all right we’re here the scrap expo 2022. i got my buddy drake here and uh from rematter and i’m just we’ve been talking about doing this sitting down and we finally got it we finally got the window of time it both worked for both of us so let’s make it happen captain yeah yeah thanks for having me here it’s excited to be here scrapbox suppose i’m pretty good so far good to you yeah yeah good so far um not a lot of companies so you know all the all the work you know is after the convention and following up with people and why not but yeah really exciting to see all the different equipment and stuff too that you don’t see at other shows so yeah well and be able to see like work live as it’s kind of like a different component that that is that this show brought and i think it kind of brought out some more people that may not have would go to an israeli show or whatever and i think the cost you know to attend the show enables like you know a broader landscape of people to

actually okay from a profitability affordability standpoint like we can go attend that show totally yeah also i didn’t realize too someone was saying that louisville is like six or seven hours of like 60 of the us population so pretty pretty central and people and i didn’t realize that either until i was talking to jim kiefeny and i was like why is louisville out of all places and he’s like and he kind of broke down the math for me i was like okay it makes sense yeah that’s good that’s a fair reason yeah yeah totally you guys been doing have any fun after after the show you guys what do you guys been doing anything anything exciting yeah i mean just me boring louisville yeah not not too much um yeah mostly just meeting up with you know some some current and uh you know prospective customers which is always good but we’re actually headed up to the commodities round table uh later today after after the show here i’ll be up there i’m gonna leave tomorrow morning early get up there yeah go to chicago and chicago’s a pretty fun city as well yeah

i i enjoy that up there i’m excited i’ve never actually been in chicago before so this will be my first time going there and uh it’s a good it’s a good city it’s pretty fun yeah i think that commodities round table kicked off today if i remember right yeah yeah we have one of our our guys going up and setting up having another booth oh you guys have a booth up there yep yeah yeah we’ve just found all the basically all the shows are the the best way to to meet people and you know share more about our product and stuff mostly because i mean people are so busy day-to-day yeah you know even if they’re busy like operating and doing and like they’re in their own they’re in their business like grinding away totally yeah so it’s always always good to catch people in a good head space when they’re you know evaluating like new equipment new programs and things that they can be doing different to potentially improve their their operation 100 so tell me i mean give me the rundown like what do you guys do yeah so myself

and my two co-founders we started rematter about two and a half years ago so that the back story on it um we all three of us were students at uh stanford university out in california um one of my co-founders our co-founder and ceo wyatt did an internship through this cleantech accelerator on campus yeah got pretty interested in industrial recycling and our senior year we were in a product design class looking at software and industrial spaces and we were all pretty interested in recycling but we didn’t know too much about it i think like like most people and you know hear you guys talk about a lot like the education of scrap industry i think most people think of recycling as like blue bin residential recycling and you know you know bottles and cans here or there so we just cold called a bunch of scrap yards in the the bay area um all the way up you know to these like really large enterprise companies down to the mom and pop operators and just sat behind skill operators dispatchers people in the yard listened to the way that they used their

software and interacted a lot of pen and paper you know a lot of potential inefficiencies and problems with their existing programs and felt like there was a synergy there uh for us to build something new so working on it part-time cove would hit march 2020 we were all ready to graduate so moved into this like crappy little apartment near san francisco and built out our bin tracking and dispatch product first so started there and now we’ve evolved into doing skill ticketing and inventory management so who was your first customer like yeah our very first customer i think that the trophy goes to allen finch of mayflower metals he was the very first customer user of the program we reached out on linkedin and i mean we looking back now we barely had a product at that point like it was a very early iteration of it and um you know we were solving a problem for him though of helping you know manages has been tracking operations so we’re forever grateful for uh him taking ourselves i always love to ask you know if you start something new like from scratch it’s like

who is the first one because it’s like there’s always gotta be that one guy or gal that like takes a risk like all right let’s see what you can do you know like gives you a shot and so there’s always like i always think there’s it always holds like a special place totally totally yeah he was our first customer on dispatch and then um andrew bomicker out in nebraska was the first guy to use our our skill our skill to getting product and yeah yeah i mean especially with software i mean it’s like any business it’s such a it’s such an iterative process that the only way that you improve is by having people give you feedback but you know you need those people who are willing to like take a dive on you know an early version of the product to actually help progress it forward yeah what’s been like the biggest challenge like for you guys trying to develop that this like it’s because it’s a pretty unique piece of software that that every every recycling facility has a purchasing software right a dispatch software and what’s been the kind of the

