Using AI to Build Meaningful Business Relationships – Manuj Aggarwal

Manuj Aggarwal podcast

[00:00:00] Peter Perri: All right. We’re live on Energy Superheroes. We have Manuj Aggarwal. He’s the founder and chief innovation officer at TetraNoodle. And not only is he experienced in business or excited, he’s the first guest we’ve had that has a lot of experience in new media and podcasting. Welcome to the podcast today.

[00:00:21] Manuj Aggarwal: Thank you so much, Peter. I’m so excited to have to be here 

[00:00:25] Peter Perri: So the first thing I wanted to ask you about was how did you get into podcasting and how did you start with the new media stuff? Because that’s a big area for investors and people in in the energy market today. Of 

[00:00:38] Manuj Aggarwal: course.

I think it’s just like with anybody else, because at the beginning, so this was around 2019 and what I was trying to do was I was trying to grow my business. Like any other business owner is. And what I quickly realized was it doesn’t really matter what kind of expertise you have, what kind of experience you bring to the table?

It’s in today’s world, it’s more about the influence, how many people are know you, how many people have seen you heard. Because we are all trying to pitch something and in that noise unless you stand out your pitch is drowned in millions and millions of voices. So that was the motive.

And, frankly speaking as M as like with everybody else, when you start. It’s like strange if we don’t know what we are doing, but as long as you keep going with the flow, it it works out. And then, as a as I was mentioning before the interview as we went through the journey, I’m an engineer.

I always like to keep track of, what is working, what is not working, keeping track of data building systems. So now we share those systems with others so that, they don’t have to spend as much time with. As I had 

[00:01:50] Peter Perri: no, very cool. And of course engineering our audience is so heavy on the engineering side being in the energy sector.

How do you, as an engineer get over the fear of public speaking? Because a lot of engineers just have a challenge with 

[00:02:03] Manuj Aggarwal: that. Yes. Yes. See I have written a huge long article on medium about my journey, about being an engineer and engineers generally are introverts because we are moving.

We are thinkers. We are analysts, we go deep into data and and we, our listeners as well. If you think along those lines, it’s more about collecting data about other human beings and podcasting and interviewing is more about listening than talking. So it is the most suitable platform I will say.

For engineers because it doesn’t involve a lot of speaking. It’s more about listening, analyzing, and then responding. 

[00:02:42] Peter Perri: And now that is for sure. True. And the reason I messed around with new media a little bit, but the reason I settled on podcasting ultimately was just the fact that you can have this long form conversation and there’s no pressure to.

BS and make it so quick that it jumps out at people. You can just take your time and stay and have deep conversations because to me that’s, what’s appealing is just the one-on-one deep conversations. And that was you also wrote a 

[00:03:11] Manuj Aggarwal: book I saw. Yeah, so I have written two books, but these books are very tech heavy, mostly for hardcore engineers.

One is on a scale of. Cloud infrastructure for companies who want to grow globally, and one is on enterprise security and firewall. Unless you really want to go to sleep or you are a hardcore engineer in these in these cybersecurity or cloud technologies these books are not suitable.

I’m planning to write more generic books, but, if somebody searches my name online, I have so much content, as I said Three articles on media, my road, they have pretty much a book. If it, it takes half an hour to read each one of them. People are welcome to check that out.

[00:03:53] Peter Perri: Awesome. So the books you wrote are those around your profession, is that your day job? As far as day to day. 

[00:04:00] Manuj Aggarwal: And it used to be, I have shifted quite a bit now. Cybersecurity is something that I used to implement for. Corporations where we took on larger projects, cloud engineering.

So I know that is my past life. I know a lot about it even today, but now we’ve worked with data. We work with data storytelling, using data. Create a resonance between what people are looking for, whether that is internal to the organization. So employee engagement, employee satisfaction communication between the executives, middle management and the field workers.

This is all about human communication. And we. As engineers, if we really think about it, if we collect some data about what people are thinking, that communication becomes very effective. So that’s what we do. And then externally the same thing, how to engage the customers, how to tell the story about the company, how to attract the right investors.

This is all about communication, storytelling, but rooted in. 

[00:05:02] Peter Perri: Wow. That’s super cool. So you’re marrying the soft art of storytelling up with more hard data. So that if I could, if I, in layman’s terms would explain it, it’s almost okay, storytelling is great, but you had to be an expert storyteller and have mastered this, almost like being a comedian is very difficult.

