Latest / What's Your Problem? / Turning Garbage Into Food

Transcript

Turning Garbage Into Food · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. The other day, I was talking with Matt Rogers
0:22
Speaker 1: about thermostats, specifically the way home thermostats looked back around
0:28
Speaker 1: twenty ten. If folks even know what a VCR is,
0:31
Speaker 1: they had these like VCR like interfaces, like it would
0:34
Speaker 1: like just blink twelve or blink eights and you have
0:37
Speaker 1: no idea what to do. They're responsible for like some
0:41
Speaker 1: between eight and ten percent of global emissions energies controlled
0:46
Speaker 1: by this thirty nine dollars plastic box in the wall.
0:49
Speaker 1: No one cared about that product, despite it being so
0:52
Speaker 1: important to our daily lives. So I kind of just
0:54
Speaker 1: had to dig in and fix it. And that's what
0:56
Speaker 1: I spent the next nearly decade doing. And by dig
1:00
Speaker 1: in and fix it, Matt means that he co founded Nest,
1:04
Speaker 1: a smart thermostat company that Google ultimately bought for around
1:08
Speaker 1: four billion dollars. And that's the kind of stuff that
1:12
Speaker 1: gets me really interested, like, what are these things that
1:14
Speaker 1: are out there that are really important but we just
1:17
Speaker 1: kind of take for granted. Now Matt thinks he's found
1:20
Speaker 1: his next big, really important, taken for granted thing. The
1:25
Speaker 1: garbage in your kitchen. I'm Jacob Goldstein. This is what's
1:34
Speaker 1: your problem? My guest today is Matt Rogers, the co
1:37
Speaker 1: founder of a new company called Mill. This is the
1:41
Speaker 1: last episode in our series on the future of food,
1:43
Speaker 1: and appropriately enough, we're talking about what happens to food
1:47
Speaker 1: after we're done with it. Matt's problem is this, how
1:50
Speaker 1: do you turn the food you throw in the garbage
1:53
Speaker 1: back into food. When Matt describes Mill, it sounds for
1:57
Speaker 1: a while like he's just talking about a high tech
1:59
Speaker 1: garbage can. But then there is this twist. I don't
2:04
Speaker 1: want to spoil it, but I will say that it
2:06
Speaker 1: is a big twist that will be hard to pull off.
2:09
Speaker 1: You might not work, but if it works, it could
2:12
Speaker 1: be a really big deal. Mill just came out of
2:16
Speaker 1: stealth mode a few weeks ago, but Matt has been
2:19
Speaker 1: working on the project since the early days of the
2:21
Speaker 1: pandemic Spring twenty twenty. We're all stuck in our houses,
2:26
Speaker 1: locked in, kind of walling on our own filth, screaming children,
2:31
Speaker 1: you know all the things. I get a call from
2:34
Speaker 1: an old colleague from Nest, Harry Tanabaum, who someone I
2:38
Speaker 1: was very close to on the Nest team. I mentored
2:40
Speaker 1: him for a lot of years. I am pacing on
2:42
Speaker 1: the balcony in our San Francisco house. No one is
2:45
Speaker 1: allowed to leave their home. I get a call and
2:49
Speaker 1: he says, Matt, Matt, I've been reading a lot of
2:52
Speaker 1: PDFs and websites about waste and no, like seriously, it's
2:57
Speaker 1: a it's a very hairy thing that could open. That's
2:59
Speaker 1: a good lead. I'm reading DAFs about waste. It's like,
3:03
Speaker 1: this is really bad. It's much worse than we think.
3:05
Speaker 1: And waste, waste meaning garbage like waste like garbage, Yes,
3:10
Speaker 1: Like one minute something is valuable and we use it
3:12
Speaker 1: and we love it, and the next minute it's like, oh,
3:15
Speaker 1: we got to toss this away, And what's it about
3:18
Speaker 1: that minute where it transitions from like valuable and awesome
3:22
Speaker 1: to like trash? Huh? And that was intriguing to me.
3:27
Speaker 1: And so it's almost like it's almost like the philosophy
3:30
Speaker 1: of garbage, like garbage as an idea. Indeed, yes, like
3:35
Speaker 1: is trash inevitable? And we didn't discuss this on this call,
3:42
Speaker 1: but like as as Harry and I dug into it
3:44
Speaker 1: over the months, the learning was waste as an existent nature,
3:48
Speaker 1: like waste is like human construct and it is not inevitable.
3:53
Speaker 1: And that was kind of the sea crystal of this
3:55
Speaker 1: idea of like, oh, like what if we made a
3:57
Speaker 1: company that could end waste and what would that look like?
