because this whole journey isn’t for the faint of heart. So I’m glad I made the decision when I did, before I got married and had a kid, and maybe more to come.
ABHISHEK: Totally. Thinking a little bit more, why is it not for the faint of heart? What are one or two sacrifices that come to mind that you think back and stand out, and make it harder?
RAY: There’s the obvious stuff, like there’s the money part. At a startup you’re likely not gonna make as much, at least up front. And maybe there’s nothing in the back, either. There’s always that uncertainty, and for sure you’re not gonna have as many creature comforts financially.
The other part is time. When you work at a company, whether it was at my first company McKinsey, or at Silver Lake, you get vacations, you’re expected to take vacations. As the CEO and co-founder I haven’t taken a single day of vacation in five years. I mean, I’ve travelled with family to places, but then I pull out my laptop and go to work half the time.
Back when I was at the previous companies, we’d look forward to Christmas. We’d go on a one or two week vacation. Summertime, it was the same thing. That never happens now. So I think it’s just different. I’m not saying it’s better or worse, because I’ve been on so many more life journeys, including some with my family. I have visited a lot of countries for work and I brought my wife along. I got to visit parts of the world where I saw relatives, for example, that maybe we wouldn’t have. But it is different. And maybe it’s a tradeoff around time as well.
ABHISHEK: Totally. It sounded like you’re living and breathing that startup life.
I want to talk a little bit more about your work itself. Learning more about Wynd Technologies and pivots the stories. From the website and from what I’ve gathered, things like, “What we breathe matters.” And your mission is to bring clean air to people wherever they go.
What were the types of product testing you had to do along the way to know the product is validated and should be scaled? You mentioned that you had several ideas and were trying to test things out.
RAY: Yeah, before I answer that, maybe just a quick step back on why we started this company and why I went into the technology and products we did.
As I mentioned, I was born in Beijing. Around 2003 I started going back to China because my dad actually moved back there and I would visit him once or twice a year. I had other relatives too, but this is all in Beijing.
I remember going back there, and the first time was in the winter of 2003. I go back, and it’s obviously cold, and there’s this fog. But it’s different from the fog that you would normally see, because being in California sometimes you get this thick fog as well. That fog you could taste, you could smell, and that was really weird to me. I didn’t know what it was at the time. The media and all the people talked about it as if it was like a weather pattern.
But as I go back every single year, from 2003 through my college days, it just became like, “Okay, this is definitely something that is way worse than a weather pattern. That fog kills people.” And it’s not just in that city, it’s in many, many parts of the world.
I think I’ve always thought about it. Until I started the company, I never thought, “Let me go do something about it.” I think it took a little maturity for me to connect the dots. But because I saw that it affected so many people, I wanted to get into that industry, I wanted to help. It had to do with my family, it had to do with what I felt passionately about.
In terms of product, you mentioned testing and the products, we viewed this air quality problem in a system type of way. It’s not about one type of thing that we think. We think you need three things. You need to be able to understand the air quality, so that has to do with measuring. So we got into sensors. Our team actually has some of the leading environmental sensing experts, we think, in the world. And we actually invented our own sensors that are much more accurate, much cheaper, and can measure things that nobody else can measure. Things like mold, different kinds of smoke, smog, even things that have to do with Covid, like aerosols.
The second piece is when you have that sensing, you have to interpret that data. Most people don't communicate like a scientist. You have to communicate it in ways that the everyday person can easily understand. Give them the recommendations so they can make their homes better, and their offices cleaner and healthier. So we got into the software side and the data side of things.
The last part, which is, I think, what most people know us for, is the purification. You’ve got to have a tool and a solution to make the air cleaner. Our curse has always been that if we find a problem we have to be able to take care of it for you. Let’s say it’s an air pollution problem, because of the particulates, then it has to be some type of air purification via our two-pack filter or something like that.
So we do all three. I guess that’s my point. We work on all three, they all work together. Often our products are packaged in a way that it seems like one product that has all three of these pieces to it.
In terms of the testing, we do a lot of testing ourselves, third party testing, our customers do testing, and we have some pretty big customers that would do a lot of validation before they work with us. So we definitely want to make sure our products are effective. Being a bunch of MIT guys, we have four on our team, we do sometimes get overly crazy about how we test it. But we definitely want to make sure that the products work and that we deliver something that’s not just nice looking, but that actually does something for your health.
