In the latest edition of the Full Stack Leader, we talked to Ravi Kurani, co-founder and CEO at Sutro, about risk, people, and adaptability.

Ravi focuses on his experiences in Southern California and his transition from a mechanical engineering background to impact investing. He shares his journeys from working at NASA to managing a fund in India, emphasizing the importance of adaptability in one’s career path. Ravi’s story shows the value of diverse experiences and being open to unexpected opportunities. His shift from aerospace engineering to impact investing illustrates the significance of a broad skill set.

In this conversation, Ravi stresses the pivotal role of people in a business, highlighting that employees, investors, and customers collectively form the bedrock of any successful venture. Ravi also mentions that career trajectories are rarely linear, advocating for leaders to embrace unexpected opportunities and remain open to diverse career paths.

 

Top leadership tips from Ravi Kurani

Below is a summary of the top Leadership tips shared during this week’s interview. Listen to the episode to learn more about the thoughts behind these tips:

1. Keep trying
2. Build redundancy for the black swans
3. People are your biggest asset
4. Always manage risks
5. Your trajectory is never a straight line

We hope you enjoy the episode. You can find more Full Stack Leader episodes here.

 

Part 1. On the journey and experience

Ryan: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Full Stack Leader podcast. This week, I’m here with the CEO and founder of Sutro Ravi Kurani. It’s great to have you here, Ravi.

Ravi: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Ryan.

Ryan: I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I’m really excited about some of the stuff you’re doing in sustainable energy and water, and I’m excited to have you tell people about some of the new technology that you’re putting together. Maybe we can start a little bit with where you came from and how you got to where you’re at now.

 

How it all started

Ravi: Yeah. Entirely. So my background, you know, imagine sunny Southern California in Los Angeles.

My dad was an immigrant, and my family came here to the United States, and he opened up a chain of pool and spa supply stores. And so, you know, all throughout, I would probably say elementary school, high school, and college. That was my summer job, right? I used to run pool service routes; used to install filters, install pumps, run acid washes, clean people’s pools until I, you know, got promoted to running my own pool store in Huntington Beach, and that was the kind of beginnings of how I basically grew up. I saw my dad as an entrepreneur, I saw him open up close to about 30 pool stores in the Southern California region – that was my initial years.

After that, I initially wanted to go into healthcare. I wanted to be a doctor. I remember this distinct experience in my senior year of high school. We had this program called Health Academy, and I was in the emergency room, and there was a motorcycle accident, a motorcycle versus…I think it was a truck. This gentleman just came in, and he was bleeding profusely. I think after I saw just the amount of stress – you know, my hats off to all of the doctors out there – I just didn’t think I could do that.

On my first day of college, I was in the biomedical or biosciences group, and the first group that I saw was the mechanical engineering group, at which point I jumped into the orientation session, and the rest was history. I ended up getting a job at JPL and NASA for a little bit, and that was kind of the first few years of my launching off in Southern California.

Ryan: It sounds great. It almost is like how I might picture a young person growing up in Southern California working on pools and doing all that, but there’s actually quite a bit of mechanics that goes into it. I’m sure you learned over the course of time.

Ravi: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that’s what kind of lent me to get excited about the mechanical engineering side during my undergrad – kind of an interesting point there.

 

Working for NASA

Ryan: That makes sense. Yeah. That’s interesting. So when you got to JPL and NASA, what would you do there?

What were some of the things you worked on?

Ravi: Yeah. So, I was working on this project on how to make jet engines more efficient. And so, basically, we were figuring out how to mix the fuel inside of the jet engine better, right? If you can mix the fuel better, then you can combust that jet engine more efficiently, which allows you to basically use up less gasoline over the time of the flight.

And so, I spent a good, probably nine months to a year working on that project. And it was great. It was really cool being able to work with jet engines with combustion with the JPL team.

 

Volunteering and MBA

Ryan: Wow. That’s awesome. It sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime type of experience.

What’d you do after that?

Ravi: After that funny story, I actually got a little bit jaded with, you know, being “an engineer,” especially within the JPL/ NASA framework of always just focusing on that really small problem, right? I felt like I was for myself, kind of a cog in a wheel, and I wanted to actually go to the Peace Corps.

That was one of the things I really wanted to do. I wanted to go to either South America or Africa for about two years to join the Peace Corps program. And, you know, a typical Indian father was like, “Hey, you can’t go to the Peace Corps unless you get a master’s degree.” And so I ended up finding a program in Monterey, California, that actually allowed me to get a master’s degree and go to the Peace Corps at the same time – and ended up getting my MBA.

