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Hell everyone, welcome to another brand new episode of Startups. They'll say, this is Anthony Pracassi, your host is always I am here joined by Sebastian Sulma, currently the co founder of Quid. He joins us from Mexico City. Actually, Sebastian, you're my first guest from Mexico and that part of the world, so welcome. And before Sebastian introduces himself, I
mean I've found sebastian background to be super fascinating. I mean, he's a global citizen right now he's in Mexico, but he's traveled to all different parts of the world, worn multiple different hats. And what he's doing now is a Quid, which is a security focused company, which he'll tell us more about. But let's hear from Sebastian himself about background and what what did what brought him to quit. So Sebastian, welcome to the show.
Hi Anthony, great to be here. So I'm actually Czech, Mexican Chexican. I've lived my whole life between very safe Europe and unfortunately, let's safe Latin America, but beautiful of course, hence what we're working on at QUIT, which i'll talk about a bit later. My career started very young and entrepreneur since I can remember. I always loved buying and selling all sorts of stuff and had a big, a pretty decent import expert company when I was a teen.
We sold over all sorts of stuff all the way from watches to merchandising, and and then I went to explored a couple of businesses in all sorts from from liquor to all sorts of electronics products, et cetera. And then I well studied and went into venture. I spent two and a half years in venture, helped to build a VC fund, raised a bunch of money, invested in over forty companies myself, and that was a lot of
fun and I really enjoyed doing that. But then, you know, I had to turn to what my heart was telling me, and that's what we're here today.
Excellent, as I rightly said, I mean fascinating background checksicon is the term that I've never heard of before, so I should get into that. So thanks to your parents, I guess, you know, so let's maybe start there, Sebastian, how much of your blended culture has kind of influenced you in who you are? You said, you know, you had a family business even when you were a teen. I'm assuming the roots started growing back then into what
you wanted to do. There was a lot of childhood focused to me now, influences from your childhood rather to who you are. Can you share anything that you can remember as to what your influences were?
Yeah, yeah, sure, so no, I'm absolutely very very grateful and pactful to my right, I speak all the languages next to them, and thanks to their efforts, and like I said, you know, very grateful. I think you know, what influenced me the most is really really the contrast you know between those two cultures, Latin American cultures. Mexican
culture is a very warm culture. It's a culture where you know, people on the street are very friendly and the food is incredible, right, and everyone's like, you know, very warm. It's a very relationship driven, right and versus you know, Czech Republic in Central and Eastern Europe, they're also a relationship driven, but it's a bit colder, right, Like people don't smile necessarily, right, and the nonverbal language
is quite a bit different, right. So that helps a lot, right in the business context to understand that it's not meant meant in a negative way.
And that's when I said, let's blame it on the weather and both the places right now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And my father he is a finance guy and my mom is a designer. You never, you know, driven me towards being an entrepreneur. I guess it's something I was more or less born with. And the taking you know, big risks and going all in, that's something I've uh, I've been inspired by online, not really not really there, got it?
Got it? Okay, So you you obviously started off there. But when it came to studying and growing up, I mean, what did you eventually choose to study before you actually moved on to you know, investing and stuff.
Yeah, I did that a very neutral agree, business management. I like engineering, and I've always thinker it around, but I don't think that's where my my talent was. I'm more of a business guy than than an engineer.
Got it. Got it? So, giving you a background Sebastian. I mean, do you spend a lot of time in both parts of the world or I mean, so tell us about that. How is that life?
Yeah? Yeah, so our tech team is based mainly in the Czech Republic. We'll they have one person supporting the time zone and everything, and it's it's it's good because the Church Republic has a lot of great technical talent, a lot of value for money, you know, it's not
been inflated by US prices like Mexico, right. And it's also I think a place where people have understood already what having equity in a company means, right, because there have been a couple of success stories, whereas in Latin, even though the culture towards equity, people will always tend to go for cash. Right. That's my personal experience, at least from what I've what I've seen and observed. Yeah.
Yeah, so right after you did your college, I mean I see that you have a little bit of a stint with y Combinator as well, I mean are and then obviously you mentioned about the venture side of things. So how is that? I mean, you know, working with startups, working with you know, investors, scouting startups, and you also said earlier, you invested in party plus startups yourself. What was that experience, like, I mean, and what kind of do you want to say? Okay, enough of this, enough
of putting my own money into other people's pockets. Let's let's start quid where you know, I want to build something on my own.
