The Gadget That's Better in Crowds Than Your Phone + Ring’s Founder Before Amazon Bought It | E2349

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Plaud: https://Plaud.ai/twist Northwest Registered Agent: https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain NetSuite: https://netsuite.ai/twist The Conservation Fund: https://conservationfund.org. Today’s show: At packed concerts, festivals, and stadiums, your phone gets WORSE with every person who shows up. Totem gets better. Carter Fowler of Totem joins Alex to explain how his screen-free compass points you straight to your friends without relying on cell towers. Find out why Carter says Apple will never ship this in an iPhone, and why kids, ski patrols, and blind users have become some of his most loyal fans. PLUS, Lon and Alex dig into the archives for Jason's 2017 CES interview with Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, a year before Amazon bought the company. Jamie explains how a doorbell he couldn't hear in his garage became Ring, and why a strong mission is "cheating" when it comes to keeping a team focused. Then he tells Jason he wants to take Ring public, not sell it. Ironic because about a year later, Amazon bought it. And get ready for some hot takes on neighborhood license-plate cameras, years before the anti-Flock backlash. Guests: Carter Fowler on X: https://x.com/Carter_S_Fowler Totem: https://totemlabs.com Jamie Siminoff on X: https://x.com/JamieSiminoff Ring: https://ring.com Relevant Links: Totem Compass, the offline friend-finding compass → https://totemlabs.com Totem closes its $1.3M pre-seed round (Business Wire) → https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250212385814/en/Totem-Closes-%241.3M-in-Pre-Seed-Funding-to-Scale-Operations-for-Explosive-Demand Totem's community crowdfunding round → https://wefunder.com/totemlabs Totem's record Lost Lands deployment last year (Business Wire) → https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251009622355/en The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, mentioned by Alex → https://www.amazon.com/dp/1633691780 Original TWiST Interview with Jamie from 2017 — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puP_D3k7vVI Amazon officially closes its Ring acquisition in 2018 (TechCrunch) → https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/12/amazon-officially-owns-ring-so-lets-talk-product-integration/ Ring calls off its Flock Safety partnership after the Super Bowl ad backlash (Engadget) → https://engadget.com/home/ring-calls-off-partnership-with-police-surveillance-provider-flock-safety-031717605.html Flock Safety plans to cut about 18% of its staff (Reuters via The Star) → https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2026/10/09/exclusive-ai-surveillance-startup-flock-safety-to-cut-several-hundred-jobs-amid-backlash-sources-say Timestamps: 0:00 Totem, an offline compass for finding friends at festivals 0:31 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations - interviews, meetings, calls - you need a Plaud NotePin S. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 4:27 Why phones fail in big crowds 6:42 How more devices make the mesh network stronger 9:07 Why Totem beats phone GPS in a crowd 11:40 Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more - with no purchase required! - Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain 13:34 Why Apple won't build this into the iPhone 18:10 Raising money for hardware in an AI world 22:10 NetSuite: For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to https://netsuite.ai/twist 23:08 Turning crowd movement into a predictive model 28:04 Rentals, kids and accessibility use cases 32:22 The Conservation Fund: Find out more about how The Conservation Fund is protecting land, wildlife, and our shared access to the great outdoors while also providing economic opportunities. Visit https://conservationfund.org. 35:47 Mesh networks on the front lines in Ukraine 38:01 Flashback to Jason and Ring's Jamie Siminoff at CES 2017 41:44 Roasting Jamie's earlier startups 48:26 How a doorbell in the garage became Ring 53:34 Why you should always bet on your friends 1:02:21 Why a strong mission is cheating 1:07:45 Selling to Amazon versus going public 1:12:09 License plate readers and the Flock backlash Subscribe to our newsletters on Substack: TWiST: https://twistartups.substack.com/ TWiAI: https://www.thisweekinai.ai/ TWiVC: https://thisweekinvc.substack.com/ Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex. I'm a regular co-host here on the show. Today, we are talking to a founder of a company that is building not an AI model, not AI infra, not AI connectivity, not even something for the enterprise. Instead, they have built a consumer device that helps you stay connected to your friends when you're out in the world, especially when your cellphone is going to struggle the most. I love this company. I love this founder. I love that it's working on bringing people together out in the world. So please join me welcoming you to the show. It's Totem Labs, Carter Fowler. Before we get to that, we're gonna talk just for a second about Plod. Now, if you're a long-term listener to the show, you know that we are big Plod fans here at Twist. Got mine with me whenever I do these shows to ensure that I have the transcript I need to find quotes,

• 0:44Speaker 00

  to find information, to find tasks to do's. Basically, if you work in the digital world and you use your voice and you need to keep track of things, you absolutely need to check out Plod. We cannot recommend it enough. So if you want to get one of your own, again, do it. Go to plaud.ai/ twist, P-L-A-U-D dot A-I slash twist. Use the code TWIST, save 10% off your purchase price and then use it to save and advance your career. You won't be sorry. Trust me. All right, Carter, how you doing?

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Great. Thanks for having me on, Alex. To be honest, it's a little surreal to be here. We didn't found Totem that long ago and our very first angel investor at the company was actually our only investor that I knew before the company was the one who originally turned me on to Twist. Started listening to it about two years before we founded the company and this podcast was a big aid in just helping me understand how investors think in the first place. So this is a pretty cool full circle moment.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  I'm so glad to hear that and I'm so stoked to talk about what you're building because here on Twist, as you can kind of imagine, we've been talking a lot about AI for years now. We haven't talked as much about hardware and we certainly haven't talked about consumer hardware that doesn't depend on AI. So I'm really glad you're here. To catch everyone up, we're talking about Totem or Totem Labs if you want. And you guys have put together a gadget that groups of people can wear at festivals or other high concentrations of humans to essentially find one another without the need of their phone or without the need for a cellular connection. Fair?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah, well said.

• 2:17Speaker 00

  So you're wearing this gadget. For folks out there who are listening on the audio version, describe what it looks like and also how much does it weigh? And then also describe how you're wearing it, if you don't mind.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so our flagship product, the consumer product here is called the Totem Compass. It's traditionally worn as like an amulet pendant style. You can see it on my chest right here. It has a nine-axis IMU in it. So the second you pick it up, it automatically, or as I like to say, automatically goes into compass mode, starts pointing you in the direction of your family, friends, wherever you need to find at the event. It's an offline communicator, so it can also communicate like SOS status if you're in some state of distress. We have offline texting coming out through our offline mobile app as well soon. And it's incredibly light, probably lighter than you think. And it works just like kind of a traditional compass. You can think about it similar to Captain Jack Sparrow's magic compass from Pirates of the Caribbean,

• 3:12Speaker 01

  right? It points you to what you want most in the world, as long as you know what you want. We haven't quite gotten to the point where we can point you to anything you want in the world, but we do have your back if you're looking for the people that you love.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  The way that I understand it is that if you have a couple of different friends and you hold up the compass device, it'll display lights on different corners, pointing you towards different friends. So I might know that blue is Carter and then I can follow kind of the blue angle towards you. Does it tell me how far away you are?

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it tells you the exact position, like bearing, and then also relative distance. So we designed to be super simple and intuitive. We stripped so many features away from it in the early days to try to make it as simple for people to grasp as possible. That's also a big reason why we went with the kind of compass form factor in the first place. But as you get further from people, it's smaller. As you get closer to them, it gets larger and larger. Then when you find your person, you collect them into your crystal at the very end. So when you have your whole family or all your friends with you, all of their lights are just within your little crystal.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  So when you're in the car on the way home from the festival, all of your compasses are gonna be just a glow like a Christmas tree. Okay.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  We need to describe to people the environment you are solving a problem in. Because I think a lot of people are saying, well, how often would I need this? What's the actual use case? So why don't you tell me about festivals, like, I don't know, for example, Lost Lands, where people love to come together. It's often dark and bright at the same time. And you might get a little bit further away from your friends than you meant to.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, festivals can be pretty chaotic environments. They're a great time, obviously. But I mean, it's the case for pretty much any large-scale event, right? We made this because the world is an increasingly crowded place every single year. And if there's one thing that human beings love to do, it's pretty much since the dawn of time, it's gather, right? We love to gather. But in today's world, with today's population density, every major gathering is basically a failure condition for conventional connectivity networks. So we built an autonomous mesh network called the Unity Mesh Network that allows you to stay connected with all of your people, no matter what, overcome those types of environments. Because the reality is a major festival, whether it's Lost Lands or an Electric Daisy Carnival,

• 5:22Speaker 01

  or even CES, if you were at CES earlier this year, right? So many people in the area, you know this experience. You have somehow, you're there with your friends, family, you have full bars on your phone. Somehow a single text can't go through. You can't load a single webpage anywhere. You look to your right where they were just a minute ago and instead it's just a mass of strangers. You have no way to get in touch with them. These environments, especially something like EDC Vegas, are some of the most challenging environments in the world for communication technology, other than maybe like active war zones or disaster areas.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  The front lines of Ukraine and EDC.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like that. And so that's why it's so important that this mesh network works completely offline. It's an autonomous self-governing network. It automatically manages usage across the mesh to maximize utilization while also preserving battery life and bandwidth for everybody.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  I'm glad you brought up other events that are not just electronic music festivals. Because while that is a large subculture, if you will, while it is a large business, it's also not the majority of the world. But I think we are all in at least one time per year, a place with people, high density, at risk of losing them. And we'll talk a little bit more about expansions down the road. But let's burrow in on the mesh network point, because to me, this is the real unlock. Because if you say bring your cellphone, limited number of towers, limited number of connections, limited amount of bandwidth, but a mesh network is designed to actually scale with more users. So it has kind of the inverse setup in that the more of these you have out there, the smarter and more accurate the Totem Compass is.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah. So essentially, how I like to explain it is it basically works the opposite of a cellphone, right? The more cellphones you get in an area, the worse they all work. The more totems you get in an area, the better they all work. So with every additional totem in the area, each one acts as a relay. Even if you don't know those people, they're still helping connect, helping you connect to your friends, your family, no matter what, passing your message along. So for example, you mentioned Lost Lands earlier in the conversation. That was one of our highest adoption events of the year so far. We had over 10% of attendees with totems out there this year and we got our score at our absolute max.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  We gotta help people here. How many people went to Lost Lands? Because someone out there is thinking 55 people and you sold five devices and it's not impressed. So put some numbers on this for me.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Lost Lands this year, I believe they had somewhere around 50,000 people onsite in a pretty small area, right? This is very dense, dense crowds. So we had over 5,000 users onsite and that was when we recorded some of our greatest mesh stats of all time. We had 35 hops across the entire festival. The mesh network carried over 330,000 messages in the weekend and we connected people across over 1.5 kilometers. It's like two miles or so. Purely offline, no towers, no infrastructure needed.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  So if you had had only 500 of the devices onsite, so let's just say, you know, like 1% penetration versus 10, would the mesh network still have worked?

