HomeTech.fm - Episode 304 - Yonomi's Kent Dickson

Episode Date: May 22, 2020

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, May 22nd from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, week 800 of quarantine. How's it going, man? Yes. Yeah. We're hanging in there, you know, to steal a quote from our guest this week. What did he say? It's the, I don't remember if this was during the interview or after, but it's just new wine in old bottles. Yeah. Yeah. Every week seems that way, right? It's Groundhog Day. It's Groundhog Day. Exactly. I finished off my mud pit outside i planted all my grass mud pit and it's it's just mud now i probably shouldn't have killed all that grass anything

any grass peaking up yet or just weeds just weeds just weeds now it's been all this time uh messing with now i'm on to like the bushes around the house and redoing those and uh i'm actually it's actually a pretty good time to put in conduit and things like that for like Christmas light outlets and that kind of thing. So it's kind of worked out for that. But got a big pot, got a big mud pit over here in the side of my yard. Good times. You got a green screen as well. I see very nice furniture there. Yes.

Yes. I from my orders from china from two months ago finally all showed up this month so very good ah yeah they're finally shipped everything's on slowboat now so that's right you there's no like um what do they call it airmail anymore i guess the airmail rates have gone insanely crazy uh so all the stuff that comes from China right now takes a really, really, really long time, four or five weeks. Yeah, so I ordered this green screen kind of like when the COVID thing started. And they were like, oh, thanks for the order. Keeping your money for a month.

So better late than never. Yeah, exactly. Very good. All right. Well, we're just going to kind of jump right into things this week. We had a great interview, Kent Dixon. He's a co-founder and CEO of Yon and thrive with their company based here in Colorado, based in the Boulder area. And if you're not familiar, Yonomi is, I'll do my best to succinctly describe it here. We'll talk about this in depth on the interview, but kind of a middleware approach to the smart home and they've got a platform, an API that developers can write against and an app that homeowners can use to really glue together disparate devices without a hub. That's the

big thing that kind of makes them different. So sort of like taking a hub and moving it up to the cloud in a very loose sense and a really interesting approach and allows them to get into some interesting use cases, again, with that kind of middleware approach to the market. Really interesting and spent a good deal of time on the interview as well with Kent talking about his backstory, comes from aerospace of all places, and moved through doing enterprise stuff. And stay tuned for the interview. You'll see how that's all relevant and how that line kind of led them to where they are today. Um, even got into some topics about building great teams and, and culture, um, at your company. So all around Ken, Ken's a great guy.

I really enjoyed chatting with him and, and, uh, be sure to, uh, tune in for that whole interview. Really enjoyed it. Yeah, it was a good one. It was a good one. Well, Jason, we had some, we had some oversee updates this week. That's really all the news that I have seen. It has been classically slow, not only because it's the summer almost. I guess it's summer.

Is it summer yet? It's May. It's May 20th. It may as well be summer. Officially on Monday. Yeah, Memorial Day coming right up. Oh, nice. So summer is here.

We know that the summer doldrums for news are here everybody's on vacation usually and now everybody is on staycation uh but nothing is happening but we did get an oversee update software can still ship that's right and by the way quick correction i just googled it because as soon as i said that i was like is, is that right? And for some reason, I was thinking Memorial Day is the official start of summer. I guess it's sort of the unofficial. Summer officially begins, Seth, in the Northern Hemisphere on Saturday, June 20th, in case you're wondering. That's absurd. So what happens if you're in Florida and it's like already 90 degrees? Yeah. It's summer. It's all a formality. Anyways, yeah, not a ton of news this week. And so again, we are going to jump straight into that interview. But there was one big piece of news and SnapAV unveiling a really significant update to the Oversea platform. And the only reason we're not going to dive into that here on this week's show is we're actually working on getting Kenny Kim from SnapAV, who's also been a guest on the show before. We have him at least tentatively lined up for next week. So we're firming all of that up and we look forward to diving deep into all of those oversee updates with him on next week's episode. So again, a very big release

out of SnapAV. Look forward to diving into that in depth. So if you're interested in what they're doing, be sure to tune in next week. We're looking forward to having Kenny back on the show. Absolutely. Well, what do you say we go ahead and jump into the interview with Kent? All right, let's do it. Hey, Kent, welcome to the show. How are you? Very well, thanks.

