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Imagine you're running a factory. You've got to put out a consistent, high-quality product that your customers will buy. But you have no control over the raw materials that come into your factory every day. One day, half of what comes in is literal garbage. The next, mixed in with your usual inputs, is some random lithium-ion battery. It's a fire hazard. And also, a surfboard.
Weird. And you have to deal with all this stuff and still keep getting your product out the door. This is literally the way the recycling business works. Recycling plants take in a largely random, occasionally hazardous stream of stuff.
a stream of stuff that changes in a pretty unpredictable way from day to day, from hour to hour. And then recycling plants have to turn that random stream of inputs into aluminum and plastic and cardboard that other companies will buy and use to make new stuff. This is why my guest today calls recycling the most demented form of manufacturing on the planet.
And it's why she and her colleagues are trying to use technology to bring some order to the recycling chaos. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is What's Your Problem? The show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Rebecca Hu-Trams. She's the co-founder and CEO of a company called Glacier. Rebecca's problem is this. How do you use AI and robotics to make recycling a somewhat less demented business?
If Rebecca and her colleagues are successful, they'll not only help recycling plants work better, they'll help companies figure out how to recycle more of the stuff that they're sending out into the world in the first place. Our conversation started with Rebecca talking about the moment around five years ago when she and her co-founder decided to start the company.
I was, you know, even at the time, obsessed with trash, just obsessed with where does all of our stuff go? And it's one of those, I call it like a matrix moment or a red pill moment where once you realize that you've never thought about where all of your garbage goes after you put your bins on the curb, you can't unsee that, right? And so...
This was also around the time where there was a lot of change happening in the recycling industry. So we're rewinding to roughly 2018, 2019. One cataclysmic shift for the industry is that China, who had previously been the world's largest buyer of recycled materials,
feedstock to make into new things. They basically said very rapidly, you know what, we're taking in the world's recycling, but most of this is trash. People are not sorting it well enough. We're getting a ton of contamination and we don't want to end up as the planet's landfill or incinerator. So we're going to drastically increase the bar on quality of what we're accepting. And then that caused shockwaves throughout the globe and certainly for the U.S. where suddenly recyclers for the first time in a long time were like,
the game is not to just crank through all this recycled material, bail it and ship it overseas. We actually need to invest a lot more in
in increasing the bar on quality and on purity rate. And what's even more challenging is that a lot of the backbone historically, and even to this day, is still just people standing next to conveyor belts sifting through our recycling and our trash. And of course, that's not only very dangerous, it's not a very well compensated job. There's a lot of hazards there, but also there's this massive sort of labor shortage.
Yes, it seems like a robot-friendly moment, a robot-friendly environment. So, like, what's your move? What's your first move? So, my co-founder had already, at the time he wasn't my co-founder, he was just a friend of a friend, he was already pretty intent on this idea that, hey, you know, automation, AI, all of these technologies are so good now that for the first time we could feasibly, rapidly commercialize a purpose-built industrial robot specifically for recycling sortation.
And it's not going to cost us massive amounts of capital. And we can actually do it in a matter of like a couple of years. So this idea that, oh, now is the moment, is it computer vision? Like what is the underlying technology that made five years ago or whatever the moment when, oh, we can do this in a way that hasn't been done before? Yeah, honestly, it's the confluence of a lot of things. So I'll break it down into sort of the computer vision piece and then also the hardware or the robotics piece. Yeah.
When you think about where industrial automation has come from, even to this day, a lot of those technologies are operating in really well-defined, truly repetitive rote environments. So think about a robot at a warehouse, and it's literally just palletizing identical boxes over and over again. And so to harken back to this idea of
Yeah.
just thinking about the wide variety of cans that are on the market and all of their, you know, colors and designs, but also the fact that they show up not as pristine cans, but crinkled in various ways, stuffed into bags. Like there's so much heterogeneity that even just identifying that item on a conveyor belt that by the way has, you know, dozens of other types of items on it is already a massive challenge that, um,
only recently has been something that we can adapt to in a cost-effective way.
And then you can layer onto that the fact that now you're not only seeing those items with this computer vision system, but you also need to find a way to actually go and grab that material and sort it into the right location. So when we talk about advances in sort of off-the-shelf parts that you use to design and make your robot, or even like the gripping technology that's available, a lot of that, even a decade ago, would have required an immense amount of
R&D with a much bigger team and a much higher price tag to get to the same point that we've gotten to after just a couple of years. Tell me about the first one you built. Tell me about building a prototype and putting it in the world. Oh, man. So there are a lot of different stages to our prototyping. The first prototype
if you want to go way back was when I hadn't even decided to start this company with my co founder yet. But I did tell him I would help him learn about the industry, see if there was some sort of a business to be had. And we met in his kitchen in San Francisco, where he had a little, you know, corner set up. So like, very, very simple. I think that it actually involved a used yogurt tub as like this rotating wheel with a piece of string tied around it, like
that's how janky we were talking, but it worked. We were like, okay, there's something here. The first piece of equipment we actually installed into a recycling facility also tells you a lot about the constraints that these facilities are under. I was kind of thinking we had to have this super built out, sophisticated, polished thing that we've proven out to the nines in the lab. And we actually called up a number of recycling facility operators nearby. And one of them was like, you know what, when you got something just like
bring it in here and try it out. Because literally, I remember him saying, if your robot can pick one more can than I would have gotten otherwise, like, it's already worth it to me. Just try it.
Was there a rat moment? Tell me more. Did you see a rat when you were putting in the first one? Literally. I was like, what is this? Not a metaphor. Not a metaphor. A rodent. I have seen many rats. Literally, even on that first install, there was a moment where I was like literally army crawling under a conveyor belt to fasten one of the legs of the robot.
And I came eye to eye with a rat who then, of course, grabbed a piece of food that was on the floor and then scurried away. Right. There are many friendly critters running around some of these facilities. Was there any part of you that kind of loved it? Oh, 100 percent. So let's talk about where you are today, both on a kind of micro level, like what your robot or robots look like, and then also a little more macro of like the scope of the business.
Do you have like one basic robot? What's it look like? Or you got a bunch of them? Yeah. So we have one base model of robot. We actually are already working with several dozen customers across the country. But if you imagine any sort of conveyor belt in an industrial facility, our robot, think of it almost like a table, right? So it's got four legs and it kind of sits over that
belt. And then the guts of the robot or the mechanisms doing the picking are kind of over the top of that conveyor system. So you've got these arms that are going back and forth. They can pick up something from the belt and then they carry it off to one of those sides of the belt where they actually drop it into the right location.
So that's the robot. And now one other thing we haven't really talked about is this computer vision system. So that's, imagine basically like a camera with some lights to illuminate the belt sitting on this little rig that's a little bit upstream of the robot. So the material passes under the camera. The camera has a second to process, or shall I say a couple milliseconds to process what it's seeing. And then not only does it tell the robot
you know, hey, there's a can coming in this location, pick it and then put it into this other spot. But what we're also finding is that that data as a standalone is also able to massively advance these operators' abilities to understand and optimize their facilities. So that's opened up a whole new world of use cases. Because they weren't gathering data in that kind of way before. They only sort of knew what was coming through in a very gross macro way.
Right. And this gets back to, you know, recycling facility operators. I have so much admiration for how they have gotten really resourceful with trying to understand their operations. But, you know, to give you a sense of things, the state of the art in the industry to this day is still mostly manual audits. And when I say that, I mean, imagine taking a half ton of material off your line and then literally having two to four people.
hand sort and categorize and weigh each item to understand what's coming through. And then assuming that that half ton is representative of like the thousands of tons coming through your facility on a yearly basis.
I often tell the story of one of our early data customers, this gentleman who runs a recycling facility in California. When he met me, he was telling me that he had mounted a GoPro camera above his conveyor belt, the one that was basically supposed to be all trash leaving the facility, but he knew he was missing some good stuff. And he would spend an hour a day after work going frame by frame through some random snippet and manually tallying how many cans and bottles...
were on that line and then using that to back into what he would try and change in his operation the next day. And then he would check that day to see if it changed anything. And so imagine his delight when I told him, hey, actually, we can mount our own camera on there and suddenly we'll just give you access to a dashboard. A machine will literally count everything that goes literally in real time. So we're seeing that, you know, the robot is this incredible foot in the door with a lot of our facility partners. But that
everyone's starting to realize that, hey, actually this data can also help us understand the entire world, not just the location where the robot is sitting either. So at this point, is it kind of a robot business on the front, but really you're like a computer vision data company?
