#75: Chris Wentz (Everykey)

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:00:00]:
We wanna make sure that people understand that, hey, security is our north star. Security is something that's, you know, not just incredibly important to us, but it is the most important thing to this product. And when you buy an every key product, you're buying something incredibly secure that has been security audited and that's using, you know, the best encryption, the best security standards that are available. Yeah. It really just kinda comes down to just all of that, all of the all of the process of building, something that you're really proud of.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:30]:
Let's discover the Cleveland entrepreneurial ecosystem. We are telling the stories of its entrepreneurs and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today, I had the pleasure of speaking with Chris Wentz, the founder and CEO of Evergy. Chris has always had a passion for entrepreneurship, founding an advertising network in middle school that grew into one of the largest video game advertising networks. He then started a consumer electronics resale business in college where he bought products that were only available in the US and sold them to customers in other countries. He also modified the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner to make it a better product and sold the improved Roombas to consumers.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:21]:
The improvements were so popular that Roomba implemented the features into their own product in the next product line. While finishing his BS in computer science at Case Western Reserve University, Chris invested the money he had made from his previous business ventures into Everykey, which is what we spend most of our conversation on here today. Everykey designs and builds a patented universal smart key that can unlock devices and log into online accounts on those devices. It ultimately replaces your passwords and your keys. Launched on Kickstarter in October of 2014 within 48 hours, the campaign had reached trending status and raised over $25,000 in preorders. Since then, EveryKey has grown substantially expanding its capabilities and offerings to the enterprise security space. And I very much enjoyed hearing the story of how Chris took EveryKey from an idea at his Case Western entrepreneurship class to a leading cybersecurity company providing products and services to consumers, enterprise, and governments alike with a real deep commitment to brand. Please enjoy my conversation with Chris Swenson.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:36]:
I've been looking forward to to this conversation. I remember seeing your product actually for the first time at a conference a few years ago. And at the time, I was pretty deep in the election and voting infrastructure industry. And I specifically recall your product in this context because I had just come from a conference before this conference where all the state secretaries of state meet up. And those are the folks who are responsible for for running our political elections. And there was this presentation that the Colorado secretary of state gave to the rest of the secretaries of state, on the importance of 2 factor authentication, which which I which I remember was quite alarming, for me to see, for 1, the degree to which those who are tasked with running our state and federal elections weren't fully tuned into the importance of multi factor authentication. But I remember then immediately grasping the value of a product like Everykey. And so it just it clicked very quickly for me, I remember in that context.

Jeffrey Stern [00:03:40]:
But in any case, very excited to to dive into all of that that with you and and your journey to get there.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:03:47]:
Yeah. Absolutely. Thank thank you for having me here, Jeff. I really appreciate this. And, yeah. You're absolutely right. I mean, there's over $2,000,000,000,000 lost every year due to password mismanagement. Two factor authentication is becoming a requirement and really a standard out there.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:04:01]:
So glad that we're both on board with that. Yeah.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:05]:
And and we'll get to to every key. But I I wanna I wanna start actually with your your path to entrepreneurship. I know every key wasn't necessarily your first rodeo, and you've had kind of a few goes at at building a company, going through the start up motions. And, you know, I'm curious what what drew you, to entrepreneurship? And I'd love to to kinda hear the stories of a few of the the companies that that came first.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:04:30]:
Yeah. Yeah. So I was a big video gamer growing up back in, like, elementary, middle school, or whatever. Played a lot of Halo and Call of Duty and got pretty competitive into it and started to create some businesses or, like, kind of mini businesses around, these video games. So we started an advertising network. Well, I guess before that, we started a tournament website where we would, match gamers with each other to kind of play competitively against each other. Maybe there'd be a small prize pool for the winners and maybe some small entry fees to even enter to begin with. And, I kinda took that idea, ended up creating an advertising network where people within the video game Halo could kinda promote their custom content, custom maps, custom, game types, different things like that that they wanted to promote and get more downloads on.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:05:17]:
They could promote that through our ad network, and those ads would then get displayed on Halo related websites. So got really interested in kind of the business side of that. You know, I started off sort of on the tech nerd side just, you know, just geeking out over, programming these websites and making them look really cool and, kind of following this branding that the video game publishers would have. So our ad halo kinda looked similar to the halo, you know, branding and everything and loved that aspect of it. But then really got into the business side as well and loved kind of building my own brand and building, building my own business and, creating something that really adds value to the world. I think that's kinda where it comes down to is, like, solving a problem for people.

Jeffrey Stern [00:05:58]:
Yeah. And I I know there was a a subsequent project you worked on, related to to Roombas. Yep.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:06:06]:
And I

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:06]:
I'd love to hear the the story of that.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:06:09]:
Yeah. So while I was in college, I I bought a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner to be able to, because I was a lazy college student, didn't wanna vacuum my own dorm room, wanted to have a robot do it for me. And so I bought this Roomba, and immediately broke. Like, probably a month or 2 after I got the darn thing, it stopped working. And I found out the reason it stopped working was because there was, like, dust and debris getting inside this gearbox that kinda spins the brushes to to, you know, clean your room. And I thought, hey. Why can't we fix this? Why can't we, like, create a better Roomba that doesn't, like, break so easily? So I created this, company called Roombafide, where we would modify Roombas and make them better and sell them back to Roombas customers. And so I would kinda buy these, like, relatively inexpensive Roombas at Costco.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:06:56]:
I found that that was kinda like the best place to source them from where you get the kinda most bang for your buck, and then I'd make them better, resell them to the customers, and, you know, made a little bit of money doing that. It was a fun early forte into business. I think I did that, like, freshman or sophomore year of college, while I was still going to school. And, we ended up getting a cease and desist letter from Irobot, the company that, spells Roomba. So, had to shut that one down, but it definitely I fortunately, soon after getting that cease and desist, Irobot made a lot of the same changes that we made to the product. They made those changes to the base Roomba product. So I I I'd like to think that I was maybe a little bit of a catalyst to to getting Irobot to improve their product and make it a little bit more durable.

