The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast Angee Review with CSO Petr Stransky

Episode Date: April 17, 2019

Angee Revew with CSO Petr Stransky MeetAngee.com

Thank you. thecvpn, thechrisbosspodcastnetwork.com. You can go there and subscribe to seven of our different podcasts that we have out there in a lot of different fields. And of course, we've got a really cool, exciting interview today. Today, I have the CSO of Angie, a company. You can go to their website at meetangie.com. And it's Peter Stransky. And Peter has over 20 plus years experience in strategic management and executive leadership roles where he worked across a number of industries, executive manager and advisor of the international companies

in the segments of enterprise software, digital media, electronic payment solutions, consumer technology, driving their growth, restructuring, and strategic exits. He's done a lot of wonderful things with companies, so we're going to learn a lot of cool things about Angie, the company, and also about him and his experience in business. Welcome to the show, Peter. How are you doing today? I'm doing great, and I'm very happy to be on your show, Chris. Awesome, awesome.

So we've been checking out your guys' product, Angie. You can go to meetangie.com to check this thing out. It's a Angie you're gonna meet Angie calm to check this thing out it's a very impressive security cam tell us a little bit more about yourself Peter and then let's get into the product itself okay well about me you already mentioned pretty I would say boring Peter yeah so I would say I had a lot of fun working across a couple of tech industries. In the past more with the segment of medium-sized companies and a couple of corporate projects. And a couple of years ago, actually, I started working with the founders of of of Angie Thomas and Lucas and initially advising them helping them to raise some money which we succeeded and I was kind of sucked in and started

actually working internally helping especially on a business side and here I am I mean after three years of working with the team and very exciting journey. And I believe we've been able to pull out something interesting. But more importantly, we just started. I mean, what you can see right now is just a start of incredible things which we will bring to the market. Well, it's a great story that you have there. It's also kind of incredible. I mean, you guys just started.

This thing's got some pretty good technology from what I've seen inside of it. So tell us about Angie. So I will start with a bit of a boring description, so a bit of technical, and then I'll do a bit of marketing description. So technically, it's actually three things in one. And the most important part is So technically it's actually three things in one and the most important part is invisible because it's in cloud because everything what

happens on ng is managed by cloud where we're using the actual device as a source of the information, what's going on and source of metadata in order to be able to establish whether there is something potentially hazardous in the household, whether there's something you as a user should know about whether there's something potentially hazardous in the household, whether it's something you as a user should know about,

whether it's something what actually potentially we should record, and so on and so forth. It's a real-time cloud system, which means that, and that's unlike a number of other systems, the embedded part of NG, which sits within the device, is actually constantly connected to the cloud and that allows us to do a couple of tricks and another part is actually mobile phone so we're utilizing your mobile phone be it ios or android for being able to recognize that you came at home being

able to offer you it as interface in between you and ng and we leverage in the latest technology which is available on those phones so uh we as ng is essentially omnipresent through the device which you can physically see uh at your home the cloud part where actually a lot of stuff is being processed and then the mobile phone which is being used as an interface but also as a way to recognize you and anyone who belongs to your household came or left and therefore allowing us to do a magic because one of the specific of ng is it's fully automated. Essentially after you set it up and I would bet under five minutes you don't have to do anything because ng does it. Until you decide that you want to know

what's going on or you want to interact with the people at home and you can do a lot of additional stuff. And let me conclude with one thing. All this allows us one incredible thing and that's constant innovation because we are adding new functionalities even after you have

ng at your home and recently we actually introduced some improvements of the way how We are adding new functionalities even after you have Angie at your home. And recently, we actually introduced some improvements of the way how you can work with the alarms. We announced a couple of integrations with Google Assistant, with Alexa, with Philips View, and we're working on additional ones. So Angie's security camera at meetangie.com. You can tell you check it out. It's a security camera at meetangie.com. You can tell you, check it out. It's a security camera. It's got full HD at 1080p with an active resolution of a nine 20 by 1080.

