Riggs, welcome to the Resilient Entrepreneurs podcast. We're really looking forward to this conversation today. We're going to be talking about all kinds of things, business and entrepreneurship and water, which I think will be something very different from what we’ve talked about before. So looking forward to it. And we're going to dive right in, in the deep end. Haha, can you see what I did there? All the puns are coming out. All the bad puns are coming out immediately. Apologies.
With a splash, I know.
Let's get right into the flow.
Apologies in advance. Nah, let's have it. Okay, we're starting at the beginning. So I'd love to talk about childhood experiences because I do believe so much of the things we experience in our childhood, how we grew up, affects who we become. So I'd love to learn a little bit about your story. Tell us a little bit about how you grew up, where you grew up, and yeah, start the journey for us.
Well, Laura and Vicki, it's a great pleasure being here. Thank you for having me. I was a son of a migrant worker. He used to launch Procter & Gamble branches in foreign countries. So he'd arrive at a country and they'd be, he'd basically get Procter & Gamble going in that country. Or if it was going, you know, build it up. So I was born in Toronto and then we moved very quickly to Puerto Rico and then Venezuela and then to Paris. And what's interesting about Paris is that I don't have a memory of not speaking French, you know, which is strange. But I guess I was six years, six years old and five and a half, six years old. And at that point, you're pretty much, things flow. And then we went to Brussels and then back to Paris. And then finally my dad said, we're going to have to Americanize you. And that, that was a disaster for me anyway, because you know, by then this is, uh, I'd just finished the seventh grade in the French system and I'd already two years of Latin. And I jumped a grade and went into a public high school in the United States. And that was a shock. Very interesting.
So I got, unfortunately I gained a very bad habit, which was that I started skating on what I'd already learned, right? Because the education even then in 1965, even then was way behind. And of course, I arrived and they had their first year of Latin in the ninth grade and I already had two, but now we don't even have any Latin at all. It's like, forget it. So there's been and I think it's true actually, even in places like France, there's been a tremendous degradation of education and, Vicki, perhaps in Australia, I don't actually know, but there's, there's been, there's been a socialization of education, as they say.
And so I think you could say that I'm, stateless. I guess you could say, sort of, I would say romantically a citizen of the world.
Otherwise known as gypsy.
Or migrant’s son, you know.
Digital Nomad.
Well, back then it was analog nomad, right? So, as an analog nomad writing letters to my parents on paper, imagine that.
Yeah, you're used to the moving and the traveling and the new experiences. I can see how that can get a little addicting too. And I also see how that can help your worldview be so different than the average person that stays in place for most of their life. How did that affect you as an entrepreneur when you were ready to step into your own?
Okay, I'm gonna tell you the good and the bad. The good is that I was willing to jump in. The bad is I was often jumping in without being ready. You know, for example, in the early 80s, I started a computer company in New York City and the first computer I sold, I was with the client trying to figure out where the on button was, you know, so.
I was gonna ask you, I was gonna ask you Riggs, what's ready really? I mean we've got to say yes and work out how, come on man. And you just explained exactly what ready needs to be.
Thank you. And that's scary true. But in the case of this business, for example, it would have helped me to have done an apprenticeship in the industry. And so I think that's the first thing. As excited as you are about just jumping in, wow, computers are the new thing, and the 80s is when small businesses first began to migrate from those safeguard ledgers. They were bear-down hard kind of stuff. Put it in a ring binder and so forth. All of a sudden they had a, gosh, they called them super micro computers back then, all kinds of interesting stuff. It was an amazing time, but you needed to be in the industry and know, for example, how many people would it take to maintain operations, right? To do maintenance and things like that, just have a grasp of the machinery. So I'm a strong believer in do apprentice in the industry that you're gonna jump into for starters.
Now, I had an amazing experience in the computer industry, but ultimately, and this is a second thing that I learned, is that it often seems like you're gonna fail when you're not.
And I was having a terrible time. You know, I was doing what was in a lot of money, million dollars a year as a small business, supporting 12 people in Manhattan on a payroll, ridiculously hard. And what I didn't realize was that when you build a computer or system house, the money's not in the initial implementation, it's the monthly fees. And I ended up just disgusted, giving the business to my best salesman.
