Mercedes Soria - CTO at Kightscope

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we are talking to Mercedes, the CTO at Knightscope, and we discuss investing in people who invest in themselves, tips for gaining confidence, and the crime-fighting robots her company makes are so cool, I go visit their office in California. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. So I was scrolling through my feed one day on LinkedIn, and I saw the future. And I took a screenshot of it, and I sent it to Chloe. And I said, "Chloe, this is like," first, I thought it was like a 3D rendering, like it was fake, right? A little R2-D2 thing bouncing around the parking lot looking all futuristic. Then I dug deep and I saw that it wasn't fake. Like, these things are actually out there. And then I said, "Chloe, you have to call these people. Figure out who their CTO or their leader in technology is. You've got to have them on the show because this right here is, like, Tesla level stuff. This is what the future is, and you guys are building it."

(Mercedes at 00:01:19) Yeah. I mean, if you look at it, you were building a self-driving car. It's exactly the same technology. The only difference is that ours is smaller and there's no people inside. So we have to do everything that a safe car has to do, a safe driving car has to do. We have to avoid obstacles. We have to speed up when we need to get somewhere. We have to stop when people are wanting to cross the street. All of that technology is the same, exactly the same that what you have in a Tesla car today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:47) I love it. But let's back up a little bit because I want to know more about who you are as a person. So please share with me your earliest love of technology. Like, when did you first experience technology?

(Mercedes at 00:02:02) So I wasn't born here in the US. I was born in South America, and it just so happens that my mother's side of the family lives in Canada. So, obviously, Canada is usually ahead of technology than South America. So I'm from Ecuador. And when I was young, I was probably—I didn't finish my primary school yet—my uncle from Canada comes with this box and he says, "Hey, this is called the Commodore 64." So now I am dating myself. But he comes up with that and he starts to teach me, "Hey, you can write this code, you can make these games and you can do all this stuff." And I was like, "Wow, this is amazing. This is wonderful. Can I have another one?" So he would bring different types of computers when he would come to visit, and then little by little I would start to get into those a little bit more. And then in Ecuador when you're going to high school, you have to choose. You have the option to choose between three different focuses in your college. You can choose between biomedical, you can choose between physics and math, or you can do social sciences. So at that point I decided I'm going to physics and math because that is the path that will take me to a computer science career. So I studied that. There was a lot of math. There was a lot of physics because they don't teach you things like here in the US. They teach you to play music, do physical activity, all the stuff that they teach you, the basic studies that you have to go through to go to college. So I didn't have any of that. So as soon as I started my college in Ecuador, it was all computer science all the way. And then via my school there was a one-time exchange program between my school in Ecuador and Middle Tennessee State University in Tennessee of all places. So I was able to come to the US to study computer science. And then I studied there and I got a master's in computer science. And then I decided I might want to stay in this country. I really like it. So I took a chance and I applied to about 50 to 100 different companies and I only got calls from three. So I got those three interviews, I got one job offer, and that's how I stayed. And then my career has always been computer programming, science, technology, that type of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:21) So you started out writing code, right? You actually did—you have experience writing code or did you just have love for the technology?

(Mercedes at 00:04:29) I started writing code in my first year of my bachelor's degree in Ecuador. That's because I already had a bachelor's degree in computer science. So I did three years in Ecuador and I did a lot of—back in that time it was Pascal, it was BASIC and that sort of thing. And my degree, you have to defend a thesis when you graduate. So mine was how to write an accounting system from scratch. That was my thesis in Ecuador.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:58) That's amazing.

(Mercedes at 00:05:00) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was obviously a basic one, but we had to do all the work that that entailed, you know, credits and debits and the money comes out of this account, goes into the other one. You can check this way, all of that good stuff. And then when I came to the US, when I started to get involved in things like HTML and web development, at that point, we used to have the chat windows that people used to talk through on the internet when the internet was really new and got more into a lot of Microsoft type technology. I did Visual Basic. I did e-commerce servers. I did Office servers, all of that. I was Microsoft all the way for a long time. And then when I started evolving in my career and I realized that what I really wanted to do was web applications, that's when I decided to move into things like Python, HTML, JavaScript, that sort of thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:51) Nice. And then how did you end up at Knightscope?

(Mercedes at 00:05:56) So I used to work with a company called Deloitte. It's a professional services firm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:03) Yeah. They're like massive, right?

(Mercedes at 00:06:04) It's like 150,000 employees around the world. So I worked there, and then my client used to be in Atlanta. So I would travel from Nashville, Tennessee to Atlanta very often. And then in one of those trips, I met Bill, who's the CEO of Knightscope. And we started to talk about, "Hey, what do you know about technology? I'm starting a company. We'd love to have you over." And then eventually, they convinced me to start what is now Knightscope. So I was employee number three. And I had to get everything from the beginning, right? We didn't have anything. We didn't have anyone to say, "This is how you're going to build this." So we're thinking about, "Okay, so I have a robot that is going to move around. What kind of information do I really need to have in this robot? Okay. So I want to be able to detect the license plate. So I need a camera. Okay. This camera needs to be able to see." So then computer vision came in because now we need to detect and there's an image, there's a license plate. And then they come in and the speed. Well, we have to do it locally because if we send it to the cloud, then it takes time to go back and forth. And if I'm a security application, I need better processing power and I can't wait for it to come back from the cloud. So those are the initial decisions that we had to make that I had to be, "Okay, this is the good thing to do and this is not a good thing to do. What do we leave in the machine? What do we process in AWS? Do we even use AWS?" All of those decisions from zero because we started with nothing. So I had to do all that from zero. And we have a good platform right now. It's extensible. We do code deployments every two weeks. Our DevOps team is pretty engaged and pretty busy. Our engineers are doing—sometimes we do fixes every day because our customers want everything to be up all the time, right? They're very picky because it's security.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:57) Well, we're here to serve the market. So we just figure out what they want, then we charge them accordingly so that the business can grow and they can get what they want.

