The Trend Report

CEO Chat with Collin Cavote of BIOME

• Sid Meadows, Collin Cavote • Season 6 • Episode 153

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Collin Cavote joins us to share how his company BIOME is revolutionizing biophilic design with technology-driven living walls that maintain themselves and last for decades.

Listen in to learn all about Collin, why he started BIOME, what BIOME is all about, and where he sees the company going in the future. 

Resources:

Episode 110: CEO Chat with Brandi Susewitz of RESEAT https://www.sidmeadows.com/episode110

Connect with Collin:

BIOME.US - http://biome.us/
Email - Collin@biome.us
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/collincavote/


Connect with Sid:

www.sidmeadows.com
Embark CCT on Facebook
Sid on LinkedIn
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Sid on YouTube
Sid on Clubhouse - @sidmeadows
Subscribe to my LinkedIn Newsletter. https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/inside-contract-interiors-7298489501159460865/

The Trend Report introduction music is provided by Werq by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4616-werq License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sid:

Hey friend and welcome to the Trend Report. I'm Sid Meadows. I'm a business leader, coach and consultant and a longtime student of the office furniture industry, and in this podcast we have powerful conversations with industry leaders, innovators and others that are making an impact in their business and our industry. As you know, my goal is simple to provide you with valuable insights, information, resources and tools to help you grow, your business grow and to help move our industry forward. So today I'm really excited to dive into this conversation, our first CEO chat of 2025, with my guest today, colin Cavote of Biome.

Collin:

Hey, colin how are you? Great, sid. It's really nice to be here and awesome to see you last week in person in Dallas, so I'm excited to keep the conversation going.

Sid:

So that doesn't happen very often. I don't get to meet my guests in person very often, but yeah, you were in the DFW area. We met up for dinner and had a really great conversation, and usually when I meet quote unquote meet my podcast guests in real life, it's at Neocon or some other event. So thanks for reaching out to me when you were coming into town. So, colin, I want to just like dive right into our conversation today. Who is Biome.

Collin:

Biome's a 10-year-old company based in Oakland, california, and we're at this intersection of technology and plants landscaping, and really what we're doing is combining these two worlds together so that we can deliver indoor health and experience and all these things that kind of the race to quality is delivering, but with ease and automation for plant care. So think of like hardware and software and what we call greenware, all turned into turnkey products that allow us to bring nature indoors seamlessly.

Sid:

So is greenware a term that you guys coined. Did you like say this is what we're going to call it? I love it, it is.

Collin:

Yeah, because if you look at all technology, the stack is always the hardware device and then the software. But what we realized is, in order to automate plants in nature, you actually have to treat it as a key part of the solution. Right, it's a living thing and it has its own genetics and it has its own bacteria on the plants, and so it has to be deeply integrated into the technology stack in order for it to succeed, because ultimately, you want those plants to live for years and be really easy, and so we actually have a 6,000 square foot facility here in Oakland, california, with indoor greenhouses where we fulfill and ship all of our plants out of.

Sid:

All right. So if you're watching on YouTube, you can see the product behind Colin, as he's sitting in the conference room. If you're listening, we're going to describe it. It is basically a living plant wall. We've all seen these in a variety of different locations. I know I saw one I won't name the airport, but I saw one in an airport that I was in. It was huge, right, and most of the plants were dead in it. They were browning. There was a lot of non-native plants to that region. There were cactus and other cacti or whatever how you say it, other things that were more Southwestern than Southern, if you will plants, and so I thought that was really interesting, but the wall was pretty much dead. So basically, you make a living wall, is that right? Yeah?

Collin:

There's a little more to it, all right. Well, I want to get into it, let's talk about.

Sid:

Okay, you make a living wall. What makes your living wall unique and or different?

Collin:

Well, let's maybe first level set with what living walls have been.

Sid:

Perfect. What is a?

Collin:

living wall, then, yeah, it's usually been a construction project right when you have to reinforce the wall, you have to put in plumbing, you have to maybe put in custom lighting, then you have a horticultural partner, then you have a maintenance partner. You have all these trades coming together. You drop a lot of money, you probably have leak damage and maybe you're getting mold in your building and you have huge service contracts. And so about a decade ago, when I was in school, I was like, well, how do we make nature actually scalable? And so today, biome, we have patented technology on modular wall-mounted living wall systems, and so basically, this is a turnkey device that hangs up like a TV or a whiteboard, directly on drywall.

