(light music)
- We've been fortunate enough at Banjo
at our office here in Vegas, to welcome a lot of you
to come by a couple days ago and took a tour,
which is great because those of you that are here
in the audience, and I see several of you
that did take the tour, will be able to tell
your colleagues and friends that you've met
here in the audience that what I'm about
to tell you is not a bunch of B.S.
because it certainly can sound that way.
So what does Banjo do?
So, like he was saying, we take in all of these signals
from around the world, not just social media.
I think we're known for social media, but we take in
everything from satellite data
to traffic data, weather data, financial data.
So imagine all of these disparate data streams
in the world that are out there.
They're circling around us every day.
They're just invisible, and we don't usually see them.
Well Banjo captures them in real time.
And our definition of real time is live,
not real time is five minutes ago, 10 minutes ago,
it's right now as it occurs.
So, in essence, we're listening or monitoring everything
in the world that occurs live in real time.
But being able to look at the manually is one thing,
and it would be impossible, you would literally need
millions of people to look at all these data signals
to interpret what's going on live.
So we've built, internally, we've built this incredible
artificial intelligence that's able to take
all of these different singles, right,
and every signal is structured in a different way,
but instantly can make them into the same signature
looking of a signal, and then they can interpret
what's happening anywhere in the world.
So what does that do and what does that mean?
So, our system, for example, someone's sharing
a social post, a photograph, someone is streaming video,
a traffic camera, a satellite, when something changes
in the world and it matters,
we know about it literally instantly.
And so, today over a thousand major media companies
in the world use Banjo every day to break the news.
I promise you see us every single day,
you just don't know that it's coming from us.
So how does this work?
So, let's just say someone shared a video,
like a Periscope video, and that video
they're streaming it live.
You guys know how Periscope works,
it's streaming live and then it's gone, right?
It's not saved.
Well, when they're streaming that live
perhaps they're seeing a train crash or derail,
and they're taking a photograph of that or a video of that.
Our system instantly recognizes immediately
that's a train crash, where in the world exactly
where that train crash is happening and where it's at.
That information is then verified
and sent to a customer such as a news organization.
That news organization has that information
and is able to then start validating and verifying it
while the person is still on the
scene shooting the Periscope video.
It's literally that fast.
We break over a million events a year.
So think about that number, over a million events a year,
that you guys see and read about and hear about
all the time, come and emanate from Banjo.
And so, what we're using this technology,
it's not just for the media industry,
it's not just for our customers like NBC and ABC and ESPN,
but it's also we're using it for corporate security.
We're using it to find out when people travel abroad,
what's happening in that area of the world live right now,
what happened there last week.
And that came all about from how really Banjo started.
In the beginning, we started as a consumer app
because I had missed a friend at the airport,
and I wanted to never miss out on an experience again
if people were nearby posting on social media
maybe on a network that I didn't even have.
But what happened was on April 15, 2013,
you guys all remember the Boston Marathon bombing.
And in that moment in time, I went into our system,
it was very manual back then, and I went and said,
"What's happening in Boston?"
There are people in this room, I know because
I've talked to you, that actually were at the marathon
that day, and they said it was chaotic.
No one knew what was going on.
There was no information.
But we knew instantaneously what was going on.
We were able to rewind time and literally go
to the street corner where the bomb was,
rewind it back to before the bomb went off,
and 42 minutes before, sorry, 42 minutes after
the explosion, we identified one of the terrorist suspects.
And it was in that moment in time that I literally
went to our board that day and I said,
"Banjo's changing, we're no longer a consumer app."
It's still available in the store even to this day.
We were Apple's App of the Year
and Google's App of the Year, but we haven't
even updated the app in over three years
because in that moment in time,
I knew our mission was to build
the world's first crystal ball.
And what I mean by a crystal ball is the
ability to know things before anybody else.
Alright, imagine having the power in your hands
to know anything happening in the world that matters to you.
Doesn't have to be breaking news.
It could be an event, a concert, it could be
traffic at the airport, whatever matters
to you and your business.
Imagine knowing that before anybody else.
And so the goal was to take what happened that day
at the Boston Marathon and be able to have a system,
artificial intelligence do all of that.
Like I had to query a system.