He's in business to this day. He still has clients that we made in the 80s. So it's 40 plus years of monthly fees, right?
And so, and so I went on a journey to learn more about stuff like direct marketing and even took a break and the ski bummed, cause that's what people have to do at the age of 40. But then, the nineties arrived and that's when I hit the dot-com!
Okay, you're right on the cusp of all the big ones.
That was my space. Because by then I did know about computers and so forth. And I got involved and it was great because it fast, and liquidity events happening. Guess what, Riggs? We sold the company. Your stock is good. All right. Then it's not. Okay, that's fine too.
So from .com to .bomb for you?
And back because what happened was, the nineties was crazy fast.
But what happened is the Y2K, the year 2000 was a good thing for me because it cleared out all of the mess of the crappy businesses that were being launched, kind of like crypto today, right? And then we were able to do really good work after the year 2000, really good work. And that's when I started really getting my stride. So I became, I was really aware that I needed to understand corporate better. And so in 1995, I actually was in a dot-com, but joined in a corporate sense in what was then one of the corporate players long gone, of course. And, by 2005, I'd worked my way up the ladder and I was now a COO and president of a company that became a NASDAQ player. And at that point, I made a move, which I probably should regret, but I actually have had fun doing it, which is I told a fund I could, I think I could be a good CEO.
So they gave me my first half million dollars and I was a CEO. And that has been almost a 20 year journey, which has taught me so much, so much. But during those 10 years, from 95 to 2005, I created a philosophy called mistake-based marketing. And you're gathering that I made a virtue out of a fault.
I'm loving it already. I'm loving it already. Bring it on.
Me too. Tell me more.
Well, here's what happened in 2000 all the research budgets went away. Now back in the day with L. Ron Hubbard, he taught me all about, you got a survey. He was a very good manager survey, survey, survey, research, make sure you know your market and so forth we get and I was doing that in the 90s and having big successes with research. I'm a strong believer in opinion research, image research, logo research all this stuff, don't just get ‘looks like a good logo. We're going with it.’ You know, it's okay. But you really should do a survey.
I recognized that my problems in the 80s were because I was not recovering fast enough from my mistakes, you see. It's not that I wasn't making mistakes,
It's not that you should not make mistakes. You should, you should learn quickly. You know, like, okay, got that. And don't - never chase the sunk cost.
So, like I put so much into it. I gotta keep going. No, you know what? You just blew X amount of money. Call it a survey, move on, learn from it. And so, that really prepared me for the space that I ended up in, which is water, which is about the least disruptive space on the planet, but it also needs the most help because water is in trouble all over the place. Badly in trouble. People don't realize it and they go, well, you know, turn on the faucet, water comes out, flush the toilet, water goes away. What's the problem, right? But there are big problems.
And what the problem is with the problem is that they're very stuck in their ways. Big water is very much, you know, this is how we do it. You know, it's big engineering and big companies and lots of municipalities and people who are actually all retiring. And so there's very little desire for change. And so I was stuck for years trying to figure out where, where was the fulcrum to make change happen. And eventually it did come about. I found it! Because the very fact that water is being held down so much by the powers that be, be it big water, municipalities and so forth is causing businesses to have to do their own water treatment.
They're completely being unserved. so this phenomenon began of decentralized water, water that is being done by the people may doing the pollution, which why not, right? If you're polluting the water, why not clean it? This municipal water treatment makes sense for a home, but not so much for a factory. Treat your freaking water, dude. So, and one of the things that is driving that is that smart lawyers started suing the polluters even after they put their water in the municipality, because it wasn't cleaned enough. And so now the polluters have to do their own water treatment because they're being sued anyway. So might as well do it right. So this phenomenon called decentralized water is now booming. It's happening. We've got our own unicorn in the space, all kinds of things like that. And we built a business around that. And that's where we are today.
Wow. Interesting. And I wanted to talk to you about water because I think I come from a very unique place. And if you've ever been to Bermuda, but we collect our rainwater from our roofs. I believe we're the only country in the world that does this. have, we live in subtropical islands, so we get a good bit of rain. And, you know, when the first settlers came here, there was no freshwater source. There's none. I mean, there's some underground water, but that's in limited supply.
