THE SPACE SAFE: HOW A SMART SAFE IS DISRUPTING A CENTURE-OLD INDUSTRY WITH OSCAR HEDAYA

E105 THE SPACE SAFE_ HOW A SMART SAFE IS DISRUPTING A CENTURE-OLD INDUSTRY WITH OSCAR HEDAYA

Transcript

Dalton Anderson (00:00.718) Welcome to Venture Step Podcasts where we discuss entrepreneurship, industry trends, and the occasional book review. Today we're sitting down with a man who looked at an industry that hadn't changed in 50 years and decided it was time for a digital revolution. He's the founder and CEO of Space, the man behind the first truly intelligent safe. While the rest of the world was building smartphones and smart homes, he was busy reinventing the way that we protect our most valuable assets. Welcome to the show, Oscar Hedea.

Oscar Hedaya (00:28.657) Hey, how are you? Thank you for having me.

Dalton Anderson (00:32.982) It is welcome to the show and really excited to talk through a couple items, just an agenda for the group today. We're to be talking about the inspiration of space, your inspiration, Oscar, and then talking about the infrastructure challenge of restructuring the thought process from a manufacturing side, like how a safe could be constructed or what a safe could be and selling that vision because you can't make a safe by yourself. You've got

a whole bunch of things involved like steel moldings, components, electrical components. How does that all get put into one product when previously they were completely separate ideas or iterations? So I think that's a massive challenge. And then talking through the current use cases and some of the cool features that you typically wouldn't get if you had a traditional safe. And then looking through a different lens on a longer viewpoint on what you could see in the future.

Oscar Hedaya (01:31.421) Yeah, that sounds great.

Dalton Anderson (01:34.636) And just keep in mind, Oscar, Oscar is mobile today. So we'll be checking in on the battery every now and then we had some voice, voice issues on the computer for some reason. It's just some weird stuff that sometimes happens with the recording platform I use. So just keep that in mind. So thank you. Appreciate the Oscar with the backup plan.

Oscar Hedaya (01:56.669) Yeah, of course. I'm a big believer in Murphy's law, you know, so if something can go wrong, it definitely will go wrong.

Dalton Anderson (02:00.846) You

Yeah, I'm sure we'll be able to hear about that when you're talking through the infrastructure challenges. But before we do that, you just talk through and give everybody the background about like your inspiration for space.

Oscar Hedaya (02:16.017) Yeah, of course. my background is in tech. Love tech. I grew up having tech. I had a computer in, well, not me, but my family had a computer already in 1998. And I remember like fighting with my brother for, you know, whether we were going to play Nintendo or use the computer. So since a young age, I've always loved tech. And for the last

15 years I've been in product development and I've been manufacturing like really, really awesome products. I was at the forefront of electric scooters. So you could think before lime became lime, I was already in that industry. And so I've kind of always like positioned myself as that guy who says, hey, what's a cool new product? You know, what's a cool industry that hasn't really moved in a long time?

And so similar to like you were saying before, like this category hasn't changed in 50 years or 20 years. And so I was in a place where I had a personal experience that we had a theft and I was looking for a safe and I couldn't find something that I wanted to buy and store my valuables in. And so that's where the idea started to like...

come together and I'm like, my God, I need to make a safe that everybody needs. You know, like we need a safe that's actually secure. And that's where the idea started to brew and come to life.

Dalton Anderson (03:55.694) I could see how that could resonate when you have a personal experience and those are definitely not fun for sure. Sorry that happened to you. And I'm glad that you had able to, I guess redirect some of that energy to this new problem that you're solving space. And I think that it could help prevent other issues in the future when this becomes a widespread product, a name.

What is it? What is it? A named household item. talking through some of the challenges like, you know better than I do because you've been in this manufacturing scene for some time and making products that haven't existed or weren't mainstream before. But I mean, there's just got to be a reason and heavy resistance from the old guard to change.

how safes were built. I for generations they've been this way. And so like, why change now? So there's gotta be a massive resistance. you walk us through a little bit about that and like your experience of restructuring this hardware to make it a software and hardware? Like, just, this is a completely new thing.

Oscar Hedaya (05:07.726) Yeah, so...

Oscar Hedaya (05:13.219) Absolutely. And so I think that's what most people don't realize whenever they're either creating a business or starting a new segment in an industry. It's very easy for people to just say like, hey, know, safe already exists. They're not doing anything. They're just putting a screen on it. You know, and that's for my safe, my product. But every industry has its challenges. The second that you're trying to like go against the grain.

exactly how you were explaining it. You know, there's so much resistance and like the reason for it is because people are making money. You know, people are making money. This works. Why are we going to change this? You know, they're selling millions of safes per year and they're doing billion dollars in revenue every year. Why are they going to go and change this? You know, like people are buying it. People are not saying the consumer is not saying

like, hey, we need a better product. Like even the consumers are happy. And I think the biggest issue is, you know, as a consumer who, you don't know something else exists, and there's a better option, you're going to take what exists already, right? And so if consumers aren't saying anything to the industry leaders, and the industry leaders are saying, hey, you know, we're selling millions of dollars of this or

per year and things are going well and the manufacturers also, they're making a metal box, they are creating this locking mechanism. There's no reason to kind of make an improvement. And for people like me, that's incredible. know, take Steve Jobs or anybody who went into an industry and said, hey, there's something really missing here. We have to go create this product that

will take this industry and put it hundreds of years, like 10 years into the future, you need people like that. And not everybody is like that. And the second that you have an idea that could fast forward an industry, there's always going to be resistance. And specifically for us, I mean, I don't know if you want me to talk about this in detail right now or later, but specifically for us, you're going to manufacturers who... And so...