Thanks for having me again, you guys. Yeah, we're excited to have you. We were just looking back here before we started the conversation, and we've had you on the show before. Some of our listeners may remember. It's been four years. So time flies, and certainly a lot has changed in four years, both with regards to kind of current events. We know things are a little crazy right now. We appreciate you taking some time to come on, but also, of course, with how you guys have evolved

and the smart home landscape has evolved, and we look forward to jumping into all of that. But before we get into some of the specific sort of product and industry developments, let's start by jumping into a little bit of your background. Kent, you and I have had a chance to connect, and I think you've got a really interesting background that I'd love to spend a few minutes just chatting about. So quickly, before we get into the history, give our audience just a sort of a personal introduction and talk about your current role there at Yonomi and who you guys are as a company. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So my name is Kent Dixon. I am co-founder and CEO of Yonomi. And we started back in 2013. Uh, so we're going on seven years

at this point, time, time flies. Um, uh, and we are, uh, a simple platform for interoperability of the smart home. Uh, and you know, we can describe more about how we got here and what that really means, but at the end of the day, that is the mission that we're all about. Yeah, yeah. We're going to jump into all that and talk about your guys' really unique approach, kind of middleware, hubless approach. Pretty interesting stuff there. I look forward to jumping into that. But let's go back and talk about what kind of got you into the smart home again, because I think it's kind of a fun story.

You started out in aerospace of all places, and now here you are in the smart home. So give us kind of the quick version of your early days in aerospace and talk about some of that history of when you started first getting inclined towards more web development and the speed of innovation and some of those things. Talk about a little bit of that history for us. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's been a really interesting, fun ride. And I've been really fortunate along the way. Yeah, when I got out of school, I studied aerospace engineering school.

When I got out of school, I got a job at this great company here in Boulder called Ball Aerospace, some of you may know. Of all the giants in the aerospace business, Ball was and continues to be kind of one of the small ones, really focused, very scientific, but launched, you know, a lot of devices into space. So it was a really great opportunity for me. Kind of a dream come true. But I quickly sort of figured out that, you know, it's not as sexy as you think it's going to be. That, you know, we talk so much these days about shipping and shipping quickly and everything else. Boy, in the aerospace business, that's not the case. And I learned that very

quickly. It's like, you know, the business is not as much about the innovation, although obviously there is a lot of it, but the pace of innovation is not fast. I worked with folks, brilliant folks, who had gone their whole career without shipping. Either the program had got canceled that they worked on for a decade, or they were still working on it. It was just delayed, delayed, delayed to the next launch. And in the meantime, it was a really interesting time. So dating myself for sure, but this is early 90s. And people maybe not remember this, but not everybody was on the internet right then. And in fact, mostly academia and mostly, you know, academia and defense and NASA contractors

were really on the internet. And the tools were pretty crude at the time for communicating and getting sharing files and things on the internet. But I started experimenting with some of those things because I found it interesting. And we had just some team dynamic problems of kind of sharing documents. And I found that there were some really cool free tools from CERN, from University of Illinois, that you could just download and host on servers. So I suddenly in my cube, you know, I had, you know, I confiscated, you know, some various hardware. I was running servers in my cube and running, you know, suddenly booting up websites and creating things and then going around with disks literally and installing browsers, you

know, freeware mosaic browsers on people's desktops say, well, this is how we're going to do documentation now. And they're like, what? And who are you? And why are you doing this? Um, and, uh, and I got pretty inspired by the fact that I could do things really quickly. Um, and I could ship, I could ship stuff and I could create value and it got people excited. And I quickly sort of figured out that like, you know what, I think this might be my path. You know, this, I think I could make a living doing this and have a heck of

a lot of fun doing it. And so, you know, I detached after four years at aerospace and said, you know, I'm going to go do this and became a consultant and went around and helped companies basically build their intranets and how to basically do this. Some big companies to basically set all this stuff up internally so they communicate better and and quickly saw like well the problem they really have is not just doing bespoke websites but really integrating all their back-end crap that you legacy stuff that was there and that's like a really hard problem but if you could magically somehow put that all together in one

GUI screen for them. You know, the billing and the ERP and the personnel stuff all in one place. It's pretty magical to people. And so about that time, one of the other consultants I was working on said, screw it, I'm going to start a company and just go do that thing. And I'm like, all right, where do I sign up? And a really brilliant guy here in Boulder, pretty well known these days, Tim Miller, started a company called Avatek. And I'm like, yes, Tim, I want to come work with you on this.

And we went and started building essentially what today, you know, or what eventually became known as middleware in the enterprise. Say, hey, let's use this brand new programming language called Java, which people are using for handsets and things like that. But we think that's a nice language to start gluing stuff together in enterprise. And we were doing scrapers and these weird things to connect into the back office systems that didn't have APIs, were never envisioned uh for this type of use case uh but uh but we found really clever hacks to make that work and uh and suddenly business was booming and then very quickly uh we got acquired uh you know you know i didn't know anything about startups at the time but we got acquired by this company called bea and when they called i'm like

who are you i don't even know who this company is um and uh and we got acquired by this company called BEA. And when they called him like, who are you? I don't even know who this company is. Um, and, uh, and we got acquired by them and brought in at the same time that they acquired a couple of other companies that we were also working with and said, okay, we're in the enterprise middleware business and we've got 200 worldwide sales people, uh, go and like go where? And they said, well, I don't know. You tell me like, okay, well here's the product. and they said well I don't know you tell me like okay well here's the product and they said great we needed shipping by q4 and there's q3 when the acquisition ended so so we did that and and then nine years go by where we iterate through this bought a bunch of

