Q&A w/ Swiftlane CEO Saurabh Bajaj Pt.1
The future of office security in a remote world, Spin's carbon positive pledge, Amazon is coming to a mall near you.
Hi everyone, welcome back to Urban Tech. I’m excited about our second Q&A with Swiftlane CEO Saurabh Bajaj. Swiftlane makes a modern, touchless access control system for offices. They recently launched a new Health Check product for checking for COVID symptoms. In the conversation, we chatted about security, privacy, the future of the office, and more.
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Let’s dive in.
A Long Thing: Q&A w/ Swiftlane CEO
This week I spoke with Swiftlane CEO Saurabh Bajaj. Swiftlane is a modern, touchless access control system for offices. With Swiftlane, you can simply walk up to the door and open it using face recognition or mobile phone.
Swiftlane provides high security, zero effort access and enrollment, a real-time dashboard, and extensive privacy controls. Saurabh previously worked at Facebook and Lyft so he has a really interesting perspective on technology, privacy, and security. Swiftlane’s new Health Check product for checking for COVID symptoms is also interesting and an example of innovating on the fly.
JT: Can you start by introducing yourself and Swiftlane?
Saurabh Bajaj, Swiftlane: I'm the founder of Swiftlane. We started the company about two years ago, based out of San Francisco. My background is primarily in tech companies and the software industry. I spent a lot of time working at Facebook, Instagram, and most recently built out machine learning and computer vision for self-driving cars at Lyft.
I was at Lyft for a long time and built out many different systems around machine learning, software engineering to power, real-time 360 camera vision for cars and perform machine learning on top of that data being collected into the cars, sensors. So I come from a technology background and I started noticing issues around security, both digital and physical security around 2018, 2017.
We hear about gun violence constantly in the news every week. On the digital side, there are lots of crypto scams happening. I'm sure we still hear that I mean. Garmin had this major breach and hack, ransomware hack, I'm sure you're aware of that, even as recent as last week, and it continues to happen. And on the physical security side, I started seeing a sense of a lack of safety and peace of mind. When coming to work, even at Lyft, we saw that there are people who might be upset as a driver or a passenger, and there's a lack of sense of safety even at the office.
And so I think that started to make me think about what experience looks like for security and how I can use my background in building deep tech to solve some of those problems and that got me interested in security. I ended up kind of going deep on the physical security side than just digital security.
JT: And so when you started Swiftlane, how did you see yourself? What problems did you want to solve?
SB: One was, as face recognition got superhuman accurate over the last three, four years, we all saw the rollout of face ID but we also saw lots of negative use cases of face recognition. I'm sure we hear stories about mass surveillance and surveillance in China. And a lot of such security and privacy concerns popped up around the use of technology. And so that worried me a lot. I think. There's two ways to go about this, right? Like one way is to just hope and limit access to technology so that it doesn't get in the wrong hands. And the other approach is to accelerate and drive positive applications and secure applications and privacy-centric applications that still empower and move the needle for the technology in the right direction.
That was one of my motivations, to use my background to accelerate positive use of AI and face recognition and biometrics instead of waiting on the sidelines and hoping it wouldn't be misused. So with Swiftlane really, we've set out to create a secure and privacy-centric physical identity layer, which allows control of how data is being used to the end customer, while also enabling frictionless, seamless access, authentication and any kind of interactions in the physical world. Our mission statement is to provide a trusted and reliable identity provider for physical interactions and physical spaces.
JT: It's super interesting. I'm curious what kinds of companies you're working with and partnering with.
SB: Pre-COVID a lot of companies had tons of operational issues. We saw a lot of traction from startups and offices in multi-tenant commercial buildings, where there are commercial lobby level entrances, and then there are street access to commercial offices. And those are disconnected systems. We saw a lot of issues there. There was a lot of keycard exchange that needed to happen and many email threads to give an employee access between the lobby system and the suite system. We started seeing a lot of issues there and facility managers and office managers and IT managers were super frustrated with that. So we got a lot of traction with starting off with just barriers and tech companies.
Quickly, things started rolling out more beyond the Bay Area as we built out our reseller network and channel relationships through security integrators so that we could provide and get our technology in the hands of businesses all over the country. We are also deployed in the LA area, in Texas and in New York City. Recently, we deployed at a water department in Washington State. We're seeing applications beyond just the office, more traditional industries such as water departments and utility firms. We work because of our system, which has been designed to be fully cloud-based.
Typically, physical security systems run on-site on a Windows-based server with limited connectivity to the Internet, and everything needs to be done on-prem. In this post-COVID world and in a world where companies offer many micro satellite offices, that doesn't really lend itself well. So what we've done is tried to eliminate all those friction points and make everything modular, small IoT hardware that can work with existing door locks, provide full central monitoring and management of systems through our cloud admin dashboard rather than rather on-prem Windows servers.