No, I love venture and I look forward to getting back to it one day. I think it's super exciting. I love it because you know, you get to meet super interesting people, people that are solving real problems, not made up problems. And that's where I think it gets exciting, like things that really improve someone's life. And I'd say that there's the best form of charity from my perspective,
right to create a business that will benefit humanity overall. Right, And you know, while I was focused primarily on developing markets, So the interesting part was that an interesting upside, Right, we could take the startups early on, invest smaller checks, their impact with those checks, and then ultimately also help them a lot more thanks to our connections. Right, So
it was not just investing. It was a lot of helping intro introducing them to other investors, et cetera, Right, helping them build their teams and stuff, and that was super satisfying. Right after, after a while, you know, I saw that there is you know, not as many as many real problems, right, and that's why we're building Quid. Right. Security has been something that's been always on my mind. Right, It's it's it's been I have a very very hard
personal experience there. So my one of my family members got chat dead in their own apartment, and you at least bite having a traditional security system, right and cameras they the system didn't prevent that from happening, right. It
really really frustrated me. Right, So security was one of my focus areas invested in a couple of companies in the space, and but I didn't see anyone, you know, taking and building this one big, you know, market defining company, uh, that that would that will really change all those lives, right, which is what I always looked at for as an investor. And so yeah, so that's why that's why we decided to build.
It with Yeah, yeah, that's thanks for sharing the background. I mean I was gonna ask you, I mean, was there a personal influence? I Mean I didn't imagine it will be a sad one, but I mean, you know here we are, right, I mean, you know that's that's your inspiration every day, to prevent those sort of things from happening, not only in your part of the world, but I mean elsewhere as well. So let's deep dive
into cred itself. I mean, you know, so you saw this tragic incident happen in your household, and you know, obviously there's so many different hardware manufacturing security providers out there, and you already said, you know, I mean it's not preventing. I mean it's it's almost a ditterent. For example, and I have a home security system in my house as well. I mean, you know, for the most part, I mean we open, we we when the alarm is on, we we we kill it and say it not to call
the cops or whatnot. I mean, you know, that's that's the only thing. I mean, you know, people can pay, for example, switch off your power supply from outside. I mean, the security system just just goes off. I mean, you know, nobody can do anything right. So again, I mean, given that the market is kind of much filled with units, whether it's from this part of the world or Asia,
it is so many people out there. I mean, what did you set out to do as your vision with quit and I mean especially focused on the demographic that you're going after, Sebastian, what will be a right?
So the vision is to prevent Fred from happening and to make security accessible, right, And I believe if this cannot be achieved with a great IoT product or with the same professional product that we've been selling over the last one hundred and fifty years. So literally, right, Like, if you take a look at what ADT stands for, do you know what it sounds for? Just a good question?
Is it detection something an.
American American district telegraph? Right? It tells you a lot about you know, the age of the company, right. And it goes all the way back, you know, to the first alarm systems in New York City being implemented and directly being connected to the police stations with a trick wire. Right. And when you think of the censor of today, right, the modern sensor of today, right, which are in the vast majority of traditional security systems, it's very similar rights
this trick wire, which is not folk proof, right. It results in ninety nine plus percent of alarms actually being false positives. Right, So it's just not a real alarm.
Right, yeah, so so so you know due to you know, eighty percent can be can be prevented and twenty percent is the hard heart stuff.
Right. So right when we when we started quit, right, the last thing we wanted to do is hardware. We me, coming from a VC background, you know, hardware is hard, right, that's always you know what you hear, what you see, and you try, you know to prevent it those and then and then you know, unless it's like something you know,
more simple to build and very very very direct. But then again, you know, like can you do real innovation without doing the hard work, like I'm talking about life changing real innovation, right, And we very quickly found out, you know, after getting access to SKI and s d ks and all this stuff from all the manufacturers, right, we really in detail try to make it work, but unfortunately we didn't improve the experience in the in the way we needed to write to actually you know, achieve
our mission. And that's why, you know, for my past I reached out to a bunch of contexts that unfortunately had and that's how we how we started doing our own own devices right where you know, the devices are a lot faster in terms of reaction, right, it enables us to do a lot more stuff and to provide this this great experience that actually prevent scream from company.
