Olympia Yarger: Entrepreneur and Maggot Evangelist

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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable people. This episode's guest is Olympia Jagger. Olympia filled the knowledge gap in my brain, specifically the beauty of maggots. I never fully appreciated maggots, particularly of the black soldier fly, but now I do. She is helping reshape waste management as the founder and current CEO of Gotera, located in Australia. Her drive towards more efficient farming and reducing food waste has led to a new kind of insect farming using autonomous robotics on Olympia attended Murdoch University where she obtained a Bachelor's degree in Sustainable Development. She also attended the Ilawarra Institute where she obtained an Associate degree in Agricultural Business and management. At the 2019 Women's Agenda Leadership Awards, she won the Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year award. She is also the Director of the Insect Protein association of Australia. Olympia was also the founder and Managing Director of Raising Raiders and a grant program that supports marsoc, the Marine Special Operations families. This is a community that she has been a part of because she has had to deal with the PTSD of her Marine veteran spouse. She is a determined, resilient and larva loving leader in the fight to develop a circular relationship between nature, technology and food consumption. This episode of Remarkable People is brought to you by Remarkable the Paper Tablet company. Yes, you got that right. Remarkable is sponsored by Remarkable. I have Version two in my hot little hands and it's so good. A very impressive upgrade. Here's how I use it. 1. Taking notes while I'm interviewing a podcast guest.

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Taking notes while being brief about speaking gigs. 3. Drafting the structure of keynote speeches. 4. Storing manuals for the gizmos that I buy. 5. Roughing out drawings for things like surfboards, surfboard sheds and office layouts. 6. Wrapping my head around complex ideas with diagrams and flowcharts. This is a remarkably well thought out product. It doesn't try to be all things to all people, but it takes notes better than anything I've used. Check out the recent reviews of the latest version. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable, people. And now here's the remarkable Olympia Jagr. How is your husband?

We've had a rough couple of weeks. It's been difficult with everything going on in Afghanistan and he's been trying to support some different groups of people to leave the country and that's brought up a lot of old stuff. And yeah, it's been a difficult couple of weeks, but otherwise he's his normal, amazing self.

Does this fundamentally mean that he disagrees with Joe Biden's decision or. It's just. It was just a long time coming and it was inevitable.

Where he sits, particularly is, is around the fact that it's been a difficult war across its 20 years. And how do you leave that situation with dignity when in the end you have to make a decision about when to stop? So I think he agrees that there's just no way for this to be anything but challenging and hard and sad, because I think everybody involved in Afghanistan wanted more than where we are today.

And he served how many tours there?

He did two in Afghanistan and four in Iraq. Wow.

So I. I think it's in the wheelhouse for many people based on books, movies, etc, not that they are necessarily accurate to sort of understand the PTSD and the conditions of the combatant, but you have a body of work about the impact on the family. So can you shed some light upon what happens to the military spouse and family?

Yeah, it's interesting living the life right, particularly in the US context, because culturally, the US service member is sort of a sacred cow. They're idolized. There's a mythology around serving in the US military. And so you end up in a place where you have to find a balance between being proud and sort of enjoying the benefits of the mythology and the prestige of that status and the conflict of the fact that that life isn't shiny and it isn't. The mythology is never really lived up to. And so what we found difficult, and I found particularly difficult, was how do I exist as a woman, as a partner, as Olympia, in a relationship that is, by the nature of the US military, geared to focus only on my husband? How do I make space for myself in that world? How do I generate a sense of importance about my needs, the needs of our children, within the context of the fact that the US Marine Corps requires my husband's work? 100% dedication. And so if an entity is requiring 100% dedication from an individual, they can't provide any. You miss out as a family, the US military, as many developed nations, militaries, Suffers the highest rate of divorce, suffers families higher rates of depression, learning disabilities, depressive acts like suicidal ideation, cutting drug use, alcohol abuse. There's so many social constructs that are challenged within the framework of your husband or your partner is a, is a warrior. And we are celebrating that. And you must accept all of the parts that come with that being true. And it's really difficult because you sort of want to be like, I hate the Marine Corps. I don't want you to do this thing that makes you so proud and makes you feel so fulfilled anymore because there's no space for me in this discussion. And so you find yourself building resentment and, and, and being, and having really challenged relationships because of it. So my goal when we were in the military was to find a way to try and help other spouses and families find their place and, and find a sense of importance for themselves. And because we're alone a lot, we're basically single parents. Particularly whilst the war was at its sort of most engaged, anyone whose husband or partner was being deployed basically parented alone. And so, yeah, it's difficult.

Just as an aside, every once in a while there's a click. So I don't know if it's from me or you. Are you doing anything that could cause a note?

No, I'm like literally hand still. Yeah, I am on satellite. WI fi. I am on satellite. WI fi.

Wait, wait, you're on satellite, WI fi.

Yeah, I'm rural Australia.

What system?

NBS satellite.

So maybe now that I know that it's very good.

Yeah, not bad.

So what is your advice to these military spouses based on what you've gone through?