It’s you can’t reproduce it. It’s not scaling. So you’re taking these kinds of skills and marrying it with data and trying to make it scalable. Exactly. That’s huge. So that’s a big deal to companies, both in terms of advertising. Of course, there’s been a lot of data put around advertising with Google and Amazon, Microsoft, all these big companies.

I don’t think it’s been done so much with internal corporate communications. Is it, would it be fair to say that’s where you’re trying to play in that space? 

[00:05:48] Manuj Aggarwal: Internal. See see the thing is that when we talk about advertising platforms like Facebook and Google, Focused on mass media, spreading the message far and wide.

And I, I’m not going to argue with that. My work is more one-on-one relationships, and how do we create that is not by advertising. Something is not by saying nobody wants to be sold these days. So I can like even if I’m talking to an employee, I can say I can order him around or.

Try to sell him. But if I create motivation, internal motivation in him and say, Hey, whatever you are trying to accomplish in your life, I’m here to help you get. And my, the job you are doing is going to be able to get you there. And now that becomes a more personable, more intimate relationship.

And that’s the way that we work with data. And then the same thing outside of the company as well. If we are trying to engage the customers rather than saying, okay, let’s do mass marketing and send thousands and thousands of emails or send ad blast or whatever, which is very. Old we say, okay, let’s try to get into the mind of the consumer and see, okay, what are their priorities?

What are their objections? What do they want to achieve in life? Talk about that. Now that will give you 10 10% of the audience that a mass marketing campaign will, but that 10% will be really your tribe. They’ll be really connected. 

[00:07:23] Peter Perri: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, because if you have real evangelists, people that are totally committed to your product, whatever it is, then those 10 people that those 10% can tell the other people get them involved.

So you, it’s a, it’s more of a grassroots, as you say, tribe type of a campaign. I don’t know if you read any 

Seth 

[00:07:42] Manuj Aggarwal: Goden. Absolutely. Absolutely 

[00:07:45] Peter Perri: tribe. It was like triggering Seth Goden. 

[00:07:48] Manuj Aggarwal: Exactly. Yeah. So a lot of the work that we have done is basically standing on the shoulders of giants like him and understanding how this world works, because I think it’s a lost art.

[00:08:03] Peter Perri: No for sure. I think Seth Goden is been around a long time and is brilliant. And it has evolved over time from the early days of the internet, he saw that it was about permission. It was about relationships. It was about creating that tribe. It was about in marketing. Creating, as he said, a purple cow, to be able to cut through the noise and the ultimate purple cow is the one-on-one conversation. 

[00:08:29] Manuj Aggarwal: And now that is where the engineering mind comes in, where, I was trying to see, okay, one-on-one conversations is great, but how do we scale it? On one side there is Google and Facebook, mass media, and then one-on-one okay.

We only have 24 hours in a day. Like what can. So now with what we do, we actually scale those one-on-one conversations a, at a, at two thousands or even millions of if needed, but they are very effective. 

[00:08:57] Peter Perri: Interesting. What are some of the biggest mistakes? When you first come into a company, you see them making in terms of their communications and how do you fit?

[00:09:05] Manuj Aggarwal: Okay. The very first and the most common and I have made it most, many times and we all do it. It’s about me, okay. By this, because it’s the greatest technology by this because I haven’t. By this because we have been doing this and blah, this it’s not nothing to do with us.

When a customer gets wind of you talk about them, talk about what is it in store for them? What is the benefit they are going to get? What is the experience they are going to get? If they work with the company, where are they going to be in three months? As a result of working with that company, that’s what we want.

And as a consumer, that’s what we are looking for in others. But when it when we change roles, as as somebody who’s a business owner we immediately changed roles. We all that goes out the window. That w that is our priority as a consumer. If he will nature? I don’t know how it happens, but it’s.

[00:10:05] Peter Perri: And now all of course, we like to talk about ourselves, right? Because we know the most about ourselves. We’re always on our own mind. But we should be thinking about the other person and what they want. And it, especially when you’re trying to sell something and it makes a lot of sense internally as well.

I see it all the time where the boss is always thinking about what the employee can do for them. But if you want to make the employee happy, you have to be thinking about it from the employee’s perspective. When you go into these companies, what does the engagement look like? What’s the first thing that you do to try 

[00:10:36] Manuj Aggarwal: and fit?