companies and we and and we created this great web logic and eventually this other product called aqua logic that was essentially this enterprise middleware that massive companies, you know, banks and airlines and new age companies like Hotels.com and everything else were using this thing to integrate all this stuff and create new e-commerce and various other ways of communicating. It was a really fun time and it was ways of communicating. It was really fun time and, uh, and it was whirlwind, uh, but you know, learned a lot about how to glue things together, how to build a platform that other people can build really value added things like travel or banking or whatever. We didn't have to know about those industries. We just had to be really good at that one horizontal thing that all of them

needed. Um, and so it was super fun. And, and we eventually sold BA to Oracle in 2008 for, for $8 billion. And, and I said, well, that was really fun, but I know one thing I don't want to work for Oracle. So I'll respect Oracle, but you know, BA already felt like a big company. So I said, I want to go back to startups. And that's where my kind of IoT journey began. This will all seem relevant in a minute, by the way. But that's where my IoT journey began. So I joined up with this startup in town called Tendril because they were working on something

that I thought was really important and really interesting and really hard. And that was in, in the, in the coming smart grid, how do we make homes more responsive to what's happening on the grid? So people can both save energy and, and the grid can be stable and, and, you know, it's a very harmonious thing. And that seemed like a great vision and and we so we built this cloud platform to basically do that and found

like well that's great we figured out these very clever ways to integrate with every smart meter on the market but what about the home how do we make the home react we could tell the consumer what's happening wouldn't be better if we could make that automated. Well, this was before there were really, you know, wirelessly connected thermostats and smart plugs and things like that. So we said, well, I guess we'll just go build those things, right? It's a bit naive, I think.

And we said, we've got to build these things because that's what the world needs, you know, and that's what our cloud platform needs. It's not useful until we can start automating things. So we actually went about building thermostats and plugs and load control switches and real-time displays, reading the meter, sitting in your kitchen counter and show you little spikes when you turn on the dryer and what have you. It was really cool. And it worked really well,

although it was much harder than I think I ever imagined it could be. Ended up being CTO at the company and hadn't done any kind of hardware things since I was in aerospace. Nothing like this for sure. And we figured a bunch of things out along the way. away. But ultimately, that business plan that was going to have us deliver devices and platform and great mobile apps to hundreds of millions of consumers around the world didn't really pan out the way we thought it was going to pan out. The company, you know, ended up surviving and pivoting a few times and now is thriving as part of the company called Uight. But I learned a lot about IoT and I learned a lot about how to coordinate things in the home and optimize for a particular purpose. And by the time that I left

and said, okay, I want to do something else, I went off and did an AI thing for a little bit. But I kind of came back to this idea, like, boy, that's really intriguing, really compelling. We all understand that everything eventually in the home is going to be connected. And even new classes of things that didn't used to exist will start coming into homes and be connected to a network somehow. And if you could coordinate those things, not only could you maybe do things like energy management, like we were trying to do at Tendril, but maybe also home health, certainly comfort and convenience, entertainment, safety and security, all these various different use cases can suddenly be unlocked once you can kind of turn the whole home into something that can be coordinated.

If only there was an API to make that all work together, then all these brilliant people doing energy and aging in place and home health and everything else could move really fast. And that's what I'd learned from my days in middleware. And that's when the light bulb went on and said, you know what? The home is the new middleware. I mean, that's where it's needed now. There's all these disparate things, like every appliance, every light switch, every bulb, every lock, every TV that comes in your home is going to come from a different vendor.

It's going to use different technology. But middleware solves that problem. It makes it look unified. That's what we need to go do. So that's how we work. Yeah. And I love that. And the way that all sort of comes together, right, and you connect these dots of the experience in the smart home, or

you probably didn't call it the smart home at the time, but at Tendril, when you're trying to deliver devices into the home and, um, and then drawing back on that middleware experience in the enterprise and, and kind of the, the, the connection between those two, uh, I think is really interesting. I can sort of see where that light bulb moment came for you guys and I presume, or came for you. And I presume that was the spark that kind of led to, you know me. And so talk about spotting that sort of what I would call kind of a disruptive, certainly a novel approach at the time to the smart home and some of the advantages that you see compared to how many of the other companies are approaching it? Yeah. So when that light bulb came on for me,

I said, that's the company I want to work for, the company who's kind of solving this software layer, this middleware layer for the home. And I looked around for folks who were working on that problem because I wanted to go show up and knock and knock on the door and say please hire me I want to come work for you and make this happen um and uh and looked around uh and there were a bunch of people working on the problem and they were working on the problem uh in in a way that I thought would never be mass market um viable uh they were building God boxes. There must've been three dozen companies in 2013 or thereabouts who were working on some form of God box. And some of them were very good friends of mine.

