The Future Is Now: Abhinai Srivastava of Mashgin On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene
Focus on doing things the right way, even if it’s slow. When we first started out, we thought that we always had to keep our investors happy. As a result, we made a lot of short-term decisions that weren’t as healthy for the company in the long term, and at the end of the day cost us more time in successfully getting to market.
As a part of our series about cutting edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Abhinai Srivastava, CEO and co-founder, Mashgin.
Abhinai Srivastava brings more than 20 years of experience in data science and machine learning to his role as CEO and co-founder of Mashgin, the world’s fastest self-checkout system. He is responsible for leading and executing the company’s overall vision and strategy and is passionate about the potential applications of AI-powered computer vision in the real world.
Abhinai began his career as a data scientist at Yahoo! in 2001, well before the term was coined. He then moved to Microsoft as a founding member of the adLab team, where he helped to create the relevance algorithm for all of Microsoft’s advertising and built the first version of the Bing Knowledge Graph. Prior to co-founding Mashgin, he worked as a data scientist for Facebook, where he built a highly relevant page recommendation algorithm that also reduced the number of spam pages by 60%.
Abhinai holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. He enjoys thinking, exploring, creating and walking, as well as a newfound love: running as hard and fast as he possibly can for as long as he possibly can. He now runs at the speed of a six-minute mile.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I was in love with physics for all of my life and was certain that’s what I wanted to do. I really hadn’t even touched a computer until I was in college. But one day, I saw a friend playing a computer game — he was doing something simple, like throwing a stone — and I was amazed by the potential of computers to ingest and simulate physics. This is really what got me interested in computer science and what you could do with it.
As for entrepreneurship, throughout my life I previously worked at big companies. In many cases I would act as an internal founder for a new product or innovation. However, the level of effort that I had to put in to justify these projects was often as much or more than the effort of actually building them. I witnessed this happen not just to me, but to many of my most brilliant colleagues. Sometimes, once a project garnered success, the same people who acted as blockades would swoop in and take credit from the builders who had dedicated their time and creative energy.
At Mashgin, we’re using computer vision and AI to make people’s lives easier. To achieve this, I wanted and needed to create an environment where people could innovate and channel their creative energy without the fear of these types of situations. I want to incentivize people to spend their time creating value, to be comfortable taking risks, and to celebrate one another for their achievements. That’s what makes a team thrive, and only a thriving team can take on the types of challenges I want to resolve.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
When we were applying to Y Combinator, it was a long shot. And when I say long shot, I mean we sent in the application weeks after the deadline with only a few days left before Mukul, my co-founder, needed to fly back to Europe after extending his time in the US for months while pursuing our “project” which would become Mashgin.
We waited and waited to hear back from them, but the time came for Mukul to get on his flight. And so off he went. From that moment, a few hours passed, and I got a call from Y Combinator. I knew this was good because they don’t call you to say no. Sure enough, they wanted us to come in and pitch them…the following day.
Mukul was only halfway through a 14-hour flight, and I had no way of reaching him. I called, texted, emailed, WhatsApped, Vibered — if it had a notification ding, I sent him a message on it. Of course, Mukul was asleep and his phone was in airplane mode. So when he landed, every electronic device on him was going crazy. Luckily, at least one of my messages got through, because the second he left his plane he grabbed his bag and got a ticket back to California — just another 14 hours. Lucky for us, that was enough time to sharpen our pitch and demo. With two hours to spare from touching down in San Francisco, Mukul and I were telling Y Combinator how Mashgin would change the world.
Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?
Our major breakthrough is utilizing computer vision to understand objects the same way the human eye does — in three dimensions. For the most part, companies that try to solve problems with computer vision use two-dimensional data. This isn’t a bad approach in a lot of situations, but it begins to fail when you have scenarios that require high precision in distinguishing between objects.
This is particularly true of checkout — you can’t charge a person for the wrong item. Any instance of inaccuracy results in a big disruption to your customer’s experience and will slow down lines, resulting in lost revenue. You need a system that is correct 99.9% of the time — and we’re able to do that by understanding objects in three-dimensional space.
