The Vergecast - August CEO Jason Johnson on opening the smart home of the future

Episode Date: January 15, 2019

Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel chats with August CEO Jason Johnson about smart locks and the challenges of integrating various technologies within a smart home. They discuss whether every company needs to be a data collection company, and why it's so difficult to be a hardware company in tech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey everybody, it's the Yenna from the Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, we have Jason Johnson. He's the CEO of August. We caught up last week at CES. August was there. Last year, August, which was an independent hardware startup that I met about six years ago.

Last year, they sold to a huge Swedish lock company called Asa Abloy. They make millions of locks, basically. The brand you're probably most familiar with is Yale. But Jason was here at CES. They announced a new Yale lock. They announced a new super high-end luxury lock from another asset ably brand called M-Tech. August is basically becoming the software platform for a huge lock company. They integrate with Google Assistant.

They integrate with Amazon Alexa. They integrate with Apple's Home Kit. And we talked really about the future of the smart home, what it means to work with all three platforms at once, how hard it is to work with the platforms are architected very differently, and the future of how you're going to get in and out of your house. Jason is super candid. He's super real. It was a great conversation. Check out. All right.

We're here with Jason Johnson. He's the CEO of August, the very well-known smart lot company. I say very well-known because I am an August customer, so everybody I know is aware that I had these products. But at CES time, you announced some new locks today. So people are probably familiar. A year ago, we sold to the world's largest lock company. It's a giant conglomerate out of Sweden that has a lot of brands. And we are actually launching more August-enabled locks from our parent company.

So Yale. So we have a new Yale lever lock we announced yesterday. And then today we announced several locks under the MTech brand, which is a more premium luxury line of hardware and locks for homes. Yeah. So the story at CES this year seems to be like it's always smart-home. It's been smart-home stuff for two or three years. Obviously getting inner-house is like a core smart-home use case. But it's really a story of like interoperability between all of these platforms.

We're seeing it's not an Alexa world or an assistant world or a home. kit world, every device seems to support everything. Is that what you're seeing too? Yeah. For me, the role kicked to this top of the week was the Apple announcement with, you know, Samsung LG and Vizio. And then of course, Apple music a few weeks ago with with the echo devices. I mean, what we're seeing is, is this, this idea of having a closed garden, which Apple has sort of epitomized that over the years. This idea of trying to be your own closed garden is just, it's just not going to work for consumers. Yeah. Consumers want the, they want the devices and they want all of the services and communication between those devices to work. And it's all about optionality. So you're seeing

even with your products, consumers, you can't just sell a home kit lock. It has to support all three. Absolutely. Right. We certainly have customers that have fully embraced Alexa, some fully embraced Google Assistant, Google Home. And then you have people that are die hard, you know, home kit, syri vans and people that want to go across all of them. They want to mix and max and use whatever they want. We have to be flexible. We have to play Switzerland. Yeah. We've mentioned HomeKit a few times. That's Apple's smart home platform. It kind of runs on the phone as opposed to in the cloud like Google and Amazon. So we met years ago at the code conference. You had your first device. We've talked about extremely wonky like Bluetooth standards. Are you still playing in the game of this industry is not ready for what we're trying to do? Are you still solving the technical problems that you and I started talking about years ago? Or is that stack mature? And now you're solving these like, you're solving these like, interoperability philosophical problems. I mean, when you and I first met, right, Bluetooth 4.0, the BLE thing had just, it just happened, right?

You're just getting BLE into devices. Before that, you had to pair. It was always this pairing process where you connect your Bluetooth device to something like your phone. And then BLE changed all that. And what I mean by that is that, as you know, you can issue an August key to a friend that's going to state your house for the weekend. And they don't have to pair to your August lock. It's just the key is on their phone and they show up and boom, they get let him. without doing any kind of a pairing process.

That was brand new. Also, when we met that first time, smartphones weren't fully adopted yet, right? Right? So there was this big question. Is everybody going to have a smartphone so they can use these types of devices for the home? And of course, we know, we know here we are six years later.