4:00
Speaker 1: And I knew from my insight days, from my family
4:02
Speaker 1: office work, I knew how big the climate, the climate
4:06
Speaker 1: part of this equation was. And what is the connect
4:09
Speaker 1: between food waste and climate change? Okay, I guess yeah,
4:13
Speaker 1: that's this is not obvious. It wasn't obvious to us either.
4:16
Speaker 1: It takes a lot of energy, water, land to grow
4:21
Speaker 1: our food. We have to drive it in trucks, often refrigerated,
4:25
Speaker 1: to get to grocery stores, get to our houses. It's
4:28
Speaker 1: like tennish percent of global emissions is the food that
4:32
Speaker 1: we've wasted. And then when food goes to landfill. This
4:35
Speaker 1: is all obviously not intuitive either. It doesn't just biodegrade,
4:39
Speaker 1: like the bid appeal of trash is actively a bad
4:41
Speaker 1: thing because it releases methane, which is like an ad
4:45
Speaker 1: x more potent greenhouse gas than CO two. Okay, so
4:49
Speaker 1: you got the call from Harry, When do you decide
4:51
Speaker 1: that you're in that you're gonna get back in started
4:54
Speaker 1: other company? Oh? Literally two hours later? Again, like this
4:57
Speaker 1: is the my instincts are pretty strong and big problem
5:03
Speaker 1: and a problem that is worth solving that I had
5:08
Speaker 1: been looking at and had not seen kind of a
5:11
Speaker 1: holistic solution yet, and also a problem that I could
5:14
Speaker 1: help on. Like when I think about what makes a
5:17
Speaker 1: great entrepreneur, it's not just that like they've got this
5:21
Speaker 1: drive to solve a problem and the problem is really big,
5:24
Speaker 1: but also like do they have the skills to actually
5:26
Speaker 1: impact that problem? And this is one really where the
5:30
Speaker 1: problem is behavior. It's like what we do in our kitchens.
5:35
Speaker 1: And that's the thing. Actually I know a lot about
5:37
Speaker 1: I spent a lot of time in people's homes helping
5:39
Speaker 1: design great products. What are you guys imagining when it's
5:42
Speaker 1: just you and Harry thinking, Okay, we're gonna do this, Like,
5:45
Speaker 1: what's the kind of vague set of thoughts you have
5:48
Speaker 1: about what to actually do? The first thought is, what
5:51
Speaker 1: if we built a new product that would go in
5:55
Speaker 1: your home to make it really easy to separate food
5:59
Speaker 1: waste at home. We're told that it's a good thing
6:01
Speaker 1: to do, but it's really hard to do it and
6:05
Speaker 1: for our household. Swathie and I are like we are
6:08
Speaker 1: climate evangelists. We spend our whole life working on climate change,
6:11
Speaker 1: and we've tried composting. We actually had one of those
6:15
Speaker 1: countertop bowls in our kitchen and there was a point
6:18
Speaker 1: where we actually had to stop because the fruit flies
6:21
Speaker 1: literally invaded our house and we had this like yellow
6:23
Speaker 1: sticky paper hang all around our kitchen. It just was
6:27
Speaker 1: way too hard. So most people don't know that it's
6:31
Speaker 1: important to separate your food waste, and for those who
6:33
Speaker 1: do know it's important, it's really hard to do it. Okay,
6:37
Speaker 1: I buy all that, And what are you imagining when
6:41
Speaker 1: you start building a bin? What do you have in
6:42
Speaker 1: your mind? What is this trash can going to do?
6:45
Speaker 1: So first and foremost, it has to not smell, And
6:50
Speaker 1: that's a crazy thing to say. You're going to put
6:52
Speaker 1: food in it and leave it there for days? Pasably
6:56
Speaker 1: it and it has week weeks weeks? Why weeks? Why weeks? Ah?
