Cyberposium 2014: Keynote 5

I'd like to introduce our final two speakers for this Fireside Chat to close out the conference. So seated on my left, on your right, is Professor Tom Eisenman, who really needs no introduction for those of us who are from hbs. He's a Howard Stevenson professor of Business Administration, co chair of the Rock center on Entrepreneurship, and cheerleader of all things to do with tech and startups here at hbs. He created a Launching Tech Ventures class and is teaching product management 101 right now. And hopefully we'll have some great conversation with Chris Hulls, who is sitting on my right, on your left. He's a founder and CEO of Life360. We'll learn a lot more about it. He founded it in 2008 and it keeps millions of families close together. He's literally redefining what family life means in today's world. So it is my distinct pleasure to welcome both Tom and Chris to the Cyberpostium stage for the first time.

Thanks.

Thanks, Dmitry. Welcome, everybody. Thank you, Chris.

Thanks.

So life 360 is the biggest Internet company I've never heard of.

Getting ready to moderate this discussion. I was kind of embarrassed and I assume, Chris, you run into this. I'm going to give the group a sense for the flow of the discussion. I had suggested that we spend a little more time than usual getting an overview of the business, what you do, who the customers are, how you monetize, how you're funded and so forth. So we'll focus on the present, dial it back to the past when this was just a glimmer in your eye and even before then, sort of a little bit on your background and talk about how you started it, where the idea came from, how you assembled the team, where the initial funding came from, what version one looked like and so forth. And then we'll do a big jump to the future and talk about strategy going forward.

Interesting moves to turn the service into a platform. A lot of activity around Internet of Things and get you to talk about that and then step back a little bit and talk about some of the challenges and lessons learned in scaling a startup. So. And then we'll reserve the last. We've got 50 minutes. We'll reserve the last 10 or 15 minutes for the crowd. And I gather you guys have been using Pigeonhole, which works great, but we decided we like to see humans. So Pigeonhole has the merit of getting really good questions, but live mics have the advantage of sort of a human getting up and sort of putting it out there. So we'll go that way.

Chris, tell us about Life360.

Sure. So Life360 is a family networking app. And our goal is to win the family network in the same way that Facebook won the social network or LinkedIn won the professional network. And there have been probably dozens or hundreds of services that have tried to do something similar. But what we did that was different from everyone else was instead of focusing on anything social like photo sharing, we thought, how can we focus around utility and build a mobile app? Which at the time was a very new thing. Now it's obvious. So our service does things like let you share locations with family members, end the where are you text, get alerts when your kids get to school, your wife leaves the office, that type of thing. With the ultimate vision of being the hub for everything family. Again, much more onto utility focus, peace of mind focus versus social focus.

So the target customer is a family. The basic unit is a circle.

Exactly, A circle.

And who's in a circle?

Usually it's your nuclear family. So the traditional white picket fenced. Honestly, we have divorced families, we have other exceptions, but it is the nuclear family.

Yep. And core feature is a check in. So I arrive at a place.

Yep. You can pull out the map and see in near real time or anywhere.

When I check in, what happens with.

My family, Everyone gets an alert that I checked in, I'm okay.

And then another core feature is places.

Yep.

So if you could explain that.

So places automates all that we see in families. One of the most common things, people getting annoyed, stereotypes happening where it's usually the husband saying, my wife's always asking me to text her when I leave the office and I forget, she texts me. We solve that problem very seamlessly.

So GPS picks up the fact if HBS is one, how granular is it? Is HBS a place or is it.

You set it by region. 200ft to 2 miles.

200Ft. Okay.

A lot of people do city regions.

Yeah. So.

Husband arrives at the office and it automatically goes out to the entire circle.

Exactly.

Okay, got it.

Other core features that we have, we have messaging. So you can coordinate meeting up for dinner. If you need help, you can push a panic button. Everyone in the family gets a very obtrusive phone call, email and text all simultaneously. But if you need help, we try to be annoying.

Yep. And so you're founded 2008.

We were incorporated 2008, dabbled in the idea. In 2007, we were actually the very first Android app ever to get venture funding.

And you're in San Francisco, right?

Yep.

With how many employees?

About 70 now.

70. Got it. Cool. And the part of this biggest company I had never heard of how many.

Million users we have 44 million registered families user account even much higher. So we're much bigger than more household mobile location names like Foursquare, other family apps like path. We're probably 10x bigger, but we solve very mundane problems that urban early adopters do not care about. Which is why we've been relatively under.

The radar and the business model.

My glib answer is get huge and worry about that later. But more realistically, we are solving real peace of mind pain points for families. And there are a lot of legacy type services that there's huge willingness to pay for. So we have a premium product now which is more or less a mashup of OnStar and AAA. You can push a button, get help in an instant. That's five bucks a month for your family.

