Seam’s Sy Bohy: Building the Generalize Interface for the Physical World
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Podcast Notes
Sy Bohy & Seam: Building the Generalize Interface for the Physical World
Aakash and Xand interview Seam co-founder Sy Bohy as he takes on build the platform for IoT. Seam lets developers connect and control 3rd-party connected devices like door locks, thermostats, and more.
Sy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sybohy
Seam: https://www.seam.co/
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Contact:
Email: podcast@aakash.io
Twitter: @aakashdotio [twitter.com/aakashdotio]
Aakash's website: https://www.aakash.io
Music credits:
Syn Cole - Gizmo [NCS Release] provided by NoCopyrightSounds
Autogenerated Transcript
[00:00:00] Aakash Shah: Hi there I'm Aakash, founder of Wyndly, where we fix allergies for life. This is Founders and Builders, where I talk to people who are working hard to bring something new and meaningful into this world.
[00:00:14] Aakash: So Sy tell us about Seam and what you guys are doing.
[00:00:17] Sy: Sure. So we're building an API that lets software developers control IOT devices from third party manufacturers. So think like smart door locks, thermostats sensors and there's a lot of complexity to controlling these devices, communicating with them and we abstract all of that away give you something that ultimately resembles, you know, Twilio or Stripe in terms of simplicity and yet it's still very powerful and it allows you to interact with the physical world.
[00:00:48] Aakash: So you mentioned a few API products there. Stripe and Twilio are interesting. I almost thought of plaid or segment. Which do you feel is more on the nose for the problems you face when it comes to kind of these integrations?
[00:01:01] Sy: Yeah. I mean, reasoning by analogy is always a bit tricky because it's, it's never quite perfect translation, but segment is good in the sense that it's an integration of multiple Attack surfaces into a single point You know, do something within the backend Plaid to me Plaid is, is, is quite interesting for different reasons or is a good comparable it's it's more the idea of providing third party access to a private resource so that the Seam example here is say I'm a resident In a multi residential building; I can give ups or door dash access to my lobby to drop off packages, food. What have you, even when I'm not home. just effectively doing sort of a, an Oauth you know, handshake and say, Hey, now through Seam you can now access this. The short answer is usually to use the direct like Stripe or Twilio or Plaid or whatever analogy doesn't quite fit all the different facets, but like it's, it's kind of. It's a good mental model to start going that direction.
[00:02:02] Xand: Cool. funny that you mentioned that like a resident using this to like let a DoorDash person into their lobby or something.
The product. It seems like Twilio and Stripe and these kinds of like API first integrations.
It seems like the customer is intended to be someone, either who is technical or has technical resources knows how to conceptualize a solution built on an API. Do you find with your current customers? Is it for example, residents? Is it more B to C or is it like B2B? Hey, I've got a commercial building. want to automate or mechanize some of my operations. kind of gravitates towards the solution?
[00:02:36] Sy: Yeah. Today it's it's B2B and it's mostly startups that are offering. There's actually two, two groups. are definitely startups. That are more like a Sonder or like an open door where they need to automate a piece of the physical world as a physical space that they operates. So like granting access to your house or to an apartment units inside of a building. We're starting to see as well is now, this is kind of where we go almost in like the B2B2C startups that have a SaaS offering. And as part of that SaaS offering, they would like to integrate with their users, IOT devices inside of an office space or warehouse.
I think is going to be a big pool for us. It's kind of like the idea of the platform of platforms. I think that's, that's the direction where we're kind of pulling in. Some of the other examples of the two the two prior examples you gave you know, a more traditional company that may not have an engineering team, or doesn't necessarily think in terms of API primitives. I think those guys were definitely seeing them today. I think there's definitely a market there. think we're going to move in that direction at some point, like we're starting the API because that's just like, there's a lot of desperate need out there for something that would fundamentally work. But the goal of technology is not just to be for other technically minded folks. Right. It's ultimately to kind of leverage something and make it accessible to folks that may not fully understand how that stuff works. And so I think the future Seam have an API product, but it's not really an API company. It's more like an IOT automation platform where we can connect to a bunch of devices through all of our device abstractions, and then we can make certain things happen on third party apps when a particular event happens on a device. That's the Zapier story. That's the, if this, then that story and that's fundamentally not extremely technical product, but it's a generalized interface to the physical world.