ABHISHEK: You mentioned going on this personal mission. What helped you focus and bring clarity that, “Hey, this is something that I’ve been observing since 2003, and I should now focus on this problem, and help people”?
RAY: Our perspective is air quality is something that is important because you’re actually breathing in this air and if it’s got bad stuff in it, whether it’s pollutants, things that irritate you like allergens, now obviously pathogens, it’s gonna affect you. But the other part of our observation is that it’s hard for you as a human being to tell whether the air you’re breathing is good or not. By its very nature, air is generally invisible.
Furthermore, the third piece is we’re focused mostly on the indoor side of things, where it’s even more invisible. Outdoors, you’ve got government weather stations and air quality stations that are increasing. I think that’s a great thing, and there are some private companies that are adding to that. On Apple Maps, you could pull it up and you can see on the bottom right corner, right next to weather, you see AQI of air quality and I think that’s great. We love that trend because it is important for people to understand the outdoors.
But when you go inside, where you’re spending 90% plus of your time, there is no easy way. Nobody’s really making that information available, it’s not even available. So our mission is to try to help people understand the indoors, call it “at scale”, we use that word loosely. But what I mean by that is providing technology that is so cheap that it becomes something that could be impetus. Every building, every home, could just have that in their home.
And it doesn’t exist today. Most air quality types of monitoring, it’s expensive. It can be $10,000 with some companies. Even if you go on Amazon, those things cost hundreds of dollars. That doesn’t bode well for “at scale”. And that’s our mission, to provide that information so people can make the right changes, and ideally, in an automated way. You, as a homeowner, might not need to do anything. It’s just part of this smart home of the future.
We have some really interesting inspections that go way beyond what we’re doing today, but hopefully can make its way into everyday life in the coming quarters and years.
ABHISHEK: Totally. It makes me think it almost adds another sense for somebody. If I can’t see my air, now this lets me sort of feel my air better in a way I can have a better experience wherever I’m going.
RAY: Yeah, yeah. One thing I realized as a startup guy is it’s one thing to make the product, and you’ve got to obviously invent the things that are differentiated, and can solve problems. The other part is to understand the customer and their needs. We’re all human beings with part logic and part emotion. I think the point I’m trying to get across is on the “go to market” side, that’s equally important.
When we use the phrase, “Clean air wherever you go,” part of the emotion that we, ourselves, want is that we, as an individual, we want to be our best. We want to have this self actualization that we can be our best. With air quality, with this invisible potential problem, it sometimes inhibits you from doing that. Right now, in many parts of the world, we’re stuck at home. We’re not being our best when we can’t go around and actually exercise, and go to school, and go to work. And that’s a big problem.
I don’t know if I’m getting too detailed, but if you look at our first video, our product video, it was for this personal product. It’s a personal purifier. But the video wasn’t necessarily just about this product. I’ve never told anybody this by the way, but the theme we actually wanted to capture was that everybody wants to be their own inner superhero, like their own Superman, Superwoman. We want to be that person that can do everything, be healthy, be very intellectually curious, be a good mom, or a good friend, good sibling, whatever it is. And sometimes there are things that inhibit that.
For us, we’re not gonna solve every problem in the world. We focus on the environment. Your environment sometimes inhibits you from doing that. You might get allergies, you might get sick, you might suffer from debilitating things related to poor air quality, which happens in a lot of places. So we wanted to help you with that. We want to enable you to get a little bit closer to being that superhuman person that you wanted to be.
ABHISHEK: Originally, what started as a personal… What changed, or what didn’t go as expected, that let you allow for some of the innovation to start happening?
RAY: There’s a lot of questions in there. But in terms of what didn’t go as expected, everything was unexpected. We definitely had a lot of things that we could celebrate and say these are big milestones, whether you call it technology innovation, to product launches that went pretty well, to customers telling us how much they loved it, to adding really awesome people on our team.
I love in a way there have been many, many challenges as well. There’s that tv show that everyone points to, Silicon Valley. It’s obviously a little bit exaggerated, but not that much exaggerated. I think every entrepreneur can relate to stories there. We’ve definitely had technical challenges, we’ve had team challenges, we’ve had “go to market” delays, operational issues, everything.
I think the right attitude that our team, hopefully we all share, is that we see it as a problem solving thing and a learning experience. But there’s been tons of things that didn’t go as expected.
