crhulls

I’m the founder of Life360. We have a 100m users by exploiting exactly this. Our app is designed specifically for your close family group vs Apple which has a single user focus.

It’s very hard to do both things well and at Apple scale it’s nearly impossible.

This is what enabled us to win despite FindMy being launched a few years after us.

As a shameless plug I’m building a family AI team as a startup within our larger 600 person org.

https://chrishulls.medium.com/life360-is-building-a-family-a...

I very much agree with your first paragraph. But then to say you could just simply invest in "in any Stanford/Berkeley/MIT person who walked through your doors, it was impossible to end up in the red." is the kind of non-reflective and overly simplistic thinking you are criticizing.

Being a good investor takes skill. The vast majority of people who come from these schools couldn't get funded, and most still fail.

The majority of investors even in this boom also failed.

My meta point is that we seem to be losing nuance on both sides, and that is coming through on many of the messages here.

Sensitivity is the false negative rate.

Although it is the opposite of what the doctors want, I would prefer a less sensitive but highly specific test.

If I had 80% sensitivity I'd miss out on 20% of cancers, but if I could match that with a 99.9% specificity I'd have very few false positives.

I hope this type of test can tune that direction.

I’m the cofounder of Life360, a company I’ve grown from seed to IPO, now with about 600 employees. This whole issue can be addressed by embracing a straightforward social contract, something I share openly with everyone I hire:

No promises of lifetime employment. I’m focused on the long-term health of the company, and our needs will inevitably change. If we continue to grow, it’s almost guaranteed that not everyone will be the right fit at every stage.

No expectation of loyalty. The flip side is that we aim to attract ambitious, hungry people, which means we need to provide real opportunities for career advancement. If we can’t, I understand you’ll move on.

If we let someone go after a single bad quarter, that’s on us for being shortsighted. We know people have ups and downs, and we don’t want to be overly sentimental, but we also don’t want to act rashly. On the other hand, if someone’s job-hopping every year, that’s usually a sign of short-term thinking. From 2014–2021, job-hopping didn’t matter much. Now, it’s becoming clear that those signals are important again.

At the end of the day, it’s not about judgment—no good/bad or right/wrong here (aside from obvious dealbreakers like dishonesty). It’s just adults making tradeoffs.

That said, I’ve seen how some companies shy away from being upfront about this, which leads to cynicism. We’ve had moments like that too—at some point, we started calling ourselves “a family.” I shut that down fast. It wasn’t popular, but it helped clarify our stance. You know what you’re signing up for with us.

My cofounder from Life360, started Hubble Network, with this in mind. Add me on LinkedIn - Chris Hulls - and I'll reply to you there.

Interesting, thanks for the insights.

We are doing a satellite integration with Hubble Network - 24/7 global coverage, no increase in battery life. It sounds like scifi but 2 satellites are up. Give us a year...

Of course I know this, but I am trying to go deeper. With AirTags and the new standards you literally can find and disable the tag for anyone using the Google or Apple networks.

I am surprised that people think the benefits of AirTags outweigh the downsides given the alternatives, of which we are one. I'm mainly just trying to learn.

I also think you probably are overestimating the deterrent value. Thieves are not necessarily thoughtful and the alerts aren't real time. Once they get the alert they might ditch the bike, but if it is back at their garage they will probably disable or remove it.

I also am a bit triggered by this line "Honestly, you as the CEO should know this." which is on the edge of being an ad hominem. Why did you choose to include this? And wouldn't you know that I know these things? Like I am asking questions to get nuanced user feedback. Do you think someone who runs a consumer product company (I started Life360, Tile's owner), isn't deeply aware of how customers think?

I'm the CEO of Tile and we are working on a line of products for theft.

As a genuine question, I'm very surprised that many people don't seem concerned that AirTags alert thieves to their presence. If your bike is stolen the thief will get the notification, even if they are on Android (with the new shared platform rogue tag detection).

I'm trying to understand the user psychology here - not pitch our own products.

Do you have any specific features you would like to prevent theft?

Yes I fired the specific worker. It was my own crew, not a 3rd party company.

I’m technically an owner builder. I have a workman’s comp policy that ranges from 10-40% of payroll depending on the task. For a residential project I can definitively say insurance is way more than 1% of total cost. Eg for the sake of round numbers, let’s say labor is 50% of the total. If I take the absolute lowest percent of what I pay for insurance, we already are up to 5%.

This is separate from liability insurance for say negligence if I got sued. I hope my umbrella policy would cover me here but I found in my situation it is a bit confusing. An insurance broker struggled to give me clear answers

Sure, in theory you are correct, but it misses the nuances of human reality.

Flipping back to my day job, a counter example is security people covering any edge case so that everything grinds to a halt or lawyers over processing everything and stifling creativity.

The same people that might grumble about something being a management issue sometimes also complain about bureaucracy and process when things go the other way.

There aren’t simple trade off free answers to this stuff.

I second this. My day job is tech but I redid a rental property. I told the workers to wear a harness on the roof. I didn’t cheap out and bought nice comfortable equipment.

They told me they were wearing it, but I came by unannounced and there they were on the roof with no harness.

I asked the supervisor what was up and they were doing the same thing to him. They would put it on then take it off as soon as no one was looking.

It was Latin machismo - the social pressure was so strong to not look goofy in a harness. The second time I saw this happen I wrote a firm zero tolerance letter which I translated to Spanish and hand delivered.

One of the crew still didn’t listen. I fired him.

(Not saying that reckless bosses aren’t an issue, especially in these trenching incidents where the safety equipment didn’t exist)

I wonder if your memory is an outlier? If I play a game, read a book, or watch a movie within a year or two I remember the edges and themes but I’ll forget the details of the plot.