Oscar Hedaya (07:39.722) manufacturers in general, what they are doing is they see a product, they see a plan and they are told, hey, make a box. When you make a box, this is how the size of the box. is the way the keypad is supposed to be. And so everything is very simple for them. You you take a product like mine that is super complex, like you were saying, you know, you're taking electronics, you're taking hardware.

and you're kind of putting that together. This is even before you're talking about software, you know, they look at it and they're like, this is too much for us. You know, it's like, it's like if you have a chef who a pasta chef who only makes pasta and now you're going to start introducing ravioli and all these other ingredients and different types of products that they're going to make, they're going to say like, Hey, look, like this isn't, this isn't the way we do things here. You know, so

Dalton Anderson (08:13.251) Mm.

Oscar Hedaya (08:37.411) There's a lot of resistance for that. yeah, I think we'll go back. We'll go more into detail with it later on if you'd like.

Dalton Anderson (08:47.214) Yeah. One thing that you said that I want to call out or emphasize and maybe summarize in a bit when you were talking about just the resistance and dealing with that. I think it's also the injection of passion into the idea and into the initiative versus you can have a small majority or minority that might be loud and saying, we want, we want smart states or whatever it may be. And then

some companies like, we'll do a smart safe and it's half-assed and it's a touchscreen that is a safe, but it's not a smart safe. Like it's not a legitimate smart safe with like smart features. And you could see that at, you know, across any industry where there is some kind of incumbent, they're like, we need to innovate. And it's like, it's not a, there's not the level of passion that is integrated into.

to the new idea, it's like, okay, we need to do it because like, people are saying that we need to do it, but I don't necessarily care about it or cash cow or these products. And so, you know, just put Bob on that one or Jessica and let them do whatever they want, be their passion project. First is a true, a truly passionate like reinvention and a lot of thought being put into like what does a

what does the product do today and what does it need to be doing to

Oscar Hedaya (10:16.323) Yeah, by the way, you hit that right on the nail. And I think part of the reason is, you you have manufacturers who are optimized really for consistency. You know, they're not made for innovation. And then you have these companies that say, okay, like, maybe we just try one simple product, like you're saying, but the product is, the problem is they keep failing. know, so you have companies like Motorola, they made SmartSafe like six years ago.

and they dropped the ball, completely dropped the ball. That safe is a piece of plastic. It uses a cheap lock. And the only smart thing that it does is it connects to the cell phone and there's a mobile app. The problem is that Wi-Fi drops all the time, right? So before we decided to go into this business, we were looking at other safes who wanted to see where the competition was sitting.

And the truth is like every single company that was doing it kept dropping the ball. Motorola is an example. Yale safes came out I think two years ago or three years ago now. I don't remember the exact timing, but two or three years ago they came out with a safe. Same idea. know, they have all it does. The only thing that makes it connected. Sorry, the only thing that makes it smart is it connects to a cell phone, but they're not looking at security. You know, they

When I say they're not looking at security, they have a cheap lock, they have a cheap piece of metal that's housing the entire unit. The Wi-Fi is constantly having issues. And then on top of it, you have a mobile app that lets you unlock your safe from the mobile app by just the push of a button, which for convenience, that's really great. But if you're selling a security product and the whole idea behind it is, hey, let's make something super secure, you know,

If you get my phone and you just push this button, that's it. You gain access to like a $10,000 watch. That's not that's not security, you know, and I think that's kind of where, you know, these companies drop the ball exactly like you're saying the company is not making a shift. They're just getting Bob or whoever you're calling in the company say like, hey, yeah, I think we need to kind of like our shareholders are saying that we need to

Oscar Hedaya (12:41.302) Try to think of like getting a smart safe. So figure out what you could do and what you want to do there, you know?

Dalton Anderson (12:48.685) Yeah, for sure. I agree. And those examples really are concrete in in the vibes that I was getting from when I was reading on the Internet. But you've been in it. So, you know, and you're deeply integrated. And yeah, it's just like. The thought, the full thought isn't there is half baked. And if it's half baked and then I think the pro I hit my mic on accident, the problem is when it's half baked, it's like, well.

We knew it wasn't gonna work. like, you know, this isn't just, the industry's not ready for this. And it's like, it could be ready, but it's just like, no one's really putting in that effort. It's like, oh, I'm training for a marathon. And then you're not training. You're like, oh, I ran like 10 times, before the marathon. And it just like, I just didn't feel ready. I just wasn't ready. It's like, cool.

Oscar Hedaya (13:36.502) Just show up.

Dalton Anderson (13:44.857) Well, you probably train like three to six months before you run. And then you got to think about your nutrition, your gel packs, like all this stuff. Like I'm into running. So like that was a good example for myself, but maybe not for everybody. But there's a lot of things that go into training for it. If you just show up, you're probably not going to perform well. Like, well, I guess I'm just not, I'm just not a runner or something like that. Like we're all biologically great at running. Like we're probably like third or something in the species list on endurance running. So it's just.

Oscar Hedaya (14:05.216) Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (14:13.9) Yeah, I don't know. It's just a weird thing that happens and it's kind of dumbfounding for myself where you see it constantly and it's just like a funny, a funny blurb that you see on the, on the data spreadsheet. It's like, well, it doesn't work. And it's like, well, you didn't really try. So, but

Oscar Hedaya (14:29.259) But I think, by the way, I think you hit it right, not to, sorry to cut you off. I think you hit it right on the, on the ball before when you said it's a lack of passion. You know, so if somebody's passionate about something exactly like you're saying, if you're, if you're a runner and you want to run and you want to like get better and you want to make sure that you're going to do amazing at your race, you're going to, you're going to prepare for it. You know, if you have a concert and you're a pianist,

Dalton Anderson (14:34.03) Yeah, no good.

Oscar Hedaya (14:58.464) You're not just going to show up, you know, like same thing with like football players or any other sport, you know, they don't just show up on on day one of, hey, the season just started. Here's the first game. Like they're training for weeks and months up until the game starts.