First, the first thing is ask about the biggest domino. What is the biggest domino that needs to fall to, to get everything else, right? Like generally it’s revenue sales sometimes it’s employee engagement. We are working with a fortune 500. They have tons of revenue, but their employees are not engaged.

Last two years I’ve been really. So we figured out, okay, what is it that, that they want to do? And what is the, what is that target audience? Who is, who are they trying to reach? Because at the end of the day, all problems are human problems. Every problem is a human problem. If you don’t know how to solve a problem, it’s about finding the right human being who can solve your problem.

If you have the right human being, they don’t, they’re not solving the problem correctly. Finding out. Okay. What is the gap? Is the knowledge gap, a skills gap, tools, gap whatever the gap is. So when we redefine that problem in a human terms, then we say, okay, this is the person who is trying to solve the problem.

This is the person who is going to solve the problem. And there is a bridge that needs to be. And that is the bridge that we utilize start utilizing data. Now, what is your data? Okay. If you take a concrete example, how much sales are you trying to achieve? What is the timeframe and what are the product lines where, you know, which will give you those sales?

What does the consumer, who is the consumer? And then now we can collect data on that. Is it. Realistic expectation. Maybe economy’s moving down. The spending habits are changing. Is it reasonable to keep selling luxury goods or can we create a little bit of a, smaller offer, which will be more affordable for people at this stage?

Or if talking to the talking to people’s understanding their priorities and as human beings. We tend to think we are rational, but we are very irrational, a bunch. What does that irrational fear? What is that irrational desire that they have and creating that. That’s how an engagement looks 

[00:12:32] Peter Perri: yeah. Makes a ton of sense. And how do you take that engagement and then fix something for the company? And then how do you know when the, when you’ve done your work and it’s time to move on or does it pretty much never finished? 

[00:12:47] Manuj Aggarwal: No, it all depends on the company on the client, but the first can you repeat that first question?

I want to make sure that I get it right. 

[00:12:53] Peter Perri: Yeah. I’m just, I’m curious how you know, that you’ve been successful, come in and work within 

[00:12:58] Manuj Aggarwal: the company. Everything, again goes back to data. So we have success criteria already defined, right? So we say, okay, What is it that you want to get out of this engagement?

And then we work backwards, right? We say, okay, you are, you’re trying to achieve 25% increase in sales. Let’s work backwards from there and see what are the steps we need to take now, as we take those steps, it’s not it’s not at all guaranteed. It will yield that result. It’s. It’s about testing.

We already have ton of anecdotal evidence. We have experience. So generally it is the step in the right direction, but still we need to collect more data as we go down that path and say, are we heading in the right direction? Is it affecting the right change? And if so, let’s double down.

And so that’s how it progresses. And at the end of the day, once that result has been achieved, then the project is considered done. And then we move on to the. 

[00:13:56] Peter Perri: Gotcha. Yeah, that makes total sense. I’m looking at your resume here. And some of the stuff on here is this tremendously cool.

We may come back to your work, but I want to get into some of these other items. For example, it says you developed an AI system to help students avoid dropping. Yeah, that sounds really cool. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yes. 

[00:14:17] Manuj Aggarwal: Yes, of course. So 30% of the students drop out in the first year, first one or two years because they find out that whatever they enroll into, they are not interested in that.

And they enrolled into those programs based on based on career counselors or friends and family. And so what we determined was we can take historical data from hundreds and thousands of students and create a mentor. Model of each student. Their sat scores, their aptitude scores, their interest level, all that.

And based on that, now we can start to recommend courses to students which are of interest to them. And secondly, and more importantly, they are able to finish those. They are within the capability of those students. So it’s almost like a Netflix kind of a system where Netflix is recommended shows to us and we are recommending courses to us.

So this was a system that we built and it actually got mentioned from president Obama and bill gates. It was so successful. 

[00:15:16] Peter Perri: That’s amazing. Is it still in use today? Are you continuing to. 

[00:15:20] Manuj Aggarwal: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s so it was developed for a company called desire to learn, and they are actually actively selling in universities and institutions around.

[00:15:29] Peter Perri: That is super cool. And as I hear you mentioned it, I can imagine applying that to let’s say all the educational content online, including YouTube, including all these programs, now that the universities are offering, some of the universities are even offering free courses online now, which I think is amazing.

That will let you train with university faculty on. At no cost, but it becomes overwhelming, right? It’s okay what do I do? There’s too much information. So I need an AI assistant to tell me, okay, take this, take that. And it knows if it knew, where I am in my career and it can help me.

