How Moj CEO Kenny Hawk grew Moj to $25M revenue and 850K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is kenny hawk he joined moggio as chief executive officer and director in november 2015. he's responsible for leading the company on his mission to give every vehicle a voice he previously led three disruptive venture back companies as ceo he holds an mba from stanford where he'll net where he now guest lectures for the engineering entrepreneurship program kenny you ready to take us to the top absolutely good to see you again good to see you i was gonna say that first episode we did back in kind of mid 2016. i guess you would have been at mojo at that point for about a year and a half right yeah about a year and a half and uh he was just getting ready to launch our first customer so a lot of progress since then well i can't wait to touch on that for those of you that want to go reference that first episode it's episode 323 and forgive me kenny if i'm wrong here but right before this you had taken the company public for a different company public for what a billion dollars or something a company called i go and got close to a billion dollars market cap correct yeah and you left that for this i actually built a couple other companies in between one in switzerland doing gps chips in lugano switzerland and then it built an active antenna array company in germany backed by excel partners that was acquired by ketrine interesting okay let's talk telematics it comes into the sharing economy it comes into uber comes into the ride sharing wars help us understand what the company does and what your current revenue model is today sure so we have a cloud platform that connects cars to the internet basically ingesting data from the vehicle by plugging in a onboard diagnostic device into the obd port in the car connects over 4g lte puts a wi-fi hotspot on your car and then lets you know where your family your employees are your teen drivers and also gives you all the information that's coming off your car and puts it in plain language so you can understand and instead of just a dumb check engine light you know what's going on with your car whether it's urgent or something simple and we also now share with you the expected cost of that repair so it gives the consumer power uh when they're walking when they're driving into a repair shop and kenny back again when you're last on you were just kind of going to market so what's the model today i mean who are you selling to and is it a sas company or what absolutely it's a sas company monthly recurring revenue we sell through mobile operators and we have a um nine mobile operators live worldwide t-mobile in the us metropcs deutsche telecom in four countries uh telus up in canada and rogers and bell and we basically take a piece of their monthly fee that they're charging the consumers so typically the service costs about ten dollars in the us are ten euros in europe and for that you get high-speed wi-fi you get four free tows per year collision notification and of course all the information that's coming out of the vehicle because the device has an accelerometer we also can detect how you're driving so harsh braking harsh acceleration if you've been uh bump tower cars being stolen so it gives you a lot of visibility around your car and basically turns any car into a smart car so ten dollars uh kind of per me driver per month correct okay and that is paid directly to the the telecom and then you take a cut of that or that's your cut we that's paid to the telecom and we take a cut of that okay in the sharing economy we have a lot of uber and lyft drivers um that are putting this in their vehicle and they're getting more in tips per week than the system costs per month so people really like having wi-fi in the car especially when they're in ubers and lyfts that's so that's what i'm trying to understand here i'm trying to understand are you a genius marketer and you understand that the way to sell this to a large mod of the market is exactly that why find your car or are you coming at this from an enterprise angle going insurance companies love the data it makes premium kind of giving you know risk aversion easier or uber use this because it's going to help you drive more revenue like which side of the playing field are you on are you really bridging the gap you know we're bridging the gap and mainly but as he sparks yeah yeah for mobile operators um you know they all want new recurring revenue streams and yet it you know there's a lot of heavy lifting to get there and mobile operators are not known for developing products so what we do is provide this white label platform for a carrier like t-mobile or deutsche telecom where they could be in the iot business without having to do all the heavy lifting so we built the platform we do the mobile apps on ios and android we do all the data and analytics you can figure out the insights where you can save people time or money and we even manage the external hardware vendor that designs and produces the device we don't do the hardware but we manage that process for the carrier so it's really easy and a good example is with t-mobile we help them generate 100 million dollars of brand new revenue in the first 12 months how through the through the product that we develop for them so so you i can take 100 million in revenue divide that by 10 you help them sign up that many new customers if you also add the hardware correct you get the cost of the hardware you have the monthly fee and that's correct you can work your way back from there okay i mean there'd be like 10 million consumers signing up at 10 bucks a month to get 100 million bucks in revenue 100 million per year not 100 million per month okay got it so just okay so basically basically basically it'd be a hundred i think to take i need to take 100 million by 120 because they're paying 10 bucks a month for 12 months yes okay good so you helped them sign up called 800 000 new subscribers new new t-mobile whatever subscribers well we're not reporting the exact number but plus or minus that's the right that's the right range okay they also include the cost of the hardware and some of that revenue but it's meaningful it's you know it wasn't a blip it was a big it was a big number it moved the needle and that's why we've gone from one carrier to nine carriers since we last talked that's what i'm trying to understand is is how you're directly attributing that to you like how do they know oh wow this is kenny driving this revenue i need to do more deals with him and other carriers are probably going to sign him up quick i should invest and be a strategic investor because we're the one that did the entire product we did everything what they did is open up their channels they put it into the retail channel we did everything else we did the use cases the app we trained the sales force on how to sell it we even did the demonstration videos that run inside the store so if you go into any t-mobile or metro pcs store in the us you'll see this product in the shelves and it'll say 10 bucks a month correct okay so okay so let's go down the t-mobile pack because this is that'll be very relatable for the audience so t-mobile set up for 10 bucks a month some of that flows through you are we talking like a dollar or like nine dollars flows through to you you know the operator gets the bulk of it because they're handling the backhaul and all the selling and but we get a nice chunk of that we don't share those numbers but it's a revenue share we get a piece of that healthy uh we just closed a 40 million dollar b round and we're gonna we're going to be uh cash expect to be cash positive on that b round okay so just to be clear how much have you raised now to date we raised um let's see 40 plus 15 call it 57 million so there's a 2 million seed plus 15 plus 40. okay when when was the 40 closed what month a december okay december were you or did you build yourself to break even at that point before you raced so you had leverage or were you still burning still burning and we will still burn through the end of this year and then we'll hit break even on this amount of money that we raise so this cash should take us through the cash break even which will happen towards the end of this year early next year got it okay i want to talk more about how you're modeling that out because you've done this many times before with success so we'll get back to that in a second but first a company launch date was 2015 is that right i actually launched in 2012 i took it over in 2015. what does that mean you bought remind me you bought it no as part of the a round the investors wanted a more experienced uh ceo the four founders were all good people that hadn't built companies before so they wanted somebody experienced to take the company into a uh carrier you know into a b2b direction they were selling b to c and it wasn't working and i took the company pivoted it to b to b to c through the operators and that's when we really started taking take off and built a you know carrier-grade platform no really really really smart so and what have you scaled today in terms of total customers using using the tool and we'll ignore the operators the folks in the middle i mean the actual the c's on the end yeah i mean we're the number reporting uh publicly is over 850 000 uh cars we've connected nine carriers and...