Other tendril expats who were at this company called revolve here in Boulder, who eventually got bought by nest, killed the hub. But the point is, a lot of these companies were saying, hey, the way to solve this problem, they were thinking about it like an engineer, which I respect. I am an engineer, and I'm an early adopter and a geek and all those things. But they were thinking about it like a geek and early adopter and like an engineer. And said, Oh, well, the obvious way you solve this problem is build these God bots with a Zibi radio and a Z wave radio and a wifi radio and a Bluetooth radio and a 433 megahertz radio and you know, whatever else we can think of. So that anything that comes in the home, you know,

we've got a hub for that and we're going to do local integrations and and that's going to be great. And, and it, and it was great. And it is great for early adopters who want to spend money on, on, on a piece of networking gear and do a bunch of tinkering to make it all work together. But we, we, my co-founders, Justin Garrett and I really said, you know, this problem is going to be solved for the mass market, not for early adopters, not for geeks, not for high wealth people. And it's got to be solved for the regular person like my mom, my uncle, my next door neighbor, who doesn't give a shit about any of that thing. But guess what? There's a smart thermostat coming in their home, whether they know it or not.

And, and, you know, and eventually, you know, 20 other things. And they, their expectation is it should just work and it should just work together. And if things are going to start automatically happening when I come home, great, that's magical, but I shouldn't have to go buy out more networking gear to make that happen. So we said, you know, the disruptive idea I think that we had is like, okay, can you solve this problem for that mass market user using things that they already have or that already exist what are the things that exist in every mass market mobile phones uh and uh and broadbent uh so given that and you know reasonably good uh wi-fi connectivity given that uh how do you give them something that they could adopt in a moment uh that automatically starts making their stuff work. I mean, that's how easy

it has to actually be. They have to say, it's free, it's easy, it takes two minutes, and suddenly everything's working and I never have to think about it again. That's the solution for the mass market. And that's not the way that, you know, a lot of our peers were approaching the problem. So we said, gosh, let's see if we can do that. I mean, would it even work? And so we spent quite a lot of time sort of experimenting with hitting, you know, the API, the crude APIs that were available for the mass market things, you know, the Nests and the Mimos and the Phillips Hughes and the Sonos's that were out at the time, 2013, remember, and said, you know, would it even be possible?

And what would the user experience be? Would it be good enough? And we went through, you know, I think, you know, a thousand iterations of kind of building a back-end platform that could do that in near real time and app user experience. And, and, and then, and let a few people start using it out there in the real world, got feedback really quickly. And, and then, you know, that's where we said, okay, I think we validated the architecture.

I think we validated use case. Now let's see if we can go faster. I'd like to kind of loop back around to talking about like the user experience interface of, of, you know, me and, and, and where you've, um, how you've been able to, where you've seen success, I guess, in getting people onboarded with the app and, and, and what, what, what you believe drives people to pick up something like, you know, me over just using a half dozen apps out of the box you know if i have a philips hue over here i have ecobee over there sonos over here why not why not use 10 apps what what what do you think is so compelling uh to get

people on board with you know me over uh over the multi-ad experience? Yeah, well, again, you know, I think for a typical mass market user, you know, simplicity is the key. We can make people's lives easier than, you know, we're doing our job. And to be clear, we're not trying to replace everybody else's app. You know, the approach here is we're not trying to do Sonos' job better than Sonos can do. We're not trying to do Philips Hue job better than Philips Hue can do.

What we're trying to do is the thing that they can't do and that they won't do, which is to make those two products work seamlessly together and the other, you know, 200 products that might come into a mass market consumer's home. And so that's our job, you know, so we'll do the aggregation and the automation of the things in the home that you'll never find in one of those other apps. So if you're sitting around, you know, having an experience with music and you want to go search music and you want to, you know, tune in and group speakers and do everything else, you should be using Sonos' app. Nobody's going to do a better job than that. But if you want to create, you know, a dinnertime routine that has the right music and the right lighting and the right environmental

cooling, heating, things associated with it, then we're the way you want to go. And it's going to be really easy because not only do we kind of do this, we've really thought a lot about the user experience and then kind of built this into our platform, uh, is, you know, it's got to discover the devices that you have. It's got to make it really easy for you to connect them, uh, together into, you know, me. And at that point, you know, yes, if you, if you are a person who thinks a lot about routines and wants to go, you know, create, uh, uh, routines or rules an elegant editor for you to do that with but even before that like for the other 99 of the world uh we actually have routines that we auto generate for you it's like okay we understand that you've got these devices they seem to be in a

similar space and here's your dinner time routine here's your go to sleep routine here's your leave home routine and they're already ready to go. And in moments you've got that automation working. You can tweak it if you want, but you should have, you should not have to think like a programmer in order to set that up. Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting stuff to hear you kind of draw that distinction between primary sort of grouping zones and things like control,

