Autonomous Security Robots with William Santana Li

William (“Bill”) Santana Li is the Founder of Knightscope. He and his partner, have formed a company in response to the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook and Boston Bombings. He has a passion, for creating an affordable platform to reduce both crime and economic burden in places of every facet of society with the right fusion of technologies and social engagement.

Knightscope builds fully Autonomous Security Robots, which are a very unique combination of self-driving autonomous technology, robotics, and artificial intelligence, to give our nation’s 2 million law enforcement and security professionals, really smart eyes and ears for them to do their jobs much more effectively.

Mr. Li earned a BSEE from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the University of Detroit Mercy.

Watch the episode here:

Brett:

I’m excited about our next guest. He is the Founder of Knightscope. He and his partner, have formed a company in response to the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook and Boston Bombings. He has a passion, for creating an affordable platform to reduce both crime and economic burden in places of every facet of society with the right fusion of technologies and social engagement. Please welcome to the show with me, William Santana Li. William, how are you doing today?

William:

Good. Hey, Brett, how are you doing? Greetings from Silicon Valley.

Brett:

Absolutely. Glad to have you here. I think he liked to go by Bill. So we’re gonna go by Bill for the rest of today. That being said, Bill, would you give our listeners a little bit more about your story, and your current focus?

William:

Sure, Knightscope builds fully autonomous security robots, which are a very unique combination of self-driving autonomous technology, robotics, and artificial intelligence, to give our nation’s 2 million law enforcement and security professionals, really smart eyes and ears for them to do their jobs much more effectively. Coming up here on April 4 will be our eighth anniversary, which is kind of vague because you know, it’s 20,000 startups in Silicon Valley, like 95% of them end up failing. So we’re pretty excited about building this crazy set of technologies and actually have it working in the real world. We’d hold contracts from Alaska to Rhode Island, operating 24/7 across the nation, we’ve operated over a million hours thus far. And crimefighting technologies have actually proven to work.

Brett:

Amazing, can’t wait to dive into that because it’s such a unique topic and so timely, given the state of a lot of things. So we’ll dive into that here in a second. But I want to take a step back, though, first one Bill, and I want you to help our listeners and myself get to know you a little bit better. I believe we’ve all been given certain gifts in this life. These gifts are given to us to be a blessing and a help to others. Some people call it a strength. Some people call it a superpower. But I want you to go back maybe to your university days or your high school days. want you to think about maybe one or two gifts that you believe you were given, and how those gifts help how you help and bless people today?

William:

I think one of the things that I realized when I started was the time. It is really important. I didn’t come from a wealthy family. I ended up kind of smashing stuff in together as quickly as possible to graduate as quickly as possible. So during high school, I went through stuff here in university, California, Berkeley after my sophomore year, and then at Yale University for some summer sessions, and then crammed everything into Carnegie Mellon during the summer and added all that up and was able to graduate a year early. You know, entrepreneurs can create jobs, can define technologies, can build brands, but you know, the one thing we can do is create time. So that was kind of important. And I think the other thing that is rather different from me than others is I kind of like to look at things from a systemic standpoint. Unfortunately, our scholastic system and our corporations breed silos or into the functional experts. So if you started your career as a buyer in purchasing, then you became the supervisor in purchasing, then the manager, then the director and the executive director, and then the vice president on purchasing. You’re really good at purchasing but your ability to actually build or run anything is really limited. Similarly, in school, we’ve got mechanical engineers and software engineers and historians and biology people, but intertwining those and mixing them is not really encouraged. To me, it’s like during interviews, I always ask, Hey kind of what’s more important as customer services and finances, the technology, I thought the best brand and nine out of 10 candidates will pick a functional area. And that’s like asking a Formula One racecar driver. You know, please tell me what’s more important than this. Steering or the brakes, like you, have to have everything kind of work together. And for a startup like we are, it ebbs and flows over time. So, and I think of thinking of things holistically as opposed to I got to be really good at customer service, or I got to be really good at technology. That’s not how the world works.

