Founder & CEO Of Deep Sentinel: David Selinger AKA The Founder Boss – S3E19 (#115)

S3E19 David Selinger.m4a – powered by Happy Scribe

Welcome back to Boss Uncaged podcast. Today’s show is not only just a special show, it’s going to be highly interesting because I was looking doing my due diligence and I’m looking at this man’s resume and I’m looking at all the different things I had an opportunity to done in a short period of time. He’s been on this planet. And not only is it amazing, but I think the best way to summarize it would be to get him a T shirt that says, hey, Silicon Valley, I’m your wet dream. Literally. Absolutely right. So I’m going to introduce him as the founder Boss, because again, literally one out of three positions he’s held. He’s been a founder. I mean, he was the co founder of Redfin. He actually worked on some RND stuff with Amazon, like with the right hand man of Jeff Bezos. And obviously he’s now the founder of this cool but interesting software hardware platform. So I want you to kind of tell us a little bit more about who you are. We’re going to dive into where you are right now. We’re going to dive into everything. It’s going to be a pretty decent, solid episode. So without further Ado, the floor is yours. David, tell the audience a little bit more about you.

Hey, thank you for having me here. I’m excited. I feel humbled by the introduction. If anything, I think like a lot of people, you live your life not really thinking about other people. Or I guess maybe you do think about other people’s perspectives, but just 1ft after one step after the other, 1ft 1ft. And so to have somebody else kind of take a look at your career in your life and come up with their own conclusions is kind of a unique perspective. I guess I could start with the beginning, which is I grew up in a little town in Oregon. I would call it something of a redneck town in Grants Pass, Oregon. I actually grew up in a suburb of Grant Pass. If you know Grants Pass. It was a big town. It has 25, 30,000 people. And I grew up in a town 5 miles out called Merlin that had 300 people and had one stop light. It was that kind of a town and it was a great upbringing. Both my folks are physicians and I got exposed to technology really early, which became this eye opening moment. I was six years old and my mom bought our first computer. And I remember it was a big deal. She brought it home and I felt just engaged and enthralled in a way that I had never done in my life again. A young kid. But I remember this feeling of just this is what I want to be doing. And I wrote a letter at the age of six to the head of admissions at Massachusetts Institute Technology, and I said, that’s where I want to go, you guys do technology. I want to be in technology. That’s going to be the coolest stuff ever. And as you observed, I became a founder boss in my career. And that happened very markedly because of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While they did respond to me when I was six and send me a care package, they also responded to me when I was 18, letting me know that I was not admitted for admission to their school. And I had to go find somewhere else to go to school. And I ended up going to Stanford, which as a backup is, wow. I mean, who gets to say that? And I was actually really bummed at the time. That’s such a crappy thing to say. But I really was. I really wanted to go to MIT, but then Stanford became just amazing foundation for the rest of my career. It brought me down to California, which is where I live now. It brought me into this world of technology entrepreneurship. Not just technology, but technology in its ability to change the world around us. It was so eye opening. I loved everything about entrepreneurship when I went down there. In fact, I remember again, coming from a little town, I just really didn’t understand what business meant. And so in that first year, I remember there was when the.com was blowing up. And for those of your listeners who are old like me, the people that are actually watching will see I don’t have any hair as an indicator of my age here. And what I do have is all Gray. I went to Nest Gate, which was kind of the big, hot company at the time.

Jesus yeah.

And I wasn’t an employee. I just wanted to figure out what they did at Nest Gate. And so I drove there and I would park in the employee parking lot, and I would tailgate. And for those of you that have never worked at a corporate place that has key card access, tailgating is when somebody just looks like they know what they’re doing and they walk into a secure door after you. So I would literally tailgate employees into Netscape and just walk around the halls and look at what people were doing to try to figure out what was this thing. How did Netscape, as a browser and as the gateway to the Internet, become what is the people that work there do? What was their daylight? And I just roamed to the halls. I poked my head into conference rooms, looked into people’s offices, listened in on hallway conversations. And that was honestly my very first introduction to Silicon Valley Valley, as you said, since then, that’s been my career. I was at Amazon. I started the AI and research team there. We can talk about that for a bunch of time. That was an amazing experience. I started Redfin with a couple of friends as a moonlighting project that we did for almost a year and then started a company called Rich Relevance, which we just sold a while ago. And then about five years ago, I started These Sentinel, which is my current company, and as a security company that uses AI to protect people in their homes and protect people in their businesses.

Again, I think you’re so modest in what you’re saying. This man, he said he moonlighted and created Redford. Now, anyone that has a real estate listener, and we had a whole real estate month last year on this particular podcast. Every real estate person essentially knows what Redfin is, but he moonlighted and created it. Right. Not only did you moonlight and create that, but you were essentially doing ads. And I just want to talk about the ads for a little bit as well, too, as with this story. But going back to what you said earlier on about you gave up MIT and you went to Stanford.

I didn’t give up. They gave up on me.

Yeah, right. But you’re major, you studied robotics, like all the damn things on the damn planet. Again, you’re in the middle of nowhere. Why did you get into robotics? How did you even know robotics was a thing for you to even dive into?

Yeah. As a kid, I grew up on five acres of land in Oregon. And so I would run around and I had a BB gun and a dog and just did a bunch of mechanical stuff, meaning I would build stuff in a tree for it. I would build a conveyor that would move things. My sister and I would kind of build the tree for it. We’d want to have some conveyor that would move things from one place to the other or a pulley system. So I was really into mechanical stuff as a kid, and robotics combined my passion for computers and mechanical stuff together. And then as I learned when I got into studying it at Stanford, I learned that that also added in artificial intelligence and data, which ultimately actually became the platform of my career, which is data and AI machine learning. Robotics is one of these things. And it was in the early 2000, which is when I was studying there. It was really in its infancy. t was not really known. What could it do? The way that we all understood robotics at that time was an arm, right? So like a mechanical arm that could pick things up and move them. And my uncle had bought me one of those when I was a little kid, and all it did was just pick something up and move it. I can play with that for hours and hours and hours. I remember the remote controls. You’d have two joysticks. And the thing that took me forever to figure out was how to open and close the hand, and you would twist one of the joysticks and it would open and close the hands. I thought that combination of movements. And if you control that with a computer, think of all the things you could do. And again, at the time, the number one thing that people were doing was manufacturing cars. It was on manufacturing lines. And now, fast forward, here we have robotics in our computers. We have robotics in the computer that are sitting in front of us. If you use VR, that’s using robotic sensors to be able to detect your orientation and where you’re looking in real time in order to present the VR world to you in Pleasanton right now, which is the town that I live in, there’s a company that’s doing a beta test that will deliver your groceries. This little, like, cooler on wheels will drive to your house, and then it’ll play a little musical tune and send you a text message and let you know that your groceries are sitting at the door. It’s so amazing where it’s gotten to. But that vision of watching Star Trek and Star Wars as a kid was really what inspired me to study robotics.