Jeffrey Stern [00:07:38]:
Oh, that's awesome. Very cool. Well, I I I am curious just with your your broad interest in entrepreneurship and as we kind of work our way towards towards every key, like, how are you navigating the idea maze? Right? The others millions of problems to solve, Roomba's being one of them. Right? But how is it that you come to the the founding insight, I guess, for for every key? Like, what what are the questions that you're asking at this point? What what were you trying to what what was the problem, I guess, that you had identified and and how are you thinking about just the these problems?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:08:15]:
Good question. I I think there's a little bit of a pattern in the way that I think about business ideas. I I think I'm often choosing business ideas that are in areas where other companies aren't already solving these problems. And in a lot of cases, it's because they, don't have a financial incentive to solve those problems. So in the case of Roombas, I, you know, came up with this idea for making a Roomba more durable because it wasn't necessarily something that Irobot wanted to do because they make more money off of selling more Roombas. So it was a great opportunity for me. When I was, a little bit later in college, I think junior or senior year, I bought and sold iPads and other Apple devices and resold them to other countries that didn't have these products as early as we did here in the US. And you can sell an iPad for, like, twice as much money.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:08:59]:
You can buy it for, you know, 500, $600 here in the US and resell it for a 1000, 1,200, like, double the price in other countries, for the 1st couple months where it's not available in those countries. So sort of finding these, I guess you could call them sort of gray markets, like places where you're allowed to play within these markets, but the big companies out there don't want you to necessarily be playing in these markets, and Apple doesn't want you to be reselling their iPads, internationally because they're not selling them themselves internationally. But what are they gonna do to stop you? You know, there's nothing illegal about it. So I think that was kind of where I got that early success in business was finding these, gray markets here. And with every key, I guess it's a little bit of the same. Right? I mean, we're solving a problem that, you know, is just an age old problem of passwords and keys being insecure and inconvenient. We were in this entrepreneurship class during my senior year in college, and the professor asked us to come up with any kind of business idea we wanted. It could be a product or a service.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:09:57]:
It could, make money, but more importantly, kind of make an impactful change on the world, really solve a problem for people. And, we came up with this crazy idea at the time for a wristband that would replace your passwords, replace your keys. So you'd wear this wristband. It would be able to unlock your phone, your laptop, and your tablet, the door of your house, your car, door of your bike lock, all these different devices, and log in to all your website accounts when you're nearby, lock them down when you walk away. And we presented this idea to the class, kinda thinking, hey. Wouldn't this be cool if Apple or Google or Microsoft were to do something like this? And fortunately for us, the professor, Wall Securea, came up to us, shook our hands, and said, guys, you should do this. I wanted to actually invest money into this to make this a real company. And that's where we we're like, holy cow.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:10:38]:
We've got a once in a lifetime opportunity here. Let's, let's go for it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:10:43]:
And so at at that point, what comes next? Right? It wasn't something necessarily you were considering prior. You know, how do you go about taking this idea then and and working to make it a reality?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:10:56]:
Yeah. Yeah. So I I might I'm definitely, like, a little bit of a, like, hey. Let's get something. Let's get stuff done. Let's, you know, I definitely love to be a go getter and kind of take that initiative. So I started to really connect with people within the business community here in Cleveland and specifically at Case. There's a gentleman, Bob Sopko.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:11:13]:
I think you've had him on a a previous episode of this show. Absolute godsend to the Cleveland and specifically Case, you know, entrepreneurial community. So really happy to have been connected with Bob, and Bob suggested, hey, Chris. Why don't you, you know, you've got all this energy when you pitch the company. I I often take a piece of paper out of my pocket and show all the passwords that I have on that paper, and I'll set it on fire just to kinda show off this problem that you have. Yeah. I'll go ahead and and the audio listeners won't be able to see this, but I have a piece of paper here. It's got all my passwords on it.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:11:43]:
These are so broken and outdated. I've got the same password for everything. And so at every key, we are getting rid of that broken and outdated access control and replacing it with something better. Turns out that when you do cool shit like that, during business plan competitions, you can raise, you know, few bucks for for your start ups. So we ended up doing a few, business pitch competitions specifically for student ran start ups, and, that helped us get the initial funding that we needed to move the product forward.

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:10]:
That's incredible. For for everyone listening, you literally just you did light the thing on fire, and it was kind of much faster.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:12:17]:
And now, usually, it burns up a little bit faster than that. So I can actually, like, kinda smell a little bit of burned hair on my, my beard here. So I'm gonna have to take care of that. It's, beneficial.

