The Entrepreneurs for Impact Podcast: Transcripts
#125:
Disrupting 50% of Global Electricity Use with New Electrostatic Motors — Matt Maroon, CEO of C-Motive Technologies
PODCAST INTRODUCTION
Matt Maroon: What we're developing is a totally different physics behind how motors work. 99.9% of what exists in the world uses magnetic forces to do that energy conversion from electricity to mechanical power. What our two co-founders discovered was something that Ben Franklin did almost 300 years ago now where he uses static electricity instead of magnetic forces to create motion and that's what we've developed. Static forces give you a whole lot better efficiency. Everyone did LED lighting 10 years ago. Motors are the next thing that is going to make the same level of improvement of switching from fluorescent lights to LED lights.
PODCAST INTERVIEW
Chris Wedding: Welcome to the Entrepreneurs for Impact podcast. My name is Chris Wedding. As a former environmental private equity investor, four times founder, climate tech CEO, coach and professor, I launched this podcast to share the entrepreneurial journey, practical tips and hard-earned wisdom from CEOs and investors tackling climate change. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. This is the number one way that listeners can learn more about the climate CEOs and investors I interview. All right, let's get started.
My guest today is Matt Maroon, CEO of C-Motive Technologies. Matt is a six-time veteran of cleantech startups. And by the way, you know that's true because we call it cleantech, not just climate tech. Developing and selling new technologies from advanced batteries to energy-optimizing artificial intelligence software with a goal of improving society's efficient use of resources and reducing environmental impact.
C-Motive is the first and only company commercializing sustainable, high-efficiency motor technology using electrostatic principles to decarbonize stationary industrial and e-mobility applications. Their investors include Prime Impact Fund, Collaborative Fund, and Starlight Ventures.
In this episode, we talked about how motors consume 50% of all the world's electricity, despite how oblivious we all are to this fact including me. The fact that 2% of a motor's life cycle cost are attributed to its upfront cost that is CapEx versus its OpEx. The whopping size of the motor market at $100 billion in sales per year. Their efficiency at 90% going to 95% compared to most motors which average 50-70%. The utility in industrial applications at less than 500 RPMs, especially in geographies with higher power prices. And of course, how dudes with long hair and climate tech need to stick together. Anyway, lots more here. Hope you enjoy it and please give Matt and C-Motive a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks.
03:16
Matt Maroon, CEO at C-Motive, welcome to the podcast.
Matt Maroon: Hey, thanks, Chris. Great to be here.
Chris Wedding: So, listeners don't know this because they're not seeing us chat, but as we joked, it's nice to hang out with another long-haired dude in climate tech. We got to stick together as you say, right?
Matt Maroon: Yeah. We have to stick together. I had told everybody that I was not going to cut my hair until we raised the latest equity round. We raised the round and yet my hair continues to keep growing, so I don't know where the endpoint is on this one.
Chris Wedding: Yeah. Maybe it's an omen. It's a sign of good luck. I think you just keep growing.
Matt Maroon: Just keep it going?
Chris Wedding: Yeah, keep it going. So, to start us off, you shared a stat earlier, which I think is worth repeating, which is around 50% of all electricity that we consume globally, I think, it is consumed by motors. I think it's easy for us to imagine, like I think about a motor in my car, perhaps, I think most of us do not think about all of the motors in industrial settings or fulfillment centers, et cetera, where it sounds like the numbers can be much higher. So, just go a little deeper in how big this problem slash opportunity is around the efficiency of motors.
Matt Maroon: So, if you just start with like your personal life and think about from the time you wake up in the morning to the time you go to bed, how many motors you interact with or rely on, but never ever think about it. So, for me, the tiny little motor in my electric toothbrush in the morning, the pump in my coffee, also my coffee grinder, the pump for my coffee maker, let alone the compressor in my refrigerator, the fan, whether it's my air conditioner running or my furnace, the motor in my old Toyota Prius that I'll be handing down to my daughter here in a couple of months, all of these things, you simply take for granted.
It's just there and you're like, “Well, of course, my furnace turns on. Of course, my refrigerator keeps my food cold,” but it all relies on very humble, often ignored electric motors. In the industrial world, that problem or that opportunity is just as big if not bigger. So, you walk into the grocery store and how many motors do you think are powering the compressors on those refrigerators? Or every box that you get delivered from the US Postal Service or FedEx or UPS or Amazon, probably traveled miles and miles and miles on conveyor belts, all powered by motors to keep the thing going. So, the motor industry is enormous. There's a hundred billion dollars of motors sold annually and, like you said, 50-plus percent of all global electricity is consumed by a motor.
