Lauren Dunford of Guidewheel on Data-Driven Efficiency, Sustainable Factories, and Finding Champions

We saw there were two guys who were in the original prototype of Guide Wheel all day, every day, all the time. Then we realized what had been different There was we had sold into the production team and it turns out what the production team cares most about is they were using that data to impact production, but also they had seen a big fall in energy intensity because they were using their assets more efficiently. We said, okay, this is actually the way to have an impact on climate and manufacturing. Let's start with what the factory cares definitionally most about, and then let's build climate and decarbonization into those workflows.

Hi folks, I'm Connor Gahn and welcome to Consensus in Conversation, a podcast where we're talking to the innovators, entrepreneurs and thought leaders who are committed to building successful businesses that also help us build a better world. Earlier this season we had a fascinating conversation with Manik Suri of Glacier Grid on the innovative smart technology platform he's built to bring greater sustainability and efficiency to cooling. For folks who haven't heard that conversation, and if you haven't, go check it out after this one, it's great. Or for those who need a refresher. Glacier Grid's platform uses advanced sensors to enable remote monitoring and automated management of cooling equipment like refrigeration and air conditioning. The access to better real time data on equipment performance helps businesses improve efficiency and catch flaws before they cause shutdowns, reducing spoilage and maintenance costs. And the ability to automate systems allows them to reduce energy consumption when they aren't in use again, improving bottom line and reducing the carbon footprint from that energy use. It's a pretty awesome idea, one that's easy for businesses to implement while offering potentially big time financial and sustainability benefits. And while there's huge and important impact to be made from such technology, specifically in the cold chain space, an absolute crazy stat that I learned in the course of that conversation is that cooling alone is responsible for 8% of climate change related emissions. I did find myself coming away from that conversation wondering why isn't there something like this for everyone? I mean, don't get me wrong, I think it's really smart for a startup like Glacier good to focus their energy on a single application in a single key space. Especially as a young company, if you try to make a product for everyone, you most often end up creating a product for no one. But at the same time, the cooling sector is hardly alone in the potential to benefit massively from the efficiency gains that can be achieved through better equipment performance data. The famous Peter Drucker Maxim you can't manage what you can't measure may not be entirely true, partially because Drucker never actually said it, but the inverse is definitely true. What you can measure you can manage much better. What kind of sustainability upgrades could we discover? What kind of savings could be unlocked in other industries if we just had the data to show us where the room for improvement really was? Well, it turns out obviously I'm not the only one asking these kinds of questions. My guest today has also been asking them when it comes to her area of expertise, manufacturing only. She started asking them back in 2016 and was so passionate about finding the answers, she went to business school to build a startup dedicated to providing them. And when it comes to manufacturing, at least those answers about the better gains to data can bring are pretty remarkable. 41% increase in machine uptime, 11% reduction in operating costs and 16% efficiency improvements. Those are the average average benefits the customers have seen using the Factory Ops platform from the innovative startup Guide Wheel and I'm thrilled to be joined today by Guidewheel's co founder and CEO Lauren Dunford. Lauren's got a majorly impressive CV and a clear dedication to making a positive impact throughout her career. A degree in Sustainability in Global Environment and Health at Stanford where she was not only honored for her academic achievement, but also found time to co found the Stanford Green Fund and run Students for Sustainable Stanford, a Truman Scholarship at the World Bank, a Fulbright Scholarship in India where she published peer reviewed research on supply chains, and then a stint working her way up from account manager to Chief of staff at Revolution Foods, a really awesome B corp that works to tackle food insecurity in schools and where Lauren first got the idea that would send her back to Stanford this time for business school and evolve into Guide Wheel. I'm so excited to have gotten the chance to chat with her about the super cool work she's doing and nerd out a little bit on the awesome impact potential of great data. So without further ado, let's jump into the conversation.

Let's get into it. Let's have a fun conversation.

Awesome.

I guess I want to start at the very beginning. Tell me a little bit about you and where you're from and your background.

Yeah, so originally from California, have now spent time living in lots of different places. So India, Nairobi. Lots of kind of different experiences to complement the California, but actually originally from the Bay Area and now based in San Francisco.

Have you always been passionate about the environment, sustainability, outdoors? Has that always been a part of.

Your life, climate and outdoors. Absolutely. So growing up, I would backpack all the time. I was part of a group where I was a counselor for a bunch of kids to teach them to learn to love the outdoors and backpack. And when I was an undergrad, actually fun fact that my co founder and I met because we were each leading the two largest sustainability and climate groups on Stanford's campus. So Amazing. Yeah, that kind of brought us together and we became friends from doing that. And I had always been really passionate about climate, but it was the manufacturing side that got pretty interesting a little bit later. So my passion had been how do we move the needle at scale? How do we think about where there's a real opportunity for impact? And of course, manufacturing is a third of the world's emissions. So when I was lucky enough to spend five years working out of a fresh food manufacturing plant and experience the challenge and opportunity that exist on those plant floors, it was kind of the intersection of manufacturing and climate that just grabbed me and I said, this is, this is where I've got to be.

I imagine not many kids grow up passionate about supply chain management, you know, in childhood. So I want to hear about that journey when that, when that did become something that you became super passionate about. I am curious though. I think what we do hear a lot of is folks who as kids have really clear season, something businessy like they just love themselves, you know, a sneaker hustle or a lemonade stand. Was business and entrepreneurship something that was part of your childhood too or no?

