Chris Hulls Transcript
Clint Betts
Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show. I am actually a user of your product.
Chris Hulls
Nice! Thanks for having me. I didn't realize you were a user. Bonus.
Clint Betts
Yeah. Having four children, it is incredible for us. Why don't you tell us how you became the CEO and founder of Life360? You've gone through an incredible, probably whirlwind, and a major achievement this year. But let's start with how you became CEO and founded Life360.
Chris Hulls
There's a short version and a long version. The long version has to do with me getting a job offer to be a dishwasher in Antarctica. We can cover that, if you want. The short version though is I was in college during Hurricane Katrina. It was obviously a huge mess, seeing how families couldn't reconnect after big emergencies. I did a business plan a school project, it was actually pre-smartphone, about using SMS to help families find each other after big emergencies.
I finished college and wasn't actually planning on doing this, but a few things led to another, and I did a prototype of Life360 when it was still more emergency-focused on the then-upcoming Android platform. iPhone had come out, no third party apps yet. Android was just announced, and it was going to be the first phone that actually let you get location on the device. It was like, "Oh, this is the way to do that thing that was in my head." We built a version; it was literally on emulators on a screen, and there was no device. When we built this thing that was meant to help people find each other in emergencies, it was like, "Wait, there's something bigger here." The bigger thing was knowing where people were. It's actually really cool. It's not that creepy once you actually see it in action. It was the era of social networks for everything. A lot of people were going after families. We thought, "What if everyone was going to have a smartphone? What if the way to really bring families digital in the same way Facebook did friends, LinkedIn did professionals, was communication and safety?"
Our one and only pivot was in that first year of existence, where we do want to be this much bigger family network with an anchor around coordination, of which safety is a part. Now, 17 years later, or whatever it is, here we are.
Clint Betts
How did you grow it in that timeframe? At what point were you like, "We've got something here? Let's really start throwing gas on the fire because people are starting to really like what we're doing."
Chris Hulls
Yeah. I'll answer it a bit differently. It wasn't gas on the fire, we were always struggling to stay alive. There are multiple breakpoints. In the early days, the most controversial thing, which is just insane in hindsight, is most VCs in our very, very early rounds were like, "Teenagers aren't going to have smartphones." That obviously turned around very quickly. When everyone got smartphones, that was one. Another big inflection point for us was when Apple launched Find My, really. Our app would be done. Here Apple, they're coming in our direction.
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Chris Hulls
This sounds like corporate speak, but it's very factual. We skyrocketed. As soon as Apple came into the space, it was the best thing that happened to us because the big issue around location was people didn't understand it, it felt scary. Apple doing this just opened up the floodgate.
Then another thing, this is very technical, but a lot of what we do to not kill a battery requires an on-chip accelerometer, so how you're driving, car crashes, all that. It was a technical breakthrough that was probably 2016 timeframe. We were a slowly boiling frog. We were never a company that had 500% year-over-year growth. Just steadily grow, and we grow 30% a year. But now, we grow 30% a year, that's tens of millions of people, even though it took us probably over 10 years to get our first 10 million.
No exact moment in time. But I think the thing now that gets us really excited is you don't have to convince a Millennial why you should use Life360. Millennials, of which I'm an old one, are now the prime parent demographic. It's flipped from, "Is there a big market here?" To, "Oh my God, this is such a big market. How are we going to maintain our leadership position when the TAM is billions of people?"
It's been, what's the word I'd be looking for here, amusing, interesting, vindicating, frustrating. It went from investors being like, "There's no market here. This is niche. Who wants to track their kids? If you have good kids, if you trust your spouse, why would you ever use this thing?" To, "This thing is so big, $100 billion opportunity. How are you going to survive when Apple's looking at you?" Very bipolar in that regard. But that makes us feel like we have something because, universally, no one questions our TAM. It's all about, "This TAM is so big, how do you win?"
Clint Betts
Yeah. You certainly have something. It'd be good for you to explain how your product is. Obviously, you can share your location on an iPhone and things like that. But Life360 is so much more than that. I think you have a big enough moat here that I'm not sure Apple can really penetrate it. But you tell me. It might be good to explain the product, I guess is what I'm saying.
