Yash Shah (00:00)
Hello and welcome back to Building Momentum. The show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful technology business. I'm Yash, your host for this show where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of people who've been in the trenches, conquering churns, scaling their teams, and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we'll be chatting with Philippe
from Fullpower.ai. Fullpower is a leading firm that has over 135 patents specializing in real-time AI, deep learning, and biosensing. We're excited to hear the story and the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll be dissecting the wins, the losses, and everything in between. So buckle up, grab your headphones, and get ready to dive in the world of building products. Hey, hey, Philippe, how are you doing today?
Philippe Kahn (00:49)
I'm doing great, thank you, how about you?
Yash Shah (00:51)
I'm doing great as well. Thank you for taking out the time and let's start with the key sort of fundamental question. What's the big bad problem that you're trying to solve?
Philippe Kahn (01:03)
Right now we're trying, the problem we're solving is basically AI powered biosensing. So, like a lot of people who are in AI, we are at the edge dealing with sensors and the environment and patients, et cetera.
and using AI to make sense of everything rather than trying to build abstract AI solutions or enterprise AI software or stuff like that. We don't do that. What we do is practical things that apply to healthcare and monitoring the environment and sensing in general.
Yash Shah (01:37)
Got it. And so, and we dive a little deeper into that in some time. However, there's an interesting part over here, which I'd love to explore a little more, which is in all the episodes that we've had up until now, we've had people who were running an agency and wanted to build a product, or they were doing a job and then started a company, or they were students, and then took a risk and started a firm. You are our first guest, who's an educator.
and who's starting a company. So talk to us a little about why did you make the shift from academia into starting a company and how did that come about?
Philippe Kahn (02:15)
Well, I'm a I was an immigrant from France. I grew up in France. Here I'm we're talking from Silicon Valley. It's actually a quarter to midnight here. And and what time is it where you are?
Yash Shah (02:26)
wow. Got it.
It's 15 past 12 in the afternoon. So fairly comfortable for me for sure.
Philippe Kahn (02:34)
Yeah, so so it's an
afternoon for us. I feel like I'm in a nightclub. And so so I was I was an immigrant in America. And so I came as an immigrant and
The reason I went from working in France is I had done on the side from my work in academia, et cetera, and teaching, I had done some software development and sold some software to some American companies. I got a bit lucky. And when I met these people, they said, you really belong in Silicon Valley, not in the States, but in Silicon Valley. And at the time,
And, you know, when I heard that a lot, I got kind of bored a little bit with academia and all that. And I said, you know, I'm going to go to Silicon Valley and get a job because I had no interest in building a company. I know nothing about business. I knew nothing about business. Right. And I don't, I didn't need anybody. So I basically took a plane from Paris to, San Francisco and, and, got a, got a very cheap room.
in San Jose on top of a garage and started looking for work. And looking for work like a lot of people like an immigrant. And my English wasn't as good, but it was decent. And I had a good resume. I had did some work. And I had
Yash Shah (03:40)
Okay?
Philippe Kahn (03:55)
I had luck with Hewlett Packard, with Atari at the time and all that. Unfortunately, because I didn't have a green card, they could not hire me. So I started doing some consulting for them and that paid my bills a little bit.
At the same time when I got here, my room was on top of a computer store. And at the time, in the computer industry, there were no standards for printer cables. you know, printer cables were all different, right? This is the beginning of the IBM PC, all the plugs were different. Everything was different. There was no local area networks, really. Everything was connected by cable.
Yash Shah (04:29)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (04:35)
And that computer store says, could you make printer cables? I said, sure. You know, when you're an immigrant and you want to work, do, people ask you to do something, you do it. And I started building those printer cables and they were good printer cables and they were very, they liked them and they started selling them. And I would sell them a printer cable for $30 and they sell it for a hundred or more. And
Yash Shah (04:45)
Yeah, yeah.
Philippe Kahn (04:59)
They started wanting more printer cables and started selling printer cables in the US. And then they had this custom printer cable business and even sell them in Europe. And then they wanted so many printer cables that I was, I hired a couple of people to make the printer cables for me. And then I started managing them and spending my time doing software consulting for companies like Atari, HP, Intel, and people like that.
