 Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii studios for another episode of Security Matters. I wanna give a shout out to my Sea of Rise group who took care of the studio the last couple of weeks. I had the jury duty, so thank you Sea of Rise. I think they did a great job, a couple of good episodes. Not to be done out, I'm gonna bring you some interesting information today. We have Yaren Zussman with us. Yaren is the director of Magos America. If you're not a radar person, you may not know that name yet, but if you're not a radar person, you ought to be. I'm going to give you some, not as an insider information or when you do a reveal, but I'm an old radar Navy gap. I started with the old A&SPS 39 shipboard radar. That was my first piece of gear I worked on. I love radar. It's very powerful and we're gonna get into technology, but first let's meet Yaren. Yaren, I know you're a busy guy, so thank you for joining me today. Thank you Aloha and thank you for having me. Pleasure to be here. Awesome, thanks man. So I'd like to get my guest, I know you've been around the industry a while and a lot of people probably do know you, but maybe just give us your history a little bit, sort of as much as you care to share. We don't give it all away on social media these days. And then kind of bring us up to Magos America today. Sure, yeah, thank you. And yeah, so I basically grew up in Israel, came to the U.S. when I was around 23. So now I can say about half my life I've been in the U.S. now. And basically all my life wanted to be in the security industry. No, just kidding, fell into the industry like anybody, fell into the industry like everybody else. In 2003 I was actually working for an IT consulting company. I was living in New York City. I was a little bored at the time and I met a VC that I knew. And for some reason I impressed him and he said, I have five companies I worked with. Go meet the CEOs, they're all early stage. One was in the space I was in, wasn't interested. And the other happened to be actually in the security industry and that's how I started. And the company 2003 was called DBTEL. And I ended up being there for a good chunk of my career. So about 12 years, did everything for the company when I started was very young. We were a handful of people and really did everything in that company from folding both shores to cleaning the floor, you name it, running a territory, then putting together a BD organization a strategic account organization eventually running the sales organization went through amazing, amazing schooling in that company the 2008 financial crisis. We were a rocket ship, we're going very, so really, really I always say I learned a ton in that company. 2010 we got out of the financial crisis. So I'm like, oh, I think they're going good. What can we do? So I went actually did an executive MBA in Rutgers and then I said, okay, what's next? So then I met a very interesting person also from Israel used to be the head of Israeli military intelligence. And he did something that today sounds trivial but at the time was very new, which is we're going to do facial recognition for access control, which is a company that was called FST Biometrics and I ended up running that company in the U.S. So we'll see of that company. Amazing time again, great three, three and a half four years we were ahead of the game in terms of the concept, but we did have major, major customers, brand names that bought into the idea what we didn't think about is that access control needs to work 100% of the time, all the time. Today with machine learning and AI works, but we had some challenges there. So the company actually pivoted more to the retail side and the less sensitive opening the door and I've been, but really again, very exciting time that I had in that company. And then also I got involved through a good friend of mine who was actually originally the CEO of Diviteli was running an incubator in Israel. That incubator was the Tyco incubator in Israel. And through that, I met a lot of the companies and that's actually how I met Magus which is the company I work with now. And I met them and I saw what they're doing and I realized, hey, this is amazing. You know, there really took technology that should be in every application on the perimeter but used to be extremely expensive. With that also Tyco did invest in the company as a strategic investor, which having a strategic investor such as Johnson Control or Tyco at that point. So in 2018, we started the company in the US and since then it's been as easy as can get. No, I'm just kidding. It's been really hard, but life has been, but it's been challenging, but it's been fun. You know, we've been growing, we've been educating the market on radars and 2020 actually has been with all the challenges and everything has been a great year for us in terms of growth. And this is where we are today. So again, very excited. Usually people like to say I'm blotting for punishment when nobody knows about a technology or nobody believes it's gonna work. I'm gonna go in and try to see if we can do it. So, but it's been till now many years in the industry it's been fun. But yeah, so that's pretty much the history of the elevator pitch. That's incredible. I love the optimism because, you know, if someone doesn't believe something will work and no one ever tries it, right? So we've got to have people