Tom Frazier - I'm an Alfred and I Have a Batman Factory

Hi everyone, Mike Malatesta here, and welcome back to the How'd It Happen? Podcast. On this podcast, I dig in deep with every guest to explore the roots of their success, to discover not just how it happened, but why it matters. My mission is to find and share stories that inspire, activate, and maximize the greatness in you. On today's episode, I'm talking to a guy who's out to change the world, literally. After starting his career as an ethical hacker for the US federal government, He moved to Australia, became a big-time executive at a telecommunications company before realizing that he'd climbed the wrong ladder. And so he decided to become an entrepreneur. We talk about inventing the future, why the best entrepreneurs are addicted to problems, not solutions, and why it is possible for adults to have carefree moments.

I would say I'm Alfred and I have a Batman factory because usually the founder is someone who understands a problem really well, but that doesn't mean they know marketing and legal and accounting and operations and HR. Like, there's all these other domains of being a CEO that are outside of a typical founder's experience level. For me, because I started my own company a few times, it's okay to fail, and I failed a bunch. And, and now with, you know, where I am with Redivider, it's a very different place. Like, we have an amazing group of people around me. My co-founders, all of our advisors. You know, we have this kind of excellence approach to thinking about stuff, and that's really helped me.

You will enjoy— I know you will— this wide-ranging conversation with this game-changing entrepreneur, Tom Frazier. Hello, Tom. Welcome to the podcast.

Hi, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, it's been a few weeks since we had a little brief sort of get to know each other call. And I've been looking forward to this ever since, because you opened my eyes during that call to some things that I wasn't aware of, like some of the work that you're doing right now, but also this really unique— I've been thinking a lot about your, what I consider to be your unique sort of path to where you are now. And I'm looking forward to digging in and exploring that some more. So look, everybody, let me tell you a little bit more about my guest, Tom Frazier. Tom is the co-founder and CEO of Redivider, which we'll learn all about. He boasts an impressive 25-year career driving transformational and disruptive architectural initiatives in future tech, B2B, and public sectors. And don't worry if you don't know what that means, because we are going to explain what all of that means. As a serial entrepreneur, Tom Founded Redivider based on his extensive knowledge of data centers and a passion for revolutionizing the industry, and he's committed to prioritizing people, planet, and profits. Tom is also devoted to spearheading innovation in the digital economy. Outside of his professional life, Tom enjoys spending time at his hobby farm in Washington State, traveling the world to teach dance, and cherishing his roles as a leader, teacher, husband, and father to his two young children. You can learn more about what Tom's up to at company website, which is redivider, redivider.co. Tom's got his own website, tomfrazier.com. He is Tom Frazier on LinkedIn. And is there anywhere else you want people to be looking for you?

That's it. You got it.

Okay. All right. Wonderful. Tom, I start every podcast with the same question, and that is how'd it happen for you?

Jace, I think how it happened for me is I discovered at a very early age I was addicted to learning. If I have one thing that I enjoy the most, it's learning everything about everything. And that takes me down different paths, like you mentioned, for teaching dance. I just found this wonderful way to connect with other human beings, whether they be investment bankers or parking lot attendants. And that led me to traveling the world doing that where I could experience different cultures. And ultimately professionally, the kind of path of learning has taken me down where I am today with Redivider, which is how can we make meaningful change, positive change for people, the planet that ultimately results in high profit for our company and our investors.

So, um, before I dig into Redivider, I, I can't let the dance thing go. So from parking lot attendants to investment bankers, tell us more about, about the, the, the dance that you teach and how you got into it besides being addicted to learning.

Uh, well, swing dancing and tap dancing is the type of dance I do, and, um, You know, one day this, I was in college, I was maybe 19, and this girl, this girl Karen said, hey, listen, we're going to go on a date. She's like, let's go to this dance class. And I went and I absolutely fell in love with dancing. Never saw her again, but I give her credit because that moment changed my life. And, you know, there's this kind of great energy about being at like a social dance where everyone is out just to have fun. Because no one goes out to enjoy that moment if you're in a bad mood. Those people just stay home, right? So, you just end up surrounding yourself with an energy of people that is a great social equalizer, right? It doesn't matter what you do for work. It doesn't matter where you live in the world. It doesn't matter what language you speak. You can have this shared connection with another human being in a way that is very pure. There's something true about going and having an intimate moment with somebody. That's a very personal moment between the two people, just having— going out dancing. And I really found that to be true in countries all over the world. Like I said, I've taught dance in lots of different places. I've been to dozens of countries, and it's always the same energy. It's always that same feeling. And It really lets me know how connected the world actually is.

How do you find these people, or how did they find you to travel there and teach them dance?

I mean, it's reputation-based, just like anything else. You know, you go to, uh, a city like Chicago and they have like a social dance in Chicago, and then you go to New York where they have something on every single day. And, you know, I lived in Australia for 10 years, and so, you know, I helped, uh, teach teach a lot of classes in Australia and New Zealand. And then, you know, you just end up getting a name where people really like what you stand for and they ask you to come.

Okay, so they invite you to come to their club or whatever— that might not be the right word.

Yeah, like their city. Yeah, city.

Okay. And then there's an event and you meet up and you teach people swing and tap, and they maybe they teach you something and Exactly right.

Yeah, it's not a hierarchical, I'm the teacher, you're the student.

Okay.

It's, you know, I have my kind of skill set and things that I'm really good at doing. And so other people want to learn that. And I might learn stuff from other people as well. And, you know, there's the kind of, in a partner dance, there's like a leader and a follower is the two basic kind of elements to it. And so, you know, you learn how to be a better leader in dance, or, you know, you even learn how to accommodate followers that have different skills, you know. So, it's always different. Every single time you go out, it's different. But the truth, the core truth is the energy is fantastic. I mean, just the people you can meet and what they stand for in that moment is very unique. I've not found it in anything else in my life.