You know, impact driven entrepreneurship, yes. So my mom actually was really on this mission to move the needle on domestic family violence stuff. And so she was full time a physician within the Kaiser network, but actually ended up starting all of their family violence prevention programs and tying the prevention of family violence to why this is actually a really important thing for companies and insurers to care about because it's so common, kind of unbelievably common. So I watched her do that for several decades. And then my dad was actually very passionate about and still is the intersection of data and education. So helping kids learn to love using data. And he was doing this 30, 40 years ago, before data was something people really talked about. So he built from scratch this software that helped in the education system. It's a nonprofit, but it's helping kids play with data and make data part of the learning that they're doing around history or science or things like that. So I watched both my parents really do something that they cared about. This was not a job for either of them and something that they felt was the impact they wanted to leave on the planet. Even though these are very different types of things, they're really passionate about them and build something.

You watch them build something. That's kind of the trick, I think.

Yeah.

I'm sure this won't surprise you. We are lucky enough to have quite a few guests who have built really impressive impact businesses out of your alma mater. A lot of Stanford grads and I always ask, you know, what is it in the water that's producing these brilliant folks who are so passionate about making the world a better place and see opportunities in the commercial private sector. Any thoughts on like, what about Stanford that's really creating this entrepreneurial business leadership mindset, but specifically like with a mind towards what's doing good?

Yeah, I mean it's a flywheel now, I think. So if you're someone who cares about building and impact driven business, Stanford is the place to be. And then throughout I think there's this helpful factor of just being able to see it's possible and see these incredible heroes that you read about are real humans and meet them and be inspired by learning about the early days as well as seeing what something looks like once it's already built. So I just think complete flywheel and definitely it wouldn't continue to work if it didn't continue to attract folks that have that mindset from the start. And then you're surrounded by people all thinking that way and all the things are quite different. People might be passionate about different types of impact, but it's really wonderful to be surrounded by people who are figuring out that same balance of where do I find a problem where business is the right solution? Because it's definitely not every problem. And, and then how do I make sure that I'm aligning to where there's true pull in the market versus wishing that people cared about the impact itself.

Were there any lectures or visitors to campus that stand out in your mind as like, you know, looking back that might have planted a seed or watered the seed that already existed?

Yeah. Oh, so many. So I'll share. Actually one of the ones that was most impactful in just like getting me interested in even thinking about starting a company or which is. We had a friend who had been an MBA a couple years before us. So we, I'm saying we because my husband and I, he's not involved in the business now, but we were, we were lucky enough to be doing the MBA together. So it was the summer before we were both starting The MBA Journey. And we had dinner with a friend who had done the MBA a couple of years before. And he said, I'm gonna send you this link and I'm gonna send it to you because I wish I had watched this talk when I was starting the mba. And it was a lecture that Irv Grossback, one of the kind of professors really well known at Stanford, did on the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship. And he did this talk at the end of this friend's time in the mba. And I watched that. I don't know if you will be listening to things while you're packing or doing house chores or things like that. So my husband and I were at his brother's house in South Africa in Joburg, and we were packing up all of our things and it was a lot because it was a kind of substantial trip. And so we put on this 20 minute lecture to listen to while we were packing. And we both had to stop packing in the middle of it and just watch and listen. Because this lecture has a couple of key insights that were surprising to me because I had grown up not really thinking about venture capital as an asset class. And you know, my parents were very much within the kind of nonprofit or impact driven world, not thinking about vc. And what Irv mentions in the lecture is you don't have to start a company with your own money. There are people who exist who want to fund entrepreneurs. And he defines an entrepreneur as someone who is tackling a problem without regard to their current level of resources. And that was really impactful for me because I thought, wow, that's actually first of all way more fun because it sounds really stressful to be trying to plow my small relative to some of these people amount of assets into solving a problem. But if Suddenly I have 0 as the starting point and I can just dream about the scale of the problem and assemble resources that match the scale of the problem, let me choose a really big problem that's way more fun. So I highly recommend that lecture. It opened up my thoughts about how to do the entrepreneurship journey and that it could be done in a way where I could tackle a really big problem and potentially where it might make sense to start something. And then I'll also say this is top of mind because I actually just got the opportunity to see him again in person. But Stanford highlights the delight story quite a bit. So Design for extreme affordability. Nejap Tozen and his co founder kind of built this company that brings solar powered appliances to places that are off the grid and I just thought we learned a lot about kind of the different ways of thinking about both the challenge of the environment that they were serving, you know, off grid communities, and then also the opportunities that that creates for a really different solution and so getting to be inspired by stories like that and then also meet the entrepreneurs. So later on I was lucky enough. Some of these people are really wonderful people. And Ned Jib had us into his home and I got to hang out with him and his family and see, oh wow, this is a real person. It's really very lucky to be part of that community of people who are not only inspiring in what they're doing, but are excited to mentor and support and pull other people along to have a different but also impactful dent in the world.

That's amazing. I want to dig in on one other kind of university experience it sounds like may have been pivotal for you, which is your work as a Fulbright Scholar in India. And I think it probably sets the stage a little bit for getting into guidewell a bit. But talk to us about your research, talk to us about that experience and what you look back on and think of relative to where you are now.

