Founder and CEO Dan Eisenhardt Details His Journey Developing FORM Smart Swim Goggles

i'm mel stuart and this is the swim swam podcast joining me today is a visionary this man is the founder and ceo of form if you don't know what form is you've been hiding under a rock

and you haven't been paying attention because this is some cool tech today we have dan eisenhart and we're going to dive into what forum is all about how it started and really learn a

little bit more about him how you doing buddy i'm doing great mel thanks for the kind words and thanks for having me

[Music] you and i have to have we spent some

time together you you uh every so often a company will will make a trip and they'll they'll come to austin where our hq is and we'll we'll hop in the pool and

we'll you know we'll we'll try some new technology or product um and i think that i was very i had a lot of disclosure with you i said um head up display goggles smart goggles you know i've been hearing about this

i've been testing this tech since the 1990s and it's just never it's never worked i i and uh so we hopped in the pool you

kicked my butt you're so much fitter than me not true very true 100 century and and i was blown away um so my first question to you is and

this is you know this is really not following the the linear narrative that we want but my first question to you is how often do you witness that experience with what you've created

you were actually one of the first people external people outside a forum to try this product and i was very nervous uh it was my first time in austin and i really i love austin can't wait to go

back and jumping in the pool and i was behind you and i remember your dolphin kick was pretty tough to to beat so i was very impressed with that so but i was happy

to see that i mean you're uh you're a very honest and straightforward guy and you've seen a lot of different technology in your time and and have you know some gold medals uh uh around your

neck so um it was great to hear like your experience was absolutely replicated afterwards when we started testing this with other people so they would first be thoughtful be like whoa okay this is better than i expected i

just have to get used to these goggles most people try you know they have used their own goggles forever and then they have to try a new pair of goggles that would be the same for any girl whether that technology or not and then the next piece of information

is wow this this uh this is really interesting this is the first time i am seeing heart wait oh this is the first time i actually get to see my split in real time there's a first you know they

all that always comes right after this is the first time and that's really cool and then it takes maybe one or two more swims to understand exactly how it's going to benefit you going forward so there's a lot to

take in but it's always been that positive sort of wow astonished uh response maybe because people weren't experience expecting it to be good

so let's add some context and add some color to this since we are on a podcast but basically um i was i didn't have a lot of faith uh

dan is very convincing and and uh and i typically will will will not agree to test product when i think that i know and i have tested product i have tested head up display

goggles which you know now that comes smart goggles for a long time and uh what the first thing that that got me was i could see

i could see the clock and i could see my splits i could stare into the sun and and i could see it and it didn't bother me i didn't have any weird brain

thing going on it was just it was effortless and if you're worth your salt and you're in the pool to do work you know it's the tyranny of the clock

and i was uh that's what blew me away the fact that it was just something that was there and i and i was a little bit jealous because i'm well past my career

and i broke my neck i had claw i had i'd stop clock and i had the sweeping clocks um in the front of my lane to the side of my lane and you know and at the opposite end and i was always cramming my neck

so jealous that that athletes now have this this new tech but uh so i just had to add that context the um what was what was amazing to me was that

you know we we finished our swim we got out and we walked over and it was you know one click and the work out loaded it synced and i was just

like what that was uh that was something i was not expecting that was that was an extra cherry on top

um has how have people reacted to that yeah no thanks thanks again for going through that experience and we've off i mean you improved it even further since because this was even before i think we

we hit the launch button back in 2019 so now the syncing is even more effortless and and we've added you know some integrations and partnerships and features since um but i think i think yeah the

we always want to build something that's just easy to use in the pool as well that's why we automated everything all you have to do is really put the pool length in and press the button to start and then everything else is tracked so that so

that whole idea of having the experience automated uh and there for you to consume effortlessly that was always uh at the forefront for us and that included the

post swim you know sinking to the phone because i've had products as well where i just could not get a damn device to sync to my phone and that just it just ruined the whole experience so i don't think that our responsibility stops in

the pool i think it goes from before you jump in the pool it goes you know in the pool and then after the swim so i think that's that's kind of what we try to cover that that whole journey

because if you're dropping in on the pod and you and you want to just press pause right now it might be smart if you do that just and uh pop over to press pause go to formswim.comformswim.com

and dive in if you want to follow them on social it's really easy it's at forum swim on facebook instagram and twitter uh so what's interesting is when i when people

deliver something that's great and when they when they when they they reach a milestone in terms of technology as an entrepreneur uh what you find out is that they're they're not coming to this green

this isn't your first rodeo uh you know aside from your swim background i know you know you're from denmark but you swam in the united states at indian river which is a story

program a junior college you're an all-american uh you had to be a great swimmer to swim there but um you know you you so you have you have swimming in your dna but you also

have you had this career that was very successful you went on and you got your mba and uh you worked for another company and developed as a recon technology and

developed basically this you develop this technology in other sports unpack that for me yeah yeah so the um the idea for the swimming goggles and

having a heads-up display in a pair of goggles that that that it was always coming from swimming so that was an idea that i got during an entrepreneurship program on my mba

and then we got together a group bunch of people came over and said that sounds cool have you got any idea how to do this i said no i hope you do and then they're like well we kind of have an

idea so we sort of put it together but quickly realized the back this was 2006 you know this is before the first iphone was released we didn't feel confident we could pull off a swimming goggle at that point in

time and so our nba instructor there said to us well is there anything else is there another sport where it's easier and we thought well wait a second

winter olympics is coming up we were in vancouver i'm still vancouver and in 2010 we thought well what if we could build it into a pair of ski goggles and that's that's really what that company became about that company spun out

called recon instruments we developed i think five generations of peso displays for skiing and later cycling as well and um and then and then that company sold to

intel in 2015.

so what you're telling me is that even though you're much younger and you have no white beard or gray hair you've already experienced an exit

as an entrepreneur i'm not jealous i may have a white beard i just haven't grown it yet so i don't know but exits are always uh

when they happen it's always sort of a surreal out of body experience when i say always i've only tried it once but there's a lot of fantastic companies out there that didn't get to enjoy that exit and

there's just a lot of randomness in that and i think there's a lot of people out there with great ideas that haven't yet started the company their companies and haven't yet experienced that exit so i think there's a there's sort of a

lifelong opportunity to do something like that in the meantime you've built a fantastic company with uh swim swim so you've changed the whole sport of swimming with what you're doing there so i don't i

think you sh you shouldn't be that humble i think my life i think my my spouse and and even some of our partners might want to exit but i'm like what would i do i have no other identity

you you know you did exit and that's a big deal and you exit you you did and you're young and uh but the point is you had all that experience and your you in your original

idea was for swim this is this is this is what's in your dna this is where you come from culturally and and you finally decided to make that move that was back

in 2016. that's not that i'm correct

in 2016. that's not that i'm correct that's that's when you started form started development uh is that correct yes that's great but it but it was three so it was two it was 2019 before you

officially launched yes you started talking to me well in advance and the interesting thing is like when is that the the head of display goggles it was

kind of it was a it's a topic that was around and then it wasn't around it was around and then when it came back around there were several companies that were all neck and neck and they're like they're going to launch and uh and

talking to you you're like mel uh you were so confident you were like we're gonna we're gonna launch it doesn't matter we're we're proud of our tech we're confident in our tech and you're gonna understand

it when you test it and uh that was 2019. this kudos to you because your your uh your launch campaign was was one of the best i've ever seen in the history of the sport

i thought the marketing campaign was was amazing you came up with that all on your own right oh yeah oh yeah absolutely no yeah you know the team

it was uh it was just the the problem it was you you got to go get is the video still there i'm going to put when i when i post this podcast i'm going to

put up that initial video because i thought that was fantastic i thought it was great great messaging but uh so in terms of you you tell me what the where the idea came from but is is this