 

Impact investing

At the end of that, a funny story that happened was a lot of the Peace Corps volunteers that were coming back to the school said, “Hey, look, you have an engineering background, and you have a master’s in business. You would be much, much better kind of doing things around investing in developing countries, right?”

There is this new breed of investing called “impact investing,” and my graduate school had actually launched a small $20 million fund in India. So, the road forked again. I ended up moving to India for a year to manage this fund that was focused on investing in companies that were building products for people who earned less than $2 a day.

Ryan: Wow. Is that still a thing that’s around? I haven’t heard of that before.

Ravi: Yeah, it actually is. It’s migrated itself into what we would call today ESG, right? Environmental, social, and governance. A lot of bigger companies will do ESG strategies. You even see the larger wealth funds, right, that are saying, “Hey, we have more sustainable investments for you to invest in.” And so this was kind of the first kickoff of a lot of that stuff that we see today.

 

ESG startups and the problems they solve

Ryan: And how did you jump into that? What were some of the things you actually worked on and did there?

Ravi: Yeah, it was actually a super cool experience.

So I lived in Mumbai for the good part of a year, and we got to see a crazy amount of startups come across pitching To become portfolio companies. One really interesting one was a company called “Delight Design” that was making portable solar lanterns for villagers.

So the big problem is, once the lights go out – meaning, actually, the sun sets – a lot of these villages are not electrified, which means that you have much less time to do work in the evenings or, potentially, study, or make dinner. So, the solar lanterns really extended the amount of time that people had that they could, you know, send women to college or send women to school, which was a big thing that we were focusing on.

Another really cool startup was a company that gave small rural farmers cell phones- and you know, back in 2011, these were all these cell phones with SMS and text, and they built a weather service that would text the farmers via SMS And let them know weekly weather forecasts, Right? A lot of the farmers may not know detailed information, and these sorts of forecasts would help them better plan if they should water or put nutrients in the ground or till the farms. So, that was a second startup that I thought was really cool.

Ryan: Yeah, such kind of basic things that we might overlook, really impacting pretty big populations of people.

Ravi: Yeah, entirely.

 

Making buildings more efficient

Ryan: And what’d you do after that? What was the next step?

Ravi: After that, I actually wanted to live in India, but I never really could figure out how to do that, so I came back to San Francisco.

And I got my first job after a master’s working at a building consulting firm. Basically, what we would do are these LEED certifications, right? The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. So we would take a lot of the large built environment, right? You see these big skyscrapers. How do you make them more efficient?

Because that’s where a lot of our energy is used in large cities, we would come in and help retrofit buildings to make them more operationally efficient in terms of looking at their HVAC systems to make sure that they’re efficiently running, they’re not running them at the nighttime when people aren’t in the office – you know, different things with windows and just energy transfer in the building.

That’s a big part of what I did in San Francisco for the first two to two and a half years.

Ryan: That’s amazing. And I can see how things from your mechanical engineering side and your desire to make change and help society come together more and more with these things.

Ravi: Yeah, entirely.

 

How the idea for Sutro came around

Ryan: So then, as you got further in your career, what were the next kind of big steps that led you to Sutro?

Ravi: Yeah, interesting story because when I was in India – actually before I started doing the building lead work in San Francisco, a lot of the deal flow that we saw was focused on water filtration, when it came to water. When we looked at the sensing market, there really wasn’t much out there, right? People were pitching us on how to fix water, but people didn’t really know what was wrong with it. That’s where I initially got the seeds of building Sutro – finding a cost-efficient sensor that can tell you what’s actually wrong with the water.

We initially tried actually selling it to the Indian government. But, you know, it was not the smartest idea for a startup that has limited time and limited funding to sell to the Indian government.

Ryan: What exactly was the product you were trying to sell to them?

Ravi: Yeah, it was the actual beginning prototypes of the water sensor. Initially, we’re trying to sell them on a drinking water sensor solution. A lot of the drinking water in the Southern part of India, which is where we were tackling, would use these chlorine pills, right? They’d be like a really small, dime-size chlorine pill.

And it’s kind of a big thing to figure out if the chlorine has actually treated the water or not for the different bacteria that are there. So, our sensor would basically be a way that you could tell if the water was clean or not – or safe enough to drink.

