Episode 14 – teaBot

Our whole community at Main Campus has been in love with their personalized tea since we first partnered with teaBot to bring their machines to our cafe and bar. Based at StartWell, teaBot is a startup that has been through acceleration programs including Y Combinator and Creative Destruction Lab and weathered their first 5 years in existence to now have over 100 machines placed globally. In this conversation we sit down with Noor (Operations Manager) and Rehman (Co-founder, CEO) to discuss how a couple of engineers from Waterloo set out to solve an efficiency problem for a family business and ended up founded a company that now makes the world's best self-serve robots to brew custom teas on demand. *More info @ https://teabot.com/ [expand title="Podcast Transcript"] Qasim Virjee 0:25 All right, welcome back to this, the 14th episode of The Star podcast. For everyone listening who is well familiar with us. Hello, welcome back. It's nice to have you again. And for everyone who's checking this out for the first time, there are 13 More episodes to listen back to everything's available from our website at circle.co/communityandofcoursetherearesyndicationpartnersincludingtheonethateveryoneusesitunessoyoucangotoitunestypeitinonyourcomputermachineoryourphoneorwhateveryouusetoconnecttotheinternetanddownloadthisstartwellpodcast. You'll love it. This time around, I am back in the studio at King Street in downtown Toronto, with a couple of fine guests who are our partners and members and residents on the third floor of this campus, our main campus in downtown Toronto. We're joined in the studio here with Romana and Nora, from T bot. Alright, how are you? Hello. I'm great. So guys, why don't we just start by introducing to our listeners what a T bot is? Or who Yeah, let's start there. What is a T bot? Rehman Merali 1:35 What is a T bot T bot is a robot that makes t so we have these large T bot machines in malls, airports, a lot of schools, universities, colleges, and the customer walks up, there's a beautiful touchscreen interface, they create their own blend of tea, they can adjust the water temperature, the strength of the different ingredients. And even the strength of the tea itself. And in a retail environment like that they just swipe their credit card or tap or whatever you choose. And then it makes you a really nice cup of tea a couple of loose leaf tea. Qasim Virjee 2:10 And do you think that that explanation was necessary for most of our listeners for some of our listeners? How, how known is tea bought? Would you say? Rehman Merali 2:19 I don't know. I mean, to me, it still feels like a startup. But we have been at this since 2014. So it's been a few years. And it's it's always nice that you know, I go into my pitch mode and I start telling the story. Oh, yeah, I saw one of those. And so as I'm starting to finally get people be like, Oh, of course I know what that is. So that's really nice. So filling, Qasim Virjee 2:35 right it is this one recognizes the brand, or at least the brand is tied to the product. Yes, absolutely. Qasim Virjee 2:42 So tell me a little bit I know this is now five years, five years on did I get that math right? Feels like the end of the day. It's not the end of the day listeners is three o'clock. For all you hustlers out there you Gary Vaynerchuk fans, it's just morning. But yeah, so tell me a little bit about the early years. How did you get started? Rehman Merali 3:03 Yeah, absolutely. So I did an undergrad at the University of Waterloo and mechatronics engineering, which is basically a robotics degree. When I was doing my PhD in robotics, as well, at the University of Toronto, and my friend Brian, he's an old high school buddy also did engineering, but at McMaster University. And