Jay Potter was born without a fear of failure. The son of an accomplished engineer, he owned his own company at 15. He has an independent spirit, risk taker at heart, obsessed with true significance!
Listen to his story behind ECOR, his company that successfully converts ag waste to building materials with an emphasis on circularity. Of significance, ECOR produces sheets of MDF (recycled wood particles) that eliminate toxic binders.
Jay is deeply motivated to solve problems of inefficiencies. Jay's turning point to ECOR occurred when he had lunch with Ray Anderson, founder of Interface. He heard Anderson's Mission Zero environmental vision. This was the moment of truth when Jay realized the economic and moral potential of sustainability.
Hear Jay's story of aligning his core values into an enterprise which eventually evolved to his creation of ECOR.
ECOR is the next unicorn with actual pre-booked business north of $500 million.
To invest, please contact www.ecorglobal.com. Talk to Jay today at jaypotter@ecorglobal.com or call 858-472-0239.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/success-made-to-last-legends--4302039/support.
Listen to his story behind ECOR, his company that successfully converts ag waste to building materials with an emphasis on circularity. Of significance, ECOR produces sheets of MDF (recycled wood particles) that eliminate toxic binders.
Jay is deeply motivated to solve problems of inefficiencies. Jay's turning point to ECOR occurred when he had lunch with Ray Anderson, founder of Interface. He heard Anderson's Mission Zero environmental vision. This was the moment of truth when Jay realized the economic and moral potential of sustainability.
Hear Jay's story of aligning his core values into an enterprise which eventually evolved to his creation of ECOR.
ECOR is the next unicorn with actual pre-booked business north of $500 million.
To invest, please contact www.ecorglobal.com. Talk to Jay today at jaypotter@ecorglobal.com or call 858-472-0239.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/success-made-to-last-legends--4302039/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
And welcome back to truly Significant dot com Presents. I'm
Rick TOKEINNY. We have so many special guests on, but
I don't think we've ever had anyone on quite like
Jay Potter. Jay is the director and CEO and co
founder of e Core Global, and he's often described as
(00:32):
a twenty five year veteran in designing, inventing, building, and
investing in dozens of innovative small companies focus on sustainability
and circularity. The reason why we've got Jay on today
is because of many reasons. We care about what happens
(00:56):
to the earth, we care about what's happening with all
the forest the world, and we actually are a part
of this social legacy movement to make this place better
before we depart, and Jay just happens to hit the
bullseye on so many of those things that we care about.
(01:17):
Jay Potter, welcome to our show.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Thanks, Rick, appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
I got to know the rest of your story in
terms of where you were born, and then I want
to know about your corporate history.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Wow, there's a big question. You know. I've always had
difficulty in talking about myself on that, but it's certain
it's certainly relevant as to where I am versus where
I started. So I had the blessing of growing up
in a middle income household. However, had a superstar father
(01:54):
who is the one of the heads of trajectory work
for the Lunar lander and nuclear missiles and the rest
of it. So we never knew exactly. I just knew
my dad was an engineer, and until I was sixteen,
I thought everybody's father had a guy with an M
sixteen at the door. So it was it was an
interesting growth. But however the best thing about it was
(02:16):
it brought me deep into science fiction of all things,
which is obviously all predicated on future. And with that
and with my father, puzzles were always always a big thing.
My dad was big on open ended questions as to well,
how would you solve that? And that's really probably what
(02:37):
drove me. And I was always found myself. I'm able
to give perspective that was different than the norm. I guess.
I was never born with a fear of failure, which
I think is a big part of it. I started
my first company when I was probably fifteen, actually was early.
(02:59):
I started working earlier than that and selling door to
door because I hated paper routes. So I started doing
lawn aeration and then hiring people and teaching college students
how to sell door to door. So I had to
hire a driver and workers, and before I knew it,
I had my own little empire, which was interesting, and
(03:19):
it paid for all my schooling, and that was good
because I felt proud that I didn't need to lean
on my parents for education. Of course, boy, what a
difference it is today to them, right, I mean, it
was practically free back then. In comparison, I got hired
by a commodity operation where they were at the very
(03:42):
center of selling commodity options, which is a little bit
on the boiler room side, which that didn't work too
well for me, but I became one of one of
the top guys of the company, and before I knew it,
you know, I was given offers from oil and gas
operations to help them raise capital, and that was the
(04:06):
end of working for anybody. At that point. I pretty
much knew I didn't need anyone's help drilling a dry
hole and started to go in and drill myself, and
in that timeframe we acquired hundreds of thousands of acres
of leases. We drilled over one hundred and fifty wells
in Texas, several in Oklahoma, dozens in California and New Mexico.
(04:34):
But I was never satisfied. That was when I became
intimate with the word sustainability, right, because oil and gas
is the antithesis of sustainability. Every day it produces less
and for any of the oil and oil and gas
operator listeners, they'll appreciate the following. People would call up
(04:57):
and say, my check this month was smaller. Why, well,
you say, well, it's because of depletion. Every time you
pull some oil out, you're pulling a little pressure with
it and pulling some water and it starts deplete. Do
you understand how that works? And they said yes, but
why is my check smaller? And that just drove me
(05:17):
kind of nuts and you start to realize that you
have to maintain success over and over again against the
odds in order to maintain a good oil and gas
operation if you don't have the massive leases. At least
that's what I found. So I was unsatisfied, and I
was able to convince my family that I wanted to
(05:38):
leave that, and so we sold the company, which was nice,
and I spent the next year of my life, open eyed, right,
reading everything, seeing everything, and somebody introduced me, which I
should curse them forever. They introduced me to the waste industry.
(05:58):
And one of the things I realized in analyzing it
was the incredible level of inefficiency. None of us are
aware of every component of it because none of us
want to deal with it. It's waste, after all, right,
it's what we don't want, it's what we it's what
we want to get rid of. And you start looking
(06:21):
at that and that that what a what a what
a what a horror show? That is when you start
to realize how wasteful that we are. So that that
was the beginning. And I then met two individuals that
really really messed with my brain, brilliant individuals. One is
an individual named Ray Anderson. And Ray Anderson was the
(06:45):
founder of Inner Face Carpets Okay. And he was the
first entrepreneur, global entrepreneur, big public company that had the
that had the way to uh do what was right.
And he against against the odds and against the risk.
(07:07):
His own board was threatening his removal from the company
he founded because of their fear that he would ruin
what they had. And what ended up happening was, of course,
he made just tons of money by changing his entire
company to a unifiber. In other words, he made everything
(07:29):
out of a single fiber, so that at its end
of life it had a single point. And that is
the very definition of circularity or the circular economy is
the is there is the constant reuse of of of
of a resource, and you i logic side, and you
have the technical side. So obviously in carpet and polyester,
(07:51):
he was on the technical side. Uh. And the gentleman
that that happened to be with him on that rainy
day in Atlanta. Uh. And I had two hours with
these people. The other gentleman was Bill McDonough or William McDonough,
and he's the author of Cradle to Cradle, and I
guess you could say that he is the godfather of
(08:14):
the circular economy. He's the one that named it, as
far as I'm aware, and he's the one that started
preaching that philosophy as a as a mindful environmentalist, architect
and inventor, brilliant, brilliant individual. And those two guys kind
(08:36):
of messed with my head enough to realize that they
had the right idea and then I started applying it
to the waste industry and trying to find the efficiencies
or the inefficiencies of where of where we can tackle
a value proposition. And so that started into pyrolysis and glassification.
