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SPEAKER_04: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another edition of This Week in Startups, the podcast where we talk to founders who want to change the world with their product or service. I saw this service on the interwebs, and I thought, that's insane and crazy. I want it. What is this product I'm talking about? Well, let me give you a little history lesson. Back in the early days of the interwebs, if you wanted to have an email address, what you did was you set up an email server. Or you had a local ISP, internet service provider, and they had a mail server. Lo and behold, Hotmail came out, and we all laughed at it. Then Gmail came out, and we all fell in love with it. And over the last two decades, we've gotten very comfortable putting our emails in the cloud. However, everybody is getting hacked. If your information is in the cloud, it is hacked at this very moment, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_06: And thank you, I'm a word maker, Jackie. And our guest today wants to go old school.

SPEAKER_04: He has created Helm Secure. It is a device, a server, dare I say, that you put in your home. And you take control on your personal server of your own data. In other words, you're going to have your email calendars and contacts locked down in your broom closet, or wherever you choose to put your Helm server. It's a crazy vision, and I'm very interested to hear how it's going. Welcome to the program, Giri. Srinivas? Srinivas. Srinivas. Thank you. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: And we talked about this earlier. You know Giri.

SPEAKER_09: Yes.

SPEAKER_10: G-I-R-I is your noble obligation in Japanese. Giri. Yeah. But you spell it. You pronounce it Giri.

SPEAKER_06: Yes. Like the street. That's right. Welcome to the pod.

SPEAKER_15: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_06: I gave a little intro there, a little history, so you didn't have to, but I think that's kind of accurate. How did you come up with the idea of creating Helm?

SPEAKER_04: And for those of you listening, it's thehelm.com.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah. So the background for how we came up with this has a lot to do with what my co-founder

SPEAKER_18: and I have been doing for a long time. Each of us had been running our own services. We hadn't really put all of our trust into companies like Google and Dropbox. And it became clear after the Edward Snowden revelations that there are a lot of consequences that people are now facing by putting all their data in the cloud. I mean, I think you have an interesting point of view on this, that if you have your data in the cloud, you've more or less already been hacked. You buy that? I think that if you put your data in the cloud and in these services that have lots and lots of consumer data, you're putting yourself, you're attaching yourself to a high value

SPEAKER_21: target.

SPEAKER_20: Well, that's obvious. But let's talk about what percentage you think are hacked. What percentage of Americans do you think are hacked?

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. I mean, our data shows that it's about a third of Americans have directly experienced some

SPEAKER_18: sort of online breach and about two thirds of Americans either have directly or indirectly experienced it. So that means they might know someone who has. So we're reaching that tipping point.

SPEAKER_27: So that doesn't include what we don't know about.

SPEAKER_18: That's right.

SPEAKER_04: And that doesn't include the employees at these companies who have been busted many times for looking under the hood. Yeah. You can be certain if you have your stuff on Gmail or if you have stuff on Facebook that some Facebook engineers looked at it. I am absolutely certain of that. And we've seen multiple lawsuits where Facebook employees creeped on their ex-girlfriends, looked at their DMs and on Gmail and Google. We know that people were looking at who was talking to who. It's pretty nefarious.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah. I mean, I think that whenever you get into a situation where companies have to rely on policy, you know, they're human beings who work at this company and they're all fallible. Right. I think even even with the Snowden revelations, it was clear that people who are working for the NSA were doing, you know, covert operations on their ex-girlfriends. Right. Is that true? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Guys are such creeps, man. Yeah.

SPEAKER_33: It's just always guys. It's always these goddamn sysops. And I tell you, I worked at Sony and we had Lotus Notes.

SPEAKER_06: The Lotus Notes databases, they weren't encrypted. You could read them. Yeah. So, people had their files with their messaging. This guy was the Lotus Notes admin. He was negotiating his salary and reading his bosses saying what the high and low they would go for was and what the breaking point was and what they really thought about the guy. And I'm sitting there with these two guys in the IT department laughing about this. Yeah. And I'm just thinking, wow, these dipshits think they're negotiating against this guy. And he's seeing all their emails.

SPEAKER_39: Yeah. You can have quite the negotiation if you've got perfect information, right? Yeah. It's not bad.

SPEAKER_26: It's like, I know what your cards are. I have God mode. Right. Go ahead and bet your ace queen. So, you come up with this idea, Helm.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah. So, a little bit of the backstory. So, my co-founder and I, we've been in security for a while. We had previously started this mobile security company that was acquired.

SPEAKER_18: We were at a company called Rapid7 that bought us. We helped take that company public. And in that timeframe-

SPEAKER_43: Did you make a lot of money? We did well. What? Like 10 million?

SPEAKER_44: What? Like millions of dollars? Or you have to keep working?

SPEAKER_16: Uh, this, it's elective for us to be able to go work on this, right? Like, we made a choice. Yeah. Good. We did. Good.

SPEAKER_44: Mazel tov. Thanks. So, that means you're playing for the love of the game.

SPEAKER_18: Absolutely. Yeah. And this is like a labor of love for us. It's been three years in the making to get to this point. See, that makes sense to me.

SPEAKER_06: That's why I didn't ask how much money you made just to be crude or entertaining, but certainly for those two reasons as well. But it seems to me like this is a very missionary-type company. You've got an ax to grind.

SPEAKER_48: Yeah. Tell us. We do.

SPEAKER_49: So, so the Snowden revelations happened in 2013. We started trading notes about what each of us had done to protect ourselves. And one of the things we kept coming back to was how we each ran our own services. But we were running that on public infrastructure, right? We were renting resources in the cloud to host our stuff. Like, I run my own email server for 15 years, right? And so we got to this point with the revelation. We're like, well, these, all of these companies are basically co-opted into this surveillance state, right? So the government goes to these companies and say, they'll say, hey, we want Jason's data. And they'll roll over. They'll hand over that data. Of course. So we thought, okay, well, what would the future of the internet look like if people could actually have easy ownership and control over their information? And we went around and around. And where we, where we landed was we really need to have some infrastructure that's in people's homes. And, you know, the good thing is, right, like lots of things have changed from the 90s where if you tried to prop up your own email server, you know, you ran into some issues and a lot of the things that, a lot of the ways that ISPs work now, they've basically prevented people from running servers in their home. So some of the work that we had to do is to figure out how do you work around some of these restrictions. And that's what I think is kind of, you know, you'll, you'll see a little bit later if we get into a demo, like how easy this is to get up and running.

SPEAKER_21: You don't have to call your ISP and say, unblock these ports, give me a static IP, like all, all the technical details. This is just plug and play.

SPEAKER_27: What does this go for?

SPEAKER_06: Let's talk about the price. Cause this is a 1.0.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, this is a 1.0.

SPEAKER_06: It looks like a little A-frame house, perhaps a tent. It has incredible weight to it.

SPEAKER_27: It looks like an upside down V. It's white and it's really heavy.

SPEAKER_49: It is. Yeah. There's a big piece of aluminum that acts as a heat sink. So that's what gives it the weight.

SPEAKER_53: Yeah. And what is it? An Arduino in there or something?

SPEAKER_49: No, no, no. So we actually have some pretty high end hardware in here. So we have a quad core ARM A72 processor from a company called NXP.

SPEAKER_55: That seems completely unnecessary. That's like huge.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah. See, well, it's, it's because, you know, we're starting with email, but we're going places beyond that. Got it. Okay. Gotcha.

SPEAKER_58: Video services. I got it. That's right.

SPEAKER_49: So, so we're starting off at a $4.99 price point. And then that includes the first year of service. And after that, it's $99 a year.

SPEAKER_61: So 10 bucks a month, 78 bucks a month. And you got this crazy server. What's the storage like in there?

SPEAKER_49: Right. So there's two different ways to store data on this. We ship with an SSD, which has 128 gigs of storage on the device. Amazing. And then in the server, we actually have the ability to expand storage. So there's a tray that slides out.

SPEAKER_65: So slick.

SPEAKER_49: And so you can put a two and a half inch drive in here, which today those goes up to about five terabytes. Yeah. Five terabytes.

