Waterbeds, Belly Flops & Startup Success w/ Ravi Kurani | Ep. 102

In this podcast episode Hosts David Baxter and Gary Voigt talk to Founder and CEO of Sutro, Ravi Kurani, a truer success story has never been told- this one is not to be missed. The convo includes each step a true startup and leader struggles and triumphs from and adds little nuggets of startup wisdom nearly each moment.

Links:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kuraniravi/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/sanimarc/about/

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David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

David: 0:05

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the biz dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host and I'm joined per usual by Gary Voight. Who is the proud owner. He just purchased this off of eBay in 1987 waterbed. How's that going for you, man?

Gary: 0:23

Yeah, I didn't quite think that through. I live in Florida, and it's very hot. So it's not really a waterbed. As much as it is a microwave. It feels like things all the microwave.

David: 0:35

When you first filled it up, I heard that with lots of holes. It just kind of sprayed all over the room.

Gary: 0:40

We saw this infomercial with this, like black goop stuff that you're supposed to be able to put on a screen door and use it as a bow slap. So we're trying that out. And so far, it's okay. But we'll see.

David: 0:51

I saw them. I saw one of those infomercials where the dude slaps one of those patches on like a boat that had like a massive hole in it.

Gary: 1:00

I think it was the guy from what was it? sitcom? The tool times that come?

David: 1:07

Oh, Tim Allen. Yes, man. That was my jam out and it was Alan, right? No,

Gary: 1:15

yeah. My parents had a waterbed back in the back and my

David: 1:19

dad had one. More importantly speak word. This is not a waterbed podcast. More importantly, are joined by Robbie Karani, who is the CEO of Sutro. And we're going to talk all sorts of stuff about his startup journey in just a minute. But what do you think waterbeds? Ravi. I mean, let's let's get into the serious stuff.

Ravi: 1:36

You know, I remember growing up my like aunt and uncle used to have one. And as little kids, we would always jump on every single bed and then he basically just punctured a hole and I didn't see one after that. So that's my that's the story with a with a waterbed.

David: 1:53

My father had one in the 80s he had, my dad was single at the time, and he just the most 80s pad if you could imagine, it was

Gary: 2:04

a projection TV. Please help me know he had an a laser,

David: 2:08

indoor ball. Ooh, in his house like he was he was sold houses as my dad did that for 40 something years. And he sold houses in the 80s. He was killing it just live in large and and he'd never saved anything. So he spent it all on just glorious way to hit a waterfall in his backyard. I mean, and the houses back in the 80s were small, right? They weren't these massive things that nowadays, his house was just crazy. And I just remember that waterbed, because I've never heard of a water bed. And I you know you as a kid, and this is my experience. And I jumped on the waterbed. You know, like every kid does, like full snow angel spread eagle jump on it. That really hurts. Don't do that on a waterbed. It's like a belly flop. It's an indoor

Gary: 2:52

belly flop is for sure. It's no good.

David: 2:54

Do not do that children. Of course, if you're a child now and you're near waterbed. Ask your parents why that's what I do. You should do. Anyway. So Robbie, you are a startup founder, which just happens to make you a perfect guest for the show. So I'm glad you're here. Thanks for so much for joining us.

Ravi: 3:12

Yeah, thanks a ton for having me on, guys.

David: 3:15

So tell me a little bit about well, let's just start with your company. What does it do? And then we'll talk about your journey. Yeah, so

Ravi: 3:22

Sutro is a robotics platform. We build a robot to tell you if your water is safe. That's kind of our vision, our mission. Our first product is for swimming pools and spas. So if you have a pool a spa or hot tub in your backyard water, water bed water bed, I don't know if we can, I don't know you'd get it inside there, the sutures kind of big. But if you could, if you could fit it inside the water bed, we'd measure the water chemistry of your of your water bed. Offering to your after that you can know if your water beds safe or not to sleep on, I guess.

David: 3:52

Perfect. So where did this idea come from? Was this your idea? Did you buy something and grid company around it? Where did where does this all come from?