By solving this accuracy problem, we can now ring up items entirely using computer vision — no need to find a specific barcode or to type an item in. This is important for two primary reasons:
First, it means the instant ring-up of items that never had a barcode in the first place. That opens up self-checkout to entirely new industries like cafeterias, quick service restaurants, and sports stadiums where many of the items sold come out of a kitchen and traditionally need to be typed in. Second, it allows the user to ring up multiple items at once, making the checkout process much much faster and dramatically reducing checkout lines. In the field Mashgin improves checkout throughput as much as 400% over using cashiers and traditional points of sale.
The net effect is that customers get what they want much, much faster, and businesses end up with more sales as a result. At Mile High Stadium, the Denver Broncos saw 34% more concession sales per game where they installed Mashgin as the primary checkout method.
How do you think this might change the world?
It has already changed the world of retail and food service. We’re giving people back the valuable time that they spend waiting to get what they need. We double, triple, sometimes even quadruple the speed that lines move in comparison to traditional means of checkout.
For each individual person, that may only be a few minutes at a time. But if you’ve ever been in a rush to go somewhere and needed to grab something on the way, then you know it can be a huge relief just to get a few minutes back. Have you ever been to a sports game and missed an important moment while waiting in line? By doubling the speed those lines move, we can reduce how often people have to deal with that disappointment.
Think about how long lines can become in the school lunchroom. Plenty of research confirms that recess and lunch breaks are very important for student development. But it’s hard for students to get the benefits of socialization and exercise if they spend half of their break standing in line. If we can bring technologies like Mashgin into schools and speed up that line, it could have a substantial impact on student health and performance.
We did the math on just how much time Mashgin has saved people to date, and even by our most conservative estimates we’ve given about 12 years of time back to humanity. And we’re just getting started.
As for future implications of the core technology and where it can go, there are some really big opportunities. Today, there are a lot of companies chasing the fully frictionless experience with no checkout at all. Most of them are reliant on tracking individual people and remembering where specific objects are in a store. However, they don’t have a true visual understanding of the objects themselves the way that Mashgin does.Our technology fills in an important gap that will be necessary in making full-frictionless retail something that can be accomplished at the accuracy level and cost-level necessary for it to scale into being a part of our everyday lives.
Outside of retail, we see a big opportunity in manufacturing. The quality assurance process of a lot of goods requires a large number of people spending time staring at and measuring items at different stages of the process. Mashgin is able to instantly build a 3D model of an object that is accurate at the scale of millimeters. When applied to manufacturing, that would allow it to detect even subtle changes from the quality standard. That means production lines that rely on visual QA can move faster than ever with fewer missed errors.
Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
No, and that’s intentional. We specifically built Mashgin to work without needing to track people and their personal information, a common concern with fully frictionless checkout. Unlike a lot of technologies that focus on watching humans, our emphasis on recognizing objects has much less opportunity for harm.
Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?
One night I was taking a walk thinking through why we were able to reach high levels of accuracy, but not high enough to be truly relevant to checkout. I wondered, “Why are humans so good at this? How do my own eyes do it?”. I tried focusing on different objects from different angles and distances. I put my hand over one eye and tried to distinguish an object in a fairly messy group of things. I quickly noticed how much harder it was to make out each object individually with one eye. That’s when I realized how important depth of field is to vision and why understanding three dimensions was so important. If my own brain struggled when working in “almost 2D,” then it makes sense that even really advanced AI could be disrupted when dealing with groups of objects or very similar looking things.
What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?
People. A high-quality team is core to any organization. We’re lucky to already be working with the top organizations in every industry we’ve targeted, and have hit a period of rapid expansion within these groups. So, we’re focused on deploying at high speed and deepening the value we can bring those clients. To do that effectively, we need a Rockstar team of engineers and deployment engineers to keep moving quickly.
The great thing about Mashgin is that with every new location, we grow faster. People use the system once and they get it. So, when a potential customer sees us in the wild, they quickly become a real one.
What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?
Our main clients are large enterprises. We do everything to ensure client success and partner with them to create an exceptional experience for their customers. That manifests in a number of ways of going above and beyond the norm. For example, even after setting up a location we’ll regularly send brand ambassadors to locations to introduce first-time users to use Mashgin. Our customer success team will help cafes optimize their menus to be even more efficient and speedy. We’ve even built entirely new products like mobile ordering because clients were struggling with their existing solution and preferred to work with our team.
In the case of Delek, one of our first customers in the convenience store space, we filmed a commercial inside one of their stores so that they could show customers the new faster, safer checkout experience they offer. This helped to tell their story as innovators who care about their customers.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I think part of the magic of Silicon Valley is how it brings enthusiastic people together in a really supportive way. There are several people who have helped me throughout my time as a founder just because they could. Both as advisors and as friends, they’ve been there when I needed them. Some of the names that immediately come to mind are Ben Narasin, Avichal Garg, Louis Beryl, Leonard Speiser, and Qasar Younis. I am so grateful for both their guidance and their friendship.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
The environment and how we treat it is really important to me. In the early days of Mashgin I noticed that whenever we received components or shipped machines there was a ton of unnecessary plastic in the packaging. So I specifically spoke to our vendors to make sure that the packaging we used was as sustainable as possible, whether by reducing the total number of components or changing the materials we use to ship and receive. In the end this costs us a good bit more for every machine, but we’re often able to re-use parts of it and recycle most of the rest. As we scale, we’ll continue with this policy and help keep sustainable packaging providers growing with us.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)
- Focus on doing things the right way, even if it’s slow. When we first started out, we thought that we always had to keep our investors happy. As a result, we made a lot of short-term decisions that weren’t as healthy for the company in the long term, and at the end of the day cost us more time in successfully getting to market.
- Your first hire should be in either a HR/recruiting or business operations. New founders do not realize how much time goes into hiring and administrative tasks that you’d never anticipate. Taking these off your shoulders will open up a lot of time and mental energy for you to focus on key drivers of the business.
- If you’re going to raise money, make sure that you’re ready for it and set clear expectations. A company can’t be a research project, it must be ready to build and ship actual products.
- You get what you pay for, especially when it comes to employees and services. We saw this very clearly with the speed and quality of our patent lawyers. Early on, we took a low bid during our first round of patents. The resulting filings took a year and only ended up with a single weak patent. When we later shifted to a well-endorsed lawyer with a higher hourly rate, they had stronger patents completed within six months. We ended up spending less money overall to get better patents despite using a more expensive lawyer.
- Great employees make it look easy. Usually, common sense is that if an employee appears relaxed, they must have been assigned an easy project and they seem to be just hanging out. What I’ve found is that those employees can be working very difficult or complex projects, they’re just finding solutions on their own and making things work rather than spending energy stressing out or complaining. That’s exactly the type of person you want to seek out, foster, and promote.
If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I would create a movement to instill greater awareness of our environmental impact. We only have one home and we are destroying it. I really think that winter is coming when we think about the environment. This will require global agreement that our actions impact the environment, as well as the acknowledgment that we can do something about it. So, I’d love to inspire a movement to spread information and compassion about these issues worldwide, because it will have to be a collective effort.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I have two, both from Paul Graham. The first is “Allow yourself to make mistakes.” Too often we let the perfect be the enemy of the good or a lack of information stop us from moving forward. It can be paralyzing. Focusing on this lesson helps me stay open to a lot more possibilities and be faster in taking action.
The second is “Fix your mistakes aggressively.” This is a really important companion to the first lesson. Just because you allow mistakes doesn’t mean you can ignore them. Don’t sink your ego into a bad decision. It’s pivotal to quickly evaluate, iterate, and fix things as you go along.
Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say?
We’ve created a unique product that makes customers happy every time they use it. At the same time it makes retailers much more efficient and profitable in their operations. We are already the most popular computer vision powered checkout on the planet with over 13 million transactions to date. Yet somehow you haven’t heard of us yet, which is why it’s the perfect time to invest.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
Believe it or not, I’m the very first Abhinai on twitter, so you can find me at https://twitter.com/abhinai. I also like to post my thoughts, experiments, and Mashgin successes on the Mashgin Blog.
Thank you so much for these amazing insights. This was so inspiring, and we wish you continued success!
The Future Is Now: Abhinai Srivastava of Mashgin On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