06:08
So, kind of wild when you think about it, just how ignored this fundamental thing is and how ignored by both like technologists, as well as ignored by the people that just take them for granted, that rely on them every single day. We're trying to address a pretty big problem here.
Chris Wedding: Well, unfortunately, we're telling everyone this little secret here on the podcast, but very large and ignored sources of impact or energy use, what a great place to start a business. Although the headline can sound boring, or unsexy, but boy, the opportunity there is pretty enticing. Yeah?
Matt Maroon: Yeah. Let me tell you, it is not the easiest introduction to venture capitalists to say, “Hey, we're going to go reinvent the industrial motor to quite have the cache.”
Chris Wedding: Yeah. Confetti.
Matt Maroon: But when you dig a layer deeper, then that's when people get excited. I don't know exactly how much technical detail you'd like me to get into, but just the quick high-level, what we're developing are a totally different physics behind how motors work. So, every motor that I mentioned earlier, 99.9% of what exists in the world uses magnetic forces to do that energy conversion from electricity to mechanical power. I trained as an engineer, but I wasn't a very good engineer, which is why I do what I do now. So, I will simplify it down to the level that I understand.
Chris Wedding: Nice.
Matt Maroon: So, a traditional motor, you pass electric currents through a bunch of copper coils inside of the motor. It's the same thing as the experiment you would do with your kid, where you take a copper wire and you wrap it around a nail. And then if you attach it to a battery, you create a little electromagnet, that's the exact same fundamentals that go into every single motor that exists today. But you pass that current through copper windings, you create a bunch of heat. It's a wildly inefficient system.
So, what our two co-founders discovered was something that Ben Franklin did almost 300 years ago now, where he uses static electricity instead of magnetic forces to create motion. And that's what we've developed and that's what we're going to be pushing out into the market later this year in 2023. Static forces give you a whole lot better efficiency, specifically tailored for a lot of these applications we're talking about in industrial apps. So, really can make a pretty big difference, net difference to overall companies’ energy efficiencies.
Chris Wedding: Okay, let's go to the origin story a little bit. I know you took the reins as CEO maybe a couple of years ago, but tell us the origin, and maybe after we go back in time, let's come back to the present time. What does it sound like or what does it look like to reach a potential customer and have this conversation they actually care about? But first, the origin.
09:13
Matt Maroon: All right, so our two co-founders, Justin Reed, who's our Chief Technology Officer, and Dan Ludois, who's our Chief Science Officer, they met in graduate school at UW Madison. So, they were both pursuing their doctorate degrees in electrical engineering. They were both looking for cool technology to work on as part of their graduate studies. And Dan very specifically was interested in electric motors and how, and why do we always do them this way? Why hasn't anyone ever tried to do something different? So, the two of them began working on the electrostatic motors while in graduate school and then spun that out into C-Motive right around 2013, 2014.
So, you can imagine a couple of fresh-faced graduate students working literally out of Justin's spare bedroom in his apartment for a couple of years. Fast forward to 2016, they were able to hire the first couple of engineers to join the team to do a little bit of preliminary design work. Fast forward again to 2019, this is when the company really, really got started.
So, 2019 is when the company raised a seed round of venture capital. It was led by Prime Impact Fund out of Boston and we have grown from there. I joined in 2020. I think there were six or seven other people here when I joined in 2020 and now fast forward to 2023, and we've doubled the size of the company. So, we're now technically 14 and a half people, still headquartered here in Madison, Wisconsin, but trying to execute that idea that Justin and Dan had while still in grad school.
Chris Wedding: Coming back to the present moment, if you will, you have the potential to talk to owners of large industrial facilities. I don't know, how easy is it to get their attention? What do conversation sound like with prospective customers? I'm sure it's not as easy because you know you can save 50% on your motors. Great. Where do I sign? Right?
Matt Maroon: Right. I mean, I wish it was that easy. Again, I think this comes down to, because motors have just been such a taken-for-granted technology for so long that no one thinks about how much better they could get or should expect out of the motors they have. An interesting statistic is that over the lifetime of a motor, only 2% of the cost is the upfront capital expense. The other 98% of the cost for a motor in its life is how much electricity you have to keep putting into it. But again, this is an industry that's been, I mean, pretty stationary, so to speak for the past couple of decades, or there has not been a ton of innovation that's gone into it. There've been incremental improvements to energy efficiency and a band-aid put on a problem here or there. But by and large, there's been no step change in technology or what people could expect.
