Full Transcript – David Selinger – Wild Business Growth Podcast #209

This is the full transcript for Episode #209 of the Wild Business Growth Podcast featuring David Selinger – Security Solver, Co-Founder of Deep Sentinel. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Selly 0:00
When you’re doing something that nobody else believes you can do, there’s a very fine line between total insanity and genius.

Max Branstetter 0:24
Hello, you genius. Welcome back to the Wild Business Growth Podcast. This is your place to hear from a new entrepreneur every single Wednesday morning who’s turning Wild ideas into Wild growth. I’m your host, Max Branstetter, Founder and Podcast Producer at MaxPodcasting. And you can email me at to save time with your high-quality podcast. This is episode 2090 If you eliminate the second zero, so episode 209. And today’s guest is David “Selly: Selinger That’s David Selinger goes by Selly hell of a nickname, Selly of a nickname. And he is a serial entrepreneur who’s the Co-founder of Deep Sentinel, Redfin, as well as RichRelevance and advisor to many, many other companies. And he was a very early employee in the grand scheme of things at Amazon. So he’s got some crazy lessons from working directly with Jeff Bezos. And Deep Sentinel is super cool in itself. It is a home security system that is absolutely changing the game. It uses both AI as well as real life human monitoring. And in any industry. It’s crazy, doing something that nobody else is doing, but especially in home security, when so much is at stake. In this interview, we also talk about the red fin story, what went well, what went not well, and Selly’s lessons on managing your time and managing your sleep, which I would argue are a little bit important. It is Selly. Enjoy the shooooooooooow!

All righty, we are here. And we are Selly-brating because today we have Selly – David Selinger, serial entrepreneur, Co-founder and involved with some companies you may have heard of over the years. But Selly, thank you so much for joining How you doing today.

Selly 2:29
Excited to be here. I wish I brought my soundboard because it has that grown button. So when you do the media, the puns like you just kind of get the entire audio

Max Branstetter 2:37
Ah, perfect. Well, we will, we will edit in that grown sound that you made? I think that will become a sound effect.

Selly 2:47
I can make my own sound boards now. Is that what you’re saying?

Max Branstetter 2:50
Yeah, exactly. The technology is crazy these days. But yeah, well, we’re going to talk a lot about your your entrepreneurial journey and some of the latest stuff you’re up to. But before that, you were in the I think as many people would consider these days, the very early stages of Amazon, you’re pretty involved played a big part there. Did you have any idea at the time, just how like crazy colossal out of this world out of this universe big Amazon would get one day?

Selly 3:19
know I mean, the stock price was like 42 bucks. And you know, my employees that asked me frequently like, Hey, should I sell? And my answer to them was always, you know, do what your heart tells you. Right? Like, if you don’t keep some, then you’ll probably end up regretting that later. And if it tanks, because at the time, I mean, the Wall Street Journal, look at Amazon had just been public a little while, while the journal was constantly running a story saying, you know, well, Amazon go out of business this quarter or next, right, those are the two options A or B. And so people you know, we’re getting paid, right? 30 40% of your compensation was in stock. If you don’t sell and the company goes out of business, you know, then you’d have regrets there. So kind of a regret minimization mode. Listen to what you think’s gonna happen. But you know, I mean, the stock has grown, I think 100 fold or a couple times over since then. So, you know, my my advice to my employees wasn’t super good, for sure. But financially but you know, it definitely wasn’t something that was kind of fait accompli that it was obvious Amazon was going to become a behemoth not not by a long stretch.

Max Branstetter 4:22
It’s hard to I don’t think the numbers were invented back then. In the 90s of how big it’s gotten. I think that’s it’s crazy to think about and how it’s an obviously like the service offers is off the charts if you’d have told people you know, 30 years ago they can get pretty much anything they want within a day or within hours. It’s It’s It’s crazy to comprehend but also the crazy to comprehend is this this guy will call him Jeff B and by that. Shout out my uncle Jeff Branstetter. But I’m talking about a different Jeff Bezos, so you worked pretty closely with Bezos. And so yet interesting dynamic there. When did you first meet him?

Selly 5:03
Oh 2002 is when I met him. So I wasn’t there at the in the days where it was like 20 people. And they they used to have an office like right across the street from a, an adult entertainment venue in downtown Seattle. I was not part of that crew, they’d already had 1000 or so corporate employees by the time I joined. And we still had door desks desk made out of a door from Home Depot, and things like that. So it’s still pretty early days. But it wasn’t it wasn’t quite, you know, 97 Jeff and, and his family in the very risky office space. So you know what, when I met him, though, he was still very much that stars in his eyes, looking at the world as his oyster. Everything as possibility one of the mantras of Amazon culture to this day is that it’s still day one. And the view was that the size of the change brought about by interconnectivity is so big that it will it will subsume and change all of the elements of how we interact with each other all of the elements of how we interact with the atoms of the world around us. And to always embrace that change instead of fighting it that tomorrow is going to bring even more change than today. And so if you hold on to what you hold is true today, all you’re going to do is miss the opportunities of tomorrow. I would say you know, obviously, he’s no longer the CEO at Amazon. And he’s, he’s stepped down. And he’s now a world class, multi billionaire, vies boats that require cities to be shut down. I believe there was a story like last week where he bought this yacht or commission this yacht, and was got into a fight with a local city because he wanted to dismantle this 500 year old bridge in order to move his his super yacht through the tent. I mean, that was definitely not the Jeff Bezos that did it right. It was much more us against the world and the world was big, bad guy. Whereas, you know, the world’s kind of pitching him now as you know, Jeff’s kind of the big fat guy. And the world’s just this little thing in the world of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk being the definers of the universe. So I think that’s another element, though that’s changed too is this concept of celebrity CEOs. There really wasn’t a celebrity CEO thing like that wasn’t a, in a social phenomenon in any of its of its ways, like the idea of Tony Stark, being this kind of wild and free CEO that was very far afield from reality. And so now I think that’s become very, very common, right? Like Elon Musk has a Twitter feed that he publishes what like 25 tweets a day, 99% of which are rude and risque and un-pc. And that was, again, just a very, very different part of the world. And so the backdoor view of working with Jeff was so different from the public persona, whereas now I think we’re so close to those, those personas of these public figures. It was really eye opening to me that how boisterous and energetic and positive and engaged he was in the business, because from the outside, it looks like kind of the stodgy CEO. And he would show up and you know, in regular closed every meeting and just be like, Let’s go at it, let’s go do this. Let’s solve this problem together. And it wasn’t about like, Hey, I’m the CEO of this big multibillion dollar company, it was about, here’s the problem. Here’s the problems. Go get it. Let’s go get as we get it, you know, do you have the answer? Because if you don’t, let’s figure it out. Right now.

