Host: Jason Jacobs
Guest: Sam Saltzman | Founder & CEO | Outlast Earth
Category: ☁️ Carbon Reduction | Recyclables
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[4:13] “Outlast [is] a tech enabled brokerage that is growing towards a true marketplace for bulk recyclables. There's basically three pillars to our software. We have a marketplace that's managed internally, and that's matching supply and demand through suppliers, which is everyone from an industrial manufacturer that might have some insulated copper wire they need to get rid of to your mom and pop operated auto dismantling junkyard that's basically pulling engines and transmissions out of cars, and then crushing the actual steel frames. And then it's matching the demand which is industrial manufacturers, everyone from large automotive companies to breakage yards in India and Pakistan that are actually hand sorting copper and steel.”
[4:57] “The second pillar of the software is a fulfillment portal. And that basically answers the age old question, how do you get 40,000 pounds of aluminum, from Atlanta, Georgia to Busan, South Korea. So it's creating tasks and automation to make everything from shipping and logistics to customs clearance more transparent and easier. And then we have our customer portal. And think of that as a tip of the iceberg. You have all this happening behind the scenes with the marketplace and the fulfillment portal, but our customers come from an area where technology has not really been a focus of their life. […] It basically takes a series of emails and creates a data silo for them to manage orders with Outlast, and also create new bids and listings to put on our marketplace.”
[11:16] “Our entry point into this was basically creating a push pull service to and from WhatsApp, where we would find someone that had 40,000 pounds of rotten electric motors […] and then we create this like ticket, we'd send this ticket to like five different brokers on WhatsApp, who would come back with pricing, and then we'd use that to effectively secure this deal. And at the time, we didn't realize the significance of the discovery of that, but looking back, it was so important. […] One of the things I've really started to realize is no true B2B marketplace actually starts as a genuine marketplace, there's always this element of tech enabled brokerage, where you have these high value customers with very nuanced needs and you're providing a very specific service for them and using that to create the liquidity that eventually fuels your marketplace.”
[15:56] “From an impact standpoint, we actually went ahead and built an environmental calculator. […] If you look at using secondary materials, so recycled goods, [such as] waste steel, waste aluminum, waste copper, which is what we focus on, there is a net savings of CO2 if you were to use prime. So we basically looked at that net savings and said, what was our net CO2 reduction based on placing these materials on the market? And it was over 200,000 tons of CO2, and that's the equivalent of taking 43,000 passenger cars off the road.”
Rating: ⚡⚡⚡⚡
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google (Original Title: "Startup Series: Outlast Earth")
🕰️ 52 min | 🗓️ 03/17/2022
✅ Time saved: 50 min
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