The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Gryphon CEO John WU At CES 2020 With New Mesh WiFi Routers

Episode Date: January 5, 2020

Gryphon CEO John WU At CES 2020 With New Mesh WiFi Routers Gryphonconnect.com

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, thanks for tuning in, guys. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. As always, go to our YouTube channel, forward slash Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button so you can get all the different latest stuff. We're going to go to thecvpn.com. We have eight podcasts there. Holy crap, look at all those podcasts. You want to go there and subscribe. One of the different services you can get that on.

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And like I've been telling you this last week, we're gearing up for ces show las vegas 2020 oh my god i've been going for like five billion years it's getting old um and uh uh we're gonna be going there we're gonna be interviewing a lot of cool people we're gonna be seeing a lot of cool stuff and we're gonna be doing interviews like we are today of some of the participants of ces and uh so you're gonna be want to be watching. You just want to fixate your eyes, no switching. Be sure to check out the, I think two weeks ago, we interviewed Gary Shapiro, my good friend,

the CEO of CTA that runs CES show. He's always fun to have on. Every year we put him on and poke at him. So be sure to check out that show as well. But today I have an interesting guest on, and his name is John Wu. How are you doing, John? Good. How are you? Good, good. And John is the CEO of GriffinConnect.com, The Griffin.

It's a mesh Wi-Fi security router and parental control system. He's going to tell us about some of the really cool stuff they're launching at CES. So welcome to the show, John. What got you into this business? Yeah, thanks. Well, actually, what got me down this path is really a couple years ago, my daughter was on the internet and she was searching for princesses. And I was actually in the room. I searched for that a lot too, john yeah unfortunately well for her you know when she did the search a lot of inappropriate stuff came up and you know as a dad i'm sure this happens to a lot of parents as a dad that was that was an eye-opener and yeah this you know i i've been in the wireless and tech industry for a while uh decided that i really needed to do something

about this especially you know these days there's so many different internet connected devices that we're introducing into our homes and I think a lot of parents are just overwhelmed like myself you know I wouldn't know how to do there aren't that many there wasn't that many good solutions out there at the time and we want to do something that just makes it easy and effective for uh for parents like myself to be able to yeah i'm really i'm really surprised this didn't come out sooner like for a long time i'm just like you know we would just get wi-fi's you know five ten years ago and i'd be like you know these just let in everything like what do you do if you have kids and i remember my brother

uh you know he had to keep his kids off everything i think when they turn like 13 or 14 he's like you know i'm a little instagram but we're gonna monitor that stuff and you should there's a lot of scary i was reading the article about uh uh you know all the things that they have and and uh how uh like there was a story about one of these companies that bust pedos kind of like uh who's that like Chris Hansen used to do. And they put up a fake profile online, and within seconds, they're swamped with pedos hitting on whoever the young person is they put up. And it's just scary.

Plus, when you search, I mean, like I said, I search for princess all the time. Most times, I'm just looking for something to go with my tiara I wear when I'm not on the show. So there's that. There's nothing beyond that. It it's just a tiara and i'm proud of it because i'm a pretty princess anyway people on the show are going what anyway guys uh so uh tell us about the product what does it do and how does it do it so yeah it's a griffin is really it's a cloud managed security and parental control mesh Wi-Fi system.

And because your internet, basically all the traffic goes in and out of your house through your Wi-Fi router. This is an all-in-one security Wi-Fi router that allows you to easily manage the traffic that's coming in. So we have an app that you can download onto your phone. And once you pair it with the Griffin router, it allows you to basically set up profiles for your kids. And you can block out things like pornography or social media sites. And it also

actually blocks out all the viruses as well. So all your connected devices inside the home is protected through this single system that basically keeps your family safe that's pretty awesome my little sister used to she she had this habit of clicking on like all of the free this click here for free that you know all that sort of stuff and i would come up to to check on her she's like chris my computer doesn't work very well and i do like a spy bot check on it i She's like, Chris, my computer doesn't work very well. And I do like a spy bot check on it. I would have like 3000 freaking. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's one of the other things that, you know, a lot of people, a lot of kids and even myself, right. I mean, you just have a bunch of different things that just comes through.

And sometimes you're, you're just accidentally click on something that could be a virus. So what Griffin does is it basically blocks it at the network level. So it won't even allow you to allow that traffic to come through. So does it tell you? Does it set you a warning that says you're in a bad area? Well, basically what it does is it blocks it, and then it sends you a notification on the Griffin app.

