Friday nights are reserved for family pizza night.  Although no startup exec is too surprised when business intrudes on a family ritual, none of us could have expected the matter of emergency services response times would come crashing—quite literally—into our Friday night.

…Interruptus

At 8:46pm last night¹, we heard a horrible-sounding car crash right outside our house.  At my day job (more about it in a minute), we work with police and emergency services every day, and so not one but two thoughts immediately flashed through my head:  1) thank God my family is safe; and 2) I know what to do now:  call 9-1-1; they don’t know about this yet; give them as much information as possible.  (Fortunately, I had already done the most important thing:  made sure my address was visible from the street as soon as we moved in.)  And so began my personal saga of trying to get useful information to someone who could help—and learning, at a personal level, why what we do every day at ShotSpotter matters:

False Start: 20:46:10?-20:48:35 (seconds 0000-0125)

Within 60 seconds, I find  our home phone and dial 9-1-1.  It’s a Vonage line, and I am unpleasantly surprised to be connected to San Francisco 9-1-1.  We live in San Mateo County, and I quickly realize that I must have neglected to update the 9-1-1 street address information for the account.  (Yes, Vonage doesn’t know where to send your 9-1-1 call unless you tell them.  Not their fault;  this is why Next Generation 9-1-1 is so important.)  Now I have to spend 55 seconds convincing the operator that there was an emergency, but I am in another county from her, that I had been mistakenly connected to her, and therefore that she shouldn’t do what 9-1-1 protocol calls for her to do if I just hang up:  1) call me back if I hang up and escalate the call as non-responsive, or 2) worse yet, send help to our old address in San Francisco, where we don’t live any longer.  Mission accomplished, but 125 seconds wasted.

How May I Direct Your Call? 20:49:00-20:51:30 (seconds 0170-0320)

So now I’ve got to find another way to call.  Option #1: call local emergency number posted on refrigerator.  (You do have your local police switchboard on your refrigerator, right?)  Too far.  I’m upstairs, time counts.  Option #2: use my mobile phone.  Fortunately, thanks to E9-1-1, calls from mobile phones usually go to the correct local PSAP (that’s Public Safety Answering Point), not to the California Highway Patrol, as they used to.  I’m connected and immediately confronted with a question:  ”What is the nature of your emergency?  Police, Fire or Medical?”  Hmmmm, car crash.  I’m thinking Medical.  But most fire departments deliver EMT services these days.  So is it Fire?  Eventually the Police will have to show up.  I wonder if it’s Police?  No, it’s Medical.  ”Medical,” I say.  ”OK, just a minute, sir.”  I’m on hold for what feels like hours, but is really about 45 seconds.

Critical Information: 20:51:30-20:54:12 (seconds 0170-0482)

“Please state the nature of your emergency.”  ”There’s been a car crash,” I reply.”  ”OK, are you hurt?”  ”No, it happened outside my house.  I’m trying to help.” “What is your address?  [I answer.]  OK, help is on the way, and I need to ask you some additional questions.”  I check the time at this very moment:  324 seconds havepassed—5 minutes, 24 seconds.  That’s how long it took me to get the word to people who could help that somebody needed help.  And I was clear-thinking and organized, because I wasn’t involved.  Maybe I knew a bit more of what to say because I work in the field.  Maybe.  If I had been a victim, adrenalin racing through my system and clouding my judgment, trying to figure out where I was, what precise address I had stopped at (or what road I was on, for that matter!)—who knows how much longer it would have been?

Keep Gathering Information: 20:54:13-20:59:17 (seconds 0483-0787)

Can you see anybody?”  ”Not yet, I’ve got to get a flashlight.”  And so ensued another 6 minutes of the 9-1-1 operator talking to me, instructing the victims through me, and getting information he needed.  Was anyone trapped in the car? (No.)  Was anyone ejected from the vehicle?  (No.)  Was anyone bleeding? (Yes.)  Were the victims young?  (Yes, under 18 and trying to get me not to call the police)  Was there obvious alcohol? (No.)

