Universal Contact Tracing with Ron Rock on School for StartUps Radio
Listen to the entire podcast on “School for Startups Radio” here.
Microshare CEO Ron Rock spoke with the leading entrepreneurial podcast “School for Startups” recently to describe how the global pandemic and its consequences have led to explosive growth for the company’s Smart Facilities IoT data solutions, including Universal Contact Tracing.™
“We didn’t start out with Universal Contact Tracing. It really been a reaction to COVID-19. Prior to this global pandemic, we were doing IoT; the Internet of Things, putting these low-cost sensors in all kinds of buildings. Sensors to track occupancy, how many people are there, the quality of the air, doing things like predictive cleaning. This brings all of our physical buildings to life, using this new low-cost IoT infrastructure, and the power of Microsoft Azure. One of our products was an Indoor Asset Tracking tool, and we were primarily using that in hospitals. At the time, we were tracking things like hospital beds, wheelchairs and infusion machines. It’s a big deal. Hospitals need beds, you can’t check-in if they don’t have a bed. You can’t checkout if they don’t have a wheelchair. Everybody’s always fighting for the scarcity around ventilators and infusion machines. So we started out, adding our Indoor Asset Tracking to all these other sensors. We were primarily selling to commercial real estate, hospitals without touching the patient, airports without touching the airplane. So think unregulated space, where we were just producing all this data to help drive efficiencies, mostly around sustainability and ESG. How can I communicate to my stakeholders that I’m reducing my carbon footprint, that I’m being a good Global Citizen taking care of the environment? How do I do all that if I don’t have the data of how my building is living and breathing every day? So that was our core business. Then all of a sudden, the week of March 16th, 2020 hit.”
“If you think about the business model for companies like those, their revenues are down 80%. So everybody left the offices and went home, and we were hustling to figure out what are we going to do to survive? Again, we’re an early-stage company, we’re not that big. One of Microsoft’s biggest customers reached out to them and said, we noticed one of your partners, Microshare, is tracking hospital beds. Do you think we could use that to track employees? That was the beginning of this whole significant pivot that we made around putting wristbands on employees to provide what the industry now calls contact tracing.”
Read a full transcript of Ron’s interview with School for Startups host Jim Beach, and the podcast can be heard on the School for Startups website or downloaded on Apple’s iTunes podcast channel.