things like that versus again, kind of the more middleware API glue that binds approach and kind of making things talk to each other. I think a good way to illustrate that further would be to shift gears a little bit and talk about what makes the platform compelling in some of your enterprise types of use cases. You talked about the middleware approach earlier in business and how you didn't have to be the expert in everything, but you had to be really good horizontally. And you had to be really good at making different use cases work together and then allowing the subject matter experts in those different verticals to come in and do their thing. Talk about how that approach translates into the smart home. Yeah, that's exactly right. And that really was the dream when we started the company was that we could build this platform and it is horizontal. We'll do the general automation stuff really well. But the real value long-term is going to come from those very specialized domains.

We refer to them as vertical domain. If we're horizontal, those are vertical. And from my tendril days, I have some experience in the energy management vertical and realize that, boy, there needs to be armies of PhDs who are doing learning algorithms about what happens in the home and how the grid reacts to that and everything else, and then coming up with the right types of automations that will make your experience great. And the same will be true in kind of the aging in place vertical and the security vertical and the safety vertical and entertainment and insurance, really interesting use cases of insurance as well. And so that's the thing we said, we're never going to be subject matter expertise experts in any of those things. But if we can elevate to them a simple API so they can be agnostic to the hardware in the home and just say, is there a thermostat?

Which room is it in? Great. Tell it to go to 72 degrees at 1159. That is so powerful to them because we saw companies who were, you know, just a couple of years ago who were in the aging in place sector who were trying to be vertically integrated companies. Like, okay, just like we tried to do a tendril back in the day. It was like, we're going to build the hardware, we're going to build the user experience and everything else. And guess what? You got to raise $100 million to do that. But if you can viably say we could create a piece of software that can be attached to any home and apply our aging in place algorithms and user experience around that, then we can viably be a startup that raises $2 million and gets to launch and has an impact in the market in a tenth of the time. And that's super powerful.

That's the big disruptor here, I think. It's not even what we're going to do. It's what the folks who are building our platform are now going to do. Interesting. Interesting. I'd like to zoom out a little bit here and, and take a look at the current, you know,

last time we talked to you, we just, we was back. I was looking at it. Episode one, 20, 2016 judge, just about July 15.

So almost exactly what four years ago. Nothing's changed, right? Like everything's roughly the same. What, what, what, what do you, what do you you see that is, I guess, the first question I have is a two-part question here. What do you, have you seen in the industry that's changed the most in the last four years? And then what do you see, what trends do you see coming up in the

future that's going to change and kind of revolutionize the smart home as we're all staying at home. We're all working at home. We're staying at home. We're working home. Everybody's at home right now. What do you see is the future here? Well, yeah. What's transpired since the last time we spoke and since we started the company even before that is is an awful lot and that was one sort of uh you know wise decision that we made early on which is or wise realization or acceptance perhaps uh is that um what's the old saying you know uh lord grant me the the wisdom to accept the things I cannot change. This is sort of a version of that. It's like we can't affect, you know,

nor can we predict which are the devices that are going to be popular in the home. You know, which vendors, which even device types they're going to be. And therefore, let's design an architecture that builds for that type of uncertainty that says, hey, when new things come along, regardless of how they sort of expose themselves

to a network or to a third party like us, let's build a piece of software that can embrace that and and keep going um so uh so that that uh ethos uh and assumption going in has served us very well and uh and you know i mentioned i think to jason the other day it's interesting in 2013 when we started the company i would not have predicted that there would be ubiquitous voice assistance in every home by 2015 or 2016. But yet there they were. And guess what?

It was pretty straightforward to integrate that into our platform. And we rode that wave and are still riding it today. And that's been great. It's really sparked the growth of kind of the smart home industry among the mass market, I think. But, you know, that's, that's not the end of it. You know, you know that's, that's maybe, you know, the first or second inning of this of this baseball game that we're in. And and and so where the future is going, I mean, short answer is, who knows? You know, I think we're well positioned to embrace it as it as it

happens around us. But, but I'm really excited for it, because I think these user experiences are going to get better and better. I mean, I think that it's funny because you mentioned earlier that, you know, we didn't used to call it the smart home. And the truth is, we probably still shouldn't be calling it the smart home, right? Because it's not smart. At best, it's obedient right now, right? I mean, that's the stage that we're at. You know, if we can make the home do what we want it to do when we want it to do it, when we tell it to do that, I mean, that's kind of where we are with voice and apps at this point. If it just works, you know, hey, that's a win. It starts to get smart when, and, you know, it'll be little bits at a time, right? It starts to get smart when it anticipates the things that you

needed and wanted, and it's already doing it. And you don't even notice it. You know, it's like second nature. And it's like breathing. It's like, you know, when you get to the point where you didn't really, you know, you were doing your cooking dinner, reading or whatever, you didn't really notice that the sun went down and the lights came on kind of slowly around you and the temperature changed and the blinds went down and everything else. And it just, all those things happened and you were comfortable and you were not interrupted. You didn't get up and change the thermostat or pull your phone out of your pocket or anything else, or even speak to Alexa. It just happened. That's a pretty smart home. But it's going to be a journey to get there. And we shouldn't try to accelerate that too

much in my humble opinion on this, because the consequences of making assumptions and doing things that the machine thought the user wanted and getting it wrong, the consequences are bad. It's a bad user experience. It's worse than, you know, it's worse than, you know, not doing anything. Right. Um, so we're going to have to tiptoe, you know, into that. And I think that's, you know, that's where we'll go. There'll be other types of user experiences. I think gestures will be really interesting. I think there'll be these things around us that sense our gestures, whether it's stuff that we wear or just, you know, uh, things that are in our home that notice that when we go like this, that, you know, in one context,

that means turn down the, um, turn down the volume on Sonos. And in another context, it might mean dim the lights. Uh, another context, it might mean, you know, turn down the stove top. Who knows? But gestures are going to be a really important thing. And, you know, I'm just excited. I think this, you know, we're not going to be done with this job of making the home smart, you know, in our generation. But we're going to make some pretty good progress. Yeah.

I love that. I may have to steal that one from you, the, the obedient home, not the smart home. And it's really interesting because I catch myself still calling it that out of force of habit. And I don't even like that phrase. I don't like the phrase smart home, but it's become so almost second nature to call it that without even questioning it. But I think you're 100% right. We've got a long ways to go and exciting opportunities. And so as we're bumping up against our time here, and speaking of kind of the future and pursuing those opportunities, I want to zoom out and kind of shift gears and talk to you about a topic a little bit outside of the smart home, but I know something very relevant

to many of our listeners who are, you know, lots of entrepreneurial folks in the audience. You've got a pretty diverse background in companies and you and I have had a chance to talk a little bit about just building teams and the importance of building an effective team and a team that you enjoy working with. And just share some of your perspectives about how,

how you think about building a great team to go, go and tackle some of these opportunities that remain in front of us. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the big challenge. It's, it's fun to talk about the technology and everything. And we'd like to geek out on that, but the, but the truth is that, um, you know, without, without a great team and not a good team, a great team, uh, you know, these, these really hard problems never really get solved. And, uh, and, or, or you can't be fast enough or you can't be in the right place at the

right time. So, uh, getting the right team together is, is super, um together is super critical. And I don't know, you know, the obvious part about building teams and hiring and recruiting is that, you know, you got to get really smart people. And that's never not true. But the thing that I've learned along the way is that that's only half the equation when you're bringing people onto the team is the other part is the cultural piece. And that's the thing that's going to really make the machine, you know, the machine, you know, that is the team really hum and be sustainable and be here seven years later, you know, and with very little attrition and love what they do and probably take pay cuts and all that to come do it. And so it actually took us a while to sort of realize and be able to articulate what our culture was.

But once we were able to do that, that could immediately be applied to every sort of recruiting or hiring experience that we had. So you could describe sort of the technical skills that you needed for sure or the marketing skills or whatever. But once we were able to define, you know, our cultural requirements, uh, then that made things easier and it made it a lot easier, easier to recruit. And, uh, uh, we sort of ripped off, uh, you know, how we talk about it from, from another, uh,

very successful local startup called SendGrid. Um, we've had this notion of 4-H, you know, that the thing that defines your culture are these four things, that, you know, people need to be hungry, humble, honest, and happy. Those four H's. So it's very simple, and, you know, it sounds like platitudes, but if you apply that to both how you, you know, you interact on a daily basis, but also apply it to how you interview people, like, you know, and this is, this is something

every time we interview somebody, like, well, that, that person was super smart, you know, aced the coding exam, all these things, but, you know, only really had three of the four H's, you know, like that's not going to work. So, so, so that's what we've embraced. And, you know, only really had three of the four H's, you know, like that's not going to work. So that's what we've embraced. And, you know, it's hard to, you know, have those ideals and live up to them. But if you can do that, you know, I think you have a very sustainable culture and a very sustainable company. Very interesting. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's tough finding the right people, but if you have a good set they don't hire brilliant jerks, right? And we've all worked with brilliant jerks, people who are very, very good at their job, very intelligent, know exactly, you know, can check all the boxes from an intellectual standpoint, but is the sort of emotional

overhead that comes with hiring people like that, is it worth it? And, uh, I I've found that, that, uh, definitively in my experience working at, at a bunch of small, small to medium sized businesses over the years that, that having that, that cultural element that you talk about is, is absolutely critical. Um, so appreciate you sharing that. Yeah. Yeah. You bet. Well, I can't, I want to do, I do want to thank you for, uh, joining us here on the show and spending some time talking about a lot of stuff, talking about your background, you know me, and how you got from point A to point B. It's been a really interesting conversation.

Just wanted to kind of like, well, loop back around and talk a little bit about you know me. One of the things, I was just on your website, and one of the things I'm most impressed slash excited about seeing that I haven't paid attention in a while is that you have a developer API on there. And I don't know how long that's been there, but man, it looks juicy and good from a development standpoint. So kind of want to get my hands on that. Yeah, we are excited. I mean, we're really leaning in. I'm glad you noticed that developer API. I mean, we're really leaning into, uh, supporting developers,

you know, we, uh, and, uh, we believe, you know, those, those are the people we talked about earlier who are going to really shape, you know, how the smart home really becomes smart and how it becomes valuable to people. Um, and, uh, and we can't, we can't do it ourselves. So we need, uh, really inspired, brilliant, hardworking, uh, people to, to come kind of take, you know, stand on the shoulders of the things that we've done, um, and then, and then take it to the next level. And we're super excited about that. And, uh, and what's, what's awesome about it. Um, you know, we said this in the early days when we first started kind of going around and telling people we were working on and talking to investors about it. You know, people would say, well, what's the addressable market for this? And I would say, well, the addressable market for smart home is it's every home on the planet.

You know, it's like every home is going to be a connected home and there's going to be a way you know if you can be a platform that makes that easier better something else then then uh then uh then then you've done something important and you could have a huge impact and that gets me very excited um and we're starting to see that right now i mean it's it's amazing i mean we're a small team still, guys. I mean, we're very much a startup. But, you know, we've got major sort of customers in Japan, you know, building cool things for the Japanese market.

We've got, you know, we've got this cool thing, you know, a couple of cool things happening, you things happening in Africa, in Kenya and South Africa and in Europe. And it's literally everywhere. And that's fun. It's daunting right now as a small team that is all U.S.-based. We've got people up in the middle of the night supporting you know, supporting and helping and doing training for developers, uh, all over the planet. But, uh, but this is going to be such a cool thing. And, uh,

and we're inspired by these great ideas and the vision that, you know, that our partners have and, and, uh, and just can't, can't wait for them to, to, uh, to, to really start shipping their baby. Awesome. Well, Kent, we really appreciate you taking some time to come on the show. If anyone is listening and wanted to perhaps connect with you to ask a follow-up question or learn more about your work at YouKnowMe, what would be the best way for them to do that? Well, definitely come to YouKnowMe.com, Y-O-N-O-M-I.com. And there's contact us links in there, obviously on social. I think we're at youknowme on Twitter and at youknowme app on Instagram and other places,

I'm sure. We should be easy to find. So please do come reach out to us. Um, we're very much, uh, we're very much about relationships here. So, uh, you're going to get a human who talks to you if you do approach us. Excellent. All right, Kent. Well, thanks again. Uh, we appreciate you coming on the show. Yeah. Thanks guys. Pleasure to see you again and to catch up. All right. Well, that'll do it for our interview with Kent. And again, lots of fun hearing a lot about Kent's backstory and how that led him into the place he is now with, with, you know, me and learning more about their platform and then closing out with some more of those business type topics. Really, really fun conversation. Look forward to having Kent on again in the future as they continue

to develop their platform. Absolutely. It's I'm. Absolutely. Like I was saying towards the end of the interview there, I was perusing the developer documentation. This looks really cool. It looks really cool what you can do with this. So I am going to kind of poke around with that and see what I can make of it because they've done a good job. It's always good, Jason. You always find good documentation. It actually has everything written down. It's always a good sign. It's always a good sign. It's always good, Jason. You always find good documentation. It actually has everything written down. It's always a good sign. It's always a good sign. It's a good sign.

Very excited about it. I can imagine. I'm not a developer, but I can certainly appreciate, as somebody who's a little bit OCD about things being tidy, it's kind of a leading indicator of what you're about to get into. Documentation is key, no matter what field you're in or what you're doing, documentation is key. That's right. Cool. Well, all of the topics and everything, links to Kent's contact info, things of that nature, can all be found in our show notes at hometech.fm. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter. We'll send you weekly show reminders and other occasional updates about all the great

stuff going on here in the world of home tech. Promise no spam on that list. We'd love to have you come join. Again, that link is hometech.fm slash 304. And don't forget, most weeks you can join us live in the chat room. Uh, Wednesdays starting seven, 7 30 PM Eastern. You can find out more at home tech.fm slash live. All right, Seth, pick of the week. This week's all you. Pick of the week. I've been watching some TV. Nice. You got a tip for me? Yeah, I do. I do. Do you have Apple TV plus? We do. We just, uh. We actually just activated it recently. And the first show we dove into is For All Mankind.

