Blending business and science to change the future of algae: an interview with Ashley and Robert Roulston

Hello everyone and welcome back to Work It, a UVic career exploration podcast. On this season of the show, we're talking with amazing UVic alumni who are making a huge splash in the working world and have some incredible career trajectories. We also talk to knowledgeable career educators who offer advice on how to find or create a career that you love.

Hi, everyone. My name is Katy, and it's great to be back with all of you. If we're going on food-themed fun facts, I am also a big sushi appreciator, and my absolute favorite is a salmon roll. Nothing like it. Before we jump into today's conversation, I want to acknowledge that at least Emma and I today are recording at the University of Victoria, which is located on the traditional territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples.

On today's episode, we are super excited to connect with Ashley and Robert Roulston, siblings, UVic graduates and business partners who cofounded Industrial Plankton in 2010, the same year that Ashley graduated from UVic with a Bachelor of Commerce specializing in entrepreneurship. Ashley was a member of UVic's women's golf team and was named one of BC Business Magazine's top 30 under 30 and is now the chief marketing officer at Industrial Plankton. Robert holds a Bachelor in Science and Biology from McGill University and a Bachelor of Engineering and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Victoria. He combined his passion for aquatic organisms with his background in industrial automation to create technology that produces quality live algae, a bottleneck for many industries. Welcome to the show, Ashley and Robert.

Thanks for having us.

Thank you.

So as you may have noticed from our introductions, Emma and I do not have science backgrounds. In fact, between us, I think we have 3 English degrees. So right off the bat, I would love to just dig into the algae of it all, and I'm hoping that you guys can share with us how algae is used in different industries and how industrial plankton is addressing that need working in that space.

The 2 major industries that use it are aquaculture and then biotechnology. So aquaculture uses it to feed their baby animals. It ends up being the foundation of the marine industries. If you're feeding shellfish or shrimp or, you know, marine finfish, that type of thing. Definitely on the shellfish side, we've done very well.

So we have you to thank.

And then biotechnology uses it to do all kinds of stuff, whether it's making medicine or fertilizer or feeding baby honeybees, all kinds of strange things. And so we help them by providing the piece of technology that just pumps out the algae they need very reliably, which is a tricky part of the process.

I didn't realize that there was such a diverse need for algae. That's really interesting. And I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about that technology you were mentioning. What is it and how do you use it and what does it mean for all of these different industries that you're providing to?

So we manufacture equipment called LG photobioreactors. It's essentially a biological process happening in something called a bioreactor. And we provide this equipment to mainly shellfish hatcheries, shrimp hatcheries, and they use it to feed their baby animals for the first life stages. There's also a lot of our clients in the biotech sector, and they can be anything imaginable. That's what we make, LG photo bioreactors.

Very cool. I love hearing the sheer number of places that something like this can be applied. It's definitely goes a lot further than I would have anticipated, but I wanna do a little rewind. So it's 2010. It's the era of colorful jeans and, like, mustache tattoos.

I didn't know what I wanted to do a degree in, so I was in the general pre business type of classes on the golf team, as you mentioned earlier. So I was naturally slightly better at hanging out with humans than Robert, the more inventor engineer was. But we knew that he was a mastermind and had brilliant ideas. And Robert knew that he needed a good business partner. So he encouraged me to do the business degree, the entrepreneurship specialization.

I wanted to save the world. I actually wanted to make a lot of money between the 2 of us. She's amazing with people, and I'm really good with technology. Yeah. Just made sense.

That's how we got started.

That's fantastic. And clearly, your collaboration and partnership has sustained into something pretty extensive. So I wonder if you could tell our listeners what working with a partner is like and maybe if there's any advice you'd give to students who are looking to collaborate on entrepreneurship ideas.

If you're not siblings, then definitely lay your share structure out ahead of time. I've seen so many situations that everything's fine in the beginning, but once something starts to be worth money, you lose some friends over that. Get everything clearly laid out ahead of time.

I heard a good one. It's not an agreement that you're signing. It's more of a disagreement that you only have to bring up the things that you're signing when there's a disagreement. So I think that's pretty funny whoever came up with that. Yeah.

It's like a prenup. Yeah.

I was very lucky with Ashley, and there's obviously an intrinsic trust there being family.

I'd say for forming your team, once you know you wanna do it, choose people with complementary skill sets, not the same skill sets because then why are you bringing them onto the team? Like Robert and I, we're all going towards the same goals even if we don't have the same skills at all. So it's nice knowing that he's got my back for these type of tasks, and I've got his back for other type of tasks to get everything done.

That's a really good point because you tend to gravitate towards people that you understand. But sometimes the people that are the exact opposite to you, they're the right people for the task. They're not the people that you gravitate towards. So

I think that touches on something so important, though. Being able to have that self awareness to, like, see where your own gaps are and what the complimentary skill set that you even need is is really important. And I think, too, in talking about planning for future contingencies from the start of a partnership, you touched on another thing that can come up, I think, for a lot of students who are attracted to the idea of entrepreneurship, which is that going out on your own, especially at a younger age, maybe when you don't have a ton of experience, you're just finishing up school or recently graduated, it can be really daunting. And a lot of people might feel like they have a great idea, but they don't know what to do to start or how how to get the ball rolling. What did your journey look like when you teamed up and first started moving on your business partnership?

Well, we started with some business plan competitions at UVic, which were incredibly helpful. And UVic staff, Maya and Brent and Brock. In particular were just so supportive. So it was a really nice platform to pitch our business ideas and and get really constructive feedback. That aspect really helped warm us up to the real world and the harsh criticism that you're going to get from real angel investors or VCs when you start talking to them.

In those business plan competitions that Robert mentioned, we won the first one that we went into, and we won $5,000, which was a ton of money when we had zero money at the time. And then I think we leveraged that into getting a loan from the bank, and then we leveraged that loan from the bank and getting money from angel investors, and we leveraged that matching funds for government grants. And we've just kept that ball rolling since, also producing lots of revenue now. But in the beginning, it was just one project after another and stacking that money to help pay rent and hire employees.

Yeah. Ashley, you forget we got 2nd place in the first time we went in that, and we were so bitter. Really, because we got $2,000 and we're like, no, we're gonna win next year. Next year, when got 5,000. And then, yeah, within a year, we leveraged it into 80,000 and won another business plan competition and just rolled from there.

And Victoria was just such a good ecosystem to start a business in. We had Rob Bennett there at ViaTech, who's just volunteering all of his time for any questions that you had. And as Robert mentioned, all those nice professors in the business department, and then we had some in the engineering department as well that ended up being great mentors.

I'd love to know more about how you were pitching some of these ideas because I can imagine that you would have had to have a really solid foundation and a great way of marketing that idea to then get those investors and get those grants. Can you tell me a bit about what that process was like?

If I had have known what I know now, I would have not even started, but we are too naive to know any better. And so then we started, and then we were in too deep, and we had to make it work. And we did. And then we just went for it.

Yeah. I think that also, like, really speaks to your time as a student and as a young person can be a really good time to take that plunge because you probably don't have a mortgage, probably don't have dependents. You can take a little more risk and have a little more space to fail. That was all 14 years ago. And now you've been doing this together for 14 years.

I don't get to build anything anymore, which is tragic because I love that part. Now I just am in a position where I don't know what I'm doing every day because it's always new. We're up to 22 people now, and we've shipped bioreactors to 33 countries. We've been growing at over 30% a year, year over year for the past 6 years. So, actually, we just bought our 1st building, 10,000 square foot warehouse out in Langford. We're building that out now for a 3 times facility expansion.

In the beginning, we were wearing all the hats. I had to do the payroll and the bookkeeping and all those admin things that I'm not a fan of, but they were delegated to me. And Robert was doing all the things and figuring out business licenses and tax. Now we have people that are better at that than us to do those jobs, but the problems don't go away overnight. Your problems just get bigger.

When everybody's working well and excited, it's one of the most satisfying feelings in the world. I wanna have a company where it feels like when I was a kid and my friends would come over and we were building a tree house together, and nobody was getting paid for it. We were just building this thing because we wanted to, and we were working our asses off. You know? We were just hauling boards up into the woods and climbing things and getting all covered in pine bark.

The people that you want to be bringing in are people who also really value that feeling of curiosity and discovery and collaboration. What kinds of employees are you looking for in your team? Like, what skills make someone a great asset to industrial plankton?

People that are willing to work in a fast paced environment. Since we built this right out of university, we don't have formal corporate job training. So we're doing what we think is right at the time, and sometimes our priorities pivot. So we need the rest of the team to be on board with the decision and the direction that we decide to pivot into.

People that push the envelope. I need people that are willing to put in a big push when push comes to shove. You get people there and they're just so excited about some weird specific healthy thing. And, you know, I'm trying to write a report, but they're telling me about something. So I'll get a bill. It's actually pretty cool.

Passion's important, it sounds like.

Like I'm wearing a shirt. I love algae.

I love that. Is this something you can buy from industrial plankton? I feel like you guys need a merch line.

Some are on our website, but they're, more obscure seaweed ones because that's our newest product line, the seaweed ones, which are gonna definitely help save the world.

Yeah.

So we do have that on the website, but so does your address after. We'll see what we can do. Oh, that's so cool.

Let's go. It's seaweed time.

Let's loop back a little bit. I wanna talk about your experiences in the co op program and what you took away from those experiences that helped you in creating your business.

As we mentioned, I was on the golf team for UVic. So my first couple of co ops were for the Canadian Golf Academy in Prince Edward Island, and then my next one was at Canada Snowboard, they're called. And that was during the Olympics. So I got to be in Vancouver 2010 on the ground. It was amazing.

I did 2 co op terms. And then I realized I would prefer to build my own things. And so then my last two terms, it is entrepreneurial coops. I would just make a bunch of money designing things for people on the side and then spend this whole coop term just trying to invent stuff. Spending all my student loan money on r and d, which after about $15,000 of that, I was like, is this actually going somewhere or am I actually a crazy person?

It's okay to make mistakes because you're a co op student. It's semi expected, and that's okay. People will forgive you.

Make the mistakes early.

Yeah, I can't make as many mistakes now.

It's very cool that you got some experience in a more traditional co op, and then balance that with following your own ideas and getting to experiment through this entrepreneurial piece. Looking on the other side, what do coop students bring to your team now? Like, why do you bring on coop students? What excites you about working with them?

They've been part of our workforce forever. At this point, I believe we'd hired maybe a 130 co op students, which is pretty incredible. They're fresh and excited and we have a good process. We're used to training them. So we give them things that aren't going to be outside of their capability to do, but are also still challenging.

Amazing. I almost see the co ops too as part of our farm team. If we were a baseball team, like, they're the up and coming future employees for us and lots of our current staff are former co ops. And the ones that aren't, we wish them the best, and many are doing amazing things. But a couple I know are engineers at Tesla, and one has a great company on his own. Some of them become part of the family at the end of the day too, and we do wanna keep up with their lives.

Well, yeah, it kind of reminds me about what you were saying about finding people that are really values aligned and, like, gel really well with the work environment. Co op is a nice way for recruiting, so that's also super cool.

Then if we have, like, a big push for production at Christmas, we'll go through all of our co ops for the past couple of years and send out an email to say, can anyone come in to help us with this production push? And we'll get, you know, a handful of the keen ones coming in. So I think we have a good relationship with our past and present coop

students. That's fantastic. There's clearly many different types of positions that you have at Industrial Plankton, but I'm wondering if you could walk us through, at least for you, Ashley and Robert, what your typical day looks like on the job. Day in my life, a

lot of it is ruled by my inbox for what inquiries are coming in, setting up demos. I occasionally get to travel for trade shows, and that's a love hate relationship that's exhausting but rewarding at the same time. We have a installation and training customer support team, and they have a pretty exciting life. They get to travel all around the world doing installations. For Robert and I, it's still a lot of government bank type meetings.

Different type of excitement. Mhmm.

More like looking into big World Bank reports about the future of seaweed and the direction of that and scaring ourselves about climate change. That's more our daily life.

Weirdly, that's part of my daily life too, and I don't even work in this sector.

Yeah. So relatable.

Yeah. My day, maybe a month of my year is traveling. So I have a pillow with a, like, a pillowcase with a handle on it. So I bring that because it really helps if anyone's doing a long trips. So a lot of just keeping up with everybody's needs because everybody is just asking you questions all the time.

Yeah. I think about that so much even in, like, my own position. Like, being in comms, you can end up in this mode of you're only working reactively to stuff that's coming in. And so then when you get those moments where you're able to be proactive and, like, dream and ideate and, like, plan, it feels so good and everyone needs that. But it unfortunately can be too rare that we get that time in that space.

Yeah. Oh, that's really well put. Yeah. Working reactively versus proactively. Yeah. That's exactly it.

And it's like the age that we live in. There's no shortage of things to do. Yeah. So, yeah, to make that time, it's a good reminder.

I look at my phone. There's, you know, 10 different types of messages from 10 different apps and, you know, I can never even get into the bottom of one of them. Like, I can't even get to the bottom of my emails anymore. So it's, yeah, it's really hard to step away, but I'll just grab a coffee and go up on the roof of my house when I used to have this really nice view, and I would just stand there for 20 minutes every morning and think because that's the only break you got.

So we touched on this at the start of the episode. And now if we're able to, I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into some of the most exciting applications that you've seen your technology be applied to and some of the most interesting and maybe unexpected unexpected problems that you've seen it help solve? In the beginning, we got into this

just to feed oysters. That's what we have in British Columbia in our backyard, oyster hatcheries. And now we're in shrimp hatcheries and sea cucumber hatcheries. So we're helping feed all these people around the world. So, that's a neat one. Another one is human health supplements. It's called nutraceuticals, is the industry that we're in. So, our equipment's being used in that. It's being used to feed honeybees. It's being used to feed other insects.

But it goes so far beyond, at least for me, like a person that is not really like in this space. I hear plankton and I'm like, oh, this is probably all related to like oceanography and, like, aquaculture. But it really goes far beyond that, which is super exciting.

What are your future plans for you and Industrial Plankton? What's coming up?

Yeah. So moving into our new facility is a big one. So that's a 3 times expansion of our current place, which is great because we're super cramped because we've been growing like crazy for the past 6 years. We're also likely going to raise, let's say, $5,000,000 on a venture capital round so I can get more engineers and just keep this momentum going. And with that, we're gonna push our seaweed bioreactor line that we started maybe 2 years ago and essentially make baby kelp plants.

That's so cool. And it sounds like there's potential maybe to harness this technology to maybe even do some ecological restoration projects, and that's where my interest is right now. So, yeah, that gives me so much to think about, and it is so cool.

Yeah. I believe some of our clients are doing that, Ashley. Yeah.

Yep. Reforesting the ocean.

So they'll just take the baby's seaweed that comes out of our equipment, and then they use it to seed the tiny little piece of gravel. So It just starts a little piece of seaweed growing on a little piece of gravel and then they just grow it on a boat and just start tossing around little pebbles of this seaweed laden gravel and you just start giant seaweed forests. But you need to be able to pump out the seaweed seedlings reliably and at cost to do that. So we're helping with that part.

That's awesome. Alright. So now we're moving on to our rapid fire segment. This is the part of the show where we're gonna ask you some questions about your time at UVic, and we just want you to answer what the first thing that comes to your mind. Are you ready? What was your favorite study spot?

I stole Robert's computer science engineering card to get into that building after hours, so I would study on the 2nd or third floor of that building. That was my favorite spot. And I met some great friends that are still friends today. Love it. Yeah.

I would sit outside the exam room for the first 29 minutes of every single exam because they'll cut you off after 30 minutes. And so I went into every single exam 29 minutes late, and I would just listen to death metal for 29 minutes and learn a chunk of a course.

Yeah. Remember, Robert was on his 2nd undergrad at this point too. We'd already finished the one at McGill, so we had it figured out a bit more than myself in 1st year.

Yeah. But I would learn every course in 2 days because the rest of the time I was doing what I called experiments.

Amazing. Playing with aquariums.

Yeah. You clearly went in the correct career path.

We weren't trying to get into law school. We weren't going for grades.

Yeah. Did you live on campus? Or did you commute?

I did the 1st campus, then the cluster housing, and then we were Fernwood kids after that. And then I actually lived with Robert and many other people in Fernwood.

Yeah. To start our entrepreneur house.

Yes. I love that idea. It's like a little incubator in Fernwood having your crazy ideas. I think that's awesome.

Yeah. It was 6 people in a hot tub, and, you know, it was nice.

Did you

have a favorite snack or food item that you would get on campus?

I like the muffins. It might not even be there from the coffee shop right outside of center. Yes.

Munchy bar.

It is still there. And I don't know if they're the same muffins, but the muffins they currently sell there are excellent.

Yeah. From a local bakery. That would be my go to snack. There's like a meal. Yum.

Yeah. It's like a brick. Oh, just pierogi pizza for sure. Yeah. In the engineering building. I don't know if they still sell that, but yeah.

From Hot House Pizza, I think it was at the time or

villages. Amazing.

Yeah. I just melted cheese. I'm a sucker for the cheese.

Yummy. Now I'm really hungry.

We

do have to stop putting questions about food in here because I also always get hungry. This may end up being like

a little bit of

a blast from the past, but you do not need to confine yourself to songs that were out when you were at Yubick. If you could choose any song as a soundtrack to your time as a student here at Yubick, what song would it be?

I have the answer, and we listened to it so much when we lived in that entrepreneurial house. I think we had it going for 24 hours on repeat at some weekends, and then it was also played at my wedding. It was played at Robert's wedding. Robert, what song is it?

Kid Cudi song.

Yep. Kid Cudi Pursuit of Happiness. Amazing.

Yeah. That came on on a cab like a year ago and I cried. I don't know. Because it was like we'd have really hard days with the whole group of us in that house and we'd just play that and we're just like, yeah. I don't know why. It just kinda spoke to us.

Aw. I love that.

I love that. I love that that's a song that you both, like, share. That's so awesome.

You might even have a separate song, but that was my song that I pick. But I think it's your song too after your answer. Yeah. Unless there's some death metal I don't know about.

That's the b side.

Yeah.

Okay. Are you both tea or coffee drinkers?

Coffee and hot chocolate.

Yeah. I don't touch tea.

Okay.

I think that anyone who can end up being an entrepreneur without being a coffee drinker is built different, and I need to know their secret. You know?

No. It doesn't exist. Our office just we turn through a ridiculous number of pots of coffee. I gotta put a halt on things.

So here in Victoria, we have both of these relatively close. Mountains or ocean? Ocean.

I could look in tide pools all day.

That checks out.

Yeah. Definitely ocean.

Okay. Now this is kind of interesting. Do you feel more productive in the morning or at night?

I'm for sure morning end. As a side note, I remember one business plan competition, Robert stayed up till 4 AM working on it, and then I woke up at 4 AM to finish it.

Man, you guys are the dream team.

But, yeah, I'm a late night person. I could just stay up until things are done.

Yeah. Me too. I submitted my final assignment for a course last night at 1 AM, so I agree.

I cannot relate. Even when I was in grad school, I would be starting my work by, like, 9, and I would be done by, like, 6 because after 6 PM, I'm completely useless as a functioning member of society. Like, I it's just over for me. Well, thank you both so much for spending time with us today and sharing your expertise and telling us about what you do. It's been such a blast, and I feel like I have learned a ton.

Yep. For sure.

Thank you guys for organizing this.

Thanks.

Workit is developed and distributed by Coop and Career Services at the University of Victoria and hosted by Emma Obeland and Katie DeCoste. Today's guests were Ashley and Robert Rolston, UVic graduates and founders of Industrial Plankton. Our theme music and art were created by Emma Obelund with audio editing by Emma Obelund. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to WorkIt wherever you get your podcasts and you'll never miss an update. To learn more about career possibilities and resources from UVic, visituvic.cadashcareerdashservices.