that get out there and push technology. So I really appreciate that what you've done for the industry. Davytale was a big name. I mean, wow, you know, they're all global. Yeah, as far as I recall, their penetration was everywhere. Yeah, I know it was one of the first, we're actually the story and this is a whole different culture but Davytale was the first reseller of Genetech in the US. Genetech was a software company in Canada and Davytale was marketing them globally and then through the years, obviously that evolved to, but yeah, it was really the fight. At that time, we were like the IP pioneers. It was us, it was Axis, it was Bosch, milestone and we were all friends because we were like fighting the big old DVR guy. Yeah, yeah. So we were the pirates at the time but it was great, great time. 2003 to now everything is IP and everything but it was always winning that first large customer. If it's a big airport or a lot of big enterprise customers we had pretty much Silicon Valley, a lot of the big companies and just winning all those jobs at the beginning you were actually competing with people. Why IP? The network is gonna fall. What is, people just didn't believe in IP and it was so long in this industry. So I would say we were successful because we had no other company. Somebody sold IP, say, oh, you don't like it, I have a DVR, I didn't have a DVR. If I lost the business, I lost the business. So that's why I think we were more hungry, we were more aggressive and we're more successful eventually. That's a great story. So let me ask you a question. Did what you went through in 0809 and 10, how did that help prepare you for when the pandemic hit this year? You had another sort of a startup trying to get launched in North America and then the pandemic hit. Were there some lessons you brought from those days forward that helped you guys get through? Absolutely. So I think the biggest thing that you learn is that the thing they can control 100% is your expenses, right? That's can't control the revenue that's gonna come in. You can't control your expenses as a company. So the tightening of that rope and making sure that you don't know what's gonna happen, right? So March, when that thing started happening I would say mid-March, we really tightened the belt on expenses, right? Everything, you look at every expense possible and said, okay, if it's salary reduction, it's just all those things, of course with everybody involved from me to the rest of the employees but also giving everybody hope that once we are out of it, everything plus will be compensated back. So absolutely and I think through the years, through day, you learn so much, you make so many mistakes. At DVTAR, I made every mistake possible from hiring to thinking and one of the presentations I usually do is I can save you time because I made all the mistakes possible. But I think a lot of those things come and then you learn it and you make the same mistake twice sometimes because you think you got smarter but I think all of those things constantly you learn and then you adapt and then you go on. So controlling your expenses, not panicking, understanding that, hey, it's temporary and then realizing, hey, let's innovate how we do business. And again, 2020 ended up, March, April was very, very scared. Then 2020 ended up a great year for us as a company. So I can't complain. Our investors are happy, everybody's happy. Now it's a new year. So we started from scratch. Yeah, it's like so many of us are kind of restarting again. And I don't know about you, but it feels like maybe the bar's been actually raised a little bit because we all got more capable. We were able to go remote. We were able to still conduct business. Everyone's travel budget went to zero or at least their spend went to zero. So you could use that money in different ways. I've heard a lot of folks talk about that. Can you talk about how large your staff was at the beginning and then how you work through that and did everyone go remote? Just give us a little sense of what sort of models went through internally. So we're young, right? Then we have R&D in Israel and we have the guys here. So the office here has been, we have an office actually in New Jersey, it's a great office, but it was somehow remote anyway because we're traveling all the time. So we're trying to be here like at least once or twice a week. In Israel, it was a little bit more radical at the beginning just through the lockdowns and everything. And this is an R&D organization. It's changing ideas and writing code and all of the, and there you have with the lockdowns and then you had just not knowing what will happen. So a lot of people were fair-lawed at the beginning. And again, as we saw the business pick up, we started bringing people back and getting called everybody, but here in the U.S., we stayed on course. Cause again, we knew that we have, we also had a lot of the sales cycle for what we do is very long, right? So it's not that deals that I started working in March will close in April. So we had a lot of things that we knew were cooking and we knew, and luckily that our customers are also not so influenced by the pandemic. We're not in the consumer market. We do a lot of work with data centers. We do a lot of work with utilities. Those are guys that have not necessarily, their budget is not being cut as much as others. We did have some