Chris Hulls
Yeah. If you look at the product, it does start with just, at the core, I think, relatively objectively, just the best location-sharing app out there in a very generic but better way. You can probably vouch for that as a customer. Find My is rough around the edges, Google's stuff is rough around the edges. Most of our competitors are also rough around the edges, because it's a lot harder to do location sharing well than it looks.
But then, the longer-term differentiation is we are about family, family, family. The features that we have don't really make sense for a large group. We've gone really deep into driver safety. How are you driving? Do you need a tow truck? And then the biggest one, in an accident. We can actually detect it from the sensors in the phone and send you an ambulance. We do that with a human operator that walks with you the whole way through. That's one example where we have other features that only make sense in the family use case. We have tons of different smart notifications. Got to school, low battery, finished a drive, how fast you were going. It's unlikely that other people do that because it really doesn't make sense for friends.
Then our membership has a whole bunch of other safety stuff wrapped around it. Disaster, medical, travel assistance, identity theft protection, data breach alert, and stolen phone protection. We're trying to move to this world where, if you're worried about anything, Life360 has your back. Now, we're adding hardware so you could have pets and things as well. We're a little more nascent here, but we bought Tile about two years ago, and a whole new lineup is coming out soon.
It's really going to be if you have a family. If you're coming to the service for protection and smaller group coordination, this is a very different product. When we think about Apple, it's not even necessarily a moat per se. It's Apple, and it very well might win. "I just need basic location sharing to share with a friend or if I'm meeting up with someone." Yeah, use Apple. But if you're that family organizer, you're navigating that day; our features really are differentiated in a way that makes us different. That was a very intentional decision as well. We have been the first to say, "Location is a commodity." It's been surprising how long it's taken to actually come true. However, in the same way that photo sharing is a commodity, it is the same with location. It's what you do with it. For us, it's ongoing differentiation around the family.
What do you use it for that's different than Find My?
Clint Betts
I have a daughter who just passed her driver's test. She has a license now. By far, my favorite feature is how fast she's going.
Chris Hulls
Yeah.
Clint Betts
I love that. That's a new thing for us. By the way, I have Tile on all my stuff because I lose everything, so I use Tile all the time as well. I love how fast they were going. How fast they were going is a brilliant feature.
Chris Hulls
Are you more worried about her or her boyfriend?
Clint Betts
Don't even. She doesn't have a boyfriend and never will. No, I'm just kidding.
Chris Hulls
Never will. I've told my daughters when they're 35, they can.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that sounds fair.
Chris Hulls
On the Tile topic, another thing that's a bit of a differentiator for us is we think those devices can both be safety devices. It's very easy to think about SOS functionality, so I'm giving you a wink, wink, nudge, nudge to some upcoming stuff we're doing there. The other thing that differentiates us from every Bluetooth device on the market is we do have an antitheft mode where you can scan your ID and agree to a big fine. You can opt out of those annoying alerts, which are great for preventing stalking, but fortunately, they are rare. But mess up a hardware device to prevent theft.
One thing that's happening a lot with AirTags is you put it on your bike, and then a thief steals your bike. You think you're protected, but the thief gets the "AirTag following you," and they disable the thing. I think we have taken an approach that is still very safe for women and people who could be stalked because you have to scan an ID to opt out of that. If you're a bad guy, literally giving a government ID that you're going to get thrown in jail for.
But now, we can actually use Tile devices to stealthily track your things in a way that will prevent theft. I think we're going to see that the idea, in the next few years, that you could lose a dog, a laptop, a bike, a car, it's just going to downright archaic. I think we can really be front-and-center with that safety and protection theme, the same way that we've differentiated with Find My. Do that with devices as well.
Clint Betts
Did you have to work with government agencies and stuff, to figure out that whole fine and submitting your ID, and stuff?
Chris Hulls
No, we did that ourselves.
Clint Betts
Oh, I see.
