Conversations

Ian Smith is the Founder & CEO of Ware, a company that is applying computer vision, machine learning, and drone technology to automate warehouse inventory management. We discussed Ian's journey into entrepreneurship and why he pursued the opportunity. He also shared some of his lessons learned finding a need, building a great product, and attracting marquee investors. Here's an excerpt:"What brought me to Ware is that this has never been done before successfully. And it's basically a secret of all the world's largest warehouse operators, that they don't know where everything is in their warehouses. And they lose stuff all the time. And the reason why, is because humans make mistakes and are doing these monotonous jobs -- they are dull and dirty, and sometimes dangerous. And it's just very repetitive and you make one single simple little mistake and you lose an entire pallet of inventory in a warehouse. That could be in a million-plus square feet, which is the size of 20 football fields under four walls and a ceiling. And then when you try to find it again to sell it or to fulfill it, or to move it again, it's like someone trying to find a needle in a haystack. There are 10s of 1000s of pallet locations that this piece of inventory can be lost in. And so that's a huge problem to solve. How do you do that with technology?"