Greenzie started from a brainstorming discussion around the broad theme of “outdoor robotics.” Hours and hours of research spawned assumptions to be tested by CEO and Co-Founder, Charles Brian Quinn (CBQ). Can software autonomously control an existing zero-turn, commercial lawnmower? This simple question requires many technical frontiers to explore. Today, CBQ and his team of robotics engineers are building, testing, and discovering the path required to answer the underlying question. We sat down with CBQ to learn how he identified this market, researched the problem, and recruited a team of talented engineers on a relentless pursuit to free humans of manual, repetitive outdoor labor.
Jon Birdsong: Let’s talk about the genesis of starting your next company. You’ve been through the process of starting Highgroove, built it to 26 employees before merging with Big Nerd Ranch where you still sit on the board today. Why go start another company?
Charles Brian Quinn: I’ve always started things. I have a list of ideas that I think need to happen or exist and I thought systematically about it and asked the question, if I could start a company here in town, who would I start it with? Knowing that I’m already in business with Aaron who I love and would totally start another business with, I kept thinking, who is someone I want to build my next company with. David Cummings immediately came to mind. I’ve known David since the Pardot days where he actually started a mastermind group of folks that turned into our EO group. Since then, we’ve been in EO and YPO over the years. So when I found out about the Studio, I knew I had to check it out. I think even my friend Geoff [Graham] had said something like, “Hey have you seen the Studio out of Atlanta Ventures?” From there, we grabbed lunch and talked all sorts of shop including a few ideas of companies to start, one example being a Professional Services Automation one we talked about. Which is a company that still needs to be built.
JB: You wanted to go start a company because you like to start things. It’s really that simple?
I do. I love building things. I like the idea of building something from nothing. I like seeing things that don’t exist and willing them into existence.
JB: Let’s talk about the ideation process around Greenzie. Similar to your list of ideas, the Atlanta Ventures Studio has a long list too. I remember that meeting where it was you, David, A.T. [Gimbel], and me and it seemed like time stopped in that meeting.
CBQ: Jon, that is a funny story! I came in and pitched David on the idea of Professional Services Automation. It’s something I know and am passionate about. I even had a one pager on it. I thought through the business plan, the total addressable market, and I love David and he’s known me for so long. He knows that I love software, and that I love hardware. One of my favorite questions to ask people when I’m out with them is, “What are you passionate about?” I don’t ask people what they do, I ask them, “What are you passionate about?” A lot of people say “OH! My kids”, or “I love windsurfing”, or whatever it may be, and I always answer “software, especially when it interfaces with hardware.” I say all of this because when I went to pitch David, he already had a good understanding of my love for software and building things. So when I pitched him on the idea of Professional Services Automation and he listened for ten minutes, nodding as he is one to do, and then said, “That is a great idea, but I have the perfect idea for you.” Then he said the words “outdoor robotics.” And I laughed. I remember laughing. And I reply, “Are you joking?” He replies back, “No, I’m serious. Open source outdoor robotics.” He proceeded to share his experience with robo mowers and how basic they are and how most of them are just hardware-focused with unsophisticated software. From there we compared it to Tesla and how it was a software-based car that has been around for six years and yet they don’t have any real competitors. He proceeded to lay out how the green industry is perfect to take a software approach and how Atlanta is the perfect city for this company and the more he kept talking I went from skeptical to ‘hold on a minute, you are totally onto something.’
I remember asking him a bunch of questions and we just narrowed in on how big this market is nationwide and how the Southeast is the perfect place to build a company in this space. It fits the criteria that Atlanta Ventures loves: team, stream, not a meme big time.
And the biggest question we kept coming back to starting out was around timing.
JB: Let’s talk about timing in a minute. First, tell me how you marinated on the overall ‘outdoor robotics’ idea in general.
I didn’t just marinate, I got obsessed, which is what I typically do.
I remember going home and just starting to do research and looking at what solutions exist today and the thing that got me really excited was the open source collection of libraries called the Robotic Operating System (ROS). The more I studied ROS, it had the trappings of an emerging framework that was just starting to get the industry excited around its possibilities and clear benefits. This is actually a very similar playbook we used when starting Highgroove: leveraging an emerging, open source library that was just starting to get real commercial usage and an industry consortium coming in and that’s what’s happening with ROS. So now, people from places like Intel and Microsoft are all coming on board with ROS because it is starting to become the standard de facto system for robotics.
