The PRTI Story: Finding Billion-Dollar Opportunities in Overlooked Problems

Sometimes the biggest opportunities lie hidden in problems that everyone assumes have already been solved. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Chris Hare revealed how PRTI discovered and validated a massive opportunity in tire recycling that others had overlooked for nearly two centuries.

The story begins with a problem that’s been around since the industrial revolution. “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,” Chris explains. This historical context provided the first clue about the opportunity’s magnitude – a problem that had persisted unsolved for nearly 200 years.

The key to identifying the opportunity lay in understanding why such a massive problem remained invisible to most people. “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 notes. “It’s not top of mind, unlike things like your household trash or plastic bottles that are in front of you every day.”

This invisibility helped mask the true scale of the opportunity. “In the US alone, we’re talking about over 300 million tires per year thrown away,” Chris shares. “In most of the world’s developed countries… 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.”

PRTI’s approach to validating this opportunity was methodical and thorough. “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,” Chris explains. This wasn’t just about proving the technology – it was about demonstrating scalable economics.

Their validation process revealed another crucial insight about opportunity identification: “The cornerstone of most innovations is it’s almost too obvious,” Chris notes. “If somebody says to you, ‘well, of course somebody’s already solved that’ and no one has, that’s an opportunity.” This counterintuitive insight – that the best opportunities might be hiding in plain sight – has shaped their entire approach to market validation.

The company’s founding team brought diverse expertise to opportunity assessment. “The original founders in 13 had been successful in all sorts of other industries. The space program, construction, oil and gas, aviation, real estate,” Chris shares. This diversity of perspective helped them recognize patterns and opportunities that others might miss.

Their approach to scaling focused on solving not just the technical challenge, but the entire supply chain. “By making it modular, you can solve the problem of not only the waste, but how does the waste move around,” Chris explains. “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.”

This comprehensive approach to opportunity validation has attracted serious institutional attention. “The traction that we’ve seen, particularly over the last 18 months, is from more institutional partners… larger scale banks, larger scale investors as well as larger scale partners,” Chris notes.

For founders looking to identify similar overlooked opportunities, PRTI’s journey offers several key insights:

• Look for problems that everyone assumes are already solved
• Search for opportunities masked by intermittent visibility
• Validate thoroughly before scaling
• Consider the entire system, not just the core technology
• Build diverse teams that can recognize patterns others miss

Their experience demonstrates that some of the biggest opportunities aren’t in creating new markets, but in solving persistent problems that others have overlooked or deemed too difficult. As Chris notes, “Solving this problem is massive, and the problem is massive. Therefore, the solution has to be massive.” The key is having the vision to see these overlooked opportunities and the patience to validate them thoroughly.