#103 – Starting a New Zealand software company (Dave ten Have & Ben Grynol)

When you’re living outside of a tech market, things tend to seem foreign. The culture and expectations of a new market are always different than you’d expect. But the best entrepreneurs learn to roll with the punches. In this episode, Levels Head of Growth, Ben Grynol, chatted with our Software Engineer, Dave Ten Hav, about Dave’s backstory as a co-founder of Omniblox, how he took on the Silicon Valley culture, and why you shouldn’t expect overnight success.

17:15 – Why 3D printing caught Dave’s attention

Dave shared why the idea of 3D printing was so fascinating to him and how it prompted him to start his own business.

When you frame it from the point of view of living on an island where the next stop is literally Antarctica, when you are that far away from the rest of the world, the idea of being able to fabricate anything you want at the press of a button without having to wait for shipping, actually makes a lot more sense. New Zealand is a long way, as you’ve pointed out at the beginning of the story, it’s a long way from anything, which means it’s expensive to get stuff and you’ve got to wait for it. So in that context, it’s like, “Yeah, hell, if I could have a system where I just press the button and it spits something out there, that makes a lot more sense.”

24:09 – The culture of Silicon Valley

Dave said his experience trying to get funding within Silicon Valley was frustrating because the business culture and expectations were so different.

We’d end up having these conversations where we’d go down to Santa Road and we’d go into a VC’s office and the opening conversation would go “Look,” I said, “Hey, you realize we’re from New Zealand, right?” And they’d go, “Yeah, look, it’s not a problem, we invest all over the world, we invest in Israel.” That was generally where they stopped at that point in time. So I was kind of, “Okay, cool, well, I think I’ve set the expectations, we’re all good.” And then the conversation would go on and go on and go on, and then there’d be the sucking of air through teeth and they’d go, “Yeah, but you’re based in New Zealand, you know that, right?” I know I told you right at the beginning of this conversation, you know what? That’s where I really misunderstood the cultural component of Silicon Valley, the business culture, not the other stuff, the MBA, the Stanford, Harvard MBA culture of the Valley at the time, which was, “Yeah, I didn’t look anything like.”

25:39 – The challenges of expectations

Ben said that because of the strict expectations many investors have, unconventional founders often struggle to get funding.

I think the challenge is that there were these funding phases, if you want to call it that, so let’s not go all the way back, but actually, let’s go back to like mid-2000s. So funding phase being Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, like Bay Area, notable university, that was the verification queue. That was the heuristic that was used of like, “You’re verified, you can raise capital.” And I’m generalizing right now, but this is generally on what was reported. And what you’d see get funded was, “Hey, we backed like two more founders who are Stanford MBA,” so I’m making this up, but that was typically the story. And then it was more around like 2012 ish, 2012 to 2020, probably less so now, but 2020 YC was the verification. So it was like, “You don’t need the college degree.” But it was really hard to raise capital if you didn’t have either of those qualifications or either of those check marks.

31:09 – Focus on your customers

Dave said that after he realized fundraising was mostly based on heuristics, he reoriented himself around his customers rather than his investors.

For me it was this realization that yeah, the fundraising game is a heuristics game. If you are able to present an idea in a certain way, framed in a certain manner, you’re just like with Sam and Josh, right, we’re a totally remote company. “Oh, no, that breaks the heuristics, we’re not interested,” and then the heuristics change over time, “Oh, now we are super interested,” so that was kind of a thing. And for me, the realization that the funding, the people with the money are not the arbiters of reality, your customers are the arbiters of reality. And I don’t think I’ll ever forget their 48-hour experience, one of the big funders said, “No” and one of my customers said, “Yes.”

33:18 – Changing the entrepreneurial mindset

Dave said he had to reframe his mindset from transactional thinking to wondering what he could learn on the journey.

I’ll just go and prove that I can do this or that we can do this. And that took much longer than I expected, at least things always take longer. And so the framing moves from being this transaction to transaction thing where it’s like Series A funding, Series B funding, et cetera. We moved from that to being, “Well, okay, this is a journey, well, what can I be learning from this journey? What are the aspirational assumptions that I need to discard because I’m not able to meet them? What are the things that I can learn and who are the people I can meet? And who are the customers I can excite? What does that starter look like?” And so that became much more of it and that’s actually become my framing when it comes to starting up and running businesses now.

34:23 – Startups are like music albums

Dave compared startups to music albums. They both take a long time to create, they’re a journey, and it’s about learning as much as it is about making money.

It’s this combination of looking at a business as an album, a new album from a band. It takes like two years to build an album and then it gets released and it’s got a life and in some cases it’s got a life of 30 years and some cases it’s got a life of three weeks, there’s all this upfront investment from a talented group of people and then the product gets released. So that’s part of it and the other part of the framing, is this idea that it’s a journey and the money is one thing that comes out of that, but learning is actually the guts of it, technical learning, psychological, emotional and all of those sorts of things. And that’s where I get the most joy, meeting, learning, being invited into the room where you’re the dumbest person in the room repeatedly, it’s kind of like how do you continue doing that? Because that’s actually really interesting, that’s the real event. So yeah, it becomes a vehicle for being invited into the room as nominally, the dumbest person and learning from people. That’s cool. They’re mixing people, that’s the better how that energy changed.

