Steven Chazin
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[00:00:00] Welcome to launch pod, a product management podcast from log rocket. Today, our guest is Steve Chazen, vice president of products at alarm. com, a technology company that focuses on intelligently connected property. Steve has been in product since his first job building technology for Raytheon, and then became a senior director, marketing and account executive and systems engineer at Apple, where he worked for nearly a decade.

he's remained in Texas and has worked in various leadership roles at companies such as Avid, Ellucian, Salesforce, Cisco, and more. On today's episode, LogRocket Matt Arbisfeld talks to Steve about his experience working at Apple, competing with Final Cut Pro, And his current role at alarm.

com, they discussed the importance of user centered product design, , the impact of AI in home security, and the value of staying intellectually curious in a rapidly evolving tech landscape. So here it is. Our conversation , [00:01:00] with Steve Chazen.

Hey Steve, super excited to chat with you today. And I have to start. I saw you at Apple for almost 10 years and you said you knew Steve Jobs. So we'd just love to start and learn how you started there and how what that experience was like.

Sure. Thanks, Matt. Yeah. So Apple was I joined in 1991 when Apple is a rocket ship. They could do no wrong by 97. The wheel started to fall off that bus. Steve had left two or three years before I joined and the company really had lost its way. What was working before. And all their unique value was usurped by Microsoft, right?

Windows 95 kind of copied everything that was unique about the Mac. And there was really a vacuum of leadership. So I really loved working at Apple, but I didn't like those times. And I resigned in right around 1997, right after jobs had come back. As a special advisor to Gil Emelio, which was really more of a marketing ploy then to get the company some [00:02:00] attention and extend a lifeline to them, but they really had no.

Product roadmap, no developer roadmap. It was really dark days and almost nobody knows how close to going out of business Apple came in those days. And so I wrote a note to my boss and I just said, Hey, look, I'm a fan. I'm a shareholder. I'll be rooting from the sidelines. Copied sjobs at pixar. com, which was the only email address I could find for him at the time.

And a couple of days later he calls with my boss on a speakerphone and told me to get back in the game and get off the sidelines. He used a more colorful language. And I got to essentially write my job description cause I told him what we should do. And he said, go do it. And I was able to do that and work directly for him for the next 18 months.

I told him it would take two years. We got it done in a year and a half. And it was a really exciting time. It really wrote the formula for Apple's resurgence, really listening to customers, understanding what the product needed to do versus [00:03:00] pushing what you had on the shelf at people. And it changed changed my life in the way of how to build great products.

And. Understand why you build great products.

Wow. What was the project you worked on?

So I reconstituted what was called the Apple university consortium. And if you remember the early days of Apple, the Mac was so different back in the late eighties that no one really wanted to write software for it. So jobs went to the university market. And picked, handpicked like 25 schools and said, if you will endorse this platform for your students, teach them about technology, which is going to be in their lives, and that's the mission of the university, we'll give it to you at the cost of it cost us to make it.

And so in the early days that worked there was a bunch of very well known universities that built a lot of the early software on the Mac and standardized on it long before anybody thought. A student needed to buy a computer in college. And that worked in the early days of Apple. [00:04:00] And I rebuilt it again in the late nineties when the same problem was happening.

All the developers were leaving the platform windows look like the fat, the future. And a lot of universities had committed so heavily to Apple that if Apple went out of business, they had to start over. They were completely a hundred percent requiring of their students to buy a Mac on matriculation.

So it was tough for them to admit that future. So we knew they wanted us to survive. We needed them to survive. So it was this match made in heaven. And every. Three to four months, we'd invite them out to Cupertino. We would show them what we were working on. We'd get their feedback. At a certain point in the presentation, Steve would kick out all the Apple people like me and talk directly to the university leaders and really drill into them why they were important and why we needed each other.

