Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#162:
Jack Morrison, CEO at Scythe Robotics — Over $60M Invested in Autonomous Clean Lawnmowers, Robotic Soccer Competition, Guaranteed Reliability, 40% Cost Savings, Power Without Pollution
Podcast Introduction
Chris Wedding:
My guest today is Jack Morrison, CEO and co-founder of Scythe Robotics. Scythe produces quote unquote state of the art autonomous machines that handle the mowing. While your team works hard to keep your properties looking their best as their website continues, smell grass, not gas. Pretty, pretty clever.
Leave the noise and gas pumas behind. With all the battery life and high torque electric motors, Scythe gives you power without pollution. Love the combo of engineering and marketing here, guys. Jack is, again, from his LinkedIn profile, a liberal arts-trained technical leader with a passion for fast code and connecting computers with the physical world. He was previously the co-founder and CTO of Replica Labs, which focused on 3D scanning and was acquired by Occipital.
In this episode, we talked about how their robotic lawnmowers can reduce costs versus conventional lawn care by 40%. The business pivot that turns their lemons into lemonade. How the RoboCup—that is, robots playing soccer—was part of their company's origin story. What led investors to commit $60 million to their growth. How they're guaranteed reliability and pay as you mow.
Yes, that sounds similar to a pay-as-you-go model that aligns incentives to create happy customers and the diversity of their team, with 40 disciplines across 80 team members, which they call Scythers. Hope you enjoyed, and please give Jack and Scythe Robotics a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people.
Podcast Interview
Chris Wedding:
Jack Morrison, co-founder and CEO of Scythe Robotics. Welcome to the podcast.
Jack Morrison:
Hey, Chris. Thanks for having me.
Chris Wedding:
So I think we should start in a less obvious way, which is me for some reason. We'll see, reading part of your LinkedIn about page—or session, rather. So it starts with liberal arts-trained technical leader. So counterintuitive for sure, with a passion for fast code and connecting computers with the physical world. There's some more there. And then it ends with robot soccer enthusiast. So first of all, fun take on a LinkedIn about. You don't see one as, I don't know, insightful, entertaining, about who the person is behind the business you're building. So let's start with the last part. Robot soccer enthusiast—say more, just on it.
Jack Morrison:
Yeah, I got into robotics and really into programming and computer science in college, making robots play soccer autonomously. It's this international competition called RoboCup. It's autonomous 5 on 5 soccer. And I fell in love with it, I think, from the October of my freshman year through actually well after I graduated. We'd fly all over the world, make the Sony Aibo dog at first play soccer on its own, and then the Aldebaran, now, which is a little about two-foot-tall humanoid robot. And when we started, it could barely stand upright, and by the time I graduated, we had, I think, four on four games going totally autonomously. So you put the ball down and click go, basically, and they take off to play each other.
Chris Wedding:
Well, and who knows, I mean, four years from now, those robots are doing, I don't know, bicycle kicks, right? With perfect precision.
Jack Morrison:
Yeah, yeah. The actually the goal of RoboCup, it's very audacious. They started in the 90s, I think. And their goal was, by 2050, to have a team of robot soccer players that could beat the Human World Cup team, human World Cup champions. You know, given that it's now 2023 and they are still stumbling around as little two-foot-tall robots, at least in the most popular competition, we got a ways to go, I think, in our robot soccer abilities. But there have been some really impressive advancements in that field, which has gotten a lot of people I know into robotics, which is really, I think, the biggest benefit of it.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, for sure. I'm picturing something devious—that if the robots were electrified, it'd be an easy win, I believe, over the humans. Yeah. All right, let's pick up with the first part of that, the liberal arts-trained technical leader. And I'll piggyback on that. How did you choose German plus computer science as your majors?
