An Innovative Display That Changes The Game.
Scott McKeon
Sydney School of Entrepreneurship Alumni
What is your Organization?
Espresso Displays is a consumer technology company that creates the world's thinnest portable monitor. Have you ever been working off your laptop and wished you had an extra screen? The Espresso Display can connect to laptops, phones, tablets, or even to your Nintendo Switch. It helps give you an extra screen which helps for work, or entertainment.
What was your Inspiration?
Everything starts very small - with a conversation. I think it is very important because a lot of people come about problems with conversations with friends, family and peers.
My (now)co-founder Will, and I were friends at university (University of Technology Sydney) together. We were working on a project and during that project, we were used to using big desktop monitors. However, we were always on our laptop and during a little discussion I said “I need a second screen for my laptop”. Being very good university students and doing everything BUT the assignment that we had to do, we started googling second screens. We went on Amazon, eBay, even Alibaba to try to find this product we wanted to buy for ourselves but nothing like that to our satisfaction existed.
So we just got started! Will made a 3D printed prototype to begin with. We ended up buying some screens from Alibaba. Got some of the next closest products that were available and we started pulling them apart.
We got cheap flights to Hong Kong, close to the Chinese border where Shenzhen is. For 10 days we visited factories, started getting things rolling. Over time we really started to do 2 things. One is, refine our skills on how to bring a product to life, which isn’t easy, but there is only one way to do it and that's to get started.
The other is actually define: What does this need to be? To not only be useful to us, but to others, to communities and societies. We’ve found that people are working off laptops is more and more common. Most university students work off a laptop as a primary device, or a tablet. We have created something that you don’t have to pack away from the coffee table at the end of the day, what we are giving you is an office in your backpack that you can take anywhere you want to go, so you can continue to do your most producing work.
What challenges have you faced?
Anything that you want to do, especially if it hasn’t been done before is going to be challenging. Lean into the challenge. The challenge is the best part, because if there are no challenges then someone else would have already done it and you would have faced that pain itself for you to actually want to see your product or design in the world.
Challenges aren’t a thing to overcome, challenges are things to lean into. To understand ‘why there is a challenge?’ To understand what you need to do and to then, overcome those challenges. Whether it is just figuring out yourself and putting in the time to learn a specific skill, or even better how can you learn from others who have experience in that specific field? And how can they help you come over those problems? Mentorship is huge all across professional industries. In companies and in the startup ecosystem. So it is very easy if you have a project or thing that you’re trying to solve to find someone and say, ‘hey, I know you’ve done this before, how can you help me to do that?’ And that is something we have used so much within our development of espresso displays and we will continue to use because there’s a wealth of knowledge out there and people are so happy to contribute their thoughts and help.
A challenge that we have faced is, ‘How do we design a consumer product?’ How do we do manufacturing in a foreign country that neither of us has done business in before? How do we actually go through this process of refining the right features, and deciding on elements?
There are so many decisions when designing a product. ‘How are we going to make something great for the customers, that they are really going to like?’ And give you their money to do it?
Beyond that, we had the extra element of doing hardware, rather than software which you can update. You need more capital behind you because it is a physical product that you need to physically build and then distribute globally. Once we had a prototype, we then had to tell everyone about it, so we could get the money upfront, and we could put that product into development. There are a couple of platforms out there that help with launches and presales.
The highs are really high and the lows are really low. Some things are fundamentally important which I have been lucky enough to stumble upon; one is, the importance of co-founders and having an early team, not just to share the workload with but having other people to share that mental journey with. It is very important because you have your friends, your family, who are all very supportive, but they aren’t in that world. So when you’re in that world it’s all-encompassing, all-consuming, you really need other people to kind of prop each other up. To me, that is very important. I have been very lucky to have the people I’ve been working with, in my life.
Another thing that I have learnt is that energy isn’t a zero-sum game; it’s a positive-sum game. You have energy, you bring that energy with you, and you give it to other people, they will have more energy and bounce it back, then you will have more energy. Which means that everyone ends up being all very excited. You lift each other up, one day they might be down and you lift them up, other days you might be down and they lift you up!
What you have found to be your best resources?
I went through this process where I was essentially trying to learn things, in case I experienced it in the future. I did this when I wasn’t as busy, so now I’m at this stage where I’m only trying to focus upon things I can apply right away. There's a whole bunch of things, particularly for people starting out, but, for me, I don't feel very comfortable with not knowing all these things in the future. And if they're not relevant to you right now, stay away from them! Because frankly, they're not relevant to you right now. What you need to do is, you need to get to that stage where you can dive right into it.
So one of my advice for people very early in this journey that are still trying to figure out what they want to be doing is, just get started on something and make one step forward. The other thing is also, don't over commit to one thing, have that project as a sandpit. And if that then becomes something more, like it was for Will, and I, that can lead to a much bigger journey. Lean in, accept that and decide if that is the journey you want to be a part of. Also, don't be attached to the first idea you have. But know, you do need that first idea just to have the sandpit to trial and test ideas, to apply things, to make a website, to get people there. The resources have to be relevant to what you're facing at that time.
