While working on developing the iPhone and then going on to co-found Nest, Matt Rogers became an expert in changing consumer behavior on a mass scale by creating products that seamlessly fit into everyday life. In his newest venture, he’s turned his sights to solving food waste starting in the kitchen. Mill sends customers a trash can that dries and shrinks kitchen scraps so they can be sent back to be used for animal feed. In this episode, Matt, Darrell, and Becca talk about thinking through every part of the customer experience from packaging to sending back their food waste, why he prefers starting a company to investing in one, and what decisions he thinks defined his previous companies.
While working on developing the iPhone and then going on to co-found Nest, Matt Rogers became an expert in changing consumer behavior on a mass scale by creating products that seamlessly fit into everyday life. In his newest venture, he’s turned his sights to solving food waste starting in the kitchen. Mill sends customers a trash can that dries and shrinks kitchen scraps so they can be sent back to be used for animal feed. In this episode, Matt, Darrell, and Becca talk about thinking through every part of the customer experience from packaging to sending back their food waste, why he prefers starting a company to investing in one, and what decisions he thinks defined his previous companies.
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Darrell Etherington 0:02
Hello, and welcome to found where we bring you the stories behind the startups. I'm your host, Darrell Etherington, and I'm here with my co host
Becca Szkutak 0:09
BeBlocky chaque.
Darrell Etherington 0:10
Hi, Becca, how's it going?
Becca Szkutak 0:11
You know, hanging in there trying not to think about how this nice warm weather is actually inappropriate for this time of year, right? Were you
Darrell Etherington 0:19
good doing the exact same thing, walk the dogs today. And I was like, this is right, I deserve this. Right. But you know, I'm planning on the planet. But that is relevant to our conversation today, which I'll get to in a minute. But first, just some housekeeping. So as always, please go ahead and rate and review the podcast on your podcast platform of choice. But also we have TechCrunch, early stage coming up. This is our premiere event where you can pick up tips on how to do things like build a business or raise money. And that's coming up on April 20th, in Boston, and we'll be there recording a Live episode of the podcast as well as just you know, getting out there, pressing palms making friends, right, Becca leaving the house, leaving the house which is Yeah, I don't do much of that. You can use code found for 40% off both founder and investor passes to the show. So today though, we're talking to Matt Rogers, who is the co founder and CEO of Nest, and who worked at Apple before that, and was the first software engineer on the iPhone project. So he's done a lot, but he wants to do more. And he's back with his new company mill. That is a trash bin that dries and shrinks your kitchen scraps so you can send them back. And then there'll be used for animal feed, so they control the whole process. And consumers get a fancy, nice looking compost bin in the mix. So without further ado, let's talk to Matt.
Hey, Matt, how's it going?
Matt Rogers 1:57
It's great. Thanks for having me.
Darrell Etherington 1:59
Yeah. Thanks for being here to talk trash. That joke has come up a lot. I'm sure I'm not the first to have made it. But we
Matt Rogers 2:06
are all about the puns. Okay, good.
Darrell Etherington 2:08
Excellent. We're in good company that I think this is a very fun heavy podcasts on occasion. But Matt, you've got mill. It debuted what now a couple of weeks ago, let's say officially just a couple of weeks. That's right,
Matt Rogers 2:20
just a couple of weeks. And so far, so good. Like we've been in stealth for a while. So it feels good to be out and rolling.
Darrell Etherington 2:26
Yeah, I have to imagine especially I mean, your big product person, right? There's always the time when you get to share with the world that must feel super special compared to the time when you're underground, putting things together doing a bunch of stuff that doesn't work. But before we get into all that, we will get into all that we should explain to our listeners in case they haven't yet heard of mill or aren't super familiar on what it is. Do you want to give them a high level overview of what it is that mill does?
Matt Rogers 2:48
Yes. So mill is a company we started just a couple years ago, that is building a new system to handle food waste. So think about the full end to end from a new bin that goes in your kitchen that makes food waste not gross and stinky. A means of collecting it and getting it back to farms to feed animals. So like the entire loop, kind of farm to table a farm. Wow, in a very kind of nasty and Apple way of making it easy and beautiful. And just like a great product experience to have at home.
Darrell Etherington 3:16
Right. And so just to make sure that listeners also know dependent they might not know but the mat references those two companies not just that random, but because he has experienced at both companies. Matt was a co founder of nest and also spent quite a while at Apple designing products. And do you want to give us a little kind of background history just for listeners that might not be familiar? Sure.
Matt Rogers 3:37
So I have like a history of being really lucky and setting up the right place at the right time I started
Darrell Etherington 3:42
if it happens so many times I stopped being lucky at some point.
Becca Szkutak 3:45
Give yourself a little credit.
Matt Rogers 3:48
Maybe but like when I was just graduating from college, I responded to like ping on like a college job board for the iPod team. And when this is the time when like the iPod was not cool and hip. This is like pipe back in 2003 This is like way back in the day. And I was like cool. Yeah, I'll go talk to those guys. And I ended up doing an internship at Apple on the iPod team and loved it and ended up meeting some incredible people I joined full time just afterwards and get like right place it right time ended up being the first software engineer on the iPhone. So amazing helped get that product Bill spent a lot of years in China making in case
Darrell Etherington 4:28
in case my listeners aren't familiar. Can you give us a brief history of what the iPhone? Actually were all right.
Matt Rogers 4:35
A whole fun podcast on the iPhone by the way, like from like old click wheel versions of the iPhone that we didn't end up shipping to what we ended up doing. Yeah, we get a whole session on on iPhone. I
Darrell Etherington 4:45
would like to do that. We will put a pin in that for a separate session for sure.
