The following interview is a conversation we had with Chris Hare, CEO of PRTI, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Over $25 Million Raised to Transform America’s Billions of Waste Tires into Valuable Commodities
Chris Hare
Yeah, nice to chat with you too. Thanks for the invite.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So, to kick things off, can we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Chris Hare
Yeah, sure. So, personally, I’m a Chris. I grew up in the UK, ran businesses, technology and industrial businesses early in my career. The company I grew up in today is part of Northrop Grumman, then moved to the US in the mid 90s after building teams, as well as being involved in building facilities in China, India and elsewhere. Since then and since living in the US, I was involved in running an MIT spin out startup that sold to what is now Microsoft and then was involved at Sony Ericsson in building lots and lots of mobile phones. So I ran a large team that were involved in the procurement of everything that went into phones. So at one point, that was 250 staff building about 100 million mobile phones a year, which was a really crazy, fun process.
Chris Hare
A lot of great people, a lot of really amazing professionals during that journey, and were building them globally. So that’s kind of the background that got me involved in senior management of building companies large and small, but also involved innovation. And really, innovation is the thread that I love to be part of and have enjoyed building teams in most of my career.
Brett
A few questions we’d like to ask, and the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder. First one is what founder and CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Chris Hare
So it’s a mixed bag, right? Because founders have to be deliberately heretics and eccentric and so driven and so committed that Pandora box of personality types means that they can also be a little tough to deal with. And I think that’s a challenge. But I think you do have to admire their persistence. So it’s present founders, it’s present ceos, it’s people like Elon Musk, it’s people like Jeff Bezos even go back a few years to Bill Gates when he was founding and running Microsoft. Steve Jobs of know. But I think there’s also founders that I grew up with. More people like Richard Branson and his involvement with Virgin and how he has not only built a great company, but built great people and also built a company that is not one dimensional and I mean single industry.
Chris Hare
And I think that takes an even stronger set of skills because in most cases, you’re building a business in an area that you maybe don’t have a background in. And so you’ve got to be nimble in the way you learn and nimble in the way that you make mistakes and fix them. And I think those are key traits that I see and admire in some really cool founders. There’s other founders of companies that are friends and colleagues and people that I admire because I’ve worked alongside them and with them. And part of their know. Example of that would be a guy called Peter Carlson, who is a Swede who works in Stockholm, who’s building a really amazing electric vehicle battery company called Northvolt.
Chris Hare
It’s super fun to see someone that you’re friends with doing great things and kind of changing the world as he is.
Brett
And what about books and the way we like to frame this? We got this from an author named Brian Holiday, but he calls them quickbooks. So he defines a quickbook as a book that rocks you to your core. It really influences how you think about the world and how you approach life. Do any Quickbooks come to mind for you?
Chris Hare
Yeah. So I was trying to look up. There’s a word that I should have looked up before we spoke. I’m one of these people who buy lots of business books, and then I read the inside cover and I read the back cover, and I may not even open the book beyond that. It’s on my list of things I want to read. So, unfortunately, at the moment, I don’t have a lot of reading time because I’m not doing as much flight based travel as I used to at the moment. And so I’ve got a long list of books I want to read that I haven’t read yet. But there’s a really cool book that came out of MIT and came out of a space force major called Jason Lowry on bitcoin analysis. That’s kind of an interesting thought process.
Chris Hare
Another really good friend and colleague of mine wrote a really cool book about bitcoin as a stable currency. Otherwise I’ve read books on executive politics that were pretty inspirational in as much that they try to tease out how do companies really work? Not just how they’re supposed to work, but otherwise, it’s people like Eli Goldrat. This is going back a few years, but he wrote some books on organizational change. The goal was one of his books that many people have heard of or read. I found that really thought provoking, because when you’re building a company or a team to build a group of companies, the challenge is people keeping people on the same page that may have different backgrounds.
Chris Hare
So having almost a common language between them also almost allows you to communicate in shorter sentences because you’ve the same book or you’ve been to the same movie, or you’ve had the same analogies. And that’s important to help you as a business speed up, in my opinion.
Brett
Let’s switch gears here and let’s dive a bit deeper into PRTI. So at a high level, can we just talk about the problem? So I was reading some staggering numbers on your website about the waste tire problem. It’s one of those problems that are out there that maybe I knew about, but I didn’t realize just how big and how bad this problem is. So can you just paint a picture for us about the problem?