There are excellent, free resources you have access to, like the YC Startup School, which has a series of video lectures, on YouTube. It kind of shows you how to think about startups.
Listening to stories of people who've created the types of things that you admire!
One of the books that Will, and I bonded over very early was Shoe dog. Which is the story of Phil Knight who created Nike, the chapters are years of his life and it's a memoir.
It is one of the best books, it felt a bit like Tom Riddle's diary, I was just immersed in the story during that time, very rarely do I find myself immersed in books like that!
There are a lot of resources out there. And I think actually what's more important is curation of those resources. I can't comment on which ones were better or worse because it's all contextual. I would say personally, give yourself a roadmap of what you need. There will be a lot of resources for what you need, but don’t do just in case learning, do just-in-time learning. Learn to solve the immediate problem at hand. Just get started on something.
What advice do you have for your peers?
Firstly - My advice to others who want to start something would be to follow the journey.
You need to build a sandpit for you to trial, test and explore ideas and projects. Talk to other people, whether they are your friends, your university colleagues or work colleagues to get involved in that conversation. Build a platform for trying different things, figure out what works and allow other people to become involved in that.
I do think you need to map out what's very interesting and important to you, as no one else can give you that advice. Once you’ve mapped it out, you need to find where you fit in doing it. Not achieving the goal, but the doing. What's something tangible that you can just get started on, and be permissionless?
Once you do that, it might work. It might not, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that you are actually working on something.
Most importantly, you have to actually like and enjoy it, along with the opportunity and the platform that it provides for you. From there, you can learn, grow, build meaningful relationships and you place yourself in the hands of opportunity.
When did you find out about SSE?
This was in my final year at university. Whilst I studied engineering, there were subjects such as entrepreneurship and commercialisation, engineering economics and finance, but they were limited in the business and idea side of things. This was something I knew I wanted to learn more about.
In my fourth year, I had come back from an exchange and had a few extra weeks before uni went back. I did an online Udemy course, which was about business (“Entire MBA in 1 Course” - thanks Chris Haroun!). That course sparked a long-burning flame I was hungry to pursue wherever the opportunities arose.
Within my university friendship group, there were a few of us who saw the course and thought... “This would be very cool to do.”
In hindsight, you marvel at all the ways that would have derailed the path I am currently on. Had I not enrolled in SSE, I wouldn’t have been apart of this blog-piece, because that's ultimately where Will and I started working on the project together, which is where we first started talking about espresso displays.
How did SSE influence your career?
I don’t think the program itself made us confident enough in itself. It’s not like ‘if we do this course, then we can create a startup’. You can read the books, do the courses, but doing it yourself - nothing can replace that. What SSE did do, is create a platform for us to work on something of which we could continue on further.
Will and I met through a mutual friend. That friend initially got rejected from the course, as had I during the previous semester. I had put in a typo on my email address, so thought I had got rejected again, until the Program Manager called me asking why I hadn’t accepted my position in the course. With that phone number, I gave it to my other friend and said, “Hey, I know you got rejected, but you should just call her and, and try to talk your way in.”
So he did that, he talked his way in. He was the one who introduced me to my now Co-Founder. 1000 ways for it to never have happened, 1 way for it to happen. Such is the narrative of a startup.
An important motto of mine is to place yourself in the hands of opportunity. You need to be there, show up, open and willing. Will believes this as well. I remember specifically before we had even thought of a name, I just came back from Nepal the day before after six weeks and I was a little bit sick. The hot and tropical summer in Nepal, now back to winter in Australia, with long transit time in between. I tried to cancel on him
Will quickly convinced me not to cancel.“I'm going to come over every night, 8:00 PM every day because we need to get started and we get rolling on this’. He’s always entirely understood the power of momentum and perseverance. From there on, every day we chipped away and got started, all with Will's initial momentum.
Why would you recommend SSE to someone?
I would certainly recommend SSE because all of their courses are really great. You get to learn about validating ideas, understanding the resources and tools that you have available, and hear from awesome people who’ve created amazing companies, movements, campaigns and stories.
Another thing, which is equally if not more important, is finding a network of like-minded people that you can then bounce ideas across and start to build that platform that you can continue to work on ideas with. They're your support network. Your friends and people who you’ve met at university might have other priorities as well, but within this group and community as well, it's very likeminded.
SSE is a selective, opt-in course, not a part of any compulsory coursework, so someone has to firstly apply, and opt-in. You can be inspired by each other, whether or not you work on a business idea together. You become this platform for each other's learning. I believe you always learn the best - not from a teacher, but from each other.
And this (SSE) allows you that opportunity to do so.
Website: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/espresso-displays-the-thinnest-portable-monitor#/
ED LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/espresso-displays/
Scott’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottmckeon1/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EspressoDisplays
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/espressodisplays/