Max Branstetter 8:34
As you’re talking about Tony Stark, I’m thinking Bruce Wayne had an incredible business career as well. There’s a lot of a lot of comic book heroes that have come out of that. But yeah, social media hands down, I think has been a huge impact on this whole, you know, quote, unquote, celebrity CEOs at Amazon is there. What’s the biggest lesson that you learn from kind of just the culture and your experience there that you keep close to your heart to this day, and whatever business venture you’re on at the time?

Selly 9:01
Yeah, I mean, actually, I think that’s probably one of the things that I like to reflect on, just to make sure I’m capturing the right piece of information from that. I’ll tell you what it is right now. And what it’s been for the last few years has been the culture Jeff created. By being constantly obsessed with data. And demanding data to support decisions demanding data to understand arguments, demanding data to get broader context on problems. Everything that you brought to him would result in a question or an answer based on data, and that that consistent behavior from the CEO trickled into the company and created a culture that was reflective of that obsessive behavior from Jeff. And there’s the amazingly positive side He chose something that was at the forefront, he chose the right thing to create a culture around, which was, instead of making these stupid decisions based on title and pay, and org structure, it doesn’t matter if you’re the most lonely person in the company, if you have the right data and reach the right conclusion and ask the right questions, you’re the right person. And you saw people rocket ship in their careers through Amazon because of that. And that was something that you couldn’t stop at any level of the organization below him because he was so consistent in driving to that. And I love that I love that lesson, I think has a negative side of it, which is that if you have a CEO who’s obsessed with the wrong things, right, surrounding themselves with people that make them feel good, or surrounding themselves with people that confirm their suspicions, right through surrounding themselves by people that are going to manipulate a situation or manipulate facts, that that is an in equally unstoppable train. And so I’m always very sensitive to what are the things that I am consistently responding with.

Max Branstetter 11:09
So that is why they call you Segue Selly, and cue the groan noise. We’re gonna get to some more q&a In addition to the data q&a Or data q&a. I will never till the day I die, be able to pronounce data correctly to please everybody, or data. But let’s get to a business that you kind of birthed while still at Amazon. And Redfin, which it I mean flash fast, fast forward. That’s a tongue twister. I mean, red fins everywhere these days. Like I had a friend recently who, you know, bought a house in California and like what he sent, you know, he didn’t send me the Zillow or any information about he sent me directly the Redfin like, huge company. Super cool that you early part in that. How did Redfin come about, even while you were still in Amazon? Yeah. So

Selly 12:01
when I was at Amazon, I started thinking about buying a house. And I was looking at properties in an area in Seattle called Capitol Hill, which is kind of an up and up and coming neighborhood now, back then it was still in the the year of kind of safety and things like that, you could definitely go the wrong direction. Let me let me put it that way. In terms of the piece of property you bought, I had this particularly poignant moment where I was looking at it at a property that was trash. It was a property where, when you went downstairs, the individual bedrooms had letters on the doors, because they had let out each of the rooms as if there were their own apartment yet heating pads and, and sleeping bags on the floor. In case you’re not able to read between the hints of my line, it was a meth house. Okay. So subtlety I’m not so good at the subtlety game. So let me let me go straight to the problem. But it was a good price, right. And I sat down with my real estate agent. And it was a guy that had been introduced to by a friend who I went drinking with on Thursdays and Fridays, and they were like, I meet meet Eric. He’s great. So I met him. And so we sit down and we had a we had a beer, and I brought my buddy with me from Amazon. And Eric, let’s call him is sitting in front of us, giving me the full nine yards why I should buy this house. And it was priced a little bit below market, but not a lot. Like definitely not meth house discount, you did did not get the full meth house discount. It was like a call a 30% of a meth house discount. But it had, it was like called 10% off on market. This guy was like, Look, this price is everyone’s just amazing. And you’ll be able to do this and this with it. And again, if you’ve never been involved in real estate, the specific things that were happening in this home made it very difficult to further develop because of the chemicals that were you know, in the home. And so I after he left my buddy and I sat there like, this guy’s an idiot, this guy is like 100% Wrong, according to every single, like, just buy the house next door, pay 10% more and not have all these problems with it. And as I started researching, how did he get paid, and I found out he had dropped out of high school and had never had a long term successful point in his career. And I was like, oh my god, here’s this guy giving me advice on an $800,000 investment for me and my family and my buddy who we’re gonna go into on it together. And he has no idea what he’s talking about. The only thing that he had that he brought to the table was this thing called the MLS, which is the former sales in the neighborhood and he was constantly say, this is 10% less per square foot than all the other MLS listings. 10% less per square foot and I was like, What is this that? And I realized that real estate was a game dominated by people that people had had access to a set of data. That, frankly, is public record, right? You know, prior home sales is available, and has been available for dozens of years at your county level, but that his entire value proposition to me was I have access to this data set. I’m not more intelligent, analyzing it. I’m not looking at the situation objectively and Frank, in fact, frankly, not only do I not have your best interests at heart, I only get paid if you read a check for 800,000 bucks. And then I make 25 grand, and I never have to deal with you again. But that’s his entire motivation. I was like, I hate this guy. This is this is the worst person I’ve ever met in my life. But yet here he is advising me on the largest financial transaction in my life. And so I became really Pat like that guy. Changed my life. Thank you very much,