36:50 – Every health journey is different

Ben compared entrepreneurial journeys to health journeys. They both take time, the journey is always unique to the individual, and you have to have a mindset of flexibility.

I think there’s a parallel with a health journey, not to dive too deep into it, but from what we see from going through, and everyone’s going to have a different health and wellness journey as far as what they use Levels for or anything, whether or not they’re using Levels or not, health takes time as does founding a company. And you can’t snap your fingers and all of a sudden it’s like, “Look, it happened, we’re there” it’s ongoing, it’s a lifelong journey of learning and adapting. And I think using that mindset, like the way that you framed it of, no, man, we go back to the drawing board, we keep working at it, we keep trying, and we know that it takes time, it does feel like a parallel to this idea of health and wellness as far as like, you can’t just use one product and all of a sudden there’s like behavior change overnight. It’s like, this takes time and it’s something that you dedicate yourself to doing, it feels parallel to a startup.

37:58 – The narrative of instant success

Dave said that while the idea of overnight success is hugely popular, it’s not realistic. Most successful businesses take time to develop.

We are surrounded by narratives of instant success everywhere, our media is awash with this narrative of overnight success. And it’s a gross disservice to the people who are trying to achieve their goals, whatever they are, but also to the people who are successful, tell the story of the fact that some poor person had to struggle for years to get to the success that they have achieved. Let’s stop telling these bullshit stories of, “They did something on Monday and they were a billionaire on Friday” that’s just not the truths and it’s a sad story because it doesn’t speak to the human condition and the human the experience. And that makes me very sad because that component, particularly as I’ve gotten more experience, that’s become the really fascinating thing. As soon as you’re able to disentangle yourself from that illusion of instant success or instant fitness or instant health or those sorts of things, then you’re in a growth story and an exploration story and you can bring people along with that story. The problem with the instant success stories, it’s one person and that’s it. Whereas a journey and a growth story is, “No, look, there’s a team of people who I love and care about, be it family, or be it workmates or other artists or designers, or whatever you will and we are on this journey and we are learning stuff and we are building rich lives and we are engaging in the human condition.” And for me, that’s exciting, that’s really interesting and that’s where that health thing is bang on.

Dave Ten Hav (00:06):

If someone were to say, “Hey, look, I want to start up a company in New Zealand and make an impact in Silicon Valley,” there’s this collective sucking in of air over teeth. Do you know why? Do you really want to do that? Is that really possible? And it was kind of like, “Well, why isn’t it? Why isn’t it possible? Let’s just do it, let’s see what happens.” So I had no clear idea of the amount of work that was required, none at all and it just hit me with a ton of bricks, it was kind of like, “I have no idea of how the United States works, like not.”

Ben Grynol (00:51):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels, we’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health and this is your front row seat to everything we do, this is a whole new level.

Speaker 3 (01:17):

When living outside of a tech market, things can always seem foreign. Things can seem like they’re a further reach than they are and sometimes they are, well, that was the case for Dave Ten Hav. Dave recently joined our team as part of the engineering leadership and he’s got a ton of experience in both engineering and as a founder. Dave’s originally from New Zealand, early in his career, when he founded a company called Ponoko that focused on 3D printing tech, being a platform for people to aggregate their designs, well, he was an outsider in the valve, eventually he found his way into different publications, things like Wired, things like Inc, all these magazines that he would see on newsstand as a kid. He remembers this one experience where he saw Wired for the first time, he picked it up in his hand from a newsstand and he still has that issue to this date, but he said, “That’s what inspired him to get into tech in the first place?”

Speaker 3 (02:16):

Well, that journey took him forward through a number of different companies that he co-founded, or he was in a leadership position. In 2019, he co-founded another company, one called Omniblox, another software company, eventually, that led him to meeting our team. Omniblox is very much a remote company and so as Levels, after further conversations, made sense for Dave and his team to join forces with Levels so that we could focus on building our software. Something that we’re trying to do, Dave was very much behind our mission and being remote, being in New Zealand, well, that wasn’t a factor. It was a great conversation and we talked about Dave’s backstory, how he became an engineer, why he loves engineering so much and what he’s looking forward to in the future. So here’s where we kick things off.

Ben Grynol (03:08):

So anyway, thought it would be good to dive in and talk about your experience because you recently joined the team as an engineer that has a ton of experience as a software engineer, and also as a founder. You’ve been an exec at startups, you’ve founded your own companies and really started like, if we take it all the way back to this foundation, maybe even before Ponoko when you’re doing everything pertaining to 3D printing, let’s start with the idea of, how did you get into engineering to begin with?

Dave Ten Hav (03:42):

Yeah, right. Good question, I still vividly remember coming home at the age of eight and seeing an 8-bit computer that dad had bought, but it wasn’t for 10 years that I really genuinely got into engineering. The precursor to it was another vivid moment, which was seeing the first issue of Wired Magazine on the newsstand, back then, the graphic design for Wired stood out, there was nothing like it, all the tech and computer magazines that existed were all glossy and shiny and had these serious kind of design colors. And then there was this crazy magazine full of spelling mistakes and it was just the first issue, I’ve still got it, I’ve still got the first issue because it’s so important to me. But the reason that’s important is because for the first time ever, it was kind of like, “Ooh, that’s what I want to do, that’s what I want to be doing.” It was kind of like, “Oh, holy shit, I found my tribe.”