Chris Hare
Yeah, sure. So vulcanization as a process, which most people are aware of, is how tires stay together. They’re kind of stuck together. Vulcanization was discovered as a chemical process in the late 1830s. And since then, lots of people have tried to unvulcanize tires and really not been able to figure out a strong way to do it consistently or in a way that’s really economically viable. The reason this is a problem is that as a world, although there’s lots of electric vehicles out there, cars, bicycles, scooters, trucks, et cetera, are still using petroleum based pneumatic tires. And the reason I think this is a problem most people don’t think about is you only change tires periodically, so you only worry about the cost or the disposal periodically.
Chris Hare
So it’s not top of mind, unlike things like your household trash or plastic bottles that are in front of you every day. Right. It’s top of mind. The problem breaks down this way. So in the US alone, we’re talking about over 300 million tires per year thrown away. 300 million. So that’s almost one person per year in the US and in most of the world’s developed countries. And those numbers shift around a little bit in terms of types of tire, sizes of tire weights of tire but a tire is a tire, and in almost all cases around the world, the disposal of them is really not recycling. It is stuff like stick them in a landfill or put them in the ocean or throw them over a hedge or bury them in the desert.
Chris Hare
There are some cases where they can be used as fuel or mixed in asphalt for putting on the roads, but most of these uses are really limited. And so what we’ve set to solve, really a largely unsolved and unknown problem that most people kind of have a wake up call when they start reading the stats, as you did, to say, hey, wow, that’s a much bigger problem than I ever thought about it. And it’s a waste of energy and it’s a waste of resources. And surely someone’s doing something about this. And I think that almost is the cornerstone of most innovations is it’s almost too obvious, right? If somebody says to you, well, of course somebody’s already solved that and no one has, that’s an opportunity.
Brett
Let’s talk about the solution then. How do you solve this problem?
Chris Hare
So basically what we have is an automated, proven and protected technology that takes tires and cooks them, warms them up to the point where they become a gas stream, a liquid oil, a solid fuel, and also we recover all of the steel that goes into tires. And by saying, this is proven and this is automated, we’ve worked very hard for the last seven, eight years to take this technology from an infancy position right to a point where we’ve run it nearly 10,000 times, where we’ve processed 50 million pounds of tires, where we’ve run it for literally over 100,000 operating hours. And the reason we did that wasn’t just to get rid of that material. It was to prove that we could before we started to scale.
Chris Hare
And the reason I mentioned automation is that when you try and grow a business, you have to figure out how to run it, how to measure it, what to measure, and then what to do with the data once you’ve measured it. And so those actionable insights are really important, and you only get those over after a while of running. You know, members of our team, our chairman, Jason Williams, our know, Wayne and Marcia and other members of the team know we really worked hard to not only have something that satisfies a practical example and practical demonstration, but really scientific rigor. And we tried to do that very thoroughly. You mentioned at the know, we’ve taken a lot of capital from ourselves and from friends and family. We’ve done that to move the foundation, and that’s what we believe we’ve done now.
Chris Hare
And so we’re just on the path to scale the business and start to solve more tires in more places.
Brett
And can you tell me more about the founding of the company? So I read online it was founded in 2013. Where did the discovery of this problem come from, and how was this solution developed, and where did the ideas come from?
Chris Hare
Yeah, so the founders had been successful in other businesses, and I joined the team in 15. So I’m kind of part of the reboot founding team, if you will. But the original founders in 13 had been successful in all sorts of other industries. The space program, construction, oil and gas, aviation, real estate. And what they were looking to do was really to find something that was interesting and solving a waste problem. They found a really smart team in Italy that had tried to solve a small amount of tires in their community, and they’d really got off to a great start. And then they got busy with other things. And so it evolved to a multi site, multistate or multi province business. It was a single site.
Chris Hare
What were able to do was agree a deal to buy the technology, continue having the italian team, some of them as our partners, but really to take the technology and scale it and really recognize that it’s modular, it’s small, it’s modular. And by making it modular, you can solve the problem of not only the waste, but how does the waste move around. And this is really a supply chain problem, because if you can solve the transportation, then you don’t just solve the waste, you solve the waste in the community. And so that’s what the founding team sought to do, and that’s what we’ve been head down doing.
Chris Hare
But it was fun because the whole group, the group of us here now, we have very diverse backgrounds, and it’s interesting, after this amount of time, that we are communicating on very disparate topics with very different backgrounds and the process of building the business, the technology, and the company overall, there’s really common themes. Running a business is running a business doesn’t matter, really, what shape or size or industry it’s in. There are some common threads, and I think that’s been fun to see as we’ve been building this.
Brett
And what type of traction and growth have you seen so far?
Chris Hare
So far, as I mentioned, we’ve processed a lot of material, so we’ve got some great partners already in the industry. I would say the traction that we’ve seen, particularly over the last 18 months, is from more institutional partners. And institutional meaning, larger scale banks, larger scale investors as well as larger scale partners, large companies, as well as large financiers. And this is necessary because our steps going forward involve a lot of capital. Solving this problem is massive, and the problem is massive. Therefore, the solution has to be massive, which typically means that there’s a lot of money involved. And so you can’t go to the local coffee shop and keep going chatting with folks and get enough money to build this business on a global scale.
Chris Hare
So I think that’s really what we’ve seen, is the recognition and the respect and the understanding of what we’ve done has been really nice to see. Because whenever you’re building a company, you do not know whether your story is going to resonate with folks. And also, you don’t know whether the same story for a smaller check writing investor is going to resonate the same way with a multibillion dollar fund or bank. And it’s been gratifying to see that the story we tell and the way we explain our business really does make sense to folks.
Brett
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Brett
Let’s talk a little bit about challenges. So, I’m sure since launching the company, there’s been a few challenges, but let’s maybe pick one challenge that you faced and overcame, and let’s just talk through what the challenge was and how you overcame it.
Chris Hare
Look, whenever you’re running a business, I wish there was just one. Right? I mean, there’s been hundreds, and they’ve been every day, and they continue. I could easily go down the rabbit hole that I’m sure other people have done on previous podcasts with you and said, oh, the biggest problem has been Covid. So I won’t waste your time and say that even though it’s certainly true, that threw everybody through a loop, it threw our business through a loop, and it was certainly a challenge. We even had members of our board say to us, look, the fact that you’ve survived and you’re still here is a testament to your ability to solve problems. And I think that’s largely true. I think what we found early on was were taking a manual process and automating it.
Chris Hare
And when you’re taking a manual process, you maybe don’t understand everything that the process does or what you are really seeing or hearing from the process. When you turn that into lines of code, you have to understand everything. So I think one of the biggest challenge was realizing that we had automated the process and it still wasn’t performing the way we wanted it to, which meant that we hadn’t automated it the right way yet. So whenever you finish a work package or a project, you think, okay, great, we’re done, we can move on to the next problem. In that case, were not done. We thought were done.
Chris Hare
And that really caused us to kind of take a breath, stop, go back to basics, and figure out, okay, well, we may now have another year to not just make the algorithm that we’ve already done, but refine it to the point it’s robust. So I think that’s one of the key challenges that we’ve worked through, and I think that allowed us to really build a strength in the team that just because it’s a bad day doesn’t mean you give up equally. Just because it’s a good day doesn’t mean, you know, I had a mentor and a boss when I lived in Virginia who used to say, it’s never as bad as it seems and it’s never as good. And that’s probably one of the expressions I use once or twice a week because it still rings true.
Brett
Yeah, I like that. Now, I mentioned that in the intro there a little bit about the capital that’s been raised so far. Can you just talk us through what you’ve learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Chris Hare
It’s all about people. And that sounds stupid to say, but it’s true. It is really about people invest as individuals and they invest individuals. So when you’re starting a company and raising money for a young company, what people are investing in is you. And we’ve been blessed because we’ve had a founding team and a leadership team that have got some personal history that’s meant that they can go and ask people for money and tell them a story, and they say, okay, we like you and we’ve made money from you before and with you before. We’ll take another go. I think the flip side is that whether you’re talking about angel investors, venture capital, private equity, or large banks, it’s still about people. And I think that what has really come through loud and clear as we’ve been developing is a couple of things.
Chris Hare
First of all, storytelling is an art. It’s some science. I did a podcast a few weeks ago with an expert in this field, a lady called Laura. And she did a great job kind of walking through how the narrative storytelling is so critical and how it gets abused many times. We’ve refined our story literally thousands of times. We have a slide deck and we have scripts and we have words we use that we change every day because the story changes and the landscape changes every day. But I think what we’ve learned through this process is you’re always in storytelling mode, you’re always in selling mode, effectively. You’re always investment raising mode, no matter what conversation you’re in. And you just have to have a team that can do that. And that’s not a skill that many people have.
Chris Hare
But if you’ve got a group that can do it and do it well, let them do it, get out of their way and let them really represent the business, because investors will see that and they’ll understand that this isn’t just one person or a handful of people. There’s a group here that have a passion for doing what they’re doing. The other thing, which, know, one of the things my colleague and friend Jason says about businesses is if you tell the truth, you never have to remember what you told. You know, we found that to be kind of linked to an open communication with our investors. Of course, with statements notwithstanding, we don’t tell everybody everything because some things aren’t going to come to pass.
Chris Hare
So you’re kind of making sure that people are up to date without breaching NDAs or things that you hope will happen. But beyond that, really speak frankly. Speak openly and honestly. And if you’re having a bad day, say you’re having a bad day and say why? And if you say you’re having a good day, say why. And people really understand that and respect that. And I think, appreciate that. It’s real. No young company ever has only good days. Therefore don’t act like it. It’s not true. So I think that honesty and truthfulness.
Brett
Is super important on the storytelling side. What do you do to get everyone at the company aligned around the same story? That’s something that I’ve heard from a lot of founders that they struggle with is team alignment on the story and making sure that everyone’s telling the same story, and that gets repeated and used all the time. So what do you do to make sure that alignment is there?
Chris Hare
A few things. So, first of all, we communicate regularly as a group. We meet regularly. We spend a lot of time together, face to face, which means it’s not just speaking the script or speaking the narrative. It’s also osmosis. We’re hearing each other’s conversations and we kind of course correct each other, which is a great way of making sure the story is not just mine or not just one of our members of our team. It’s collaborative. The other thing we do, or that I do, is I recognize that not every member of team will have the same story. And that’s okay if you’ve got the head of engineering that’s got a slightly different spin one aspect of the story that may better than the generic version that I might use from my seat.
Chris Hare
What we also do is, as we are doing tours, for example, we let investors or partners or the government members that might be visiting speak with our staff pretty much at will. And what we tend to find is that if they speak to someone and ask them a question, and that question is answered in a very similar way to the way they may have heard it from me or from others, that adds credibility, because it means that we’ve not overscripted. It means that it’s authentic, and that message gets through. So as much as you want everyone on the same page, you want a level of, I would say, media awareness or media training. That means that really you’re just understanding that when you’re speaking to anybody, it could be the outside world.
Chris Hare
I think you want to make sure that it’s not overly done so that it feels false and it feels starched to the point that it is not just authentic to the company, but authentic to that individual. Not everybody wants to do, or lives to do podcasts or other media interactions. That’s okay. Everyone’s got a role to play. But I think letting them speak their truth is super important in terms of the way they see the business. As long as they’re not saying stuff that’s completely out of left field, which, again, is part of us. Learning together makes a lot of sense.
Brett
And that’s super useful, because, like I said, a lot of founders do struggle with that, and a lot of startups struggle with that. Now, moving into the final question here, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. Can you just paint a picture for us? What’s that big picture vision that you’re building?
Chris Hare
So when you’re building a company, that’s kind of a tool that I use, actually, in terms of the way that we talk about our future is what’s our five years from now or ten years from now? And then looking back on the prior time, what did it take us to get there? I had a couple of those conversations this morning, actually. I think I would like our technology and our company to have much broader reach in the next five years. I would say that it needs to be solving this problem on a larger scale, domestically and internationally. In order to do that means adding to the team, adding to other investors, maybe even adding to ownership structures such that we’re part of a larger group that is solving this problem in a bigger scale.
Chris Hare
So I think we believe that we can harness value from this waste stream in a way that’s not been done before. And the better thing than doing one at a time is to do a few million at a time or to do tens of millions at a time. So I would see us having multiple sites in multiple locations and starting to become recognized as a company that’s really doing good and making money. And the more money you make, the more good you can do, right? Philanthropy starts with having a net worth in the first place. And I think we see the business the same way. If we can build a strong business with strong economics, then we’re seen as a business first and an environmental and a renewable solution second. And that’s okay.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision. I love the problem that you’re solving, and I love the approach to building the company. Here we are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap before we do. If any founders listening in want to follow along with the journey here. Where should they go?
Chris Hare
Yeah, so our website is prtitech.com. So prti tech.com, get in touch. As I mentioned, we’ve got lots of stuff that we are doing. We need lots of help. We like helping others, too. Bandwidth. If there’s bandwidth, we want to help. And also, look, we like being surrounded by smart people because we don’t know it all. We’re not even sure we know the right questions some of the time. So the more people around us that like what we’re doing, that can help, the better.
Brett
Amazing. Chris, thanks so much for taking the time to chat. Really appreciate it and really enjoyed this interview.
Chris Hare
Not at all. Thank you for the invite. Appreciate it very much.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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