7:02
Speaker 1: So why weeks? If you're going to change a daily ritual,
7:05
Speaker 1: it's got to be really easy. It's got to be
7:07
Speaker 1: the easiest thing in the world. And today, the easiest
7:11
Speaker 1: thing to do with your food waste is throw it
7:13
Speaker 1: in the trash And the side effect of that is
7:16
Speaker 1: you're taking out the trash almost every day. So part
7:19
Speaker 1: of building a better system is not only can it
7:22
Speaker 1: not smell, but like, can we drop that chore? Could
7:26
Speaker 1: you take out the trash like once or twice a month? Okay,
7:29
Speaker 1: that is a very tall task if you can think
7:30
Speaker 1: about that way, right, I mean, like even in one day,
7:33
Speaker 1: that countertop bin is thinking I know I have one,
7:36
Speaker 1: and it's true. So that was kind of the task
7:39
Speaker 1: we set out for ourselves. So how do you figure
7:40
Speaker 1: out that part? Yes, okay, we spent honestly months on experimentation,
7:47
Speaker 1: and tell me some of the things you tried that
7:49
Speaker 1: didn't work. Oh okay, I think my favorite experiment that
7:52
Speaker 1: didn't work is we try this kind of microbial technology
7:56
Speaker 1: and are there bugs or fun guy that can kind
8:00
Speaker 1: of break down food and eat it. And that's kind
8:04
Speaker 1: of some of the essence of how composting works. It
8:06
Speaker 1: turns out actually a lot of those mechanisms are actually
8:09
Speaker 1: inherently stinky. I mean, presumably we evolved to be a
8:13
Speaker 1: verse to rotting food basically, right, Like it smells bad
8:18
Speaker 1: to us for a reason. It smells bad because if
8:21
Speaker 1: danger danger, you will get sick. So okay, so the
8:24
Speaker 1: microbes don't work so what happens Our chief scientist who
8:29
Speaker 1: kind of leads our Seattle team, doctor Jeff Hill, was
8:33
Speaker 1: burning some food scraps in his lab like literally like
8:38
Speaker 1: like one of these like pyrolyzing ovens was laying them
8:41
Speaker 1: on fire and yeah, scientists, two fun stuff. I gotta
8:46
Speaker 1: get one of those ovens. And he's like, Matt Harry,
8:51
Speaker 1: food waste has more energy than wood, and we're like,
8:55
Speaker 1: what I mean? It has more energy than wood? And
8:56
Speaker 1: a guess this this makes sense, Like our food has calories.
8:59
Speaker 1: Calories is energy. So like we start digging in to
9:02
Speaker 1: like what he's learning, and he's like, wait a second, here,
9:04
Speaker 1: if we dry the food a kins like drying out wood,
9:07
Speaker 1: like it preserves the energy, and like, oh, this is cool.
9:13
Speaker 1: And then he also has his next Aha, he's looking
9:16
Speaker 1: at the materials and he's like, if we dry out,
9:18
Speaker 1: it preserves the nutrients, so like preserve the calories, preserved
9:22
Speaker 1: the nutrients. Like oh, and like in hindsight, this is
9:26
Speaker 1: like a no brainer, like oh, like we just invented
9:29
Speaker 1: drying things out. That's like a dehydration. Like we've been
9:31
Speaker 1: in We've been in this for astronaut food for decades, right,
9:34
Speaker 1: like or like beef jerky. It's like this has existed
9:37
Speaker 1: for really thousands of year old technology. That's why this
9:41
Speaker 1: is cool. So what we land is like if we
9:44
Speaker 1: dehydrate the food, it doesn't smell because it's preserved basically.
9:49
Speaker 1: So now you still have the problem if you want
9:51
Speaker 1: it to be there for weeks. You know, people throw
9:54
Speaker 1: away too much food, right, the trash can is gonna
9:56
Speaker 1: get full, correct exactly, So uh, like beef jerky is
9:59
Speaker 1: still pretty big. So it's cool is we have this
10:02
Speaker 1: kind of notion of like you dry it and you
10:03
Speaker 1: grind it at the same time. So and these things
10:06
Speaker 1: actually work synergistically because as you grow ended up, it
10:09
Speaker 1: makes it easier to get the water out. And food
10:13
Speaker 1: is about eighty percent water, so as you're grinding and
10:16
Speaker 1: drying it out, it gets really really small, really really small,
10:20
Speaker 1: like eighty percent size reduction. So if you can imagine,
10:25
Speaker 1: you know, you've got a big dinner party and you
10:27
Speaker 1: filled up the bin. You wake up the next morning
10:29
Speaker 1: and there's like this brown powder at the bottom. You're like, oh,
10:32
Speaker 1: where did all the food go? It's because there's mostly water,
10:36
Speaker 1: so okay, So like that is a really elegant plan
10:41
Speaker 1: I imagine it's hard to actually make all that happen
10:44
Speaker 1: inside a trash can that somebody can just put in
10:47
Speaker 1: their kitchen and plug in. Incredibly difficult, Yes, incredibly difficult. One.
