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Tune into this podcast as Founder & CEO of Lotus Laboratories, Dhaval Patel, speaks on how his own struggles with disability inspired him to innovate a wearable ring that controls home features just by pointing. He then explains how people with disabilities and older adults can develop a more efficient routine with this groundbreaking technology. In the discussion with Kyle Rand, Co-Founder and CEO of Rendever, Dhaval shares suggestions for founders looking to find out more about their target market. He also advises listeners on the importance of finding your ‘why’ as a technological innovator and how to overcome lows, keeping your head up through tough obstacles. Listen for insights on how this founder looks at creating an entrepreneurial legacy as a first generation immigrant, and how founders can create a supportive network.
Tanya Perkins, Host:
Welcome to AgeTech Talks, conversations about AgeTech powered by AgeTech Collaborative from AARP leading a global mission to drive innovation at the nexus of longevity and technology. You are tuning in to a series of discussions recorded live at CES 2024 that highlight the dynamic startup founders who are making aging easier for everyone by pioneering innovative AgeTech solutions. In conversation with fellow startup founders, Kyle Rand and Tanya Perkins, each episode invites an AgeTech Collaborative startup founder to discuss their journey and share the invaluable lessons they’ve learned along the way. Today, we’re thrilled to have Dhaval Patel, founder and CEO of Lotus Laboratories to share their story.
Kyle Rand, Host:
All right, hello, I am here live at CES on the show floor at AgeTech Collaborative from AARP, joined by Dhaval from Lotus Labs. Dhaval, how are you doing today?
Dhaval Patel:
Great. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for taking out the time to do this.
Kyle Rand:
Excited for the conversation. Now we’re here to talk about really the founder journey, but of course key to the day-to-day life of being a founder is pitching. Give us the 60-second elevator pitch. What is Lotus Labs?
Dhaval Patel:
So for people with limited mobility, we’re talking veteran soldiers, older adults or disabled persons. Lotus is a wearable ring that controls objects at home by pointing. But unlike Alexa, there’s no apps, no rewiring and no internet. It essentially lets you go from home to smart home in seconds and take it with you wherever you go.
Kyle Rand:
That’s amazing. So what is it about you, Dhaval that made you want to jump into the space of creating this product for this demographic?
Dhaval Patel:
Yeah, it sort of started with my own story. I was born with twisted knees and over the years I’m on and off crutches a lot. And one night, a few years ago, I got into bed having left some lights on, but I was too tired to get out of bed, hop onto my crutches, hobble 10 feet, turn off the light, hobble back 10 feet and get back into bed. So I just slept with the lights on the entire night and woke up in the morning thinking, well, if someone like me, I’m an engineer, managed a division at Apple, I’ve worked at the company that makes the wall switches at Lutron and I have 37 patents, but I don’t even have smart home technology. If someone like me doesn’t even have smart home tech, who does? And so that’s what got this going.
Kyle Rand:
So you woke up that morning and you were like, I’m not the only one who is going to go through a night like this?
Dhaval Patel:
Yeah.
Kyle Rand:
When was that?
Dhaval Patel:
This was a couple of years ago now. I woke up out of bed not having slept well. It was a terrible, terrible night. Then assumed of course imposter syndrome that it was just me and then gradually I couldn’t get it out of my mind. So over days and weeks, and so in my free time I was sort of just Google how many people are affected by this? How many older homes exist? What’s the average age of homes? What’s the penetration of smart home technology, et cetera, et cetera? And over time the nutshell problem is 91% of homes in the US were built before smart homes even existed. But there’s no easy way to upgrade, right? If you were trying to get an Alexa, step one is rewiring the wall switch that you’re trying to control to connect to the internet, to be able to talk to Alexa.
