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Welcome to this week’s deep dive exclusively for Nexus Pro members. It’s an honor to have you here. This deep dive is a follow up to my recent podcast conversation with Logan Soya, CEO of Aquicore. I learned a lot from this conversation and want to share my takeaways and the full transcript with you below.
In case you missed it in your inbox, you can find the audio or video here:
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Enjoy!
—James
Aquicore is interesting to me because, like Logan said in their mission statement, they’ve built the product around the core user personas of the real estate organization. For software people, that might sound like the most basic thing to point out. What a novel idea!!! But bear with me… I think it’s actually quite rare in the overlay world.
I think a lot of overlays have been built with an extremely technical user in mind. And while that user might be an important part of the second tier of users for the organization, but they’re not the primary tier (owners, operators, and managers) of the asset.
For example, when I was an energy engineer doing retro-commissioning projects, I used overlays that were great ***for me*** because they replaced the analysis I was previously doing in excel and made it continuous. However, those great-for-me overlays had very little chance of becoming sticky and engrained in my clients’ operating processes because it wasn’t built for any of them.
One argument you could make here is that for the overlay software to be “THE” overlay, it must include an extension into the lives of the primary users of the building. I’d also go further and say that in order to be called a “platform”, a product must serve the analytics to all the users of the platform in a way that is useful to them. It’s all the same data… why not?
Assuming that argument is correct, technical-first overlays would need to extend from the technical to the non-technical user. That strikes me as a big leap. But if you flip that around, like Aquicore is doing, and start with the non-technical user and then extend to the others, it seems much easier.
Obviously, super-technical overlays could remain in their silo and simply serve analytics results to a more comprehensive overlay platform. I think we’ll see that scenario play out too, like we are with CopperTree serving analytical results to the Willow digital twin for example.
Perhaps these are the three different growth patterns of the overlay as it extends beyond a single user base. Exciting times ahead (if you’re an overlay nerd).
My highlights:
I definitely want to hear your thoughts on this episode.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hello, friends. Welcome to Nexus, a smart buildings technology podcast for smart humans. I'm your host, James Dice. If we haven't met before, I write a weekly newsletter on the same topic. It's also called Nexus. Each week I share what I've learned, my opinions, and what I'm excited about in the quickly evolving world of intelligent buildings. Readers have called Nexus the best way to stay up to date on the future of this industry without all the marketing fluff. You can check it out and subscribe at nexus.substack.com or click the link in the show notes.
Since starting the Nexus newsletter, many of you have reached out to me wanting to talk shop, and we have. After a few weeks of those wonderful conversations, I realized I needed to record and share them with our growing community. So here we are. The Nexus podcast is born. This is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industry together.
Episode 18 is a conversation with Logan Sawyer, founder and CEO of Agricor. We unpacked our cores approach to smart buildings, which is rooted in solving the problems of a few core user types in the real estate industry. Logan gave us answer to why building tech is 20 years behind the tech and our personal lives and his journey from the telecom industry to founding Aqua core in order to do something about that, we also went on a bit of a rant together on the energy management hierarchy of needs, which was fun.
Finally at Logan introduced a new feature that his team just announced. It's called projects. I love the projects concept and think it fills a key gap in the energy management process. This episode of the podcast is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the nexus pro membership community.
You can find info on how to join and support the podcast at dot com. You also find the show notes, which has links to Logan's LinkedIn page. Oh, and by the way, if you take a look at your podcast feed and you're missing some episodes, that's because those episodes are exclusive to members of nexus pro.
Sign up for a free membership to get your personal podcast feed with access to all the episodes without further ado, please enjoy episode 18.
alright. Hello, Logan. Welcome to the nexus podcast. That's great to have you. Can you introduce yourself for
Logan Soya: [00:02:15] the audience, James? Great to be here. so my name's Logan Sawyer. I am the founder and CEO of aquifer.
James Dice: [00:02:23] All right. can you take us through what is Encore and, maybe start at the beginning, you're a founder of it. or the founder, what, what led you to start it and, what's your journey to get to where chorus today? Sure.
Logan Soya: [00:02:36] Yeah. So like any story like this, it is quite a journey. So I'll see, let me see where I should start and how I can go, to where we are today.
my origin story is, I'm a physics student by training, by academic training. I got into the telecom space. And my first professional career prior to Encore was really in the telecom space, deploying large multimillion dollar operation centers for at and T and Verizon and their international counterparts.
So that was my professional skillset. over time, I was always passionate about energy, always passionate about, what I call like hard, durable value creation, if that makes sense. So really just, I actually almost tried to do a PhD in like alternative. Almost borderline crazy cold fusion energy or something like that.
Okay. Then I didn't get a, eventually I guess I got a letter as I was talking with the, the sponsor of that, research that his program was getting shut down. So it shows you how crazy I was trying to push the limit at one point. anyways, was. lucky enough to have a pretty fun run.
As a telecom engineer wanted to go further, had an intrepreneurial bug raised a couple million bucks to try to, start some internal communications initiatives, but ultimately found myself dissatisfied. with, that, sort of culture, just, like I think, had too much of an itch to try to make a difference.
and we didn't want to follow the rules if that makes sense. And so did my MBA at Georgetown. my MBA at Georgetown is really where our cohort started. I was searching for something that was a Venn diagram between what I knew how to do professionally and what I was personally passionate about and was fortunate enough to, get more and more into, to this idea of, energy monitoring, smart home fools, had a kind of a knack and an interest for it.
And, yeah, and had some entrepreneurial classes at my Georgetown MBA, which I will give them credit to that really pushed me, out of my comfort zone to actually try to create a business plan for, the early version of Aqua Corp and, and ultimately just grew fascinated by the wastefulness of buildings, the inefficiency of buildings, the lack of communications technologies.
I think in particular, the thing that struck me, he was, I was working in the telecom world where, 99.99% uptime is required in order to have our cell phones work. And so what I was doing is I was deploying network, monitoring systems to oversee thousands of devices that make our cell phone communications work and monitoring thousands of points of data across thousands of pieces of equipment.
And then ultimately creating SLS that would drive, a truck to get, Deployed to go repair a cell phone tower or a piece of equipment on a cell phone tower. If something went wrong, my favorite example is like I was working on a, company in Bahrain and, I had a monitoring system that I deployed.
So when the, ship dropped anchor cut the fiber optic cable going from Dubai to India, like it was like my monitoring screen that would like, that I designed that would announced that dispatch a bunch of things, people to go fix the cable so that, internet could be, you repaired between countries or something like that.
And so that was like a super fun. and then realizing that real buildings just did not have any of that connectivity. And so, as a result, buildings were extremely inefficient, extremely wasteful. And this idea that if I, if Agricor a good monitoring solution could be in every building across the United States would say $40 billion a year felt like a big, durable, hard problem.
That was interesting and exciting for me to try to tackle. So I came at this industry having no experience in real estate, no experience in the built environment. just more of an it background than anything else. And then, a deep curiosity, for, for why things are not working as I would hope they would be.
James Dice: [00:06:38] That's fascinating. So you have a very similar story to start off this episode as a Prabhu. from facilities who like he had a very similar background and telecom industry, which I know you had told me that before last time we talked and it just didn't Dawn on me that you were used to things being so connected and uptime and connectedness being such a big thing.
And then you just look at buildings and you're like, Oh, there's this huge gap
Logan Soya: [00:07:07] here. As
James Dice: [00:07:09] we ask you what happened? Okay.
Logan Soya: [00:07:11] I remember my first, so I'm credit to Georgetown's MBA program and entrepreneurial program. So my professor really pushed me to do some onsite interviews and here I was pretending to know what I was talking about doing my first sort of a site visit it's with like facility guys and Oh, so what does this do?
Oh, that's a switch gear, and just like really. Deep acknowledgment of the level of just spreadsheet driven or not even spreadsheet just rolled up diagrams in a basement type. Situation that so many buildings still live in today and just a profound appreciation. So my journey was really starting at the boiler room and just like wanting to know those users, wanting to understand why, their jobs are so hard and could communication and telecommunication help make those jobs a little bit easier was the starting point.
Got it.
James Dice: [00:08:02] All right. so that's what kind of led you into the building's world. So give us the history of Encore after the Georgetown MBA program.
Logan Soya: [00:08:11] Yeah. Fortunately managed to raise a small bit of capital to get my start and choose not to pursue, anything else outside of my MBA. went full fledged into Aqua Corp, probably weeks into my MBA, frankly.
and then, eventually actually started in like really granular circuit level monitoring. My very first, sort of trial, location was a bar called little miss whiskeys where I did like circuit level metering. And, I remember that eventually my product got unplugged because the slushie machine was more important than, my energy monitoring tool for the restaurant.
So really just like basic stuff in the early days, but lots of crazy fun, just entrepreneurial stories. If that makes sense. Moving forward realizing that, circuit level metering was quite challenging, quite hard to deploy a value there wasn't quite as meaningful, eventually worked my way upstream to utility level, metering, and realizing that there's just more value to be created for larger assets.
So that's when I finally started to get into real commercial assets that Aqua core is like corn bread and butter. And then eventually, realized that, there was an entire world called real estate that exists, that, is an industry that, buys and sells buildings. And so suddenly there was this complete transformative, awakening that says okay, I'm not actually just solving the problems of the building. I have to understand who are the users in the building? Why do they do what they do? How does real estate work? Why do people buy and sell buildings? And if I can answer those questions, then I can bring it all the way back to why are buildings inefficient in the first place?
and so Aqua cores journey from 2014 on. has really been this kind of discovering process that I call from the boiler room to the boardroom, just like going all the way from, your classic onsite building engineer, and their challenges all the way up to, the Blackstone's the Goldman Sachs of the world.