something where when you were swimming you're like wow i hate i hate creating my neck at clocks we i wish this would were in my goggles were you thinking that back when you were in your late teens and early 20s you know what i wasn't because it was

hard to put anything like like a vision like that this was back in yeah back in the 90s and 80s and 90s and what i what i did do is i was a competitive swimmer and 1500 you know

and the 4500 freestyle so i spent a lot of time just like in short course 25 meter and 25 yard pools doing a ton of turns and just always having to do the mental math

and i remember that pain and of course we got to know you know what it feels like to swim at a certain pace but at the same time there wasn't a motivation if i always felt like i could give more

if i had only known more at the time you know that whole feeling and then i started um you know running and having a running watch and and going on the bicycle you know on the bike and you have a

handlebar amount of computer and the wearable sort of revolution happened and and i you know i started to wonder why swimming hadn't been brought into that sort of 21st century so it wasn't while

i was a competitor that i actually articulated this exact value proposition but it slowly crept in my mind like the big question mark of why is swimming still stuck in the stone ages

and i think that was that was the pain that i felt i think why isn't somebody solving this problem and then when i suddenly did this mba and somebody my instructor said you got to pitch something you're passionate about

i was like well i've been swimming my whole life i'm an engineer and i thought man i just want i don't know if it's if it's possible but but i just want metrics in real time i don't

know how to do it but i'm gonna just ask that question to the class and that was how this whole thing started it's pretty cool i mean you got so uh you you got your masters it and if i'm pronouncing this correctly is it all

borg you did yeah perfect pronunciation so you guessed your master's in engineering there so you're one of those guys engineers always scare me because their key points are so much higher

and then you went on to get your mba at the sauder school of business is that correct in vancouver that's right i was actually doing my mba in melbourne and melbourne business school and then

it was an ant uh sorry an exchange program to vancouver and so it was kind of convoluted but that's how it worked out you're a man of the world

it's a this is how it works it's it so you mentioned that the that you you recognize the way when the when and during the wearable revolution that uh that swimming was still in the stone age

so you you this this was your pitch this was your prod this is what this was like was this your mba thesis uh or was it just one class it was just one class but it was an entrepreneurship course that ran over

some two semesters i guess so it was a pretty big module and it was definitely the class that i was most excited about so you knew that you were doing this you knew you were going to launch this then

that was it was real i think it was real the minute i got up and pitched the idea i felt that it was real it wasn't it wasn't like a school environment

are you i have a lot of peers that are where you know where uh i'm a founder so how did it start affecting your sleep at that point

because i i find that people you know when you when you have that when the idea comes and you're like this is going to happen um i i go back and track my sleep and

it's like my sleep drops off 10 20 30 because i'm i get up i can't i wake up and my mind's going was that your experience it was and like i don't come from a

family of entrepreneurs right i mean i come from a family of engineers actually everybody's an engineer in my family and they work for somebody else and i never thought thought that i would go and

start anything but what i did know was that if i'm passionate about something like i was with swimming you know that was all i did for many years you know i go i dive all in and i

immerse myself and i can't help it and and i felt that again with this idea you know when i when i started to look into it and research it it's just the energy you get is just

unparalleled anybody who's been involved in the founding or early on in the business know how this feels like it's just an amazing feeling everybody that's listening so far they heard me on the front end

and it was a it was a wow reaction and uh deserving you know kudos to you you you did it you pulled it off you crossed that threshold um but it's sort of like iphone or like the

you know you get this technology and it's extraordinary someone told me the iphone had more you had more information and more ability to access information than

president clinton like back in 1995 with with an iphone and you put in a regular person it's a lot of tech it's a lot of development um you know what were the hurdles what

were the hurdles in creating and delivering this technology i mean there were many hurdles you're always obviously struggling for cash because nobody wants to fund like the

first of anything you know so so i think this was okay this was probably more so with with recon instruments um which was the company that led into this right that was tough back then you had

the financial crisis hitting you know the first pitch i did i remember was the day lehman brothers went bust and everybody was sitting there reading the news in the meeting and it was like

good luck buddy you're not going to get this funded like nobody wants unless you have to i remember one of the guys said unless you have to cure for cancer you're not going to get funded and i was like all right so so that was

kind of what i was used to when when recon was built so i had to go and get really creative about raising capital and luckily that that got over the finish line and a lot and those people

got a good return so i so so the second time around when firmware started it was a bit easier i have to admit to get the funding for it uh but even even that i mean and once you've got the

first couple of million in a company like this needs a lot of capital right because we're developing everything in-house we're doing optics and you know machine learning and software on the app and software on the

device and hardware development and then you have sales and monitoring so it quickly balloons out of control and you have to if if you if you want to go on the journey that we want to go on which is not just to be

let's say a profitable company by next year and then like right into the sunset like what we want is to build like this global swim club almost of people that are

using our product becomes a new way of swimming right it's an essential piece of equipment so um yeah then you need a lot of money so it was it was hard it's always hard to raise to raise cash

it was hard technically to pull off of course because you know water is 800 times more dense than air so any kind of drag in the water right that's going to be a problem especially

for the faster swimmers so we needed to shrink it down but we also had to make sure that they'd had enough battery life so that people could you didn't have to jump out of the pool after 30 minutes and charge it we wanted to give a lot of

battery life and we have 16 hours which i think is important to make again it needs to be effortless not like oh i forgot to charge it and then you can use it um and then and then of course the

experience i think in the beginning this is very early days just when intel had purchased a recon i was actually already then testing with some proof of concepts and it was pretty clear that you can't really take in a

lot of information while swimming because you know you're breathing and it's a little bit chaotic sometimes so we have to really scale back in ambitions very early on to very few data

points and that's when we realized that you know what that could actually work well for us because instead of thinking like we had a recon a full color high-level resolution display which was opaque so you had to look down to see

this monitor and then it you know it was a pretty impressive image doing that for swimming wouldn't make sense because you would get too distracted and you didn't need it because you couldn't take in that information it had to be

simple monochromatic and then it had to be more contextual and serve up different things at different times that was so clear to us and that helped us because then we didn't have to have as big a battery

or as you know sophisticated a display technology from you know in terms of costs we had to develop everything ourselves and then custom build it for swimming not just like off-the-shelf

stuff that we could repurpose it has to be purposely built for swimming so we did that i can hear your passion

i i i i hear you climbing the mountain and i and i i the only physical product we have is a magazine and we do that because our advertising partners asked us to do it

and i so i never fully understood managing a physical product and that's paper and and most of it's outsourced but it's uh so i have i learned in the

the smallest way what it what it means and and how that's a quality magazine too beautiful pages like when that comes through the door

you know that is just a joy to read so i i i love you kind of reinvented the the paper the magazine it's it you know the interesting thing is i heard you said you had to get granular

you had to focus and and that's uh and you needed to be great in just these these few things um just for someone who you know i'm not an engineer a lot of our listeners aren't engineers how does the technology

work so um it just works just no we we have a sensor we have a bunch of sensors in there so we have what's called a nine axis sensors and

this sensor is what we've used to develop our machine learning algorithms around so if we had to code every single instance in the pool and try and get the device to

recognize those instances for example when you turn and when you rest and when you swim butterfly it would be a million lines of code okay and you would never be able to fully do it do it justice

machine learning allows us to actually get a to a very very high threshold of probability that the device knows what you're doing based on how we teach the device so we'll get a bunch of different swimmers in the pool we'll film them and

then we'll match that video with the sensors these this nine axis sensor that we have all the raw data output and over time you'll get to understand actually you know what it what it feels like

uh looks like to swim butterfly and what it looks like when you're turning it when you're resting and then based on that we can tweak and build in a ton of parameters and logic to then get to a very high higher

accuracy threshold so that's in a nutshell how it works and that's the that's the brains right and then the the optics is is actually many ways simpler like the optics is even though it's very

difficult to build but we have a micro display that's an organic light emitting diode is called an oled and that display beams light through this light pipe into

what we call a wave guide which is a little sandwich piece of glass that sits inside the goggles and the light goes in that waveguide and hits um a beam splitter

and that beam lets in half of the light that come from the display and half of the light from the surroundings so you get that immersive feeling of these numbers floating in front of you and and the

the freefall mirrors in there are constructed in a way that the image is not like looking at a phone from oh i just turned on my spotlight here um you know because

it's not like looking at a phone at a close distance it's actually augmenting the image and magnifying it so that it's you can all it's always in focus for you it's um

like i said the outset i i fully expected i did not expect to see the display and for it to be something that just was there and immediate for me to

i had it and i i really anticipated having sort of a brain issue but i i could stare into the sun and it was fine so it was fine staring into the sun it

was fine underwater it was fine everywhere and that was that was what was mind-blowing it's um you know technology something that that is uh i

would say that my better judgment told me that we we live in a world where older coaches control the sport of swimming and

they're slow to adopt technology and uh you know what i i know that's a hurdle so have you experienced that hurdle what is what is what has it been like in terms of

adopting new technology because you're at the you're the tip of the spear yeah no you're absolutely right and we didn't expect that to happen uh because it is a big hurdle i think for many

coaches because they've been doing coaching for so many years in a certain way and it's worked for them you know but most of them is they've been successful and it's hard to imagine what an alternative path would look like right

and i think adopting new technology like you said in the beginning of the program there's so much junk out there so i'm sure a lot of coaches have burned their fingers on technology that they thought was going to help them and then end up just not working for them

and when you have to scale it up to your entire team what if you have to spend more time connecting disconnecting uploading and then actually coaching so i think there are some scars on the back

mixed with also maybe some level of complacency or fear and in terms of what it's going to do to their coaching and loss of control

i think i think all those things are natural like normal questions for humans to ask if you were in their position what i do see is that coaches that have an open mind about these types of things they do get rewarded quite a bit and

that doesn't mean that they will take this technology and put it on every single swimmer overnight most of them are strategic about it and they'll say hmm this will work really well for

pacing for my you know 450hz swimmers maybe i could use the distance per stroke feature for my sprinters when we're doing drills on improving their their propulsion phase

maybe and then you start thinking yeah you're right you're right and then they come up with ideas that i hadn't thought about it's like okay well this we're going to use it in million different ways for different swimmers at different times and it's not something that you use all the time

and i think that's what that's what's happened i think in competitive swimming you know and then for triathletes you know it's a little bit of a different story it's been it's allowed triathletes to swim

anywhere and training around anywhere in the world in the world and their coach can still see and follow what they're doing and they're such data freaks that they have been waiting for this device for so long right i mean this is something that they've been asking the

same questions i've asked like why the hell hasn't this been developed yet and then you have to fit the swimmers that are really the largest cohort of course and those are people that could be ex-competitive

swimmers could be contra athletes tomorrow or just just enjoy swimming and there's tens of millions of them even in just in the u.s

and those people of course they are starting to really use our products now and uh starting to see you know and get inspired from our launch you know first going to competitive swimmers and olympians and

seeing them actually go okay this actually works for us well it works for them it should work for me too and you know we all

manage the pandemic in our own way and uh i was it you know for our company we're a media company so when it was a story and our audience had nowhere to go so they came to us

so we didn't feel the pandemic i can tell you that a lot of folks that we worked with um they're everything's shut down but i noticed that you it's it it looked

like you pivoted or it looked like maybe you moved up your your start date for open water sooner which was it was it was it your plan all along or did you move faster into open

water during the pandemic it was our plan all along to launch open water but we did move faster and you know we we saw this as something that could

really benefit to athletes and open water swimmers with minor modifications we didn't want to go in and put gps in every single swimming goggle because gps doesn't work indoors and now everybody like the ninety

