Rishi Sharma

Founder and Podcaster

I grew up in the security industry. My earliest memories are warehouse floors stacked with cameras and cable, ride-alongs with technicians, and customers trusting us to protect what mattered most.

That experience shaped how I lead today.

Over the years I helped scale a video surveillance company from a family business into a national brand, and we achieved a successful exit. It taught me how rare durable companies are and how important it is to protect the people and culture that make them work.

Today I run NextGen Live Security, focused on live video monitoring, security systems integration, and fire life safety. We build on the foundation I was raised in, combining disciplined operations with modern technology.

Security is changing fast. Customers expect seamless monitoring, smarter analytics, and faster service. The heart of the work has not changed. It is still about people who show up, respond quickly, and keep promises. Our job is to blend both worlds. The craftsmanship of legacy operators and the precision of AI driven systems.

We focus on practical improvements that compound over time. We train technicians to master tools that reduce false alarms and improve awareness. We simplify quote to cash workflows so every install, upgrade, and service visit runs smoother. We standardize checklists and feedback loops so quality stays consistent as we grow.

I have run P and Ls and managed field teams. I have learned that great systems do not replace good people. They amplify them.

This industry raised me and I am proud to keep building in it. If you operate an integration firm, manage a monitoring center, or lead security for a facility, I would love to trade ideas and compare what is working.

Email me at Rish@Nextgenlivesecurity.com

Mentor

The Founder Institute carefully recruits 20-40 Mentors per semester, and we typically only accept Mentors that have built or led technology businesses. Our Mentors lead the weekly training sessions, and their mandate is to help our participants by sharing their experience, outlining the latest tactics, and providing critical feedback. In addition, through the Founder Institute's Shared Liquidity Pool, Mentors are strongly incentivized to help our companies after Graduation, and many have become formal advisors to our Graduate companies.

Rishi S.

True story from a security company I work with.

Customer calls in.
"Your cameras keep dropping offline. We're done."

$4,200 a month in RMR. Gone.

The team ran diagnostics.
Cameras were fine.
NVR was fine.
Software was fine.

The building's Wi-Fi was garbage.

They installed six IP cameras
and a cloud access control system
on a network held together
by an $80 consumer router
in a utility closet.

And nobody thought to check that
before the install.

This happens ALL the time.

We sell cloud-connected everything now.
IP cameras. Smart locks. Remote monitoring.
All of it running over networks
we never even look at.

One integrator I know started adding
a basic structured network install
to every single proposal.

Runs about $800 to $1,200 extra per job.
Customers barely push back on it.

Service calls dropped.
Churn dropped.
Margins went up.

Because the stuff they installed
actually worked the way it was supposed to.

If you're still treating the network
as "the customer's responsibility,"
I'd rethink that.

It's your name on the system
when it stops working.

#SecurityIntegration #PhysicalSecurity #RMR #SecurityBusiness #MindfulCapital

From Video Surveillance Exit to NextGen Live Security | Helping Founders Transition with Care & Unlock Growth in Physical Security

Your sales team is busy.

But busy doing what?

I've watched reps make 50 calls a day in the security industry.
Tons of demos. Tons of proposals.

And still lose deals they should have won.
Not because the product was wrong.

Because they pitched features to someone who couldn't sign a check.
Here's what nobody trains sales teams on:

How businesses actually work.

Where budgets come from. Who controls the money. The difference between capital spend and operating spend.

Most reps are trained as order takers.
They wait for a request. Quote a price. Hope it closes.

That's not selling. That's clerking.

The best reps I've seen think like operators.
They ask: "Is this funded?"

They ask: "Who else needs to say yes?"
They ask: "Does this fit your capital plan or your monthly budget?"

That one question changes everything.

Because when you understand how money moves inside a company, you stop chasing bad deals.
Your pipeline gets cleaner. Your close rate goes up. Your forecast stops lying to you.

And here's the real shift:
Stop selling projects. Start selling recurring revenue.

The install isn't the finish line. It's the onboarding.

Train your team to think like business people — not product pushers.

Business literacy is the most underrated competitive advantage in sales.

What's the one thing you wish your sales team understood about how companies actually buy?

The biggest threat to your central station isn't competition.

It's your false alarm volume quietly burning out your best operators.

One central station VP recently said 80% of their outbound alarm calls go unanswered. I believe it. I spent years listening to operators dial number after number into voicemail. Same script. Same dead air. Same look on their face by hour six.

We treated it like weather. Just something you dealt with.

But here's what that "weather" actually costs you.

Your best operators quit inside three months because they spend entire shifts chasing noise instead of handling real emergencies.