Yash Shah (05:10)
wow.
Philippe Kahn (05:26)
And so I was able to do some business and like that, and that's how I got here, but I was illegal. I didn't have any resources or any money and I just did what I had to do to survive. And so that's, that's how I started in Silicon Valley.
Yash Shah (05:45)
What an inspiring story, right? And that's how I think it happened earlier in the day. So now you would look for an opportunity. If you were to do it all over again, you might want to look for an opportunity while in Paris. And then once you had a few conversations, you make the jump. But this is extremely inspiring, right? Not knowing what's about to happen, taking a flight, going out there, having conviction in your own
sort of skills and character and be able to figure things out. And that's amazing. The other thing that I want to talk to you about is, as you also sort of rightly pointed out, that there's a difference between a product person and a person who can run a company. How did you go from knowing how to make a product to having to run a company, building a team, negotiating with vendors?
you know reading P &L balance sheet all of those other skills or did you so like did you become that person or did you find a co-founder did you find a partner who would do all of those things and sort of focus on what you knew best what what was it like
Philippe Kahn (06:49)
No, I have no idea what business was. I still don't. It's very, it's very confusing to me. But my family were modest cabinet bakers in Paris, and they ran a cabinet shop making, you know, cabinets. And so I grew up working in the cabinet shop. I was the first person in my, in my family to actually finish high school.
Yash Shah (06:53)
Okay. Okay.
Philippe Kahn (07:17)
let alone get higher degrees. And I learned in the cabinet shop what it took to sell to customers because they would come and they wouldn't know what they want. And my grandmother would tell him, hey, no, here, think you need a
Yash Shah (07:19)
Wow.
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (07:33)
You need a table made of mahogany and four chairs and we can make them for you in this way and all that. And my husband can decorate them in these ways and all that. And I saw her do that. I saw her run the business. It was a cash business. You know, you only spent what you made. And I saw my father, my grandfather, basically make the furniture and the whole family worked on that. I did.
Yash Shah (07:50)
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (07:58)
So I was working in the shop since I was eight, nine years old. And so, so that's where I learned. And so I started my business exactly that way. That's all I knew what to do. I says, I'm going to run it like my grandmother ran the shop and, and I'm going to do what my grandfather did, which is great stuff that people want to buy and want to pay for. And that's basically my business philosophy. I had no other co-founder, no venture capital, no capital.
I've none of my old four successful businesses at any venture capital already of that.
Yash Shah (08:33)
I mean, there's this saying in Hindi. I translated it in English and say that it will not sound as inspirational, but in Hindi, it's extremely inspirational. It essentially means that my teacher, my professor has been experienced. So I'm not going to, so it sounds really good and well put in the language that I speak, but yeah, so I've been taught with experience or through experience, right?
But coming to the product that you have, one of the products that you have under the full power platform is sleeptracker.ai. And so talk to us a little bit about why build that product, what benefits does it offer, who is it for, why does that product exist? And before you talk about that, if you can share with us a little bit about the size and scale of ops as things stand today, this will.
allow the people who are listening to this or watching this on YouTube or Spotify, this will help them sort of put everything that you're about to say in context. So if you can give us sort of a status quo and then follow that with an introduction to a sleeptracker.ai, that will be helpful.
Philippe Kahn (09:40)
Well, you know, one of things I want to make a point to is when you see the venture capital back world and a lot of people want to do that, it's a world made of recipes and ways to do things. And everybody knows the same. You need, you know, the playbook thing. And it doesn't work.
Yash Shah (09:59)
Yeah, playbooks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (10:06)
And so it really doesn't work because if a playbook work, you could put robots and they'd execute on the playbook. So my theory is that it works one time out of a hundred or one time out of 50. But most of the time it's not going to work because if it worked, everybody would do it and there would be no opportunity. It's just that simple. So all this playbook stuff is one thing. I think you...
Yash Shah (10:25)
Yeah, fair.
