Jul 16, 2026 · 57 min
BenRudolph
Co-founder of Peregrine, a GovTech data platform for police, fire and emergency agencies
$6.8B GovTech Founder On Why Most Startups Fail Selling to Government - Ben Rudolph
In this episode
Today I'm talking to Ben Rudolph, co-founder and CTO of Peregrine Technologies, to trace his path from Stanford gymnastics to building one of the fastest-growing companies in government technology. They discuss his time at the UN working with refugees, the 18 months he and co-founder Nick Noone spent embedded inside a police department, surviving the early "wilderness" of company building, and how Peregrine grew into a multi-billion dollar business. The conversation also covers leadership lessons, company values, and balancing fatherhood with running a fast-scaling company.
Chapters
- Trailer
- Intro
- Stanford gymnastics and meeting Nick
- Working with refugees at the UN
- Deciding to start the company
- Moving into a police department for 18 months
- Where the Peregrine name comes from
- Winning the California RFP
- Growth from wilderness to product-market fit
- Biggest mistake and hardest lessons as a leader
- Becoming a father while scaling the company
- How Peregrine uses AI internally and externally
- Life philosophy and closing thoughts
- Outro
About the guest
Full transcript
LubaBen, thank you so much for taking the time.
BenThank you.
LubaYou and your co-founder, Nick, were on the same gymnastics team at Stanford. Tell me more about that time.
BenYes, yes. So Nick and I actually knew each other before Stanford. Gymnastics is a small world. It's only a few people who subject themselves.
LubaOnly like people in the US.
BenYeah, yeah. So Nick was a senior, I was a freshman, and we became really close during that time. You basically are in the gym 25 hours a week, every week of the year. And we won a national championship together.
LubaWow.
BenAnd really bonded during that time. I think, you know, those teammates, those are the people that I trained with and worked out with. Still friends today, like brothers.
LubaSo how many people were on the gymnastics team at that time?
Ben21. Varies year to year, but yeah.
LubaAnd were you thinking you were going to be a gymnast professionally, or was that just a passion, a hobby?
BenYeah. You know, the thing about gymnastics, you can't make money doing it. So I knew from a very young age that...
LubaReally? Even if you're in the Olympics?
BenYeah.
LubaWow.
BenYeah. No.
LubaSo people just do it for the fame and the vibes.
BenAnd the fame. Fame and the vibes. I think recently there's been some influencer gymnasts, right? And you can make money that way.
LubaBut you don't want to become an influencer.
BenThat wasn't an option. And I don't think I'd be very good at it. But yeah, no, I knew this wasn't a, like, lifelong kind of pursuit.
LubaBut you were doing it all through Stanford, all four years?
BenNo. So I actually, in my junior year in college, injured my knee pretty badly.
LubaOh, no.
BenAnd had to retire and became team manager after that, which was fun. But no, I wasn't able to complete all four years.
LubaSo you and Nick become friends before being on the same team in college, and you continue competing together. Were you friends with everyone from the team, or did something about Nick stand out in particular?
BenYeah, I mean, I'm very close to a lot of those guys from the team. I think naturally, some closer than others, but all right.
LubaYou know, Belmont, Peregrine now?
BenYeah, yeah, definitely. They were first. Our first hire was from the gym.
LubaOh, wow. That's amazing. Okay.
BenYep. And we've had quite a few hires since then. I think at the beginning, we had 22 or 23 people at the company total, and like 25% had some gymnastics background.
LubaThat's amazing.
BenI think when you're small, it's very difficult to hire. And we had a lot of trust with a lot of gymnasts. I remember I actually just, like, looked at every college and looked for their varsity gymnastics team, and would get 100% response rate from gymnasts who studied computer science. And that was like my recruiting funnel to start.
LubaWait, why was that a part of your strategy? Like, you know, like attracts like, and you knew you were going to have a higher response rate? Or was there something about gymnasts in particular that you were looking for as qualities in your future teammates?
BenI think yes and yes. I think gymnasts work hard. They have the athlete work ethic, but also it's very hard to recruit when you're a tiny company. And I think there is a diaspora of gymnasts. And when you reach out to another one, you're more likely to get a response.
LubaWhat did being teammates together on that Stanford team teach you about your future co-founder relationship that then showed up in the company's journey?
BenYeah, that's a good question. So I think there's a couple things about gymnastics that are interesting. I think one of the things: you work really hard during these moments, and in gymnastics there's a lot of feedback. You're constantly coaching and pushing each other. And what I love about Nick's and my relationship is we can work really hard, go into the room and go back and forth to get to a really awesome outcome. That's like what we did to become national champions.
I think the other element of gymnastics that's unique is it's an individual sport in a lot of ways, but it's also a team sport. And so we knew how to work really well as individuals, and independently, but knew that actually the bigger and greater goal is the team.