(09:01):
How do you make energy out of it? That seemed
the simplest answer, and it is our country says everything
that we want to get rid of is bury it
in the ground. That's how we deal with things. That's
the politics of waste in this country. Europe went entirely
the opposite direction. They said, no more landfills because they're
(09:24):
just damaging, and let's go all incineration because we can
control much better the effluent or the pollutants in that
process and at least we end up with energy, and
a lot of it. So Europe has three hundred and
sixty plus incinerators that are actively eliminating that waste and
(09:47):
at least providing a product electricity or heat. I think
that needs to change in this country, but that's I
can only solve one thing at a time. So after
that I had I was involved in another of really
cool deals, you know, using electrolysis to make hydrogen, using
(10:10):
electronitis to make a disinfectant, very exciting stuff. Another partner
and I we built our nation's first industrial pellet plant,
which is a waste biomass to make pellets that you
co fire with coal in order to reduce CO two.
(10:32):
I'm not sure I believe in that math anymore now
that I'm more learned, if you will. Then we had
a big hit just in another efficient inefficiency that needed
to be explored, UH, and that was parking lots. And
my partner and I were able to find an avenue
(10:55):
to address that, and it happened to be with KEYO
Sara UH, where we said, you have a parking lot,
you make solar panels, you spend fifteen hundred dollars a
square foot on marble in the lobby, but you don't
paint white lines in the parking lot. Yet the property's
worth exactly the same. So we started making what we
called the solar tree, and then they'll started popping up
(11:19):
all over the place. We did hundreds and hundreds of those,
you know, everywhere from Johnson and Johnson to a bunch
of universities to Dell Computer there in Austin. Lots and
lots of those. But everybody copied us and that was.
That was a bit of a tough a tough deal,
but we reinvented ourselves the old pivot and we came
(11:42):
up with the ev ARC, which is the electric Vehicle
Autonomous Renewable Charger, because we knew back in twenty ten
every fleet was going to go electric. Why because it's efficient,
much less expensive, and it's readily available the electricity so
(12:04):
obviously by solar. So we made a unit that allowed
municipalities to charge their vehicles effectively because they don't get
driven a lot. And that company we were able to
take public with about forty million invested and went to
about seven hundred million in value, and we took a
(12:26):
good chunk of those proceeds and started this current adventure,
which is probably the single most important of anything I've
ever done, and some say that it could possibly be
one of the one of the larger environmentally impactful and
societally impactful inventions, which I pray that to be true.
(12:48):
As they say, from your lips, you know, to God's ears,
that's right.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
The e core people and venture capitalist and any other
listeners to this show is the champion of the circular economy.
At a time when we in the world desperately need
alternatives to deforestation and waste. With that having said, now
(13:14):
tell us about ecre all right.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
E core is just it's about simplicity. I look at
things and the big problems that I've seen, I think
I have to be solved with big and dumb if
that makes sense. It has to be something that can
be applied everywhere. You know, Solar is a great example, right.
(13:40):
Solar when it started in the in the you know,
in its beginning of its real climb in the in
the early two thousands, was six and seven and eight
dollars a lot. It's now forty cents a lot. It's
now half the price of coal by some measure. So
the same should be true with respect to solving global housing.
(14:04):
And that's where this that's where this journey started, which
was just a simple question, how do we solve for
global housing when the middle class is doubling every fifteen
to eighteen years because of wage, you know, levelization globally,
people are gonna want houses, and they're gonna want walls
(14:24):
and floors and ceilings and windows and doors and everything
that goes with it. And wood composites happened to be
the other than cement are the primary component of most housing.
So that's where it started. Was that was the genesis.
(14:45):
And then from there we found a really simple technology
that we were able to advance, which is to which
is to make a board. And our choice was much
like Ray Anderson, you know, twenty five years ago, which is,
let's make it the right way. Let's not make it
(15:05):
the way that it will work and be something a
little bit better than what the market has today. But
let's go all the way. Let's make something that does
not have its equal Let's make something that you can't
make better, and that is a binderless, glueless, wood based,
(15:28):
agricultural I'm sorry, non wood based panel. So let's use
the agricultural waste that's so prevalent. Instead of waiting for
a tree to grow thirteen years, our food we have
to grow in order to survive, grows every six months.
So let's use that exactly.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
And folks, I am sitting here with samples of E
course product, looking at a flooring material, and it is
truly amazing. In this same kit, I see how this
product or what the product is made from, and I
(16:09):
wish that every single one of you had your hands
on this right now to see soy straw, wheat straw corrugate,
and of course if add one to Texas, you would
put cotton stock in it or remnants from our corn
fields or wheat fields. What a fabulous product, my dad
(16:32):
and my grandfather. A shining down upon you, J. Potter,
because this is something that was long, long overdue in
the construction industry. So I applaud you, and I want
to know why in the world venture capitalists would not
invest in ecor.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
More often than not they're fearful of the of the timeline.
So if most venture capital today has become addicted to
quick investment in a quick return software obviously being I
know a real obvious victim of that or well victory
(17:16):
of it, depending on your on the side. Same with
AI in many aspects, same with all these things. They've
been very quick. They haven't had to invest in factories. Again,
that's what's required. We're actually building something, something that has
to be manufactured, and that is not that's not a
cozy and warm place for most and most the venture
(17:41):
capital is forty five year old. You know MBAs that
have never operated a company before. So software is much easier.
Gravit itce right. It's anything tech, anything, anything Internet related
is their world. They haven't had to think about how
things are made. But Rick, when you and I were kids,
(18:02):
and you and I talked about this in one of
our previous calls that we first of all, when we
watch television as children, we actually had to turn a
knob right to change a channel. And one of the
things that we always saw as kids, because you and
I are about the same age, is the asbestos commercials.
That's right right, the one saying that we've got to
(18:24):
get rid of this product and if you or your
family members have been affected by asbestos called one eight hundred,
we'll sue for you. Well, the same as being is
now happening with bespect to wood based and formaldehyde carcinogenic
panels that are the prevalent product of the day, and
we cover our houses in it and our furniture with
(18:46):
it simply because there was nothing more economical to use.
And that's the only rationale. So now we've come up
with a product that has lower cost inputs, so we
can actually make it at a lower cost at scale
than they can at scale. So now that excuse doesn't
exist anymore. And believe it or not. Some of the
(19:09):
customers that we're talking to are telling us, well, now
that you guys have come up with this new product,
we're now a little concerned that the product that we're using,
we're creating liability for ourselves. Is we're knowingly selling to
the consumer a product that is off gasing carcinogens. Well
(19:29):
if when I, of course would say, well duh, right,
but again, they have a business to run and their
obligation is to their shareholders, not to the environment. So
we knew and I've learned over twenty five years with
all these different inventions and companies, if you don't make
a better product and a lower cost, it ain't gonna
(19:49):
go very far and certainly not very fast. But here
we stand. We're now in the market, we're selling product.
Everyone we're selling it to wants to buy more. Uh.
We now we're now staring at a pipeline that that
we have to build multiple facilities in order to meet
(20:10):
that that.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Ass I've known, I am well known for taking shots
at other generations, including our own generations, and I would say,
based on what you just said, for a generation that
cares so much about their children and what they don't eat,
(20:35):
and what they where they live, the type of clothes
that they wear, the type of toys that they use.
