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[upbeat jazz music] ♪ ♪ - Hello.

This is John Harmon, founder, president, and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey, just grateful that you're here today on "Pathway to Success."

Our guest today, you know, we're living in an environment today where innovation and technology is just disrupting society.

And it's a great thing.

Competition, more efficiency.

We're delighted to have Derek Peterson, the founder and CEO of Soter Technologies, here.

And so, Derek, let's just start telling us just a little bit about Soter Technologies.

- Thank you so much, John.

It's a pleasure to be here.

I'm really excited to talk to you and have this conversation.

Soter Technologies-- and I'll back you up a bit.

If you know anything about Greek mythology, Soter Technologies comes from the Greek god Soteria, which is the God of Safety.

So what we like to do at Soter Technologies is make environmental sensors and devices to keep people safe, primarily focused on the K-12 education space.

We like to keep our young students safe as they go to school.

- So that's a good start.

But now, let's go back.

Let's get to know you, a little bit about your background, your upbringing, education, and we'll go from there to just find out how, you know, that light bulb came on and said, hey, technology is the route for you.

- That's a good question, John, but then we have to go way back because I'm getting up in the years there.

So I grew up in a town called Bay Shore, New York.

And that's in Long Island.

And I graduated from Bay Shore High School and then went on to college at Stony Brook University.

But back in high school, I found my love for technology in 11th grade when a guidance counselor asked me, you know, you should probably take this computer course, because I was really thinking I was going to go to college to go study medicine and go off to become a pediatrician.

So I took a computer class, and I fell in love with it.

And next thing you know, I find myself writing software every night without even having a floppy drive-- a floppy drive, now, to save my work, or a hard drive.

I just continued every morning, rewriting the same program all over again, and keep doing that.

And lo and behold-- I kind of date myself-- back in the '80s, there was thing called breakdancing.

And I wrote the world's first breakdancing program on the computer.

And therefore, you know, they stopped the school, had a school assembly just to see my little application of a little character breakdancing on the screen.

Everybody thought it was a novel idea.

I was written up in all the newspapers-- the local newspaper-- when I was a kid, called--deemed the computer whiz.

- Wow.

- So therefore, I went on to school thinking, now, I like computers.

Let me go off to Stony Brook University and study computer science, where I got a degree in computer science and applied math.

Stony Brook University is a great university.

And the reason why I went to that university is because I had a-- my aunt was actually running the EOP program there.

And at the time, I graduated high school when I was 16 years old.

And so therefore, my parents wanted somebody to keep an eye on me, per se, because I'm going to college so young.

- As a young man growing up who had a significant amount of intellectual capacity and bandwidth, I'm sure that was not really embraced by everyone at school.

And oftentimes, kids that fit that description are often bullied.

Did you experience that?

- Growing up in my town, I actually graduated high school the shortest kid in my graduating class.

I graduated about 5'1", weighing 110 pounds.

And when the football players and basketball players called out "wedgie time," they came to look for Derek Peterson.

- Oh, wow.

- I remember distinctly after eighth grade music class, there was a young man-- I won't mention his name-- but he would come and choke me and my best friend, lift us up our feet each one in one hand, and just kind of raise us up in the air until we said, "Mother, may I?"

And so then therefore, my father instructed me that you know what you need to do?

You need to make the biggest guys in the school your best friends.

And so that's what I did, encompassing the biggest guys in the school to be my best friends.

And eventually, they became my bodyguard.

And also, another thing going through high school, being the shortest kid in the graduating class and still being athletic, I was never able to make the high school basketball team.

So you imagine how I got picked on for that.

That you go out and try for the basketball team.

And I have my mother and my father.

They're rooting me on during tryouts.

- Wow.

- And then the next day, I go into the boys' locker room to see if my name is on the coach's glass door to look for my name.

And I'm getting through the crowd of guys there.

And all of a sudden, I hear in the background, "Hey, Peterson, you got cut."

Which then led me to continue to deep dive-- go deeper into my books and my studies and so forth.

And also in that same time, I'm battling-- do I want to study my studies and study my books, or do I want to try and be "street and hood" and hang out with the gangs, and be a tough guy?

But fortunately, I did have-- I was raised with both parents, and they did instill with me good behavior and good manners and so forth.

I was able to always find myself out of trouble and get back home when things went down.

- You chose to stay focused and yield to your more favorable angels, if you will.

And now, here you are today.

So professionally, who did you go to work for?

And why did you choose that initial company?

Or why did they choose you?

- So let me just take a pause at Stony Brook University because, remember, so going to Stony Brook University, I was still 5'1", maybe 5'2" at the time.

But then guess what happened?

I drank my milk, and I grew a foot in a year.

And then therefore, I was able to try out for the Stony Brook basketball team.

Although they were Division III, I was able to walk on to the team and play one year.

However, due to my studies, again-- and when you going to away games, I can't study computers on the bus because there was no laptop.

There was no internet, no nothing.

So I ended up only playing one year.

And then eventually, I did graduate college in four years with two degrees.

And then I went on to work for a small company called MicroVision.

And I was their junior programmer, and I was writing tax software.

So I learned a lot about accounting and writing tax software.

Believe it or not, accountants used to call us up, and call me up specifically, to ask them to ask my advice on how to do taxes for their own clients.

- Wow.

- So I got really good at understanding all the tax laws because I had the program the tax laws into the computer.

And so therefore, I'm, like, starting my own entrepreneurial business there.

I'm thinking, wait, you're asking me about tax laws and all this information.

Why don't I start doing taxes for people?

So on the side, I would do taxes on the weekends for people because I did all the work-- or I was already doing it all.

So I left MicroVision because my boss was challenging me, which is more important to me, my religion or working?

And he challenged me one day in the break area because they wanted me to work extra hours during the tax season, and especially work on Sundays.

I thought, I needed to go to church on Sundays.

- Amen.

- And so therefore, he asked me, he challenged me, which is more important, the job which I pay you money, or your so-called religion?

I said, well, you're gonna lose every time.

God is much more important to me than any money you could ever pay me.

- [laughs] - And therefore, the next week I was fired.

I didn't get discouraged by that, because I know God always has a plan and works everything out for me.

- Mm-hmm.

- I saw an ad in the paper.

Remember, ads in paper, they don't do that anymore, right?

- Right.

- I saw an ad in the paper.

And it was a job at Stony Brook University at the School of Medicine to run the IT department.

And at this time, I knew nothing about networks.

Networks are just starting.

And it was just like, what is a network?

I walked into the School of Medicine, met with the dean, and said, "I'm the right guy for the job."

And praise God, he hired me on the spot.

They gave me an office.

And for the next two weeks, I bought books and books and locked myself in that room and studied, and studied, studied until I figured out everything I needed to do to get this job done.

And I was very successful at that point.

- You established Soter Technologies.

At the opening, you shared what that name meant.

But why did you go off and start your own enterprise?

- So let me-- that's a great question.

I'll tell you-- I'll get to how I got to Soter.

But first, let me just take you back at Stony Brook University-- the School of Medicine where I was the IT instructor-- IT director.

I left that post to go work for a company called Symbol Technologies.

And Symbol Technologies invented the world's first barcode and did all the barcode readers.

And I started out there running their engineering IT group.

And then over time, that persisted.

I was there for 16 years and eventually left Symbol Technologies as the VP of engineering and having hundreds of people reporting to me.

And one of the reasons why I left is because now I had enough experience under my belt that I thought, "I can do this on my own.

I can grow my own business."

And so in doing so, I left that post and started a company called Computers by Design.

And in Computers by Design, what we did is, we created library software to keep public computers safe from being destroyed.

I invented, also, the first machines or coin-operated machines that charge people for printing when you're at the public computer.

We were also able to charge people for time on that computer when they're using the machine.

And we were also able to make sure that PC stayed safe so you couldn't destroy the PC.

And at that time, we had roughly amassed about 3,000 customers, and I had about 30 employees doing that.

I eventually sold that business to my partner and then joined forces with another colleague of mine from my ex-job, Symbol Technologies, and we formed the company called Intelligent Product Solutions, IPS.

And they brought me on to help grow the business with them.

And I was managing the software group.

And then therefore, we grew that business from roughly 3 guys to about 110 guys and gals.

And we had offices across the country.

And what our primary business was, was we were engineering services.

So we had teams of mechanical engineers, software engineers, industrial designers, electrical engineers, and so forth.

Basically, we were the hired guns to make any product you possibly wanted to make.

For example, we were brought in to help redesign the airport body scanner for a company called L3.

So that body scanner where you put your hands over your heads as you walk through security, we were the team that actually redesigned that for L3.

We worked on various projects for Google, Verizon.

We were there for eight years.

Eventually, I said, "You know, guys, I need to leave.

"I want to start something different and get back into making products."

And therefore, I formed a company called Digital Fly.

And what Digital Fly did, we actually were doing social media monitoring.

So we were actually looking for threats against students and adults focusing on teachers in a school atmosphere.

So if somebody made a post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and so forth, we would look for these threats and then send the school principal and security resource officer a text message and an alert saying there's a possible threat against this student or this teacher or the building infrastructure, and so forth.

- So let us take a break here.

I mean, it appears to me that you've made or have been involved in everything that we use every day.

You're talking about the barcode, you know, for inventory, point of sales transactions.

So we're going to take a break here on "Pathway to Success" with our guest, Derek Peterson.

We'll be back in a moment.

announcer: The African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey is your pathway to success.

We encourage you to visit our website at www.aaccnj.com or call us at 609-571-1620.

We are your strategic partner for success.

- Welcome back to "Pathway to Success."

I'm your host, John Harmon, founder, president, and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

Derek Peterson really found his pathway to success and continues to build upon it each and every day.

Then you founded Soter Technology.

Talk about that company and some of the products that you created through this vehicle.

- OK, John.

Thank you so much.

With Soter Technologies, our primary focus is, how do we keep people safe?

And all of our products are in that venue.

Our first product we released was a product called FlySense.

And what FlySense is, is the world's first patented vape and bullying detector.

So what this device is able to do is able to listen to sound anomalies at a decibel level, picking up on the human voice frequency to understand when there's potential bullying or aggressive behavior in locations where you can't place cameras, which is typically bathrooms and/or locker rooms.

- Wow.

- And so imagine now we can pick up the sound of possibly the bullying going on and send a text message and/or an email message or in-app notification to a principal a teacher or a security resource officer.

Then in 2017, schools asked us, "We've got this vaping problem that's coming up.

Can you help us with that?"

And the nature of an engineer is to solve a problem.

And so I went back to the labs again and said, how do we solve this problem that people are saying-- vaping-- knowing that smoke detectors can't pick up on the vape?

And we invented the world's first vape detector.

And we put that same technology into the same sensor that was doing the bullying detection and released our first device called the FS200.

And in doing so, and I became the subject matter expert on anti-vaping and how to help schools keep their kids safe in bathrooms and locker rooms and in places you can't traditionally put cameras.

Going a little further, in 2020-- we all know what happened in 2020-- there was the--unfortunately, we experienced that pandemic.

And wanting to do something to give back to the world, how do I help the world stay safe?

We created or invented the world's first human health body scanner that we call SymptomSense.

So we would scan for respiration rate, heart rate.

We would scan for also blood oxidation level, and then also do temperature, and then we also were able to throw in height and weight also.

And therefore, we give you the highest degree of confidence when somebody walks into a built structure, they were safe, not having COVID.

And with SymptomSense, we were able to sell that into some of the most iconic places in the world.