A field of view is 360 motion traction tracking camera with winding the lens. I think that was the thing that kind of jumped out at me about you guys's camera, the motion tracking. I think that's pretty interesting yeah so it's a it's a part which was a bit tricky on an engineering side because essentially what you have is around ng you have six

PR sensors which allows us at any moment to understand what's happening around NG regardless how you place it. As well as, as you mentioned, 360 degree action field of view and the way how we achieve it because NG can rotate around. So we essentially are using the PIR sensors to understand when there is a motion and then we actually take the camera to that position and we can analyze part of the video. We actually are just preparing some computer vision mechanisms in order to allow you to have further understanding what's happening in that field of view where the motion was.

Last thing which actually we can do with that, essentially NG learns that there is a wall. Now, technically, what it learns is that there is no motion for a long time. So it just essentially is analyzing its surroundings. And then it comes to a conclusion, which is adjusted actually on an ongoing basis, where actually there is no motion. And that actually allows NG to ng to think well that's a wall that's where no one uh usually is and we use it for one feature which actually right now we are

the only one having that which for privacy function so when you come at home what ng does it turns to the wall so the camera doesn't look at you and we're finding this very important for a number of people because they don't trust companies that they will protect the access to the camera and I think that's actually a good sensitive approach. So what do we do? We make sure camera is actually not looking at you. So the camera doesn't look at you when it's kind of in a rest mode or it knows you're in the home from the sensors and stuff? Correct. When we know that you're at home, we call that mode privacy mode because it does one more thing.

It doesn't allow anyone to connect to NG as well without your permission. That's really cool. I really like that feature, especially nowadays where you're like, who's watching me through my webcam? I mean, there's all sorts of hacking that's gone on fbi for a while i was just watching people through their webcams uh you know i like that feature where it's not looking at you i guess it just turns into the wall huh correct it does and moreover uh we actually any videos which goes through cloud uh or any videos which uh which you watch through a function which we call LiveView are encrypted. So no one else can actually access them. No one else can see them.

We're using asymmetric encryption for that. We're not watching anyone's video. I don't want to mention a company which does that. We believe the privacy is extremely important. It's essentially, interestingly enough, I believe privacy is a neighbor of these solutions to come at home because we are invading your privacy. So we want to make sure it's done in a way where you are still in control. Yeah, it just came out that a certain company has employees that actually do listen to your to your

chatter I've seen that company from time to time it will light up I think yellow or an orange yellowish color and it claims that when it's doing that it's just listening to make itself

better yeah whatever man And it claims that when it's doing that, it's just listening to make itself better. Yeah, whatever, man. So it's cool that you guys have these sort of privacy things. Now, one thing that's interesting about this is it comes with a security tag as well. Tell us how those work. Correct. So security tag, which is essentially a sensor, which does a couple of things for us, but the core is that it recognizes the motion of the doors. So you place the security tech at your entry and exit points,

and it allows Angie to understand when those were open or closed and make better sense of presence of the people, of happening at those entry points, even if there is no direct line of view. So essentially, it increases the intelligence of the entire system because of that. And it's easy

to place them. There is no complicated manipulation of a security tag. And you can have multiple security tags at your home. So if you have have two exits then you place it on both if you have three the same there are of course some limitation of the distance you can put it at so this thing will do several things it'll give you a home feed through the app it'll give you real-time alerts through the app so let you know

when unexpected visitors in the house house. Alarm events, so alarm videos are captured and uploaded securely to the cloud. I do love the cloud feature. I never have figured out, you know, we get tons of cameras to be on the Chris Voss show, and I'll get these cameras where it's like,

oh, there's a micro SD card here in the camera that saves, you know, your alarm videos. And you're like, oh, there's a micro SD card here in the camera that saves your alarm videos. And you're like, well, all the thief has to do is steal the camera and they have the video. It doesn't make any sense. So I love the cloud feature where it goes to the cloud. So even if they steal the security cam, I know i'm gonna have their i'm gonna have pictures of them in the cloud that i can turn into the police that's that's true now actually uh the

engine is designed uh even with more backup than that so there is a local memory so in case uh that there's no wi-fi available which might happen uh i don't know off your, I don't know, shut down your Wi-Fi. Exactly. Or it just, you know, there is some outage. The same is actually with power outage. So one thing which actually Engie does have is backup battery, which can last up to eight hours.