Max Branstetter 15:48
Mr. Eric. And now in hindsight, you love that guy that’s like best. He’s a real peach.

Selly 15:53
Yeah. You know, give me if you’re listening out there. Let me let me send you a bottle of Perrier-Jouet or something like that. And the next little bit here, but yeah, I mean, it was, it was abysmal, how poor all of his advice was, in fact, maybe right? Like if it hadn’t been quite so obviously wrong, I might not have gotten the message. And I might have just kind of cruise through this. But it was so bad that, that my friend Russell, and I just looked at this, this is so broken, we got to do something. And we ended up finding people that were really motivated about the problem, they’d already started working on the problem. They had no technology. And I put together this great team of technologists who kind of like me, and just made enough money at Amazon and Microsoft and the early tech scene in Seattle, that we all learn this lesson, and we’re super motivated about it. And so we spent nights and weekends from like 8pm till 4am In the morning, for I want to say like eight or nine months every single day, building out Redfin. And as one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever worked on, you know, if for no other reason than to get a group of like six or seven guys together, it was all guys unfortunately the time but six or seven guys together every night for eight months between 8pm and whether it was 1am when you left or 4am. It was just an enthralling experience kind of pushing the limits of your physical abilities.

Max Branstetter 17:16
I don’t like to do two part questions. But this you had an interesting we’ll call an exit from this company. So there’s two angles I want to hit here. First of all is Why do you think Redfin is so successful today? What went wrong with your connection to the company that you are no longer with Redfin today?

Selly 17:36
Yeah, sure. So So I mean, you know, why do I think it’s successful is really easy. Since day one, the culture was an obsession about user experience. And you know, the word user experience is in the tech world. And even for you know, if you’ve got kids, your kids probably say, like, tick tock is the extreme about users. But what are their features? What are they? What What is it useful for? But it’s just so fun right here. Yeah, there’s like multi billion dollar company, just based on this really, really great user experience. That was just not a thing in 2004 2005 when we launched Redfin. And in fact, when we were pitching venture capitalists to invest in the company, they were like, no user experience will never matter. That’s not That’s not a business model. And you know, look at all of the massive multibillion dollar companies, whether it is you know, tick tock, Instagram, Facebook. I mean, for god’s sake, Facebook Meta just spent $10 billion dollars on the metaverse and that’s entirely user experience, right like that. There is it is nothing but user experience. And so that that early commitment and transformation to the fact that users in a world where data is available to everyone where software is becoming closer and closer to free, where the things that we pay for are becoming commoditized. The thing that differentiates them is the content and the experience. And that has been the thesis of Redfin. And the reason you got a link to Redfin, whether your friend bought their home using Redfin or not, it’s still the best experience meaning that Redfin as they dial up their user experience. And they continue to focus there when they start turning on features that monetize. The customers are very comfortable moving into the monetization phases of Redfin, because they’ve trusted that experience for a long period of time. That thesis was on day one of the company. And, you know, we talked a little bit about the culture and commitment of the company, and that comes from the CEO and in every possible way, when we brought in a new CEO, we made sure that that was the that was the core focus is getting Glenn Kelman, who’s still the CEO today, and a phenomenal one, and that has persisted. And I think that knowing that one thing that makes you different that one thing that you’re committed to that is going to be your driving force is has been great, you know, in terms of me and my I learning’s. I mean, there’s like the 20 minute version of the story. And there’s the one minute version of the story. I’ll give you the one minute version, which is that there were three founders, myself, Michael Dougherty and David Eraker. And David, by far is like one of the smartest, like just most passionate and driven individuals I’ve ever met. And I think that’s one of the things that makes for a great transformational CEO, because you’re doing something that everyone else is saying you can’t do. Right? That’s, that’s what Elon Musk does. That’s what Jeff Bezos did. That’s what Bill Gates did. That’s what to a certain degree Mark Zuckerberg did. And when you’re doing something that nobody else believes you can do, there’s a very fine line between total insanity and genius. And the line is really, really small, it’s very, very gray. And if you’re joining a company, and you don’t agree with the other person where that line is, that will bite you eventually defer me my lesson as the CEO from there was that we ultimately ended up where we had a team of, of, I think, 18, full time employees one day, and the next day, we had zero other than David. And he just didn’t agree with the rest of us on what that meant. And you know, in a lot of senses, I say, congratulations to you for sticking with what you believe with believing. And for me, the lesson was, hey, don’t join another company unless you 100% agree on where that line is. And, and then secondly, as I’ve transitioned my career since then, to being a CEO, one of the things I very much enforce with my direct reports is, here’s where my line is, I’ll listen to you and I will hear you, and maybe my line will move. And I commit to you to always listen to you. And I will, if you bring me data that suggests I should move it, I probably will. And I do. And that’s that’s something that is really important. But the thing that you might have heard that I think is really important is I’m always very transparent about where it is. Because if it’s fuzzy, and you think my line should be here, and I think it should be here, and we’ve had the debate, and it’s here, it’s here, like, you can’t play in this middle ground and pretend that you’re right. Because at the end of the day, I’m the CEO, and I have the responsibility to make sure we’re all marching to what that tune is. And so again, in that regard, I very much respected its decisions at that at that time. But I think it was a bad outcome for you know, for the company at that at that particular moment. And you know, it this happens more frequently than I think people are aware like, we’re founders just completely have Fallout, you know, if you look at the number of people that put “Facebook Co-Founder” on their, their LinkedIn profile, it’s a lot of people.