Chris Hulls
We do engage with regulators just to be open about what we're doing.
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Chris Hulls
Because I think it's very easy to sensationalize that because it looks like we're helping the bad guys. It's like, "No, we're really not." You can literally go on Amazon and buy a stealth tracker where you put in the SIM. If you want to do some work, there are some really advanced and bad-guy trackers. I think it was because of our act of making you scan your ID. People said, "Well, can't you just take a picture of someone else's ID?" No, we do a live NIS check. You open up the phone, you have to turn like this, turn like that. Lidar scanning. If you have a newer phone, it's very hard to fake it.
Clint Betts
Yeah. Yeah, that's so cool. I love that. What does a typical day look like for you? Oh, by the way. Before we even get to that, we should say you IPOed in June. I can't believe I just-
Chris Hulls
We did, yeah.
Clint Betts
The day-to-day life of a CEO of a public company versus a private company must be different.
Chris Hulls
Well, we've been-
Clint Betts
Tell us about the ...
Chris Hulls
We've been public actually for five years. We started on the ASX; we moved to the NASDAQ. Our move back was-
Clint Betts
Oh, you moved to the NASDAQ in June?
Chris Hulls
Yes. We've been public for five years. Public versus private doesn't necessarily change my day other than earnings.
This is not exactly what you asked, but the thing I noticed about being public versus private is that you have an external forcing function that is both good and bad. One thing I think happens with companies as they get bigger and financially stable is that you lose that existential threat of going bankrupt. It's very easy to start doing things that are not mission-critical. No one's going to debate that. It's common sense, but in practice, it's really hard to avoid getting a little bit fat and lazy.
If you're public, every quarter, you're going to be put in a pressure cooker. If you have a really good quarter, it doesn't mean, oh, you can skate for the rest of the year. All the analysts are going to put up the projections. If you have a good quarter, the goalposts are moved higher. If you have a bad quarter, you have a lot of scrutiny on why things didn't go well. You cannot be lazy as a public. It's very, very hard.
In terms of my day-to-day, it hasn't changed all that much, but we are in a very constant cycle of public market communications and earnings releases. Having to worry about the market. A lot of that is done by our finance team. But that pressure is real. The downside of some of that is it does give you a bit more of a short-term lens, which is a way I really get frustrated about. Because, on the one hand, discipline is great.
But on the other hand, sometimes you want to be able to say, "I'm going to not hit numbers for a few quarters because I want to invest further out into the future." I don't want to have to show ongoing financial leverage. After the crash in 2022, it was like every year or every quarter, we had to show that that loss was shrinking and then flipping to profitability, which we've now done. Our EBITDA break even and full profitability are what we've been guided to for next year. That's a lot of the change.
I'd say in terms of my day-to-day, the scale or the size in having more people and having more prevalence, that's probably what's changed my day-to-day more than being public per se because we just have a lot more attention; we have a lot more people. More people, more problems. We are big enough now where there's press, there are regulators. I'd say we, as a company, stir emotions in all directions. Some parents, such as yourself, love us for, I think, very good reasons. There are also a lot of people who say, "This is Big Brother. You're taking kids' freedom away from them. You're not trusting them. You're not letting them spread their wings."
It was very ironic. I was the ultimate free-range kid. As an aside, my parents let me go to Africa by myself when I was 11. We can dive into that. We are actually a perfect tool for free-range kids because you can give them freedom without panic. Then we have regulators. It's data, it's kids, it's advertising, it's location. Then we're working with insurers, I think in a very good way that you should like. It sounds like your daughter speeds sometimes, though, so maybe she does not want to opt in to use it as base insurance. But I want to be able to tell people, "Hey, you're a great driver. You really should have an insurance rate based on how you drive." It's a win for customers.
But anyway, I bring that up. We evoke a lot of strong emotions. I think our move to NASDAQ will just put our prominence and profile up even more as a company. I do have to navigate that side of things in a way that's not natural for me because I meet the archetype of a zero-to-one aggressive, brash, disruptor type. Figuring out that balance, and even [inaudible 00:14:45] have been on the call. I think I make people uncomfortable a bit because I'm not the buttoned-up, polished CEO.