Oh, really? So if they shut down the power to my house, to shut off all my cameras and Wi-Fi, I'm going to be covered. Still works. Engie works. Awesome. I always worry about that because I get paranoid.

I put a padlock on my power box because it's outside here in Las Vegas because I'm always worried, like, all they've got to do is shut off my power, and then that kills my Wi-Fi. It kills all the cameras and stuff. But, yeah, what we've seen especially here in las vegas because we had a lot of uh uh doorbell pirates that steal stuff off the thing and as soon as they see that there's a camera recording them like a ring or anything else they run away because they know they've either been made with their photo uh or they're going to be made. So they just, as soon as they see a camera, they're out.

Yeah. So the thing is that ng goes a bit step further in not only focusing on the break-ins and what we're seeing a number of users, you mentioned the home feed, using it for understanding what's happening at their homes.

And especially if it's like an apartment complex, the break-in danger is not necessarily as high but there might be service person coming in there might be some people which you haven't invited or you didn't know about and all this is being captured or even if it's your kids you know when they came so you can be either happy that they are at home or actually you know that they came late. There's a number of scenarios which we're supporting.

And more importantly, as I mentioned, based upon the feedback from our users, we're actually adding new scenarios and new functionalities on the go because ng updates itself. So you don't have to do anything. If there's a new functionality or bug fixing, of course, it doesn't happen too often,

then it automatically actually updates your ING and then you continue to use it even without knowing that there is a new functionality. So we're very excited about those new functionalities based upon the customer feedback and what we're seeing can be new use cases. It's pretty interesting, you guys, also, where you can just capture video if you want.

So if your dog's being cute, you can capture that. Your kids are being cute, you can capture that. Save it as a moment, your thing. What's also kind of different about you guys is you guys basically sell this thing based on subscription monthly or yearly subscription plans. You don't really buy the ANG, is that correct? That's correct.

Yeah, we decided that actually, in reality, consumers are looking to have functional service. And in order to have functional service, you have to have functional cloud services there, cloud storage and all this stuff. And reality is that most of the companies are trying to find a way how to charge you for that. And when we are thinking about it, we came to a conclusion, well, this is unfair. And more importantly, it's not transparent.

And it's not about the hardware. It's about what it does for you. So we are having a very simple offer, which is right now OnePlan, which you can either subscribe month to month or annually. You pay that. You don't pay anything for the hardware.

So you have essentially a lifetime warranty for hardware as long as you pay subscription. So if something goes wrong with hardware, we just replace it. If there will be new versions of hardware, we will actually provide you with the new one and so on and so forth. So there is no risk on your side

and you get access to all the services without hidden charges or something you would not know about. I really like that plan because most of the cameras that we're seeing nowadays, if you want cloud access, I actually have one product that got sent to us, a garage door opener that works with IoT. It plugs in all your IoT stuff, but if you want to use Google Home or Alexa, you have to pay a fee to be able to open your door saying, you know, blah, blah, blah, to open my door. And so most of the security companies out there, if you do pay, you know, $100, $150, 200 bucks, you drop for a security cam,

you're still going to have to pay for a monthly fee for a cloud service. If you want cloud. And like I say, I highly recommend cloud because if anything happens, you know, I just, like I said, I always giggle because I'm like,

they'll just steal the camera and then they'll have your recording of stuff. I've got an outdoor camera that, that it, it doesn't even work on the cloud. It works, but it has a card inside of stuff. I've got an outdoor camera that it doesn't even work on the cloud. It works, but it has a card inside of it. It's like, if you rip the thing off the wall, well, then there's your video. And for $16