And trying to understand like, how does building efficiency, matter to institutional owners of real estate. so that's where Agricor is today, where we are serving predominantly these institutional owners of real estate to have a platform that they can oversee their day to day energy and maintenance operations, and get a holistic kind of single pane of glass to ensure that they are upholding a certain standard of quality at all of their sites.
and so that's a far cry from the days of little miss whiskey. And so it's been pretty fun to see that evolution and realize, the scale that is necessary to actually make an impact, across an industry.
James Dice: [00:10:55] Totally. Little miss whiskey. That's awesome. You guys have that as your, like one of your founding legends of the company.
That's really cool. Yeah.
Logan Soya: [00:11:03] Yeah. There's a few founding legends in there, hidden in there. I don't actually talk about that story very often. So I guess it's worth resurfacing that one for this occasion.
James Dice: [00:11:13] Totally. your employees that listen to this are going to be, wanting to know the full detail of that story.
I'm sure. So I do want to dive into the personas because I think what you've taught me so far about that as actually very unique. So I want to dive into that in a minute. but I want to ask this broader question before we dive in, which is, as you have gone on that journey and understood the industry, from the outside first and now from the inside, like why do you think buildings are behind.
And I like to say decades behind, other technology, including the telecom industry, but mostly
Logan Soya: [00:11:47] just like our personal,
James Dice: [00:11:49] like this stuff for carrying around every day. W why from your perspective are buildings so far behind.
Logan Soya: [00:11:55] let me start super broad, like super macro, and then I'll dig into CRE and kind of buildings in particular or like the real estate industry in particular.
so super macro trends are, if you think about the industries that got disrupted by technology first. it was information based industries, right? information based industries, Dan, the fastest path to disruption through technology because you can digitally encode whatever that work is in a faster, easier way.
So unfortunately, a lot of the other ones industry is out there in this world that are now going through transformation. There's a common trend, right? it's industries that have some sort of physical aspect to them or industries that have some sort of field aspect it. And so the macro things that are, that I am excited about that, bring us to where we are today, but we're lacking in the past are, Connectivity to the physical real estate is just really hard. And so that was really expensive in the old days. getting that information to the right people required mobility and that wasn't around in the old days. And then not to mention, buildings are so unique, right? there weren't data crunching.
Technologies available to create highly personalized experiences. and now you have like machine learning and AI and stuff like that to help tackle that. So I think there was a couple of more macro reasons that are worth acknowledging first, before we dig into the why does the real estate industry, have its challenges?
so that's step one. And then if you dig into real estate and real estate in particular, if you look at it at how it's categorized in wall street, like real estate is a sub sector of finance. And so real estate is really like an investment vehicle to buy and sell assets that yield a return.
So when you, contribute to your 401k Vanguard then takes that money and deploys it to investment managers. Those investment managers then take that money and, have to do something with it. And one of the things that they do with it is they buy and sell buildings.
And because a building is an appreciating asset that will gets you your 8% return so that you can retire when you're, when you're ripe and older or whatever. Yeah. hopefully still very active and still doing lots of cool stuff. And so now you need a nest egg to do that with right.
Anyways. So it's a weird thing because like how removed is that from how a building works? Think about that, right? like that entire ecosystem is out there. And, I can tell you that the experts that are really good at investing. I have no idea, like what is happening to make a building actually work.
and so there's so many layers of it abstraction from one, one role to the next, if that makes sense that, it's just created this kind of disconnect between, the buyers and sellers of buildings, the operators of buildings, the facility managers of buildings. and I think a lot of that is.
has helped to disrupt, the, willingness to invest in technology. Cause if you don't get it, obviously you're not going to be interested in it.
James Dice: [00:15:02] Absolutely. Yeah. That's fascinating. and I think that's a great segue into like how you guys approach the product and how you approach the market and developing core as a company.
so can you take us through how you've attacked that? And specifically how you've mapped out all those people. and the way, the reason I'm so interested in that, I kind of want to nerd out on this a little bit. It's because I'm in the middle of developing the nexus foundations course for this industry.
And I've structured basically this lesson as week one, don't even begin to start to
Logan Soya: [00:15:34] talk about
James Dice: [00:15:35] anything about technology until you understand. The people that are involved and how they view things. And not only how they view things, but what does their day look like? What, what are their pains?
What are their gains? So it sounds like you guys have gone deep into that. And so I'm happy to, I'm interested to hear you talk about it.
Logan Soya: [00:15:52] Sure. Yeah. look, I think, I think this is one man's, perception and we've, we've done a lot of research on this, but there's always room for more advancement and more learning.
for us, I think the reason why we got sat on this chorus was just, like I said, we really started at the boiler room and then we realized like, Oh wait, that person doesn't have budgeting authority. So who does those, and that kind of set us on this chain of events to go keep researching further and further down the food chain until you realize that, wow.
I didn't realize that my retirement plan is actually related to the building that serving. Right, Yeah. what we've done is we have a, there are certainly ownership groups and operators of buildings for the most part, right? People that buy and sell buildings and the people that operate those buildings on behalf of the owners.
that's a start. And then within those organizations, there's different personas and different personalities that care about different things. And building engineers are the most obvious onsite Person, who is committed to optimizing and maintaining the building systems, making sure that they're running well, making sure or that, tenants are not, calling in and complaining for a hot call or a cold call or something like that.
but, that building, yeah, engineer very often works alongside a property manager or a general manager as it's called in some industries. the property manager, the general manager really cares about, true management of the property, from a budgeting aspect, from a leasing aspect, from a tenant happiness aspect.
Right? And so those are two roles that really like work conjoining together at the building level. But once what happens when you break out of the building level and you want to start selling to multiple buildings, or you want to start having a product that can. Influenced multiple buildings over time.
and so that's when you break out of that and you realize that there are, asset managers out there, there are operating executives, and engineering leaders and property management leaders out there that you really have to ensure that you're catering to the types of reports, the types of budgeting tools that they need, the variance analysis that they go through.
an asset manager. Has a mandate to create value, for an investor. And what does that mean? That means that, it's the rent that they're getting from a building minus the expenses that it costs to run the building and that creates the, the income of the building.
And then if they can reduce the expenses by a couple of pennies, a square foot, then, that's when value is created and value is created. in a big magnitude actually, for every penny that they save in the building. And you know what you're going to tell call at building engineer as to why this tool is beneficial, is a very different narrative to what you have to tell the asset manager.
as you progress this kind of real estate journey, and I think, technologists that really love this industry and care about this industry, you need to really think thoroughly about who are the personas that they really want to, service, with their technology and what are the pain points that they really are trying to solve?
And if they can do that, and they can articulate that clearly then probably they can make a bit of a better use case in an industry that's otherwise, pretty fragmented and pretty hard to realize who does what With the exception of everybody watching your shows, because you've done so much efforts to try to make sense of the space.
James Dice: [00:19:15] Yeah, I'm just barely beginning to understand this whole stuff. Space. I'm wondering how you've mentioned three or four personas or
Logan Soya: [00:19:23] asset manager,
James Dice: [00:19:24] operator, engineer, property manager.
I'm wondering how you, zeroed in on those specifically when, like really, when you think about a building, there's also so many other people, people that have their hands in the pie, if you just think about like energy specifically there's energy managers, sustainability there's, obviously the controls play a huge part of it.
So the controls company, and we talk a lot about controls on this podcast. I feel like I'm barely beginning to scratch the surface there. You have design engineers, architects, like all the people that are just like. In it and maybe would need to use the tool as well. So how do you talk about like this, like second subset of personas?
Logan Soya: [00:20:04] Yeah. it's very challenging and, that's, something that's so interesting about real estate is like you really have a lot of specialists out there. And it's a fragmented market, where every single, Every single person has something to contribute. and so the question is like, how do you pick your battles?
Who do you choose to really spend your time solving those pain points for? So in our case, I think we just continued our journey of progressing up the food chain as it were to, Maybe due to my curiosity, partially due to try to understand how to create process that efficient and effective, for us to create a product that has value.
but, all of those problems are valuable problems that need to be solved in the industries. And it's a really interesting question to understand how could, data sets like Aqua Corp be beneficial to everybody. So awkward definitely follows like open source practices and API APIs.
we're very welcoming of partnerships because nobody's going to be able to solve every single use case out there in the industry. So I think you're right to observe that. Yeah. I heard somewhere that, a typical building has 50 to 70 service partners, To make the building run.
So it's like to your point, between the electrical contractors, the mechanical contractor, the landscaping, the cleaning crews. There's just a lot of people that make a building actually work successfully. Totally.
James Dice: [00:21:29] Cool. yeah, I'm again, just trying to learn myself. And obviously you created a couple of different dichotomies here.
There's like the portfolio and the site. so that like immediately separates, them into two groups. And I think that's at least helpful to start with, a lot of these contractors are not serving all the sites. Even if they're multiple sites, they're not serving the entire portfolio, that type of thing.
So cool. okay. Let's nerd out on the product a little bit. how have you gone from, that persona journey to developing out, Aqua core and. And maybe start with what it is for people to zoom in on the capabilities today.
Logan Soya: [00:22:06] yeah, sure. So I would say, in a nutshell, Aqua has become a smart building operations platform and, we are, enabling and focused on large portfolio and owners to deploy, smart monitoring too.
Save energy, automate tedious administrative tasks and ultimately run a more optimized portfolio is how I would describe it. so we, we sit at the intersection between these portfolio. overseers of buildings and the onsite teams. And, if I were to break down kind of the benefits of the product, we can, remotely collect, energy data, water, data, gas, data, BMS data, utility bill data, mash, a number of these different types of building telemetries together.
And our goal is to, automatically surface recommendations and projects, prescriptions, in a very clean tightly packaged, format that then, a layman on the non-energy expert. If it makes sense, can look at that project, say yes, that makes sense. I understand why I need to go.
