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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, Brian Lofermento.
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And how frequently here on this show do I talk about the fact that entrepreneurship is the vehicle to not only make the business world better, but to make the world better and to do good things for society?
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Well, today's guest is such an incredible example of that, because this is someone who has had so much prior experience in his career as an executive, as the CEO, the leader of so many cool companies that have been successful, to someone who now pulled himself out of retirement to serve as the CEO of a business that is truly making the world a safer place utilizing technology.
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It's gonna be so cool.
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Unfortunately, he's solving a problem that we wish didn't exist, but fortunately he's recognized the opportunity to make the world better in this way.
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So let me tell you all about today's guest.
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His name is Paul Moritz.
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Paul brings extensive executive leadership experience to SignalQ.
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Signalq is a software only signal intelligence platform that provides a low cost, simple to incorporate, military grade event detection capability that can leverage freely associated mobile phones as sensors Think crowdsourcing for gunshot detection.
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That's the solution that Paul is really spearheading and bringing to the world.
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Over the past decade, he served as the CEO of NetCraftsman LLC, where he significantly grew the business, ultimately leading to its successful acquisition by a private equity-backed firm.
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Paul's strength is not only in creation, but in execution.
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We're all going to learn a lot from him today.
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We're not only going to learn about the cool technology that he's bringing to the world, but also the way that he sees the world, the way that he views growth and, most importantly, the way that he views impact.
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So I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Paul Moritz.
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All right, Paul, I'm so excited to have you here with us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Thank you, Brian.
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Happy to be here.
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Heck, yes, so I tooted your horn quite a bit.
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We're going to learn a lot from you here today.
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I tooted your horn quite a bit.
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We're going to learn a lot from you here today.
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But first things first, you've got to take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Paul?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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I started young.
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I was one of three brothers to a single mother, and so we had to help our mom out.
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I got my.
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I sold my first company when I was 12.
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It was a lawn service business that I built around the neighborhood that we lived in, usually borrowing the customer's lawn equipment because in the beginning I couldn't afford my own.
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I built up enough contracts that someone eventually bought that business, got my first full-time job when I was 14, as a freshman in high school, learning how to repair cars, auto body shop Along the way.
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What I learned early was that it wasn't really about the original idea.
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It was about being a really good executor of an idea.
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Then I joined the Army.
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The Army taught me discipline, taught me focus, taught me to plan and then execute that plan and adjust if the plan isn't right.
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And then spent a long time in and around the intelligence community working at small and large companies.
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In and around the intelligence community working at small and large companies.
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I got my MBA in 2012, late in life, and that gave me a foundation of education to go with my experience.
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That really said to me that I am not an idea guy.
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I'm not the guy that's going to sit around and think up the next most brilliant thing that there is.
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But I'm the guy that knows how to take something that's a good idea and get it to market and get it to market to the people that really need it or could use it, or that want it or whatever the reasons are that they're going to buy it.
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So I'm an execution person and I learned that about myself a long, long time ago and it's true now at NetCraftsman.
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The company had been around for almost 20 years when I took over as CEO.
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It was small, but they knew there was something there and I agreed with them.
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It was a consulting business with just great engineers and we built it and sold it and that was it for me.
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I was gonna be done and I was playing golf and fishing and doing all the things I'd always said I wanted to do, but learned that there's only so much golf you can play and a compelling idea came to me, found me, and this compelling idea is around the gunshot detection technology that you alluded to.
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And so my story is long, but the thread is that I learned I ran sales, I ran marketing, I ran operations, I ran an engineering group.
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I kind of had every job in a business, and so, when it was time for me to be a CEO, what I understood best was go find the right people, the smart people, and that my job became keeping the pardon the word the crap out of their way, letting them be successful.
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Yeah, paul, I love that overview and very publicly thank you for your service as well.
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I think it's incredible hearing this overview because I relate.
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I started my first business when I was 19.
