This episode features an interview with Jeri Ellsworth, CEO and Co-founder of Tilt Five, a modern-day tabletop gaming kit powered by augmented reality technology. Jeri is a lifelong gamer, inventor, creator, and one of the world’s leading AR experts. Her love of invention began with building race cars before transitioning to hardware design. In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Jeri discuss AR tabletop games, choosing your career path, and appreciating the history of technology.
This episode features an interview with Jeri Ellsworth, CEO and Co-founder of Tilt Five, a modern-day tabletop gaming kit powered by augmented reality technology. Jeri is a lifelong gamer, inventor, creator, and one of the world’s leading AR experts. Her love of invention began with building race cars before transitioning to hardware design.
In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Jeri discuss AR tabletop games, choosing your career path, and appreciating the history of technology.
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Episode Timestamps:
(02:22): What Jeri is working on right now
(12:02): What Jeri’s day-to-day looks like
(16:26): What tools Jeri uses
(18:33): How Jeri got into the industry
(26:42): Rapid Fire Questions
(38:25): Random Segment Generator
(46:54): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“Sometimes people look at my journey and sometimes it's like a hero's journey; dropout of high school, get into racing, brute force my way into different fields and learn it all myself. For some people, that's a really good direction to go. I've always been non-traditional in the way I think about things and do things, and so, very rigid schooling never really resonated with me. But, it depends. It depends on your personality. Some people are better served to have a more rigorous path. It definitely hasn't been easy, so I don't recommend it unless you have a personality like me.” – Jeri Ellsworth
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Links:
The Dev Morning Show (At Night) YouTube Page
Cassidy Williams: Hello everybody and welcome back to The Dev Morning Show (At Night). I am so excited to be here with you today. My name is Cassidy Williams and I am here with my wonderful, delightful co-host, Zach. Hey, Zach.
Zach Plata: Hey, Cass. Are you playing any interesting
board games right now?
Cassidy Williams: I just got the expansion for Wingspan, the Asia expansion, the brand new one, and I'm very, very excited about it.
Adds a lot of cool elements to the game.
What about you?
Zach Plata: Love that. I am, uh, we, we've played a game called, uh, Welcome to Your New Home, which is apparently Daniel Radcliffe's favorite board. Oh
Cassidy Williams: yeah, it's fun. Haven't unhear of that one. Well, speaking of awesome games and cool people, uh, we are joined by Jeri Ellsworth today.
She's the CEO and Co-founder of Tilt Five. Jeri,
welcome to the show.
Jeri Ellsworth: Thanks for having me. It's amazing to be here.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, I would love to know what's your favorite board game right now? Um,
Jeri Ellsworth: I just went through, Couple rounds of, um, Gloomhaven. That was pretty funny. Ooh. Um, yeah. After I unpacked the, uh, after we, I don't wanna take all the credit for it, we unpacked the, uh, 20 pounds of pieces and punched them all out.
Gosh. Pretty phenomenal though. Oh, bird .
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. It's a, it's an amazing one, but that's one where you gotta have like, A dedicated group of people who are willing to go through the whole thing. But it's a cool
game.
Jeri Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. We only made it through a couple times on a couple of the, uh, the rounds and then we all got busy and so it's, it's still kind of just sitting there queued up, ready to go.
It's, it's here in the office.
Cassidy Williams: Ooh. Oh, well that's even, that's fun too if you have it here in the office. Cause then you can play it with your teammates and stuff too.
Jeri Ellsworth: Of course, I had my pandemic legacy that we got about 80% of the way through. and then the pandemic hit and it's been, uh, sitting there
It's too weird needing to be, I know.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. That was what happened actually with my original Gloomhaven group where we started playing regularly and then pandemic hit, and. It happens .
Jeri Ellsworth: Well, we have a piece of technology that can help with that. So yes, , and
Cassidy Williams: I'd love for you to tell us about it. What are you working on right now?
Tell us about Tilt Five.
Jeri Ellsworth: So, Tilt Five, um, we, when we founded the company, um, we wanted to do an AR headset that presents holograms on the table for group environments. And so, uh, we did a lot of thinking about what's the direction we should go with when we designed this hard. and we did a lot of thinking about it.
You know, should we go after education or productivity tools? And, uh, my co-founder is a huge, um, D&D player, so he was influenced by that. Mm-hmm. , I'm a huge video game player. I worked in the video game, uh, industry for quite a few years, and so it was a natural direction for us to focus our product on an AR headset and all the peripherals that go with it that are focused on games where you can come together as a.
you see these holograms pop out of the table. All these game characters are running all over the place and you can directly interact with them. Yeah. And so, um, yeah, we've been at it for a little over five years. We just start shipping our first product, uh, four or five months ago. Uh, it's been getting really great reviews.
Um, so it's been great to have that focus on like a little nice, um, niche that we can optimize. And board games is a big part of it because since it's tabletop it lends itself naturally to, uh, re-imagination of existing board games. We just announced Katan a month or so ago, so Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's, I've been so fun.
