Tech Brew Ride Home - (BNS) Terra Trust And How To Build In Uncertain Times

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

If the entire world shifts after you launch your startup, what do you do? Terra Trust founder Mike DiPetrillo tells you how to do it. What was our original use-case? DOUBLE DOWN on what you do well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another bonus episode of the TechMeme Right Home podcast. I'm your host as always Brian McCullough. This is another portfolio profile episode. It's a really kind of timely one as we're about to get into. But the company, the portfolio company that we're talking to today is Terra Trust. If you want to look them up while we're talking, it's Terra-dashrust.com or just Google Terra Trust. And we're talking to the founder, Mike, Di Petrillo. Hey, Mike, thanks for coming on. Yeah, thanks, Brian, for the time. Really appreciate it. All right. Let's start out, as always. Give me the two-minute elevator pitch of what TerraTrust does.

Yeah, so the two-minute elevator pitch is we focus entirely on the environmental impact of technology. I always like to say that IT operations today is transforming into business operators, right? with green ops going around, thin ops going around. So we give them the new data that they need to operate in that new role. So it's sort of an observational product, like a SaaS platform that sort of lets people like identify and like mitigate things around sort of your what would you call it, your bill of materials around environmental costs and things like that. Yeah. So if we take it another level deeper, if you look at kind of IT, operations. They've traditionally operated with two knobs and dials, one being cost, the other being

performance. So take the scenario of I'm deploying a new application. Do I'd use four front-end web servers or two front-end web servers? Well, performance-wise on that dial, four makes perfect sense, right? Performance better. And then on the cost sense, well, a lot of stuff's deployed in like Kubernetes and containers these days. It cost me like 20 bucks, right? So the cost is negligible. What people don't realize is there's actually downstream business impact to a lot of that stuff. As I said in the intro, we focus on the environmental impact of tech, so it's less on the checkbox sustainability kind of thing, and it's really making you aware of the cost of that. So those downstream web servers, if you're at a net zero company, there's 170,000 of them out there right now, then you're paying for carbon credits. It's all set that activity.

It could be 350 bucks a ton, right? you're paying for the downstream water impact, the downstream, you know, end-of-life impact. There's all these downstream impacts. If you're deploying into data centers in Ireland, you have a data center tax. It goes along with a carbon. You have social tax in some places. So there's all these kind of levers that are out there that you need to be aware of. And we translate basically that cost and link it in directly with your everyday IT activities.

So that as you're deploying that, you can see new knobs and times. And you can be like, wow, that actually. cost me $1,000 per server, not $20 per server, and I'll make different choices. If you take MasterCard as one scenario there, they actually deploy into more expensive Amazon European zones, right? So we're in Europe that costs the company more, but they have a lower carbon footprint. And so the overall cost is actually lower for the company. So rather than deploying in the U.S. that they've traditionally done, they've altered and they deploy

in those European zones. So that's what you can start to drive if you get this new information and new insights is better business decisions, more efficient business decisions. So essentially, I mean, to put it to the lowest possible common denominator, I'm paying you to save me money, essentially. And it pays for itself, especially I would imagine now in this AI moment of the last couple years where the compute cost. essentially are skyrocketing, especially if you're in the AI space, especially if you're a company dabbling in the AI space. So speak to that for just a second. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's all sorts of stuff about AI, and it definitely is a bolster for us. You know, we have a whole play around what I call AI carve-out. If you think about it, you know, every time you do use AI

in just an email, it's like pouring a bottle of water out. Right. So that's how much water consumption there is, but you wouldn't think of it. We were just talking with a large international bank that was going to spend half a million, or half a billion, sorry, $500 million to build a new data center just for AI stuff. And that's pretty common out there. It sounds like a lot, but it's pretty common. And so we'll go into a company. We'll say, well, you know, the reason you're building a new data center is because you're out of power and kind of, you know, the cooling and the infrastructure and the carbon footprint of this data center. And we'll go and look at their current infrastructure and help them find those efficiencies. So it's much like an ITAM kind of a thing if you look