- So a lot of customers come to us saying, you know, I literally had a gentleman tell me a couple months ago, like, "I would never pay you to tell me what I already know about my trash." And I'm like, "I'm not gonna convince you that you don't already know everything about your trash, but you know, you want a robot? Let's get you a robot."
And that has since evolved the conversation where we're just sort of starting to show him this data. And he's like, oh, actually, I didn't realize that this was the case. The flip side is also true where someone's like, I don't know if I need a robot yet, but I'm really interested to see what I'm losing on the back end. We install that camera and then suddenly, lo and behold, that data makes the case that, holy cow, I'm losing so much stuff. I don't just need one robot. I maybe need two or even three robots. Right. So it's kind of this mutually reinforcing flywheel that's been really integral to the success of our business so far.
Tell me about your work with Amazon and with Colgate-Palmolive. What are you doing for them, with them? Yeah, so to start, maybe just, I'd love to explore this idea of what is a circular economy, because it's a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot. But it's really important to understand why Amazon and Colgate and their peers matter here. Right now, we are living in mostly a linear economy. In other words, someone makes a thing, we consume a thing, and then we dispose of it.
right? A circular economy tries to turn that process into a circle. So instead of throwing it out in a landfill forever or incinerating it, that material gets brought back to the front end and reused somehow to make new stuff that we can then consume. And the ideal is to make this go on forever so that we limit our resource consumption. So now that we have this growing base of recycling facilities that are
You know, gathering data that are getting a better understanding of what's coming into their facilities, what's actually being bailed and sent out to the end markets. We're working with companies like Amazon and Colgate on a number of fronts. You know, the first is even just to understand where is all of that packaging going. To their credit, they and several of their peers are.
have realized that there's a paradigm shift possible now from we have designed a thing that's technically recyclable, you know, our packaging R&D engineers have made this awesome monomaterial HDPE toothpaste tube in Colgate's example, to now trying to understand, okay, well, we made this thing that is recyclable, is it actually getting recycled? And that was a lens that
we couldn't really get at scale before. And so now with Glacier's technology, we're able to monitor in real time, you know, how much of these tubes are actually ending up at the recycling facility. And once they're in the facility, are they ending up in the right place? Are they being sorted correctly such that they can actually be turned into new stuff? Or are they ending up in the landfill, in which case, you know, suddenly this recyclable tube isn't very recyclable at all. So we're starting to answer these really, really critical questions.
So Colgate knows, whatever, how many tubes of toothpaste they sold in a city. And if you were working in the recycling facility for that city, you can actually count how many tubes of that toothpaste came down the recycling line and how many tubes of that toothpaste wound up in the bin? I mean, is that the reductive version of what you're saying?
Essentially, yeah. And we're even seeing now with these rapid advances in AI and in detection that, first of all, it's no small feat to even define what is a tube and how you tell the difference between a toothpaste tube versus a sunscreen tube versus a lotion tube. But now we're getting to the point where we can actually say the brand of toothpaste it is from all of those visual markers.
And so we're just seeing this sort of Cambrian explosion of interest from a wide variety of different, you know, packaging producers and brands to really start understanding this previous black box on what happens once they release this packaging into the wild for consumers to buy.
So I understand that California has a law that is in some fashion supposed to put companies like on the hook for their products, right, after they're used to incentivize companies to have their products be recycled, right? Is that...
Am I characterizing that law right? And is it relevant to your business? Yes. So I believe you're referring to EPR or extended producer responsibility laws. For those who may not have heard of EPR, it's essentially this premise that, you know, if our recycling and waste system is supposed to
find a way to do something good with all the stuff we're throwing out. The people making all this stuff that we're throwing out should probably have some skin in the game to make sure that that stuff gets either disposed of or reused properly. Right. And so EPR laws are already in effect throughout Europe, throughout Canada, some other regions. And then they've been passed in a number of states in the U.S., including California. Yeah.
Now, while EPR in the U.S. is still in its infancy, in other words, it's been passed in a number of states, but there's a lot of hairiness to figuring out how to actually implement the system across all the producers selling into a state and all of the recyclers operating in that state. It is, I think, a step in the right direction because in a lot of ways, it helps to create that circle we were talking about earlier. You're seeing that a lot of brands and producers are
are starting to take even more of a vested interest in understanding what is happening to all of their packaging because they know that imminently they're going to need to start proving the sort of end-of-life outcomes for that packaging in order to, you know, one, not be heavily fined, and then two, maybe even have a right to continue selling into that state.
It seems good that Amazon and Colgate-Palmolive are trying to figure out if the things they make that are recyclable are actually being recycled. But it seems like for that sort of thing to happen at a meaningful scale, you would need laws, basically, right? I mean, if the companies are just incurring the cost either out of the goodness of their heart or in the hopes of, you know, generating goodwill that will lead to higher revenues, those seem like marginal cases. Are the EPR laws such that
You think it will become a meaningful part of your business, a meaningful part of the world that companies will, in fact, be on the hook to figure it out? Or like, what do you think is going to happen? You know, I will say that early indicators are that all of these states are taking it quite seriously. So in addition to requiring a lot of these brands and producers to pay into a massive fund up front to even just start implementing products,
some of this movement. A lot of these states are also, you know, we're seeing that some of the kind of like early deadlines and fines for noncompliance are actually being upheld, which I think is a really strong signal to the market, hey, this is something that needs to get taken seriously. Now, to your point, I do think that at the end of the day, whatever flavor this legislation takes,
The key to make sure that recycling is still a viable and sustainable value proposition is that there needs to be some sort of an end market for that material, right? Because let's say these brands, even if they're required to pay billions of dollars into this EPR system, if there's no one on the back end to receive that material that these recycling facilities are sorting, then recycling can't really happen at the end of the day. Right.
Someone needs to buy the bale of plastic. Exactly, exactly. But if they can have guarantee that there is a buyer on the other side, right, and that that person or that company will buy at a certain price, then suddenly they can sustain that business forever.
quite well for the long run. And so to that point, you know, one other model that's often brought up in the realm of legislation is actually minimum recycled content laws, because it kind of gets at the same issue from the other side, where you say... Basically creating demand, creating demand for a bale of recycled plastic coming out of the recycling facility. Exactly. And it kind of disentangles the market for recycled feedstock from the market for virgin feedstock.
which is another great way to kind of catalyze the movement of that material throughout that recycling ecosystem. We'll be back in just a minute. You probably think it's too soon to join AARP, right? Well, let's take a minute to talk about it. Where do you see yourself in 15 years? More specifically, your career, your health, your social life. What are you doing now to help you get there? There are tons of ways for you to start preparing today for your future with AARP.
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What are you trying to figure out right now? What's a big thing you're trying to figure out? We are at a really exciting inflection point at Glacier because of, I think, two big things here. The first is just how do we scale smoothly and rapidly? You know, we've gone from a year ago, we were making maybe one robot every three months, and now we have the capacity to make three to four robots per month, and we're expecting to go even faster by the end of this year in the next six months.
And then the other big frontier for us, in addition to just, you know, how do we scale and get more of our stuff out there is what the heck do we do with all of this data? Right. We've already seen that the early use cases for this information people are taking to really in droves.
But there's a much more built-out version of this data platform where we say, you know, we don't just have a camera in one or two points throughout your facility. We can actually get sensors to sort of blanket the facility. And in that regard, we can take a huge step towards becoming more like that manufacturer who has information on every single step of their process and can respond in real time and know exactly what's going on at each stage. So, I mean, let's just talk about the recycling business for a minute. The facilities you're talking about
They're just private companies? The vast majority of them are. So this is a common misconception about recycling is that, you know, these are all, you know, somehow like public entities. By our estimation, about 80 or 85 percent of these recycling facilities are privately owned and they can be anything from a family owned, you know, business all the way up to the massive waste companies like Waste Management, Republic Services, Waste Connections. These are publicly traded companies that also own many of these recycling plants as well.