SPEAKER_67: Yeah. Yum, yum.

SPEAKER_61: Yeah. So that's more than you could ever use. Like right now I'm paying for two terabytes from Apple and I'm paying for like a terabyte from Google. I'm using like 17% of it. They don't offer it like a hundred gigs at a time. Right. I know what they're doing with that cute little game they're playing.

SPEAKER_72: But yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_61: But you don't have a, I don't have a backup.

SPEAKER_73: So what do I do in that case?

SPEAKER_21: You do.

SPEAKER_73: So, so somebody steals my helm.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. So one of the things that the service covers is offsite encrypted storage. So in the, yeah.

SPEAKER_49: So in the box we ship with the, this USB thumb drive. And what that does is it gives you a place to store your recovery keys. So when you go through the setup process, we establish these recovery keys that are used to encrypt all of your backups. Only you have access to the keys. So we never have access to them. And in the beginning, those backups are, are stored at the service that we run and maintain. So if you lose your helm, it's, it's lost in a house fire, whatever you call us, we'll

SPEAKER_18: ship you a new helm overnight. You plug the recovery key in and you'll be able to get up and running that same day. Wow.

SPEAKER_80: So, um, and this existed on the web to a certain extent with LavaBit, right?

SPEAKER_06: There was like this encrypted email service, but the feds tried to get their emails. And I don't know if Snowden was using that, but somebody was, Assange maybe. Snowden was using LavaBit. Yeah, sure. LavaBit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_83: And LavaBit pulled the plug because they're like, we're, our choice is to go to jail or turn this thing off, right?

SPEAKER_49: Yeah. So it's a pretty interesting story. There was, uh, so Ladar Levinson, who was running LavaBit, um, was asked to turn over keys that would give the government access to decrypted emails that were being hosted on the LavaBit service. They knew Snowden was one of his customers. So Ladar did something pretty honorable. He actually shut down the business. Um, he was compelled to give the keys, but he actually stopped running the service. He's now trying to like rebirth the company with a completely different approach. Um, but this is a little bit of a different approach, right? So rather than munging together multiple customers' data into one service, like a centralized LavaBit service or Gmail service, this is actually a dedicated email service that's just for

SPEAKER_18: you and whoever you want to be on it in your home.

SPEAKER_27: All right. When we get back from this quick break, we're going to set up my home. Thank you so much for bringing it.

SPEAKER_61: Gary, that was incredibly generous, uh, to bring me my 499 service with unlimited lifetime supply.

SPEAKER_06: I never take freebies, by the way. I always pay for it if I want it. Sorry, I'm going to buy one after this, but we're going to set it up. We're going to see how easy the setup is.

SPEAKER_04: And I want to know what it would take to actually hack this. If the government came and confiscated it, what would it take for them to hack it? And will quantum computer computing make all this encryption irrelevant?

SPEAKER_40: As somebody told me, uh, just last week, I don't know if I buy that or not, but how hackable is the helm when we get back?

SPEAKER_89: I am constantly trying to improve myself and the way I've been doing it most recently, not through books, not through audio books. No, not through surfing the web, looking for random YouTube videos. No, I've been using Skillshare, Skillshare.com. It is amazing. And I've got a new project coming in the first quarter and I wanted to design the logo myself. I found a woman named Jessica on Skillshare and she has a masterclass in lettering and illustrating. And it is amazing. She did the new MailChimp logo among many others. And I have been captivated by this class. I have to say, instead of just listening to a podcast or going into an audio book, I'm going step-by-step through her course and I am learning a ton. And if you're out there and you have a skill that you would like to share, I suggest you become a teacher because you'll get a bunch of exposure just like on Instagram, except it's going to be deep exposure. Like I know this woman, Jessica now, and I am going to reach out to her because she's in San Francisco and I might hire her and give her 10 dimes or whatever she charges to do a new logo for us. That's the magic of Skillshare and becoming a teacher there. It also can become an additional stream of income for you as well. And build your social following. In addition to the Logotype Masterclass with Jessica, Albert Wanger from Union Square Ventures, our friend, got a great video course up there on how to start a startup. Neil Blumenthal from Warby Parker. Stephanie Corey from Away, which we use Away. Our friend Gary Vaynerchuk is on there doing social media in a noisy world. So here's your call to action. Join the millions of students learning on Skillshare with a special offer just for my listeners.

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SPEAKER_06: Hey everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis.

SPEAKER_04: You can follow us on the Twitter and the Instagram at TWI Startups. And you can visit us at thisweekinstartups.com if you want to help out the show. There's two ways you can do it. One, write a review on iTunes.

SPEAKER_06: Two, email your friends and say, this show is amazing. I've learned everything I know about entrepreneurship from watching This Week in Startups. Or whatever, you know, you can freestyle a little bit there. Whatever you want to put in there. You can see me on that email to your friends. Jason at calacanis.com. I read all my emails. I respond to the best ones. My guest today on the program is Gary Srinivas.

SPEAKER_59: Srinivas. I'll get it. There we go. And he is the CEO and co-founder of Helm Secure. We've raised $4 million. And led by our friends over at Initialized Capital. My friend Gary's over there. Yep. And Alexis. Yep. Who led the deal? Gary. Gary did. Okay. He's really dope. He did Postress. Mm-hmm. Smart cat. Yeah. Why did he give you $4 million or whatever percentage of it that he did? What was his thesis? You knew him before or you went to Y Combinator? What's the story?

SPEAKER_18: Well, Gary and I go way back. I mean, he and I went to school together once upon a time. What? Yeah. Where? Stanford? Yeah.

SPEAKER_74: Look at you, nerds.

SPEAKER_100: You went to Stanford, huh? Computer Science undergrad?

SPEAKER_74: Yep. Gary was CSE, but yeah, same idea.

David Friedberg: Wow. Look at you, nerds.

SPEAKER_103: You guys were nerding out. What was Gary like in college? Pretty much the same as he is today. I mean, he's a great guy. He was a great guy back then. He was. He's a great guy. I love that guy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_108: He's a good guy to be a VC too, you know? Because he's like an entrepreneur's entrepreneur. He works hard. He hustles.

SPEAKER_39: Yeah. He's very empathetic with people and I think he's just, he's a high character, high quality person.

SPEAKER_59: Have you met Alexis Williams yet? Yeah. Husband of Serena Williams. Very famous.

SPEAKER_111: I've met, I've spent time with Alexis Ohanian, sure. You have.

SPEAKER_17: He also built some community website at some point. Yeah. More notably, married to Serena Williams.

SPEAKER_113: Have you watched his Instagram? Yeah. It's hilarious.

SPEAKER_114: It's like a reality show. It's like watching the Kardashians.

SPEAKER_103: It's hard to believe that it's just a couple of degrees away now.

SPEAKER_43: But yeah, it's, it's hilarious.

David Friedberg: It's like whole, it's, and he's, he launched a spirit now. I'm like, what are you doing, Alexis? You know, you're launching a beverage or like a, now I've got to launch a tequila. Oh, the Armenian cognac?

SPEAKER_118: He's got a cognac. Yeah. And he's doing a cognac.

SPEAKER_83: I'm like, you're just raising the bar for all investors now.

SPEAKER_121: And he did.

SPEAKER_122: I think that is. Yeah. Um, so let's set this bad boy up here.

SPEAKER_83: And, uh, but before you do that, tell me quantum computer going to be able to hack all this encryption stuff coming out. What do you think? You know, it's a big debate.

SPEAKER_49: I, I'm, I, I cannot say that I'm any sort of expert in quantum computing. I think there's a lot of theory behind it, but the practice is pretty far away. They're still trying to get it to work. Yeah, exactly. Like, like low qubit quantities, like just to function. Yeah.

SPEAKER_18: So, um, you know, if the theories are proven out, then yeah, we will have to reimagine cryptography. Absolutely. But I think we're a little ways away from that.

SPEAKER_60: What type of cryptography are you using? What would it take to brute force this kind of thing? And if somebody were to hack it, what would be their easiest route?

