Eric Law: Lumber, Robotics, Innovation, Sustainability | Turn the Lens with Jeff Frick Ep31

Eric Law: Lumber, Robotics, Innovation, Sustainability | Turn the Lens Podcast with Jeff Frick Ep31

English Transcript

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Cold Open
So, Eric, I'll just count us down and we will go. You ready?
Ready as I will be.
All right. In three, two.

Jeff Frick:
Hey. Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here coming to you from the home studio for another episode of ‘Turn the Lens’. And we're excited about this next episode. You know, we've touched a little bit on some environmental areas. We've talked a little bit about sustainability. We've had the, you know, the Clean Tech Council was on and we've also done some stuff with robotics. So this is a really interesting kind of coming together of robotics and kind of an old industry solving kind of a nasty problem that's really better done by machines than people, because nobody wants to have this job. And as we learned in ‘Dirty Jobs’ (Mike Rowe and Co) there’s a whole lot of crappy jobs, that computers are just better to do. So welcoming in through the magic of the internet, I think from Oakland, California, just over the bay not too far. He’s Eric Law, the Co-founder and CEO of Urban Machine. Eric, great to see you today.

Eric Law:
Awesome. Thank you for having me, Jeff.

Jeff Frick:
Absolutely. So why don't you just give us the the 101 for people that aren't familiar with Urban Machine, what are you guys all about?

Eric Law:
Yeah, we are a 2½ year-old robotics startup that is building robots for removing metal fasteners from lumber. We take out the nails, the staples, the screws, and then once it's metal free, you can treat it like virgin wood. You can build with it again, you can use it in furniture. It's really a cool product once the metal comes out.

Jeff Frick:
So how did you come up with this idea to use robots to pull nails, fasteners and screws out of pieces of wood?

Eric Law:
Everyone asks that question, you know, what did you trip on and hit your head on, right? on this idea

Jeff Frick:
A screw or nail I’m guessing probably

Eric Law:
Exactly, smashed my finger with a hammer? Yeah, so I've, you know, I've got about a 20 year career in construction and tech, and the last project I was doing was I built an innovation program for a large contractor, where we focused on bringing in robots to augment the craft. And we really looked for dull, dangerous, dirty tasks that are highly repetitive. And that's where the robots do really well. Right? That high repetition is key for it. and it's, you know, tasks that humans aren't necessarily good at. And while I was there bringing these robots in and we started a sustainability project with a group of folks there, and we were looking at waste streams. And that's where I was learning, you know, concrete and steel have recycle paths. but wood do not, you know, wood’s going to the landfill, wood’s going to incinerators because of the metal fasteners? It was just too expensive to get them out. And so that's concrete formwork. That's demolition wood, temp structures, handrail, just all getting ground up and going to incinerators and landfills. and so that was kind of the impetus for like, Hey, this is a really big problem. It's about 37 million tons of dimensional wood here in the US every year gets thrown away.

Jeff Frick:
Not a good thing. Well, let's back up a step on the robotics piece of it specifically because you were in robotics before and they asked you to look for applications for robotics. And I think what’s interesting because people get, I think, way confused by all the press with humanoid robots and you know, at the NVIDIA show, Jensen had, I think like eight, you know, people looking robots. But the most successful robots don't look like people at all. It's a Roomba (iRobot), you know, that runs around and vacuums the house. It's the Amazon, you know, ones that we see that are moving, moving pallets around all the time. Clearly, they've been in manufacturing and cars and stuff for a long time. So when you think about how do you apply robots, so you look at a problem first and you say, this is perfect for a robot because I think it's a different way to think about robots. I think people that aren't in the industry tend to go straight to that humanoid thing and not really think about. It's a machine that we can program to do tasks that just does better than people. If the attributes of the task are just right.