Yeah. And unlimited places, right?

Unlimited places, yeah.

Poor service comes with two places and.

You can add more. Exactly.

Got it. Cool. How do you acquire customers?

It's really organic demand and word of mouth. We haven't spent anything on paid marketing.

And how are you funded?

We've been standard VC funded, a mix of angels to get going. Seed funds then larger funds have been bigger. Now strategics with how much? 76 million total.

76 million. So big, growing fast.

Plan for monetizing. I think we got it. That's the basics. All right, so that's the present. Let's dial it back to the past. So tell us a little about your background. Before you did this, what did you do?

Sure, I didn't have a normal business path, I didn't have a normal tech path. I grew up in a tiny redneck small town in Marin, which is a bit of an oxymoron. 300 person town.

Joined the Marin north of Kelton, north of San Francisco.

Yeah. Normally people think of very affluent professional class, but I was surrounded by farms. Started a few small businesses before I finished high school, then joined the military, then went to Berkeley. I was on a more finance track. Got a job at Goldman, then had a whole health scare which gave me the cliche epiphany of wanting to do.

A couple of years at Goldman.

Not even I had health scare very soon after.

Tangent on that. I'd only found a tumor a minute because I was trying to go to the South Pole as a dishwasher and failed a physical. So when you have to swallow for the doctors that they actually can find something Wrong. Then I was actually a deferred student here at hbs, started the company during all that and went from there.

So you could have been in the audience.

I could have, yes.

Listening to.

Somebody else, maybe with the Life360 idea.

Maybe.

So tell us about turning HBS down.

So I had a health scare, really threw my life in turmoil where I thought it could be bad. Got good very quickly. But since I had all this tide in my hands, I had this idea and like I'm going to take a stab at it. I had got in here, I asked for deferral and I actually got another deferral because we took a while to really get going. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. The person that gave me the deferral was D. Leopold. I'm not sure if she's still running admissions here, still head of admissions. So if it weren't for her extra deferral, I probably would have gone and taken a job or come here right away. So thank you, Dee. If you are around.

Thank you, Dee. So where did the idea come from? It seems like an unlikely thing for somebody fresh out of finance, background out of Berkeley.

Like something you'd expect somebody with a family to come up with.

The initial seed was Hurricane Katrina and seeing the government saying we need to use technology to make sure families can connect more easily.

But then very quickly when I started working on it, I realized there was a much bigger opportunity that all these people were trying to make a digital presence for the family, but they were all doing the very standard things. They weren't really thinking about something new. They're photo sharing for families. And what we realized was with this big thesis at the time, everyone is going to have a smartphone and that is going to be a remote control for life. People should really remember six, seven years ago, it was not at all obvious that smartphones were going to be that hub. And we thought location was very, very powerful because it is so core to the interactions you have with your family members when they're apart.

So 2007 was the year the iPhone was launched. Life360 was conceived as mobile first.

It was conceived as mobile first. The initial prototype was all SMS based and then Google was doing a competition to find the best use cases for the then upcoming Android platform. And they were the first smartphone that would allow you to get location without having an app in the foreground to pull the gps. Exactly. So with iPhone, you actually couldn't do that until iPhone4 because they did not allow backup.

So your first app was An Android app.

Yep.

Your website mentions that you are a lean startup in San Francisco. So do you actually follow that whole discipline in terms of how you researched the company and the opportunity? We were prototyping and testing and so forth.

Minimum, yes and no. No in the sense that.

When we users did not ask for what we wanted and we actually had a few years, probably three years of no traction. I think our first year was 5,000 total users. I think yesterday we got 103,000 in a single day. So if we had listened to the data, we would have gone home. We are lean in the sense that we try to move quickly, learn quickly, but it hasn't replaced our vision, which I was very adamant about day one.

So what did version one look like?

Version one was a very broken Android app on the G1 with a bunch of things tied to the web. Because at the time that's what most people had and it didn't work very well. But the core around the family on a map was there from the beginning.

In the smartphone app itself.

Exactly.

But the apps were talking back to a website.

Exactly. And you could have feature phone support with sms, which was not a good user experience.

And it had all the check in functionality, but had a check in and panic. Not places.

No, places.

Okay. So places came a couple years later.

And that was always something we wanted to do, automating the whole thing, but the ability to have always on location without killing a battery with something that the phones wouldn't support. And we had to develop a lot of proprietary tech to do.

And how did you pick the family? Because I could imagine if you were doing location sharing, you could have done hipster posses like Foursquare did. You could have done some enterprise thing.