LubaSo what does that look like in practice, to be still focused on yourself but also not forget about the external mission and goal as a team?
BenIn terms of the company or gymnastics?
LubaIn terms of either, because I assume that there are parallels to both.
BenYeah. I think in terms of the company, I think of a lot of it as autonomy and ownership. And, you know, we give folks a lot of freedom to operate and own problems, and just hold each other accountable to great outcomes and great results.
LubaThat makes sense. Well, let's talk about the company. Can you explain to me in simple terms what Peregrine is and what it does?
BenYes. So this is actually a harder question than you think, but at its core, Peregrine is bringing together disparate sets of data to help organizations solve their hardest problems.
And the reason why it's somewhat hard is because we so strongly believe in deep customer empathy. And so when we go to talk to a police department, a fire department, we don't say we are going to integrate their disparate data sources to solve their most important problems. We come and talk to them and question and ask them about what they are working on, what they're trying to solve. So at LAPD, they're trying to figure out, how do I best resource my officers on a week-over-week basis? And we work with them to accomplish that mission through leveraging the data they already own and have. So we take that approach as we work with different customers.
LubaYeah, that makes sense. So you have this customer-first approach where you come to, say, a government organization like LAPD and you're like, what is the problem? And then, what are the data sources that are inherently disparate to them? Connect them together and figure out one, like, data layer to help them solve those problems.
BenTotally. Yeah, exactly. I mean, when we started the business, we lived in a police department. And the thing that we saw was, in the last 20, 25 years, we've just seen, like, this explosion of data sources, point solutions for everything, whether that's, you know, body-worn camera, 911 calls. There's systems for detecting whether a gunshot goes off. All those live in silos. And it's actually very difficult to leverage that information in these types of organizations, especially when you don't have an engineering team that can do that type of work for you.
LubaSo bring me back to your post-college days, because you didn't start the company right after college. So assuming you and your co-founder stayed friends or in touch for a few years post-graduation, you kind of had very different career trajectories in the beginning. So you went to the UN, right? Tell me more. Bring me through that journey, and then I want to hear how you ended up starting Peregrine.
BenYeah, yeah. Right after school, I actually had an offer from Airbnb, a small company at the time.
LubaOh, nice. That's funny, I used to work at Airbnb. Look at that, we could've been teammates.
BenI know. It was before their Brannan office. And then I had an opportunity to kind of pursue an innovation project that I had started in school and continue it in the UN.
LubaWhat was that project?
BenWe were helping build technology for refugees to better communicate with UN staff.
LubaOh.
BenAnd doing that in ways, because back then mobile phones were just starting to take off and be used a lot more, and the UN hadn't really had the technology to be able to do that. So that was the genesis of what got me involved.
LubaFor you at that time, was it a technical project, or were you specifically interested in this refugee problem, and then you created a solution for the problem?
BenSpecifically interested in the refugee problem at school. And we, you know.
LubaWhy were you interested in it?
BenIt was actually through a class. We took a class where they paired computer science students with political science majors to work on different types of problems and see what they could do together. And I was really motivated after that. I had, you know, spent all my summers prior to that working at different tech companies. But it was like very tech, like. Yeah. And so that was kind of what sparked my interest. When I landed at the UN Refugee Agency, I ended up doing actually a lot of work all over the world.
LubaAnd how many years were you working with the UN?
BenTwo and a half years.
LubaGot it. So you decided to screw the frothy tech salary, the cool offices, the snacks.
BenYeah.
LubaLet's go work for the UN. Let's go, let's walk.
BenActually, I think it was because, after four years of living that life, I wanted to get outside of Silicon Valley.
LubaMakes sense.
BenAnd I wanted to work on real-world problems that felt tangible. And yeah, this felt like a great way to do that.
LubaAha. So you go work at the UN. Tell me more about that life.
BenI mean, it's a really interesting organization. They do a lot of amazing work. I learned a ton there. A few of my takeaways from that time: you talk about data problems and data issues, this is an organization that is international. They have offices in almost every country. They're trying to understand what kind of interventions are working, where are the refugee flows, how can we best respond to certain types of disasters, et cetera. And I actually spent a lot of time there putting that data together, helping a lot of the folks do what they would call monitoring and evaluation, to understand the effectiveness of different interventions, things like that.
And that was the first time where I was like, wow, if you can get data into one spot and you can leverage it to answer questions unique to your organization, you can do some really powerful things. And that was a system that was kind of custom built for UNHCR. But it was really kind of the first taste of that.
I think the other thing that I took away from that experience was designing close to the customer. I spent time on the Sudanese border talking to refugees. I was 22, 23. It was one of my most humbling experiences, and I learned a lot about these folks, what kind of trials and tribulations they've been through, and what their needs were. And that kind of listening and empathy was, I think, instrumental to informing how I built software and technology for them. Yeah.