Ravi: 4:02

Yeah, two tangential tread threads. The first is my dad used to own a chain of pool and spa supply stores Southern California. So imagine sunny, sunny Los Angeles growing up down here. Started off from testing people's pools running at my dad's pool store. Fast forward to when I was actually running a small venture capital fund in India. Well, I should say I was an associate at a venture capital fund in India. A lot of the deal flow that we had coming in was around water filtration. And one of the things we started asking all the founders is you're building all these water filters, but you're not doing anything with water sensing, right? How do you know what you're filtering for if you don't know what's wrong with the water, and water is used for a multitude of different things from farming to drinking to swimming pools. And so we built our first sensor in India. stupidest idea startup can do don't try selling to the Indian government. They'll they'll, you'll you'll probably wait longer to meet somebody and your funding will dry up you for you to get something in front of the guy you need to talk to. And so we came back to the US ended up pivoting the technology and said, Hey, water sensing is water sensing the same waters in your swimming pool that was in that drinking water. Let's go ahead and adjust the sensor array to basically measure swimming pools. And oh, by the way, I grew up in the pool industry, right. And so that whole kind of narrative ended up coming together. And we said, let's go ahead and deploy products in the pool industry where we can get more dollars per unit from wealthier pool owners, and then do the drinking water stuff later. And so that's kind of a how the idea came to be.

David: 5:33

So you have been, according to LinkedIn, you've been doing this for about six years. Is that correct?

Ravi: 5:38

That's seven now. Yeah, I think it's close to close to seven years now.

David: 5:41

Nice. And so are you still only swimming pools? Or have you moved into the drinking water world?

Ravi: 5:46

So we're still in the swimming pools. We got acquired four years ago by a large chemicals company in Canada. And so they helped us really commercialize the technology, right? I mean, building building hardware is hard. And so you need to you need a lot of financial capital, a lot of resources to get the thing made, and then deliver it to people's homes. And so we're coming on year four of our product launch now. And so this year is the first year that we're actually going to start exploring these other markets with cooling water towers, drinking water, agricultural water. And so we are doing a bit of a exploration in the next year to figure out exactly where we should go next.

David: 6:24

Okay, so let me let me back up here a little bit. So you grew up in the pool world, which is so funny that we started with waterbeds. Totally random with that had nothing to do with anything. But here we are. That was totally planned. Everybody totally blank. So I'm thinking of my dad's old pool. So I remember the guy coming out. And the way they test water is they would grab a little vial, put like three drops, shake it, and that was the only time they ever touched it. Right? Yeah.

Gary: 6:54

Yeah, the wind read and to see what your pH

David: 6:57

levels were right. And so you are in the pool industry, you realize, hey, they're, they're doing filters, but they're not sensing the water to see if the filters are doing their job. That seems like a weird thing. So you decided let's build a hardware company. Of course, that is, as you said, incredibly hard. I was just mentoring a group of high school students who did this really cool program does not plug but it was a cool program called Launch x, where they bunch of international kids come to the in this case, it came to NC State. And they build a startup with other kids from all over the world, it was crazy. And so I came in, you know, a few times during the process to help mentor the kids. And a lot of them wanted to build a hardware thing. And I was like, Guys, if you want a real product, a real thing to do here, don't go hardware. It's just a nightmare. And there's so much to it. And I think a lot of people miss that. And so did you think Did you know that going into it? Or is this something you were like add like all these kids or add, you know, whatever hardware? I'll just do it?

Ravi: 8:01

Yeah, I just, you know, you see a problem and you build a solution for it. Right? And so hardware, software, AI, you know, these these things are vehicles to get to the end game of solving a problem you're trying to solve? Is hardware more difficult than software exponentially, right? I mean, you have to literally build physical atoms, and put things together versus you know, bits on a on a computer.

Gary: 8:26

I'm going to ask you a question. A lot of times, in startups or small businesses, when you get to the place where the idea is formed into something that you have to build, whether it is software, or hardware, of course, funding money, that's always kind of the big blocker there. So you need to produce a product, you need to produce the MVP, the minimum viable product. But you don't really want to spend a much much or you don't have enough to spend, I can see that being like the main hindrance in getting like good engineers, and at least a good build for any kind of hardware software. We see this all the time. In our instance, we're in software, that a lot of companies will just go with, you know, the cheapest option, which usually means hiring someone out that they don't really know, they're not really 100% Confident in or they're going through a third party to get to these developers. And then it's just like, trying to put a puzzle together with the pieces don't quite fit. Is it even worse in hardware? If you don't have the right people building? Because that's something you mentioned, you wouldn't you would hire better engineers at first.

Ravi: 9:29

Yeah, I think my kind of point there is more around being being agile, right with with hardware, you can do the same thing you're doing with software. But in hardware, there's a way to actually like take off the shelf things right. Like you can take an off the shelf board, you can have an off the shelf sensor, it really breaks down to are you solving the problem correctly? And are you doing it in the quickest way possible? Right, like so. So for example, we stepped out very early on trying to build a sensor from scratch. And that's like tackling a million problems, right, you're trying to figure out what we use a technology called micro fluidics, which is even more complicated. So now we're like, looking at core science we have like chemistry going on. And then we're having to build that from scratch putting that into a vehicle, that's going to take the data off of it and put it through Wi Fi onto your app. And then we have to build entire app, right, so we haven't even come to the app yet. And then we have to like build an entire app, what we probably should have done very early on, is taken an off the shelf technology that exists and deployed like five of those units, instead of tackling the entire chain of building this horribly complicated chemistry plus the actual hardware plus the software in itself. And so I think when I say, you know, finding capable engineers, I meant more on finding engineers that can look at the actual problem that needs to get solved at that moment, versus tackling the entire, the entire like plethora of problems that we should be tackling in the grand scheme of things. Which makes it even that much more complex, which means where do you actually spend the dollars that you're raising on on the hardcore chemistry part on the app part on making it a piece of hardware. And so that's what we kind of, you know, didn't actually attack the right way, is what I would say, Okay.

David: 11:15

When I think of most hardware companies that I've worked, you know, startups very early on, is that nowadays, they're always starting with some sort of raspberry pie, or, you know, something like that, with wires sticking out of it, just to see if the thing works is a great way to start. But I'm just imagining you, but now I gotta put this thing in water. Like a whole nother level, I've got my Raspberry Pi with wires. And now I'm gonna put in my Ziploc bag,

Gary: 11:41

I was just gonna say zip lock and twist ties. And

Ravi: 11:44

we ended up having we ended up having otter boxes, and we took epoxy and just like, shut all the wires. So, you know, a little over there was a tube outside that would just suck the water up. And that was that was our first prototype entirely. Yeah,

David: 11:57

very cool. So I want to take another step back. So I love this. We're talking hardware, we're talking about the difficulties of it. But I want to one of the things we'd like to focus on is people. I like to think our audience, it's not like I can go and talk to my audience. So I like to think my audience is people who are thinking of joining and starting their own thing. They're probably still working. And they're trying, they're thinking of to dive dive off. And so I like to focus and ask founders, the initial, you know, first year, you have the idea. You've got that, did you have capital? Did you bootstrap it? With? Like, day one? Were you working in a real job and supporting yourself on the side? Like, where were you in your life?

