Alexander Linn
Alexander Linn is the founder and CEO of Shipshape, an innovative company transforming how homeowners manage and protect their properties. Shipshape’s AI-powered home management system is the first of its kind, combining cutting-edge technology with a mission to enhance the safety, efficiency, and reliability of homes. By providing real-time monitoring and proactive maintenance alerts, Shipshape empowers homeowners to prevent costly damage, protect their families, and ensure their homes operate at peak performance—all while promoting environmental sustainability.
Linn’s inspiration for Shipshape stems from his background in smart building systems and a transformative mission trip to Kenya, where he witnessed the profound psychological and practical impact of having a stable and safe home. He realized that while people monitor their health, cars, and finances, few have the tools to proactively manage their most critical asset—their home. Shipshape fills this gap, offering peace of mind and safeguarding homes against risks like water damage, mold, and HVAC failures.
Under Linn’s leadership, Shipshape not only delivers groundbreaking technology but also embraces a social mission. Through the Shipshape Foundation, the company subsidizes home services for lower-income homeowners, encourages employee volunteering, and funds community grants to support housing stability. Linn views the home as more than a structure—it is the foundation of health, security, and well-being. His vision is to make every home smarter, safer, and more sustainable, ensuring that homeowners everywhere can thrive.
Listen to the episode on Spotify here or on your favorite podcast platform and check out the Urban Monk Academy here.
Podcast transcript:
Keeping Your Home Safe with ShipShape
[00:00:00] Welcome back urban monk podcast. Dr. Pedram Shojai. Today, we’re looking at our second skin. By that, I mean, our homes. We talk a lot about health. We talk a lot about toxins and resilience and building up your immune system. But the homes we live in, man, you could get into a lot of trouble. If you’re huffing paint inside those four walls, if you will. And so I’ve been looking at this topic a lot, obviously since last series. Um, new course called sanctuary, looking at how to make the home safe. One of my favorite technologies. It’s really kind of the quantified self. For your home. The way you can. Create a dashboard to understand what’s happening and sleep because you know, you’re safe because you’ve got monitors and sentinels.
If you will. In places that matter. I think is really important to hear about. I want to make sure that you understand. Things have changed. You want to feel safe at home? It’s gotten easier. [00:01:00] Alex Lynn, has a interesting story of how he ended up here.
He is now on a mission to help save people from the challenges that one would face with environmental. Um, on slot, if you will, in your own home. And this technology I think is really cool. Really affordable. And I think it’s a no brainer for every person who owns a home. Just keep your family safe. Enjoy.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Alex. Welcome is good to see you. Appreciate you being here.
Alex Linn: Hey, thanks for having me. I’m excited to join.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah. I’m excited to share what you’re doing with my folks. Um, uh, there’s a whole revolution happening in health and wellness with the gadgets, right? rings, the watches, all the biometric stuff. Um, and a big part of what I’ve been working on with my urban monk Academy students is. this concept that I’m, I’m labeling multiception, right?
You have exteroception, which is your five, five senses, right? Then you have [00:02:00] your interoception, which is how your gut and your heart and all these things are communicating with your nervous system, chemo, chemoception, proprioception, and all these different arrays of data that are feeding up to the brain and are critical sources of information for us to understand.
you know, assess whether we’re safe, whether we can sleep, whether we should digest, whether we should run. And this is the primitive stuff, right? Then all the gadgets got added, right? So now I got a ring that tells me how I’m sleeping because I can’t figure that out when I wake up in the morning and I’m tired.
Um, and that data is layering onto all of my internal arrays, giving me more information and allowing me to make decisions about what to do. Lifestyle choices, right? Like the aura ring for sure. Definitively prove to me that drinking sucks, right? I cannot have a glass of wine or a beer or anything and then not see diminished sleep quality period.
Proofs in the pudding that sucks. [00:03:00] Now you’re in this really interesting, I’m going to get your origin story in a second, but I’m framing it up for my audience here. You’re in this really interesting space where we are dealing with the home and the place that we dwell, which we call the second skin. In our homesick home series and a lot of things that we’ve done and there are so many things in the home that can get us and you’re dealing with a sensory array that is now at the home level that’s feeding back information that is critical information to us in a much more efficient way that can help us make better decisions at home.
And to me, I find that to be credibly relevant. And important at this juncture as things within the environment, things, you know, within our homes are starting to break. So within that context, give me how you got into this because then I’m going to dance around how we’re going to use this to get healthier and happier.
Alex Linn: [00:04:00] Yeah, for sure. Um, well, first of all, I think when we thought about the data we could deliver homeowners, um, the goal is to make it actually useful so you make better decisions. Um, and we’re living in a world where there is so much data that people have, it’s not always helpful to figure out what to do next or how to resolve that issue.
So, when we first looked at building ship shape, um, I came at it from an angle of smart buildings. I had worked on smart buildings and commercial HVAC going back to 2009 and saw some of the advanced data we had around energy management and maintenance management. But when I looked at the smart home, the smart home was mostly geared towards automation and entertainment with some security.
So I thought there was an opportunity to bring the kind of data we had in smart buildings and smart factories to homeowners, um, and help them make better decisions. So we built a monitoring platform that monitors for leaks, it monitors for [00:05:00] humidity risks, it monitors air quality, the power usage of all your appliances, but the real question was not, could we get data from those devices and those appliances?
Um, you know, there are a lot of folks who have a leak sensor in their home. The question is, could we actually send an alert from that, that someone found helpful? And they would take action on it and then connect them to the right kind of professional to resolve the issue. And that’s where I think the market has mostly overlooked that, you know, believe it or not, when we send a customer a water leak via push notification and we say, hey, you got a water leak in your attic.
A lot of people will not respond to that and you might think that’s crazy, but the reality is these folks, they got a baby in 1 arm. They got a job to take care of. They didn’t really sign up to be a property manager. Um, this is not their full time focus. And meanwhile, they’re getting hit with hundreds of alerts every single day, text messages, emails, push notifications, [00:06:00] bunch of different apps.
So we wanted to design a service that would be like a security system. We actually pick up the phone and call you, make sure that you saw that alert. And when you see that alert, it’s not enough to just tell them they have a problem. We wanted to have the local experts, you know, the home service contractors as part of our platform so we could give the homeowner an easy solution.