I think it ties in with. I did come from a bit of an unusual background and I'm kind of an introverted guy and I kind of don't like doing what everyone else is doing. And it seemed like, hey, everyone is ignoring families. Everyone. At the time, this was when it was all about social, social and people were building social network families. But it was again just Facebook for another group. So I thought about just, let's just do something that no one's ever done. And I also, like, there was no competition. I think Peter Thiel was here a couple months ago saying, the competition's bad. And I agree with it. We had a very crappy team when we started. I had no idea what I was doing. But we had many at bats just because no one was coming after us. And now we have Tons of competition. Because the idea is a little more obvious now, but at the time there was nobody.

Yeah. So who are you technically? Do you have technical training?

I don't. I've had to learn a lot of it on the way, but by trade.

So who actually built the first version?

The first version? A team in India. It completely failed. I wouldn't even call it a first version. I'd call it a failed attempt. But now we have all our tech in house and a very strong technical co founder.

And how'd you find your co founder?

I met him randomly at a networking event. I chopped everything 99 out of 100 times. They were waste, but got lucky.

And how far along were you when that happened?

I had been working out on my own for probably a year and a half.

Wow.

You did not have.

It was not a pretty start.

Yeah. It was less than shoestring and bubblegum.

Yes.

Yeah.

Broken coat and bubblegum.

And so how does a guy.

Did he have startup experience?

He had done an open source project out of his dorm room and he had never, never done anything. This was his first job. First full time job.

Yeah.

And so two of you, we just.

Went for it from there.

Yeah. And then what's the rest of the early team? How long before you hire others?

So when we were trying to win this. So Google is putting on a competition for best Android app. So I just told the world what I was doing and I had a hodgepodge team of different coders. So until we got our first real funding, we would just piece things together in a very broken way, which I don't recommend to anybody, but we did what we had to at the time.

Yeah. And so tell us about the first real funding.

The first real funding was kind of a funny story to that. One that also ties in with serendipity. I was just showing up to everything. We didn't really have a lot of traction. I entered a business plan competition at Berkeley, met a judge there, Marc Jacobson for Oatville. He invited me to startup event. There's a dinner for startup founders. I sat next to a guy who I didn't know who he was called Evan Williams, who probably people know who he is now the CEO of Twitter. We just started talking. He was sort of a big name then, but not as big. Next to Evan, a guy named Dave McClure sat down who was thinking about becoming a VC. And Evan introduced me to Dave. I didn't know who the hell Dave was. And Dave thought I was a big deal because I was buddies With Evan and we became Dave McClure's like six investment and he got us off to the races.

McClure before he did 500 Startups, did Facebook Fund, right?

Yeah. So before that he did a Founders Fund angel group. And that is private.

And you were in that very first.

We were before even Founders Fund. And then he invested in Founders Fund and Facebook Fund then.

So Facebook Fund is an investor in Life365.

Yeah, we were one of the. One of Facebook funds startups is. Yep.

And so who are the rest of the. Yeah, I forgot to ask that when we did the.

We have some traditional VCs like Bessemer and DCM and a bunch of seed funds. Then strategics like Samsung, BMW and adt.

Adt for the folks in the audience who don't know what they do.

The world's largest home security company.

Got it. Cool. So funding the business model. Clear from the start that you try to do a freemium or did that.

It very quickly became clear. Since I did have a finance background, I was much more like, well how do I make a DCF around this? But I've been a big convert. That business model for a network company should not matter. I mean people challenge me on that. I really say find me one single company that's got a critical mass of engaged users that has not been able to monetize. And I don't. I think that is a non existent problem.

Instant messaging, Can I ask you this?

Instant messaging, you can monetize by selling yourself to.

You can, but I mean even if WhatsApp got $1 a year per user, they're getting hundreds of millions a year in reven. So maybe they weren't worth 20 billion, but you're still talking about a business even at common low multiples. A billion dollar business.

I'll buy it. I'll buy it.

Pivots in the first year or two. So it's pretty typical for a startup to change the target customer, change the business model.

We have been very, very firm about the vision since day one. So there were no pivots there. The one thing that was a big shift and also a lesson learned was we were very emergency focused. We moved towards daily utility. One thing to keep in mind, especially on mobile, the friction of getting a user is so low. But to lose a user is almost just as easy. If you do not have daily engagement, you're out of sight, out of mind and you're dead. So if you look at every big major mobile player, you're using them on a very Very regular basis.

So the core use case changed some, but always the family and always the yes.

So we shifted on. We're an app to keep your family safe. Towards where? An app to make your life easier, of which peace of mind and safety is a big component, but not the be all, end all.

So it took years, by your description, before you really got traction. Was there a moment, if you sort of look in that time stretch, where you finally were able to kick back and say, this is magical. I know we're out of the woods. I know we're going to make it. I know we're safe.