Ravi: 12:40

Yeah, there was definitely bootstrapping, I was working a day job at a boutique consulting firm that did building efficiency management. So you know, like LEED certifications and stuff. That's what that's what I was basically doing for the, for the large buildings in San Francisco. And when we first started building it out, we ended up basically doing a concept that's called concierge ng concierge, and basically means that there's initially this problem, right, we asked this question, will people trust in a floating robot to measure their water chemistry? And will they look at an app to basically follow those instructions, we're trying to solve those two major problems. Now you can go out and solve those two issues, a ton of different ways. What we ended up doing initially was, we first had to find these people, right, so I first back then it was really easy to get into nextdoor.com, which was the Facebook for, you know, neighborhoods. And so I logged in next door, San Rafael Marin County is a wealthy neighborhood north of San Francisco. I just went on to Google Maps, and I figured out you could see homes with pools. I just picked an address and I typed it in, right, because next door needs to know your address before they let you in. tried two addresses. They're like, you know, sorry, taken, sorry, taken, the third address worked or like, welcome the next door. And so I went in the next door and I commented on their, hey, I'm new in the neighborhood, just moved in, have a swimming pool. Anybody have any tips? People started commenting over the course of the weekend, right? Hey, I have a pool guy that I use. I go to this pool store, I do this thing. I do that thing. I now had 10 to 12 potential customers. I came back again two days later. And I said, Hey, you know, there's this cool company, cool company in San Francisco. Here's the website. Here's the landing page. What do you think about it? And so people obviously went to went to my landing page that I had created. I think out of the 12 people, I ended up getting like four people that signed up, left their email on the actual website. The rest of them were like, hey, this idea is stupid. This idea is cool. I totally would buy this thing. You know, I could fire my pool guy. I don't have to go to the pool store. And so I took these three, four email addresses. And two of them actually or three of them ended up picking up the phone. I got two of them to actually Pay for a data unit. At that point in time, we actually didn't even have a data unit. And so we went out there. And we concierge, again, right with these two people to validate if I put this robot inside of your swimming pool and told you what to do with your swimming pool, would you follow along. And so we walked inside there. And obviously, we didn't have the hardware, we didn't have the app built, we were testing a prototype of it. But it wasn't ready for primetime to give him I didn't want to lean on that to give him chemistry information. And so basically, I became a pool boy as I was back in LA, and I would drive around in validating the actual hardware. And then I would take that data and basically just text them, I'd say, hey, Sutro, here, looks like your pH is off, go ahead and put in, you know, half a gallon of acid TECHSPEC done when done. And they will just text back done. That gave me over the course of the next four weeks, a real solid loop of understanding now that we have this product inside here, and people are actually listening this information, I went back and actually did interviews, I said, Hey, we put this thing inside your swimming pool, the robot is telling you what to actually put inside your swimming pool. I want you to take this away, you know, how disappointed would you be if I grabbed this technology away from you right now. And I just took it away, I refunded your money. And we call it a day. And from behind. There actually, in both cases, one had a husband and the wife, I was working with the wife on one house and the husband on the other their spouses came out, they're like, please, please, please don't do that. Like we had my daughter's second birthday party last weekend. And this is the cleanest the pool has ever been. So like, please leave this like we'll pay you whatever we need, keep to keep this technology in there. And that's when we realized we actually had a model. So we did that, again, a few more times, we had about 50 people in the course of the next two months that we actually had built up. And that's actually how we raised our first half a million dollars. We said, Look, we validated this idea. We've put in a prototype of the technology, I have 50 customers that are willing to pay for this thing and they have, we need more money to actually build up the technology, hire the engineers, and scale this thing so we can get it into every pool across the US. And so that's that's kind of my story of the first year of how we raised our first half a million and how we initially bootstrapped.

David: 17:06

Man, I tell you, that's like a whole dissertation right there on how to start a startup. I love that man, dude, that's like growth hacking. I mean, the whole bit. It's like, it's like you just checked all those boxes.

Gary: 17:18

There was no issues, no speed bumps? Like,

Ravi: 17:22

I mean, of course, right? The robot would sink in the water. I mean, there was, there was a ton of stuff that was going wrong. But we had those two questions up on the board. And that's like the only two things we kept on going back to, will people trust a robot in their swimming pool? And will they follow the instructions that we give them, and then later on actually buy chemicals from us, right. And so those are like the two and a half to three variables that we're really testing.

David: 17:49

So one of the things we talk about a lot is the what we call the slog, which is the time it takes for you to start your idea when no one cares. And to the point where you have your own gravity, meaning people are not coming to you, because they think you're going to solve whatever your problem is, right? They know your name. I mean, generally, gravity takes a while, but you almost sounds like you didn't really have a slog, you went straight in there and found customers immediately before you even had an app. So did you ever have a time where you're like, I'm yelling in the winds, and no one cares? Or did you just constantly, I know I can grow this, I'm going to add another couple of people and another couple of people.

Ravi: 18:33

I mean, I think the slog is a slog is an everyday thing, right? You wake up every day. And in my story, right? Again, as Gary pointed out, I didn't I didn't paint the kind of ups and downs of that entire journey looks like a very straight line from from A to B. But while you're doing this, and even still today, it is it is a slog, right, we have we have a commercially viable product, is the price point too high? So the question we asked, like, Could we get more users if we lowered that? Well, I have to, you know, since we got acquired, there's there still is a slog of going to my board to say hey, I need a budget increase to go ahead and basically subsidize these units, because I have a hypothesis that if we come in with a lower price point, we're gonna sell more units. Right. And again, I think there's slogs across the spectrum. It just depends on how you're defining it. And so if we kind of go back to your first question of what was the slug when you were first starting? The Slug is definitely way more real than but it's also way more freeing, right? Because if you don't have anybody you're necessarily reporting to if you don't have a product out there, you don't have customers that are buying it. There's also a little bit less responsibility on your shoulders. And so from that standpoint, like yes, there is a slog, because nobody knows about it. But then also it is a little bit more frank. I guess some examples of slog was raising our first round, right raising that first half a million overall what I would say you have, on average of five to 7%, close rate right back, back back then. When I was raising, I think it's probably a little bit different. Now, if you put AI in your name, you have a 50%. close rate if you if you're building

Gary: 20:07

to San Francisco,

Ravi: 20:08

this was in San Francisco. Yeah. And so from that standpoint, right there is there is a sales process, you also run from a fundraising standpoint, if you're trying to raise half a million dollars, and if you have a 10%, close rate, you need to have $5 million in exposure at a 90% probability of closing all those people, right? Because then eventually, you're going to land at that 10%, close rate, that gives you 500k. And so that's the slog, right driving up and down Sand Hill Road, basically having nine out of 10 people tell you no, and finally hitting that that 10. So you can raise that half a million. There's SLOG and looking for Chinese factories, when we were first building out this thing, right, we spent a good 30 to 40% of our first two years in China in Shenzhen, trying to find factories that would take this product, right, because a factory wants to make money from selling stuff. You're this little founder that walks in there. And they're like, Yeah, you want what 3000 units, like we're making the the Samsung Wi Fi chip here on the other line that's selling 10s of millions of units every single year. I don't even care about your business, right? Go to the go to the next factory. And so in every one of these aspects, whether you're fundraising, whether you're looking for customers, whether you're looking for people to work for you, there is a slog, and you're right, people don't know your name, and when they do, then they come to you. And then the slog is, how do you find the right people? Because everybody's coming to me, right? And so there is there's kind of always this redefinition of it, as you get to the to the next plateau on where you're going to.

David: 21:38

So let's go back to your story. So you've got you, you work, how long did it take you to get those 50 people before you were starting to think money?

Ravi: 21:49

It took Well, we started thinking money very early on. But when we first started talking to the investors, we realized that their number one thing that they that they value in terms of risk is market, right? They're like, do we as an investor, even know that people want to buy this thing, because investors invest in a bunch of different things. And so one day, they're investing in ride sharing company, Uber, and the next day, they're like, looking at a pool product, right? It's very, it's very difficult for an investor outside of them being in a particular vertical to actually know if an idea is gonna be successful or not. And the real signal there is customers is users. And so then becomes this chicken and egg question of how do you get users if you don't have a product, which is where you arrive at this next door strategy, that that we ended up building for ourselves? Right? I think there's a strategy that's different for every product, depending on the founder, depending on the market. And so we took about two and a half months to get to 50 users. Back to your first question. We ended up raising our first 50k, five months after that, which came through an accelerator. And I think the first half a million probably came like a year after that give or take. So I think in the course of a year, we had gotten to 50 customers gotten our first 50k gotten into an accelerator and raised our first half a million.