10:52
Speaker 1: It's like in the getting to from the wetness to
10:55
Speaker 1: the dryness, there's still some wetness to get there. So
10:59
Speaker 1: what do you do with any odors that are created
11:01
Speaker 1: in that that twenty four hour period of the twelve
11:04
Speaker 1: hour period. And our engineers kind of scoured the world
11:08
Speaker 1: for like the most effective, the highest surface area activating
11:14
Speaker 1: charcoal in the world, and we found this really cool
11:18
Speaker 1: coconut core based product that has like a square mile
11:23
Speaker 1: of surface area in our little can. It is pretty wild.
11:26
Speaker 1: So so you you put all this together and you
11:29
Speaker 1: make a thing. You make a high tech trash can
11:31
Speaker 1: that will grind up and dry out your food waste.
11:35
Speaker 1: Tell me about the thing you landed on. What's it
11:37
Speaker 1: look like? How does it work? Yes? So what we
11:40
Speaker 1: what we built is a new kind of bin that
11:44
Speaker 1: it's about two feet tall, looks like a kitchen trash bin,
11:48
Speaker 1: beautiful like white white steel wood vinear top, like a
11:53
Speaker 1: beautiful steel pedal, and is effectively a bottomless pit so
11:57
Speaker 1: two feet tall, normal size of trash bin. But because
12:00
Speaker 1: it's drying things out automatically, every night, you fill it
12:04
Speaker 1: up and during the day and you wake up the
12:06
Speaker 1: next morning and it's basically empty. It takes three ish
12:09
Speaker 1: weeks to fill up. What does it look like after
12:11
Speaker 1: it's ground up and dry. It's like looks a coffee grounds.
12:13
Speaker 1: It's actually we call it food ground coffe ground because
12:15
Speaker 1: it literally looks a coffee grounds. Okay, and it's a
12:17
Speaker 1: very familiar thing, like, oh, like brown's dry, it's kind
12:21
Speaker 1: of fluffy. Yeah, it's coffee grounds, but it's food. But
12:24
Speaker 1: it's cool. Because this material is dry and small and
12:28
Speaker 1: shelf stable, we don't need to get it out of
12:30
Speaker 1: the house in a garbage truck anymore. You could put
12:33
Speaker 1: it in the mail. So we did a partnership with
12:35
Speaker 1: the US Postal Service to put this material in the
12:37
Speaker 1: mail back to us. Wait, that's a that is a
12:40
Speaker 1: major twist putting it in the mail. It is indeed
12:44
Speaker 1: it was for us too. Why the mail? Why the mail?
12:50
Speaker 1: And also what is Matt and Mill gonna do with
12:54
Speaker 1: all of the food garbage that people are starting even
12:57
Speaker 1: now to send back to Mill in the mail? That
13:01
Speaker 1: we'll explain everything in a minute. Okay, let's get back
13:11
Speaker 1: to the show. Matt is explaining how he and his
13:14
Speaker 1: colleagues decided to have customers mail their garbage back to Mill,
13:19
Speaker 1: and also how Mill is going to try and turn
13:21
Speaker 1: that garbage into food for chickens. Why the mail, Like
13:26
Speaker 1: like I feel like you've sort of solved the problem already,
13:29
Speaker 1: Like I don't know what's what's going on with the mail?
13:32
Speaker 1: Why the mail? Well, as I mentioned, like, our lead
13:34
Speaker 1: scientists had spent months then analyzing this material and it
13:38
Speaker 1: has energy, it has calories as nutrition, and he had
13:41
Speaker 1: this moment where he's feeding it to his chickens in
13:45
Speaker 1: his backyard and they love it. And we talked, we
13:51
Speaker 1: talked to some more scientific advisors, we talked to some
13:54
Speaker 1: experts and they're like, yeah, this is this is a thing.
13:57
Speaker 1: Like we used to do this as a society back
14:00
Speaker 1: in the day. Whatever food we didn't eat went into
14:03
Speaker 1: the backyard to feed the chickens of the picks. That's
14:06
Speaker 1: how humans used to live. And as society has gotten
14:10
Speaker 1: more and more industrialized, we've kind of gone away for
14:12
Speaker 1: that and we don't farm in our backyards anymore. That's
14:15
Speaker 1: just not how we live. Most of us don't live
14:17
Speaker 1: that way. So just that you know, it would be
14:19
Speaker 1: a shame to compost this stuff. It's rocket fuel. Like
14:24
Speaker 1: we got to preserve the food. We need to get
14:26
Speaker 1: it back to us so we can get it to farms.