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:28]:
I I I appreciate the the commitment to the to the cause there. Because it because it is a a real problem. I think it's one that that probably everyone at this point can personally kind kind of identify with. When you when you were in those early stages, what in your mind was kinda the first big break? What what were you trying to to validate, at that point, and and how are you thinking about where can we get traction initially?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:13:00]:
Yeah. So that's a great question because, you know, we're starting this company that's got a pretty serious level of complexity to it. You know, this every key company would have to create, apps for iOS and Android and macOS and Windows and all your major browser extensions. And, it seemed like quite a challenge to overcome, and we knew that we needed to raise some venture capital to get that done. I I'm I've got a computer science degree myself, but I can't code to save my life. So really needed to hire some people much smarter than me to, really bring the product to market. So it made logical sense in my mind to prove to the venture capitalists of the world that there's a market willing to buy this thing. Right? So we went on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, did a little bit of crowdfunding to kind of prove out that there is a market for this and to get some initial preorders and some initial funding for the business to kinda get it off the ground and get the ball rolling.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:13:56]:
And, you know, it turned out that people really loved the product on those platforms. We actually raised more money than any other company in this category on both Kickstarter and Indiegogo. So, it was, it was a success, and we were able to then take that and, raise some early venture capital from, Inkwell Venture Capital and a few others, based off of that initial crowdfunding success.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:16]:
This initial crowdfunding and venture capital that you're raising was towards the I get what you would call, like, the MVP. I it's often with, like, the the crowdfunding. It's it is often a a pre buy in a lot of ways. And so there's, like, the expectation that all those contributing are are gonna get the first go of of what it is that you guys are putting together. Right?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:14:41]:
Yeah. That's exactly right. On on crowdfunding, you're basically preordering a product. You're usually paying a lower price than what the, retail customer is buying in the future will be paying, so you're getting kind of an incentive to get on earlier. And, obviously, a lot of people just love to be one of the first customers of a of a cool company. I mean, wouldn't you have loved to be one of the first people to buy an iPhone from Apple, for example? Would be a really cool thing to, be able to brag about and everything to your friends. So I think that's, where people were coming from. And, yeah, fortunately, there were enough people to, to support the idea that, that we've got it successfully funded, and that helped us kinda build out the initial technology.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:15:18]:
It definitely ended up being if you followed our crowdfunding journey at all, you probably know that it wasn't a smooth road. We certainly had our fair share of challenges. It took us, many months, even many, you know, multiple years longer than we had originally anticipated to actually deliver, these products to people. And, fortunately, people were very happy once the product was out, but there were some dark days. There were some dark days where we were, you know, had just so many negative comments in our Kickstarter page, like, hey. Why isn't this thing out? Yeah. The estimated estimated delivery date was months ago. What's happening? And, fortunately, all of that is now in our past, and people are happy with the products that they're using.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:15:58]:
But there was, it was a struggle for a while. So it's really Yeah. Because you're setting these expectations and then maybe not meeting those expectations. And that's, as common for most crowdfunding projects. I think something like 85% of crowdfunding projects don't deliver on time, so it's not like there is anything unusual, about, our cadence there. But it certainly, it it certainly was a struggle.

Jeffrey Stern [00:16:22]:
What what were some of those challenges that that you encountered at that point?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:16:26]:
Yeah. So I think we didn't really anticipate how tough it was going to be to make Bluetooth and security reliable on all different devices, right? So for us to our company name is EveryKey. And for us to really live up to that name, to truly be your every key, every key needs to work on all iOS and Android phones, all Windows and Mac computers, and then pretty much all websites as well. And that sounds simple on the surface, but it's incredibly challenging to actually make that happen. So, for example, on Android, you've got different phone manufacturers, Samsung and Google themselves and, you know, all all these different Android, phone manufacturers creating their Bluetooth stacks a little bit differently. So you find out that your code that worked really great on Samsung maybe doesn't work so so great on Google Pixel devices, and you have to kinda rewrite a lot of stuff. And there's a whole lot of that. There was a whole lot of, like, we made the product perfect for some devices and then we find out all these differences between different devices, and we had to kinda go back to the drawing board and rewrite things.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:17:29]:
There was a lot of that in those early days, and there still is a lot of that. I mean, unfortunately, that's still a challenge that we and any other company that's working with some of these APIs has to deal with. Things like security protocols, unlocking a device is not something I could probably count the number of companies that do that on a on my hand. Right? So these aren't very well documented APIs. They're really hard to work with. They're not super well supported by the operating systems. So there was a lot of, trial and error, in those early days to to really make things reliable and secure. Obviously, security is our number one priority.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:18:01]:
So we wanted to make sure that every decision we were making was going to have a positive impact on the security of our product as well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:09]:
And there there's a whole I mean, building a any company is is difficult software, but there there's a whole hardware component to what you were doing as well. Right? Yep. How did you figure that part of the equation out as you were, you know, building the software to to integrate with all these systems? How did you kinda navigate the physical nature of the other side of it?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:18:32]:
Yeah. Yeah. So so, fortunately, one of these business pitch competitions that we happen to pitch at, it was called the Magnet ProTech, Challenge. And, this was many years ago. This was actually even before the Kickstarter campaign launched. We pitched in this, pitch competition. There were some fantastic companies, in that pitch competition. We were very lucky to actually, come home with 1st place in that competition.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:18:57]:
And that matched us with, or that included that 1st place, win at ProTech included $10,000 of free design services with a company here in town called SmartShape. It's, ran by this guy, Mike, who's just a brilliant entrepreneur himself. He's actually I'm sure you probably had him on your program. If if you haven't, you definitely should. Mike's incredible. He's actually walked all the way across America, like, all the way from New York City to San Francisco. Really, really great guy. We started working with SmartShape.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:19:27]:
They kinda coached us through how to manage the industrial design and not just coached us through, but they completely managed the process themselves, the industrial design and manufacturing of the product. So they introduced us to a lot of different manufacturers here in the Cleveland area, and we kinda chose the the ones that we like the best and made them the most sense, pricing and business wise. And, we were kind of off to the races. So, fortunately, that was not really much of a challenge for us. Manufacturing always has its challenges here and there. And, obviously, we're having a lot of challenges now with supply chain issues as every company is. So manufacturing is never a nonissue, but it's certainly a less of an issue compared to the software, challenges that we've had to overcome.