And when you run into people who they These, these all sound like people who are already into and excited about dancing. When you run into people who aren't, how do you inspire them to give it a try?

Well, usually people think of dance as something you do in school as a child, you know, and, um, there, there's nothing more liberating than seeing adults who have tremendous burden, right? If you're a parent, you have burden of raising children, or you're a professional, you have burden in your job and all these stresses that come with being an adult. And when you finally convince somebody like, hey, just go try this, and they're very reserved about it in the beginning, and then you finally see them have that moment where there's just this unadulterated joy that they are experiencing, it almost feels like they've found something that they've lost or forgotten about. Like, it is possible to have carefree moments as an adult. And it's wonderful.

I like the way you put that. It is possible to have carefree moments. That's, that's a very good, that's like a great takeaway for everybody that's listening right now. Even for me, I'm like, yeah, it is possible to have carefree moments. That's really cool. So you, you've already mentioned Australia and traveling around the world. How did you, I think a lot of people are often sort of wonder like, how does somebody, where did you grow up, Tom?

I grew up in Arizona and then I went to university in upstate New York. At the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Okay. And, and what I was going to say before I interrupted myself was I think a lot of people sort of wonder, how does somebody get started traveling the world or working in, you know, Australia or Asia or wherever? I, I don't remember all the places you've been, but how did that get going for you?

I've always loved to travel. You know, when I moved from Arizona to New York, it was a very eye-opening experience just inside of America, the number of cultures that we have. You know, I think a lot of people tend to think that America is one kind of flavor, and it's not. It's a lot of different cultures that you can experience. So, you know, for me, the way it happened is I started— dance was my catalyst, and it was— I was living in Rochester, so I would travel to this city and that city or go spend a weekend in Chicago or New York or Florida, Atlanta, it doesn't matter. And I just, I found this kind of desire to experience all these different cultures, you know, and I made that part of my, I guess my core identity is going and experiencing cultures in different cities. And I was working for the federal government at the time and doing computer security. And I just had this burnout moment where I'm like, you know, I do this like security stuff for incredibly critical assets, right? And, you know, nuclear power plants, Pentagon, State Department offices, that kind of stuff. And I just got burned out and said, I'm going to leave the country. I'm going to go live somewhere else and have that experience. And so I, you know, packed my bags and said, what are the countries I can be a dual citizen of? And so I moved to Australia. I just love the life outlook in Australia. And so I lived there for almost 10 years. And, you know, how did I get to Australia at the time? It was very fortunate for me. You know, you look back and things that seemed easy, but in retrospect, I was just uninformed about how difficult it was. Right. So it didn't, it didn't faze me, right? It's the burden of knowledge, right? But I moved to Australia and ended up having a job that had me traveling all over Asia Pacific to different countries. And again, I would go there for work for, you know, 2 days and I would take a day on either end and go experience that culture as well.

That makes sense. The, the change from Arizona to Rochester, I assume you went to, I think you went to Rochester. It was a technical school, right? Like, like the MIT.

RIT.

RIT, right?

Yeah.

Rochester. I thought I knew it was something like MIT. So was that a, was that an intentional thing for you? Like you knew you, did you know what you wanted to be when you went there, Tom?

Pretty much. I mean, I've always been into the computer field since I was kind of very little. I remember buying, working really hard and buying my dad a 1-megabyte RAM chip for his computer for Father's Day or his birthday or something. And, you know, I just remember being so proud to like do that for my dad and figure out how it all worked and what I had to buy. And so when I went to RIT, you know, I knew I wanted to be in the field of computers and this was right when the internet was kind of booming. So when I was 18, well, I actually started when I was 17 in my first year when I was 18 and I actually couldn't afford to go there. Was more expensive than my family had money to pay. But at the same time, I went there as part of this thing called Computer Science House, which is like, RIT has these things, it's like frats but for special interests, right? So they had Computer Science House or Engineering House, et cetera. And so I went to Computer Science House and wow, I was blown away. Like the kids at this kind of social program in RIT, we're doing just amazing things, right? When, you know, all these technology standards are being developed and we're like inventing this stuff as we go. And for example, we had a vending machine, like a drink machine, and a bunch of, you know, smart kids figured out how to put a computer in there so you could log into your computer from your dorm room and say, I want a Coke, and, you know, I'll be at the vending machine in 10 seconds. And so, it debits your account and you walk down the hall and ka-chunk, little Coke comes out of the vending machine. And so, it's just surrounded by all these people doing really, really interesting things and I just got hooked. I mean, the problem with being addicted to learning is you find something cool and you're like, "Oh, shiny object," and you go discover that. And for me, the two kind of core themes have always been either dancing or computer technology. That's kind of where I stayed. And as it turns out, the projects I did in that first year led me to be the youngest faculty staff at the university. So I started as full-time faculty staff right after my 18th birthday, which then allowed me to pay for my schooling, to do school full-time and work full-time.

No way. So at 18, you were teaching as a faculty member?

Well, RIT does faculty/staff as kind of one bucket. So I was on the staff side, not the teacher side. So I was running the computer systems for the campus on the software side of things and in the data center that we had on site. And, you know, at the same time we were building the, this, you know, super connected campus that everyone has today. But back then in the like mid-'90s, this is '95, not every dorm room had an internet connection, right? So at the same time, all that's going on and, you know, everyone's getting connected and I'm part of this computer, I'm actually chairman of this computer science house organization on one side, but I'm kind of running the campus systems on the other side and being a student taking classes from my teachers whose office is like next door to mine, you know, so I had a very unique early career that really took away a lot of the limitations from my mind about where you could go. you know, and I think a lot of people today in university, they go, they study, they do their thing and, and there's like this kind of structured approach and, and back then it was like catching glitter, right? There's just so much excitement around in the air and it was fun to just run around and, and collect as much knowledge and experience as I could.

