Macro Micro Michael Marco & Startups at the Edge (M4Edge)

M4Edge is about startups with technologies that can change how the economy functions. There’s very little that is as central to a functioning economy as energy, and that’s one reason why climate change is such a deep societal problem. There are also very few industries that are as important to a growing economy as the construction industry. And so today’s episode is one of a two-part miniseries on technologies that are aimed at the greening of the construction industry. Interestingly, both of our guests were recently named to the prestigious Forbes 30 under 30 list, for energy. Today’s guest is Apoorv Sinha of Carbon Upcycling Technologies, or CUT. CUT takes captured CO2 and then basically stores it, but not underground, as is one popular solution, but in commercial products. In fact, the presence of the carbon in the products, like cement, for example, actually makes the products more cost effective to produce because you use less original material, and it gives the products some enhanced qualities. It’s the trifecta. Better cost efficiency, better product, better environment. This is the kind of solution where, if it manages to scale, could be deeply impactful.
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As always, enjoy the episode and thanks for being curious!

Our episode today is about the future of ____. We left that last part blank because you can decide for yourself. We interview Jay Rogers and Vikrant Aggarwal who are, respectively, the CEO co-founder and president of Local Motors. I could tell you that Local Motors is an automotive manufacturing company, but that would be criminally uninformative. Local Motors makes vehicles that are unusual, and makes them in an unusual way. Their marquis product, Olli, is a fully autonomous, electric vehicle shuttle bus. Their manufacturing process relies on Direct Digital Manufacturing (DDM), hybrid additive and subtractive manufacturing, and is designed around "microfactories" – hence the local in local motors. This conversation is about the future of mobility, manufacturing, work, supply chain, energy, you decide. And, on what other podcast can you get a CEO talking about Nobel winning Harry Markowitz, Michael Porter, Nassim Taleb, Oprah Winfrey and the Wolverine movies?

If you haven’t yet rated and reviewed our show – Please do! It only takes a minute, and it really helps. Starting with the next episode, we'll read our favorite review left for us on Apple Podcasts, so make a it a good one. 

Today's bonus episode is about the multiple layers of uncertainty we are all facing right now. More specifically, the episode is meant to give you some insight into how M4 Strategy Garage can help your business untangle those uncertainties as you try to navigate the murky waters ahead. We have categorized the covid recovery uncertainty into five elements, and within each element have identified several variables we believe are important to monitor, in order to understand how the economy will respond to the pandemic over time. We've come up with three scenarios, which each comprising a combination of those variables in differing degrees.
Listen to the episode to get a taste of what we're thinking and how we can help you. Reach out to us for some deeper advice. Forward the episode to people at your company who you think can benefit from our framing of the uncertainty. Post the episode on social media to help us spread the word about M4Edge. Rate the episode and review the show on Apple Podcast and ... Stay Curious and Stay Safe!

On today's episode we speak with Paul Appleby, the CEO of Kinetica. Paul has held leadership roles in some very prominent tech companies, including SAP, SalesForce and C3, and he's now at the helm a big data startup, so he’s definitely been at the center of our changing economy, and has a lot to reflect upon. 

We recorded our interview with Paul in early March of 2020 and we’ve delayed the release a bit because we wanted to give room for some of our M4 Corona Combatants mini-episodes to get some airtime and some of your mindshare. If you’ve not checked those out, please do. Of course, as you heard in the teaser quote at the top of the episode and as you’ll hear in the interview, Kinetica’s power and its platform can certainly be applied to many of the problems at hand in battling the Coronavirus. 

Kinetica’s strength is its ability to take massive amounts of structured and unstructured data from diverse sources, and do the analytics in real time. Kinetica offers a glimpse into some of the imagined capabilities we’ve seen in movies for years, whether it’s analyzing banking transactions on the fly or the millions of pieces of real time data flow from a fully automated traffic system to tracking the unfolding of a pandemic. As Paul says, they’re at the crossroads of data, business and AI, and it’s an exciting place to be. 

You’ll see that this is a classic M4Edge conversation. We cover a lot of ground from pandemics to terror threats to banking to dynamic supply chains, but also to what this all means for the future of work. We know you’re a curious lot, but even for us conversation really traversed a lot of ground, so buckle up. 

PLEASE write us a review on Apple Podcasts, it really does make a difference. And PLEASE share an episode or the show links with a friend or on social media, and help us build or community of Curious Listeners.