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, it would still work. However, you know, at distances, it may not provide pure connectivity. And that's an interesting problem that's just inherent to mesh networks, right? There's a lot, there have been many, many attempts at creating mesh networks at scale, but there's an inherent cold start problem to mesh networks where, you know, they get incredibly valuable as more adoption arrives. It's almost like a double-sided marketplace. But the question is, how do you get to that critical threshold of adoption to make it super valuable for everyone?

• 8:53Speaker 00

  I see, I see. Now, a question about how the technology actually works. So the mesh network makes sense to me for passing signals around an area. But to me, it doesn't have as much to say about where someone is physically. So is there also a GPS or GNSS component to this that actually does the direction element?

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah, we use GNSS. There's really three core technologies in the device itself, the totem. It begins with GNSS, which, you know, common language is GPS. The reason we say GNSS is GPS is just referring to the American constellation. We pull from multiple constellations around the world. But our accuracy is incredibly precise. Many people think that it's actually impossible. If you go and check, you know, Reddit over the years, some people have been like, one meter accuracy, that's literally technologically impossible. We get it pretty regularly. That's been our median accuracy over the last year. And that's the first core piece of the tech. The second is our peer-to-peer communication protocol. It runs on 2.4 gigahertz, which is important because, you know, it's one of the most widely

• 9:53Speaker 01

  familiar, widely accepted protocols across or frequencies across the planet. And also it allows for incredibly, you know, real-time updates, which is important. Because if you're only getting an update every minute, two minutes, three minutes in a dense crowd and you have 100,000 people in a field. Sometimes that can mean, you know, losing the 50, 100, 200 people between you and the person you're trying to find. So those realtime, second by second updates that we get are incredibly important. And then the third layer is that mesh network that we talked about, the Unity Mesh Network.

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Okay, this all makes good sense to me now. So we all know that GPS works, but I know GPS largely from an American perspective. And I know that there is a European Union constellation. I think China has one, Russia has one. There's a few out there. You guys also operate in a great number, I think dozens of countries you've sold units in. So what's it like to actually support the different GNSS networks versus say just GPS? I presume they're all similar, but I'm not quite sure if they're as easy to access as perhaps the American constellation.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, the access is actually not too difficult. And that's something that I think a lot of people misunderstanding many people have because governments have paid so much money to put these satellites up into space and they just beam the signals down for free. Right? And so it's actually accessing them is not that difficult, but then getting that incredibly precise positioning is the real challenge. Cell phones, of course, also have a GPS component, but we typically get anywhere from five to 15 times the accuracy and precision that any cellphone does, especially in crowds. GPS drift with phones can be anywhere from 20 feet to 150 feet. And that just goes back to exactly what we were saying earlier. 150 feet can sometimes mean 100, 200, 300 people between you and finding your child in the middle of the field.

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• 12:29Speaker 00

  I'm supposed to ask you business questions at this point, but now you you've picked my curiosity. Okay, so why? Why does my phone have GPS drift? And I was, just for context, I was just in Manhattan, dealing with what felt like this exact issue. So I'm really curious, what went wrong?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it happens often, especially in major cities, especially if there's a big event going on. I remember last year at South by Southwest, I was trying to get an Uber and my phone was confidently telling me that I was about three or four blocks away from where I actually was. Right?

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  And that's because cell phones rely on and depend on, they're kind of designed with the anticipation that you will always have cellular connectivity. You will always have that data connection. And so they actually use three different layers for their positioning. They do use GPS, but then they also use trilateration between cell towers and sometimes even, you know, sensing off of other devices, Bluetooth nearby. Apple's Find My Network is pretty famous for that.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Okay, so essentially, my phone is trying to use multiple signals and expects connectivity. Your device is just GNSS slash GPS.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 13:32Speaker 00

  Based and doesn't. Why would my phone try to do more if it ends up with a worse result? Because it sounds like you've nailed accuracy here and I would love my phone to be less garbage at it.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's an interesting question. And we hear that a lot, right? It's like, why wouldn't Apple just do something like this with their phones? Right? Couldn't they just put a mesh radio in their phone and try to accomplish something similar? The reality is, you know, like I mentioned, they're designed with the anticipation, the expectation that you will always have that data connectivity. And that's what they're striving for, because that's really what their entire business model is built around, is keeping you connected at all times to that central hub. And large companies like Apple, Samsung, any of these rarely ship products or technology that undercut their core business model. And especially ones that really put them at odds with some of their greatest commercial partners, like

• 14:25Speaker 01

  cell carriers around the world that subsidize the purchase of tens of millions of phones around the world every year. You know, it would be incredibly damaging to many of these networks and many of these companies to ship something that works completely offline with an autonomous decentralized mesh network like this.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  There's a book written about this. It's called The Innovator's Crisis. Oh, wait, no, it's Innovator's Dilemma. Yeah. There's a lot I want to get into about the future implications of this tech. I'm pretty excited about it, but let's get into some business brass tacks here. What does a totem compass cost me? And I know you sell them in packages for groups of festival goers. So what's the average number sold at a time?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, great question. So right now totem compasses go for, a single one goes for about $88, but almost no one ever buys one, right? That's kind of the key here. So our typical group size is, has gone up over time significantly. During the early days, it was around 2.6, 2.7. Now we're at around 3.8, 3.9. So the four bundle is definitely our most popular package. It comes with all kinds of different accessories as well. As you can see here, like I'm wearing just what it comes with standard with a black skin, but we have different kinds of skins, you know, natural necklaces, other kinds of chains for people. We have tethers for it as well, in case you don't want to wear something over your chest. And in a couple of months, we're going to have a wristband attachment too. So you can

• 15:48Speaker 01

  kind of wear it how you want to wear it. And the idea is that, you know, as you, you know, as the network grows, as more and more people adopt, it just gets more and more valuable. Network effects are really the primary factor that has driven all of our growth to this point in time, whether it's across the economics, how we actually price the compasses, them getting cheaper as you buy more, or just how the device itself works, how the network builds itself, and also how eye catching and conversation starting it is when you're out in public. So around 30% of all of our purchases over the last couple of months have at checkout cited them either coming from someone recommending the totem compass or

• 16:31Speaker 01

  meeting someone in an event who was wearing it, seeing someone who was wearing it.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  If it's on my chest and it has a big light in the middle, it does attract attention. Like, I feel like it is, in a way, brilliantly also a native advertisement for itself.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  But let's keep talking about the economics here, because I think your four-pack costs something like $365, somewhere in there, which I presume there's some good margin hiding in there, because electronics, we've kind of solved how to manufacture stuff in this global economy. But what I didn't see, Carter, was a recurring revenue component to this. And I'm working my way towards your fundraising journey. So I'm trying to set the stage a little bit here, but am I correct in that this is mostly a thing that I buy and then I own and I just get to use?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's something that is very important to us and core of our philosophy at Totem is your relationships, you own them, right? The totem represents your relationships. This is a connection to your people that we can never revoke, that you own it, you buy it once, you own it for life. We never plan to revoke access to the network based on any kind of subscription fees. We do have other features coming out that will be optional to upgrade on, you know, premium subscriptions for consumers and many other channels to add new revenue streams coming up. But the core device itself, that's a central part of our philosophy is you deserve to own your connections, your relationships in the world, and that's what Totem means.

• 17:55Speaker 00

  Yes, I really like that, because in this context, I am a consumer of your product versus someone who's thinking about investing in it. But if there's one thing I've learned by from talking to, I mean, investors of all startups, not just VC, but also private equity, they are obsessed about recurring revenue. So when you had come up with this idea, when you were thinking about raising capital, what was the investor reception to you coming up and saying, look, I'm not doing AI, I'm not doing recurring revenue, I'm not doing enterprise agentic orchestration like everyone else. I'm making devices that are going to help people at festivals and other events find one another. Did that resonate? Or were you running uphill while carrying sandbags?

• 18:31Speaker 01

  That's a great metaphor for it. And honestly, in year one, that is pretty much exactly how it felt, maybe with a little twist of eating glass, too.

• 18:39Speaker 00

  Oh, good.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  But yeah, it's changed a lot, the fundraising world in relation to hardware like this over the last three years. You know, in 2024, pretty much anyone that I would speak to would say, hey, sounds pretty cool. I might get it myself, but ultimately, all we like to do is B2B SaaS, just B2B SaaS, B2B SaaS, B2B SaaS, right? 2025 comes around and then it all of a sudden switches. They're like, if AI isn't in your tagline on your deck, then sorry, like this seems pretty cool, but we're just not interested. But in 2026, things seems to be changing quite a bit as people realize that the value distribution in AI is actually pretty uncertain and it seems pretty concentrated toward the top.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  People are not sure where you're going to get that return. And so actually, this year, it's been a complete change for us. Hardware, and in particular hardware that generates proprietary data, is like kind of what some people look as really the only remaining moats in a world where pretty much any SaaS product could be rebuilt overnight.

• 19:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, people are now just decompiling apps to get to the source code. And then, I mean, that's going to, that's going to crush software IP, I think, forever. So I'm on board with this. But there's a quirk to how you raise money, because you guys raised, as I go back to my notes here, oh, yeah, 1.3 in a pre-seed round, but 1.6 in a crowdfunding round, making you one of the Only companies I've spoken to who I think has raised more money from their customers in pre-sales than from venture capitalists, which to me, Carter, is like the definition of product market fit. And so to me, like you think investors will be raining cash down from the skies, but you raised a couple of million. What did that unlock for the company? And when are you going to go back to the well?

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it was really important for going back to that cold start problem that's inherent in mesh networks. It was really important for us to overcome that because in the early days, we were selling the product for much lower price point, sometimes at certain volumes, literally at cost in our first year to make sure that we seeded the network with enough density so that it would be valuable for people. And now the interesting thing is with every passing month, every passing year, the devices themselves are more and more valuable because the network itself is more robust. So over time, our pricing has adjusted that our margins have accommodated that. And over the last month or two, we've been seeing the best margins that

• 21:00Speaker 01

  we have across the company around 58% gross margin, which is pretty healthy for a hardware company.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Do you, I mean, look, I'm a big nerd for gross margins because I know how much they matter. So as the mesh network grows, as the devices become more valuable, more useful, are you able to raise prices and therefore just improve your margins strictly by saying, hey, this is better now. And now instead of 88 bucks, whatever you said, now it's 100. Ha.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, when we originally brought the product to market, the price for one compass to really get specific was $49.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Now is, yeah. And if you bought five or more, it was $37.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  So your cost basis is $37.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Right around there. Yeah. And so, yeah, today we sell them for 88. Of course, it gets cheaper as you buy more. We like to, you know, we're always looking for new accessories and things to rope into it. But I think the big reason why we're so effective in raising capital early on, especially in our pre-seed round from angels around the world before the crowdfunding round, was the optimism around the long-term value of the data of our network that our network is generating at these events.

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• 23:08Speaker 00

  So a beautiful segue. One thing that I saw is that you guys actually partnered with Lost Lands to some degree. And I think your devices can also put out like an SOS signal and reach out to like the festival itself, which, you know, as someone who has been intoxicated in their life, I think that's a pretty good idea. Just leave it there. But the data element to this is very interesting because on one hand, I can really understand why the data is valuable. If I'm a festival, I can track where people are walking. I could better design layouts and flows and all of that. But I, and I'm sure that I'm wrong, I don't see like infinite uses for the data. So I'm curious what the bull case is on the information you collect anonymized and so forth from these devices.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's important to note that all the data that we collect is fully aggregated anonymous data. There's no personal data attached to any of these devices. We have no way of tracking or attaching a node to a person's identity. But what we're really monitoring is the topology of our network and how it changes over time. This is really essential for us because we need to monitor those KPIs to improve the network over time, deliver more value to our customers.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  But the real value for this data is in its fidelity and granularity, right? So this is incredibly high fidelity data, like meter level, second by second updates, like I mentioned in the past, in some of the world's most commercially valuable spaces. And we aren't planning to sell that data directly, but what we're building toward is a, you know, world first predictive model for crowd flows to allow organizers, security, event, sponsors, anyone to actually watch their weekend unfold before the gates open. Because that's a unique challenge within live events, live entertainment is you really only have one go at it, maybe until next year, right? And that's a really, really long feedback loop to incorporate. And so the

• 24:59Speaker 01

  ability to incorporate a, you know, simulation model to actually watch how these people, how crowds will move around your event, try changing things. What if we add another exit here? What if we put a stage here? What if we add another kiosk here? Is incredibly valuable and can fundamentally change the event planning process around the world.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  Uh, big sports events. You know, I think if you've ever been to an NFL game, I went once and that was enough, turns out. You'll be absolutely blown away by the sheer number of people. The television does not do it justice, folks. And especially when you're trying to leave, it's nuts. And so I can kind of see like, have you ever seen a child on a leash?

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, too often.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  It always looks kind of sad. And even though I'm a parent, I get it. But I can imagine families having these for non-festival environments that are quite dense. And then I can imagine that that data would impact stadium design or concession setup. So like, this is broader than I was thinking. I like that. So basically, anything live and large could benefit from your learnings about how people move through the world physically. Okay.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. And it's not just about if there's absolutely no cell signal at the event as well, because, you know, people are really, really hungry for connection these days. I believe it was 3% of people in 1990 in America said they had no close friends. That was up to 10% last year in America. 10% of Americans said that they had no close friends whatsoever. But at the same time, companies like Live Nation are selling more tickets to events than they ever have. So people are clearly craving this kind of in-person, immersive experience, connecting with people in the real world. And that's a beautiful part of the totem as well, because it is outwardly so simple. It's, you know, you look at it, it's an analog device, screen free. So it keeps you connected within the place you're

• 26:47Speaker 01

  trying to be while being completely disconnected from the outside world and allowing you to be fully present.

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Carter, you can't, you can't tell me how it talks to satellites and uses mesh networking and then call it an analog device. Screen, screen free device, I will allow.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Analog interface. Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  There you go. An abacus is an analog device. It does not do anything that we're describing here. Okay. I want to talk about some future use cases that I'm really excited about, but quickly, tell me about what you're going to build for consumers, the premium subscriptions you mentioned. I presume that down the road, I'm going to be able to, what, use like Morse code on the little gem in the middle to send my friends a message? Like, what's coming for me and my, and my, and my friends at the festival that we can do with these things?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the Morse code feature that you mentioned is already rolled out. When you send someone SOS signal, signal that their crystal does begin to blink SOS in Morse code. That was one of the earliest features that we added in.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  I'm running behind.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  But the roadmap from here involves, I mentioned earlier, offline texting and offline social networking through our mesh network, live on the grounds. So not just allowing you to find each other, but actually communicate with each other, not just allowing you to find the friends and people that you already have relationships with, but make new relationships with people who share similar interests at the event. We're also moving toward running onsite rentals at many different venues, which I think is going to open up a huge new market for us because there are only so many people who go to these events so frequently, experience this problem pervasively consistently throughout their year, that it makes total sense for them to buy and own one of these. But many, many people, you know, for a $30,

• 28:25Speaker 01

  $40 price point for the weekend, $15, $20 for the day, especially when you're thinking about families with kids going to Disneyland, you mentioned sports arenas, et cetera. And that's a huge, huge avenue for us that we're going to be exploring over the next year. We're going to be doing our first pilot of probably around New Year's Eve this year. And then, of course, the predictive models that we were talking about earlier, that's a big part of our path forward. And we have been working on that model now for over a year, and we're ready to pilot it here in the next three to four months.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  Okay. The Disney example was actually something that I had in my, in my notes because I was thinking about where would I use this? And I've learned recently how fast toddlers move. And so if I could just staple one of these onto my children, then I could always go out and find them. That makes a lot of, the rental thing's brilliant. How fragile are they? Because I'm kind of imagine giving them to my four year old and then saying, "Okay, honey, we have this for the day." And then she's like, "Ah, rock, bam." And, you know, so are they durable enough to go through like 15, 20 rental cycles?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the good news about the totem is from the beginning, we designed it, kind of the principle we had in our mind was asked to be simple enough and durable enough for a five-year-old to use. Because even a 50-year-old at a music festival or at an NFL game is not all that dissimilar from a five-year-old, you know? We like to devolve to that cognitive state pretty quickly. So, um, yeah, the really nice byproduct of that is that it is simple enough for kids to use. It is durable enough for kids and kids actually really love it. That's a big reason why outside of live events and music, families with kids, especially under 12, is probably our second biggest demographic segment of our customer base, especially before you want to put a phone in your kids' hands, expose them to the entire broader world, get them addicted to the brain rot

• 30:10Speaker 01

  and TikTok and everything. And kids love it. It looks fun. It looks cool. My five-year-old nephew loves the totem compass, the pretty glowing crystal within it. And they also love that it's not just a tracker that mom and dad put on you because you're a liability, right? But it's something that the whole family has, that they can also use. Exactly. And so many parents, I don't know if you've had this experience yet. I think your kids are still pretty young. I hope not, but it will probably happen at some point where you're out in public, you look down and your child is no longer at your side. And with all the parents that I've spoken to since we started this company, many of them say that that was some of the most desperate, anxious moments of their life. And whatever you're feeling in that moment-

• 30:50Speaker 00

  Just thinking about it. Yes.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Whatever you're feeling in that moment, I promise you that your child is feeling twice over.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Oh, 10 times.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I even have personal experience with this. My wife's younger sister was actually abducted, kidnapped at Disneyland when she was four years old, um, back in the 2000s. She was missing for over four hours. It required all of the Disneyland security forces to find her. Family was in shambles, of course, during all of that time and still talking to, you know, her parents about what that was like. It's almost like you're having those, you know, not to make light of it, but almost like Vietnam flashbacks behind the eyes of that trauma.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, well, I'm never going to Disney if they allow for abductions on site. Um, but yeah, I, I think that's a very good point. But there's, there's two use cases that I'm thinking about down the road that I'm really curious if you're also considering. Uh, the first one is something like an offline social network for children. I don't know if there's ever going to be a point to which there's enough density of these devices in like a neighborhood to make it work, but there's, trying to not dox myself here, children on my street. There you go. Uh, and I can imagine how, you know, my kids would like to be able to send them messages, but I'm also very much not going to give them a phone. I'm not going to give them an old iPhone. I don't want them to use the iPads, trying to keep them off all the screens. But if you told me that this little device allowed them to send like a voice message or a text message just to their friends and I can decide how many

• 32:12Speaker 00

  nodes they connect to, I think I would be willing to pay kind of an unlimited amount of money for that.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, um, I actually had a call with a dad in Australia recently who had been trying to solve this problem for his kids. He had bought them so many different trackers. He bought them $500 Apple Ultra watches to try. And he said, he bought the totems and nothing performed better than the totem compasses. I spoke with a, um, a mother actually in the UK last year who got it because her child had been begging to walk to and from school for over a year. She felt so uncomfortable with that. And this just gave her the peace of mind to allow that, you know, to be, to be okay with that. So it really does have many, many other use cases beyond festivals where the biggest adoption has been. I've talked to ski patrol leaders who are using this to coordinate their teams out on the slopes in Colorado. And it's also become very, very popular within the,

• 33:00Speaker 01

  um, blind and deaf communities as an accessibility tool.