And the recycling plants are buying recycling from municipalities? Like, do they pay for whatever? Cans and plastic jugs? It's actually a very interesting question. It depends a lot on the condition of those end markets we talked about. So in today's climate, where those markets are really volatile and a little bit uncertain, oftentimes...
you know, these recycling facilities will get paid by municipalities in order to take in and process that material. But what's interesting is, you know, back during the heyday of recycling, when, you know, China was buying everything, there was no shortage of, you know, appetite for that material. The equation flipped. My sense is some recycling is quite efficient and a good business, and some is
Not very efficient and a bad business, right? Give me the, like, stack ranking for recycling. Best thing to recycle to worst. Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, the best things to recycle, of
According to a recycling facility operator would be the things that most reliably will make you the most money. So top of the stack would be aluminum cans because there's always a market for those. They're super easily recyclable. And to recycle an aluminum can actually uses about 95% less energy than to make that aluminum can from that virgin ore.
And this gets back to the point about the sort of cost spread between recycled versus virgin feedstock, right? The harder and more costly it is to make it virgin, the more of a willing market there is for that recycled material. So cans are great. They always work as a business. Aluminum cans are good. Okay, what's next? Aluminum cans are great. Next is, we're going to get a little technical here, HDPE natural. So this is
HGPE is a type of plastic resin. If you look at the little Chasing Arrows recycling logo, it's resin number two. And most commonly, it takes the form of milk jugs, right? That's sort of translucent white. The gallon milk jug. Exactly, exactly. And then from there, you know, I'd say it's probably...
PET bottles. So that's triangle number one. That's like your water bottles, your soda bottles. This is actually a type of resin where we forecast a huge gap in the supply versus what's going to be demanded about five years from now. So that's a really interesting one to watch.
And then... Why? I can imagine demand going up, but why can't they just make more of them from virgin petroleum or whatever? Yeah, it's a combination of legislative requirements around minimum recycled content combined with sort of like the nature of the end markets that are demanding PET. So, you know, PET could be used by the, you know, water or beverage bottle manufacturers, but...
A lot of that PET also gets absorbed into markets you wouldn't imagine, like carpet or mattresses or other textiles. So the bad news is that there's plastic everywhere, but the good news is at least they can use our recycled bottles? Exactly, exactly. So that's one turf that's getting pretty heated. Okay.
And then at least to round out the sort of container side of things, the other very common thing that gets sorted is HGPE color. So again, it's triangle number two, but it's been dyed, right? So this is typically things like your shampoo bottles or your laundry detergent jugs.
And so is that also like pretty good? Are we still at pretty good on the stack? That's all pretty good. I'd say those, every single recycling facility you go to will sort out those commodities. And I'll mention here that there's a big time honorable mention for cardboard and for paper. I was focusing on containers, but a lot of people talk about plastics a ton. The majority of the recycling stream is still paper and cardboard, right? So that stuff like
that's almost table stakes for a recycling facility. You just have to get that right if you want to stay profitable. And that's a reasonable business as well. Yes, that's a very reasonable business. A lot of these recycling facilities actually talk about something called the Amazon effect. In other words, as
e-commerce and shipping has become the way we buy things. Cardboard has just inundated the recycling stream, which is great because you can always sell cardboard now. There's a really hot market, but also not so great because maybe your facility was built 10 to 20 years ago before this became a thing. And now you have to find a way to sort of jerry-rig it to handle all of these massive oversized boxes that are coming through your stream. So what then we recycle is
dumb, isn't really getting recycled, doesn't make sense, whatever. Yeah, this is a very long tale of things. You know, I mentioned... It's the everything else, yeah. It is the everything else. And this points me to what I often tell people is a misconception about recycling is the phenomenon of wish cycling. And I was guilty of this too until I started Glacier and learned a bit more, which is this idea that if you're not sure if something is recyclable, a lot of people who want to do good for the planet are like, ah, I'll toss it into the recycling bin in case
they can do something with it. And in fact, this ends up being a huge problem for these facilities because most of the time they can't do something with it much as we wish they could. So a lot of these contaminants that people throw in there are things like those plastic bags or, you know, those films and flexibles, which some facilities can recycle, but most can't. It's things that have plastic in them, but it's not kind of standard plastic. So for example, you,
One very confusing and insidious example that gets brought up often is children's toys, right? Maybe they're made out of some bulky plastic. You're like, hopefully this can be recycled, but chances are that toy has various different grades of plastic on it that aren't easy to pull apart. And heaven forbid, it's an electronic toy with the batteries still in it because that can literally cause an explosion or a fire and blow up the facility. We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
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Let's do a lightning round. It's going to be a little more random. So I know you were a consultant. Is it right that you were a management consultant? I was a management consultant. I'm curious, you know, now you run a company, right? I'm curious, what do you know now from running a company that you wish you knew when you were, you know, telling people how to run their company? Yeah, I think a lot of what I've learned running Glacier has been around people
Always identifying and then sort of like revalidating what is that North Star metric or objective that we're aiming for and then making sure that anything else we're working on or anything we're communicating is in support of that. So like you're still a consultant. Yeah.
