Mark Brinkerhoff is the president of Fusion Design which is a full-service product development company located in Silicon Valley. Founded in 1990, they have worked with a variety of clients from small companies to fortune 100 corporations with engineering services.
Mark’s specialties include: Product Development Consulting, Turnkey Solutions, Industrial Design, Mechanical Packaging and Mechanism Design, Finite Element Analysis, Thermal Analysis
We talk about:
- What are soft batteries? Elastic Wiring? Limitless Multi-touch Force?
- What about 5 g technology, how is that going to play a part in wearables
- What is the typical design process when you are building a product?
Find out more about Fusion Design
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Shawn Flynn 0:00
You’re listening to the Silicon Valley podcast. On today’s show, we sit down with Mark Brinkerhoff, who is the president of Fusion Design, which is a full-service product development company located in Silicon Valley. Founded in 1990. They’ve worked with a variety of clients, from startups to small companies to fortune 100 corporations with engineering services. Mark’s specialties include product development, consultant, turn-key solutions, industrial design, mechanical packaging, finite element analysis, thermal analysis, and more. On today’s show, we talk about what are soft batteries, elastic wiring, limitless multi touch force? What about 5g technology and how that’s going to impact and play a part in wearables? And what is the typical design process when you are building a product? This is much more on today’s episode of the Silicon Valley podcast. Enjoy.
Announcer 0:55
Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast with your host Shawn Flynn, who interviews famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leaders in tech, learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 1:11
Mark, thank you for taking the time today beyond the Silicon Valley podcast. Now, you’ve been in the valley for 20, 30 years and had this amazing career. I mean, we just talked about rebuilding a 50-year-old car off air of course and some of your adventures. But before we dive in, the questions can you tell us our listeners a little bit about your background up into this point.
Mark Brinkerhoff 1:33
So, I’ve been here in the valley for a very long time. And by the way, thanks for having me today. Pleasure to be here. I started in the valley in about 1983 after going to college and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo as a mechanical engineer. And I was fortunate enough to get a job at Hewlett Packard back then, in Santa Clara. They had a division that did instruments and laser interferometers. And I was one of the manufacturing engineers on those programs there. So that was the beginning of my career in the valley. Before that, I was always a curious individual. I grew up in Northern California and always tinkering with things. So, I think a little previous activity that spurred my inspiration for what I do today was at age seven, I was a slot car enthusiast. And I enjoyed playing with them a lot building tracks racing around. And I wanted to make sure that my car was the fastest one. So, I needed more power. Slot cars obviously are little DC cars that race around tracks for those of you who may not be familiar with it, so I decided I need more power. So, I plugged it into the wall socket, that sucker spun really fast for about half a second and then smoked. And it didn’t blow the fuse. But then I thought about it. God that was crazy. But fun. I said, Dad, what kind of a career does this kind of thing? And he said, Well, Mark watching you. I think it’s mechanical engineering. So, my entire career started at that one point. And all the way to now it’s been mechanical engineering all the way. In the beginning, it was as a worker for big companies like HP and Amdahl. And now it as business owner, which is fusion design today. I’ve been doing that for 30 years, myself.
Shawn Flynn 3:15
Now your company today you’re working with startups to fortune 100 companies. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re doing working with these companies? And how is it different working with a startup and working with a huge conglomerate?
Mark Brinkerhoff 3:30
The startups are, are very interesting, and that usually they’re entrepreneurs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 people, sometimes more, but most the time it’s that small. They’re usually very knowledgeable in one area, and maybe not so knowledgeable and many others like business in some cases, or marketing or sales or manufacturing. So, they come with a great idea and a light bulb over their head and don’t know the steps to go forward. The way we deal with them is more of an educational approach. I’ve done a bunch of videos, you can see him on our website in this regard, because I get questions that are repeating very often. How do I do this? How do I do that? How’s the world handle these things, I did videos with the help of my son, put them on our website. So, you can see him there’s probably 15 different videos there on how to do development. And those are for the entrepreneurs, the startups and then there’s a mid-range client of ours who tends to have a lot of the infrastructure they’ve done it before. They’re very well-funded. they’re innovating in an area maybe like telecom creating 5g systems, which are a big part of our future. They know what they want and they just execute on a very small piece of a big program. In the case of an entrepreneurs, a small startup. They happen to need almost everything so we educate and connect him with those resources and fill a lot of those gaps ourselves in the case of the midrange company. We see their gaps very specifically now write up a statement of work for us, which is amazing. thing with an entrepreneur, we follow that statement of work and address their needs as quickly and accurately as we can. And hopefully they hire us again, in the future. That happens often, the fortune 100 companies are yet different again, they have very large bureaucracies, and they have gateways for small businesses like mine to get through before you can get work there. And without naming too many big companies, a number of them, once you get through what I call the gauntlet, their master service agreement requirements, that’s the term often use, there’s other names for it, then you get on their approved list and their pursuit of you is through internal means. So, you get into their internal network, and they look for that resource internally, they know who the approved vendors are. And it shortens their delivery time for a service or product they might procure. It’s quite different.
