The intervention guy
Most security companies sell you a recording of the worst night of your life. Dave Selinger sells the moment a stranger's voice comes out of the camera and tells the intruder to leave.
That is the whole idea behind Deep Sentinel, the Pleasanton, California company Selinger co-founded in 2016 and still runs as CEO. AI watches the live video. The instant it spots something that looks wrong, a trained human guard is patched in, often within seconds, talking through a speaker and calling police if needed. The company's line is blunt: stop crime before it happens, not after. It claims to intervene in more than 4,000 crimes a month.
It is a strange second act for a man whose first fortune came from figuring out which sweater you might buy next. But pull the thread and the logic is consistent. Selinger has spent his entire career turning piles of data into a decision made in real time. At Amazon it was a product recommendation. At Deep Sentinel it is whether the person in your side yard at 2 a.m. is a neighbor or a problem.
He grew up in Merlin, a speck of a town in southern Oregon near Grants Pass. At six he was handed a Leading Edge Model D computer and spent his hours modeling houses in AutoCAD. As a kid he ran a small arbitrage hustle, buying pink erasers and pens and reselling them to classmates at a markup, until unpaid invoices and a squabbling partner taught him what a bad balance sheet feels like. He has said the lesson stuck: take a risk only if the payoff is enormous or the passion is real.
Stanford took him seven years, because he kept leaving. He dropped out during the dot-com boom to chase startups, and somewhere in there helped launch MyTwoFrontTeeth.org, a group that delivers holiday gifts to families who need them. He finally collected his computer science degree in 2003 and walked straight into the most formative job of his life.
Jeff Bezos hired him out of college. Within a week Selinger was sitting with Bezos for regular feedback on his work, an access most employees never get. When his manager was fired, Bezos handed the recent graduate the entire division. Selinger and his team dug into Amazon's data and built systems that, by his account, helped grow the company's annual profit by more than $50 million and produced a stack of patents. One of those efforts became the seed of what is now Amazon Advertising, a multi-billion-dollar business.
He did not stay long. In 2004 he co-founded Redfin and became its first chief technology officer, helping build what is now a multi-billion-dollar real estate brokerage. A brief 2005 stint at Overstock.com followed, where he untangled a stalled ERP project and pointed the analytics team at upsell and cross-sell. Then, in 2006, he started the company that made his name.