LubaSo I see a lot of parallels, you know, this whole data problem and compounding all the different data sources to solve problems. Customer empathy. Two and a half years at the UN. Where did you go next? And bring me to the story of reconnecting, potentially, with Nick and deciding to start an actual company.
BenYes. So after that, I spent a couple of years working at a tech startup in Boston, and this was a B Corp, which is kind of close to a nonprofit, and they worked on kind of last-mile solutions for community health workers in places that didn't have a lot of doctors or health workers. And it was actually very similar to my reflections and experiences at the UN. In this case, I had spent a lot of time building these solutions and partnering with different government agencies. And what I really took away from that was, when we were able to work with them and when we were able to deploy, it was just so much more effective, so much more powerful of an intervention, because you had the support of the government. You're able to roll it out to many more people.
And I bring that story up because it's what, honestly, gets me really excited about Peregrine and why I feel so passionately. I think one of the best ways to improve our cities, our states, our counties, our countries is through good governance and good government, and the public servants, and all these things that we take for granted that happen. There's a lot of folks doing a lot of really good work for our country and cities. And I'm passionate about how can we build technology for these institutions that often, I would say, don't get the best treatment. Yeah.
And so that's what motivates me. That's what gets me really excited about Peregrine. I think if we can make these institutions better and we can help them with the tools, they are doing such important work for our cities that you can have a lot of impact. Yeah.
LubaYeah, for sure. So 100% agree on building the tools for good actors and decision makers so that the life of an everyday citizen, including ourselves, can be improved. Yeah. So how did you guys land on the idea? How did it all get started?
BenYeah. You know, I think me and Nick had very parallel experiences, and we were both passionate about working with government and had some priors doing so. And public safety was an area that we both felt was very important and we were passionate about. And really, the beginning is always the hardest, right? Like, you don't have any customers. You don't have any product. And...
LubaBut was it you guys starting just a conversation over beers, or at, like, a workout, gym together?
BenAbsolutely. We did do a couple of those. So when we graduated, I actually distinctly remember this conversation. He was graduating, he had just finished his master's, and we were getting a sandwich, and I was like, "Hey, you know, I really like working with you. If you ever think about starting a company, you know, call me. I'm, like, really interested." And then, you know, five years later, I think...
LubaHe calls you.
BenHe calls me, and we start talking. And, you know, that was January 2017, something like that. And we kept talking, kept talking. And then he came out to Boston, where I was at the time.
LubaTo visit you.
BenTo visit me and talk about it more seriously. And we worked out together.
LubaAnd that was the part of the story.
BenYeah, that was definitely a key component. And then it just felt right. It felt like we could build something great together. I feel like these types of opportunities to work with someone that you really enjoy working with, who you think is really talented...
LubaYeah, they're very rare.
BenThey're very rare. And so we took a chance, and I moved out to San Francisco a few weeks later, basically next door to him.
LubaAnd you quit your job in Boston, you move out to San Francisco?
BenMy job had, you know. Yeah. It was just like a moment and an opportunity that I couldn't let just go by.
LubaAnd at that point, did you guys have, like, inklings of this specific idea? What did you start with? Were you like, okay, we're gonna, you know, combine all these different data sources to solve the problems of public safety? Or did it start with something very different?
BenYeah. I mean, a lot of the time we started with a problem, and what are we trying to solve, versus how are we going to solve it and the technology behind it. And so when we were passionate about government, we really wanted to start with the customer first and what their needs were. And so we started working in and embedding in the San Pablo Police Department.
LubaSo that was the first step. You were like, police department, San Pablo seems like they can take us to observe them.
BenWell, I think at the beginning of any company, there's this period of what I call the wilderness, and it's when you're trying to figure out what to do to make progress. And I think for a lot of people it's really hard, especially folks, athletes and high-achieving folks, that are used to having trails. So there's a straight line: if you work really hard every day, you will get better. But there's a point in starting a company where you can work very hard every single day and not make progress.
LubaYeah.
BenAnd so I'd say that period for us was searching for the right partner to be able to develop the technology. And we had called a lot of agencies. We knocked on a lot of doors. And it was actually this one commander at the time at San Pablo Police Department, where...
LubaHow far is San Pablo from San Francisco? Is it close?
BenIt is close. It's just across the Bay Bridge.
LubaGot it, got it.
BenSo we commuted there every day. It was like 30, 40 minutes. And it's kind of in a high-crime area.
LubaGotcha. So that commander was like, "Okay, boys, come in."
BenYeah, he picked up Nick's call, and he told us, like, "Come. You need to get a polygraph." It was the most extensive background check I've ever received. It called, like, ten of my, you know, my girlfriend at the time, my parents, my friends, just to, like, do all the proper checks. And, you know, when we started it, really, we didn't have a product. It was about learning from them, understanding, and waking up and solving cases with them every day. So our mission and our job was to help the detectives solve cases.
