This Week in Startups - E1124: Reducing response times for first responders & revolutionizing outdated systems with RapidDeploy CEO Steven Raucher | Rising Stars of SaaS 1

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

Check out RapidDeploy: https://www.rapiddeploy.com FOLLOW Steven: https://twitter.com/stevenraucher FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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Your first app is free forever, and right now O-Doo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at Odo.com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-com slash twist. Hey, everybody, hey, everybody. Welcome to a new series we're doing here on this week in startups. Everybody knows what SaaS is. And we are doing a series on software as a service. Cloud computing, some people were referred to as,

basically it's software that exists in the cloud. and SaaS generally connotes business software, although we might touch on some consumer SaaS here. We're going to try to stay focused on business to business software. In other words, software that helps solve an acute business problem. And the nature of SaaS that will explore during this series, a 10-part series, is that it reduces cost, it reduces the installation time, and you don't have updates coming at you all the time. And typically the pricing is either much more fast. fair, or it is, in addition to being more fair, it is consumption-based in some way.

Could be consumption based on how much work you do in the system, how many purchase orders you do, how many documents are scanned or signed, or it could be consumption based on how many users are using the platform, i.e. something like Slack, which only charges you for active users. And another interesting feature of SaaS software is because it's lower cost, because it's It's available to be installed and you used immediately. In other words, you don't have to set up a server. You don't have to install software. Many of you never even lived in a world where that existed.

In addition to that, the switching costs tend to be lower because you don't need to sign a multi-year lease on the software. You don't have to have some big upfront cost. You just start using it. If you like it, you expand. You land and expand. That's sort of the definition of SaaS, for those of you don't know, and it's created quite a revolution. And SaaS startups tend to be much easier to get to break even. and much easier to get to monetization because you only need one person to need this software

who's willing to pay you $10,000 a month to pay the salaries of you and your co-founder or your modest draw and keep the lights on. Compare that to trying to make a Snapchat competitor or a meditation app or whatever it happens to be or in any advertising-based business for that matter. So many founders you'll see will pivot from building a consumer app to going enterprise. It's almost like a trope. It's almost like a funny pattern that we all laugh about, which is as an investor, you might have that moment when the founder says,

you know what, I tried consumer for 18 months. It didn't work. But we have two customers who are willing to pay us $100,000 a year. We're going to just move to that to keeping the lights on. Now, what's the downside? Why wouldn't everybody just make this software? It tends to be a little bit more boring

to build business to business software. So you need to have a very customer focus on a very unique set of customers and enjoy building that. And you don't become famous. I'll make it that simple. You know, somebody builds a Tesla and you get to drive a car, you're going to become famous. Somebody builds the drive train or the battery pack for a Tesla.

Nobody ever knows that customer. So many founders will choose to do consumer because, let's face it, they want to interact with a large group of consumers. In fact, we had the Nicola founder on who was building basically business to business trucks to do shipping of beer for Anheiser Bush or whoever it was. And then he said explicitly, I want to start a pickup truck so that I can. sell into the Robin Hood Traders, a famous, disturbing, weird quote from that episode that got a lot of speculation. So anyway, that's the series that we're going to start. And I'm really excited about today's because it's very close to my family and, in fact, the guests' families.

It is really about saving people's lives. And I say that with a lot of experience in this space and a very specific understanding of the difference between one or two minutes in response time. for emergency services. And emergency services system started here in the United States in the late 60s when they decided instead of people running to a call box, there were literally call boxes. I remember in my youth in Brooklyn that some kids, some bad kids would go to the call box and press the button. I'm not saying I was one of those kids. But kids would do stuff like that. And every five or six blocks in the city was a call box. And when there was an emergency, somebody would say, go find a call box. This is before we had phones in our pockets, call boxes in our pockets. And that led to, a group of people, centers, congressmen, building the 911 system, which was designed because

nobody was using the area code 911, and because it was easy to remember. And they wanted to have a single number that everybody in America, and eventually Canada deployed the same number system, thinking that might become a global standard 911. And AT&T at the time decided, the bells decided that they would support this. And now we live in a world with 96% or so, according to my research, Americans and Canadians are covered by some level of the 911 system, but it has been updated twice in its existence, according to today's guest. And his name is Steve Roucher, and he is the co-CEO and founder and co-founder, I believe, of Rapid Deploy. Welcome to the pod. Steve. Thank you. So it's co-found and CEO. I always try to get that right. My note said co-CEO and

founder and I just thought, that's probably wrong. Let me make sure I ask. Sometimes that happens. There's a mistake in the notes, but not often because my researchers know that if they make a mistake, I will talk about it for eight minutes on the staff meeting. And I just got my eight meetings for this, my eight minutes for this week. So you heard my little preamble about the 911 system. The 911 system, born in the late 60s here in the United States, really didn't even have mass adoption, you know, more than 50% adoption until the 80s. People used to write the phone number of the local police department or the local fire department or the local ambulance crew on their refrigerator, correct? Yeah, and in some parts of the world, that's still the way business has done.

You're kidding, really? Yeah, yeah, sure. In South Africa, where we started, on every person's fridge I'll ever go to will be the number of your local responding agencies. And some of those are volunteers like in Cape Town where we started. And in fact, our CTO, the OG, the original founder of Rapid Deploy, volunteers for the very service whose number was on my fridge in Cape Town. So it's very local and, you know, countries around the world have adopted 999 as opposed to 9-1-1 or in Europe. 1-1-2 is the common number. So there's very little standardization across the world.

Here's a stupid question. Why don't all those numbers just route to the same place at this? point. Like if we know people from Europe traveling to America, people from Cape Town traveling to America, and vice versa, might dial 112-999 or 911, why don't they all just resolve to the same place? I mean, I hate to be the stupid kid in the class giving a brilliant solution on a global basis, but I certainly am not the only person who came up with this simple, simple concept of all three numbers work all three places. Well, if you dial 911 in Europe, you will get your local 112 center. It depends on where you are and the routing rules that are associated.

with it. But I mean, that is, yeah, that's beyond my wheelhouse. I'm not in the networking side. Go ahead and say next time you give a keynote at an emergency conference, you go ahead and fly that one up the flagpole, see if anybody salutes. So you make a service to help enhance 911. But give us the state of the 911 system today, the legacy system. What is the attributes of what the legacy system can do and can't do, and what percentage of people, maybe you can start with that, are covered by the legacy systems in the United States. We'll start with the United States. It's obviously it's a disperate. It's easier context. That's the main thrust of our businesses at the moment.

So I'll tell you what it's not. It's not minority report, right? So it's not these screens. No AR and smart gloves. Got it. No, okay. No smart gloves. And also there's not a lot of interconnected systems and agencies, the vast majority of the telephony component of the 911 system is highly analog. There are large efforts underway now to convert those into IP-based systems. But, you know, the integration even, there are 7,9 and 1 centres, give or take in the United States, and with possibly an exception of less than 20, those systems integrate fire, spilling a ASCII file of 512 kilobits into a serial cable,

and that's how your location might travel downstream. Okay, so it's basically analog, which means the data being sent is being sent in a little compressed ASCII file. it doesn't have a lot of bandwidth and then it's got to be reinterpreted. What does an IP-based system, what are the benefits of that? Well, we don't solve for the telephony component, but if you can imagine, that is the major point of ingress in the 911 system today. If you think about how 911 was processed, let's go five years back, it's a phone call in

and it's like a radio walkie-talkie call out to the responding agencies. And we're now in a world, as you know, which is everybody's connected. We can consume location, real-time location from an iOS or an Android phone directly into our platform. So suddenly we're getting IoT signals, telematics, like pinpoint location accuracy, but the system itself wasn't designed to consume this or the designs that are in place don't have the downstream systems to connect. So you have essentially two locations, right? You have the location of my smartphone, if I'm calling on that.