So, the challenge we have with a lot of people is walking in and saying, “Hey, we can save you 50% on your electricity bill.” You got to get over that first, the shock value of, “Well, why haven't I heard about this before? Why is no one else doing it? Or why is it a company of 14 people out of Madison, Wisconsin that has seemed to crack this nut when no one else in the world has done it before?”
12:41
So, we’re targeting in our target audience to speak to, really two audiences. One, the people that are in charge of the sustainability for these large organizations that have been put in charge of setting and then meeting a roadmap for reducing their emitted carbon, whether that's scope one carbon in the products, the scope two carbon from energy or even scope three embodied carbon. Companies are now making these public commitments to shareholders. They have to do it and a lot of the low-hanging fruit has already been taken up.
People can buy wind racks or they can put solar on the roof, but until these large organizations really take a focus on reducing the amount of electricity they use, the amount of energy that they actually consume, they're always going to be chasing their tail in terms of hitting those sustainability targets. So, we want to meet with people that understand what those targets are and realize that this is a very low-risk way to reduce their overall carbon emissions.
And then the other people are, obviously, the operations managers, the CFOs, the people that are tracking how much they are actually spending on electricity costs. Everyone wants to know that they can get a payback in under two years and it's in almost all scenarios, we're able to deliver that sort of economic payback as well.
Chris Wedding: So Matt, just to repeat the stat you ran through, which is pretty stunning, if doing a life cycle cost assessment of a motor, only 2% of the entire cost is the cost of the motor itself. But I'm guessing that many facility owners, let's say, make a decision based on first cost, which is understandable yet myopic. Is that part of your challenge, I wonder?
Matt Maroon: Yeah, 100% and obviously not unique to C-Motive. I think every new hardware company that's selling something better, particularly when you're small, we're not going to be the cheapest motor to start with. We certainly will be building our way there and feel like we can get there, but absolutely the challenge is to get people to understand that, hey, a payback period in 12 months, 18 months, two years, is still better for you given how much electricity you're throwing away from the inefficiencies of your traditional motor.
Chris Wedding: Okay, so I'm going to ask a question, which I'm sure you've thought about a hundred times, but I'll ask it anyway. Given the kind of first cost concern, like they cost a little more, there's a couple of your payback or whatnot in some scenarios, have you all thought about, or is it in your plan to do a kind of efficiency as a service solution where you own the motors, but you provide cost savings essentially, it becomes an OpEx versus a CapEx for your customers maybe?
Matt Maroon: It's a great idea. It's on the long laundry list of things that we have to figure out still. And again, this is also part of the reason why we're also specifically trying to talk with people in charge of sustainability, because there is a dollar metric or a euro metric associated with how many kilos of emitted carbon you have in the scope to carbon emissions. So, we got to figure out, and again, it’s a challenge not unique to C-Motive, but everyone in the cleantech hardware space, how do you properly monetize these new technologies that bring value? Not just on your utility bill, but also bring value on carbon maintenance systems? I mean, there's a whole laundry list of things. So yes, we got to think about it. No, I don't have a really good answer for you right now.
16:28
Chris Wedding: Yeah, understood, long-term plan. So, your entry point is maybe like a VP or a chief sustainability officer, perhaps who understands both the carbon savings and the cost savings. Who do they get involved with next to get you to a yes?
Matt Maroon: The next step is really reaching down into the actual operations team. So, from the people that are responsible for doing the maintenance on the motors that they have right now for changing gearboxes or changing out belt systems, as well as those that are responsible for specing new equipment, you're going to expand your logistics facility. You need to add another two miles of conveyor systems. You can go to the conveyor manufacturers and there are many of them and specify, “Hey, I want to have a motor that meets these certain efficiency specifications,” or, “I want a motor that is permanent magnet-free and still meets these efficiency specs.”
We start with sustainability, then it really goes from there into the much more technical selling of, hey, here's how these things integrate, here's how they work, and here's how you would spec them with your suppliers.
Chris Wedding: Got it. And is there a scenario where you all don't do the selling, but instead you're brought in to the project through like an energy service company, like a Honeywell or someone?