Clint Betts
That's perfect. That's exactly what we need in today's day and age, particularly in the company that you have. How do you decide where to spend your time each day as CEO?
Chris Hulls
It depends on the day, obviously. I think a lot of stuff is, unfortunately ... I struggle with it, is the honest truth. Because a lot of the stuff I feel like I'm spending time on sometimes feels very low leverage, and I can look at my day, and I've done 15 phone calls. Did I really have an impact there? I do try to say, "All right, this just comes with the territory of getting bigger."
These are the things I want to make sure of. Do I have the right people in place? How do I not lose sight of always hiring? Because you get bigger, you just can't do everything. I am also trying to find the one or two strategic areas I really want to dive into because I can't do all of them. Then there is all the public company outward stuff, where I have to do some of them.
Interviews like this are kind of fun. I get to meander and all that, I'm not going off a script. The thing I hate with a passion is doing that, "Read the earnings like a robot." Of course, I'm not supposed to sound like a robot, but it's fricking robotic. Every word is written out, it's all public. The lawyers have reviewed it. Then rinse and repeat, that's the worst part of the job. But that's forced on me. Quarterly earnings, AGMs. Maybe if I ever get a little bit further along in life, I can have our CFO do it. But I'm not at Elon level where I can just say, "Deal with the CFO." I don't think that would go over well.
Clint Betts
I've come to understand that it takes a minute to get to the Elon level.
Chris Hulls
Yeah. How do you do that without being a bit of a jerk, too? I think some people probably think I'm pretty hard and maybe a little bit insensitive, but I fundamentally like to think I'm nice. I don't think Elon's nice. It's a little disappointing that so many of our most successful CEOs are kind of just assholes. How do you be a hard driver without doing that?
Clint Betts
Yeah. Why do you think that is? I'm sure you've read Walter Isaacson's Jobs book, all about Steve Jobs and things like that. It sounds like he and Elon maybe had pretty similar personalities there. Why do you think that's the case?
Chris Hulls
I honestly don't think it's that complicated at all now that I've seen it. You get constant pressure from more people wanting to come in and tell you what to do, and the bloat happens. Sometimes, you just need a person to say, "I don't care how you feel; I'm just giving it to you raw. Take it, leave it, go, push, steamroll." I think the thing there is that works when you're massively successful because everyone wants to hitch to your wagon. If you are an outlier and you do have one of these true visionary leaders who's probably smarter than most of their people, you just give them credit. Whether you like Elon or hate him, he's putting electric cars and rockets ... Geez, the guy's a genius. Started OpenAI. Get on board, get off, or not. He just steamrolls you.
Clint Betts
It's crazy. There's nobody like him.
Chris Hulls
Yeah.
Clint Betts
In today's modern era.
Chris Hulls
Yeah.
Clint Betts
He's like Henry Ford, who was also maybe not that pleasant.
Chris Hulls
I think as a second-tier CEO or third, I don't know where I am on the tiers. Depending on who you're benchmarking me, you could put me in different ones. But I have to be a bit more of a diplomat. Elon and Steve Jobs are kings. Maybe not the most benevolent, but they're so smart, and they're so good, and they push, push, push.
But what I see is I get so much pressure, not intentionally, to remove outliers. I think a lot of big companies, a lot of even being public is they remove the downside. Being public, we can do anything crazy without really risking the market. That limits the upside because crazy drive outlier results. I think that's more common in the private markets and allowed, so to speak, because you're not getting ongoing scrutiny. But in the public markets, when you get to scale, I think the true outliers are ruthlessness, which is a competitive edge. I know a lot of people tell Elon and Steve Jobs they could do that without being jerks. Maybe, in some theoretical sense, they could. But I think you'd need someone who is just going to be a bulldozer, own it, and embrace the chaos. Hey, at some point, Tesla might still blow up in his face. But if you want the outlier results, you need the bulldozer.
Clint Betts
Yeah. That's exactly right. You mentioned being robotic on your calls and stuff, and it brought to mind artificial intelligence and AI, and the growth of that, and how it's permeating every company no matter what type of company you are. How are you thinking about it?
Chris Hulls
There's I think our internal productivity, and then what we do externally. They're two very different things. Externally, I think we are going mainly... In terms of the wave of generative AI, there's not a lot that's fundamental to us that wasn't there before this big wave. Of course, we're going to do customer support. We're already doing translations. That's not exactly customer-facing per se.
What we want to do is not AI but more machine learning, probably in the buzzwords, though. If you look at most family's days, it's very mundane. Home, work, school, finish the drive. We're sending out so many pushes. Could we use the machine to say, "Hey, Clint, we're going to get really annoying, a very few times, the things you really want to know about?" It's 11:00, and your daughter's in this weird place, or maybe she's not moving on the side of the road. Maybe we should tell you and wake you up. Instead of just having these very machine gun pushes, which our users love surprisingly. We send so many pushes. But it's about your family, so you like it, as you probably know. It doesn't feel like spam.
Clint Betts
Yes, of course.
Chris Hulls
But what if we could override your phone volume and be like, "Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. There's something you really need to see here." For a parent, going back to the free-range thing, instead of waiting up at night for your kids, just go to bed, and Life360 will wake you up and override your phone volume if there's anything to worry about. Hopefully, parents will then feel open to be like, "Just go out. I've got this guardian angel watching over you."
It's not generative AI, but it is AI all the same, machine learning, to do that anomaly detection and add value. That's also I think how we're going to differentiate from Apple, and as location becomes commodity, do more.
Internal productivity, though, is a lot. We're doing a ton with AI. I'm so bullish on that. Personally, with every email I write, press release, or whatever, I can go so much faster with AI. I just write like crap, and I can talk back and forth. At first, I was looking really smart, and people didn't know I was quick on things. It's like, "ChatGPT." Teenagers already know how to do it. They just picked it up in seconds. I am a youth in that regard. I'm not atrophied as an old, middle-aged guy not learning.
Clint Betts
That's awesome. What are you reading? What reading recommendations would you have?
Chris Hulls
I'll literally give the last book I read and the weird things I do. I read a book called High Weirdness by a guy named Erik Davis. I think it was Drugs, Esoterica, and Mysticism in the 1970s.
Clint Betts
Yes, this is cool.
Chris Hulls
Have you heard of it?
Clint Betts
No, no. But I'm in.
Chris Hulls
It's a hard read. I was having to look up every other word. It's not easy. The last word I had to look up was anamnesis, which is a sudden re-remembering of lost, forgotten information. The book basically tracked Phillip K. Dick and, Terrence McKenna, and a couple of others, around just what was it in the '70s that happened around this zeitgeist culturally around breaking norms psychedelics. It got lost, and it's all resurfacing now. That was my last book.
As an aside, I also did find out ... I was babysat, and Phillip K. Dick, who most people may or may not know is a sci-fi author, in his old bedroom. I only found that out a few years ago. There's a whole weirdness of Life360, which is very Phillip K. Dickian in that prevalence, Big Brother. Very, very random.
For people who don't know him, his books are Blade Runner, Total Recall, Adjustment Bureau Men, and High Castle, so you've almost assuredly watched a movie.
Clint Betts
Yeah, one of the greats. Definitely one of the greats. What do you read day-to-day? Do you read the news, the Wall Street Journal, and things like that? Or do you tune that stuff out?
Chris Hulls
No, I'm an addict. It's very bad. When I get another break, I'm going to break my phone addiction. I don't read pop culture stuff, but I enjoy reading more academic material. Then I keep up with the business news, and politics. All of that. I do very well on Trivial Pursuit, other than the pop culture questions. That could probably give you an insight into what I read. And sports. Sports and pop culture, I need a teammate.
Clint Betts
Okay, okay. That makes sense. What, in your opinion, are the three most important traits or attributes of a leader?