at it from that perspective, but it's a little bit further than ITAM because we're saying to pay for that, there's also kind of those downstream impacts that you're saving cost on. I always like to say, you know, IT eats too much, it drinks too much and it smokes too much. That's the water, energy, and carbon that it all boils down to. And so we come in to help you get healthier, right? Kind of give you that nutrition label that when you're going to eat that thing, you want to know what's inside of it if you're getting healthier, not just the, ooh, candy bar, that's high performance, and I'm going to buy the cheaper candy bar. You know, you want to know what's in that candy bar. So that's, yeah, AI is definitely a bolster, but it goes across everything. It's everything that we use in IT. If you think

about, like, the log data that you have, you know, there's efficiencies to be had there. And those downstream efficiencies save you money, straight up costs, but they also save you carbon, which then is also translated into, you know, all these costs that we just talked about. So at the end of the day, like I said, better business decisions that save you money. It's not so much the sustainability checkbox, the old good thing. That comes along for free and along for the ride. So what we're describing is essentially ESR stuff, you know, environmental social risk stuff. And so this is where we get into the timeliness of it.

I believe, you know, a ride home fund invested before the election. happened, and I believe one of my first questions to you was, what if the election goes a certain way, and obviously it went away, so that there's a change in political landscape for the product that essentially you are set up to deliver. I want to ask you specifically how you're thinking about that directly right now. And then I want to double back and talk about this almost philosophically, but how are you thinking about what the change in the political land? means for Terra Trust right now. Yeah, I mean, when we first talked, right, and he came in, it's, it was definitely a question.

And we knew it could go, you know, either way at that point in time and we're prepared for it. And it's gone that way, you know, Trump is a new U.S. president and, you know, staying apolitical in this. You know, we see that he's already had executive orders and he's reversed and pulled us out on the climate accord and stuff like that. So you can see the actions that are directly impacting this. What I always tell people is there's 80 different countries with these laws and regulations around this. And again, we don't focus so much on laws and regulations, but that's a byproduct of it. But there's 80 countries right now. There's 24 U.S. states that have laws and regulations just last week.

They issued a statement that said, hey, we're still committed to this. They represent 54% of the U.S. population and 57% of our economy. So these are things that Trump, no matter how he tries, can't touch. Now, is there downstream impact to that where other people follow and other people do stuff? Yeah, probably. But if you look back, I kind of equate that to GDPR. You know, when GDPR started the same way, started in Europe, everybody here in the U.S. is like, thank goodness, we don't have to deal with it.

Then they realized, oh, but we do business with you and you do business with you. And then the same U.S. states, they're doing this with the sustainability thing, picked up GDPR and issued their same stuff. Right. And it became kind of like, okay, well, we have to do this. The same U.S. President, Trump, was president in his first term when all that went down. He tried to put the kibosh on it, but it still took, right? So I use GDPR as a good, you know, case because it has the same kind of, you know, adoption, the same kind of peer pressures from supply chain, the same regulation adoption around the world,

same regulation adoption in the U.S. states. It's like a cookie cutter of this. And it happened with the exact same president doing the exact same things in his first term. So that's any proof point. That's good. So on the philosophical level, what I want to know is I feel like, you know, I've been a founder, there's founders listening. One of the things that you maybe don't think about when you're like, oh, God, that's a great idea. Somebody's going to do it. It might as well be me.

Sometimes you think about the regulation aspect. You mentioned GDPR or like you think of, you know, maybe the Uber example or whatever where it's like, well, this is a, great idea. I'm going to go into the market with it and then I don't know how often founders think about that about the political landscape changing. Again, I'm using regulatory in the past. But what would you say to founders in terms of, you know, founders think about, you know, product market fit, having a runway, hiring and things like that, but maybe way down on the list or maybe nowhere on the list of what they think about is, hey, what if the environment that you launch into changes?

Yeah, I mean, when you're starting a company, right, and a lot of people will talk about this, but sometimes ignore it, is when you're trying to figure out where you go, you sometimes have a vision. And it's the vision of, here's what the world will look like in five years, right? Or 10 years. you kind of want to stay around five years in tech. You know, here's what the world will look like. If that is the case, I'm assuming that is the case, you know, that's based my whole vision

on this thing. Then in year one, here's the thing that needs to happen and the thing I need to get happen to then go forward. You know, sometimes you try and swallow the whole thing and solve the whole problem at the time. And it's like, take the incremental steps. This is our current thing for this year that we're trying to solve. And yes, there's all these other opportunities.