(Mercedes at 00:08:05) The funny part for us is that there's been a lot of press coverage for Knightscope. So a lot of people think that the machine does some stuff that it doesn't do. Like, for example, I have people who come to me and they say, "Hey, I was at the mall and when the machine saw me, it started following me." And I'm like, "Well, the machine doesn't really follow people." But they think it does, right? So out of those things that people think that the machine already does, out of those comes some really good ideas of, "Okay, this is something that we probably should do." For example, "Hey, we are at the mall and they're like, hey, do you detect temperature?" We're like, "Oh, wait," because there's pipes at the mall, there's pipes at any other offices that you go to, and typically the security guards are checking these things to make sure that there's no accidents. So we're like, "Oh, bingo. We need a thermal camera so we can detect temperature." And little by little, the product has been evolving in terms of what we want to offer our customers. The majority of it is about what they want.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:05) That's so neat. And then so can it, like, can I buy a pretzel at the mall and bring it to me?

(Mercedes at 00:09:12) Not yet. But what it could do is if you walk by it, it will detect your phone, your MAC address of your phone. It will take a picture of your face, run a face detection. It will also—if you go outside to the parking lot—it will take a picture of your license plate and determine what kind of car you drive. So the one thing that sometimes people get a little iffy about is, "This machine is collecting a lot of information about me and, hey, privacy," right? So what people don't usually realize is that when you go in your daily life today, you go to the grocery store and there's a camera right at the door. So they're taking your picture and they know where you are at all times. When you go to the bank, there's a camera when you take your money out. When you go, even when you go to wash your car, people now have cameras. So that whole perception of privacy doesn't apply when you're outside in a public place. So it technically applies when you're at your home and it's your decision if you want to put your house in a video or not. But as soon as you step out of your house, this condition of privacy is really gone. And when people see the results of bringing the machines to their workplaces specifically, like corporate campuses—they are some of our biggest clients—crime has really gone down to like zero, which is something we didn't expect, right? So there's places in which, for example, a hospital down in LA that we deployed at. So they used to have—they have a third shift because the emergency room has to be open 24/7. So there's a shift from 11 to 7 AM where people would just be afraid to go outside because there were incidents two times a day, three times a day. Somebody would break into a car. Somebody would get assaulted, all those things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:05) It's not a good hospital.

(Mercedes at 00:11:07) And that is the hospital. The neighborhood is not great. And to be honest, when we deployed a robot, we're like, "What are they going to do to our machine?" Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) Oh, that's right.

(Mercedes at 00:11:16) That's what we're thinking, right? And then what happened, we've been there for almost two years, and the crime rate has gone to zero. Nothing has happened in that place since the machine has been there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:27) I just got back from the hospital, like, five minutes ago.

(Mercedes at 00:11:30) Oh, okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:31) Oh, I'm fine. No. We had a—Monday, we had a baby boy.

(Mercedes at 00:11:36) Congratulations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:38) Yeah. And then—

(Mercedes at 00:11:39) I saw a girl on your website. Is that the second baby?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:42) The girl is the first baby.

(Mercedes at 00:11:44) Okay. So I know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:45) This is the second baby. Yep. And then I got back and one of my people got—

(Mercedes at 00:11:51) A little baby boy. Awesome. Call it baby. Yes. That is awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:57) I know.

(Mercedes at 00:11:58) People always ask me, they're like, "How about kids?" Right? And I'm like, "I have robots. I have robots because I don't have kids, right? There's just no time."

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:13) Yes. I'll tell you what. I would be happy with kids or robots. Like, I think robots are so cool. And, yes, we have a startup that happens along with the show. We had the show and then it got popular and then a startup came out of it because people were asking for content on the show. And then we ended up saying, "All right, fine. We'll build a leadership program." And then we ended up doing that, which I saw you've got leadership awards. You're a fantastic leader.

(Mercedes at 00:12:43) Thank you. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:43) How do you say the name of that organization? Is it A-B-I-E or something?

(Mercedes at 00:12:48) It's a Grace Hopper Celebration. It's the event where they give you the award. Then you have to speak in front of 18,000 people. And then the Abie—the award is called Abie. It's an Abie award. Yeah. It's called Abie. It's Anita Borg .org. That is the organization that I worked for. She was the first female in technology that ever got awarded something. So that's why—that's how they decided to use her name. And she was very—and she pushed women in technology. She pushed for diversity, all those things that we're still pushing for. She was one of the first people to pioneer in that sort of stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:24) I'm going to send you a gift.

(Mercedes at 00:13:26) Sure. What is it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:28) Look at this.

(Mercedes at 00:13:30) Hi, chica. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:32) It's a children's book. It's a children's book. It's called The Princess Physicist. She gets stuck in a tower, but instead of a man coming to save her, she finds a book on physics and saves herself.

(Mercedes at 00:13:44) That is awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:45) She uses physics to get herself out of the tower.

(Mercedes at 00:13:48) Awesome. That is wonderful. I love that. That's awesome. I need that book. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:52) I'm sending you a copy.

(Mercedes at 00:13:54) Cool. Thank you. Do you buy it for your girl? Do you think you're gonna—

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:59) I wrote it.