I don't think we're safe yet. We're definitely not out of the woods. The blessing, the curse of network businesses. For any major network, there's only one winner. So you have to be first. We know Google's going to be competing with us soon. There's tons of competition. So until we have hundreds of millions of active users, we are absolutely not out of the woods. But I would say there have been two real moments that have given me some relief. The first was Christmas 2011 or 2012. I'm forgetting exactly now, but it seemed like there was this big confluence of younger kids getting smartphones, the whole vision of mobile and the phone being a core of that being a when, not an if, and people realizing that there were use cases beyond just playing games and phone calls. And we saw, really overnight, our adoption might have just been the holiday season where this all came together. The organic demand for a product probably went up by 10 or 100 times.

Wow.

And one was going from no users to tons of users instantly in a space, and it was nothing we did.

Yeah, so you said there were two moments.

So that was when I knew that we were going to get users. The second moment's actually really come in the last six months where it's felt like the market is actually understanding what we're doing. A lot of it was validated when ADT, the home security company, invested 50 million bucks in us. It was, why does this matter? Like, why is this not just an app, this is a child tracker. But people actually understanding that having this network of family members where you know where they are all the time is a big, big deal. I mean, with adt, we're going to be able to know your entire family's out of the house and automatically lock the doors, turn on your thermostat and turn on your home security system without the user doing a thing. And all these big guys in the Iot space are realizing if they don't have the family. They're at a major strategic disadvantage.

So a product like this that crosses the family and at its core you got the 17 year old who's just started driving.

Sort of probably with some ambivalence about whether mom and dad know where she's going. How does your team learn about. It's a very subtle thing, right? The relationship between family members and so forth. So how do you understand that and how do you incorporate what you've learned about how families view an application like this into the design of the product? What's the mechanism for making sure you can actually activate the thing? Because you meet both parents needs and other family's members needs.

Sure. So I say there are three things we do. First part is a little bit arrogant on my part and it's like I have a vision. I think this is what the world's going to be like and we're going to build towards it and we hope it catches up. So one example, we're building a calendaring app right now. If we ask our users what they want, they're in the. The users that respond to that survey are in the context of like a desktop calendaring app. What we're thinking though of is like who are the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people who don't have a desktop? They probably are using Post IT Notes on the fridge.

Compete with Post it Notes, not Gmail. And that is a gut driven instinct and ignoring the users. That being said though, we do listen to users and like for calendaring which we're building now. Tell us how you are using these things. How many events per week are you at with your family members? What are the biggest challenges you have with getting everyone in the family to an event? So in that sense really like what are the pain points versus like what solution do you want? That's kind of how we think about it. It's two different things. And then. And we do this component.

Who does that inside? You have product managers inside the company?

We have product managers that do it. I also do it myself. I think it's very, very just as we've gotten bigger, it's easy to lose touch as a founder with your customers. So I forced that discipline on myself. But my third point though, which is different than most people is we have an interesting problem where we have the downloader, which is mom and then another perhaps less enthusiastic consumer which is a teenager. So we kept to make mom happy and the teenagers tolerate it, tolerate it, which is actually very easy once they get it on because we see like teens actually end up with way more freedom when they use Life360 because they don't have to call mom every hour and mom can just pull up the phone. Okay, good. They're not at the hospital. It's great. So once we get people using it, it's easy. But that adoption is a challenge.

I gotta say my wife, when I described it this morning, she lit up and loved the idea. She bemoaned the fact that there was a brief moment, some folks in the audience may remember it, where teenagers wanted blackberries.

There was.

It didn't last long.

We're probably all of that same age in the audience.

And she used the BlackBerry to make sure my daughter was still alive because even though she wouldn't answer the message, she could see whether she read it, which is essentially and I'm not dead signal a hack of your solution.

Any moment where you came close to throwing in the towel. A long path to.

In those early years before we had traction in any real funding, we had more than two times. We had less than a month of money. Our initial funding was 10 grand for my mom, 15 grand from an old teacher and my credit card. That does come back to why this deferral here was amazing.

And that's what paid for the India outsourcing. Yeah.

Then we got $50,000 from an angel and 300,000 from Google. But that all happened over a couple of years.

It was very scary and it felt like there was nothing we could do. I was ready to go until we had $0 but it felt like many times. Yeah, we're dead even now.

We're doing very well now. But I'm assuming we're going to have.

A few more expletive moments where. Where relative to the amount of money we've raised are just competitive threats.

Yeah, you're on different people's radar than you might have been five years ago.

I have much higher class problems, but they still keep me up at night.

Got it.

Cool.

So let's dial it forward to the future. Companies made a big push around becoming a platform. So if you talk a little bit about that, what that means and a lot of that's in the context of Internet of things, smart home, connected car and so forth. So tell us what's going on.