And I’m constantly learning. It would be amazing if you could just have a lifelong learning program. Done for you by AI. 

[00:16:12] Manuj Aggarwal: Yeah. So that was another project. We actually did a personalized learning for school systems where, we can feed it the curriculum and then based on where you are, it will customize the curriculum on the fly.

So every student in the class will get a personalized curriculum. So if you know a certain topic, you can skip ahead. And if you don’t know certain topic, it will provide you more more content so that you can get up to. 

[00:16:36] Peter Perri: That’s incredible. I re I really do think that’s probably the biggest gap in society right now.

And the biggest problem we face, I’m I’m in the sustainability realm as we talked about. And of course climate change is a huge problem, but I think an even bigger problem is the lack of sufficient education throughout our societies in the income inequality, which of course is driven.

Educational gaps. So I think if there was a way to solve that in a way that was cost-effective you have a world changing 

[00:17:04] Manuj Aggarwal: solution there. Yeah. It is everywhere. And, we just need to understand that a lot of people are scared of AI, but it has very impactful sort of applications that, that are existing and lot more.

[00:17:20] Peter Perri: Yeah. I think we should definitely be embracing AI for the next few hundred years. I think maybe after three or 400 years that might get us, but I think we’ll be okay until then. So 

[00:17:31] Manuj Aggarwal: yeah. Yeah, no I think it will be much sooner. Like I think there is this superintelligence that people are working on, which will surpass human mind.

I, in my opinion, we should see that within our lifetimes. 

[00:17:44] Peter Perri: Oh, wow. That’s amazing. So what do you think about I know Elan has said that the AI is gonna, is potentially going to be menacing to us. Do you think that’s a possibility? Are you more, is it 

[00:17:55] Manuj Aggarwal: more, I have this conversation so many times, I believe, I don’t believe any technologies menacing in.

It’s the human beings who are menacing to ourselves. So you take fire, for example, you can burn somebody’s house down or you can cook food with it. Same thing with nuclear. Like you can make energy with it or you can destroy humanity with it. What I think again, obviously I cannot fake what Elon is thinking.

He has so much more information. In my opinion, what he’s really afraid of is if society becomes in such a way that, there is less less requirement for us to do repetitive work. How will we react to that as society, our, how are we going to retrain ourselves?

How are we going to like redistribute resources? Because that’s going to be a huge challenge because our society is built right now based on how much we can contribute and extract the resources for ourselves, pay our bills and all that. And if AI is doing most of that work, how are we going to it?

[00:19:01] Peter Perri: Yeah, what do we do? I think that’s an incredible thought experiment to go through and that’s, and I’m an, I agree. I think that I talked to a buddy over at Uber, I think about 10 years ago and I said, what are you guys working on? And he says, working on robotic kitchens, eventually you’re going to be able to just push a button on your phone and have any food delivered to you that you want.

But. Self-driving car. It’s going to go to a kitchen. That’s driven by robots. So that’s going to create a big gap in terms of and even further issue with wage gaps and skill gaps. And that brings me back to your technology on AI and education, because I think we’re not going to have the luxury of.

Retraining people over a decade, they’re going to have to retrain over a couple of years and we really need a system that’s able to do that. And there really can’t be a big cost to it because people can’t afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think. I don’t 

[00:19:50] Manuj Aggarwal: think that’s going to be a thing of past, because as you said, information is everywhere.

So it’s not about information anymore. It’s about synthesizing them. 

[00:19:59] Peter Perri: For sure. Yeah. And the, my, my friends in unit that work in universities won’t like this, but I think the biggest bubble in the world right now is the education bubble. If you look at the cost of, let’s say a fancy degree versus the availability of information, and of course the universities are smart, they’re developing programs and offering courses for much lower costs.

I think in preparation of this. You take a school like Harvard, they’re able to reach a global audience now, which a lot with lower cost programs, which don’t necessarily drive towards a degree, but can really teach people. So I think letting them be scalable in a global level is an important element, not keeping all that information for themselves.

What’s your next exciting project. I got to know. If you’ve had the AI learning, I like your work in companies, but you’re out of the box. I got to know what you’re working on next. 

[00:20:51] Manuj Aggarwal: The technologies that we are working on is basically what we are trying to do is help people unlock their own potential.