That's another good catching glitter. I'm just, it's difficult to catch glitter. Yeah. There's so much of it. Yeah. Hey, Did I, I know that you got a patent early. I don't know if it was when you were still in college, Tom, tell us, tell us about that. Cause not that many people have patents first of all. And I know you got one at a relatively young age, right?

I only have one, like a filed and approved patent. I've tried for maybe 10, but I tend to try for really difficult ones. As opposed to like small, small ones. So the one patent I have with two other guys is a system that we developed about 10 years ago to kind of process records of something in real time. So it's, it's actually in the telecom industry. You know, if you think of the way billing works for your mobile phone, by law, they have to cut the bill off at the end of the month and then send you a bill. And what happens is the systems to generate that bill often they want to run it right to the end of the month, right? And oftentimes it takes 5 or 6 or 7 more hours after the end of the month. And so all that's kind of lost revenue because they've already issued the bill. You know, I invented a way with, again, with 2 other guys about how to do that in a very different way that allows it to run in seconds instead of hours. And the result of that is telecoms that use that technology can be significantly more profitable because they're not for giving, you know, roughly 5% of a phone bill every month for millions of customers.

And is that something that you ended up developing into a business, or did you, or was that in a business you had had at the time?

That was in a business.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That was in a business.

Yeah. So you go to Australia, you spend 10 years there, and you sort of intimated that you were, you know, working in, I think you were working in telecommunications. I think it might have been for Verizon, or at least part of your time there was for from Verizon. As I recall, you basically ended up being very successful at Verizon. Can you take us through that time and just get us up to speed on what happened while you were in Australia?

Yeah, yeah. So I moved over there. Again, I spent more than 10 years of my career in computer security. So being the ethical hacker, white hat guy, And, you know, my job was to, you know, test systems. And that's what I did for the federal government, ended up going to Australia. And a week after I got there, that company got acquired, which then got acquired again by Verizon. And, you know, I found myself in my late 20s being a regional director for Verizon across all of Asia Pac. So that was, of for cloud computing and security. And so I would go, you know, go around to the different parts of Asia and give speeches and do technology projects that would help, you know, our customers, whether they be banks or governments or anything with critical infrastructure that had some exposure and everything has exposure when it's online. So it's just a matter of how can you best reduce that? And, You know, it was really great. I mean, I learned a lot from both the process of being in a company that was acquired by Verizon as well as how large companies work versus small companies work. And, you know, my key takeaway there was large companies don't really innovate. They just scale things, right? So they, they tend to buy innovation that small companies create and they scale it to their footprint. And I remember one day, you know, I kind of had that realization and I remember one day I woke up and I felt like I've, you know, everyone has the analogy of climbing the corporate ladder, right? And I felt like I was really near the top of the corporate ladder and I was like, I think I climbed the wrong ladder. You know, I remember having that exact phrase in my head of like, this isn't what I want to do. Working for a big company anymore. Not, not because it wasn't good, but there's very little opportunity for me to learn at that point. It was really about, like you said, scaling something that already existed. And so I quit and I started my own company and started another company, you know, ran an incubator starting companies. So to date, I've been the founder, investor, or board member of about 70 companies. And I feel like that's been my home mentally is the idea generation, the scaling of an idea to something bigger. And at this point, it's now taking that, but doing that in a more meaningful way where meaning again is kind of people and planet. Like, how can I take my skill set and be the best contributor to the world that I possibly can be for myself, for my family, and for society at large.

And how many years are we talking about between you making this determination that you had climbed the wrong ladder to now? Just so I have a reference.

I'd say that was 15 years or so.

Okay.

All right. 18 years.

So, a lot's happened in 15, 18 years based on what you were just talking about. This whole climbing— the realization that you climbed the wrong ladder time. I feel like a lot of people might feel like they've climbed the wrong ladder, at least from time to time. And I would venture to say, and this is just a guess, but I would venture to say that most people— I'm just gonna say, get over it, right? They're like, oh, you know, I don't feel really great about what I'm doing right now, but what I'm doing right now is a big-time thing, like like what you were doing. And I don't know what I would do with myself if I didn't do this. And, you know, there's a lot of inertia, gravitational force keeping you in place, and I'm wondering how you broke away from that, because I think all humans would have at least some of it. So how did you, how did you handle it?

Well, again, because I had a very atypical start, professional career started when I was 18, right? And most people's professional career kind of starts in their late 20s, right? So I have 10 years more in my back pocket than most of the people of my similar position. And so because I was younger, I didn't have kids, I didn't have debt, you know, I didn't have any of the weight that I think a lot of people might feel. And so for me, it was a bit of a lighter decision to make. Because you know what, if I started a company and I was working at it for 2 years and it didn't work, I have an awesome experience set to go get another job. You know, I can, anyone can get another job. It's just a question of can you endure the pain of being a startup founder for some period of time? And that pain is not to be underestimated. It is painful. It's rewarding, but it's painful. It's lonely. It's very hard. And so if I had children when I started this journey or if I had huge student loan debts or all these other kind of issues, that pain may not have been the right choice. And so I think for me it was not a difficult one to make, but having talked to many thousands of entrepreneurs over my career, the commonalities I've heard is people want to change, they want to do their own thing, but they're afraid of the risk. And I'd say if that's your position, don't do it. It's okay to not fulfill every dream and goal that you have because at the end it's about the pursuit of happiness in life, in my opinion. And so you have to find what makes you happy. And if you can endure that pain and this is a path to happiness for you, then make sure you have a great support network and go for it and find the right mentors to teach you how to be a CEO instead of a founder. And that's the core truth that I try to embody in people is I would say I'm Alfred and I have a Batman factory because I help a founder become a CEO in a lot of ways because usually the founder is someone who understands a problem really well, But that doesn't mean they know marketing and legal and accounting and operations and HR. Like there's all these other domains of being a CEO that are outside of a typical founder's experience level. And so for me, because I started my own company a few times, it's okay to fail and I failed a bunch. And now with, you know, where I am with Redivider, it's a very different place. Like we have an amazing group of people around me. My co-founders, all of our advisors, you know, we have this kind of excellence approach to the thinking about stuff and that's really helped me.