Sure. So backing up a little bit life 360 really was predicated on the fact that we are not a tracking product. We're a way to aggregate families with very useful data around it. Specifically the location of family members. And this Engagement around a map type interface, which can make a lot of existing products better. So we realized that if we can control families, if you're using Life360 with everyone in your family who has a smartphone, you're using us many times a day. You trust us. Your family's safety is in our hands. It's a very powerful position to be in. So going back to the ADT example, the reason they approached us is they realized that traditional home security is no longer about being in the home. If you really want to protect a family, which is why you actually protect your home. It's also about when people are on the go. And if you want to protect people on the go, what do you need? Well, you need that family network. Family. So they came to us realizing that we're gonna be the future evolution of a security service and we can actually enhance their home as well. So I mentioned previously the ability to have everything in your home happen in an automated way. Doors locked, thermostat goes down, home security system arms, which sounds very boring, but it solves a major problem for ADT because they have a huge percentage of their homes that have not been armed in the last week. If you haven't, if you're not using your home security system, are you going to pay $50 a month for it? So we can probably add hundreds of millions, even billions to their share price just by reducing churn alone.

ADT sells the equipment and services.

So you become a layer.

You can imagine integrating their service into.

Yours or vice versa. Exactly. So there's going to be a home button in our app. You're going to push that home button. You're going to be able to control your lights, your doors, your thermostat, home security system all from within Lite 360. And that actually really helps ADT and other partners we have. Because who cares how you're interfacing it if you're providing engagement to a product and you don't open your home security app multiple times a day, because why would you. But you are opening Lite360 multiple times a day with a very parallel use case.

Got it. Cool.

So other examples, to make it more holistic, BMW and investor, we're talking about getting an API access to their cars. So you can actually, you're looking where your family members are on the map. You can see where your car is or even Samsung's another investor. They obviously have a lot of wearables. So if they ever did a wearable for senior citizens or kids who don't have smartphones. So they're a very natural plugin that will drive sales and engagements of those products.

So all that pushes you in a couple of directions. Technically, you need an API. Strategically, you need a pretty strong business development function.

Yeah. So on that point, our biggest challenge has actually been focus around that. It's been somewhat humbling to me to see how hard it is to get more and more features built and things done as the team grows. Because definitely means that.

Each additional engineer designer, the marginal utility decreases almost seemingly asymptotic to zero. Because you have all these huge companies, you wonder what are they doing with 10,000 engineers? So I've seen every time we double the the company gets harder and harder to keep people focused and move quickly. So we're trying to balance the needs of how do we make our core experience better while also maintaining this long term vision that it's much more strategic that we need to get done.

So technical problems have been very low, but kind of people and focus problems very high.

Who maintains the roadmap? Is that you? Do you have a head of product?

I maintain the roadmap. How we've divided work, I manage anything three months longer or out, but anything three months or less, I'm pretty hands off on. I think, as is the case with a lot of people who are very good at the early stages, which is much more strategic and just getting the weeds and getting things done. It's a very different skill set than being able to turn the gears of a larger team.

Sort of pull back and talk about some of the lessons you've learned about scale because you've scaled pretty dramatically over the last couple of years and very fast. Some of the lessons learned about scaling a tech startup so pace is always a tricky question. I mean sometimes it's not under your control. You're growing slowly and there's not much you can do about it. But you probably have choices now about how fast you can go.

Yeah. So.

So how do you know when you're going too fast or not fast enough?

So I can't say I figured this out because I think it's any company that's growing every time you hit a new steady state and what worked even six months ago is broken again. But the tension we wrestle with and it goes back to some of the questions asking are we a lean startup? What is more important, a big bang release where there's big changes or keeping a cadence in the team. So I think a mistake we had previously made was not releasing often enough because it was Hard to keep the team on a rhythm. So now we're much more adamant. We release every month and it might not be a big release but it was able to keep the team on more of a regimented schedule. So we know this is going to happen on this date and no one really has an excuse for it. We are launching now.

You've got to get your users then to upgrade to whatever that release is.

Unfortunately in the last 12 months both Apple and Android don't have auto updates so that used to be a big problem. But we see something like 90% of our users on auto update.

Makes sense.

You're also getting to a stage I'm guessing where the earliest team members in startup typically jacks of all trades who can do a little bit of everything, marketing, business development, product and so forth. You've probably got a lot of specialists now. Yes, and fairly senior new people. So how has that gone? The sort of mixing of.

The early team members who were sort of present at the creation with the new folks who more formal, more process driven.