Jeffrey Stern [00:20:07]:
Got it. So you're you're able to to navigate the challenges and and ultimately deliver for those early folks. What comes next? Like, how do you think about go to market strategy at that point and the the path forward?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:20:21]:
Yeah. Yeah. So, obviously, we're really we started this company to build a huge brand around security. Right? I want people to see our the name every key and our logo, the EK logo, and to really know that that's synonymous with great security, similar to where you see the Apple logo and you know that that's synonymous with great user experience and great design. I want the same thing for our company. So, obviously, we wanted to really get the name out there in a big way. We've ran a lot of, advertising through Facebook and Instagram and Google and different things like that. We've gotten into some retail.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:20:53]:
We're in, everything from Best Buy to OfficeMax, Office Depot, Newegg, a bunch of, different, microcenter, a bunch of different, retail chains out there as well. So that's been really helpful in kind of spreading the the brand name to consumers. And that was the original vision of the company, was to really, like, target consumers, your everyday consumer. This is something that I wanted. I built this for myself and for everybody else, every Joe, Dick, and Harry out there that has passwords and wants to have some help managing them. But through that effort, ironically, kinda what we found was that consumers aren't even the best market for this product. Really, it's enterprises. The companies out there are really they're they're the ones that are losing $2,000,000,000,000 per year due to password mismanagement.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:21:34]:
They're the ones that have entire IT departments who obsess on a daily basis over the security of the company and would, you know, have some serious losses if the company was hacked. And oftentimes, hackings, they almost always come back to poor password management. You hear about the pipeline hack. You hear about these cryptocurrency hacks that happen all the time. Usually, it's just somebody using a shitty password, and that's what somebody uses to to gain access. So we realized that that is a good market for us, is to target these, large enterprises. And so now we've, you know, in a way, pivoted the business and have started to focus on selling to large enterprises and to government as well. We actually were just selected for a $1,250,000, contract with the US Air Force to solve some of the problems that they have.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:22:20]:
And LG, we have a a big deal with them. We're under NDA, so we can't talk too much about it. But there's a pretty awesome thing going on with LG and us right now. And a bunch of other companies are starting to, work with us to solve the password problems that they have.

Jeffrey Stern [00:22:33]:
It makes a lot of sense to me, just circling back to what I I I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, my exposure to just government and I I it it most of the the challenges come from kind of the basic security fundamentals, password management and things on top of that, like 2 f a. So it it's not surprising to me, ultimately, that there was a a shift perhaps in the direction of of the company. From a positioning standpoint, it's a very different process to to sell the enterprise. Was the was from a security standpoint, was the product ready for that? Or did you have to make different kind of investments into product offering and and marketing and strategy?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:23:17]:
So, definitely, the sales process changed completely. I mean, shifting from with consumers, you're advertising on Facebook and Instagram and, Google and such. And, obviously, with enterprises, there's almost totally different approach. I mean, some of those tactics can still work and can still drive some, inbound sales leads. But in general, you're kind of also managing relationships with IT departments and with CISOs, chief information security officers, reaching out to some of these people to try to get them interested. So it is a very different sales process, and government is a totally different sales process from that. But, fortunately, from a product standpoint, we really did build this product to be incredibly secure from day 1. The way that every key works is that the encryption key that encrypts all of your passwords is stored only on your devices.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:24:06]:
So there's no way for somebody to hack our central database and have all of your passwords in plain text. It just simply doesn't work like that. They would have to have that encryption key, which only resides on your devices. And we've gone through security audits even back when this was really a consumer focused product. A lot of our early Kickstarter and Indiegogo backers really pushed us to make this as secure as possible and to go through security audits where a third party is coming in and taking a look at it and saying, hey. This is secure. This is not secure. And, fortunately for us, we passed every single one of those security audits with the best port score you can possibly have, which we're so happy with because even the biggest and best companies out there, like Apple and Google, only get the best possible score about 20% of the time.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:24:47]:
But we've only gotten the best possible score, and we've gotten about 4 or 5 times now. So security is our number 1. It's our north star. It's something that we've always really taken very seriously. And, fortunately, there hasn't been a huge amount of changes, needed to be made to the security. There's certifications. There's, some companies look for you to, you know, have certain, certifications in order to go into their enterprise in order for them to use this in an enterprise or government setting. So those are changes that we've needed to make, and we are applying for a lot of certifications and have started to get some of those now.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:25:19]:
But the security itself, the general platform really has been remarkably unchanged since day 1.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:26]:
And how, I guess, have you thought about competition? Because from the perspective of the consumer market, I never had come across too many. But I feel like the the companies that I am aware of, on that side of it, the the Lastpasses, the the Ubiquis, the there's there's a bunch of them. But my my and this is just anecdotally, but my understanding is maybe a lot of those companies started with enterprise and expanded more into into the consumer realm. And so how have you gone about, you know, thinking about competition and and your own kind of competitive differentiation?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:26:02]:
Yeah. Well and I think one of the great things about coming from the consumer space was that user experience, making this really easy to use and fun to use, has been something that we have obsessed over since day 1. You wouldn't believe how many hours and days we've spent in meetings just talking about the most small details of the product, everything. Like, if we can reduce something from 2 button clicks to 1 button click, we'll spend hours finding ways to do that and finding ways to optimize the user experience to make things as easy to use and as simple as possible. And I think that that background of coming from the consumer world and having to make a fantastic, phenomenal user experience is something that we get to take into enterprise, and enterprises still care about that as well. They still want their employees to have a good user experience. They still want their employees to be saving time and not having to, you know, deal with some clunky product that's hard to use. So I think that that's been something that's really benefited us.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:26:56]:
And I think just being a little bit more ambitious in the competition has really benefited us as well. I mean, a lot of those products that you've talked about, YubiKey, 1Password, LastPass, you know, they're great products, but they're very limited. They're they're, you know, the latter, they're just password managers. The former, it's really just a kind of, you know, a kind of hardware security key that really has to be, like, plugged in and everything. Every key is kind of a combination of all of these. Right? So it's both a hardware security key and a password manager all in one. So it's a little bit more ambitious than these competitor products. It's doing a lot more than any of them are.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:27:32]:
And then it's also fully wireless. We actually have a, an issued patent on one to many, wireless, authentication. So kind of gives us a step up and a an advantage over the competition to be a fully wireless device. We wanted to it goes back to that user experience. We wanna make sure that people don't have to take this thing out of their pocket and plug it in to, to to make it work. We wanted it to just be fully wireless, work over Bluetooth. And I talked about the original product, in the initial conversation here as being like a wristband, but it's also, it's more than that at this point. It's a kind of key fob form factor, and you can put it on a key ring and, still wear it as a wristband.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:28:10]:
And very soon here, we'll actually be coming out with, an app only version of this where you can actually you won't even need a hardware product anymore. You'll be able to just use your phone as in every key to connect to everything else.