the challenge you i guess maybe didn’t expect when building this building this business out yeah totally so i think on the the bin tracking and dispatch side it’s a very i think it’s a pretty narrowly scoped problem in terms of you have a bunch of different size containers they’re out at commercial accounts you’re dispatching out drivers it to us it was like a pretty linear way to build a software um to solve that as we started getting into more of the transactional piece of like skill ticketing inventory management sales the level of depth and nuance is was a lot higher than we originally anticipated and especially as we talked to different yards of each size people do their their inventory management slightly differently they do their accounting slightly differently and like there’s little differences in how people operate which you know are working great for them yeah as a software provider that’s trying to be you know a one-fit solution you have to figure out a way to be flexible enough to adapt to each operation give them like an opportunity to kind of give you feedback and like dial it all the

way in like figure out what that need all the way is right totally yeah and the line we kind of glommed on to early is like we’re not a custom software but we’re customizable and we really looked at it as um you know basically just having like a litany of settings as a way for people to customize the way that their their interface looks and the way that you know they they interact with uh with the the product is super important like a really specific example is uh as a part of our dispatch product in our mobile app drivers have the ability to create their own own jobs and dispatch runs so some yards loved it because they have guys running on the weekends or night shifts when there’s not necessarily a dispatcher who’s like giving them giving them run schedules so they need to create their own runs other yards are like there’s no way in hell i want my drivers creating runs like you know we have a very structured process but yeah but they’re using the same software so you need to build in flexibility where you can either have like

a dispatch manager or the driver like you kind of it’s a so what’s been like the the coolest thing about like since you’ve started the business and you built the software like what’s been like the most like enjoyable piece of it or like what like what makes you smile about doing what you’re doing yeah so i mean it’s it’s been such an incredible journey and even reflecting back on just like looking at early iterations of the product and how far it’s come like it’s it’s almost unrecognizable and hopefully you know we’re saying that again you know two years out that you know it’s just gotten this much better sense i i think the most enjoyable part though honestly has been we’ve had the opportunity to go on so many different sites like physically to to different scrap yards and you know install the product train people on how to use it and then actually seeing it live is super cool i think there’s a certain level of you know pride that comes with like you’ve built something completely from scratch and then you see people utilizing it hours hours and hours a day it’s

saving them time on a process where they were like previously you know doing everything on on pen and paper you’re sitting there watching somebody run their whole business with something that you built totally yeah it’s awesome it’s like the best feeling in the world nothing and the industry is just so cool i think especially as we’ve immersed ourselves into more like we’re trying to recruit more of our friends and stuff because i think like i was saying earlier i think this part of recycling is just it’s it’s unknown by such a huge part of the population but the scale at which materials are are being recycled that i think people don’t follow money understanding exchange like people don’t understand like the the the real dollars that are being exchanged daily right like between customers and consumers and i mean so like that and i think i feel like the industry as a whole and i was talking to sean davidson yep you know yesterday i mean there’s still a lot of like tech opportunities because it is it’s not truly an old school like people kind of you know kind of poo poo the

recycling industry in a lot of ways but there’s been a lot of tech innovation in the last 10 years that’s really like pushed it forward you know and i feel like what you guys are doing is similar like you guys fit in that kind of niche where you know that small mom-and-pop excel you know operator needs that next organization level right like to build their business totally yeah and i mean i think one of the things from a product standpoint that have been the most surprising um because you know obviously like we’re doing demos and product walkthroughs and i think you know most people have some some semblance of like a purchasing system so yeah you know there are certain areas where you know i i think we’re really good on but one of the things that’s that’s pretty different is we have uh mobile apps for like mobile purchasing on the go or printing off inventory tags on the yard and i think it’s i think the phone and especially like across all levels of like tech comfort yeah being able to run more of your operation on your phone and

create contracts send contracts i think is really powerful and that’s something that i don’t think people as we onboard them like fully like understand during the demo but then they it’s like the most used part of the product so that’s one of the things that my my mind should have shifted a little bit as we’ve just brought more people on and see how they use it yeah so how many i mean how many people now do you guys have in the in your organization your company yeah so we’re we’re uh about 15 people so far yeah so mostly mostly engineers which like you know makes sense for a software startup and we we brought on our first couple sales folks and customer success uh a couple months ago just as we’ve been bringing on more yards we need to honestly like support it right you have to yeah and i think customer service is an area like you just you never can sacrifice on that um even for like a software where a lot of things are self-service like there’s a lot of users you know at these yards who like you know

they might not have a phone outside of like the one that work issues them and whatnot and it’s important to provide that that ongoing support i will say like just me you know when we when we were i don’t know i think they went 2005 we were still entering manually entering like handwritten purchase tickets into quickbooks right into like an excel sheet and so and we kind of had this kind of wonky dispatch deal and the biggest difference in our business that helped us organize it was actually implementing a software that was built for the scrap industry right and i can i and i say this like whether it’s your business or in another competing software or whatever i mean i like you like we do we do some business but ultimately like i tell people this all the time like if you want to really change your business if you’re a small guy just trying to get to the next level if you can get a software that can combine your dispatches and your purchases and just help you from an on an organizational level you won’t it’s hard for me to tell

you how much of a difference that makes in your business it’s crucial totally to take the next step you have to do it and and it’s a and it can be an expensive bullet to eat but the the payoff is is is exponential totally yeah and i mean especially for you know owner operators it’s like time spent doing paperwork and compliance it’s like i mean you have to do it but it’s a necessary evil and if you can cut you know that that time out of your day you can spend it focused on you know calling new accounts like checking up on existing efficiency totally yeah do you want i mean it’s the difference between like a 1986 excavator and a 2022 activator right like it’s it’s gonna be more efficient easier on diesel like it’s there’s just it’s an efficiency game right totally i think that’s where you know finding the right software finding the right you know stuff that fits with your within your business within your budget is it just creates efficiencies that you you might not you you never realize until you actually implement it yeah for sure and it’s

interesting too um one of the things that we’ve noticed you know especially since like so much of the business is physical software can kind of feel like this like you know you can’t touch it you can’t feel it it’s not metal it’s not uh you know machinery and you know even like looking at some of the machines out there where you know you can like move your attachments you know from like a magnet to a grapple like a couple minutes quicker like people are willing to invest a lot of money to do that yeah and it’s like well your back office like is also an area that’s like worth investing you know time and energy into yeah exactly and i think and i and that’s why i i want to have this conversation is because like i’m not here to anybody like i’m just going to tell you what’s worked for me and i say like if you can get efficient on the office space side like it’s going to create as much opportunity or more as you are if you get a fish on the equipment side totally i think you make a

pretty good point there yeah no and it’s yeah it’s it’s it’s just so fun like the industry is is really it’s really awesome and i mean like you said earlier i think there’s a lot of like good tailwinds like technology wise where technology doesn’t need to be scary like ultimately it’s it’s there to like make your life easier and grow your business like that those should be like the two functions of exactly any pro whether it’s like you know you’re talking about shawn earlier like pricing data you know that’s like a great example of you know 100 and our industry like like it’s only going to grow and i think like for like young people that are trying to decide like what they want to do whatever whatever that whatever that is like go to college not this that become a software engineer become an equipment operator whatever like you need to take a hard look at the recycling industry because i i feel like there’s a ton of opportunity but you see there’s a ton of tailwind that’s coming because people are realizing that the resources are only like finite right like that’s

there’s it’s at some point like you have to reuse everything totally totally and the more you can start to figure that out like it’s it’s it’s a growing industry and there’s going to be a ton of opportunity yeah i completely agree i’m like anecdotally too like from talking to like you know friends from school and like in college study like environmental sciences and stuff like you know focused in recycling it seems like so much of the like higher education it’s focused on waste like it’s not really touching industrial recycling which you know i think if if more people like knew about it there there would be you know more interest and and you know higher levels of recruitment but yeah i agree that’s why it’s been super fun like at a lot of the you know shows like this and the israeli events like seeing all or like connecting with a lot of like young buyers and traders and you know you know sons and daughters of owners who are like coming up in the business because it’s super cool because it’s like i mean i i i’ve listened to podcasts we’ve talked about

that story of like bridging the gap of like how your parents operated and continuing that legacy but then also like you know putting your touch on it and stuff and yeah allowing the next the next generation if they want to do it great if not then somebody else do it you know yeah yeah it’s you know you’ve been able to kind of put your your touch on it from an operator standpoint say okay we used to run the 1986 excavator yeah we run the 22 and like this is the difference it’s made in our business so i’m stoked man i’m i look forward to seeing you in chicago again yeah definitely catch up and drink a beer and go from there yeah absolutely thanks for having me