a month, they get the main camera, unit one security tag, unlimited cloud storage, so you guys don't have a cap on that. That's nice. iOS and Android app, multi-mode protection 24 7 customer service and continuous app updates and like you see that's pretty nice with any cameras i have and we have cameras that go bad with all the testing we do um you know when you call them up they're just like

well you you bought it you own it you broke it it's yours um so i think it's nice that they can you know have the security of getting a continual update plus they get the cloud service as well you just don't have to think about it and that's our aim uh and uh as a matter of fact what we're seeing is that a number of our customers are uh actually the ones who when are really sold on the idea of buying a camera, installing it and trying to figure it out, or home security system as such. So they like the proposition, which is, okay, you actually subscribe.

As I like to say, you hit the subscribe now button and then everything else is our problem. And that's exactly how we approach it. We, of course, have a lot of room of improvement. We're looking at how we can make our service faster, our responses better, being able to support all the use cases. But that's what we are excited about. And we're excited about that we can have a very simple offer, which is you subscribe now and then everything is on Angie. And that's our philosophy. And I believe that's

the only way, honestly, for most of the market. Because what do you see in the U.S.? There is 75% of households not using anything. That's our market. We actually, as a matter of fact, we don't see ourselves fighting, you know, for those households where all our competition is. We want to address those households who are essentially neglecting existing solutions because they just didn't like the proposition.

And in the app, they can get all their stuff, they can invite users. So this is really good too if you've got people coming to your house, like maybe dog walkers. A lot of people are using dog walker services now. And so they have to come in the house to um to take in walk your dog uh maybe you have a maid i've used maids from time to time um or made or somebody coming by to take care of the house maybe pick up kids or drop off kids uh you can literally know when everyone's coming and going and who's in your house whether they're a stranger whether they are who they are is there any facial recognition yet on the app so we're not using facial recognition currently the main reason is

because we don't consider it uh actually uh reliable enough for the for the home environment we're playing with that so we might be introducing that as well as we playing with a couple of speech recognition scenarios. So we might be coming with some of those in order to, again, improve the quality of recognizing who is exactly the person which is at house, but at the same time with this privacy protection. So it's important that you know that for the reasons which you exactly perfectly defined because we see scenarios where there are actually other people

who need to have access essentially to your home but you don't, let's put it this way, you don't trust them the same as your family members. So you want to essentially make sure that you have some level of understanding what they what they're doing but that's why you know we're trying to make sure that we uh properly address uh privacy issues it works reliably and so so forth and i think one of the big unique things other than the fact that it has motion traction it moves around to see who's moving uh the unique privacy mode i mean privacy is just becoming such a buzzword when it comes to everything that's going on. I mean, you're hearing about so many different things,

listening to you, watching you, people who can access your cameras. It's crazy what's going on in the world. And I like the unique privacy mode. I suppose if I was sitting around and suddenly it turned and started watching me, I'd kind of be like, okay, so what's going on with the camera? Exactly. I personally believe that the privacy kind of in general is becoming, let me put it this way. People are starting to be aware that there is a lot of data and a lot of information, various services and various providers are gathering. And there is, by the way, there's nothing bad about that. The problem is people are not necessarily aware of it

and they're even less aware of what's happening with that. And sometimes happening without their content or the content is like 50 pages, so you don't know actually. So I believe that there is definitely a space for, you know, improving the services, utilizing your data. But it's something where it's cooperation with the user, making sure the user knows what's going on, protecting the user data. And to be honest, me as a representative of Engie, I want to protect our company as well. We don't want to have a data which actually we don't really need because that's the best protection from anyone else,

potentially taking advantage of the data. That's, in a way, how to make sure that not only we misuse the data, but no one else can. And that's what we believe is extremely critical for the future of any smart services and smart appliances for the homes. Really having the privacy in the mind as actually almost number first. And then, you know, the service and other propositions. So privacy keeps you in control.

