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The initial problem I started solving was a symptom of a bigger problem, which was labor challenges. And labor challenges are probably what I will spend most of my career working to solve.
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Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by Frontlines IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with Venture backed founders and marketers. Where they talk, all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump in today's episode. Today our guest is Colin Herd, CEO of Mock. Colin, welcome to the show.
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Thanks, Brett. It's great to be here.
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B
You founded three companies now. So you most like pin?
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A
Well, yeah. Or I despise boredom. That's another way to look at it too.
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B
So glass is not full, glass empty. That's probably a better way to think about it. If you think about the different companies that you founded, is there something that connects them? Is there some through line there?
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A
A hundred percent. It's probably not obvious to anyone that looks at the three different companies that have started, but there is a thread and, you know, it's kind of a progression from one thing to the next. You know I am considered a tech founder now, right. The last two companies have been very deep technology companies. The first company, however, was not a tech company. It was an equipment company. We were building hard iron assets that you could use in row crop production ag to solve compaction problems. So we were bolting on this large mechanical system called track till to planters. So you might ask, how does petro compaction to attach to some of the things we're doing today like defense and autonomy and agriculture. So one core theme is ag. It's always been ag. My background's in ag. It's what I studied. I have a real passion for farmers and how they get work done. The initial company, you know, the problem set that we're solving for was largely introduced through large equipment having to be used to just get everything done in time. So you have these very short planting windows. Every year. We're in one right now. There's farmers all around me that have been put on the sidelines because of rain. And so the rule of thumb is you have about 10 days of good planting weather every year before you stop losing crop yield. And all the farms across the country are using this, in some sense, oversized equipment. As I started to kind of just dig deeper into the problem, it's a labor challenge, right? If they could use multiple smaller planters and avoid compaction, they'd do that. And so what I found kind of in a roundabout way was the initial problem I started solving was a symptom of a bigger problem, which was labor challenges. And labor challenges are probably what I will spend most of my career working to solve, because there's so many elements to it. And it's not a problem that you just flip a light switch and something some magic technology solves for it. So the space we're focused in is obviously labor challenges related to the equipment and operating that equipment and doing some of the really hard jobs in our world that require you to be in dirty, dangerous environments and sometimes do very dull work too. Right. And so that's kind of how that thread all connects, right between the equipment company, my first autonomy company, and what we're doing at Mach now.
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B
And when it comes to Mach, if you're on a plane, someone sits down next to you, they're chatting, they say, so what do you do? How do you answer that question?
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Typically it kind of depends on who they are or who I read them to be, you know, so if they're more tech focused, I'll kind of go into more details. But my default is the same way I describe it to my 7 year old, which is we make giant machines into robots. And that works pretty well, right? I mean, most people can kind of get there. So yeah, that's the short summary. We turn giant equipment into robots.
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B
And for you, when you hear mvp, what does that mean for you in your world?
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Well, yeah, so an MVP for us is typically we've integrated hardware and software physically onto a heavy piece of equipment to do something. And that's the key part is there's a lot of applications. When you look at the off highway space, machines aren't built to simply go back and forth. And just like the on road is basically the same use case no matter what, right. Move material on people from one location to the next. There's a whole bunch of nuances when you get further down into that. But at the end of the day, it's kind of the same use case. When you look at the off highway space, it's about doing an actual job, right? Maybe that's putting posts in the ground, maybe it's digging a hole, maybe it's working A field. And so that MVP for us looks very different depending on what the machine is that we're automating. But it's not something you can prototype in an afternoon.
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When I look at the list of industries and I'll just run through them. Agriculture, landcare, logistics, mining, defense, maritime, construction. Was agriculture the initial entry point or where did this all begin?
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Yes and no. So it's kind of interesting with Mach. The foundations of the company date back to 2013 and the original technology was beginning to be deployed and developed primarily for the government. And so we did a lot of defense work, worked in some maritime as well. It was really before you could afford any type of commercial autonomy. I always like to say, like a lidar at that point was 80 grand. And you know, there's nobody commercially that can justify the cost.
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B
Just for a reference point, what's lidar cost now?