[00:04:29] Aakash: That's a generalized interface for the physical world
[00:04:33] Xand: That's a great soundbite.
[00:04:34] Sy: Yeah, we started with like an API to the physical world. And the problem with API again, it's a little bit. Exclusionary like elitist where it's like, this is only for developers. I think that like the, the better description is like, it is a programmatic interface to the physical world or generic programmatic interface of the physical world, because that says nothing as to what the actual implementation needs to be. It just says, this is what you can do with it. Right.
[00:04:59] Xand: Yeah, no, that makes sense. Actually talking about talking about that in terms of starting up,
I have a little bit of background home automation and I've found it immensely frustrating too. Like I'm a hobbyist, obviously they don't do it professionally. I found it immensely frustrating to connect all of the stuff in my house when it's easy wave Philips and they don't talk to each other. How, how did you come to realize that there was a market for this? Was it a personal itch? Was it. How did you find out that, Hey, I can build something off of this kind of interface in the physical world.
[00:05:29] Sy: Yeah, it. There's two this two fibers, that story there there's mine. And there's also my co-founder. I think my, my co-founders, I mean, we, we, we went to school together and, you know, we, we kind of like sort of after, after graduation kind of went our separate ways, but like we started recombined later. So her point of view is very direct. She was. She was in charge of IOT integration for Sonder. And in that job had to deploy tens of thousands of door locks that were integrated with their backend reservation system across the world. It was a complete letdown in terms of like, know, being able to easily do that as a software engineer. I think they went through terrible struggles to kind of make that work. And I think to some extent that that actually gives them an edge today compared to the other guys that are out there. me specifically, I started my career with nest. Right out of school. And you know, I worked on the original thermostats and sort of, kind of got to see the Dawn of IOT for the smart home specifically. I think fast forward to like 2018 I, I spent some time off from my previous company and I went to live in Taiwan and also in China for a while. When I was in China, I was permanently based out of Shenzhen And in Shenzhen you know, I've been going there over the years for, for family reasons. It's very interesting too sort of analyze the state of the technology industry by checking out the state of what's currently on sale at the electronics market in Huaqiangbei And in 2018, what you're seeing is every single IOT device that you can possibly think of been commoditized. Cameras thermostats, everything is available off the shelf. What's intriguing to me. And again, sort of the Nest standpoint, it's like, yeah, but like the deployment of IOT that sort of the idea of making these devices useful that still hasn't happened. I'm not saying like, the idea for right then and there, but at least it was very obvious to me that they were two worlds that were fundamentally disconnected. It was the hardware world. And then there was the software world of people that actually want to do things with these devices. And really the idea is like, you need to come in between and, and merge those two.
[00:07:33] Aakash: So you and your co-founder were perfectly positioned to see this disconnect and this divide. Right because she was experiencing it very disorderly in her role at Sonder. You were in Shenzhen seeing the people that we're actually building the IOT devices. Maybe having some difficulty interacting, engaging buyers or that at least some of those buyers needs were not met.
[00:07:56] Sy: The traditional sort of like OEM. ODM to some extent out there making these devices. Did you not understand what software engineers that are used to again, Stripe, Twilio, Plaid, Segment. They don't understand that mindset. In fact, when we have conversations with them now, very often they're like, Oh, you need a gateway and you need like connection to all these devices. Oh, well, we have, like, we have this thing, like, and we look at the cell phone. Like, no, no, no, no, no. Like. You're not saying our operating system image and you're going to flash it onto this device. We want nothing to do with your software. It's a bit dramatic and, and bit of a short explanation of what's really going on behind the scene, but I think it's a good reflection of like, just complete disconnect between the two worlds.
[00:08:41] Xand: That's amazing. you're looking at all these hardware devices you're looking at tons of promise, but you're missing a small little piece of the puzzle. It's like the linchpin that connects the train and the, the rest of the cars? And you, you can be that right. You can be the pin on that. All of this turns on.
[00:08:55] Sy: Yeah
[00:08:55] Xand: That's really exciting.
[00:08:56] Sy: I still kind of struggle to fully explain, like where does seem start and where does it end? But best analogy is , it's a middleware meaning that we're starting to have conversations with really large networking equipment manufacturers. The people that sort of run your enterprise network inside of your building, your warehouse or factory. Their access point, networking equipments already have many of the radios that are needed to talk to the IOT devices what's missing is the interpretation layer of what these devices are telling you. And also what you can tell them. And so I think I see a world where. Potentially Seam comes packaged directly on to those access points that are being made by third party. That's kind of a middleware, you know way of the world.
