Episode Details

Connect with Rish Gupta: rish@spotai.co

LInkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/profilerish/overlay/contact-info/

Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce our guest today, Rish Gupta. Rish is co-founder and head of product at Spot AI, a groundbreaking video intelligent company built to answer a simple question, "Why is it so difficult for people at work to access video off their cameras?"

Rish, welcome to the show. 

Rish Gupta: Thanks, Lisa. Excited to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Lisa Ryan: So share a little about your background and what led you to focus on video. 

Rish Gupta: Yeah, it's been a circuitous route to videos that always want to build technologies. So when I graduated college at about 22, 23. I started a company that was a pure software company. I knew nothing about running a business. I ran it for five years, grew to a few million users, and sold it. Again, though, I didn't know anything about running a business. The thing that helped the timing was it was just a couple of years after the event of smartphones.

So the new behaviors and the influx of new people coming onto the internet because of smartphones led to that growth as a business for us. So as I was looking through new ideas and things to think about, one of the things that became constant was the number of mobile phones in the world.

91% of the people already have mobile phones, and the number of PCs has stayed constant at 2 billion for the last decade and sells approximately 300 million units a year. So it's okay. These computing devices are not growing. They're everywhere, but they're already there.

But everywhere around us, if you see, look at your home, small internet chips are being inserted into your fridges, cars, and these Alexa, the baby cams, and the pet cams. And that seemed like a computing paradigm is changing where everything around us will get digitized.

And the same thing was happening in, in the business arena. And then, when you double click on the business arena, you see that 80% if you're trying to get visibility into your physical operations. So basically, through the internet of things or any of these new technologies, 80% of how we consume the world is through our eyes.

And 85% of the data on the internet is videos. So we thought, wow, would it be any different in the business arena? And that's why video seems like a really exciting place to focus on concerning enterprises. And then, as we dove into it, we realized that the existing state of videos is people had sold them IP cameras over the last 15 years. So every business, from a gas station to a manufacturing house to any part of an industrial chain, has a security camera.

But then they're not able to access it. So they still use a USB thumb drive. It's an old-school VHS-like recorder somewhere in the back room. One person may be in the organization who knows where the video is and knows how to access it. And so, all these pain points in getting this data into the hands of users.

And so that, that's what kind of drives us towards solving this problem. 

Lisa Ryan: That's interesting because I think about what you just said about computers, that that, that hasn't grown and that, but the mobile technology has, and it's that's probably because five-year-olds don't have laptops yet, but they do have iPhones. So, why are they so far behind with so much mobile technology in the security camera industry? 

Rish Gupta: Yeah, that's a good question. When we started building this technology, what baffled us the most was how far behind these cameras were.

And the reason for that is if you think about what most people would remember is as children, we used Panasonic, S