Yep. And if I called on my home phone, you would know where that phone, I guess, in some registry or according to some telephony system, where it was? There's actually three locations, if you think of it like that. So what you have in the traditional 911 system, you have the wide database of all wide. addresses. So from your home phone, there'd be a database that the system would look up while it's

routing to nine-on-one. And then in the mid-80s, when cell phones became prevalent in the states, there was a hack to solve for now mobile signals and how would they work out exactly where those were. And now it was by triangulation across cell towers. And it only really got very sophisticated in the last few years where Apple and Google switched on their EED and ELS services respectively in America, which is the supplemental handset location. Which is taken from GPS, I take it. Which is taken, well, it's a hybrid location, which GPS is obviously a major component, but both Apple and Google have their own secret source to give you the exact location.

Which is Wi-Fi routers, right? They know the location of Wi-Fi routers or public Wi-Fi routers, and they kind of triangulate around that. From what I understand, is that correct? Yeah, device-based hybrid locations are what they call it, right? Device-based hybrid location. Fancy way of saying, we know if you ping this router, we know where that router is, we know where your cell phone towers are, and we know where your GPS is.

So we got you eight ways to Sunday, which is why sometimes when you're at an airport, it knows your location really well because it knows the Wi-Fi routers in the airport. And even if you don't connect to those Wi-Fi routers, it knows you passed by them and try to connect. Is that correct? It's my understanding. Look, I don't look under the hood of the operating systems of the cell phones. That's my understanding is that they do that.

When we get back on this quick break, I want to know what is the fault because I was, actually, I did work for a voluntary service, Bravo and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I did work as a dispatcher there and then eventually on the ambulance itself. And when I was a dispatcher, there was a huge issue of telephone, literal telephone. end the figurative telephone where a call would come in or the ambulance would pick somebody up and they had vitals that they needed me to tell to the emergency room of who was coming in and what was their condition. And I had to write it down on a piece of paper and get that information back and forth from all parties. We'll talk about how that is evolved when we get back on

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Hey, welcome back to this weekend startups. I'm your host, Jason Kalakanis. And this is our rising stars of SaaS. Software as a service. I gave you a little preamble at the beginning of what SaaS is. I think you get it really well. And today we've got a perfect guest to kick off the series, Steve Roucher. is the CEO and co-founder of Rapid Deploy, a startup which has a very personal meaning, which we'll get into and personal importance to Steve. And we left off talking a little bit about what I had to, you know, my role when I was a dispatcher was to sort of translate this information.

But of course, some things get lost in translation. the tone of somebody's voice, obviously, there is a time delay. So I'm curious, where are we with, you know, the sort of live nature of these calls? I know that there were some experimentation. I don't know if your company is doing it, but once the call is coming in, we have now the location of the person. We know what kind of smartphone they're on, I assume. And we might know something about that place because there are maps of all type types now. So a map is there. But also, a police officer, an ambulance, or a fire truck now has a computer in the dashboard or a laptop on a mount. We see them all the time. And I understand now there's some live dispatching. So if a

police officer was near a, you know, I don't know, a domestic disturbance or a property crime, they could actually listen in to the call and hear the dispatcher talking to a person or multiple units. An ambulance could listen into a police one. A police can be listening into an ambulance one and see if there is need for extra help. Is that something you guys have deployed yet? Is that something that's at deployed? And then what happens once the call comes in? So that's been deployed upstream of us.

That's a call handling component of the solution where they can actually loop in the first responders coming on scene. But where we really assist that situational awareness component is, you know, we can ingest the live videos straight from a caller. So you can send them a short link, switch on a web RTC session and stream in real time. The feed coming from their cell phone, imagine, you know, they might be pointing at a burning building or might, God forbid, be an active shooter scenario. And suddenly you've got maybe six callers coming in. And we can aggregate that video and pass that to the first responder in real time. so they know what they're rolling into. That exists in the world today?

Yeah. So just so I understand how this happens, because I have never even seen a demo of that or anybody, I've never experienced it, thankfully, but I'm on the phone with 911. They say, hey, I just SMS you a link, click it and show me a video of what you're experiencing. Stay on the phone.

Is that what happens? That's what happens in our system. Wow. Is that currently in use in, any jurisdictions and how long has it been in use and are there any specific instances where it's had some dramatic effect? So we we rolled out that feature recently to a fire service in Arizona. I can't speak whether they, how much they've used that. What we did in California where you live, which is maybe more relevant for you and you were speaking about, you know,

we know what kind of cell phone is calling 911. We rolled up the entire state of California on our mapping platform, which has embedded two-way texting, which was switched on, you know, and you spoke about the power of SAS, a year into the contract, COVID hit, and the head of California 911 called me and said, Steve, you know, there's domestic violence in the uptick. How can we silently communicate with callers? And as a SaaS speecher, we're like we enabled that overnight, and the whole California had the ability to be able to have a text conversation with a caller. and another thing you raised was like dynamic sentiment scoring, also live translation.

So bringing all of these kind of enterprise and consumer tech into the 911 system to be able to have that real-time communication, translation, sentiment, identification. Okay, so let me just break this down and give an example. Somebody is experiencing domestic violence and being on the phone, you can be overheard. so somebody could call 911 and they say, listen, you know, this person's attacking me in my home and the person says, would you prefer to chat? I can send you a text link or I've sent you a text link if you want to chat if that's safer for you.

Yeah. Rather than the person kicking down the bathroom door and murdering you, God forbid. So you could have that text come up and the person can text with the 911 operator. That's correct. And also, you know, for a 911 hang up, which is more typical in a domestic. violent situation. So you have some of dial nine-on-one and then they put the phone down. With the fact that we have hyper-local location available to us, if it's from a cell phone, we can tell that's a residential address. And so, you know, a trained 911 telecommunicator can very easily work out

like this, highly probable that this is a domestic abuse situation, domestic violence situation, and they can start with, we just noticed a text message from you, do you want to write back to me? Oh, wow. So we know from statistics, a 911 call that gets hung up or they call 911 and they just hear some background noise for 30 seconds and then it hangs up or something could be indicative of a domestic violence situation. So they tax, then the person can call back. Wow, that's an incredible, that's an incredibly clever solution to a horrible problem. So what about the on-scene and multiple agency part? You did sort of indicate that there is, is an issue of multiple systems. So when you come into, you know, a specific location, if you were to come into California, would you be coming into the entire state? Is it run, is 911 run as the entire state of California?

Or is it run as the Bay Area versus the Los Angeles area? Or is it down to Santa Monica versus Venice versus, you know, L.A. County. You know, how granular are these 9-11 services run today? So there's 440 911 centers in California. And we just finished rolling them out. So I know. Okay. No, wait a second.

Are they all under government jurisdiction or are they on the local or is it some hybrid system? Explain to me how California does this. So California centrally manages all 911 via the Cal OES, which is the California Office of Emergency Services. Okay. That's great. Right? That's good to have it centralized?

Yeah. I would be certainly. Yeah. I'll tell you what's very interesting. If we unpack the dynamic of centralized 9-1-1-1 and combine that with like a lesson in SAS, why 9-1 and SAS are like unbelievable bedfellows, it's because 9-1-1 is basically funded by your phone bill, whether it's wireline or wireless depending on where you live, right?

And, you know, we know by population density, that the bigger the population, the bigger your 911 service and more number of calls you'll have, and you'll have more responding agencies. So by us meeting agencies like this and realizing that they are funded directly in this linear graph to the size of their population, which is in turn drives their funding model, like SaaS is the perfect solution for a government agency like this, right? So you can charge, I assume, California, buy the number of nodes on the network, the number of phone numbers or people paying for that service?

Right. So we can charge for, like, with a number of call-taking positions or dispatch positions in a 911 center. Ah, which is a proxy for the number of people who are calling in. But then does that create a strange incentive? Because I was, you know, are interested in incentives here. If you make California more efficient and they can lower the number of dispatchers or a dispatcher can service more people. or if you increase the amount of time, conversely, your SaaS bill would go up.

So if you do your job and you make it more efficient in one way, efficiency defined by you need less operators, that's one form of efficiency. It might not be the right form in this case. But if you lower the number, you get paid less. And if you were to increase the number of you were at increased call length, which might actually have better outcomes, in other words, less domestic violence or because the person's on the phone with them

longer. It seems like actually the SMS message you send would increase the amount of time it would take because you might then get into an hour-long text thread with somebody and an important text thread. So how do you deal with that incentive and how do you charge today? So, I mean, it's a really great question. And then we can go down a rabbit hole on incentives because there's some really weird. I know, let's do it. It's such a great conversation. I mean, that's a great thing. Incentives matter. It's fascinating. I find incentives fascinating. It's really fascinating. So how do you charge today. Yeah.

Let's start with that. So we charge, we charge by seat in a 9-1 center, but concurrent seats, and this is a big thing because the legacy vendors, right,

so these typical old school CAPEX projects, which we saw in enterprise and got killed by the, you know, all the modern SaaS software that happens in enterprise today. That still continues

in GovTech and largely in public safety as well. So this notion that I need a, you know, a primary site and a backup site and they charge, and they charge for double the licensing because they have to have both sides. Whereas, you know, we believe, and firstly we're a very mission-driven business,

and I think we'll probably get into that in a bit. But because we're a mission-driven business, we're trying to solve for the most efficient experience, right? And like, we don't just think of the customer as the state authority that's paying our bill. I think of the customer as the victim who's calling 911. Because that's ultimately what you're trying to solve for. And the other customer is the first responder.

and how do we protect them with better situational awareness and context of what they're actually But on a dollar basis, the customer is the government and the number of concurrent seats, which means you were able to come in, and I'm guessing, demolish the legacy systems and cost. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know about your personal connection to all of this and what the legacy, you know, beating the legacy systems as a SaaS company, since this is the stars of SaaS. I want to know how you beat the legacy systems and what that RFP process is like going up against an incumbent when we get back on the sweet startups. While the global pandemic has created economic uncertainty, many companies are innovating and solving problems. You know that,

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So go to our crowd.com slash twist for a free account. That's O-U-R-C-O-W-D.com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Rising Stars of Sass, episode one of 10. It's going to be a great series already. We're talking about the nuances of SaaS. But, you know, there's a lot of human components to this. I know people who are in the service of saving lives. It is always very personal. My grandfather, a firefighter, my brother a firefighter, my uncle, a cop, cousin a cop, two other cousins in, let's just say, federal law enforcement. I'll leave it at that.

So we got a Irish family filled with service in firefighting and police in law enforcement, which informs a little bit of my thinking about the world. I'll be honest. But you have a personal connection to this, Steve. You were a banker, I believe, for 20 years. You left South Africa to go to London and make some bank in banking as one does. But you had some personal tragedy, and I know that you've talked about it before. Yeah.

Not the personal tragedy of working and banking for 20 years to be clear. Well, my karma restoration project is still ongoing. So we know about that, right? And I laugh because you're so self-aware of this. And I've heard you on some other podcasts or other videos that your company has produced in my research. And I've watched you kind of lament your 20 years in banking. But this is personal for you. Let's get into it.

Yeah, I mean, like, I would also argue that the 20 years in banking kind of prepared me for this journey as well. Awesome. Well, you know, actually, in interesting ways, there were, there was parts of my journey in banking when I built my own systems and realized I could disrupt my competitors by building my own options pricing models. And suddenly knowing that, you know, number one is not always number one forever. if you have better technology, it's actually, it's a huge game changer. And, you know, when I, when I met, when I went Brett, I'd realize that. And Brett's the original founder who built the initial system. But how I got on this journey, in 06, I lost my brother to a drowning accident in Cape Town, just very near where I have my holiday house in Cape Town near where I grew up. And in 2015,

I took time out after capping a 20-year career in investment banking. I was like, I've got to go back to my roots, take my kids, get the feel of Africa under their feet. And as soon as I arrived there, I realized I now have time on my hands. And I wanted to do something to honor the men and women who had been volunteering on the National Sea Rescue Institute, which is a completely volunteer-based organization that helps offshore rescue in South Africa. So it's the equivalent to the Royal Lifeboats in the UK. I don't think there's quite an American equivalent. We don't have that.

I mean, we have lifeguards, of course. Yeah. And we have the Coast Guard. Yeah. Yeah. But we don't have a volunteer service like this. There might be on some lakes or something like that. But, you know, growing up in Cape Town, you grow up on the water and you grow up kind of like

the water is a big part of your life, correct? Is my understanding? 100%. Yeah. I mean, I grew up. I remember the first time I went to London. and I couldn't see the sea and I couldn't work out who would have a major city without an ocean. It doesn't make sense.

It doesn't computer. But also, as beautiful as the oceans are there, there is a respect you have to have for those oceans. Those oceans are particularly, I mean, historically known as the most dangerous oceans in the world coming around that cape. Is it called Cape Horn? The Cape of Storms. So it's called Cape of Storms, right? So the Cape of Good Hope was notorious for wrecking many merchant ships over the centuries. And your brother went out for a swim

and he just Yeah, he went out for There's also notorious wind in Cape Town and the sea is also frighteningly cold It looks great in photos It's Instagram friendly but like super cold And anyway, he got into some difficulty Swimming offshore

And it took a while to For that to all trickle down And get the response going And I realized He went out alone for one day for a swim Yeah, like it's where I'm in a bay nobody swims at. And, you know, they might dip their feet in, but no one tries to swim across this particular

bay unless you really know what you're doing. Right. But the point of that was, you know, I landed up back in Cape Town and I know that these men and women who are volunteers that they have to go, you know, if it's an unsuccessful rescue like it was for my brother, you can imagine just normal people have normal jobs in 9 to 5 and suddenly they have to go, you know, pull a body from the bottom of the ocean and do all that. And the kind of trauma associated with that is nothing can prepare you for, right? It is, yeah.

It's one of the life-changing experiences you can have as emergency service person the first time you get called to a call that, you know, ends in a death. And, you know, every single person you've talked to who works on an ambulance or in any volunteer or firefighter, can tell you in detail about that first time. And I could tell you mine as well. And, you know, it's, I wouldn't say it haunts me to this day, but it is something I've carried with me for 30 years of my life since I've watched somebody, you know, pass or, you know, wasn't able to, in this case, resuscitate somebody who, you know, was having a heart attack and who was very old, but, you know, did CPR on them. And it is a, it is a traumatic experience for sure. And you just think about that job, think about that work that people do, to go and try to help somebody in that

moment. It's just, it really is. It takes a tremendous fortitude as an individual. And we could expand on that and say, you know, it's unbelievable. You think about your 911, the first person you speak to when they, you know, take your 911 call. Yeah. I mean, they, they've had literally thousands of those. And only recently, just in California and now in the last few weeks, they're going to recognize as first responders before they were classified as as clerks or admin. And you can imagine this. Yeah, yeah. Which is ridiculous. I mean, the dispatchers are such a critical role in this. The dispatchers are negotiating, you know,

the, who to send, and then where to send them to, and then communicating all these services in the back end. It's, there, there are the conductor of this orchestra of services, whether to deploy a helicopter or a boat or firefighters. I mean, it is. Or talking about through CPR, right? I mean, like, it's just, it gets really hand on.

