The Pomp Podcast - 312: Mark Jeffrey On The Importance Of Timing

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

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

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Mark Jeffrey is the co-founder and CEO of Guardian Circle, a service tackling emergency response through a unique community approach. He's also a serial entrepreneur with five exits, a published author, and worked closely with some of the biggest names in tech, including Jason Kalkanis and Travis Kalanick. In this conversation, we discuss how emergency response can improve, why disbanding the police probably won't happen, what it has been like to work with some of Silicon Valley's most successful entrepreneurs,

and the experience of building a company during COVID-19. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mark, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. The first is Blockset by BRD. You'll know BRD as one of the first blockchain wallets in the App Store back in 2014. They've now built Blockset, which is essentially the Amazon AWS for the blockchain industry. It's a hosted blockchain infrastructure product. Blockset enables enterprises and developers around the globe to deliver high-quality blockchain-based applications in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost. Using the services provided by Blockset, businesses can build professional custody solutions, accurate and near real-time

portfolio management solutions, auditing platforms, commercial block explorers, and much, much more. Go check them out at Blockset.com. The next is Crypto.com. It's an all-in-one platform that allows you to buy, sell, store, earn, loan, and invest crypto all from one place. You can join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. That's right, they got a million people to download the Crypto.com app. You can download it today and earn 50 US dollars using my code POMP2020 or click on the link in the description. Crypto.com, not only do they have a cool URL, but it's also the place where mass adoption

is happening. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com, again, pompletter.com, or go in the description and you can click the link there. All right, let's get into this episode with Mark.

I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. Super excited to have Mark here. Thanks so much for doing this, man. Really glad to be here. Thanks for asking me on. Yeah, for sure. Let's start with just

your background. Where'd you grow up and what'd you do before you got into technology? Yeah. So, well, I grew up in New Hampshire, so kind of in the woods. My dad was a software engineer, so we had TRS-80s and Apple IIs and things like that in the house. So that was super cool um so became a software engineer when i got out of school uh worked in the defense business for a little while and decided that was not for me didn't like working in a lead room uh you know not in the entrepreneurial world so uh then i went to delphi internet for a little bit um that was kind of a cool thing that got me out to la um and i had an office right next door to sean connery and i showed him the internet for the very first time which is a pretty was a pretty funny story

um and then uh and i started my first company a thing called the palace which was this avatar virtual chat in like 96 so so very early and i was funded by softbank uh time order and intel um and it was pretty big it had about 10 million users at its peak which for those days was just enormous right so um so yeah so that ended up there was no business model though right we nobody knew how to make money off of these things we now know the answer would have been nfts right inside of a virtual world but we didn't have that back then and we didn't even have payment rails like there was no paypal the credit card process we just had no way to do that stuff so um so great phenomenon but not really a business um but did sell it so that was cool um and then

did my second company which was a thing called super sig which was putting all kinds of functionality into email signatures um and that you know we raised like two and a half million for like Ron Conway and some of those folks up in Silicon Valley. I'm in LA, so up north. And that was my crash company. So unfortunately that one didn't work out. And then a friend of mine came to me and said, well, I have a company that's sort of on the ropes. You're completely on the ropes. Why don't you come work for me for a little bit? And so I said, yes. And that friend was Travis Kalnick, and later CEO and founder of Uber. He was working on his second company at the time, a thing called Red Swoosh. So I did that with him for about a year, year and a half,

something like that. It was like maybe four to six of us in a little kind of cramped office in Westwood for about a year and a half. So he ended up selling that company, but like eight years later, right? And it really did not look like it was going to go anywhere for a very long time. So the story, the story that I've heard about Red Swoosh is he basically, everyone had left, moved on and do other things. And he just was persistent as hell. And then out of nowhere, a bunch of investors started getting checks. And they were like, what the hell is this from? And he was like, Oh, yeah, I sold the company. Yeah, it was kind of like that. And, you know, he, I ran into him, I talked to him again, and sometime around 2014, 2015. And I was very

interested in what was up with uber obviously but but i was really more interested i was like how the hell did you sell that company right and and it really was just a story of grit i mean that's absolutely true and that's that is travis so i give him that um the real story that i've heard is that um akamai acquired a another company that was in sort of an adjacent space and they got a patent portfolio with that company red swoosh had a patent that threatened that patent portfolio so out of abundance of caution they acquired red swoosh as well not for its business because there were no engineers there were no engineers there was no product there were no customers that's why i was like this is just this is crazy and so you know it was he had