car companies that we're working or rental car companies that we're working for. And that business died obviously cause they're not spending money right now. Their revenue went almost to zero in one day, right? So, but our core business in the core vertical markets we operate ended up being, okay, just I think it was the shock of the pandemic. Initially the people were just, okay, what's gonna happen? And then from all the business innovation that we had to come with, if it's technical training, if it's doing all remotely, I think it actually made the product much better cause you go in and you say, okay, I cannot travel to Hawaii to support you guys doing an installation of the utility, right? So, how do we do that remotely now? So, I think a lot of the tools, and I heard somebody say yesterday, if this pandemic would be five years ago, it will all be screwed. But what happened in the five years with Zoom and all of those technologies that came around just made it much more manageable in a way. So I think from that point, a lot that will take from it, I think we'll also influence into the future. I used to travel over 100,000 miles every year in the air. I don't see myself going back to that. I see myself going back to travel. I don't see myself going back to traveling those crazy amounts that we used to. Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I think that expectation of, you know, delivering a bit of a solution discussion, you know, having remote capabilities is gonna be a big piece of business going forward. I love to see everybody invest in training. I saw some of the clips you folks had on some of your white paper stuff that was, I thought, really valuable to sort of explain for people, and they were well done. Especially someone who doesn't understand the value of radar and what it can bring to a scenario. So we're near the midpoint. I wanna definitely get into radar technology. So we have to pay some bills. So we'll take about a one minute break and we'll be right back with Yaron. Hang on, everybody. We'll see you in a minute. All right, and we're back with Yaron Zussman of Magos America. And we're talking, well, we've been talking about Magos and Yaron's like amazing business expertise, but he's leading a company now that I think can lead this industry into a place that was really the realm of DOD in my experience as a radar guy. Radar has a massive, I think, opportunity to help us finally cover perimeter in a cost-effective way that we always needed. That's my pitch about radar, because I'm an old radar guy and I love it. Now, my radar didn't work that good. I gotta tell you, I was in the Persian Gulf and the air was full of sand and dirt and we were kind of blinded. That's all I'm gonna say is our capability dropped. So we may talk about some of the vulnerabilities of radar that maybe you guys have overcome, but let's talk about radar, the development of Magos a little bit and the opportunity that you saw getting into the market and then some of the projects that you've done to date. Sure, so yeah, so the company actually started with a very clear vision that it started by two brilliant engineers that actually did electro-optic, did radars work mostly in the military and the academia, and they did that work and really investigated how radars should protect and used to protect, like you said, DOD. Mostly, actually one of our founders been in the Army for many, many years, but then they realized through the expertise that with today's evolution of technology, not moving forward, all of those things, radar should not be that expensive, right? So when you think of radar, and it's funny because we were last year as this did a pitch competition, we actually won that pitch competition as a startup, but we start a pitch way. When you think about radar, you don't think about innovation, right? You think it's a 50-year-old technology. So what's innovative about radar, right? So we start from, it's not like this, but what they did is really take radars and reinvent it and make it very, very small. Our radar is a very small device, make it an IP device and make it very affordable. And on the other side, we also took a lot of software and tied that software to make it speak to all the systems that are out there today. So we're integrated into the variants and the new company that's very discolored right now, the Vigilan, the Genotex, Milestone, and all of that, and with that GUI and that capability of the radar, we now make it very, very clear value proposition because when you look at the radar today, a radar looks at, you know, we speak in meters, but about, you know, our smallest radar is about 250 meter, which is about 750 feet. And then it goes up to about 3,000 feet, which is a one kilometer radar. And it looks at about 120 degrees. So the paradigm shift on the perimeter, that usually when you hear a presentation from most of the companies at the perimeter, you need fixed cameras on the perimeter and then you need PTZs to be two in tours. We, in a way, we shattered that because we say, no, you need four or five radars around the perimeter with those PTZs, but those PTZs are now very smart because we move the PTZs based on the target that you detect, right? So each one of those radars looked at 120 degrees in vertical and then it also has an elevation of about 30 degrees. So now you cover per square meter, your economics