Microshare: Ron Rock

IndustrialSage

Microshare CEO Ron Rock shares the story of his entrepreneurial journey; his company’s pivot during Covid; and their digital twinning systems.

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Danny:

Hello, and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by Mr. Ron Rock who is the CEO of Microshare. He’s coming in all the way from Philadelphia today. Ron, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

Ron:

Thank you. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

Danny:

I’m excited to jump into this. We had some great conversations before we actually started rolling. But for those who don’t know Microshare, give us a little synopsis on who you are, what you guys do.

Ron:

Sure, so Microshare is in the IoT, internet of things, business. And specifically what we do is what we call digitally twinning the world, creating a virtual replica of our physical worlds by putting sensors on virtually everything. Why do we do that? We do that to improve the quality of life, to improve the sustainability in ESG initiatives, make it a better planet, create new efficiencies. And in this whole IoT world also surrounded with data is allowing new business opportunities. So companies like Microshare exist to be doing these types of projects. We specifically work in commercial real estate. We put sensors for occupancy, predictive cleaning, environmental monitoring, indoor asset tracking, COVID contact tracing. So think about anything that an industrial space will need. We also think about industrial space as hospitals without touching the patient, airports without touching the airplane, so that unregulated band where we all live and breathe every day outside of our home is where Microshare is building these digital twins and creating lots of safe value for employees and your ecosystem’s customers.

Danny:

Great. No, I’m excited to jump into that a little bit more. Obviously, it’s incredibly relevant and increasingly critical, really. So before we get into that a little bit more, during this part of the episode, I want to get to know you a little bit more. I want to get to know your story. So Ron, take me back to, how did you get into the IoT space, the technology space? High school, college, did you just say, “Hey, I love technology.” What did that look like?

Ron:

I wish it was that well-planned. I started out as a cook at Denny’s. I was cooking eggs from 11 at night to 7 in the morning, the graveyard shift. I put myself through college, La Salle College here in Philadelphia. My degree is in accounting.

Danny:

Oh, mine too. That’s a good one.

Ron:

You know, I didn’t know what to do. I was good at math, and our guidance counselor in high school said, “You know what? Be an accountant.” I realized by my junior year in college, I didn’t want to be an accountant. But it’s a great foundation to be able to get into any business. In the mid-80s, as I was graduating, IBM personal computers were just coming out. And I took a job at ComputerLand in Philadelphia selling IBM PCs when nobody knew what they were. And a few years later, I was one of the top reps in the country selling those computers. I discovered, though, that there were lots of opportunities to do things, and there were no companies to support them. When I was growing up, my house was the one that all my friends came to. When their 10-speed bike broke, I fixed it. Then, when we all got driver’s licenses, I was always tinkering with engines. I restore old cars. I restore old furniture. I restore old houses, like the one you see me in right now. And my father was a great guy. He said very simply, “Ron, you can have anything you want. You’ve just got to pay for it.” And so there was this value in my mind that I could do anything. Nothing was intimidating. So in the late 80s I started my first company, Brook Rock Corporation. We were the first company to be remanufacturing toner cartridges in 1988.

Danny:

Wow.

Ron:

Now that is a global industry. And today if you Google Brook Rock, you can still find some Brook Rock branded things on the internet. We sold that company before I was 30. I got involved in several other start-ups, so I’ve been an entrepreneur most of my life. I’ve also worked in two Fortune companies and ran a publicly-traded company in technology space. So I spent a lot of time in financial services. I spent a lot of time in insurance. I’ve been on public boards of insurance companies. And so my whole career has been, though, the same theme of, how hard can it be? I can figure that out. Let’s go do it. So I started Microshare.

