[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARTIN OMANDER: Welcome to "Google Root Access,"
the show featuring actionable startup advice.
My guest today is Alex Haro, co-founder of Life360.
Alex, tell us about your startup.
ALEX HARO: Sure.
Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me onboard.
I'm super excited.
Life360 is an app for families that
lets them see where everyone is, communicate, coordinate,
keep in touch, and get automated alerts when their family
members leave work, arrive home, get
to school, that kind of stuff.
And by focusing in on that, we've
been able to amass a huge user base of 44 million families
and growing very quickly.
We're adding an additional one to two million families
every single month.
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh, great.
And you should add one to that one million.
I signed up the other day.
ALEX HARO: Awesome.
Always great to be talking to a user.
MARTIN OMANDER: Yes.
And so this can actually-- I haven't started using it yet,
but this app can actually tell me,
when I'm at work, when my son leaves school and comes home
to our house?
ALEX HARO: Exactly.
And what we've seen is those interactions,
a lot of the important family interactions,
are when they're apart.
The number-one text message in the world
is still, "Where are you?"
And it's kind of crazy in the day of smartphones, especially
around families, that they're still sending those text
messages, "Hey, where are you?", back and forth.
So we focused in on what are the really cool interactions
around location?
Automated alerts are one.
We've had some others, like you can get into your BMW car,
and say, "Drive to my wife," and it will route you right there.
We can automatically arm your home security system
when your whole family leaves the house.
So instead of being this thing that no one ever uses,
it's this thing you're using every single day,
thanks to location.
MARTIN OMANDER: Oh, great.
So I have one concern, though.
Won't this run down the battery on my phone, my son's phone,
if it keeps running that GPS chip?
That's a fairly power-hungry chip, right?
ALEX HARO: Sure.
And I think you're absolutely right on that.
A lot of apps have tried to do this, and what they've done
is they've woken the GPS chip every 10 minutes.
And that absolutely does kill your battery life.
And what we focused on-- I mean, we launched back in 2008.
We've really been focused on how do we get location out
of the phones without impacting battery?
And luckily, there are many different sensors
on the phone that give you location-- things like Wi-Fi,
things like the cellular networks,
even things like the accelerometer
and Bluetooth and audio.
All various different ways to get location
and confirm where people are.
And so we've spent a lot of time figuring out
what are the right sensors to turn?
What are the right tradeoffs to make?
GPS is obviously more accurate, but more battery.
How do you make those tradeoffs, and how do you
get awesome location without killing the battery?
And we've been very successful doing that.
MARTIN OMANDER: Great.
So I'm an engineer.
I've written a lot of code.
ALEX HARO: Awesome.
MARTIN OMANDER: You have an engineering background, too.
ALEX HARO: Yes.
MARTIN OMANDER: I can just imagine massive amounts
of code dealing with various sensors and various devices,
with various tradeoffs with battery and accuracy.
How-- that must be a nightmare to deal with all that.
ALEX HARO: It is a nightmare, and it
is a lot of tech we've really had to build.
And as an engineer, I love the hard stuff.
But we didn't want to be a location app, right?
We want to provide awesome stuff to families.
And so you are right.
We've had to deal with chipset-level bugs
that we've fixed ourselves.
But luckily, Google has provided a new API
that they call Fused Location.
And what it does is a lot of the stuff we've been talking about,
where they take all the various sensors in.
You can tell it, hey, I care more about accuracy,
or hey, I care more about battery.
And it just provides you one interface to get location.
And they've built this on top of Play Services, which
is really awesome.
And they've also added things like good geofencing.
The first version of Android geofencing?
Not very good.
This new version of geofencing, especially providing
the fused location, is really good.
And activity tracking-- so they know
if you're walking, if you're running,
if you're sitting at home, if you're driving your car,
or going faster than the speed of light.
MARTIN OMANDER: Mhm.
How many of your users go faster than the speed of light?
ALEX HARO: None, too much.
But you know, let's hope one day.
MARTIN OMANDER: One day.
ALEX HARO: Especially if Elon Musk gets his way, right?
MARTIN OMANDER: That's right.
So this allows your developers to work
on sort of higher abstraction layer level?
They don't have to deal with the various different chipsets
and such.
ALEX HARO: Exactly.
And one of the really cool things
is because it's built on top of the Play Services,
it gets updated when the Play Services are updated.
So a big debate, especially in the Android world,
has been fragmentation.
A lot of people have gone back and forth on
is Android fragmented or not?
And when you're dealing with the chipsets that
are in specific phones, it absolutely is fragmented.
But luckily with this new Fused Location API,
they've been able abstract around that.
And now, instead of waiting for Android to be updated,
you just have to tell the user, update your Google Play
Services, and they automatically get all the benefits.
When new chipsets come out, that code is automatically shipped.
When new bugs are found or new things are fixed,
the API is automatically upgraded
as part of Google Play Services instead of
as part of the Android platform.
And that's an awesome win for users,
and an ingenious move by Google.
MARTIN OMANDER: Right, yeah.
Because my son has had his phone for a year or two,
and I don't think it's been upgraded by the carrier once.
ALEX HARO: Exactly.
But with Google Play Services, he'll
definitely have the newest code.
MARTIN OMANDER: Great.
So Alex, what is your advice to other startups who
are doing mobile location-based computing?
ALEX HARO: Sure, my advice is really
focus in on what you can build on top of location.
I really would not advise you to become a location company,
and worry about all the sensors, and do
a lot of the hard stuff and heavy lifting
that we had to do.
With these new APIs around location
that Google has provided, you can
start to build on top of location
and offer really cool new user experiences on top of it.
And that's really what you should dedicate your time to.
Build on top of these APIs that exist.
Let Google worry about the really hard details
around location, and you worry about the awesome products
that your users want to use.
MARTIN OMANDER: Very good.
Thank you for sharing your experiences with us, Alex.
ALEX HARO: Absolutely.
Thank you so much.
I had a ton of fun.
MARTIN OMANDER: And thank you for watching.
We hope you found something you can use in your startup.
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