And again, most people don't know, but the foundation for the. Mac OS then was partially built by these universities themselves. It, the Mac kernel was built on a [00:05:00] Carnegie Mellon foundational shell called Andrew or mock and Dartmouth and Harvard and MIT all built a lot of the plumbing for it. In return, we gave them an open source license to the Mac, which again, most people have not even paid attention to that because they didn't want to commit to Apple in the event Apple went out of business, unless they had the code to continue their enterprise.

And again, it was very fortunate that Steve agreed to do that and that helped turn the company around. And the product we showed them was the iMac, which would many ways was built for the university customers in mind.

Got it. So they were, you were working together with all these universities to develop the next big operating system. And that's what sort of usurped the Windows 95. 

Was the future of the Mac again. There was only the, what was the system seven, system eight, that was their platform, but they had to take what the universities had built, which was the foundation for next in itself, and then build on [00:06:00] top of that, all the components to make it into a robust operating system with all the security and platform requirements.

And a lot of that was built by these university partners, converting it from what. Was running on the next platform to the Mac hardware. And then later on doing it again, when they converted to the Intel platform,

How did you get that done in 18 months? Was it a mad dash or nights and weekends? What were the learnings

a little bit of both. I live in, I lived in New Hampshire at the time, but my head, my, my office was in California, so I would spend two weeks out there living at the Saratoga in, in Saratoga, California, commuting to the Apple office and working well into the evening to make that stuff work And that was also the same place we put the university leaders in Saratoga.

And so we gave them a nice place for them to work together. So we benefited from having all these motivated individuals focusing on the same problem, which was save Apple. And [00:07:00] then committing to buy the platform that they were putting their ideas into. So it was really a very unique time and it worked.

The iMac, not just the software and the hardware but the marketing around it saved the company, even though technically it was no different than what we were selling 18 months before. It gave us that leg up to go. And in the meantime, the thing we were doing behind the scenes was the think different campaign to get people to think different about Apple and why they wanted a computer in the first place.

Very cool. Yeah. It goes to show how much of. Software is just getting the messaging out and people knowing what you do. And that's great. Are there any like Steve job anecdotes or lessons that you take have taken with you or maybe some that you've shied away from having worked with

Yeah, that's a good question. So one thing is really understanding why you're building the product. A lot of companies. They have a hit product and then they kind of [00:08:00] milk that forever, but they've stopped thinking about why they built the product in the first place or who they built it for. Steve was always insistent that the people who were building the product were using it constantly.

The feedback came from the users of it, not from the designers or a piece of paper. The other piece, which is unique to Apple and it's something I took to the rest of my career is typically marketing and sales are on one side of the business. And product and engineering are on the other.

And when times get tough, they point at each other, the product people and the engineering people say, Hey, why can't you sell what we gave you? And the marketing and salespeople say, what you gave me can't be sold. And at Apple, it's not like that at all.

Before you start writing code or building a design, you decide what the message is, why it exists. It's reason for being, and then everything stems from that. And you get a very clear picture of why you're putting a feature in or why you don't need that feature. And saying no becomes this [00:09:00] liberating activity because you don't have to add that feature if it doesn't support the reason it should exist to begin with.

And a lot of companies forget that, but it's it's something unique to Apple, right? It's in the same people's brain. They know why they wake up and build this feature or why they message it that way, because. It needs to solve this problem better than some of the product that might already exist.

Do you feel like that? I guess you've, you haven't been there for many years at Apple, but do you feel like that culture is still there? Or from the outside, they had the iPad ad and people feel like the Apple vision pro messaging has been all over the place. Do you feel like some of that has been lost?

In the

That's a good question. I've been waiting to, to pontificate on that for a while till I see it, but Apple has been so successful for so long. It's hard to say that there's something. Different than when Steve was there. I think what they do, and this is again, fairly unique to their culture is they assign people who are, they call them DRIs, directly responsible individuals, [00:10:00] and that person is empowered to make these, this product succeed and the buck stops with them.

