Symphonic Labs launches Waves camera glasses targeting IRL creators, aiming for mass production in Q1

went viral yesterday. We should play his video maybe before he joins. Pull up the video that went viral yesterday about Waves. The uh the uh glasses. Okay, I'm hearing it. Let's bring it up. Let's see it. This is a spot. The cinematography on the startup ads is getting insane. That feels like noise cancellation.

It sounds like the audio is switching. A banana. Get the [ __ ] out. So, when he's tapping it, is he starting a live stream or just taking a clipping? Oh, clipping. I'm not late, am I? Wait, this is this is beam. This is what Casey Neistat was describing. 10 10 seconds or Yeah. The bar for startup launch videos is 10x.

It's insane. Getting Project X vibes. You remember that movie? Yeah. Yeah. Your average like Republic company has trouble producing marketing videos at this level. This is remarkable. There we go. Whoa. Now we're getting into FPV. Hardcore Henry. Somebody just pulled a gun at a house party. I guess it's wild.

Yeah, if you have a life like that, maybe you do need to be recording all the time. Hey, does she have it on too? Is it recording recording me? Oh, there you go. Okay. Oh, records in the center. Okay, cool. Well, let's bring him in. I'm excited to talk to him about waves. Bring them in. Welcome. What's going on?

The man the man that kicked the hornets's nest. How you doing? How's the last How's the foot? How's the last 24 hours been? Foot stung. I mean, it's been wild, man. It's It's been amazing. It's really really awesome. Just Before we start, sorry. Are you recording this? No, no, no, no. Okay, you can. You're live.

We're recording. We're recording it. Yeah. No, these are cosmetic. They they they're not uh not not live. So, yeah. Uh, this is a kind of like a typical hardware pre-launch vision statement, collect pre-orders, and then start manufacturing, I assume. Yep. Very cool. Uh, what what was the key takeaway?

What was the good response? What was the stuff that you think you need to address? How has the overall response been? What have you like learned? What did you expect versus surprised you? So, I'll talk about the good and the bad. I think um, you know, we we have hundreds of creators in our inbox right now.

It is it is really popping off. I mean I think uh you know Twitter is is very much like a tech forward audience but even with that I think with the virality we were really able to lock in our ICP here. Um we have some of the biggest names in IRL that want to work with us.

I can't name names right now but uh it is very exciting. Um the downside I mean like I think I think we we we got a lot of feedback about privacy. Um, and uh, you know, I think uh, we're we're still pretty set on our stance here.

Like we're going to ship with an indicator light, but in the conversations that we had with content creators, a lot of them uh, emphasize the fact that like, you know, they they want something that allows them to capture candid, authentic moments because those go the most viral.

Um, and if in certain situations that means them being able to disable the light, uh, we want to give that option to them. Um, so yeah, and that's distinctly, uh, we were just talking with Casey Neistat. He said that if you try to cover the indicator light on the meta ray bands that stops filming. Yeah.

And so do you think part of your opportunity is that you're willing to go and do something that Zuck uh, Zach won't? Counterposition. I think so. So, like I mean I I don't think Meta realizes where the puck is going.

I think they're they're way too focused on like adding AI and uh waveguide displays and trying to go after a bigger market that we don't really know is going to fully adopt just yet. Um what we're seeing now is like the most retentive Ray-B bands users are content creators. And what are they doing?

They're posting social content on reals and Tik Tok. They're posting prank videos, riz videos, um like social interactions, interviews, things like that, right? And all of them that we talk to are just like, we want to take this and we want to go live.

Like instead of me uh flirting with somebody on a short clip, I want to actually live stream a date and have chat tell me what to say and what to do, right? Um so we just want to be able to enable those kinds of content to to exist. How is the actual live streaming infrastructure?

I assume this pairs with your iPhone somehow to to pass to like some sort of stream key to Twitch or whatever. Yeah, exactly. It's just RTMP. So we stream to the phone and then phone streams to either the the streamers back end and then to Twitch or Kick or just straight to the streaming service. Yeah.