Municipalities start issuing fines because your false dispatch rate is out of control.

Clients stop picking up because they've been conditioned to assume every call is another false alarm.

It's a flywheel spinning in the wrong direction.

The central stations getting ahead of this aren't hiring more people. They're using conversational AI to triage the noise before it ever reaches a human. 

False alarms get filtered. Systems get put on test. Dispatches happen without an operator playing phone tag for twenty minutes.

This isn't about replacing your team. It's about protecting them.

Every minute your best operator spends chasing a false alarm is a minute they're not on a real one.

AI doesn't make operators unnecessary. It makes the job survivable.

Most businesses are using AI to do the same work cheaper.

Faster proposals. Fewer callbacks. Leaner teams.

Real gains. But here is the problem: your competitor bought the same tools last Tuesday.

When everyone rows harder, nobody pulls ahead. Margins compress. The customer captures all the value.

The businesses I keep watching are doing something different. They are using AI to change what the customer is buying. Guarantees. Bundled outcomes. Pricing tied to results instead of hours.

That is not an efficiency play. That is a positioning play.

In this week's Mindful Capital, I break down the difference between rowing and sailing, why the market misprices efficiency, and where pricing power actually comes from.

If you are an owner running a service business, this one is for you.

#AI #SmallBusiness #PricingStrategy #EntrepreneurshipThroughAcquisition #MindfulCapital

You cut headcount. Automated proposals. Shaved two days off your quoting cycle. Then a prospect tells you they got a lower bid from the outfit down th

Open article: Sailing vs. Rowing: How AI Creates Pricing Power, Not Just Cost Savings by Rishi Sharma • 5 min read

Sailing vs. Rowing: How AI Creates Pricing Power, Not Just Cost Savings

The security industry talks about RMR the way real estate talks about cap rates. Everyone knows the number. Few understand the mechanics underneath.

RMR is not a business model. It's a moat, if you build it right.

Most operators stop at contractual switching costs: multi-year agreements, monitoring contracts, maintenance terms. That's layer one. It gets you in the door but won't keep competitors out.

Layer two is operational. Manage credentials, firmware updates, compliance logs, remote diagnostics. Switching vendors now means real operational disruption, not just a contract penalty.

Layer three is data. Every incident, service call, and site record builds an intelligence edge your replacement won't have. The more you process, the harder you are to displace.

This is what separates a low-margin integrator from an infrastructure partner with real pricing power.

SDM reports the range of RMR models has never been broader: cloud, subscription, managed services. SIA's 2026 Megatrends puts AI-driven managed services at the top of the transformation list.

The risk: treating RMR as a billing cadence without building the workflow depth behind it.

Revenue recurs on a schedule. Moats hold because they're earned.

Pop quiz for security integrators:

When was the last time you updated firmware
on a customer's NVR?

Or changed the default password
on their IP cameras?

Or put their security devices
on a separate VLAN from the office network?

If you're being honest, the answer
for most companies is "never."

And that's a problem
that's about to get really expensive.

Every IP camera you install
is basically a small computer
sitting on someone's network.

Every cloud-connected door controller
is an access point.

Not just for people walking through the door.
For anyone on the internet.

We sell "security" for a living.
But most of us don't secure
the systems we install.

I think the next few years
are going to force this conversation.

Insurance carriers are already starting
to ask questions about connected devices.
Customers are going to expect
cyber hygiene as part of the package.
Not as a premium add-on. As standard.

The integrators who figure this out now
get to set the terms.

The ones who wait
get to explain to a customer
why their "secure" building
got breached through a camera
with the password still set to admin/admin.

Where does your company stand on this?
Honestly want to know.

#SecurityIndustry #Cybersecurity #PhysicalSecurity #VideoSurveillance #MindfulCapital

I keep having the same conversation
with security company owners.

"We need to grow. We need to add trucks.
We need to start acquiring."

Okay. Cool.

What's your gross margin
on your top 10 accounts?

"...I'd have to check."

That's the problem right there.

Not the lack of growth.
The lack of knowing your own numbers.

I've looked inside a lot of these businesses now.
The pattern is always the same.

The ones growing the fastest?
They spent a year or two doing boring stuff first.

Got out of the truck themselves.
Started reviewing cash flow weekly, not quarterly.
Wrote down how things actually get done
(instead of keeping it all in their head).
Hired to a system instead of hiring to put out fires.

THEN they grew.

The ones who skipped all that
and went straight to "let's double revenue"?

They're the ones calling me stressed out of their minds
wondering why nothing works
even though they're busier than ever.

