Building a wearable technology company from her college dorm room
My chat with Charu Thomas, Founder and CEO of Ox
Today’s conversation is with Charu Thomas. She is the founder and CEO of Ox and is featured in Forbes 30 Under 30.
Ox has raised a $3.5M seed.
This issue is a 5-minute read about her origin story.
Joshua: Hey Charu! What is Ox?
Charu: We're building automation technology that directs warehouse operators with wearables and software so they can be more efficient on the frontline.
Joshua: Nice. What was the impetus for starting the company?
Charu: A few things actually. I had this opportunity to work with the inventor of Google Glass while I was still at Georgia Tech. And I hate sitting in a cubicle and wanted to investigate entrepreneurship.
I had heard about startups from some of my friends in high school.
My first foray into entrepreneurship was through the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC).
At the time I wanted a supply chain company because that's where my background is.
Joshua: How did you start the company?
Charu: Well, I was interested in mixed reality…
I saw it as a blending and merging of the digital and physical realms, which is really intriguing. I also think it's a way to overcome our physical limitations, it's part of that next generation of evolution.
There was this professor on our campus called Thad Starner—he was inventor of Google Glass, and he was one of the first wearable computing pioneers back at MIT Media Lab.
There's pictures of him in the 90s carrying around a big backpack which had a computer in it, and a video display, and it was called The Lizzy.
So I went to his office and told him about my idea. He gave me some tips and by the end of the conversation he said half jokingly, “give me 10% when you're worth a billion.”
To me it was the ultimate vote of confidence.
I kept coming back every week to office hours, just bothering him, peppering him with questions to learn more about the technology.
Eventually he let me lead some of the order-picking studies that he was doing, I ended up joining his lab.
We published a paper together and entered it in this wearable computing symposium called ISWC. We ended up winning Best Paper. We somehow beat this MIT postdoc who was another Best Paper candidate.
Joshua: So you started Ox in your dorm room?
Charu: Yeah, originally, it was in my dorm room.
We self-funded the business, but to be honest we actually didn't really even pay for anything. We didn't pay ourselves.
One thing that we did do was we signed up for a lot of invention competitions. So that's actually how we got our first $100k…
We won this startup competition called Atlanta Startup Battle.
I don't think I would be here without that money.
It's what led me to where I am today, because that was the first $100k we had after I graduated from college.
After I graduated, I decided to go in full time.
Joshua: At what point did you start kind of realizing that the business was actually going to be a thing?
Charu: As an entrepreneur, you have to have this level of delusional optimism.
I was invited to this accelerator program. It was compelling because it was focused on supply chain and retail.
The sponsors were three Fortune 500 enterprises focused on the transportation logistics supply chain. There's a really great ecosystem that I just had no understanding of, and it has over 1300 suppliers and vendors in the space.
I came through the program not really expecting too much because I just didn't know what to expect.
But I was just so shocked and impressed by how kind and willing to help people were. I think that's really where I thought that this could work.
I had spent about $10k on a patent. I first filed that provisional patent with an IP attorney.
And I spent most of the rest of the money on hiring the first full time engineer who is now our CTO, but that was most of my money.
Joshua: So $10k for the patent and then, let's say $90k for building the MVP. Then what?
Charu: Yeah, so my biggest focus was sales, and we ended up landing Walmart!
Joshua: Wow! How’d you do that?
Charu: Connections through the accelerator program.
We basically sold something we hadn’t fully built out yet. And we used that money to finish the product, and then made sure to use the pilot money for future development.