And this, I'm just going to go on a little tangent here if you don't mind. You mentioned the pursuit of happiness and I've heard a lot of people talk about the pursuit of happiness and some I've heard say, you know, the founding fathers got a lot of stuff right, but what they didn't get right was this pursuit of happiness because the pursuit of happiness means that you are constantly, you can never be happy. In other words, you're always pursuing happiness as opposed to achieving happiness. And since you brought it up, I'd just like to get your take on that.

Well, yeah, so I guess to start off, I have one tattoo and it's on my hand.

Okay.

And it's on my hand for a reason. It's a, I don't know if you can see that. It's a question mark and an exclamation mark.

Oh, okay. Yeah, it's combined.

Yeah, it's called an interrobang. And the reason I have that tattoo is my only one. And while it's on my, why it's on my hand is I don't know where I'm going to end up, but I'm excited about the journey, right? That's the question and the exclamation mark. And so, so to answer your question, I'd say the, the pursuit of happiness doesn't mean that you're unhappy. But happiness can mean many different dimensions. It can be different kind of sizes as well. So you can be happy in your everyday life but feel sad that you're missing out on something bigger, right? So for me, it's always just trying to increase that in every aspect of my life, you know, from my family to my profession to, that's why I love helping entrepreneurs because it makes me happy to know that I can help someone on their journey.

Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks for showing us your tattoo. That was really, I've never seen a tattoo like that. That's really neat. And how do you spell that? What you called it?

It's called an interrobang. I-N-T-R-R-O-B-A-N-G. It's a very old glyph. Like, you know, the back when ink was expensive, they used to use it a lot. To mean both of those without needing ink for two symbols. Oh, I've just repurposed it artistically to kind of mean something else for me. But okay. Yeah, that's fun. I'm a typography nerd as well. So this is like a bit of a typography nerd for myself. It's, you know, exciting.

Okay. Typography nerd.

That—

I don't hear many people refer to themselves as that either. So that's pretty neat. And you're breaking a lot of ground with me today. This is good. When you What, uh, I just want to ask one more question about the government work. That, so it sounds like you were, and I don't know if you can actually talk about the work you did or not. If you can, great. But it sounds to me like maybe you were in this sort of highly classified type, doing highly classified type kind of work. And I'm wondering if, yeah, first of all, I don't know if that's true, so you can tell me if that's true. But how did you get recruited for that, or how did that happened for you right out of school?

Yeah. So I was working at RIT and, you know, this is at the time when everyone was stealing music and MP3s were like, you know, people were taking CDs and ripping them and giving them away for free on the internet. And I just got really hooked on this idea of security that all of a sudden everyone's world was upside down. You know, everyone's trying to connect all these systems to the internet to gain the, the new abilities of telecommunications. Uh, but at the same time, the security governance and kind of controls were not in place for the whole world. And this was just a wonderful time to be a part of that, of inventing technologies, learning how to defend things, building governance programs, compliance programs, threat models, you know, all kinds of stuff. So I left RIT to go work for Xerox in Rochester and literally full-time job of breaking into data centers. You know, we had data centers all over the world and remotely breaking into them, doing it in person, you know, lots of different kind of things. And from that work, I kind of got recruited to work on a few critical infrastructure projects for the government. And that led me traveling all over the place to these federal facilities about how we can put software in to better monitor things or control things or keep criminals out, that kind of stuff.

Gotcha.

It was just very, again, looking back now going, hey, I'm in my 20s and I'm working in the Pentagon. You know, it's, At the moment, it just felt like, well, that's what needs to happen. And looking back now, I was like, wow, okay, I was one of the very few people to have that kind of experience. And it all stemmed from me just doing projects that were, I don't know about cutting edge, but they were meaningful and they were making a major difference in terms of protecting the country. So it was great. It was very difficult and it was very stressful. I cannot possibly convey the stress level of trying to secure critical infrastructure at that level, which is why, you know, like I said, I got burned out. Everyone gets burned out. And to pick up and move to Australia, but then do that for Verizon at a corporate level, I kind of, you know, I felt like I took a little breather, but then it got worse again because now I'm doing it for different governments in different places or large multinational companies. And just, just very exciting.

And we talked about you, you know, realizing that you climbed the wrong ladder. And when we talked the first time, you said to me that being an entrepreneur is like a drug for me. So you determine, you determine that you're on the wrong ladder. You decide you're going to become an entrepreneur. You talked a little bit, or you, you mentioned a little bit about the pain that accompanied that decision and maybe still does from time to time. So how did it become a drug? Because it wasn't something that you engaged in before. It doesn't sound like it, at least. How did it become a drug? And how has the drug of being an entrepreneur helped you deal with the pain of being an entrepreneur?