LubaWow, that sounds really fun.
BenAnd it was.
LubaDangerous.
BenWell, mostly behind the computer, but okay.
LubaGuys, so you guys were not going out to the field, on the crime scene?
BenWe would definitely go out to the field. But it wasn't like we were the patrol officers, first to the scene kind of thing.
LubaHow long were you working with the department?
Ben18 months.
LubaGot it. Wow. And it was, like, full time, every day?
BenEvery day. We had no other office.
LubaThat's crazy. And I assume you weren't making money.
BenIt wasn't making money, no. That was a hard time financially, but it was a fun time as well. I think I learned a lot. You know, there was...
LubaYeah. What are your specific memories from that time? What did you learn?
BenOh, I mean, I just didn't have that much experience working with law enforcement generally. And so I think people have this perception that these organizations have all this really complex technology to help themselves. It's so far from that.
LubaIt's like pen and paper.
BenI remember walking in, they had blank CDs, which hold, like, maybe 80 megabytes. And they were...
LubaAre you serious?
BenYeah. They're burning, like, evidence videos onto these CDs so they could pass it off and drive over to the district attorney's office to hand it over. I mean, it was a lot of manual stuff. And the caseload was really high. They had all sorts of cases that they had to work on, and, you know, it's like armed robberies, and it would take so much effort. Just to get the data to investigate to the next step was a lot. So the decision to even prioritize a case was hard.
LubaBecause it was like, do I want to deal with the CD burning and bringing it to another person?
BenYeah, it was definitely a good learning experience. Learned how that worked and how hard the job is. These detectives, they have high empathy, and they do a lot of interviews with folks. And I was always really impressed. Especially, there's a lot of undercover work that was really interesting as well.
LubaSo why is it that law enforcement is so behind when it comes to tech?
BenYeah, I think it's a complex question, to be honest. It is supply and demand. I think it's very challenging. Like, if you're a government agency, it's really hard to procure. You often have to go through city council, do a variety of approvals. You have constrained budget. And because of that, it's difficult to build a company that sells into government, because you're kind of at the whim of these longer cycles. So it's just a challenging environment to kind of build this technology, whereas in the consumer environment you have a little bit faster cycle, and it develops more competition, things like that.
LubaSo besides how tedious it is for detectives to do this work with the, you know, CDs that have 80 megabytes on them, do you have any fun stories from that time that you can share?
BenYeah, I think, I mean, I wouldn't say they were fun. I remember the case where I felt like our product really started to work or resonate.
LubaWhat was the product at that point?
BenSo really, when someone commits a crime, and you have a reasonable suspicion that a certain person was involved in that crime, you can go to a judge and get a warrant. So you get some information and data about that specific time period. And these are usually called CDRs, call detail records. And our product was taking that information and combining it with some of the data they already had access to in their record management systems.
And I remember there was kind of a cold case homicide that they had been working on, put away for a while. And we had taken a look at it, resurfaced it, were using it in the product to try and see if we could get to that next lead. And I remember us being able to connect the information to get to that next lead that led to the ultimate... We were expert witnesses in that trial.
LubaYou just solved the homicide case.
BenWe did. We did.
LubaThat's awesome.
BenYeah, it's great. I think, you know, it's always sad when somebody, you know, that means we kind of failed that person.
LubaYeah, sure. But that happened before it went to your department.
BenYeah.
LubaYeah. The failure of the person.
BenExactly, exactly. But that was the moment where I was like, oh, wow. This is powerful, and this could be leveraged in good ways. And so...
LubaSo how many months into being at that police department, camping out with them, working there every day, did you guys have a hunch on what the product could be, or at least the product that you started testing out? Because maybe it has gone through multiple iterations.
BenYeah. I think within a few months we started to recognize how data-intensive these jobs were. Both of us had priors doing data work, integration work. And so that was very natural.
LubaYou kind of already had a taste for it.
BenYeah.
LubaYeah. And where does the name Peregrine come from?
BenThat's a good question. So the peregrine falcon is an animal that is very service oriented. Nick had spent a bunch of time in the Middle East, and he had, you know, been exposed to these falcons. They used them. And the idea of the peregrine falcon is that, I think one of the core values for Peregrine is service orientation and to serve. And I think a lot of how we operate and how we think about operating is through service orientation. And our goal is to make the organizations that we work with better and be able to operate better. And so that's kind of our approach.
LubaYeah, that's a very sweet story. Was it a lot of brainstorming about the name, or was it...
BenIt was good. It was a lot of brainstorming. I think our instincts have always been to have that service orientation. But yeah.
LubaSo usually in anyone's startup journey, there is this push for "talk to customers, talk to customers, don't be siloed and build your product and fall in love with that." I feel like you guys have lived it to the max extent, where you literally lived with the customers. You didn't just talk to them. Do you think it's just your personal experiences with the UN and then that Boston company, where you really developed that empathy, that impacted that? Or were there other influences that made you both decide that that was the best approach?