Hands on. I mean, there's, anyway, like, we're going down another rabbit hole, which I can, Not the point of the show. But I mean, just to put a note in it, I'm very sorry about your brother. And then to do something this meaningful with the rest of your life as opposed to trading options, which you are pretty self-aware of is like a video game, right? I mean, compare and contrast, waking up every day and going to work. For the audience who is wondering about what they should do with their life's purpose,

you're now in, I guess, the third half of your life like me, the importance of finding something that you wake up every day. and the passion you have for this versus maybe the level of passion you had for, you know, playing the options video game, as it were. Yeah, so, I mean, the options video game, I just wanted to win, right? I mean, that was pretty much, and you could only measure your wins and losses by your P&L, by how much money you made. And you could, one, me personally, I always say that I created nothing other than

revenue in those first 20 years of my life. Obviously, there's a lot of experience that I've garnered over the, years. But certainly, if my kids asked me what I would do for a living, I would have to tell my, you know, dad talks a lot on the telephone and gets paid. I mean, that's like the sum total of my net contribution to society. And when I went to, so I landed up volunteering at that agency in Cape Town, right? Wow. The same one that had tried to rescue your brother. The same crew and boat that are gone, I try to rescue my brother. So I literally went up to their door and I said, what do you need? Do you need money or people? They said, we need people. And I said, I volunteer.

And I started the next Saturday. Yeah, but what was more interesting is about three days after that was their first, well, it was my first monthly meeting every first Wednesday of the month. All the volunteers at that particular station got together. And there were about 20 people that had been coming there for between 20 and 30 years, like every weekend volunteering. Giving up their weekends. So these are people. people, to be clear, who are putting in their 40, 50 hours a week, and then in the small amount of time they have a wake left, they're getting on a boat to go rescue people who are drowning. Yeah.

Extraordinary. I mean, as a guy who grew up in like five different Swiss banks between London, New York, to hear people talk about volunteering their time like this was like a total moment for me in realizing that there was so much more to my life than how many toys I could accumulate. and the high score. I mean, basically you're trying to get a high score in banking. So for young people listening, do something meaningful with your life that also could result in a high score. These are not too disparate things, correct?

Well, I mean, there's two opinions I have on this. One is even when I was in banking, I would be sitting in the city of London and I'd have all these Oxford grads with a double major in, you know, physics and chemistry coming and trying to get a job on a trading floor. And even then, I would say, listen, guys, I don't care what you say to me. interview, I'm not hiring you, go, go, go, go, go fix cancer. Like, yeah, the brain drain within the financial community is just, you know, it's, it's terrible how that's kind of siphoned off the best of the best. And I think it's maybe redressed now and maybe consumer internet is having its moment taking the best of the best out of there.

But I think a mission. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, no, if you're Facebook or Google and you're printing money at the velocity, they're printing money, you literally have people who have PhDs and computer. vision, computer science, who could be literally curing cancer, like doing computer vision models or doing drug discovery models, or creating, you know, the next, you know, device used on an ambulance to save people. And instead of doing that hard work, they're going to optimize the percentage of clicks to an ad for some racist Russian paid for anti-Hillary Clinton ad. Like,

literally, that's what you're doing with your life, really? You got a graduate degree from Stanford or Harvard or MIT, and you're going to work at Facebook optimizing the ad network. Really? I mean, it's pathetic. I mean, this is why we've been able to grow like this. We moved our company to Austin in Jan 2019. And I've recruited out of IBM, Apple, like all the big guys in Austin. And that was largely because we have a mission-driven business, right?

When your mission is, I want to reduce response signs for all and improve situational awareness for first responders, it's not, I want to make sure that your eyes never leave, you know, the little black mirror in your hand. Yeah, right. So it's a very different mission. When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk about how you measure the decrease in response time and what that means in terms of people's lives when we get back on the speak startups.

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to get your $1,000 in credit right now. Welcome back to the Rising Stars of SAS, brought to you by our partners. Thanks to our partners. You heard me read their ads. If you heard me read their ads, probably SaaS companies, and they're probably worthy of you typing in that special slash twist or whatever it is URL and using their product. Seriously, if you're a fan of the show, go go visit those URLs and let them know if you buy the product that your uncle Jason sent you from this week in startup. It's really, it's really amazing. I mean, we've sold out this podcast now for the last five or six years. And, you know, it's great to have the support of all these sponsors to be able to tell these stories two, three, four days a week sometimes.

And today's story is no difference. Rapid Deploy is the name of Steve's company. And you can go visit them at rapid deploy.com, R-A-P-I-D-E-P-L-O-Y.com. Based in Austin, as you just mentioned, you're a South African. The company was founded in South Africa. You're co-founder who built it,

who's a tech whiz. And you chose to place it in Austin back in 2016, in 2017 time period. Is that correct? Well, I decided in 2017 when I went to Austin for the first time. It's like, if we ever raise our Series A and we ever get serious about America, this is where we're going to be. And why? I mean, most people would say, coming from South Africa,

hey, Elon went to Palo Alto, David Sachs, went to Palo Alto. They all wound up in the Bay Area. You chose Austin. Why? I mean, the city, the whole. What Peter the city resonated with me. I've seen America. I've lived here before. And Austin, it was my first journey to Austin.

And I think the combination of the energy of the city, the can-do business attitude, the amount of talent specifically around customer success and SaaS enterprise businesses was pretty phenomenal. And I wouldn't be competing for salaries, you know, with the salary scale of the Bay Area, which is notorious. Yeah. Texas is also a huge public safety state, and it's also the base of our biggest distributor and reseller, which is AT&T.

So a lot of good reasons to be in the state of good state of Texas. And what is it like for you on a cultural basis as a South African? I do see that my South African friends are a bit, I think the reason I vibe and get along with a lot of South Africans is they're a bit rough and tumble, perhaps, is the word? A bit self-reliant comes to mind. A bit of an edge there. Am I accurate? It's also why I think I vibe with Australians.

I mean, no offense to people from London, but I'm not saying people from the UK are me compared to South Africans and Australians, but the Africans and Australians seem a lot like Texans to me or people from Brooklyn, I'll be honest. Right, yeah. A little bit of a tough edge there. We've got, I think a tough edge of very, very strong work ethic. In fact, when I moved to London in the 90s, people recruiting specifically for South African and Australians because we were known to outwork anyone else in London back in the mid-90s.

And also, I mean, Texas has got a very similar culture, South Africa, right? It's focused around outdoor living, good living, beer, barbecue, water sports. The barbecue is pretty much the beginning and the end for me. I mean, let's just get to it. Franklin's Brisket or La Barbecue? Franklin's. You go Franklin's. I go Franklins if you can tolerate the lawn.

I go to the barbecue. I get there at 1030. Yeah. With my boy, Brian Alvey, like when we go to South, when we go to South by Southwest, we literally don't go to the conference. We go. We go to the barbecue at 1030 because I think they open at 1030 11. And we're the first people there.

There's like six or seven people. And what you do is you have an early dinner and then we work out at night or something, or we work out in the morning, and then we go right there. And we skip breakfast, we have brunch. Oh, my Lord, the beef ribs there. Just tremendous. Just tremendous. I mean, I think that's, it's definitely on my top 10 lists of places to live after

the Bay Area. If California does fall off into the sea, that's definitely, Austin just seemed to be on my short list right now. And it's been growing 4% a year. though a lot of people talk about it getting crowded, it's still not crowded. No, I mean, I think the version of traffic in Austin and the version of traffic, I spent almost 20 years living in London. It's not comparable. Right. So people talk about traffic. Like, yeah, right. Were you one of those bankers who had the congestion pricing, you know, like easy pass on your car and you drove into the district?

Yeah, the congestion charge was, you know, they hit you for $20 a day to drive into the, to work. I mean, it's just unbelievable. Just so people around the world understand this, and they were going to bring it to Manhattan, and New Yorkers didn't want to have any of it. Bloomberg was trying to, I think, get this through because if you're a billionaire, who cares about an incremental 20 bucks a day, and I'm hearing Washington, D.C. has one. But if you go into the central corridor in London, you get hit with a 20 pound or a $20? I mean, back in the day, it was roughly equated to about $20 a day. So you still had to park for $40 a day

or have a parking space for $500 a day at your banking office and you would drive from Notting Hill or Surrey, I don't know, where were you in London? Yeah, I was in Queens Park near Notting Hill but I mean, look, the first two months You drive 45 minutes, 10 miles and then pay $60 for the privilege. But it's like anything in a major city the first two months the traffic dropped off

and then everybody said, okay, now I've now got an extra $3,000 a year tax and you just eat it and you life is a lot. as normal, right? Yeah. It's pretty crazy when you think about it, though. What a great incentive, though. I really think that's like one of the missing pieces here with global warming is not

incentivizing people properly. Because when they did that $20 thing, it did reduce congestion or no? For about three months. And then everybody just... All right. So at least the city made enough money to put more money into public transport or something. When we look at the system and we look at time, the time. the time to get to a location needs to be compressed.

Putting aside rapid deploy and your fine company and building a SaaS-based solution, which is so obvious. I mean, congratulations on the success. I know you guys have really hit like some really big clients. The industry, when you go to industry conferences and they talk about the time, what is the, you know, a city, a suburb, the footprint of time, and then how do they compress that time? Because it would seem through AI and machine learning and having this data, which has been, let's face it, I believe all of the analysis is done by universities or people collecting information about emergency services and then writing some research report five years later. But given what you know, you could say on Saturdays or the first Tuesdays of every month or these time periods, 7 to 9 p.m. from 9 to 10.30, we have all these. emergencies and it's like we don't know why and it's like oh that correlates with the football game or the basketball game and everybody getting out and getting drunk and falling over and cracking their skull

you could literally smartly deploy the way uber does um the placement of assets i.e. ambulances police cars etc. Are we up to that point where we're intelligently placing the assets because something like a heart attack the the difference in minutes or an acute asthma attack which is really that was always a scary one for us. When we heard somebody was having an allergic reaction to a bee sting or an asthma attack, man, that was scary because the clock is ticking on a heart attack, but the clock on somebody who's having an asthma attack, I mean, they're just going to, no air, no life, period. I mean, end of story. And so talk about that. So we've had case studies done in South Africa. We've been operating for much longer. And to have an empirical case study,

we want a lot of data, right? And in, South Africa with our customers, we've reduced their response time by over 35%, which is massive, right? 35%. So you took a 15 minute response time to 10 or a 10 to 6 or 7. Something like that, yeah. That is extraordinary. And what is that based on? When you break that down, how does that occur, that reduction?

There's a number of things you can do. All these tiny incremental changes, which add up to something big, right? So whether you're embedding turn-by-turn navigation directly with the in their terminal or their smartphone. We operate on like Samsung and iOS, no problem. So it's not just, you know, it doesn't have to be a laptop, right? We wanted to solve for the lowest common denominator. And being able to actually let the machine control everything about that location,

no human error, you spoke about, you know, writing things in a pen and paper. I mean, that's why Brett, my co-founder, got the original idea for this platform. He was a paramedic, volunteer in Cape Town and, like, writing, posted, for the dispatch address and then trying to open his phone and type it in. And this is pretty much the most common thing. If you go to any major center around America and you go hang out with the fire trucks, you'll see that most of the guys, if they're running older technology, which most of them are, they probably are using their personal cell phone to type in the details and get routing

on their personal cell to get to see. Unbelievable. Yeah, most of the legacy systems that are in place today in America and in responding. agencies have as the crow flies navigation. So they literally say, oh, you're only 10 minutes away from, you know, let's say, Houston to Midtown, right? Because it's just drawing a straight line as opposed to, you know, calculating live traffic.

So we put in like live traffic, ETAs, you know, offer different routes, offer all the kind of things. Again, the consumer, most consumers have more tech in their hands than the people that are saying out to save their lines. And that is, that's nuts. So that's what we're trying to fix. Yeah, it does seem like we did not place the headquarters of EMS and fire departments intelligently. They are legacy based, especially in an old city.

So if you're in Londontown or you're in New York or Italy and somewhere in Rome, you know, the fire department may have been situated 100 years ago or 200 years ago and has not moved since. And the density could be completely different. what really has to occur, and this has not occurred yet, and this is another one of my ideas that I want to give to you, so you can bring them up with your next conference. Certainly somebody must have thought about this, but micro-em-slocations and a more distributed approach would certainly work. This happens now. It does? Yeah, you get staging locations, right?

So you know, on your Saturday night, my agency needs to have ambulances distributed around the city in case. get called. The same way you see tow truck operators always hang around those on ramps where they know there's going to be an accident. They're doing that in a non-scientific way. They're doing it based upon intuition and like, hey, yeah, you know, I've been at this for a while. We should have somebody here. They're not doing that strategically with your software yet in the, in real time. Well, I'll say that there are, again, this is the problem with public safety technology that we discovered. We thought we're solving an African problem. It turns out it's a worldwide problem, but incredibly prevalent in the United States

is that there are custom systems to solve some of these issues that none of the systems are really well integrated into each other. And this is a function not only of legacy, let's say, analog tech, but it's also a function of the old school business model is about charging for every integration, right?

Because if you're an old school legacy software provider, you're dropping all your stuff on-prem and then everything is like a custom integration work, whereas if we run one code base for the whole of America or globally, every time I do an integration, every one of my customers can use it so there's no need to charge for integrations, which is the game change. We think how many systems need to interoperate in public safety. And there shouldn't be a charge for that.

This is where the incentives do matter. How much cheaper is your system than the legacy ones? We didn't get to that question, but since this is the, you know, for SaaS entrepreneurs this series. How did you determine your pricing and then how does it look versus the legacy competitors just on a yearly basis or over a decade? I mean, the total cost of ownership over a five-year contract is roughly 50% ownership. Wow. In other words, they could have it for 10 years for the price of five. Yeah. And not only that, what we can't obviously model out and obviously I've modeled and the beauty of being in public safety is all your competitors pricing are available to

freedom of information request so I can see every response. Well, that's kind of good when you're developing a pricing strategy. You can just completely undercut them. Right. But it's not just designed to undercut it's designed to actually be efficient and leverage the same funding mechanism that my customers are using to get paid to be able to pay for their software. Right.