You know, you’ve got a risk that we detected. Here’s a professional who can drive a truck over to your house and fix it. That was kind of the genesis of ShipShape and how we thought about making the data useful.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I had a very traumatizing experience around this, um, to the extent that this would be trauma. I was on vacation and I started getting these alerts. Downstream alerts. We’re talking about upstream versus downstream. Um, where the, the, a lady like at a desk at our local water company was calling us saying, you have a very big leak.
And so, [00:07:00] you know, I’m out of town. I send a guy to the house. I’m like, Hey, go look. He’s like, there’s a leak. I sent another guy and I’m like, look, I think it’s your meter. No one’s finding a leak. There’s nothing going on. And you know, two weeks go by 8, 000 water bill. Mind you, we were heating this water before it was spilling.
Um, and you know, major issue. That was found, but it was because we had already burned the candle and someone on the other end was saying, this is, you know, this is a three bell alarm. And had I had leak detection and I had, I had the IOT in my home having better Sensing and reporting. I could have saved, I don’t know, this was, you know, it was a 50, 000 problem.
I could have saved a lot of money and a lot of water and, you know, save the fish. And so how do we get out ahead of this? How do we go upstream to predict, prevent, detect in a way that allows for a homeowner to be like, this is a real problem and this is what I got to do about it.
Alex Linn: [00:08:00] Yeah. I think a lot of the answer is experience that works for the homeowner. There are quite a few different appliances that are smart now. Uh, there’s different sensors you can buy on Amazon to detect a leak. But for a homeowner to set that up, they’ve got to basically be an IT expert. Uh, and then they’ve got to have several different apps on their phone that they keep track of.
So our point of view is if we could give the homeowner a single check engine light, you know, one trusted source, where if ship shape goes off, that’s going to notify me about a risk. It’s going to notify me about how to improve my performance in my home, that that would centralize the experience that would make it much simpler for the user.
And we would deliver them solutions that Their contractor would just put in for him. Now, I don’t know about you personally, but a lot of folks won’t go to Best Buy and buy something off the shelf to go hook up their water heater in the attic. But if their contractors over at their house, and they say there’s new [00:09:00] technology for this, you’ll be able to get a monitoring service.
Even if you don’t want to use 1 more app. Um, let me hook this up for you. We find the customer looks to that contractor as an expert and thinks it’s a great idea. So, really, the answer to your question, I think, is getting the rubber to meet the road water sensors are not new water sensors have gotten a lot cheaper over the last several years.
But really, we need a solution that works to get these homes connected. So that we can find these issues proactively and what you just hit on. I actually would call that a trauma. I think, you know, it is at the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to have secure housing. Well, even in a world, uh, like the United States, even in homes that are expensive homes, People are worried on a daily basis about what’s going to go wrong next.
They, you still remember that 50, 000 problem and how disruptive it was and painful it was for your family. I think when people live with that kind of low [00:10:00] level anxiety, you know, their, their mental wellbeing is not as good as it could be. You know, it’s harder to think about the future. If you’re in a home and your kid is getting sick from asthma and you know, there’s a mold problem.
You can’t find it. You don’t know how to get rid of it. Imagine how hard that makes it for you to think about the future and get excited about the future. You’re so bogged down with just trying to have a secure roof over your head. Well, when we looked at that problem holistically, the, the homeowners spending money on maintenance, insurance, and utilities, perhaps the most wasteful market in the whole world.
because the people who live in the homes are not well trained on all this stuff. It’s very complicated. It’s more complicated now than it was 20 years ago. And as a result, decisions get made reactively. So approximately 30 percent of the money people spend to maintain and operate their home is wasted because these decisions are [00:11:00] made after it’s a 50, 000 problem instead of when it could have been handled with a small repair.
Dr Pedram Shojai: This is as above, so below, right? Like this is very, very similar to a lot of the conversations I’ve had over the last several years on the podcast with various doctors, right? I’m monitoring my blood pressure, not because I’m trying to prevent a heart attack, but because I had a cardiac problem. And now a guy.
is saying you’re going to die. And so I’m going to throw some pills at it. Now you’ve got to do all these things. And so it’s a very reactive market healthcare, right? Whereas wellness isn’t, but people aren’t actively seeking wellness, right? They’re trying to lose weight. They’re trying to, you know, look sexy.
And so what I like about the solution you all have put together, and I, you know, my dog in the race on this is after doing homesick home and being like, Oh my God, look at these problems, folks. We realized that we were missing something. where people were like, not jumping on it immediately because people are like, well, my grocery bills are high [00:12:00] and that complicated.
And there’s a lot of ostrich effect when it comes to problems with the home, because that sounds expensive. And so what I really like about what you all have done is you’ve made it a no brainer. You’ve made it relatively inexpensive and it almost pays for itself all the time. And you’ve made it an easy dashboard so that I can have this box in my Maslow’s hierarchy checked off, um, without having to fear the unknown.
Like for me, sleeping in the house, knowing that like maybe I’m leaking another eight grand worth of water under the house and not knowing if it’s happening was a really weird feeling. So how do we bring peace of mind to an area where it’s like people have so much stress and trepidation around saying, Oh, that sounds like an expensive problem.
I don’t want to look.
Alex Linn: Yep. 100%. And we see, um, there is so much friction to go take action. One, there’s [00:13:00] affordability. These problems can cost thousands of dollars to fix to. There’s trust. Like, who’s the right person to get to do it? Do I even trust them? Um, if you think about getting your going to the auto mechanic and he says, need to replace your brakes, like, God, you know, I don’t know.
Well, he pulls your brake pads out and he shows them to you and you see they’re all worn out. You know, you feel more confident in that decision. Well, taking care of a home is full of decisions where the homeowner is totally driving blind. And as a result, people will literally look at their thermostat reporting high humidity.
For months, for years and not do anything about it because they one, they can’t afford it. And two, even if they can’t afford it, they’re not really sure what to do or who to trust or how to make sure it gets done. Right. Um, and so that causes a lot of work that needs done on these homes to just not get done until it’s too late.
