Pioneering Innovations in Software and IoT with Joel Sotomayor of agDirigo

Speaker A: Welcome to the Innovators of Things podcast, a profile series about the builders and leaders of connected devices powered by hologram. Today's guest is Joel Sotomayor, the founder and CTO of actrigo. And now to our host, Jillian Kaplan.

Speaker B: My name is Jillian Kaplan and welcome to Innovators of Things. I am here with Joelle Sotomayor. Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker C: Hello, nice to meet you. Thank you for having me here.

Speaker B: Yes, very excited to chat with you today. And I want to start off by sharing with our audience who Joelle is and how you became the innovator that you are today.

Speaker C: Sure, it's Joelle. I've only really had one job, ever worked in retail, always been in software development. Started off working at St. Joe's Hospital when I was at the University of Toronto and had a part time job. Eventually I was elevated or had a job in the operating room as a uni clerk. One of the first things I had to do was photocopy these sheets of paper. And at the time, because I went to eft, I thought it's kind of below me. So I asked what this was about and then eventually found out that it was a scheduling program. And then I saw the frustrations with the registration clerk, the booking clerk and all of the paperwork that she had to do, all the last minute changes. And I thought, well, you know, since I basically finished my task for my job at the four hour shift within the first hour, I basically had three hours to think about things or sneak in some homework once in a while. And then I thought that it would be, I'd really, you know, thought I'd, uh, I'd be able to help out in terms of automating the scheduling program. I talked to my OR manager and at first she said, no, just do your job. And then I explained to her the, the power of databases. And then I eventually wrote a, uh, Windows program and I automated the entire scheduling system for the operating room in Toronto, Canada. St. Geor Hospital. This is a long time ago, probably about 20 years ago or so, but that's where I got started. Eventually I also tied in supply processing and distribution. So any elective surgery needed supplies based on the surgeon and the case that was required. And so all these things were required for an elective surgery or a scheduled surgery. And so I automated the entire thing. A printout was actually created in which the people from SPD could collect the instruments and supplies required for, let's say an appendectomy that was needed there and then have everything ready for the next Day's surgery. After I completed that task, I thought it'd be good to have measurements how efficient the OR was, how often were the cases taking? Were there, you know, did it take longer, was it shorter? And if it was, if any kind of trends were found, maybe we can just allocate four to five minutes for a case instead of an hour, which then we could squeeze in another. Another scheduled case to help out patients. And that's generally why I got into software development. I thought it was really fun. It's something that came to me naturally as well. Didn't have to think about it too much. And I've also liked the fact that I. It wasn't just, you know, one dimensional. You had to look at what the customers had to think of. And then, because this was the or, you know, you also think about the patient and having, you know, clinical times in the OR improved. And then there were ways, too, of making sure that, uh, things weren't left inside a patient. So it's called a count sheet.

Speaker B: That's important, right?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, it's really important. At the time, there were cases in other hospitals in other parts of the world that left sponges inside. And so there was a count sheet that said, okay, if you open up this container, it had four sponges. By the end, you should have four of these things back. Usually gauze materials. And so that was also done. And, you know, it was a Catholic hospital as well, and I'm Catholic. And so I. I thought it was good for me to provide this kind of service. This wasn't. I didn't get paid extra to go and do this. This was just my passion project. When I was at the hospital, I obviously still had to complete my responsibilities in the unicler position. But since I had a lot of time and I was pretty efficient at, uh, things, I also wanted to give back to the patients and to the hospital for giving me this amazing job.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's amazing. And I think it's like a common theme amongst innovators, right, Is they always take the next step to figure out the root of why they're doing what they were doing. Right. Like, why are you photocopying all of this stuff? Like, what's the reason behind it? And, like, how can I make it better? And I think we've all had bosses like the one you described, who's like, no, just do your job. But then once they get to know you and your capabilities and see that you have passion for doing a little more and going above and beyond it's incredible because a lot of times they can really help you and encourage you because it sounds like you went from that small task and that small fix to building all these other fixes.

Speaker C: Yeah, we had utilization reports for all surgeons, all types of services, because each of the theaters represented a service or a surgery component. So there was general surge, there was ophthalmology, there's orthopedics, cardiovascular. So all these disciplines and having that kind of metadata of cases and cost was all, I thought, pretty important at the time. And it's also reducing length of stay because at the time, you know, there was a trend to lower the amount of time a patient was in the hospital. And so by improving and making improvements and having this data that we collected, you know, kind of reinforce the thinking. I've always said, if you want to make good policy, you got to have the data to prove it. Not just a whim, some sort of hard, concrete data points.