Yeah, yeah. So I got really passionate about this specific intersection of where there's a very big opportunity for impact that has a very large dollar value to the business community. And I actually first got passionate about that when I was at the Stanford campus working kind of as head of that student group because we did a lot of projects around finding energy efficiency and operational efficiency opportunities within the university that had that nice kind of in the two by two dollar value and impact associated with it. So I found, okay, not every problem looks like this, but boy, there are some things in that upper right where if I think about my desire to have a big impact on climate change at scale, let me find those problems. And the reason I was excited about those problems was because those are the areas where I feel like I'm going to be able to have a flywheel type impact where I get started. It turns into a profitable business. You know, people are motivated and helping this scale versus the more it scales, the more money I have to raise. And I also really liked the ability to build a business where I was selling directly to the person who benefited. I'd worked previously and had a lucky opportunity to be at the Hewlett foundation, which is a great foundation and, and philanthropy is really hard if your goal is impact, because the people who you're accountable to, the donors are different from the people who you're accountable to. As the people that are actually impacted. And so then you're balancing all these different constituencies. And I was like, ugh, I really want to find the type of problem where the person I'm serving is the person who pays me. So when I looked at trying to structure the Fulbright, I thought, okay, first of all, how do I learn a ton, get out of my comfort zone? And then second of all, how do I find an area where I can make a little contribution in one of those areas of the two by two matrix where there's a big opportunity for impact and a big dollar value? And fruit and vegetable supply chain waste is one of those 30% of fruit and vegetables that get wasted in between the farm and where they're sold. And that just is a really big opportunity. So was lucky to get to dive into that and have a number of different experiences of how hard it is to move the needle in practice, even when in theory there's so much opportunity. But very, very lucky to have had that.

I mean, it's a good segue to kind of jump into the career conversation, hear about your time at Revolution, which I know is key to landing where you are today and building what you've built today. So let's start with that. What drew you to Revolution? And I love the work they do, but give us a sense of how that worked.

Yeah. So I first found out about them while I was doing the Fulbright and I was doing research and publishing a paper and going through that peer review process. And I was like, I, I do not enjoy this. I'm sure there are some people in the world who really love to publish things and will have their impact be through that. And boy, I have now checked the box. That is not me. I want to be building things. And I remember thinking to myself, I just want to pour my whole self, my heart, my soul, my days, my nights. I just want to work on something that should exist in the world and I don't mind if it's hard. I kind of like if it's hard. So I heard about Revolution Foods and I thought this is perfect, fresh, healthy food for low income students. That's something that sounds first of all hard, but second of all, like something where I could really bring my whole self to try to make that happen and feel good about the building and impact that I was doing in the world. So I think I applied two or three times and got through interviews and I was still based in India and so finally got the opportunity to start in the most entry level position for them and then had, you know, lots of opportunity expand. Because I also learned that startups are a place where the only ceiling is your own capacity to continue to take on and deliver impact successfully. So in that time, became in charge of the partnerships across our $65 million West coast business, where I was based physically in our East Oakland manufacturing plant. So sitting not on the plant floor, but I had to walk through the plant floor to get to my desk. And I was the person the customers called if something didn't go perfectly, if there was a problem. And we were producing millions of units a week. So there were frequently challenges. And so seeing that combination of the pen and paper and spreadsheets that were the tools that were available, there really weren't great tools for plant floor tracking of even the most critical metrics. Seeing the very manual ways we were doing that, and then being the one who had to receive the calls and deal with the pain when things didn't go well or we missed a delivery really had an impact on me.

Did the light bulb go off right then?

No.

Is that like.

So tell us how you got from that insight to. I've got this idea, I headed back.

To Stanford and looked at that area of manufacturing and climate that the light bulb had gone off. Okay, there's a big opportunity in this area. And dived into working on that area with a customer centered mindset.

Customer being the manufacturer or customer.

Customer being the manufacturer. So, and this was interesting because Stanford, of course, has so many classes that, you know, allow you to apply entrepreneurial thinking. And so I just had the opportunity to, in the two years of the mba, look at the problem from a bunch of different perspectives. And at the kind of start, what we were doing was looking at manufacturing and climate in emerging markets as the specific thing. My husband is Kenyan. He was very excited to spend some time living back where his family is and in the country he's from. And so we both had this interesting constraint that we wanted to be in Nairobi at the end of the mba. So manufacturing climate, emerging markets, with Nairobi as the pilot spot, we started talking with customers. And so it was the customer conversations of where are there problems that could move the needle that really started on this journey of the design school process. Empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, where you're gathering information, focusing down to the one problem and point of view you're going to solve, then ideating around solving it, and then very quickly prototyping and testing is the method that we continue to apply even today to hard challenges. And it was certainly the one we were applying back then and gathering a bunch of information from customers. We were told that what they cared about was energy. They said, you know, this is emerging markets. Managing energy is really important to us. Look, we're doing it with pen and paper. We really need a good solution. Oh, that really matches. We've got climate, we've got manufacturing. And I asked, so do you really care about energy? Are you sure? Because energy management systems in the United States, they just haven't taken off like crazy. And they said, oh, this is emerging markets. We care so much because energy is triple the price, because the grid goes out all the time, because power quality fluctuations mess up our machines. And so we actually started by building the first prototype around an easy, intuitive way for manufacturers and emerging markets to manage energy. And then it got very interesting because we sold that in and they bought it and they clipped it on their machines. And then we were looking at the usage data and no one used it. We just sat there being like, what the heck are we going to do? We, these people bought this system, they clipped it on their machines. Why is no one using it? And then we saw there were two guys, Willy and Parav, who within our usage data were these bright spots. They were in the original prototype of Guide Wheel. All day, every day, all the time. We said, okay, well, let's figure out first, what the heck are Willy and Parav doing? So we drove out and shadowed, okay, what, what does the day in Willy and Parav's life look like? And we realized what had been different there was we had sold into the production team. And it turns out what the production team cares most about is driving more production. And turns out that's really important to a factory because a factory is on this planet to produce things or stuff from raw materials. That is literally what a factory does. And so what Willy and Parav were doing was they were using the energy management data, which was essentially the electrical heartbeat of all the different pieces of equipment on their plant floor. So similar to a Fitbit, you would see, like when the machine was running from its electrical consumption, that electrical heartbeat, you would see how much it was producing. You would see if it was running well. They were using that data to impact production. And they had driven a 20% improvement in productivity of their assets. Huge for the bottom line. And they were using this data in a way that was both far more impactful for their business by driving productivity, but also they had seen a big fall in energy intensity and energy cost of production because they were using their assets more efficiently. And we said, okay, this is actually the way to have an impact on climate and manufacturing. Let's start with what the factory cares definitionally most about. Let's design around that easy, intuitive drive, the thing that people come to work thinking about every day, get into the workflows, be really darn useful and then let's build climate and decarbonization and into those workflows rather than having to push a string.