I think go in wide, wide open on, you know, where, what you are hoping to achieve out of being engaged in the military and recognize that you have, you are part of it. You're not secondary or an add on, you are part of being in the military and, and own that. So, you know, make sure that there's a place for you in that conversation and that you ask for the things that are important to you. So if it's important to you to have time with your family, you can't make it the time, specific time that you want, but you can say, I'm going to need this kind of support from you or I'm going to need this much time from you. And I think as partners we sometimes forget that we have a right to ask for that. So don't give it all up. Remember that it's a partnership, this relationship you have with your service member. Yeah.

Do you think that this is kind of a loaded question, but do you think that the political leaders, who are primarily old white men, have any concept when they decide to send troops anywhere, declare war, be the tough guy, kick ass, take names? Do they have any concept of the true impact on people when they squeeze the trigger, so to speak?

No. No, they don't. And that's. That's their luxury, right? They can just lean on the mythology of what it means to send their country to war, and they can leverage the nostalgia and the iconography around military members sacrificing for their country. And that's why we see this politicization of the flag and kneeling and not kneeling. And, you know, do you support the troops? The irony, I think, is summed up in I protested the Iraq War to 2003, 2004, 2005, and I was considered a traitor and unpatriotic to my service member because I didn't support him in going to war. And I found that such an irony because it's like, surely if you support the military, you would be the greatest support you could ever provide. The military is to use the. Their presence with absolute reserve. And you would never send them to a war without absolute certainty on what it would mean to do that. But instead, we had to celebrate going to war. God, we canceled the Dixie Chicks over it, for crying out loud. Which just felt wrong. And so if you didn't support going to war, you automatically didn't support the troops. And that just. That was a narrative that lasted well into 2007. And that's just a politicization of what it means to be in the military.

I understand your perspective there, but would your husband see Colin Kaepernick taking a knee saying, he's a traitor. He is pissing on everything I stand for. Or is he considered a hero?

Well, there's a reason why he's my husband, I guess, you know, on personality type. So he. He. So he believes strongly in the American right of freedom of expression. And for him, the ultimate honor you can do your country is to question when you believe that it's not being just or good. My husband's PTSD is directly correlated to his need for justice and goodness. And his PTSD is relative to when he recognized that what he was doing was not just or good. And so for him, watching the kneeling and Black Lives Matter and. And climate, justice and all of those social issues of people going out into the streets and demanding better from their governors and governance is the most honorable way to. To, yeah, the best Way to honor America and, and what she believes. Because that's what it's all about.

Is he the only person in the Marine Corps who believes that or is that.

I mean, there's more than you realize. It's like being liberal or progressive in the military is the new don't ask, don't tell. So you hear more from the conservative sort of constrained side. But no, I think quite a number of, yeah, quite a large percentage of the military actually believes these things, but they just getting on with their day to day. They're not, you know, you really. To make your voice heard or to stand up and have a voice, you need to have a grievance. If you're happy with how things are going, you tend not to make them known. So I think you're only really hearing right now from the dissenting voice.

I want to have one happy military story. So I want you to tell the story of. I hope I got this right. Snickle Fritz.

The coolest dog to ever leave Afghanistan. So Snickle Fritz is. She was given to my husband. They found her within their interpreter, gave it to them. They found her in a trash heap. She's this looks like a kind of a border collie cross dog. And for him, he was diagnosed with PTSD in his fifth deployment. He redeployed for his sixth deployment about 16 months later. And he was really not well. He didn't speak a lot, very angry. And while he was enduring that sixth deployment, he was really struggling. And so this funny little dog who has this really bodacious attitude of I dean it fine for you to pat me type thing or I will sit with you for this small period of time and then I must leave because this is too much. So she's kind of a very aloof dog. And yeah, he found sort of a connection with her. He talked about it so much that I was sort of like, hey, why don't we try and bring her home? So we through a charity, we, we got her puppy rescue mystery and we got her on a plane and she's most traveled dog. I think she's been, you know, Afghanistan from to Kabul in a, in a taxi to Qatar and then to the US and then from the US to Australia. So she's actually asleep behind me and yawning and she looks very bored. And.

And I read that all in all it cost about $5,000 to get her to Australia.

Yeah. Oh. So, yeah, total cost to get her to Australia is, yeah, just over five. So it was like all these doctor's Visits and vaccines because Australia doesn't have rabies and a bunch of other stuff. And then she had to do 10 days quarantine at like 450 a day. So it was, it was an incredibly expensive exercise. But, and I'm not normally frivolous in that way. Like I, you know, we didn't bring all of our pets when we moved to Australia, but Fritz is, is different. She's just really, really different. And she, she kind of kept our family together. When he came home from that last deployment, we, we really sort of galvanized around her and she just, yeah, she just always knew like she, when he would be doing well, she would just sort of demand that he sat with her by like lying across the top of him. And it's not like she's had any professional training or anything like that. She's probably not even conscious that he's not doing well. She just wants his attention. But he would be sitting on the couch like just angry and you could feel it emanating from him. And she would like pop up on the couch in this sort of funny, graceful way she has and then just unceremoniously drape her whole body, body across his lap. And then she does this funny huffing thing when she's stressed. She just does these really deep breathing so she'll be like, like this and then after a while he just sort of chills out. She's pretty amazing.