Is there any like push back from Apple on this type of thing? Are they pretty open with those particular APIs? It's effectively just a camera. There are apps that exist already that let you do this just with Yeah. Which is a different camera. Yeah. What about the uh h how do you evaluate like the technical risk?

Uh the the glasses look great. They're very and they look really tiny. Uh you're trying to pack a lot in there. Uh maybe the the actual uh quality of the video matters less early than just the ability to have that FPV view.

So I'm pretty confident that you know we'll be able to hit a pretty similar quality to a meta ray bands or a meta Oakley. Um we we have good connects in Shenzhen that have set us up with some really good uh suppliers. And you know, I think uh like if if the issue is like can we fit it in these frames, the answer is yes.

Um like the way we've sized it is is kind of unique in that I almost call these like the hockey stick temples because we keep it thin in the front and then like thicker in the back. So PCB uh internal battery and then swappable battery the temples. So they two different batteries.

So you can swap one and then swap the other and then swap the one and then swap the So, there's only one swappable battery, but uh we'll we'll pack it with two. So, like while while you're using one, the other one's charging. And so, you can just flip-flop. And it's hot swappable. So, you don't have to stop your stream.

You don't have to stop your stream because there's enough battery juice in the actual glasses that when you take the battery out, you have a minute to swap the next one or something. Exactly. That makes a ton of sense. What were you doing before this?

So, I originally started this company with my co-founder to do uh subvocal speech recognition. We did a lot of stuff with like neuroch and just like um ML research and I think we were caught in this loop where like we wanted to make a cool gadget. Um but we were way too research focused and not market focused.

Um and we just decided to do a full 180 and just like you know I'm I'm very inspired by what Roy Lee has done and what Aby has done with their products. And I I just think that like you know really focusing on a retentive user so i. e.

a content creator, but then also making a gadget that's just cool um and nice to wear and doesn't look like a super bulky thing and just I think that's that's the goal for me. So, sub vocals. So, you were thinking like hardware device that I can whisper and it picks up what I'm saying or just mouth out words.

Yeah, just mouth out words. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Uh interesting. How much did you spend on the launch video? Is very well well produced. That thing looks amazing. So, I mean, we have a we have the next Spielberg on our team. Man, Donald is is an amazing individual. Um, we we actually filmed it in Canada.

So, um, for context, my co-founder and I were both Canadian. Uh, we filmed it in Vancouver. It was around I'd say USD, like maybe 50 60K. Solid. Yeah. I mean, I mean, it looks like Super Bowl quality. Well, yeah. And there's so many different actors. I'm assuming you just like actually had to hire a bunch of people.

Now, none of the footage is from the same sensor that will be in the actual camera. So, there'll probably be some sort of disconnect there, but hopefully people are happy with the final sensor. Do you have any goals? Like, you know, we shoot on FX3s. I like the full-frame look. I like a 12 megapixel, you know, 4K.

Uh, obviously can't stuff all that into, you know, something the size of a little c smartphone camera. where where are the break points in terms of quantitative metrics for a camera to get good enough that people will actually share it?

Because even with the metaray bands, the the pictures and images I was taking and videos, they weren't jumping out to me as like, yeah, these are really great to post right now. Yeah, I think a big thing with with the metas is just image stabilization.

Like if you're like walking around while while you're taking the video, there's like almost like a bobbing effect. And I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done there. Um, low light is another thing. I mean, you're kind of working against uh the volume that you have to fit the sensor.

So, you you already constrained with how much light that you can actually capture. Um, but um, you know, yeah, that dark party scene you filmed, that would be extremely rough, dude. Kind of a wild choice. Not the sunny day, but it tells a better story. So, I I get why you did it.

And obviously this stuff will get better, but there are like laws of physics around like you just can't fit a medium format sensor in a fra unless it's an eye patch. Maybe maybe that's the future. You put the full sensor right there. What um h how do you expect the what do you expect the go to market to look like?