• 33:04Speaker 02

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• 33:48Speaker 02

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• 34:12Speaker 01

  It was something that we didn't really think about because the Gen 1 totem doesn't have haptic vibration in it. Um, we were trying to preserve battery life early on. And I always thought that for, you know, some, a blind person, that you would really need that feature, kind of like some kind of hot and cold experience for it to work well. But something that I didn't realize is that, um, the majority of blind people, it's not that they can't see anything, it's that they can't really see beyond a few feet away, which really makes crowds in public spaces a very, yeah, terrifying, dicey experience. And, you know, not able to make out the face of your spouse even at five or 10 feet is really intense.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  You can hold the compass up and see the lights. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. You can hold a pretty little compass in your hand and see those lights and follow a light, um, far more easily than any-

• 34:59Speaker 00

  Are you going to make a haptic version?

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we do have plans to roll out a, uh, version specifically for kids. Um, work in progress title, the buddy band that we're talking about, much smaller, um, specifically for these use cases and, um, a variety of other models of the compass, many of which are, what we're really trying to move toward here is full independence from infrastructure with the tech. So right now, of course, it doesn't rely on towers for communication. We just still have reliance on satellites. So we're working on building the world's first dynamic trilateration algorithm to actually position you within a mesh with no satellites to get us away from, or to get us to full satellite independence. And then also incorporating solar charging

• 35:42Speaker 01

  technology into it to hopefully get you away from the grid as well itself. So this is just the one thing, it's a fully self-sustaining communication ecosystem, the one thing that you can rely on to find your people, communicate with them when nothing else works.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  It's a modern Swiss Army knife. All right. Last question that I, I gotta let you go, but, uh, as a big supporter of the Ukrainian Armed Forces fending off Russian aggression and invasion, uh, we're looking at a battlefield that is famously fraught for communications. I mean, this saw the rise of FPV drones because everything's jammed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do simple, durable, mesh, network-based devices have a potential role in supporting people against invasion? Like, like, is there something we could do here that could support the Ukrainian troops so they have more and better technology to defend themselves?

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think decentralized networks are absolutely the future, whether we're talking about civilian use cases or military use cases like that. Um, and especially over the last couple of years, we've even seen problems with satellite-based positioning in Ukraine specifically, right? Um, you see the Russians jamming the actual satellite signals so you don't even get the position in the first place. And it also illuminates the importance or some of the other flaws within centralized networks. You remember the kind of fiasco when Starlink was discontinued for everyone in Ukraine a few years ago? That's the danger of a centralized network is actually a switch that can be flipped. And we love Starlink. They've done a lot for connectivity around the world, especially solving coverage. The real last frontier, big unsolved problem with connectivity

• 37:15Speaker 01

  is not coverage anymore. It is congestion.

• 37:17Speaker 00

  All right. Well, on that note, where can people find the website? And is there a role you are hiring for Carter? You want to shout out to the broader Twist audience?

• 37:25Speaker 01

  You can find us on totemlabs.com, um, on social media, probably anywhere on your feeds. We're probably already there. We've done around 800 million views across social media over the last two years in the first place. And we are not hiring right now. However, we are probably going to be bringing someone on to our team for social video editing and someone else to help us with this, building this proprietary data model to predict crowd flows here in the next six months or so.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  All right. Well, that's you. Give Carter a shout. In the meantime, my name is Alex. This is Twist. We'll see you next time. Bye.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Glass from the past here, also from 2017. We're going a bit further back. We're going to January 2017 this time to the CES 2017 event in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. You look like you're about to say something, guys. I don't want to cut you off.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Well, no, I just, I think it's important to tell the youngins, why, why was Jason at CES? Why was this company at CES? Why was Jason there for long enough that he wanted to find a booth to camp out?

• 38:28Speaker 03

  I, I feel like, yeah, like CES over, like, I feel like it's one of those things, maybe during the pandemic, that does, like, it just never recovered, maybe. CES used to be like the center of the technology calendar, like way before tech had anything to do with like everybody going to Davos, which is a weird one now, like all the tech guys have to go to Davos all of a sudden. That was not a thing in the late teens. It was CES. Everybody had to go to CES. And it's, it's very curious to me, like, part of me is like, well, because CES was gadgets and hardware and devices. And now we're all so obsessed with models and evals and AI agents that it just doesn't

• 39:11Speaker 03

  translate until we figure out like the robots, maybe that'll bring CES back. So that's part of it. Maybe it's just people are not as into Vegas. I know that's also the trend that like Vegas gets a lot fewer visitors every year. And so maybe that everybody's just less excited to, for an excuse to go to Vegas in January. I'm not really sure. I'd love to hear your thoughts on why it doesn't feel like CES is the place you gotta be anymore.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, the problem is CES used to be bigger than the media footprint of a lot of tech companies.

• 39:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  Now tech companies are essentially nation states. Why would they be subservient to a conference? But at the time, it was a way to aggregate companies together. And if you recall, major companies would do keynotes at CES versus having their own event.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  Because they needed a way to get people to care. It was, you knew there were reporters there, so you'd do a big thing.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  It was weirdly, it was like, it was like CES and South by Southwest were like the two.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  That was the successor in a way.

• 40:09Speaker 03

  Those were like the two tent poles of like, that's how you get people excited about your new device or app or whatever. You gotta have a big splashy debut at CES or South by Southwest. I don't even know what it is. It was like Burning Man and Davos in 2026?

• 40:23Speaker 00

  Neither, but you're right. Hardware at CES. And then every year at South, like people will say, what was the breakout app?

• 40:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  You know, was it Foursquare? Was it Twitter? Whatever it was.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  I'm dating myself very clearly here. But I think also startups began to do more Apple-ish things. Like if you think back a long time, we didn't see founders giving like Apple style keynotes about iterative launches. But Dropbox brought that to the fore. And I think Airbnb to some degree as well. And I think once you realize that you don't have to use someone else's stage, you can just do it yourself and then distribute it online versus caring more about the in-person component, it went away. But in this case, we are talking to a hardware founder that, of a company that everyone has heard of, and Jason has posted up at that booth. So Lon, who are we talking to?

• 41:06Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, we're talking to James Seamanoff, of course, the founder of Ring, the doorbell, smart doorbell company that is now, if you're watching this and you're a younger person, you may not even know that was a private company before being purchased by Amazon, which happened about a year, a little more than a year after this interview we're about to watch. So that will be sort of interesting, too. There's discussion of like, are you gonna sell the company? Are you gonna keep growing? And we'll, we'll certainly talk about all that. But yeah, this is January 13th, 2017. Jason speaking with James Seamanoff, the founder of Ring Doorbells. I believe the first clip is one that I had picked out. I, this was, I feel like this was a classic bit

• 41:47Speaker 03

  that Jason does not do as much anymore with serial entrepreneurs and founders who used to come on the show. He used to like to kind of go back over their failed projects and, you know, kind of like revisit like a little bit of an autopsy, sort of what went wrong here, but also just a little bit sort of making fun of them. Jamie, James is a very good sport, which makes this all in good fun and self-effacing. And I'm sure he didn't mind. Let's take a look at roasting some of his failed startups.

• 42:17Speaker 04

  Over, over five years ago now.

• 42:19Speaker 05

  Now it's five years.

• 42:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's over five years.

• 42:20Speaker 05

  And as an entrepreneur, I have to say, I underestimated you. I looked at you as an entrepreneur. I'll be, we're friends, so I would talk this way. I, you remind me of like a tinkerer, because you would find all these little businesses and you would build beautifully elegant solutions to businesses, but none of them ever broke out.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 42:41Speaker 05

  The first one I remember was brilliant. It was PhoneTag.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 42:45Speaker 05

  And before text, speech to text was great. You said, hey, forward your phone number here. And you had somebody in Manila transcribe it.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 42:53Speaker 05

  And then I would send people to voicemail and then I would get a perfect transcript.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Read your voicemail.

• 42:58Speaker 05

  And read your voicemail. It was so brilliant. That business did okay.

• 43:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, like.

• 43:03Speaker 05

  Still goes on.

• 43:04Speaker 04

  Still, still ended up Nuance bought it.

• 43:06Speaker 05

  Nuance, which is the text to speech people.

• 43:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, but for very little. I mean, to your point, you're right. I mean, it was, it was, at best, it was a single.

• 43:14Speaker 05

  It was a single where you.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  It was a bunt.

• 43:15Speaker 05

  It was like getting hit with the ball and getting on first base.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Yes, which by the way, I.

• 43:19Speaker 05

  Which counts.

• 43:20Speaker 04

  I'll take, I was still on first base.

• 43:22Speaker 05

  Um, and you spent a couple of years on that.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  I did, yeah.

• 43:26Speaker 05

  Then you were like, I got, and then you got unsubscribe.com.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:31Speaker 05

  And that's when I was like, I always liked just a person, I was like, oh, respect going up as an entrepreneur. This, this cat's figuring it out because you got unsubscribe.com, an incredible million dollar domain name. And you created a really brilliant idea, which was, put this Chrome extension or Google extension, something in and press the unsubscribe button and you'll handle getting me off that email.