percent of full swimmers you know ninety-five percent of the world that are pulsing was suddenly now they have to have a gps and a huge battery along but that they can't use so we didn't want to put it into the product we

didn't feel like making another skew another like version because that was also risky it's very seasonal and it's not that big a market but we did want to launch it and then the padema kit and we thought okay what can we do and we

started coming up with crazy ideas and it turned out that we could just partner with garmin and apple and use their watches and you know triathletes use garmin and swimmers use apple and then we could use

their gps and then we went and tested in a very cold lake here in in vancouver called sasemet lake it was like a late march and we had to buy a special wetsuit and

i didn't jump in it to begin with we said i sent somebody else and then uh and then uh and then i jumped in about a month later and then we all started to test it and it turned out that we could actually connect to

the wrist and get uh and get that experience using our goggles as kind of like a dumb display for the watch so that that was a free update that we launched in july during

the pandemic and i i think that was really i was very proud of that moment because i felt like you know hey you something can happen outside of your control but if you band together you know you can actually create value for

your customers and come up with something that maybe you would have been able to do in that time frame if you didn't have that external pressure so i i really enjoyed that

can you talk about what you just launched in august i sure can um i mean this is also something that has been in the plan since day one

so we we've got plans of course with this product that we launched in 2019 what you saw back then in the pool in austin was really uh the first step the first chapter for us but a chapter that

if we didn't complete that satisfactorily we couldn't do chapter two three four and five because if you don't have accurate tracking and and and a good display

you can't really move forward from that so that was step one but step two was always this notion of you know wouldn't it be great if you could just see workouts in your goals like you did you wouldn't have and this

is for all those people that don't have a coach what if what if you could just get the workout you know be sent from your coach but let's just say that that that there was this device that could just lead you through every single

step of the way and um and that that was what we launched august 24th a huge library of workouts from our app you can just pick you cannot download up to five workouts

and then it just guides you through the experience and you first of all you don't have to think about like when you started whether it was up top or down bottom you know and what your you know your rest time should

be and a lot of stuff that was solved in the first chapter and then the second chapter is okay well i i can just focus on getting into like zen and enjoy swimming and maybe think about my technique because these goggles is going to tell me exactly what

to do i'm so jealous of you that's cool that's cool that's really cool um what you know what's next in sports tech

do you know what man things are moving so fast now i think ai is really something that we haven't even started to scratch the surface what ai can actually do not just for wearables but

for sports you know big data and so i'm excited to follow that uh and see what what other companies are gonna use that for i think ar

augmented reality we've come up with i think an application that is practical pragmatic and focused you know we're not coming out with something or it's like oh here's a great you know full resolution

full-color display that you know you figure out how to use it like we really took some piece of technology and showed that ar can be used in a way that will add a lot of value in a specific

application i think you'll see augmented reality be used in a similar fashion but implemented differently still purpose built for many other types of sports applications

so i think you'll yeah i think you'll see ai and ar really be the driving forces behind and innovation in the sports space um i have a feeling that this is

something i want to dive into and in a second podcast which would you come back and talk to me about it because i i know that our i know that uh

swimming data and ar are are going to redefine all sports but uh i i don't feel like i have a phd there and i think that you you have the unofficial

phd for this topic so could we cover that in a second pod i'd love to i'd love to come back is there anything that you would like to say and as a parting thought or just a just a cactus conversation

i would say coming back to what we talked about with the coaches i would say it's very simple keep an open mind and i think it costs you nothing to keep

an open mind and you know what you did that right when you answered my email and you said okay come to austin we jumped in the pool you could have easily said listen i've tried a thousand devices and i'm done

but you kept an open mind and i think people that have come into the family of form now and a part of our community they kept an open mind and they they're

they've they've been rewarded for it and so that would be my piece of pardon advice that i appreciate is as a as a nice

ending and i would just like to say this in terms of customer service this is a great company if you reach out to them they're very responsive and uh in in in this world in swimming that matters

dan thanks for coming with us if you're out there and you're listening remember go to formswim.comswim.com

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