Future Proofing Our Cities

"We're designing New York City over and over like it was back in the 1900s. This needs to change"

The infrastructure underpinning our modern lives often goes unnoticed, yet fundamental systems like water, energy, and transportation require constant innovation. On this episode of Liquid Assets, host Ravi Kurani speaks with Adam Tank, co-founder and Chief Customer Officer of Transcend, about their mission to transform infrastructure design through technology. With experience across microbiology, consumer goods, and robotics, Adam brings a unique perspective to improving the water sector. Seeing inefficiencies in engineering firms firsthand, Transcend overhauls the conceptual design process for critical assets like wastewater treatment plants.

Their software integrates calculations and automates generating documentation, 3D models, and other preliminary outputs. This empowers engineers to focus their time on innovation and optimizing for sustainability, equity, and more. Adam shared insights on starting a company and the importance of nailing product-market fit early on. Tune into the episode to hear how Transcend's technology enables engineers worldwide to transcend the status quo.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Adam's Journey: Adam's unique background across microbiology, consumer goods, and robotics.
• Transcend's Mission: How Transcend's software transforms infrastructure design through automation.
• Empowering Engineers: Understanding how Transcend gives engineers time to focus on innovation.
• Startup Insights: Adam's perspectives on starting a company and finding product-market fit.
• Global Impact: Discovering how Transcend's technology impacts millions around the world.
• Optimizing Design: Seeing how integrated calculations optimize preliminary design.
• Purposeful Entrepreneurship: Finding inspiration in startups using technology for good.
• Envisioning the Future: Adam's vision for more sustainable and equitable infrastructure.

Listen On:

• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts

Watch the Interview:

Meet Adam

Adam Tank stands out as a visionary entrepreneur in the domains of water, wastewater, and energy technology. As the co-founder and Chief Customer Officer at Transcend Software, he has played a crucial role in transforming the engineering landscape. His entrepreneurial path began as a reaction to the mundane and often trivial decision-making processes in the corporate world. Disenchanted by endless meetings over minor issues like PowerPoint slide aesthetics, Adam was driven to seek a career that was both dynamic and impactful.

His venture into entrepreneurship was fueled by a strong passion for sales, marketing, and customer engagement. At Transcend Software, Adam and his team have pioneered innovative software solutions, revolutionizing the way wastewater treatment plants are designed and operated. This groundbreaking technology not only streamlines engineering processes but also promotes the creation of sustainable and efficient water treatment facilities. Adam’s expertise in blending technology with environmental sustainability and customer needs has established him as a prominent thought leader in the field and continues to share his insights and advancements in water-related technology.

The Book, Movie, or Show

In our quest to discover the literary influences shaping our guests' visions, one title stand out in Adam's repertoire.

"Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill stands as a timeless guide to achieving success, particularly relevant during challenging times like the Great Depression. Its enduring popularity stems from its practical philosophy of positive thinking and actionable steps toward attaining wealth. Hill's central tenet is the power of our thoughts in shaping our reality and he provides a clear blueprint for transforming these thoughts into tangible riches. This involves techniques such as visualization, affirmation, forming a Master Mind group, setting clear goals, and meticulous planning.

For anyone seeking a life-changing perspective on wealth creation and personal success, "Think and Grow Rich" offers an insightful and proven path. This book is more than just a read; it's a journey towards redefining one's mindset and actions to achieve the seemingly impossible.

Sponsored Amazon Affiliate links.

Transcript

00:00
Adam Tank
We're effectively designing New York City over and over. And we're designing New York City like it was back in 1900 or 1950. When I talk about critical infrastructure, I'm talking about the infrastructure that we, as humanity needs in order to survive and thrive. So that's healthcare, that's transportation, that's water, power, that's telecommunications, all of those things. At some point in the future, our software can be to design all of those. Conceptually inspiring, but we are transcending the way that design engineering is done and has been done for, again, probably hundreds of years. And if we can effectively transcend the status quo, it's going to better for the world at large. 

00:42
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to another episode of Liquid Assets. We have an amazing guest for you today, Adam Tank from Transcend. 

00:49
Adam Tank
Hi, everyone. I'm Adam Tank, the co founder and chief customer officer at Transcend Software. 

00:54
Ravi Kurani
Adam, before the call, were just talking about you had gone into corporate, and once you have the entrepreneurial bug, you just can't escape that. What are you talking about? Why was corporate such a. Yeah, I. 

