Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after you left Datron? Why did you leave Datron? To build something else? A startup?

Justin Grooms: When I was in the defense space, I had a lot of exposure to some early research that was being done in spatial computing, and I thought that it was just such a fascinating technology.

An opportunity came up with with Leap Motion, which was doing hand tracking primarily and was congesting tons of data and building models. It had a brilliant team that was working with them on the commercialization aspects of their business.

I had just gotten married and was looking for moving into kind of a commercial space. Working in the defense industry is an extremely taxing job to have. You’re traveling all over the world all the time. This was a commercial company that was looking to solve what I thought was at the time one of the hardest problems that was out there.

This was 2016 and there weren’t big AI models that people were just signing up for from all the big tech companies. We really had the opportunity to build something from the ground up of taking billions of data points from hand motions, ingesting them into models, and then helping to teach computers how to understand these natural, organic movements that I’m doing right now, even talking to you that, to an artificial system is just totally lost. That was a great company.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of functions were you doing in Leap Motion?

Justin Grooms: So, when I joined Leap Motion, my responsibilities were essentially all the commercial aspects of the business. It was very similar to what I’d been doing at Datron. So, Leap Motion had for years been developing this fascinating advanced technology and had some great commercial success. But at that point, it really needed to broadly commercialize, take this technology into the wild, to get good contracts, and to get good engagements with commercial partners.

What happened though is, as often does, you know, you and I talked about this a little bit earlier, was you can be doing everything the right way sometimes. And Leap was just in a really tough spot where it needed to fundraise. It was a tough fundraising environment at that period of time, especially in, spatial computing. It was a little early for AI or ML, at least in a broad sense.

We started to look around and say, “Well, what can we do with what we’ve built here?” My role quickly pivoted the in last year or so that I was there into focusing on finding an acquisition partner for this. I managed the M&A process. We received term sheets from Apple and Qualcomm and ultimately sold to a UK-based company called Ultrahaptics.

Sramana Mitra: All right, so now you have sold Leap Motion and we are in 2016?

Justin Grooms: No, 2019.

Sramana Mitra: Okay, what happens next?

Justin Grooms: So, the former Chief Operating Officer at Leap Motion had left Leap Motion to go to this extremely cool early phase startup called Bolt and wanted to know if this was something that I’d be interested in joining and doing a little bit of what we were trying to do at Leap – take massive amounts of data, find different ways to monetize that and build out a commercial program. He wanted me to focus on how do we get those initial big wins, how do we find big customers, and get that first commercial enterprise level engagement.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Bolt CEO Justin Grooms
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