Focus is the main killer of startups, right? We've been through it many times. I just had this discussion yesterday in our all hands with the team. It's like, here's our focus. I have one of my, you know, kind of advisors that was a previous CEO of Swift, people move money around the world. And he always used to say, I'm going to use the F word now. Focus.

So that's the main thing is you have to focus on that. But, you know, if you're a founder and you're going into that. space, you have to know over those five years, things are going to change, you know, whether it's, you know, companies are going to be different. They're going to be paying attention to different things. You could have a stock crash. You could have, you know, political landscapes change. You could have new regulations, bad regulations. There's a new competitors that pop up, like deep seat just came out of the nowhere. Right. Signed it everybody. A lot of stuff can happen. You know, a perfect, I'm glad you brought up the idea of a stock market crash.

or something like that. So again, what founders may be, founders think of timelines again in terms of like runway and product development and things like that. But, you know, if you launch a startup in 2006 and the great financial crash happens, and like you have to also, I feel like founders, when they think of timelines, it is sort of the black swan event, but it's not black swan because you have to assume that within the next three years, some of your fundamental assumption about the product in the market will probably change because of external things that you can't control. And especially five years out, and especially 10 years out. So how would you think of that in terms of you trust the product, but then should you also be thinking of how the products

can evolve to meet that? If you're Airbnb and suddenly there's a recession and nobody's traveling, you know, or COVID or, you know, right. So how do you, how do you, the advice to founders out there thinking in terms of timelines and nimbleness? What would you say? Yeah, sometimes it's hard and I've lived through it many times. I mean, you know, I was in blockchain for 10 years and started blockchain when no one was really doing it. I mean, they were, you know, like Bitcoin and stuff, but I'm talking about blockchain as a use case, right? And then we started to get adoption with the product that we were building and, you know, stock exchanges started using it, stuff like this. We had real business cases. And then crypto winner hit. And then everybody was like,

Even though we had blockchain and it wasn't crypto, like, you know, the currency stuff, with blockchain, we were associated. And so we got clobbered, right? And you had to figure out, well, what can this be used for? And then COVID hit. And so we built a COVID proximity detection solution. It said, our blockchain solution, what is it fundamentally good at? What does it fundamentally deliver?

And it fundamentally delivered providence of data. Well, that can be used in a lot of places. A lot of pieces need providence of data. So that as a founder, like we're saying, here and it's like, okay, we built a thing around sustainability and we were talking to the chief sustainability officer, people that understood sustainability. That was kind of the initial thing we were talking about last year. Then Trump gets elected. The chaos that we thought was going to happen in our space happened, right? And we're sitting here and it's like, you know what? This is about

business efficiency. It's about a business decision. That's fundamentally what we're doing. Yes, we D-risk stuff and there's risk and, you know, kind of the sustainability stuff. So that's still there. It comes along for the ride, but it's fundamentally delivering better data to you in your new role as a business operator, not an IT operator because all the green ops and thin-up stuff that went along. So that's how you kind of pivot. You say, we still have the same solution.

We didn't rebuild stuff. We didn't rebrand stuff. We just said, what is it that we're really actually delivering to people? and skate into that, and then you can avoid a lot of the other, you know, things that are going on. That's really smart. And it's funny that you mentioned crypto because I feel like the crypto space is having the inverse moment right now. We're all of a sudden, all of a sudden, Katie bar the door, anything's possible, the, you know,

the regulatory environment, which, but also think about, and you're talking about this, being a blockchain or crypto founder in your past, you know, if you were a founder in 20, 2016, 2017, and it's like, hey, we could be put out of business tomorrow if the, if the regulations hit us the wrong way. I could go to jail if the regulations hit me the wrong way. So even though crypto is having the exact inverse, like for 10 years, I feel like crypto has been in that space where like we have a great idea. We want to build a great company around it, but we don't know. It could be shut down tomorrow. Like almost the crypto folks have the battle wounds that probably will help them survive. Sorry to anything. I was there for 10 years now.