It's difficult for sure. I'm naturally a non process guy and so now I'm. Now I'm someone who is of the ilk that can't stands process. If I were an employee I, I would probably have had to have left leave by now because I would never work in a company that has to be that structured. Fortunately I'm not on the individual contributor side so I have to deal with it. But it's such a. There's such a huge tension between being process driven versus like the people who are best at starting early companies, especially on the engineering side. I've seen this firsthand. They'll work three days straight until 6am every day and they'll just completely crash and they get probably five or ten times more done than the engineer at a big company. But that doesn't scale when you have codependency. So some of those people have left. My co founder was that he was the archetype of that.

And, and when we did scale and we had a pretty open discussion like can you be the manager in this? Tried it very quickly realized we hadn't and we found a new CTO that would have been absolutely terrible at actually getting.

Is the co founder still with you?

Yeah, he took the president role so he's being much more outbound, being a mentor to the coders but he doesn't manage any of them.

Yeah, Dmitri mentioned I teach a course on product management. So I'm curious, how big were you, how many employees when you hired your first professional product manager.

We had it. We had organic product management come up probably around our Series A. But I say organic since it bubbled up from the team was done very poorly. But we brought on people who really knew what they were doing, who were gray hair if you will. More.

Probably after we had about 20 people. I would have done it earlier if I could do it again.

It's classic problem at Dropbox. Foursquare, Opower all hired and fired their first product manager at about 30 employees. Just because it's traumatic for an organization that's been fluid, working the way you just described to sort of have somebody come in and put some.

I would say that if your company wasn't chaotic early on, that's probably a big problem, honestly. So there's more on the finance side. But we our investors at BMW, the Ventures team is great, but they have this finance team that looks like a big company and they looked at our books. I thought this thing is a huge mess. The CEO's incompetent, he needs to go. And my point to the Ventures guys, like if I was spending my time on making sure every piece of accounting was done right, it would have been time I wasn't spending on actually making a product that our customers love. So I think a bit of chaos and brokenness is probably a good thing early on.

Sounds good to me. Which the last comment brings up your role as CEO. So we know what that looks like when there's two or three of you. It's very different when they're 70. So what's it felt like? How's it different for you today than it was five years ago.

It's not doing what I'm naturally good at or enjoy doing, which is tough and I'd like to scale with it.

Which is the product.

Yeah, I'm the keeper of the vision and that's what I would have a very hard time handing off. And I think if I did hand it off to someone who is more regimented or purely data driven, it would not be a good thing. So I've had to learn to over communicate. I have to say the same things ten times to the team. I have to explain why, which I really don't like because explaining why slows you down. And I'm the type this is, this makes sense and I just expect people to get it, which is doesn't work when you're getting bigger. If you deal with investors, you have to be more outbound.

So it is a challenge.

It's a natural growing pain.

Startups out there or managers of entrepreneurs that you look to for inspiration as role models.

I'd say I'll give a couple examples. These are cliches, but for good reason. I like people like Elon Musk. It's the crazy big swings. If life360 is a big success, I'd love to do something just as crazy. More going back to other ones. LinkedIn's been a great inspiration for Life360 in the terms that was relatively slow growth model. LinkedIn more or less has doubled every year for many years.

It took a long time before it really took off.

I mean, there's a bit of irony when you will. If you go to a VC and say you're doubling every year, that might not excite them, but do the math. If you keep doing that for a few years, all of a sudden you're a behemoth. So we're very slow growth in the sense that we're never going to get 10 times our user base in a year. But if we can keep doubling, we'll be very, very big, very fast and people will wonder how the hell we came out of nowhere.

Yeah, cool. My guess is you're going to tell me that you can't imagine doing anything else but running life360 for the rest of your life. But if you were going to launch another startup, would you do anything differently next time around?

I can imagine plenty of other things than running Life360 to be honest.

But I would.

I don't have to have issues raising capital now. I'm sure that would be very easy. So it's if I were to give advice to myself seven years ago, it is the cliches. Read any cliche startup advice, it's probably right, but it's understanding those cliches that are tough. And for us in particular. The biggest thing for me starting out was not having a good technical co founder. And I see my friends who have business backgrounds. If they've already been working on the idea for a little bit, they're very reticent to give up a huge chunk of equity.

To someone who might be younger and a lot less seasoned and not have the pedigree. But it's for every company that made it without a made it without a good technical co founder, a thousand probably failed. And if you're doing a startup and you already have the odds so stacked against you, don't try to be the exception on things like that. Give up the equity. I basically brought on an equal partner even though I'd been Working on it here. Half. So that'd be my biggest one.

Cool. Excellent audience. What do you want to know?

Yeah, just fire. Just shout it out. We've got mics you can come up, but I'll bet you can project. So what is the exact value proposal?

I know you answered this already, but I didn't understand how you want that.