When privacy mode is active on the unit, Angie will voice announce outside requests for live view. So if you're the wife and you got the pool boy over in the mailman, you don't want your husband dialing in to see what's going on, then Angie will let you know if anyone wants to come and watch. That's how it works, basically. You know, that's quite interesting because we had a lot of debate in the past how to deal with kind of relationship issues at the household.

But it's not our job. Our job is to make sure that people who are at a household can actually express their will. And we believe this is the right way. So that means it's up to you

to either allow someone to connect with the device or not. Of course, we have also the ability to, so for example, if you have kids, the so-called member mode, where for certain family members, you might not have this privacy level for the reason to take care of them. So there are scenarios where you want to be able to actually have the access to the monitoring as a parent, for example. But yes, the privacy is not only an issue between companies and users, but also between users themselves. Yeah, I mean, there's sometimes I walk around in my underwear when I make a

breakfast and if I had kids or something, I wouldn't want them dialing in and seeing dad walking around in his underwear making breakfast and stuff. I'm just not a morning person. But I don't have kids, so I don't have that problem. But, you know, I can see different formats of where you might want to. Well, you want privacy. Personal privacy is personal privacy. You might have some teenagers that are, you know, I teenagers are so there's that so this thing's pretty cool and and it's pretty simple and easy to set up you just hold the QR code off the mobile

phone which we've used we've reviewed products like that before it takes sequences it and it should be good to go. One thing that was interesting, great for keeping an eye on elders, great unique privacy mode. There's limited users you have on it. So I guess if you have a family, a polygamist, and a bunch of people coming over, you can, you know, have unlimited users basically. Correct.

There's no live access view and constant feature updates. You can essentially add and remove the users as you need. So if you have a bunch of friends who regularly come in to visit you, you can add them in. There is no cost. There is essentially even no hassle. So that's important. As I said, we want that plan to be simple. So it means everything is included.

You don't have to think, do I need this? Do I need that? How is this priced? How is that priced? I personally believe that especially, of course, if you have a large house, then you might need to design your security system around the house. But our focus are single family

houses, apartments, condos, where we believe energy is what you need. You don't have to think about, do I need two motion sensors, three motion sensors, two cameras, five cameras? You don't have to. But there's one NG and that's all. And we will take care of you. And this simplicity is extremely important. And we're finding it for a number of users as essentially the key element.

If it's not simple, they just won't go for it because they don't need a hassle. Yeah, you've got smart home integration as well. It'll work with Alexa and Philips Hue integration. So you can arm the Angie with the voice command from alexa or uh with philips hue you can deter intruders with a flashing red lights and i'm not quite sure how to help with that they're triggering uh and you guys are working on uh sonos and google assistant integrations as well correct so essentially uh the way how we're looking at the integrations is, let me start somewhere else. I personally don't believe in the proposition of a smart home as a

reason why you would be buying something. As I like to say, consumers, based upon our understanding, don't want to buy smart home products, but something smart for their homes. And there is quite a difference, which means if you label it smart home, that doesn't necessarily mean it is working for you. So we are trying to make sure that ng blends into your life. So if you're using Alexa, perfect, you can use it. It integrates with ng easily. If you're using Google Assistant, the same. If you don't have it, no problem. If you have Philips U, perfect, you can use it. And so on and so forth. We'll be adding

additional integrations. Essentially, integrations is one of the important areas of the development efforts in our case for the same reasons. If you're using certain services or certain devices, we want you to continue to use them.