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You started even younger than that, and what I chalk so much of that experience up to is, paul, when we were kids and I'm lumping my 19-year-old self in as a kid we didn't know any better other than just to do, and you and I in particular we didn't have all the resources that people have today.
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We couldn't just Google things and learn about things that way.
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We had to learn by doing.
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Talk to us about that entrepreneurial DNA, starting so young, because a lot of people think about how few resources we had, but it sounds like for both you and I that became our superpower is learning by doing.
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Superpower is a relative term, but what I learned from my parents who were not together both of them was that hard work matters, and when you combine hard work with a goal, a vision, if you will something, you can see something you really want to achieve.
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When I was 12, when I was 10, when I started my lawn service, it was really all about I just needed money, wanted money.
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There were things I wanted to have that my mom couldn't afford to get us and she needed help, needed help too, and and so what I decided was that that doing something to to produce an income, to make a difference over the years, was what really drove me.
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And and yeah, it started young, but it really started almost out of necessity If I, if I wanted to be successful at the thing, if I wanted to acquire the things that I wanted to acquire which, as a kid, that was success I needed to do it, not on my own, but I needed to do it by doing it and not by thinking about it, not by processing it, not by joining up with somebody else, but by just grabbing the bull by the horns and doing it.
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And my career has pocketed with startups that some most didn't work but some did and joining organizations that really needed a push to drive someone to push them forward, and that's just where I've settled in something and I want to call that out because I think this is something that listeners can really take away a lot of value from is that doing something?
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you didn't say doing the right thing.
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You didn't say doing a specific thing, you said doing something, and it just seems to me, even going back to the overview that you gave us about your journey from here whether it's we're talking military service, professional career, CEO of an IT company, all of these things it's one thing led to another, and obviously it sounds like it makes sense in the rearview mirror, but the fact is you've just always been doing something and, importantly, picking something up from all of those things.
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Talk to us about how you gained things and accumulated it along the way, on a nonlinear path.
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It's interesting when people ask me what's your key to success, what I tell them is I don't know what to do.
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Generally speaking, I don't know the right answer, but I know the wrong answer because I've probably done it.
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I've probably made that mistake in my 40 plus years of driving business, and so the opportunity to make that mistake, to learn from that mistake and to move on.
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It sort of goes back to that do something.
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And that really my first real job was.
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I joined the military.
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I joined the army at 17.
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And I was in a fairly dangerous profession where you needed to learn to listen to people who knew what they were doing.
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Do the things that they said to do that were right.
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Ignore the things that they said to do that were wrong, and when you got new data, change your plan.
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You know you're going to in life, in the military, no matter what you're doing, you're going to set down on a path.
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You have to constantly take in inputs, you have to constantly learn.
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You have to constantly process and change your plan accordingly along the way.
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And if there is a superpower in me and doing something is the result of that, it's being adaptable, it's being decisive and then adaptable.
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Yeah, I love that.
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I'm going to use that as a segue because obviously, when we talk about military and the dangers that come with it, there is an unfortunate problem in society that we do face, which is, I mean, even on your website you guys call out as an example, at events, at concerts, you know we're always under threat, threats that we know of, but also you've worked in in known intelligence agencies and officials and there's threats that we're not even aware of.
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Talk to us about Signal Q, because there's Paul just hanging out on the golf course and something got you excited enough to say, wait, no, let's use the power of business and the power of executive leadership to make the world a better and safer place.
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I will and I have to back up just a little bit.
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There's a company that's been around for about 20 years.
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It's Loughborough and company.
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They're in the software development kind of high-end software development, mostly in the intelligence community, building radio frequency and signal intelligence solutions for the intelligence community, which is a fairly rare kind of a skill to be able to understand radio frequency, the sounds, the unique sounds and signal intelligence, which might be sounds, might be sight, might be all kinds of things, and develop solutions for them.
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And so about seven years ago the founder of that company was listening to the news, was listening to another school shooting, and said to himself I think I can help here.
