#sparkchamber 031521 — Av Utukuri

“An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight. The truly wise person is colorblind.” So said philosopher/physician Albert Schweitzer, and so describes our remarkable #sparkchamber visitor today, serial entrepreneur, CEO, founder, and multi-tasker, Av Utukuri.

Av studied engineering at the University of Toronto, and started his first company in his second year there. He’s been a serial entrepreneur ever since — Vizetto, developers of a remote-creativity software platform; Baanto, enterprise-grade touchscreen solutions under the brand name ShadowSense; and Nytric, a concept-to-market innovation consultancy. The drive to perfect design and understand purpose of products compels his focus on deep and complex technology, intensive R&D, and developing cutting-edge products.

But there’s so much more to the story!

In his own words:

I am a multi-tasker, a drinker from the fire hose — that’s my skill. I like to think about complex problems and attack them from different angles at the same time. I am very technical. I’ve probably written about a million lines of code, but I do love to take complex technology and break it down so that it can be easily understood by everybody.

As a CEO, I’ve always been in the visionary role. In the lexicon of Silicon Valley, there are different types of CEOs — there’s sales CEOs, business CEOs, finance CEOs — and I’m a product CEO. Product CEOs are more like Bill Gates and Elon Musk — it’s all about the stickiness of the product, the resolution of a pain point and understanding how you can do that in the most creative way. That’s what resonates with me.

I love art and design, and together with my deep knowledge of tech, the desire to create persists. Building start-ups, creating something from nothing, this all requires vision and imagination. Even writing code is artistic. There’s a beauty in organizing information, as in how the code’s going to flow. There’s elegance in it — similar to the narrative process, when you write or read books, there is the same type of elegance of thought in code writing.

I got into Ontario College of Art & Design but wound up going to University of Toronto for Engineering. The major reason I didn’t attend OCAD is because I’m a colorblind artist. My daughters are now 11 and 8 and they sit and mix paint with me. I describe to them what I want, and they tell me to add more of this and that. It becomes a whole family thing, they are directing me.

I have to make my paintings really vivid so I see the colors. If you think of classical art for example, the background is really dark and the foreground is always bright. I need it to be the opposite, I need the background to stand out or else I can’t see it. And for me, I want to pump up the colors — the blues have to be really blue or else I don’t see it. if you tone it down and suddenly the oranges, the browns, the greens … they all blend into the same tones. If it’s a true pure color like a Ferrari red, I can see it. But if you move down to a more muted Honda red I can’t distinguish it. A lot of colors become grey to me very fast.

1.] Where do ideas come from?

For me, I find that ideas are knocking all the time — you know they say opportunity knocks and you have to be ready to hear it. There are two different schools of thought. The first says you need to be constantly listening as the opportunity or idea only knocks occasionally. The other approach fits with my experience: opportunities and ideas are knocking all the time, you simply have to be open to them. When you are open, opportunities and ideas can be found everywhere. It doesn’t matter if the markets are going down, or the markets are going up, new tech is coming in, old tech is going out. I’ve found that even in the most difficult situations, the most difficult problems, the ideas are always there. It’s just that people tend to say, “I am not open to that idea, I don’t like that idea, that idea’s too hard, it will never work, it’s not doable.” I find that common with a lot of people who are not entrepreneurs. The easy answer is you shouldn’t do it — it’s too hard, you can’t get it done, how do you know you’re going to go ahead and do it? The idea is staring right at them, yet they don’t act on it. The right response is to ask, “How can it be done better?”

I wouldn’t say I am fearless, but what’s interesting is that a few years ago I faced a lot of failure and one day I woke up and decided that I was going to have a “burn it down attitude.” I told my friends, my business partners, the banks, my investors, “this is the best I’ve got, if you don’t like it, replace me, fire me, burn it down, it’s okay.” And it was unbelievable how the attitudes around me changed and people were more willing to work with my ideas. Frustration is what helped me come to this realization, that if I walked away with zero, it’s still more than I had when I started, I had great experiences and gained a lot of knowledge. The pandemic also made me realize that I have much to be grateful for, everything that means anything to me is under one roof.

2.] What is the itch you are scratching?

I’m always fascinated by trying to do something that others haven’t thought of. I am always looking to see if there’s a better mousetrap, and most of the people come back and say, “How do you know it will work?” Proving that it’s going to work or not doesn’t fascinate me at all. Actually, if you prove that it works, I’d be bored because somebody else can do it then.

When you look at most technological innovations, I find the question I ask is, “Can it be done? Is there a different way? “

When you ask those types of questions, ideas present themselves all the time. A hundred times a day people will say, “this thing or experience sucks, why can’t it be better?” That is an idea knocking right there. You are identifying pain points in your own life, all the time, and what do you do with that? It’s that curiosity as to how can you push the envelope. And I love the idea of a small start-up beating the biggest companies. It’s better to have a team of two engineers heading in the right direction than 200 engineers working diligently on the wrong problem.

3.] Early bird or night owl? Tortoise or hare?

Something clicks for me late at night, my thinking becomes more focused and my creativity kicks in. I am also much more a hare. I believe in and live the agile development process. I think people should fail quickly and spectacularly as often as possible. It’s a terrible fate to succeed quickly or to fail slowly. If you succeed quickly then all of the failure is still ahead of you, absolutely no learning comes out of it. You hear all the time how people raise 10 million dollars immediately with their first business plan but then don’t know how to productize, or how to take it to market. To me what’s always worked is fail quickly, fail spectacularly, and quickly pivot.

When I say hare, I mean that I am quickly jumping into something based on very little data. I’m of the opinion if the CEO was always making the right decision based on the data that presented itself, then there’s no risk. The company could be on autopilot and manage itself.

I love agility, I love being the hare, I love failing quickly.

4.] How do you know when you are done?

When there is no more risk in the decision, that’s when I know I am done. When I can’t contribute anything else, when there isn’t a challenge anymore. I am always looking for the pain point and once I figure out how to solve it, I move onto my next challenge.