Got it? So maybe we can go onto the hood a little bit, Sebastian, I mean, so I totally support the vision make it accessible and prevent this from happening. What are you doing differently? I mean you did say you try to not get into the hardware, but I mean you do have some hardware sort of companies right now, So can you talk a little bit about what is the offering and what what happens? Let's say, I mean, or if I need to set it up in my house, how do I go about doing it?
Yep RT. So the way it works today right is we do we do have a complete set of devices. It's twelve skaus, so we govern essentially everything you know, all the way from smart access to the actual video monitoring right to sensors, et cetera. For you to be able to live in one app right and not have to leave leave that ecosystem. Then you know, the core component here is the combination of AI and humans. So we contextually understand what's going on in a location, whether
it's a home or business. We understand if it's you entering your home or if it's a potential intruder. And if we see the moment that there is a in the moment that we see that the potential intrusion is about to happen or is ongoing right before you enter your parameter, essentially, right, we immediately activate and learn. We'll let you know and when in a couple of seconds someone from our monitoring center connects and take a look
at what's going on. Right in the monitoring center, you know, the same thing, right, they see who the property members are. They only get access to the cameras you allow right within the protocol. And essentially there they have this modern right VMS and ticketing system which allows them to take action really fast. Firstly prevent right and then send help as fast as possible if it's needed. Right. So I think I think that's really where you know our edulized.
You know, we're not just a company doing nice devices or a nice app, right, or have the AI vision component right, which is which is super important and it being fast. Right, we also have this VMS and service stack, right.
So it's a very complex product, right, it took us a lot of time to develop a lot more than we wanted to right and right now the service is only available in Mexico, but because you're a front, we can send you some to test out and it will unfortunately not be connected to a monitoring center yet but soon.
I mean, I'm curious to see some demos of this and see the whole AI part of it in action, which is which will be pretty cool. So I mean, how has that option been so far, Sebastian, I mean, but what stage is the company in. What's the early feedback that you're getting from early adopters?
Yea, so we are. We've raised about eight hundred thousand to date. How we have a functioning product and service right and we're still calling it being up because we're by perfectionists in that sense, but we should, we should have the full version coming out very very soon in this quarter. And what stage are we in? Well, we are alive in Mexico and we have about dirty customers right now. Most of them are businesses that are piloting right our solution for several of their locations to bring
it out to hundreds. And I'd say Mexico is a great place to be doing that because even though Mexican customers are more demanding on the service level per se, they're they're less demanding on the product level, right. So it's not like they're going to sue you if you know, a button doesn't work properly, right and you don't get a response, right, which is it can be a life or life that you know, threatening kind of situation.
Right.
So of course this is super important for us. That's why that's why we're holding back, let's say, on growth to other countries directly on their our platform, right, which is quick.
Quick, where are you doing the manufacturing of the hardware?
Meanly in Asia?
So okay, yeah, got it right now.
I'd love to I'd love to work with Mexican manufacturers. The thing is that the technology is not here and the prices are not here, right, or we're open to other other places, but it's just where we found fund Yeah.
Yeah, I mean I understand. I mean, you know, especially with your vision to make it accessible to people, I mean, you need to figure out buying balance between you know, what you put into your hardware and I mean how how does that whole package become accessive? So the other question I had on the product itself Sebastianism. I mean, is it like self install or for businesses? I mean you guys do the install as well.
You can self install it, but we in Mexico do everything. So we have a network of installer partners that we've trained, and essentially we're three sixties kind of solution, right, So you could say customers appreciate.
Yeah, that makes sense. So, first of all, on Quid, I mean, congratulations on the launch and the growth. I mean it feels like a really important startup. I mean especially considering I mean the crime rate and everything you see on TV. So hopefully Quid comes in as a big factor to help bring that down and help people be safe. But I want to go back to a little bit Sebastian to your days as a venture guy,
if you will, and obviously you already mentioned it. I mean you mean, you meet so many people with the real purpose behind there start up, solving for real world problems.
And given that this show it kind of talks about both sides of the coin, both founders and investors, I mean I want to hear from you about any big takeaways or learnings that you had round meetings with those founders about you know do's and don'ts that you tried to kind of bring into Quid and said, Okay, I mean I will not be like that particular founder if you will, or you know, here are my learnings that
I'm putting into my real life or my startup. I mean, any anything that you can think of as big takeaways from your career as a VC, right.