And I would say there's the almost excessive when it
comes to being persnickety about that. You need to tell
(20:55):
me that you're not as careful about what's put into
your new home when this could expose it the very
thing that our generation, my cousin Albert passing away from asbesos,
this is today's asbesis. This is the same problem. So
I just challenged the venture capitalists that may be parent
(21:17):
to look at the big picture here. And let's jump
right over to Wilson County, Texas.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
All right, we are so pleased.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
As Texans that you are coming to our state with
the second plant, and I would urge you to open
up a third, a fourth, a fifth plant all in
the state of Texas, in the country of Texas. Rather, so,
tell us about the e core plywood plant that will
be going into Wilson County, Texas. Your vision, it's scale
(21:47):
and the ripple effects it'll have on our economy.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Well, it'll be a full scale plant. All the plants
that we've engineered, they're all going to be modular. So
it's simply a function and of production units. Texas. I
have to say, until I analyzed it, I did not
know how vast Texas was well. And that when I
(22:13):
was in oil and gas, a lot of my work
was you know, on the fringe border of New Mexico,
and the other was down in Corpus Christie. You as
a you know, a lot of us we take whatever
visuals we have and that's our experience and we and
we have a tendency to apply it everywhere. And I
(22:34):
granted I am in California, so I have this incredible
geology here, the Pacific Ocean, the Sierras, Texas to me
was like a desert. Well as soon as you start
poking around a little deeper, Holy cow, Texas is a monster.
Not just in topography, I mean, your topography is absolutely
unbelievable from what my original assumption was ten years ago.
(22:58):
And the and the amount of agricultural generation is crazy big.
And then we found cotton and that one has just
blown my doors. And how much cotton growth there is,
how prevalent it is, and of course you know there's
called the cotton Belt and all it goes all the
(23:19):
way from Georgia all the way into southern California. And
the funny thing is is, of course the heartland of
it is in Texas. And as I dug into it
for almost fifty years, actually more than fifty years now,
the cotton co op or the collective has spent money
(23:39):
on one university after another saying what should we do
with all this cotton waste? The stems, they're worthless to us,
they don't have hardly any nutritional value. They're hard to
grind up and put back in the soil. They wash
into the ditches. The counties pissed off because they've got
(24:00):
to go clean out the ditches. It's this big problem,
what do we do with this? There's got to be
a way for us to have either value or less
expense in dealing with it. And every single event, other
than one group I saw one paper said that maybe
they could get some chemicals out of it. Every single
one of them came to the same conclusion. It's a
(24:21):
great material to make a board out of, and yet
no one's done it. And the reason no one's done
it is because no one knows. Our world's built on
this idea that you have to build it and then
they'll come and now our whole world says you can't
take the risk of building it, and they will come.
(24:44):
And so now you go reverse it back to your
question and venture capitalists, and no one wants to pay
to go find the go find the buyers before you
actually have a product. So we've had to do the
whole thing. We've gone out and found the buyers for
the material. That plant in southeast just southeast of San
(25:05):
Antonio will be about fifty acres in size. It will
have about four hundred thousand square feet and buildings that
will support everything from the harvest which is our feed stock,
and through processing and then conversion into the boards and
(25:28):
a little bit of storage area. But pretty much everything
that will be made will have already been contracted for
years out going forward, because what we're doing today has
set all that up, and that is we make enough
at our small plant for everybody to test it. And
instead of going into the architects and the others just
(25:52):
to sell a sheet or a pallet for them to try,
we are selling it by the truckload to the large
just companies in the world in the furniture and flooring
industry for them to say, test it, test it, retest it.
Lab test it, make prototypes out of it, put it
(26:13):
in in uv chambers, to water chambers, to you name it.
They've done everything they can to it and so far
we're winning that our product is better than what they're
using and it's sustainable. And for the adventure capitalists again listening,
Sustainability has another name when it comes to a when
(26:37):
it comes to a physical product, it's called a residual.
That's value, okay, and that's value that keeps paying. That
is the circular economy. So in San Antonio, we'll probably
employ one hundred and one hundred plus people directly and
it will probably impact if the numbers are the same
(26:58):
as the plant that we have in Europe up will
probably provide two hundred plus indirect employment, you know, from
the truckers to the construction to you know, everything that
goes into it. That facility will probably generate you know,
(27:20):
close to one hundred million a year in revenue and
pretty close to about forty million a year in ibadah.
So good margins. And that's assuming today's price, which tomorrow's
price will be much higher. Because something else that we
that we take for granted is this we live in
(27:41):
a resource rich country. But we have to understand that
we're part of a global community and the globe in
Asia and Africa, in South America are growing at a
much much faster rate than we are, and that will
cause and there's already an exist it's today resource scarcity.
(28:02):
And you mentioned at the beginning about deforestation. Unfortunately we're
hiding from what's taking place out there. We we here
in this country rationalize what we do and we call
it sustainable forestry. We plant a sapling every time we
cut a tree down. Well, you know that's okay when
(28:23):
you have a law a forest. But there's most of
the world has been denuded and it's happening rapidly. I mean,
if people want to scare themselves, type type, go to
Google and type in uh uh resource type in deforestation
comma Brazil or Madagascar or Africa or Southeast Asia. It's
(28:47):
a horror show right now. It is a according to
according to AI, it is uh a football field every
one and a half seconds, So it's a huge number.
So I guess that would be about forty or fifty
(29:07):
football fields a minute. Those dumblers are just guesses because
there's a whole bunch of harvesting that's taking that is
not being reported because it's because they are deforesting. They
are stripping the land, and when you strip the land,
you lose all that biodiversity exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
You know, from a venture capitalist perspective, they investors, even
the shark tank level, they want to know what business
we've already got secured so they'll know when they're going
to get their return back. And I think about unicorns
(29:53):
that have come up in the last fifteen years, and
then I think about the trillion dollar lumber industry, and
I wonder, how can we reframe ecre and what we're
going to be doing for Mother Earth and for generations
to come, the construction industry, the furniture industry, et cetera,
(30:14):
et cetera. How can we reframe it as the next
unicorn that does something good?
Speaker 2 (30:21):
All right, So let's first less to find what is
a unicorn? Right, and that's been pretty prevalent. It's a
billion dollar enterprise, right.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Billion dollar enterprise? What was that fast fast billion dollar enterprise?
Speaker 2 (30:38):
So in order for us to reach a billion dollars
in revenue, all we have to be is little more
than one percent of the entire market. That's a pretty
small number. Again, it's a huge number when you're talking
about the volumes, but it's a very achievable number. In fact,
(31:00):
multiple engineering firms have already reviewed us on behalf of
big private equity operations that are looking at us and
licking their licking their chops. That is a The number
they gave us was a serviceable obtainable market of one
point five billion per year, and that is that's their
(31:22):
most conservative number. And that's us just being a sustainable
alternative to the market. In other words, if anybody was
given the choice and only on hardboard, between a clean
board or the board they buy today, or for the
same price our board that has the same performance characteristics
(31:43):
but carries a residual and it is no off gassing,
we should win. Obviously, we should win our share of
that of those of that market. Well, here's what's really happening.
That was that's that was our concept going in to
the last facility that we built in Europe. Okay, so
(32:05):
I knew or felt very confident that given that choice
between board A, which was yesterday's board, and board B
our board, we will win more often than not simply
because it's a no you know, call it a no brainer.
What makes it more interesting is that the entire market,
(32:29):
the entire existing traditional composite market, is built around a
dry process forming technology. In other words, you get the
whole bunch of fiber, use a whole bunch of glue,
and spit out the boards. We're using a wet process.
We're making something closer to a really hard and thick
(32:53):
paper than we are a wood based panel. So we're
making agricultural waste long fiber with short fiber from urban waste,
and we're coming up with this magic blend with the
right thermodynamics and throughput that we can compete at scale
(33:15):
with those same monsters. Yet we're going to deliver a
board that's very different. So we just came out to
the market. Now over the last ten years that take
us to get here. The first seven years we went
out and built our market by working with every large
company on the planet that declared themselves to be sustainably
(33:40):
driven and environmentally conscious. So we got to do things
with Google and Amazon, and we did dozens of whole foods,
you know, in the form of signages and surfaces in
wall coverings and ceiling coverings and dressings and Mars, candy
bars for displays, and Heineken and their bill I mean
(34:03):
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these so
that we would have a portfolio which also includes houses
and apartments and everything in between. So that we had this.