Enough about that. Let's talk about something really exciting and uplifting and pleasant. So how about we talk about maggots?

Let's do it.

So first of all we have to start with a definition. And the definition I want is what is sustainable food?

Oh huh. That's a very interesting question. Sustainable food to me is the ability to produce food continuously without having to add external inputs from the this, the loop. So I think right now we're using up all the resources we create in a year, in really short periods of time, in less than a year.

Right.

And so I think that's unsustainable because we're going to continue to out consume our production. And so sustainable food to me is when you can continue to produce food because you have created a supply chain that is self fulfilling. You are using as much as you need to create as much as you need. And that loop is closed so that it is undiminishing. I think that there's a very un succinct reply, but we're close enough.

And is there an example of any sustainable food today that's an even better Question.

It's such a unique thought around our current food system. I don't think so. I think we are moving to better food systems and better philosophies around what food systems need to be. But I, I actually don't think we're there yet. And, and I think there's a multitude of reasons why you, you look at the logistics of food supply, you know, all of those sorts of things. Even with, when you consider insects, we've used a new animal, we've domesticated a new animal, but we haven't really changed how we farm them. And so by and large they, they still follow the same sort of unsustainable farming systems. So no, I don't think so, not yet. We're getting there.

I want you to make the case for insects as a source of protein.

So from my perspective, what insects deliver as a source of protein into our food supply chain is an opportunity that's dynamic. So you can feed insects a variety of substrates, so all the way from your very clean and quite homogenous sort of grain and harvest waste through to really ugly, not great waste. And that's really stepping out of the three main insects. We talk about any insects, we can look at all the waste streams. And so when you think about what it's going to take to produce more protein in the world, we have to find new inputs that are currently not allocated to our supply chain to improve and increase the amount of protein we produce. So you can't say, oh, I'm going to feel feed these mealworms bran and, and that's sustainable. And then you go, well, wasn't something eating the bran before? Like, haven't you removed it from a part of our supply chain and reallocated it to insects? And whether or not insects eat that more efficiently or create more kilos per pound, it, it still doesn't take away from the fact that you've only, you've sort of robbed Peter to pay. Paul Insects because of what they, their ability to eat, such a dynamic range of things can be really new protein in our supply chain, not what I call repurposed protein where you're just sort of taking from what the supply chain to give to a new thing. So I think that's why insects have this really unique place when we think about circular economy, I think they even, even bit more of a rock star because the idea that we must reuse each of the parts of what we're building and creating to repurpose and recycle and upcycle insects fit very neatly in that story because they are designed to eat the scavengers by nature. They're designed to eat the end of things. And so we can really add and build out our supply chains in a circular economy way with insects. They kind of empower it in a way which is kind of fun.

But how do we overcome the ick factor?

Yeah, so the ick factor, me, sits in two places. One is in our culture. Right. And the second is in our privilege. So, and kind of, I guess you could say, in a way, our privilege drives our culture. One of my favorite researchers says that the ick factor for insects is about a, it's our full belly problem. Right. So we are, we are satiated in our food. We are confident we will have food. And so we have the luxury of being able to say we do or do not want certain types of food based on feelings. If you're hungry, you just eat food. Don't really care if it, if it was grown unsustainably or with hormones or, you know, you're just like, I'm hungry and I'm going to eat. And so I think two things are changing. Social cultures are changing, values around food are changing. These things are omnipresent. Now you, everybody's talking using the buzzwords of sustainability and providence and transparency and all of those things. And then the second part is, I think, where we are truly moving away from food privilege. I think climate change is going to start to really pressure our food supply systems and they will become unbalanced and tenuous because we can't control production in unstable climates. And so I think we will start to care a little less about the factor as we continue.

I, I could make the case that we eat escargot, we eat various forms of fungi, we eat crabs as a delicacy, and crabs are on the bottom of the ocean eating anything that falls down in water full of cat from the latest rain. So what's the problem with insects?

Yeah, let's just, it's been this thing, right? It's a carryover from, you know, public health from before we had fridges. Don't eat stuff with bugs in it because it's gross and dirty for all intensive purposes. Lobsters are, and crabs are the insects of the sea. And I, I, I say the same thing you, the idea that we would happily put a bleeding piece of flesh in our mouth, right? We're like, oh, yeah, this is great. But then we're like, oh, I don't know about this dehydrated cricket. The horror. I think it Shows the lack of consciousness around the choice we're making. And so yeah, and I do believe that the social consciousness is changing. I think we are evolving. The challenge for insect producers is that humans are boring when it comes to food. We're not adventurous. We think we are, but we're not. We eat the same thing week in, week out. We very rarely change our eating habits. And so adding new food that's losing literally outside the realms of what we're used to is a difficult thing to do regardless. That's why all the plant based people aren't making things that look like plants. They're trying to replicate things that look like meat so people can imagine it belonging in their culinary sort of repertoire. Right, but what do you do with a cricket? Like how do I add that to a lasagna? Where does it go? It's difficult.