 

On working with the government organizations

Ryan: That’s amazing, but it’s a huge deal to try and get a small startup product into such a massive governmental organization like that, correct?

Ravi: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Entirely.

Ryan: How do you even approach something like that?

Ravi: I mean, I think through some of the contacts that I had made in working with first ventures. We had some government contacts, so I flexed a little bit of those conversations to see if I could get in the door. But you know, it just turned out to be a massively uphill process

 

Revisiting the idea of Sutro

Ryan: And then you had to pivot and change a little bit. What would you do after that?

Ravi: Yeah. So, I mean, it’s funny after that, I actually tabled the Sutro product – or what was Sutro that day – and came back to San Francisco, as I mentioned, and worked in the building consulting firm until I actually started running – my dad still had his pool stores, and I was running his Amazon business, right? I was helping him with e-commerce because that was the time that Amazon was really picking up, and people were coming online.

Just seeing a bunch of the data throughput, right, of what people were buying, putting my brain back in the pool industry, again, the swimming pool industry, it dawned on me like, “Hey this product that I’d shelved for drinking water sensing in India has direct applicability to measuring pool water chemistry.”

And so we shifted the entire business model around and took the tail of the snake from the head and said, “Hey, what if I launched Sutro as a product in the pool industry where there are wealthier pool owners that can help basically fund the business from a revenue standpoint?” And then the long tail of this business model will allow us to go back to India and actually launch this drinking water product, maybe a few years later.

Ryan: Yeah. That’s amazing. It’s never giving up on something that you’re trying to bring to the market or bring to the world.

Ravi: Yeah. Yeah. Entirely.

 

On facing rejections

Ryan: So, as a leader, though, what are some of the challenges you face when you get large rejections like that? How do you work with those?

Ravi: I guess I can see the beauty in the negativity or the beauty in the negative space, right? Odds are you will get shut down nine times out of 10, right?

Because your idea is just maybe not right for the market, maybe you’re not right for that particular demographic. Maybe you’re not right for that customer. And, like I said, I tabled it when I came back from India, and there was a two-and-a-half-year hiatus until I picked it back up again for a very different market.

I think it’s just almost to a certain point, being agile, keeping your eyes open, and just really looking for opportunities based on all of the previous experience that you’ve built.

Ryan: Yeah, I was just reading an article recently about the founder of Canva and how she went for funding to 150 or something places, which is a pretty common story. And you just keep getting knocked down and knocked down, but she kept getting back up and has built it into a $35 billion business or whatever it is at this point. But those kinds of knocks, I think there’s something in the leadership spirit that has to embrace them and really has to enjoy them.

How are you able to alchemize your sense of fear or failure around that into something that you use?

 

The art of putting things down

Ravi: it’s interesting. I think there is a lot of. I guess the word I would use is probably “disattchment,” right? At some point in time, there’s like this duality, right?

You have to be so focused on the thing that you’re building – but at the same time, if it’s not working out, you have to be able to put down the baby, you know, the proverbial baby for a little bit and then come back to it. Actually, an author that does this best is. Stephen King. He has this amazing book called “On Writing” where he says that he will start some of his best drafts, and he’ll legitimately just open up a drawer in his office and put it down there for sometimes a year, six months, a year and a half, and then revisit it.

And his brain is in a very different spot to where he can actually, as you said, alchemize many different things from the environment, from his other additional experiences. And then actually put together a much better prompt for a book that he otherwise may not have been that great a year and a half before.

Ryan: Yeah, I’m actually very familiar with that book. I love it. And he also talks about, on a related note, the aspect of uncovering the story and digging it up or excavating it. Sometimes, that takes years throughout the life of a product. You may not know exactly what it is for a long time.

Ravi: Yeah, exactly. And I think he uses this metaphor of archeological find where everything is there. You just have to take that really delicate brush and scrape off all the dust. Eventually, it’ll come out to be this idea that you did have in your head, but you didn’t even know it existed.

 

The importance of flexibility

Ryan: Yeah, that makes sense. So, as you’re thinking about going for further investment and growing as a company, how important is it for you to stay flexible? Like, what do you have to do when you’re working with people who are looking at investing in you?

Ravi: Oh my gosh, you need to be 110 percent flexible.

