Entrepreneur Perspectives Podcast Archives - KazSource

David Selinger (aka “Selly”) is the founder and CEO of Deep Sentinel, a security company blending AI with live human monitoring to stop crime in real time. From Amazon to Redfin to AI security, Dave Selinger has built a real-time protection system now scaling fast with $15M in Series B funding from top investors.

In this episode, Selly breaks down how Deep Sentinel works—from crime prediction models and real-time police calls to training AI to spot danger before it happens. He explains how the company went from idea to reality, how it stacks up against traditional alarms, and why his military mentors shaped his leadership style.

This isn’t just about cameras. It’s about making AI useful, delivering outcomes that matter, and building a team with zero tolerance for compromise. You’ll also hear Selly’s thoughts on parenting, college, career detours, and how early obsessions with tech led him from Stanford to Jeff Bezos’s office to the front lines of crime prevention.

• How Deep Sentinel stops crime before it happens using AI and live guards
• Why traditional alarm systems fail — and what real security should look like
• Lessons from military mentors on leadership, discipline, and zero compromise
• The challenge of scaling real-time protection for homes and businesses
• How Selly’s early work at Amazon (with Jeff Bezos) and Redfin shaped his tech mindset
• Raising kids with curiosity, independence, and meaningful support
• Why the future of security depends on speed, customization, and trust

[00:00:00] Introduction and Initial Scenario
[00:00:42] Podcasting and Audience Engagement
[00:02:06] AI and Podcasting Insights
[00:03:17] Real-Life Security Challenges
[00:03:58] Deep Sentinel’s Unique Approach
[00:04:49] Customer Experiences and Success Stories
[00:11:34] Public-Private Partnerships in Security
[00:15:52] Advanced Security Solutions and AI Integration
[00:27:45] Exploring Security Challenges and Solutions
[00:29:27] Military Influence and No Compromise Mentality
[00:33:35] Childhood Passions and Career Pathways
[00:36:02] Parental Support and Personal Growth
[00:41:43] College Education and Career Advice
[00:48:14] Amazon Experience and Innovations
[00:54:23] Founding Redfin and Its Impact
[00:56:29] Deep Sentinel’s Growth and Future

• Website
• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Series B Funding

Related Episodes:

• Ankit Somani | From Google to Conifer: Rare-Earth-Free Motors, $20M Seed, and Rethinking College
• How AI Is Changing College Counseling and Admissions with Senan Khawaja, CEO of Kollegio
• AI Content Detection & Digital Ethics with Madeleine Lambert

Entrepreneur Perspectives is produced by QuietLoud Studios — a modern media network and a KazSource brand.

Get in touch with Eric Kasimov:
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Credits:
Music by Jess & Ricky: SoundCloud

Entrepreneur Perspectives – Guest: David Selinger – Company: Deep Sentinel – Host: Eric Kasimov

Selly and Eric discuss the power of podcasting as a trust-building tool, especially in business. David reflects on how podcast appearances offer depth and transparency, revealing someone’s true character beyond polished public personas.

[00:00:00] David Selinger: I’ve got three guys armed. They are wearing ski masks. They’re at this location. They appear to have high capacity magazines, and there are three hostages inside. That’s a pretty different chunk of information based on the same type of sensor.

[00:00:34] Eric Kasimov: Entrepreneur Perspectives is produced by Quiet Loud Studios, a production company, and content network. Learn [email protected]. I appreciate it. Thanks for joining us today. I know you got a lot going on. You’re busy. It sounds like the podcasting world’s important to you to come on here, tell your story and all that.

[00:00:50] Eric Kasimov: So you said you’re doing one podcast a week about right now? 

[00:00:53] David Selinger: Yeah, something like that. For some reason, it’s a good way to reach our audience and seems to work out 

[00:00:58] Eric Kasimov: okay. [00:01:00] Yeah, no, it is. It starts a lot of conversations, right? And people get to understand who you are. I actually heard you on my first million.

[00:01:06] Eric Kasimov: It was from 21. 2021. So it’s like, I don’t know if it was during COVID or something like that. Yeah, I definitely remember that. Yeah, it, that helps too. It helps someone like myself who’s gonna have a conversation with you, like, you know, how buttoned up are you? Like, what do you wanna talk about? And you guys are just laughing, having a good time.

[00:01:21] Eric Kasimov: You’re like, I mean, you’re using Yiddish words on that episode. I believe so I was like, you’re speaking my language. I like, I’m the only Jewish guy here. And I’m like, well now we got two, so we’re good. Yeah. So there’s just a lot y. When you’re on a podcast, whether it’s like someone who’s gonna possibly work for you.

[00:01:36] Eric Kasimov: Or invest in your company or just learn about the business. Like to really get a feel for like, who am I dealing with? And I think it works all always, like I could listen and be like, you know what? I’m gonna cancel this episode because this is not my guy. Or I don’t wanna work at this company because I’m not gonna be a fit culturally, like whatever that is.

[00:01:53] Eric Kasimov: I think there’s, it’s different than like reading a website or a blog even. Even though blogs are important too. But like, I can really get who [00:02:00] you are and like what makes you laugh, what makes you tick. I think it’s good. I think it’s smart. 

[00:02:04] David Selinger: Yeah. I mean there’s a level of depth that I think is really interesting.

[00:02:06] David Selinger: You know, as you’re saying that, I’m wondering if this is an effed up idea here, but like direct open AI to pull everybody’s podcasts and instead of kind of getting their, this is the version of me I’m presenting to the world of podcast, I think, you know, you kind of probe and push and you get a different angle.

[00:02:25] David Selinger: I imagine asking OpenAI like, what’s David really thinking about X, Y, or Z and get. Deep in there and, and build a model around that. I bet you’d it’d be pretty, 

[00:02:35] Eric Kasimov: pretty crazy. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we’ve done it. We’ve experimented. We have another show called Savers The Metaverse, so it’s kind of like totally out there.

[00:02:42] Eric Kasimov: And then we will incorporate AI into it and bring in conversations and like have it relate something that has nothing to do with one another and bring those two ideas together. And then it’ll understand based on the kind of show that we have, like where it can push and where it like could just go as outrageous as you want it to.

[00:02:59] Eric Kasimov: But [00:03:00] then like once it starts recognizing the patterns, then you’re onto something. ’cause I think that’s the key. Yeah. And so it’s like if it heard you on 27 podcasts right, then it would say, okay, here’s clearly where he likes to go and talk about like, you know, or whatever. And like, exactly. Or here’s what he hasn’t talked about yet.

[00:03:16] Eric Kasimov: And like push him on that a little bit. So anyway, yeah, I think it’s, it’s fascinating and I was listening, you say this in, in different episodes, you’ve talked about it before and I was actually talking to my dad earlier today. He’s got all these different cameras and they watch it. I’m even at their house sometimes and it’s always jingling.

[00:03:32] Eric Kasimov: It’s like letting them know that a squirrel just walked by or the packet or their neighbor just dropped off a package. And you know, when I was listening to you talk about this stuff, it’s like, great, you have cameras so you can watch your shit get stolen. And it’s funny right? And it’s so true that like, okay.

[00:03:47] Eric Kasimov: We saw it. Except it’s not funny. No, it’s not. And maybe we can go catch the person, right? Because we got him on camera. Your neighbor caught him on camera. But it still happened and you still have to deal with everything now. And you’re solving that issue. And when I, when I [00:04:00] like hear you talk about it and read about Deep Sentinel, I’m like, okay, wait, this makes a lot of sense because not only do we have the ai, but we have the human element right then and there, which I think is what, that’s the missing piece, right?

[00:04:12] David Selinger: Yeah. And it’s the right then and there part, right? I think a lot of people. We’ll be really proud of their cameras. And maybe for the first week or so, they’re like, yeah, every time it goes off, I look at it within a minute, right? Or whatever. And then you realize that, yeah, I have these ring cameras, but I also have this other thing going on, which is the entire rest of my freaking life, right?

[00:04:37] David Selinger: And whether it’s my business or it’s my home, I just don’t have the time to be responsive at that level. Whenever the world decides that it’s, you know, again, a squirrel’s gonna run by the camera. And so the specific instances that that really drove this home for me, there’s a couple, one, which was kind of exciting for us and personal, which is that our very [00:05:00] first crime stop, our very first arrest was for this guy out in New York, upstate New York.

[00:05:07] David Selinger: And he had bought our system because of exactly what you said. He had, hi, someone had broken into his car, opened his garage door using the garage door opener in the car, and then spent the entire night from like 1:00 AM until 4:00 AM inside of his garage, like sorting through stuff, not just stealing things, like actually kind of splitting it into piles.

Selly explains how typical home cameras only offer evidence after a crime has happened. He shares early incidents that drove him to build Deep Sentinel, including a garage break-in that went undetected until hours later and a home invasion that occurred while a father dropped his son at baseball practice.

[00:05:29] David Selinger: The stuff that he didn’t wanna steal and the stuff that he might steal, and then the stuff he definitely was gonna steal and the dude like knew he had time and it’s all recorded, like hours of recording. There’s nobody that can do anything with that. ’cause the police don’t have a facial recognition database.

[00:05:45] David Selinger: At least I hope not. And they’re certainly not gonna use it for that kind of petty theft if they did have it. And then we had a more serious one happen. So anyway, that guy got our system, same type of thing started to happen. And instead though we intervened within 30 seconds, [00:06:00] uh, yelled at the guy called the cops.

[00:06:02] David Selinger: And cops were there within a couple minutes. A more serious one, though. I live in Pleasanton, California and one of my neighbors. He had Arlo cameras and he was that guy, like he was very serious about security, very serious about his family. He’s got two little boys and every single time the camera would alert, he would look at it, look at it, look at it, look at it, look at it.

[00:06:24] David Selinger: And one time he was driving his son to baseball practice and he got the alert, I’ll be there in three minutes, got to baseball practice parked, dropped his son off. Sure enough, it’s been five minutes. In that five minutes these guys had set up at his front door, banged the door down. His wife was in the shower and they were inside the house.

[00:06:49] David Selinger: She’s in her towel screaming and yelling and thank God got the guys to leave the house. But I mean, this is like a, this is a dad’s or a mom’s [00:07:00] nightmare that this type of thing happens and it’s minutes. It’s not like. Hours. Do you have 

[00:07:05] Eric Kasimov: to be there in that moment? Right. That’s terrifying when you say that.

[00:07:08] Eric Kasimov: Like the wife’s at home by herself because what if they came in with other plans? Right, or Or, yeah, they’re off and they’re gonna do what? If someone’s in the house? That’s just bad. Wrong place, wrong time period. Never knew about that. Yeah, that’s terrifying. It’s frustrating too because we’re all sold all these other, and I get it, like security’s important, right?

[00:07:25] Eric Kasimov: So we’re gonna have it if it’s better than nothing, there’s no doubt about it. And we’ve been through all of ’em, and I know SimpliSafe ISS a big one and a ring zing one, and, and it could help, right? So there’s aspects of it, but it’s that missing piece. Like, and you even said about like the guy was like, spent the time in the garage, like sorting through stuff.

[00:07:40] Eric Kasimov: Like that’s crazy. I, I think there was another scenario where there’s a house and there’s workers there and they’re not there during the summer. And so one of ’em squatted in the house for who knows how long, they don’t know. Yeah. That would never happen if there was a sit because it’d be like, that’s who are you?

[00:07:56] Eric Kasimov: Like you need to leave now. Or the police are on their way like that just [00:08:00] because if the squatter knows, maybe there are cameras, but they could like disguise it or the camera goes off for a few hours or whatever, like 

[00:08:06] David Selinger: Yeah. I mean one of the things that, that we’ve seen really consistently is that the speed at which you intervene and, and start interacting with a potential criminal.

[00:08:15] David Selinger: Has a massive change, right? I mean, if you think about it, if you’re in the planning stages, they’re still outside. They’re maybe thinking about breaking in and you just say, Hey, what are you doing there? That’s a great opportunity for them just to run off, right? Low risk for them. They haven’t really done anything, so even if they get caught, they just say whatever.

[00:08:34] David Selinger: And then the further you move into the crime, the what we call the lifecycle of a crime, the more serious the intervention is. It’s required. That’s why speed is so, so, so important. Even for something as serious as like a home invasion, right? I mean, you catch somebody very early in that process and just saying hello could be enough to stop the whole thing.

[00:08:52] David Selinger: Yeah. 

[00:08:52] Eric Kasimov: What happens? Okay, so I’m thinking ahead and we’ll bounce all over the place. So you do stop the person, they come to the door. I saw there’s a [00:09:00] video and there was four guys and they’re looking at a store it looked like, and they’re like peeking in and like trying to get in. And then someone comes on and be like, please leave now.

[00:09:07] Eric Kasimov: And they run off. Are they less likely then to do it again somewhere else? Or they’re just like, we just need to go find a place that doesn’t have a deep sentinel system. Like are we stopping it down the road further, or, I mean, that’s partly not the person’s problem because it’s private security. It’s like, okay, don’t fuck with those guys anymore.

[00:09:24] Eric Kasimov: Like. Or it’s just like, Hey, listen, bad guys are bad guys. They’re gonna go figure it out somewhere else anyway. That’s not really your responsibility to solve crime, forward thinking and psychology, right? 

[00:09:35] David Selinger: Yeah. I mean, I would love to stop all crime everywhere. The way I would look at it is kind of in these layers of security, which would be at the core, is my primary responsibility to protect my customers.

[00:09:49] David Selinger: And so first and foremost, yes, they’re gone. It is very infrequent that somebody then comes back, and if they do, then we would recognize them and, and the good news about that is that police are [00:10:00] very responsive to those types of situations. Secondly, though is that we do see that the frequency with which crime attempts occur goes down over time when we have entire cities or blocks, like we have a partnership.

Dave Selinger outlines how Deep Sentinel intervenes within seconds of a crime being attempted, stopping intruders before they act. He explains how early detection radically changes outcomes and how the service has even influenced police response and urban safety strategies.

[00:10:18] David Selinger: Sponsorship actually not where we’re sponsoring. The city business association is sponsoring us in a number of towns where the downtown has seen rampant crime. And what these downtown associations have done is they’ve said, look, if you get Deep Sentinel, we’ll pay for the first thousand dollars of your system because when we protect the entire downtown area, what we’ve seen consistently.

[00:10:42] David Selinger: Is that we’ll stop the crimes and then maybe they go to a different location. We stop it there, and then it starts having this kind of systemic halo effect where the crime for the entire downtown area goes down. And in some of the rural towns in California, what we’re seeing, this is where [00:11:00] we’ve been sponsored by some of the downtown associations, is that it’s completely changing their policing strategies.

[00:11:06] David Selinger: They don’t have to have all these responses to BS calls. It’s changing the health of the downtown area. And so that for me personally as an entrepreneur, as somebody who’s like poured my heart and soul into this thing, I love protecting our customers. Having that halo effect is what, that’s the type of thing where I can be.

[00:11:26] David Selinger: Put a badge on the chest and say that’s something that we do that nobody’s ever done before. 

[00:11:30] Eric Kasimov: Yeah. And you’re just, you’re reducing vulnerability to everybody and spread. Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. And what’s also, and I, I think you had mentioned this before too, and it’s kind of talking what, it’s not the cities that is buying it, because then you’re worried about like, okay, well how much control does government have now on all this?

[00:11:45] Eric Kasimov: Yeah. This is all still private. So the company’s coming in, or I’m sorry, the city’s coming in and say, we’ll help fund it’s, but this is your data. We don’t want the data and you don’t want them to have the data. 

[00:11:55] David Selinger: I am a big fan of public private partnerships in that regard. Well, [00:12:00] whether you’re like super paranoid about Big Brother or just a little bit, or you’re just like, Hey, I think good fences make good neighbors.

[00:12:05] David Selinger: I don’t need to be paranoid. Let’s just have like good lines. I’m a very, very big believer in having very clear definitions of what the government has access to and what they don’t have access to, and as much as we can provide support back and forth, that’s amazing. We do have some government customers as well.

[00:12:24] David Selinger: In those cases, obviously to the government customers, and they provide the disclosure that they’re capturing their data, but accessing data for private parties, we do not do that outside of very specific instances. So for example, if there is a crime ongoing, we had a, a hostage situation in San Francisco.

[00:12:43] David Selinger: It was about six months ago. We provided snapshots of images of the criminals to the police. So as the police were responding, they knew, as they entered the scenario, they had the situational awareness to say, here’s what the bad guys look like. Here’s what the good guys look like. Let’s make sure that [00:13:00] we’re informed before we go into this very, very 

[00:13:02] Eric Kasimov: escalated situation.

[00:13:04] Eric Kasimov: Wow. So they had cameras on and they were a customer of yours. Beforehand? Yep. Oh, wow. It was a 

[00:13:10] David Selinger: customer of ours that had a hostage situation where armed men came in and took over their store, and then we provided the snapshots of what the armed men looked like to the police, and this was SFPD. Anybody who knows SFPD, they don’t respond to almost anything at all anywhere.

[00:13:28] David Selinger: They were there within, I wanna say like two to three minutes, and they were fully 

[00:13:32] Eric Kasimov: informed by the time they arrived. That’s wild. Yeah. ’cause you hear that like you hear about different security systems. It’s all false alarms, right? Like I woke up in the morning and I forgot that I turned the alarm on. I let the dog out, the alarm goes off.

[00:13:45] Eric Kasimov: You don’t want the police showing up. It’s seven in the morning, like, oh geez. And then, yeah, or it’s just whatever, right? Like the thing fell off. I’ve had this before. Or like on, uh, what is it, SimpliSafe, it fell off the door. Like the sticky thing or the screw Yeah. Or whatever. It got loose and then police are there and they’re like, what are [00:14:00] we doing here?

[00:14:00] Eric Kasimov: So they’re gonna stop responding. I, you know, it’s like the boy who cried wolf. It almost feels like, 

[00:14:04] David Selinger: well, I mean, not even feels like, right. I mean, I think 60 to 65% of Americans. Now live in a city or a region where the police department, sheriff’s office, state police have declared that they are legally exempt from having to respond to calls from security companies.

[00:14:25] David Selinger: Such an alarm companies such as a DT and VNT that are only providing burglar alarm. We are fully distinct from that because we never have false alarms. In fact. Our system has, has been so robust that a number of instances, you know, these police departments have these just like sending out fines systems, that if you get a call from a burglar alarm, they just send out a fine.

[00:14:47] David Selinger: And we have gotten a couple of those letters and in fact, turn them around since that not only is the, the police department revoke the fine, they make deep sentinel exempt from it and then start promoting [00:15:00] solutions of that ilk. Uh, which were the only one. But they, they promote the category. And say, Hey, you should get something like this, that, that has live video monitoring.

David (Selly) breaks down the differences between Deep Sentinel and traditional alarm companies like SimpliSafe and ADT. He explains how Deep Sentinel delivers critical, real-time details to police and provides context-aware, human-monitored responses—something traditional systems can’t do.

[00:15:10] David Selinger: And you know, that’s how 180 degrees this is from what the police are used to dealing with. Yeah. 

[00:15:16] Eric Kasimov: How affordable is it right now? 

[00:15:18] David Selinger: Yeah, so it, it is definitely more expensive than alarm. I will not beat around the bush on that. It’s a much higher level of service for a small business or a single family home.

[00:15:28] David Selinger: It starts around 200 to $250 a month. Plus, uh, whatever hardware solution that you choose. We do work with existing camera systems, so we’ll also just be able to retrofit a lot of camera systems and, and then the service is really the key thing. And so that’s paying for the ongoing AI and compute systems, all of the, the live guards that are actually intervening our licensing with the police and all, all the, the interactions.

[00:15:52] David Selinger: Our interaction also is just, since you kind of asked about pricing as a long segue, but when we call the [00:16:00] police. Let’s, again, let’s kind of compare this with an alarm system. So you’ve got, when SimpliSafe calls the police on your behalf, hi, this is SimpliSafe, the garage door’s open. That’s the end of the conversation.

[00:16:11] David Selinger: Like what? What’s another question I get asked? Well, is it the upstairs garage? I don’t know. Is it the, I don’t know. Is there someone to say, I don’t know. Is there just literally no more information that they could provide even if they wanted to? It’s not that they’re a bad company or anything like that, like ADTs in the same bucket, Vivid’s in the same bucket.

[00:16:25] David Selinger: There’s just no more information they can provide. When we call, Hey, I’ve got three guys armed. They are wearing ski masks. They’re at this location, they appear to have high capacity magazines, and there are three hostages inside. That’s a pretty different chunk of information based on the same type of sensor, right?

[00:16:48] David Selinger: At the end of the day, there’s just, there’s just these dumb sensors out there, and what we view the security as the, the gap is not in the technology really. The gap is in how are we using the technology [00:17:00] to create a solution that actually stops prime? And that’s why when we charge our customers, it is a bit more because our conversation with the police, we stay on the line with the police during the whole call.

[00:17:10] David Selinger: Not because we’re just checking in on them, but because they’ll say like, all right, are they still inside? Are they still wearing their steam masks? Has anyone else shown up? Do you see the officers arriving? Yep. I see the officers there in the back. They’re 150 feet from where the victims and the criminals are.

[00:17:26] David Selinger: Wow. 

[00:17:26] Eric Kasimov: Yeah. That’s totally different. I would imagine, I mean, when you say that it sounds affordable, be from like, it’s just this white glove, it’s as opposed to having guards on site. Right. Which has its own set of issues. Right. I You’ve referenced that before, like, well, they’re tired, they missed it. They’re like, how much are you paying for the guards?

[00:17:42] Eric Kasimov: Like what, what kind of guards are they? Like they rent rent. Well, I mean, yeah, 

[00:17:46] David Selinger: look, let’s not belittle them for sure. Everybody’s gotta have their games on their iPhone to be able to play. During their job job, even if that job is protecting you and your business. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s really neat to take [00:18:00] the combination of technology and apply it to that guarding space because the, like you said, right?

[00:18:05] David Selinger: I mean, they’re people every, its system of security. The softest point is the human beings. And so what we’ve done that I’m especially proud of and that our, our team has just really dug in on, is not just using. Our technology and our AI to deliver this system. But then also on the backside, a big part of where we spend a lot of our energy.

[00:18:26] David Selinger: In fact, if you look up our patent portfolio, you’ll see this is entirely what our patent portfolio is focused on, is taking the data from the guards when they’re sitting at their console and using that to build subsequent models so we can, we can build models that detect this person’s just 20% less awake, and we can do that and detect it.

[00:18:49] David Selinger: Seconds. Not do it after the fact, after we find out somebody broke in and your guard was sitting on the can playing Angry Birds for three and a half hours, right? Like [00:19:00] we know within moments if something changes in the behavior of our guards. And so that allows us to, to do something really, really unique in the security space, which is we don’t deliver security a person at a time.

[00:19:14] David Selinger: We deliver it a service at a time. It’s kinda this weird concept that if you’re not in this space, it it, it’s hard. But like, think about it this way. If you have a person protecting, let’s say your apartment building, you walk them through and you’re like, here’s the lobby. Here’s what I want you to do in the lobby.

[00:19:28] David Selinger: Make sure nobody’s lying on the ground dying. And here’s the pool. I want you to make sure nobody’s lying on the ground, dying there, and that, that you know that nobody’s there between the hours of 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM And then here’s the mail room. I wanna make sure nobody’s jimmying the door. Instead of doing that as a person, what we did was we created services like here’s our lobby service where we, we look for slip, fall, we look for medical emergencies, and we let people walk through.

[00:19:53] David Selinger: Here’s our pool service where we let people do whatever they’re doing during the day, but during off hours, they’re probably residents. Let’s make sure we [00:20:00] get them out. Mail rooms, we look for Jimmy in the door, and so instead of delivering that by a person, we call each of those a service level and then.

The conversation dives into how Deep Sentinel offers layered services for different areas like mailrooms, pools, and lobbies. David compares the system’s modular approach to AWS’s cloud services, enabling scalability and precise protection.

[00:20:09] David Selinger: Kind of the same way that AWS took servers and they said, here’s a server. And they tore it apart. And they said, instead of buying a server, you’re gonna buy compute, you’re gonna buy storage, you’re gonna buy database, you’re gonna buy message queues. You’re gonna buy each of those individual services. And by doing that, they were able to make those a thousand times more scalable, 10 times, 20 times more affordable and consistent.

[00:20:33] David Selinger: So kind of the better, faster, cheaper. 

[00:20:36] Eric Kasimov: Solution. Yeah. Is that what someone could, you know, go to Deep Sentinel and say, I want this? Like how far, like you said, it starts at this price and how far do you want it? Like, do you want Fort Knox here? Yeah. Like, what do you want? Yeah, that’s 

[00:20:46] David Selinger: exactly right. So we’ll have apartment buildings that’ll say like, look, I just wanna start with my mail rent because my mail room is a freaking mess.

[00:20:52] David Selinger: Packages are getting stolen every day. People are jimmying the door, they’re, they’re just following people in. And then they’ll [00:21:00] expand. They’ll say, okay, wow, that worked. We now don’t have a mail room problem. Now our problem is our pool. Let’s add that. And then, then our problem is this. Let’s add that. And it also allows for like a lot of apartment buildings especially are owned by large ownership groups.

[00:21:13] David Selinger: And they’ll say, okay, we’re having this problem and in this chunk of our portfolio and this problem and this chunk of our portfolio, so we’re gonna gonna buy chunks of services 

[00:21:22] Eric Kasimov: based on what we need, where we need them. And so then the individuals can do the same thing. ’cause I was gonna say, scaling it is like you have a certain amount of customers, then you have a certain amount of people watching it, right?

[00:21:32] Eric Kasimov: Because that’s right. You’ll also have the individuals watching it. How many guards are you today? Where are you at with that today? 

[00:21:38] David Selinger: Yeah, so we’re, in terms of scale, this is another thing that we’re obviously really proud of. Like to get to better, faster, cheaper. These numbers have to be way, way, way better.

[00:21:46] David Selinger: And this is where the AI comes to play, is the AI allows us to have. Essentially one guard for every 200 plus properties. And again, that’s like the upside down of a physical [00:22:00] security guard patrolling, where you’ll have three to four guards for a property. ’cause in order to provide 24 7, you’ve got multiple shifts.

[00:22:06] David Selinger: You’ve got the weekends and all that other stuff. This is in absolute numbers. So we’ve got about 20 some thousand cameras and then just a little under a hundred guards right now. 

[00:22:17] Eric Kasimov: Okay. And so the AI’s detecting all of these things. That’s right. And you’re helping out, you know, I’ve heard like if a sporting event, like the FIFA Club, world Cup’s happening here, right.

[00:22:25] Eric Kasimov: And I know they’re scoping out these stadiums and they’re looking at different things. So they’re coming in weeks or months before to scope it out and let’s put a fence here. They can only enter this way. Like why is this thing, whatever that might be. A house is obviously different. How do the people know like where to put the cameras and like what’s the best spot for it?

[00:22:42] Eric Kasimov: Because every house is different. This where they’re coming off the street is different. Like are you guiding them on it or are they using their best, you know, thought process on that? How does that look? Yeah, so it depends. We have a 

[00:22:51] David Selinger: set of best practices and like how to do it. Videos that we teach people how to do that because I, I do think, you know, probably [00:23:00] 75% of this is common sense plus a little bit of tips and tricks.

[00:23:03] David Selinger: That said though, for the more serious situations, we do have trained installers throughout the country that they’ve gone through a more rigorous training level and they’re, they’re made aware of like, here are all the key risk points, here are the different solutions. We do also train them on things that are not deep sentinel, because I think that’s, that’s pretty important too at the end of the day my, to try to help our customers stop their crime.

[00:23:25] David Selinger: So things like you mentioned fences. It turns out that like without a combination of cameras and thoughtful environmental design, you are not gonna be able to stop criminals, right? I mean, if you have an open lot that has no lighting and you know you have a sign on the street, I’m gonna give an extreme kind of ridiculous example that says, we have loot chests here full of gold.

[00:23:50] David Selinger: Just walk in and get it. There’s nothing a camera’s gonna do. And so you’ve gotta be able to kind of combine. Here’s how we’re funneling traffic. Here are our fences. Maybe we put barbed [00:24:00] wire on these ones. Here’s where the gates are. Here’s the access control system. We put on the gates, and that, that as a totality becomes a security solution.

[00:24:09] David Selinger: So we, we actually do a lot of training on our, our installers on how to do that combination intelligently. There’s a practice called Sted, C-P-T-E-D, crime Prevention through Environmental design. It was recently legislated, I believe, in the states of Florida and Georgia, that upcoming construction projects for apartment buildings have to be step TED design.

[00:24:36] David Selinger: And when you combine the two, you have step TED plus an INT intelligence system. That’s where we crushed. Okay. 

[00:24:42] Eric Kasimov: So then the AI is watching all these things. So it’s not like this individual’s got 200 people or homes that they’re watching or customers, right? Yeah. And they’re like thousands of televisions at this point.

[00:24:53] Eric Kasimov: The AI is what’s watching it and triggering it, and then it’s kind of alerting to say, we have a situation here, something, just, [00:25:00] whatever that might be. That’s when they’re tuning in within seconds probably. Yeah,

David explains how Deep Sentinel uses AI not just for detection, but to model specific responses for every customer and even every camera. He shares details about their patent portfolio and how custom AI models improve security outcomes over time.

[00:25:03] David Selinger: that’s right. So the software that we built that in, including the AI. Does a lot of that bridging to make those people scalable, to do that.

[00:25:11] David Selinger: Not just looking at 200 camera feeds all at once. That’d be crazy, right? But to be able to see that and direct their attention to the things that are the most important. So we’ve got various points of intelligence in the system, which is what are the cameras that I should be looking at? What’s the level of severity of that particular situation?

[00:25:30] David Selinger: What’s the service level that they’re getting right? Is, is this a pool service? Does this have business hours that are between here and here? Are we inside of those hours? Are we outside of those hours? Is this a person that we’ve seen before? Is this an instance that we’ve seen before? What are the types of responses that are expected here?

[00:25:46] David Selinger: One of the neat things, in fact, I mentioned our patent portfolio. One of the neat things that we just started doing, fully closing the loop.

[00:25:55] David Selinger: See everything from the events that turned into nothing to the events that [00:26:00] turned into full armed police response. What we’re doing is we’re actually training what are called end-to-end AI models. So they’ll look at a situation in the first 10 seconds and say, what’s the probability that something that looks like this turns into a massive armed response from the police?

[00:26:15] David Selinger: What’s the probability that this turns into a nothing burger? And that’s essentially the end-to-end assessment of the severity. And then when you pour in all the data, what’s the video stream? What’s the audio like? What’s the history of this event or sort of this camera, what’s the guard doing? Is the guard clicking on it?

[00:26:33] David Selinger: Are they investigating? You can look at all of those data and come up with this massively predictive model, uh, kind of all the LLM of security in order to be able to see what is it that’s gonna happen at the end of this event. And that makes it so the guards are even more informed throughout the 

[00:26:51] Eric Kasimov: entire process.

[00:26:52] Eric Kasimov: Right. So as you guys continue your life with Deep Sentinel, it’s everything’s getting smarter. The more situations you run into, it just [00:27:00] continues to, yeah, we’re getting smarter. 

[00:27:02] David Selinger: Our knowledge about your properties getting smarter. One of our, again, I’m gonna keep referring back to our patents because I’m so proud of these.

[00:27:07] David Selinger: They’re so cool. Yeah, yeah, sure. One of our patents is that we do unique models for every single camera, every single property, and I believe we’re the only company in the world that’s even tried to do this. And so what we have is we actually send a custom model down to each and every one of the properties to look at what is the behavior at that individual property.

[00:27:26] David Selinger: So we have a kinda a big general model, but as you’re seeing even in the LLM world, a lot of times people are making these kind of specific models. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing as we’re doing that and then sending that down to the property and running that at the property. 

[00:27:39] Eric Kasimov: Got it. So. Now you have to protect your side of it, right?

[00:27:41] Eric Kasimov: ’cause you’re holding a lot of data. So you have a lot of cybersecurity you have to be aware of. So the ultimate hack wouldn’t be like to get to the house. It’d be like, how do we get into deep sentinel’s system, hack the whole entire thing and shut it down? I don’t know what they would do there. But obviously you’ve thought through that.

[00:27:54] Eric Kasimov: You’ve been at Amazon, Redfin, you’re doing a lot of stuff in managing it and all that, like I’d imagine [00:28:00] then you have a ton of security on your own side of it, right? And then the guards that you’re hiring, like you have. It’s not easy, I would imagine to like bring all that together. Yeah. I mean, one of the 

[00:28:09] David Selinger: challenges of our business, like you said, is to kind of make sure that it’s all secure.

[00:28:13] David Selinger: On the flip side though, it also makes it cleaner for the customer and cleaner for me. I don’t have to go turn around and choke somebody else’s throat if there’s a problem, right? I don’t have like other players involved in my ecosystem. I either am doing it or I’m not doing it. If I’m doing it, then I can just manage that quality and just.

[00:28:34] David Selinger: We run something kind of akin to Six Sigma on every single piece of the operations. It’s getting every one of those pieces better, making sure that our security operations, our legal agreements, our HR policies, we have a ridiculous HR policy, for example, right? Like which, if you’re familiar with hr, you know that it’s really, really hard to fire people.

[00:28:54] David Selinger: And so our part of our HR policy is like, okay, I don’t care if I fire you or not, you’re just not providing [00:29:00] security for my customers right now. You can go type on that computer over there in the corner. And that’s just the way that it runs. And I, and I’m not gonna break the HR law, but I’m also not going to have somebody who’s not doing a great job at their job sitting, providing security for my customers.

[00:29:14] David Selinger: And so being able to control all of that, again, just gives us a lot of confidence in what we’re doing and the ability to be that better, faster, cheaper solution. Cheaper, consistently. Consistently, and always 

[00:29:26] Eric Kasimov: getting better. I talked with Army Combat Vet and he talked about no compromise. Like there’s no compromise.

[00:29:33] Eric Kasimov: So the second that I was at, and he’s leading it and they’re going into battle and he’s just like, that, there’s no compromise. And now he’s running bank divisions or whatever and he, he operates the same exact way. I think you had some military mentors, if I’m not mistaken, about seeing and hearing different perspectives.

[00:29:48] Eric Kasimov: And you could explain that because I thought that was fascinating how you had that, ’cause I’m listening to this combat veteran and talk about, I’m like, well, yeah, that’s because. You’ll find yourself, I’ll find myself being like, well, you know what? I’m gonna like, he’s a [00:30:00] really good person and he means really well, so I’m gonna like overlook this one.

David discusses how Deep Sentinel manages quality across its security team, drawing inspiration from military leadership models. He emphasizes zero compromise on safety while treating employees with respect and humanity.

[00:30:03] Eric Kasimov: Oh man, great. But when you get into this world of bad, you can’t do that. And then you’re like, no, why am I giving this away? If I were to talk to you and you call me up, be like, dude, you gotta cut. That, that can’t happen in your operation. Yeah. 

[00:30:14] David Selinger: Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, I’m not a vet, so I wanna make sure I’m just really clear about that.

[00:30:17] David Selinger: I, I have a ton of respect for that and that in fact, like actually since I’m sitting here, I happen that we weren’t planning this, but, uh. I just had a weekend with my uncle who retired as a colonel in the, in the Pentagon, and I did him a favor a couple weeks ago, and I didn’t know about this tradition. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this, but he held out his hand and he gave me, I’m gonna hold up to the camera here, gave me this coin, so.

[00:30:46] David Selinger: It’s a tradition in the Army apparently, that if somebody does you a very serious favor, you give them this and this is a sign of your mutual loyalty. I’d never gotten anything like that. I never even heard about it, and I [00:31:00] was hanging out with them last week and I got this, which was just the neatest thing ever.

[00:31:04] David Selinger: It just happens to be sitting on my desk right here, here. But yeah, I mean, taking a lot of keys from the military. Number one is in the Gulf Wars. The army developed and the military developed a concept called left a bang. They had figured out all the ways to reduce casualties. Once a conflict had started body armor.

[00:31:24] David Selinger: They made the IED resistant personnel carriers. They, they implemented all these different policies for how to, how to respond to attacks, and they realized that they’d completely maximize that, and the only way to actually reduce casualties in those wars. Was to go left to bang, to go before the very first shot was fired and detect it early.

[00:31:45] David Selinger: And that is everything about what we do. The earlier we can intervene in a crime. I mentioned that the more impact we can have in preventing damage to people, property, everything. The other thing that we think about militarily, [00:32:00] uh, this guy, my, my uncle, obviously Uncle Art, if you’re listening, thank you Uncle Art.

[00:32:05] David Selinger: I also had a mentor at one of my last companies who is also a colonel in the Pentagon. And one of the things I really loved about him was he dispelled a lot of kind of the, this harsh management style, the harsh boundaries, right? They’re clear boundaries, but that doesn’t mean that you have to combine that with kind of the full metal jacket, uh, version of, of managing human beings.

[00:32:27] David Selinger: And it’s like, I’m not gonna be mean to you. I’m just not gonna let you provide security to my employees. You can fix your stuff. Cool, then you can do that. But having that, it’s almost like a paradox in your mind that I am gonna have absolutely zero compromises as it relates to the services and activities that may put my team or my my customers in any sort of danger.

[00:32:52] David Selinger: At the same time, I’m gonna manage you as a human being and being able to do those two things at the same time. I think that’s one of the most amazing [00:33:00] things that the military has done. Figuring out how to do that at the enlisted level, at the enlisted officer level, at the commission officer level, all the way up through generals and I, I’ve had an opportunity to work with a lot of the, the commission officers to learn how they think about that, and I’ve just been so impressed at the way that they think about that.

[00:33:19] Eric Kasimov: Yeah. And, and like you said, like obviously if you serve and you have that experience, it’s gonna serve you a different way. But if you can go learn from the other people, read the books or whatever, like you can have some perspective and live through their experiences to try to apply it to what you’ve done right.

[00:33:33] Eric Kasimov: And then mix and match it all up. And it makes you think too of like, uh, in your story as well, Robert Green’s book Mastery, I dunno if you’ve ever read that or heard of it. He talks about like these childhood obsessions, right? And he’s thinking about. Why are you so passionate? What, what are you passionate about?

[00:33:50] Eric Kasimov: And then, ’cause I can have this conversation with you and I could see like all these passions you have and it goes in all the different areas and obviously with technology and computers and, and IT and security. And then you’re connected [00:34:00] with the military and all this stuff. And like maybe it’s growing up in Oregon and you had access to a computer and a system.

[00:34:05] Eric Kasimov: You’re like, wait a second, this is fascinating. I wanna play games, I wanna do this, I wanna build games. And then like, then you go down this path and like of all these different things. And you could have a conversation some years later and be like, okay, yeah, this makes total sense. ’cause as people, as like younger people are looking like, what am I interested in?

[00:34:21] Eric Kasimov: I don’t even know. And sometimes how would you know? But then you just gotta keep going and then think back maybe when you were younger or something. And that’s kinda what he’s saying is what was it that like just lit you up and that got you outta the bed every day and like, I want to go do that more and more of that type of stuff.

[00:34:36] Eric Kasimov: You know, people like it could be passion, but it doesn’t have to be like there’s something there and you could still monetize it and get into great businesses and go work for Amazon or, or whatever, and we could talk about that. But when I say all that, is that bringing you back to when you were younger and on a computer to get to this point today?

[00:34:51] Eric Kasimov: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that I think about the 

[00:34:53] David Selinger: most is how ludicrous it seemed at the time to make money on computers, [00:35:00] because it was kinda going back to 19 82, 19 83 for your younger listeners. That is just before the Mesozoic age. And so, you know, the Velociraptors had just, just died off, so it was a reasonably safe age, but it didn’t make any sense, right?

David shares personal stories about how his parents supported his early interest in computers, even without fully understanding it. He reflects on how he now tries to give that same support to his own daughters, regardless of their career outcomes.

[00:35:16] David Selinger: There were very, very few personal computers out there. Only the richest people had them in their homes, the most ridiculous kind of businesses that were on the edge and doing crazy stuff. They were the ones that had it. And so the idea that this would’ve become. A business and a career and something that actually could make money actually wasn’t at all apparent at the time.

[00:35:39] David Selinger: My parents are both doctors, and not only did was it not, it was like the opposite of what my, my family pushes us towards, right? Like as my, again, as my uncle, he’s in the army. He has a PhD. My mom has a doctorate. All of her sisters have doctorates of various forms. That was the path, and you get a, you become a doctor, you [00:36:00] become a lawyer, and then you make money.

[00:36:01] David Selinger: And so the number one thing that I look back at and I try to model as a parent was that my parents, even though they didn’t understand what I was doing and they didn’t know for sure that it would make money, they supported it. They made sure that I got good grades, they made sure that I had the discipline to show up every day, clean up my room, kind of do my stuff.

[00:36:26] David Selinger: And then once I did that, they supported my interest in computers unconditionally. They sent me to camps. During the summer, by the time I got to to my first year at college, I’d already finished the first two years of curriculum because my parents had sent me in summers to go take college courses on computer programming theory.

[00:36:44] David Selinger: And that was just amazing. And I still had to, you know, I still had to do the basics. They allowed me to do that, but even though they didn’t understand it, they couldn’t relate to it at all. They didn’t like computers. They still supported it. And so my number one thing as a dad. [00:37:00] Is to try to make sure that my kids have that same type of experience.

[00:37:04] David Selinger: You can’t replicate anything, but like, help them make sure that they, they’re able to take care of themselves, do the fundamentals, and then whatever they like. My older daughter is into theater. She’s at a two week theater camp right now, and I, I miss her like mad, but I couldn’t be happier about that. My younger daughter.

[00:37:24] David Selinger: Same thing. She’s doing okay at school. She’s getting her stuff done, she’s taking care of herself, and then she likes horses and she loves equestrian. And so this summer we’re supporting her to make sure she can go to her horse shows. And she’s actually gonna go to Pony finals out in Kentucky in a couple weeks.

[00:37:41] David Selinger: And I don’t know if either of those can make any money at all whatsoever, but I’m gonna make sure that they have the responsibility to take care of themselves and the capability. Find another type of work if they have to, but then if they wanna pursue that, they can. And I think that’s, again, that’s that same [00:38:00] tough balance.

[00:38:00] David Selinger: I’m not gonna take ownership for their future, but I’m gonna make sure they have their fun and moles. They can do that. 

[00:38:07] Eric Kasimov: And who knows what it leads to. Right? Like, ’cause that one interest becomes something else. And yeah, she could be a talent agent, she could go on Broadway working commercial. I mean, it’s just, or you just have that experience and ’cause I think it’s that of, and you’ve done this in your career, right?

[00:38:20] Eric Kasimov: Of like, you’ve done this and then you do that and then you mix and match and then next thing you know, it’s like, that doesn’t make any sense. And I think, yeah, we should see more of that, especially with ai, that it shouldn’t, it’s not gonna, like, you can, if you want it to be replace you and you wanna do nothing.

[00:38:33] Eric Kasimov: Sure. But yeah. My parents thought I 

[00:38:36] David Selinger: was an abject failure until I was about 30, I think, and it wasn’t until Redfin went public and then was on the, in the Wall Street Journal that my parents were like, oh, he is like, he is like doing stuff that apparently matters to 

[00:38:54] Eric Kasimov: other people. That’s cool. Wow. This is after Stanford and after Amazon, right?[00:39:00] 

[00:39:00] Eric Kasimov: Yeah. Yeah. That’s wild.

David and Eric dive into the shifting value of college degrees in a world driven by skills, not diplomas. David offers nuanced advice on choosing college or alternatives based on personal drive, goals, and meaningful work—not societal pressure.

[00:39:04] David Selinger: But they still supported me. They still let me do my thing. And uh, and I really love that. I look back at that and I mean, I’m, I’m up visiting my parents right now and I just, I love being able to say thank you to them for that because it wasn’t like they had some foresight and they were like guiding me to somewhere.

[00:39:21] David Selinger: They were literally just supporting me and letting me figure that part out and that man, that’s cool. That’s really, really cool. Can I tell a, a totally off the beaten path story. In the same vein, my older daughter, like I said, she’s into theater. So for her 16th birthday, we flew her to New York where she got to go to Broadway and watch a bunch of Broadway shows.

[00:39:41] David Selinger: And on the day of her 16th birthday, I, we just did the coolest thing ever. And, uh, she did it. I didn’t do it. So we went to her to cabaret and then it was like one in the morning after Cabaret finished and she got to meet all the actors and stuff like that at, at the stage door. And so then we’re like, Hey, let’s go to a [00:40:00] piano bar.

[00:40:01] David Selinger: And you know, she’s 16, she’s not allowed in a bar. But the good thing is most 16 year olds that are trying to sneak into bars are not trying to sneak in with their parents at 1:00 AM and do a pinot no bar. And so we literally just walked in the door, got a table and her 16th birthday, she’s in New York and the greatest city in the world not having a drink, but but at a piano bar.

[00:40:23] David Selinger: And then we went to go get a drink and we turned around and she had sn up on the piano and she’s sang cabaret. On Broadway at a piano bar at her birthday for her 16th birthday, and she shut down the bar. Like literally everybody put down their drinks. All the talking stopped and everybody sang along with her.

[00:40:42] David Selinger: It was so. Amazing. And that was a hundred percent her. You know, like that felt like such a success as a parent to be able to see that 

[00:40:49] Eric Kasimov: happen. Yeah. And, and letting that creativity, when you can see these kids go out there, you say all this, ’cause I have three kids, myself and my middle. My daughter loves theater, right?

[00:40:59] Eric Kasimov: Loves theater, loves [00:41:00] music, loves dancing, like all that kind of stuff. And like you can get out and in front of somebody and just do that. And just love doing it. Like your daughter signing up to get up on that stage and just like, like imagine one of us try that. That’s not like, it’s just not a normal thing to be able to do that.

[00:41:15] David Selinger: Well, in fact, we’d actually told her, Hey, lay low, you’re 16 in a bar right now. And that was her version of laying 

[00:41:21] Eric Kasimov: low. So, you know, go figure. That’s amazing. So you have kids like that, right? You go to Stanford and it’s kind of cool actually your parents weren’t like, oh wow, you know, Dave’s gonna go to Stanford.

[00:41:31] Eric Kasimov: Like, he’s a wild success. It doesn’t seem like that was the prestige factor, right? That they needed to be telling other people. You now have kids now and they’re coming to college and you, we talk about college all the time. You’re hiring people, like where are you at with college? And you absolutely have kids eventually are coming close to being on the way.

[00:41:49] Eric Kasimov: Oh man, this is a tough question 

[00:41:52] David Selinger: these days. So I do college counseling for seniors and juniors at my, my local high school down in, in [00:42:00] Pleasanton. And I love doing that by. I can relate still, whatever, 30 years later to the experience of like feeling a bit repressed and like scared that I’m gonna let my parents down in that, because I remember that process of deciding that.

[00:42:15] David Selinger: And so I’m still really involved in that. And the world has changed a ton is the short answer, right? I mean, I think the idea of getting a four year degree and then being set, that idea is gone and it’s still out there. And I think people still believe it, but it’s definitely not true anywhere near the way that it was 25 years ago.

[00:42:37] David Selinger: And I think the extreme version of that is when you look at ai, if you’re great at ai, I don’t care whether you have a PhD or no degree, you’re gonna be making a million bucks a year if you’re doing open AI research at OpenAI. That’s kind of the way the world is working now, and the best way to get that expertise certainly is to get a degree.[00:43:00] 

[00:43:00] David Selinger: Doesn’t mean that the converse is true. That doesn’t mean that if you get a degree, you have that level of expertise. And, and I think the world is really starting to come to understand in these diversified work environments like Upwork and, and things like that where skills and outcomes matter a lot more than the education.

[00:43:21] David Selinger: And the education is still, again, I think a critical part of that path for a lot of different people. And so I don’t ever dissuade people from going to college. But if people are hesitant to go to college and like, I don’t know what I wanna do, college is a great place to figure that out. There are other ways to figure that out.

[00:43:38] David Selinger: What, what is it that you think you wanna do? And I’ve seen a lot of success through different paths, and I think that continues to be increasingly true for people. And it’s like very complex world out there, right? I mean, you’ve got. These incredible technology paths that are sucking people into them, even if they don’t like them.[00:44:00]

The conversation turns philosophical as David discusses Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. He reflects on how fulfillment, not just material success, should drive career and life choices, especially in an unpredictable world.

[00:44:00] David Selinger: You’ve got the arts, you’ve got politics going crazy like that. And so I think at the end of the day, it’s almost like a survivalist modality is like, what is it that you believe feeds you and that you’ll be able to feed yourself doing? And if you can answer both of those questions with any degree of confidence, that’ll be the direction that I encourage people to go.

[00:44:22] Eric Kasimov: That’s good. I mean, you said it. What do you like? You emphasize that part because I think a lot of times it’s society, it’s parents, it’s parents, friends, it’s friends, it’s teachers, it’s the school. It’s like, no, no, no, you have to go to Stanford. ’cause if you go to Stanford, I get to wear the Stanford shirt.

[00:44:36] Eric Kasimov: Right. We could all wear it and not just Stanford. Right. It could be anything in whatever school that is. What do you want to do? And it’s hard. And then we don’t even know, like, you know, prompt engineering wasn’t a thing like a few months ago. It almost feels like, right. And like, let’s fast forward six months from now.

[00:44:49] Eric Kasimov: I don’t know what it’s gonna look like. Like even the tools we’re using for podcast production, you know, we’ve been able to take on more clients as a result of it. We’ve been able to do more with it. We create more with, it’s like. [00:45:00] It’s tough. Like finance is another place, right? So you have a lot of people going into finance and they want to go get the investment banking job.

[00:45:05] Eric Kasimov: So they want, you have to get this internship. So you have to go interview, but you are not interviewing by yourself. There’s hundreds of other people. So people are literally taking on a hundred interviews as an individual to go get that potential investment, banking, job, internship. ’cause they’re hiring ’em from, I just talked to someone who’s in the college world as a sophomore, I’m in college.

[00:45:23] Eric Kasimov: And again, if you can get that and that’s what you want, that’s great. But I don’t know, like it’s. Talking to someone like yourself who went to Stanford, who’s, you know, went through different companies like in Amazon and looking at it now and just saying like, listen, what I did 25 years ago is different than what’s happening today.

[00:45:39] Eric Kasimov: I don’t know how else to say that. 

[00:45:40] David Selinger: Yeah, I mean, and I think about it now increasingly as I get older and older and my vision goes bad and things like that. I think about it in the context of meaning and less happiness. Feeling happiness is kind of a challenging word to get around. Is that joy? Is that just like enjoying a moment?

[00:45:58] David Selinger: One of my favorite [00:46:00] philosophical books is, uh, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning. I’m rereading it. My dad gave it to me when I was like 18 or 19 years old, and I love that. If you haven’t read that, it’s a book about a man’s journey through self exploration and understanding himself and his own motivations by living through a concentration camp during World War II and holy moldy.

[00:46:28] David Selinger: What an amazing perspective. And the way that he writes it is, again, I don’t, have you read this book, Eric? Oh yeah. I read it a lot. Like, oh yeah, like so humble. Not about like, Hey, I’m telling you how to live your life. I’m just sharing my experience that I survived concentration camp and I watched people who lost hope die.

[00:46:48] David Selinger: And I watched people who had false hopes die, but the people who survived found joy in the moments. A concentration camp, ladies and gentlemen. [00:47:00] And then when things were tough, they gritted their teeth and they went through and it really kind of boils down to that and story after story after story. And the thing that I do find myself coaching both the parents and the children on is that lesson that, that this view of this outsized craziness outcome.

[00:47:23] David Selinger: That may not be a good one, right? Like I know a lot of billionaires as a human being, and I will tell you that I don’t get the perspective that they’re more fulfilled or happy in their lives than people that live in a one bedroom studio apartment and are getting, getting by, but spend time with their family every weekend and are happily married or have kids or dogs that they love.

[00:47:48] Eric Kasimov: It’s really that simple. Yeah. I’m glad you brought that book up. It’s amazing, you know, the fact that like, he just thought and got his way through it because his wife, he thought she’s alive and was it with [00:48:00] within a few days? Obviously she was not. Yeah, I, I would read, listen to it. All of the above. Every chance someone gets Yeah.

David shares how he landed at Amazon after discovering programmatic ads before they were mainstream. He recounts helping create personalization systems and working directly with Jeff Bezos before leaving to launch Redfin, which quickly went viral.

[00:48:08] Eric Kasimov: A couple of things I wanna finish on. I know we’re running low on time. We’ll finish with your company and how people can learn about it. But right before that, you were at Amazon. You were at Amazon early, you did a lot of amazing things at Amazon. I think you were there for like a year, year and a half.

[00:48:20] Eric Kasimov: Like somewhere in that timeframe, I think like the, if you bought this, you’ll like this type of thing. And Amazon every time that was you. Right. And when did Amazon come calling? Like how did that come out to be? ’cause you were there I think in oh three, that’s early days. Amazon. 

[00:48:34] David Selinger: Yeah. So I was there oh two through oh four and.

[00:48:38] David Selinger: So I invented part of the, if you like this, you’ll like that. There were a lot of other people that did that. There was a guy named Brent Smith and, and folks like that that did stuff before me. I did new versions of that, new algorithms and new systems, and ran the first AI team that was dedicated just to AI and data.

[00:48:56] David Selinger: And there were two things that that brought Amazon [00:49:00] to me. One was Jeff had this vision that like at de sha and his banking background, you could use data to make money. And that whole concept, it’s become data science and, and analytics and, you know, business intelligence and all that stuff. It was very, very nascent at that time.

[00:49:17] David Selinger: So he literally had to convince the board of directors that that was possible. And so my first job at Amazon was to create a presentation for the board of directors that gave a set of examples about how one could use data, about customers to make money and how they found me. I don’t really know, honestly.

[00:49:38] David Selinger: Like I was back at Stanford. I had dropped out and then I had joined this company, Dutch Brothers Coffee, which is now publicly traded coffee company, rad company, if you don’t know about it. And I had joined them as a, as a partner, running their digital side. And I had discovered this thing where if you log into Google and then you say, [00:50:00] Hey, if ever anyone’s looking for coffee, show them this ad.

[00:50:04] David Selinger: And we printed money. Because nobody had figured this out yet. And so we, I mean, literally printing money, selling high-end coffee makers competing with the biggest brands out there in the world. But because we were coming into the internet, through Google, we bypassed all these big brands and, and so I figured that out.

[00:50:25] David Selinger: And you put in a dollar. Get hundred out, put in a dollar, get hundred out, and just kept doing that. Yeah. 

[00:50:32] Eric Kasimov: Yeah. 

[00:50:32] David Selinger: If you’re familiar with the concept of a money printing machine, that’s literally what I found. So I was doing fine and gonna Stanford driving around my little BMW and I had a cute little girlfriend and so I wasn’t really looking for a job or anything.

[00:50:46] David Selinger: I was doing just fine. But I went to Amazon on campus interviews just for shits and giggles. And I put my feet up on the desk face. That’s great. I was so ego egotistical, so, [00:51:00] so beyond just, you know, beyond the pale. And so they’re interviewing me and they’re like, why are you here? I don’t know. I just thought it would be interesting.

[00:51:11] David Selinger: Well, okay, well then tell me what you’re doing at least. And I told them this thing and the guy sitting across the table from me is this guy named Neil Roseman. He’s the VP of Consumer at Amazon. And he goes from just being completely turned off by me through the whole interview, and he just leans all the way into the desk and he’s like, wait, wait, wait.

[00:51:31] David Selinger: So you buy a dollar worth of ads and you make a hundred dollars not in sales and profit every time? And I was like, yeah, dude. It’s like clockwork. I just keep putting it in. And that’s how programmatic advertising was born at Amazon. Amazon then taught Google how to make AdWords, and that ended up being a project that was run by a friend of mine named Blake Cho, who’s now the CEO of Boom Supersonic.

[00:51:58] David Selinger: If you’re not familiar with Boom [00:52:00] Supersonic, one of the coolest companies in the world right now, they’re making a commercial aircraft that will go the speed sound supersonic speeds for. All of the major airlines around the world. So I also gotta cross paths with really rad

David tells the story of launching Redfin, creating the first interactive real estate maps, and how it disrupted the industry overnight. He describes the rush of seeing his product explode in popularity and how that success drew him away from Amazon.

[00:52:16] Eric Kasimov: people. Yeah, obviously. So are you, you used his name before Jeff.

[00:52:20] Eric Kasimov: Were you like, were you working in conversations like side by side? Yeah. 

[00:52:24] David Selinger: Yeah. I mean, side by side probably that would be a way step too far. But yes, like meeting with him on the regs at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, and, and getting this board of directors presentation ready, making sure that he felt prepared.

[00:52:40] David Selinger: Once that presentation was done, CD uh, promoted me to run the team. So I was working on that project in a team, and then he promoted me to, to run that team and then continued to meet with him to build out that process. And, and the reason they pursued me, which again kind of goes back to your question about college and education, he hired me to manage a [00:53:00] group of PhDs who were all infinitely more educated than I was.

[00:53:04] David Selinger: But the reason he wanted me to run them and he was replacing a person with their PhD with me was because of the focus on how to use the data to make money. Not just what can I do with the data, not just how can I make money, but that intersection, that kind of renaissance review of how do I know enough about data, know enough about statistics, know enough about databases that I can manage a team.

[00:53:33] David Selinger: A very technically adept PhDs yet keep my feet grounded in what does the business need? How do we make money? What does it mean to make money? What works, what doesn’t work? What are the policies, procedures, legal requirements to make all those things happen? And by doing that, we launched probably like 10 or 15 different projects that year.

[00:53:55] David Selinger: That team had been around prior to me joining, and they had launched zero projects in the [00:54:00] prior year. We launched 10. And of those, I would say three of them now are responsible for over $10 billion in revenue at Amazon. 

[00:54:13] Eric Kasimov: How do you do that? And then, uh, you’re there, what do we say, like a year and a few months or whatever, like Yeah, about two years.

[00:54:18] Eric Kasimov: How do you pull the trigger and say, yeah, it’s been great. I got other things I wanna work on. 

[00:54:23] David Selinger: I got bored, honestly, about a year and a half in, and I started working on a, a moonlighting project. It turned into Redfin. When we launched Redfin, there was no way I could not jump ship and go work on it. We launched it.

[00:54:39] David Selinger: It was this interactive mapping application where you could look up properties and see their past property history and listings and things like that. None of those things existed at the time. You could not look for past purchase history of properties at the time. You could not use a reasonable map to do that.

[00:54:59] David Selinger: Maybe most [00:55:00] importantly, there was no such thing as an interactive map. Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, apple Maps, all those things were created as a replica of Redfin. And yes, we created that in a specific vertical, but like no one had ever made interactive mapping before. So we ended up getting front page coverage on just dozens and dozens of newspapers all throughout the country.

[00:55:23] David Selinger: So when we launched. We, I think I turned the servers on at like 2:00 AM and went to bed and I woke up and I went to my favorite coffee shop, which is called Cafe Lateral in downtown in Seattle, and I got my Mocha and I turned around and everybody had their laptops. That’s not unusual, but I’m not exaggerating.

[00:55:44] David Selinger: Every single one of those laptops had Redfin’s website open and someone was showing their friend, dude, have you seen this? And that was just such an emotionally amazing experience. We had 600,000 visitors from zero the day before [00:56:00] our internet providers shut us off because they thought we’d put up a porn site.

[00:56:03] David Selinger: Like they’d never seen a spike in traffic like that ever before. That’s the only thing that could do. And, and you know, in a way, like there’s a lot of people call it real estate porn. It kind of is a, you know, it’s kind of a real estate porn site, and, and it just, it made real estate fun. I went in that day and I was like, all right, I’ll give it another week and see what happens.

[00:56:21] David Selinger: And it just kept doing amazing things. And so I, I put in my resignation. You had to go? 

[00:56:26] Eric Kasimov: Yeah. You’ve been building stuff all, all along. So as we finish up here, it would come as no surprise to anyone listening that you, the funding that you’ve received for Deep Sentinel, you just had the funding round, I think in the spring of 2025.

[00:56:40] Eric Kasimov: What was that? What do those numbers look like? What’s going forward from here? So we’re 

[00:56:45] David Selinger: passing through 15, 20 million in revenue right now, and so we raised a $15 million series B venture round. We have, like I said, about 25,000 cameras, six to 10,000 custom or something in that range, [00:57:00] and we’re growing really rapidly.

David shares the current scale and impact of Deep Sentinel, including its $15 million Series B raise and thousands of crimes stopped each month. He encourages listeners to visit deepsentinel.com and their YouTube channel to see the system in action.

[00:57:01] David Selinger: We’re doubling year over year. I think the need for security is certainly there. I think that’s expanding the fact that we’re providing something that is at a price point that’s never existed before at a certain level that’s never existed before. That’s really exciting. We have to do a lot of market education and that’s hard.

[00:57:19] David Selinger: It’s very, very hard to do that. So my one ask of your, your listeners would be, if you aren’t familiar with this, go look at our website, go get YouTube and search for deep fentanyl. Look at our channel and what you’re gonna see is the thing that I’m the most proud of. Hundreds and thousands of stopped crimes.

[00:57:36] David Selinger: We stopped somewhere between 3000 and 5,000 crimes every single month. If you search for Deep Sentinel arrests, you’re gonna see videos of people getting arrested because we caught them. If you search for, let’s say, a DT arrests, you’re gonna find out all the A DT employees who’ve been arrested for stealing your data.

[00:57:55] David Selinger: So in terms of like what we do, that’s the norm, right? Like [00:58:00] what you’re seeing from a DT. They don’t really get people arrested. They don’t really stop crimes. We really have to educate people that there is an opportunity to do something way, way, way better, and yeah, it’s a little bit more expensive.

[00:58:12] David Selinger: Really not that much more, especially for 

[00:58:14] Eric Kasimov: a business. Yeah. And totally worth it. So how does, how does my father, how do other people, individuals, families, whatever, like get started with this? 

[00:58:22] David Selinger: Yeah. So I would start at the YouTube channel, make sure that you’re familiar with what you’re getting, and then we have a very educationally oriented [email protected].

[00:58:31] David Selinger: We have offerings where you can buy cameras from us and we’ll ship them to you. You can be protected within about a week. Set ’em up yourselves. You can have a local installer do them. You can get a professional installation done. You can get wired cameras. If you already have a high-end camera system that uses one of the standard systems out there, we can probably convert that and monitor that as well.

[00:58:49] David Selinger: So there’s a bunch of different ways to kind of get protected. A way to start to go to our website, deepsentinel.com

[00:58:55] Eric Kasimov: and, and just learn more there. And you can start your monitoring there as well. Like you would just like sign up [00:59:00] for the system and 

[00:59:01] David Selinger: Yeah, so if you buy the cameras from us, they come with the monitoring included.

[00:59:05] David Selinger: You literally just. Plug them in. The setup takes about 20 minutes and then you’re off to the races. I love it. I love it. Anything else we all need to know? Where do people connect with you? Follow you? No, that was an amazing interview though. Thank you Eric. I really, I loved all the questions and, and the direction you took everything.

[00:59:21] Eric Kasimov: Yeah. I could keep going for hours, but we’ll stop. I appreciate, I know you’re busy. I appreciate the time you coming on here. Thank you again, Sally. Yeah, thank you. Really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Entrepreneur Perspectives. This show is produced by Quiet Loud Studios where we create podcast writing and original media.

[00:59:35] Eric Kasimov: Learn more at quietloudstudios.com.

The post David Selinger on AI Security, $15M Series B, and the Deep Sentinel Mission | EP192 appeared first on KazSource.

Blake Harris is the founder of Blake Harris Law, the largest exclusively offshore asset protection law firm in the United States. With a team spread across four continents, Blake has built a niche global practice helping high-net-worth individuals legally protect their assets through Cook Islands trusts and other offshore strategies.

In this episode, Blake breaks down how his firm grew by narrowing focus, embracing content creation, and rejecting the traditional image of a law office. He explains how social media became a tool for trust-building, why he abandoned domestic estate planning, and how he hires team members from unconventional places — including front desks, social DMs, and international job boards.

This isn’t just about trusts. It’s about creating leverage, working remotely before it was trendy, and building a brand clients feel like they already know before the first phone call. You’ll also hear Blake’s thoughts on confidence, criticism, client education, and why offshore asset protection isn’t just for the ultra-wealthy — it’s smart business.

[00:00:00] The “aha” moment: Going all-in on offshore asset protection

Related Episodes:

Entrepreneur Perspectives is produced by QuietLoud Studios — a modern media network and a KazSource brand.

Get in touch with Eric Kasimov:

Credits:

Entrepreneur Perspectives – Guest: Blake Harris – Company: Blake Harris Law – Host: Eric Kasimov

[00:00–00:02:00]

Blake shares the pivotal moment he chose to go all-in on offshore trusts—despite it only making up 25% of his revenue at the time. This decision changed everything.

[00:00:00] Blake: I just took a day, had an aha moment, and realized, although offshore trust only compromised maybe 25% of our overall revenue. If I don’t ever go exclusively into this area, I’m never gonna have this area blow up, and I’m never going to reach the level of wealth that I want doing basic estate planning.

[00:00:32] Eric: Entrepreneur Perspectives is produced by Quiet Loud Studios, a production company and content network. Learn [email protected]. We’re just have a conversation. It’s kinda like we’re doing right now. And I love that idea of like people coming in. So like one of the things I was thinking about when you think about attorneys, right?

[00:00:48] Eric: That you got this law firm and you’re sitting, you got the mahogany desk, like this old school way of performing, I guess you could say. And you mentioned your team’s coming in. So my question is, where is your team based out of? [00:01:00] When you say my team’s coming in, what do they do? Obviously it sounds like very remote situation, right?

[00:01:04] Eric: So what does that look like?

[00:01:06] Blake: So as far as what does my team look like? We’re in about four different continents, seven different countries, which is great because it allows us to better serve clients. I’ve got some team members in Europe that they start off. Well before we wake up in America, and then I’ve got other team members in the Philippines, in New Zealand, and they start working later than everyone else.

[00:01:28] Blake: And we’re really able to accommodate clients from all around the world. And we work with different banks and trust companies in many different time zones. So it’s very much a global practice.

[00:01:40] Eric: Yeah. So you’ve been remote, so this wasn’t a COVID thing where you said, Hey, let’s go remote like a lot of other companies have done.

[00:01:45] Eric: You’ve been remote.

[00:01:46] Blake: It was trending that way. COVID definitely cemented us as a virtual law firm. I mean, I’m, I’m happy clients in person if they wanna come down to Miami. We, I meet clients a few times a month down here in Miami, but majority of our clients, [00:02:00] we don’t end up meeting in person. I do make quite an effort to get out there in person and meet with not just clients, but trust companies, bankers, other attorneys.

[00:02:00–00:04:30]

Blake explains how his law firm operates across four continents and why a remote structure gives them an edge. COVID didn’t start this—it just confirmed their path.

[00:02:09] Blake: I am a big believer. Showing the power of the internet and podcasts just like this. But I’m also a big in the in-person connection. There’s just a special energy that you exchange with a person that you are not

[00:02:20] Eric: able to do over a Zoom call. So you said before, like you’re not always meeting with the client in person, but at some point are you meeting with them in person?

[00:02:28] Eric: Most of my clients, I

[00:02:30] Blake: never end up meeting in person.

[00:02:31] Eric: You don’t end up meeting. So you’re building trust through this scenario, right? Through content, through podcast and phone calls. And then they’re gonna listen to you and be like, okay, he, he knows what he’s doing.

[00:02:40] Blake: Correct. Yes.

[00:02:41] Eric: Okay. How are you then getting that?

[00:02:44] Eric: Is it become where like you start off any business, people get to know about you, right? They learn about you, they see it. Then there’s word of mouth scenarios, and then it’s then they can go validate you on social media. Yeah. You’re nodding.

[00:02:55] Blake: Yep. So I mean, in terms of marketing, there’s two aspects of marketing.

[00:02:59] Blake: There’s the social [00:03:00] media, the internet marketing, and then there’s. Person marketing where you meet with people in person, you go out to conferences as do speaking engagements, and it’s only that combination that’s really going to get you the best possible results. And I find over and over that people tend to be good at one or the other.

[00:03:17] Blake: They’re either very comfortable going out in conferences and meeting with people in person, but then they’re a little bit camera shy or they’re happy having a computer screen all day, but they refuse to go out in person. I think it’s the combination of the two is really what’s going to make a business grow the best.

[00:03:32] Blake: Yeah,

[00:03:33] Eric: I’ve seen that a lot. If you think like websites early, two thousands and, and not, and even more recent, right, keywords. And so you follow this formula, you stuff it with keywords, you show up, you get the results, you get the contact people reaching out to you. And then social media is even got, obviously the algorithm game, but it’s the combination of effects of all of it, of all of it working together, of your podcast, of your social media, of meeting the person, of talking about going, you know what I mean?

[00:03:57] Eric: Like it’s not this A to B, [00:04:00] just the dynamic is real.

[00:04:02] Blake: And to your previous question of, yes, we get word of mouth referrals as well, whether they’re past clients, just other professionals or attorneys that have been consuming our content for a while. They may come across someone who needs an offshore trust and while the referral source, while the client may not have heard of us before, the referral source may have been consuming our content for a few years have had time to grow and trust us, and those.

[00:04:28] Blake: Pretty easy to convert clients when they come from a trusted referral source.

[00:04:30–00:06:45]

Why Blake doubled down on both content marketing and in-person networking. He highlights how clients come through a web of trust: podcasts, referrals, and years of content consumption.

[00:04:33] Eric: Absolutely. Which is a part of the combination of that word of mouth thing. When did other, you said other attorneys, right? So they’re probably talking to their clients and they’re saying, okay, you need to talk to someone like Blake.

[00:04:42] Eric: We need to look at some asset protection, offshore asset protection. When did attorneys start to say, oh, ’cause you just said they’re consuming your content. Right. ’cause I’ve talked to a lot of attorneys and I know, I know an attorney down in South Florida. Who actually basically had to leave his firm that he had been with for a long time because he was creating content, because he [00:05:00] was big on social media.

[00:05:01] Eric: That law firm wasn’t ready for that. Right. When did it become for you that other attorneys were like, this is a, we’re okay with it now? Because there was a point in time when I don’t think they were, but you might have had a different experience.

[00:05:14] Blake: I posted on social media a few months ago, a screenshot of a text message, which said, Hey, Blake, you know other attorneys make fun of your content.

[00:05:22] Blake: And I respond with, yeah. Have you ever heard of John Morgan? Who’s the CEO of Morgan Morgan, the world’s largest injury law firm, and for many years he did. What other attorneys were afraid to do? What other attorneys made fun of him, and that’s go on TV and market and advertise. Now he’s a billionaire. I have a view that if you are speaking with an attorney who refuses to go on camera, I find that a little bit suss.

[00:05:50] Blake: I’m a little bit concerned that if you can’t stand by what you say, if you’re not willing to have it recorded, if you’re only willing to give legal advice and the. Your own office where you’re not [00:06:00] held accountable, there’s no way of holding you to what you promised. That seems a little bit suspicious. So I have taken a very different approach, which is that the more social media I can do, the more that I can put myself out there, the more confidence and trust that I’m gonna build with my client and referral sources and my entire team.

[00:06:17] Blake: I encourage social media to be used as well. I think that it is the tool to use. We go back the clock by 30 years, I wouldn’t be on social media. Social media didn’t exist. I would be writing books and writing articles, and though I’ve done a bit of that in my current practice, the way people communicate and connect is through social media.

[00:06:38] Blake: You go into a coffee shop, the person in front of you is sitting there on their phone. They’re not reading a book, they’re not reading a newspaper, but they’re buying shoes right there on their phone. If you want to get in front of your customers, you have to be on social media.

[00:06:45–00:09:10]

Blake addresses other lawyers mocking his social media presence—and why he couldn’t care less. A mix of childhood resilience and support systems gave him the confidence to show up online.

[00:06:51] Eric: Yeah. When did you develop the.

[00:06:54] Eric: I don’t know what it is. Maybe the audacity or the feeling of like, I don’t give a shit what they think. Right. You said before [00:07:00] like, do you know that they’re making fun of you and you’re just kind of smirked? You’re like, that’s awesome. I could care less that they’re doing that win. Did you have that when you were a kid?

[00:07:07] Eric: Did you have to go through something to get to that point? Like what was that like? Not that this is a psychology experiment, right, but

[00:07:13] Blake: it’s a good question and it’s a wonderful thing that I have because I know a lot of people, their biggest fear, I think death’s, their biggest fear. And then after that is public speaking and it’s really holds a lot of people back from taking chances and putting themselves out there and getting some great exposure.

[00:07:33] Blake: I don’t know what it was. I think that having somewhat of a humbling childhood where I was not very big, I was picked on some, and you hear some negative feedback along the way, and you get tough. I mean, I guess for some people it weakens you and you die, but sometimes the kid who was overweight gets picked on and goes on to be the strongest of all the kids and becomes a big muscle builder and grow stronger from it and having.

[00:07:58] Blake: Taking in negative [00:08:00] feedback early on, I was able to not, like you said, give a shit what people think. And from there I’ve been very comfortable putting myself out there on the internet. And when the internet says not nice things, it doesn’t bother me, it rolls off. I think a lot of that actually comes from partially getting toughened up early on, but also I think it has to do big with.

[00:08:21] Blake: Connectivity and having people in your life who you trust and you believe, and they believe in you and they will support you. The option of fear is connection. And if you have a good foundation, it does not need to be a big foundation, but one or two family members who they have your back, you’re gonna be more confident going out there.

[00:08:42] Blake: The saying I like is confidence is not, they’re gonna like me. Confidence is I’m gonna be okay if they don’t. And when you get to that. Where you can give a speech and I’ve given speech to where I woo the crowd and I’ve presented some times and it’s been less my best [00:09:00] performance. But you just keep going.

[00:09:01] Blake: And, uh, endurance is really the key to running a successful, a successful business, endurance and willing to accept some shots and pushback from people.

[00:09:10–00:12:30]

How a Google search, not law school, led Blake into offshore trusts. He’s now running the largest law firm focused exclusively on this niche—and explains how he actually learned the trade.

[00:09:11] Eric: Yeah, we hear about like the standup comedians when they go out there like you see like a Chris Rock or Theon, like they go and perform and they just bomb, right?

[00:09:19] Eric: And they’re trying new jokes out and no, no one’s laughing. And then they get the special, they get the Netflix special, and then it’s like, oh my God, it’s amazing. You’re like, yeah, but it took me five years to get to this day to even have this conversation and to go through all that humiliation, let’s just say.

[00:09:31] Eric: But they’ve built it up. Right.

[00:09:33] Blake: And I heard that about Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve, that’s. I think some of the things he says are funny, but I’ve never found him to be a particularly funny person. However, he has such consistency. He was the one who every single night was at the comedy clubs and just kept pushing forward and kept pushing forward, and now he’s probably the richest comedian in the world.

[00:09:52] Blake: It’s endurance trump’s talent nine outta 10 times.

[00:09:56] Eric: Yeah. You’re in this whole legal [00:10:00] world and education’s a big topic of conversation right now. What’s your background with, obviously you have a law degree, right? You got your bar right, all that stuff.

[00:10:08] Blake: Uh, so grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. Went to undergraduate and law school at the University of Florida.

[00:10:14] Blake: Gators got out there as soon as I. Got my diploma, went up to Colorado, working for a trust law firm there, I think it was my third day on the job. I Googled what is the most complex or most expensive type of trust, and I discovered offshore trust and I pretty much fell down that rabbit hole and have been following that my entire career.

[00:10:33] Blake: Shortly after I left and started my own law firm. Now I run the nation’s largest exclusively offshore asset protection law firm. So it was just something that pretty much called me early. I say that I didn’t pick this life. It very much picked me and I enjoy it. It’s taken me all around the world. I’ve traveled to close to 50 different countries.

[00:10:53] Blake: I’ve built up a great team. I’ve found friends and people I care about in different parts of the country, in different parts of the world, and I’ve been able to pull together [00:11:00] a team of talent that I would never be able to pull if I never left my hometown.

[00:11:05] Eric: You looked it up, right? Like you googled it. Was there anything in school?

[00:11:10] Eric: That made you good on this path or was this like, I’m online late at night, figure this thing out.

[00:11:14] Blake: Should I take a few minutes and bash on school if you want? Yeah. The only time I ever short trust mentioned in school was by my trust professor, who was a great professor, but he just said that he would never set up an offshore trust for a client.

[00:11:28] Blake: And I went by afterwards and said, Hey, you said you’d never set up an offshore trust. Why not? And he’s explained well, I would never set up an offshore trust unless certain criteria are met. I said, you know what? Keep teaching. Never set up an offshore trust because this is gonna matter. Competition I have when I get out into the legal world.

[00:11:48] Blake: And sure enough, this field I’ve been in and the competition is relatively small. There’s a handful of attorneys who will set up a Cook Islands trust from time to time. But in terms of attorneys who’ve dedicated their practice to Cook [00:12:00] Island Trust. There’s very few others like mine.

[00:12:03] Eric: Yeah. So you had to go through the education aspect of it was like you have to get it, you have to get the degree to get to law school, to get your law degree right, to get your bar.

[00:12:11] Eric: That’s the, it was like correct tickets, checkpoints, but they had came

[00:12:15] Blake: from the street or came from the. Flights. It came from actually partnering with attorney who did this type of work, who wrote the initial legislation for the Cook Islands back in the 1980s, and then getting out there and actually meeting with the trust companies in person and meeting with the bankers in person.

[00:12:30–00:17:30]

[00:12:32] Blake: And just like we started off the conversation, there’s a special energy special about information. This industry does have certain history and secrets to it that people are a little bit more hesitant to share. But as you build relationships with people and get more comfortable with people, you can uncover more information and negotiate better deals for your clients.

[00:12:51] Eric: When you’re looking at bringing on people to your team, whether they’re attorneys or staff or whatever, are you looking at their backgrounds in college? Are you looking at what [00:13:00] they’ve done? Like how are you finding them? What’s important to you when you’re hiring?

[00:13:04] Blake: So a couple of different questions you threw out there.

[00:13:09] Blake: Most of the team, I would say, of our. I think we’re about 15 now. Only one person came in with industry knowledge. We hired somebody who was working for one of the trust companies for seven years, and he brought a lot of knowledge to the firm. Otherwise, pretty much all the knowledge we have has been by me teaching the rest of the team, and I’ve had my own path of learning and partnering with attorneys and buying and spending a lot of money, and then meeting with people and learning from working through cases with clients.

[00:13:41] Blake: So. It’s very hard to find somebody with industry knowledge. There’s just not a lot of people who do this type of work, and finding one that’s gonna be a good fit for the firm is difficult. So if they come in with industry knowledge, we welcome it. But I’d say we have a pretty solid brain trust and being able to take care of anything in the [00:14:00] offshore industry.

[00:14:01] Blake: So more important to me is finding somebody who is teachable. We do things differently than other law firms. I say, I run an no BS law firm. I’m not micromanaging my employees and having them sign in and sign out at the beginning and end of each day, you’ve got a job to do to take care of the job, and we’re not too concerned about how many minutes you’re logging in on your computer.

[00:14:23] Blake: So it’s very much a culture fit that somebody is smart enough to learn quickly, somebody is going to be very responsive, somebody who we can trust, somebody who can. Do the job and be trained with it. So in terms of what, I look for somebody who’s humble enough to take orders, somebody who will have good follow through, someone who will treat the clients well, somebody who doesn’t bring any drama.

[00:14:48] Blake: The general things in terms of where we find people. It’s been some unique ways that I’ve hired people over the years. One of my assistants used to [00:15:00] work at the front desk at the building I used to live in. I noticed that he seemed like a nice young man. I started speaking to him and realized this young man is brilliant and we could actually use somebody smart like this.

[00:15:10] Blake: So he went from being the front desk gentleman. At Conduent building in Denver to working for an international law firm, and now he’s traveled literally all around the world with me. Another person. I was following his social media for a while. It was completely unrelated to law or anything we do, but I just thought that he was very well organized and he made very clear arguments, which just made sense, and I just liked the way he presented and he and I started interacting through social media.

[00:15:40] Blake: I’m a social media influencer as well, so we kind of clicked there over time. We became friends and then when we had a position opened up, he joined the team and he’s done a great. Job, another person I mentioned that we worked with at the trust company together, and then we did find someone through a Craigslist and we found someone else through a recruiter, and then we found another group of, uh, [00:16:00] team members through an online job board in the Philippines.

[00:16:03] Blake: We hire people from different countries who could work different hours and we’ll take more competitive rates than Americans will take. Another person who I recently hired was, uh, doing Muay Hai with me. He was a bit younger than me, and I just noticed that he had such good discipline in the way that he did his martial arts training, that I figured that discipline would be carried over to other parts of his life, and it very much has.

[00:16:28] Blake: I am always on the lookout for new talent. Even if we are not looking to hire, I’m always looking for talented individuals who would help the team grow because. A business can be slowed down for a variety of different reasons, but pretty much comes down to two different things. Either you’re not getting enough new business, so you got to do more marketing and go on more podcasts with Eric, or you need more people to actually do the work when the business comes in.

[00:16:55] Blake: That could be the bottleneck in the business as well, and I don’t wanna be in the position where we’ve [00:17:00] got. Overflowing, but we don’t have enough people to do the work, and so I’m always lining to future employees. I just had a Zoom call yesterday with an individual who’s referred by a friend of one of our attorneys that will probably be offering a job to, and it probably won’t be for another few months, but I’d like to have that.

[00:17:19] Blake: Chess piece lined up so that the moment we’re rugged and move forward, we don’t have to start from scratch and then potentially find somebody who doesn’t work out after two or three months. So I’m always looking for new talent. Even if we’re not hiring, I wanna have a pipeline of good people ready to go.

[00:17:30–00:22:00]

Blake explains how offshore trusts aren’t shady loopholes—they’re strategic, legal protection, no different than insurance. He walks through how and when opposing lawyers learn the money is out of reach.

[00:17:35] Blake: So. Whatever job you’re doing, whether it’s running a law firm or backing groceries, do the best job because somebody’s watching you and you never know when someone’s gonna pick you up and say, Hey, I like what you just put on social media about making music. Why don’t you come and run my help, run my company?

[00:17:52] Eric: Yeah. That’s amazing. You’ve built this system to where, and it’s in the content, it’s in the hiring. It’s been acquiring clients where [00:18:00] it can come from all different angles. You’re not like, here’s the one set we’re gonna go, this is it. And then if an individual, like you just said, is backing groceries or creating content of their own, right, I would look at someone like they might graduate with a marketing degree.

[00:18:13] Eric: That’s great. Have you ever been on a podcast? Have you hosted your own podcast? Have you written a blog? Are you on social media? What have you actually done that? I can see? And that could be like, oh, that’s really good. Yeah, of course we’d wanna hire you because when we get put on an application, you get 150 applications in this marketing world now within 24 hours.

[00:18:29] Eric: It’s crazy. And most of ’em haven’t done anything in marketing. So it’s very easy to stand out if that person showed up. Well, here’s the podcast that I’ve done. Even if it’s not great, it shows that initiative and then you’ve built the system to do all of those things and you’re like, I can only imagine, like that DM shows up for that one guy you just like started interacting with.

[00:18:46] Eric: He’s like, wow, I’m talking to Blake. This is fascinating. Next thing you know, here he is doing this stuff. And if you had asked him probably a year or five years prior, he never would’ve thought that he’d be working for you, right? No different than you never thought you’d be working in offshore [00:19:00] trust, right?

[00:19:02] Eric: Man planned. God laughs. Yeah. Yeah. That’s it. You mentioned before, and we talked about it a bit, about people laughing, right? Or people judging, or people thinking, uh, I don’t know about that. And you start getting into the offshore asset protection, offshore trust your, your professor’s like mm-hmm. You don’t wanna do that, right?

[00:19:19] Eric: And then you get other people out there and be like, okay, so what are we doing? We’re hiding money now. It’s like the bad guy’s always gonna win because he puts the money in a place. But then you think about it, like, you know, thinking about our conversation today, beforehand. And I’m like, okay, so if you’re a doctor.

[00:19:33] Eric: And you do everything right, but you still get sued, right? Because who knows what happened. Right? And is it fair that that doctor now has to get sued and let’s say they didn’t do anything wrong or whatever, but they know they have money, they’re going after ’em, so they’re just protecting it. It’s no different than someone’s fire insurance on their house or life insurance or car insurance or whatever that might be.

[00:19:54] Eric: There’s so many different analogies there. I mean, people will insure their televisions now, so. And this is not an insurance question, [00:20:00] it’s just one of those things of maybe backing it up to my original, where I got go down this path of when people hear that you are in offshore, like asset protection, offshore trust, is there judgment out there?

[00:20:14] Eric: Is there questions Are there, the people are like, I don’t know about that. Like. You see what I’m getting at, and you’ve probably heard these different things, whether it’s blogs or podcast or whatever, and people making opinions on, not necessarily what you do, but just the overall thing about offshore.

[00:20:27] Blake: Oh, people make opinions about what I do.

[00:20:29] Blake: No doubt about that. I mean it, I kind of joke that it’s one of the family questions of is what Blake does for work, even legal. I come from a family of attorneys. I’m the one who’s flying to the Cook Islands and helping clients open bank accounts in Switzerland. Eric, I do not subscribe to the theory that there’s anything honorable, that there’s anything noble about being weak, about being unprotected, about being vulnerable, about being in a position where somebody can come and take advantage of you.

[00:20:57] Blake: I believe just the opposite. I think that the most [00:21:00] noble thing individual can do is make themself as safe and as protective as possible. Build up the best fortress you can, and that’s actually in line. Most of the way America sees law and business. If you have a car, people can say buy car insurance. Why?

[00:21:17] Blake: In case you get sued. If you start a business, someone’s gonna say, form an LLC. Why? To protect yourself in case you get sued. If you start to accumulate a few hundred thousand dollars, somebody may even say, put that money into a domestic trust. Why? In case you get sued. If you start to get a few million dollars, somebody.

[00:21:34] Blake: Who cares about you and is wise, he gonna say, put that money into an offshore trust. Oh, all of a sudden offshore this seems sketchy. This seems weird. The truth is Americans and not you, I, Eric, and not anybody who’s listening to your podcast, but the rest of Americans overwhelmingly or very narrow minded, most Americans have never left the United States.

[00:21:54] Blake: Those who have most have not gone anywhere beyond Canada or Mexico, but. [00:22:00] People who are going to see the most success in the decades to come. They’re the ones who will think globally to solutions, to their problems and all of short trust is legal, it’s ethical, it’s smart business.

[00:22:00–00:26:30]

Typical clients? High earners with $1M–$10M net worth. Offshore trusts give them leverage to settle—not to dodge responsibility. It’s not about hiding—it’s about strategy.

[00:22:10] Eric: Yeah. That’s it. I like how you, um, ended that there and just stopped because there’s nothing else to say.

[00:22:16] Eric: There’s nothing to defend. It’s just is what it is. Right. What are examples of. Simple examples that don’t, like, I don’t get it right, not me, but anyone listening or whoever that might be, who’s never gone down this path or even like looked into, what does this look like? What’s a typical situation that you would deal with?

[00:22:34] Eric: Like is it a doctor, is it someone who’s a, like a tech founder’s, accumulated a lot of money, they’re married, whatever, like they’re just trying to protect it. What does that typical situation look like for you?

[00:22:44] Blake: So 30 years ago, the industry was overwhelmingly medical professionals, doctors, surgeons, worried about a malpractice claim.

[00:22:53] Blake: But that’s very much changed and the industry is much more fragmented now. Yes, we still work with a number of doctors. [00:23:00] We also work with attorneys, engineers, architects, as well as a lot of social media and entertainment personalities, business owners, real estate investors. Most of our clients are married.

[00:23:13] Blake: It tends to be the husband that contacts us. We, we do have quite a few single individuals. Most individuals are between about age 30 and age 60. Most have a net worth somewhere between about one and $10 million. There’s a common misconception that in all short, trust is only appropriate if you’re 10 plus million.

[00:23:32] Blake: Most people up offshore trust million, those are who most are. Leverage the most. If you’re worth a hundred million dollars and you can hit with a $5 million judgment, you pay it, you move on. No big deal. But if you’re worth $3 million and somebody hits you with a $5 million lawsuit, you need to settle and an offshore trust is going to buy you leverage to settle.

[00:23:56] Eric: Got it. When that lawsuit comes in, they don’t know yet [00:24:00] that the money’s offshore. Right. When does that. Come to the other attorneys that are making this judgment like, right,

[00:24:06] Blake: so the cards are in your hand when you, well, when I tell the client it’s appropriate will reveal that there’s an offshore trust.

[00:24:14] Blake: However, if we don’t want to tell the opposing party, they’re not going to find out until after the lawsuit is over. They’ve won their case, they’ve got a judgment, and then they call the client in for a debtor’s examination and they have to, at that point, fill out a financial affidavit. And at that point they say the offshore trust exists, but simply disclosing the trust in no way compromises the protection of the trust.

[00:24:37] Eric: So they find out afterwards, correct. They’ve already know the lawsuit’s over and they’re supposedly right at this point having to pay their sum of money. But then they realize like the money’s not here to pay it.

[00:24:50] Blake: Well, and then at that point you realize you brought this whole lawsuit, you got your $5 million judgment, but the person you’re suing, they’ve got a car in their name that only has [00:25:00] $25,000 worth of equity.

[00:25:01] Blake: They’ve got an offshore trust, but the value of the offshore trust. To the client, it’s technically $0 because they’re discretionary, beneficiary, and all of a sudden you say, oh wow, we just got this big judgment. Can we get a hundred thousand dollars settlement? And at that time, we can decide whether the client wants to pay some settlement just so there’s no judgment hanging over their head.

[00:25:21] Blake: They don’t have to worry about getting called back for another debtor’s exam. Okay.

[00:25:25] Eric: In that scenario is this like you’re looking across the table and they’re just disbelief?

[00:25:29] Blake: So it’s a few different situations. I mean, if it’s a situation where the trust was set up before any lawsuit got filed, then somewhere before the lawsuit is finalized is typically when we’re going to reveal the cards, reduce the clients copy, they have to pay for litigation.

[00:25:45] Blake: But sometimes it happens after there’s a judgment. Then you say there’s an offshore trust and the opposing party says, oh, shoot, we just waste a lot of time. Yeah. And then at that point they can determine, do they wanna try to go to the Cook Islands and litigate there where they’re not going to succeed?

[00:25:59] Blake: Or [00:26:00] do they wanna just take some settlement offer? Or do they wanna just sit on the judgment? But ultimately, most plaintiffs needs to wanna get paid, and a settlement is an order. So is it Ty?

[00:26:10] Eric: I keep saying that word because it seems. Appropriate here that when you see a judgment go through that it’s that money is usually not changing hands at that number.

[00:26:20] Eric: So if it’s $5 million, it’s like they’re not actually getting $5 million. Correct. Okay. You’re saying only if they have that offshore trust.

[00:26:27] Blake: If you’re dealing with a corporate defendant, you may get the full $5 million. If you’re dealing with an individual and their money’s protected with the trust chancellor, they’re not gonna get that full paid on the full judgment.

[00:26:30–00:29:00]

Blake doesn’t waste time trying to change minds. Instead, he focuses on educating people who are already interested or curious. The rest? They can follow his content at their pace.

[00:26:38] Eric: When the word comes up offshore it, again, this is narrow-mindedness. This is like, okay, we’re thinking Ponzi scheme, we’re thinking Epstein, we’re thinking Diddy, we’re thinking all that kind of stuff, right? Because those are the things that you hear in the media all the time, right? And that’s what is cycling through social media feeds, what people have to go on because it’s like, well, what are they gonna do?

[00:26:55] Eric: Dig deeper into it. No, they’re not going to. That’s probably where a lot of the [00:27:00] conversations come from. ’cause that’s what family members or friends or. Outsiders that you’ve never even once spoken to are hearing. And so that’s kind of what they’re thinking. But then it also goes into the client. So there’s probably a lot of education on your side to help people understand this is why you should do this thing.

[00:27:16] Eric: What is that timeline for that individual who wants to make this move? Are you dealing with a lot of reluctance or just there a lot of, I, I would imagine you don’t want to get in the world of convincing someone constantly because you’re, you’re looking for the people that are interested in it and have already kind of come to the table and they’re, they’re further down the path.

[00:27:33] Eric: What does that look like for you when it comes to not even selling it, but just talking about it? Yeah. Well,

[00:27:38] Blake: I’m not taking my time trying to convince somebody to set an offshore that doesn’t want to or is against it. However, there is. Usually some clarification that needs to take place and there’s a lot of misconceptions that need to be addressed.

[00:27:56] Blake: Will I still have access to my money? Yes, of course. I’ll be able to take a [00:28:00] distribution anytime you desire. Am I going to lose my funds, the foreign trustee? No, of course I can. The money still be invested? Yes. Is it legal? Of course. Is it gonna be reported to the IRS? Yes. And we’ll provide guidance on how to complete the reporting requirements.

[00:28:15] Blake: So. In terms of where clients are in the process? Well, because the amount of information that my firm has already put out, it’s all over the place. Sometimes we have people call, we’ll have a conversation that lasts less than five minutes, and they’ll hire us right on the spot. Other times people will contact us and it’ll take them another six months or a year before they’re ready to pull the trigger.

[00:28:34] Blake: People just come in at every single different point of the process, and if somebody is. Kind of close to being ready to go. I’m happy to take the time to get them over the finish line. If they’re early in the process, I’m happy to educate them and steer them in the right direction. Maybe they wanna take some time to review, to watch more my videos on social media, or to read one of the books I’ve written and, and moved them along.

[00:28:55] Blake: If somebody contacts us and they are just looking to be told [00:29:00] this can’t be done looking to be convinced of something that they’re not going to switch their mind on. No, I’m not out here trying to convert anybody, but I’m happy to educate and dispel some of the myths. Yeah.

[00:29:00–00:32:00]

At one point, Blake did more than just offshore—but it diluted the focus. He decided to say no to everything else (even domestic trusts) to go all-in on the thing he does best.

[00:29:11] Eric: Are you using other attorneys, so, ’cause you’ve built this niche business and someone comes in there and I don’t know, they, they wanna talk about estate planning.

[00:29:20] Eric: Are you taking those types of projects on or are you handing it off to another attorney?

[00:29:25] Blake: We are exclusively offshore, so if an somebody wants domestic estate plan will refer them to a attorney in their area to handle the estate planning matters. I think it’s a part of the reason that other attorneys are comfortable referring business to us because we’re not competing with them.

[00:29:40] Eric: When did that, has that always been the case? I know you got into this early, but early on were you trying to say, well, we need to have, we need more money, we need more revenue, so we need to take on, we got this case, we gotta litigate this case and domestic stuff. Right? What, when did that switch happen? Or was it immediate in like just total confidence to go forward with it.

[00:29:56] Blake: So I’ve been an attorney for about 15 years. I’ve always focused on the [00:30:00] trust sector, so I’ve never been one who’s doing car accidents or divorces. I’ve always been in the trust sector. And early in the career we did a variety of different types of trusts. We were doing asset protection trusts, both domestic and international, so some of the more basic stuff.

[00:30:14] Blake: But for about the past five years, we’ve been exclusively offshore. We got out of the basic estate planning because it was a distraction from the area that I wanted to go after. And then within the asset protection world, we actually dropped doing domestic trust as well quite a few years ago because I saw how it would actually play out when the client needed a domestic trust.

[00:30:36] Blake: And it was so, such weak leverage that I really felt like I was doing a disservice decline by setting up a domestic trust. And for the past several years, we’ve been exclusively offshore. And with that we’ve set records in the Cook Islands. We’ve been told by one of the leading trust companies that we’ve registered more trust over the past few years than any other law firm in the world.

[00:30:55] Eric: Wow. Did you have guidance or was it your own inner workings to say, [00:31:00] let’s go forward with just doing offshore trust? I mean, you just said before like you felt like it was holding you back on the other side, but was there other people behind you saying like, go all in with it? And the reason I ask this is when you think about a lot of bus people are building businesses and they’re going in many different directions and, and sometimes it makes sense and other times it’s like you’re distracting yourself from it.

[00:31:20] Eric: So as people listen to this and hear what you have to say, someone has said, no, no, no, this is what we do and we’re the best at it. That’s where you can be number one in the world, right? Like you’ve been told. What did that look like though, for you to make that move? Or like, you obviously play with a lot of confidence in your mind, so I Maybe it was just that simple to say, I know what we need to do and we’re gonna go do it.

[00:31:41] Blake: It’s something that I had wanted to do for many years, for quite a while. I’d wanted to do it. I had a breaking point, aha moment about four or five years ago when I realized that this practice that I’m growing, it’s. Servicing a lot of clients, but it is not as [00:32:00] profitable or servicing clients as well as I would like, and I just took a day, had an aha moment, and realized, although offshore trust only compromised maybe 25% of our overall revenue.

[00:32:00–00:36:30]

Miami is home base, but Blake could work anywhere. Travel is a big part of his lifestyle, and he makes it work seamlessly with client and team needs.

[00:32:11] Blake: If I don’t ever go exclusively into this area, I’m never gonna have this area blow up, and I’m never going to reach the level of wealth that I want doing basic estate planning. So I took the leap about four or five years ago. I didn’t have anybody tell me that it was the right move. I had a lot of people who were very nervous about me making the jump, but ultimately I feel like I was guided by some higher spirit that said, Blake, this is your calling and I don’t regret it all.

[00:32:38] Blake: It has allowed us to become much more skilled than would ever be if we were trying to focus on doing several different areas of the law. It has allowed us to become much better on marketing. People know exactly that. I’m the offshore guy. I’m not somebody who sells a bunch of different types of trust.

[00:32:55] Blake: It can be very confusing if someone’s talking about a lot of different things. Nobody’s gonna know what you’re talking about, [00:33:00] but when you talk about one thing over and over, people know you as the guy for whatever it is you keep talking about. You stick to.

[00:33:07] Eric: Yeah, that 25 percent’s interesting because like you might’ve said, oh, it’s 75%, it’s the biggest part of our business, and it wasn’t.

[00:33:13] Eric: Right. No. Like you had to get there some. Yeah. That’s fascinating. Yep, yep. Because I think a lot of people sit, can look at their business. You can pull out your profit and loss. You look at it and be like, okay, well this doesn’t make as much money, so we can’t. You know, this is what makes the most, let’s focus on that.

[00:33:27] Eric: And sometimes it’s not the case. Right,

[00:33:29] Blake: right. No, we definitely went up to what was a smaller practice, smaller portion of it. But it’s hard to initially convince someone to set up an offshore trust. Once you set up a lot of them, it actually becomes a lot easier and things start flowing. So it was a gamble, but I’m don’t have any regrets about taking it.

[00:33:47] Eric: Yeah. Cities matter. Where you live matters. Miami’s like a international city. You go there and you know, Spanish might even be, it feels like, I’m not saying it is, it feels like it’s the first language, English, the second language. Mm-hmm. You can get anywhere in the world from [00:34:00] there. Being home based in Miami for yourself is probably a massive deal.

[00:34:04] Blake: Miami makes sense. It’s a. Growing town. I live at the beach and I’m 25 minutes from an international airport, so it’s easy for me to hop over to Europe and connect on the West Coast to wherever I’m going. In the South Pacific, it’s a city where clients are happy to come and meet. Clients wanna meet ’em.

[00:34:24] Blake: Happy to meet them here. I do spend about half of my time traveling. I’d say about of my travel, about half. It’s domestic, going to different cities in the United States, and the other half is international. I also like the warm weather. I’m originally a Florida boy. My family’s here in Florida as well.

[00:34:42] Blake: Miami’s a big city, so it, it makes sense for me, but it really doesn’t matter too much where I am. I don’t know that my practice would be all that different if I was living in Seattle.

[00:34:51] Eric: Yeah.

[00:34:52] Blake: Or Cancun. Yeah.

[00:34:53] Eric: Yeah. But your plan is stay there. Miami’s growing. Yeah, I was just there. I was uh, where we, coconut Grove [00:35:00] area and then you get out.

[00:35:01] Eric: So you got that little nest right? You go, it’s amazing area and you branch out and it’s just, it’s huge, right? It’s tons of traffic, a lot of people there, a lot of people moving there, especially post COVID or during COVID I should say. Where are we going in Miami? Like what’s your thought process on that?

[00:35:16] Eric: And like, cities are fascinating and a lot of people are moving around and everyone’s coming, you know, Charlotte, we’re in Charlotte, North Carolina and it’s just. I don’t know. Greater Charlotte’s like 120 people a day move here type of thing. I’m sure Miami’s got similar type numbers. They’re just gonna, it’s gonna not stop.

[00:35:30] Eric: Right. So your thoughts on cities Miami, if that’s of interest to you, like what that looks like going forward, what do you think?

[00:35:38] Blake: I mean, I’m here for a reason. I have the ability to pick up and move anytime I want that much headache. I’ll keep Miami as the home base and kind of the headquarters for my team.

[00:35:50] Blake: I’ve got lots of my team who come through and work. Outta Miami from time to time as well. But like I mentioned, I’d spend a lot of time traveling [00:36:00] myself as well, mostly for business. But if I’m over in Al Lumpur for a conference, I might pop up to Thailand to do a few weeks of Muay Hai training. If I’m in Europe I’ll for business, I don’t mind sticking around a little bit longer to enjoy some, uh, wine and food in Europe.

[00:36:18] Blake: So I like that I am. Traveling quite a bit, and when I travel, it’s mostly for business and I enjoy meeting people from all around the world. But for a home base, Miami just makes so much sense.

[00:36:30–00:39:00]

Blake reframes sales not as sleazy persuasion but as trust-building through knowledge. If you believe in what you’re offering, selling it should come naturally.

[00:36:31] Eric: Yeah. Well, you’re developing a lot of perspective. It’s, you had mentioned it before for people who have left the country and learned and met other people, and then you’re, you’re finding people to work for your company and at all points, right?

[00:36:41] Eric: There’s so many different ways to do it. So you develop all these different perspectives on things that keeps you. Really, it gives you the edge, keeps you ahead of the game and understanding like the dynamics of how people work, which then I would imagine plays itself out into the different clients that you start working with, right?

[00:36:57] Eric: One perspective, I’ve seen a lot, especially in [00:37:00] maybe younger generations, and I don’t know this because I’m seeing you come in here, it’s 10:00 AM on a Tuesday and we’re having a podcast, right? So you’re thinking about content. You’re thinking about this is a way to market, this is a way to build trust.

[00:37:09] Eric: You’re in the sales world, right? You’re not convincing people, but at the end of the day, you are educating people and that’s a form of sales. When you’re talking to people, I would imagine it’s important that they have that ability to sell, right? They have the ability to talk about things with confidence and to ask for the checks to say, this is the next steps.

[00:37:26] Eric: Because like you said before, you’re not gonna sit around and convince people to do it. You’re not overselling somebody, and then they’re gonna go down some path that they never really wanted to go down. Why are people allergic to sales? Why are people allergic

[00:37:38] Blake: to sales? Suppose it can be a little bit intimidating and sales can have a negative connotation to it.

[00:37:45] Blake: But if you believe in a product and you understand it, ’cause you need to have both the belief that you’re doing something good for somebody by helping them with the service and you need to understand the service, the basics of that, I can tell you just you put your money in this and safe protect from lawsuits, [00:38:00] but there’s certain technical aspects of it that people want to understand better, and you need to have good product knowledge and you need to have a good.

[00:38:08] Blake: Background and reputation to stand on. So trying to sell an offshore trust if you’ve never done one before, is going to be an uphill battle. But when you have the Blake Harris law brand behind you, and you have our Rolodex and our experience and our team, and the results that we’ve gotten for clients behind you, it actually becomes quite easy.

[00:38:27] Blake: So I think that sales is nothing to be afraid of if you’re properly trained, if you’re selling the right products, if you’re selling the right team, then once you do it, you’re gonna realize. This is not bad. So I think that it’s just a matter of what you are selling.

[00:38:41] Eric: Yeah, yeah. Getting support behind it too, right?

[00:38:44] Eric: Like it’s bigger than you, which is always the case, right? People can be in sales and have a service team behind them, and you’re not even selling, you’re selling all of it, right? The product, the team, the service, and it’s confidence, I believe. Confident that you know that the product stands by itself.

[00:38:58] Blake: Exactly. You’re selling [00:39:00] our experience. You’re selling our network, you’re selling our, our reputation. And when you have a good team, network and reputation to stand on the things, sell themself.

[00:39:00–00:41:00]

With 250K+ followers on TikTok, Blake knows it could vanish overnight. He explains why the platform is only one part of a broader media ecosystem he’s built intentionally.

[00:39:09] Eric: Yeah. So TikTok, you’re really big on TikTok. You have a huge following there. You wake up one day, well you, we kind of knew it was coming, but then TikTok disappears, I’d imagine.

[00:39:19] Eric: No big deal. You have other channels as well, but what was your first reaction? Or did, was it like total confidence? This will come back in two days.

[00:39:26] Blake: I had no idea what was gonna happen to TikTok, but it only represents maybe 10% of our. New clients. So while we don’t wanna lose that, it’s not gonna be death for the business.

[00:39:38] Blake: If any one social media platform goes down, the business just evolves and grows over time. We didn’t have TikTok three years ago, and if it’s gone tomorrow, we’ll still be around three years from now. So platforms come and go and they grow and they shrink, and that’s just part of the game. You don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

[00:39:56] Blake: Ski. Yeah.

[00:39:57] Eric: Yeah, I get it. Well. You know, [00:40:00] it’s hard because to try to be, you know, if you look at like a small business and you have all these different platforms, let’s say there’s seven main social media platforms and, and then there’s other things. You get email marketing websites and you know, podcasting, all that kind of stuff.

[00:40:12] Eric: And you could go all in on one or two. And if those one or two change like podcasting’s big right now, but what does that mean and how do you get there and how do you clip it and whatever. And then it’s like, eh, the podcasting thing died out. And I’m not saying that’s gonna happen, but things change. You know, the rate, everyone thought, oh, the radio’s be great, or the transistor rate television.

[00:40:28] Eric: So it’s hard. But just to kind of diversify, and I think there’s something in our conversation that I’m seeing from you that I think a lot of people could take is. There is no one size. Right? But you have this one path that you’re going down, and that stays the path, and that’s the confidence that you have in the offshore trust.

[00:40:45] Eric: Right? And so you’re gonna do that, and then everything else that you’re doing with it, right? Yeah. Tiktoks a big deal. I mean, you got, I don’t how many followers is, it’s over 200,000 followers or something crazy like that. Two 50. Two 50, sorry. Yeah. So, you know what I mean? So it’d be 300 by the time someone listens to it.[00:41:00]

[00:41:00] Eric: And that could change, right? That could be considered rented land, as they say. But you’re not going anywhere because TikTok goes down. Again, how do other people play off of that to say, okay, well what does that mean for me? Like people build this massive YouTube channel. YouTube could change the algorithm tomorrow.

[00:41:00–00:44:00]

Eric reflects on how Blake’s content makes it feel like you already know him before you talk. This is the new standard in trust-building and branding

[00:41:14] Eric: And they do. They’re changing it constantly. So I don’t know what’s gonna happen. And most even Mr. Beast doesn’t totally know what’s going on at YouTube. He might be the closest one that would, might get the inside knowledge first. But you see what I’m getting at though when it comes to, yeah, don’t marketing brand.

[00:41:29] Eric: Yeah, all that. Don’t make your personality

[00:41:32] Blake: your follower count. Don’t make it how much money you make or how much money you have, make it how hard you work, and that’s something nobody can take away from you. The business will go up and down, but as long as you are consistent with your efforts, you’re going to always see results and you will come out on top in the long run.

[00:41:54] Eric: What did we not talk about as it relates to offshore asset protection that you wanna make sure that [00:42:00] we address today? Unless we covered it all?

[00:42:02] Blake: Well, we hit all the main points. Uh, asset protection is not just for the super wealthy. Most of our clients have between about one and $10 million in assets. In terms of pricing in offshore trust, it’s different than a domestic revocable trust.

[00:42:16] Blake: You’re looking at around 20 to $40,000 to seven offshore trust. Takes about 30 to 60 days in terms of our law firm, as I may have mentioned at the beginning, we are the world’s largest exclusively offshore asset protection law firm. I’ve spoken at events both domestically and internationally, written several books on the subject, myself and the other attorneys who work with me, we teach continuing legal education, so other attorneys who do this type of work, we’ve taught me to them how to do it.

[00:42:43] Blake: Chat, GPT has named me as the number one asset protection attorney in the world. And. As of the recording of this podcast, we’ve never once had a client lose a penny from one of their trust.

[00:42:54] Eric: Yeah,

[00:42:55] Blake: if you want to get in touch more, share the socials. The handle is [00:43:00] at Blake Harris Law. My website is blake harris law.com, but every major social media platform, Blake Harris law.com, lots of education about asset protection and just generally information about traveling, running a business, and a little bit of my humor in there as well.

[00:43:15] Eric: Yeah, well I’ll tell you what, if I’m gonna have a interview or conversation, I should say like this and I can go online and it, you make it very, and Blake Harris isn’t like some random name, like just, you’re the only one, right? There’s a lot of Blake Harris. You show up on any social media account, on any video I want, any podcast I want, so I could go and listen and learn about, and I would ex, you know, if anyone’s interested or just learn about your story about niche businesses or why you would show up on a podcast at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday when you’re running this big international business.

[00:43:43] Eric: You could go learn about Blake, right? And I could go do the same thing. So when I come in here, I’ve already seen you, I’ve heard you talk. I can see like the humor, like the style, the whatever it might be, get the jacket on. So nothing’s a surprise and it just, it makes the conversation just, you can go right into it, which I’ve always thought [00:44:00] that way.

[00:44:00–end]

Blake closes with key takeaways—offshore trusts are for smart planners, not just the super-rich. His track record? Not one client has ever lost a penny through a trust his firm created.

[00:44:00] Eric: And you know, a lot of people I’m talking to are doing that type of thing. And I’ve heard from people who have hire headhunters and they go sit down with the person that they’re bringing into them as the potential hire. And if that person has content, that person they’re interviewing already knows them.

[00:44:16] Eric: Right? And they’re showing up for a reason. ’cause if they didn’t want to be there, they would’ve told ’em like, this isn’t interesting to me. I don’t want to be here today. ’cause they got to see the content. So no one has to waste time with it. So this is an incredible medium. And then to say you can educate people, like you said before, if someone was interested in it, but they weren’t really there, you could just send them a video, a blog, a book.

[00:44:37] Eric: Uh. Whatever that might be, and they can further educate themselves while you’re off doing whatever else you need to be doing, helping other clients or traveling.

[00:44:44] Blake: It’s great. I have people I’ve never spoken to call me up and say, you know, Blake, I feel like I know you already. Yeah. And that. It’s great in the trust building process.

[00:44:53] Eric: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Blake, I appreciate it. I appreciate your time. Like I said, Tuesday morning, that’s great to talk to you, learn more about asset protection, everything else you’re doing [00:45:00] with marketing and just the way you think about things and building your business. So I appreciate the time and effort on your side.

[00:45:05] Blake: Rock and roll, Eric, great chatting with you as well. Thanks for your time.

[00:45:09] Eric: Thanks for listening to Entrepreneur Perspectives. This show is produced by Quiet Loud Studios where we create podcasts, writings, and original media. Learn more at quietloudstudios.com.

The post Offshore Trusts, Global Team, Media Mindset: Blake Harris Is Not Your Typical Lawyer | EP191 appeared first on KazSource.

Senan Khawaja is the Co-founder and CEO of Kollegio, a startup using AI to bring personalized college and career guidance to every student, not just those who can afford it. He’s also a recent Stanford grad who’s thinking hard about how higher ed needs to change.

In this episode, we talk about the messy reality of the college application process, the future of mentorship in an AI-driven world, and what it takes to build something meaningful inside a system that wasn’t designed for equity or access.

[00:00:00] AI Personalization and Building for the Future
[00:00:39] Introducing Entrepreneur Perspectives and Eric’s Background
[00:02:30] Starting a Podcast and the Power of Media Leverage
[00:04:07] The Beauty of Putting Content Out into the World
[00:05:34] Tech Startups vs. Boring Businesses: Excitement and Innovation
[00:06:31] Kollegio’s Marketplace Model: Free for Students, Valuable for Colleges
[00:08:50] Democratizing Access to College Counseling
[00:10:45] How Universities Fund Marketing Through Personalized Student Engagement
[00:12:50] Removing Bias and Prioritizing Student Success in Recommendations
[00:14:33] The Stress and Anxiety of the College Application Process
[00:15:47] Two Worlds of College Decisions: Prestige Race vs. Basic Choices
[00:17:46] Upheaval in Higher Ed: Rising Costs and Demographic Shifts
[00:19:39] Kollegio as a Trusted Partner for Personalized Next Steps
[00:21:03] Reflections on Stanford and the Prestige Factor in Education
[00:22:08] Challenges for Universities: Defensive vs. Forward-Thinking Strategies
[00:24:00] Evolution of Education: From Prestige to ROI-Focused Outcomes
[00:25:48] Avoiding Polarization: Getting Real About College Choices
[00:27:34] AI Fluency in Universities and Future Policies
[00:28:16] Predicting College in 2030: Traditional, Online, and New Pathways
[00:30:16] Mindset Shifts and Expanding Options Like Hybrid Models
[00:31:55] The Frustrating Reality of College Costs and Loans
[00:33:15] Tuition Increases, Discount Rates, and Stagnant Net Revenue
[00:35:29] Linking College Value to Career Readiness in a Changing Job Market
[00:37:00] Who Should Teach AI? Questioning University Expertise
[00:38:49] Disconnects in Curriculum, Signaling, and Job Needs
[00:40:50] College Closures, Consolidations, and Rethinking Institutions
[00:42:55] The Messy Reality of Life Paths and Disruptions
[00:45:00] Pivotal Moments, Human Mentorship, and AI’s Role
[00:47:14] Authenticity Over Box-Checking in Applications
[00:49:11] Counselor Shortages and Scaling Guidance with AI
[00:51:46] How to Connect with Senan and Kollegio
[00:52:16] Episode Wrap-Up and Closing Thoughts

Related Episodes:

Entrepreneur Perspectives is produced by QuietLoud Studios — a modern media network and a KazSource brand.

Get in touch with Eric Kasimov:
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Credits:
Music by Jess & Ricky: SoundCloud

Entrepreneur Perspectives – Guest: Senan Khawaja – Company: Kollegio – Host: Eric Kasimov

[00:00–05:00]
Launching Kollegio + Why Storytelling Matters
Intro, podcast setup, the idea behind building something publicly, and early business context

[00:00:00] Senan: That’s kind of the beauty of AI is like the ability to personalize for each individual person. So yeah, I’m definitely excited to see where it goes and kind of being able to build at the precipice of ai ’cause we’re building into a system that we hope is gonna get better. Right? Yeah. So it’s like, okay, at Jaji BD four, it’s functioning at a certain level, but at five it’s gonna be even better.

[00:00:19] Senan: At six, it’s gonna be even better. Of itself is just gonna get better as time goes on. So yeah, that’s gonna be exciting to see.

[00:00:39] Eric: Entrepreneur Perspectives is produced by Quiet Loud Studios, a production company, and content network. Learn more at quietloudstudios.com.

We have an insurance brokerage business. And so our clients are wealth managers, typically like the wires, banks, commercial agencies, that kind of thing. So we’re going B2B, doing third party, going [00:01:00] direct to their clients.

[00:01:00] Eric: So they have hundreds if not thousands of clients, and been doing that for a long time. And that industry’s the life insurance industry. So we’re doing it like more with, uh, businesses and business clientele, also consumers. Entrepreneurs, founders, all that kind of thing. And what I started realizing, and this is pre COVID, is like 2013, I had moved over and started my own business.

[00:01:25] Eric: And stories are just getting old in the insurance industry. It’s such an archaic business and it’s a good business, right. Sometimes the boring businesses are actually good. Yeah. Usually. Usually, yeah. And nowadays everyone’s just like looking for the sexy thing. Right. And I get it right. And I’m sure you live in that world of like how let’s create the new AI thing.

[00:01:41] Eric: And that’s absolutely right. So I was showing up and just creating con like telling stories the same story. I’m like, I’m bored. I, I don’t wanna do this for the next, you know, how many years started creating content, started blogging, doing all that, and everyone’s like, don’t do that. That’s stupid. Like, all that kind of stuff.

[00:01:57] Eric: So it was funny. Then there was like [00:02:00] one founder, a business owner in Utah and he had somehow we connected on Twitter and he is like, can you do this for me? And I’m like, yeah, let’s do that. So we started helping him and his story wasn’t like, he was great. He was doing amazing things. His story had nothing to do with like his business really.

[00:02:16] Eric: It was about like who he was as an individual. And if like if I had a kid, I would want my kid to go work for that guy because of all the other stuff. And then everything else was like just part of it. So we started creating that and then fast forward had a few people come in and said like, you should have a podcast.

[00:02:30] Eric: You should start talking to people online. Like, that’s weird. Like, how would I do that? We started doing it and fast forward. Yeah, so it, and then you start realizing, right, it becomes. It’s like the whole naval advocate, right? Like the coding and the, the leverage that you can create from coding. But then like media is the other one, labor, human labor is the other.

[00:02:48] Eric: So I was just kind of floored by, I always felt like in that transactional community, you had to be there, get the transaction, get the deal done, work through that deal, work through that timeline. Whereas in like media. [00:03:00] Someone could just reach out to you because they heard your podcast or read a blog post or whatever, and that could lead to who knows what.

[00:03:06] Eric: So it was like very different in that space. So now, now we’re just, I see it as like just creating media assets and the assets create. Sometimes they, people pay us, so we’ll do podcast production for companies, which has been awesome. And then I get to watch that founder who’s like, I don’t know if I want this.

[00:03:21] Eric: Or it’s not just podcasts. It could be a blog. It could be social media. It could be like, Hey, let’s just talk and turn it into snippets and whatever. Or who knows what it turns into. And you watch that individual be like, this is what I like to do more than everything else, because now I’m casting the vision, I’m, I’m thinking through ideas.

[00:03:38] Eric: I’m doing all this stuff. And so, you know, that plus our own content like this, and I get to talk to people like you. Like I said before, I have three kids, one in college, one’s on his way to college. I’ve gone through the process, I’m watching it, and I’m just always fascinated and trying to learn. And so it’s like, wait, so I can have this conversation with you.

[00:03:58] Eric: It doesn’t always have to have like [00:04:00] this positive ROI. Like there’s just this unknown thing. So your question led me a lot of different thoughts on all of it, but what were you saying?

[00:04:07] Senan: I was just saying I think that there’s definitely something beautiful in the idea of like putting something out into the world and people might stumble upon it, whether that’s few days, few hours, few weeks, few years down the line and just.

[00:04:23] Senan: Connect people and connect ideas, and it’s just a thing that exists out in the world. And yeah, I think it’s definitely something really, really beautiful and powerful. Yeah.

[00:04:34] Eric: Yeah. Like sales is real, right? Like I think there’s a lot of people who are afraid of it. But you have to ask questions, right? But it has to be done genuinely.

[00:04:43] Eric: So it’s like I can reach out and I know like, Hey, if I reach out, I genuinely want to talk to you. Like, I’m not just gonna reach out to random people and like, let’s talk or let’s do, and I, I have no intent of like, this has to go. So like, it could just be an awesome conversation. Like that’s like you said that to your point about like, that’s the beautiful thing.

[00:04:57] Eric: And not that [00:05:00] long ago you couldn’t have done this, and now you can, and then, I don’t know, you’d just be better for it. It helps other people too. So anyway, yeah, so that’s kind of how all that started and it’s just ongoing as you know. And I heard you talking on, I think it was like this weekend ed tech, I don’t know when that was.

[05:00–10:00]
Tech Startups vs. Boring Businesses
Comparing the excitement of tech with meaningful “boring” industries like insurance

[00:05:16] Eric: Might have been like a year ago or six or a few months, or maybe just recently. Like you are exploring at like, you’re exploring so many different avenues with where this could go. Like maybe you do it like you’re this grand master schema, like here’s what’s gonna end up. But like I don’t think you’re making any bones about it.

[00:05:32] Eric: Like this could go in so many different directions.

[00:05:34] Senan: Yeah, I definitely think when you’re building something as a tech startup and just kind of to your first initial point like about insurance and boring businesses, I definitely think boring businesses are, are great and important for the world, but I’m really yeah, grateful to be able to be on the other side where it’s like, okay, maybe there’s a 90% failure rate, but this is kind of where a lot of the excitement and innovation happens, [00:06:00] which I’m, it’s, I guess it’s part in.

[00:06:02] Senan: Part and parcel of, of the equation where it’s like, okay, you get to be part of something exciting. But you know, if I invested in laundromats and I was like at an opening laundromats, I’m sure I’d have a much more stable source of income that I’d be building. But yeah, it’s definitely in, in terms of vision and like how we go, it’s like, it’s actually pretty interesting because when you talk to certain people, like I think now, like two years into the company now, I’m talking a lot about.

[00:06:31] Senan: What’s happening right now, just because we’re actually a very difficult business that we’ve decided to set up, and I’m happy to dive in more about the specifics, but on one side, we have students, and students don’t pay us. So it’s like we have a product that’s for the students that doesn’t make us any money, and then as students use the platform and we get to know them really well, then all of a sudden it becomes very valuable for colleges.

[00:06:53] Senan: And then colleges come and wanna have virtual events and wanna be listed and market to students and things like that. So it’s. [00:07:00] It’s this interesting kind of marketplace that we’ve set up. And I think that it definitely can be super successful and it can be the future, but it’s the type of business that can only exist with venture capital and all of these kind of other systems just because it’s been nearly two years and, and setting up this process, right, and setting up kind of the marketplace.

[00:07:22] Senan: And now we’re working with nearly a hundred thousand students and we have awesome institutional partners and things like that. It’s something that if I was bootstrapping or trying to do from day one, it wouldn’t necessarily occur. But over the course of these two years, it’s always been about selling the vision of what we’re gonna become and how yeah, where we’re gonna go.

[00:07:43] Senan: And it’s, I think, less of a master plan and more of a story that we tell and a story of, imagine a world if every student, no matter who they were, where they came from. Good. Access this level of [00:08:00] personalized career guidance, coaching that, and college guidance coaching that traditionally was only reserved for the uber wealthy.

[00:08:08] Senan: And it’s what does that world look like and and sharing that. And that’s, I guess what the majority of the past two years have been. And then recently, I think in the last three, four months, it’s been now a lot more that we’re at a stage of, okay, we can actually tangibly do things as a business ourselves.

[00:08:25] Senan: Which also has been really, really cool. So it’s not just those farsighted conversations, but it’s also like engaging in partnerships and we’re hoping to get a few really exciting partnerships off the ground with some really awesome players who are existing in the space in the next few weeks. But yeah, it’s kind of those two conversations, like what can happen right now and what can happen in the future.

[00:08:45] Senan: And for the majority of the two years, it’s just been talking about what can happen in the future.

[00:08:50] Eric: Yeah, I get that. When you’re helping. Give access to this counseling to go to college. Right? And typically there’d be a massive cost to it, [00:09:00] whether you go to a private school or you hire someone independently, which I believe you did some of that work as well.

[00:09:04] Eric: And then you realize like, wait a second, what’s gonna get me up in the morning to do this? You can’t do that. And then say, on top of it, we’re gonna charge you. I don’t know. A subscription fee, right. Or a large payment fee on the front end of it. So that’s that combination, like you were saying before of like, okay, we’re gonna give you access to this, but we need funding in order to make this thing work so we can give access to the student that otherwise would not have that.

[00:09:24] Eric: Right. That’s the complicated thing, I think one of the things you’re talking about.

[00:09:27] Senan: Yeah. No, definitely. I think there are players in the space who try to do that. They try to charge folks and best of luck to them. But I think that. That was also our initial thesis, right? Where it’s like, okay, this, the average person in the United States is paying five to $10,000 for this service, and now we want to like bring it to 1% of the price point where they’re paying, you know, 50 to a hundred dollars.

[00:09:55] Senan: But then the reality is that there’s still so many people who are left out [00:10:00] because of that. And it’s twofold. One, which I’m kind of grateful, very grateful how this paid out, but it’s like on one end you have. Like the impact side, right? So it’s like I can be more impactful, reach more first generation, low income, English as a second language students, which are the majority of students on the platform if the platform is completely free.

[10:00–15:00]
Fixing College Access and Guidance
Scaling support with AI, shifting how colleges recruit, and removing bias

[00:10:20] Senan: And then two, also from the business perspective, I can actually achieve wide more widespread distribution and create more value if it’s free. So it’s kind of like these two prevailing concepts that that we’re running with at the same time. Yeah. Yeah. Do the

[00:10:36] Eric: universities at some point become. Part of the funding mechanism for what you all are doing, like the students you don’t want

to

[00:10:45] Senan: pay?

[00:10:45] Senan: Probably. Yeah. So universities do pay us and that’s how essentially we’d make money. So it’s very interesting. A university on average will pay $3,000 on marketing per student per year. Right? So that’s non personnel [00:11:00] spend. So if, if the college down the street, like I live in the Bay Area, Menlo College, for example, or Santa Clara University, if they wanna enroll a thousand students.

[00:11:08] Senan: They’re spending upwards of $3,000 per student. So that’s $3 million in marketing spend. That’s not staff, that’s just marketing. So it’s really a quite a large untapped market. And the thesis is okay instead of spending, you know, like on a billboard, right? Like old school marketing where Facebook ads, where we can actually find the students who are one relevant to you.

[00:11:36] Senan: And then two, communicate to them about the things that they actually care about in a language that they understand. So Eric, if you love to play soccer, if you’re in your high school music club, you should be learning about Menlo College’s soccer team and music clubs and things like that. Right. And that’s the level of personalization we can get to.

[00:11:54] Senan: And it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s something that’s really valuable for colleges because we have a depth and breadth [00:12:00] of students that. Really never been seen before in the market because students come and they use our platform for hours over weeks, months, and years. So it’s, yeah, it’s really that deeper engagement that we see there.

[00:12:12] Senan: And on the flip side, for the student, we’re also like very avidly, a student first platform. We’re not trying to put our finger on the scale anyway. It’s like if you’re a kid and none of our college partners are a good fit for you, that’s totally fine. Like, uh, those will just be the colleges that are hosting events on the platform and, and things like that, right?

[00:12:32] Senan: So it’s just the space that we’ve created where student success is our number one priority, and that’s from like an ethical, moral and impact perspective, what we wanna do, but also from a business perspective, we win when every student comes on and we become their trusted partner and they have the best possible experience as well.

[00:12:50] Eric: Yeah. If a university’s paying, let’s say. Obviously not just one, many, many universities paying, someone’s paying more, someone’s paying less. Are you able to remove the [00:13:00] bias that might exist inside of that platform to say, well, yeah, Santa Clara’s paying a lot of money, so therefore they’re gonna show up as more relevant to your students.

[00:13:07] Eric: I’m assuming that’s obviously been thought through and you, you guys, but like for people to know that, I think that’s a big deal.

[00:13:13] Senan: Yeah, no, definitely. And it’s, yeah, kind of going back to my point about how much we, we care about the student success, it’s really just all about what’s the best right fit for you.

[00:13:23] Senan: And Santa Clara can, like, if they pay us, they’ll get exposure vis-a-vis like having a virtual event or being able to message students who were relevant to them and things like that. Like students opt into that kind of communication, which is, yeah, from a privacy perspective exactly as college board or common app and these other applications function, it’s in line and even actually maybe better in class as compared to them, but.

[00:13:50] Senan: Yeah, those colleges basically get a chance to reach out to students who are directly interested in them and they get a chance to host events and things like that. But if we have, like we, for example, one of our tools, we have like [00:14:00] an AI recommendation quiz. Like it’s never gonna be the case where if somebody’s not a good fit for, so Clara University, or let’s say collegial University, that we’re gonna say that, oh, you should definitely apply to University one, because that ruins the student experience, right?

[00:14:15] Senan: In the short, medium, and long term. And two, the college, if we send them a bunch of students. Churn after one year, that’s also not great for them. Right? So it’s not good for the students, it’s not good for the colleges. And that’s why, part of the reason why we’re really focused on the great student outcomes.

[00:14:32] Senan: Yeah,

[00:14:33] Eric: of course. And if it becomes obvious that there’s a bias, then it won’t work anymore and the business won’t work. So it’s like, it’s like always doing the right thing. Always works. The college app process like I talked to you about before, three kids, two of ’em, one’s in college, one’s on their way to college and, and going through it, and both different kids and both have different interests of what they wanna do.

[00:14:50] Eric: It’s a fascinating experience, right? If you don’t have the experience with it, it’s so hard. And I’ve talked to plenty of parents and kids, and then you see the stress and you see the anxiety, [00:15:00] and then you see. Society talking to you and what you have to do, and this is the direction and why aren’t you whatever, and what’d you get on your scores and which, how many aps did you take?