Jeffrey Stern [00:28:21]:
So so building on that, I know you've also done some interesting things from a a marketing perspective. And I know at some point in in your company's history, you had created a a partnership, of sorts with John McGaffey, who I know has a a bit of a a notoriety about him. I I'd love to to kinda hear the the story and and thinking that went into that and and all and the impact of that that relationship as well.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:28:46]:
Yeah. Yeah. John is, was a fun guy to work with. That's for sure. We're really, sad that he's, he's gone now. But, yeah, John, the the John McAfee story, really, it stems from Kickstarter and Indiegogo. When we first launched the product, a lot of people were talking about how, hey. I wanna buy one of these.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:29:08]:
This sounds like a great idea, a great product. I want one, but I'm not sure if I can trust this random company called Everykey out of Cleveland, Ohio that I've never heard of before with all my passwords. Right? And it's a fair very fair, you know, objection for people to have, for sure. I mean, who am I to to trust with with all your passwords? I'm some, random person you never heard of. So we wanted to attach ourselves, attach our brand with a big name in the industry. Right? It could be a company, partnership, or it could be a person that is well known for creating great security products. And John's name, John McAfee, the founder of McAfee Antivirus, was literally number 1 on the list. Like, we literally came up with a list of 20 different people and companies we could reach out to.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:29:51]:
And John's name was number 1, and we thought we'd have to get to number 15 or 16 before anybody even returned any of our calls. Right? But fortunately for us, we emailed John, and he replies back, like, an hour later saying, Chris, this is the coolest effing thing I've ever seen. I wanna be involved. I wanna I wanna I wanna do a product video with me involved and promote this product. Can you come down to Nashville, Tennessee a week from now and film this product video with me? We're like, well, hell. That was so much easier than we thought it would be. We kind of, you know, put together a last minute kind of product video script for for John to promote the product and got in a, got in our cars and drove down to Nashville with a production company to film the video. And, Yeah.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:30:34]:
As they say, the the rest is history. John adding his name to the company and promoting it was just so influential for us. It took us from this kind of no name startup company that people didn't know if they could trust or not into a, you know, becoming a household name for security, something that people are beginning to know and trust. And if anything else, it certainly it got the conversation away from, is this secure and into a little bit more of productive conversation about the feature set of the product and, how people could use the product and everything. And, obviously, there was a little bit you know, you mentioned controversial, history of John McAfee. Obviously, the fact that, he's a bit of a controversial figure. So I think that that only benefited us, honestly, because it kept the conversation going. It kept people talking about us and talking about John.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:31:22]:
And anytime that we posted, you know, a Facebook ad, with John's name and face and holding every key, there would be some conversation around that. So for better Sure. It happened, and then it definitely helped the company. It definitely helped us build that credibility and get people talking about us.