Collin:

There's no dirt whatsoever in our products. So our plants are hydroponic, soil-free. That makes it lightweight, makes it pest-resistant and also just really clean. And so you can hang these up as a distributed amenity and rather than like big lobby green walls which are great, they're beautiful art pieces but we really want to be the product that is like furniture that you can specify into open office, into conference rooms, and actually bring the benefits of plants deeply into the workplace, into hospitality environments where people are actually spending time. And what's really remarkable is with the technology on the devices that self-water they can sense the temperature and humidity of the room and change their onboard settings. We're actually able to dramatically reduce maintenance costs. And these devices will just text or email clients one to two times a month to just top off the water with a water can and you're good to go. So generally we can save folks 90, 95% on monthly maintenance costs.

Sid:

Okay, so you're simplifying the entire process of bringing plants into the office, putting them on a wall or hanging them on a piece of furniture or wherever they go to be installed. Putting them on a wall or hanging them on a piece of furniture or wherever they go to be installed, and so you're soil free, they're hydroponic, which means that they're pest free, and so you get a really great product that looks really good. And then you add the technology to it that, in phase one of the technology, which is where you are currently today, says oh, hey, sid, through an app on my phone, it's time to fill up or tap up, tap off the water container in the unit so that you know that they're always going to continue to be alive and thriving in that environment. Correct? Did I reframe that correctly?

Collin:

Yeah, exactly.

Sid:

Okay, so phase two of this is something a little bit more unique and more different. So talk to us about because you mentioned it very briefly talk to us about self-watering. What does that mean and how you guys have developed a self-watering living plant wall.

Collin:

Sure, sure, well, I'm sure almost everyone listening here knows that you've got to water plants usually once a week or every two weeks, and our current devices are already really good at making that once a month or so, because they can just run the pumps and self water. But we still have that issue of how do you get that water into the device, into the system. And our CTO was in Japan a few months ago now maybe almost a year ago and bought a dehumidifier for his in-laws and realized after he dehumidified it that he had this mountain of water leftover that he had to deal with. And there was this aha moment of wow. That's the thing that enables our products to succeed if we could just get water dehumidified onto the devices. And so since then, we filed an international patent on device moisture harvesting, which basically allows the next generation living walls.

Collin:

We're also rolling out planters to be able to harvest their own moisture directly from ambient air, without drying out the air to any flushing, and essentially never needs to be refilled, and so it's a really amazing superpower. And what's even better is the water that we can dehumidify. It has no salts. It has no salts, it has no chlorine, it has none of the tap water chemicals, and so it allows our products to be even healthier, the plants to even be more lush and have better coloring. It's a really incredible technology, and so for the end of this year, maybe into 2026, we're already starting to specify with some longer term projects. The first never water ecosystems.

Sid:

That is really, really cool and I love the story of how it came about. Like doing something completely different, bought a dehumidifier, set it up for a completely different reason, and then your chief technology officer, cto, discovered oh wait, a minute, we can do this with our product and turn it into self-watering, and I think it's brilliant.

Collin:

It is really brilliant and I think it speaks to the power of technology. We can use these cross-discipline skills and tools, and that's really what we see at Biome as the biggest opportunity. Our whole mission is to scale nature, especially in the built environment, but to do that we need to bring in all these diverse kind of angles and technologies, and so we're going to continue to do that. I'd say like this is a very exciting component. This might be our, like GPU version of progress, kind of a major leap for all Explain GPU real quick though.

Collin:

Well, the CPU is the computer chips, and then the graphics cards are what NVIDIA created.

Sid:

Okay, got it.

Collin:

And that was the big leap that allowed, like ai and large language models to to kind of proliferate got it.

Sid:

So basically the technology is the brains behind it, right, and you're really marrying the two together, and the tech because you're really a tech company, right I mean that's really what you are.

Sid:

but the product that you're providing is not only technology in the form of being an app on your phone, it's also supporting a physical product that sits in an office and that functions in an office, and nobody listening to this podcast can argue the benefits of having plants and greenery in an office. There's tons of benefits. We all know about it. We all understand at least for the most part, I believe we all understand the benefits of biofuel design it is one of the hottest topics in our industry and the need to bring green into the office space. And you're honestly addressing both of them right With a cool, new, unique product and then adding technology to it which, as you said earlier, is simplifying the care of them. And then you're going to in phase two later this year, early next year. You're going into the plants taking care of themselves for all practical purposes.