Yeah, I mean, these are very deep philosophical questions, and I would say being an entrepreneur entrepreneur is not for everybody. You know, everyone has different things that they need in their life and things that they want in their life and things they want to avoid in their life. And being an entrepreneur is not for everyone and that's okay in the same way that I wouldn't want to have a job where I did the same thing every single day. That's not for me. I would get bored and go stir crazy. But for other people, that's what they look for. And that's great if that's where their happiness takes them, that they use the idea of doing something every single day. So when they're not at work, they can explore themselves outside of work. That's fine. But for me, I love inventing the future. I love the idea that the future is unwritten and we all have the ability to see a potential future. And for me, the drug of being an entrepreneur is trying to test that and see if it's real. Right. And the really great entrepreneurs in my experience are addicted to the problems but not the solutions. Right. So if you invent something and you have this product and you're just so proud of what you built, you're going to try to convince yourself and everybody else that that future is real. Even if it's not, even if it's a terrible idea and just an easy example, I've had pitched to me probably 100 times or more of this idea of like, well, we'll optimize parking spots in different cities, right? Where parking is difficult. And for some reason, first-time entrepreneurs love this concept, but it just doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter. Like it's not meaningful to anybody. But because it's novel, like a bent fork, it's unique, but it doesn't mean it's useful. So the addiction to being an entrepreneur is testing the, being addicted to the problem, like what problem are you really trying to solve? And again, just to use redivider for a second, the gap between the computing that we require and the quality of life of humanity, you think would go up and down together because they're so tightly coupled. The truth of it is the gap gets wider. Humanity is not improving on a number of metrics, core metrics, as our computational demand increases. And that's one of the core problems that I want to try to solve for. And so I don't care if I have one solution, it doesn't work, then I'm going to create another one and another one. And you end up version controlling your way into something that really does solve a meaningful problem. And so the pain that you feel along the way is you have to deal with the fact that most of the ideas you have to solve that problem are gonna fail because they probably suck. And, but going through that pain lets you shake it off and reset and try something else and keep trying until you get to the place where you, you've done something amazing.

I think I love that you, the way you shared that, that, um, the best entrepreneurs are addicted to the problems, not to the solutions, and the example that you gave, because I think that's something that people really have to keep in mind. You can have a cool solution to something that nobody cares about and it doesn't do anything for anybody, like the parking thing you, you mentioned, and That's, it's like you're just, but that's just barking up the wrong tree sort of thing instead of questioning yourself as to the real core of what entrepreneurs are built to do, right? Make someone's life better or make the world better or—

Yeah. And this came from Elon Musk, so I'm not trying to steal it, but I think it's beautiful. You either need to have a major solution for a small set of people, or if you're going to solve a small problem, it had better be for a huge number of people. And first-time or second-time entrepreneurs tend to not hit either of those buckets. They tend to solve a small problem for a small set of people, which no one cares about. So, you know, it's, you've got to kind of pick where you want to go. And again, if you focus on the problem instead of the solution, you can eventually get there. If you have the grit to go all the way to the end. And if not, and you say, hey, I tried 50 versions to solve this problem, I'm not the person to do it. That's also okay because that means that your capacity is to solve a different problem, not that one. And that's fine. You know, like in my career, I've solved a bunch of different problems to varying levels of success or failure. And it's only now after, again, we'll just call it 70. I don't know if it's 65 or 72, whatever the number is. Only after doing this 70 times have I found the true calling for me, which is trying to deliver energy as impact by, you know, the computing resources that are growing at an exponential rate, doing that in the most sustainable way possible to be better for our planet and doing it with tremendous social impact to improve the communities in which we operate. Like it took me 70 times to figure out that I don't want to take a small piece of a bunch of companies. I want to devote my existence to this idea.

Yeah. But you are still exploring during that time, these 70 or more problems that you thought might lead to this kind of impact, right?

So you, yeah, I guess my, in some cases I'm I'm supporting Cas for somebody else's journey, right? Like I'm on the board of a company that is called Pebblebee that does these amazing tracking technology, like little keychain thing or wallet tracker. They were the first in the industry. They've got tons of patents. Like, you know, that founder, I'm like riding shotgun on his journey for that, right? Wherever I can support and be helpful because of my experience. But Redivider is my journey. You know, it's the one for the journey of my co-founders, all of our advisors and investors. You know, we, we have this kind of shared vision and belief about what we can do.

Okay. So explain to us what Redivider does.

Essentially, it's a data center company done a wildly different way. When everyone started working from home in what, 2021, the fabric of the internet kind of broke. right? It used to be a huge data center with a really big internet pipe to a downtown building full of people. And now everyone's working from home and I think that's here to stay. Well, the whole idea of where computing happens is fundamentally different. And so Redivider was born with this idea of what's called edge computing. So taking a, a smaller form factor data center, building it in a factory on like an assembly line to get higher efficiency, higher quality, lower cost, and putting that data center in thousands of locations instead of dozens of big locations. And it's there to kind of augment what's already there. But the beauty of having a blank sheet of paper and trying to solve for the problem is as we went through this process, the data that we ingested 2 big things always came out. One is it's not— the data center industry is not sustainable. And the easiest showcase of that is if you type in Bitcoin mining into Google, you just get this rap sheet of how it's so bad for the planet. But really, that's the canary in the coal mine for the data center industry in totality, right? It consumes 3% of the world's power. That's going to increase dramatically. The amount of data that we're going to use is going to be 5x what it is today by 2025. So the sustainability of every piece of data we create and the fact that one piece of data gets copied, copied, copied, copied to make hundreds of versions of it all over the place just creates this unsustainable future. And that's one that we want to solve for. You know, how do we, how do we have power generation that's clean? How do we build carbon accounting so we can at least measure the embodied carbon that we have as our footprint? How do we improve on that measurement? How do we align it to the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals that are these mandates for all these board-level initiatives? You know, every major company in the world stands up and says, we want to be zero, net zero by 2050.

Yeah.