So that’s why, when we looked at it, it’s 1 thing to have a check engine light that says, hey, you’re running high humidity. That could be a risk of mold growth. It’s [00:14:00] another thing to educate the homeowner with an article from the Environmental Protection Agency. and tell them what that means and help them monitor it over time and help them identify a contractor that could be trusted to propose a solution.
Um, and then ultimately once they get the work done, help them monitor it so that on an ongoing basis, they know if they spent all that money, it’s still working the way that they wanted it to. Um, so that whole experience creates peace of mind and peace of mind is something I learned about from the home service contractors.
You know, these are the local businesses that are the companies that keep in the people that keep our homes running. Think about your HVAC contractor, your plumber, your electrician. Those businesses are, you know, they’re the boots on the ground. They’re the experts. And when I went and started working with them and said, What, what is a connected home solution that would really help the customers you serve?
They all talked about peace of mind. And initially [00:15:00] I was like, who actually buys peace of mind? What is that? And then I started talking to homeowners and we find that the number one reason customers get ship shape is not to prevent a water leak or prevent mold. It’s to get peace of mind that they’re not going to have something come up to bite them, that they had no visibility about.
And it’s also, you know, if you look at customers who have areas in their home that are hard to reach, um, a lot of homeowners physically can’t get into those areas. Like my dad, for example. He used to go into his attic and into his crawl space. And, you know, he would still like to go in there, but, you know, he’s, you know, like a lot of our homeowners who live in these homes.
It’s an aging population. We’ve got to find a way to help them feel in control of their house, even though they might not physically go in the crawl space like they did 10 years ago. And this is a way to get that sort of ability to see in the dark.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Hmm. It’s funny. There’s so many parallels. Like, you know, the car mechanic, the light [00:16:00] comes on, you’re going to blow a gasket, you’re going to drop your tranny, like you’re going to stop. You don’t want to replace a transmission in a car. Uh, cardiac, um, you have higher blood pressure, you’re going to blow a gasket, you know, uh, symbolically the same way and you’re going to die, right?
Like that’s a big problem with the home. I don’t know if people have like you, you, the example that you used, I would like to kind of ride that horse into the stable a little bit, right? High humidity mold risk. What? Like I’m a guy who had a mold problem in a house, different house than the one I was talking about.
You know, it sounds like I’ve had a lot of home problems. Um, but like, you know, we had a water heater that was burping and dripping into a wall and then behind it, you know, my, my daughter’s closet had mold all up on the wall. Right. See it happening. Uh, woke up one day and was like, what the hell is this?
Oops. Right. But then that ended up being 30, 000 worth of remediation. It looked like ETS house. Like it became [00:17:00] a real thing and I didn’t see it coming. Um, but then, you know, later on, we’re like, you know, my wife had histamine reactions and like itchiness and all these like weird symptoms that you just blame on stress or, you know, food or whatever it is, it could be in the house.
So let’s, let’s talk about just. Humidity, crawl space mold, and how big of an actual problem that is. If people understood that that’s a home heart attack, maybe they would look at that humidity reading a little differently.
Alex Linn: Yeah. So the humidity and the problem in the homes is largely coming from poorly managed HVAC, heating and cooling. Um, we completed a grant application for the department of energy that specified that 40 percent of homes. Have air conditioning systems that are too big in ’em and it’s causing humidity problems.
So literally the Department of Energy is saying, right now we got a problem. Four outta 10 homes in America have an air conditioning system that is [00:18:00] causing that home to run chronic high humidity.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Is that because they’re just being sold like a fancier car than they need? Like, like, are they buying too much or is that just, I don’t know,
Alex Linn: Well, there’s
Dr Pedram Shojai: what’s that problem?
Alex Linn: multiple reasons. One would be, um, these systems are more complicated now than they used to be. So the way that the technicians used to size and estimate what kind of equipment to put in your house has gotten a little bit more complicated. And so sometimes those estimates are wrong. It’s not because they’re trying to oversell the customer.
They just estimated the wrong size. Another thing that happens is, um, after you put the unit in, the homeowner might go do some energy efficiency stuff. They might seal their attic, seal their crawl space, put in new windows. Well, now there’s less need for the heating and cooling load. And again, the unit has become too big.
It might not have been too big when they first put it in, but now it’s too big. Um, and then ultimately, when you go to get that unit replaced, a lot of times they look at what size unit you have right now [00:19:00] and replace it with a similar size unit. So in any scenario, if you end up with a unit that’s oversized, it doesn’t run enough.
And the biggest way that you pull the humidity out of the air in your house is running the air conditioning. So it might run long enough to bring your temperature down to the comfortable temperature while the humidity has still not come down to a safe level of humidity. But then the air conditioning will turn off and the manufacturers are getting smarter.
They’re coming out with equipment that’s better at this. But for the most part, people who currently have air conditioning systems, there is a big problem that there’s a lot of them that are oversized. The other problem that you see is windows are poorly sealed and crawl spaces are vented. When you have a vented crawl space, if you just think about the the physics of it.
You know, imagine taking a cold can of Coca Cola, putting it on the table on a hot summer day. You’d see the water droplets start to form, uh, and that condensation would build up because the [00:20:00] difference between the cold temperature of the can and the hot temperature of the air. Well, when you have a crawl space that’s vented under your home, it’s the same effect.
You’re cooling the inside of your house, so it’s colder up here. And you’re sucking in hot air through those vents and that temperature differential will cause condensation to build up in your crawl space, which will rot those floorboards and lead to mold foundation damage and even infestation. Dust mites and other critters that you don’t want under your house.
So it turns out that when we built homes. 1 out of 4 homes in the United States, about 26M homes. We’re built with a vented crawl space. Um, according to building code at the time, we thought that was the best way to do it. Um, a lot of those building codes were conceived of before we were even putting central air conditioning into homes.
So, along comes central air conditioning, and now we’re building the homes the wrong way. [00:21:00] And it wasn’t until 2013 that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Came out and said the crawl spaces should be sealed and in 2015, the 1st building code in America changed. So, for the most part, we are just now figuring out that these homes were built in a way that accelerates mold growth in the crawl space.
And if you look at the relationship between central air conditioning and asthma, it’s really interesting from the time we put central air conditioning into homes, and it went mainstream, we’ve increased the rate of asthma in our population. Two and a half fold. Now, are there other factors at play? I’m sure there are, but it’s very clear that we put central air conditioning in these homes, started creating humidity problems, have not yet gotten to where we’ve solved those humidity problems, and as a result, mold and corresponding asthma and respiratory illness is getting worse.
Dr Pedram Shojai: [00:22:00] That’s incredible. That’s incredible. is a statistic that it’s what, two to five times worse indoor air quality than outside and then mold and dust mites and all that being part of what contributes to that. That’s a big deal.
Alex Linn: And if you look at how it impacts our communities, it’s there’s even one step further. That’s very alarming, which is that we fund school districts and many areas in the United States based on the number of days kids attend school in the month of September, they say, okay, that’s the attendance of that school.
Let’s allocate the budget accordingly. Well, in areas where you’re at high risk of humidity damage and mold. Um, states like Alabama, the number one reason kids miss school in the month of september is from asthma attacks. And,
Dr Pedram Shojai: this is a direct correlation with their level of education and the funding based on their asthma.
Alex Linn: and the research has been done that has shown that the rate of asthmatic hospitalizations is 10 [00:23:00] times that when you go to low income and minority populations. So we’ve got whole vulnerable populations in America where their whole school district is getting less funding because the air quality problem, the mold problem is worse.
And those neighborhoods, so it’s a real drag on, you know, our economic development and on the well being of our communities to not address this issue.
Dr Pedram Shojai: That is, This is incredible. Um, quick question. I want to just before we leave this topic, you said in 2015, they came up with these standards. I’m assuming there’s usually, uh, like a tail on that to say, okay, now we have two years, three years for, you know, contractors to get up to speed to implement this.
So like this happened in 2015, when did we start seeing the, the homes built correctly based on these standards?
Alex Linn: Um, there are many areas of the country that are still running on 2012 building codes.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Okay. even properly implemented
Alex Linn: it’s not even implemented yet. I mean, I still [00:24:00] drive by a whole track home developments and see vented crawl spaces. I still see. You know, million dollar homes being built in neighborhoods and then to crawl spaces.
It’s something that is, it still has not taken on, even though, you know, we now know the industry now knows the science and there is a group of contractors that’s out there helping homeowners to go back out and seal up those crawl spaces. But we’ve got millions of them that need to be fixed. Still,
Dr Pedram Shojai: How big of a problem, like, uh, first of all, like, you know, I have a, Let’s just say it’s a 3000 square foot house. Typical cost to go retrofit, fix it, get it right. We’re talking 5, 000, 30, 000 like just what’s the ballpark on how much this ends up costing the homeowner.
Alex Linn: it costs about 7 to 10, 000.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Okay. And then what are they, I mean, aside from peace of mind, do they get better energy efficiency? Like what, what are the short term [00:25:00] benefits obviously versus, you know, obviously not having the risks.
Alex Linn: yeah, so we did this pilot with Southern companies, research and development team. Southern company operates Alabama power, Georgia power, Mississippi power. They’re the second biggest utility in the country. A lot of their homes sit on top of vented crawl spaces, about 50 percent of the homes in that region.
Um, so we’ve done a couple of research and development pilots with them and demonstrated that this method of sealing them and controlling the humidity does work. Um, that if you, if you do not do that, the home does run high humidity. And it does grow mold because it runs high humidity in the crawl space.
Um, and we’ve also looked at the energy impact. And the total cost of ownership of the project. So if you’re a homeowner and you don’t do this project and you live in the house for 10 years. Most likely you will have to pay for a mold or mediation and potentially a foundation repair project in order to sell your home, that project is [00:26:00] going to cost more than 10, 000.
So a lot of times people say, I don’t want to spend 7, 000 or 10, 000 now, or I can’t to fix it. But then it gets worse because now 10 years later, you’ve ended up with structural damage. You’ve ended up with, uh, water damage and you end up having to pay for remediation. You have to fix it anyway to sell the house.
Now, along the way, uh, there is considerable energy efficiency benefit. So this research was done by Southern California Edison, the utility out in Southern California. It was also done by Advanced Energy, a research group in the Carolinas, and they’ve identified that if you seal the crawl space, it will make, make your heating and cooling 18 to 26 percent more efficient. So, you will reduce how much your heating and cooling system has to work because you’ve sealed that crawl space. Now, in many cases, you need to put a new dehumidifier in, so that may use some additional electricity. Um, but [00:27:00] again, the alternative is. Having to pay to replace rotten floorboards and remediate mold anyway.
Now, if you factor in, so if you look at the energy savings, you look at the damage prevention and you look at the health benefit, if you live on top of a house with mold, a certain portion of homeowners will then end up with respiratory illness. They’ll have medical bills for going to the doctor, paying for prescriptions.
Um, and sometimes it can be like you mentioned, really, really bad end up paying for. therapy appointments and having, you know, major, uh, mental health issues that come with the physical health issues. And, and it’s also like, we have, uh, homeowners who have been basically told they’re crazy and, you know, went through all kinds of treatment for stress and they left their, their career path only to find out the real culprit was the mold.
So, uh, when you look at the economic benefit, the payback period on these projects averages out to be in the range of about 10 [00:28:00] years. Um, plus or minus sort of depending on some factors. Um, but again, if you don’t do the project, not only would you miss that whole payback period, but you’re gonna have to pay for it anyway and get none of the benefits.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So, so many parallels, so many parallels with health care, it’s, it’s kind of sickening, It’s like you could do wellness now or go to the ER later. Um, a couple questions. One is, okay, my friend Robert Kiyosaki would kill me for saying this, but I think that For the majority of Americans, their home is their number one asset.
So protecting an asset that’s supposed to appreciate five to 10 percent a year and, you know, Brit build wealth for you. Uh, this really, you know, kicks you in the asset if you are, you know, getting mold under your floorboards and losing your foundation. So did you guys look at like what percent of households, um, Use their home as their primary asset, leverage it into, you know, kind of selling and retiring and all that and where, where the risks [00:29:00] are there.
Um, because this is obviously a big deal. Most home owners would really suffer if this happened to them.
Alex Linn: Yeah, well, for most Americans, the majority of their net worth is in their home. Um, and for many Americans, the, uh, asset value or the equity value of their home is greater than their 401k or their retirement. Um, and I don’t have the exact percentages handy, um, but that, that’s sort of well known that that’s where a lot of American’s wealth is.