Question's what's the value proposition? So exactly.

So to a family, it's doing all these things were done very inefficiently, like asking people where they are, when are you gonna meet for dinner, Are you safe? And basically automating all that. So when I was first getting my freedom, my mom gave me a calling card to call home when there was a payphone 10 years ago. Is text message now. We're doing that same thing with life360 and building upon it. So anything collaboration, communication, peace of mind with families is what we're trying to really dominate. And business model will tie in with services that people pay for within that domain.

Should we. What's your bet that there's anybody in the room who's a customer, a user?

Anyone who's a user? I mean, if you don't have a teenager with kids, you're really not in their. Sweet.

So let's ask. So show of hands, any users in the room?

There's a hand almost up over there. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah. Where? Yeah.

What's the use case?

I said a new user asked about 45 minutes ago.

I would say on that note, though, I think way too many people doing startups, more people with business backgrounds, look at existing products and look for models to replicate. There are tons of verticals that are products that you don't use or in areas that you don't use that it's probably wide open.

So, yeah, that's. So it's actually.

That's a contrarian view.

Peter Thiel's advice. This is exactly the outcome you'd want.

How are you going to use it?

And you think they'll.

Yeah.

Do you think they'll put up with it?

Yeah. Cool question here.

But I'd be curious to know about sort of values. So if you had to represent an animal or animal.

Your values and me.

Personally or the values.

And how does that map onto animals?

Me personally.

So you have to answer it first. What animal are you?

Okay, so I would choose the leopard.

Because it's sort of elegant.

All right. All right, that helps.

I'm trying to think about this one. I've never been asked what animal I am.

It's a strange question.

I'll say something, I don't know the animal, I'm trying to think of it, but maybe some sort of cat that's kind of hid in the background, stays out of attention but kills everyone else without even realizing it.

Let me ask you a question. So what is success for you individually and what is success for your company? How do you define success?

I haven't figured out my own success yet. I'm trying to do things I feel good about and make the world better in some way. I know it's a cliche. I'd also like to be able to not worry about money, but that is a second order thing. And for the company, I mean from the investor side, it's very clear we give a very good return on capital. And if you're taking VC money, that's what you're signing up for. But actually I personally am very proud that we're doing a service that solves real problems. At least once a week we get some email that we save somebody's life. The Boston Marathon here, we had a lot of people that were using our app and it was the only way they were able to get a message out saying I'm okay because the phone lines were clogged and we worked. So that makes me feel very proud.

At the mic, I'm just wondering since.

You seem to have taken investment from a lot of strategic investors and I know there's been a lot written about kind of there's a good and there's a bad with that. I was just wondering what your thoughts were on it. So I think it depends why you're taking strategic money. First of all, if you're taking money for strategic money's sake, that's not. If you can take it and consider them dumb money, that's fine. If you can contain them and not give them much say dumb money's not always bad money, especially if you already have people who can help you. In our case though, the strategics that we have taken money from have all been ones that are actually strategic. So adt the thing that was hard was the commercial deal, not the investment deal. We took money from Samsung because they're the largest OEM device maker and devices, something we're very excited about. And it was very symbiotic. BMW, they're a very well respected car brand. Can you think of a better first partner to show that a huge brand in the car space trusts us? So we have done deals with every one of our strategic investors. Whereas if you're Just kind of taking a bit of sprinkling from people. Yeah, that can cause problems.

Thank you. This is Mike.

Yeah. I noticed that you were early adopter for leveraging online platforms for raising money at a later stage. Could you just talk about how you leveraged angellist in your Series C and just how that's affected you? Sure. So we first used angellist for our Series A.

And at the time people were saying it's the only desperate company's going AngelList, and that was really VC thinking and kind of keeping it insular and it was very unpopular. But I will admit for a Series A, we had a hard time raising money and AngelList did really help. They featured us heavily and it really got that momentum of a forcing function to say, if you don't invest now, we're closing it around and that is absolutely critical. You need to be aggressive raising money and VCs will wait forever if you don't force them to make a decision. So that was our Series A. It was very helpful. I'm glad we ignored our naysayers who said it would make us look desperate for our Series C, though it was a very different reason. So for context for everyone here, we raised about a 50 million round about six months ago. And with AngelList they allowed us to let Angels come into a very late stage deal. And the reason we did it is we had all these Angels that wanted to invest, some of them very good angels, but I don't have the time to manage hundreds of more investors. It's just way too much work. But with AngelList, it let us have a vehicle where they could all go in through one legal entity managed by one professional investor without us having to manage that. So single entry on the cap table, we now have we close out of Syndicate Angeles, which at the time was their biggest ever, where we brought on 99 new investors, which was their legal maximum. And now we have 99 new investors who are advocates of life, 360 people who give me feedback, who are there when I need them, but I don't have any of the headaches. So it worked out very, very well. And I think there is an element of giving back to the community that we do want ways for smaller people to get involved. Whereas 50 million used to be an IPO, now it could be an Angela Syndicate and anyone can invest.