Now this is my sixth start-up. I’ve had a couple big wins. I’ve had a couple catastrophic losses. And not surprisingly that, if there’s any entrepreneurs out there today listening to this or watching this, your failures will stick with you for life. You tend to down-play your successes, and boy, the losses are painful. And you learn so much in those losses. So that’s me. I’m basically an entrepreneur because I think I’m unemployable. I just go and create companies so that I can have job where I want to be. And so I met my two partners, Charles Paumelle and Tim Panagos, who are co-founders of Microshare with me. I met them in 1999. I started a company in 2003 called Knowledge Rules. I grew that company globally and sold it to Accenture in 2010. And our customers were some of the biggest companies in the world: Citi Bank, JP Morgan Chase, American Express, AIG, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs which is the IRS of the UK. And the common theme on all of them was big, scalable, resilient, secure, regulated data.

So our DNA is lots of data. It’s the kind of data that can’t go down. You just expect, when you swipe your credit card, it works. You just expect, when you go to the ATM, the account balance is right. There’s a whole world of new technology out there that can be very forgivable. But there’s core infrastructure data that just has to work all the time. And so when we sold Knowledge Rules, we had begun building these massive platforms for companies like GE to bring all these disparate, regulated data sets together. And we learned a lot about how data locked behind the firewall and data out in the cloud were beginning to co-exist. And we were all showing up at work with our mobile phones and saying, “Hey, now I want to be able to get my email on this thing, not my desktop that’s locked in the office, can’t be taken away.” And so we learned a lot about all of that. Also new things like Salesforce.com and DocuSign were coming up. So suddenly companies couldn’t save all their stuff in one place. That was the genesis of Microshare.

And what we realized was IoT takes this problem and puts it on steroids. Let’s just imagine that maybe banks had 40,000 data sets between—and then if they bought another bank, they went from 40,000 to 80,000. But now with IoT, there’s going to be a trillion devices out there. And every one of those devices has a communication protocol, has a data format, has security, has encryption, has to be managed. And every single piece of data is just as important as your bank account. It is a vulnerable spot that hackers take advantage of. Data can be stolen. Data can be manipulated. So we decided to bring our data-centric view into IoT. I’ll stop there. We could go lots of different directions from it, but life-long entrepreneur is the short answer.

Danny:

No, it’s great. I love it. I love the story. I’m a huge data dork. I guess that’s maybe where the accounting thing came from. There’s stories in the numbers, right? There’s stories in the data, and it’s a matter of finding that and saying, what is this, and learning and making really informed decisions based off of it. And I think it’s super fascinating. Especially now, we talk about IoT and how it’s been taken off. We’re hitting a nexus of technology and speed with ISP where you can actually do this. You were talking about how you’re deploying sensors all over the place. I was reading somewhere that the manufacturing space, particularly, is the most data-prolific industry in the world. I can’t remember how many petabytes of data that is being generated when you think of all the different processes, even from a commercial real estate space, in terms of the actual facilities. All of the things that are going on there, I think it’s fascinating. And there’s so many, we’ll call them stories or insights or information that are locked that, having this technology now, you’re able to unlock it, and you’re able to see what that is. One thing that I want to circle back on, I was just curious. Where did you get this entrepreneurial spirit from? Was your father an entrepreneur? Your family? Do you have a predisposition to that growing up? Where did that come from?

Ron:

I appreciate the question. My dad was a hairdresser, and he had his beauty shop attached to our house. So my dad slept every day until 9:15, rolled out of bed, went down, and had his first appointment at 9:30. And in the summer times, we were building a cabin in upstate Pennsylvania, all out of recycled scrap material. Frankly, we’re still building it, 50 years later. In the summertime, my dad would take four days a week off and just work three days a week. And he was always able to accommodate the demands of the family and what we wanted to do with his ability to provide an income. And so it was a very unconventional household to grow up in. And I think I just took that for granted, so even when I went to college, it was nothing to work 11 at night to 7 in the morning. It didn’t occur to me that, no, that’s unconventional. I had classes; I needed money. I worked, and I slept when I slept. And there was no sense of, there’s a proper way to do it. You just make things work.

And so at Knowledge Rules, our global corporate headquarters was my home in Philadelphia. We had a whole wing with apartments on it that we–the only reason that we bought a home that big was, we could accommodate my offices. And I woke up one day, and I thought, gee, I’m doing the exact same thing my dad did. I’d wake up. I’d walk down the hallway. I’d be at work. And there was just a, again, being the CEO, I was always able to accommodate where the kids were in life, what we needed to do. And so I think I was early in this idea that work life and personal life are really very intricately interwound. They’re not disparate. And by the way, that has some disadvantages as well.

Danny:

Sure, yeah.

Ron:

But very much, that’s why I was able to do this.

Danny:

That makes a lot of sense. That answered very clearly. I always love asking people that question that have started businesses and sold them because I feel like 9 times out of 10, there’s something, for the most part. It’s built in, or it’s learned, or both, or whatever. But I think the key is that—I remember—this has been a little bit of a phrase. There’s always another way. The status quo or whatever is not—so I think, obviously from a very young age, you saw that and experienced it. And what may be normal to you is very unconventional to everybody else. I think that’s fantastic. What an interesting foundation. Obviously, you have a very, very vast career. Is there somebody or something that stands out in terms of, it could be a mentor. It could be an event. I could be a family member. It could be something that happened in high school or middle school, or at Denny’s. Something that’s had a measurable impact in your career and on your life. Does something jump to your mind?

Ron:

There’s so many things. My team, and a lot of my team has followed me from company to company. I have a million Denny’s stories. You learn so much at Denny’s. Talk about instant gratification: you’re either successful, or you’re not. People either like their breakfast and pay for it, or they leave because it didn’t come out fast enough. There’s so many Denny’s stories that are part of my—other people have Harvard Business Review. I break in Denny’s.

Danny:

That sounds like a book. “Everything I Needed to Learn About Business, I Learned at Denny’s.”

Ron:

Yep. But no, I think if I had to pick one that was most defining, it would be my failure during the dot com. I got involved with a company. I was employee number one. We were well-funded, theoretically. We had venture capital that had committed $80 million to us. We ramped up. We hired almost 70 people. I had people leave really good-paying jobs to come join me. We had a couple million dollars of initial funding, and it was in March of 2000. That was the beginning of the end of the dot com meltdown. And so what happened from March to September is, I was flying around the country meeting VCs who had already committed, and they were saying, “Hey Ron, just one more question.” And you’d go back, and you’d crunch a bunch of numbers, and you’d get it back to them. And in fairness and in hindsight, they didn’t know that they weren’t going to fund me in April, May, June, and July. They were getting nervous. They were doing their job. Same thing; I thought they were going to fund, and so at the end of the day the meltdown happened. All the VCs backed out. I had a huge payroll. I had people who had shifted their lives to join me. And it taught me a lot of humility. It taught me a lot of–if it can go wrong, it really can go wrong.

And there’s a level of sensitivity—sensitivity might not be the right word. But there’s a level of awareness now that, even as I’m growing Microshare, we’re 44 people. We’re currently raising $20 million on top of 20 we’ve already raised. I have a pretty extensive recruiting pipeline, and I’m very cautious, very aware that I don’t pull the trigger. When I ask you to join my company, I am now responsible for you. And I’m responsible for you even if the people behind me let me down. That doesn’t give me license to let you down. And so there’s a level of connectivity there and awareness that I think has had a profound impact on my career because—and if any of my employees are watching this, they might be busting my chops later—but at the end of the day, anybody that’s worked for me in the last 40 years will work for me again. And that’s a reputation I’m proud of. That’s a relationship that I take very seriously.

Danny:

That’s fantastic. Obviously a very difficult experience. A lot to learn from, a lot to unpack, and I’m sure there are still things that you’re unpacking and learning and looking at. What did that do to you, from a risk standpoint? Obviously entrepreneurs know the uncanny ability to be able to take on more risk than most. What did that do for you immediately thereafter? You mentioned it a little bit, how you’re very cautious about when you might bring somebody on. The ability to take on more risk and see that opportunity and say–I don’t know. Does it make you, initially, a little bit more gun-shy?

Ron:

Actually, no. Here’s the scary part of it. I’m much more conservative about the risk that I’ll put my employees under. Me, I’ll triple down. I’m okay losing my money. I’m okay failing. I’m not okay with my team failing. I’m not okay with my team not getting paid. So yeah, the risk is a great—I lecture sometimes at schools where I’m the least educated guy in the room. I’m lecturing at masters and MBA programs, and I have a slide with a big guy sitting on a thing of dynamite, and the sparks are getting ready. And I say, “Look, you can go to school to be an entrepreneur. You can learn lots of things that may or may not be important. But let me tell you. Entrepreneurism comes down to one thing and one thing only: How much risk can you personally endure? If you can’t endure risk, you’re in the wrong job.” After a lecture on time, a guy came up to me, and he said, “Mr. Rock, that was awesome.” He goes, “Can you help me out?” I said, “Oh, what is it?” He goes, “I have a great idea, but how do I get my wife to go along with it because she won’t let me borrow the money.” And I was like, “Dude, psychology department’s, I think, the next hall down. I can’t help you with that.” But the mere fact that he was asking and that he was deflecting his inability to take the risk onto his wife as opposed to looking in the mirror and saying, “Look, are you going to take the risk, or are you not?”

And that’s a hard thing because people want to be entrepreneurs. They aspire to be an entrepreneur. They go to school to be an entrepreneur. I didn’t go to school to be an entrepreneur. There’s all of that, but at the end of the day, you’re not going to get an A+ in entrepreneurism and have a guarantee that you’re in a great career like you go into many other, financial services or consulting or manufacturing. There’s a lot of career paths out there where an A+ matters. An A+ in entrepreneurism doesn’t matter at all. It’s, can you apply it, and can you take risk? And I think the risk comes back to some of your early questions. I was never afraid to tear open that 10-speed gear box on the back of my bike when 10-speeds first came out. Everybody else was scared to death of them. I’m rebuilding a Rolex watch that got caught in a fire. I used to rebuild cars; now I’m working on a scale of—and I looked at this watch, and I thought, “I can do that.” And I’m 50 hours into it, and oh, my God. But you know what? If you and I are talking six months from now, I’ll have a Rolex on. I’ll say, “See this? Built it from scratch.”

Danny:

We’ll do a follow-up. That’s awesome. I don’t know. I just love asking these questions and getting everyone’s different—specifically entrepreneurs, their perspective on all of this. And we could probably go on for another three hours on this, but I’m going to transition to pivot a little bit now back to Microshare and talking specifically about, there’s a lot of challenges that have gone on, obviously, over the last 12, 13, 14 months, if I can do math. What are some of the big challenges that you’re seeing right now and going forward as we start to emerge a little bit?

Ron:

Sure. Initially, for me and for Microshare, Covid became real the week of March 16th of 2020. I was in London, and all of a sudden, all the restaurants were doing take-out only. Business meetings were getting cancelled. We really didn’t know what was happening. And by the end of March, I had come back to the states because the State Department said, “If you’re an American, get home now, or risk being stuck where you are indefinitely.” That was a little scary, and I had to fly home through Dallas. And you were treated–it was the first time, as an American, that I felt like my rights were totally stripped away. You weren’t allowed to talk to anybody. You were herded like cattle through these chutes. Your temperature was taken. You weren’t allowed to sit, once you got off the plane. And it was really scary, coming back.

And it was scary for us as a company. We had just closed a couple really big, global deals where we were doing occupancy and predictive cleaning. Occupancy in a lot of your temporary office spaces, so think companies like we work where you go into a conference room, and they want to know people are in that conference room because they bill you extra to use those conference rooms. So it was a revenue shrinkage solution. It was a massive, massive deal, globally. And by the end of March, they cancelled that order. We also did a huge deal from one of the global accounting firms. They were going to put our occupancy—and we can do room occupancy. We can do desktop occupancy. And as we move to a lot of hotel space offices, you want to know. If you’re thinking of going into the office in Atlanta today, you want to know how many people are there, how many desks. Oh, by the way, you’d like to reserve a desk on the third floor, if you can. And so we were building those kinds of solutions. All those got cancelled by the end of March.