And then as new technology filters into the system, whereas my competitors would think that's a services business and charging for that, you know, we believe that business shouldn't exist. We believe that data should be free, especially when it comes down to the monetizer, you know, not monetizing the incremental improvements we can add by connecting all these pieces. This is really the power of SaaS. I explain this to everybody when, you know, I do the Squarespace ad for this podcast is I've watched Squarespace. They've been an advertiser on this podcast, I think, for six or seven of the 10 years. It might be the longest continuous sponsor of the podcast and definitely in the top three or four in terms of the amount of support.

they started they were the beautiful website company then they added blogging and they were the beautiful website company that had blogging and so okay that was like okay well there was WordPress over here and Squarespace added like the blogging component well then they added the e-commerce component and then they added SEO and analytics so it's like oh you could get Google analytics you could get a blogging piece of software you could get an e-commerce platform or you can just get Squarespace it has all of them and the price stayed the same so when you buy into and the same with Slack right now like Slack You can just buy Slack once and it just gets better and better. You don't charge for every new feature.

You add those new features as a way to getting people addicted. The same thing is happening in Tesla. I don't know. I'm assuming you drive a Tesla. Yeah. Which one? You have the Model X. Model 3.

I'm not a big hitter like you. Am I just got a Y? I know. I just traded my 3 in for the Y. How amazing is the Y? I mean, I think my wife would kill me if I just swap cars. I just. It is interesting.

Like I was Anyway, I was talking to a friend about this And I was just saying how much better I thought the Y was than the three And my friend was like, no, no, the three is a really A great car. I was like, I don't know, I feel like the Y just feels even better.

It feels like 20% better to me. The three is an amazing car. But if any friend of mine said, should I pick the three or the Y, I would say the Y because it's so cavernous. It's like gigantic inside. When you're in the back seat, you could like,

I could put suit. cases under my kids' feet and they would never touch them. Like, it's gigantic how big it is inside. Yeah, I've only seen it. I saw when I was traveling across America recently and, I mean, it looks good. You drove your three across America? No, no, I drove an RV across America, but I am. Nice.

What an experience. Yeah, it was good for the kids and the wife to see America. But the, yeah, I think the test is I had a friend of mine who had an X and a three. And I was looking at the X when I was moving to America, and he said, and the friend of mine, he has a McLaren, an X and a three. And it was like, the three is the best car I've ever owned. And I used to be, you know. It's true.

It's true. And I used to be, again, a fancy investment back in the day, collective cars and all that other nonsense that comes to me. Well, you're a Ferrari guy or you more of like a Bentley and Maserati guy? You can be honest. I prefer the Maseroy. Which ones have you owned? I've owned a Maserati. Yeah.

Feels like a Maserati. got me. Yeah. But the point is the three is the best car ever. It's better than a Maserati. I mean, it literally drives incredible. It's, it is such a wonderful car. But I don't know if you've had this experience where all of a sudden you looked at the century mode and they're like, oh, by the way, the century mode now. Oh, we have an in-dash viewer. And it's essentially like I bought the Al camera to put on my dashboard of my minivan to have like security and to know where that car was all the time. And it's like, oh, Tesla just built in a dash cam. You don't have to buy a dash cam. It comes with a dash cam. You're done.

Not only does it come, but a dash cam. It comes with four dash cams because it's recording the front, the back, and the two sides. But the point of that is relating this back to SaaS. Yeah. It's a SaaS product, yeah. Right. But there's somebody, I think somebody tweeted Elon going, when I honk, why doesn't your camera record? And he was like, that's a great idea, right?

And then it's in the next release. And that's pretty much how we're doing 911 to same way. Yeah. Yes. If domestic violence send SMS to save lives. So brilliant. such a brilliant little genius move. I just had the founder of the app,

what's the app that has all the 911 calls in it? Oh, God. Citizen, thank you, producer Nick. Citizen on the phone. Citizen now, when there is in, they've taken the consumer aggregated video streams, etc. citizen on their phone, but they don't have like an offering for the sergeant's front desk.

It seems to me that that's going to be the ultimate future is when five citizens are taking a video of something. Have you talked to the citizen folks about putting a feed of citizen and correlating that with 911 calls? I, not directly. I can introduce you to the founder. I mean, I think that this is the most important thing you could do with your product is if a 911 call comes in on Main Street and, you know, on Market and Sixth, which is where

the WeWorker used to work out of. I didn't pick that. One of my employees picked it for some god-awful reason. But I mean, it's literally like the corner of, you know, like I think they're safer corner. It's, it probably would be in the top 10 most dangerous corners in the world. But Turk and Golden Gate, like literally one of the most dangerous places of the planet, like downtown Baghdad, probably safer at this point. Like, most interesting. sections in Afghanistan are safer. This is like one of the most dangerous places in the world. And if somebody pops up a video from Citizen and then I called from the same location,

it would be amazing if in the dashboard the dispatcher saw citizen calls within one block of this and then could click on them and open them in a second monitor. And you must remember, so what we've tried to do here is no matter how popular an app is, right, you're actually changing user behavior. So we've seen this, we've seen like, you know, there's been all kinds of reactions to panic button apps over the years, especially in places like the United States where 9-1 is of the very developed system.

And so if you think about the way we try interact with the caller and ingest the real-time video and pull in the location off their device, we're trying to do all of this without them changing their programmed user behavior of like, you know, X many years, right? I don't, I don't disagree that citizen-based information is valuable. But there's also, we're coming to this interesting place within public safety right now, where we have myriad signals coming into a 911 center.

You know, we've just announced we're going to be visualizing on-star crash telematics in 911, you know, that's going to be coming up in the not-due. being like the dash cam. So if an on store goes off, you would turn the dash camera on. So you could see what happened. If GM's OnStar division sends a call to 911, all the telematics data around that would be available for the,

for the telecommunicator. So you can imagine, you know, seatbelts deployed versus, you know, pressure sensors, oh, the front right inside passenger wasn't wearing a seatbelt, but there was someone in the car. And it had a, you know, 3G impact and rolled twice. We'll know that. Right. And then it's how you take that information, put that through a model, understand what kind of response you need.

So this car at a 40 mile an hour, 3G impact, send two ambulances and a jaws of life. That's where you start pulling all these myriad signals together. That's going to be a game changer. Because think about that. Now you've sent the right tools to the right place. That is one of the big faults in the system is you send the wrong tool to the wrong place. I mean, the big unlock for the, for lowering fatality rates has been the dual dispatching of the fire department and EMS to heart attacks and having all firefighters do that. And that was like this big controversy and turf war in and of itself.

But this is a great one. Hey, yeah, this is, this is a major impact accident, send the draws of life. But are you saying you might think the citizen data is not clean or it's too much or that? or that maybe the 9-11 system doesn't want that kind of citizen participation. I heard a little bit of kind of an undertone there. I mean, I watched that podcast. It sounds like they're trying to replace 911. So I'm not sure if there's a strategic move not to interact with 911.