14:29
Speaker 1: And as you can imagine, like that's a pretty tall task,
14:32
Speaker 1: Like how do you get like hundreds of pounds of
14:35
Speaker 1: material per household? How do you collect that? Suddenly you're
14:38
Speaker 1: in a super different business, right, Like sure, selling people
14:42
Speaker 1: a fancy trash can, like I get that, but like
14:45
Speaker 1: having them mail back to you the dried out food
14:49
Speaker 1: garbage way, It's like that's like a huge change in
14:53
Speaker 1: what I'm imagining you doing. And it seems like a
14:56
Speaker 1: huge change in complexity. It seems borderline absurd that I'm
14:59
Speaker 1: gonna be mailing back my garbage to you. This is
15:02
Speaker 1: our journey. I would say. There's a combination of skill
15:06
Speaker 1: and luck in all entrepreneurship. Yeah. One of our founding
15:09
Speaker 1: team members, Alissa Pollock, was one of the first people
15:14
Speaker 1: at uber eats. She was one of the founding team
15:16
Speaker 1: members of uber Eats and ran business operations for them,
15:19
Speaker 1: and so she had looked at all sorts of different
15:22
Speaker 1: logistics models that exist, and you know, she's super creative.
15:27
Speaker 1: And one of the things that she pushed us on
15:29
Speaker 1: is like, hey, like we don't need to drive trucks
15:31
Speaker 1: around to pick this stuff up. Like it's small and light, Like,
15:35
Speaker 1: let's put in a package and ship it. So, like,
15:37
Speaker 1: we made some calls and we talked to some folks
15:41
Speaker 1: at the postal Service and a few folks that were
15:43
Speaker 1: retired from the postal service. We talked to some of
15:45
Speaker 1: the people who do package collection and I was like, yeah,
15:51
Speaker 1: that seems doable, Like you could mail a whole tree.
15:54
Speaker 1: These days, you put all sorts of stuff in the mail,
15:56
Speaker 1: and especially because it's shelf stable, like, yeah, we could
15:59
Speaker 1: pick this up. And one of the first kind of
16:02
Speaker 1: thoughts we have is like, oh, like this can't be
16:04
Speaker 1: good for the environment, like mailing boxes of dried food.
16:08
Speaker 1: That can't be a good thing. Right, So a lot
16:10
Speaker 1: of you you got a lot of moving stuff around
16:13
Speaker 1: driving it, that's right, I think that this can't be
16:16
Speaker 1: a good thing, right. So, being an environmentally conscious team,
16:19
Speaker 1: we actually did the analysis. We built a full life
16:22
Speaker 1: cycle analysis of this, and we realize actually, like it's diminimous. Okay,
16:26
Speaker 1: the methane generating power of this food waste is so high.
16:29
Speaker 1: And actually the trucks from the mail are already come
16:33
Speaker 1: in your house anyway. Yeah, like they're dropping off packages,
16:36
Speaker 1: the dropping of letters every single day, and the trucks
16:38
Speaker 1: usually go back empty. I buy the carbon footprint, that
16:41
Speaker 1: sort of climate change piece. It's more the operational part
16:45
Speaker 1: of this, like, well, we haven't even gotten to the
16:48
Speaker 1: point like sure, let's say I can get the food
16:51
Speaker 1: waste back to you. Let's say it's convenient for me.
16:53
Speaker 1: Let's say the environmental footprint is fine, you still gotta
16:55
Speaker 1: get it to a chicken. And by the way, you
16:58
Speaker 1: might be feeding that chicken the chicken that I ate
17:01
Speaker 1: and dried out, which feels a little weird. Is it?
17:04
Speaker 1: Is there a sort of health risk there for like
17:06
Speaker 1: any kind of human consumption of cons eating chicken, Like
17:10
Speaker 1: is that a piece one is concerned about? So the
17:13
Speaker 1: key is we get the material back to us, we
17:16
Speaker 1: filter out any contaminants, We pasteurize the material again, so
17:21
Speaker 1: kill any pathogens those kind of things, and we blend
17:23
Speaker 1: it all together. So let's say, like if you only pizza,
17:26
Speaker 1: we're gonna blend your pizza scrap household with everybody else.
17:30
Speaker 1: So you have a factory now that to do this,
17:33
Speaker 1: Like have you built this in advance? Yep, of course,
17:37
Speaker 1: we gotta build the whole end to end. This is
17:39
Speaker 1: so much harder than tell it a fancy trash can.
17:42
Speaker 1: This is this is so much harder the nest and
17:44
Speaker 1: it seems like a huge amount of the sort of
17:47
Speaker 1: operational challenge. Slash risk is the back end, right, Like
17:51
Speaker 1: it seems like in a weird way, drying out the
17:53
Speaker 1: trash is the easy part, and like getting it from
17:57
Speaker 1: my house to a chicken, that part seems like I can't.
18:00
Speaker 1: That part seems very hard and like it might not work. Yeah,
18:03
Speaker 1: this is the double black Diamond of startups. Yeah, it's
18:06
Speaker 1: like just building hardware is hard, Like most hardware startups
18:10
Speaker 1: fail because of execution, right, like that, A, you have
18:15
Speaker 1: a marginal costs that you don't have in software, and
18:17
Speaker 1: you have to get lots of people to buy it,
18:18
Speaker 1: and you have scale problems, like it's hard to sell
18:20
Speaker 1: a fancy trash can. And this is so much harder
18:22
Speaker 1: than selling a fancy trash can. Right, that's right, but
18:26
Speaker 1: we've got to solve it. End to end again, like, okay,
18:28
Speaker 1: if there's any friction for people, they're going to not
18:31
Speaker 1: do it. And what are you going to do with
18:35
Speaker 1: hundreds of pounds of dried food? So we had to
18:38
Speaker 1: get it back. Where is your processing facility? You have this?
18:41
Speaker 1: It exists now are first ones outside Seattle, and over
18:44
Speaker 1: time we see us building more and more around the country. Like,
18:47
Speaker 1: as we have more customers, we have more density, we
18:50
Speaker 1: should build facilities in every city. So you process it
18:54
Speaker 1: and then you sell it to chicken farmers as chicken food.
18:57
Speaker 1: We sell it to farmers as chicken foods, as an
18:59
Speaker 1: ingredient to chicken food. It won't be the exclusive thing
19:01
Speaker 1: a chicken will eat, but it's like it's called twenty
19:04
Speaker 1: twenty five percent of a chicken's diet. Is there any
19:07
Speaker 1: kind of regulatory hurdle you have to clear for this
19:10
Speaker 1: to work? We actually are actively going through this today,
19:13
Speaker 1: Like we are deep in the scientific and regulatory process
19:17
Speaker 1: and review for this new feed ingredient. Okay, so you
19:21
Speaker 1: have to get approval from what USDA or something. It's
19:24
Speaker 1: kind of a blend of USDA and FDA. We are
19:27
Speaker 1: still working through their process. So if your product is
19:30
Speaker 1: a hit. Are you going to have a warehouse full
19:32
Speaker 1: of prime chicken food ingredient that you can't sell yet?
19:35
Speaker 1: Is that a risk at this moment? Not yet. We're
19:40
Speaker 1: gonna need to use a lot of the feed we
19:42
Speaker 1: create for R and D and for the you know,
19:45
Speaker 1: for the first several weeks months, we're probably gonna use
19:48
Speaker 1: most of this material for R and D. Wow, Okay,
19:52
Speaker 1: so I think I've got the whole arc. We've got
19:55
Speaker 1: the whole arc. Well, let me ask you one more question.
19:57
Speaker 1: What's the business model? Ah? So the business model is
20:01
Speaker 1: we've built this all, this, this full loop from your
20:04
Speaker 1: kitchen table all the way back to the farm, and
20:07
Speaker 1: we've built it as a membership. So you don't buy
20:09
Speaker 1: the bin okay, like you don't buy new charcoal filters
20:13
Speaker 1: when they run out. You don't pay for the mail.
20:16
Speaker 1: It's all included for about a dollar a day a dolt,
20:19
Speaker 1: So like thirty bucks a month, thirty three dollars a month.
20:21
Speaker 1: Thirty three dollars a month is kind of a lot
20:25
Speaker 1: for garbage, right, it's whatever of four hundred bucks a year,
20:29
Speaker 1: certainly if you're not paying for the kind of marginal
20:33
Speaker 1: garbage bag. Right, if it's if it's a true incremental cost,
20:36
Speaker 1: certainly most people aren't going to pay that. You don't
20:39
Speaker 1: need most people. So like who is your who is
20:42
Speaker 1: your target audience? Who are you starting with target customer?
20:45
Speaker 1: I should say yeah. So the way we think about
20:47
Speaker 1: it today is for folks who have felt the pain.
20:51
Speaker 1: And when I say the pain like the pain that
20:53
Speaker 1: my family had, they had the fruit flies and made
20:55
Speaker 1: Maybe they've got rats, Yeah, maybe they've they've tried composting
21:00
Speaker 1: and they just don't have the time, order the space
21:01
Speaker 1: to do it. A dollar a day for a less
21:03
Speaker 1: stinky kitchen sounds like a great idea to me and
21:06
Speaker 1: for me like a dollar a day for one less
21:08
Speaker 1: choice are I'm in? Yes, Although to be clear, you
21:12
Speaker 1: still have to take out all your other garbage all
21:14
Speaker 1: the time. I mean, I recognize that if food is
21:16
Speaker 1: most of your garbage, you take it out less. But still,
21:19
Speaker 1: if you know you still got to take out everything else.