Shawn Flynn 5:55
Okay, I guess going back a little bit further, can you talk a little bit about your company, what it actually does, cause I think there’s a little gap there between we work with all these companies, and this is actually what we do for these companies?
Mark Brinkerhoff 6:09
Great question, I should have covered that sooner. As a mechanical engineering company, we do mostly product designs and equipment designs. Now what’s that mean? It could be that we create an X ray cancer therapy machine for a very large company that does that. They would create core technology. And we would create all the components around it, for example, covers, electronic enclosures, cable designs, mechanisms, things that go like that. And we do the industrial design, which is the aesthetics, look, feel, image, ergonomics, usability, partners who do software and hardware, meaning electronic hardware, we do the mechanical hardware our resource team, there’s 10 of us in my company. And there’s up to 10 contractors work with us all the time. And so, what we do is we figure out the gaps a customer has, and then we fill them with talented resources to meet their needs. To do that we have a shop makes things we have a machine shop, we have a 3d printing room. Between those two, we create things that didn’t exist before. 100 times a year at maximum. So far, we’ve done way over 1400 projects, and it’s been a busy life just at fusion, our customers range, like we talked about from one individual all the way up to fortune 100 companies. The way it works is it’s all through the network. We really don’t have a billboard out on 237, or anything like that everything exists as a relationship from one person to the next. I hate to say it, but it’s kind of like the virus spreading, right? It’s spreads by close contact? Well, I think business actually spreads the same way. Fortunately, businesses a good thing with the virus obviously isn’t
Shawn Flynn 7:56
most of our audience. Are those entrepreneurs out there and the VCs that are working with them? What advice do you have, for me working to build a custom product? Well, I’m working with an equipment design company.
Mark Brinkerhoff 8:08
We do both equipment and product. If your device or design or interests is a product, and we would take a certain approach there, if it’s a machine, it’s a different approach. Typically, with a product, you make a lot of them. A machine you make a few of them. You still make a lot, but usually it’s a lot less. I think one of the biggest there’s like three or four challenges I see with entrepreneurs and how they deal with product development. Usually they have a great idea. Maybe they’ve made a proof of concept, a simple version of whatever they’re doing, or maybe they haven’t. My first advice is I like to wear two hats, pretending I’m an entrepreneur and a competitor to the entrepreneur. Put those two hats on it different times. So, if you’re the entrepreneur, you’re inventing something new, and really cool. If you’re the competitor, you want to say, Well, I want to steal that idea. And I want to make it for myself. Right? So, you want to wear both hats. First one, the hat I like to wear is Who else out there already has a product like this. Can I find it? Is it on Amazon? Is it in the US Patent database? Where can I find it? I look really hard to find the products I actually honestly try to kill my idea. It’s hard to do that, especially for an entrepreneur, because they tend to have a narrow view of what their ideas and they run really fast. I’m one of them, I get it. Do you look at the marketplace and I don’t find what you’re doing? Nobody has it and it’s still has high value. I do a provision or I recommend a provisional patent that locks your date and your idea into a US database. That’s the first step. Then I try more prototypes, lots of prototypes, you’d be surprised what you can make with things you buy at Home Depot or Fry’s electronics, and it usually is quite ugly and not worthy of production. But it proves a principle. I promote trying it, whatever it is, we’ve done things like exercise devices, small electronic mechanisms that integrate with each other. I always believe in buying what’s close and modifying it to do what you want to do. And then try it on the marketplace on the people that you trust, and see if it makes sense end game and then ask him, what would you pay for something like this, you can see there’s a lot of upfront work here before the actual hard development occurs, because it’s an expensive task. But I always promote being very, very sure, in fact, if you can make a partnership with the marketing entity or the sales entity ahead of time before you even develop it, that way, once you’ve done your product, it’s like a roller coaster, it rolls right into the next phase of development in a way that’s already arranged. And there are ways to do that. most of the time, people have an idea they come in, they develop it, but they don’t have an end game for it. So now it’s really cool. It’s done every manufacturer, but they have no way to sell it. Well, it’s a great idea is not that great if it can get to market the market doesn’t even know it’s there. Think of the whole picture. Oftentimes entrepreneurs have a lot of trouble with that, because they tend to focus on what’s right in front of them. What’s my next goal? They don’t look at the big picture. So, I think my advice is, look at the big picture, make a roadmap for yourself, with others or on your own march to that and recognize there’ll be bumps along the way that you’ll need to deal with. That’s the best way to start. But I start with