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I think the technology that we're building, the approach that we're taking with signal intelligence and platforms that automatically do things, could be of value.
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And so he started essentially tinkering.
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About five years ago he met a gentleman, a brilliant scientist, who has his PhD in linguistics and has been solving really complex radio frequency and signal intelligence problems for a long time.
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They got together and invented a way to detect unique acoustic signatures, and I say that on purpose.
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Gunshots are just one example of a unique acoustic signature.
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Drones, explosions, screams, all kinds of sounds have a unique acoustic signature and together they invented and patented what is now the core of SignalQ and that technology is looking for very specific signatures in the sound stream.
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And Andy, the founder, said about five years ago, started pouring money into the company to build a prototype About three years ago.
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This is all before I joined.
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I joined in May of this year.
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They went to the army and said we think we've got something.
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The Congress was literally hosting these things called congressional rodeos, looking for solutions for gunshots, and all the big companies that you could think of I won't name them all came together and this tiny little piece of a company called Signal Q was also invited and won the rodeo, beat out all the other competitors with a software-only solution that's extraordinarily effective and because it's software-only only, can be very inexpensive.
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And that process of winning the rodeos and demonstrating to the army the efficacy of the solution led them to spin out the business and that's about the time that I joined in may.
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We continue to work with the army to continue to evolve the use of the technology, but but the Army has proven that we are extraordinarily effective at detecting gunshots.
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Our false positive rate is very low.
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It all happens on an edge device.
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If I were holding it, it would be my Android cell phone.
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It can be any device that has a microphone.
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We focus on cell phones because everyone carries them and the vision for SignalQ, my job, is to get to the point where SignalQ is on every phone, everywhere all over the world, and that's millions, sorry, billions of phones.
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But to get to the point where everyone has gunshot detection.
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And, as you said, we can't stop gunshot happening, we can't stop mass shootings, but what we can do is give the people that have to respond to those shootings lots of information, information about the fact that, yes, there was a gunshot.
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This is the caliber of the bullet that was fired, so it's a long gun or a short gun.
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And, more importantly, if three or more sensors find it again, our sensors, our cell phones we'll tell them exactly where it is, whether it's indoors or outdoors.
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We'll geolocate down to the spot that says there is one shooter or 10,.
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They're in this location, they're moving.
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Because the phone is such a useful sensor device, it has lots of other sensors in it.
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So your phone knows if you get in your car, for example.
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It knows when you get out of your car, it knows if you're running, it knows if you're walking, accelerometers and other technologies.
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We use all that so if there is a gunshot and someone takes fire, for example, we can tell did they fall, did they take off running, did they get into their police car or whatever vehicle they're talking to?
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And so it's the combination of the power of that sensor turns out to be the cell phone that billions of people have, and our low cost software solution gives us the opportunity to achieve that vision, which is that we can't stop gunshots from happening, but man can we identify when they happen and exactly where they happen?
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Yeah, paul, hearing you talk about this, I mean it is powerful because that software only approach.
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Software can change the world.
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We've seen it in so many different ways across so many different applications.
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But what I'm really hearing from you is I mean, it's a win-win all around.
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We're all interested in this type of solution.
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And so I want to ask you about stakeholders, because anytime I get to talk to an executive like you, where the network effect is in full play from a business standpoint, where the more people that use it, the better it is for all of us, and so with that in mind, we're talking about end users citizens, we'll call them, I guess we're talking about.
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The government obviously wants a solution like this.
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We're talking about law enforcement, we're talking about event managers.
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There's so many people whose best interests are having the network effect at full play here.
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What's the path, paul?
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It's a big question as the CEO of this company, but how do you navigate that landscape of all these different stakeholders?
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Where do you focus in on strategically to get that penetration?
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I'd love to hear the way you work that out.
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You know, it was really interesting and very complicated because we could go anywhere.
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As you pointed out, brian, everybody feels like they have this problem.
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We wanted to get to schools because that was kind of what spurred Andy's first vision.
