312: Mark Jeffrey On The Importance Of Timing

Mark Jeffrey is the co-founder and CEO of Guardian Circle, a service tackling emergency response through a unique community approach. He's also a serial entrepreneur with five exits, a published author, and worked closely with some of the biggest names in tech including Jason Calacanis and Travis Kalanick. In this conversation, we discuss how emergency response can improve, why disbanding the police probably won't happen, what it has been like to work with some of Silicon Valley's most successful entrepreneurs, and the experience of building a company during COVID-19. =============================== Blockset by BRD is your hosted blockchain infrastructure. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near real-time portfolio management solutions, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much more: blockset.com =============================== Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Mark Jeffrey is the co-founder and CEO of Guardian Circle, a service tackling emergency response through a unique community approach. He's also a serial entrepreneur with five exits, a published author, and worked closely with some of the biggest names in tech, including Jason Calcanis and Travis Kalanick. In this conversation, we discuss how emergency response can improve, why disbanding the police probably won't happen, what it has been like to work with some of Silicon Valley's most successful entrepreneurs, and the experience of building a company during COVID-19. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mark, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is Blockset by BRD.

• 0:53Anthony Pompliano?

  You'll know BRD as one of the first blockchain wallets in the App Store back in 2014. They've now built Blockset, which is essentially the Amazon AWS for the blockchain industry. It's a hosted blockchain infrastructure product. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near-real-time portfolio management solutions, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much, much more. Go check them out at blockset.com. The next is crypto.com. It's an all-in-one platform that allows you to buy, sell, store, earn, loan, and invest crypto all from one place.

• 1:37Anthony Pompliano?

  You can join over 1 million users currently using the crypto.com app. That's right, they got a million people to download the crypto.com app. You can download it today and earn $50 using my code POMP2020 or click on the link in the description. Crypto.com, not only do they have a cool URL, but it's also the place where mass adoption is happening. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing my opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com, or go in the description and you can click the link there. All right, let's get into this episode with Mark. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:45Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. Super excited to have Mark here. Thanks so much for doing this, man.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Really glad to be here. Thanks for asking me on.

• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, for sure. Let's start with just your background. Like, where'd you grow up and what'd you do kind of before you got into technology?

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, well, I grew up in New Hampshire, so kind of in the woods. My dad was a software engineer, so we had, you know, TRS 80s and Apple 2s and things like that in the house. So that was super cool. So became a software engineer when I got out of school. Worked in the defense business for a little while and decided that was not for me. Didn't like working in a lead room, you know, not in the entrepreneurial world. So then I went to Delphi Internet for a little bit. That was kind of a cool thing that got me out to LA. And I had an office right next door to Sean Connery, and I showed him the Internet for the very first time, which is a pretty, was a pretty funny story. And then, and I started my first company, a thing called The Palace, which was this

• 3:44Speaker 02

  avatar virtual chat in like 96, so very early. And I was funded by SoftBank, Time Warner, and Intel. And it was pretty big. It had about 10 million users at its peak, which for those days was just enormous, right? So, so, yeah, so that ended up, there was no business model, right? Nobody knew how to make money off of these things. We now know the answer would have been NFTs, right? Inside of a virtual world, but we didn't have that back then, and we didn't even have payment rails. Like, there was no PayPal, the credit card process. We just had no way to do that stuff. So, so, great phenomenon, but not really a business. But did sell it, so that was cool. And then did my second company, which was a thing called SuperSig, which was putting all kinds of functionality into email signatures.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  And that, you know, we raised like two and a half million for like Ron Conway and some of those folks up in Silicon Valley. I'm in LA, so up north. And that was our, that was my crash company. So, so unfortunately, that one didn't work out. And then a friend of mine came to me and said, Well, I have a company that's sort of on the ropes. You're, you're completely on the ropes. Why don't you come work for me for a little bit? And so I said, Yes, and that friend was Travis Kalanick, and later CEO and founder of Uber. He was working on his second company at the time, a thing called Red Swoosh. So I did that with him for about a year, year and a half, something like that. It was like maybe four to six of us in a little kind of cramped office in

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Westwood for about a year and a half. So he ended up selling that company, but like eight years later. Right? So, and, and, and it didn't, it really did not look like it was going to go anywhere for a very long time. So

• 5:26Anthony Pompliano?

  So the story, the story that I've heard about Red Swoosh is, he basically, everyone had left, moved on and do other things. And he just was persistent as hell. And then out of nowhere, a bunch of investors started getting checks. And they were like, What the hell is this from? And he was like, Oh, yeah, I sold the company.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was kind of like that. And, you know, he, I, I ran into him, I talked to him again, and sometime around 2014, 2015. And I was very interested in what was up with Uber, obviously. But, but I was really more interested. I was like, How the hell did you sell that company? Right? And, and it really was just a story of grit. I mean, that's absolutely true. And that's, that is Travis. So I give him that. The real story that I've heard is that Akamai acquired a, another company that was in sort of an adjacent space, and they got a patent portfolio with that company. Red Swoosh had a patent that threatened that patent portfolio. So out of an abundance of caution, they acquired Red Swoosh as well, not for its business, because there were no

• 6:27Speaker 02

  engineers. There were no engineers, there was no product, there were no customers. That's why I was like, This is just, this is crazy. And so, you know, it was, he had something to negotiate with, and it was the patent. So it wasn't just sort of nothing. But he was able to negotiate a much larger exit than probably another mere mortal would have been able to do, right? Because that is Travis. So

• 6:47Anthony Pompliano?

