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"Waste shouldn't exist at all. It is a human creation. There is no waste in nature, and it's our responsibility to fix the problems that we've created by building better, more efficient circular systems."
— Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli
Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter and podcast for smart people applying smart building technology—hosted by James Dice. If you’re new to Nexus, you might want to start here.
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Episode 145 is a conversation with Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli and Laura Rosenshine from WATS.
Early Stage is another new series of episodes featuring early stage founders of startups hoping to fill a gap in the smart buildings marketplace. Episode 145 is a conversation with Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli and Laura Rosenshine from WATS. Meredith and Laura share their passion and insights to better manage the waste we all produce. And they’re eager to connect with the Nexus community at large!
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S441930-15083.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
[00:00:00] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Waste shouldn't exist at all. It is a human creation. There is no waste in nature, and it's our responsibility to fix the problems that we've created by building better, more efficient circular systems.
[00:00:19] James Dice: Hey friends, did you know the best way to continue learning beyond the Nexus podcast is to sign up for our newsletter? The Nexus Newsletter is your one stop shop for staying up to date on the latest smart building trends. Sign up today free of charge, and we'll drop this industry leading resource right into your inbox every Wednesday.
[00:00:34] If you're already signed up, double high five and thank you. But now tell your coworkers and your friends once you're signed up. The best way to continue the learning. Is to join the Nexus Pro membership community or our online course offering. Headlined by our flagship course, nexus Foundations. Diving into these products allows you to connect with our global community of like-minded changemakers licks are below in the show notes and now on the pod.[00:01:00]
[00:01:04] Hey Rosie. Hi James. Welcome everyone to the Nexus podcast. This is a first in a new series we're calling Early Stage. Where we're gonna hear from, well, early stage founders of startups hoping to fill a gap in the smart buildings marketplace. Um, even though I feel like everyone feels the pain of it being a very crowded marketplace, I think we still believe there are gaps to fill.
[00:01:27] There are needed innovations and out there. So these are the sort of next generation of innovators that will help get us thinking of where we're headed next. And the first guests we have in this series are. Meredith and Laura from Watts, welcome to both of you. Can we start with you, Meredith? Can you, um, introduce yourself and give us a little bit of your background?
[00:01:50] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Yes. Hi. My name is Meredith Danburg. Fiorelli. Thank you so much for having us. I'm the co-founder and c e o of Watts. I, let's [00:02:00] see, quick background. I sit on the board of directors of the US Composting Council. Um, I've been. One could say obsessed with trash, uh, for a little more than 10 years at this point.
[00:02:12] And I first found waste through composting and through the massive potential that exists in diverting food waste from landfills and recovering nutrient value from food. And it was a very, very fast rabbit hole into. Zero waste in general. All materials, the value of all materials in our economy and helping businesses to reduce waste.
[00:02:36] James Dice: Thank you. Laura, how about you?
[00:02:39] Laura Rosenshine: Uh, my name is Laura Rosenshine. I'm the co-founder and c o o of Watts. I live in New York City. Like Meredith, I found waste and my passion for waste reduction through understanding what organics and organics recycling was. Since I grew up in New York City, there's garbage everywhere.
[00:02:59] It just didn't [00:03:00] even occur to me that there were better options. And through an experience or a volunteer program in New Zealand, I learned three or four different ways to compost. And when I came back to New York City after that time, I was like, alright, can't throw my food in the garbage anymore. What are my options in this urban jungle and my path to where I am today?
[00:03:21] Which you know, as a zero waste expert. Started with community composting in New York City. It's a larger space than people probably give it credit for, and New York City is a bit on the forefront of some of it, and it just spiraled from there. Community composting is great, but I love eating. What about all the restaurants that surround me in New York City and there's a rat problem.
[00:03:47] Those are probably tied together. And it, it just spiraled from there. So here we are, um, bunch years later, just wanting to take the knowledge and, and spread it through a SaaS product as quickly as possible because our [00:04:00] planet is in. Dire situation.
[00:04:03] James Dice: Yeah. One of the things I'm excited about, what you guys are doing, one of the reasons I'm excited about it is because it's your knowledge that you've developed through consulting and through helping people reduce their waste, that you're then gonna start to product to eyes, basically.
[00:04:16] That's fun. Okay. So if we're thinking about all the facility managers out there, all of the sustainability E s G folks out there, and then all of the CTOs, the CEOs, and all the different real estate organizations that could be listened to this. Why does waste matter to them?
[00:04:33] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Waste is everywhere. Waste touches everything.
[00:04:36] Everyone generates waste no matter where they are or what they're doing, what types of material? The volume and how it ends up somewhere obviously is very different depending on some of those variables. But waste matters because, Materials are resources. There were resources that went into getting them to us, [00:05:00] whether that is the biological resources, the human resources, transport, et cetera.
[00:05:05] Um, energy of course, and. There is a massive amount of inefficiency in how we're currently managing materials as humans on planet earth. And so really, really simply, that's why waste matters. Waste shouldn't exist at all. It is a human creation. There is no waste in nature, and it's our responsibility to fix the problems that we've created by building better, more efficient circular systems.
[00:05:35] Rosy Khalife: I love that. Uh, Laura, you mentioned urgency. You, you made that clear that there's a certain level of urgency around this, around timing. So maybe you can elaborate a little more around kind of like, why now? Why do we need this now?
[00:05:49] Laura Rosenshine: Why we need to address our waste problems right now? In general, it's because resources are finite.
[00:05:55] We live right now in what's referred to as a linear [00:06:00] economy, where we take resources from the earth, we make things from them. And then we throw them away. We need to transition to a circular economy where those resources can go around and around and be reused and repurposed and recycled. The other reason, I think why now, at least in the US the disposal options for the away portion of the linear economy have really negative implications and consequences.
[00:06:30] The two main areas are both landfill and incineration. Incineration has a human health impact on the communities that are around them and are getting harder and harder to cite and build and landfills. Less of a localized community problem and more of a harder to establish. No one wants them in their backyard than nimby.
[00:06:54] The NIMBY problem, the landfills, it can't exist forever. And historically they're on the [00:07:00] decline. We have fewer and fewer of them in our country.
[00:07:03] James Dice: Meredith, can you talk about the regulations happening right now? So if you think about all the cities, people that are listening to this podcast, they're used to energy benchmarking, energy performance laws, local laws happening, you know, throughout the country.
[00:07:17] At this point there's, it started in New York City with local law 97. And it's even like the state of Colorado, the state of Washington. It's even statewide regulation Now, can you talk about how there are parallels to that on the waste side, and so we start to think about building owners, getting fined for not doing the right things from a waste standpoint.
[00:07:37] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Yeah. I also wanted to note that two other kind of points, so there are three points that I think also relate to the why Now. Regulation is one of them. The other two can kind of be thought of as. Social pressure. Essentially the fact that people are demanding more accountability from everyone, whether it's a building owner or a brand or their employer and, and [00:08:00] corporate pressure.
[00:08:00] Essentially, the fact that corporate entities, because they're getting this, this demand for accountability, they're setting their own rules, regulations, targets. Standards, reporting requirements. And these are also why nows, if you will, reasons why waste matters now more than ever, and why tackling wastefulness and inefficiencies in waste management matter on the regulatory front.
[00:08:25] So there are a lot of ways to. Slice that onion. Is that, is that the term?
[00:08:32] Rosy Khalife: I don't know. I like it.
[00:08:34] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Yeah.
[00:08:34] Rosy Khalife: Peel the onion.
[00:08:35] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Peel the onion. Thank you. Sliced bread. Laura, at the highest level in the United States there, there are more than 9,000 municipal recycling programs. No wonder people are confused. Right? The rules are different everywhere you go.
