Climb By VSC: Episode 48

Maggie Philbin: Welcome to another episode of Climb by VSC where we interview interesting founders and vices and folks in the climate space. I'm excited to have Shane Dyer on the podcast today to be talking about everything that he's working on with the Irri green. Welcome to the show.

Shane Dyer: Oh man, so happy to be here.

MP: Well, I'd love to know more about your background. I know you've done a lot of work with Stanford, and you've worked on Whirlpool products and Mattel. So, Shane, why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself?

SD: I came out of Theresa Mays Lab at Stanford, which was mainly doing a lot of very early work back in the old days on like, on networking and distributed sensor networks, and very clearly on the internet was coming on just Tron right there. You know that Netscape browser had just been released. So, there was a lot of excitement and I think the thing that I was always really fascinated with was how powerful you could make things if you took non computer devices and connected them to the internet. So my whole career has been kind of starting companies in there from you know, doing you know, one of the very first sort of, you know, camera connected to cell phone startups to help you know, auction houses and things and add like high photo work for insurance companies out to, you know, my last company, which was an IoT platform for high volume consumer products. So, if you've had those like Chamberlain or Lift master garage doors that you can you know, remember when you forget to close your garage door, and you and you leave your house and you must push the button, we did the technology behind those. And so that's always been a really passionate and when we sold that company in 2017, you know, you know, we definitely felt the success for that had worked on like 60, different IoT products, everything from toys, to, to pumps, to all these things, but I found two things, which was one I was really excited about those kinds of products that became better and more climate friendly when you added networking to them. And then the second thing was I really wanted to nail one product, you know, running a platform company is great and has a lot of advantages, but you don't really control anything. And so and so I think when I met Gary, who was my co-founder he had been working on he was an inkjet printer inventor and he had been working on you know, it turns out if you're an inkjet printer adventurer and you look at sprinkler systems, they drive you bat crazy, just looking down how they how they took water down and you see water running down the sidewalk or that thing and you can't you basically can't do anything but start a company to solve this problem. And he had just you know, they're just released you know, he got he had been working on this on the pressure technology in his garage for like for years. Just starting to get that out, get that tested. And it was clear to me that this had to be an internet connected first product to bring things like weather data and sort of, you know, cloud intelligence to the way we do irrigation. And you know from there, that's where we got together, and it just made a lot of a lot of sense to make a company and you know from my side I've got two kids in California it's not clear there's going to be water around left for them if we don't do something serious. There's a lot of startups focused on, you know, carbon and oil products and you know, electric cars and solar. So, I think we can get that problem under hand, but water was something where it didn't seem like the same level of resources and intellect were being applied there. And so, it was an open space for us to, to consider you know, to consider attacking.

MP: How did you get to the phase that you were like; we are going to attack this because there are so many options?

SD: I think at the time they were doing some work with Fresno State on measuring the efficiency of like printing water, you know, using evergreens digital sprinklers, and they had just gotten the survey back where, you know, when we combined it with weather data that we could bring down to it, it was pretty clear that to the same crop for us, you know, whether that was like grass for landscaping or something like that. We could use about 50% less water. And so, I think I remember running back to the hotel room and doing, you know, doing, you know, work on water rates in high water cost areas like Texas and Colorado. And, you know, I came back to Gary and I'm like, look, you know, we've got the paddles on this. And you know, the ROI for replacing your irrigation system is about 2x solar. So, there's something about the size of the solar business here, and there's not a whole lot of people other than us doing this right now. Let's go start the, you know, let's go make this happen. And Gary had already started the company at that point, but it was just like, you know, this points I'm like, Okay, I'm all in let's what, what, let's turn this into a real business. Okay, so where's the business out today, the product you're agreeing to which was kind of our first commercially viable product beyond beta product, you know, you always hear about like the Apple two, but you don't hear about the apple one that was the one in the wood box. Right. So that was kind of our first big non beta product was launched about two years ago. And as soon as we got that in the market, like it was just immediately clear that we had product market fit you know, our sales guys you know, we're selling that originally like arena residential was the beachhead segment because that's the folks that pay the most money for water. And you know, the first robotic you know, digital sprinkler heads were a little smaller. And you know, the salespeople were closing it like, you know, more than 20% rate which is unheard of, you know, like solar salespeople close at like 3%. So, it's just clear that we had a winner at that point. And then the company has been kind of growing at like two to 4x every year since then. So, it's been kind of one of those kinds of hang on to your hat. You know, you got something here. You know, you know, a lot of you know, and a lot of this was just, you know, one of our DCS said this but they basically went and did the survey and said, Hey, Shane, there's like $3 billion worth of latent hate people have for their existing irrigation systems, which I'm sure as someone with a yard you can you can you can you can you can understand, you know, there's always broken hands there's always water running down the street. There's always like swampy patches and then dry yellow spots. It's something that was just right for some good innovation.