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But it can be challenging to get to schools because of contract vehicles and they're distributed and they all work different ways.
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And so we ended up taking a really broad approach to the market and touching kind of every industry, and the one that popped up to the top is law enforcement.
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They, much like the army, they expect to be shot at, they expect to fire a weapon, and so they know that this problem is something that is real and in their face every day.
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And so we started with public safety.
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We're doing work with a variety of counties and, in a couple of cases, federal organizations.
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We're in the proof of concept phase with several now.
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Those proofs of concept are all going very, very well, so we expect them to turn into revenue in the near term.
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But the second reason to pick public safety is school's.
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Just one step beyond that.
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If you're talking to a county, for example, the school system resides in that county, and so counties become important to us, and that is all predicated on the cell phone as the sensor.
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The next market that we'll go to, after public safety, is venues, concert venues, stadiums, because every one of them that we've discovered has cameras.
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They already have cameras.
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They're already watching what's going on, looking for issues that they have to worry about.
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90 something percent of those cameras all have microphones in them.
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It doesn't have to be a cell phone, it just has to be something that has an audio capability so we can deploy on the camera system that already exists and turn that entire stadium into a gunshot detection device.
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And then when individuals walk in to that stadium with their cell phone with the SignalQ software on it, it just joins that mesh and extends that sensor network even more.
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Yeah, it's very cool solution, honestly, and even these real life use cases that you're showing us just further exemplify the fact of the more we use it, the more it's embedded into society.
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It just sits in the background is really.
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What I think is the beauty of this solution is that we don't necessarily think about it in the moment.
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You talk about it just being on those devices and then the rest takes care of itself because of the software.
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So hearing that is very cool.
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I want to ask you about the conversations you have, because we all have conversations in our businesses and I'm going to call it sales, but I don't think any of us really like to view these conversations as sales.
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But obviously, in any sort of sales environment, we're looking to disarm people, we're looking to show that we're of service to them, we're looking to talk about the solutions that we bring to the table.
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But, paul, in your case, you're doing it on a topic that is very difficult to talk about in public and very difficult to confront.
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So talk to me about what those conversations are like.
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We all like to ignore these things until, unfortunately, we see them in the news.
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But what are those preemptive conversations look like when you're talking to the stakeholders?
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I'll answer that question, but I'll give you a.
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It's even more complicated than that, because if someone says, all right, I buy that you can do this, show me, we have to go to a gun range.
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It's not like we can bring up a demonstrate, we can show them videos, we can show them pictures, but to truly demonstrate the power of the solution we have to go to a shooting range.
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So you even have that complication.
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And so when I first started, my first slide was just a bullet list of all the horrific events that have happened over the last.
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I only use the last five years, and because you only have to go back five years to just see many horrific events.
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But after my third sales call I took that slide out because people don't need to be told that this is a problem.
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There's a very effective, low-cost solution.
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That, because it's software only, because we're using a cell phone as our sensor, that virtually everyone, including students in a school or every police officer or every civilian that goes to a concert venue that they already have them.
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My first slide now starts off with demonstrating the effectiveness, the efficacy and the price.
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We really focus on those things.
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We're much more effective than the hardware solutions out there because we're listening everywhere, we're crowdsourced, we're not listening only in the direction we're pointed to.
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So that's the efficacy part of it.
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We're low cost because we're a software-only solution.
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Technically we could charge whatever we wanted and we've set our pricing model to be so low that in a school system, a county school system with more than 100 schools that we're talking to, the annual cost of a license for SigniQ is less than what they spend on the year-end pizza party.
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So we're trying to drive that.
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It's extraordinarily effective.
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We're very, very affordable and we can be everywhere.
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The crowdsourcing, and so that's my first slide and I usually don't get off that side.
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The next kind of things that people want to talk about is okay, so how does it work?
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But and we get into that but but my side is really about, you know, it's effective, it's affordable and it can be everywhere.