Ben Grynol (04:56):

And you ended up being on Wired, didn’t you?

Dave Ten Hav (04:59):

Yeah I’ve been on Wired a couple of times. So yeah, that was cool, got to know at the time the editor of Wired-

Ben Grynol (05:08):

Chris Anderson?

Dave Ten Hav (05:09):

Chris Anderson. Yeah. It has played an oversized role in my career from an aspirational point of view and then, like a lot of those aspirational things you finally turn up in Silicon Valley and you just realize the bill of goods that was really being sold at that magazine. It’s kind of like, “Huh? OK. Yeah, right, not too sure I want to be here, not too sure I like these people, not too sure I like the way they do business.” And so that’s where it’s also played a really interesting role because it was, I mean at it’s core, it’s still an incredibly valuable publication, but I think, for me, it told a story and that story was idealized and I don’t want to say it was artificial, it wasn’t, but it was definitely the PR rag for Silicon Valley, there’s no doubt about it.

Dave Ten Hav (06:09):

But it was at the age of 16, I found this magazine and when that’s what I want to do, and then I spent 16 years, I was 32 when I got to San Francisco for the first time. I spent 16 years trying to get the skillset that got me to Silicon Valley with a startup that was exciting enough to grab people’s attention and a key element of that was learning how to write software.

Ben Grynol (06:40):

And so let’s go into to that idea from the outside in, right. So you’re in New Zealand at the time, 16 years old and you see this thing that is foreign in every respect, like it’s a new magazine, a new publication foreign by geography, what did that feel like as far as…? Did it feel accessible? Did it feel like, “Man, I could reach for this thing?” Or was it one of those things that you sort of like manufactured in your mind and put on a pedestal to be like, “This is the Mecca,” what did that feel? This thing that just felt so far away from where you were located and what was the path and how you thought you were going to get there?

Dave Ten Hav (07:23):

So it’s a little bit of option C, right, kind of a combination of the two things. I think the thing about the stories, particularly in the first couple of years of Wired magazine was that the stories felt accessible while it was obviously, lionizing the tech entrepreneurs that were there. I think one of the big things about Wired magazine that separated it from the likes of Mac world or BC world or those things, was the cultural content. It was obvious that the editorial team, Kevin Kelly and Negroponte at the time had gone, “Hey, look, the Bay Area is this,” melting pot of tech and art and all of those sorts of things. And so in many respects, the combo of that kind of stir fry of things, made it feel accessible, but yeah, it was totally, eventually, I’ll get to Mecca thing. And so that became, or it was at the time, an aspirational goal.

Dave Ten Hav (08:40):

So to answer the second part of the question, what was the process? Well, it was kind of like, at the time, there was kind of this established mechanism in Wellington where Victoria University, which is the college that I went to is on the top of the hill. Wellington’s like San Francisco, the city, but super-condensed, it’s like, there are hills, there’s a flat area and then there are hills and you can walk back and forth in 15 minutes, it’s time, but it’s super-condensed. So the college sits on top of the hill and there is the street called the Terrace and the Terrace runs down the hill through consultancy, businesses and banks and eventually ends up at the bottom where the government departments are. The joke was that, you went to college, you rolled down the Terrace, you picked up a consultancy gig on the way down and you did that for a couple of years and then you either went into government or you did your own thing, that was kind of the joke, but that’s exactly what I did.

Dave Ten Hav (09:52):

So I rolled down the Terrace and I picked up a job at a software consultancy called Glazier Systems. It had just been acquired, this was the dotcom era, the first dotcom era and there was a big M&A roll up going on in New Zealand and Glazier got acquired. They became advantage group and I went to work for them and then with four other people, we left and started our own consultancy business. But in the meantime, I ended up working for people Rod Drury, for instance, who’s a very famous entrepreneur in New Zealand, responsible for company called Xero, which is kind of like QuickBooks, but for the rest of the world. Yeah, I left the consultancy business that I found which is still running, it’s still 21 years on, I mean, they’ve done such a good job, I’m so impressed with them. Left there and then ended up starting Ponoko yeah, and that was compelling enough that when it was pitched to TechCrunch, they went, “Yeah, come and present at the first TechCrunch,” which is what we ended up doing.

Ben Grynol (11:15):

When you were doing all this, you’ve got this mental picture in my mind of, you’re holding onto this first issue of Wired and you’re looking at this thing, did you think to yourself being an outsider geographically, not even on the same land mass, right? And by proximity far away too, it’s not one of those things where it’s like, you are still close by flight, you’re far away. Did you feel, or were you curious of like, “Man, how hard do I have to work? What do I have to do in trying to figure out that?” Because you benchmark, not being around that geography, it’s like, you don’t know where you stand as far as… Let’s use running as an analogy, if you don’t know if running 50 miles a day is a lot, a little or at the mean, how do you figure that out? You’re trying to figure out for yourself of like, “Man, how hard do I have to work to reach the Mecca? What were you doing?”