MP: Talk to me about like, how easy is it to set it up.

SD: This is one of those areas where when you when you start a company, you always end up innovating in areas you never expected. So, one of the key areas was to give like somebody that has a home a tool on our website. So, if you go to our website, there's a little section, www.yourdomain.com there's a little box where you can just enter in your address. And that pulls up you know, sort of a satellite Google satellite view of your home. And you can literally just kind of take some dots and trace out the areas you want to irrigate. And then you can drag in these digital heads to see how many of them you need to irrigate that area. But in general, you know, you only need about one ear green had for about every eight to 10 mechanical heads. So, it's a lot simpler to put in, and then it tells you how much the system will cost. But it also given that area and what you're growing. It'll kind of give you an estimate of how much water you'll save per year. So, it's very easy to go back to your water bill and kind of sit there and go, oh, mine, you know, this is a project that would pay for itself in three years or five years if I put it in that digital system versus if I put in you know the traditional mechanical technology that wastes far more water.

MP: I mean, that's so smart. And I've read a lot about new startups that are working on like wildfire detection products as it relates to having like, do you envision one day like Irrigreen having sensors to be able to do anything wildfire related?

SD: We have people taking our products and doing crazy things with them, which I really love, and we tend to learn from those like we have. We've had folks like watering clay tennis courts to maintain those because this is a much more accurate way to water. And we have had some folks working on using your green sprinkler systems for wildfire as well. You know, to you know, basically get houses wet if they're in areas of path of fire. Again, these are very early times. So, we're just learning about these applications. And now we don't have any dedicated products for them. But you know, as soon as you get something on the internet, and it gets out there you see it being used in the in the most creative and wonderful ways. And I have to say like a lot of our new features and our new roadmap is driven by these landscapers or these homeowners that are that that wants something or exploring something new in their system. So, we use, you know, our customers and our community as a huge source of innovation.

MP: Yeah, I want to go back for a second when you're launching the product to start with so many IoT products start as a Kickstarter campaign to like to get the community is that the route that you took when it came to launching a product?

SD: Maybe it would have killed us because our product has some big fundamental deep technology. You know, like a lot of the fluid dynamics around divide and designing the printer port and the fact that you know, we have to have software in the in the robotic sprinkler heads and you know, software and controller software in the Cloud and then iOS and Android software, where the schedule for it, you know, there was really about four or five years of dedicated red Before we had a viable product and I think that's just, you know, I don't think deep Tech is a really good place for Kickstarter. In that, you know, people don't you generally want to wait that long for the product to come out. So, I think for us, you know, that wasn't the right fit, but then as soon as we had it you know, using E commerce and using a lot of the online channels, especially like a lot of the lawn influencers and the people that really care about growing great landscaping. They've been invaluable. I mean, as soon as they got a hold of you agree and even just the accuracy improvements, you know, became the way to grow the very best lawn and that was one of the ends of the first things that kind of caught fire for us. So, we you know, we got several customers from those folks, but just because the red cycle and that the amount of scientific development that had to go on first, we probably weren't a good fit for like a Kickstarter.

MP: So, when you're working on the smart garage door openers, what are some maybe lessons that you learned working on that technology that you've applied now to what you're doing with Irrigreen? I'm sure there's got to be like a lot of similarities.

SD: Like I think Irrigreen was like the 61st IoT product I'd worked on, from pool pumps to garage doors to you know, washing machines to, you know, you know, connected lighting to you know, sensors like that. So, we just seen so many things that I was able to kind of pattern match and go, you know, what are the very, very best practices that we saw, you know, as particularly sort of, you know, preparing for scale and putting scalable architectures in place. The other thing that was that was interesting to us was really putting the humans at the center of this. So really understanding we'd seen a lot of the pitfalls of making IoT products that were too hard to use. And being simple and really intuitive was something that we were very, very excited about from the start. So, we had spent the time to put a lot of complicated architecture in place so that it could be simple for the user. So little things like you know, when you wander around in your backyard, and you run out of Wi Fi, how can you still talk to your sprinkler system in a way that, you know, that makes that whole piece seamless? So, there's a lot of very interesting technology in terms of handoffs and things like that, that must be in place in order to have this really simple experience for the consumer.

MP: What are the things that you've heard from customers that they're like, this is what I want to do differently with me with my yard?