Okay. Well, at the same time, you're trying to 4x your computing requirements and it has as much carbon emission as the entire airline industry. So you're kind of, you're one side is trying to meet the demands of the business. The other is trying to meet the goals of the business. And Redivider was like the, the solution that we ended up putting together is trying to solve that problem by Building these modular data centers, putting them in lots of places, focusing on sustainability, and at the same time contributing to these communities in which we operate for job creation, education, you know, taking our waste products of hot air and hot water and designing a greenhouse that gets, you know, operated by the community that can help change the relationship children have with food. You know, if you think deep enough about some of these core issues, you, you, all these solutions can exist. And that's what Redivider is here to do is, is really use the growth in computing to satisfy board needs of net zero by 2050 and do so with high social impact.

Okay. So let's get into how that happens. I think you explained the why pretty good. I think the, the how— so you've, right now you've got these big data centers, you're taking a factory approach. And it's, it, to me it's, and I know it's not at all the same, but it's kind of like, uh, there's a big thing now, there's a company called Blockable that I'm invested in. They're building homes inside of a factory, not, not mobile homes, but maybe you're familiar with Blockable, right?

So they Yes.

Yeah. So, so you're bringing that same mindset to, to the data processing with this edge computing thing. You're going to put them in a bunch of locations instead of a central one, and I'm sure they're going to be powered differently, and we'll talk about that. But I'm wondering, just for the people who, like me, who are just— I don't even understand why is it better for it to be closer than it is for it to be central, for example. And how does that help us?

It brings a number of benefits, and I'll use an example of a smart city, right? So today you live in a city that's growing and you have a lot of issues, right? There might be traffic congestion, there might be homeless considerations, there might be all these kind of social programs or green space parks for kids or just city planning where they're going to put routes for new homes or commercial, right? Those have some major opportunities to use technology to do things better. And just on the traffic one, I'm not going to go into all the details, but just the traffic one, you could put a camera on a bunch of different kind of traffic lights and feed that data, that computer vision data, to be processed to say, hey, based on all this machine learning, what do we need to do with our traffic lights in terms of timing or road creation or allocation of resources to increase the happiness of people driving their car, right? If you're in traffic all day, every day at red lights, it sucks. You, you then are not your, your energy is not in the right place to then go to work and be like, oh, I'm having a great day. It's like you start off like, oh, I'm having a bad day. Yep. Yep. Yep. So if you can process all that computer vision data locally in the city with a small data center, is going to be significantly cheaper than paying to transport that data to a big data center, paying for a computer to deal with it, and then, you know, shuffling it back over here. That cost can be tremendous. And so the idea of it being local is a lot cheaper. It also means you've reduced your security concerns because that data is not transferring to a lot of different places. It's being held locally. And it also enables new things where, let's say you've got a manufacturing plant that wants to open up nearby. Hey, we're going to add this many jobs, this many people, this many vehicles, What does that do to traffic? Oh, well, the city can now say that that's not a great location. This one's better. Right? And so you can attract better businesses by having a smart city and all that can be fueled by data that's done in local proximity as opposed to in the air quote cloud.

Okay. And is the, if it's close by, I'm just assuming the latency would be less. It would be faster processing. Or no?

Yeah, yeah, latency is better. Another example is 5G. You know, we've all heard that 5G speeds are way faster. Yeah, well, technically that's true, but if the data you need access to isn't nearby, you still have to go and get it from far away and bring it back. So by moving the computing closer to the source of the data near the cell phone towers, well, now that promise of speeds becomes reality of better speeds and better experience.

Oh, okay. That's a good example because so 5G is faster, but if it has to make its way through all these other less fast, it doesn't seem faster. In other words.

That's right. Yeah. You could have the fastest connection to the tower possible, but if you then go through a construction zone to get where you need to go, it's going to be super slow, right? So there's layers and layers and layers of benefits. Of how edge computing is a great addition to what we have. And it's never going to replace these large industrial scale million square foot facilities, but in certain pockets, it's meaningful. And I'll just give one more example. The idea of areas that can't build large data centers like the state of Florida. There's always weather patterns that prevent investment of $2 billion. Like Google just announced a $2 billion facility they're going to build in Ohio. No one's going to invest $2 billion in a place that might get run over by a hurricane. But if the facilities are now smaller and they're way cheaper and you have hundreds of them, well, the hurricane might take out 5% of those facilities, but you have increased resilience because all these other ones are still operating and all the consumers in Florida will get faster speeds because that infrastructure that didn't pass the risk test now can be put in place in a wildly different way. So there's lots of examples like this of kind of where Redivider would deliver benefits. We're solely focused on doing them where we have high sustainability and high social impact.

And the, you mentioned the amount of electricity that data centers use. I think that most people don't have any awareness of that and the growth of it. You know, everybody knows what ChatGPT is now, but large language models and just AI in general, I don't think most people understand the amount of computing energy it, the amount of energy it takes for that kind of computing. They also, you, I also mentioned the heat, the amount of heat that's produced from making these, right? So that has to be cooled. So that's more energy being used. How do you get around the energy part of the, the equation?