We know exactly how that's that six years ago? Yeah, yeah. I was like saying like three, I'm just like aging myself down. I'm like, oh, it was just a couple of years ago. Six years ago you started doing this. Yeah. What's the biggest change along the way?

Is it the voice assistants? Certainly, the voice assistants gave a big, a big lift to smart locks and the overall smart home category. You know, you get one of these devices. I mean, they're virtually free. I mean, let's be honest about this. Google and Amazon would give all of us a free speaker with microphone if you could do that. You can't do that.

It turns out people devalue things if they're free. But they would give us all one for free to get us all hooked. I'm shocked that Amazon every year isn't like, thank you for being a prime customer. Here's another one. Right, right. But, you know, they're heavily discounted. And the reality is once you get one, you know, you want to find ways to use it. And so people, they buy a connected light bulb or a smart lock or something else

they want to use with it. And they find out, hey, this is really a great way to interact with my house, right? My favorite use case is nighttime, right? I mean, I used to have this routine going around my house and I turn off all the lights. I turn down the thermostat. I make sure all the doors are locked. And now I just, I just give one voice command. It's, you know, it's peace of mind. Yeah. All right. I'm asking you this question for my producer, Zach, who says his dream is to leave the house and not have his wallet, not have his keys, just have his phone. You can do that now. If you have an August lock in your door, you can probably leave the house with just your phone. Do you see that all coming together? Like, here's one thing that's like your little identity and

it's going to be your keys and your wallet. Is that like the big dream? Yeah. And, you know, and I do that today. I have my, my phone and I don't, I don't carry keys anymore. I don't, I don't carry cash. I think the phone or a wearable is a great authentication tool for for access control and for payments and other things. But let's get away from that. Like, how about, how about we move to a,

to a whole new level of authentication that requires me not to have anything other than just me? Yeah. It's terrifying. It's a little bit terrifying. There's a demo here on the show floor. Have you seen it? It's a video wall.

And it's a big camera and it's just literally, as people walk by, the AI is like, man, 35, women, late 20s. Wow.

And then it assigns you a code. And every time it's, it's for retail, right? It's like trying people in a retail store. And these demos have been around for a long time, but they're doing it at scale. T.S. And you can just see how you would put all those cameras around your house and be like, where is everybody right now?

And it's like, wait, I kind of want that. Like, I kid. Like, I could see it. Like, where, like, hey, Siri, where's the kid? Like, you can feel it exactly. And then you're like, wait, that's terrible. Siri went on. That's pretty funny.

Are you seeing, do you see those strands coming together in your work? Yes. We have certainly been working on, you know, facial recognition. And we see it as. as a future technology. It's still a ways off, right? Yeah. But it's getting better and better.

Do you feel the sort of any threat from the, you know, Amazon Key is here? They're going to, they're going to sell you a bunch of stuff and put a camera in your house and the delivery driver can put the stuff in your garage. And, you know, they're Amazon. So they can be like, you know, we're going to try half-ass facial recognition. We have enough AWS instances to pull it off. Like, we just horsepower it. Do you perceive that as a threat?

Do you think every user experience here is good enough? I mean, we have, we have locks to work with Amazon Key. and that's, you know, it is a futuristic, you know, way of managing access for services to the home. I mean, Amazon certainly has the cameras and has the ability to do the vision processing. If anybody was to introduce that, you know, I think it could be them. Yeah. Google as well, though. I mean, Google has spent a lot of effort there.

And I think, I think the Nest cameras were the first to actually tell you all your family members and when they're, when they're in the house. So it's funny, you make one specific category of things. Do you feel like it's harder or different to? to work with each of these providers in that category, because you don't have the full suite of products. Like do you, when you, when Google comes to you, or Amazon comes to you, or Apple comes to you, do you think, okay, this is what we wanna do.