  That, that's awesome. And then what did you do after Red Swoosh?

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so after Red Swoosh, I started another, I was stupid enough to start another company. And this one was a business social network. So yes, we were a competitor to LinkedIn. We started in 2002.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  We didn't know about LinkedIn yet because they hadn't publicly unveiled themselves. They were about six months ahead of us, so not terribly far. We sold, we ended up, we couldn't raise money for it. So we ended up getting to about a million users when LinkedIn had 2 million. So, you know, we were within shooting distance. And then IAC, Barry Diller, Interactive Corp.,

• 7:26Speaker 02

  they basically acquired us through a long, long story. But they ended up acquiring us in 2004. And then, you know, we didn't know how we made money. It was another one of these things. It was a great phenomenon. But nobody knew how to make money off social networks in those days. And it could have been a lot of things, right? Now we know what the answer is, but looking forward from these moments, those answers aren't clear. It could be you charge people to post, right? Or it could be you just, it's free, but you give us your email address and we're allowed to email market to you. There were a lot of people doing things like that back then. So Diller came to us and said, "Great, I've acquired you. I love what you're doing. It's awesome." But all of my companies are either number one or number two in their category.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  So you have to pick a category of revenue and become number one or number two in that category within a year. So I said, "All right." So I kind of went away for about a month to try to figure this out. And I ended up working with, I hired Charlene Lee, who is now pretty well-known as an analyst. So I worked with Charlene a lot on sort of these ideas. And I came back and I said, "Look, it's jobs. All this is, it's Monster just inside of a social network. And you use your social graph as a way to find better candidates or better jobs that you have connections to." Again, this was not obvious, sort of, and it is looking back. It wasn't from that moment looking forward. So we went and presented it to Diller. And this was before LinkedIn decided to do the exact same thing.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  So we presented Diller, Diller says, um, you know, this is, you know, I like, he said, basically, look, it's, he agreed that it was monster.com, but Monster spent a hundred million dollars a year on advertising. So he was like, I would have to spend a hundred million a year on advertising. And we were like, no, look at the, we had the growth curve. We did have, you know, the, the, the story, you know, curve going up and to the right. And, uh, and we said things like geometric growth. We didn't have the word viral growth yet. That wasn't in the lexicon. Um, and it wasn't really sort of commonly understood. So we're describing viral growth through them, but we don't have the words yet. And he just thinks we're full of shit.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  He thinks this is just some shit we've cooked up. There's, to his credit though, there's nothing in his experience that maps to a phenomenon like this, right? He comes from a world where you spend money on advertising and then people come, right? And so he, he wasn't wrong. He just didn't have anything to sort of relate to it. So he, he basically said, I don't believe this. He said, well, come up with something else. And I said, there is nothing else. This is the right answer. And then there's all the wrong answers. And so basically he was like, well, I'll buy you guys all your contracts then. And that was, that was kind of that. So I left. Um, and then I wasn't really sure what I was going to do. Oh, I wrote, I started writing novels. I did that. And I podcast some of the novels. I was one of the first people to podcast a audiobook. I was one of three. So we all, all of us ended up getting like millions of

• 10:18Speaker 02

  downloads because we were the only free audiobook novels in the world at the time. And then iTunes added podcasting supports. All of a sudden, we were the only game in town, right? So, um, and that's a whole nother. So yeah, that was, that was this book, this book here, which ended up getting published by Harper Collins. So that was a whole nother little adventure I went on. Um, and then, so I was thinking about doing another tech company and I didn't really have a good idea. I was piddling around with a couple of things. And I got a call from Jason Calcanis and he basically said, hey, I got a, you know, I got a term sheet from Sequoia to do this new wave, uh, search engine called Mahalo. And I'm looking for a CTO, you know, what are you doing? And, uh, you know, it seemed like a good idea at the time. So I signed up

• 11:01Speaker 02

  and, and, and really it was a good idea at the time. We were basically saying humans were curating search results. At the time, Google's search results looked very sort of roboty and, and, and there wasn't really much meat there. So you know how today there's like, like little side card that comes down that shows you kind of a summary of whatever it was you were just searching for? That wasn't there yet. Mahalo was doing that. And except we were trying to, you know, human curated on a much larger scale. So we were right. The searches could be vastly improved with some human intervention. But the problem was is that, you know, we, in order to compete, we would have had to compete successfully with Google.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  To do that, we would have had to have a corpus of data that was competitive with Google. And it took so long to make search results by hand. That after a year, we had like 5% of the internet done, right? Or 5% of all search results. And so, so basically, the end result was 95% of the time, Mahalo sucked. 5% of the time, it was 600% better, right? But that just didn't really work in the end. So, so we did, you know, we worked on that for about four. I worked on that for about four years. Elon Musk was an investor, so got to meet him, got to hang out with him. And, you know, Sequoia was an investor. So there's some, there's some great people hanging around in the Mahalo offices. It was kind of like Warhol's loft for a little while.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  So a lot of, a lot of really interesting and great people and ideas kind of flowed through that office. In, at least in LA, it was kind of the center of action for about four years. And then I was, I, you know, long story short is then Jason and I started talking. And Kevin Pollak started hanging around a lot, the comedian. And Kevin, yeah, he's great. I love Kevin. And, and so, you know, Jason knew from my podcasting days that I was very into podcasting. Knew that, that world. And so he said, look, let's do a podcasting company. We'll call it This Week in. And you can be CEO and we'll all be three-way partners on it. So we started that and I did that for about a year and a half. And, and long story short is we just couldn't make it profitable.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  It was just, there was, there was too much diversity in the shows. They were all over the map. So that meant we had to sell ads against, we had 30 shows. We really had 30 different markets. So we could gain those sales efficiencies. They all had very different demographics. And some of the shows were too broad, like This Week in Music, for example. You know, one week it was speed metal, the next week it's classic rock, next. You know, next week is RAP. Those are completely different audiences. So it could never sort of find its groove. The tech shows did very well. So Jason's show This Week in Startups, that did awesome. We had, there was one I hosted called This Week in Cloud Computing. We had like a This Week in iPad. We were sort of following a lot of them up with a lot of, a lot of the model that Lilo Port had laid out, right?