So yeah, just to give you some stats on your question, there. So the total data center power consumption in 2019, 2020 was 286 terawatt hours. So let's ignore the scale because that's mind-bogglingly large. It's going to go to 1,000 terawatt hours by 2030. So we're going to 4x the amount of power this industry needs, which is already taking 3% of the world's power, right? So it's an enormous, enormous, enormous growth. And by doing these in these large physical centers, you have to have a lot of that power in one place. So, you know, I, I wrote a, a thought piece on, on LinkedIn maybe last week, and the reality is the renewables that are getting added to our power grid are generally non-dispatchable. Which just means they're kind of localized, right? Wind works in certain areas, solar works in certain areas only in certain times of day, you know, so it's hard to build these large facilities that have 24/7 baseload requirements and still do it with renewables. So, you know, my LinkedIn piece basically like, I think unless humanity changes course, we're going to have to turn back on coal power plants. To meet our computing requirements. And that's bad. Like we don't want to do that, but that 4x growth is huge. So the idea for Redivider is if you look at the power grid, most people think of it as like a unit of one, like there's the US power grid. The reality is it's hundreds and hundreds of interconnected systems. And within those systems, there's often little pockets of power that you can tap into that's being unused or wasted. So if there's 1 megawatt of power over here, we can put a data center there that's currently going to waste, or there's a solar farm or wind farm that has excess power where we can put a data center there. And the city planning to use that power is going to be in 20 years. So 10 years from now, when the city planning catches up, we can say, all right, well, now that community gets faster access because our data center is there, or because it's modular, we can put it on a truck or a train and move it somewhere else. And so we haven't wasted the asset investment to then decommission it to have people live there. And the most shocking around all of this is water, the water consumption. So you mentioned ChatGPT, you know, the average conversation with ChatGPT consumes about half a liter of water. So like a single-use water bottle for one conversation. So the idea that water consumption is so heavily used by the data center industry, yet cities like Phoenix are saying no new housing because there's no more water. We just have this conflict of doing more large facilities, because these facilities take such enormous resources. So by making them smaller, we can put them in more places. We can reduce that resource need in one location, yet still help meet the capacity growth that consumers want.

And from a modularity, you mentioned you can put them on a train or a truck or whatever. Where does it go? What kind of structure does it need to be housed in? Can it be in an existing building that's just in the city like you were mentioning before, the city example, or what, where does it have to go?

Well, that's what we've spent years kind of designing and thinking about is how we do all the different scenarios. So our approach is to have a library of modules that cater to different use cases. So some of them would go what's called a building in a building. Where everything that comes off the assembly line is a building. You know, it is a— oh, okay, a metal structure building. But in some cases, those metal structure buildings are designed to go inside of another building. Like, you have a big concrete warehouse that has power. Maybe it was a commercial bakery that had 2 megawatts of power. Well, we don't want to tear the building down, so we'll design it a little more low cost. It doesn't have to be exterior rated, and we put it inside of that brick building. In other cases where it is going to be weather dependent, like I mentioned in Florida, well, it's got to be a hurricane-rated building. Great, we're going to have that line build that unit. And this other campus, it actually has 10 megawatts of power that we can put there. So instead of having a module of 1, we can make 10 modules, for example, that would then get bolted together on the site.

Okay, so you can, you can chain them together, I guess, sort of thing to build. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

And where, where are you now with your technology? Are you building systems now? Do you have systems on the ground in places where Where are you in the development stage of the company?

Yeah, so we, again, we started in 2021. Well, we incorporated in 2021. We started in 2020, but 2021 is where we started. And we have our first facility that is our kind of showcase facility that uses a bunch of different technologies on how this all works. So that's installed. At our first facility. We're still waiting for that to go live, which would be in the next kind of 30 to 60 days here. So it's very, very exciting times for us after years of hard work. And then it's back to the supply chain. You know, this is the supply chain derivative business when you talk about doing things in a factory. So we've been lining up all of our kind of allocations for different components that go into a data center. So that we can put them through the pipeline and they can come out the other end. And our goal against that is probably 18 months from now, we want to be in a place where we can go from a piece of land to a live operating data center within 30 days.

Oh, no way.

The typical period is a construction project, right? So it's like a 2-year build and you know, all this stuff. And we just don't think that's going to get the industry where it needs to go, not even close. So, you know, our goal of going from dirt to live in 30 days is a very big, hairy, audacious goal. And we're excited about it.

And where are you building these or where are you going to build them?

They're being built in Colorado right now. And probably next year we look to open another facility on the East Coast. To manufacture on both coasts because obviously transporting, transporting a data center on a truck is a huge expense that adds no value to what we're actually doing. So we want to reduce the transport cost, but we've been really focused on the library, getting the different module types put together and thought through, getting our infrastructure in place for the supply chain. And you know, the, the next cab off the rank next year would be expanding the throughput.

Okay. And maybe this would be the last question, Tom, but I'm wondering, as you look, you're a guy that's used to looking into the future and trying to solve problems that will become bigger in the future. And, you know, the gap between humanity and computing, for example, have it not be, widening instead of— I think that's what you said— instead of— so, but so I'm curious what you think. I've heard a little bit, and I'm not nearly an expert, but like this LK99 thing that's supposed to maybe compute without the heat. I'm wondering, and I've heard about people who want to take solar and they want to like take the solar power, condense it, and use it to cool data centers. I've heard about people doing something similar to you, but you seem like a way step up, you know, building data centers in shipping containers, you know, and putting them in different places. Is there something on the horizon that would help reduce— well, fusion too, I guess, I suppose. But is there something on the horizon that you see that could potentially in a very meaningful way impact the amount of energy needed and/or heat produced that would complement what you are doing now and help solve this very large problem of carbon and just a lot of energy being used? It's so funny that you mentioned nobody mentions computing power. They mentioned EVs, right? And then you go, I got it. In California, you're going to have to have EVs by this date, but then they've got rolling blackouts on because it can't power everything now. And just imagine if it's 4x on the computing power alone, and let's just say it's 10x on EVs. Where are you going to, where are you going to? Yeah. So what's your futuristic take on that?