So are you, are you intellectually offended when you hear about companies make God? What's. There are three or four companies that are making plant based meat. So is that offensive to you? That's intellectually dishonest or hallelujah.

No, I think it's great. I think what any of us in this, in the, in the new food category have to be a bit more conscious of is what this language means and why we feel like we have to use it. So plant based meat is looking at trying to leverage known and understandings around food so that they can introduce a new category. I think the challenge is what you end up with is sort of a arguments from red meat producers and red meat industry. And then secondly it's kind of a lazy marketing ploy. Right. Like chickpeas are great. Like sell them for what they are. And, and I say that a lot. Same as the insects stop grinding them up and sticking in in a muffin. They hiding insect protein is not the way to get it commercially adopted. I think we have to. Yeah, I think there's obviously market entry points and ways to create excitement around a brand or a food. But I think not owning what we are producing and celebrating it for its uniqueness is a missed opportunity. It's just a bit lazy.

Seems to me that my audience should learn about the black soldier fly. So tell us about this insect.

Like talk about a glow up. The black soldier flies like suddenly become the darling of the insect protein production industry and was largely unknown like 20 years ago, 10 years ago. It's a non vector naturalized species of fly. So it exists all over the world even though it technically doesn't come from all over the world. It's A interesting fly insofar as its life cycle is a little upside down compared to other flies. So you have a really short FL. Life cycle and a really long pupa and larval life cycle. It eats aerobically as a fly, as a lava. And so from the perspective of managing it as a domesticated species, you've got, you've a reduction of the, the pathogens that normally happen with managing food waste. And it's not as smelly because you're not sort of getting this rotted, putrescent smell when you, when you, when you're processing waste using those insects. And as a fly, you know, the argument continues about whether or not it eats or doesn't eat. It can absorb moisture, but it doesn't technically eat or forage as a fly. And so it's a non vector species for humans, so makes it quite a safe species of fly. And they're kind of cute too, which is nice and handy if you're going to be a maggot farmer. So pick the cute maggots.

Beauty being in the eye of the beholder. You're not suggesting we eat the fly in the fly stage, you're suggesting in the larva stage.

Yes, that's right. So yeah, so most insect production, eat consumption happens at the larval stage. And so yeah, with, when it comes to fly larva, that would be the highest protein, most nutritious. Same with beetles, the larval stage is the highest protein, best, most nutritious. So if you're going to consume maggots, which is, you know, if we talk about ick factor, eating a cricket is still probably ranking streets ahead of eating a maggot because maggots are just that one more step into the void. I think on, on ick factor. But yes, if you're going to eat, you would eat the lava itself, the maggot.

Okay, now we're going to go into areas. That guy is totally ignorant. But it seems to me that if these larva are eating bad stuff and you eat the larva, aren't you getting bad stuff too? So does the form of nutrition in the substrate affect what you can do with the insect?

100%. So when you look across the substrate, you know, if you were feeding them for human consumption, you would want to use more controlled, better inputs. So you would use your, what's called cleaner organics. So usually harvest or manufacture manufacturing waste like fruit pulp or things like that. We focus predominantly on nasty stuff. And so, you know, then you have to really think about what's in those substrates and how they work the insect itself. And this will sound a little bit like a late night commercial. Just wait. There's more. Just they do have antibacterial qualities in their gut and so they do have the ability to diminish pathogen load and remove bacteria from substrate and also through their own guts. Like in, in creating any food you need to be conscious of your inputs to create a clean product for sure. But again, to the dynamic nature of insects, if they're only for food, then we've missed on the opportunity to manage some of the most difficult waste streams we have today. And so let's not lock them into a box. They can be. They're all things to all people. Guy Maggots.

When you say your black soldier flies are eating the nasty stuff, what's the nasty stuff?

So we, we manage food waste all the way down to the lowest end. So household waste and the reason why household food waste is, is really nasty is because people, they don't care, right, it's my bin, I'll just throw it in, it doesn't matter. And so you'll find, you know, cat litter, you'll find fecal waste, nappies, you'll find pesticides, poisons, rodent poison, stuff like that. You don't want to look at that input and then say that's, you know, largely going to be okay as a protein input. So we've done a lot of testing and. And you just cannot. Yeah, you can't get them to eat that kind of waste and then, and then have that protein be suitable for livestock. Human consumption. But human and household food waste is the largest volume of food waste of all the food waste segments. So most of the food waste happens in 10 kilo loads once a week out of every house across the world. And so, you know, why would we not try to manage that in the most efficient way possible? And then yes, you've still got insects at the end, but there are a variety of different uses you can, can turn those insects into that isn't consumable for either livestock or humans, but you can make, it's a biofuel in the oil. There's chitin, there's melanin, there's all these sorts of fabulous things that we need in our supply chain to create sustainability. It's a lost opportunity to say, oh, because I can't use these insects to make a consumable food, I just won't manage that substrate.