[00:08:48] If we, if we think about New York City, You have people traveling from the tri-state area to come to work. The rules in the morning and at night when they leave for work and get home are different than when they're in their office in the [00:09:00] middle of the day. And those rules dictate things like, which bin does my yogurt cup go into, for example?
[00:09:06] And they're based on infrastructure. It's based on the availability of infrastructure, um, who owns the infrastructure, who uses it, the frequency of collection. There's so many variables, and those are the foundation for this regulatory environment. So we see the most movement or maybe the most innovation happening at the state and municipal levels, which I'm sure isn't too surprising.
[00:09:26] James, you mentioned local law 97. Local law 1 99 is the waste rule that was passed in New York City focused on commercial waste, looking to create structure in currently a, a relatively open market environment. And the real goals there are carbon emissions reduction through making routing more efficient and making enforcement more feasible really for the city so that they can encourage businesses to.
[00:09:52] To divert waste from landfills, especially through a pricing mechanism, which is another policy mechanism called pay As you throw, the [00:10:00] idea that trash the landfill or the incineration waste stream is the most expensive one, and that recycling, and composting and alternatives are cheaper. Therefore, price, incentivizing waste reduction, and creating, uh, economic opportunities.
[00:10:14] For really baking in that transparency in materials management, statewide, bans on materials are pretty common. Almost every state has banned something from landfill, uh, usually hazardous or dangerous materials, but we're starting to see that ratchet down more. So things like organic waste, bans or mandates are requiring composting of residents and or businesses, supply and demand side regulations, specifically looking towards, on the one hand, Extended producer responsibility rules, which are essentially requiring the producers of products to pay for the development of collection and recycling infrastructure.
[00:10:54] And on the other hand, you have what are called minimum recycled content rules, which is saying, [00:11:00] you know, your products have to be made out of a certain percentage of recovered content. As opposed to virgin material. And so we see those happening. There's a lot more, there's a lot more to it. Um, Laura, uh, is there anything that I like out of that list that is glaringly missing?
[00:11:19] Laura Rosenshine: I think I'll just add that there have been material bands from landfills and incineration for a really long time. Um, usually stemming from a safety perspective, but those bands are growing at the state level and. Often what we're seeing is the implementation of those bands being left up to the municipality.
[00:11:41] Um, which of course brings us full circle back to mayor's original point, which is that there are so many different rules and regulations happening.
[00:11:50] James Dice: And so if I'm a owner of real estate assets, I now have an increased regulatory risk burden that I'm dealing with. I don't. Know what I'm [00:12:00] supposed to do, and I also might be fined if I'm not following those rules that I don't really know how to navigate.
[00:12:06] There are also increased probably reporting requirements that say, here's what I am doing. Right. So increased costs, like what you guys used to do in past lives, consultants or people I need to hire to figure this out. Right. So can you, when one of you talk about the sort of status quo, so like if I'm, you know, given real estate organization the average rate, What's the, how do they manage their waste today?
[00:12:31] How do they reduce their waste? Is their technology involved? Can you talk about that sort of status quo that you guys are coming into with your product?
[00:12:39] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: There's a pretty wide status quo spectrum ranging from Why are you asking me about trash? As long as it gets picked up, I don't give a flying, whatever to, I'm trying to do literally everything that I can.
[00:12:54] To build efficiency, reduce costs, build transparency, divert waste. So on the [00:13:00] one hand, you essentially have a, if it's not broke, don't fix it. Like what? You know, I'm not even gonna engage with this topic until someone's knocking on my door finding me for something. Those obviously aren't our initial target opportunities, although they're probably cost savings opportunities sitting on the table with those entities.
[00:13:19] The other side of the spectrum, you might look for example, at um, Lots of manufacturing operations that have become true certified true is the zero waste certification standard through the US Green Building Council. And these are entities that have spent time and resources to gather data on and report on their waste diversion to prove that 90% or more of what they're generating is being diverted from landfills in order to be able to achieve that certification.
[00:13:49] So in the middle you have education data collection. Lots of communications between stakeholders, uh, that are managed. I, I would say very inefficiently using [00:14:00] email, Microsoft teams, et cetera, and lots of PDFs and Excel sheets. That's really the norm here. The, those are the tools in the toolkit. And then passion, like there are, Laura and I, I think have, are just.
[00:14:13] Even though we've been doing this work for a long time, we are constantly thrilled by the amount of motivation that we find from an individual or a team within an entity who has taken it upon themselves to learn about waste, figure out their municipal rules. Like find signage templates to download. Um, and it's that passion that we're really looking for and that that matters so much.
[00:14:39] And I think in, in a lot of cases, what a company, a business entity, a site really needs is to be able to find that person who's already there and give them the tools that they need to be able to, to make change happen.
[00:14:54] Rosy Khalife: That's awesome. I wanna back it up for a little bit, and I'd love to hear the founding [00:15:00] story of how this all got started.
[00:15:01] That's usually my favorite part of any entrepreneur's story. So how did you all get started? Can you share that with us? Was there an aha moment? You know, take us through.
[00:15:13] Laura Rosenshine: Sure. Uh, thank you for the question. It is a, it is a fun story. A number of years ago when Meredith was running common ground compost, a bit of our roles were redundant and I had an opportunity to go start another zero waste company with a woman here in New York City who had, has a great reputation and has done some incredible work.
[00:15:33] And part of the goal there was to bring in software to. Change the game. Uh, in terms of how we had both been doing work historically, unfortunately, or fortunately, I'm not sure. Um, we didn't jump straight into kind of the VC startup world. We tried to do things ourselves and we tried to build a product or a, an application as our starting foundation.
[00:15:58] Um, and it was, it was really [00:16:00] hard. Uh, it was really hard to manage client work, grow our. Process conceptually and also update it to make it better. And so ultimately after a couple of years, I was frustrated that we hadn't made as as much progress as I had hoped on the software front. And so I left and came back to common ground compost to focus on the software, kind of keep keeping going on that same trajectory.
[00:16:26] We had made some progress and we had actually. Started abusing my relationship with my sister who has a background in computer science. Um, and also was a corporate lawyer who did quite a bit of work on, on databases and Wow. She was taking a break from being a corporate lawyer after her work on the mortgage crisis and she basically said, I think that I can, I think that I can.
[00:16:51] Teach myself a low-code platform and build you something and I think this is where I wanna take my career, and I want you to be the test dummy. And I said, great. And so I just would unload all of my [00:17:00] problems on her. Every day I'd send her spreadsheets and be like, do this better. And she is kind of a genius.
[00:17:06] And so she was able to, Build us a structured database and an application and show us the potential. And so over the course of about a year and a half, she built all these different modules that solved all of our problems a little bit. But neither one of us had any framework for building software. And so, I burned her out, obviously, um, and she said, I'm done.
[00:17:26] But she said, take whatever I've built for you and do something awesome with it. And Meredith was certainly interjecting over that course of the year and a half, and all of our experiences were coming together. And so we just took a leap of faith and basically said, let's hire someone to take over what Lizzie has built.
[00:17:44] And, um, let's, you know, get the right team in place to have a proper M V P and let's do this the right way.
[00:17:50] Rosy Khalife: Wow. That's awesome. I love that you brought your sister in. I have two sisters and I'm always and a brother, and I'm always roping them into helping me [00:18:00] with, with all my things. They're my perpetual problem solvers, so I love that.
[00:18:04] James Dice: Shout out to Lizzie. The abused, burnt out.
[00:18:07] Rosy Khalife: Shout out to
[00:18:07] James Dice: Sister, genius sister.
[00:18:09] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Yeah, I absolutely second that. Lizzie triple whatever that Lizzie is a, a total genius. And, and had such a huge part to play and kind of what got us to this point. I remember some of those early days of I'm going to hang out at Laura and Lizzie's place cause they were living together at the time.