Then you got to put a smart speaker everywhere you just rewired your switches, in every room and then you got to pair every switch one by one. And just that first step, depending on the size of your home, can be 11 hours or $2,000. And this is best case if you own that house. If you’re renting an apartment, there’s no solution. If you’re traveling like we’re here for CES, if you’re traveling, there’s no solution. It affects everyone, but disproportionately affects people like me, about 27 million people with limited mobility who can end up spending up to an extra four hours at home on self-care every day. Imagine waking up and being stuck in traffic for four hours. Non-optional. That was the genesis of the research and why we decided to go down this road.
Kyle Rand:
So it started with the personal moment and then you built up a data profile, you built up personal conviction. When was the moment that you were like, I can’t wait anymore. I got to scratch this itch.
Dhaval Patel:
It was actually slow. I genuinely originally thought this was not a good idea. I had this moment and then I didn’t do anything for nine months because I was doing something that was the opposite of what everybody else was doing. Everyone now talks about internet of things, right? Everything’s connected to the internet, and here I am sort of going the opposite direction. I’m using technology that’s 30 years old. And so I was convinced it was not a good idea. And so for the first nine months, I just interviewed people, different people with different kinds of disabilities. So lower mobility, people who… Are folks who are blind, folks who can’t hear, etc. And so after nine months, every single interview, these are really long interviews by the way, we’re talking nine hours long, over three days, very, very long interviews, and they had no idea what the product is. And so gradually after nine months of interviews, after every single interview, we kept saying, can we get this already? I sort of had to get up and do something about it.
Kyle Rand:
What is it about your background that really set you up for success to be able to go from that aha moment to going and building that conviction?
Dhaval Patel:
Well, there’s some things that are specific to me and maybe some things that are not. So I think the specific parts are my background. So I’m an electrical engineer by training. Electrical and mechanical engineer. So building things is sort of what I do, but the part that is I think relevant and could be anybody is genuinely just going and talking to who you believe needs or wants your product and ask them what they want. And the most common feedback we started getting is older adults want smart home technology. They just didn’t want to do the rewiring and they didn’t want anything that uses apps and they didn’t want anything that needed the internet because they hated pairing. And that was the big focus. So we started working backwards from the problem statement saying, if everybody wants smart homes, but they just don’t want these three things, what could we make that doesn’t have those three things? And it just sort of ended up being this, which was ironically the opposite of “smart home technology.”
Kyle Rand:
Okay, so if I’m a founder listening to this and I have this same kind of an itch that I really want to scratch and you’re telling me, okay, I need to go just talk to people. What am I doing? Am I going to a cafe? Am I going to a library? Am I going to a local senior center?
Dhaval Patel:
Yes, to all of them. It’s basically find your users however you can find them. Because really the initial first 10 or 20 or 30 conversations will kind of set the trajectory of what you think you want to do. You’re going to keep iterating no matter what. The key is, find folks who you believe really need what you think you can build and find them wherever they are. Whether that’s at a coffee shop or at a library or a Facebook group or just messaging somebody randomly over LinkedIn. That’s really underrated. People should do that more. You’d be surprised how many people just want to help.
My first ever interview, Elise, I won’t use her last name, this older lady in Atlanta, she ended this nine hour long interview by saying, “I really love this. If there’s anything I can do, please let me know.”
And I said, “When we finally end up someday building a prototype, would you like to try it and give us feedback?”
And I’ll never forget, she said, ‘I don’t know if I’ll be around when this comes out, but anything I can do to help the next generation of people who are disabled, I would love to.”
And I remember keeping on the phone and crying. This is a lady I’d never met. And yeah, she spent all this time with me. And so then you really know that it’s worthwhile doing. I’d rather try and fail than not try it all.
Kyle Rand:
And when you’re building from that moment on, you have to hold on to a moment like that. That must be so motivational for you in the day to day.
Dhaval Patel:
Yeah, everyone says startups are a roller coaster. It’s moments like that that sort of are the north star that keep you going. But why you’re doing what you’re doing and really, especially in the really bad days, it’s moments like that that stick with you. I have goosebumps right now just remembering that moment.
Kyle Rand:
I love that. If you had to just define what your why is on the day-to-day, how would you simply explain it?