So you know how many sites are being blocked. So I can know the little johnny's up to some there in his room uh uh and the other thing i like about this this is why was this around when i was a kid you can suspend or you basically pause your internet at the house so if the kids aren't doing what they're supposed to like your chores and stuff you can be like yeah let's make their world end hit pause yeah it's actually surprising when you when you hit the suspend button you'll start to see all the kids come out from there oh yeah my parents used to have to beat me with a stick to punish me

and now you don't have to do anything the child you don't have to hit them or you know not feed them for a week or something at a time i've heard that's bad too cps told me that once and and and so now you just go hey the internet's gonna turn off and they're like no and then you just pull out your dad mode and just go bing and then they're like what okay we'll take out the garbage yeah we actually have a full um you know chris one of the things we added is basically a full scheduler so you can actually set up uh um you know chris one of the things we added is basically a full scheduler so you can actually set up uh bedtimes for each day of the week yeah days weekends so at night uh you know 10 o'clock you can shut off the whole internet i i used to game with my with my nephew and his dad and so the gaming like every night like eight or nine o'clock

whatever the bedtime was supposed to be there the whole negotiation would start that i guess every parent has to go through um and and so and so it'd be like hey son you gotta go to bed it's x o'clock and he's like oh come on dad like 10 more minutes and the dad's like okay 10 more minutes you know and that negotiation goes on for like three three hours and the whole time is just like every 10 minutes it's like and i used to tell my brother i'm like hey man why don't you get one of these nice wi-fi's that you can program to where it just it just ends at 8 p.m or you know 9 p.m whatever the thing is there's no argument and if anything you can just go well it's not me it's that wi-fi sis

there's no negotiation yeah we had customers that have told us that actually having the griffin in their home actually stopped a lot of uh complete i mean they had arguments almost every day when i shut off the internet you know when i get off the internet now that it's on a set schedule that there's you know it's it's kind of uh brought some peace to their households yeah yeah i remember i used to game with uh we used to have you know big raids and stuff and there would always be this kid that was on our clan who was like 12 or something like that and it was always be this kid that was on our clan who was like 12 or something like that. And it was always funny. Cause he, he'd get on,

he'd be like, um, yeah, I think I only have about 10 minutes and then it shuts me off and we'd be playing with them. And like, all of a sudden he'd be talking and they'd go blink. And then we're like, Oh, the scheduler kicked in. So this is good. This is good. You can monitor the managed devices. Do you see IP addresses

or do you see names of websites or both? Or what do you see when you're monitoring what's going on here on your app? Well, it's based on domain. So the Griffin actually filters everything out based on domain.

And also we make it really simple so you don't have to set up individual websites you can set up a grade level for your child so it's a you know kindergarten or high school level and it filters out a certain type of content based on those settings or for the adult you can just leave it unfiltered so so the idea is that we give you flexibility and how you want to manage your household. So I can make a separate lane for mommy and daddy because we do our chores. Exactly.

The chores are feeding the kids. But yeah, dude, I would be like a military parent if I had one of these because I'd just be like, okay, man, the chore is being done. Nope, push the button. Nuclear, nuclear, and then, yeah. And then I would lie to him, probably tell him that if I do suspend the internet, it's like a bank fall

that can't be turned on for another eight hours. That's why I don't have kids. I just gave you some ideas didn't i i actually want to mention that we actually added uh uh basically a reward time so right now you limit internet access to a certain amount of hours per day yeah one of the features too so you allow them to just use it and you can say okay well you can use it anytime but you only have three hours of internet usage per day and once it's up then that's up you know so yeah allows them to self-regulate you know learn how to kind of control their internet usage by themselves and the other great thing that we added is um you can uh there's a reward time so

like you said if they do their chores you can give them an extra bonus or you can there's a reward time so like you said if they do their chores you can give them an extra bonus or you can deduct half an hour if they're boy hey you know my dad used to do this thing where when we you know we're getting out of hand he started grabbing his belt and he'd shake it like don't make me take this off and we'd be like oh okay he's going for that now you can grab that so you just grab the phone you just go go, see the button right here? Oh, there goes a half an hour. Want a half an hour more?

Are you going to do your, oh, oh. So, yeah, it's interesting how their whole world ends, too, when they don't have internet. It's very effective, yeah. The world just ends. Like, you know. So you guys have got a lot of good stuff going on. You're on tom's guide

they uh gave you best security focus mesh router pc uh mag.com giving you a best wi-fi mesh network systems for 2019 top 10 list uh best of cs 2019 best family router for family safety and privacy from Tech Eris. Fatherly, gave you the best parental control, hardware around next to a belt. No, I'm just kidding. Amazon, how's my dad? Amazon, 600 plus positive views on Amazon.com and my dad's belt, zero.