David: 23:11

Okay. What's interesting is one of the things we talk about a lot and advise a lot when we're talking to our clients and stuff is to go and do your idea for free. And in your case, you can't totally do that, because you have a gizmo, but what if you're software, one of the things I find a lot of really early startup people just don't want to do. And I think it's just because there's too excited, I'm not sure. But they want the they want to come to me or the people like me, and to Bill Minette right, my right now I could buy a build mana. Like you don't need to spend this bazillion dollars. It's not really Brazilian, but that this big chunk of money to build an app when you have no idea if there's an idea here. And so I also we say no pretty regularly because someone come up to us with an idea. And they're not ready to give us money. Because the idea doesn't have a market it doesn't. Like we'll figure those things out. And then come back because we'd love your money. But I don't want to waste your money. You're not ready for me. The worst thing I can do is build an app. And then I spend all your money. It's a bad idea. And it dies. That to me is I don't want to do that. Right. And so it's refreshing to hear I mean it again, you're you're in a slightly different world because there's a gizmo so you're not you can't do it totally for free. But you can get pretty close with some OtterBox is right. But you're going out there and you're proving your idea before you drop some real cash. And that is a step that so many startups seem to skip over. And I'm like, Guys, this is dumb, right? You're gonna have to invest. If nothing else, take the money that you're about to invest your time, which is your most precious resource. Right? You've got it. You're gonna throw down two years of your life waiting to see if you have an idea when you can answer that right now. Most startups when they're talking about pure software, or two sided markets, classic example. Like every MBAs classic two sided market. And you can do that with a spreadsheet and a phone. Right? You can just you can do your entire app calls side a call side B, put them together, cell phone, boom, done. No tech, and no one wants to do that. I think they feel that's too cold calling. I'm not sure what it is. But that the number of people who just like no, no, I know this is going to work build me an app. I mean, eventually, if that's what you want, and you want to avoid, we're gonna take the money, but we don't want to, you know, I mean, at some point, we have to, to keep our lights on if you're going to be that way. But we really don't want you to go that route. And, and we will advise against it. So I love hearing that, that you took that the hard route, I think the right route.

Gary: 25:43

So let's fast forward dating the idea. Yeah.

David: 25:47

So you've now raised money. How did that go? Was that obviously unless, you know, a lot of rich people, that's not friends and family. That's angels, that sort of thing. Right?

Ravi: 25:56

Yeah, it's angels. It's a few larger investors, or I would say larger at the time, because we were seed stage or precede it again, I think I would define that as the slog, right. That was that that was the one in 10 investors are going to are going to write the check. Having that exposure, you know, when I say exposure, I mean, your your Excel sheet should be filled with 5 million worth of deals, because you're only going to get 500,000. Right? And so just knocking on doors, getting those intros. How do you get the intros right, if you talk to other founders, they may not want to introduce you to an investor because that becomes competitive. Coming to networking events, stealing, you know, sneaking into Salesforce force.com conferences and hanging out at the Hyatt Hotels, seeing who's sitting around there to see who you can end up bumping shoulders into I mean, it's, that's the slog, right. And so that's a lot of what we went through in our first year, raising that first half a million. And then like you said, once, it does become a little bit easier, and people do know your name, and you have a little bit more validation out there, it becomes slightly easier to raise a little bit larger checks. But then again, you're you're in the next weight class, you're competing with the next group of people that are also going for the next 5 million 10 million $15 million round. And now your exposure has to be 150 million, because you're only going to close 15 million. Right. And so the, that's kinda what I was saying earlier, is it's just a fractal, you're like at the next step in the next weight class. And there's just the great amount of just as great amount of people in that same weight class that you're going to be competing against, and that you hit the reset button and start the slog all over again. It's just at a different scale.

David: 27:34

So okay, so we continue on. So you've got now you got your $500,000. What did you do that you invested in the product? Did you start building? I mean, you were talking about you had all of these pieces, you have chemistry, you have the robotics, you have the app? Did you have enough money to do all of that? Or did you focus that? Where did you go from there?

Ravi: 27:51

We initially started focusing on getting the chemistry, right. And so that was around that microfluidic technology. And so we just basically zoomed into, how do we create defensibility around the hardware by building a microfluidic chemistry chip that can measure chemistry properly? And a lot 10 times better than the remaining technologies out there? And what the metric first initially turned into, do people trust a robot? And will they listen to our chemistry information turned into how do we make a microfluidic chip, that's 10 times better than the remaining technology out there. So we always had this 10x number all across the office, on making sure that we could actually build the chemistry properly. And we spent Yeah, we spent the good, probably a good 300 to 400k on building out that microfluidic chip technology, filed some patents. And then we ended up raising I think, close to another million right after that. Before we actually got acquired and so that was it was kind of a quick, it was a quick line to to our acquisition at that point in time.

David: 28:54

So what led up to the acquisition, like you're, you're a startup, you own a person, you're the primary guy, you're doing your own company, you're the boss, what inspired you to be like that, let's get bought.

Ravi: 29:06

We were in the midst of raising our Series A, and we were because we had the technology kind of well built out at that point in time we were working on some OEM partnerships, we were raising a Series A and so in the midst of raising that series, a one of the strategics basically came to us and said look, we have enough money to basically cover your entire series A but we don't want to buy a percentage of the company like we we see value against our distribution channel against our, you know, water chemistry management around drinking water around agricultural water around swimming pools, and you guys have this pool product but we totally see your vision of scaling and across the rest of verticals and water. And we cater to those verticals and water with our with our chemicals. And so we spoke to the investors kind of tossed it around, had a bit of a bidding war because you know, I just wanted to be a fiduciary. I wanted to be fiduciary responsible to make sure that we got the best deal We'll, and then we just made the decision to say, hey, look, this is probably the best home for the technology. Let's go ahead and work with these guys up in Canada to, you know, have them acquire the company.

David: 30:12

And you stayed with the company clearly, how is it having a boss again?

Ravi: 30:17

Oh, it's awesome. Actually, I very much appreciate it because, one, it's a great learning experience, right in beginning to scale the technology, I'm starting to move into a little bit more of an operator role, and being in a much larger company where they really iron out operations, because that's what great big companies are great at has been a great learning experience, because I've moved from like a startup CEO to being more of a Series A or B, or maybe even a Series C CEO at this point in time, in making sure that I'm managing people, and managing supply chains, we have like, we're managing Incident Reporting now, right? Like, how do you spin up multiple servers, because we have 10s of 1000s of users to make sure that stuff doesn't crash like that, that was never a problem, because we didn't have that many users. And so it's just a lot of these sort of scaling issues, which is great being a part of a large company, because we can basically learn that, while we're sitting nested under then

David: 31:13

what I guess my, my final, the final step here for me is at least when I'm putting these things together, and maybe you can enter this because that would be this is gonna be weird question. But what's next? Like? Are you one of these serial entrepreneur guys who's gonna be like, alright, I, you know, I made an agreement to work for this company for three to five years, whatever that is, when that's done, I'm gonna go and do this again. Because I loved this whole process. or is Man, I just, I love water. I love doing stuff with water. This is my I'm gonna ride this sucker where you sit?

Ravi: 31:43

Yeah, I mean, I started this entire thing back back in India when I was at that VC fund. And it started with the vision of water is just going to be one of the next problems that we face we face as a species, like we saw that in India coming on a billion person population. The US has its own problems. I mean, there's Flint, Michigan, kids are drinking water with lead. Like, we have drought issues in California.

David: 32:08

I mean, California in the Colorado River, yeah, that's a big Gosh,

Ravi: 32:11

and then and then over rains over here, and we have mudslides, like I just think this, this word water is going to be a problem. And I've and I've always thought that and figuring out how to manage it is going to be the next solution. Whether that's through Sutro, inside of this company. I don't I don't quite know the the direction. However, the path that I'm walking down now does open my eyes to a lot of what is going on in water and how I can better solve it. And so I think there's a vehicle and using the acquisition to basically boil up Sutro to be even larger to get into even more places. So we can actually inflict kind of even larger change on the way that we look at water. I'm in the process of moving to New York, right. So I think there's a lot of problems there. There's a lot of water problems there. There's also a lot of money around water, right Wall Street, a lot of the larger private equity funds, a lot of the hedge funds. Water is a is a large dollar amounts sort of thing. Because you need an infrastructure, you're literally moving molecules and pipes. And then there's DC, right? I mean, policy. Water is such a weird thing. Because it's like electricity, like the internet. It's it's an infrastructural problem. And that's very well defined by policy. So really kind of, you know, reflecting back on that question of what's next for me, where I'm at right now really opens my eyes to what could be next. I don't really have an answer on whether I'm going to start something next or whether I'm going to do something with the with the acquire or if this particular path that I'm on actually opens up even more opportunities within itself. And so yeah, could could kind of go any any which direction.