(Mercedes at 00:13:59) Oh, you wrote it. Sweet. Nice. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:03) So my mom, like, just got a stomachache, went to the hospital, had cancer, passed away in two weeks. And, yeah. And so my brother is a physician, and my sister is a physics teacher. And I'm like this creative podcast engineer guy. And then so we said, "Let's take the money that she left us." She left us $25,000 between the three of us. We each got, like, $7,000 or something. "So let's take that money." And at the time, my wife was pregnant. We were having our little baby girl. And we said, "Let's write some children's books, form a charity, spend all the money printing up thousands of children's books, and then giving them away to homeless pregnant women's shelters, foster families, in-need children, just donating all the books." And, you know, we kept a couple for ourselves and to give away and things like that for the foundation. But, yeah, we did that. And so we called it the Beasley Foundation. We named it after my mom because that's our last name. And then we did that as a project. Took us about eight months to do all the books, form the 501(c)(3), get all the paperwork, actually order all the books and go through customs, do all that stuff, and then deliver them. But I wrote two of them. I wrote Princess Physicist and then one called Back to the Moon, which is a little brother and sister who want to go to the moon. And so that one's to encourage space travel because that's a little thing we could—not Elon Musk, but I can encourage space travel through a children's book. And then this one's to encourage women in STEM. So—

(Mercedes at 00:15:35) That's such an amazing way to spend some money like that. You know? That's amazing. Because normally people would be like, "Oh, yeah. We have inheritance."

(Mercedes at 00:15:44) We'll use it for something. But for you to think about, you must have already known that women in technology is something that maybe needs a little bit more push. That's why maybe you already knew there's not as many women in technology. That's one of the things that I'm also very concerned about and that I try to work on, encouraging more women to come to the field of science and technology.

(Mercedes at 00:16:06) But we're still not there yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:08) Yeah. We have about 11 people here, and we're 50/50 right now.

(Mercedes at 00:16:12) Oh, you have my dream percentage. That's what I wish everywhere would be. I think we're at 30%, which is also good for where we are. Silicon Valley, typically a company like Google says we're doing great, we have 17% women. And we're like, that's not great. And then Microsoft is doing great, we have 19% women. But my personal dream, where I want to get to with Knightscope, is the whole holy grail of 50/50, right? Because there's more women than men actually graduating with computer science degrees these days, but somehow they're not making it to leadership positions. There's a lot of them that seem stuck at the middle management level, and then we have to work on getting them more incentivized to go above that. And that's some of the things that I've done, and that's one of the awards that you saw that I had won.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:08) Oh, well, excellent. Yeah. I'm all about it. It's an interesting line for me as an individual because I definitely support it, but I'm also of the mindset of like, I want the highest quality people. When I have a need, I try to be indifferent, but at the same time, I know this team needs this because it's a culture thing. Sometimes you have to intentionally structure the teams at times. And so it's a tough balance, right? Because you want to be completely diverse and inclusive of everybody. You want to just say it's about the talent and the skill and just first come, first served, I guess, would be the closest way. At the same time, there's this give and take, this struggle. There's no super clear answer on how to deal with it. So I just kind of go with it in each moment, and I try to be the best version of myself, and I try to be objective and get the right person for each job.

(Mercedes at 00:18:13) Yeah. One of the things that I—I read a lot of books. I love to read. If I wasn't in technology, I would have been an editor because I can read all day long, which is great for my job, right? Because I have to be up to speed with all the technologies. So I'm reading papers on how to detect people, faces in a camera, how to do deep learning, all those things, right? But I read about—and one of the things that they said in one of those books was, if you have a need, figure out what you need. And for every resume that you receive, do not show a name. Just do a Sharpie over the name and don't show it. And let people read the resume so they can read the resume for what the resume is as opposed to, hey, this is a woman or this is a guy. That's one of the things that we're starting to do at Knightscope.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00) I like that. That's a good—that's interesting. I haven't heard that before, but that makes sense, right?

(Mercedes at 00:19:07) Yeah. And one of the things that I'll tell you a story, what happened to me when I was at a prior company where I was. There was a guy who was a white guy. I have nothing against white guys, don't get me wrong. It was just that he came to me one day and he said, I'm talking to you, so please don't think it's a bad thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:25) I'm more of a peachy color anyways, so—

(Mercedes at 00:19:27) There you go, you're peachy. Yeah, exactly. So he comes to me and says, the only reason why you've gone so far in your career is because you're female and you're in technology. You're a minority. You're kidding me. I was like, what? Excuse me?

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:40) Somebody said that to you for real? That's like not made up?

(Mercedes at 00:19:43) Not made up. For sure. And I'm like, I didn't even know what to say. I'm looking at this guy and I'm like, excuse me? He says, I want to know when we're going to have a diversity and inclusion team for white guys. And I was like, what? Anyway, so needless to say, the guy was like, off for other reasons, but I think he's not in the company. So obviously, he had a problem. But it was shocking to me because some people think that, but they're not actually saying it to you, right? He actually said it to my face. So that was important. From that moment on, for me, at least the impact that that had on my life was that I'm going to work so hard in everything I do so there's never, ever a doubt that I deserve the place that I have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:26) Look, I'll tell you right here. You know, there's just good people and there's bad people in life, right? And don't ever let that hold you back mentally or—I'm glad that you took it and you're using it as fuel, right? But I would never think that the reason someone's getting ahead is because of their gender or like just say, oh, it's because you're—that's such a weird thing to say. Here's what the world needs more of, and I think I can bring everybody together on this, especially the entrepreneurs and the overachievers like yourself. We need more hungry, driven, obsessed people that just want to do a good job and improve the world. We need more of that.

(Mercedes at 00:21:09) Company culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:11) No, we're trying to recruit those types of people for our company. But I'm sure you know because you're on the executive team, right? It's like you have the executive team, you have that core five, seven people maybe that are like all rock star players, and they just want to make it happen and change the world. And then you have to figure out how to deal with that as you scale.

(Mercedes at 00:21:36) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:36) That's so hard. How many people are you at right now?

(Mercedes at 00:21:39) We're 65 right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:41) Yeah. So you guys are definitely experiencing that.

(Mercedes at 00:21:43) We're growing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, hard. Yeah. So one of the things that we did at the beginning of Knightscope was we had a core of five people that came—three of us that started at the beginning, and then we hired a CFO and another person. So one of the things that we really wanted to do was hire people who had the knowledge of what was current in technology. And it just so happened that it was a recent graduate. But one of the things that we really stand for when we're looking to hire somebody at Knightscope is we want two things. Number one, that emotional intelligence for you to be able to deal with exactly what comes your way and for you to understand that a startup is hard. And number two, they're just never happy. They have a customer-centric attitude that says, okay, so if I was the customer, what would I want my robot to do? So those are things that we really look for. And obviously, we also look for, okay, can they program in Python? Can they do algorithms? Do these people know speech to text? So whichever technology that we're using, that's kind of secondary. But what could make or break a person coming into Knightscope is those two things, which are very important to us. But like you said, I mean, those are the people that everybody wants to have in their teams, and that's why, especially in Silicon Valley, we're fighting with the Facebooks and the Googles and all those people for the same talent, right? So one of the things that we offer as a company is you're going to be working with something that is cutting edge, you're saving people's lives, and you're making an impact. So that's how we sell the dream of Knightscope and why people want to come work here. We've had 10,000 people apply to work at Knightscope. Imagine that. Going through all those resumes, we've only hired those few.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:31) That's amazing. Well, I believe it, right? Because they're hard to find. But the good thing is I heard this terminology today. I'm a big fan of Audible, so I listen to lots of Audible books.

(Mercedes at 00:23:43) Me too. That's how I get through books. Yeah. Why doesn't everybody do that? I know. I don't know. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:49) It prepares me mentally for the day, and it's good. It gets my mindset.

(Mercedes at 00:23:54) I think one day it's going to kill the Kindle, but hey, that's just me. Yeah. People aren't going to want to read anymore. It's just going to be Audible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:01) I had the CTO of Walmart on the show, and a week before he came on the show, they had released their version, their competitor, because they're in this massive battle with Amazon. You know, Walmart and Amazon, right?

(Mercedes at 00:24:14) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:14) And so they just released their version of the Kindle. And I was like, dude, I love Audible so much. Have you heard about that? And he's like, no. He's like, I like Walmart books. And he pulled it up, and I was like, oh, yep.

(Mercedes at 00:24:27) Well, next topic, please.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:30) Yep. Next topic. Sorry. No, but I haven't checked out the app yet, but apparently they're doing exclusive content things. Like some content will only be available through that. But I will tell you what, I have a deep love for Amazon, and I don't know why. But it's just because they make my life so easy.

(Mercedes at 00:24:49) So the current book that I'm listening to on Audible is a Gary Vaynerchuk book. If you just look, if you go to Amazon—

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:57) I already did. Yep.

(Mercedes at 00:24:58) I know. Oh, you have it? The 40-hour workweek book?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:00) Yeah. Oh, yeah.

(Mercedes at 00:25:01) Okay, that's the one I'm reading right now. And I think last week I did Insane Mode, Elon Musk. That's a good book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:09) Oh, he's got a new book?

(Mercedes at 00:25:11) It is not his book. Somebody wrote his biography in that book. It's called Insane Mode. And it walks you through everything that happened at Tesla from the time they started—

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:23) It's a similar one?

(Mercedes at 00:25:24) No, no, that's a different one. No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:24) Okay.

(Mercedes at 00:25:25) It's a different one. It's called Insane Mode.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:28) Yeah, yeah. I wrote it down. I did not know there was another Elon Musk book.

(Mercedes at 00:25:33) It's awesome. That was awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:35) Yes. Yeah. So you're physically located in Mountain View right now, and I saw on, I think, your website you guys have a showroom, and so you have your robots available to be seen. Is that in Mountain View?

(Mercedes at 00:25:49) That one's in New York City. So it was in New York City. We had it right a couple blocks from Times Square. We had it October of last year until December 31st. And the whole idea was we had a lot of customers in that area that wanted to know how their robots would work. One of the things is when you buy a robot, it's not very simple, right? It's a complicated process because we sell it to big companies, Fortune 500 usually. So their procurement team has to approve, the IT team has to approve, the security team has to approve. So there's a lot of people approving, and they don't usually make a purchase without actually seeing the machine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:28) Mm-hmm.

(Mercedes at 00:26:29) So we had a lot of customers that were in the Northeast that we were selling to, and then we also were raising a round of funding. There were a lot of investors over there. So we opened the showroom there, and we had it there for three months. It was insane. People were walking by, and they would just walk in all the time. It was awesome for us, right? Because there was so much interest in the machine. And then now we're doing one in LA for the next three months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:53) And you're moving?

(Mercedes at 00:26:53) Yeah, we're moving them around in the U.S., depending on—

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:59) Is it open right now?

(Mercedes at 00:27:00) Not yet. Not yet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:00) When will it be open?

