 This is State Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Oh, ha! How you doing? Gordo the Tech Star here. Welcome to another exciting and thrilling episode of Hibachi Talk. I've got some old friends here in the house that we're going to talk about, pow, pow box. So grab yourself a libation, pull up a chair, and sit down, and we'll sit here. And how do you like my new pow box t-shirt? Looks great on you. I'm serious. Yeah, I'm looking buff too. I'm serious. Anyway, so thank you for the shirt. Yeah, right on Gordo. There's no free lunch, so I now got to interview you. Thanks for having us. So we have Greg Hoffman here, and he is the head of sales for pow box, and as well I'll agree with you, the CEO and founder of pow box. Hibachi Talk's third show, I think, you were on when you were just starting pow box. Right before I moved. Right before you moved a couple of years ago. And we got a pretty good, I think, a nice success story here, coming along the way and so on. But let me get, you know, we'll do a little quick refresher on who you guys are, you know, where you grew up, where you went to school, you know, get that out of the way. Is that like my viewer to know? Yeah, and we'll get that out of the way, and then we'll continue the saga of what's happening with pow box. Sure, sounds good. Hey, Greg. Well, I'm Greg Hoffman. I'm the head of sales at pow box. I'm from Southern California, a place called Palos Verdeus. I'm actually a University of Hawaii graduate. Oh, cool. I was out here for a while, and that's how I got linked up with Huala and pow box, and I've been here since the beginning. Terrific. Yeah, since the beginning of pow box. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Working with him for all that long time. Yeah, fucking me. Yeah. I had hair when I started with him. Yeah. The downfall. Yeah. The cordu. Yeah, yeah. So tell us about yourself, Huala. Sure. Probably a kidney graduate. I've been in tech for a while. I've been doing email since 1999. Started pow box in 2015, basically. When I was on your show the first time around, I think I moved to San Francisco the following week, and we had about six customers at the time, and now we have over 1,200 in all 50 states. 1,250 states. Yeah. Of clients. So tell us about pow box. Because pow spam, you started in the early days when all the email first started and everybody was getting spammed to death. And you came up with a solution that would be easily implemented and prevent you from getting spammed to death. And that product is still around today. Yeah. And then pow box is a continuation on that, but with a focus on encryption and regulated industries. And we're starting off with healthcare and HIPAA. So your HIPAA compliant email. So for the viewers, you know, when you're sending email around and you've got health records on it, those records are open if they're not encrypted. Yeah. So it's a federal regulation required by law when you're sending protected health information to encrypt the data in transit and at rest. And email is basically, you know, US healthcare is the last American business segment to use email in the workplace. And we just see an incredible opportunity ahead of us. So your market is healthcare professionals. Is that your focus? And that's a great niche to start off just because it's so heavily regulated. If you can be HIPAA compliant, I mean there's many other areas that we can go branch off to. From that. Yeah. You know, we talked about yesterday like Seagull schools is it uses your product because they've got a thousand cakey children. Yeah. And they want to protect that information that's being passed around between parents and teachers and such. So they've, they, they wrapped Pow Box around their email. That's correct. So, but isn't email already encrypted? Doesn't Google and Microsoft and all those guys give me all this stuff? Well, there are legacy hosting providers out there today that do not support what's called transport layer security. Okay. And in that instance, you're sending stuff in plain text. It's not encrypted. But you are seeing it's much more prevalent that people are adopting TLS. So it's becoming more and more. TLS that, that layer. Transport layer security. Right. And only about 10% of email hosts today do not support TLS. Oh, do not support. Do not. So it's, it's pretty common. It's pretty, pretty common. So, um, but if I go and open up a Microsoft account and, but my email is not encrypted automatically come out of Microsoft. It's, it's the, the issue is that you might send it to someone who does not support TLS and then you are writing the risk of leaving it vulnerable to a man in the middle attacks. Okay. Intercepting that email and doing something malicious with it. Right. So, so, um, now you've got, you know, when you left here, you had a few clients. Six. Six. And now you're at how many? Over 1200. Over 1200. And you're in all 50 states. Four countries. Four. Yeah. We've got Australia, China. I don't know a few, but focus in Hawaii. So, no, not focus in Hawaii, but focus in the United States. Yeah. So that's, that's a considerable amount of growth in three years. Three years. Three. Yeah. It's been three years. So you must have a, how's your staff now? Cause it was like you and him, that was it. So we're up to 12. And we're making plans now. We've hit a certain revenue milestone and looking to hit our next milestone within the next 18 months. So that's what we're busy doing at the moment. So, so why are