requirements document, once you’ve got through all this, does the world have it? Do they want it? What do I need as a company to help you, for example, that’s a requirements document. And it’s called a PRD. In the classic sense product requirements document. And that’s driven by an MRD, sorry about all the acronyms here. Marketing requirements document is one that is directly from your research, you’ve done a product, you’ve tried it and you’ve shown it to others, you’ve watched them use it in a way that is what you thought it was or absolutely not the way you thought it would be used. Once you’ve done that you understand the basic needs, then you convert that to the PRD. And it is more engineering centric. So, if the device has to move this far that far to do a certain task, you would say how far a foot two feet, thousand feet, whatever it is, needs to fly over the building 12 times whatever it is, numbers appear. It is a numbers game. Engineers love numbers. If you haven’t heard that before, you just heard it now. Anyway, they love numbers, because it gives them a target they can meet. Engineers love the science of things. And the science is based on numbers, things that actually the world wants in a numerical way. For us to be good engineers. We need good numbers.
Shawn Flynn 12:57
The product, tearing it apart from that competitors view. How does one go about doing that? Do patent lawyers get involved in this at all? What does that process conversation look like?
Mark Brinkerhoff 13:12
It usually starts with an understanding of where the person comes from. I tried to understand their career and what they’ve done today. If they’re engineers already, then I address it from an engineer’s point of view. If they’re not, I look at another point of view. We’ve had hairdressers come in and want to do things for their world and there’s a lot of innovation opportunities in that space. I have to speak in the terms of the hairdresser, obviously, not so great for me I don’t have a lot hair doesn’t work so well. But they, the idea is to start where they are like a tutor, the best tutors understand the knowledge level or depth of knowledge in a certain category of their, those their tutoring, we do the same first of all understand where they are. Take them to a point where they need to be verbally made a checklist and we often create a list from where they are today to where they need to be, even before they can start with us. Marketing, you talked about marketing. That’s a hard one, marketing people. In my view, they are looking for the next greatest product that almost sells itself because it’s the least amount of work for them. I get it, I want to do the same thing. developing relationships with usually through friends that are connected to those that are other trusted friends, if not directly in the marketing space. Find them, find those who’ve sold products in Walmart or Home Depot or wherever your target market places find those folks and talk to them about what your product is in general. You’ll need a nondisclosure. I always promote that. There’s lots of them online. I think she could find plenty there. Get one that you’re happy with. And then get your provisional patent in place and start looking for a marketing resource. Sometimes marketing company with a company to, there’s many ways to place a product in the world, it’s one, you could be a manufacturer, and sell it yourself. You could license it to someone else, or some combination of the two. And I always ask that up front, because the output of our efforts change dramatically. If you’re just trying to sell an idea, we’ll do something that looks great, but hasn’t had all the details wrung out yet, because it costs a lot of money to do that. Then we’ll do something that works. But it’s done in a rather quick way to be efficient for them to get to selling their idea. Now, if they’re going to go to market, and we do a lot more work on all the details, if it’s a plastic enclosure, for example, which we’ve done hundreds of and then all the little details are figured out what it looks like how it works from the inside and the outside, what electronics go in it, how the heating works, is there a power spies or a battery doesn’t mount in the body? Does it live on a bench? I mean, all these things are thought about in great detail. There’s different paths. So, choosing a path first, and getting a marketing and or sales entity on your team is great. That could be advisors, it could be people you pay, there’s brokers out there, there’s a lot of options.
Shawn Flynn 16:09
If you’re an entrepreneur, looking to raise funds, are you looking for that prototype that you’re just selling the idea? Or are you looking for that finished product that can go to market?
Mark Brinkerhoff 16:22
I think it depends on the funding entity. Usually those that fund programs are looking for an exit strategy, figuring out what an exit strategy is for that funding entity or person is a big part of the picture. For example, if you’re in a space that hasn’t ever produced volume, components, products and things like that, I always promote selling the idea, the output of that for getting money would be a really cool prototype. One that works beautifully. Looks great, does everything you want, but it’s not ready for Showtime yet. So, you create this really cool prototype, and you take it with you with a presentation about the numbers, the finance, the business plan, the marketing plan. That’s how you get funding, in my opinion, unless you have a close rich friend who trusts you emphatically, they exist, they will just find you so go, we get jobs that way.