Dhaval Patel:
I wish more people did this. It’s building tech that’s usable by everyone, but optimized for older adults or disability first. I don’t just mean Lotus. I mean, why isn’t all technology built that way? Because by doing that, you’re helping the people that need it the most and you end up solving for everybody else anyway. So why not do that? By the way, there are plenty of examples for this. So for instance, if you’ve ever used captions or if you’re watching Netflix at home or you’re at a sports bar, there’s closed captions. That was originally created for people who were deaf back in 1972, but we all use it all the time, whether you’re on Insta or you’re on TikTok, all the videos have captions now. You’re watching a movie at Netflix at home, we all use captions all the time, and that’s the key.
Why not do that all the time? This is going to sound like a digression. Have you seen Hamilton? But there’s this quote in Hamilton, which is for me, obviously a big part of my why. What is legacy? It’s planting seeds in the garden you never get to see. And I remembered thinking, I used to be at Apple for about two and a half years before this. I remembered thinking 30 years from now, I don’t think I’m going to be telling my grandkids, Hey, your granddad added the ninth camera on the iPhone. Interesting, but I’m not entirely certain how meaningful, and so that’s the thing. I want Lotus to be this thing that continues helping people even after I’m long gone, and that’s the way to do it, to build tech that’s optimized for disability, but usable by everyone.
Kyle Rand:
I love all of that and I also love that because we are sitting here on the CES show floor, what is it? 13,000 square feet full of companies that are really looking at empowering a better life span. Do you feel like what we see cultivated here today is translating to broader tech markets or do you think there’s work to be done there?
Dhaval Patel:
I think it’s on the right path. There’s a lot more people that are now really focused on asking the correct why. Which is, why should we do this? I mean, we’re here at CES. There’s more than 4,000 startups. I think people are getting a lot better at really focusing and emphasizing on what’s your why. The first thing that they really teach you at Apple is why should this device exist, period? Why does it deserve to exist in the world? And you really start there, which is why it took me nine months to convince myself.
Kyle Rand:
Yeah. It takes a lot of work to actually figure that out, right? You can’t just… Well, maybe for you you can but for a lot of people, you can’t just wake up one day and be like, aha, that is the why.
Dhaval Patel:
Well, even in my case, I woke up and I had a terrible night. I didn’t know that I was going to do a startup. I had no idea. I mean, I’m a first generation immigrant. No one in my family has ever been an entrepreneur before. I didn’t even grow up in the US. I’m just an engineer. I still feel like I’m just an engineer. It took me nine months to convince myself.
Kyle Rand:
Okay, so you say that you still identify as an engineer, but I see your presence here on the show floor. I see your product. It looks amazing. When in the past couple of years, did you have a moment that you were like, oh, we’re really doing this. We’re really building a business.
Dhaval Patel:
There have been a couple. It’s hard to say, but probably the first time it happened was when we won our first pitch competition. Then it was actually right around the time of AgeTech Collaborative. I had just gone to New York, but on the way back they canceled my last flight and I was supposed to be in Atlanta for our first ever pitch competition. So I missed my flight, had to take the first flight in the morning, didn’t get my bags because I was in a different flight from a different airport and made it to the pitch competition with 30 minutes to spare and won the competition. That was the first time that it really felt like maybe something was starting to happen.
Kyle Rand:
What sounds like pure, classic travel chaos to having a moment of success, to me, it sounds like the why and the product and the opportunity had become so ingrained in you that you could flip a switch and win a competition like that.
Dhaval Patel:
I still don’t know about the winning part. I’m sorry. This is imposter syndrome now talking. I think the part that really struck a chord with me was how there’s a genuine community that really wants to help older adults and focus on longevity and focus on people with disabilities. Very mission-driven founders and mission-driven entities. AARP being obviously one of the big ones, but there’s so many others. And that was the first time that it really felt like of all these people in this community want to reach out and want to connect and want to talk about it. Even the folks that were in the same pitch competition and didn’t win, we had amazing conversations after the fact. And the overwhelming love and support was so much that it really started to feel like maybe we’re onto something here.