BenYes. I think both of our priors were all about embedding with the customer and understanding that. I mean, even roots at Stanford, there's this design thinking methodology, very much rooted in the idea that you need to live the problem, you need to live with your customer to really, truly be able to build for them.
LubaI do think 2017, 2018 was quite a controversial time to go into GovTech, into government. How did you feel about that? Was that at all a part of the equation, or a part of, you know, just the narrative that you had with your friends or with your peers, about the fact that you're working with these organizations that not everyone regarded as both sexy and important?
BenI guess, yeah, it's totally true. There's a couple of things I'll say. One is, I really learned the importance of public safety. I spent a lot of time in the UN visiting countries that didn't have functioning public safety institutions, and that's a very kind of scary place to be. There's a long history of pogroms, where there would be killings of Jews, and where they wouldn't get the help and support that they needed when they needed it. And so that history is told and kind of retold. And I think for me, it's a really important aspect of why public safety really matters and why it needs to be as good as possible.
And the reason I think it's important to wrestle with is, of course, these institutions are complicated. And I really think the people who want to work on real-world problems and get into messy problems, like, law enforcement is hard. It is not easy. There are hard decisions you have to make. And I think it's much better to wrestle with that and try and make that better than it is to kind of run away from that problem.
Being at the UN, I remember joining and feeling like this is an organization that's doing really good work, and I do really believe they are, but it is also a complicated organization. Not everything is black and white. There's a lot of nuance. When you look at a problem and you go deep into it, the problems are nuanced, and solutions are often nuanced. And so...
LubaInstead of running away from them, it makes sense to actually try to tackle them.
BenYeah.
LubaSo tell me about other inflection points at the company. So one was obviously just even starting to find who the customer is and what the problem is. So you guys spent 18 months at the police department. What happens next?
BenSo what I'd say is Peregrine spent almost all of its energy on product and implementation and deployment. When I think about Peregrine, I think about it as, like, 50% technology and 50% the way we deploy. And after that moment, we grew. We grew word of mouth. I'd say the first three or four years, Peregrine was deployed to a handful of customers, and it was a lot of product R&D. It was a lot of ensuring that we were deploying right and building that reputation. That was really important for us. It was groundwork for us.
LubaHow many people were you guys in the first three, four years?
BenHow many? So the company employees, I would say in 2020, we were around 25, I'd say.
LubaAnd you'd already raised your seed at that point, or was it Series A?
BenYeah. So we raised our seed probably about 12 to 14 months into the company.
LubaOkay.
BenAnd then our...
LubaWas it hard to raise for this problem at that time?
BenAt that time, there wasn't that much interest in GovTech. We were lucky to have people who really believed in Nick and myself.
LubaWho were those first believers?
BenYou know, the very first kind of institutional investor in Peregrine was an organization called Goldcrest. And they wrote our first seed and led our Series A.
LubaOh, well, that's amazing. What happened in 2020? There were some government contracts that I read that you guys won, and it was really unlikely that you would.
BenYeah. So we had this big RFP that, you know, someone from Amazon showed us, like, "Hey, this looks up your alley." And it was working with the state of California to help with emergency response. And I remember this RFP because it was during the pandemic. And I remember, everybody was home for Christmas in, like, their San Francisco apartment. They didn't actually travel. And I remember, night and day, just, like, coding, building out the features and stuff that we would need for this RFP that we were going to present.
LubaWhat is RFP?
BenRequest for proposal.
LubaOkay.
BenYes, sorry. This is a very common way to get submissions to solve a certain problem within government. And we had this big demo day. It was a series of demos leading up to one kind of crescendo. And it was all this scenario based on Lake Berryessa, and how you could use your technology to help map out different ways of responding to a wildfire. And we had set up the entire office as an EOC, emergency operations center, and basically ran the scenario that they asked of us, like a real response, which was a lot of fun, a lot of work. And we were in the office, you know, night and day for that. And eventually we won that contract. Probably should have been one of them.
LubaWas it a big contract?
BenIt was. For us at the time, it was a very big contract.
LubaWhat was a big contract at that time?
BenIt was over a million.
LubaYeah. Okay, nice.
BenYeah. And so that was good for us.
LubaWhat were some other times when you entrenched yourself in the field with your customer?
BenYeah, I mean, a lot of different times, and especially now, that is a lot of our ethos. I'll give you one other example, where there were hurricanes coming down to Florida. I think it was 2024, Hurricane Debby. And we had just signed a contract with Manatee County, Florida. And that weekend, the hurricane was scheduled to hit, and one of our engineers got the call. Flew down that weekend. Started integrating data from, you know, water gauges, 911 calls, surveying the land. And it was a really awesome example of the impact that you could immediately have, and just, like, living on site. And so everyone is going out of Manatee County. She was going into it, and that one assist.