JB: So there was a pattern that you recognized from your success at Highgroove?
CBQ: Yes. Exactly. Once I saw that, I got even more excited because I knew with a lot of work and smart people solving this problem, we could commercialize this and now is the time.
JB: Before we go further, give me the quick 30 second pitch on Greenzie.
CBQ: Our mission is to free humans of repetitive, outdoor labor and we’re starting with the green industry.
JB: Repetitive?
CBQ: Remind me to tell you a story about that word.
JB: Will do.
CBQ: At Greenzie, we are building a retrofit kit that goes on commercial lawn mowers to add aftermarket auto-pilot to reduce the cost of labor using software-based robotics for commercial landscapers. So the idea is that if we can automate the time consuming, repetitive, boring, hard labor activities like lawn striping, we can free teams up to be able to do the more creative work like edging, weeding, and blowing. It makes the customer much more happy and lets the robots do the repetitive, boring part.
Back to the ‘repetitive’ part. What’s interesting is when you have an idea, but keep it a secret and don’t put it out into the world, it doesn’t get better. So I started telling everyone what we were doing and I have a lot of good friends who provide candid feedback. I first started out saying “We want to free humans from labor,” and my good friend Geoff commented, “Why, what’s wrong with working?” And I sat there and thought, “Hmm, it’s incongruent because I love working! I love labor and doing things and building things, so why would I want to prevent that?” Then I realized what is it about this task that I don’t like and to me technology has always been an enabler of the mind-numbing, repetitive boring parts, and I reflected on it and said that’s the kind of labor we want to free up.
And by the way, this type of evolution has been since the beginning with the company.
It’s all about systematically proving and disproving thesis after thesis after thesis and using those learnings to build the best company we can.
As you remember, when we started out, we thought, okay let’s build a better robo mower, and look at where we are now.
JB: Exactly, how did you make that discovery where you changed from robo mower to today, retrofitting commercial lawn mowers?
CBQ: What we did is we systematically started asking potential customers. Before we even had a name for the company, I started interviewing dozens upon dozens of not only people who had robo mowers but people who mowed lawns for a living. From there, we stumbled on what I thought was a massive pain point and what was cool is we started crafting the questions even further. For example, at the beginning, we’d ask, “What takes the longest?” and some of our commercial people would respond, “Oh getting out there” or “Driving to the job.” Then I realized that might not be enough, so I started doing ride-alongs with the crews. We would just show up with some boots and a work shirt and spend the whole day with many crews who do this for a living. It was interesting because I saw and observed a lot more of what they did versus what they said. I would ask questions like, “What took the longest on that site?” and I knew because I timed it. While, yes, driving to the site would take the longest, the part when they were on the lawn mower, going back and forth, took 18 of the 29 minutes that they were on the property and afterwards I remember asking the crews, “Well what about that lawn striping?” and their unanimous response was, “Oh, well we have to do that, that is a given.”
It was such a hard part of the process, just listening and observing and definitely one of the parts of the startup journey that isn’t glorified as much. I just knew I had to be systematic about it. As time rolled on and I sat in the call room (a tiny room big enough for one person) long enough and I asked the right questions to the right people. I really started to identify the key pain points for the business owners, which immediately got return phone calls with their Ops Manager, and that was all around reducing the cost of labor. They knew exactly where they could improve. This industry is super smart. A lot of people have preconceived notions because it’s the green industry, but truthfully these people are insanely smart and they work incredibly hard. They know what’s coming and they are all looking for the edge. When you talk to the right people they get it and they see it and they want what we’re doing to exist.
After enough time understanding the market, we made a major early shift from building a better robo mower to innovating in the massive and underserved commercial market. The answer was easy once we had all the discovery and data.
JB: With all of that said, is Greenzie a hardware company or a software company?
CBQ: Greenzie is a software company. We build software for robotics and we do it with off the shelf sensors and with as minimal amount of hardware as possible.
JB: Let’s talk about the retrofit kit. Is it hardware you add to a Kubota? A John Deere? An Exmark?