[00:09:45] Aakash: See Siemens
making. So, sorry, there's a. You're making it seamless. Sorry. I had to.
[00:09:51] Sy: The puns are going to write themselves. I you know, when, when we started the company, we say, When we kind of started working on it. The code name of it was like Weaver. And then it's just not really a good name that we liked, but pretty quickly we start thinking about like, what is it that we're trying to do? And it was like world meets digital world. And like, we are going to be the seam between those two and shockingly enough, there's no major tech company that could think of that had that name. So we're like, well, we're going to take it. perfect. mean, it's all the way down into our logo. Our logo is like the intersection of like, sort of almost to origami pieces that are coming together. And that's, that's again, like the idea of like, just trying to be helpful to developers and businesses by creating an interface to this very complex world that that is IOT and, you know, the analog world.
[00:10:43] Aakash: Can you go into some of the detail on what goes into being that interface. You've alluded to having to write your own hardware level code and flashing so you're less onto devices Onto these
devices.
I think when I first thought of Seam, what I understood is it's an API layer. And then underneath, they probably have two or three very frustrated engineers writing thousands of integrations codes. Lots of integration code. But it seems like you're actually going even deeper than that.
[00:11:15] Sy: Yeah. It's the deepest technical stack I've worked on. I mean nest some extent. It's pretty deep too. I was skipped We're making on our own devices, but it's, it's on par with that. We're trying to
[00:11:26] Track 1: Right.
[00:11:26] Sy: API to just about any IOT device. one that we saw, the very specific subsegment of the market that we saw was a door lock control. And specifically kind of like ZigBee Z wave door locks as a, as an initial starting point. To control these devices you fundamentally need a gateway that's nearby to bridge from the protocol ZigBee Z wave over to TCP IP HTTP. Right?
There's no solid product today on the enterprise side, Samsung smart thing is pretty good actually for consumers. And then there's obviously quite a few open source initiatives for hobbyists, like home assistant and so forth. But there isn't like something that works across 10,000 door locks anywhere in the world with 50, a hundred different customer support agents that need to access that stuff and so forth. So we were like, okay, cool. Like we gotta find a gateway. And when we started thinking more about the gateway, so we did our own internal E design. So we have a PCB scandal. I could carry a board. We slap at their peak module. On it. also have some off the shelf. A white labeled gateways that we're exploring as well. So that's, that's going to the hardware platform. what we do is we were super fortunate to have Jordan. Joined us back in November. used to lead enterprise GitHub enterprise on sort of the packaging of GitHub. The entire services set of, of get hub onto a VM to then ship it to customers who have more sensitive use cases. So started looking at our old stack. He was like, yeah, I think, I think we can do our own Yocto Linux implementation. And that actually allows us to run a bunch of Docker containers, run at the edge right onto the device. And that allows us to then. Effectively have each gateway be treated as like, almost like a mini server. And that's a very powerful. to be in because now. You can run a ton of logic at the edge. You can completely decouple the thing from having to have a cloud infrastructure. I'm going to think it's important for hobbyists who, who walked you out, privacy and security kind of built in. And so like, that's, that's why we went down the journey of like, Hey, we're going to create our own image. It's not immediately obvious. You know, the YC advice in fact, we've been told many times, like you guys should just grab something off the shelf and make it work. But I think that. Coming from the, from the hardware side of things, when you deploy. You know, tens of thousands of devices, like you don't want to handicap yourself with having to maintain. X thousands of legacy devices. Out of your software layer. So if you can sort of do it right from day one, even if that takes a little bit more time, you probably should do it. So you know, to wrap up the answer for that question, like what exactly goes on? I mean, just there's an operating system. There's a bunch of Docker containers running on that OSTP. The the, the entire set of application, like I'll just devise, stick management. It's all that sort of stuff like happens inside of Docker containers. There's a cloud infra that also expose an API to each of the different devices. With respect to ZigBee and Z-Wave you actually quite fortunate that there was already some precedents in terms of like, here are the set of instructions that the door lock or sensor should be able to receive. that standpoint, we don't have to write too many specific protocol bindings for, for API. There's definitely quirks for each of the devices, it's fairly limited so far, but I think we have a pretty good game plan for how to deal with the eventually we're not just busy wave where like, Everything you can sort of think of. And therefore there needs to be a specific implementation for each of those. And I think we, we know roughly how to do that at this point.