We can push back on them and make them work the way we want to. Or is it, do they tell you what to do and it's different and you have to negotiate it? We like, Deeter and I just spend some time with the son of people. We're like, we're looking at Google Assistant, which is delayed. And it was just like very obvious that the stuff Amazon wanted

to do and the stuff Google wanted density was like different. Do you, do you perceive that as well? Well, on the lock side, I mean, we actually worked with each of the three companies to define the lock profile for their platform. So we were the first smart lock on all three. So because you're the first, you get to work with them and it's very friendly and it's been a great relationship. You know, I will mention something I haven't I haven't mentioned publicly before. Working with Apple with HomeKit, of course, Apple would like us to see us add HomeKit capability to our cameras. Yeah. Well, that's a whole different level of complexity and business challenges that the locks don't have. So it's been a great relationship

with them, you know, on locks. You know, cameras has been a little more of a challenge. What's more challenging about cameras? You know, one of the, one of the great things about HomeKit, of course, is that is that things work locally. You don't have to be connected to a cloud. And for it to work locally and the way the Apple architected HomeKit, it's very intensive. In fact, that it requires a couple of simultaneous video streams and always having this uptime. When it comes to video, So HomeKit is a challenge. And that's why you've seen very, very few HomeKit cameras so far. Now it's going to change because Apple's becoming more flexible, trying to work with folks like us.

And one more challenge too, of course, is for all of us that work with HomeKit, we also have to support all of the Android users, all the non-Apple people out there, right? So we have to make sure that by putting in something like one of these technologies into our device, we're not disenfranchising the other half of users out there. And that share, especially internationally now, because you're part of the bigger company. That's right. I'm sure that's something you're thinking about even more. What specifically, there are two simultaneous video streams?

Yeah, yeah. I can't remember all of the latest specifications for video implementation with HomeKit, but there is a set of requirements that is a challenge to implement technically. Yeah. You know, I have a doorbell cam. It doesn't seem like that's going to come to that doorbell cam over time. Intentions were there. I remember Ring, Canary, and August.

All three of us said we were going to add HomeKit to our cameras. and all three of us have not. And then even people like Arlo, who have like one or two models to support HomeKit and then the other eight models don't. Yeah. Again, you know, it's a challenge. And, you know, don't even wrong, I love HomeKit, right? I everything in my house is HomeKit enabled.

I'm a big believer. Whereas when you deal with Alex and Google Assistant, everything is 100% cloud-based, right? Which makes it so much easier to implement. There's a little bit of like Alexa can just like do some UPMP stuff. And it seems like that cloud around. trip actually slows you down. And that's a piece of the user experience. I don't think anyone talks about enough with these smart platforms that it actually you get a better user experience if it's all in your house. Yes. Because you're not round tripping into the cloud,

especially the video stream and then like experiencing that lag. Yes. Do you see that? Are you pushing on that? Like, hey, where should a lot of these sports lives? They live in your house, on premises, or should everything be in the cloud? I personally think, you know, there's benefits to both, right? The cloud guys, you know, Lex and Google had done a great job of reducing latency. I'm just shocked by how fast you can say, you know, Alexa locked the front door and how fast it happens. I mean, it was surprised me the first time I saw. It still was a surprise to me. And I actually just left a meeting. I just had, I just had a meeting with the Alexa team and I got the, the 2019 roadmap and the things are working on. And yeah, I'm not, I'm not going to totally blow my NDA. But I mean, I'm saying there is a roadmap for 2019 and Alexa. I, you know, without blowing it, I got to tell you, I am so impressed with that team. Yeah. How they've thought through. these exact kinds of issues that you just brought up. And they have fully thought it through.

And they have a whole strategy for how to improve it in every way. It's spectacular how much they're doing. Yeah. Again, the story of CES, as a consumer shows, like you guys have some new consumer products. So other people here with consumer products. But the story seems to be people like you come here to meet with people like the Alexa team and the assistant team to plot out the future. Is that balance shifting for you? You know, it's convenient. You know, back to home kid. I remember, boy, it was five years ago, CES. I remember the Apple team said they wanted to meet with us in our suite and they wouldn't tell us what it was. This is way before HomeKit was, you know, was announced in public and they, you know, they gave us, you know, a sneak peek. Obviously, they knew about August, but I think it was really convenient for them to go visit a handful of people, right? I'm sure that,

I'm sure if I could guess, you know, Phillips Hugh and others were also part of that little, that little tour that the team did when they were out here. It's a very convenient place to to basically see everybody. Yeah. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this.

