Energy Tech Startups

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0:17 the Energy Tech Startups Podcast. I'm filling in for Anata this week. I'm Pyle Patel, joined by Jason Etier. We're joined today by Rekka Patel, who is the founder and CEO of Zarathis A digital

0:31 experience platform that helps teams move from ideas to outcomes fast. So welcome Rekka. Tell us

0:39 a little bit about what Zarathis is. So Zarathis is a platform where we are trying to bring innovators to bring their ideas and create outcomes out of it. So, Zarathas is a digital experience

0:55 platform where I want to help innovators bring ideas into outcomes, faster and together. What I mean by together is collaboratively. So, we've thought about collaboration a lot because when you

1:11 are coming up with ideas, sometimes you need to ideate with technical folks, but other times you might need to ideate with business folks and you might have mentors you wanna ideate with and also

1:24 build with. So, you want to be able to have a cross-section of people that you can call upon

1:33 and collaborate with on your ideas. So, we think about in digital transformation, you don't want to just keep going and building something. You want to go ahead and fail your idea very quickly if

1:44 it's not gonna go somewhere. So, what you wanna do is if you collaboratively work people, then we can bring the outcomes out. faster and quicker. Yeah, and I think this is an evolution, right?

1:56 We were just walking in here to the DW office, and I think that the COO and CTO and a couple of the devs around a flow chart at a whiteboard, and you're like, Oh, this is what people used to do in

2:07 offices, right? They would get together and kind of talk through user stories and usages And.

2:16 with the demise of kind of the modern office, it's not, you know, the old whiteboard doesn't work anymore So you need a new way to kind of bring ideas together, bring discussion together, and

2:25 then store it. That's a great perception. Yes, so I came up with the idea by looking at the gaps that are there in innovation and in teams, right? Where you now need to bring multidisciplinary

2:41 teams that work together. So you mentioned the example. And in that example, we're actually seeing that they're still working probably on a technology problem. Today, when founders are coming out,

2:55 as I said earlier, we need to go from technology all the way to building your business. So you need all kinds of collaboration components, right? So we want to make sure that we are able to bring

3:08 multidisciplinary folks together. We are able to have them communicate openly. So like in a crowdsource format, total open, or if they want to do it privately, then in the platform we built

3:21 access control so you can do it all privately as well, or in hybrid space. So what we want to be sure of doing is the multidisciplinary interactions across teams, across organizations, across

3:37 verticals. And that's what Strathus is focused on. So this is your current, I guess, company, but I imagine this is not your first rodeo. So maybe tell us about your career history, Rekka, and

3:54 how maybe some things that you worked on the past helped you to build or at this? Sure, so I'm a geologist by education and I'm a hard rock geologist at that. Moved to the US and went into

4:10 sedimentary rocks. Obviously I came here at the hiatus of the oil industry and so I had to go into oil and gas So I did that, when I first came to this country, I was in Oklahoma, so I decided -

4:25 Oh, you moved from India to Oklahoma? So actually I was born and raised in Africa in Nairobi, Kenya, went to India for my education and then the path was to come to the US for further education.

4:40 All that didn't work out for one thing or the other but then I did move to the US where I came here

4:48 after a graduation and then stayed on. And then I had

4:55 to come in and moved to Oklahoma and started looking at what I could do because I had to work and took sedimentary courses at University of Tulsa and got into oil and gas exploration. Initially, I

5:12 was working with consultants to learn a little bit, but there weren't jobs there And I decided I wanted to become an independent anyway because I liked the idea of finding things. I guess I've

5:25 always had an entrepreneurial spirit in me, so I wanted to do things on my own. So I went into exploration. I had some very good finds in Oklahoma, one of the largest finds in 30 years in a

5:38 formation called Wilcox.

5:41 But interestingly, I ended up, At the second downturn of the industry where when I was going to get my first set of checks, I went, oil went from 80 to 10

5:54 and all

5:56 of a sudden, so all of my colleagues were moving into environmental work and I thought, okay, that's the thing to do if the guys are going there, I'm going to go there, right?

6:09 But it wasn't satisfying for me because environmental in the field was actually worse than the oil and gas in the field, and so I decided to go ahead. Really? How is that possible?

6:22 Well, I guess my first incident in the field, there was a shooting. It wasn't the heart of the city of Tulsa, but it was in an area where there was a shooting, so I was like, you know, ruffled

6:33 a little bit Being out in the field at oil rigs was much easier, right? And I have been one of the fortunate ones where I was accepted. You know, because I didn't kind of act like I'm the boss

6:48 here. I'm going to tell you all what to do, right? So I was accepted and I had good experiences. Yes, of course the guys loved to Rag me all the time and they did all kinds of fun stuff, but I

7:00 Accepted it as part of you know being part of the team kind of a thing and so I moved on into environmental which I found very difficult, right and I Also then didn't want to go into all the clean-up

7:15 sites, right? So I went to work for a company where I was doing their sales, which was working out, but I loved Identifying solutions. I like to solve problems and so it wasn't satisfying so I

7:30 said I have to go into the I wanted to go back into upstream. So I said I had to move to Houston and I work for a company where it's a good thing. but I had a colleague that had to move back to

7:42 Dallas because he had two autistic kids. And he helped me out by saying, figure out how to get to Houston. And when I leave, I'll make sure you get my job. So I moved to Houston for the love of

7:54 the upstream oil and gas industry. Nothing else is here in Houston other than my love for the industry, right? But I didn't want to go back into exploration when I came So I decided I would move in