Jeffrey Stern [00:31:39]:
Yeah. No. It's it's an incredible story. I I think just it also speaks to the the value of a well intentioned and thought out cold outreach. I just feel like I'm always surprised the degree to which those, people are receptive and respond to things that you think they they may not. It just takes reaching out.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:31:59]:
Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes it just takes that that simple reach out. We do a lot of cold outreach at every key, and sometimes I'm surprised at how many people reply to those kinda emails. So if they're really tailored, if they're very targeted, you know, you you'll get a response more more often than not if if you're really good about it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:13]:
So as you're building this business and transitioning from the consumer side to the enterprise side, thinking about, you know, perhaps not a transition away from hardware, but more the incorporation of the software side of things. At what point do you you have to and do you have to go back to the markets to raise additional capital to kinda scale the the business?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:32:39]:
Yeah. Yeah. We've, we've continued to raise money since the, you know, crowdfunding campaigns. Well, yeah. So we kind of, we went through this accelerator program called the Alchemist Accelerator, which is, supposedly one of the best, b to b or enterprise accelerators. This was right around the time where we were starting to make that shift from consumer over to enterprise, focus. And, through the Alchemist Accelerator, we went through the demo day process where we got up on stage. This was pre COVID and got to, you know, pitch to 100 of maybe even thousands of of investors all at a single point in time, and they, showed interest on us.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:33:14]:
We were, you know, the the cool kids on the block for for, like, a hot minute, and that was a lot of fun. And, that helped us raise, you know, a decent amount of money. We raised a few million through that process and have continued to use the Alchemist connection to our advantage to raise more money for the company through that venture. Man, it's, it it just really kind of made me realize how much, this was all pre COVID, of course, but how much investors really wanted to invest in start ups kind of near them and in very areas that are very familiar to them. Right? So, being a tech start up from Cleveland, Ohio didn't appeal to some of these investors as much as a, you know, a startup that's in their industry in, the San Francisco Bay Area, for example. So that created a whole new set of challenges of our geolocation being something that would dissuade investors from investing in us. And we had to kind of navigate that carefully. And, you know, I would spend more than 6 months of the year out in Silicon Valley at that time.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:34:16]:
So we would start to, have a kind of mini office, basically just an apartment that I was renting out there for the time period. And we would start to call that our headquarters, which, you know, is definitely kind of but you kinda you had to do what you had to do, to get the money in the door. And that was, one strategy that we found to be pretty effective. And yeah. So just a lot of, a lot of that kind of stuff, just a lot of, knocking on doors, hearing a lot of noes, you know, a lot of people. Of course, you know, we still had to be upfront about, you know, our kind of main office being here in Cleveland and having most of the employees here in Cleveland. Some people would, say no for that reason or for many other reasons. You know, the fact that we were, very still consumer focused at the time or a lot of our revenue had been generated from consumers even though we were starting to target enterprises, obviously, was a a bit of a turn off to some investors.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:35:02]:
But we found some some really open minded investors that they really love the company. You know, people like, Greg Kidd, one of the early cofounders of Ripple, one of the largest cryptocurrencies out there. I think they've got, like, a $25,000,000,000 market cap or something. People like Marjorie Xu, the former VP of Verizon, and Kurt Petersen, the founder of this company called Cepheid, sold for a few 1,000,000,000, and every piece of US mail is screened for anthrax through their systems. Anyway, a bunch of different cool people like that, got behind the company and, very happy to, you know, have them as investors and advisors and helping us move in the right direction.

Jeffrey Stern [00:35:38]:
Yeah. And just taking a a quick detour, because I'm curious your perspective on this. I mean, that that narrative just doesn't hold the same weight and gravity to it today that it it did pre COVID. Right? With the the nature of geographic proximity and how have you seen that change and and what's what's your kind of perspective on that from a Cleveland side?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:35:59]:
Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really hard to change these investors' minds sometimes. But at the start, when I first started raising money, I was very upfront with people about, hey. We're a Cleveland company, and that's a good thing. You know, it means that our cost of having an office is significantly lower than if we were in the Bay Area. It means that, you know, we can pay employees less than we pay in the Bay Area, and that doesn't necessarily mean that we're taking advantage of them. They live better lives here in Cleveland because the cost of living is so much lower.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:36:25]:
And there was all these benefits to being a Cleveland company, and I was like, wake up, investors. Come on. Like, see these benefits and, you know, invest in companies like ours. And at the time, they were super close minded to that. So it's really interesting to see the huge shift. We see now the opposite in today's world. We see silicon valley investors saying we don't invest in silicon valley We only invest in places like cleveland, ohio, and that is just so satisfying to see that, you know, they're finally starting to open their eyes to it They're finally starting, you know, unfortunately took this, you know, deadly illness to to make things to open their eyes to it. But, you know, at the end of the day, they are starting to realize that, hey, Silicon Valley is not the only place in the world where people are building great companies.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:37:05]:
Great companies can be built anywhere.

Jeffrey Stern [00:37:07]:
Yeah. No. I I think there's it's an exciting development for for sure. What does every key look like today? What what's kind of an overview of the the company and and also the the organization itself?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:37:21]:
Yeah. Yeah. So, things are going really well for us. I mean, we've started to land a lot of big government contracts, a lot of big, enterprise deals. It's definitely not the initial vision of the company. Right? It definitely wasn't. We're not selling to consumers quite as much as we once were. We're still running some ads and still getting some consumers on board.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:37:38]:
And oftentimes, that does lead to enterprise sales. We are super focused on selling to businesses at this point. We're doing a lot more remote work recently. We only work in the office one day per week at this point. Who knows if we'll even have an office, you know, a year from now? That's definitely up for debate. You know, pretty similar to a lot of other tech companies, when COVID started. We made a lot of the same changes that that other companies made and, just being a lot more open to hiring kind of everywhere in the world and trying to get a more diverse, you know, set of people working on the product and, and selling and everything.

Jeffrey Stern [00:38:15]:
So you you mentioned the the present state perhaps has deviated a little bit from the original vision. But what does what does success look like for you when you you kinda project out going forward? What what is the impact that you hope to have as a as an organization?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:38:32]:
Yeah. I mean, success to me would really be I I I built this company because I'm obsessed with building an awesome brand. I really want people to say see our name, the Name Every Key, and the EK logo, you know, our flagship logo. And I want them to see that brand and know that that is just synonymous with great security. I want people to see that and know that that's the apple of the security world. If you're asking what's the endgame here, I mean, I guess that would really lead itself to an IPO, an initial public offering. I would love to take this company public on the stock market. I realize how low the chances are of that happening, and I realize how, you know, absurdly difficult that is.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:39:13]:
But I don't care. I'm still gonna go for that. That's still gonna be my goal at all times. And, you know, if we got a really awesome acquisition offer someday that is hard to say no to, maybe I'll be eating these words. And, people will be sending me this podcast and being like, oh, I told you so. You but, you you know, at the end of the day, I think if we're solving problems for people, making people's lives easier, making people's lives more secure and building a great brand while doing it, then that's that's success in my eyes.