you back home? What are you doing back here? Why are you coming back to Hawaii? We're, we're creating this playbook that we want to replicate across the country. And we want to spend a week in a certain area where we have a concentration of customers. Okay. And we just film as many customer success videos as we can in the span of a week. Then we cap it off with a social mixer, which is the world. And that's where we get prospects and customers in the same room in a low pressure atmosphere. And we let the customers talk to our prospects. And that's where the magic happens. Okay. But the strategic goal of the year is to build a video library of customers having success with Powbox. And we want to position ourselves as the market leader and that, hey, if I'm the mainstream buyer, I'm not an early adopter. I'm a mainstream buyer. I won't get fired for buying Powbox. And look at all these people using it. Right. So that's the genesis of our week, this week is filming customer success videos just back to back to back. A lot of credibility and validation. I mean, starting out, one of the biggest issues was people are saying, you know, this sounds too good to be true. How do we know this is really HIPAA compliant? How do we know that this is legit? Right. And, and, and let's talk about that because, you know, I run up against this, you know, and I use, I use your product on my GJB and associates, you know, because I have, I have healthcare clients and some of my healthcare clients use it and some of my healthcare clients don't use it. I mean, I try to convince them. It's always the IT manager that seems to be suspicious of what it is because it's so easy to set up. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. So let's talk about that. I mean, how long does it take me to get my email set up to be HIPAA compliant using Powbox? Haas, you want to take that one? To get set up? Yeah. We can work with G Suite, Office 365, and Microsoft Exchange. So if you have one of those platforms in place, we can seamlessly integrate in in less than 30 minutes. We can have your entire organization up and running. So I could have, I could have the entire, you know, Queens Medical Center. I'll pick that as an example with, I think it's thousands of employees and turn up thousands of employees in less than a half hour. Yeah. What's great about a Gordo is there's nothing to install. There's no downloads or any plugins to set it up. To set it up, you go into your admin panel and you make some minor configuration changes. Right. Like creating an outbound gateway or a smart host. Right. And that's going to redirect your outbound email through Powbox server. Right. And at that point, you're good to go. And from that point, you're on. So why would you not do this? I mean, you're not overcharging for this thing. It's not that expensive. That's why we moved to San Francisco. Yeah. Because we think we're on to a big idea. Yeah. Because what happened here is you just couldn't get it to grow. Seriously. With the mainline prospects. So there's an interesting little sidebar. So you have a tech business in Hawaii and you're not taken seriously. Yeah. Not at all. Okay. Why is that? Because I think we're a gimmick. Yeah. I think we surf all day. So they still got that mindset. So they still have that mindset. Oh, yeah. And I did a show last week talking about lucky you live Hawaii. And one of my comments in there is like we're ranked at the bottom, according to Forbes magazine, as a place to do business. Yeah. So you have all the brain trusts to the mainland. And all the tax revenue that you would generate if you were here. Yeah. And how 15 employees you said now? 12. 12 employees and all of what they would bring to the economy is all now in California. You know the magnet in the bay area or Silicon Valley right now is stronger than I've ever seen it. I mean there's people from the Midwest, East Coast. I mean it's just, you know you can run into a Stanford MIT, I mean the brain trust in Silicon Valley is just incredible. What you've got Twitter is headquartered there right? That's four blocks from us. Four blocks from where you are. Yeah. And there's a whole other plethora of tech companies all within that area that you're in. You name it. It's all in that spot. Slack is a block from us. Oh Slack. One block. Sales force less than a mile. Okay. You got Bright, Yahoo, Uber, Zendesk. That's all within one mile of your office. One mile of your office. Half a mile. I like one of the things another thing you do is like you contribute to the community which I think is kind of neat. Yeah. You donate spam musubis. I've ever seen something where you're doing that one day. When we hit our 100 customers we did that. Hoff was there for that. And then when we hit 500 customers we did another one. And then when we hit 1,000 customers we'd give it 1,000 and Hoff was there for all of them. Yeah well in the Bay Area I think these big tech companies have a bad rep. They're just taking, they're making their rents go high. The wall is bringing that aloha spirit out to the Bay Area which is great. Yeah I mean how many people have had spam musubis before? You guys got it. I can't even pronounce them correctly. We get some funny looks. They look at it like what is it? Yeah. Do I have to take the wrapper off? Yeah. Exactly. That's kind of neat that you're at least bringing the aloha spirit to the Bay Area. And the staff gets into it. Everyone gets into it. So you guys got to make them all? Not