Ben Grynol (12:14):

And I’m assuming you were an anomaly amongst your friend group or the people that you surrounded yourself with where they’re like, “Man, Dave, what are you talking about this Wired? We don’t do that here that’s for that other place.” What did that sort of be like? How hard you worked and the way that everyone around you thought about what you were wanting to get into?

Dave Ten Hav (12:34):

Yeah. I mean, that’s a really good question because this in new Zealand’s tech history, right? This is prior to Lord of the Rings, the moment Lord of the Rings kicked off in New Zealand, I got a very mixed relationship with that very tired thing.

Ben Grynol (12:49):

You can rant about it, it’s okay, we can digress.

Dave Ten Hav (12:51):

Yeah, well, I mean, it has all the problems that won movies, technology and government subsidies and shitty labor relations and all of those sorts of things have got. But I also have to be completely upfront about the fact that the third business that I ran and the first business that I sold, was full of people who were attracted to Wellington because of Lord of the Rings. A very good friend of mine, still very good friend of mine, has got a technical Oscar for the work that he did on Star Wars and Avatar, but he’d been attracted to New Zealand because of the Lord of the Rings. Yeah, so it’s prior to that, so we’re still with, I don’t know what Canada is like, but New Zealand had a very deep cultural self-loathing thing going on in the late ’70s, early ’80s and even into the mid ’90s but we were slowly getting over that.

Dave Ten Hav (13:56):

And so it was very much a thing of yeah, what I wanted to do was exceedingly unusual at the time, I loved New Zealand, I’d still live here, but I didn’t like the kind of parochial attitudes that existed. If someone were to say, “Hey, look, I want to start up a company in New Zealand and a make an impact in Silicon Valley,” there’s this collective sucking in of air over the teeth. Do you know why? Did you really? Do you really want to do that? Is that really possible? Well, why isn’t it possible? Let’s just do it, let’s see what happens. So I had no clear idea of the amount of the amount of work that was required, none at all. In fact, I was so ignorant that I remember like three years into that experience of being in the states, I remember standing on Valencia Street one day and it just hit me with a ton of bricks.

Dave Ten Hav (14:56):

It was kind of like, “I have no idea how the United States works, like not” and I’ve been there, I’ve been operating there for three years and it was just kind of like, “I’ve got no idea how this place works.” I got suck it into the idea that I understood the United States because I grew up with US media, I’m a kid of the ’80s, so I grew up with A-Team and Knight Rider and all of that and the music, Springsteen and John Mellencamp and all of those sorts of things, as much as I grew up with British content, right? So BBC and Dire Straits and all of that sort of stuff. And I spoke the same language and they used dollars and cents and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but there was just this visceral moment of, “Oh, I’m a stranger in a strange land.” Eventually, the disconnect became apparent, I think that’s the best example of how little thought I really put into how much work was required to get it done.

Ben Grynol (16:09):

And so when you’re on that path and by the way, you’re singing a love language to my musical heart, with all those references to Mark Knopfler, Springsteen and Mellencamp, why not? Lovely, but when you’re doing that, eventually you made it there and you get there and you think like, “What exactly is going on here?” From what you said, it seems almost like a false bill of sale, there was this manufactured outlook on what you thought it would be and you got there and it seemed like it was a lot different. So let’s go into this whole idea of Ponoko as we take this path, maybe frame exactly what Ponoko is and why it was so culturally relevant and so absurd, if you want to use that word, it was absurd to think that one of the world’s leading 3D printing platforms, we call it platform because it was part of the ecosystem system, but was located exactly opposite direction of where everything in the world pertaining to 3D printing and all of the buzz around it was happening.

Dave Ten Hav (17:13):

Yeah. When you frame it like that, it is absurd, when you frame it from the point of view of living on an island with a nick stop, is literally Antarctica. When you are that far away from the rest of the world, the idea of being able to fabricate anything you want at the press of a button without having to wait for shipping, actually makes a lot more sense. New Zealand is a long way, as you’ve pointed out at the beginning of the story, it’s a long way from anything, which means it’s expensive to get stuff and you’ve got to wait for it. So in that context, it’s kind of like, “Yeah, hell, if I could have a system where I just press the button and it spits something out there, that makes a lot more sense.”

Ben Grynol (18:07):

Let’s digress too for a sec into it because this is like mid 2000, so 2006-ish where you founded it, what exactly is it just so that everyone gets the frame of reference?

Dave Ten Hav (18:20):

Yeah. So it was one of the very first digital factories, right? That’s how the guy I co-founded with and myself kind of structured the idea. It was this idea that with digital fabrication technologies like 3D printing, laser cutting and CNC routing, you could essentially back in an entire factory with a big database of design. So you could look through that big database and go, “I want that and I want that and I want that” and you could hit the print button and they would pop out of some magical machine. And the core bits of the magical machine already existed, right, 3D printers had been around for a while. CNC routers had been around since the ’50s, right, maybe even earlier and laser cutters had been around for 20 or 30 years at the time as well and then the crazy thing was, they’re all based on the same computational technology.

Dave Ten Hav (19:12):

I mean, numerical control was something that came out of the US Navy in the early ’50s, so they were all based on the same thing. And it was kind of like, “Well, okay, if they all speak the same sort of language, then you just integrate them all and you have this magical device that produces both additive and subtractive parts.” So additive being 3D printing where you build up and then subtractive being where you cut stuff out of sheets or out of lumps of atoms. And so by combining those additive parts and those subtractive parts, you make amazing things and it’s one of those timing things where the maker movement was just kicking off at that point in time, Maker Faire had just kind of started to hit its straps as part of that web 2.0 thing that was going on in 2005, 2006. The really fundamental thing there was that it moved this concept of the successful technologists from just being computer programmers, to being metal workers or industrial designers or knitters, sewers and chemists.

Dave Ten Hav (20:34):

So all of a sudden, what the maker movement did was, it just blew out the space of opportunity, but the tools that existed were hugely primitive. Where this really started from was that I had gone through a phase of designing skateboards, of all things and I wanted to get these particular skateboard hubs milled out of aluminum. And I found this place in one of the suburbs of Wellington and the quote that came back was jaw-dropping, it was like $10,000 for 100 units or something insane like that and I just looked at that and went, “That is ridiculous, I could design it on my laptop right now, why can’t I just have a print button? Where is my print button? Why do I need to pay $10,000?”

Dave Ten Hav (21:25):

So the maker movement was made up of, or I saw it as being inhibited by those sorts of things because services like Ponoko didn’t really exist at the time and it was kind of like, “Well, let’s just make one of those.” It was a personal itch, it was something that annoyed me, it was something that technically I knew how to construct to make it work and that’s what we did.

Ben Grynol (21:51):

Yeah. It was a wild thing because the barrier to entry, assume there was access to the machines, so anything that you’re doing in CNC or 3D printing, the barrier for a lot of people was being able to design the actual files. And so having the aggregation that Ponoko did was like, “Hey, here’s how we are going to create access for more people to do this and make it open source.” It was a wild thing because I was such a huge fan of Ponoko and everything you were doing and I was watching it, I was a kid grabbing the magazine, I was a kid reading about what’s happening. And then when we had first connected, I was like, “Wait a minute, I’ve known of what you’ve done for so long that it was sort of one of those [inaudible 00:22:36].”

Dave Ten Hav (22:36):

Yeah, I know.

Ben Grynol (22:36):

My friend and I used to admire it so much, it was just interesting, it feels analogous to that idea that you brought up of like seeing the Wired magazine and picking it up, being the outsider and being like, “Wow.” So it’s like, hearing the full story of the way that it was built from the outside. I thought you guys were in the Valley, the framing of it felt like that, it felt very much like a Valley company.

Dave Ten Hav (23:00):

That was for very explicit reasons, right? Because one, I wanted to be in the Valley, that’s where I wanted to be and two, that was the sort of story that I wanted to tell, it was a science fictional aspirational story. All of the significant stories about one that had impact on me came from the Valley, the only one that didn’t come from Wellington, it was Icebreaker, the clothing manufacturer. So the language, the brand, the vibe, the voice, the nature of interaction and all of those sorts were 100% ripped off from what was going on in the Valley and that was exactly what we did. So it was to look like a Valley company, let’s go to the Valley and then let’s see whether or not, we can raise some money there and that’s where the bill of goods kicked in or at least that’s an unfair assessment. That’s where my ignorance of the actual process of raising venture capital kicked in, what I really meant.

Dave Ten Hav (24:08):

And so we’d end up having these conversations where we’d go down to Santa Road and we’d go into a VC’s office and the opening conversation would look, I said, “Hey, you realize we’re from New Zealand, right?” And they’d go, “Yeah, look, it’s not a problem, we invest all over the world, we invest in Israel” that was generally where they stopped at that point in time. So I was kind of, “Okay, cool, well, I think I’ve said the expectations were all good” and then the conversation would go on and go on and go on and then there’d be the sucking of air through teeth and they’d go, “Yeah, but you’re based in New Zealand, you know that, right?” I know I told you right at the beginning of this conversation, you know what? That’s where I really misunderstood the cultural component of Silicon Valley, the business culture, not the other stuff, the MBA, the Stanford, Harvard MBA culture of the Valley at the time, which was, “Yeah, I didn’t look anything like.”

Dave Ten Hav (25:12):

So in New Zealand, I wasn’t anything like Kiwis, but then I’d go to the states and I was nothing like the entrepreneurs that they wanted to invest in. I didn’t have a college degree from Stanford or Harvard or any of the Ivy League ones, probably didn’t wear chinos well enough for whatever it was, the visual trigger.

Ben Grynol (25:33):

The black Patagonia vest, you need one of those?

Dave Ten Hav (25:36):

Yeah, exactly.

Ben Grynol (25:39):

I think the challenge is that there were these funding phases, if you want to call it that, so let’s not go all the way back, but actually, let’s go back to like mid 2000s. So funding phase being Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley, like Bay Area, notable university, that was the verification queue. That was the heuristic that was used of like, “You’re verified, you can raise capital” and I’m generalizing right now, but this is generally on what was reported. And what you’d see get funded was, “Hey, we backed like two more founders who are Stanford MBA,” so I’m making this up, but that was typically the story. And then it was more around like 2012 ish, 2012 to 2020, probably less so now, but 2020 YC was the verification. So it was like, “You don’t need the college degree.” But it was really hard to raise capital if you didn’t have either of those qualifications or either of those check marks.

Ben Grynol (26:45):

Sam and Josh experienced this when they first started trying to raise capital for levels of the seed round, this was January of 2020 and Sam had started reaching out to investors and people said, “Cool, where you guys located?” And it was, “Oh, we’re entirely remote, our whole team is remote” and it was, “That’s not going to work.” And then COVID hits and things went dark and then June things started picking up again, like people were responding to emails and the responses were, “Tell us more about this remote thing that you guys are doing because it seems to be something, right?” And so now, you are on this team and you’re located in a different part of the world, but it’s kind of full circle back to the, “Hey, maybe this thing that you were trying to position us, it never really mattered, actually doesn’t matter.” And I think the reason people had risk aversion towards anything outside of certain geographic areas, call it 15 years ago, was because they thought there’s no way you can ever access talent and build talent and do all these things. And it’s like, well, that’s entirely wrong.

Dave Ten Hav (27:58):

Yeah. Well that’s right. And even back then a team that was split between New Zealand and West Oakland, and then went on to do exactly the same thing with make Makey Makey. Ran Makey Makey from New Zealand with a team that was smeared all over the United States, but I think both examples highlight the gate keeping exercise that occurs with venture capital and the reliance on heuristics. There’s that Paul Graham quote, which he either said it or he didn’t, but unfortunately it’s attributed to it, which is, if someone like Mark Zuckerberg walks into my office, I’m completely full, I will invest in that company. Well, no, I know that was never explicitly stated, it’s never been explicitly stated at least in the period of time that I was in the Valley that, “No, we’re not interested in you because you don’t match this set of heuristics.”

Dave Ten Hav (29:08):

I had a fascinating experience a little later on where we been on the cover of Inc Magazine. So we generated enough buzz and enough interest that Inc Magazine flew one of their top flight writers and one of their top flight photographers down to New Zealand to write a story on us and shoot photos of us to then put us on the cover of the magazine. So we’d reached that stay and I went into a few months out, no, this must have been September, this was October or September the same year. I got two big invitations, one was to a large, big tech VC arm, I won’t mention who they were, but it was here down in Menlo park. And so I went down to Menlo park and I was given a lot of time, I was given a generous amount of time to have a conversation with the head partner of the firm.

Dave Ten Hav (30:19):

And the end of the conversation was, “Hey, we really like what you’re doing, but we can’t see the five year plan, we can see the 10-year plan, but we can’t see the five year plan, so let’s just keep in touch.” And the very next day, I had a meeting with one of the large CAD companies in the Bay Area and they rolled me into a gigantic Cisco video conference room and they then said, “This is what we want to do and this is where you fit in.” And that meeting was like four hours long and it was so exhausting to me that I had to go back to where I was staying and I just slept for 18 hours afterwards, it just blew my mind. And for me it was kind of like, oh, it was this realization that yeah, the fundraising game is a heuristics game.

Dave Ten Hav (31:18):

If you are able to present an idea in a certain way, framed in a certain manner, you’re just like with Sam and Josh, right, we’re a totally remote company. “Oh, no, that breaks the heuristics, we’re not interested” and then the heuristics change over time, “Oh, now we are super interested,” so that was kind of a thing. And for me, the realization that the funding, the people with the money are not the arbiters of reality, your customers are the arbiters of reality. And I don’t think I’ll ever forget their 48-hour experience, one of the big funders said, “No” and one of my customers said, “Yes.”

Ben Grynol (31:58):

What did you do with that energy? So it’s really easy to take two directions, it comes down to mindset. One direction can be like, everyone is, “You almost get angry.” You can get really angry and things aren’t working out, or you can turn it into a healthy chip, like a bit of a chip on your shoulder of, “I’m going to go back. I’m going to put my head down and I’m going to work twice as hard to prove that geography doesn’t matter, it comes down to execution.” Both are outcomes that are understandable because people can take either direction, but what did you do with that energy?

Ben Grynol (32:42):

You go to the Bay Area, this thing that you’ve been aiming for for your entire life since you’re a kid. You get there, there’s a false bill of sale where people are like, “Yeah, we like what we see, but we don’t like it that much because you don’t look like us, you don’t sound like us, you don’t dress like us,” all of these things that you just like turn, “What the heck?” How did you think about it? Did you ever get to a place where it was like, initially you were upset? Or was it always like, “I’m just going to go out hustle everyone.”

Dave Ten Hav (33:13):

It’s the latter, this is just kind of like, okay, well they said, “No.” Okay, well, I’ll just go and prove that I can do this or that we can do this. And that took much longer than I expected, at least things always take longer, right? And so the framing moves from being this kind of transaction to transaction thing where it’s kind of like Series A funding, Series B funding, et cetera. We moved from that to being, “Well, okay, this is a journey, well, what can I be learning from this journey? What are the aspirational assumptions that I need to discard because I’m not able to meet them? What are the things that I can learn and who are the people I can meet? And who are the customers I can excite? What does that starter look like?” And so that became much more of it and that’s actually become my framing when it comes to starting up and running businesses now, it’s this combination of looking at a business as an album, a new album from a band.

