Innovative & Precise Location Tech with Kipp Jones, CTE of Skyhook

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Kip, the Chief Technology Evangelist at Skyhook, and they discuss the technical challenges of combining different types of location technology to achieve accurate location solutions in any use case, how critical location technology can be in emergency situations, and what individual contributors should expect when they step into management for the first time. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Kip at 00:00:50) Mine really started in computers when I was in, I think, the seventh grade. Tiny little high school in Nebraska, and for some reason we had computers. And when I say tiny, it was a class of 14. So yeah, I got started on an Apple, earlier on a TRS-80, or Trash 80, and started really digging in. I was a little scrawny guy, and so I was the geek in that club, right? So there's only one of me. So yeah, I spent a lot of time on that. You know, either that or go feed the cattle or whatever. So I went from there through high school working on Apple II, Apple II Plus, Apple IIe. Similar to only later, I wrote a software package for seed distribution management, accounting, invoicing, inventory, a full suite package. And so that was my first commercial software endeavor.

(Kip at 00:02:04) From there, went to college in Nebraska. So again, I'm hanging out in Nebraska. Did a BS in computer science at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Learned a lot. It was more practical education, you know, applied more than theoretical.

(Kip at 00:02:23) So I took that and leveraged that into a job for a couple of years and decided that working in big companies was not my gig. And so I was in a large financial insurance company, and it felt like you're just a cog. And I didn't really like that. So I endeavored to continue my education. Went to Georgia Tech, did my master's in computer science. This was 1993 when I arrived in Atlanta.

(Kip at 00:02:56) You know, really just dove into the computer science, the full meal deal, and I learned a boatload from that. Also got connected with a bunch of really smart people, which was cool, one of which I ended up writing and speaking about. A couple papers we wrote. So my first World Wide Web was the Third International World Wide Web in Darmstadt, Germany. So back in '94 was when that one happened.

(Kip at 00:03:30) So early on the web scene and really excited about what was happening with that. Did a lot of work on the NCSA web server, met with the team up there. So that was pretty fun at that time. I mean, it was pretty heady times rolling into and continuing up through the later nineties. And so that was fun.

(Kip at 00:03:53) I joined a company. We IPO'd. Well, it was a little startup company of another company, kind of an intrapreneurial kind of startup. And about eight months after I joined, we were on the roadshow doing an IPO about the same time as Netscape back then. So got a flavor for that and continued. Started my own company, sold that, joined another company, left there, was a founding member on another company. A lot of these were, well, some B2B type of companies, doing a lot of smaller businesses, trying to get them on technology, spun up, especially for the internet and getting online commerce and getting all that stuff going, which was really early back then.

(Kip at 00:04:43) But we were spinning that up, and then video distribution over satellite, which, so IP-based video distribution at that point. So some pretty interesting technical challenges with that one. Yeah. And then the same guy I started that first startup with that IPO'd, Harbinger Net Services, the guy who started as the product manager, and I started as the lead engineer, he ended up starting Skyhook.

(Kip at 00:05:14) And so he called me up and said, "Hey, do you work for free?" And I said, "Sure, why not?" And so I started work for him remotely. At that time, I was working on my own PhD as well. So it was pretty interesting times because Wi-Fi and mobile devices were not really put together at that juncture, right? So that was sort of, again, getting into yet another startup, and this was pre-Series A. So this was really angel funding at that point.

(Kip at 00:05:54) Eventually, we got it spun up, so I did a lot of that early engineering and development to get that stood up. And we eventually got contacted by Apple, by Steve Jobs in particular. Have a really cool voicemail from him in which he left a voicemail, and we had the, you know, that it would automatically just cut the audio and send it out. And my boss, Ted Morgan, he sent out a note, said, "All right, who's pulling my leg? Right? This is not Steve Jobs. This is somebody's doing something." But so he deleted it initially, and luckily it wasn't deleted deleted. So he pulled it back and got the number off of it, called up, and sure enough, connected with Steve Jobs. And from there, we ended up getting a deal done with them, which eventually became an executive MBA required course to learn about how that deal was negotiated and everything.

(Kip at 00:06:57) So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:57) That's pretty cool.