(Mercedes at 00:27:00) Sometime later this year. Probably later this year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:02) Oh, later this year. Okay.

(Mercedes at 00:27:03) Yeah, it's probably later this year. Probably in the second part of the year.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:07) So I'm out there for a week on the 17th.

(Mercedes at 00:27:11) Of March?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:12) Yeah, of March. I'm out there not next week, but the week after. And I'm doing a talk at—you know Williams-Sonoma?

(Mercedes at 00:27:18) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:19) Yeah. So Yasir is their CTO, and so I'm going to give a talk to all their technology engineers and everything like that, all the people in technology.

(Mercedes at 00:27:27) What's your talk about?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:29) Creating better leaders.

(Mercedes at 00:27:31) Sweet. Better leaders in your organization in technology. Nice. Yeah. Hey, that's awesome. Is that what your company does, right? Your startup? That's what you do in technology?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:43) Yeah. So we had people like you, great leaders, come on the show, and they're all sharing advice about how they went from individual contributor to first-time leader to leading teams to engineering crazy products to running entire companies. And about four months into the show, some people asked—because we have a big audience, right? And so they were writing to us and asking. They said, we hear you talk with all these great leaders about individual ownership, giving credit, diversity, all these different things. But how do we get our 25 technology leaders to do this stuff with their teams? Like, how do we get them to take this action versus just being like, here's another book with 10 great things in it? And I said, I don't know.

(Mercedes at 00:28:26) I know what you're talking about. I didn't—

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:28) I was like, I don't know how to get them to do it. And so we started whiteboarding it at the office, and we were like, what if we took clips of the show, and then we gave—like, we had the CTO of NASA giving a piece of advice, right? And then we had steps to actually go execute that with your team. And then you made an entry into a text box or a journal or a diary. We ended up calling it the ReflectDB because that was way cooler than a journal. The ReflectDB.

(Mercedes at 00:28:56) Sounds good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:57) So now you'll go do the challenge, you'll do it with your team, and then you come back, you make an entry into ReflectDB about how it went, and then you get feedback on that from your manager or whoever. And so we built this basic version in 10 days. We deployed it to a few people that had been on the show. They liked it, licensed it, and then I watched a bunch of YouTube videos on how to do sales. And then I did sales.

(Mercedes at 00:29:19) Oh, one of those. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:21) So then I sent out emails and did sales, and I sold—I've never done sales in my life. I sold like $100,000 in three months.

(Mercedes at 00:29:30) Oh, congratulations. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:32) I know. So it was awesome.

(Mercedes at 00:29:33) That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:35) Yeah. Well, it was me and then a team—Jake and some other people that were helping with data and building content. And then I talked to somebody I knew in Tampa, because it's like an hour away from us, who does venture capital. And I said, hey, look what I did. Maybe we should turn this into a company, like a bigger company. He's like, yeah. So we raised our first round of money, and now we have 11 people, and we just sell technology leadership.

(Mercedes at 00:30:02) Wow. Hey, that's something. Getting a VC to back you up is big, you know. That's big.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:08) We're excited.

(Mercedes at 00:30:09) We're raising a fund right now, actually, too. We're raising our what would be our Series S. We call it our S because the next series will be the IPO. Okay. So we're raising $50 million.

(Mercedes at 00:30:23) We've raised so far $46 million, and we've come to deployment in 16 states starting with just California at the beginning. And then we deployed to different time zones, different states, because we needed to make sure that the machine was able to take weather and to be 24/7 and all of those things. So we went to different places like the Northeast. We went to Texas, everywhere where the weather is a bit not as pleasant as California. So we've proven that the machine works.

(Mercedes at 00:30:52) We've proven that it does what it's supposed to do. And we're raising that money to get into our K7, which is the unit that is pretty much — it looks exactly like a car.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:03) Like a car.

(Mercedes at 00:31:03) Like a car. Yeah. I saw it. Even school. That guy is the big product.

(Mercedes at 00:31:08) Right? So that's the one we're working on next, because right now our units can be in parking lots, inside buildings, inside offices. But some of our clients, like PG&E, the electric and gas utilities company, they want us to be securing their 3,000 facilities.

(Mercedes at 00:31:28) Right? But they have gravel and terrain is not great. It's not asphalt. It's very difficult terrain. So that's what that machine will do.

(Mercedes at 00:31:37) You'll be able to go on just about any terrain that you want — green farms, solar farms. That is our next step into making more machines for Knightscope. Because at the end of the day, what we want to be able to do is go to a customer and say, hey, where is your location? What does it look like?

(Mercedes at 00:31:55) Yep. We have a machine for you. So that's what we're doing now. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:00) You could pair it with a drone, and so they could have eyes in the sky and communicate with the one down below. That'd be cool.

(Mercedes at 00:32:08) Yes. For the K7, it's actually going to have — in the back of it, the door is going to open and we're thinking of putting a drone there. Because the thing about drones, you probably know this, is they only last about 20 minutes in the air. The battery can't be carried, so it cannot be a part of its own. It has to be part of something else.

(Mercedes at 00:32:30) That's why we're incorporating it into the K7 machine. We have a drone that comes out if there's a place that you need to get a little bit more closer to or something. It comes out of the back of the machine, it flies over to where it needs, and then we merge the information from both places and we give the customer what they need.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:47) That is so cool.

(Mercedes at 00:32:49) Yeah. And guess what? We've already had — at the beginning, we thought, okay, maybe in about five years or so, if we can prevent some sort of crime, we will feel like we've done something good. Right?