So for everyone who has to like, say, Hey, why should I be. Adding this feature or is this necessary or what's the timetable that one individual and of course their team understands what they're aiming for and Steve insisted on that. And in fact, before you'd have a meeting, you'd ask everybody, why are you here?

And unless you were one of those people, or you could contribute to the meeting, go do something else. You don't need to be here. And I'm sure you've been in many meetings where there's a lot of people that come in and. Maybe half the people don't need to be in the meeting. They're there because they're interested in it, but it's not tantamount to the success of what you're talking about.

So he made that more of a focal point for the company. And I think there's something to be learned from that as far as the the ad that they threw out for The crush ad, as you referred to, and I saw this immediately, there was just something off about it. They were trying to be a little too clever saying [00:11:00] all this stuff is in this one device.

By the way, I have my new iPad over here when in reality, if they just sat back and looked at it, I'm sure this would have died at Steve's doorstep. If you just reverse it, play it backwards. All that stuff becomes a wellspring empowering the person who owns the iPad to do that stuff. They may never have tried to do before versus take all these creative arts and crush it into one device, which everybody knows, it's not the pencil that makes the art, the artist

Yep.

warm.

And so I think they lost their way on that one.

But they apologized, which is rare for them 


m 
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too. And they took it down.

yeah, I get, you know, lesson lessons, you got to respect how quickly they have responded to the feedback and live and learn. And I, yeah, I wanted to ask you that, especially cause you at some point went to Avid, which competed with final cut pro. So just would love to learn what that was like and what it was like to go head to head with Apple products.

And what do you recommend that path for people you know, building? 

yeah, people worry that [00:12:00] Apple waits and waits and then take somebody's market from them. And there've been history stories about being Sherlocked and you probably know these verbs and your listeners probably get all that. Apple doesn't intentionally try to take somebody's business to their credit.

They are a very horizontal product company. They tend not to go vertical at any segment. They want their products to. Be a foundational element and then the developers can build on top of it. They've only made a couple of exceptions to that. And one of them was the video editing market. And that was a personal vendetta that Steve jobs had against this company called Avid.

And the way that goes is when Apple was really in trouble and Steve had not yet decided to become the CEO, he had a backup plan. His backup plan was to save Apple, even if they lost to Windows, he was going to re entrench in the Hollywood motion picture industry, which was a pet, interest for him.

And the way that was going to happen is Apple owned the platform, the Macintosh, which was used by almost all Hollywood editors [00:13:00] when they moved to digital editing. Now, of course, the software they used was Avid's Media Composer. And this is still the primary tool used to create most of the motion pictures you've seen in Hollywood and television.

And so he had the platform, he had the Mac. He had this new invention back then called Firewire, which was the device that brought digital media into a computer and brought it out and was the foundation for the original iPod, if you remember. They had the operating system, macOS, and they were missing one piece.

They were missing a video editing tool. So Steve went to Macromedia at the time and bought a piece of technology, what was called Key Grip. And he brought it in house, it was Windows and Mac, he ripped out the Windows components of it, rebuilt it as Final Cut. He called it Final Cut Pro. And launched it.

Famously for 999, where every other video editing product, including the Avid was 10 times that or [00:14:00] more, right? It was a revelation that anyone could pay a thousand dollars for a video editing system in Hollywood when they were paying hundreds of thousands, or they were renting those systems from houses just to edit their movies.

And. The foundation of that was Media Composer built by this company called Avid Technologies, but during the late nineties, Avid, like every other developer decided Apple was going out of business and to save their business, they had to move to Windows. And that pissed Steve off because his holes, his whole foundation for re entrenching the Mac was based upon Hollywood being on the Mac, right?

If Hollywood moved off the Mac, his plan was dead. So when I didn't know any of this, by the way, when I moved to Avid and I didn't go straight from Apple to Avid, I went to another startup and then I ended up at Avid and I've always been in editing. I have a family. So I had digital video cameras back then, which were awesome.