something to negotiate with and it was the patent so it wasn't just sort of nothing um but he was able to negotiate a much larger exit than probably another mere mortal would have been able to do right because that is travis so that's awesome and then what did you do after uh red swoosh Yeah. So after Red Swoosh, I started another, I was stupid enough to start another company. And this one was a business social network. So yes, we were a competitor to LinkedIn. We started in 2002. We didn't know about LinkedIn yet because they hadn't, they hadn't publicly unveiled themselves. They were about six months ahead of us. So not terribly far. We sold, we ended up, we couldn't raise money for it. So we ended up getting to about a million users when LinkedIn

had two million. So, you know, we were within shooting distance. And then IAC, Barry Diller Interactive Corp, they basically acquired us through a long, long story. But they ended up acquiring us in 2004. And then, you know, we didn't know how we made money. It was another one of these things. It was a great phenomenon. But nobody knew how to make money off social networks in those days. And it could have been a lot of things, right? Now we know what the answer is. But looking forward from these moments, those answers aren't clear. It could be you charge people to post, right? Or it could be you just, it's free, but you give us your email address, we're allowed to email market to you. There were a lot of people doing things like that back then.

So Diller came to us and said, great, I've acquired you. I love what you're doing. It's awesome. But all of my companies are either number one or number two in their category. So you have to pick a category of revenue and become number one or number two in that category within a year. So I said, all right. So I kind of went away for about a month to try to figure this out. And I ended up working with, I hired Charlene Lee, who is now pretty well known as an analyst. So I worked with Charlene a lot on sort of these ideas. And I came back and I said, look, it's jobs. All this is, it's monster just inside of a social network. And you use your social graph as a way to find better candidates or better jobs that you have connections to. Again,

this was not obvious sort of it is looking back it wasn't from that moment looking forward so we went presented it to Diller and this is before LinkedIn decided to do the exact same thing um so we presented Diller Diller says um you know this is you know I like he said basically look it's he agreed that it was monster.com but monster spent a hundred million dollars a year on advertising so he was like I would have to spend a hundred million a year on advertising And we were like, no, look at the growth. We had the growth curve. We did have, you know, the story, you know, curve going up and to the right. And we said things like geometric growth. We didn't have the word viral growth yet. That wasn't in the lexicon. And it wasn't really sort of commonly understood. so we're describing viral growth through him but we don't have the words yet and he just thinks we're full of shit he thinks this is just some shit we've cooked up there's no and to his credit

though there's nothing in his experience that maps to a phenomenon like this right he comes from a world where you spend money on advertising and then people come right and so he wasn't wrong he just didn't have anything to sort of relate to it so he he basically said i don't believe this he said well come up with something else and i said there is nothing else this is the right answer and then there's all the wrong answers and so basically he was like well I'll buy you guys all your contracts then and that was that was kind of that so I left um and then I wasn't really sure what I was going to do oh I wrote I started writing novels I did that and I podcast some of the novels I was one of the first people to podcast a audiobook I was one of three so we all all of us

ended up getting like millions of downloads because we were the only free audiobook novels in the world at the time and then iTunes added podcasting support so all of a sudden we were the only game in town right so um and that's a whole nother so yeah that was that was this book this book here which ended up getting published by harper collins so that was a whole nother little adventure i went on um and then i so i was thinking about doing another tech company and i didn't really have a good idea i was piddling around with a couple things and i got a call from jason calcanis and he basically said hey i got a you know i got a term sheet from sequoia to do this new wave uh search engine called mahalo and i'm looking for a cto you know what are you doing

and uh you know it seemed like a good idea at the time so i signed up and and really it was a good idea at the time we were basically saying humans were curating search results at the time google's search results looked very sort of robot-y and and and there wasn't really much meat there so you know how today there's like a little side card that comes down that shows you kind of a summary of whatever it was you were just searching for, that wasn't there yet. Mahalo was doing that, except we were trying to human curate it on a much larger scale. So we were right.