01:08
Adam Tank
Think I just got frustrated and tired of sitting in multiple meetings deciding about what font should go on a PowerPoint slide. And in the world of entrepreneurship, there is never a world where you're going to spend any more than 10 seconds thinking about that. Realistically, if you expect to get anything done, especially in the early days, it's all hands on deck all the time. No two days are the same. You're expected to be ultra creative, ultra nimble, ultra agile, and in many ways, the corporate life is the complete opposite of that. And I just found that I love when I effectively can't predict what my calendar is going to look like for the week. That's a lot of fun for me. 

01:46
Adam Tank
And in the corporate world, your calendar is probably triple booked most days, and it's probably laid out months in advance because meetings happen that far in advance. It takes that much time for things to get done. So once you have been A part of this ecosystem, it's really hard to go back. 

02:02
Ravi Kurani
Let's kind of trace that story. What has been your entrepreneurial journey? And obviously, I think at the end of that, we should leap into transcend. That's kind of a little bit of. 

02:11
Adam Tank
Yeah, that sounds good for you there. I mean, I want to hear a little about Sutro, too. So I'm sure your listeners might know about you, and we'll talk about how we spent some time in San Francisco together. But my journey has been, I'm not going to say unconventional but there's been some twists and turns that have been pretty fun. And I ultimately stumbled into water, which most of us do. Not many of us really think we're going to be water professionals from the day we're born. Maybe there's a handful, but generally that's not the case. So I started out as a career microbiologist. 

02:38
Adam Tank
I was a food safety engineer for a Fortune 500 company, and I didn't realize it at the time, but what I effectively was doing was determining that the presence or absence of water in the manufacturing process was one of the biggest determining factors on the quality of food. So the presence or absence of water will determine the growth of bad stuff that make you and I sick. And I enjoyed the science of it, and I enjoyed that technical aspect of it. But what I didn't enjoy was basically like routine memorization of what I felt were boring quality principles and practices. I didn't like the engineering aspect of it. I liked being out talking to people. I liked being out solving problems on the floor. I liked being more, you could call it at the time. 

03:25
Adam Tank
I ended up finding out it was basically more sales and marketing. I enjoyed that type of engagement with people. So I interacted with a corporate sales and marketing guy who came to the plant one day, and it's a long story and it's written on my blog. For anyone that's interested, I'll do some self promo, Adamtank.com, you can check it out. And basically I ended up putting my tail between my legs and crawling back to my cube saying, what am I doing with my life? I have to figure out something different. And fast forward about six months from then, and I had moved to Brazil to work for a small company in Rio de Janeiro, another food company. And I wanted to be closer to sales and marketing, wanted to be closer to small business. 

03:59
Adam Tank
I wanted to get a feel for what it means to be more entrepreneurial and what it means to be in sales and marketing and growing a brand, and had an amazing experience in Rio. I came back to the States to get an MBA and then went to work for GE Water after graduate school, which was really my first foray into the water world at large. And I had an amazing mentor and close friend, still is now. His name is Ralph Exton. And Ralph was always one to encourage me to pursue my interests. And one of those interests was early stage innovation. Again, the entrepreneurial thing, the startup thing. At the time were calling it smart water or digital water. And so I was working with the GE Ventures team to determine what water companies we might want to invest in. 

04:42
Adam Tank
And through that came across this concept of non revenue water and leak detection and potable water systems. So I was fortunate to spin a company out of GE that was a robotics business focused on inspection repair potable water pipelines. That's where I met you, Ravi, was when I was living in San Francisco, living the Valley lifestyle. That company was acquired. And then, if you fast forward today, now with Transcend, a new software startup starting out in the water industry, doing engineering design automation for critical infrastructure. So designing wastewater treatment plants, drinking water related assets, and then now power actually related asset substations, and taking that burden away from engineers in the conceptual and preliminary phases of projects, freeing them up so they can focus on more important stuff. So that's like the long and short of it. 

05:29
Ravi Kurani
That's awesome. Let's kind of double click into what they are spending time on today and what they could be spending their time on. What is that gap that transcend actually fills for the folks out there that don't know what wastewater water and energy look like, can you walk us through that journey? 

05:45
Adam Tank
Sure. When you are going to design a new asset, let's just use a wastewater treatment plant as an example. So every time, for those that are listening that have no clue what happens in water, which is the bulk of the population, you turn on your tap and water comes out and you flush your toilet and it goes away, and you don't think about it otherwise, all of that water comes from somewhere, and all that water has to go somewhere. And it takes a lot of effort, money, engineering, and built assets to make that happen. And a big component of doing all of that is the engineering work that goes into thinking about how big should these assets be? How much energy do they consume? Where should it all go? How do we treat it? How do we make sure it's safe for people? 

06:27
Adam Tank
And in the earliest phases of projects, engineers don't have the time that they want to look at all the potential options for what could exist. You have designs that you've done in the past, you sort of take an old one, you put a new flavor on it and push it to the utility or whoever is the person that's going to be responsible for financing it, and that's sort of it. So a lot of engineers find themselves in this role where they're copy pasting, they're doing things like spending hours trying to format word documents, creating technical descriptions and proposals of what they want to design or build. They're moving lines around on a computer screen to try to make things look good, and it's just boring work, quite frankly. 

07:07
Adam Tank
I haven't met a single engineer who's told me that they enjoy trying to get an image formatted in word properly. Because anyone that's tried to do that, understands moving text with images in word is like the 7th layer of hell. Yeah. So our software takes care of all of that. Our software creates the documentation that an engineer typically would produce in that stage of projects, gets rid of the grunt work, and then lets them focus on what are some more options that might be available to us, what's the best outcome that we can provide for this utility? And we now have the data available to us because the computer spit it out. To be able to make smarter decisions around what ultimately we should be building. 

07:42
Adam Tank
For folks like you and I, Ravi, to have better lives, to have clean water, to have wastewater treatment, that's super cool. 

07:48
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. It was so funny. I was interviewing somebody yesterday. And back to these infrastructure systems. I think he said, we're building the size of New York every single month, projected out until like the year 2050 or 2060. And back to what you're saying, right, is if we're building New York City month after month across the world until 2060, the infrastructure has to be managed well. Right. And if you're just kind of throwing it out there and people, one, are not enjoying their job that they're doing secondarily, it's just grunt work of shaping images in Microsoft word. Right. 

08:21
Ravi Kurani
I mean, I'm sure it's way more complicated than that, but I think there's a lot more at stake here from a risk perspective, if we're going to be growing at the pace that we're growing, and I think totally efficiencies are there to be had which transcend, then unlocks. 

08:36
Adam Tank
That's right. I mean, we're effectively designing New York City over and over, and we're designing New York City like it was back in 1900 or 1950. Yeah, that's what we don't want to break anything. We don't have time to consider new innovations in construction materials or in the case of water, wastewater, new treatment technologies, new digital solutions that can help operate this infrastructure better. We just aren't taking those things into consideration of the planning phase. So I would ask people that are listening, if you are going to build the New York City of the future, what are the considerations that you'd be taking into account that would make it look different than what it is today? And A lot of people are going to say, I want more natural systems, or I want more natural capital as part of the city. 

09:17
Adam Tank
I want more of New York City to look more like Central park than I do whatever crammed apartment buildings that are there. I want more water. I want more resilient infrastructure. I want to be able to make sure that we can handle flooding or droughts or heat. I want to make sure that it's equitable. I want to make sure that anyone who wants to live here can live here and have a good life, but we don't have time to take those things into consideration. So that's what software, ours, and there are others, too, that can do that to free up people, to be able to focus on those types of outcomes. 

09:48
Ravi Kurani
That's so awesome. I know you've had history in Rio that you said there's, like, a bit of a philanthropic site here, and even the name Transcend. 

09:57
Adam Tank
Right? 

09:57
Ravi Kurani
I want to kind of pick on two things here. What is Adam Tank's vision for this? Not. It's not just a digital software to help wastewater, water and electrical companies. What does the future look like for transcend our dream? 

10:13
Adam Tank
Our vision is that every critical infrastructure project is designed at a conceptual level using our software. So when I talk about critical infrastructure, I'm talking about the infrastructure that we, as humanity, needs in order to survive and thrive. So that's healthcare, that's transportation, that's water, power, that's telecommunications. All of those things. At some point in the future, our software can be used to design all of those. Conceptually inspiring. 

10:39
Ravi Kurani
And when we go into other things like healthcare, I mean, I imagine a systems diagram with really complex inputs, because the inputs are different for an LA county healthcare system versus a Bombay, right, in Mumbai, India, versus New York City versus Kansas City. I think the inputs there are very different. And how can we open the covers a little bit on how the software works, and how can it mold and flex itself to these other large infrastructural. 

11:09
Adam Tank
Projects, you are spot on that the inputs required per project or per region are going to differ from one another. So, in water wastewater, we have just an unbelievable data set that either automatically populates based on project characteristics or the region that someone is designing this infrastructure for, or it's an input field for the user. So we basically can enable the tool to ingest whatever type of data that might be required in order to have an output that accurately reflects the realities of what's going on in that particular area. The other part of it is that really what our secret sauce is and our bread and butter is that we have built a platform that fully automates and integrates all of the engineering calculations and decision making that goes on in a project across disciplines. 

11:59
Adam Tank
Right now, what you'll find in traditional manual design engineering is that in the case of water or wastewater treatment, it'll start with a process engineer who's looking at the process of treating the wastewater. They'll then do their work in whatever tools they use. They'll then hand that data over to a mechanical engineer who's looking at the equipment that might go into a treatment plant. Once they're done, they hand it to an electrical and controls and instrumentation engineer who puts a little more tweaks on it. And then finally, to a civil or architectural engineer that stuffs all that stuff inside of buildings and then arranges it on a site. It's all typically manually done within each discipline, and there's always a handoff there. So the quality and consistency and the data, it's a challenge. It's a big challenge, and it takes a lot of time. 

12:39
Adam Tank
We're talking about months and months of effort. So our software, the way that we've architected, is that it's all in the cloud. And when you have these project specific inputs, it goes into our tool, and it first starts out doing the process design and process simulation. It comes up with the answers. It translates that into mechanical outputs, and then this electrical, and then to civil. And then we use industry standard softwares that the engineers are already using to download outputs. So, as an example, a 3D model is generated in the cloud by our software. But an engineer can now take that and open it in, revit in an Autodesk product, and do whatever detailing they need to. 

13:15
Adam Tank
So they have a baseline to start from, so they have more detail, more answers more quickly, and then they can apply their smarts and their innovation, their creativity, to something that they weren't able to do before because they were too busy just creating the baseline in the first place. It's sort of a multifaceted thing, but. 

13:32
Ravi Kurani
Hopefully that makes sense. The thing that kind of comes to mind is for folks out there that are familiar with database design, went from, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but went from relational database design to what is now mesh. Right? There's like a whole bunch of other technologies around mesh, but you're taking something that was very linear and put in series, and you've turned it into this web at which you can almost zoom out to the third dimension, look down on it, and figure out what parts are actually moving and not moving versus waiting for the part before you to finish. More like a waterfall methodology of like, okay, well, now the guy for me has to finish. Now I'm going to push it to the guy ahead of me. 

14:09
Ravi Kurani
Makes complete sense, because if you can look at the network, you'll then begin to see the network effects, whereas if you're just in the network, you only see the nodes that are right next to you. 

14:17
Adam Tank
Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. It is a systems based, holistic approach, and it's an outcomes based approach. And too often, we're just focused on what's right in front of us, and we don't have an appreciation for how that impacts either other parts of, in this case, the treatment process, or the civil arrangement on a site, but that, of course, impacts the surrounding community, which we typically aren't thinking about either. We're so focused on building this treatment plan, we are taking into consideration, what does this look like for the people that surround it? What happens to the rates for that community? What happens to odor control? How does this impact the surrounding values on homes? 

14:56
Adam Tank
We might pay a little bit of homage to it in a master planning phase of a project, but generally, I can say it's an afterthought, but that's not typically what's coming to mind. First, for an engineer, they're just trying to get their job done in the small amount of hours they have to do it. 

15:09
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. And it's so funny, I used to work in impact investing back india in 2011, 2012, and this conversation of economic externalities really never came to mind from a true capitalist perspective of, like, there are just externalities of any equation that you do, whether it's. Whether it's driving a car, whether it's not driving a car, whether it's living in a city, or whether it's living in suburbia. And everything does have a multimodal, relational piece against what's right next to it. Like you just said, the wastewater facility may have a distinct positive or negative effect against the houses that are right next to it. Right. And that could be through odor. 

15:49
Ravi Kurani
And thinking about that kind of logical train of thought in what you're saying is the engineer just doesn't have time to encapsulate everything that could go wrong, would go wrong, could go right as well, which makes complete amount of sense. 

16:02
Adam Tank
That's super cool. Yeah. The could go right thing is one that I really like to think about, because there have been so many innovations in not only treatment. But what happens once the water is treated in terms of reuse or digestion of solids to create energy? There's new methods of greenhouse gas reduction and more carbon efficient materials and processes in the systems. And today, no one has time. No one has time to think about it. Those technologies can't be modeled rapidly enough to get in front of the engineers who are designing and proposing these systems to the utilities. So they sort of get stuck. It's the typical valley of Death trope. 

16:42
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, I always like to zoom into the founder journey. Like you said, entrepreneurship is such a vibrant is the word that comes right versus something that's just so static. Like you said, from the corporate side of things where your calendars packed out three months in advance, like you said earlier, what was the entrepreneurial journey for transcend, when you kind of first started getting from that zero to one is just so interesting to see. And yeah, there's a lot of founders, a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to liquid assets and what kind of words do you have from them if you can kind of weave that through your story as well? 

17:16
Adam Tank
The biggest thing that I have learned going from zero to one is to. And I would love to get your take on this, Ravi, with what you built at Sutro, the most important thing you can do is sell it before you build it. Because the worst thing you can do as an entrepreneur is fall into this fallacy that if you build it, they will come. People think if they build, especially engineers, fall into this trap. If you build the coolest freaking water quality management and monitoring device in the world, that because it exists, everyone is going to buy it. And that's just simply not the case. So what I would encourage people to do, and what I did at the robotics company and what we've done at Transcend is go to the person or people that you believe will be your ideal customer. 

17:58
Adam Tank
We're talking like, write a list of the ten Dream customers that you have. Go after one, two, and three. And firstly, see if you can actually get a meeting with them. It's not as easy as people might think, and you're going to find that product is arguably the easiest part of the journey. It's selling it's marketing it, finding product market fit, finding the right price points, finding your distribution channels. That's all the hard stuff. So first, figure out if you can actually have a conversation. And then secondly, figure out if what you are anticipating, building, or planning to build is actually valuable in the eyes of that customer. How far are they willing to, in order to give you the credibility or the gumption or the belief that you need to go and actually build this product or this business. 

18:42
Adam Tank
And in my opinion, the best way to do it is to either get an LoI or actually get them to invest in the business, either as an investor or as an early customer, to fund a prototype of some kind. So that's what I would encourage people to do, especially those that are going from zero to one, is as quickly as you can figure out product market fit, figure out exactly what it is you need to build, and ideally get a customer to cut a check in advance of you actually building the thing. 

19:06
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, I would agree with that 100%. For even the founders that I mentor, they get in that zero to one territory, they get so wrapped up in the engineering, right? They're just like, hey, if I made this button a little bit more accessible, or this seems, like, really hard to sign into, and I'll ask them, I'm like, how many customers have you talked to that have actually requested that you need to move the button? They're like, well, none. I just think it needs to be that way. And it's like, well, I wouldn't spend a dollar or even a minute of my time changing something if somebody hasn't really requested it, or I haven't talked to enough people to where I now have the hypothesis that I should change something to make the usability or the actual acceptance of the product better. 

19:45
Ravi Kurani
But so many times I just have to tell people, I'm like, pick up the phone, find five, like you said, five people's numbers. Pick up the phone, cold, call them, see if this is even a problem they're willing to talk about. Because if they're not even willing to talk about it, they probably don't have a problem that your solution is not going to be purchased. 

20:03
Adam Tank
Yeah. Yes, that's exactly right. And I mean, you had background in the pool industry, correct, before you started? 

20:09
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, yeah, I did have background in the pool. My dad actually owned a chain of pool and spa supply stores in Southern California. And through the impact investing work that we did india, we realized that water sensing was a big problem. And so we had kind of seen the proof in the pudding based on the amount of pitches that were seeing, people were pitching water filtration. And every time we would ask them around water sensing, they wouldn't have them. And then we spoke to government officials. They also didn't really have water sensing capacity or capability that they needed. Initially tried to sell it for the Indian government. Stupidest idea a startup can make is try to sell into the red tape that is India. 

20:48
Ravi Kurani
And so we actually ended up pivoting the company to go to pools and spas when we came back to the US. Because water quality is water quality. Right. You're measuring different parameters, mind you, for different applications that you have. But the spectrum of chlorine is parts per million of chlorine. And different people might have different levels of what they need that chlorine to be. But you have to make sure, yeah, you're talking to your customers. And when we started speaking to pool owners and the fact that my dad had a chain of pool and spa supply stores, it was very clear the writing was on the wall. And we, to your point, did not even start building the solution any more than we already had india, outside of actually getting ten customers that we had locked in as beta testers. 

21:29
Adam Tank
That's great. 

21:29
Ravi Kurani
Paid beta testers, actually. Yeah, entirely. I 100% agree with you. 

21:34
Adam Tank
I love that the paid part of it is huge. Granted, your entry point is a lot different than some other companies who might be selling a new pumping system or a membrane system or whatever. They're $100,000 systems or six figure software contracts. But in any case, even if it's a non binding Loi that tells you something, they're willing to go through enough of the legal BS to get an Loi signed. That's meaningful. It's a commitment of some kind. But I would encourage entrepreneurs who are building something from the ground up. Do not start building until you get meaningful commitment from who you think is your ideal customer? 

22:11
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, you obviously sell into these engine. Is your primary customer engineering firms, or are they the large wastewater plants? Who do you primarily sell to? 

22:22
Adam Tank
It's a great question. So we have three customer segments, and our revenue is about 30 right now. So one are the asset owners themselves, that could be a private asset owner or a municipal water wastewater utility who have water and wastewater treatment plants or assets that they're doing a bunch of master planning and capital planning work around, or spending a lot of money on engineering, either internal or external, that they want to start to bring in house. The second are the engineering firms, and they're starting to realize and come to Understand that the billable consulting hour model that they've been used to for probably hundreds of years at this point is not going to get them the returns that they need in the future. And so you have a couple of options available to you. 

23:07
Adam Tank
One is you shift to fixed fee work and you find a way to increase your margins by reducing your cost of labor or pulling on some other levers. It can be a race to the bottom where it's all commoditized, billable hour work and you're not going to win. But if you start undercutting people, you might be able to grow your business, but obviously it's not going to work over the long term or you find a way to automate. And that option is where we believe the future iS. And that's why we started this Business, because we believe that the Future is in automation, it's in technology, it's an automation. So that's where we get Excited about the third customer base are the equipment suppliers themselves. So imagine, Ravi, you want to sell a Water quality sensor into a wastewater treatment plant. 

23:49
Adam Tank
If that wastewater treatment plant is being upgraded or expanded or a utility is building a new one, and they're using our software to do it. At a conceptual level, you want your water quality sensor to be specked in to that equipment list when our software kicks it out. So that way you effectively win that work as early as possible or at least start building the relationship with the utility as early as possible. 

24:11
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, it's funny you say that. I was speaking to our mechanical engineer and he uses SolidWorks and McMaster car, which you've probably heard of. But for those of you who don't know, there is a thing about, like, it's the Amazon for engineering components, right? Peristaltic pumps, any sort of electronic components as well. And I think he was telling me that every single McMaster car part or a really large portion of them are now available on solidWorks. So you can have this plugin and you just code up the know UPC number or the SKU, whatever it might be. And that part shows itself in the proper length, width and height. You can go ahead and manipulate it. You can go ahead and add it into your CAD design. And I'm like, that's genius for McMaster. 

24:52
Adam Tank
Because if you put all of your. 

24:54
Ravi Kurani
Parts in SolidWorks, I'm going to go ahead and buy those parts when I actually make the thing I'm trying to make. And so that's exactly a smart idea to be working with the equipment suppliers as well. It just reminded me of that McMaster car idea. 

25:06
Adam Tank
Yeah, it's spot on when you think. 

25:08
Ravi Kurani
About the sales cycle and you think about your first ten hundred thousand customers. What was the initial story of how you started getting the product in one of these three? Did you choose one of them, then go down that vertical? Did it start to morph into all three of them. Did you go into all three all at once? 

25:25
Adam Tank
What did that look like? This software was born out of a parent company called Organica Water. The software was in development, has been in development, or was developed starting in 2012, 2013. So it's effectively a ten year old product at this point. And we found a trend since then in 2019. So there's a six year gap there. That six year gap was exactly what you're referring to, Ravi. So Organica built this tool because Organica's challenge was they had this really cool wastewater treatment technology. Then every time they went to propose to a utility or an engineering firm, the utility or engineering firm would say, well, prove to me that this thing works. You're telling me that you can build me a wastewater treatment plant that looks like a botanical garden. I don't believe you. 

26:05
Adam Tank
So Organica was spending hundreds of hours to put together all of the documentation, including 3D models, in order to get these engineering firms bought into the idea of a botanical garden wastewater treatment plant. And so at the time, they could do a handful of projects every month to bid on. So they were bottlenecked from capacity to grow because they just didn't have the amount of manpower required to support these bid activities. So the CEO, ARI, of Organica at the time said, I got to find a way to automate this process. I got to find a way to automate my preliminary proposal, my budgetary proposal process, so I can go bid on more work. Because, by the way, there's also an opportunity cost for the projects that I went after and didn't win. I can't cost recover on those. 

26:46
Adam Tank
So for everyone that I'm not winning, I could be bidding one that I might win. So developed this tool took about a year and a half. And after the tools developed, Organica was able to bid on dozens of projects a month. I think they went from something like 15 or 20 projects a year to hundreds per year that they were bidding on without any additional engineering overhead. Yeah. So the goal was really built for an OEM or the tool was built for an OEM, but they were doing the engineering work that an engineering firm would have to do in order to effectively assess his equipment. So it was basically built for OEMs and for engineers. But as Organica started to more fully develop the tool, they started modeling competition inside of the software. So competitive treatment technologies. 