Yeah. So from that moment to kind of your current elevator pitch, how do you now describe the product or how do you describe Godwell in general and kind of how do you pitch into markets now?

Yeah, definitely. So depends on the person of course. So I'll talk to you as if you were a VP of operations across a bunch of different manufacturing plants. And what we would say is first tell me about your day to day. Do you have a bunch of different. And these are going to be leading questions for you. But hopefully we would ask them in a way where we would actually learn the true state and figure out hey, do they have a problem we can solve? Because this is all about a puzzle fitting together the person who has the problem that we uniquely can solve. We'd say do you have different plants, different types of machines, ages, makes models across those plants where because it's such a patchwork, a patchwork patch, you end up tracking manually on the core things that matter most, which is is your equipment running at the right time producing the output that you're selling. So looking at the key bottleneck machines, how do you track those today? If it's pen and paper, the reason you track with pen and paper might be because the only solutions in the past were heavyweight, expensive, requiring experts that you didn't have in your smaller plants or across every plant. And what we've got now is a way to connect every asset in minutes and have the real time foundation on which we can then drive improvements in productivity. 41% improvement in productivity on average. And the way we do that is a little bit nonintuitive. But like a Fitbit can clip around your wrist in minutes and measure your heartbeat and tell you, Connor, you are running or you are hiking or you are in deep sleep or REM sleep. A remarkable amount of information about your activity from a very simple analog signal, which is your heartbeat guide wheel can clip around the power going into any machine or component within it with a sensor that's as simple and non intrusive as a smartwatch measuring that current draw. And then Guidewheel's algorithms and software turn that into meaning. And action. So we can reduce changeover time, setup time. We can get ahead of any problem a machine might be having. We can pinpoint the challenge all with a shared source of truth that a CEO all the way up, down, around to operators, plant managers, VP of ops. Everyone can share the same understanding and second by second, granularity into what their machines are doing every single day. And we're going to first use that to help you drive a huge increase in production. We're going to have AI powering it and making it smarter with every machine, every user and every factory. And then from the start, we've got the data to be able to track and reduce emissions and improve sustainability as well. We'll build that into your workflows because we know that that will be something you care about and probably are required to have over the next few years, but it'll be built into something you do care about, which is production versus a separate system.

I love the analogy of the Fitbit. I think it makes it so real for the lay person, Fitbit for factories.

So I still don't know if it's like the right analogy to use, but, boy, it is how we start.

Yeah, when you zoom out and think about kind of, let's look at it both ways, the total opportunity for impact and the total addressable market, kind of economically, because manufacturing is, as you pointed out, it's a big sector with big potential. How do you even begin to think about numbers that big?

Yeah, I mean, it's huge. And that's part of the fun too. So let's not boil the ocean. But boy, let's know that if we can tee up the dominoes and market segmentation in the right way, there's a big impact at the end. So when we think about both market size and impact, we think about the impact being something on the order of the size of all of Brazil, Mexico or Canada's emissions. So that's if we can reach a meaningful number of the world's 10 million factories. And then when we think about market size working backwards from let's build a company that we can take public, that is the real time layer for the world's factories on which customers can build an ecosystem of developers can build, we've got kind of that generational company as our aspiration. So we work backwards from that and then try to get real detailed in the specific segmentation and crossing the chasm, et cetera.

As you kind of look from today, are there any real interesting trends that you can already identify as like, hey, this is what we already know about manufacturing inefficiencies or this is what we already know about the low hanging fruit that could both save manufacturers money or grow manufacturing revenue and or have a meaningful impact on emissions. Like is there any kind of low hanging fruit you're already seeing right away?

