Good morning.
Welcome to the Impact on FinTech TV down on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
I'm joined this morning by Matthew Plotkin.
He is the co-founder of Earthly Insight.
Matt, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Jeff.
It's a pleasure to be here.
So Matt, give me a little background before we dive into what Earthly Insight does.
Why are you in Impact in the first place?
Where it was like to start the show that why, why are you using your powers for good?
Yeah, that's a great question, Jeff.
So, I spent most of my career in tech, and anytime we get someone new within their career, I would always talk with them, and they would say something along the lines of, We're really changing the world, and in my mind, all we're doing at this tech company is generating or creating a productivity tool.
We're really not making the world a better place.
The purpose of the tech products is to make more money.
The purpose is not to make the world a better place, and so I kind of Uh, I kind of got fed up with, with that, and I'm like, let's, let me start something else, where the profits actually go to a good cause.
So you started and launched Earthly Insight.
What was the focus for that company, and really, how do you start a company from scratch that's not driving revenue?
That's a great question.
So it's not easy, but the, the main focus was always 13, or a significant portion of our revenue, had to be donated to uh an environmental charity.
Environmental causes is something that I deeply care about, and I've had that idea for uh for quite a long time.
And then we chose an AI products because Um, when we started Earthly Insight, chat GBT was just coming to the marketplace, and chat GBT is something people use on a daily basis, and AI has its own environmental concerns that go along with it.
So we thought it was a perfect marriage to Create a solution similar to Cloud, chat GBT, etc. where we can make it uh more energy efficient or more eco-friendly, while also having those pro proceeds being donated to environmental nonprofits.
So, starting with the raising capital side, what, what is the response when you're talking to someone about raising capital, when you say right off the bat that you're gonna give away a third of the revenue?
Is it a heartfelt response, or is it a, what the hell are you doing response?
What, what, what, or, or the whole gamut of it?
Yeah, so, to go back to my original point, the goal isn't to get rich here or anything like that.
So, this entire project was bootstrapped.
I've been saving up money for quite a long time to have an initial investment, um, so we can get this off the ground.
I didn't know when I was saving that it would be an AI related product, but I knew we would create some software related product, where their money would, or the proceeds would go to an environmental charity.
With that being said, with that in mind, There's no plan for us to go raise more capital, especially from private investors.
If we did look for some funding down the road, it would be uh something along the lines of like a government grant or or things like that, but we're we're steering clear from private investors.
We want to make our mission very clear that the purpose of Earthly Insight is to donate money and support environmental causes, and if we bring in institutional or private investors, we, we feel like there's a high chance that could cloud the mission.
So talk to me a little bit also about the difference going in on the front end.
Is it using less water, less energy than a comparable chat GBT when you do a search?
Yes, it depends on the type of uh search, but as a whole, if you're using Earthly Insight over JTBT, uh, they will be using less energy.
There's certain things that we do in terms of memory, um, to make sure that the the LLM calls or the API calls are smaller, and then additionally we leave out more intense energy intensive features such as image generation, feature generation, etc.
Down the road in the very near future, within the next few months, we'll be launching a feature where each user could actually track the amount of energy consumption and water usage um that they have per chat, or per conversation.
So as an example, if the chat is getting extremely long, and it's becoming very energy inefficient, we would then in-app provide recommendations on uh how to use less energy for that specific question.
That's great.
And is it easy to spread the mission?
Like, how are you getting the message out to consumers, and do you find consumers really looking at it favorably?
So, if Urban Insight is definitely a B2C product, we've, we post blogs pretty regularly, we pay for some like basic Google ads, we do um a lot of stuff with social media, and then also through word of mouth and doing interviews like this.
So it's definitely, you know, very bootstrapped.
We don't have like a lot of budget or this huge marketing engine to drive new users, so just having an opportunity to talk here, to spread the word is, is uh means a lot to us.
So talk to me about why you picked rewilding as the driver on the environmental side to offset a lot of the environmental damage of things like chat GBT and and Cloud, which is, you know, water usage, environmental degradation, rare earth minerals, um, what made you pick rewilding?
When we set out to start Earthly Insight, Part of it was, how do we make AI more ecologically friendly, but the bigger picture, the bigger question we wanted to answer is, us as human beings have really destroyed our planet, and we're using up a lot of the natural land.
Rewilding is the most comprehensive form of nature restoration.
So you take degradated land and you Um, through various processes, you're, uh, bringing it back to its natural habitat.
That can, uh, that's introduction of different species, different plants, you're recreating an entire ecosystem, you're not just planting trees.
With rewilding, uh, compared to, let's say, planting trees or another form of reforestation.
There's a greater, uh, carbon capture as well.
It's just the most comprehensive way uh for for us to restore degregated land and give that to the planet.
So talk to me a little bit about the future.
Um, you're competing with companies that are racing, like the whole world depends on it to get to the next great edition of Chat GBT or Cloud, or ultimately artificial intelligence.
How do you keep up in a race like that?
Are there trade-offs that you have to make in designing the product to be able to keep consumers coming back to it?
We're not in a race to to compete with the clouds, the Googles, the uh the open AIs of the world from a feature standpoint.
Our goal is to make a product that our users want to use, and so, what we do is we wait, we let these companies lead in innovation, and any features that could benefit consumers.
We take a survey with our user base.
We're gonna implement features that our users actually want.
So we, it's great actually, um, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic can do all the market research on what users actually want once they implement. that we uh survey our users to see if that's something they would want to see within earthly insight, and if so, we add it.
We're, we're looking for feature parity, we're not looking uh to be on the cutting edge of technological innovation.
Again, you can think of earthly insight as like, A household product alternative.
You might buy toilet paper without plastic, uh uh functionally, you know, both toilet papers do the same thing, however, one's better for the planet, and that's the way we we're positioning earthly insight.
It's a great positioning.
If you have a message for our viewers, what would it be about why they should use earthly insight, yeah.
My message to the Uyghurs is, AI is very impactful on the planet, and there's a lot of daily swaps, it doesn't have to be a swap in what AI vendor that you're using, but there's a lot of swaps that we can do in our day to day lives that help the planet around us.
One is eating less meat, um, another is switching out household products to use less uh, use less uh plastics, and hopefully we see a transition.
Where there's similar alternatives in the software space.
I know there's an alternative to Google called called Ecoja, where they donate money to environmental nonprofits, and then in the AI space, instead of using your Geminis, your clouds, or your Chachi BTs, we offer earthly insights.
As an alternative.
Sounds great.
Matt, we're gonna have to leave it there, but really enjoy the work that you guys are doing and hope that you grow faster than the competition.
Thanks for being on the show today.
That's it for the impact on FinTech TV.
I'm your host, Jeff Guderman.
Until next time.