CBQ: This is how much customer discovery informed our decisions. Our customers told us exactly which ones to use. I asked all the potential customers we were talking to which equipment to use and they all said ‘Exmark.’ When it came time to make the decision, Exmark was the clear choice and it also mapped to the market share data as well.
JB: When you started the company, what were the big steps you needed to validate that this was going to be a substantial company?
CBQ: We did a lot of customer discovery, more than I have ever done in my entire life. After doing 90+ deep dive calls and onsite visits, it became very clear that we were on to something. The thought wasn’t whether we’d found demand, the thought quickly turned to ‘if we can do it, then this will be big.’
JB: If you could do what?
CBQ: If we could control a mower with software. If we could get there and automate parts of this process by adding on a little hardware and with a lot of software, then this will be big. From there, we had our initial questions answered through customer discovery and now turned to the product.
JB: So that was a big shift?
CBQ: Yes. I remember the exact week. From there, it was a question of, can this be done and for me, that is fun, scary, and exciting place to be.
JB: Can we talk about the team? When did you start recruiting?
CBQ: Well, the best time to start recruiting is 4 years ago…
We both start laughing
…but the next best time is now. That’s always been a specialty of mine. One of the biggest decisions I had to make early on was whether to bring a number two on immediately that would help with all the operations. I realized bringing a number two on that early is like “playing startup.” What is most important is the product at this point.
It was around that time that I had lunch with Dr. Paul Judge (who’s also a recent investor). Paul said, “Hey, I know a great person for the role you’re looking for, he does mechanical engineering and we’ve worked well in the past,” and of course that was Josh Terrell. If someone I immensely respect refers someone to me, I try to hire them quickly and soon after Josh was on the team. The team started growing from there and now we’re up to nine.
JB: This was in December. Tell us about the learnings you discovered from January to May where you had a kernel of truth that this problem can be solved and it is doable.
CBQ: We have been pursuing relentless improvement (kaizen) which is our second core value. The first is safety first. For example, the team first wanted to know, can we get the control rod to move? Then the next question was: can we get it to move smoothly? Then can we put that in the software system where we can add all sorts of commands to it? That’s the sort of assumptions we’re validating everyday. We’ve broken down enough of the problem into consummate parts and proved this is doable. It wasn’t one kernel of truth but a collective group of assumptions tested and verified where we know this is doable to a much bigger extent.
What gives me goosebumps is when we work so hard on the software and iterate so much on improving it, that when it works, and it does what we programmed it to do, it’s just amazing.
Building those components together, one by one, and the systems starts to look almost smart and you as a programmer know it’s not, it’s literally just doing what you told it to do over and over again which is what robots are great at.
JB: Is is fair to summarize: in the last 10 months, from idea to execution, you’re extremely close to having a commercial lawnmower run autonomously?
CBQ: That’s right. We started at P 0.0 and then went to P 0.1, P 0.2, and now we’re at P 2.6. What gets me so excited is what happens right after we hit one our milestones. Some of the best work we’ve ever done has literally been right after hitting our production milestones. Our most recent one, we were in the field for eight hours, hot and sweaty, and we came back spent another six hours as a team planning our next sprint. We’re at a point where we’re gaining energy as we’re doing. The day after our last demo day, 1700 lines of code were removed and done on the next day.
I believe energy begets energy and you don’t save up and rest up to become a great athlete, you train like hell.
JB: What keeps you up at night right now?
CBQ: Safety. Safety is huge. We know we need to go above and beyond regarding safety. In my mind, I believe we’re going to look back when we’re successful and we’re going to say, “Can you believe we had people on these things?” I mean, people die on these machines when they’re strapped in and they roll over. They are very dangerous. Safety systems is on top of my mind every single day.
JB: You’re traction has sparked interest from big names in the green industry, how did you get their attention?
CBQ: We’ve been very open with manufacturers and strategics and just about everyone we’ve met and had a conversation with about Greenzie. We don’t have people we talk to sign NDA’s. We lean towards transparency because we know the benefits outway the perceived threats.
JB: Where does Greenzie go from here?
CBQ: We have two very simple missions this season. We want to get two paying customers and we want to improve on our software so our mowers are faster, straighter, safer, and more autonomous. We have a relentless pursuit of that every day.
Story by Jon Birdsong