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You can get a higher performing lidar than the 80 grand one now for, you know, 3 to 5 grand, depending on where you want to supply it from. So. Wow. Yeah. So it makes it much more approachable. Right. And I think LIDAR is just an example. But technology as a whole has progressed so much since that point that the costs have come down to a very reasonable point. So the routes were in defense. And then very quickly, say in 2018, we started in agriculture and it was actually the first commercial use case. So we started working with a company that was California based, building sprayers for orchards and automating those. That company has been very successful. We did about 200 machines with them and they were eventually acquired by John Deere. So we're still supporting the fleet that they have out there running our technology, but that's kind of how we started. And so my background obviously being in ag, and then our CTO's background's also an ag. That was definitely the entry point for us.
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B
When you just separate private from defense, what does that look like? Just revenue wise is like 50, 50
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our own business right now. Yeah, it's actually we do way less defense than we used to. And that was kind of intentional. We wanted to introduce this product, integrate it with OEM equipment so the manufacturer's building these machines and bring it to the commercial market where there's a lot of scale. And you're not always kind of living hand to mouth from defense contract to defense contract. One of the things that we've seen just in the last two years though is that the defense industry has changed a lot. And so it's much more approachable for companies like us. To get into that space. And it's actually an area that we're focused on a lot more right now. So I'd say like split right now is like we're probably 10% of our revenues related to defense and then I expect that to continue to grow significantly. Actually, even this year, we could see it flip to 50%. Being from defense, I know a lot
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of defense tech founders and I think there's some jealousy there. For the ones who started two years ago versus the ones that started 10 years ago, it seems to be a very different story, not just with selling to the government, but even the sentiment selling to the government in Silicon Valley at least, I think that was kind of not okay 10 years ago or largely not. Some people were into a hundred percent.
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Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I think VC as a whole wasn't even looking at defense as a sector that they were interested in until you had companies like Palantir and Andrew. Right. That kind of paved that path and now everybody's looking at it. And you know, the amount of capital that's getting put into venture backed defense firms is incredible. Today this show is brought to you
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by Frontlines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines I.O. podcast. Now back to today's episode. When you think about the profile of buyers that you're working with currently, how would you describe it? What's kind of the high level overview of that ideal customer for you?
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Yeah, so an ideal customer for us is typically mid market or mid sized oem, maybe a billion dollars or so at turnover that ultimately cannot afford or doesn't have the timeframe to build all of the technology out in house. And just like most companies buy their hydraulic control systems from a supplier or their component parts for the vehicle from a supplier, that's who we are targeted, is to be a supplier just like anyone else in their Rolodex. And that's given us a lot of opportunity in different places in the market. So that's kind of our ideal OEM customer. On the other hand, they're not fast to go to market and they'll tell you that. Right. It's not a quick progression from MVP to Let's roll this out on a commercial basis. And so the other thing that we have a really unique advantage in is that we have developed over 30 different OEM platforms where we've integrated our technology. And at the same time we're talking to, you know, 10x that in terms of the actual number of contacts that we have with different platforms that want to do autonomy at some level. And so part of what we are in a position to do now is kind of be a matchmaker between the enterprise kind of end users of autonomy companies that are saying, look, we have this massive labor problem. Maybe it's in Corey's or maybe it's in land care. We've got, you know, hundreds of assets that we want to automate in this timeframe, help us do it right. And so then we can go to the oem, say, look, here's a buyer, here's the technology and here's the customer. And that has really been helpful in the last even six months in terms of progressing the timelines that we have in terms of go to market with some of these customers.
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B
And if you just zoom out as a whole, what does the GTM strategy look like today?
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Yeah, it's kind of that. Right. So it's basically finding large enterprise customers that are pounding the door, asking for autonomy and technology on their fleets. And some of it's safety related, some of it's labor related. But at the end of the day, they're struggling. And it's not that they want to replace workers, it's that they cannot find the workers. Right. And you'll hear this from any competitor of ours that's in this space trying to solve these problems. It's not a labor replacement goal. It's a scarcity issue and it's a safety issue. There's a tremendous amount of safety challenges when you're dealing with heavy equipment and people in close proximity. And so our go to market is to find those end users and then find the right OEM platform that is scalable, that can basically be mass produced with our technology integrated on it and connect those dots. And yeah, like I said, I think there's an interesting dynamic happening right now across the off highway space where people are seeing this technology in the real world. They have confidence that it can actually work and they're saying, we need it, let's figure it out.
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I don't know how similar this is in your industry, but we had a company on a while back that's building robotics for food production. And when he came on, he kind of Described it as he was stepping through a graveyard of companies that had tried to do it, they'd been unsuccessful, and he kind of broke it into buckets for why that had been the case. He didn't name names or anything like that, but he kind of put him into buckets. I may have some of these details wrong, but I believe it was two weeks ago a very large autonomous tractor company I believe imploded. Or I know there was some drama about a farmer on Instagram or TikTok talking about it. Like, how would you kind of map the ecosystem? You know, if there are others in that graveyard, like, what have they done wrong in their approach?