[00:14:47] Xand: I just have to, I just have to interject. We could do an entire episode. You're embedded device you're running several virtualized, Docker containers. That's
[00:14:58] Sy: yeah.
[00:14:59] Xand: It's so that's so fascinating to me.
[00:15:01] Sy: I had 'em. This is the only one. I promise I'm going to brag a little bit because I'm so blown away by this guy, Jordan, that we have on our team. When, when he came on board, You know, we said, Hey, we kinda need to have our, you know, dockerize environments. We have unit economics for hobbyist or whatever, sort of like free tier that is such that we can really use some of the paid services out there for, for OTA and so forth. And so he was like, okay yeah, we can do a Yocto, you know Linux distro. then I was like one, more thing. Many of these gateways are gonna be connected to cellular where there's there's a data of constraint. Like how much data you can consume. And so he was like, okay, well, that's interesting because now I need to do kernel updates. That are not the traditional sort of Yeah, just so that everybody has context. Normally, when you do an operating system updates on an embedded device, would you what's I think generally called like an AP updates or like a TiVo updates. it's like you pull down the new image and then you changed at the boot loader to point to the new image. And if everything goes fine and you can yank out the other one, otherwise revert back. So if you pull down a brand new LS image, you're talking about gigs, right? of data coming down the pipe and over cellular, it's a problem. And then you have the same set of problems at the doctor later, right? So Jordan set up this whole thing where he's using he's using OS3 to sorta do effectively you can think of it as like get kernel updates. And so he's doing these micro changes that the kernel and he's also sort of big he's like he's taking the continuous that we give him for the application. He strips them out. He only takes the parts of codes that I've changed. He pushes them down as like a micro Delta updates the kernel level. It's fricking amazing. And I think two things are gonna happen. The first thing is, I think we're gonna, we're gonna publish this work at some point. The second thing is you know what, we're going to open source this because like, it just doesn't make sense of this sort of stuff has to be done. Doesn't really exist today. Other people should be able to leverage that. Cause it's, it's useful for us. It's useful for other folks.
[00:16:55] Xand: anybody listening. Who's not. Who maybe that made, this is too deep in the weeds for them. I apologize. But this is the equivalent of doing upgrading parts of your car while you're driving it. This is just absolutely fascinating. I'm Joe. Jordan is in the wild.
[00:17:08] Sy: He's I, you know, like I think One of the desire for Don and I coming into this company is we want to find you know, the people that we work with, we wanted to find very sharp minds with kind souls. It's actually the heuristic we go by, right. And my God, like. You know, both Jordan and savvy that we've hired recently. Like, you know, This sort of fit the Mark and, and, you know, so, so, so blessed to be working with these people and, and the things they do. And I'm just like, Is this possible? this shouldn't be Possible. So,
[00:17:42] Aakash: Yeah, well, you just described sounds.
It's mind blowing that. That's incredible. Wow. So you take this incredible technology. And then you're going and asking the manufacturers to put it on their devices.
How did those conversations go?
[00:18:00] Sy: Yeah. So what I want to make clear so you have the end devices, like the door locks is sensors, et cetera. We don't need to flash those.
[00:18:08] Track 1: Okay.
[00:18:08] Sy: already good to go. We can communicate with them. would you need? Two flashes is the actual the bridge, the gateway that we have
How did those conversations go? Well, To give you the context. So you know, most, most of these manufacturers that are making like off the shelf, like liberal gateways are primarily in China and then also in Taiwan the guys making these things tend to be multi-billion dollar company. And you know, when we approached them as like a no name startup they don't exactly acknowledge us. It's a little bit like, know us going to Google and be like, Hey, we need you to put this on the Google homepage. It's like, who are you? But I w why don't you pretty fortunate that like I think when we have these conversations the OEMs kind of see us as kind of where the market is going. And so I think it's good for them to kind of try some of their beta products with us. And so I think now it's, it's where. We have a couple of. Good relationships, actually, that I think we're going to be able to actually get a white label. A gateway that sort of has everything we need minus a couple of modifications on the hardware. In, in flash it on there. And, and I think that the. The nature of the relationship is such that I think we're going to contribute back a lot of software over two times a week. You know, again, we have our own operating system. It's called BAFTA. It's named after the star Wars creature. And yeah, all the time. The gateway application is called C3 PO because it does translation between portal costs. Then we will happen to be a bunch of star Wars nerd, which is why like we'll probably launch on May 4th, right? May the fourth be with us. But we, we yeah, that side, that means just kind of write themselves in, in our, in our company. But yeah, so, so baptize specifically is, you know, this, this allows us and I think, you know, all this OTA stuff that it can do over the air, that's pretty, clever. I think it would be nice to give it back to the OEMs and, and help them actually have more secure software platforms.
[00:19:59] Xand: Yes, super cool. So real quick, when you're talking about your white label device, so w so full disclaimer, Aakash and I did a podcast about seam seeing a few months ago. I think at the time we talked, you had some sort of hardware gateway or device. And is that, is that different from the white label? Okay. When you're talking about.
[00:20:20] Sy: From a feature set standpoint, it's the same from a, who's actually making it designing it. It's completely
[00:20:24] Xand: different
[00:20:25] Sy: Yeah, so we have our own internally. I think. We sort of went down that path because we're really struggling to find something that would kind of do the trick for, for what our customers needed. Most of the gateways you'll see out there from, from OEMs and ODMs that to be 200 powered for what we need to do of competing logic at the edge, like you can run on most of these things. So, so we ended up doing on design, but like, I think you know, route venture who is one of our main investor, we, we haven't really announced around or anything yet, but know, th they have a lot of experience sort of in the software, hardware, junction, and, and Chrissy, specifically, one of their partner who used to lead of Apple's manufacturing for the Apple watch. Was kinda like, well, you know, I love making hardware, but if you can avoid it, that would be better, for like a complex multi radio products. Those, those tend to be even, you know, an order of magnitude harder. And so I think that's, that's a fine point. And so, you know, It's not easy to take an off the shelf device that we haven't designed from day one to kind of around sort of what we want to run on it. But it's, it's probably a smarter decision. And so I think probably around the time when you guys were did that first initial podcast and when Jordan can join us, I think is when we really start to look at like, Hey, Could we target a different architecture? For operating system and frankly, a complete different hardware platform and still make this work. And the short answer is maybe It's still, it's still like maybe but it's getting closer. You know. But, but I, I kinda hope it works because the base ideas like. If we make it work, if you can make, somebody is doing like a hardware startup or upstate a hardware startup out there, if, if, as much as possible, try to get off the shelf stuff, because process of manufacturing, supply chain sourcing your components, all that stuff, like I'm getting a taste of it. It is not pleasant. Like. It's difficult. It's very difficult. And on top of that, currently a global shortage of chips. You know, so all the. Yeah. All the lead time for sourcing any sort of components are completely out of whack. So yeah. just avoided. If you can. Are you the reason I haven't gotten my RTX 30. All right. Yeah. I have not, but I've been a. Yeah, there's there's the, the, the, the TLDR here is think in Q2 of 2020, we shut down most of the fabs in the world because of COVID 19. And that you know, The the, the world's, you know, electronics industry has decent stockpiles in general. But all of that guff completely exhausted by the explosive consumer demand that we've seen for electronics because of remote learning, remote work. Yep. So yeah, you know, the, the fabs are back online to fire on all cylinders, but, you know, it's, it's just hard to keep up with all the demands and it's affecting like, People way beyond us, I think Ford or some of the auto OEMs sort of shut down some of the production lines because of this. I was just going to it. And this is entirely my fault. This episode's been pretty tech heavy so far. Do we want to pivot into like the business side of stuff? Oh, gosh. I can
[00:23:19] Xand: literally be
[00:23:20] Aakash: I got it. Yeah.
Well, so we've talked about the product a lot here. We've talked about the magic of the product and what it really unlocks for. The customers. How, how. How are you finding those customers? Well, I guess the first question is like, We've talked kind of abstractly about the customer's problems, but who is most acutely feeling? This pain who most acutely needs seem yesterday.
[00:23:44] Sy: Yeah. Right now, right now, it's anybody that's trying to programmatically let somebody into a building. That's the one that I see left and right. You know, it's, it's so simple, like in 2021, there should be a way for you to say like, let this person in, you know, through an API and work at like, you know, anywhere in the world. And it's like, no,
[00:24:02] Aakash: So is
that.