So let's talk about your entrepreneurial journey. Just give me your background in tech and founding and stuff like that. And then we can get into where the idea for Territus came from. Yeah. So we could talk about this for a long time. You know, one of my superpowers that I didn't know I had was being able to see stuff before it happened, you know, two to three years down the road. that's also the greatest weakness because then you're like, oh, I'm executing on this thing. People are like, no, what's the here and now that you're going to deliver? And you're like, well, it's this thing.

But it's, you know, how do you translate that? But I've always been at the forefront of tech and a tech guy. I mean, even coming out of college, I developed one of the first web-based calendaring systems, but there was no web browser. This is pre-netcape, right? So then when the Netscape came around, it changed it and it became valuable. So it's, again, one of those things.

It's like, oh, I have this web-based calendaring system. What was it? What was the one? It's called WebCal. Okay. Wait, didn't that get sold to like excite or somebody? No, eventually Novell recruited me a long long time ago. And I went into group wise, you know, with them.

And then I got into search and created a very paramountry search engine. And then went into Ink to Me, which powered all the search around the world. And then one of my greatest blunders is I was actually in a customer and this funny yellow box showed up and it had the word Google stamped on it. And I was doing enterprise search for this large enterprise. And I said, what is that thing? They said, oh, it's the thing we're looking at for search as well. And I said, well, it doesn't have a portal. Like, there's no taxonomy.

Like, this thing's stupid. Get it out of here. And they tried to recruit me. And I said, no, several times. Google did. So, wait, what you're mentioning, people don't know this. Google early on actually had a hardware product that they tried to sell to enterprises. Oh, yeah.

It was a box. Yeah, a literal box. Two U-box that slid in there and they sold it to enterprises for enterprise search because that was the hot thing then. And yeah, it started showing up in all these data centers and all of our accounts. And they didn't get really any traction there. And so then they skated after Intime's core business, which was web search, right? Again, Altavista, Yahoo, all these are powered by Intami. And that was a search engine behind them.

And so. Listen, you're tickling my. my history hat sort of thing. Okay, so I interrupted you. So Google wants to recruit you. You don't go with Google. Bring me forward. Ink to me goes bluey in the dot-com days, right?

A lot of the Inkitamites then went over to VMware because VMware was starting to come out with enterprise products and building a sales team. And so I was one of the first kind of seven salespeople over there at VMware joined in 2002. And then it was always a startup person. right inside of VMware, starting the new businesses, starting, you know, different things. Raggy Raggaram, who's the CEO, was always pulling me out, getting me to do new things, started the cloud business there, which took a long time. The last group I had was blockchain and quantum competing. And then, you know, that's where my blockchain career began and left VMware,

went to a blockchain startup. Like I said, we had to pivot a few times because I joined the month before the COVID lockdown, not knowing there was going to be a COVID lockdown to your point of things change. surprised. And so we built a COVID proximity detection solution that you'd wear and see if you're around some people and protected by blockchain privacy and stuff like this. And then blockchain lockdown stopped. CEO said sell it off. We did that. Started an ESG thing because we're connecting IOT devices that measured different things. And then that started my sustainability journey. And then, you know, long story short, basically that, you know, stopped. I'll tell you more about

that later where it went. And then went to another. company that was sustainability focus but kind of connected capital markets and physical world and then left there at the end of 2000 or 2023 and said you know what it's tom done working for other people myself for a change form terra trust and then that took a journey but basically you know landed on this you know tech sustainability which happens to be a sweet spot it takes all of my tech knowledge and all my sustainability knowledge and combines it and there's a gap in the market I was listening to the founder of Netflix the other day. He's like, you know, the way you build a business is you find a hole and you fill it.

So there's the hole and we're filling it. Obviously, I can see where the idea came from. But what you just mentioned here to get back to a philosophical bent, someone that for 25 years has worked for other people, what is it the thing? Because I always like to use the phrase, oh, this is a good idea. If I don't do it, somebody else will. But also, is it that if you have that much of a career, people out there that have a career of a similar length, what is the emotional

or even logical steps that you have to go through to be like, this is my time, I'm going to do this? Yeah, you know, a lot of people wait until they have a giant pot of money, you know, when they get later in their career to do it. You know, a lot of startup people, don't look like me and you. They typically are those younger crowd that are coming out in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and, you know, haven't gotten beat up in the world quite yet. And so people like us are usually more cautious. And I was not an independently wealthy person.