Max Branstetter 22:36
It’s on my LinkedIn profile actually.

Selly 22:40
Well, it actually grows very frankly,

Max Branstetter 22:43
I was a late adopter to even using it. So I don’t think I could claim that

Selly 22:46
I was invited to be the seventh employee at Facebook. And I the reason I didn’t join Facebook is because in my first conversations with Mark, it became really clear like we, we did not agree on a lot of stuff. And maybe it would be healthy, and we could figure that out. But like, if he’s the CEO, and I disagree with him, I’m going to end up kind of out on my rear. And that’s not necessarily where I want to be, you know, and so I ended up not not making that decision to kind of pursue that. But it was definitely a very harsh lesson that, that and then when I looked around, and I saw how frequently that happens, it’s something that I carry with me very, very closely to say, at the very least, I carry the responsibility, I carry the accountability, to be very crystal clear about what’s in and what’s out. And if there’s something gray, me leaving something gray is a disservice to everyone in the company, because that’s gonna lead to a power struggle, right? And power struggles are fundamentally an unnecessary stress and reason for losing people that I own 100% that divvying up of power inside of the company.

Max Branstetter 23:53
So let’s get deeper to Deep Sentinel. Which is your newest baby. And I think it’s amazing what’s happening in the world of what would you call it private home security. These days, there’s been so much innovation over the past over the past over the past decade, especially. And Deep Sentinel, you you’ve created in a running a company that is very unique in this space. What drew you into security slash surveillance in the first place as a business idea?

Selly 24:28
My attraction is actually interestingly enough, is the exact opposite of what I recommend to most people. My interest in this was driven by technology, I saw a technology transition in about 2014 that machine learning and artificial intelligence which have just a history of of decades, decades and decades and decades of like, massively over promise and under deliver, had actually turned the page into the hey, we’re gonna do something very, very meaningful and real here. And you know, I mean, the experience that I had is in the in the 90s, right there was this thing called multi layer perceptron networks, neural networks that were going to pass the Turing test. And they were going to be able to predict and evoke emotions from you and trick you into thinking that there were humans. And for those of you that were not alive between 1995 and 2010, here’s the summary. That did not happen, right. And it not only did it not happen, we didn’t even come close, right? Like, we invented sound cards so that your computer could actually make realistic sounding sound, really, we invented the internet. So you go shopping on the internet and buying more stuff. But we definitely did not create computers that you know, even sounded a little bit like a human being. And then in 2014, this type of machine learning called Deep Learning got invented. And it was very, very focused on solving a few really key problems number one, voice and speech recognition, and speech synthesis, number two, image recognition, video analysis, things like that. And then number three is gameplay, interplay between systems. And in all of those three things, the size of the technology leap was like more than 10x, Bolt 10x, better 10x cheaper, 10x faster. Just everything leapt. And and so I committed myself to that technology. And I spent some time trying to figure out what were the areas that I thought were going to really change. And in parallel while I was doing this technical research, call it about two years that I spent doing research on the technology building my own neural networks. My first AI that I built using this technology played Super Mario World. Super Mario Bros. 1 actually, technically, that’s actually

Max Branstetter 26:39
that’s, I can’t imagine starting any other way than that. That’s perfect.

Selly 26:42
It is that. And that’s how deep central started. So I could have just answered that question with with the little blurb. But that would have been too funny for you. So I have no such thing. I apparently, and so I was doing this research, I was working with some of my friends who were in venture capital at the time. And my neighbor had a home invasion. And and we were really scared. I mean, as a neighborhood, I live in a in a very safe and you know, reasonably well to do neighborhood. It was a scary type home invasion. And we looked at what was available at that this woman’s house and she had cameras, she had really high on cameras, she had an alarm system. She had everything that the police would recommend at the time. And so we asked the police officer, like, why did this still happen? And he said, Well, what did you think any of those things we’re going to do? Yes, maybe that’s as good as you can get. But what did you think an alarm system was going to do? It wasn’t armed she was home? Yep, silence inserted silence here. That’s not That’s not breaking the podcast? That was the answer. Nothing. What did you think the cameras were gonna do? We have the video from the cameras. Did you think they were gonna like jump out and stop the crime? And everyone was like, kind of? Yeah, yes. Could they do that? And you know, voila, right? There’s the moment where I was like, hey, could they do that? That would be great. If cameras could stop crime, then we could take advantage of the fact that everybody’s installing cameras, and then and then stop crime. And so I started a company to do that. That’s what the channel does. We use AI. And we deploy cameras, where we have like, 20,000 or so cameras out there and we stop crimes all day long every day. That’s what we do.