I've been, uh, looking at internal builds of a couple of board games that we're producing and it's. Really, really cool. You know, board games have some friction to it, right. You know? Yeah. Your friends have to be in the same room. You have to learn the rules. Um, when it's dinnertime, you either have to take it off the table or you have to eat your dinner at the couch and you can't leave it set up for weeks unless you're really hardcore, you know, if the game go like gloom haven, like you kind of need to leave that.
But with our system, what's really neat is. You know, it has built in tutorials. It has the magic of all of the, uh, game characters actually moving. And you can directly interact with them. Your friends can log in from anywhere in the world and join in. So we take away all that friction and when dinnertime rolls around, you just hit the save button, roll up the game board, and then have dinner.
And then if you wanna come back after dinner, great. Or, you know, a week later you can. Um, so yeah, board games really lend themselves well to our system. . Um, it's so relatable. Even non-video game players understand what it's like, uh, when you use our system. And then our system's also great for video games, which is my favorite thing to do is play action games, you know, co-op action games on the system.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, that, that's so exciting for me because one thing that I did a lot in the pandemic, cuz. It, it happened was I would play things like tabletop simulators so we could play board games, but remotely. And now that we're more in person, now we'll play a game like Feast Road and for example, that is a lot of parts.
And so in between rounds there's so much resetting to make sure that it's all back in the, in the right place and then you can go again. And so something like that where you can have. Joy of physical gaming, but less of that reset
Jeri Ellsworth: is very, yeah. On the next game that we're gonna announce, um, I just had this magic moment, uh, when we were kind of alpha testing it, where we were all sitting around the table and because it was in the early days of development, The cards and all of, um, your private information wasn't private between the players.
Oh. Yet, so, you know, our system, since everyone wears a headset, sits around the table. You can have private information between each player, but because it was early, we didn't have that feature in there yet. And so, You know, one of the programmers here in the office was onboarding me to the game who had played it before.
You know, he was pointing to my cards and saying like, well, you need to do this objective and you know, you want to click this icon and drag it over here and that's gonna do this or that. The onboarding experience was like amazing. And as soon as we got the, um, build of the, the game that didn't have the kind of open hand mode where you could see everything, I.
not as much fun and not as easy to onboard people. So I went back to the the team and I'm like, we have to have an open hand mode because it's just so nice to play that way. You know, your first couple times through it, where Right, private information doesn't matter. It's kind of like how mm-hmm. , you learn a game the first time.
So we added that feature and we've been demoing it at various trade shows and it is so easy to get people into. into that board game, uh, whereas it would be really difficult otherwise. That is
Cassidy Williams: so cool. And yeah. Perfect for learning a game. And like, granted, you might not wanna see everyone's cards while you're playing for the first time or, or, or for the 10th time or whatever, but mm-hmm.
when you're learning it, that's, that's so cool. I'm geeking out of it. Yeah.
Jeri Ellsworth: And what's neat about our system is I have one here. Sorry if I'm going too long on touting up our system. No, you're good. These are the glasses. They're just super lightweight, small. Um, any of you that are into like XR, VR type things, it's got the widest field of you in the, the market for ar, so it's 110 degrees, which means your whole table is just filled with the gaming experie.
And then we have our magic wand that goes with it too, which allows you to point at things. It has a trigger. It's really intuitive for people that have never used a, a game controller before. And then it, you can also hold it sideways, so it's like a Nintendo controller, so you can play pure video games as well.
And uh, it's super low cost. So since we focused on video games and board games primarily, we were able. optimize what we put in it. Like we're not trying to be a productivity tool. Sure. You know, we don't have to have like all the sensors that they need to walk around the world. We just have, you know, just enough to do kind of tabletop group experiences.
So it's, you know, the first system that you buy and the kits 3 59 and then every other pair of glasses afterwards is $300. So it's truly at a consumer price. That's amazing. I want it , . You can get it now. You know, we, uh, we started shipping, um, we started shipping maybe four months ago and we were, we did a Kickstarter campaign to launch the product, uh, a couple years ago and,
We were the largest ever AR project on Kickstarter, which was really awesome. So
Cassidy Williams: I think that's how I first heard about it actually. Oh, yeah, yeah. From
seeing it as a popular Kickstarter thing.
Jeri Ellsworth: Yeah. Before we started the, the conversation, we were talking about fundraising and things like that, uh, the reason we did the Kickstarter was we had to prove that there was like an interest, a market fit in the world for this thing.
And our investors were like, we're not gonna give you any more money unless you go out and prove to us. , you know, people in the world want it. And, uh, we didn't have, we were just tiny at the time. We were very little money into the company. We had a prototype that worked and, uh, we, we kind of put all the cash in our bank, which was not much as for marketing, and it just blew up on its own, which was really amazing.
Wow. That's awesome. But, um, yeah, so we, we got the product into development through the pandemic, which was really challenging to actually bring up a factory where you couldn't even step into the factory. So we've never stepped foot into the factory. Um, which Wow. My, my background is new product. Wow. Yeah.