• 43:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:52Speaker 05

  So brilliant. That business.

• 43:55Speaker 04

  Terrible.

• 43:56Speaker 05

  Was horrible. Nobody paid for it.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  I mean, the, the product's still to this day, one of the best products ever, I think.

• 44:01Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  I mean, like it cleans up your email in the right way. It's the wor, it's great. The business of it was the worst.

• 44:08Speaker 05

  People wouldn't pay for it.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  Zero. Ah, $0.

• 44:11Speaker 05

  Fantastic. So you, you come up with an elegant solution that everybody wants. Everybody tells you they want, but as an entrepreneur, they basically, people can tell you that, that the statistics can show you that they love the product. But then in the final moment, the credit card doesn't come out.

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Just, there's just no way to convert it into dollars.

• 44:28Speaker 05

  Brutal.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  It just, it just was brutal.

• 44:30Speaker 05

  So what happened with that business? You sold it or it just saw a light?

• 44:32Speaker 04

  We sold it and got the investors their money back.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  Perfect.

• 44:34Speaker 04

  A hundred cents on the dollar I got their, because I, I actually feel very, and for me, it's something I've been, I feel a very big responsibility to the dollars that we take in.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  This really hit home for me. Jason and I, a few years ago, he was doing a company called Inside. And the idea was, at first it was going to be apps and then we sort of transitioned to newsletters. It was like real time news updates. It was kind of like the dying, when people stopped caring about news. It was in like the last year or two that people cared about reading the news or what are the news headlines before everybody just switched over to what does my favorite podcast host think I need to hear about today? And nobody reads the news anymore.

• 45:13Speaker 05

  Hey, hey.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  Sorry, but, but back then, uh, so we were making this news product and I mean, we would focus test it and the reactions would be like more enthusiastic than any product or service or video or content I've ever worked on. Like people would give us like A plus scores and like, I love this and I will download this and read this every day. And this is exactly what I want. And finally, I don't have to watch CNN or like, we got like, the feedback was incredible. We were so excited. We thought we finally cracked it, you know? And then no, but nobody would download the app. It is so hard to get somebody to download an app. And this was in the era where everybody was like, I got my, I got my 25 apps on my phone.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  I'm like, there, that's it. I've got app fatigue. I don't want more apps. I got the perfect app. Today, people download an app for what? But like back then, it was like, I've got it very organized. I like how my apps are. I don't want to download a new app. It was like pulling teeth every time you wanted to try to get somebody to download a new app. So this was like, it wasn't a problem with the product or anything we were doing specifically. Nobody could be like, oh, I don't want to download this because I don't like this feature or I don't like this button or I don't like the way you wrote that. There was nothing to fix. It was just like, the market doesn't want this thing you made. It seems great. You love it. People like it when you show it to them on their own. Nobody's ever going to access this.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  And we just, we, we gave up. Like eventually we just pivoted into other stuff because people didn't want it.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is the old startup mantra, if you will, that, you know, failure is fine as long as you learn something. People used to try a lot of different things and a lot of them would fail. And then you'd find the one that worked. And it, it was this expectation of experimentation that does seem to be a little bit now lacking. Cause you know, you want to like have an idea, get a co-founder, go to like entries and speedrun. And then you want to build FOMO for your seed and you want to, it feels much more accelerated and therefore less contemplative, perhaps. Again, not a bad thing, but I am worried that we're going to lose something in the translation process.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  I think there's also so much more scrutiny on things the moment they launch. Like I was just talking on a call before we, we, we got on here, I was just talking about Jev, the type safe AI's decision model. That's only been out for three weeks, by the way. There's already competing products. Like if Jev, if the company behind Jev tomorrow was like, you know what? We're not really going to focus on Jev. We got this other idea. Everybody would be like, oh my God, they, they failed. They're miserable. They couldn't do it. And it's like, it's been a month, you know, like there's no, there's no like, I'm just going to build quietly for six months and a year and see if my idea comes together.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  And maybe we'll pivot to something similar. Like the spotlight is on you immediately.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  And as recompense for the insta spotlight is a chance for insta scale. So the makers of Jev scaled to trillions of tokens really, really quickly. They just raised money at a 7.5 billion.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  30% of the Fortune 500 now using Jev is what the founder just said.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  So you don't have as much time to tinker, but if you get it right, you can hit the equivalent of like six home runs at the same time. And so it's a, it's a trade off, but I do just love hearing people that are in their garage tinkering around. And that brings us Lon to our next clip, which is, how did this Ring business get off the ground? So let's go to the garage, literally, and find out.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  It started. Here's how I, here's what that came out of. So I get done with unsubscribe and I'm like, I, I just have this like kind of meltdown of, to your point, like I keep coming up with these great ideas.

• 48:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  None of them are becoming real businesses.

• 48:51Speaker 05

  You question yourself as an entrepreneur. You say, maybe it's not for me?

• 48:54Speaker 04

  No, I said, what am I?

• 48:55Speaker 05

  What am I?

• 48:56Speaker 04

  Like I really said to myself, like, what, what, like, what do I want to do? Like, what am I? Like, because I've never really cared about the startup or whatever. It's like, really like, what do I like to do?

• 49:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  And I've never really gone for money. Like I, and that was part of the problem was I actually was not going for money. I was always in, so I realized, you know what I am? I'm an inventor. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm not a business person. I'm an inventor. I like.

• 49:14Speaker 05

  Inventor first.

• 49:15Speaker 04

  And so I said, so basically how does an inventor build, but I, I'm an inventor who wants to make a big impact.

• 49:21Speaker 05

  Right.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  And the only way to make a big impact is to build something that gets out there.

• 49:24Speaker 05

  A meaningful business would reference.

• 49:25Speaker 04

  It has to be a meaningful business. So I said, like, kinda, so I said, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna go in my garage, I'm gonna hire like two guys, or two people.

• 49:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  Uh, on my, on my dime.

• 49:34Speaker 05

  Right.

• 49:35Speaker 04

  And I'm gonna keep inventing stuff off all these ideas I have, and we're gonna let them stew. Like, I'm gonna let all this stuff marinate. And we're gonna see what takes off.

• 49:43Speaker 05

  Right.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  So we're gonna do multiple businesses, see what, what happens, and then if one pops, we'll kinda go with it. Now, I thought multiple would pop, I had all these crazy ideas, but.

• 49:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I may submit an incubator in your garage.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  Like a personal incubator.

• 49:55Speaker 05

  A personal incubator, which made it very pure.

• 49:59Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 49:59Speaker 05

  It was pure.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  Oh, it was, I mean.

• 50:01Speaker 05

  You came out with this crazy idea, you'd have like a box on, that way you put it on a table with like eight charging ports on it.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  With like a retractable charger.

• 50:08Speaker 05

  Charging cables.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  We had this like conference call.

• 50:09Speaker 05

  I was like, that's kinda nice, yeah.

• 50:10Speaker 04

  This conference call system thing, I had a gardening idea.

• 50:14Speaker 05

  And then you come up with this product, Ring.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  But I didn't, so here, I didn't come up with it. I was in the garage.

• 50:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 04

  And people are stopping over, and I couldn't hear the doorbell.

• 50:22Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 50:23Speaker 04

  So I said to one of my guys, I said, find a wifi doorbell online, like, like, buy, buy me a wifi doorbell so I can go to my phone.

• 50:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  And they're like, it doesn't exist. And I'm like, you guys are idiots, you don't know how to use Google. Get, doesn't exist, I build it myself.

• 50:39Speaker 05

  Amazing.

• 50:39Speaker 04

  And everyone who comes over is like.

• 50:41Speaker 05

  Can I have that?

• 50:42Speaker 04

  This is the greatest thing ever.

• 50:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, and they're like, how much is that quest? Three hundred dollars, four hundred dollars? Like, yeah, uh.

• 50:46Speaker 04

  Sure, yeah, I, I soldered it together, fifty dollars, like, I don't know.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  Uh, Lon, if there's ever a, a story of accidentally stumbling into what you need to build, I think needing something, thinking it's been built, going, trying to find it, realizing it's not being built, and then rushing into it is just about perfect.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I love the, I love the, the inventor slash founder narrative here. I feel like that, like, not, not to take anything away from today's founders, many of whom brilliant, many of whom are inventors or have invented things, but in, in, in that, in that, in that old school tinkering way. I feel like today's founders who are inventors are, it's like, they, they're, it's coding, or it's, it's new ways to do machine learning, or to train models, or it's become very technical. And this is just like, he soldered this thing together that he wanted in his garage because it didn't exist. It reminds me of like the old guy from Gremlins, you know? Like, uh, just like, what's a good idea? Smokeless ashtray, that doesn't exist, I'm gonna figure out how to build one with my own two heads.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  That's from, that is from the movie Gremlins, that's the thing he's promoting.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  I don't know if I've seen the movie Gremlins, Lon.

• 51:53Speaker 03

  What, you've never seen the original eighties movie Gremlins?

• 51:56Speaker 00

  I, I saw E.T., that's from the eighties. Yeah, well, invite me over for movie night, you still haven't done that.

• 52:03Speaker 03

  Anyway, if you have not seen the classic film Gremlins, the main character's dad is an inventor, and that's where he finds Mowgli, as he's selling his wares in Chinatown, and he stumbles into a curiosity shop.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  What's Mowgli?

• 52:17Speaker 03

  Mowgli's a, Mowgli's the, uh, the guy, have you seen like, there's a cute guy, and then he gets water on him, and that's where the gremlins come from?