Shawn Flynn 17:22
How often does someone come to you and say, this is my idea for the product. I’m gonna raise VC funding. And then you just basically tell them this idea is not gonna work. It’s not doable. It’s not buildable. It’s not, just a dream crusher, I guess,
Mark Brinkerhoff 17:42
The bearer of bad news? I’m not that guy. No, as an engineer and a business owner, I can tell you whether the engineering makes sense. Or the product can be reproduced in the volume you desire. I can’t always tell you if the world will accept it. That’s marketing and sales entity, but mostly marketing, in my opinion, is an idea good or bad. I can tell you from an engineering point of view, it’s going to break. It won’t work, it won’t fly, it won’t do what you want. We get those occasionally; I usually say it with questions. If this happens, what will your device to have you tried it yet? And usually ask him to try it because usually people can prove their products worth or capability by quick prototypes. The Fry’s Electronics Home Depot componentry thrown together or some other device it took apart modified to do something else. They try it. And then they either prove themself right, or prove themselves wrong, but they do it quickly. So, they can move on and do other great ideas. If it isn’t a good one. I try to help them prove it to themselves. Rather than tell them it’s a terrible idea, because I hate squelching innovation. And I try to help them decide whether it’s a value or not.
Shawn Flynn 18:55
When you’re working with these early-stage companies, and they give you a design. Do you ever talk to them about the manufacturer and the next steps for it, say the prototype is built, but then they need that manufacturer overseas as introductions? How does that conversation continue after the first conversation with you?
Mark Brinkerhoff 19:16
You know, quite a bit to even ask that question, Shawn. We do a couple things. First of all, we have relationships with global companies, both onshore, offshore, nearshore, next door all over the place, and you can’t do this many projects and not have those at least some relationships. The other thing we have is I have a cabinet full of products that we’ve done before. And I tend to show ones that have similar technologies in them to theirs. Sometimes it’s, I have a plastic enclosure with a rubber over mold rubber coating. That rubber coating is very desirable in a certain industry. So, I’ll go pull three or four of those out of the cabinet, put them on the table and say this is the part you’d mold it’s done in one mold. And this is the rubber coating, it’s done in a family or friend mold the next mold. And here’s how they put together; I even have a demo mold in my office that you can actuate by hand. You can see how the little injectors work or the plastic flows in and all that other stuff. That is the educational piece. There’s a lot of opportunities there. And if they know already know this stuff, then I’ll recommend vendors directly that can talk to them. And my favorite vendors should anyone asked and they often do are ones, if they’re foreign, they have a local engineering presence. Someone I can call invite in, well now maybe just call. Someone I can invite him to come and chat about what their services are chat with the client. And that works out really well because they can interpret the need, and translate it into the distance and or language barriers that might exist with the fabrication side.
Shawn Flynn 20:57
You’d mentioned when someone comes in with an idea, you might say from an engineer’s point, this works, this doesn’t work. Has any investors angel or venture capitalists come in and go, I invested in this product, Will it work? Will it not work?
Mark Brinkerhoff 21:11
So, it’s like a vetting, not directly. We have done something similar. We call them tear downs. I don’t know if you’ve heard of tear downs. tear downs are the disassembly of a competitive product. And or many of them, you study how they work. You look at them from a manufacturing point of view, you actually quote them, you take every part out and say, Oh, this is a plastic part. And it’s molded in a tool that probably cost this much each part, the volume is 40,000 a month. So, the material cost is this, there’s plus some assembly, labor and inspection, okay, this percentage, that’s the price of that part. Maybe there’s 50 parts in it. And you add all those up together and you create a bill of materials that’s costed. So that’s a task we’ve done many, many times. So, it’s called product tear downs. And that’s the closest we get to looking at how things work. And whether they work well or not. And we’ve seen some really bad products too. Sometimes we do tear downs that we can’t believe that they were built a certain way and how they got through to the marketplace is amazing to us, then we see other products, and I could speak names, but I probably shouldn’t. Other products that are so well built. It’s like man, I love this. And we go out and buy them ourselves because we know how well they’re made. That’s very interesting.
Shawn Flynn 22:31
Say instead of an engineer coming to you saying we built this product, if more of the financial guy came to you and said, I’d like to do the projections for this company for investors this is our building materials and that. Do you ever sit down with the numbers guy and kind of project what things would look like how much money they should try to raise if they want to take this product to market or have conversations like that?