Max Branstetter 28:24
So how does it like if you research Deep Sentinel, it clearly one of the most unique things about your company is that you offer Oh, my god, I almost said human trafficking. I would that would have been terrible to have PR thing for you. Human monitoring, from surveillance standpoint,

Selly 28:40
how much you charge for human trafficking? Is that expensive? Or is that? Is that a that’s a free offering? It’s like an add on security and business security and human trafficking.

Max Branstetter 28:50
Exactly. It’s, you know, the possibilities are endless. Sorry. But you offer monitoring by by real humans. It’s not just, you know, the cameras that are not going to stop anything. Like it’s real humans. It’s real people that have the ability to interject there. But where? So there’s the human piece. Where does AI play into the mix? How’s that work together?

Selly 29:11
Yeah. So if you think about it, so what you just said is, right, so when you come to my house, if you start trying to break into my home, you’re gonna hear within 10 seconds, hey, this is deep central security I see you, I need you to stop the police are on their way. That message has three really important things. The first thing is it’s within 10 seconds, it has to be super fast. If you can reach a criminal before they’re really far into a crime, the most likely outcomes are just going to leave. Number two is that it’s a human voice speaking to you, they’re not going to let go they don’t go away. It’s not a recording. And if you do not leave, then you know, it’s a live person which actually changes the psychology of a criminal. Most criminals don’t want to get caught. And the third thing is they say the police are on the way and you know what, the police are on their way. And the reason that we get police responses so quickly is because unlike a burglar alarm, I mentioned that with my friend who had the almondy Even if the burglar alarm had gone off, it would say, hey, this family has an open window. Right? So ADT calls the Pleasanton Police Department. Hey, Pleasanton Police Department, there’s an open window at 123 Main Street. All right, cool. Hey, I’ll just go and send my window closing service over there. Because that’s what the police department does. We close people’s windows, you know, 99% of the calls from ADT are false alarms. When we call, there’s a masked man about six feet tall, his name’s Max, he’s breaking into Mr. Salinger’s house, he’s got a crowbar. And here’s his description. That’s what police departments were designed to do. And a human being is really at the core of doing all three of those things, intervene, quick, intervene with with true human being level of interaction, and then contact the police and describe the situation describe the crime. That’s what police departments are good at, the AI comes into the into the mix that if you were to pay someone to sit and watch cameras for your house, that would cost 1000s of dollars a month. What the AI does is it helps us do that incredibly efficiently. And really, really effectively. So that we can get the economies of scale where an average small to medium business owner can afford this, we’re talking a couple $100 A month versus 10s of 1000s of dollars a month for a patrol guard or live person to sit and watch a video for you 24/7

Max Branstetter 31:21
You left out that this criminal you know, scary guy named Max was incredibly good-looking, as well. So I did leave that out, didn’t it? Yeah, you did. Very unintentional, I’m sure. But this is becoming more and more crowded space. You know, it’s home security and privacy. And I mean, I remember growing up, you know, it was before, like ring, and you know, these first ones to use cameras, to you know, it was just like, the systems that when the front door would open, it would just beep like I think that was kind of all it was back then. But now it’s become even though there’s so many options, it’s so crowded as as a business how you’ve been able so far to break through and, and have people switch from some of the other competitors to you.

Selly 32:02
Yeah, I mean, actually, if anything, I think those guys that really paved the way for us, thank goodness, you know, you mentioned privacy, they’ve paved the way in terms of privacy policies and people’s understanding of what what privacy expectations should be. The second thing they’ve done, you know, you mentioned the beeps, right? Like, you want me to sit here on on your podcast and tell you what having a ring camera sounds ludicrous. Be be be it for 4050 times a day, right? Like that’s, that’s a sweet way to spend my day. The second thing that a lot of people have have experienced, especially business owners, right. And this last four years, we’ve seen a massive shift in the kind of overall climate of crime. It’s just an observation about where we’re at as a society. And you have cities like Denver, in Denver, Colorado, you have a one in 20 chance, 5% chance that in the next 365 days, someone is going to break a window in your car and steal stuff out of it. One in 20 in the entire city is ridiculous, right? And these types of crimes. It’s not necessarily by the way, breaking into your home or assaulting you. But these types of property crimes, trespassing, vandalism, homelessness, they’re so massively increased their well on what’s called an exponential curve, right. And if you paid attention during high school math, you know that that curve is not a line, it’s not a straight line. It’s it’s a curve that goes up into the right it’s, it’s so big things like package that catalytic converter that that the FBI has had to qualify their statistics on it, meaning for the last six years or so, you know, the FBI reports that there were 25 million smash and grabs in the United States for the last risk. This is the number of reported ones where police had enough resources to go on site and verify a report which if you’ve called the police in the last two years, you know, they probably are not going to show up to take a report. They just don’t have the time or energy to do it. That has really paved the way because if you own a ring or you own an ester, you own Arlo cameras or you own Lorax that you bought at Costco, you know for a fact that having a video of three mass guys coming up to your electrical shop, stealing $25,000 of copper cable and then leaving does exactly nothing to prevent that from happening. It does nothing for the police, because they can’t do anything with that those three masks guys look just like the other three masks guys that have broken into 25 other places in the last three weeks. There’s nothing happening. And that kind of awareness was the same moment that I had. Right? That was the moment I had with my neighbor where we said Hey, Why didn’t these cameras stop the people from breaking in and doing this home a visual because they don’t do that? Right? And so that competitive market if anything, has really really paved the way I mean our conversion rate when people hear about deep Sentinel, hey, I’ve got a car lot and I have a catalytic converters every week. Can you stop that? Yes, I can. How much does that cost? You know between 1000 to $5,000 upfront and then a few 100 bucks a month. Sweet, that’s costing me 3000 to $5,000 a month, I’m instantly ROI positive, we have a close rate of like 40 to 50%. In the first 30 days of somebody hearing about deep cycle,

Max Branstetter 35:16
what’s the biggest thing that you have had to do differently as a CEO with Deep Sentinel vs. your previous runs?