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Yeah, I love that because, from a business perspective, that's really what we all aim for.
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And again, I'll wrap it under the disguise of a sales conversation, but it's not sales, it really is service.
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And so I want to use that as a segue point, paul, to talk to you, the CEO not you necessarily the SignalQ CEO just as an executive and as a businessman, because what I really love is it's very clear from today's conversation that there's a lot of brilliant minds behind the scenes at SignalQ making all of this stuff possible, which these are very complex solutions.
00:20:09.108 --> 00:20:18.506
But what I love is that they've recognized and you all have recognized the power of business to be the vehicle to get this into the hands of so many other people.
00:20:18.506 --> 00:20:26.660
And, of course, that's one of your value adds as a successful CEO is is that recognition of hey, the more that we grow, the more we can change the world.
00:20:26.660 --> 00:20:31.798
Talk to me about that business emphasis, because there's so many ways that people want to pretend.
00:20:31.798 --> 00:20:37.989
You know business is exclusively about profit, but we, as entrepreneurs you're preaching to the choir that we know it's about impact.
00:20:37.989 --> 00:20:41.816
So talk to us about that being the vehicle through which you get SignalQ out there.
00:20:50.865 --> 00:20:56.124
It's a good topic and I'm a business person and the people that the folks that started the parent company are business people and everybody wants to make money.
00:20:56.124 --> 00:20:58.538
But I'm at a point in my career and they're at a point in their career.
00:20:58.538 --> 00:21:01.647
They're running a very successful business that SignalQ was spun out of.
00:21:01.647 --> 00:21:05.515
So to some degree, it isn't about the money anymore.
00:21:05.515 --> 00:21:16.420
Of course, I'd like to have more money I think all of us would but the business part is really tied to how can I do good?
00:21:16.420 --> 00:21:17.787
How can I do well?
00:21:17.787 --> 00:21:19.170
Sorry, by doing good.
00:21:19.170 --> 00:21:23.479
And it's serendipity, the reason I'm the CEO of this company.
00:21:23.479 --> 00:21:36.351
It's the network that I've built over my 40 years, overlapped in a place with their network, and so when it came time for them to say we really need somebody to run this business, numerous people said to them you should go talk to Paul.
00:21:36.351 --> 00:21:43.257
He's a guy that can help you do this and he'll do it for the right reasons because he he's made his mark.
00:21:43.257 --> 00:21:44.146
Um, he's.
00:21:44.969 --> 00:21:57.586
What I don't have in my legacy as a business is, until net craftsman, I couldn't look backwards and say I helped build that true story when I was dating my girlfriend now some 20 plus years ago.
00:21:57.586 --> 00:22:01.856
Um, back in the days when I got out of the army and went to work for the government.
00:22:01.856 --> 00:22:11.212
There was a period of time where, about six months, where my clearance had to transfer and you could sit around on your thumbs and not do anything or you could just wait until your clearance transferred.
00:22:11.212 --> 00:22:16.955
I chose to wait and built multi-million dollar houses for a cousin of mine and I was the laborer.
00:22:16.955 --> 00:22:22.275
I was just carrying wood and tools and I didn't do anything exciting, but I still.
00:22:22.394 --> 00:22:29.852
When I was dating my girlfriend in the wooing phase, I drove her back to that neighborhood and pointed out some of the houses that I helped build with pride.
00:22:29.852 --> 00:22:34.602
I helped build them, and so until the craftsman came along, I didn't have that on my resume.
00:22:34.602 --> 00:22:36.992
I didn't have a business.
00:22:36.992 --> 00:22:44.275
That was a legacy that when I left it would keep going, that I had built, and so now SignalQ affords me that opportunity.
00:22:44.275 --> 00:22:45.258
We're starting from scratch.