(Mercedes at 00:33:02) And now we've been live deployed since 2015, that is less than four years. We already have a dozen crime fighting wins that we cannot really say they're ours. For example, we prevented a fire at a shopping mall. We — based on our evidence, people at the mall were able to capture a sexual predator that was basically exposing himself to people. Yeah.

(Mercedes at 00:33:27) We've been able to prevent fraudulent insurance claims. We've had a crime down to zero at the hospital. We've been able to capture people who have done hit and runs. Because the camera is running 360 degrees. Right? So the machine has about 60 sensors on it of all the things that it can detect.

(Mercedes at 00:33:48) So what we do is produce information all day long and then the challenge for people like me is, okay, I have all this information that comes from this machine, but how do I show it to my customer in a way that it makes sense to them? So that's like the big thing for us. Right? So we have a bunch of dashboards and we have applications and we have information coming from different types of servers. So all of that into an application that a customer can go open from anywhere they're at, enter their credentials.

(Mercedes at 00:34:18) It's just a Chrome browser, that's all they need, and they can see the status of their deployment. So we're pretty happy with where we are so far.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:27) That is so exciting. Now, I want to talk a little bit more about the Abie Award. How many people did you have to speak in front of to do that?

(Mercedes at 00:34:35) 18,000 people. In one location? One location. Yes. So I didn't know what I was getting into.

(Mercedes at 00:34:43) That's the way I look at it because I was like, oh, look at that. That sounds good. And they called me up and they're like, hey, you were nominated and you were awarded. I'm like, oh, that's awesome. That's great. You'll be doing a speech. I said, oh, okay. That's great. And then when I get there, they're like, yeah.

(Mercedes at 00:34:59) I think there's 18,000 people for this conference alone. I'm like, but they're not all going to be in the room, are they? They said, you're the keynote speaker. They will be in the room. I'm like, oh my God.

(Mercedes at 00:35:10) Where did I get myself into? So it was awesome, though, because it was the first time that I've been to Grace Hopper Celebration. It's been going on for like 16 years and it's the only time that I've been there. But it was awesome to see all of these women. It was all women. Right? It was 99% of the people were women and there were a few men too. It doesn't mean that the conference targets only women. Men are also coming, but the majority of people there are women.

(Mercedes at 00:35:40) And then people start talking to you about your life and what your speech meant to them. There's people — this has been two years now, and I got a message last week on LinkedIn from somebody who saw me speak at the Abie Award, and she said, I saw you. It's very encouraging, and I would love to stay in touch with you. And I have people come like all the time. It was really — it was an amazing place to be.

(Mercedes at 00:36:05) I really loved it. I loved the experience. And if somebody wants to hire a lot of women in technology, I think that is the best place to go because that's where you're gonna find all of this talent. A lot of them are graduating from college, a lot of them already have professions and careers, but that's like a recruiters' heaven because all these women and they're all technologists and they are looking — not all looking for a job, but everybody's going to listen to something if you want to offer them something. So it's a great place to go for a career, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:40) And so as you made this transition in your career and grew as a leader, a lot of the audience that we have, they listen to the podcast for this type of advice. Right? They want an edge when they're trying to level up. So let's make a hypothetical one because I'm just gonna make it up on the spot. Let's say you have individual contributor engineer on a team who's been doing it a year and a half.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:09) Loves it. Not really sure if they want to do the people track or the technology track, but they're definitely gonna try the people management track. Right? They think that's a challenge. They're already good at technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:23) They think it's a challenge. They wanna improve their people skills. They wanna make that next step. How would they go about doing that?

(Mercedes at 00:37:32) So some of the things that we do — I'll tell you what I do at Knightscope. Some of the things that we used to do when I was at Deloitte. So you have the opportunity — if you wanna start becoming a leader of more than just an individual contributor, we start to give you an opportunity by leading projects first.

(Mercedes at 00:37:49) So when you lead a project, depending on how your company is organized, the person who's the leader of the project sometimes has HR responsibilities for the people who work on that project and sometimes they don't. Right? So you give them some other responsibilities for the length of the project, and they see how they do. You see how they do, and they see if it works for them or not. Because especially if you happen to have a project that, by all means, runs late or the stakeholders are pretty picky about it or you have something that's gonna make you more stressful, that person is going to realize if they can do it or they can't deal with it.

(Mercedes at 00:38:28) And I've had people in two situations. I had people who told me, Mercedes, I have no interest in leading this project. I don't need it anymore. After this project, I only care about what I do. I just wanna be a technologist.

(Mercedes at 00:38:39) They don't wanna lead. And I've had people after the project that said, hey, I love working with people. I love problem solving. I love talking to them about their lives. I am interested in figuring out what they can do with their careers. I wanna help them get there. And those are the people who are like, okay, you're ready. And you don't say, okay, today you're an individual contributor, tomorrow you're gonna be leading a team. It doesn't work that way.

(Mercedes at 00:39:03) You have to introduce them little by little. And the project route is the best way that I have found that you can introduce somebody to management. And obviously, they have to have somebody above them that are willing to train them. Because if they are gonna lead a project and they haven't done it before, there has to be someone in front that says, hey, if you have a problem, I'm the person for you to talk to.

(Mercedes at 00:39:22) So that's what I've tried. I did that at Deloitte and that's some of the stuff that we're trying here at Knightscope that is working really well for us. So that would be the suggestion that I have for somebody if they're trying to do something like that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:36) Okay. I like it. That's a good one. It's like a leadership trial.

(Mercedes at 00:39:42) Right? Yeah. And then sometimes you have people who have — these people who are already, they've already trained before they even take that project leadership. Right? They know enough. I've recommended this to people as well, when we were at Deloitte or even now online, there's a lot of training in terms of how to manage people.