Oh, definitely. And you know we're not the first ones to bring visibility into the factory floor. Visibility has always been something that's valuable. So the good news is we're not the only ones who know about the low hanging fruit. There is so much low hanging fruit both on the productivity side and on the energy and emission side. So on the productivity side it's you can't manage what you don't measure and if you're managing the factory floor with gut feel and every operator you're going home every day and you know, honey, how was your day? It was fine versus it could be honey, how was your day? Oh, I crushed my previous best. Our night shift beat the day shift for the pizza party at the end of the week. You know, friendly competition and having that be around the metrics that actually matter to the business can have a massive impact. As well as the data of here's where we're actually losing time and money. Here's the data behind the pareto of reasons for downtime. Lost production time oftentimes on the key bottleneck equipment. Every minute of lost production time is lost revenue from assets that they could be bringing in. So it's very important. But if the team is managing everything with gut feel, it becomes very hard for that to be a data driven conversation and therefore much harder to solve those problems in a constructive way. So huge opportunities on the plant floor for just improvements in productivity for managing with data. We're not even talking about the amazing things we can do with AI and alerting and insights and all of that. This is just like basically use data where you didn't have it before. The other big opportunity is on the decarbonization side which is everyone who knows the manufacturing space knows that there is low hanging fruit on the ground when it comes to energy cost reduction. But it's very, very hard to capture because it's a lot of smaller things. So compressed air leaks. The question when you walk into a factory is not are there compressed air leaks? It's how much compressed air is leaking all the time. Because these are. These are really hard to maintain systems and there's so many opportunities for things to happen. Sizing and being able to invest in more efficient equipment often requires data that most Factories don't have boiler insulation. Energy efficiency in terms of how equipment is used, system sizing, it's just all this stuff where once a team has the data, there's typically a 10 to 25% and sometimes more. I had a factory tell us the other day that they had decreased their energy intensity by, by 45% which is amazing. But it's all. It depends of course where you're starting. And there's so much there where you need a motivated team with the data to actually solve those problems. But they're there once you do it. And that's just the low hanging fruit for energy efficiency. The other really exciting thing is once you have that pulse of every machine from the electricity draw, that's exactly the data you'd need to size and finance not just more efficient equipment, but also renewable energy to know what the load curves look like to take advantage first of the low hanging fruit so you don't end up oversizing a solar system or a thermal battery or anything. Those things are really expensive. So you don't do the low hanging fruit first. You might end up over investing and then ending up with a bunch of wasted energy. So it's not just low hanging fruit, it's the stuff you should do first by definition. And then it's also the behind the meter visibility where when you look at what needs to happen for the smart grid and integration of renewables and demand response and peak shaving and all of the intelligence we need behind the meter guide wheel with each of the, you know, fitbit for factories, electrical heartbeats of all the pieces of equipment used by the factory team, it is that foundation for the world's largest electricity users to drive the grid towards net zero in an intelligent way.

Yeah. We talk a lot on the show about the concept of these hidden economies, you know, industries, processes that are hugely impactful on a day to day basis but not most of us take for granted. Right. And I think manufacturing and industrial operations kind of falls squarely in that zone. When you think about kind of whether it's those early days walking to your opposite Revolution Foods or now spending time knee deep in manufacturing facilities, what are kind of the things that you think most Americans or most people ought to know about, like this world that's so foreign to so many of us.

Yeah. I think the thing that I'd want to share is it is so full of opportunity and joy of building and there's so much both need and fulfillment in this space because you can look around and like now I look around and I see. Oh, we have a customer that makes the decals on the sidewalk or on the asphalt, like the yellow lines, you know, igloo coolers, the, you know, glass that I'm using to have water, the pipes that carry that water, it's just all over. And so to be able to be part of not just building that and maintaining the things that help us have a good quality of life every day, but of actively transitioning and supporting that shift to sustainable production and to local production. There's such momentum right now with onshoring and reshoring and just the ability to have resilient local supply chains and American manufacturing here in the States, local manufacturing other places in the world. A lot of the constraint that manufacturers are feeling right now is not enough people, not enough talent goes into the space. And so I would say to everyone listening, look around for the opportunity to join the manufacturing profession or industries that support it, because it is massive and there is a ton of untapped opportunity. I'm part of the executive committee for the U.S. center for Advanced Manufacturing. So we think a lot about how to bring people in and understand this is a noble profession to be building the things that we use in our lives every day. And one where I just wish more people would see it and I wish it weren't hidden, I guess, is maybe the quick way to say that.

It's funny because, you know, especially in the finance world now, right, like, people love to talk about, let's go find the pickaxes and invest in those. But when they think of that and when they say that, what they really mean is, like, the pickaxes that are helping in AI or the pickaxes that are helping in, you know, technology, you know, deep technology. And there's literally a world, a giant world of actual industrial, you know, supplies that are part of everything we consume and see and touch every single day, it's like that just kind of gets glossed right over and we go straight to. The pickaxes that I actually mean are the ones that are, like, doing AI, not the other stuff.

Yeah. And I just. I totally agree. I wish that people would think of the pickaxes more broadly and. And think who's doing real things. I mean, getting to come home and talk about your day to your kids or your family or your significant other, your friends, and share, hey, here's what I helped do today. It is really darn fun when it's very tangible.

