Perseverance Over Speed: Creating a New Category with Impinj's Chris Diorio
40:21 Share

I hear this saying, especially coming out of Silicon Valley, that's fail fast. If impinge had been held to fail fast, we would have failed because there was no fast. So the fail fast mantra works for disruptive approaches to existing problems where the foundation's already built. Fail fast does not work when you're inventing a new category.

Welcome to Founded and Funded. I'm Madrona Venture Partner Patrick Ennis, and today, Managing Director Tim Porter and I have the pleasure of hosting Chris Durio, co-founder and CEO of Impinj, the pioneer and world leader in RFID technology, products, and solutions. I've known Chris for more than 24 years, since Madrona and my firm at the time, Arch Venture Partners, co-led Impinj's first round of financing in the summer of 2000.

Today, the three of us are going to reminisce about old times and share some fun stories, while also diving into what it takes to truly launch a new category and the patience required by both entrepreneurs and investors when doing so. Developing new speculative technology, navigating channel partner relationships, making it through an IPO during uncertain times, and how Impinj became the least known $4.6 billion public company in Seattle.

This truly is a must listen for any entrepreneurs out there. Chris, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Patrick. Why don't we start because Impinj is a massive success story, but many people may not know about it. So why don't you just tell us, what does Impinj do?

We make miniature radio chips smaller than a grain of sand, really smaller than a grain of sand. We were just joking. Our radio chips are about the equivalent in length to 50 bacteria. With those radio chips, enterprises can track their items, get inventory in stores,

Know that all the items in a medical crash cart and an emergency room are in the crash cart. And there's a myriad other uses. Impinj is such a special place in Madrona history and for me personally. So this is particularly fun and gratifying. When I started in Madrona in 2006, Impinj was one of the first companies I got to work on with our co-founder, Tom Ahlberg.

And our colleague Sujit Vaidyanathan at the time, Patrick was working at Arch, but was in the same office with Madrona. I literally met him on my first day in 2006. And so now here we are, and what a huge success story and never a straight line to success, which we'll get into. But let's go back to the beginning and the founding and the original deal. And so $15 million round in 2000,

Everything that was getting funded then were dot coms. And here's Chris, a new-ish star professor at UW-CSC from Caltech, partnered up with one of the fathers of the industry, Carver Mead,

I'd love to hear, Chris, a little bit of the founding vision around disposable semiconductors, RFID, were those things you even thought about then? And then Patrick, maybe you can comment on $15 million round in 2000 was big. Like how did Arch and Madrona, like how did this come together, you know, in the founding of the company there in the beginning? Well, you know, the founding vision was none of those things. The founding vision was a wireless technology that allowed us to make very, very low power radios.

The original idea behind the company was we were going to use that wireless technology to improve the power efficiency of base station radios for the new big thing, 3G wireless. But then the dot-com bubble burst, the bottom dropped out of that market, and we had to find something else to do.

And so we looked around, we did a lot of analysis. We looked at ultrasound and GPS and many things, and we settled on RFID. Because with our wireless technology, we could make, like I said, miniature radio chips that were just tiny. I mean, really so tiny that with the naked eye, you can barely see them. And those radio chips absorb their operating energy from radio waves. So there's no battery. And we said, we can make these chips. We can put an identifier in them.

We can allow enterprises to get information about their items and then going forward ultimately, enable people to get information about their items. We started going down that vision and then nine months later, Walmart made an announcement that they were going to track all pallets and cases using this RFID technology. We all high-fived, "Woohoo, success. We're going to IPO in 18 months, so we're done." Well, as we'll get into, we weren't done.

About 14 years later, we IPO'd with a lot of ups and downs along the way.

And I know we'll get into this, but as I look back now, I can truly say any transformative technology takes time, a long time. It doesn't happen overnight. And that was sure a learning experience for me. But anyway, to go back to the beginning, the plan we initially had didn't materialize. So we focused on a new one and made it work. As is so often the case. And thus the Internet of Things was born.

