Entrepreneur Perspectives – Guest: David Selinger – Company: Deep Sentinel – Host: Eric Kasimov
[00:00–05:30] The Power of Podcasts and Personality
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.
[05:30–10:15] The Flaws in Traditional Security Systems
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.
[10:15–15:00] Real-Time Crime Intervention with Deep Sentinel
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.
[15:00–20:00] Why Deep Sentinel Isn’t Just Another Alarm System
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.
[20:00–25:00] Scaling with AI: From Mailrooms to Entire Cities
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,
[25:00–30:00] Patents, Personalized Models, and Smarter Security
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.
[30:00–35:00] Hiring, Ethics, and Military Lessons in Leadership
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?
[35:00–39:00] Parenting, Passions, and Personal Support
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.
[39:00–44:00] College, Careers, and Modern Success Paths
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]
[44:00–48:00] Man’s Search for Meaning and Rethinking Fulfillment
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.
[48:00–52:00] The Amazon Years and Birth of Redfin
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
[52:00–57:00] Building Redfin, Going Viral, and Changing Real Estate
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.
[57:00–59:35] Deep Sentinel $15 million Series B Funding, Scaling, Future of AI Security
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.