[00:18:24] And just kind of seeing on Lizzie's, like huge screens, like what she built and then being like, wait, this thing talks to this thing. And like, what about this data? What about this process? And giving them my like waste audit template being like, here's the spreadsheet. Like, make it better. Um, and then seeing the, the iterative process.
[00:18:41] There, and I mean, it's funny, you know, Laura and I, in those early days, would kind of look at each other and just be like, Uh, are we really gonna have to build software? Like is that really, or is that really where this is taking us, like this obsession with trash and with materials management and building efficiency and transparency and equity into this system?[00:19:00]
[00:19:00] Like, are we really gonna build software? And I think we, we like stalled ourselves, expecting someone to do it. And no one did. At least not in the way that we think it needs to happen. And that's, you know, that's, so that's really where we've started and it's, it's stepping inside of a building rather than focusing on kind of what happens afterwards.
[00:19:20] It's not focused on routing, it's not focused on collecting materials, it's focused on making buildings a piece of the supply chain, because materials move through buildings.
[00:19:30] Rosy Khalife: Hmm, that's, that's perfect segue into telling us a little bit more about what does the product actually do and, and how does it work.
[00:19:39] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: I can give a quick kind of what, what it is today and probably go a little too far into our vision, cuz I can get really deep in that rabbit hole. Um, so a way to think about how, how we've built the m v MVP of Watts is as a waste centric crm. That's tied with a waste centric sustainability [00:20:00] reporting dashboard.
[00:20:01] So on the CRM front, we're looking at workflow, we're looking at digitizing waste operations, starting with the waste stream. So waste streams are the foundation of the platform. Um, quick, quick glossary here. Material types are the things that you put into the trash. So paper is a material type, or food scraps is a material type.
[00:20:22] Waste streams. Are groupings of material types. So a recycling waste stream might be paper, glass, metal, and plastic. We would call that single stream recycling. So waste streams are the foundation of watts. In a, in a traditional building, you might have trash recycling, cardboard, ideally compost. You'll probably have e-waste.
[00:20:43] You'll have some hazardous materials or universal waste. You'll probably have, ideally a textile bin, shredded paper waste oil. If you're right. This, like I said, I can. I'll stop. It can be a rabbit hole. Um, and what we've started with, with the CRM is identifying what [00:21:00] associates to a waste stream, stakeholders schedules, and, and flow movement.
[00:21:05] How do these things move through a building? Who's responsible for it? Where's it ending up? And how can we do that? How can we train people to do that more efficiently? How can we use space more efficiently? Then the reporting side is what are the carbon equivalencies to the amount of material that we're generating?
[00:21:20] And of course, what's the diversion rate? How much are we diverting from landfill? And the very broad vision here to step way out is to build a platform that understands what we call a waste profile, the waste profile of an entity, and helps them work towards waste reduction by automating the process of delivering recommendations that are like action oriented plans.
[00:21:44] To help them take the steps that they need to take to reduce waste that are based on the realities that they face, which include their business type, their site type, their geography, their own goals, and of course the regulatory environments, um, that, that [00:22:00] are kind of framing all of that.
[00:22:03] Rosy Khalife: Very cool. Laura, anything to add around how it works or, or anything else?
[00:22:09] Laura Rosenshine: Well, I'm pleased to say that my sister is not behind the computer doing these things anymore. Um, no, I don't have much to add. Meredith, you said you said it really, really well. We have a really long roadmap ahead of us and are working with our early clients to pick off kind of one problem at a time because we believe that.
[00:22:31] As Meredith said, everyone has waste and everyone needs to get rid of it or have it find its second home. So there's, there's a lot to do, but we're in a really good place to start chipping away at it.
[00:22:44] James Dice: So you mentioned early clients. Can you guys talk about some, some sort of story that building owners can relate to about how you're working with these early clients and sort of.
[00:22:54] Um, how they're sort of, I love, I love the phrase waste operations. Can you talk about how they're sort of [00:23:00] transforming their, their waste operations?
[00:23:03] Laura Rosenshine: Sure. So one of our early clients is a multi-site food, like fast food business basically. And a bunch of years ago, they decided to analyze how much money that they were spending on brokerage.
[00:23:17] Brokerage in the waste industry operates similarly as how we understand it today. There's a middle person that helps you. Find third parties to manage it. To come pick it up. To come pick it up. Yeah. Um, and in this case, they analyzed those costs and they said, whoa, we're spending a lot of money on this.
[00:23:37] Let's try and do it in house. And so they got rid of their brokers and they started taking this huge responsibility over at the corporate level. So not saying to the sites, you're now responsible for all your waste, both from a relationship level to scheduling to infrastructure, but at corporate, we're gonna handle this for you.
[00:23:57] And over the course of the last two, [00:24:00] three years, they did a great job with the resources that they had, but they got to a place where the efficiencies were totally lost. They had to improve. So imagine managing site information, vendor information, waste schedules for three to four different waste streams.
[00:24:17] In a spreadsheet, uh, when you have a problem, you have to, they weren't able to quickly get to the information that they needed to get to, to decide how do we resolve this problem? Do we call the hauler and have them come back? Or do we wait until the next day? Wait, when is the next pickup day? Uh, and whose fault was this?
[00:24:35] Should there be a credit associated with it? And so just having a structured. Really user friendly visualization of waste information was a massive step forward for them in order to get through the daily issues that they faced around waste management.
[00:24:52] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Of course. And another thought I have in terms of waste operations, um, and I'm sure site operators and [00:25:00] facilities teams will agree with this.
[00:25:02] While they might be responsible for moving material, making sure it gets where it needs to go, making sure it gets collected on time that they're following, you know, State and municipal rules. The janitorial teams aren't the ones putting materials into the bins and tenant spaces, and so, you know, they're, they're moving materials around, but they're not the ones complying or not complying with disposal rules.
[00:25:23] And one of the things that we run up against, have been running up against for our, our entire waste obsessed careers is the, the challenge of, of cynicism. The, the challenge of apathy, of the fact that people. Individuals stand at a waste station. Maybe it has excellent signage. Maybe the bags are all different colors according to a certain plan that's been set.
[00:25:47] And that clearly somebody's trying, probably an entire team of people are trying, but they are confused. They have disposal anxiety, and they stand there and they're like, I have a coffee cup. In one hand it's got a [00:26:00] plastic lid, a cardboard sleeve, the coffee cup, and then in my other hand I have a takeout container that has food scraps and a plastic fork in it, and they're like, I, I, I don't have a third hand and I don't, I can't make, I can't do anything right now within the three seconds that I'm willing to dedicate to this, shove it all in one bin, whichever one is in front of me.
[00:26:19] And what ends up happening, the building gets fined for non-compliance. And then people that follow behind that person and use that waste station, look into that. Compost bin and they're like, well, there's a coffee cup in there. F this, the system isn't working. You know, obviously this building doesn't care.
[00:26:34] I'm not participating anymore. And they shove their trash in it too. And it's, you know, a never ending cycle. And while this is a very, very, very large mountain to climb, we are at the bottom thrilled to be here recognizing that, building transparency into systems in a way that can be shared across. All stakeholders is an essential foundation.
[00:26:56] And so we, one of the ways that I talk about, or think about Watts [00:27:00] is as this, like digital scaffolding for how trash functions in a building. And yes, we're targeting operations and facilities right now, but one of the very next steps is, is the tenant engagement, the, the opportunity. To have standardized messaging and to have consistent education that everyone can follow and understand, both from.