Jack Morrison:
Not super common, no, although we've been a handful, actually. But I sort of fell into the German part. The computer science, frankly, like I was saying, came from getting involved in RoboCup, my RA my freshman year. Happened to be the captain of the team. Thought it sounded neat and just fell in love with it, you know. Going into my liberal arts undergrad, I thought I might study physics or MA, even religion. Found it a really fascinating study. And when I got into computer science, I was just hooked from the beginning. The German part was a little bit more happenstance. I had taken Spanish all through high school and growing up and wanted something different and took my first German class, kept taking it. Went abroad in Berlin for a semester my junior year. And there I go, I had a minor.
Chris Wedding:
So I mean, I guess you're learning languages in both, for sure.
Jack Morrison:
That is true. A lot of language development.
Chris Wedding:
All right, so we're starting off at looking backwards, let's say. But just to bring the audience up to present day, you've raised, I believe, at least online, I suggest around $60 million or so, with what started as inspiration around robots playing soccer to autonomous lawn care robots, let's say. I'll let you elaborate in all their glory here in a second, but quite the journey, Jack.
Jack Morrison:
Yeah, I've, you know, just fell in love with the ability to make code change the world around you. And, you know, in RoboCup, that was just kicking a ball or a diving save. And when I left college and worked in, you know, a whole bunch of different industries on computer vision applications, you know, helping machines to understand the world around them, just continued to really build up my own skills. And this understanding and belief that technology could do really great things for the world. And that ended up leading into Scythe a few years later.
Chris Wedding:
All right, so let's drill down a little more on present day, and then we'll go backward and forward in time. So again, we referenced around $60 million raised. Your latest, quite large round with friends over at ArcTern and Energy Impact Partners. Do you have product out, taking care of corporate headquarters as such right now? Jack, what's the story on the ground?
Jack Morrison:
Yeah, we got a handful of our pre-production M.52 units deployed with customers this year. Now that the growing season slowed down and it's winter here in Colorado and throughout most of the country coming on, we've scaled that back, but we're gearing up right now for our first run of production M.52 units. And for the listeners who don't know what M.52 is, it's our 52-inch wide, all-electric commercial lawnmower that's fully autonomous. So it helps landscapers not only do their work without the normal emissions and the noise of gas mowers that are annoying to anyone who sat in an office park for a week throughout the summer and had, you know, a leaf blower or lawnmower go by, but they also are autonomous.
So they do a lot of the work for the landscapers, allowing landscapers to focus on the rest of the work that it takes to care for beautiful outdoor spaces.
Chris Wedding:
And you mentioned the. The smelly emissions, which reminds me of something on your old website. I think it was smell grass, not gas. Is that right?
Jack Morrison:
That is right. There's a lot of great pun opportunities in this space. You might say it's a greenfield opportunity for nice puns. Puns and tech development.
Chris Wedding:
I mean, not to put you on the spot, but if you have more puns, I'm a big fan.
Jack Morrison:
Jack, see if I can slide them in.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, let's see. Okay, so in a way, we're getting folks ready to join your wait list, I believe, for M.52, as you will prep for production units when spring approaches. Yeah?
Jack Morrison:
Yeah. So we are taking reservations now. So we've got over 7,500 mowers reserved from about 70 different landscapers across the country. Yeah, really exciting. You know, this industry has been primed for both electrification and automation. The problem really is that nobody's built the tools that actually work for the landscapers out in the field. And so, at Scythe, we really taken it upon ourselves to listen to the customers and build something that fits into their everyday workflows.
So M.52 largely looks like any other commercial mower that you'd see on a truck. It's a stand-on form factor. You can drive it manually, but you can also hit go, basically, on the top of it. And it's got eight cameras, GPS, IMU, a whole bunch of sensors that help it to navigate on its own across properties.
Chris Wedding:
All right, so just to make sure, I heard you can operate it with a human, but the plan is that they would. The customers would most likely set the autonomous feature, you know.