Matt Rogers 4:49
Like I started my career at Apple making iPods and iPhones. I left Apple in 2010 to start nest with my co founder Tony Fidel, and we built that company from zero to a billion plus in revenue, we sold it to Google in 2014. I helped run it for Google for a couple of years, transitioned it over to the Google hardware folks that are running it today and had spent the last couple of years actually working in climate, both as an investor and as a philanthropist, and had spent a lot of years working on the areas of climate that are overlooked. So made some early bets in things like carbon removal, and helping save emissions and agriculture and industrial emissions, things that are not very sexy, but are really important. And that's kind of what got me to where I am today. That's why we started mill, I didn't realize how bad waste was both from the planetary perspective, but also from the human perspective. So yeah, we're building a new company to end waste, like waste shouldn't exist.
Darrell Etherington 5:49
Wow. I mean, that's a very ambitious goal. I think that you should start with an ambitious goal, you want to make real change, right? I'm curious about, like, you mentioned, overlooked industries, and you know, you're spending time on the VC side, and on the philanthropy side. So what was the decision process there to hone in on this particular problem, and then also to go operator side, again, because you didn't want to just throw money at the problem this time around? Not just I mean, oh, man, it's good to throw money at the problem, please do,
Matt Rogers 6:16
you're getting deep into my psychology. So I really enjoyed being an investor and being a board member. But also, it was quite frustrating at times, too. You could give an entrepreneur really good advice, doesn't mean they're going to take it. Sure. And I think kind of my lesson learned to, you know, being the investor side for several years is, I find the work of building pair rewarding, and I enjoy doing it. So the opportunity to partner up with my old friend Harry Tenenbaum. Harry worked with us on the earliness team. And to start this new company, I was like, I gotta go do it with him. This is the company go build. It's a really big problem, we could actually solve it. Like, we have the skills to do this. And it's a tractable problem. Sure. But yeah, like, being investor is fun. But like you have, you know, you have limited tools available. Yeah, the end of the day, the entrepreneurs are gonna make their decision.
Darrell Etherington 7:07
And they probably just pick the wrong one all the time. You don't have to say that you can
Matt Rogers 7:12
type, you can see the brick wall coming and that train is rolling right into it. You can say, you know, I think in six months, that brick wall is gonna be there, and they may still run right into it. That's true. Yeah.
Becca Szkutak 7:23
I'm curious, because as you mentioned, food waste is such a huge issue. How did you take that focus on that area, and sort of narrow it down to like, what ended up becoming mill and ending up focusing on sort of like a consumer product? And what was the ideation there?
Matt Rogers 7:39
Yes. So I look at things like very much like a product manager was like, Okay, if we want to end waste, what is waste? Where does it come from? And what can we do about it? And we were astonished to learn, like, first off, like food waste, is the biggest category and waste. It's the, the biggest chunk of thing in landfills, like it's about 25 percentage of landfill. It's a lot of food that we throw away. Yeah, we throw about 40% of the food we grow. And about half of that comes from our homes. So it makes sense, like, oh, like, that's where we should start, we should start with making it easy to put things in the right bin at home. Like some people try composting, it's sometimes very hard requires a lot of time and space to get fruit flies like it's challenging. So can we make an experience at home to kind of get things on the right path. And what we learned is actually we need to build the whole path too. We have like, food waste, really big problem. Like one of my favorite stats is if food waste was a country by emissions, it'd be the third largest country, it's like China, largest emitter, then us then food waste, like eight to eight to 10% of emissions. It's a really big deal.
Darrell Etherington 8:46
Yeah, I had no idea. I mean, I think in my intuitively, I guess I would say like, oh, probably the biggest way started industrial processes or something like you always see you see that counter narrative of like, Oh, don't worry about your plastic straws. Like you got to be out there making decisions based on like where you buy and sourcing and policy decisions. policy decisions are what's really going to save us an individual action has kind of fallen out of favor as a way to do because we grew up in the like Reduce Reuse recycle world where that was like drilled into our brains as kids of talking to me and Matt primarily, Becca, I don't know if that messaging is like that popular while you were growing up. But that was like, it was okay. Yeah, it was all we heard. And then you'd go out and be like, Okay, I'm gonna recycle this coke can and then I'm doing my part and I save the world, right? And then later, you kind of went like, no, wait a minute, what about like Exxon or whatever.
Matt Rogers 9:38
So this is a really important topic, actually. And I'm definitely a believer that individual action matters and such that it adds up to systems change and drives systems change and policy change. And that's actually one of our kind of theses behind mill is that we can make a better product a better experience at home and use that as a case study to change municipal systems work. And actually, we've got our first partnerships and pilots rolling out of the next couple of weeks on that front, like that. Today, like most cities are trying to do the right thing with waste. They have climate pledges, they have zero waste goals. But it's really hard to change people's behavior at home and create new daily rituals. So this is actually one of our theories of change, like individual action does matter such that it actually adds up and drive systems change. Right,
Darrell Etherington 10:29
right. But it can't be piecemeal. It has to be sweeping and holistic. And to do that, you have to change behavior, which you're the expert at, right? Like you understand how to get people to adopt something on a mass scale that is new and novel.