Matt Maroon: Yes. Again, being a very small team, we're trying to maximize the amount of outreach that we can do, try to get to as many people as possible. So, a lot of our focus right now is on those end users, the VPs of the sustainability, or the chief sustainability officer to get them to understand. But there is also absolutely a push strategy here as well through system integrators. So, whether they're energy service providers, whether they are the people that are supplying the overall industrial automation equipment and the intelligence behind industrial automation, as well as the integrators that are building and selling the conveyor system, the material handling, the pumps, the compressors, et cetera. So, we've got a lot of work to do. There's a lot more people for us to reach out to than we can do with the limited time that we have, but you're absolutely right. It's got to be both end users and the suppliers as well.
Chris Wedding: For most of your end-use customers, do they have the sensing, monitoring capabilities such that after they put in your motors, they can be like, “Oh yeah, our electricity use is indeed lower for this motor,” versus just, I'm looking at my overall bill and trying to say, “Well, probably it's because of Matt's fancy motors,”?
19:17
Matt Maroon: My new motor? Great question. I think it's a pretty good mix of people that would just be looking -- Again, if you've always taken your motor for granted, why would you ever spend any more money monitoring actual motor performance? One of the interesting things that we've learned as we've talked to particularly bigger customers, they're the ones that are coming back and saying, “Well, we were shocked. When we actually monitored our facility, we were shocked to find out that 65% of our electricity was coming from motors.” So, we know people can do it, but I don't think that it is the norm at this point in time.
Chris Wedding: Okay. Let's go a little deeper into the types of customers that benefit the most from what you're doing. I think maybe you've referenced like an Amazon perhaps, maybe there are certain sectors, maybe it's a certain size of company, a certain geography that matters. Like if you were to profile your ideal customers with a few attributes, how would you describe them?
Matt Maroon: Geographically speaking, it really comes down to what people are paying for electricity right now. So, if you're in Europe and you're paying 20-30, I don't know, 35 euros cents per kilowatt hour for industrial power, obviously a much stronger motivation to do energy efficiency projects versus maybe being somewhere in the Midwest here in the US where you're still relatively inexpensive. So, we are looking for organizations that geographically are in those higher industrial cost rates for electricity, Europe, the Northeast, the United States, et cetera.
The type of organization, we are trying to find people that don't have a facility where they have one motor or two motors, but really those groups that have 100 or so. Motors running everything from pumps to conveyors to overhead fans because obviously the broader that you would adopt this new technology, the bigger your savings would be. The biggest real criteria though that we're focused on are the people that have made those public sustainability commitments.
The people that are actually monitoring and reporting against their scope to carbon emissions, those that understand really the critical nature of raw materials and are looking at -- And so, this is something that I've not discussed yet, but our motors do not use any rare earth metals, no permanent magnets. We use less than a tenth of the amount of copper that exists in a traditional motor. We do not use any electrical steel.
So, there is a real strong, not just a supply chain value proposition here, but for those that are really concerned about the availability of some of these raw materials, almost everything I brought up, almost 90% of them come from offshore. So, there are a number of organizations that look at, yeah, it's more efficient, will save me money, will save me my scope to avoid carbon emissions, but in addition to that, it's the better thing to do from an embodied carbon standpoint, from a raw material sourcing standpoint.
So, being a small company, giving these first demonstration units out into the field, we are really trying to find people that understand all of these different dimensions and aren't just
myopically focused just on the energy efficiency alone.
22:38
Chris Wedding: Yeah, sure. How about your team? What kind of skills, et cetera, comprise your team today? What kind of team members will you be looking for?
Matt Maroon: It is not a stretch to say that the world's center of competency for electrostatic motors sits right here in Madison, Wisconsin. There's no one else in the world working on electrostatic motors. So, the know-how, the 100-plus years of combined experience, makes this pretty unique as compared to a lot of other places. We are today pretty heavy on technology, as you would expect, pretty heavy on electrical and mechanical engineering.
There is a chemistry element to our product as well. And again, we haven't gone into a lot of the details of the science, but there's a very strong electrochemistry aspect to what we're building here. So, we also have organic chemists, synthetic chemists, as well as organic chemists, or I think I said organic twice there.
Chris Wedding: That's how important it is. Yeah.