This side.

What are your plans for international expansion, given differing cultural norms for parenting around the world? So we're already 70% overseas, but philosophically a debate we had just to really put a framework around this Would you rather have an A plus product in the US or a B product everywhere? So our firm decision is we need an A product in the US to completely dominate a region. And as long as we work everywhere else, that's okay. Even if perhaps there would be regionalized features that would be better. Just because it is so hard to go region by region.

Is it a single English language version everywhere?

We only did a localized version the last three months. We have 15 languages now. We're going to go up to 20 next month.

Did you get what you need?

Yeah, internationalization is really hard. It sounds easy, but it's a huge thorn in people's side. So I would encourage people to stay focused because if you. The world is moving to the winner, having just the best product, and until you have that massive network, you're hugely vulnerable.

So I think the audience probably has a good fix on who might compete with you in the U.S. i mean, there's overlap obviously with Foursquare, and there was a whole series of similar services that sort of have died along the way there. Has anybody outright cloned you overseas?

Tons. If anyone here has an international phone, try searching for family locator or any similar keyword. And there are many, many, many competitors.

Do you have any recourse? I assume the idea can't be protected. Do you have patents?

We do have patents, but I don't believe in software patents. We're being sued by a patent troll now and making a big fuss over it. But the really, the recourse is building a big network effect. I don't think there's patents. Patents might slow people down, but they're not going to stop people. And ethically we don't want to go there.

Got it.

Cool. Please.

Hi. 40 million users is impressive. So congratulations. Thank you. I'm curious to hear how you think about branching out and collaborating with different verticals. Specifically healthcare.

Collaborating with health providers or different emergency room services as well.

So how are you thinking about that? Is that something that actually is in the plans that will probably be eventually. With our API, we're going to be an open platform that anyone can plug into. But in terms of doing real collaborations, we have to be very ruthless on saying no to anything that doesn't have the opportunity for immediate scale. So we get a lot of really interesting partnership opportunities with school networks. Like even. Even entire states have approached us about doing things like, could I tie into life360 so there's emergency. I can see where all the kids are. Even an entire State Integrating with Life360 would not move the needle on scale. So we're looking at things like how do they impact people across the world or at least across the country instantly because it is just so hard to stay focused around a core. But eventually a self serve API that people can take our data and do their own things. That's how we answer it.

Sounds like you get a lot of inbound business development inquiries hundreds per week and I'm guessing it's a couple of years. A lot of startups, as they succeed, they go from mostly outbound business development where you're reaching, you're little and you're reaching out to big guys to eventually people start to reach to you. And I asked you the question, when you introduced product management before, when did you formalize business development, hire somebody to manage that deal flow?

Our first BD hire came in 2012 and it actually came from a deal we were working on with OnStar. Big companies slowed it all down. The guy who was leading that deal said this thing's never going to get done in OnStar going to work for you. So we hired him, he switched sides and we did it ourselves and he's.

Handling the whole thing.

Now we have two BD guys, one international carrier guy and one kind of connected device side.

Thank you please.

Hello?

Yeah, so I think you did a great job in terms of resolving one annoying problem which is like messaging back and forth between family members to know how you're doing and if everything is okay. But at the same time it sort of reduces the interaction between family members and especially showing how like one family member cares about the other one and showing these like awareness and kind of emotional state towards the other family members. Have you ever thought on how you can sort of leverage this aspect of your platform to increase interaction between family members in terms of their emotions towards each other rather than reducing this interaction between.

So I'll answer your question twofold. First off.

I have a big disagreement with you. I don't think we discourage interaction. If you want real interaction with your family, you go home and turn off your phone.

The people that have started going a more social focus to families like Facebook, for families with Facebook features, they've all failed because real interaction is not through the phone. That being said, we are trying to find ways to inject more emotion into our product because well, I'll be the first to admit we are a very utility focused product and you're usually not passionate about utilities. They're just sort of there. So we are looking for ways to make our messaging system a little more robust. So instead of just being this, how do I get everyone to dinner at the right time? Have things like be able to send a smiley. If you say you're feeling sad, you can do it. But we've. Our success has been built on the fact that the phone is not the way to foster close family. We're the way to actually get you simply through the day when you're apart. So hopefully you're home sooner and can enjoy the dinner table without any electronic distractions.

All right, thank you. The organizers told me we could run five minutes late. We've done that. AUDIENCE thank you, Chris.

Thank you. Thank you.