8:07 to

8:09 learn. I took a sabbatical of like seven months and I studied all the software packages. There are to solve problems in the industry. And software was a big thing, you know, back then I'm talking

8:19 about 22 years ago, right? So I decided to get into software sales and I decided to go into a discipline which was brand new at the time, which was rock physics So I went to work with ICON Science,

8:36 where we were just coming out of a - spreadsheet solution to do interpretation and analytics for rock properties. And I helped them build that with the team in London, that's a UK company. I was a

8:52 solo printer here, right? So I helped them get that into all of the major oil companies, but because of my geology background, I doubled up as a technical person. So I helped the companies deploy

9:06 it around the globe And that is where I learned a lot about the pain points they have that are hard to solve, a lot of them being collaborations. So this was in the '80s when we were deploying

9:21 software underFollow the Sun rules, we were all building it. What was that

9:28 mean? Follow

9:32 the Sun rule means that

9:36 So, let's say Australia comes on board and as they're getting offline at five o'clock, then, you know, Asia comes on and, I mean, in terms of the time zone, yeah, time zones come on. And then

9:48 Europe comes on and then US comes on, right? So they were trying not to continue buying licenses and put them on the shelf, right? So the corporate, so

9:58 this is like cost savings. I guess when, when software is what100, 000 I had kind of thing and so you'd move the license key around Yes, you'll move the license, so it was for managing budgets

10:09 for the corporates and because there was too many products that were on the shelf. This came after, I'm going to give you some history, this came after mobile, right? When mobile was acquired by

10:22 ExxonMobil they found out they had 1,

10:25 800 apps that had never been used in over five years, right? When you come with those kind of learnings, then you start saying, okay, what are we going to do to improve so that we, I worked with

10:36 the Shell guys and the Exxon guys, we came up with these ideas and it was Shell who implemented it first, right? So that was a very fulfilling experience because I had the opportunity to work from,

10:53 all the way from end users, all the way to decision makers. I worked with all of the different personas in the sales lifecycle, but also in the technical acceptance lifecycle. And then the company

11:06 wanted me to go ahead and manage the company. They wanted somebody, they wanted a CEO and I wasn't interested. And that's because I like problem solving and I'm better at solving problems. We

11:20 talked about it than solving people problems. So I decided that I did not want to do it. So I want you to get back. to your career, but I find that interesting as a woman, you were offered a CEO

11:34 role and you didn't take it. Was it really because you didn't, you wanted to solve problems and did you have imposter syndrome or like was there any like hesitation being a woman in a male dominated

11:50 industry that influenced that decision? No, I have never felt different, right? I've never felt that by being a woman, I think differently. I actually did not want to do it because I love

12:05 problem solving. And earlier in my career, when I went from oil and gas to environmental, I'd proven that unless I am solving problems, I'm not really excited about what I'm working on, right?

12:19 So I wanted to really solve problems. And I liked the idea of being able to touch more people I could help by, um, you know, showing more new technologies, building new technologies with them.

12:34 So that was my reason. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So the top of your ladder is cool problems to solve, not the title and the benefits that come with it actually. I feel like a lot of people and their

12:45 young think they want to be the boss and then you realize how much work it is, like motivate people and you're like, uh, I just want to do fun things, right? So I can totally see the decision

12:55 point where, um, especially when teams get big, like I think the ideal team is to have like 15 people because like after that, you don't know people as well and you have to deal with politics all

13:06 of a sudden and it's just, I wouldn't want to do that. So, uh, it's like a necessary evil to have to manage, right? And that, and that takes away your free time to do fun stuff. Right. Right.

13:17 So I think it's a, a question you probably have to think about it for yourself is at a certain point, you know, if you're successful, you're going to have 100 people enjoy. and Strathas in the

13:26 company,

13:29 and you're thinking of to hire someone to manage with you or decide to sell the business to someone else so they can deal with scale up. I don't know if you thought about that in terms of your

13:39 personal. I actually have because when I came up with the vision of Strathas, so you initially have to come up with how am I going to build this, but as we started building, I wanted to make sure

13:54 that Strathas remains an infrastructure that

13:57 anybody doesn't need to be an organization, an individual, a founder, a domain expert, anybody can come to with ideas and they can go ahead and look at how can I get my idea to delivery, right?

14:14 So I wanted them to think that full innovation lifecycle, right? I'm going to co-create, maybe I'm going to create on my own. prototype, I'm going to go ahead and get my MVP, I'm going to go get

14:28 tested, and I'm going to deliver. So that full life cycle is what I wanted in Zrathas, and that's what we worked on. But when I did that, I had to think a lot about in an environment like Zrathas,

14:42 which I started it as a platform, but the eventual vision is going to be a self-help ecosystem. Anybody can come from anywhere You can come in as lift office

14:55 coming to do collaboration only, or somebody can come in and they bring ideas and start working on ideas. So crowdsourcing hackathons or just individual ideas, right? So that was the idea. So

15:10 I've envisioned Zrathas to always have more of a self-help ecosystem where I don't envision me growing the back office. you know, to hundreds of people like SaaS platforms, technically would do. I

15:26 would envision it to be able to provide the best infrastructure with the latest tools and the right integrations to where it's the people that come in are facilitated to pick and choose what they need

15:42 and build their own workflows. So if you look at the back end of Strathas and how we are unique functionality in

15:52 Strathas' projects, so we contextually connect collaboration components such as discussion forums, audio-visual capabilities, workspaces, training, et cetera, within that project. So each

16:07 company will want to do this a little differently and they would use the core pieces of Strathas but they might want to bring something of their own So we have made sure that we are building an

16:18 infrastructure that's highly adaptable.