Matt Rogers 10:42
That's right. It's funny, you should say, I don't feel like an expert. But at the same time, I guess, if you look over the last 20 years, I've done quite a bit of these products. And the way I think about it is it's not just about the changing behavior, it's just making things really easy. And if you make things really easy, they actually it starts to become the default ritual, the default habit, and I harken back to like the early nest days when we were designing that first thermostat. And we made that really cute green leaf on the dial. And people would always look for the leaf, they would turn the dial they saw the leaf to like, Okay, I'm doing the right thing. And it's a subtle cue, but it ended up actually, that ended up driving behavior. And people would change it from 77 to 74. And that would end up saving a lot of energy.
Becca Szkutak 11:24
I can definitely speak for myself that if a consumer product gives me a little treat for like doing the right thing. I'm more likely to adopt them.
Darrell Etherington 11:31
Yeah, I'm definitely I have the nest, I think pretty close to when it came out. And it definitely changed my behavior. And it's something that stuck with me. But I think that also brings up kind of the other thing you mentioned, which is that the consumer case builds a municipal case, which is what you saw with NES, right? Like, once you started doing that you had incentivization through rebate programs and utility providers and stuff like that, is that kind of the model that you're exactly right.
Matt Rogers 11:55
That is actually like you would think like, oh, like maybe you should start with utilities and municipalities. But actually, right, generally, those organizations move slower, and they want to see data. So actually, the path to start with consumers at home is actually the right path, it starts to build the flywheel effects, and you build data and word of mouth. And then the larger players like utility companies following I think about like the first years of nest, primarily a direct consumer business. And what really got scale happening and actually started drive down cost was when utilities realized, oh, like we could do this, too. And there's grid level benefits and, you know, behavior change at home.
Darrell Etherington 12:35
Yeah, I think that the question there that I bet a lot of founders, probably not with your history, and maybe that's a key component, but like a lot of founders end up encountering that decision, and then going the other way, likely on the advice of like their investors, right? Because you see a b2b opportunity or something like an enterprise opportunity. And you think that's easier. And it's also like, more repeatable, and we've seen it kind of before, and the other one seems a lot harder and more challenging. And individual consumer bases and building scale, there seems like just a really sticky mess instead of selling to one buyer who then does 1000 seats or whatever. So how do you get around that? Or how do you advise people to get around that when they're having conversations with investors?
Matt Rogers 13:15
transparently, like, harried I have heard this too, right? Even our own journey with mill like, we've had VC say, oh, like you should just do b2b and sell this directly to restaurants. And yeah, like, yes, like from like a early you'd ever
Darrell Etherington 13:27
say like, but do you know who I am? Remember me like? Nothing in my history shows that that's the way it works.
Matt Rogers 13:35
I like to listen to advice. But again, I don't don't always take it. I think I'm like my advice to founders on this. One is, especially as the leader of your company, like, you've got to have a strong gut about where you want to go and what your Northstar is. And there are lots of windy roads along the path. And if you know what your Northstar is, like, you know where you want to get to and for us, mill, we want to get to municipal scale. Yeah. And it makes sense if that's your Northstar, like what the path is to get there, like behavior change at home, new daily rituals is the place to start. You know, it really depends on your business. But like, yeah, founders got to have a clear vision of where they're going. And investors are good at pattern recognition, because they see so many different pitches and so many different companies, but they only have to spend so many hours on your company. So like you know your company best.
Darrell Etherington 14:24
Yeah, I think is like just based on your has you have you changed that approach from when you were kind of like premier investor, and then you have that experience like is that all changed how you interact with investors, or how you pursue that part of the business.
Matt Rogers 14:37
I'm always respectful and always listened. But actually, I think maybe this is a benefit of experience. I'm also not afraid to push back and say, Hey, no, actually like, this is our theory of change on the business and our long term vision. This is why we're going to do it and you know, we're not blinded by gut we also will use data, right? Yeah, if we're in year two or year three of the company and we're not seeing consumer traction, but we're seeing a lot of pull or in b2b or in restaurants or grocery stores? Yeah, like maybe we'll look at those two but so far so good on the consumer side.
Becca Szkutak 15:08
And say I am a consumer Well, I guess I am. And say I wanted to start were saying, so I've ever bought something in my life. Um, how would I go about sort of setting up? I know, things are still kind of rolling out because the company is so new, but how would I start using now if I wanted to?
Matt Rogers 15:25
Yes. So not only new company, but also like new business model too. And we'll get a bit too wide in a bit. But you gotta mil.com You sign up for a membership. And the kitchen bin is included free in the membership. The setback experience to get the food waste back to farms is included in the membership impact tracking is included. And down the road actually, maybe rewards are included in membership to maybe you get a dividend of eggs from the farm. Yeah, that'd be great. It's like really like farm to table a farm, its entirety. And it's all available for about $1 a day. And we did this for a number of reasons. One, less learn from nest. People don't like buying hardware and having to subscribe to Sure. So yeah, yeah, it's probably from there. We're like Nest Cam. Peloton is a good example to like, you spend money on this really premium products, and you gotta pay per month. That kind of sucks. Yeah. And people hate that. And the other is like you think about like, where we're going. And today, you pay for waste management per month. It's a service. Sure, yeah. Down the road. Like, if we're preventing waste, and we're doing a waste prevention service. were popular fitness, similar model. Especially you think about municipal partnerships down the road.