• 13:54Speaker 02

  So tech shows worked, the other shows kind of didn't. So we were sort of left in this no man's land. So after about a year and a half, Jason said, you know, I think I can make a run at it. So he took, he took a crack at it. He couldn't make it work either. But I left and then I, again, was sort of like, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do. So I consulted for a little bit. I just went to local VCs. I said, sort for hire, you know, what do you, what do you need, what do you need help with? So I did that for, I was like a run in for about two years. And then, and then I had the idea for Guardian Circle, which is the current thing that I'm doing right now. So, anything else in the past you want to talk about?

• 14:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, so here's my question is, you have worked on many companies that people who pay attention to technology, especially over the last 20 years or so, will know a number of those companies, a number of those players that ran companies, founded companies. What's your biggest lesson learned through all of that? Right? Whether it comes from the people, the companies, like, what would you say is the biggest lesson you learned through that whole timeline?

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, there actually is a biggest lesson, oddly. And I learned it when I was at Mahalo and Mike Moritz, who is, you know, fabled Sequoia partner, founder, came to visit us one day and he, he had like a Q and A, ask me anything session. And I asked him the question, I said, look, you, you have like 30 years, it was either 30 or 40 years of venture capital experience at the time. You've seen a lot of stuff. What, what's the difference between the companies that make it? And, and become big things like Apple and Google? And the companies that just die? And I really thought the answer was going to be something like, ah, well, it depends. There's a lot of things, a lot of factors. And, and he said, oh, that's easy.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  The, the, the companies that focus on one thing, one thing only, and are the best in the world at one thing, have a shot at being the Apple or the Google. I can't, I can't tell you that for sure they will, but they are at least, they at least now have a lottery ticket. And a lot of times they do win. The companies that definitely fail every time are the ones that can't take a direction, right? They're like, like, oh, we should, oh, there's money over in enterprise. So let's, let's forget our consumer thing, go over here, right? They, they sort of get distracted by all these siren songs around them. And those are the companies that die. And, and if, if you're, you know, pivoting like, you know, so, so much, you're doing pirouettes, like, you're definitely gonna die. And that's the pattern that he's seen. So that's, that's sort of A.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  B, I would, this is not a direct lesson of mine, but when I heard this, it rang very true. There's a guy named Bill, Bill Gross, who founded Idea Lab, and he has 30 years worth of data from that, where he analyzed, so he did a study where they analyzed, what is the difference between the companies that make it and the companies that don't? He did his own sort of, you know, qualitative, quantitative study. Is it the team? Is it the amount of money? Is it the quality of the idea? You know, what's, where's the magic? And he's, and the answer was very surprising and very clear. The answer was timing. Almost nothing else mattered. The biggest coefficient of a company's success is timing. And there was absolutely no question about this.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  So, um, so that was a pretty surprising, but very clear finding.

• 17:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it, it's really interesting too, how, uh, when you talk to these folks who've been around for decades, right? And they've seen everything come through the door, uh, they can boil it down to one thing, right? It's not just, uh, oh, it is this complex answer. It's like, no, no, no, like, here is the thing from my experience that matters the most. Um, and what that really tells you is it's like, they've got the clarity of thought, uh, and they really do understand it, right? It's kind of the, the adage of like, if you don't really understand something unless you can explain it to a child, like, they're able to boil it down to here is the one thing that matters.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I know. And I have to say, I'm guilty of, you know, look, we're founders. We fall in love with our products, right? This is a thing that I thought of. I'm super happy about it. And when I'm telling you about it, I want to, you know, to me, it's fucking Lord of the Rings. Right? And I want to, I want to take the time to craft the story. But you don't give a shit. You have, you have a million people coming to you. You just want, you just want me to get to the point right away. And, and, and also you want the customer to get the point right away. Cause the customer is going to listen for like three seconds and, you know, maybe do it, maybe not. So, yeah, and I'm definitely guilty of overly pros, you know, overly talking my, my products. So I have to watch out for that.

