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Dropcam
Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy
The company makes WiFi cameras that let you stream video from your home live. It also has a $99 per year subscription service that lets you store a week's worth of video at a time.
Last week, Dropcam announced it's working on a technology that can tell when a person enters your home so it can alert you via email or app notification. The person recognition can tell the difference between humans and other moving objects, which has obvious security benefits. It'll go live to subscribers later this summer.
Business Insider caught up with Dropcam's CEO Greg Duffy last week to talk about the new people detection feature and how the company prepares to grow and possibly IPO.
Below is an edited transcription of the conversation.
Business Insider: Why are you implementing people detection?
Greg Duffy: We're thinking about Dropcam as a way for you to see what's going on at home and we want to curate that content for you since there's so much of it. The whole service takes in orders of magnitude more video than YouTube per user. We've always talked about Dropcam being more than just a hardware device. Our cloud service gets better over time. You buy your Dropcam and there are things it's going to be able to do in the future that it wasn't able to do the day you bought it. The first thing we're going to launch is enhancement to our motion detection, which is actually going to allow Dropcam to recognize people.
BI: How does the people detection work?
Duffy: It's a computer vision feature that we run in the cloud if you enable it on your camera. You need to be on one of our recording plans to get it. There's a huge amount of computing power that's being dedicated to doing this in the cloud. It's a really amazing way to pare down the number of alerts that you get from your camera. Imagine if you have a home with pets. You probably don't want to be alerted about your pet running in front of the camera when you're in the middle of the meeting.
Dropcam The Dropcam WiFi camera.
Duffy: The way we're able to do it is like all artificial intelligence or machine learning concepts. We had to provide some training data, which we're able to pull from our public featured cameras, which are only a small percentage of Dropcams. They're located all over the world and user submitted.
BI: What are some of the most interesting things users have captured on their Dropcams?
Duffy: It's been amazing seeing all the things people have caught. Some people have caught their kids' first steps. We've had tons of examples of people catching their kids' first steps or first words - all kinds of things they'd want immortalized. That's definitely a big use case. Also, people are catching burglars. Often, the burglars will even steal the camera, but it doesn't matter because all the video is in the cloud. It just gives us a better shot of their face. In fact, there was a guy who got his face on the local news from a Dropcam video and his mom recognized him and turned him in.
BI: Do you think everything we do in the future will be recorded?
Duffy: I think to a certain extent, yes. There's always a tempering of this because I still think privacy is a thing and it's going to be something that people care about for a long time to come. I think certain areas of your home will be recorded. We want to make sure that we're recording when you want us to record and not when you don't. [Note: Dropcam is also launching Bluetooth presence monitors that can connect to Dropcams and let the device know when you're home and don't want to be recorded. They'll launch this summer and cost $29.]
BI: Dropcam has raised a lot of money. Is there an IPO in the future? What's next?
Duffy: We've seen a lot of IPOs recently, and I think the way we look at it is maybe a little different than those companies. An IPO is just your last capital raise. You should need the capital and you should also feel like your growth rates are slow enough that the private market is not the place for you. We're still growing revenue on pretty significant numbers. I don't think it would be a good time for us to go into the public market right now, but I think it's definitely a goal for us to be a completely independent and profitable company. A lot of companies going for IPOs right now aren't profitable, so I think we'd like to avoid that.
BI: Does that mean you think a company must be profitable in order to have an IPO?
Duffy: I think it's a good idea to have a lead on profitability at the very least before you go into the public market. Venture capitalists are used to dealing with the risk of companies that aren't profitable and evaluating those risks and the technologies and other other things that make the companies valuable. It's really about predictability. I think that's more important for something like the public market.