And GlaxoSmithKline went to Microsoft, our biggest partner, and said, “We noticed that Microshare has an indoor asset tracking solution.” We put very inexpensive tags on hospital beds, wheelchairs, infusion machines, ventilators, and track where they are. So doctors and nurses look at the app on their phone; they know exactly where these things are. And GlaxoSmithKline said, “Do you think we could use that, modify it, for contact tracing?” In March of last year, nobody knew what contact tracing was. We never heard of it. Nobody. Well, the CDC came out and said, “Well, contact tracing is people closer than six feet, two meters, for more than 15 minutes—” and there’s been a lot of variability since—”that’s important. That’s going to be how we track the spread of the virus.” And so we were able to easily modify our software with off-the-shelf hardware to create a contact tracing solution. And with that, we made the front page of the Financial Times, globally, the third week of April last year. That led to the front page of The New York Times twice about Microshare. And then Fast Company, and then The Washington Post, and then the BBC did a piece on us. And we took contact tracing, and the idea was that it was for essential workers. Folks like you and me can work out of home indefinitely. But people in nuclear power plants, mining facilities, hospitals, distribution warehouses, essential workers have to show up.

And so we started selling to that group. And by the way, all the press we got meant that our website got inundated with traffic. So the challenge was keeping up with the demand, not proactively selling it. And we took contact tracing, and we bundled it with our occupancy, indoor air quality, and we have something called touch-free feedback. If you see something–if you’re in a conference room, if you’re in a cafeteria, if you’re at a college campus–if you see something that worries you, who do you tell? And so we put these QR codes all over that you can scan with your phone, and it’ll say, “In an emergency, hit this. You need the cleaning crew, hit this. If somebody’s sick, hit this.” And it automatically links on the back end who can respond. In the UK they have something great; I love it. On the subway, on the trains, they say, “See it; say it; sorted.” See something, say something, and it’ll get sorted. Well, we’re solving for the say something. Who do you say it to? Who do you call? Putting this touch-free feedback is what we started. And we had push buttons, and we realized, with Covid, you don’t want to touch something else. But we bundled all of those into Clean = Safe.

So we had a Clean = Safe campaign going after essential workers. A lot of traction with pharmaceuticals, so GlaxoSmithKline, Gilead, Novartis all became customers. Power plants in Australia became customers. Hospitals and nursing homes in the UK became customers. And so that was our reactive—and what’s interesting now, just as a side note, we sell it as a subscription. So we have 12-, 24-, 36-, and 60-month subscriptions for everything that we do. And prior to Covid, most of our business was 36 to 60 months. When contact tracing became available, everybody—again, in April, we all thought we’d be done by June. By June, we all thought, “Oh, my gosh, by Thanksgiving.” By Thanksgiving, certainly by New Years. Well, here we are. We’re all still in it. So people signed a lot of 12-month contracts. An interesting side note, two things: our contact tracing solution continues to expand globally. And customers that signed up for one year are now renewing for another. So there’s a false sense of security in the US that we might have the majority of the problem in the rearview mirror. On a global basis, we’re still in the second inning. So that was Clean = Safe.

But we started thinking about analogies of, where’s the world going? Early on, we were one of the first to say, “We’re never going back to January of 2020” across the board. As consumers, as employees, as college students, as doctors and lawyers, we’re never going back to January of 2020. So what is the new normal? What’s it going to look like? And the analogy I came up with was 9/11. 9/11, when it hit, for the next 12 months, it was absolute global chaos. First of all, all of us were getting our sea legs. And if you remember, 9/11, even within a week or two weeks—one time I was watching Peter Jennings on ABC, and the TVs went blank. And immediately you’re like, “Oh, my God, what just happened?” How big is this going to get? How bad is this going to be? Then, there was the smoke coming up from the site, and there was a lot of knee-jerk reactions.

Danny:

Oh, yeah.

Ron:

And trying to travel, it was darn near impossible. But now, here we are decades later, we all know the drill. Whether you’re flying out of Dubai, London, or New York, you take your laptop out; you take your shoes off. You go through the metal detector; you stand like this. We’ve figured it out, and there’s a permanent infrastructure that’s never going away in air travel. I believe the same thing’s going to happen with Covid. And so just last week, after a lot of work in Q1, we launched a new branding, go to market, called EverSmart. And EverSmart is that new layer of infrastructure. We’re going to just expect that when we go to offices, we want to see how many people are there. If we’re going to go to the cafeteria, is it red, yellow, or green? Red, there’s too many people right now; you can’t go. Yellow, if you can wait, wait. Green, come on down; grab a cup of coffee. You’re going to want to use the restrooms. You’re going to look at your phone and say, “Which restroom has been used the least all day, and which restroom has the least number of people in it right now?” You’re going to want to look at your app and say, “What is the air quality in this building right now? How frequently is the air being refreshed?”

So environmental monitoring, occupancy, people counting, something we’re calling a universal crowd safety. And crowd safety is, we’re used to going into an office building, and we get a visitor’s badge. Now that visitor’s badge is going to track where you are in the building. We’re going to be able to look and say, “Hey, we’re getting too many people on the second floor. We’re getting too many people over in the research area. We’re getting too many people in the shipping dock.” So real-time crowd management married with real-time air quality married with real-time, overall building occupancy married with touch-free feedback at any point in your experience from the moment you leave your house in the morning until you come home at night. If you see something, say something; get it sorted. Putting that infrastructure in place, all of these things are what we talk about with EverSmart.

The other thing that we’re talking about and that’s getting a lot of traction, buildings have been moth-balled for a year. Buildings never had an off switch. So now you’re going to start to bring these buildings back to life. But now there’s conversations about hybrid workplace, flexible office time, vaccinated and not vaccinated. So let’s play that out. What does that mean? If everybody has flexible office time, does that mean everybody comes in on Wednesdays, and nobody comes in on Mondays and Fridays because they want four-day weekends? So suddenly I’ve got a crisis on a Wednesday. What if I start saying, “Look, if you’re vaccinated, you can come in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you’re not vaccinated, Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays. Okay, that means my cleaning staff, my cafeteria staff, my security guards, my parking guards, they all have to be fitting into the vaccinated, not vaccinated. How do I think about buying electricity for the next year?

A lot of these companies buy their electricity on auction based on very sophisticated models of demand. All those models are now irrelevant. How do I measure, real-time, how many people are coming into my building by hour, by day, based on weather, based on time of year? How do I align my security staff, my cafeteria, my food purchasing? Because at the same time that we’re coming back to life, we’ve got a global initiative that the US is lagging behind on, but now we’re stepping up with global warming, ESG, and sustainability. You’re being held accountable for your carbon footprint. So how do I know how much energy to burn, how much carbon monoxide to expel? How much waste am I producing from unused food and refrigeration systems running that don’t need to be and HVAC systems running that don’t need to be? So how do I align my actual consumption of space with my consumption? That is EverSmart.

Danny:

I think it’s super interesting. Again, all the implications on that as we look at, you mentioned energy use, for example, in a building, on how you might buy that, or even the supply chain. All the facilities, maintenance, everything that goes into it from CPG to what have you. There’s a whole life cycle, whole ecosystem. And right now, you’re right. It’s this, “I don’t know. What’s it going to be like?” It sounds like it’s a really great solution from a standpoint, not even just Covid, from a safety standpoint and having that flexibility to be able to respond. Who knows what’s going to happen tomorrow? If things flare up again later, who knows? Going back to the essential workers piece, being able to have proactive plans and the data and the ability to be able to actually respond to it and understand what the needs are, I think is invaluable. But there’s certainly a lot of other insights that you can glean from that, which I think was part of the initial thesis of Microshare to begin with.

Ron:

Absolutely. One of our biggest clients, they love our solution. And they said, “You know, we started out being reactive, doing contact tracing. What we’ve been able to now learn is, be proactive. There are lots of behaviors in our factory we never knew about.” And by making a few minor changes, they had some obvious super spreaders. The people delivering the mail were super spreaders. They never realized. So if this one person got sick, you could potentially knock out 70% of your employees. They made a few minor changes. They also were able to start identifying hot spots. Every space in an office building or a factory is not equal. Some places are used 140%. Other spots are used 10%. Knowing that really matters when you start thinking about driving a safer, more efficient facility. The other thing I’ll say is that, and you touched on this a little bit in one of our earlier conversations, the reason we’re able to do this is that the sensor technology has plummeted in cost. You talked about how there was a lot of data in manufacturing, and you’re absolutely right. But the data was there because the ROIs supported custom sensors, getting them powered. But a lot of the sensors I work with are under $20.

Danny:

Is it more like BLE technology?

Ron:

It’s BLE; it’s something called LoRa. It’s a low-power, wide-area network. But the magic of it is that it is battery-operated. I don’t have to tear open walls, so the installation is cheap. And I like to say, our solutions are disruptively cheap. I can provide contact tracing in an entire organization for less than a cup of coffee a day per employee. That just wasn’t possible five years ago. And it’s not the sensors. It’s Microsoft, IBM, Google, Amazon, all have cloud infrastructure now that just five years ago, you would have needed to build out a million-dollar data center just to begin turning this stuff on. You’d have had to tear open walls and put in wiring. You see RFID which is pretty popular. RFID is good, but only in certain installations because it’s expensive. So again, going back to manufacturing, the ROI was there. But we’re at a point now where I could put sensors on every dog, cat, kid, manhole cover, snow plow, toilet seat, refrigerator door, the sports jacket that you’re wearing. I can sensor up everything. And I start getting that data, and I’m driving safety, efficiency, quality of life, reducing carbon footprint. And the economics now work where they didn’t five years ago.

Danny:

Yeah, it’s an exciting time. That’s for sure because there’s a lot of challenges that a lot of us now, we’re going to be able to solve because we’re going to have more visibility and more insight. Ron, listen, I think we could probably, honestly, go on for another I’d say a solid four or five hours because this has been a fascinating conversation, your background, learning about Microshare, the solutions, your story with the pivot and everything. I really want to thank you for your time, sharing all of this with our audience. I think you guys have a very fascinating and quite honestly, a really critical solution that not just manufacturers, obviously, can leverage, but a lot in other industries. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us your story and Microshare’s story.

Ron:

Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure. I really enjoyed the personal questions. That’s a little bit outside of the normal with these, so thank you very much. I appreciate the interest, and we’re excited to evangelize what we’re doing. We think it’s really exciting. We’re saving lives. How cool is it to have a company trying to make a profit, but you know what? You’re making a difference. And so we’re excited about it.

Danny:

And that’s a great purpose. Again, thanks for your time. This was awesome. Alright, so listen, I love this episode. All these episodes, I feel like they keep getting better and better. Check out Microshare, Microshare.io if you think this is a solution that you guys might need in your facility or in your building. Certainly we could talk about contact tracing and safety, and Ron was talking about a little bit of the challenges of looking for issues. If you have your workforce that gets infected, and then you have to close down the facility, your manufacturing plant, or what have you. We kept hearing about all these stories. There’s solutions. There’s technologies out there now that will be able to help to solve that. And oh, by the way, not just get data to create safety protocols, but also other information and insights to be able to increase your operational efficiency and whatnot.

So obviously, it’s a very exciting time from a technology standpoint, data-wise. You know, if you listen to the show, I am a data dork, so I get excited about this stuff. So anyways, I’m going to stop yapping. Thanks so much for watching or listening to the Executive Series on IndustrialSage, and I will be back next week with another episode. And I will see you then. Thanks, bye.

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