Selly 35:23
Oh man, Deep Sentinel’s definitely a more complex business, which I think again, has its positives and its negatives. We’re building our own hardware we’re integrating with third party hardware we are. So we support if you have ONVIF cameras on your property that are standards based, we can integrate with those, we have to integrate with lots of different manufacturers and brands, we have, instead of having kind of a typical software company has really kind of three departments sales and marketing, software engineering, and then customer support and operations. So those are kind of like your three divisions that split up differently, and whatever. I also have hardware manufacturing, in inventory, and my security operations. So instead of having three departments reporting to me as a CEO, I’ve got to manage and coordinate five fully functional departments. And that’s, that’s something that I think is underrated in terms of how much more complex that was. The second thing that I’ve had to deal with is COVID. You know, not not, not for me, but as a business, we launched in the third or fourth quarter of 2019. And we were like full steam ahead, were spending $300,000 $400,000 A month sometimes on marketing. And what I want you to envision here, I’m gonna use a lot of visuals here is a freight train with 100 cars on it, adding more cars behind it and going faster. And then there’s a wall called March of 2020. And you don’t see this wall until March of 2020. And then you hit it going full steam ahead, adding more and more and more to it. That was very, very disruptive to our business. And and so we had to adjust everything, you know, going going to a full work from home model, how do you manufacture hardware in that type of environment? How do we manage inventory? Again, how do I manage instead of three departments, five departments in that type of ecosystem, it was a very, very big deal. And so the even if you’ve been around the rodeo two or three times, it’s never easy, right? And that’s why entrepreneurship. So kind of exciting and interesting is, even if you’ve done something else, I’ve never run a business like this, I’ve never run a business as hardware integration. And I’ve certainly never run a business through a global pandemic transition that gave me all of two weeks notice.

Max Branstetter 37:41
It certainly keeps you on your toes. That’s I’ve heard a lot of analogies about the past couple of years, but never with the train that keeps growing and growing and then strain to a brick wall. That’s that what that one hurts on an extra level. And you just might feel like you’re hitting a brick wall with your podcasting endeavors. If that is the case, let’s bust through that brick wall. You can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com and sign up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter, that is your key to unlocking your podcasting and taking loads and loads of time off your plate. Speaking of time, Selly knows time management extremely well. Same as sleep management. So let’s get to a little bit that will make you a little bit more timely and a little bit more sleepy, or sleepier, as the kids say, let’s switch gears a little bit, let’s get to more you as a person and as a CEO or a business leader. So I know that you have over the years taken a very clever look at kind of how you spend your time and how you how you treat yourself and shoutout Parks and Rec Treat Yo Self. But let’s start. Let’s start with time. So how do you approach your time and how you spend it each week as a CEO of a company that, as you mentioned, has so much momentum past the brick wall?

Selly 39:05
Yeah, I mean, as a lot of momentum has a lot of dynamism, right. And so there are probably two or three things that I would say are my personal tenants about time. The first one is that time is the single most important commodity that I allocate, and that we allocate as a company on an ongoing basis. And so because of that I measure my time really, really specifically and very consistently. I make sure that the way that I allocate my time on a weekly basis reflects what I believe are the strategic and operational priorities of the company. Those are those are big, buzzwords what I mean by that. Right now I have a gap, let’s say in my customer care organization. If my time allocation says I’m spending one hour with customer care and 25 hours with sales, I have a mismatch between my belief of what’s important With the company, and how I’m spending my time, and that doesn’t necessarily need to be one to one, it doesn’t need mean that, you know, sales goes down to one hour, and customer care goes up to 25. But what it does mean is that I need to make sure that it’s it’s closer to reflecting the specific things that need to be done to, to to move the needle for the for the business. So if I’m at 10 hours in Customer Care, and five hours in sales, that’s much closer. And it’s not a precise science. And it’s not something you can measure on a one week basis. It has to be really at a principled level as to be ongoing. I do it every single week. I do it every single month, and I do it every single quarter. And I do it using those kind of time units, both forward looking and backwards looking. Meaning I have to also be really honest with myself about Did I do the wrong thing last month? Hey, I now know what happened last, but I miss my sales numbers by 15%. Did I allocate my time correctly? No. All right, when could I figure that out here? Okay, cool. Let’s look at the calendar. How can I change my time allocation? Oh, my God, I spent 30 hours over the next three weeks on this one stupid thing. I should have been better about that. And that just brutal honesty, that’s where Bezos comes in. That’s data. All of that that I just mentioned, especially when you’re looking backwards is data and if you are so attached to having to be right, which I think again, is one of things I learned from from Jeff was, you don’t have to be right, in the backwards looking rearview mirror. You have to be right tomorrow. You can’t control whether you are right yesterday. So stop fighting about and stop trying to defend it. So I’m trying to, you know, come up with a justification for your stupid reason you did something yesterday. That’s a waste of time. Look at it, were you Right? Or were you wrong? And what are you going to do tomorrow about? So that’s number one. The second thing about time is I tried to be really, really clear and crystal clear with myself with my future me about how I want to allocate my time. And I do that I’m a little bit funky in this. In that I kind of talk about future me as if it were kind of another person, I learned this from a buddy of mine named Nathan Eagle. In, in college. He’s the he’s like a super famous dude. Apparently, he’s a professor at MIT now and all this other stuff. But, you know, I knew him as the blonde surfer dude. And he always used to refer to the future me as someone who kind of abused. Yeah, future me can take care of that fisheries enough to deal with the fact that I drink too much tonight, you know. And so I always I love that analogy. And so I treat future me a little bit differently, though. And I want to make sure that I can tell future me what to do. And future me is going to want to do that because it’s the right thing. And so I’m allocating time into tomorrow, I’m assigning tasks. And tomorrow, tomorrow and in the next couple days, very explicitly reflecting again, that that kind of view that I have, of what should I be doing differently based on what I learned from the past. And then the third thing is I have really, really anal retentive tools, those are diverse notebook where I keep track of my to do list, it’s a specific size, it’s an eight and a half by five inch notebook. And it’s that size, because I can’t have a to do list that’s 50 lines long, because it’s just not big enough, which is a great thing. Because if you have a to do list, it’s that long, you’re not going to get it done, right, like big hit. And the second thing about it is that it’s it’s organized by time. So every two to three days, I rewrite my to do list. So if I’m rewriting the same item numerous times, it means again, hint hint, future use probably not going to do this one and so do future you a favor, stop asking future you to do this, and ask someone either delegate it or decide you’re not going to do it, or plan around it not getting done. But don’t keep pretending that future us going to do this do do that. I don’t know quasi weird multi multiple personality disorder service of solving the problem now. And then the third thing I do again, is I use that as part of my data in terms of my backwards looking did I have other things that I was lying to myself about getting done that maybe weren’t that high priority? And I shouldn’t have had them on the list the whole time.