just makes sense. Yeah, 100%. I don't know, will that, you know, I think, I don't think people think about a perimeter, but you know, people have seen spent solutions, right? Well, people can go under and over them. So when you talk about having vertical dimensionality as well as horizontal dimensionality, that's where radar gains a whole lot of value because you just can't move in that field of view without detection. And detection problems have been something that we've suffered with many of the different types of solutions that we've built in the industry, either A, like a fence system is only good on the fence, right? Or B, you know, most is only good at it. You have to get to the fence in order to trigger it, right? So, you know, fence companies, but we trigger before, so I'm not saying I'm here to replace your fence, although some people do replace because they don't want the fence. They say, okay, we work a lot with, we have radars on fence line a lot of the time, but if we detect way before they get to the fence, right? So the detection is way before that. Yeah, which is so valuable, right? And so this is the, I think sort of the revolution that people may not understand as you get a lot more coverage from different types of attacks, you might say, whether it's a little bit elevated, it's not necessarily someone just on the ground, but it's someone also in the air because you have that vertical dimensionality of a radar. What are we talking about from a footprint perspective? You mentioned, so you got 120 degrees, so I could see, you know, three or four could easily cover 360 degrees of a space. And you said maybe out to 700 feet or out to maybe a thousand meters. And then is that a typical sort of thing or are you going like a long oil pipelines as well? Or is it typically more, you know, like in a longitudinal fashion or is it more of a, you know, square like a stadium type application? So it's mixed, right? We have projects that are exactly that, protect if it's a pipeline or a canal or anything from that matter. But a lot of our work is really protecting around perimeter, right? So again, if you look at a perimeter, that think about a typical data center, right? That's a big market for us right now. So when somebody builds a new data center, their planning is usually traditionally has been, you put 20 poles around the perimeter, you have fixed cameras, you put analytics, you put, and this is all great, but a lot of the consultant that see our product say, wait, I can now put five poles around the perimeter. So it's not only the cost of the radar, it's the cost of your IP ports, it's the cost of maintaining the system later, it's the cost of ownership over the long term. And really it allows you, I said the PTZ manufacturers love us because we help them sell the most expensive PTZs, right? So if we work with Sli or with Axis or with didiotech or any of that one of these guys, we now take their cameras that are very good cameras, but we move them based on exactly a target there. And in a way, we like to say, we make PTZ camera relevant again, because when I was a TV, my days at TV tell PTZs were always at the right place at the wrong time, you know, you go for something, the PTZ was doing a tour, it was busy. Now the PTZ is moving based on triggers from the radar, which I think is the unique capabilities. And actually even today we went another step and we added what we call the AI to that. So we're actually classifying the targets as well. We're telling you, hey, this target is a person, this target is a car, this target is a vehicle and also help you eliminate nuisance alarm, because that's the biggest problem of the industry is nuisance alarm, people shut down stuff because they're sick of getting those nuisance alarms and they're sick of getting that email. So we said, we'll give you an alert when it's really an alert or an alarm when it's really an alert. Yeah, it's incredible. That is something, I mean, you know, we obviously, in the DOD model, you know, we had that, but we always had people watching and we always had, you know, a second layer of verifying. You know, operators today don't have time to act upon, you know, bad intelligence, right? They really, that alarm fatigue will wear them out quickly and then they're like, oh, this doesn't work. I'm not paying attention. So it's that value of getting a real alarm when it's really worth looking at is something that shouldn't be overlooked. I think that if people haven't experienced that or worked in that environment, they just don't understand how valuable that proposition is. And to now start to feed it, I love the idea of having some ML or AI baked into that that starts to give them because if it's a vehicle approaching, what's the rate of speed? Or what's my playbook for an approaching vehicle that's unknown, for example, versus someone on foot or, you know, 10 men on foot or whatever it may be. So it's super valuable that you can provide that additional intelligence. Can we talk about the sort of functionality? I mentioned before some of the difficulties we had and my radar was 60 years old actually. So it was analog, you know what I'm saying? We travel shot to the component, you know, bad capacitor, bad transistor. But let's talk about the modern radar adoption. Are there environmental variables or how do you overcome some of the variables that we experienced