Philippe Kahn (10:30)
You need two things. need, you really need a vision and a passion for what you're going to do. So for me, you know, my, my companies came from passion for something that I wanted to do. And what was important for, for my, my first company was programming languages and tools, programming tools. And so C plus plus C Pascal and all that.
We became the leaders for that. And that's the world I came from because that's what I studied. I studied and at the time at the PC revolution, there were no good tools to build software for people. that was timing was perfect. That's why I knew how to do and I could build and put a team together to build compilers and to build development environments and all that. So that's the world I understood.
My second company, I focus on wireless connectivity. And I thought that after I left my first company after 12 years there, and it was a public company when I left it, I spun off a group that was focused on wireless technology. at the time it was the beginning of wireless technology. So we focus on that. And I was part of the people who work with
Ericsson and Intel on the Bluetooth specification. So we built the first Bluetooth capable platform and the company was acquired by Motorola and that great. That was called Starfish Software. When that happened, know, a little bit of magic happened where the first interesting
Yash Shah (11:54)
How about?
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (12:07)
cameras came out. That was a Casio, the first digital camera came out. And I looked at that and have an experience with Motorola with wireless technology and cellular phones. I thought that putting both the camera and the cellular phone together and creating a platform for that would be really exciting. So I started building that for eight months and then I made it all work.
Yash Shah (12:12)
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (12:33)
in a great serendipity event when my daughter was born took that picture and that picture became very famous, one of the most famous pictures in the world, right? And so that work and then I was able to get patents and license the technology to companies in Japan first and then the US, etc. And the company got acquired again by a combination of VeriSign and then later the IP to Google.
And so, and then I started after that, I started, I started full power technology because I got interested in the world of biosensing and my, my background, in the, late eighties, early nineties was with early occurrences of AI, with prologue, et cetera, et cetera. And about 15 years ago, when I started full power, nobody was talking about AI yet.
Yash Shah (12:59)
Yep.
Philippe Kahn (13:24)
And so, but I thought that I could use, I could use the, the, the concepts at least of what we call today machine learning to actually build an edge cloud system, focus on sensor based biosensing and at the edge of the system. And of course, one of the first applications was to
Yash Shah (13:34)
Mm-hmm.
Philippe Kahn (13:46)
to make a partnership with a company called TempurPedic, which is the world leader in bedding, build with them, I mean, build a technology that enables the smart bed, which we do, and now they ship it around the world. that's, so sleep from a consumer perspective has been very successful for our platform. And then we also,
Yash Shah (13:52)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Philippe Kahn (14:11)
working on medical applications of what we do for conditions like COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, apnea and other diseases that manifest themselves in an acute way during sleep. And we also apply our platform to dermatology and other healthcare type of systems. So our platform is fairly versatile.
Yash Shah (14:27)
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (14:39)
But you're right, we initially focused on sleep and we are the world's, I think, specialists in sleep science. We have a partnership with Stanford University as well as UCSF University of California, San Francisco.
Yash Shah (14:54)
Got it. Got it. Interesting. so tell us as to, I mean, we'll link a few really good videos and more information and including a few papers as well down as to what is the importance of sleep and why should you get really good full night sleep. There's been a lot of studies and research done in and around that. But one of the things that I also want to talk to you about is
is a lot of entrepreneurs in their early stages confuse and think that work-life balance is opposite of passion. So they would say that, as an example, if I'm working 80 hour work weeks, that means I'm passionate. So that's what they define as passion. And I think you have an interesting view on that as well. If you could elaborate that a little bit, that will be helpful.
as well as to what are your thoughts on work-life balance versus passion and how do you sort of draw a line and how do you think about it?
Philippe Kahn (15:48)
I've you, you, you, you called something work life balance. Is that right? What is, what is that? What is work balance? If you're going to be an entrepreneur, you better forget that. Otherwise you're a fake entrepreneur and you're just relying on spending other people's money for the hobby of trying to do something. So
Yash Shah (15:54)
Yeah, so, yeah, so.
Okay.
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (16:15)
When if you're truly an entrepreneur, you're going to make a lot of sacrifices. And you're going to have a lot of sleepless nights. And you're going to miss a lot of sports events if you have kids and a lot of birthdays and you might not be a good parent, but at the end, it'll work out. the concept of work life balance is very difficult to associate with entrepreneurship. If you want work life balance, I recommend you go work for a big company.