[00:24:03] Sy: doesn't exist.
[00:24:04] Aakash: Is that only massive companies like we work our Airbnb. Are you going after these gigantic companies are they're smaller people that. I just don't know about, because I'm not in the space.
[00:24:15] Sy: Yeah. nature of us being like a beta product kind of in stealth, like is actually we're going after the smaller guys first. And so there, there are companies in your batch actually on your current YC batch. That are one of them there are other startups they tend to be not operating at the scale of. You know, an Airbnb or an open door. You know, they're probably like. One or two orders a month, probably two orders of magnitude lower, but I think it's, it's good, good breeding ground for us to really kind of get, you know, really understand like how we build a great, great develop a product. What do we need? You know, and, and are, these are the first set of people today. Yeah. That's
[00:24:52] Aakash: So the
so, so there are people out there with a few thousand. Devices or a few thousand doors that need to be managed.
[00:25:01] Sy: Yeah. And Andy, the stereotypical way by which they're effectively sort of duct taping a solution together is buy like a consumer, a consumer version of effectively what we're building. So Samsung's smart thing is the most common example I've seen. And then they effectively hire is somebody usually the Philippines or Malaysia to be a human API to these devices. And what this means is like, On the consumer products, like the consumer products were never matched. Do you have 10,000 or a thousand or even a hundred door locks attached to your user accounts? So they have to create, you know, a different user account for each of the different door locks that they have. And because there's no ITI, they have to. Log into an enterprise app and then log outs. And, you know, day this person receives a spreadsheet of like, Hey, here are the access code that you need to program onto this door lock. Or here's what I need you to open the door. It's like, how is this the state of the world? but I mean, it's like good on them for figuring out something, because as a startup, you should do whatever it takes to make it work. But I think when you look at Dawn and her job at Sonder You know, pretty quickly. So there was that while we kind of have to create our own solution from scratch and it's, it's insanity. Like you're a hospitality company. You shouldn't have to go and create like networking gear to make this work. You shouldn't have to go create. Seem right. you know, without naming too many names and because of, you know confidentiality and so forth. Like th there are a lot of big companies doing this today is the big startups that, you know, lack of a better solution. If they've had to spin up entire internal teams to go figure this out,
[00:26:35] Aakash: So, yeah, so right now the solution is. Figure out some way to hack. Around the existing consumer application, like, like the Samsung smart thing, I believe. Which is what you described and that that's, that sounds very much like. Some of the stuff that I'm doing.
[00:26:53] Sy: Yeah. Do things that don't scale. And I mean, it's, it's a, it's awesome because it gives you a false sense of security because actually those platforms would work really well for like small fleets of IOT devices. But once you get past, like it doesn't. Life gets hard
[00:27:09] Aakash: Yeah. And
then the, and then the other option is like, Spin up your internal, like spin up an internal team of a few engineers and a PM probably. Dedicate them. To something that's probably not your main business.
[00:27:25] Sy: I agree and, and. You know, it's like when, when we think about pricing for our products and I think a lot of it's still kind of up in the air, but like,
W when you think of the alternative of, you know, if you, if you don't use seem what's the alternative, the alternative is, is a world of pain and misery Or spending one or $2 million a year on sort of a, a core engineering team that only solves this. And it's just like, No, like this cannot, this cannot be the way of things. Right. Th there's got to be like at some point in abstraction that that solves this and the, to go back to the world of analogy. Like I think when, when when we were fundraising and I was explaining investors, What SIEM is the mental framework that we're trying to put investors in was like, Hey these API APIs, these abstractions. Have created very valuable companies by virtue of externalizing of access, to a very complicated piece of infrastructure and make it easily accessible to developers. And so you have Stripe with payments tool, you would telco plaid with banking. Seam with IOT. Right.
[00:28:28] Aakash: So let's say.
[00:28:31] Sy: Oh, sorry, go. Yeah.
[00:28:32] Aakash: Let's say five years from now. SIEM has become a. Household name in IOT. What does the, what the scene looked like and what does the industry look like?
