1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:10,840 Hi everyone, welcome to GreenMonk TV. I have a special guest on the show today, Amit. 2 00:00:10,840 --> 00:00:13,160 Amit, would you like to introduce yourself? 3 00:00:13,160 --> 00:00:19,040 Sure. Hello everyone out in GreenMonk TV land. This is Amit Chatterjee, the CEO of 4 00:00:19,040 --> 00:00:24,160 Hurrah Software. The easiest way to remember how to pronounce our company is Hip Hip Hooray. 5 00:00:24,160 --> 00:00:34,200 Amit, Hurrah Software, a new start-up company. You've kind of de-cloaked to use Star Trek 6 00:00:34,200 --> 00:00:41,080 lingo in the last two weeks or so I guess. Do you want to tell us a little bit about Hurrah? 7 00:00:41,080 --> 00:00:47,960 I know you are a carbon software company but that's a very high level interpretation of 8 00:00:47,960 --> 00:00:49,440 what you guys do. 9 00:00:49,440 --> 00:00:55,040 Actually, we're a little bit more than a carbon software company, Tom, but it's a 10 00:00:55,040 --> 00:01:02,080 great question to ask. Hurrah focuses on helping companies find ways to drive operational efficiency 11 00:01:02,080 --> 00:01:07,140 and mitigate business risk associated with the consumption of natural resources. Now while 12 00:01:07,140 --> 00:01:11,480 everyone has spent a lot of time focused on carbon, it's equally important to remember 13 00:01:11,480 --> 00:01:18,840 that solid waste, wastewater also drive down companies' efficiency. So our job is to essentially help 14 00:01:18,840 --> 00:01:24,600 the company get healthier. We essentially take this similar to the akin model of what in the 15 00:01:24,600 --> 00:01:29,880 fitness world would be known as the BMI, the Body Mass Index. We've actually pushed out the concept of 16 00:01:29,880 --> 00:01:35,880 an Organizational Metabolism Index. While I'm probably not the best spokesperson for BMIs, I am 17 00:01:35,880 --> 00:01:41,080 one of the best spokespeople for OMIs. That's essentially finding a way to help an organization measure the inputs, 18 00:01:41,080 --> 00:01:47,640 as well as the outputs of their organization, and manage them more effectively. The bottom line is, the company 19 00:01:47,640 --> 00:01:55,000 becomes healthier, the organization sees less waste, both in terms of water, carbon footprint, as well as solid waste. 20 00:01:55,000 --> 00:02:01,400 If I have a company and I'm implementing your software, where am I going to get the inputs to put into your software? 21 00:02:01,400 --> 00:02:05,160 Is it going to be programmatic or do I have to sit in front of a spreadsheet and put them in? 22 00:02:05,160 --> 00:02:13,720 That's a great question, Tom. A lot of times customers are always thinking about how do I get the most accurate 23 00:02:13,720 --> 00:02:23,720 version of my inputs? And my inputs are defined as fossil fuels, energy, electricity, water, raw natural resources, 24 00:02:23,720 --> 00:02:29,240 materials used to build your product or service. All of those things reside in different parts of your 25 00:02:29,240 --> 00:02:38,200 organization, be it in your utility metering, be it inside your EH&S systems, be it inside sometimes 26 00:02:38,200 --> 00:02:44,600 the water meters, and oftentimes it's in production accounting software. So there's an opportunity to 27 00:02:44,600 --> 00:02:50,360 aggregate a complete picture. We partner with a lot of companies that enable us to help aggregate the 28 00:02:50,360 --> 00:02:55,720 complete picture very early on around designing the solution for organizations. 29 00:02:57,240 --> 00:03:03,720 There's going to be then an integration process bedding in your software where you, I assume your 30 00:03:03,720 --> 00:03:07,640 software can suck in information from lots of different systems, yeah? 31 00:03:07,640 --> 00:03:13,960 Absolutely. I mean, there's definitely, you know, we have four modules for the software that 32 00:03:13,960 --> 00:03:19,400 customers can engage with. And in the event that they're not fully aware of how big the scope of 33 00:03:19,400 --> 00:03:23,880 their problem is, our Discover module will help them do that, either it be manual, 34 00:03:23,880 --> 00:03:31,480 Excel-based, or integration software, which we work on. And we use a several variety of technologies 35 00:03:31,480 --> 00:03:38,680 that allow us to pull data from other systems. But more importantly, generally, once you have a picture 36 00:03:38,680 --> 00:03:43,320 of what you want to do and somebody tells you that your greenhouse gas emissions are 10 or your water 37 00:03:43,320 --> 00:03:48,440 footprint is 10, you want to find a way to reduce that as soon as possible. That's where our next three 38 00:03:48,440 --> 00:03:54,600 modules come in. Plan, act, and innovate. Plan is essentially the forecasting element that allows 39 00:03:54,600 --> 00:04:00,120 companies to define what are the leverage opportunities, where they can truly drive cost savings, 40 00:04:00,120 --> 00:04:05,560 operational efficiency for their organization, relative to the investment of where they started 41 00:04:05,560 --> 00:04:11,240 in terms of their natural resource consumption. The action part actually allows them to then look at 42 00:04:11,240 --> 00:04:16,600 the equivalent of an abatement curve, finding the low-level quick wins that have high degrees of ROI 43 00:04:17,400 --> 00:04:23,000 versus and balancing out longer-term strategies such as converting to solar or eliminating a particular 44 00:04:23,000 --> 00:04:28,200 power plant that is inefficient or waiting for a machine that's ending its depreciation cycle and 45 00:04:28,200 --> 00:04:34,680 upgrading it. The last piece that's equally important is the innovate piece. What Hara has focused on very, 46 00:04:34,680 --> 00:04:41,960 very, very, very disciplined in the stealth process was building an innovative compendium of alternative 47 00:04:41,960 --> 00:04:46,840 technologies. We like to classify that as the first written record of how effective alternative 48 00:04:46,840 --> 00:04:53,160 technologies are working either through best practices or through benchmarks or through, more importantly, 49 00:04:53,160 --> 00:04:59,720 user-rated community features. That allows customers to start to experiment with technologies and provide 50 00:04:59,720 --> 00:05:04,920 information back to the organizations as to how well a particular technology works for them, or more 51 00:05:04,920 --> 00:05:10,600 importantly, how that could be published across other landscape of facilities that look like that customer. 