I shouldn't have had to query a system.
I had to rewind time and look through
thousands and thousands of images and videos
from the Boston Marathon, and I shouldn't have to do that.
So how could you teach a system like a human being
to sift through all that information instantaneously though,
and use the same sort of reasoning and thought
that a human being does, and come up with answers.
And so, today, that's how we're known.
We tell people we created the world's first crystal ball
because literally, for those that came to Banjo they saw,
every day thousands and thousands of events
before you know about it, before the media knows about it,
before any news wire knows about it,
before Wall Street knows about it
to trade on it, we know about it.
And we use that information then for financial services
or the media like I've said, or corporate security,
big brands we've done things as big
as the Super Bowl, et cetera.
So what does this mean for many of you
in the audience who have a small business?
How could this technology be used?
So, sure, we're using with, today, thousands
of big corporations, but it really,
how is it going to impact the consumer
and how is it going to impact small businesses?
Today with a small business, for example,
you don't have the ability when you start
to compile like a Bloomberg terminal.
It's too expensive.
Or if you want to get some kind of research report,
they're too out of reach or too expensive, hard to get to.
So imagine having all of that kind of information
that was live that just mattered to you,
and get rid of all the other noise,
imagine having that very inexpensively
and without a lot of work.
And so, today we've built something called the rules engine.
It's just a name internally, it's not a sexy name at all,
but what a rules engine does is, I literally can
say something like, "Hey, go to this part
of the world, look around these stores.
If any of this kind of thing happens
through this kind of imagery, or if this logo shows up,
or if this kind of action happens, or if a police car
comes into frame, if any of these things happen,
I need to know about it immediately."
For that exact part of the world,
or for any part of the world, these set of rules happen,
I know about it instantaneously.
It's just that easy.
It's common sense language, you're just talking
to a machine, and it's spitting back
out to you real, these alerts.
So imagine knowing as a small business
what's happening around your competitor's stores.
Where your likely customers are at.
If you're advertising, are people even taking photographs
of the areas you're advertising?
Is it showing up in social media?
Because people aren't hashtagging.
People aren't in Times Square hashtagging
the Coca Cola billboard there, but yet it's shared,
literally, tens of thousands of times a day on social media.
They don't know about, we know about it.
Every time any type of major brand in the world
shows up in any video or anything, we know about it.
Any time any object shows up, any type of car shows up,
any type of person shows up, we know about it.
So imagine knowing that for your small business
and having that advantage, not just advantage
from your competition, but your advantage to the customer,
the end user, the person that really matters.
And so, I'll leave you with this
thought with what we're really doing.
At the end of the day, we're changing
the way we consume time.
So time hasn't been messed with in a long time.
And the reality of it is, what do you mean by that?
So today when you get something from the news you think,
"Oh, I'm learning this in real time."
But the reality is is it happened
over here, right, the event.
So this oil pipeline exploded somewhere and you're learning
about it on CNN, and it's still burning
so you're thinking, "Oh, this is happening right now."
The reality of it is CNN knew about it 15 minutes
before you found out about it.
It took them that much time to prepare
the story, verify it, et cetera.
They found out about it from a source, right,
that found out about it et cetera.
And you can keep going down the line
until the actual pipeline exploded over here.
This is truly real time, it's live.
This is our perception of real time,
this is what we deal with every day in life.
Unless you're physically on the scene of something happening
or you're watching a live event on TV,
which is even delayed, our perception of time
and what true real time isn't.
So, in the fact, if you knew everything that
was happening over in the moment that it happens,
think about that, in the moment that anything in the world
happens, what's happening at Disneyland right this second?
Then you would actually know of
what we perceive as the future.
Even if that future is five minutes from now,
15 minutes from now et cetera.
That oil pipeline is a real example.
We detected an oil pipeline exploding in Saudi Arabia.
It took 52 minutes from the time that we detected it
and we gave out the signal, for the trading triggers
in Wall Street to go off, and the break crude oil futures
traded that day, I think it was three dollars higher.
52 minutes.
Imagine if I go to a hedge fund right now and I say,
"Hey, in 50 minutes from now this pipeline is gonna explode.
You can trade and it's gonna make this money."
They would think I was crazy.
But that's the reality of it,
that's what I mean by changing time.
So our time at Banjo today, everything we look at,
everything we do in our lives,
before I go the airport I want to know
what the line is like at TSA, especially with the craziness
that's going on right now, like how do you know that, right?
We utilize our system and it tells us how long the line is.
We utilize our system, it tells me what traffic
is really like on the way there.
Yeah, sure Waze or Google tells you
there might be traffic, but why is there traffic?
Should I detour?
Is it an accident?
Is it a cop giving someone a ticket on the side of the road
and they're just doing lookey looing
and I might as well go that way
as opposed to detouring and missing my flight?
All of those simple things in life that we take for granted
and not having enough information,
this is what Banjo allows us to do.
So anyways, I'll leave you with this one thought
on a company locally here in Vegas.
We're here in Vegas, we're also in Silicon Valley,
but our large operation center that's open 24 hours a day,
and for those of you who didn't have an opportunity
to come and visit us, I do invite you there.
It's a secure facility, so you have to apply ahead of time,
but when you come in there, I'll think you'll
have that holy shit moment, right?
Because really when you walk in there and you see
all that's happening in the world in real time, not on TV,
but just through the data and the signals
of what's happening, and then you see it pop up
on TV 30 minutes later, you start to change
your whole perception of the world and what that means.
- So let's start out with this...
I wonder if we can look at maybe three distinct periods
of you life, and if you can say something from that time
that sort of prepared you to be an entrepreneur
or left you with something that you still draw on this day,
let's say from your time as being a punk rocker in L.A.
when you were a squatter, when you were working
in the pit at NASCAR, and when you were
a crime scene investigator in Davidson, North Carolina.
- Yeah, I think, you know like I told
a group of military veterans I had the honor
of speaking with yesterday at lunch,
you know, I chose to be homeless.
I chose to leave home at 15.
I chose not to go to high school.
My parents are great people.
I love them dearly, but it just wasn't,
hanging out at the house wasn't for me.
So I did, I lived underneath the freeway underpass
for years, squatted in abandoned buildings,
and, you know, that just taught me,
it taught me how to be really street smart.
And I think we could take that word for granted
but literally how to fight for things.
I didn't call home in years, and so,
it's not like I had money and I had access to money.
I fought for every dollar, I earned
every dollar I got by any means.
How I ate every day, I was a lot
thinner then than I am today.
But so that just taught me survival skills
and something that, you know, I probably didn't
have as much even though my mom was a survivor
in the sense that she was raised in an orphanage
in New York City, and they kicked you out back then
around 16 years old, gave you enough money
for a bus ticket anywhere you wanted to go.
So she lived on the streets for a long time as well,
and then built herself into who she
is today which is amazing.
And so, I guess I wanted to follow in those footsteps
and learn that journey of her life,
because I didn't have that experience growing up, right?
Obviously, I grew up in a great household.
We were lower-middle class but still.
And so I learned that in that experience.
And then, you said NASCAR pit crew.
So NASCAR, you know, I bring a lot of what I do
in Silicon Valley and a lot of what I do
in running our company, I attribute to NASCAR.
Why?
For those of you who have ever watched racing,
understand that the pit crews are extremely talented
in the way that they can go over a wall during a race.
All these different emotions happening, the car coming
speeding in at you, you're hot, maybe you're frustrated,
but yet you have to perform this act,
this pit stop in seconds, literally 11, 12 seconds
or else it's the difference between you winning
a million dollars that day and winning
100,000 dollars that day.
And I think, like most of you,
I'd rather win a million dollars a day.
And so, it's about knowing though what the people
next to you are doing in that pit stop
because shit happens constantly, right?
And that you weren't planning for.
And it's about preparing for the unknown all the time.
And we do that in Silicon Valley, and I do that
with engineering, and I do that with non-engineering,
and I'm constantly preparing for
the unknown and the unexpected.
And so people all the time will say,
"Oh, you guys got lucky on this, you got lucky on that."
And I say we prepare ourselves for that luck, right?
Yes, the opportunity came along and we didn't know
it was gonna come along, but it was due to the preparation
that we had done that we seized the moment.
And to me, being an entrepreneur is all about
seizing the moment and the opportunity when it comes along.
We could try to force it to come along.
We could put ourselves in that position.
But sometimes it just comes along,
and those that have succeeded time and time again,
you see and you look at their stories,
they may not talk about this, but if you look at it,
it's that they were prepared to
seize the moment at that time.
And that's what NASCAR really taught me,
and I think that's why we've been
very successful in that organization.
I mean crime scene investigation, why did I do that?
I mean like I told the group yesterday,
I just wanted a badge and a gun.
(laughs)
I mean, and I wanted to try it out.
It was a lot of fun to have a badge and a gun for awhile.
Some days I still pretend I guess I have a badge and a gun.
- That could go in the wrong direction.
- It could go, but at the company, I use a lot of,
you know, you start using a lot of deductive reasoning.
The way you analyze a problem, the way you're looking
at a crime, the way you're looking at solving a crime,
is a lot of the way we look at today
at architecting our system, solving the system.
It could be one of these four outcomes.
How do we use deductive reasoning to get
to the true outcome as fast as possible
without spending too much time chasing
the wrong evidence, the wrong path.
And so, I'd say that's how those three areas of my life
have helped me in what we do today.
- One thread that runs through your story,
which you already touched on, is incredible resourcefulness.
And one of my favorite bits of the big story
we did on you a year ago was where you went to San Francisco
just kind of out of the blue, entered two Hackathons
completely out of the blue, knowing nobody in town,
and win them both, which to put that into
it's proper perspective, never, ever, ever happens.
You're entering these Hackathons against
these teams of engineers that have been
working together for years.
But what I just learned yesterday,
was that one Hackathon in particular, the Google one,
you had a very unique strategy for winning.
Can you talk about that?
- So, so my girlfriend who's in the audience,
we've been together more than a decade now,
obviously I have commitment issues.
(laughs)
So, she's the one who signed me up.
So it's not like by happenstance, like she said,
"Hey, I signed you up for this Hackathon in Silicon Valley."
And I was like, "What the hell is a Hackathon?"
And she's like, "You're gonna go
against all these engineers.
You think you're badass, but let's just see."
And I said, "That's great."
So I actually wasn't gonna go,
and she convinced me, and I drove up there.
And I won one and then the next week
was the Google Hackathon that I got invited to,
and I think there was about 300 engineers,
and they were from Twitter and AMD
and Yahoo, and they brought teams.
And these teams of people already had these big ideas
of what they were gonna do once Google
told them this is the problem we want you to solve.
Well, I looked around and I didn't know anybody.
And I just said to Jennifer, I said,
"Listen, here's how it works.
They're gonna parade us up on stage
and go in front of a lectern like this
and you're gonna be able to say what your idea is."
And the Google executives and the venture capitalists
that are in the room that are gonna judge this
after 52 hours, are going to pick, I think it was,
16 different ideas out of 300 that you're gonna go
forward with and then they form teams around that.
Well, I was an outsider.
No one knew me, there was just no way
they were gonna pick my idea because I saw people
from Google, like I said, Yahoo,
they were gonna get their ideas picked.
And so, I said, "You know what, this is a room
of mostly guys, mostly engineers,
mostly venture capitalists, my girlfriend's good-looking.
If you go up there and tell them it's your idea,
I don't care how good or how bad it is,
they're gonna pick you, I promise."
(laughs)
And I'm not saying they picked her because of that,
but somehow she got picked.
(laughs)
So, when that happened, it was amazing because all these
engineers gravitated to her to be on her team.
And she pointed at me and she said, "No, go talk to him."
And that's literally how it got started.
And then, of course, you know, it was about leadership
and bringing that team together, all these people
I had no idea who they were, and building this
incredible idea which even Jennifer, my girlfriend,
helped me with, and then winning that day,
and then I actually raised about
a million dollars from that so...
- Fabulous.
So let's fast forward to right now.
As I mentioned in my intro remarks,
it's been quite a year or so for you.
Raised a hundred million dollars, you've signed on
a ton of clients which you can tell us about,
but you and I were talking about this yesterday,
you're now moving from here's this really cool start-up
with this amazing idea to now there's real money behind it,
now there's a real board involved,
now we've gotta make it a real business.
Can you talk about those challenges?
- Yeah, so it's actually somewhat harder than I thought.
I've owned several successful companies
that I've built from the ground up in different areas
from retail, to construction, to manufacturing,
but all of them I made profitable
within, I think, the first year.
I think every single one of my companies
were all profitable the first year.
And Banjo, we just burned cash.
Because we're building such a big idea,
as I talked about in the beginning,
and that requires a lot of R&D because
it's something that's never been done.
There's no road map.
And so, this went on for years, literally,
for the last four years, engineering, data science,
our entire company no sales, no business development,
zero marketing people, all focused on building the future.
Are we going to be able to achieve this?
And when we did, now it's about changing that mentality
to we have to split the team in essence.
We have to split the company, because now
we need half of the company supporting us
becoming a company, and a business,
and a sustainable business, a profitable company,
but we still want to make sure that we sustain the R&D
nature of us and continue pushing the bounds of science
all the time so that we have competitive advantages
always coming online in the future.
And that splitting of the team, and it's not really
it's not like you take half of the team and divide them,
but it's like how you move people
one direction and the other.
How do you motivate people who every day came to work
because they were working on the cool, new thing?
Now they're working because they're sustaining
a thousand companies that we've signed up,
and they're sustaining that business channel
and that's a very different mentality.
And to some people, it's just not as exciting
especially to scientists and to some engineers.
And so, it's been a challenge.
It's been a challenge to our culture.
It's been a challenge to the way we do business everyday.
It's been a challenge to motivate.
It's been a challenge to me as a leader to actually learn
more about how you lead through these times.
I mean the good news is we have gone from,
I mean, last time we met was like December I was with you,
and we had 40 or 50 customers, and we're over
a thousand now six months later, five months later,
and growing by a dozen or so a week.
So, and there's still no sales department,
although that's a mistake.
I need to bring in sales in the company,
but it's really hard.
Going through this transition is really difficult right now.
- I guess I want to leave ample time for questions
for the audience, so let's do this one quickly.
Can you identify one challenge that you've been focusing on
that you've found a way to overcome perhaps?
- Yeah, I think for us it's having
one type of group of people.
So engineers and data scientists, and now you start bringing
others in the company who don't have that background,
who don't talk that nomenclature, and the culture
and the nomenclature of the company is that, right?
And it just doesn't have to be in your lives.
It doesn't just have to be engineers or data science,
but you've had one group of people, one thought process,
not one thought process, but you know what I mean,
coalescing around one main idea, now these new people
are coming into the organization,
and you don't want it us versus them.
This is a team sport.
That's why our email is team banjo.
This is everybody together, but bringing these two different
cultures, if you will, together when one culture is already
so strongly rooted, and it starts with me, right?
And sometimes I still run engineering to this day.
And so, it's my responsibility and it's my leadership
that's going to enable that to make it happen,
but then I need the other leaders in the company
and all the people in the company to want
to accept that and bring that together.
And it's challenging, and it's harder than I thought.
And the bigger thing that maybe some of you
can take this away and it would be helpful is,
you know, especially when you're a sole founder
and when you're the leader and you're still
a very active leader in the company, meaning you're like me,
in engineering and stuff everyday, they're gonna look
at you and how your emotions are, the things that you say,
and the things, your impressions on your face,
you've gotta be cognizant of that.
And some days I forget that, and that really
helps shape the company culture.
Like I love our culture, I think we've done a great job,
but now we have to change things,
and we have to change things for the better.
And that starts with me, and it's about not forgetting
about that and not forgetting that we have
a greater responsibility because all of these people
that work for you, gave up other opportunities, right?
They quit jobs, they moved their family
across the United States or from another country,
and you have a responsibility to them
to make it as the best company.
You have a responsibility to yourself and your investors,
so just never forget that, and it's hard.
- As with every time I sit down with you,
I feel like we're just scratching the surface,
but I really want to let the audience ask some questions.
So I think there are two mics going around.
I see a hand over there.
There's one down here, there's one over there.
Wow.
Let's start with you, sir.
- [Male Audience Member #1] Hi.
Thanks for your presentation, it's so inspiring.