(Mercedes at 00:40:02) So you can go to YouTube and you find videos on how to manage people. If I have someone who's interested and who's willing to give this project a try, I will say, hey, go a couple of weeks, try to watch some of these videos, see what you learn, and see if you have questions that can help you out. And then, obviously, the person that's helping them in that project, in this case, let's say it was me, I need to be prepared to invest some time and tell those people as well. I need to have a vested interest in them succeeding.

(Mercedes at 00:40:30) So it takes some time, but the pay is just awesome because then people realize they want it or they don't want it, and it's their decision. It's not yours. They're the ones who decide, okay, I can do this or I think I'm gonna just go back to technical.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:44) So what stands out to you? Because you just mentioned a very important part, investing your time. Everybody wants your time, and everybody says they want you to invest time. But you as a person of high performance, you have to be careful about how you spend your time. So you have to decide who you want to invest in, and that's very important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:05) Right? So what are some of the qualities or attributes of people that stand out to you that you say, they're doing that, that's right, I'm gonna consider investing my time in them?

(Mercedes at 00:41:17) So the number one thing that I look for when I'm trying to figure out who I spend time with — I don't spend time with people that I don't know. So I get the emails and the LinkedIn messages. Hey. I don't know you, but I would like to have coffee with you. And you're like, it's a hard time.

(Mercedes at 00:41:34) I'm sorry. But for the people that I do spend the time with, the people that I do know, it needs to be something that they consider valuable. Because, it's maybe this is something just for me, but if somebody is not grateful for the time that you spend with them, if for them it's just whatever, I don't spend my time with those people. But those who have shown me that they're interested in the topic we're gonna discuss or the path that they want to take or they're gonna take my advice and actually act on it, those are the people that I spend time with.

(Mercedes at 00:42:05) And I don't mind spending a lot of time with someone if I know that they're going in the right direction, but sometimes you have people who just give it the lip service. Right? You never know them and they come to you and they say, oh, I love what you do and I'd love for you to be my mentor. And you're like, I don't know you, right? And then there's some people who come to you and say, hey, you don't know me, I would like to maybe talk with you for five minutes on the phone. These are my credentials.

(Mercedes at 00:42:31) This is what I'm trying to do. This is the work that I have already done. You know they put time into preparing for that five or whatever, 10-minute call with you. Those are the people that I invest my time with. Yeah.

(Mercedes at 00:42:42) Because you're right. You get the people who are like, can I grab 10 minutes for you for coffee? And you're like, man, by 10 minutes here and there, I will never have 10 minutes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:50) I know. Like, I'll do guest interviews or something on another show and people ask questions. Like, I did this one, and it was on machine learning. And I gave a five-step — like, if you didn't know machine learning and you wanted to get into it, this is how you would do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:05) I just told them how I would go about it. Right? And then I get people that would reach out to me and be like, oh, I loved your interview. How can I do this for myself? And that's all they would say, and I'm like, I just wanna respond to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:19) But then you get the people I will respond to was, oh, I started doing this. I did A, B, C, and D. And on step three, I got really lost because you said this, but then this kinda happened. What do I do now? That person I respond to because they're like, oh, this is smart.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:34) I should do this. They started putting time into it. They started executing on it. Then they hit this roadblock, and they're like, oh, I need help now.

(Mercedes at 00:43:40) Yeah. Those are the people that I have to say that invest in them, and I have to say that they put some time into it. The 10-minute coffee with somebody you don't know, it's just like, I can't do that. I wish I could, but, you know, time is not there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:54) So help me with another thing, another piece of value here. Let's say that I want more, but I don't have the confidence to ask. Right? So maybe we've got a high-performing female engineer

(Mercedes at 00:44:15) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:15) And she's got her peers, and people are getting promoted, and she wants to get promoted as well. And she works really hard. She works hard at work. She's interested outside of work on growing and improving her skills, but she doesn't really know how to make this information tangible. She doesn't really know how to put it together in a package and show her leader how much she cares and that she wants more opportunity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:45) How does she do that?

(Mercedes at 00:44:48) So she's very good and she doesn't know how to — let me see if I understood correctly. This person's very good and wants to get ahead, but she doesn't know how to show it to the leader, all the successes that she's had.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:59) Yeah. How does she wrap that up and then have the conversation and then say, this is — look at what I'm doing?

(Mercedes at 00:45:06) Okay. So I'll tell you the bad way of going at it and actually the good way of going at it. Right? Perfect. So the bad way of going at it happened to me when I was at Deloitte.

(Mercedes at 00:45:15) They have a very good matching program for leaders and mentors, for mentors and people who wanted to find a mentor. And they matched me with a mentor there, and he was a guy. I won't say his name. So the time I had a meeting with him, I said, hey, we got matched up. We'd love to meet with you. They may not send us for a call.

(Mercedes at 00:45:35) This is what I do. This is what I'm looking for. So we get to the meeting and he said, okay, what have you done? So I said, I have done this, a member of this group.

(Mercedes at 00:45:43) I manage these people. These are the projects I've worked on. This is what I'm interested. All this stuff, right?

(Mercedes at 00:45:48) I waited for the meeting. And then when I was done five or ten minutes later, he says, well, you're doing everything that you should do. I can't help you. You're already doing everything. I don't know what else you could do.

(Mercedes at 00:46:00) And I'm like, excuse me? So, yeah. I mean, you're already doing everything. You don't need a mentor. And then he left.