Dave Ten Hav (34:28):

It takes like two years to build an album and then it gets released and it’s got a life and in some cases it’s got a life of 30 years and some cases it’s got a life of three weeks, there’s all this upfront investment from a talented group of people and then the product gets released. So that’s part of it and the other part of the framing, is this idea that it’s a journey and the money is one thing that comes out of that, but learning is actually the guts of it, technical learning, psychological, emotional and all of those sorts of things. And that’s where I get the most joy, meeting, learning, being invited into the room where you’re the dumbest person in the room repeatedly, is [inaudible 00:35:21], how do you continue doing that? Because that’s actually really interesting, that’s the real event. So yeah, it becomes a vehicle for being invited into the room as nominally, the dumbest person and learning from people. That’s cool. They’re mixing people, that’s the better how that energy changed.

Ben Grynol (35:43):

It’s also cool to see how things have evolved with companies that can be models for people locally. So let’s say, Canva, Canva is woven into the tech ecosystem as much as any other or company and they’re from Australia, Athletic Greens, New Zealand. These are major companies, this is Rogan and Ferris and all of these thought leaders that the world looks up to, talks about these companies and it’s not a matter of being an outsider. And it’s like, “Well, we couldn’t possibly use Athletic Greens or Canva because they’re not one of us,” the world is flattening through this renaissance a little bit, but it provides more opportunity to really break down like, are people doing great things? One of the things you touched on, and I know we haven’t gone into Makey Makey and Omniblox, we can maybe not go there, but one of the things that you touched on, that’s interesting, is the idea of knowing that when things don’t work out, you go back to the drawing board and you keep trying.

Ben Grynol (36:50):

And I think there’s a parallel with a health journey, not to dive too deep into it, but from what we see from going through, and everyone’s going to have a different health and wellness journey as far as what they use Levels for or anything, whether or not they’re using Levels or not, health takes time as does founding a company. And you can’t snap your fingers and all of a sudden it’s like, “Look, it happened, we’re there” it’s ongoing, it’s a lifelong journey of learning and adapting. And I think using that mindset, like the way that you framed it of, no, man, we go back to the drawing board, we keep working at it, we keep trying, and we know that it takes time, it does feel like a parallel to this idea of health and wellness as far as like, you can’t just use one product and all of a sudden there’s like behavior change overnight. It’s like, this takes time and it’s something that you dedicate yourself to doing, it feels parallel to a startup.

Dave Ten Hav (37:54):

Yeah, I think that’s a really insightful statement. We are surrounded by narratives of instant success everywhere, our media is a wash with this narrative of overnight success, right? And it’s a gross disservice to the people who are trying to achieve their goals, whatever they are, but also to the people who are successful, tell the story of the fact that some poor person had to struggle for years to get to the success that they have achieved. Let’s stop telling these bullshit stories of, “They did something on Monday and they were a billionaire on Friday” that’s just not the truths and it’s a sad story because it doesn’t speak to the human condition and the human the experience. And that makes me very sad because that component, particularly as I’ve gotten more experience, that’s become the really fascinating thing.

Dave Ten Hav (39:07):

As soon as you’re able to disentangle yourself from that illusion of instant success or instant fitness or instant health or those sorts of things, then you’re in a growth story and an exploration story and you can bring people along with that story. The problem with the instant success stories, it’s one person and that’s it. Whereas a journey and a growth story is, “No, look, there’s a team of people who I love and care about, be it family, or be it workmates or other artists or designers, or whatever you will and we are on this journey and we are learning stuff and we are building rich lives and we are engaging in the human condition.” And for me, that’s exciting, that’s really interesting and that’s where that health thing is bang on.

Ben Grynol (40:10):

If you anchor on the wrong things, it can feel defeating because it’s like, “Well, it didn’t happen for me that way.” And then, not that we should give up, it’s just that being human, it’s easy to throw in the towel on things being like, “Well, this health and wellness journey is too hard, this startup’s too hard.” It becomes this spiral of negative self talk, I’m not ever going to be like those people in the Valley, so I might just as well stop. And by not allowing yourself to enter into that mental state, then you keep going and you keep going and you keep going.

Dave Ten Hav (40:50):

And you derive the wrong message from the result which is, “I suck.” No, the story sucks.

Ben Grynol (41:01):

But you got to change the story.

Dave Ten Hav (41:02):

You got to change the story. And so I think, for me, that was one of the big things and later on in my career, it became this thing where, and particularly with COVID, it was kind of, “Oh, I needed to reassess a whole bunch of assumptions that I made” because basically, my MO with projects is, I work in New Zealand to reach kind of a 70% solution and then I go into my target it and stop pounding the paper. And I’d kind of reached the 70% solution and was ready to get on an airplane in April, 2020, well, we all know what happened then and it was kind of like, “Oh, okay, well, maybe I need to refactor this for our local market,” that failed miserably.