Dalton Anderson (15:17.218) Yeah, they're constantly attacking the problem, whatever that problem is. It's not a thing that floats in and out of their mind. It's always on their mind, which is the difference. And that creates a better product in this scenario. And I know that we wanted, maybe we could talk into just the manufacturing piece, like the technical hurdles. So I get the fact that, maybe people don't understand the manufacturing piece, but I think you can send over some CAD files and

Oscar Hedaya (15:25.877) Yeah. Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (15:47.063) the design of the product and then the manufacturer's like, okay, cool. But then how do you get the metal molds and then the hardware all put together? And then also like just the process of turning that into, that's like updates, updates over the internet or whatever it's called. What is it? What is it? What's it? What's the exact term? yeah, there we go. yeah. Over the year updates.

Oscar Hedaya (16:09.802) OTA, it's over the air updates.

Dalton Anderson (16:15.554) Like all of that piece together is quite complicated. Just can you make sure that is resonates or resonates with the audience of like who's listening or watching like all that goes into doing that. Cause it's super complicated. And then you also have to make a commitment to constantly update previous versions or previous hardware. And you've got to understand a little nuances of each hardware. Like it's a lot.

Oscar Hedaya (16:29.044) Yeah.

Oscar Hedaya (16:32.543) Yeah.

Oscar Hedaya (16:44.086) Yeah, I think you understand it more than 99 % of people do. But so before before I started this company, I was part of the 99 % of people who did not understand it, you know, like, kind of thought, hey, you know, this is cool. This idea is cool. Let's get a metal box. Let's put a screen on it. Let's put all these electronics on into it and

You don't really understand how complex something like that is. What people don't talk about is, okay, you have all these electronics, now they need to be able to talk to each other, right? And they need to know what's happening. They need to know what's going on. So you make this motherboard or PCBA, and that's the brain that connects all the electronics to one another, right? To this brain.

Let's say you have an arm. I have an arm, I have an arm, right? Like how do I decide where it's moving? You have to have the brain, which is the motherboard, the PCBA, that's up here. And so now if I wanna look at you, I'm opening my eyes and my brain is kind of like computing everything that my eyes are seeing. And now if I wanna open the door, I look with my eyes, I go with my hands, I open the door, I pull. You know, we don't think of that.

as like a normal consumer. The average consumer just says like, hey, this is cool. know, a camera exists. Yeah, a camera exists and a touchscreen exists. Like this is not new technology. But what people don't realize is to kind of bring it all together. To create a PCBA could take a year when you're taking all of all of these electronics. And why? Because you have to

Dalton Anderson (18:17.016) Does it work?

Oscar Hedaya (18:38.207) put together these drivers and you have to put together this different logic of like, hey, how does this work? How do we open this up? And then after that, you know, it's not just like these electronics that are talking all together, but you need to actually have developed also software or firmware that makes the talking possible, right? And so that's like step one, step two, and then you have to start talking about like different

use cases, you know, like how do you know that the door is open now? You know, because you have a door that works on a motor, right? So now when you type in the correct pin, you want to tell the motor, open the motor. Now, how do know that the motor is open? You have to create a, you have to use sensors, you know, so it's not just like, hey, this one thing that says like, and I think that's where people really misunderstand it. And that's

Totally where I misunderstood it before I started this company. I thought it's more like, hey, these things exist already. It's very easy to just put this all together. But there's a lot more thought that has to go into it. And the number one thing that you do when you're creating a product like this is you have to find electrical engineers. And then you have to find software engineers. And it's not just like one engineer. And going back to like,

what we were talking about before where like, you know, manufacturing just really has one engineer, it's just mechanical, right? They're not looking at electronical, they're not looking at a software developer, they have one engineer that's a mechanical. Does this work? If you turn the key, will the key open, will the key close? That's it, you know, that's what they're looking at. So now when you're taking into consideration all these electronics,

Dalton Anderson (20:25.347) Mm-hmm.

Oscar Hedaya (20:33.751) and all this other stuff, that's where a lot of issues could appear. That's where more time and more love needs to go into building a product. that's where, like you were saying before, that's where you need to have a passion and it needs to really be like a focused line of smart safes, where that's all we focus on is smart safes.

We're not doing regular safes and then, hey, let's try to make this one also smart. And I think that's... And then you spoke about like, we didn't go into the actual software, but we're the only safes in the world that has a touchscreen. And because we have a touchscreen, we've been able to put an entire operating system on the safe. And it sounds cool, right? It sounds great. Like...

you have an iPad on your safe, you could just imagine like, like the options and features and all these different things that you could have by having a touch screen. But, and the other companies, what do they have? They have these digital keypads one through one through zero or one through nine. And you just push it. It's that it's super simple. But again, the complexity when you're having an entire operating system, it brings

Dalton Anderson (21:44.974) Mm-hmm.

Oscar Hedaya (21:57.502) There's so much that goes into it that you also you don't think about. You you're thinking that like, hey, this is a pretty simple thing, even for you know, making an operating system that just deals with the safe and it has just a few little features. But I remember like in the beginning when I was hiring my developers, they're like, wow, this is really complex. And I was part of the 99 % saying like, what are you talking about? This is so simple.

Dalton Anderson (22:25.954) Hahaha

Oscar Hedaya (22:27.345) You know, you just put in your bin code, it unlocks and they're like, no, there's a lot of like thought and logic and language that has to go into developing this, you know, and on top of it, you have to have your sensors that all talk to each other because, you know, we have, we have cameras on the outside, cameras on the inside. When do those turn on? You know, we have motion sensors that, that are active on the outside and they're sensing and

If the motion sensor senses a human being and not a cat and not a dog and you know, like, and not just light, right, there's a lot of AI that goes into each sensor that adds these logics behind it. And again, like the 99 % would never think of that. We're just thinking like, hey, there's a motion center. What is a motion sensor? It just senses motion, you know, like, you're not thinking about like what goes on in the background.