So we had to figure it out right away from the first days and Bermuda was settled the same time as the US. So we go back, you know, the same type of history. You know, so collecting water and having our own rainwater and thus preserving it and being very cautious about it, especially in the warmer summer months. so I've always been brought up to be super, super water conscious. And I realize now like it's part privilege and part, you know, struggle. And we often just take it for granted. Luckily, I didn't take it for granted because I wasn't allowed to. know, shower went past two minutes and you were in big trouble, right? It was like, turn off the water when you're putting in the conditioner. We were very conscious of water and very lucky that we are privileged to have such quality water. But I understand that it's very different in different areas of the world. Help me understand a little bit more like what are some of the other issues? I understand the pollution from the companies, but how does the water system work in the US for anybody who's maybe outside the US and doesn't understand the specific issues inside the country?
Well, our water infrastructure kind of drives the problem in a way because it was built in the early part of the 20th century when everybody thought big concrete, big central systems. Think of the LA river, you know, Grease where they're driving up and down a dry river. And the idea was get all that fresh water into the ocean fast, you know, get it out of here. And like, wait, wait, it's fresh water, you know. So the mentality back in the early part of the 20th century was very centralized, very dictatorial and you have in LA, have this giant, giant water plant called Hyperion and they process, you know, a million gallons a second or something ridiculous. So the centralization made a lot of sense to build large central systems. Unfortunately, there are a few very large systems in America, but then there's 150,000 smaller systems. So you have these small rural water systems. They'll serve 10,000 people. And then you have got these giant ones that serve 4 million people, right? So by volume, the top 15% water treatment systems service 85% of the people. It kind of flips, right? And there's a problem with that, which is that they can never keep up with the environmental regulations, which by the way are very sensible, right?
So if you go to a site called ewg.org, environmentalworkinggroup.org, ewg.org slash tap water, and in America, put your zip code in there. And you'll be astonished to see that all of the water, chlorine and everything, are within legal requirements, but often thousands of percents above what scientists know today. So the water quality, while compliant, I'm not saying the municipality is not compliant, is way below what the science says. And so the EPA tries to catch up and say, you gotta get rid of microplastics, but then they don't allocate enough money, right? The whole microplastics effort, the Forever Chemicals effort, is mandated by the EPA, has a grand total of $5 billion nationwide. It's basically unfunded.
In fact, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that by just four years from now, we'll be running a net deficit of what we should spend of $430 billion a year in America alone, almost half a trillion dollars every year that's not spent. Well, when you don't spend half a trillion dollars a year that you're supposed to. Eventually things start breaking. We have a sewage main break every two minutes in America. It's under reported because it happens down the block, Joe just had a main break. But it's nasty, and it messes up the groundwater. And here's the other thing, Laura. You're talking about short showers, and that's meaningful in Bermuda. But total residential use or demand for water is only 10% of the total.
So 90% is business and agricultural. This is all over the world, by the way. The ratio between business and agricultural varies. Somalia, it's mostly agricultural. In America, it's half and half, business and agricultural. They are the real, that's where you can get the most bang for your buck if you wanna make the water better, is not short showers. Yeah, okay, short shower is fine, whenever. I learned my trade on a ship and you're right, you turn off the thing because that water is precious. But I wonder if the large polluters are more than happy to have the population blame itself. I mean, it's kind of like, yeah, very bad people. You need to shake short showers. Meanwhile, we got rice paddies in Imperial Valley, which is about as water intensive as you can get.
You know, how do you get out of this problem? Well, the first thing you know is that you should recycle the water that you have. Israel does a very good job. Almost 90% of their water is recycled. We recycle less than 1%. And I think Vegas is the best, they get up to about 20%. They're pretty good.
Now you can recycle.
Which number one reduces the amount of water you have to buy. So your water rates go down. Number two, it helps with droughts. Doesn't it. We've estimated that if you can just get that 1% up to 15%, we will double the amount of freshwater available in America, which is a good goal.
What about the water that's being used in LA that's being sent directly into the ocean? That could be saved, it could be recycled, it could be stored more and so that mentality is not being fixed by government, because government is basically there to keep things still, hold them still don't do anything and that's kind of their function. I'm not saying it's bad.