Matt Maroon: Exactly and how little I understand about it too. As we look to expand in the coming year, the focus is really going to be on commercial and kind of operations. So, we need to get the message out, we need to talk to more people, we need to get demo units out in the field. And from there, in a hundred-billion-dollar motor marketplace, we're not going to be selling one motor or 10 motors. We're expecting purchase orders for thousands of motors, and so scaling up and getting those quality systems in place, and getting our supply chain in place, all of that critical operation is going to be the next phase of growth for the company in the next two years.
Chris Wedding: All right. I'm going to open the door and if you want to walk through that door and geek out on the science of your product, you’re invited, man.
Matt Maroon: All right, I'll do it super quick, and again, this is the best that I understand too. So, I described early on, traditional motors are all based on magnetism. You take electric currents, you pass it through copper windings, it creates a magnetic field and that's how you create motion from electricity. We're using static cling, so it is the same force that if you took a balloon and rubbed it against a wool sweater, you can feel that electric field charge up on the surface of the balloon. That's the force that we're building up inside of our motors. We are just magnifying that force tens of thousands of times.
So, we use printed circuit boards for our rotors, which are the rotating disks in our machine, and the stators, the stationary parts of it. Common off-the-shelf printed circuit boards, you can literally get them made anywhere from all the standard materials. We align a number of these rotors and stators. They kind of look like vinyl albums. They're about 10 inches in diameter, and 25 centimeters in diameter. We put anywhere from seven to 20 of them in a row to get the right amount of power that we need out of it, and then we fill our motors with the chemistry that I was just describing. So, our motors are filled with this proprietary dielectric fluid. And so, the primary purpose of the fluid is that it acts to magnify the electric fields that we generate on the inside of the machine. So, the better the fluid, the greater the strength of the electric field, the more torque output, the higher the efficiency of the motor.
26:12
We've got a long roadmap of, where we're at today is not the end point for what this motor is going to be in the future. We're going to continue to get more torque density out of the machine, more twisting force per unit weight. We're going to continue to drive the efficiency from, today we're at 90%, we'll be moving up to 95 plus percent in the future. And that's compared to a traditional motor that when you attach a gearbox to it or a belt drive system, it could be anywhere from 50-70% net efficiency. So, we're starting already better and we've got a pretty solid roadmap of technical work ahead of us that will get us to levels that simply can't be achieved by traditional magnetic machines.
I guess we're focused on low-speed applications. So, you're not going to find our motors inside of a Tesla Model 3. We're focused on applications where the rotating speed of the machine is less than 500 RPMs. And so, that's where we win, those are the applications we're focused on, and all of these industrial applications I've been talking about, that's where they fit.
Chris Wedding: Perfect. Well, I was going to joke and say that like any good CEO, you went from tech and turned it into selling. Well done.
Matt Maroon: I know. God, if 20-year-old Matt could see me now, I'd hate myself.
Chris Wedding: No. I have probably joked on this podcast before that when I was an undergrad environmental science major, one of my mentors, a professor was like, “Well, what do you want to do later?” And I was like, “I mean, academics for sure.” And he's like, “Well, why not the private sector?” I was like, “Oh, man, sales are terrible. I just hate sales, they’re so gross and slimy, whatever else.” And this botany professor like fell out of his chair, laughing at me. He's like, basically, “What an idiot.” He's like, “Even in academics, you're always selling. You're always selling something.” I fully embrace it now.
Hey, it's Chris. Just a brief message from our sponsors and we'll get back to the show. Just kidding, we don't take sponsors. On the other hand, I do have the privilege of leading the only executive peer group community for growth stage, CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. With monthly group meetings, annual retreats, and one-on-one executive coaching calls, our members help each other boost revenue, impact, capital raise, clarity, confidence, work-life balance, and team effectiveness. Today's 30-plus members represent over $8 billion in market cap for assets under management for climate solutions. If you're interested, go to entrepreneursforimpact.com and join the waiting list today. All right, back to the show.
29:15
Let's go from C-Motive to Matt. So, the transition is maybe, how did you choose to become CEO?
Matt Maroon: This is my seventh startup company. Most have been venture-backed. I've spent time at two startup companies within large multinational blue-chip companies. Everything prior to this has all been energy storage. So, my first startup company, spun out of Caterpillar, the heavy equipment manufacturer in Peoria, Illinois and that goes all the way back to 2003, I think. So, I've worked on a bunch of different battery chemistries for things ranging from the early days of electric vehicles to portable devices, ultra-capacitors, lithium-ion batteries, large battery systems for utility-scale solar installations.
