Seymour Segnit Podcast Transcript
Seymour Segnit joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Seymour Segnit. Seymour Segnit is the passionate and enthusiastic founder, president, and CEO of MagFast, an inventive new suite of sleek and powerful magnetic plus fast wireless chargers that are changing charging for good. Segnit founded MagFast in 2017 after a four-year run at the helm of another USB charging company, and his new family of wireless chargers is set to revolutionize the industry Seymour grew up in London and studied engineering at Oxford University, and although he admits that formal education was never his forte, his strong work ethic and grit saw him through a successful early career in communications.
Seymour had previous stints at both Ogilvy & Mather and Saatchi & Saatchi, two of the world’s largest advertising agencies in London. He then went on to host a live show for Europe’s top commercial station, Capital Radio. Well, good afternoon, Seymour. Welcome to the show.
Seymour Segnit: Hey, Brian. Thank you for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. Making the time today. You’re hailing out of New York City. I’m in Kansas City, so just an hour apart, and I appreciate you. Seymour, let’s jump right into your first question here, if you don’t mind. Your path is wonderfully varied. You studied engineering at Oxford, worked at advertising giants Ogilvy & Mather and Saatchi & Saatchi, hosted a live show on Capital Radio, co-founded an early SaaS startup in Silicon Valley, and ran a USB charging company before starting Magfast in 2017.
You’ve called Magfast a culmination of an entire career. How do you… all those chapters, advertising, radio, software, hardware, actually come together in what you’re building now?
Seymour Segnit: I’ve kind of got no idea, but I’ll give it a go for you, Brian, because it, it does seem to be… I found that whenever you’re involved with sort of any area of endeavor where other people are doing something for you or helping to do it, it kind of helps if you already understand the field a little bit.
Like, if you’re, if you’re having a carpenter, replacing a door in your house or something, it helps if you understand the tools just a little bit. And I find that because the bus- the business of business is so many, is so multifaceted, right, that the sort of bizarre range of experiences all over the place means that if we’re talking about marketing, you know, I’ve got a little bit of a feel for it.
If we’re t- if we’re talking about how to speak to people, it didn’t hurt that I was a disc jockey on Capital Radio for a while, was in the software business for a while. I think one of the number one advantages that we’re building for the company at the moment internally comes from that understanding of software and how data should be.
Not… This, this isn’t customer-facing. This is the stuff that we’re, especially in the modern age with agentic technologies and so on, that we’re building internally is becoming a kind of superpower. And if I hadn’t understood for, several decades the way I wanted data to be but could never really have it ’cause it was too hard we wouldn’t be able to do what we’re doing, what we’re doing today.
And then of course, it, it di- didn’t hurt that, that before Magfast I worked in USB charging for a while and started to understand that industry. So d- does that kind of make, make sense a little bit how the jigsaw fits together?
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate that. Always love the backstory. Kind of builds what has led up to what you’re doing today and how you’re successful in your space, so I appreciate that.
Seymour, your core insight is that people don’t need more adapters, they need one system that works everywhere. MagFast is built as the first and only true charging ecosystem where chargers and power banks share a common design language and snap together magnetically with Qi 2 technology. Why did you decide to build an integrated system rather than just a better single charger, and why has no one else done it?
Seymour Segnit: I can’t really tell you why no one else has done it. I mean, the, the… One, one of the problems with making a system is that you’ve kind of got to commit to some stuff early on, right? Because you can’t constantly be changing. You can’t evolve every product ev- e- every few months, every, every couple of years.
You need to say, “No, this, this matters, and this is sort of permanent or s- or semi-permanent.” If, if you look at the companies that have done it well Remember when we were kids, Brian, sitting, sitting there on the nursery floor surrounded by Lego? They don’t get to change, the, those little, the little bits on the bricks that make them hold together.
Like, that was a, that was a big commit, right? When they commit, when they committed to the spacing of those little, I don’t– what are they called? The little bumps. Like, they, they were laying it down for decades to come, right? If you look at the, the tool making companies, right? They have to decide the design of the battery so as that all the tools will work with the battery.