[00:27:22] Uh, I'm a visual learner to, I speak a different language to, I need to watch a video to show me animation. We're really trying to wrap all of those needs up in one into one place. Because they have to be coordinated and it's gonna be a really big undertaking. But I think the fact that we have been at this for a while and that we really understand all of those different stakeholders needs, uh, keeps us incredibly motivated knowing that we're building the right way.
[00:27:50] Rosy Khalife: Awesome. Love that. Can you share with the audience is this. Live. Can people buy this yet? Or where are we at in that process? So they [00:28:00] know?
[00:28:00] Laura Rosenshine: So we're pretty early in the process. I wouldn't say that we're picking our first clients very carefully. Um, we actually are spreading ourselves over a couple different verticals just to figure out where we can get the best foothold.
[00:28:14] Right now, we are definitely looking for probably about 10 to 12 more what we're calling co-development partners in 2023 that. Have the right mixture of problems, motivations, assets, but I'll use that term like loosely and you know, just stakeholders that are willing to, to go on this adventure with us.
[00:28:36] We are in the process of rolling over our platform from a low code platform to a code platform, which we're really excited about and we're growing our, our dev team. But yeah, we have early users and are making a lot of progress every week that goes by.
[00:28:52] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Yeah, and some of our early advisors would probably continue to disagree with the way we're thinking about this.
[00:28:57] Um, Every business has [00:29:00] waste. We want every business to be able to use watts. We've gone back and forth over the last year in, in trying to decide whether we should really focus on a single industry, like, you know, commercial office buildings or multi-site food business. And where we're netting out is that it's really much more about the, the types of stakeholders, the set of challenges, um, and the way that waste is handled and managed.
[00:29:23] So our immediate targets are these business entities with multiple sites, ideally at least 15 sites across, ideally multiple geographies so that we can really tackle those big problems who manage waste. At the corporate level. We absolutely see kind of whatever a franchise operation, being able to use Watson the future, but that's not our immediate target.
[00:29:44] James Dice: All right, so we have a couple thousand people listening to this. We have several hundred people that are in our community of members, and I'd love to ask you guys how can they help? How can, how can we help as a community with what you are trying to accomplish?
[00:29:59] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Spread the word. [00:30:00] If you are one of those businesses that has corporate level control over waste management and you're like, wow, these ladies seem to know what they're talking about.
[00:30:08] Um, which hopefully that is what you've, um, derived from this conversation. We'd love to talk to you. You know, I think we're, we're entering in, especially kind of this spring and summer 2023 we're entering into. A pretty deep discovery phase trying to engage with a lot of different types of business entities and roles to really understand the problem set, define what those challenges are so that we can continue to grow this.
[00:30:35] Massive, arguably already five year long roadmap that we have set for ourselves. Um, there are so many problems to solve and, you know, we wanna be able to tackle them in a, in a strategic way that meets the most needs, the most rapidly.
[00:30:48] Laura Rosenshine: And I'll just add to that, that even though we have a history of being zero waste consultants, We've had to pull ourselves out of the game a little bit because we're building this and [00:31:00] Meredith and I don't wanna reinvent any wheels.
[00:31:02] We're not the one setting national or global best waste management practices. We wanna bring those practices into the platform. So if you happen to be someone that works in this space that has come across, An amazing tool or something that works really well for behavior change or, um, education or, or anything really, like, we wanna leverage your experiences and bring them into kind of this one stop a shop ecosystem for waste management.
[00:31:33] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: And I guess it wouldn't be 2023 if I didn't say ai. Um, I'm sorry. But same thing Laura said. Specific to that, we know that there are so many opportunities from content development to image to image recognition where there's a massive amount of overlap and tons of potential for efficiency. So if that's something that you know a lot about or want to talk to us about, we would love to set up a tighter chat.[00:32:00]
[00:32:00] Rosy Khalife: Amazing. Thank you both for being on. Last, last question, how can people find you and your company?
[00:32:08] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Our website is get watts.com, G E T w ats. You can find both of us on LinkedIn and if you wanna send us an email, you can send it to hello@getwatts.com.
[00:32:21] Rosy Khalife: Amazing. Thank you both for being on. I feel like you both set the bar very high for this series, so I'm excited for that and I'm excited to have other early stage founders join us.
[00:32:36] So thanks again.
[00:32:38] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Thank you for having us.
[00:32:39] Laura Rosenshine: Thank you for having us.
[00:32:42] Rosy Khalife: That was awesome. I love that. We kicked off this series with two female founders. Very cool. Um, James, what was your favorite part of this episode? Let me share mine first. My favorite was their passion. I just love that they both have a personal reason why they're doing this.
[00:32:59] [00:33:00] They've been thinking about it for so many years and working in it, it just feels so aligned and I can't think of two better people to be tackling this huge problem than than those ladies.
[00:33:11] James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. So, so cool to hear their story. I've been talking to them for about six months. Now just kind of offering any insights I can.
[00:33:20] Uh, we've been talking about partnering for the Nexus syndicate. Can we help in some way? One of the things I'm super excited about with what they're doing is that they're new to startups, but every time I talk to them, they've made like a huge stride. And even just this conversation from the last time I talked to 'em, they've added so much sophistication the way that they've honed in on like, these are the types of customers that we want to talk to right now and here's how, what we can offer them.
[00:33:44] So that was cool. I think the waste operations piece is interesting. If you think about the history of like the smart buildings technology world, right? A lot of times it was focused on we're gonna collect your data and show you something in a dashboard, right? And they [00:34:00] talked about that, but I think the main piece of the product they're talking about is the operations.
[00:34:04] So operationalizing a way to manage their waste, and that's a different product. If you're saying, I'm gonna basically digitalize the operations for them, right? You're, you're setting out to build a different product than a dashboard, and you're gonna be able to solve problems in a more deeper way than you are just by showing someone some data and expecting them to change based on that, that insight that they're supposed to get on the dashboard.
[00:34:31] So what do they mean by that? Right? So they're talking about. Actually their product being the place where waste operations happen. So if instead of I'm gonna manage waste in my email and on a spreadsheet, they're talking about someone that's in the corporate organization actually logging into was to perform actions.
[00:34:48] And that's a different, that's just a slight tweak, but it's a huge tweak that's happening, I think across waste, across energy, across maintenance that. Getting into the [00:35:00] actual workflows of the humans that are doing these things is kind of where all of the different use cases and smart buildings need to get to, to like have an actual impact.
[00:35:10] Because we're talking about transforming the way people are operating a building, not just showing them some sort of data on a screen or a report or. Whatever.
[00:35:22] Rosy Khalife: Hmm. That's a great thanks for, that's helpful just for me as someone who, you know, this is the first time I meet them and, and really learn about what they're doing that's helpful to kind of differentiate between what they're doing and what the rest of the world is doing.
[00:35:36] Um, amazing. Thank you, uh, again to our guests.
[00:35:39] James Dice: Yeah. And we'd love if you're listening to this, for us to get some referrals here. So if you know an early staged company as well, or if you're an investor and you've invested recently, An early stage company that needs a spotlight on what they're doing, let us know.
[00:35:54] Um, please connect us with them. You can connect us@helloaccesslabs.online. We're looking for [00:36:00] companies that are a pree seed stage. They've gotten a few customers, they've seen some transformation in those early customers, and they're looking for sort of a bigger set of eyeballs, uh, on what they're doing.
[00:36:17] Rosy Khalife: Okay friends, as we're trying these new formats, please let us know what you think in your podcast player right now, or on the episode page on our website. There's a link to a survey for this specific episode. We'd love to hear from you and we wanna hear your feedback. Also, don't forget to sign up for the Nexus newsletter or invite your coworkers and friends with a link below.
[00:36:37] Catch you next time.
"Waste shouldn't exist at all. It is a human creation. There is no waste in nature, and it's our responsibility to fix the problems that we've created by building better, more efficient circular systems."
— Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli
Welcome to Nexus, a newsletter and podcast for smart people applying smart building technology—hosted by James Dice. If you’re new to Nexus, you might want to start here.
The Nexus podcast (Apple | Spotify | YouTube | Other apps) is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industry—together. The project is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community.
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Episode 145 is a conversation with Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli and Laura Rosenshine from WATS.
Early Stage is another new series of episodes featuring early stage founders of startups hoping to fill a gap in the smart buildings marketplace. Episode 145 is a conversation with Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli and Laura Rosenshine from WATS. Meredith and Laura share their passion and insights to better manage the waste we all produce. And they’re eager to connect with the Nexus community at large!
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S441930-15083.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
[00:00:00] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Waste shouldn't exist at all. It is a human creation. There is no waste in nature, and it's our responsibility to fix the problems that we've created by building better, more efficient circular systems.
[00:00:19] James Dice: Hey friends, did you know the best way to continue learning beyond the Nexus podcast is to sign up for our newsletter? The Nexus Newsletter is your one stop shop for staying up to date on the latest smart building trends. Sign up today free of charge, and we'll drop this industry leading resource right into your inbox every Wednesday.
[00:00:34] If you're already signed up, double high five and thank you. But now tell your coworkers and your friends once you're signed up. The best way to continue the learning. Is to join the Nexus Pro membership community or our online course offering. Headlined by our flagship course, nexus Foundations. Diving into these products allows you to connect with our global community of like-minded changemakers licks are below in the show notes and now on the pod.[00:01:00]
[00:01:04] Hey Rosie. Hi James. Welcome everyone to the Nexus podcast. This is a first in a new series we're calling Early Stage. Where we're gonna hear from, well, early stage founders of startups hoping to fill a gap in the smart buildings marketplace. Um, even though I feel like everyone feels the pain of it being a very crowded marketplace, I think we still believe there are gaps to fill.
[00:01:27] There are needed innovations and out there. So these are the sort of next generation of innovators that will help get us thinking of where we're headed next. And the first guests we have in this series are. Meredith and Laura from Watts, welcome to both of you. Can we start with you, Meredith? Can you, um, introduce yourself and give us a little bit of your background?
[00:01:50] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Yes. Hi. My name is Meredith Danburg. Fiorelli. Thank you so much for having us. I'm the co-founder and c e o of Watts. I, let's [00:02:00] see, quick background. I sit on the board of directors of the US Composting Council. Um, I've been. One could say obsessed with trash, uh, for a little more than 10 years at this point.
[00:02:12] And I first found waste through composting and through the massive potential that exists in diverting food waste from landfills and recovering nutrient value from food. And it was a very, very fast rabbit hole into. Zero waste in general. All materials, the value of all materials in our economy and helping businesses to reduce waste.
[00:02:36] James Dice: Thank you. Laura, how about you?
[00:02:39] Laura Rosenshine: Uh, my name is Laura Rosenshine. I'm the co-founder and c o o of Watts. I live in New York City. Like Meredith, I found waste and my passion for waste reduction through understanding what organics and organics recycling was. Since I grew up in New York City, there's garbage everywhere.
[00:02:59] It just didn't [00:03:00] even occur to me that there were better options. And through an experience or a volunteer program in New Zealand, I learned three or four different ways to compost. And when I came back to New York City after that time, I was like, alright, can't throw my food in the garbage anymore. What are my options in this urban jungle and my path to where I am today?
[00:03:21] Which you know, as a zero waste expert. Started with community composting in New York City. It's a larger space than people probably give it credit for, and New York City is a bit on the forefront of some of it, and it just spiraled from there. Community composting is great, but I love eating. What about all the restaurants that surround me in New York City and there's a rat problem.
[00:03:47] Those are probably tied together. And it, it just spiraled from there. So here we are, um, bunch years later, just wanting to take the knowledge and, and spread it through a SaaS product as quickly as possible because our [00:04:00] planet is in. Dire situation.
[00:04:03] James Dice: Yeah. One of the things I'm excited about, what you guys are doing, one of the reasons I'm excited about it is because it's your knowledge that you've developed through consulting and through helping people reduce their waste, that you're then gonna start to product to eyes, basically.
[00:04:16] That's fun. Okay. So if we're thinking about all the facility managers out there, all of the sustainability E s G folks out there, and then all of the CTOs, the CEOs, and all the different real estate organizations that could be listened to this. Why does waste matter to them?
[00:04:33] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Waste is everywhere. Waste touches everything.
[00:04:36] Everyone generates waste no matter where they are or what they're doing, what types of material? The volume and how it ends up somewhere obviously is very different depending on some of those variables. But waste matters because, Materials are resources. There were resources that went into getting them to us, [00:05:00] whether that is the biological resources, the human resources, transport, et cetera.
[00:05:05] Um, energy of course, and. There is a massive amount of inefficiency in how we're currently managing materials as humans on planet earth. And so really, really simply, that's why waste matters. Waste shouldn't exist at all. It is a human creation. There is no waste in nature, and it's our responsibility to fix the problems that we've created by building better, more efficient circular systems.
[00:05:35] Rosy Khalife: I love that. Uh, Laura, you mentioned urgency. You, you made that clear that there's a certain level of urgency around this, around timing. So maybe you can elaborate a little more around kind of like, why now? Why do we need this now?
[00:05:49] Laura Rosenshine: Why we need to address our waste problems right now? In general, it's because resources are finite.
[00:05:55] We live right now in what's referred to as a linear [00:06:00] economy, where we take resources from the earth, we make things from them. And then we throw them away. We need to transition to a circular economy where those resources can go around and around and be reused and repurposed and recycled. The other reason, I think why now, at least in the US the disposal options for the away portion of the linear economy have really negative implications and consequences.
[00:06:30] The two main areas are both landfill and incineration. Incineration has a human health impact on the communities that are around them and are getting harder and harder to cite and build and landfills. Less of a localized community problem and more of a harder to establish. No one wants them in their backyard than nimby.
[00:06:54] The NIMBY problem, the landfills, it can't exist forever. And historically they're on the [00:07:00] decline. We have fewer and fewer of them in our country.
[00:07:03] James Dice: Meredith, can you talk about the regulations happening right now? So if you think about all the cities, people that are listening to this podcast, they're used to energy benchmarking, energy performance laws, local laws happening, you know, throughout the country.
[00:07:17] At this point there's, it started in New York City with local law 97. And it's even like the state of Colorado, the state of Washington. It's even statewide regulation Now, can you talk about how there are parallels to that on the waste side, and so we start to think about building owners, getting fined for not doing the right things from a waste standpoint.
[00:07:37] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Yeah. I also wanted to note that two other kind of points, so there are three points that I think also relate to the why Now. Regulation is one of them. The other two can kind of be thought of as. Social pressure. Essentially the fact that people are demanding more accountability from everyone, whether it's a building owner or a brand or their employer and, and [00:08:00] corporate pressure.
[00:08:00] Essentially, the fact that corporate entities, because they're getting this, this demand for accountability, they're setting their own rules, regulations, targets. Standards, reporting requirements. And these are also why nows, if you will, reasons why waste matters now more than ever, and why tackling wastefulness and inefficiencies in waste management matter on the regulatory front.
[00:08:25] So there are a lot of ways to. Slice that onion. Is that, is that the term?
[00:08:32] Rosy Khalife: I don't know. I like it.
[00:08:34] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Yeah.
[00:08:34] Rosy Khalife: Peel the onion.
[00:08:35] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Peel the onion. Thank you. Sliced bread. Laura, at the highest level in the United States there, there are more than 9,000 municipal recycling programs. No wonder people are confused. Right? The rules are different everywhere you go.