Then we then worked on the technology to bring it
down to a lower cost. And just this last February,
we partnered with a giant company in Europe called Storeenso.
(34:23):
They're the Georgia Pacific of Europe. And they said, you're
the only one making the perfect board. You're the only
one making a board that is one hundred percent bio based,
not ninety two like the best board out there, but
(34:44):
one hundred. And they said we want you as a partner,
and we said absolute. Now, remember that that company, Storeenso
or Georgia Pacific would have killed us for breathing ten
years ago. But their customers are saying, where's the environmental product?
Why why do I have to keep doing this? I
(35:06):
need to bring down my carbon footprint and the rest
of it. So we partnered with them. We went out
to the market and were blown away by the response.
So out of the hunt, out of the more than
four hundred interested manufacturers and distributors we chose seventy. One
of them is a Kia. A Kia has approved us
(35:27):
for for purchase in their in their in their supply chain,
which is fantastic. We're now working with the furniture division
on performance testing. We're doing the same with our country's
largest cabinet operation, UH and many others. And we've already
(35:49):
sold out everything that we can produce in our facility
that we don't want to keep aside for continued testing
for other manufacturers. So before we even build our next facility,
I feel I'm not embarrassed or I feel I'm embellishing
to say we'll have well over a billion dollars in
(36:10):
backlog before this time next.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Year, representing less than one percent of the market. Yes,
so therefore there's a new definition to unicorn. The only
difference is is that it's about having the right am
ount of capital to build right enough to build a
nut plants to meet the demand that's already there.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Yep, right now. It's about packaging for the big giant
funds that are out there, infrastructure funds and the like.
We have to finish our we have to finish our
work right. So now we need to bring in our
third party engineering firm that does all the negotiations with
the vendors on pricing and delivery and warranties and penalties
(37:00):
for any failure. You know, we have to We have
to at the same time off to bring these customers
further along, to get them into into very tight taker
pay agreements right, which we'll do, will complete those. We've
done several of them already, about almost two hundred million
(37:23):
dollars worth of those already. So we need to do
more and that's what the venture capital money that we
need will perform. It's that it's that next big step
we have. We have quite a few conversations going on
in fact today in Europe, a very large Swiss family
and a large American family office engineers and an investment banker.
(37:47):
We're in our European facility today in order to validate
what we have is what we have right, we could
literally line up a dozen facilities to be built.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Now. That's that's the true sign of a great investment.
In my thinking, Jay, going into Texas, what regulatory rules
are challenges to overcome here in the state of Texas
to build the plan and then to catalyze the entire
(38:24):
significance of the cores.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
You know, you're gonna have probably seven to eight trucks
an hour coming in or out of the facility. It'll
be operating twenty four to seven. It's it's not a
quiet operation. It's grinding, refine, grinding and refining, so it
(38:47):
certainly has some noise, so you're not going to want
it in a residential neighborhood. Again, as far as as
far as regulations against us or challenging us, none that
I can really see. I would say all the regulations
that are either written in forced or or short short
in the on the on the stage of coming, they're
all in our favor. Everybody wants to get rid of
(39:11):
of the of the off gassing and they're from aldehyde.
And of course all these big companies can do is
just go to the next least expensive nasty which is
which is called an isocyanide, which is a derivative of cyinide. Right,
so it's it's like it's kind of like sinide's cousin.
So yeah, it won't it won't have any formaldehyde, but
(39:34):
it's still nasty and there is no residual.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
That's right. We are talking with the one and only
Jay Potter, who is the CEO, director, co founder of
Ecor Global, and such a great conversation about such an
important topic. You all should know that Jay will be
one of the feature games on our Truly Significant Texans
(40:03):
in Agriculture. It'll be hosted by Commissioner Sid Miller. Commissioners
looking forward to meeting you and the one and only
podcast studio in the state of Texas that looks like
a shrine to Texas cowboys. You're gonna love seeing all
the arrowheads and the Cherokee head dress and longhorns and
(40:27):
buffalo heads and everything else. And it's my job to
get you ready for that fun interview Today is sort
of a practice round on that too. I've got about
four or five questions left for you, and they're more
along the deeper philosophical side, because I want people to
know your heart as we talk about success versus significance.
(40:48):
I'd love to know what does success look like for
you and your company ten years from now.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Wow, it's hard to think that far obviously in the
future when you're wrestling with the challenges of the of
the day. But for me, it's always about living up
to my commitments my grandfather on his deathbed, and again
(41:19):
I'll get choked up talking about this, but it's I
think it's germane and it certainly answers your question. I believe.
And he said, the man who wins in life is
the one who dies with the smallest bag of regret.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
With the smallest bag of regret.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
And that that to me, that that hit home and
it and it's been with me since he gave it
to me twenty eight years ago, and that has always
been something that lives with me when I'm talking to
investors who this company has been built, yes, by venture capital,
(42:00):
but it's been built on the venture capital of high
net worth individuals more than anything else. And it's been
built on relationships, and it's been built on their belief
in my commitment that some way, somehow I would find
our path through this I mean gauntlet of resistance that
(42:26):
exists everywhere. Everybody wants innovation, but nobody really wants to
go through the brain damage to bring it to life.
And I told them, and either foolishly or brilliantly, that
I was game, that I was going to do it.
And there've been quite a few challenges along the way
several at least five I can think of off the
(42:46):
top of my head of existential events that we survived.
And that's either by the support of these wonderful people
or ingenuity to outthink a problem. But that's to me,
where we get is living up to that commitment, whether
that is a billion dollar entity or I mean, if
(43:10):
things are what they are, this technology is going to be,
whether it's ecor or somebody else's version of saying, you know, actually,
I gave another good piece to give you. My daughter
came home from eighth grade. This is now five years ago,
(43:32):
six years ago, and she said, I wanted to show
you this. And she had been given a four page
printed pamphlet for a educational class on environmental science and
the center fold was a parking lot covered with solar
(43:52):
trees and she said, and I knew they weren't ours.
There were well many many contractors copied us. And she says, look, Dad,
one person can make a difference.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Powerful that's the That's what I'm talking about. That's where
somehow in the world of an investors, there's there has
to be a look at the problem, look at the solution,
look at the people that already have come up with
(44:28):
a solution, put money behind it to accelerate the solving
of a problem.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
Yes, yes, that's again, that's what And then it can
go anywhere because there's it's it's there's more money out
there than there's ever been before in history, and there's
going to be more demand for materials than ever so again,
no different than than the obvious value that solar has
(44:59):
brought the world. This is as much a no brainer,
if not more so, in many aspects.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
For anyone listening today, Jay, where do they go to
find out information on the company?
Speaker 2 (45:14):
I think we've got a very informative website at ecre
Global dot com e c O R Global. We've got
some wonderful young people here that are just maniacs on
putting out some good content. Uh not just on the
company and the board and and all of it's and
all of its uses, but but uh, you know, it's
(45:37):
just some real quality thinking and questioning of what are
we doing as a species? What what what are we doing?
Uh to save our our children? Uh in our in
our grandchildren. I mean, at the rate that we are
are polluting ourselves and stripping ourselves, we've already eaten all
(45:59):
the low hanging fruit. Everything is getting on the on
the top of the branches where things are good, where
things are so ready to break. But the website is good,
uh and fantastic. Obviously reaching out to me or any
of our staff, you'll get an ear full of of
our of our adventure and and our motivation. And uh,
(46:21):
it's it's healthy. It's really healthy. I'm very proud of
what we've what we've built. The great stuff is.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
Coming exactly exactly, it certainly is.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Jay.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
In the last week a friend of mine passed away
and it was doctor Jane Goodall, and she was featured
in our last book, Truly Significant. And Jane's last words
to us were, you may not know it, you may
not find it, but your life actually matters, and you're
(46:58):
here for a reason. And I hope that that reason
will become apparent to you. You can make a difference
in this world. You just need to choose what that
difference is. And she said finally to me, You've got
to find hope, and don't look into the darkness, but
(47:20):
look into the light. Yes, I see Ecore is the light,
and I see your product is something that's going to
outlive you. Your team it'll be the legacy product of the century.
I'm appealing to the venture capitalists that listen to this
(47:40):
show to take a really, really hard look at how
this company is solving a major, major problem. And with
that having been said, thank you so much for joining
us on today's program.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
It's been an absolute pleasure. It's absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Thank you, Rick, You're most welcome, and folks, we hope
that you continue to enjoy your journey of success, but
please find your way to significance. Have breck with you.
And welcome back to truly Significant dot com Presents. I'm
Rick TOKEINNY. We have so many special guests on, but
I don't think we've ever had anyone on quite like
Jay Potter. Jay is the director and CEO and co
founder of e Core Global, and he's often described as
(00:32):
a twenty five year veteran in designing, inventing, building, and
investing in dozens of innovative small companies focus on sustainability
and circularity. The reason why we've got Jay on today
is because of many reasons. We care about what happens
(00:56):
to the earth, we care about what's happening with all
the forest the world, and we actually are a part
of this social legacy movement to make this place better
before we depart, and Jay just happens to hit the
bullseye on so many of those things that we care about.
(01:17):
Jay Potter, welcome to our show.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Thanks, Rick, appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
I got to know the rest of your story in
terms of where you were born, and then I want
to know about your corporate history.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Wow, there's a big question. You know. I've always had
difficulty in talking about myself on that, but it's certain
it's certainly relevant as to where I am versus where
I started. So I had the blessing of growing up
in a middle income household. However, had a superstar father
(01:54):
who is the one of the heads of trajectory work
for the Lunar lander and nuclear missiles and the rest
of it. So we never knew exactly. I just knew
my dad was an engineer, and until I was sixteen,
I thought everybody's father had a guy with an M
sixteen at the door. So it was it was an
interesting growth. But however the best thing about it was
(02:16):
it brought me deep into science fiction of all things,
which is obviously all predicated on future. And with that
and with my father, puzzles were always always a big thing.
My dad was big on open ended questions as to well,
how would you solve that? And that's really probably what
(02:37):
drove me. And I was always found myself. I'm able
to give perspective that was different than the norm. I guess.
I was never born with a fear of failure, which
I think is a big part of it. I started
my first company when I was probably fifteen, actually was early.
(02:59):
I started working earlier than that and selling door to
door because I hated paper routes. So I started doing
lawn aeration and then hiring people and teaching college students
how to sell door to door. So I had to
hire a driver and workers, and before I knew it,
I had my own little empire, which was interesting, and
(03:19):
it paid for all my schooling, and that was good
because I felt proud that I didn't need to lean
on my parents for education. Of course, boy, what a
difference it is today to them, right, I mean, it
was practically free back then. In comparison, I got hired
by a commodity operation where they were at the very
(03:42):
center of selling commodity options, which is a little bit
on the boiler room side, which that didn't work too
well for me, but I became one of one of
the top guys of the company, and before I knew it,
you know, I was given offers from oil and gas
operations to help them raise capital, and that was the
(04:06):
end of working for anybody. At that point. I pretty
much knew I didn't need anyone's help drilling a dry
hole and started to go in and drill myself, and
in that timeframe we acquired hundreds of thousands of acres
of leases. We drilled over one hundred and fifty wells
in Texas, several in Oklahoma, dozens in California and New Mexico.
(04:34):
But I was never satisfied. That was when I became
intimate with the word sustainability, right, because oil and gas
is the antithesis of sustainability. Every day it produces less
and for any of the oil and oil and gas
operator listeners, they'll appreciate the following. People would call up
(04:57):
and say, my check this month was smaller. Why, well,
you say, well, it's because of depletion. Every time you
pull some oil out, you're pulling a little pressure with
it and pulling some water and it starts deplete. Do
you understand how that works? And they said yes, but
why is my check smaller? And that just drove me
(05:17):
kind of nuts and you start to realize that you
have to maintain success over and over again against the
odds in order to maintain a good oil and gas
operation if you don't have the massive leases. At least
that's what I found. So I was unsatisfied, and I
was able to convince my family that I wanted to
(05:38):
leave that, and so we sold the company, which was nice,
and I spent the next year of my life, open eyed, right,
reading everything, seeing everything, and somebody introduced me, which I
should curse them forever. They introduced me to the waste industry.
(05:58):
And one of the things I realized in analyzing it
was the incredible level of inefficiency. None of us are
aware of every component of it because none of us
want to deal with it. It's waste, after all, right,
it's what we don't want, it's what we it's what
we want to get rid of. And you start looking
(06:21):
at that and that that what a what a what
a what a horror show? That is when you start
to realize how wasteful that we are. So that that
was the beginning. And I then met two individuals that
really really messed with my brain, brilliant individuals. One is
an individual named Ray Anderson. And Ray Anderson was the
(06:45):
founder of Inner Face Carpets Okay. And he was the
first entrepreneur, global entrepreneur, big public company that had the
that had the way to uh do what was right.
And he against against the odds and against the risk.
(07:07):
His own board was threatening his removal from the company
he founded because of their fear that he would ruin
what they had. And what ended up happening was, of course,
he made just tons of money by changing his entire
company to a unifiber. In other words, he made everything
(07:29):
out of a single fiber, so that at its end
of life it had a single point. And that is
the very definition of circularity or the circular economy is
the is there is the constant reuse of of of
of a resource, and you i logic side, and you
have the technical side. So obviously in carpet and polyester,
(07:51):
he was on the technical side. Uh. And the gentleman
that that happened to be with him on that rainy
day in Atlanta. Uh. And I had two hours with
these people. The other gentleman was Bill McDonough or William McDonough,
and he's the author of Cradle to Cradle, and I
guess you could say that he is the godfather of
(08:14):
the circular economy. He's the one that named it, as
far as I'm aware, and he's the one that started
preaching that philosophy as a as a mindful environmentalist, architect
and inventor, brilliant, brilliant individual. And those two guys kind
(08:36):
of messed with my head enough to realize that they
had the right idea and then I started applying it
to the waste industry and trying to find the efficiencies
or the inefficiencies of where of where we can tackle
a value proposition. And so that started into pyrolysis and glassification.
(09:01):
How do you make energy out of it? That seemed
the simplest answer, and it is our country says everything
that we want to get rid of is bury it
in the ground. That's how we deal with things. That's
the politics of waste in this country. Europe went entirely
the opposite direction. They said, no more landfills because they're
(09:24):
just damaging, and let's go all incineration because we can
control much better the effluent or the pollutants in that
process and at least we end up with energy, and
a lot of it. So Europe has three hundred and
sixty plus incinerators that are actively eliminating that waste and
(09:47):
at least providing a product electricity or heat. I think
that needs to change in this country, but that's I
can only solve one thing at a time. So after
that I had I was involved in another of really
cool deals, you know, using electrolysis to make hydrogen, using
(10:10):
electronitis to make a disinfectant, very exciting stuff. Another partner
and I we built our nation's first industrial pellet plant,
which is a waste biomass to make pellets that you
co fire with coal in order to reduce CO two.