Would you agree with that premise that like that citizen should be, there should be like more citizen community people are responding because it I agree the citizen folks are definitely on that you know very very controversial um let's send these Jedi Knights let's send these folks from the community to deal with an emergency based on what you know do you think that's a smart idea um I think vintillantism is a huge problem like it really is and I've seen it everywhere. And I think, I don't know where you draw the line. I don't know from a corporate liability point of view, other than having a Yula that some just clicked on and all those risks are obviated. I don't know how you really get past that as a private company,

right? I remember in South Africa, there were a huge amount of panic button manufacturers who try and create an iPhone app or an Android app for a panic button for a private security company. and I would just say to the private security company, so when you don't have a god to respond, like who's culpable? And it's like, oh, well, then we just don't have a god. It's like, well, the person you've now trained to hit your panic button, you know, wants to know that you have an SLA, right,

that someone's coming. And the beauty of public safety is, you know, the government system is put there in place. It is your safety net, whether you like it or not. Yeah. Whether you agree with, you know, public safety at large, like those are the people

are going to save your life and they don't have a choice whether they're on a break or didn't come to work. I mean, people will arrive. And that's, I think,

I think that's really maybe not very well thought out in the long-term plan there because, you know, you come from a family of service. The same thing that hit me with the first time I went to that volunteer meeting

is something that I experienced. every, like every time I go see a customer, I'm so overwhelmed by the people that work in these centers and in these responding agencies have literally, like, decided that the mission is greater than their personal gain, right? Are they putting themselves at risk, listening to the worst day of everyone's life on a phone for a 12-hour shift? Whatever kind of job there is within the public safety universe, that's 911 call, take an EMS, you know, fire, police, in other kind of areas.

all of those people are like, are saying the job is before me and quite often before their family, right? Yeah. When they're rolling, they're not thinking of their family. They're thinking of how they're going to do their job. You really can't. I mean, that was the thing, you know, like I was counseled on was, listen, it's okay to have these emotions about the calls. That's human. You got to be able to do the job.

So when we show up to that car accident and you see people hanging upside down in their seatbelts and there's a kid in the child seat hanging upside. hanging upside down. Like, yeah, it's really scary. And yeah, it's really disturbing. You got to get that kid out of that seat. You got to get them out of that car before it lights on fire or whatever could happen.

And so there is definitely a naivete, I think, to the, let's have a bunch of citizens rush to, and maybe I should have brought that up with the founder a little bit more. But there is definitely an inherent danger to people showing up at an emergency situation and escalating it. As you're saying, there could be vigilanteism.

there could be group think, which is, you know, mob mentality can get very out of hand very quickly. And these situations are pretty, I mean, I think you guys have a term for it, which is situational awareness. And we were trained when we were on the ambulance, like, you have to be safe first. So when you get into that situation, first make sure you're safe. If there is a gun involved or, you know, you're being called to somebody being stepped and the person with the knife is still there. You need to stay back and wait for the police. to arrive and get that person with the knife or the gun out of there. You can't, we can't have an ambulance crew get shot or stabbed next.

Right. So this is kind of the point, right? So in that other conversation, I remember them saying, we don't broadcast suicide or domestic violence calls. But so that's okay. So they can broadcast bank robbery in progress, right? You've got 20 people on bicycles trying to stop a guy with an assault rifle. I don't know.

It just doesn't sound like I'd want my kids, you know, responding. There definitely needs to be some thought about this because, as you said before, there's a lot of freedom of information act information here. But when you add real time to it, you know, in the review mirror to know that there were, you know, it's a bank robbery is one thing or even an hour later. But to know that, I mean, in some case, and in all cases, citizens are going to arrive before the emergency workers. We used to have these people.

I think they called them squids when I was in New York. It was a derogatory term of them because they just would sit there. But there were people who had radios. who would overnight, they'd be just drinking coffee. It was almost like this weird, like proud boys, kind of like people's militias. They would drive Crown Vicks that they had bought in auctions, like old police cars.

They would drive them to police scenes and just sit there and drink coffee. And they were like, who are you? And nobody, I just wanted to take some pictures and be here and get that rush of going to an emergency situation. And I would always say, like, who's that guy? Is that marked, is that like a marked NYPD or is that like some other agency? And no, no, that's just a squid. I was asking, why would they do this?

And they were like, yeah, these are mentally disturbed people, was the feeling. These were mentally disturbed people who wanted to just go to exciting scenes because they had nothing else going on in their lives. If we maybe pivot a little bit and just and think about like situational awareness in today, you know, today and 20 or 10, even five years ago, It was very different, right? Like now you have live traffic, you have hyperlocal weather, you have CCTV over every city that you can, as a law enforcement agency, be able to tap into a large part of that. I'm not saying you need to run AI cross-ac because I know that's hugely controversial

or a bunch of AI bias and things like that. But just even eyes on, like, what are my six-neur-c-t CCTV cameras near the side, the same way you'd want to know what are your sixth-neur-firing. hydrants and what kind of traffic am I rolling into? What's the best way to route me? Right? Yeah. I mean, in fairness to citizen, they do tell you, the point of the app is also for you to avoid

it. So there is that for every idiot who runs to an emergency situation, there's 999 people who run the other direction. So I think net net, they're probably are keeping people safer. But I want to touch on that CCTV thing. You came from London where you have the highest percentage of CCTV in the Western world. it might even be higher than the penetration in authoritarian countries, to be honest. And, you know, citizen does say, like, avoid this area like right now.

So I think they're trying to get ahead of that. But it seems to me, we have crazy left cities in America. I live near one of them, San Francisco or in the area, surrounding area, where they literally need CCTV more than anybody. They need facial recognition more than anybody. and they've literally preemptively banned it. They tried to pass a bill, and I think producer Nick will look it up

while we're talking. I think they preemptively, a couple of cities, and they are like far left, crazy cities that are poorly run with incredible crime. They are preemptively banning CCTV. As somebody who works in this field and who lived in the hub of it,

pretty great to have a camera everywhere in a major city that was previously filled with crime, correct? You've got to be 100% for CZTV, personally. Personally, I am, and I think... Are you for AI, facial recognition? So, and this is interesting, right? This is where it gets muddy, right? Because AI can detect a long gun,

that can detect a handgun drawn, I can detect a car accident, I can do all these kinds of wonderful things. Sure. And there's some things that AI is. and good at it. You know, Jason, the way that you train AI, you showed like, you know, millions of pictures ago, this is what you're looking at.

Yeah. Right. So, is AI good enough at differentiating, you know, different races of people and actually identifying a subject? And this is, I think, where it comes down to is that AI still, when it comes to diversity, has not tackled the diversity issue. And I suspect that's probably what is the main driver of, of, of, um, of, um, of, um, of, um, gating AI out of, you know, a city like San Francisco. I mean, I'm not, I'm not a law enforcement

guy. I'm like a public safety guy. Like, I want the best outcome for, for the citizen and the first responder and the 911 call tag. Like, I want everybody to have a great outcome. Would I, if I was running a city, just outright ban a technology because it wasn't there yet? No, I would put it through trials and make them get hurdles. Yeah, that seems logical. Yeah. Like, this ban seems to me to be virtual signaling. San Francisco, here it is from the New York Times, San Francisco, long at the heart of technological revolution, took a stand against potential abuse on Tuesday by banning the use of facial erection to suffer by the police

and other agencies, the action which came in an eight to one vote by the insane border of supervisors. I put the word insane there myself. Make San Francisco the first major American city to block a tool that many police forces are turning to in search for both small-time crime suspects and perpetrators of mass carnage, banned in 2019.

I mean, I can help you follow a car across the city. You can do all kinds of very interesting. interesting things. It seems to me, like, if you do think that the facial recognition could be deployed and be biased in some way, that would be any reasonable person would be concerned about that, 100 people would be concerned about that. So very simple. In cases of uses for facial recognition, you need to have a supervisor has to run it. There is an audit trail. And if you want to use it for some police thing, you have to get a warrant and you go to a judge. Very simple. But the fact is, You know, and another way I think that this should be deployed is if the crime rate in a city is below a certain percentage, maybe you, the technology is not widely available.