[00:28:42] Sy: Yeah. We have a lot of internal documentation actually. We described internally, like how things are supposed to work. And think what's gonna be useful as I could be telling. We try to, when we do our introduction or background on a particular like peace. We just started talking about like, Why is it that we're doing this? Like, what's the, what's the outcome for the end-user. think it seemed will only be useful. If we reach a state where. We've gone very wide in terms of the number of different types of devices we support. And also very deep in terms of the functionality that we expose for each device. Right. So that's the pure, like, Feature functionality that ultimately can take us to like a much bigger. You know, meaningfulness For the actual, like, Sort of the, the How are like the interface itself. I mean, you know, we touched on this earlier, but like, Today, it's an API. I think long-term. We have to, yeah, we have to create like a, almost like a low code solution for seem like a node red equivalence for the enterprise or something to that effect. And, I already see this because We're getting inbound from companies that do not have engineers on staff. And these companies operate at enormous scale. We're talking like, you know, a property management company that has 100,000. family homes throughout the United States, and they want to do water leak detection and energy sub-metering and so forth. And seem doesn't have to just be for companies that have developers that can be for these people to, we just have to figure out a way to abstract. The implementation of IOT with your third party app. I think for us, like, we're, we're, you know, this is where, like the Stripe of the Twilio only analogy and it breaks down. It's like, I don't think we're gonna simply be contained to just. Technical companies.
[00:30:38] Xand: Yeah. And that's, that's the way you really break out. Right.
In your conception five years from now, a thing. It's this little white label gateway, and you tell a property owner, Hey, you plug this in. There's a web interface you just say what you want to do. And when, and that's how, that's how this
[00:30:53] Aakash: you've done if this, then that for physical. For physical things.
So next time I car, next time my car. Well,
This might not happen in the future because we're all working remote. But next time I come back from my commute. My instant pot immediately turns on. Without having to do anything. I mean, I don't know, maybe that's farfetched, but maybe not.
[00:31:16] Sy: Yeah, I don't, I don't think we're going to be touching consumer stuff too much. But because like, it's, it's a, it's a pretty. It's a pretty competitive slash well-served space right now with like, sort of you know, Google home and Then on the enterprise side, yeah, I mean, the typical example I see right now is when a flood detector is triggered inside of a single family home. go create. Maintenance tickets in the property management platform, whether that's AppFolio or, or Yardi or what have you. So I think, I think that's really like, you know, I think these like zip here, if this and that type of solution have had a time in place. And I think like our time and place our context. Is the physical world?
[00:31:57] Aakash: Is there.
[00:31:58] Sy: and there's stuff.
[00:31:58] Aakash: Go ahead. Yeah.
[00:31:59] Xand: Oh, I was just gonna say and there's stuff to write if you're a property, but talk to me about your property manager with 100,000 homes. With leak detection, you know, with cameras, with. You know, all these kinds of monitors. All they need to know is that many of these property managers are handy, right. Or they have people who can install stuff physically. The development parts of what they're missing. So there's a solution potentially in the future.
From what you're saying, can tell someone, Hey, just take this physical thing, plop it in the basement. Set it up in the web interface and you're good to go. You'll have leak detection. That's awesome. Yeah, that's really cool. forward.
[00:32:32] Aakash: Well, before we wrap up, is there anything you want to tell the listeners? Sy.
[00:32:38] Sy: I always really like to have conversations, with hobbyists, like people that are not businesses. To of see like what, what problems are out there that people need us to solve for them semi urgently. So if you have something like this, like feel free to reach out. Can I also talk about my meme, generator
[00:32:55] Aakash: talk about whatever you want, man. It's all, it's your, the floor is yours.
[00:32:59] Sy: So before we started recording I was saying that I'm the, I'm the big, heavy user of meme, generators aligned. I like this, this base image where you can sort of capture in your own texts. once somebody to make the equivalent of that for short video snippets from like movies or what have you, but like where you can edit the text of what the actors are saying with like a deep fake. And you can completely change the dialogue and apply it to whatever sort of context you're you're you're currently, currently talking with that's that that's my desire for them. Whether picture of beams. It's it's it's an, it's an important product to build, so, yeah.
[00:33:35] Xand: What's. What's the prize. Do I get to see him tee shirt? If I make this.
[00:33:39] Sy: You gotta, you got $1 billion and my friend, that's the next billion. I'm surprised. Why is he hasn't funded this yet? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe this year. Another RFP, like entertain the world and help it communicate more.
[00:33:51] Xand: Cool.
[00:33:52] Aakash: Thank you so much.
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