• 18:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think everyone is. So let's talk a little bit about Guardian Circle. I was telling you before we started that like, I feel like this is your guys' Super Bowl, right? So we, we've got a pandemic. Yes, literally. We've got a pandemic that occurred that led to this economic shock. And now we've got social unrest in all 50 states and even internationally. And so maybe just give us a kind of overview of like, what is Guardian Circle? And then we can kind of talk about like, why it's important, given the, the timing right now.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Guardian Circle is friends and family 911 or community emergency response. So the idea is you download our app and you get your friends, family, neighbors also download it. And then you connect as guardians in the system. Both of you have to opt in. It's like being friends on Facebook, right? And one of you can not guard the other at any moment you want. When you're in trouble, you hit an alert button. So the idea is push a button, help comes. So signal goes out to all your guardians, their phones start exploding with this evil klaxon sound, which is good because it's an alert and this is an emergency. And then when they, when they answer that alert, everyone is brought into a shared map and chat room. So in, you know, under 30 seconds, everybody knows where everybody else is.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  And everybody can talk to everybody else. And this is the important part, this is true whether those people knew each other beforehand or not. They all know you, but they don't know each other. But getting your mom and your neighbor talking during your emergency, difference between life and death, possibly. Right? So, so that's the basic idea.

• 19:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what are the scenarios in which you guys kind of see this being most helpful? Is this like, hey, I'm drunk and I'm lost? Or is this a thing where I've gotten a really serious car accident? Like, how do we understand kind of the situations where you guys foresee this being used?

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, well, I can tell you the situation that inspired it, which is a great example. My girlfriend had a stroke, and she's fine, I like to say that right away. So she was, but she works out of her garage. She was all alone, and she couldn't type, and she couldn't, she was trying to dial the phone, like, her brain just wasn't working, right? So she could have pushed a button, but that was kind of it. And I happened to come home at a weird time, and I found her and brought her to the hospital, and, you know, it all worked out. But afterwards, I started thinking about this, and I'm like, my god, like, if I hadn't gotten there in time, strokes are like time-dependent. If too much time passes, you're paralyzed or you're dead. So, you know, and I realized, and when I reversed engineered the situation, that there was all kinds of help all around her.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Her neighbor was home, several people had been driving by, you know, in short, there were seven people within a thousand yards of her during the course of the emergency. She was drowning in help, but she had no way to get to it. So, and I was like, well, if somebody could just push the button, I started thinking about guardian circle, right? Somebody pushed a button, then, you know, and somehow we could have an Uber-like screen where, instead of, you know, instead of cars coming, humans were alerted and could coordinate, then this would, you know, your network is closest and can help you fastest kind of thing, right? So that was, that was the original. It was really about health things initially. And then as we started showing it to people, we did show it, there's a, there's a, there's a place called Crypto Blockchain Plug here in LA, and it's sort of, you know, it's in

• 21:43Speaker 02

  the inner city, so a lot of folks there are scared to call the cops. They're like, we just, look, we don't call unless, you know, somebody's arm is chopped off, then okay, but other than that, no. They'd rather sort of handle things themselves. So, anyone that likes neighborhood watch kinds of things, for whatever reason, it's very appealing to them. If you're in a remote area where the cops can't get to you, it's also very, right, it's not really a practical option, call the cops, they're gonna be here in an hour, right? That doesn't really help you. So. And then finally, women's safety is a big concern that a lot of people think of with this. So we, you know, the X Prize people, when they found out what we were doing, they

• 22:25Speaker 02

  were doing a women's safety X Prize to protect women in India. And, you know, there the cops, when the cops come, the cops usually assault the woman also. So, which is just insane, right? But so the answer is not more cops, right? So, you know, in India, they already know kind of what America is now knowing for the first time. They've known it for a long time, that you can't rely totally on the police. So, you know, there's, you know, the women's safety, a lot of jobs that women are alone and possibly going to be isolated by a creepy guy, real estate agents, hotel housekeepers, that's, it's a big problem for hotel housekeepers. In fact, there are now panic button laws that are coming out

• 23:09Speaker 02

  nationwide requiring hotels to buy products like, you know, what Guardian Circle has. And we are now selling into that market, we're just starting to sell into that market ourselves. So, you know, kind of a wide range of things. But you're right that before all of this COVID and other things, when we told people about Guardian Circle, our pitch was kind of like 911 is not good enough in a lot of ways. They don't know, you know, they don't know your location when you call from a mobile device. There are problems with 911, but, but most people feel like 911 is safe, right? There, if you're in America, you're like, yeah, I'm good. I just call 911, I'm fine. And we had a hard time kind of getting a lot of people to, you know, people don't like to think about emergencies.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  So getting on their radar was just tough, right? Unless they already were someone that was at risk, elderly, a woman who's been assaulted, who, you know, was just afraid of it happening again. If it was on your mind in some way, it was easier. But other than that, it was difficult. Over the last couple of weeks, like three, four, you know, COVID, obviously, but the last week in particular, you know, getting people to think about emergencies is no longer a marketing challenge, right? So that has suddenly shifted the dynamic and now people are seeking us out instead of us seeking them out. So, so, yeah.

• 24:24Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's the thought process that it's something there's kind of two camps, right? One is like, hey, the COVID crisis has made me think much more about those around me, my community, all that kind of stuff. But then two is a lot of the social unrest around police brutality and things like that. Like, I'm fascinated with the idea of creating multiple layers when it comes to community kind of protection, right? So you mentioned kind of neighborhood watch is the, the least lethal, easiest, kind of loosely organized group, all the way on up to, we have a military that protects the United States, right? And, and there's a whole bunch of steps in there. What you guys have basically done is use technology to create the equivalent of really kind of a neighborhood watch that's technology enabled.