52 00:05:12,360 --> 00:05:15,800 What are your guys' backgrounds? I mean, where do you get the expertise for this kind of stuff? 53 00:05:18,520 --> 00:05:25,400 Pardon me. We got this expertise from a variety of sources. Several members of our team come from the 54 00:05:25,400 --> 00:05:31,720 carbon environmental legislative backgrounds. One of our colleagues spent eight years at the UN 55 00:05:31,720 --> 00:05:38,680 negotiating the Kyoto Protocol. Another has EU background around the actual carbon management trading capabilities. 56 00:05:40,440 --> 00:05:46,680 Others have science degrees in the PhD in physics or environmental sciences that allow us to really 57 00:05:46,680 --> 00:05:53,000 come and accurately do this. Secondarily, there's a set of very strong world-class software team members, 58 00:05:53,000 --> 00:05:59,880 people who've been co-founders of TIBCO Systems, been leading edge software developers at SAP or Oracle 59 00:05:59,880 --> 00:06:07,160 or Siebel or PeopleSoft, to demonstrate the ability to actually productize a business process application 60 00:06:07,160 --> 00:06:13,320 that cuts across an organization and allows you to create a business process where there previously hadn't been one. 61 00:06:15,080 --> 00:06:22,520 Secondly, our board of advisors is a world-class set of people. We have a Nobel Prize winner, 62 00:06:22,520 --> 00:06:27,560 Ed Rubin, who helps us think about climate change policy at a very broad scope. 63 00:06:27,560 --> 00:06:34,280 Arpad Forbath, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, one of the leading thinkers around 64 00:06:34,280 --> 00:06:41,320 carbon lifecycle analysis, and the list goes on. And we're constantly looking to work and collaborate with 65 00:06:41,320 --> 00:06:46,840 the leading academic institutions because we know that one of the key elements for us is to always be on the 66 00:06:46,840 --> 00:06:52,760 cutting edge, not bleeding edge, but cutting edge of where environmental sciences are maturing and bring that 67 00:06:52,760 --> 00:06:54,760 into organizations as soon as possible. 68 00:06:54,760 --> 00:07:02,200 Arpad Forbath Your typical client or customer company, 69 00:07:02,200 --> 00:07:10,200 they're not going to be the mom and pop shops at the end of the road. You announced when you 70 00:07:10,200 --> 00:07:14,200 launched some extremely interesting companies. Do you want to talk a bit about that? 71 00:07:14,200 --> 00:07:20,120 Arpad Forbath Yeah, absolutely, Tom. You know, I would say that one of the things that's unique 72 00:07:20,120 --> 00:07:27,880 about the infrastructure we've chosen is we've gone with a very cutting edge, you know, 2007 73 00:07:27,880 --> 00:07:32,920 infrastructure that's allowed us to sort of take advantage of the software as a service model 74 00:07:32,920 --> 00:07:40,360 deployment. It allows us to actually enable companies as large as the Coca-Cola company to be able to help 75 00:07:40,360 --> 00:07:47,720 them deploy globally instantly the product and have very quick ROI starting to use the product as soon 76 00:07:47,720 --> 00:07:53,400 as possible. But to your point about mom and pop shops, we can also work with smaller organizations. 77 00:07:53,400 --> 00:07:58,520 The city of Palo Alto, a community of about 60,000 residents, was actually able to leverage the 78 00:07:58,520 --> 00:08:04,520 software and find success as well. Now, while the Coca-Cola organization provides probably one of the 79 00:08:04,520 --> 00:08:09,800 more interesting stories in terms of brand recognition and value, I think one of the other 80 00:08:09,800 --> 00:08:15,080 stories that Haraw would like to also promote is the fact that a municipality with its limited budget 81 00:08:15,080 --> 00:08:20,200 was able to find value and drive ROI in three months from the software, but more importantly, 82 00:08:20,200 --> 00:08:26,840 find $800,000 of cost savings around energy abatement and additional savings of greenhouse gas 83 00:08:26,840 --> 00:08:34,280 emissions reductions by about 5%. So there's a lot of quick ROI savings as well as, as the way we like 84 00:08:34,280 --> 00:08:43,160 to put it, lay off energy, don't lay off jobs. And it's, I assume because it's a zero install 85 00:08:43,160 --> 00:08:50,840 software as a service delivered application, it's a, it's a service based sign up fee as well. It's not 86 00:08:50,840 --> 00:08:55,480 a license fee or maybe it's a combination of the two. 87 00:08:58,280 --> 00:09:03,800 No, you're absolutely correct. What we allow the customer to do is based upon the number of modules 88 00:09:03,800 --> 00:09:09,000 licensed and how many facilities they've deployed against, they then have a monthly subscription 89 00:09:09,000 --> 00:09:15,320 that they are then charged. Super. Okay. Amit, it sounds like a really, really interesting project 90 00:09:15,320 --> 00:09:20,920 and kudos to you guys for, for pulling it off. Thank you very much. And it's a very exciting time 91 00:09:20,920 --> 00:09:29,960 to be helping companies think through the process of laying off energy versus laying off jobs.