Yeah. America has always had this NIMBY mentality, right? Not in my backyard. That's true for garbage and recycling that we ship off to other countries. It's true for oil, where we're willing to buy oil from third countries, third-party countries, as opposed to doing it in our own country. That would have far more environmental benefit and far more national security. And that NIMBY problem America is going to have to deal with. You're going to have to decide, do you want to Do you want to use TikTok or do you want to put more power generation in your backyard? Because the two are not compatible. And again, I don't believe solar is the right solution for baseload things like data centers. Solar is great for your house. I mean, it's amazing for your house. Wind is great in some cases, but not all cases. But I'm really bullish on the hydrogen economy. Been a long time coming, but it's the only thing that we can consistently do that if we can produce enough hydrogen in a lot of different form factors, there's lots of ways to do it, but produce that hydrogen and have an entire hydrogen economy that powers baseload industries like concrete or steelmaking or data centers or, you know, you name it, that, that has to be the path forward. Forward. And I think there's a lot of ways that we could do that, but all of them depend on kind of two limiting factors. One is regulation. You know, so for example, with nuclear, there's plenty of nuclear technologies out there, plenty of solutions to real problems that the regulations of America don't really allow them to go forward. So I think as citizens of America, we have to decide, do we want that or not? And if we do, we need to lobby our governments to change those regulations. So the power generation is on the regulatory side is one, and then the power operators is a whole other situation. Our grid is super old, it's very fragile, and I don't think it is the path forward. I think the grid is If you mentally consider the grid legacy that you have to interact with, but you don't have to improve, the number of solutions that open up are tremendous. And for example, with Redivider, we see power as kind of the critical problem. So our business is really two, twofold. One is the data center side and the other is onsite power generation because we've realized we can't just connect to the grid. And cross our fingers that it's going to be okay. So doing onsite power generation with a technology called microgrid island, where everything is connected to itself, but that doesn't necessarily connect to the outside world. We really think counties and cities and states that already have deregulated energy markets, deregulated gas markets, we think those are going to be the front runners that end up powering new economies because that's where these kind of onsite power generation technologies can be applied. And then we don't have to worry about the grid. Let the grid go at its 20 to 50 year replacement cycle and we can operate in a 1 to 5 year build cycle and be a lot further along than if we waited for everybody else.

Gotcha. So you're, you're basically saying we need things that complement the grid. They're accretive to the grid, not dependent on the grid. Is that fair to say? That's right. Okay. Well, you're doing some big stuff here, man. It's, it's a, yeah, it's really amazing. I've had a good time exploring not just your story, but then here, you know, in the last 20 minutes or so when we've really dug into Redivider. This is very interesting to me and I hope it will be for everybody. Tom, before we go, is there anything that I should have asked you or you would like to leave us with before we end the podcast?

You know, I think it really, the only thing I would add is, you know, the use of technology is the driver of a lot of these sustainability problems. And, you know, do you need all the technology you have today or are you oversubscribed to technology? You know, and I think that's a very personal question. For everybody, but it's one that's super relevant to think about. You know, if we want to continue this path as an entrepreneur or as just a consumer of using layers and layers of new technology, using AI to do things that we've never done before, then we have to ask, you know, at what cost and how do we deal with that cost? And I think a lot of people right now are very excited since ChatGPT came out about the potential of AI, but they're probably not as supportive of what it takes to get there, right? And, you know, that's an open question. Again, be excited about the journey and, you know, that's, I hope, something everyone can bring in their journey is exploring a little bit about what it takes to do that and making sure, you know, you understand the implications.

Yeah, it just made me think, Tom, that you mentioned NIMBY, you know, not in my backyard. So we have this sort of very unique, what's the right word? Dichotomy. I don't want anything in my backyard that could mess with me, but I want everything in my front yard that makes my life better.

Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And the, If you look into the data, if you really want to like go down a rabbit hole with me, since 1971, the amount of power we consume versus the population growth is bifurcating, right? So we're not adding as much power as we are people. And that's true in America. That's true from almost every developed country. And at what point does that break? And I feel like right now, is that moment that it's breaking, and we'll see what happens because of that. I mean, the next— if you are into technology, there's two awesome times to be alive so far. One, when the internet was created, and literally right now today. And it's exciting to see where this goes. But unfortunately, this time around, it may not end— well, I guess if you look at the dot-com bust, it was kind of similar, but it may not end in a very positive way if we're not careful.

Got it. All right. Well, that's a great thing to leave us with. Potential future best time, second or second best time. That's great. And you're there. So thank you so much for driving that and for being on the show. I really enjoyed getting to know you and exploring this. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great.

All right, everybody who's listening, I hope you took a lot away from this episode. Look up Redivider, redivider.co, and get educated about what's going on here because this is a big deal and it is going to impact everybody. And it's great to see folks like Tom and others doing the hard work of of trying to come up with a problem or come up with solutions to real problems as opposed to coming up with solutions that don't solve a problem like the example he gave us earlier. And do me a favor, please make today one of those days that you maximize the greatness that's inside of you and that you work on making your future your property, something that you own and are very proud to own. Till next time, thanks. Hey everybody, thanks for listening to the show. And before you go, I just have 3 requests for you. One, if you like what I'm doing, please consider subscribing or following the podcast on whatever podcast platform you prefer. If you're really into it, leave me a review, write something nice about me, give me 5 stars or whatever you feel is most appropriate. Number 2, I've got a book. It's called Ownership: How Getting Selfish Got Me Unstuck. It's an Amazon bestseller and I'd love for I would love for you to read it or listen to it on Audible or wherever else, Barnes Noble, Amazon. You can get it everywhere. If you're looking for inspiration that will help you unlock your greatness and potential, order or download it today so that you can have your very own copy. And if you get it, please let me know what you think. Number 3, my newsletter. I do a newsletter every Thursday and I talk about things that are interesting to me and or I give more information about the podcast and the podcast guests that I've had and the experiences that I've had with them. You can sign up for the podcast today at my website, which is my name, mikemalatesta.com. You do that right now, put in your email address, and you'll get the very next issue. The newsletter is short, thoughtful, and designed to inspire, activate, and maximize the greatness in you.