Product Leader Spotlight: Sankarshan Murthy

Anna: Tell me about Bumblebee Spaces.

Sankarshan: Bumblebee Spaces is a different way to think about a Smart Home. We [often] talk about Smart Homes by adding lights, speakers, door locks and thermostats, but Bumblebee Spaces changes the architecture of your home throughout the day and works for your needs.

The whole space thoughtfully figures out where you'll be, like, what you'll be using at any given point and kind of changes around your life to increase usable space. And it’s also powered by a really interesting software that understands what is being stored, what is being used, what is not being used to reduce your footprint.

Anna: How did you get into IoT and come up with the idea for Bumblebee Spaces?

Sankarshan: I worked at Tesla and Apple before this - building high quality, high volume products that delight users with beautiful hardware. But really the magic of all the hardware is enabled by powerful software.

We looked at some of the key areas that needed to be improved for humanity to thrive. There’s a few big things to unlock: energy, housing, and transportation.

Housing has been kind of the same for hundreds of years (concrete, wood, drywall, etc.) but your mortgage, taxes, insurance, heating and cooling - all of that has increased. You're paying per square foot, but you're not using the volume effectively.

So [Bumblebee] was born from our own pain of spending on housing. We wanted to figure out: how do you make the most out of this space?

We realized the thing that you do need to do is kind of upgrade it to the technology that actually makes the space useful. We think of ourselves as a “space company.” Bumblebee unlocks space.

Anna: If Bumblebee is successful, how will you have an impact on the world?

Sankarshan: If you look at a home that is 1000 square feet, and if you observe how you use the space, you don't use all the rooms all the time. You're mostly in one or two parts of the roohousem depending on how many people are occupying it. And then the rest of the time, let's say your bedroom, your bed just sits there 16 hours a day doing nothing. Your walk in closet, you're in and out for a few minutes. The rest of the time you're just paying for it all the time. So you're essentially paying for a lot of space without optimally using it. With Bumblebee, we’re able to help you optimize your space without compromising your life.

Secondly, Bumblebee is also a really interesting software stack that understands exactly what you're storing. So that makes it like for you to be aware of what you're purchasing, what you're consuming more easily because you have a tracking system of all your home inventory and you can automatically reduce your footprint.

When you turn up the dial and look at it at a high scale when we're massively successful and deploy it across millions of homes living this way, you freed up millions of square feet of buildable space or green space out in the world. This essentially translates into a very powerful way of changing the whole housing market.

You can get a smaller footprint living, a lot more greenery, a lot more freed up space for wilderness, rainforest, but your human footprint is now contained, even though it's contained, humans are happier because the quality of life is much higher than that. And you have much more time to do adventures because there's more wilderness surrounding you. Right? So that's kind of how we see the future evolve as we scale.

Anna: Do you have any advice that you’d like to share with other founders?

Sankarshan: Surround yourself with the people who add value to your ideas.  It's all about inspiring the right type of people to be with you on this journey. This matters a lot because humans are able to collaborate and take someone's idea and build off of it and such. You'll have an insight, and suddenly the insight becomes so much larger than you because humans are able to perform together as an organism together. I can give you a version of my idea, and next thing I know, someone's built off of that. That gets me even more excited.

I'm a big fan of First Principles thinking. This comes from my Tesla days. Like, whatever you think, you know, you don't know. Basic questions, which actually break down the barrier of what is the fundamental truth? So more than being right or wrong, it's all about searching for this fundamental truth. And on the journey to the truth, you'll end up discovering very interesting insights. That's always been my guiding force

There's lessons to be learned when you make a mistake, but you can only go one direction in time. So being kind of stoic about, okay, this is what happened. And now that we're here, what do we do? Always going through that thought process is very interesting. And that will take you to the fundamental truth.

Anna: You’ve spoken of the knowledge that you learned at Apple and Tesla and now Bumblebee Spaces, but when it comes to product achievements, do you have one that you’re particularly proud of?

Sankarshan: I am super excited about what we're building here at Bumblebee because of how big the value of creation is.

Every time we add a room at Bumblebee to any home, the ripple effects of that, like the value we create instantly is hundreds of thousands of dollars, because we freed hundreds of square feet. At the cost of San Francisco, New York, Miami, they're all like $1000 to $3,000 a square foot. So it's a massive value that you create instantly, right?

Also even from the very early days our user stickiness like how much people love to use our product and repeatedly every product getting used every day and how sticky it is. Nothing like it. No other product I've worked on has this level of user engagement. That really makes us super proud of what we're building.