If consuming insects becomes mainstream at some point, Whole foods label will say black soldier flies are fed on non grotesque Substrates so you can safely eat ours. It's like the equivalent of non GMO organic. All the stuff now that there's labels on other foods, I think when you.

Look at it it'll actually end up being even more segmented than that. Like the Australian feed regulation sort of spaces it out. So if it goes to human consumption they have to eat pre consumer waste streams. So agricultural amount. Wow. Yep. If it goes to livestock feed, you can feed sort of all the way down to post consumer but only sort of stopping at back of house restaurant like you couldn't do front of restaurant. And so that's a pretty wide variety of food waste. And then of course the last bits not suited. But I think it'll end up being these maggots were fed organic food waste that came from the organic place of waste and these insects were fed on, you know, post consumer food waste, which. That would be your fast food version? I think. So, yeah. It'll. It'll come down to that. Sure.

So Taylor Swift will endorse a particular form of 100.

Yeah.

Black soldier fly larva.

That's right, yeah. Choose green lava. They've been fed the best organics waste from across San Francisco and maybe you could even create like a wealthy postcode waste substrate that made people feel better. So it's like these maggots only ate rich people waste and then.

Or how about free range ways?

Oh yeah, like where you could just dump it in as you go. Yeah. There's a whole. It's a untapped market opportunities here.

Let's say that you are producing the kind of protein that's fed to livestock. Now can't someone make the case that you are contributing to global warming because you're making it more possible to raise livestock who fart methane into the atmosphere and you are increasing methane and global warming gases. So you are contributing to the problem.

Sure. And you could, I think you could absolutely make that case. And my case back would be can we first deal with Exxon and Shell and BP and the fossil fuel industry as a whole and once we've dealt with that, then yes, I'm more than happ to come back to the table on burping cows. I think humans need to eat. I think mass animal production I think is going to change. Your CSIRO here in Australia has already solved the burping cow problem with seaweed. So I think there's. I'm more interested in removing the things that don't need to be true. So we do not need to run our vehicles with petrol. We do not need to run our electricity with coal. Remove that global emission first and fast. And then let's come back to the issue of agriculture. I think agriculture returns as much carbon to the world as it does. There's a balance in agriculture because of the nature of what it is, whereas there's no balance with fossil fuels. It just takes.

Would you describe what your company does?

Sure. So Gotera manufactures and deploys autonomous modular infrastructure to manage waste using insects. So we have maggot robots which are large waste management sort of units which are. They look like a trash compactor, so commercial sized trash compactor and the larvae live inside and their environments managed. They're fed autonomously by the machine. And our customer can just walk up to the machine, put the little wheelie bin against the bin lifter and the machine accepts the waste, macerates and treats the waste and then manages the insects. So what we've done is we've created infrastructure that's modular and autonomous in so far as it can stand on its own. You can stack them together to make more capacity. And then we've got upended waste logistics entirely by instead of saying, oh, I'm going to have to come and collect this bin and take it back to this central facility every day or every other day, I can collect and bring back to a more logistics, opportunistic, decentralized location or I can deploy this unit to the location. And so you've got this like complete shift in how we think about the logistics of waste, which has a bottom line return to our clients. So it's cheaper because we're not. The units are serviced every 12 days instead of every day or every second day. And so you've completely removed a lot of the components of how that works. And then of course, at the end of 12 days you get a couple of tons of maggots and you get some maggot poo, which is fabulous soil conditioner and carbon additive for agriculture and vermiculture. And. And you've completely reduced the impact of waste management down to a very small CO2 profile. So yeah, maggot robots, that's what we do is heat generated lots actually, because the insects sit at 10 degrees hotter than their ambient temperature and our larva feed at 32 degrees Celsius. And so sometimes in their trays they can be up upwards of 42 degrees Celsius in the tray. The Australian strain is a little bit different to the European and American strains because it was just something I found out really early because I was reading all the European research. And like, 27 degrees is the temperature. And then. And then I would start trying to get them to do stuff. And I remember that I'd watched them on the wall of the Avery flies not mating, and it was 27 degrees. I'm like, I'm following the literature. And then one day, one of our staff interns came to me. She goes, it's 35 degrees in the aviary. I'm like, oh, my God. And we ran down because it was a really hot day, and. And we opened the door and there was just, like, mating pears dropping all over the thing. I'm like, oh, they like it hot. Okay.

Maggot humor.

Yeah. Nothing but the best scientific discoveries here.

You know, is there a concept that you could have a consumer version of this little maggot robot factory that, you know, Russell Crowe could order and put in his house in Walla Molo or Wallamala or wherever he lives in Sydney? I mean, or is this purely a restaurant, institutional level kind of thing?