Um, and you know, interestingly, like you have a financial advisor, right? Um, or at least a place that you had your 401k parked, and they give you some advice on options to invest your 401k. There is, there is no financial advisor. There is no trusted advisor for homeowner. And you’re right. That’s where people are building wealth.
And we’ve sold this American dream. Uh, and we, we ultimately promoted homeownership as a path to. Building middle class, but when we did that, we [00:30:00] pushed our rate of homeownership up so high that there are a lot of people who are signing up to buy homes because of that ideal, because of that dream, that they’re really not equipped, um, to manage them.
Could be like me, for example, like right now I’m trying to start a company, you know, but if I was in charge of managing all the maintenance of my home, I’d probably end up. Overlooking something and end up spending a bunch of money. And all the time, all of a sudden that return I thought I was getting gets eroded.
Um, so I may not at this point in my life be in the best place to build my wealth and home. Um, there’s a lot of folks like that. And ultimately, you know, one little issue like this, you take a typical American home, a 200, 000 home. And in order for them to go sell that home, they now have to do 15, 000 of foundation repair work. They just aid into, you know, potentially half or more of the equity that they had in that house that they were going to be able to use for a down payment on the next house. So [00:31:00] it is a, it is a huge tax on people’s retirement and net worth. When these issues come up and nobody really talks about, you know, the average cost of maintaining a home in America is now over 10, 000 a year.
So when you go buy a home, you look at what is my mortgage going to be? What’s my interest going to be? What’s my insurance going to be? Okay. I can afford a home this much as how much I can spend. Turns out you needed to increase that by 20 percent or 50%. To cover the maintenance. And if you can’t, if you don’t cover the maintenance, you’re going to look up and find that there’s a bunch of deferred maintenance in that home that you’ve got to do to sell it and all the money you thought you were building up in equity gets wiped out.
And even to the point where we have seen, I mean, sadly, many customers that we’ve worked with have literally lost their home and had to have it torn down because mold in particular, an overlooked water damage in particular can become such a big problem that it literally wipes out the whole value of the house.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Whoops. There goes your nest [00:32:00] egg. All right. So my, the way my brain works is there’s so many other entities that could have a dog in this race. I know you did a partnership with Alabama power and like, so there’s, Energy savings, which could come back, um, into this. And I want you to share that, but you know, my brain starts thinking, okay, well, how did they, you know, you want to sell someone 40, 000 worth of solar panels.
There’s companies that will put up the money and fund it, put her on your roof and take a percentage of the savings and help pay for the thing. Like I’m thinking farmer’s insurance. Has a dog in this race. I mean, there’s gotta be like insurance rebates and power rebates. There’s gotta be a way for other folks that are sharing risk with you and your home to say, yeah, you know what?
We need this.
Alex Linn: Yeah, 100%. When one of our core values is to look for the win win, this, this platform is not designed to be a disruptor. The, the contractors, the utilities, the insurance, they can all be more profitable while helping the homeowner save money. [00:33:00] And the homeowner can save money, and there’s plenty of room in the middle for us to get a fee for providing the technology.
That’s how wasteful the market is. So our current system qualifies for insurance discounts. And a lot of customers can take a certificate of monitoring. We give them provide that to their insurance company and get a discount. We see discounts on the range of 10%, sometimes more of the policy premium. So a lot of customers in the first year of their insurance discount will fully pay back the cost of the ship shape system.
Um, then in the utility side, you know, they’re helping homeowners with attic installation with heat pump installation, so energy efficiency that makes your home more efficient or new electric appliances that they can use to better optimize the grid. Utility companies increasingly have programs and the federal government offers programs to help people make those improvements.
Um, you know, we, in order to hit our sustainability goals as a society and in order [00:34:00] to control the pollution that we’re putting out from our economy, you must address the single family home. You know, housing accounts for 19 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. So you can’t just skip it and say, well, it’s too hard to deal with that.
And if you look at the grid resilience issues, we have a really cold day. In Texas, the grid shuts down, uh, you know, at least they have to run Brown outs to prevent the grid from shutting down. I mean, there’s literally lives lost when that happens, we will not be able to manage the grid and deliver the electricity to people on those really hot days or those really cold days.
If you don’t fix these issues in the home. So it’s, we’re not just talking about pollution. We’re talking about livelihood to even get power to people. And then you look at insurance. Insurance is literally canceling coverage and markets like florida and california because it’s just, you just can’t manage the risk.
Well, that leaves homeowners totally carry in the back. So there’s the utilities and the insurance. But then also the contractors. [00:35:00] These are really good businesses. Homeowner has an HVAC contractor come over and do work for them. They might love that contractor. By the time they need work done again, a year and a half later, they forgot who they were.
And so the contractors end up becoming marketing organizations where private equity is coming in and buying them up. And whoever spends the most money on marketing, uh, is winning in those markets. So we can help the contractors focus more on quality. More on customer experience and have a loyal relationship.
You know, if I’m a homeowner, I would love for it to be the same person who walked back in, who remembers me and I’ve got a relationship with them. That’s not how it works. I go back to Google and I search again and I find someone with five stars. Um, but the contractors have a lot to benefit from this as well.
Um, so we’re trying to look at how do you put the different stakeholders together to make this affordable? Um, and interestingly, uh, you know, health insurance will be another one. They’re not currently health insurance programs to help people with their homes, but we have talked to some big health insurance carriers and [00:36:00] they’re interested in this, but the problem in the market is the utilities can’t give a discount for health benefit.
The utilities can’t give a discount for risk reduction. The insurance companies can’t give a discount for energy efficiency. We’re trying to put it all together into one pie that says, what’s the total cost really look like? And also include financing. So we’ve, we’ve got a great relationship with a number of financing companies that our car, our contractors work with.
Um, but we’re absolutely determined to figure out how do you make this affordable through one, the actual economic benefits to the best available financing and three, the various subsidies and incentives that homeowners are trying to navigate. Is the goal is to actually modernize America’s homes. The goal for ship shape is not to send you an alert about a leak.
The goal is for us to help make the whole housing market more efficient.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Quick interlude. If you haven’t checked out my new course sanctuary, please do so the urban monk.com. Just go to courses. You’ll [00:37:00] see it. It’s where I have spent a lot of time doing research, helping you figure out how to make your home a Zen healing, Oasis, how to bring the right gadgets into your home to help you heal. How to turn your shower into a spa, all the things that you can do. Uh, within the four walls of your own home to make it a place that feels safe and make it a place that restores you, the course is great.
My students are loving it. Take a look.
Yeah, it’s funny there. There’s all these stories about GDP and you know, the GDP going up is a good thing for the economy, but you know, a family of five getting into a fatal car accident and creating emergency room bills and the body shop and all the morgue and all those things add to the GDP. But that didn’t necessarily make society any better.
And you know, when we were doing research for homesick home, um, I started making a lot of phone calls cause I’m like, I don’t, I don’t understand this business. I really need to [00:38:00] understand like how to solve these problems. I called a few of my friends that are contractors. I was like, Hey, you know, this mold remediation thing, tell me about it.
And most of the contractors I talked to, other than people that actually hang a shingle and specialize in that are like, man, no one wants to deal with that shit. Like our guys want to do high end renovations and do work that we’re proud of. Nobody wants to go into a moldy, nasty mess and clean up a bog that’s toxic and look like, you know, space, man, like that’s not.
Good work, right? That doesn’t move the housing market. That doesn’t build up the assets. That’s, that’s wasteful, right? It’s like heart attacks versus wellness. Like we want the economy to thrive. So you’re on the right side of that equation. And I think that this is the tip of the spear because the technology is helping feed the data intelligence, which is helping roll up better decisions and protection of the asset.
Speaking of assets, your children in the home, you know, your health, your pets, and all of that. And so I think this is just the beginning, um, of a really [00:39:00] good thing. And I think you’re already like super affordable, right? Like, so the cost of the units isn’t that much, the monitoring isn’t that much. And then when I was playing around with the one I got, it’s like, we can add things.
It’s like, Hey, the fridge went out. I should know that. Right? I got 4, 000 worth of steaks in that fridge. Like that, that is a real big problem. If I let that go. And so what else can we currently feed into the ship shape AI ecosystem to just have a better web of sensing in our homes.
Alex Linn: Yeah. So ship shape has the environmental monitoring, temperature, humidity, leak detection. Um, we do have sensors that just have temperature and humidity. Um, we have power monitoring, so anything that you can plug into the wall. Um, if you’ve got a pool pump or a water heater, we have a heavy duty switch.
You just have to have an electrician install that. Um, and then you can go to your circuit breaker and put an energy meter on your circuit [00:40:00] breaker. So literally anything in your house that uses power, you can monitor the power use. Any area of your house that’s at risk of humidity damage or extreme temperature or water damage.
There’s a simple sensor you can put there. And then we also tie in with. popular products like the Ecobee thermostat that has VOC monitoring and CO2 monitoring, and we can help you make those alerts more actionable, or the Nest thermostat or the Honeywell thermostat. And we’ve got a number of smart appliance manufacturers, um, and other smart products that work with our app.
So the idea is you could use ShipShape to connect any appliance, any hard to reach area of your home. Even if it’s a 10 year old appliance with a simple sensor, you go put next to it. Now it becomes a smart appliance.
Dr Pedram Shojai: And this array of data that feeds back information that is critical to The biggest problem, and [00:41:00] this is, this is what happened with all the gadgets too, when the gadgets start coming out, I had like nine places I would log in to get data and try to read the tea leaves and make sense of it all. And so I didn’t have.
Data visualization tools. I didn’t have a dashboard and so it was really cute tracking all this crap in my health and wellness, but then it took a PhD to help decipher it. Right. And so no one’s got time for that. So how have you guys helped the average Joe who is a homeowner, but is busy driving a kid to soccer, use this in a way that’s actually useful.
Alex Linn: Yeah. So I think the first thing is taking all that data and turning it into alerts. We have a proprietary patented framework. We call it alert actions, or we apply some machine learning. We look at the data coming from the appliances coming from the environment. We would even look at weather data, the age of your house, and we could use this data to send you an alert that you need to take action on. Now, [00:42:00] important thing about ship shape is you can tie all your stuff together. So you have 1 app instead of having 11 apps to go analyze your 1 app that’s sending you the alerts and if you sign up for our service. A human being in a service center here in the U. S. Is going to call you and say, Hey, you have a critical alert.
You might not have seen it, but as a service, we’re making sure that we help you with it. Even if that homeowner doesn’t even know how to use an app. That’s a really, really important part of it. The pro monitoring. Um, and then the alerts have to be actionable. There’s got to be enough context that says, what does this mean?
I mean, great. High humidity in my living room. Okay. Well, what do I do? What does it mean? Well, when you explain to the customer that if your humidity trends above 70 percent for an extended period of time, and you give them an article to educate them on that, they realize, Oh, this alert is telling me I’m at risk of growing mold.
Growing mold could lead to expensive damage. It could lead to me getting sick. And the way to fix it is hit this button right here. There is a trusted pro [00:43:00] who in this area fixes these kinds of issues. The ship shapes already vetted. They can come over and give me an estimate on what I really need to do to fix it.
So that has to actually be actionable. I do think that the consumer wants a single app. So a lot, a lot of manufacturers, we have a platform where manufacturers can plug in their products to ship shape. They’re increasingly approaching us because they’re saying, look, you know, we make a really great appliance in this category, but the homeowner doesn’t want an app for every category of appliance they have.
The homeowner wants our, our connected appliance to offer more value. And one way our connected appliance could offer more value is if it worked with a ship shape service. So increasingly manufacturers want to plug in to ship shape to give the homeowner that unified experience. And similarly, you know, it’s.
It’s great if you get a sensor from your insurance company that helps you detect a leak, but do they help you find a contractor to get it fixed? Do they have a contractor? So when you bring it together for [00:44:00] the customer, where on the one side, they’ve got all the appliances and systems in their home connected.
On the other side, they have the service providers they depend on to help them operate their home. Then we can use some AI in between to make those connections smarter. And a lot of it’s not even, not even super smart AI. A lot of it is just water detected. You need to take action. Um, the other thing we’ve done is built an AI assistant.
You know, we think fundamentally interfaces are going to change very rapidly with this new AI. Um, so instead of having a bunch of data and analytics and stuff, you’re trying to decipher. Why don’t you just have an AI assistant you can talk to, who explains to you the risk? So we have built that in our app.
There’s an assistant named Sam. Sam stands for Ship Shape Assisted Maintenance. It’s a cute little otter. Uh, you know, otters spend their whole life taking care of their houses. They’re cute. They hold hands when they sleep. You know, we try to make this stuff a little more friendly, a little less scary, a little more friendly.
And if you don’t understand anything going on in that whole app, any of [00:45:00] that data, you can just ask the little otter fella to help you understand it. And you can ask for what you need. So making it more of a conversational interface. I think will make it a lot more approachable. For people who might get overwhelmed with needing a PhD to decipher all the data.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Love that. Um, you, you touched on something. I want to just double click on it real quick. Um, there is a tremendous amount of loss of trust, right? In the industry. It’s like you go to a mechanic, they’re going to tell you you need more than you need. And so for contractors, it’s very hard to know who you trust.
So you’ve got kind of an Angie’s list component to this that you said you built in around the service providers. How do you vet these folks? How do I know that this is someone I can trust?
Alex Linn: Yeah, it’s a great question. So I think the first phase of these marketplaces, I want to go to Google. I want to go to Angie’s list. I’m going to go to thumb tack and find a contractor. They were really in the business of selling your data to that contractor. Their customer was the [00:46:00] contractor who wanted to be on the marketplace to get leads, um, which I think is, was, it was helpful and valuable in the market.
And we like those companies. Um, but naturally the best contractors in the market didn’t necessarily need Angie’s list to help them get a lead. They were already really good. They already had their own marketing. Well, when it comes to offering a monitoring platform and it comes to offering ongoing maintenance, It tends to be that only the best contractors who really stand behind their work want to be on our platform. So we have a sort of self selecting phenomenon where those contractors who aren’t going to answer your call after they do the project, they didn’t want to use ship shape to begin with. The contractors that use ship shape, they want to secure your trust and be your trusted provider for the long run. Now, we do have,
Dr Pedram Shojai: to show that, they want to prove that it worked and the proof’s in the pudding.
Alex Linn: right, and, and they’re trying, I mean, this lack of trust, I would say, yes, there are a lot of problems and quality [00:47:00] issues that, that homeowners see that causes the lack of trust. But I think the bigger issue is the lack of education. Homeowners just feel like they’re being sold to, I mean, contractor comes over and says, need to put 10, 000 dollars of plastic in your crawl space because of some invisible humidity that you can’t even see.
And you’re like, yeah, right, dude. Like I’ve heard this before, right. But homeowner sees data trending now that the contractors that work with us, they think it’s great. They, they’re after a more consultative sale. They want to advise the homeowner on what the homeowner needs. The reality is like you pointed out, these homes will need work.
You don’t need to oversell them or hustle them to buy something today. If they trust you and they’re going to call you. They’re going to need that work done at some point. So I think that’s, it’s important that our position is we don’t sell the data to the contractor. We are the trusted advisor to the homeowner.
Um, if the homeowner wants to request help, we will help them get a contractor. So that’s [00:48:00] one important part of how our model works differently than the old traditional marketplaces. The other,
Dr Pedram Shojai: lead, a lead exchange marketplace first so that, uh, the highest bidder gets the best visibility.
Alex Linn: right, right. We’re not selling to the highest bidder. We’re trying to deliver the best experience to the homeowner. Um, and then, you know, that that also is complemented by some quality control measures. We have, we review their Google reviews, their better Bureau, better business Bureau reviews. Uh, we review their length of time in business.
We look at their insurance certification. Um, and then, you know, that that also is complemented by some quality control measures. We have, we review their length of time in business. We look at their insurance certification. Um, and we even lean on partners of ours, um, that have already vetted their own networks.
So there are manufacturers we work with that have a trusted list of contractors. So we, we then can overlay our qualification criteria and we know that they’ve got a track record of working with someone else we work with. And then the best part is we [00:49:00] monitor their work. So if we monitor their work and they keep having more errors than someone else in our terms of service, we have the right to essentially kick them off our platform.
If they don’t uphold the quality standards
Dr Pedram Shojai: Yeah. No, I mean, this is, this is, you, you get out of line, they start talking about it at church and the community knows, like you, you behave when you’re in a community. you know, there’s a standard of care here. So no, that’s great. That’s great. I think that’s an important piece of the feedback loop that you guys have already kind of dialed in.
And I’m sure that as the thing grows, the network will grow and more, more feedback gives you better and better quality data on who’s doing better work.
Alex Linn: for the homeowner, the experience of maintaining their home, there’s no reason that there should not be an exceptional experience. If you think about the difference between an iPhone and an Android phone, you can go buy a phone that has a touch screen on it for a couple hundred bucks. There are a ton of people who spend a thousand bucks on an iPhone [00:50:00] and feel great about it. Because it’s a better experience and a better product. I think what we are trying to do is build the network of contractors that want to deliver that caliber of experience and help kind of elevate the whole industry so that it’s, it’s, uh, Encouraging everyone to need to keep up with, you know, the quality of the iPhone, which is ultimately in the homeowner’s benefit.
Dr Pedram Shojai: So just to recap, ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure, your immediate health benefits, Uh, being exposed to mold and toxins and things, obvious humidity, asthma, obvious, uh, and then the long term securing and protection of the asset, which is probably the number one asset class that you own in your retirement.
If you think you have it would be tied up in this asset, uh, energy savings. Long term short term [00:51:00] potential insurance savings long term short term and then peace of mind which is a bit and intangible but is Apparently a pretty big item when you interview people. What did I miss?
Alex Linn: I think you’re, I mean, you’re particularly dialed into this kind of a customer. I think it’s been a great conversation. Um, I’m trying to think if there’s anything else I would, I would add, um, any other questions that you think we should go into,
Dr Pedram Shojai: No, man. I mean, listen, I love the work that you’re doing. I’m a big fan of anyone who’s trying to solve big problems, right? Like you’re not out here trying to hawk gadgets. The gadget is a part of an operating system that is a feed forward loop into fixing a really big problem with our economy, with our housing, with the way we operate.