And so, similar to the story you just told, I remember it was 2006 or 2007 at my first startup company. I had been working in R&D because that was where my background was at the time and there seemed to be a string of hirings at the executive level that I would mildly classify as assholes. And so, I went into my CEO at the time and I was like, “I don't understand. Like, do you have to be an a-hole to get to this level?”
I'll never forget, Ed said, “No, you don't, you don't have to do that.” At that time, I decided that at some point, I didn't want to work for an a-hole anymore. And so, I guess the past 20 years of my career I’ve just been trying to learn as much as I can, at least to get to the point where I won't make the same mistakes that I made in the past. I remember when I interviewed with Justin Reed, the co-founder here, the first thing I told Justin was, if you learn more by failure, then I'm the smartest guy in Pittsburgh right now, because my career to that point had just been, “Well, let's try this and see how this works,” and it didn't work out. So, that's what brought me to this point in time, was trying a bunch of stuff, and then learning what not to do again in the future, and then vowing to myself not to make those same mistakes again.
Chris Wedding: Well and not to settle for working for assholes or to be the asshole employing and building a team and really, really importantly.
Matt Maroon: Yeah, there's a lot to be said about being genuine and actually you do get what you give off, so that has been a thing that I've tried to and I continue to try, even though it's harder some days than others, but continue to try to just like, look, we're all in this together. No one at any one of these cleantech companies, not one company is more important than the other one and no one within the team knows more than anyone else. We all have our place. We all have our skill set of what we got to do if there’s actually a future where we make a difference. We make this transition to more energy-efficient devices, and cleaner sources of renewable energy, it is going to take everyone to do it. There’s no one person that is going to be responsible for any of this.
Chris Wedding: Well, I was staring at another question on my sheet over here, which is to tell us something you strongly believe in, whether at work or outside of work. I think you might've just said it, but we'll call that answered unless you want to add to that.
32:52
Matt Maroon: No, quite honestly, I don't remember what I just said, so I won't be able [crosstalk – 00:32:57].
Chris Wedding: Nice. Just wind this guy up. It's number seven, guys, number seven. How about, tell us what advice you might give your younger self to be faster, more effective, happier along this path, in addition to not working for a-holes.
Matt Maroon: I really genuinely think the biggest thing is, if you don't enjoy what you're doing, whether it's the work itself or the environment that you're in or the mission that you're trying to do, life is simply far too short to be doing something that you don't like doing and you're not going to do your best work. I can look back and know that I did my best work when I cared the most, when I liked the people that I was around, and especially now, there's too many jobs out there.
There are too many opportunities to go do something you actually care about. Like don't settle and so that's what I would love to tell myself, I mean, save myself a couple of years in my early career. Anytime I get a chance to go to UW and talk to a group of undergrads or even graduate students, it's like, just pick something that you really care about, because otherwise you're going to regret it.
Chris Wedding: Yeah, that makes sense. I was advising a mid-20s professional yesterday and they had two job opportunities and one was more corporate, safer, probably better pay, probably would get the two-year rotational training, but you could tell his heart wasn't into it. And then there’s the other one, and he used the word excitement and you can tell it, he kind of lit up and I was like, “You don't need my advice.”
Matt Maroon: You already know the answer.
Chris Wedding: Yeah, exactly. How about, tell us some habits or routines, whether these are daily, weekly, yearly, that keep you healthy, sane, and focused.
Matt Maroon: Well, I think you should ask my wife and my daughter how sane I am.
Chris Wedding: Okay.
Matt Maroon: Before I try to answer.
Chris Wedding: That was a hardy laughter. Okay. We'll take that. Yeah.
Matt Maroon: I'm a hyper-competitive person as probably a lot of people that you talk to are. I need to find outlets for that competitive energy. So, like eight or nine years ago, I got into running and I am not fast and I do not enjoy running, but it is the outlet that adds that extra layer of discipline of what I need just to keep like, all right, I'm looking at my calendar right now, I have my tempo run tonight at 5:00 p.m. And by God, I will go do that tempo run tonight at 5:00 p.m. and I will be able to measure and feel the progress going forward. And so, I am a slave to my calendar.
35:36
I have found that the discipline that I need is putting stuff on the calendar and then checking the box and the feeling of accomplishment afterwards. But again, I don't know how many other people feel the same sense of accomplishment as I do by checking stuff off their calendar.
