A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:05:45 · Ben Rudolph, Pablo Srugo
[00:05:45] S0: So my background, I went to Stanford to take a year of science. I spent every summer working at different Silicon Valley companies and I really took away from that experience that I wanted to build technology that had meaningful impact on communities around us. I spent a lot of time working at tech companies where I didn't really believe that that was true and so after school, I went and worked at the UN Refugee Agency. Spent a bunch of time deploying technology in very hard to reach places, solving issues that are similar to the issues that I solve today. Which was the UN Refugee Agency has extremely disparate data and it's very difficult to understand how different interventions are working at different refugee populations. I joined a similar type of company that was deploying technology in hard to reach places, doing data collection in Africa and India. Partnering with governments to have interventions on one. For example, we worked with the Indian government on ensuring adherence to TB drugs and both these experiences, I took away a couple of things from it. But one, it's really difficult and challenging to work with the government. It's slow, it's bureaucratic. [00:06:58] S2: I was gonna say, it's not the obvious place that you then, launchpad for entrepreneurship.
00:06:58 · Pablo Srugo, Ben Rudolph
[00:06:58] S2: I was gonna say, it's not the obvious place that you then, launchpad for entrepreneurship. [00:07:02] S0: Totally, but if you're able to do it and if you're able to partner, and you're able to do it well. I think the impact there is real, and I saw that. And so, what gets me really excited about Peregrine generally is we found this way to partner with our cities, our states, our counties, our federal government to build technology. Best in class technology to the public servants, the folks who often get the worst technology, and give them really great technology to do their jobs better. And so, that is the frame of mind that I've had. We got started in law enforcement. We're building a much bigger platform and much bigger technology than that focused area. [00:07:37] S2: Tell me more about the origin story. How do you go from, you know, building and selling software to governments as part of another company to deciding to start your own thing and specifically Peregrine?
00:07:37 · Pablo Srugo, Ben Rudolph
[00:07:37] S2: Tell me more about the origin story. How do you go from, you know, building and selling software to governments as part of another company to deciding to start your own thing and specifically Peregrine? [00:07:48] S0: Yeah, actually a lot of it goes back to my cofounder. We did gymnastics together in college. Spent a lot of time, twenty, twenty five hours a week. Someone who I felt was a really great partner. We always wanted to start a business together. We had talked about it in college. He had gone and spent time at Volunteer. We were on what I'd call maybe dual tracks, where he was working with different types of government institutions and deploying software in very hard to reach places. And I remember in 2017, we kind of linked up with a very similar perspective on how we could partner with these kinds of important institutions to deliver better outcomes and that's really when we linked up. I moved across the country to come to San Francisco and really got started kind of in the back of my apartment in 2017. [00:08:38] S2: So was that born out of what you were doing? Because the idea is very generic at that point, right? It's like, let's take data together and help law enforcement, for example. Was that kind of the first version of the idea?
00:08:38 · Pablo Srugo, Ben Rudolph
[00:08:38] S2: So was that born out of what you were doing? Because the idea is very generic at that point, right? It's like, let's take data together and help law enforcement, for example. Was that kind of the first version of the idea? [00:08:47] S0: It was definitely the first version. I think we came to the problem with a very open mind and from first principles. When we went to partner with the first agency we worked with, the San Pablo Police Department. We didn't have a prescriptive solution. We had an objective, which was to help these detectives solve the cases that they were working on and then we worked backward from there. [00:09:09] S2: But you somehow knew that it was a problem. Obviously everybody wants to solve more cases, but you knew that they were probably not making the most of the data that was available to them for reasons that you saw like at the UN, et cetera?
00:09:09 · Pablo Srugo, Ben Rudolph
[00:09:09] S2: But you somehow knew that it was a problem. Obviously everybody wants to solve more cases, but you knew that they were probably not making the most of the data that was available to them for reasons that you saw like at the UN, et cetera? [00:09:21] S0: It was actually just, because when you go to solve a case, you get a bunch of data that you have to sift through and sort through. And we're like, wow, this is really hard. And it was there where we're like, okay, we need to build something to actually process this information. And then, we started tying it to some of their record management systems that they already had and connecting those dots. And those are the very initial steps when you're trying to solve a case. Obviously, there's some piece of this where we came from a background, where data integration was a very important problem and something that was front and center for us. But it was also very much a first principles, how do we solve this problem for the customer? [00:09:54] S2: You know, you want to have impact. So I get that that's kind of in the back of your mind. But what pulled you towards law enforcement in the first place? [00:09:56] S0: I think public safety is an incredibly important problem. I spent a lot of time in countries that had no functioning public safety system and I personally believe that, doing public safety correctly and right is a very, very challenging and hard problem. And I was motivated to work on that problem, and dig deep on it.
00:09:56 · Ben Rudolph, Pablo Srugo
[00:09:56] S0: I think public safety is an incredibly important problem. I spent a lot of time in countries that had no functioning public safety system and I personally believe that, doing public safety correctly and right is a very, very challenging and hard problem. And I was motivated to work on that problem, and dig deep on it. [00:10:20] S2: So both you guys just kind of, you just cared about public safety. You just decided, let's talk to some people. See what's happening in that world, see what problems we could solve. [00:10:27] S0: When we initially set out to find a partner, we were knocking on doors. We actually researched a ton of different folks in the Bay Area, different captains, different leaders who might be open to this type of partnership and our methodology here was really. We looked at essentially the org chart of these police departments. Who are the number two, number three in charge? They were maybe a little bit younger. They were leaned into technology. Isolated that list, we did a bunch of research on these folks, what kind of cases they worked in the past, and then we left very thoughtful messages. We reached out to them, and we were persistent in that. [00:10:27] S2: Were you asking them specifically at that point?