And what I have learned in my life is. You are, we are all much more powerful than we think we are. We are able to accomplish much more, but what we really need is a support system around us. We need relationships who are, who can really bring the best out of us. And what we are working on is these AI systems frameworks.

To help create those relationships between human beings and create those communities at a rapid pace. And it’s in line with what I said earlier, right? Once you understand what people want, once, once you understand what their desires are, you can use technology to scale the communication. And when you are able to communicate at scale in a way that people really understand and they want to be understood, that creates a community.

And so that is what we are working. 

[00:21:56] Peter Perri: The communities is huge. And I agree with you look at our ancient times and how religions formed around small communities. And that was really the use of the initial religions was to create these communities of people. And create symbiotic situations.

And I think that is one thing we’ve lost with so much technology that we’re reliant on. And I think as we move away from these sort of surface level interactions that we lots of the times have on social media eventually those communities are going to become much richer and deeper. Like they used to be in old times.

I think we’re in a transition period here where we’ve got this tech. Okay, now we’re surface and we’re having all these real surface level communications, but we got to get back to depth. I think. Tell me about the podcast. I want to know, how did you become so successful with the podcast and getting it out there?

So many people try to do it and fail. I know this is my second attempt. 

[00:22:54] Manuj Aggarwal: Yeah, it’s not easy for sure. But one thing I say is that, first of all, you have to love it. You have to love talking to people. And and having interests, interesting conversations having the curiosity to ask, just you’re, you are taking one thought after the other and taking the conversation where it goes.

But if we become robotic and just, ah, Question number one, question number two. That’s not going to be interesting to you. It’s not going to be interesting to the audience. Then the second part. Having the network to find interesting people to talk to because the more interesting people you bring on the more diverse ideas you will have, the audience will love that.

So it’s all about. Consistency and keeping the standards high. And then again, also listening to the audience, if we are getting good feedback continue to double down on that. If you heard, if you hear oh, this is not something relevant, then try to be open to drop that from the content.

So I think it’s like anything in life, nothing is easy. But if you really keep keep going, easier. And so my podcast it’s called bootstrapping your dreams show. And, we have done about 320 episodes so far in three years, and we’ve had some really amazing guests, Olympic champions, celebrities, movie stars sports stars, even sharks from the shark tank former director of the CIA CTO of the United States air force.

It’s been an amazing. 

[00:24:20] Peter Perri: Unbelievable. So I got to know who was the hardest person who was the most difficult person that you had? Do you remember one interview that was just like, man, that was 

[00:24:29] Manuj Aggarwal: tough. Being in front of the former director of CIA was not easy. And, asking a question to a person who knows every secret in the world that was nerve wracking, but yeah, it was a very interesting, like a lot of insights like he’s a great guy.

Great man. Lot of accomplishments learned a lot. Yeah. 

[00:24:49] Peter Perri: No for sure. You must’ve done a good job cause you’re here. So he’s still high. He was happy with the episode. 

[00:24:55] Manuj Aggarwal: Yeah. He could have pressed a button and 

[00:24:57] Peter Perri: yeah, though. They’re very cool. And I, so I, I also read that you came from a humble background and I’d be crazy if I didn’t ask about it.

I’d love to know more about your background and how were you able to rise up? Because that is a challenge for so many. 

[00:25:12] Manuj Aggarwal: I used to work in a factory in India. I used to work for $2 a day started working at 15 12 hours a day, six days a week. So that was a tough life. But what, what happened was like, I really thought that, Hey, there is more to life than this.

And I was flipping through some business magazines and I was looking at all these success stories and I was like, okay, these guys have the same. You’re an eyes and everything is same. What else am I missing here? And of course at that point, I had no idea of what this all meant, but I just had a desire to do this.

To seek out more and to learn more. And I got into computers at that time then I just fell in love with computers because, I thought, oh, we were talking about being an introvert. I was a total introvert. And I was like, oh, these machines obey my orders. And they don’t talk back. What is better than that?

And when you start pursuing your passion and the other thing. You keep asking for help. You keep building your network. You keep upleveling yourself. Once you reach a certain stage, ask yourself, okay, what is the next level? Who can get me there? Find that person who’s already there.

Talk to those people, even if you don’t get any help, observe their behavior and then try to replicate that behavior. And that’s how everybody becomes. With what they become. That’s the most surprising thing after talking to all these successful people, we think that they have some magic formula, but nobody has a magic formula other than their own motivation and their desire to keep learning from others and keep replicating their.

[00:26:52] Peter Perri: Just keep going and don’t quit. I think that’s, it’s tough because you get that advice when you’re young and you’re like, what does that mean? They must have a secret. And then you spend 10 years in your twenties looking for a hack or at school or something. And then as you just give up on that and you’re just like, okay, I’m going to work my butt off until I get where I need to go.

[00:27:13] Manuj Aggarwal: Exactly. It’s just and then the other thing is. One thing I really want to emphasize, this gum called passion, a lot of people say, find your passion, but something that you will do regardless, something that you will, even, if nobody pays you, nobody pays attention to you.

You’re going to keep enjoying it. Because as you said, working your way through this life is not easy. And if you have big goals, You better be ready to fall apart many times. And if you are doing something, which is, oh, just because, next door neighbor is doing, just because the guy who’s driving a Ferrari is doing, and it’s not your passion.

You’re going to give up on the first a setback, right? So if you focus on things and believe me, there could be so obscure things that nobody gives a down. It could be like literally weaving baskets under water. That could be your passion. But trust me, there are 7 billion people.

You will find somebody who will be interested in that. If you are truly passionate, 

[00:28:15] Peter Perri: For sure. And it didn’t use to be that way, but the internet has unlocked this, they call it the long tail. So now we have the ability to reach that small community that cares about the underwater basket weaving or whatever it else it is.

There’s a community for it out there. My my mom watches. On YouTube, where there’s a guy and he just feeds raccoons. And he’s got hundreds of raccoons that come up to his house and it’s very entertaining. And the guy has millions of YouTube followers and all he really did was just. Make friends with the raccoons and he pets them and he feeds them.

And that’s pretty much the whole, I’m trying to look for what his hook is, but, feeding raccoons is a purple cow. 

[00:28:58] Manuj Aggarwal: So people, yeah, you never know what will resonate with people. That’s why I said they don’t. We are not rational. We are not rational at all. No 

[00:29:05] Peter Perri: abs absolutely not.

We’re emotional creatures that make emotional decisions and then justify those decisions rationally. So it’s very interesting. We’re supposed to talk about energy and sustainability could you tell me how you view climate change, how you’ve used sustainability and where are you applying some of this data knowledge in that.

Yeah 

[00:29:27] Manuj Aggarwal: I’ll give you a quick example. First of all we just completed a project for a mining industry for copper and silver and gold mining. And, as this it’s a very dirty industry and lots of pollution happens. So we implemented a blockchain solution for supply chain to track all the.

Or to make sure that it is mind in a sustainable manner. So that’s the first step to collect data and make sure that it is it is not tempered with. And now coming back to general sustainability, I think that’s the biggest challenge that humanity faces right now.

The thing is that, as we say, as we said earlier, we as humanity, we tend to go in extremes, when we see something good, we just want to squeeze the last drop of juice out of it. And when that happens, nature strikes back. We think that we are powerful and then we can change nature, but as we have seen in the pandemic, Nature is very powerful, no matter what, it will figure out a way to slap our butt and get us on the right track.

And then the. Naturally things will start to shift in the other direction. As we have already seen ESGs being implemented across the world. People, companies making becoming more aware of sustainable growth diversity and inclusion equality for everyone. These are not the things that you used to hear three, four years.

Right now it’s on everybody’s mind now, whether that’s being, that’s enough or not, but I can tell you more, money’s flowing into this now. So that means things are changing and things change slowly, but we are heading in the right direction. And in spite of doom and gloom, what we hear in the news V R very resilient.

We have overcome tremendous challenges. This is not the first time that we have faced a big challenge of global challenge. I’m a hundred percent sure I have full faith in ourselves that we’ll be able to figure it out. If not for anything else, then the problem becomes good. Big enough. There is a lot of money to be made when we solve those problems.

[00:31:32] Peter Perri: No, for sure. I’m a big believer in that we’re headed in the right direction. I’m a. I’ve always been an optimist and no matter what you tell me just the way nature can adapt and evolve and as you say, kick us in the butt. That’s exactly what I felt like happened during the pandemic.

It was amazing because we said we couldn’t reduce submissions. Inside of six months, we all went inside and dolphins were swimming in Venice, all of a sudden, so it was almost like saying, oh yeah, you can, if you really have to. And as you say, also, people are resilient. So we’re going to face some problems with climate change.