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Yeah, I mean, as a founder in this space, you want to be very cautious and conscious of what's working and what's not working for different companies that are trying to kind of solve the same problem. The tractor company that you're speaking of, very familiar with. I think there's a couple things there that hurt them. Part of it is their own making, I would guess, and then part of it is market. So number one, you're making a completely electric tractor without even thinking of autonomy. There's a huge amount of scope there, reliability wise, runtime wise, components wise, supply chain wise. Ton of challenges just to do that standalone. The second piece is that the market is really pushing hard away from EV in this space for a lot of reasons. It's more expensive, you don't get the same level of performance and you can't achieve the same runtimes. The saving grace for EV is actually it's way more automatable, just everything controlled by wire and it's very high precision. So that's where I think, you know, they introduced this autonomy concept on top of evolution, which at the same time introduces a tremendous amount of new scope. And so it doesn't matter how much funding you have, you can kill yourself by biting off too much. And I think that is what I've seen a lot of in this space. When you try to make a brand new vehicle platform, you try to make it electric, you try to make it autonomous. It doesn't matter even if you're John Deere. Right. It's going to take you years and a tremendous amount of money to do that.
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Well, makes sense. So it's just tackling too many problems on top of one another. When it sounds like the one problem that you're really tackling, it's hard enough.
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A hundred percent. Yeah. And there's a tremendous amount of it. And that's part of why we exist Right. Is we want to make it really easy for people who build extremely high quality equipment at scale to quickly introduce reliable, safe autonomy solutions into that stack and not have to reinvent the wheel.
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When you think about the go to market strategy that you unpack there, how much iteration and how much pain went into it until you were able to have this channel or this strategy that
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was working, you know, it's interesting. So part of it was just actually looking at our historicals and realizing like where we were having the most success and where we were having the most challenges. And so some of the best OEM partners we have, despite, you know, where we're at technically with them and validating everything, there's still just a very stage gated process to go to market. And you know, being an early stage company and trying to figure out how do we scale revenue quick enough, that just wasn't working at the right time frame. And so when we looked back though, there was kind of these non traditional OEMs or these customers that we've been working with that are moving very quickly. So that's kind of light bulb moment I guess, honestly is look back through the data and you're like, well actually the majority of our revenue today is coming from non traditional OEMs, people that are connected directly to the end use case. And when I look back at that first success story of the company, the company called Gus doing the sprayers, right. That we started with in 2018, I would actually call them a non traditional OEM. They were a custom spraying service at their origin. Right. So they built this solution to solve their own problem first. When it worked for that, then they took it to the rest of the market and kind of became more of a traditional OEM at that point. And so the companies building equipment who are attached directly to the end use case have a lot higher velocity in the kroker to market. But then also the companies that are not even building the equipment but just have that end use case are pulling really hard right now. And so we want to capitalize on that.
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And would you say that you've crossed the chasm? You know, are you cross it? Are you still currently selling to the early adopters? And once you're through all of those, you'll need to change the go to market strategy?
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Yeah, I think the go to market strategy will change a little bit once we have crossed that chasm. We're not there yet. I don't think anyone in the industry is fully there yet. I mean, you've seen glimpses of it in certain spaces, like mining at some level, but mining has been there for a long time and automating stuff. So I think within the rest of the industry as a whole, we're still pushing through kind of that early adopter phase, getting things to market in a scalable way. I get the sense just where we're at right now on a macro level is that that chasm is going to be cropped very quickly, I'd say within the next two to three years. And that's really what we're excited about. When we look at some of the product that we've got integrated on machinery and some of the demand, and seeing those two things come together right now is it's going to make some very significant impacts, I think. So all of that actually being fueled to a degree by some of the advancements in AI right now as well. Just in terms of what the capability sets are that we can deploy on the edge, it's advancing at a, you know, kind of a breakneck speed. And so that's also kind of a tremendous tailwind going into this. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Company, a marketing leader's best friend. In these times of budget cuts and efficient growth, we help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co
- [17:51]
B
I feel like what has to be so interesting about this era that we're in right now is everyone, regardless of who they are in their personal lives, you know, they're most likely having these wow experiences with ChatGPT or Claude or whatever it is like with AI at a high level, like my mom is having these like, wow experiences and like a lot of people's moms and dads and, you know, older generations and all these people, like everyone is dealing with this. So I have to imagine that just from a technology adoption perspective that like the market is primed for change because you go live your personal life, you play with these tools, then you come back to work like you're thinking in probably a different way, whereas maybe 10 years ago you weren't as open to new technology and emerging technology.