One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. They offer a host of helpful tools you can take advantage of, from payment processing to analytics to website design. Their design studio includes hundreds of templates to help you create the exact website you've been envisioning for your business. If you're wondering, what if I need help? Then no worries, because you're never left to fend for yourself.

Shopify's award-winning customer support is available 24-7. It's time to turn those what-ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash verily. Go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all, all by yourself, are over. There's no romance and burning out while you're trying to scale.

Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across more than 125 categories so you can feel scale. skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount. And finding the right talent is easy. You can browse profiles, review past work, and get help scoping the role so you can get started quickly. Seriously, you could connect with the right freelancer in just a few hours, especially when you sign up with Business Plus. Their AI-powered shortlisting pairs you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours. No endless searcher required. You can visit

Upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upw-w-r-k.com. Upwork.com. So let's talk about August specifically. One thing that is really interesting to me is I met you. You were literally like a startup founder with a hardware startup six years ago. Those are not guaranteed wins. Like we cover a lot of hardware startups. You guys did phenomenally well. A year ago, you decided to sell to the big company. Asse Ablo. Is that perhaps that correct? That's right. Yeah. What does that decision like look like for you? Like how do you decide, well, it's time to go be part of the big thing? You know, it certainly wasn't easy. We've always had a lot of vision

for what we could do with August. And now it's part of why the name is sort of a, what they call in marketing speak, an empty vessel that can do a lot of things with the term August. But, you know, what we found was particularly when it comes to access control and managing, you know, the home and people and services in and out of the home, that there's a lot of different ways people get into the home, right? There's a lot of different locks, right? So obviously, you have a deadbolt on door to your house, and most Americans do, but many people don't have dead bolts, or they have a lever lock or a knob lock or a mortise lock, and there's all kinds of configurations. And then if you live in a multifamily building, you get into the building, right? And we couldn't

solve all of those, because a lot of those are actual mechanical, you know, physical, metal problems. And so we really had a choice. Either we could partner with a whole bunch of companies and make all that stuff or actually become part of a company that makes all that stuff. And it just so happened that at the time that Asa Obloi approached us to purchase. So so did two other companies. And so it all happened in a kind of a fury of like, okay, well, I guess we really should think about this. And even I sat down and we talked through it and we thought, you know, we could do a lot of fun stuff with Asa Obloi. Yeah. So are you? Are you? you know like the software provider. You said the announcements here are not August

announcement. They're Yale announcements or MTech announcements. They are. They're not August products. Are you, is that real? Like even inside the big company, it's their products and they're just running your stack. Like yeah, do you have like contentious partner meetings like internally or is it just one big happy family? You know, being a Swedish company, I got to tell you, the culture is just really egalitarian. There's just really nice non-conflictation. Everybody's nice. Yeah. It's like, you know, I probably swear more than anybody else in the whole company. I'm probably the most cantankerous. So August is a separate company that I'm still CEO of and I run and we still make August products. In fact, we have several new products under the August brand

that we'll be announcing in the coming weeks and months. But as you suggested, based upon what we announced this week, the August technology, right, our embedded technology, our August access cloud services and our mobile app, all of those are now being added to the various portfolio companies so that you, so that if you have any of these locks, you can use the August app and, and you can control all of your different locks within the August app. For six years, we've had people say to us, hey, I don't have a deadbolt on my front door, or I want to lock my closet or the door to my wine cellar or maybe the door from the garage into the house.

But it's just a knob or a lever, right? Do you make that? And we've always said, no, we don't make that. Well, now I have that, right? It's a Yale branded product. It's called the Yale Assure Leverlock. You know, for me, it's, it's, I'm now able to deliver these products that people have been asking for for years. And an Osoply has thousands and thousands of these skews that we can August enable and literally solve every single type of, you know, access challenge.