You have to look for initiative from the private sector and that's where decentralized water comes in again. So we built a business around that and, and then we got to the next problem, which is people don't have money for these systems because you build a brewery and you don't have a budget for a million dollar water system. You've got a budget to make beer. So what do you do? Well, you survive the fines. You get fined, you truck the water to another county and do all kinds of weird things. You don't have the money. So what we put together, there's a new concept called Water On Demand where - here comes the MRR. You don't have to pay for your machine, just pay by the gallon. So you're paying our meter instead of the city's meter.
And now we get, and here's the second tweak. Regular investors, not institutions can invest directly into Water On Demand. So you get regular, like think people who would normally invest in a multi-unit real estate project, right?
Well, now they can invest in a water system on exactly the same terms with the LLCs and the bank leverage and this and that, all that stuff. So it's identical to real estate, but it's a water treatment system, half million dollars, million dollars, $2 million, whatever it is. So that's, that's becoming so exciting because not only do we have the monthly recurring revenue, which creates the cap rate and the cashflow and all that stuff, but we're also making it possible for people like you and me to invest in something interesting at the early stage, which we, I'm sorry, we just don't get access. Yes, I had early access to Bitcoin if I'd ever believed in it, but here we are.
So there we are. We're doing this power to the people thing with water and structuring it like real estate. And that took a long, long time and a lot of work, but we're there.
Wow. So thank you for all that, It's quite the education for both of us and no doubt for many of our listeners. And I really love how you're an out of the box thinker. So clearly, you've had several strategy conversations with the right people in your team about how are we going to make this affordable? How are we going to solve the price problem? How are we still keeping it accessible? How are we sticking true to our own values around this business because this is what's important to us. That's a lot of strategic conversations. What do you think out of all that, plus the ones I haven't named, was the most important aspect to getting you to where you are today after this long?
When you're failing, find out what it is that's making you fail and don't just, you know, I heard an interesting saying the other day that bankruptcy occurs little by little and then all at once.
But it's true. you're in the, usually in the little by little stage, right? And right there is when you could be fixed, fixed, fixed, fixed. And I have to say, even the all at once can be fixed. I can't tell you how often, you know, we've gotten down to, well, I think we got payroll. And it's like, really? It happens so often. Somebody new comes in the company and go, what? We only have two and a half weeks of money? And like, yeah, yeah, that's pretty good actually. You know?
Such an entrepreneur. We got this. It's fine.
You get immune to the whole problem because and here's the important thing is that, most businesses have a terrible problem getting funding - funding, funding, funding. Capitalization is the big problem in the 80s with my computer system I was actually introduced to a Wall Street dude who said I'm gonna take you public and I turned him down because I said sorry, I'm not profitable yet. How many companies, we've just learned like profitability, who needs profitability? I mean, you need market share, you need penetration, you need to be growing fast, but not necessarily profitability at the bottom line.
That's what I didn't understand at the time. I was succeeding, I was doing well. I was getting a lot of customers and I was a pioneer and I was building this business that I didn't realize had a long tail, but did. And I said, well, I haven't become that profitable.
And that's how an entrepreneur thinks. But that's not how you would think in the public space, public investors invest in the future. They're investing in the future of a stock. You know, I'm invested in Tesla and I guarantee you that at 400 some dollars I'm investing in the future of Tesla not as present. And Tesla was a case study. They were billions in the red for years, years, but they were making their metrics. They were building cars and they were, the cars were getting better and they were putting the supercharger network and all these things they were doing. So they're executing on plan. And so the problem is people don't know where to get the funding.
And there's a giant gap between seed funding, friends and family, your credit cards, your day job, SBA loan, and then getting money from a family office or somebody smart, a small institution or whatever. There's a giant gap and that gap is filled by regular investors.
It’s a combination of crowdfunding and accredited investors and you run them together. Because if you're going to spend money getting investors, you do it through advertising, you do it through social media. If you're going to get investors, then you don't want to waste investors. Even the best targeting in Facebook, you're still ending up with 80% unaccredited investors. And so what are you going to do? Turn them away?