Jack Morrison:
Yeah. So you can do both. So autonomy is really hard. The world, especially the off-road, outdoor world, is really weird. And so we've built a machine that can be manually operated for the more challenging parts of a mowing job. You know, going behind a bush, super close up around small trees or up against buildings or all these complex areas that autonomy will get to one day. But for now, the autonomy is best at some of the more open areas that save a lot of time, frankly. And so the way it works is an operator will walk onto a trailer, get on the machine, drive the mower off of the trailer, and put it up into the area that they want to mow. If they've already mapped that area, they just hit go.
If they have it, if it's a new property they've never been to, then they physically drive to the machine, they ride on it. So they go seven, eight miles an hour, and they drive it around the perimeter of each mobile area on that property. Then, forevermore, it remembers that and shares that across their fleet of machines, so that every time they show up, they just have to put it up in there, tell what direction they want to stripe, how high they want it to cut the grass, and then they hit go and go do the other work. And then, when it's done, they can come back and do cleanup or the more complicated stuff.
Chris Wedding:
Yep. I like what you just said—that once you map it, you share it across different machines. It isn't just living on one machine, which makes all the sense in the world. I've just never thought about how that would work. You also alluded to this earlier, but maybe say more that it's not so much that you're, whatever, taking jobs from those in the landscaping profession. It's allowed them to do more, better.
Jack Morrison:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I think this is one of the things that differentiates Scythe from some of the other folks in robotics, especially in our industry, is we look at our responsibility as not only being to the businesses themselves to help them grow, to help decarbonize, you know, the workforce that takes care of all of our outdoor spaces, but also to frankly help the, you know, men and women in this industry go home less tired, get less beat up during the day that they're spending out under the hot sun, you know, take them off that mower and let them do the more detail-oriented flower work in the shade, whatever it is that is easier on them so that they can have more energy, you know, be with their family.
But at the business level also, you know, landscapers can't find enough people today. I'm sure you've heard this across any sort of other automation stories you've talked to, but there is a major labor shortage in these very manual industries. When it comes down to it, landscapers are competing with, you know, Starbucks baristas for candidates. And if you could choose between being inside versus out under the hot sun, it's a pretty easy choice. You're driving for Uber or working at BUC-EE's in Texas. Any of these things make it hard for landscapers to attract people. And so, when we give them robots, they're not about to go lay off their staff because all of a sudden they got robots. What they're going to do is they're going to use that machine to, you know, create more leverage for the people on their team.
Whereas before, they might have to send six guys to a single property. Now they can, you know, take three of those off one truck and send them to a second property. And that's how they grow their businesses without having to find the people they just frankly can't find.
Chris Wedding:
So you reference this a little bit as in like you're aligned with the customers and you're also aligned in a much bigger way in terms of how they pay for your product. And it sounds to be in stark contrast to how other, I don't know, lawnmower OEMs, if I can say, sell their product and what repair really means, and what the incentives are around, you know, longevity, uptime, etc. Maybe describe what I believe you call guaranteed reliability.
Jack Morrison:
That model, sure, we call it our pay-as-you-mow model. Quite a pun, but it's a rhyme. Basically, landscapers pay for the work the machine gets done for them, and, like you alluded to, this aligns our incentives with theirs. Instead of us selling them a machine that, you know, we don't make another dime off of until the thing breaks, and then our incentive is for it to break as soon as possible, if you look sort of cynically at a traditional OEM's business model, that's how it works. They make money off the repairs, off the extra parts. We instead only get paid for the acreage that our machines actually mow. One price for autonomous acreage and a lower price for manual acres.
So if that guy's on the back of the machine mowing manually, and that way, you know
Chris Wedding:
The machine breaks on them, that's on us to fix it. Again, incentivizes us to build the most robust, fastest, longest-lasting machine we possibly can.
Jack Morrison:
And I can imagine some people also wondering about, you know, the safety of a machine with fast-spinning, sharp blades not run by a human. Obviously, you've thought about this like a million times from the very beginning, but just kind of set the audience straight. How safe are these mowers?
