AeroScout: "Find the lighthouse customer as soon as possible"

During the Silicon Valley trek, eight of us visited the offices of AeroScout. Yuval Bar-Gil, CEO and co-founder, was our host.

AeroScout is a leader in Active RFID asset tracking and location solutions over standard Wi-Fi networks. Its enterprise visibility solutions locate and monitor assets and people in both indoor and outdoor environments (real time asset location) to improve business processes. They currently have over 200 customers in the healthcare, manufacturing and logistics industries. Their goal is to convert coordinates into business value. AeroScout has received in total $49M in 3 rounds of funding, with Menlo Ventures, Intel, Greylock, and Cisco as main investors.

He mentioned that a typical tag (Wi-Fi device) costs ~$65 and Aeroscout has optimized the battery consumption to last up to 3 years. Instead of transmitting the location every X minutes, they use chokepoint exciters, which trigger the transmission to minimize power consumption.

Yuval mainly talked about entrepreneurship in new markets, giving us very valuable pieces of advice:

• A good strategy in entrepreneurship is to take a small market in which you can be the leader and is expected to grow. "Real time visibility solutions" is a new market that they are inventing in which they want to be the leaders.
• "Find the lighthouse customers as soon as possible": he mentioned that in new markets, you should find the customer that enables you to develop a solution around your product in the right submarket.
• In startups, "YOU ARE ALMOST CLOSE TO SIGNING A MAJOR BUSINESS DEAL" . He compared it to the lyrics of the Green Day song "I was almost a rock star" (I guess he refered to Waiting)
• He recommended us the book "Crossing the Chasm", which I just bought.

More recently, I have read that Aeroscout has signed a partnership with Time Domain and Reva Systems to combine UWB, RFID and WiFi tags.