Busy and profitable are not the same thing.

What did you skip?
Genuinely curious. I've got my own list.

#SecurityIndustry #SmallBusiness #Entrepreneurship #MindfulCapital

Most people in security services are chasing the big contract. The whale account. The game changing partnership.

I get it. We did the same thing in my family's business early on.

But the thing that actually got us onto the Inc. 5000 list multiple times wasn't one big win. It was a pile of small ones nobody wanted to talk about at dinner.

Shaving two minutes off a dispatch workflow. Fixing an onboarding checklist that hadn't been touched in five years. Replacing a chain of back-and-forth emails with one automation that ran while we slept.

None of it was exciting. All of it compounded.

One small fix saves a few hours a week. Roll that out across forty client sites, fifty weeks a year, and you're looking at thousands of dollars recovered from thin air. Stack ten of those fixes and suddenly your "boring" ops improvements are doing more for your margins than that whale account you spent six months chasing.

This is what I think about constantly now as we build NextGen Live Security. The gap between a good security company and a great one isn't vision or culture or some proprietary technology.

It's whether the team has the discipline to make the business 1% less clunky every single week. To actually fix the bottleneck instead of working around it for the fourth year in a row.

Compounding isn't magic. It's math. And most operators leave it on the table because the work isn't glamorous enough to post about.

Culture isn't a value on a wall.

It's what happens every Monday at 9am.

As an operator and investor in the security industry, I've talked to a lot of companies.

Alarm shops. Integrators. Monitoring centers.

The fast ones all have something in common.
It's not better techs. It's not more trucks.

It's rituals.

Named, repeatable habits the whole team knows by heart.

The best security companies I've observed do things like:

→ Monday morning standups. Review every open install, every stuck service ticket, every at-risk RMR account. Start the week knowing where the fires are.
→ Friday ride-alongs. Owners or managers ride with a tech once a month. You learn more in one truck ride than ten reports.
→ Weekly pipeline scrubs. Sales and ops in the same room. Kill the dead deals. Move the real ones forward.
→ Quarterly "what broke" reviews. Not blame sessions. Honest looks at what failed — a lost customer, a bad install, a missed renewal. Then fix the process so it doesn't happen again.

I learned this concept from Shishir Mehrotra.

He says you can judge a company by the quality of its rituals.
I believe that.

Because most companies have meetings.
Great companies have rituals.

One drains energy. The other compounds it.

The security companies that scale don't do it by accident.
They built the machine on purpose.

What's one ritual that keeps your team sharp?

I picked up John Malone's memoir expecting a standard business book.

It wrecked me in the best way.

Not because of the numbers (though taking a near-bankrupt company to a $48B exit is wild). But because the frameworks he used to build the largest cable empire in America map almost perfectly onto the security industry I work in every day.

Malone looked at a fragmented, subscription-driven, infrastructure-heavy industry and saw a compounding machine. He invented EBITDA. He built an acquisition flywheel. He turned distribution into leverage. He structured every deal so the downside was survivable and the upside was enormous.

The security industry is sitting on the same kind of opportunity right now.

I wrote a deep-dive for Mindful Capital breaking down the mental models from the book and how they apply to alarm dealers, central stations, and integrators.
If you're in the security space, or any fragmented recurring-revenue industry, I think this one's worth 15 minutes.

#MindfulCapital #SecurityIndustry #EntrepreneurshipThroughAcquisition #JohnMalone #AlarmIndustry

I just finished reading John Malone's memoir. The playbook he used to build the largest cable empire in American history maps almost perfectly onto th

Open article: What John Malone's Cable Empire Teaches Us About the Future of the Security Industry by Rishi Sharma • 16 min read

What John Malone's Cable Empire Teaches Us About the Future of the Security Industry

57% of employees are using personal AI accounts for work right now.
One in three of them admit to putting sensitive company data into those tools.

That's not a Gartner prediction. That's a Gartner survey from late 2025.
It already happened.

So if you run a small or mid-size business and you haven't figured out your AI governance policy yet, your employees figured it out for you.

They're using ChatGPT on their phone to draft proposals, answer customer emails, summarize internal docs.

Nobody asked permission. Nobody checked if it was safe. They just did it.
Gartner just dropped their top cybersecurity trends for 2026.

Two of the biggest: agentic AI creating new attack surfaces, and shadow AI usage running ahead of any company policy.

For SMB owners, this is not a "we'll get to it" problem.

Your team is feeding client data into tools you didn't approve on networks you don't control.

You don't need a 50-page AI policy.