Brett:

Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. And so I want to try to encapsulate that. So time and being efficient and thinking of ways to speed up and have and get your studies done and you’re running a company building something from scratch in Silicon Valley. So you’ve always looked at time and efficiency and another way. And then on top of that looked at big problems from a systemic standpoint, a broader and saying, “How are we? How are we solving these problems? And what are the things that are in the way to solving that? And we’ve got to change that, reimagine that”. is that a fair summary, Bill?

William:

Yeah. I think if we fast forward to Knightscope, kind of looking at the country’s issues if you would have asked me for eight years ago, hey, we’re gonna be in the middle of a pandemic, the robots are immune. And literally, the entire country after what happened over the summer, and January 6, is going to be looking at reimagining public safety. And you’d be in the right in the middle of it, I’d say, Yeah, kind of Hollywood sci-fi. Movie plot. And but you know, here we are, I think from a systemic standpoint, that may be your viewers may not be fluent in. The US Department of Defense has a $700 Billion budget, there’s one person in charge, and we give the troops every level of capability you might ever imagine. And there’s a Northrop Grumman or Lockheed Martin, or Raytheon, or Boeing to build whatever he or she might need in a theater of war. There are two plus a million soldiers. That is not the case on our own soil. So the US Department of Justice and the US Department of Homeland Security effectively have no federal jurisdiction, over 19,000 law enforcement agencies, and 8000 private security firms. And we’ve got 2 million people on the ground that wake up every morning and willing to take a bullet for you and your family. And the level of technology that we provide to them as a country is certainly beneath the dignity of this nation, we effectively have them trying to secure the country with the technological equivalent of a number two pencil and a notepad. And in that case, there’s no risk capital, there’s no one single person in charge, there’s no strategy, it’s systemically broken.

Brett:

Wow, that is staggering to hear that and having family members served in the Marines and the army. And I had no clue of those stats. So let’s dive in right into exactly what you’re doing to take that head-on. What are autonomous security robots? How are they helping to bring change to what you just talked about?

William:

Sure, the strategy is twofold. The first one’s a little bit easier than the second one. The first one is just to provide a physical deterrence. So if I put a mark law enforcement vehicle in front of your home or your office, criminal behavior changes, Alternatively, if you’re driving down the highway, and there’s a marked police car on those side of the road, I don’t care what speed you’re doing, you’re gonna pump those brakes. And that is similar to our machines that are behind me. If you’re trying to steal a car at a hospital at three o’clock in the morning, and you pull up in, there’s a five-foot-tall, 400-pound machine roaming around on its own, there’s no one remote controlling it, there’s a strobe light going, it says security on the side, you have no idea what it does, you’re gonna steal the car down the street and not there. And that’s literally what’s been happening with our clients across the nation. So that kind of the simple part, just physically being there stops a lot of negative silliness from happening. The second part is a little bit more complicated. So these machines generate over 90 terabytes of data a year that no human would ever be able to digest. And we put that in a format that an officer or guard can utilize, and the machines can then provide 360-degree eye level, high definition streaming video, we can run a thermal scan, we can treat your mobile device as if it’s a license plate and kind of be on the lookout for that device. Same with license plates. The guards can speak through the machines as if it’s a mobile PA system. So it’s basically providing the guards and officers really smart eyes and ears and having their eyes ears and voice on the ground and being able to be in a lot more places at the same time. And then that force multiplier is what is driving a lot of the crime reduction that we’ve seen with the application of technology across the country.

Brett:

So my mind has me thinking, Minority Report here, Bill, so I know you’ve probably heard this a lot.

William:

No, never heard of it. Minority Report, Star Wars, Robocop, I haven’t heard of any of them. No idea what you’re talking about.

Brett:

So help us with the biggest, I guess, false beliefs or maybe fears that like us American citizens or anyone really looking at like, our data or security or freedom? So I know there’s probably so much out there that is just so unreasonable. So what’s the biggest false belief of what you do? And how does it overcome that maybe the challenge of some of the fears that someone like myself who’s learned about this first time would have?

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