LubaShe volunteered to do that?
BenYeah. Yeah. She, yeah.
LubaLike, "No, we forced her to go."
BenIt was definitely a "Do you want to go? Are you willing to go?" And no, it was, honestly, she did an amazing, amazing job. And, you know, so much of that kind of emergency response, it's about the boom, like when the actual hurricane hits, but it's also the day after the boom. And Peregrine was instrumental in helping assess damages. A lot of responding to emergencies is actually ensuring that you get funding from the federal government, and the way you get funding from the federal government is telling the federal government what is damaged and how much is damaged.
LubaThat makes sense. Maybe whenever you guys onboard employees, you have a mandate for them to go into sort of a government.
BenAnd that's the interview. There's no typical, you just go to a hurricane.
LubaSo what does being in these emergency situations with your clients teach you, or what has it taught you, about running a company or running a tech company?
BenYes, of course, I think. You know, I think the thing that I've learned from working with a lot of first responders and those organizations is respect for how hard these people work and the jobs that they have to do. You know, we were just working in Ada County, up in Idaho, with some emergency responders that are doing 14 calls a day that are each, like, an hour long. And it is really hard work, and it takes a toll. Like, if you are constantly being exposed to those kinds of events, that has a mental toll. If you're constantly, like, doing investigations on the worst types of crime, those are really hard moments.
So it gave me a lot of empathy and motivation to build a company that could empathize with those problems, and also provide access to those types of problems for engineers who don't often get access to those problems. I think it's rare to be able to build technology and have it impact real-world events. And so I think a lot about how we can get the best and brightest engineers to be able to solve these types of problems and help these folks.
LubaSo how do you teach that empathy to an employee that's not necessarily working directly with one of the customers? So, say, how many people are you guys now?
BenWe're almost 400.
LubaOkay, so say I'm applying to interview at Peregrine. I'm an engineer. I start working there. It seems like I'm going to be pretty removed from one of those clients. What do you do internally to continue to emphasize this?
BenYeah. I mean, a lot of our engineers are, we have a forward-deployed engineer team. We call them deployment strategists. They are on site all the time.
LubaOh, nice.
BenThey do live that and breathe that. And I think as an engineer, personally, I still go on site quite a bit. A lot of our engineers go on site. We try and get every engineer to go on site and work with one of our customers. Sometimes it relates to a feature they're building, so they can see it in action and understand how it's going to be used. I think engineers have to make so many subtle decisions when they're building something. Having the context of their users just makes what they're building a lot better.
LubaYeah. Has it become easier to hire talent now that GovTech is cool?
BenYeah. I mean, what I'd say is hiring is always hard. It's always hard. Hiring is always hard. I definitely think there's been a shift. And since we started in 2017, there's been ups and downs. But I think, you know, by and large, the good thing about the Peregrine culture and the people that are here is they really believe in the mission. And so there are always those people who get it, who care.
LubaYeah. Talk to me more about the company-building journey. So for a couple of years, you were a pretty small team, and now you're 400. What were the points at which you started growing really quickly?
BenI think in the stages of a company, you know, there's that wilderness that I talked about. There was, you know, product-market fit.
LubaWhen did you start feeling product-market fit?
BenThere was that moment when, you know, we solved that cold homicide case. I think there was also a moment, one of our early customers in New Mexico. I walked into the department and, you know, I just saw Peregrine up on the screen. And they were using it.
LubaThat's awesome.
BenIt was a great experience.
LubaAnd not a part of your presentation.
BenYeah. It wasn't like we were forcing them to use it. They were just using it because it had value, which is cool. And so that's when, I think for us, the challenge of going to market and distribution was really at the forefront. And that was a really hard problem, and it took us a few years to solve. Procurement's very long. These cycles are challenging. There's a lot of ways that things get delayed. I think we spent probably 2020, 2021 figuring that out.
And then I'd say 2022 and onwards, we've really seen a lot of growth. And I think that's been truly on the back of really great deployments and having a product that works, and customers who believe and will be reference customers for you. And I also think it's a product of the kind of sales team and go-to-market team that are knocking on doors all over the country, understanding the community's priorities, understanding what that city needs, and being able to kind of speak to those priorities to be able to sell.
LubaIs Peregrine in San Francisco? Is it helping out SF?
BenPeregrine is in San Francisco. Peregrine is.
LubaAny stories for how you guys have, you know, solved a lot of homicide cases, or...
BenThere are quite a few that I honestly haven't been as close to. It's actually a recent deployment of ours.
LubaOh, cool. Congratulations.
BenThank you. Yeah, Peregrine is in many of the Bay Area cities and counties.
LubaWhat's the biggest mistake you've made as a leader so far?