We've kind of done it for a few different species now. So for black soldier fly, because of the type of unit we've designed, it's mostly an enterprise function. So it's good for city councils to put on their landfill. It's good for large manufacturing to manage their waste. But we've also built one for mealworms, which is a farming machine. And so the business model is a much different situation where you would actually use it as the technology to farm mealworms for human consumption. And it operates on the same premise. It's, you know, it accepts the substrate, it feeds the mealworms, it manages the mealworms. But what it means is for six weeks, you can seed the unit. And for six weeks, nobody has to really do much to. Because the machine's feeding them and reporting data. And, you know, aside from poking your head in there to make sure everybody's still okay, you really can just leave that be. We think a lot about what other robots can we make to empower the opportunities that insects provide? And what other insects can we use to deliver on waste management? That's kind of what we consider our superpower. Building robots that get insects to do a job.

The end result is kind of ultimate composting material. No?

Yeah, it's great stuff. Yeah. You could grow babies in it.

Babies?

You haven't heard that?

Agriculture, human being.

Why not?

Wait, what? That one went right over my head. What?

Well, that's North Carolina saying, this country's so good, you could grow babies in it.

Well, it sounds like something Lindsey Graham would say, but okay, we won't go there. So your company is fundamentally a food tech combined with robotics combined with maggots. I must say that is a unique positioning statement. I have never heard a pitch that included those particular words together. So what was it like raising money for Maggot 2.0 here?

Yeah, it is hard, right? Like, you stand in front of venture capital and you say, so hear me out. We've got maggots and we've got robots, and it's like biotech meets hardware, which are two of the two things that you guys are really scared about. But I think it's a thing. So just give us some cash. It was hard, right?

And you're a woman and look at.

Me walking around with, yeah, all. And I'm a single founder. I'm 45. So much. So many things that made it hard. I think anyone doing hardware or biotech, sort of deep tech stuff to describe your idea, your story, your business model in the pattern that Venture needs to see to make it work. Right. So venture has a pattern. And, and you know this because you've got the slides, right? And I used your slides. And I tried.

I, I did not anticipate maggot farming as a use of it, but.

Okay, well, no offense, but you can tell because I tried to shove maggot farming into those 10 slides and it could not get it to work.

I guess we were destined to meet. So I.

If you could do an update to the slide sitting that allows.

Oh, I feel so bad. This is a niche. I completely missed the maggot niche. If I could just get 1% of.

The maggot companies using the slides, it would, it would make a big difference. So I, Yeah, that's difficult. And I, I think, honestly, I was just fortunate that I met a venture capitalist who could look at what we did and go, if you were a software business, you'd be here. Do you know what I mean? Like, they had the ability to do that because. Yeah, and I think even more so, it's. It's super difficult to sort of go, hey, come on this journey with us. Because, you know, for the next five years, we're probably going to own six verticals in this business. Right? Because it needs so much R and D, and that's something Venture definitely doesn't want to do. And so, yeah, there's a few parts where that just was really, really difficult. But I've been fortunate. I've met really inspiring and creative investors who backed us early and thankfully One of them had a brand that was big enough that everyone else got fomo, because that's all it's about, right? If you can get one penguin to jump off the ice and they've got a big enough brand, everyone's like, oh, this must be a thing. Let's get on the maggot train.

I don't know if it's true, but the story goes that American Indians used to harvest buffalo by starting a stampede towards a cliff because buffalo have their eyes on the side of their heads and they run with their heads down. So basically they just follow whatever's in front of them. So the way to harvest buffalo was to start a stampede towards the cliff and the whole herd would jump off the cliff, because that's how buffaloes operate, which is very similar to venture capitalists.

I, I would concur, and I mean that without malice, but, yes.

It'S hard to take that without malice, but go.

Ahead, you can give that to me. I like. Because if you're trying to follow a pattern and you can't really see it for yourself, but somebody else does, I think it's. Yeah, I think it's reasonable to be like, do you get this? Yeah, I get it. Here's how you can understand it. Okay, I'll follow you. Let's go. I have seen the more or the less discerning side of that. The sort of. Bob told me about you at golf and I. I thought, why not? Which is sort of uninspiring, but, yeah, I think, yeah, whatever works, man. I'm a founder. I'll take money. You know, I'm all but busking in the street here.

All money is green, as we say in Silicon Valley.

That's right.

I read this very interesting story that at the close of your fundraising, you locked one venture capitalist out, but he pried his way back in.

Yeah, so I was having a really hard time deciding. We were oversubscribed. I didn't want to take any more money. In the seed stage, we raised 1.2 million. I was at 1.7 and. And I had to make a decision. And I, I liked both of the. The two firms that were sort of in the overs side, and, And I couldn't make a decision. I. I just did pros and cons lists. I was like, who's more strategic? I could not find a leverage to go, someone's in or someone's out. And finally we had a thing where one of them called me up and they were like, hey, we've just found our staff members. Has a conflict. It's a very small conflict. And here's what it was. So they had invested as an angel in another black soldier fly company. And I kind of was just like, oh, there it is.

It's a crowded market.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They might have used your slides.

There's going to be a shakeout someday in the black soldier fly market.