So the key things that we're trying to solve here is to reduce the friction for the end-user and the employees and the residents in high rise residential buildings, while also reducing the operational burden or/and the legacy systems that currently exist and create huge pain points for the management experience.
We're really trying to simplify those different pillars. I think the big difference is this industry has not changed fast enough in a very long time. And so there's a lot of friction points, which are solved by throwing more people at the problem. We're trying to reduce those frustrations for end-users as well as property managers and office managers.
JT: I'm curious, you mentioned a cloud-based system, does that also kind of speed up deployment? What does it look like? If someone wants to install a system? How fast can it be up and running?
SB: In a traditional ecosystem, if you were to set up an access control system, those are running some very complex Windows-based applications. So you need to send a specialized IT person to set up the laptop to access control panels and then program everything in and it requires significant training cycles.
What we've done is just take a more modern startup-oriented approach to simplify the product setup. It's a five-minute onboarding process. To understand how to use the Swiftlane software you don't need to be a technical person. You don't need to go through a six-week training program. It's designed to be intuitive and easy to access. So an office manager or receptionist, people who are managing and running around in the office, can manage it without requiring constant handling. Now and then. And what we did was instead of creating custom wiring, we just built all our hardware from the ground up to be better Ethernet-based, which is standard cables, you just plug it in, and it all gets provisioned. Directly in the cloud.
JT: Make installation and kind of plug everything in a lot easier for setup.
SB: Typically an installation takes only an hour or two per door. You can finish most offices in less than a day and it doesn't require a complex workflow.
JT: I'm sure office managers and operations people really appreciate that. I would love to hear what Swiftlane’s experience has been since COVID? I know you launched some new products.
SB: Commercial real estate is seeing the biggest dip it's seen in a long, long time. Because of the COVID epidemic, every company moved to be a remote-first organization from day one. So around March, we started seeing the complete shutdown of new decision making by every company. We saw that everyone was singularly focused on enabling remote work for all their employees as companies. Now, a lot of tech companies have decided to not open up their offices until early next year or the Summer of next year.
But a lot of businesses still require people in manufacturing, health care, utility companies, a lot of segments that still need in-person employees to come in and they have to adapt. It was more about the safety of employees for coming in. And so that was the number of problems I was trying to figure out how to maintain social distancing. How to avoid overcrowding How to avoid common touch surfaces. And have systems that can be operated remotely. And also be able to create staggered schedules and easily dynamically change those schedules based on a new changing ecosystem every week.
So we really decided to take all those problems that we were hearing, and continue to add features and improvements to the product to allow companies to get through this time really, really efficiently. What we started noticing was there was a lot of guidance from CDC and OSHA on what the company should be doing, but very little tooling or workflows designed to enable that. And secondly, a lot of companies started looking into buying $10,000 camera sensors for temperature checks. The problem with those is anyone who's asymptomatic - almost 60% of people don't show symptoms of fever - so it doesn't catch those people. And it doesn't provide enough coverage and creates huge capex costs for companies.
So our approach was how can we actually do all this and we also saw companies were taking paper form-based health service from everyone coming into the office to ensure that to prevent liability. So we built Health Check, very quickly in a two to three week turnaround time to provide employee self-health check directly from the app in a privacy-centric way.
We don't store any health records on our system, but still provide companies the ability to ensure that only healthy people are coming into work, and then not having to deal with paper health records and all kinds of liability. And this ties into our access control. So you can deny access to people unless they connect and finish their health check and take temperature at home and make sure that they're feeling safe. And they're not feeling any other symptoms of COVID besides fever as well.
Similarly, the ability to add staggered schedules, which can then be configured to show up on the user's app. So people can know what certain windows of time they can go in, if you let's say your total office capacity is 200 people, but you're probably only allowing 15 people at a time.
You want to be able to create three, four-hour windows of time and people can do their work. I mean, especially if you think of a hardware company, a company that might be building hardware, they might have hardware engineers who might need to come in to test their hardware. They can do it from home because they can't carry all of that and then get home. It might be a shared piece of equipment that needs to be operated. So all these cases require staggered schedules and social distancing while maintaining safety.
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The second part of our conversation will run next week — don’t miss it!
What I’m Reading This Week:
The Verge: Uber may shut down in California if forced to classify drivers as employees, CEO says
“Uber may shut down its operations in California, one of its largest markets in the US, if it is forced to classify drivers as employees, the company’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on MSNBC Wednesday.”
