Arturo Falck and Steven Valenti founded Whoo.ai to help owners and tenants of apartment buildings deal with security and buzzing people in. Their device connects to a free app giving tenants a Ring doorbell-like experience. A clever go-to-market strategy promises quick adoption.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Arturo Falck and Steven Valenti
What Whoo.ai is Solving
The Benefit of an Open, Android-type System versus a Closed, Apple OS-type System.
"... As a property manager or property owner, you pay for the device and then you pay us a subscription service for every one of your tenants..."
"... We actually are in a really good position to bring the technologies of things like Cobu to these communities because they already have the app..."
Arturo's Backstory
Steven's Backstory
"... I just wanted to point out that my brother is also involved, we actually have two sets of brothers..."
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of Ring Doorbell For Apartments
Guests: Arturo Falck and Steven Valenti
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston podcast is sponsored by Purdue University entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty, faculty of its top five engineering school in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic.
Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups which I'm involved, including a startup that came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
[music]
Sal Daher Introduces Arturo Falck and Steven Valenti
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations of Boston's most interesting angels and founders. This is Sal Daher, an angel investor who's tremendously interested and curious as to how to build better technology companies. Today, we're very privileged to have Arturo Falck and Steven Valenti. Welcome gentlemen.
Arturo Falck: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Steven Valenti: Yes, thank you.
Sal Daher: Arturo Falck, that's A-R-T-U-R-O Falck is F-A-L-C-K, and Steven Valenti, Steven with a V and Valenti, V-A-L-E-N-T-I. These gentlemen are from Whoo.ai, which is doing something very, very interesting. If you're a homeowner, you have the benefit of the Nest doorbell camera, and they can do all kinds of wonderful things for you. If you rent an apartment, you don't have that possibility.
What Whoo.ai is doing is offering that possibility to you in an open-source way. Anyway, gentlemen, explain the problem you're solving in a more fine grain way.
What Whoo.ai is Solving
Arturo Falck: Thanks for having us. As you just said, we are essentially the ring of apartment buildings. The beauty of our system is that a property manager can install a single device at the front of their building with a very simple installation, essentially one cable that connects it to the internet.
We give a free app to all of the residents so that they can answer that front door from wherever they are. They don't even have to be home. They can answer them remotely. They can see through the camera, and they can open the front door no matter where they are. What makes us really special is that we don't just make this product for ourselves. We license it to some of the best manufacturers of prop tech hardware out there.
These are companies that already have well-established distribution and sales networks. We basically help them modernize their products by offering them the software that allows them to run a SaaS business when traditionally they've been selling hardware.
Sal Daher: As an owner of multifamily properties, apartment buildings, a few apartment buildings, I can say that this is cool. What we have in our properties are the old buzzers, which don't work most of the time. Sometimes when the municipality has an inspection, and they force us to get them to work, it's extremely expensive, and they don't work for long. It's very old technology. It's clunky. It's just terrible.
The prospect of having something like this, which leapfrogs all of that, goes on the internet from a property owner perspective. I'm like, "Wow, this could be really, really powerful." It creates a different experience for the building. More feeling of control, fewer lost packages, fewer weirdos getting into the building. There's so many advantages. From an angel investor perspective, even though I'm right now not writing checks, I'm trying not to write any checks because I'm involved in a raise for a fund that we're creating.
It's not public yet, but anyway. This is a startup that I look very closely because of the business that I'm in, owning apartments. Also, as an angel investor, I think your approach of not trying to be Apple computers to own all the equipment and everything else, but instead be-- sorry to mention this, Microsoft or Android model where you create a standard, and you license your technology to a wide number OEM manufacturers, because that will lead to fast adoption.
You are up against heavily funded competition, which is not open source, which is, what's the term? A walled garden? Is that the term for it? The very controlled environment. They're trying to do everything. They have heavy funding, but you guys have the advantage when you're competing with them by having this open source and going to the people who are already in the buildings in a lot of these buildings.