Yeah. And you guys have. I mean, you really have a roster of, like, a who's who. Of the brands that we do know that manufacture. Right. You guys have an amazing list of companies as customers, I think for factory, ups, product, gm, Johnson Johnson, Coca Cola. What was it like to get these big brands on board? It has to be really rewarding and exciting and daunting and I mean it is the big challenge that you envision. I think those, those companies alone. So tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah. And it also just. We have so much opportunity in front of us. That's what gets me excited too is there's so many folks that we don't work with yet who the reason we don't work with them is they don't know this is possible. It's just such a kind of wide open opportunity. I will say the thing that gets me most excited about thinking of all those names as you list them off is the moment we find the person within those operations who is the champion, who's in the weeds getting things done, getting the team engaged, tech interested, hungry, thoughtful, up and coming leaders within those organizations who grab and run with technology and are excited to have it positively impact the lives of people on the plant floor and to play that translation role where it's really hard for us to come in. Even with best product on the planet, it doesn't reach people necessarily automatically. And so for that factory ops champion, we now have a group of these people where they are sharing ideas among themselves. There's mentorship and all of that. And to see that factory ops champion grab it, get the idea, it's like the light bulb just turns on and then do the hard work of engaging in the right way. Each of the folks on the plant floor who's actually going to make a difference, no tool does anything until someone uses it. So that's where my eyes light up is thinking of those people, where each of them is a really special person who's responsible for the success.

I want to ask a similar question about your fundraising process. You talked about this epiphany of what entrepreneurship is and that there's this whole world of venture capital that exists. And I'm curious how that experience has been. I mean, you guys have a cap table with again, great brand names on it. Breakthrough Graycroft, Decarbonization Partners. What was that pitch process like for you? And as you look back, anything you've learned or think about kind of from that experience that you think other folks ought to be thoughtful of or would want to know as you know, as they might be going into the marketplace?

Yeah, definitely. So funny. It just goes back to the people again. So as you list out those names, what I think of is who's the person where I'm lucky to have them sit on my board and have them be the human I call when things aren't going well and where I'm excited to get their advice. And we've approached the fundraise process whenever we did it with a who's the human who's going to join our board mindset. So optimizing for the person and the partner as well as the firm and making sure the incentives are aligned because it's only fun to build with partners when you have aligned incentives and the same mission. And so I've tried to be pretty thoughtful about are we a venture backed business? Are we aligned with the exit desires and big swings that these firms want to take? And lucky yes. Like we are in it to build a generational company. We are in it to take Guidewheel public and really build this profitable great foundation as we have the impact we have. We will not have a big impact if we can't do it with a wildly profitable and large company. And so thinking about alignment of incentives, thinking about who is the person that I'm going to be working with. And that's a long relationship and I'm so jazzed. Greycroft Breakthrough decarb. They've just been absolutely fantastic. I could not be more fired up to build an amazing company with these people.

Do you have any fun stories from the roadshow of either unexpected responses from the venture community, Be it immediately they got it or someone that just didn't get it or I mean again, I was a banker for. I was a banker for 10 years and so I've sat in my fair share of.

Yeah.

And I know they can often be entertaining.

Oh, very entertaining. But I will say what was really interesting to observe was in the Series A I would come in and be talking about manufacturing and people would say how big is the market? And would say look so big. And they would say, I don't know. And the market size was a real thing. And then the lack of interest in manufacturing. One of the number one reasons people didn't invest in the Series A was when we got to know it was often because we're just not excited about this market.

Yeah.

Oh boy. Was Series B different Series B. I came into those calls and they were like, let me tell you, here are the three people we've had sicked on the manufacturing market for the past years. They've dug into every nook and cranny. This is A market we are so jazzed about. Here is our thesis on we love the manufacturing market. And we would get to the market size slide and I would say, it's huge. It's obvious to everybody, do you need me to cover the market size? And they would say, no, no, no, no need to cover the market size. We know it's massive. Market size is not a question. So it's very interesting to see people's eyes just universally across the venture ecosystem open up to the massive opportunity in manufacturing and I think also open up to how real the problems are to be solved.

Do you think that was a function of when you were out to market with the A versus the B or.

Was it oh yeah, 100%.

Was some of the same investors that had just such different reactions the second time around or different investors also?

Oh, it's a good question. I think both. I can't really remember because it was just so universal. So the A, it was all about timing. This was nothing to do with us. This was in 2021 when we were raising the A.

The A versus the D. Or was.

It oh yeah, 100%.

Was it some of the same investors that had just such different reactions the second time around? It was different investors also?

Oh, it's a good question. I think both. I can't really remember because it was just so universal. So the A, it was all about timing. This was nothing to do with us. This was in 2021 when we were raising the A. People just had not realized what a big opportunity this was. And by 2024, yeah, it had become not only people have realized what a big opportunity this is, it's become obvious. But also it had become relatively more interesting, real and concrete. And also, of course, what guide wheel is betting on is AI will continue to improve and we can continue to do amazing things once we have this great data. And that thesis became clear to everybody as well. And then also selling more software to software companies became harder.

Yeah, and there's that. Yes. I mean, speaking of one of those iterations, and you put a pin in this earlier, but I am curious to hear how. How you are thinking about AI in your business, what that capability could do. I imagine that has positive implications on how the venture world thinks about the opportunity. I imagine it has incredible impact on how customers think about it. So how are you guys talking about that right now?