SPEAKER_56: Yeah. So what are the, what are the weak links as it were that people need to know when they're setting this up?

SPEAKER_16: Yeah. I mean, so I think that we, we have taken a pretty comprehensive approach to security. There's this notion of like defense in depth, right?

SPEAKER_49: So it's, you can think about it like an onion. There's different layers to the onion. So there's, there's security from a network perspective. There's security based on proximity. I'll talk about like how we handle two factor in a very seamless way where you don't have to deal with the six digit codes. And then there's physical security. So if someone actually physically got possession of the device, how are they

SPEAKER_18: actually going to be able to get data off of it, if at all? Well, and what I'd say is, you know you know, my background in security and my, my co-founders background in security, a lot of that came from working on hardware

SPEAKER_49: based security, right? So this idea that you'd use security chips to manage encryption keys and create secure compute environments. And so we've brought that to bear on this.

SPEAKER_18: And what's pretty cool is, you know, in the past 10 years, like Apple has made this stuff pretty accessible to people in the form of an iPhone or an iPad. And so we look at what we're doing with Helm is actually like a pretty good secure, you know, sort of compliment to what you see with an iPhone. If someone got ahold of your phone, it'd be very hard for them to get data off of it. But then think about where does data come from or go to with your phone, right? So we think, you know, Helm should be that destination.

SPEAKER_27: And the weak link today, if you're hosting it, is the people hosting it, the government.

SPEAKER_06: And on your phone, it's stupid passwords and copying your SIM card and intercepting the four digit, the six digit code.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah. Yeah. SIM jacking has definitely been a problem. I mean, there's.

SPEAKER_61: Explain SIM jacking to people and how big of a deal that is.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah. I mean, so the, the traditional vector of attack for SIM jacking is social engineering. So you call up Verizon or, or one of these carriers and you pretend to be the person who's SIM you're trying to jack. And you say, look, I need to port my phone number. This is my new SIM card number. And they do it. And they're able to prove, quote unquote, prove who they are by virtue of maybe having the last four of your social or your home address. There's some, they're able to prove their identity somehow, some way. And so then once they're able to repossess the phone, then they're actually able to

SPEAKER_18: kind of, you know, the phone and your email, those are two of the main entry points into your online life, right? So phones are typically used for, you know, two factor authentication or somehow proving yourself to another online account. So just imagine like your banking accounts, your crypto.

SPEAKER_06: I mean, I mean, it's how people lost their crypto, right? There's a huge number of, this is why people were so stupid. They had public email addresses at their, whatever Coinbase account. They have a public phone number. People get those two things that are on social media talking about how many Bitcoins they own. They reset their password. They know they got a password at Coinbase. And then all of a sudden they wake up with nothing in their account. Yeah.

SPEAKER_142: And there's no way to get that money back once the Bitcoin's shipped out.

SPEAKER_111: Yeah. You're done. That's a challenge in crypto right now.

SPEAKER_49: I will say though that the carriers are taking steps to help minimize the risk of SIM jacking. So if you're concerned about this, you should call your carrier and tell them that you want to specify a PIN.

SPEAKER_18: If you specify the PIN, then the person now has to prove their identity. They have to provide that PIN code to enable a SIM transfer. So anyway, it's one way to protect yourself.

SPEAKER_145: Okay. So let's set this bad boy up here.

SPEAKER_18: Sure. Okay. So we can bring my-

SPEAKER_127: Pull up your phone. Yeah. If we can get this on the screen here. There we go.

SPEAKER_06: Helm, get ready to take back your data. Over the next few minutes, you'll be setting yourself up in charge of your own email, calendar, and contact information. You can also begin moving your data to the cloud.

SPEAKER_123: I don't see anything in here about a VPN. Not yet. Oh, yeah. That, to me, is the layup.

SPEAKER_122: That's coming, right? Yeah. Oh, so yummy. Yeah, it's coming.

SPEAKER_06: I use two different VPNs, and I'm just like, mainly because when I'm overseas, I can't listen to like Spotify or Netflix. Sure. So I have two different ones, and then it feels like Netflix and Spotify are playing whack-a-mole with the different VPN providers.

SPEAKER_122: So if you have two and you switch it through three or four different ports, eventually you know, work out okay. You get something, yeah. You get something.

SPEAKER_18: And like a VPN that's running in your home gives you that ability to sort of be at home even when you're away.

SPEAKER_151: What is that, next year? Soon.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah.

SPEAKER_18: Early next year.

SPEAKER_06: That, to me, is going to be the great one because people's browser histories and what they're pulling up, they don't realize that like the government has every search, every URL you've ever visited.

SPEAKER_21: Well, Google does, and by virtue of Google having it- And your ISP. The government can get access to it. And your ISP, yeah.

SPEAKER_44: And the ISPs are using it to target you with ads. Yeah. So they're selling your data. Yeah. People are so dumb, they don't even know this.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah. When we look at a VPN service, like we'll be looking at combining that with an ad blocker. So those will go hand in hand. Yeah.

SPEAKER_155: Yeah. That's interesting.

SPEAKER_10: So then you take like the, yeah. Now it's really hard to know who they are, who the person is.

SPEAKER_59: Keep going.

SPEAKER_21: Okay. So what this setup experience is doing is basically looking for the Helm server over Bluetooth.

SPEAKER_49: It's discovered it. Yeah. That number that you see there corresponds with the serial number that's on the bottom of the device. So we're going to go ahead and pair over Bluetooth. And just to set the stage a little bit to get to this point, as a customer, you can go to

SPEAKER_18: the helm.com, add the product to your cart, buy it. You'll get an email. That email will come with the confirmation code. And what we're going to do is we're going to use that confirmation code in the setup process to activate the device. So that's going to be the next thing that we do. Because we were so chatty, the device went out of pairing mode. We'll have to reboot it. Yeah. No, we don't have to reboot it. We just put it back into pairing mode. Start over. Bluetooth.

SPEAKER_122: Why does Bluetooth suck as a technology? Well, it's gotten a lot better. It has gotten better. You're right. But is there something fundamentally janky about this protocol? And is there a better one coming?

SPEAKER_49: Well, I mean, it's gotten, so I think it's progressively improved.

SPEAKER_21: Your Bluetooth 4.2 went a long way, and that's why your AirPods work as well as they do, I think. That's true. Yeah.

SPEAKER_74: The AirPods are pretty amazing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: That's the way it's supposed to work. Yeah. Yeah. But it never works that way with my cars. Well, actually, the Tesla's gotten better, too.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah. So, I mean, I've had a pretty good experience with basically all four-plus devices.

SPEAKER_21: 5.0, I think, is going to improve range and performance. So, yeah. Okay. So, let's go ahead and get this thing paired.

SPEAKER_06: All right. When we get back, we're going to set up the helm. Stick with us. I want to tell you about Vetteri. They are a hiring marketplace for connecting top talent with growing companies like yours.

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SPEAKER_92: Welcome back to This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_59: I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. Follow me on the Twitter at Jason, Instagram at Jason. And you'll see all the different briskets and Wagyu, prime rib, just all the stuff I'm cooking. Okay. I'm here with Gary Srinivas, and he is the co-founder and CEO of Helm Secure.

SPEAKER_06: You can see them at thehelm.com or on Twitter, Helm Secure.

SPEAKER_59: And we are installing my new complimentary Helm device. Wow, so generous. Thank you, Gary. Here we go. We're going to get started.

SPEAKER_109: Yeah. So we're going to go ahead and get started. So this is doing a scan over Bluetooth.

SPEAKER_18: And just to set you up, so you've gone to the website. You've purchased the device. Yep. You get an email. $4.99. $4.99. $100 a year after that. That's right. You get an email. The email will include an activation code. Fast forward a couple days. Device shows up in your home. And what you're going to do is you're going to use that activation code to set up the server. At the time of purchase, we ask you, do you want to use an existing domain that you already own? Or do you want to select a new domain that you can register through us?