It’s funny. I was chatting with one of our first employees yesterday after we got done in the office. And if you look back to three years ago, when we first launched Sutro in March of 2020, we had built an entire business model on distributing Sutro through pool stores, right? Brick-and-mortar stores. And in the course of three months, the US shut down. There were no more doors open. Pool stores couldn’t operate anymore for the next few months. In the next one or two months, we had to entirely shift our business strategy and move online.

Shortly thereafter, there was another example: we have a cartridge that measures the water chemistry. Inside that cartridge, we use the exact same syringe that’s used for the vaccine deployments. My mechanical engineer was scrolling through the news websites one day, and he saw a header picture of the same exact syringe that we use. He texted me, and he’s like, “Oh my gosh, I think we’re gonna have a problem because they’re rolling out vaccines, and they’re using the exact same syringe that we use for our product.”

So, even these two examples from yesterday when we were going back, you just have to be agile. You have to be flexible.

Ryan: Yeah, that’s amazing. And the fact that he realized by seeing that picture – that’s really impressive. But yeah, it really is true. You don’t know – and the pandemic, I think, is such a great case for everybody – but you don’t know what’s going to hit or when it’s going to hit. You have to be ready to move and be flexible.

Ravi: Yeah.

 

Focusing on the things that matter

Ryan: One of the interesting things I find about what you’re doing is that you seem to enjoy taking on some of the projects that are really at a base foundation of how we exist amongst things -you know, working with water or, doing really base level things around the way that buildings work – and I think you even go a little bit deeper into some other areas, like, I know you’ve mentioned janitorial before and things like that.

These seem to be subject areas that not everybody’s always interested in. They may not be the sexiest of topics, but did you look for that on purpose, or was it just naturally the area that you were in?

Ravi: it’s funny. I didn’t actually even look for that, and maybe it comes from my father coming in as an immigrant and really my family focusing on first principles, right? It really comes down to survival when you’ve come to a new country. You know, how do you make money? How do you put food on the table?

And I think just seeing him and my mom working at the pool store, it’s the simple things that people need, and it’s actually funny that you can connect those dots because I never thought of it that way. But I think it does go back to the first principles that my family taught me when they first moved to the US.

 

Inspiring the people to build with you

Ryan: That’s awesome. And as you’re bringing people in and recruiting them into your kind of vision and mission. ‘Cause I do feel like you have a mission that’s running through everything. How do you inspire them to want to be a part of what you’re building?

Ravi: Yeah, I think we definitely have this much larger vision of bettering the quality of human life. And a lot of what we touch at Sutro is around water, right? I think when you look at the day-to-day, obviously, we’re in swimming pools and spas, but in our acquisition that we had about four years ago from a large water sanitation company in Canada, The kind of puzzle pieces really came together from a vision perspective.

To your question of how I encourage people to join Sutro or how I motivate them – there is 100 percent this larger vision of us moving into drinking water agriculture – that’s kind of where we started from. We do want to come full circle back, and that’s the story that we tell everybody.

Ryan: That’s great. Yeah, I really hope you do because we have a company in India as well and have spent quite a bit of time there, and that’s a great example of a region that could absolutely use some of the amazing things that you’re doing, but there are lots of them. It’s not the only one – arguably, even Los Angeles.

Ravi: Oh my gosh. I mean, you look at even Flint, Michigan, right?

Ryan: Exactly. Yeah, that’s very true.

Ryan: So, on The same level, it seems like you’re blending together a variety of different types of engineering people. And really, you have different aspects that this can apply to – the pool and the mechanical engineering – all of that seems pretty straightforward, but there are other aspects to what you’re doing as well, too.

There’s software as well. There are other pieces, correct?

 

Putting together a multifaceted team

Ravi: Oh yeah. Entirely.

You know, we have a full-stack multimodal engineering team. Even if you start at the hardware, the actual floating laboratory is, in itself, a Venn diagram of the medical industry meets mechanical engineering meets electrical engineering, right?

We’ve taken what you do in the medical industry through blood sampling and taken a swimming pool test kit and shrunk it down to one-fiftieth of its size. That, combined with the mechanical engineering of how you actually dose really small amounts of liquid, combined with the electrical engineering of how do you then aggregate all that information using computer vision of us looking at the colors of the water, and then send it to the cloud.

Once it approaches the cloud, you have your typical app infrastructure, right? We have back-end engineers who are working on Elixir all the way to people who work on web applications, the API that we have down to our React Native engineers who do stuff with Apple and Android to actually make that app that sits on your phone.

You know, even past that, we use engineering and data to dictate how we push ads on Facebook, Google, and Instagram. A lot of that is also taking in massive amounts of data of seeing what our demographics are clicking on, where they’re moving, what they’re doing to better serve them up the proper messaging that will help to sell the product quicker.

We’ve actually infused engineering across the entire organization, not only from the product, app, and hardware side.

 

Fostering team communication

Ryan: Wow. That’s it’s a lot. And I know you’re dealing with a lot in bringing these engineering groups together and thinking about how to inspire them and lead them. Is there a common ground you’re able to find with them in terms of the way that you communicate, or do you find that you’re really trying to inspire different teams, like communicating differently with them?

Ravi: Yeah, it’s interesting. We initially built Sutro as a, I would say, a horizontal organization. When you look at the Sutro management structure, on one side, we have RevOps, which is revenue operations. Inside RevOps, there is Customer Service, Marketing, and Sales. And then, on the other side, on your right hand, you have the Product team, which is all of engineering.

What I really like to do is actually take not that level of the heads of Product and RevOps, but actually the people underneath them, the people that lead the Sales team, the Marketing team, the Customer Service team, the guy that’s the Head of Engineering the woman who’s the Project Manager, and connect everybody at that level.

We have different channels in Slack that allow each of those members to talk to each other. I almost want the customer service team talking to the firmware developer because that customer service guy sees firsthand what feedback the customers have in terms of them using the device, and that should go straight to the firmware team, not go through 17 different steps to finally get to the engineers.

 

Future plans

Ryan: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Cutting through that noise is a big part of what allows for so much better efficiency amongst groups. That’s amazing. Is there anything that you’re looking to really change over the next year or so? Like, something you really want to take the teams and open up?

Ravi: Yeah, a big initiative that we have this year Is an initiative that I’m calling Sutro Labs, which actually starts to bring us back to that full circle. We would like to move outside of the pool and spa industry and really start utilizing the Sutro platform as a puzzle piece to many different industries.

We want to get into agriculture, get into food and beverage, into janitorial, into drinking water. That’s kind of a big push for this year of really figuring out who those organizations are, where those people are to begin those conversations, so we can actually start doing the work that we set out to do seven years ago.

Ryan: Wow. That’s amazing. I can’t wait to see how those plans lay out and what your approach is to meet each of those industries in their own unique ways.

Ravi: Thanks.

Ryan: Yeah. All right. Well, thank you. It’s been amazing to hear your insights, where you came from, what your leadership style is, and how you approach things.

I can’t wait to hear your top five tips, which are coming up in just a minute.

 

Part 2. Top leadership tips

Ryan: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Full Stack Leader podcast. Again, I’m here with Ravi Kurani. He is the CEO and founder of Sutro. We have had such a great discussion so far,

And I’m really excited to hear about your top five tips on how you approach leadership. So, Ravi, maybe we can jump in and hear number one.

 

Tip 1: Keep trying

Ravi: Yeah, as you probably heard in the last few minutes of us talking, You’re going to always continuously get pushed down, and nine times out of ten, people will say, “No, it’s not going to be right for the market.”

So, point number one is to keep trying, right? You will find inspiration somewhere else. You’ll kind of alchemize and remix the ideas that you have, and if you’re really passionate about it, it will see the light of day sometime very soon.

Ryan: And in moments where somebody who’s feeling like they’ve dropped a product, What are great ways for them to look at other alternatives to bringing it to light?

So I really liked the idea that you went from just looking at the drinking water problem, and then we’re able to come to the awareness of “Oh, this actually fills this pool problem as well.” How can people look at things from different angles?

Ravi: Yeah, I think a lot of that comes from gathering data -and what I mean by that is actually having conversations.

A lot of my work early on, when we started doing the drinking water stuff, was instilled from interviewing hundreds of companies that were in the Indian space. Flipping that model around came from me managing my dad’s e-commerce store and selling tens of thousands of items online.

Once the idea has been tabled and it’s ruminating in the back of your head, continue to have conversations and keep your eyes and ears open as to what other people are doing, what they’re thinking about, and also other markets.

 

Tip 2: Build redundancy for the black swans

Ryan: All right. That’s amazing. How about tip number two? What have you got?

Ravi: Tip number two is to build redundancy for the black swans. Nicholas Nassim Taleb has an amazing book called “The Black Swan,” which is what I’m referring to here.

These are events that kind of are massive events that end up changing the entire outcome of what’s happening in the world. I would say that they are 100 percent out of your control – a good example of that is the pandemic or COVID – in 2020, there were a bunch of businesses that were looking at that year thinking, like a restaurant, they may have been open. In the course of a month, all doors were closed, right?

So pivoting, keeping redundancy, and building other pathways for you to jump to when black swans do arrive will allow you to stay nimble and agile so you can make sure you actually deploy efficiently.

Ryan: Yeah. I think that’s an amazing tip that people – at least in this generation – have consciously become aware of over the last few years.

But, hopefully, people listening to this a few years down the road might remember that this is an important topic, and there’s never a moment where that can’t possibly happen.

 

Tip 3: People are your biggest asset

Ryan: All right. How about tip number three? What do you have?

Ravi: People are your biggest asset. What I mean by this is, you know, Sutro wouldn’t be where it is without all of the people that have touched it. An idea is an idea; a napkin sketch is a napkin sketch. You yourself usually cannot execute an entire idea by yourself.

So, from your employees who are helping you and your colleagues who are helping you get the business off the ground to your investors, people who are putting money into the company, to the customers who are people that are buying your product at the end of the day, regardless of what the widget is, the idea is that you’re making people surround the entire ecosystem that buys, invests and works on this particular idea.

Ryan: Yeah, that’s amazing. And I think when you think about people as assets as well, you think about the value of assets and the value of the way that people are. So, it’s one of those things that there’s an intrinsic value to the people, as well as the value to what they can bring to the business.

How do you feel like you inspire both of those things within your work environment?

Ravi: I think it’s really listening more than anything else, where I think a lot of times founders, leaders, CEOs think that they need to be talking all the time, but a lot of value comes from you just closing your mouth and opening your ears listening to the world around you, listening to the people that, you know, work with you, the investors that want to invest in you the customers that want to buy from you.

That’s how you build a better product, a better environment, and, you know, a better investment thesis.

Ryan: Yeah, that’s great. That should be my mission statement for my whole career. “Close your mouth and open your ears.” I love that.

 

Tip 4: Always manage risks

Ryan: Number four, what have you got?

Ravi: As a CEO, you’re always managing risk.

This hits along with point number two with the black swans. Your number one goal as a CEO is that you’re just always looking for where risk exists. There’s risk in the product,  risk in people buying the product, risk in employees – and risk in the money that you take for.

I guess, those of you listening in the future, in 2023, we had a big crisis that happened probably about two weeks ago where Silicon Valley Bank, one of the largest banks in California that funded a lot of startups, ended up turning insolvent.

And, it was a big thing for the course of five days, but You know, that’s a risk that we don’t think about as a startup. you would never think, “Hey, my bank is going to fail.” And this is the life, the day in the life of a CEO is you’re just continuously managing risk, figuring out in this situation, how you can get a line of credit, making sure your employees get paid. Really managing risk is your main job as a CEO.

Ryan: Yeah. And, in a related factor, I think that’s a great example. What’s happening with the banks right now is really just another good picture of this issue of having to pivot quickly, but it really is managing the unexpected and knowing that’s actually a part of your job.

Ravi: Yeah. Yeah. Entirely. That’s actually a great way to put it.

 

Tip 5: Your trajectory is never a straight line

Ryan: Yeah. All right. How about tip number five?

Ravi: Tip number five is your trajectory is never a straight line. What I’ve realized is in the founders that I’ve mentored, right? They always kind of view execution as the straight line. “My history is I studied computer engineering, and therefore I need to be an app developer, and therefore I’m going to create the best app.”

Many times, your trajectory doesn’t work that way. If you look at my story – I started off as a pool boy, ended up working at NASA JPL, worked at a venture fund, building sustainable management, and then ended up building a swimming pool robot that can better solve water issues for other industries.

Nothing inside there speaks a straight line. I think that goes back to keep trying and to building redundancy. You just want to always keep looking for opportunities and keeping your eyes open. Yeah, that’s what my point number five is.

Ryan: Love it. These were amazing insights.

And I think that the depth of what you’re doing within trying to change the entire ecosystem of how we live and thinking about very basic things like water and the environment. They’re huge, but I love the way you’re integrating technology and lots of different engineering types into that solution.

So, we appreciate all of your insights, the way you ran us through everything, and giving us some perspective on how you’re trying to change the world.

Ravi: Thank you. Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan: All right. Awesome to have you here.