Yeah, it's. It's this whole thing, right? And so I was like, this is it. Like, this is. Thank God. You know, and this is the reason. And so I was like, oh, I couldn't possibly. I can't. I'm not gonna proceed. Like, you know, I should. You guys should have told me earlier. This is the reason why I'm not going to let you invest. And. And when you're not joining the round. And I got off the phone and I felt a bit weird about it because it was, you know, that knowing where you're like, you just did. That was a cop out, Olympia. That. That was just. You just ran away, essentially. And then I had talked to one of the analysts, and then Will, who was the. Is the head of. Of that fund, he called me back and. And he's like, hey, I appreciate it if you don't want to be on, you know, want us on the journey, but that can't be the reason. That's not the reason. He's like, we really pride ourselves on integrity. We're here for the right reasons. And, yeah, I'm not going to let you use that reason. And I was like, oh, whoa. And so I just sort of. I was feeling really vulnerable. I was so tired at that time, I had no staff, just two in two. Two interns that work part time, and. And me. So I'm like fundraising and mag and robot building. And I just sort of said to him, I said, I. I have found it difficult to make this decision and I don't know what to do. And. And he had this, like, amazing. We had this amazing conversation where he was just, like, talked me through it, but not. It was. He literally divorced himself from being an interested party and helped me work through it myself. And in a way where you could honestly say this is not. Not clouded by bias or he's not trying to move me one way or the other. So. And then I cried, lots of ugly crying. And I said, let me call you back. I need a minute. And so I got off the phone, I pulled over because I'm driving. I was always driving. And. And I was just like, all right. Got myself resorted out and and called him back. And I was like, let's do this. Because to me, it was like, I'm alone, right? As an only founder I have, I can't go down the mountain to have these conversations with my team. They kind of need me to stay inspiring and stay okay. And. And if I was going to go on this journey, my investors truly needed to be a little bit different to the sort of standard, you know, imagine you get to have an investor that doesn't care if you cry and cares about making good decisions in that way. How good? So I was like, yeah, let's do it. And I have not regretted decision once. Like, and. And because they're so such an incredible firm, like Will will call me randomly and be like, hey, I had you in my orb. And I'm like, really?

How cool is that?

Like, you know, he just had you on my mind. Wanted to check in, see how you're doing. And it's like, that's a beautiful thing. Go with. Yeah, but.

So did you throw the other VC out or you took it all?

No, I. I threw out the other vc.

You should have asked me what to do. And you know what? I would have told you. I would have said, take it all. Don't worry about dilution. Take the money.

Yeah.

There's an old saying in Silicon Valley. You eat when served. So I've never heard of a company who said, oh, I took too much money. I've never heard that story. Anyway, so. So let's pretend that I am a restaurant owner. Maybe I'm the CEO of McDonald's. Let's take the best case. And you say, wow, this is intriguing. It reduces food waste, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, does it save money for a restaurant? Does it make money for a restaurant? Or is it just feeling better about your impact on the globe that should motivate a restaurant owner to do this?

No. So with us, it legitimately save some money. So the process we're able to provide means that the source segregation can be a little less. Yeah, it doesn't. We can handle a little bit more contamination than composting. We require less logistics. And so the cost of trucking is reduced. The cost of waste total is two things. The managing of the waste and the transporting of the waste. And so the cost of managing the waste is one piece, and then how much it costs for the truck to get your waste to the place to be managed is the other. If you can shorten that drive, you are immediately cheaper. And so we sit you know anywhere generally between 25 to 50% less than landfill on collection and management costs. The second part is if you pull your food waste out of your general waste bin, then usually, particularly for restaurants, you can reduce the amount of collections for your general waste and the size of your general waste bin, which also saves you money. So you've got this sort of double whammy on benefit and it is completely financial, the greenwashing around like doing better for the planet and things like some people value it, some people don't. If that comparable people will choose an option that's better for the environment over another. And so if we can stay at that parity on pricing or a little below, then we're in a good place.

And is there any revenue streams from selling the protein or as feed or as fertilizer or something? Or is it all cost savings?

No. So yeah, the offtake is, has a value as well. So your protein can be sold and your frass can absolutely be sold. We do make money on both ends. Again for us, where we really have to sort of dig deep is, is is what this looks like in the conversation around where these insects go after they've eaten whatever they've eaten. So our job is to sort of build out new supply chains, make sure that we're managing the types of waste that are going to different insects and those sorts of things. We treat insect protein not as a product but a commodity. Most of my peers the other way around, they, in the insect industry, they treat insect protein as a product and they hold the processing of that product all the way through to the end of life and then they give it a name and sell it out. We treat it as a commodity and sell it specifically to its use case based on what it's eat.

So are you saying that every couple weeks you pick up the, the little maggot farm and take it back and harvest it and then empty it and send it back. It's like a dumpster.

Yeah, so we just vacuum them out. So we just leave the unit where it is and we suck them all out and we then take just the insects back. So that's even better, right? Because you're, you're feeding all this food waste, but then you're only transporting a really low value and volume amount.

