From Directly Working with Jeff Bezos to an Explosive Growth Company of His Own with David Selinger

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. We're talking with David Sellinger. Hey David, how are you doing?

I'm doing very well.

And you're talking today from what part of the universe?

I live in East Bay, Pleasanton, California.

Okay. And glad to have you with us today. Appreciate you taking the time. And is that very far from Silicon Valley? Is that where you have.

So we're in what's called the Tri Valley. It's just on the other side of the San Francisco Bay from the Silicon Valley proper. But there's a huge tech community out here. You see Facebook and Google buses all day long.

Hopefully the real estate prices are a little bit better on that side of the ridge.

I would not go so far, maybe a little bit better. But it's been interesting as the pandemic set. And actually a lot of tech workers wanted to move and get outside of kind of the really constrained part of Silicon Valley and have slightly larger homes and kind of nicer neighborhoods. And so we had this massive upsurge in real estate prices during the pandemic. Our neighborhood probably grew by about 75% over the last two years in terms of value.

So a little bit. What happened to destroy the affordability of living in Montana? Everybody from California moved out there.

We tend to try to destroy everything we touch. I grew up in a little town in Oregon and there was nothing worse you could say to another kid on the first day of school than I'm from California.

And now you are one.

Now I live here. I don't know about that. But yeah, yeah, I'm part of the problem, that's for sure.

Yeah, to the outside world, you're part of the problem. Anyway, David, give me, let us all know about your background, which you've had a really fortunate exposure to a lot of high powered growth and high powered people and high powered success. And so talk about where that kicked off with you and Amazon, Jeff Bezos and that.

Yeah, so like I said, I grew up in a little town in Oregon. It's a town called Merlin. I mean, beautiful place to grow up, but there you go. And I still have lots of friends that live in that area. But then I got a chance to go to Stanford. I studied artificial intelligence there. My first big kind of well known company that I worked at was Amazon. I ran the applied artificial intelligence and machine learning Division there's called Customer Behavior Research. I worked directly with Jeff for much of my time there, met with him almost on a weekly basis to get that department off the ground. Then I started a company called Redfin, which is a real estate and online real estate company. Was really the first of its kind to think about how do you take technology and apply it to real estate. They're now a publicly traded company worth a few billion dollars. They do, Gosh, almost. I wanted to say the best estimate is around $100 billion in real estate transactions. Their revenues are a little over one and a half to $2 billion now. And then I started another AI company called Rich Relevance, and we just sold that a few years ago. And then about five years ago, I started my current company, which is Deep Sentinel. And it's again, it must sound like a broken record. It's artificial intelligence now applied to security. And so we use artificial intelligence to protect people's businesses and homes. We just launched in 2019, and we're still pretty small, but we're just passing through about 10 million in revenue.

And let's talk about how do you pop out of Stanford, and was it your specialty? What caused you to get interested in artificial intelligence intelligence? Because I'm sure you're not talking around the campfire up there in Oregon about these subjects. As a young boy.

Yeah, I didn't fit in super well in Southern Oregon for a bunch of different reasons, that being among them, for sure. I was always really passionate about mechanical stuff, things that moved. I remember when I was six years old, I watched a show about this robotics competition at mit, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And I loved that concept of building. I've always loved building stuff with my hands. For those of you listeners that are viewing, you'll see some projects behind me. Like, I built my own mechanical BB8 robot here from scratch. And I just love building by hand. And so I got drawn into robotics. And robotics, as I learned at school, was this incredible mixture of traditional computer science and computer engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and the brain of robotics is artificial intelligence. And so that's how I got drawn into this. I started working at the artificial intelligence lab at Stanford under a professor named Osama Khatib, and started doing research in artificial intelligence. And just again, I just loved it and continued working on it.

And so how. How big of advantage did that give you, graduating at that stage? Because you look like an old man, about 76 years old.

Oh, geez. Thank you. I'm much older.

But, I mean, you didn't graduate from Stanford last year. So when did you graduate?

I graduated class of 2000 and I graduated a couple years later because I dropped out to be at Stanford. At.com startups.

Yeah. And so it probably learned more than you would have if you stayed at Stanford for those years.

