Jeff Lawson explored building a GPS item tracker in 2000
Jeff Lawson · Twilio: Jeff Lawson · Apr 3, 2023 · at 25:16
Twilio founder Jeff Lawson describes brainstorming startup concepts in winter 2000, including an early predecessor to item-tracking devices like Tile and AirTags.
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“We said, well, if you're always losing your keys or your car or your whatever, couldn't we put a GPS chip and a, like a pager radio Into a small package and let you just keep track of where things are. And this was in 2000. Called the thing locator. And so we did a bunch of research and what we found was that the power requirements of both of these things, GPS and the pager network would be the form factor of this thing would be pretty large. And so like you wouldn't put it on your key chain.”
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