BenOh, interesting. Don't make mistakes.
LubaYou don't have?
BenThanks. See, I think this is a learning that I've had, that I've evolved into. And it wasn't like a decision that was wrong or right. But when I started Peregrine, people talk about company values and defining those and the importance of them. And I remember starting, and I was like, these are...
LubaYeah. Who cares?
BenWho cares? Like, these are the words on the wall. It matters what you do. Yes. And I still believe that. But I've also recognized that that in and of itself is a value. And I think as we've seen...
LubaSo one of the values is no words on the wall. Yeah. I saw some words on the wall.
BenNow, I think we are very execution-oriented. We have, like, a phrase, "grab a shovel." And we like to get into the details and do the work. And I think having values and ensuring that folks understand and know those values is really important, because when you scale, those are the things that get people to all align.
LubaYeah, that's what they're going to pay attention to.
BenExactly, exactly. And then I think the second thing is having a very high hiring bar. If you hire the right people, it solves a lot of problems for you.
LubaWhat has been the hardest thing for you as a founder, especially given that the company started scaling pretty fast?
BenHuh. I think maybe a couple pieces here. One, I just really love working in small groups, small teams. People that started at Peregrine with us, like, seven years ago, are mostly still here, and I have a great relationship with them, and I love building with them. I don't necessarily have the time as much anymore to do that. So, you know, that's, like, a piece that I miss.
The other challenge I'd say is, I think what Peregrine is doing and what we're currently trying to do, has it been done? I think Peregrine is the fastest-growing software company in government. You know, Marriott.
LubaAnd what's the second fastest?
BenI don't know, but I think there's been a lot of hardware companies.
LubaYeah.
BenAnd, you know, in public safety. And the only reason I bring that up is because I think the problems that we're facing are new and novel. And so figuring out the ways to solve it, that's always a challenge.
LubaHow do you uplevel yourself as a leader? Is it mentors? Is it executive coaching? Is it, I don't know, reading books and biographies of great leaders that you look up to? Is it all the above?
BenI think we have amazing, amazing leaders at Peregrine that I honestly learn a lot from every day. And I...
LubaWhat's been the recent thing that you learned?
BenWhat's been the recent thing that I've learned? I think actually this was a pretty profound thing for me. That was like a mental shift.
LubaDo you find your job stressful? Has it been less stressful in the last couple of years since you guys have grown, or the opposite?
BenOh, opposite, for sure. I think, you know, this is my second on my list. I think I've been traveling a lot more. The work has been around the clock. I think going through hypergrowth is a different phase than finding product-market fit, and the intensity is a lot higher. And that's a lot more demanding on my schedule, our team's schedule. So...
LubaHow do you deal with stress? How's that lifestyle for you?
BenI think I have an inherently low stress factor.
LubaThat's good in general. Not neurotic.
BenNot. Yeah, I'm not. But, you know, that's maybe not surprising, but I find working out a way to, like, relieve stress. So I still find time to do that. You know, Nick and I will still go work out.
LubaOh, that's awesome. Good. Yeah. Co-founder bonding activities.
BenYeah, yeah.
LubaHow many times do you work out?
BenI try and get into the gym three times a week. I have two young kids.
LubaWow. How old are your kids?
BenI have a three-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old.
LubaDamn. Okay. Do you feel like you're a very present dad, given the demands of the job, or?
BenI mean, I could always be doing better on this front, of course, but I do try my best. I was, for the longest time, very afraid of having kids and, like, what it would do.
LubaYeah.
BenYeah. But it's actually, honestly, been an amazing, amazing part of my life.
LubaWait, tell me more about that. Because I think a lot of people who have very big ambitions and demanding jobs, they have a lot of fear around having kids, because that's going to disrupt their lifestyle so much and disrupt their focus, potentially. What was that decision to have kids like, I guess three years ago, in the midst of the company? And what has it actually been like?
BenYeah, I mean, it was a hard decision. I was scared, I wasn't sure. I think the thing is that at a certain point, you are trading off years of your life that you'll be with your kid, if you know you want kids. So, you know, you have a finite number of years, and the longer you wait, the less time you get with the kids. So I was really, I mean, I knew I wanted a family. I knew I had to go through that. And so we made the decision to do that.
I think, like a lot of things in life, you find a rhythm, and you find a way to cope and a way to work. I mean, I can't even begin to say how incredible my wife is, who is really supportive in, like, the hard moments of the company.
LubaFrom kids to AI. Let's talk about it. Let's talk about AI and Peregrine, as in, like, external AI use, how you guys are thinking about it, and also how you think about AI internally.
BenYeah. So I think this moment in technology is actually really exciting. I think Peregrine is in a really exciting moment for it as well. The things that I think will make companies successful in harnessing AI, especially in the enterprise, in these high-stakes environments: one, being close to customers, and that is something that is, like, deeply in Peregrine's DNA. Two, access to some novel piece of data. For us, that looks like helping the customers leverage their own data. And then three, the security and governance controls necessary to allow for AI to be broadly adopted.