Tweak a control sequence or what have you, let me go do that. And then, and then ultimately report that, to an executive team in a more aggregated fashion. So for the executive, the portfolio executive looking across dozens of buildings, they now have a single pane of glass to see all of the different projects that are getting executed across their portfolio.
Some of those projects are being surfaced automatically by Accor. Other projects are just capital projects that they've planned in their budgets, and they want to see how it is it's going. And if that, chiller replacement got executed on time and on budget, all of that information is now in a central repository.
I think a big pain point that we recognized was that these, these different kinds of capital projects and, and, And issues that we were detecting were never getting put into sort of a single repository that an executive could really appreciate. And so that's a big pain point that we've been focused on.
James Dice: [00:24:16] Yeah. Cool. and you and I have talked about this, but, and I've talked about this in the podcast to everyone, I guess, but my whole journey has gone through. doing energy audits, doing retrocommissioning projects, doing all these types of upgrade. Yeah. And energy conservation measure type of projects in the past and something that's always struck me as there really isn't like a single place that a portfolio has all of these projects.
there might be a spreadsheet somewhere and there might be two spreadsheets. One for operating budget and one for capital budget, but there hasn't been in my view and I've seen a lot of software demos there. Hasn't been like a software overlay that collects all this data and really brings together these portfolio level aspects and the site level aspects to like,
Logan Soya: [00:25:03] figure out how are we going to prioritize projects.
James Dice: [00:25:06] And it seems like you guys have prioritized that, because of that, noticing that
Logan Soya: [00:25:11] gap. Yeah. I would even, I would say that it was a little bit of our own pain point. and it's a pain point that I think many dashboards and monitoring tools have. If I'm an energy monitoring tool, my belief is, call it energy monitoring one dot.
Oh, the concept was that we would report this data on a dashboard. Somebody would look at that dashboard and then they would take an action. But I think we've realized that the world is more complicated than that. And and also, product design techniques have gotten better.
And so the question is okay, what could we do to. Help users go through the process of changing their behaviors in the way that we would want, them to take action based on the data that we're surfacing. So in the end of the day, if we can package it in a set of projects and, automate that kind of flow, then I think you have a higher likelihood of, individuals changing their behaviors.
And then not only that, right now, you can add cool tools like collaboration and chat. if James, half's had a commissioning project that he was working on with him, the client, he could have quickly done a quick chat, at, customer, Hey, Here's this extra piece of information I'm looking for.
Can you, before the next meeting, so that meeting can be more productive because you've already traded, a couple pieces of information and you're really, you're meeting with your client is roar about getting the impact done and, or closing the project out rather than, taking the next step.
If that makes sense. Cause you've already been able to take the next step asynchronously a couple of times in the product. Totally.
James Dice: [00:26:46] Yeah. it, and I've written about this a couple of times, I often call it the human in the loop problem. you have all of these different types of software that have come into this industry and in the past, and they've all surfaced potential actions, but I think that then the owner or the operator has to then figure out how do I get from this potential action to.
A resolved and verified, fixed issue or a completed project, in this case for using this vocabulary. But I, haven't seen a lot of tools, take the user of the product on that journey, and try to figure out how to streamline and automate that as much as possible. And in your case, like you just said, bring people together and let them interact around the issue.as well, just like when we used to. on Facebook or whatever anyone uses to interact with their friends. This is the same sort of workflow that we need to be interacting with around these issues in our buildings. Because what I've experienced is the more places you allow. So just say you're doing fault detection, for instance, the more places you allow that to break down in between the action. However many places there are, it's a breakdown, it will break down. And so I think it's about getting to action and getting to resolution and getting to verification as quick as possible. and I think that's awesome.
Logan Soya: [00:28:09] And maybe just to circle back on that note about having these very different personas that look at things very differently, that ability to interact over a common, Concept called a project in our case gives a property manager and a building engineer, an opportunity to actually collaborate together and work together to solve the problem. Whereas maybe in the past, Energy monitoring was such a foreign topic for a property manager that they were like, Oh, that's the building engineers problem.
I don't even know how that works. And I don't know how that connects to me paying the bills necessarily. I know it has something to do with it, but I'm not necessarily totally clear on it now. It's okay. my month and variance in my bill was off and I can chat with my building engineer and my building engineer has.
some data that backs up, like why it wasn't over or under this month. And because there was this project that was going on and so on and so forth. And I think that's really fascinating because now you're getting different disciplines talking about this conversation that has always been so like.
Encased in just a few select subject matter experts. And so hopefully, the goal is that, the smart building analytics capabilities of Agricor core can be perceived as not just beneficial for, the building engineer and the energy of the building, but really smart building analytics can be.
Beneficial to all aspects of running a building, Even if it's to do with your budgets or even if it's to do with just eliminating some mundane process like accruals and reporting to your accounting team. and if we can start there, that's a very easy starting point that people can feel like their life is a little bit easier before we get to the really deep, really extensive retrofitting of, your onsite equipment and whatnot.
Totally
James Dice: [00:30:00] knocking down silos. I love it.
Logan Soya: [00:30:02] I've asked man. It's, it's not easy. It's not as easy as it sounds, on a podcast, but, you just gotta take it one step at a time.
James Dice: [00:30:12] I love it. And so it sounds like the projects piece is a new feature that you're launching.
probably by the time this podcast comes out, you guys will have some sort of announcement. and we didn't do that on purpose. It was just the timing was it happened that way, but can you talk about the launch of this, uh, and kind of what you're excited about with that?
Logan Soya: [00:30:32] Yeah, really excited. for us, I think it's going to be a cornerstone opportunity for, users of our product to really have, we were talking about this central repository that can, show, the hard work that the onsite engineering teams are doing day in and day out in a way that has not been.
Illuminated in the past, right? you didn't quite realize all of these things that are happening to keep your building safe, to keep your building running well, to keep, your building successful. from my perspective, it's an extremely exciting announcement for us. We're really happy to launch it.
we've already, seen a number of beta users, really enjoying, the opportunity to use the projects platform. it really creates a sort of a two way collaborative, A street between folio executives and onsite building engineers that is easy to maintain. So you don't have to, if you're overseeing 20, 30 buildings, it's much easier now to go see and interact with your onsite teams.
number one, then number two, for each of these projects, one of the things that we noticed is that, executives are always just looking for that one-page cut sheet or just some really simple sort of explanation as to what's the status of this project and why does it matter?
And so we've really put a lot of effort in creating sort of a one-click generation, right? if you're a building engineer, You're probably not, looking to spend hours of time making the perfect presentation as to why you did this thing. so if we can take that burden off of you and, make sure that your hard work is done successfully, then, then I think that's another kind of silo, broken, in terms of making people interact and appreciate the value of.
The, the facility systems that maintain and keep the building running.
James Dice: [00:32:21] Cool. Yeah, definitely. I want to ask also about the product itself and get a little bit more nerdy if you're cool with that, it sounds like the projects is like the, kind of the culmination of, you got the data in, and then you're getting data in from, like you said, utility bills.
interval meters. and you guys have your own, you do your own hardware there. but then you're also connecting to the building automation system as well. So projects are the culmination of getting all that data together, getting it all into one place, normalize it.
And then you have different types of analytics that you're using to come up with these projects. Can you explain how that process has gone
Logan Soya: [00:33:02] Yeah, sure. So high level, customers can get started at whatever level of depth of data that they would like. so Aqua core is designed that you could start with basically getting utility bills in first, then advancing to metering data or sub-metering data.
Then eventually getting to much more complex data sets like sensors and backnet systems and whatnot. but in the end of the day, What ACA Corp does, is it as you've described sucks in all of that data into a normalized, dataset and, what we've really spent a lot of time on is thinking about how to run predictive analytics on that data.
to do a lot of the same things that I think traditional FTD analytics does. but, with a wider range, because we have lots of different sets of data. So using, bill data, your tariff structure and, and your utility metering data to create better optimal start algorithm that factors in your tariff schedule, I think is, is an interesting example, right?
And so we have a, basically a library and that library grows. Yeah. And clients basically can choose, They can choose to start with a very basic data set that has a basic library of 10 or 20 best practices of optimal start, optimal stop, or they can get into much more complex, analytics around optimizing your cooling tower for outdoor air, et cetera.
so it's really up to the user to decide what degree of sophistication they're looking for. And that gives. Clients and opportunity to have a single platform that can grow with them as they get more mature, with their own sort of, choices, to roll out across a single building or a portfolio.
but all of it is like the same layer, right? The idea is like it's one layer that is driving these detectors, that surface projects, and it all surfaces to the same. and place, which is this kind of project repository. And so it creates consistency across a user's experience rather than needing to say, Oh, I have one tool for bill analytics and one tool for water leak, detection, analytics, and one tool for HVAC analytics, which I think has always been a pain point that we've heard in the market, with our customers.
James Dice: [00:35:17] Yeah. even just like the experts of the industry, they always draw this line between. Like whole building data and system data. And I've been trying to knock that down, when I worked at right, well, I was trying to knock that down in the national lab system. And now I'm just just saying, it's all one bill.
It's just, you're getting data from different end uses.
Logan Soya: [00:35:36] And it
James Dice: [00:35:36] doesn't really matter where that data comes from. It just needs it's to be in the same place. And then now we can use all of the data to provide different capabilities and I think, yeah. One of the pains I've always had with people drawing that line between and meter data and system data.
Is that it makes, I think it makes the market downplay and downplay what you can do with meter data. Cause you can do so much with just utility bills. First of all. And I think a lot of people overlook and they don't realize that they don't need to start out by getting so complicated.
Logan Soya: [00:36:09] So true so much
James Dice: [00:36:10] with their meter data. And then even if you just add your 15 minute meter data, now you're like enabling all of the stuff like you just said, optimal Starbucks
Logan Soya: [00:36:19] will stop. Like
James Dice: [00:36:20] you can do so much more with that before you even get into complications. And this is like one of my rants
Logan Soya: [00:36:26] it's yeah,
James Dice: [00:36:27] You can do so much with meter data.
If you're listening to this, like you don't have to worry about backnet and haystack, if you're just starting out on the energy management journey, don't even
Logan Soya: [00:36:37] worry about
James Dice: [00:36:37] it. Yeah. Just connect your meter. you can capture a lot of savings, things like that.
Logan Soya: [00:36:42] it's so cheap.
It's so easy, so much faster, so much better. 80% of our clients are predominantly focused on this meter data and build data. And if you don't have the basic blocking and tackling, and you don't know that your onsite teams are just taking those basic steps, to optimize, just the high level stuff.
Then, just please do your thing. Silva favor. Don't worry about all those other technologies out there. Just get, centralized bill management and centralized interval data. If you start there. You will automatically see an incredible boost in your overall knowledge of your portfolio energy perspective, and you will see the real results, right?
like with interval data, that's the first layer of data that you can really specific things to do. You're building to make it better. build data is great because it can indicate to you leaders and laggards across your portfolio and give you some benchmarking as to where to look. But like interval data.
Now you're talking about very discreet things that you can change in your building that will actually take you on that ESG journey or take you on that energy efficiency journey, that yields outcomes and results. and that's, with the advancement of interval data coming from utility API APIs, right?
There are many buildings in the United States today that are eligible for software only. Interval data. And if you can just sign up for Aqua Corp, take a trial, just do the interval data. We'll help you get set up with those utility interval data inputs. And even if that's just going to eliminate and educate you, do you have a better understanding of how to take action?
that's such a huge, huge difference from not knowing, even a basic. just not knowing, like what's the status of your energy spend and is it good or bad? Totally.
James Dice: [00:38:31] Yeah. I don't know, I'll get off my soap box now.
Logan Soya: [00:38:35] I feel like I took the, I took on the soup.
James Dice: [00:38:37] There you go. Yeah. I'm happy. I'm happy that other people are seeing that light and you guys have definitely given me a lot of feedback. Good feedback on the energy management hierarchy of needs. So if anyone wants to dig deeper into that concept, the build data and the meter data is at the base of the hierarchy, in case anyone's wondering, so they can dig deeper into that.
We'll put that in the show notes. All right. Let's move on from the product. and talk about the world we're living in right now. So it's August, I'm in the U S but the U S is still struggling with this a pandemic. And so I'm wondering like what your outlook is and what you're seeing with your clients as far as the real estate world and, like what that for your country.Yeah.
Logan Soya: [00:39:19] I think that, look the real estate world. I think everybody is acknowledged just that it is an industry that is most prime to be effected by what's going on with COVID both in the short term and longterm, it's obviously very variant by asset type. hospitality, retail, obviously getting hit the hardest, data centers probably doing pretty well right now.
So I think you really have to take that under consideration in OnCourse case. I think there's a couple of things that we've noticed when COBIT first happened. It was actually, there was a silver lining in the sense that it was, we saw an immediate jump in product usage because, clients that had no access to interval data, Had to wait until the next bill came out to see what was going on from an energy perspective.
how we reacted, how Aqua Corp reacted is. We actually created a series of custom reports that we would release on a weekly basis to our clients. Where what we would do is we would give them benchmarking data to benchmark, for example, how, is their building performing relative to their baseline versus the Atlanta Metro area.
And so that we would say Oh, the Atlanta Metro area on average is 28% lower than their baseline. You're at like 42%. This might be an opportunity for you to reach out to this particular engineering team and ask what were the things that they change. And so you could benefit from that across your portfolio.
And so perfect example of what we just talked about. So I think a lot of the prop tech world, sorry to interrupt you by the way. But a lot of the prop tech world is out there saying we have to get occupancy data on every space and then we can normalize for occupancy. And what you've just said is like, all you have is one 15 minute meter at a bunch of buildings, And then you're able to say, what was my drop.
James Dice: [00:41:08] I don't even care like what the occupancy data is. We know that occupancy has dropped, What you're able to say is before and after, and then compare that before and after to all these other buildings that are on average. observed the same drop in occupancy and that's just one piece of data,
Logan Soya: [00:41:23] That's right. And look, like every building is unique. tenants are different building, HVAC systems are different. I trust that, my customers know their buildings and know how to take that information, but having timely information. Means the world for them.
And so for us, we actually saw an increase in engagement because of that. And I think overarching, if you zoom out, definitely, from a real estate strategy, managing your expenses and thinking about how to manage expenses wisely is going to be a top priority for our clients, into the future until we see sort of economic recovery.
So I think that, One thing that I'm really pleased by is that I do think that, folks are appreciating, what remote monitoring benefits can provide. it was thrusted into their purview in a way that I think maybe has helped accelerate, appreciation for the benefit of the technology.
Um, you know, look, I think. I think all businesses are probably going to struggle to make, business decisions, smart business decisions in a changing world. it's definitely not, business as usual. And I think it's going to be incumbent on us to tell a very clear and crystallized story as to what are some specific reasons why technology should be a top investment, especially energy or smart building technology to help them, rethink their business models, in a post COVID world.
and so I'm optimistic. acknowledging that, these challenges are real for our customers to rethink their industry in some
James Dice: [00:42:57] cases. Cool. All right. Fair enough. okay, so back to AHCA core, as you think about the release happening right now, what are you excited about the next six months to a year? with the product and with the company. Yeah,
Logan Soya: [00:43:11] I think, I'm very excited is the immediate reaction. I think that, Aqua Corp has come a long way and the industry has come a long way to realizing the benefits to the types of technologies that are out there. I also think the PropTech industry has come a long way to realizing that we don't all have to think of ourselves as competitors to one another, that there is an ecosystem out here that we can all work together and find out.
what are the strengths and weaknesses of the different vendors and find better paths to partnerships and integrations. so I think looking out into a year from now, I think Aqua cores depth of analytical capability will be increasing substantially. I'm excited to, also look into partnerships and integrations that can allow, Other technology providers, opportunities to really, access the active user base that Accor has because they are super cool things that are out there that, we went through this hard journey of learning customer personas and learning the industry.
So is there a way that we could help accelerate, really cool energy efficiency technology out there to fast track some of that, and we're very receptive to that type of thinking, right? Like I think that's only going to make this industry very much better.
so I think, in the next year of Accor, Encore is going to really start to come into a sort of a it's next generation of how it wants to take advantage of the data it's collecting and yeah. Making it more actionable and more predictive for its customers. And then I think, that's one theme and then the other theme is just, I'm looking for opportunities to really create yeah.
An ecosystem that, that everybody can benefit from both our customers, other vendors, other makers of energy efficiency related or smart building related tools. Like how can we start to bring this together in a more integrated fashion that in other industries that I don't think yet has happened in full force yet in our industry.
James Dice: [00:45:12] Cool. Love it. okay. One final question. I've been thinking a lot about this question and I just started asking it on the podcast. So that you'll be the second or third to answer it. you guys have a great team, right? So how are you, um, attracting talent in the smart building spaces are a problem that I've perceived to be difficult.
I've tried to hire. And the, like in the past six months tried to hire people, not for nexus, but when I was at Enro and it's a difficult proposition because it's very specific, industry, very niche industry, very specific skillset needed to understand all the stuff we've been talking about so far.
but then it's also, like we said, there's that gap between where our industry is technology-wise and where other industries are. And. What I perceived for a company like yours is it seems like there could be a difficulty with convincing them to tackle this problem. And so how do you think about that?and how do you think about hiring and
Logan Soya: [00:46:10] attracting talent to this space? yeah. Good question. I think if you're not careful, it is, it can be a big challenge, right? You definitely have to set your sights high. And I think first and foremost, I think others have mentioned this, having a clear mission and a clear sort of a mission driven culture, if that makes sense is really important, right?
That allows you to surface the folks that are. Wanting to, work, at a place that has a deeper philosophy. and so for us, our mission statement is to create global impact by connecting people to buildings. And so for us, I hope that, we can inspire.
people that are maybe not newcomers to the industry to realize that there is real global impact that can be created, in our, the space. And, and I think that's step one. Step two is if you're looking for a hard technical problem to solve, like combining, legacy systems, smart machine learning analytics, Elegant user interfaces to address, uh, users that may not have that much knowledge of how their building works is a very hard problem.
so I think, it's about, whether you're passionate in energy and climate change, whether you are passionate in real estate, whether you're passionate in hard technology. I think those are the dimensions that we look for. And I think, the rest is on us to help tell the story and the narrative of where Accor is going in a way that gets people excited about it.
there's definitely a lot of cool things on the horizon. I think it all starts with the culture and I think it's all starts with that root mission that you have to make sure you get right. And if you can get that right. And I think you can attract some pretty cool people.
James Dice: [00:47:51] Yeah. the problems we're solving, it might seem like we're solving them in one building or one portfolio, but this is a global problem that we're solving. And that's what, that's a great thing to start with. and just the second piece too, is it's so juicy, like solving this problem is just so thick and it's endlessly entertaining to me, all the different layers of the problem.
I think that's what we need to attract is people that like that, if you're attracted to that and you want to devote your career to that, like this is the place to do it. I love it. Cool.
Logan Soya: [00:48:24] Thanks. Thanks for coming on the show. Yeah. Thank you for having me, really loved the stuff you're doing and definitely, look forward to, being, as helpful as I can.
James Dice: [00:48:33] Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Logan. And talk to you later.
Alright, friends. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Nexus podcast. For more episodes like this and to get the weekly Nexus newsletter, please subscribe at nexus.substack.com. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. As always, please reach out on LinkedIn with any thoughts on this episode.
I'd love to hear from you. Have a great day.
Happy Thursday!