(Kip at 00:06:59) Yeah. Yeah. So Skyhook, we've had an interesting life cycle, several, you know, phases of a business as they usually go. But it's been quite the ride.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:12) Where does your—if you look back, you mentioned all the startups and early companies. Well, it takes a lot of resilience to get through that. It takes a lot of grit. You have to go through incredibly—we all say it so proudly, right? It's like this happy thing, and mainly because I think we overcame the obstacles and that's why we're happy. But going through it is not fun. It's super, super difficult. Looking back on your life, did you think you got your grit from your parents or some experiences you had? Where did you get that?

(Kip at 00:07:45) Yeah, I think definitely the parent side. You know, they went through a lot of trials and tribulations. You know, grew up with not a lot of money, and so always had to make do. You know, well, but somehow came up with the things that I needed, you know. I think playing around with the, you know, 101 Electronic Projects things and being able to dig into phones and take them apart and play with them. So, you know, I had enough technology around that I started playing with it, and I saw my family was able to continue to make things happen, you know. And they were like, "All right, so you just kind of go do it." So but yeah, that was a lot of it, really, is just seeing how they reacted to adversity and just, you know, some of it's good, some of it's bad. But you can always learn from them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:39) Yeah, exactly. And now I'm curious, you kind of talked a little bit about it, but what is Skyhook's main line of business today?

(Kip at 00:08:47) Sure. So it's always been positioning. So it's the ability to find a device, or have a device find itself, actually, more appropriately. So it's really, you know, GPS is well known and fairly understood, at least from the basics of it. But it doesn't solve all positioning problems.

(Kip at 00:09:13) So there's signal issues. You go inside, drops. Issues because it's a line-of-sight technology, you know. So devices that, A, either don't have GPS, or B, don't want to use the power that is required for GPS, or C, you just want to also be able to position indoors and when you're in some occluded location. We provide Wi-Fi-based positioning, cell-based positioning, IP-based positioning, and a complete set of hybrid positioning technologies that allow those signals to be combined and processed to find you pretty much wherever you are. You know, there's still challenges, which is why I like this. It's a continuing process, and you're never done because there's always, "Oh wait, we need it more accurate. No, we need it more accurate. No, we need it to do this. We need it to operate in a mine. We need it to," you know, so the challenges that keep coming at you are really interesting and keep you engaged. And, "Oh, how do we solve that one?" right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:17) So here's my question for you. All right, when I get off the plane in New York, right? It's like pre-pandemic, right? I get off the plane in New York—and I'm not going to New York now post-pandemic—get off the plane, go try to get my Lyft or my Uber, right? And it's bouncing my blue dot around everywhere. And I'm like, "What's going on here?" And it's just so frustrating. And I'm sitting here looking at all of the fact that I can press a button and get a car to come to me, but we can't figure out which exit of the building to take and where I'm pointed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:58) And so I was curious, is the technology there to solve it and it just hasn't been implemented? Is it fragmented and hasn't been put together? Because I do understand the concept of how GPS works, right? And I was just curious. My first thought—I'll share with you my first thought. First thought is, if it loses line of sight, why couldn't it just use the accelerometer to help bridge the gap until it got a clean line of sight again?

(Kip at 00:11:24) And then—

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:24) My other thought was I was reading about some of the ways they're using Wi-Fi for locations, and I was like, "What if there's Wi-Fi signals around here? Could they use those?" So why hasn't it been solved yet, or has it been solved?

(Kip at 00:11:35) So, I mean, it's still a challenge. The problem is there are several problems. A, with the accelerometer and dead reckoning in general, you need a position to start from, right? So until you get a fix on where you are, the accelerometer can't really help you, right? So you need a solid fix before that, and then you can use that to do the dead reckoning and then deal with drift and things like that. But with Wi-Fi, absolutely improves it, especially in places like New York where you are getting a lot of that urban canyon sort of occlusion and that, you know, signal bouncing all around and timing going off. So that is certainly one piece that helps fix that. But again, it's not a, you know, it's not—with the signal strength with Wi-Fi, you still get a lot of error, right? You can still get an error. It's better, really, than GPS overall for those places where it's occluded for GPS. But you have to kind of have a combination of those signals, and you have to know how to fuse them appropriately. And I think that's where—we've got that technology out there. It's just not complete there, right? So you're not getting that completed, and some places have better Wi-Fi signal than others. And you kind of have to know the properties of each of those signals in order to know which one to use and how to combine them and how to use that to stop the, especially to stop the bouncing and to get you to the right location in that early signal phase. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:21) If you were to guess how this problem from a business perspective, how would the solution actually roll out? Do you think it would be a device the airports could buy and put in there? Or do you think it would be just software on the phones just connecting the things? How would it look?

(Kip at 00:13:36) Yeah, I mean, you can do a lot with the software on phones. So there's also some more, you know, there's continued improvement on GPS and GNSS in general. Use multi-constellations so that you can find a satellite that isn't as occluded based on where you are. There's a lot of information now out there about where signals are occluded. So now you can kind of figure out that you are in one of those zones and weight other things more heavily on a different signal. So there's things coming along that will continue to improve this. And it's software, it's the sensor fusion, it's the accelerometers, and all of those capabilities on device. But in order to use Wi-Fi or cell positioning, you've got to know where those beacons are. So that's the other half of the equation that we have to deal with as well.

(Kip at 00:14:30) And I think the other technology that's for Wi-Fi that's coming is the signal round-trip time. So now you get away from, you know, if a person walks between you and it, right, water is a really good dampener for Wi-Fi signal, right? So us being ugly bags of mostly water, you know, you'll get a different signal strength if you're facing towards it or you're between it, right? So those things seem to change where you are, right, when it really is just you turning around.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:05) Did you just call us ugly bags of water?

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:10) Dude, that's hilarious.

(Kip at 00:15:12) Mostly water.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:13) I couldn't let that go. Yeah.

(Kip at 00:15:16) Yeah, I don't know where I heard that, but yeah, that's how I think of us. But yeah, so anyway. But yeah, so once you have the actual signal round-trip time, you have a much more accurate knowledge of where you are. So that's a technology, I think, that we in particular are excited about as it rolls out. And we're seeing that technology. It's not really being advertised because it's, you know, you kind of have to build up—again, it's a chicken-and-egg thing. You have to build up enough devices that can use it, enough infrastructure out there that has it, for you to be able to make a pitch to anybody in general, right? But that technology really does advance things, and it appears to us in our testing that the mesh networks that are out there, the mesh Wi-Fi routers, almost all of those we've seen actually support this, even if they don't announce it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:15) That's pretty neat. I'm curious with all these satellites going up, right? You got the SpaceX satellites going up. We're putting so many things up in the space right now. Blue Origin—I don't know if it's them or Amazon, whoever, somebody something Jeff Bezos is attached to—is putting satellites up to then compete. Is that affecting your business at all? Does it help you? Does it hurt you? What is it to you?

(Kip at 00:16:38) Yeah, I mean, it hasn't really changed a lot for us because, you know, the satellites are great, and the new constellations that have gone up again are excellent, but they still have challenges. It still doesn't solve everything, right? So you still have issues with deep indoor, you know, underground, all of those locations, tunnels, whatever it is. That's hard to solve with just the satellite, right? So you're going to need some augmentation with that. And I know that, you know, as far as positioning with cell or any other thing, right, so from satellite is not easy. So, you know, you've got that. You also have—so we do a lot of work with IoT devices, so asset tracking, pallet tracking.

(Kip at 00:17:35) So we work with CHEP, one of the pallet manufacturers. Matt—they build pallets all over the place. They don't like losing them because they cost money. So they're trying to figure out how to do that at cost-effective rates, right? If you're trying to power a GPS chip to do this, it will, you know, it takes more battery, more power to spin up that GPS, run that GPS. So, you know, we can start to lower the cost of that without having a GPS chip on there or only using a GPS chip when you really need to, right? So there's some power management, and everybody we deal with yells about power, right? That's one of the big things is you can't use power, right? You have to do this without using—zero power footprint. Which is hard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:25)
So you just have these sensors and you send out some sort of electrical field and the sensors reply, like RFID expanded type?

(Kip at 00:18:32)
Well, so with Wi-Fi, they're constantly yelling at you. So that's how when you pull up your laptop, your phone, and you look and there's a list of routers on your thing, which one to connect to, they're just announcing. So every 100 milliseconds, they're saying I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, still here. And so all you have to do is really listen to that. Right? And depending on what you do, then you can solve that equation on device. You can just send that information to something else to solve it, and you don't need it back because most of those, they don't care where they are, but somebody else wants to know where they are.

(Kip at 00:19:13)
So there's that. And with like low power wide area networks, you know, whether it's in the IoT or Sigfox or whatever, those are able then to use very low power transmission to get these little packages back to home. So, you know, solving problems like that where you just don't have the power, and you also are looking at a price point to get down to a cost effective solution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:41)
Is it no power or low power?

(Kip at 00:19:43)
No, it's low power.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:44)
So is it like piezoelectric type devices, or how are they getting the power?

(Kip at 00:19:49)
Yeah, they're just, you know, they're just down to less than little chipset. Right? I mean, it's just the chips you need, very little memory. You've got a very smart low power CPU that knows when to turn on and when to turn power things on and off. So it's a combination of that software layer as well as just the raw hardware that you put in there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:15)
And you guys are building these?

(Kip at 00:20:17)
We don't build them. We license our technology for people who are building devices. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:23)
Oh, that's pretty neat. And what benefits do they—so you're like an SDK? Like, they can use your utilities to build these systems really easily and fast?

(Kip at 00:20:35)
Yep. Yeah. And then we manage the database of where those beacons are. So in order to solve that for Wi-Fi, you need to know where they are. And so we've got a database of, I think it just passed 6 billion now, access points around the globe that we know where they are approximately. Right? And we also allow people who are in a situation which won't have managed infrastructure to put their exact locations in, and that can be used for private only kind of model too. So there's a way to say I know exactly where they are so I can tune my beacons to my system. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:19)
Do you have services too at Skyhook? Like, do people come to you and want you to build stuff, or do you refer them to a partner? How does that work?

(Kip at 00:21:26)
Well, we do services in the way in the fact that a lot of people want a different feature or different capability or it's new OS or it's some strange requirement that they have because of whatever else they're doing. So a lot of our engagements with customers are customized. Right? So we spend a lot of time just tweaking it for, you know, whether it's a device integration or a chipset integration. So we will run wherever in the stack. So we do really low level integration with chipsets, like Qualcomm, for example. And we do integrations at the OS. And then we do integrations at the app layer, anywhere in that stack. We can also integrate just straight API. Right?

(Kip at 00:22:17)
Or if you worry about all of the power management, all of the grabbing the access points and packaging them and sending them to us, and we'll just give you the answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:30)
That's pretty cool. Do you have some like interesting customers that you could talk about, like different ways that they're using it that you can discuss?

(Kip at 00:22:38)
Yeah, I can certainly. I mean, I have a number of customers. So let's talk about personal safety devices. Right? And what they call the MPERS, the mobile personal emergency response device. Right? So that I've fallen and I can't get up. Yeah. So like Philips Lifeline is one of those we work with. Right? So again, it's an issue where the people are generally inside. Right? And if they are inside and they fall down, you want to know where they are at that time. Right? So and if you can't get that fix, you don't really know—as an emergency, you want to know as much information as possible.

(Kip at 00:23:22)
And so the same thing going outside. If you just go outside, you know, it'll take a while to get the GPS fix, for example. So you can carry that with you. So, you know, that gives them that extra layer of fidelity for that positioning, and that gets pretty critical. In fact, we have a lot of different devices in the MPERS or the personal wearables space because of those things. And because generally, when you're a person, you're going to be indoors a lot of times. So you want to be able to get that location.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:00)
Yeah. That's super important. Right? They fall in the bathtub, that might require a different response than falling in the bedroom or something.

(Kip at 00:24:06)
Exactly. And if you've got a big house, I guess, you know, it's the other—

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:11)
That is true.

(Kip at 00:24:12)
Yeah. Right? Or the apartment—so one of the challenges is there's a constant press to get vertical positioning better. So GPS is really good on the plane, x, y. But the vertical side, it doesn't work as well, primarily because of the arrangement of the satellites being all in one plane from you. Right? So it's harder to get that diversity to understand exactly where it is in that space. So that's an issue. And even like the FCC is pushing harder for safety requirements on E911, for example, to get that in. So we have a number of people working with us to make that better, right, to be able to get a four level accuracy.

(Kip at 00:25:02)
And that's a big one. So we've got a solution in place. We're just starting to roll that out. But that's a really neat sort of advancement. Right? That sort of more 3D positioning. Because mostly what we've seen in phones is just your 2D plane positioning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:23)
But like in the iPhone I have today, I've got like the new one, the 13 or whatever. Can that tell my elevation?