Do you think you need to expand your portfolio beyond just locks? I mean, obviously, you make the doorbell camera, which I guess is a doorbell and a camera. Yes. But then you look at the rest of the smart home ecosystem. Are you thinking, well, I need to make more security cameras. I need to make smart plugs. I need to make a microwave. Like, it's pretty trivial to make some of these products

on these platforms. Do you think you need to expand farther, or are you like really focused on just the one line? Well, you know, as a global, so the company is the leader. Right. We're literally number one and number two, just about every country on the planet, right? So we are the leader in access control and locks.

And not just residential, also for corporations, right? our H-ID business. Most corporations, your key card, your key fob is all ours as well. So that is what we do, right? We really do that well. But there are things that are related to access, right, like cameras and other security types of products.

And so you'll see some more of that from us. In fact, in the UK, we actually have a full-blown security system, right? It just competes with ADTs and the likes. It's a Yale branded security system that's very, very popular in the UK. Maybe we wouldn't do that in the U.S. because there's plenty of great security systems. In fact, we partner with most of them. So, you know, it's a country-by-country decision.

Really? Country by country. And that's just like what's happening in the market, what's happening culturally? Yeah, what's happening culturally and what is the need there. So I bought a first-generation lock. I bought the, and I upgraded to the HomeKit lock, and then I bought your latest one. And the one complaint I always had was like,

this cloud platform was like a little slow. It's a little, it's a little like hazy sometimes. For remote control when you're, when you're away from home. Yeah. You know, you open it. And then you got bought.

And then like three months later, I was like, everything got a lot faster. Was that just like, you were able to just like write a bigger check to your cloud provider? Like, was that related?

I've been dying to ask you this. Because I noticed it, it was like perceptive, faster about three months after your acquisition. You know, I'll tell you, that's fun. I never, shared this. I'll tell exactly what it was. It was right after we were required, we made a decision to stop working on new physical products and just like the entire software team was focused on how do we just improve our back end and our cloud services. Really? And the team had been asking for several years to do that. Yeah. But of course, we're always racing to put out new products and new features.

and this was that chance to have kind of a breathing room and frankly grow up a little bit, right? Go from being a startup to being an established company and have everything be revamped in the back end. It's so funny. I got you noticed. Absolutely noticed. I was like everything here got a lot faster. And I always wondered like, do they just write a bigger check to AWS? Like, when we got it?

Like here you go. Put us on the faster bandwood plan. Like stop throttling us. So we talked to a lot of founders. We talked to a lot of hardware startups. This is a rocky terrain. Is this kind of the path you want people to take, that you recommend people take? Is there a path for August, like as a standalone company, especially now?

Like, I'm looking around CES now, and everything is about interoperability. Everything is about leverage against major platform players. Can you do it without the scale of a big company like a NASA Ablo? I don't want to discourage the hardware startup founders out there. But the data shows that it's pretty hard, right? There's very, very few hardware companies, if you will, that we've seen that have been able to stay standalone. You know, Roku so far and Sonos so far and GoPro. Sure, some great examples that have been able to do it.

But the list is really small. And I think you said it well, it's a tremendous amount of resources required, right? You have very heavy manufacturing expenses. You have big distribution expenses and scaling, right? So, you know, with software and services, you can scale very quickly at very nice margins. Hardware, as you know, has limited margins and it doesn't scale nearly as fast, which means it's far more capital intensive. And sure, it can be done. But ask yourself, do I have to make a piece of hardware to solve this problem?

Or is there existing hardware that I could put my technology, my software, my services onto and not have to be in the hardware business? That would be a far more economically advantageous way to do it. And there's obviously plenty of examples of that. Yeah. I mean, I just looking around here, I mean, there's any number of very generic smart locks you can buy. And it seems like, I don't know if I trust that vendor. Like, I've never heard of them. Every year. Every year, we see a dozen new, you know, smart locks at CES. And then, and then the next year, half of them are gone. And there's a dozen new ones. And the following year, the other half are gone. Five years ago, I came here and, you know, there's like 10,000 MP3 players or whatever. And it's like, you know what? You can take a risk as a consumer on a no.

name media player. Like a year from now, like that company implodes, the service that ran it dies, the clouds, someone doesn't pay the AWS bill, right? And they're like, well, and you're like throw it in the trash, like move on if you're life. When you're building infrastructure at home, it seems like the bigger players are just going to have the entrenched consumer trust that they're going to continue to be there. Is that something that you had to fight against? It's something that you have to build. Like, how do you, do people even care? Is that just my instinct and it's totally wrong? One thing for certain is that as we add more and more smart devices to our That does mean that's more things for us to maintain, right?