21:00 Help Arrives (seconds 0788+)

The cavalry arrives.  Two fire trucks and the Central County Fire chief, police, ambulance.  The neighbors disperse back to their homes to bring their families up to speed on what happened.  The professionals take over.  The kids are taken to local hospitals.  The car is removed.   Someone sweeps up the debris.  Nighttime quiet returns.

11 Minutes Matter

Which brings me to response times.  The Burlingame and San Mateo County emergency responders did their jobs perfectly:  they arrived quickly (roughly 6 minutes from my giving the address;  maybe 8 minutes if one of my neighbors had also called and not had my Vonage-related false start), to the correct location, and rendered aid.  But through no fault of their own, first responders were completely dependent on me and my neighbors to get them to the right place.  We live in a quiet neighborhood where such incidents are uncommon.  When they do happen, we all call.

My Day Job

Whereas accidents can (and do) happen anywhere, others live in neighborhoods where, sadly, violent crimes also put lives at risk—and do so every day.  At ShotSpotter, we deal with one particular kind of violent crime:  gun violence.  Literally every evening, our systems detect between a hundred or more shootings nationwide.  And therefore a hundred or more times a night, ShotSpotter delivers information similar to what it took me 5 minutes and 24 seconds to deliver over the phone automatically to police—about 150 times faster than I was able to.  Unfortunately, if you live in a neighborhood where you hear gunshots every night, you’re also not as likely to call the police every time as if you hear it once a year.  ”It happens every night; the police already know!” That’s why studies show 9-1-1 receives a call less than 25% of the time a gun is fired.  And as you can see from my experience last night why, even when they do receive a call, 9-1-1 finds out anywhere from 3 to 8 minutes after the event.  (And bear in mind that in the 25% of cases in which people do call 9-1-1 about gunfire, they don’t know where the gunfire took place; they know where they live!  So that adds time to the response too, as police don’t know precisely where to go.)

When lives are at stake, seconds matter.  (See USA Today’s “The price of just a few seconds lost: People die”, for example)

So I’ll go to work on Tuesday knowing that our product helps make communities safer, if not from an unfortunate car crash which thankfully caused no serious injuries,  then from the hundreds of gunfire incidents we help pinpoint for police so they can arrive to exactly the right place, minutes earlier than they otherwise could, hopefully in time to save a life, perhaps take a gun off the street, and in time to send a message to the community that while car accidents may happen, gun violence doesn’t have to.

1. I have accurate elapsed times in this post for everything thanks to the phone logs on my mobile and Vonage phones, except for the first 30-45 seconds which it took me to go from our family room to pick up the phone

Last year, I traveled Pakistan to speak at a counter-terrorism conference.  I met numerous devout, serious Muslims who decried the senseless violence extremists have brought to their country.  Little did I think that, just a year later, I would be comparing those well-meaning, peaceful Pakistanis with the peaceful, shocked residents of Arizona.  But here we are, a modern first world democracy, confronting the fact that our own internal extremists brook no more dissent than do Pakistan’s and feel no more compunction at shedding the blood of leaders with whom they disagree than do the likes of Mumtaz Qadri (Taseer’s murderer and bodyguard).  In Pakistan, extremists murdered Benazir Bhutto for her  non-extremist beliefs;  in the United States, extremists murdered  Dr. George Tiller for practicing abortion.  Pakistani extremists defy the Koran when they take the lives of other Muslims whose beliefs they do not agree;  American extremists defy their (mostly Christian) beliefs when they take the lives of those whose beliefs they don’t like.

Now we find out that the alleged perpetrator in Arizona is mentally ill.  Does that exonerate him?  Make him any less an extremist?  The vast majority of schizophrenics lead non-violent, if unenviable lives.  Few of them create YouTube channels devoted to anti-government rantings.  So I brand him extreme.  When will we—Americans and Pakistanis alike—act collectively against the overt hostility of our public debate, before it roils itself into outright murder?  We live today in a democracy transmogrified into a killing field, in which those with whom we disagree politically are not only not worthy of our respect, but not worthy of their own lives.  It is already too late to save the first victims.  Will Americans wait until political killing is reaches the heights it has reached in Venezuela, or Pakistan, or Myanmar?

I have spent much of my professional career fighting to end one type of violence: gun violence.  Every day, my work at ShotSpotter helps save lives, solve gun-related crimes, and take criminals off the street who would otherwise keep using guns to destroy lives and communities.  A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to be asked to join the Board of Directors of PAX, our country’s leading non-profit dedicated to reducing youth gun violence.  I thought I was making a difference.  And then I wake up on a day like today, and I read the news from Islamabad, and the news from Tucson, and I realize just how much more difference there is to be made, and how much work we all have before us.

There was something surreal about watching President Obama take the oath of office from a hotel room in Karachi, Pakistan. Several times, I wondered whether there were more suicide bomb barriers surrounding his dais or my hotel. Suicide bombers had nearly destroyed the hotel a year or two earlier, and the predictable reaction—to erect sufficient vehicle barriers to stop more than one simultaneous attack—had of course been implemented. And so I watched, from 13,000 miles away, as America took what I profoundly hope will be the first of many steps towards reestablishing its international reputation as a symbol of freedom, all the while knowing that I was under strict orders from our hosts not to leave the building.

All around me were little security instruction sheets, thoughtfully Xeroxed by the hotel staff and placed in every room. From the typical (“this water is unsafe for drinking; kindly enjoy the complimentary bottle of mineral water provided”) to the stern (“do not stand on balcony; snipers may be active”), the warnings combined to deliver the message that, thanks to the efforts of less than 1% of the population, Westerners are simply not welcome in Pakistan. 99% of Pakistanis we met were hopeful, interesting people, happy to talk to an American (and to ask us about our new president—more about that in a different post). But all I had to do was look out my hotel room window to realize that it is the 1% who rule the country.

View from my Karachi Hotelroom

As they so often do, this picture tells the story better than I can. The balcony is enclosed in a net, lest grenades be thrown up onto the landing. The wires above the pool are for god-knows-what security technique. (My guess: since they are either grounded or energized, probably an anti-eavesdropping measure which doubles as a mechanism for defeating radio frequency bomb triggers, although my mobile phone worked just fine underneath them, so perhaps not.) There were magnetometers, x-ray machines in the lobby, and nearly every entrance to every building was peopled by thoroughly un-reasuring armed guards. There were small trucks parked in the parking lots of both “Western” hotels, each filled with four chain-smoking Pakistani infantrymen, on top of which was mounted what looked like an M60 (.50 caliber machine gun). Two bomb-sniffing Labrador retrievers worked the parking lot. ID checks were performed endlessly.

I doubt that any experience since 9/11 has reminded me that this really is a war. Not a war which gives our government the right to abrogate our Constitution, but a war nonetheless. And until it ends, Americans traveling abroad had better remember that the actions of our own government (and in particular the recently-departed administration) catalyze reactions abroad which pose as grave a threat to our well-being as any other. (Until 2002, there had been no attacks against Western targets in Karachi. That all started after we reacted to 9/11.) In the end, no matter how hopeful I am that the inauguration of President Obama will set us off to righting our standing worldwide, we will remain “the enemy” for a long time to come.

Not so.  Enter Sequoia Capital’s “RIP Good Times” presentation.  Within a day, eight people had forwarded it to me, along with notes taken by a briefly-anonymous Sequoia portfolio CEO.  Shortly thereafter came the Benchmark Letter, which another investor and our corporate counsel both forwarded to me.  And the Ron Conway email.  The argument is that revenues and earnings will fall off the table (thus perhaps justifying the fact that today’s S&P 500 is trading at a pretty low average P/E of 10.5), thus necessitating tectonic readjustments to spending.

And there it was: in one great, coordinated movement, Silicon Valley panicked.  It was as if the Valley remembered 2000-2001 and couldn’t sleep.  A friend of mine, at a Seqoia company, worked the weekend and executed a 40% layoff earlier this week.  Hi5 cut staff, Zillow and Adbrite did the same, and the list goes on and on.  One day everything is fine;  the next, the world is ending.  Trader mentality hit Sand Hill Road.  With the zeal of the converted, a paroxysm of cost-cutting swept Valley CEOs.

This “stampede for the exits” mentality of supposedly long-term investors here in the Valley makes zero sense.  One of my Directors correctly pointed out that Moritz et al. at Sequoia were undoubtedly “firing for effect,” and I’m sure they were, but tell that to the employees laid off by my friend’s Sequoia-backed company.  The problem with making rapid adjustments to early stage companies is that the adjustments themselves effect the business.  There’s a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in startups:  trimming too fast or too precipitously will injure the company far more deeply than it would a larger, established company.  Why?  Because start-ups in particular rely on their employees to go the extra mile, think the impossible is possible, burn the midnight oil, and invent the ingenious.  They also rely on their employees knowing they’re involved in something special, relishing their creative environment, and collaborating with their colleagues.  (For which, of course, they need to have colleagues…!) Take all that away, and a start-up is just a thinly-staffed, under-capitalized company with no track record or proven market.

There’s another, more profound risk, however:  react too strongly and Heisenberg will assure your startup misses the market opportunity it’s not expecting.  The problem with over-optimizing, particularly in venture-backed companies, is that they will miss the unexpected, creative opportunity, either because they are so busy dealing with the ramifications of precipitous cost-cutting or because they will be so under-staffed and so hyper-focused on cash flow that they will have neither the energy nor the creative spirit to do something daring when the opportunity presents itself.

Does this mean we should be spending profligately and ignoring the broader dynamics of the economy?  Of course not.  No CEO in his or her right mind would do so.  But the fact remains that what makes Silicon Valley great is certainly not its ability to play the part of proverbial “tail” to the economic dog which wags it.  Every one of us should take a careful look at our spending, our sales forecasts, and make sensible business decisions based on what we see.  (In our case, we see changes coming and are adjusting for them.  We’re cutting where we need to, investing where we can afford to, and otherwise treating the shake-up as an opportunity to test every single one of our assumptions.  And, yes, if one of those assumptions changes and we see a problem, then we’re going to cut spending.)  But lay off 40% of staff just because someone gave a presentation?

Fortunately, voices of sanity have begun to speak up.  My friend and colleague Pascal Levensohn (full disclosure: also now an investor and Board member in my company) wrote an excellent post today putting context around the Sequoia presentation.  And none other than the Sage of Omaha himself is going long on US equities.  All of us running businesses under these economic circumstances are well-served to create a back-up plan (the “survival plan”), take a whack at expenses wherever and whenever possible (hey, shouldn’t we be doing that all the time anyway?), test every single assumption in our models, and perhaps think long and hard before hiring additional staff.  But then we should go back to work, build amazing businesses, and remember that Silicon Valley is about the future and we’re in charge of creating it.

As the press release on our website explains, inclusion in the AO Global 250 “signifies major developments in the creation of new business opportunities in the global technology industries.” And, hey, if AO’s founder, Tony Perkins (of Red Herring fame) gives us his approval, I for one am happy to have it.

• ShotSpotter was originally deployed in the District by the FBI, in August 2006; the Metropolitan Police Department has subsequently taken over operational responsibility.
• By September, police will be covering 16 of the District’s 68 square miles with ShotSpotter.
• Police rely on ShotSpotter to provide accurate information about gunfire more quickly than they hear about it at 911—if anyone calls 911 in the first place (more often than not, they don’t).
• In one district (District 7, where 21 of the City’s 78 homicides occurred last year), ShotSpotter detects as many as 50 gunfire incidents per week.
• ShotSpotter has helped DC police make arrests, save lives, and has provided key evidence in high profile cases, such as the officer-involved shooting of DeOnté Rawlings.

The blogosphere and traditional news media are actively reporting this news.  Check out the coverage and photo on Fox News and  WTOP, and blogs at YourStreet, APBNews, and of course on the ANC2C02 Forum (a resident of Shaw and a regular blogger on the topic).

Personally, it’s gratifying to see a city and its community rally around what my colleagues and I spend our days working so hard to deliver.  Nothing replaces good, hard police work (no ShotSpotter sensor will ever look in someone’s eyes and make a tough decision, put its life at risk every day, or put handcuffs on a suspect), but in the end, our job is to deliver our first responders the best tools they can have, and it appears to be working in our nation’s capital.

About a year or so ago, I was lucky enough to meet Dan Gross, the co-founder and CEO of PAX, a New York-based organization which has developed two truly innovative programs which reduce gun violence long before anybody ever fires a weapon. A former advertising executive, Dan found his life changed forever when his brother became the innocent victim of gun violence himself: his younger brother Matthew was critically wounded in the now infamous 1997 shooting on the observation deck of New York’s iconic Empire State Building. Leaving his lucrative advertising career behind, Dan has since become first the leader of PAX and then the creator of two important programs.

One of these programs, Speak Up, addresses the reality that many school shootings are avoidable. According to the US government, over 1,000,000 students take some kind of weapon to school at least once a month. Moreover, over 80% of school attacker tell someone of their plans before they execute them. In other words, in four out of five cases, friends of the perpetrators−often themselves students in the very schools which will later fall victim to gun violence−have heard rumors, threats, innuendo, or otherwise have reason to suspect the perpetrators may turn to guns to settle their grievances. Although it seems obvious that a “hotline,” reminiscent of suicide prevention hotlines, should be created for kids to report such threats anonymously, it turns out not to be quite so simple. There are both legal and procedural complications inherent in accepting anonymous tips regarding minors. Enter Speak Up! Thanks to a 24/7 hotline at 866-Speak-Up and numerous educational and support materials, students now have a safe an anonymous resource on which they can rely. Perhaps equally importantly, PAX has spent the time and money to develop a carefully-calibrated protocol which is endorsed by national law enforcement and educators’ organizations.

The second program, called ASK, encourages parents to ask if the homes which their children visit to play contain firearms. Why? Because a shocking 1.7 million children in the US live in homes with weapons which are both loaded and unlocked. In 2003, nearly eight children and teens were killed by firearms every single day. And in 2004, a horrifying 37 children and teens were injured by firearms every single day. With 40% of children living in households containing firearms, it’s not unreasonable for parents to ask: “Are there any guns where my children are playing?” (As aside: neither I nor, it seems, PAX, have any objection to properly licensed and secured—i.e., locked—firearms. This is not a gun control issue. This is a safety issue.) This year, on June 21st (the first day of summer), communities nationwide will recognize ASK Day, a day to focus on asking a simple question which can save kids’ lives.

If you have a moment, browse over to the PAX website and learn a little bit more. Find out how you can help. Every time these two PAX programs succeeds in reducing an incident of gun violence—even if that eliminates an opportunity for a ShotSpotter-assisted arrest—I, for one, will feel our society has taken a step in the right direction.

Gun violence has become not only the tool of murderers but the tool of intimidators, and thus it is becoming all the more prevalent. One city in which our technology is deployed, for example, suffered 100 murders last year. There were another 300-500 people wounded by gunfire. But in that same city, over that year, we detected more than 3,000 incidents of gunfire. All of this in a city in which it is illegal to fire a weapon outdoors within city limits (unless, of course, one is at a licensed shooting range). It is safe to assume this approximately one-in-ten ratio is not the result of preternaturally poor aim on the part of those shooting the weapons. Nor is it anything to be happy about. As these data indicate, guns are fired illegally just as often for purposes other than to kill someone. So one need not only be concerned about murders and hard-core felons. We also need to worry about the people who fire guns for the sake of intimidation, to “mark territory,” or simply because it’s fun.

The solution to our nation’s gun violence problem does not lie solely in technology such as ShotSpotter. Naturally, as the company’s CEO I am inclined to recommend the technology as a reliable mechanism to reduce gun crime (in fact, ShotSpotter systems have been proven to reduce gunfire and violent crime), but that’s not the point of this posting. The sad reality is that, by the time ShotSpotter finds out about a crime, society as a whole has missed the opportunity to prevent that crime from happening in the first place. Around the office, we can occasionally be heard saying that ShotSpotter can’t help put the bullets back in the gun. Nor can we stop the gun from being fired. But what if somebody could? Therein lies a tremendous opportunity.

The next post in this series: capitalizing on that tremendous opportunity