So he gives you some really good stuff with this. Internet security system, powerful mesh wi-fi so it's going to do that uh mu mimo stuff yep yeah i always love that mu mimo it moves around stuff with you it meshes around and stuff i don't know why uh i like saying mu mimo am i saying it even right i think so i think it's called uh mu mimo actually mu mimo no man it's it's but i like mu mimo i like mu mimo so these parent you got parent controls that are in their internet security uh so that's good you're you don't have to worry about little johnny clicking on you know i don't know anonymous.com and unleashing a whole attack of a do not denial of service,

a DOS attack. That's always good. So you can review your kid's parent history. You can set network bedtimes, home times, you can suspend the internet, enforce safe search in YouTube. YouTube is really important too.

I mean, there's a lot of stuff on youtube that people get out of control with um and there's a lot of crazy stuff that you don't want to have your kids seeing either uh it gives you intelligent intrusion intrusion detection and malware filtering uh what is the content filtering with crowd ranking what is that um so what we do is basically we take some of the feedback from from parents so when you approve or deny deny a website we actually get that input and and if we get enough approvals or if we get enough

denials we actually automatically add it to your blacklist so it's a dynamically changing list and we think that actually adds a lot more. It makes the list a lot better. Nothing is 100%, but if we get everybody involved and people are actually helping to create a better list, we think we have a better solution. And this is really important. A lot of people don't realize this. I mean, my sister used to click on so many of those free ads. She had like 50 toolbars.

Like the whole screen would be gone that she could have access to. She just had all these toolbars that were tracking her and stuff. And I'd be like, holy shit, what have you done, honey? These are way too many. And then we recently heard about how Microsoft shut shut down a bunch of the north korea uh hacker websites i think they seized about 50 of them and one of the things they do is they you know they go uh attack people's internet modern all that good stuff so it's really important to have a lot of secure systems one thing i'm noticing is on the app it you kind of have an

age group setting system where you can go toddler elementary high school um middle school 18 plus and then that wild and woolly chris unrestricted area i guess unfiltered yep so that's good so you can put kind of your age group of your child and then you guys kind of you guys kind of uh gear that towards that particular age group. So the different age group basically goes from basically a whitelist with a toddler. So you can manually approve certain websites that they can get access to. Yeah. Basically unrestricted where everything's open.

And so what we want to do is basically make it easy for parents. They just select the age group that's appropriate for their kids, and everything is done automatically inside the Griffin router. And you guys have an ad blocker built into this as well? We do, yeah. I mean, one of the things about, you know, a lot of viruses are now spread through ads, and it also takes up additional bandwidth.

So we added an ad blocker in there as well. So when you go to a website, all the ads are – you don't see the ads, basically. That's pretty good. Plus, I don't want the kids seeing what mommy and daddy are searching for. It's got 1.2 million block sites stored locally on Griffin and an aggregated website reputation ratings from multiple sources, including other parents. So I think that's good.

You got the crowd sourcing that gives you an idea of what's going on over there. And you guys started this how many years ago? We started the company three years ago and the product was first introduced about a year ago. And it's a risk-free 30 day or I'm sorry, 90 days money back guarantee. So that's good.

You put your money where your mouth is. So tell us what you guys are going to be doing at CES. So at CES, we're going to be launching its little cousin. So right now, I don't know if you can see the Gryphon. This is the original Gryphon that we launched. It's the White Obelisk Tower. It's cool looking. It's very pretty.

This is going to be the new one. Oh, wow. It's the white obelisk tower. A little bit. It's cool looking. It's very pretty. This is going to be the new one. Oh, wow. It's quite a bit smaller. Just a little bit less powerful in terms of the Wi-Fi, but still pretty good. It goes up to 1.2 gig in terms of throughput.

And the coverage for this guy, it's 1,800 square feet. Wow. And I like it because it's uh it's pretty nondescript or indescript nondescript whichever that is um it matches you know yeah i mean the thing i like about your other uh your first set of wi-fi things it looks like a nice sort of candle set that sit on each end of the you know the it looks nice you know yeah you can just put it it doesn't have to be a wi-fi router yeah it just it's it's a it's a sculpture it also the great thing about this is

the the the software functionality is it's all the same so it's the same app that you download all the same great features uh you can actually uh this one actually will pair with the original one. Oh, wow. So if you need a little bit more coverage, this one can give you some more coverage. Or you can just use it by itself. Wow. And we're going to be selling these in sets of one or three pack. So you can link them together into a mesh network.

