From student to start-up: Virginia Tech alumnus changes the moving industry with artificial intelligence

In 2005, a 15-year-old Zach Rattner ’11 opened the recent issue of Time Magazine to read the cover article, “How Apple Does It,” the sixth cover feature of the innovative tech giant.

Accompanying the article was a photo of five men: then-engineering vice president Tony Fadell, iPod head Jon Rubinstein, industrial design chief Jony Ive, CEO Steve Jobs, and marketing director Philip Schiller. But it wasn’t the shiny new iPods, the MacBook, or even Jobs in his statement black shirt that caught Rattner’s eye – it was the graph paper drawings laid out in front of them.

“I had that image stuck in my head, this visual memory about wanting to be the guy who does the drawings,” Rattner said. "I didn't care about being a rock star person holding it. I wanted to be the guy who draws it on graph paper.”

Pen and pencil drawings drew him to engineering at Virginia Tech, and Rattner’s own curiosity and drive to challenge himself brought him to build his own business in artificial intelligence (AI). Rattner graduated in 2011, majoring in computer engineering, and went on to work at Qualcomm shortly after.

It would be a few years before Rattner and fellow Qualcomm colleague, Siddarth Mohan, would take the leap to co-found Yembo, an AI-powered company that provides content inventory, measurements, 3D models, floor plans, structure identification, and more via virtual surveys.

Nearly 10 years after launching Yembo, we sat down with him to chat about creating an AI start up; writing a book about his experiences; and his best Hokie advice.

What did you really learn at Virginia Tech? What sticks with you even today?

Virginia Tech taught me

• how to think,
• how to break a big problem down into smaller ones,
• how to visualize in my head what's happening on, for example, the silicon when I'm running a complex piece of code.

That knowledge doesn't get old; it doesn't get obsolete.

There was one class called applied number theory that stretched me and pushed the boundaries of my math knowledge and what I felt like I could learn. One assignment I particularly remember. We only had four questions, and two of them were unsolved problems in the field of number theory, which none of us knew. The professor didn't say anything, he just gave us homework, and nobody got it. But that was one of those light bulb moments for me, where the value wasn't so much in the answer you came up with, but the thought process. It was probably my worst grade out of my entire time at Virginia Tech, but in terms of horizon opening and trusting the mind, it was totally worth it.

What inspired you to take the leap of faith and build a startup? Many people talk about starting a company on their own, but you actually did it.

As someone who did it, I think it ended up being 100 to 1,000 times more work and more difficult than I thought it would be. My co-founder and I made a calculated risk in the early days – we treated it like a science experiment. We wrapped up these non-binding letters of intent by talking to moving companies and asking them, “if such and such a thing were to exist, would you be interested, and at what price point?” We basically got a stack of them big enough to convince us that there's probably a business to be had here.

The more I learned about the moving space and building AI for home services, the more I realized how sorely needed a solution was. Once you have that conviction that you're doing something that the world really needs, it's okay if the workload is more than you anticipated.

I love being able to see the impact of people falling in love with the products, not being able to imagine their life without them – all those things that come when you find product-market fit. It’s been a way to see things through, where I can see the impact of my work, and where I can actually change the way an industry operates. It’s very exciting.

I know you recently published a book called Grow Up Fast: Lessons from an AI Startup. Congratulations! What inspired you to take up a writing project?

There's just so much happening in the AI space, and I felt like I needed to encapsulate and share what I've learned to make it easier for somebody else to follow along. I learned so much starting an AI company, answering questions like

• How do you find a problem with pursuing?
• How do you hold the value proposition?
• How do you round up the tech to make it applicable to the target market?
• How can iterating delay your customer?

I wanted to organize all that in a package I thought could inspire the next generation of AI entrepreneurs, and I figured a book was the best way to do that because I can't sit down and talk to everybody for four or five hours!

What is your top advice for our Hokie students, whether it's about classes, studying, choosing a major?

I encourage students to not get stuck in a single-track mind of what success looks like. In my experience, creativity sits at the intersection of two different things, and if you just go in one direction, then you’ll miss that intersection. Those intersections are really fascinating – they're where you can make the world a better place.

I feel like the open-ended independent study courses at Virginia Tech helped me stand out from other engineers. By the time I had graduated, I’d fabricated my own printed circuit boards I designed, and I put on a fashion show with the architecture and fashion design majors. It was the grand finale of all these different engineering courses and applications, so I recommend taking some independent study courses, too.

Want to learn more about Rattner? Meet him in person on September 25 at the Arlington Research Center. Register for his colloquium talk today.