And that was all during the COVID time and so forth, and eventually, schools came back into session, and we went back into helping schools stay safe.

And in doing so, we've come up with another product of ours.

And that product we called Juno AI.

- Wow.

- And what Juno AI is, it's a tool that overlays on an existing school camera infrastructure.

And with that, we deal with artificial intelligence.

We're able to help the school understand when there's a potential fight, because we do fight recognition or crowd recognition, and it will send an alert to schools when we see a fight beginning to happen.

We're also able to understand six emotional states of students.

So imagine this now.

We're able to continually to look at faces as kids coming into the building, looking for that student that was happy for three weeks, and all of a sudden, now that student is, for some reason, sad or angry.

When that student now is turning angry, we now can therefore send the principal a text message or an alert.

You may want to talk to Johnny or Jill or whoever that person is and see if anything's going on.

Is anything troubling this person?

We're just trying to give the school one more piece of information to help them understand the particular mindset of a student before they do something heinous into the school, which you see happening time and time again in the United States.

- You know, given your work with students and people in general, your thoughts about facial recognition in the context of what you do?

- One of our main focus as a company is to make sure we keep-- privacy is of the utmost concern to us.

Remember, I told you earlier we're putting devices in bathrooms.

So therefore, I know we can't have microphones or cameras in bathrooms.

And same thing with Juno AI.

We're not doing facial recognition.

We understand the face.

When we see the face, that face becomes then a serial number into a database.

And so the next day when that student comes into the school, we can look at the face, match it back up to a serial number.

And we don't understand the actual image of the student.

- Wow.

- If there is an alert, and there's a problem we see, we then let the principal-- we tell the principal to go back to the camera at this day in this period of time within a 10-minute time frame, and you want to look for the students there.

And that's the most clues we're going to give the principal at that point.

But we're not going to identify any student whatsoever.

- So you've done all this great stuff.

In terms of a legacy, what have you done to encourage others to pursue technology as a career?

- I go into local high schools, and I lecture on STEM.

I created a scholarship under my father's name called the Lewis M. Peterson Technical Scholarship.

And I offer that to-- at Stony Brook University.

I've created an entrepreneurship program in conjunction with Stony Brook University called the Wolfie Tank.

The Wolfie is their mascot.

I've also done the same thing now with SUNY Old Westbury, and we call it the Panther Tank 'cause the panther's their mascot.

What it is, is a takeoff of the "Shark Tank," where we have a panel of judges and we judge the students on their entrepreneurial goals.

- I got introduced to this ChatGPT.

Talk about it-- its ability to influence society, but also some potential adverse implications.

- ChatGPT is an AI tool that's pretty much been out there analyzing and collecting data on all of us and different technology topics for many years now.

And so it's an artificial intelligence tool which then can help you as a student-- students watching this-- write papers, or in business, create marketing plans, create brochures for you, give you all the text that you can ever imagine.

And it's actually fairly good, I mean, in the text that it's creating.

So it's a wonderful tool in that sense, John.

- So in essence, it's taking someone doing your homework to a whole nother level?

- Or--but I like to think of it-- taking what you're writing as a marketing plan, or as a brochure, or a paper to another level.

It should be used as an assistant, not as your main source of information.

- You know, you work all the time.

And people ask me this question I'm going to ask you.

You know, what do you do for fun?

- That's a great question.

So what I do for fun is by day or early day, I'm actually a gym rat.

I'm at the gym every morning at 5:00 AM going at it.

And what I like to do for fun is, I'm a multi-finisher Ironman triathlete, competitor.

With an Ironman Triathlon, the triathlon is three events, where you swim 2.4 miles, you bike 112 miles, then you run a full marathon at the end of it, 26.2 miles.

And it's 140 miles of pure joy.

And so I'm always training for events like that.

I've done them all over the world, and it's been a great time.

- You have shared a lot of things that you've done.

And what did it feel like to you to be recognized as one of the 50 Most Influential African Americans in Technology?

What did that feel like when you got notified of that?

- When I got notified of that, I was just shocked.

So to receive that award, it was a complete honor to be able to do that, to represent our community, and to continue to be the forefront and to be a change agent.

- Sources of inspiration and motivation for you?

- Well, it definitely comes back down to my mother has been an inspiration to me.

My family is really-- all together, has always-- all parts of my family have been a great motivation to me and inspiration.

My father, who's not here, also has been an inspiration.

And countless others have been there for me by my side.

- What is your words to someone who may be pondering-- someone who perhaps had been bullied or not given an opportunity to demonstrate to society what they had to offer?

What is your word of advice to them?

- I never took no for an answer.

I always kept pressing forward.

I was told when I went to university that I was not going--I should not study computer science.

It was going to be too hard for me.

I said, "I guess I'll have to prove you wrong.

Now let me do it."

It just takes a lot of hard work and determination.

- That's a great testament to your success, your perseverance.

But is there an example of an experience that you may have encountered when you were trying to get your product or service presented to a company, and they did not perceive you or receive you in the manner that you thought they should have?

- That happens all the time.

I show up sometimes at a conference or at a company to show my product, and I walk in the door, and I realize they're looking for Derek Peterson.

And I'm Derek Peterson.

- Mm.

- They were expecting somebody of a different persuasion or color.

- Mm-hmm.

- And then they're like, "Oh, you're Derek Peterson."

Yes, I'm the one you're looking for.

My product and my intellect wins them over.

- You have a relationship with the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

And what is that like?

And why would you encourage others to consider engaging the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey?

- That's really simple, John, because you are the man.

It's a pleasure to work with you, alongside of you, partner with you.

You host great events.

It's a wonderful organization.

I couldn't say anything less about it.

- So the future?

- Right now, the sky is the limit for us in regards to the future.

We've got new products coming out that you'll be seeing a lot of new announcements.

We just made a partnership we announced last week with one of the world's largest security companies, Johnson Controls.

And that's a huge opportunity for us in regards to growth.

We have many more partnerships coming out and announcements over the next six months.

And we're excited for our future.

And people will be able to recognize Soter Technologies very shortly as a household name.

- I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, I know you're home just in awe of what you heard.

But let's all applaud in our own way Derek Peterson, CEO of Soter Technologies for being with us today.

- Thanks, John.

It's been great being here.

And it's awesome as always.

- Just honored to have you.

And all that you've shared, I'm sure our viewers appreciated it.

Until the next time on your "Pathway to Success," this is John Harmon, founder, president, and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

Thank you for tuning in.

[upbeat jazz music] ♪ ♪ So in New Jersey, there's a current debate whether the governor should allow the corporate business tax to sunset and not be extended.

And our position would be that we should support the governor's allowing this to sunset.

Today, we have the highest business tax in the country.

And by allowing this to sunset, we would probably be the fourth highest.

It's still an area of dubious distinction.

But let's talk about what businesses do.

Businesses create jobs.

Businesses provide philanthropy to support Boys and Girls Clubs, seniors, all types of programming to make our communities better.

Businesses also, they build things, products and services that we as consumers buy.

Where would we be without businesses?

Businesses are a strategic partner in society that we need to find a better way to understand, to work with in a more harmonious fashion.

I'm proud to be the founder, president, and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

We have approximately 900 members.

There's 1.2 million Blacks in New Jersey and 88,000 Black businesses in New Jersey, all of which depend on you to patronize them.

Think about how business is a part of your life.

I'm going to invite you to come out on June 15th at Montclair State University to experience a whole diverse group of businesses and people at our Juneteenth Black Expo.

Please join us on June 15, 2023, at Montclair State University.

Thank you, and we look forward to your continued support of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

♪ ♪ announcer: Support for this program was provided by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

Berkeley College: education drives opportunity.

Be inspired.

♪ ♪