David: 33:45

It when you mentioned New York, one of the things that was so weird, we went to New York last year, and everyone in New York, it's like Texas, people in Texas love talking about Texas, people in New York like to talk about their water. It is they're like really rabid about the, you know, their public, just regular water from the tap is the best water in the world. And like the bagels, you know, you can't make these bagels anywhere else because we have New York water and I it was water. I mean, I'm no expert, but it was like, Okay, it's tasty. It's great. Good job, but that man, they're rabid about their water there is whatever they're in, apparently, and I don't know anything about this, you probably do. It's quite a feat to do what they do every single day because there's so many people and so much water and the fact that it is so clean and so good. is quite an engineering feat. But anyway, just anecdotally it was really interesting. You'd mentioned New York and they're like yeah, they're really serious about their water over there. So I met but there's no swimming pools. So you're gonna be unless you go out of the city.

Gary: 34:48

We ask everybody that comes on the show that same question at the end your journey seems to have been other than the slog daily, your journey you seem to have made some of the right moves so I'm sure your three pieces of it Weiss are going to be pretty good. So what would be three pieces of advice you would tell any entrepreneur or new business about how to get going and how to go from starting the idea to being on the right path for success in their business.

Ravi: 35:16

The first is find the right people to surround yourself with. And when I say people, I mean, people that are investors, people that are your colleagues, your founders, your your employees, and people that are your customers, too. Because people really make the business go round. The second I would say is, don't be afraid of rejection, because the whole goal of entrepreneurship is, is continuous rejection, right? The whole finding 150 million exposure, so you can raise 15 million, you're gonna get nine noes before you get one. Yes. And that's just part of the game. Back to what David was saying, validate your idea I interview or I mentor a bunch of founders, and many of them I just seem to be scared to like you said, pick up the phone and call 10 customers to see if somebody will buy that thing, because they just have this idea in their head that they need to make it before they actually get it out there. So fear, yeah, don't be afraid of rejection would be the second. And the third would be to keep focus, a lot of entrepreneurs and even us very early on, wanted to tackle everything all at one time. You only have 10 working hours in a day, right? If you're a crazy dude, maybe you can go for 1510 hours, right? Or 12 hours. But overall, if you think of those 10 hours, and if you want to do something that's going to really make a difference in moving the ball forward. You just you have to stay focused. And so it's really, you know, back down, I said this a few times, we had statements written up around the office in our, you know, on the walls of what are we attacking this month? What are we attacking this week? What are we going to attack today? And I think yeah, keeping focus would be my would be my third of really whittling it down to that like one thing you can do today, this week, this month.

David: 36:59

One thing, my kids are teenagers, older teenagers. And one of the things that they have both said, and I even ran this by some of our guys who work for us. And they're all in their 30s, right, early, early 30s. And they won't pick up the phone at all, like there's a fear, just to make the phone call to a stranger. Absolutely no way, never going to happen. So I can totally see that. Don't be afraid to just reach out and talk to people. I think that's gonna become more and more critical advice, because startups are not going to change. I mean, the technology, what they're building this and the other, but startups of all ILX is all about people. I at the at the early stage, it's all about meeting the right people networking with the right people, you know, investors, whatever you want to call it, but it's it's a it's a relational thing. Entrepreneurs are relational, they have to be. So you got to get over that fear. If you're a young person, you got to pick up that phone, you just got to get over that. So I think that's really spot on advice.

Gary: 38:06

So Robbie, if anybody else wants to learn more about your business, the products that you make, you said, you're moving into other fields, just then swimming pool. So if they want to keep an eye on that, what's the best way to either find out more about your business or get in touch with you?

Ravi: 38:21

Yeah, you can find out more about the pool business at my sutro.com. That's mysutro.com. And if you're interested in learning more about the other stuff we're doing on water, you can definitely follow me on LinkedIn. That's where I post a lot of the updates. So we just probably Google Ravi Karani, Sutro, LinkedIn, you'll you'll definitely find me.

Gary: 38:41

Yeah, we'll put those links in the show notes for sure. Cool.

David: 38:46

Well, thank you so much for joining us, Robbie. This was a bit a lot of fun, really enjoyed talking to you. Yeah,

Ravi: 38:50

thanks a lot for having me on guys.

Gary: 38:53

And if anybody else wants to ask us questions, leave any comments or snide remarks. You can email us at Hello at the big pixel dotnet or you can leave a comment below this video or reach out to us on any one of our social media channels. Just look for big pixel.

David: 39:08

Alright, and with that we are out we will see everyone next week. Thanks again for joining us.