Absolutely. I mean, honestly, I think like running Glacier, a lot of people think that the tech is the hard part and don't get me wrong. It's insanely hard and insanely challenging. But when you think about something as cross-functional as a circular economy, like I'd say the majority of my day gets spent thinking about how to align incentives, right? Like recycling facilities,
brands, manufacturers, local legislators, like they all kind of want different things. So how do you explain initiatives or proposals to each of those parties in a way that makes sense to them and gets everyone rowing in the same direction? So is the answer nothing? Is the answer you feel like you're actually still doing what you were doing? No, not at all. I mean, I would say that, you know, one big mindset shift for me that has been very healthy is I'm definitely a perfectionist and a type A personality, you know, by upbringing.
And in management consulting, you're really encouraged to lean into that, right? Like people are paying you big bucks to make sure that you got every, every single last detail down to the decimal place, right? Everywhere. And so, you know, I'd say that my consulting days were great for training me on like how to make sure I knew what details mattered and really like make sure that everything lined up.
But with an early stage startup, it's the opposite, right? Like you don't have time to be perfecting everything. And so that has actually allowed me to sort of flex towards how quickly can I move and still be efficient, right? Like what is the right sort of,
balance of making sure that you're putting out high quality work and that things are generally moving the right direction, but also realizing that actually it's okay and probably good that certain balls are getting dropped. Because as one of my mentors told me, if you find that you are doing everything perfectly and nothing is failing, you're probably not moving fast enough. Yeah. I interviewed the guy who started Planet, the satellite company, and he told me that he was
He was upset when none of their satellites were failing. It meant they weren't launching soon enough. They were spending too long to work on it. It's the same. That's exactly right. That's been a massive learning and frankly, a pretty painful one in the early years of Glacier when all I wanted was to make sure that every single thing I outputted was going to work. And, you know, at the end of the day, I was like, I just got to get rid of some of those sort of controlling tendencies if I really want this company to scale at the rate that it needs to. What's one tip?
to stop being too type A when you're running a startup? Honestly, I don't know that this is healthy, but my approach was to kind of just like overwhelm myself. Give yourself too many things to do so that you have to just pass them on before you're done with them. Yeah, and I'd say it wasn't intentional per se, because it's certainly not a very pleasant experience to go through. But I often joke that...
I think starting an early stage company was maybe the only thing that could have broken me of some of these perfectionist habits because I really had to go through sort of the dark side of...
pulling all nighters, working myself to the bone, realizing, you know, like, what is this all for? And having that sort of existential crisis moment to say, okay, I don't want to give up on Glacier. And I know we've got an immense amount of potential ahead of us. So I now need to fundamentally rethink how I'm balancing this list of 1000 priorities if I want to do it and still be around and a successful leader years from now.
Are you less of a perfectionist in your non-work life now than you used to be? Absolutely. It's amazing what perspective gives you on things. Or just lack of time. Yes, yeah, yeah. Some would call it just a raw lack of time. I do think that it really sort of forces you to think much bigger picture about what matters to you and make sure that you're carving time out for that and then just not sweating the details. And the amazing thing is,
Once you start doing that and you realize that the world isn't going to end because you forgot to do this thing or decided not to do that thing perfectly, it gets easier and easier to do. Right. So that's been really healthy for me. Rebecca Hu-Trams is the co-founder and CEO of Glacier. Please email us at problem at Pushkin dot FM. We are always looking for new guests for the show.
Today's show was produced by Trina Menino and Gabriel Hunter-Chang. It was edited by Alexander Gerriton and engineered by Sarah Bergier. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem? Bettering your business takes working with the best.
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