16:22 and access control so people can come in and build their own innovation journeys. The way they envision, we don't want them to only envision it like us, right? Yeah, I was just looking something

16:35 up on my phone. So one of the funky things about platforms is you gotta, hey, you gotta have a lot of multiple users. But if you nail a platform model well, you have really high like revenue per

16:48 head efficiency. So if you think about the oil industry, I think last time I looked at it, the average oil company does something like two or3 million per employee, which is like one of the

16:57 highest in the world. Like if you look at a modern software, SaaS as a software as a service business, I think they tend to sit anywhere from like 50 to 100, 000. And a lot of that

17:07 depends on just how profitable your business is. But if you look at like platform businesses, you can sit at like a million dollars per person in the headcount. So I can see how you can be very

17:18 efficient And, um, kind of building a business where you're kind of reusing that, like you said, a utility function over and over again to create value and you don't have to, you don't have to be

17:29 huge. Also, and then with that, you don't have the, you know, fiefdom of hundreds of people to manage. Yes, yes, yes. Because I think, and the way we've built it is, you know, the access

17:44 control and giving, so I've always thought about taking this to large organizations because they do a lot of innovation and problem, they have a lot of problems to solve where they need to bring

17:58 multidisciplinary folks in, right? That was early learnings, the pain points I learned from them. So when I did that in that space, what I always kept in mind that if they liked this on-demand

18:12 platform of, you know, coming in and looking at innovation and quickly validating the idea or killing the idea, right? they would, if they liked it enough and there was value, then they would

18:25 white label this platform. When and if that happens, you don't want to build too much into your platform that is too core, it should all be extensible, which is what I have thought about. And at

18:39 the end, I took time to come out to market also because I thought it was very important and critical to go ahead and build sysup capabilities in the platform So in fact, when coming back to, you

18:53 know, managing a lot of people, I think when innovation comes into, when we talk about innovation, it's usually companies have their own way of working with their people. So they'll want to work

19:06 with their people the way they want to. They like to, including, you know, sharing workflows and managing support. So I wanted to make sure this is up capabilities in place, even for help. So

19:20 that would be the touch. So tell us about your ideal customer profile. You talked about initially having a vision of selling this to enterprise. Like who are the users of

19:35 Zratthis and where are you gonna scale? So as we have built and as industry has changed, the needs of innovation and industry have changed, our ICP has to be very flexible and our ICP which started

19:49 in my mind when I started building as being organizations now extends out to associations.

19:59 It also extends out to universities and anybody that is doing any kind of crowdsourcing hackathons. So that brings a much larger customer base for Zratthis that I probably didn't think of in my first

20:16 year and a half, right? And so if you look at -

20:22 folks in the government, if we look at NASA, right? NASA has a program for innovation, and they're looking for platforms like ours where they can put out problems and they can bring a global

20:37 community to solve. So we now have all the different pieces of collaboration, learning, as well as solving the work spaces. So now they look at us and we are working with them I mean, I've

20:54 registered on the government sites, thinking of what's the registration. I'm saying registered on Samgov to do

21:06 business with government. And my focus is NASA in their innovation space. And we are shortlisted on that. And when the project goes through, we will be bidding on projects for open innovation with

21:22 NASA, right? And so I think one of the things to ask is like, who's the buyer, but who's the user? And when we talk about a collaboration environment, how many users are plugging in within a

21:32 given use case? What do you think about NASA, for example? So I think they've had, when they do their global projects,

21:43 they're in the hundreds, right? In the four, five, six hundreds. And they've had some projects that are much larger In our space right now, since we started selling Zarathas, which is about a

21:55 year now, we have seen projects where we've had, so this last week, our first customer is an association technology collaboration center, who has some of the same belief systems on innovation as

22:13 us. And they ran a variables workshop for NASA in

22:20 from TCC and we had 15 teams, about seven students per team. So we had over 120 students in the platform doing different things, right? Then we have, lift-off is using the platform and within

22:37 like a day, just like our pilot which we had with an energy company, we were able to get about 26 people sign up. In their case, it was 26 companies and 57 people and lift-off we've got about

22:53 20 people that have signed up so far. So these are individual founders so that we can say 20 companies, right? So that kind of where we start off, I think, and I would think it would be that or

23:06 in that space, in that

23:11 range, thank you. In that range, because what happens is

23:16 everybody will want to try or they go into which is the direction we want to take, right? And so in that first case, you were talking about, I think one of the things you shared before is you have

23:28 teams. You said there are like seven students per team. And then if I remember there are different roles that kind of can cross across the collaboration profile. So walk us through that kind of

23:39 case study on how the different users interact on the platform. Okay, so let me just take an energy example, right? So we had the AI challenge that SCG did, and it was different people. So we

23:56 had students, each company in that program had to bring teams. And of course, Drathas didn't have a full team and we didn't have enough people. So I went to the University of Houston, I got

24:07 students and I had two teams. So we brought in geophysicists along with geologists with petro physicists. We brought in some AI experts. folks that were moving from geophysics into AI and ML

24:25 learning. And the idea was to look at large data sets in oil and gas, seismic data sets, and look at identifying fault - it was a fault detection project. So we did that. And we also - Zratas has

24:42 an educational initiative called Simplex. So it stands for Students and Industry Mentor Projects in Zratas. So we bring our - That's an acronym. Yes, it's like a little fix. One heck of an

24:54 acronym. So

24:60 we bring our own advisors and mentors. So on Saturday mornings, we help students mostly the geoscience side, because that's my learning, right? So we bring them and we try to help them cross over

25:15 into other disciplines. and learn how they can solve problems by understanding and learning from other disciplines. So in fall detection, typically in oil and gas, we would take fall detection and

25:30 we would look at all the geometry right around where that fault is occurring or around a well where we know it. One of our data science advisors is a senior guy. He challenged all these students and

25:45 said, why don't you make this an OCR problem and you'll go much faster, right? So what is OCR? Optical Character Recognition, right? So, and it's something that's a technology that everybody's

25:58 using today. However, nobody had thought, you know, let's go ahead and apply that technology to solve this problem. And the results were very different and our student teams actually got prizes

26:11 for the - Interesting. Hackathon, yeah The hackathon was much larger and it was with.