Not in our building, sadly, [chuckles] because I don't think the manufacturers of the equipment are still around, I don't know, Circa 1975 or something.
Arturo Falck: No, they're not, but it'll be a lot easier to upgrade your building than you might imagine.
Sal Daher: Oh, the wiring is all there. It's easy to pull the internet wire to the entrance. What's the evidence that you have with traction of people adopting your product?
Arturo Falck: When we started the company, we knew that we needed to really learn a lot about the market. The very first thing that we did is we signed an agreement with one of these manufacturers to let us sell the devices ourselves.
We've been selling devices for a couple of years now and improving the technology along the way. We have about 200 buildings or 300 buildings that have adopted our technology, and we've been getting a lot of really good feedback. One of my favorite quotes is from a property manager who said to me, "Until I installed your devices, I felt nervous every time I asked for the rent increases but now, it's totally justified."
[laughter]
Sal Daher: Oh, that is so comforting for a property manager or owner to hear. He's like, "Oh." Actually, as an aside, we've owned these properties for 10, 11 years. You know what the biggest driver of rent increases is? Take a guess.
Arturo Falck: Fresh paint? [laughs]
Steven Valenti: I wouldn't know. [laughs]
Sal Daher: The cost of government. What we pay to the municipalities in the form of property taxes, water, and sewer. Interesting. Last time I checked, in 10 years, it went up 100%. We had raised our rent 50% to try. Obviously, eventually, we're going to have to raise our rents 100% because it's going to be all municipality. Basically, we are tax collectors. The tenants don't know this. They think we're just greedy people getting very rich.
The reality is that we cannot charge $2 over the going market rate because otherwise, we end up with vacancies. If we're going to have a proper leasing of our buildings, we need to observe the market. What happens is the cost of property ownership is being driven up by the municipalities and they say, "Oh, apartment buildings, these guys, no problem. We can raise the taxes on them. We can raise water and sewer," and this keeps going up and up and up and then we have to pass it on. [laughs]
[laughs] We don't have anywhere else to come from, but it's just an aside anyway.
Arturo Falck: That's okay. I did want to tell you. we've basically tested how the market reacts to having these technologies on properties, and we're finding that there is definitely traction there. We have competitors who have also been growing in that respect. It's definitely a proven market. What is really interesting, what we really wanted to test is whether we could actually bring this technology to the incumbents, to the companies that have already been manufacturing hardware.
In that respect, we have been making some really great progress as well. We just launched the second product on our platform or the second platform for our software, and we're in conversations with the third one, and there's definitely strong interest in the industry. I think that Steve can speak a lot more to this.
Steve Valenti: One of the things that we try to do is approach a company that is one of the largest biometric companies in the world, and they make all the time clocks for many of the brands that you already see and know in the United States like ADP, Paychex, Kronos, all those types of people. They make the time clock readers. About 15 years ago, they got into the security business of making biometric readers for access control and things like that.
We approached them to say, "We know you're great at making terminals. We can port our software over to Linux and/or Android and what type of terminal do you have that might be appropriate for the front door of a building?" They were super excited because they actually already had a plan to build something to go up against some of the competition in the world that exists globally, and they're a global player.
They have factories in Shenzhen, they have factories in Thailand, they have factories all around and subsidiaries all around the globe. They are looking for speed to market to go capture as much market share as possible and be the biggest in this business as they are already in the time clock business. We approached them, we showed them the software, the paywall for them to be able to share revenue with installing dealers around the globe.
The simplicity of it and the fact that it works with any carrier globally, whether it's T-Mobile or AT&T or any of them that are around the globe that we already have those contracts and everything figured out. The bottom line is it became so much simpler for them to scrap what they had started to think about developing and just say, "Boom, we can put this on our product today and avoid two to three, four years of development and be able to start selling our hardware right now."
The Benefit of Open Source
Sal Daher: That's very promising. This is very interesting because you are approaching incumbents in the industry. For example, in the building security space. They have the technology for controlling access to buildings and all of that, and it's a natural tie-in to have this layer added on to their technology, which allows interaction with tenants in the building. Which leads me to think, is this also a possibility for commercial buildings?