And we're busy. And having to, like, you know, maintain all this stuff can be quite a challenge. And the last thing you want to do is put stuff in your home that is going to stop working, right? Because the cloud service behind it is shut down. And we see this over and I mean, this is a story that we do regularly. Like X thing stops working because company was acquired and cloud service shut down. I think, you know, those of us that are gadget, you know, geeks, you know, we all have drawers of this stuff, right? You know, you take it to Salvation Army.

They don't want it. I think some of the things that both Amazon and Google are trying to solve for is cloud services that could potentially stay persistent potentially, right? They haven't totally solved that yet. But certainly Apple's done that with HomeKit, right? That is one of the magic things about HomeKit devices is because it doesn't require a cloud service operated by the company or an app, you could install a, say, a HomeKit thermostat, and that company could disappear. But the Apple home app would still in theory be able to talk to that thermostat and still have it be able to continue operating. And, you know, that is one of the ways to think about making your product

selection is how is this thing going to persist? Yeah. How is it last over time? Yes. So you obviously operate a cloud service. We do. You know, I look at every other vendor. I buy I'm a sucker for smart outlets. It's an easy way to like just gauge an ecosystem. So I have every brand of smart outlets. I'm always like, well, your app sucks. This one's slow. should it be should it look like that for the consumer that you have a different app for every little device in your house that then is a cloud service user account that then talks to your google account or amazon account or whatever or are we actually moving towards that sort of story place where that you have one sort of like middleware solution that just talks to everything like smart things i think there's always going to be things that the particular vendor's app does that nothing else can do right like from the august app there's some very specific features and functionality there but but honestly many August and Yale lock users can use the Alexa app or they can use the Apple Home app or they can use, you know, they can use a smart things app and do a lot of their basic functionality that means that maybe they don't open the August app very often at all. And I think that's fine, right? I guess I'm just coming out from the sort of like how many user accounts to, it's in a year where it seems like the focus on privacy and data storage and is just higher than ever. Like how many more user accounts to a cloud service do you need? Do you just want one? Should there,

Should you even have more than one? Remains an open question. And then you look around CES and it's like, all right, do I want a Kohler, like, user account and password? And do I want Kohler to store my bathroom data? Like, so I can connect my Google home. Like, that's a big, it's a silly question. Yeah. But it's a, like a philosophically huge question.

Like, do you want Kohler to become a data company in this way? Right. Or do you want August to be a data company in this way? Right. And is that a core competency for Kohler, right? You know, to pick on them. But it could be any type of appliance. You can pick on any of the toilet vendors you want.

I mean, do they want to be in the business of maintaining a cloud service and a mobile app and staying on feature parity? That's a decision they have to make. Are you doing any data collection? Are you trying to, do you have like weird stats about, you know, on this moment at 4.15 PM, more doors were unlocked in Sweden than ever before? Are you doing that kind of like big data collection? We've always thought of the data as really as our customer's data right? In fact, in fact, all the data gets flushed every 30 days. We don't store it.

A, privacy, B, it costs money to store it. I mean, we now have billions of lock openings, right? You know, it's a lot of data. I think that there is some value to that data and there is some things you can do with it to hopefully serve the consumer and make their life better. Certainly the AI companies we've talked about a few times here. I think there's fun things they can do with that data that's actually beneficial to you. And, hey, we've noticed you've been home for a while. And it's, you know, it's midnight.

Would you like us to lock your doors for you, right? I mean, AI agents could do that based upon knowing your presence and the status of your doors. And that's not a bad thing for them to have that. Now, they could do bad things with that data. You know, ultimately, everybody has to choose what is the tradeoff of the convenience and benefits of sharing data with companies versus the potential risks. I haven't heard a lot of risks, frankly. I mean, I know they exist.