And because we have this operating system, we're actually able to do software updates like you were saying. So we have these over the air updates. So whenever we're releasing new features or if we find a bug or any other thing, we're sending new updates to every single customer. So I hate that like a year and a half ago, I read an article that...

this one safe manufacturer that worked with about five or six safe companies here in the US, they did a recall and they recalled it was I think like 600,000 safes. And so what was the issue? Yeah, what was the issue? The fingerprint sensor after you would enroll a fingerprint, if you wanted to access the safe, any fingerprint would work, not just the one

Dalton Anderson (24:06.669) Wow.

Oscar Hedaya (24:23.173) that you enrolled. But like, so technically, yeah, like, what do you do? You know, and no other safe company does software updates. And so like, the problem is you either take this heavy box of metal and you go try to send it in and you're probably paying for shipping. The company isn't paying for shipping. So like, you have a heavy box you have to deal with and you realize that like the secure piece of metal that you hoped was like super secure.

Dalton Anderson (24:25.838) It's great.

Oscar Hedaya (24:52.398) was not secure at all. you know, I think there's a reason why and we didn't create anything new, you know, we didn't create software updates. We weren't the people who did that. know, Windows has been doing it for 20 years. You know, we just decided, hey, let's take that incorporated into the safe that way. Security is always going to be at the highest level of security forever. You know, and that's something that we did here. And I think that's what

I don't want to not to like pat myself on the back, but like I think that's what a good entrepreneur does. You know, they say, hey, these technologies exist. We're not going to totally reinvent reinvent the wheel here, but we are going to take a segment of an industry and that's outdated and we're going to improve it. You know, and I think that's how like you take Dyson, for instance, I love Dyson. You know, the Dyson vacuums.

Dalton Anderson (25:50.796) Yep. They're amazing by the way. A little expensive, but they're amazing.

Oscar Hedaya (25:51.674) So they're amazing. They're expensive and they know they're expensive. so I heard a podcast from the guy who started Dyson. I think it was like 10 years ago. I listened to it. But basically he went to Hoover Vacuum, and Hoover Vacuum used to use the bags and he told them, hey, I want to license this technology out to you instead of bags.

Dalton Anderson (26:14.925) Mm-hmm.

Oscar Hedaya (26:20.462) you know, it sucks in and then brings it into this thing. I don't know. It's not my industry, so don't know. Maybe I'm butchering it a little.

Dalton Anderson (26:26.574) a cylinder called like a debris cylinder.

Oscar Hedaya (26:29.603) Yeah, so he wanted to sell this to Hoover and Hoover was a massive corporation at the time and they said no, know, like we don't, we're not looking to innovate. We're not looking to bring in new technology. Like things are working great for us. And this guy Dyson was super broke. Like he didn't have money, you know, and he decided and he put a lot of energy into it and kept pushing and like he ended up selling a couple to

corporations to like for companies who were doing like big who needed like heavy duty vacuums and that's how it started and he's worth like eight billion dollars. You know what I mean? Like this guy, he killed it. Why? Because he took an industry that was stagnant and he put in a lot of love and he created a product that now went into the next life cycle of that industry. And so that's

Kind of what I did here and that's what I hope every entrepreneur does. Doesn't just make like another mouse that they would use on their computer. Make something different.

Dalton Anderson (27:38.735) Yeah, there's plenty, plenty of new ideas. There's no need to recycle. Definitely. And just the sidebar, not related to this conversation, but more related to Dyson. like, I think that's Dyson's M.O. like recently I watched some kind of video where they took Dyson engineers and made some kind of vertical slash horizontal farm for strawberries in the UK because there's not enough sunlight. And I think now they have strawberries for like 60 % less costs.

Oscar Hedaya (28:05.775) Bye.

Dalton Anderson (28:05.894) and they're more nutritious. And it's like this whole like automated system that circulates light and vertically rotates the strawberries because they're like on this like large cylinders and then they rotate around and then the light spreads. It's just crazy complex system. And it's like, wait, like there's this Dyson's Dyson's doing all sorts of innovations, innovative stuff. And I don't know the thing that's their M.O. They just do crazy stuff and they're like, all right, we'll sell it.

Oscar Hedaya (28:21.647) Brilliant.

Dalton Anderson (28:34.988) I don't think they have a specialty in any area. think they just innovate, which is a cool company.

Oscar Hedaya (28:39.182) But you know why? Because they're private. They're privately owned. You know, so you have the heads of this company who are saying like, hey, let's try this. Like, let's put money into anything. And if something sticks, great, then we'll make another billion dollars this year. You know, where as you take a company like that's publicly owned, they don't have that ability. You know, they have shareholders that they're kind of like answering to.

And so if you lose a billion dollars that year because you tried to make an electric car and you're like, nah, scrap it. You know, if it's your money, you care, but you don't have to answer to anybody, you know? So.

Dalton Anderson (29:18.85) Yep. I think the only way around that is to change the voting shares for shareholders, but public companies don't like doing that. think you just have, if you're in a special situation, think the only most notable would be Metta, where Mark can dictate the direction of the company. But other companies, there's just so much voting power for majority stakeholders. You don't really have that choice.

It kind of depends. There's pros and cons to everything, but I don't think every company is to be public for sure. Cause it, I think it would, it reduces the level of innovation, but speaking on innovation. I know that you talked through all the complexities, the sensor, just the manufacturing process. What does that mean for the user? Because like now that we're going to apply it, I think without being, I guess too comparative, it's kind of like,

turning the safe into like a Tesla safe where like cars were cars. And now that we have like this Tesla that has like cameras on the outside, it recognizes when people around it, it screenshots and sends videos of interactions. And it's like, okay, how does, how do all these sensors get rolled up and these, all this technology? How does that make my safe better? Like, how does that make me feel like my valuables are being protected? And so I want to just talk through.

how the sensors, the manufacturing process, all that technology and technical knowledge went in to build a better product that you have currently.

Oscar Hedaya (30:52.962) Yeah, so I, before I jump into that, I want to say also, you know, I spoke a little, I mean a lot before about, you know, how you have different engineers and different sensors and different electronics and PCBAs. And when you're creating something to this magnitude, again, it doesn't, when you're just looking at it, you're just like, okay, it's a safe, you know, you don't really understand what goes into it, but we had a ton of hurdles.

You we had to reiterate our PCBAs multiple times. We found that there were so many different issues that like you over time, you you fix and you change and you improve. And specifically now we're talking about like features, right? That's that's like what so now we have all these electronics, we have all this this amazing PCBA that's the brain.

And so like, what are you getting out of it that you're not getting with a regular safe? And that's kind of like the main focus, right? And so the real difference for me, for the way I see this product is this is a connected device, you know, and I'm going to dumb this down as simple as I can. But when you're buying a regular safe, traditional safe, right, you're buying this secure piece of metal that you know is going to protect your goods.

It sounds amazing, right? The concept sounds amazing. The problem where it fails is you don't know if something happens to your safe. Right? So if you had a safe at home and it's not connected and somebody goes into your house, they break into your house, maybe you don't have an alarm system, maybe something doesn't pick up, I don't know. You know, they could go in and they could either open your safe, break into your safe, steal your safe. You would never have any idea that anything happened.

You know, and so if you have somebody who goes into your safe and takes something that's much worse than if they seal the entire safe, right? Because you don't know how what they accessed, how they accessed anything like that. And that's where, you know, connected devices and similar to mine, right? We're talking about like there's four other smart safe companies in the market. They don't do what we do, but they have some kind of connectivity, right? So

Oscar Hedaya (33:18.496) that's where a connected device really comes in is if somebody touches your safe and so our safe specifically, we have tamper sensors. So if somebody moves the safe, you're going to get a notification. If somebody touches the screen, you're going to get a notification. Somebody tries to put a pin code in, you're going to get a notification. If the sensors, sorry, we have humidity and temperature sensors. So if there's a fire in the building,

you know, the temperature is going to go up in safe. So you'll get notified for that if the humidity goes too high or too low, you'll get notified for that. And so we work a lot with sensors where most of these other smart safe companies don't do that, right? They only work on one thing. Did it open? If it did send the notification, you know, so we are a lot more advanced in that, in that sense. And so the idea behind it is we want people to be

connected to their safe. We want people to have peace of mind. That's ultimately what we're doing with all our features. And so one of the features that we have, which is really great, is if somebody picks up the safe, then it'll go into a lockdown mode. And what will end up happening is the safe screen ends up flashing this red alert. You can't use the screen. This really, really loud

alarm goes on, which is 130 decibels. And yeah, yeah, it's really loud, especially if you're like in a small room. Yeah. Yeah. I like I remember when we were testing this thing, I could not stand it, you know, and like, but that's the point, right? The point is you want somebody who's breaking into your house if they're taking this thing to say like, holy crap, you know, like

Dalton Anderson (34:50.867) That's like airplane loud.

Dalton Anderson (34:56.432) In a room that's going to mess up your ears.

Oscar Hedaya (35:16.852) I can't walk 20 feet with this. I'm going to go crazy. Somebody else next door is going to hear, know, so that's that's one of our features. The next feature that's like really cool that I love also, I'm talking a lot about burglars, but is panic pin. So if your pin number is 1234, and you enable panic pin, that means that if you put in your

your pin backwards, is 4321, that'll still unlock the safe. That way the burglar doesn't know. But in the back end, what's happening in the background, and we're able to do this because we have complex software, right? What it's doing is it sends a notification out to your emergency contact that says like, hey, we're under duress. There is a burglary happening right now. Please send the police. And here's the address that you need to send the police to.

You know, so we have these features. And I want to say, like really amazing, a lot of our features, we have over 40 features that are super, super unique that no other safe has, again, because of the software. But a lot of these features that we have, we didn't come up with ourselves, right? We have customers who email us all the time and say like, hey, it would be very cool if you guys could put this feature in the safe. And we're like,

Yes, it would be very cool. Give us two months. We'll give you a software update and you'll see that awesome feature that you wanted because not only is it an awesome feature, but we think that every other customer can use this. so Panic Pin was one of those features that a customer gave us.

Dalton Anderson (37:03.544) Hmm. Yeah, those are those are great points like the over the air updates makes a lot of sense given that one, you have software or not software, but you have sensors that you need to update over time. And then also, it's a better experience if there is a bug like, say, I don't know, somehow it passed you a tier QA, however you want to phrase it your company, and something happened and it should have never gotten in production like

eventually things like that do happen no matter if the controls. But in this scenario, instead of recalling the safes, you can just do an update and apologize and like, Hey, that was our bad. We've corrected it. We, you know, added some new procedure that will prevent this from happening again. But also it's not a problem. And, you know, it was only an issue for 19 days versus, we've known about this for years. And like, you have to, you have to bring the safe in or gets

Oscar Hedaya (37:58.483) Live with it.

Dalton Anderson (38:00.155) get somebody to mail it. And then the other thing is, and I think that's a big benefit to a smaller company, like a startup is being able to iterate fast. That's the biggest thing like speed of execution and to be able to integrate customer feedback, people who believe in the product and that are early adopters slash customers and partners, then that, that is invaluable because you're

Your biggest and I say best marketers are the current users of the product. And like there, I don't think there's anything better than having someone say, Hey, I contacted the company and I asked a feature and within a month and a half they had it and like they hear customer feedback. Like not only are they an innovative company, but they're, they're not arrogant in the fact that we're the, we're the best.

Oscar Hedaya (38:35.977) Yes.

Dalton Anderson (38:57.201) We're the best product manager you'll ever have is your customers like getting the feedback and then integrating it. Sorry, I'm a little little sick so my voice might go out but integrating the feedback is just. I don't I don't know if there's a more optimal situation.

Oscar Hedaya (39:15.123) Yeah, I couldn't agree more. you know, it's not just like the benefit I see is number one, people feel more connected to the brand. You know, number two, you really you really don't know where it could end up taking you. You know, today it's a feature. And in six months, maybe somebody says it would be cool if you have this product. And all of a sudden you're like, hey, you know what, these customers, these people who have our product,

feel connected. It's funny I'm using the word connected, but the people who feel connected to the brand and the company and they love the fact that we listen to them actually just gave us a new product, know, and all of a sudden you could have a new product which is a new revenue stream. You know, don't think in general, don't think people, companies rather, I don't think companies listen to customers enough, you know, and I mean it could be because people are complaining all the time or people want free stuff.

I don't know what the reason is, but obviously the bigger the company, the less the company is going to listen to the customers. But yeah.

Dalton Anderson (40:25.029) No, I think it's a little bit of like a green bubble syndrome. Like when you go to the board room or you go to your, your supervisor and you get higher up at the company, everybody's sensitive of rocking the boat. And that just, yeah, then that just makes it so there isn't like a lot of candor and there's a lack of candor in the room on what needs to get done and what could be done. And then that's also a part of integrating feedback. It's like, okay, like

Oscar Hedaya (40:35.783) Yeah, no one wants to rock the boat.

Dalton Anderson (40:53.073) if you're talking about all these things that you're getting suggestions for, then it's like, why didn't you think about it? Why didn't we think about this? It's like kind of causes issue with your department or whoever you're talking with. And I think it's more of a cultural thing, but I think it's a lack of candor with leadership. Typically. mean, it's quite common in that kind of space when you get the high up, which is disappointing, but it, think it's good because it creates opportunity for people that want to innovate. Like if every big company was like very tentative and

Oscar Hedaya (41:17.093) Exactly. Exactly.

Dalton Anderson (41:22.657) loved their customers and were just amazing at customer support and product innovation, then that doesn't leave much space for everybody else. So I'm fine. And I'm very happy with the current situation because if not, there isn't a lot of opportunity. Right. So.

Oscar Hedaya (41:39.784) And by the way, I want to go back. I know it seems like I love going back. the other thing I wanted to talk about the OTA was, you you take companies, even Apple, you know, every couple of weeks, you have another update. You know, and I think part of the reason is when people are building out these products, a lot of times you have engineers who are thinking of things logically in terms of engineer. But then you

Dalton Anderson (41:46.009) Yeah, no worries.

Dalton Anderson (41:56.209) Mm-hmm.

Oscar Hedaya (42:09.48) are not not every engineer thinks in terms of like use case customer use case, right? Because the average customer is not an engineer and it needs to be have a good user experience for them. Right. And I think that's where a lot of like products fail is a lot of IOT products or tech products is like it's a lot of the time you're thinking of like the engineer who's creating this thing, who's a developer, whose their brain is just one side and they're not

taking into consideration the other side. And so, you know, to have, even if the first iterations are going to be made by engineers, and then after that, you're putting in more user use cases, that's where software updates really, really kind of come in. You know, where the user is going to be able to maybe find bugs or find like, hey, if I want to go to settings, instead of having to push four different buttons to go to settings, it would be much cooler if we had this, you know?

And so the experience and the ability to have the over the air updates, I think that's really like for me, one of the biggest, this is one of the biggest takeaways, you know, not just like, hey, this sensor, this sensor, we could make the sensor more sensitive because people are complaining that it's, it's not sensitive enough. You know, it's, it's everything all together. And yeah. Yeah, sorry.

Dalton Anderson (43:37.683) No, no, I agree. think it's a huge, no, I think it's a huge feature and things, things are circling back and emphasizing it. And then another thing to circle, like maybe encompass all the sensor and over updates is like some of the stuff that I was able to take away from doing research for this episode was you get like these like real world screenshots or views of people walking by the safe, clicking on it. When you open the safe, it screen, like it does like a picture of the person who was in the safe.

also logs like different actions that were happening. Like somebody looked at the safe, someone touched the keyboard, like it has the time and almost it's similar to, obviously don't want to be too comparative, like you're your own, your own company, but for people to understand it's like the ring doorbell where, you know, a package was dropped off, somebody was there and it's a video or, know, somebody rang the doorbell and they had something to say and it has a clip of it and you can see it. So it's, it's similar to that to where you can see all the actions and interactions on

and or near the safe. And that is cool. And then also logs who was in there. Like if you have set up different user accounts, because you can set up multiple users, not just one key code, it's multiple. And then from there, you know who use what kin and you if that person, hopefully that person is the only one who has access to that pin or sharing pins, that's a big no no. But if you are or aren't, the system will say, okay,

I've got Oscar's pen, but Dalton, it has a pick of me. But otherwise you wouldn't know. Like if someone had secretly had your, what is it called? Your, your, your safe pen, whatever, whatever the knob is, like code safe code, you wouldn't know that I had it. But in this scenario, if I secretly somehow got your pen and I don't know, hopefully maybe not, but

you have your secret key for your crypto in there and it's written down and I get in there, you immediately know that somebody used your pen and it's not your partner. It's not someone who's authorized to do it. You don't know me. It's a random face and say, okay, we've got a serious situation here. Like we need to lock our keys. We need to take action like immediately, but otherwise you wouldn't know those things. And I think

Dalton Anderson (45:59.719) that applies both to a residential aspect of people that I've like, would say one of the biggest things would be if you had a secret key of like crypto, if you have like five Bitcoin, I mean, smart safe is probably the most optimal approach because you don't really know. And then if you have some other stuff that's quite important, but maybe it is like gold or, or stuff that

Oscar Hedaya (46:12.059) Thank

Dalton Anderson (46:22.491) either you don't necessarily know who took it or you don't, you, you have to be careful like who has access to it and you have to know who accessed it. And then that also applies like on a commercial level, like for businesses that are opening up or that are transacting with, I don't know, valuable goods where people don't necessarily want to be on the call all the time. So you can set up the safe and people could access it. And then you would know that they accessed it.

and do this transaction, like, I guess not in person, but with the safe, like the safest. What is the word where in between two transactions, custodian, I think like a custodian transaction where the the safe is the person or entity in the transaction that is like this the safe space for the group to interact where like, I don't have to be there, you don't have to be there, but I can pick up the goods because like you gave me the key and I

put in the pen and then I know that you took the goods because I have a picture of you.

Oscar Hedaya (47:24.581) Right, right, like an intermediary.

Dalton Anderson (47:27.538) Yeah.

Oscar Hedaya (47:28.997) Yeah, by the way, you hit it all on the ball. basically, like, it's funny because like when you think of Ring Doorbell, you know, they, not everybody said, hey, we need this product, you know, but the second that you started seeing like videos of people stealing packages, you know, it becomes sort of like evident that like

This is an obvious purchase that we need to spend 150 bucks on the Ring doorbell because why wouldn't we have this extra level of security? You know, and I think it takes like sometimes experiences for you to buy a product that makes you more secure. Example like Ring doorbell. But I think once you have it in your life, you can't not have it anymore. You know, and for us to say false, so like I had

Dalton Anderson (48:19.923) Hmm.

Oscar Hedaya (48:24.228) About two weeks ago, my housekeeper came to my house to clean my house. She comes like once every week or two, depending how bad it gets in there. But she came and she didn't tell me she was coming. So I didn't know she was coming to my house. And she went and she was cleaning my safe. And I got a notification that said that there was activity on my safe and there could be a tamper detection or whatever. There's a tamper detection. Please check the safe. I opened the app.

Dalton Anderson (48:34.088) Mm-hmm.

Oscar Hedaya (48:54.658) I look at the, so I just got the low battery for 20 % warning. So I look at the app and I see the camera footage, it's live streaming. I'm in my office, she's in my home. And I look and I'm like, what's she doing? And then I see she's like cleaning the safe, you know? And I love that. That is what the connected,

Dalton Anderson (49:01.693) Okay.

Oscar Hedaya (49:23.522) device does for you, you know, and we live in a time where today most things are connected, you know, like you have a robot vacuum that's connected, you have a lawnmower that's connected, you have your Google Nest that's connected, you have your Ring doorbell that's connected, like it's so obvious that you should also have a safe that's housing money, gold, silver, your Bitcoin, a weapon.

You know, I had a, I was at a trade show, a gun show, and this guy came up to me and said, he's like, you know, I have a kid who, I have a a child, I don't remember if he said he was like 10 years old or something, or 12, and he was in the office and his kid went into the safe that had the gun in it and he was showing his friend. And he had no idea, like he found out like weeks later,

But he's like this safe that you have is perfect for me. Number one, I get the notifications I would know instantly. Number two, your safe, we didn't talk about this UNI before, but our safe is one of the only safes on the market that has 2FA. So if you want to have not just your PIN code, but if you want to have a PIN code that changes every 30 seconds with like a Google authenticator, you could do that with our safe.

Dalton Anderson (50:49.876) Mmm.

Oscar Hedaya (50:52.982) It just gives these, yeah, it's really awesome. mean, your grandmother won't use it. But if it's you who maybe has one or 10 Bitcoin in there, you you really need that extra layer of security. And that's something that we offer. like, that's something that if we later want to do more features or more layers of security, we could do that all through the OTA. And so, you know,

Dalton Anderson (50:53.236) That's really cool actually.

Oscar Hedaya (51:20.88) kind of bringing it back full circle. It's, yeah, it's, it almost makes me wonder like, why didn't somebody really create this before? I don't understand, you know?

Dalton Anderson (51:35.125) No, those are good points. And I moved to New York City, so I don't necessarily have my handgun with me anymore. But when I lived in Florida, I did have a handgun and I want to keep it in a safe. But once again, I wouldn't know who accessed it. And it is is loaded. Like the reason that you have the gun is for protection. And so when I did have it in the safe, it's like, OK, like I want to make sure that it's locked up and that if I only person in my house was my grandma, my Nana.

Oscar Hedaya (51:51.469) Yeah.

Dalton Anderson (52:03.23) But I mean, she's not going to be fiddling with it, but I don't have any kids. But like, that's a problem. Like when the kid is playing around the gun or showing their friends like, yeah, you're supposed to teach kids to know how to handle the fire. I'm like an adult. Like, you know, you don't you don't point any point in anything that you wouldn't be OK with killing you. There's a whole bunch of things that you just you have to teach the kid. But kids are kids. So it's it's a problem.

So I think that's a great thing. Yeah. And then, and then the other thing that you said that was interesting was the like two factor authenticate piece about like this real time code that gets sent over. It's similar to how high net worth banks, they send like some kind of sensor that sends like a new passcode every 15 seconds. And then that's the passcode to log in. So it's similar to that. And I think that'd be really important if you've got like

Oscar Hedaya (52:32.931) They don't listen anyways, but...

Oscar Hedaya (52:54.243) Exactly.

Dalton Anderson (53:00.5) You know, Bitcoin, your special special, you know, your secret key for your Bitcoin. And the other side, you know, it's like people like, oh, wow, like that's inconvenient. Like, I don't want to do that. Well, it's supposed to be inconvenient. Like if it's inconvenient for you, then it's definitely super inconvenient for the person who doesn't have all the stuff to get to the access. Like for them to do it, it's like not only do they need your pen, they also need your phone and they need your biometrics to log in or like your PIN code.

All sorts of stuff and then they need to be getting in the app. Like it's a whole, it's a whole thing. So when it's inconvenient for you on a day to day basis, when you have all the information, it's like near impossible for someone else to do it, which is what you want. If you're trying to protect yourself. And if you're in a situation where you need a safe and you're storing stuff and especially a smart safe, then it's, probably a good call.

Oscar Hedaya (53:48.364) Yeah, it's a no-brainer. I mean, the other thing also is we also, our safe is super, super customizable. So we have, you could set up 2FA if you want, or you don't have to if you don't want. You could set up Panic Pin if you want, you don't have to if you don't want. We have a Forgot Pin, if you don't wanna set it up, you don't have to. If you don't wanna have the cameras access the exterior,

or interior camera, you could just turn that off. That way you'll never have access. And so we've made it super customizable. That way it's not just one size fits all because today that's how safes are. Every safe is one size fits all, but it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be like that.

Dalton Anderson (54:39.445) agreed. Due to your battery, like closing out here soon, I think I don't know what battery level you're at. You could give it a quick check. If you just, I would like to touch on before we drop two things. One, the future, like I can think of the future ecosystem that you're envisioning or like product feedback that you've gotten and like where you see it going. And then the last thing is like, how do people get in contact with you or like learn more about space?

Oscar Hedaya (54:45.718) think I have like 10 minutes left on this thing.

Oscar Hedaya (55:07.681) Yeah, so basically, when we created this product, we also put a patent out, we had an entire vision of like, hey, where this roadmap is going to be. And when people think of safes, it's just this one security product, right? You buy a safe, goodbye, right? When you need access the safe, you go to the safe. Now, because we have this safe that's now connected,

Dalton Anderson (55:27.573) Mm-hmm.

Oscar Hedaya (55:34.899) We and we have an operating system and like I know we keep talking about it, but because of all of that stuff, we're not just this one safe that you get it and forget it. Right now we're a safe that has tons of data, tons of information is living in the cloud, right? Which it's funny to say the cloud because like sometimes people think it's not secure. It's super encrypted.

and everything lives on the cloud. But the use case that we're working on now that we've slowly been going into, and this is part of our roadmap for the next year that we're focusing on, is not just one safe forget it, goodbye, but we're looking now at enterprise, and we're looking at big corporations and hospitality. We're working with a company now

and their doctor's office to have many locations and they put like, I don't know what they put, they were explaining it to us like drugs or narcotics or something in the safe and they need an audit trail. So it's not just for the consumer with the person at home, but it's also for enterprise where like you have a doctor's office or a law firm where you may want to have a...

a safe that keeps your documents, your lawyer, and you may have your assistant that may also have her unique pin code and username. And if you want her to get access, you could give her access at certain times, you could turn it on, turn it off, or you could suspend her or whatever you want to do. But the more important thing is, you have an audit trail for companies and enterprise. And then on top of it,

If you're a hospitality company, sorry, a hospitality like a hotel company, and you're the Marriott or JW Marriott and you have 500 safes. Now all these 500 safes are connected to one portal where these companies can now use like the security at the hotel now has one place where they're able to see what's going on with each one of their safes. You know, did we have a safe that didn't check out?

Oscar Hedaya (57:53.696) Did we have a safe that somebody forgot their pin and they tried to use the thing 20 times and it doesn't work? That gets flagged in the system. So it's no longer like this, we buy 500 safes for our hotels, we'll only know if there's an issue if somebody calls us. They don't have to deal with that anymore. Now it's all centralized in this one secure spot. And that's kind of like...

where the next six months to 12 months is. And then after that, the future roadmap of the company is making more safes, different features, different sizes, different shapes. And then after that is be known just as a security company that has awesome, cool product that you really didn't realize that you needed in your life. And the focus is not just going to be on safes, but it's going to be on awesome security products that you need in your home or your office or

Wherever.

Dalton Anderson (58:55.816) Yeah, I'm excited how everything's going to play out. I think it's going to be beneficial for everybody, like profitability wise with the company and then also for society. Hopefully. I think it's, I think it's a cool product that, that I think the roadmap makes sense. And as a spectator, least overall feel that it's super cool, like a super cool thought process and definitely.

the passion resonates throughout the show and hope that that resonates through people's ears when they listen to it. And I really appreciate you being on the show, Oscar. And how, if people want to get in contact with, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no worries. If how people want to get in contact with you or learn more about yourself or the company, like what are your recommended paths to do that?

Oscar Hedaya (59:35.369) Yes, you asked me... Sorry, you asked me that, I didn't answer.

Oscar Hedaya (59:48.831) Yeah, so if you go to the website, www.thespacesafe.com, that's T-H-E space as in S-P-A-C-E, and then safesafe.com, you go to our website, and you'll see a contact form there. Anything that is meant for me, my team sends to me, you can send me any questions you have, even if you're a startup that's looking for

to ask a couple questions without being charged for it. If you have any advice that you're looking for, if you have features, if you have any questions for me or for the team, just shoot it there and everything will be redirected to me or to other people on the team, whoever needs to answer.

Dalton Anderson (01:00:36.284) Awesome. Yeah. I'm sure the people I'll make sure that's in the show notes, but of course, wherever you are today, good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning. Thanks for listening in and listening next week. Goodbye.

Oscar Hedaya (01:00:37.78) Yeah.

Oscar Hedaya (01:00:49.983) Thank you. Thanks for having me.