• 52:24Speaker 00

  I could just keep asking questions all day and we make no progress. So I'm just gonna say, one thing I appreciated about that last clip was the optimism that the founder had. Um, he said, you know, we're gonna build stuff, and then one of them will pop, I thought many were going to pop. I, I, I, I do just love the endless and deep well of founder optimism. It never gets old to see these people because they just see the world in a slightly different way than, than, let's be honest, I do, maybe you too, Lon. And, uh, I, I, as a, as a nervous, anxious person by nature, I don't default to the best possible outcome. And yet, here we have people just out there like, it's gonna work out, we're gonna have fun.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm way too, I'm way too cynical, and I'm always thinking about the reasons why something is not going to work. And I feel like the founder mindset is, you just constantly focus on the reasons that the thing is going to work, and that's how you like, keep pushing through, even when like, your first three inventions don't work, you're like, but I'm a great inventor, and I've got this whole setup, and trust the system, I'm gonna just keep inventing things, and one of them's gonna take off. And that is probably the key difference between like, a Jamie Seaman of enough, and a Lon Harris, like, if you really wanna boil it down. There's your practical, practical tip for the day.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  All right, now Lon, you and I have been friends for a while now, and I think that next clip involves, uh, all things friendship.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Yes, uh, I mean, I think where the, the goal is, or the, the lesson here from Jamie is that, you know, you, you bet on your friends, and he's got a specific anecdote to share that I think highlights why, you know, even if you're not a hundred percent on board with what they're doing, it's always a smart idea to like, support your friends and back your friends. You, you never know how things are gonna play out, let's watch the clip.

• 54:03Speaker 04

  Like Luke, you're doing it, and he said, okay. And yeah, so Luke's been a great friend and supporter. Um, he actually, it's very funny, he was supposed to invest, uh, he got another couple friends to invest.

• 54:14Speaker 05

  And he.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  And he backed out at the last second.

• 54:17Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 54:18Speaker 04

  And that would be, uh, I think it's like a fifty or a hundred X now, that, cause that was the angel, angel, angel, angel.

• 54:25Speaker 05

  Four million dollar round, uh.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  I may even sub, like, it was really early.

• 54:29Speaker 05

  Wow. Yeah, you know, it's the thing, you, uh, the mistake I always make is, as an angel investor, is you always bet on your friends. You just always bet on your friends, you have complete knowledge, you know, I know you're not going to let the business die.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:41Speaker 05

  I mean, somebody might kill you, but you're not gonna let it die, you'll fight until there's nothing left.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  And I think that's like, when we talk about, cause we laugh about it, but I think that's what makes him mad, is that exactly that.

• 54:49Speaker 05

  He knew it.

• 54:50Speaker 04

  He knew it, and the product was not that good at the time, I mean, it was like, he's not wrong.

• 54:55Speaker 05

  It was a little klugey.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  It was, it was tough, I mean.

• 54:57Speaker 05

  It was a little klugey, and when you got it dialed in.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 55:00Speaker 05

  You changed the name of it at some point.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  To Ring.

• 55:03Speaker 05

  To Ring, it was Doorbot or something in the beginning.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was Doorbot, yeah.

• 55:06Speaker 05

  Um, and when you, you, you rushed the hardware out, is that one of the lessons, you rushed it a little bit in the beginning?

• 55:11Speaker 04

  You know, it's funny, cause people ask, like, what would you do differently?

• 55:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:14Speaker 04

  And I say, like, I would rob a bank, I mean, no one was gonna give me money.

• 55:18Speaker 05

  Ah.

• 55:19Speaker 04

  So I had to rush it, like, survival was rushing it, like, I, I would've died otherwise.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, I mean, yeah, what would you do differently, I would rob a bank, is, uh, is, is, is very funny, and I mean, I, I think it does speak to when you've got, you know, Ring is a product that was not just like, an iteration of a previous kind of technology, it was like a brand new thing, that people didn't necessarily understand when you first explained it to them, they invented a whole new category of device. And so when you're doing something like that, I think it probably is a lot harder to raise money than like, oh, this is the next logical iteration of this thing that you already know that you like and want.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  Yes, but I'm more captivated by the bet on your friends, you already know them point, because it actually, I think, under, um, unlocks an important learning. I've talked to a lot of VCs about the founder investor relationship, for example, and how they, they often describe it as a marriage, and I don't think you can really get entirely what that means if you haven't been married, but it means that you're, you're with somebody, and things will go wrong, and you have to keep going through it. And if you have friends, and one of your friends is doing something, you've seen that person already fall down. Now, not in the exact same way as a marriage, but like, if you have a longitudinal friendship of ten years, for example, your friend will have had some highs and some lows, and you will have seen things through both, so it's already like a pre-vetted person.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  Now, your friend's an idiot, you know, maybe not, but like, you know, presumably your friends are quite smart, and, and that, that hit me as well, because really, the only real angel investment I've ever made is just into a friend of mine, and I get investor updates, and I'm like, whatever, I'm sure they'll figure it out, it's gonna be great. I love this.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a lot of the wisdom that we hear, not just on our podcast, but on any time you watch, if you watch like, VC podcasts or angel investor podcasts, like, especially when they invest in early-stage companies, like, there often isn't a lot of evidence or signal that, that, you know, like, you're, you're looking at a limited amount of data, so you have to make a decision that's hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, based on very limited evidence, what a lot of these guys and ladies have told us over the years. I, I think Doug Leone said this on his most recent appearance on, uh, Twist, was like, you're, it's almost all about your judgment of the founder, like, it's, it's, you're sizing this person up, what kind of a person are they?

• 57:38Speaker 03

  Are they gonna be relentless, are they gonna be very clever and creative when things go wrong? Like, are they gonna try to screw me if things go very right? Like, you're, you're taking a meeting, you're reading some board docs, you're, you're, you're, you're trying to get a sense of who that person is in a very small amount of time, so you can make this huge decision about whether to back them to the tune of millions of dollars. If you're already friends with that person, a lot of those questions are answered and boxes are checked, you, that, that job becomes a lot easier if you decide you wanna bet on this founder, it's like, do I wanna bet on this person who I know? Would I put money on they're going to achieve something they set out to do?

• 58:18Speaker 03

  And I think you do have a pretty good sense, I, I, I'm not saying this is like, criteria for having a friend, like, I've got lots of friends who I would not necessarily trust with like, five million dollars of, of money, but I do think you have a sense for which of your friends are like, that person, if I gave them money, would never give up trying to make it successful and pay me back, that person, if I gave them some money, they are immediately going to Disneyland and it's gone, you know, like, I think you, you get a sense of who those people are.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  Uh, there's either friends I wouldn't lend five dollars to, let alone five million dollars.

• 58:53Speaker 03

  That doesn't mean they're not your friends, it just means like, they're not the friend I would make an angel investment in.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  No, some people are just really bad with money and that's okay.

• 59:02Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  That's how credit card companies make their money.

• 59:04Speaker 03

  Or they're not even like. Yeah, it's not even like they're bad with money. It's like, well, that person, like every three years, they've got a different job or they're pursuing a different project or they're doing something else. And like, they're just, they're not that kind of person where they're going to set this as the five year goal and then make it happen. And I feel like that is what, that is already what VCs are looking for. Like they're going into that meeting, like, can I figure out if this is the kind of person who's gonna like, stay up till 3am every single night until they crack this problem and get to the answer? Or is this person gonna be like, well, I've been working for six hours already today and my show is on, I'm gonna knock off early, you know?

• 59:44Speaker 00

  The lesson for all you aspiring angel investor friends out there is if you do have a friend who's had several exits of medium and small size, and they're working on something new that a bunch of other angels are gonna put their money into, sell your mixer to be in the round. Like, don't, like, that, that is literally the slow pitch right over the, you gotta swing at that one.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  It's also the, the, the cost benefit or like the risk assessment. Like, if this does go wrong and you lose that money, like, well, you lost that investment, but you backed a friend. You did a good thing anyway. You get to feel good about it, even if it goes wrong. But if it, it works and your friend is wildly successful and like, one day they're gonna be on a podcast talking about their friends who invested in them and believed in them. Like, you don't want that to be the story. You, you don't wanna be the one person who is left out of this big celebratory payday from your friends. You wanna, it's worth the money to risk to almost to be, for the chance to be a part of that.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Live your life as if someone is gonna provide a retrospective on a podcast 10 years later.

• 1:00:46Speaker 03

  I think about that a lot. I actually think about that weirdly. I think about that. Uh, I'll tell this one story that we could move on very briefly. I went to Terry Black's with Jason and Mark Jeffrey, uh, when, when I first moved to Austin. And this was coincidentally, the dinner where they came up with the idea for Stillcore Capital. So like, if Stillcore Capital one day becomes like a $10 billion, like, huge thing and like, those guys saw Tao coming years ahead, and it's like, now this massive thing everybody wants to talk about, I've got an unbelievable podcast story. And I was thinking that in the moment, I was sitting there eating my mac and cheese, like, one day, if this thing blows up, I'm gonna be like king of the tech podcast for a week, cuz

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  I'm gonna just coast on this narrative of like, I was there. Uh, you know, like, like, there's that Pixar dinner that they talk about, where like, the four or five guys who were, Steve Jobs and like, the original Pixar guys, like, had lunch. You were like, we should do a movie about bugs. And like, a hundred people claimed they were at that lunch now, because it was where the first five Pixar.

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  This is where they came up with like, a, a large chunk of the early Pixar output was mapped out in that meeting, if members.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Correct. It was like, well, they, they were talking about Toy Story and then they were like, I think Monsters, Inc. and Bugs Life. And like, they were just throwing out ideas. What, what are Pixar's stories gonna be? And what's the vibe that we're going for? And, yeah, I mean, like, obviously, like, Lassiter and Stanton were there, but like, uh, it's one of those things where like, somehow 30, 40 people were at this lunch, if you listen to everybody. We saw this too with Honest Trailers. Like, 100 people apparently were in the room when Honest Trailers was invented. Not me. I was not one of them.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  You've made it when people are trying to LARP your success.

• 1:02:23Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  Uh, all right. So, back to the interview. This next clip, I think, is the most important one from anything we've talked about today. I think it illustrates a very important business concept. It's well put together, and I think I cannot improve on its language. So, if we can, roll the clip, and I'll see you guys in a minute.

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  Insecurity, that you don't need to get into smoke detectors.

• 1:02:42Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Or door, or door locks.

• 1:02:44Speaker 04

  It's, it's a, you know, and again, this is where, from the entrepreneur's side, I've learned. And I, having a strong mission is cheating. It's just cheating.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  Why?

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

  Because it makes it so easy to run the business and to keep everyone on track.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 04

  Which is one of the most difficult things in, in any company, is focus and keeping people on track. And when you have a strong mission, that's actually one that people want to work for. People want us to, like, our, our team is excited to have us succeed, because it means we make neighborhoods safer. And that's exciting. And then the second thing is it keeps everyone on the same page. So, no one's saying, Jamie, let's do a, um, you know, I heard XYZ, like, a, a pet feeder is doing really well, that's connected. We should do one. Like, no one says that, because they know that it's not our, that's not our mission. And so we'd never, so that we're, the distraction layer is just like, gone.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 1:03:32Speaker 04

  And it's all the way through. And that's, it's such an easy way with that, just reducing crime in neighborhoods. Like, you, four words, and you can just like.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  So when somebody comes to the meeting, they're like, oh, you know what? I was looking at this thing. There's like, pools need to be automated. You can have like, a whole pool system. Wifi would fit right in, and we can have the interface. You're like, does that make your house safer? I'm like, no. And you're like, well, what if we made something that if a kid falls in the pool, an arm goes off? It's like, okay, well, that's on the table.

• 1:03:53Speaker 04

  And that's when like, you know, we actually do that. Like, like, someone will say that, and they'll be like, well, but, like this, and you start to start.

• 1:03:57Speaker 00

  So I've been at a startup, when we had an offsite on the executive team, and went through and came up with our mission, our vision, and our values. So I've done this exercise.

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  Me too.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  At a venture backed company. And it felt a little faux. It felt like you were like, i- i- if you ever like, invented the fantasy world for a novel or a game to be played in, it feels a little bit like that. You're like, I'm gonna put the forest over here, and there'll be a mountain, and we'll, we'll stand on it.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  Uh, but here is an example of why those exercises, even if they are a bit contrived, matter. Because if it does clarify your thinking, it will save you endless side quests. And those are often the, the, the cul-de-sacs where startups lose momentum, miss a trick, miss a quarter. And I just, I have never heard someone quite say so succinctly why it matters.

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, mission creep is literally what they call that, when their startup starts to like, drift away from what you should be focused on. I think OpenAI is such a fascinating case study here recently. Like, when Sora came out, it was sort of obvious, I think, to a lot of us that like, this does not feel like where it's important for these guys to focus their attention. Like, like, the slop feed feels like maybe Meta, like, would be focused on the slop feed, but not, not OpenAI. And then sure enough, once Anthropic started like, really coming into their own, is like Claude Code is what everybody's using, they had no choice. They were like, all right, we gotta like, we're put, we're buying the Tech Bros podcast, but we gotta put this, this app, uh, to, to one

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  side. And I think that's like, it, there's so many, there, there's always the temptation, even for companies a lot smaller than OpenAI, to be like, oh, this is a cool thing that's sort of adjacent to what we're doing already, and it would be fun, and it would goose interest, and we'd get like, that short-term sugar high of like, a cool new feature. But, you know, it like, it's so easy to get distracted when you're, when you're still starting out and figuring out what it is that you do.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  The OpenAI, the OpenAI example is interesting, cuz I, I wonder if I, I would put more like, corgi insurance-making cafes, which Brex also did. They had the Brex Cafe.

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  That to me is like, is like a real side quest. In the, in the case of OpenAI, you know, I wonder what impact being a, a lab-ish, like, environment inside leads to product focus. Cuz you know, they had a couple of people working on Sora, and they were like, this is awesome. And then they're like, let's put it out. And then someone's like, all right. Same way they launched their browser. Do you remember what it was called? Probably not.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  Atlas.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  Now with the codec. Yeah. Well done. Um, no, 10 points.

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  Well, OpenAI podcast, not fair. Not a fair question.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  I know. No, but my, my point is, most people wouldn't. But they were, they, they have the ability to experiment so quickly, because they have their own infinite token agentic coding setup. They can really do a lot. I think you're right, but I think it's also an example that shows how much things are changing as well for these frontier labs compared to other companies. But.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's, it's both. But I think the point there is like, it's not just internally. Like, obviously, some things are distracting. It's good to have your whole team focused on, like, these are the big picture ideas and the vision. But I think it's also from a consumer standpoint, you don't wanna distract people. Like, you don't wanna make it like, fuzzy what OpenAI is. And I think that ever since then, you can see very purposefully, Sam Altman is like, I'm going to control more of the narrative about what it is that we do and what we sell. And, hey, you know, I'm gonna be this like, meter for intelligence or whatever. Like, I think there is a lot more effort, because of, in the early days, it was a little like, well, it's the ChatGPT company, and also we have this other app, and also you can put it in your browser, and also you could do

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  this. Like, they're, they are trying to now zero it in on like, what is OpenAI? And what do we do? Uh, whereas Anthropic's like, it's a church now, you know? Like, they're both trying to sort of close in.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  I'm writing about that eventually, when I, when I find enough time to pin it down. Um, all right, listen, let's do one more clip here. Let's take a look at the conversation about selling the company, or not. Keeping in mind, Lon's timeline, he gave us the top, which is, this is a year-ish before the billion dollar sale?

• 1:08:07Speaker 03

  Like, a year and a month, I think, before.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  All right. Hit the clip.

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  Easy for them. They've just chosen a new route. They wanna go to bed at night, and just make massive margins and not innovate anymore. They're lazy. ADT's lazy. You're gonna eat their lunch. How many rounds of funding have you done? Three? Your C round?

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  It's three, yeah.

• 1:08:25Speaker 05

  God, this company's gonna, when are you gonna file for public, what, Q4, you think? This is a public company.

• 1:08:30Speaker 04

  I'd like to take it public in the fall.

• 1:08:32Speaker 05

  You're kidding?

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  No, I'm serious.

• 1:08:33Speaker 05

  Have you ever said that on before?

• 1:08:35Speaker 04

  Uh, I always.

• 1:08:36Speaker 05

  This is making startup exclusive.

• 1:08:37Speaker 04

  So, so I have said, so with this business, I have said from, from day one, my goal is to take it public, not to sell it. We have too big of a vision. And also, it's when you, when you stand up for something, when you say you're really gonna do something like this, like reducing crime in neighborhoods, a company can't buy a company that reduces crime in neighborhoods. They need to buy EBITDA and margin and all this other shit. And there's lots of stuff we do that they'll never get.

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  You never sold any secondary shares either. I mean, I can get a little secondary share, actually.

• 1:09:03Speaker 04

  They would, but any company would kill all the good stuff here immediately. They'd have to. There's no way they could see this, the, the stuff that I spend money on would kill a normal executive. I mean, they just would die. They just couldn't see it.

• 1:09:15Speaker 05

  Like what?

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  Just all these, like, I mean, I have stuff that I'm doing, I'm working on products that will launch in two years. And I'm spending, you know, I'm budgeting $5 million for it this year.

• 1:09:24Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:09:25Speaker 04

  And, and at the size company we are, there's just no one would let me get away with that in a real business.

• 1:09:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, being public, it does lead to a little.

• 1:09:32Speaker 04

  But by that time, I think, I think.

• 1:09:34Speaker 05

  You'll have escape velocity.

• 1:09:35Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  You can't, you can't sell it, Lon. People won't get the vision. They're, all they want is EBITDA. Ring, ring. Hello, it's Jeff Bezos.

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  If Jeff Bezos calls and Amazon wants what you're, what you're making, I mean, I guess that's a very tempting offer.

• 1:09:49Speaker 00

  But also, what did Amazon unlock for Ring? An enormous amount of resources and distribution. And if they wanted to theoretically follow their mission of making your house safer, making your neighborhood safer, then, okay, I can see, I can actually see in a non-cynical way, no BS, how that vision could have been well-served by selling to Amazon. Am I disappointed? Yeah. But, you know, I, I do think that, as Jason has said on the show many times, those types of deals are critical to the startup and venture capital landscape's health. So maybe this is one of those win-win-win moments.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  It also, it is also, I will say, just a fascinating bit of Ring, Amazon synergy, that that's so much of what Ring cameras are recording is like, is my Amazon.

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Amazon delivery people.

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  Yet, like, it is kind of like that they're verticalizing the front door, doorbell delivery loop, you know, like, your entire front door stack is now gonna be Amazon, like.

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  Oh, don't say front door stack, Lon. I can't.

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  Like, that's what, you know, like, next it'll be like the Amazon robot brings you your delivery or whatever, like, they kind of like, Amazon owns your front door in a weird way.

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  Okay, so what if, well, hear me out, what if the Ring provides the view for the drone from Amazon Prime Air to drop your package?

• 1:11:09Speaker 03

  That's exactly what I'm saying.

• 1:11:10Speaker 00

  Therefore, it's not just part of your door stack, it's also your door control tower.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  That's what I'm saying. Like, yeah, I think, I think that may be the play, like, 10 years ahead, is like, your front door brought to you, but your stoop, stoop by Amazon is where we're, is where we're headed.

• 1:11:25Speaker 00

  All right, last thing for me about this one. I just love how he's like, I'm doing things that no sane executive would let me do. And that is just, ah, that's why founders are never boring to talk to, because they are not so molded by the MBA process.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  Who have lost all their flavor. And, but I, I would say humanity.

• 1:11:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, again, it's like, the, the, the appeal of Jamie, I think, is that he's like this old school, like, tinkerer. He's like Rick Sanchez in the garage, like, fiddling around with these, like, devices, seeing, like, building real things. And there is sort of an inherent, like, romance to that, especially, I think, today, when, you know, building is so associated with, like, sitting down and telling your agent what you wanna build and letting them sort of go. Uh, one final thing I wanted to talk about here, obviously, when you hear about Ring doorbells today, it is, you know, often in the context of, ah, everyday ways people use them, but, but sometimes you hear about it in terms of the concerns about privacy, concerns about surveillance. Obviously, Ring

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  and Flock have that, if your pet goes missing in your neighborhood, will help you find it Super Bowl ad. They caused a whole lot of blowback and they ended up canceling that whole project. Uh, so they were already talking about this in, in sort of a different way back in 2017. I think it's fascinating to see how that conversation has progressed over the last nine years. Let's take a look at a little clip.

• 1:12:47Speaker 05

  Let me run another idea up the flagpole.

• 1:12:49Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:12:50Speaker 05

  Automatic license plate readers is a big debate in my community.

• 1:12:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:12:53Speaker 05

  A bunch of communities are doing this.

• 1:12:54Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:12:56Speaker 05

  It is a million dollar install for, a million to $2 million install.

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  And we have a good friend that lives in a neighborhood in LA that has one that you might.

• 1:13:03Speaker 05

  Really?

• 1:13:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:04Speaker 05

  Brentwood, Bel Air kind of place?

• 1:13:05Speaker 04

  The, the Mandeville.

• 1:13:07Speaker 05

  Oh, Mandeville, sure, of course, yes. They have license plate reading in Mandeville.

• 1:13:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:13:11Speaker 05

  This costs a million dollars to put into a neighborhood, I understand?

• 1:13:13Speaker 04

  Extremely expensive.

• 1:13:14Speaker 05

  Million, $2 million.

• 1:13:15Speaker 04

  Extremely expensive.

• 1:13:16Speaker 05

  With your product and your inroads into communities, you could easily create, and I'm sorry, I gotta start using we, since I'm on the board.

• 1:13:25Speaker 04

  We, we.

• 1:13:26Speaker 05

  We could easily create a solution.

• 1:13:27Speaker 04

  You, you should actually be you.

• 1:13:28Speaker 05

  No, no, no, we, we, we.

• 1:13:29Speaker 04

  Okay, I appreciate that.

• 1:13:30Speaker 05

  We could build a system where the community could extend and put these in their front of their houses, people who have it. The, if you're not on a street, or not on the main street, you could say, everybody on the block contribute this amount of money and we'll put it in the street, install it, and we could put in this for, what, $100,000 instead of a million?

• 1:13:50Speaker 04

  Like, a couple hundred dollars.

• 1:13:53Speaker 05

  Okay, but let's just say we wanna put 100 of them into a community. We wanna do all of Santa Monica, wanna put 100 in.

• 1:14:00Speaker 04

  Like a city.

• 1:14:00Speaker 05

  Like a city, yeah, well, it's, or town, let's say town.

• 1:14:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a town.

• 1:14:04Speaker 05

  Town, 50, let's say 50 cameras, 50 cameras, and we wanna provide the service, and we wanna provide the admin and interface for the police.

• 1:14:11Speaker 04

  20 grand.

• 1:14:12Speaker 05

  20 grand. Plus 20 a year in service?

• 1:14:15Speaker 04

  Less.

• 1:14:16Speaker 05

  Maintenance? What if I want service? 500 bucks a month, maybe? Because we want service. We wanna be able to call somebody 24 hours a day and have it fixed and repaired and whatever.

• 1:14:23Speaker 04

  Of course, of course.

• 1:14:23Speaker 05

  But you need to have logos on it. This is the big win.

• 1:14:25Speaker 04

  That would help reduce crime in neighborhoods. So it's good. I'm just, I'm just saying.

• 1:14:29Speaker 05

  Hot dog.

• 1:14:29Speaker 04

  But by the way, but again, like, look at the cheating side of how that works as a, running a business.

• 1:14:34Speaker 05

  Literally, we're having this discussion in my neighborhood right now, and I was like, listen, guys, there is an open source solution for license plate readers. I don't know if you saw it.

• 1:14:40Speaker 04

  Oh, of course.

• 1:14:41Speaker 05

  There's an open source product, and I'm like, I'm going to put this open source product on my street, and I'm gonna put a sign up that this is a, I'm gonna put literally an arrow and say, this is a license plate reader, we've read your license plate.

• 1:14:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  So I mean, I think what's so fascinating to go back and look at this now is that there was like not, no real, like, pause to be like, is this a thing that would upset people? Is this a thing that would make people feel spied on? It was.

• 1:15:04Speaker 00

  Jason did say it was a debate in his neighborhood.

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  It is, but, but he then comes right immediately to the cost. And it's like, it's so prohibitively expensive. Who's watching the videos? How do you be sure that, that the camera's seeing something and then someone responds and it relates to real world action and we're not just like, producing all this footage that goes into the ether? Um, so it's a very practical, like, back then, it was not, it wasn't a thing that was happening. Flock and, and companies like that, mostly Flock, they're the most visible, have sort of figured out the practicality. And now we're sort of past that discussion. We all understand, sure, a police department could set up a camera. I mean, that's the other thing I would talk about. Uh, so we, we figured out, all the logistics took care of themselves. You could set up a camera,

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  you could read license plates, it triggers if they're looking, the cops are looking for somebody, or whatever, stolen car, or whatever, we could route that, or whatever. It's looking out for unsafe things. But, um, you know, then the conversation shifted to, well, is it up to homeowners? Or who's gonna, you know, we, we ended up now falling into this, like, well, it should be law enforcement, like, the Flock is selling the cameras to the sheriff's department or the police department, and then they're putting them up in communities and they're monitoring it, and it's up to them to sort of use it responsibly, as opposed to Jason's idea of like, some guy in his basement with a bank of monitors watching the entire street and every, every, uh, car that drives that. It's just so fascinating

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  to me how this conversation has not, never gone away, but only increased in intensity. But we're looking at it so differently now. I don't think if you told those two guys in that studio, like, in 10 years, there will be license plate reading cameras everywhere, and people will be like, attacking them with bats.

• 1:16:47Speaker 00

  And it'll be so bad for Flock's business that they'll be going through a very public round of layoffs after they offered bios to people, because the reaction to this idea was so monstrously negative, because people didn't like it. Their price came down so far, we blanketed the nation, and then people turned their noses up at it and said, you know what? I don't think so. And this is actually the limitations, the limits of, of, uh, of a company's mission. Because if your only mission is to make neighborhoods safer, then you will do things to do that that may be less salubrious. Uh, if you're an AI head, this is the paperclip problem, if you will. So we've seen, you know, monobanical efforts can run into certain problems, but it also goes to show one, one thing, Lon, nothing ever changes in tech.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  It's a, yeah, if the mission was always like, to make neighborhoods as safe as possible without violating anyone's privacy rights, like, that's a very different company.

• 1:17:42Speaker 00

  Very different company.

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  So I think, yeah, I think that's interesting.

• 1:17:44Speaker 00

  But Ring, though, mostly okay, because it's your house, it's your feed, it's your view. I've never had a friend come to me and be like, have you seen these Ring doorbells? Have I had friends talk to me a lot about Flock?

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Well, I think, yeah, I think we all, the idea, like, I could set up a camera on my porch that films people coming up to my house, that's been, people have been doing that for many, many years. In fact, I, they're doing construction on the, the lot next to me, and they have cameras looking at the lot to make sure, you know, kids don't run in there after hours and drink beer in the half-built house or whatever.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  Leave the kids alone. That's what the houses are for.

• 1:18:20Speaker 03

  I say kids, I meant me. But, um, you know, but like, but no, I don't think anybody's really complaining about that. I don't think anybody has an issue with that. It's as soon as you turn the camera, and it now it's like just down the street at things you don't own in places that don't belong to you, that, that, it's a, right, Ring, I feel like they're on pretty safe ground, because it's just like, well, I can, I can, I can record my stoop, that's my stoop by Amazon.

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  We don't want Minority Report, we want safe houses. That's, I think, the, the balance point here. But an absolute treat of interview. I had not seen that one before, Lon, so when I was prepping for this, it was actually really enjoyable to see.

• 1:18:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  And a very, very refreshing founder to speak to. Really impressed by Jamie. Love

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

  It's fun, uh, it's fun to take a, take a flashback into the Twist Archives. There's so many, there's like 17 years of Twist Archives. We're never gonna, if you like flashback episodes, you are in luck, because we are never gonna run out of classic twists. Jason has talked to everybody dozens of times. So always more to, always more in the archive to comb through.

• 1:19:17Speaker 00

  You know, Lon, the next time you wanna go back into the archives, just give me a call and I'll jump back on. And if you want more of Twist, if you wanna stay up to date on the interviews that will in later years become these absolute classics, then pay attention to Twist everywhere you get your news, X, Instagram, WhatsApp, Substack.

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  Substack, please, Substack. Not so much WhatsApp, Substack, though. TWIstartups.substack.com, that's where to go. Uh, is a free version, you'll get the, you will get the episodes of the podcast, you will get, uh, our morning ticker, which is our sort of news dump. But if you pay $10 a month, you will also get daily tactical and practical posts, based on stuff from the Twist Archive, based on stuff we found elsewhere on the internet. All helpful founders, giving you tried and true, tested strategies they have used at their own company. Don't just wonder what to do the next time you're facing a difficult question. There are, some other founder has already gone through that and answered the

• 1:20:15Speaker 03

  question. So TWIstartups.substack.com is where to go. Sign up for $10 a month and join the tactical, practical crew. For Alex Wilhelm, I'm Lon Harris. We'll see you next time on This Week in Startups.