From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: David Moss, Co-Founder, President and CTO of People Power Company (Part 1)

We have a huge audience of developers, engineers, and programmers who want to transition to becoming successful entrepreneurs.

This conversation explores the journey of such a developer. Fantastic story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

David Moss: I was born in Arizona. I grew up in a small town. There wasn’t a lot happening out in this town. I was interested in building things and taught myself how to program in the C language when I was 12. I continued by starting a business when I was in high school fixing computers, building websites, and so on. I always had an idea that I was going to do a startup as I got older.

Those dreams did eventually come true. Getting there was an interesting path. I ended up going to college and studying electrical engineering partially because I was a little bored with software at that age. I had been doing software for so long, I wanted to learn more of the tech stack and get down into the physical realm.

While I was at college, I got an internship with a startup out of Mountain View and ended up moving to Southern California. It was there at Bitfone where I met the CEO Gene Wang, who is a successful four-time CEO entrepreneur. We did a lot of great things there at Bitfone. We created the global standard for how to do firmware updates on phones.

Sramana Mitra: You ended up joining Bitfone?

David Moss: That’s right. I started as an intern. As I graduated college, I immediately headed out and started my first day on the job as a full-time developer. We served all of the major telecoms and handset manufacturers. This company was created at a time when if you had a problem with the phone, you had to take it back to the store and get it reflashed. We had created this revolutionary way to do over-the-air firmware updates.

That was a great journey. The company ended up selling to Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for $160 million. Between Bitphone and People Power, I did work with a US government contractor. I had the opportunity to work with universities such as Berkeley, Stanford, and Harvard on the development of an open-source wireless sensor networking operating system called TinyOS. This was an interesting job for me. Half of my work was open source and the other half was classified.

Sramana Mitra: That’s an interesting dichotomy.

David Moss: This was in the early days of wireless sensor networking and battery-operated devices. Gene and I reconnected and created People Power with the concept that homes will be connected with this type of technology in the future. We wanted to bring the ability to have connected devices combined with a cloud service that would pull it all together.

Sramana Mitra: What year is this happening?

David Moss: We started the conversations around 2009 and got going in 2010. I was living in downtown Palo Alto at that time. At this time, the US government was also pumping a lot of money into subsidies and grants for energy-related startups. That was our first venture into this world of connecting our physical surroundings. We developed technologies that enable us to manage and control energy.

It turns out that people really don’t care too much about saving energy. That was the tough part. We had a lot of businesses, utilities, and government saying we’ve got to be able to manage this. To the consumers, saving a couple of bucks on your electric bill is not that compelling. We started to explore new ways to bring connected technologies into homes.

This segment is part 1 in the series : From Developer to Successful Machine Learning Entrepreneur: David Moss, Co-Founder, President and CTO of People Power Company
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