And so for us, we've always been deploying to kind of what I'd say are high-stakes environments. Permission controls have been front and center since literally day one, where we needed really fine-grained permission controls at the row level, column level, all the places that you can imagine. This new AI era demands new types of governance models, security models, for handling how AI agents work and ways to control them. And so I think Peregrine's right in the nexus of that. And it's been very exciting to see our customers be able to adopt this to dramatically, dramatically change the way they're working.
LubaDo you feel like you have to thread the AI narrative carefully? Because obviously in the broader US market, there's a lot of fear related to AI. Or is your customer base pretty open to, like, "Whatever solves the problem, we're on board"?
BenYeah, I think for us, it's not necessarily, like, threading a story. It's just about providing the right controls. And so what that looks like for Peregrine is that Peregrine's AI features and functionality are off by default. And this is, like, an explicit decision that agencies and organizations can make or not make, but they still get a lot of value out of Peregrine, whether it's on or off. And I think this is kind of up to the community and all that to decide how they want it to be used. Secondly, I think for us it means targeting AI at specific workflows that we think it's good for, and using judgment and reasoning to think about, okay, what is sensible and responsible.
LubaThat makes sense. And how about AI in your engineering organization? How do you think about it? Are you one of the leaders who mandates AI use across the board and, you know, checks how many tokens people use every performance cycle? How do you think about it?
BenI'm not a big mandate guy. I think we use a lot of AI technology. We are investing in engineers to help us change the way we're working. I think what we're seeing is a lot of our engineering team is using cloud agents. You know, people are developing features from Slack, which has been a really interesting transformation.
I think, like a lot of engineering organizations, we're still figuring out where the bottlenecks are. Like, review is still an important aspect and still takes a lot of the time. AI gets you a lot of the way, but it honestly misses some of the nuance for complex features in a complex codebase. So, yeah, I'd say we are transforming our engineering organization, and honestly, broadly, our company, to be AI native, in a responsible way, but not, you know, being like, "You must use."
LubaYeah. So what does AI native mean for you specifically? In which way are you guys AI native?
BenYeah, I think for us it's two things. One is internally: the ways of working and how we do our job is done through the use of these new technologies and tools, and that comes in a lot of different varieties. We actually leverage Peregrine and Peregrine's AI capability to run parts of our business. And that is internally how we think about becoming AI native. Externally, I think for us that means transforming the way our product works and the offerings that we have to be able to leverage this new technology in the ways that make most sense.
LubaThat makes sense. And has the profile of an engineer that you're looking for changed with the AI coding boom? How have you seen it evolve?
BenYou know, I find that smart, motivated engineers are still doing well. And I'm still excited by that profile. You know, of course, if somebody has a background in AI and has an understanding of how these LLM technologies work, I think that is an absolute bonus. But the things that made you intrinsically a great engineer pre-AI still make you a great engineer.
LubaWhat makes someone a great engineer, intrinsically?
BenYeah. I think the best engineers are, one, technically very, very strong, and can understand problems and do them well. I think two, they are proactive and curious and want to solve problems. And I think three, they are motivated. And we think a lot about building. We are builders at our core at Peregrine. And so those are some of the ways that I think about engineers being great. We talk a lot about ownership at Peregrine, and expansive ownership, and engineers who want to own problems end to end. I love those people, and, like, we like to give. Yes.
LubaSo you were saying...
BenNo, no, I'm not. Who does it? Who does it?
LubaWhat's the thing you learned about human nature from your work at Peregrine and beyond?
BenI think the first thing that jumped to my head was that people really struggle with ambiguity, is maybe something that I have learned. I don't know. I personally, it's been hard, especially when we were starting the business. But clarity is something that...
LubaWhat's some example that made that specifically jump to your mind?
BenOh, I think, you know, for example, that RFP that I was talking about, where we were working with the state of California. That was a really hard moment, and we had to work a lot to get to that end goal. But we knew what the goal was. We knew what we were shooting for. If you don't know what you're shooting for, I find it's very challenging. So, like, providing that level of clarity is one of the main things that I think about for the company.
LubaTo wrap up our conversation: what's your life philosophy in one sentence?
BenOh. On the spot, I think: 10% of companies are ideas, 90% is execution. And what I mean by that as a life philosophy is that, in order to achieve something that you're proud of, that you've done well, you often have to put in the work, put in the effort to do that. I think in my own life, all the things that I've been most proud of are the things that I've worked really hard to obtain over a long period of time, whether it was gymnastics or, you know, Peregrine, things of this nature. I really think that sort of longitudinal effort in time to achieve something is important.
LubaAmazing. Ben, thank you so much for your time.
BenThank you.