Steven Valenti: Yes, absolutely. There's a lot of applications that we can port this technology to, all sorts of touchless credential applications, and everything else that we want to be able to do. For right now, we're focused, laser-focused on the apartment building solution. There'll be other stuff that we could do with key management and all sorts of things that we could do to tie into this as well. Today, we will be raising some money in order to go after more software development and expand our offerings and offer our OEMs even more choices and more solutions.
We really think it's important to make sure we can prove out our technology and give several vendors or several manufacturers who already have existing sales channels. That's the key for us to get quickly adopted in the marketplace and become that android platform or I like to use the old analogy of VHS versus Beta. Sony had a very good platform, and Panasonic JVC owned a very good platform. Sony, some people would argue, had a better technology.
Sal Daher: Beta max. Beta Max was actually a higher resolution. It was just a better technology, but VHS took over because it was open source basically.
Steven Valenti: They outstripped the technology that Sony wanted to keep in-house and they licensed it to everybody else. VHS became the standard platform around the globe. That's what we're aiming to do on a global platform. We think it's really important to make sure we have several players that are all competing healthily in their market segments and using their existing channels.
Speed to market is a key thing here. That way we're grabbing as much market share as possible through several channels that are already mature. They already have sales staff in all parts of the world, and they have an established dealer base that trusts that entity, that manufacturer has already worked with their customer service. Has already the fulfillment capability globally. To me, that's really important versus ourselves trying to do it.
Starting here in the United States and growing outwards. We can now grow from all over using those existing channels.
Sal Daher: Excellent. How is it that you expect to make money?
"... As a property manager or property owner, you pay for the device and then you pay us a subscription service for every one of your tenants..."
Arturo Falck: The business model is very simple. The manufacturer sell the hardware just like they have been used to for many, many years. They sell their hardware through distribution. They obviously already have a structure for getting the product to the customer and paying all the people involved in that process.
We do charge a small licensing fee for the software that comes built into that device. Part of the money that we make is from that licensing fee. What is more important is that our product comes with a subscription service. It's really a SaaS model. As a property manager or property owner, you pay for the device and then you pay us a subscription service for every one of your tenants.
We keep most of that subscription service, we share some of that with the manufacturers, which obviously brings in a new line of revenue for them. We take care of everything that has to do with subscriptions, including charging the customers for that.
Sal Daher: You own the SaaS platform, the OEM manufacturers are owning the distribution and you are basically coasting on their distribution network and they are relying on you to provide the online services, the servers, and all of that so that you can have secure communications between the tenants and people in the entry points of the buildings?
Arturo Falck: That's exactly right. What the manufacturers get from us is the whole turnkey solution in terms of the service for the residents. In addition to that, there's a lot of additional software that we provide that they obviously don't have to even think about their software for managing the system, their software for the property to manage their residents. There's integration with the property management software that is available out there.
Sal Daher: For example, does it integrate with Buildium?
Arturo Falck: Not yet, but it will.
Sal Daher: By buildings use Buildium.
Arturo Falck: Yes, that's really good for us to know because we're a startup company. We haven't been able to integrate with everybody yet, but we're going to be integrating with the software that our customers use first.
Sal Daher: What kind of services are you offering that would tie in with the building management system?
Arturo Falck: We keep adding to our network in a way. We have customers who want elevator controls, for example. We are currently integrating with hardware that will control elevators. Until now we've been focused specifically on residences and residential units. We are making sure that our customers and the residents of our customers really love the system. We've kept the features to a minimum, but make sure that they are totally stable and basically best of breed.
Steven Valenti: Yes. One of the things that was really important to focus on at first is that the end-user experience was seamless. When a call comes in, it doesn't look or feel like a Whoo.ai app. It is actually an Apple call coming in or an Android call coming in on the platform. It's not foreign to the user. If grandma picks up the phone, she's going to understand how to swipe and answer the call on an Apple.