Um, and I think that’s just, that’s groovy. So I really appreciate the work that you’re doing. If you’re listening to this, um, on the podcast, [00:52:00] uh, I’ll put a link in the show notes. Um, we have a discount for my listeners for the product itself and, um, get it into the house. give me feedback on how you’re using it.
Um, again, this is a very, very small expense for getting not just the peace of mind, but the vitality and the wellness that you deserve. And again, I, I can’t overemphasize how important it is. Your home is your second skin. So if you are eating organic and doing all this crap for your health and you have not, stepped out to your second skin to secure the sanctity of that sanctuary.
You’re really missing an opportunity, not just on the wellness side, but you’re missing a big black swan event in your life, right? Like there’s a lot of risk that you’re not looking at there. And I promise it’s not that hard. I’ve done it. Um, it’s not that hard. I’m not a techie guy. It’s, it’s kind of awesome.
Alex Linn: you know, the other thing that I would [00:53:00] add, actually thinking about it is, uh, we talk about, uh, risk prevention. But there’s also just helping people do their maintenance and stay on top of all the maintenance they need to do. Helping people have a plan for what expenses might be upcoming. A lot of people move into a home, they remodel the bathroom, and there’s no money left over to replace the AC unit when it goes out two years later.
So we help people not only stay on top of the maintenance to extend all the lifespans of their equipment. But also know that, hey, that water heater is now 10 years old in your attic. And if you’re not setting aside some money to replace it, it’s going to be a lot more painful than if you know that’s coming up.
So there is a kind of proactive planning and maintenance aspect that doesn’t just depend on getting notified about a risk.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I’m gonna tell a quick story and we’ll end on that is the, the mold issue that I had in the house. We actually had sold a house. We were going to build another one and then we were renting for a [00:54:00] year while we were doing it. And so I was in someone else’s house and this problem that emerged came from a flash heater.
That got choked up because they run on gas. And so it had soot buildup and it just, the pipes got choked up and it started burping water out and onto the wall and it became mold and all this stuff. So just if this guy, you know, you buy a house, you get all this stuff, every, you know, there’s a bunch of manuals that you throw in a drawer and there’s no intelligence or alert systems.
But had this guy known that he was two and a half years behind on just a regular service of. A thing in the house that could have prevented a 000 headache and a lot of human suffering and all that. Would he have done it? Maybe, maybe, maybe so. Maybe not. I mean, people miss their dental cleanings, but that is.
Effectively, the problem that we’re trying to solve is prevention is worth a pound of cure, and this could have been so much pain averted had he had [00:55:00] an alert and just called a guy that he trusted to come over and do a 200 maintenance versus all this crap.
Alex Linn: Yep. The answer is a lot of people would do it who are not currently doing it. Would everyone do it? Maybe not. But, and how fast does that two years go by? You move into a house, they told you that your maintenance is up to date. Next thing you know, you just finished getting your furniture, you’re a year in.
By the time you turn around, you’ve been in that house for four years. And all the stuff they told you in the inspection is totally outdated. And it would have been nice to get a reminder about that. Um, as time goes on.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Could you set up an alert system and ship shape if you don’t have it already for all that? So it’s like a single source of truth for it’s like all things home on a dashboard. If you haven’t developed it, I’ll suggest a product feature, right? Like I would love to have a single place To just know my home checklist is, is looked after, right?
Alex Linn: Yeah, I would say we have almost everything, almost every appliance you could think of that requires maintenance. You can set that up and ship shape. Um, we even have a scoring model where you get a home health score for your home and [00:56:00] see. Kind of how you stack up, um, we’re adding more to it, but it is very much a whole home solution and all the critical things you need to keep, keep up with from, you know, doing a regular radon inspection and making sure you don’t have high radon levels to, you know, tracking the humidity in your attic and flushing that water heater periodically.
So the sediment doesn’t corrode it. All that stuff is already in the platform. Um, and of course there’s, there’s more, we will keep building to make it smarter and more comprehensive. But I mean, it is that single source of truth, all your appliances, all your providers, all your sensors tied into a single app.
Dr Pedram Shojai: I’m going to end on one note, um, and this is, if we’re talking about a single source of truth for the home, the reason why I’m wearing this ring right here is my friend Jeff Bland talked me into it, you know, founder of functional medicine. I’m like, man, I know when I sleep well, why do I, why do I need a ring to tell me?
And he’s like, Pedram, it’s because of the intangible [00:57:00] things that we don’t know yet. And maybe 10 years from now, we could cross correlate your cortisol levels with your heart rate variability and get really interesting data, but we wouldn’t know if we didn’t grab the data. So what if, hypothetically, you, three years from now, realize that as the humidity in your living room went up through an app that told you, There was a correlation with your heart rate variability, your sleep quality going down, and all of a sudden we start to get much better understanding of our own internal states, our health states, and all these arrays of data based on the intelligence feeding us in a way that is useful to us, right?
So I love Getting the data, reading the tea leaves and understanding what to do with it is still, you know, the problem we’re all trying to solve collectively. But to me, this is a no brainer. So Alex, I really hats off to you. I really appreciate the work that you’re doing and I’m going to continue to support it because I’m a fan.
Um, keep, keep going, man. You got me in your [00:58:00] corner. I really love the work that you’re doing.
Alex Linn: Well, thank you. And likewise, you’re doing really important work. It’s always awesome to speak with you. I love these conversations. So I’ll look forward to catching up with you more soon. And thank you for inviting me.
Dr Pedram Shojai: Thank you.
I hope you enjoyed that. I’m really excited about these new technologies that help us live more healthfully in our homes. If you are a subscriber to the urban monk academy, or if you purchase the sanctuary course. On my website. I have an extended discount for my students on shipshape and many, many other things that I recommend for the home. I think that it’s important to do the research, but then the things that I find I put there and if there’s an opportunity to pass through discounts to my students, I do so. So get the course, learn about this stuff, get a discount on this and keep your home safe for the longterm value of the asset. But also, how about the present value of your mental [00:59:00] readiness, your vitality, all the things that come from living in an environment that begets health. Let’s get that. I’ll see you in the next one.
Oh,