I imagine you could partner with a bunch of just big streamers and really focus on delivering value for them and then if it working well for them then you would have like the next 100,000 people ready to go. Is that how you're thinking? That's exactly what we're doing.

Um, so we're we're already talking to big IRL streamers about partnerships. Um, we're going to Shenzhen in a couple of weeks just to get the beta device ready and then we're going to test it on a 100 different creators and just get their feedback, iterate, improve the user experience.

Um, and then, you know, we're trying to do mass production Q1 next year. Um, and I think like, you know, there's kind of just like an infinite marketing glitch here.

It's like if we give these streamers early access to just show what this kind of content can look like, it'll just inspire other creators and wannabe creators to to buy this product. Yeah. Is there I feel like there's like going to be a whole new like you could create a whole new class of IRL creators.

I can imagine somebody that's h they just do hiking or they just ski or they you know they and I'm sure people do that already but if you make it really truly seamless and I can imagine creators that uh yeah are more like the like like um these like ambient videos and music on YouTube where there's not really study with me type of thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of crossover. We'll get it set up. We'll get glasses on Ben our producer. We'll have a Ben cam feed. Awesome. Hey, we love we'd love to do a pair when we have one. Yeah, for sure.

Uh on on kind of like pricing and technology, one thing that I thought was interesting about the Vision Pro was that it was like almost an order of magnitude more expensive than the Quest, but it was very clear that Apple was able to spare no expense, get the best screen, and they jumped forward a lot in terms of just quality.

Didn't really hit the mark in terms of retention. But when I think about a streamer, most people who are doing it professionally, spending $3,000 on a Sony camera is totally reasonable.

Is there a world where instead of Meta's Ray-B bands which are in the couple hundred mark, you go to a couple thousand dollars and you're buying and you're providing a more proumer, more professional level product and that actually acts as a differentiation and then maybe you go down the price ladder over time.

Are you looking into that? Is that is that even something you could do? Oh, absolutely.

Like I think right now uh we're we're going to stay sort of like in the mid market, but we we would ideally want to find like bigger um like creator groups and like I mean like imagine like I could almost imagine having like a super pro version that's like $1,500 $2,000 and like Mr. Beast uses it for Beast Games.

You get the POV of like every single contestant in Beast Games. Dude, that would go crazy. And like I I that's something I would really want to see. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people do that with like the headmounted GoPros.

It's a little bit awkward and just doesn't land as well, but uh but you can get great footage out of a out of a GoPro mounted to your forehead if you're racing around. Uh in anything else, Jordy? No, this is great. Thanks for Thanks for jumping on. Congrats on the launch.

I think uh a lot of the pe a lot of people's like concerns are real, but I think there's ways around it, and it ultimately will just come down to how individual people choose to use the tech the technology.

Like there's going to be people that use this to live stream privately for their grandma so they the grandma can feel like they're hanging out with the grandkids and there's a bunch there's so many like use cases that are really there are people right now who use the cameras on their iPhones to violate people's privacy at Coldplay concerts.

Yeah, like that happens. So we have to deal with it's it's not a device problem. I think it's more of an actor problem. You have people that are going to do weird [ __ ] and we we don't condone that. Um, I think we're just going to focus on creators that want to make genuinely good content.

Um, I didn't I didn't get to see what Casey was saying because I was in another call. Yeah. But, uh, I would love to just pull up to New York this weekend and have a chat with him and show him the frames and get his thoughts if that's something he's interested in.

If he still, uh, likes the original vision of Beam, I would be more than happy to have a conversation. Yeah, I'm sure he'd have a ton of interesting feedback that you could incorporate and twist around. Just it'd be a great meeting of the minds. Um, real quick, John, just want to say loved your videos on startups.

Like I would I would always watch your like startup history videos while eating dinner. Like I I love a meal in YouTube. So just like that was that was a you should you should go back to that at some point. I I think it would be really cool. But TBPN is awesome, man. I love the show. This is great.

Yeah, we're having a lot of fun. Thanks, Chris. Well, awesome having you on and and good luck with everything.