Precursors to the iPhone and the tools existed for normal humans like me to edit movies. And it was, liberating [00:15:00] and it was fun. And yet you couldn't really afford a lot of the high end software like media composer. So when I joined Avid I had not known that the leadership of Avid had gone out to Cupertino, met with Steve and was told by Steve that he was going to crush them. And in more flowery language. And, um, I had accepted this job offer. I had come in on my first day on the job and the executives were like hanging their heads. Like they were like, we're dead. We're going out of business because Apple wants to eat our lunch. And they were very creative t shirts about how to spell Steve jobs name differently.

Any case I met our CEO. His name is David Kral. I'll just. First day on the job. And he told me that, you came at a strange time. We're not so sure what we're going to do. And I told him, look, Apple has these rules. They can't crush a company in the court of public opinion. They have to play nice.

They're a nice company. So you have some leverage. And so I knew how [00:16:00] Apple operated and I said, don't sell the company. Let's go beat Apple. And that idea of beating Apple, became a rally cry. So just by fortunate timing, I was able to do a whole bunch of things inside that company that no one tried to do before.

And what we did, we decided to take the media composer, bring it down into a software only version we called Avid Express Pro. And this this product included many of the same components for media composer, including some components from another higher end product called symphony, which did color correction.

Which was, a rare skill that you had to go to college to figure out, but we brought that into the box and you could click on one image and click on another and match the color. So we had all this capability in the box. We lowered the price to 300 bucks. We we we decided to launch it in Apple's backyard at the final cut pro user group in Hollywood.

And. We didn't tell any of this stuff to Apple. We [00:17:00] got Steve to coauthor a press release with our CEO, where we said, Hollywood runs on Macintosh, which is Steve wanted to say. And it just so happens that Hollywood runs on Avid. And now this tool that Hollywood uses is available for normal people to run on their own computers at home.

And we knew if we had Steve's blessing. All these people would go do the homework and figure out how much they would pay for Final Cut Pro versus our product. And they would look at the pedigree of what we did nothing but video editing and Hollywood's built on it, so we knew we'd win. The last thing we did is we put Mac and Windows software in the same box, which back then people stopped doing.

So it didn't matter what platform you ran on, especially at schools. You got them both. And I changed the license so you can run them simultaneously on two systems, which everyone was afraid to do, but we did it. And long story short, we kept Apple at arm's length. And even today, very few movies are edited on Final Cut Pro.

Wow, amazing. It's like you named your [00:18:00] enemy, but then you got even closer to them and ended

Yeah, and then they came after us again with final cut express specifically named after our product, which we knew that was coming to. And so we gave away a free version of our product the same day they launched it. So they couldn't ever

savage.

was pretty savage. It was fun telling that story because we are, we were one of the rare companies, I think that beat Apple in its own game and it only

amazing. Yeah, because yeah, final cut for your kind of hobby editing, but still, yeah. To, to your point, not a not many movie studios use it. So

It came very close, but no 

did Steve end up embracing Avid at some point once he saw, we can own the platform and. It's great when developers succeed too, or that's the vendetta.

no if if Steven braced avid, there would be no final cut pro he kept it around and it's still one of those rare tools like a logic pro that seems strange for Apple to go after industry with their software and they're good at it, so [00:19:00] I'm glad it exists.

And in some ways it lived until the, even this iPad ad had Parkinson uh, right,

down there too, I think, or a music studio.

Oh, great story. And then, yeah, maybe just like final area is you're now at alarm. com. Maybe you could just share background with the audience of what that is and what you're doing.

Alarm. com is the biggest company you've never heard of. Uh, We provide the sort of the operating system to the smart home security, home automation industry. So if you have a security panel on your wall, likely it's broken. Powered by alarm. com somewhere. And it's the system that gets the signal to the monitoring station in the event of a break in.