SD: I think the huge one is like, you know, I just had had the enthusiasm from them of instead of having all these sprinkler heads that were, you know, some of them were broken, they were always spraying on your car or your fence or your house. You know, you had wet spots and you know, yellow spots, dry spots on your lawn, and you've replaced that with this one kind of like Bellagio fountain that sits in the center of the zone and then perfectly traces you know, the your landscaped area, so not a drop of water is missed, you know, going into the driveway or going on to the hardscape. And like, what I didn't really get the beginning is how much people just enjoy the experience of having this thing pop up and then perfectly sort of trace the shapes in front of them like we get here. All this reports of like I had this barbecue, and I turned my system on for everyone and they got to see my sprinkler basically tracing this really complicated my friend driveway and it's almost like you know, entertainment at that point to go through. But at the same time, you know there's a 50% of the water so if somewhere in California and Texas or Colorado where the water is expensive, you know if they got a reasonable size so you're on some of them are saving, you know, $1,000 you know, a per year or more officer water bill. So, it's not just you know, being green, it's also being you know, smart with your wallet. And I think those stories, the ones that move me the most and you know get me up in the build bed in the morning to make sure we invent the next thing.

MP: I must imagine it's really difficult to engineer that. Can you like walk me through how you built a team to be able to do that on so many yards that are unique.

SD: I mean, I think that they that I've always loved I've always loved companies that have hardware and software and communications because you need these real these diverse teams that work together really well. It's kind of like, you know, IoT companies with hardware in them are kind of like the decathlon of startups, in that, you know, you must be good at lots of different events. You must be able to pull volt and sprint and run a mile and all these other all these other parts and I think that's really sort of appealed to me and it's been the kind of company that I've really enjoyed building. But what it also means is you really need a deep talent pool of people that are experts in these various areas from wireless networking to, to hardware design, to fluid dynamics, to you know, the sort of agriculture in the end sort of you know, biology models that you need to be able to, you know, to get water in. And so, you really end up creating almost like a science team across, you know, across the folks who put together to do this product, right. So it's not something you can do really quickly and it's and let me tell you, it's painful in some ways to get a company like this started, but it provides so much, you know, so much sort of competitive advantage to get it in there because it's not a product that's very easy for someone else to create a copy of or something else like that. You must get a lot of parts, right. And, just in terms of like getting the reliability profiles, right. You know, you've got this you know, robot had that must last for 10 years and really harsh environments, freezing. So, so it's not an easy problem, but I think those are the problems that if you solve them, well really allow you to just take overtake over a market or take over an industry.

MP: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But it also seems like you too, would need to stay tied to that investor. That's equally part of it. What has it been like on the fundraising front?

SD: you know, I think, I think you know, so far, we just, we just did another, you know, off scheduled close. And, you know, a few months ago, surprised. Um, you know, the great part about this is, I think, I think we've built a real company. I mean, it's got the, you know, it's got the dynamics, it's very close to profitable things like this as well. So that part has made fundraising even in difficult environment, really, you know, much easier for us than maybe an earlier stage. hardware companies, you know, we are a software company at the heart, but we do have hardware components. And so, you know, my first question to anyone see is, am I going to be your first hardware investment? And if the answer is yes, then that's probably not the right fit. So, finding, you know, that's that, you know, even if it's a software company, they've invested in companies that have had hardware enablers for the software is key. And I think the other one was, you know, getting a mix of folks that were also very interested in climate so finding investors that, you know, really understood the impact that you know, that that water savings had not just on our water resources, but also you can look at places like California where it has a huge impact directly to carbon. You know, if you take a city like San Diego you know, as the population grows, they must find more water. And in many cases that water is done through desalinization, right, which is incredibly energy intensive, and a lot of that's driven by natural gas, or just the cost of pumping water from Northern California to Southern California. You know, that is, you know, I think that's the number one largest user, single user of electricity in California is moving water, you know, across the state. So, so that was a big, big, big fit for us for finding our initial investors.

MP: And so, have you found that cities and municipalities are also interested in the product too?

SD: Very much so I think that that, you know, we've had a number reached out bound to us and we've done some small projects. We'll probably want to build a larger head to go after some of the more municipal pieces if they have large parks or something else like that as well. And we're working with another several customers on that.

MP: That makes a lot of sense. And so go back to your talking about the sales team was like blown away after the launch. Yeah, usually they do that I have a product like, you know, like the nest cameras I have around my house, and I go to the Lowe's and I like test them out and play with them and tinker but how do you get the product out in front of homeowners?