anymore. We tried that. It was oh man that's a lot of work. In my mind I can't stand it. I just can't see everybody in the halalas kitchen making spam musubis. It was actually my kitchen. It took us over eight hours to make 100. Oh my gosh. We had all these bottlenecks, production bottlenecks. Wow. And after that I forget this was a buyer. That's terrific. That's terrific. So again you know come back to this, you know this powbox product it's been around now for three years. Yeah. 1,200 clients. Hospitals. Couple. Yeah. Collector's, hospitals. Tons. Tons. Groups. Yep. Insurance companies. A few. A few insurance companies. Early education. I know that for sure. Make a Wish. Yep. Is another one that Make a Wish Hawaii. Yes. First customer. First one. They're on it. So what's the biggest challenge? Well being efficient with capital. Okay. That's probably a big challenge. Yeah. So you're always fundraising? We're always mindful of the spend. Okay. Yeah. Because you're still improving and enhancing the product. Continually. Yeah. And when we come back from the break we'll talk about the API that you've just announced and so on. Sure. So why don't I do this? Why don't we do a quick break. Yep. We'll pay our bills. Yep. Angus wants to talk to you guys so he's going to come back and I don't know neither can I. I never know what he's going to do. Anyway so Gorda the Texan I'm here with Hawala and Greg from Pow Box and we'll be back in about a minute when we pay some bills. This is Stink Tech Hawaii raising public awareness. Match day is no ordinary day. The pitch hallowed ground for players and supporters alike. Excitement builds. Game plans are made with responsibility in mind. Celebrations are underway. Ready for kickoff. MLS clubs in our supporters rise to the challenge. We make responsible decisions while we cheer on our heroes and toast their success. Elevate your match day experience. If you drink. Never drive. The host of Stink Tech Hawaii's Research in Monart and at that program we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the earth from space to looking at the earth from space to looking at the earth from space to looking at the earth from space to looking at the earth from space going underwater talking about earthquakes and volcanoes and other things which have a direct relevance not only to Hawaii but also to our economy. So please try and join me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon to think Tech Hawaii's Research in Monart and see you then. To all the grieving founder CEO of Palbox we're back from the break. We've got a special guest with us Angus Mac Tech and I just want to say anyway, great to see you again Hvalala. Great to see you man. Last time I saw you we were a thousand of you. Yeah. Last night. Well, hey I didn't tell the girlfriend that was that to you guys. Hey Greg nice to meet you too. Great to meet you. I got to leave a couple of jokes for you. You know HIPAA jokes right? All right. You ready? Yeah. Knock knock. Who's there? HIPAA. HIPAA who? HIPAA Potamus. Knock knock. Who's there? HIPAA. HIPAA who? If I tell you I beat non-HIPAA compliant so I can tell you. Oh man. How's that one? Okay, now I got one last one. This is not a knock knock so what do you call someone that gets really really sick every time they're thinking of HIPAA? Potential customer. Oh there you go excellent man. They're also a HIPAA contract. HIPAA contract. Anyway, let's say HIPAA jokes last night thinking of them all. Anyway thank you guys for being out there getting some money through my way you know because this guy's people are real tight. Sure Angus. All right we'll take him and we'll be back in a while and we'll turn it back over to you and you can take it from there. All right. All right. Hello. Let your ring ring free where you be. So Gordo. Yes sir. Where do you see going on in the tech scene in Honolulu? Catch us up. I think the biggest thing that's getting a lot of the press right now is this whole blockchain, we can talk about the Bitcoin piece and that's always got all the hype but the blockchain and what that's going to do to medical records and what will happen in that space. I think for you guys it's going to be a great opportunity as I think organizations like Epic and Cerner who are the big EMR organizations at healthcare organizations are going to have to be making some changes and looking at that. So that's kind of happening here. As you know you're not going to get massive startup tech firms here. It just isn't going to happen. Co-working spaces that have popped up around town which is kind of nice at least we get some startups. Hawaii Venture Capital Association is still doing some investing, small investing in players but you're not going to see there's just there's no incentive. I mean when they took away the Act 2.2.1 money that destroyed any incentive to do tech business here in Hawaii. And then I'll go back to cryptocurrencies. The legislature, not legislature but these bright people down at the state shut down Coinbase. So I couldn't trade Bitcoin. So I went to Europe and did it there. So now what? I mean they just don't understand. So that's tech in Hawaii it's my mother and I would say no hope. There's just no hope. That's what she's talking about. I'm trying to speak Japanese. Anyway, okay let's come back so let's come back to this. Palbox I can go to palbox.com website. I can sign up for the product. Yep. And get a free trial. 14 days. And I can do all that without even having to make a phone call. That's correct. We've got self-service going. That's right. So you've got self-service there. But if I want someone phone numbers operating on call. And that's that. And you can do a 14-day trial. Yeah. You turn it on you get to see how it works and if you don't like it you turn it off and I don't have to go through any training of any employees. That's correct. It's all self-serviced all the way through. You've got to go. Why does it sound so good to be true? That's why we moved. I can't. Well you've got 1200 clients that have decided there. Do you know what the total number of email boxes that would represent? Wow. I think it's around 13 or 14,000 and we're doing about 7 million encrypted emails a month now. 7 million encrypted emails a month there. That's pretty darn good. The market leader is doing 30 a month so we want to catch them. But the market leader doesn't it's not as simple as you guys. They don't have to set up a portal and do all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of friction. That's correct. I've got to go there and I've got to log on and set up a user name and password and all kinds of stuff like that. Additional steps required. You're right and so then you don't have any of that. Yeah. We just thought if we could put the user before the technology and think about how the user would want it that's guiding a lot of the engineering decisions we made. For me when we went to Seagull School when Seagull Schools went on to it and they're on G Suite so they're on Gmail but they're using a SeagullSchools.org as their domain. Got that all set up on with Google and then there was a matter of minutes just to flip on the encrypted email. It was kind of cool. It was very cool. I thought it was again I thought it was too good to be true and live it and see it. So it was actually harder to set up my Google accounts than it was to do this. Yeah. And in retrospect I would have done things a couple of things a little bit different than what I did initially when I set it up. So can you name drop some of your special clients that are Hawaii customers? Or maybe anywhere. We closed a pretty decent one. Skilled nursing organization in Boston Nezoni Health about a thousand users. Well. E-grinding Office 365. We got them up and running within 30 minutes. Close a couple hospitals in the West. Clay County Hospital that's a good size one as well. Christie Management. Yeah. Another hospital system. Another hospital system. Wow. Gosh. There's it's surprising. It's a wonderful surprise how big HIPAA is. Yeah. We've got farms all care pharmacy. That's one. Oh are they on it? Yeah. Surgery centers. Surgery centers. Pharma. Well there's still a lot you can go after. What about those? What about doctors groups? But they're so cheap. Doctors groups are so cheap. And I can say it because I know they are. That's why they became group and break off from the hospital so they can make money. That's their primary focus. In my opinion whatever that is is that doctors groups focused on making money and then the patients second. So hard to get them to buy anything. Well the nice thing about being in a regulated space is you don't really have a choice. You just have to pick something. And we've done our SEO and our marketing. We're very easy to find online. We focus on user reviews. So we have positive a lot of positive reviews online. So you know and it's all addressing the question like where is this from? Hawaii too good to be true. So we really focus on nailing down all the objections beforehand. Now what about the name? Now Pow Box it's a spin off of Pow Spam. But how does that get reacted to? I don't know. Hoff's on the front lines a lot more than I am. Well yeah there's some confusion. It's kind of an odd name. So people are they're like Pow Box who's Pow. There is some confusion there but once you kind of explain the evolution of the name and where we came from people get it. Because you would think it would be like HIPAA mail or something like that would be that would Well we have ambitions beyond HIPAA. That's why we didn't use it in the name. Okay so let's talk about that. You've got some of the next phases in the evolution of this product. Yeah so we released the HIPAA compliant email API a couple of weeks ago. We worked very hard on that. We pushed for six, seven weeks. Just hardcore engineering focused on that. So you could think of it as a HIPAA compliant send grid. So that's keeping us ahead of the game. So a HIPAA compliant application program interface that would go on to what? So you could have a portal or an app and if that portal or app needs to deliver email that needs to be HIPAA compliant in a transactional manner that's where you can plug in our API. So if you've got something that's doing forwarding or sending out newsletters. That or you know a receipt of hey your your pharmacy results are are ready. Okay. Here they are. Email notifications. Yeah. Oh your meds are ready to pick up or here's your lab tests. Yeah. So I'm thinking that there's a very complicated thing called my chart. Right. So it's an epic product within the epic electronic medical record where I can actually get access to my my chart, my medical chart. Right. And have it there. But you know I've started but now I got to make a phone call to the hospital. No one answers the phone hospital. So I got to wait, wait, wait. I tried to email and they want to talk to me on the phone. Get that all set up. But I'm thinking once that's there that's a