Ep. 07 - Alumni Stories - Marc Printz

WBS Podcast #7 - Marc Printz

0:06
Welcome to the WPI Business School podcast where we catch up with Incredibles alum here in the B School in here, why they they chose WPI, how they chose the particular program of study, how they were involved in campus and what their WPI experience has been like.

0:25
I'm your host, Ed Gonsalzen.

0:27
I'm an instructor here at the B School and I'm excited to welcome Mark Prince.

0:32
He's class of 2019 and alum here with a Bachelors of Science and Business.

0:39
And Mark is the founder and the VP of development at Farm Blocks, which we're going to obviously talk about some really interesting concept in in an organization.

0:48
So Mark, it's great to have you here today with us.

0:51
Thank you for joining.

0:52
Thank you for having me, Edward.

0:54
So what we can start off here just to get some background about who you are and we'll talk about the WPI experience a bit later, but maybe you can share with the audience a little bit of how you got into WPI.

1:04
So what's the back story?

1:08
So basically all through high school, worked on various startup projects in the agricultural scene, growing a lot of our own products essentially, and then packaging to higher value like pestos and things like that, selling to friends and family.

1:24
So Ari got the entrepreneurial bug there and then really ended up at WPI because at that time I was specifically interested in a combination of entrepreneurship, sustainability and aerospace engineering.

1:38
And so really my interest is actually designing spacecraft for long term voyages and the food systems necessary for doing so that we work in and eat like oatmeal packets essentially for multiple years, traveling to say Mars, etcetera.

1:53
And that's really what brought me to WPI in terms of programs as well as culture.

1:59
And then actually arriving at WPI on literally the first day on campus during new student orientation, met my Co founders of today at a talk by one of the entrepreneurial professors about entrepreneurial programs.

2:17
And we both stayed after to ask him questions and that's how we met.

2:21
And then later we met in one of our freshman year classes, one of the GPS courses.

2:27
And that really set the tone from the rest of my academic time at WPI on a entrepreneurship trajectory, which quickly took me away from the aerospace engineering degree towards the business entrepreneurship side in all of the various entrepreneurship startups in projects that we worked on during our undergraduate time at WPI.

2:53
OK, so where did you grow up?

2:55
What part of the country?

2:56
Local.

2:57
Oh yeah, Massachusetts was in Massachusetts, Middlesex County, and went to a very project based middle school, high school, charter school where it wasn't so much on exams, it was more on projects and group work and presentations.

3:12
And so that's really where that whole group aspect, group work aspect got it to me.

3:17
And I guess even the business side of working with people.

3:20
Yeah.

3:20
So you said Middlesex County.

3:22
Is it Wrentham Billerica, Billerica or Billerica?

3:26
Billerica, OK Billerica.

3:28
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

3:29
But my family's actually both from split between Mississippi and some uncles out in California and then France.

3:36
And so always grew up basically, if you went to see family at top on a plane, OK, in the food interest, what sort of drove that?

3:44
So growing up, we, we grew a lot of our own food backyard garden.

3:48
So, you know, distinct memories, even at four years old or five years old, helping harvest like green beans as well as like blackberries and blueberries.

3:57
And like climbing over a fence to get in there when I, because I couldn't open the, the actual door yet of the fence, but I would climb over it and I would accidentally like fall and spill the blueberries.

4:07
And we just grew a lot of that.

4:09
And we were shooties when we would travel to a new place instead of doing the history tour first.

4:13
We did the food tour while there.

4:16
And we just grew up really all around, you know, live to eat.

4:21
And everyone in my family is such a good cook, especially on the European side of the family, where they all grow a lot of their own food.

4:28
They have a lot of, you know, their own chickens, their own ducks, their own gardens.

4:31
They have fruit trees.

4:33
And so I think that's really where that bug came from and the interest in Food First consuming and then later learning more about the food industry of today and how I might be able to partake.

4:47
OK, so there you mentioned that the European influence.

4:50
So we your parents or grandparents, immigrants from Europe, but all are now my father.

4:56
Yep, from France, specifically on the first Sherman border.