Darrell Etherington 16:35
Yeah, that's very cool. I think the lesson about like wanting to because the other flipside is like if you get a device, and then you pay for a subscription, also, you need to be able to use it separately from the subscription, right or else it's, you feel like oh, I've been totally screwed. Like, this is a real I got misuse of my funds or whatever, right,
Matt Rogers 16:52
like buying a Peloton. Yeah, like you buy a Peloton, but don't subscribe, like you bought like a bike that stay stationary bike for 1000 bucks
Darrell Etherington 17:00
plus, right? I'm thinking a lot. There's a lot of exercise equipment that has this model in this problem. And this challenge, I think it's like really difficult. There's a company, I tested out their equipment recently, but it's like, this platform thing that's kind of like a Tylenol, but it's on the ground. It's called the Vitruvian. But it's like, they don't even put their monthly subscription costs anywhere on their website. Like if you go in the FAQ, and you're like, how much does it there's a question is how much does it cost us per month? And it's like, it's a very reasonable amount after your first year. Doesn't say
Matt Rogers 17:30
to the point like, people hate that kind of Yes. Yeah. Just do it all included. Yeah. And like, Yes, I understand. Like, there's an ongoing cost to running the service. And maybe there's videos and classes, I get that. But like, just be transparent about it and make it all upfront. And like say like, oh, like for 50 bucks a month, it's all included, you get the exercise equipment and the classes. Yeah. That's how SoulCycle works. Right?
Darrell Etherington 17:52
Exactly. And it doesn't like I think the thing that they're overlooking is that it leaves such a sour taste like and it's a kind of indelible memory, like it's an association with that brand that you're not gonna get rid of easily once it's there, right? It was just like they snuck this by and they're sneaky. And I'm gonna remember that was Yeah, they
Becca Szkutak 18:09
really suddenly, like, raise the Peloton membership price. And one of the reasons was that they rolled out classes in Spanish and German. And I was like, but I don't speak Spanish.
Darrell Etherington 18:20
Spanish German speakers
Unknown Speaker 18:23
thrilled for them. But fine here, by the way, people
Darrell Etherington 18:28
can't see this video. I don't know if that's why it was coming up so much map. But it comes to mind for sure. Yeah, amazing.
Matt Rogers 18:35
Amazing. There are products and experiences we use every day. There are different ways to market, you know, and to sell these products. And I think we're trying to innovate and make this easier on people. And yeah, it's harder on the company side, we have to finance that hardware that's gonna go to yours to your home. But it's the right thing for the customer over the long term. So we're going to do it. Yeah.
Darrell Etherington 19:01
I mean, it seems like a particularly challenging area in which to do that, because your surprise and delight is essentially like you're making something a bit less unpleasant that is already unpleasant, or, I mean, you talk about this, like, are you able to turn this into something that is like actually pleasant from a user experience perspective? Because my green button experience right now does suck, right. But it's also like, it's mildly unpleasant, but it's like not anything I really think about that could be like, Oh, this is amazing. And I want to engage with this. Right? Yeah.
Matt Rogers 19:28
Yeah, this was our aha moment. So like, we've been testing the mill experience for about a year now. Yeah, in our own homes, in some external field testers. And once you have it, you can't live without it. Like, I don't think you realize how often you take out the trash on a daily basis or weekly basis.
Darrell Etherington 19:44
Well, more, not as much as I should. There are many times I tie up the green when I put it on the garbage can and I'm like, I'm going to take that out next time that I'm going to attack because it's really cold right now. And it sits there for a lot longer than it should.
Matt Rogers 19:56
So like the detour ification of the house is a really it's a fun On one end, in our house, we live in San Francisco, we're like we're three floors up. And I didn't have to carry these like gross, icky bags down three flights of stairs, inevitably they would be drips on the stairs, and on the way back up, I'd be like wiping each stair on the way up trying to clean it. So like, I don't have to do that anymore. So that's, that's cool. Yeah, there's like, the no smells is a real thing. And again, like you don't realize it until they're gone. I'm like, Oh, my in my kitchen did stink. And like, after that dinner party, like, holy cow, did we have a lot of scraps. And this experience with mill is like a bottomless pit. Like you put it in, you wake up the next morning, and it's empty again. And it takes weeks to fill up. So it's just like, it's a better way. And, you know, trash is one of those things that we've taken for granted. This is a lesson I learned from Tony and Steve, on the journeys, you know, on Apple, and and so like, there are things that we take for granted, but we don't have to, like there are better ways. And like, I think those the best products are the ones that we take for granted every day that suck, but could just be so much better. Yeah, well, I
Darrell Etherington 21:01
mean, they're better from just like, because once people experience them, right, they can never go back to the other one. But it's also better for in terms of like, the competitive field, right? Because typically, it's a lot more open. Like you're not like, Oh, I gotta wedge myself in here and differentiate myself in a very, very aggressively competitive field. Like right now you're competing with, I forget the good trash bin, but they're like, just they look really nice. Oh, simple. Yeah, yeah.
Matt Rogers 21:23
It's like the like the big steel steel trash cans. Yeah,
Darrell Etherington 21:25
yeah, they look good. They have nice spring action. But there's they're not much beyond that.
Matt Rogers 21:30
Indeed, when I think about like our competitors, I think our competitor more of like the landfill. Like right, the bin is important, because it makes the experience at home so much better. But actually, like, the product at Mill is a new system. Yeah, it's not just about the bin and like getting this another like lesson learned from the yesterday thermostat really important. But actually, it was the key to unlocking a new energy system and like a distributed grid. And I love these kinds of companies where like, it's hardware enabled, or product enabled. But actually, it is systems change that this was driving the company.
Darrell Etherington 22:02
Yeah. I mean, well, the iPod was that too, right? And that was a great object lesson on that, like you changed all the way I mean, without everybody bought music
Matt Rogers 22:08
without the iTunes Store. Like it would just have been an mp3 player. Yeah, there are many mp3 players before the iPod iPod. Like I had a radio I had like 10 songs in your pocket. Oh, yeah, man, like 10 songs in your pocket. Also, like an inferior product. But really, it was the iTunes store that gave it life.
Darrell Etherington 22:24
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I had a bunch of those. They were really all like cheap feeling and awful and unpleasant to use. But yes, it was it was really the access to music. And it was the way that the library was managed and organized and the way that you purchased that that changed everything. I also had Sony MiniDisc players a lot just before that, if you remember those are fantastic. I love those. I think
Matt Rogers 22:45
they're to come back. Like my guess is like it like a retro way. Yeah, they're on their way back.
Darrell Etherington 22:50
I gotta dig one up. I think my parents still have. There's
Matt Rogers 22:54
like a whole underground economy of people who take like, old iPod classics and like retrofit them and like, oh, yeah, there's retros coming back. I keep saying this, like, it makes me feel old like that an iPod.
Darrell Etherington 23:09
I know, thinking about any of this stuff is really like for the time. But I do want to ask, thinking back to like the NES days, which is even now like, that's quite a long while ago now. Right? But
Matt Rogers 23:21
we sold the company in 2014. Wow. Yeah.
Darrell Etherington 23:24
It feels like it feels like ancient history at this point. Yeah. But what is your approach now as a founder, like, Does it resemble how you approach being a founder at that time? Or is it like, night and day, like totally different?
Matt Rogers 23:35
Honestly, it is night and day, it's a totally different world, in what I think I have a lot more empathy for what the team is going through on a day to day basis. And when I started nest, I was like, 25 years old, right? And I was 1,000%, working all the time. And every minute of my body, every moment in my brain was like, thinking about NASA, and how to get from A to B on that. And I realized, like, oh, like people have sick parents or have little kids at home. And just like, they have a life too. And I think as a founder that's now 40 and has two little kids and dealing with cancer and all those things in the real family stuff. You have empathy. And like, this is actually it was it's called like, building mill versus building nests. Like, it really is a marathon, not a sprint. And when you're a mile marker for and you're running out of gas, like are you really gonna make it to the end? Yeah. And I think about like the nest journey, we sold in 2014. I think I had like $20,000 in my bank account, like my total net worth when we sold. So like, I was definitely feeling the pressure. And I think if if I had had like a different mentality, like maybe would have kept going. Yeah.
Becca Szkutak 24:45
And kind of on the flip side of that, what do you think you did well, in the process of founding nests, building it up off the ground and eventually selling it that you hope to not necessarily repeat exactly here at Mill but hope to sort of be able to recreate in some way
Matt Rogers 25:00
And, you know, this is a lesson learned directly from the Apple playbook of relentless pursuit of the best customer experience possible. Like everyone says that every product person or founder he talked to always says that, but to go to like the nth degree to do it is another story. And just think about, like, with your early days of mill, we're like on our 20th iteration of packaging, as an example. And like, just making it easy to open the box. And you know, the bin is about 50 pounds, it's pretty heavy, like, how can you make it easy to get it out of the box? And just like we had, I can't even tell you how many iterations like at least 20 plus to get it right. And it's one of those things that people say that they'll do anything for their customers, that doesn't mean they actually well, yeah, I when I when I favorite stories, early nest, there are days when we would get phone calls through customer support of people saying, hey, my heater is not working nests broke my heater. And we would send an HVAC technician to their house to fix their heater. Wow. Despite like, not like thermostat has nothing to do with your heater. Yeah. First is needed maintenance. But we wouldn't go do that. And like, that's something that we learned at Apple, like Apple would go to extremes, to make a better product and to make a great customer experience. And people recognize that. And they that homeowner that got their furnace fixed, is going to tell all their friends how awesome nest was?
Darrell Etherington 26:22
Yeah, I think that's a great point. Because I think that's the one point where you feel because you do hear that all the time. But you probably see that fall down most when people are like thinking about locus of control, or whatever like that, what is the domain of my product, and what is not the domain of my product. And they make the mistake, I think it's a mistake to say the, you know, my product ends where whatever the physical constraints of my product stop, like anything beyond that, or any system that plugs into it is not my responsibility. There's real stability of those other things. And it's like, no, no, if you're designing it to interact with these things, it now is responsible for all those things, especially if it's like, the interface for it, like a person doesn't go down and fiddle with their boiler or whatever, or their heater, like they use the thermostat. Right? So that's the responsibility. And that's where it lies. And that must be something that is drilled into you at Apple, I would imagine, right?
Matt Rogers 27:13
That's right, you think about whole systems, and the system end to end, iPod iTunes, iTunes Store, and the music and content that gets put on the store you think about is that is the system. And that's how we thought about it nest. It wasn't just about the dial on the wall. It's about the furnace, and the air conditioner, and the energy grid, and all the things that were happening around us. And that was our mindset creating Mel, it's not just about building a new bin, it's about how does the material leave your house? And where does it go? And has it get processed? And who are the farmers that are going to be buying it? You know, just like the whole end end? And that's a different way of looking at things. It's really hard. Like, it's definitely like the double black diamond of startups. Yeah. Like, that's what you got to do. That's how you drive systems change.
Darrell Etherington 27:59
Yeah, when you're building a team, like, how do you either hire for that? Or how do you inspire that or make sure that people follow that diligently, when, when they're, you're training them.