Yeah. My background in, uh, um, new product introduction is, uh, you know, you're always in the, the factory bringing it up. And so we had to learn all new things anyway, so we started producing the units and, uh, we had left a pre. Pre-order button on our website, and we were massively backordered. And as soon as people got their systems started talking about it, we started getting more sales.
But what's exciting is we're about this next shipment that comes in in about two weeks, you're gonna be able to go to our website and click buy now and get it within like days, which we've been pushing so hard with the factory, like build more, build more, and we gotta get to the point where you can just buy it and get it.
yeah. Oh, the, that's all. Although I'm not even confident that our, I'm not confident our current order is gonna last. I keep looking at the numbers and it keeps going down, which is, uh, really exciting.
Cassidy Williams: Maybe by the time this episode airs, it'll be just wildly popular and everyone will be by .
Of course, of
Zach Plata: course.
Well, I think now is a great time to, uh, throw it over to our awesome sponsors, LaunchDarkly. The Dev Morning Show (At Night) is a sponsored podcast. It means someone has to pay the bills around here. We're sponsored by LaunchDarkly, and LaunchDarkly is the first scalable feature management platform. That means dev teams can innovate and get better software to customers faster.
How? By gradually releasing new software features and shipping code whenever they want. Fast tracking their journeys to the cloud and building stronger relationships with business teams. Thanks for the money LaunchDarkly.
Cassidy Williams: Thanks LaunchDarkly. Wow. Money's cool. Anyway, , Jeri, because you have a, a smaller team, but such a popular product as as CEO, what does your day-to-day
Jeri Ellsworth: look like?
Oh, that's a great question. Um, so my background for the last 20 years I've been an engineer, so working on products and in the early days of the company, I was act actively involved in. Tons of the hardware aspects, and that's transitioned recently, uh, as the company's grown, we start shipping the product.
You know, I spend a lot of time fundraising. So, you know, as one of our advisors put it a, uh, a startup doesn't fail because it's product is bad or, or, uh, its team isn't good enough. It only fails because it runs outta money. Mm-hmm. And so, Uh, my job primarily is to constantly raise money and, um, it's a, a new skill I've had to learn.
Um, but when I do get a chance, I, um, I do follow one of our other advisors, uh, recommendations. He says, your job now, besides being cash extraction Officer , is, is to, um, , nose in fingers out, which I think is great. Um, mm-hmm. , and I try to live by that. So, you know, I, I circulate through, talk to the team and I, you know, since my background, I, I can help out at times, but I try to keep my fingers out of, of what they're doing because, you know, I don't have as much time to dedicate to it.
Um, our team is really amazing and of course every founder says that, but such a small team, uh, we were able to make a profitable. hardware product, you know, on, you know, just a fraction of the money that any of the other players in this space, you know, has spent it. It just baffles me. I look at hundreds of millions of dollars going into, um, startups and they don't even deliver a product.
And we did this all on just a, yeah. On almost nothing, but it, it, it goes again, back to the team. Like I was able to go, my co-founder and I were cherry picked, like the best people we worked with in the past, and we all came together and it's such an exciting product that it was pretty easy to recruit. Um, people that got excited about it and, and want to.
You know, impact the world in such a positive way.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. That transition to like fingers out and nose in and stuff is challenging because the, the, especially when the product is so cool, but,
Jeri Ellsworth: uh, I worked in so many startups where the founders just couldn't, uh, do that. Mm-hmm. and it's never a good thing, you know, as you start to scale up.
Yeah. You can't micromanage everything in the company. You have to have really great people around you and trust them if they do the right thing, but validate that they are right.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. And, and it's, it's, it's fun to dabble, but you don't want to end up just causing more work for
Jeri Ellsworth: your people too. , I'm our software team's worst nightmare.
So whenever a new SDK comes out, you know, I'm one of the first to like grab it and start to dog food it, so you know, we have a unity and Unreal. S d. . Um, which is amazing, by the way. Um, check it out. It's, it's so easy to use our product. You know, we have real time editing, so you can actually wear the glasses Oh.
And edit your project in real time. , it's probably a first in the industry. And, uh, but anyway, I grab it and I'm, I come from a hardware background. I was a chip designer. I've done consumer products. You know, I was never a programmer, so I'm terrible at it. But I like, I like making things for our system.
It's just my fun thing to do on the weekends. So I'll take the SDK and I'll write the worst code and I'll break it, and then I'll come back in and I'll be like, you know, I did this thing, I passed an integer into here. Why ? Yeah. Yeah. They, they, they look at my code and they're always like, oh, Jeri, oh, , what?
What did you do?
Cassidy Williams: And I'm like, but that kind of makes you the perfect QA
Jeri Ellsworth: tester.
Zach Plata: Yeah, exactly.
Jeri Ellsworth: Yeah, we never expected anyone to do that. . It happens all the time.
Cassidy Williams: You've got like a little halo going and you're just like, oops, ooh. And I built something with it. , .
Zach Plata: Well beyond, you know, like the hardware projects and you know, the SDKs and stuff that you're, what other tools do you use kind of on a day-to-day basis?