Yeah, totally. So this is, I mean, core to the generational company we're building. It's not just about the data, it's about structuring guide Wheel from the start to be getting smarter with every machine, every user, every factory. And the way that we do that is we think about not just the power of the sensor data and making sense of all of those patterns, not just from current, which is the sensor we start with, but all the other sensors we can layer on after we have that foundation. Temp, humidity, speed, moisture, all sorts of other things. And the way that we've built Guidewheel is that users, as they use it, are adding context, so they're making meaning from that sensor data and showing Guide Wheel what is important, what it means, how to recognize the actionability in those patterns of data. Because action, at the end of the day is the only thing that really matters coming out of any system. So the investment that we've made in the AI side has really started to pay off. We have an incredible AI team that has already gotten all of these amazing algorithms live within Guide Real today. So an example being our Scout ultra rare event detection algorithm, where it's looking constantly for anomalies in production, maintenance, quality, and flagging those anomalies proactively and then soon becoming prescriptive in terms of recommending, but not yet. This is live Today with predictive, not yet prescriptive, but that's the next one. And the neat thing about how we've thought about AI is each of the algorithms live within Guideville today are designed by a team that brings not just the best of the best in terms of AI, but the best of the best in terms of manufacturing knowledge. So our head of AI previously built the most advanced algorithms for one of the largest steel companies on the planet. So when he goes to launch Scout as this predictive anomaly detection algorithm, he doesn't say, oh, ask the users to tag all the bad things that happen so that we can remember and recognize them in the future. It's like, no, that's unrealistic. A lot of the bad things that happen are not going to happen frequently enough for the system to learn from the bad things. So what we have to do is think differently about how Scout is built to recognize when something is no longer normal and escalate that. And so an example of this, where I would hope that it wouldn't require someone to recognize a bad event, is I got an email from a customer that was titled Guide Wheel Saves the Day. And they described, hey, we saw in the pattern of data a problem we went out and investigated, and in the back of the plant, there were a group of machines that were smoking. It was about to be a factory Fire. So being able to prevent a factory fire in a certain area of the plant where hopefully that same thing will never recur again, but where we can be detecting the problem is a really powerful ability. And it comes from bringing together that manufacturing and shop floor and deep understanding of how manufacturing works that we've built into the team with the best of the best in terms of what's possible in AI.

Yeah, let's pivot and talk about mission. And you have such a deep seated passion around sustainability. I'm curious how you think about and talk about aligning that mission into the work. How do you align profit and purpose in your work?

Yeah, so we try to think about it in a really practical way so you won't see green on our website. That's not what our customers care about first. They care about production first. And we only earn the opportunity to bring in energy cost reduction and emissions tracking and other things that they do care about also. We only earn the opportunity to bring those into the conversation when we're delivering outcomes that move the needle for their business as a top priority, which is always production. So practical, practical. Practical would be my approach from a customer lens, from a company lens. We actually thought from the start about how do we make sure that we're allowed as a company to bring impact and purpose into what we do. So we incorporate it as a public benefit corporation. So this is not a B Corp, but similar. So B Corp goes and certifies as, hey, you know, check, check, check here, here are the boxes. What we do is we say this is a actually different form of company. It's something that I think Patagonia is. There are bunches of public benefit corporations now, but this is built into the bylaws of Guide Wheel. We're allowed at the board level to think about both profit and purpose and the climate change purpose is built into that incorporation as a public benefit corporation. But again, we only get to have that impact if we are fully delivering great value and building a profitable, great company. And so that practicality coming first is really important.

You kind of gave us a good, I think, semblance of this earlier. But when you think about data, what does the big picture of sustainability look like for the manufacturing industry? What's possible and how do you guys think about, you know, advancing that as part of your mission?

Yeah, so we think about advancing it where it's in that quadrant of the right thing for climate and sustainability is the right thing for the bottom line and priority of the manufacturer. And we say we're not going to try to do things that fall outside of that right now there's lots of low hanging fruit that's in that quadrant. We will focus on the low hanging fruit across all of the factory floors on the planet. And within that there's also often an overlap. And this goes back to the supply chain exploration actually of where there's an opportunity to reduce waste helps the bottom line. And whether it's wasted time driving more productivity from the same assets, whether it's decreasing energy intensity by being able to decrease the time a machine spends idling or decrease scrap or wasted material, there's a lot of opportunity in that upper right quadrant of where reducing waste reduces cost of production and improves the ability to efficiently make the things that we need every single day. So we as guidewheel, don't say we're going to touch anything outside of that quadrant right now because there's so much in that quadrant that can move the needle today. Everything we talk about in terms of emissions reduction potential, the size of Brazil, Mexico or Canada's emissions, all of that is the low hanging fruit where it aligns to business objectives today. But we're going to do that while laying a foundation for manufacturers as the requirements increase around emissions tracking and reduction, of being able to have the granular data that they will need in the future, but based on that foundation of driving results today.

Are you hearing, I'm curious if you're hearing companies that are really starting to focus on that tracking and kind of reporting. I know it's less prevalent here in the States than in parts of Western Europe, for example, but is it something that is starting to really take a foothold?

Yes. Yeah. Tons of companies doing it. And then also our customers get really excited when they see that guide wheel can do that. It is not the first priority for them, which makes sense. A factory is on this planet to produce things. It's not on this planet to save energy or track emissions. But it is really important to them increasingly. And the reason is because their customers are asking them for that data. And so the requests from customers, big companies with big supply chains being driven by their investors and their commitments are really starting to trickle in to, to all of these conversations that is only ramping up and we're continuing to watch and align to how do we make sure we're meeting the needs that each of our customers will have three years from now, five years from now, in terms of all of the details and partnerships are a big part of how we think about that as well. How do we make sure we're partnering with folks that do other pieces of this ecosystem so that any one of our customers can go to one system that has everything versus, you know, logging into 10 or 15 different systems. How do we make sure we're playing nice with others from the start?