The searches could be vastly improved with some human intervention. But the problem was is that in order to compete, we would have had to compete successfully with Google. To do that, we would have had to have a corpus of data that was competitive with Google. and it took so long to make search results by hand that after a year we had like five percent of the internet done right or five percent of all search results and so so basically the end result was 95 of the time mahalo sucked five percent of the time it was 600 better right but that just

didn't really work in the end so so we did you know we worked on that for about four i worked on that for about four years elon musk was an investor so got to meet him got to hang out with him and you know sequoia was an investor so there's some there's some great people uh hanging around in the mahalo offices it was kind of like warhol's loft for a little while so a lot of a lot of really interesting and great uh people and ideas kind of flowed through that office in at least in la it was kind of the center of action for about four years um and then i was i you know long story short is then jason and i started talking and kevin pollock started hanging around a lot, the comedian and Kevin. Yeah, he's great. I love Kevin. And, uh, and so, you know, Jason knew

from my, uh, podcasting days that I was very into podcasting and knew that, that world. And so he said, look, let's do a podcasting company. We'll call it this weekend. And, uh, you can be CEO and we'll all be three-way partners on it. So we, we started that and I did that for about a year and a half. Um, and, and long story short is we just couldn't make it profitable. It was just, there, There was too much diversity in the shows. They were all over the map. So that meant we had to sell ads against, we had 30 shows and we really had 30 different markets.

So we could gain those sales efficiencies. They all had very different demographics. And some of the shows were too broad, like This Week in Music, for example. One week it was speed metal. The next week it's classic rock. Next week it's rap. Those are completely different audiences.

So it could never sort of find its groove. The tech shows did very well. So Jason's show this week in startups, uh, that did awesome. We had, there was one I hosted called this week in cloud computing. Uh, we had like at this week in iPad, we were sort of following a lot of the, of the, a lot of, uh, a lot of the model that Leo port had laid out. Right. So tech shows work. The other shows kind of didn't. So we were sort of left in this no man's land. So, um,

after about a year and a half, uh, Jason said, you know, I think I can make a run at it. So he took, he took a crack at it and he couldn't make it work either. Uh, but I left and then I, I, again, was sort of like, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. So I, uh, I consulted for a little bit. I just, uh, went to local VCs. I said, sort for hire, you know, what do you, what do you need? What do you need help with? So I did that for, it was like a run-in for about two years. Um, and then, uh, and then I had the idea for guardian circle, uh, which is the current thing that I'm doing right now. So, uh,

anything else in the past you want to talk about? Well, so here's my question is you have, uh, worked on many companies that people who pay attention to technology, especially over the last 20 years or so, will know a number of those companies, a number of those players that ran companies, founded companies. What's your biggest lesson learned through all of that, right? Whether it comes from the people, the companies, like what would you say is the biggest lesson you learned through that whole timeline? Yeah, there actually is a biggest lesson, oddly. And I learned it when I was at Mahalo and Mike Moritz, uh, who is, you know, fabled Sequoia partner founder, um, came to visit us one day and he, he had like a Q and a ask me anything session.

And I asked him the question. I said, look, you, you've, you have like 30 years. It was either 30 or 40 years of venture capital experience at the time. You've seen a lot of stuff. What, what's the difference between the companies that make it and become big things like Apple and Google and the companies that just die. And I really thought the answer was going to be something like, ah, well, it depends. There's a lot of things, a lot of factors. And he said, oh, that's easy. The companies that focus on one thing and one thing only and are the best in the world at one thing have a shot at being the Apple or the Google. I can't tell you that for sure they will, but they at least now have a lottery ticket. And a lot of times they do win. The companies that

definitely fail every time are the ones that can't pick a direction right they're like like oh we should oh there's money over an enterprise so let's let's forget our consumer thing go over here right they sort of get distracted by all these siren songs around them and those are the companies that die and and if you're you know pivoting like you know so so much you're doing pirouettes like you're definitely going to die and that's the pattern that he's seen so that's that's sort of a b i would this is not a direct lesson of mine but when i heard this it rang very true there's a guy named uh bill bill gross um who founded idea lab and he has 30 years worth of data from that where he analyzed so he did a study where they analyzed what is the difference

between the companies that make it and the companies that don't he did his own sort of you know qualitative quantitative study is it the team is it the amount of money is it the quality of the idea you know what's what where's the magic and he and the answer was very surprising and very clear. The answer was timing. Almost nothing else mattered. The biggest coefficient of a company's success is timing. And there was absolutely no question about this. So that was a pretty surprising, but very clear finding. Yeah. It's really interesting too, how when you talk to these folks who have been around for decades, right, and they've seen everything come through the door, they can boil it down to one thing, right? It's not just, oh, it is this complex

answer it's like no no like here is the thing from my experience that matters the most um and what that really tells you is it's like they've got the clarity of thought uh and they really do understand it right it's kind of the the adage of like if you don't really understand something unless you can explain it to a child like they're able to boil it down to here is the one thing that matters yeah no i know and i have to say i you know i'm guilty of you know look we're founders we fall in love with our products right this is a thing that i thought of i'm super happy about it and when i'm telling you about it i want to you know to me it's fucking lord of the rings right and i want to i want to take the time to craft the story but you don't give a shit you

have you have a million people coming to you you just want you just want me to get to the point right away and and and also you want the customer to get the point right away because the customer's gonna listen for like three seconds and you know maybe do it maybe not so yeah and i'm definitely guilty of, uh, of overly pros, you know, overly talking, uh, my, my products. So I have to watch out for that. I think everyone is. Um, so let's talk a little bit about guardian circle. I was telling you before we started that, like, I feel like this is your guy's Superbowl, right? So we, we've got a, uh, yes, literally we've got a pandemic that occurred, uh, that led to this economic shock. And now we've got social unrest in all 50 States and even internationally. Um,