It is looking in sounds and feels like an Apple call. Some of those that integration tight with the OS platforms was really critical in getting that worked out at first. It's easy to get an app, but it's not easy to make it all seamless with Apple and seamless Android, no matter what make model, or manufacturer of phone it is. Making that all work seamlessly was really important to the user experience.
Arturo Falck: Also, if a resident does not have a smartphone, our system makes a call to their landline and it's just seamless for them.
Sal Daher: It's a less rich experience. They're not going to have a video interaction, but at least they'll have voice interaction like the old intercoms.
Steven Valenti: Correct. One of the great things about that is that you being a building owner, you know that those wires that were installed in 1970, you don't have to go ahead and pull all new wiring or try to reuse that old wiring. We're really circumventing that and using the power of the internet to really communicate to your landlines or to your cell phones. It makes the cost of installation much lower to get involved with this type of technology.
Sal Daher: It's not just installation, it's also reliability because these wired systems are always going down. They're always, something is happening. Actually, thinking here about the Nest doorbell. A big part of that is just the camera aspect of it. I'm just thinking one of the problems we have in our buildings is building security. We have people who come into the buildings that are not supposed to be there.
Is there anything that you guys are thinking about in the direction of building security? Given the fact that you have a camera in the entry point maybe people can tie into that. It wouldn't necessarily be something that concerns the tenants, but the owners are really-- building security is a big hassle for us, and the systems that exist out there just for someone at our level, it is just not there. We're trying to use Nest and it doesn't.
Arturo Falck: Yes, it's a great question. We are constantly being requested by our customers to actually provide video feeds that we can record for them and make available. We have the technology, we can absolutely do it. We will be bringing that technology to our customers relatively soon.
That actually brings, it's a nice segue, to the fact that everything that we built gets upgraded over the year, just like a Tesla.
Sal Daher: The product, instead of decaying or getting old, it just gets better, better.
Arturo Falck: Exactly.
Steven Valenti: Yes. Another thing too is that we're also looking into integrations by using the OEM model we can go to certain manufacturers that already have integration to other video management platforms and their hardware or camera inside of their device, which our software will pull a stream off of, might already be integrated to another building system, like a Genetec or milestone or some professional, enterprise-grade video management platform which might take a long time to integrate one on one, which is our hardware.
Because it's working with someone else's hardware, that integration has already been done. Again, speed to market, trying to manage as many opportunities as possible is really critical.
Sal Daher: The other thing, thinking about go to market, you guys could also look at the building management system people as another channel in your go-to-market strategy. For example, Buildium has several products on its platform that are not their own. They're not native products. For example, they use PayNearMe. PayNearMe is a service that allows tenants to pay in cash at retail locations.
The funds, they pay a small fee, and then the funds are credited to the tenant's rental account instantly. This is a service that we, as the user of the Buildium platform, we pay for that. The other service is just the ability to pay via an ACH debit from their bank account. That's another add-on service. Another add-on service is just the idea of electronic signature of leases.
All our leases are electronic, and they're kept on the Buildium platform. I can easily see this as another product that might show up in the Paulette of offerings that they have. If you want to give people connection to the entry points from the units, we can offer that or building security as well, eventually.
Arturo Flack: I love it. You're a step ahead of most people that we speak with. This is exactly what we're building. We're building a network where we connect all of these technologies that surround the proper management of multi-tenant properties. We are starting with the intercoms. We're making our platform open so that we can connect other technologies to each other. We're essentially positioning ourselves so that we can be the hub to make all of these things possible.
Sal Daher: Another thought here. I am an investor in a company called Cobu. Are you familiar with Cobu?
Arturo Falck: Yes, I know Ben. [chuckles]
Sal Daher: That is in a different dimension. They're not involved in building management. They're involved in creating a social environment in the building. It's a community in the buildings. They actually have documented, it tends to be high-end buildings. It doesn't apply to our buildings. Our buildings are decent buildings, but they're very basic. The buildings that they're going after tend to be very high-end properties.