Chris Wedding: Well, I was talking to another 20-something yesterday on career advice and the question was, “Well, how do you get so much done slash what you want to get done?” I was like, “Timeboxing and basically having it on the calendar, an appointment to myself.” I mean, this is Friday morning is when I write the newsletter and I have a two-hour block and I better finish it in those two hours.
Matt Maroon: I think the acknowledgment, it's okay to take that time to do it, that stuff for yourself as well. Not to get super philosophical, but it's okay to be selfish and take some time for yourself. You can be a successful climate tech entrepreneur and not spend a hundred hours a week doing stuff. Your productivity from hours 60 to 100 are going to fall off. And so, it's fine.
I have made a habit now for, I don't know, 10 years that I don't do any work on Saturdays. Saturday is the day when everything gets shut off and it's been fine. Like that email can last another day until Sunday morning when I get up and make a cup of coffee and go do it. That again, I think that’s just some self-discipline, some acknowledgment that everyone that is doing this, you're already fighting an uphill battle. Why put yourself in your own way as well?
Chris Wedding: Yeah, I like that. The other part about being hyper-competitive, basically what you said is you're being hyper-competitive with yourself. You're seeing your improvement in time, performance, and whatever else with running, which I can imagine some listeners were ready for you to say, “I took up this other hobby and now I love crushing the competition on weekends,” it’s fine, but I think competition with self is a great reframing for that.
Matt Maroon: Yeah. I like seeing my times from the start of a training season to the end of it. I’ve, well, fortunately or unfortunately, only run one ultra-marathon and I use ultra in quotes because it was only a 50 K, but I remember the whole point was, mentally, can I force myself to do it? That was what the competition was, it was the very binary, yes, no. I don't care how long it takes me, can I force myself to be on my feet for 31 miles? I don't expect a lot of people to understand why you would do it, but the feeling of holding yourself accountable and a sense of accomplishment was what now makes me want to sign up for another one.
Chris Wedding: Yeah. Along the same lines of competition with self, I don't know if you wear any biometric tracker, an Aura Ring or a WHOOP band, but I wear this Aura Ring and I find that not every day, but most days I'm like, all right, so what was my score for sleep? What's my score for activity and what's my score for readiness? Why am I not at the same score that I was yesterday or two days ago? So, I think sometimes these wearables can facilitate the competition with self.
39:01
Although, a friend the other day was like, “No, I don't wear an Aura Ring. I don't need to be reminded that I slept like shit last night. It induces negative thinking.” You know?
Matt Maroon: Yeah. I use Garmin for all my training runs and it gives you a VO2 max score, which before everyone sits there and yells, I understand it's not accurate. My wife tells me every time that I brag about my VO2 score it’s not accurate. I get it, but it's relative to itself. And so, the other thing that it gives you is, so your VO2's max score and then your fitness age, which now that I'm getting older and older and not wanting to reckon -- Like my daughter turns 16 here in a couple of months and that is a shocking slap in the face to just how much older I'm getting. Anyway, I like seeing my fitness age because it tells me I'm still in my 20s and I think to myself, “Oh, yeah, I'm still in my 20s.”
Chris Wedding: Okay, and I'm sure that Garmin does not round down for any purpose whatsoever.
Matt Maroon: No, I'm sure it does not. I'm sure it's a hundred percent accurate and there's a scientific algorithm that sits behind it.
Chris Wedding: You're definitely looking a strong 23, man. What can I say?
Matt Maroon: Thank you. I'll take that. I’ll absolutely own that.
Chris Wedding: On that vote of confidence, hey, Matt, final message to listeners, whether it's the kinds of customers or team members you want to hear from, what you got?
Matt Maroon: I encourage everybody, if you're not, to think about the tangible ways that you are going to continue to progress forward on those sustainability metrics. Everyone did LED lighting 10 years ago. Motors are the next thing that is going to make the same level of improvement of switching from fluorescent lights to LED lights. You can move from traditional magnetic machines to what C-Motive is offering. Generate that savings and we're open for business. We are looking forward to getting some of these demos out there and learning alongside early partners.
Chris Wedding: Well, I think that is the sound bite of the podcast. You've all done LED, motors are next, baby. All right.
Matt Maroon: Motors are next.
Chris Wedding: Hey, good stuff, Matt. We're rooting for you-all’s success.
41:11
Matt Maroon: Thank you so much. It was great speaking with you, Chris.
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