Guest

Steve Subar

Founder and CEO at Mat Fresher, serial entrepreneur with 30+ years building and exiting companies including Open Kernel Labs

Today in the Sky Lounge, we are joined by Steve Subar, COO/CEO at TechCXO, who's spent three decades building, guiding, and growing companies. His latest venture? The world's first fully automated yoga mat cleaning machine.It's not exactly cocktail party material, Steve admits. But the story behind MatFresher reveals something more interesting than the product itself: what happens when an experienced founder decides to design the business model before the company.After selling Open Kernel Labs to General Dynamics in 2012 and spending 13 years consulting for tech companies, Steve started his next venture with three non-negotiable constraints. He wanted recurring revenue. He wanted high gross margins. And he was done—completely done—with B2B sales friction. His entire career had been large systems, complex sales, long cycles. At this stage, he wanted something different.The yoga mat problem emerged from Steve's own 20-year hot yoga practice. Here's a discipline built on the Sanskrit concept of Saucha (cleanliness of spirit, mind, and body), practiced on mats that smell like the inside of old hockey equipment. But before investing in product development, Steve did what experienced entrepreneurs do: he tested whether anyone actually cared.He bought a folding table, rubber gloves, antiseptic spray from Whole Foods, and a Square reader. He showed up at yoga studios and asked people if they'd pay two bucks to get their mat cleaned. They would. But something more valuable happened during those 50-minute gaps between classes when he had nothing to do but talk to studio owners and staff.He learned that the bigger problem wasn't hygiene—it was unit economics. Only 10% of yoga studio operators net more than $100,000 annually. They're not in it to get rich; they're in it to help people. But cleanliness is the number one factor affecting their Net Promoter Score and churn rate. If Steve could reduce their labor costs while visibly improving hygiene, he'd solve two problems at once.This is the kind of insight you can't get from market research or surveys. “Information is not the same as wisdom,” Steve says. You can look up anything online, but “you can't Google for experience.” True wisdom comes from combining information with experience—and that's what leads to good decision-making.Steve's career bears this out. At Open Kernel Labs, his team figured out how to apply virtualization software to power-constrained devices like mobile phones. They started by targeting the most paranoid customer: the NSA. Thousands of people couldn't bring cell phones into Fort Meade. The agency was stuck with the “ObamaBerry”—essentially two BlackBerrys glued together, one for classified and one for unclassified communications.Open Kernel Labs became the first method for the NSA to enable standard smartphones for their employees. That stamp of approval opened commercial doors. By the time General Dynamics acquired the company, their software was in 1.6 billion phones.Steve calls this approach “in through the out door”—finding the entrance nobody else is using. While everyone lines up at the obvious door, he looks left and right for the legitimate entrance that's wide open but overlooked.Now with MatFresher, he's applying those same principles to a hardware-as-a-service business in an industry where most VCs say “we don't do hardware.” But that's the point. Thirty years in, Steve isn't looking for the crowded entrance. He's still finding out doors nobody else sees. Steve Subar brings 20+ years of experience launching and leading high-growth technology companies in hyper-competitive markets; from inception to IPO and Fortune 500 acquisition. He’s recognized for novel product and business model innovation with a focus on enterprise applications, B2B, and SaaS software. As a founder, CEO, investor, and board member, Steve’s earned a reputation for building clever strategies and winning teams, driving accelerated growth, developing strong customer relationships, and creating superior shareholder value.