Yeah, I’m just hearing you. I mean, you could still see that twinkle in your eye like a seven year old kid, just happy as hell talking about robotics. So that’s one of the things that probably led you to get stumbled across your next career step, which was essentially Amazon. So I want you to talk about the research and development Department, because that’s what you’re talking about. Are you talking about machine, machine learning, talking about AI, artificial intelligence, but all these different things? And then you’re presented with this opportunity at Amazon.

Yeah. So I was working at the time, I had just started a division of a company called Dutch Bros. Which is a coffee company based in Grants Pass. They’re now public. It’s an awesome company. So I had partnered with the founders there, and I was doing some tests on their website. I was running their website and ecommerce and technology, and we had found these ads on the Internet that Google allowed you to advertise. This is just, like, super obvious now, but go back if you can, especially for your younger listeners. I’m going to ask you to put on your dinosaur glasses. Right. So pretend you’re a dinosaur and you’re seeing the world through my eyes. And it turns out very few people were advertising on Google was not even public yet. They had just launched a search engine. And their advertising products, nobody was using them. They weren’t this massive BM us that they are today. So there’s your dinosaur goggles perspective. And I started selling coffee makers on Google Super high end ones that again with the dinosaur lines. It was really hard to find them back then. Right. So if you were a coffee aficionado and you did not live in Los Angeles, Chicago or New York, you could not buy a high end car. You have to fly somewhere or drive somewhere to get these high end coffee makers. So I put them on Google and Holy crap, within moments, I’m selling dozens of them a day. Here I am, this kid. I happen to have access to supply of these things. I’m buying ads for $0.50 on Google. People are paying $0.25 to $0.50. I have to pay them for every click. And people are buying one out of every two times they click on that ad. So I’m paying a total of $1 to sell someone a $500 coffee machine change. I’m making $$150 to $250 every time. And that was fine. So I was making enough money that I was driving around in my little BMW all around Palo Alto, hanging out with my girlfriend, not doing anything. And Amazon was doing interviews, and I was bored. And so I went and I interviewed with Amazon, and I was like, hey, I’m Dave. I basically put my feet up on the table in the interview, like. And they’re like, Whoa, that’s a pretty aggressive attitude for a lot of the kids at these College interviews. They’re showing up in a suit. They’re like, nervous in their chair. And here’s this jerk who shows up with his feet on the table, tell me what you got. And they were kind of taking aback. I, of course, did okay on the technical part of the interview. And then I was interviewing with this guy named Neil Roseman, who was the head of consumer at the time at Amazon. And I said, yeah. So I don’t really think I’m not interested in coming to Amazon because here’s what I’m doing every day. And I buy these clips for $0.50. I sell them a coffee maker. I make a couple of $100, and I just make dough every day, and I don’t have to do anything. It’s sweet. And Neil leans across the table and he goes, Wait, walk me through that one more time. You pay $0.50 for a click and you sell them at $250 to $500 coffee maker. Half the time I was like, yeah, all day, all day. His eyes lit up. And that became the origins of a project at Amazon called Ribbonba that became the first hundred million dollar a year run rate customer of Google. We taught at Amazon. We taught Google how to do what’s called programmatic, which is computers bidding, advertising. And I ended up falling in love with the opportunity to take these things that I had learned at my little kind of scale and blow them up and turn them into a real platform at Amazon. And they moved me and convinced me that I would be able to have a major impact on the world, and it would have a major impact on me. And frankly, they were right. I really look at my career as that decision being the foundation of everything I’ve done since then. And I feel very blessed to make that decision because I was pretty cocky, as you can tell at the time, and I almost didn’t do it.

Well, I mean, just telling your story, you would think someone would hit that level at Amazon and they’ll be done right. But we’re talking about, like, that’s the dawn of your career. And in that dawn of your career, where we are right now, as far as your story goes, you got kind of bored or you wanted to have, like, a side hustle interjecting Redfin. How the hell do you work at that level? Amazon is not to say like a mom and pop around the corner. You’re working at the height of most people’s careers. And then you said, I’m going to start something completely different, completely new, completely out of the box. I want you to kind of talk about that story. Why the hell did you jump into the real estate software platform?

Yeah, I used the term egotistical already and cocky and that those would be the two words I would use to describe the answer to your question. And I had made enough money that I was thinking about buying a house in Seattle. And I had this experience where I just realized, Holy smokes. This is a smoke and mirrors game where the real estate agents are tricking people into buying houses that they probably shouldn’t buy because there’s a disparity of information. There’s an inequality of the amount of information the real estate agent has versus the customers. And that information is supposed to be public record. What houses are for sale in what area, how much did these sell for? What’s the liquidity of the area. All that information is registered with your County Registrar, but it’s just really hard to get. And so I actually went to the county, and I said, I want to get access to this data. And they gave me after I think it took a week, they gave me a CD Rom, and again, dinosaur goggles, here CDROM is a little laser disk that had all of the sales data. And you had to know then how to load it up on your computer. You then had to read it in very cryptic format, and then you could get access to this information. And I realized, Holy Moly, if everybody had access to this, I could understand it. Can you imagine how that would change, how people would buy real estate? And I met these guys that had the same idea, and they were doing it on they built a Windows app, which you’d have to download, and it didn’t have any distribution, but they had this really neat idea to take that information and put it on the map so you could see all this information on a map. And we fell in love with each other. And within a couple of weeks, we decided to build this as an Internet website. And this is at the beginning of Web 2.O, and this is interactive websites. No one had really built functional interactive websites. Maps that you used back then. You’d click and you’d wait 20 seconds and a new map would appear. So there wasn’t this kind of concept of click and drag that just didn’t exist at the time. Again, massive dinosaur goggles. We spent the next eight months building the first interactive map for the internet and we put all the real estate listings for Seattle on there, all of the historical sales for Seattle on there. And we would even draw the outline of the lots on this map and it blew people’s mind. When we launched. We launched, I want to say fall of 2004. And just to kind of give you a sense of how novel this idea was, we launched and we’re like, sweet, here we go. We had 4000 unique visitors on that website the day we launched. Literally zero visitors beside us and our family the day before. 400,000 people came to the website the very first day. I was up till 03:00 in the morning, of course, and I work late and we push go and I go to bed and I get up in the morning at 630 or seven, I’ve got 3 hours groggy beyond all. I go to my coffee shop, I get my coffee and I look around and I’m like, Whoa, everybody’s got their laptop. Whatever. Let me drink my coffee. I drink my coffee, I walk over behind some people and Holy crap, everyone in the coffee shop, they’ve got Redfin.com open on their browser showing everybody. Look at this. This is Bill Gates house. Holy smoke, did you see how much he paid for this? Let me see how much my neighbor’s house and so forth. And it was just all people spying on their neighbors. By the way, nobody bought any houses for the first period of time. They were all just spying on their neighbors. But it opened my eye to this incredible experience of data need to be in the hands of people. And when people are empowered, it creates all this opportunity. I mean, think about now, you can go on to Zillow or Redfin now and you can see what they think your house is worth and they’re smarter than most of the real estate agents out there and they have a really informed perspective of that’s all based on data. They analyze what all the sales are in your neighborhood and they present that to you. That wasn’t even an idea 20 years ago. And so that to me again, kind of looking at it from a career perspective, that was one of the most magical moments for me because no one had ever seen anything like this before. In fact, the headlines of a lot of the newspapers that wrote articles about this, have you ever seen this kind of fly by real estate experience? Nobody’s ever seen anything like this before. And that actually became the inspiration for Google Maps and Apple Maps that we all now use. Every single day.

