Stanford ecorner The Altruistic Entrepreneur [Entire Talk] Damien Patton, Banjo 25-01-2019 URL: https://ecorner.stanford.edu/?post_type=video&p=61592 Everything we know about real time is wrong, says Damien Patton, founder and CEO of Banjo. By analyzing and processing billions of live data signals, Banjo is able to deliver live-time, live saving information to aid agencies and the media. Patton shares his mission of using technology to help people by using artificial intelligence for good, and encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to listen to their gut when faced with tough ethical decisions. Transcript (engaging music) - [Presenter] Who you are defines how you build.. - So the first thing I'm gonna start off with, you're gonna hear me talk today a lot about time and that I'm a big believer in that you can't waste time.. And we're together today for probably 50 minutes or so and there's gonna be a Q & A period as part of this.. And many of you I know have already researched both on myself and on Banjo.. But most of what you're gonna hear today is new.. It's gonna be new to you and so please as you're hearing this I just ask you to keep an open mind.. I ask you to get your questions ready 'cause you should have a lot of questions and whether it's in the class after this or whether it's in here I hope that you get an opportunity to ask them and I'm a very transparent person.. So no topic is off topic for me.. So please bring the heat, if you will.. So I'm gonna start off talking about, every day we have decisions that we make that change the way that our life will go, right, and some of them are small decisions and many of them are large decisions.. But we get information today in a time frame that we, who in this room actually has heard of the term real time? Right, real time analytics, real time data, but real time for you and I, we think of it as live, like right now we're having a conversation in real time.. The reality is the way the term has been used in tech and in our every day lives, real time is just the best that people can do.. And the problem with real time is that real time is truly historical.. It's already happened.. In the sense that when we're looking at information and data for us to make decisions that are gonna impact our own lives, real time data is filtered at that point.. It's like the telephone game.. I tell you something, you tell someone else, by the time you get to third person it's already been altered.. You didn't mean for it to but just we're humans and that's what happens.. If something's not happening live then it can become biased and if it becomes biased that we're not making the best decision that we can make because we're already looking at the data, the information to make a decision either late or we're making the decision through someone else's eyes.. And so today I'm gonna talk a lot about the change in time that we as human beings are going through right now and the way that you as a human being are gonna be able to make better decisions in your life.. It is a paradigm shift that we're going through today from this real time concept to truly understanding as things happen live and I'm gonna break it down so we can all look at certain things that are happening in our own lives today, things that are important.. So how does this bring us to Banjo and what does Banjo do? For those of you've who've researched Banjo you probably think you have a pretty good idea but now I'm gonna hopefully blow your minds on what we really do behind the scenes.. Years ago I saw that real time was not good enough.. Real time is the reason why today, unfortunately many people don't get the aid that they need in the time they need it to save their life, or to reduce human suffering, but if they had information live or if someone else had information live they could've made a decision, a better decision that could've saved someone's life.. And so at Banjo we are this live intelligence platform that has built a system that can truly take in the world of live public data.. I know that sounds like a big statement, the world of live public data but I mean it.. We process today, whether it's 911 phone calls, live public cameras that are out there, social media, traffic, weather, think of all the different types of live data signals that are happening around you every single day, happening around us right now that we don't even realize.. Think how many of them could impact your life if you only knew that it was happening, or if you could five of them together at once, which as we know doesn't happen and is very difficult.. So what Banjo's able to do is take in these thousands and thousands of signals and what do I mean by a signal? Well if I'm talking to you about 911 phone calls and I mean all 911 phone calls, that's one signal.. If I'm talking to you about a social network..
That's only one signal, all of it.. We process thousands and thousands of different types of signals every single second.. And when we process that what I mean is we gather all that information live, while it's still streaming.. It has not been altered in real time in a sense that's historical; it's still live.. And in that moment we've built artificial intelligence that truly understands what is happening in these signals.. But because we have so much data and so many signals we can also determine what is real and what is false.. Because no matter how good a source of data is and no matter where it's coming from, one source of data I call it as no data.. For those of you who are entrepreneurs when you get out one day and you're gonna raise money possibly from venture capitalists, I also tell those that I'm mentoring and that is one buyer is no buyer, meaning if you only have one offer it's equivalent to no offer, you know you need to get more.. It's the same thing with data.. You can't make the best decisions in your life from one piece of information.. And so how do you bring in so many different pieces of information that are so unrelated to one another but yet coming together and being combined from all these multiple sources can then tell us the degree of confidence, the degree of truth that is coming out of each signal, and then to find the anomalies.. So now we have all these signals coming in live from around the world, all right now, and then how can we determine what that means.. Is there something that you need to act on? Is there something that's gonna change your life? And some of 'em maybe even save your life or a loved one's life.. So how this works is this data comes in live on a stream and our system know what everywhere in the world looks like now because we've been listening for a long time.. And what you may be thinking to yourself is wow, this sounds pretty scary.. Someone that has access to that much data, in fact I think it's the largest live data store now in the world with more signals than any other one company has.. But the big difference here, the day I started this company until now and it's been a long time, we've also protected user data in a way that others have never done and we strip the data of personal identifiable information.. In fact most of our data suppliers we request that they don't even send us any PII at all.. But if they do we've patented a process that scrubs that so that even our engineers won't have access to PII.. So it's always protecting the user data.. We as a company have never sold data, ever.. And you may think well wait a minute if you have this much data and this much insights and you guys no what's going on before anybody else why wouldn't you have sold the data? We'll talk later about ethics and artificial intelligence, and the way that we've led this company since the day we started it and why we've made those decisions.. But getting back now to how all of this information comes in and we know what normal looks like.. So when normal is disrupted and then we can validate that disruption by multiple other types of signals that cannot be influenced by another signal we can verify that something's happening.. Let me give you a few instances.. Last year, October 1st in the city of Las Vegas you guys all know about the large shooting that took place.. Our system was listening and in the moment of that shooting our system knew that not only was there a shooting, that it was affecting many people at the Route 91 Harvest Fest on The Strip in Las Vegas, and it knew where the shooter was, and it knew all of this before the 911 phone call even was made.. Before the 911 call was even made the system had gone through all of this information, had made sense of it, and had validated it, and verified it, and we as a company sent that information out to the media to let them know that this was happening.. Unfortunately the reality of it is the media once they get it they'll do their fact-checking but they also gotta think about how they're gonna put headlines on things or when they're gonna send something out, so there's a delay.. This is when we go back to real time.. We were at live and the difference between live information not getting out in the Vegas incident, police officers showed up to the wrong hotels.. Many of the people, hundreds of people that needed to go to the hospital and finally made it to the hospital, the hospitals didn't know that there was a large shooting that happened until people started showing up at the doorstep almost an hour later.. Then doctors had to be paged and that takes another hour before doctors come in, and blood has to be transferred to the hospital.. That golden opportunity to save that life is now long gone.. We don't think as a society that this is even possible because we see in movies, like that's not how it works in the movies.. It's not real life; this is real life, Parkland School shooting the same way.. The hospitals were completely unprepared 'cause they don't have live information being fed to them, we would think they would but they do not.. And so that has to change.. So at Banjo we're making sure that all of this information that's being collected is being collected for the purposes of one mission and this is a part in Silicon Valley and not just in Silicon Valley but outside where our mission really changes and differentiates us from the rest in the sense that it's not a mission statement, it's a mission.. And the mission is to save human life and to reduce human suffering by using artificial intelligence for good.. And you could say, well what is good? I just stop it at that statement right there.. That's what good is.. 'Cause we can all sit here and justify how to use artificial intelligence against data in a way we believe is good but if you really stop and think about it and you ask yourself the question how do you feel about that and for just one moment you get that little tingling sensation in your gut it's probably not the right thing to do.. For example we could be selling this data today and completely disrupting the stock market.. There's no doubt that we know things long before the high frequency traders know 'em in Wall Street.. And we've been offered contracts of dollar amounts that would blow your mind and we've always said no.. People thought I was crazy way back when when we were filing patents on how to protect user privacy because no one cared eight years ago about that.. Now today it's a big topic and so there's a spotlight on it.. But we never wavered from that.. And that's what put us in the position today where people trust us by bringing in this anonymized data but remember it truly is anonymized and it's public data.. It's just being brought in at a speed, a speed of live that others have never been able to do and verifying it so that you or I can make a big difference in the world.. And so let me give a few examples of how this technology is being harnessed.. About