Collin:

Yeah, exactly, and by doing that we end up caring for our tenants, the people going into our spaces, and that's really the whole mission here. And we're wanting to start to partner with furniture dealers, with furniture manufacturers, because, at the end of the day, we're making embeddable solutions that can be utilized by other brands, that can be inserted into other products, and we just want to see nature really take off. So, yeah, I think I put that out there to the universe. We're really looking for partners to help us scale this and bring the benefits, because, you know, especially as younger workers are coming into the workforce, we know that they're really caring about natural elements. You know, when these people aren't at work, they're out in nature, they're going on hikes. And if we can deliver those experiences into the real estate we're building, I think we're going to attract people, we're going to make it easier to be at work, have a better culture and, ultimately, better emotional and physical health.

Sid:

Correct 100%. There's a lot of benefits to it. So you've got a pretty impressive list of customers that have been buying your product and you've been doing a lot of direct outreach and a lot of direct selling and really putting your product out there. Which is really the way to start is by doing that. And now you want to expand into the furniture world, the dealer world, the partnering with other manufacturers is kind of like an OEM, if you will, and then independent reps as well to potentially represent your brand.

Collin:

Correct Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

Sid:

And so can you share a little bit of it. Maybe share a success story with us of like your product being installed somewhere? Yeah, for sure. If you don't want to say the name of the company. You can say a large multinational retail chain or something like that, if you want to Okay.

Collin:

Yeah, we've gotten pretty good at kind of walking around the room of this. Yeah, I mean we've worked a lot with Gensler on a number of architectural scale solutions, and that's been from large banking clients. We work with some of the largest banking institutions as an amenity across their whole national portfolio and I think what we're finding with the large banks of the world, law firms and technology companies is, historically, plants have been this office to office solution and they need a unique service provider at every single location. They don't have a national provider like they do for almost everything else, and so really we're finding a pretty easy adoption. We'll start with a pilot that could come through a furniture dealer, come through a direct sale, and then we're seeing being added as a design standard to many of these brands.

Collin:

I'd say one of our probably biggest opportunities right now is a large investment group that's expanding their Chicago office. I don't know if I can bring a whole lot of additional qualifiers to them. That's fine. The confidentiality is always a little frustrating thing as a startup because it really could help the story, but we're seeing expansion not just from city to city but also within the building. So Greenwalls used to be just a lobby focal piece, but now for us they're going on every floor, they're going on multiple locations in each floor, and so we're seeing clients go from one green wall in a lobby to maybe 40 to 50 distributed smaller elements throughout a floor plan, and that's also happening nationally.

Sid:

And we're going to link to your website in the show notes so people can go and check out the product, see the different sizes and all those things that are available with it, right. But I think there's a couple of things I want to add here. First off, it's not necessarily specifically a day one product. It's also a day two product. So I'm talking to all my sellers out there that are thinking about how do I go add value to my customer, how do I go back in with something that's not a workstation, not a chair, not a monitor arm, not a high adjustable desk, and add value to them? Because we sell those physical products, right, and that's what we typically focus on is those physical products.

Sid:

Though this is a physical product, it's actually not a piece of furniture, so it's an adjunct to it, so it's a great day-to solution. I also think that it is a great adjunct to furniture because it is still part of the built environment. It adds value to the built environment. But again to my sellers out there, this is a way to differentiate yourself. It's also a way to go back and knock on the door to your existing customer and say, hey, listen, I got this really cool new product that came out. I think you'll like it. It has a lot of benefits both to your environment but also health benefits for the environment, and super easy, and I want to show it to you. It's a completely different conversation than let me sell you 25 more test chairs. I think those are two things that people need to be thinking about.

Collin:

Yeah, it is. It's often showing up with innovation, with the hospitality vibe and element, but also in a way that can save the client money, especially operationally. When a traditional plant wall costs $400 to $500 a month to service and ours costs $6 for some plant vitamins, you can start to actually have these things pay for themselves in six months or less. And so I think being able to bring to the clients this opportunity to bring in innovation, bring in biophilia and also save money is a really powerful combo. And you know, I think the dealers and the sellers are starting to really appreciate that, although not traditional furniture, we've essentially furnitureized the living wall into a product that is an easy ancillary solution, and I'm going to say this it's a low competitive field.

