Intelligence should live where the people are.

When the creator of Android asked me to join Simple Things as SVP of Product and a core member of a new senior leadership team, the company had extraordinary technology in search of a market: a deep base of edge-AI capability, backed by a16z, waiting for someone to guide what it should become. That was the mandate in three parts: fix the product pipeline, find the market, land customers.

IoT devices shipped across LoRaWAN, Matter, and Wi-Fi: 11
Signed customer LOIs, inside a year: 3
Core platform patent applications, filed in a single year and still in prosecution: 3
The year the funding market closed the window: 2023

The Simple Things hub on a wooden sideboard beside a stack of books — Fig. 1 · the design language

The thesis has aged well. Intelligence should live where the people are, at the edge, and the cloud should be the escalation path rather than the default. We built a privacy-first platform that paired local edge AI with frontier models: what could be sensed, decided, and acted on locally stayed local, and only what needed heavier reasoning went up. In 2023 that was a contrarian architecture. It is now, roughly speaking, the industry's roadmap.

The products made the thesis concrete. We designed fourteen IoT devices and shipped eleven of them, with a design language that was its own statement: playful, precise, and meant to sit in the open and be touched, in a category that had spent decades apologizing for its hardware by hiding it. We built presence into the platform itself: the building understanding occupancy, computed locally, without surveillance of the people in it. The invention pace matched the ambition: the platform's core patent applications, covering microservices, smart-building architecture, and flow programming, were filed that year and remain in prosecution today.

The building side of the platform

Simple Things product imagery

The Simple Things hub twice over: the face with its status display, and the back with its connector row — The hub, both sides: the status display, and the connector row that wires a building

The Simple Things keypad, a white wall unit with a black display, a ridged dial, and a twelve-key pad — How the house is armed: the keypad

Five Simple Things devices arranged on a pale ground: the chime, the entry sensor, the motion sensor, and the radar sensor around the doorbell camera in the centre — What the hub listens to: chime, entry, motion, radar, doorbell

The Simple Things building controllers side by side: the access, input, and output modules, sharing one enclosure design with different terminal banks — The building controllers: access, input, and output, one enclosure design and three terminal banks

Published application drawing of the flow programming node graph — Fig. 2 · from the filings

The market answered. Inside a year we went from technology in search of a market to three signed customer LOIs. Then the 2023 funding market closed the window, as it did for a generation of hardware companies, and the honest move was the disciplined one. I led the wind-down with the founder: manufacturer commitments renegotiated, the team placed, and the IP preserved. Those inventions since transferred to Rubin's next venture, Genki Robotics, which is its own kind of validation. Companies end; good inventions don't.

What I took with me was the architecture. The burned-in conviction that the edge is where consumer AI belongs went straight into the next chapter, where the building itself became the product.

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