4:58
So there's a lot of history there with my grandparents being there young during World War Two.

5:06
You have older siblings who were because both both my grandparents were, were doctors and they had older siblings at the time who were practicing medicine during the actual time of everything going on.

5:19
And so you drive around with them and they would just point to the hill and they're like, hey, that's not a real hill.

5:24
That's the rubble from the Old Town.

5:25
You're like, really?

5:26
Yes, yeah.

5:28
Which is which is crazy.

5:30
So we're just first meeting for the first time here, and it's amazing.

5:35
You know, I'm obviously a bit longer in the tooth than you are, but my parents were immigrants from Portugal.

5:41
And I remember growing up we had a garden.

5:44
And my father, and it's actually a pretty significant garden, made his own wine.

5:48
We had a wine cellar.

5:50
So that sort of history and culture that came from Portugal translated over here to the US.

5:56
And although I appreciate a good wine, I guess I've distance myself a little bit from that.

6:01
It for me, I'll go to the wine store and buy the wine at it.

6:04
We don't make it, but I still have my own garden.

6:06
So one of the first things I did when I bought my first home is there is the garden.

6:11
It's going to be there.

6:11
And I carry that tradition on.

6:14
Unfortunately, my kids, my 3 kids haven't done that.

6:16
So have you been able and fortunate enough to travel back home to France at all?

6:21
Mark 2, three times a year?

6:23
OK, perfect.

6:24
And I think one thing that is still the case in Europe is food is very different there.

6:30
It's people care.

6:31
I mean, in Portugal, there aren't any fast food restaurants in France.

6:34
And the big cities there might be in Paris, but when you go there, the food is so much simpler.

6:38
It's so much healthier.

6:39
You go for a month in Europe, right?

6:41
You eat at least I eat like crazy.

6:43
I come back, I've lost weight.

6:44
Why?

6:45
Because I'm eating healthier, smaller portions, great quality food.

6:51
And you're walking everywhere.

6:52
And it's a completely different dynamic than we have here in the US.

6:55
So it sounds like we have that sort of connection there and experience because of immigrant parents.

7:00
Exactly.

7:01
Exactly.

7:02
And it's a completely different way of seeing things.

7:04
It's all about quality, not quantity.

7:07
And it's more about the experience.

7:09
I mean, it comes down to a simple dish of little feta cheese and a tomato and a piece of basil.

7:16
Yes, that's all you need.

7:18
Oh, yes, true.

7:19
Why do you need to make it so complicated in so many levels of flavors?

7:24
Just make it simple.

7:26
And so, yeah, Yeah.

7:28
And there's also an important aspect, I would say, of quality of life that comes from the European roots, quality of life.

7:35
You know, people work hard, but they also understand the need to live, right.

7:40
And so it's interesting that even today related to, you know, our work working with farmers, it's helping them balance that quality of life so that they can not just grind away and constantly have to work to the next crop, but they might also be able to improve their quality life and have Peace of Mind.

7:59
So we'll circle back to food in one second, but I want to just touch upon your interest initially in aerospace.

8:05
What drove that particular interest?

8:07
And then I think, you know, blending that with your interest and love of food seemed like a natural transition, but what was the initial spark that had you go down that particular Rd.

8:19
That's an interesting question and not one that I've thought about for a while of why the whole spacecraft going past Earth sort of thing.

8:30
I guess I don't necessarily have a great answer of how it came to, just that I was really interested in food production in a sustainable setting and what better case is there than being in a closed ship trying to go for years on end?

8:47
And how do you create a fully operable, sustainable loop there of nutrients, food, etcetera, to be able to maintain itself for several years, let alone be able to travel to very remote places beyond just.

9:03
OK, we'll circle back to that in a minute.

9:06
In terms of the interest you had in aerospace engineering and technology, STEM related disciplines, were you solid in math and science and had interest in that when you were in middle school and high school?

9:17
Yeah, every STEM field, every STEM math, physics, science, everything.

9:22
All right, so that makes sense.

9:23
Material science, OK.