26:18 Nvidia. So, oh, wow. Yes. That was a nice thing that we did. Good. And so I think we talked a little about the customer segment. How do what's the, how does the target buyer discovers or at

26:32 this? And then what does it look like to get set up? We haven't been doing a lot of marketing, which I am getting ready to do a lot more off. It's going to start even in the LinkedIn's. I haven't

26:45 done a lot. So we are getting ready to do that. And just to clarify, you just started commercializing a year ago. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We have a freemium layer. So anybody that discovers Rathus

26:58 can go into the platform under the freemium account and

27:03 explore. Right. Now, as I say that, remember, I also said that we are access control. So they will only be able to journey into anything that's open. And there's enough out there now, right?

27:17 There's challenges there. There's things there that they can explore. So that's one way of learning. But I am working right now on building, I've started building my AI agents and I've built

27:31 sizeable agents over the last week where it's going to be mostly helping people journeys Rathas into, do I want to do a project? Do I want to do a collaboration? What do I want? And that will be

27:46 one of the key ways, I think, of helping people understand Rathas. We didn't start out wanting to do this, but we ended up building a very robust platform. And today, because it's tied into a

28:02 lot of the corporate work flows and how that thinking was from when I envisioned it,

28:12 We, as a founder, I don't have resources. I don't have people that I can start training. So right now, all the dependency is on me to be able to bring people, and I'm trying to solve that

28:22 problem by working on AI. Okay. And so,

28:29 I think starting with that thread, so you're the principal driver here, but you've been building a team of advisors.

28:37 How do you get them on board? How do you find them? Kind of teach us about kind of what that journey's been as you've been kind of solo, but with all these kind of this brain trust you in building.

28:48 And we're gonna give Hani a shout out because he's awesome. I don't think most, I don't know if everyone in our audience knows about him, but he's a great mentor and ecosystem. So tell us about

28:57 him and others, and I know you work with Pradeep. So tell us about them. Are you ready to lead the decarbonization charge? Energy Technexes is your platform for growth, offering unique resources

29:08 and expertise for energy in carbon tech founders. Join us at energytechnexascom and start building your thunderlisset. So

29:18 when I started my journey, I'll give you a little bit of a backdrop before that. I started my journey, I had this huge vision, and I'm not a developer, so my first problem was, I don't know how

29:28 to build this.

29:31 So that was a problem that I had to solve, but I got very lucky in that I had a colleague that helped me out, and we designed everything, and then I identified a company in California that's helped

29:44 us build everything, and on time, right? So, but the workflows and everything has had to come from me. I have known honey al-Shawahi for over all my

29:57 life in Houston, so 24 years now, right? It's the energy industry,

30:03 it's like so many. Yes, and I was calling on Shell, right, so I knew him And the one thing that we always talked about was the future and we both always talked about collaboratively solving things.

30:16 And he moved from being a SME in petrophysics in Shell to a game changer role in Shell, right? So that is where innovation happens. And so he was all in innovation. And recently we were comparing

30:34 a little note that he had where he was thinking what I have built many years before me, right? But because I knew him and I knew that he was in innovation when I was coming up with my idea, I was

30:46 always testing it out with colleagues I knew initially. And honey happened to be one of them. And I respected him a lot because of the fact that he was in the game changer program. And even early

31:01 days, I knew that collaboration was atop his mind, right? And it wasn't collaboration as in, We're just going to say collaboration, but it's party thing, but he was thinking about

31:12 multidisciplinary collaboration. So when I learned that he is retiring, I made a very quick call to him to bring him on board, and he actually did come on as an advisor, and he's been pivotal in a

31:29 lot of the decisions we have made in Zratos, right?

31:34 To the extent I saw him yesterday, and I'm building my agents, and he says, Well, you need to learn all about MCP now. How are you going to deploy these, and how are we going to make them

31:45 translatable?

31:49 He's the forward thinker and also the researcher, but he's an extremely good advisor in the sense that he lays it out both ways. Here are the consequences and here's why you should do this and you

32:08 can't get anybody better than that to be advising you, because you as solo preneurs, we can make a lot of mistakes, right? I could go in one direction without ever talking to somebody and then I

32:20 could find that there's nothing there, right? So that is why collaboration in innovation is very important and critical to honey and I. And the relationship is how I started working with him

32:36 Matt Bell, who is also, yeah, you know. Was he a CEO at one point when you were at Icon, or was that a different timeline? No, he was after me. Yeah. I'd left. But I didn't want the position.

32:47 Oh, yeah. He got the position. There we go. Yeah, well, somebody else before him actually. But no, so I had known him in Shell. So he also, I'd known him. What I'm hearing is this is a

32:60 shell gang. This is. No. No, no, no,

33:05 no. Which does exist in Houston. We got a lot of great shell folks floating around. Yeah, we've got two. We've got two. Okay. It's not a

33:11 gang, it's a mafia. Mafia.

33:14 I'm sorry, I don't think that's all we say. Like, do people know what that means? Yeah, I think like in Silicon Valley, they have all these like mafias. I think in Houston, we should, I think

33:21 that'll be like one of the catalysts to the Houston ecosystem is when we have more of these mafias. All right, all right. I was gonna make social commentary, but I won't.

33:31 So yes, our shell mafia including Matt Yeah, so Matt was somebody I looked, he was with Shell Technology Ventures when I first got to know him because Icon Science was a Shell Technology Venture

33:43 Company.

33:46 But we really didn't take all the bells and whistles. From them, we wanted to be independent and we were, and we were among the few that was making them money from the beginning. So knowing him

33:57 when I came to the second version of what I thought I was building, I thought I wanted, you know, now to go and talk to - people that would give me, you know, feedback. I, so I approached him

34:09 for feedback. And we met over a cup of coffee, which ended up being two cups of coffee. He says, you're not wanting feedback on an idea. You got a product here. Yeah.

34:20 I said, yes. And then, I said, you know, and then I learned that he had changed. So during COVID, he changed from being, he was a CEO over at, I forget the company now. Not JIODA. Not JIODA

34:37 and just after that.

34:40 Yeah. But no, he's focusing on the marketing mentor. Yeah. So he, during COVID, he decided that he would join his wife and they started a marketing. I mean, she was already doing marketing,

34:50 content marketing. He decided they'd do digital plus and they took on more customers. And that's what he was working on now. So when I learned that, I thought, okay, who better than than to get

35:01 him to help me do all my marketing, right? So that's how he came along. Pradeep was just because I started building and I'm your classic founder that I just have this idea and I really don't know

35:16 how to run the full fledged business and especially not a SaaS platform. So I said, okay, how am I going to price this? So initially you say, it's easy. I'll do it like the Amazon and the

35:28 Microsofts but you can't really do that because I also wanted to make sure that if somebody came into the project and Zrathas and I'm calling myself a collaboration platform, I'm not making them by

35:40 collaboration components, right? You can't do that. So I needed to solve my problem of pricing and how do I go to market? I had known Pradi just through the landmark meetings, right? So he had

35:56 come to a couple of the life events and I just, called approached him and said, um, I'm doing this and, uh, you know, given your, uh, background and successes, I would like for you to help me.

36:10 And, uh, he thought about it. And he says, that'll be a challenge. I've never done a SaaS platform. So that's how we came together. And that was a, a, a very difficult, uh, relationship to

36:24 build because he had to do a lot of coaching He had teach me a lot about, um, simple, you know, how do you approach people? Why do you approach people? And how are you going to price? And how

36:36 do you not go ahead and say your price too early? I mean, all the tricks of trade, right? So he's, he took the time. I mean, the first year, all we were doing is, uh, online sessions where

36:47 he was coaching me and teaching me as a school. Right. I feel like I needed to hit him up because, uh, we keep selling products to customers who have no money. Um, it's not a good business model

36:56 at the Technaxes.

36:59 But if you want no money, I mean startup founders. You are always like, trying about60 at a time.

37:06 Pile's gonna be always saying like, Why would you say that?

37:10 But like, I guess like, in that customer lifetime value, like it's very much like the duration of that value comes later. Just think about it that way. The other issue is there always comes a

37:20 time in a startup founders life cycle where they like they remember and then suddenly their series C dries up and they're like short of cash for like six months. And just like, you know, it's okay.

37:30 We just got to let you kind of ride it out. So there's always like cash management is always the challenge and you want to still provide service. Like you say, like a collaboration service without

37:40 taxing too much, if that makes sense. You have to, you have to make decisions. I'll share a story which you will cut out, right? Yeah, well, I got to write those down. Hold on.

37:51 Go ahead. So,

37:55 I had NASA and Rice University AI use the platform for a workshop. Okay. It was a huge success. Okay, yeah, those are two good logos. Right, no, the workshop was a success with the audience

38:12 asking for where are we going to collaborate next, right? Because the audience says this has been a huge successful workshop, but you know, month from now we won't remember this, we won't

38:24 remember this, we need to have a vehicle where we can do all this collaboration. They were already using it for students. So Monty and Sanjay looked at me from the bottom, right? They're looking

38:40 at me and I said, yeah, you know, we'll use Rathas, right? And so that was said, and I made a comment. I said, communities are only as good as the owner of the community. puts into it. So

38:54 you need to have somebody run the community. There was a guy there that was like, I'll run it, right? And I did like three sessions with him, taught him all abouts, rattles, he nearly his ideas

39:04 and everything. So now came pricing. And I kid you not for a community size they were bringing. I, here's what I told them, right? I said, look, I'm going to help you guys out.

39:19 1, 000 a month and there won't be any restriction because Monty had wanted to do more in the way of his

39:28 Thursday, NASA talks, right? So he thought it's great. He says, oh, you're going to help us. We just need to bring our credit card out, right? Yeah. Okay. So now, you know, we had a chat

39:42 and now we all get together and Sanjay gets on board there We should not be paying for anything. You need to go find people that will fund you and sponsor you and we are not gonna pay for anything.

39:55 And I sat through the whole thing and I said, thanks for the time, guys. I can't do business without any. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had to say that. So you have to pick.