• 25:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And to me, the part that's really interesting is I don't need to know the other people, right? Like, all we have to do is just be connected. If I know you and somebody else knows you and you're in trouble, then all of a sudden, we're, you know, me and that person are on the same team, right? We're, we're here to help you. And so putting us into some kind of chat is a pretty interesting dynamic. We almost create these like ephemeral social network graphs, right? Around a person?

• 25:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, the emergency world has a name for it. They call it dynamic, dynamic group management or regrouping. So, but yes, that means exactly what you just said. And that, that is one of the key problems to solve an emergency response is getting all these people communicating immediately that can clear up the fog of war, if you will, around the emergency. And, but they, these people don't have each other's phone numbers. They don't know each other's names. They typically have no way to communicate or, or anything that puts them into communication. So we found it. We found, it's kind of a hard problem to explain to someone, but during your emergency, you're like, oh shit, I really wish X, Y, and Z could talk to one another right now. It, it's kind of the top problem. So, so, yeah, it's a big deal.

• 26:21Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And then I guess, kind of, how do you see the acquisition of users going here? Right? So like, obviously, before you had this whole thing where you had to convince people there's a problem in how to use the technology. Now they're convinced. Like, what do you see? Kind of the change when it comes to the acquisition and marketing?

• 26:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I want to touch on one thing you said earlier, because it just reminded me of something I didn't say. When we first started this thing, I thought of it as a CDN of help, right? So, just like Akamai, they have peers at the edge of the network closest to where the bits need to be delivered. And 90% of the time, that's much more efficient. But that doesn't, you know, that doesn't get rid of Amazon. That doesn't get rid of centralized servers. You still need those. The CDN is a boost, is like a booster rocket, right? And so in the same way, Guardian Circle was not meant to replace the police. It's a CDN of help. You know, your network is closest and can help you fastest, like a CDN.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  But I never imagined that, like, people would be like, "Yeah, you know what? Get rid of the cops totally. We'll just do this." And so I'm like, "You guys are going further even than I would." You know, I'm still in CDN of help world. But, you know, the defund the police thing, I think it's a moment. I don't think we'll end up truly with no police forces around the country. I don't, I don't think. I don't think it's going to go there. But I do think we'll end up somewhere more in the middle. So, so we, you know, we have, we have changed our marketing. You know, you've probably seen some of my tweets where I've just been tweeting things out like, you know, if things get crazier, this could help. And I have to be careful about how I say it, too, because I don't want, you know, there's a lot of people who are trying to profit off of this.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  And yes, we're trying to market into it, but we don't want to seem ghoulish. But the fact is, we worked for four years on a product which is perfect for this moment and can save lives. So, you know, yes, we're going to market it. I think it's okay. I don't think there's any moral qualm about doing that. But I do have to be respectful about how I do it, right? So, you know, you're thinking through, you know, the tweet very, very carefully to make sure there's no way it could be misinterpreted or taken the wrong way. You know, that's changed. I'm a bit more tiptoeing about things.

• 28:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and on the defund the police and demilitarize the police, or actually disband the police, which is a new one for me, to me, it's kind of this weird situation where it would be hard to argue that the police has not become militarized. So the idea of like, hey, maybe they shouldn't be walking around with weapons of war. Okay, like, I think some people, you know, that's not that hard to get there. When it comes to things like defund, which in New York City, there's talking about taking away one of the $6 billion in their budget. Okay, so you got to make some hard decisions that happens to every business, like, got it. Where I think that, you know, you're kind of hinting at, and it's gonna be a hard leap for people, is like, the disbanding of the police, right?

• 29:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And what I said to somebody the other day, and actually, I tweeted it, was, look, if you want to disband the police, you better be like, the biggest Second Amendment fan in the world, right? Because, like, who are you going to call if you can't defend yourself, and you can't call somebody to defend you either, right? You get in this weird world. So I think that it's more like, the either smaller budgets, or demilitarization is likely where we end up, which gives opportunity, I think, for things like this, right, that can kind of provide more of the safety component, rather than the like, hey, there's somebody who just robbed me, is running down the street with a gun, like, I don't know if I'm calling my neighbor as much as I'm calling the police, right?

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, so Guardian Circle can provide a much bigger buffer zone between, you know, the guys with the guns, and all these problems in between, that can be solved by a lot of other people, right? So, you know, and I think we'll have, I think we have a much bigger role. I think where this will end up is somewhere in the middle, and there will be a much bigger role for things like Guardian Circle, and, you know, a layer of community emergency response. That doesn't fully replace the police, but you go through that first before, okay, this is bad enough, we'll call the cops. But I think if you get, you know, to your point, if you get rid of the police, ultimately, that just creates a power vacuum, and that will be filled by mafias and gangs. Like, that's where that will go, because

• 30:43Speaker 02

  people, you know, then, you know, this thing gets crazier, people be like, someone save us. And that's when the mafia and the gangs be like, well, well, you know, we'll save you, but, you know. Cost you a little money, right? You know, that that'll happen, right? That's that's where it'll go. So.