Cobu, which is community building, basically attempts to provide connection for the tenants in the building so that they have activities in common and all that stuff. You do know Ben. That's good. What's the connection? How did you connect with Ben Pleat?
Arturo Falck: Just through the startup scene here in Boston, we know some people in common who introduced us to each other, much like what you just said. It seemed like there should be some synergies between our companies. We've spoken. We think that there will be some synergies, and most likely we're going to be doing something together at some point.
Sal Daher: Just a very brief detour here. Cobu, I've interviewed Ben on a podcast, it's called Cobu, and really, it's a community building. The reason he's tripped over this is that his mother, who has passed away, was a very energetic and entrepreneurial woman. She was in real estate. When she moved to her dream apartment in Manhattan, she became very isolated.
Your apartment is this gorgeous, beautiful apartment. She thought, "Oh, moving on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky." It was solitary confinement almost. It was very disappointing. Then Ben says, "How can that be, in this gorgeous building?" Everybody's already busy working. The building's design doesn't lend itself to interaction. People never meet each other. They don't know who they are.
He started working on this problem of creating community in these really, really beautiful buildings, but where people just don't know each other.
"... We actually are in a really good position to bring the technologies of things like Cobu to these communities because they already have the app..."
Arturo Falck: We've spoken about this, there's really great synergy between our companies because with our system, for better or worse, the residents don't really have much of a choice. They have to get our app if they want to be able to answer the front door. That actually is a really important aspect of our business proposition, that as we grow and again, we're growing because of our relationship with the manufacturers who already have relationships with building managers and owners, as we grow, we keep building a larger and larger install base of our apps on people's phones.
Not just any people's phones, but they're in little pockets. There are communities inside of each one of those buildings. We actually are in a really good position to bring the technologies of things like Cobu to these communities because they already have the app.
Sal Daher: Like the fourth screen problem. The additional screen is really, really hard. You have a very compelling case for people to have that app on their phone because they want to get their packages, they want to see the food deliveries, and so forth. You'd be surprised. People living in very, very basic apartments, such as the ones that I have, these are the basic. They take food deliveries.
They have food delivered to them like everybody else. They have FedEx packages, they have Amazon packages delivered to them like everyone else.
This is tremendous. By the way, I should mention, for transcription purposes, Whoo.ai is W-H-O-O.AI. At this point, Arturo and Steven, I thought we would switch a little bit to more about how the founding of Whoo.ai came about, the background of each of you, and that softer stuff. First I'd like to do a little promo for the podcast. The best way to promote the podcast is for listeners to first follow us on the app where you're listening so that we show up in your feed on a regular basis.
I guarantee you this podcast is designed for learning, helping me, this very curious guy who wants to learn things, but it throws off a lot of interesting stuff to other people as well. I'm selfishly here saying, "Oh, I'm very curious about this and that." It elicits interesting lessons from people who have done a lot of work and who are doing something really difficult.
There have been countless Aha moments for my listeners. We've had several startups that were inspired by the podcast, by conversations in this podcast. If you know anybody who is thinking about starting a company, somebody who is a founder, or somebody who's thinking about becoming an angel or who is an angel, I recommend that you connect them to this podcast and leave a rating and a review. Particularly on Apple podcasts, a short written review is very powerful.
It gets us ranked. You'd be surprised. The algorithm picks it up and all of a sudden, this podcast, you expect to have so many downloads. It gets 1.5x, 2x downloads just because of one or two reviews. When you have 170 reviews where we are right now, that happens. Anyway, Arturo, eres Ecuatoriano?
Arturo Falck: Soy Ecuatoriano, si, muchas gracias.
Sal Daher: What's the story? When did you come to the States?
Arturo's Backstory
Arturo Falck: My parents are not so happy about this, but I came to college when I was 18 and back in the 1980s.
Sal Daher: [laughs] Back in the other century.
Arturo Falck: The previous millennium, my plan all along went to Virginia Tech and I studied robotics, materials engineering. My plan was to go work for Apple for a few years and then go back, take over my parents' family business.