SD: Well, I think you know, I mean, a lot of this is sort of the power of the internet, which is as soon as we had not just us putting content out over how do you install these products, how do they work, but we also have this other community especially of like, folks that had been post you know, close to done for their lawn and post it up or put something on Reddit or tons and tons of YouTube. If you Youtube Irrigreen, you get you know, hundreds of videos, very dedicated people for all their lawn showing you how this works for them and how they put it in how they modified it and all these other pieces like that. So, I think I think that created this sort of just snowball of, of interest in Eric Green and then we kind of coupled that with, you know, both good ecommerce with a lot of explanations for the product and videos of how to walk it through a lot of content around that. And then also, we have our irrigation pros, which are, you know, anytime you want, you can set up a meeting with one of these experts that can basically just look at your lawn and help you design a system for it and answer all your questions. And the combination of those three things created a really, successful direct model. The other part is just you know, IoT smart service, right? The ability for that sprinkler head to tell when there's a leak or tell when something's gone wrong. You go from playing defense, right, which was the old days when you went on a trip and you came home and there was either you had a lake in your backyard that wasn't there before and you had a $4,000 water bill, or you came home and all the expensive landscaping you'd put in is dead, and you've got to spend 1000s of dollars to replace it. So, you know with IoT and the ability to have this added it basically tells you when there's a problem and you can correct it before you know before the leak goes too far before you know before your landscaping has died. And so having heads that tell you about their health turns out to be important if you want to do landscaping in a more evolved way.

MP: Do you envision that the platform will also give homeowners the ability to like to know where it's well to plant things or not? Based on like the location you already have a map out their whole yard so could you offer other features.

SD: We're starting to play around with things like this as well and I don't want to put too many spoilers out there. But stay do stay tuned. plat recognition and things like that are though that technology has come along so far. You know that part of AI is really evolved at this point. So those are certainly things we're thinking about how to take advantage of. I mean the way I look at this right now as you know these printing digital sprinklers that evergreen makes it's kind of like the very first airplanes, right? We're getting into like Kitty Hawk at this point. And there's an entire sort of aviation industry to invent here and we're you know, I mean, we're just super excited because there's lots and lots of directions to go with this product and you know, now that you have you know, people that are buying it are happy with it. That really helps us drive, you know, drive our whole team, you know, you know, forward and scale the company.

MP: Oh my gosh, I can't wait to get I'm going to buy it. I'm going to have it. We're just talking to my husband so we can get these installed. Then I'll be I want to be part of your customer group because I have ideas galore.

SD: Yes, great! We need these ideas.

MP: I'm curious. You talked about working on 60 other projects before that. Were there any that haven't seen the light of day or maybe once and did it work out that you wished had?

SD: Oh man, let's see. I’ll tell you one that really lit me up? I mean, Pentair did some interesting internet connected pumps. And what was interesting to me about those projects where the internet connected them and basically figured out the times when swimming pool pumps didn't have to run as long, and you could turn them down so they use less electricity. When you started a model that across a city like LA that had so many swimming pools, you could see these cool macroeconomic effects on how we could do better in climate by just being more intelligent. And so, I think I noticed that those were the kinds of products that really lit me up when IoT was doing something that was you know, for good. That that kind of pushed push me forward and really, really got me excited about doing Irrigreen with Gary.

MP: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, it's all about efficiency for customers and for the environment to I mean, there must be better ways to conserve water. I mean, I just looked at my neighbor's here to across the street and we're not really in a drought anymore, but I feel like California always isn't a drought. And when you see how much is wasted when the sprinkler heads just going everywhere. And it's hard on your you know your bills we all want to save money to with inflation.

SD: Yeah, and you know, I think you know, people that don't even consider themselves environmentalist still want to be good stewards for you know, resources in their environment. It's not a good luck if there's water running down your sidewalk after your water.

MP: Well, is there anything else I should have asked you about today? I've enjoyed this conversation. Where can people find you?

SD: The easiest way to do it again is just going to irrigreen.com, spelled i-r-r-i-g-r-e-e-n.com. And you'll basically see the videos there but you'll also be able to put in your own plot your own house or your folks house or your friend's house that how's the yard and figure out really quickly like what it would cost to put in a system and also more importantly, it'll reach back to three years of weather data and figure out how much water you'll save. So, it's a fun exercise. It only takes like five minutes or so to do but it gives you a really good idea of like what it could do for you. And then I think just kind of be part of the Revolution like you know, this is this is there's no there's no downside to this. You're going to grow up beautiful green landscaping, you'll be the envy of your environment, your neighborhood, but you're also going to be doing your part to kind of help save and hopefully you know you know the system will pay for itself. Over time with Waterville settings. So, it's kind of a no brainer. It's a good way to sort of get on board and do something in a little more evolved way.

MP: I love that. Thank you so much for joining us today on the show.