(10:32):
I'm not sure I believe in that math anymore now
that I'm more learned, if you will. Then we had
a big hit just in another efficient inefficiency that needed
to be explored, UH, and that was parking lots. And
my partner and I were able to find an avenue
(10:55):
to address that, and it happened to be with KEYO
Sara UH, where we said, you have a parking lot,
you make solar panels, you spend fifteen hundred dollars a
square foot on marble in the lobby, but you don't
paint white lines in the parking lot. Yet the property's
worth exactly the same. So we started making what we
called the solar tree, and then they'll started popping up
(11:19):
all over the place. We did hundreds and hundreds of those,
you know, everywhere from Johnson and Johnson to a bunch
of universities to Dell Computer there in Austin. Lots and
lots of those. But everybody copied us and that was.
That was a bit of a tough a tough deal,
but we reinvented ourselves the old pivot and we came
(11:42):
up with the ev ARC, which is the electric Vehicle
Autonomous Renewable Charger, because we knew back in twenty ten
every fleet was going to go electric. Why because it's efficient,
much less expensive, and it's readily available the electricity so
(12:04):
obviously by solar. So we made a unit that allowed
municipalities to charge their vehicles effectively because they don't get
driven a lot. And that company we were able to
take public with about forty million invested and went to
about seven hundred million in value, and we took a
(12:26):
good chunk of those proceeds and started this current adventure,
which is probably the single most important of anything I've
ever done, and some say that it could possibly be
one of the one of the larger environmentally impactful and
societally impactful inventions, which I pray that to be true.
(12:48):
As they say, from your lips, you know, to God's ears,
that's right.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
The e core people and venture capitalist and any other
listeners to this show is the champion of the circular economy.
At a time when we in the world desperately need
alternatives to deforestation and waste. With that having said, now
(13:14):
tell us about ecre all right.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
E core is just it's about simplicity. I look at
things and the big problems that I've seen, I think
I have to be solved with big and dumb if
that makes sense. It has to be something that can
be applied everywhere. You know, Solar is a great example, right.
(13:40):
Solar when it started in the in the you know,
in its beginning of its real climb in the in
the early two thousands, was six and seven and eight
dollars a lot. It's now forty cents a lot. It's
now half the price of coal by some measure. So
the same should be true with respect to solving global housing.
(14:04):
And that's where this that's where this journey started, which
was just a simple question, how do we solve for
global housing when the middle class is doubling every fifteen
to eighteen years because of wage, you know, levelization globally,
people are gonna want houses, and they're gonna want walls
(14:24):
and floors and ceilings and windows and doors and everything
that goes with it. And wood composites happened to be
the other than cement are the primary component of most housing.
So that's where it started. Was that was the genesis.
(14:45):
And then from there we found a really simple technology
that we were able to advance, which is to which
is to make a board. And our choice was much
like Ray Anderson, you know, twenty five years ago, which is,
let's make it the right way. Let's not make it
(15:05):
the way that it will work and be something a
little bit better than what the market has today. But
let's go all the way. Let's make something that does
not have its equal Let's make something that you can't
make better, and that is a binderless, glueless, wood based,
(15:28):
agricultural I'm sorry, non wood based panel. So let's use
the agricultural waste that's so prevalent. Instead of waiting for
a tree to grow thirteen years, our food we have
to grow in order to survive, grows every six months.
So let's use that exactly.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
And folks, I am sitting here with samples of E
course product, looking at a flooring material, and it is
truly amazing. In this same kit, I see how this
product or what the product is made from, and I
(16:09):
wish that every single one of you had your hands
on this right now to see soy straw, wheat straw corrugate,
and of course if add one to Texas, you would
put cotton stock in it or remnants from our corn
fields or wheat fields. What a fabulous product, my dad
(16:32):
and my grandfather. A shining down upon you, J. Potter,
because this is something that was long, long overdue in
the construction industry. So I applaud you, and I want
to know why in the world venture capitalists would not
invest in ecor.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
More often than not they're fearful of the of the timeline.
So if most venture capital today has become addicted to
quick investment in a quick return software obviously being I
know a real obvious victim of that or well victory
(17:16):
of it, depending on your on the side. Same with
AI in many aspects, same with all these things. They've
been very quick. They haven't had to invest in factories. Again,
that's what's required. We're actually building something, something that has
to be manufactured, and that is not that's not a
cozy and warm place for most and most the venture
(17:41):
capital is forty five year old. You know MBAs that
have never operated a company before. So software is much easier.
Gravit itce right. It's anything tech, anything, anything Internet related
is their world. They haven't had to think about how
things are made. But Rick, when you and I were kids,
(18:02):
and you and I talked about this in one of
our previous calls that we first of all, when we
watch television as children, we actually had to turn a
knob right to change a channel. And one of the
things that we always saw as kids, because you and
I are about the same age, is the asbestos commercials.
That's right right, the one saying that we've got to
(18:24):
get rid of this product and if you or your
family members have been affected by asbestos called one eight hundred,
we'll sue for you. Well, the same as being is
now happening with bespect to wood based and formaldehyde carcinogenic
panels that are the prevalent product of the day, and
we cover our houses in it and our furniture with
(18:46):
it simply because there was nothing more economical to use.
And that's the only rationale. So now we've come up
with a product that has lower cost inputs, so we
can actually make it at a lower cost at scale
than they can at scale. So now that excuse doesn't
exist anymore. And believe it or not. Some of the
(19:09):
customers that we're talking to are telling us, well, now
that you guys have come up with this new product,
we're now a little concerned that the product that we're using,
we're creating liability for ourselves. Is we're knowingly selling to
the consumer a product that is off gasing carcinogens. Well
(19:29):
if when I, of course would say, well duh, right,
but again, they have a business to run and their
obligation is to their shareholders, not to the environment. So
we knew and I've learned over twenty five years with
all these different inventions and companies, if you don't make
a better product and a lower cost, it ain't gonna
(19:49):
go very far and certainly not very fast. But here
we stand. We're now in the market, we're selling product.
Everyone we're selling it to wants to buy more. Uh.
We now we're now staring at a pipeline that that
we have to build multiple facilities in order to meet
(20:10):
that that.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
Ass I've known, I am well known for taking shots
at other generations, including our own generations, and I would say,
based on what you just said, for a generation that
cares so much about their children and what they don't eat,
(20:35):
and what they where they live, the type of clothes
that they wear, the type of toys that they use.
And I would say there's the almost excessive when it
comes to being persnickety about that. You need to tell
(20:55):
me that you're not as careful about what's put into
your new home when this could expose it the very
thing that our generation, my cousin Albert passing away from asbesos,
this is today's asbesis. This is the same problem. So
I just challenged the venture capitalists that may be parent
(21:17):
to look at the big picture here. And let's jump
right over to Wilson County, Texas.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
All right, we are so pleased.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
As Texans that you are coming to our state with
the second plant, and I would urge you to open
up a third, a fourth, a fifth plant all in
the state of Texas, in the country of Texas. Rather, so,
tell us about the e core plywood plant that will
be going into Wilson County, Texas. Your vision, it's scale
(21:47):
and the ripple effects it'll have on our economy.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
Well, it'll be a full scale plant. All the plants
that we've engineered, they're all going to be modular. So
it's simply a function and of production units. Texas. I
have to say, until I analyzed it, I did not
know how vast Texas was well. And that when I
(22:13):
was in oil and gas, a lot of my work
was you know, on the fringe border of New Mexico,
and the other was down in Corpus Christie. You as
a you know, a lot of us we take whatever
visuals we have and that's our experience and we and
we have a tendency to apply it everywhere. And I
(22:34):
granted I am in California, so I have this incredible
geology here, the Pacific Ocean, the Sierras, Texas to me
was like a desert. Well as soon as you start
poking around a little deeper, Holy cow, Texas is a monster.
Not just in topography, I mean, your topography is absolutely
unbelievable from what my original assumption was ten years ago.
(22:58):
And the and the amount of agricultural generation is crazy big.