Eric Law:
Yeah, the humanoids are cool looking at, you know, and they scare a lot of people and they do some fun stuff and they play soccer, but at the end of the day, it's the task-specific machines that rule in the automation world, you design a machine for a very specific task and then you have it repeat that task you know hundreds of thousands of times over and over. And that's where robotics are very successful today. If you look at auto manufacturing, right, you have a robot that puts tires on cars and tightens lug nuts and or welds or you know, very task-specific and that's where the opportunity is, right? Those highly repetitive tasks. Humans are much better at problem-solving, right? The majority of humans don't want to do the same thing over and over and over. We get bored. And so you find opportunities where there's high repetition and the machines will do it, you know, millions of times the exact same way over and over. And so all the construction robotics companies that we worked with, it was all specific. It was layout, you know, drawing lines on the floor. It was drywall finishing. It was brick laying. And the other thing we had to do too is there wasn't enough robotics startups in the space, so we would identify business problems, on our job sites, and we would go out and look for people to start companies and venture capitalists to back those folks, to solve those problems.

Jeff Frick:
Okay. So you found a huge opportunity in this waste stream, like you said, the cement waste stream, there's some recycling going on there. The steel one is going on, but these huge piles of And I think you said 37 million tons. Is that right? Per year goes into landfill, which is just shocking. and a horrible, horrible big number. But the and again, I've listened to a few of your podcasts. Most of that stuff is from demolition or, you know, taking things apart. That's not the same as a robot putting a tire on, in the GM line. That's the same tire on the same nuts every time you have like infinite variability of the crap that comes off these demolished buildings. So how did you start to really think about the problem, break down the problem of how you could take these really highly variable inputs and then still have a process that you could have a, you know, a nice output.

Eric Law:
Yeah. So what we did is we looked at what's the repetition, you know, what's that overarching theme that just repeats over and over. And that's the fasteners right. That's the nails, the screws and the staples. And there's a lot of them. Right. You know, every six inches, every 12 inches, you know, you can get a fastener in a board, that was holding up drywall or plywood or whatever that, you know, attached material was. And so we said, let's have the humans focus on the non consistent, the non high volume. So if you think about like electrical boxes and structural fasteners, those are low volume but there are lots of different shapes and sizes. So in our in-feed we still have humans that take off those odds and ends. And then the machine takes care of the high volume high repetition. And what we do is we actually normalize the material. So we cut all those fasteners down to make them little nubs, and then we cook them all to reduce the friction force. And then we pull them all out. So it's really about, you know, four step process, coming into and then the fifth is we run it through a metal detector to make sure it truly is metal free for our customers. And that's the one quality requirement we have from the industry is it There cannot be a nail left in that board. It's got to be metal free because otherwise it will destroy our planar blade or a saw blade. You know, virgin wood, machines do really good with lumber and wood. They don't do well with metal. With metal.

Jeff Frick:
And then in terms of the process, right. Do you bring the tech to the material or do you bring the material to the tech.

Eric Law:
Yeah. So we are focused on taking the tech to the material. Most of this material is collected at waste facilities. Sometimes people call them MRFs or ‘Material Recovery Facilities.’ And it’s where all the contractors, whether it's demolition or concrete all dump their trucks and trailers and bins full of wood. and so they've got the raw material for us.

Jeff Frick:
And then you, process it. So describe to us kind of the basics of what the line looks like, what the machine actually is that you would set up at that spot.

Eric Law:
Yeah. So it's about 150ft long. You start with some in-feed workstations for the crew, where they've got tools and workstations to help them clean that material and send it into the machine. And then the next, you know, 125ft is for the most part, automated. our machines are probably about the size of four refrigerators, lined up. And each of these machines has its own step. Right. So we got, bandsaws running on the cutter one that's cutting all the fasteners after it’s cut Then it goes into the cooking station where everything gets cooked, and then from there it goes into the picking station.

And it's really cool and impressive. and then it goes through a metal detector. And if it dings. We still got metal. It doesn't ding. It's metal free. so it's really a pretty straightforward linear process. And then out the other end, we have employees that sort the material.

Jeff Frick:

And how many people to operate it.

Eric Law:
Yeah. So it runs from 2 to 4. 2 to 4, okay.

Jeff Frick:
It's just interesting because I think at least for for layman like me, you know, I think we really started to see the re-use of the construction materials on site with cement next at next to freeways and stuff, because you can see it, right It's not behind a fence where, back in the day they would haul all that cement away when they're redoing the highway. And now you see they've got this dedicated spot where they're running it through this grinder and basically putting that material back in place. So that's kind of a similar thing that, that we'll start to see for wood?

Eric Law:
Yep. Absolutely. So right now today all the wood goes through a grinder before they bury it. We're essentially going to replace that grinder. So all the long material, all the high quality stuff that doesn't belong, you know, either getting burned or buried goes back to the job site.

Jeff Frick:
And what are the economics that you have to hit to make it worthwhile? Because it seems pretty cheap and easy just to throw the broken stuff in the back of a truck and drive it off to the landfill. In terms of expense and complexity from the, the developer point of view.

Eric Law:
Yeah. So we have to compete with virgin lumber, right? So at the end of the day, the contractor, whoever's buying that wood makes a decision, right? Do I want the reclaimed material or do I want the virgin material that came from the forest? And so our target is to have a process that competes with a virgin log mill. Right, so those are the guys in the Pacific Northwest or in the Southeast that go harvest the trees and process them and turn them into virgin two by fours. The big advantage we have is we don't have the shipping because our source is right next to our customers, right? We're sourcing material from metropolitan areas, we clean it up in those metros, and we sell back to those metros. Whereas virgin lumber coming out of Pacific Northwest, if you're going to Texas, you're going a couple thousand miles of rail and trucks to get that material to your customers, which is expensive. The other thing we don't have is we don't have the risk of a commodity. You know, lumber prices go up and down. As we saw during Covid, they went up about 3½ x which was a huge impact on housing prices. Because lumber is still the predominant building material for single family and multifamily residential. And so because ours is all locally sourced and we're not a traded commodity, we can provide consistent pricing to our customers. So we don't have those shocks.

Jeff Frick:
And is the business model to provide the service that somebody else just continues to own the wood. Or do you take ownership of the wood, or are you still trying to figure out where's the business model in terms of who's paying whom to do what and what the ownership of the wood or the output is?

Eric Law:

Yeah. So right now we're in the wood business. So all the material that we clean, we sell. Okay. To really get the market going. Our long term vision is to lease and sell the machines to customers that will then operate the machines in their local metro areas. They'll source the material, process the material, and then sell it back within their metro areas. Our goal is not to operate lots of wood processing facilities across the world, because what’s interesting, this is a global issue. Europe's got the same challenge. Australia, New Zealand, anybody who's built with wood has massive amounts of wood waste.

Jeff Frick:
And I think it’s what's in Australia that I think Atlassian’s building like the largest wood skyscraper as a new headquarters.
(Atlassian Central in Tech Central, Sydney Central Station, 40 story skyscraper, hybrid timber-steel exoskeleton).

Eric Law:
Oh really,

Jeff Frick:
I'm pretty sure, have to double check the facts, but I think so because I think in a couple of the items you talked about, you know, people talking about doing more with wood, as even a replacement for steel and concrete in more applications. But I think that's pretty interesting.

Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the robots and robotics. It's especially there's all kinds of interesting kind of robotic processes that you have to put into these things in terms of, being able to see the nails and being able to adjust to the nails and treating a nail different than a screw and angles and this and that. Wonder if you could share some of the challenges and also some of the advances that you've seen in your in your career in robotics, as you know, motors get smaller and and you know, the horsepower that you get with the computing power that you get, I mean, it's a whole different world than when you started in robotics a while back.

Eric Law:
Yeah, it's a couple major advancements. I mean, obviously the cost and power density of motors is phenomenal, right? We don't run any hydraulics. You know, historically, the lumber industry does everything with hydraulics to get their power performance ratios. We don't, we have no hydraulics on our systems. We have a little bit of pneumatics for a couple operations, but it's mostly all electrical drive, which makes it really efficient to move material gives you incredible control accuracy over the material. And then the other one is computer vision. We're using cameras. Our system is full of cameras to take pictures of the wood and to identify fasteners. And so, when we look at the advancements in computer vision and AI technology, we're leveraging that, to solve a real problem, right? We're not Bitcoin or any of the other fun AI projects that have humanoids running around. It's like we're using AI to solve an industry problem and a waste problem. Which is awesome to see it get put to use.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah. That's great. And I saw you've got I saw one interview, that you had a couple interns on. So I wonder if you can share a little bit about what's going on in kind of academia. And robotics, I mean, robotics seems like such a cool industry that brings together all these different specialties. I know you were a mechanical engineer. How you got in, which is probably the more traditional, but, you know, there's opportunities for software people. There's opportunities for human factors. I mean, there's so much going on in robotics. As you take a step back and look at that industry as an opportunity for people to think about either an existing career or a new career.

Eric Law:
Yeah, it’s probably one of those few industries where you're combining multiple expertise to actually solve the problem, right? It's hardware, it's physics, it's software, it's computer vision. There’s a lot that goes into these machines and getting these machines to market, and we do research, with local universities. We've have interns on our team. I’ll have some more this summer as well. And then not just the robotics side, but also the sustainability side. Right. So okay, we got robots that process this material, but how do you sell it back into the market. Right. Who's the customers? What do they do with it? What's the process? What does that demand look like? Because we're connecting two points in the economy that have never been connected before. Right, the waste industry has never sold wood to the lumber industry. And so we're making those connections. So in order for our robots to work and be successful, we have a sales team and a marketing team that's driving that demand. And so it’s a huge team effort to get this shift going and not just the tech but also the market side as well.

Jeff Frick:
Well, let's talk a little bit specifically about the carrot and the stick in sustainability and governance, because I've seen, you know, you speak at a number of different conferences, you speak at building conferences and materials conferences, but you're also speaking at sustainability conferences and clearly, the role of governance and the changing of laws, either to hit sustainability targets or to have requirements, especially in buildings, changes things pretty dramatically. So where are you seeing, you know, kind of the tailwinds from a governance point of view that's helping you? And how is the market kind of responding to both kind of the carrot side and the stick side of just not throwing stuff in the garbage?

Eric Law:
Yeah, there's really two drivers there, right? There's the demand side where people are looking for more sustainable building materials. Right? They're looking at their carbon footprints. They're looking at the waste from those materials. Where are they sourced from? They want local over long haul materials. Which really aims you at reclaimed lumber, right. If I can source material for my new building from an old building down the street, that's a huge win on sustainability. And it's a great story, Right, The designers really like that.

The other side is the waste problem. So as we started to dig into it and learn more about the waste industry and who owns it, typically the government agencies are responsible for the landfills and disposing of waste within their regions. And nobody wants to build a new landfill. Over the next 60 years, all the landfills in the U.S will be full. And it takes about 20 years to permit a new one. And so nobody wants to go down that path. It's not. It's massive expenditures. It's not politically. Nobody wants to fill up a canyon or fill a hole in the ground. And so what we're seeing from these government agencies is different legislation to keep material out. And wood is one of the biggest contributors to landfill space by volume. You know, the concrete's not going in, the steel’s not going in. So when you look at buildings, it's the wood. And so there are deconstruction ordinances, there's source separation ordinances, there's incentives not to bury the wood economically. And there's a lot of, a lot more of these that want to get passed. But the challenge is, what do you do with all this wood? Okay, if we don't put it in the landfill, what happens? Well, we chip it and we burn it. That's not much better, right. And so we're the first ones that are bringing the technology to market that says, okay, let's take as much of this wood as we can. It's still dimensionally intact, and let's use it in the buildings again. Let's go store this carbon in building walls. Right. Which is a great place to store carbon because I can store carbon and I'm housing people, which is a huge win. That's way better than storing it in the ground or, you know, whatever some of these other schemes are to manage it. And so that's our goal is to keep it back in circularity and let people build with it again.

Jeff Frick:
And you said most of that's being driven at the municipal level because they're the ones on the hook for the landfill.

Eric Law:
Yeah. So that can be cities, counties, metropolitan government agencies. It kind of depends on where you are. We've talked with a whole host of different people who host that problem states are getting involved in it. We're seeing state funding coming down, federal funding coming down. We've had some agencies, received federal funding to go rent our machine, and set up reuse facilities in their metropolitan areas.

Jeff Frick:
Interesting. I want to shift gears and talk about something you've discussed in other podcasts, which is changing people's behavior without really trying to change their process too much. Right. It's hard to get people to change their process, right? Everyone's stuck in their ways. But there's also, you know, kind of precedent processes and subsequent processes that are all tied together. So to interrupt that or to get people to change a step of that is very, very difficult. You made a really interesting comment. You're trying to do it without actually changing anything. And I wonder if you can share, you know, some of the techniques and how you approach it and And I saw one interview that you had, you know, a local, wood guy who had his own mill, who, you know, clearly was a little innovative and willing to take a chance and try something new and, and had open eyes and open ears. But how are you addressing this very old, marketplace with a lot of old players and a lot of established ways of doing things, and you're really kind of trying to change it up a little bit.

Eric Law:
Yeah. So if we start with the waste industry, right, which is our source. Right. So how can we minimize the impact to them while adding financial incentive. So right now, today, typically they minimize the wood, they sort the wood out, they smash it all up into woodchips and they burn, bury it, maybe a couple of them are sawn up for some landscape products. And so our goal there is how do we source that material from them and incentivize them economically? The good news is they're used to recycling other materials, right? They grind up concrete and sell it as base rock. They take the steel and they go the scrap guys with that. And so they're used to trying to convert waste into a high value or valuable commodity. So when we pitch them, they're like, this is very interesting, right? We're very interested in selling this as a commodity. You know, truckloads of wood going off our facilities. And some of them are at risk of losing their woodchip customers because burning wood chips is losing out the solar. It's interesting how all these things work when you start to learn about these industries. It's like, wait, the incinerator guy that's burning the free wood chips that you're giving them can't compete with solar. And they're like, no, the operating costs on the wood burners are just getting crushed by the solar panels, because once you put out solar panels.

Jeff Frick:
Interesting. I’ve never heard that before

Eric Law:
Yeah, a lot of these guys are shutting down. And so we actually had a couple of people introduce us to the term ‘Woodmageddon’. And if they don't have a place to burn these woodchips or bury these wood chips, what do you do with them? And so right now we're one of the few options available besides burning and burying it. So it's nice to have the right timing. I would say right and have these pressures. So for the waste world, they're very open to it. They're like, if we can make money selling our wood instead of grinding it and giving it away, that's a win for them.

And then on the construction side, the great thing about lumber is the dimensions have been pretty consistent, you know, since about the 1940s, when they went from rough sawn to this finished inch and a half three and a half. And so as long as we get it metal free, any virgin lumber mill can process it. And so we can sell them lumber just like they procure it from an existing log mill. And so long as we can sell them a material that acts like, looks like, measures like their existing material, there's very little change to them. And then they get to sell it as a greener story. You know, we went and got our FSC certification so it can be FSC reclaimed lumber. That's a big win for them. And then a lot of folks are looking as Hey, this product looks and sells just like my other products, but it makes me look better. And I can market it as a more sustainable material. Oooh, that's a win too. And so that's our goal, right? How do we add that value to our customers that outweighs the small risk? How do we minimize that risk as much as possible? And so it's awesome to have these first adopter partners to go validate that with and go demonstrate that says, Hey, here's material. We're selling it through your company, here's your customers, it’s running. They're building it. They're taking pictures of it, and it's working.

Jeff Frick:
Wild. The Woodmageddon. That's funny you because another one of your interviews you mentioned that 37 million tons, if I’m getting the number right is half basically half of the new wood shipped by the lumber industry in the US per year? Is that, did I get that right?

Eric Law:
Yeah, for soft woods, it's about half of what we harvest from our forest for soft woods.

Jeff Frick:
That's crazy, that's absolutely bananas

Eric Law:
Yep, and we produce a lot of wood here in the US and we import a lot of wood.

Jeff Frick:
So let's talk about wood for a minute because I'm sure there's going to be a couple people that are going to stumble upon this just to talk about wood, the quality of wood, the change in wood and wood construction. And we know, you know, back in the old days, there was a lot more old growth that was taken down. There's a lot of old redwood that's out there that people just treasure, what do you find in this process and what's kind of the uptake and the opportunity just from a pure, you know, kind of the wood that was in the buildings that you just can't get wood like that anymore.

Eric Law:
Yeah. I mean, that old growth stuff, your only option is a building, right? You can't go out to the forest and cut down old growth trees anymore. And so you got to do it from a building. And those buildings are holding a lot of material, right? Despite, you know, our average buildings here in the U.S are what, somewhere between 30 and 50 years old probably despite that short lifespan, especially here on the West Coast, there's still a lot of buildings out there that were built prior to the 1940s that have old growth rough sawn truly two bi dimensional lumber in them, with really tight grains. And it's beautiful stuff. When we get that stuff, it flies off the shelf. The designers love it, because it's unique, right? There's not a large volume and traditionally is really expensive material to get your hands on.

Jeff Frick:
Great. I want to shift gears a little bit and just talk about labor and talent and trades. you mentioned in a number of your interviews specifically, you know, we're not taking out high skilled craftsmen and tradesmen. But I would imagine in the construction industry, like in every industry, labor and talent period, is a problem and is only going to get worse, unfortunately, going forward. So when you think about in terms of the talent and, and just getting people, what does your solution or does it really help them, along those lines, is it an alternative way that they don't need as many people, is this a great way for people to, to expand, into different areas within the industry? How do you fit within kind of the whole labor tightness story?

Eric Law:
Yeah. So ironically, we actually are adding labor, with our machines because we need people to feed them and take it off the out feed. And there's nobody doing this today at scale. Right. Traditionally with robotics, mostly in construction, we looked at augmenting labor. Right. How do I reduce the number of labor hours I need on a jobsite with a machine? And it’s obviously been going on for, you know, over 100 years with automation and caterpillar tractors and stuff and now its robotics. But for us, we're actually bringing a machine to market that's actually going to increase the demand for labor. so our machines, you know, they take about 2 to 4 people to operate. So not a huge amount. But what it does is downstream is it feeds a local manufacturing base, because now you've got a raw material in metropolitan areas that you can feed into wood manufacturing companies. Which is a great opportunity. So we've actually had quite a few municipalities reach out to us where they're like, hey, we've got these old blighted homes and buildings. We'd like to take these down, but we want to turn them back into local buildings and we want to do some job force training which our machines work out really well. Right? You get to put people in a manufacturing setting processing lumber. They're not doing the nail pulling. They're operating the robots and the machines and the maintenance on machines. So they're higher skilled jobs than pulling nails and fasteners. So it's really cool to be bringing in tech that's actually going to put more people to work solving a sustainability challenge.

Jeff Frick:
And are the machines that you're shipping today just give us a kind of where you are in terms of the lifetime of the company. I think you've shipped like 4 or 5 machines, if I recall, from some of the other interviews probably off date. Are these, you know, kind of production prototypes. Are they scale machines. Are they in a position yet to get the scale that you're going to need to really make them hum? Or are you still working out a couple of the kinks.

Eric Law:
Yeah, so we have shipped two R&D machines. We had one that went out May of last year that started field trials, ran for about four months, before we swapped it out with the next version. The current version that we're running right now spent three months at a large waste facility in San Jose that did a pilot down there. Then we moved it up to the lumber yard in American Canyon (CA) that we've been based out of, for our field testing. And it's been running up there. So it's, it'll be nine months old, almost, that the system's been running. So it's pretty cool to see this one running. And then we have one more iteration on the tech. And this next iteration on the tech will be the hardware that we’ll ship to our first customer in October. So it's nice to start to transition from the R&D. R&D is great, but it's expensive. Right? Right. And then to shipping units to customers. That one will head up into, the city of Seattle, in October.

Jeff Frick:
That's great. So what was kind of the biggest learning of, moving from the lab to the prototypes out in the field? It's unexpected. Unexpected learning, I should say.

Eric Law:
Yeah. You know, it's these manufacturers and they give us these specs and they say, oh, yeah, they operate in these temperature ranges, and you start loading the hardware and you start putting the pressure on it, and it starts failing.

Jeff Frick:
Oh, then, your components you mean, the components that make the machine

Eric Law:
A lot of components, yeah. We went through a lot of components. Was a big learning one. The computer vision, you know, we started with 3D depth sensing cameras and unfortunately, they haven't performed as well as we needed them to. So we've actually taken a step back and brought in 2D cameras, which cost less, but are performing way better. and even in our environments, they're performing better. So it's going back and using some more proven technology, we'll call it, but the system that we're building in the shop is just screaming fast compared to the last iteration. And the last one is doing great. So it's pretty cool to watch those iterations and the tech evolve to the point where it's like, Okay, let's get ready to ship this one to a customer.

Jeff Frick:
And what is fast? What are you measuring? Fasteners removed per unit time or board feet through the machine or what are? What are some of your measures that you're working towards?

Eric Law:
Yeah. So internally we do fasteners per second coming off the machines, board footage moved, linear footage moved. We do everything in metric on the engineering side, but then on the customer side, everything’s feet, and board feet. And then for the customers, it's a board footage range. Our target is to move, you know, 2,500 to 7,500 board feet per shift with the system. So that'll run you about, what’s that, it's about 500,000 to 1 million and a half board feet per year coming off that system, if you run one shift, if you run two, you just doubled it. Is really the economics. And what that does is it puts us at price parity with virgin lumber mills. So that gets us down in that 40¢ / 50¢ cent a board foot market. And so we can compete head to head with them.

Jeff Frick:
That's great. That's real. Those are big numbers. So let's shift gears one more time before I let you go. And this I found fascinating. And all these podcasts, I was listening to you At the end, they always say, right, How can people get ahold of you, Eric? And rather than saying, go to Urban Machine (dot build) What does it, you have a funny dot. Dot what?

Eric Law:
Dot build, Urban Machine dot build.

Jeff Frick:
Maybe that's too hard. You say go to LinkedIn. And you're all over LinkedIn and you even say we're talking about our products on LinkedIn. We're, you know, communicating with our, community on LinkedIn. And I just thought it was interesting. I wouldn't necessarily think because I think it was another interview you said, you know, not necessarily everyone in your construction world is in LinkedIn. So I’d just love to get your take on how you're using LinkedIn. Why are you using LinkedIn this way? I'm obviously a huge proponent myself, but, you know, one of the requirements for it to be effective sometimes is if your target market is actually swimming in the same pool, if they're not in the pool, it's kind of hard to communicate, so share a little bit about your strategy with LinkedIn and its, and its effectiveness.

Eric Law:
So it's interesting, you know, trying to find where is your market. Where are these people congregating Where they working and sharing information. And it turns out it's LinkedIn. That's where the contractors are. the architects are the engineers are The waste industry yeah, they're working on it. Most of them aren't on LinkedIn. It's a good old fashioned phone call to get to those folks. But for sustainability, the design world, the construction community, they're all there. And so Jorie (Wisnefski) who heads up marketing for us, has been very active on there with building that community of followers. And we have superfans, you know, we went and visited a waste facility last week and we got to meet one of our superfans there. she just recently joined their team, which is cool. It's like people have been following us and supporting us. you know, when people see the machine running, they're rooting it on, to pick fasteners, which is very cool. To be in a space where, hey, you're solving a problem and people like it. There's nothing bad about this story about reusing materials to build again. It's a great story. It's a great piece of technology. and it's something we desperately need. We got to stop throwing away these high quality materials and get them back into the buildings.

Jeff Frick:
Especially if we’re throwing away half of what we're shipping in fresh every year. That's just that's gonna not work long. Yeah, that's crazy. So what have we not talked about Eric? What have we not talked about that we should have talked about? Because you're the expert, and I'm pretty new to this whole space, but I think it's super cool. I love the sustainability angle. I love the tech angle as well.

Eric Law:
Yeah. I mean, we've covered the tech. We've covered the sustainability, the construction industry, the, the engineering side of it. It's, you know, it's cool. The history of the company, it's a lot of work. You know, we got a really sharp team that's cranking away at designing and building and testing these machines. We are 15 people, so it's not  a tiny team, here based out of Oakland. but we're making great progress, which is awesome. And we really appreciate opportunities to come and share that story with folks like yourself and spread the good word.

Jeff Frick:
Yeah, it is a good word. And it's exciting on a lot of fronts And again, I think the robotics angle is so cool. I think the AI angle is so cool. You’ve got so many different technologies in this robotics between the computer vision and all the mechanical stuff. I think it's a great story. And at the end you get this beautiful this beautiful product and keep it out of the landfill. So what's not to love?

All right, Eric, well, thank you for your time today. It's really a cool story. Glad to learn more about it and expand my, my knowledge a little bit on the robotics side beyond Roombas and Amazon warehouse robots. It's good to see them doing other things, besides just moving stuff around.

Eric Law:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, Jeff.

Jeff Frick
All right. Thank you. All right. He's Eric, I'm Jeff, you're watching ‘Turn the Lens’ with Jeff Frick. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening on the podcast. We'll see you next time. Take care.

Cold Close
All right. That was great. Thank you.
Awesome, Jeff, that was great.