(Kip at 00:25:31)
It can tell. Usually, so barometric pressure is one of the prime sensors for that, and they are very accurate in a relative sense. So if you know what it's said at a ground truth, then the offsets are very accurate. Right? So the problem really in that is you need to know, a, what your device reads at that ground truth and what the actual, you know, what the ground truth is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:01)
Yeah. Because I'm in the mountains of North Carolina, and my ground truth is different from the building I see across the street.

(Kip at 00:26:07)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the problem. Right? So you have to know kind of the ground pressure at that time in that space. And then you need to know because our devices are all different and the calibration of those chips are different. So you may start it up even in the same device, the same chip, the same everything model. It could have, you know, a five, ten, something Pascal difference between those two. And so you have to also know then the calibration of that device. And then relative to that, and then you can compute your relative distance.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:44)
So what's E911—so I actually got to go do a tour of like the local operations center in my town. It was a cool building with no walls or no windows. I apologize. No windows. Yeah. It had no walls. No wall building. It's called the field. Yeah. It didn't have any windows.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:02)
And it was like also, it was the emergency place or emergency operations center, but also the 911 facility was located within it. And I got to listen to them take some 911 calls. And they were talking about this E911 and being able to—I was asking them like, how accurately can you position? They said it varies by call and they have different tools, but it's never always perfect. Because I've called 911 before and they're always asking like, what's your exact location?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:29)
And I'm like, why? It's 2021. You have my phone. You're the government. You also probably have my emails. Do you tell me where I am? That's what it is. It's the inter agencies are not playing with each other. So what are they doing today with E911? How are they—can they have any guess on level?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:52)
Like today in the most advanced building in the world, someone's calling 911. Do they have any idea of vertical?

(Kip at 00:27:59)
In general, in a mobile device? In general, no. Most of them don't. I mean, so if you've got a GPS signal, you'll have a four or five level knowledge of it. And then you've got to wonder if as long as you've got the right building. Right? So if you have multiple buildings nearby and, you know, you're inside, maybe, you know, it depends. Right? So that's one of the challenges. You've got to get both x, y right and the z, especially in urban zones.

(Kip at 00:28:33)
But yeah, there's knowledge there, but we haven't quite put all the pieces together to make that universally possible. But it's getting there. Definitely people are making progress on that, you know, from the from Apple and Android space, to folks like us and others. There's a small community of people that are building these positioning systems, right, to solve different kinds of challenges. And all of us are, you know, hunting for the best way to solve this, how to deploy it, how to get it out there, and how to get it into the phones.

(Kip at 00:29:18)
So that's that story. And that's fun, you know, but, you know, again, working on all these technologies. So we were able to do some tests with the Department of Transportation because they're not only thinking about the 911, but they're thinking about GPS resiliency and what they call positioning, navigation, and timing. That's their big group is the PNT group. And they are worried, you know, what happens if some satellites fall out of the sky or get shot down, whatever. You know? Or there's somebody who blasts and jams GPS. What happens? And what are the technologies that we can have as a secondary, you know, fallback to work with or fill in if something like that were to happen. So that was pretty fun, you know, just thinking about, well, what would happen and how could we be a component in that infrastructure that would continue to provide some positioning.

(Kip at 00:30:28)
We're not gonna do the timing side of things, but the positioning navigation side would work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:34)
You ever see people using it for like cattle or something? Like tracking cattle?

(Kip at 00:30:39)
Well, cattle are mostly outdoors, so GPS is a really good solution for the for cows. Although, again, GPS is power hungry, but you probably don't need to be constantly monitoring them. You probably just need a periodic, hey. Are they in my, in my field, or are they—

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:59)
I need real time cow positioning.

(Kip at 00:31:01)
Cow positioning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:02)
Inside. All my cows, they're treated very well. Yeah.

(Kip at 00:31:06)
It's a—yes. It's a spa. The cow spa. But yeah. So that's why, you know, there's cases where that's really all you need, right, is GPS at that point or GNSS as the more generic name goes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:24)
Yeah. I talked to one woman, she was awesome. And they were using cameras and object detection to count cattle and different things like that. I was like, that was pretty interesting. Right?

(Kip at 00:31:36)
That is, yeah. Yeah. Because I used to have to go out and 1, 2, 3, 4. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:42)
It's much faster.

(Kip at 00:31:43)
Yeah. That would be better, especially because I'm not really good at counting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:48)
I want to talk a little bit about some management stuff, like culture, leadership. I have a question written down because I was inspired by this guy I talked to. He was, I think he is the founder or CTO of SmartDeploy. His name is Aaron Suki. And we're talking about the job of, or what I'll give a background on what they do. Right? They do deploying computers. They do it in a smart, modern way. So they massively deploy operating systems and things of that nature. But I was talking to them about the gaps in IT teams and in the employees and things of that nature.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:24)
How do you make sure that your teams and your customers and everybody's communicating well? How do you facilitate open communication?

(Kip at 00:32:33)
Yeah. No. That's critical. And especially in, you know, the switch over from in person to remote has been a challenge. We discovered we're pretty good at it, I guess, because we've done really well. But it does, you know, the technology does kind of isolate you. And so we've done a lot, especially during the pandemic, is, you know, do virtual gatherings, virtual happy hours, play games online, you know, different trivia, what have you. And so that's part of the camaraderie and just keeping that sort of flowing. Right? Because that's the thing, especially as you get new people come in who have never met anybody because we hired you virtually and you started virtually.

(Kip at 00:33:25)
So that's a real hard part, getting them integrated. But I think as far as communication, you know, we use Slack, so we're on all sorts of Slack channels. So we got the just the general one, the pet one. You know, you've got a couple of those kinds of group channels that you can just pop on and chat about, hey. My cat's really driving me nuts, whatever it is. You know, so and then you've got your team specific or project specific stuff. So you can integrate and just chat through that. I think that's been a really good tool for us. You know, I think as a—we're primarily, you know, an engineering technology kind of company. We're selling technology, not really, you know, the full solution set. We're not out there selling something to a consumer directly. So we're sort of focused on that. And so we've got a lot of engineers, and oftentimes, you know, they don't really want to get in that group, but you kind of work them in. Right? And just get folks involved, and they find out, hey. This is kind of—this is all right. Right? This is kind of—I kind of like parts of this and get them involved. But I think we're very wide open as far as, you know, ideas, as far as, hey, push back on things. And, you know, in talking about opening up the office, how we're gonna do that.

(Kip at 00:34:55)
We've gone way, you know, just back and forth to understand people's proclivities, what they're thinking, what would work, what wouldn't work, you know, to try to figure out a path. So, yeah, I think it's just that. It's just having multiple channels, multiple contacts, and a true open sort of conversation as opposed to here's what it is and wait till somebody pushes back. You know? That's—I think that's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:24)
Because they won't push back until they're pushed over the edge.

(Kip at 00:35:28) And then you know you've gone too far.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:30) And that's not good. I spent some time in Nebraska this summer in the Omaha area. We had a couple team members there, and I was there for a couple days. I started realizing that everybody was super nice, so I called up one of my team members. I was like, what's the deal? What's going on here? And she's like, oh, you haven't heard. It's like Nebraska nice. And I was like, no, I haven't heard of that, but it is very accurate.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:58) Is your headquarters in Nebraska?

(Kip at 00:36:01) No, we're in Boston. We've got a headquarters in Boston and a headquarters in Philly. It resulted through a merger of two separate companies, so we kept them both. We've got engineering in both, we've got management in both. We've got a mix and match, which is another interesting piece of the puzzle, right? Keeping all that moving together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:26) Yeah. Nebraska nice with Boston. That's cool. I love it.

(Kip at 00:36:29) Yeah, I know. It's like, how does that work? But yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:38) Absolutely, with maybe some expletives on there. But I find that people are great everywhere. And I love that when I was asking you about communication, you started with getting people together. I have found over and over again that 80% of the problems are solved by just getting people together in something other than their current work and responsibilities. Yes, you should get together in your current work and responsibilities and geek out there. But when you're doing something that's not exactly your work and you're learning about people in a social way, it just smooths out so many things and it just makes everything operate better.

(Kip at 00:37:19) Yeah, yeah. No, I think that getting a personal relationship and personal understanding, it's a necessary part of that. Otherwise, if you're doing all so much online stuff, you can't read their emotion. You can't read, you know. Some people are just very direct and they don't really mean anything bad. They're just like, this is what it is. And, you know, if you know them, you're like, oh, they're not yelling at me. That's just what they say. They say what they mean.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:56) There's so much data in our inflections and our relationships that is completely stripped when you go into Slack. I found that when we were hiring people during the pandemic and I didn't meet them in person, and then we flew everyone together quarterly to have a dinner, I found multiple times that I took things the complete wrong way. And I said, now that I have the personality to match to the text, all the crazy messages I've gotten from this person now make sense. Because if I just say them in their voice in my head, it's like, oh, that's just them being them. That's just who they are.

(Kip at 00:38:32) Very important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:34) Yes. So have you guys gotten together at all since pandemic, or has it been everybody remote?

(Kip at 00:38:39) You know, no. Actually, I flew up to Boston several weeks ago just to have a happy hour. A group of us got together and got to hang out, you know, outdoors at a beer garden and hang out and just talk like, you know, what the heck's been going on? There's been births, there's been hirings, there's been people leaving. It's like, what else is going on? Marriages, all sorts of stuff has happened.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:12) Babies. There's lots of people. My wife tells me it feels like every single day there's new baby announcements. I was like, I guess it was summer.

(Kip at 00:39:22) There's a lot going on. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:25) What are, I was told to ask about Kip's Quips. It's hard to say, but what is that?

(Kip at 00:39:31) Oh, that's just, actually, I started that back in my old Apple days. That was my little newsletter for the Northwest Kansas Prairie Apple Computer Group, which also is kind of a prairie apple, if you know what that means.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:47) No. What is that?

(Kip at 00:39:48) It's a euphemism for cow poo. So they just leave them all over like apples. And so that was the name of our computer group. And Kip's Quips were my newsletter every month for that group.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:07) Oh, very cool.

(Kip at 00:40:08) And now it's my Twitter handle.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:10) Oh, now it's your Twitter handle? Are you still writing these days?

(Kip at 00:40:15) Some.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:17) Any book coming out soon?

(Kip at 00:40:18) No. You know, I've been thinking about it, but so many choices.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:23) Yeah. I think you should. I'm a huge fan. Writing a book is incredibly difficult, but you learn a ton.

(Kip at 00:40:30) Yeah, yeah. No, I've been jonesing to do it. I just haven't actually dove in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:35) I find a lot of people will go the book route as they start to wind down their career. And I think that's a perfect time because that's when you have the most experience, right?

(Kip at 00:40:46) Right. And yeah, and you need to get it out before it goes away.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:50) Yeah, yeah. So I want to make sure, we've got about twelve minutes or so left. We're not super hard on time. I don't know. Did we have a hard stop for you?

(Kip at 00:40:59) No, it's not hard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:00) Okay, cool. Because I always try to be super respectful of that. But I just want to make sure that we cover all the points that we want to get out there about, you know, what Skyhook does. Is there anything that we've missed that we really need to make sure we hit on?

(Kip at 00:41:15) I guess one of the things I would talk about is the fact that we are truly a global business. So we operate everywhere. Every day we're getting a billion, 2 billion requests, something like that, hitting our API servers around the globe from over 200 countries. So it's a big operation from that standpoint. And so there's, you know, millions of devices running around out there that are trying to figure out where they are. And so when we talk to people, you know, we're like, well, yeah, where are you? Well, we're here, but we operate globally. And in fact, a lot of our customers are international, again, because we deal with a lot of device manufacturers, a lot of phone makers, a lot of just any kind of tracker. You know, there's gazillions of those coming out of the Asian area, right? Europe is building a bunch. So we have to have a global perspective on everything we do, which is great again. I mean, I love the fact that we've got this big audience out there that we can address. And that's a big part of our business. So that's challenging. Another one with communication again, you've got a challenge with time zones, with languages, with cultural, all up and down the board. Made it harder in the COVID days where you can't really travel. So it's hard to get into international companies if you can't be there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:00) Yeah. China has a lot of people in there. They've got cities that are pretty dense. Have you guys done some stuff over there?

(Kip at 00:43:08) Yeah, we have. And we've done a lot in Japan in particular, which is nice because they've got, you know, everybody has devices. The density of devices matches the density of the buildings and people. So that's great. And that's where we get some challenges like, hey, you know, we have a lot of underground trains and stuff, so we need people to know where they are. So, you know, we've worked a lot to make our system understand and not get, sort of recognize that you're down there and not use sort of the top of the earth signals at all. Even if you happen to catch a few, you really want to focus on the signal layer that you're in and make that more accurate so that the commuters and everybody on those trains has an idea where they are, because it's really occluded for GPS.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:04) Yeah. I remember when I was in San Francisco for a conference, right? And everyone's at the Moscone Center. My phone was not working a lot because it was intermittently working. And I was talking to the Uber driver about it. He's like, oh, this is what happens when there's conferences in town. And I said, oh, okay. That's pretty interesting. Also the hotel rooms go from like $200 a night to like $1,200 a night. I was like, that's a mortgage payment, man.