Kyle Rand:
You mentioned community and I think for all founders, community is so, so critical. And you very clearly have an impressive background in just deep engineering. I think you mentioned 37 patents. To go from engineering to winning pitch competitions is for a lot of people, quite a big leap, and I’m sure you had some help through community getting there. How would you recommend to new founders, they start to build such a community?
Dhaval Patel:
Yeah, community’s super important. Everyone says this, but it’s sort of like reading about swimming versus actually being in the water. Until you get into the water, you don’t realize it can get very difficult and very lonesome. Even with the team, it can get very lonesome. Because there are only some things that only founders understand and only founders have experienced. And so certainly there are two big things that come to mind. One is just leaning on other founders. I think I’ve been pleasantly shocked by how you can reach out to literally any founder on LinkedIn or any other way that you can find and how if you are a founder, they will immediately respond back saying, is there anything I can do to help? Because only founders who have been through the really arduous journey, they just know that it’s so difficult. It takes so much effort and honestly, quite a lot of times it’s quite painful. If they can just pay it forward, if they can reduce your pain by 10% because somebody did that for them.
Part of the reason I’m here on this podcast is I just want to pay it forward. If I can help make somebody’s life easier, even 5 or 10%, especially another founder, I feel like I’m doing my job. The other part of that is groups of such people, which are accelerators, especially for really deep tech, hard tech or hardware companies, it’s a long process. You have to build hardware. It’s capital intensive. There’s a lot of supply chain considerations. There’s a lot. The community exists where they’re specialized in helping specifically early stage founders. And so a AARP’s AgeTech Collaborative, other accelerators that you can think of, really, those are very helpful.
Kyle Rand:
I think the saying that hindsight is 2020 is one of the lessons, you just have no choice but to consistently learn in life and while building a company and any opportunity that you get to bring in somebody else’s 2020 hindsight vision, you should definitely take, and I think it’s a great call to action to other founders to also think constantly about how to pay it forward because we’ve all been through some serious highs and some serious lows, and those can translate to better founders building better products, working on better missions.
Dhaval Patel:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you genuinely know it’s not just an aphorism. You’re helping these people build better worlds and we all share the same one. So if you want to live in a better world just by doing that little thing, just by helping somebody 10 more percent on a mission, you really want to see succeed, you’re making a better world. Genuinely making a better world because nobody has it harder than that founder.
Kyle Rand:
I’m curious, founders, we all have gone through the lows and it’s really easy to talk about the abstract. Is there an example you would share about a low that was just like you would have loved having that hindsight?
Dhaval Patel:
There are many. I think in my head they tend to be moments where I thought, okay, Lotus is over. And one of them was when I thought about starting Lotus, I did it with a friend. In fact, I was the best man at her wedding. She was a doctor, internal medicine, and we started it together and she was how I got connected to all these people with disabilities. But of course, because of doctor-patient privilege, she would just tell them what we were doing or rather that we were trying to interview people with disabilities, and then I would talk to them. Now, fast-forward past those nine months for personal life reasons, she had to step away from Lotus, and this was exactly the time that we were choosing to apply to accelerators. I thought that was it. We just built some prototypes and given them out to people and people loved them, but I thought, well, without a doctor, no one’s going to pay attention to Lotus.
Why? What’s the credibility? Why should we believe this genuinely helps the people? But we pushed through and knock on wood, I guess the hindsight is if you genuinely believe in your mission, stick with it. And this will sound weird, but universe figures out ways in helping you out, and I mean this, not in the abstract sense. I’ll give you examples. One of the people I interviewed, our current head of accessibility, Natalie, she’s legally blind and deaf. She has Usher syndrome, and she was one of the people I interviewed and she reached out a month after this happened saying, ‘Hey, you interviewed me a few months ago. I really liked the idea so much that I’ve been keeping track of what you guys have been doing through just LinkedIn. Would it be okay if I joined the team? I’d be really interested.”
