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- [00:00]
Mike Depatrillo
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Brian McCullough
Welcome to another bonus episode of the Techmeme Ride 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, 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-trust.com or just Google TerraTrust. And we're talking to the founder, Mike Depatrillo. Hey, Mike, thanks for coming on.
- [00:37]
Mike Depatrillo
Yeah, thanks, Brian, for the time. Really appreciate it.
- [00:39]
Brian McCullough
All right, let's start out. As always, give me the two minute elevator pitch of what TerraTrust does.
- [00:45]
Mike Depatrillo
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, finops going around. So we give them the new data that they need to operate in that new role.
- [01:06]
Brian McCullough
So it's sort of an observational product like a SaaS platform that sort of lets people identify and mitigate things around sort of your. What would you call your bill of materials around environmental costs and things like that.
- [01:25]
Mike Depatrillo
Yeah. So if we take it another level deeper, if you look at kind of IT operations, they 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 use 4 front end web servers or 2 front end web servers? Well, performance wise on that dial, four makes perfect sense. Right. Performs 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 to offset that activity. They could be 350 bucks a ton. Right. You're paying for the downstream water impact, the downstream 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 goes along with the 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 dials and you can be like, wow, that actually cost me a thousand dollars per server, not $20 per server. And I'll make different choices. You take MasterCard as one scenario there they actually deploy into more expensive Amazon European zones. Right. So we're in Europe that cost 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 US that they 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.
- [03:29]
Brian McCullough
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 costs 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.
- [03:58]
Mike Depatrillo
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, 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 that 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 costly 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 cost, 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 feel good thing that comes along for free, along for the ride.
- [05:57]
Brian McCullough
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, right. 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 landscape means for terror trust right now?
- [06:45]
Mike Depatrillo
Yeah, I mean, when we first talked, right. And you came in, it was definitely a question and we knew it could go either way at that point in time, and we're prepared for it, and it's gone that way. Trump is a new US President and staying apolitical in this. We see that he's already had executive orders and he's reversed and pulled us out of 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 US 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 US 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, started the same way, started in Europe, everybody here in the US 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 US 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. US 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 case because it has the same kind of adoption, the same kind of peer pressures from supply chain, the same regulation adoption around the world, same regulation adoption in the US 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.
- [08:39]
Brian McCullough
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 you think of 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.
- [09:41]
Mike Depatrillo
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. But you kind of want to stay around five years in tech. You know, here's what the the world will look like if that is the case. I'm assuming that is the case, you know, that 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, 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 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, right? So that's the main thing is you have to focus on that. But 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. Whether it's 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.
- [11:18]
Brian McCullough
Right.
- [11:18]
Mike Depatrillo
Signed it, everybody. A lot of stuff can happen.
- [11:21]
Brian McCullough
You know, a perfect. I'm glad you brought up the idea of a stock market crash or something like that. So again, worth what founders, maybe 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 assumptions 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 product can evolve to meet that if you're Airbnb and suddenly there's a recession and nobody's traveling or Covid. Right. So how do you the advice to founders out there thinking in terms of timelines and nimbleness, what would you say?
- [12:33]
Mike Depatrillo
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 winter 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 provenance 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 sitting here and it's like, okay, we built a thing around sustainability and we were talking to the chief sustainability officer and 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 de 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 ups 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.
- [14:30]
Brian McCullough
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 where 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 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, for 10 years, I feel like crypto has been in that space where 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 almost. The crypto folks have the battle wounds that probably will help them survive.
- [15:23]
Mike Depatrillo
I was there for 10 years.
- [15:27]
C
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- [17:40]
Brian McCullough
Well, so let's, 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 terratrust came from.
- [17:53]
Mike Depatrillo
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. And people are like, no, what's the here and now that you're gonna, you know, 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 Netscape. Right. So then when 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 calendar system.
- [18:32]
Brian McCullough
What was it? What was the one?
- [18:34]
Mike Depatrillo
It's called WebCal.
- [18:35]
Brian McCullough
Okay, wait, didn't that get sold to like Excite or somebody?
- [18:39]
Mike Depatrillo
No. Eventually Novell recruited me a long time ago and I went into groupwise, you know, with them. And then, and then I got into search and created a very parametric search engine and then went into Ink to me, which powered all the search people 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 a 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.
- [19:20]
Brian McCullough
Google did. Well, 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.
- [19:29]
Mike Depatrillo
Oh, yeah, it was a box.
- [19:30]
C
Yeah, a literal box.
- [19:32]
Mike Depatrillo
2U box that slid in there and. And they sold it to Enterprises for enterprise search because that was the hot thing then. And yeah, it starts showing up in all these data centers, in all of our accounts. And they didn't get really any traction there. And so then they skated after ink to me's core business, which was web search. Right again, AltaVista, Yahoo, all these powered by into me and that was a search engine behind them.
- [19:58]
Brian McCullough
And so listen, you're tickling my history hat sort of thing. Okay, so I interrupted you. So Google wants to recruit you. You don't go with Google. Yeah, bring me forward.
- [20:13]
Mike Depatrillo
Inked me goes bluey in the dot com days. Right. A lot of the ink to mites 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, you know, kind of seven sales people over there at VMware, joined in 2002 and then was always a startup person right inside of VMware, starting the new businesses, starting, you know, different things. Ragu Ragurong, who's the CEO, was always pulling me, 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 computing. And then that's where my blockchain career began. 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, surprise. 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 focused 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, formed 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. And 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.