Chris Hulls
Probably I think it depends. It's not one-size-fits-all. One thing I was trying to figure out, I'll answer your question more indirectly. I've made it pretty far in life, and I'm trying to figure out why. What is that secret sauce that I have? I'm not just not looking to pat myself on the back, but I'm more just learning what that thing I'm good at. Very few people are the best in the world at anything, but if you find three things you're above average at and somehow pair them together, that might make you actually almost the best in the world at something because, as you get that geometric effect. What is it?
Life360 and me, which is not generically, I am extremely assertive. I have no regard for social norms, which is why I lean in here and I'm more persistent than almost anybody. Which can lead to stubbornness and a bit of obstinance, if I'm not careful. I think as we've scaled, I've tried to figure out how do I maintain those things, while also growing in ways I need to grow?
I think it's hard to have a generic answer because what are you trying to do? Are you trying to maintain something? Or are you trying to disrupt something? What type of business are you? I don't think I could ever run a sales-led business. I don't think anyone would want to hire me to take a scaled business and manage it. I'm the more disruptor architecture. And I don't want to do this forever, so I've been trying to figure out what I am good at. What are the three things that I've been above average at? That's helping me frame what is my role here going forward, what are the things that I want to delegate because I'm just never going to be good at them, what are the things I don't want to lose in the company that got us to where we are. Because it's very easy, as you get bigger, you get pulled in so many directions.
Clint Betts
What do you know now that you wish you had known at the beginning of your career?
Chris Hulls
There's so many. I never thought this would be a 17-year journey. I assumed most likely it would fail, and I was going to go back to business school, and just try to make money in a very boring way for financial security. I just assumed this would fail. Or that it would be quick.
I was not intentionally falling in here. I just think, as you get older, how these little choices you make early on can have a decade-long impact. I don't think I'd necessarily do anything differently because I got lucky. Very, very lucky. That whole butterfly effect is interesting to me. A little decision here can change your entire life.
Clint Betts
Yeah.
Chris Hulls
Another one, this is more cliché. One bad piece of advice I think people get is when you're estimating and realize things are harder than they are, so double the time. The reason that's bad advice is that you think you only need to double. It's probably 100X. When you have a big, big, big, big vision, I'm not exaggerating that because you each time you get bigger or add more people, the complexity grows exponentially.
When I look at the Life360 vision, I probably oversimplify it by 100X. I do think there are more people who think they're putting in the buffer. When you don't know what you're doing, just how hard it is to do anything is just insane. I don't think that's novel advice about needing to focus and all that, but I always thought, "Oh, I doubled the estimate, I'm good." No. I'm still oversimplifying, and I still have not solved that. I'm always shocked by how hard things are to do.
But the positive side, the reason startups exist is that this is just the rule of nature. As you get bigger, or just tech debt, bigger surface area, prominence, you get a few advantages. The old analogy is you're a battleship. When you turn the battleship, you can bulldoze everybody but you lose that agility of the speedboat. We should be happy about that because it's the only reason that these mega-monopolies don't own the entire world.
Clint Betts
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Well, I have two final questions for you. One is, as a CEO, and I think you realize this and probably are more aware of this, probably more than most leaders, is your responsibility that society seems to be handing you these days, of speaking out, and being public, and expressing your opinions on things that really have nothing to do with your business expertise or Life360 at all.
Chris Hulls
Yeah.
Clint Betts
I don't really care, or I'm not trying to get your opinion on that, like what is your opinion on the state of things. But I would love to know your opinion on how does it feel to have that responsibility?
Chris Hulls
I have an extremely independent streak, and I'm uncontrollable. When I feel constrained, I get angry. I think a lot of why some tech leaders, I'm saying this generically, flipped a little away to the right and Libertarianism is that feeling of being controlled because I think we have our different soft underbellies. I think aggressive founders, that feeling of being controlled, just give you a reflex of anger. I don't like it; I fricking hate it. But we do have a no politics rule at the company.