9:25
So AP physics, calculus, those kinds of things were.

9:29
That's an interesting thing that even at our high school, as I mentioned, we weren't really exam based, we were project based, which means we didn't have AP.

9:36
And so that was an interesting thing that drove me to WPI was that I went as far as I could and what we had jumping ahead, math courses, but we didn't offer AP.

9:47
And so with WPI, there was the flexibility to still count that, you know, I did Calc 2 coming out of like WPI, for example, and was able to jump into those courses, Calc 3 level, for example, at WPI.

10:01
Same for Spanish courses, language, we didn't again have AP, but I was able to leverage those and the projects that I'd done to essentially jump ahead a few classes with NW.

10:13
OK, so undergrad EE grad from WPI and I got my master's part time going back to school.

10:21
And when I came, I came as an undecided engineer.

10:24
The thing that drove me was the space program.

10:27
So I, I graduated from high school in 77 and we were in the throes of man on the moon and there were hundreds of thousands of engineers, technicians, scientists working to that one goal to get to the moon.

10:41
And it brought people together.

10:42
And that's why I pursue that.

10:44
And then when I got here and I took a few classes my freshman year and tried to understand, then I made my decision to go to electrical engineering and stay with it.

10:52
It sounds like it maybe you can speak to this a little bit.

10:55
You came here having a certain view and then pivoted once you got here.

11:00
What were the things that made you make that adjustment and started focusing on business.

11:06
So I came in aerospace engineering, minor sustainability, took a few entrepreneurship classes freshman year and ultimately what actually drove it was me and my Co founder of today and us starting to work on various startup projects.

11:21
So for our GPS course first semester freshman year, we worked on one sort of startup like concept business model, yet while on the side working on a separate one, which was for gamified charitable giving.

11:38
Essentially you play your game and you donate.

11:40
And so working on both those aspects at the same time found that I much more enjoyed the business entrepreneurship side then essentially doing aerospace and physics and that I like to working on large picture problems of sales, marketing business model and then a little business development of how can we develop a product them are I provide a value and to a certain market.

12:08
And the journey from there and the discovery, the customer discovery.

12:12
And that's drew me away from engineering those projects and actually doing and starting various small businesses.

12:20
Gotcha, makes sense.

12:21
And I think the school does a good job of providing those off ramps or on ramps to different areas, right?

12:27
So you can come here thinking one thing you because you had that project based learning which WPI is built on, right.

12:33
The WPI plan is over 50 years old and it's based on project based work.

12:37
You get to sort of test out in a Safeway, if you will, these kind of areas.

12:42
And sounds like you did that.

12:44
It didn't you mention that you met your Co founders like day one.

12:47
Is that true?

12:48
Yes, that's correct.

12:49
So for a first day of freshman orientation, yeah, for the year, it actually started that we just met after a talk of an entrepreneurship professor to ask questions.

13:00
And then we met in the same class where we started working the same project that ended up being the first business we were working on.

13:06
And then we attended a talk by Martine Bert, who is also involved with WPI about various, I would say, entrepreneurial projects happening that he was also involved with.

13:18
And that led us to think about the gamified charity Donate.

13:21
So it was all connected that within the first few weeks at WPI, all that started entrepreneurship started well, started happening.

13:30
And it was, I knew I was interested in that because I wanted to join the makerspace component, but I thought I went to be more on the maker engineer side.

13:38
And it turns out actually I wanted to be on this side.

13:41
And it's funny, you mentioned Martine.

13:42
So he's still here.

13:44
He's essentially a social entrepreneur.

13:46
He's an incredible person.

13:47
He's from Paraguay.

13:49
He's actually the former mayor of Ascension, which is the capital of Paraguay.

13:53
People have talked to him, talked about him as maybe being president of the country he founded, Poverty Stoplight, and he still teaches a class here in social entrepreneurship that's highly regarded and people love attending.

14:07
So I'm not surprised that he had an influence on you because students love to hear his story and what he's talking about.

14:13
So that's good to hear.

14:16
So let's move forward now.