I mean the first I'm gonna mention, it's really it's really hard, right, Like what we're doing at Quid is the hardest thing I've done in my life by far, right, And I think evaluating that that as hard as you can is very very important, right, because I think Jensen hunts at something quite quite interesting, right, he said, you know the superpower founders is that right, you don't know how hard it is, and we'll get the superpower is that we keep lying to ourselves, right, And that's true.
I mean, we're doing it's freaking crazy, right, then, you know, I'd say the other aspect is as validated as hard as as as much as you can. I think one of our mistakes is we had very early on we had over ten thousand customers signed up, right, And which is which is amazing, Right, this SELP does raise and everything. We didn't ask those customers opinion, right we made We made a couple of right bets right on on that. And you know, even we didn't convert many of them,
right like because the willing to having the difference. You know, oh hey this is actually quite expensive, right, So so always like try to transact as early as possible.
Right.
And then another one I'd say, is is team a critical right we made even though you know it came from a venture background, and the things I'm saying now, I sent them to founders and I said, a bunch of time, I still make those mistakes right in one way or another the founding team. It's just so important because you know, we made a couple of wrong choices on on the technical side right of the team. I
think most startups wouldn't have survived what we have. We have and today I'm really happy to say, you know that we're shipping on a weekly basis, We have a weekly demo, we have stuff really to show for and and I'd say having that from the beginning, right like, especially if you're non technical, like have a demo at least once a week, right, if not more with your technical team to show them what they're actually progressing on, right, like,
like actually what they're what they're what they're getting done, get into GitHub, understand it, right, because you know, it can be quite dangerous, you know, especially if you raise money, right and you're like, ah, yeah, sure a twelve months,
right or have ten months? You know, it can be quite easy to disassociate yourself with that, right, especially if it's you know, not someone that's built a billion dollar plus business before, even if they built big businesses, which was in our case, right like they were they were
unicorn engineers, right, it is engineers from unicorns. But the thing is that it's very different to be in an enterprise and to be shipping under that than to be building everything by yourself, right, even if they had hobby projects, et cetera. A lot of things can come in between. So I'd say that like focus on results, on transacting and try to you know, I think there's two paths you can take here. One you can try to raise a lot of money, right. Two you don't raise and
you know, don't have this burden on your shoulders. Yeah, I think it depends very much on the company.
Yeah, yeah, great, great insights. Thanks for shedding, and you mentioned team as well. It's back to QUID. I mean you did mention earlier you have a team in Mexico as well as some folks are. How did you go about constructing your team? I mean when you decided to build QUID, I mean, did you have a fairly neat idea of saying, Okay, these are the people I want or you know, I mean you had to build it brick by brick.
Yeah, yeah, I had some ideas, but it ended up being break by brick, right, same thing right, Like, same thing with team building, but getting the right people on board that's really hard. It's really hard to to to
sell right, Like in our space. It's not like a sass you know, where you get a lead and you're like okay, bay here and you link them up, you mboard them, boom, right, And this is this is quite complicated, and I think because of the complexity of security is why many investors shy away from investing in security, which I understand, right, because it's because it's very hard for smaller teams to execute well in this industry, right, very hard.
It's it's it's it's complex, right, you have all these moving layers, right, and if you take a look at how the security companies have today operate right, like to give the specific example in this space, right, it's a it's a glued together puzzle kind of thing, right where there's missing pieces of the puzzle over the place. And I find it insane. You know that that it's still
it's still works this way. So that's why that's why we see such a huge opportunity and building quick come and yeah, now that makes sense.
So what's what's next for Quinn Sebastian. What what's the next twelve months twenty four months looking like?
Yeah, so I'm happy to say actually that we're living off our revenues now, so thanks, it's pretty rare. We did over one hundred thousand revenues last year. We're probably going to do over one hundred thousand this quarter. Projecting well beyond that, you you can you can request my deck if you're an investor. And what we're planning is this year we're planning to two more devices which are going to take take us to the next level really
like on top global security device level. Another thing is we're also probably going to open up more countries this year already. So we have a closed deal for the Czech Republic with a huge partner to build a big challenger there, and we're also working on about half a dozen others. Yeah, we're going to raise around soon end of this quarter. We're going to raise one and if not earlier, and existing investors are committing. So I'm quite
excited about that. And beyond that, you know, I definitely see how we're going to reach beyond a billion dollars in nerve Ansota the next ten years. Right, It's going to take us longer than we'd like to clearly, but a straight face.
Yeah, that is awesome. I mean, that is great progress. Congratulations to you and your team. I'm sure whoever's looking to invest, I mean, this is the great place to invest, just based off of your numbers. And speaking of the numbers, Sebastian, one of the things I find in a lot of startups that do well is a founder lead sales and
founder lad growth in the early stages. I mean, you know, there are a bunch of startups that I've seen, I mean where the CEO or one of the founders says I don't want to be part of sales, I mean, leave me behind the scenes and I will take care
of this. But the most successful ones, at least in the early stages, the founders are out there, you know, doing road shows on the street, I mean, talking to people and selling even before they think of bringing in someone to you know, just do sales full time, right. I mean, what is your opinion on that sort of concept? I mean, has that worked for you? I mean, based on what you're saying, it looks like I mean you're always out there selling.
Right, Yeah, we're out here selling. I'd say it's very So I'd take two things. One is, I think it's very important for founders to be involved in sales because of the product componant. If you want to build a great product, right, you need to know what your customers want, right, or at least get feedback from them in some form, right, So it's quite important to have that. On the other side, I do say, like you have to be efficient. Time is the most scarce resource, so you have to be
as efficient as possible. You only have a couple of bets you can make. You can everything. No, you should not, right, even if you let's say that in that perspective, like if you're a founder, try to be very savvy in your time. Try to you know, can use AI. Try It depends very much on your on your self process. Right. If you have a bunch of inbound, that's amazing. If you're doing a hardcore outbound, then get some AI tools,
get help. Consider either you know a great outbound agency or higher person right that that knows how to do it well. And yeah, i'd say get this you know b DR component going. And then and then you know, come in into the to the real discussions right where you're where you can really bring a lot. You know, if you if you're in a stage where you don't have the cash and you're figuring it out, let's say, you know, do it yourself right, like we've we've done
everything right, Like yeah that quit. So yeah, we've tried it all out.
Yeah that makes sense. That makes sense. Speaking of AI, Sebastian, I mean, you you are using AI heavily. Looks like in Quid what sort of AI are you using? Is that homegrown? I mean are you adopting some of the technologies out there and building it into Quid's products. And I mean, and I'm assuming you know there are skeptics out there on AI. There are people who are gung ho on AI that it might potentially replace us and
all of that. So it's a two part question. I mean, you know, what's AI is influence and quid and then your general opinion on how AI is reshaping our world of technology.
Right, I'll start with the ladder because I find it quite funny. Like in Mexico, we often come across people that you know, are like, hey, you know, and how can we trust the I you know, when they have guards that work twenty four hours a day, right, like twenty four to twenty four hour shifts, which you know what that means is they sleep on the job, right, there is no other way to do it right, or
they get very distracted if they don't. So I find that funny because they're like asking me if they can trust a technology that doesn't sleep and you know, works twenty four seven versus a person right that you know, probably won't catch an intruder coming in if they're sleeping, right. So I'd say we're battling that you know, traditional thinking. But we definitely see this changing even in a you know, traditional country like Mexico where labor force is not necessarily expensive. Right,
even in Mexico, we're seeing this price demand push. Right. Our product is less expensive than having a twenty four hour security guard at your door, right, whether it's a business or home.
Right.
So yeah, what we're what we're doing is, of course, we're taking everything we can from the open source world. I honestly think that it's very very hard to compete as any startup with open source components and division space. Right. So we are experimenting with several models, you know, especially in relation to the contextual understanding, which is which is
what i'd say it is a core differentiator. Yeah, you know, there's a big difference between hey, understanding if it's a human, or understanding if it's a view right entering or if it's an actual intruder, and what are the signs of that being an intruder and how fast do we need to react and all of that it's very very important. So for that, we're using what can be called selective structured state spased sequence models. And we have a couple, you know, more things we're going around with.
Yeah, yeah, thanks for sharing, Sebastian. I mean so so cool what you guys are doing with quid. I'm so glad I ran into you. So I'm going to keep track of what you guys are up to. Wish you guys well. I'll be a cheerleader here, keep us posted on what you're doing next and your next round of fundraising. Will be sure to share all your details to to
our community. But thanks so much Sebastian for jumping on startup still Say and sharing a story, a super and super awesome one at that, and we should the very best.
Thanks. Thanks, Anthony, I appreciate your time and having us here.
Yeah, welcome. Take care of Sebastian.
You two have a good one.