Mark Brinkerhoff 22:59
We do. But we’re only a piece of that program, we have a relationship with a local entity that has many other companies within it, that fill out that type of request. Because there are many skill sets that go into projecting the needs for a company. I like to call it the roadmap, you study the roadmap, and you assign resources. And those resources can be human resources, or just general capitalization that goes with it. If you can map those out with the help of usually it’s four or five experts. I’m in the mechanical design space and the prototype space. But I’m not in the volume production space as much as someone else’s. I mean, I’m there but not every day. Another discipline would be someone who lives in that space and adds their financial projections to the program as a whole. Typically, in my view is people just pick a number out of the air, and then go ask for it. Honestly, I think the best way to do it is to talk to the experts, you may end up doubling it, because there’s one thing that really trips up a program and I call it creeping elegance, typically is something that people say here’s what the market wants, I want to do this. As they get into this, like, Oh, we have that other feature. Oh, and this one, and that one and this one, and the later they do that in the game, the more costs it adds to the budget and projecting for iteration is important, but can be futile if there’s infinite iterations.
Shawn Flynn 24:28
So then how many iterations should someone plan for a new product and how many tests in the market. Alpha test, Beta test or however you like to call it? Should they try to do before that mass push to market?
Mark Brinkerhoff 24:43
The answer, I hate to say it is it depends. Depends on the market. There are many different markets in some cases, if it’s highly human interactive. It’s a lot of iterations it might be 20. easily. If it’s something that’s very simple, doesn’t have a lot of human Interface but does a really cool task three, four or five, maybe it’s proportional to the number of requirements associated with its finish, fit as 100 requirements, often takes more iteration. It’s like a four-dimensional puzzle. Three dimension is the shape, and how you get everything into the space that you need in the fourth dimension is, in my opinion, and how it’s used, how well it performs, what its reliability is, what’s its longevity, these are all things that aren’t directly in design, but influence it.
Shawn Flynn 25:32
You mentioned creep, when should someone go enough is enough
Mark Brinkerhoff 25:37
To remember that comment on product requirements document I made. If that can stay pretty solid throughout the program, you’ve already done your market research, which helps you to find when a product is good enough. I’ve heard before you guys have studied it here to its MVP, minimum viable product. In most cases, if you ask the marketing person to judge what a minimum viable product is, it’s about a list of features that’s a mile long, as long as you can make it. If you start to do that, you’ll probably never finish because that list is going to evolve the agreement up front on what that list is for the first release, and then pushing anything new into the second, third and fourth release. I think it’s the most efficient way to get to market and start making revenue. Most people violate that even though they know it’s true, they can’t help it.
Shawn Flynn 26:27
At the very beginning, you talked about all the different companies and that that you work with one of them was wearables. What’s kind of the future for wearables? What’s advancements have been made in this area, I’m really curious.
Mark Brinkerhoff 26:39
There’s a lot of advancements in wearables, I went to CES this year, probably the last big show I’ll ever go to, sadly. So, I know I’ll go to another show someday, I just don’t know when. They had a huge department wearable very exciting for me to see. wearables include everything from alerts for those who need help to body monitoring systems to simple aids for communications, it’s a long list. The one that I’m most excited about is augmenting humans so that they don’t have to suffer as they often do. The diabetes space is a classic example, if you have diabetes, and you watched the life, you live lived, or those who have it lived, it’s really quite debilitating. Even though you may feel well, most of time, you have to prick your finger, 5 to 10 times a day, you have to watch your glucose levels, make sure you don’t eat the wrong foods. And in a way, that’s not just weight management, it’s true blood sugar management. I think the wearable opportunities are greatest in the space of augmenting humans to be more normal than they were before. Right? Normal meaning happy, healthy don’t worry about all the little things in life worry about family and journeys and things you’d like to do in this world. I think wearables have the best opportunities in that space. And there’s lots of channels.
Shawn Flynn 28:04
Can you talk about a few more instances of wearables, because I got a feel a lot of our listeners when they think wearables, I mean, they just think a watch?