40:09 Yeah. Just like going back to your, you describing how you built your advisory board, just I think

40:18 your words reiterated to very common lessons that we try to teach founders. So one, when you, there's a saying when you're fundraising, ask for advice and you get money. And when you ask for

40:33 money, you get advice. And I think there's parallel. When you ask for feedback, you can get an advisor. And then the other thing that I think, you did well in building your advisory board is

40:49 adventure. People are looking for signals, right? Early signals. And so you bringing on people for deep and honey, for you to be able to get them to believe in you, it allows organizations like

41:04 NASA and ETN, et cetera, also to believe in you. Yeah, yeah. And I guess looking back, if you were to mentor your past self from five years ago. Oh, this is a good question, Jason. Oh, I

41:17 know, it's in the guide. Oh, okay, we did it, we did it. Sorry, people here don't know, I have a script that I work off of, and so one of the scripts is, how would you take this lesson,

41:25 learn about building your advisory board, and how would you kind of teach your younger self? So if I were to go five years ago when I started and rebuild my advisory board, I would not give up my

41:38 ace, honey at all I wouldn't give up Pradeep either, right?

41:46 Those two, no way I would trade or redo anything because both gave me value over and beyond what I had expected. For the others, I think on some of them, I had made quick decisions, right? In

42:04 the four years, I actually had an advisor that I as we parted ways last year, I asked him to leave because I didn't see any value coming from him. So you have to, when you have advisors, you have

42:18 to see what you're getting from them as well. There are some that, so what

42:28 would I do for myself? I think I would evaluate their backgrounds and I would also look at which I didn't do is talk about what their future vision is on what we are building.

42:46 right? And that is why I had to tell one of the guys, no, it's not going to work out, right? Because his vision was very different, and a lot of people today, and there were decisions I made in

42:59 the platform, such as, you know, what tools we will use, because I'm thinking everything needs to be persistent, everything needs to be able to grow with

43:12 the customers that come in, right? If a customer comes in, and after two projects that they do, they want to leave Zratus, because they don't want to work in Zratus anymore, whatever their

43:23 reason is, they should not have to give up their knowledge base that they would have built in Zratus. I want everything to be extensible, and it should carry forward to them. These are things I

43:35 learned that were pain points for, you know, vendors and talking to organizations, so I wanted to make sure I'm giving them what I know are pain points, right? So those decisions that we made, I

43:49 don't want those to change. So if an advisor in that case had come in and wanting me to change the decisions, that wasn't going to work out. But then when you look at it, did he have a long-term

43:59 vision or not? So I think, and you guys can teach us, and coach us how we do this, but it would be nice to be able to say, When you're looking for an advisor, here are four or five things you

44:15 should always look into. So the one big thing I will say is matching that vision, bringing that does our vision, and it's future, right? It's not the present, it's the future. Does it match or

44:30 not, right? Yeah, I feel like it goes two ways. One, you don't wanna have to be kind of fighting up hill constantly with someone who has a different vision when it's, you're the entrepreneur,

44:41 it's your vision, you're going to push it forward and so that. I think the best mentors also just know that. And they're there to support you and kind of navigate.

44:51 And then the best advisors are kind of instant leverage. Like when you're describing your engagement honey, right? He's there helping you save your time, having to explore yourself. That is

45:02 instant leverage. You've now kind of 10xed yourself so that you know what to focus on instead of trying to figure out do I need this, do I need that? How does it all fit together?

45:13 That value is instant, almost instant, right? And it's okay to walk away from a mentor if they're not right for you, right? I think that's hard to learn first time. Yeah, it was hard for me to

45:25 learn that it's okay, but what made it easy in the one where I walked away was, we definitely had very distinct differentiations and are thinking on collaboration. And that's where I said, okay,

45:42 you know, you've been with me two years and you're still thinking of why am I not using this particular tool and we've already built our product. So if you're still stuck there, there's no value

45:54 that I'm getting out of you, right? You're still stuck on to use this, use this, right? We'll talk about that later, but. So I think that would be nice to have a ability to have those four or

46:08 five points How do you select your advisor? That would be nice because I didn't have any kind of map to go from is to, I'm bringing so-and-so for this, I'm bringing so-and-so. I just got lucky

46:26 with the first three and then I had a whole bunch that came and went and things didn't happen, right? But then you keep colleagues like, I have my data science advisors, very senior guy in

46:38 industry. And he is being with me from day one, right? So technology-wise and what should we bring, what should we work on? He's the right person to go to. Yeah, I like this like where we're

46:56 zooming out because so Reka, you've joined our liftoff class which is this fundraising brew camp and energy techniques is running for the first time. And one thing that's interesting about the 20 or

47:11 so founders in that room is maybe there's one or two guys in hoodies but most of the founders are like you, Reka. You've worked in industry, made career professional and now you're starting your

47:24 business. It's

47:26 in your next phase of life. I'm curious, what advice do you have for other mid-career professionals? Because I think that's one of the challenges in the energy industry is if you're working at one

47:39 of these oil companies, you have these golden handcuffs. very comfortable lifestyle, and then it's seen as a risk and maybe there's a stigma about leaving that safety net, like, tell us about,

47:51 you know, how you think about that and how any advice you would give to people wanting to take a entrepreneurial journey in the middle of their career. I just did this coaching for an ex on mobile

48:01 guy yesterday. Okay. Okay. So it's fresh on your mind

48:08 Um, so, um, so, and it's always looking back and it's always experienced. And when you get the, when you get the question asked as directly as you have, right? Then you, you also contemplate