Welcome to this week’s deep dive exclusively for Nexus Pro members. It’s an honor to have you here. This deep dive is a follow up to my recent podcast conversation with Logan Soya, CEO of Aquicore. I learned a lot from this conversation and want to share my takeaways and the full transcript with you below.
In case you missed it in your inbox, you can find the audio or video here:
Nexus site | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Add to other podcast apps
Enjoy!
—James
Aquicore is interesting to me because, like Logan said in their mission statement, they’ve built the product around the core user personas of the real estate organization. For software people, that might sound like the most basic thing to point out. What a novel idea!!! But bear with me… I think it’s actually quite rare in the overlay world.
I think a lot of overlays have been built with an extremely technical user in mind. And while that user might be an important part of the second tier of users for the organization, but they’re not the primary tier (owners, operators, and managers) of the asset.
For example, when I was an energy engineer doing retro-commissioning projects, I used overlays that were great ***for me*** because they replaced the analysis I was previously doing in excel and made it continuous. However, those great-for-me overlays had very little chance of becoming sticky and engrained in my clients’ operating processes because it wasn’t built for any of them.
One argument you could make here is that for the overlay software to be “THE” overlay, it must include an extension into the lives of the primary users of the building. I’d also go further and say that in order to be called a “platform”, a product must serve the analytics to all the users of the platform in a way that is useful to them. It’s all the same data… why not?
Assuming that argument is correct, technical-first overlays would need to extend from the technical to the non-technical user. That strikes me as a big leap. But if you flip that around, like Aquicore is doing, and start with the non-technical user and then extend to the others, it seems much easier.
Obviously, super-technical overlays could remain in their silo and simply serve analytics results to a more comprehensive overlay platform. I think we’ll see that scenario play out too, like we are with CopperTree serving analytical results to the Willow digital twin for example.
Perhaps these are the three different growth patterns of the overlay as it extends beyond a single user base. Exciting times ahead (if you’re an overlay nerd).
My highlights:
I definitely want to hear your thoughts on this episode.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hello, friends. Welcome to Nexus, a smart buildings technology podcast for smart humans. I'm your host, James Dice. If we haven't met before, I write a weekly newsletter on the same topic. It's also called Nexus. Each week I share what I've learned, my opinions, and what I'm excited about in the quickly evolving world of intelligent buildings. Readers have called Nexus the best way to stay up to date on the future of this industry without all the marketing fluff. You can check it out and subscribe at nexus.substack.com or click the link in the show notes.
Since starting the Nexus newsletter, many of you have reached out to me wanting to talk shop, and we have. After a few weeks of those wonderful conversations, I realized I needed to record and share them with our growing community. So here we are. The Nexus podcast is born. This is our chance to explore and learn with the brightest in our industry together.
Episode 18 is a conversation with Logan Sawyer, founder and CEO of Agricor. We unpacked our cores approach to smart buildings, which is rooted in solving the problems of a few core user types in the real estate industry. Logan gave us answer to why building tech is 20 years behind the tech and our personal lives and his journey from the telecom industry to founding Aqua core in order to do something about that, we also went on a bit of a rant together on the energy management hierarchy of needs, which was fun.
Finally at Logan introduced a new feature that his team just announced. It's called projects. I love the projects concept and think it fills a key gap in the energy management process. This episode of the podcast is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the nexus pro membership community.
You can find info on how to join and support the podcast at dot com. You also find the show notes, which has links to Logan's LinkedIn page. Oh, and by the way, if you take a look at your podcast feed and you're missing some episodes, that's because those episodes are exclusive to members of nexus pro.
Sign up for a free membership to get your personal podcast feed with access to all the episodes without further ado, please enjoy episode 18.
alright. Hello, Logan. Welcome to the nexus podcast. That's great to have you. Can you introduce yourself for
Logan Soya: [00:02:15] the audience, James? Great to be here. so my name's Logan Sawyer. I am the founder and CEO of aquifer.
James Dice: [00:02:23] All right. can you take us through what is Encore and, maybe start at the beginning, you're a founder of it. or the founder, what, what led you to start it and, what's your journey to get to where chorus today? Sure.
Logan Soya: [00:02:36] Yeah. So like any story like this, it is quite a journey. So I'll see, let me see where I should start and how I can go, to where we are today.
my origin story is, I'm a physics student by training, by academic training. I got into the telecom space. And my first professional career prior to Encore was really in the telecom space, deploying large multimillion dollar operation centers for at and T and Verizon and their international counterparts.
So that was my professional skillset. over time, I was always passionate about energy, always passionate about, what I call like hard, durable value creation, if that makes sense. So really just, I actually almost tried to do a PhD in like alternative. Almost borderline crazy cold fusion energy or something like that.
Okay. Then I didn't get a, eventually I guess I got a letter as I was talking with the, the sponsor of that, research that his program was getting shut down. So it shows you how crazy I was trying to push the limit at one point. anyways, was. lucky enough to have a pretty fun run.
As a telecom engineer wanted to go further, had an intrepreneurial bug raised a couple million bucks to try to, start some internal communications initiatives, but ultimately found myself dissatisfied. with, that, sort of culture, just, like I think, had too much of an itch to try to make a difference.
and we didn't want to follow the rules if that makes sense. And so did my MBA at Georgetown. my MBA at Georgetown is really where our cohort started. I was searching for something that was a Venn diagram between what I knew how to do professionally and what I was personally passionate about and was fortunate enough to, get more and more into, to this idea of, energy monitoring, smart home fools, had a kind of a knack and an interest for it.
And, yeah, and had some entrepreneurial classes at my Georgetown MBA, which I will give them credit to that really pushed me, out of my comfort zone to actually try to create a business plan for, the early version of Aqua Corp and, and ultimately just grew fascinated by the wastefulness of buildings, the inefficiency of buildings, the lack of communications technologies.
I think in particular, the thing that struck me, he was, I was working in the telecom world where, 99.99% uptime is required in order to have our cell phones work. And so what I was doing is I was deploying network, monitoring systems to oversee thousands of devices that make our cell phone communications work and monitoring thousands of points of data across thousands of pieces of equipment.
And then ultimately creating SLS that would drive, a truck to get, Deployed to go repair a cell phone tower or a piece of equipment on a cell phone tower. If something went wrong, my favorite example is like I was working on a, company in Bahrain and, I had a monitoring system that I deployed.
So when the, ship dropped anchor cut the fiber optic cable going from Dubai to India, like it was like my monitoring screen that would like, that I designed that would announced that dispatch a bunch of things, people to go fix the cable so that, internet could be, you repaired between countries or something like that.
And so that was like a super fun. and then realizing that real buildings just did not have any of that connectivity. And so, as a result, buildings were extremely inefficient, extremely wasteful. And this idea that if I, if Agricor a good monitoring solution could be in every building across the United States would say $40 billion a year felt like a big, durable, hard problem.
That was interesting and exciting for me to try to tackle. So I came at this industry having no experience in real estate, no experience in the built environment. just more of an it background than anything else. And then, a deep curiosity, for, for why things are not working as I would hope they would be.
James Dice: [00:06:38] That's fascinating. So you have a very similar story to start off this episode as a Prabhu. from facilities who like he had a very similar background and telecom industry, which I know you had told me that before last time we talked and it just didn't Dawn on me that you were used to things being so connected and uptime and connectedness being such a big thing.
And then you just look at buildings and you're like, Oh, there's this huge gap
Logan Soya: [00:07:07] here. As
James Dice: [00:07:09] we ask you what happened? Okay.
Logan Soya: [00:07:11] I remember my first, so I'm credit to Georgetown's MBA program and entrepreneurial program. So my professor really pushed me to do some onsite interviews and here I was pretending to know what I was talking about doing my first sort of a site visit it's with like facility guys and Oh, so what does this do?
Oh, that's a switch gear, and just like really. Deep acknowledgment of the level of just spreadsheet driven or not even spreadsheet just rolled up diagrams in a basement type. Situation that so many buildings still live in today and just a profound appreciation. So my journey was really starting at the boiler room and just like wanting to know those users, wanting to understand why, their jobs are so hard and could communication and telecommunication help make those jobs a little bit easier was the starting point.
Got it.
James Dice: [00:08:02] All right. so that's what kind of led you into the building's world. So give us the history of Encore after the Georgetown MBA program.
Logan Soya: [00:08:11] Yeah. Fortunately managed to raise a small bit of capital to get my start and choose not to pursue, anything else outside of my MBA. went full fledged into Aqua Corp, probably weeks into my MBA, frankly.
and then, eventually actually started in like really granular circuit level monitoring. My very first, sort of trial, location was a bar called little miss whiskeys where I did like circuit level metering. And, I remember that eventually my product got unplugged because the slushie machine was more important than, my energy monitoring tool for the restaurant.
So really just like basic stuff in the early days, but lots of crazy fun, just entrepreneurial stories. If that makes sense. Moving forward realizing that, circuit level metering was quite challenging, quite hard to deploy a value there wasn't quite as meaningful, eventually worked my way upstream to utility level, metering, and realizing that there's just more value to be created for larger assets.
So that's when I finally started to get into real commercial assets that Aqua core is like corn bread and butter. And then eventually, realized that, there was an entire world called real estate that exists, that, is an industry that, buys and sells buildings. And so suddenly there was this complete transformative, awakening that says okay, I'm not actually just solving the problems of the building. I have to understand who are the users in the building? Why do they do what they do? How does real estate work? Why do people buy and sell buildings? And if I can answer those questions, then I can bring it all the way back to why are buildings inefficient in the first place?
and so Aqua cores journey from 2014 on. has really been this kind of discovering process that I call from the boiler room to the boardroom, just like going all the way from, your classic onsite building engineer, and their challenges all the way up to, the Blackstone's the Goldman Sachs of the world.
And trying to understand like, how does building efficiency, matter to institutional owners of real estate. so that's where Agricor is today, where we are serving predominantly these institutional owners of real estate to have a platform that they can oversee their day to day energy and maintenance operations, and get a holistic kind of single pane of glass to ensure that they are upholding a certain standard of quality at all of their sites.
and so that's a far cry from the days of little miss whiskey. And so it's been pretty fun to see that evolution and realize, the scale that is necessary to actually make an impact, across an industry.
James Dice: [00:10:55] Totally. Little miss whiskey. That's awesome. You guys have that as your, like one of your founding legends of the company.
That's really cool. Yeah.
Logan Soya: [00:11:03] Yeah. There's a few founding legends in there, hidden in there. I don't actually talk about that story very often. So I guess it's worth resurfacing that one for this occasion.
James Dice: [00:11:13] Totally. your employees that listen to this are going to be, wanting to know the full detail of that story.
I'm sure. So I do want to dive into the personas because I think what you've taught me so far about that as actually very unique. So I want to dive into that in a minute. but I want to ask this broader question before we dive in, which is, as you have gone on that journey and understood the industry, from the outside first and now from the inside, like why do you think buildings are behind.
And I like to say decades behind, other technology, including the telecom industry, but mostly
Logan Soya: [00:11:47] just like our personal,
James Dice: [00:11:49] like this stuff for carrying around every day. W why from your perspective are buildings so far behind.
Logan Soya: [00:11:55] let me start super broad, like super macro, and then I'll dig into CRE and kind of buildings in particular or like the real estate industry in particular.
so super macro trends are, if you think about the industries that got disrupted by technology first. it was information based industries, right? information based industries, Dan, the fastest path to disruption through technology because you can digitally encode whatever that work is in a faster, easier way.
So unfortunately, a lot of the other ones industry is out there in this world that are now going through transformation. There's a common trend, right? it's industries that have some sort of physical aspect to them or industries that have some sort of field aspect it. And so the macro things that are, that I am excited about that, bring us to where we are today, but we're lacking in the past are, Connectivity to the physical real estate is just really hard. And so that was really expensive in the old days. getting that information to the right people required mobility and that wasn't around in the old days. And then not to mention, buildings are so unique, right? there weren't data crunching.
Technologies available to create highly personalized experiences. and now you have like machine learning and AI and stuff like that to help tackle that. So I think there was a couple of more macro reasons that are worth acknowledging first, before we dig into the why does the real estate industry, have its challenges?
so that's step one. And then if you dig into real estate and real estate in particular, if you look at it at how it's categorized in wall street, like real estate is a sub sector of finance. And so real estate is really like an investment vehicle to buy and sell assets that yield a return.
So when you, contribute to your 401k Vanguard then takes that money and deploys it to investment managers. Those investment managers then take that money and, have to do something with it. And one of the things that they do with it is they buy and sell buildings.
And because a building is an appreciating asset that will gets you your 8% return so that you can retire when you're, when you're ripe and older or whatever. Yeah. hopefully still very active and still doing lots of cool stuff. And so now you need a nest egg to do that with right.
Anyways. So it's a weird thing because like how removed is that from how a building works? Think about that, right? like that entire ecosystem is out there. And, I can tell you that the experts that are really good at investing. I have no idea, like what is happening to make a building actually work.
and so there's so many layers of it abstraction from one, one role to the next, if that makes sense that, it's just created this kind of disconnect between, the buyers and sellers of buildings, the operators of buildings, the facility managers of buildings. and I think a lot of that is.
has helped to disrupt, the, willingness to invest in technology. Cause if you don't get it, obviously you're not going to be interested in it.
James Dice: [00:15:02] Absolutely. Yeah. That's fascinating. and I think that's a great segue into like how you guys approach the product and how you approach the market and developing core as a company.
so can you take us through how you've attacked that? And specifically how you've mapped out all those people. and the way, the reason I'm so interested in that, I kind of want to nerd out on this a little bit. It's because I'm in the middle of developing the nexus foundations course for this industry.
And I've structured basically this lesson as week one, don't even begin to start to
Logan Soya: [00:15:34] talk about
James Dice: [00:15:35] anything about technology until you understand. The people that are involved and how they view things. And not only how they view things, but what does their day look like? What, what are their pains?
What are their gains? So it sounds like you guys have gone deep into that. And so I'm happy to, I'm interested to hear you talk about it.
Logan Soya: [00:15:52] Sure. Yeah. look, I think, I think this is one man's, perception and we've, we've done a lot of research on this, but there's always room for more advancement and more learning.
for us, I think the reason why we got sat on this chorus was just, like I said, we really started at the boiler room and then we realized like, Oh wait, that person doesn't have budgeting authority. So who does those, and that kind of set us on this chain of events to go keep researching further and further down the food chain until you realize that, wow.
I didn't realize that my retirement plan is actually related to the building that serving. Right, Yeah. what we've done is we have a, there are certainly ownership groups and operators of buildings for the most part, right? People that buy and sell buildings and the people that operate those buildings on behalf of the owners.
that's a start. And then within those organizations, there's different personas and different personalities that care about different things. And building engineers are the most obvious onsite Person, who is committed to optimizing and maintaining the building systems, making sure that they're running well, making sure or that, tenants are not, calling in and complaining for a hot call or a cold call or something like that.
but, that building, yeah, engineer very often works alongside a property manager or a general manager as it's called in some industries. the property manager, the general manager really cares about, true management of the property, from a budgeting aspect, from a leasing aspect, from a tenant happiness aspect.
Right? And so those are two roles that really like work conjoining together at the building level. But once what happens when you break out of the building level and you want to start selling to multiple buildings, or you want to start having a product that can. Influenced multiple buildings over time.
and so that's when you break out of that and you realize that there are, asset managers out there, there are operating executives, and engineering leaders and property management leaders out there that you really have to ensure that you're catering to the types of reports, the types of budgeting tools that they need, the variance analysis that they go through.
an asset manager. Has a mandate to create value, for an investor. And what does that mean? That means that, it's the rent that they're getting from a building minus the expenses that it costs to run the building and that creates the, the income of the building.
And then if they can reduce the expenses by a couple of pennies, a square foot, then, that's when value is created and value is created. in a big magnitude actually, for every penny that they save in the building. And you know what you're going to tell call at building engineer as to why this tool is beneficial, is a very different narrative to what you have to tell the asset manager.
as you progress this kind of real estate journey, and I think, technologists that really love this industry and care about this industry, you need to really think thoroughly about who are the personas that they really want to, service, with their technology and what are the pain points that they really are trying to solve?
And if they can do that, and they can articulate that clearly then probably they can make a bit of a better use case in an industry that's otherwise, pretty fragmented and pretty hard to realize who does what With the exception of everybody watching your shows, because you've done so much efforts to try to make sense of the space.
James Dice: [00:19:15] Yeah, I'm just barely beginning to understand this whole stuff. Space. I'm wondering how you've mentioned three or four personas or
Logan Soya: [00:19:23] asset manager,
James Dice: [00:19:24] operator, engineer, property manager.
I'm wondering how you, zeroed in on those specifically when, like really, when you think about a building, there's also so many other people, people that have their hands in the pie, if you just think about like energy specifically there's energy managers, sustainability there's, obviously the controls play a huge part of it.
So the controls company, and we talk a lot about controls on this podcast. I feel like I'm barely beginning to scratch the surface there. You have design engineers, architects, like all the people that are just like. In it and maybe would need to use the tool as well. So how do you talk about like this, like second subset of personas?
Logan Soya: [00:20:04] Yeah. it's very challenging and, that's, something that's so interesting about real estate is like you really have a lot of specialists out there. And it's a fragmented market, where every single, Every single person has something to contribute. and so the question is like, how do you pick your battles?
Who do you choose to really spend your time solving those pain points for? So in our case, I think we just continued our journey of progressing up the food chain as it were to, Maybe due to my curiosity, partially due to try to understand how to create process that efficient and effective, for us to create a product that has value.
but, all of those problems are valuable problems that need to be solved in the industries. And it's a really interesting question to understand how could, data sets like Aqua Corp be beneficial to everybody. So awkward definitely follows like open source practices and API APIs.
we're very welcoming of partnerships because nobody's going to be able to solve every single use case out there in the industry. So I think you're right to observe that. Yeah. I heard somewhere that, a typical building has 50 to 70 service partners, To make the building run.
So it's like to your point, between the electrical contractors, the mechanical contractor, the landscaping, the cleaning crews. There's just a lot of people that make a building actually work successfully. Totally.
James Dice: [00:21:29] Cool. yeah, I'm again, just trying to learn myself. And obviously you created a couple of different dichotomies here.
There's like the portfolio and the site. so that like immediately separates, them into two groups. And I think that's at least helpful to start with, a lot of these contractors are not serving all the sites. Even if they're multiple sites, they're not serving the entire portfolio, that type of thing.
So cool. okay. Let's nerd out on the product a little bit. how have you gone from, that persona journey to developing out, Aqua core and. And maybe start with what it is for people to zoom in on the capabilities today.
Logan Soya: [00:22:06] yeah, sure. So I would say, in a nutshell, Aqua has become a smart building operations platform and, we are, enabling and focused on large portfolio and owners to deploy, smart monitoring too.
Save energy, automate tedious administrative tasks and ultimately run a more optimized portfolio is how I would describe it. so we, we sit at the intersection between these portfolio. overseers of buildings and the onsite teams. And, if I were to break down kind of the benefits of the product, we can, remotely collect, energy data, water, data, gas, data, BMS data, utility bill data, mash, a number of these different types of building telemetries together.
And our goal is to, automatically surface recommendations and projects, prescriptions, in a very clean tightly packaged, format that then, a layman on the non-energy expert. If it makes sense, can look at that project, say yes, that makes sense. I understand why I need to go.
Tweak a control sequence or what have you, let me go do that. And then, and then ultimately report that, to an executive team in a more aggregated fashion. So for the executive, the portfolio executive looking across dozens of buildings, they now have a single pane of glass to see all of the different projects that are getting executed across their portfolio.
Some of those projects are being surfaced automatically by Accor. Other projects are just capital projects that they've planned in their budgets, and they want to see how it is it's going. And if that, chiller replacement got executed on time and on budget, all of that information is now in a central repository.
I think a big pain point that we recognized was that these, these different kinds of capital projects and, and, And issues that we were detecting were never getting put into sort of a single repository that an executive could really appreciate. And so that's a big pain point that we've been focused on.
James Dice: [00:24:16] Yeah. Cool. and you and I have talked about this, but, and I've talked about this in the podcast to everyone, I guess, but my whole journey has gone through. doing energy audits, doing retrocommissioning projects, doing all these types of upgrade. Yeah. And energy conservation measure type of projects in the past and something that's always struck me as there really isn't like a single place that a portfolio has all of these projects.
there might be a spreadsheet somewhere and there might be two spreadsheets. One for operating budget and one for capital budget, but there hasn't been in my view and I've seen a lot of software demos there. Hasn't been like a software overlay that collects all this data and really brings together these portfolio level aspects and the site level aspects to like,
Logan Soya: [00:25:03] figure out how are we going to prioritize projects.
James Dice: [00:25:06] And it seems like you guys have prioritized that, because of that, noticing that
Logan Soya: [00:25:11] gap. Yeah. I would even, I would say that it was a little bit of our own pain point. and it's a pain point that I think many dashboards and monitoring tools have. If I'm an energy monitoring tool, my belief is, call it energy monitoring one dot.
Oh, the concept was that we would report this data on a dashboard. Somebody would look at that dashboard and then they would take an action. But I think we've realized that the world is more complicated than that. And and also, product design techniques have gotten better.
And so the question is okay, what could we do to. Help users go through the process of changing their behaviors in the way that we would want, them to take action based on the data that we're surfacing. So in the end of the day, if we can package it in a set of projects and, automate that kind of flow, then I think you have a higher likelihood of, individuals changing their behaviors.
And then not only that, right now, you can add cool tools like collaboration and chat. if James, half's had a commissioning project that he was working on with him, the client, he could have quickly done a quick chat, at, customer, Hey, Here's this extra piece of information I'm looking for.
Can you, before the next meeting, so that meeting can be more productive because you've already traded, a couple pieces of information and you're really, you're meeting with your client is roar about getting the impact done and, or closing the project out rather than, taking the next step.
If that makes sense. Cause you've already been able to take the next step asynchronously a couple of times in the product. Totally.
James Dice: [00:26:46] Yeah. it, and I've written about this a couple of times, I often call it the human in the loop problem. you have all of these different types of software that have come into this industry and in the past, and they've all surfaced potential actions, but I think that then the owner or the operator has to then figure out how do I get from this potential action to.
A resolved and verified, fixed issue or a completed project, in this case for using this vocabulary. But I, haven't seen a lot of tools, take the user of the product on that journey, and try to figure out how to streamline and automate that as much as possible. And in your case, like you just said, bring people together and let them interact around the issue.as well, just like when we used to. on Facebook or whatever anyone uses to interact with their friends. This is the same sort of workflow that we need to be interacting with around these issues in our buildings. Because what I've experienced is the more places you allow. So just say you're doing fault detection, for instance, the more places you allow that to break down in between the action. However many places there are, it's a breakdown, it will break down. And so I think it's about getting to action and getting to resolution and getting to verification as quick as possible. and I think that's awesome.
Logan Soya: [00:28:09] And maybe just to circle back on that note about having these very different personas that look at things very differently, that ability to interact over a common, Concept called a project in our case gives a property manager and a building engineer, an opportunity to actually collaborate together and work together to solve the problem. Whereas maybe in the past, Energy monitoring was such a foreign topic for a property manager that they were like, Oh, that's the building engineers problem.
I don't even know how that works. And I don't know how that connects to me paying the bills necessarily. I know it has something to do with it, but I'm not necessarily totally clear on it now. It's okay. my month and variance in my bill was off and I can chat with my building engineer and my building engineer has.
some data that backs up, like why it wasn't over or under this month. And because there was this project that was going on and so on and so forth. And I think that's really fascinating because now you're getting different disciplines talking about this conversation that has always been so like.
Encased in just a few select subject matter experts. And so hopefully, the goal is that, the smart building analytics capabilities of Agricor core can be perceived as not just beneficial for, the building engineer and the energy of the building, but really smart building analytics can be.
Beneficial to all aspects of running a building, Even if it's to do with your budgets or even if it's to do with just eliminating some mundane process like accruals and reporting to your accounting team. and if we can start there, that's a very easy starting point that people can feel like their life is a little bit easier before we get to the really deep, really extensive retrofitting of, your onsite equipment and whatnot.
Totally
James Dice: [00:30:00] knocking down silos. I love it.
Logan Soya: [00:30:02] I've asked man. It's, it's not easy. It's not as easy as it sounds, on a podcast, but, you just gotta take it one step at a time.
James Dice: [00:30:12] I love it. And so it sounds like the projects piece is a new feature that you're launching.
probably by the time this podcast comes out, you guys will have some sort of announcement. and we didn't do that on purpose. It was just the timing was it happened that way, but can you talk about the launch of this, uh, and kind of what you're excited about with that?
Logan Soya: [00:30:32] Yeah, really excited. for us, I think it's going to be a cornerstone opportunity for, users of our product to really have, we were talking about this central repository that can, show, the hard work that the onsite engineering teams are doing day in and day out in a way that has not been.
Illuminated in the past, right? you didn't quite realize all of these things that are happening to keep your building safe, to keep your building running well, to keep, your building successful. from my perspective, it's an extremely exciting announcement for us. We're really happy to launch it.
we've already, seen a number of beta users, really enjoying, the opportunity to use the projects platform. it really creates a sort of a two way collaborative, A street between folio executives and onsite building engineers that is easy to maintain. So you don't have to, if you're overseeing 20, 30 buildings, it's much easier now to go see and interact with your onsite teams.
number one, then number two, for each of these projects, one of the things that we noticed is that, executives are always just looking for that one-page cut sheet or just some really simple sort of explanation as to what's the status of this project and why does it matter?
And so we've really put a lot of effort in creating sort of a one-click generation, right? if you're a building engineer, You're probably not, looking to spend hours of time making the perfect presentation as to why you did this thing. so if we can take that burden off of you and, make sure that your hard work is done successfully, then, then I think that's another kind of silo, broken, in terms of making people interact and appreciate the value of.
The, the facility systems that maintain and keep the building running.
James Dice: [00:32:21] Cool. Yeah, definitely. I want to ask also about the product itself and get a little bit more nerdy if you're cool with that, it sounds like the projects is like the, kind of the culmination of, you got the data in, and then you're getting data in from, like you said, utility bills.
interval meters. and you guys have your own, you do your own hardware there. but then you're also connecting to the building automation system as well. So projects are the culmination of getting all that data together, getting it all into one place, normalize it.
And then you have different types of analytics that you're using to come up with these projects. Can you explain how that process has gone
Logan Soya: [00:33:02] Yeah, sure. So high level, customers can get started at whatever level of depth of data that they would like. so Aqua core is designed that you could start with basically getting utility bills in first, then advancing to metering data or sub-metering data.
Then eventually getting to much more complex data sets like sensors and backnet systems and whatnot. but in the end of the day, What ACA Corp does, is it as you've described sucks in all of that data into a normalized, dataset and, what we've really spent a lot of time on is thinking about how to run predictive analytics on that data.
to do a lot of the same things that I think traditional FTD analytics does. but, with a wider range, because we have lots of different sets of data. So using, bill data, your tariff structure and, and your utility metering data to create better optimal start algorithm that factors in your tariff schedule, I think is, is an interesting example, right?
And so we have a, basically a library and that library grows. Yeah. And clients basically can choose, They can choose to start with a very basic data set that has a basic library of 10 or 20 best practices of optimal start, optimal stop, or they can get into much more complex, analytics around optimizing your cooling tower for outdoor air, et cetera.
so it's really up to the user to decide what degree of sophistication they're looking for. And that gives. Clients and opportunity to have a single platform that can grow with them as they get more mature, with their own sort of, choices, to roll out across a single building or a portfolio.
but all of it is like the same layer, right? The idea is like it's one layer that is driving these detectors, that surface projects, and it all surfaces to the same. and place, which is this kind of project repository. And so it creates consistency across a user's experience rather than needing to say, Oh, I have one tool for bill analytics and one tool for water leak, detection, analytics, and one tool for HVAC analytics, which I think has always been a pain point that we've heard in the market, with our customers.
James Dice: [00:35:17] Yeah. even just like the experts of the industry, they always draw this line between. Like whole building data and system data. And I've been trying to knock that down, when I worked at right, well, I was trying to knock that down in the national lab system. And now I'm just just saying, it's all one bill.
It's just, you're getting data from different end uses.
Logan Soya: [00:35:36] And it
James Dice: [00:35:36] doesn't really matter where that data comes from. It just needs it's to be in the same place. And then now we can use all of the data to provide different capabilities and I think, yeah. One of the pains I've always had with people drawing that line between and meter data and system data.
Is that it makes, I think it makes the market downplay and downplay what you can do with meter data. Cause you can do so much with just utility bills. First of all. And I think a lot of people overlook and they don't realize that they don't need to start out by getting so complicated.
Logan Soya: [00:36:09] So true so much
James Dice: [00:36:10] with their meter data. And then even if you just add your 15 minute meter data, now you're like enabling all of the stuff like you just said, optimal Starbucks
Logan Soya: [00:36:19] will stop. Like
James Dice: [00:36:20] you can do so much more with that before you even get into complications. And this is like one of my rants
Logan Soya: [00:36:26] it's yeah,
James Dice: [00:36:27] You can do so much with meter data.