three months ago now, an attorney general from a different state contacted me and said I've seen the demo of what your product can do and it's amazing how you unsilo all of these data sources from all these different places to get us information faster for the purposes of saving our citizens lives in our state.. But would like to see if you could put a dent in child abduction.. And I said okay, I personally understand and you can relate to child abduction so how could we solve it? And so what he did is he invited us down for a statewide, a drill where they actually abducted a real child with an actor and hundreds of police officers, different agencies participated in this, just like if a child had been abducted, and the federal agencies were there, and the state agencies is there, and the local agencies.. And when this child was abducted they went hours, many, many hours, in fact I think the report came out that it was like 13 hours later.. They just happened upon the child by getting a good lead, a good tip that led them to the child.. But the average statistic is that the average child taken by a stranger would have unfortunately died within the first three hours after the abduction.. And so when the drill was done, the attorney general and his investigators looked at our information that had gone out to them live.. We didn't know anything about the drill.. We didn't know any of the details.. And what they determined is that if they had been using us at that time that the child would've been recovered in just a few minutes after the abduction and almost certainly would obviously have been alive, which is the difference life and death of a child.. It was so profound to them that this attorney general went to many other states' attorney generals, all the way to the federal government and all the way down to local police departments, not in his state, but across the United States and in just a few short months this software, this technology now, being used for child abduction has now forever changed the way children will be recovered in this country and I assure as I am standing here today that years from now we will look back on the successful rate of recovery when a child is abducted will have been changed forever because of something that happened literally 90 days ago.. And so now we move from an amazing opportunity to save the life of a child to other opportunities that this thing, that this technology allows us to harness.. For example, we all hear about the opiod crisis that's ravaging throughout this country.. And we hear that we're putting a lot of money into it, meaning the government's put nine billion dollars recently into it, but is it really making a difference? And the problem that we find is that there's all these silos of data, we think in a perfect world that everybody works together, it couldn't be further from the truth.. Federal government doesn't work with state government.. State government doesn't work with local government.. They don't work with private companies.. Lot of reasons for that, protectionism, old, I'll call it tribal wars between agencies, or between private companies, private companies not wanting the government to have access to information.. But all the data to solve the opiod crisis is literally right in front of us.. It's just never been put together in a way that gives us a clear picture live in order to get ahead of the problem.. We're always on our heels with the problem.. We're never able to get in front.. And now with Banjo and what we've developed with all this live information, the ability now to get in front of the opiod crisis is now in front of us and we literally will be able to put a massive dent in that, a real dent, a measurable dent.. And a lot of you are sitting here today saying well why haven't I seen this and why when I've researched Banjo why haven't I seen or heard any of this? Well it's on purpose.. While we're very transparent and I said to you before today when I got up here please ask me any question that comes to mind 'cause we are very transparent.. I'm very transparent, sometimes too transparent.. But I want you guys to be able to understand how this is used, why it's used, so you truly get an understanding because what's hard is when you're very quiet like we are, and I'm gonna tell you why we're quiet in a minute, but it's hard to educate on a technology that sounds like, well it sounds like mythical.. It sounds like this is not possible.. If this is possible why didn't a Google do it? Why didn't a Microsoft do it? How could this have not have already existed? And there's a couple of simple reasons for that.. And number one is having someone internally that has vision and a mission to get something accomplished that's very personal to them.. Number two is having the credibility to get access to a tremendous amount of data sources that as I said with all these silos, government wouldn't trust certain private companies with data and vice versa, and we've broken those walls down.. But it's hard when you don't go out there and you don't put yourself out there publicly.. But the reason we decided a long time ago, I think the last major article on us that I did was about four years ago, and it was very distracting at the time because everybody who realized what we had, the acquisition offers from the giants came, and they kept getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger to where our investors, even our employees were like this is game changing, you know we should think about selling.. Or maybe it was you should think about selling this technology or use this technology in the stock market.. But remember what I told you, we only use this for saving human life and reducing human suffering, period the end.. So if it doesn't meet that goal, I can't be tempted by money, we can't be tempted by money and that's a hard thing for people to say and even sounds a little like BS with you sitting out there, and so when I was introduced they said that I have a little bit of an unusual background.. Well we all do.. We all have different life experiences.. Life experiences that are gonna enable you to create something amazing, whether you become an entrepreneur and start it yourself or where you support other entrepreneurs to create amazing change.. And it's not unlike what has happened here at Banjo and why this exists today.. So for me, I'm a homeless kid and when I say homeless, I mean like I was really homeless for years.. I lived under the underpass of a freeway.. I ate out of the dumpsters.. I never went to high school.. And people say why would you be homeless and how long? And well there's a lot of circumstances.. And it starts up in the home, and things happen in the home that you have to escape from and I rebelled and escaped from that before I could even get a driver's license.. And so no education, no driver's license, no money, and there I am on the streets of LA for a long time and for years.. And so I understand what it's like to live with literally nothing, not even your dignity.. And then I was fortunate enough that there was an opportunity for me to go into the military during Desert Storm, for
many of you weren't even born then but in 1990 when Desert Storm was starting up they needed able bodies and I was able bodied.. I didn't have an education but I was an able bodied person and so I was able to get myself out of the streets and bring myself into the military where I excelled and that really helped me start a new foundation for myself, it gave me some pride, it gave me some dignity, and it eventually gave me the wherewithal and the finances to get an education.. And from that education I spent time as you guys heard in becoming a chief mechanic in a top NASCAR team 'cause I wanted to understand what that was about.. I then went and studied from everything from the FBI to law enforcement to homicide investigation because I wanted to become a crime scene investigator before there was a TV show Crime Scene Investigation.. Because I wanted to understand what it was like to solve hard challenges and so I went out there in law enforcement and I did that for a while, and then I was lucky enough to start hacking my way through things and eventually found myself at a few of these big hackathons, the last major one was at Google, and when I won that the investors here in Silicon Valley asked me who I was 'cause I wasn't from here and I was able to raise a significant amount of money and here we are years later with Banjo, you know being so transformational.. It didn't start off transformational because the technology and artificial intelligence didn't even exist when we started it but you know we quickly adopted it, early on, I think it was 2012, 2013, we were doing artificial intelligence at a level still that I believe that most still aren't even doing.. But we always thought about the ethical constraints and our ethics around artificial intelligence.. And so you as entrepreneurs, as you get out there to start in your journey, I want you to think about how are you going to ask yourself what is the ethical use of artificial intelligence? How should we be using this? What is the best thing that we can do, not just for yourself, but for mankind? And it's a hard decision.. I sit there and listen to my friends who run big companies today and they sit there and justify how they're selling people's data and making money for something like advertising and I quickly say to them, I say well those people don't know you're selling their data, and they say no but we justify it because they've opted in to use this so therefore we're selling that.. And I'm not here to pass judgment on them and I'm not passing judgment but for me I don't like the way that feels.. And so even if I could sit there and justify it to myself I know what that initial feeling is and so what I ask you to do, because this is a very hard subject that humanity has to deal with today, not just the artificial intelligence and the ethics around it, the ethics around people's data, is how does it make you feel? And I don't mean how does it make you feel after you've sat there and you've convinced yourself how it makes you feel, go with that initial instinct in your gut, and you know what I'm talking about.. You feel that way before an exam.. You feel that way before, maybe there's a tough question or a tough conversation you gotta have with somebody.. We inherently know what the right thing to do is.. We just ignore it.. We ignore it because it's either uncomfortable or there's an advantage to us maybe financially to ignore and that gets me to the other point.. People always tell me, Damien this is great, what Banjo's doing in saving lives at this level is unprecedented but most people would use your technology and they go make money first, go make a lot of money, and then you become altruistic.. You don't become altruistic now because you can never become a big company.. And I'm not just sitting here to prove them wrong but we are gonna prove them wrong because this is already becoming a big company and we have been altruistic about it.. Our mission is very altruistic.. And you can be altruistic in the things that you wanna do in life, and don't let people tell you that altruism at the end of the day comes at the cost of financial gain.. All right so we can have a whole debate and discussion about what does that mean to be a financial gain and how should you feel about that, or what makes you feel successful.. Is it just money? No don't