And so maybe just give us a kind of overview of like, what is Guardian Circle? And then we can kind of talk about like why it's important given the timing right now. Yeah, so Guardian Circle is Friends and Family 911 or Community Emergency Response. So the idea is you download our app and you get your friends, family, neighbors to also download it. And then you connect as guardians in the system. Both of you have to opt in. It's like being friends on Facebook, right?

And one of you can not guard the other at any moment you want. When you're in trouble, you hit an alert button. So the idea is push a button, help comes. So signal goes out to all your guardians, their phones start exploding with this evil klaxon sound, which is good because it's an alert and this is an emergency. and then when they when they answer that alert everyone is brought into a shared map and chat room so in you know under 30 seconds everybody knows where everybody else is and everybody can talk to everybody else and this is the important part this is true whether those people knew each other beforehand or not they all know you but they don't know each other but getting your mom and your neighbor talking during your emergency difference between life and death possibly right So that's the basic idea.

And so what are the scenarios in which you guys kind of see this being most helpful? Is this like, hey, I'm drunk and I'm lost? Or is this a thing where I've gotten a really serious car accident? Like, help me understand kind of the situations where you guys foresee this being used. Yeah, so, well, I can tell you the situation that inspired it, which is a great example. My girlfriend had a stroke, and she's fine. I like to say that right away. um so she was but she works out of her garage uh she was all alone and she couldn't type and she

couldn't she was trying to dial the phone like her brain just wasn't working right so she could have pushed the button but that was kind of it and um i happened to come home at a weird time and i found her and brought her to the hospital and you know it all worked out but afterwards i started thinking about this i'm like my god like if i hadn't gotten there in time strokes are like time dependent if too much time passes you're paralyzed you're dead so um you know and i realized and when i when i reversed engineered the situation that there was all kinds of help all around her her neighbor was home uh several people have been driving by you know in short there were seven people within a thousand yards of her during the course of the emergency she was

drowning in hell but she had no way to get to it so and i was like well if somebody could just push the button i started thinking about guardian circle right somebody pushed the button then uh you know and somehow we could have an uber like screen where instead of you know instead of cars coming humans were alerted and could coordinate um then this would you know your network is closest and can help you fastest kind of thing right so that was that was the original it was really about health things initially um and then as we started showing it to people um we did show it there's a there's a there's a place called crypto blockchain plug here uh in la and it's sort of you know it's in the inner city so um a lot of folks there are scared to call the cops they're like we just look

we don't call unless you know somebody's arm is chopped off then okay but other than that no um they'd rather sort of handle things themselves so anyone that likes neighborhood watch kinds of things for whatever reason it's very appealing to them if you're in a remote area where the cops can't get to you it's also very right it's not really a practical option call the cops are gonna be here in an hour right that doesn't really help you so uh and then finally uh women's safety is a big concern that a lot of people think of with this um so we you know the x prize people when they found out what we were doing they were doing a women's safety x prize to protect women in india and uh you know they're the cops when the cops come the cops

usually assault the woman also. So, which is just insane, right? But so the answer is not more cops, right? So, you know, in India, they already know kind of what America is now knowing for the first time. They've known it for a long time that you can't rely totally on the police. So, you know, there's, you know, the women's safety, a lot of jobs that women are alone and possibly going to be isolated by a creepy guy, real estate agents, hotel housekeepers. It's a big problem for hotel housekeepers. In fact, there are now panic button laws that are coming out nationwide requiring hotels to buy products like what Guardian Circle has. And we are now selling into that market. We're just starting to sell into that market ourselves. So kind of a wide

range of things but you're right that um before all of this covid and other things um when we told people about guardian circle our pitch was kind of like 9-1-1's not good enough in a lot of ways they don't know you know they don't know your location when you call from a mobile device there are problems with 9-1-1 but but most people feel like 9-1-1 is safe right there if you're in america you're like yeah i'm good i just call 9-1-1 i'm fine and we had a hard time kind of getting a lot of people to, you know, people don't like to think about emergencies. So getting on their radar was just tough, right? Unless they already were someone that was at risk, elderly, a woman who's been assaulted, who, you know, was just afraid of it happening again. If it was on