(Kip at 00:44:35) Right. And how long do I get to stay? Oh, one night?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:38) Eight hours. I can stay eight hours. There's no early or late check-in. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about, we have a wide range of people that listen to the show, everything from enterprise CTOs to startup people, people in between that just want to grow their career. What problems is the person facing now that would most likely become a customer of yours?

(Kip at 00:45:06) So it's basically thinking about the problem of location. So, obviously, location. So anybody that, you know, whether it's a tracking device or MPRS or, you know, any of those types of devices out there that you'll see, you know, asset trackers, it's that layer right there. Now we can, like I said, if you're on an operating system like an Android open source, for example, it doesn't come with any support other than for GPS, right? So if you're deploying one of those operating systems, you need more, right? So we're seeing that happen in what they call the lower end phones, right? The smartphones, the feature phones, if you will. But people are used to how the smartphones work, right, and the quality of the experience. But if you were to only have the GPS and try to mimic that same experience, you're gonna fall short, right? So anybody who has customers that are going inside and need that combo view, you really need to look at additional technologies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:28) Is it just skyhook.com? Is that how people go and find out more?

(Kip at 00:46:31) Yep, yep. Indeed. So easy and simple.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:34) That's exciting. What's one piece of advice that you'd give an engineer that's aspiring to take on more management responsibilities?

(Kip at 00:46:42) I would say, one piece of advice. Well, first of all, make sure you want to. You know, so I think there's this sort of almost a path where you get stuck in moving in that particular ladder as opposed to going this way because, hey, maybe there's more money or whatever it is. But make sure you're gonna be happy doing that. Make sure you're happy with human interaction, human touch, human foibles. You know, you can hide a lot of that when you just do an engineering task and everybody's on their own little thing and you just have integration. If you are managing people, you're gonna deal with a lot more, right? So I would just say be prepared for, you know, for another relationship. It's a different relationship than what you have as a peer. And multiple relationships now you're gonna be piling on. And it's a different relationship than what you have as a peer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:43) Yes. I found that it was super difficult to make the transition. But the reason why I believe I kept going was because of it being so difficult. It was so many skills. It was like 90% of the job was not technology, right? And I didn't have those skills. And so I had to go around and acquire them, and that's experience, and experience is painful. But I found it was also rewarding because learning those skills did help me in other parts of my life. It helped me in my personal relationships, like with my girlfriends at the time, now my wife. It's helped me in so many different things, communicating, understanding. I used to tell people like, I hate repeating myself. I'm not even going to repeat myself. And then I realized that leadership is like mostly repeating yourself. And I get it too.

(Kip at 00:48:31) Yeah. But it is, but also you have to kind of learn some empathy, right? And sort of have to, you almost have to go into their shoes, you know, furthering what we were talking about before with the groups and understanding people, right? So it's one thing to just be a peer or just communicating, but when you're in that management position where you've got, you know, you now have some responsibilities you have to deliver upon that rely on them, and you need to make sure that that's coordinated without, you know, diminishing their human aspects and what they are going through as well. So those are all components that you have to kind of say, oh, so you have to assimilate that as part of the whole job. Rewarding, as you said. I mean, it really is. You learn a lot, and you've made some great friends that way too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:27) I wanna go really deep here because I feel like we've got a good relationship going. Alright. What is one mistake that you made several times over and then finally you said, I have enough, and you just stopped making that mistake?

(Kip at 00:49:42) I would say getting angry. Not that I don't get angry, but I don't take it out on somebody else, right? And I think that's probably the biggest thing that I did that would be, I'd go back and go, yeah, you should just relax a little. That it's just better to work through these things. And, you know, instead of escalating up and just like, just kick back a bit and absorb. Part of that is just listening, as well as learning how to just sit there and listen and take things in without just immediately reacting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:24) Oh yeah. I found out real quick that there's no shortage of people who are willing to play the escalation game, right? And it never works out. It's like, if you want to escalate and then they want to escalate, then it just gets bad fast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:38) So yeah, anger is not a good one. It's Nebraska nice. It makes me think that your anger was really, really small.

(Kip at 00:50:47) It lasted that long, but it was a great question.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:51) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.