Who knew there was so much to maggots?

My God, they're so good. They're so good.

Not so much for the maggot entrepreneur, but for the entrepreneur who is in a segment that, let's just say this is not social media or Cyber cash or security or enterprise software, but someone who's off the beaten path. What's your advice to this non tech startup, Ag startup, particularly one led by a woman.

So the first part is being a woman is going to be your challenge and your weapon. And so women think about things differently. And we are, we have a different approach and because we've never been allowed a seat at the table, we problem solve in different ways. And that is a superpower and we should see it and understand it. But it will also be your greatest challenge. If I had a dollar for every man who's said to me, after I've tried to order a large piece of hardware, does your husband know you're buying this? To which I have responded, are you kidding me? Not at all. No. No. In fact, I've had a long.

This is 20 years ago, this is recently.

No, this is like I have a story literally from six months ago where we were trying to get some stuff fabricated and I went in to buy a couple of different types of steel and for the team and the guy goes, these are some different types of steel. I'm like, yeah, great, I'll take them, thanks. And he's like, well, does your husband know that this is what you're buying? Do you want to check with him? And I'm like, my husband doesn't know mild grade steel from stainless steel because he has one skill set and none of it habits to do with handiwork. And the guy's like, well, you know you different types of steel, like welding. And he's trying to give me a lecture. I'm like, do you even know? You don't even know what I'm using it for. Like, just sell me the product. Thank you. So yeah, like that stuff can be hard. I think what we don't recognize as women is that we buy into it. So be more conscious in your own subjugation. So there aren't, you know, the whole, Sorry, can I just ask a question? It's like, why did you apologize before you asked a question? Or can I just ask a dumb question? Or this is probably a dumb question. Be more conscious of the language we've been taught to use so that we are less in, in the room and get rid of it because you have a right to be there. It will just feel a little uncomfortable sometimes because people will be shocked that you're there. So I think those two things, particularly as a woman, are important to be more conscious of so that you can deploy them as a superpower or curb them when you are hurting yourself with this sort of learned language that we were given. And I think the second part is when it comes to ag, conventional agriculture has a really bad rap. But they will help you if you actually go out into the world and ask the right, ask questions from a place of learning. So don't go out and do like you all entrepreneurs, like, call all the customers you can and blah, blah, blah. That's not trying to learn, right? You're just trying to get an outcome for your product. You're trying to get them to confirm that you have solved their problem. Go instead from a place of learning. And so one of the things that I feel figured out by accident, but have used for years now is what don't you like about what I do? When I tell you what I do, what do you think the problem will be? The customer will, will tell you all sorts of things. And even if it's stuff you don't want to hear, it's so interesting to get honest feedback, right? Because once you've given someone permission to critique what you're doing, they will love that opportunity like lots of people love that opportunity, Right? Well, let me tell you this thing you're trying to do. Let me explain to you why this might not work. And sure, their intentions may not be empowering, but the language and the information they will provide is profoundly useful because your customer is telling you their fears, their concerns, and you can use that information to make your product better, make your service delivery better, make your innovation iteration better, because you're hearing their actual problems, not not telling them. Because the question we normally ask is if I could create this gate opening system that would reduce the number of times you'd have to open a gate, would you want that? And they're like, I don't know, I guess it's a different line of questioning, right? So, yeah.

The Remarkable People podcast is sponsored by the Remarkable tablet company. This tablet helps you focus on no interruptions with social media, email and web browsing. As part of each episode, I ask my guests how they do their best and deepest thinking. That's because the folks at the Remarkable tablet company want you to do your best and deepest thinking too. How do you. The maggot, queen of the world, the Melanie Perkins of maggots, how do you do your best and deepest thinking?

I walk with a dog generally. I have a farm. I'm very fortunate to live in a beautiful part of Australia. And I walk preferably at night when there's nothing out and it's quiet and I just sort of trudge along. It's kind of this funny walk. It's not a purposeful work. I just sort of trudge. And yeah, if I've got a dog with me, there's something lovely about that because they come back to you and they go away from you and they break you out of that reverie and then you can readjust your thought process. But, yeah, right now it's walking with a dog. Yeah.

I am enlightened and I'll never look at a maggot the same way again. I hope you never look at a maggot the same way again, too. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People, bringing you the latest news in the world of maggots. My thanks to Sarah Nolay, who suggested Olympia Yager. I would have never sought out the maggot Queen of Australia were it not for Sarah. My thanks to Jeff C. And Peg Fitzpatrick, who helped me create another remarkable episode of the Remarkable People podcast. My thanks to Luis Magana, who has transcribed this so that in case you're deaf, you can read this interview. And finally, to a newcomer to the team, Madison M A D I S U N not O Nismur, who did the background research for the intro and helped me with the questions. That's the Remarkable People team. Between now and the next episode, please, if you haven't been vaccinated, get vaccinated. Wear a mask when you're indoors and wash your hands constantly. All the best to you. Mahalo and aloha. This is remarkable people.