get me wrong this has to make money.. This has to be successful in a significant way or else we could never continue to grow and we would never achieve our mission of the amount lives and ending of human suffering that we wanna do.. But each and every single person in this room, you have a unique life story, like I have a unique life story, yours is just different.. Different is not better or worse.. It's that, it's different.. You can create and do amazing things.. Things that I could never even dream of.. Things that I couldn't even understand because of your unique experiences.. Because of things in life that you're either dealing with today, you dealt with before, or the things that you aspire, that you want to accomplish in the future and that's why you can create something amazing.. Even if you're sitting there today and saying I don't know if that's for me.. That's okay you don't have to make a decision today on what's best for you today.. But I can assure you if some homeless kid with no education who probably my best accomplishment in life is the fact that I'm not in prison has been able to achieve something of this magnitude that is literally changing the way that we will be able to deliver information to people faster, you will get information faster, that it'll make a massive change in your life for the better or for your loved one's lives for the better.. You can do anything.. And so don't feel the pressures of you needing to go out and start something; I mean every time I come and speak at one of these things everyone feels this need that they need to become the entrepreneur and come out with the next big thing, not so.. I'm grateful that behind me I have an amazing team of people and have had an amazing team of people for almost eight years ago when I started this, several of them are sitting here that were there the day I started it and are still with me today.. And I'm grateful that they didn't go out on their entrepreneurial ventures of their own, that they've been able to support the craziness coming out of my head every day to make it a reality.. And so just because you don't have that desire maybe to go out and do something of your own that doesn't mean you don't play a significant role in making it happen.. The idea might've been mine, to change the world from real time to live, or to how we can save human lives, or how we can rescue children going forward that have been abducted, but without the amazing team behind me, the people that also believe in giving up things in their life, giving up opportunities that other tech companies came to them and said hey come work on this next advertising, you'll make more money right now in the short term, but all these folks decided for the long term gain, the long term gain of that saving human life was their mission and I'm grateful to them everyday and it's just as the people that you'll work with to create something amazing will be grateful, and not only grateful, it wouldn't have happened without you..
So just know that going forward that you don't have to lead the change to create the change and I can't overemphasize that enough, and especially in such a community as we're in today in Silicon Valley and here at Stanford; I know that all of you are destined to do great things, either from starting something or being the sparks inside something that'll make big difference in humanity, and all that I ask is that you ask yourself that internal question when you're doing it, is what are the ethics around this? How should we treat technology, artificial intelligence? How should we treat data? And ask yourself the question, if you weren't in this, and you really have to divorce yourself from the moment, and this was being done to you without you knowing about it would you be okay with it, and if you get that little tinge like I said, that's your real answer.. You may choose to ignore it but you can't say that you never felt it.. So I'm gonna stop right here so you guys can ask questions.. I hope you guys have a bunch of questions.. I think we got 10 minutes or so of questions.. So let 'em start coming.. - [Audience Member] Could you just tell us more about why you're keeping a low profile with your company? I think you started to say something-- - Thank you for reminding me.. Sorry, he asked why I never finished talking about why we keep a low profile.. So we didn't for a while and you can see a tremendous amount of stuff out of there where I was speaking to massive audiences, or they were doing these huge feature articles, or I was on Fox News one day, CNN the next, CNBC the next, and it was just building a hype machine, and I don't believe in hype.. I believe in execution.. You either do it or you don't.. You don't talk about it.. And so what was happening is all these people were coming into our company and offering us to acquire us, or saying let's go make a gazillion dollars in the financial markets; well that starts to distort people, not everybody is going to have the internal fortitude of a leader, like myself.. They're not gonna be able to say hey let's just stay this line 'cause it becomes very distracting.. It's a shiny new toy in other words.. And so in order to cut out all the shiny new toys and the distraction and to make sure that we weren't one of those companies that says oh imagine if we had just stayed doing this we could have done amazing things like eradicate the opiod crisis or change child abduction forever.. And so because of that I just stopped all media so there was no distraction, but that doesn't mean we're not transparent; all of our customers, government, private company, and in fact just people that aren't our customers, you, every one of you.. If you wanna come in and see all of this data being transformed, processed, and delivered to customers, everybody can come to the facility we show that in.. It's in Park City, Utah.. Not a horrible place to come visit.. But you can see this.. So we're very transparent, it's just I'm now very vocal about it because I don't want the distraction for the team.. Everybody is focused.. It's not an exaggeration to say that every moment that we're not sitting there focused on the mission that there's a life at stake and we know that because when we deliver something that changes life you go back and say how would this have impacted things over the last year had we gotten it out a year earlier, and when you look at the statistics, it gives you all that motivation in the world to stay focused on our core mission of saving human life and that's why we don't do a lot of media and why we stay pretty quiet.. - [Audience Member] Hi, now you've raised I think a hundred million in 2015? - Yeah - [Audience Member] I was wondering how much runway did that give you, are you now profitable or you know what's the outlook? - Well we've raised, I think we've raised between 130 to 150 million dollars.. Our runway, we have years worth of runway left.. Are we profitable today? The answer would be no we're not profitable today and the reason we're not profitable today, we've had opportunities time and time again to be profitable but they were for the wrong reasons.. That doesn't mean we couldn't have been profitable for the right reasons but I continue to invest back in our technology, because again, three months ago this child abduction from the attorney general that came to us and said you can solve this.. That wasn't in our lap and the amount of money that we put into that, to invest into that, far outstripped the initial money that you're going to get for it.. Now over time it'll pay for its self but it was far more important for us to invest in that to save a child's life today than worry about how to pay for it later through profitability.. - [Audience Member] Do you think that your career in law enforcement and crime scene investigation modified your vision for the company as well as you know partnering up with different states to do with like child abduction, do you think that's where it came from? - The question was for those that didn't hear it did my time in law enforcement modify or influence the way I do things? Again, just like in all of our life experiences, all of my life experience absolutely influence me including that; I mean my days before I was homeless and what happened to me in the home and then going out and to being a homeless kid and surviving on the street, all of that factors into every decision I make every day.. Like it should in all of your decisions every day.. It taught me right from wrong today and how I feel about things around ethics.. All of that came born out of experiences.. So absolutely, every thing that I've experienced as a human being, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was being in the military, all of that influences the way that I look at this and we didn't get into this today, and maybe in the class after this we can get into questions but there's a whole discussion about someone from law enforcement looking at the power of this, what you could do with this, and to me there's so much good you can do with this, so much good you can do in helping folks and we'll talk about that in the next class for those of you that are in it.. Right here.. - [Audience Member] So you mentioned at the beginning, you mentioned the two shootings and you mentioned the disconnect between live and real time, my question is about whether, what the problem was and whether there is a solution, or if there is a solution currently? If something like that were to happen again, why there was that hour delay, or three hour delay-- - So the question was on the shootings why was there such a delay that that still exists today? I'm paraphrasing but the reality of it is it exists worse than you think and I'm a realist so I'm just gonna tell you the way it is through my eyes.. If I was to take each of you today to a 911 center to listen to the calls coming in and watch how they're processed and they go out to get that person life saving help you would all walk out of there completely depressed.. This is not the movies.. It is much slower than you think.. Not for the men and women that are doing the job at the 911 center or the men and women on the street in emergency services trying to get you aid.. They're just doing the best they can with what they have and it's still pretty archaic and it's
because data is so siloed between agencies.. The answer's there in front of 'em.. When the shooting happened in Las Vegas it was really just turned into chaos and confusion and there was no way to distill that chaos and confusion into understanding what the truth was, let alone where the shooter was, let alone even alerting the hospitals.. I would love to tell you that a year later it's changed.. It's not changed.. There's a lot of reports by the government that you can go read that tell you how bad it really is and what they're going to do about it but we all know how slow that change is.. And what we're doing as a company is we're going into entire states at the governor's level and even at the federal level, and totally changing that today but it's gonna take time because you're breaking down silos and divisions in government, in private companies that have never worked together before, but the thing that makes me feel great about this everyday is that how fast those barriers are falling.. Because when people see it for the first time you can't unsee it; if you come to Park City and you were to watch this, and you were to watch the child abduction working in real time, you'll never be able to unsee that again and how fast all these things came together, and you'll see these people who are working in that field of public safety, the transformational change it has on them as a human being, 'cause that's what they wanna do, they wanna save your life.. And this is giving them an equalizer and an opportunity to do that better than it's ever been before.. So that's what helps create change.. - [Audience Member] What's the source of your data, like for the Vegas shooting you were mentioning, what were the signals that you captured? - Oh there was a lot of signals for Vegas.. I mean everything from social media to public, the Department of Transportation cameras, to radio traffic, I mean a tremendous amount of signals.. Like I said if you come in and you