Now, how many plugs do you have on the back? For this guy, there's two. Okay. So two. And then... This one has four so all right so you can get the big one or you can get the mini one use the mini one less like an extender to get to your home yeah i always i always uh it's always fun to play with your home and play with these wi-fi we of course you do that all the time the chris voss show we test out wi-fi routers and we're

always walking around the house the meter is going there it is and then you're like oh yeah we need to boost this area up here um you know what i do i just i just they should make it a way so that a parent can mess with their kids and they can like downgrade the speed of their wi-fi when they're annoying you like you don't fully cut them off you just you just make it like china wi-fi slow china internet slow you know that really bad hotel motel six slow and you know just to torture them and then you're and they're like uh you know what's going on i can't do that you're just like maybe you should be a better child anyway so john i understand you guys also have a new feature called the griffin homebound tell us about that yeah so uh griffin homebound well one of the things one of the problems is once the kids leave the house how do you how do

you manage their devices and that's where homebound comes in so what it is is it's a small app that you install on their mobile devices. And what that does is really, it basically routes the traffic back to the Griffin network before going out to the internet. So from your management perspective, it seems like they're still at home. So the traffic goes homebound before it goes out to the internet. That's pretty smart because I think my nephew figured out, I sent him a parental control Wi-Fi thing, and I think he figured out that he could leave the house to see what he really wanted to see. You know, he uses phones.

We have kids that, yeah, I mean, they figured out they can turn off the Wi-Fi. So now they can't do that. They turn off the Wi-Fi. They're still at home. They're still at home. There you go. I like that. does it have like a parental code on it so i can make sure the kid doesn't turn the app off or you know delete the app for the day we lock it on the uh

on the phone so there you go and we send you a message if they uninstall it or if they turn it off we'll send you a message saying then they're in trouble now well that's pretty cool you can keep monitoring where they're going um you know monitoring where they're on instagram who they're talking to kind of and what what they're doing i think it's really important i mean the the kids you know when you're a kid you don't really have you don't understand the evils and the stuff of the world so um and then definitely when they're wandering around god knows what they can pick up from some of these different things. There's a lot of people that hack you at Starbucks these days and different things.

So I think that's great. It just phones home and goes right through the system then. Yep, that's right, yeah. All right, sounds good. So you guys are going to be there. You guys are going to be having meetings. What's the best way for people to reach out to you if they're at CES and they want to meet up with you guys at the show,

check out the product, all that good stuff? Yeah, if they want to reach out to us, just email me at john at griffinconnect.com, G-R-Y-P-H-O-N, connect.com. Mm-hmm. Griffin Connect, G-R-Y-P-H-O-N-C-O-N-N-E-C-T.com. There'll be one around. Are you guys going to stay in a certain area?

Are you guys going to be in the big LVbcc are you going to be in the sands or yeah for the first couple days and at the sunday and uh and monday we're going to be in the mandalay bay area oh yeah most of the time we're going to be in the uh at the venetian uh sands area yeah venetian yeah i'm so excited for all the walking i think i'm just gonna get me one of those uh uh things you drive around you know pretend like i'm handicapped i'm mentally handicapped so i think i qualify for it uh so this will be fun you guys will be there there's all sorts of people you guys are going to meeting with it'll be really nice and then um so pretty much they need to get in contact with you on the email and uh let you guys know when a good time is to meet up and talk

about utilizing your stuff too and if you guys get a chance send us some so that we can review it on the chris voss show because we'd love to do that as well in fact i think my wi-fi is going out for some reason my wi-fi and i we have good wi-fi but it's been going for a couple years um but it's starting to wind down i think because about every other day i'm having to reset it does that sound bad we'll be happy to send you a couple of years yeah there you go there you go and uh so be sure to check it out guys go to uh griffinconnect.com that's g-r-y-f-F-O-N. Did I say that right? Yeah. G-R-Y-P-H-O-N connect.com. And tell them Chris Voss sent you. Be sure to ping them so that you can take and meet up with these guys at the big CES show 2020.

This thing is going to be pretty freaking awesome. And watch for future reviews on the Chris Voss show. Anything else we need to know, John? No, I think we're good. Yeah. We're looking forward to the CES and hopefully to meet up with some of the folks that's listening to the show. That's it, man.

And thanks for making a product that can really help parents out because Jesus, I mean, the web does not get any nicer, prettier, less dangerous. It just seems to be keep getting worse. So, yeah, I mean, look at the CES. We have so many different connected devices now out there uh you know that ces is just an indication of all the connectivity that's coming our way oh yeah it's like even i when the wi-fi goes down at my house you know for whatever an update i'm just like my friends at silicon valley got it the worst though with that roaming uh uh that roaming power outages they were giving for fires oh my gosh i'm like i'm like i can go without lights but

if you take my wi-fi out too oh man what's gonna end anyway guys uh thanks for tuning in we certainly appreciate you guys be sure to watch for all of our coverage we have a billion interviews next week uh i think starting uh sunday night uh billion interviews to bring you from cs we're going to bring you some of the coolest and most exciting tech out there in the cs world and of course uh griffinconnect.com which is here hey guys thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next time all right thank you