“Earlier this week, Uber and Lyft were ordered by a California superior court judge to classify their drivers as employees. At issue is the classification of ride-hailing drivers as independent contractors, which Uber and Lyft say most drivers prefer because of the flexibility and ability to set their own hours.”
“But labor unions and elected officials contend this deprives them of traditional benefits like health insurance and workers’ compensation. Both companies have said they would appeal the ruling, which was stayed for 10 days.”
To me, this seems a bit like Uber’s CEO is trying to mobilize the Uber user-base to advocate for the company — a strategy Uber has been doing for years — in the face of more regulation.
Axios: Ford-owned scooter company Spin makes "carbon negative" pledge
Some great news from Spin: “it will find a way to cut more carbon emissions than it creates by 2025.”
“Why it matters: It's a fairly quick time frame, which means lots of tangible stuff needs to happen soon. It also comes as "micro-mobility" services are emerging as a wildcard in urban carbon emissions.”
“The big picture: In theory, electric scooters and bikes can enable avoided car trips. But they have their own emissions footprint — think energy used by vehicles that move them around for charging and maintenance, as well as scooter manufacturing and supply chains.”
Pillars of Spin's emissions plan are:
Transition the vans that move the scooters around to plug-in hybrid and fully electric vehicles.
Recharging scooters with only renewable power.
Recycling and reuse of scooters no longer in the fleet.
Encouraging the use of scooters in a way that displaces car travel.
Achieve a minimum 24-month lifecycle for Spin vehicles
Shivam Vohra, Senior Program Manager of Sustainability Initiatives at Spin, talking to Urban Tech about the move:
“We have to hold ourselves accountable for tracking the carbon emitted in providing our service. This is made easier by the fact that we employ a majority of the people deploying, collecting and recharging our scooters, using Spin vans and warehouses. Operators relying on all gig workforces — using personal vehicles and charging at home — face a difficult challenge in accounting for these emissions. If we are truly offering a more sustainable mode of transportation to cities, we should be eliminating more carbon than we produce.”
The Wall Street Journal: Amazon and Mall Operator Look at Turning Sears, JC Penney Stores Into Fulfillment Centers
“The largest mall owner in the U.S. has been in talks with Amazon.com Inc., the company many retailers denounce as the mall industry’s biggest disrupter, to take over space left by ailing department stores.”
“Simon Property Group Inc. has been exploring with Amazon the possibility of turning some of the property owner’s anchor department stores into Amazon distribution hubs, according to people familiar with the matter. Amazon typically uses these warehouses to store everything from books and sweaters to kitchenware and electronics until delivery to local customers.”
My take: Someone needs to make use of underused retail space; why not Amazon? Malls provide central locations to high-demand customers. Amazon, when it bought Whole Foods, did it to add a great brand to its roster and to leverage the brand’s reach to young, affluent, urban, customers, critical targets for Amazon Prime.
Bloomberg: Airbnb Quarterly Revenue Drops 67%; IPO Still Planned
A scoop from the WSJ team: “Airbnb Inc. reported tumbling revenue and mounting losses in the second quarter, but the home-sharing startup is still eyeing a stock market debut before year’s end, according to people familiar with the matter.
“Revenue fell to $335 million in the period ending June 30, said the people, who didn’t want to be named discussing private information. That’s down at least 67% from the more than $1 billion the company reported in the same period last year, a shift that reflects the magnitude of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on global travel. It’s also a steep decline from the $842 million in sales in the first quarter, according to financial information viewed by Bloomberg.”
It appears the momentum for an IPO for Airbnb may be too strong to stop.
The Wall Street Journal: Startup Office Firm Taking on Zoom in Virtual World
“Zoom has thrived during the pandemic by offering virtual conferences as an alternative to office gatherings. Now, a firm in the events and meetings business is launching an alternative to Zoom.”
“Convene, a startup real-estate firm that provides co-working space and meeting locations inside office buildings, introduced last month a video meeting service that will try to recreate as much as possible the feeling of attending a business conference.”
“Hosts can hold panel discussions and breakout sessions online. Up to 3,000 attendees can send questions to speakers in real time, see a list of event attendees and start private video chats with colleagues, friends or potential clients.”
This is definitely an interesting move for Convene and one I really admire. Being a digital-first company is not easy, and neither is launching a new business-line during a pandemic. I look forward to following how the new service performs.
The Wall Street Journal: As E-Commerce Booms, Robots Pick Up Human Slack
One of my favorite writers, Christopher Mims, explores how robots are becoming augmenting operations as e-commerce takes hold.
This trend was starting before COVID, but again we are seeing the acceleration of this trend because of COVID; similar to what we are seeing with remote work.