Matt Rogers 28:07
So we definitely over index on passion. And like, we will interview a lot of candidates for roles. And we'll pass on people that are very, let's call it technically sound like maybe like they're the best firmer engineer on the planet, but they really don't care about trash like chair, you know, they can go work on anything, right? If there's someone who's less skilled, but you know, they're gonna go to the extremes, because they want to end waste. And they care about the planet and their climate driven. Like, those are the kinds of folks that we bring in. And it was a very similar thing to kind of the early days at NASA. But obviously, as nest grew became more smart homey than just about thermostat and energy. But I think like mission orientation is the most important thing when building a startup. Because you could learn new skills, but like, it's hard to teach passion.
Darrell Etherington 28:49
Yeah, I would say impossible. Actually, I try every day. I'm not lucky, you better you're very passionate. Other people who shall remain nameless.
Becca Szkutak 29:04
Curious, so taking a step back for a second, because you did mention looking at the whole system. And obviously, in something like this, as you mentioned, that includes farms sort of these pickup drop off like a lot of moving parts that require a lot of other people and businesses to and I'm sort of curious, like, how does this affect like, when the product rolls out? Do you think it makes sense to start in like a specific area? Can this go like National right away? Like how do you sort of set up the rollout for something that does require that many players at once
Matt Rogers 29:32
actually transparently like these are all things that we looked at through the journey getting to this point, like in the kind of iterations of the business getting to this point, like we thought like, oh, like, is this a business that kind of launches locally, city by city, because of that kind of deep local logistics component and we got both kind of lucky but also like, again, like able to make some especially during the pandemic, you can make calls and people to answer. We had some conversations with the Postal Service. Like hey, like, could we part are with you guys. And could you pick this stuff up? And Nellie? They say yes. But like, this would be a great business for us. We'd love to get involved. We have climate goals. Good part. Yeah. Great partnership, good place to start. Post Office goes everywhere every day anyway. Yeah. So like, postal carriers coming to your house every single day rain or shine anyway. Now could those trucks go back with some packages on trips they already were on. So both from a business perspective and that, like we're not adding a lot of cost. And in from environmental perspective, we're not adding any other miles. So it was, it was a really good win win win. That's what enables mill to be national. Without the Postal Service, we probably couldn't be a national company.
Darrell Etherington 30:40
Do you want to tell them that publicly? Because then I feel like the contract value might go up. That's we should we should edit that part out.
Matt Rogers 30:47
We let's call the Postal Service also has like a public good mandate to Yeah, so I think we're, we're hopefully gonna also play up the public good side.
Darrell Etherington 30:55
Nice. Yeah, I bet reminds me of in Japan, like the Japan Post does like eldercare, like they do check in on seniors who, you know, might not have other support systems or, you know, readily available family members.
Matt Rogers 31:08
That make sense, like, your postal carriers come in your house every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. Yep. What are the other kinds of things they could do under there? Right, in this case, like, could they pick up a box of dried food? Yeah, they sure can. It's a
Darrell Etherington 31:20
key part of national infrastructure that, you know, people should leverage and use as much as possible. And instead of privatizing, I forget where you all are at with that. I'm Canadian. Oh, yeah. Have you privatize your postal service yet? Or no, it's still a public good. And
Becca Szkutak 31:35
it's putting along? Yeah, public money?
Darrell Etherington 31:39
Well, come on good. Public services are good. You just need more taxes to go. This is the part of the podcast where I go on a socialist tear. When we get a lot of letters. Yeah, I think I had a related question, which is like, you know, the other another analogy, Japan, but I used to, I live there briefly, but I would put out my garbage. And then the people would come around, and they would just lecture me about all the things that I had done wrong with sorting my garbage, right. So that is an immense behavior change to ask. And especially with organic waste, because it's like a little bit, at least in the traditional system, like a little something wrong, like you put in a contaminated receptacle or whatever. And it screws up the whole thing. So how do you deal with that? And making sure customers are like your allies in that regard? Yeah.
Matt Rogers 32:27
So this is their, like, where the US lags, basically, everywhere else in the world. You mentioned Japan, like South Korea, China, Taiwan, Singapore, like they all do a better job than we do. Yeah. Same with the Europeans. Europeans are also really good at like, oh, like, this goes in a different bin because it gets recycled and has value Americans don't figure this part out yet. Because it's hard, because it's a major inconvenience. And Americans don't like inconvenience. So again, like, make it easy, maybe we'll do it. But yeah, we've designed the mill system to also to nudge you the right way. Like, hey, like we saw, you put a plastic bottle in the bin, we filtered it out. But now like next time, don't put plastic in the bin. At our facilities, we sort and process the materials that we get, and make sure it's safe to feed chickens.
Darrell Etherington 33:13
Oh, cool. Okay, so I mean, that's great, because there's a feedback system and there's some accountability, but like, gentle because what happens here is I sort stuff into green bin, blue bin, just trash bin. I don't know what happens to it after that. I don't know if I did it right or wrong. I have no idea. Right? Yeah, I just
Matt Rogers 33:31
bought like a truckload of compost for our garden. And it was full of little plastic bits. And my daughter being the resourceful girl she is picked out a bunch of the little plastic bits and like made a collage, like all the treasures she found in the garden, which is both like, heartwarming, but also brutally sad. Yes, yeah. So we're not going to have this problem because they can. This is a cool thing about food. When food gets dry gets really small. So when we send our food grounds back to mill, we sorted and sifted, we are able to very easily extract the good stuff, and like the plastic bits, or we filter out
Becca Szkutak 34:08
and something that's curious because I know I mentioned, you guys mentioned that it doesn't smell which is great. But grinds are a sort of works but the food wastes overnight. Is it loud?
