[00:00:28] Jay: . Hi everyone. Welcome to the First Customer podcast. Today I am lucky enough to be joined by Martin Lukac.

He is the co-founder and CTO of Nexleaf Analytics. Martin got his PhD from UCLA building, one of the first large scale wireless seismic networks. He and his co-founder started Nexleaf in garage in 2009 and today their technology monitors vaccine refrigerators in 28,000 health facilities across 30 countries protecting vaccines for 86 million kids. Doc Martin, welcome to the show. Hello, buddy. How are you?

[00:00:55] Martin: I'm good. Thank you for that intro and thank you for having me. 

[00:00:57] Jay: was that all accurate? Even your name? Did I get the name right? I feel like

[00:01:00] Martin: Name was right. the numbers are a little higher now. our official numbers will come out at the end of March. 

[00:01:04] Jay: Beautiful. Alright, so where did you grow up and did it have an impact on you being an entrepreneur?

[00:01:10] Martin: I grew up in Southern California. my parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. I think that I would say that maybe had a little bit of a motivation, for me to be an entrepreneur because they came from nothing. They escaped communism. they came here and built a whole life. and yeah.

so I think that I would say less the place, more the people.

[00:01:32] Jay: And what did they do for work?

[00:01:34] Martin: my dad's a doctor. he's an eye doctor, so he's now retired.

[00:01:38] Jay: All right. Very cool. Well, I love the immigrant to doctor story, especially making it successful here in America. what was the first business you started, after? And I know the answer to this, but I have to ask you, what was the first business you started?

[00:01:50] Martin: First business is the one I'm in right now. 

[00:01:52] Jay: There it is. All right. That makes it nice and easy as

there's no back. No this, all right, so I do, I am very curious about the wireless seismic network, as just a nerd in general and a lover of nerdy sounding things. What is that and why did you do it?

[00:02:07] Martin: So, when I was in grad school, I was in this center, that was built around specifically studying and researching. Back then it was called sensor networks. Now it's called IOT. So this is. Early in mid two thousands. and so it was a bunch of computer science departments around a bunch of schools, not just doing research for the sake of research, but actually working with other scientists to research, to help them do their research with this technology.

And so I was helping seismologists. I also worked with some people studying birds. my co-founder, was. Studying, arsenic poisoning in groundwater. and, you know, every sort of computer science and computer engineering student was kind of in a different space, but it was all the same thing.

This technology and wireless technology and collecting data.

[00:02:57] Jay: how long did that take? Like what was the process like? It seems incredibly,and also you're in like a third world country, right? Or you're all over the place in different,

[00:03:05] Martin: for the seismic networks for me, that was in Mexico and in Peru.

so we were working with Seismologists at UCLA and they were putting a transect, like it was about a hundred stations from in Mexico, from like Acapulco North through Mexico City, all the way up. Most of them were wirelessly connected to each other.

So back then you didn't have Starlink, you didn't have cellular networks. and so we literally set up mostly off the shelf wifi links, going five to 20 kilometers each, and creating like a daisy chain of these, with a couple places along the line that actually had internet so we could get the data near real time.

[00:03:45] Jay: Okay. Wow. so how did you turn that, or what did you learn from that, that you kind of carried into Nexleaf? Because it all, your whole, everything I know about you, which isn't much yet, but, there feels like there's a through line. what kind of brought you to the next thing that you did?

[00:04:00] Martin: So, both my co-founder and I Nithya and I realized, like when we were doing this, we were working with these scientists and this was all new to them. Normally they send out someone, a grad student in the field to collect data, or they put out a data logger and they come back to it six months later, and now all of a sudden they're getting data like right away or within a day or two.

And, you know, we're software engineers and we're just like, oh. You need help dealing with all this new data, you need help dealing and processing it and analyzing it and figuring out what to do with it. Like that's what we were doing. It wasn't just the technology, it was also almost this like people, part of it, of working with people to figure out how to make use of this technology in this system.

And so that's sort of the through line to Nexleaf. Because with Nexleaf it's not just about like. Selling, oh, here's a device. It'll get you data. It's like, let's figure out how to make use of this, especially in the context we work in, the low and middle income countries where there may not be the resources or the expertise to you know, like.

You give FedEx some new sensors, they're like, yeah, we got internal teams. We'll figure this out. Right? you go to any Ministry of Health and it's like, okay, yeah, we have a couple champions here that'll own this, but how do we get the rest of the country and the rest of the system making use of these data and these systems?

[00:05:21] Jay: And I remember you talking about that when we talked before the show and just that whole world is, it's like as you get older, you realize there's just entire worlds and universes that you may never even know exist your entire life. Like that's probably one of them. If I didn't talk to you around, Hey, this is how the Ministry of Health like absorbs a new technology or data, like I would never have known that, right?

So I back me up to like. You guys are sitting there, and you're like, we have either a problem, you know, out there that we wanna solve, or, you know, we have this, these resources to do this. What was the first step? Like, what did you guys do? Like how did you pick what you were gonna work on?

[00:05:58] Martin: so it's. We don't do this anymore, I just want to sort of clarify that, but it was,my co-founder had some colleagues working in the clean cook stove space or clean cooking space. And this is, again, one of those things that's like no one knows this is a problem. I'll give you the really short pitch on it.

so every day two or 3 billion people light a fire to cook their meals. All the soot and smoke from cooking that, have major health impacts. There's more deaths, from this inflation and complications from all this pollution than malaria, HIV and TB combined. So it's, a massive global health crisis and like no one knows about it.

and,my stats may be out of date since 

we haven't been in this space for five years, but this is the context we were in back then. And so. What was going on is there was a number of organizations that were building these, what are called clean cook stoves, these contraptions that try to burn the same types of materials or pellets or other things in a lot cleaner ways to create a lot less soap so you get more complete combustion and all that.

And they were, back then, they were literally putting these out there and saying, look, we put out 10,000, we've had impact. Right? You go back a few months later to where they had these deployed or given away. They're either broken or no one's using 'em. So we had been talking to, and starting to work with these, researchers and NGOs that were like, no, we can't keep doing it this way.

We need to get some data around this, and we need to figure out how to use this data to improve this whole intervention, this whole process of trying to get people to adopt and make use of these cook stoves.

[00:07:40] Jay: so what was the answer? You did a great buildup there. what was the solution? I have to know, what did you

[00:07:44] Martin: The solution was, we were, we did, we took this technology remotely monitoring the temperature of these stoves. and we started tracking it. And what we did with, these collaborators was. you would come back a month or two later and, you know, you'd ask the women who were cooking like, Hey, how did, how's this going?

How do you like it? And they would say, oh, this is great. And you'd go, oh wait, hold on. I can see here that you haven't been using it. Are you sure it's great? And that would completely open up the conversation. And so you would start getting feedback, you'd start understanding what works and what doesn't work.

And, you then have the even harder task of trying to get that information to get processes to change around these people that are funding it, the people that are building it, and trying to sort of create essentially like a good product loop. where, the really, the key thing is getting the folks that are funding this to demand, I need to see data to know this is working.

[00:08:45] Jay: Yeah.

[00:08:45] Martin: yeah.

[00:08:46] Jay: So it's another problem that, just didn't have even. The information needed to start to solve the problem. Right. It feels like

that's been, if there's a through line, that's what it's, so what was next? You guys did the cook stoves, and then you were like, all right, we've, fixed this now,

[00:09:01] Martin: we're not in that space anymore, but we're proud of, the influence we had in the sector to get them to start using it. 

[00:09:06] Jay: Yeah. No, I 

[00:09:06] Martin: maybe three, four years. and then everyone was saying, we need data. We need data. And we were like, yes.

[00:09:12] Jay: I do love it.

[00:09:13] Martin: The next was, so we were obviously monitoring temperature and these sort of tech nonprofits, public benefit spaces are quite small.

and so some colleagues were like, Hey, you guys should be monitoring temperature of vaccine refrigerators, right? Because as you know, vaccines need to stay cold. Most of them need to stay cold, otherwise they go bad. and so, There's lots of refrigerators all across Africa and South Asia in these remote health facilities.

and no one knows if they're working or not. And so it's the same sort of cycle of, oh, there's not data being used here when there's, you know, a couple billion dollars a year spent to buy and subsidize vaccines, for the 80 poorest countries. do we know if this is an effective intervention?

You know, and short of going out and sampling blood from lots and lots of people, you can start working to make sure that supply chain, all those refrigerators these vaccines are going through are working. And so we were very quickly able to, I wouldn't say pivot, it was sort of adapting what we had instead of monitoring hot things to monitor cold things.

and we were doing this, we, I should find some pictures for you, but we literally had a cell phone in a box. With a temperature sensor connected through the headset jack. And so this was there, you know, in a, we set up and in a few hundred facilities we set out to prove like, hey, even in these remote facilities that have, you know, a thousand or 2000 doses of vaccines, it's worth it to monitor it.

It's worth it to sort of drive an understanding of. Is, are these refrigerators working? Because at the time, no one was looking at this sort of last mile, and that's one of the most important points in the in, the supply chain. So yeah,

[00:11:02] Jay: It's been 13 minutes and 10 seconds, at least on my time where we missed a few minutes, pre-show, but we haven't mentioned, revenue or money or income or anything. And I think it's, it says a lot about you in general. and that's the, obviously the next question is. Not just how you monetize this stuff, but, how do you balance being this, you know, kind of altruistic guy with this mission or missions and revenue and like, it's like, it's kind of like good and evil almost, right?

Because like you need the one to fund the other. And it's like, how do you guys approach this? Obviously it's like a co-op grocery store or whatever. It's like, how do you, what do you do with the money at the end of the night? And it's like, I don't know, like, so how do you guys approach that and, Has it been something you guys kind of openly talked about at the beginning?

[00:11:52] Martin: Yes. So from the very beginning, we actually chose to be a nonprofit because we felt like we needed folks to, especially since we were looking at that cook stove space, initially, we needed people to. You know, dispel any myths they had about like social enterprises,

 even, you know, early, early 2010s, that was still kind of a new thing.

and so we've, we, you know, after a few years we ended up with kind of a split model where because we're a nonprofit doesn't mean we can't have profit.

We still have profit, but that has to go back into the company. And so we actually sell IoT devices and services devices that we manufacture. but we also get grants and foundation funding.

And that's focused on doing exactly that cycle we talked about earlier of figuring out, okay, here's this technology, ministry of Health, you know, champions here. Let's figure out how to get your policies, practices, everything, adjusted or. Set up so that you can make use of this and actually get an ROI from these systems.

And we do our best to try to price and set all that stuff up so that we can sustain ourselves and continue to have impact by either growing to more countries or potentially growing to new verticals in new areas. So it's expanding impact and you know, we want revenue so we can expand our impact.

[00:13:25] Jay: Just explain the. The salary piece. you know, a guy like you, you start a, you know, a nonprofit obviously, like pe most people are like, well, they just don't make money. You're like, the guys don't get paid or like, whatever. And then like, you guys have been around for, you know, several years now. So I would have to imagine that what it's like the finite and mean, obviously not numbers, but just in general, like. How does, like paying yourself work when you start a nonprofit, or how does it change as you, and this doesn't need to be obviously like a full, breakdown of how nonprofits or just, but just from a co-founding perspective or a founding perspective, how does that work?

[00:13:59] Martin: So we, like within the first six months, because we were very quick and very good at getting a grant, like I was getting paid. And then a couple years later, both the, the co-founder, Nathan and I, we sort of were like, you know what? Let's take this a little more. Well, sorry, we were taking it seriously, but let's take the payment and what the value that the people we hire and ourselves.

Morely. And so we basically, came up with a, you know, most organizations will have like a compensation philosophy, and what we do is we benchmark and we target to pay people. I think it's a little above the median that, People in equivalent roles would get, in nonprofit tech companies. And so we're not, we don't wanna underpay people.

We want to pay people the value that they're worth and, you know, for what they're contributing to the impact we're driving. And so, and there's a lot of, you know, I, I could always find a couple of the names offline, but there's a lot of. People out there advocating that you can't go in as a nonprofit and underpay people, underpay your staff, underpay everyone, because that's just, that's a lie, right?

That's then claiming like, Hey, we could have this impact. and the only way to do it is if we sacrifice everything, right.

if you really wanna have impact and you really want to prove sustainability and that you can carry this on, and it's not just the a, a blip on the radar. Like, yeah, we. We proved this one thing and it worked and then it all fell apart.

Like, you have to pay people well. So, the same thing happens with like overhead. There's like all these discussions with. Nonprofits when you apply for grant, it's like if someone sees that they're overhead, there's like that general, you know, this general percentage you apply on top of everything for like your administration and just management and all that stuff.

Like if it's too low, you really shouldn't take that nonprofit seriously. Of course, if it's too high, you shouldn't take 'em seriously either. But right. Paying. You want your nonprofits to be able to sustain themselves and manage themselves and not just have everything, every dollar spent be precisely to the project they're delivering, right?

There's this whole overhead that's needed. and if you don't cover that, you can't sustain yourself. So.

[00:16:18] Jay: That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and we talked about that a little bit before too. The, I hate the word culture at this point just 'cause it's like been beaten to death, but like I would have to assume working at a nonprofit tech company feels. It's different in some capacity. Right. And you, we kind of mentioned like some people don't get the mission, but Mo for the most part, like everybody's kind of in on this mission, which if you're working at a SaaS company making like a bank app, like is really everybody like in on that mission?

Like sure, like to get the quarterly bonus or whatever, then to like leave as quickly as possible. But like, are there, so have you found that to be true? is there something. Different ish about the people that you guys find that like want to kind of be part of something different. 'cause they could go work at, like you said, you know, Comcast or Microsoft for probably 10 or 15% more and just be a corporate drone for, you know, a few years and get beaten to death and spit out.

But like what, like how do you guys feel about that kind of culture that you've built? and is it different than, you know, a norm, a normal quote unquote not, you know, technical, non nonprofit, a profit.

[00:17:27] Martin: I think we tend to find, I mean, not, I'd say it's split like, because there's parts of the organization that are very like program driven, like they're the ones that work with the ministries of health. and those folks generally already are in this space or in neighboring spaces and either public health or 

some sort of related consulting or something. those are already folks that are kind of mission aligned and see this stuff on kind of the engineering and product side. I think most of the folks we find like it's new. it's a new idea. Like, oh, I can do something that's like public benefit that isn't just like increased shareholder value, right?

it's sort of it your shareholder is the folks that you're trying to have impact for, and. Pretty much everyone that we, you know, over the years we've had people that are just like, kind of there. It's a job, but generally I feel like most of the folks, especially the ones that stay a little longer, you know, they appreciate the impact.

They understand it and they're driven by it. So.

[00:18:31] Jay: As a business owner, I just love the, I just love the mission. I love having like a rally mission. You know, you go to Disney World and it's. Bat shit crazy. 'cause it's like a cult basic, but like these people believe in the mission, right? Like, and like I as a business owner, I love that you guys have this thing, you just drive towards all, it's not fake, you know?

'cause most of those missions are some stupid like, end around way to say, get us more money, right? It's like always

what it is. but I love that yours is like kind of driving towards real impact and change and you're building technology towards that. It's a really cool process. What do you want? To leave, you know, I hate to say legacy again, not my favorite word, but like, you're building all this stuff.

Like are you kind of hoping to get to some level where you can kind of say, Hey, I've reached the amount of people I wanna reach, I've done whatever. Or do you think that maybe you haven't, you don't even know what that is yet?

[00:19:22] Martin: I would say every few years the bar moves, so like, and it changes what it looks like. the highest level metric we have, of speaking of our impact right now is that, you know, we're monitoring and protecting the vaccines for one in six children born every year. And so we can. It's a big number.

It's surprise. Like I still, I always get surprised when I hear that, 

[00:19:46] Jay: That's one of my kids, by the way. I have six, so that's perfect. One of my six kids you saved the vaccine for, so thank you. I appreciate that.

[00:19:52] Martin: and so, you know, over the years it's either increasing that number or increasing the number of countries we're working with, and protecting vaccines for, and so it. That's the growth for us. and you know, on the sidelines there's obviously the kind of sustainability part, not only for ourselves, but also for these systems and the ministries.

Just a really quick example of that is, there is. You know, the same way we did in the Cook Stoves, we would like to think we had some influence in the vaccine monitoring space as well, where we were the first ones to really monitor the remote health facilities. Fast forward to now, and there's requirements, to the fridge manufacturers that they have to build in at least logging data, logging into their fridges.

And so, Getting this sector and, you know, maybe there's another sector we'll go into at some point in the future to sort of aada, adapt and embrace the use of data and a cycle of improvement with that data and all of that. Like, that's sort of the end goal, to get that drive to happen. Like if you step down from the, you know, focus on children, you step down to the, you know, the effective and, Effective use of data and technology. Like that's, there's sort of a secondary mission there.

independent of whether it's children or, you know, maybe solar or other medical equipment or animal vaccines or any of these other sectors that, you know, everyone's like, oh, you should do this, you should do that.

Right.

[00:21:26] Jay: So you have something that you're super passionate about that you do for work, and I'm sure, consumes lots of your quote unquote free time. What do you do outside of work?

[00:21:38] Martin: lately the past year or two, it's been,yard work and gardening, but then also a lot of home automation stuff. I don't know if you're familiar with home assistant, so.

[00:21:47] Jay: Oh yeah. Yep.

[00:21:48] Martin: Myself, I've got a whole bunch of stuff going and then I, my, my brother also does it. And so we sort of collaborate on both our places and play with it.

And, yeah.

that, and I'm trying to see more of the us. I've had the fortune because of the job to travel everywhere outside of the us. but I'm slowly trying to knock off one or two places each year. Us just to see more of it.

[00:22:13] Jay: I love that. I love that very much. You need one of those maps with like the little thing you can scratch off or a pin in it. Like everybody on Pinterest, has, well, when you come to Philadelphia. Please let me know. Martin, you are fantastic. I have one final question. I'm very curious about this with you. I don't want this to be about what you do today. This one's tough, 'cause I always tell people not about business. I don't want this to be about your business. if you could do anything on Earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be? See why it's such a hard question with you, because

you're like already doing some of the shit that people would like, would try to pick for the answer.

So like, you got, I, that's why I'm like,I'll give you a second.

[00:22:54] Martin: You know, my mind's just ticking through all those things, like I've heard people say. Better roads. Oh, better power. Oh, better food, right? Like what are all these challenges that are out there?

[00:23:04] Jay: You can get to all of them. I guess if you can't fail, like maybe that's your answer. Can't fail. I also can't tell you the answer. So you

[00:23:20] Martin: Yeah. Yeah. I

mean, I, one of the things I would say that, and I don't, this isn't well formulated, so, so maybe you could brainstorm with me for half a second here. is the amount of. Just general conflict and strife that happens both on interpersonal levels, but then also global levels.

It's like if there's something that I could solve that I wouldn't fail at, is just like people being able to sit down and work out their differences.

[00:23:49] Jay: It. Okay. You, you're not the first person to say that. I agree. I mean, even as simple, like you, you see these big, you know, the wars and stuff are going on, and obviously like, the communication there is like a different level, but then you see it even, like you said, interpersonal, like one-on-one. Why shouldn't we always be able to just. Talk to another person and like understand what they're saying. And as a guy who's been married for 15 years, I can promise you that's not the case all the time. So, Martin, great answer. Thank you for being on. if people want to hear more about anything you've had to say today, how can they reach you directly?

[00:24:23] Martin: they should just email me or hit me up on LinkedIn. pretty easy to find. yeah, I can, just Martin at nexleaf, N-E-X-L-E-A-F.org and I'm happy to, chat about the work, or anything.

[00:24:37] Jay: Beautiful. All right, well, put all that in the, link in the bio. and other than that, man, thank you so much for being on. We'll catch up with you soon and best of luck, and keep, saving the world 'cause we need people like you. All right. Thank you buddy. I

Appreciate it.

See you Martin.

Later. 

[00:24:48] Martin: Bye. 

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