Myst is an exception which is probably a testament to how impactful it was to 11 year old me, but I’ve played Riven twice and I could barely tell you what it is about. If I play it again, I’ll start getting my memory jogged and it won’t completely be like starting from scratch but pretty close to it.

Dementia runs in my family so I am always paranoid about lapses in my memory (I’m 40). When I talk to others I don’t seem to be alone.

Which one of us is the norm?

Weird- can you email me? chris@life360.com and I will forward this to get looked into. The map thing seems like a bug. I'd also like to learn more about your concerns on over upsells.

Glad to hear that! If you are up for it, can you email me - chris@life360.com - I'd love to learn more about your story

I won't repeat what I have said in other comments but scroll down for more specific thoughts on the points you make.

At a meta-level, we don't think the bad behavior of a very very small number of abusive should degrade the product for tens of millions of good actors. Theft is unfortunately extremely prevalent and a key reason why customers by trackers - we think the greater good is to responsibly support this use case.

We have put safeguards in place that make it tough to use our products to stalk, and while nothing is perfect, the only complaints of stalking we have received are from people who were allegedly stalked by Tiles that did NOT have the anti-theft feature turned on. By adding this ID scanning friction, which includes a liveness check, we have empirical data that the bad actors go elsewhere.

We have a member protection link at the bottom of our page - it is not buried. https://www.life360.com/member-protection-resources/

We encourage people to first go to the police, and we work with law enforcement to help bring criminals to justice on a regular basis.

We use a third party and they do a liveness scan with a live camera feed so it is not nearly that simple.

I'm sure we can come up with edge cases or potential ways people could cheat the system, but we are adding so much risk and friction to stalkers that they would likely just buy a real stealth GPS tracker with an LTE connection.

As a genuine question, why is there no outrage for these devices that are literally marketed as stealth trackers?

Sure, I agree with that. We did user testing and people understood the concept. It is anti-theft in the sense you have a real chance of getting your stuff back, unlike with AirTags and now Google network devices where thieves will just disable the tracker.

Yes, we were sued, but we will fight it and win. I think most people on Hacker News know to approach lawsuits with skepticism.

And I feel like many people being critical of us are arguing with emotions and not data. You have to scan a government ID and agree to severe penalties for misusing our product. We have had zero instances of reported stalking from anyone who has enabled the anti-theft feature.

Can you articulate with data why what we are doing is problematic?

Yes, and we will fight it and win. This was also before we launched our anti-theft feature by the way.

If you want to see the insanity of going after bluetooth devices, just search "stealth GPS device" on google and see what comes up. Ebay is targeting me with an ad that says "Hidden GPS Tracking Device for sale" There are legit LTE enabled stalkers right there in plain sight.

I am very open to being wrong and changing course, but let's have a data-driven decision.

When we launched our anti-theft feature, we were clear that if we found there was widespread abuse, we would change course. We have had literally zero complaints of anyone being stalked with a device where anti-theft was enabled.

And I think you are misunderstanding the new standards. Google and Apple will proactively notify thieves of nearby trackers, and allow a thief to disable it. This is next level bad for anyone relying on their tracking device to protect against theft.

What is the data that would change your mind? I would change my mind if we found that more than .1% of our customers were abusing this feature.

Humans are lazy. The average person who steals a bike is not going to pull out a Bluetooth sniffer. And if they did, they would probably find dozens of nearby devices (try it yourself - I just did and have 53 Bluetooth devices near me).

Thieves will, however, reply to an alert that says there is a tracker following you and hit the "disable" button. Friction is key. Google and Apple are making it extremely easy for thieves. We are pushing back on this.

CEO of Tile/Life360 here - I made a meta comment but I'll call out that because all Life360 users now scan for Tiles, and we are on 1 in 8 phones in the US, our network is actually huge. The small network thing is a misperception. We bought Tile knowing we could supercharge their previously small network.

CEO of Tile / Life360 here.

We decided to opt out of the Google and Apple finding networks and the new proposed standards because it completely ruins the ability to use Bluetooth devices to deter theft. If you put an AirTag on say your bike, and thief steals it, they will get a notification and immediately just find and disable it.

We actually built a (controversial) feature that lets you opt out of anti-stalking features if you scan a government ID. As of today, we have zero known instances of abuse—the friction of scanning an ID is enough to make a bad guy think twice, and a committed stalker can just go get an LTE-enabled stealth GPS device on Amazon. It is crazy that the press and regulators focus on Bluetooth devices when actual stalking devices are readily available.

Some people are commenting on how small our network is. People don't realize that Life360 is on 1 in 8 phones in the US. We are huge outside of tech bubbles. If you are at an airport, mall, or anywhere with any meaningful density of people, our network is on par with the big guys. There is a J curve to the benefits of increasing density, and outside of rural areas we essentially have complete coverage.

Beyond this, we just announced a new satellite-to-Bluetooth network this morning, and we plan to open it up to developers in 2025. It won't matter where you lose your stuff, we will be able to find it. And thieves won't.

https://www.life360.com/find/

I’m about as anti-woke as it gets but I want to give the author credit for a well thought out article. If I discount any writing from “the enemy” I’ll just reinforce my filter bubble.

Are there specific things you didn’t agree with here?

Ideally it would be the opposite. Men and women, on average, like different things.

I’m hoping we get back to the world of embracing equal opportunity without assuming racism or sexism when distributions aren’t 1:1.

This article has some interesting stats which go beyond “look how all rich people are white men.”

What do you think this is then telling us? Is there some cause vs correlation being mixed up? Or are infections just a trigger for something that was waiting to tip?