Speaker B: Yeah, totally. Like, you can't make decisions. Like, you can't see improvement. You can't improve what you don't measure. Right. Like, if you're not measuring it to begin with, you can't make improvements on the back end

Speaker C: mouse.

Speaker B: But, hey, you never know, like, based on what you just said. So that's amazing. And it seems like you've been pretty focused on using technology to improve lives for a long time. Like, is that sort of been your passion?

Speaker C: Yes. And, uh, you know, I. I'm a pretty geeky person, and I think most programmers are very conservative. They don't really do too much and, you know, are very worried about things not going according to planning. And so. Yeah, but I also think that's a real benefit. Like, when I finished university, I bought a house. So not a lot of people can say that, but because I worked a lot and learned how to save and understood the value of what I was doing and had, um, you know, really good jobs and really good mentors as well. That's another big benefit that helped shape my brain back in the day. I was also on a team that finalized the multiple Listing service, so MLS CA in Canada at the time. Uh, and I still do. I love relational databases. I think they're just.

Speaker B: I've never heard. I love relational data.

Speaker C: Oh, yeah, 100%. I totally understand. It comes to me very naturally, the organization, you know, how things connect. I don't know if I was ever born to be a programmer, but I really like the logic behind it. And to me, just, it's very easy and natural for me to understand I also like Transact SQL, so it's the query language for relational databases. It's one of my uh, most favorite things in life. I still have my book that I look at once in a while and I get bored. I'll reread things.

Speaker B: That's what I read about. I don't remember what you just said. Something SQL, that's what I do in my free time. So, you know. Just kidding.

Speaker C: I love it. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I've also.

Speaker B: When are you bored?

Speaker C: Oh, I'm never bored.

Speaker B: Right. I was gonna say you can't be bored, not with all this stuff.

Speaker C: Yeah, I've never owned a television. If you're a programmer, you don't really watch. We often like to play and tinker with things and open things up and understand things. That's kind of in our nature. I think engineers also have the same kind of drive. A programmer once in one of my first jobs I always call it my real job because now I've had my own company for so long but before that I had a real job. Real job, yeah. And his name was Tiku and he always said, you know, if you're going to be, if you're still going to be, do this in five years, you're going to turn out like me, weird and a little bit out of shape.

Speaker B: And was he one of your mentors that you were saying really shaped your career?

Speaker C: Yeah, he was a great low level programmer from Romania. A big shout out to the Romanian programmers that you know, listen to your podcast. They still, there's a lot of studs in that country in terms of the learnings that they do and how they're taught. One of the best low level programmers in the world consistently still today. Yeah, it's really cool. I've always made software. I've exited two companies. Those two were in biosecurity, so contact tracing. Prior to Covid, I already had something that kept track of things and how animals can get people sick and vice versa. Basically a zoonotic event. And then I got into hardware. So all of the money that I've made I've spent building hardware. Hardware is the hardest thing ever to make and I have a real deep appreciation for people who make hardware. So the hardware that we make still made in Canada, designed, manufactured, engineered, all in Canada, nothing has ever been exported. We haven't bought anything and called it Adrigo. Uh, when it's uh, everything that we own from the ground up, the printed circuit board design, all of the programming on the back end, our Ah, sensor covers all these things and it's been really, really helpful for me. It's expensive, for sure, but it's also the learnings that we've had. We had sensor coverage. So just for your audience, we have these amazing sensors that have close to 16 million sensor data points. But because they are traveling with animals and everyone's already experienced Covid, you know that sometimes animals get people sick and there's something called biosecurity and you need to control or contain that biosecurity outbreak. So you have to power wash and clean these trailers. So the sensor covers really have to be important because you can't just buy off the shelf sensors. Yeah. And they have to be. Not only work in very hot and cold environments, but also when they're being soaked in chemicals. So the whole design of that, you know, we've done several iterations. I can tell you so many, so many funny stories about, you know, one time we had something that looked really cool until you power washed it and the thing blew up.

Speaker B: No, it didn't look so good anymore.

