Notes from An Interview With Dave Selinger of Deep Sentinel
When I listened to it: March 2021
Why I listened to it: In this podcast episode, the hosts of My First Million and the founder of Deep Sentinel discuss “human in the loop” services. The basic idea is that you can turn a regular service into a “super service” by using technology to supercharge a human. This concept is relevant to what I’m trying to do at LegUp Health, so I wanted to make sure I captured some notes on this topic. Shout out to Tyler King for recommending this segment to me.
Go to the podcast episode for the recording or scroll down for my notes. The segment with Dave Selinger starts at the 47-minute mark.
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My notes
About David Selinger
David “Selly” Selinger (@daveselinger) is the founder of Deep Sentinel. He also founded Redfin and RichRelevance.
About Deep Sentinel
Deep Sentinel is a home security company that produces a series of cameras powered by deep learning that can evaluate threats on a property.
Think of Deep Sentinel as Ring on steroids.
With Ring, you get to “watch people steal your shit” ⇒ it doesn’t do anything to stop the crime.
With Deep Sentinel, technology-powered, on-demand security guards pop on when the technology detects a problem.
Cameras don’t stop anything ⇒ after a local home invasion in his neighborhood, Selly decided to start Deep Sentinel to turn cameras into tools that can stop crime.
The pricing starts at about $100 per month ⇒ They have ~2,500 customers; half are businesses, and half are residential.
Human in the loop
A security guard is unaffordable due to supply-side constraints.
How do you make security guards affordable? You supercharge them with technology.
You use technology and then put “a human in the technology loop.”
Instead of having one guard handle one property, one guard can handle 100-200 properties.
“Super Service”
With technology-enabled humans, you create a “super service” ⇒ this turns a regular guard into Iron Man.
Each guard is more powerful and engaged in their work (no downtime; so no snooze time)
You scale a super service by:
Filtering unnecessary work
Matching situations with protocols (processes, scripts, escalation, etc.)
Increasing margins
Super service is not labor arbitrage.
Additional opportunities for super services exist in:
Cybersecurity —- escalate to a human
Telehealth — expand service area geographically / increase access
Door attendants — greetings
Long term care — Watching elderly folks
Construction security
Carlot security
Mail theft
Better than traditional home alarms
Traditional home alarm suppliers (e.g., ADT) have a 99 percent false alarm rate ⇒ this wastes police time.
Deep Sentinel verifies a crime before calling the police.
Traditional alarm players (e.g., ADT or security guard staffers) have to change their DNA to compete (or buy Deep Sentinel).
Unique marketing tactics
Social media opportunity is huge ⇒ They share the top crimes “stopped” videos of the week.
When there is a severe home invasion, Selly reaches out to victims and gifts the service for six months.