And over time, we've put AI in that panel to understand the. Patterns of behavior of a home. So even if you don't arm the panel, it learns what's normal for you and pushes you a notification that you might want to check in. And of course it all became [00:20:00] modernized with the iPhone. So all this stuff runs on apps, but you might not want to always check your phone to figure out what's going on.

So the system does that for you. So today, if you want to know that your car has arrived and it's just your car and not a strange car, it'll notify you that, your accurate showed or a package has been delivered. To your doorstep, or it's been retrieved. You may have taken it or someone else may have taken it.

All this stuff is the benefit of AI. And the reason I love this job is my job zero. And I think to your listeners when you think about why you wake up and why you work, why you go to sleep you're zero, your job zero is Protect your family, right? As a child, as a parent, as a spouse, as a partner, that's what you think about it.

It's so low on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You almost don't think about it, but it's always there. And so if you can know that something you can buy can take away some of that anxiety for you, that's a phenomenal. And so I get to do what I would do [00:21:00] anyway in this job, always looking at new technologies that can be brought to the service of people, helping them stay aware of what's going on in their lives.

And as we run more, complicated lives, we need more of this watching over the things and people we care about. And that's what I get to do. So it reminds me of Apple where I loved playing with computers when I was a kid. And I loved, being in that industry and seeing it evolve. Now I love doing what I do because I would do it anyway.

I get to build these.

really important and you can, yeah, it's nice to be able to wake up and know you're helping protect millions of people around the world. One, one thing I hear a lot about AI we see this at our company is it really easy to have false positive also miss important signals and insecurity.

That's. One of the most important things. So I'm curious how you've approached this problem of signal versus noise, when to alert, how you have training data, and how you [00:22:00] think about that noise problem. 

Well, 

If you think back in the early days of home security system, there was a human in a monitoring center somewhere. That got a signal that one of your motion sensors or door or window contacts tripped while the panel was armed. That's all they knew. So they had to use their brain to figure out, is this a real emergency?

And yet, this is public information, 80, 85 percent of all of those signals are false alarms. So it takes a human to figure out that there was no threat to life or property. Now, you flash forward to now, we have AI sitting at the edge, looking at signals, ratifying it with other signals to determine, is this a real emergency or is this likely to cancel?

And so not only do we give the consumer the ability to verify an alarm because they may have tripped it themselves, I don't know how many people have done it with their Apple watches just by accident, where they can tell the monitoring station, nope, it's okay. So the monitoring stations agents are free to focus on real events, or it looks at other signals that are coming from other devices in your home to say, you know [00:23:00] what, this does seem strange.

We really do think this is a real event and then get help faster. AI is a real boon to that because you essentially, when you think about it, you're taking a brain and putting it in a device and having it look at a signal. That signal may have never been designed for. from it. I mentioned security cameras and people started putting cameras on their front doorbell not too long ago, but They would get inundated by every flag waving or tree moving or birds or rains or spiders to the point where they got so alerted to it, they just became notification blind.

They turn it off. And now the AI is trained to the point where it knows all those things are false alarm triggers and understands how to look through that fog of confusion and figure out what's really important and then focus on providing a signal to somebody. Who really needs to know that. And we're still in the early days of that.

Do you have a massive data set of [00:24:00] those false alarms that you test against? You've just figured out the edge cases over the years and work those into the system.

it's a self fulfilling system where if the signal says, Hey, this looks like it might be a real event. And the user says, Nope, that was just me doing something. It gets trained in the moment. So now it's got more information it never had before. When it starts, it's very generic.

But what our system tends to do, and this is all locked into the home, so the data never traffics anywhere, it learns what's regular for that home, and then alerts when something looks irregular. And it's very effective because, if you open a window, even if your system's not armed, I would say, especially if your system's not armed, because people tend to not arm it unless they leave or, they're on vacation. And you open a window at two in the morning, just to get a breath of fresh air. That's an event that looks very much like a bad dude climbing in the window at two in the morning. The system can't know the difference today, especially if you don't have a camera, but it does know that's not normal for your home because you rarely [00:25:00] open your window at that.