You strike me as someone that approaches the business world and problems with an optimism of positivity, you know, hopefulness. I think being an entrepreneur is inherently requires a little bit of that. And yet, you know, weeks like this week, we're recording this as another hurricane is about to hit the Florida coast. You know, for a lot of folks, the problem around extreme weather and the changing climate, it really feels so big and so hard and that it's so impossible to fix that. I think a lot of folks just feel hopeless about trying. So one question I tend to ask guests is like, how do you defeat defeatism both in your day to day life, but also as you're building a business that's seeking to have a positive impact?

Yeah. So I think no one person is going to solve the whole climate challenge. But what gets me really excited is if I can be really focused on making this dent, this dent of low hanging fruit plant floor, fill that gap with guide meal, which is a huge problem all on its own. But it's only a tiny portion of the climate challenge. But then get to meet all the other entrepreneurs that are tackling other aspects of it. That is a blast. And getting the community of entrepreneurs tackling different potential pieces of this together and supporting each other. I don't know, it's terrible that there are problems and challenges this big on the planet, but also, is there anything more fulfilling in life than to get to tackle a big and meaningful problem? And so I, I don't know, I just, I'm excited to get up in the morning, do what I can to make our dent and also see how we can build community around and support the other entrepreneurs doing really important work in different and related areas.

I mean, you're out there in front of this topic. Other folks that are out there doing other interesting research in climate tech or big innovations or building other businesses that you're like, you guys should know about them. Who else kind of, who are you excited by when you read about or think about or talk to folks you know in the space?

Yeah, yeah, so many folks. And I'll also say that the diligence we went through with Breakthrough and honestly decarb as well give me a lot of confidence. Anyone in the Breakthrough decarb portfolios, they are doing something that makes a Big difference, at least as far as I can tell from having been diligenced by those funds. So Antora Energy, Thermal Batteries. Andrew's an incredible CEO. Anyone working with him would be extremely lucky. I think very highly of them. Julia Collins, Building Planet Forward. Thinking about supply chain decarbonization, just absolutely wonderful. I'm thinking about Dandelion Energy and geothermal and Fervo and Tim. And there are just so many entrepreneurs that I feel inspired to know and now I feel embarrassed that those are just the names that happen to come to the top of my mind. There are so many others as well. But yeah, any of those just I feel tremendous admiration for, you know, nudge it from, from delight, different piece of the problem, but also so meaningful and yeah. And honestly breakthrough and decar portfolios. Whenever friends come to me and say I want to work in climate, where should I look? I say look at those portfolio companies.

I mean my answer to my own question is these conversations, right? It's entrepreneurs and founders like you and the others that I've gotten to interview because this is, I don't know, somewhere between 85 and 100 episodes. There's 100 brilliant entrepreneurs that I've talked to in the last year or two who are solving unique corners of a variety of challenges, all of which ladder up to a more sustainable, better world. And that's pretty incredible. And it's hard to stay defeatist long when you have these kinds of encompasses Conversations every day wrapping up here, you're talking about like your goal to build a generational business. So I want to end on a big question which is when you look back at, you know, this generational business decades from now, what do you hope your legacy is?

So I hope our legacy is what was the quantifiable impact we had on the customers we serve and their bottom lines and the backbone of the economy on climate in terms of quantifiable emissions reduction. And then how did we do it? Did we do it in a way that was building a company that's a great place to work and having impact on our team, which is Guidewheel is a place where values driven high performers are able to reach their full potential. And if we can have impact we're proud of quantifiably on the things we've set out to move the needle on and be proud of how we did it every day, that's an impact I'm really, really happy to have.

That's awesome. That's the perfect place, I think to wrap up last kind of just housekeeping question where can folks learn more? Where should they connect with guidewill learn more and you know, anything they should check out readings, talks, events, anything that you want to point folks to.

Yeah, totally. We're not super active on very many social media platforms except we do have a LinkedIn presence. So if you want to follow for events where we'll be LinkedIn is a great space spot. And then of course our website also tries to recap some of those things, but I would definitely recommend LinkedIn.

Thank you so much for taking the time today Lauren. Such a fun conversation, such inspiring work in a space that is so gigantic that I'm not surprised that the market size slide was the one that did it for folks.

Huge thanks to Lauren Dunford for joining us on Consensus and Conversation this week. You can find out more about Guide Wheel at their website guidewheel.com or you can connect with Lauren on Twitter I'm sorry, I mean x or on LinkedIn. Auren Dunford don't worry, we'll have all those links for you in the show Notes. As always, you can email us directly at ciconsensus-digital.com that's ciconsensus-digital.com you can also message me directly on LinkedIn and ThreadSK. Gone, that's KGone. Send us your questions, comments or ideas for future guests. We love the feedback. If you've enjoyed this episode, please take a second to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It's so helpful with growing our reach and adding new people to the conversation. It helps us to continue bringing you more awesome talks for the business leaders you you want to hear from. Thanks everyone. We'll be back next week with a brand new conversation.

Consensus in Conversation is hosted by me, Connor Gahn, an executive produced by me and Jeff Rock. Our producer is Will Gatchell with editing by the team at Reasonable Volume. Special thanks to the Consensus team including Creative Director Kate Tucker and Greg Herrigal on research. Consensus in Conversation is a podcast by Consensys Digital Media produced in association with Reasonable Volume.