So now we, now here's what we've done. OriginClear no longer has water companies. We now spun off all of our water businesses into a new entity called Water On Demand Inc. So if people go to waterondemand.net, they'll see there's, there's that whole, two operating businesses that one handles very large users like power plants and the other one handles smaller modular type sites. And then the third division is this real estate, you know, water-like real estate.
We've spun it off and believe me, that was such a terrible learning experience because that's a whole other, well, let's see. No, we don't have time. Anyway, we have a spin, a spinoff and now Origin Clear is an accelerator. We take people's businesses and we help them get funding.
Now, the problem is that a lot of businesses are not worthy of being funded. You give them money and they will lose it. We have association with another group that I work with that does the very early stuff. Right now, OriginClear, for example, is talking to a company that is a fantastic company, they have Fortune 500 customers, they have amazing technology, they have patents, they're a sole source, and they're going out of business because they got themselves in such a cash flow twist. They got too, too tied up and they're private. They got so tied up and you know what? They took a bunch of MCAs. Merchant Cash Advances.
The MCA is when you borrow money at 100 plus percent.
Ooh, ouch, right.
And you get the money and then you then every week the money comes out of your bank the bank account double what you took. That is very common. It's a very common thing at one point even in my company I had to do it for a while and lord it was painful.
This business came along and it was just right for OriginClear because it's a functioning business. It's big enough and we can solve it with funding and they're not broke, right? They're a pure cash problem. That is exciting. And so now we're taking OriginClear and basically using the funding mechanism to get people rapid money, you can you can raise rapid money, even as a private company from these offerings.
and then you know kind of kind of you have to start the start the outboard and then go up and then you Get to the point where you're to become really worthy of institutional funding. So and that's where we Were that transition right? So, You know, there's a there's a group called Y Combinator in America and they do a good job, but they primarily feed to VCs. We don't feed to VCs, we feed to institutional, private equity and so forth, slightly different.
And is this a, are you one of many in this market or is this a new-ish idea?
Nobody raises money. Nobody.
People don't know how to raise money and they say Riggs. Can you raise the money? Well, yeah. Okay. Now do you have a hundred thousand dollars? That's hard. That's hard. Even that's hard, right? So, but you need that much just to get the advertising going, right? You need something. So it's we'll work with them, but it's better if they have their first $100,000 to throw into that. So it's really exciting because while doing water, which is so hard and hard to move, we developed this superpower, which was fundraising. And now we've developed a compliant way to raise money because remember, there's all kinds of regulations around raising money. It's fully compliant. And now people can come along and essentially get their funding. And, like I say, it's happening right now.
Congratulations. It sounds exciting. I can see the excitement in your face. I can hear the passion in your voice as much as you're still committed to that original business. It's that I don't know, there's there's a light inside of people who are entrepreneurs who have that spirit who see a problem and are able to solve it and yeah, that's, think that's what I'm seeing in your rings. Is that right? Is it, what is it that drives this for you? What motivates you? Whether you pivoted or you haven't.
Well, I've pivoted many times. And part of it is that after that 80s experience, I vowed never again to permit myself to fail. Just that's it. It's over. Just don't fail.
Just make mistakes and call it marketing.
Well, but recover, make mistakes and learn.
If you make mistakes and don't learn then you're just an idiot, you know, and I've been an idiot many times. So what we think we've done, look the water industry needs help big time. It's gigantic. It's kind of like the way the taxi industry was before uber very antiquated and by the way to this day the taxi industry is antiquated I don't even know why but they they still don't have their act together because you know my wife and I were in Mexico over Thanksgiving and we got stranded somewhere and I tried calling a cab and it was like this, that, and then I just went to Uber and boop, boop, boop on the app. There was the Uber car. Thank you very much. So you're revolutionizing an industry that badly needs revolutionizing and that's water. So water is a gigantic challenge for our health. Remember that a huge amount of disease comes from bad sanitation, is what it is. But in addition, all the toxins that come from industry and nitrates that come from agriculture, all these things are all going into the same pot. Got to fix it.
I have to say the early, the early, the early learnings that I got from L Ron Hubbard really stood me right because you can't become the effect of your failures. You've got to be, and it's too easy to go, my God. The other day I spoke to somebody, had a great thing going for years. And then how's it going with your blah, blah. It's not going so great. I'm like, dude, you raised a ton of money. What's up with that? So, and the other thing that keeps me going is the investors. People invest in our business. They need to win, right?
