Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate the intersection of technology and business, uncovering innovations that redefine our world. Here we are. We made it, which has been, a while in the making. Right? Yeah. Yes. So I guess my, my background is in solar energy. Nice. I started a company in Hawaii. We developed our own software for it because at the time, there was no real solar specific software. You know? Yeah. It really took off. I mean, I borrowed 250 ground from a friend to start it.
And by our 3rd year, we were doing a 150,000,000 in sales. Fantastic. And, you know, it sort of I had I had this philosophy previously, but, you know, really fleshed it out doing this project and a few others is that, you know, like, the cheapest and best way to grow, really, any any business is to come up with a way for other people to use your ecosystem to just kill it, to make more money than they've ever made before. You know?
Yeah. And if you do it well, your Salesforce or Amazon Web Services or, you know, like, you'd pick a pick a company that's really done well and and this is what they've done well. Right? They've come up with a way or other businesses to just kill it using their systems.
And so having that as a focus, you know, as as you develop your go to market strategy and you know, obviously, at first, you have to sort of handhold the whole first business relationships and all of that, but you build all the infrastructure with the goal of, you know, creating a business in a box for a given entity or a given set of individuals or what have you. Right? And that's how that's how you make something just take off exponentially. I love that.
And it's it's, good to hear you say that because this is where we're sitting at an interesting spot today. So the company's a year old, but a year ago is when I wrote the original prototype for what would we would eventually start building towards. And that original prototype informed a lot.
So I believe very strongly that all of a sudden, we have the ability for human beings to talk to a computer the way we talk and for it to give you the results of what you need, whatever that was, in a way that you understand, because it understands you. You don't have to talk geek anymore. Don't have to write code anymore. And I went out to prove that to be true or false right away.
And what I realized was it's actually false at the moment, but the gap between here and there is not as far as I thought it was. So okay. Great. I built a thing called Brother. It can write code. You tell it what you wanted, ask you a bunch of questions spit something out, and it works. Yay. That's cute.
It's a nice toy, but if you actually wanna build something that's worth something, you've gotta do the next thing, which is all businesses or integrations, you don't write custom code in isolation. It's not greenfield. Right? It's full of brownfield. You've got ERPs and whatever else. You've got all these systems that you actually integrate. That's what software is today. So we need to solve that problem. That's a harder problem. So we started down that path.
But, along the way, we ran into a bunch of problems that I think are industry wide. If you're trying to incorporate modern large language models in AI into your enterprise application, there's a series of problems you're always gonna run into. You've got this nondeterministic thing. This thing that doesn't translate into true or false. Right?
It can be it can come back one time and say Christian, and the next time say a radically different thing It's also still true, but a different way of saying it. How do you write tests for that? Because your system has to know it's a good answer or a bad answer. How do you know? Yeah. So we we ran that problem hard. So we, took a big step back, took our alpha down and said we have to solve that. Now the spot we're sitting on right now is that itself is a very interesting product potentially.
But that's not what we've been asked to do. We've got a lot of partners now that are coming and saying, we wanna solve this specific problem in this AI space because we're a managed service provider, or we're a we're a solutions integrator, we're a we're a service company, and we'd like to be a product company, but we don't know how to do and we sure as hell don't know how to do it in this modernized AI automated world. Yep. So the opportunity sitting in front of us is really an Airbnb.
Do we build this universal problem and take that to market, or do we have to solve that anyway, which we do? And we start building these products for other people and do a big rev share on it because they've already got tons of revenue. Right? I can just take your sales funnel. I can make you way more profitable. I can, like, give you something you've never had, which is, you know, monthly reoccurring because you're a service based company, right, and do a revenue split on it.
And white label and I don't care. I can be plumbing in the wall. Yeah. And that's where we're at. That's what we're doing today is is working with some of those big partners to identify if that's really a viable path or if we need to build something in isolation as a product that we take to market that has mass appeal. So the path that you're exploring is with, like, consulting group, Yeah.
So CDW is the biggest of them that's come to us and said, we have a solutions integrator, which means they they work with, Amazon to implement Amazon's AWS with some large company. So Nike wants to move from their own data centers or some other cloud provider Amazon, and they pay this company to do that for them. Yeah. Right? There are a lot of those companies. It's a $300,000,000,000 a year industry to do that.
That's why Amazon Web Services is what it is because they've made a path for companies like that to go kill it. Right? Right. Right. So, yeah, I have a friend who owns 1 of those companies.
Her name is Dow Jensen, it's it's like an Amazon Web Services reseller, and she says the the reason why she has her customers is because if they go direct, to Amazon, which they which they can, they end up paying a hell of a lot more because they're not aware of all the little programs and this and that in, like, ways to configure their business activity such that they, you know, have the most efficient bill with AWS. Right? And then the other one is, a form made of mine, Steve Wadsworth.
You know, he invests these types of companies, And he has a company that he bought that is, it's called DCI. I know DCI for some reason. I'm doing consulting with them right now, DCI on their sales funnel. And what they do is accounts payable. Right? Like, big companies have these problems where they have all these disputes and, you know, they have they have to figure out how to pay their vendors and and so they manage that whole process with their software.
But when I'm talking to them, their soft where is, like, Fuji is hell. Like, and it and each big customer, it's like a it's it's not like a form product across all their customers. It's like each customer has its own siloed service. You know? Yeah. Yeah. And they're all huge customers. Right? And it's all like a big account.
But now as they're trying to grow, they're trying to, like, you know, get things, more streamlined and organized and, you know, it's like our total reorg, right, of their whole company. Yeah. So I when I first heard about your the way Kim described it was, you know, you have this AI tool that that goes and figures out technical debt and figures out how to, like, you know, streamline code and, you know, all of out. Right? I thought, well, well, this is like a perfect fit. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Plus, the guy who's backing them, like, if if it works, the guy who's backing them is like, you know, this is the kind of company he companies he backs, right? Yours is the kind of companies he backs. Yeah. So it's like a perfect fit for a number of reasons. Right? Yeah. We do, that is our focus area for the product we've been building for some time. Yeah. And, we ran the problem we ran into is why it doesn't currently work, and we had to pull it back and then reengage with it.
So we had to solve that problem. And then while we were solving that problem is when we got approached by other parties that are like, well, hold on. You have this thing that already does what we do as a business, we would love to license that and, you know, co sell it white label, whatever, And we're like, well, shit. That's a super language.
That's a great way of doing some dilutionary activity of bringing on investors, have our customers start paying for it and allow us to good develop against it. Our goal is still to get to the, what I say, the brownfield of software development where, you know, all the messes lie and clean it up.
Yeah. But, we're not at the point where that product is is ready for that kind of, that kind of use case, which is gonna take a little bit longer than expected because there's a series of failures you're gonna hit along the way. You'll be Hammer to overcome, and we're still getting way through those. I I'm really curious about getting back to what you were talking about what you did. The the software company on the solar side.
25 years ago, I wrote one for wind development that we were trying to corner the market on all the available spots for commercial wind. And I it just did a bunch of overlays on the practical based on, like, as a transmission lines nearby, who owns it as a public or private land, etcetera. Yeah. That was one of my better exits because the the company's best spotters or best Festa vest. I don't know how to say it, but they bought us because they were trying to do that themselves.
Yeah. Find find find project sites. Yeah. Yeah. I love that industry because it was so full of hobbyists that it was you could come in with a decent business. Might be like, crushing that. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so my current thing that I'm doing is it's called Safe Connect Solar. And you know, we came up with a way to make residential solar and appliance instead of a construction So currently, when you buy solar, you buy it from a contractor. Yeah. And the reason is because of safety.
You know, your life safe your fire safety, is managed by that permitting process, right, and engine electrical engineer drops up the plans, submitted to the city. Contractor signs on that they're gonna build it according to those plans. They come and inspect it. The city's liable for the thing getting built to code, you know, all this crazy stuff. Right?
Yeah. But every other thing in your house, literally every other thing in your house, the safety is managed through a national safety certification for that device through a Nurdle, you know, a nationally recognized testing lab, like UL or CTL or one of those. Right? Right. And so I decided someone has to go through the fucking brain damage of making this a a a national getting a national safety certificate for solar as an appliance.
So I started doing that, and it took a lot longer than I thought. But here we are now the finish line. Like, we got a change to the national electrical code, which which was brutal. Yeah. It took 5 years, but that happened came out in the 2020 code release. And then I was able to get UL to finish our certification, and now that's ready to publish as a new as a new standard for a for solar as an appliance, right, pre engineered.
So I'm, like, running around, you know, like, trying to figure out the right path. I'm talking to, because it's it's a heavy lift. Right? I mean, it's like 10,000,000 plus to bring this thing to market. Right? So I'm talking to you know, strategic investors. You got a, like, a a German distributor that wants to take over, you know, over the market and sees this as a differentiated path to do it. You know, I've I'm talking to some different, you know, equipment manufacturers.
Talking to a venture group, which, you know, I'm not a big fan of venture, but, you know, gotta gotta keep it in the mix because it's time. You know? And so I've got all these negotiations going. And I don't I wanna be able to hang on because this residential solar appliance It's gonna be huge, man. It's a it's a $2,000,000,000,000 market. You know?
And, like, being being able to set a box batteries down and plug it in, being able to, like, you know, have standardized infrastructure installed in that house that lets you just bring a solar system. We will click. Click is the way it's gonna go, and it's gonna cut the cost in Hammer, and it's gonna explode. And, you know, like, in Hawaii, when we did this, went from 2% to 2% of Hammer having solar to 40% of single family detached homes having solar in in under 5 years.
And that's when we bring the cost down, that same explosion is gonna happen on the national scale where everybody, school teachers, firemen, get everybody the only reason we don't have it on our place is, we live on an island outside of Seattle, which means we have Howard Jurups in Dainbridge. No one would be. Okay. Yeah. The you have outages all the damn time. Right? Like, I I had a 1 week in the middle of winter a couple years ago where route a power.
I have a barn, which is a brand new building built up to modern code. I've got a round pen, which is a much bigger building built to like, extreme code. Yeah. I have a house. It's rather large. All of them have roof surfaces that I could put something on, but I also have industrial grade, like, transformer at the quarter because the well for the entire regions on my properties, on my land.
Mhmm. And so we've got significant infrastructure in place to build out a much larger solar field or whatever we wanted to do, but it was always the permitting process to about this because it takes so damn long, and it's so expensive while you're waiting on it because you're still paying the contractors to do to, like, sit around and do nothing while you're waiting on if you had an appliance where I didn't have to go through that entire process or at least it
was significantly reduced, we would Hammer done it years ago. Awesome. Todd, pleasure, man. Let's, keep it going. Alright. Sounds good. And that's a wrap for this episode of Tectastic. Wanna thank you personally for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Until then, keep exploring, and stay curious. Thank you for listening. If you are new here and enjoyed the content, please subscribe. It really helps us out. And if you are a regular listener, thanks so much for your continued support.
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