Mark Brinkerhoff 28:12
there are many. And I believe they’re all driven by sensor technology. A wearable is typically just a device that captures. I call it remote data remote meaning not next to the computer so often, that data can be temperature of your body or the world around you. It can be vibration through acceleration measurement. It can be humidity, can be shock, it can be lots of things that it measures. And I think the cool thing about that is the sensors are getting cheaper, faster, better. For example, right now you can monitor your glucose level for many days at a time without ever pricking your finger. That’s a wearable, a very cool one, you can look on the market and see who’s doing that. I think the best opportunities are in those spaces. I have the watch that you described, I have the Samsung watch, and I love it. It gives me all kinds of aid of the Apple Watch, I see that it gives me all kinds of data. At the end of the day, what do I care about when that data comes out? I care about how many steps I did, because that’s my number one measure of my activity level. How many steps did I do oh, I’ve only got 5000 steps? Let’s go for a walk or go for a bike ride, whatever it is, right? Let’s go. I like it for that. It’s measuring a whole bunch of things, how well I sleep monitors that, I think the real opportunity and the cool part of wearables is what you do with the data. That’s a big deal. It’s one thing to get sensors all over your body. But it’s what you do with it. But here’s my dream. Five years from now, if I had to guess I’ll get up in the morning and walk down the hall or into the restroom get ready for my day. My data set will download before I finished brushing my teeth. I’ll get a few advisory things that are important to me. Mark your blood glucose levels are Low, you should probably have an extra orange today, or the muscle in your lower left calf is severely strained. And you should stretch and Ice that thing today so that you don’t hurt it further. So, these kinds of things are possible. There’s elastic sensors that measure motion over time, there’s a force feedback system that can augment motion. It’s an endless list. It’s very exciting.
Shawn Flynn 30:26
I’m also curious about laws and regulations. And with all this data, is there anything that’s gonna will one stop it from expanding because of regulations a lot? Is there anything that’s going to protect the consumer, or should they even be worried?
Mark Brinkerhoff 30:43
I think they should be worried if you look at early on, these devices that measure steps, usually watches, but there’s others. I heard on many occasions that the error rate is as much as 30 or 40%. Relative to either steps and or heart monitoring. I always like to cross check to see if the device is there. And the good news is a lot of these devices are ranked or rated by users. Amazon’s great and others do it too. If they’ve got four stars, or better, they’ve got thousands of reviews, odds are pretty good, they’ve done a good job of dealing with the accuracy of their devices. There’s another thing that’s very interesting to me, I watch how entrepreneurs approach this world. And they pick one of two paths. Because if a device is a medical device, it has one path, it’s really expensive and hard to do, because it goes through the FDA. That’s one path, if they pick the more of an advisory consumer path, not medical, a lot easier path to follow, because it’s not so stringent. And a lot of people try to start with the easier path and then move it into the medical path after they’ve got some market share. And that’s really hard, because if you study how medical devices are done, which many wearables are medical devices, There’s this design history tracking thing you need to do, but they’ve avoided all that and try to do an end around that. Be very careful before you consider a medical device, as a non-medical device start with and then migrated into being one secondarily, really, really challenging. There’s something called a design history file. And we participate in that a lot as a design crew. We are contributors to the design history file as an entrepreneur, you would be the owner of that design history file, and lots of other regulatory things. So, you need a tracking system that’s FDA approved, and traceable, that you follow throughout the program. It’s a quality management system QMS, they often call them. And those are very expensive, they can be upwards of $100,000 to set up and most entrepreneurs don’t walk out the door, saying, oh, first thing I’m gonna do is set up a kms program. And the first thing they want to do is invent their product, right and get it to the market. So, at this QMS is in the way, it’s often a big deterrent. These watches are not often medical devices, if you look at it, they don’t claim to be a medical device, and they never will. But I think Apple’s doing it, they’re going to start migrating that way with their new devices, it’s going to become critical to performance of your health. And that’s when it becomes important. We did one really early on just a bit of a story. We did a device where it was for measuring your ability to breathe for Asthmatics. Basically, you blow into this device and it spins a little impeller, and the little impeller inside the device has a magnet in it. That magnet sweeps across a little coil and counts the number of times per second that that propeller impeller, guess it’s called propeller rotates. That rotation is then aggregated and you this is back when they had fax machines by the way, sorry, you plug that into a fax line or a phone line, and it uploads to the doctor. So that was a medical device. And the whole point was you would do a measurement, it would know the time, the flow, it would report to your doctor and he or she would look at that data and say, mark your breathing is getting worse need to come in or here’s a prescription. That was an early wearable you’d keep in your pocket and take it out you do the breathing test; you’d plug it in later. Now it’s instantaneous. It goes up as fast as you take the data.
Shawn Flynn 34:29
Is there anything else stop in the advancement of wearables in our daily life?
Mark Brinkerhoff 34:36
I think there are manufacturing limits. Typically, the classic approach to a wearable is you choose what it’s gonna do. You choose the sensors that do it. Choose the battery that goes with it choose how you’re going to charge it or there’s disposable and reusable or not that kind of thing. You choose all these things. It typically involves a plastic enclosure, a rubber over mold button switches display LEDs. All these little parts, those all take time to invent and integrate. And I believe the future is putting all this onto flexible circuitry. I think once that’s happening, and it is happening, once that happens, these devices will be part of your clothing, there’ll be in your belt, they’ll be in your shoe. They’ll be wherever you need them whenever you need them. If they fail, you tear it out like Velcro, and you put a new one in, and it’s off to the races. That is coming. So anytime I look at a wearable, I look at it from how can it be reliable, easy to build a useful device. The technology and manufacturing is evolving all the time. But the more steps you add, the harder it is to do a wearable, you want to reduce the steps, you want to keep it on one machine. That’s not very possible right now. But if one machine could do all the work, you wouldn’t have to hire 100. Humans assemble this thing and test it and the machine would build it and spit it out the other end. So raw materials in one end, and finished goods in the other we’re very far from that. Now, today, what you do is you make the plastic parts at one vendor, you put it in a big box with a million other versions of that plastic part and you ship it to the assembly house along with everybody else shipping their circuit boards, their LEDs, their displays, their batteries, and then somebody sits there and puts it together. That is a huge limiter to wearables most products too, but especially wearables, because they’re almost always small. So, I believe the best opportunity out there is for the manufacturers to figure out how to integrate all these sensors into a rapid deployment methodology. And I like some of the companies that are doing it for part fabrication where you just send them your CAD model. Two days later, you get your part. Well, I think the future is you send them your product model. It comes back in a few days. I think that’s the future.
Shawn Flynn 36:56
Now before this interview, I was doing some research on battery technology. Can you talk about soft batteries elastic wiring, multi touch for all the advancements that’s happening there?
Mark Brinkerhoff 37:089
The battery world is one that’s been very interesting to me and also a huge limiter. If you look at most of these wearables, they have a life of limits in time. Typically, my watch has a three-and-a-half-day battery life, I have to plug it in at three and a half days. That’s really awkward. If you think about it. What do I do at the three-and-a-half-day mark? I’d rather have it be three days, two days or four days, but not three and a half. Right? Because in the half day, I’m probably at lunch. I’m not going to put it on the charger in the half day. So, batteries are a big deal. They take up the most space in a wearable in most cases, they get hot if they’re used heavily and they don’t last that long. So, battery opportunities are there. I went to CS earlier this year, I saw some really cool batteries. As a Japanese company that I’m thinking of at the moment. They had invented flexible batteries; they wouldn’t tell me how they did it. I say sell me one I’ll tear it apart. But whatever. That’s another story. Just because I’m curious, not because I want to copy it. Anyway, the battery was truly flexible. You could twist it like a pretzel, you could tie in a knot, you could wrap it around your arm, you could make it a necklace, it could be on your wrist, you could slap it against your wrist it would wind around your arm was amazing how they do that. And I know that it’s liquid polymers, typically, those polymers are arranged in ways that can be flexible. And I’ve seen the really simple ones, but they had one that was far and above greater than any I’ve seen. But usually they compartmentalize the batteries into small segments and connect them all. And the segments that in between each segment is a flexible zone, that flexible zone is one that gives it its true bendability though the battery itself is still rigid, like it’s always been. But there are flexible zones. And it’s broken into lots of little batteries, very small batteries, all in a row with a flexible interconnect. And that’s one way you get flexible batteries.
Shawn Flynn 39:03
And how does 5g technology play into this because the wearables are talking to each other they’re talking to
Mark Brinkerhoff 39:10
I think the biggest opportunity in the wearable space is body networks. If you can get batteries that lasts long enough. There’s other ways to do this too I can mention later. But if you can get batteries to last long enough, you can have a body mounted network. It’s ubiquitous. You don’t think about anything you’re wearing, you just put it on and it’s already got the sensing integrated into it. All connected through a 5g network. So, it goes to your phone, it can go through other people’s devices agnostically as long as there’s security embedded, which is a big deal, by the way, as long as security is maintained. 5g allows you to communicate in many different ways. There are many different technologies wrapped into one term 5g. I know you’ve had podcasts about this before, so I won’t try to be anywhere near the experts that that gentleman was. To me it’s very exciting to be able to do body mounted networks. So, I think that’s a big one.