look at our center every day, you're going to realize that when you're driving up and down the highway, the amount of signals that are actually there that you don't know about but that are just publicly there, IOT signals, traffic application signals, the Department of Transportation's cameras, social media, all of that data but it's all siloed; you would think that our law enforcement would have all those signals so if you get in a car accident they know about it instantly, it couldn't be further from the truth.. That doesn't exist.. It exists maybe in a report somewhere.. It doesn't exist in reality.. Straight back.. - [Audience Member] Where does the money come from to invest in new technology like in the case of the child abduction scenario or like to pay your workforce? - Yeah so we've raised a lot venture capital money and at the same time we've made money, meaning from our contracts, and so I can tell you 100% of everything we make today from the contract, 100% goes back into innovation, call it R & D, whatever term you wanna call it but 100% goes back.. So in the child abduction, the opportunity was there in front of us to change how a child is recovered forever and to change history, it was an easy decision to take funds that we would've put maybe elsewhere on something else and focus it on that.. In the very back in green.. - [Audience Member] How did you actually figure out all of these AI algorithms that are able to process this huge amount of data and give usable results? - Yeah how are we able to figure out the AI algorithms.. I'll give you the short answer to this and I'm happy to talk to you in depth.. We were doing AI before AI was cool and I truly mean that.. It's like I try not to even talk about AI because so many people just hijack the term AI, like if you're doing an Excel spreadsheet with a few macros all of a sudden you're in AI.. But it's no different, you remember big data a few years ago then everybody started talking about big data.. I mean it's no different.. The reason I'm talking about AI today is because I wanna put the focus on the ethics around artificial intelligence, not so much the artificial intelligence itself.. But if you wanna see how we do it and the things that we've developed and the self-training AI that we've developed five, six years ago, a lot of those folks that are here tonight who work in Silicon Valley would happily show you or anybody else those things.. Right here.. - [Audience Member] First of all, as a fellow veteran thanks for your service.. That does mean that I'm being sincere.. I was curious more like how are you building these relationships, to me my immediate question when you first told that story about the shooter is why couldn't your company contact Las Vegas PD? Or the hospital, like the campfire, you know what I'm saying how are those relationships starting to happen? How are you breaking down the barriers as you mentioned? - So here's reality.. Why aren't we just contacting everybody when we something bad happening every day? Right now in the United States we see about 96,000 bad things a day that law enforcement, emergency responders don't even know, 96,000 a day right now.. How would we contact, which one do we choose to call and not call so here's the reality of it.. Someone asked me during, in fact the last administration in the White House called me to the White House the day after the Paris attacks if you remember a few years ago those poor people were slaughtered in the Bataclan Theater and wanted to know how we knew about that eight minutes, eight minutes before the French authorities knew about it and the amount of lives that could have been saved and I said what did you want me to do? You want me to find out some police station in France call them up and say hi, and first of all I'm speaking English, I'm an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley let me tell you what I'm seeing going on in your town.. By the time they kept hanging up on me.. That's just reality.. I can tell you right now in the 911 scenario for calling on the Vegas shooting, it wouldn't have been taken seriously and if it was it would've been routed, there's so many inefficiencies it wouldn't have helped anyway.. The only way to affect change is to truly get in to all of these places, all of these private industries, government industries, and change them from within 'cause it's the only way it's going to work.. They're just not gonna take flippant calls from us.. I wish they would and you're welcome to come and sit down in one of our offices and I'll give you a phone and a desk, and you can just sit there and watch and start calling them, and it'll be pretty disheartening, you'll see very quickly that no one pays attention.. They only pay attention when you change from within but that's how we get the relationships.. There was a shooting this last weekend and the city the shooting was in had just talked to us but they didn't have the budget, didn't wanna do this.. When that shooting happened the police weren't even on the scene yet and I'm getting calls personally, all the way to the Speaker of the House from that state's calling me and saying hey what can you do to help us in this situation, we need to know.. So unfortunately in this country and for human beings it takes
tragedy to have action.. Very rarely do we spend the money and get ahead of things.. It's always reactive.. We're trying to change that but we are also living in this world of reality.. So over here.. - [Audience Member] Following up from that so why don't you maybe have a plan to decentralize the good stuff? - Decentralize how? - [Audience Member] So I'm installing AI agents, people are installing AI agents in their homes, now it's getting more pervasive, five, 10 years from now.. I install Banjo 'cause it takes care of that type of analysis and I get to know the shooting's happening in Vegas if I'm in Vegas, or I get to decentralize.. - So I would say a lot of the big consumer companies, and I won't mention them, who are putting devices in your homes, today, are working with us on something very, very similar to that.. (audience applauds) (engaging music)..