Start with three questions:

What tools are people actually using? What data is going into them? Who decides what's okay and what's not?

If nobody in your company can answer those three questions today,
that's your Monday morning priority.

What's your AI policy look like right now? Or is it the "don't ask, don't tell" 
approach?

Curious how other SMB owners are handling this.

#AI #Cybersecurity #SmallBusiness #SMB #MindfulCapital

I spend a lot of time in the remote guarding space so I figured I'd share what I'm actually seeing in 2026.

The video surveillance market hit $71.6B globally this year. Growing at 10.6% CAGR.

The remote video monitoring segment alone is on pace to reach $8.2B by 2033 at a 13.2% clip.

The broader manned guarding market? It jumped $6.5B in a single year from 2025 to 2026.

But the growth isn't coming from hiring more guards.

Guard turnover still sits between 100% and 300% annually. The BLS projects 162,000 openings every year and almost all of that is replacement. People leave. Constantly.

That's the tailwind for remote guarding.

One operator with AI-powered analytics can monitor 30+ sites at once. Edge cameras now run 30 trillion operations per second on the device itself. 

Bandwidth drops 70%.

The big money is moving.

GardaWorld closed on Stealth Monitoring. Folded it into ECAM. That's a $100M+ recurring revenue business built entirely on watching other people's cameras.

SMEs are the fastest-growing adopter segment at 12.8% CAGR as cloud platforms kill the upfront hardware cost.

Now the headwinds.

Customer trust in "no boots on the ground" is still a problem.

Internet reliability at remote sites kills the model before it starts.
Response time without physical presence is a real concern for high-risk sites.

And regulatory frameworks haven't caught up to the tech.
This market doubled in value in under 5 years.

If you're an integrator or operator and you haven't figured out where remote guarding fits in your business, someone else in your market already has.

What are you seeing? Growing demand or still a tough sell locally?

#RemoteGuarding #SecurityIndustry #PhysicalSecurity #VideoSurveillance #MindfulCapital

I build AI driven off market deal sourcing engines for private equity firms, family offices, and holding companies - so they can deploy capital faster, avoid auctions, and acquire at rational valuations.

My journey
• 2021 — Started my first business from my parents’ bedroom at 17
• 2022 — Built my first company past $2M helping online businesses scale with paid media
• 2023 — Founded Customers on Command, specializing in performance-driven acquisition systems
• 2024 — Scaled to a $2.5M run rate in 12 months, fully bootstrapped
• 2025 — Merged with an experienced deal sourcing team to build a nationwide, AI powered deal flow platform for PE firms and family offices

What I’ve achieved
• Scaled 10+ businesses past eight figures using modern digital growth systems
• Built proprietary off market deal sourcing engines that generate direct, pre-qualified seller conversations
• Helped investment groups replace broker dependency with predictable, data-driven deal flow

If you want to learn how AI + digital acquisition systems can create a consistent pipeline of off market opportunities - without broker fees or auction pressure - follow along.

Ciaran Houlihan

After 200+ conversations with PE firms the last couple months, I keep hearing the SAME frustration...

"We're tired of competing with 20 other buyers on every deal."

Here's why broker dependency is killing your deal flow.

Let's be honest. The traditional deal sourcing process is broken. You know the drill:

1. A broker calls with a deal.
2. You're one of 10-20 buyers in a crowded room.
3. The auction drives up the price.
4. You either overpay or walk away empty handed.

I spoke with a blue collar PE firm recently. They do great deals in the $2M-$8M EBITDA range (roads, concrete, bridges, fiber optics). Solid business. But every single deal comes through a broker.

That means:

• Competitive auctions
• Higher prices
• Zero negotiating leverage

What do these firms really want? Proprietary deal flow. Deals before they hit the market. Sellers who aren't talking to 20 other buyers.

The core problem? Most PE firms don't have a system to source off market deals. They're stuck in the broker cycle.

We built a marketing system that consistently generates 80+ qualified seller calls per month for one of our partners. This isn't cold calling; it's smart marketing spend that brings in business owners actively exploring a sale.

These aren't sellers on the market. They're not talking to brokers. They're responding to targeted ads and self educating through our process. By the time they schedule a call, they're already framed for a serious conversation.

The true way to break broker dependency and build your own deal flow machine is simple:

1. Build a system that reaches sellers *before* brokers do.
2. Use performance marketing (not outbound cold outreach).
3. Let sellers self educate and self schedule.
4. Engage them early in their decision process.

Deal flow is king. And the firms that control their own deal flow? They win.

Helping Private Equity Firms & Family Offices Accelerate Off Market Deal Sourcing.

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