Building Physical AI before it had a name
In this episode of Builders, Matthew sits down with Filip Kaliszan, the Co-Founder and CEO of Verkada, the AI-native platform for physical security. He and his co-founders started Verkada in his living room in 2016. Now, ten years later, they’ve built a business with more than 30,000 customers, 2.4 million managed devices, and roughly $1 billion in annual sales.
This episode digs into how Filip and his co-founders spent 12 deliberate months searching for the right idea before landing on enterprise video security, how to go from building a product to a platform, and how physical AI and the company's fleet of 2.4 million devices are compounding into a genuine data moat.
In this episode, Matthew and Filip discuss:
- How Verkada's approach to hardware and software, guided by customer needs rather than trends, became a durable go-to-market advantage
- The hardest product Verkada ever built (access control panels), and the organizational lesson it taught about focus
- Scaling employee/founder trust and relationships
- Why every decision matters more than any single "big" decision
- How to build a generational culture along with a generational company
- What a decade of first-principles thinking has taught Filip about running a company
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