My question is how much mindfulness and work,
I don't know how you'd quantify this,
but how much mindfulness and work went into protecting
what you guys do and provide from getting
into the wrong hands like The Joker, The Riddler,
countries like Fat Bastard without naming them?
- So, we actually spend a lot of care in doing that.
Our vetting process is rigorous.
We talk about a thousand customers today,
we'd probably have, this is no exaggeration, 5,000 today
if our process wasn't so rigorous.
And what do I mean by that?
We vet out every company and organization
that applies to use our service cause we don't
have a sales team, so we don't go out and talk to anybody.
Everybody comes to us.
We validate and verify who they are,
what organization are they with,
how are they going to use it,
and we made a call long ago that
we wouldn't work with government agencies.
And the reason why, as a military veteran,
I'm very supportive, obviously, of our military
and protecting our security, having a powerful technology
like this, I'm not naive to the fact of what
this could do in the wrong hands let alone the right hands.
And so we do spend a great amount of care on privacy.
I think it's one of the biggest things we're known for
at Banjo is the amount of, one third of our overhead
and our non-human being capital,
but one third of our overhead, machines, security,
everything goes to protecting privacy, and that's a lot.
And we're talking millions and millions of dollars a year
just in protecting privacy and so that's how we do it.
Thanks for your question, great.
- [Male Audience Member #2] Hi.
Putting aside that you seem about five minutes away
from creating person of interest, what I wanted to ask you
is when you have that much data coming in at once,
what kind of process do you have in place to help
your client not confuse correlation and causation?
- Yep, great question.
So, we actually have, if you came to tour Banjo
you would see, we have a last line of defense,
and in that last line of defense it's human still.
And so while people say how can it scale with human beings?
Well, it has to, and the reason why is because
with the media, the media now trusts us
that when it comes from us it's been verified already,
and when they get that story, they still have to do
their job as a journalist before they put it on air,
but it's without giving them noise.
So I can tell you there's other companies that do
event detection and they might just listen to Twitter
and look at key words, but because of that
they're giving out 30, 40 percent
false-positives every single day.
So imagine in a million events in a year, like I said,
that would be 400,000 false-positives a year,
it's too much noise.
For us, we've had two false-positives in the entire
history of our company, right?
So, it just never happens.
Why?
Because we built this last line of defense
on top of the A.I., a human element.
And when I say a human element, it's five people.
Five human beings are able to get us down
to two false-positives in all of that.
So the noise that they're getting, it doesn't exist,
and the stories they're getting are validated
and they matter to them.
And we measure that and we're constantly tweaking.
I mean just this morning before I got in here
I was on with data science and engineering
talking about a new model we're gonna put out today
for object recognition to ensure that noise levels
even to our team can go down.
So it's a constant battle.
Like you said, the amount of data we pull in,
it would literally mind would explode when you see it,
because mine still does every time I see the bill.
(laughs)
But, anyway, so that's how we're doing it.
Thanks for the question.
- [Male Audience Member #3] Hi.
Thanks a lot for a really inspiring
and eye-opening presentation.
I'm in the mental health field,
and one of the first things that kind of popped in my head
is whether it's suicide and depression or overdoses
from drugs et cetera, I'm almost seeing that there's
potential here to identify when those events happen
long before it would typically happen.
I mean somebody typically might have a picture
of it happening or some other data source
long before they call 911, et cetera.
And I'm wondering if you ever thought about how to use it
in that context in saving lives directly in that way?
- So the answer to that is yes.
But, here's the reality of it...
And I hope that you as entrepreneurs out there
know this lesson already, I still seem to learn it
every day and it's kind of like deja vu, but you can't chase
the shiny new object every day.
And what I mean by that is when you have something
like Banjo there is so much, every one from your walks
of life in here are different than mine, right?
You have a different experience.
Mental health industry, you're right, this could
absolutely be used for it, and it will be used for it.
We focused ourselves today on making sure,
we call it the north star, and we make sure
that we're gonna achieve that north star,
and that's creating the crystal ball.
And now we're creating it as a platform
so that anybody from any industry, any vertical:
mental health, financial services, travel,
things that we haven't gotten into.
They can easily tap into this technology
and build whatever they want on top of it.
They can, again, go to it and query normal language
without having to be an engineer and say,
"These are the things that are important to me.
If these type of things happen in a picture or video,
anywhere in the world or in a certain area,
if these type of words show up,
if this type of slang happens,
if this type of logo happens,
I want to know about it for my vertical, for my business."
And that's what we're gonna make available
to everyone, hopefully, within short order.
I mean, it's available now to some because we had a focus,
but it doesn't mean that we're not concerned
or that we don't care about your industry,
and many of yours out there, but we would fail
as a company if we tried to do all things at once,
and tried to be all things to all people.
We just wanna expose our technology for what it can do,
that's why we used the media, right?
Because it helps see everyday, wow, that' amazing
how you can break that story, but Banjo's
not about breaking stories, right?
Just like I said, it's about knowing anything
before anybody else to make better decisions,
you as a human being.
I don't wanna replace you with a computer.
I just want you to have better information
right now so you can make a better decision
for you and your customers.
- Question right there.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
- [Male Audience Member #4] Damien, Chris Cody.
I had the chance to be over at your place on Tuesday,
and I, too, had my holy shit moment.
What you guys are doing is, and in this work
it gets tossed around a lot, truly disruptive,
so congratulations on making your passion a reality.
My question is around the backdrop of censorship,
so it's slightly different than
the question you heard earlier.
Facebook has been accused of that, I think,
within the last seven or so days.
How do you guys balance or provide the barriers
to what makes it through and what doesn't
for political gain or harm, financial gain
or harm, et cetera?
- Yeah, that's actually, that's a great point
because I don't believe in any censorship at all.
And that's, you know, we get asked all the time
about helping political candidates for office, right?
And I refuse to have our company play
any part in it one way or another.
Now, like you mentioned Facebook, people,
curators looking at content, deciding what goes through.
Everything goes through at Banjo, literally.
It's really what the company subscribes to
that they want from us is what they see.
But you won't find a story, for example,
I'll just take a political example
cause that's what's been in the news.
Right or left, we're not here to report the news.
We're not here to create a title on something
and swing something one way or the other.
We're here to give a signal out.
That's it, a signal.
And what you do with that signal is up to you,
and so there is no neutering if you will.
And there is no, someone is not sitting there
with a sinister plot to say we're gonna swing
things one way or the other because I can assure you
that all signals go through
and, I mean, that's our business, right?
Our business is signal detection.
We haven't even gotten in to the practice
of how do we even mute certain signals from happening,
and I don't want to get into that practice, right?
And that's one of the reasons why we chose not to work
with certain types of entities to prevent us
from doing things like that.
And it's hard.
I mean we've had, I don't wanna name names,
but we've had presidential candidates themselves
come to Banjo here in Vegas,
and we had to decline helping them,
and that's hard because you're looking at
might be the future leader of the free world,
and you're telling them that you're not gonna help them.
And I'm not gonna lie to you, it's tough,
but those are the decisions that we
as leaders have to make every day.
We have to make the tough decisions.
That's why we get out of bed and do what we do.
- [Male Audience Member #5] Hello.
I'm Patrick.
Thanks for your story, it's amazing,
really inspiring, and thanks for your service.
I'm a veteran as well.
- Thank you for yours.
- Two questions: First thing is, the two people,
or you said you have a team of
five people that filters everything.
Did you fire the two people that actually
let those two stories go through?
That's the first question, and the second question
is how do you actually monetize what you do?
- Yeah, so I've fired a lot of people.
(laughs)
That's just reality.
I've actually fired, for as big as the company is,
I've probably fired as many people,
and that's not a negative way.
We have to make those hard decisions.
Did the people get fired for making that mistake there?
The answer is no.
We all make mistakes every day.
None of us is perfect.
If the same person made the same mistake
and let both those go through then yeah they'd be gone.
But that's not what happened, right?
We have to all learn from our mistakes.
I think you have to give everybody an opportunity
to learn from their mistakes.
If they keep repeating them, of course,
then you should probably be making
better decisions on who you hire, right?
So, as far as how we make money,
so it's different for every type of entity right now.
So for like the media side, they subscribe
to the signal, right?
They subscribe to getting stories that matter to them.
So if you're the BBC, you might just care about things
in Europe, maybe maybe not.
Maybe you care about the whole world.
If you're a local NBC station, like here,
we have Sinclair Broadcasting,
the NBC station here in Las Vegas,
they may care about things that are happening
mostly in Vegas, but if it's a big story,
a big signal internationally like the Egypt
plane crash today, or nationally like something
going on in the election, they want to know about.
But everything else we quiet all that noise.
So they're paying for the signals that they ingest from us.
Corporate security, same thing.
If you're a corporation that owns 1,500, I'll call it,
retail outlets in the United States
and you want to monitor what's happening
within a kilometer of those retail outlets:
traffic, crime, et cetera, then you're subscribing
to just that and you're paying for just that.
If you're a big brand like one of my customers, Bud Light,
and you want to see where your logo is showing up
everywhere in the world cause they have no idea.
Where are people just drinking a Bud Light right now,
and it's showing up in photos and videos?
They don't know, right?
So, we charge them for how much photos we have
to process in order to get to that information.
So, it's based on the different types of vertical,
but, ultimately, everybody's just paying for the signal.
We try to make it super easy, and not complicated.
Hence, the reason we don't have a sales force yet.
If you as an entity out there were to subscribe
to Banjo today, I can tell you right now,
we just onboarded The Weather Channel, for example.
The Weather Channel is onboarded, from the time
they signed the contract which actually took a long time
because they're owned by IBM now,
until from turned on, we're talking minutes.
I think all training told into The Weather Channel
go live on air with our stuff, maybe we have
30 minutes into them as a customer.
So that's how we've streamlined
our process and how we charge.
Yep, thank you. - Fabulous.
Over on the right, left for you guys.
[Male Audience Member #6] Good morning.
In an age of constant, instant facts
and the impetus to react instantaneously,
are you concerned about the loss
of thoughtfulness and wisdom and judgment?
- No, and that's because, like I said, I'm not trying to
replace, and I don't want to replace anyone out here
in the audience and their business with a machine,
I just want to give people better information
to make better decisions.
When you talk about thoughtfulness,
I like to think I'm thoughtful,
and I would think most of you as entrepreneurs
in your business are thoughtful thinking about the future,
the implications, what you want to do,
just where you want to take your company,
what's the next company you might wanna start.
But no I don't worry about the things that have yet to come
because if we, especially from the technology side,
if I sat there and worried about everything
that might happen, I probably wouldn't innovate.
I'd get stagnate because I would worry too much.
So I really just I lead my life of not worrying about much.
Now if something happens and there's negative implications
because of something we've done, then absolutely,
I'd take action immediately without question.
But I try to live my life without fear or worry of anything.
- Time for one more in the back.
- [Male Audience Member #7] Hi, thank you.
So, if you could give one bit of advice to
an entrepreneur who is on the verge of scaling up,
and I mean you went through that and you said
several things about your culture and how important that is,
but as that occurs, what advice would you give
to an entrepreneur to prepare to scale up
and create the kind of company you've created?
- So, charge, right?
Just go forward.
There's no way you can prepare enough,
and I see it constantly with new entrepreneurs,
it's procrastination, right?
Because they just, "I haven't prepared for this.
I need to launch this.
These people, when I launch it, it needs to be perfect."
You know what?
At the end of the day, nobody gives a damn.
They're not gonna remember your mistakes.
You're not gonna remember your mistakes,
but you need to make those mistakes.
So the more time you procrastinate,
is the less time that you're
going forward and moving forward.
So when it's time to scale, of course,
you should think through what does it mean to scale?
Who should I be hiring?
What systems do I need to have in place?
But ultimately, you have to move forward.
You have to execute.
Ideas are cheap, execution is what is key.
Regardless if you succeed or fail, and I choose success.
But you have to move forward, and don't get paralyzed
in that, you know, you're worried that what the impression
of your business or you is going to be
if you fail at this or if you don't do this
because people don't remember.
I promise you they don't.
And I look back on all the times I procrastinated
on things and I think about how stupid I was
and how I could have saved minutes, or hours, or months
of agonizing and stress and gray hair
if I had just moved forward and learned along the way.
So that's what I would advise you, just charge.
Charge that hill, plant that flag up there and just own it.
- Awesome.
(audience applauds)
(light music)
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