your mind in some way, it was easier. But other than that, it was difficult. Over the last couple weeks, like three, four, you know, COVID obviously, but the last week in particular, you know, getting people to think about emergencies is no longer a marketing challenge, right? So that has suddenly shifted the dynamic and now people are seeking us out instead of us seeking them out. So, so yeah. And it's the thought process that, um, it's not like there's kind of two camps, right? One is like, Hey, uh, the COVID crisis has made me think much more about those around

me, my community, all that kind of stuff. But then two is a lot of the social unrest around police brutality and things like that. Like I'm fascinated with the idea of, um, creating multiple layers, uh, when it comes to community kind of protection, right? So you mentioned kind of neighborhood watches, the least lethal, easiest kind of loosely organized group all the way on up to, we have a military that protects the United States, right?

And there's a whole bunch of steps in there. What you guys have basically done is use technology to create the equivalent of really kind of a neighborhood watch that's technology enabled. And to me, the part that's really interesting is I don't need to know the other people, right? Like all we have to do is just be connected. If I know you and somebody else knows you and you're in trouble, then all of a sudden we're, you know, me and that person are on the same team, right? We're here to help you. And so putting us into some kind of chat is a pretty interesting dynamic. We almost create these like ephemeral social network graphs right around a person. Yeah, so the emergency world has a name for it. They call it dynamic group management or regrouping. But yes, that means exactly what you just said. And that is one of the key problems to solve an emergency response is getting all these people communicating immediately that can clear up the fog of war, if you will, around the emergency.

um and but they these people don't have each other's phone numbers they don't know each other's names they typically have no way to communicate or or anything that puts them into communication so we found it we found it's kind of a hard uh problem to explain to someone but during your emergency like oh shit i really wish x y and z to talk to one another right now um it's kind of the top problem so so yeah it's a big deal for sure and then i guess kind of how do you see um the acquisition of users going here, right? So like, obviously, before you had this whole thing where you had to convince people there's a problem in how to use the technology. Now they're convinced, like, what do you see kind of the change when it comes to the acquisition and marketing?

Yeah, so I want to touch on one thing you said earlier, because it just reminded me of something I didn't say. When we first started this thing, I thought of it as a CDN of health, right? So just like Akamai, they have peers at the edge of the network closest to where the bits need to be delivered. And 90% of the time, that's much more efficient. But that doesn't get rid of Amazon. That doesn't get rid of centralized servers. You still need those. The CDN is like a booster rocket, right? And so in the same way, Guardian Circle was not meant to replace the police it's a cdn of help you know your network is closest and can help you fastest like a cdn um but i never imagined that like people would be like yeah you know what get rid of the cops

totally we'll just do this um and so i'm like you guys are going further even than i would you know i'm still in cdn cdn of help world um but you know the the defund the police thing you know i i think i think it's a moment i don't think we'll end up truly with no police forces uh around the country I don't think. I don't think it's going to go there. But I do think we'll end up somewhere more in the middle. So we have changed our marketing. You've probably seen some of my tweets where I've just been tweeting things out like, if things get crazier, this could help. And I have to be careful about how I say it too, because I don't want... There's a lot of people who are trying to profit off of this. And yes, we're trying to market into it, but we don't

want to seem ghoulish but the fact is we've worked for four years on a product which is perfect for this moment and can save lives so you know yes we're going to market it i think it's okay i don't think there's any moral qualm about doing that but i do have to be respectful about how i do it right so you know you're thinking through you know the tweet very very carefully to make sure there's no way it could be misinterpreted um or or taken the wrong way uh you know that's changed i'm a bit more tiptoeing about things so yeah and and on the defund the police and demilitarize the police or actually disband the police which is the new one for me um to me it's kind of this weird situation where uh it would be hard to argue that the police has not become militarized so the idea

of like hey maybe they shouldn't be walking around with weapons of war okay like i think some people you know that's not that hard to get there when it comes to things like defund which in new york city they're talking about taking away one of the six billion dollars in their budget okay so you gotta make some hard decisions that happens to every business like got it uh where i think that you know you're kind of hinting at and it's gonna be a hard leap for people is like the disbanding of the police right and what i said to somebody the other day and actually i tweeted it was like if you want to disband the police you better be like the biggest second amendment fan in the world right because like who are you going to call if you can't defend yourself and you can't call

somebody to defend you either right you get in this weird world so i think that it's more like the either smaller budgets or demilitarization is likely where we end up which gives opportunity i think for things like this right that can kind of provide more of the safety component rather than the like hey there's uh somebody who just robbed me is running down the street with a gun like i don't know if i'm calling my neighbor as much as i'm calling the police right yeah yeah so guardians circle can provide a much bigger buffer zone between you know the guys with the guns and all these problems in between that can be solved by a lot of other people right so um you know and i think we'll have i think we have a much bigger role i think where this will end up is somewhere

in the middle and there will be a much bigger role for things like guardian circle and you know a layer of community emergency response that doesn't fully replace the police but you go through that first before okay this is bad enough we'll call the cops but i think if you get you know to your point if you get rid of the police uh you know ultimately that just creates a power vacuum and that will be filled by mafias and gangs like that's where that will go because people you know then you know this thing gets crazier people be like so someone save us and that's when the mafia and the gangs be like well well you know we'll save you but you know cost you a little money right you know that'll happen right that's that's where it'll go so look look uh ask any soldier

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

agree that, you know, when you have that power vacuum, what happens is people that you probably don't want being in charge end up being in charge, right? Yeah, that's where it'll go. So it's unfortunate democracy is hard and law and order is hard right now you know the pendulum is really it's swung very far in one direction right now so emotions are high and while there's a huge there's absolutely a point behind where the emotions are right now uh we're not we're not thinking about the the logical consequences of where that that thinking goes yet i don't think in full so what do you think is the biggest risk right because like i i always find it interesting when timing lines up, right?

So you've built a product. Now in kind of the more macro environment, it's like, bam, like, okay, everyone's paying attention right now. Hey, we're going to roll this product right into this great timing. How do you think about risk during this time? So you mentioned one on like the marketing message

and more kind of like people misconstruing or seeing something as insensitive. What are the other risks that you see? Yeah, I mean, for us, you know, it took us, it really took us four years to get, to what I call, you know, in my mind is the 1.0 version of the products. So, and that, that was, it's really a 3.1 version. Uh, and that came out in kind of the end of last year. Um, and there's a lot of reasons for that and a part of his money. So, um, you know, we, we did, we did do a token

sale. So we do have a token called guard and there's a wallet inside of the app and you earn tokens for, uh, referring people into the network. So the more you help build the safety network, the more you earn so um so for us you know the risk had been getting too you know getting too much publicity before we were ready now we're ready now we're scalable everything's good um so like the timing just weirdly worked out perfectly on all of that um but at the same time you know guardian circle is a free service uh it doesn't make any money um which is fine it doesn't it doesn't cost a lot for us to run it so it's not really it's not like we work or uber where we're spending gobs of, of cash. It's not that. But, but it's, it's you know, we, we need a way

to, we need to either raise money or we need to have some revenue coming in. So the risk right now is, is, is the Mike Moritz risk, right. Of, of, you know, diverging our focus. So we did have some funding lined up in March which I won't go into the details of that, but bottom line is it was about 5 million and it fell through because of COVID and the market, you know, anytime the market crashes, venture capitalists, you know, kind of their, their limited partners are like, no, we're, we're, we're not going to give you our money after all. Right. So there was a fund closing and it didn't happen and blah, blah, blah. So, so then we said, all right, well, we have to do a revenue product. Um, and we looked at a consumer revenue product and what we

discovered was it was probably too early for that. Um, it was, it was a great time to grow the free product. Um, but where the actual money is, is in the hotel housekeeping, uh, business. So like I said before, there are panic button laws coming into effect right now, which require hotels to provide housemaids with panic button service. And it's a law in Vegas, there's a California law that looks like it's going to pass. And there's, you know, a few places, a few cities around the United States, but it does look like the sort of thing that's going to go nationwide. In an aggregate, you know, it's probably about a billion dollar market in the US. Worldwide, it's like five or six billion something like that so um so there's money there and it's a it it's a special case of

guardian circle so we're building a new product based on guardian circle and that effort's been underway for a couple weeks now and it's almost done so that's the good news i was actually afraid that this might be you know a six month build or something stupid like that um you know there's some modifications we have to make to the product because you know if you're in a hotel gps doesn't work right you know you can't really rely on gps so you know it's sort of a combination of bluetooth and nft and nfc tags not nfc nfc nfc tags uh so some other technologies that have to be brought into play but the api that we made for the devices for the x prize that api is now reusable in this context so a lot of the sort of ladders that we put down uh for ourselves we're climbing up right

now right without real life we didn't know when we were putting those ladders down why we how we would use them but they've turned out to be very useful now but the danger is is that we you know we'll have a bifurcated bite you know we'll have two focuses at once uh you know about the hotel business and the free product and you know if we're sort of serving two masters that will eventually which we are right now i'm consciously knowing that we're doing it but at a certain point that will become dangerous for all the reasons mike moritz pointed out so right now that's my biggest fear. Yeah. And then how has it been kind of navigating this while running a company, right? So you mentioned kind of the challenges with the fundraising side, but how have other

things around building a product and managing a business kind of changed due to the COVID crisis? Well, we had become a crypto company kind of around 2017 or so. And we were already working from home so nothing changed there we never had an office right um but I was I was basically living out of hotels and planes for a good year and a half kind of you know uh you know and and at kind of a crazy pace I mean in my life you know there was there was regular life and then there was internet time you know regular time the internet time then then there was crypto time right which was sort of even more fast and more furious and and now there's COVID time which is like another crank in the ratchet.

But we were already working from home, but I'm no longer traveling. So that has changed. So I actually think it played to our strengths because the rest of the world started acting like we already were. And I've heard this a lot. We were already a distributed team. We were already at home. So we didn't have to reinvent ourselves, whereas most of the rest of the world

did so um the only the only thing that did change is i stopped traveling like a crazy man so which is probably good so so yeah i don't know what else to say other than that no no it makes sense and then i guess also like as you guys uh continue to build the technology how do you think about um kind of the international market versus the uh domestic market and you mentioned kind of the india um you know endeavor but one of the things i've become more and more interested in is as people are forced to uh go inside due to covid uh they spend more time on the internet and what you actually get is uh you get a lot more um kind of uh continuity in the content people are consuming the uh conversations they're having right like you now let's say that you used to go and have

10 conversations a day and eight of those were uh in your local community whether it was at a coffee shop at the office whatever it was it was non-digital right and two of them were uh digital And I'm making up kind of percentages here, right? Or numbers. But now if all of a sudden, nine out of 10 conversations are done online, like the geographic barriers don't matter as much. And so you actually end up kind of colliding more and spending more time talking to people in other geographies, whether they're domestic or international. And so how do you guys think about marketing the product to international markets versus domestically? And do you see a change there based on this idea of like more people are living in kind of the digital economy than the analog one right now? Yeah. So there absolutely is a difference between marketing Guardian Circle internationally and domestically. um internationally it's largely on android and you know making making a product for making an app for android is just a giant pain in the ass you're probably in this bunch of times but

you know you get all these different makes and models all these different screen sizes all the different handsets are running different versions of android um you know you get different carriers and it is just a madhouse and so you know that was one of the reasons why it took us so long get the you know the product uh in shape because we were dealing with all those problems and um and there's also different sensibilities uh for what people will accept in terms of permissions so we went through a lot of different versions of the onboarding process specifically because internationally a lot of people were not getting their login code because sms is uh you know not that reliable outside the united states um so we had to you know put things

in like robo calls and you know other ways of getting getting that information uh we even got it enabled uh we haven't released this yet but we did get it enabled on uh and i always get this wrong we chat or the i can't remember which whatever one of those is the most popular one worldwide we're on that um so uh but and most of those people don't like giving up uh giving access to their contacts however uh we used to have a version so when you when you log into guardian circle we ask for uh access to your contacts so that we can help you invite them to be guardians and we we used to not do this and we found that when we didn't do it people just couldn't if we didn't hold people by the hand and and do everything for them that we could

they never ended up inviting uh people to be guardians that was very difficult even if you know they got into the system so so we created an in-app contact manager and an in-app invite system which is now excruciatingly easy and wizard-like um and it took us a long time to get there um but a lot of people internationally just don't like that they're like nope i'm i'm afraid of this for one reason or another however we've discovered that americans are not americans are just like yeah i don't care fine whatever uh great and they are they are the americans are much i would say healthier guardian circle users all of them have like uh you know at least three guardians for the most part um and even the ones that don't have that have less than that um they've invited like

five or six people right so they they the behavior is that they are trying to regenerate you know they're trying to generate more users at all times uh and they're trying out the alerts they're doing practice alerts uh so they they get it um and there are pockets of the world that do get it but by and large it's been more difficult uh to kind of get it out to them so the latest version So we just made a version of Guardian Circle because of the international users, which is now the mainstream version, where we actually don't require access to your contacts, but you can't send out invites to people. You can only receive them.

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

message to a landline that's why right but people just it's it's not in their nature to sort of you have to do those things for them so and that's true that's that's unfortunately true of americans as well as people internationally. Yeah, it's super interesting to me too how you start thinking about the cohort analysis around how valuable is a user that's got three people who they've connected with versus five versus one

and internationally versus domestically. You can really kind of dig into this. And part of this is when you have almost these micro social networks to some degree, really what you're doing is you're trying to find who's the person who's the most connected, who also is most bought into the mission, right?

Because if they're bought in they've got a large network, then they can kind of pull a bunch of users with them. And I've seen a lot of companies who successfully have done that. And then others who they knew that's what they needed to do. They just were unsuccessful in being able to locate, you know, who's that person who their social group will actually follow. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing is with Guardian, certainly like, well, let me start here for LinkedIn or Facebook or MySpace or whatever, in order for it to be valuable, there'll be a lot of people on it. Right. So, so you don't go to, it's like a nightclub right you don't go to it unless a lot of other people are there right so

um however uh in our universe guardian circle is 100 useful if you have two to five guardians it doesn't matter how many people on guardian circle you still have two to five guardians you're not really interacting with anyone else so um in that respect we're not really chasing the people that have like millions of followers like if we were twitter or instagram or something like that um but for those people i mean one of the reasons we did the guard referral program is to give those people links so as they recruit people you don't have to be guardians with them you just have to if they use your link to get in the system you earn guard for doing it so you know that's one way we're trying to engage with that i guess but other than that not really

yeah where um where can people go find uh more about guardian circle well we are at guardianscircle.com and uh you know our twitter handle is at guardian circle um so we're pretty easy to find. And we've been pretty good about being very visible, I think. So, so yeah, there it is. Got it. And then, um, I wrap up every episode with the same two questions. Uh, the first one is a super serious one, which is, uh, what's the most important book that you've ever read? Oh, um, I, you know, if we're talking about business, uh, I'm a big fiction. Well, you know, I write novels, so obviously I love fiction. So, uh, there, you know, that's one answer, but I won't get into that. Well, I'll get into it real quick. So I love this series of books

called The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever. And, you know, the plot is basically Lord of the Rings, except in the 70s, a guy from our world hits his head and goes into this fantasy realm. And he's like the Frodo, right? And his wedding ring is the ring. So it's very, very well crafted and very well done. I've always loved those books since I was a kid. But in terms of business, I have to say Crossing the Chasm. It's an old one, but still in my mind, the best one. I also really like Zero to One by Peter Thiel. That I also found that was one of the best books I've ever read. And, you know, Crossing the Chasm has got one idea in it. And it basically says, you know, pick one thing and do it better than everyone else in the world, which kind of lines

up with what Moritz said from Sequoia. So it's a very hard lesson to learn. That is, you know, it's easy to, it's easy to read and be like, oh yeah, I get that. And then you turn right around and start not doing it. Right. So it's, it's hard to put into practice. So yeah, it's one of these things where when you're reminded, you're like, duh, but it's easy to lose track of it. Uh, day to day. Uh, last question, which is a more fun one is about aliens believer or non-believer. Oh, absolutely. A believer. No question. Why? I just, the, the universe, the universe is just here it's here to generate life i mean i feel like and i i know it's sort of a non-scientific thing but it just it feels to me that like there would be no reason for the universe unless we're

here to generate life and consciousness um and so i have no proof but it is my very very very strong gut that life is just everywhere and this idea we have about dead planets and you know spinning around dead suns and there's a lot of that and that's most of what's going on i just my gut says no i just don't buy it so aliens absolutely yes i love it this up okay what what one question do you have for me to uh to finish this up oh um you know uh what i guess what is the most interesting crypto project other than a coin like a dap uh that you have seen lately like what's what's exciting you right now is there anything

or is it you just kept watching i mean i uh i am uh notorious for you just bitcoin look we've made a bunch of investments in different companies i won't play uh favorites among uh among all of the children if you will but uh by far i mean bitcoin is uh so you know head and shoulders above everything else and and really from a global importance standpoint in my opinion right if this ends up doing what we think it should do um in terms of uh assuming a certain role in the world that will be one of the greatest technological innovations you know in human history uh let alone in our lifetimes and so um i think that uh it's just really really crazy that we get to live through this yeah i agree a bitcoin bitcoin i still say that it's more important than

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

listen i appreciate the time to do this i think that uh people will uh learn a lot here and uh we'll send them to go check out a guardian circle but i want to do it again in the future really appreciate it thanks thanks bob