SPEAKER_178: Oh, so that's easy peasy. Right. Love it.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah, so you've already got calacanis.com, right? Yeah. So you can bring that to this if you'd like, right? Genius. Down. Yeah. So what we're going to do, this activation code is going to just map to like a demonstration domain. And we're going to go ahead and use that for the setup. So I'm going to go ahead and hit continue here. And it's going to ask me to pair over Bluetooth.

SPEAKER_21: So we're going to go ahead and do that.

SPEAKER_93: What email server do you use? Is it like a specific flavor of email?

SPEAKER_49: Yeah.

SPEAKER_18: So we pretty much leverage a lot of great mature open source software to do this. So the mail stack is a combination of PostFix and DoveCot. We're using the Darwin Calendar and Context server from Apple. Great. This is actually what they used to ship on OS X server and what they use internally. We've managed to fit that on here. Yeah. So we've got a whole bunch of stuff that's going on here. So getting back to the demo real quick.

SPEAKER_49: So what you see here, the device has scanned your, you know, everything here and found the Wi-Fi. So the Wi-Fi here is called Studio. So we'll go ahead and pick Studio. Yep.

SPEAKER_18: So now the phone is basically telling the server, hey, go ahead and join this Wi-Fi network. So the way you should think about this is you can put Helm anywhere in your home. You don't have to, like, stick it next to your networking gear. No, it's beautiful.

SPEAKER_185: Put it on the shelf next to your Sonos.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah, exactly. That's the way we've designed it. So, you know, you can go anywhere. Okay. So now we're going to go ahead and enter in this activation code, right? This is what we got at the time of purchase. I've got it here on a Post-it note. So I'm just going to go ahead and type this in.

SPEAKER_187: And this is making it super safe, I guess.

SPEAKER_21: This is just telling the server, like, this is the domain that you wanted.

SPEAKER_61: Ah, got it. So you're matching the domain. You've thought about that. Exactly. Because that is, like, the big sticking point for setting up your emails, the whole MX domain, whatever that is. Yeah, all the DNS records.

SPEAKER_49: We take care of all that stuff, right? So we found the domain. So this is set up to be the Demo 10, right? Going to go ahead and hit continue. So now the server is configuring itself to be, you know, running email services for the Demo10.com. It's also getting security certificates. So the connections coming in and out of the server are encrypted end-to-end.

SPEAKER_21: And we're done. Wow. That was it, right?

SPEAKER_193: Create the admin account. Then I can create an unlimited number of email accounts.

SPEAKER_49: Exactly. So I'm going to go ahead and just create mine. So, and I'm going to give myself the username Geary.

SPEAKER_18: Hit continue here. Boom. I'm going to, for this demo, I'll just give it a dummy password so you don't have to take it off screen. Good. Hit continue.

SPEAKER_49: Notifications, like we'll tell you, you know, when backups are completed, you know, if your device goes offline. What if I'm under attack? So we don't currently do anything around notifications for attacks yet.

SPEAKER_198: We will be sharing, like, some information in weekly status emails, like how this is keeping you secure, basically.

SPEAKER_189: Yeah, because you're putting up a server, you will be attacked constantly. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. I'll scare people, too. They'll be like, oh, my God, I'm being attacked.

SPEAKER_61: It's like you and every IoT device on the internet. Right. I was on the board of Dyn, the DNS company, and they had the giantest, the biggest DNS denial, I'm sorry, denial of service attack in history.

SPEAKER_06: Because some idiot company took all these cameras or some IoT device, and, like, it was like admin, admin, password, and, like, all of a sudden, everybody on the planet started flooding their DNS routers. And it was, I think it was either 10x or 50x, the previous larger denial of service attack.

SPEAKER_61: They got back up in, like, six hours. Pretty dope.

SPEAKER_205: That's pretty impressive. Yeah.

SPEAKER_61: No, they know what they're doing.

SPEAKER_82: Yeah.

SPEAKER_103: Okay, I got the safe recovery key here. This is your USB key.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, so this comes in the box, and what you're going to do, so we'll stick this in the server to get the key written. USB-C. USB-C, yeah. Oh, fancy. Yeah, everything here is, like, kind of, you know. State-of-the-art. State-of-the-art and modern.

SPEAKER_49: After the key's written, you're going to want to put this someplace safe. So if you've got a safe in your home. Put it in the safe. You're going to put it in the safe in your home. If you don't want to have it in your house, you've got a safe deposit box, you've got a trusted family member, you put it over there, right?

SPEAKER_18: Love it. And this is what's going to come in handy if anything ever happens to your server. The key's actually backed up to a second place, which is on your phone. So you have two keys. Two keys. No single point of failure, right? Got it. So you could lose your phone. You have this. If you lose this, you've probably got your phone, but you're probably not going to lose both.

SPEAKER_210: And if I have my phone and it's backed up to iCloud, I have an encrypted version when I re-

SPEAKER_61: No.

SPEAKER_211: We don't back up any of your data to any cloud services.

SPEAKER_67: So if I do lose my phone, I've got to go to the key.

SPEAKER_211: You've got this key. Maybe I need two keys. Yeah. Yeah. So we will have the ability for people to create multiple keys. Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_213: And you can use any USB-C. Right. You just have to give us one.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah. We give you one. We specifically actually limit it to the keys that we provide for the time being. We want to make sure that these are robust keys that can last. Okay. So the last step here is we just want to set up email calendar and contacts on the phone. So we take advantage of configuration profiles with iOS. This is something that Apple provides. It's got to be installed through the browser. And with this, you actually don't need to type in a password. You don't need to create any accounts. You just install the profile. Yep. So I'm going to go ahead and allow here. It's going to tell me there's an email, a calendar, and a contacts account. I hit install.

SPEAKER_216: Oh, that's so great.

SPEAKER_18: If you don't mind blocking this part out.

SPEAKER_21: Quick block. Yada yada passcode. I don't want to show people my pin.

SPEAKER_218: Yep. You have the Kanye passcode? Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. I don't. I thought about that. Did you see that? I did.

SPEAKER_222: It's like Kanye. Yeah, that's got to be. Come on, Kanye.

SPEAKER_18: You know, I think that he probably has enough security around him that he doesn't have to worry too much about the security of his phone. But he should. He really should. Yeah.

SPEAKER_55: Everyone should. One of the challenging parts about social media is when people are suffering from mental

SPEAKER_27: illness, they engage social media more. I think the dude is mentally ill at times. Well, they admitted that he's got mental illness. He admitted. Yeah.

SPEAKER_228: It's on the cover of his album, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: He's like, I have mental illness. Yeah. And you'll know it when I start tweeting. It's like, really? This is what our society's come to.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. Well, and the way in which it's been exploited is just sad.

SPEAKER_233: Yeah. You know, it's like the president's like, oh, great. Let me bring in somebody who I can be woke with the black community and then leverage

SPEAKER_06: that to get votes or show people that black unemployment is the lowest amount ever and Kanye West likes me. Therefore, I'm not a racist piece of garbage.

SPEAKER_83: It's my opinion, not yours, Gary. Okay.

SPEAKER_234: All right.

SPEAKER_83: Sorry to go off on a tangent, but you can't be pro people with tiki torches running a white power march and then also be woke on the other side. They were not good people on both sides. I agree with that. Sorry. I agree with that.

David Friedberg: And listen, don't at me if you're a fan of the show or me. Don't at me. Okay. It's my opinion.

SPEAKER_83: We're not going to agree that people with tiki torches shouting, Jews will not replace us, are good people. Sorry. We're not having that conversation. Continue, Gary. All right.

SPEAKER_236: Right about now, your comments person's like, what did I get this guy into?

SPEAKER_111: All right. Last step here. We're just going to hit finish setup and we're done. Right? So this is going to take you to the dashboard.

SPEAKER_18: So if you've got... So buttery. If you want to send me an email, you can send me an email to Gary at the demo10.com.

SPEAKER_237: Got it.

SPEAKER_240: All right. I'm going to send you an inappropriate dank meme. Send you a dank meme. Okay. Okay. Dank meme. All right. Okay.

SPEAKER_39: We'll give it a sec. It'll take a little time to get here, but it will get here.

SPEAKER_243: What am I giving up while we're getting an email? What do you...

SPEAKER_244: If somebody's going to be like, oh, I have to give up something. There's always some give-take. What does they give that you give up? There's no webmail experience.

SPEAKER_21: That's probably the main give. No webmail experience. I need a client.

SPEAKER_18: You need a client. And you can use the mail app on your phone. You can use any of the standard apps. You can use Outlook. Any of the standard apps across any of the devices that you use.

SPEAKER_49: But the reality is with webmail experiences, you can't guarantee a secure experience.

SPEAKER_210: If I wanted to use Superhuman, though, and log into this, I can't.

SPEAKER_49: So good question.

SPEAKER_18: They're downloading and indexing all those emails in the browser. Yep. I'd love for them to integrate with what we've got.

SPEAKER_03: All right. Emmy Warbending producer. Jackie, take a memo, please. Thank you. Introduction for Gary and Raul.

SPEAKER_255: Yeah, let's make it happen. Let's make it happen.

SPEAKER_06: Because you know what? I think it's the same audience.

SPEAKER_10: I think it's massive overlap. I think he can move a lot of those boxes for you and vice versa. It could become your front end.

SPEAKER_31: All right. I sent my email.

SPEAKER_257: What's going on here? From Jason. From Jason. Call Kanye back. Okay? Boom. All right.

SPEAKER_259: There you go. That's just the easiest setup I've ever seen.

SPEAKER_233: It's for sale or not for sale yet? It's for sale. Yeah.

SPEAKER_49: So we started taking orders on the 17th of October. Today, we're actually shipping first units out to customers. Whoa. Yeah.

SPEAKER_261: Scary. You've got a big weekend ahead of you. Yeah. Oh, my God.

SPEAKER_49: And this is the first time we have a production unit out in the wild, too. Wow.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah. Hardware's hard. Mm-hmm. Have you capitalized the company properly? What is this going to be really hard? I mean, you have to order 1,000 units at a time, 500 units. So what's it like to run a hardware company?

SPEAKER_18: It's not easy to run a hardware company. It's hard. It's definitely, I think that, you know, my last startup was an enterprise SaaS solution. What I've come to appreciate is, you know, building a hardware company is exponentially more difficult. Why? Why? Well, it's a number of functions that are involved, right? Software is an important part of building a hardware company. Maybe the most important part, but there's a lot. Operations, logistics, manufacturing, you name it, right? I mean, manufacturing tests. I mean, there's quite a bit of effort that's involved across the board, and you need to

SPEAKER_49: bring on people who, you know, can do a few different things at the same time, not just one thing.

SPEAKER_48: You need, like, three times as many people, five times as much capital. It never...

SPEAKER_264: Yeah. I mean, I think that if this...

SPEAKER_27: Nobody ever does it for the amount of money they think they're going to do it for.

SPEAKER_83: Every founder I meet is like, I've had founders who did a Kickstarter, and their

SPEAKER_04: idea was to charge less for the Kickstarter than it costs to make to incent people to buy it, and I'm like, it's going to cost you more for the original unit, so you're going to

SPEAKER_61: take $100,000. I had a company take $150,000 from the public for what would cost $400,000 to deliver, and I was like, oh, this is going to be brutal for you. Like, now you've got a gap.

SPEAKER_276: Yeah. Is it profitable from out of the gate, or you break even, and you make money year two when you get the Hyundai?

SPEAKER_49: No, we have positive unit economics from day one. Oh, my God. Yeah, it was intended, like, intentional.

SPEAKER_18: I mean, I've seen too many hardware companies where they're losing lots of money on the initial units, and it catches up with them. Right, and Apple doesn't, right? I think Apple sets a pretty good standard for how companies should be thinking about that.

SPEAKER_266: So I could also use this for my Dropbox replacement, or not yet?

SPEAKER_18: Not yet. So on our roadmap, what we publicly disclose is we've got a VPN service that's coming, password management, and file share and file sync.

SPEAKER_266: Oh, so, like, I'll have, like, my LastPass on here.

SPEAKER_282: Yeah, so it'll be...

SPEAKER_189: Or my, what is it, 1Password?

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, it'll be a service like that, right?

SPEAKER_49: It'll be a service like that that's got clients for all the different types of devices that you use. Instead of those passwords syncing back to 1Password, where 1Password's got a ton of user passwords, it's going to sync back to...

SPEAKER_266: Have one of those services ever got hacked, or they're massively encrypted, but...

SPEAKER_49: There have been compromises for LastPass, and there have been some challenges that these password services have faced. There's always... I mean, security is a cat and mouse game, right? There's always going to be compromises.

SPEAKER_18: I think the real question is, like, when there is an issue, like, how broad is the impact?

SPEAKER_27: The big challenge with your service is if my home internet goes down, no email for me.

SPEAKER_21: No email until your internet's back up.

SPEAKER_27: Right.

SPEAKER_264: Yeah, I mean, the good news... What happens twice a year? Yeah, like... For an hour. Residential internet right now is at two nines.

SPEAKER_58: Is it really? Yeah. Yeah, I have to... Where I am in the peninsula, it's, like, twice a year. Yeah.

SPEAKER_49: So, I mean, you know, it's pretty reliable, and, you know, Akamai does a pretty good state of the internet report where they categorize this stuff, and we took a close look at it.

SPEAKER_198: We looked at reliability, and we looked at speed, right? So, speeds are going up. They're improving. I mean, we believe that...

SPEAKER_73: Because you need to upload speed for this.

SPEAKER_288: Well, not for email, but for the file stuff, yeah, we do.

SPEAKER_189: And then, eventually, you'll do... You haven't announced it, but you'll do VoIP and video conferencing so that I don't have to go through a public VoIP or video conferencing service.

SPEAKER_264: Those are good ideas, yeah. We have not announced anything like that, but those are good ideas.

SPEAKER_122: That would be a great idea, because you know that the NSA is listening to everything. They got everything.

SPEAKER_18: I mean, they have a collect-it-all mentality, right? I mean, they're publicly on the record about trying to collect it all.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah.

SPEAKER_233: I mean, they're at the endpoints. They're just at the endpoint of Verizon, AT&T. After 9-11, it was pretty public.

SPEAKER_42: Well, here in San Francisco, in AT&T's building, right? They took up space. Yeah, that was the Snowden League. That was one of the things that was confirmed, I think, by the Snowden League, but was actually explored and reported before the Snowden League. Oh, it was.

SPEAKER_123: Yeah. And they basically, just at the AT&T hub here, they just... Every piece of data going through, they got.

SPEAKER_293: Is what the Snowden Report said. It's what it looks like. Yeah. That's what it looks like.

SPEAKER_61: Any of these three-letter agencies contact you reach out to use? Yeah. Oh, wow. And what are they like? Hey, what you're doing is not cool? Or will you give us a backdoor? What's their take on your situation at home?

SPEAKER_49: I think that they're curious about the product.

SPEAKER_18: There's a little bit of a quid pro quo. Like, we're interested in potentially investing, buy some units. In Qtel. So, it's a very interesting dynamic. I think that this potentially presents some concerns, right? Just like the FBI was concerned about the iPhone, right? With the San Bernardino case, right? Yeah. So, there's always concerns about how are people actually going to protect their data. But it's people's right. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_122: And the FBI will bend and try to break you if they can, which, you know, Zuckerberg's more than willing to do whatever it takes to get into China or flip people. He didn't care. But someone like Tim Cook has morals and ethics, and he cares.

SPEAKER_303: And you do, too. Yep. You would never give it over. You'd rather shut the servers down. Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah.

SPEAKER_18: I mean, we've designed the product in such a way that we don't have anything that we can give over. Right. So, genius. The data's on the server. It's not with us. The data that can come back to us is encrypted with keys that only you have.

SPEAKER_138: So, like, if we are asked to turn over data, we're going to hand over encrypted data that...

SPEAKER_308: If your company gets shut down, don't think it's going to happen, but like in the case, it does.

SPEAKER_83: The server's still up and running.

SPEAKER_142: If it's on here, you just wouldn't have your backup.

SPEAKER_49: Server's running. There's a service component to it. And so, my co-founder and I are committed to kind of two different things. One, we'll open source everything that's required for people to be able to run the service on their own. They can sign into Amazon and just set it up. Oh, neat. Yep.

SPEAKER_264: And then the second thing is, you know, we want to keep the service running as long as we've got paying customers.

SPEAKER_27: It'd be interesting, too, as a hedge to have...

SPEAKER_122: I mean, I don't mean to go crypto and serverless and distributed, but there is some distributed angle here where you could create some sort of peer system with all these units being out in the wild where they could connect peer-to-peer and back up each other. So, I was an investor at a company called Space Monkey. And Space Monkey's idea was peer-to-peer backup. So, you and I are both Verizon customers.

SPEAKER_83: You know, Sarah and Jackie are on Verizon. We each have a two-terabyte drive with, you know, a terabyte of our backup. And then we all encrypt pieces of each other's.

SPEAKER_316: But because you and I are on AT&T, we can transfer better over the backbone, et cetera. Yeah. You could do something like that, too.

SPEAKER_42: Yeah. So, this is my senior project in college. Really? We called it SIBs, the Shared Internet Backup System.

SPEAKER_49: So, you've got to remember, like, in the 2000s, everything peer-to-peer was all about, like, sharing music.

SPEAKER_281: Yeah, it was Kazaa. Kazaa, and, yeah, and, like, Napster, you know, all this stuff.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah. And so, we basically thought, okay, well, what if we could do something like that for backup?

SPEAKER_18: And so, absolutely, like, once you get to critical mass of having nodes distributed in the network, there's all kinds of interesting peering services, not just backup. You can actually create, like, an onion routing network.

SPEAKER_42: So, you can create an equivalent to something like Tor. Yeah. Right? So, there's a lot of stuff that you can do.

SPEAKER_321: Wow. I get so much upside in this company, and I miss the investment. I'm such an idiot.

SPEAKER_122: All right. Well, another company I miss the investment in. Congratulations.

SPEAKER_326: I see Lemos, Lemnos Labs. Who's that, Lemnos Labs? I know that name.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah. So, Jeremy Conrad, who's now kind of, he's off running his own startup. Eric Klein, Helen Beninski. So, they've got a few partners over there. But they're a hardware-focused fund, and they're also doing investments. And companies that are in the hardware ecosystem around hardware. So, they've been great.

SPEAKER_328: What do you got? A dozen people over there?

SPEAKER_329: At our company? Yeah.

SPEAKER_49: So, full-timers, we're approaching 15. Wow. You know, to bring a product like this to market, it takes about 50 or 60 people. So, yeah, we've got, you know, good relationship with NXP. We've got some contractors. I mean, it's-

SPEAKER_93: Taiwan or Shenzhen? Neither. Where do you make it?

SPEAKER_49: So, initial batches are being made here in California, and then we're actually moving manufacturing down to Mexico. Bespoke.

SPEAKER_332: Handcrafted.

SPEAKER_49: Well, it's intentional, right? I mean, you want, you know, you- Oh, you don't want the Chinese- You want to have a contract manufacturing partner where you have some assurances about how the product's being made.

SPEAKER_334: Yeah, I mean, I'll say not you, but, like, my gosh, yeah, trusting the Chinese with your secure setup, Helm server, that's exactly what-

SPEAKER_336: You're exactly who they want to compromise.

SPEAKER_21: I mean, Apple's figured it out, but they've got a certain amount of buying power that we don't have yet.

SPEAKER_43: Oh, right, because they're over there, too, making sure that chips aren't being put onto-

SPEAKER_61: That whole story wound up being bunk, or, huh, the Bloomberg story?

SPEAKER_49: The Bloomberg story, yeah. I mean, I think that there's some challenges in the reporting.

SPEAKER_18: And so, you know, I would have liked to see a bit more proof.

SPEAKER_108: Knowing what you know about security, you would not trust a router from China for your service.

SPEAKER_18: I currently do not trust a router from China for my home internet, so- Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_189: No way. I mean, the value to them- What's the name of- Huawei is their big routing company?

SPEAKER_83: It's like their big- Huawei? Yeah. Huawei- Yeah, sure. Is like the Cisco over there.

SPEAKER_341: And did we ban them from buying a company here? I think we banned them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_21: So there's been, like, government blocking of procuring, you know- Huawei.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah, from Huawei and other companies as well. I mean, this- I used to work at T-Mobile. This was like a whole thing about, you know, they were providing a lot of infrastructure to mobile carriers as well, so.

SPEAKER_252: We use and love Gusto at all of my companies. Launch, Inside.

SPEAKER_61: And why do we love it so much? Well, I was just talking to Ashley, who's been our COO and the managing director of our syndicate. And she loves the fact that it is so quick and easy for us to onboard new employees. That process used to be arduous. With Gusto, it is seamless. And they give you persistent and helpful communications on a regular basis about what's going on. And I am on the administrative email addresses so I can see this as the CEO, even though I don't manage it anymore. But I like to see those communications.

SPEAKER_06: They're not annoying, but they're persistent. And they keep you informed and make sure that you do everything right, including things like

SPEAKER_61: your benefits, commuter benefits we started giving, healthcare, dental, vision, all that good stuff. Hey, 401k, 529, which is that awesome tax break you get when you start saving for college and HSA, all the payroll, all the benefits in one place. This is what makes Gusto so amazing. Payroll, taxes, and HR is easy. Super easy for your small business. Fast, simple payroll processing. Throw all your benefits in one place. And by the way, they have tremendous support. Chat, if you don't like to talk to people on the phone, or phone, if you don't like to chat. Either one, you can do. So now is the best time to get set up. Obviously, the new year is coming, so I don't want you to wait. And listeners of This Week in Startups get an amazing offer. They get three months free when they run their first payroll, okay? Three months free. So I want you to try a demo yourself. I want you to go to gusto, G-U-S-T-O, .com slash twist. Gusto.com slash twist. I use it. As she manages it, we love it. It's very easy for me to read this ad for Gusto because it is the best solution out there for all your HR needs. Payroll, benefits, taxes. You want to make it easy, and you want to get back to work on your product, and you can do that by going to gusto.com slash twist. G-U-S-T-O.com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode about the threat slash inspiring concept,

SPEAKER_27: depending on who you are, of our government building out the 5G network in order—

SPEAKER_10: because there was a little bit of talk of this. Like, it was serious discussions of, like, we can't trust anybody. Yeah. We need to put up the 5G and have the government control, which was like, wait a second.

SPEAKER_233: If we can't trust anybody, it's the government to build the backbone of the people we want to trust? Right. But it's like, the government wants to protect against foreign attackers, but our government is also an attacker. What do you think of that?

SPEAKER_352: Yeah, I mean, I think—

SPEAKER_233: Critical infrastructure being controlled by the government.

SPEAKER_49: I mean, we have the same concerns about the government having access to what is currently

SPEAKER_18: consumer-critical infrastructure, right? All the cloud services that we depend on, right? So I think—I mean, I wouldn't want the government building out 5G infrastructure. I also would want to be careful about where material is being procured from. It's just something that, as consumers, you know, you want to have some sort of checks and balances, and you're putting a lot of eggs into that one basket, and then at the end of the day, you have to worry about which way the wind's blowing politically. If you're a liberal and then there's someone conservative in office, you might be concerned and vice versa, and really, we should be designing systems that are agnostic, right?

SPEAKER_59: And full disclosure, we're sitting here on a Friday when Mueller has indicted Michael

SPEAKER_357: Cohen and ripped up Manafort's deal, and Trump is going ballistic.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting time, right? When the Snowden revelations happened, Obama was in office, and a lot of people looked the other way because they were like, okay, well, we don't think this will be—we think that we're on a path to fix things, and we trust the guy who's in charge. And then now, you know, for those people, the guy who's in charge is radically different. And so there's a lot more concerns about what is a surveillance state going to really look like under this type of administration. And to me, it just speaks to, like, you know, this is where you have to actually just intermediate, right? You should not allow which way the political winds to blow to make you actually vulnerable from that perspective.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah, and I think you've got to take control of it yourself, which is why I like what you're doing. And I wanted to have you on the podcast because I think it's a very bold vision that the time

SPEAKER_233: is now for Helm because it's the first time I know people who are like, yeah, I got a VPN. And I'm like, you're a civilian and you have a VPN. Why? And they're like, I don't want people reading my stuff. It's only 50 bucks. And like, there are infomercials for VPNs now who are like, do you want your porn search? You know, you can have privacy or not.

SPEAKER_43: And it's like a pretty serious issue.

SPEAKER_42: So I just had a conversation a few weeks ago with an investor who mentioned, he's like, you know, his thesis, right, is that we're at this tipping point around privacy. And he thinks the thing that's going to tip the vast majority of people over is their porn history being exposed.

SPEAKER_49: Oh, it's moments away. Right, which was just kind of interesting for me to hear. I think that it's much broader than that. But if whatever it takes to motivate people, I mean, it's clear that what's gone on with

SPEAKER_18: Facebook has motivated people to uninstall the app in record numbers. Like engagement, at least in the US, is way down.

SPEAKER_27: Way down. And if you want to know exactly how creepy Facebook is, just go to the location settings and look at your location history in Facebook and understand that they know the seven places you were today. If you think you can trust Zuckerberg or Facebook, you have lost your mind.

SPEAKER_59: Well, I mean, you're a compromise.

SPEAKER_111: You've got a lot of entrepreneurs that watch this podcast, right?

SPEAKER_49: So if they ever go and try to do advertising on Facebook, we did off-brand testing before we launched the company just to get a sense of like how. And so when you get into the details about how you can actually target people, it's fascinating. Yeah. Right? Julie Ang, when she was at ProPublica, did a pretty interesting sort of like expose on this.

SPEAKER_21: And she's the one who uncovered that you can use angles on people's religious preferences or- So easy to do. You know, racial biases. There's a lot of things there. Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_61: I mean, think about it. Zuckerberg created the ability to target people by the color of their skin and their

SPEAKER_123: religion. Okay. Who in their right mind would even introduce that? Google didn't. It's bonkers. It's greed. And they will not let you put an affiliate link in.

SPEAKER_377: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: Right? And they'll stop you from putting a dating service in. But then they claim that they can't stop Hillary Clinton, Pizzagate nonsense paid for in rubles. They could solve all these advertising problems very simply.

SPEAKER_83: Anybody who wants to put up a political ad, you have to put your social security number and the tax ID of your company. Now the person in the company says, my name is on this. So when this hits the fan, I mean, I mean, I'm not putting my social security number in there. You'd have to have like a high degree. They don't want to take any of the velocity and simplicity out of it.

SPEAKER_300: And every time the press goes in, even to this day, and tries to hack the Facebook ad system, it works. Every time. To the press out there who are doing this, mazel, keep going. Embarrass the hell out of them. You could easily create, what is it, 20 people is the minimum you can have in a group?

SPEAKER_381: Yeah. Or is it 50 now?

SPEAKER_300: You and I could sit here all day long. We could put like Sam Altman's email in, right? Our pal Sam. And then put 49 people we know are on the East Coast. Then send everybody to a landing page. Target them. Then just say like white guy versus black guy versus male versus female. Isolate them. Then know that they hit the certain pages. Cookie them. And then follow them around. It's like, it's so easy. And then they're sitting there and they lie to the Senate and the Congress. And like, you can't target individuals.

SPEAKER_383: I was like raising my hand. I was like, I could show you that in 15 fucking minutes.

SPEAKER_42: Well, the best part about that is like, there are some people who have blogged about their experience, like trying to get jobs where they said, I want to get a job.

SPEAKER_21: I know that this is the hiring manager.

SPEAKER_49: I'm going to craft my ad campaign. So it only reaches like one of three people. And one of those three people happens to be the hiring manager. I mean, so it's, it's, you know, it's one of these things where I feel like there

SPEAKER_42: has been this push to say, can we do this? Can we do this? And there hasn't been enough time to, you know, people haven't taken the time to stop and say, should we be doing these things? Yeah. Should we really be doing these things?

SPEAKER_61: It really is, I think, the Zuckerberg effect on Silicon Valley, which was, if you can hack

SPEAKER_06: it, if it can be hacked, then it's just.

SPEAKER_393: Right.

SPEAKER_06: And this is so 1990s in its approach, which was, and I remember because I was in New York and, you know, in the periphery of the hacking community, we're, you know, trading wares and all this stuff, doing phone freaking in the 80s. And the attitude of hackers in the 80s into the 90s was, listen, if the system's capable of being hacked, then we hack it. If it's not capable, then you make it not capable.

SPEAKER_61: But it might is right. If you can hack it, and then that tipped over into the startup community.

SPEAKER_83: Move fast, break things. If you can hack it, beg for forgiveness.

SPEAKER_95: And this is, I mean, yeah. And we hacked our democracy.

SPEAKER_395: We let the Russians hack our democracy.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah, but I mean, so like I was part of that scene in the 90s. It's interesting to hear you talk about wares.

SPEAKER_21: But anyway, so like that whole thing.

SPEAKER_396: If you need Chessmaster 3000, I can hex that for you.

SPEAKER_21: But that whole scene was about curiosity. Sure. Right. It was about curiosity and learning, at least from my perspective, like the time that I

SPEAKER_49: spent there. Right. And what I think has changed is, you know, with startups, you add this business imperative. Right. And, you know, did Zuckerberg specifically create this? I don't know. He obviously is responsible, but he oversees all of it, whether, you know, whether he likes it or not, he's responsible. And I think that, you know, there's more of an ethical imperative as we see what's going on. You know, it's now becoming very obvious with what's going on with Google.

SPEAKER_399: Yeah. Going to China. Yeah.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah. It's like, really? Google's going to China? It's like, for the love of God, like Sergey Brin is, you know, an immigrant.

SPEAKER_06: Larry Page is one of the most considered people I've met in my life. And Sundar is, you know, I don't know if Sundar's an immigrant, but certainly his parents

SPEAKER_58: are, I believe. And they're all worth tens of billions or billions of dollars. Like, how much more money do you need? Do you really want to be a Google executive who hands over a dissident, a religious leader,

SPEAKER_83: an author, a journalist, to the Chinese government to be tortured and imprisoned?

SPEAKER_404: Yeah. And they get killed. Right? I mean, that's the... I mean, what is, what are you thinking?

SPEAKER_84: You have $10 billion, and now your legacy is going to be handing people over.

SPEAKER_404: Yeah.

SPEAKER_300: What does the incremental $5 billion adding to your net worth do?

SPEAKER_144: Well, how do you sleep at night? How do you sleep at night? How do you sleep at night about that? That's the thing I don't understand, right? It's like... It's so bonkers.

SPEAKER_408: It's so disappointing.

SPEAKER_264: I would love to understand, like, how the rationale changed from 2010 when they pulled out to 2018, right?

SPEAKER_83: I think Sergey's not day-to-day. And then Sundar, they gave him a lot of power, and Larry's disengaged. Oh, I totally understand. I think it's a disengagement of the founders.

SPEAKER_198: Yeah. Plus pressure, right? Street pressure to just keep the numbers up and to the right. They don't need to. Yeah. I mean, I agree with that.

SPEAKER_04: Zuckerberg wants to do it so bad. Zuckerberg wants to hand over dissidents so bad. This is how low Zuckerberg's moral character is. He learned Chinese and has been going to China, trying to impress them that he learned Chinese to get Facebook in there, begging them.

SPEAKER_06: That's how low moral he is. He's begging them to put Facebook in there, knowing that the Chinese government will use

SPEAKER_276: Facebook to murder, torture, and silence people.

SPEAKER_198: I don't know that the Chinese government needs Facebook now to do that. I mean, they... No, I know, but...

SPEAKER_18: If you take a look at, like, their requirements for how they, you know, how people have to engage with the government to just get online.

SPEAKER_414: Oh, they have their social security, they got everything.

SPEAKER_185: Yeah, so... They got their face, they can find anybody on the street in 10 minutes. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_416: But why would Zuckerberg with $50 billion, you have $50 billion, and you're going to make

SPEAKER_300: your legacy, and you're Jewish, by the way, and you remember the Holocaust, you remember these horrible things, your family has been talked about it, and then you go to China, and you're going to allow a million Muslims or whoever to be Roundup, Fulang, whatever. I mean, how would you ever go to synagogue or see your parents again? It is disgusting. It makes me furious that people... And you know what it is? The democracy in this country gave him that $50 billion. The freedom of this country gave Zuckerberg that $50 billion.

SPEAKER_419: Given the opportunity, for sure.

SPEAKER_49: I mean, I think what you're touching on, right, is the fact that we've created an environment

SPEAKER_18: where we're seeing the consequences of this rapid assimilation of people's data, right? This is what is making all of these things... All of the potential fallout that you're describing comes from this assimilation of people's data and basically inviting the government to say, hey, we want to get access to this, or inviting advertisers to be able to exploit this information. It is interesting, and I think we have a lot to learn by taking a look at... I'm not saying that I agree with everything that's going on in Europe right now around privacy and security regulations, but they have a much more fresh memory of the consequences around trying to accumulate this type of information about people.

SPEAKER_420: And power. And unchecked power.

SPEAKER_198: Oh, yeah. It naturally flows, right? It naturally flows from having this much information about people.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah. I mean, literally, it's... I mean, it's like the Stasi, you know, like they're listening... That wasn't that long ago. No!

SPEAKER_83: There are people in the Stasi who are in Germany right now,

SPEAKER_06: like, who are members of the Stasi. Have you ever seen the film The Lives of Others?

SPEAKER_43: Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a fantastic movie. Fantastic film. Yeah. It's one of my favorites.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Jackie, I like this guy. I can hang with this guy.

David Friedberg: Who are you? Where'd you come from? I feel like you and I could be bros. We could sit there and talk about this all day.

SPEAKER_06: All right. Listen. Geary, I am so excited that you have made the Helm's secure server. Anybody in my audience who's got that extra chatter and who is an influencer and who is part of the early adopter crowd, please, if you hear my voice right now, go by thehelm.com and tweet about your experience. And support founders who are trying to reverse the huge mistake we've made of giving large corporations our data. And to maybe create a counterbalance that makes them behave better. At any point, Zuckerberg and Cheryl could do the easiest thing in the world. You log into Facebook and it says, for $10 a month, $100 a year, we will collect none of your data and delete you from our database for all time.

SPEAKER_424: Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: But I think 4% or 5% of people would do it.

SPEAKER_83: And then they have complete cover. You want it for free? We have your data. You don't want to opt out? You opt out. Would you opt out? 100%.

SPEAKER_42: 100%. Yeah. Well, I would take it one step further.

SPEAKER_49: Let's let them start off with the ad-free experience. And then next level, let them develop a distributed version of Facebook.

SPEAKER_10: I'm so wanting to back a distributed version of Facebook. I'm dying to find an entrepreneur to give 100 dimes to.

SPEAKER_426: Yeah. Let them come. Put it on the Helm server. Have it run on the Helm.

SPEAKER_61: No, I mean, a distributed computer system, you know, like these, what do you call it?

SPEAKER_10: SETI at home kind of thing. You'll have that as obvious. Like you could be crypto mining on this if crypto ever comes back.

SPEAKER_129: But I doubt it will.

SPEAKER_49: Well, I don't think it'll be a mining thing. But I do think there's some interesting proof of stake or Lightning Network type applications down the road.

SPEAKER_18: Like we have to see who's going to win.

SPEAKER_344: I know. Right now. There's a lot of noise right now. There's a lot of cruft right now.

SPEAKER_61: It's so annoying because like 10 years ago, we were talking about Bitcoin on this podcast. Like we're the first people to talk about because I saw it on Hacker News and read it a bunch. And I was like, oh, this is fascinating. I wrote this article, the most dangerous currency ever. I started talking to the miners when it was two or three cents.

SPEAKER_06: And then all these grifters are like, oh, I can make 100x my money. And then just giant scams. And the SEC is like, if you're going to sell security, read these documents.

SPEAKER_61: And they're like, no, it's not a security. It's like, okay, but you're telling people to buy two for one. And they're buying it because it appreciates. Like the test is, what does the person buying the tokens think?

SPEAKER_42: Yeah. I mean, it felt like the dot-com thing all over again.

SPEAKER_18: There was an invitation to a lot of – it brought a lot of people who just cared about the money and didn't understand like what was going on underneath. Exactly. The dot-com era.

SPEAKER_439: Very exploitive, right?

SPEAKER_58: Yeah. I mean, I was watching this guy, Jabarish Chahill, the scumbag guy who beat up two different girls here in Silicon Valley. He got arrested. I think he pled guilty or got settled or whatever.

SPEAKER_06: But anyway, he did this like Lydian coin or whatever.

SPEAKER_83: And the grifters and the criminals are now flocking to crypto. I felt so bad for the crypto early believers.

SPEAKER_49: Yeah, exactly. That's why I feel bad. And not just the early believers, but the people who are actually trying to build something legit. It got co-opted. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: All right. Are you hiring?

SPEAKER_344: We are. We're always looking for great engineers.

SPEAKER_10: All right. Well, there you have it, folks. It's thehelm.com. And usually the founder, in this case, Geary,

SPEAKER_431: gets first name at thehelm.com. Do you run thehelm.com off of a helm? It's the same stack. We run it on slightly different hardware.

SPEAKER_303: Oh, you need a bigger thing. So you'll have a pro version or an upgraded version for corporations at some point, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_49: There will be like a biz version of this. One thing I didn't tell you, which you might find interesting. So there's a little cap on here. Oh. There's a USB-C port that's on the top. So you can expand this by stacking.

SPEAKER_198: Putting a chimney. Oh, no, you can stack them. You can stack multiple. Yeah, so you can expand compute and storage.

SPEAKER_445: But it's still the same domain, same server. For now. For now.

SPEAKER_198: Yeah, and we will have support for multiple domains, too.

SPEAKER_61: Dude, the design of this is so gorgeous and buttery for 1.0. Did you use IDEO or something? Or did you do it yourself?

SPEAKER_198: We worked with New Deal Design here in San Francisco. Good. God, yeah. I mean, they're amazing.

SPEAKER_95: Yeah, that's like a $400,000 design project.

SPEAKER_446: I know my price. It was about 400 times. It was not cheap. I know these design firms.

SPEAKER_83: But you know what? It's worth it because you got a lot of press for this thing. And probably half the press is based upon the privacy angle. And the other half is based on how beautiful it is. It's an object of art. It catches people's eyes.

SPEAKER_198: I mean, we want it to be a conversation starter, right? You see something like this. It's real-world virality.

SPEAKER_79: You see David Sachs' real-world virality piece? I haven't seen it. He wrote this great piece, David Sachs from Yammer, of real-world virality,

SPEAKER_06: which is like somebody's ordering an Uber. It comes up, and the person's like, oh, what's an Uber?

SPEAKER_83: What's the Uber logo? And then you explain it to them. Or CafeX, you see CafeX, you see somebody ordering on their app, you're like, oh, what's CafeX? Because it's in the real world. So over-the-shoulder real-world.

SPEAKER_451: So a Sonos system has that because you're like, what is that? How does that work? Oh, you can connect to it? Then they go buy one.

SPEAKER_111: Well, that's going to happen. When you get set up, your emails, you'll have a footer on there that'll allow people to compare and contrast like Gmail with Helm.

SPEAKER_61: What's the story with you have a give-to-get program, you get 25 bucks or something like that? You got to get that set up. Coming. Get that set up. Then I'll tweet that. I'll get a free one every six months.

SPEAKER_10: All right, listen. And everybody, as I said, go check out the Helm.com bio unit and follow Giri Srinivas on the Twitter, G-I-R-I underscore S-R-E-E-N-I-V-A-S.

SPEAKER_61: Thanks for coming on the pod. Thanks for having me. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.