Alex Haro discusses his experience raising over $100M for his company, Hubble Network. He also details the near-failure of Life360's Series B funding round.
Alex Haro discusses his experience raising over $100M for his company, Hubble Network. He also details the near-failure of Life360's Series B funding round but eventual success through an ADT partnership.
Ultimately, this is a grind and the highs and the lows. Hopefully, there's more highs than the lows, but sometimes there's a hell of a lot more lows before there's any highs. It's all survivable. [music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the Deal Maker Show. So, today we have a exciting founder. an exciting founder that he's done it a couple of times and the last one you know was quite the hit and now he's on a rocket ship and again all types of good stuff that we're going to be talking about you know whether it's inspiration uh also stories about scaling a company all the way to IPO uh testing you know and the early days of building something and and really again all the good stuff that we like to hear when it comes to deal making too. So be very very prepared for the session today. It's going to be quite inspiring. And without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Alex
Ado. Welcome to the show. >> Hi. Well, thank you for having me and uh appreciate you pronouncing the last name correctly. >> Well, you know, obviously from Spain, too, just like >> Yeah. >> So uh so give us a walk through memory lane. Dad from Mexico, mom from Salt Lake City. How was life growing up for you? >> [snorts] >> Yeah. Life for me growing up, my uh parents were restaurant entrepreneurs. So when my dad immigrated here into the the US, he spent a um a majority of his career building a series of different restaurants, including some very popular uh Mexican restaurants that are still running in uh West LA. So Casablanca, La Cabana, Pacos Tacos, a few others. Um, and so I got to uh get my workaholic nature directly from my parents and uh spent most of my waking hours either in school or at the restaurant. Uh, so I I felt more at home, you know, in
the back office of a a restaurant than I did uh sort of anywhere else. And uh I think it's a big part of who I am today. Uh, you know, growing up with that sort of immigrant workaholic kind of mentality of uh, you know, build what you can and then just get stuff done. Well, I mean, you didn't wait any any longer. No, I mean, being able to have that entrepreneurial mindset and an upbringing right after school. You took good notes and you went at it with your first company. So, tell us, you know, what happened there. >> Yeah, absolutely. Well, as you might imagine, there was a lot of pressure to get into the restaurant business and I uh realized that I have a love for computers that I could not ignore and u you know, the restaurant business is very brutal. So, uh, immediately after, uh, leaving college, uh, where I studied computer science, I kind of had to make a choice of, uh,
either go into the restaurant game or go start my own company. And so, I I decided I wanted to go start my own company, not focused in the food space at all, but, you know, really focused on what could we build with technology. And uh you know that was a lot of the inspiration for me kind of moving on a whim from Southern California to San Francisco to really just figure out what I wanted to do with my life, figure out what company I wanted to start. And it ultimately is what led me to uh find my co-founder of uh uh the first company. So, you know, feel very fortunate that I kind of just went for it and uh left school and said no to the the restaurant game and just uh decided to set upon San Francisco to figure out what I was going to do with my life. >> So, what ended up being the inspiration for Life 360? >> Yeah. So, uh, me and my co-founder actually met at a a random tech
event and, um, you know, we ended up talking a lot about Hurricane Katrina and sort of how a lot of families got, uh, displaced because of the the natural disaster. Uh, you know, there was a lot of criticism um to the government kind of about their response to the the tragedy and a lot of families got displaced and didn't know how to find each other or how to find help or or what to do. And uh you know uh Chris Halls, my co-founder of Life 360, and I spent a lot of time talking about uh this new platform called Android, which had just been announced um and uh iPhone had just launched as well. And you know, these always on GPS connected devices could be something that actually helped families stay safe. And so that really was the initial inspiration for Life 360 was thinking about in these times of natural disasters, how can we uh help keep families close and connected, how can we help
them, you know, really think about uh knowing where everyone is, being able to find each other. Uh initially it was very focused on natural disasters, but pretty early on we learned that, you know, out of sight, out of mind. Uh and so how do we actually get to be a part of everyday family life? Uh but we were also very early in the days of mobile. I mean um we ended up putting together an application for a competition that Android uh announced uh and ended up winning first place. So our first source of funding ever was a $300,000 grant from Google. Uh and for a very very long time, our only profitable year as well. Um until, you know, more recently. Uh and but we were so early in the days of mobile that you know families didn't have smartphones yet. Uh it wasn't clear to everyone that everyone was going to have a smartphone. And so you know in the early days of pitching this idea of a
family will be connected through a smartphone. Uh we had a lot of skeptics and a lot of people that just didn't believe us that every uh one would eventually have a smartphone and you know what is the power if you uh remove that where are you text? And so that's really what kind of inspired us to push and and start Life 360 even in the early days. >> So what what was the end, you know, business model of Life 360? How are you guys making money? >> Yeah, it it took us quite a long time. I mean, I think you look at Life 360 now and we're a public company and we'll make, you know, close to over $500 million of revenue this year and it, you know, it feels like in some sense a a success that was always going to be um but it took many many years of grinding it out and trying to figure out [clears throat] what is the business model, how will we uh scalably grow. The first four,
honestly the first kind of almost six years, we were just focused on how do we get people to use it? How how do we engage our customers? How do we build something that becomes embedded into their everyday uh you know the everyday fabric of their everyday family life. Uh and it really wasn't until uh we built the driving safety features that we really started to monetize. So Life 360 is a premium app. Anyone can go download life 360, start using it with your family, see where you are, see what's going on, see the history of where your family has been throughout the day. Uh, and you can do that all for free. Uh, but we also have built driving safety features. So, we will tell you if one of your family members get gets into a car accident or if something happens and and they um emergency services needs to be dispatched. Uh, and and that really is the crux of uh what I believe we launched in
2014. So almost six years after we really started the company was when we first started monetizing. Uh and we could talk a lot more about the difficulties of fundraising before having any revenue, but it it wasn't necessarily the world's funnest uh journey either, but you know, we stuck to it and grinded it out. And then in 2014 when we had kind of more of this premium feature because we we realized we wanted every family to use this. And um uh that's why we went with the premium model versus trying to charge customers upfront for the service. Uh and then when we did launch driving that really allowed us to monetize and so you know in the first couple years we scaled to a few million users just through pure organic growth just word of mouth, you know, soccer moms showing it to other soccer moms saying look at this cool utility that I'm I'm using. Uh and then as as we launched uh driving
in our premium features got uh more mature that allowed us to invest in in user acquisition and and really you know really go into hyperrowth me mode and as I mentioned we're now over 100 million users because of that. >> What was that moment where you felt like I think that this is really exploding? Yeah, I uh I mean there were so many fun uh milestones along the road. Uh you know certainly the first time we passed a million users and then five million and 10 million and then you know 50 million and now a h 100red million like all of those milestones were were huge celebrations and very exciting. Um being able to ring the bell uh on on the NASDAQ and you know have that IPO moment is truly one of the highlights of my uh life so far. Uh, but you know, honestly, it happens fairly often. I get reminded the impact that I've had at Life 360 because, you know, I'll see a random taxi cab
driver,…