Priority 1: Don’t surface the thermal issue yet.
You don’t have NDA signed. Raising the thermal defect in a pre-NDA meeting puts your analysis on the table without protection and without formal engagement. If they don’t proceed with you, you’ve given them your work product for free. If they do proceed, you’ve raised it in a forum (with Claire/Arm) that may not lead to the right escalation.
Hold the memo. Tonight is for diligence questions, not findings.
Priority 2: Use the meeting to gather information that strengthens your Phase 1 position.
The questions to ask, framed as a prospective CTO doing technical diligence:
- Current product state. “Walk me through where the product is today. What’s working in the Thailand pilot, what isn’t, what feedback are pilot users giving?”
- Architecture overview. “Can you describe the current technical architecture end-to-end — collar firmware, dock, mobile, cloud, ML pipeline? Who built each piece?”
- Firmware specifics. “Who’s the firmware team and what’s their relationship to Pync — employees, contractors, what’s the engagement structure? What’s the IP ownership setup?”
- Thermal and certification. Don’t lead with the defect. Ask diagnostically: “What thermal testing has been done on the collar? What’s the certification roadmap for FCC, CE, NBTC? Who’s running certification?”
- Pilot health. “What’s the protocol for pilot users? How is feedback collected? Are there any safety incidents or complaints to date?”
- Roadmap to July launch. “What’s the gate criteria for July launch? What needs to be true for the product to ship at scale?”
- Team plan. “What’s the engineering hire plan? Who reports to the CTO? Where’s the firmware leadership coming from?”
- Arm specifically. “Arm, what’s your current scope and time allocation? What does H-1B transfer to Pync look like timeline-wise, and what does your post-transfer scope look like?”
300k coming in from investors in about 3 weeks, mid May Singapore investor and distributor, 2000 units Kismet, food nutrition product for dogs, owned by John Legend, partnered with Pync, ready by Q3 2026, 20% off
Capgemini in talks.
- 30 units for data collection, worn product for some time, how battery snap with collar, heat. ML models improvements. Test with paid users next week. Still lots of bugs. In Thailand. Connectivity issues, when outside of home, connect to phone. When back home, connect to wifi. Chinese firmware.
- TBD to migration. Next 2 months migration.
- Pync US own IP. 2 firmware engineer, 1 PM in Korea. Arm will be PM going forward.
- 3rd party certification. Thermal issue almost done fixing. Reducing data transmission.
- Complaint about hardware, battery. Detachable system. Safety band for user. Accessories of the collar is not as soft, is strong but mechanism too strong. For software, connectivity. Building avatar. Interviewing users, let dog wear collars, take video, 5-10 hours video, do data training too, has been doing for 7 days. After 7 days, interview feedback.
- July Thailand. Live avatar to reflect real actions of dogs. AI model. 2 behaviors for avatar. General features.
- Team. 2-3 engineers including me.
- Arm spend times after work, light work.
2 months migration time maps to the part-time work trial.