Matt Rogers 34:18
It's not so okay. It's quieter than a dishwasher, but a little bit louder than refrigerator. So if you kind of put on your mind and feel like the technical audience, it's like 40 ish. dBm it's like, not too bad. Ya know? It's like it runs at night. So it also like, doesn't bother you
Darrell Etherington 34:34
in the kitchen at night. 40 decibels. You're not going to hear that. Yeah,
Matt Rogers 34:37
it's quieter than your dishwasher. So like, especially if you're running your dishwasher at night like you're not going to hear it over your dishwasher.
Becca Szkutak 34:43
Both of you to assume I have a dishwasher. You should get what I'm asking because
Matt Rogers 34:50
game changer, like sliced bread dishwasher. Like
Becca Szkutak 34:55
my landlord loves when I email love these.
Darrell Etherington 34:59
Email your landlord that exactly list and then like, see what you get.
Matt Rogers 35:02
That's actually another go to market of ours. Yeah, I
Darrell Etherington 35:05
was gonna ask about that. Yeah. And we work with
Matt Rogers 35:07
landlords like, especially like in like larger apartment buildings like trash is pretty stinky. And like everyone knows about those gross trash chutes and trash rooms at the end of the hallway? And like, Could we get rid of those? Yeah, like, there's a path there too. Now, that would be amazing.
Darrell Etherington 35:22
So I alluded to this at the top, I'm going to ask it to enter here, but like, what is it like for you building this in stealth? And then getting to the actual go to market moment? How do those phases? Is it everything is all the energy and excitement and that go to market? Has it all leading up to that? Do you have kind of consistent energy throughout? Or how do you manage that?
Matt Rogers 35:41
I am always pretty high energy. I think it's maybe it's one of my good traits. Good entrepreneur, but like, I'm always pretty high energy, I'm always pretty optimistic. So I've been going at this almost three years now, at like a very steady 95%. Like, full throttle. But really like launch, like leaving stealth, launching the company starting to be out in the world, for us is really rewarding. Because like, we knew this is going to be cool. sure that people are gonna like it, that's gonna make it make a big difference that there's a positive impact. But it's really good enough to hear from others. Like we're not only drinking our own Kool Aid. Yeah, that's one of the things I always caution other entrepreneurs is like, Are you only drinking your own Kool Aid? Or you're getting some external validation and data to Yeah,
Darrell Etherington 36:27
I wish there was a easy way to extend that metaphor. Are you drinking other people's Kool Aid? Is that does that work? Are you drinking like, well, that sounds funny D in addition to Kool Aid, is there's other brands in there? I don't know.
Matt Rogers 36:39
Is that what Elon Musk bought Twitter? Do I bought Twitter? So he gets like drink other people's Kool Aid? Or have people drink this Kool Aid? That was the whole point.
Darrell Etherington 36:50
Right? I think I think you're right. I think that is exactly why.
Matt Rogers 36:54
Like, if you're worth $100 billion, like, what's $30 billion in friends,
Darrell Etherington 36:58
you know, I mean, yeah, yeah. For some cool is it worth it? Totally. I just thought of this. But when do you have visions on like, crossing the whole garbage shack? Like do you look at the all of them as opportunities, as opposed to just the organics or what
Matt Rogers 37:11
it is the right question? Yeah, we're starting with food. Food is a quarter of landfills. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff we throw away that we shouldn't. That's really hard to deal with. Yeah. And yeah, like, I think over time, like, that's where this company could go, like, can we and waste? Yeah, I suppose
Darrell Etherington 37:26
it must be a debate because you've got the other 50% of food waste, which is probably a commercial and enterprise or whatever, right? So but look at that way, and then you look the other way. And you're like, which is gonna work better? Like what we have the end with the consumers, we expand that way? Or do we go up the stack? Oh, my gosh,
Matt Rogers 37:41
like, you're not only in my mind, but like, in my mind for like many years, like, a time at Nest, or Tony, I we're having the same discussion. Like we had just launched our second version of the Nest thermostat. We're like, oh, like, do we do something new, a new category? Do we do more in energy doing something grid side? And that's when the doing the smoke alarm next, right? And that kind of led us on this path of being a smart home company? Sure, rather than a home energy company. And I think about like that fork in the road. And like, do we make the right call on that fork in the road? Like similar conversations with the middle team now like, which forks in the road do we take at which time? And it's really hard to know, which is the right path? Yeah, it really is.
Darrell Etherington 38:20
Yeah, I guess I mean, all you can do is wait for some signals and then make a make a choice. Right. It looks like that's formed. But yeah,
Matt Rogers 38:26
that's right. And but there's no back button. That's the other thing, right? No Back button and startup land?
Darrell Etherington 38:30
No, there certainly isn't. But I mean, you know what, I think you'll get to all of it eventually. Matt, I have faith in you. You're obviously high energy, very optimistic person. You'll get there. You'll get
Matt Rogers 38:41
it for the long term. Like, yeah, this is not a company we plan to sell to Google in three or four years. That's not the plan. Like the plan is to solve a systems problem. Yeah, it took us a long time to do that. Cool. Well,
Darrell Etherington 38:52
I hope you solve it for the sake of all of us. And thanks again for joining us, man. It's been great having you, of course,
Matt Rogers 38:57
my pleasure.