Yash Shah (16:19)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Philippe Kahn (16:44)
or
a venture capital company.
Yash Shah (16:48)
Got it. are you saying that building wealth, building a lot of wealth in a very short amount of time requires you to identify opportunities and execute? And so for a very short amount of time, you might have to sacrifice on the work-life balance. Be passionate about the vision that you're working towards.
recommend getting rid of a good sleep plus hard work or sleepless nights are also okay. What are your thoughts around that?
Philippe Kahn (17:20)
I think that you have to be opportunistic and sleep when you can and be active in sports when you can, take care of your family when you can, but you have to be passionate and spend a lot of energy on building your enterprise. If you're an entrepreneur, I think there's no
Yash Shah (17:30)
Hmm.
Cut it.
Philippe Kahn (17:45)
there's not shortcut for that. And you need to find a life partner, a husband or wife, whatever you choose to, to understand that and to be on that on that path with you. People don't understand. see a lot of people who do. you know, I just don't want to work on weekends. I say you don't want to what? And so it, this is a
Yash Shah (18:08)
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (18:12)
It's a hard choice. It's like becoming a monk. You know, you go and you become a monk, you make some sacrifices, you know, you're, you're being an entrepreneur is very similar to that. And I know that there's a playbook and people think and you should, you know, you raise a lot of money and you run your, your, your startup, like a big company and all that. I don't think it makes a lot of sense. And ultimately, especially
Yash Shah (18:16)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (18:39)
in today's environment, think it's going to be very challenging to a lot of people. So all this said, it's really worth it. And when I say sleep is important, that part of what our solutions for sleep is, what's important is not quantity of sleep is quality of sleep. It's like everything else. And if you have the quality and the quantity, that's great. But most importantly, quantity be fun.
Yash Shah (18:47)
Hmm.
Hmm. Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (19:03)
I quality becomes comes before quantity, sorry. I mean, it's really important. A lot of people say, I slept eight hours, but if it's eight hours of non-quality sleep in a room that's too hot with noise and all that, you're better off getting five hours of sleep or four hours of sleep in a quiet, cool room and better sleep. and you know, there's a lot of strategies that have been developed
Yash Shah (19:08)
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (19:30)
including taking power naps, 22, 25 minute naps, do it today if you haven't slept. There's many ways. mean, that's, that's how I operate personally, you know, you're talking to me, it's midnight right now. And I probably be up till two or three in the morning and I'll be up in it. But I'm, you know, I operate like that. I have no problem.
Yash Shah (19:34)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, very similar myself as well. also have a 30 minute power, like two 30 minute power naps during the day. And so I have a really nice place in the office where I can go and sleep. It's extremely dark and quiet and calm and I can have. But before I let you go though, I want to understand, you have a hundred and like full power.ai as an organization has 135 patents and
ISO certifications and all of that as well. But how do you get to that? Like even if I think of 15 years, that's like 10 patents a year. Do you like, how do you get there?
Philippe Kahn (20:34)
Well, that's what I do. mean, I've been doing that for a long time. I have more than 250 patents to my name. And so I have more than 200.
Yash Shah (20:41)
Oh! Is 135
wrong? Was it 250?
Philippe Kahn (20:46)
is so you can search, I have more than 250 patents and in areas like a lot of stuff that I did, including, you know, digital photography, know, AI, database management, programming languages, compilers and all that. That's what I do when I have a concept.
Yash Shah (20:50)
Wow.
Philippe Kahn (21:07)
I try to see what is innovative or not. And I research it and I do it myself. I don't do it with lawyers because a lot of a lot of people patent things with lawyers and I've never understood how lawyers could patent things because lawyers are not inventors, they're lawyers and they're good. It might be useful to write things up maybe and clean it up. But at the end of the day, the person who has to
Yash Shah (21:14)
Okay.