- [22:12]
Brian McCullough
Obvious, 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, what is 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?
- [22:53]
Mike Depatrillo
Yeah. A lot of people wait until they have a giant pot of money when they get later in their career to do it. A lot of startup people don't look like me and you. They typically are those younger crowd that are coming out and 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, 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. 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 listening, 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 dime 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.
- [25:10]
Brian McCullough
Yeah, obviously you can learn with somebody else as a net to catch you, which is extremely valuable again. But how many, how long ago did you start Terratrust?
- [25:24]
Mike Depatrillo
At the end of 2023. So we've been in business for a year and a month or two.
- [25:29]
Brian McCullough
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?
- [25:52]
Mike Depatrillo
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 is 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 and that are going to be Additive to you, 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 terratrust 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 don't 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.
- [28:09]
Brian McCullough
One more before we get back to. Let's end with going back to the product and TerraTrust. The stereotype of a founder, I guess these days is, oh, 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.
- [29:11]
Mike Depatrillo
So.
- [29:11]
Brian McCullough
Yeah, what is that like, when you do have a track record raising money, hiring, all that stuff?
- [29:17]
Mike Depatrillo
Yeah, I've had both dynamics there. Right. So a lot of our early investors were 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 Wasinger.
- [29:33]
Brian McCullough
Exactly.
- [29:34]
Mike Depatrillo
Who 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, he'd understand it and everything like that. And 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 of 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 were catching up about that. Now he's the president of this company. Right. 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, it's like, yeah, later in my life. Good that you went and 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.
- [31:20]
Brian McCullough
But that's what, that's, that's what I'm getting at is I feel like the, 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, I'm a nobody. But when you have, you, you just described you have a 20 year relationship with someone and they're like, yes, let's go, partner, whatever. But when someone says, mike, love you, but I don't, 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?
- [32:00]
Mike Depatrillo
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 him 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 this pitch? This is awesome. And 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 in, but I just can't do it. And I'm like, okay, you know, as a, if you're fundraising, I told somebody, another founder, this way, you are a collector of no's. Go out and get no's. 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 no's. You're just gonna have to get over that. You have to stick your pride on the shelf. You're gonna stick everything over there and just assume that you're a collector of no's that day. How many no's can I get? Make a game out of it.
- [33:08]
C
It.
- [33:08]
Mike Depatrillo
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 talk, 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 like, lifelong friends with him, still do stuff and everything like that. I'm 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 roof. But, you know, whatever.
- [33:56]
C
So it's a new year, 2025, and you're thinking, how am I going to make this year different?
- [34:01]
Brian McCullough
Shopify.
- [34:02]
C
That is how you're going to make it happen. And let me tell you how. Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open for business and get your first sale. Get your store up and running easily with thousands of customizable templates. No coding or design skills required. All you need to do is drag and drop. Shopify makes it easy to manage your growing business, too. They help with the details like shipping taxes and payments from one single dashboard, allowing you to focus on the important stuff like growing your business. What happens if you don't act now? Will you regret it? What if someone beats you to the idea? Don't kick yourself when you hear this again in a year because you didn't do anything. Now established in 2025 has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.comride all lowercase go to shopify.comride to start selling with Shopify today. Shopify.comride I like having a secret weapon when I go into some sort of a business negotiation situation. An ace in the hole, if you will. An advantage in my back pocket. That's how Mack Weldon thinks about clothing as a secret weapon. Timeless, classic style that's infused with performance fabrics and hidden details to give you secret confidence in how you look. Mack Weldon has become my go to business attire. Some guys just want to look good without calling attention to themselves. Mack Weldon Apparel gives you understated good looks for understated confidence. They're not flashy, just classic. Always in style. And made from the world's most comfortable performance materials. Mack Weldon clothes are designed to fit your style and the demands of modern life. They look like regular clothes, but feel like the latest in modern comfort. They're the go to choice for guys who want to look great without even trying. Get timeless looks with modern comfort from Mack weldon. Go to mackweldon.com and get 25% off your first order of $125 or more with promo code Brian. That's M A C K W E l d o n.com promo code Brian.
- [36:02]
Brian McCullough
I love, I love being a collector of nose. I don't imagine you're the first person to say that, but that's a great somebody else.
- [36:10]
Mike Depatrillo
I'm just.
- [36:11]
Brian McCullough
All right, let's, 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 Terra 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 who, what, what sort of a company listening right now would be an ideal candidate to come talk to y'all?
- [36:45]
Mike Depatrillo
Yes, all of them. But you need to have 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 the 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 10Qs. 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 the 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 come. 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 gonna 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, you know, Dynatrace the other day, not to mention, you know, specific names, but, you know, they're already 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 Dynatrace 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, connecting 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.
- [40:03]
Brian McCullough
Well, final question, if someone's listening that wants to get 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 they do?
- [40:24]
Mike Depatrillo
Yeah. So we are raising right now, if you're an angel or a vc, either way, then, you know, contact us. I'm just a mikera-trust.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, as you've 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 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 I'm big on that. And then if you're, you know, 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, you know, usually those people call me back in a month or two and end up, you know, as a potential customer, 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. But I'm a big believer in network. That's what's gotten me this far in life, and that's what will continue to get me that far in life again.
- [41:56]
Brian McCullough
Mikera-trust.com terra-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 terratrust and a company that I'm extremely proud of and have a lot of excitement for what's ahead.
- [42:20]
Mike Depatrillo
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening.