Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] Shubber, welcome to the business for good podcast.

Shubber Ali: Thanks, Paul. Great to be here.

Paul Shapiro: Hey, it's my pleasure to be talking with you. It's a topic that I not only am passionate about, but have participated in myself because in Sacramento, where I live, we have this program called cash for grass, and you may not have heard of it, but it's pretty self evident what it is where it's.

The city basically pays you to remove grass and put in either natives or drought tower and plants to save water. It's pretty cool. And so I did this, I'm eager to talk about it. But first, let me ask you, Shubber, about how you got interested in this space in the first place, because it wouldn't seem so obvious based on your own background that you were going to be the, the chief native pollinator friendly garden guy.

Shubber Ali: Yeah, no, thank you. And it's funny. I wouldn't have guessed that I got here, but when I look backward at my career, everything I've done up to this point actually is a piece of the puzzle that helps me do what I'm doing my job right now. But how it all started was actually So i've [00:01:00] been a gardener for about 25 years just as a hobby kind of thing on the side wherever I lived I always put in stuff to attract, you know butterflies birds, etc And go to the local gardens that are home home depot lows Any of those places and just buy pretty flowers and stick them in thinking they were helping You'd see some stuff in the yard and i've also it just coincidentally been a supporter of the national wildlife federation since the mid 90s just as an individual donor And, you know, occasionally get an email, this sort of thing and read through it sometimes.

Well, when we moved back here to Maryland from Northern California, four and a half years ago, the house that I bought had about two acres of lawn. And I'm not a big fan of lawn. I actually grew up in Southern California where they have similar programs for, lawn removal. We can talk about that.

But, I wanted to start putting in plants and, shrubs and trees and things. And I just happened to get an email around that time from the National Wildlife Federation that said this book had come out, Doug Tallamy's, book, Nature's Best Hope, and it was like a needle across the record moment for me where, you know, because [00:02:00] I read the book and realized that everything I've been doing for gardening to help wildlife for the past 20 years had not only not been helping, it had actually been hurting the environment, which is a really kind of disjointed moment for me and so and the basic reason was I wasn't planting plants that were native to the area and the book makes a really clear link between loss of native plants Oftentimes very pretty flowers and shrubs and things like that Which is a loss of food source for the native pollinators and their caterpillars Which then becomes a loss of the food source for the birds that rely on those caterpillars for their young Which is why birds have been disappearing and why butterflies and native bees have been disappearing.

So I said, okay. Well, let me go buy native plants And I went to my local Lowe's, in this case, where I live, that's the closest garden center. And I spent three hours Googling every single plant in the garden center, and none of them were native. They were all invasive species from around the world. And that's when I realized the kind of the magnitude of the problem because gardening is a 50 billion dollar industry [00:03:00] But most of it is selling you essentially garbage plants that look pretty but are actually hurting the environment so I reached out to the national wildlife federation because I had a role as one of the global leads for innovation at accenture And I called them and said I want to do A pro bono project with you to help you figure out how to solve this problem because i'm not the only gardener out there with this problem, which is It kind of goes a spectrum from awareness, education, but then access, because once I found out about native plants, I started looking for places to find them, and there were these little tiny nurseries here and there, but they were hard to get to, and oftentimes only carried a few species, and so I said, what we need is to create more education and more access, meaning supply, and they agreed, so we did a bunch of workshops and then built a business plan and a whole vision for creating essentially what would start as an e commerce business for it.

Native plants where part of the trouble as well is knowing what's native to your backyard, right? It's not enough to say native because everything is [00:04:00] technically native somewhere and say well, what's native to you? So the National Wildlife Federation had built actually with Professor Tallamy database called the native plant finder which literally gives Trees, shrubs, and perennials across all of North America at the zip code level.

So you can just punch in your zip code. It'll show you only what's native to you. And that became the foundation for this e commerce business. We helped them build. they built it in 2021 with the help of Accenture some others. And then launched it. I was actually the first customer. Got the plants and, delivered by FedEx right to your doorstep just in time for the pandemic.

So. You go online, you punch in your zip code, you only see what flowers, are native to your area. And then, you pick the ones you like, if you want to help monarchs, or hummingbirds, or whatever species you want to help. Because they actually show you the list of species that each set of flowers or individual plants they sell supports.

And they get delivered right to your doorstep, and all you have to do is dig a hole, put it in the ground. And then every year, because they're perennials, they come back bigger and [00:05:00] better and it's astounding, right? They, you know, so instead of having to buy plants every year, you put them in the ground and every year they come back on their own and you're getting more and more of it within a year.

We saw a massive impact in our yard, just in terms of the number of different wild songbird species, butterflies. I had turtles showing up as I dug a pond, all kinds of things happened. It was really amazing. So I went back to them in 2022 and said. There's a huge market opportunity, but you're not for profit.

Actually, the largest, not for profit for habitat conservation and, environment in the U. S. You know, 150 million business or so, but they don't know how to run a company. So I say, what you really need to do is spin this out of the for profit business to go after that 50 billion gardening market. And be the biggest shareholder, because then the equity will be worth a lot to you as a, as a, an asset.

And it took about nine months, but, they finally kind of wrapped their heads around what we need to do to do that. And they said, we will spin it out on the condition you come and be the CEO. And so [00:06:00] there's kind of how it happened, because I built companies before I've sold previous companies ahead. I've also done big partnerships and big consulting and obviously was part of the formation of the idea.

So, I came in in October, 2022. And we spent about nine months doing all the legal works to actually spin a department out of a not for profit Into a separate c corporation, which is officially what we are now on september 1. We became a separate company All the employees transferred over there's now 15 of us but we have a very very strong relationship with the national wildlife federation as they are our biggest shareholder They own over 80 of the shares in the company employees have the rest right now and Our mission is their mission to create habitat to help bring back declining species.

We're just using commerce

Paul Shapiro: to do great. So I want to get into that as to why using commerce as opposed to keeping it as a nonprofit and why you think you'll better achieve the mission. Of the organization that way, but let's just talk about this book first that you said was, you know, bringing it all to you first.

I [00:07:00] imagine you got this email about that book. You decided to read it. You probably were not thinking this is going to shift your career in such a major way. Let alone cause you to be the CEO of a new startup. but I read it, based on your recommendation and I just want to summarize it. So again, it's called Nature's Best Hope by Douglas Tallamy and it was really good.

it was really good. First of all, he's a funny writer. I mean, even, you know, for some people, if you're not into nature writing, he still was actually a really funny, writer who I enjoyed reading. But the basic premise of, Tallamy's book, Nature's Best Hope, is that And basically too much wilderness has now been destroyed by the top invasive species on the planet, which is human humans.

and if that we want to give wildlife like birds and bees and butterflies a chance, basically we have to do it in our own properties, right? We have to turn our own lawns and our own corporate landscapes into wildlife friendly corridors, which he refers to as the homegrown national park. I really liked that.

Like the idea of having your own national park right on your own property. But, you know, his [00:08:00] basic argument is like, look, we've done so much damage that if we care to actually try to save and salvage some of the species on this planet and not drive them into extinction, the only real hope is that.

There's so much lawn and so much corporate landscape that we've just seen a personally do this ourselves and not just hope that state parks are going to be created or national wildlife refuges are going to be. Created and so let's just talk about the scope of this problem for a second. Shubber. Like, if you think about the opportunity with how many lawns are out there, what are we looking at?

Like, you know, how, how much impact can we actually make? I mean, you have 2 acres, but most people don't end up anywhere near that. You know, my small fraction of that. So, you know, what do you need?

Shubber Ali: You actually, if you take a six by four foot portion of your lawn, however big your yard is, and just dedicate that to native plants, you will see an impact.

The issue is kind of two parts. One is the amount of lawn we've created in this country over the last 200 plus years, building off of the [00:09:00] European model that when the founding fathers came over, they were like, we want the estates like they have in England. And so what do they do? You get Monticello, you get Mount Vernon, you get all these massive You know, rolling lawns, which then, by the way, we have to mow, which throws more carbon in the atmosphere and does all these other things, but they're essentially sterile, and they have very, very shallow root structures, right?

So you're not, you're not getting the water absorption, you're not getting the benefit of the insects, you're not getting the carbon that gets sequestered. The thing is, I can't remember the exact number, of parks that he mentioned, but he said if everybody just took Was it half of their lawn across the U.

S. So not the whole thing. We're not saying get rid of your yard because, you know, if you have kids and you want them to play out on the lawn, you have a lot, right? Took half of it. It would be a national park greater than, you know, Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone and a bunch of others combined. Yeah, right.

But

Paul Shapiro: it's a great patchwork. Yeah, I mean, you know, tell me says in the book, he says in the state where you live, Maryland, he said, you know, in Maryland alone, there's over a million acres of lawn, which is [00:10:00] more than twice the area allocated to its state parks, state forests and wildlife management areas all combined.

I mean, think about that the ones it's a, it's hard to fathom just how much space. Humans take up like not our actual bodies, but the ones that were on and then if you think about it, like, if you think about all the space taken up to provide us with food, also, it's just huge, huge amounts of cropland to devote

Shubber Ali: and and that lawn again, like the root structure that it's really awesome poster in our office.

it was actually artwork that was done back in the 90s, pretty famous drawing, but it's, it shows the root structures of lots of different grasses and native plants, and then it shows lawn. And lawn only goes down about four to six inches, and that's turf. You can pull it out, and it's basically compacted soil below it.

But if you put in native plants, their roots go down as far as 15 feet. And so places like Maryland actually pay you, there's a program here in Montgomery County called RainScapes that will pay you 7, 500 for your residence if you've got a place where water runs off during rainstorms. To put in a rain garden, [00:11:00] because what you're doing is the water gets absorbed instead of running straight to the storm drains and to the Chesapeake.

And so instead of spending all that money later trying to put a band aid on the Chesapeake because it's polluted, if you can actually get the water to be absorbed and filtered in the ground where it should go in the first place. That actually helped. And that goes to the program you talked about on the West coast.

So my hometown of Long Beach, same thing. $3 a square foot to take out your lawn and put in drought tolerant plant. Oh, which actually absorb and, and sequester that water.

Paul Shapiro: $3 a square foot is pretty good. in Sacramento it's $1 per square foot. and it's up to 2000 square feet. It, it's a little bit more generous if you're doing a corporate landscape, but for your residential home, it's a dollar a square foot.

But still, it's pretty awesome. And I, I will say. My wife and I did this at our home and the benefits have been so tremendous. We had an entirely grass front lawn, just like nearly all of our neighbors do. And we switched it. We took out 100 percent of the grass in the front lawn. We kept some in the back for our dog, but in the front, it's entirely now, drought tolerant native plants.[00:12:00]

And what was once basically a desert. Is now an unbelievable oasis of wildlife activity from hummingbirds to other songbirds to butterflies and more. so much so that, you know, I even saw owls hovering above our yard, which I don't know. Really? Yeah. Yeah. It's really incredible. Like it's not that big, but still.

you know, it turned into the place where our neighbors literally on a regular basis are taking photos of our lawn. They come by and they bring their kids by to look at it. It's like a little meadow and it's small. Like this is not a, we don't have a big yard at all. but it's a really beautiful place, that people in the neighborhood really appreciate.

And there've been a couple of people who've been inspired by it to change their own. Lawns up, but sadly not as many as I would like yet. but you know, hopefully

Shubber Ali: through that, have you put a certified wildlife habitat sign out

Paul Shapiro: in front yet? no, I I've seen those. I know that, I know that those exist, but we haven't had it, certified or anything.

It's just

Shubber Ali: a, well, so, so certification is actually a self certification [00:13:00] process, but NWF has been doing that for 50 years and all you need are four things, which I think you probably have, and then you can get a really cool sign, but what you said is actually, And you also go in the register there. But what's what's really good is and if this data shows that when somebody does certify and put a sign up their neighbors are 60 percent more likely to do the same thing.

So part of it is like you're saying people look at that and they go. Oh, okay. And so if you just go to nwf. org slash certify. You can actually learn more about the program. It's really easy. And, I certified my house the first year after we moved here. Nice. you know, I don't think I was going to say.

Oh, go ahead.

Paul Shapiro: I was going to say, yeah, maybe I'll do that. I'd be happy to. A former co worker of mine, Krista Rakovan, she used to live in Maryland, but now lives in Ohio. I know that she, recently got herself certified as like a native landscape design person. And so, I know she has some thoughts on this, too, and is in favor of the certification program.

So I'll check in with Krista also on this, but I do want to ask you [00:14:00] about why we want this because you raised this issue about how like lawns came to be that we're trying to. Replicate what we had seen from European gentry. And that's why we get these big lawns because most of us just think, you know, lawns are the norm now, right?

Like 99 percent of homes have a lawn. So why, you know, the question becomes like, how did this come to be? Because it was once associated with aristocracy and now it's for anybody who has a home and I was really riveted in telling me his book to learn about the history of this. And because. You know, it's a lot more in depth than just, like, wanting what the Europeans had, because why did they have it?

Like, why'd they do it? And it's like, well, yes, it's a display of wealth that you have all this land that you can do nothing with. You're so wealthy that you can just have a dead area in front of your house. That is. not producing food or anything. but there's something psychologically about it that humans seem to like.

And, so tell me about that. Like, you know, why is it that humans are attracted to this [00:15:00] big, short, grassy landscape?

Shubber Ali: So there's, there's two parts that I've seen. one of them actually goes back to a lot of the work I did before this. So the first part is there's also, I think he mentions it in the book.

Is, you know, nature was always a scary thing for humanity for the longest time, right? You know, things live in the woods and places like that. So having clear lines of sites where you could actually have these big. This is looking after your home gave people a bit of a sense of security. You don't really need that when you're living in suburban track housing, to be honest, but we kind of kept the mentality and that actually goes to the 2nd thing is there's a.

There's a term we used to use in the consulting world, and it's actually a book that I'd started writing before I took this job, but then this job became all consuming, so it's sitting half finished on my shelf, but, it's on a topic called orthodoxies, and orthodoxies are something that are all around you, and that's really, and that's part of how we created this business was to say, how do we break some orthodoxies, but it's nothing more than a fancy way of saying, that's the way we do things.

Right. And they exist everywhere. They exist in business. They exist in government. They exist at the PTA, your local school. They [00:16:00] exist in anything you do virtually. If you just do things using a heuristic, they may have been adopted long before you got there. And so one of the reasons we have lawns today and every development that's out there is because every development out there has lawns.

Paul Shapiro: Right. Yeah, it's so true. It's like, well, why do we do it? Because all of our neighbors did it and their neighbors before them did it. Right. It's so true. But there is something to this, idea, like from an evolutionary psychology perspective of why humans would like this. And you mentioned, well, you know, it doesn't really provide much of a survival benefit for us in a suburban landscape like we live in now.

Right. but our minds don't know that, right? Like a blink of an eye ago, we were living on the savanna and exactly. And so to our minds, it obviously hasn't caught up with the fact that that type of landscape is conducive to survival because we're still living on the African savanna from our minds perspective.

And so, if, if having not much. [00:17:00] Obstruction visual obstruction to be able to look around and see if there are predators coming, is the way that you have a better survival. Of course, we're gonna be more comfortable with that. I mean, this is why we always think about the forest as a dangerous place. But a meadow is somewhere that's safe for us.

And so it's, it's like, we're almost like fighting human psychology here. We needed a new type of heuristic to use the term that you did. And it makes me think, well, you know, it's hard to fight against, against like what we are designed for evolutionarily, but, we can, you know, you know, we don't, we don't, you know, we've fought against so many other things from our evolutionary background that.

you know, are things that we have can are, at least that we're capable of overcoming, like, you know, we don't just sit around eating sweets all day, even though our ancestors certainly would have now, some people might do that, but not everybody, not everybody. And we don't need everybody. We need some people who can just say, hey, listen, I'm open to having a better type of landscape.

And so, oh, go on. I'm

sorry.

Shubber Ali: So on that note, there's, there's, there's also a lot [00:18:00] more evidence coming out in an area that's only recently getting proper scientific research. So. on the reasons why we should do this now, it doesn't mean again, go completely the other end of the spectrum, but if everybody took a small portion of their yards, what you would do is create little islands for the wildlife and the population, like,like a friend of mine in Chicago, in the loop, put some native plants on his balcony.

And he texted me a month later when a monarch showed up and he was, he was freaking out. I was like, this is amazing. I'm like, they can find it if you make it for him, but we need to create these oases. The reason why is, so there's another book that I highly recommend that I read. again, all these that I discovered as a result of coming into this industry and taking on this job.

But Richard Lou wrote this book, Last Child in the Woods, back in 2008. And it was, it was groundbreaking, right? So what, and the subtitle is Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. So there is a really clear, body of scientific work now that's only growing on what is happening to humanity because we're becoming disconnected from nature.

And the pandemic really was an eye opener for people who then had to spend [00:19:00] time at home or taking walks outside. We're immersing ourselves a little more in nature to see it's actually very restorative and it's not just anecdotal and it's not just, you know,almost like a placebo effect. There's actual scientific data on effects of like even taking a walk in the woods and what it does to your blood pressure and to the production of serotonin and all these things.

You know, reducing stress, you know, the, the, the Japanese do forest bathing, right? And they've got really good science that I've been doing for 20

Paul Shapiro: years. Well, it's, it's interesting. You mentioned the Japanese because I, just got back from a work trip to Thailand and I spent nearly all of that time in Bangkok, which, you know, has very few trees in downtown Bangkok.

And After a couple of days there, I started feeling it like it was such an urban landscape with virtually no nature whatsoever. And so I took a walk over to a very beautiful park, which was remarkably close to, you know, what is completely urban, but it's called, Benchakiti Park, I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that, but that's how it's spelled and that's how I would pronounce [00:20:00] it.

but it's a beautiful, beautiful park with trees and water and, and there's, you know, very, it's very serene. And I'll tell you, just psychologically, I felt better going there. And I thought about this because I was reading the book at the time. And Ptolemy talks about vitamin N or vitamin nature, which we should, you know, view as like, you don't want to be deficient in vitamin N, so to speak.

so I, I really like that. And I, I personally felt that for sure, that there was this benefit. And so, I certainly, you know, am favorable to the idea of doing something for wildlife. I think it's great. Like, I do want to garden for wildlife, but it's also a gardening for us, you know, giving us something.

It is for you. Exactly. So let's, so let's talk about the actual business then Shobber, because, you know, you, you talked about what it was like to spin out from a nonprofit charity into a for profit corporation. Why couldn't they have just done this on their own? Like, why couldn't the national, they were doing it on their own, right?

So, so what was deficient about it? If they're, you, you said they were, you know, they're making some pretty good revenue as a mission oriented, department with the for profit, you [00:21:00] know, trying to do some commerce, but why is it better to start selling shares in a company and have a profit

Shubber Ali: motive here?

Yeah. So there are a couple of reasons. The first is that the people who were running it were people who work at an offer profit and didn't have the experience. So in theory, you could hire in a bunch of people to work at the not for profit who have decades of business experience. So they'd have to know supply chain and marketing and, other parts of operation fulfillment and all the things that go with, you know, actually building e commerce platform and the rest.

And, when I got there and I lifted the hood on the, on the car, so to speak, what I saw wasn't an engine, but like two hamsters on a treadmill. Because most of it was set up the way that people who were their best efforts, but who didn't have decades of experience in those things doing did so contracting with their supply chain was all in the favor of the supply chain and out of the business.

And so their, you know, their, their margins were all out of whack and their fulfillment model was all out of whack. And, you know, we gave them a very clear plan for, you know, get local growers in every state. So you have very short distance from grower to, to customer. And they can actually even like go [00:22:00] and do pickup as opposed to shipping.

What do they do? They set up in order to try to scale quickly, they set up one big grower in Wisconsin and then there are FedExing plants to North Carolina and Maine and all places in between. Well, the carbon impact alone, just, I mean, that doesn't fit the brand, it doesn't fit what you're trying to do, but it's also expensive as heck, which makes a plant more expensive.

so there's like a whole series of things that just were easier to do if you're in a business. And then you say, okay, well, why couldn't those people be hired into the business? And the answer is because if you want to get people to work for a business as a startup, you either give them equity or you pay the market rates.

Well, there's no way not for profits paying market rates right off the bat. And so you go, okay, well, if you spin it out and you give people equity, you're going after a multi billion dollar market, you've got NWF and it's millions of existing members, so you have ready made customers. Right. So if you can create a business to sell to them, the equity value, let's just imagine for a moment, this becomes, you know, a quarter billion dollar business, which is very, very conceivable in the next, you know, five to six [00:23:00] years that the rate is growing.

they're 80 percent of that is worth more than all the revenue they bring in, in a year today, just as their equity holding. Right. So it was like, and then we're going to keep growing the business. It's not like we're going to stop and sell it. The goal is very closely to list the company.

Paul Shapiro: Right. So I read recently that the company has about a million dollars in revenue so far annually.

Is that accurate? That was

Shubber Ali: that was last year's revenue. And our expectation this year is we're forecasting between 3

Paul Shapiro: 5. Okay. So you think that this year in 2024, let's say on the optimistic side, you have 5 million and that by 2030, you're going to be at 250 million.

Shubber Ali: No, no, no, no. That's the market value of the business.

Remember when you list the company,

Paul Shapiro: that you're not talking about revenue. Okay. Got it. Got it. You're talking to

Shubber Ali: me about 40 to 45 million at that point, but right. We will be at well over 50 percent margins, right? We're already, this is the thing that, that, which is why I love this over previous startups.

Is we actually make money on every product we sell we just aren't at scale yet to cover our our overhead, right? Yeah, it's a [00:24:00] very it's where we break that

Paul Shapiro: it's a very novel business model I've not heard that much about it where you actually make profit where you actually, you know sell things for more than it costs you to produce them.

It's weird yeah, it is crazy, isn't it? Yeah, it's a it's an odd idea, especially in the last several years in startup land So let me just ask a devil's advocate question of you, then Shubber, because you're talking about how there's this great market opportunity. You think you might get to a quarter billion dollar valuation with multiple tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

Why couldn't somebody do like what I did, right? I wanted to do this to my yard. So I went to my local nursery and they have a section there called like, you know, natives and trap tolerant perennials and so on. Why can't I just go do that? Why should I use Garden for Wildlife as opposed to just go get these from my nursery?

Well, in the long

Shubber Ali: run, that's exactly where you will get them from, but there will be a branded section that's called Garden for Wildlife with the brand of the National Wildlife Federation and all of our partners behind it, like the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and all the others that we're partnering with, right?

But in the short term, most people don't have [00:25:00] access to native plants. You're lucky that you have a garden center that does that. But most people still shop at the big box stores and they do not carry natives. And that's like some limited. If you want to go to a local nursery, which are these mom and pop businesses, and we're partnering with them, they have a limited selection.

And the other thing they don't do is they don't do e commerce. They very specifically like we grow plants. We don't, I was just at a conference last week. For the mid Atlantic region, which had a bunch of native plant growers at it, and we're talking about joining our supply chain where we will get the orders.

We will then route them to them. They grow the stuff for us. And then we do fulfillment and take it away because they don't want to do last mile. They don't want to do any of that. They want to grow plants. You know, these mom and pop shops are like. You know, five people in a 3 million business, and they're happy doing what they do.

Paul Shapiro: So, so how does it work? Somebody goes to the Garden for Wildlife website, you can plug in your zip code, and then you'll get a list of plants that are native to your area. And then you can select for what you're interested in attracting, whether it's, you know, hummingbirds or butterflies, [00:26:00] etc.

Shubber Ali: So, so some of the things that we built over the last year to make this even easier is, You go, you put in your, your zip codes, the first step, and then you're shown a combination of both collections and single species.

Collections are pre curated by a horticulturalist, groupings of plants that serve a specific purpose. So we have one that's called Monarch Monthly. Why? Because it has milkweed, and a specific milkweed depending on what part of the country you're in. But it also has two other plants that flower after the milkweed does, because the adult monarchs need additional food, not just The food for the caterpillars, right?

So you need to get three seasons of bloom. And so that's a curated collection for monarchs. There's also single species. If you're like, Hey, I want to just buy a bunch of little blue sand grasses. You can just buy the single species and order it. Once you place the order and it shows you the impact and all that stuff right there on the page, you place the order, you put in your credit card and boom, you know, it shows up via FedEx and we ship right now between late April and mid late October.

Paul Shapiro: So, what happens between the time that I quick order and the time that it shows [00:27:00] up? So you don't have your own greenhouse or your own nursery. So you very little CapEx

Shubber Ali: associated with this, right? Yeah. So right now, what we have is a network of seven growers that we've contracted with in different parts of the country.

So in Colorado, Wisconsin, Connecticut, North Carolina, Florida, Minnesota, and, oh, yeah, Southern Virginia. That's our most recent one. hidden gem farm. It's a husband and wife couple. They've got three acres. In that case, we actually built them a greenhouse, right? Because they wanted to grow native plants, but they didn't have the capital.

And we're like, okay, we'll build a greenhouse. Yeah. Yeah. We'll put the equipment in there. You provide the supply for us, and that allows us to then serve the local markets of North Carolina, Virginia, with, a long term loyal supply partner. Right? And then we will actually, they'll earn that greenhouse over a period of about 2 years from the plants they supply to us at a lower cost, and everybody wins.

Right? So this is how we, we help support local businesses. what happens is the order goes through our website through Shopify, and then it's routed to our sales force and our order management system ultimately goes directly to whichever greenhouse. [00:28:00] Has the species that were being ordered for that state.

Right. So we have like, it's just, you know, relational database and lookup tables and has the inventory available. That order then gets sent to them. A label gets printed. They literally pack and pull and put in the boxes and FedEx gets an API link sent to them saying we've got orders to pick up. FedEx shows up, picks up the boxes of stuff and off it goes.

And you're going to choose a few days later.

Paul Shapiro: So it's kind of like your own Instacart or your own DoorDash, but for instead of ordering from a menu of dishes that you want, you're ordering a type of plant that you want. And it's got to meet these screens about being native to your area and wildlife friendly and drought tolerant and so on.

And I presume perennial or are you doing annuals also?

Shubber Ali: So no, no, no, we do, we do native perennials and we also do, shrubs. So we do like native azaleas, Carolina roses. In a couple of years, we'll get to trees, but it takes a while to grow trees. So. Well, we already have that in like kind of our back end production.

They won't be ready for sale and shipping because some places will sell you bare root trees, but if you've ever received a barrier tree, you [00:29:00] know why you never want to sell a barrier tree. Literally, it looks like a stick with a little baggie with roots at the bottom, and it is very underwhelming from a customer point of view.

Yeah.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. you, you mentioned caterpillars a moment ago. And so for, for me, this is something I didn't really think about that much was, you know, if you want. Butterflies. Obviously, you need caterpillars. but having the, you know, having the plants of butterflies like to eat is not the same thing as having the nutrition and habitat available for the caterpillars.

So you could have, let's say, milkweed, which could be helpful for adult. Butterflies, but not necessarily giving them the ability to procreate because you don't have the conditions that are necessary for the caterpillars to thrive. So, to let me talk to her, tell me, excuse me, talks about this in his book, nature's best hope, but tell me, what do you need for these caterpillars?

Like what is, how do you create a caterpillar friendly environment, which is like, you know, the basis of birds, basically not just the monarchs, but you know, if you want birds to eat, you really need lots of caterpillars. I was shocked to these [00:30:00] birds are eating literally like thousands of caterpillars a day.

that they need to keep to feed their babies. So, what do you need in order to, to basically incubate some caterpillars in your yard?

Shubber Ali: Yeah, so there's a couple of things. One is, putting in those native, perennials. there's a lot of them in our, our, there are certain ones that are called keystone species that support like hundreds of different species of moths and butterflies and the rest.

The monarchs actually just the most extreme edge case that everybody's familiar with because of all the campaigns and save them because they have hyper evolved to only feed on one kind of plant. The caterpillars can only feed on milkweed. The adults can feed off of anything that provides the pollen that they can actually get it from.

But, caterpillars the milkweed.

Paul Shapiro: Thank you for correcting my, my misunderstanding of that. I appreciate it.

Shubber Ali: No, it's quite all right. And so, so milkweed, no milkweed, no baby monarchs, no baby monarchs, no adult monarchs. It's really that simple, right? But once you get the adult monarchs, you need to have other kinds of flowering perennials in the other seasons, which allows them to continue to feed after they've hatched and they're still [00:31:00] before they migrate again.

and this actually just going back to the website. One of the things we added last year was filtering like you have on Yelp. And you can say, I want lunch, 2 signs, Italian, you know, dine in. and you can put those filters and you'll only see those restaurants near you, right? open now, well, you can do the same thing now saying I want things that are, you know, red or between two and four feet tall or dry soil or clay soil or full sunshine or shade, or, and you do the filters and then it'll only show you the plants.

That meet those criteria so you can design your yard, right? Which is always very helpful, and we we introduced that last spring and people seem to really like that But going back to the caterpillar So another thing that people don't realize is they're like, okay Well, i'm going to put a big oak tree or a maple tree or something in my yard Which is great because it supports lots of species, but then i've got lawn all around it Well, the problem is a lot of these tree caterpillars actually drop to the ground and burrow into the soil And then hibernate and kind of develop in the soil that eventually will emerge and then fly, you know, and then transform and fly off.

[00:32:00] The issue is that ground is super compact. Again, what I was saying about turf is turf is really dense, right? You know, you've got the six inch and then it's hard and it's very hard for them to burrow in there and do that. So what they basically, they drop and die. And so if you actually put. Native plant around whether it's shrubs or perennial flowers, whatever else around it.

You're actually creating a zone of life around your tree So if you've got a lawn and you've got like a maple tree in it Just put a small native garden right around the tree and you'll have an impact Because you're then creating a place where the caterpillars can

Paul Shapiro: actually thrive Right, yeah, and I hadn't thought about this.

In fact, I do have a really big tree in my front yard and, the base of it is just a bunch of rocks. You know, there's no, it's not grass, but it's there's nothing. It's just rocks. And I thought about, well, maybe it should be, putting something there because, the, the term, which I hadn't thought about before that I was introduced to me recently was this.

Idea of three dimensional gardening, right? So instead of just having a tree, you have something like below it. and instead of just [00:33:00] having, you know, the plants below, you have some shade that's being provided by a tree as well. And it made me think about how the fact that, you know, you don't have to do all or nothing.

Like, if you want to do something, you can think about lawn. As more like a throw rug, as opposed to a wall to wall carpet that you don't have to have, you know, your entire room carpeted wall to wall, but you can still have that rug, but then allow something for wildlife as well around there, because the one itself is basically your, it's an, it's like an artificial desert that you've created there.

Shubber Ali: so. And the other part is, like, for anybody who's listening to this podcast who have, you know, young kids or planning on having kids at some point, if you just take, again, a section on the side of your lawn, so think of it almost like furniture on your wall to wall carpet, and you're putting, like, a sideboard up, or you're putting up, you know, a, a cabinet for your stereo and all the rest of that, imagine that as being the native garden.

You don't have, just leave the rest of it. If you want lawn, that's fine. Personally, I hate mowing lawn, and I don't find it ridiculous to pay somebody to come and mow my lawn [00:34:00] every week. Because it's just, it's just a waste of money as well. But, but if you just take a section, like you go buy some of those nice like paving stones or rocks from, again, a Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever, you know, garden center near you, and then just take that little area and put in native plants there.

And watch and see the difference. It's a place where like your kids go and look at caterpillars. You can discover the first time you see this kind of butterfly or this kind of bird. And that's the other really cool thing is, one of our partners is the Cornell lab of ornithology and they have, an app that's really cool.

And I tell everybody about it. And the best way I can describe it is it's Shazam for birds. It's called Merlin and it's a free app. You download it and it's got every single bird in North America. And you literally just stand outside. If you hear birds chirping or singing or whatever, and you push record and it will identify every bird for you based on their bird song and tell you what they are, and then you can get more information by clicking on them and it's free.

But what's really cool is once you start doing this, you're going to start noticing more and more birds showing up in your yard because I have like [00:35:00] species. I never saw when I first got here, we now have 15 to 20 different ones in our backyard all the time. and it's fantastic because the bird song is also proven with recent science.

To actually make people happier. So you want a free tonic? You want free health care? Here you go.

Paul Shapiro: Hey, nice. Very nice. Well, we'll, we'll include a link to the Merlin app in the show notes of this episode for business for podcast. com. It looks awesome. I was just checking it out while you were speaking and it looks like a cool app that I will certainly download myself for sure.

okay, so let me ask you, like, you have had a pretty, lengthy now career doing startups, working at Accenture. You've, you've done a lot of things in your life, and now you are running this new startup where you already have. the backing of a pretty large organization, but you need to sell shares to write if 80 percent of it is owned by a nonprofit organization and 20 percent is owned by the employees.

Eventually, you're going to start actually raising capital, which is what you're [00:36:00] trying to do now. So I noticed that you're selling safes or simple agreement for future equity. On the website that people can directly invest into the company and, and, get some future shares in here. So tell me, what are you trying to raise?

What do you think the valuation today ought to be for that safe or what's the cap on the safe? And what are the terms of the investment here that yeah,

Shubber Ali: great question, Paul, let me, let me just clarify a little bit. So we actually did a safe. That closed in october. It was over subscribed. we had a We'd set a target of four million dollars.

We actually ended up raising five million The lead investor was this the national wildlife federation, so they doubled down on their investment But then we had other investors as well I was an investor, the chairman of the board was investor number of others were investors as well because we all believe in the mission what we did on the back of that is again and this actually goes to your question, you know Why Garden for Wildlife and not just some other business or whatever else that could do this too is the National Wildlife Federation brings millions of members with it, right, which are ready made customers.

So if I only ever [00:37:00] sold to NWF's membership, this is a billion dollar business. Leaving that aside, what I also want to do is turn them into investors and not just customers, right? Because they support the mission, they support NWF and this is NWF's mission. So. We actually launched a, a reg CF crowdfunding round, late last year.

And it goes through at the end of April this, so about four months, it closes at three and a half months. And that's actually an sec registered offering, but it's open to anybody. You don't have to be accredited. So you can invest, you know, as little as 250 and buy shares, common shares in garden for wildlife.

That's, you're now investing in the mission of the

Paul Shapiro: business. The minimum investment is 250. Correct.

Shubber Ali: And the reason we're doing that is, you know, it's one is to create kind of stickiness with a much larger base that will then become what we call investors, right? Investors, customers, but actually evangelists, but also because it's just working capital.

That's a scale faster. So to get, you know, from 3 to 5 million to. 10 million in revenue next year allows us to build more greenhouses and do other things we [00:38:00] need to do, make us more scalable, faster. So we don't have to go out and raise additional rounds because again, as we said earlier, profitable in every unit.

Paul Shapiro: So what is the valuation that if you invest 250, 000 or 250, 000, like what's the investment, what's the valuation that you're investing

Shubber Ali: in? So the valuation on this Ridge CF round is 25 million, which is on the back of the safe round, which was actually capped. At 25 with a 20 percent discount. So they effectively got a 20 million valuation.

and the thing to me that's really exciting is that we don't see doing series B series, D series, you know, all the rest of those later on, like other ones do, so people keep getting crunched

Paul Shapiro: down Nice. Okay. So it's a 25 million pre money valuation, minimum investment, 250, and you can invest through your website, right?

So if you go to Garden for, if you go to Garden for Wildlife website that you can directly invest there. There's

Shubber Ali: a, it's actually [00:39:00] invest. gardenforwildlife. com and, our, our partner, the, the actual securities broker that's doing this for us is and they're actually running the platform, the rest, but There's a video on there that explains the business talks a little bit about it,at the, at the recommendation of my marketing department.

if you invest 10, 000 or more, you get dinner with me,

Paul Shapiro: nice, very good for better or worse.

Shubber Ali: I'm even happy to cook, but, but no, it's,and, and I'd love to try some of your products. Yeah,

Paul Shapiro: that sounds good. We'll only do 5, 000 for the ingredients. no, that's great. So for a quarter, you want to, you want to make a 250, 000 investment.

You're going to own 1 percent of this company. Right. So it's, you know, You know, this is a good opportunity for people to invest and we'll include a link to the to the investment page. So people can check that out. I do want to ask you about the legality of the nonprofit promoting this for profit enterprise when it was a department of the National Wildlife Federation.

Obviously, like it would seem like less. Of a concern, but how does that work? Like you have a nonprofit 501 c3 tax exempt [00:40:00] charity. I, there must be some limitations on how much it can promote a for profit business that it is the primary

Shubber Ali: shareholder of. Yeah, so, and we spent wow, I mean, that's probably why it took us a total of 9 months to get the thing actually spun out.

So I was like, when I first got there, I'm like, December 31st, we'll be out of here and they all started laughing. You know, I was like, I had no idea what I was getting into. But it took a long 9 months to to do everything from license agreements, shared service agreements, all the things that that defined.

With external council, we use an internal council. We worked on this to define the relationship between us and them. We are, we are a separate entity. They actually can communicate about us to membership. We actually have an agreement where 6 times a year, they will email their entire membership on our behalf.

the 1st, 1 of those, so we do that normally, it's kind of February, March, April, May, which is ramp up the gardening season and the start of gardening season. And then, kind of September, October or August, September, because fall is actually the best time to plant your [00:41:00] plant, because then they grow their roots through the winter and then the spring, they really take off, but people like to garden in the spring.

So that's when we hit them as well. the winter, we don't do co marketing with them. And the reason why is because that's when people are fundraising and they didn't want competition with that. But from a legal point of view, you know, they actually have other partners and lots of not for profits have corporate partners that they can promote.

When they're doing, like, one of our other, big not for profits that we, we signed an agreement with in partnership with last year, is the World Animal Protection, which is an awesome international not for profit. World Animal Protection U. S. is based in New York, great group, and they promote us to their membership, but we don't get access to their members directly.

They promote us to the membership, and if their members come and buy from us now, they're part of our customer base. Yeah, but then we promote

Paul Shapiro: them. I could, yeah, I could easily see how there's, you know, like some type of a, affiliate program, right? Where, like, World Animal Protection says buy from you and every, and every, you know, sale, they get something from that.

I [00:42:00] don't know enough about nonprofit law to answer the following question, but I would imagine like National Wildlife Federation. Let's say they have a member magazine, right? And let's say it goes to their millions of donors and there's ad space in that magazine right now. They take ads from I don't know, you know, let's say, you know, Martha Stewart living right?

And Then they say, okay, well, we're going to give a free ad space to garden for wildlife, something that we would have sold for, you know, 50, 000 to somebody else. We're going to give it to them because we want to promote them yet. They have a pecuniary interest in this company. So like, you know, how does that work?

Are there any limitations at all? Or can they just turn their entire magazine into a free ad for garden for wildlife? Well,

Shubber Ali: so it's funny you say that because they actually don't take ads and we actually do pay for the one ad that does

Paul Shapiro: go in there. okay, well, yeah, let's say their CEO goes on TV and says, Hey, everybody buy from go, go buy from garden for wildlife.

It's a free ad that way. That's right. Like how, how does it work? Are there any limitations at all?

Shubber Ali: Not that, not that we've come across [00:43:00] in working with legal counsel, as long as we're not. so there are some very, very strict restrictions on what not for profit. That was actually got a really good article on this that I read, on when a not for profit is getting funds from a for profit or some sort of like affiliate type program.

That they can't specify the amount they're getting on a transaction basis because that actually, then triggers some IRS rules about their 501c3 and other, but to say, Hey, we're in a partnership you buy from them, we get funds. That's that is totally above board with the

Paul Shapiro: IRS. Oh, interesting. Okay, cool.

Well, thank you for the education. I, I certainly appreciate that. And that's why, that's

Shubber Ali: why four years of not going to law school talking right there. So I would say, you know, kind of like they say, not financial advice and say, well. We spent nine months talking to lawyers and this is what we came up

Paul Shapiro: with.

I'm sure National Wildlife Federation is a pretty good council. listen, Shubber, you've done a lot of things in your life. you're now devoting yourself to trying to create better. Environments for wildlife and for humans who want to be able to enjoy wildlife as well. So my [00:44:00] hat is off to you for that.

I imagine that somebody with the experience that you have is probably thought quite a lot. About things that you wish existed that didn't, that don't exist yet. And so let me just ask you, what do you hope somebody listening to this might take away and go start themselves? Like what companies do you hope they will go start?

And maybe they'll be on the show at a later date saying, ah, you know, that shover guy from garden for wildlife, he gave me this idea. Now I've started this company. Yeah, and

Shubber Ali: I'll preface this by saying everything's been done. It just, it hasn't been done well enough that it's now a household name, which is why there's always opportunities, right?

And I, there's a slide I used to show when I would give talks either in my class or lectures that I was doing at Accenture that showed Craigslist and then showed it like all these startup companies are now very successful companies in their own right that took one piece of Craigslist and just focused on that thing.

And blew it up, whether it was a dating thing or, you know, a sale thing or this or that or whatever else. Right? So there's always opportunity for innovation. I preface by saying that because as soon as I say these ideas, people are going to say, oh, well, [00:45:00] somebody's doing that. They're probably doing something like that.

But that was usually the kiss of death phrase at big corporations to why they wouldn't innovate because like, oh, well, we looked at something like that. It's like, well, okay, but you didn't figure out the right problem to solve. And that's always the core of it is there's a great quote out there. nobody knows where it came from, but it says if you had an hour to solve a problem, it's been 55 minutes defining it in five minutes solving it, because really understanding the problem.

Well, the solution becomes obvious. Most people jump in. I think that's the problem. And then they can't quite get product market fit, which is the latest term for that thing, right? Because they're never really understanding the problem. So I'll give you the problem that I'm thinking about. There's two, one of which I actually did this as another pro bono project when I was at Accenture with Best Friends Animal Society, another fantastic not for profit out there, whose mission is to end, is to create a no kill country so that shelters stop putting animals down.

They have to be dogs and cats. And they're on a mission to get to that by 2025 and they've gotten a long way already. One of the things I talk with them about, which I think needs to be created at a much larger scale, so [00:46:00] more broadly. Is what I call the platform for volunteers and what I mean by that is if you think about most of the not for profits out there that do fundraisers, walk a thons, bike a thons, jog a thons, fill in the blank a thons, they're taking generally very well skilled, intelligent people with a huge amount of capital up here and asking them to walk in a straight line, bike in a straight line, run in a straight line, and have other people give them money for doing that.

Instead of saying, how do I harness their brainpower, their talents, For my organization to solve this problem or this problem or build this business or solve this thing. And there's gotta be some way to unpack that so that people can help organizations without having to go work for the organization, but in discrete bite sized chunks, right?

Almost like packetizing the internet to get, right? How do you, how do you take these tasks and make them small things or spin up a little project where people can work on it? There's a platform for that. We actually did this for best friends on getting volunteers to help tier three shelters. Become more efficient and more educated because best friends couldn't do it [00:47:00] from the top down because they didn't have the resources, but they had donors who lived all over the country who were near these places.

So, if you could train them, they could do it as a volunteer basis and that was this idea of how do you unlock the talent? So, they're not just writing a check, but they're actually engaging in your mission. So, that's 1 that could help the entire not for profit world, which I think is fantastic. The 2nd 1, is, so I was taking a hike earlier today with my family when it was flurrying.

It's now sunny here in Maryland and we haven't really got snow, but. When I first moved here four and a half years ago, having lived here three times before and having gone through big snowstorms, I thought, well, long driveway, I should get, a snowblower. So I bought a snowblower and for a year and a half, it sat in the box.

Because we didn't get snow, and I think I've used it twice in four and a half years, and I don't know if I'll use it again now this year, global warming and all that, but that got me thinking about how everybody in my cul de sac has a snowblower and everyone in my cul de sac has a fill in the blank that you only use once or twice.

I said that part of how we fix the problem of the consumption driven world. And by saying, do I really need that thing or do you need to have [00:48:00] access to that thing? And so if you can create a platform that allowed for localized asset sharing, so, but you have to solve for problems like insurance and social credit and things that like, I can lend this or like one person can have this thing and it gets linked out and you make it super easy with QR codes and scanning and this and that.

And ultimately, how do you make it so that we don't all need to buy one of everything when we don't only want everything? Because I've got so much stuff that I would, you know, back in the old days, when you knew all your neighbors and you had all your friends and everything else, you just lend stuff, you lend tools, you get them back, we become so hyper fragmented.

We don't do that very well anymore, but we should, and we can start to turn. Now, of course, corporate America will push back and say, well, these are the things we sell. It's like, okay, but do you need to, you know, Yeah, we maybe sell a little bit less of that

Paul Shapiro: and do something. Yeah, you know, interestingly, in Montgomery County, Maryland, where you live, in Tacoma Park specifically, there used to be a tool lending library.

And so you could go to, it was kind of like, it was like a, it was like a shed. It's like a big shed. And this guy named Walt Rave, who sadly passed away, [00:49:00] but he was the Tacoma Park tool librarian. And what's really cool is that you could go there and not just borrow tools, but he would show you how to use them.

And so like, you know, let's say, you know, snowblower seems pretty self evident how to use it, but a lot of tools, somebody who has, very little, let's say carpentry experience, et cetera, might not know what to do. And so, well, this kind of Walt Rave would actually help you use them. It was really cool.

But now, I, I do use like the buy nothing groups on Facebook. So if you belong to the buy nothing group on, you know, like for your neighborhood on Facebook, and you have to prove that you live in the neighborhood in order to get into it. And I see it all the time on their people, not just giving away things, but learning stuff out.

And so it's a nice, you know, it's not really a. You know, it's not really a business. Anybody has started. Well, I guess Facebook is the business, but, but it's still a good way. And next door for this, right? Right. Yeah. It's still, yeah. Next door. It would have been effective there, but yeah, but

Shubber Ali: like I said before, it's not a household name, therefore it's still a

Paul Shapiro: problem we're solving.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Just because it exists [00:50:00] somewhere, somebody else could do it. As I often say, look, you know, there's enough room in the world for McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's, even though they're all selling burgers and fries. So, but there's enough room for all of them.

Shubber Ali: Interesting choice for you.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, hopefully they will be, you know, there'll be enough room for all of them to be selling plant based burgers only. so finally, Shubber, there's a lot of resources that you have already listed during this interview, and I'm going to be linking to all of them, so whether it's Nature's Best Hope or Last Shot of the Woods or the Merlin app and so on, but are there any other resources that you haven't yet offered that you want to make sure people, can check out any books or anything else that have been useful for you in your own journey as an entrepreneur and now as the CEO of this company?

Shubber Ali: Yeah, so the first thing I would say is, you know, I think there's, I actually did a count on this and then I stopped funding over, I think close to a thousand, but there are so many countless books out there on innovation and starting a company. The rest, they don't, it's almost like a business record.

It's on right. And like, I would say, don't waste time with that. If you just focus on the thing I [00:51:00] said before, do you really understand the problem to solve? Because if you look at the best innovations out there, the best companies I've seen out there to start up and just get traction immediately, it's usually.

The, the solution, your, your first round, my first reaction is always duh. Cause it seems so obvious once somebody does it, but that was the right way to solve the problem, which means they actually really understood the problem and solve it in a way that nobody thought of before. Look at those examples. I think the early Ted talk, there's so much out there now that's for you to say, really go watch Ted.

But there was some great early Ted talks that I still go back to. Simon Sinek's Ted talk on, the golden circle, which is from like 2007. It is fantastic. The first six minutes. All you need, if you don't want to watch the whole 18 minutes, but it's worth the 18 minutes where he goes to the why, how, and what, which became this whole thing about the golden circle and start with why that launched his career.

But this is the original talk. Highly recommended. Another one is the sixth sense, which was a talk by Patty Mays, MAES from MIT media labs. I think it was about 2009 [00:52:00] and it starts to show an interesting problem. Consumers have that at the time they're looking at technology as a way to solve it. The problem still exists.

I think it's a huge problem, but. the idea of how you take information friction out of an equation so that you connect people with the information they need more easily can lead to all kinds of new opportunities in the marketplace out there. in that case, there was a very simple example of, you know, if you have preferences about the kinds of things you want to buy, like, for instance, let's say you're vegan or you really care about carbon impact or whatever the thing is, if you could just pick up a product and it would tell you with a red, green, yellow light on it, does it meet your.

your your belief structure doesn't meet your values, and if it doesn't, it shows you an alternative. Think about how that would change people's consumption because too many people on the one hand, give money to causes or support, you know, whatever thing they particularly care, but at the same time, they're buying from companies and supporting, businesses.

That actually violate [00:53:00] the core values, and they don't know because that information is broken apart. If you can connect those two dots, it can have a huge impact much more than many other things people could do.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, I hope you're right. I hope you're right. I have been consistently impressed by humanity's ability to act quite differently as consumers than we do when we're dealing, let's say, with voting or other types of civic oriented things.

I'll give you an example. So if you think about, like, in California, where I live. Two times, both in 2008 and in 2018, we've had votes on the treatment of egg laying chickens. Both times, two thirds of Californians voted to ban the caging of chickens, and the second time included banning the sale of eggs from caged chickens.

At the same time, however, when Californians voted to make it a crime to sell eggs from caged hens, 90 percent of the eggs being sold in the state were coming from caged hens. And so people were very willing to ban a practice that they themselves were basically engaging in because we act very differently as customers than we do [00:54:00] as citizens, essentially.

And the same is so all the time. I mean, we, you know, would say like, well, I, you know, Don't want to support sweatshop labor or whatever. And, you know, we just buy the cheapest clothing, right? It's obvious that and it's not a condemnation. It's just means that we have a bug in our software that allows us to act very differently when we are acting as consumers than when we're acting as citizens.

and so some way to try to harmonize that would be quite helpful. And I hope that that can be achieved.

Shubber Ali: Well, and the information is there. Somebody just needs to take the time to connect the dots and then to create essentially. A self validating system so that, you know, if you crowdsource the data on what a practice might be like this, this company is engaging in sweats out labor, for instance, and that ties to the brands, but you can also prevent a company from being unfairly blacklisted.

In fact, they don't do that thing, but somebody puts them up there, right? So you have to have that, that in there as well. But, but, you know, it's kind of like you were saying about [00:55:00] the egg laying, you know, I think. For instance, a lot of people would object to gestation crates that they use in New Jersey for, pigs, pork production, right?

Pigs. And, and, you know, we use the euphemism of pork because we don't want to call it what it actually is, because then, you know, it makes it harder to kill and eat it. But when people see it, if I've ever shown somebody a picture of one of those kids, they're like, oh, my God, I can't believe that. I'm like, yes, but you enjoy your bacon.

You need to connect the dots. You need to see.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, there was even, I was reading a book not too long ago about the anti slavery movement and really interestingly in the mid 19th century in America. there were many people who were against slavery, especially in the North, but most of the goods, like the cotton, the sugar, the tea that they were using were still coming from slave labor.

And so there were efforts to create free labor stores where all they sold was freely produced goods that meant not just on the plantation, but also the boats couldn't have slaves on the boats who are shipping them up to the stores and so on. And despite the large amount of anti [00:56:00] slavery sentiment in the North, especially in places like Ohio and so on, these free stores were a flop, people would not support them because they were more expensive and this is a really good example of just like we're talking about basically where people are, willing to take a stance and say that they oppose a certain practice and in this case, the, the abomination of slavery, but when it comes to what we purchase, you know, if it costs more, you know, if there's a cheaper option, it's, it's pretty hard to, for most people to say, oh, I'm going to switch.

so which is there's a reason why

Shubber Ali: the big retailers, won't mention their names exist, selling really, really cheap products because people will, you know, still want to get it for 5 cents less or 10 cents less. No doubt. but that being said, there, there is a segment of the economy and that's the same with technology adoption at some level, you know, DVD players started at a thousand dollars and they got down to, you know, some a hundred dollars, but the people could afford them first could afford them first.

If you can connect with people who have the values and. The capital to for [00:57:00] instance, I know that there were some places in Colorado. I remember years ago reading about this that just said, you know what? Okay, so wolves will eat some of our sheep to produce wool. What we're gonna do is sell our wool slightly more expensively and say, but we don't kill wolves.

And so there was, it was, it was wolf friendly wool products and it was a slightly premium on the product. But people were buying it because they connected the value of, I don't want will shot so I can have slightly cheaper

Paul Shapiro: wool, right? And there's, you know, and there, there are ways that you get the ball rolling, right?

The progress, but gets progress. Like, you can see how that eventually leads to a system that maybe even bans the wolf killing in the 1st place, like, because you see, there's demand for something like that. But I hope there's a lot of demand for garden for wildlife. I'm really looking forward to seeing you reach that 40 or 50 million in revenue and the quarter billion dollar valuation.

I hope that I hope to see you at the IPO. it would be a really fun day seeing you, at the stock exchange. So. I hope all of that happens very much, Shubber. And I [00:58:00] admire what you're trying to do here. And I look forward to following the progress that you make with this company because, the world needs it.

The world really needs it. So thank you so much for all that you're doing. Thank you, Paul. I

Shubber Ali: really appreciate the time and the great questions and just enjoyed our conversation.