[00:08:48] If we, if we think about New York City, You have people traveling from the tri-state area to come to work. The rules in the morning and at night when they leave for work and get home are different than when they're in their office in the [00:09:00] middle of the day. And those rules dictate things like, which bin does my yogurt cup go into, for example?
[00:09:06] And they're based on infrastructure. It's based on the availability of infrastructure, um, who owns the infrastructure, who uses it, the frequency of collection. There's so many variables, and those are the foundation for this regulatory environment. So we see the most movement or maybe the most innovation happening at the state and municipal levels, which I'm sure isn't too surprising.
[00:09:26] James, you mentioned local law 97. Local law 1 99 is the waste rule that was passed in New York City focused on commercial waste, looking to create structure in currently a, a relatively open market environment. And the real goals there are carbon emissions reduction through making routing more efficient and making enforcement more feasible really for the city so that they can encourage businesses to.
[00:09:52] To divert waste from landfills, especially through a pricing mechanism, which is another policy mechanism called pay As you throw, the [00:10:00] idea that trash the landfill or the incineration waste stream is the most expensive one, and that recycling, and composting and alternatives are cheaper. Therefore, price, incentivizing waste reduction, and creating, uh, economic opportunities.
[00:10:14] For really baking in that transparency in materials management, statewide, bans on materials are pretty common. Almost every state has banned something from landfill, uh, usually hazardous or dangerous materials, but we're starting to see that ratchet down more. So things like organic waste, bans or mandates are requiring composting of residents and or businesses, supply and demand side regulations, specifically looking towards, on the one hand, Extended producer responsibility rules, which are essentially requiring the producers of products to pay for the development of collection and recycling infrastructure.
[00:10:54] And on the other hand, you have what are called minimum recycled content rules, which is saying, [00:11:00] you know, your products have to be made out of a certain percentage of recovered content. As opposed to virgin material. And so we see those happening. There's a lot more, there's a lot more to it. Um, Laura, uh, is there anything that I like out of that list that is glaringly missing?
[00:11:19] Laura Rosenshine: I think I'll just add that there have been material bands from landfills and incineration for a really long time. Um, usually stemming from a safety perspective, but those bands are growing at the state level and. Often what we're seeing is the implementation of those bands being left up to the municipality.
[00:11:41] Um, which of course brings us full circle back to mayor's original point, which is that there are so many different rules and regulations happening.
[00:11:50] James Dice: And so if I'm a owner of real estate assets, I now have an increased regulatory risk burden that I'm dealing with. I don't. Know what I'm [00:12:00] supposed to do, and I also might be fined if I'm not following those rules that I don't really know how to navigate.
[00:12:06] There are also increased probably reporting requirements that say, here's what I am doing. Right. So increased costs, like what you guys used to do in past lives, consultants or people I need to hire to figure this out. Right. So can you, when one of you talk about the sort of status quo, so like if I'm, you know, given real estate organization the average rate, What's the, how do they manage their waste today?
[00:12:31] How do they reduce their waste? Is their technology involved? Can you talk about that sort of status quo that you guys are coming into with your product?
[00:12:39] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: There's a pretty wide status quo spectrum ranging from Why are you asking me about trash? As long as it gets picked up, I don't give a flying, whatever to, I'm trying to do literally everything that I can.
[00:12:54] To build efficiency, reduce costs, build transparency, divert waste. So on the [00:13:00] one hand, you essentially have a, if it's not broke, don't fix it. Like what? You know, I'm not even gonna engage with this topic until someone's knocking on my door finding me for something. Those obviously aren't our initial target opportunities, although they're probably cost savings opportunities sitting on the table with those entities.
[00:13:19] The other side of the spectrum, you might look for example, at um, Lots of manufacturing operations that have become true certified true is the zero waste certification standard through the US Green Building Council. And these are entities that have spent time and resources to gather data on and report on their waste diversion to prove that 90% or more of what they're generating is being diverted from landfills in order to be able to achieve that certification.
[00:13:49] So in the middle you have education data collection. Lots of communications between stakeholders, uh, that are managed. I, I would say very inefficiently using [00:14:00] email, Microsoft teams, et cetera, and lots of PDFs and Excel sheets. That's really the norm here. The, those are the tools in the toolkit. And then passion, like there are, Laura and I, I think have, are just.
[00:14:13] Even though we've been doing this work for a long time, we are constantly thrilled by the amount of motivation that we find from an individual or a team within an entity who has taken it upon themselves to learn about waste, figure out their municipal rules. Like find signage templates to download. Um, and it's that passion that we're really looking for and that that matters so much.
[00:14:39] And I think in, in a lot of cases, what a company, a business entity, a site really needs is to be able to find that person who's already there and give them the tools that they need to be able to, to make change happen.
[00:14:54] Rosy Khalife: That's awesome. I wanna back it up for a little bit, and I'd love to hear the founding [00:15:00] story of how this all got started.
[00:15:01] That's usually my favorite part of any entrepreneur's story. So how did you all get started? Can you share that with us? Was there an aha moment? You know, take us through.
[00:15:13] Laura Rosenshine: Sure. Uh, thank you for the question. It is a, it is a fun story. A number of years ago when Meredith was running common ground compost, a bit of our roles were redundant and I had an opportunity to go start another zero waste company with a woman here in New York City who had, has a great reputation and has done some incredible work.
[00:15:33] And part of the goal there was to bring in software to. Change the game. Uh, in terms of how we had both been doing work historically, unfortunately, or fortunately, I'm not sure. Um, we didn't jump straight into kind of the VC startup world. We tried to do things ourselves and we tried to build a product or a, an application as our starting foundation.
[00:15:58] Um, and it was, it was really [00:16:00] hard. Uh, it was really hard to manage client work, grow our. Process conceptually and also update it to make it better. And so ultimately after a couple of years, I was frustrated that we hadn't made as as much progress as I had hoped on the software front. And so I left and came back to common ground compost to focus on the software, kind of keep keeping going on that same trajectory.
[00:16:26] We had made some progress and we had actually. Started abusing my relationship with my sister who has a background in computer science. Um, and also was a corporate lawyer who did quite a bit of work on, on databases and Wow. She was taking a break from being a corporate lawyer after her work on the mortgage crisis and she basically said, I think that I can, I think that I can.
[00:16:51] Teach myself a low-code platform and build you something and I think this is where I wanna take my career, and I want you to be the test dummy. And I said, great. And so I just would unload all of my [00:17:00] problems on her. Every day I'd send her spreadsheets and be like, do this better. And she is kind of a genius.
[00:17:06] And so she was able to, Build us a structured database and an application and show us the potential. And so over the course of about a year and a half, she built all these different modules that solved all of our problems a little bit. But neither one of us had any framework for building software. And so, I burned her out, obviously, um, and she said, I'm done.
[00:17:26] But she said, take whatever I've built for you and do something awesome with it. And Meredith was certainly interjecting over that course of the year and a half, and all of our experiences were coming together. And so we just took a leap of faith and basically said, let's hire someone to take over what Lizzie has built.
[00:17:44] And, um, let's, you know, get the right team in place to have a proper M V P and let's do this the right way.
[00:17:50] Rosy Khalife: Wow. That's awesome. I love that you brought your sister in. I have two sisters and I'm always and a brother, and I'm always roping them into helping me [00:18:00] with, with all my things. They're my perpetual problem solvers, so I love that.
[00:18:04] James Dice: Shout out to Lizzie. The abused, burnt out.
[00:18:07] Rosy Khalife: Shout out to
[00:18:07] James Dice: Sister, genius sister.
[00:18:09] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Yeah, I absolutely second that. Lizzie triple whatever that Lizzie is a, a total genius. And, and had such a huge part to play and kind of what got us to this point. I remember some of those early days of I'm going to hang out at Laura and Lizzie's place cause they were living together at the time.
[00:18:24] And just kind of seeing on Lizzie's, like huge screens, like what she built and then being like, wait, this thing talks to this thing. And like, what about this data? What about this process? And giving them my like waste audit template being like, here's the spreadsheet. Like, make it better. Um, and then seeing the, the iterative process.
[00:18:41] There, and I mean, it's funny, you know, Laura and I, in those early days, would kind of look at each other and just be like, Uh, are we really gonna have to build software? Like is that really, or is that really where this is taking us, like this obsession with trash and with materials management and building efficiency and transparency and equity into this system?[00:19:00]
[00:19:00] Like, are we really gonna build software? And I think we, we like stalled ourselves, expecting someone to do it. And no one did. At least not in the way that we think it needs to happen. And that's, you know, that's, so that's really where we've started and it's, it's stepping inside of a building rather than focusing on kind of what happens afterwards.
[00:19:20] It's not focused on routing, it's not focused on collecting materials, it's focused on making buildings a piece of the supply chain, because materials move through buildings.
[00:19:30] Rosy Khalife: Hmm, that's, that's perfect segue into telling us a little bit more about what does the product actually do and, and how does it work.
[00:19:39] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: I can give a quick kind of what, what it is today and probably go a little too far into our vision, cuz I can get really deep in that rabbit hole. Um, so a way to think about how, how we've built the m v MVP of Watts is as a waste centric crm. That's tied with a waste centric sustainability [00:20:00] reporting dashboard.
[00:20:01] So on the CRM front, we're looking at workflow, we're looking at digitizing waste operations, starting with the waste stream. So waste streams are the foundation of the platform. Um, quick, quick glossary here. Material types are the things that you put into the trash. So paper is a material type, or food scraps is a material type.
[00:20:22] Waste streams. Are groupings of material types. So a recycling waste stream might be paper, glass, metal, and plastic. We would call that single stream recycling. So waste streams are the foundation of watts. In a, in a traditional building, you might have trash recycling, cardboard, ideally compost. You'll probably have e-waste.
[00:20:43] You'll have some hazardous materials or universal waste. You'll probably have, ideally a textile bin, shredded paper waste oil. If you're right. This, like I said, I can. I'll stop. It can be a rabbit hole. Um, and what we've started with, with the CRM is identifying what [00:21:00] associates to a waste stream, stakeholders schedules, and, and flow movement.
[00:21:05] How do these things move through a building? Who's responsible for it? Where's it ending up? And how can we do that? How can we train people to do that more efficiently? How can we use space more efficiently? Then the reporting side is what are the carbon equivalencies to the amount of material that we're generating?
[00:21:20] And of course, what's the diversion rate? How much are we diverting from landfill? And the very broad vision here to step way out is to build a platform that understands what we call a waste profile, the waste profile of an entity, and helps them work towards waste reduction by automating the process of delivering recommendations that are like action oriented plans.
[00:21:44] To help them take the steps that they need to take to reduce waste that are based on the realities that they face, which include their business type, their site type, their geography, their own goals, and of course the regulatory environments, um, that, that [00:22:00] are kind of framing all of that.
[00:22:03] Rosy Khalife: Very cool. Laura, anything to add around how it works or, or anything else?
[00:22:09] Laura Rosenshine: Well, I'm pleased to say that my sister is not behind the computer doing these things anymore. Um, no, I don't have much to add. Meredith, you said you said it really, really well. We have a really long roadmap ahead of us and are working with our early clients to pick off kind of one problem at a time because we believe that.
[00:22:31] As Meredith said, everyone has waste and everyone needs to get rid of it or have it find its second home. So there's, there's a lot to do, but we're in a really good place to start chipping away at it.
[00:22:44] James Dice: So you mentioned early clients. Can you guys talk about some, some sort of story that building owners can relate to about how you're working with these early clients and sort of.
[00:22:54] Um, how they're sort of, I love, I love the phrase waste operations. Can you talk about how they're sort of [00:23:00] transforming their, their waste operations?
[00:23:03] Laura Rosenshine: Sure. So one of our early clients is a multi-site food, like fast food business basically. And a bunch of years ago, they decided to analyze how much money that they were spending on brokerage.
[00:23:17] Brokerage in the waste industry operates similarly as how we understand it today. There's a middle person that helps you. Find third parties to manage it. To come pick it up. To come pick it up. Yeah. Um, and in this case, they analyzed those costs and they said, whoa, we're spending a lot of money on this.
[00:23:37] Let's try and do it in house. And so they got rid of their brokers and they started taking this huge responsibility over at the corporate level. So not saying to the sites, you're now responsible for all your waste, both from a relationship level to scheduling to infrastructure, but at corporate, we're gonna handle this for you.
[00:23:57] And over the course of the last two, [00:24:00] three years, they did a great job with the resources that they had, but they got to a place where the efficiencies were totally lost. They had to improve. So imagine managing site information, vendor information, waste schedules for three to four different waste streams.
[00:24:17] In a spreadsheet, uh, when you have a problem, you have to, they weren't able to quickly get to the information that they needed to get to, to decide how do we resolve this problem? Do we call the hauler and have them come back? Or do we wait until the next day? Wait, when is the next pickup day? Uh, and whose fault was this?
[00:24:35] Should there be a credit associated with it? And so just having a structured. Really user friendly visualization of waste information was a massive step forward for them in order to get through the daily issues that they faced around waste management.
[00:24:52] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Of course. And another thought I have in terms of waste operations, um, and I'm sure site operators and [00:25:00] facilities teams will agree with this.
[00:25:02] While they might be responsible for moving material, making sure it gets where it needs to go, making sure it gets collected on time that they're following, you know, State and municipal rules. The janitorial teams aren't the ones putting materials into the bins and tenant spaces, and so, you know, they're, they're moving materials around, but they're not the ones complying or not complying with disposal rules.
[00:25:23] And one of the things that we run up against, have been running up against for our, our entire waste obsessed careers is the, the challenge of, of cynicism. The, the challenge of apathy, of the fact that people. Individuals stand at a waste station. Maybe it has excellent signage. Maybe the bags are all different colors according to a certain plan that's been set.
[00:25:47] And that clearly somebody's trying, probably an entire team of people are trying, but they are confused. They have disposal anxiety, and they stand there and they're like, I have a coffee cup. In one hand it's got a [00:26:00] plastic lid, a cardboard sleeve, the coffee cup, and then in my other hand I have a takeout container that has food scraps and a plastic fork in it, and they're like, I, I, I don't have a third hand and I don't, I can't make, I can't do anything right now within the three seconds that I'm willing to dedicate to this, shove it all in one bin, whichever one is in front of me.
[00:26:19] And what ends up happening, the building gets fined for non-compliance. And then people that follow behind that person and use that waste station, look into that. Compost bin and they're like, well, there's a coffee cup in there. F this, the system isn't working. You know, obviously this building doesn't care.
[00:26:34] I'm not participating anymore. And they shove their trash in it too. And it's, you know, a never ending cycle. And while this is a very, very, very large mountain to climb, we are at the bottom thrilled to be here recognizing that, building transparency into systems in a way that can be shared across. All stakeholders is an essential foundation.
[00:26:56] And so we, one of the ways that I talk about, or think about Watts [00:27:00] is as this, like digital scaffolding for how trash functions in a building. And yes, we're targeting operations and facilities right now, but one of the very next steps is, is the tenant engagement, the, the opportunity. To have standardized messaging and to have consistent education that everyone can follow and understand, both from.
[00:27:22] Uh, I'm a visual learner to, I speak a different language to, I need to watch a video to show me animation. We're really trying to wrap all of those needs up in one into one place. Because they have to be coordinated and it's gonna be a really big undertaking. But I think the fact that we have been at this for a while and that we really understand all of those different stakeholders needs, uh, keeps us incredibly motivated knowing that we're building the right way.
[00:27:50] Rosy Khalife: Awesome. Love that. Can you share with the audience is this. Live. Can people buy this yet? Or where are we at in that process? So they [00:28:00] know?
[00:28:00] Laura Rosenshine: So we're pretty early in the process. I wouldn't say that we're picking our first clients very carefully. Um, we actually are spreading ourselves over a couple different verticals just to figure out where we can get the best foothold.
[00:28:14] Right now, we are definitely looking for probably about 10 to 12 more what we're calling co-development partners in 2023 that. Have the right mixture of problems, motivations, assets, but I'll use that term like loosely and you know, just stakeholders that are willing to, to go on this adventure with us.
[00:28:36] We are in the process of rolling over our platform from a low code platform to a code platform, which we're really excited about and we're growing our, our dev team. But yeah, we have early users and are making a lot of progress every week that goes by.
[00:28:52] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Yeah, and some of our early advisors would probably continue to disagree with the way we're thinking about this.
[00:28:57] Um, Every business has [00:29:00] waste. We want every business to be able to use watts. We've gone back and forth over the last year in, in trying to decide whether we should really focus on a single industry, like, you know, commercial office buildings or multi-site food business. And where we're netting out is that it's really much more about the, the types of stakeholders, the set of challenges, um, and the way that waste is handled and managed.
[00:29:23] So our immediate targets are these business entities with multiple sites, ideally at least 15 sites across, ideally multiple geographies so that we can really tackle those big problems who manage waste. At the corporate level. We absolutely see kind of whatever a franchise operation, being able to use Watson the future, but that's not our immediate target.
[00:29:44] James Dice: All right, so we have a couple thousand people listening to this. We have several hundred people that are in our community of members, and I'd love to ask you guys how can they help? How can, how can we help as a community with what you are trying to accomplish?
[00:29:59] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Spread the word. [00:30:00] If you are one of those businesses that has corporate level control over waste management and you're like, wow, these ladies seem to know what they're talking about.
[00:30:08] Um, which hopefully that is what you've, um, derived from this conversation. We'd love to talk to you. You know, I think we're, we're entering in, especially kind of this spring and summer 2023 we're entering into. A pretty deep discovery phase trying to engage with a lot of different types of business entities and roles to really understand the problem set, define what those challenges are so that we can continue to grow this.
[00:30:35] Massive, arguably already five year long roadmap that we have set for ourselves. Um, there are so many problems to solve and, you know, we wanna be able to tackle them in a, in a strategic way that meets the most needs, the most rapidly.
[00:30:48] Laura Rosenshine: And I'll just add to that, that even though we have a history of being zero waste consultants, We've had to pull ourselves out of the game a little bit because we're building this and [00:31:00] Meredith and I don't wanna reinvent any wheels.
[00:31:02] We're not the one setting national or global best waste management practices. We wanna bring those practices into the platform. So if you happen to be someone that works in this space that has come across, An amazing tool or something that works really well for behavior change or, um, education or, or anything really, like, we wanna leverage your experiences and bring them into kind of this one stop a shop ecosystem for waste management.
[00:31:33] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: And I guess it wouldn't be 2023 if I didn't say ai. Um, I'm sorry. But same thing Laura said. Specific to that, we know that there are so many opportunities from content development to image to image recognition where there's a massive amount of overlap and tons of potential for efficiency. So if that's something that you know a lot about or want to talk to us about, we would love to set up a tighter chat.[00:32:00]
[00:32:00] Rosy Khalife: Amazing. Thank you both for being on. Last, last question, how can people find you and your company?
[00:32:08] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Our website is get watts.com, G E T w ats. You can find both of us on LinkedIn and if you wanna send us an email, you can send it to hello@getwatts.com.
[00:32:21] Rosy Khalife: Amazing. Thank you both for being on. I feel like you both set the bar very high for this series, so I'm excited for that and I'm excited to have other early stage founders join us.
[00:32:36] So thanks again.
[00:32:38] Meredith Danberg-Ficarelli: Thank you for having us.
[00:32:39] Laura Rosenshine: Thank you for having us.
[00:32:42] Rosy Khalife: That was awesome. I love that. We kicked off this series with two female founders. Very cool. Um, James, what was your favorite part of this episode? Let me share mine first. My favorite was their passion. I just love that they both have a personal reason why they're doing this.
[00:32:59] [00:33:00] They've been thinking about it for so many years and working in it, it just feels so aligned and I can't think of two better people to be tackling this huge problem than than those ladies.
[00:33:11] James Dice: Yeah. Yeah. So, so cool to hear their story. I've been talking to them for about six months. Now just kind of offering any insights I can.
[00:33:20] Uh, we've been talking about partnering for the Nexus syndicate. Can we help in some way? One of the things I'm super excited about with what they're doing is that they're new to startups, but every time I talk to them, they've made like a huge stride. And even just this conversation from the last time I talked to 'em, they've added so much sophistication the way that they've honed in on like, these are the types of customers that we want to talk to right now and here's how, what we can offer them.
[00:33:44] So that was cool. I think the waste operations piece is interesting. If you think about the history of like the smart buildings technology world, right? A lot of times it was focused on we're gonna collect your data and show you something in a dashboard, right? And they [00:34:00] talked about that, but I think the main piece of the product they're talking about is the operations.
[00:34:04] So operationalizing a way to manage their waste, and that's a different product. If you're saying, I'm gonna basically digitalize the operations for them, right? You're, you're setting out to build a different product than a dashboard, and you're gonna be able to solve problems in a more deeper way than you are just by showing someone some data and expecting them to change based on that, that insight that they're supposed to get on the dashboard.
[00:34:31] So what do they mean by that? Right? So they're talking about. Actually their product being the place where waste operations happen. So if instead of I'm gonna manage waste in my email and on a spreadsheet, they're talking about someone that's in the corporate organization actually logging into was to perform actions.
[00:34:48] And that's a different, that's just a slight tweak, but it's a huge tweak that's happening, I think across waste, across energy, across maintenance that. Getting into the [00:35:00] actual workflows of the humans that are doing these things is kind of where all of the different use cases and smart buildings need to get to, to like have an actual impact.
[00:35:10] Because we're talking about transforming the way people are operating a building, not just showing them some sort of data on a screen or a report or. Whatever.
[00:35:22] Rosy Khalife: Hmm. That's a great thanks for, that's helpful just for me as someone who, you know, this is the first time I meet them and, and really learn about what they're doing that's helpful to kind of differentiate between what they're doing and what the rest of the world is doing.
[00:35:36] Um, amazing. Thank you, uh, again to our guests.
[00:35:39] James Dice: Yeah. And we'd love if you're listening to this, for us to get some referrals here. So if you know an early staged company as well, or if you're an investor and you've invested recently, An early stage company that needs a spotlight on what they're doing, let us know.
[00:35:54] Um, please connect us with them. You can connect us@helloaccesslabs.online. We're looking for [00:36:00] companies that are a pree seed stage. They've gotten a few customers, they've seen some transformation in those early customers, and they're looking for sort of a bigger set of eyeballs, uh, on what they're doing.
[00:36:17] Rosy Khalife: Okay friends, as we're trying these new formats, please let us know what you think in your podcast player right now, or on the episode page on our website. There's a link to a survey for this specific episode. We'd love to hear from you and we wanna hear your feedback. Also, don't forget to sign up for the Nexus newsletter or invite your coworkers and friends with a link below.
[00:36:37] Catch you next time.
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