Sid:

So, to the dealers listening out there and the sellers listening, it's a great opportunity and a great way to enhance your overall gross profit on a project or an after the project sale right To make a little more money but yet still providing a lot of value. So I think you got to think about it in a lot of different ways. It's not furniture, it's a different type of product. I'm going to add value to my existing client because we're all as a furniture industry, colin, we're always looking for a new business and so many times we drive past our existing customers to go sell a couple hundred desks and chairs when we could actually drive to an existing customer with a new product that's got a low barrier of entry, low competitive field, that I can also make a lot of money on selling, a lot of money on selling. And then now I'm really becoming a true advisor, slash, consultant, valuable resource to my client.

Sid:

So, mr Dealer listening out there, I just gave you like 10 different reasons why you want to contact Colin to talk about plant walls and I'm simplifying it, right, but plant walls because it's a lot of value. So, colin, I want to shift gears for a few minutes, if that's okay with you. We're going to put all your product information down there. But I want to talk about you because you have a really fascinating story. I've had the benefit of hearing it a couple of times and, honestly, our industry though we sell physical goods and physical products we're really made up of people, and the people is what makes our industry so special and so unique. So how did you get into? I'm going to call it the furniture industry. Tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Collin:

Yeah Well, thanks for the opportunity to share a little bit about that, sid. I got into furniture by accident almost. I got in through innovation, through I want to build this plant wall and scale nature. And in that startup world it's like how do you get to market what's your product market fit? Who's going to be early adopters? And became pretty aware that we had to go into workplace furniture and into this specific type of selling. But ultimately, what got me to want to start building these products was a little bit of discomfort with the modern world. I was living in Philadelphia at the time, finishing school. I had made a degree in biomimicry which is now becoming kind of popular as a way of studying what is biomimicry.

Sid:

Tell us what that is.

Collin:

Biomimicry is a combination of two words biology and bio, and then mimicry, which is to mimic or to copy. And so there's more and more science out and research showing that natural systems don't create waste. They're regenerative, they're closed loop. They have all these benefits because there is no such waste in the natural world, right? But human made systems are often linear and extractive and we have a lot of waste at the end. So I wanted to study these natural systems, thinking that maybe that would help inform new things down the road. So I was studying that field, but I was also in Philadelphia and I was getting a little depressed and anxious, living back in a city, because previous to that I'd been off grid. I was living nomadically and foraging for food in the Pacific Northwest for a while. Definitely a different chapter of my life, but a really rewarding, incredibly beautiful period where I got to appreciate that the natural world provides everything that our species uses.

Sid:

So I'll pause you right there for a minute, because that's a really important component of the story in my opinion, because you basically said okay, I'm really tired of school, mom and dad, I need you to buy me an airline ticket to Seattle and I'm going to live off grid. And when you did that and you literally, like, went off grid into the woods, if you will, forged for your own food, I assume you lived in a tent or something right, and you really got to connect with nature and learn about nature and the power and the benefit of nature. Did I say that correctly, colin?

Collin:

Yeah, just a caveat. I actually took my parents out to dinner and I said I bought a train ticket from Philly to Seattle. I need you to take me to the train station. And then, yeah, I had chartered a seaplane from Seattle to a small remote island off the coast and then I lived with two foragers in a shack, without electricity or plumbing, for about six months.

Sid:

Wow, that's a really cool story, right, like that is something, an experience that you did that helps to form who you are as a person, right?

Collin:

Yeah, it was. It was very informative and my mission then I was 19,. It was how do I reduce my impact, right, so much sustainability. We was 19,. It was how do I reduce my impact? So much sustainability? We're saying, well, how do you reduce your impact? How do you reduce that?

Collin:

And then ultimately I got to this point. I was living off grid gathering food. I had no technology, no cell phone, and I realized that I had reduced my impact to zero and I was making no impact. And that was the big realization I have to actually come back to society, I have to come back to business and I had to figure out something scalable that, if it becomes infinitely scaled, is still a good thing for our species. And for me that came back to nature and I think the more we can scale nature, the more benefits we're going to have for clean air, the more benefits we're going to have, emotionally, beautification of space, and so really that was the kind of the true birth, I think, of biome. I didn't have really the clear concept until I was back in Philadelphia and in school, but all of that was the journey that kind of led to the creation of this.