I mean, I've done okay for myself. But, you know, you just had to make that leap. And it was, you know, one of those things. If not now, if I don't take the opportunity to do this now, when will I do it? You know, I only have so much runway left in my life. and, you know, I want to take the opportunity to go forth and do it. Like I said, I've always built new businesses and built new things for other people. So it's not like I've never been an entrepreneur.

I've just done it inside of other companies. Except for one time, or a VMware had an internal incubator that they created. And so you basically pitch to this. They fund you, give you stock, essentially, but you remain a VMware employee. So you kind of have that comfort of quasi being a startup person, quasi not, but you're running your own business and you grow it and then it gets bought back in or spun out, you know, kind of that thing. So that was quasi startup-ish.

But otherwise, inside even VMware, you're creating a new business like blockchain. It's a new product. You have to go fight for funding. You have to go fight for market. You have to hire your people. You have all the kind of the pain points of a startup person, a little less risk. But you still have the same pain points. You learn the same stuff.

So even people that are out there that are founders or maybe want to be founders and run their own company, you can get those skills and learn those skills, even at the company that you're at or at other companies. You just have to find that role and learn those. And it's good to learn on somebody else's dying and then go out. But you're going to learn new things. And you need to be connected to people like this and the community like this. And if there's anybody out there listening that just wants to bang their head, and say, hey, help me with this.

What do you think about that? I'm in these founder communities all the time. I share stuff all the time with people and learn stuff from them all the time and happy to do so. Yeah, obviously you can learn with somebody else as a net to catch you, you know, which is extremely valuable again. But how long ago did you start Terra Trust? At the end of 2023. So we've been in business for a year and a month or two. Okay. So even with all of your background and experience, a year and a month or two, what is the thing that you didn't know that you would tell yourself back at a time machine or someone like yourself that is making this leap? Like, what do you wish you had done differently? What is the thing that you didn't know about working without a net?

The thing working without a net is it puts a little bit more strain on the family, right? You don't have that. reliable paycheck that's going to come in. Working as a founder, raising money is a little bit different without the net versus in the net. You know, I've always had to go fight for money and make the justification and everything like that. But convincing people to part with money, I've been a sales guy for a long time, so at least I have that skill. But it's still hard, right? You have to convince people, and a lot of times early on, they're betting on the team. So surround yourself with some good people that you trust. that are going to be additive to you, you know, open up your ears and listen to them if they're

additive to you. If they're not additive to you, get rid of them. One of the biggest things I've learned in my life, and this really hit me, you know, kind of at Terra Trust too, is you can never hire too slow and you can never fire too fast, right? So be careful of who you're getting in bed with. be careful you may be like oh you'd be a great advisor you'd be a great advisor you'd be a great advisor and then you're having to curate all these relationships and you're spending too much time doing that or you get people surrounded to you and then you know startups change you have kind of a thesis you'd go out test your thesis then you start to build product then you start to take that to market then you start to expand that machine after you kind of got that machine in place and you need

different people along those stages and so as a startup as a founder it's very hard to bring on those people and then let go of those people to reorient the team and reorient the skills that you need along the way. That's probably one of the hardest things you have as a founder because you know it's your family essentially but I read an article about that too. It's not your family, right? You'll fire your family. Well, some people try to but you know essentially you don't fire your family. You're not going to fire your son or daughter most of the time or your wife or your parents or stuff like that. So it's, it's, it's different than family and needs to be treated different than family. And it's hard because being a founder or being a CEO is the loneliest job on the planet,

for sure, by far. One more before we get back to, let's end with going back to the product and Territrust. You know, the stereotype of a founder, I guess, of these days is, oh, you know, 25 and out of Stanford or whatever, but no necessarily, no track record. And so, hey, I've got this great idea. I have no track record. I have no, I have to convince you to believe in me. But it's different when you're our age and you have 20 years of experience. What is it like, because you do have a track record, when you go to the people that you've worked with for 20 years, and you say, hey, invest in me. Or, hey, I've started this.

Why don't you leave and join up with me? What have you learned about that? Because you do have a track record. And so then maybe the people that you really, really want, they know you and they love you. And they're like, yeah, but I'm not going to do that with you. So, yeah, what is that like when you do have a track record, raising money, hiring all that stuff?