It’s crazy. I’m hearing you tell this story, and it’s so profound for the listener. I really want you to kind of. And I’m going to do a quick recap. Right. He started off with robotics, and then he got into research and development at Amazon. And then from there he was on board. I’m just going to go ahead and create some real estate thing. He’s just out of nowhere. And then the story progresses. And then people that know about online, like online shopping, they may be familiar with Overstock. So that’s like the next part of your adventure. How the Hell’s you go from selling coffee to being Amazon, being so profound, jumping into real estate. And then now you’re at a retailer, online retailer, which essentially could be viewed as a competitor to Amazon.

Yeah. So I only spent about a year in Overstock. I went there as a favor to a friend to help out with a project that turned into, like I said, a whole year. And it was a really unique experience. Overstock is based in Salt Lake City, Utah. And I’m not a member of the LDS Church. I’m not Mormon. And so it was a really weird experience for me socially. Salt Lake City, for those of you that haven’t spent much time there, has the opposite distribution of political views of every other city in America. Most cities in America have something like a Bell curve, right. Whether you’re Democratic or Republican, you’re probably actually really close to your neighbors. Maybe you vote this way and this way, but you’re generally kind of pretty close to each other. And Salt Lake City is what we call in statistics, a bathtub distribution, meaning that the middle is actually almost vacuous, it’s empty. And you have all these people that are very far. Right. That a lot of people know about. This is the folks that are in the Church and they follow the guidance of the Church. And the interesting thing about Salt Lake City specifically, though not the rest of Utah, Salt Lake City also has this incredibly Liberal chunk, but they’re not near to each other. They’re very disparate. And I had my very first experience there. I went to go again. I drove there with my, I think, at a Nissan Pathfinder at the time. I drove there with my Pathfinder, and I parked it in this garage across from the Church. And I went into a coffee shop at Coffee came back, the garage was closed. It was 06:00 on a Saturday. And they closed for Sunday services early, which is understandable now that I understand kind of the dynamics of the Church a little bit better. I did not understand them at this time. There wasn’t a phone number to call. There was no way to get my car back. So I go to the guy next door who runs a tattoo shop. I walk in and I’ve got earrings. And so he could immediately identify on this path of distribution that I didn’t know existed in Salt Lake City. I am over here on the left side, like, this guy’s not a member of the Church. He’s this guy. And I go, hey, my car got stuck in the garage here. Do you know how to help me get out? And he goes, Those effing churchgoers, they shut the garage down. And I was like, oh, no, I’m not mad at anybody. I just want to get my car back. And I remember for the ensuing kind of nine months to a year I spent there, that was a pretty defining characteristic of the experience was there are people way over here and there are people way over here. And I’ve always kind of prided myself on being somebody that can bring people together of differing views and can listen to all perspectives. And that was a really neat experience for me in the sense there was some career things that happened there. But I think the number one thing that happened for me personally at that moment in my career was really challenging my belief that I could listen to people who disagreed because I had never been exposed to people that really disagreed so fundamentally. And I still think about that to this day. The number one thing that I take from that is the ability to listen to someone with whom you vehemently agree is really unique and really difficult and really precious.

I think that’s a solid segue because we’ve been talking about all your successes and we’re talking about these household names and these pedigrees. Right. So my next question is going into what you ended on that last note with. It was like, in this journey so far and we’re only still in the beginning of your journey. Right. What hurdle did you really have to overcome? When was that moment of, okay, I want to give up or this sucks. Did that ever happen in those first couple of years?

All the time. That’s the story. I’m sure you know that’s the answer, right? I mean, there are people where they glide through, right. And things are awesome pretty much the whole way. And I definitely was not one of those people, I can tell you that for sure. I’m very self-critical. And so that I’m sure doesn’t help with that in terms of that perspective. One of the stories I like to tell about failure and turning failure into what I think failure is intended to be, which is a lesson to learn from, is the invention of Amazon advertising. And so Amazon advertising is a 31 and a half billion dollar business unit at Amazon framing that 31 and a half billion dollars a year Amazon makes from Amazon advertising. And this is Amazon selling ads on the Amazon website. In 2002 or 2003, I was running an experiment which used algorithms and data to determine what would be placed on the Amazon homepage. And there have been a bunch of different experiments like this. Jeff Bezos was a huge believer in using algorithms to make these types of decisions and personalizing it. So every person got something unique on it. Again, we’re at the very beginning of this trend of the use of artificial intelligence for this at Amazon. And so I was doing some pretty fundamental research. We were testing what was called a Bayesian network to predict what people would want to buy. That was kind of the state of the art at the time. I was collaborating with a bunch of professors. One of them was down at Oregon State University and he was kind of seen as the pinnacle in this area of Bayes nets. That’s just an esoteric term to mean you use probabilities and you chain probabilities together to try to figure out what someone wants to buy. And so we built this thing that we actually patented it. It was an amazing engine that could do this type of math in real time every time you loaded the Amazon page fast and it would predict what is it that you want to do? You just watch TVs or look at TVs. Let me show you the best TV that you can buy for your money. You just looked at Harry Potter books. Let me show you the most recent release for Harry Potter books. And we spent probably six months building this thing and we had sold it up the chain. I was going to stake my career on it because my team was an RND team. We hadn’t really shown any value yet. And I was going to show the executive staff, look, here’s this thing that we built, we had a whole bunch of ideas. We built all this infrastructure, we built all these algorithms. Now we’re making money for you. This wasn’t a low stakes project. This was the entire budget of my multimillion dollar a year cost team to the executive staff. This is how we’re going to make money. And Bezos had bought into it. And my entire kind of command chain was waiting. We launched it. We looked at the first week of results, and my team came into my office and I still remember the team lead, this guy named Pat. And Pat was kind of ringing his hands. He goes, Mr. Sally, I’m really sorry. I have really bad news. And as a boss, right stomach, but steel face. Cool. Tell me what the bad news is. Let’s deal with it. This is going to be something we can handle. The system doesn’t work. It sucks. All of our results are horrible. Not even down a little bit. We were down astronomical amounts. It was like 30% loss in revenue from the home. It sucked. Everything about it sucked. And again, I kind of staked my career on this thing. And so I said, okay, well, can we take a little look at the results? And sure enough, everything sucked. So I said, okay, let’s do this. Let’s absorb this piece of information. Let’s all go home early today. We work super hard on this. We work for six months late nights. I said I had stand up meetings, meaning the entire staff meeting at 06:00 P.m. Every day because half the staff would work until midnight every day. And then we would have a staff meeting at 09:00 A.m. To kick off the next day. That’s how late we were working on this project for six months. It was a marathon effort to have that kind of effort tank this hard. It needed to step back. And obviously, I’m telling the story to you guys already know this is like a Disney story. You already know the end of the story is okay. The characters will end up okay. I get kissed and I wake up and I turn into a Princess. So sure enough, I wake up the next morning and I still don’t know what I’m going to do. This is one of those moments. I think this may be the moment that you’re looking for here. I promised my team we are all going to go home and we’re going to come back the next day with fresh minds. And I am expected to show up with some better answer. And I don’t have it. So again, I do my routine. I get up, I go get my coffee. I was walking to the office at this time, which was awesome, by the way. Walking time, amazing. Just cleared my head every day. And Seattle has six months out of the year that are the best weather of any city in the world, six months out of the year, where their suicide rate is higher than a lot of other cities, which is not so positive. And I’m affected by seasonal affective disorder, which is why I don’t live up there anymore. But it was one of those OK time. So it was good. I’m walking. It’s beautiful. I’m clear in my head. And so I at least come in, not down. I come in with a plan. And my plan was let’s look at this. Let’s look at the data and let’s take our time. Let’s not jump to the conclusion. Let’s look through this. Every line, every line, every line. And let’s try to figure out if there’s any insights, any light at the end of the tunnel. And so I sit down with the team after an hour of just I think I brought food into by the way, food helps brought Donuts, actually, if I recall correctly. And so not a good suggestion, but I brought doughnuts and we sat down, we spent an hour, we worked our way through it. And what we found was in all of this pile of trash, it was a golden nugget. And the golden nugget was that one of the pieces of content that we showed to a tiny fraction of the customers were these ads and Amazon had this rogue Amazon team that would show Amazon credit card ads to a lot of Amazon customers or not to a lot, actually, to a very, very small few, because they did not have the support of the executive staff at the time. And that piece of content blew it out of the water. That piece of content had profitability. That was, I want to say, like ten to 20 times higher than any other piece of content. So if you just looked at a TV and I could sell you a $2,000 TV pretty confidently, it was still better and more profitable for me to show you in that. And so we ran another experiment and we tested that just to see if that hypothesis was right. And Holy smokes, it was super right for certain chunks of customers that we could identify. Using this Beijing network approach, we could find content that was way more profitable. It just wasn’t doing what we thought it was going to be. It wasn’t selling you a TV. It wasn’t selling you Harry Potter. It wasn’t telling you about Amazon’s new clothing line. It wasn’t selling you DVDs and CDs and music and stuff like that. It was showing you an ad. And so I presented that to Jeff Bezos, and he hated it. He thought it was the worst idea ever. But when I showed him the data and I told him the story of how this was entirely based on experiments and the data supported it, he said, run with it. And now fast forward almost 20 years. It’s $31.5 billion of revenue for them.

Just hearing you tell that story, I hope mailing you a Christmas card every single year. Just saying thank you. Because obviously you’re talking about a third of the revenue share coming in from just like the ads, man, which is utterly damn remarkable, right?

It’s huge.

It’s massive. It’s massive. So going into, like, I’m listening to your story and I want to kind of continue adding these puzzle pieces together, and I want to jump back into the beginning, right? So as a kid, you kind of grew up in the middle of nowhere, but you understand technology, but you have a hell of an entrepreneurial insight and hustle. Does that come from any parent or Guardian that you could remember growing up as a child?

Absolutely not. This is one of the things I talked to my folks about. I love being an adult, able to have conversations with my parents because the ability to ask that type of a question, like, where did this come from? What happened? How did you feed this? I have kids now. How should I help feed my kids passions that are different than my own. How do I do that in a way that I can still inspire them by what I do, but not stifle them? Every parent sucks at something, right? We all know that. But they did some stuff that was really remarkable given their background. They come from a hyper career, conservative backdrop. My dad’s family had emigrated from Austria during World War II just in time. My dad’s family and my family were Jewish. So leaving Austria just at the beginning of World War II was a life saving decision for them. And they became doctors. And that was kind of the traditional immigration get an education, become a doctor or a lawyer, save your money, don’t get credit cards, and then buy a house. There you go. There was a cookie cutter blueprint. You followed that. You gave that to your kids, and then your kids would be happy. My mom’s family very similar Chinese immigrants. They were landowners and nobles in China, but then very poor when they came to America. I’m going to tell you, they had a laundromat and you’re going to say, okay, right? They did. They had a restaurant. Yeah. We had a store in Chinatown in Philadelphia. My great grandmother ran that store until she was 98 years old and until, like three months before she died. That is my family. That is what I grew up in the opposite of like, take big risks and be an entrepreneur. But there was an element of entrepreneurial support from the Chinese side. And so I think that’s where it came from, was that my parents were very conservative. They never took any risks with their money, but I wanted to. I grew up being a risk taker and being excited about doing stuff that broke the rules. The first thing I just talked to my parents about this, like two weeks ago, that really showed how much I broke the rules. I stopped going to school in high school before noon my sophomore year, as soon as I could drive. I just stopped going to school in the mornings. And I would skip my first three periods pretty much every day. And I asked my parents, like, you are such bad parents, how did you let me do this? And they said, well, your teachers seem to be okay with it because I talked to my teachers and I made sure I did all my homework and I made sure they understood the concepts that they were teaching. I just didn’t want to be at school. And my teachers were really amazingly supportive of this, too. This is one of those things where growing up in a small town, I think, really played into my favor because they cared about me. They knew me by name. They knew that whatever they saw something in me that I didn’t see at the time. And they let me get away with this stuff that I don’t know that I would say it was good, but it fueled my passion for breaking rules and doing good stuff by breaking rules. Because, for example, one of my first periods was physics. And I would skip physics every day. But then I would read about advanced physics and I would come back to the physics teacher after school and talk to him about the theory of relativity and theory of quantum theory and try to understand the actual underlying concepts. And so his name was Todd Roy was the teacher. I still remember his name and he was baffled by me. He didn’t get it, but he supported it. And he said, as long as you show up and talk about stuff and you’re really learning, I guess it’s okay that you skip and I won’t Mark you absent anymore. But please don’t tell anyone that I’m doing this. And I just made that deal with all of my teachers. And I got away with, again, breaking the rules and achieving a new plane of performance by breaking the rules, which as a parent, my gosh, I don’t know that I want to encourage anybody to tell their kids to do that necessarily. But somehow my parents were okay with that and they learned to live with this crazy risk taking son that was fundamentally different than them.

