Start School Session: Vivint Co-Founder Keith Nellesen

Yeah.

And are you surprised by what the company became? How big it got? I mean, now it's all about the home.

I mean, you've always been about the home security and all that type of stuff.

But it does so much more.

It's like a home tech company.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Then you spun off solar? Obviously, I never would have.

I mean, we were trying to do 12,000 accounts.

That was our goal.

Right.

I can remember we had the spreadsheet that said if we did 12,000 accounts, we could net a million bucks.

And about four years in, we did that.

And so that was the goal.

And I learned pretty...

We also were constrained by what we could and couldn't do because we would sell our accounts to Terminex or ADT, and they're very antiquated.

And we could see that, hey, we could do more, but it didn't matter if you could do more if you couldn't get them cut in, if you couldn't get them online.

And so I can remember in 2004, Our first year with Monotronics, they did some really bad things right before the summer and really caused immense problems in the whole industry.

And I can remember walking into Todd's office and saying, hey, we're not doing this anymore.

We can't rely on something.

We relied on Terminex.

It screwed us, right? We go and spend eight months.

I explained to everybody, because summer sales looks really easy.

I promise you it is very hard.

And we spend eight months, I call it tightening the spring as tight as we can get it.