Sal Daher: I can detect the entrepreneurship gene is there is running in the family.
Arturo Falck: Oh, yes. What happened is I met my wife.
[laughter]
Sal Daher: Those accidents happened.
Arturo Falck: Never made it to California. I ended up moving to New York instead, working for, at first, a whole bunch of startup companies and then financial. We wanted to start a family and decided that I needed to start making some real money. I worked for Goldman Sachs. I actually managed the technology team that built algorithmic trading for them, which turned out to be a really good field to get myself into, worked for another 15 years doing algorithmic trading.
Sal Daher: This is like when people say, "Oh, this guy's a rocket scientist, he's a brain surgeon, he's a quant."
Arturo Falck: All right. He's a quant. [laughs]
Sal Daher: Yes, he's a quant. This guy is very very brainy quant. Please continue, Arturo. He's blushing. He's a very shy turning color but this is a very smart guy.
Arturo Falck: I feel like I need to clarify that I'm not the quant. I'm the technologist that translated what the quants had in their brains into actual code that worked.
Sal Daher: You're a quant, but you're a quant whisperer.
Arturo Falck: I'm a quant whisperer.
Sal Daher: Yes. You're quant with a high EQ because the hardcore quants, look my dad was a mathematician. The hardcore quants are not always high functioning.
Arturo Falck: I'm going to take the compliment by contrast. Anyway, about five years ago, I decided that even though I was making good money building software I really wanted the software to make the money. I started a company doing something at first, very, very different. I built a company that used facial recognition to help people who cannot recognize other people just interact better with each other better
Sal Daher: How cool?
Arturo Falck: Help them navigate social situations, social interactions.
Sal Daher: Wow that's possible?
Arturo Falck: Yes. What happened is when I came up with the idea, I realized that I could make retail salespeople into superstars by just helping them recognize who was actually coming into their stores. Because half of what makes a good salesperson, good at their job is just knowing their customers and the best part of knowing their customers is recognizing their faces. Long story short, it was a great idea. Being an engineer that I am, I built prototypes, put them into stores, tested things.
What I found is that I ended up starting the company in exactly the wrong way. I had technology and I was looking for a problem that would fit that technology. I learned it the hard way. I ended up pivoting multiple times, and eventually, I ended up putting our devices into schools. This was back when there was that shooting epidemic. In the process, I formed a relationship with one of the biggest manufacturers of intercoms in the world, Aiphone.
It's a big Japanese company. I brought the leadership of Aiphone to see our schools in Boston, and all that they could talk about was how they were losing their shirt to these crazy startups that were doing multi-tenant intercoms through phones. I pivoted the company one last time and at first, we wrote a proposal to Aiphone that we would build the solution so that they would solve their problem. In good Japanese fashion, it took them six months to review everything and eventually declined our offer.
By then we had already built the technology. We started testing what it would be like to actually be in that market. We realized that it's a huge market and that there was a real need for a better solution than what was out there at the time. Eventually licensed it to some of Aiphone's competitors.
Sal Daher: Your initial dead end there is very typical of engineers. Engineers they want to build something instead of figuring out what problem they can solve, what they can build.
Arturo Falck: I'm happy to report that I am a recovering engineer.
Sal Daher: You're an engineer who learned but there are some that stubbornly continue to be engineers and they're always trying to build stuff ahead of the need. That is so fascinating. How did Steven join Whoo.ai?
Arturo Falck: I'm going to let him tell the story, but I just want to say that it was a match made in heaven when we met each other because he actually understands the industry that I had been trying to serve without really knowing it very well.
Sal Daher: Without your knowing it very well, but Steven was really an insider. Before we go to Steven, I just wanted one more thing. What industry is your family in, in Ecuador?
Arturo Falck: It's funny, but my parents had two different businesses. They were somewhat related to each other. My father had an importing business. He imported ball bearings and mostly from Germany. In any case, my mother owned a chain of hardware stores.
Sal Daher: [laughs] Your father imports ball bearings from Germany mostly. Your mom owns a chain of hardware stores in the retail business.