Jeffrey Stern [00:39:40]:
I wanna go a little deeper on on the the brand side specifically. Like, how is it that you build a good brand? And what does that actually mean?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:39:51]:
I think it it all goes down to well, there's the graphic design aspect of it, of, obsessing over every little detail. And then it's also about what your company stands for. Right? So in our case, I guess, when it comes to what we stand for, certainly, we stand for great user experience, phenomenal user experience, and really great security. Right? We're kind of the intersection of convenience and security. So we wanna make sure that everything within our ecosystem, everything from our website that you land on when you click one of our ads or when you first hear about our company or find it on Google, that website needs to be super easy to use. It's gotta be very sleek. It's gotta be intentional with everything from the colors to the fonts to the spacing of objects to the animations that we're using on the page. Everything's gotta be incredibly intentional, very well thought out, very slick, very modern, very new age, and very clean.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:40:44]:
And then we want to make sure that we're really getting across the messaging that we wanna get across. We wanna make sure that people understand that, hey, security is our north star. Security is something that's, you know, not just incredibly important to us, but it is the most important thing to this product. And when you buy an every key product, you're buying something incredibly secure that has been security audited and that's using, you know, the best encryption, the best security standards that are available. Yeah. It really just kinda comes down to just all of that, all of the all of the process of building, something that you're really proud of. I think a lot of people we work with a lot of different, like, ad agencies that will, like, put together these ads. And some of them not not the one that we're working with currently.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:41:27]:
I I'm super happy with our current ad agency, but some of the ones in the past. They, you know, they'll put out some questionable material that you're just like, man, you it looks like that was just, like, thrown together in, like, 5 minutes by a by a 7th grade. What's what's going on here? You know? And, like, I just, I'm just so passionate about this brand and what we're building that, like, sometimes it'll almost, like, like, raise my blood pressure if I see something that's, like, trying to represent our brand but is doing it incorrectly. Like, if there's not enough padding or if the colors are off or if, the logo is, like, not crisp and looking good and, like, plenty of margin around and everything to make it look nice and premium. So those kind of things, I just obsess over them. And we literally spend hours on, like, making sure that this stuff is all very buttoned up and that, and a lot of it comes down to also just, like, surveying people and asking people what they like too. Because right? I mean, we're not just building this brand for ourselves. We're building it for for other people to be impressed by it and to to make sure that we're getting across messages that we wanna get across.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:42:24]:
So we'll spend hours, lots of money, lots of time, on surveys asking people, hey, what do you the most mundane of details, things like, you know, which shade of blue do you like better? Those kind of things are things that we just, I think a lot of companies don't even care about them. They'll just go into Photoshop, and they'll just choose a color. Right? For us, we spend hours on this kind of stuff.

Jeffrey Stern [00:42:45]:
Yeah. As you reflect on on the journey here so far, what are some of the things that surprised you most as you you went about building and scaling every key? And flip side of that question, you know, thinking towards the future, what has you most excited over the next year and change?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:43:04]:
Yeah. Yeah. You know, I I think the the main thing that kinda surprised me is how freaking long it will take. Everything takes longer than you expect it to. And I know everybody says that, but you don't realize it until you're really in the thick of it. It's true what they say. It takes 10 years to build an overnight success. And, man, is that true.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:43:26]:
You know? It's, you watch these movies about, like, Facebook and Apple and how quickly they rose to power and everything. But what you don't see is the years years of hard work and blood, sweat, and tears put into building those companies and a lot of the failure that that happens along the way. You know? Our path to success has not been, you know, it's been a bumpy road. It it has not been all sunshine and rainbows. We've had a lot of, roadblocks have gotten in our way. There's been a lot of times I I can probably count, you know, 5 to 10 times where I felt like, hey. We might not be in business a month from now. You know, this might not be a viable business anymore, and I'm not sure if we're gonna even still be around.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:44:04]:
So those kind of challenges, take a big mental toll on you and I think as long as you just keep going, then you're gonna be successful. And a lot of the times, I think the successful companies are really just the they're the last men standing, last men and women standing and just the people that continue to put in the hard work even when it felt like the chips are down. A lot of people give up. You know, a lot of people give up way too easily.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:28]:
Where do you find that that resilience, that keep going mentality?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:44:34]:
It's a good question. I don't I don't know. I guess it might just be kind of, like, instilled in me by my parents, possibly. I remember back to, like, elementary school where me and my mom would, like she she wanted my, you know, papers, like, for class to be, like, perfect. Right? She wanted, like, if we got an assignment where you had to write, you know, a couple paragraphs about something. She wanted that to be absolutely perfect. So I I remember all these nights where we would, like, sit at the computer, and I'd be on this, like, spinny chair and she'd be kind of in front of the computer doing some of the typing. And she would, like, really just continue to we we wouldn't stop until it was perfect.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:45:15]:
We wouldn't stop the essays until they were absolutely perfect, down to every last word. If there was a specific word in the essay that didn't seem perfect, it didn't seem to fit correctly, or it wasn't quite as perfect as it could be, she would just keep crisp. Can you think of something better? Can you think of a better, you know, word to be using here? Or how could we make the what what what should the punctuation be in this sense and everything? And she would just obsess over those details. And at the time, it felt so freaking annoying. I'm just like, can we please just go to bed? Call this at night. It's gonna get an a already. This is the perfect paper, you know? And I think that, like, her constantly just going at me to make it perfect really instilled in me something that I carry with me to this day of, you know, just this constant obsession to make things absolutely perfect. And I think that was, you know, on hindsight, a good thing.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:46:09]:
And I think that's that's the case for a lot of things that your parents do. You know, they they they feel pretty shitty in the moment. But, at at the end of the day, once you've grown up, you come to appreciate them.