Wow. So, I mean, on the flip side of that, you alluded to obviously you’re a parent now, right? So how are you managing and juggling all the things that you I mean, obviously with your career?

Poorly.

Well, let’s talk about that then. You’re saying poorly. How do you view it as being poor?

Dude, I try so hard. I don’t know. I don’t know. If you ask them on Sundays, I’m sure they’d say I’m a good dad. And on Sundays I’d say I’m the worst. I will tell you this, though. I make time for being a parent, and I think that’s one of the most important things. And I prioritize being a parent and I listen. Those are probably the three things that I think I do well. Now, if the output of that is good or bad, my God, any parent would tell you, I don’t know if I’m doing a good job or not, but those three things, time, priority and listening. And so, for example, my older daughter, she’s a drama kid. Again, as 180 for me as you could be. She sits in her room and she draws. I suck at drawing in every possible way. And she draws for hours every single day. She’s so creative. She’s had the ability to draw and think of designs and think outside the box and present characters that you would never imagine at a level of depth that has always been incredible. She’s a performer. She dances, she sings, and all those things I suck at. And so again, time, priority and listening. I try to listen to what’s important to her. I try to understand the things she likes Sims, and I could listen to her describe those characters. She listens to audiobooks. She has probably 30 books that she listens to. She has eye problems, and so she can’t actually read very well. But she listens to an entire novel every three days. And she consumes, on average, three to five new novels every single month and loves the characters. She could tell you back stories that she’s made up for all of the different characters that she listens to. So I listen to that. Then I prioritize. I make sure that when we do our budget every month, we have enough budget. I would not doubt if at the age of 13, she is Audible’s number one customer in the history. I’m not even kidding. It is astronomical how much money she spends on Audible. And I prioritize it. And that’s okay because that is the thing that drives her brain. So I listen to what’s important to her. I prioritize it as it relates to time and as it relates to money and as it relates to listening and as it relates to supporting her and letting her room look like crazy, crazy, crazy. And then I spend time with her. I sitting on her bed where she feels comfortable to listen to her. So I don’t know if I’m a great parent, but I think those are the three things I think about. The other one that I think about, too, which you alluded to, is I work. I’m very fortunate in my career that I’ve made enough money that I could kind of bounce around. And probably not in California because gas is almost $40 a gallon here. I literally can’t fill up my truck, by the way, just for the record, you know, like credit card companies, stop your gas fill up at $150. I have an F 350 and it cost $250 to fill up my truck now anyway. So I couldn’t live here without working. I could live almost anywhere else in the United States without working for the rest of my life. But teaching your kids the importance of work, I wake up every morning at 06:00. I’m working when they wake up. I’m working when they get home from school. I’m working when they get home. But I also make time. I have dinner with them every single night. I’ve done that for the last ten years.

Wow.

And finding that kind of rigorous definition of priority and the importance of work, I think that’s also another important thing that I try to model for them.

Wow. You’re talking about your daughter being a voracious reader. Right. And I don’t know what your answer is going to be as far as, like, your reading regimen, but I mean, obviously, you’ve dibbled and dabbled in so many different spectrums of expertise to where are you getting information through reading or are you getting information through Osmosis? Let’s talk about that for a minute here. What books are you reading?

Wow. So I’ll tell you again, another unique moment in my career. My freshman year at Stanford, again, I came from a small place. I thought I was pretty smart. I had one regional math number one in the entire Pacific Northwest. Oregon, Washington, Idaho, numerous years in a row. So I was pretty full on myself when I got to Stanford. And I got humbled Quicklike. And there were kids that had already taken three years of calculus. And so I was really good at the basics, but I hadn’t had the exposure that a lot of the kids that went to Palo Alto High School had had three years of calculus. My high school only offered one. You couldn’t have three years if you were the smartest person in the world and you went to that high school. It wasn’t there. And so one of the classes I took my very first year at Stanford was speed reading. And if there’s one class at school that I could point to and say that just fundamentally changed the shape of my arc, it was speed reading. It wasn’t my calculus class. It wasn’t my physics class. It wasn’t my computer science class. I had already taken three years of Stanford computer science by the time I got into school. So my computer science classes were fun, but I’d already done most of that coursework. The theoretical side, at least. And that was another thing my parents did awesome because they supported me doing that. They sent me off to College level courses starting in high school and the end of middle school. And so I was really lucky with that. But I took speed reading. And what speed reading taught me was that consuming information is not about consuming all of it. It’s about finding information in the data. I mean, if you look at a news article, how much of that information is really important? And the teacher I remember this the very first day the teacher crushed us. Okay, here I am. I’m your professor today. I actually got a degree from a Liberal arts school out in the Midwest. You’re probably smarter than I am because you all got in Stanford. I didn’t get to Stanford, and we all laughed, but we all thought, yes, we’re smarter than you. And this guy’s like, okay, here’s a newspaper article. Read it and then answer questions for me. And we all did that. And we all got them right. We’re so smart. I didn’t remember this. He then says, okay, here’s a longer article. You have 30 seconds. Everyone read it. We all failed. I haven’t read this article either. Ask me any question from the article. Every single one write on a full page article. Why? Because he knew where to look for the information. He had read the entire article in 30 seconds because he read in depth the first paragraph. He then read in depth the last. That was the next thing he read. He went straight from the first paragraph to the last paragraph. So he knew the preamble and the argument, and then he knew the conclusion, and then he read the first line of every paragraph of the story. So then he knew the arc of the trajectory. That’s pretty much all the information. If you have 30 seconds to read something, that’s a pretty darn good way to do it. And so you’ll see, behind me, I have a stack of books and stuff like that. I read every single one of these books, but a lot of them I’ve only read for five minutes. I’ve read the entire book in five minutes by using that methodology that he taught me, which is you have to relax your brain for just a moment and convince yourself that if I read differently, I can actually consume almost all of this information, but not ever absorb all of the data. And the difference between information and data is really fundamental. Again, a lot of these books I have only read for five minutes, but I’ve read them cover to cover. I read the first paragraph or a couple of paragraphs of the first chapter. I’ve read the entire introduction. Most likely I have read the first sentence of every chapter. I’ve probably read the first paragraph of every chapter. I’ve probably read the last paragraph of every chapter. And I’ve probably read point sentences that align with the arguments that were introduced in the first paragraph of the last paragraph of every chapter. Again, as ridiculous as that may seem, it’s less about what one book or one thing have you read that really changed you? For me, it’s the way I read that I find is really unique. And I tell people that sometimes my employees are people that I’m mentoring and they’re always blown away because the question is like, what should I read? And my answer is, I think that’s a very hard question and everyone’s going to give you a different answer. What you need to be able to do is to read everything quickly.

Damn, that’s like a mic drop moment. Like, we get into podcast, right? Move on. That’s it. That was the final take away everyone. But in reality, just hearing that information is phenomenal, right? I mean, you pretty much have seamlessly told us a systematical way to read data really quickly to get an overview and take away the key takeaways without having to read all the insight information between the lines, which is fucking phenomenal. I’m sitting here, like, trying to pick up my jaw off the damn floor.

Well, I appreciate it, man. I can remember. I’ll give another just a visual example for people. One of the other things this teacher did, and I should remember his name. I feel horrible for not remembering his name because I remember the way he looks and everything he did.This one day he had us come in and he had us bring a piece of construction people like, you’re such an idiot. We’re in College, we don’t have construction paper. Construction. So we brought in a piece of construction paper, and he had us cut out a hole that was half an inch by half an inch. And he said, I want you to be able to read an article. This is probably like the third week or fourth week. We were already kind of impressed by the guy. He’d already proven that he was smarter than us in this realm. And he had us read an entire article through this entire half inch by half inch hole. And again, once again, we the smart Stanford kids thought we were going to be able to do this. He had already taught us a couple of his tricks, and he was able to do it very differently again, because it was so precise about the way that you move it. How do your eyes move across an article? Do they move side to side? Do they move top to bottom? And what he taught us to do is also to control the way our eyes move. When we read, he taught us that on average, the average person does this. Bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce. I’m sure if you think about the way you read, there’s something about that. You bounce from one word to the next and you hesitate. So the first thing you taught us was how to move left or right without hesitating. And he just made us move this paper left. Don’t move. Don’t slow it down. You can’t stop it. You just need to keep going. Never stop. Never stop. Never stop. And after about two weeks, three weeks of doing that, forcing yourself not to let your eyes stop, you’re able to do it. Holy crap. Holy crap. I’m reading three times faster. Word for word. I’m reading three times faster. I haven’t even changed my consumption. The next thing he taught us was he took that same piece of paper, and we’re not allowed to move side to side at all. Top to bottom, you can’t move side. No side to side movement, top to bottom. And we did that for weeks. You can imagine these kids are taking super esoteric classes on hypothetical theoretical physics. And then you have a guy move your paper to the bottom of every day for three weeks. But, man, it is life changing. The way you consume information crazy.

That leads me into your current path of where you are right now with deep Sentinel. Right. I’m going to do a hypothesis is right. And I want you to kind of take this at face value. Just me outside looking in. Right. You’re into home security, right. And again, you started off you had a real estate side real estate aspect. So through that data, obviously, you can kind of see where you can plug in security. Then we fast forward to about roughly 2016, when you started the founding of that company, and shortly thereafter, two years. Then Amazon buys out Ring, right. Which is essentially in the same spectrum as space. So I want you to talk about that journey collectively. You’ve collected all this data. You’ve created systems to collect data. So you can kind of see data. And obviously you’re reading ten times faster than the average human being can. How did you kind of, like, finalize to where you are right now with such a dynamic hardware that is essentially attached to a system to where people are watching live? And then they’re saying, hey, leave my box, stop stealing my shit. Stop where you are right now. I want you to kind of, like, depict that because, again, for the average person, like, hearing this is like, what the hell? How the hell I can’t keep up. But you’re there.

Yeah. So deep Sentinel. I’ll just do the 30 seconds on Deep Sentinel. What Deep Sentinel is, is if you imagine your Nest or your ring cams, your Arlos attached to a super hyper intelligent computer that has an AI that can tell when there’s a problem, that AI then tells a guard in real time within seconds that they need to be intervening and talking over your two way audio. And the guards do it. So everything that you kind of envisioned you would be doing when you bought your Nest or your ring, and you realize, until you realize that you’re just overwhelmed by the alerts and you turn them off, everything that you initially imagine, we make that happen. We have built the entire system end to end so that our guards are able to prevent crimes. And the reason I did this is one it uses AI right at the heart of how we do this, as we built a really unique machine learning artificial intelligence that in real time looks at every single video feed and is able to analyze within microseconds whether you are doing something suspicious or not. And that’s number one. And that makes it so that we can do this in a cost affordable way. Because as you would probably guess, having guards watch your property, whether it’s your business or your home, is astronomically expensive. It starts at like $10,000 a month. That’s the starting point, right? That’s like if you walked into a car dealership and they’re like, yeah, so our cheapest one is $120,000, but that’s just for the first year, right? I mean, just, Bam, the cost of an average house within two years. So that’s number one is it uses this AI to make it accessible. Now, it’s not cheap, right? Deep Sentinel is more expensive than a ring or a Nest, but it is way less expensive than having a guard watch your property all the time. Number two, and this is really kind of the process of how I got here is that it’s important for your listeners that are watching the video feed here. You’ll see that I’ve got a bunch of books behind me. About a quarter of these are on parenting. And while I say I’m failing miserably, I try really hard. I read a lot about parenting, and one of the most important things I’ve learned about parenting is that creating a sense of safety is game changing long term. I’ve seen that in the positive sense, and I’ve seen that in a negative sense. My wife and I work with two foster kids, and we have for the last 15 years, 20 years. And we see what the lack of safety that they felt in their childhood, how that affects them even to this day and doesn’t let them go. It doesn’t allow them to feel safe and experiment. It doesn’t allow them to love in the way that a lot of the rest of us are able to feel love. And it changes that. And as much love and as much support as I provide them, he can never make up for that missing moment, those traumatic moments for them early in their lives. And then with my kids, I see and hopefully in a positive sense that when I do create safety for them, they are able to branch out. They’re able to take risks. They’re able to learn on their own in a way that lessons that I couldn’t teach them, lessons that they can only learn from their own failures and their own expressions. Safety is a fundamental building block to me, not only of a family, but then of a society, of a city, of a community, of a country. And it’s, I think, one of the key missing ingredients, I think in America right now that we are as a culture not sure what the role is of our law enforcement. We as a culture individuals, I’m sure, are very confident in your view of what law enforcement is. But we disagree like we as a country don’t have a common understanding of that. We don’t have a common understanding of how we talk about politics. We don’t have a common understanding of how we talk about money. And having a place of safety allows us to have some of those dialogues that are important, some of those dialogues that are uncomfortable. And the more safe someone is, the better able they are to engage in the ideas of someone else with whom they vehemently disagree. And again, kind of going back to the Salt Lake City experience, I was only able to listen to people on both sides because I felt safe in myself. I didn’t feel threatened by people that presented it, a very conservative agenda presented by the LDS Church. I accepted it, and I believe it, and I support it. And I believe that they believe it. And I believe that they’re good people. And I wasn’t threatened by the people that had tattoos and smoked cigarettes and drank coffee at 9th and 9th in Salt Lake City, in the district where all the Liberal people live. And that safety, to me is so fundamental, so deep-set. And we believe that everyone deserves to be safe. And we found a way to give that to people that they’ve never seen before. So we have customers every single day at Deep Central. And this is why I do it. They email me and say, I slept last night for the first time, feeling safe. Can you understand how important that is to me? How important it is to my wife, how important it is to my family? And even if that’s because I’ve made their business more safe, that trickles into your family because you’re staying up all night worried about are people stealing the electrical cable out of my trucks? That’s my livelihood. That’s how I paid for my kids to go to school. That’s how I pay for our food. Are people stealing the catalytic converters out of all my cars? Are people stealing the RVs off my RV law? Are people stealing my employees? Cars are homeless people vandalizing my storefront, breaking in my front door. Are they just terrorizing my employees? So my employees are all quitting, and then I have to hire new employees, or I have to show up and open every day and close every day. Those are all things that create stresses for people that we don’t need, and they’re all preventable. But what we realized at Deep Sentinel was that no one else was providing that safety. We were preventing maybe a false sense of security because I have cameras. Oh, look, there’s a video of somebody stealing my catalytic converter. What are you going to do with that? You’re going to feel bad for yourself. Maybe you’re proud you have this video for a second, but then you still don’t have a catalytic converter, and they still come back and steal it again next week and changing that equation. That’s why we do what we do. And again, it builds off the technology background that I have. But I decided when I started this company, my wife and I sat down with the kids, and we decided that whatever I did next, we wanted it to be our legacy as a family. We wanted it to be our contribution that had a bigger impact on society. As proud as I am of everything else I’ve done, I wanted to do something that I felt really good about modeling for my kids. Not just hard work, but that if you do hard work, you can really influence the lives of people around you.

Yeah, I think that’s phenomenal to back that up, too. I mean, doing my due diligence, I watched some of the YouTube videos, and it was one video that stood out to me that was, like, really cool and really awesome. Was like, a lady got out of her car, and the security people were like, hey, can we help you with something? And she was like, hey, I just want to read you a thank you card for Christmas. And she’s up in the camera, and she’s like, security guard, could you read it to me? And she’s like, thank you for protecting me. And it goes back to what you’re saying. So, I mean, obviously, not only are you doing it, but you’re spreading that information through a hardware device, which is kind of phenomenal. You’re building a whole community of safety through hardware, which is something that people don’t resonate with. And I think it kind of goes back to you having such a profound connection with robotics in the early days to where you bring it forward. Now you put in the human condition on top of it, which, again, most people, there’s a disconnect between both sides of the coin. And you have that synergy.

Which you are in our office. Five years ago, when we were building that first version of the software, we talk about how can we create an emotional connection to a piece of hardware? And it’s really hard to do that. It’s really hard to do that. People say, I love this thing for a little while, but then it becomes very transactional. And we wanted it to not be transactional. We wanted it to be truly an emotional connection to something that meant this is a part of my life, it’s a part of my livelihood. And so when we designed our hardware, one of the things that we put on it, I’ll hold it up for people that are watching, but we had this red ring at the top of our camera. So our camera has two rings on it, which kind of signifies it’s got two things going on. It has audio and video, and it talks to you. And so we made this to look kind of like an eye, and it has a red ring that spins around it to tell you that there’s someone watching. And that’s exactly what we do. So when you have in hardware world, we have this thing called an out of box experience where what is your first five minutes left? Because that’s going to set the platform for what are your expectations for this thing for the rest of its life? And so part of our out of box experience is that you put the battery into our camera, you hang it up on your door, and then the red ring comes on, and then you wave to it. And when you wave to it, it says, Hi, this is Victoria at Deep Sentinel. I just wanted to say thank you for being our customer and trusting us with your safety. Is there something I can do to help you right now? And that for everyone else. When every other device you’ve ever installed, you get on your phone and you’re kind of looking at your phone, and that’s your out of box experience. Ours. The key thing was I want you to look up. I want you to look up from your phone, and that physical motion, and then that interaction is what differentiates the whole experiences. Instead of it being year crunched over looking at your phone, I want you to open up. I want you to look up. Maybe this like an over exaggeration, but kind of like the voice of God kind of coming down just a different thing. And for the religious listeners, please, like, I don’t mean that in a dispassionate, but that kind of like out of body experience where you’re reaching out beyond your home. That was what we wanted to create. And every one of our customers has that experience that you’re saying that this is different. There’s something about this that is not like anything else that I’ve ever interacted with.

Well, with that, let’s talk about final words of wisdom. Right. So I think your journey kind of talks to multiple different people. You’re talking to potential customers that are looking for that level of security. You’re talking to that young kid in the Midwest that’s into robotics and trying to figure things out. And you’re also talking to that highly effective, highly motivated VP or executive team leader right now. What words of insight would you give to them when they’re hitting these hurdles, how to push forward and continue on their journeys?

Yeah. So, man, if there’s one thing that I like to do when you got to boil the whole set of a career into one thing, one of the things we didn’t talk about where all my missed opportunities, I had an opportunity to join Sean Parker as the first Vp/president of Facebook, period, full stop, Bam, talking billions of dollars I left on the table. And so there’s a way to look back on your life and on your career that’s full of regret. And the reason I look at those moments and I have very little, if no regret looking at my life and my career is because the one thing that I did that I really credit my parents with and I love having learned from them is that every one of those big decisions I made, I made with my heart, and I made a couple where I didn’t I made a couple where I tried to follow money or I tried to follow career. And those are the ones that I regret. And now having the benefit of years between me and those decisions, I don’t regret them in the grand sense because I learned the lesson that you shouldn’t follow path for title, you shouldn’t follow path for money. I don’t think now if you can’t eat, one of the things about the Jewish religion they taught us very early on was if you can’t eat, you can’t sleep, you can’t breathe, you always listen to those. And so I know there’s people in that situation. But speaking once you’re past that, once you’re at the point where you have this flexibility to make decisions and listen to your heart, and you can choose between making $300,000 a year and doing something you hate and making 200 or making 200 and doing something that you love and making a million dollars a year, because those opportunities are out there. Right. Those are out there every single time that I listened to my heart and I did what was important to me, important to my family. I don’t want to live every day like I’m dying. I don’t think that’s a healthy perspective. But if I live every day and I ask myself if I were to die tomorrow, would this be the decision that I wanted to make? That I think is a healthy perspective and that is a perspective that I have very few regrets. And even with X amount of money or Y amount of money, I love every moment of my life and I love every decision that I’ve made. And I feel like I’ve learned and I’ve grown and I’ve grown closer with my wife. I’ve grown closer with my family. I have connection with all of my staff and my company. We have very low employee churn because we aspire to connect with each other at the level of the things that matter to us because we are all doing something that matters to us. And I think that if you can stay true to that from beginning to end of your career as much as possible, whether you end up here or here, I think you’re going to end up at the right place.

That’s a profound statement. And it kind of makes me like I’m just going to jump the gun with my next question is usually as a bonus question, but with you ending with that such a profound statement. My next question is if you could spend 24 hours with anyone dead or alive, uninterrupted for those 24 hours, who would it be? And why?

My grandma? The reason I say that is because I missed a couple of opportunities. I was really career focused when she passed away and I missed a couple of opportunities to go hang out with her a couple more times. And so by the time I told her about my wife and that we were going to get married, she was in a coma. Gosh, that’s such a personal answer, though. But it is true. She’s the one person that I could have gone to visit one more time and I didn’t. And she’s so different from me. I had a lot to learn from her. She’s all artsy and flowers and she wore a bonnet to Church every day. And this is my mom’s mother and she would call us and tell us how the pastor said how pretty she looked and that was her life. She loved that. And again, it’s the opposite of me. I’ve got Star Wars stuff on the wall behind me in computer science and AI books, but I loved it and I wish I would have gotten 24 more hours with her. The last time I spent real time with her, I took her out on the Rogue River in Grants Pass, Oregon, and we went on the jet boats there and she had such a blast. And we took a couple of pictures together. And she’s the one person that I have other relatives, too. But she’s the one that I was kind of the closest to that I didn’t get that last day with.

I think based upon the stories you was telling and earlier on, you was talking about your daughter and her creativity, it sounds like you have somewhat of a reincarnation of your grandmother living with you growing up.

You know what? That’s a neat perspective. I never thought of that. I will think about it that way. I think going forward. Yeah. She’s awesome. She challenges me every single day when I wake up. That was a little bit I don’t think you’re probably looking for more of a career answer, but that’s my honest answer.

I think your transparency is a breath of fresh air. So I think your answer was the answer that we needed here. Definitely. And I think you brought up Star Wars kind of this closing out with, like, a more bonus, funny side of things. It’s if you could decide who would win in a chess match between Yoda, Professor X, and Tony Starks, who do you think will win and why?

Yeah, I’m tempted to say Yoda right, because I think he’s got everything it takes. But I actually think Yoda would actually play the chess match as a larger strategy to create trust with the people he would lose intentionally, not in a way that was obvious to anybody else, so that other people would give him information that’s his entire kind of Feng Shui with the universe is that he’s very comfortable. He was very comfortable dying because his death was a part of a bigger journey. That would be the most direct response there. And then the person that I would want to win would be Tony, because I think of Deep Sentinel. Tony is the model of Deep Sentinel. Deep Sentinel. We have a statue of Iron Man in our office. We have a six foot tall statue of Ironman. When you walk in, the first thing you see is the hand like jewel pointed at you. Because Tony Stark embodies who we want to be. We want to be funny and personable and approachable and human, and at the same time, we want to be intelligent and driven by technology. And then the third thing is that we’re the best of both of those worlds. And that’s what Iron Man really was right to me. I think that combination of computer and human, Jarvis and Tony together, that’s who I would aspire to be. That’s who I think would win the match.

Wow. It’s phenomenal. I definitely appreciate everything that you brought to the table today. It’s one of those things that eye opening is refreshing, is insightful. So going into closing, I think we’re overtime. But if you want to, we can kind of just push it a little bit longer. I’m giving you the microphone. You’re the host of Boss Uncage. In this journey. In this conversation, are there any questions that you would like to ask me?

Oh, man. Well, I mean, look, I opened up a lot in terms of my life. I gave a lot of perspective there to benchmark me against your other guests. Tell me the things that you thought I did incredibly well and the things you think I did incredibly poorly or things that you think I would benefit from, given the experience of all the thousands of other people you’ve interviewed, what’s something I could learn about.

Man, it’s just so interesting hearing you speak and obviously listening to your career path. And to your point, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people at this point in time. So it’s kind of hard for me to kind of put a direct comparison between you and anyone else. I mean, I’ve dealt with multi millionaires and I’ve seen the great opportunities. But I think as of right now in this podcast, I would think your delivery and your profound history is kind of unmatched at this point, to be honest with you.

What can I learn, though? Tell me, what is the topic that you’ve talked about with another boss that you think gosh, this sounds like something that Sally would find super interesting and exciting and an opportunity to grow.

I think off your conversation beforehand was just talking about like NFPs to a certain extent. So I think with your knowledge and your know how have you touched into that space? I mean, obviously, understanding analytical data, understanding AI, understanding robotics, going into NFT is a whole another platform, a whole another world. The meta verse is uniquely different. So have you jumped into that space? I know you understand it, but are you eventually planning on diving into that space?

I am learning about it right now. I have one investment in this space and I have a friend who’s a developer for NFTs and I am literally like wrapping my brain about around it right now. I had dinner with some friends two nights ago, one of whom invested really heavily in NFTs and the other one is a complete disbeliever. And we had a long two hour conversation about this. I think I’ll tell you my view on NFPs and what I’m trying to figure out, which is how do we make this a non luxury thing? How do we make this something where it’s not Gwyneth Paltrow buying it, but it’s you and me trading baseball cards on the street corner or on the bus? I guess I don’t even know kids ride busses to school anymore, but on the bus on the way to school, right again, I don’t know how old you are exactly. For me, it was garbage bail kids and then magic cards in high school. And how do we make it more like that? Where there are ten cent cards and there are five cent cards and then there’s trash cards and right now NFCs are all 5000, 10,000, $50,000. Who really wants to spend $5,000 on a digital thing? That could go away tomorrow and has no tangible value. Who has that liquid cash to do that? It’s truly a luxury couture product. And is there a way to make that something you and I can just hang out and riff on?

I definitely agree with you in that space, that spectrum. But I think your background and having that analytical data like that insight, like you said earlier on, you figured out 90% of what you was doing essentially with Amazon in the beginning, completely failed. But you found that one little puzzle piece and that one piece grew and it grew into a $31 billion industry. Right. So what in the NFT. Space based upon what you know, and I think that’s the next adventure. Right. How do you bridge these two things together? You have the insight, you have the data, you have to know how, but to the general public, they still even know what the hell NFT is or even how to download NFT or how to purchase NFT. What could you do in that space to kind of help that transition?

I will think on that question. It’s been awesome getting to know you and answer all your questions. Man, I’ve enjoyed this a lot.

Yeah, likewise. For sure, man. And again, I don’t want to suck up any more of your time. Like I said earlier on, I think you and I could probably talk on and off for two, 3 hours end up being like a Joe Rogan experiment. It’s a good way to segue out at this point. Again, I appreciate your time. You’re busy schedule everything that you’re doing, and again, you’re not just developing and creating. You’re also giving back to humanity to another level, to where I think once people realize that and they start to come to fruition with it, by all means, they’ll be thanking you for sure.

Man, I would love that. That’s what we’re trying to do and it’s what drives us. The woman that you mentioned that holds up the Christmas card. That’s what I think about all the time. We have customers that do that every couple of days, and it’s what drives me. It’s a huge motivator.

Wow. Well, this is final note, Dave also known as the founder boss. I appreciate everything you brought to the table today, man.

Thank you so much.

It’s been awesome estate S.A, grant over and out.