ABHISHEK: Now we’re in the pandemic mode and you started touching a little bit on that. But what’s been the impact of Covid on the business, and how has it changed your thinking?
RAY: First and foremost, our goal with the crisis when it started earlier this year, was to make sure that our team is healthy and safe. We started working from home way before it was mandatory to do so. I’m very proud to say this, we didn’t have to do any layoffs. Obviously there are financial challenges and whatnot. And everyone was thinking that the world was gonna fall apart, but we’ve kept it together. In fact, we’ve actually added people over the course of this year. I guess my point is that first and foremost, we wanted to take care of our team, make sure that everyone’s safe and taken care of.
I think the second part around Covid, it really accelerated the education of what we’re trying to do, even though Covid was never something we dreamed was something we had to go help on this year. But it has to do with air. In part, it’s transmitted via the air.
People talk about aerosols and droplets, those things that float in the air. That is definitely in some ways an air quality problem because if you are in a place that has poor ventilation that doesn’t do the right amount of filtration for the aerosols and droplets, that could mean people have a higher likelihood of getting sick.
For us, I would say it’s definitely been positive for evangelizing our mission. For business, it’s been good as well. We’re not trying to take advantage of the situation. The way I see it is like we have something that could help people, in terms of monitoring for health and safety about the air quality. Is it well ventilated? Is it properly filtered? Both residential and commercial. So let’s go out there and try to do that.
Also on the purification side, if people need localized air purifiers it’s something we’ve helped a lot of people with as well.
ABHISHEK: That’s fascinating. It feels like there’s some thought leadership that’s starting to take place in this space from you guys with the Covid stuff. I feel that people just want to know more about their air. They’re more aware of, “Oh, this has a very direct impact on my living being.”
RAY: Yeah, for sure. One of the things that I can talk about now, because we started introducing this product and we’re gonna do a lot more news about this launch. Basically, as our society reopens, people will want to know when I’m going back to school, or sending my kids to school, or going back to work, or even traveling and staying in a hotel, they want to know, “Is this place safe? Are they doing enough to keep me healthy, keep me safe?”
Obviously, you can’t 100% guarantee that nobody ever gets anything. But there are many things you can do around the air, including better ventilation, including making sure that things are filtered through higher density filters, making sure there’s not this accumulation of aerosols in tight spaces and whatnot. So we’re introducing a validation program that can easily prove that this restaurant, this hotel, this office space, is as optimal as it can be. A, that can help people get more comfort, and B, for the business, that can help them with the reopening. And as we all know, a lot of businesses are struggling and they want to reopen, but they want to do it safely. So we can be part of that toolkit for them.
ABHISHEK: Totally. It also feels like a full cycle, when you started you wanted to help individuals and now you’re multiplying that to a commercial scale with this upcoming… Would you call it a service or a product?
RAY: We started on the service side. We have a growing community that we are very devoted to. At the same time, we were expanding partnerships with the commercial side, as well. And there are some really exciting updates on that that you’ll probably see in the coming months around hotel partnerships, and commercial office space, and medical offices, daycare centers, lots of education. Hopefully you’ll be seeing us helping make sure that those spaces are as healthy as possible for reopening.
ABHISHEK: I love that. As we’re wrapping up, what’s next for you? Or what are you most excited about?
RAY: I think we’re very vertically focused on one thing, which is the air quality. So there’s a lot more we can do there. On the sensing side, we want to be able to measure more things that matter to people, for their health, for their safety. So there’s more types of things that we’re gonna be measuring. And obviously make it easy, still, to interpret those. We’re not gonna give you a science report that people can’t interpret. There are other ways we can help you clean those issues, so we’re doing research there as well.
And in terms of the “go to market” side, we’re very excited that we’re in a number of channels already. You can find us in the Apple Store, Best Buy, and our website. But on the commercial side, as I mentioned, we’ll hopefully start announcing some really cool partnerships, where we can scale with those other settings outside of the home as well. So I’m looking forward to that.
ABHISHEK: Awesome. Some exciting things happening. And if you’re listening right now, go check out hellowynd.com. It’s in the podcast description, as well.
Thanks so much, Ray, for being on the podcast.
RAY: Of course! I’m really excited you’re doing this podcast. I’m a huge fan.
ABHISHEK: Thank you.