Yeah, and I've had both dynamics there, right? So a lot of our early investors were, you know, people that I worked with in the past. They knew me. They, you know, bet on me, you know, the way we got introduced, right, was through Yvonne Lawsinger. Exactly. It was a longtime champion of mine, a great and amazing woman. She's like, yeah, you need to talk with Brian.

Brian would get this, you know, you'd understand it and everything like that. So having those people in your corner is definitely huge. I would recommend anybody listening of any age, your network is going to be your greatest benefactory of all this stuff, right? That's, you know, again, keep in touch with those people, build that network. When I was out looking, you know, VCs now and everything like that, I realized, you know what, I'm either directly connected to every one of these VCs or I'm one step away from every one of these VCs because of the network that I've built over that, you know, long career inside

up there and selling globally and everything. So a lot of people will connect to people and then never keep up with them. I was just on with a partner that we just signed and he came in because he was one of my first VMware customers that I had like 26 years ago. And we're catching up about that. Now he's the president of this company. 26 years it's been since I've seen this, but I've kept up with him, you know, here and there along the way. And then that led to a partnership and a sales opportunity, you know, with this person immediately. So, you know, that helps when you're going out and raising money because you do have that track record and you do have that relationship.

Now, hiring is totally different thing because, again, all my friends and cohorts and everything look like us. They have gray in the beard, you know? And so they're like, yeah, later in my life, good be you. I became a founder, but I'm kind of happy where I am. And, you know, I'm in this position. so I'm not going to come over and join you. And so that's harder, right?

Because then you're having to go and recruit from people that may not have a track record. But that's what I'm getting at is I feel like the founder with no track record when they get told no. I mean, it hurts. It always hurts to be told no. But you can internalize that as like, well, yeah, because I'm a nobody. But when you have, you just describe, you have a 20-year relationship with someone in there like, yes, let's go, partner, whatever. But when someone says, Mike, love you, but I don't get this idea. I don't, you know, I'm not on board. Like,

that, how does that make you think about what you're doing in terms of, but you love me, but you know me, and so you're still saying no. How do you internalize that? I had a lifelong friend that I've known for 30 years, 35 years, that has always told me, hey, I want to do something with you. I've always wanted to do something with you. I want to build a tech company and he's always told me this year after year after year after year we go skiing all the time year after year after year and he sold his company a few years ago got a large sum for it and everything like this and so then I called them up and I started this company I was like hey you know here it's time to do this and he's like okay what is his pitch this is awesome and um here's the pitch

he's like Mike you could have told me anything else any other idea on the planet versus this sustainability thing and I would have been all right but I just can't do it And I'm like, you know, if you're fundraising, I told someone, another founder this way, you are a collector of nose. Go out and get knows. You're going to hear no, no, no. I've heard no, I don't know, 30 or 40 times today already, right? You are a collector of nose. You're just going to have to get over that.

You're going to have to stick your pride on the shelf. You're going to stick everything over there and just assume that you're a collector of nose that day. How many knows can I get? Make a game out of it. And then what you're going to find is you're going to. talk, you're going to refine your pitch, you're going to refine your pitch, and then those people start to say yes. So someone's saying no to you, don't take it as a no to you, right? It's just a no to that idea that you have. And your idea is not bad. It's just not right for them, which is, hey,

that's fine, you know, my lifelong friend. Still lifelong friends with him, still do stuff and everything like that. He doesn't come out of the will or anything like that. But it's just, he didn't like the space I was in. He thought the idea was good. He just didn't like the space. it didn't align with, you know, his values and everything or what he was interested in doing. So I'm like, hey, that's perfectly fine, which I find ironic because he drives an EV car. But it has solar on his roofs, but, you know, whatever. I love being a collector of nose. I don't imagine you're the first person to say that, but that's a great.

That's a great thing. I heard somebody else. I'm just repeating it. All right. Let's end by coming back to Tara. Because there are not only founders listening, there are people that are working at companies for whom Tara might have a solution. So, again, this is a SaaS product that will essentially, it'll give you information to be more efficient to save money or whatever. So what sort of a company listening right now would be an ideal candidate to come talk to you all?

