Eyebot is on a mission to make vision care accessible to everyone, equally.
Jack Moldave, Co-Founder & CEO, shares everything you need to know about their Engineering team!
In this Video
Jack discusses:
- Who is Eyebot?
- Details on the Engineering team
- Kiosk Details & Unique Challenges
- The interview process
- Why now is a good time to join
Video Transcript
Hi, my name is Jack Moldave. I’m the CTO and one of the co-founders here at Eyebot. Eyebot makes fully automated vision testing kiosks that can measure your eyeglass prescription in about 90 seconds. We’re deployed in Walmarts, Sam’s Clubs, as well as moving to a bunch of other places. Think of us as bringing the eye test from the back of the room to the front of the store, enabling people to get their eyeglasses significantly faster and a lot cheaper.
We are a small engineering team right now. We operate pretty lean and I think if I were to look at it from an outside perspective, a lot of people think that we have quite a few people here. Actually, we have about 12 people. I think the largest team is our software team and we also have a pretty big systems team—big meaning four or five people.
It’s been a really fun journey to get there. By operating at essentially a fairly lean small startup, you get to learn all sorts of things. We have people who started off as a software engineer and their second week on the job they were assembling kiosks, and we have people who are mechanical engineers learning Python and using Python to automate various things. That being said, they spend the majority of the work doing the thing that they’re really good at and trained to do, but you have so many opportunities to really understand the context of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and working with all these other teams. We’ve built a really tightly integrated team to do that.
We started this company in 2021; that was the incorporation date. Matias and I actually met in 2020 to get things rolling. A lot of the inspiration for our work comes from the time that we’re in. What we wanted to do is build something that was touch-free because no one was sticking their face in any sort of kiosk during those times. We also wanted it to be something that was relatively self-served so any user could walk up and just get their test. We were seeing that scheduling is a huge hassle; booking it and getting there takes weeks. So we wanted to make something that you could walk up to and in about 90 seconds finish your test and get your eye prescription.
That has its own challenges. Nothing really existed, so we built from scratch an autorefractor, which measures your eye prescription by sending infrared light into your eyes and measuring the output, as well as a lensometer which extracts the prescription from your glasses when you place them in a tray. This happens simultaneously for the user using our kiosk and takes about 10 to 15 seconds for the entire thing.
That involved so much engineering. We built the autorefractor from the ground up. We designed basically all the components to work as a self-served tool, which involved optics, embedded systems, mechanical design, robotics, and computer vision. For our early engineers, that was only a couple of us, so we really worked across that entire stack.
Now as we’re moving forward, we get to be a little bit more specialized. Some of the problems that you’ll start to see is that we built a face tracking system that works fantastic for what we needed, but now as we scale to hundreds of different deployments and work for all sorts of people, we want to bring it from 80% to 95%, then 95% to 99%. Those are some of the problems that you’re going to be working on. Bringing something from 80% to 100% is quite a bit of work. You’re going to probably fundamentally redesign a lot of these systems. You get to take something that you know is probably possible, but you also have a ton of influence over the direction that it’s actually going to go.
We run a fairly standard interview process, although there’s a couple things that we do a little bit differently. One of the first things we do when we bring a candidate in is we actually have them use the kiosk. Rather than having us explain this thing, we can just give a live demo. We found a live demo explains the whole thing in about 90 seconds and then it sparks a lot of conversation. A lot of our candidates actually walk out with an eye prescription, which is a kind of bonus with your interview.
My favorite part of our job interview is we do a working session. We usually do a problem that we have solved, and most likely the people who are interviewing you have personally solved that problem. They really know the intricacies of that. They give you the problem and they say, “Hey, we’d like to solve this together.” There will be a whiteboard and maybe some toys that we bring in, like cameras. They basically treat you like you are the new hire tasked with solving this problem. I am a resource; you can ask me any questions you want. It’s really a collaborative experience. Instead of a worksheet that we send you home with, you get to see what it’s like to work with us and we get to see what it’s like to work with you. It helps us see if a person is nice, smart, thinks quickly, and is creative on the fly. For the candidate, they can see if they like us. After they finish this, a lot of people say, “Hey, that was actually kind of fun,” because we’re just working together to solve hard problems.
I think there’s a few different reasons to join. Some of the hard problems are still not solved yet. We’ve made a fantastic kiosk, but there are so many things that we can do better and so many different areas that we want to get into. When you’re joining now, you get to work on things that are built 80% of the way and build them into a scalable solution that works for thousands of units in the field. The things that you work on actually go to customers rather quickly.
I remember when I was in college, my dream job was to work at some place like BMW because I was a mechanical engineer. They are awesome, but I think I’d be such a small cog in such a giant company. I always wanted to work at a smaller place where the thing that I was working on would be shipped within the year. We are a small company of about 27 or 28 people, and we’re hopefully going to double that by the end of the year. The stuff you work on actually gets shipped to customers rather quickly. You can actually go to a Walmart in Pennsylvania and see your pull request active in the field and watch people using it, which is really satisfying. We like to hire builders, and builders like to build things.