A colleague called him cute for tackling small problems. That insult drove him to find massive, overlooked opportunities. He rebuilt home security from scratch with a smart doorbell, floodlight camera, and neighborhood app, turning a 200-year-old industry into a billion-dollar company.
Guy said to me, most insulting thing anyone could ever say, and he put his arm on my shoulder. He said like, I love you, man, because you just like to work on these like little things and it's like so cute and fun to see. I am now much more successful than he has ever been. When you're finding these things, if they were obvious that they were huge problems, someone would be doing it. You have to find these problems that are sort of not obviously huge. Like in my case, the security market had not yet started looking at how you could build and invent products around presence and sort of like true crime prevention. The alarm was built in the 1800s and kind of was pretty much like very the same thing. And we were like, we can look at this problem differently, which is again, that was the superpower, not just the doorbell, but then we did the floodlight camera. Even the Neighbors app is a huge social network for crime and safety in neighborhoods. Like all that stuff came out of looking at the problem and trying to solve it.
