The 'golden age' of the smart home, with ecobee CEO Greg Fyke
GeekWire
GeekWire
4.4 • 116 Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2024
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Greg Fyke is president and CEO of ecobee, the Toronto-based smart home company known for its pioneering smart thermostat and a growing ecosystem of devices, including security systems and smart doorbells.
A former Amazon Alexa executive, he’s personally based in Seattle, exemplifying how remote work has transformed the geography of the tech industry. Fyke succeeded ecobee founder Stuart Lombard as the company's CEO last fall upon Lombard's retirement.
On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, Fyke discusses the emerging "golden age" of smart home technology; ecobee's focus on simplicity, long-term functionality, and integration across ecosystems; its competition with Amazon and Google; and its approach to automation and artificial intelligence.
Other topics include ecobee's November 2021 acquisition by Generac, and their broader focus on energy management solutions, leveraging components like home batteries, solar energy, and intelligent control systems.
- The Verge: How Ecobee is becoming the smart home company Nest should have been
- Greg Fyke on the HomeKit Insider podcast.
With GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop. Audio editing and production by Curt Milton.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | When you are looking at what eco-be is facing in the market, I mean you are competing |
| 0:05.1 | against two giants in Google and Amazon or am I sort of overstating the |
| 0:10.6 | difficulty of that? I mean what is it like to compete against those two well there's |
| 0:14.5 | certainly big companies no question of that for sure one of the the benefits we have |
| 0:19.3 | is this is our core business this is what we do This is what we you know we get up in the morning |
| 0:24.6 | we think about this all day. We go to sleep thinking about this and I think that focus and |
| 0:29.3 | attention is allowing us to I think make some really smart choices. |
| 0:34.0 | Welcome to GeekWire. |
| 0:40.0 | I'm GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop. We are coming to you from |
| 0:43.6 | Seattle where we get to report each day on what's happening around us in |
| 0:46.7 | business, technology, and innovation. What happens here matters everywhere and |
| 0:50.6 | every week on this show we get to talk about some of the most |
| 0:53.0 | interesting stories and trends in the news. I'm pleased to be joined in the |
| 0:56.6 | GeekWire offices here this week by Greg Fike. He is the president and CEO |
| 1:01.1 | of E.cobe, the Smart Home Technology Company that's been a long time pioneer in the space. |
| 1:06.7 | Greg, it's great to have you here. |
| 1:08.4 | Thanks, Todd, it's great to be here. |
| 1:09.9 | One of the reasons why we're able to meet in person is that you're actually based in |
| 1:14.8 | Seattle. EcoBISA Toronto-based company, but you get to run the company from |
| 1:19.8 | Seattle and before we jump into the ins and outs of smart home tech I'd just be curious how did a person in Seattle end up |
| 1:27.8 | running ECOB as president and CEO? Yeah, it's a great question. I do spend quite a bit of my time still in Toronto and love spending my time there. I think you know my paths crossed you know I think early on with with Stewart who was our founder and we ultimately kind of found a path to make this work, to get this started. |
| 1:47.2 | It was actually during the time period of COVID. |
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