Yes. But you need a focus. Back to the F word, right? So we basically have kind of three main sectors that look at this. One is, and this is a tech supply chain, to tech consumers. Anybody buying software, hardware, services, tech consumers from a GHG accounting standpoint, from a sustainability standing point, right? This falls under kind of category one, purchase goods and services.

So you have to report on it. All this reporting, by the way, is now part of the international financial. reporting standards. So it's part of your 10Ks and 10 Qs. It has to go in there and it has to be audited. So, you know, you kind of don't have a choice in the matter. That's the check box thing. But again, back to driving efficiency. You know, we sell financial services, tech or tech companies, right? We sell to consumer goods. We sell to big box stores. You know, I mean, you name it. Everybody has kind of movie studios. Everybody's come to us because they're like, yeah, this makes a lot of sense.

This is something we need to do. We're doing AI. We're going to do an AI carve-out. We're doing cloud migrations. We want to see if this is better to run in the data center or better to run in the cloud or which cloud, right? It's a, you know, efficiency thing. Or, you know, we're running 170,000 global companies that are out there that are doing

net zero stuff and we're going to continue doing net zero stuff because guess what? We also do business in China or Canada or New Zealand or Australia or any of these other places that require this anyways, or we're getting pressure because we're a Microsoft, Salesforce service now, you know, IBM partner and they require it. So you get a lot of dynamics. But tech consumers is one space, right? Then on the other side of the supply chain is the tech producers, where we actually sell a lot to and sell more to, really.

And they're the people that are producing hardware and software. So, you know, storage companies, software companies, they see it as a sales differentiator for them. to get in there. So they actually license our data or license our components and build it into their products. So the same people you're using for running your IT operations

are likely licensing our software and building it into their software anyways. But we also connect to them. So if you're using like I was talking with Dinotrace the other day, not to mention specific names, but, you know, there are any monitoring stuff.

And they're like, hey, we have all this kind of carbon data, but we don't really do anything with it. And so it's like, great, send it to us. we can make sense of all that and then bring it back to your customers so it's made sense of. And then they just use more of your dinotrace licenses to collect all this data. So we don't deploy sensors or anything like that into your environment. We actually just connect to a lot of these other places that you already have and then make sense of it in a new way for you so that you have this new and improved data.

So like an installation for us, yeah, we're a SaaS company, but it's connecting to all these things that are out there. We grab usage reports from the cloud providers, so you don't have to do anything new there. We provide, you know, connect in all these other things that you're running, software and hardware that are around there, and give you new telemetry data, new sense of that data on there. So there's really no installation necessary or anything special, wonky happening. Well, final question. If someone's listening that once again involved, I don't know if you're still hiring. I don't know if you are interested in still speaking to investors. You mentioned even community, if people are interested in what you're doing and just like want to talk about this space or whatever.

What are you looking to, if people want to get involved, what should what should they do? Yeah. So we are raising right now. You know, if you're an angel or VC either way, then, you know, contact us. I'm just a mic at terra-dust.com. So you can ping me directly. If you are a customer or a partner in this space or, you know, are running into this. and everybody is, it pops up over and over and over again,

or it's tangential to what you're doing. Then, you know, we drive everything with partners and partner integrations that you probably heard. Then hit me up. And then if you're looking for a job, we have a few here and there. You know, we're not growing exponentially on the job side just now. But we do have those people out there.

And then sometimes you just find somebody that's like, I just want to help you, you know, and be involved somehow. And there's more than enough work to go around. and we find stuff that lines with your passions and big on that. And then if you're in the community, there's a lot of stuff where I just talk to people about what's going on. I don't even sell you stuff. It's like, hey, yeah, let me just talk to you about what this makes sense for in your company

or what you're doing or what you're seeing, help you navigate the waters a little bit. And I find that usually those people call me back in a month or two and end up, you know, as a potential customer or potential partner. But if you just want advice, you know, a lot of founders shouldn't do that. I wouldn't recommend it. Choose up a lot of time. But I'm a big believer in network.

That's what's got me this far in life. And that's what will continue to get me that far in life. Again, Mike at terra dash trust.com. Tara dash trust.com to check out more about the company, ping me directly. If you feel like, oh, let's do an intro, say Brian sent you or whatever. Mike, thanks for coming on the show and telling us about Teratrust and a company that I'm extremely proud of and have a lot of excitement for what's ahead. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening.