Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters inside our buildings and out.
This Podcast is about Indoor Air Quality, Outdoor Air Quality, Ventilation, and Health in our homes, workplaces, and education settings.
And we already have many of the tools we need to make a difference.
The conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success.
We speak with the leaders at the heart of this sector about them and their work, innovation and where this is all going.
Air quality is the single most significant environmental risk we face to our health and wellbeing, and its impacts on us, our friends, our families, and society are profound.
From housing to the workplace, education to healthcare, the quality of the air we breathe matters.
Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters
#85 - Liam Bates : Clean Air, Clear Vision: Inside Air Quality Monitoring
The journey from visible smog in Beijing to sophisticated indoor air quality monitoring systems spans just a decade, but the transformation has been remarkable. In this eye-opening conversation, Liam Bates, CEO and co-founder of Kaiterra, shares how personal experience with air pollution sparked a mission that evolved from consumer devices to enterprise-level building solutions.
We explore why Kaiterra made the strategic decision to pivot from a successful B2C business selling the popular Laser Egg monitor to focusing entirely on commercial applications. This shift reveals fundamental truths about how building data becomes valuable only when it drives meaningful action—a journey that begins, not ends, when sensors are installed.
The discussion challenges outdated approaches to building performance testing, making a compelling case for continuous monitoring that captures the dynamic nature of occupied spaces. Rather than eliminating the need for specialists, this technology revolution allows experts to focus their skills where they matter most: solving complex problems identified through ongoing data collection.
The most profound insights emerge when Liam frames air quality monitoring not as a luxury or an ROI calculation, but as a fundamental health and safety requirement. Just as we wouldn't question the value of smoke detectors or fire sprinklers, the ability to see and manage the air we breathe represents a basic obligation to protect human health.
Whether you manage commercial properties, design buildings, or simply care about creating healthier indoor environments, this conversation will transform how you think about the invisible elements that impact our wellbeing every day. The future of healthy buildings isn't about collecting more data—it's about using that data to create spaces where people truly thrive.
Kaiterra
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Welcome back to Air Quality Matters. We already have the tools and knowledge we need to make a difference to the quality of the air we breathe in our built environment. The conversations we have and how we share what we know is the key to our success. I'm Simon Jones and coming up a conversation with Liam Bates, ceo and co-founder of Katera, a global leader in air quality monitoring, management and analytics. Liam has a diverse background, as an entrepreneur, television host and adventurer, which I didn't know, so we talked about that. Of course, he also co-founded Katera, formerly known as Origins Technology, in 2014,. The company creates IoT hardware and software products focused on measuring global air quality and pollution levels. Katera's products, such as the LaserEgg air quality monitor in the early days, have been widely adopted, included by Apple stores across China before pivoting to the B2B sector a few years ago. We have been trying and failing to sit down for this long overdue chat for ages, and it was really great to finally make it happen. The sector is undergoing major changes and Katera are in the thick of it. We talked about this, how Liam sees the balance of long-term monitoring versus performance testing, and much more. It's a deep dive into a sector from a global voice on the subject and, importantly, where he sees this going over the next few years. Don't forget to check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet.
Speaker 1:This is a conversation with Liam Bates. I mean, what most people might not realise is that I do occasionally do a little bit of research into companies and people before podcasts. Uh, as it goes, and um boy, you got an interesting backstory, um, and it goes away. It goes way back, um, and and I I discovered products I didn't know existed, like laser eggs and things. So, um, I think it'd be really good just before to kind of get going. It would be to kind of set the scene of how you kind of ended up here, in a way liam and and how kaitera was. Is it kaitera, kaitera? How do you actually say the name kaitera, kaitera, how kaitera came to be, because it's a.
Speaker 2:It's perhaps a more interesting story than most in a lot of ways well, how far back do you want to go and how crazy do you want the stories to be?
Speaker 1:well, let's go back to the crazy good stuff, like no. So I mean things like winning big chinese language competitions right being on adventure television programs, sure, and setting up very early days indoor air quality monitoring and environmental monitoring. So I guess there must have been. There's certainly a global journey for you of how you ended up, where you were doing the things you were doing, but something I guess led you into this kind of environment, environmentalism, monitoring the air. There's got to be a story there somewhere, I guess.
Speaker 2:It's all connected in some strange way, jumping back I don't know what many, many years at this point, almost 30 years. So I grew up in Switzerland, in the mountains, surrounded by cows, looking over the Matterhorn, very sort of idyllic postcard, not many people around. And when I was, I think, 14, I turned on the television one day and saw a documentary on National Geographic about the Shaolin Temple in China and I thought that looks amazing. This is what I want to do. I want to go to China and go to a monastery and practice martial arts every day, all day. And, as you can imagine, this was a little bit of a challenge to convince my parents that that was a good idea, convince my parents that that was a good idea. But after a few years of persuasion, when I was 15, turning 16, they finally agreed to let me go to China for about two and a half months in the summer one year and just practice martial arts every day, all day, and that was a life-changing experience. In hindsight it was incredibly fun. I learned so much. I learned all about this completely different culture, country, so on and so forth, and that is sort of what sets the stage for eventually falling into air quality.
Speaker 2:Fast forward a little bit between going to China to learn martial arts in high school and founding Kiterra. I also went on a very random journey of. I've always been a person that's have followed my passion and said if something looks fun, looks interesting and looks like a really big challenge, that's what I want to do. And so that that path took me to a lot of different places making I was making television shows for a while, I was working in adventure travel documentaries, so I spent several months living in the jungles in an island off the coast of Indonesia, floating around on a little raft in the Pacific with hunting, spearfishing fish and trying to avoid pirates, not get shot. So not very much to do with air quality.
Speaker 2:But that was sort of my prior life. It all changed when, in 2014, I went back to Beijing. I was there for a few months and my at the time girlfriend, now wife, came to visit and when she was a child she had severe asthma issues but, like many children, she grew out of it, thought that it had all gone away, until she landed in a country with very severe air pollution and she started coughing. And we used to joke that you could measure the AQI by counting how many times she coughed in a minute. Kind of funny but sad um and and, and that is what sparked this interest into, like what's actually in the air that we're breathing and that's.
Speaker 1:It sounds obvious now but yeah, that's interesting timing is, is that of that under thethe-dome period of time in China as well, when that documentary came out? That was so impactful.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. There was this period in late I'd say 2012, 2013, where the world and China suddenly woke up to A air pollution is a problem. It exists. China suddenly woke up to A air pollution is a problem, it exists. There had essentially been sort of denial before that and it became undeniable because the air I mean we were seeing levels of almost hitting a thousand micrograms per cubic meter of PM2.5. You would be in a skyscraper and you could not see the ground beneath you looking down.
Speaker 2:Now, unfortunately, many more people have experienced this since then in all sorts of different parts of the world. I've heard people talk about the exact same experience in New York being on the Empire State Building, looking down and not seeing the street below. But that was the first time that in China, people really experienced that. You also had, I think, social media coming up and everyone suddenly went oh my god, this is insane. What is this environment that we're living in? And it's the first time I thought about it. And that coincided with with uh, my, my wife coming to, to, to visit and experience beijing, and so it was really like a wake-up call and say, okay, like I'm having a lot of fun traveling the world and exploring remote islands and all, but this seems like something that I should drop everything to try and understand more, because it's an enormous problem.
Speaker 2:And, of course, the more research you do on it, the more you realize this is insane. Why is no one thinking about this or talking about this or doing something about this? And it just seemed like there were no solutions. And so this did not start off as a business. This did not start off as there's an opportunity here to create a company. This started off as I have a problem and I want to fix it, and there are no products on the market to fix it.
Speaker 1:So that's, that's really how we got started yeah, really interesting, and usually when people so you're looking at this landscape in china at the time, and the world's eyes fell on China for a period of time, particularly because of the Olympics under the dome, it created a lot of local attention. So air quality became a thing and created some profound changes in China, particularly about how industrialization was placed around big cities like beijing, you know, had really major impacts. Um, yeah, but you face this landscape and you say, right, I want to do something about it. And you, you kind of have a choice to go in different directions, I guess, and one of them is is kind of governance and rules and regulations and getting involved in the, the political side of stuff. The other one is the engineering side of stuff. I want to make big things that clean stuff and protect people.
Speaker 1:And you know you end up down the he vac filter, air cleaner, big boxes of things, stuff. But you find yourself going down the electronics route and the uh, somehow I need to visualize what's in the air, see the air and so on. What kind of led you there? Like, is that an electronics background of some description? Is it a fascination in technology? The? How did you end up in the sensor world and the the kind of the monitoring air quality world a stubbornness, and when someone says you have no experience doing this, you can't do this.
Speaker 2:That is generally the best way to get me to try to do something so no I mean I have.
Speaker 2:I have no real background in electronics. I'm not in any way, shape or form qualified to do any of the things that I'm doing or, for that matter, have ever done in my life, but you know. So some of the core values of our company. One is be insanely curious. Another one is where there's a will, there's a way. Another one is leave your ego at the door is leave your ego at the door. So I think these embody, in many ways, they've been chosen for a reason, because I really strongly, passionately believe that. I mean, this isn't.
Speaker 2:Most things in the world are not rocket science. If you and even rocket science, if you really put your mind to it, if you're really passionate about something and you think that there's an interesting, exciting problem to solve, you can solve it and you can teach yourself just about anything in today's world. And so that's what we did. The question that we had was okay, well, I see air quality data outside. I see that it's terrible. What am I breathing in my home? And there really were no tools in 2014 to answer that question Outside of extremely expensive lab grade equipment. There really was no way to answer that question. Of course, my first instinct was to go online and try to find the device that I wanted. And we only got into this because there was no device that did what I wanted and so, like I said, it was kind of a weekend project to try to create some, something that could do this.
Speaker 1:That spun out of control and 10 plus years later, here we are yeah, and it's worth casting your mind back to what we were looking at at that period of time. You know I had the the ceo of reset on not so long ago and it was a similar story there.
Speaker 1:You know it's. It's hard. It's easy to forget that this was over 10 years ago now, and over 10 years ago when we were monitoring air quality in classrooms and things like that. You were lugging suitcases of gear around trying to find power outlets, drilling frames on the wall to put all the gear up on, and you know, effectively, heath robin, singing sensors and tech together in the form of data log, data loggers. You know to download stuff with laptops like a lot of people are still doing that.
Speaker 2:I mean, we'll probably get to that, but yeah, but that's the world.
Speaker 1:That was the world of kind of environmental monitoring, you know and and this lot. But the start of the longitudinal monitoring, of putting stuff in to get some picture, but you know, ndir sensors were a new thing back then we just didn't have the technology and certainly not the communication protocols and the software and the ux that we experience now with this tech.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, it's amazing how far it's come in that time it really, it really, it really has, and it's, I mean, our, our first. Our first prototype was a, a paper cup. The housing was a paper paper cup with some holes punched in the back that I took scissors to and some electronics stuffed inside. And I mean it was a pretty mind-blowing moment when I take this device and put it outside the window and watch the numbers go up, and look at the numbers and compare it to the readings from the US embassy in Beijing and say, wow, these are reading the same thing. Take it inside, turn on my air purifier, watch those numbers go down. I mean it was. Yeah, it was really eye-opening. And I think that is that seeing that data for the first time is what put us on this path to saying, if we're going to improve air quality, this is really what we need to focus on, because there are so many like what I was doing.
Speaker 2:I realized that the air in the place I was staying at the time was bad, and so the default thing to think about is, well, let me go buy more air purifiers.
Speaker 2:And then I realized actually that, once you have the data, I didn't need more air purifiers I needed.
Speaker 2:I had leaky windows, I just needed to put some duct tape around the windows and it was the equivalent of spending thousands of dollars on improving, on trying to filter more air. And of course, you have the exact same analogy you know in in the commercial real estate, in the building space, which is that when you're blind, you just go with these assumptions of things that will improve the air, which can be incredibly cost ineffective, take a lot of energy and have all sorts of problems. But once you can actually identify what the problems are, well, then you can make more educated decisions. So I'm jumping a little bit ahead here, but it's also that realization that started us moving from the consumer space to the more commercial real estate space, because we started off as a consumer company we were building. Our first product was called the Laser Egg and it was a consumer. It was essentially the first ever indoor air quality monitor for home use. We designed it. It was the product that I built for myself, that other people wanted.
Speaker 1:And it went into apple stores in china, didn't it? I mean, this was a b2c product that found itself into the retail sector, so you started at the b2c space yeah, not not, and and not just, not just apple stores and and not just in in in china.
Speaker 2:Um, we, we launched that. We created the product. We launched it very, very quickly and to say it was popular would be a massive understatement. In some of the most polluted cities in the world Beijing, Shanghai, New Delhi, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh there's a significant portion of the population where you would see these devices in almost every home Today. If I run into somebody that lived in Beijing or Shanghai or New Delhi in the past 10 years, if I ask them did you own a laser egg? More often than not the answer is yes. So this was an incredibly popular product, especially in parts of the world where air quality was a real issue. And then it grew a lot with wildfires. So when we saw bushfires in Australia, the wildfires in the US, we really started to see this consumer business take off. And then we had to make the very hard decision to not do this and to go into B2B, which I'm happy to share more about, if that's interesting and obviously that's what we need to chat about today.
Speaker 1:I was going to ask you does that B2C product line still exist, or was that something that has been taken on or sold on somebody else to do since?
Speaker 2:So it no longer exists to do since. So it no longer exists. And what? What we realized is so we launched this. We launched the laser egg our consumer, our consumer business and very quickly we ended up. Actually, I mean, the story of how we got into apple stores is is the perfect example. Apple employees all over the world started buying these products and they started bringing them into the office, putting them on their desks, and somebody said what are all of these nice little white devices that you all have on your desks? I said, oh, it's an air quality monitor. Look at it, it's great, it's interesting. So we actually got a phone call from Apple. Our company was about nine months old at this point and I remember picking up the phone and they said this is Apple calling. We'd like to sell your product. What Is this? A scam? This is a windup. Yeah, this doesn't make sense. And so that's how we got into the Apple stores. But then you can also see how Apple and other companies then started to ask us well, we want to monitor the air in our offices because our employees clearly care about this. We realize it's important. We've seen the research. We want to monitor the air in our offices, because our employees clearly care about this. We realize it's important. We've seen the research. We want to measure the air.
Speaker 2:Do you have a product that is better suited for commercial real estate? Because a consumer product and a B2B product are extremely different and, in fact, there's almost nothing similar about them other than that they measure air. Everything else is different, and just quick examples of that a consumer product should integrate with Google Home, alexa. It should maybe talk to your smart lights. Maybe you should be able to talk to it. It should measure air quality versus your sleep. You know you're maybe tying to apple health. There's, there's all these things. Whereas a product for commercial real estate should integrate with backnet. It should have it should. Your platform should support single sign-on. You know all of these things.
Speaker 2:It's a totally different business, totally different product. The only thing in common is actually this very sliver in the middle, that is, they measure there. You know they measure air quality, and we were running essentially two businesses side by side. We were running a b2c business and a b2b business. They they were both one company and they were. They were both measuring air quality, but every single thing about those two business units was separate, and that is. That's not a position that you want to be in as a startup.
Speaker 2:And so we had to make the decision do we believe that the future is in the consumer space or do we believe it's in the commercial space? And at the time, consumer business accounted for probably 80% of our revenue and we said you know what? I think this is a much easier problem to solve. It's actually much, much less valuable when solved. I believe there's a lot more value to the world in the commercial side and it's a lot. It's a 10x more interesting engineering problem and it's a lot more fun. And so we had to make a very hard decision to say, garrett of bsc, cut, cut 80 of our revenue and focus 100, go all in on commercial right decision.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, I, I, I, I absolutely believe that because you know there's, as an example, like ikea has a consumer air quality monitor. I'm not very familiar with it, I don't know how good of a job it does, but what, what you need to do in the let me think how to phrase this, I think a consumer air quality monitor. Once you have the data, there's only so many things that you can do Air purifiers or open your windows In many places. If you have HVAC in your home, then there's a couple things that you can do around that. So really it's about enabling people to see the data and then letting them play around with the levers that they have in their own home to hopefully improve their air, but that's it. So the only thing that the product can do is really display that data to you, and a lot of people are going to do an amazing job of building a product that does that Commercial much harder.
Speaker 1:And I can, having been in those spaces, I can. I can visualize the trajectory as well. You know, when you first start out the, the excitement is in making the thing you know in actual. The holy shit, this works. This is amazing. I can. I can see stuff on screens and on computers and I can see the air and it's amazing. And so you have this product.
Speaker 1:You're trying to figure out where it goes and very quickly you realize, in electronics, b2c is just a singular race to the bottom of scaling and price reductions and, like you say, there's not a lot of utility in the product. So, as a, as a vision of the next 10 years, you're going well. Did I want to get into making the next casio watch to go on a clock, to go on the mantelpiece? You know it's where, where does electronics go, you know. Whereas b2b, there's a lot of utility in the information that you have and, as an entrepreneur, that's exciting because you can bring value to complex problems and I can see how that that is a pull. It's an interesting one, isn't it? And I was making a note there and I said what happened. Um, and what I mean by that is clearly there was a national interest in China at the time, around air quality, ambient air quality and leaking into internal. You were seeing mass take up of a consumer product. It was even making it into. You know, as many entrepreneurs dream to be getting a call from apple to say we want to sell your product. Yet you project a few years on and it's as if b2c air quality monitors don't really exist. You know, you know that they, they're, they're there, there's air things and others that have made a business, and a good one at it, but it hasn't exploded. There's not one in every home, in the same way that there's a phone in everybody's pocket and there's a and so on and so forth, right. So something happened.
Speaker 1:That opportunity, that window of interest seemed to die away for a period of time and we got back to the pandemic. Back to the pandemic, and it's as if people had to relearn what an indoor air quality monitor was. Again, right, you know we were measuring slightly different things, slightly different concerns, but but it's as if people were looking around, going what's one of these white boxes that can see the air? What? What is this magic? You know, right.
Speaker 1:So that opportunity came and went and you get a little bit of a sense we're kind of deja vu again. We've had a pandemic, there's been a massive interest in seeing the air in our buildings for the first time and you get a real sense that that opportunity is slipping away to some degree. And it's interesting and I wonder if there's some lessons there in history about global or national focuses on air events and finding better ways to seize those opportunities to ingrain these things into the psyche of populations. You know north america we've got wildfire, smokes and interests in pm at the moment, for example. You know we do. We need to get better at grasping the moment. Um, because what we don't want to be doing is looking back 10 years from the pandemic, which is only a few years away, amazingly, um, thinking did we miss an opportunity there somehow?
Speaker 1:you know I don't think that's decided yet. I you know, I think we've definitely. The awareness has definitely gone up, but it's not a fait accompli at the moment.
Speaker 2:It could go one way or the other. I think part of that is, if you're looking at the consumer space specifically, it's just the way it is. Things go in fads. I mean I remember, if you look at all the wearables, the ups and the downs in there, everyone had a Fitbit, then no one had a Fitbit, and then they've gone to rings, and then it's, you know, and then, and people going back to old, old watches, I mean you know so. So to your point, it's, it's, it's not a, it's not a good business to be in, you know, as as as an entrepreneur, someone trying to lead a company, because you're going up and down every year, and I mean I'd much rather have slow and steady growth than exponential growth and then an exponential drop.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wondering where it's all gone, yeah right, you know that's not a good situation to build a viable sort of business on, and. But I think most important is just yeah, to the point that you made. I mean, on a personal level at least, I love solving hard problems and really interesting problems, and you need, in order to do that, you need the person on the other side to be equally engaged. The person who's actually trying to fix it in their own home or in their business and that is one of the wonderful things in buildings is that it's somebody's job to do this, not all companies but that you have facilities, you have somebody in charge of designing the building, you have HVAC, etc. And so I do believe it's a lot easier once you can provide those people with the data. You can work together with them to understand the problems. They can actually create value for that business which is long term ongoing.
Speaker 2:And yet we do have those ups and downs from things like a pandemic, from things like wildfires, but you, but you do still see a sort of slow and steady increase in the baseline awareness, in a way that everything is all. The ups and downs are much more muted than on a consumer business, right, if you're doing B2C, it flies up, it flies down, you might get right back to zero. But commercial real estate is not necessarily going as fast as everybody in this industry would like and it does go up and down a little bit, but definitely it is. You know, year over year I think we're seeing a massive increase in awareness and what people are willing to do.
Speaker 1:And I think well, firstly, I think you're absolutely right and there's a fundamental truth, a fundamental utility that being able to see the indoor environmental quality of our spaces brings to the value buildings have. We've seen that in the years in how lead has adapted and become more human orientated, human centered in its approach. We've seen the, the development of well again, well has had to evolve post-pandemic but it's, but still fundamentally it's a human-centered proposition. Ashrae is just coming under the new presidency for the next two years and what's the focus? Uh, indoor environmental quality and human health. So you know, there's no doubt there's a a tide, a relentless tide towards recognizing that we build buildings for people and if you can bring utility to that fundamental utility, to that in making people's jobs better, finding value, efficiencies, all of those things, it's a good business to be in absolutely.
Speaker 2:And there's more and more companies where you see the, the real estate function, rolling up to a either chief people officer, and I know more and more companies that have a, a chief people and places officer. And I mean it's obvious. But why does real estate exist? It exists for the people. So, yes, sure you know it's a huge asset, maybe historically it's, it's, it's lived under the cfo because it's just, it seems like a giant asset. But you know what else is a giant asset? Your people. In fact, it's a much bigger asset than your real estate and so, of course, they have their own dedicated chief people officer, chro, whatever it might be, and it is only natural that real estate, which exists purely for the purpose of those people, belongs in that part of the organization and not COO, cfo, somewhere else.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a complex space to sell into, though man isn't it? I mean, these aren't straight line sales routes. That real estate, construction, construction, split incentives, facility management, landlord-tenant relationships these are complex relationships, lots of money at stake, lots of big contracts and cycles in play. You've got to have your wits about you selling into this space. It isn't just having a flashy website and a decent product and hoping it takes off like then there's no short, there's no short circuits or shortcuts in b2b, is there, yeah?
Speaker 2:no, and I mean I was, I was, I was going to agree with you and also say that it's. It's. It's also just the nature of the types of companies that are going to make the commitments to really care about the health and the well-being and the productivity of their people and try to space, but neither is selling anything to a Fortune 500. Incredible companies that are sort of at the forefront of innovation and of thinking about their people and creating people first spaces and places that that are adopting these, these solutions in this type of technology yeah, I know you mean I'm conflicted there, though I I have to be honest with you.
Speaker 1:I, I, I totally get that, and you, I think you need champions, pioneers, people that raise the flag. I had this very conversation with joseph allen about it. Is that my worry is that often in a lot of those fortune 500 companies, we're really just putting a badge on something that was already pretty good anyway. You know, you walk into a lot of modern buildings. Whether they've got a well standard or not, there's a good chance they've got a pretty sophisticated johnson control hevac system or a schneider, this or whatever. Right, I don't want to let leave any of them out. Honeywell, whatever the big ones are right. So, um, carrier, sorry carrier anyway. So, um, all potential sponsors, you see, um, so the um.
Speaker 1:The challenge is um, I often think we're just crossing t's and dotting. I's a lot of that environment and I spend a lot of my life as is coined the long tail of the real estate sector. And boy, there's a lot of low hanging fruit there. You know these are spaces that are run to failure. You know these are spaces that are run to failure. You know we've all worked in those. Yeah, low hung tiles, poorly lit office environments with bad ventilation and derrick in the cubicle the other side of um the office that everybody can still smell, you know, like it's like there's, there's a lot of good work that can be done in the lower tiers of the of the environment and we don't seem to have an answer for them yet, like we're, we're, we're playing around with the deloitte's and the linkedin headquarters and so on and so forth, which is great two great customers of ours, great for the brochures, right?
Speaker 1:you, you know, and they're phenomenal buildings and you go into them and, like you know, they're amazing spaces. But that's not where the good can be done and that, for me, is the big. That's why I'm conflicted, because I love being able to showcase what we can do with healthy buildings and well buildings and so on. I think it's phenomenal. And well buildings and so on. I think it's phenomenal.
Speaker 2:Um, but 99.5 percent of the rest of the workforce ain't working in those buildings, you know, yeah, no. So I, I 100 agree with that. I think I would. I would maybe challenge a couple points or present a different perspective. I think one of them is just, I, I do agree, the majority of these buildings generally do quite a good job.
Speaker 2:That said, we've discovered countless issues in even the best buildings and projects. I mean just an example of one recently. I mean this is in India, so obviously it's a challenging environment, but it's a beautiful building, it's got all the certifications, it is incredible and it's full of building. It is, uh, it's got all the certifications, it is incredible and it's full of fortune 100 tech company tenants and you know, in this building overall, looking at the air quality, it looked quite good, but we're very rapidly able to pinpoint extremely high pm levels in a group of meeting rooms right in the middle of the office, which is perplexing because the ones around them were fine and so all the sort of windows everywhere that had you know where you might have infiltration of PM was fine, but somehow these conference rooms right in the middle were experiencing issues. Just to jump to the end of the story, they had a different dedicated mechanical system pulling air into those conference rooms because they didn't get enough fresh air and that was not on the same maintenance schedule. It was basically just an oversight. No one looked at it ever. So you know seven-year-old filters or something that no one had ever changed.
Speaker 2:So even in those incredible offices there are all sorts of problems that come up. There are all sorts of problems that that come up because the building that you build on day one, or the, the building that you design, you know from design it goes through engineering and then construction and then maybe testing and balancing, but maybe not, you know, maybe and and then, and then it gets handed over to the, to the user who actually puts people inside and starts using it and and then, and then they typically change half the spaces to do something that they were never intended to do and you end up with issues. But that's just in those good spaces, I think. To address kind of the long tail, I absolutely agree with that. We've done work with schools, for example, where it's a CO2 levels of four or 5,000 in every classroom, crazy levels of VOCs because teachers are burning incense and candles in the classrooms. I mean, you know, just kind of anonymous stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly, and, and, and there is a huge opportunity to address those. That said, I do really think that, and I think the solution to address those is actually very, very, very easy regulation legislation. You know we could have a. We could talk about that for hours, but I think where all of these tie together is that the certifications, the well, platinums, the, the, the leads, these top tier showcase projects create momentum. They show what's possible. And once that is visible, then everybody else starts to feel the pressure to catch up.
Speaker 2:And so, if you look at it as sort of a technology adoption bell curve, we've got the Deloittes and the LinkedIns and the Octas at that end. All the way on the right of the bell curve, they're the early adopters. They're creating showcases and they're using that to stand out as incredible places to attract the best and to retain the best talent that they can in the world. And then what that does is it starts to move the entire bell curve to the right and you get slightly earlier adopters that also start doing this. Now you still have the long tail of call it it 70%, but what eventually starts happening is you might get slight pared down versions of this and then eventually regulation catches up and this isn't a hypothetical.
Speaker 2:This has happened many times. To look at a completely different industry, seatbelts were an innovation by Volvo. They were not regulated regulated they absolutely are now. But volvo, trying to lead the way and creating a luxury car let's be honest that that most people couldn't afford led all cars to having seatbelts. And if we look at lead, we see the same thing. It pushed low emission materials into the spotlight and eventually california ended up adopting those ideas into its own building code.
Speaker 1:So what was once optional and what was just once, you know, just for the best companies out there, became mandated and became part of building code and legislated we see this convergence across all markets and you know that that's that, that's that game of of pioneers and front runners and regulations and standards eventually converging to a new norm and then there's the next trend or the next advancement. We've seen that with things like the passive house movement. You know that you have passive house, then you have passive house equivalent People doing some of the stuff of passive house but not all of it and eventually regulations. They're not being much difference between modern regulations and what passive house is anyway, and so all of a sudden everybody's kind of doing the same thing but there's still some differences in quality and outcomes. But ultimately the entire sector has moved on because somebody's shown a better way of doing it.
Speaker 2:You're going to see well today. I believe you're going to see well today, you know, I believe you're going to see it. Just taking well as an example whatever well is today is, you know, x number of years into the future. That will be the baseline and it will be regulated, and that and that, those x years into the future, well will already have evolved into a whole new thing that is being chased by those companies that are at the forefront.
Speaker 1:And you see that often with this. We see that now with the standards, with a lot of the air quality stuff, I mean there's really a very thin gap between a lot of the kind of the WHO, the well, the resets, the. You know, at the end of the day does it matter whether we're talking about 10 micrograms or 12 micrograms or 15? You know, we're kind of we know that's the rough area we need to get into. Very similar with Passive House. Everybody kind of understood we needed to get down to 25 watts per square meter per annum. Once you got down there, buildings were pretty efficient, so it doesn't really matter if it's 22 or 26. Splitting hairs really at that stage, 22 or 26, splitting hairs really at that stage. You work in China and places like India. You know buildings can be a very long way away from 15 micrograms to keep to PM2.5, right that's the target.
Speaker 1:That's a good outcome for anybody.
Speaker 2:Absolutely no. I mean, yeah, so we've got. I mean, I've learned so much about how different buildings are different around the world. Outdoor air pollution is different around the world. We're very much a global company. We have devices deployed in, I'd say, almost every country in the world and we've got some customers that have put over 10,000, 20,000 monitors across their entire portfolio, have put over 10,000, 20,000 monitors across their entire portfolio. So you're seeing all different building types, all different issues, and I mean even to the point earlier of the Deloitte's or LinkedIn. I mean some of these companies that you would think are in the best and most amazing offices in the world. If you look at their entire portfolio, actually there's a huge range. They have incredible buildings and then they just have ones that are really, really, really not performing.
Speaker 1:Um, and that's due to geography, construction, so on that's a really good point, and I remember talking way back to um tyler smith, actually johnson controls. He was making this point about their portfolio. You know, johnson controls have hundreds, hundreds of thousands of buildings across every continent and there's a huge spectrum of quality there. So so if I had one call to action or ask of these big companies that are showcasing their glass clad head headquartered building in New York or wherever it is, is I want to see you applying that same rigor across your entire portfolio. You know I'm not interested in just seeing your platinum-scored buildings. I want to see how you handle strategically everything else as well. It's not just about painting a rosy picture for your brochures. It's about genuinely having a strategy, a monitoring strategy, a clean air strategy and so on for everybody. Um, that that would be my call to action to them. That for every, every deloitte headquarter building, I'd like to see their deloitte offices above the high street in dagon and having the same monitors and the same approach.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm gonna take.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna take the soundbite and send it to deloitte so yeah, but I think that that would be great because it showed, because that genuinely shows the way to the long tail then say, look, no, we can do.
Speaker 2:We can do it in our good buildings, but we also recognize there's a spectrum and this is how we've approached it and done it with everything else as well, you know, and that that would be a good good market signal, wouldn't it is that they start dripping this down and showing the way for every everything else yeah, I, I absolutely agree, and I think that is actually one of the big trends that we are seeing is companies maybe shifting from historically saying I'm going for a certification, therefore I will measure my air quality. This is my brand new, shiny office, therefore I'll put in all the smart tech, all the gadgets, all the bells and all the whistles and it's really just. It's a showcase of a single building and we're seeing a big shift from that to this mindset of I'm doing this for my people, and my people are not all in one fancy building, they're located all around the world. We should be offering them the same type of experience. It shouldn't be 10% of people are in a beautiful office and 90% are in somewhere where the roof is caving in.
Speaker 2:No, if we're going to do anything, it needs to be portfolio wide, it needs to be equitable, it needs to be the same for everybody, and I think technology is also enabling that a lot by becoming easier to install, easier to implement. I mean, just within Kiterra, we've had a big focus on creating fully wireless, battery powered, run for almost a decade solutions so that anybody can install them. You could just ship this to every branch of a bank and the bank. You know somebody working in that bank can just take off the sticky tape, put it on the wall and start getting data immediately. You don't need to have an IoT specialist come in. You don't need to run wires. Get an electrician, try to work it out with your InfoSec, Because those barriers are what have historically created a huge amount of friction to actually deploying these globally in any sort of portfolio and the reality is most buildings that are going to be around in 56 years, 50 to 60 years already exist.
Speaker 1:So we've got to find ways. You know we can't, we can't be installing these construction phase, you know, in certain parts of the world. Um, you know, I think the global footprint of real estate is going to double in the kind of the middle east asia area of the world. But for the rest of the world, europe particularly, and those buildings are there, you know, and you can't be running whatever the cable is of the day around the building and trying to figure out to network into this, that and the other, just not a runner. You know, yeah, and ultimately you can't manage. You can't manage what you don't measure, which is a beautiful segue kind of into this, into the kind of where we are today. Is that one of the one of the values that I hate? Using the term low-cost monitoring, but it's kind of how, just where it's ended up.
Speaker 2:But this longitude, I can have a rant on that one topic right there so how?
Speaker 1:how are you getting on selling your low-cost monitors, leon?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, if you will give me 30 seconds to rant briefly about low cost yeah, this, this is.
Speaker 2:This is absolutely a pet peeve, and every time I see an academic, I'm like why? Okay, so I understand. I'm like why? Okay, so I understand. Stop calling them this. It is not helping global adoption, so I hate that term. Personally, I know exactly where it comes from. For many years in the start of our company, actually, we were also doing a lot around outdoor air quality monitoring. We worked with some of the largest municipal governments in the world actually to do ambient measurement of outdoor air quality, and that's where this term comes from.
Speaker 2:Historically, you had a $50,000 beta attenuation mass monitor and that was what was measuring PM2.5. And so anything that was $1,000, $2,000 was low cost compared to that, and so there's been a wealth of research papers and academic work done labeling these things low cost. But if you work in HVAC, if you work in IoT, if you work in building management, that's not. You know, just as an argument like one thousand dollars is not what low cost means to you. You hear low cost, you think 15, a 15 gadget, and that does not a. That doesn't inspire confidence. If you go to a building manager, if you go to the head of real estate for google and you say we're going to put these low cost monitors on the walls, they're thinking you want to put a ten dollar thing on a wall. Well, I don't believe it's going to work. It's probably not, you know.
Speaker 2:And we don't talk about a low-cost smoke detector, a low-cost sprinkler system. We just talk about a sprinkler system, a smoke detector, a fire alarm. All of those things cost a lot more 100 years ago and now they don't. But we don't label them in that way because it doesn't make sense. We just expect them to work. They're not gadgets and toys. They are accessible, scalable tools that allow us to measure air quality in every single room, not just in one fancy lab. So I'd rather we called them I don't know distributed sensors, just monitoring systems, or enterprise air quality monitors, because that's what they're actually doing. They're complex systems that don't cost $15. They don't cost $50,000 either, you know, but they're doing. They're creating a lot of value for those companies, and that is what we should focus on, not the fact that they don't cost $50,000, because that is completely irrelevant to any of the people actually buying these products all right, liam off your soapbox, mate yeah, it's, it's uh, yeah, sorry I, I thought I wanted the low-cost ones, not your ones.
Speaker 1:You know just. You just know it's the salesman's nightmare, isn't? It is something being coined, the term low-cost, anything at low cost, high value. There's no, there's no way out of that corner. So, like now's the chance we need to figure out what you want to call them.
Speaker 1:Um, so, well, yeah yeah, we need, we need, you need an alternative. I mean you, yeah, I've, I've struggled. If there's a spectrum isn't there. That's the challenge. And you're trying to differentiate from what, perhaps, talking to tsi, you'd call near reference grade sensors, the sensors that are a tier down from laboratory level sensors that might cost two or three thousand euros, that you're walking around and doing measurements with, to something that is two, three, four, five hundred euros, that's going into the walls of office meeting rooms and so on. So there's clearly a spectrum. It just doesn't help from a marketing perspective that down at the, the, the, the higher value engineered end of it, um, that it's being called low cost, um so, yeah, maybe it's not even.
Speaker 2:It's not even. Yeah, I mean, for me it's not even a, it's not even a marketing issue. To be honest, it's not how I think about it so much. It's more that it's a term that has been coined in sort of academia, which I love, researchers, you know. But the people that are using these indoors have no context, and so it it just. When you put low cost in front of it, it is confusing, it's more. It's more confusing than anything else because it's maybe it's just do I want a low cost or do I.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's only us that's hearing low cost, because maybe it's only us that's talking to researchers. You know, I don't know, did. Do any of your customers have they ever actually heard the word low-cost sensor, other than you accidentally spurting it out? The reality is, like you say most consumers have no idea what you're talking about at all in the first place.
Speaker 2:Which is why we should stop using it, because it's just, I don't know, why are you saying this? It doesn't make any sense to me and you're right, the most of them actually will never hear this. The exception is when you're sort of at conferences, you're at a green build or something, and you've got workplace leaders in the room, you've got somebody that worked on one of these projects, and then you've got a researcher or someone like that and they keep talking about low cost and everyone's just scratching their head so it's not making yeah it's not like it's making our life harder to sell these products.
Speaker 2:It just confuses everybody, which I don't think is good for a nascent industry yeah, no, that's very true, very true.
Speaker 1:But what I mean, interestingly? I mean one of the reasons cost has come down for these products, and it genuinely has. I mean it's phenomenal what we can get into these boxes now at a cost compared to where we were a few years ago. Um, that happens for a reason and that's happening because there's a market there, somewhere. The sensor manufacturers are able to scale and bring in cost effectiveness into production, so the manufacturing costs are coming down with these products like the.
Speaker 1:There's a fundamental truth behind all of this stuff that these have a place in buildings and particularly they're bringing a value of long-term monitoring of spaces that, as, as you pointed out earlier, the building might be fine but a space gets changed in its use or deteriorates over time, or somebody makes a mistake on a damper or something and things happen, and there's an innate value in being able to capture the performance of spaces over time, isn't there? So you must have seen that develop over the last five to 10 years, just seeing these value propositions pop up in all these different scenarios and being able to build these business cases as to why it makes sense to deploy this technology.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely it is. I mean, things have evolved so much it's really hard to compare. I will, without naming any, I think so one of the let me think, maybe to go through a quick history. My experience 10, well, less than 10 years ago, let's say eight years ago. My experience eight years ago was you'd run into potential customers and they'd say, well, yes, we're interested, we need this air quality data. And then they might go out, they might install sensors, and at the time, what sensors were doing was providing them with a number, maybe a very simple dashboard with a line graph on it. And I remember running into one customer Fortune 100, and they'd installed something like 2,000 or 3,000 sensors, very, very early in sort of the world of companies adopting technology like this.
Speaker 2:And I'd run into the same person every year and I'd say, well, those sensors that you purchased from whatever company it was, you know what, what have you done with that information and what, what value has it brought to your business? And one year on, it was sort of well, we just got it up and running. We've got the data, you know, haven't really done anything with it yet. Year two, sort of well, we've got people looking at the data. We're starting to get some like basic thoughts, but we haven't really, you know, actioned upon it. Year three was.
Speaker 2:I think this project has been a complete failure. We put white boxes on walls, we got data, but the reality is no one has the time to look at it, nobody knows what to do with it, and so we just have sort of a lot of data sitting around. Maybe we'll do something with it in the future, um, and at that point in time, a few people started to have that similar experience and I think the conversation, certainly the conversations that we were having started to shift from I don't need data, I need answers, and that is also how the industry has evolved, and I can't speak for all the different sensor manufacturers out there, and I think we've seen 100x increase in sensor manufacturers as well, think we've, we've seen, you know, 100x increase in sensor manufacturers as well. There were literally probably three of us eight years ago in this space. Now there's, I don't know, hundreds, um, but is there? Is there?
Speaker 1:though, because I mean, you see it better, it's a very it's a very, very, very, very long tail.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say like that.
Speaker 1:There are a handful of manufacturers that have got a reputation and a brand name, of which Katera is one of them, and they are known, and then there's a bunch of other stuff, as you say, but I don't get the impression that it's a crowded marketplace from the sense of the people that are doing good work. You can literally count on one hand the brands that are doing significant business in the space.
Speaker 2:Exactly, it's really three brands probably that have, yeah, you know, significant presence and then a very, very, very, very long tail, and I think what we're seeing? A bit of a split there as well. If it goes back to this, we're in a stage where we cannot just be putting boxes on walls that give you a data point. Uh, I've seen I've seen so many dashboards that you have 100 devices in your building and what you get is a line graph, a time series graph, with 100 lines on it. What the hell is anyone going to do with that? Yeah, kind of model where you sit down and understand what are your goals.
Speaker 2:Why are you trying to measure air quality? If you're just trying to tick a box, honestly, you should probably just go buy somebody else's products because someone else can help you tick that box. But if you are trying to actually improve your air quality, are you doing that? Are you doing that for esg reporting? Are you doing that to improve your facilities, your operations? Are you doing it because you want to communicate to your employees, you want to give them a more powerful and a better experience, like all of those things? They all start with measuring your environment, but they end up in very different places and you need to understand what are the goals, what is the value that the end user is trying to get out of this data and then really work together and hold their hand to make sure that they can get that value. So it's I say for that, for is that?
Speaker 1:scalable that approach because it's very consultative in its sales approach, which tends to slow things down. I mean, I'm like you said earlier. You prefer that steady growth, the consistent, steady, deep relationship, deep value growth pattern, which is good, but that that we see this in social housing as well. It's. It's another area where we've seen quite an explosion public housing in the deployment of environmental sensors, because they can. There's some really obvious. There's some very good value propositions in spotting damp and mold and voids and fuel poverty and all sorts of things you can see with environmental data. But they've hit the same wall. Funnily enough, that you're talking about there.
Speaker 1:It's the not another dashboard scenario and also little white boxes on walls that somebody looks back at the end of a three-year period and is asking the question what value did that bring to the organization? And often in these large organizations, as you know, the person you were talking to at the beginning ain't there at the point. Somebody's asking what are those white boxes on the walls doing and who? Who approved that and what value is it brought anyway? Like, how often does that conversation happen to you? So there is this. Tom Robbins from Switchy put this very well If you know what you're doing and you're secure enough in your position. You have to have the uncomfortable conversations up front with organizations, because if you don't, you're wasting each other's time. Ultimately. Exactly Because if you don't, you're wasting each other's time, ultimately You've got to figure out how to bring value to a company with this data.
Speaker 1:Otherwise, it will just be another dashboard in three years' time and, particularly if your model is a SaaS model, you're screwed then, because all of that growth and profitability is buried in the long-term relationship. That isn't going to happen. I'll have you back to the podcast in just a minute. I just wanted to briefly tell you about Eurovent Certified Performance from Eurovent Certification, a partner of the podcast.
Speaker 1:We all know HEVAC systems play a vital role in improving indoor air quality. However, there is a risk that some products may not live up to expectations. Even the best installed and maintained HEVAC equipment can underperform if data used to specify products and design systems is incorrect. Consequences can include poor indoor air quality, increased energy consumption, increased maintenance, system failure and non-compliance with regulations, and that's bad for everyone. However, there is a way to ensure products perform as advertised and deliver good, sustainable indoor environments. Selecting products holding Eurovent certified performance ensures that the manufacturer data has been independently and impartially verified. Eurovent's certification stringent certification process not only guarantees product performance, but energy efficiency too.
Speaker 1:I met some of the Eurovent certification team back in January at the Indoor Air Quality Matters conference and was seriously impressed with what they're trying to do. Their core aim is to create transparency in the industry by making certified data freely available. This means you can directly compare the performance of products to make informed decisions. Their certified product directory holds vital information on everything from air handling units to air filters. So don't take a chance on unverified products. Trust in proven performance. Details as always in the show notes at airqualitymattersnet and at Eurovent Certification that's wwweurevent-certificationcom. Now back to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah, matthew, you mentioned whether this is scalable, so I think. Well, to be honest, I think it's not a question of is this scalable, it is simply a question of how do you scale it, because this is the only way to deliver value, in my opinion. If you don't do this we're still going to end up with white boxes on walls.
Speaker 1:So it's just another challenge to solve and, like I said, I like challenges yeah, and you know, and, and you know, if you're in the right environment and social housing has been, um, a victim of this if you've got a sector that's big enough, you can survive as a business for quite a long time, scattergunning and getting success and sticking white boxes as pilots into whole bunches of buildings and kid yourself that you're building a business when really you're just scattergunning and eventually that road runs out. It runs out for everybody that takes that approach, unless you just strike lucky somehow. Right, but that's not a way to build a business. So I think you're absolutely right. It's that you you've got to understand you don't, you can't manage what you don't measure. But if you don't have a plan for the data you're looking at, what's the point of measuring at the end of the day?
Speaker 2:yes, yeah, and I think I think it's, it's there's. You know we think of like. Our journey starts, really, when the device is installed on the wall. That is very, very different to the vast majority of sensor providers. Their journey ends when they ship the product out the door. For a lot of companies, I set the invoice out, I got paid, I put the product in the mail, that's done on to the next one. For us it really is the opposite way around. A lot of the hard work begins once that device goes on the wall, because now we need to deliver the value that has been discussed and agreed upon about what measuring your environment is going to provide to your business. And it's not easy. But I think it's the only way to be truly successful in this space, because exactly otherwise, you're going to end up with a pilot here, a pilot there and you can do that for a while. But that's not a good way to build a solid business. It's not a good way to move the industry forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and is your, without giving the secret sauce away, is your commercial model based on recurring revenue and bringing that after sales value, or is it buried within the hardware and the profitability within that to be able to deliver the after sales value? If you, or is it a mixture of the both in in some way? Because there's a there's a heavy cost in offering that value post sale of the product, isn't there?
Speaker 2:exactly. I'd say it's a combination of both um, because different people also have different needs. They're going to do different things with that data, but most companies that are able to really get the most out of doing something like this and measuring their environment, they are looking to get ongoing value over the long term, and that requires upfront cost. And the reality is I believe the reality is that, regardless of sort of what provider you use and what business model they have, that ongoing cost is going to be true no matter what. If you just get the white boxes on the wall and now you have all this data, well, you still need somebody to make sense of it if you're going to get any value. So now you're going to have to hire a third-party consultant, or you're going to have to hire somebody a data scientist to try to decipher the data. So either way, if you want ongoing value, you have ongoing cost. It's just a question of where that cost ends up sitting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really good point and actually a really interesting segue into a question I originally spoke to you about, and what kind of prompted us to come together in the podcast, apart from the fact that we've been trying to do this for about a year and a half, so it's great that we finally got to sit down and that's as much on me, by the way listeners, as it is on Liam, but just purely just timing. But, um, one of the things that we've seen in the market particularly, um, we've seen Katera make quite a big play for over the last six months or so I would say maybe bit longer, I might be wrong is the value of long-term monitoring, particularly within standards like WELL, and what appears to be the displacement over time of this more traditional approach to spot-check, kind of deep-rigated, near reference grade monitoring. Um, it's interesting, like, when you look back at the history of well, where it came from and it came from a time where enterprise level monitors see I'm using the new word now, liam- there you go, yeah um, we're fairly new.
Speaker 1:We were still not sure what their value was going to be in buildings.
Speaker 1:We, there was still some unanswered questions about reliability, drift. You know that those kind of things calibration over time, um, and because of the rigor of some of those standards like LEED and WELL, definitely a reliance on the more traditional approaches of getting a consultant in with fairly expensive gear to come in and walk around the building and give you a report that tells you X, right, and you could stand on that because we've been doing that for years, right. And then these boxes in the background in buildings providing the, the long-term monitoring. But there's a shift happening. We've seen a shift in well, allowing now for the displacement largely of those spot checks in in lieu of longer-term monitoring. What's's your sense of that reading that? Because you've lent into that clearly over the last six months. It's something that you've made a thing of. Where do you think that's heading as an industry and is everybody capable of doing that? Is it a market that's ready for the complete displacement of that kind of near reference grade spot check measurement?
Speaker 2:yes, so I have. I have many thoughts on this um, and I think I'll preface it by saying that I am actually a huge fan, believe it or not, of performance testing and on-site testing and I think it serves an incredibly valuable role, and I'm a huge fan as well of the people and the organizations that do that and are capable of understanding deeply what is going on inside our buildings and analyzing things in person using their eyes, their nose, their ears, and I'll tell you a bit more about, I think, why that is in a moment and what I think their role truly should be. But maybe just to get back to kind of the first question, I mean I think if you rewrote, if Well and Lead did not exist today and you wrote the standard and this was day one, if I'm being totally honest, I don't think that those I think continuous monitoring would be the only approach written into the standard. That's interesting Because it provides such a more holistic picture. More holistic picture.
Speaker 2:The traditional approach is I get somebody in maybe once a year and then they come back. You know they might come back three years later for recertification and they're taking a single measurement at a single point in time in a very limited number of spaces. If it's a hot day, if it's cold day, if there's a train idling outside, if it's a holiday, if there's high traffic, these will all lead to vastly different measurements If people are in the building or not, depending on what time of day, how busy is the office. These things are not mandated, and so it's basically a random sampling and you get a single, highly accurate measurement at that one point in time. So it's like having a very, very, very high definition photograph of a tiny, tiny percentage of the whole, whereas continuous monitoring is a video recording with audio, you know, that runs for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So if you're looking at photographs, you might get a vague idea of what's going on, but you're going to completely miss the plot, and I think that is exactly what happens.
Speaker 2:Bringing an expert in once a year gives you a static snapshot of a building, but buildings change from hour to hour, from season to season, and you need to understand that. Unfortunately, it's also very easy to game systems when you have one day when everyone comes in and I've seen this countless times Some buildings going for certification. Oh, we've got our spot check on Monday. Hey, everyone, a reminder don't wear perfume, come into the office later, don't eat lunch at your desk like you might normally do. Call up the hvac guys. Hey, can you increase to maximum you know airflow for for this this one day and then shut it down again because we're saving energy?
Speaker 2:So what on earth is the point of all this? If that's how we're, you know, if that's how we're thinking about our buildings, um, like, like I, let me like. Like I described the the uh issue earlier, we're identifying PM 2.5 in a building in India that would never be captured with a spot check. It would be fundamentally impossible. So, maybe shifting gears slightly. I said I think that these are really really important people and they're doing really really good work. So this is not about replacing experts. It's about changing the tools that they have access to and enabling them to do better work. The way that I think about it, continuous monitoring is essentially your GP, right? Your general practitioner is essentially your GP, right? Your general practitioner it's giving you. It's somebody that you go in. You see annually you get a variety of somebody that sort of looks at you and tells you how are you doing.
Speaker 1:If you have a problem, if you're feeling uncomfortable, you know, you call them up, you say, hey, I've got this, I have a sore throat, blah, blah blah, and they help to identify problems I've used this before as well, and the way I've put the way I've put it is that indoor air quality monitoring, the, the enterprise level sensors um it is is a bit like health wearables that they're giving you the, the, your, they, they're giving you the pulse of the building, they're keeping an eye on the blood pressure, they're doing the basics and you might go to your GP or have one of these experts look at that data and come in and give you a bit of a check because you've identified some problems.
Speaker 1:As a result of that, you're going out a minute. I'm not sleeping as well as I used to, my blood pressure's up a bit. My, you know I'm not as fit as I used to be. I'm out of breath, my resting heart rate's gone up. You know you can start to see some of these things going wrong, but at some point, at some point, or you always need a blood test.
Speaker 1:You know, at some point when there's a problem you need somebody that's not a weekend warrior looking at data, actually understanding what the building's telling you, being able to read the tea leaves and tell you you might want to deploy. We're seeing spikes of TVOCs in these rooms at these times. You know what you might want to send somebody in there. We might want to do an actual speciated voc check for a couple of days in that space and try and understand what. What are we seeing? Is it just jenny with her perfume, or is it actually something more profound going on in that space? You can see those hierarchies develop. The question I'd ask you, though, perhaps, is are we employing any of those people to do that yet, or is it just purely displacement? At the moment, are we just seeing the gradual displacement of these environmental monitoring experts for longitudinal monitoring?
Speaker 2:Well, I think the kind of the. So just to answer that directly yes, we are, but it depends a lot on the person. And so I think we need to take a moment to sort of step back and if we continue going with the medicine example, like, what is the purpose of a doctor? It it's to keep you healthy, it's not to use a stethoscope, because that's what they've always done in their life. What is the job of a and I'll just use, you know, building expert for as a broad term that you might, you might have, you know, on-site testing, industrial hygienist, whatever it might be what? What is, what is the value of that person? It is to help you create a healthy building.
Speaker 2:It's not their job and their reason for existing is not to carry around a tripod with some expensive equipment and a clipboard. That is simply a means to the end. So the question I would ask is what is the most effective way to get to that end? We have these amazing experts. It's a scarce resource. We should be using them and deploying them in a way that is infinitely more valuable and that, by the way, will be great for their business as well, because it is a huge waste of resources to take somebody that knows so much about a building and have them stand around sitting next to a tripod with a piece of equipment as it samples error for 45 minutes.
Speaker 1:I mean there are so many better things that they could be doing yeah, and I was talking, you know, I was talking to a guy from one of them, the, the global players in those performance testing companies, you know, and he's he's literally flying between australia, europe and north america to test buildings for 24 hours, 48 hours at a time yeah, I mean it's just an unbelievable waste of expertise and resources and unbelievably expensive to do it.
Speaker 1:You know, those experts are a finite resource. You're absolutely right. And at the absolute pinnacle of that finite resource is your occupational hygienist. They're you, they're the equivalent of your consultant in the medical profession, who is an expert in buildings and can actually give you the diagnosis that you've been hungry for all of these years. Um that, there is a finite resource of these people and if you speak to anybody in industrial hygiene, they can't get them in fast enough.
Speaker 2:It's just a exactly, exactly, continuous monitoring. It's your health wearable, it's your GP, it's your routine exam and then, when you find that there is something wrong, you call in a specialist. Imagine for a moment if we just flip it on its head. Imagine if we handled human health the way that we handle building health today. We'd say, okay, well, no matter what, every three years you need to go get tested for tropical diseases. And, by the way, if you feel sick in between, well, you know too bad, because you've got to test for tropical diseases coming up in two and a half years. Like that's basically what we do today in buildings.
Speaker 2:It's absurd. What we should be doing is measuring them all the time and when we notice that something's off, then we call in that specialist you know the neurologist, the pulmonologist, whatever it might be who comes in and uses, because they have all these things that sensors cannot do right. They can look for water damage, they can use their nose, they can use their ears, they can tap on pipes and see if there's a problem with them. That is a unique expertise that should only be deployed when we have an idea that there's a problem and we need somebody to investigate further. And then at that point. By the way, if you say I need to fly this person six hours on an airplane, sure that makes sense, but flying somebody, I mean we've seen this.
Speaker 2:We've seen teams fly from London to Brazil to do performance testing for a certification. It's incredibly expensive and they walk away with a report that just says yes, you hear the readings you passed. And what happens with that report? It gets submitted, they get a certification, and they a certification in the eyes of the building owner. That is so different to what you can do with continuous monitoring, ongoing data and somebody helping you to interpret that data. So these people, they absolutely are a part of the future. I do not think they're getting displaced, but I think with any new technology and any shift in technology, there are going to be those that embrace new technology, and this is what we're seeing. We're seeing the ones who embrace new technology and say this continuous monitoring can play a part in the solutions that I offer and it's going to enable me to be 10x more effective. They're going to win. And the ones that refuse and say what I've always done is carry around a tripod, I'm going to keep carrying around my tripod.
Speaker 1:They are the ones that will struggle in this new future. Do you think to still man that position a little bit, that the enterprise-level sensor market is ready to take up the baton in that regard? Does it have the rigor in calibration, in deployment, in understanding environmental science, in the placement of sensors, in the interpretation of data? Does it understand the limitations of light scattered pm sensors and tvoc sensors and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on. Right that this is a. This is a world driven very often by uh, because we can, rather than because we should, when it comes to deploying tech. Because and joseph allen makes this very critical point we're labeling buildings as healthy and with that comes a certain responsibility. And if you're the primary means for labelling that building as healthy, is that a baton that the sector is ready to take on? A good example of that is under the Wells Standard.
Speaker 1:Traditionally you could get your points, and you still can, and most of those were designed around what the art of the possible, not the art of the should. Those were designed around what the art of the possible, not the art of the should. So you know the metrics were CO2, temperature, humidity, TVOCs, you know, and in those lists some of the more advanced ones, which were the bastion of these performance tests, were things like formaldehyde and NOx tests and various other things. Now we started to see the chemical sensors that are capable of doing nox readings and formaldehyde readings and so on, but the bandwidth of their accuracy is plus or minus an order of magnitude above the, the threshold limits of who, so virtually meaningless from a data perspective. Um, so you know, and I've, you know, I've got them.
Speaker 1:I've got formaldehyde sensors in one one of the, the sensors behind them, behind me I've deployed actual formaldehyde in the space and it's very good, like they do, for sure pick up formaldehyde, but at the kind of levels that we're looking to capture it at low cost sensors, you know, at an ambient kind of not really not really spiky event level and not really giving you the picture you want. So it's an interesting space and so the question is to still to still man. It's try and consolidate that down to a still man question is the low cost sensor market ready to take on the responsibility of putting a green light on a building and saying it's a healthy space?
Speaker 2:so I I will definitely sort of argue that that side. But I would also just flip the question around first and say can we really put a healthy sticker on a building based on an arbitrary date that was done two and a half years ago when potentially nobody was even in the building?
Speaker 1:true, I mean to me to me that seems completely absurd now, and I think that's a given the I suppose the the proposition to the steel man argument is that currently we did both. So currently we had both. Yes, long-term and at least, or you would hope, an annual check by somebody that knows what they're doing, coming in and, in an ideal world, someone that would look at the data, look at a typical day and try and come in and get a measurement for something that was reflective of the normal conditions. That's what you would hope. That check would be right. Right, notwithstanding the people gaming the system. But you would hope, in in its best possible scenario, somebody would look at a space, look at the basic information coming out of enterprise level monitors um, I'm gonna have everybody call them enterprise level monitors by the time we finish this podcast, by the way. And, um, we're gonna, um, and you'd have somebody coming in and checking that indicative measurement period and actually seeing what was there to benchmark it.
Speaker 2:Are we ready to drop that so debatable? And I actually, like I said you know, to sort of preface the beginning of this, I actually I do believe that there is a very important role for on-site testing. Formaldehyde is a great example. There are a number of specific chemicals that are hard slash, impossible to accurately and specifically measure using continuous monitoring and types of sensors that you're going to typically see installed in the building. So I think it's so. First of all, I don't think I agree with you. I don't think it's. It's. It's either or there is a position, there's, there's a world for both of these things, and I think one of the challenges right now is is actually that there is this. There can be this view that continuous monitoring is supplanting whatever existed before, and I don't think that's actually the future that we're going to end up in.
Speaker 2:And we work with a lot of performance testing agents and they still need to go in and measure things like water quality. They might take a formaldehyde sensor, depending. Like you still need people on site to do other things, if you look at well, you still need people on site to measure water quality. You still need to measure acoustics potentially light, you know. So that there is work that must be done on site. Those people know so much about the building, how it performs, where sensors should go. So in fact, we have a lot of partners who are doing these things and they're the ones putting sensors on the walls. They're also the ones looking at the data. They're the ones looking at the data, seeing if there are any issues. If there are issues, they might go and actually take samples for formaldehyde, benzene, whatever else it might be, send those to a lab. But if everything's looking good, maybe we don't need to do that.
Speaker 1:Um and I think this is a really interesting, a really interesting frame to to kind of bake down and see how it trickles down into the rest of the environment. I mean, what's fascinating for me here? Right, because it's. It's obviously a very hard question to answer because they're, you know, there's a shifting sands with time and the development of technology and perception, and also we're trying to build, to frame and propose at the level that we're typically talking about here, which is well and again back to this kind of deloitte headquarter type scenario.
Speaker 1:Boy, is this going to be a hard one to to have down in the low ends of the, the tail of the, the built environment, because they certainly don't have the luxury of flying people halfway across the world to to measure buildings. So like, in a way, this is a kind of a what you call it, a um, a third world, first world problem. You know, in the, in the, in the real real estate world, you know we're arguing the toss over whether it's worth flying somebody halfway across the world to measure a building or not. You know what a great problem to have. You know if you're managing, you know, building after building in industrial estates across the midwest or something as an fm business. This isn't a conversation you're having.
Speaker 2:Well, and so that goes back to. I think these experts are so important and enterprise sensors are just another tool in their toolkit or their tool belt, because anybody can go and install those sensors. Let's say you're in the Midwest and you're doing all these bank branches, so literally the bank manager can just go and put a monitor or a few monitors on the walls of every bank branch and then that industrial hygienist or whatever it might be can sit in their home office, not flying across the world, and look at all of that data and say fine, fine, fine, fine problem, investigate here.
Speaker 2:They can look into the data and you can potentially hire somebody locally who doesn't have as much expertise to go in and do some of that on-site work to gather some more information. So again, the partners that we're working with that I see really winning in the market from a performance testing perspective. They're the ones that are saying you know, my job isn't to carry around a tripod, my job is to deliver on a healthy building. What are all the tools that I have available? I will use continuous monitors when that makes sense. I will use on-site testing when that makes sense, but it's not an either or and it gives so much more potential and flexibility to the end user.
Speaker 2:We have tons of customers that are coming to us right now and saying I hate performance testing. No offense to the people that do this. This has nothing to do with the companies that offer those services. It's just a headache for a company that is based in New Zealand. There's no testing agents in new zealand. They fly somebody in from australia for every building. Again, it's crazy. Like there's. There's going to be a better way here, and so those testing agents where we work with a lot of the ones in australia who are absolutely embracing this and they'll use a combination of different tools to get the customer to the best outcome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting. And I think it'll be interesting to see how Well and Lead and Reset and Breham and others wrestle with this. I mean you've seen them wrestle with exactly what the makeup of their product is. We've seen a lot of diversification, a lot of spread across different areas. You know well, you know you've got well portfolio, well health and safety, well performance. Well, you know as it's had to adapt and change to changing ties, well, residential more recently, exactly. So it'd be interesting to see how they extract the value of that proposition from it. And also, as you say, particularly for the people that aren't necessarily doing it for well standards now, that are doing it genuinely to try and understand the performance of their buildings, it'll be interesting to see how that moves forward. I mean, one of the things that's made your job significantly easier over the last six months has been your development of wireless battery operated, very easily deployable sensors. You know, I mean that's. I imagine that's lifted your business enormously from a from a deployment perspective and an ease of use for your customers absolutely it has.
Speaker 2:It has radically reduced the cost of sensors because you know, I think a lot, of a lot of the times when people look at a sensor, what they're looking at is they look at the sticker price. Okay, it's making up numbers here, $500. And they think, well, that's what it's going to cost. I multiply by the number of sensors and that's that that cost is a tiny fraction of the overall cost of deploying sensors. I mean, it can easily be less than 10% of the total cost is the actual sensors.
Speaker 2:You need to wire these things in many places. You need, you know, union electricians. You need to go through different regulations there's you need to do after hours, maybe you need a ladder that needs, you know, you need extra insurance, like. There's just so much stuff that we don't always think about that adds to that hidden cost. And so being able to make it so that anybody can install one of these things in less than a minute and it will stay on the wall and take readings for eight years on battery, that reduces the cost just so much for any type of existing building. Obviously, there's still a role out there for wired sensors and, honestly, that actually makes up a very large portion of our business still because they have. They have their own sort of role and job that they're they're particularly good at. But uh, wireless and the key here is that the batteries last long enough.
Speaker 2:If you're changing the batteries every year, like, just go with a wired sensor, you know yeah um, but if, if they're lasting for almost a decade, that that fundamentally changes the equation in the conversation, which opens up new markets.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and have you been able to keep the granularity of the measurements with these battery operators? Because that's one of the biggest challenges. Is that everybody can produce a sensor that can last 10 years. If you wake an NDIR sensor up once a day, right, and in fact often the limitation is just on the life of a cell battery will die at some point anyway. So you know it's not. It really it's a case of the use of the sensors and the power consumption of those devices. You've obviously, you're obviously comfortable that you've found a balance between getting a useful granularity out of the data and being able to provide the longevity for the battery.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and maybe I'll just use this opportunity to give a shout out to our engineering and product team who have really done, I mean, something incredible. So just to directly answer that question yeah, like the SenseEdge Go, which I've got one right here with me, this device will run on battery for eight years and it will give you readings for the vast majority of the parameters inside every single minute for eight years. So it's not, it's not turning on once a day, it's, it's turning on for every single minute. This can effectively replace a thermostat, um, a co2 sensor that you're using for demand control, ventilation, because you get a higher enough frequency of readings to be able to do controls with it.
Speaker 2:It could plug into your BMS, go to the cloud. It's also measuring occupancy. I mean it is incredible that this thing can run for that long, and this is why it took us so long to you know candidly to develop a product like this. Five years ago we were saying we have a wired solution, it'd be great to have a wireless one, but we just did the math on it and it's like well, either you're replacing the batteries every two years or you're sending a reading every half hour, and neither of those is acceptable.
Speaker 1:So it took five years to build this and I think technologically it just physically wasn't possible five years ago. I think you'd have been struggling or you'd have been coming up with some very clever algorithms for wake-up times of sensors, where, I mean, I had this idea years ago that if you could you get sensors to just wake up every now and then and then, if it doesn't see anything unusual, it goes back to sleep and so you can do some stuff that might be clever to conserve batteries. But again, it just goes to show the advancements of things like photoacoustic sensors, ndir sensors. All of this tech is it's just every year is dropping its consumption. Power consumption is getting more efficient. It's keeping the accuracy. The algorithms of, you know the, the automatic baseline corrections, have got better and better as well. So a lot of the big question marks that were over a lot of these sensor technologies have been answered just with the passage of time in a lot of ways, haven't they?
Speaker 2:yep, and, and I love that you just brought up sort of some of those clever algorithms that you were, you were you're mentioning because we let. That is we. We did a ton around that and actually very similar to what you just described. We actually filed a number of patents on exactly that.
Speaker 1:So yeah, very very similar concepts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, I think it's logical to anybody looking at the space to figure out how to get these devices to like. Now. I think, honestly, now it's battery tech is the hardest thing. Now I mean it's just actually preserving batteries for long enough because, like in theory, now we're getting down to a power consumption level and an algorithm level where you could go longer. It's just having the cells that are gonna provide the consistency over that period of time, you know, and having plastics that aren't gonna yellow and age. That the thing is, you know. But I imagine really at 10 years you're kind of in the replacement cycle of a lot of the wall hardware. Anyway, at that stage, do you know what I mean? It's very.
Speaker 2:It's very little hardware that you look at, that's more than 10 years old really yeah, yeah, exactly, and you certainly can make it go longer if you adjust the, the frequencies of measurement. I mean, yeah, let's think you go for 20, 20 years without a problem. But you're right, most, most, most of the case, most of the time, you don't have 20 year old devices on any walls yeah, what's your thoughts on calibration now at these stages?
Speaker 1:you know I I know that there was a big question mark over that for quite a few years, particularly when things like well, that required annual calibration of sensors and things and a lot of debate amongst the sensor community about what that really meant and you had innovative products at the time where you could remove parts sensors that you felt needed that kind of in-factory calibration, right. And then you had some sensors in the box that you felt didn't need that factory calibration, had some sensors in the box that you felt didn't need that factory calibration. Where do you think we are as an industry now with that kind of reliability of enterprise level sensors over the two, three, four, five year period that we're now looking to deploy them? Do you think we're at a point where you can fit and forget largely, or do you think you should be still need somebody to check it at some level in some way?
Speaker 2:we've done a lot of research on this and run sensors, for, I mean, we've been doing air quality monitors for about a decade now, so we've had sensors running, you know, non-stop for that long, and so we have a huge amount of data on when things actually drift, what level of exposure they need to see before they're at risk of drift, and so on. And there have been huge advances in the technology of a lot of these sensors. But there are still limitations and that's why we've designed our products, like you said, in a way where you have these sensor modules that you can just replace and recalibrate, put back in. It's kind of like changing a printer cartridge and the Well, I think. If we just look at the industry, if I'm being honest, I think that we have seen more and more products over the past few years essentially adopt the design that we had with these replaceable modules, which to me is a signal that it's the right thing to do when most of your competitors follow, suite and do the exact same thing, the exact same thing. But when I look at the data, there are sensors that just do need to be recalibrated. I mean, if you, if you, you know, I don't care what anyone says and what data they show me.
Speaker 2:I like I've seen PM 2.5 sensors in India measuring, you know, ambient air quality. Like those die fast, you know. I've seen sensors where you take them apart. You see a spider web inside. I mean there's bugs can crawl inside. There's just so many things that can happen. Fans slow down uh, you cannot maintain the exact same fan speed for 10 years on a sensor. Uh, you know, because of pm 2.5 sensor, for example, has it needs to maintaina relatively constant airflow rate, which is which is done through a fan, not a pump. So there's a number, you know. Lasers inside degrade. There are so many things that can degrade, and we're not even talking about sort of electrochemical sensors here yet, which also have their own, their own challenges. So all of these things point to some sensors can last for a very, very long time. Some sensors cannot, and it depends also on the environment.
Speaker 2:So I I do think it's necessary to um have the ability to replace sensors. I mean that's why we make these design decisions sometimes. You will be able to if you're. If you're using it in a clean room, sure, maybe it'll run for five years with no problems. But if you're using it in in new delhi and your building isn't performing as it should because most of the time they don't then it's definitely not going to last for five years. So the question is two years down the road, do you want to just swap out a module, or do you want to have to pull the whole thing off the wall, get a new one, put it on the wall, reconfigure it to the network?
Speaker 1:remap the back end points. How do you know that you need to do that or you don't.
Speaker 1:So there's an interesting maybe, perhaps there's another opportunity for those building specialists, the sensor specialists that maybe they're not going in and doing annual performance checks on buildings, but they're going in and doing biannual checks on sensors and making sure they're in actually out. On the one take podcast not this week but I think in a couple of weeks I've got a paper by Lydia Murawska looking at how you deploy PM sensors in buildings and have one source of truth that you have one calibrated device that you calibrate with outdoor devices and then you use that as a reference then for calibration amongst other modules or nodes within a building. So these are questions that are still trying to be answered and I suppose I suppose kind of spins it back to that kind of still manning the, the, the enterprise sensor question is is it, is the market ready? Well, it can be, is the answer. But equally we could be deploying sensors into spaces and seeing numbers that aren't very reflective of those spaces in three or four years time if you haven't done this right.
Speaker 2:That's the hard reality agreed I think that is one of the challenges with you know, when you ask a question like is the space ready for this?
Speaker 2:Mean I'm thinking through the lens of the work that we do with customers today.
Speaker 2:But, as I described, there is a very, very long tail of sensor companies and producers that are offering vastly different solutions, both from the hardware, the software and kind of the services aspect.
Speaker 2:So it might very well be that if a customer comes to us, we would bring in a performance testing organization that we have a relationship with and say hey, here are people that can tell you where to put these sensors, help you put them on the walls, take care of the recalibration process for you and do all of these things that you need. But if you are buying a random sensor off of Alibaba that's being sent from a factory in China that is essentially just cobbled together a few sensors into a white box and outputs it over Modbus, I mean, you're ending up with something very, very, very different, and so it's a little bit tricky when we start talking about, as an industry, are we ready to solve these problems or not? Because, yeah, the truth is, some are and some are absolutely not, and so you do need to have a little bit of due diligence before making decisions on this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, from my part of the world. In Ireland, we say cop on. You know companies are going to have a bit of cop on when they're entering this space because you know there's a you go for the lowest price, you, you, you'll. You may not get the quality that you want out of the end result, but again, this is a challenge. We're talking about this challenge particularly through the lens of buildings that can afford to do this. When we get to the hard-nosed stick end of the market, where people are doing it because they have to comply, it's a very different space.
Speaker 1:We've seen this in Ireland. They introduced the Code of Practice for Indoor Air Quality in the workplace as a knee-jerk reaction to the pandemic, primarily so they actually have a very good standard Code of Practice. It fits within health and safety in the workplace and it just requires two simple things One, that at least every two years your ventilation system is checked and you have a certificate to say it's doing what it's intended to do. And two, if you can't do that, that you have indoor air quality monitors deployed. Um, and so far, as far as I can tell, precisely zero organizations have followed the code of practice because it's just not being enforced and until somebody makes them do it, it's just not going to happen. Now, you know, at the same time there are lead platinum buildings going up in Ireland, you know, at the other end of the spectrum. But for your hairdressers on the high street and the cafe around the corner and the warehouse, the offices above the warehouse in the industrial estate on the outskirts of town, and that 1960s accountant's office, you know, in suburbia, and all of that, they ain't budging. You know, and that's that's the challenge.
Speaker 1:And and for me I think actually that's where the real value of air quality monitoring comes in, because you don't have to ask people to change their hevax system. Just purely breathing or breathing. Breathing awareness of the quality of the air that you're breathing can be very powerful and in that environment those sensors sit somewhere between b2b and b2c. You know there's that kind of saying. Now, if you employ 300 people, probably 30 of them have got an air quality monitor on the desk. You know, like there is a. There is a world that exists between the two. Isn't there now, where people are bringing their own devices. People have their own respiratory problems and their allergies and their long-term ailments and long covid and so on and so on and so on. People are more aware of their workspaces. It goes back to your Apple store, absolutely. Employees of Apple stores were coming in with devices and Apple started to go. What are those? It changes the dynamic of the conversation.
Speaker 2:No, absolutely, and I know numerous companies where there are Slack channels for air quality where the employees are in there and they're sharing stories about air quality, they're sharing readings. There's sort of been this organic Slack channel created for employees that care about air quality and the environment, and we're actually sometimes helping by proactively providing them with the air quality reading so they don't need to run around with their monitors you know checking what every conference room is. They can just do it directly and talk about it in Slack. It's not every company that is embracing that sort of radical transparency not by a long shot, but yeah, I mean it's definitely.
Speaker 1:It's definitely a different world to five years ago and it's a hard place for a company to be in because you're now not just complaining with complaining susan from the third floor, unfortunately. Now it's complaining susan with data and that's a very difficult position to be having her in the hr meeting room where she's complaining of headaches and sick building syndrome and everybody's been brushing her off to now. She presenting you with a spreadsheet of the CO2 and VOC levels in the office and whether she's right or wrong or that device is accurate or not, is kind of irrelevant. At that point you need to have a position. Yep, and that's an awkward place for companies to find themselves in. Relevant. At that point, you need to have a position. Yeah, and that's a. That's an awkward place for companies to find themselves in and the same.
Speaker 2:The same is true even between companies. So we do a lot of work with with tenants, but also with landlords, and so you have an entire building that you know. The tenant is now measuring the air quality, and who's responsible for that air quality? Well, certainly the landlord is in very large part responsible, and I mean a grade a office that has google and apple as tenants on 10 of their floors. I mean, they, they definitely want to know what is being, what is the air that is being pumped into those buildings or into into those tenant spaces, because if there's ever an issue, somebody is going to come knocking and the only reason that they've been able to fill the rest of the building is because Google took out five floors.
Speaker 2:So you need to keep those key tenants, those star tenants, happy and once they are collecting their own data and bringing it to you again, you don't want to be on the back foot. You want to be proactive about this. You want to understand what is my building actually delivering to my tenants. If there's a problem, I should know about it as the building owner before anybody else does yeah, and big companies won't thank me.
Speaker 1:But the the the angle I'm surprised nobody's ever found to leverage is the union angle that you know. Unions should be giving their members yep sensors to go out into the workplace with, because they have a responsibility to protect their members. Workplaces have a responsibility to provide adequate ventilation and air quality for employees, no matter where their place of work is. Doesn't matter if you happen to be lucky enough to be in the headquarter building or the one in, you know, downtown detroit or wherever you end up like. You've got a. You have an equal responsibility.
Speaker 1:Um you know, we saw hints of that in the pandemic. You know, things like teaching unions started to provide advice to teachers on how to advocate for better air quality. But the first union that really takes the take grasps the nettle here and actually says you know what, as part of union membership, we give each of our employees an indoor air quality sensor and collectively work to provide better air quality for our members. Boy, you could cause some trouble based on what we see when we actually measure ventilation and air quality out there in the real bad world.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah I mean, I think these are all great examples of how you know we're going to end up in that place. Where this stuff is ends up is being commonplace, being regulated. I don't see it going any other way, it's. It's just.
Speaker 1:It's just a question of when yeah, one of the things I've been meaning to ask you, liam, is that you're one of the best communicators out there, particularly around air quality and and joining these dots between healthy buildings and data and sensors. You're really very good at it. How do you balance that with the job of being a CEO? Because there's a daily grind to being a CEO, I'm quite sure, but you also have really put yourself out there as the face of Cotatera as well and the communicator for a lot of these positions. There must be a balancing act for you, because it's a complex thing to be managing your business, I imagine, and a lot of work, and every time I speak to you, you're somewhere else doing something else, but yet seem to be able to consistently communicate very well on this subject. Did you find that hard balance?
Speaker 2:well, I mean first, yeah, I know I, I appreciate that, uh, it's, it's great, great to hear that. I mean I I just try to talk about something that I'm passionate about and so if that's, if that's resonating, that you know, I'm very glad to hear that. So, thank you, um it, I I mean. So I like to, I like to work hard, I like to play hard, um and and, candidly, you know that that takes up 99% of my time. So you know, so I do spend a lot of time working because I find it really interesting and, like I said, you know, it's like I love working on fascinating challenges that are hard problems to solve. So I'm kind of thinking about this 24-7. And when I'm not, I'm usually climbing a mountain or trying to do something fun like that, and that really takes up all of my time.
Speaker 2:But I see it as part of just the job to go out and talk to people and try to understand where the market's at, what the struggles that companies are having are, talk to them, understand that better and try to share what I hear one person saying with all the other people out there, Because it is such an early space, there are so many workplace leaders, real estate professionals that know air quality is important, they know they should be doing something about it, but they really don't know anything beyond that that I should probably do something and all these people are sitting around having similar thoughts and not knowing exactly what to do.
Speaker 2:Around having similar thoughts and not knowing exactly what to do. So, really, I'm just trying to connect the dots a little bit and help people. See, you know, this is what Deloitte's thinking, this is what LinkedIn's doing, this is what Okta did in their offices. You know this is what Apple's doing, so that hopefully, we start to get more alignment as an industry around best practices and can, yeah, get to better outcomes. But yes, it's tricky to juggle all that with the triangle, with the travel short answer yeah, yeah, for sure, and managing a business.
Speaker 1:But you know, I speak to some of your people fairly regularly and they're all very competent, clearly talented people. So, like you, surround yourself with talent, I mean. And that that's the, that's the other oh, incredible incredible team like we have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, we have. We have such a, such a great team and I mean we're lucky to have every month, every month, when we sort of do all hands meetings. You know, we look who's who's been at the company, work anniversaries, and it's like almost every time it's like here's this person who's been here for eight years, seven years, nine years. I mean we've. I'm super proud of the team that we've built and it's just so many incredible people who also like to work hard, play hard, take on big challenges and the vast majority are, you know, are here a decade later.
Speaker 1:We've seen a. We've seen a huge change since the pandemic. The pandemic. You know, the pandemic was five years ago now, nearly. You know really the start of that, and before it was five years ago, I think. At this stage, time flies and yeah, yeah, literally yeah, and, and so we're into the next five-year block. You know, I think there was the post-pandemic block and I think we've definitely come through that now. I think that's far enough behind that. We can say that was a half decade period. That's, that's finished. What? What do you think or what are your hopes this next five year period looks like for uh sensors? Uh, is it just that we stop calling them low-cost sensors? Would that be a good result if we're talking again in 2030?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, now that, now that I've got you on board, we've got a good start.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, how do I mean, how do you see that playing out? Like what do you in your in with your kind of crystal ball? Um, how do you see the kind of next five years playing out is, is it?
Speaker 2:is there a trajectory? If only I had one of those yeah, yeah, because it's still dynamic. Crystal ball, yeah, um, yes, but I think it's also very clear, um, to be honest, I I feel like there are some major global trends that that are, that are not shifting you know, um, there's more and more awareness around air quality, the.
Speaker 2:if you look at sales of consumer sensors, sure they're not're not. It's not like a phone everyone has in their pocket yet, but it is so much higher than it used to be and the numbers are still increasing every year. So there's growing awareness around air quality. There's growing importance placed on health. It is becoming more and more important for companies to be able to attract, retain, engage talent. The workplace also has a very different role. It needs to be more engaging. It needs to cater to the true desires that people have not just have 17 flavors of kombucha on tap, that people have not just have 17 flavors of kombucha on tap and the things that people are caring about broadly, just based on the global state of the world, the economy. A number of these things, which will be true for the next decade, are, I think, much more concrete and real than, again, the beanbags and the kombucha, then again the beanbags and the kombucha. And so all of those things to me and what I see companies saying points to leadership of companies focusing on this, realizing that the environment is important, creating people first places, trying to enable their people to do better, trying to enable their people to do better and also being more equitable around what they do globally, as you know not just having the one beautiful showcase office, but actually having best practices that they can implement across their entire portfolio and do the same thing for all their people, so that they're being fair to all those people and creating a positive environment for all of them, and so I think we will see great growth in demand for solutions like this. I actually think it's really important to separate.
Speaker 2:I think when we say sensors, we talk a lot about sensors, but that's actually a very small piece of the equation. When we look at the need that the companies have, sensors are just one part of that. It's the piece that collects the data. What are you going to do with that data? Turning that data into value that hits on all the things that I just mentioned is kind of the key part that needs to be developed further, more broadly, and is going to retain those companies and get them to invest more in doing more and more and more of this, and also allow more companies to see that value like. The more you know, the more the more value. The more bang for buck that you get, the more likely we are to have it start making its way through that long tail that you were describing as well?
Speaker 2:um, yeah, yeah, that's really interesting I think the biggest, the biggest improvements are not going to be physically on a hardware at this point. The marginal increase we can get making a sensor five percent more accurate is not going to move the needle. Making it last one more year on battery is not going to move the needle.
Speaker 1:It's everything that you do after that yeah, but I think that's that's a really valid point. And then I think that that the what next question is always the big question that comes out of environmental data. It's a so what? And that's the thing that will ultimately move the needle. And the more examples we have of that, the more stories that we can tell, the more successes and failures and lessons that can be learned, the more valuable people will see in that what next question.
Speaker 1:Because that's the thing that makes it tangible, that's the thing that creates value, that's the thing that in three years time, when somebody's sitting around making difficult financial decisions, sensors are not on the table for discussion. They're something that's ingrained into the DNA of the functioning of that space. It's the same as not questioning whether you're going to remove a thermostat, you know, from a building. Um liam, look, it's been brilliant talking to you. We've just eaten up two hours. I'm conscious you're still recovering from colds and flus and things, and so we should probably end before you fall over at some point or lose your voice. Um, it's been brilliant chatting to you, as ever. We no doubt we're going to cross paths properly at some point. We always seem to miss each other on various continents when you're traveling through. But we'll we'll keep an eye on each other's diaries and try and grab a cup of tea or coffee at some point next time you're in town.
Speaker 2:Thanks a million I'm sure, I'm sure past will cross. No, yeah, no, thank you, this is.
Speaker 1:This has been good fun so so welcome back everybody to the bonus segment, as uh myself and liam realized, there was at least 15 questions we didn't get through and uh. So, yeah, welcome to the uh, the bonus section go love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean so. So there there was. There was one thing that, as you were talking just there, sort of at the end about thermostats, was triggering in my mind and kind of brought up an earlier point that you had, or an earlier question that we had talked about, which is kind of energy savings versus like an ROI and like, well, can we just get rid of this thing? And so I wanted to very quickly share some thoughts on that, which is that the main reason that you invest in sensors is for human health. It's for people, right? Yes, absolutely. Sometimes you can use this data to save energy and to make other optimizations in your building that have some ROI. That on a spreadsheet looks wonderful and makes somebody very happy and the CFO has a great smile on their face. That's great, that's the cherry on top, but that is not the primary purpose.
Speaker 2:If that is the main reason that you're investing in sensors, then you are starting off completely from the wrong premise. It's like if you went to buy some state-of-the-art medical scanner in a hospital and then you defended the purchase by saying, well, it's a great scanner, it uses slightly less energy than the other scanners. No, the job of the scanner is to take accurate scans and save lives. So you're totally missing the point. Scans and save lives, so you're totally missing the point. And it's kind of like to the thermostat point.
Speaker 2:Imagine if a building owner said smoke detectors, convince me to install those. What's the ROI? And you might say well, smoke detectors might save lives in a fire. Okay, sure, I get that, but is it going to lower the heating bill? It's absurd. Clean air is a fundamental health and safety issue. It's not some line to be justified on an Excel spreadsheet or quibbled about. So my view is if a company needs a hard ROI in energy savings or anything else facilities, optimization, fault detection then one of two things must be true Either the value has not been communicated properly or they just place zero value on the health and cognitive performance of their people, which, by the way, is their single greatest asset, single greatest expense. If a company says anything like we're people, first, you know, we care about equity, we care about inclusion, accessibility, uh and then starts asking about the roi on clean air, then that is a fundamental contradiction and they just actually don't care about that and it's all just marketing fluff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so yeah, the real roi is healthier, more productive, more loyal, happier workforce yeah, and that's a really good point and actually for people that are interested in that point, the podcast that went out this week that we're recording was with a guy called Stefan Flagner, who's starting to look at the economic value of healthy buildings, because one of the things that we still understand is that we're at the frontier of really demonstrating the hard value of healthy buildings. And you're right, in a way, you're asking the wrong question if you're looking for the ROI of a healthy building, but if you're a hard-nosed, as he said, what he's interested in as an economist is, in his mind's eye, that business owner on small margins, who's typically conservative, who's trying to balance the books between upgrading the HEVAC system this year, deploying sensors, saving money on the forklifts, trying to work wherever they can afford to employ somebody or let people go. There are organisations on hard margins and hard lines coming at this conservatively. If we want to move the building in the healthy building space, we have to find a way of talking their language, and it's fine for us to talk about equity and diversity and healthy buildings in the higher echelons of well-being but, quite frankly, in the rest of the built environment that's a luxury and we can complain about them not understanding the 330-300 role and the true value of an employee and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1:But we haven't yet demonstrated with hard numbers that value. It's still in the world of academic, please believe me. And that's the challenge, he would argue as an economist. We just don't have the scale of evidence to be able to point down the lower echelons. When you're not employing 10,000 people and you're not looking at health and well-being and diversity and equity and all of these different things, the value of health and well-being in the workplace and for the rest of the workplace, that's a harder sell. So I think it's a really interesting space that I think. So that's a harder sell. So I think it's a it's a really interesting space that I think.
Speaker 2:So that's another podcast way over here I really want to answer this one question. I don't know we're going way over here. Pretty sure that you know. I mean, I, I very strongly believe that if you went to those same people and you said you don't have to install a sprinkler system, you don't have to install fire alarms, you don't have to install smoke detectors, any business, the, the goal, the role of a business in a capitalist society is to make money. If you can lower your costs, you will lower your costs. That is just the fundamental, you know system that the world is operating on and has signed up for. So how do you get small businesses to do that? Legislation and regulation. It is the only way.
Speaker 2:Until this is mandated, companies, small companies, that long tail is not going to do this. You can put any amount of evidence in front of them. It will not change anything. We don't need more data, we don't need more research, we need laws and we need them to have bite. And, by the way, when that happens and every single building in the world has an air quality monitor, they will go down in price by 80%. If you came to me and said, hey, I can bring you 1,000 times your current annual sales volume, they go okay. Well, you're going to get a very good price because all of our costs just went down, and so that problem in many ways simply vanishes. The small business owner doesn't need to see research.
Speaker 1:And you know what the irony is. When that does happen, everybody's going to turn on a dime and do it like that, as if it was never a problem, and you're going to be stood there going.
Speaker 1:I've been telling you this for 15, 20 years and you've been telling me that it's a problem. A law comes along and tells you you've got to do it, and you do it like you're having breakfast, and that happens over and over and over again and we're here shouting into the void, often for decades at a time. Finally, a law comes around and everybody just has to get on with it, and you look 10 years back and it's as if it was never a problem. You know it's, it's. It's amazing how the world it's not a productivity it's not a productivity issue.
Speaker 2:It's not a productivity argument. It's basic health and safety. It's the biggest environmental human threat in the world. You know almost eight million people die this. Almost one in five people in india will die because of air pollution. This is not a productivity. Oh, we can get three extra percent out of our workforce. No, it's just a very basic quality of life, human thing to do. So if you give a shit at all excuse my language about those things then you should be doing this and that is the only argument that actually you know. Yeah, matters at the end of the day, I believe and some people don't and that's okay, because the
Speaker 1:law will come eventually and if you don't, somebody's going to come along and make you do it at some point. You know that's that's kind of where we go with it.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that was a brilliant bonus section. I'll introduce that at the beginning. Say, look, hang around to the end. There's a there's a great bonus section at the end. We managed to get Liam swearing at the end. Listen, mate, really good to talk to you. We'll catch up again soon. I'll talk to you later. Thanks for listening. Hold on a minute Before you go and shoot off or onto the next podcast. Can I just grab your attention for one minute? If you enjoyed this episode and know someone else you think might be interested in this subject or you think should hear the conversation, please do share it and let's keep building this amazing community. And this podcast would not be possible without the sponsors Ako, errico, ultra, protect, imbiote, 21 Degrees, farmwood and Eurovent. They're not here by accident, thank you.