Apple and other parts of the industry have, have locked in on stuff. But what we decided to do was to say, “We’re not gonna try…” I- actually, in an earlier phase of the company, we had our own magnetic system which was great. You know, people loved it. M- magnets are kinda magical. They speak to the child within.
But but it meant that either we had to persuade other companies to do what we were doing or folks were only ever going to be, w- with us if they wanted things to snap together. And those products were great. I was proud of them. They took far too long to ship. We made a whole bunch of mistakes.
But for the second, for the second phase of the company, for our second generation products, we decided, you know what? We’re gonna, we’re gonna lock in on the the industry standards. And you, you just mentioned Qi2 there and MagSafe, which is the kind of the Apple name for the same thing, and that’s the r- the kind of ring that you see…
I’m, I’m gonna s- say this in very sort of basic language, ’cause our discovery is that most people, most consumers actually don’t know about this amazing feature in their phone, which is that it can charge wirelessly and the big unlock for charging wirelessly is to have one of these cases with with a ring of magnets on it that then allows it to attach to the da- dashboard of your car or attach to the mount on your desk or, or, or whatever.
So we decided to say we’re gonna lock in on those two technologies the, the MagSafe Qi2, we call it wireless magnetic charging ’cause then we think people can understand what it is, and the USB-C standard, which is now standard across the industry, which, which is very, very powerful indeed. I mean, you, you can get way more power out of one of those cables than most of us need for, for anything we do every day.
Our, our top cable called, called Lux Pro, 240 watts. This is insane. You know, your, your ph- your phone needs, needs 30 or 40 or whatever. Your laptop maybe, you know, maybe tops out at kind of 120, a hundred, 150. So the standard can… is, is fantastic. Loads and loads of data for people who need fast data transfer.
And then you mentioned design language. We just decided to go with really simple kind of organic shapes that people love. S- c- circles and ovals aren’t going out of fashion. You know what I mean? They, they’re gonna, they’re gonna be here a year from now, 10 years from now, a, a, a century from now.
And so we just try to keep the design so simple that it will always be delightful
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. That’s awesome. Let’s talk about that again. You talked about kind of the genesis of your product, but your second generation, you decided to lock into that industry standard, and you talked a little bit about that Qi2 standard and Apple’s MagSafe standard.
But at the end of the day, you’re leveraging the standards. You’re trying to help educate people on what all this means because at the end of the day, we do need to keep it simple for people, and you’ve done that with just your design. It’s a design that is really simple, and, and people tend to love that, so I appreciate your insights.
Seymour, you’ve generated over twenty-five million in orders and pre-orders 100% through digital marketing, often via webinars and live streams you host yourself. Yep. That’s an unusual way to launch hardware. Why did you go direct to consumer, and what has you running your own marketing taught you about that traditional hardware company would never learn?
Seymour Segnit: Well, don’t do it is, is the main, the, the main learning from all of this. No, I think, look, if, if you go direct… There was a, there was a, a time in sort of, the zeitgeist when it was like everybody needed to start a direct-to-consumer company. You know, remember the, the kind of the, the mattress companies and the shoe companies and the, and the kind of e- the kind of everything companies.
And the best of them, of course, did, did really, did really well. I’m still… I actually took my wife to the airport just a few hours ago with her Away suitcase. But a lot of them didn’t, didn’t work out because they hadn’t sort of figured out the economics of it, and, and candidly, I don’t think we had during our first generation.
We were looking over our numbers just yesterday with, with, with the team, and, as a… in business, right, the n- numbers matter, and we’ve made dramatic improvements in, in our kind of, you know, in our, our margins and our costs and all of those kinds of things. But your question was about going direct to, to the customer.
You can’t really know the customer if you don’t know who they are. You know, you b- if you, if you put a product into a store and it’s purchased, you may never hear from that individual unless there’s a problem, right? There’s a tiny chance that they’ll, that they’ll review you somewhere, but they’re more likely to review you…
Th- when people have a problem, they’re more likely to give a bad review than a happy customer is to give a, a good review. We know this as a, a kind of core principle of business. Whereas if your customers buy from you, then you’ve got at least basic information to keep in touch and say, you know, “Are, are you happy?”
And w- when they get in touch, you can say, “Oh, I see you purchased it, 17 days ago or, or 170 days ago,” what, what, what, whatever it is. And if you have all of that information in one place… And this is if I could sort of share one of the core principles that, that I think is, again, I’ve wanted for decades in business, but it’s kindly finally becoming possible because I think we’re ahead of the average company in, in using, in using LLMs and agents to, to kind of superpo- superpower the team.
Not everybody’s with the program yet, but the, but our best people are getting, you know… M- my, my best, my best software and systems lead, she believes her- herself to be 15 times more efficient now, 15, than she ever was before. 15. So, a dollar paid to her is worth $15 from a couple of, couple of years ago.
But when you know your customers and you’ve got the information, you can, you can super serve them in amazing ways, and so using that, we’ve now got, for instance- A voice agent, right? That’s actually delightful. And Brian, I, I don’t even know how to say this to you. The, the, th- that we have one massive problem with our our voice agent that can talk to our customers.
You wa- you wanna know what it is? People assume that Maggie is going to be awful because they’ve always been awful, right? Automated customer care services have been appalling for 20, for 30 years. You know, you … I, I was talking to a friend of mine at the coffee shop the other day. He says, “Seymour, you’re an idiot.
No one wants an automated like that. Press two for this, press three for that. Your call’s very important to us. You’re an idiot.” I sent him a tape of Maggie later in the day, a recording with a, with, with, with a customer, and Maggie’s going “Hey, Brian thanks very much. Oh y- your package? Yeah, it was delivered yesterday afternoon in in Kansas City at about, about 2:30 on your, on your porch.
You, you, you got it okay, did you?” That’s our automated agent speaking like that to customers, and they’re thrilled. You hear the recordings of it, they’re absolutely thrilled. So that’s a good reason to go direct to your customers is, is because when they call, you can, you can serve them brilliantly in minutes today rather than putting them on hold ’cause they’re so bloody important and having them wait for 15 minutes to speak to someone who doesn’t really know who, who they are.
And there’s m- you know, there’s many, many other reasons as, as as well. I, I think it’s a s- it’s, it, it becomes a superpower if you do it right. But we do want to be in in retail. You know, like we’re, we’re a relatively young company. You know, we do, we do millions of dollars a year rather than tens of millions of dollars a year at the moment.
And when we have a b- kind of, a better balance sheet for funding inventory, ’cause it’s very expensive to go into, into retail. We do want to be there because then people who see our advertising and don’t buy from us may stumble across us in Best Buy. But we’ve got a whole sort of system built around the product to kind of encourage product registration at much higher levels than our, our previous work on that.
We’re getting… A, a typical product registration card will get half of a percent of people registering or something. We, we’ve got something in place that t- typically gets 25 to 30%. So at least we would know a third of our customers from retail, right?
Brian Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And I appreciate that. Early on in our conversation, you talked about the various backgrounds you had in your career that helped really in what you’re doing today, building an amazing company.
But you leverage that marketing background, of course, and that direct to consumer approach has been really successful. And what I took away, you can’t know your customer if you don’t know who they truly are. Yeah. And I really appreciate that. Leveraging AI, of course, you said you had staff that leveraging AI, they got about 15 times better in efficiency and productivity, which, which is awesome.
And of course, you’re absolutely right. The voice agents have come literally 200% in just the last probably eight to 12 months.
Seymour Segnit: That’s true, but make sure that they’ve got the information, ’cause otherwise it, it’s just a really good voice that can’t talk to you. The example I, the example I gave of, “Yeah, Brian, we delivered your package at, to, in Kansas City on your porch,” that, that’s sp- we are doing that every day now.
I, I don’t know other companies that are because they don’t have all of their data in one place and, and the… You can’t speak to a custom- you can’t answer all of a customer’s questions if you don’t know all of the information about, about the customer. Done ethically, held securely, of course. But typically this information has been scattered across multiple systems, and we’ve brought it all together in one place.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, using that retrieval. Augmented generation is, is very powerful, of course. It is.
Seymour Segnit: The rag.
Brian Thomas: Yep. The rag, yep. So Seymour, last question of the day, if you could briefly share, the charging world is shifting fast with USB-C and the new Qi2 standard now leading the way, and you’ve said there’s no significant perfect solution yet.
If we look five, even 10 years out, where do you see the charging heading? Will cables finally disappear? What role will smarter battery tech play? And what does changing charging for good ultimately look like when it’s fully realized?
Seymour Segnit: I think finally the industry has got a couple of winners here with USB-C and the, the Qi2 MagSafe standard.
I think the standards are really good. I think most people they kinda know what USB is, and that, and that now it’s this newer, neater one. Like, I think the average person, like certainly Apple people know the, the, the thing they plug in, the, the, the cable changed a few years ago, and now it seems to be the same cable everywhere.
So I think consumers have that, that sort of perception, and I just, as I explained a, a little earlier, the standard, the USB-C standard i, is gonna give us everything that we need for a long, long, long time to come. It, it, it, it, it really is. I mean, you can, you know, you can download a high-definition movie in three seconds on the faster things it, with…
and lots of watts. With the with the I, I can’t even believe I have to say two names. Qi2, MagSafe, depending on which world you live in, standard, which at MagFast we call WMC, the wireless magnetic connection. WMC, wireless magnetic connection. It’s this ring of magnets is also great, but most people don’t understand it because the industry’s…
E- even here with me, industry expert, I can’t– I don’t even know what to call it to our listeners today, Brian, because the And- Android people don’t know what MagSafe is, and Apple people don’t know what Qi2 is and, and it’s a, it’s a terrible muddle. But wireless magnetic connections, mount– wireless magnetic charging with that ring of magnets on the back of your phone is fantastic and once you switch to it, you’ll never go back.
You just never go… Yeah, you’ll plug in occasionally. If you’re in a hurry, it’s a bit faster by cable. But most of the time you just have a mount in your car, a mount on your desk, mount by the bed, and just, as, as I’m talking, as I’m talking to you now, I just, I look across the room, there’s my phone mounted on, right now it’s on MagFast Air Pro, the the marketing malpractice, not to mention our product name, but Mag- MagFast Air Pro.
And it’s charging away, and it’s very convenient, and it’s angled, angled towards me, so it’s great. When I leave this, I’ll go next door to get a cup of coffee. I’ll just, I’ll grab it off, no fumbling with wires. So I think those two standards stay with us for a long, long time to come. We have a, a secret project that we think can bring the best of both worlds in a way that’s compatible with both worlds, but it’s it’s a way, it’s a ways off yet.
So that’s a little something we’ve got kind of i- in the, in, in the back pocket. And you were saying, well, you know, what, what does changing charging for good mean over the long term? I, I think it means, I mean, MagFast’s origins are now getting on for a decade old. I feel like we’re coming into our, our kind of power, you know, as a company, I think we’re coming into our power now.
I think if you have some core, sort of core ideals and core values, they don’t change over time, just your ability to, to deliver on them does. So we said changing charging for good at the beginning ’cause it was, you know, it was quite a n- quite a neat catchphrase. We still use it. It’s still core to the company.
I don’t have a sort of public catchphrase that captures that same essence, but we do have an internal goal that ev- that, that, and it’s, it can only ever be a goal because it’s such a tough standard, that everything we do should be delightful. And Brian, that– when people first hear that, maybe even you, dear listener, listening to it now, you think, “Well, that’s, that’s a bit of a, that’s a bit of a, a wooly-headed CEO, isn’t it?
You know, how, how cute he wants things to be delightful. Isn’t that sweet?” I’m here to tell you it is the toughest standard in business. Is this product delightful? Well, it’s a little bit awkward to plug this in. Okay, well, it’s not done then. We’ve got to send it back and redesign it. Is this packaging delightful?
Like, does it actually lift your spirits a little bit when you hold the packaging in your hand? If it doesn’t, it isn’t delightful. Oh, your automated phone agent I think we have a delightful one. I don’t think many other… It, it, and, and, oh, and are we actually nice to each other in the company every day, right?
Or are people playing silly, stupid office politics and so on. It’s you know, the– it’s, it’s a, it’s a new way of capturing the old principles of how to win friends and influence people, right? You know, what’s the expression? You catch more flies with honey, right? If we’re all good to each other the whole time, individually as people within the organization and with our, and with our customers, really good things, good things happen.
That’s the destination. We’ve screwed up massively in the past, like massively in the past. But whatever we do, we try to make it up to to, to our stakeholders, our, you know, literally our shareholders. One in five of our customers is a, is an actual shareholder in the company, thanks to the Reg CF launches that we’ve been allowed to do.
Three-quarters of our shareholders are customers. That– those are un- those are unusual. And I think it’s because we make the products in such a way that when you have one, you really do want to get another one. You’re not locked in with us. We’re not locking you into a standard. What we attempt to do is to lock you in, I, I guess, emotionally.
You just love the products so much. And and it s- it seems to work because we have– I think the latest number is the average owner of one of our– if, if you own a product of ours at all, I think the average number is now fifteen. And someone said the other day, “Well, yeah, but you do cables. I mean, people just have lots of cables.”
Yeah, seven of them are cables, but eight of them aren’t cables. If you look around, if you look at, I believe Apple’s number is a-around four products. Yeti, right, which is like the church of Yeti you know, people worship Yeti their number is, you know, three and a half, four, something like that.
So I think this, this sort of dream-dreamer CEO with his idea that everything should be delightful has actually got some numbers to back up that it’s it’s commercially quite a smart strategy, though I say so myself, Brian.
Brian Thomas: Delightful. I appreciate that. I really do. And just to highlight a couple things here Seymour.
Finally, the industry is winning. We’ve got these standards, USB-C, Qi2, MagSafe, of course, but speed and convenience is dominating the market, and that’s what people want. And that game changer now you talked about is that wireless magnetic charging. And of course, delightful is the new standard, and I really liked how you went through that.
So I appreciate that. And Seymour, it was such a pleasure having you on today.
Seymour Segnit: That’s very kind of you. Could– Shall we do something delightful for your listeners, Brian?
Brian Thomas: Oh, of course.
Seymour Segnit: Should we, should we give them one of these cases? Sure. Would that be, would that be okay? Or would that… Or, or am I taking advantage of the situation?
No. Should we do that?
Brian Thomas: Let’s, let’s just do it.
Seymour Segnit: This is, this is a, a thing that we do for new customers. Pretty much any phone from the last five years, we have a case. It’s called the Clear Cut Case. It’s a simple, beautiful, clear, high-quality case with a ring of magnets on it. We will gift one to anyone who would like to go to magfast.com/brian, the name of your host today, folks, Brian Thomas.
Just go to magfast.com/brian, and it’ll take you to a page where you just pick your phone, and we’ll give you the case. It’s $49 in the store. You pick up shipping, which I think is f- I think it’s $5.99 in the, in the, in the US. Of course, if you happen to pick up other things while you were there, we would be thrilled.
But that’s that’s not, not necessary at all. But we have the cables and chargers we were mentioning just now. But go, go, go get a case and see how, see how great it is, and maybe we’ll see you again sometime.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. Thank you again for that. I appreciate helping the listeners out, of course. And as always, it’s been a pleasure having you on, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Seymour Segnit: Okay. Thanks, Brian. Pleasure.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Seymour Segnit Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