And Patrick, I'm sure you had that all was part of the plan, right? The original deal memo. How did Arch and Majorna come together to want to do this deal and that size round and convince Chris and maybe comment on Carver too and his role in those early days? Yeah, well, it's interesting you say that because we've looked through the files and there's no mention of RFID for the first two years. That's correct. And that's not an exaggeration. There's everything from medical ultrasounds to cable modems and DSL and 3G. So,

So we were kind of wandering around the product market fit wilderness for a while. And that can be frightening and you're told not to do that. But sometimes it's a good thing when you really have a breakthrough technology. If you pick that application too early, you may not ultimately realize all the value. Now that's bad advice in general to entrepreneurs. Don't worry about your application. But sometimes as long as you keep the burn rate low and you're smart about what you're doing.

So speaking of the round, as you point out, in the year 2000, if you discount back inflation, you know, that size round, $7.5 million from Madrona, $7.5 million from Arch. That was a fortune. Thank you, Patrick. No, it took a village. But I think part of it was, and Chris, correct me if I'm wrong, we sincerely thought that might be the only round that we do. And you had great interest there.

From all the top firms in Silicon Valley, partly because of you and what you had achieved in your relatively young career. But also, you know, also due to Carver Mead, who is as consequential a figure as there is in the history of technology in the last hundred years. And that's not too much of an exaggeration. So how did you view that working with Madrona and Arch and our clients?

founder Tom Ahlberg and working with us versus going with some of the Sandhold Road firms? There's a lot in those questions. Well, first on the $15 million, at the time we founded the company, I was a three-year faculty member at the UW.

They did. $15 million was kind of off-scale for me. It's truly amazing that we were able to raise that amount of money. We thought it would last forever, but of course, that amount of money never lasts forever because you've got a ton of work to do, hiring people and all the things along the way. We ended up doing multiple subsequent rounds and I believe raised something in the range of about $125 million over the course of the company before we IPO. But again, we were truly developing a transformative technology.

So going back to those days, we had Tom Alberg on our board. We had Patrick Yu on our board. We had Carver Mead. And it was the collective experience of you guys that kind of settled the company and allowed us time to really think and pursue opportunities. And any time a major problem came along and I was all frustrated and all worried, especially Carver and Tom, they'd say, relax, it's okay. Why don't you look at it this way?

And it was that kind of wisdom and that it's more than wisdom. It was that, um, experience and their ability to, um, to drive confidence in the paths we were taking confidence, even though we didn't at that time know which direction we were headed or how we would get there. It was that confidence that really helped build a company. And so you go out, hire good people, hire the best people you can, can you can hire only people that are better than you are. And I truly mean that. And, um,

With a strong team, you will, in general, find a way to be successful. We have a set of principles that underlie the company, and they are the most important thing to the company. When I go to customer meetings, I'll often start with our principles. They begin with be respectful, always act with integrity, always think big, always trust your instincts, always be curious and listen. And they end with a saying by Patton, which is,

Tell people where to go, not how to get there, and you'll be amazed by the results. So those are our principles. And then we have our mission statement, which is separate from that. And our mission in the world is to connect everything. And we're going to do it. It's so instructive. And you can have breakthrough technology and world-class technologists, but company success comes back to culture and people. And that just cuts across all of the great companies that we see here.

Founders get to that culture in different ways though. Would you say, so that's an amazing set of principles and you've articulated it well and the company lives them every day. Did those kind of happen organically? Did you and Carver really specifically say we're gonna write this down early? How did you kind of create that originally and then cultivate it all these years? It didn't happen early. It actually happened later on in the company's history. We had a set of ways that we behaved

But they weren't codified in a set of principles. And it wasn't even until after our IPO. And what year was that? We IPO'd in 2016. 2016. And so the principles came about, I think, 2017 or maybe 2018, where we actually sat down and said, okay, the company's growing, getting more and more people. It's time to write these things down. They were not new. They were a set of sayings and actions and the way we behave. They weren't new.

But putting them down on paper was an important step in the growth of the company. But we were living those principles up to that time. And today, I believe my number one job as CEO is to give every employee at Impinj the opportunity to be wildly successful. Because if every employee is wildly successful, the company can't help but be wildly successful. And I believe every employee's job, and I tell them this,

is to do everything they can to make our customers wildly successful. Because if our customers are wildly successful, we can't help but be wildly successful. And that really is the vision of the company and how we behave and act. And the principles kind of codify that. But it's just our viewpoint and how we go to market, how we act as people in the company. And it is the most important thing to our company, bar none.

So great. Geniuses taking complicated things and making it simple. That's a great example. But it's hard to put it in practice and you all have done a great job. Let's go back to the story. So we talked about the founding and you mentioned Walmart making this big announcement, but then sort of teased. Maybe that didn't play out exactly like everyone thought. It did not. You mentioned it was 16 years to the IPO.

So many fits and starts, you know, we sort of joked RFID, once it defined that as a market, was still the market that was one or two years away for 10 years, 15 years. How did the company persevere, continue to execute and grow despite a market that arguably took longer to develop than maybe you thought when you first sort of really defined it and honed in on it? There's two answers to that question. I think part of the answer is if you have a vision and you truly believe in it and you can see it,

You know it's going to be there. You can just see it. Don't give up. Just do not give up. Persevere and say, I'm going to make this thing go no matter what. I don't know how I'm going to get there. I don't know what the path is, but I'm going to do it. And day by day, I'm going to figure it out. And not just I. Every person in the company has got to say that. We are together going to figure it out.

And so, yes, in 2003, Walmart made an announcement that they were going to tag all pallets and cases. This was great. It was fantastic. Except for a couple of small nits. We didn't have any spectrum we could use. We didn't have any wireless standard by which to communicate. And we didn't have any products. Other than that, it was great. And on top of that, we didn't have any money to buy spectrum. So spectrum is not a cheap thing.

Building all the products is not so easy. And creating a worldwide standard for radio communications, like people think Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Well, we had to create the equivalent thing. We didn't have it. And you cannot create a worldwide standard overnight. So we got to work.

And we created a standard that finally got ratified in 2005 with an immense amount of work. It was like the work of 100 PhD theses. It was just incredibly hard because it was like doing your PhD thesis and everybody's fighting you. Got the standard approved, but we had to build products to it. We still didn't have spectrum. So I personally spent a ton of time on that standard development effort. I was a project editor for it.

Then I went and met with the FCC. I joined TG34 in Europe, which is the standards body associated with spectrum allocation. I presented in front of Medi in Japan and we did everything we could to get spectrum

allocated for free. With the assistance of some large end users, we actually made it happen. In the meantime, the market, all the hype went up, but with no spectrum, no standards, no products, then came crashing back down again. By 2006, it was a mess because we had just gotten some of the spectrum of things, but everybody was walking away saying this RFID stuff's not going to work. It wasn't until 2010 that we were far enough along from a product perspective and everything else perspective,

that a couple of large retailers, Macy's, Decathlon, Marks & Spencer, decided to adopt RFID for inventory tracking in their stores. And that was the beginning of the turnaround. So we went through the typical Gartner hype cycle, way up, more than a billion dollars of VC money got poured into RFID when Walmart made that announcement, way down, crashing down. And only one company of that whole time made it out the other side.

And we were lucky enough that it was us. All the other companies failed or got acquired along the way. - And Chris, how many chips has Impinj made over the course of time? And where might the average person have encountered them even though they didn't know they were encountering them? - We've sold more than 100 billion chips to date. - Let's say that again. - More than 100 billion. - You didn't say 100 million. - I did not, I said 100 billion. So we've sold more than 100 billion chips

The industry has been growing at a 29% unit volume CAGR since the year 2010. And at this point in time, we're probably about 0.5% penetrated into the opportunity.

The total opportunity is of the order of 10 trillion chips a year. I wish I had brought a vial. I have a vial that's about the size of the end of my pinky that's got half a million chips in it. And it's just tiny. So they are effectively consumable silicon. So we put the chips into our onto items. In retail stores, for example, let's say for retail apparel or apparel and footwear tracking for inventory visibility in stores, the

The chips are generally inside the price label. So if you hold up the price label to a light and look through it, you'll see a little black dot. That's our chip and you're mostly seeing the glue around the chip. And then a small antenna laminated into that label. When you get home, you cut off the label, you throw it out, you own the item. And then the retailer goes and buys a new item with a new chip. Every one of those chips identifies the item uniquely.

Employees in stores go out with a handheld reader, maybe twice a week and do a quick store inventory so the store knows what they have, knows what they need to order. Going forward, we're actually doing self-checkout systems, loss prevention systems, and other systems to make the consumer buying experience much more seamless.

So on my phone, I have an app where my airline tells me where my bag is. When I do a road race, it tells me what my really bad 5K time is. That sounds like you must be involved in that somehow. We're involved in a lot of those things. If you fly Delta Airlines and use Track My Bags app, if you ever peel back one of the baggage tags, inside you'll see an antenna with a little dot on it. So Delta tracks your bag with what is now called RAIN, R-A-I-N for radioid, radioid

identification. If you run a foot race, like a 10K or something like that, there's one of the chips with a little antenna in your bib, which you throw out at the end of the race. So you don't have to untie the tag and return it at the end of the race, like in the old days. So our chips are on everything. If you think 100 billion, there's roughly 2 billion people in the entire Western world. So

We've delivered roughly 50 chips for every person who's listening to this call and we're just getting going. So as I like to say, we're the most pervasive technology that nobody's ever heard of. I love that. You know, from a company building standpoint, it's so fascinating because again, you're breaking new ground from a technology standpoint.

You had to sort of search around to find this set of use cases and product market fit, as we say. But even at that point, you know, Delta and these retailers, there was a lot for them to bring together and write applications or track their inventory, etc. So you're sort of building the tech, evangelizing to end customers, building partnerships to actually integrate and take these things to market.

That's a hard set of things to pull off. And of course, back to people, you had some great people around the team across both technology and the business side, but maybe talk a little bit about how you cultivated those end customer scenarios and the end customers while also kind of working across all these partnerships. One of the strange things in our industry, which you don't see very often,

is that our early adopter companies were some of the largest enterprises on the planet.

Think Delta Airlines, think Walmart, think Macy's, think Decathlon, the largest sporting goods retailer. Think the Department of Defense, think Department of Homeland Security. These enormous size companies or institutions, hospital chains. We learned pretty early on that we needed to work with the large enterprises,

Because they were the ones who could retool their operations and retool their supply chain to use what we were bringing to market. The advantage there is our customers were huge. The disadvantage there is that they had huge operations and it

takes years for them to fully deploy. I think an important lesson there for all startups and even if they're not targeting Walmart and Delta right out of the box, which you all did is that you worked backwards from the end customer and then you had to develop the channel partners and integrators like

you know, you weren't actually printing the hang tags with price tags on it and neither is Walmart. Somebody else is doing that. Correct. Somebody else goes and installs other things, et cetera. But you started with that end customer and said, what's the scenario? And you really helped them cultivate. And then the whole solution kind of in the partners necessary came together from that order. We went to the end customer and really said, you know, tell us about the problems you're having.

It's really about solving the enterprise problem. Tell us the problem you're solving. We can solve this problem. Here's what the solution will look like. The most important thing there is establishing a trusted relationship with that enterprise customer. Truly a trusted relationship that you and they are in it together to solve their problem.

So, Chris, I'd like to ask about how you thought about the financing strategy, because you and your team have done a great job through the years of raising money when you needed it from value-added sources. And entrepreneurs and CEOs are always thinking, how do we view strategic investors versus financial? Early on in Impinja's lifecycle, I think in what we used to call the Series B, I think maybe now it'd be called the Series D cycle,

But you brought in three corporates as investors, TSMC, UPS, and Unilever. And one of them in particular turned out to be an amazing long-term partner, and the other two were good partners also. But wondering if you had any thoughts on that, especially TSMC, although they've been around for 40-plus years, recently they're in the news because of

all the supply chain issues and global issues regarding different countries and who makes what semiconductor. And it's very interesting 'cause Impinja's co-founder, Carver Mead, is actually the one that provided the intellectual and technical justification for the so-called fabulous semiconductor industry.

And Morris Chang, who's a very famous founder and CEO of TSMC, several times has publicly credited several conversations with Carver in the 1970s for the founding of TSMC. And yet here you are, a big customer of companies like TSMC.

Actually, Patrick, two of those companies have had a very significant impact. Obviously, our relationship with TSMC that goes back more than 20 years, and we have worked closely with them and they with us to develop this technology and develop these chips. We actually chose TSMC early on because we did a bunch of technology evaluation. Back 20 years ago, TSMC wasn't very big, but they had by far and away the best technology. We've had a partnership with TSMC ever since, both their investment in us,

And that was a financial investment. Today, they're investment in us and just a customer for them and the things they do to help us along as we develop newer products. The other one to look at is UPS. If you listen to UPS's public statements by their CEO, they talk a lot about RFID and they talk about tracking packages.

and the benefits it's driving for their operations in terms of reducing misloads, reducing misshipments, and providing packages at the right place at the right time when they say they're going to deliver it. I encourage you to go listen to some of those statements because it really is a testament to a company getting in early, understanding the benefits of the technology, seeing it as an opportunity for them, and then driving it forward. It's an example of one of those Fortune 100 enterprises

that takes time to adopt, but has had the vision for a long time. I know Patrick, you had a chance to meet with, going back to the TSMC one, you had a chance to meet with Morris Chang. Chris, that was one of the thrills of my professional career. I was on the board of an optical networking company that happened to have a board meeting in Taipei because UMC, which was a TSMC competitor, was an investor. Because of you and Carver Mead, he sent an email and the great Morris Chang

20 minutes one-on-one at CSMC headquarters in Chinchou City. I was shaking the whole time because in my mind, he was like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Henry Ford all put together, but yet he was talking to the little old me and it was because of you and Carver. He was such a nice gentleman, so smart, had nothing but great things to say about and pinch even then. This was 2002, I believe.

He is in the same mold as Carver and Tom Auber from Madrona. And I have no other way to characterize them other than just wonderful people because they think about helping others along their journey.

And now one of the most valuable companies in the world and that a lot of folks hadn't thought about until AI, chips, NVIDIA, all those things. And there we mentioned AI. Now we can move on. Yeah, that's right. What a story. I also just want to comment on, you mentioned Tom again, but had such an influence on Impinj and of course on us here at Madrona, but so many things, you know, that I think he did help us all be successful, which is, you know, work with great people,

empower them, take big bets, and then be patient, right? And probably more, but those all really kind of come through in how Impinj ultimately became successful and what we try to really take into our investment philosophy today. Well, yes, first about Tom. Tom was a wonderful person and we all miss Tom. He was wise. He was smart. He was trusting. He was helpful.

He was patient and I wish he was still around. I really do. He was on our board from day one, along with Patrick joined us on the board early on. Maybe at some point you can tell your story about how we got to that board. But he was on our board from day one and he stayed with us up until just a couple of years ago. I believe he was on two boards in the very early days, Amazon and us. And he stayed with us, I guess, probably. I don't remember when he stepped down, maybe 2020 in that timeframe.

So his wisdom and the values that he brought to the company were immeasurable to our success. It was amazing because when we first put the deal together for Impinj in 2000, we talked about this idea.

Tom was on two boards then, Amazon and Impinj. And, you know, we were in awe of that. I think we were somewhat intimidated, but we really, really benefited from having someone of his caliber. And he was such a great mentor to everyone that he touched. And specifically, how we put that deal together, it combined a couple things. Even though I wasn't actually working at Madrona,

I was sharing office space with Madrona and Tom was happy to mentor anyone. So Tom was one of my mentors and he gave me a lot of guidance for Impinj. And I remember when we were negotiating the term sheet, Chris,

Tom empowered me and then my bosses at Arch empowered me within a range. And then Chris, you had a unique suggestion. Instead of coming over to your office and negotiating the term sheet, what did we wind up doing? And it's a tool that I've heard you've used many times since. Yeah, we went on a walk. So I do this a lot. So we had obviously gone through the terms and there were some sticking points and it's often really hard to settle a negotiation around a table.

So oftentimes, and I do this with our enterprise customers as well, I'll say, you want to go on a walk? Or do you want to go on a run? I've actually done deals on a run. And there's something about going out and walking or running. Be careful with somebody who's a lot younger than you when you do the run one. And I remember Patrick, I said, you know, Patrick, what's most important to you? He just told me and I said, well, here's what's most important to us.

How do we get to a resolution? We just work through it. It was probably only 30 minutes. And we came back and we were done. And I've done that innumerable times with many, many customers actually out in the field. I'd like to go back to the investment topic for just a second. You know, I hear this saying, especially coming out of Silicon Valley, that's fail fast. Mm-hmm.

If Impinj had been held to fail fast, we would have failed because there was no fast. As I said before, any transformative technology takes time. Everybody takes mobile phones for granted today. It's taken 40 years.

I mean, I used the first mobile phone in 1985. It had a rotary dial. It was in a briefcase with a rotary dialed on a coil cord, right? So the fail-fast mantra works for disruptive approaches to existing problems where the foundation's already built. Fail-fast does not work when you're inventing a new category. And the benefit of having Madrona

and Arch on our board was that they didn't have the fail fast mantra. You guys had the nurture the company to success mantra. And Impinj was incredibly lucky, incredibly lucky and thankful

to have Madrona and Arch as our first investors. That's kind. I mean, and it's in the hardest parts about this business is riding the line between having patience versus putting good money after bad or falling in love with a bad idea. Tom was really good at this. I want to tie one other thing in here. I mean, Tom is clearly good at identifying talent and working with great people. You and Carver, Jeff Bezos early on. You've also done a great job. And I think for a lot of founders, you know, you came at it, you were...

technical background, you were a professor at UW, you had some great business partners over the years, Bill Collaren, Evan Fine, other, you know, how have you, you know, you were not CEO, you've now been CEO again for a long time. Any tips for, you know, newer founders, your approach to hiring people

create people that aren't technical? Like how did you hire heads of sales, heads of marketing, just in general, do you have an approach to, that's something you had to learn over time? It's always, I think one of the hardest things is bringing on board great people in areas that maybe you're not as comfortable with or don't have as much experience with as a founder. - You know, Tim, that's probably the hardest thing.

in a company is to hire good people and you always make mistakes along the way. And then to be able to correct your mistakes relatively quickly. Because what you'll find in a company is that bad apples, you will hire some, can cause immense damage. They don't only cause damage financially or other things, they cause cultural damage.

So the question is, how do you find the right people? And I don't know that there's a, I mean, you can write all this stuff down, you know, all kinds of things. And I don't, I haven't found an institutionalized way to go at it. I meet with people, spend time with them. I don't, I try and kind of probe who they are. I asked them questions about some of the things that were most difficult for them, how they would approach problems, but they're all basically ways of getting the person to open up.

and tell you who they are as a person. And I don't like to make a hiring decision until I understand who a person is. You know, on the technical side, it's easier for me. I have a, I guess I'm going to share my cheating technical interview question. I haven't figured out a way to do this on the non-technical side, but on the technical side, it's really easy. I meet with somebody and I say, I'm going to give you 20 minutes to ask me any question you want. But, and then I'm just going to ask you one question. And I'm going to tell you the question right now. So you have 20 minutes to think about it.

Okay, the question is this. I want you to spend the rest of the interview and teach me something. It could be in any topic, anything. And I've had people go into soil biology. I've had people go into neuroscience. I've had people go into, you know, the details of spectrum analyzer design, whatever it is. I want you to teach me. We actually did something in crypto and we were deriving equations on the board. Like, I just want you to teach me something. And you can get a lot from a person by asking them to teach you something. And

You're not asking them questions to probe what they don't know. You're asking them questions to probe what they do know.

And that's the most important thing, because if they actually truly do know something and they worked it all out and they understand it and I like it, you've actually learned something about the person. So great. Yeah. Don't steal my question all the time. Why just technical? That's a good question for anyone. If you actually understand something deeply, you should be able to teach it to me. It's harder to do on the sales side or something like that. I haven't yet figured out an equivalent question if I'm hiring a sales lead or something, but it is a question I use fairly often. Love it.

Love that. It's such a great tool because as you know, many tech companies, Bell Labs in the old days, Microsoft, they would ask these trick questions and there's no correlation between how you do. Like one of them, I was in an interview at Wall Street once and they asked me if a chicken and a half lays an egg in a day and a half, how many eggs does one chicken lay in one day? And that's absolutely ridiculous. If you know the answer, you know the answer, right? I would have said, you know, I don't really like eggs. Next question. Outside the box thinking. Just

Okay, we got to talk about the IPO. Okay. So Patrick had alluded to, you know, financing strategy over the years. You went public in 2016, as you alluded to, for those who don't remember, 2016 was not exactly a go-go year for tech. There was a kind of a bit of a downturn in that timeframe for a variety of different reasons.

And Pinge had already been around 16 years. We were outrunning our, we had outrun the funds that were initially funding us. Yes. So tell us that story and how did you, how did you manage to get public and how was that then a springboard for, you know, what's happened subsequently? How did we manage to get public through a lot again of perseverance? I mean, we had tried previously and hadn't had, um,

success just due to bad time, your events that happened. It was just, you know, in a prior attempt, the market bottom dropped out of the market just as we were about to go out. So a window opened in that 2016 timeframe. We decided to go, we put everything into it and we really, we focused on our story, this idea that we're going to connect everything in our everyday world to

a point of manufacturing through the supply chain, to point of sale, to consumer use, to end of life, beginning with the enterprise side. In so doing, we're going to transform business operations and really we're going to transform people's lives. That was the basis of the story and the industry has been growing at this pace, the opportunities here, all the pieces are in place. We went out and told the story passionately. The idea was hard.

We did not have the most glamorous IPO. You can hear about all these glamorous IPOs. They're flying here and there on private jets and it's easy. No, we didn't get to do that. I think in the first week of the IPO, I ate at McDonald's one night, Au Bon Pain one night, Subway one night, and then one night on the train where all they had for food on the train was a bag of M&Ms and a little half bottle of screw top white wine. And that was dinner. But we did pull it off. And you ended up raising about $100 million?

you know, in the valuation, the market cap after you went public was like 400 million. Yeah, it was. I don't remember the numbers. It's been too long ago. That was the order. I mean, I remember working on that together with you at the time. And, you know, you think about people talk about IPO windows being open or not open and that it's this place that billions of dollars gets rained down. But, you know, that was, that was a financing. It was a financing event, but it was a financing events with the public markets. It, um, and, uh,

What the IPO really did for us is it opened the window to the financial markets so that as we executed, we had access to more capital. And it basically allowed us to accelerate our trajectory and put more distance between us and our competitors. And that really was the benefit of the IPO. It's such a great story about IPOs being financings. I mean, so in eight years since, it's been almost 10X financings.

valuation, market cap increase. So it's pretty hard to get 10X in any business, but post IPO in less than 10 years is incredible. And another Tom story, I mean, he invested individually into the IPO and that was a bit of a catalyst too. And another kind of shrewd opportunity that he saw. So 24 years in, still day one, you mentioned earlier 0.5% penetrated. Okay.

Talk a little bit about the future of Impinj and the opportunity, the scenarios for consumers, for businesses that's still unfolding around this cool technology that you've really pioneered and created a category around. So when you use the term RFID, it's about as broad as saying radio because there's all NFC is RFID. There's animal tagging. There's all kinds of RFID. Key cards are RFID.

So a couple of years ago, we wanted to rebrand the industry in a name that was more consumer facing because the future is really about consumers getting benefit from the connected items. So we decided to rebrand the industry with RAINN, radio identification. That name has been a little slow to take hold, but I believe it will take hold. There truly is a future coming where not just enterprises, but people get the benefit of connected items, where you can locate the items in your house just through the readers in your house and you know where things are.

where you can authenticate your medicine or you authenticate items you buy either for authentication purposes or before you even purchase them. Where your phone, just by connecting with those items, we're not in phones today, but there's no reason. This could be the reader. This could be the reader. A phone could easily be the reader in the future. And I don't see any reason why it won't be a reader in the future. People will be able to get information about their items using their phones. And you can almost think of it as a, you know, kind of a

Apple AirTag type model writ very broadly. That really is how I envision the future. Every item that has value or interest to people, we can connect and we're going to do it. We're going to extend the reach of the Internet by a factor of 1,000 from powered electronic devices to things, and that is the Internet of Things. We're going to connect everything and it's going to be fun along the way. I'm just getting going. It's a good thing I'm still young. Not.

- So to that end, Chris, 24 years and counting, probably 25, 'cause you were putting InPinch together this summer, 25 years ago. - Yeah. - You have the same physical, intellectual, and emotional energy that you had then. How do you do it? Any tips for CEOs out there? - Don't get old. - Interesting advice from a physicist. - Just keep going. I work hard.

But I also play hard. Enjoy the time with your family. Enjoy the time when you're not working. Enjoy the time when you are working. I guess that is the advice. If you really like what you're doing,

then it's not work. So I love my time at home. I've got a granddaughter now. She's the joy of my life. And I get to, I actually take time off work half a day every week, not counting the time where I spend with her on the weekends and I babysit for half a day. That's my time blocked out of my calendar to go to be babysitting. And we play blocks and we read Dr. Seuss and all kinds of stuff. I get to do that. And I, but I also love what I'm doing at work. And so I guess that's the, that's the story. Do what you love, love what you do.

thank you so much you're so generous with your time you've built an amazing company and category so many people we we we built we and the team company you guys were on the team we built a company that's kind and i know patrick and i both learned a lot and you've spent a lot of time mentoring and sharing advice and this is another great example of that so thank you so much and here's to the next 25 years well thank you thank you thank you both very much thanks