Writing

Today marks exactly one year since I started working on AccessGrid full time. I wanted to reflect on what I’ve learned from one year in a new industry. I’ve worked in a hand full of industries over my life; e-learning, affiliate marketing, e-commerce, payments & blockchain. This post is really just a diff of access control to my prior experiences. Mostly for myself, but maybe for someone else considering entering this industry from the outside.

By far the biggest and most notable difference in access control is that this industry moves at a snails pace compared to every single industry I’ve worked in. Compared to crypto/blockchain access control moves at the literal pace of time - meaning it flows at the slowest possible rhythm that allows it to continue to exist. Compared to even payments which is probably more critical infrastructure for most people, access control is still very slow. I’ve seen companies in payments ship new products in a matter of a month or so for v1’s. Access control companies roll out product updates (not even new products!) once every six months or so. Insane.

The number of times I’ve emailed people to receive a “out of office” reply is absolutely remarkable. If you find yourself in any given August trying to actually get anything done, do not fret, your prospects are not ghosting you - they’re ghosting everyone! Their customers, partners, vendors and more. I verified this by having customers and partners email into access control companies when I wasn’t getting responses & the same thing happened, weeks to months before a response. In early July I had one potential customer tell me they were sure we were going to move forward, but only after they returned from vacation on September 3rd.

I think this slowness is largely a moat, or at least the industry believes it to be a moat. I see it as a structural weakness. The rest of the world does not wait weeks or months for things and servicing customers and partners on a reasonably fast timeline will be expected here sooner or later. It’s just a matter of a competitor offering the convenience people have come to expect elsewhere, in this industry.

Of course, not every company is slow. Surprisingly, the market leader who is like 40 years entrenched has a culture of shipping & moving fast. Which brings me to my next point: when you look at the market from a high level, it mostly reflects the activity on the ground level. HID is the leader in the space because they are proactive, investing in partners and moving quickly. Salto maintains market presence because the engineering team strongly considers innovative solutions. The players with smaller, more stagnant, market share are moving only as needed. The upstarts gaining double digit yearly growth are moving as fast as they can. One important note here is that a smaller player is still doing tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year.

Largely it’s an efficient market.

This is probably the strangest thing about this market. I have never been in an industry where customers want a thing and the thing exists but the supply and the demand cannot be connected efficiently.

I’ve been here working on Apple and Google wallet credentials that open doors because I was able to see demand. The demand exists directly at the end user level; tiny 100 person organizations up to 100,000 employee companies. Innovative companies, luxury brands, hotels, multi-family buildings, corporations and more. I have spoken to them all. They all want the ability for their people to get in with just a phone - but there is a large chasm / hole in the market.

The hole is huge, it consists of a hand full of players that distort incentives to serve these customers what they want. Installers, specifiers, general contractors, integrators, software providers all have a role to play in stretching the gap. The larger hardware manufacturers  (HID, Allegion, Salto, etc) already have some form of wallet credentials but crossing the chasm sounds impossible to them.

Which brings me to my next point…

n this industry, it really does seem that narratives are the only thing that matter. In other industries I have seen people try to use narratives to drive ideas forward, but ultimately only customer behavior mattered - for example in blockchain there was a narrative about how account abstraction was going to change everything about how ethereum handled transactions. I watched companies pour millions of dollars into product development - only to realize the user behavior was not coming. The opposite also happens, in e-commerce there was relatively little attention paid to mobile in the early 2010’s but the surge of mobile traffic left every e-commerce player with no choice but to build mobile friendly websites & in some cases, apps.

In access control - this is inverted; companies only seem to move to if there is some kind of industry consensus that this “thing” is true, and not only true, but true in every way they hope it to be true. The narratives also cut the other way, you can experience complete inertia if the prevailing narrative is that this “thing” doesn’t work. For instance, I have seen CEOs of very large access control companies say things like “Mobile wallet credentials are too expensive for our customer base” when I have first hand knowledge of at least half a dozen of their customers, large and small, want wallet credentials and would pay way more than they think. I have heard about how companies have sold huge amounts of mobile wallet enabled readers but failed to activate the customers with those readers in any meaningful way - reaching the faulty conclusion that mobile wallet credentials are too expensive.

I say all of this as a new entrant to an established industry with deeply entrenched players. I have basically zero context about what happened before I got here, I’m only reporting on the ground from what I can observe.

With that said, I am excited about the opportunity to try help the world get what it wants from this industry. Whether the industry likes it or not. 😎