21:22
Speaker 1: When you take food out of the trash, dream your
21:24
Speaker 1: garbage can fills up pretty slowly. Yeah, and it doesn't smell.
21:28
Speaker 1: So Actually, like for our house, we take out the
21:29
Speaker 1: garbage now like every three four days. It's a big
21:31
Speaker 1: difference for us we talked about the emotional side, Let's
21:34
Speaker 1: talk about the rational side of it. The rational side
21:36
Speaker 1: is in most cities in the country, you pay per
21:40
Speaker 1: month to your waist your waist bill based on the
21:44
Speaker 1: size of your trash cart at the curb. So in
21:48
Speaker 1: San Francisco, I have a sixty four gallon cart, I
21:50
Speaker 1: pay like seventy bucks a month for it. If I
21:52
Speaker 1: downsize to a thirty two or a sixteen gallon cart,
21:56
Speaker 1: I'm gonna save like twenty or thirty bucks a month.
21:58
Speaker 1: And this exists around the country. People have no idea,
22:01
Speaker 1: and most people are on the big big bins. So
22:03
Speaker 1: people are paying by how much trash they put out now.
22:07
Speaker 1: And this might, if not pay for itself, pay for
22:10
Speaker 1: part of itself, just by people paying less for their
22:13
Speaker 1: traditional garbage collection. Exactly. You got it, exactly similar story
22:17
Speaker 1: that we had a nest. So yes, you're buying this
22:20
Speaker 1: premium thermostat, but over time it's going to help you
22:23
Speaker 1: save money by using less energy. It's a very similar analogy. Yes,
22:27
Speaker 1: I know that in a lot of rural places there
22:29
Speaker 1: is not garbage collection, and you have to pay to
22:31
Speaker 1: go to the dump, and often you pay by the bag,
22:34
Speaker 1: like when I was thinking, who's going to use this
22:36
Speaker 1: thing that you're selling? That's what I thought of. I mean,
22:38
Speaker 1: is that is that part of your target audience? Absolutely,
22:43
Speaker 1: And actually for folks that live in rural areas that
22:46
Speaker 1: don't have pick up, they may even often have uses
22:50
Speaker 1: for the material themselves and they don't even need to
22:51
Speaker 1: send it back to us. If they want to use
22:53
Speaker 1: this material themselves, they can absolutely use it themselves, like
22:56
Speaker 1: if they have backyard chickens, if they compost and have
22:59
Speaker 1: a garden, awesome. Yeah, we think it's really helpful for
23:02
Speaker 1: them too. So you're just about to launch, we're talking
23:05
Speaker 1: the week before your big public announcement of this. As
23:08
Speaker 1: you you know, I'm sure that as a founder you
23:11
Speaker 1: have to be a wildly optimistic person at some level, right,
23:15
Speaker 1: you have to have some set of hope. But when
23:16
Speaker 1: you think about the things that might go wrong next week,
23:20
Speaker 1: next month, do you what do you think about? What
23:22
Speaker 1: are you worrying about right now? Oh? Man, there's a
23:25
Speaker 1: lot actually, and there's probably a list of forty five
23:27
Speaker 1: things or fifty things, and I'm worried about these days,
23:30
Speaker 1: from the operational to like will the parts get to
23:33
Speaker 1: the manufacturing facility on time, and are we clear to
23:36
Speaker 1: build and one of the things that we don't know
23:39
Speaker 1: and are people gonna like it? We've been using it
23:44
Speaker 1: for months. I've been using at my house for about
23:46
Speaker 1: six months. We've got a couple hundred people I've been
23:48
Speaker 1: feel testing it and we've getten some really good feedback.
23:51
Speaker 1: People like it, But like, are people gonna love it?
23:57
Speaker 1: It's too soon to answer that question on the show today.
24:01
Speaker 1: Neil just came out of stealth mode a few weeks ago.
24:03
Speaker 1: But if it's any consolation, we do have a garbage
24:07
Speaker 1: themed lightning round up in just a minute. That's the
24:15
Speaker 1: end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show.
24:19
Speaker 1: Let's finish with the Lightning round. Just a bunch of
24:21
Speaker 1: fast questions. Fun, fun, fun, indeed, fun is what we're
24:26
Speaker 1: going for here. So I understand you're a Star Wars fan,
24:31
Speaker 1: and I'm curious of all the Star Wars movies, what's
24:34
Speaker 1: your favorite scene? Favorite scene. I'm gonna go with Luke
24:41
Speaker 1: Skywalker on hoff in Empire Strikes Back when he's like
24:46
Speaker 1: and Ben, you will go to Yoda my favorite scene
24:51
Speaker 1: at all Star Wars. It's just beautifully done. I really
24:53
Speaker 1: thought you were going to say the trash compactor. Oh, man,
24:56
Speaker 1: that's a good one. I feel like that's the that's
24:58
Speaker 1: the mill scene. Man, they're in a trash compactor and
25:01
Speaker 1: it's even feeding the weird animal. Oh my god, there's
25:04
Speaker 1: a weird animal in there. Yeah, that's hilarious. Let's talk
25:08
Speaker 1: about garbage a little bit. What is the smelliest thing
25:11
Speaker 1: that people put into the garbage in a typical household. Oh,
25:15
Speaker 1: we've actually created a stink bomb for the office. It's
25:18
Speaker 1: kind of a mix of garlic, shrimp, kimchi. It is
25:23
Speaker 1: some stinky stuff. Like one of the things our engineers
25:26
Speaker 1: have challenged us with is they put our bins in
25:30
Speaker 1: our conference rooms in the office and they load them
25:33
Speaker 1: up with these stink bomb recipes and just let them
25:36
Speaker 1: run and we'll be in the room having our meetings,
25:39
Speaker 1: doing our discussions and not smelling anything. And that is
25:42
Speaker 1: the bar like stink bomb recipe, no smell. Who's your
25:46
Speaker 1: favorite Backstreet Boy? Ooh? AJ? And the reason why is
25:52
Speaker 1: he's carrying the team now Like AJ is really like
25:55
Speaker 1: coming to his own and actually like twenty twenties Backstreet
26:00
Speaker 1: Boys is unbelievable. Like, thank you, AJ. We appreciate you.
26:04
Speaker 1: If you weren't working on food, what would you be
26:06
Speaker 1: working on poop? Poop? Maybe diapers? Like, what are all
26:12
Speaker 1: these other stinky garbage ee things in the house? Methane bomb?
26:18
Speaker 1: Super gross? Does it have to be? So you've done thermostats,
26:23
Speaker 1: you're doing garbage. You think you might do diapers next? Look,
26:26
Speaker 1: poop is not out of the question. Strong, what's the
26:29
Speaker 1: most surprising thing you've learned about garbage? I think I'm
26:33
Speaker 1: still surprised by how much of the economy is to
26:36
Speaker 1: handle and dispose of the stuff that we're done with.
26:40
Speaker 1: It's like a multi hundred billion dollar industry that we've
26:44
Speaker 1: effectively taken for granted. It doesn't have to exist and
26:47
Speaker 1: it's really really really big. Well, that's good for you
26:50
Speaker 1: as a founder. If we can have some efficiency gains,
26:54
Speaker 1: the money is there, we can get some of the
26:56
Speaker 1: how money to make our business work. Yeah, that's actually
27:00
Speaker 1: one of our theses behind the company is we're building
27:03
Speaker 1: something new, but people pay for waste today. We pay
27:06
Speaker 1: a lot for waste today. So yes, Like, is there
27:09
Speaker 1: a better way of doing things that we can shift
27:11
Speaker 1: over time? Absolutely anything else we should talk about. I
27:16
Speaker 1: think stepping back like, this is attractable problem. And as
27:21
Speaker 1: someone who's spent twenty plus years looking at climate solutions
27:24
Speaker 1: and the things we gotta do, there's some areas that
27:27
Speaker 1: are really hard and we have to invent, like nuclear
27:29
Speaker 1: fusion to solve this is attractable, solvable problem. We have
27:34
Speaker 1: to keep food out of landfill, and like that is solvable,
27:38
Speaker 1: like we could do that. So the taglight is solving
27:40
Speaker 1: food waste easier than nuclear fusion, Easier than nuclear fusion.
27:49
Speaker 1: Matt Rogers is the co founder and CEO of NIL.
27:53
Speaker 1: Today's show was produced by Edith Russolo. It was edited
27:56
Speaker 1: by Sarah Knicks and Robert Smith and engineered by Amanda
28:00
Speaker 1: k Loong. I'm Jacob Goldstein. You can find me on
28:03
Speaker 1: Twitter at Jacob Goldstein, or you can email us at
28:06
Speaker 1: problem at Cushkin dot We'll be back next week with
28:11
Speaker 1: another episode of What's Your Problem