00:22:45.258 --> 00:23:11.266
We're a startup, I'm out raising money, I'm doing all the things that the business needs to do, but wrapped around it I think to your point, brian it's a business that we've built in a way and with a cost structure that we've built very, very low to allow us to drive a price point in the market that will drive adoption, will drive acceptance, will drive that vision of having SignalQ embedded on every phone, everywhere, all the time.
00:23:12.106 --> 00:23:14.347
Yeah, paul, I love those real life insights.
00:23:14.347 --> 00:23:18.884
I'm so appreciative of how transparently you share all of that with our listeners here today.
00:23:18.884 --> 00:23:32.336
And I want to ask you this question because the more mature I've gotten as an entrepreneur and as a person I'm 16 years into my entrepreneurial journey I've consistently found that the better the questions are that you're asking yourself, the better the answers are that you'll find.
00:23:32.336 --> 00:23:34.599
You ask small questions, you'll find small answers.
00:23:34.599 --> 00:23:36.844
You ask big questions, you'll find big answers.
00:23:36.844 --> 00:23:41.775
What are some of those questions that you're asking yourself as an executive when it comes to SignalQ?
00:23:41.775 --> 00:23:55.156
Because, hearing the fact that you're fundraising, hearing the fact that you're talking to all the different stakeholders, you're navigating a lot of waters simultaneously, paul, when you sit down for your executive time and maybe you're surrounded by the other brilliant minds behind the scenes.
00:23:55.156 --> 00:23:57.962
But what are those questions look like that you ask internally.
00:24:00.913 --> 00:24:02.497
In the beginning they were around the technology.
00:24:02.497 --> 00:24:09.184
My first day we went to the range because I wanted to see what I wanted to see for myself that the technology worked.
00:24:09.184 --> 00:24:24.257
But nowadays it's really about spending a lot of time talking to the market, asking questions about how they'll use it, how they want to use it, what features do they want, because there's lots of capability that is still nascent, that we haven't built out yet.
00:24:24.257 --> 00:24:32.353
But the majority of my time is spent with the engineering team the folks that are building the technology, because we could get pulled in lots of different directions.
00:24:32.353 --> 00:24:39.871
We could get distracted by this client or that client who wants us to do things in a different way than what we believe the mass market wants to do.
00:24:39.871 --> 00:24:45.711
So most of our questions are around not around if we should do something, but when we should do something.
00:24:45.711 --> 00:24:49.922
When should that feature or that capability be built into our roadmap?
00:24:51.270 --> 00:25:03.040
Everything that a client asks for that drives them to want to buy is important, but our questions and our discussions are really around the when, and we're trying right now to stay very focused on gunshot detection.
00:25:03.510 --> 00:25:14.041
Even though our logo says event detection, everything about us is, in the broader sense, about event detection, because there are other dangerous events besides gunshots, but gunshot has the attention of the market today.
00:25:14.041 --> 00:25:14.988
Gunshot has the attention of the market today.
00:25:14.988 --> 00:25:21.310
Gunshot has the attention of the targeted audiences that we're going after, and so we have to stay very true to that.
00:25:21.310 --> 00:25:30.398
And so, to answer your question, what I'm asking of the engineers is that's an interesting idea, that's a good idea, but where does that put us on a roadmap?
00:25:30.398 --> 00:25:32.053
How does that get us closer to revenue?
00:25:32.053 --> 00:25:55.942
Because revenue is really what it's all about, and while I'm raising money as we drive revenue up, if I can keep revenue growing at the pace it's growing, I can raise less money, which means our valuation doesn't get impacted as much, and so there's lots of pieces around it that most of the questions are about how do I adapt this technology to the business market that we face and get to the customers as quickly as possible?
00:25:56.609 --> 00:26:00.922
Yeah, paul, thinking and talking like a CEO here in real time in front of us today.
00:26:00.922 --> 00:26:02.115
I'm so appreciative of that.
00:26:02.115 --> 00:26:11.781
I'm going to piggyback off of Nike's slogan here, because it fits right in with your unique value add and in anything you've done up to this point, which is, of course, just do it.