(Mercedes at 00:46:06) And I'm like, well, that's not great. So I promised myself that I would never do that. So one of the things that I do here at Knightscope is I take ladies in. Guys are welcome too. It just so happened that ladies come. I take them to watch a movie.

(Mercedes at 00:46:22) I take them to conferences and stuff like that. So if somebody is there and they want to be able to present a case to a manager to get promoted, the first thing that I would do is I would say make sure you do the homework, like taking classes, taking training, figure out what you want to do, figure exactly what you're asking for. And if they don't know how, I will have no issues sitting with them and just going through a conversation of what they're looking for and if that person is the right person to do that. But one of the things that I've done that is very useful is I keep—you know, a lot of people apply to work at Knightscope. So I have a folder of what I call the good resumes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:06) Oh.

(Mercedes at 00:47:07) So what I usually do is I give that to a person and I say, okay, this is what you will need if you're applying for that job. Give me your information in that format. So when they go talk to the person that they want help with, they have, hey, I did my homework. These are the things that I want you to consider. Here's a piece of paper that shows everything I've ever done. And that is in the format of one of those good resumes that I keep that are effective and that they convey a lot of information in very small amount of time.

(Mercedes at 00:47:38) So that's what I would do. I would say, hey, make sure that you have something you've done, put it in this resume format, show it to the person that you wanted to talk to. They will always want to look at it. At least in my view, if somebody comes to me and says, hey, I would like to show you what are the things that I've worked with and it's a very concise document, one pager, here you go. That's what I would do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:59) So you make the intangible tangible?

(Mercedes at 00:48:01) Yeah. Because otherwise, you can talk to them for however long, but to me at least, if you give me a resume, I'm going to read it. And it takes me a lot less time to read a two-minute resume than it takes for you to be able to explain to me what you're looking for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:20) And it sounds like just the more it's a more professional interaction between humans too. Because we can sit down, we can go over it, we can have a piece of paper to look at, we can discuss it.

(Mercedes at 00:48:30) And then sometimes when people are—and the thing that it helps a lot is because sometimes you have people who are either shy or they're introverts, and they get in front of somebody of power or a higher position than they have and then they just forget what they were going to say. Right? But if you have this resume format of what you're looking for, all you have to do is point to it, and then you get what you need.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:53) This is great advice. No, I like—you gave like three solid pieces of advice. That's very helpful.

(Mercedes at 00:49:02) Thank you. Thank you. I've just been doing it for a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:04) No, I love it. And I actually wrote down—you said Grace Hopper, the Abie Award, the people at that conference. I'm going to look into more of that after because I want to—I just want to explore and know what's going on in the leadership community.

(Mercedes at 00:49:20) Nice. Yeah. That's a great place. I mean, there's so many—there's also from that when you go, I don't know if it was because I attended or because I got an award, but there's a mailing list that they have. It's called Sisters.

(Mercedes at 00:49:32) It's a group. And daily, you get emails from women who are working on different projects, who are going through tough times that need advice. They're looking for somebody to mentor them. There's a connection that you have if you sign up for the Sisters group that goes way beyond just attending the conference. And it was good for me to learn, but it's also very good for people who are very young in their careers. They can get a lot of help that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:57) Yeah. One of my personal, I guess, maybe seems more of like advisor, I guess, mentor is kind of a similar word, but is a very successful female entrepreneur. And that's where I got a lot of the ideas about going out and speaking and networking is because that's what she's done to grow her business. And I think another part that I'm thinking about right now is that she knew me when I like, before I was born. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:25) So she was like an aunt in the family, but not actually the aunt, you know, like, really close. She's my mom's best friend. Right? And so she took a different route. She did a business route, and she built a furniture company—or furniture rental company—and it's actually like the largest one in Vegas.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:42) So they do all the events. They book like all the furniture. When the event comes in, like, the venue doesn't own all that furniture. They ship it in and they crane it in, you know, for rentals. And so she has this massive business that does that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:55) And so I started asking her about, like, how did you do that? Because her whole thing was, like, I'm going to be a millionaire when she was 18. She just kept saying that. And by 23, she had one of the largest furniture rental companies in Vegas and has since grown it, and it still exists today and still huge. And she's done like the HGTV shows and all the cool stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:13) But watching her and all the events that she did and all the groups and the associations, that gave me some insight as to what the people who are at the top are doing. Like, it's important.

(Mercedes at 00:51:27) Nice. Yeah. Yeah. Very nice. And one of the things that—I don't know how this works for people who don't have that agreement.

(Mercedes at 00:51:35) But when I was at Deloitte, they had an agreement with Harvard University for people to do online training. So I cannot emphasize for people who are listening to this enough. If you want to get somewhere, prepare to get there. You know what it takes to get there and do the homework.

(Mercedes at 00:51:52) So when I was an individual contributor and I knew I wanted to at least give it a try to see what management was like, the first thing I did was to take management leadership classes at Harvard from the agreement they had with Deloitte. So those classes were on my own time at nights, weekends, all of that stuff. But they helped me a lot to know there's a lot of problem solving, there's a lot of, hey, this is a case that happened, this is the situation, what would you have done? So that was very useful at least for me when I was trying to make the transition. So preparation is 90% of how you get there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:29) Yes. I love it. Alright. We're going to end it on that because that was just like, that was like mic drop advice. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:36) Okay, Mercedes. Awesome. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful for your time and that you came in to share, and I just—I can't say thank you enough.

(Mercedes at 00:52:47) Alright. Thank you so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:48) Yes. Have a fantastic day, Mercedes.

(Mercedes at 00:52:50) Alright. You too. Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:51) Bye bye. Bye.