Jeffrey Stern [00:46:20]:
Yes. Yes. Much appreciation for for the parents. Just circling back to the the the second part of that question, when you think about, you know, what's coming next, what Oh, yeah. What what has you most excited?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:46:31]:
Man, there's I I guess maybe part of the reason I didn't answer it is because there's just so many cool things that would that are coming down the pipeline. Right? I'm just so excited about, like, man, this this, like, military contract that we have right now with the Air Force. I mean, right now, the Air Force, believe it or not, they're, like, writing their passwords on sticky notes and putting them around the rims of their monitors. This is the US Air Force. This is, like, the people that are hired to serve and protect our country, and they're just writing their freaking passwords on sticky notes. It's insane. So things like that. Things like solving these big problems for, you know, big, big organizations is just something that I've gotten really excited about.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:47:07]:
New features of the product. Things like, you know, I I don't know how much I should be talking about it publicly, but there's so many cool features. I guess I'll talk about the one that I've already kind of hinted at a little bit, using your phone as an every key. Right? Today, we have a hardware product. Hardware kinda sucks. It's not great from a venture capital standpoint. No you know, venture capitalists would obviously prefer to invest in a software company rather than a hardware company. There's supply chain issues that are continuing to be a problem and probably will continue to be a problem for the foreseeable future.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:47:37]:
So offering a software only solution will not only solve a lot of those problems, but it's also gonna solve a big objection that some of our customers have had, which is, hey. I don't wanna carry another hardware device on me. I'd prefer to just use my phone as my every key. So that's something that I'm super excited about, and we are so close to having that done. And I can't wait to, to release that because I'm sure that that's going to have a huge huge, positive impact on on the company and customers are gonna love it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:04]:
Mhmm. That's that's super exciting. Just wanna bookend the the conversation here. We ask the the same closing question, that we we do to to everyone on the show, which tying it back to Cleveland, is for not necessarily your favorite thing in Cleveland, but for something that other folks may not necessarily know about, a hidden gem.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:48:27]:
Okay. So I've been really interested for the past few years in urban exploring. It's where you find, like, kind of abandoned buildings and you kind of explore them. You see all the, you know, something that was once a, you know, huge, you know, building that had thousands of people in it that was a, you know, real, center for commerce or something and is now, you know, gone to the forest. And there's now, you know, graffiti and moss growing everywhere. And it's just crazy to see that, you know, that that that contrast there. So I would say, urban exploring in Cleveland is pretty awesome. There's the Warner Swayze Observatory, pretty close to the Case Western Reserve campus.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:49:09]:
Case actually owned a little bit of history on this. It's an observatory that, Case owned at one point and because of air pollution, it no longer made sense to be in its current location. So they kind of abandoned it and it's now just gone to those trees. So it's this huge building, really, you know, amazing, you know, multimillion dollar building out there for anybody to explore. And this is not legal advice. I don't think you're, like, technically supposed to be exploring this, although I've you know, people do it so often that I don't think there's a huge risk. But again, not legal advice, explore at your own risk, of course. And then also the, the old Cleveland Aquarium is is another, hidden gem in the urban exploring, area.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:49:48]:
It's, you kinda gotta, like, crawl in through this, like, window, and there's, I I don't know why. I don't know if it was once used as, like, a police station or something, but there's all these, like, old police reports there and stuff, which are just, like, kind of people can, like, read through them and shit, and it's, kinda crazy. So, I I love some of the urban exploring opportunities here in Cleveland.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:09]:
That's awesome. Again, not not illegal advice, but

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:50:12]:
Yeah. Again, not advice. Don't do this. Don't go to these locations.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:17]:
Well, Chris, really, really appreciate, you coming on and and sharing your story and and the work you're you're doing with with EveryKi. I think it's it's really cool what you built and seeing kinda the the progress that you've made since since I remember first encountering you guys a few years ago. So really appreciate it.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:50:35]:
Thanks so much, Jeff. I I really appreciate you having me on. It's always fun to to do podcasts like this. It's fun to kind of really take a step back and see, like, where the business has gone and some of the progress that we've made. Because when you're really heads deep into it, sometimes it feels like a struggle and sometimes you feel like you're not making progress. But it's things like this that really make me love where we've gotten as a business and really make me appreciate the, you know, the team that's behind me and, everything that we've been able to accomplish. So thanks so much for this opportunity. I really appreciate it, man.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:05]:
Yeah. Absolutely. If folks have anything that they would want to follow-up with you about, what would be the the best way for them to do so?

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:51:14]:
Yeah. I mean, you're welcome to contact me over email. That's probably the best channel. It's just chris.wentz@everytea.com.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:26]:
Amazing. Well, thank you again, Chris.

Chris Wentz (Everykey) [00:51:28]:
Yeah. Thanks, Jeff.

Jeffrey Stern [00:51:31]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an email to jeffrey at layoftheland.fm or find us on Twitter at podlayofthelandor@sternfa, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guest for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.

Jeffrey Stern [00:52:08]:
The Lay of the Land podcast was developed in collaboration with the UP Company, LLC. At the time of this recording, unless otherwise indicated, we do not own equity or other financial interests in the company which appear on the show. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of any entity which employs us. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.