• 30:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Look, look, uh, ask any soldier if they went to Iraq or Afghanistan, they will tell you that many people in those communities, not all of them, but many people in those communities will say, hey, when the Taliban, you know, looked over our village, it sucked. They were super violent, but there was law and order, right? And all of a sudden, when you guys went and ran them out of here, there's now this power vacuum. And yes, we're trying to replace it with democracy and, you know, all this kind of stuff. And so that transition period is actually very weird for those people, right? Because they're used to kind of a very rigid kind of oversight. Obviously, when you come at it from democratic ideals like we do, we say, hey, well, you know, look, there's a better path, right? Let us help you do that. But but I definitely agree that, you know, when you have that power vacuum,

• 31:39Anthony Pompliano?

  what happens is people that you probably don't want being in charge end up being in charge, right?

• 31:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's where it'll go. So it's unfortunate. Democracy is hard and law and order is hard, right? And, you know, the pendulum is really, it's swung very far in one direction right now. So emotions are high. And while there's a huge, there's absolutely a point behind where the emotions are right now. We're not, we're not thinking about the the logical consequences of where that that thinking goes yet. I don't think in full. So.

• 32:12Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think is the biggest risk, right? Because like I I always find it interesting when uh, timing lines up, right? So you built a product now in kind of the more macro environment. It's like bam, like, okay, everyone's paying attention right now. Hey, we're going to roll this product right into this great uh, timing. How do you think about risk during this time? So you mentioned one on like the marketing message and more kind of like people misconstruing or or seeing something as insensitive. What are the other risks that you see?

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, for us, you know, it took us, it really took us four years to get to what I called, you know, in my mind is the 1.0 version of the product. So and that that was, it's really our 3.1 version. Uh, and that came out in kind of the end of last year. Um, and there's a lot of reasons for that and a part of it is money. So, um, you know, we we did, we did do a token sale. So we do have a token called Guard and there's a wallet inside of the app. And you earn tokens for uh, referring people into the network. So the more you help build the safety network, the more you earn. So, um, so for us. You know, the risk had been getting too, you know, getting too much publicity before we were ready. Now we're ready. Now we're scalable. Everything's good.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Um, so like the timing just weirdly worked out perfectly on all of that. Um, but at the same time, you know, Guardian Circle is a free service. Uh, it doesn't make any money, um, which is fine. It doesn't, it doesn't cost a lot for us to run it. So it's not really, it's not like WeWork or Uber where we're spending gobs of, of cash. It's not that. Um, but, but it's, it's, uh, you know, we, we need a way to, we need to either raise money or we need to, uh, have some revenue coming in. So the risk right now is, is, is the Mike Moritz risk, right? Of, of, you know, diverging our focus. So we did have some funding lined up in March, uh, which I won't go into the details of that, but bottom line is, it was about five million

• 34:07Speaker 02

  and it fell through because of COVID and the market, you know, anytime the market crashes, venture capitalists, you know, kind of, they're, they're limited partners like, no, we're, we're, we're not going to give you our money after all, right? So there was a fun closing and it didn't happen and blah, blah, blah. So, so then we said, all right, well, we have to do a revenue product. Um, and we looked at a consumer revenue product and what we discovered was it was probably too early for that. Um, it was, it was a great time to grow the free product. Um, but where the actual money is, is in the hotel housekeeping, uh, business. So like I said before, uh, there are panic button laws coming into effect right now, which require hotels to provide housemaids with panic button service.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Um, and it's, it's a law in Vegas. There's a California law that looks like it's going to pass. Uh, then there's, you know, a few places, a few cities around the United States, but it does look like the sort of thing that's going to go nationwide. Um, in an aggregate, you know, it's, it's, it's probably about a billion dollar market in the U.S. Worldwide, it's like five or six billion, something like that. So, um, so there's money there and it's a, it, it's a special case of Guardian Circle. So we're building a new product based on Guardian Circle. And that effort's been underway for a couple of weeks now and it's almost done. So that's a good news. I was actually afraid that this might be, you know, a six month build or something stupid like that. Um, you know, there's some modifications we have to make to the product because, you know, if you're in a hotel,

• 35:33Speaker 02

  uh, GPS doesn't work right, you know, you can't really rely on GPS. So, you know, it's sort of a combination of, of Bluetooth and, uh, NFT, NFC tags, not NFT, NFC.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  NFC tags, so some other technologies that have to be brought into play. But the API that we made for the devices for the X Prize, that API is now reusable in this context. So a lot of the sort of ladders that we put down for ourselves, we're climbing up right now, right? Without real life, we didn't know when we were putting those ladders down, why, how we would use them. But they've turned out to be very useful now. But the danger is, is that we, you know, we'll have a bifurcated bite, you know, we'll have two focuses at once. You know, we have the hotel business and the free product. And, you know, if we're sort of serving two masters, that will eventually, which we are right now. I'm consciously knowing that we're doing it. But at a certain point, that will become dangerous for all the reasons Mike Lawrence pointed out. So right now, that's my biggest fear.

• 36:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then how has it been kind of navigating this while running a company, right? So you mentioned kind of the challenges with the fundraising side. But how have other things around building a product and managing a business kind of changed due to the COVID crisis?