There’s no doubt, but we can also develop solutions to mitigate that. And we have to make sure, I think to me, the biggest challenge is how do we allow Places that have energy, poverty. How do we allow those places to be able to develop their economies and in the way that we developed our economies but do it in a sustainable way.

It’s going to be a challenge. 

[00:32:27] Manuj Aggarwal: Yeah. The thing is. This goes back to my previous common lot of smart people around the globe, a lot of smart ideas. But they are not able to execute because they have no community around them. They have no backing. There’s no validation.

There’s no capital. This is the core of the problem that I see that if we enable those people, these innovators to come up with those innovations and bring them to market anything can be. 

[00:32:53] Peter Perri: I agree. Totally. And that leads me into investors, right? So we do get a decent number of investors on this show and I make my living as an investment banker.

So I spend most of the day talking to investors and they have very rigorous criteria. I saw from your bio that you’ve raised some venture capital. They’re tough, right? Tough with diligence, very rigorous processes. And as much as we talk about ESS. They still have very high return thresholds.

How do we unlock all that money? Because there’s just trillions of dollars in the hands of limited partners that are looking for great investments. How do we unlock that and find those great ideas? 

[00:33:30] Manuj Aggarwal: The very first thing, what I, when I sit with investors and they’re, they can do all the due diligence.

They can do all of that. What it comes down to is whether the investor. The weather, there is a connection between the investor and the person who’s raising money, whether their values are aligned or not. So that’s the first thing. And we, again, being an engineer to, we have a system to really accelerate that that connection.

And then the thing is when you look for it’s always. Let me start back. It’s not about the investment. It’s about the person who is who’s behind the plan. Don’t back the plan back, the man behind, or man or woman behind the plan. Because if you see people. Do great things. They leave clues in their life, right?

So you always start with their, Hey where did you come from? Hot. Tell me a little bit about what you have done. How did you come, overcome that challenge? So when you listen to their story, you can really get a very good idea. Okay. If I give this person a million dollars, is this going to go down the drain or this is going to melt.

Because you can see from their trajectory, like you can plot their life on the graph and say, Hey this this is going, not do I want to ride this wave or not. And that’s an easy decision, but if we keep focused on okay. Doing due diligence on, on the paper, looking in the account yeah, of course that is necessary, but it’s first starts with the person who’s behind that.

[00:35:05] Peter Perri: That is so true. And I just spoke to a guy today and I have to keep it under wraps because we’re it’s confidential, but just spoke to a guy and I said, what’s your plan? And he said in 30 years, I’d like to develop hypersonic planes. Okay. In 30 years. And I’m thinking, man, 30 years is a long time.

Okay. It’s going to be, it’s going to be a while before this is able to work, but I’m still excited about. Just the person. Yeah, because you look at the amount of success that they’ve had at a young age. They’re going to solve some big problems along the way. I want to get involved with that team. 

[00:35:45] Manuj Aggarwal: Yeah. So there you go.

So that’s called resonance between people. And then once you behind that, you become excited. You also want to help them in solve those problems. And then when you have a community of people, you, when you find a person like that who will not stop at anything, and you have a community behind.

Everybody is inspired to, get that thing done. 

[00:36:06] Peter Perri: Absolutely. It’s for sure. True. We’re almost at time here. I think I could talk for another hour with you. Cause you’ve got so many good ideas, but I want to let you at least talk about anything that you’re plugging, anything that you want the audience to know.

How can they learn more about you and find you and what are specifically the kind of companies that you’re trying to 

[00:36:26] Manuj Aggarwal: So we work with solopreneurs to fortune 500. If somebody is looking to accelerate their growth and they are just looking for coaching in how to gain visibility, how to how to build an influence online, because that is very important.

These days they can contact me through LinkedIn and on the corporate side, if people have, data that that is hit. Dormant because data is the new gold data is the new oil. So if people want to unlock the power of data and they want to create a, powerful stories out of data, they want to create powerful outcomes.

Connect with me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is where we are all there and I’m very active on LinkedIn. So connect with me and we’ll be. 

[00:37:11] Peter Perri: No, I’m a news. This has been great. And definitely everybody reach out to Manuj Aggarwal. He’s the founder and chief innovation officer of TetraNoodle. If you want to gain more value from your data, as he says, data’s gold, data’s the new oil reach out to him on LinkedIn and and make sure that you reference, they show when you do reach out.

Thanks everybody. Manuj was awesome having you. Thank you 

[00:37:36] Manuj Aggarwal: so much. Thank you.