Arturo Falck: That's right.
Sal Daher: Fascinating.
Arturo Falck: Now they're both retired and the business did not stay in the family. [laughs]
Sal Daher: Oh, yes. I know. I can just imagine the pressure for you to come back and run the business. My wife's family in the same situation, the youngest son ended up running the business and it's a heavy obligation to have. Eventually, they sold the business, even though he was running it, but it basically took over for his dad to sell the business. It's a big burden to bear.
I'm glad to see that you are living out your parents' entrepreneurial spirit in a totally different sphere. I think in the end they'll be very happy with it.
Arturo Falck: My mother for many years, when I was in college she kept asking me, "What do you study?" I kept explaining, I'm an electrical engineer, I'm studying robotics. She would always say, "Why are you studying that? What this country needs are electricians." Fast forward 20 some years, 30 years. I'm essentially an electrician now.
Sal Daher: Wow.
Steven Valenti: I was going to say, she's not wrong. [laughs] We all need electricians.
Sal Daher: Yes. We all do, but no no, what you're doing is you are an entrepreneur with a software platform. That's a very powerful thing. Steven, tell us your story. Where are you from, by the way, Steven?
Steven's Backstory
Steven Valenti: I live in the North shore of Boston and--
Sal Daher: North Shore.
Steven Valenti: North Shore [laughs] but I don't carry quite a heavy Boston accent because I have to admit, I grew up in Lexington at first and then moved up to the North Shore. Any case went to school throughout the Boston area and I was blessed to have a father who was in the family business, who started the family business, which is a manufacturer's rep. He started in the '60s bringing Panasonic into the United States.
Back in the '60s, Panasonic was bringing in broadcast equipment. Then they got into some consumer goods and in the '70s they got involved with security products, cameras, and whatnot. We actually had within the company, FM Valenti, several different product lines that we were representing Panasonic being the main product line and both broadcast and audiovisual and security.
That's when I graduated from college over at Tufts University, ended up getting involved with the family business, my brother's involved. I thought I was going to go into medical and I saw how much fun and how much money he was making. I said, "Darn, I don't think I want to do another eight years of school."
Sal Daher: [laughs] This is awesome. Whoo.ai has entrepreneurial pedigree of both sides, both of the technology side and the business side. It's amazing.
"... I just wanted to point out that my brother is also involved, we actually have two sets of brothers..."
Steven Valenti: Yes. I've got quite a bit of relationships between our family and everyone else involved with the FM Valenti side with companies like Phillips. We've switched from Panasonic to Samsung back in '91 and Samsung now was bought the security division, the military space, and optics division of Samsung Tech one was bought by a Fortune Five Korean company called Hanwha. Most people know Hanwha for the Q cells that they do in the solar business that competes against Tesla and everything else in the solar panels. They're the largest manufacturer of solar panels, but Hanwha now owns the Samsung division of security products.
We've grown into that whole family of product lines in the security group as well as in the access control biometrics, all the things that we talked about, and also have done quite a bit in the AV and streaming world for the AV side of the business with smart classrooms, board rooms, conference rooms, and all that stuff. Arturo and I came to gather basically because one of our integrators who knew us very well said to Arturo that we got to meet, you got to meet Mr. Valenti and his family. They've done wonders for other manufacturers getting into the marketplace.
Arturo reach out to me, and we sat down in our conference room, I was instantly attracted to the technology. The idea of not having to build out from scratch a whole new, even though I'm very familiar with all the security reps in the US but to be able to set up a global network would take a long time and a lot of lift for us. By going to manufacturers that have global expertise and already have distribution channels around the world, we had some serious discussions about how that could shape up.
We've witnessed several manufacturers that have done stuff like this with Tyco and taken their software, their hardware to Tyco and then instantly had traction around the globe and their symptomatic group and all that stuff. We made some analogies, we had some comparisons and we sat down and penciled up a whole business plan for that side of the story. That was very attractive, I think to Arturo and his team, and that's when they offered for Sean and I to become partners in the business.