with some of the older technology in our environment when operating radar? So actually if we look at what we call the MIMO radar, we have multiple inputs, multiple outputs and a radar takes care a lot of the quality environmental stuff. We don't care about, actually my best demos are in rain and snow cause you don't see anything, but the radar works. But radar does have its diseases as we call it, right? Because radar staring in a busy area is going to let you a lot of noise, which is clutter, right? And we'll create, so radar in general, radar likes radial movement, meaning that you come to it, it's new. So if I say a radar works for 500 meters, if I do tangent movement to the radar, which is a harder for radar to detect because it works in Doppler, so the distance of detection is going to be shorter than the maximum rate of the radar. And we do, we call radar 101, we say about land, for example, a tree can create a lot of clutter, it will not create an alarm cause we know that the tree is moving, but you hiding under the tree are not going to be detected as a person, right? When you get out of the tree area, it will detect you. So there are things like if something creates a lot of clutter or noise to that radar and you're hiding behind it, it'd be okay. But from that, it's like the diseases of a lot of, call it, you don't want to put it in front of a wall cause it's going to block the radar. But again, if we look at that versus, I used to sell analytics, right? We had one of the best ones in the market called I-O-Image, you can tell all of them, it's a great product, but the calibration process, the, all of those things, when I saw this technology and that's where I decided to sign up and build this thing here in the US was seeing the cost benefit, right? It's what you put in, what you have to install, how much less infrastructure, how much less power, it's a three watt device, right? It's a one cable to the device. That's when I realized, okay, this is, this can be a game changer on an itch market on the perimeter, but it can be a game changer. And again, right now it looks like that's the right track. We are seeing the adaptation being amazing. So it's great. Yeah, I'm hoping to see a whole lot more of that proliferate. Is the, how is North America, how's the market? Are they, you still need a lot of education or you haven't getting a lot of sessions going or are you still finding people are like, wow, I didn't know, a lot of people just aren't familiar with radar, so I didn't know how the, how you find the market space here. So we're seeing a very, very good adaptation. So there is, the utility space has been looking at radar for a long time and some of them have been deploying radars for a long time. So we have to educate them why our radar, right? So that's from that point. Data centers, we're seeing them very willing to listen and deploy, we're doing a lot of data centers, probably our second largest vertical market today outside of the utility space. And again, we see them because they have to protect them. They're critical sites, they have that combination of logical worrying about hacks, but also worrying about physical getting into the data center. So that they're willing to look at any technology that can help them build in a lot of them. Fulfillment center is another one that we're seeing. So anything that is in their remote location and the area has a perimeter, we're seeing people willing to listen, but there is a lot of aha moments like I had when I saw it first time. Other time we do webinars, people are like, wow, I did not think that that's what we can do, right? So we're seeing more and more. And also we have some great partnership, right? So the partnerships are key. Integrators that have adapted, have been early adapters and like any other technology that is out there, you need the early adapters. So do the work and install and get out there before the rest come on board. So that's been always a challenge, but that's once you have them, once the early adapters are in, they feel it's part of their success that's rolling out your program. So they become ambassadors for your product. And we're seeing that, like I said, in every vertical market that we have, we have an ambassador. So one excellent customer of ours is actually Yale University. He said, what the heck is the university needs radars? And Yale University, their athletic field, they needed to protect cause there was some areas there and their athletics is open. It's a great area. And just instead of blanketing it with cameras, a couple of radars, we were able to help them really solve and exist a real problem, right? So there's a lot of those that we're able to do. And again, that's where we've been really focusing on finding the right partners to work with and going to business. Awesome, I love it. I think it's gonna be such a game changer for protecting our critical infrastructure, which I have a passion for national security. So whatever we can do to help, please let me know. Check out Magos America, folks. Get a hold of Yaron if you need a demo. Radar can definitely change your application and help your customers protect their assets, protect their people. Yaron, I really appreciate you joining me today. Great session. I'm sure we'll talk again soon, sir. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Mahalo, Mahalo. Thank you. Mahalo, aloha.