Jeri Ellsworth: Uh, tools, you know, um, , I designed a lot of the optics in our system, so I still get to, to use optics tools. Um, so those are really fun. You know, my, I'm a, I'm self-taught everything I've done up to this point. I never went to school to be an engineer, so I taught myself electrical engineering and chip design and how to design products.
That's awesome. And so, uh, when I started working on XR devices, I didn't know much about optics. Had read some stuff about it, so I just dove in headfirst and started playing with the tools, started to understand kind of like how the different pieces work together. And um, now, you know, I've gotten quite good at, uh, doing optical design.
So we're always looking at like, you know, what are we gonna do in the next couple years for product? So that's kind of my pet project as far as like, hardcore tools. Um, so I'm, I'm doing optical designs and thinking about like, you know, what's a 20 24, 20 25 product look like? Mm-hmm. , um, on a personal level, um, I do all kinds of things.
I still do a lot of chip design type work with FPGAs, so I do use a lot of verlo synthesis tools. Ooh, haven't touched
Cassidy Williams: that in a long time.
Jeri Ellsworth: Oh, , yeah. Yeah. Which makes me a terrible, terrible programmer. Again, going back to my team, when they look at my code, they're like, why do you unroll everything? Like everything's unrolled?
And I'm like, well, it's because in chip design, you don't wanna have a lot of like things wrapped up in four loops. You kind of wanna. , this line turns into a circuit. Right. And so that bleeds into my programming. But, you know, I'm always like programming little things. And, um, my garage, um, is full of all kinds of nerd tools.
I have an electron microscope and sputter coders and oh, and stuff like that. That's awesome. I digress. I'm like way off in the.
Cassidy Williams: Well, and so you mentioned that you're self-taught and you've been in the industry for so long. What got you into the industry in the first
Jeri Ellsworth: place? I think it goes back to when I was a kid.
I always dreamed about like making products. I've always been kind of an inventor since I was young, so even before I could. Make things. I was taking things apart, just trying to understand how they worked, which was extremely frustrating for my father because he'd buy me a home computer and I'd have the screws out of it in like a few minutes and be looking inside of it, or you know, a new toy.
I'd just dismantle it and I'd have more fun taking it apart. So it always was in the back of my mind that, you know, someday I'm gonna be building these things that I'm taking. and, uh, my career path's been very interesting. So I started off my career right outta high school as a professional race car driver, and I actually built the chassis.
So these are big V8 power sprint cars and, uh, late model cars. . Yeah. Yeah. I, uh, wow. I ran the I five circuit, which was a thing, and, and did quite well at that, but I was always an entrepreneur as well, so I would build the cars for other people and. . And then in the nineties I saw a big opportunity. Uh, it was right around 1995, windows 95 wasn't out yet, and I'm like, wow, there's a lot of margin in building custom computers and this racing thing is pretty tough business.
So I, uh, started a computer store. It's a long story. I won't go into it. It wasn't easy at first cause I didn't know anything about. , how to be relatable to customers and stuff like that, but mm-hmm. , I had lots of mentors that helped me along the way, but you know, some local business owners kind of took me under the wing and taught me how to run a business, and it became quite successful.
I had a chain of stores and that was pretty good through the nineties. And then in 2000, the whole computer store market crashed. Mm-hmm. , you know, year 2000, you know, was a big hype. We sold a lot of units then everything crashed. , but I'd always been doing hobby electronics and I'd gotten into using these F P G A chips, which F PGAs are, you know, there's big CIA gates in them, ands and ORs and X ORs and stuff like that.
Yeah. To oversimplify it, but it lets you simulate what a full custom chip can do, and I found that fascinating. I'd been building circuit boards and making little designs with these F PGAs in the nineties and when my business evaporated. , you know, I asked like my father and all my friends, what should I do?
And they were like, go to school, you know, get your high school diploma, get your college diploma . And I'm like, nah, that's not for me. So I just came to Silicon Valley and started, um, meeting entrepreneurs and showing them all my little circuit boards that I built. And after dozens and dozens of interviews, eventually one founder took a chance on me.
Um, I took that very serious. I did a a really good job for them. Worked really hard, worked for $12 an hour. Woo. . Woo. I was making the money , but it was my chance In Silicon Valley too. Yeah, in Silicon Valley. And they may have been taking a little advantage of me, but, um, that was the stepping stone. And then from there I did other projects and other projects, and I got a bit of a reputation as like, and I, I had mentors that were teaching me, so I kind.
I've got these, this group of advisors and mentors around me that were guiding me through my career path and other engineers that kind of followed me from project to project. And we got this reputation as like, just get Jeri and her team to solve your tough problem, . And so I've, I've circulated through dozens of startups and I got to, I got to see the good and the bad of startups and what to do and what not to do.
Um, eventually I ended up at Valve Software. I put together their r and d department. Um, out of that came the HTC vibe, you know, a bunch of other projects. Yeah. And that's where I got the bug for augmented reality because Gabe Newell, the founder of, of Valve, he hired me specifically cuz he'd looked at my YouTube channel and he's like, you've got the right, um, perspective on, you know, how to.
