{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"NC Tweener Talks","title":"Robin Cowie, CEO & Founder of Skillmaker: From Haunted Woods to the Repair Bay","html":"<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"180\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" seamless src=\"https://share.transistor.fm/e/1475466c\"></iframe>","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2988,"description":"Robin Cowie, CEO and founder of Skillmaker, went from co-creating The Blair Witch Project to building AI and extended reality tools for auto repair technicians, and he did it from Carolina Beach.\nRobin tells me how his father's \"point of view learning,\" first developed to train South African gold miners, shaped his films, his work on Madden, and now Skillmaker. We talk about how NAPA paid him to spend two months listening to repair shops before he built anything. That research turned into a platform that assesses technicians, cuts entry-level training from two years to a few months, and uses smart glasses to put verified repair data in front of techs mid-job.\nRobin also shares hard-won founder lessons. He explains why distribution is the hardest part of any startup and how partnerships with NAPA and Solera solved it early. He walks through how more than 460 shops paid for a beta product and generated about a million dollars in revenue before launch. And he explains why his goal is for Skillmaker to become boring.\nTimestamps\n00:00 Welcome to NC Tweener Talks\n00:23 Thanks to our sponsors\n01:32 Scot's intro: from Blair Witch to auto AR/VR\n03:08 Meet Robin Cowie, CEO & founder of Skillmaker\n03:42 Gold mines and \"point of view learning\"\n04:58 Film school and The Blair Witch Project\n06:25 Selling at Sundance and crashing the van\n09:25 Madden Longshot\n10:35 George Lucas, Skywalker Ranch, and Star Wars on a bedsheet\n12:00 From London to Carolina Beach\n13:50 Finding the problem: healthcare, then NAPA\n18:40 Cutting training from 2 years to 30 days\n20:20 Smart glasses and shop productivity\n22:50 Assess, accelerate, assist\n23:35 Quest 3, Unreal, and \"teach 5, test 5\"\n25:50 148 hours of VR content and the pipeline behind it\n29:05 Expanding into transportation\n30:20 Smart safety glasses and the Pareto principle\n33:05 Verified data: NAPA, Identifix, AutoVitals, ASE\n35:45 Robin's prior companies and his leadership team\n39:05 An agentic company and why distribution is key\n40:45...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/UEzoK7N1siD9YRaSVBWfZ8B3suSS2aonEIZ5NwBH1Gs/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS80NjBh/YWVhZTA4ZTUyY2Fl/MDdhNzQwZWFhNDI4/MDc3Zi5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}