Some other homeowner might leave that window open all the time, so they won't get that alert. So it builds this data set, as you want to call it, on the relative information about that unique property and its occupants. And there is some genius there in terms of understanding when things don't look right.

And the beauty of that is you can have all kinds of false alarms, if you want to call it that. You can have robot vacuums or dogs triggering motion sensors. But over time, the bias of that home understands that's the regular level of activity. If all of a sudden the activity level should drop off, That's another cause for alert.

And we've taken that even beyond the security system. We put it in your mobile phone. So now our users who use our app or one of our partner's apps, which says powered by alarm. com at the bottom, they can get information about a loved one at a distance who may not be walking as much as normal or getting their steps in or get, or they're far from their geofence or even they change the cadence of their battery charging.

Where every night they plug it in and every morning they'd unplug [00:26:00] it. All of a sudden that changes. That's a signal that says, Hey, you might want to check in on a loved one.

That approach makes sense that every home is different and one AI without knowledge of that can't do a good job and it's important to have that, the context for For determining the alarm. And I think

That's that's probably in a lot of different use cases. It's about each user or customer is a little different.

So you have to

That's right, Matt. And the one other thing I would say, and I just read an article about this today is a lot of these disparate systems. There's many different products in the smart home space and home security, but they don't talk to each other. So you can't get that relative data set from other places.

Whereas with the alarm. com platform, all these things talk to each other. I used to have 22 separate apps to control my smart home. I now just use my alarm. com app and all that data from all these devices rationalizes a signal that says, Hey, here's what is normal for all these types of devices in your home versus.

Independent ones.

Super interesting conversation and [00:27:00] talk about Apple. There's, I guess, maybe the final question. There's a lot of, I've talked to a lot of software people who are like, I want to work in hardware or I want to work in energy and they feel like software has been tapped out. Do you have any have you liked going into hardware?

Do you think we have too much software now and we need more people doing hardware? Where would you recommend a college grad to go and spend their energy? You did electrical engineering, for example. Would you have, would you tell a kid to go study EE or stay in CS? Or, yeah, how would you think about that?

That's a great question. Yeah, so I have I always love how things work. So my early backgrounds in physics, which is the study of how the universe works. And so if you understand basic foundations, then you can layer on top of that other specialties like electrical engineering. When I was in college, there was no. Computer engineering, the way we think of it today, there was nothing to learn about AI or even develop it. That was like a pipe dream. That was a vision of the future. And now it's here. So I would say it's good to have [00:28:00] command of a lot of different subject matter simply because the world shifts so quickly.

And then the one piece of advice I'd give. Not just students, but employees and wherever they are in their career to stay intellectually curious about new stuff that scares you that doesn't, that didn't exist when you were in school, because if you don't learn it, it's going to steamroll you simply because you It's different.

And you haven't embraced it. And I'll give you like two examples. When I was in school, there was no digital marketing. Marketing was flyers. You'd put in a envelope or you'd put in a magazine and then the reader would read it and send back their comments. Now we think about digital marketing is real time information to your website.

You guys are in the business of doing that. You know what I'm talking about? Imagine going to career in marketing and not learning digital marketing after you graduated. You can't stop. It's the same thing with computer science, same thing with electrical engineering, same thing with every industry, just peer around corners and look at what's [00:29:00] new.

And you'd be surprised how much that opens up doors to your next job. If you ever look at my resume, every job that I have, every job that I got came from doing more in the job I was in. That got me excited about the next job that I could get. And I never really looked for a new job. I just got excited that I knew something new and somebody thought that I could do better at it.

So I would encourage you to do more than you need to in the job that you're in.

And stay curious and hopefully that's why they're listening to you and your, in your lesson. So yeah, with that, thanks so much. She really interesting conversation. 

you, man. I appreciate it.