Max Branstetter 44:07
Future Me is gonna love that answer man that’s sweet man.

Selly 44:12
I look forward to meeting Future You

Max Branstetter 44:14
my future self does as well. And then you also there’s there’s the time piece and then there’s also I know you’re a huge fan of sleep and kind of taken a recently taken a greater look at sleep and what it means for productivity and just overall health. Just to keep it short and sweet and sleepy. What is something anybody can do to sleep better at night?

Selly 44:41
Wow, um, I think the easiest one is start going to sleep at a consistent time and stop drinking caffeine at before noon. So my my one liner I have is no caffeine after 12:15 And so I don’t I don’t let myself have About a Diet Coke or a coffee or a tea or anything after 12:15 which is brutal because I used to be a three coffee a day person, one in the morning, one right after lunch, kind of like all Europeans, right you have an espresso after lunch, and then one in the afternoon when I would hit my my crash, and I allow myself to have zero coffee after 12:15 in the afternoon.

Max Branstetter 45:26
Well, let’s energetically wrap this thing up. Let’s get to some Rapid-Fire Q&A.

Selly 45:29
You ready for it? I will. I’m gonna get all the best tangents in my mind right now so that I can make this as difficult as possible for you.

Max Branstetter 45:36
Let’s go. Perfect future me is shaking his head. But let’s get Wild! Where’s the coolest place you’ve ever been mountain biking?

Selly 45:46
Hawaii, I did the Powerline Trail from the north end of Kauai to the south end of school i i did it on a date it was 98 degrees and it just rained which meant the the mud was like super slick. But it was so gorgeous. Really bad idea. Do that with a group don’t do it right after it rains. Amazing.

Max Branstetter 46:04
I have so many questions involving safety and fun and all sorts of stuff. But anyway, Star Wars if you were cast in a remake of some Star Wars movie that’s probably already been remade if you were to be cast in a Star Wars movie, what character would you love to play?

Selly 46:24
Okay to so in Rogue 1 K-2SO is like the epitome of ironic and just constant sarcasm I believe K-2SO’s very first line. This is the humanoid drone that saves Jyn Erso. So his first line is congratulations you’ve been rescued. Do not resist it’s any any just like beat the crap out of the star of the movie. Okay to so is awesome.

Max Branstetter 46:54
Perfect. I enjoyed that movie, but I did not remember the name. So thank you, I’ll look for you in the remake. What is a column weird talents, but it’s really just something you’re really really good at. But it could be about anything and has no impact on your job whatsoever.

Selly 47:08
I can wiggle my ears and I can wiggle them individually both my right ear and my left ear separately.

Max Branstetter 47:15
Amazing, perfect. All right. And then I saw you studied when you were at Stanford, you studied Robotics. What’s something you learned from from that research that really like got you super excited about robots besides Star Wars?

Selly 47:31
So my field of Robotics was Haptics, which is like force feedback that’s under Xbox controller that vibrates in specific ways and things like that.

Max Branstetter 47:39
I knew I heard that term before. I think I’ve only seen in relation to Xbox controllers.

Selly 47:43
It that’s kind of the typical place you hear about it. It’s making its way into VR. I’m sure you know, Facebook’s probably spent, you know, $5 or $6 billion on some haptic stuff. But it’s actually shown in Ready Player One, he buys the suit. That’s called a haptic suit in reading the one where he the girl touches him, and he’s like, kind of Yeah. turned on by

Max Branstetter 48:04
for another podcast. Yeah. Doesn’t know what this is why we’re rated Explicit. Anyway.