And she had a consulting company at the time that she shut down and joined the company, mind you, for no salary. There was another person, Mike, our head of firmware right now. He came out of retirement for no salary. He came out of retirement to work on Lotus just because he lost his parents preemptively, unfortunately, during the pandemic when they couldn’t age in place and had to be moved into senior living. And so there are all these people sort of just gradually, and it was very slow. I mean, now in hindsight it feels like, oh, it just happened and now we have a really great team. But at the moment it felt like a really key team member was leaving and she was a very important part of the team. But if you just stick with it… It was a really tough time, but gradually we kind of stuck with it and figured out ways and just like a startup, everyone shared the burden.
Kyle Rand:
It sounds like not only did you stick with it, that moment translated to finding really amazing mission-critical and mission-obsessed team members to come in. And you probably really needed that as you had the co-founder leaving because that mission obsession is really what it takes as an individual and especially as this situation of solo founder. How do you maintain focus and keep your head down and not crawl into bed? Because it could be so easy to crawl into bed.
Dhaval Patel:
Yeah, I can’t claim that that hasn’t happened. There are days where you just don’t want to wake up or you want to keep sleeping and just… It’s been really rough. I think the one thing I did right completely by accident was those user interviews. Because that just stays with you. And so maybe you’re terrified, terrified for 24 hours, you spend the whole weekend, you do nothing, you just watch TV and wile it away because you’re terrified. But then right after that, you wake up and you’re thinking, well, there’s all these people who helped me out who didn’t have to, spent their time or money or effort. You’re just like, I don’t care. Maybe I’ll fail. I’m going to try. I’m going to literally try until I can’t, physically cannot anymore. And so yeah, you get back on the horse.
Kyle Rand:
You said something earlier where you identified something that all founders will resonate with. The journey of founding a company can be quite lonely. And for people who haven’t done it’s so easy to be like how? You guys are on stage. You’re at conferences, you’re at networking events all the time. You’re always surrounded by people talking about your product. And the reality is that many of the things that you deal with, of course are happening behind the curtains and many of those things, you’re a team of one, maybe a team of two that’s handling them. And in order for us as a community to be better, we really have to just be okay with sharing those lonely journey moments. Because A, we can learn from each other. And B, it helps us feel seen because you’re right, we all go through those moments. We all go through those days.
Dhaval Patel:
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I think you touched upon something key, which is what gets focused on a lot are the success stories. Only when you talk to those founders, they will tell you how close to “death” their startup came and all the stories behind what it took to get that fundraiser, get that customer, and then you realize, well, what I’m seeing is this airbrushed version. Because that makes you want to read about it, and which I understand why that happens. But only when you talk to the founders, you get, oh, my God. Even when we were going through that acquisition, one of our investors almost said no. So we had to rush into this conference room and talk to them even while we were getting bought for millions of dollars. You don’t hear about that part. You hear about the millions of dollars part, so hopefully someone hearing this, please know that you’ll face “death” or come close to it quite often, and it’s okay.
Kyle Rand:
You know what? Who doesn’t love hearing about the tenacity that it actually takes to get to those golden minutes? I love this. I think if there’s one big call to action for every founder listening, we just have to be more open about the authentic founding journey, not just the glitz and the glam.
Dhaval Patel:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I really wish and hope that other founders both now and coming talk about everything that it entails. Really, the genuine whole experience, not just the negatives and not just the positives, but all of it that it entails.
Kyle Rand:
All right. You’ve heard it here. This is Ben Dhaval Patel with Lotus Labs. Thank you for being so open, so authentic, and I look forward to sharing more moments and stories and tough journeys of my own as-
Dhaval Patel:
Thank you.
Kyle Rand:
As you continue to connect.
Dhaval Patel:
Pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Kyle Rand:
Thanks, Dhaval.
Tanya Perkins:
Thanks for listening to AgeTech Talks, from AgeTech Collaborative from AARP. You can learn more about today’s guests and all of the innovative startups in the AgeTech Collaborative by visiting the startup directory on agetechcollaborative.org.