And making partially almost you would say ng invisible this is pretty interesting too not only do you guys have a built-in battery but you guys have advanced sound recognition so it can recognize sounds like shattering glass fire alarms going off which is really cool that'll notify you you guys even have a pet feature that doesn't trigger false alarms if you're if your pet goes by and then this is even more interesting a voice password so if your phone is dead or you don't have with it you you can arm or disarm Angie using your voice that's pretty cool yep so right now what we using is four digit code because code because especially people in the US

are used to using it for the bank services in the past. We're looking to potentially replace it by actual recognition of your voice. So we did a couple of testing there. Also, because right now for this four-digit code, we're using actually cloud for processing. And we are working on bringing all of it to embedded so that we don't need

cloud, we can decrease latency, increase reliability, and so on and so forth. So it's meant for when your phone doesn't work or when some of the members of the household, like kids, do not have a phone. And we're looking how we can enhance these

functionalities going forward in order to be, again, able to cover more use cases, which might happen, which are either direct hazard or might be just, you know, something potentially annoying and you might want to know about it. Well, that's definitely smart because I've had times where my phone goes dead. I'm out doing an event or a show here las vegas and i come back and my phone's dead and uh i'm sure i'd activate the alarm when i walk in yeah uh so that's really brilliant to have there are some times where uh i've i've walked out to the car put my phone in the car and then i come back in for something and i realized that i need to arm the whole system. So there's times where that goes on as well.

That's probably important not to trigger your alarm and have some control over. Anything more we need to know about Angie? So I think what is important is we're really looking at having our users to drive our roadmap partially. What it means is we're looking into understanding what is important for them, how we can essentially make their life easier and safer and for their families. And that's what we see as a mission of NG. And we built the initial architecture.

We are at the beginning of our journey as a company. And we're very happy about having the customers which we do have. We're happy about adding new customers. But we are extremely excited about the opportunities which we have as a company to bring new functionalities and including taking care of the situations which we might not be even thinking about. So we're looking forward to work with our customers

but also with the other stakeholders in order to get that feedback and be able to deploy new functionalities and enhance what Angie does right now and make it smarter. Yeah, this is awesome. So people go check it out. Go to meetangie.com.

That's A-N-G-E-E, meetangie.com. You can take an order of one of these for about the price of what you would pay after you buy a security cam at full price. And then you'd have to pay a monthly cloud to that security cam company. You can just basically pay a monthly fee to have all of it. And you don't have to expend the really high cost of buying a unit and then paying the monthly fee. You can get everything all included just by paying a monthly fee i also like the feature where if maybe it breaks down or uh it needs improvements of course you guys are constantly improving it i really love that feature because we've had stuff

that has been sent to us i don't usually buy my own security cameras but uh with the security cameras we'll get like a really good one i'll be like I really like this security camera and I'll be missing something like smart home integration or like it doesn't have You know Google, but it's got Alexa or you know the vice versa And then and then like six months later or three months later that company will come out with another version of the product that has Full integration, but you can't get that because you have the old product and you're just like oh man this sucks so i think it's really great that people have that upgradable feature with you guys they're going to pay a relatively low monthly fee uh but and they also don't have the high cost of of outputting i remember when i first was looking at getting security cameras for my house i'm like this costs a lot of money just to get a bunch of these to cover the whole house and all the areas of the two-story home. And so I like the low entry cost

that makes it so people can get their cameras, get them going, and they just have to pay the monthly fee they'd otherwise pay for an online cloud service. Thanks for that. And I would like to highlight one more thing. You can cancel anytime. So if you don't like it, if it doesn't do for you what you need, or if you found something better, you can cancel anytime. There is no string attached. And that's very unique as well. And we believe that the NG service is great and will be becoming better and better. And that's why we actually can afford to have such an excellent offer that's pretty cool that's pretty cool alright guys so check it out go to meet Angie calm Tom Chris boss saying check

out their different cameras there will the camera that they have on there and some of the different features it has I think it's pretty interesting watch from the videos watching the tracking on the cameras on their videos is really interesting how it tracks and knows what's going on and pays attention the the uh the motion stick uh sensors or where the sensors go in the windows and doors so they know when they're being opened and stuff uh that you guys have yes that's correct yeah those are great too so watch the videos check them out be sure to give them a like subscribe to us on YouTube so you know all the things that

we have going on thanks for tuning in everyone and we'll see you next time