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Well, well, we, we, we had become a crypto company kind of around 2017 or so. And we were already working from home. So nothing changed there. We never had an office, right? But I was, I was basically living out of hotels and planes for a good year and a half, kind of, you know,

• 37:08Speaker 02

  and, and at kind of a crazy pace. I mean, in my life, you know, there was, there was regular life and then there was internet time, you know, regular time, the internet time, then, then there was crypto time, right? Which was sort of even more fast and more furious. And, and now there's COVID time, which is like another crank in the, crank in the, in the ratchet. And, um, but, you know, we were already working from home, but I'm no longer traveling. So that, that has changed.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  So I actually think it played to our strengths because the rest of the world started acting like we already were. And I've heard this a lot. We were already a distributed team. We were already at home. So we didn't have to reinvent ourselves, whereas most of the rest of the world did. So the only thing that did change is I stopped traveling like a crazy man, which is probably good. So, yeah, I don't really know what else to say other than that.

• 38:04Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, it makes sense. And then I guess also, like, as you guys continue to build the technology, how do you think about kind of the international market versus the domestic market? And you mentioned kind of the India endeavor, but one of the things I've become more and more interested in is as people are forced to go inside due to COVID, they spend more time on the internet. And what you actually get is you get a lot more kind of continuity in the content people are consuming, the conversations they're having, right? Like, you now, let's say that you used to go and have 10 conversations a day, and eight of those were in your local community, whether it was at a coffee shop, at the office, whatever

• 38:47Anthony Pompliano?

  it was, it was non-digital, right? And two of them were digital. And I'm making up kind of percentages here, right, or numbers. But now, if all of a sudden, nine out of 10 conversations are done online, like, the geographic barriers don't matter as much. And so you actually end up kind of colliding more and spending more time talking to people in other geographies, whether they're domestic or international. And so how do you guys think about marketing the product to international markets versus domestically? And do you see a change there based on this idea of, like, more people are living in kind of the digital economy than the analog one right now?

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there absolutely is a difference between marketing guardian circle internationally and domestically. Internationally, it's largely on Android.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  And, you know, making a, making a product, making an app for Android is just a giant pain in the ass. You've probably heard this a bunch of times, but, you know, you've got all these different makes and models, all these different screen sizes, all the different handsets are running different versions of Android, um, you know, you get different carriers, and it is just a madhouse. And so, you know, that, that was one of the reasons why it took us so long to get the, you know, the product, uh, in shape, because we were dealing with all those problems. And, um, and, and there's also different sensibilities, uh, for what people will accept in terms of, uh, permissions. So, w- we went through a lot of different versions of the onboarding process, specifically because internationally, uh, a lot of people were not getting their login code because SMS is, uh, you know,

• 40:20Speaker 02

  not that reliable outside the United States. Um, so we had to, you know, put things in like, uh, robo calls and, you know, other ways of getting, getting that information. Uh, we even got it enabled, uh, we haven't released this yet, but we did get it enabled on, uh, and I always get this wrong, WeChat or the, I can't remember which, whatever, one of those is the most popular one worldwide, we're on that. Um, so, uh, but, and, and most of those people don't like giving up, uh, giving, uh, access to their contacts. Uh, however, uh, we used to have a version, so when you, when you log into Guardian Circle, we ask for, uh, con- access to your contacts so that we can help you invite them to be guardians. And we've, we used to not do this, and we found that when we didn't do it,

• 41:04Speaker 02

  people just couldn't, if we didn't hold people by the hand and, and, and do everything for them that we could, they'd never ended up inviting, uh, people to be guardians. That was very difficult, even if, you know, they got into the system. So, so we created an in-app contact manager and an in-app invite system, which is now excruciatingly easy and wizard-like. Um, and it took us a long time to get there. Um, but a lot of people internationally just don't like that. They're like, nope, I'm, I'm, I'm afraid of this for one reason or another. However, we've discovered that Americans are not. Americans are just like, yep, I don't care, fine, whatever, uh, great. And they are, they're, the Americans are much, I would say, hell

• 41:44Speaker 02

  Guardian Circle users, all of them have like, you know, at least three guardians for the most part. And even the ones that don't have, that have less than that, they've invited like five or six people, right? So they, the behavior is that they are trying to regenerate, you know, they're trying to generate more users at all times. And they're trying out the alerts, they're doing practice alerts. So they, they get it. And there are pockets of the world that do get it, but by and large, it's been more difficult to kind of get it out to them. So the latest version, so we just made a version of Guardian Circle because of the international users, which is now the mainstream version, where we, we actually don't require access to your contacts, but you can't send out invites to people, you can only receive them.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  But once you are guarded up with someone, you can send alerts to them and they can send alerts to you. So the, the product is fully functional, except for the outbound invite portion of it. So, and, and, and to be clear also, the other thing, the other big thing we ran into was, both domestically and internationally, when we didn't do the contact manager and sort of cleanse the contacts, there was a lot of bad data in people's contact, just tons of it, and they just don't think about it. So they would send out invites to landlines and then call us and be like, it's not working, your product sucks. And then we, you know, we, we figure out, oh, you're sending it to, you're sending an SMS message to a landline, that's why, right? But people just, it's, it's not in their nature to sort of, you have to do those things for them.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  So, and that's true, that's, that's unfortunately true of Americans as well as people internationally, so.