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (21:33)
to create the patent, write the patent has to be an inventor or a team. I work with my team. Yeah, one of the great secrets of being successful is having a great team, a team that's passionate, that shares the same values as you have, that is motivated by what we're doing, not by trying to make money quickly and all that. if you want to make money quickly, make money, I suggest you create a machine that
print bank notes and make them. But, you know, money has to come as a consequence of the value you create and what you build and your passion really and the passion of your team. And that's my philosophy.
Yash Shah (22:10)
Kevin.
Got it. Got it, Philippe. Thank you for taking out the time and being with us. This has been an extremely valuable and insightful episode starting from. And so one of the things that we try to do with these conversations is, at least for early stage founders, they get to see examples of real world people who achieved significantly more and started out from near zero, right? Started out from...
from scratch. So those examples are always helpful. But thank you, Philippe, for...
Philippe Kahn (22:48)
What does your company do?
Yash Shah (22:50)
Our company Momentum, it essentially helps businesses with engineering services and requirements. So if you're building a digital product, whether you need UI UX or you need back-end development, front-end development, AI agents, all of those things. And largely we're getting into a space where we help sort of mid-market and early stage companies set up their team over here in India. So their own team, their own engineers.
Philippe Kahn (23:14)
You
do outsourcing of work for tech companies. What parts of the technology do you cover?
Yash Shah (23:25)
So more of it's not necessarily, so we don't do things hands on ourselves. What we do is we essentially help, so as an example, let's say if you are a company, let's say full power wants to build a 10 people team over here in India, then we will help you build the team, manage the payroll, make sure that they have a good space, all the physical infrastructure that's required and all of that. So that's essentially, so it's not, so we are essentially bells and whistles.
Philippe Kahn (23:45)
team.
Yash Shah (23:52)
that you require for a team to function well. All of their, so like we have about two million square feet of space. We have 15 office spaces, grade A buildings. have, so all of those things, right? So that sort of bells and whistles put together for a team to function well. That's essentially what we
Philippe Kahn (24:09)
I I see. So one of the challenges you have in India with people working on India, we don't do any outsourcing ourselves. We build everything ourselves. we know you. But I've tried several times. One of my VP in engineering is a prior company is Shekhar Kirani, who you may know.
Yash Shah (24:35)
Yeah.
Philippe Kahn (24:36)
Shekhar is a principal at Accel He's a very good friend of mine. He was my VP engineer. And he always told me that the challenge was attrition. It's like people don't stay very long, stay out a year or a year and half, then they look for a better rep. And in the kind of work we do, we need people to stay a long time because everything takes a while. So how do you address that?
Yash Shah (24:38)
Is a VC in Accel. Yeah.
Yep. Yep.
Yeah.
So there are a couple of ways to address that. Ideally, the reason why people move, there are lots of reasons why people switch and move jobs. So one of the things is that what we've seen, so we currently employ about 800 people on behalf of our clients. And so one of the things that we've seen happen is that if they are very, very early in their career, so five, six years of experience or less, they are much more likely to move.
But once they are married, once they are settled, they have sort of, once they've had a few experiences with different companies, then they are not as likely to move. So the average tenure for someone with seven plus years of work experience who has a kid, who has a family is significantly less. Second thing that we've also noticed is that it has a lot to do with the company culture. And so one of the things that we tend to do with our clients is,
is that since we are not outsourcing, since we are not the people who are actually building it, we are just essentially taking care of the team. So imagine that there is a shared services team that we have whose key job is just to help businesses and people do their best work. And that includes a lot of things. So that includes, since a lot of things are significantly more economical here in India.
We are able to have parties, we are able to take them out, we are able to really, really treat them well. The health system over here is great, so the insurance, all of those things sort of play a role. There are small little, so we sort of have an internal note on this. Happy to share that with you. But so as an example, Google Pay has 200 people with us, Salesforce has 150 people with us.
Schneider Electric, if you know, they have 60 people with us, Coca Cola has 40 and so on and so forth. So essentially they are their team members only, but we are looking after everything.
Philippe Kahn (27:02)
I see, I get it. That's a good business model you have. Well, thank you. I'm going to jump out because it's past midnight already. And I wish you a good day. And that was a fun conversation.
.png)
.webp)