48:23 for a second. And in that contemplation, um, even though I'm not here to sell, I will say, I would tell them to leverage platforms like Strathus. And why would I say that? Because, um, at the

48:38 onset, I said, you know, what I want to do is help innovators, you know, get their ideas to outcomes fast, right? And collaboratively. I'm saying that because if they use the platform where

48:53 they're like discussing, you know, and you don't have to discuss in an open forum, the second you say, okay, now I'm giving out something that I don't want to talk to everybody about, you can go

49:02 ahead and do the private conversations in Strathas, right? So

49:08 talk it out and do what the investment community tells you, go fail your idea quick, right? And the way I can tell them to fail their idea because when we come from corporates, right? There's a

49:27 mindset that we come with. And that mindset is hard for us to change because we've grown up as this is how the world is, this is how business is. We don't know the other side. Yeah, this is how

49:40 you do business. This is how you do business. I think collaborating and reaching out, reaching out to energy technexists, right? Now you guys are really helping people start from the beginning

49:54 and you've got different offerings that you have that are helping founders, you know, leverage different things to learn of where their weaknesses are. That's where we would come in and say, you

50:09 need to be a little bit more open. I mean, I understand that all of us have our IP and we don't wanna talk, but that's 20 of your business. That's 20 of everything you're gonna do. The 80 you

50:21 need to learn, you need to just be out there, show your vulnerability of not knowing, right, and learn from others. Coming out of corporates, we do have a hard time on that, right, because

50:34 mid-career, anybody coming out already coming out with. I was so good at this, they didn't do this for me, they didn't, you know what I'm saying. So I think I would say that

50:47 go with that first premise of go make your idea fail fast, right? And that's what the investors are telling us to do. You know, have you really have everything. And do that with the community and

51:01 it's more relevant to do it with community now. And you know, that energy tech next is you, you're building it where you're not pushing anything but we can pull so much, right? So do it in

51:14 communities where you feel comfortable and you're able to pull a lot of information and leverage learnings because from that you are going to find that you might have like-minded founders that maybe

51:30 are working on something very similar and you might even be able to cut costs on what you're developing by partnering and collaborating. So collaboration's not bad when you are starting out with

51:42 ideas on your own as well, right? So that's what I would encourage them to do, great. Yeah, I think a challenge that we haven't necessarily cracked here in Houston is we get a lot of individual

51:55 entrepreneurs coming in saying I need to find a co-founder, I need to find a technologist, or I need to find a business person, and they don't know where to find them. And so right now I kind of

52:05 just direct them to the Y Combinator has a nice like founder dating service, where every week they kind of match you with someone based on your, like if you're a business owner. Can you swipe or

52:14 like how do you like present yourself to the world? Yes, I'm gonna say. So it's like, I don't wanna say it's grinder for founders. No, it's like the platform has much more in depth kind of

52:24 insights on the like people's accomplishments and like what they work on. And if they're like a full-stack developer, do they do Ruby or do they Python or stuff like that and then they're like

52:35 bonafide. So it's more. Yeah, I wanna say it's not like a jobs board either, 'cause the jobs board is like your resume. This is more about like, how can we work together and build a team? But

52:45 the challenge of course is it's West Coast focused and then software focused. And sometimes

52:52 I've heard a few successes coming out of some Houston companies where we do have nationally distributed teams now and that kind of works for them. But I think a lot of times when you're looking for a

53:00 co-founder, you're looking for someone local who is interested in that kind of same problem that they're passionate about. And we haven't necessarily figured out how to find and kind of bring those

53:13 potential founders together.

53:16 One of the challenges might actually just be the culture in Houston is people do want to do it their way or they have their own individual vision. And if those things don't line up perfectly, then

53:26 it's challenging. An example of a team that did come together kind of nationally was actually Mars materials. out there last week and it's completely virtual team I think for the first two years of

53:37 life and then we're kind of in hard tech they're like they're building I forget exactly what the material is but it's a it's a nitrogen fixing kind of plastic material like krillow nitrate nitrate

53:46 that's the nitrogen I was thinking of I'm glad you remember that I just had a call with Mars the other day so that's why I knew that I can say it say it wrong so I'm glad you said it right but no the

53:56 point is the teams can come together nationally they did come together I believe as part of a decarbonization I think it was the, gosh it was like the air accelerator and so those those communities

54:08 form but at a certain point you've got a transform from that kind of ideas faced like actually building and then one of the successes and I would assume one of the rare successes because they're so

54:21 aligned on mission. Yeah but also I think what I heard is they went for the technical help and technical is always easy. to find co-founders in and match, make, et cetera. When you are coming

54:35 from domain to match that, it's much harder. And sometimes you're not necessarily only looking for somebody on the technical side to come in and be your technical founder. You also might want a

54:49 co-founder that is in the domain and understands a different aspect of what you're thinking, right? We're trying to find complementary skill sets with someone you actually enjoy working with Yeah,

54:58 thank you, yeah, complementary skill sets. So that's where Zratus, I mean, when we were building it, the idea was to enable the discussion forums was to enable them to come in and ideate

55:11 together. And if they come together, fine, because now you're trying to actually bring your domain experts together and they don't need anybody in development yet, they want to be able to just

55:24 bounce ideas off somebody with similar mindsets, right? Domain expertise or Maybe it's a domain expertise in engineering of some sort versus geoscience of some sort, but if they were here together,

55:37 so that was the idea. So, Zratiss' patent, you know, is actually about multidisciplinary interactions. And those are brought together through our workspaces. Eventually I'll tie them into the