This episode is number 3 in our Corona Combatants series. In this series we’re trying to amplify the efforts of our guests and their companies who are using the tools at their disposal to help fight the sprawling battle against Corona. If you’ve not heard the other episodes in this series, please check them out – they include distance learning resources from Legends of Learning, accelerated lending and distance lending from Boss insights, and a Maker based effort to produced PPE by CU Denver and Make4Covid. In this episode, we highlight the work of two companies - 3DHubs - we'll hear from Ben Redwood, and Sorcero -we'll hear from Nnaemeka Osakwe.
3DHubs bookended our 2019 miniseries on 3Dprinting, and Sorcero was one of the first companies we ever had on the show, and one of our first repeat guests, so it’s heartening that both of these companies – very much part of the M4Edge community - are helping fight this fight.
More of these Corona Combatants mini episodes are on the way – please really do share these with others, especially if you know someone who can help. Stay curious and healthy!

https://covid19.sorcero.com/
https://www.gofundme.com/f/covid19-manufacturing-fund
https://www.m4edge.com/strategy-garage/

As the coronavirus forced governments to shut down large parts of the economy, ordering workers to stay home, one of our first questions was: where are the robots when you need them? 

So we invited Brad Bogolea to come on M4Edge. Brad is the co-founder and CEO of Simbe Robotics and they produce…well…robots. Their most well-known robot is named Tally, and has already been widely deployed across major retail chains, especially grocery stores. Tally goes up and down the aisles and uses image recognition to take a real time inventory of the items on the shelves. 

The information Tally collects is then used to improve supply chain management, but also to gain insights on consumer behavior and sales trends. 

Improving inventory management and supply chain management is crucial today, now that supply chains have come under enormous stress because of the Coronavirus disruption. In this podcast, Brad tells us what he is seeing in the retail sector today, and how Simbe and its robots are helping grocery chains meet our needs in this difficult time. 

The value of Simbe’s robots extends well beyond the current emergency: it is estimated that in normal times, inefficiencies in inventory management cost the US retail industry over 1 trillion dollars!

We also discuss with Brad other areas where robots will eventually be able to contribute, and the technical and psychological aspects of human-robot interaction. 

Up until a few weeks ago we all feared the robots would take all the jobs. Today we almost wish they had taken them already. It’s a great time to understand better how robots and humans can work together, and how we can reach a balance that makes us all better off, including by making our economy more resilient to shocks like the one we currently face.

Enjoy the episode, share it, review it on Apple Podcasts, and thanks for being curious!

Our guest today is Keren Moynihan, founder and CEO of Boss Insights.
Our conversation with Keren is especially timely, as we recorded this podcast on Monday, March 16th, 2020. Just the day before, Sunday March 15th , the US Federal Reserve held an emergency meeting and announced a set of monetary policy measures to support the economy during the #coronavirus crisis. The measures are strongly focused on the need to keep lending flowing to both businesses and individuals, to help them through what we all hope will be a temporary period of serious economic difficulty.

This is where Keren comes in: Boss Insights has developed a set of tech applications and solutions to make lending faster, cheaper and better. In a nutshell, Boss Insights helps lenders like banks and credit unions to get fast and easy access to relevant data from the businesses that are borrowing from them or would like to borrow from them. This is especially relevant for private companies, which don’t have the same reporting requirements as publicly listed companies on the stock market. With these data, Boss
Insights can help banks understand their clients better. 

This means they can have a better assessment of the risk of the loans they make, but also of their customers’ evolving needs. For example, lenders can better anticipate whether a business will need foreign exchange services, or other financial services to manage its employees or its supply chain. 

The current crisis highlights how important it is for lenders to have a better, real-time understanding of their customers. The extreme social distancing measures adopted in the US and in some European countries will have a very negative impact on some sectors of the economy, and small businesses will be hit especially hard.

The Fed has emphasized that banks should keep lending, to help their customers through this difficult period. For banks then it becomes crucial to be able to understand which customers face only a temporary disruption because of the shock, and which ones instead might have a more structural problem in their business model – because they need to focus their help on those businesses that can stand on their own feet once the crisis is over.

Keren also talks about how the #Fintech revolution is transforming the financial sector, the role of Ai and more. It’s a great conversation on the prospects of finance and lending not just through this crisis but beyond it and well into the future.

Enjoy the episode, share it with friends and colleagues, and if you can spare a few minutes do write us a review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for being curious, and stay safe during this difficult time!

This is a very special edition of the M4Edge podcast, and a part of our Corona Combatants series: we speak with a team of people who are striving to leverage 3D printing resources to quickly supply hospitals and care centers with some of the equipment they need to handle the covid-19 emergency.

Our guests are all affiliated with the University of Colorado Denver, and the Anschutz Medical Center through a novel project called Inworks, which as one of our guests says, is like a maker space on steroids. Inworks seeks to create innovative solutions to some of the world’s most challenging problems, and so stepping up for Covid response was what they were made for. And they are really stepping up the challenge.

Their efforts are currently focused on Personal Protective Equipment, or PPE. This is — in the definition of the Food and Drug Administration, protective clothing, helmets, gloves, face shields, goggles, face masks and/or respirators or other equipment designed to protect the wearer from injury or the spread of infection or illness.

In the fight against the covid-19 virus, health care workers are a crucial resource, and protecting them from contagion is a top priority. As the number of covid cases rises, some hospitals have already been running short of some personal protective equipment.

Everyone who can, should try to help. Some automakers have switched their production to ventilators, in coordination with the FDA.

As our guests explain, 3D printing has two characteristics that can help address this challenge: its speed and its distributed nature. Using 3D printing and an open source design approach can allow us to quickly develop important pieces of equipment—in this case, face shields. And leveraging the distributed nature of the 3D printing market community across the country can allow us to produce at scale and close to the health care providers in need.

This podcast is also a call to arms: our guests will emphasize the need for makers, fabricators, designers, engineers and health care experts to join the effort, and explain one way of coming to help. Coordination is crucial, to learn from each other, to diffuse best practices, but also to make sure that help reaches hospitals in the most efficient way possible. Our guests have helped to launch an online platform, make4covid.co  to facilitate this effort. 

Neither one of us is a health expert; our guests are not medical experts either, and they will underscore the importance of coordinating with the regulators and following all the FDA’s prescriptions and guidelines. Theirs is one spontaneous effort, and others are doubtlessly sprouting elsewhere around the country.

In a situation that requires to have all hands on deck, we thought it would be valuable to show how 3D printing and the maker community have quickly jumped in to help, and to publicize this effort so that others can join in or reach out to our guests to exchange insights, share advice and help each other help our health care system.

So this is an episode you really should share, and quickly, because it might help. If you are someone who could help, get in touch.

Stay curious, stay safe and stay healthy, everyone.

M4Edge is about startups with technology that can change how the economy functions, and nothing has quite as potentially dramatic an effect on the economy as a Pandemic plus a possible recession. But some of our guests’ companies can help. In times like these, it’s very easy to despair, but it’s important to find as many ways as we can to find reasons to be hopeful, and more importantly, to create reasons for hope.

We realized recently that some of our guests – these awesome entrepreneurs - are creating reasons for hope, and we wanted to amplify their efforts by sharing them with you. We’ll be releasing some mini-episodes of our entrepreneur’s forms of Corona combat.

We urge you to share these, not because we want the listeners, but because these offerings and solutions will ease suffering. So please, really, spread the word. Today’s M4Edge Corona combatants are Sandy Roskes of Legends of Learning, whom we had on the show last year, and Keren Moynihan of BOSS Insights, whom we interviewed recently and whose episode hasn’t even dropped yet. Listen, and share. 

Stay curious and stay healthy.

Our guest today is Katherine Sizov, Founder of Strella Biotechnology. This is our third Ag-tech show in our young 2nd season. We opened with Allison Kopf of Artemis, and this episode follow Hunter McDaniel of UbiQD. There will be more; it's one of our themes this season, and is increasingly important in the age of Corona-driven changes and challenges to our economy and supply chains.

The first thing you should know is that Katherine is fresh out of college, and she founded Strella Biotechnology while she was still a student at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied molecular biology and chemistry. And by the way, she was also on the fencing team. Now to us, that’s quite impressive. 

Katherine decided to tackle an issue that affects every single one of us: food waste. Did you know that over one third of produce never reaches the consumer? Add in the share that does reach, but that we find unsatisfactory, and we are wasting close to one half of the fruit and vegetables harvest. And that’s in a developed country like the US, with the best refrigeration technology and transport infrastructure. Imagine in the developing world. 

If we want to address environmental sustainability and world hunger, we must reduce this waste. 

To do this, Katherine tried to figure out—as she puts it—how to hack a fruit. 

In this podcast, Katherine explains how fruits and vegetables talk to each other, why the expression “one rotten apple spoils the whole barrel” is actually scientifically accurate, and how Strella developed specialized biosensors to reduce food waste across the supply chain. 

This is a fascinating and sparkling conversation, full of surprising facts and insights on the fruits and vegetables we eat every day (at least we should) and how they get to our table. 

Plus you will hear directly form Katherine what it’s like to become a startup entrepreneur in college – what lessons has she drawn?

Strella Biotechnology is one to watch –and so is Katherine, who is just getting started.

Enjoy the episode, share it with friends and colleagues, and if you can spare a few minutes do write us a review on iTunes. Thanks for being curious!

Another link to follow on Food Waste: John Oliver's masterful take on the problem a few years ago, which opened many people's eyes to this travesty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8xwLWb0lLY