1. Hi Mark, thank you for sitting down with us. Can you explain your background a little bit?
I’m a serial entrepreneur with two exits — I’ve previously been venture-backed by Softbank and Intel and was CTO at a company backed by Elon Musk and Sequoia. My first company, The Palace, was sold in 1999 with 10 million users. My third company, a social network called ZeroDegrees, was sold to IAC in 2004.
I’m also a Harper Collins author. I was one of the first people ever to serially podcast a novel in 2005. In 2013, I published BITCOIN EXPLAINED SIMPLY. In 2015 I published THE CASE FOR BITCOIN — which was a direct response to Bitcoin crashing from $1,200 to $160 when few still believed.
2. What is Guardian Circle and when did you come up with the idea?
Guardian Circle is globally decentralized 9-1-1. When you’re in trouble, push a button and we generate a flash-mob of qualified help from the people and resources already near you. Imagine ten people arriving in three minutes, anywhere on earth. That’s the vision.
Six billion people have no 9-1-1. One billion do, but it is terrible (1960’s tech) and getting worse (example: when you call 9-1-1 from a mobile phone, they have no idea where you are — Uber can find you more easily than 9-1-1.
We fix all of this. We open the emergency alert grid to vetted citizens, any alert device (via API) and private response services for the very first time.
I came up with the idea after my girlfriend Heather had a stroke and was all alone in her garage for half an hour. I found her and took her to the hospital in time, and everything is fine now. However, I realized later that seven people had been within a thousand yards of her during this event — she simply had no way to alert them. She was literally drowning in help — but couldn’t access it. She was debating calling 911, but once you summon an ambulance, you also summon a $20K bill, so many just forego that call — and she was trying to ‘tough it out’ because of that. Since her brain had shut down, she couldn’t type or talk so this eliminated the 911 dial option anyway.
I said to myself, someone has to have created an app to summon nearby help! When I looked, I found there were a lot of ‘panic button apps’ that simply sent a text message with a link to five emergency contacts. I realized if I had gotten a text — even from her! — that said, “Heather is in trouble! Click here to see her position and help her,” I would immediately suspect that link of being spam. I would think her phone had