Yeah, of course. We like to say internally that autonomy means safety. There really is no sense in making an autonomous machine unless you are focused on making it safe. The going back and forth in straight lines—we do very well. But that's not really the hard part. The hard part is making sure that this machine, like you said, is 1200 pounds, has 52 inches of a mowing deck underneath it, and it's moving totally under its own power and its own control. And so, we are really focused on making sure that it is operating safely, that it's aware of its surroundings. We do that a few different ways. One is we've got eight HDR cameras that ring the top of the machine so they can see in 360 degrees.
They have stereo vision in all four cardinal directions so that we can tell where things are around us. We're using that camera data as well to semantically label everything around us—so to differentiate from a tree and a tall person, a dog and a park bench. And that allows us to operate safely, where we can be effective for landscapers. Like, we can drive around a tree, but we can come to a stop for a person. And, you know, advances in machine learning and AI over the last few years have really enabled a new class of robot behaviors where they can actually do this totally under their own power while they're out in the field without having to phone home to an operator or to, you know, a computer in the cloud.
Then we've also got ultrasonic sensors on the machine as a sort of backup layer of safety to really make sure that this thing knows what's around it and can operate confidently and safely out in the real world.
Chris Wedding:
Perfect. That's great. Okay, so going back to the business model. Great. Pay-as-you-mow makes a lot of sense. But what does it look like out of just dollars and cents for that landscaping operation versus business as usual? Whether it's pay up front, pay for expensive repairs later, just overall cost. How do you, how do you talk to them about what that should look like?
Jack Morrison:
Yeah, so we say to landscapers that we want to be 40% of the fully loaded cost of a human riding a gas-powered machine. So, once you add up all the costs that go into having a person or machine, you know, including the interest on that machine, the depreciation, the machine, the service, the repairs, all of the spare parts, the insurance on the person, the hiring, their training, the retaining—all of that, you know, and of course, their hourly wages—all of that really is what gets rolled up into cutting an acre of grass. And so, when we estimate what the prices for a landscaper, we want our, you know, our bid essentially to be dramatically cheaper than what they'd pay for the equivalent services of a person. And again, that's not because we are trying to replace people.
We think they will forever have a place in the green industry, as they call it. But we believe that automation needs to not only be more effective but also bring those costs down. And by bringing the costs down, we can have a second climate impact—that is, to help cultivate more green space. You know, if we can bring those costs down so dramatically that it becomes a no-brainer to install more parks, more green areas around offices, homes, all of these areas, you know, they have massive impacts on climate—from decreasing the amount of cooling needed in the summer, decreasing the temperature of urban areas through green space, to increasing mental and physical health for the people who live around them.
So we view our job in both these lights: on the one hand, we're looking to just help landscapers grow their business and do more work, and then on the other, cultivate more of this green space. And both of those, frankly, mean we want to be driving the price down as much as we can to enable scale from our customers.
Chris Wedding:
And I think I heard this properly, but your customers are not really buying a lawn mower. They're paying for a service. This goes from a CapEx to an OpEx. So, things like appreciation, you know, sale taxes, etc., kind of go away, right?
Jack Morrison:
Yep, that as well.
Chris Wedding:
I'm with you. Okay. Also, on your website, in the I think the about us section, you were remarking that you talk about benefits for your team, and that includes flexible paid time off. And then parentheses, you say basically something like, you're encouraged to take it, right? What—I think there might be an exclamation point or—I heard an exclamation point when I read it. Can you say more about that? I have felt it in prior jobs. That is not feeling encouraged.
Jack Morrison:
Yeah, of course. Yeah. You know, so there were two reasons I wanted to start Scythe about five years ago now. One was the product and, you know, the promise that I saw for automation. And that's all of what we've built with M.52, and we'll continue to build out. The other, frankly, was to build an amazing place to work, the type of place that I'd want to work as a software engineer or, you know, any of the other amazing different roles we've got at Scythe. And that was super important to me—to create this great environment. And part of that is taking time away. As much fun as I have every day doing this work, you know, it does start to wear on you. Startups are a grind. They are a roller coaster. And that takes a toll on your mental and physical state.
And I didn't want to build a company that would burn and churn through our team members. You know, I wanted Scythers who'd stick around for years. So not only do we encourage folks to take regular paid time off, we've also actually got a sabbatical program where, after four years at Scythe, you get a month of vacation and a few thousand bucks to go take that vacation, get away, unplug, and just, you know, get back in touch with all of the other things that you love in life so that you can stick around at Scythe and grind through achieving this big mission of ours.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, that's super exciting. You're right. It can be a grind for sure. And I think I heard you also say this word, Scythers. So you got a name for your people, right?
Jack Morrison:
Yeah, Scythers.
Chris Wedding:
Nice. I like—maybe easy for listeners to think, you know, Jack and team started with this cool idea. Five years later, super easy, 6 million bucks, doing what no others have done before. That's the worst. Not the truth. Maybe tell a story or two about you. Thought this was going to be your path with Scythe Robotics. It wasn't. And then what did you learn from a couple of dead ends, let's say.
Jack Morrison:
Yeah, we had some really, shall we say, interesting ideas in the early days of Scythe. First off, we thought we were going to go into golf right away. Right off the bat, we sort of thought to ourselves, well, who mows the same grass more often than golf courses? Nobody. So we'll, we'll go into golf first. The more we learned early on about the golf industry and, as a market, you know, they're extremely high quality standards because grass is essentially their product, the more we decided that entering there with robotics and with automation would be a pretty high bar. And so we pivoted to, you know, still a great group of customers, but the commercial landscaping industry—that's probably a hundred times the size of the golf course maintenance space, if not a thousand times the size, frankly.
And, you know, you need the grass to be shorter, but you don't need it to be 2 millimeters and not 3 millimeters, like on a fairway. If you scuff a spot when you're mowing, it's not great. And, you know, our machine has gotten really good at not doing that over the years, but it's not the absolute end of the world like it is on a golf course. We've got an angry golfer on the fairway who doesn't like that their ball landed in some divot created by the mower and a horticulturist who has to go fill that hole. So, yeah, I think that was probably our biggest early lesson.
Otherwise, you know, it's been a repeated set of learnings that anybody who doesn't work on your team, you know, contractors, vendors, they do not have the same interests and incentives as everyone on your team. And so we've built a really strong, diverse group of folks. We've got—we're nearly 80 people now, and that spans almost 40 different specialties, from all sorts of engineering to operations, customer success. We've got roughly two of each role. And that makes for a really fun team to work alongside but also gives us the skills and the abilities in-house to do whatever's really necessary to achieve our mission without relying on outside resources who often don't, you know, aren't in it for the mission. They're mercenaries, not missionaries.
Chris Wedding:
That is a great quote there at the end. Missionaries versus mercenaries. I can imagine lots of ways that you've had to learn that lesson. Let's switch from Scythe to Jack as we do towards the tail end of our podcast here. What advice might you give your younger self to be happier, more effective, more impactful in building a career like yours?
Jack Morrison:
I think we talked about this a little bit, and insights, culture, somewhat, comes from my own personal learnings. But I think taking vacation occasionally is helpful. And that was a lesson that I didn't learn early on and definitely held me back and burnt me out. I think the other piece that lots of folks learn over time is the benefit of exercise and just continually caring for not only your mind but your body, and how caring for your body can help take care of your mind over time. Those are things that, in my 30s, have really come to be much more, I don't know, evident to me as I've been building Scythe.
Chris Wedding:
And how, as a, you know, busy CEO, do you make the time for vacation?
Jack Morrison:
It's tough, but we've got a great team here, and so surrounding yourself with people you trust that you can hand work off to and know that things will be just fine. And frankly, you know, one of the most exciting parts about vacation—and I think my team rolls their eyes at me when I say this—is coming back to the office and seeing all of the amazing things in our progress channel and Slack that have happened while I was away. You know, at this scale, there are so many things going on all the time that stepping away can be really a great reminder of how many things happen without me present at all. So I think you just have to sort of commit yourself to do it.
I'm not quite at the week-a-quarter goal I think I have for myself over the next couple of years, but I'm getting there. I definitely sneak away for a ski day here in Colorado every once in a while.
Chris Wedding:
Understandable. Yeah. Being in Boulder or the Boulder area, lots of temptation to get out of the office. Let's maybe drill down a little bit on the taking care of your body and your mind. What does it look like for you on a daily, weekly basis?
Jack Morrison:
I've got a gym nearby and just try to get out and lift a little bit, and then I've gotten into just sort of quiet meditation over the last few years. That goes a really long way, I think, towards calming my mind. I'm an Enneagram Type 7, which means I love diversity of experiences and lots of new things. And I think I have a mind that's often flitting about from thought to thought very quickly, and meditation definitely helps to lower the anxiety level and bring a bit of calm to my thinking. So I try and do that at least a few times a week, though I'm nowhere near as regular as I'd like to be. I think the last part is just getting out and skiing. You know, being here in Colorado, there really is—
There are few places like it, with so many great mountains nearby, and, you know, skiing in the winter, mountain biking in the other three seasons. It's beautiful to be outside and be away from the office and the keyboard and just soak in all the green space that we do have access to here.
Chris Wedding:
Well, maybe, maybe on the meditation habit you're looking to develop or the week-a-quarter vacation you're looking to institute, perhaps you'll have some new friends among the thousands of listeners who pin you. Hey, Jack, how's your meditation coming along? A new kind of LinkedIn message.
Jack Morrison:
I'd appreciate the accountability from anybody out there.
Chris Wedding:
How about some books or podcasts or quotes that keep you—or really, your team—focused and motivated for the work that Scythe is doing?
Jack Morrison:
Yeah, you know, I think from a book, I had to pick one. I've never heard somebody recommend it on a podcast or anything. I got introduced to the idea of systems thinking a few years ago, and there's a couple of books. One is called Thinking in Systems. The other is The Fifth Discipline. They're great books about taking that real big-picture view and building up rigorous diagrams of how a system works—from a business model at a company to, you know, the development process within an organization or natural processes.
And I think charting that out and those sorts of graphical techniques have helped with, you know, the flywheel of our business at Scythe, for instance, and are things that I recommend to folks on our team to take that next step in their journey, particularly leadership, to level up on how they think about the impacts of the changes they're suggesting—since the first-order impacts are often some of the smallest—and it's about how that change will reverberate throughout a system that really makes the biggest difference.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I think it's the unintended consequences, good or bad, that leaders have to be aware of when making a decision. For sure.
Jack Morrison:
Yeah. And if you don't understand the system and how that will be felt after a couple of nodes in that system, then you're set up to just be trying it on luck alone. And that's not a great way to, I think, operate personally or professionally.
Chris Wedding:
Move to maybe the two final questions here. One would be advice that you may give the, again, probably thousands of listeners who are looking to build or are building companies in the climate space, the sustainability space—whether it's how you arrived at the idea you started working on, how you might have redone the first year or two in your building. What comes to mind as a basic joke?
Jack Morrison:
You know, I had one investor, I forget who it was exactly, but they complimented us on knowing exactly what we were building and how we make money from it. And that seemed like such a simple thing that it felt really obvious to me. But the more, you know, friends I've met in the tech community—and I think, you know, unfortunately, the climate space has a number of these where you get lost in the coolness of the solution that you're building and exactly how that's going to be a sustainable operation can fall by the wayside. And so I think my advice would be just really understand the space you're operating in, how you provide value to your customers very concretely, and why it is they will pay for that value.
Because, you know, these do have to be sustainable enterprises, and we've got a lot of carbon to take out of the atmosphere and to eliminate from our production every year. And we need growing, you know, very fast-growing businesses to help make that a reality. So I think folks who know their market, know their customer, and know how they make money in the end is incredibly important.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I think the other thing which you all illustrate really well, which is tech innovation is part of the challenge, but the business model maybe is equally important to getting customers to say yes. I mean, if you all just took the same, sell a product, then sell repairs and parts later, you know, mentality, I don't know, maybe you would be as successful as you are today. But helping your customers turn this decision from CapEx to OpEx, aligning incentives, and talking about, as you did earlier, look, 40% less, right? Per mile, per acre, etc. Anyway, I think that's an easy part to forget whenever you love your technical innovation as compared to business as usual.
Jack Morrison:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's where, frankly, systems thinking sort of comes in for us. We don't think, you know, there's any one piece of the puzzle that would pull off Scythe without the others. So there's electrification, there's autonomy, and there's the business model innovation. And you really can't do any one of those alone. If you try and build just electric mowers, as folks do, they're incredibly expensive. You have to sell them outright. There's no real way you can pay on a usage basis for a manual machine. So you have to sell, you know, $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 electric machines that no landscaper can afford.
And if you try to sell a manual piece of equipment on a pay-as-you-mow basis, people will look at you like BMW owners do about paying for their seat heaters. So it's really, you need all three of those working together. You know, electrification makes autonomy easier to build. The autonomy enables this new business model, and this new business model lowers the barrier to entry for electrification. And that's why we think all three of them will help this industry—and I hope many other industries—decarbonize by bringing much more advanced technology and, you know, zero emissions technology into the field sooner than it would based on just, you know, cost curves for batteries and motors. Perfect.
Chris Wedding:
All right, final question here. What, what kind of, I don't know, message, call to action, etc., would you like to share with folks listening? Whether it's, you know, I don't know, who you want to hear from at Scythe or kind of even going beyond, you know, size. A call to action for, you know, more entrepreneurs, investors in the space. The microphone is yours, as it were, Jack.
Jack Morrison:
Sure. I mean, at Scythe, we're hiring for a whole bunch of great new roles. You can check out joinscythe.com and see the roles we've got open. We've got some software, some operations, some assembly roles. Would love to get new folks into the climate area. I think for potential future founders, I'd love doing to just get out and build really cool things that can help to save the planet. I think there's so many different spaces that people can participate in, whether that's joining an existing company or taking that leap and building your own. I'd love to hear from other folks who are doing just that.
I think I love, you know, hearing new founder stories and meeting new founders, and the more we join together, the better chance we all have to make it and to really change the world and help save the planet.
Chris Wedding:
Well, obviously, all the listeners agree with that. And I think, too, your story about you thought the golf market was your go-to, and then, for these reasons you mentioned, you realized it wasn't. I think for some teams—or maybe this was true for you too—they could feel like, oh shit, now what? You know, this is kind of, this is our North Star. But to realize, you know, in those moments where things don't go as planned, the door that opens can actually be better, right? Bigger market and so forth, easier economics, more tolerant customers than your original target. So there's, I don't know, it's not quite lemonade out of lemons, but it's something like that in the iteration process.
Jack Morrison:
Yeah. I think as long as you have that strong mission and that conviction about why you're doing what it is you're doing, you know, every great business has some sort of pivot in its early days to adjust course that stays true to that mission. For us, it's, you know, helping humanity take better care of our outdoor spaces. And we just happen to pick a different early market to go into to do that. But as long as you have that mission, you can really stay true to it. There's, you know, a million different ways to do any one thing right.
Chris Wedding:
Perfect. Hey, Jack, listen. Rooting for your all success. The world needs more cool solutions like Scythe.
Jack Morrison:
Awesome. Thanks for having me on, Chris. Great to talk.
Chris Wedding:
Thanks for listening. And if you want more intel on climate tech, better habits, and deep work, then join the thousands of others who subscribe to our Substack newsletter at entrepreneursforimpact.com or drop me a note on LinkedIn. All right, that's all y'all. Take care