But I loved it. It was a great. That was maybe one of the best career decisions and life decisions I ever made, as weird as it may seem. Yeah, I mean, you know, I was very immature emotionally when I got to school and I was very bright. I had, I'd really kind of proven my capability intellectually, and that was massively not at par with my emotional capability, my eq. And so when I got to Stanford, I had this really weird set of experiences I had. I just won like number one math in the, in the regional math competition of the entire Pacific Northwest, which is Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and I think Northern California. And so I was pretty egotistical in that regard. At the same time, I grew up in a small town and I'd only had one year of calculus, where the kids that lived in Palo Alto and in Silicon Valley had three years of calculus. And so I was getting beaten up pretty bad intellectually for the first time. And the other thing was that I had taken a lot of computer science classes when I got to Stanford, so I'd already finished the first two years of computer science classes at Stanford. And so I was really in this kind of weird spot. Combine that with lack of emotional intelligence and I just didn't know how to think about myself anymore. I felt fundamentally lost in all these different. I'm really smart here, but I'm not really smart here, and I'm really immature and how do I work that out? Going to work for two and a half years really forces you. I mean, the cool thing about the real world is that it's the real world, right? And it doesn't, it doesn't let you get away with. All right, cool. You know, here's your assignment. I did 90% of it. That's still zero because you didn't finish it. And in school you get a 90%. That's pretty awesome. Or you can do really well at this one thing, but not really well here. But in the real world, you just, you don't have that flexibility. The second thing it taught me was in school, when you're, you know, whatever university you go to, you always HEAR from these 18, 19, 20 year olds, I'm so busy, I'm so busy. And it's not until you've dealt with paying your Bills, cleaning your house, working and doing everything on top of that, that you realize, no, you just have really bad time management skills. You're not that busy. And so when I went to work and I worked at these startups where I was working 80 hour weeks, 100 hour weeks, sometimes literally 100 hour weeks, and I got to understand what a real hundred hour week looked like. It wasn't, you know, you go to class for three hours a day and then you smoke weed for six hours and then you do your homework for three hours. Like, that's not the six hours in the middle there, buddy. Or, you know, going to a frat party. Yeah, that wasn't working. You know, I know it's part of the college experience, but like. And so when I got back to Stanford, dude, I went from taking 15 units and like kind of cruising through, I was taking 20 units, which is a full load. You cannot take more than 20. And getting all A pluses and doing extracurricular research and doing research papers for the various Nobel laureates there, I came back on fire. And I also realized, by the way, the third lesson, which is you're never going to have another time in your life where you are getting to dedicate your time to learning and improving yourself. You never get that back. You never have another window. And so here I am, 21, and I come back to Stanford and I realized, oh my God, there are 20 Nobel laureates here. And most of them have office hours where nobody comes and visits them. And if they do come and visit them, they ask stupid questions. So I went and I found, okay, there's Doug Osheroff. He got the Nobel Prize in physics. He likes photography. Let's go to his office hours and ask him what his favorite project is. Photography. Instead of asking him some dumb question that every freshman student that wants to suck up to a mask, find out what he's interested in. And you know what I got? I got six hours of Doug Oscar off talking about photography and how physics and the physics of light and photons work with photography. So again, long answer to a short question, but amazing experience.

Yeah. And you, but you went back. The thing was that you didn't.

Do.

The mistake that many college students do is just, they just drop out.

Yep.

Go on drugs, don't, you know, just drift. They drop out and drift. But you dropped out and went to work.

And I dropped out to go to work. In fact, like, I didn't just drop out to drop out. I dropped out. I found opportunities. I found I was much more passionate about Work than I was about like what's the school thing anymore?

Yeah, and the emotional stability, maturity or whatever. I mean, you see things like Michael Phelps, like one of the athletes of all time, go in and win all of these medals and the Olympics and then come back and turn into a pothead that gets drunk and parties in Miami and just totally debases himself. It looks like it humiliates himself and just totally poisons his reputation. Then he has to go rebuild it back and get on TV with these public service announcements of, you know, I'm really a serious guy now. But you know, it's not that he's a bad guy, he's just was not emotionally ready to handle that thing. And this is why you see also people in Wall Street, New York or you know, they jump out of windows. You know, there's that recently there was that former Miss World. You know, she'd had jobs in TV anchor, this, that the other. I mean she was a star and. But she jumps off the balcony and I mean.

And I think that's part of it. Like I was in my little tiny world of math as a 19 year old. I was a little bit of a star. Like I was the kid to beat when you went to these things. But I hadn't, I hadn't figured anything out beneath that. Like you when you look at somebody who's accomplished something great, you make a bunch of assumptions about how they got there and who they are around that accomplishment. And I think we as a society focus so much on that, we've forgotten about how important this. Not in the, like, let me coddle you and be. Create safe space for you to be an idiot. Right. But how do we create human beings? Like how do we as a society move people through the aging process and create mature human beings? And that's resulted, you know, in societal problems. You mentioned, you know, Ms. World, which is heartbreaking. Right. Like somebody that everyone would look up to, but in fact was lonely and scared and isolated and didn't have outlets. And we have issues with weapons where lots of people own guns and don't do things. But we have a problem, right? And we've got all these issues where we say we have these mental problems, but we haven't really as a society dug into how do we solve them. Especially as we, as we get more sophisticated and more complex. Our world for a 13 year old is way more complex than it ever was for us when we were 20, in our 20s and 30s.

Yeah. The overwhelming amount of information they're exposed to can be exposed to the options they have. Yeah, I want to dig into that. Thanks for listening to the Million Dollar Mastermind. If you felt there were any valuable takeaways from this episode, please take a minute and leave us a five star review. Your feedback is important and really helps us get the word out to a wider audience. Remember, we have a valuable webinar that is absolutely free. Register for it right now@whiteallonwinning.com thanks for listening.