Dave Ten Hav (41:51):

But the reason I believe I wasn’t successful in that scenario was that I fell into the trap of doubting the valuable bits of my story which was, New Zealand’s a great place to live and I love it, but I actually like selling stuff in the United States, that’s what I enjoy doing, that’s where I get the traction. So that’s kind of a way of saying, “Well, you need to review your stories all the time,” you need to, and some of them are valuable and some of them you shouldn’t abandon and some of them you should abandon.

Ben Grynol (42:23):

So you changed the story, did you?

Dave Ten Hav (42:26):

Yeah.

Ben Grynol (42:26):

Ran Ponoko until 2013, then you founded Makey Makey, or co-founded-

Dave Ten Hav (42:31):

No, I didn’t. So there’s a gap between Ponoko and Makey Makey. So I ran a computer vision laboratory for a year, that was the one that was made up of a bunch of wasted digital refugees, essentially and we sold that IP, that became some very early reality capture tech that was used in the first phase of the VR explosion, 2000 teens. Then I went to work for Makey Makey, I ran that, I took over running that from the founder who did that for five years and that was a delightful experience, it really was real. And part of that was realistic how shit I was at managing people earlier, I was too scared to be the manager that I wanted to be and therefore, I let a bunch of people down. With Makey Makey, I was given a freedom to be the manager that I wanted to be and built a beautiful team of people and to this day, I still in contact with them, we still have really strong relationships. So yeah, again, that’s that story of time.

Ben Grynol (43:50):

Lifelong learning and developing through the journey, but then you ended up co-founding Omniblox, what led you to that? I mean, it feels like, again, from an outsider’s perspective, it feels like an amalgamation of everything you did prior where it’s like, “Well, this is an iteration on all this past experience.”

Dave Ten Hav (44:12):

Yeah. And practically it is, right, it’s me bringing together very early business analysis work that I did at Provoke, which was the first company combining with the 3D and the product design work at Ponoko and then the 3D work that I did at [inaudible 00:44:31]. And then that’s layered over the top of it, running a business like Makey Makey, and seeing where these things break and were creaking and where there were these gaps and going, “Oh, that’s an interesting gap, that one over there, that’s huge. Let’s go and do something there, let’s find something in there.” And so yeah, we founded Omniblox and met my co-founder in November of 2020 and Sean, I’d never met Sean, if we loop all the way back to this conversation, right, Sean and I had never met face-to-face, never.

Ben Grynol (45:12):

In your context, Pacific Northwest?

Dave Ten Hav (45:16):

Pacific Northwest. Yeah. And I’m in-

Ben Grynol (45:19):

That’s where Sean is from.

Dave Ten Hav (45:20):

Yeah. And I’m in New Zealand, but we got on really well and I mean, we proved that we could ship a product completely remotely using email and video. And that’s what then brings us to Levels because the culture fit between our organizations is just spin on.

Ben Grynol (45:43):

So as we’re building now, we are here together, what is it that you’re looking forward to with all your past experience, your lens on tech, the way you’ve seen it from building in New Zealand, the way you worked remotely? What do you think about when you think about the long game with Levels, as far as what we’re building? What is it that excites you and just gets you invigorated that first, like the kid that grab the wire, what brings you back to that?

Dave Ten Hav (46:17):

It is one of those. The second day, the onboarding experience is almost analogous to me taking that magazine off the magazine rack, right? Because I remember sitting there at like 10 o’clock in the morning, New Zealand Time and it just hit me, it was kind of like, it was less than 50 people in the company at the time, less than 50 people in the company in every single one of these cards on the Kanban board has got at least one video and at least one memo behind it. The totality of that just kind of hit me like a ton of bricks and it was kind of like, “Oh, I thought I was good, I thought I was good at the culture thing, but I’d been banging bricks, I’ve been banging stones together for the last 20 years.”

Dave Ten Hav (47:07):

That’s how primitive my assessment of it was and I just looked at what you had done and miss and Josh, and then [Haney 00:47:18] and I’d looked at what you had all put together and it was just kind of like, “Oh, holy shit, I’m going back to school, man, it’s the dumbest person in the room thing, right?” It’s kind of like, “I’m here to learn and don’t get me wrong though,” the attractive thing was definitely the big picture, but the thing that gets me up in the morning is the culture thing. And damn Josh and damn miss because [inaudible 00:47:51] was always my big bad, it was always my big bad, and they’re just incredibly talented, empathetic, articulate people who are doing amazing things. So that’s what I’m here for, it’s here to learn that stuff and participate in something that feels culturally iconic. And that’s the thing I’m geeking out on.

Ben Grynol (48:16):

Maybe we got to command shift three, get you a screenshot of that onboarding checklist. And you can put that in a frame beside your Wired issue.

Dave Ten Hav (48:27):

Yeah. I mean, it’s one of those, I remember talking to my wife and I said, “I think I’ve joined a cult.” In many respects, it reminded me of my background, I was brought up at Catholic, a good, good Catholic, so I’ve been through the religious indoctrination thing and I’ve learned how to deconstruct it too. It was kind of like, “This is a indoctrination” but I get why they’re doing it and it’s simple things like learning how to turn off my email. For 20 years, I’ve never turned off email solidly, but I do it every day now and I feel good it’s a good decision. And so just understanding those insights, understanding the insights that you all had brought to the table and shared and presented. Yeah, sign me up man.