And then we found cotton and that one has just
blown my doors. And how much cotton growth there is,
how prevalent it is, and of course you know there's
called the cotton Belt and all it goes all the
(23:19):
way from Georgia all the way into southern California. And
the funny thing is is, of course the heartland of
it is in Texas. And as I dug into it
for almost fifty years, actually more than fifty years now,
the cotton co op or the collective has spent money
(23:39):
on one university after another saying what should we do
with all this cotton waste? The stems, they're worthless to us,
they don't have hardly any nutritional value. They're hard to
grind up and put back in the soil. They wash
into the ditches. The counties pissed off because they've got
(24:00):
to go clean out the ditches. It's this big problem,
what do we do with this? There's got to be
a way for us to have either value or less
expense in dealing with it. And every single event, other
than one group I saw one paper said that maybe
they could get some chemicals out of it. Every single
one of them came to the same conclusion. It's a
(24:21):
great material to make a board out of, and yet
no one's done it. And the reason no one's done
it is because no one knows. Our world's built on
this idea that you have to build it and then
they'll come and now our whole world says you can't
take the risk of building it, and they will come.
(24:44):
And so now you go reverse it back to your
question and venture capitalists, and no one wants to pay
to go find the go find the buyers before you
actually have a product. So we've had to do the
whole thing. We've gone out and found the buyers for
the material. That plant in southeast just southeast of San
(25:05):
Antonio will be about fifty acres in size. It will
have about four hundred thousand square feet and buildings that
will support everything from the harvest which is our feed stock,
and through processing and then conversion into the boards and
(25:28):
a little bit of storage area. But pretty much everything
that will be made will have already been contracted for
years out going forward, because what we're doing today has
set all that up, and that is we make enough
at our small plant for everybody to test it. And
instead of going into the architects and the others just
(25:52):
to sell a sheet or a pallet for them to try,
we are selling it by the truckload to the large
just companies in the world in the furniture and flooring
industry for them to say, test it, test it, retest it.
Lab test it, make prototypes out of it, put it
(26:13):
in in uv chambers, to water chambers, to you name it.
They've done everything they can to it and so far
we're winning that our product is better than what they're
using and it's sustainable. And for the adventure capitalists again listening,
Sustainability has another name when it comes to a when
(26:37):
it comes to a physical product, it's called a residual.
That's value, okay, and that's value that keeps paying. That
is the circular economy. So in San Antonio, we'll probably
employ one hundred and one hundred plus people directly and
it will probably impact if the numbers are the same
(26:58):
as the plant that we have in Europe up will
probably provide two hundred plus indirect employment, you know, from
the truckers to the construction to you know, everything that
goes into it. That facility will probably generate you know,
(27:20):
close to one hundred million a year in revenue and
pretty close to about forty million a year in ibadah.
So good margins. And that's assuming today's price, which tomorrow's
price will be much higher. Because something else that we
that we take for granted is this we live in
(27:41):
a resource rich country. But we have to understand that
we're part of a global community and the globe in
Asia and Africa, in South America are growing at a
much much faster rate than we are, and that will
cause and there's already an exist it's today resource scarcity.
(28:02):
And you mentioned at the beginning about deforestation. Unfortunately we're
hiding from what's taking place out there. We we here
in this country rationalize what we do and we call
it sustainable forestry. We plant a sapling every time we
cut a tree down. Well, you know that's okay when
(28:23):
you have a law a forest. But there's most of
the world has been denuded and it's happening rapidly. I mean,
if people want to scare themselves, type type, go to
Google and type in uh uh resource type in deforestation
comma Brazil or Madagascar or Africa or Southeast Asia. It's
(28:47):
a horror show right now. It is a according to
according to AI, it is uh a football field every
one and a half seconds, So it's a huge number.
So I guess that would be about forty or fifty
(29:07):
football fields a minute. Those dumblers are just guesses because
there's a whole bunch of harvesting that's taking that is
not being reported because it's because they are deforesting. They
are stripping the land, and when you strip the land,
you lose all that biodiversity exactly.
Speaker 1 (29:31):
You know, from a venture capitalist perspective, they investors, even
the shark tank level, they want to know what business
we've already got secured so they'll know when they're going
to get their return back. And I think about unicorns
(29:53):
that have come up in the last fifteen years, and
then I think about the trillion dollar lumber industry, and
I wonder, how can we reframe ecre and what we're
going to be doing for Mother Earth and for generations
to come, the construction industry, the furniture industry, et cetera,
(30:14):
et cetera. How can we reframe it as the next
unicorn that does something good?
Speaker 2 (30:21):
All right, So let's first less to find what is
a unicorn? Right, and that's been pretty prevalent. It's a
billion dollar enterprise, right.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Billion dollar enterprise? What was that fast fast billion dollar enterprise?
Speaker 2 (30:38):
So in order for us to reach a billion dollars
in revenue, all we have to be is little more
than one percent of the entire market. That's a pretty
small number. Again, it's a huge number when you're talking
about the volumes, but it's a very achievable number. In fact,
(31:00):
multiple engineering firms have already reviewed us on behalf of
big private equity operations that are looking at us and
licking their licking their chops. That is a The number
they gave us was a serviceable obtainable market of one
point five billion per year, and that is that's their
(31:22):
most conservative number. And that's us just being a sustainable
alternative to the market. In other words, if anybody was
given the choice and only on hardboard, between a clean
board or the board they buy today, or for the
same price our board that has the same performance characteristics
(31:43):
but carries a residual and it is no off gassing,
we should win. Obviously, we should win our share of
that of those of that market. Well, here's what's really happening.
That was that's that was our concept going in to
the last facility that we built in Europe. Okay, so
(32:05):
I knew or felt very confident that given that choice
between board A, which was yesterday's board, and board B
our board, we will win more often than not simply
because it's a no you know, call it a no brainer.
What makes it more interesting is that the entire market,
(32:29):
the entire existing traditional composite market, is built around a
dry process forming technology. In other words, you get the
whole bunch of fiber, use a whole bunch of glue,
and spit out the boards. We're using a wet process.
We're making something closer to a really hard and thick
(32:53):
paper than we are a wood based panel. So we're
making agricultural waste long fiber with short fiber from urban waste,
and we're coming up with this magic blend with the
right thermodynamics and throughput that we can compete at scale
(33:15):
with those same monsters. Yet we're going to deliver a
board that's very different. So we just came out to
the market. Now over the last ten years that take
us to get here. The first seven years we went
out and built our market by working with every large
company on the planet that declared themselves to be sustainably
(33:40):
driven and environmentally conscious. So we got to do things
with Google and Amazon, and we did dozens of whole foods,
you know, in the form of signages and surfaces in
wall coverings and ceiling coverings and dressings and Mars, candy
bars for displays, and Heineken and their bill I mean
(34:03):
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these so
that we would have a portfolio which also includes houses
and apartments and everything in between. So that we had this.
Then we then worked on the technology to bring it
down to a lower cost. And just this last February,
we partnered with a giant company in Europe called Storeenso.
(34:23):
They're the Georgia Pacific of Europe. And they said, you're
the only one making the perfect board. You're the only
one making a board that is one hundred percent bio based,
not ninety two like the best board out there, but
(34:44):
one hundred. And they said we want you as a partner,
and we said absolute. Now, remember that that company, Storeenso
or Georgia Pacific would have killed us for breathing ten
years ago. But their customers are saying, where's the environmental product?
Why why do I have to keep doing this? I
(35:06):
need to bring down my carbon footprint and the rest
of it. So we partnered with them. We went out
to the market and were blown away by the response.