27:27
Adam Tank
The engineering firms started to say, how are you turning these around so quiCkly? To me, nobody else can do this. And Organica started to share about it. They wanted to use the tool for their own purposes of engineering in other markets. So it just sort of became the self fulfilling prophecy. And eventually in 2019, re had to make the decision, do we keep this as part of Organica, or is there a bigger opportunity here to have it as a standalone software business? And that's when he called me and we spun transcend out as a standalone software company and completely divested from Organica. So re and I, as co founders of Transcend started in 2019. 

28:01
Adam Tank
And we have continued to go down the EPC route, the engineering route, continued to go down the OEM route, and we're finding that the bigger utilities that have these assets, a lot of times they do this work in house. This is a way for them to deploy more capital more quickly and make better decisions as part of the master planning process. The ball keeps rolling, momentum keeps building up. And at this point, I think it's too much to slow down, which is great. 

28:27
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, that's awesome. Why transcend? Where did that name come from? 

28:31
Adam Tank
It's a great question. It was for better, for worse, my brainchild. So it's probably pretty self explanatory, but we are transcending the way that design engineering is done and has been done for, again, probably hundreds of years. And if we can effectively transcend the status quo, it's going to better for the world at large. Yeah. So it is our mission. That is how we came up with the name. Awesome. 

28:55
Ravi Kurani
I like that. And I love how when you went through your vertical of engineering companies, right, you could, on your billable model, drive the cost down to the bottom. But in automating work, and we're seeing this across multiple industries, you now give the ability for people, these engineers, to level up. They get to now spend their time, their precious hours in a day in building just more resilient, more interesting systems, more systems that take more into consideration versus doing the work they were doing yesterday. ANd like you mentioned, right, New York City was built 100 years ago. We can't keep copy pasting 100 year old model that doesn't work in today's day and age. Totally makes sense. 

29:35
Adam Tank
Yeah, you're exactly right. I'd say 90% of the engineers I talk to about their day to day, when they go to start working on a project, they have ideas that they want to explore. Like, they desperately want to be innovative and creative and think critically about these problems. But with a billable hour model, you have to do the work you have to do in a set amount of time and you can't afford to deviate from that. If you want to keep your job and keep your customer, mean, you nailed it, Ravi. Like, not only can you more effectively do better work and more fun work for yourself, but you can level up, because now you do have time to go and explore new innovations, new opportunities. Get out. Talk to the customers more often. Go out and talk to the community. 

30:22
Adam Tank
You don't have time to do these things. So I completely agree with you. It is taking your game to the next level. A lot of people think it's competitive. Our solution might be competitive with an engineering job. That's not the case at all. I really feel like it gives you superpowers. Yeah. 

30:34
Ravi Kurani
And I feel like that the value proposition for engineering companies at that point in time are their ability to then go ahead and build out verticals around the most greenest city engineering firm, the most odor resisting engineering, whatever that might be. Right. You can go ahead and start carving out these other verticals that you otherwise would have never really had the ability to explore outside of spending tons of dollar on engineering, which sounds a brilliant kind of like chat GPT. People are, like, all scared of chat GPT, but takes my job. I think it's an intern that I have to the side that allows me to flex my mind and allows me to ask better questions. That's all chat GPT. Does it point in time. 

31:15
Ravi Kurani
It allows me to be more creative so I can go ahead and actually see the crevices of my own mind in which I'd probably need to hire an executive coach for the full day to sit right next to you. When I had an idea, right, it gets you that, like, one inch further, and that kind of really allows your brain to kind of stretch out a little bit more. 100%, yeah. 

31:34
Adam Tank
If you think about your brain having a cognitive load, there's this baseline there that's sort of always there, that every time you want to spin up a new thought process, you almost have to overcome that hurdle. Yeah, I use chat GPT the exact same way. For me, it takes care of that baseline thought, so I don't have to think about that. I don't have to think about the outline of a blog post I want to write anymore. It'll just do it for me, and then I can focus on the details, restructuring things, being more creative, right. Being more innovative. But if I didn't have it, I'd probably spend 10 hours, eight of which aren't productive, because I'm doing the stuff that Chad GBT can do. Right today, maybe the hours aren't exactly right, but you get the point. I love the idea, Ravi. 

32:13
Adam Tank
I love this concept of looking into the future and thinking about what tier specialize in. What is your actual value proposition as an engineering firm. Because if you ask those folks today, most are probably going to say, I hear this a lot. It's our expertise. It's the fact that we've done this forever and ever and ever. But that's what every single one of them says. Yeah. What is your area of expertise? Like, are you the most green? Are you the one that's focused on natural capital systems? Are you the one that's most focused on equitable infrastructure? What is it that you want to do that takes our whole, frankly, our whole world to the next level? That really excites me. I love that idea. 

32:49
Ravi Kurani
That's cool. I always love to invert. 

32:52
Adam Tank
Right? 

32:52
Ravi Kurani
Like, what happens if transcend doesn't exist? What does the world look is? It's always good to kind of take the, I think not Warren Buffett, but who's the other guy that, my gosh, Charlie Munger always says this. At every problem he looks at, he always inverts it. If I was to ask you that question of, like, without transcend, what does the world look like? 

33:15
Adam Tank
It looks like what it does today. It looks like broken pipes. It looks like sewage overflows. It looks like 80% of the world's population not having access to wastewater services or clean water. It looks like kids dying from preventable diseases due to dirty water. It's ridiculous. These problems don't need to exist, but they're going to continue if we keep doing the exact same crap that we've been doing for decades. Something has to change. And it's a metric that we track month over month and that we report to our board how many people are being impacted by designs run using transcend tools. 

33:51
Ravi Kurani
Are you able to share? 

33:52
Adam Tank
Yeah. So today it's right on the front page of our website. Let me check, because it's updated every month, so I don't have the latest one. It's got to be somewhere in 130,000,000. Let's see here. In four years. Let's check. 146.146.1 million people in more than 70 countries. 

34:08
Ravi Kurani
That's awesome. Wow. 

34:09
Adam Tank
Every day I wake up, I think about that. That's what gets me. I mean, there's a lot of things that get me excited about what we're doing, but that is always the. At the end of the day, regardless of how tired I am or if it was a bad day or whatever, that always keeps me going. That always keeps me going. 

34:25
Ravi Kurani
I asked this of all of our guests, is there a book or TV show or movie that has one just had a profound, maybe overview effect or something that just has kind of changed your view on life. It could or could not be about water, but do you have one? 

34:42
Adam Tank
Think and grow rich by Napoleon Hill completely changed my life when I was, I think I was 19. I may have been 20 years old when I read it for the first time. But that was where that seed of entrepreneurship was sowed. Was reading that book, think and grow rich. Yeah, think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And maybe you may not get as much out of it because you've already gone down this path. Ravi's. But I welcome you to read it because you still might be able to pull some nuggets out of it. Up to that point in my life, no one had ever shown me what a future in business or entrepreneurship could look like. 

35:13
Adam Tank
And I had always had these thoughts of, there's something more than this prescriptive outline that's been sort of put in front of me from my parents and from their parents. I don't know. The typical Indian parents show up like, you're going to become a doctor, an engineer, or maybe a lawyer, but doctor, maybe your parents weren't that way because your dad. Okay, so for me, it was, you're joining the military, or you're getting a big corporate job and a steady paycheck every two weeks. That was it. That's all I knew. None of my family members were in business for themselves. None of them, my entire family, had been government workers or in education. But I'd always felt different. There was always something inside of me that felt different. 

35:48
Adam Tank
And when I read, think and grow rich for the first time, I realized, oh, my God, there are other people out there that think this way, too. Like, this is okay. This is normal in a sense. And so that's what really started to get my gears turning. And, like I said, sowed the seed. 

36:02
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. Okay, I'll have to definitely put that on your profile once we get this episode. 

36:07
Adam Tank
Live. 

36:07
Ravi Kurani
Think and grow rich. Adam, thanks a ton. This has been super inspiring. I love your worldview for the way that infrastructure and water should be built. For all of those of you out there listening, Adam, where can we find you if we want to learn more? 

36:21
Adam Tank
So, transcendinfra.com is anything about transcend? You can find us on LinkedIn or just Google search. My personal stuff is on Adamtank.com. So I write some stuff that's water related, some stuff that's personal. Try to weave them in at times together. And then if you follow me on LinkedIn, I also have a Water podcast and a water newsletter that talks about innovations in water and technology. So I think if you search Adam Tank, you'll probably find all of those things. So maybe we'll just leave it simple like that. 

36:47
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. Cool. For all of those of you out there, you can find liquid assets wherever you listen to your podcast, be it on Spotify, on Apple, or on Google. Adam, thanks a ton for joining us today. 

36:57
Adam Tank
You bet. Thanks for having me.