Great company in the pet wearable space!

In Episode #566, I interview Lisa Tamayo. She’s the CEO of Scollar, an open platform, multi-functional, smart collar for pets. She has over 25 years of experience in entrepreneurship and financial and strategic planning. She’s the co-founder of Green Building Studio which was acquired by Autodesk in 2008. She’s also the chairman of SoCo Nexus, an incubator accelerator in Northern California. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – Pitch Anything What CEO do you follow? – Ben Horowitz Favorite online tool? — Evernote Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – “Trust Yourself” Time Stamped Show Notes: 01:30 – I introduce Lisa to the show 02:13 – Scollar is a smart collar 03:10 – The first product, Scollar Mini, was designed exclusively for the under-searched cats and small dogs market 03:29 – Scollar is currently on pre-order and has launched a Kickstarter campaign 03:52 – Scollar is like Fitbit for animals 04:10 – The Fitbit engineering team has partnered with Scollar Mini 04:26 – Scollar Mini is currently at $99 for pre-order and will retail at $149 04:35 – The pre-order started in mid-October 04:50 – Scollar is starting to build their following 05:15 – Scollar has negotiated with a bank to get credit 05:23 – Lisa and her partner have self-funded a part of it 06:00 – Lisa and her husband are the first founders of Green Building Studio 06:18 – Autodesk has bought all the assets of Green Building Studio 06:35 – Green Building Studio was Autodesk’s market partner for a long time 07:28 – Lisa has almost $600k in Scollar 07:44 – Lisa discusses the spending 08:07 – Finding someone in hardware to help build the product are typically employed elsewhere 08:30 – It took Lisa a while to find the right team to work together 09:08 – Most funding went to the trial and error of the product 09:25 – Team size is almost 40 10:00 – Lisa shares the factors involved in asking for a loan 11:10 – It took the bank months to agree with Lisa and grant her the loan 11:40 – Working Solutions gave them the loan 12:10 – Working Solutions is a great option for quick capital 13:00 – The cost of making Scollar 13:19 – Cost per unit 13:43 – Possible wholesale price 14:50 – They might use the wholesale price in 2018 16:02 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Hardware is a far different process to create than software—it may take time to find and build the right team. There are many options for gaining capital – choose the one that suits your company best. Trust yourself and everything will fall into place.