A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:00:00 · Ben Rudolph, S1, Pablo Srugo
[00:00:00] S0: We're interested in learning more about how you solve these cases. Could you take us along as a partner? We'd love to learn more and he said yes. He invited us to the police department, he gave us a bunch of background checks, basically handed us this book and he's like, all right, let's see what you can do. And we got to work, and basically worked out of that department every day for eighteen months. To answer your second question first, our average ACV right now is around $250k. I always tell founders kind of the same thing, go sit with your customer. Prove value, that is the thing. If you're in an apartment or things like that, get out of that apartment, go to the customer, try and find a situation where you can build alongside the customer. [00:00:40] S1: That's Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit. [00:00:52] S2: Do you think the Product Market Fit Show, has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests, thank you. Ben, welcome to the show, man. [00:00:52] S0: Thank you, Pablo. Happy to be here.
00:00:52 · Ben Rudolph, Pablo Srugo
[00:00:52] S0: Thank you, Pablo. Happy to be here. [00:00:52] S2: So you started Peregrine just over eight years ago. You just raised a $250 million round, at a $6.8 billion valuation. So clearly things are working and I would say in your case more than that, every founder, at least that I meet. Typically they want to add value, change the world, however you want to make that sound bigger. But in your case, the impact you're having is very clear. I mean, you're helping law enforcement solve crimes, you're helping fight wildfires, these are pretty meaningful things. So we're going to get into all that, what Peregrine is, what it does. But we start always, because this is ultimately about product market fit and how you found product market fit. So let's start with that. What is the moment for you when you felt like things were really working? When you felt, okay, we have product market fit or something like it, at least?
00:01:55 · Ben Rudolph, Pablo Srugo
[00:01:55] S0: Yeah, so the story of Peregrine is long and, you know, we got started by embedding in the back of a police department. We were working with detectives solving homicide cases, sexual assault cases, armed robberies, these types of things going in day in day out. We were there for about twelve to eighteen months and building product working on these cases. And the moment where I really started to feel like, okay, we're actually building a product that is adding value and being useful is there was this complex homicide that they had been working on for a few years. It was gang involved. There were lots of burner phones, rental cars, and a couple people ended up getting killed. And they had called us to basically ask for help on finding the next lead on this case. And seeing if we could help solve this. And that was when I was like, okay, we're at least providing something that they're thinking of us to solve this case. And that case actually moved forward to the point where we were expert witnesses in the trial that ended up solving that particular case. [00:02:57] S2: But your product helped solve that case? [00:02:57] S0: Yeah, that's right. [00:02:57] S2: That's pretty wild. What is your product? What does your product do? Because again, the fact that you're solving cases, you're also doing wildfires, you touch a lot of different pieces. So what does your product actually do? How did you help solve that case, for example?
00:02:57 · Pablo Srugo, Ben Rudolph
[00:02:57] S2: That's pretty wild. What is your product? What does your product do? Because again, the fact that you're solving cases, you're also doing wildfires, you touch a lot of different pieces. So what does your product actually do? How did you help solve that case, for example? [00:03:12] S0: Yeah, what we saw when we came to that police department is there's been a proliferation of technology point solutions for all sorts of different types of data collection methodologies, and they weren't able to actually leverage that information to achieve their goals. And in this case with the detectives, they were trying to solve cases. So our technology basically put all this data into one current complete asset. They were able to join other data sets together. When someone commits a crime, you're able to basically request information on that particular time portion, get cellular data. Peregrine's platform puts all that data into a current complete data asset, transforms it, enriches it, and then, provides applications on top of it to enable users to explore and find insight from that information. However, I'd really say that I think of Peregrine's product as fifty percent of its technology. It's that platform that allows you to get insight, build workflows, and do that type of technological work. The other fifty percent of our product is really the way we deploy and the way we partner, and work with our customers. And I think, that symbiosis is what made Peregrine successful in the early days and something that we've tried to hold on to.
00:04:25 · Pablo Srugo, Ben Rudolph
[00:04:25] S2: Maybe to bring it all together, you go to that example where you solved that cold case. Where you helped solve it. As a result of your technology and the service layer and the partnership, and everything, what happens? What are you able to uncover? I don't know if you can talk about that specific example, but that would be ideal. But what can you specifically uncover that maybe before was just not possible to figure out? [00:04:45] S0: Oftentimes when you're trying to solve a case, you're trying to tie a person to a location at a time and place. And in this particular case, they were able to marry a bunch of different cellular records. It's hard to overstate how complex and varied this information is. Think dozens and dozens of Excel files, different time zones, messy data. Being able to connect that all together, visualize it, understand where different phone numbers, people are in relation to, like, geospatially and from a temporal perspective, and marrying that together. And understanding, okay, who is here at this point in time, who is here at that point in time, and just having that information. And understanding the movements of the people involved in the crime is critical to actually moving the case forward.
00:04:45 · Ben Rudolph, Pablo Srugo
[00:04:45] S0: Oftentimes when you're trying to solve a case, you're trying to tie a person to a location at a time and place. And in this particular case, they were able to marry a bunch of different cellular records. It's hard to overstate how complex and varied this information is. Think dozens and dozens of Excel files, different time zones, messy data. Being able to connect that all together, visualize it, understand where different phone numbers, people are in relation to, like, geospatially and from a temporal perspective, and marrying that together. And understanding, okay, who is here at this point in time, who is here at that point in time, and just having that information. And understanding the movements of the people involved in the crime is critical to actually moving the case forward. [00:05:28] S2: Many times I'd say when I talk to founders of companies like this. That are very technical and hyper focused, for example, I talk to somebody in cybersecurity and they're like, yeah, I used to be in the armed forces or I used to be a hacker for IDF, like things like that. I'm looking at your profile, I'm trying to make sense of it. How do you end up here? How do you end up in this company?