14:18
There was actually just a meeting earlier today where people were talking about what makes the Business School at WPI different than a Business School at any other school.

14:30
I think we have a view of that, but I'd love to hear what you feel that differentiation is.

14:39
So in many cases, being a part of a business program looking to start a business, when you're surrounded by just other business people, you end up with a certain type of business that you create or you're constantly looking for, hey, who can help me build this product?

14:58
Being a part of a business program surrounded by engineers, you're like, oh, I need a software engineer near an airspace.

15:04
I need someone else who can design electronic boards, etcetera.

15:08
Well, you know, a bunch of different people out of WPI and everyone is very interested, especially in WPI, in working on and building cool stuff, but also doing good.

15:20
They want to work on cool things that have an impact.

15:23
And so I think that was also pretty instrumental as well, that it's people who are motivated and you're surrounded by all these people who have very high technical skills and are trying to find something to work on.

15:36
And then being able to provide a business aspect to help direct them and their energies to work on things that can immediately, you know, impact someone out in the world is pretty unique given that there's such deep technical expertise at WPI.

15:51
So we've never, this is the first time we're talking in meeting, right?

15:54
Couldn't have asked for a better.

15:56
So I'll try to simplify that lovely dissertation on how you saw the Business School being different.

16:04
WP is, in my experience and at least in what I try to do, WPI is a Business School for engineers, scientists and technologists.

16:12
And because of that, you have these great resources and I think that's a good lead in now to farm blocks and in your company and what you're doing now.

16:20
Technology is being used everywhere.

16:23
The use of tech, especially to have impact and change how things are done is universal across every area and certainly in agriculture, right?

16:33
You could call it Agrotech, call it whatever you want, but ability of what technology's done to be able to produce more food.

16:40
Think about the impact of combines, irrigation techniques, using drones to do aerial surveys and adjust the use of water watering or other technologies or whether it's things to to increase the yield of a crop.

16:55
Technology's always been there.

16:57
But perhaps you could describe a little bit more how at your company, what you're doing in the implementation of technology that might be different than what's happened in the past, let's say 50 years or so.

17:09
Sure.

17:09
So in in a basic sense, we're providing producers, tools, sensors and control devices in a platform format for easily creating their own monitoring farm automation system.

17:25
As to what that gets them is that they can easily determine if they need to irrigate, if they have leaks, what's the weather?

17:32
You control your irrigation system so that they are most efficient with their resources, water, fertilizer and improving yield while also being as productive as possible with the time they have.

17:47
In most cases right now, everything is done manually.

17:51
They need to go out there manually, check, OK, do I need to irrigate?

17:55
They turn on their irrigation system, then they have to wait around.

17:58
They manually turn it off.

17:59
Otherwise they don't know.

18:00
They don't know what's happening.

18:02
And so it's a very manual intensive.

18:03
And what we're dealing with today is a substantial labor shortage in the United States and globally for farmers, let alone stresses of drought and everything else going on, especially tariffs, is that labor is the number one thing that the average age of farmers is 59 to 60 years old.

18:24
It's getting older, it's increasing.

18:26
Younger individuals are not entering the agricultural field as much.

18:30
Absolutely.

18:32
And so doesn't matter if you have the water, if you don't have the labor.

18:36
So you need each person to achieve as much as two people used to be able to.

18:42
And a lot of that savings is from manual activities of walking around, checking if they need to irrigate, turning on irrigation systems, see how much fertilizer they have left.

18:53
Yeah.

18:53
What's the weather?

18:54
It's very simple problems that compared to today of going to different planets and spaceships or AI seen basic, but it's actually so important for them that you know in their fertilizer tanks across their orchards, which might cover 10s to hundreds of thousands of acres.

19:11
They don't even know how much fertilizer they have left or if someone's stealing it.

19:15
And so just telling them what's left and what they have and what they need to do, providing the data to make those decisions is enormously.

19:24
Now I would also highlight that to date the industry, it's termed Agrotech AG Tech and which is apartment, it is corrected.

19:35
It is technology applied to agriculture.

19:37
Now that is true, but that is self limiting in terms of who is going to adopt those products.

19:47
Just in the term technology that a lot of farmers are not technology natives have a flip phone or they might have a smartphone, but they are not technology apps people.

20:00
And so even just reusing the word technology, you are limiting yourself to perhaps even just 30% if even 20% of all farmers out there.

20:11
So for us, we're more so positioned as simple tools that producers can use to monitor and automate so controller pumps and track what's happening with sensors.

20:26
From their phone or computer.

20:27
And so it's self installed.

20:29
It's all simple plug and play, tap your phone.

20:33
Nothing is complex.

20:34
That requires software development skills or extensive computer knowledge at all because that's what those systems are today.

20:43
And so the systems out there, they have to have a service engineer go install it for someone and then that farm, if they even know how to use the system to begin with, they might have to have a more tech leading person on their team to be able to use those tools.

20:57
Yep.

20:59
And so it's limiting on the industry just because it is targeted as agricultural technology when at the end of the day, technology is just a tool.

21:08
It needs to be easy used, simple and provide a value.

21:11
And so for focusing on simple and the easy to use is, is critical for adoption in the agricultural space.

21:19
So what is your business model then?

21:20
It sounds like you describe this sort of holistic system.

21:24
It's got these sensors and pumps and actuators and things that deliver or monitor water, fertilizer, other sort of inputs into the system, right?

21:35
Maybe there's moisture sensors that are at whatever.

21:38
So and so how do you monetize that particular offering that you're giving the industry?

21:44
Certainly.

21:45
So I guess I would start with the overview architecture of how the system works to then answer that question that we have sensors that plug into what we call a monitor box to data logger that collects the data.

21:59
Yep, mods battery power, transmits it wirelessly.

22:03
That is sent over several miles of radio frequency to a base station gateway which collects that from up to several thousands of devices, monitored devices out on a farm field and that sends it to the cloud some whether it's Ethernet or cellular.

22:22
Now those sensors that we plug in our third party sensors either from established sensor manufacturers in the United States such as Media Group or Lycor or generic ones, we source ourselves.

22:35
From our perspective, we can work with really any sensor.

22:39
We put on our own proprietary adapter so that it's plug and play.

22:44
It's always the same connector, no configuration required in the system.

22:49
Plug it into our monitor box, tap your phone to it and the app give it to a name.

22:55
The tapped phone just pairs it with your account, give it a name.

22:58
So you know Westfield Row 12?

23:01
Yep.

23:03
Then that data appears in your app transmitting to a base station.

23:06
So that's really the entire setup.

23:08
So for a pricing perspective, we're selling a sensor based on what that sensor costs.

23:12
And then there's that monitor box component, which a producer can either purchase with a subscription component or there's a a lease or an annual lease so that they can benefit from a lower capital cost to enter as well as the benefits of a lease model.

23:28
And then they had purchased the base station gateway infrastructure.

23:33
Yeah, but news can cover many, many miles of terrain.

23:36
So the infrastructure cost is intentionally low even price as well as as margin wise so that it's not prohibited to individuals to set up a automation system just because of infrastructure.

23:51
And then do you, I'm assuming there's a dashboard and do you look at sort of a software as a SAS model for the application that runs it all and you get some kind of like subscription revenue from that?

24:02
Is that how you handle that?

24:04
So that is all baked into the term monitor because it's how many devices do they deploy?

24:09
Do they deploy 10 or do they deploy or large deployments 1800 got you.

24:14
So based on their size and then because it's a software platform and it's all about data, well, based on how you want to massage that data and different automation schemas you want to provide in the future or plugging in AI tools, you can provide software specific products as well on more of a SAS subscription model and even open up as an ecosystem to work with other partners who provide special models for the optimal irrigation for pecans in XYZ slip.

24:46
OK, they developed that model.

24:48
Farmer Joe or Sandy wants to click the button and activate that mud.

24:53
Well, perfect.

24:54
Maybe do a little share there or what's the optimal adjustment for your pumps irrigation wise to avoid peak demand charges from the grid and potentially be compensated by the grid to use less money during certain hours.

25:09
Exactly.

25:10
And and so a system like that has the intelligence to allow you to play around and minimize the input cost, right.

25:17
You know, water is an input cost.

25:19
People will think water's cheap, but it's actually not.

25:22
I know that there's a lot of almond and pecan farmers in California and I think they're water cost because of how California is built are very significant inputs into the cost of their products.

25:34
So if they can look at that carefully and take advantage of minimizing that input into the system and then take advantage of off our electricity cost 'cause you you don't get water without pumps, right and electricity.

25:47
So that's an interesting element of this.

25:50
And I'm sure you use that to sell the benefit of making that kind of an investment.

25:54
That is correct.

25:55
It's all the same data.

25:57
Now, how you leverage that data, you could do different things with it.

26:00
Everyone talks about AI these days, but AI is only important if you have data to begin to do something with.

26:06
The issue in agriculture is that that data doesn't exist, diverse data sets.

26:11
And so first you have to aggregate that data, which doesn't just include like, oh, what's the weather and what's happening soil wise.

26:18
You need to understand everything because a farm is diverse.

26:21
You need to know the soil, you need to know what's going on water, how much fertilizer do they have?

26:26
Is there thefts, evapotranspiration rates, controlling pumps, power usage over time?

26:31
And there's so much to understand so that you can then begin to start to massage the data in terms of AML or AI model that it do various things with.

26:42
And the other thing I want to touch on upon is, as you highlighted the water constraints in California, not just about the cost of water, it's that certain water districts are so restricted by water that producers are being required by law to reduce their acreage and hence, well, reduce their water usage, which basically linearly correlates to all right, well, now we need to cut down a third and orchard 1/3 less water.

27:10
Well, if you're more efficient through automation technologies and massaging, again, the AI for optimized irrigation processes, well, you might be able to achieve those same reductions in water usage while maintaining your same acreage in same yields.

27:25
Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts with something like that.

27:28
And actually sounds like your system in your solution provides the all of the inputs and now you can look at them and maybe do something to approve the efficient.

27:39
I mean, it's about efficiency, right, And productivity.

27:41
So that's essentially what you're delivering.

27:43
So let me circle the WPI.

27:44
In your time at the Business School, how did the course work, the experiences, the project work that you had a WPI factor into preparing you for this journey?

27:56
Now with farm blocks, all of the projects treat them as a mini startup.

28:00
So that which trial, right, trial and error you go through the motions to get used to that thinking and especially through the I core program.

28:13
Can't recommend that enough.

28:15
Yes, actually the component of customer discovery.

28:19
Go talk to customers.

28:20
The biggest thing that especially will happen with engineers and given the the West Business School, there are a lot of engineers the eye that again, they want to build something, but at a certain point you need to talk to people because you'll find random things you would never anticipate.

28:36
Like, one of the things we discovered in developing the data logger monitor box is that it turns out in winter when there's a bunch of snow and you have a bright sunlight, the button that you press to join in the monitor and get feedback from it.

28:52
Well, if it's bright sunlight reflecting on snow, you can't see a button flashing.

28:57
Yeah.

28:58
And so it's things you would never expect.

29:00
And, oh, wait, by the way, you know, farmers, their fingers are probably two or three times the diameter of yours, and they can't hold tiny nuts and bolts.

29:11
You would never know that from just developing in a lab.

29:13
So getting out there and actually talking to people and put it in their hands before it's even ready, it can literally be the box that doesn't work just so they can feel it and just see how they hold it and what they do and how they talk about it is really, really important.

29:29
And I think that's something that through the I Core program and a lot of the WPI entrepreneurship courses recommended and push you to do.

29:36
So with those projects of thinking about, oh, what could be as different business you could do and develop a business model around them.

29:46
Yeah, I, I've graduated almost 40 years before you did.

29:49
And interestingly enough, I found the same kinds of things.

29:53
And I was lucky, my first job out of TI as a design engineer.

29:56
What I found was that when you went in the field and so I was designing products and you design them in this sort of these four walls and you.

30:04
But when you go out there and my products were automotive sensors.

30:08
So I would these things would go under hood.

30:10
And then when you go out to these, out to Detroit back in the day when they made a lot of cars and you'd just go to these test tracks and these test facilities and then you saw what really happened, there's no way you can experience that.

30:23
And I think your example of, OK, you can't see this light because the sun's hitting it.

30:27
And then you have just practical issues, ergonomic issues where farmers tend to work with their hands and they're rough and just the ability to touch and move and handle things.

30:38
Those are practical design concerns that you probably wouldn't appreciate unless you went out there and did it.

30:45
So I think that's a really good example and WPA certainly does do that and put you through these projects and the other things that you mention like I Corp, you get to experience that, OK, get it out there as quickly as you can, even if it's not perfect and learn that way.

31:01
It'll be much better than if you're doing it inside this antiseptic lab that where everything's pristine and perfect, Then you don't get that experience, right?

31:08
What are the most, I think, random things that we didn't anticipate.

31:12
What's that?

31:14
Squirrels.

31:15
Squirrels.

31:16
Look, squirrels and what?

31:16
Packers.

31:17
They see something on a tree, let's say, or in the equivalent in California are coyotes.

31:23
Well, they're going to go around and chew on it.

31:27
So it's just things you would never expect.

31:29
And you're like, huh, OK, yeah.

31:31
All right.

31:31
I I guess that kind of makes sense.

31:34
Or Vermont.

31:35
Turns out Vermont and Quebec, commonly, they'll have six weeks of no direct sunlight.

31:40
Oh, well, if things are battery powered, you have to survive that under tree cover.

31:44
But it's things you wouldn't find out unless you actually put them out there and you talk to people.

31:49
And so that really leads to important design considerations.

31:52
For sure.

31:53
Yeah, for sure.

31:55
Before you're ready, just put it out there.

31:57
What's the old adage?

31:58
It's ready.

31:59
Fire aim, right?

32:00
You're better off in getting that out there and testing it and then trying to hit that perfect target because it's almost impossible.

32:06
You're not going to be able to do that.

32:08
I think WPI is a school on the engineering side and I think on the B school side, you'll learn that, right.

32:13
You're better off now.

32:15
You can't bring something out to market that's half baked.

32:18
It needs to be reasonably baked so that you can get some good feedback.

32:22
And it sounds like that's what you've been able to do.

32:23
Just to wrap up, are there any closing comments or things that you want to share with the audience about your experience at WPI specifically in the B School?

32:33
I would just as much as possible connect with other people and that are also entrepreneurial or at focused on trying to innovate and develop new devices and just try it out, try as many different business ideas as possible.

32:47
I mean, heck, we went through half a dozen, yeah, before we are today.

32:50
And so if one fails, Oh well, move on to the next.

32:54
What did you learn?

32:55
Focused on what you learn, what you got out of it and less about digging a hole in the sand.

33:01
Be more focused on what you learn.

33:02
And that's, I think the other interesting aspect too, is that if you start a company, even if it fails, if you generated some revenue, got some customer traction, etcetera, even if it fails, well, you're pretty well lined up from a career perspective to then jump into another startup or even larger business because they're, oh, you try and you really, you do so many different things.

33:23
You so wear so many different hats that you're, it's not as risky from a career perspective.

33:30
I'd say the business is always risky, of course, of its perspective because of all the experience you've gained, everything you've learned.

33:38
That sets you up far and ahead of just jumping into a role where you're only doing one specific thing at a large 100,000 person company.

33:48
And you're actually well set up to then jump into higher management roles or higher engineer roles, depending what you want because of that unique experience.

33:58
Yeah, agreed.

33:58
Well, thank you, Mark, for your time today.

34:00
Really appreciate it.

34:02
Thank you and thanks to our listeners.

34:04
I hope you all enjoyed this episode.

34:07
Don't forget to like, subscribe and share and you might consider a WTI B school program and that could be your next step on the learning journey.

34:16
So until next time, remember STEM plus business equals impact.