55:41 discussion forums too, right? And that's why I started this AI thing on my own because I said I need to

56:02 accelerate that. So, Zratiss' is all about multidisciplinary interactions and it's always been thought of initially as the technical folks coming together, not the development, slight distinction

56:17 there, right? Yeah, so I'm gonna get the clock, so we have a few more minutes left. So, tell us a little bit about what Zratiss and the company looks like in the next five to 10 years. Ooh,

56:26 it's a big vision

56:30 I envision Zarathas going, well, we've always been an open infrastructure, but very intentional infrastructure. So what I want to be able to do is take that. And I'm saying this with a little bit

56:46 of confidence because our first customer, Technology Collaboration Center, has been thinking in our space And the space they're thinking in is how do you bring multiple verticals to

57:03 cross-pollinate, right? Technologies, learnings, et cetera. So Technology Collaboration Center is a company that is an association that has space, energy, health care, and manufacturing

57:18 members. And what they're trying to do is cross-pollinate these verticals to learn from each other, and help each other solve the problems. Vertical has learned something unique and they want to

57:32 say how do we pass on that's exactly where we stemmed from right? We were looking initially into just multidisciplinary in the geoscience and energy projects But then we said oh, this is going to be

57:44 you know open for others and you know That's how we came in together with NASA and are interested in doing the challenges for NASA now So I think where I see ourselves grow on the project side is more

57:60 the crowdsourcing in hackathons, right? So we've got several of those coming in right now That will give us exposure Where we think that companies who have been they've had a touch of Reflective

58:17 hesitance right to not come in and start using strathus, right? It's not that they haven't piloted they have and they provided me a lot of input as we were building but What happens to them is to

58:31 change their systems that they currently have, it takes them a lot of time and effort. So they'd rather go ahead and stick with the old systems than come and try something new. And that is why is

58:46 Rathus is built where it's an on-demand platform and we're not asking anybody to go ahead and buy a license and keep it in. Bring your projects when you have them, bring your learnings and when you

58:58 have the courses when you have them and use it then, right? Prove yourself the value and then bring it into the next level. We plan for it, but we haven't done it. So I think that these open

59:13 projects, so the crowdsourcing hackathons and all will lead to companies now seeing value to come because what do companies want in innovation? They want to come out to the.

59:26 They want to come out to. openly with their problems. And they want the younger, more younger and younger people to start solving these problems. So that, you know, there is a little bit of

59:36 domain knowledge shared before, you know, the, the experts leave, right? So I see myself into from the vision that started, the vision going to a totally different arena, but still staying

59:52 within, I have an infinite, infinity loop ones, rathas, but still staying within the infinity loop of different things we do, but our ICPs are growing. And do I see that we will get global, we

1:00:01 will get global I'm being

1:00:10 and I've done some marketing and trade marking different countries. And I know where I'll go. But I haven't started that market yet, right? But we will go global in about Six years from now will

1:00:24 be more global than now. Good And where can people find you today? And can you spell the URL?

1:00:32 Oh, actually, before we get into that, I'm curious. Why the name Zorathis? Because most companies, or most founders, don't pick company names that start with X. Unless you're Elon, of course.

1:00:47 Yeah. You have to pick, so I'm old enough to tell you that you have to pick an app. You have to have an X in your company to be successful, like ExxonMobil, Xerox. Nexus obviously. Xerox. Yeah.

1:01:02 Where's the X and G, but okay, there's a reason there. All right, I'll tell you my story. So when I started, initially I was like, I'll solve some customer problems, right? So I was working

1:01:16 with Aramco. And I'd gone for months saying my no name company can do this, my no name company can do this. In that Aramco decided they wanted me to help them solve a data problem, okay? And even

1:01:28 though by then, by the time they came, I decided I'm not gonna start too early on going to customers, I said I can't say no to them. So now I had to go and

1:01:41 work with Aramco and I needed to have a name for my company So I'd been looking at names, I'd studied Swahili names, of course you go to the Latin and all that, Greek, I hadn't found anything.

1:01:54 By nephew and I found Apex, but on the flight back from Atlanta, which is where I was with him, I learned that ATT's streaming platform is gonna be called Apex, so that died very quickly. So now

1:02:10 I wake up that morning and I have to sign a vendor agreement with Aramco and I still don't have a name. So I decided it was 530 in the morning. I said, Why not go to the Indian language Sanskrit?

1:02:24 Okay. Okay. I said, Let me see what they call in Sanskrit. What is a connected collaborate in Sanskrit, okay? So it was a very long word, Shrutitva, but phonetically, it was spelled as

1:02:39 Z-R-A-T-H-U-Z-Rath. And then it was something else, but I said, Zrat I like that Zrat, right? Connect, I like that Zrat. So I'll do connect us, Zratas, right? But Z in a company? No, no,

1:02:55 no, I'm gonna be successful, I need an X. Why not,

1:03:01 why not? So that's how the name came about. So there is a meaning behind Zratas, it's connect us. Yes, how was that? Good, so spell out the URL from the rest of us. So to find us, yes, you

1:03:15 can come

1:03:20 to wwwzrathuscom, which is spelled X-R-A-T-S-N-T-O-M-H-U-Scom. All right, awesome. And you're on LinkedIn yourself. And yes, you can find me on LinkedIn and - And how do you spell Reka? So Reka

1:03:33 is spelled R-E-K-H-A, and the last name's Patel, P-A-T-E-L. There's lots of us in the world, exactly Speaking of a mafia, but anyway.

1:03:45 All right, good, no thanks for being here with us. Thank you, thank you.