We're moving through it a little slow. I think we're four or five episodes in right now, but enjoying it. Really, it's a fun show. Yeah, yeah. That one's really good. It's one of my favorites to watch. I knew you would like it.

You're a space geek, right? Oh, yes. Space. Yeah. Anything space. And that one's like a good alt history. Like they twist it and then they twist it again on you a couple of times. But at the same time, they kind of like have a lot of the same names that you're familiar with if you're familiar with space history.

So it's a really cool setup. And they delivered on that show, I think. So I'm really excited to see what the next season brings. Yeah, we're enjoying it so far. If you get tired of a serious show about space, you can watch a really silly show about game development. There's a show, it's kind of a newer show called Mythic Quest. I think it came out earlier this year, maybe in February sometime.

And I finally just sat down and watched it. It's on par with, what is it called? Silicon Valley. Okay. So if you've seen Silicon Valley, I'd say that one's probably a little more like on the developer slash startup owner side of things. And this one is more kind of like geared towards gaming and has a lot of things that are kind of like gamer culture and just kind of funny.

I mean, I'm not even a gamer, but I recognize a lot of the things that they're talking about in there. But it's all about like this massive game that's super popular and the developers and people that make it and how they decide on new features and that kind of thing that go into it. Um, I'm about halfway through. And the reason I put this on, on my pick of the week list is because of an episode that is like episode five. Uh, it's called a dark, quiet death. Um, it is, it is a, it is the, that's the name of a game

that is, uh, that they, they kind of of this episode kind of centers around but it was so shocking this this episode is actually so shocking for for me i guess i don't know for me it was just a shocking episode like i this is one of those shows you can put on in the background and just kind of leave there and it plays and you're kind of laughing at a couple of jokes they make like when that episode came on i was like this is different and i started watching it excellent writing excellent acting like everything everything that I want to tune in for and just stare at the TV screen was done. You could not miss a beat of it

because it was so well done. And I will say episode five of Mythic Quest, if you haven't seen that, just go watch that. Well, I wouldn't say go watch that one. It's well worth it. It could be its own episode. It could be its own TV show.

But it's really well written and just kind of like out of the blue episode in a sea of like funny, lighthearted things. It's just a completely well-written episode. And that's why I was like, oh, I'm the Mythic Quest going to pick of the week. They've done something good here. There you go. They hired a good writer. Yeah, I need more comedy in my, in my rotation. The owner of a successful video game design company and his troubled staff struggled to keep their hit mythic hit game mythic quest on top. I could

definitely see how that would lend itself to kind of the Silicon Valley, uh, type of treatment, which I enjoyed. I didn't watch. I know there was a bunch of seasons of that show, but I watched one or two seasons and thought it was a riot. Yeah. So I have to check this one out. And I think Silicon Valley was a little harder for me to I mean, I liked it. Don't get me wrong. I really I watched it all. But like I felt that that one was just like it was one of those where the comedy was was like cringe comedy like how like the main character was just like you're doing something that was so stupid why are you doing this like if you just held your tongue or whatever you'd be a billionaire and like on this one is not that type of comedy not that type of writing um and and not it's just more

light-hearted and uh just kind of funny jokes here and there. So definitely worth a watch. What I liked about Silicon Valley was like, you know, the whole startup culture and everything is never really resonated with me all that much. And I feel like people who are part of that culture tend to take themselves so seriously. Yes. And it just tore all of that apart and just completely took everything to the extreme and, and made so much light of,

of some of these things in, in the startup culture that again, I feel like sometimes people just, you know, take, take themselves a little, a little too seriously, uh, as, as part of that culture. Um, so I thought it was pretty fun, but anyways, good tip. I'm always looking for always looking for new shows to go check out. So we'll have to give this one a look. Well, if you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week, or great ideas for the show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm and fill out the online form. Absolutely. And as we always do, we want to give a big thank you to everybody who supports and listens to the show, but especially to those of you who are able to financially support our efforts here through our Patreon page.

If you want to learn more about how you can do that, head on over to hometech.fm slash support and learn how you can contribute to our efforts here for as little as $1 a month. At that $5 level, we'll give you a big shout out on air. Every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for all sorts of fun conversations around home technology and much more. Got a great community there and we'd love to have you. And if you want to help out but can't support the show financially, we'd appreciate if you can head on over to iTunes or whatever podcast app you're listening to and just give us a positive rating. It helps

people find the episodes and the shows and kind of directs people our way that may have not otherwise found it. So we appreciate that. Love those positive ratings. Absolutely. Definitely help people find the show. So take a minute to do that. All right, Seth. Well, that'll do it. Another fun episode. Always enjoy sitting down and putting these together. Hope you have a great weekend. We'll look forward to connecting with you next week. And again, looking forward to having Kenny Kim on from SnapAV to really dive into those oversee updates. Yeah. Well, Jason, have a great weekend. All right. You too. Take care.