medical record that I'm going to be doing some portal. Right. That may or may not be encrypted. It better be but hey you know we're surprised every day what we see coming across our inbound leads for sure. Yeah. What's happening out there. So I'm just sitting here thinking about all the different things we can do with this. Well yeah. So last couple of weeks on May 25th GDPR goes live in Europe. What's GDPR? It's a new set of burdens and healthcare regulations. Opportunities. Opportunities for you guys. So we've been getting a fairly steady stream of inquiries using our product to attain GDPR compliance. Wow. And we're carefully looking at that. We don't want to claim stuff or not. Right. But then there's you know there's FINRO, there's other countries healthcare. FINRO is the Finland. Oh sorry that's just the financial regulation. Okay see I don't know what this is. Then there's mortgage regulation. You know financial markets, but I think HIPAA and healthcare is a big big opportunity. Yeah well that's certainly the one. I mean our true competition in my opinion is the fax machine because it's just rampant in healthcare. Ancient technology. I know it is amazing that you know people are still sending healthcare records via fax. Oh. It's millions. Yeah very common. So we need a fax encryption API that will allow you to encrypt those. Well I think our encrypted email API directly can take out the fax machine. Yeah. When you can programmatically use that to replace the fax machine. Replace the fax machine. Oh man people save a boatload of money on those machines too. Yeah and I think that leads to a lot of user error, data redundancy when you're getting a fax that you can't read. It's not digital you have to re-transcribe the information, the slowness of it all. I mean it's really labor intensive. People are standing in front of those things all day long. If you leave the paper in the tray that's a potential hippo violation. If you ever had an onsite audit you've got the PHI just sitting in that paper tray. All kinds of issues there. Yeah and when I've gone to doctors offices and noticed most of them were stopped now but when I first started going they had the sign-in sheet and I say to them just so you know this is a HIPAA issue you're doing right here because I can just now see everybody that at least I got their names. That's right. And I know what specialty you are. Anything that can identify a patient that's PHI. Yeah so I see some of them now have gone away from that. You go to one desk first and you let them know and they write it down or put it on the computer and then it's not there but they're still there. They're still I still get sending newsletters and it comes across my email. Now I know it's encrypted because I've got PowerBox but I don't know what they've got but it's a opaque area. Email newsletters and whether that breaches HIPAA or not. Right because if I'm getting that newsletter it's indicated that I am a patient. You could make that inference. You could make that inference and say oh gee Gordon's going to go see this kind of That's correct. That's correct. Wow. Wow. So where's your what's your goals for the next three years? Oh three years. Okay give me one year. We have a plan in place and depending on capital available or raised we'll get there in 18 months or maybe 22 or 24 months. So are you at liberty to say what your top line is right now? Sure. Yeah we just crossed one million annual recurring revenue so for us that's an important one million annual recurring revenue and let me ask you can you remember what you were making when you left here three years ago? Yeah our cash it was $650 a month MR our monthly recurring specifically remember that. $650 a month and in three years now you just crossed a million dollar threshold. That's correct. That's terrific. Thank you. That really is terrific. You know McKinley too. Yeah. Yay public schools. Yeah. So that's awesome. All right any last message you want to give your website and that before we wrap this thing up? Yeah. Come check us out powbox.com paubox.com we're the easiest way to send and receive HIPAA compliant email built in Hawaii now we're scaling NSF and we live in the state of Hawaii. Yeah. So that's great man LTT. Yeah. It is and I would encourage people to definitely go look at it and a 14-day free talk trial you've got nothing to lose. It's a win-win. Nothing breaks nothing breaks gentlemen you're going to get this is your third solo cup. That's right. I tell you I don't want to see you selling these for Bitcoin. Hey this is our autographed solo cup you get to That's a high honor thank you Gorda. Maybe it brings you good luck who knows what else. But we'll see you back. Make a donation to Hibachi Talk. All right. All right. I'll agree. CEO and founder of Pilebox Greg Hoffman head of sales good job up there man. Thanks. I hope you give him a nice presentation. Hey the highest paid person should be the best performing sales person. I totally agree with that. Amen. Gorda the techs are here. Thanks again for watching us on Hibachi Talk. You can follow us on Hibachi.com you can check us out on Twitter at Hibachi Talk you can even follow Angus if you want on Twitter and Facebook I don't even know what he posts I just pretend not to even know what's going on. But anyway thank you guys and you know we have a tagline at the end of every show we ever say. So as we say at every show at the end one two three How are you doing? I screwed it up. Perfect. Thank you.