[15:00–20:00]
The Prestige Trap + Real Student Needs
Mental health pressures, elite school fixation, and value vs. brand

[00:15:08] Eric: And, and how are you gonna make your application look? So like the best? And then like, what did you do? Right? So it’s, I feel for a lot of parents and kids, because I’m like, if they don’t know, even know where to go, how would they manage this entire process? And then you go show up on some of these campuses and you see the mental and the mental health crisis is real right now, right?

[00:15:26] Eric: There’s a loneliness epidemic, right? There’s all these things going on. What are you seeing with this whole college application process? Like you just talked about the different platforms that exist out there. Like where are we going with this? Is this just gonna continue down this path, or is this why you’re in existence today to like try to help people make sense of what’s going on because it’s a mess.

[00:15:47] Senan: Yeah, so it’s actually very interesting on many levels. So the first thing I’d say is actually they’re, let’s just classify them into two worlds, right? So I was very [00:16:00] much part of the world that you were describing, right? Where it’s like, how do I make the best possible application? How do I get into the best possible top 100 school?

[00:16:08] Senan: All of that stress, and definitely even as a founder who’s been close to my company, has been close to bankruptcy and things like that, which maybe we can get into. But yeah, it’s college apps was still probably one of the most stressful times in my life, which is kind of hilarious to think about.

[00:16:24] Senan: Hilarious and sad maybe. Yeah. So that’s one segment of right, where it’s like all of these students are targeting the top a hundred schools and they’re coming from more affluent families, and it’s kind of like this rat race almost, where it’s exactly what you said, super competitive, like in the Bay Area.

[00:16:40] Senan: It’s probably, I don’t wanna say if I had to, yes, it’s probably the most competitive in the world. Like I see ninth graders, right? First year of high school and they’ve got internships and the kid is coming to me and talking about. Starting a startup, which is great, right? But I don’t know how much they feel that their environment is [00:17:00] forcing them to do that.

[00:17:00] Senan: Right. Versus like when I was in ninth grade, like I barely knew that what college was, right. I was like, oh, that’s the thing that people go to and things like that. But I see it as just getting more and more competitive. For sure. And there’s also a different world, right? Where the majority of people actually belong, which is like, do I go to college or not?

[00:17:21] Senan: Right? And that’s maybe like, should I go to my community college? Do I go to my local state school? Maybe I go to my state flagship, right? If I’m very smart or feeling very adventurous, or maybe I go to a trade school or maybe I don’t go to college, and this is like a world where the majority of students are kind of operating in, and both of these worlds are really in for an upheaval, right?

[00:17:46] Senan: Because the costs are going up. You know, there’s demographic cliffs that are taking place. There are like less people who are entering the college going time. And schools like four year institutions are in particular are really struggling because [00:18:00] many of them have to redefine themselves. Right? How do I def like justify an $80,000 price tag when my average, you know, graduation alumni salary is 50 K.

[00:18:11] Senan: Right? And it’s actually a complete separate story that most people don’t actually pay the sticker price, but. College are really in for that, for that upheaval. And to your question about how we see that path of like all of that uncertainty, like I think that’s really where we’re trying to play as hopefully a trusted partner where we can help figure out what that right next best step is for you.

[00:18:37] Senan: ’cause there’s so many students, like I was just talking to, I won’t take his name, but somebody who’s like a very average student and from a very wealthy family, and it’s like. They’re being forced into kind of this, everybody goes to college in that high school, right? Then there might be other people who are very bright people, but nobody goes to college in that high school, right?

[00:18:57] Senan: Or very few people go to college and they’re first gen student. So [00:19:00] it’s like, how can we kind of optimize outcomes? And I think that’s kind of where collegial comes in because it’s like, Hey, let me dynamically work with you. So that we can figure out what the next right best step is for you, whether that’s a four year college, whether that’s a two year college, whether that’s a trade school, whether that’s a coding bootcamp, right?

[00:19:19] Senan: Whatever that next right best step is for you. Let me show you what it might look like, what your life after that might look like, where you might go and like achieve that, and then how you might pay for it, and then how you might qualify yourself to get into that school. That’s really where we’re playing right now and hopefully that.

[00:19:39] Senan: Can alleviate some of the stress, but I think a lot of the stress from that kind of top hundred school version is just this, this kind of prestige race and yeah, so society kind of pressuring folks, I think it’s, it’s gonna be very tough to alleviate pressure there, but maybe as more folks from that segment choose not to go to college, do other things, society [00:20:00] might de-stigmatize that.

[20:00–25:00]
Stanford, Strategy, and The ROI of Education
Senan’s personal experience and universities choosing between defense and offense

[00:20:02] Senan: Yeah, you hear

[00:20:03] Eric: more people talking about it now. I mean, I’m sure you’ve heard like the All In podcast and Shamma gets on there and he starts talking about at a time when he wants one of his kids to go to the prestigious, the Ivys, the whatever, and then the kid shows up one day and says, I want to go to SEC school.

[00:20:16] Eric: And then early on he would’ve been like freaking out. He was like, you’re not going to Alabama or Mississippi. Now. He is like, no, I actually think that’s the right decision for him. There’s a lot baked in there, right? They get into the political side of stuff and we don’t have to go down that path right now.

[00:20:26] Eric: But that is changing. Like you see the numbers of the students coming down here. So living in Charlotte, North Carolina and you know, you’re an a CC in Southeastern conference country that the numbers to go to school at South Carolina, at Georgia, the applications are through the roof, right? And they’re building great programs there where like 20 years ago.

[00:20:48] Eric: That wasn’t like you would just send in your application and when do you start? Like when’s, when do I show up for my first day of school type of thing. And it’s not the case anymore. You went to Stanford, right? And you just graduated, which is [00:21:00] wild. So like, you’re already like doing amazing things. So that’s awesome.

[00:21:03] Eric: Thank you. So you’re, but you’re very close to it. Like you said, it wasn’t that long ago you were living in this world and like, wow, that was crazy. That was my most stressful time of my life. Now that you’ve gone through that and you’re kind of like sitting back laughing at, I’m sure Stanford did a lot of great things for you.

[00:21:16] Eric: So it’s not that these universities are all bad, right? It’s just that prestige thing is real, and Stanford is one of those schools that’s in that world of prestige. Like how do you look at that knowing what you just experienced? And you’re probably still gaining a lot from that world like. Where does that come to mind?

[00:21:34] Eric: Because you’re also, I could hear you and when you say it, it sounds very real of like you’re seeing a student and you’re not judging them to say if they want to go to a two year trade school or not go to college. Like we just had someone else on the podcast and Ankit was talking about, he was a former Google employees partners, a former Apple employee.

[00:21:49] Eric: He’s like, I could care less what you went to college. Show me what you’ve built type of thing. Anyway, saying all that, like what comes to mind for you as it relates to like the world you were just in.

[00:21:58] Senan: Yeah. It’s interesting, I think. [00:22:00] Universities are being more and more challenged on the product, right? And it’s a very competitive time, right, to say it lightly.

[00:22:08] Senan: And people have to define for themselves, is my product competitive? Am I competitive on price program campus? What can I do to justify why I should exist in a way that previously there has not been as much pressure and we’re seeing enrollment leaders being extremely, extremely forward thinking. As well as extremely defensive.

[00:22:31] Senan: Right. And I think the second you start playing defense is when you start getting stuck in the tar pit. And then once you’re in the tar pit of, okay, I’m like in a budget deficit and I’m gonna cut spending and then I’m gonna get more deficit and cut more spending, I think that’s a really a downward spiral that’s very difficult to get out of versus.

[00:22:52] Senan: On the other side, more forward thinking, enrollment leaders are willing to engage with different solutions, think about repositioning their brand, [00:23:00] and kind of take these more brave steps to redefine themselves. Really like think about outreach differently, think about programs and product differently to really justify why they should exist.

[00:23:14] Senan: And then we see a lot of thriving there also. Right? So I speak to. In a month, I’ve probably speak to like 40, 45 different colleges on average. So I’m speaking to a lot of different colleges and it’s, yeah, I’m really on the pulse of what’s going on, and I’m really seeing this dichotomy of people who are kind of turling up and people who are, okay, we have X, Y, Z amount of time to achieve X, Y, Z.

[00:23:40] Senan: Who are the people that can help me on this journey and how can I reposition my brand to reach the right students? And. Offer them a convincing product. Right. And that’s kind of the unfortunate reality of, of what’s going on in higher ed. That’s one piece. And then kind of to your thought about prestige and signal.

[00:23:59] Senan: [00:24:00] I think that the real, like the old concept of education that came from the Romans and then the Middle East and then Europe and all of this, like the old like tradition of education. Is actually very different from it is what it is now, right? ’cause if it’s like, what’s like the degree that I can get that gets me the highest paying job, that’s not really what the old concept of education was.

[00:24:26] Senan: Where it was like, okay, wealthy people come and they study philosophy or they study theology or like English language and things like that. And it’s kind of like what you might associate Oxford with in these universities. And there’s not really much linkage between job prospect and. Education and like higher education in particular, but that’s because those people are, you know, wealthy aristocrats and things like that.

[00:24:48] Senan: Anyways, so it’s kind of interesting that there are these universities that have that prestige factor and it’s like maybe they do have really strong engineering programs and things like that, but there are a lot of [00:25:00] universities also who just, you know, appeal to wealthy folks and they can go there and study a degree that maybe isn’t linked to some financial outcome as much.

[25:00–30:00]
What Will College Look Like in 2030?
Hybrid, online, and student-first education models

[00:25:09] Senan: It’s just for that older concept of education. But of course that’s not for the broader public where it’s like, okay, I need to get a degree and I need to, if I’m investing a hundred thousand dollars, I need to be able to have that ROI on it. So that’s kind of a different concept to what the older concept of education that’s kind of more linked to that prestige where you see a lot of, you know, wealthy folks coming in and studying those types of other degrees, which also I have, you know, no disrespect for like if you can do it.

[00:25:35] Senan: Definitely. That sounds like a lot of fun. Yeah.

[00:25:38] Eric: You know what’s weird is like you go social media, right? And everyone’s like, don’t go to college or go to college. Like, let’s polarize it somehow. And, and that’s, let’s argue about it. Let’s, you’re right, I’m wrong, right? Actually, I’d be right. You’d be wrong.

[00:25:48] Eric: Yeah. But like in that scenario. It’s actually getting real with yourself and using the tools and using the people like yourself and your tool to say, [00:26:00] Hmm, what’s best for me? And getting real with that as opposed to not what’s best for my classmates and for their parents and for the high school that I go to.

[00:26:08] Eric: How do I get real with myself? Which is a mindset thing, right? Like, and then it’s using the tools and leaning on your trusted advisors, just like you would do in anything in life. There is no one answer. So you’re not gonna say, yeah, I think Stanford’s a joke. Don’t go to Stanford. They’re just gonna take your money and make it at the other end.

[00:26:23] Eric: You might be like, Stanford’s amazing if you want to do this, right? So, and that goes for all like directions that you could possibly go with this. It’s not some one size fits all, and I can hear that coming from you. And then it makes me think like, okay, this is 2025. Where is college in 2030? Like that’s five years from now, and I don’t think we all know right.

[00:26:44] Eric: What’s gonna happen, like where AI’s going? Like it’s funny, I saw Ohio State University, one of the largest universities in the country is came out, their president came out and said, we’re gonna be, I think it’s ai, fluent AI fluency, and they’re gonna teach a class on it. Right? All this kind of stuff. So on surface it’s like, okay, cool.[00:27:00]

[00:27:00] Eric: A university’s gonna go out there and we’re gonna teach. Artificial intelligence, these kids like they’re gonna understand it, they’re gonna be able to use it. Maybe even the classrooms, you go to Reddit threads, of which there’s a lot ’cause it’s such a large university and they’re like, can you refund my money then since AI’s gonna be doing this teaching and the university’s not gonna be doing it.

[00:27:16] Eric: Right. So it, it plays on the other side and it’s kind of not been a fallout from it, but a little bit, right. At least on the Reddit boards. So I just don’t know what happens from here today, 25 to, let’s say, what does college look like in 2030? I dunno if you have an answer on it, but I’m sure you have like.

[00:27:32] Eric: Talking points or thoughts on it, right?

[00:27:34] Senan: Yeah, I definitely think in terms of AI fluency and like running away from ai, like I talk to people who are super interested. Like there was one enrollment officer I spoke to in Austin, actually St. Edwards in university, I think he wouldn’t mind me mentioning, but he was like, oh, I use Gemini in my workflow and I encourage my team to use it.

[00:27:53] Senan: And they’re like very into it. And I know other folks like someone in. Aurora University, for example, [00:28:00] they have like a AI policy, and then other folks I speak to are like, oh, I’m unsure about how we’re gonna engage with the ai, and they’re kind of taking that approach. But in terms of where college is in 2030, I think there’s kind of three main strands.

[00:28:16] Senan: And this is something I’ve thought about. It’s like the traditional college, right? And it’s like the traditional college that’s able to become more efficient and pivot. They still have that core in-person experience that’s, you know, very valuable for folks. And it’s the ones, like you mentioned, maybe some SE schools, but I think hopefully the majority of colleges that are gonna survive this tumultuous time and be able to offer like a strong brand presence, a strong product to their students, then they’re like the online schools.

[00:28:46] Senan: So that’s like WGU and there are a few others that. Have these really strong online programs that are really great for adult learners and things like that. And then there there’s maybe something completely [00:29:00] different. So I think it’s called Outsmart College. So it’s the ex CPO of of Duolingo, and he’s essentially made this kind of Duolingo style bite-size clips where people can swipe and like kind of consume college level courses and get credits in a bite-sized way, like five minutes at a time, 10 minutes at a time.

[00:29:21] Senan: So that’s kind of interesting, like those completely new pathways. And then I think community colleges are also emerging as a real winner, like trade schools. So I think for four year you kind of have these three brands where it’s like the traditional one that’s adapted, the online one that’s, you know, becoming more popular.

[00:29:38] Senan: Maybe something completely different where you have like core trainings. Maybe. Maybe companies offer like direct trainings directly, like okay, after high school. Do this like two, three year program and then you can get a job that’s like six figures or something like that. And then there’s the the traditional community colleges and trade schools, which I think are poised to do really well as well off [00:30:00] this windfall.

[30:00–35:00]
College Costs, Loans, and Financial Reality
Rising tuition, net revenue confusion, and how this affects student decisions

[00:30:00] Senan: That’s kind of how I would lay out the ecosystem right now.

[00:30:04] Eric: Yeah. Your mindset when it comes to this is unique. Like I said before, I talk to so many people and they have this. Specific, this is where it’s going. Right? And you’re in the industry and you’re trying to help out a wide array of students, right?

[00:30:16] Eric: And not everyone’s cut out. Not even cut out. I shouldn’t say that. They’re not, you don’t have to be a founder of a tech startup company, right? Like there’s so many different things that you can do in this world. And I think what get cut up in like, oh, this, or wealth or like, what’s important to you in, in going back down to that.

[00:30:32] Eric: That point of it, and you’re watching these universities at play, like I’ve watched Arizona State who has their in-person thing, right? They’re in Tempe, Arizona. It’s a great experience. They built the online program, and so you see they’re, they’re going out there and they’re trying to educate the masses on their online, which is different.

[00:30:47] Eric: Very different than being on campus in Tempe University. Right? And they’re building other campuses in other places, and they’re becoming very large. And their technology, right? Number one in innovation and like some of the students laugh at it, but then when you get into the system and see it, [00:31:00] you’re like, actually they’re, they’re not running off of legacy systems.

[00:31:03] Eric: They’re actually running off a system that looks like it was actually built in 2025, not in 1990. And you’re like, okay, well there’s something there to it, right? Like you can actually get their curriculum, even though you might not have direct access to the advisor every day there’s something with the technology that you see, you’re like.

[00:31:18] Eric: They’re not doing that at most universities. Their technology’s so off, right. So I think that school’s been around for a long time, so they can run a hybrid approach and do it all as opposed to other universities who are locking the doors. We’re not letting you in unless you’re, you have this thing going for you and you’ve traveled abroad and you have six different majors.

[00:31:36] Eric: And, and, and that’s not bad either, right? But it’s, there’s just a lot of options out there. And we need to help students, families, universities, high schools, counselors, whoever. Understand what all is out there. There’s another part about college that’s frustrating, which is the cost of college. It’s out of control, right?

[00:31:55] Eric: And the loan situation is out of control. And it’s hard to [00:32:00] teach a 17 or 18-year-old, like what does that look like in four years, in 20 years, right? And a lot of times these people will marry, one goes to college, they don’t have a loan. Then they marry someone, they do have a loan and they’re paying off a $200,000 loan.

[00:32:13] Eric: They’re like, wait a second. That’s on my books now. Right. So that’s a real thing as it comes to it. But I’ve heard you talk about where like, and you just said it before, like these universities are spending, spending $3,000 per student on the marketing. Then there’s all sorts of other costs and they gotta keep up with it.

[00:32:28] Eric: So. You’re gonna go visit the University of Kentucky and you’re also gonna go visit the University of Alabama. Like who’s got the better gym? Who’s got the better dorms? Who’s got the better food? Like all this stuff costs a lot of money. And I think you said, and you can teach us on this, like the colleges aren’t making a lot more money today.

[00:32:44] Eric: I think they’re like, there’s some universities like at Harvard or Ohio State that have huge endowments. Right? But that’s different. Help us understand like. Are the universities not making as much, and do they have to raise the cost because they have no other choice to do it? Like why are we in a situation that we’re in [00:33:00] where the money’s not the same as it was 10, 20, 50 years?

[00:33:04] Eric: Definitely wasn’t 50 years ago it was like $300 per semester. But you see what I’m getting at when it comes to the money. Are the universities still making a lot of money even though I’ll stop there. You get what I’m saying?

[00:33:15] Senan: Yeah, of course. So I think that. There was an interesting article that I was reading the other day that was showing how the average tuition price has gone up, but so has the average discount rate quite a lot, and essentially what that results in is net money that colleges are taking home as kind of more or less remains stagnant when you’re accounting for inflation and these types of things.

[00:33:39] Senan: So an average discount rate, like if a college on a sticker price costs $80,000, the average discount rate would be. 50% or something akin to that. So we’re really seeing those kind of high discount rates where people are, and that’s kind of something colleges do to recruit students and make the students also feel valued.

[00:33:59] Senan: Where, [00:34:00] yeah, like maybe the sticker price is 80,000, but okay, Eric, we’re gonna give you a presidential scholarship and you get $20,000 off a year and things like that. But I think cost is definitely something that colleges really have to reconcile with. Like one, they do have their existing costs. Like it’s not easy to pay for someone’s room and board for four years, but also understanding like how much do classes cost and how much do professor’s times cost and things like that.

[00:34:25] Senan: And then we’re seeing like a lot more hybrid approaches, a lot more innovative approaches, but also perhaps cutting down on the amount of bureaucracy. And maybe that’s something that AI can help with a lot. And I know I’m seeing a lot of startups in that space. So I think it’s a lot of how much can colleges.

[00:34:44] Senan: Reconcile all the different things that are going on within their own house. And then at the same time, offer a compelling product to different students, to different segments. Understand why people are paying, how much they’re willing to pay, how much they should pay, and, and just thinking about that in, in a dynamic [00:35:00] way.

[35:00–40:00]
Jobs, Curriculum, and the AI Knowledge Gap
What students are being taught vs. what the world needs

[00:35:00] Eric: So the colleges, while they’re not making as much as we might think, like the colleges keep raising it and the families just keep paying it. Right, but what you’re saying is it’s not like the college is just raking in cash, but what they could be doing is maybe lowering their costs on the front end in some other ways that would allow them to make more money that they obviously need to make some money and then in turn lower the costs back to, to the families.

[00:35:28] Eric: That, right.

[00:35:29] Senan: It’s all linked to career readiness. Right? Because we’re in a place where that you go to college to get a good job, right? That’s the vast majority of people, right. And if you can’t guarantee that good outcome, right? Then it’s like how can you justify the cost, right? So I think having that really strong pipeline, and that’s why things like AI fluency and things like that are super important because it’s like, okay, do you have places where people can learn the most UpToDate things in a world that is changing so rapidly, where [00:36:00] frankly in two, three years, traditional computer science programs.

[00:36:04] Senan: Frankly, even now, like I have friends who’ve studied at Stanford, done, you know, master’s in computer science from, you know, the best computer science school and they’re struggling to get employed, right? So imagine for the rest of the world who has wants to study computer science and it’s like these are traditionally one of the programs with the highest ROI, right?

[00:36:21] Senan: And this is something that’s rapidly changing. And now we’re gonna see entry level law positions and accounting positions and all of these entry level white collar jobs really shifting. And it’s like, these are the traditional reasons why people went to university. Right. So this is also kind of part of that overall market dynamic that’s really affecting the way students are thinking about college and how colleges should be thinking about it as well.

[00:36:47] Eric: Yeah. The AI fluency, and I could argue that, do I wanna learn if I’m a student or if I’m a parent, who’s the student’s going to school? Do I want my student learning or this? Learning from the [00:37:00] university about how to use ai or do I want them learning from you or me or someone else? Like, does the university even know how to teach this because it’s so new and, okay, cool, we’re going af and they should, so they’re gonna have to hire for that though, because if, if these professors aren’t ready for it.

[00:37:18] Eric: Well, just because you were given, it’s like you said, soccer before. So just because the person’s a history teacher. And they watched a soccer game the other day, it doesn’t mean they should be your soccer coach, right? But at the university or at the school, we need someone to teach soccer. So they’re gonna be the coach, right?

[00:37:32] Eric: Just because you’re there and you watch some videos about AI and you like, it doesn’t mean you should be teaching the student how to use ai. Like I’d rather find someone who actually knows how to use it or get on YouTube, right? And you can learn how to use it or open up chat BT and Gemini and Grok and whatever, and just start messing with it again.

[00:37:50] Eric: You need guidance and mentorship and all that. Is it the university’s best job for that? Like it always goes back to, [00:38:00] shouldn’t they be teaching money in schools? Right? Shouldn’t they be talking about finance in schools? Yes. But at the same time, like you can also learn finance without it. Like go read about Warren Buffett, go watch some videos, listen to podcasts, read all their books, talk to some mentors, go intern.

[00:38:13] Eric: Like that kind of thing. Is it the school’s job? Not even job is it? Do we want our students learning AI from people that maybe don’t even have that expertise in doing that? That’s concerning because like you said, when they graduate in 20 30, 20 40 and so on, maybe they don’t even have jobs. Like you said, the job market for computer science degree people like, okay, maybe it doesn’t exist anymore.

[00:38:33] Eric: Yeah,

[00:38:34] Senan: I think it’s definitely a great point of like, who’s the right person to teach ai, and I think that’s really interesting where it’s not necessarily, doesn’t necessarily have to be in a school environment. Historically it’s, it’s very interesting, even at a school like Stanford where there’s such a huge prestige factor.

[00:38:49] Senan: So many of my friends who wanted to go into finance, something I also thought about for a while, that’s not something that’s really taught much in school, and it’s a lot of self-study that those kids are doing outside of [00:39:00] school. Right? There are courses, like I know there’s one person we’re talking to, potentially hiring, she’s studying sales at Indiana University and a lot of like a school like Stanford doesn’t even offer sales, right?

[00:39:10] Senan: Yeah. It’s like such necessary thing. It’s like there’s a disconnect between. What’s wanted, what’s needed and what’s offered. And then also is that institution even the best place to teach it? And versus like a sales crash course, right? But then it’s also the signaling, like would person hire someone based on just the fact that they’ve done a crash course or the fact that they have some experience, like experience without the degree.

[00:39:34] Senan: Like I think the degree gives you a level of signal that’s different. And until we start perceiving it differently as a society where it’s like. Okay, this person doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree, but they know how to sell really well. Okay? Are they like, am I just gonna hire this 18 or 19-year-old now instead of the 21 or 22-year-old?

[00:39:53] Senan: But maybe the salary expectations are different. It becomes this weird dichotomy. But if someone has, let’s say, three or four years of work [00:40:00] experience that’s relevant instead of college, that person is probably worth more than someone who went to college. But again, it’s also. So much of work is interpersonal relationships and things like that, that it becomes, becomes really interesting.

[40:00–45:00]
College Closures and Disruption Opportunities
Shifting institutions, closures, and room for new entrants

[00:40:15] Senan: And I think that as people really think about these questions and as they’re pushed to the forefront, we’ll see. Yeah. I think a change in the number of colleges, because it’s also fascinating, the United States has nearly 4,000 higher education institutions. Someone like the United Kingdom, the UK has, I believe the number is just under 200.

[00:40:36] Senan: Wow. So. Yeah, you can see the, the difference here. Does every student need to go to college? Is that the right step? Do we need so many institutions? And I think that that question is really, it’s a scary one, but it’s It’s the one that’s on everybody’s minds.

[00:40:50] Eric: Yeah, it is. I know of schools that have been shut down, right?

[00:40:53] Eric: They had to raise, there’s a school here, limestone University. It’s in the Gaffney, South Carolina. So it’s like a couple hours away from here. There’s [00:41:00] outlet malls there. Like that’s why you know it well, there’s limestone. It had limestone. University had been there over a hundred plus years. They had to raise $6 million and they raised $2 million and they had just closed the school.

[00:41:11] Eric: So they graduated their final class, I think it was 1600 kids, 900 of them were student athletes and they were all out of a university. So this has been happening more and more. And you don’t exactly know why that is. And they probably didn’t have the money in reserves. They didn’t have the endowment, whatever.

[00:41:26] Eric: That’s a challenge. And those kids gotta go transfer. And so some of these bigger schools can probably take ’em on and they’ll help ’em out, but So you think there could be a situation to where. Like in business where they all are becoming part of the, the larger state, like that school could have been as a private school I think, I don’t know, but become part of the larger state university where they have like add another campus type of thing or they’re gonna have to do something and consolidate like we see in business.

[00:41:51] Eric: Yeah,

[00:41:51] Senan: we’re seeing a lot of amalgamations closing down. Like the stat was in 20 24, 1 college per month has been closing down on average. So [00:42:00] I think that number is increasing, if anything. I know there was Penn West University that’s now like three campuses, which were three separate entities before, and now it’s like if a professor teaches one class somewhere that that same class is being broadcasted to the other two campuses at the same time and they’re kind of taking on these innovative methods.

[00:42:19] Senan: Yeah, but it’s okay. How can I convince people in my own backyard to attend? And then why would someone from out of state wanna attend this university as well and just do. Just think about that. I think it’s all about positioning all about brand and so much of this is yeah, signaling. That’s why we have these high prices, right?

[00:42:38] Senan: That’s why it costs 80 grand on paper. It’s because then I can say that this is something that’s really valuable, but I think people are wisening up and they’re saying that, okay, show me what’s the average alumni starting salary, right? Right. Why would I pay 300 grand for university if I’m gonna come out and make 60 grand a year?

[00:42:54] Senan: It just doesn’t make sense.

[00:42:55] Eric: Yeah. Yeah. That’s wild. It’s almost like, it’s like our conversation [00:43:00] today. You know, we had our first connection. It was definitely laggy and like there’s all sorts of stuff and then you know, you have your brother traveling back overseas, right? There’s a lot. It’s real life happening.

[00:43:08] Eric: Technology’s happening and then our lead IT project manager, like something happens and people are like, oh my God, it’s technology. Like what’s going on? And he is like, it’s technology. Go figure. Like sometimes you just can’t explain it, pick up the pieces and move on. My point there is that this is messy, right?

[00:43:23] Eric: Like I feel like there’s come, this thing with college is. You pick a college based on where you want to be, right? Which is, there’s a lot of proof in that and that you’re supposed to go down the set path for you and then when you go down the set path for you, everything’s gonna work out. You take your loan, you go to school, you meet a, your potential spouse, right?

[00:43:42] Eric: You go to football games and then you graduate, you get the job, and then you get the house and then blah, blah, blah. And all that stuff’s been disrupted. And instead, it’s more of like, what’s interesting to you? Where do you wanna play for a little while? It’s messy. It’s just life and shit’s happening and I don’t know what to [00:44:00] make of it, but to like go down and like, here’s exactly how it’s gonna, like, I just talked to someone recently who was like going to do something else and everything changed past and now he’s an attorney doing offshore trust, right?

[00:44:12] Eric: Like, he’s like, I don’t even know how I got here. And things happened along the way where you have even at a professor at school says, don’t do that. I don’t know. I don’t know what that all means, but picking this thing that you have to go down some certain path for college and that’s gonna ultimately lead you to this destination that like, I don’t know, in five years, we don’t even know what the destinations are gonna look like, let alone 20 years from now.

[00:44:32] Eric: Right. Everything’s changing right before our eyes. You know, a year ago AI was here, but it looked very different. This conversation’s gonna come out and probably a few months after that chat, PT Five’s gonna come out. Who knows what that’s gonna do. Right. So, I don’t know. I’m sure you have thoughts on all of where I’m going.

[00:44:47] Senan: Yeah, no, I think it’s so different and I’m glad we’re having this conversation because it, it’s also given me an awesome opportunity to think about this and I think it’s so much about the people that you meet and influences on your life. [00:45:00] Like, I just think back to when I began high school, I was actually living in, in Europe and we had moved back to, yeah, from my, from my father’s work, and we had moved back to Pakistan.

[45:00–End]
Mentorship, Authenticity, and What’s Next
AI + human mentorship, counselor shortages, and how to support students better

[00:45:11] Senan: I was thinking like what subjects I should take in high school and it’s very like a British system where you take certain subjects and it’s like not a lot of flexibility. And I decided not to take like sciences, right? So in high school I didn’t study chemistry, physics, or biology. Right? Like formally.

[00:45:29] Senan: And I just think how different my life could have looked if I decided to study those things. But it was just literally some, like a few people advised my parents and myself that, oh, it’s not a good idea to take those if I’m coming from. You know, a Western education system and that just influences the trajectory.

[00:45:45] Senan: Or even for myself, like meeting someone who was able to, who had got into a really good school, who was able to mentor me like in my life. And it’s like these pivotal moments that really express everything. And I’m now my, like my head is turning [00:46:00] because one thing we’re always thinking about in GIO is like, okay, the AI is great for personalization, but where can there be humans also in the loop?

[00:46:09] Senan: And I think that’s really something fascinating where it’s like, okay, as you navigate K Collegio, can you meet other people who are also on similar journeys and share similar ideas? And I think that could be something that’s really interesting to elevate the human experience. But yeah, I agree with you.

[00:46:23] Senan: It’s very messy and that’s kind of the beauty of AI is like the ability to personalize for each individual person. So yeah, I’m definitely excited to see where it goes and kind of being able to build at the precipice of ai. ’cause we’re building into a system that we hope is gonna get better, right? Yeah.

[00:46:39] Senan: So it’s like, okay, at chat GBT four, it’s functioning at a certain level, but at five it’s gonna be even better at six, it’s gonna be even better in of itself is just gonna get better as time goes on. So yeah, that’s gonna be exciting to see.

[00:46:50] Eric: Yeah, I like seeing, like when Sam Melman comes outs like, I’m not happy with this version of chat GBT or whatever.

[00:46:56] Eric: Like he said that in the past, and it’s like, that’s your baby. So most of the time you 

[00:47:00] hear people come out and they’re like, just talk about how great it is. But you’re being honest because. It’s like you’re building in real life. Like you hear, you hear about that, you know, people are on X and they’re posting about things that they’re doing, and they’re, they’re making mistakes and they’re doing this, they’re doing that.

[00:47:14] Eric: And it’s even what you said, I think you guys talk about this at EO where like when you’re applying to college, it’s not checking the boxes that you think they want you to check. Like you’re playing some sort of game. You’re like, okay, I think if I do this, if I volunteer my time doing this, that’s gonna help me get into college.

[00:47:29] Eric: And you’re talking about your, what’s your real strength Like, let’s find that Maybe it’s. Collecting comic books, playing in a band. Maybe it is something to do with computers. I don’t write like, who are you as an individual? And if that university doesn’t value that, like I would say to the kid is like, probably wasn’t the place for you.

[00:47:47] Eric: And who knows? They don’t know you. They never got to sit. Typically, nowadays, they don’t get a chance to sit down with you and your family and talk about your life and spend like three weeks with you, right? Like they get a snapshot, I don’t know, 15 minutes, an hour, [00:48:00] whatever that might be. Like who are you as a person?

[00:48:02] Eric: And just like. Keep pushing for it, right? And we said it’s messy, but I don’t think it’s, you know, you do this, you do that, you get this internship and then, because what I hear is all their students, like, I can’t get this internship. Like they’re interviewing with a hundred businesses in the banking world.

[00:48:18] Eric: Let’s say they want to go into Finance a hundred and they can’t get a job, they can’t get an internship. And I’m like, well, what if you start built your own business this summer? It doesn’t matter if it’s successful, it’s the fact that you’re doing something different. Like, I don’t know. I’m not saying go get that internship and that might work out and give you exactly what you wanna be doing.

[00:48:35] Eric: And that’s great. But I don’t know. It’s also changing so very fast.

[00:48:39] Senan: And that’s the reality of, of the job world. It’s, it just gets more and more competitive. And people like these full-time banking positions, for example, are recruiting in second year of college, which is like insane. Imagine like that’s great.

[00:48:51] Senan: End of psych, most quality recruiting for a full-time role. So that means you have already have done the internship beforehand and it just goes earlier and earlier and earlier. It’s [00:49:00] complete insanity, but I think that, yeah, and also to your point about high school counselors, I think those people are heroes, but the average high school counselor to student ratio is 400 to one in the United States.

[00:49:11] Senan: So Yeah. Or yeah, one to 400. These people are superheroes, but there’s only so much they can do. And there are these access organizations that are also great, but are also limited in fidelity. So it’s like, how could we deploy AI at all of these pivotal points too? To help deal with this issue and scale.

[00:49:29] Senan: And I think it’s gonna really, it has a really excellent opportunity to elevate the workforce in a way that we’ve never seen before where people can train directly for jobs, they can figure out what’s right for them. They can get that level of personalized college guidance. And that’s kind of the nor I began with.

[00:49:44] Senan: And perhaps we can end with it as well that this service that traditionally was only for the very wealthy. Is now for the first time, has the potential of being given to every single student, right? Yep. And speaking to them in a language that they understand [00:50:00] being adaptable to who they are. And I think that’s where we’re gonna see something really beautiful, where, especially as we expand beyond four year colleges, where every student gets that personalized tutor, that personalized coach especially, and it’s so impactful when you don’t have those people in your community that you can go to, who have gone to college, who have done X, Y, Z thing.

[00:50:18] Senan: Especially as those things change, right? Like if someone wants to become a prompt engineer right. For example, like those things that didn’t exist one one year ago, one and a half years ago. Yeah. You’re not gonna have ready-made mentors. And definitely the kid who doesn’t have anyone like who’s gone to college in his community definitely has no mentor for that.

[00:50:35] Senan: Right, right. And it’s like, and as new roles pop up and things like that, I think it’s gonna be a really exciting time. And that’s kind of what we’re hoping to be at Keio is, is one of the good use cases for ai.

[00:50:48] Eric: Yeah, when I saw an article read about it, what y’all are doing, being in the college world as we’ve talked about today, I was like, I wanna like know what’s going on here and I want other people to hear it.

[00:50:58] Eric: And I, I know a lot of people [00:51:00] need to hear it. Like that one counselor for 400 students is, is crazy. I could just think about the amount of questions you would have and if you don’t really know where to look, ’cause nowadays you can go online, watch videos and do all that. And there’s amazing amounts of resources.

[00:51:13] Eric: You’re a resource, right? And your company’s a resource and people around you are. But if you don’t know what to do and like, I don’t know how you would navigate it unless you just opted out and said, this is, we’re just gonna go to school and just kind of like build up for which you can do that too, right?

[00:51:27] Eric: Like I said, it’s messy. There’s no specific one way to do it. But to have this as a resource for you and the universities sound like they’re listening and you’re having 40 conversations a month. That’s amazing. So Steven, how do people get ahold of you? Obviously learn about the company and where y’all are going and if they wanna read about the funding round that you just got and all about that.

[00:51:46] Eric: Yeah,

[00:51:46] Senan: of course. So you can find me, Sinan Quad LinkedIn, kleo.ai. K-O-L-L-E-G io.ai. You can find out about us if you think that there’s, you know, an opportunity to partner or something like this, definitely [00:52:00] message me on LinkedIn and yeah, if you think that it’s something useful that you’d like to use, anybody can sign up and create an account.

[00:52:07] Senan: And yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Eric. This has really been a wonderful conversation. Yeah, I’ve enjoyed it. Thank you for your time. Of course. Have a rest of your day. Take care. Bye-Bye.

[00:52:16] Eric: Thanks for listening to Entrepreneur Perspectives. This show is produced by Quiet Loud Studios where we create podcasts, writings, and original media.

The post How AI Is Changing College Counseling and Admissions with Senan Khawaja, CEO of Kollegio | EP190 appeared first on KazSource.

Scott Sheridan is the CEO of Tastytrade, a trading platform and brokerage he co-founded with longtime partner Tom Sosnoff. Together with their amazing team, they’ve built a trading and media empire using a counterintuitive strategy: giving away their best content for free.

In this episode, Scott explains how their “goodwill model” works — from free education on Tastylive to transparent customer service — and why betting everything on authentic content paid off. You’ll also hear his thoughts on broken systems, the future of education, and what separates genuine content from noise.

This isn’t Scott’s first rodeo. He and Tom previously built Thinkorswim — you’ve probably heard of it — which was acquired by TD Ameritrade (now part of Charles Schwab). Today, Tastytrade serves thousands of active traders while Tastylive produces 10 hours of live market content daily, has 447K+ and growing subscribers on YouTube, and their videos regularly get hundreds of thousands of views! Tastytrade is the brokerage platform where viewers can actually execute trades — turning educational content into trading customers.

• Why “that’s the way it is” is a terrible excuse
• The real reason customer service is falling apart
• How AI can remove gatekeepers and speed things up
• Why insurance and financial products are too complicated
• How Scott thinks about risk-taking in your 20s
• College, cheating, and what education is (and isn’t) worth
• Autonomous vehicles, safety, and the future of driving
• Why Scott has never been on social media
• What makes Tastytrade content actually trustworthy
• The culture loss in remote work — and what to do about it

• 00:34 – Building Tastytrade through free, educational content
• 04:51 – Using goodwill as a business strategy
• 08:06 – Why most firms can’t copy Tastytrade’s model
• 12:25 – Real customer service vs. being treated like a number
• 18:06 – What’s broken in big industries
• 20:17 – “Change the industry” as a mindset
• 26:15 – Encouraging young people to take risks
• 28:40 – College isn’t for everyone (and that’s okay)
• 32:27 – How AI will reshape learning — and teaching
• 34:17 – Riding in a Waymo and the case for autonomous driving
• 40:11 – Social media, screen time, and mental health
• 44:37 – Creating honest content in a hype-driven world
• 46:55 – Why they brought employees back to the office
• 52:06 – From Thinkorswim to Tastytrade
• 54:09 – Who Tastytrade is really for (and how it’s evolving)

• Tastytrade: website
• Tastylive: YouTube Channel

Related Episodes:

• Ankit Somani | Ex-Google, Rare-Earth-Free Motors, $20M Seed, Rethinking College
• Dr. Shalabh Gupta | Biotech, AI, and Making Dialysis Optional
• Remote Work in Today’s Financial Advisory Industry | Joe Cantanucci

Entrepreneur Perspectives is produced by QuietLoud Studios — a modern media network and a KazSource brand.

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Music by Jess & Ricky: SoundCloud

The post Tastytrade: How a Trading & Media Empire Was Built by Giving Everything Away | Scott Sheridan CEO — EP189 appeared first on KazSource.

Dr. Shalabh Gupta is the founder of Unicycive, a biotech company working to simplify treatment for dialysis patients. He’s also a physician, former Genentech executive, and someone who thinks deeply about careers, leadership, and the role of AI in healthcare.

In this episode, we cover the problem of pill burden, how to reverse engineer your career, and what most people misunderstand about medical education.

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Entrepreneur Perspectives is produced by QuietLoud Studios — a modern media network and a KazSource brand.

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The post Dr. Shalabh Gupta | Unicycive Founder on Biotech, Careers, Pill Burden, AI in Healthcare | EP188 appeared first on KazSource.

Conifer co-founder Ankit Somani left Google to build something with more heart — and fewer rare-earth magnets.

Backed by a $20M seed round, Conifer is making electric motors that are clean, compact, and don’t rely on China-controlled materials. In this conversation, Ankit talks about the problem they’re solving, what it’s like building real hardware in a software-driven world, and why he’s telling his kids not to go to college.

We also get into the mindset side of entrepreneurship: parenting in the age of AI, staying grounded through spiritual practice, hiring for “high agency,” and handling the daily chaos of startup life.

This isn’t a pitch deck. It’s the real conversation founders actually want to hear.

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The post Ankit Somani | From Google to Conifer: Rare-Earth-Free Motors, $20M Seed, and Rethinking College | EP187 appeared first on KazSource.

Two men talking about fatherhood, presence, and managing expectations. This isn’t a blueprint. It’s a conversation.

Vin Infante has strong views — on work, fatherhood, therapy, homeschooling, entrepreneurship, and what it means to show up as a man. You might not agree with all of it, but that’s the point. These are the kind of conversations that surface things many won’t say out loud. Vin is a former FDNY firefighter and mental performance coach.

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The post Fatherhood and Untangling Expectations with Vin Infante | EP186 appeared first on KazSource.

With early backing from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and a $40M Series A led by Framework Ventures and Polychain Capital, Meanwhile is revolutionizing life insurance with Bitcoin-denominated policies. Co-Founder Zac Townsend explains how digital currency and modern tech are making life insurance more accessible — while solving the industry’s legacy system problems. Zac also shares insights on fundraising, working with high-profile investors, and why podcasting builds credibility in the crypto space.

00:14 – Bitcoin Life Insurance: Philosophy & Mission

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The post Bitcoin Life Insurance? How Zac Townsend and Meanwhile Are Rebuilding a $1T Industry | EP185 appeared first on KazSource.

In this episode, Eric talks with Joe Cantanucci, CEO and Founding Partner of AdvisorLink, about today’s rapidly changing financial advisory industry. With 25 years of experience, Joe shares practical insights on how remote work is reshaping productivity, mentorship, and client relationships in a field that is about to experience the Great Wealth Transfer.

00:00 – Remote Work Challenges vs. Traditional Office Expectations

Related episodes: Developing Soft Skills and AI at Work with Robin Daniels | Serious People Will Always Read with Eric Jorgenson

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The post EP184 | Remote Work in Today’s Financial Advisory Industry | Joe Cantanucci appeared first on KazSource.

In this episode, Eric talks with Yehuda Niv, Founder & CEO of Spines, an Israel-based AI-based book publishing platform that’s transforming how authors publish their work. From his early recognition of AI’s potential to his mission of helping one million authors get published, Yehuda shares his vision for democratizing the publishing industry.

00:00 – AI and the Future of Work

Entrepreneur Perspectives is part of the KazSource family. We’re building a modern media network through QuietLoud Studios, SportsEpreneur, and KazCM.

Host, Eric Kasimov: X | LinkedIn

The post EP183 | Yehuda Niv | Democratizing Publishing with AI & The Future of Books appeared first on KazSource.