Darrell Etherington 39:04
All right, Becca, that was our conversation with storied investor and entrepreneur, Matt Rogers. He's done so much. I think one of the most interesting things he talked about was kind of how frustrating it was for him to be an investor and not be able to get in there and just do things and make things happen. I bet that's probably a common problem for operators turned investors.
Becca Szkutak 39:26
Yeah. And something we don't hear about often, but I'm sure you're right. And I think for him specifically, coming from that team on Apple, like we talked about on the podcast, Apple is so particular about user experience, while it seems particular about everything, coming from that to being a founder and then an investor I'm sure it's like, even more frustrating for him based on like, both those experiences.
Darrell Etherington 39:50
Yeah, that must be tough. I mean, I think it is. It's a thing that you hear about from anybody who spent a significant amount of time at Apple is like that obsession with detail and with every l MIT of the process and that approach to systems thinking, which is like very comprehensive and holistic, but it must be so hard to see startups doing that. But on the flip side, like, it must be so hard for founders to be like, you want me to think about all that. But also, we employ three people or whatever. We also don't have billions of dollars back.
Becca Szkutak 40:21
Now, that dynamic, I think is so interesting, because it's like, even if advice is good, like you said, you can't always even take it. Yeah. So like that constant struggle of even if you agree with what's being said to you, or you think it's helpful, but also just the logistics of is it even possible to do Yeah,
Darrell Etherington 40:37
but I do think it seemed like, it was the combination of yes, he wants to be on the operator side, he wants to be getting stuff going. And then he also he saw this opportunity, and was like, I have the skill set to make a difference here, right, because I think the key ingredient with this particular thing, and the thing we've seen many, many other efforts public and private kind of fail at is changing human behavior, which is like the most challenging thing in the world to do. But all of Matt's past products have demonstrated a like, really remarkable ability to do that.
Becca Szkutak 41:14
And I definitely think it's interesting here, with this being one of those aspects of climate change, where the consumer behavior and consumer aspect of it actually can make more of a difference than, say, corporations cutting carbon emissions and sort of the like, which is always that argument against some of those consumer changes. But it definitely, I think it's interesting, because while I agree, it would be a slight consumer behavior change. I'm curious if he'll get any pushback from the people who were only grow up like we talked about being told to recycle and then finding out years later, like, a lot of that didn't actually help or didn't actually do anything. So I am curious if that company will face any sort of pushback in any way like that. Yeah. That No, I did.
Darrell Etherington 41:57
I did think about that. Because I think there's a there's like a disillusionment or like a whiplash effect that makes it harder to then climb out of that trough. Like it's not like just that you have to institute this positive change. It's like you have to overcome this impression that past attempts at positive change, we're actually for not right, so it's like, fool me once Fool me twice type thing that you have to get over. And I definitely feel that myself personally, like I do. I think the straws is the best example. Like, I don't care about paper straws. I don't care about it. This is a controversial hot take on the found outro. But like, I want my plastic straws are really good. They're really good at what they do. Other types of straws are not nearly as good at what they're supposed to do. The metal ones are dangerous. The paper ones are tourists. Yeah. Cuz you could do if you fall on it, I don't know, you get to go through your soft palate. Who knows? This is a hot day.
Listen, you never know. And you're just drinking and you could fall forward. Can Happen. Gotta be careful. Anyway, this but though, like, I always felt like why you asked me to do this when I am not contributing that much to the ocean waste or whatever. It's mostly fishing nets and stuff. But the I think the good point here that he made that was eye opening was that, like individual consumers combined represent 50% of the waste in that huge, huge category, which itself is I think he said, the third largest when it comes to waste categories overall, right? Yeah, that was like, Oh, wow, you really can make a difference here. And I think he'll be able to galvanize some kind of action on the back of that. But I think the user experience is going to be what takes it the rest of the way. Because when I started thinking about it after the podcasts, like, if you told me like, Oh, someone's going to come and take your green bin contents on a daily or whatever basis, and it's the post office person, and they're coming anyway. And like, that sounds amazing. To me, it sounds so convenient, about a part of my life that I find rather unpleasant, and like, you know, like a chore that I do not look forward to doing. So I think that is the real selling point.
Becca Szkutak 43:57
Mm hmm. I also think it's interesting too, because unlike with recycling some of those other consumer based green choices is that you see the end goal here. Like you can kind of track where things are going, like, Oh, this is being used to feed animals, like that's gonna get some people just off the bat, whereas opposed like recycling, it's like you're putting it in a same bag, as you're putting your trash it gets thrown in a truck that looks exactly the same. And that you know, it gets like burned, where it's actually bad. Like, this could be a much more compelling sell, easy getting picked up from your house and sort of knowing the actual direct positive impact on the other side. Yeah. And
Darrell Etherington 44:35
then if it does eventually evolve into what he kind of alluded to where they you get rewards through some kind of a farm share or something. Like even if that becomes an add on service, or they partner with that, but then you get a discount of membership. I could see that being really successful too. Because I think you know, that's also something that consumers are already saying they want and are interested in is these kinds of farm share grocery delivery participation programs, right so that's looked at in make it like a cost benefit like yeah, that seems amazing. So I have a high hopes for it I will say. Honestly I was skeptical going into it. Matt did a very good job of convincing me that the idea I had liked, so I hope they do become a success long term. Found is hosted by myself Managing Editor Darrell Etherington and TechCrunch plus reporter Becca skew tech were produced by Maggie Stamets with editing by Cal Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator Alisa stringer leads audience development and Henry pic of it manages TechCrunch his audio products. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai