AI, Energy, and Building a More Sustainable Future with Josh Rainbow

The Green Building Matters Podcast with Charlie Cichetti

The episode features a deep dive into the intersection of AI technology, energy infrastructure, and business sustainability with entrepreneu

Key takeaways

• Josh Rainbow's company utilizes approximately 250 AI agents, with 150-200 being fully autonomous, to reduce OPEX by 45-50%.
• A critical distinction is made between mentors, who provide influence, and sponsors, who actively open doors and support career advancement.
• The expansion of AI giants like OpenAI and Meta is increasingly threatened by energy and power infrastructure constraints.
• Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are identified as a potential technological solution to provide the necessary cheap, reliable nuclear power for future compute needs.
• Effective entrepreneurship involves 'buying back time' through automation and delegation to focus on high-value strategic tasks.

Main topics

• AI-native business operations
• Energy constraints in AI scaling
• Mentorship vs. Sponsorship

Notable quotes

A mentor is someone that can influence you... A sponsor is someone that supports your career and development, opens doors.

Conclusion

The episode highlights how leveraging emerging technologies like AI an

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Welcome to Green Building Matters, the original and most popular podcast focused on the green building movement. Your host is Charlie Cecchetti, one of the most credentialed experts in the green building industry and one of the few to be honored as a lead fellow. Each week, Charlie welcomes a green building professional from around the globe to share their war stories, career advice, and unique insight into how sustainability is shaping the built environment. So settle in, grab a fresh cup of coffee, and get ready to find out. Why Green Building Matters. Speaker 3 (0:33) Hey, everybody. Welcome to the next episode of the Green Building Matters podcast. We're talking more and more tech. Technology can really help in this movement. Sustainability, decarbonization, some call it resiliency. And I've got Josh on today. He's up in Alberta, Canada. Josh, how you doing, man? I'm doing good, Charlie. Thanks for having me. All right, we won't talk about how I'm in Atlanta and the Calgary Flames used to be the Atlanta Flames. I hope they're doing pretty good for you guys up there, okay? But it all started here, so 80s. My dad went to a bunch of hockey games in the 80s here in Speaker 4 (1:07) Atlanta. I'm actually an Oilers fan. Oh, okay. Than originally, so it's even worse. Even worse, yeah, man. Speaker 3 (1:16) Winnipeg then stole the Thrashers. We just can't. We got soccer team here. But all right. So, you know, buildings. We're going to get to that. We're going to get to software. We're going to get to tech. We're going to get to the events that you and your team host. But you got to take us back. Tell our listeners, if you would, a little more of that origin story. Where did you grow up and go to school? Speaker 4 (1:34) Yeah, I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, just north of Calgary. So that's pretty north as far as Canada goes. Pretty cold. Gets down to about negative 40, negative 45 Celsius in the winter. Definitely was an interesting place to grow up, especially with my family heritage, part European, part African. But loved it. I love living in Alberta. It's a great spot. And then as I reached my late teens, I ended up moving down to Calgary. Went to the University of Calgary, studied quantitative sciences. So for anybody who's unfamiliar with quantitative sciences, it's essentially, you know, financial hedging instruments, models that would be used for hedge funds or insurance companies or banks to help them power their investments, reserving all that fun stuff. And then somehow I found my way into tech, thank God. And I've been here for the better part of the last decade. Speaker 3 (2:39) Oh, man, amazing. So I always appreciated math. I never really liked at Georgia Tech like calculus and stuff. I kind of like statistics. So someone that's maybe wanting to get into data, can you kind of let us know early on? I'm going to assume that you didn't mind the numbers and stuff, but did you need the advanced math too? Or can you go, what kind of math do you need to get into data? Speaker 4 (3:02) Yeah, so, I mean, my degree was pretty much advanced mathematics. Okay. algebra, statistics, and then complementary courses like economics and computer science. Okay. I'd say for, you know, today's day and age, the average person probably can get away without doing the advanced mathematics. Again, it was more so for the financial models that we were building. But it's definitely helpful if you look at like advanced data structures or advanced algorithms to have those concepts because, you know, looking back, the stuff that we did early on, you know, entry level mathematics, calculus, whatnot, they were just building blocks we use later on. And, you know, something that you spend a whole year doing might come up once in a blue moon, but it's a part of a theorem that gets you to your end goal. Again, not very exciting stuff for most people. I really only ever liked math and science. I finished most of my mathematics. By the time I was 13. So when I got to university, it was mostly just review. But, you know, I was different. I also struggled a lot with English language arts, history, geography, those types of things. So I said, if I'm going to go to post-secondary, which I almost didn't, I would only do a math degree. Speaker 3 (4:27) Thanks for giving us that peek. I'm sure some listening are just curious there. Okay, so did you have any mentors along the way so far? For some, Josh, a mentor is someone you read their material, you see them on stage, they influence you. For others, maybe you're lucky enough to be in person. At lunch, they challenge you. Maybe they open a door. Have you had any mentors? Speaker 4 (4:47) Yeah, so I've been quite fortunate to have a lot of mentors and sponsors in my career. Before I dive in a little bit more on that, the distinguishing factor is, you know, a mentor is someone who can influence you, like you said, whether it's in person or virtual or someone you see. But a sponsor is someone who supports your career and development, opens doors. And I've had the great fortune to create a lot of those, which is actually turned into a company now. But I'm a bit different. So I was like a heavy nerd. I loved things like Iron Man. We've built AI in our company. We have Jarvis and Elon Musk. We start with all these agents working for us. But I was a heavy nerd and then I also was big into sports and sales. I've sold everything from cars to homes, door-to-door, phones, cleaning, and then selling myself and university as a product in terms of... getting jobs, not the other type of thing. But, you know, I got to the point where when I was in university and I moved away, I had a really good mentor who led a student association I joined on day one. And he broke down for me the pyramid of quantitative sciences, which, you know, you have the least important is actually your grades. Then in between that, you have kind of different projects or work experiences that you'll get. And most importantly was, you know, internships or co-ops, as we call them in Canada. And it was through those experiences that I made a bunch of friends and mentors and sponsors, you know, very specific to my career path at the start. But then... In Calgary, Alberta, you know, and Alberta in general, we're quite lucky. We have a very friendly relationship-based ecosystem. And so, you know, when I started down further in my career, I would go for coffee or lunch with someone and then they'd introduce me to someone else and they'd introduce me to someone else and so on and so forth. So much so that it gets to the point where you have an abundance of those relationships that feed and pour into you. And so now on any given day, I might have, you know, three, four, five coffees, keeping in touch with people I've met over the years and looking to help each other out, whether it's introducing, making connections or doing deals. And we've gotten to the point where we have for our advisory board, two leaders of multi-billion dollar companies, one tech, one not tech, and then one billionaire from the energy space. as well as a lot of individuals who've built and sold companies or ran companies as a part of executive leadership teams that I've met over the years. And it's funny, you know, a lot of these people, they see young people who are trying to be successful and they say, you'll be successful. Don't worry about it. Just keep going. And you're like, well, can you just give me the secret? Right. And it's funny looking back. So much of it is timing and keeping up with relationships. There's people that have brought me success in terms of additional clients at the right time, right place. There's people who've made introductions and have opened doors to things like senior government officials or some of the top tech leaders across North America. There's people that will sponsor you in terms of... giving you their time and helping you work through business ideas, whatever it is, we've received it all. And we wouldn't be here without any of that. So it's been huge for my career, my advancement. And I would encourage anybody who is pursuing a career to look for coaching opportunities and advisory opportunities as they're going through their journey, entrepreneur or not. Speaker 3 (8:47) Man, some really good wisdom on how you've been guided. I love the... the sponsor versus just a mentor. So thanks for sharing that, Josh. So sustainability, I know we're going to talk tech and your path to that. You know, I'm hoping some of, you know, your upbringing influenced you on this, but, you know, did you feel like you've kind of got into sustainability here a little bit? And if so, when did that kind of happen? Speaker 4 (9:12) Yeah, I'd say, you know, my sister will probably like to take credit because she's a big sustainability person. But You know, for me, I think when I look at my career, I kind of break sustainability into a couple different things. Obviously, we have the sustainability of our ecosystems and what it takes to keep them going and building them and whatnot. But I've also looked at my own sustainability and my own journey. And so it's been very interesting. I think for me, I learned more so. Through failure, so whenever I've hit walls or, you know, I've experienced things that, you know, haven't quite worked out or I haven't seen the results that I've wanted. We've looked at, you know, either from a business perspective, internally in our company, like, are these processes sustainable? You know, can we continue them up? Are we relying too much on people? Do we have systems and processes in place? Or, you know, more from an ecosystem perspective. Like, is what we're doing actually beneficial? Is it taking off? You know, are companies able to build and capitalize from our endeavors? We have a very interesting ecosystem in Canada. You know, if you look at the venture infrastructure, it's not really built with sustainability in mind. Speaker 4 (10:42) We have the federal government through a few of their institutions that distribute capital to skilled investors. And they do it with strings attached, obviously. But it has a very hard time reaching founders, for example, especially at the early stage. It's early and late stage that you have the biggest issues. But if you're somewhere in the middle, you know, you can see a lot of funding either through grants or... or venture debt or capital raised coming your way. So when we look at that model, it's not really built with sustainability in mind. There's a lot of leaders, some in our network from Neo Financial and companies like Zazune and Float that are looking to change the game in Canada in terms of keeping companies that are struggling, looking for that sort of funding here rather than going to places like the US. A key example of when we're looking at sustainability in the ecosystem, it's so multifaceted and there's private companies in there, there's private investors in there, and they all have a role to play. But it can be a struggle sometimes. And I'd say we're quite fortunate with the position that we're in to be an aggregator, bringing people together. But we see a lot of those problems and it's no easy task to kind of look at them and break them down. It takes multiple people to help lift them up. Speaker 3 (12:07) It's great to hear your perspective, too, on investing in sustainability and mission-driven companies, too. So I know we'll come back to that. One more look back, then I kind of ask about present day. So what are some of your proudest accomplishments so far? What's on the highlight reel? Speaker 4 (12:24) You're talking to the wrong guy. I have a really hard time talking about my accomplishments, but a couple of things. You know, I'm very proud to have gone through the university journey, wanted to drop out multiple times. I will come back to that. I'm very happy to have built the relationships that I have in my career that have allowed me to have more freedom. in terms of choosing how I work, when I work, and the projects I work on. Very proud to have the family that I do that have raised me with the mindset that I can really accomplish anything that I want in life. And, you know, happy to have the Speaker 3 (13:08) people Speaker 4 (13:09) in my circle that I have that support me to the good times and the bad. I'd say, you know, we're still a growth stage company. We're early on in our career, so. Our