One book that had inspired you in the early days was The Entrepreneur’s Dilemma about innovation coming from within.
This is a mindset conversation, right? So how much of mindset, makes success?
So Clayton Christensen of course was a prophet, an amazing person, the late Clayton Christensen. And what he said was that the mindset of a company is to do what they're doing it, doing it, it, which is good, right? You wanna establish something and keep it rolling. But innovation, as you said, comes from within and is often suppressed by the company. And then literally the innovators leave and create a new company to replace the old.
It's happening right now in automobiles, right? That is Elon Musk said, one day there's gonna be seven Chinese car companies plus Tesla. And the entirety of the Western auto industry, except Tesla, and they'll have a hard time, will just disappear, disappear.
Whatever you think of Elon, he's a publicity master. So he kept, what he does is he, you see, people like you and me as investors, we're basically visionaries.
We fall in love with ideas. It's actually very bad for us because we get involved with bad ideas. but we turn it to, we go from being an investor to a donor, you know, and that's not a good thing. If you're to donate, make it a proper charitable organization. so because you'll get the deductive deduction at least. So that’s what he did, he appealed to that vision and excitement.
And then he just kept forging on and, he tells the story of he had some horrible times. But he made it through, by constant innovation and failing - failing early, failing often.
Yeah. Innovation’s going to come and disrupt every industry. And we just had a great conversation the other day with an expert on AI. And his future forecast is, it's going to blow most people's minds. It certainly blew ours in that conversation of what's going to be possible and what's coming in every, every area, right? From education down. And I love what you said. And I think you make such a strong argument for the importance of marketing. And of course, we're two marketing people so we're going to get excited about that conversation. We also know that when times of financial stress, marketing is the first budget that every business cuts.
Which is insane.
That's the first thing that everybody. It makes no sense. History shows that anyone who markets during a downtime is the ones who are successful afterwards. There's evidence of that. And of course, it makes so much sense, your point about the marketing.
Even when cashflow is not great, when you're marketing well and you're on a mission and people can see that and connect to that, that people want to support that. Whether that's buying from you as a customer or investing as you as an investor, the importance of that cannot be overstated. You have to go out and tell your story and explain why it's important to what you do, your community, the world, whatever the level of impact you're creating, small to large, telling your story, being the face of your brand. Personal branding is such a key point. But I appreciate what you said so much because it gives me an optimistic feel for it, which I feel like sometimes isn't always there. People are a little stressed. I think financially people are a little concerned of the future. There's so much talk, so much change. Plus the US just went through an election cycle. So there's always that uncertainty of what's coming. Nobody really likes change. But everything you've said is change is coming. Innovation has to come and I think more of that is coming. What's your crystal ball view for the next five, 10 years for water and for entrepreneurs? Like where do you see the future? What does it look like?
Well, you better, you better like change. Let me tell you something. AI alone, but there's other factors that are going to dramatically change every job description out there. Um, last night I was, I was repurposing some for my wife's school, uh, repurposing some NDA document that she got from somewhere else. I was search, replace, search, replace, search, replace. I'm like, really? You know, it was a big document, took me two hours because whatever. And you know, the AI's just - give me an NDA that applies to a school and its curriculum and do it now.
30 seconds. Yeah. You could do it now. ChatGPT could do that for you right now.
It can do it right now? Literally the only thing that's getting in the way is my unwillingness to do the learning curve on ChatGPT. That's the only reason I'm not doing it. But she is now doing AI for, you know there's now a whole AI structures for schools and teachers and everything. And she's adopting it. She's like, this is great. She used to painfully make word lists from a particular book, you know, word list.
So that's going to be a big change. The second thing is there's a lot of optimism. Post November 5th, I saw a lot of optimism happen in America, and that's good. And a lot of things happening. I do think we're in for a major correction. I don't dare say recession. But I think that we're going to have some turbulent times economically. I do think it's going to happen. But I think that I'm a big believer in the transformative power of technology.