You know, making hardware for video games. And he says, what I want you to do is bring the family together to play video games. Because right now you've got hardcore gamers, you've got casual gamers, you've got gamers that used to be gamers that don't, don't play anymore, and then you have non-gamers, you know, find a way to bring 'em all together.
And in fact, part of this technology, I discovered it there and I purchased it from valve software because they decided they were just gonna go down the VR path, not the augmented reality. , but that's, that's like I fell in love with the idea of bringing families together. Yeah.
Cassidy Williams: That is awesome.
Jeri Ellsworth: Gosh. So sorry.
Long-winded, uh, story, but that's how I got to this point in time where I'm a founder and it's fascinating , but I gotta do some really exciting projects over the years. Um, so I worked in the toy industry for five years. That's where I really cut my teeth and got to work with. , uh, highly disciplined product people.
Mm-hmm. , and they taught me like, know your audience. You know, what's the value proposition you're bringing to them? You know, why are they gonna like it and how can you do it, um, for an economical price? And so all that built up to, you know, what helped us make this. I also gotta work on exciting products. I worked at Astra on the low earth orbit rocket that they just launched into space recently.
Cassidy Williams: That's so cool. I, and I kind of, I kind of love that play is serious business for so many companies and stuff too, where where, yes, the ultimate thing is something where it's someone just kind of having fun, but it's a very serious business to make it, how do we make this a high quality, fun experience for everybody?
And that's, that's the coolest thing to see across a career and, and all the stuff that you've been,
Jeri Ellsworth: that's one of the most valuable things I learned and. It didn't come easy. So when I started working in the toy industry, they approached me and I didn't know anything about, you know, designing a product for an end consumer.
Like I had done chip designs and all kinds of things just as an engineer. This time I was in charge of designing a product that resonated with a particular audience. The first project they handed to me, they'd already figured that out. So I just executed as just, I would as a normal engineer. great. We, it was a viral hit and things went well.
And then they gave me the opportunity to pitch my own toy pro, uh, toy design to them, which I'm like, oh, yeah, I can make a toy that's really fun with, you know, my ego and everything. And I, I present this toy to them, which is like a super nerds toy. All of us would love it. It just had lights and displays and sound and, you know, and they, these executives took one look at it and they're like, they just reamed me.
and I was almost in tears, like, oh, when I was pitching them this toy, cuz they were so harsh on me and then afterwards they cornered me in the hall and they're like, you know, sorry we were so hard on you, but you need to understand, you know, next time you pitch a product, you need to come in, tell us your audience, why they're gonna love it, you know, unit economics.
And they just taught me all these pieces and, uh, . A lot of times as an engineer, you don't have to think about that because maybe your leadership's already figured that out for you. You just failed. Yeah. Yeah. And the toy industry is very much like a startup, right? It's mm-hmm. The toy industry, the design cycle is one year.
Uh, you're expected as a product owner to understand your audience, you need to like condense it down to the bare minimum, you know, just ditch everything that's not adding fun to it, which, , um, an interesting challenge. I love it. All right.
Cassidy Williams: I'm moving us on to rapid fire questions and
Okay. We're going to be asking you questions rapidly. . Uh, the first one is we all have project ideas that we're squatting on. What's, what's one of yours?
Jeri Ellsworth: Personal or professional? Oh, both. Either one. Oh, okay. Well, obviously a second gen, uh, version of our product. I was alluding to that. I have so, so many ideas and I can't act on them right now.
Right. Like we, we have such a good product now that, um, you know, we can market for like a year and a half or two years. So, you know, I have to like, Hold back from, um, spinning up people to work on it or even to work on it myself when I should be out like fundraising or doing some of these other activities.
Um, I have so many personal projects, so, uh, I alluded to my garage, so my garage is like a nerd's playground. Um, a few years ago I set up an entire chip foundry in there, so I've been slowly but not quickly. working on a, um, a full process to make pretty complicated chips in my garage. And I have an idea in mind of what I wanna reproduce.
It's some retro technology. I'm, if you go look at my background, I'm always doing retro tech kind of stuff. That's so cool. So I have a super secret retro chip project I wanna do. It may take me a decade to get there someday though, but I've been slowly gathering all the tools. . If my landlord came over and looked in the garage, they would be convinced I have a meth lab going cuz it does not look like what normal people have in the garage.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. Well just cuz there's so many specific parts for making chips, so I can only imagine the piles. . ,
Jeri Ellsworth: yeah. I've done some very simple chips that I did that maybe 10 years ago on my YouTube channel, but I wanna take it to the next level. Yeah.
Zach Plata: Nice. All right. What is the most recent thing you over-optimize?
Cassidy Williams: Pretty much, it's always good when the answer to that is a lot. , ,
Jeri Ellsworth: uh, that's a great question. I always over-optimized things. Well, um, actually the, the circuit board that's in our headset, I, I did the entire design on this and you know, coming from the toy industry, they don't let you use circuit boards that.
Yeah, a ton of layers in it. And we use really complicated chips in here that have a lot of pins on 'em. So normally you have to go as high as 12 layers. And I was obsessed. I'm like, it's going to be six layers, no more than six layers. I have a price point in mind. We're gonna hit it. And this design is such a.
can I say mine?
bleep. Uh, but, uh, it was so hard to do, to do in six layers because Oh, I'm sure you know, you have these complicated chips and you have to get the wires out from underneath them. So it took so many hours to like untangle these wires and get 'em out from these chips, and I'm super proud. , but I probably just time to market.
I probably should have just went to more layers,
Cassidy Williams: but it's so cool that you didn't have, it's cool. I
Jeri Ellsworth: have such nerd cred with my peers. When I show them and they look at it, I'm like, and it's six layers. . .
Cassidy Williams: That's awesome. What's your golden rule for hardware design or just working in general?
Jeri Ellsworth: Don't over-optimize everything, come
Fair. Fair. No, no. I I mean that's kind of true. It's like, it's so easy as an engineer to get excited about the latest technology. I think my golden rule is look at, can you do this with commodity components? Mm-hmm. and do that. Um, cuz you can get in real trouble in hardware engineering if you get too. and our whole product is designed around this.
It's like, um, everything's plastic, including the lenses. The circuit board is six layers, right? So it's an easy process to build. It's very commodity. As we selected components, you know, we might have been able to go a little faster designing it if we use some fancy chips that do a lot more, but instead we chose like simpler parts that you.
20 variants that all plug into the same place. And again, that comes back to like the toy industry. It's like they never wanna. Stuck with a single supplier of anything. I think that also applies to, you know, you know, other aspects of the business as well. It really, it
Cassidy Williams: applies to so many different things.
Cuz if you go too custom on something, uh, it gets harder to debug because it's so custom. Mm-hmm. or, or if you end up getting something that's too many dependencies, then you have a whole dependency. Update to fix something. Yeah.
Jeri Ellsworth: It's saved our bacon quite a few times. I mean, we may not have been in production now, um, with some of the things we're able to change really quickly.
Like you think that your design at prototype stage is good and then you built the first couple thousand and you're like, Ooh, we're seeing, you know, out in the field, people are having trouble with u sb and it's like, oh, well, we'll, Yeah, change a capacitor here. And because it wasn't like fully integrated, we have that flexibility to change a small component to improve the quality of the product.
What is your
Zach Plata: favorite? It depends. Question.
Jeri Ellsworth: Oh, I think I just went through some of those. It depends. . Yeah, that's true. Sometimes people look at my, um, journey and sometimes, you know, it's like a hero's journey. Like drop outta high school, get into racing. Brute force my way into. , you know, different fields and learn it all myself.
Um, for some people that's a really good direction, you know, to go. I'm mm-hmm. always been kind of non-traditional in the way I think about things and do things, and so very rigid schooling never really resonated with me, you know, but it depends. It depends on your personality. Right? Right. You know, some people are better served too.
You know, have a more rigorous path. Um, it definitely hasn't been easy, so I don't recommend it unless you have a personality like, Yeah,
Cassidy Williams: Makes sense. Uh, what is the oldest piece of tech that you still
Jeri Ellsworth: own? Well, that's a great question also, uh, I don't know. I love retro tech, so I have a lot of old stuff. So our office is set up like a museum.
There's glass cases. All around the office That's so fun with, uh, old technology in it. So I have retro computers going back to the seventies, Ataris, apple twos, things like that. More modern stuff from the nineties and two thousands. And I love to set up our office where there's a failed product and a successful product sitting right next to each other.
Mm. Um, so you can look at the trade offs. So as you talk to engineers, like this one was successful because they did this and this one failed because they did that. And so there's a lot of old tech around the office, which is a lot of my personal collection, but I also have like vintage video gear here.
Um, it goes clear back to the sixties. So I have a reel to real video recorder. The first consumer camcorder, which we actually wear the record. Has this giant apparatus and then you hold this black and white camera up. But I mean, possibly, um, this might be one of the oldest pieces I have in the office. So this is a core memory stack from a CDC mainframe.
So this is core memory. Oh, oh, I don't remember how many bits of memory. But I can see down in there the cores are really big. So this is just probably the icon to launch your web browser on. Your desktop has more storage than this. Oh my gosh, . Um, I absolutely love having this old tech around because, Uh, there's been so many times in my career because I study the history of computers and electronics that you're tempted to go down one path to design something, and then you think like, wait a minute, minute.
In the 1960s, they used this, a transformer to do this complicated task instead of like an integrated circuit. for our problem that solves it and it's way cheaper or faster or, and it's super valuable not to forget about the past. Yeah. Then I collect pinball machines. I have some pretty old pinball machines too.
That's really cool. Oh, that's really cool. So that's really cool. Our office is loaded with pinball machines and. So it's, it's hard to say what my oldest piece of tech is.
Zach Plata: Yeah, I think hearing more about your office, it's kind of like, maybe I do want to go back to, come on, come
Jeri Ellsworth: people love we, we do a happy hour every two or three weeks on Fridays.
So fun. We try to fun, invite the nerdiest people we can find, so there's always people bringing their kind nerdy projects in. And we hang out , eat beer and that's awesome. Drink beer and eat pizza. That's love. That's so cool.
Zach Plata: Well, what is your favorite hardware? Pun.
Jeri Ellsworth: Pun. Or can it be a joke? Ooh, a joke. It can be a joke too.
Yeah. Oh, this is terrible. But I think this sums up my 20 years, uh, working in companies that have a strong software and hardware aspect to it. Um, how many programmers does it take to screw in a light? None. Oh, it's a hardware problem. Hey, . But that's, that's the dilemma in hardware startups where, um, there's always this finger pointing like, right, the product's not working and it's software.
No, it's hardware. And uh, it's one of those barriers you have to break down.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah, it's a very good lesson. Communication across teams, I'm sure. Oh yeah,
Jeri Ellsworth: yeah. Yep. .
Cassidy Williams: And last but not least, what's your most used emoji?
Jeri Ellsworth: Probably smiley face. I don't like using all the other, all the other, or maybe the celebration one.
You know, that's
Cassidy Williams: a, that's a classic. That's, that's a
Jeri Ellsworth: fun one. Yeah. Yeah. I think, yeah, we, we use chat a lot in, in work, cuz. , probably 60 to 70% of our company is remote, so, mm-hmm. , you know, it's, things are really lost in chat and I hate that about it. Right. So, yeah, I try not to use the frowning one, so it's not misinterpreted as like, am I frowning at the personnel or am I frowning at the situation or the statement, or
Cassidy Williams: whatever.
Yeah. Yeah. . Yeah. It's emoji are definitely like both helpful in that, but also is like, wait, is that a passive aggressive smiley face?
Jeri Ellsworth: Yeah.
Cassidy Williams: so many of those, the dynamics of it. Okay. And now it is time for the random segment generator. Ah,
okay. So now it is time for some random segments, and this first one is dev. Oops. What's the story of something that you broke? Oh,
Jeri Ellsworth: Oh my goodness. That is so hard because, you know, part of hardware design is you try to build and break it as fast as possible, so, right. Mm-hmm. and, uh, in hardware, the lead time to fix things is so long. Um Mm. You wanna have your most catastrophic failures early on and as quickly as possible. Yep. So, I think probably the one that had the most potential.
costs. The most money was, I was designing a chip for a toy. And, um, the synthesis tools output a log and it spews lots of stuff. And you, you're, you're crunching at the last, you know, moments before you're at final tape out of the chip and you're like, ah, it was fine the time before, so I'm just gonna submit the net list.
And I did. And so we were so behind schedule, we had to do what was called a super hot lot on the the chips. So you just run all the wafers through and you don't do any prototypes of it, you just send them through, oh, , like millions of dollars of chips. And my confidence was pretty high. This thing was gonna work, but.
Anyway, the chips landed at the factory in China. They bonded them onto the board. This is chip on board. So it's um, it's a little trickier than having like packaged chips that you can then analyze. So it's now under a glob of epoxy and they fire up the first a hundred units and 50% of them don't start.
Oh no. And it's like you can't ship a product like that if only 50% of 'em start. And of course, these executives in the toy company, they're intense, like. , you know, when you mess up, the hammer comes down and rightfully so, and I like that about it. But yeah, I had screwed up big time and so they put me on a plane to go over to, to China to figure this out, and I'm over there in a, in a foreign lab, you know, without my tools trying to figure this.
And what had happened is I didn't read my logs close enough, and I'd forgot to reset one of the flip flops in the, uh, design. Oh no. And so chips, when you turn flip flop is what stores a one or a zero for folks that don't know. And so this particular, um, chip had a, a video controller in it. And what this flip flopped did is chose one mode versus another.
And so, Produce chips. There's variance between, um, each of the chips just, they're baked like cookies. They're all a little bit different. And so 50% of them would start up with a zero in this, uh, oh bit, and some would start with a one. So 50% of them were in the wrong video mode and, um, was causing everything to lock up.
Also on this design, because toy designs are so cost sensitive, you don't. You don't, uh, use flash memory. It's too expensive. So you do mask ROMs or you do one time programmable. So they'd already made hundreds of thousands of these rom ships for it that we'd tested on a, like a, an FPGA emulator. So we were highly confident it would work, so we couldn't even get in there to fix the, the software to kind of, you know, dang try to get around this.
So what I ended up doing is I'm like, crap, what a, what can I. and I'm like, there is these weird test pins that, you know, uh, you use for testing the chips before you, um, cut 'em up off the dye. And usually, uh, those are resetting the, um, the state of these flip flops through a secondary channel. I'm like, maybe I'm gonna get lucky enough that that particular chip, if you toggle the test, , it's gonna reset it back to zero or one or whatever it needed to be.
And I got extremely lucky. So, whew. I was able to like, yeah, I got a little
Cassidy Williams: sweaty thinking about that. Yeah. ,
Jeri Ellsworth: I was, uh, I was able to like, add like two little, like 2 cent components outside the, the part that would just toggle this pin and get that. But I could have lost that company millions of dollars and oh gosh, that was a colossal, oops.
Zach Plata: Who,
Jeri Ellsworth: I'll tell you, the, the toy guys don't get, um, are not happy If you come back and say you lost him a couple million dollars. Yeah, I, I'd say
Cassidy Williams: a few people might be upset with things like that.
Jeri Ellsworth: But glad you got through that . Yeah. I don't think I've ever had any like completely fatal oopses, um, on a product that isn't gonna
Cassidy Williams: knock on some wood there.
Answer that one. .
Zach Plata: All right, moving on to the next segment. We've got dev opposites. So we've got a few questions here. What do you do outside of your day job and, you know, non-tech hobbies?
Jeri Ellsworth: Oh my goodness. I am such a nerd. Through and through most of my hobbies are. , I guess. Um, understandable. Yeah. I talk about a few things that I did that are pretty interesting.
I played roller derby for quite a few years. That was fun. Oh, cool. Oh, yeah. Knocking people down and skating really fast, so that was
Cassidy Williams: fun. Yeah. I'm terrified of roller derby people. I, I went to one bout and I was like, oh, they can all beat me up. .
Jeri Ellsworth: The funny thing is I was like the smallest girl there, so it's like, So I had to learn little tricks to be able to knock down the bigger girls, cuz some of 'em are intimidating.
I can't remember what her name was, but she was, she was the daughter of a, a football player, like a professional football player. And she was big and when she made contact, he went flying. Um, but more recently, I think, you know, completely non nerdy thing is I like to go out in the desert and ride a ride.
Dirt bar bikes, you know, that kind of goes Oh, cool. Goes back to my racing days and thrill seeking. So occasionally I'll go do that. Yeah.
Cassidy Williams: If you weren't in the tech industry at all, what would you be doing? Would it be racing stuff or something else, do you think?
Jeri Ellsworth: I think I'd be in educat. . Mm huh. Yeah. Yeah. I, I appreciate all the mentors that took me under their wing, and I tried to give back as much as I can. I have a YouTube channel where I do educational videos, like how to do difficult science things in your garage, and, and I get a lot of satisfaction out of that.
Yeah.
Cassidy Williams: Love that. I feel the exact same way. It's, it's, it's fun seeing people take what you teach and then they run with it and
Jeri Ellsworth: mm-hmm. and make it their own. Mm-hmm. . It's really humbling. You know, I did my YouTube channel and I just kind of put it out into the universe. If someone likes it, they like it, if not, and, uh, I've been doing this for, uh, quite a long time.
I haven't done videos in a while cause I've been so busy. But, um, I get emails every single week of people, like, I appreciate what you said or did here. . There's certain young folks that found my YouTube channel that I've been following over the years that got inspired and then went on to do engineering or other things in their life, and they occasionally drop me a note and say like, because I saw this video, it inspired me to go do this other thing.
I love it. Yeah, that feels good. That's
Cassidy Williams: so cool. That's. All right, and our final segment is 4 0 4 s and heartbreak. What's something that was taken off of the internet? There's a page not found. Doesn't exist anymore. It breaks your heart.
Jeri Ellsworth: Geo cities. Mm.
Cassidy Williams: Uh, good one. Good one. You're classic.
Jeri Ellsworth: I don't know. I'm a nostalgia nerd.
So there's just something charming, about 10,000 animated gifts that Yes.
Cassidy Williams: Yeah. Such good stuff. And I think on that note, For Cassidy's sage advice,
something that I really wanna advise anybody out there is to really just appreciate the history of the tech that you're building, because a lot of times you could be frustrated with the state of web development or the the state of how to build X, Y, and Z, whether it's a hardware project, a software project.
But a lot of times when you look back to see. we came from. You not only are humbled by all of the work that it used to take and or how hard it was to learn back then, but you can also learn from it too. And maybe you'll find a solution that you hadn't considered before because it might be an older one.
That being said, Jeri, thank you so much for joining us. It was
Jeri Ellsworth: awesome. Yes, thank you. It was so fun. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Uh, where can people
Cassidy Williams: find you on the internet? Anything you
Jeri Ellsworth: want to plug? Oh, oh yeah. Um, so if you want to go check out our. Uh, Tilt Five.com. It's just all spelled out. It's inside.
Joke our name. Um, and then, uh, define me on all social media that I participate in. Don't do Facebook's, TUI, um, . It's Jeri Ellsworth, JERI and then Ellsworth. . Awesome.
Cassidy Williams: And once again, because making podcasts is expensive. This show is brought to you by LaunchDarkly LaunchDarkly Toggles Peaks of 20 trillion feature flags each day, and that number continues to grow, and you should use them.
You can head over to launchdarkly.com and learn about how. Thank you for making this show possible Launch. I've been Cassidy Williams. You can find me at cassidoo, c a s s i d o o on most things. And I'm CTO O over at
Jeri Ellsworth: Contenda.
Zach Plata: And I'm Zach. And I'm a DevRel at Rive and you can find me on Twitter at
Jeri Ellsworth: zachplata. Thank you for
Cassidy Williams: tuning into The Dev Morning Show (At Night).
Make sure you head over to our YouTube channel where you can like and subscribe. You can also listen to the audio version of this wherever you get your.