So out of the hunt, out of the more than
four hundred interested manufacturers and distributors we chose seventy. One
of them is a Kia. A Kia has approved us
(35:27):
for for purchase in their in their in their supply chain,
which is fantastic. We're now working with the furniture division
on performance testing. We're doing the same with our country's
largest cabinet operation, UH and many others. And we've already
(35:49):
sold out everything that we can produce in our facility
that we don't want to keep aside for continued testing
for other manufacturers. So before we even build our next facility,
I feel I'm not embarrassed or I feel I'm embellishing
to say we'll have well over a billion dollars in
(36:10):
backlog before this time next.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Year, representing less than one percent of the market. Yes,
so therefore there's a new definition to unicorn. The only
difference is is that it's about having the right am
ount of capital to build right enough to build a
nut plants to meet the demand that's already there.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
Yep, right now. It's about packaging for the big giant
funds that are out there, infrastructure funds and the like.
We have to finish our we have to finish our
work right. So now we need to bring in our
third party engineering firm that does all the negotiations with
the vendors on pricing and delivery and warranties and penalties
(37:00):
for any failure. You know, we have to We have
to at the same time off to bring these customers
further along, to get them into into very tight taker
pay agreements right, which we'll do, will complete those. We've
done several of them already, about almost two hundred million
(37:23):
dollars worth of those already. So we need to do
more and that's what the venture capital money that we
need will perform. It's that it's that next big step
we have. We have quite a few conversations going on
in fact today in Europe, a very large Swiss family
and a large American family office engineers and an investment banker.
(37:47):
We're in our European facility today in order to validate
what we have is what we have right, we could
literally line up a dozen facilities to be built.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
Now. That's that's the true sign of a great investment.
In my thinking, Jay, going into Texas, what regulatory rules
are challenges to overcome here in the state of Texas
to build the plan and then to catalyze the entire
(38:24):
significance of the cores.
Speaker 2 (38:27):
You know, you're gonna have probably seven to eight trucks
an hour coming in or out of the facility. It'll
be operating twenty four to seven. It's it's not a
quiet operation. It's grinding, refine, grinding and refining, so it
(38:47):
certainly has some noise, so you're not going to want
it in a residential neighborhood. Again, as far as as
far as regulations against us or challenging us, none that
I can really see. I would say all the regulations
that are either written in forced or or short short
in the on the on the stage of coming, they're
all in our favor. Everybody wants to get rid of
(39:11):
of the of the off gassing and they're from aldehyde.
And of course all these big companies can do is
just go to the next least expensive nasty which is
which is called an isocyanide, which is a derivative of cyinide. Right,
so it's it's like it's kind of like sinide's cousin.
So yeah, it won't it won't have any formaldehyde, but
(39:34):
it's still nasty and there is no residual.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
That's right. We are talking with the one and only
Jay Potter, who is the CEO, director, co founder of
Ecor Global, and such a great conversation about such an
important topic. You all should know that Jay will be
one of the feature games on our Truly Significant Texans
(40:03):
in Agriculture. It'll be hosted by Commissioner Sid Miller. Commissioners
looking forward to meeting you and the one and only
podcast studio in the state of Texas that looks like
a shrine to Texas cowboys. You're gonna love seeing all
the arrowheads and the Cherokee head dress and longhorns and
(40:27):
buffalo heads and everything else. And it's my job to
get you ready for that fun interview Today is sort
of a practice round on that too. I've got about
four or five questions left for you, and they're more
along the deeper philosophical side, because I want people to
know your heart as we talk about success versus significance.
(40:48):
I'd love to know what does success look like for
you and your company ten years from now.
Speaker 2 (40:56):
Wow, it's hard to think that far obviously in the
future when you're wrestling with the challenges of the of
the day. But for me, it's always about living up
to my commitments my grandfather on his deathbed, and again
(41:19):
I'll get choked up talking about this, but it's I
think it's germane and it certainly answers your question. I believe.
And he said, the man who wins in life is
the one who dies with the smallest bag of regret.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
With the smallest bag of regret.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
And that that to me, that that hit home and
it and it's been with me since he gave it
to me twenty eight years ago, and that has always
been something that lives with me when I'm talking to
investors who this company has been built, yes, by venture capital,
(42:00):
but it's been built on the venture capital of high
net worth individuals more than anything else. And it's been
built on relationships, and it's been built on their belief
in my commitment that some way, somehow I would find
our path through this I mean gauntlet of resistance that
(42:26):
exists everywhere. Everybody wants innovation, but nobody really wants to
go through the brain damage to bring it to life.
And I told them, and either foolishly or brilliantly, that
I was game, that I was going to do it.
And there've been quite a few challenges along the way
several at least five I can think of off the
(42:46):
top of my head of existential events that we survived.
And that's either by the support of these wonderful people
or ingenuity to outthink a problem. But that's to me,
where we get is living up to that commitment, whether
that is a billion dollar entity or I mean, if
(43:10):
things are what they are, this technology is going to be,
whether it's ecor or somebody else's version of saying, you know, actually,
I gave another good piece to give you. My daughter
came home from eighth grade. This is now five years ago,
(43:32):
six years ago, and she said, I wanted to show
you this. And she had been given a four page
printed pamphlet for a educational class on environmental science and
the center fold was a parking lot covered with solar
(43:52):
trees and she said, and I knew they weren't ours.
There were well many many contractors copied us. And she says, look, Dad,
one person can make a difference.
Speaker 1 (44:08):
Powerful that's the That's what I'm talking about. That's where
somehow in the world of an investors, there's there has
to be a look at the problem, look at the solution,
look at the people that already have come up with
(44:28):
a solution, put money behind it to accelerate the solving
of a problem.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
Yes, yes, that's again, that's what And then it can
go anywhere because there's it's it's there's more money out
there than there's ever been before in history, and there's
going to be more demand for materials than ever so again,
no different than than the obvious value that solar has
(44:59):
brought the world. This is as much a no brainer,
if not more so, in many aspects.
Speaker 1 (45:09):
For anyone listening today, Jay, where do they go to
find out information on the company?
Speaker 2 (45:14):
I think we've got a very informative website at ecre
Global dot com e c O R Global. We've got
some wonderful young people here that are just maniacs on
putting out some good content. Uh not just on the
company and the board and and all of it's and
all of its uses, but but uh, you know, it's
(45:37):
just some real quality thinking and questioning of what are
we doing as a species? What what what are we doing?
Uh to save our our children? Uh in our in
our grandchildren. I mean, at the rate that we are
are polluting ourselves and stripping ourselves, we've already eaten all
(45:59):
the low hanging fruit. Everything is getting on the on
the top of the branches where things are good, where
things are so ready to break. But the website is good,
uh and fantastic. Obviously reaching out to me or any
of our staff, you'll get an ear full of of
our of our adventure and and our motivation. And uh,
(46:21):
it's it's healthy. It's really healthy. I'm very proud of
what we've what we've built. The great stuff is.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
Coming exactly exactly, it certainly is.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
Jay.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
In the last week a friend of mine passed away
and it was doctor Jane Goodall, and she was featured
in our last book, Truly Significant. And Jane's last words
to us were, you may not know it, you may
not find it, but your life actually matters, and you're
(46:58):
here for a reason. And I hope that that reason
will become apparent to you. You can make a difference
in this world. You just need to choose what that
difference is. And she said finally to me, You've got
to find hope, and don't look into the darkness, but
(47:20):
look into the light. Yes, I see Ecore is the light,
and I see your product is something that's going to
outlive you. Your team it'll be the legacy product of the century.
I'm appealing to the venture capitalists that listen to this
(47:40):
show to take a really, really hard look at how
this company is solving a major, major problem. And with
that having been said, thank you so much for joining
us on today's program.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
It's been an absolute pleasure. It's absolute pleasure.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Thank you, Rick, You're most welcome, and folks, we hope
that you continue to enjoy your journey of success, but
please find your way to significance. Have breck with you.
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