Right. we now have, we now own two Teslas in the family, which is kind of insane, but the cars are so darn good. There’s no maintenance, you just drive them. It's ridiculous. So that kind of change. And of course soon, within five years, we will not have two cars. Well, if one car just in case and the other car will be the cyber cab, I'll just, sorry, I gotta go to blah blah. Here's my little app. There it is. Jump into it. It goes.
That is the future. So now what the important thing for entrepreneurs is to think about is, this is opportunity, right? This location is opportunity. When things change. yeah. That's why water is so exciting right now, because one big reason municipalities are losing ground is they have their own civil tsunami. 7 million jobs became available and more every day. So retirement's happening at a mad pace. So private opportunity is, there's lots of private opportunity, to create water companies, local water companies, servicing those new, abandoned or orphaned businesses, right? Lots of that going on.
I love these conversations. Why I love this podcast so much and having incredibly intelligent people like you Riggs, you come and bring your wealth and depth of knowledge in deep areas like water and how much that means to you and why.
Plus your incredible life history story, which is just amazing and I think speaks to the power of getting out there in the world and traveling and living in different places. So you have a more expansive worldview. I think that's super important too. And then understanding what you do about failure and quitting and not quitting and what that all means and learning the lessons. And then, you know, now you're sharing them with others and helping others on this, their own mission, whatever.
And I'm talking to everybody listening, like to go out there and share your experiences, share your light, share your failures and your successes and your lessons and how you help people and market your business. By the love of God, please market yourself and your business and your mission so that other people can jump on board, so that you can get the funding if you need it and bootstrap your way to your first 100,000. I think that's actually really good advice. Bootstrap your way to a certain level and then that's when you leap up from there because then investors are like, wow, if you ever watch Shark Tank, they always are, what have you made so far? They always wanna know what you've done to this level to getting on that stage and they get excited when you can give them some numbers.
So, you know use that sort of as a good starting point whenever you're, if you're at the startup phase. I know a lot of people probably thinking that they need to start a side hustle this year, or maybe they're worried about redundancies. So they're thinking about what can they do and they're maybe they're building a business or maybe they're like, you know, I've had enough of this corporate life. It's time for something different. We know that there are people all over the world right now with those thoughts and taking the leap in 2025. And yeah, that's what we love to talk about. That's how we love to help people and we love people like you who come and bring optimism to this space. You gave me such hope for the future, which is great because I think a lot of people are feeling a little uncertain. And like I said, we just had a discussion with an AI expert and it left me a little uncertain, but now I'm feeling a little bit different. So that's why I love these conversations.
Technology is is a net, it is a net benefit. We know we learned that with a lot of what’s going forward, but I do want to say, I'm going to give you a little scoop. And that is that we're actually working, this side company called Takeoff. Well, you can hear more about it because they are in a co-production agreement to do a, one of these reality shows is gonna be called The Raise. It's gonna follow companies as money is being raised for them. The production company is called American Stories Entertainment, very cool people. And they make these shows for, have you ever heard of the Fast Channel, the Free Ad Supported Streaming Television, FAST, which is like Roku and all those weird it's actually about a very large audience, very large audience.
So they've, so, and the reason I mentioned it, because you said Shark Tank, but there is, what happened to Shark Tank? We don't have a lot of these entrepreneurial shows out there today.
The point is, The Raise is gonna educate people about this and you've heard it here now, it's the first time I'm discussing it publicly. Boom, mic drop.
I love it. I'm so excited for that. I think more than ever with all the innovation and all the technology that's coming that entrepreneurs need to be on the forefront, they need to be aware and learning and figuring out how to create these businesses because if you have an entrepreneurial mindset, you have that gap-filling understanding. Like you see the gap and you're like, I got something to fill that. And that's what we need more than ever. So this is a perfect time to go out there. And I'm loving anyone who lifts the veil, shows people what it's really like, the good, the bad, the ugly, the crazy, the chaos, open it up so that you know what you're in for. And hopefully that leads to way more successful, incredible businesses building amazing things in the near future. That's exciting. Thanks for letting us know.
Well, one day I'm going to interview you two on how you got together at both sides of the world.
We're ready for it.
Yeah, yeah, the world needs more Riggs.
Well, the world needs more Vicki’s and Laura’s, so thank you. Thank you for what you do.