• 43:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's super interesting to me too, how you start thinking about like the cohort analysis around, you know, how valuable is a user that's got three people who they've connected with versus five, versus one, and internationally versus domestically, like you can really kind of dig into this. And, and part of this is when you have almost these like micro social networks to some degree, really what you're doing is you're trying to find who's the person who's the most connected, who also is most bought into the mission, right? Because if they're bought in and they've got a large network, then they can kind of pull a bunch of users with them. And, and I've seen a lot of companies who successfully have done that. And then others who they knew that's what they needed to do, they just were unsuccessful in being able to locate, you know, who's that person who their social group will actually follow.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, the thing is with Guardian Circle, like, well, let me start here. For LinkedIn, or Facebook, or MySpace, or whatever, in order for it to be valuable, there have to be a lot of people on it, right? So, so you don't go to it, it's like a nightclub, right? You don't go to it unless a lot of other people are there, right? So, however, in our universe, Guardian Circle is 100% useful if you have two to five guardians. It doesn't matter how many people on Guardian Circle, you still have two to five guardians, you're not really interacting with anyone else. So, in that respect, we're not really chasing the people that have like millions of followers, like if we were Twitter, or Instagram, or something like that. But for those people, I mean, one of the reasons we did the Guard Referral Program

• 44:43Speaker 02

  is to give those people links, so as they recruit people, you don't have to be guardians with them, you just have to, if they use your link to get in the system, you earn guard for doing it. So, you know, that's one way we're trying to engage with that, I guess, but other than that, not really.

• 44:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Where can people go find more about Guardian Circle?

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Well, we are at guardianscircle.com, and, you know, our Twitter handle is @GuardiansCircle. So, we're pretty easy to find, and we've been pretty good about being very visible, I think. So, you know, there it is.

• 45:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then, I wrap up every episode with the same two questions. The first one is a super serious one, which is, what's the most important book that you've ever read?

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Oh, you know, if we're talking about business, I'm a big fiction, well, you know, I write novels, so I always say I love fiction, so, you know, that's one answer, but I won't get into that. Well, I'll get into it real quick. So, I love this, this series of books called The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever. And, you know, the plot is basically Lord of the Rings, except, in the 70s, a guy from our world hits his head and goes into this fantasy realm, and he's like the Frodo, right? And his wedding ring is the ring. So, and it's, it's very, very well crafted, and very well done. I've always loved those books since I was a kid. But in terms of business, I have to say, Crossing the Chasm, it's an old one, but still, in my mind, the best one. I also really like Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  That I also found, that was one of the best books I've ever read. And you know, crossing the chasm has got one idea in it and it and it basically says, you know, pick one thing and do it better than everyone else in the world, which kind of lines up with what Marit said from Sequoia. So it's a very hard lesson to learn. That is, you know, it's easy to, it's easy to read and be like, oh, yeah, I get that. And then you turn right around and start not doing it. Right? So it's, it's hard to put into practice. So, yeah.

• 46:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Sure. It, it's, it's one of these things where when you're reminded, you're like, duh, but it's easy to lose track of it day to day. Last question, which is a more fun one, is about aliens, believer or non-believer?

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely a believer. No question.

• 46:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 46:54Speaker 02

  I just, the, the universe, the universe is just here, it's here to generate life. I mean, I feel like, and I, I know it's sort of a non-scientific thing, but it just, it feels to me that like, there'd be no reason for the universe unless we're here to generate life and consciousness. And so I have no proof, but it is my very, very, very strong gut that life is just everywhere. And this idea we have about dead planets and, you know, spinning around dead suns and there's a lot of that. And that's most of what's going on. I just, my gut says, no, I just don't buy it. So aliens, absolutely yes.

• 47:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it.

• 47:39Anthony Pompliano?

  This up.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 47:42Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what, what one question do you have for me to, to finish this up?

• 47:47Speaker 02

  Oh, um, you know, what, I guess, what is the most interesting crypto project other than a coin like a DAP that you have seen lately? Like what's, what's exciting you right now? Is there anything or is it, you just kind of watching?

• 48:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, I, I am notorious for you. Just Bitcoin.

• 48:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, look, we've made a bunch of investments in different companies. I won't play favorites among among all of the children, if you will. But by far, I mean, Bitcoin is so, you know, head and shoulders above everything else. And really, from a global importance standpoint, in my opinion, right? If this ends up doing what we think it should do in terms of assuming a certain role in the world, that'll be one of the greatest technological innovations, you know, in human history, let alone in our lifetimes. And so I think that it's just really, really crazy that we get to live through this.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. Bitcoin, Bitcoin, I still say that it's more important than the Internet. And, you know, look, if the Internet, if the Internet's, if software's eating the world, and it's mostly the Internet, the Internet ate like, you know, retail, books, movies, telecommunications, and then that's kind of it. I mean, that's not nothing. It's a lot. But that's kind of it. You know, whereas Bitcoin, you know, maybe all of crypto, maybe Bitcoin, but in some form, crypto is going to eat world law, finance, banking, reserve currencies, right? That meal is just orders of magnitude, orders and orders of magnitude larger than what the Internet ate. So, yes, I think it's more important than the Internet ultimately.

• 49:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. I love it. All right, Mark. Listen, I appreciate you taking the time to do this. I think that people will learn a lot here, and we'll send them to go check out a Guardian Circle, but what to do to get in the future.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Really appreciate it. Thanks. Thanks, Bob.