How This Smart Locker Became the Hard Drive of the Neighborhood | Miles Mufuka Martin, Co-Founder & CEO of Relai

Miles Mufuka Martin, founder of Relai, joins to share how he's building the future of local delivery via a network of battery-powered asynchronous exchange zones... and perhaps the hard drive of the neighborhood as a result. Miles shares the gritty reality of building a company from the ground up, including getting rejected by 300 businesses before a local pizza shop finally said yes to hosting their first asynchronous exchange zone. We dive deep into the challenges of hardware development, what it took to learn how to code after getting burned by outside dev shops, and how Relai is secretly building a hyper-localized network of compute power for local businesses and startups.00:00 The Local Delivery Paradox00:20 What is Relai? (Asynchronous Exchange Zones)02:50 300 Rejections: Getting the First Pizza Shop04:15 Getting Burned & Learning to Code from Scratch08:11 Heritage, Resilience, and the "Figure It Out" Mentality11:46 The Co-Founder Dynamics of a Hardware Startup14:21 The Secret: Building "Invisible Infrastructure"19:38 Lightning Round: Business Mistakes & The Roku Dream23:59 The Pittsburgh Dream: Exchange Zones on the Sister Bridges #businesspodcast #pittsburgh #thoughtlitersWHAT IS THOUGHT LITERS?Thought Liters is a series created and hosted by Adam Conner. On the show, Adam learns from the top of the world through the bottom of their glass. Each episode, we share a flight of local craft with the best and brightest brand minds around – whether it be an entrepreneur, an athlete, an artist, or otherwise. The questions evolve as the sip changes.The show is proudly founded and produced in Pittsburgh, PA.The whole goal is to have conversations about business with a more lighthearted look and feel. Adam thinks most business content is dry, and wants to change that.If you’re interested, follow along! If not, that’s cool too. But if you wanna be where the thought leaders are…you’ll tune in to where Thought Liters is.