Selly 48:09
That’s right. So so haptics, what I loved about haptics was I learned about the way that the brain interprets specific sensory input. So like, for example, the tips of your fingers, not only can you feel sensation, you feel sensation at a specific level of sensitivity that’s different than sensitivity on the back of your hand. And it’s also measured at a different frequency than other things. So you can hear at incredibly high frequency, you see an incredibly high frequency. But however, your fingers actually only feel it like between 60 and 80 Hertz. And so you can actually recreate a feeling without actually creating the feeling because you can synthesize it, by making something that feels at only in your brain when your brain interprets the symbols, as if it were something which is just blew my mind that you can actually kind of hack the brain using these physical inputs from around your body to make it feel like something’s happening, which is how if you go to Disneyland, or you go to Universal Studios, they have the virtual rides, where you feel like your fault you’re not falling you’re in a in a freakin stationary thing. But they figured out how to hack your brain to make it feel like you’re falling. And I love that I think that is one of the most amazing things you can do is to create a sensation of something that’s not actually happening.

Max Branstetter 49:27
That is crazy. That’s I feel like I’m on drugs just from you explaining that. Speaking of last one, Seattle, you were you were there. I don’t know what the official years are for like the Seattle tech boom, but you were definitely there and a big part of it, as well as just personally, I’m a huge fan of, you know, the grunge music and like the bands that came out of Seattle around that time a little bit earlier, but what was your favorite part about being in Seattle like in in that timeframe?

Selly 49:59
I It’s not as much of a timeframe thing, but it’s a little thing about my life that I don’t think I’ve ever talked about publicly. So I used to live at a an apartment building called Harbor Steps. And I moved there because they had a swimming pool. And I just like having a swimming pool in Seattle is kind of hard because it’s cold there for a good chunk of the year, like only like 95% of it. The thing that I actually took advantage of the most was, the Seattle Art Museum is across the street from Harbor steps. I was literally across the street from one of the best museums in the world. And my favorite artists is van Gogh. And during my time period there, they had an off list exhibition of a bunch of pieces of van Gogh’s art, especially pencil and pen. Most people are familiar with his like colored paintings, almost, I want to say 70% of van Gogh’s art is in black and white. And he used to write letters to his brother Theo and say, I, you know, I’m not worthy of doing things like oh, he was a very, like, self effacing, not confident individual. And so his letters are actually really annoying to read. But the art that he created during this period is just fantastic. So I would go every single day for about 100. And I think 180 days in a row, I went to the Seattle Art Museum and just went to that exhibit and sat in front of each of the paintings, and I just absolutely adore van Gogh.

Max Branstetter 51:21
He was absolutely incredible. And this year, you’ll probably hate me and sign off right away for this. But you went from your weird talent about your ears to van Gogh. So that was a very beautiful segue. But no, but absolutely legendary. Selly, thank you so much. This has been really fantastic. Speaking with you and learning from you. Just so cool. All you’ve done and all you’re up to with Deep Sentinel, where is the best place for people to learn about Deep Sentinel, as well as if they want to follow you on social?

Selly 51:52
Yeah, sure. So the two places that send people would be to the Deep Sentinel YouTube channel, just go to YouTube and search for Deep Sentinel, we’ve got tons and tons of videos, if you like Cops, and you like people getting caught in the act, you will love this station. It is just people trying to vandalize people trying to break in and people assaulting people and just getting stopped. It’s called our stopped line. And that’s what we do. We’re the only company that does it. And I couldn’t be more proud of that. If you want to follow me professionally, the best place to go is go on LinkedIn. You can follow me there, I publish security best practices, I publish advice on business and I publish it you know, not things necessarily about like the Seattle Art Museum, but you know little tidbits here and there. And, and I tend to be a very aggressively data driven middle of the road. And I’m very disappointed with everybody around us. And so if you share that view, you’ll see that every once in a while as well.

Max Branstetter 52:44
It’s so disappointing. And I really appreciate it last thing, final thoughts stages yours, it could be a quote, it could be a line it could be, it could be a quote from Star Wars, who cares, send us home here.

Selly 52:54
In the last 8 years of my career, the most important thing I’ve learned is to pray prioritize my family without compromising my career. And that exercise is so incredibly dumb. And again, like COVID, and in California, we were worked from home, you know, segregated for a year and a half or so. And it is amazing how meaningful it is to know that when I am for example with my children, that my phone doesn’t have a place in that environment, and that I can give my kids 100% of my attention. Now that may only be for an hour a day. But the act of segregating that time, makes it my number one priority. If I’m trying to mix in time with my family, in the middle of work, and then I’m constantly answering emails and things like that, I find that my family feels like they’re number two. And if your family feels like they’re #2 then they are #2, and the ability to make sure that when you’re with them, even if I work 12 hours/day when I’m with my family, I am 100% with my family

Max Branstetter 54:10
You are #1. Thank you so much, Selly for coming on the podcast celebrating your heart out sharing your amazing stories from the worlds of entrepreneurship, and art museums. And thank you Wild Listeners for tuning in to another episode. If you want to hear more Wild stories like this one, make sure to follow the Wild Business Growth Podcast on your favorite app and tell a friend about the podcast and then check out some Deep Sentinel “Stopped” videos because it is it’s it’s Cops revamped. It’s amazing. You can also find us on Goodpods where they’re a fantastic podcast and podcast recommendations and people and for any help with podcast production, you can learn more at MaxPodcasting.com and sign up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter. Until next time, let your business Run Wild – Bbring on the Bongos!