If you're listening to this, like you don't have to worry about backnet and haystack, if you're just starting out on the energy management journey, don't even
Logan Soya: [00:36:37] worry about
James Dice: [00:36:37] it. Yeah. Just connect your meter. you can capture a lot of savings, things like that.
Logan Soya: [00:36:42] it's so cheap.
It's so easy, so much faster, so much better. 80% of our clients are predominantly focused on this meter data and build data. And if you don't have the basic blocking and tackling, and you don't know that your onsite teams are just taking those basic steps, to optimize, just the high level stuff.
Then, just please do your thing. Silva favor. Don't worry about all those other technologies out there. Just get, centralized bill management and centralized interval data. If you start there. You will automatically see an incredible boost in your overall knowledge of your portfolio energy perspective, and you will see the real results, right?
like with interval data, that's the first layer of data that you can really specific things to do. You're building to make it better. build data is great because it can indicate to you leaders and laggards across your portfolio and give you some benchmarking as to where to look. But like interval data.
Now you're talking about very discreet things that you can change in your building that will actually take you on that ESG journey or take you on that energy efficiency journey, that yields outcomes and results. and that's, with the advancement of interval data coming from utility API APIs, right?
There are many buildings in the United States today that are eligible for software only. Interval data. And if you can just sign up for Aqua Corp, take a trial, just do the interval data. We'll help you get set up with those utility interval data inputs. And even if that's just going to eliminate and educate you, do you have a better understanding of how to take action?
that's such a huge, huge difference from not knowing, even a basic. just not knowing, like what's the status of your energy spend and is it good or bad? Totally.
James Dice: [00:38:31] Yeah. I don't know, I'll get off my soap box now.
Logan Soya: [00:38:35] I feel like I took the, I took on the soup.
James Dice: [00:38:37] There you go. Yeah. I'm happy. I'm happy that other people are seeing that light and you guys have definitely given me a lot of feedback. Good feedback on the energy management hierarchy of needs. So if anyone wants to dig deeper into that concept, the build data and the meter data is at the base of the hierarchy, in case anyone's wondering, so they can dig deeper into that.
We'll put that in the show notes. All right. Let's move on from the product. and talk about the world we're living in right now. So it's August, I'm in the U S but the U S is still struggling with this a pandemic. And so I'm wondering like what your outlook is and what you're seeing with your clients as far as the real estate world and, like what that for your country.Yeah.
Logan Soya: [00:39:19] I think that, look the real estate world. I think everybody is acknowledged just that it is an industry that is most prime to be effected by what's going on with COVID both in the short term and longterm, it's obviously very variant by asset type. hospitality, retail, obviously getting hit the hardest, data centers probably doing pretty well right now.
So I think you really have to take that under consideration in OnCourse case. I think there's a couple of things that we've noticed when COBIT first happened. It was actually, there was a silver lining in the sense that it was, we saw an immediate jump in product usage because, clients that had no access to interval data, Had to wait until the next bill came out to see what was going on from an energy perspective.
how we reacted, how Aqua Corp reacted is. We actually created a series of custom reports that we would release on a weekly basis to our clients. Where what we would do is we would give them benchmarking data to benchmark, for example, how, is their building performing relative to their baseline versus the Atlanta Metro area.
And so that we would say Oh, the Atlanta Metro area on average is 28% lower than their baseline. You're at like 42%. This might be an opportunity for you to reach out to this particular engineering team and ask what were the things that they change. And so you could benefit from that across your portfolio.
And so perfect example of what we just talked about. So I think a lot of the prop tech world, sorry to interrupt you by the way. But a lot of the prop tech world is out there saying we have to get occupancy data on every space and then we can normalize for occupancy. And what you've just said is like, all you have is one 15 minute meter at a bunch of buildings, And then you're able to say, what was my drop.
James Dice: [00:41:08] I don't even care like what the occupancy data is. We know that occupancy has dropped, What you're able to say is before and after, and then compare that before and after to all these other buildings that are on average. observed the same drop in occupancy and that's just one piece of data,
Logan Soya: [00:41:23] That's right. And look, like every building is unique. tenants are different building, HVAC systems are different. I trust that, my customers know their buildings and know how to take that information, but having timely information. Means the world for them.
And so for us, we actually saw an increase in engagement because of that. And I think overarching, if you zoom out, definitely, from a real estate strategy, managing your expenses and thinking about how to manage expenses wisely is going to be a top priority for our clients, into the future until we see sort of economic recovery.
So I think that, One thing that I'm really pleased by is that I do think that, folks are appreciating, what remote monitoring benefits can provide. it was thrusted into their purview in a way that I think maybe has helped accelerate, appreciation for the benefit of the technology.
Um, you know, look, I think. I think all businesses are probably going to struggle to make, business decisions, smart business decisions in a changing world. it's definitely not, business as usual. And I think it's going to be incumbent on us to tell a very clear and crystallized story as to what are some specific reasons why technology should be a top investment, especially energy or smart building technology to help them, rethink their business models, in a post COVID world.
and so I'm optimistic. acknowledging that, these challenges are real for our customers to rethink their industry in some
James Dice: [00:42:57] cases. Cool. All right. Fair enough. okay, so back to AHCA core, as you think about the release happening right now, what are you excited about the next six months to a year? with the product and with the company. Yeah,
Logan Soya: [00:43:11] I think, I'm very excited is the immediate reaction. I think that, Aqua Corp has come a long way and the industry has come a long way to realizing the benefits to the types of technologies that are out there. I also think the PropTech industry has come a long way to realizing that we don't all have to think of ourselves as competitors to one another, that there is an ecosystem out here that we can all work together and find out.
what are the strengths and weaknesses of the different vendors and find better paths to partnerships and integrations. so I think looking out into a year from now, I think Aqua cores depth of analytical capability will be increasing substantially. I'm excited to, also look into partnerships and integrations that can allow, Other technology providers, opportunities to really, access the active user base that Accor has because they are super cool things that are out there that, we went through this hard journey of learning customer personas and learning the industry.
So is there a way that we could help accelerate, really cool energy efficiency technology out there to fast track some of that, and we're very receptive to that type of thinking, right? Like I think that's only going to make this industry very much better.
so I think, in the next year of Accor, Encore is going to really start to come into a sort of a it's next generation of how it wants to take advantage of the data it's collecting and yeah. Making it more actionable and more predictive for its customers. And then I think, that's one theme and then the other theme is just, I'm looking for opportunities to really create yeah.
An ecosystem that, that everybody can benefit from both our customers, other vendors, other makers of energy efficiency related or smart building related tools. Like how can we start to bring this together in a more integrated fashion that in other industries that I don't think yet has happened in full force yet in our industry.
James Dice: [00:45:12] Cool. Love it. okay. One final question. I've been thinking a lot about this question and I just started asking it on the podcast. So that you'll be the second or third to answer it. you guys have a great team, right? So how are you, um, attracting talent in the smart building spaces are a problem that I've perceived to be difficult.
I've tried to hire. And the, like in the past six months tried to hire people, not for nexus, but when I was at Enro and it's a difficult proposition because it's very specific, industry, very niche industry, very specific skillset needed to understand all the stuff we've been talking about so far.
but then it's also, like we said, there's that gap between where our industry is technology-wise and where other industries are. And. What I perceived for a company like yours is it seems like there could be a difficulty with convincing them to tackle this problem. And so how do you think about that?and how do you think about hiring and
Logan Soya: [00:46:10] attracting talent to this space? yeah. Good question. I think if you're not careful, it is, it can be a big challenge, right? You definitely have to set your sights high. And I think first and foremost, I think others have mentioned this, having a clear mission and a clear sort of a mission driven culture, if that makes sense is really important, right?
That allows you to surface the folks that are. Wanting to, work, at a place that has a deeper philosophy. and so for us, our mission statement is to create global impact by connecting people to buildings. And so for us, I hope that, we can inspire.
people that are maybe not newcomers to the industry to realize that there is real global impact that can be created, in our, the space. And, and I think that's step one. Step two is if you're looking for a hard technical problem to solve, like combining, legacy systems, smart machine learning analytics, Elegant user interfaces to address, uh, users that may not have that much knowledge of how their building works is a very hard problem.
so I think, it's about, whether you're passionate in energy and climate change, whether you are passionate in real estate, whether you're passionate in hard technology. I think those are the dimensions that we look for. And I think, the rest is on us to help tell the story and the narrative of where Accor is going in a way that gets people excited about it.
there's definitely a lot of cool things on the horizon. I think it all starts with the culture and I think it's all starts with that root mission that you have to make sure you get right. And if you can get that right. And I think you can attract some pretty cool people.
James Dice: [00:47:51] Yeah. the problems we're solving, it might seem like we're solving them in one building or one portfolio, but this is a global problem that we're solving. And that's what, that's a great thing to start with. and just the second piece too, is it's so juicy, like solving this problem is just so thick and it's endlessly entertaining to me, all the different layers of the problem.
I think that's what we need to attract is people that like that, if you're attracted to that and you want to devote your career to that, like this is the place to do it. I love it. Cool.
Logan Soya: [00:48:24] Thanks. Thanks for coming on the show. Yeah. Thank you for having me, really loved the stuff you're doing and definitely, look forward to, being, as helpful as I can.
James Dice: [00:48:33] Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Logan. And talk to you later.
Alright, friends. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Nexus podcast. For more episodes like this and to get the weekly Nexus newsletter, please subscribe at nexus.substack.com. You can find the show notes for this conversation there as well. As always, please reach out on LinkedIn with any thoughts on this episode.
I'd love to hear from you. Have a great day.
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