And I'm not saying they don't. And you can have bad actors. And I won't name any of those companies. but you know for the most part. Oh, I will. Like, I would never let Facebook run my smartphone home. Like, never a million years, right? I'm a little, like, I mean, a little skis out by letting Google and Amazon into my house in that way.

But, you know, like, they put out the portal camera. And it's like, what does every review say? Like, don't let Facebook put a camera in your house. It was probably bad timing to announce that hard. It was probably bad time. Right. So I get what you're saying. But does every company need to be a data company?

That's, like, really the question of the industry right now. Like, can you run a business? without some sort of associated data service that's subsidizing cost. It seems like your answer is we can just sell you locks forever and we're fine. You got to ask yourself as a company, what is your core mission? What are you actually trying to solve for? And where do you want to be at some point in time? And back to these white goods, these appliance companies, you know,

do they really want to be in the data business, right? Or do they just want to make toilets? Which is a very good business. Yeah. So last question. It's very nerdy. and I feel like it would be doing you. We've only ever really had nerdy conversation.

So we've been up here in the abstract. But I'm going to end with very nerdy August platform questions. Right now, the way August is architected is very different than everybody else. So you've got a Bluetooth lock. If you want to put that on a Wi-Fi, you've got to buy an August Connect and stick it in the wall. Then you've got a doorbell cam, which is Wi-Fi. They can also act as that bridge. Are you ever just going to do a Wi-Fi lock?

Is it is a technology there yet? I mean, from day one. We've thought about a Wi-Fi. lock and and we've certainly spent a considerable amount of time and energy looking at and Wi-Fi chipsets that would allow us to do that. The challenge is is a lock has to be able to, more than anything else, name a system in your house, maybe your thermostat in the wintertime. There's a few other things in your house that you need to make sure it works reliably and consistently. And, you know, battery management, power management for a lock is extremely important to

us and having to swap out your batteries every every couple of weeks is just not something consumer is one to do right if you got a Wi-Fi would lock from us and you had to change the batteries in two or three weeks you would probably rip that lock off is there like a power to the door standard are you do you get to go like are there door federation meetings i don't know how this works i'm assuming is there like a national door standard body and you go there and you're like here's our power to the door standard that we're proposing there is no shortage of efforts to to to bring electricity. I mean, we actually make us all, but it makes door brackets with invisible wires right in the bracket. So you can run wires right through the door, right? We have blocks.

They're commercial. They're not residential. And, you know, we've explored wireless, you know, trying to and, you know, do that in a safe way. Well, you've explored wireless power to the door. Oh, we've, every, every type of wireless thing. We've looked at it. We've tested it. We have in a lab. We've actually shown it. We demonstrated it CS a couple times. Nothing ready for mass consumer use. When we think we can deliver that. with both the power, right, but also latency too, right? You know, trying to wake up a, you know, Wi-Fi radio real fast, real-time when it's raining outside and you're standing in front of your door.

There's lots of complexities to doing it. So we are not going to deliver a Wi-Fi lock until we think it performs, you know, as good as our Bluetooth locks do. Do you think about the other standards are out there, the Z-Vs, the Z-Waves? We do. We did end up putting Z-Wave in the third-10 August lock. We did add Z-Wave, mainly because the security companies, the big security dealers, they asked us to do that.

And, you know, we love Zigby, right? We have Yale locks that are Zigby enabled. Are you going to take over the entire tech stack of this company? Are you, you know, is that where it's trending? They, you know, like I said, my colleagues worldwide and my team have really enjoyed working together and we have all kinds of exciting projects. I promised I wouldn't spill the beans on anything coming, but there's a whole bunch of new. Yeah, your PR person.

She's been typing this whole time. She just looked up at me. But there's some really neat products coming North America as well as around the world. Very cool. Well, we look forward to all that. Thank you for coming by. My pleasure. And then we dragged you away from the show for us.

This is great. Good to catch up. All right. That was Jason Johnson. He's a CEO of August. Great conversation. We're back from CS now. We're all going to get some sleep, get our bearings.

We'll be back with a regular Burgecast on Friday. Hopefully everyone will have gotten enough sleep. We'll see you then.