If there is an acute situation, i.e. murder rate is above this percentage, crime rate is above this percentage or in this neighborhood. Maybe when the crime, maybe not by neighborhood. That could be also biased. I'm thinking it's throughout loud. But maybe if the crime rate in an overall city was high, then you could deploy the technology, you know, at more scale. But man, it would be amazing if you could actually not just track the car that did the bank robbery, but if somebody beat somebody up and you have that on tape and you're able to reasonably try to identify that person or some kid was kidnapped. I mean, these people are crazy. If a child was kidnapped, if one of their children was kidnapped, their position on this would change immediately. Yeah, I mean, immediately. they have no, this is virtue signaling at its goddamn worst.

If one of their children, God forbid, was kidnapped, they would be 100% of this existing for all time in all cities. Hypocrats. Let's frame it like this, that I want, as a person living in the United States or anywhere, that I want my kids to be safe and, you know, God forbid anything should happen, I would like everyone to have the best tools of their disposal. But on the other side, I understand how there's been a knee-jerk reaction to this technology. And actually, I think it's incumbent upon the companies that build this technology.

And I'm talking about it. We go all the way up to sort of Microsoft cognitive services and AWS on their side, who have snap-in tools that do a whole bunch of these analytics. That's for these large companies to actually work through these. issues with an AI ethics board to actually define what a good algorithm is for using, and I'm going to say algorithm like decision tree for using this technology. Yeah. And look, I, as someone who's been advocating, I don't have told you this, Jason,

but when I came to America in June 2017 with Rapid Deploy for the first time of the first conference, I had most of the biggest names in the industry. I'm talking about, you know, vendors come up to my one-man booth and tell me to go back to Africa because we don't do 911 in the cloud. Like verbatim, right? Wow. Go back to Africa. Literally, that was the quote.

And could have been a much more career-ending quote if you were from South Africa. Right. I mean, that's an insane quote to say to anybody. I had that said to me by salesmen of one of the biggest companies in America in my space. People are insane. Right. But what you can take out of that is. The cloud. The cloud is the power of this.

Well, this is what we're trying to get to here. I mean, there are still today, and you spoke about RFPs, and we're talking about SaaS, and you're talking about, like, flipping to enterprise, not consumer. So for the benefit of the audience who is in consumer tech, and RFP is a procurement process. Request for a proposal. There we go. Yeah. And within this, this is how most business is done today within government space, certainly

enterprise space as well for large procurements. And even today, like, you know, not far from where I live is a large agency who just put on RFP saying must be on premise. Right. Crazy. And so you will always have an agency or any kind of political body maybe who doesn't advocate for the technology that you have. And that's, you know, that's the beauty of a democracy. and I'm not advocating for being mandated to cloud-based solutions because you want happy customers, you don't people force to buy your technology if I want your technology.

Yeah, I mean, the price and the feature set are going to be the thing that win it for you over time. But if you think about the security of on-prem, because you're going to have so many people on the cloud, you will have such vigilance across one set of servers that having 100, servers or a thousand servers around the country, they're just not going to have the vigilance on every server to keep them all up to date, to keep, can you all monitor. These servers get put in a

closet. Nobody looks at them for four years. They never get updated. And by the way, somebody can walk into the goddamn closet and take the goddamn server. Like, literally, you're not, you don't even know where Amazon Web Services is. And to get into Amazon Web Services, it would be harder to get into an Amazon Web Services cloud location and still a rack. To even find it would be impossible. possible, but to steal that rack would be harder than to break into a fire department, ambulance department, or city building, or even a police department with guns, it would be harder to get into the Amazon Web Services. Right.

So you think about cyber, right? Yeah. So we use Microsoft as Gov, which it literally cages their data center inside a cage, right? So I mean, and then there's, and then everybody who's access there is, see, just approved, fingerprinted like criminal justice, FBI. Can you have background check? Background, the whole shooting match.

Yeah, who's cleaning the garbage is in the local police precinct? You can be fairly certain it's going to be like a random person who is not in the background check. Let's get the benefit of the doubt and assume this is actually in a secure backroom

within a police department or nine-on-one center. Even then, the argument remains, who has more budget to defend your threat vectors? You and your guy with the machine under the stairs or Microsoft in their $2 billion a year, you know, cyber program. With a lot more at stake, by the way. The bad press for Azure, or Amazon Web Services or Rackspace or IBM's Cloud, whoever's cloud it is, the bad press makes it for for a hack of a 911 system would put them on Megatilt to have unlimited resources on that because it's the tip of the spear for them.

Listen, I wish you continued success. You've been very generous with your time and with your candidness during this program. and it's just great to know that there are people out there building software like this that will save us. Tech will save us. That's the hashtag I want you to put on this podcast. Hashtag tech will save us.

I know it's unpopular. I know everybody thinks tech will not save us. I believe that capitalists and entrepreneurs, especially our brothers and sisters from Australia and South Africa, those hardcore Brooklyn-style entrepreneurs who are just going to win at all costs. They're not going to fail. They're going to succeed in the mission.

They got that grit like you do. It's fantastic. It's great for America and the planet. That American entrepreneurialism and this platform win, right? And you need to win. And it's a noble mission and you have a very personal connection to it. So again, Contolence is on your brother. But I'm sure he's looking down at the work you're doing and the amount of life extension

that will occur because of what you've done and the heart. hard work you put into this. Sincerely, his legacy will be, you know, a thousand or 10,000 of his lives saved because of your motivation. So in that way, I think it's, you know, just beautiful for you to be doing this on behalf of your brother's legacy. Thank you. I mean, that's, I mean, I know that we're out of time here.

But when I first saw the system, even in its infancy, we had processed 15,000 incidents. And if 1% of 1% had saved lives, it's like, oh, my God, if we can scale this, this is what I want to devote my life to. So yeah, you get the nail on the head, very observant. If you're, and I appreciate you talking about, it's a hard thing to talk about. If you're looking for a job and you want to live in a great city, that's functional. And as a pro-entrepreneurialism and capitalism bent, here's a free commercial for the people of Austin. You didn't ask for it.

But Austin seems to be a kick-ass place to build a company, as opposed to the Bay Area and San Francisco specifically, which is doing everything it can. this horrible, horrible leadership, both in California and specifically acutely in San Francisco. You guys and gals are a disaster. You should be ashamed at yourself. And you're driving some of the great founders out of this amazing state. California, the best state in the union, and you're destroying it. How do you sleep at night, government officials? You're just literally driving everybody out of this great state with your ineptitude and ridiculous policies. But congratulations, Austin on winning the most, the greatest test, and also Colorado and Arizona and Florida and Nashville. Congratulations on being. The views expressed this podcast are not mine. These are my views.

Yes. Your views are your views. My views are my views. And we'll see you all next time of this week. It's startups. If you need a job, go work in Austin at Rapid Deploy and do something meaningful with your life. Quit. Google. Quit working at Facebook, specifically Facebook. I mean, seriously, working there, get your head examined. If you're smart and you're working at Facebook, seriously, how do you sleep at night? Go work at rapid deploy.com. All right. Thanks, Steve. And look forward to getting some barbecue with you at La Barbecue or Franklin's. Frankly, I think, frankly, we should go to Franklens and the barbecue. We should do it two day. We go. We do two brisket. Boom. We do a brisket run. Breakfast brisket, lunch brisket. We'll deal with the lines and we'll

live stream it. All right. We'll settle it. Yeah, we'll settle. Okay, Stephen. Thank you so much. We'll see you all next time on the swing and service. Bye-bye. Thank you.