Sal Daher: Sean being?
Steven Valenti: Sean is Sean Valenti, I'm sorry, my brother and partner in the business of FM Valenti. He's--
Sal Daher: What are the official titles?
Arturo Falk: Chief Geek and Chief Salesperson
[laughter]
Sal Daher: Chief Geek and Chief Salesperson. Who's the CEO?
Arturo Falk: I'm the CEO.
Sal Daher: Steven and your brother Sean, are you co-founders as well? Is that--
Steven Valenti: Yes, I would say.
Arturo Falk: I just wanted to point out that my brother is also involved, we actually have two sets of brothers.
Sal Daher: Two sets of brothers? Oh my goodness. There are a lot of stories, guess your brother's name?
Arturo Falk: Roberto.
Sal Daher: Roberto and Aurturo Falck.
Arturo Falk: Yes. Roberto Falck is a photographer in New York, a photographer by trade. He brings a really unique aesthetic to the company as well. What I wanted to say is that when we joined forces with the Valenti brothers, this whole idea of licensing our software to manufacturers was just an idea.
It seemed to make sense, but since then, it's no longer just an idea. We've executed on it. We've signed contracts with the first of those OEMs. We are in advanced conversations with the second one. We now have our system running on three different platforms.
Sal Daher: This is really fascinating. All this pedigree the brother dynamics. I'm getting very tempted to look more closely at this company, but I can't, I don't have the bandwidth. I have to focus on my stuff. This is very tempting. This is awesome. What a great adventure your gentlemen embarked
Arturo Falk: Thank you. We'll send you some chocolates to maybe increase the temptation [laughs].
Sal Daher: No, don't send me chocolates. What you can send me is, that's even more valuable because in a Halloween house full of chocolates, I got grandkids upstairs. Are you kidding me? The house is first thing with chocolates. What I would like you to send is high-quality images of your screenshots so I can include in the episode page showing what your platform does, showing a unit installed, showing the interface.
Also, if you could send us your full-resolution portraits, that would be really, really helpful for creating a really nice episode page.
Arturo Falk: Yes, definitely.
Steven Valenti: Certainly.
Sal Daher: At this point, is there anything else that you gentlemen want to touch on before we wrap up the interview? I'm like a kid in a candy store with this. [laughs]
Arturo Falk: You probably can already tell that we have some ideas for how to build on top of the stuff that we are building. We're really building this company for the long term. We are not interested in just solving one little problem. We're interested in solving one little problem that people have right now, and then using that platform to solve the next one, and then that platform to solve the next one after that.
We have a plan that I think might make us a unicorn at some point.
Sal Daher: I wouldn't be surprised. I would not be surprised. Gosh. There's so many uses for this, fascinating. As we wrap up, is there anything else that you want to--
Steven Valenti: We want to talk about any of the fundraising at all or any of that type of stuff? Or where are we at with that?
Sal Daher: Let me just say this. A company like yours with a very interesting technology with the partnerships that you have, with the adoption that you have to date, you are going to be needing to raise money right now and in the future. I would say that anybody who's listening to this who may have an interest in this type of company even if at the time that you connect, they're not raising, they're going to be raising the future.
This is a company that's going to need a lot of capital to build a really, really huge business. Keep your minds open and reach out. Also, if you're involved in the industry, if you are in the real estate side of things, if you are in the building access and security side of things talk to these gentlemen because these are very serious people. They know what they're talking about.
Arturo Falk: Thank you.
[music]
Sal Daher: Arturo Falk, Steven Valenti I'm very, very grateful to you both for coming on the Angel Invest Boston podcast to talk about Whoo.ai, W-H-O-O.A-I which is Nest for Apartment Buildings.
Arturo Falk: Thank you very much. Thanks for having us.
Steven Valenti: We appreciate the time and the enthusiasm as well. It's been great. [laugh]
Sal Daher: No, this is exciting stuff. For building owners, we're a little nerdy. This is Angel Invest Boston and I'm Sal Daher.
music
Sal Daher: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.