Sid:

That's really cool. And our journey that we all walk because we all walk different journeys, right, and I think our journey does inform our future. At what point did you say I'm going to be an entrepreneur, I'm going to start a company, I'm going to start a?

Collin:

tech company. Where did that come about? I was the six-year-old with a lemonade stand and had a job since I was 11. So I've always loved business and I've always loved working. I'd say I think I had a bit of a crisis in my teens, early 20s, about can business do good for the environment, and so, in a way, biome is actually a big grand test to see if we can, to see if business can actually be leveraged to create scalable good. But that was really when I decided to reenter. Business was like this experiment Can capitalism, can this engine which is so powerful, be directed in a way to deliver these benefits? So I think it's always been in my blood. But I think, like all of us, we've become aware of the state of the world, the state of inequality across people and our environment, and so I tried to reconcile with that and do something constructive.

Sid:

So the short answer to that statement slash question is yes, businesses can do good. I'm going to add to that say businesses need to focus more on doing good as an industry. We are a huge consumer of the world's natural resources in the manufacturing of our products and I think as an industry, we do a really good job at talking about sustainability and putting things in action that do help the world, that do help air quality, that do help with reforestation of land and things of that nature, right, but we can always do more and we can always be better at it, and sometimes it becomes a little bit of lip service service. And here's the other side of it is, if you're a manufacturer and you get started getting asked all these questions about well, do you have this certification, do you have that certification? Can we get this blah blah blah and this blah blah blah, right, those are all really important.

Sid:

Your practices are even more important and we need to lean into your practices, because all those certifications cost thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dollars and I think there is a lack of respect for what it costs to get a certification and too much value on the certification to say, oh well, they have this certification. So they got a green checkbox and we'll specify their products. We really need to go deeper and look at what are your practices as a company. Even if you don't have those, what's your real behavior? I feel like that was a soapbox moment.

Collin:

No, I totally agree with you, sid, and I think there is a lot of pressure on manufacturers, and the paradox is we need innovation in furniture, we need a lot of innovation in this space. But in order for startups and all these orgs to innovate, they then also need the capital on top of innovating and finding product market fit to get these certifications, to get these projects. And one of the challenges we face with. We call our flagship product Tyga Tyga for reference. It's the largest biome on the planet. It actually it's the forest that wraps all around Canada, russia, europe, so it cleans more air than the Amazon rainforest, so that's why we call it Tyga.

Collin:

Tyga was actually the first computerized electronics product to be RedList compliant. So back six years ago, we got rid of all the PVC, all the lead in the electronics, all the normal stuff that's in almost every electronic device, and we got rid of all those things to be the first technology product ever to be Red List compliant. But what we found was clients didn't actually buy it for that. It was a checkbox kind of a thing, and so what we've done is we've not always redone the certification or renewed the certification, but we've still engineered to those standards. And so I think what we see the value in is how do we create the whole supply chain to be circular and regenerative, because ultimately we're going to own that. We have a take back program. We don't want to get old PVC back in, right. We don't want to get old toxic materials back, and so we do it because it's the right thing, but also because we have a far enough horizon where we're going to have to confront all these things if we put bad stuff out there.

Sid:

Okay, that was really great, but you said something that I wrote down that I didn't think I knew. You have a take-back program. Can you explain that?

Collin:

Yeah, With our take-back program. It's a way for us to align our interests with our clients. With a lot of technology products and furniture and most consumables, there's somewhat of an interest in the product not lasting very long so that the clients have to buy it again, and we don't think that that's actually the right model for us. We'd rather have legacy products out in the field for decades because we think the market's plenty big enough for new products to continue to come out. And so what we do at Biome is we push really hard for longevity.

Collin:

Our new product line that's coming out this spring, we call it the 4S models. They now have, at 99.999% accuracy, a 15-year life cycle on the hardware and software, which we're getting to the point where we're like an established refrigerator or other kind of dishwasher electronics company. That longevity is key. And then it aligns us with the take-back program because if a client has an issue we can easily upgrade them to a new model. But also at the end of a 15-year cycle, because it's a larger format product, we want to be able to get it off of the client's hands, not go into a dumpster. We can bring it back here, upgrade a few components, water pumped, maybe a new electronic board and then donate it to a school. We can find other locations to bring these that can have another five to 10-year life cycle, and so we think that take back program allows us to own that whole kind of post-consumer life cycle in a really inspiring way. That gets our mission out even bigger.

Sid:

So I want everybody to hit the back button and go back for about a minute and listen to what he just described as the mission of this company, and one of the things he said that I think, colin, that you said I think is so very important is we are working to prevent our products from going into landfills, that we are a good steward of the environment as we're building our products. We are a horrible consumer, if you will, for waste. Almost 17 billion pounds of office furniture go into a landfill every year. We make up 50% of what goes into a landfill, and if you guys want to fact check me on this, go back and listen to the episodes with Brandy Susiewicz, the CEO and founder of ReSeat, where she talks about this a lot and we have to do better.

Sid:

So what you've done? You're a non-furniture guy. We could almost call you a hippie, right To a degree. Right, we could, but you're a non-furniture guy. You're somebody that loves nature. You're an entrepreneur. You want to see how you can scale nature to do better in the world and you've created basically a full circle product that somebody can buy and then you can take it back and upgrade it and then donate it to someone else who could use it like a school or a nonprofit organization where it's going to continue to get benefits for, and you're preventing things from going into a landfill. So it's literally like end-to-end circular, colin, and I didn't know that, and I congratulate you for forward thinking as to the impact that your product could have, not only when you're selling it, but when it's reached its first end of life. You're giving it a second life and that's really spectacular.

Collin:

Thanks, sid. We also think it makes a lot of business sense, right, like, yes, there's a hippie, heartfelt component to all this, but ultimately, a lot of brands try to be exclusive, but what we see is the opportunity is so big that we might as well get our older systems out and redeploy them to people that couldn't previously have access to buy them at a new purchase price, right? So then you've got a whole new generation of young students getting aware of our brand, and so it serves everyone to kind of reinforce this and keep things out of waste, because it allows us to our brand to be seen as valuable and supports us doing the work we want to do, which is ultimately to get nature everywhere.

Sid:

So we got off of you a little bit, which honestly doesn't surprise me at all. Right, we got off of you a little bit, but you're an entrepreneur and you said earlier in the conversation. You're a 10 or 11-year-old company, but we're just now hearing about you on our side of the fence. What have you been doing for 10 years, colin? Yeah?

Collin:

it's a great question. Well, new product categories take a while. So I was a first-time founder, had to figure some things out. Learning how to raise capital was a big process, but I think the hardest thing that we had to solve here at the company was automation. Really, how do you make a machine keep something alive without impact, without touching it, without being close to it and needing that thing to stay alive for years at a time? We're really building life support systems, so there's a lot of ways that could fail, and we had to, over the years, experience every way that they could fail and then design that out as a possibility and engineer that out as a failure mode. And so we had to invent the product category, refine it to the point that we could sell it to commercial enterprises, and then we also had to get it to scale. We had to get to the production volumes high enough that the cost could come down.

Collin:

There's a long history of companies that struggle to bring a new product category to life because the world's not necessarily familiar with it yet. But once they unlock it, the value is just so huge and can go into so many markets. And that's really where we're at today with our new 4S. It's our fourth generation of the hardware. We now have very scalable production and ultra reliable lifecycle, so now we're not afraid of shipping our product nationally and internationally, because we know the automation and the hardware is so reliable that we're not going to be shipping headaches out, and so I think this speaks, though, to what is sustainable growth. It's very easy to grow exponentially and push things to the limit, but it's very likely you're going to get over your skis, so to speak. Figuring out sustainable growth means getting all your gears in place so that, when you actually start to apply the power, the gears don't shatter and break under that stress, and so I'm maybe more of a conservative founder in so much as I really want to make sure everything's dialed before we push go.

Sid:

Well, I appreciate that and I think you're proving to us that that journey that you've been on is the right journey and you've been doing all the right steps, even though it took you 10 years to get to where you are today. You've been doing all the right things and now you're ready to say hey world, here I am, this is what we've got, this is what we're doing, and you've got a great story to go along with it, which is really cool.

Collin:

Well, thanks for helping us tell a story, sid. Yeah, no.

Sid:

I mean, I'm a huge listen. The audience knows I'm a huge believer in people. I love sharing your stories because, again, that's who we do business with. We do business with people. So, speaking of that, what's the best part of your job today?

Collin:

The best part is really showing up to clients.

Collin:

I really love doing visits, so I was just in Seattle for a week, down in Dallas for a week meeting with our clients. Seeing the surprise that comes to people like wow, I didn't know this was possible. That wow factor is really exciting to me Because for me it's been a 10-year life work and now to see that start to convert, it's really thrilling. I also love to see our team grow here in our space, whether it's our greenware operations, our hardware team, software team. So looking at all these people that can now come to work and I get this almost daily it's like I finally have something I can believe in and show up to work and care about. I finally have something I can believe in and show up to work and care about, and I think the more that Biome can continue to offer that to people as we grow, the impact can be really huge, and so I get a lot of joy from our team and our clients getting to be part of this company which is, I really hope, delivering more value than just financial to the world.

Sid:

That's great. So what does Biome stand for? Or does it stand for anything?

Collin:

Yeah, so biome's a word for a real thing. You know, a biome is any place on a planet that shares similar weather, climate and terrain. So think of deserts. You know, you could have the Sahara, you could have another desert halfway across the world. They're not connected, so they're're separate ecosystems, but because they share all these similar qualities, they're a biome. And so tropical rainforests are a biome, temperate rainforests are a biome, coral reefs are technically a biome, and so you have all these. All these kind of disparate locations can add up to being a biome because they share similar qualities. And for biome, the company, what we're saying is no matter where our products go in the built environment, they're part of this new biome, this new built environment biome which previously hasn't really existed, and so that's really where it comes from. It also just speaks to inclusion. It speaks to the environment indoors, the people indoors, all of these things combining together.

Sid:

I'm glad to ask the question because, again, I didn't know the answer to that one and I think that's a really great story and not at all what I was thinking.

Collin:

So we're good, I also don't know what you were thinking, sid.

Sid:

I thought it was a play on words like biometric or something you know totally nonsense like that. So you know, forget that. I even had an idea. So let's talk about the opposite of. What do you love about your job? What's the most challenging thing about your job and building a business from the ground up?

Collin:

There's some challenges, for sure, I think you know. There's companies that are adding services to pre-existing businesses it's more of an additive type of business or creating a slightly different version of a pre-existing model. And then there's what's called the zero to one types of companies, companies that are really developing a new category or completely new product. That requires integration of skills and things that previously were never combined. Biome is definitely one of those types of companies, and I think one of the challenges has been how do you convince people that this is going to be the next big thing when it currently is almost a market size of very, very small right, if you look at living walls, it's a pretty small market size, but if you start to say, for all the reasons why well, it's a construction project, they're $100,000, there's no technology, there's no scale you start to be able to understand why it doesn't really work currently. But I think convincing people to see a future that doesn't exist yet is challenging.

Collin:

Storytelling is key. Finding visionaries is key. Finding visionaries that can do something about it is extra important and hard. So then, more tactically, of like what makes this hard Hiring, finding the right people to help build something from scratch that really like, as I've said all along, that are going to wake up in the middle of the night anxious that something's wrong. You know I have that, but I need our other team members to have that level of care and I think that can be a trait that's somewhat rare. It really takes a lot of buy-in and so finding the right team for that, but gosh yeah.

Sid:

Those are a lot of great answers, by the way. I mean they were and you described it too like you're looking for early adapters, right. You're looking for people to. I mean A. If you just listen to the last 30 minutes of your story, what a powerful story you have and the hard work that you put in to build this company and make sure that it was the right product. And you're leading the way. You're doing good things. You're young, you're a young company and you're showing an older, more established industry how things can be done different, but yet you're doing a lot of good in the world, right? And I think that's really, really important. And I'm super glad that you came on to join me today.

Sid:

And I want to give a big shout out to my friend and fellow listener of the podcast, matt Cain, with Cain Contract Group up in Boston. Matt introduced me to Colin, and so that's how we got connected. So, matt, thank you for this introduction. Colin, thank you for joining us sharing your story. If people in our community want to get in touch with you, what is the best way for them to do that?

Collin:

Yeah, I'd say, take a look at our website. We're biomeus and if you want to drop me a note, colinll at biomeus.

Sid:

We'll make sure his website, his email address and LinkedIn profile and all that are located in the show notes for you. Just remember if you do reach out to Colin, please let him know. You heard him here on the trend report and that's why you're reaching out to him. Colin, thanks again for being here today. I really appreciate you here and coming to join us and sharing your story today and all of you listening today. Thanks as well for being here with us. Go out there and make today great and we'll see you again in a couple of weeks. Take care, everyone. One.