I think we've done better than most around avoiding that. One thing we did a couple of years ago, more proactively, we actually moved away from using words like DEI. There's no secret Conservative dog whistle here. I was having our conversation with our heads of people, and it was just, "This is getting polarizing." She had different views than me, I had different views than her externally. But when we got to the first principles, we were actually pretty aligned. "Let's just zoom out, let's talk about what we care about as a company." If you actually look at what underlies, take the politics out, there's a lot of alignment. We were like, "What are we aligned on? What are we trying to do?" As part of that, we just said things that were tied to political affiliations or things outside the mission, we're not going to comment. I think that's really helped us, especially after October 7th. We just, "Here's our policy," we stayed out of it. Then we've had a lot of credibility, where we're not picking and choosing. We're just not in there. We haven't had any of the issues that many companies have had because we've been consistent. We're not secretly only doing it when it favors one side or the other, we're just out of it.
Other than the stuff that impacts families directly. We are thinking about getting involved in limiting screen times for kids, as an example. That is right in our wheelhouse as a business. But we're otherwise apolitical.
Clint Betts
Yeah, that makes sense. Were you surprised when Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong got so heavily criticized for doing that? Maybe you were doing it even before him.
Chris Hulls
I think that climate-
Clint Betts
It's a public company.
Chris Hulls
No, I was not surprised by the criticism. I'm happy that is now more the norm. Some companies, I think, did use it as a bit of a right-wing dog whistle. I can't comment on whether Coinbase did or did not do that. But I think you are seeing a lot of companies, like us, which we're like, "This is not us aligning left or right. We are just being very clear, outside of any controversy. If you are looking for a company that encourages activism in any direction, we are not the right company for you."
I think there is a pretty big wave of companies doing that now in a very non-political way that is effective. I think there's an acknowledgement things swung too far, in terms of what was expected at work and what was productive for companies or society.
Clint Betts
Yeah. Finally, we ask everybody this question at the end of every interview. That is, at CEO.com, we believe the chances one gives are just as important as the chances one takes. When you hear that, who gave you a chance to get you to where you are today?
Chris Hulls
I have so many of them. I will talk about two people. One was when I enlisted in the Military when I was 17. Grew up middle-class. A lot of military people in startups are usually officers, but I was a grunt. I came out, and I went to a community college. One of my professors there really took me under his wing. The first non-friends and family check came from him. He actually gave me the basement of his house, and he really encouraged me to do something a little bit riskier. His name is Robert Kennedy. No affiliation with the Robert Kennedy you're thinking of. He really was such a great mentor to me. Yeah, a community college professor who took that chance on me.
Then, another one, I have a board member who gave me a first check at truly arm's length. He's actually with me today, James Synge, who's been along the journey the whole way. A lot of those early ones. Also, the Chairman, John Coghlan, has been a great mentor for me over the years. He was CEO of Visa and joined our board in the seed stage. Kind of a weird board member, CEO of Visa to seed company. But now we're public, so I've had a mentor that's been there.
Those are the three that come to mind within the business context. I feel bad for not saying more because there are so many. But since this is a Life360-esque interview, that was my chain. I also think my parents were also like, "Don't worry about security." I have also sorts of issues with [inaudible 00:35:31]. But they were like, "Be independent, spread your wings. Take risks." They never tried to put me in a box or bucket, and I appreciate that.
Clint Betts
Chris, thank you so much for coming on. Seriously, congrats on what you've built, it's unbelievable. Again, I use the product every day.
Chris Hulls
Thank you.
Clint Betts
I use Tile every day. It's very rare that somebody comes here, and I literally interact with their product every day. Thanks for building it. Seriously, thanks from me and my family.
Chris Hulls
Thank you. Glad we have you as a customer. I'm very excited to show you some of the stuff we have coming up in the future. I don't know if you have pets, but I'm hoping if we do another interview in a year or two, you're going to have all your pets on here as well. We'll see.
Clint Betts
I do have pets. I do have pets.
Chris Hulls
Okay. We have to stay in touch about that one.
Clint Betts
Thanks, my friend.
Chris Hulls
Thank you.
Clint Betts
Appreciate it.
Edited for readability.