Interviewee
Max Wieder, is the CEO & Co-founder at Celcy, the company building personal kitchen robots that remotely cooks meals to perfection. He holds two degrees from Johns Hopkins University – a BS in Mechanical Engineering with an Aerospace Concentration and a MS in Engineering Management.
Transcript
Ari Tulla: My name is Ari Tulla. I'm from Finland originally, been living in the Bay area building companies for the last about 15 years now. And my latest company is called Elo Health. It's all about, as you said, trying to to turn food from the course of disease today into your best medicine. I think we all know that, you know, food has a big impact on making us feel better, lighter, heavier, and all those things, but it also has this big impact on making people sick once we eat the highly processed food for, you know, 10, 15 years. You know, many of us are developing chronic conditions like type two diabetes, hypertension and so forth. So we are trying to build a system that can help people take control of their nutrition and make it simple to get the right nutrition, at the right time.
Max Wieder: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Elisa Muñoz: How did you actually start Celcy?
Max Wieder: Essentially came up with a concept I said about five years ago. Our friend's oven died and it was basically us getting tired of listening to him do his due diligence of do I get this oven with wifi, do I swim with a temperature probe, specialized pizza drawer? And we just got tired of it. So we started, you know, I'll get the one that has, you know, an app and get the one that has a refrigerator and a meal service and all the bells and whistles and we tend to all have that pause aha moment where we said, Oh, this is a fantastic product, we can make this. And we did our due diligence on the internet and we found nothing like it existed. We whiteboarded it and we have, between the three of us, we had six degrees from Hopkins, so we all engineer and so we designed it in a single weekend on a whiteboard and five years later.
Elisa Muñoz: What do you think it's the key differentiator at Celcy?
Max Wieder: Yeah, so the, the biggest differentiator is we're the first iot kitchen appliance, Internet of things. Everyone out there, you know, they use the word smart, they attach wifi and sensors and things like that, but you know what goods the sensor has then you have to walk up to the thing and use it. So we're the first completely hands off kitchen appliance that from loading your food in the fridge to taking a hot meal outta the oven does not require you to be physically present. Really.
Elisa Muñoz: Interesting. And can you talk a little bit about what progress has been made?
Max Wieder: Yeah, so from that whiteboard concept, the first next step was proving it worked. So we actually built a Frankenstein type device where we took a freezer and a toaster of and and hacked them together and made it work. Then we moved to individual tabletop testing of making things work. And last summer we actually built our first five alpha units, which were production representative. And then from that point we've been working towards design for manufacturing. We'll have our first beta unit done by the end of this year. We launched beta presales in July and sold out within a month. We are launching a phase two shortly, so you can go to our website cel.com and sign up to be a beta tester. And those beta tests are looking to start in the late spring of next year.
We're the first completely hands off kitchen appliance that from loading your food in the fridge to taking a hot meal outta the oven does not require you to be physically present.
Elisa Muñoz: Such exciting news! What would you say it has been the biggest challenge talking about the technical and the business side?
Max Wieder: So the technical side, surprisingly, has not been that challenging for us. So as I mentioned, we have a lot of engineering experience on our team. We actually, our extended team includes two engineers that we pulled out of retirement. So between the two of them, they have almost 90 years of experience.In electrical design and manufacturing and machining. Designing the product has, has been relatively easy. They come from a lot of government type backgrounds. So trying to do things at a cost affordable rate has been the most technically challenging to make sure that we still have a product that is affordable.So that's mostly the technical side difficulties. On the business side, we're a hardware startup and it's never good to be a hardware startup in, in, in the startup realm. Especially then when you add consumers to that and then the fact that we're almost creating a new market.
Elisa Muñoz: Do you remember your first experience with investors?
Max Wieder: We started with friends and family around five years ago and that was eye opening. I would say we were just trying to raise 55,000 through friends and family and it took, you know, six to nine months talking to friends and family. Like there were plenty of people that said, I love the idea, but you know, you know, 5,000 here is a lot to just a normal person. You know, we were, before we even went to them, we had bootstrapped as much as we could doing that frank device and building up the due diligence to even go out to talk to these people. And the primary use of that funding was to start our patent and it took four years, but we're fully pantsed.
We have the patent on iot kitchen appliances basically on that utility. That first interaction was very eye-opening in the sense of if I could, if it took me that long and that much work to get friends and family to give us money. I just knew that once I went into the actual angel space and venture capital spaces it was going to be much more difficult. And I've talked to hundreds of angels and VCs, I've pitched dozens of times. It is quite difficult.
Elisa Muñoz: I wanted to ask you what you say it's next for Celcy? You know, talking about expanding or maybe launching a new product?
Max Wieder: We have a nice extensive roadmap of what we want to do, but step one is getting our product out to the people who are eager to use it. So our beta experience that we sold, you know, people put money down because they wanted to use this product and our goal is to get them that product as soon as possible once that happens, where they'll start marching towards actual production, getting the unit out to the masses as well as expanding our, our food demographic. So as I mentioned, we are taking a very curing espresso type approach to the food. So it's not just gonna be our food, but we are going, we already have a couple food brands that are in the, you know, on the sidelines ready to join us once we start getting consumers using our product.
Elisa Muñoz: And last one at least. Can you tell me something that no one knows yet about Celcyl? Maybe some news to come or some announcement.
Max Wieder: mean we have some things in the pipeline but I don't wanna dig too much into them, you know, but I've kind of hinted that we have our, our becomes at the end of this calendar year. Our first data unit, our biggest announcement happened last week where we showed off for the first time our integration with Amazon's Alexa. So during our live pitch we were able to ask Alexa to bake us some cookies and the device in the back of the room started baking some cookies. Amazing.
Elisa Muñoz: What advice would you give to the future entrepreneurs starting on this path?
Max Wieder: Don't do hardware and don't do consumer. No, the world of startups and entrepreneurship sounds glamorous but it is, it is a grind and you have to be fully committed and you have to have the right team. Me and my co-founder have been friends since college. He actually was the officiate at my wife and my wedding. You know, we're good friends and you know, some people say like, don't go into business with a good friend cuz it'll destroy the friendship. But you know, it hasn't it anymore at least yet. I don't know. But it's hard. There's a lot of decisions you have to make and, and you also have to make sure you have your priorities right. My first and foremost is family. As much as I work, as I said, like a hundred hours a week, family first and I make sure I have a dedicated day per week that is family time only. And if there's a conflict between something, I make sure someone else covers it so I can be with my family.
Elisa Muñoz: That's amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time, for being here, for sharing your experiences Max.
Max Wieder:It was my pleasure.