Shawn Flynn 40:02
And then what are some of the biggest business opportunities you think in the future
Mark Brinkerhoff 40:07
In the wearable space? I think it’s my dream I talked about earlier, all night, I’m being monitored in a non-intrusive way and I’ve given personal feedback on how my body is performing and what I can do to make it better. Elimination of pain or improving sports playing capabilities, I love to play sports, I set my goals and I think wearables has the best opportunity for me to improve my existence along with many others. I’ll give you an example. I’ve had a shoulder challenge lately. And I had an appointment with Kaiser, by the way, I love Kaiser and really good. They’re hampered like the rest of us are in this fire situation. But I had a physical therapist’s video call with a physical therapist. And that’s kind of an oxymoron if you think about it. Physical Therapy when you’re not in physical space with the person think about that. Well I did, the gentleman I dealt with was fantastic. He could tell things by watching and talking. But he couldn’t push on a muscle and say, Oh Mark, that muscle is the problem because it’s too tight. Or this one’s torn or that bone joint is not working well. So, you can’t hear it or feel it cracking. But I think one of the opportunities for wearables and a huge business opportunity because this medical base now is to make remote appointments far more effective with in person sensing technologies could be augmented reality, it could be far better camera systems, it could be sensors that you mount on your wrist on wristbands that measure acceleration and position. So, to say, for example, on my shoulder session, this gentleman had three so far. He says, okay, Mark, put your elbow down to your hip, and rotate your wrist out to the side as far as you can go. And I want to know what that angle is. I’m an engineer. So, I’m probably going to take a guess at that. But most people are going to go I don’t know, I can’t tell you that. And so, it’s, it’s not fair to ask the patient to give detailed numbers back to a doctor. So, I think there’s a huge opportunity, I think it’s one of the biggest, the more remote we are, the more these sensor games, especially with wearables are going to play a massive role. The guy or guys who crack that one.
Shawn Flynn 42:22
Anyone from Kaiser out there, we do accept sponsors. So just throwing it out there.
Mark Brinkerhoff 42:26
Yeah, they’re great.
Shawn Flynn 42:28
So, Mark, with all this investment in technology, is there anything else that we didn’t cover today that you think people out there, entrepreneurs, people, wearable fans might want to know, might be interested in learning, any stories that you’d like to share?
Mark Brinkerhoff 42:44
There’s two things, one that comes to mind. And a lot of people have trouble doing this. But if you’re making a mechanical device, or even if it’s electronic, but mostly mechanical, that’s my world, so I can speak to it. Don’t be afraid to fail. Do it really fast. Be honest with yourself, it’s really hard, because people are very optimistic. When they’re entrepreneurs. I know, like I said, I’m one of them. But you can brush over the fact that your design is gonna work or isn’t going to work in a way that gets you way down the path. So, you waste a lot of money and time, if it’s not gonna work. Be honest with yourself, and prove it as quickly as you can. If you don’t know how to prove it, ask a friend who can or someone like us, just say come in and say, Mark, I’ve got this idea. I have no idea if it’s gonna work. Can you help me build some to try it out? And we do that, right? We have 3d printers, we can go to Home Depot and buy stuff, tear it up, make something else out of it we do it all the time. And I think that’s a big piece of advice. Be honest with yourself, be able to wear two hats, at least. Maybe one is the business hat. Who could take your idea? Does the world really need it? Those kinds of things. And then there’s the entrepreneur hat, inventing things. That’s the most fun part, by the way. invent, those things that are, that way, I’ll give an example. One gentleman came in with an exercise device many years ago, really nice guy, his job in the daytime was a trainer. And he had invented something for the traveling trainer. And I thought it was a great idea. But remember, I’m not supposed to judge it for its marketability. I’m judging it for its feasibility. By advice, and we did we advise him to build as many prototypes he can to prove or disprove his beliefs. And he did. He had a string of like eight or 10 prototypes before even started working with us. It started us at a position that was way higher than we normally would be able to start given the expense of the development that we have to offer. It’s the best way to go. So, come in with a really solid working solution in his case, he got a great product at the end. It’s I’ve got a big picture of it on my wall now. So proud. Anyway, that is the best.
Shawn Flynn 44:57
And Mark if anyone wants to find out more information about you or your company, what’s the best way to go about doing that.
Mark Brinkerhoff 45:03
I think the website is the best. I put a bunch of videos on there that help people learn about the development process. www.fusiondesigninc.com.
Shawn Flynn 45:14
Great. We’ll have all that information on the show notes. And Mark, I want to thank you again for your time and for everyone. That’s listen to this show. Please share amongst your network passes knowledge on, listen to this episode a couple times because I mean, trust me, you always pick up new things every time you listen, and write that review on iTunes to help us get indexed and encourage us to make great more episodes like this in the future. All right, Mark, thank you again for being a guest here on the Silicon Valley podcast.
Mark Brinkerhoff 45:41
Thanks for having me.
Announcer 45:43
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