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Yeah, I think so. I think at this point everybody's just, they're seeing things that couldn't be even imagined to get done, you know, a year ago. They're seeing it happen just like that and gracefully happen. And so then that kind of thinking starts. It challenges your bias, right, that maybe you've had for years about a certain technology working or being ready. And so as that bias gets challenged, it makes you ask those questions, why can't my lawnmower do this? Right. You know, or you see something in one sector and you're like, well, this machine's doing this. Or we have self driving cars all over San Francisco. Right. Why can't my tractor grind itself in the field fully? And, and so I think actually that self driving car, the era that we're in right now, where it's pretty peripheral, is having a really similar impact to the GPT. Right. It's just like people you know are in Phoenix or San Francisco, they take a self driving car ride and also they have that light bulb moment of like, holy cow, this actually is working. Right. It does do the job. It is unmanned. Where else can we apply this technology to?
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B
One of my favorite things to do when I have friends visit San Francisco is have them take Awaymo. Like I had a friend visiting from Germany the other day and I called him a Waymo and sent him to his hotel in a Waymo. And it's like a magical, magical experience. It's like there's something just, I don't know, kind of hurts your brain just sitting there like the world has changed. It's like we're in a different world now that you can like this technology that's been talked about for like my whole life, it's like today, it's no longer in the future. I know, which makes it exciting.
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Yeah. I was surprised even I was there, I don't know, or three weeks ago. And you know, just downtown San Francisco is like Waymo after Waymo. I mean there's probably more Waymo than driven cars at this point in certain parts of the city, which is incredible.
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Yeah. The other day I took a picture, I was on the, walking my dog and I. You get around across the street and I look, there's a Waymo on this side, Waymo on this side, Waymo on this side. And they're like 10 Waymos stacked here. It's like, yeah, you're in Silicon Valley and it makes sense. It's going to be interesting to see how that technology gets, you know, kind of pushed, I think across the US but it sounds like they're moving fast. Now, when you reflect on this entire journey so far from a go to market perspective, what would you say has been the most important lesson that you've learned so far?
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I guess when I look at it from a go to market and I'll combine this into my other company as well, where we started you know, in 2016 is when we founded Smart Ag, which was the former company, I thought we were super late. The year we founded that company, C and H debuted their autonomous tractor at the Farm Progress show. And I was like, oh, my gosh, we're cooked. This has already been solved. And turns out, in hindsight, we were tremendously early. We were the first company to retrofit a autonomy system onto a tractor for grain carts. And frankly, nobody in the ag space had truly figured out any level of autonomy yet that would work. And so part of it is just understanding kind of where you're at in the market overall. And despite all the shouting from the rooftops you might do, telling people, hey, this technology is ready. There has to be a general consensus that it is. And I think we're starting to see some of that happen where autonomy is having success, just like we talked about it with Waymo in certain segments. And that's changing people's perspective enough where they're saying, yes, this can be done. We do want to prioritize it. It is a strategy for our company, for our teams to embrace. And so you just have to kind of listen to the winds of change a little bit and understand where you're at in that market cycle and be positioned for that moment of we need it and we need it now. It has to happen. And make sure that you can step into that opportunity and not be too late and not be too early. Right.
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B
Very helpful advice and really fun conversation. Let's go ahead and wrap here before we do, for those that are listening in, that want to follow along with on this journey, where should we send them? Where should they go?
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Yeah, check out our website. It's just Machmach IO and then hit us up on LinkedIn. You can find me on Twitter. That's Colin. Underscore Herd, and love to engage with anybody that has any type of thoughts or use cases or ideas on this. So we're always looking for new opportunities. Amazing.
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Colin, thanks so much.
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A
Thanks, Brett.
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Well, that's all for today. Today's episode of Builders, brought to you by the Frontlines. If you want more amazing content like this, visit Frontlines IO, where you'll find the library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers and other GTM leaders, where we unpack the tactical lessons from their journey. And of course, as always, if you do want to launch your own podcast, we'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit Frontlines IO Podcasts as a service, mention that you listen, mention you love the show, and we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you on the next episode.