Speaker C: So that's, that was a $10,000 mistake. You know, Another time, one of our earliest designs was that the sensor stuck out and then pigs started to eat it because it was outside of the container. Now everything's containerized. There's no on and off switch. Uh, and they're putting animals within these trailers. The truck drivers don't really want to be where the animals are because it's also not safe for them. So all of our sensors are always on. They're paired with this unit called the datalink, which then is sent to the cloud and then sent through hologram's amazing platform. We use hologram's universal IoT data SIM card. We've used it for over five years and it's still the best platform out there. It's enabled us to travel from western Canada all the way down to southern US and all of our, uh, costs are very controlled and not, you know, very expensive because of the hologram system while we jump from cell tower to the other cell tower. So there's a lot of value into using a platform from hologram.

Speaker B: That's awesome. I have a lot of questions based on what you just said. I'm going to start out with what you talked about with like pigs eating sensors and sensors blowing up. And you had mentioned a while back that you feel like a lot of software engineers don't necessarily like, take risks. Right. They do kind of like the work they're supposed to do. So because you're clearly a risk taker, calculated risk taker, which is a trait that I see on a lot of people who are innovators on this podcast. What do you think made you just be a little bit different and like, willing to fail forward, I'll call it, and take these risks and learn from them in order to get to that end goal that maybe isn't by the book.

Speaker C: Great question. I think one of the best. I, uh, think if you want to invent something, you should be resource constrained. And it's when it's your own money. I have this term that no one really knows, but I use it often. I call it opm, Other people's money. So when you get VC backed, no longer your money, it's other people's money. Yeah. And so you think a little differently because now you don't worry about your Runway.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: When you do worry about your Runway and you want to be smart about the money that, uh, you have, whether it's yours or somebody from a venture fund, you have to be careful about everything that you're doing and be very cost conscious. There's a lot of software accelerators, but not hardware accelerators. And so when you start to build a sensor or some piece of hardware, you always have to look at the end goal in terms of what is the price point that you can do it where it's sustainable for your customers and they see real value into something that, uh, provides that value that, you know, they wouldn't have without using your sensor and being resource constraint. Not having an unlimited amount of money will cause you to think differently, cause you to be really innovative and to find ways, you know, to save money, but also do it in a very efficient manner. One of the things I think we specialize in is our, ah, data delivery methods. Right now it's about 12 kilobytes really small data packets, which cost us to reduce our, uh, data overhead. So we focus a lot on data payloads. When you analyze that, you can use Wireshark, you can see how much TLS encryption adds to it. So if you can get rid of certain things, you can reduce that data packet weight or overhead weight and then have cheaper operational server fees because that's a big thing that your customers are going to complain to you about. Oh, uh, I'd love to use this product but, you know, it's gone through the roof in terms of my server fees. So we look at what our customers are doing, what value we can bring to those customers, to their customers. Because usually, uh, on the agri Food production, you know, food chain. There are different verticals and a lot of actors involved. And so if you can try to see where your product fits and how we could help all parts of this, uh, supply chain, the more benefit they'll have and the less friction they'll have in terms of adopting your tech.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. More benefits, you know, make it easier to fix, more problems, easy to use. Right. Like, that's huge for people. So I would love if you just backed up a little bit because I know a little bit about, like you talked about the pig sensors and transporting animals, but can you tell our audience a little bit about, like, what you're working on now and like your overall, you know, company and mission? Because how many companies have you had at this point?

Speaker C: I feel like I've had two exits and then I've got the RICO and then I have a couple of little side projects that I work on. You know, a, uh, really cool encryption project which is similar. Well, it's from the learnings of Agdrigo and building this sensor. I think the way data is being transferred could be improved and that, uh, security is very important. A lot of, you know, threat can come from a compromised sensor that could be used, you know, in, in a very malicious way. And the other really big thing that I think a lot of people forget about is that a lot of businesses and a lot of your listeners, they all use artificial artificial intelligence. AI is basically based on data because that's how you build a model. If you can't provide data provenance and prove that that data actually came from a sensor, you as a business owner, would you trust that data to make a decision? No. Yeah, so that's a big thing. It's at the fabric of everything that's happening in this world right now. Providing data provenance is going to become bigger and bigger content creators. They're losing, you know, royalties and people having their content impersonated and they're making these videos, you know, obviously sometimes in jest, as a joke, but it could be used maliciously where, you know, you're basically looking and sounding like a person, a famous person, but it's really not them. And so it's the whole provenance of that. Uh, and so these are these two things that, you know, personally I'm working on on my own because I, I think it's, it's important to do to add value to the world and to make sure, you know, technologies have guardrails. I think that's also really important to have and then but for our regal system, we're building in our next gen sensors in order to gain more market share into other verticals that we haven't really crystallized or are just touching upon. Our sensors are very ruggedized and we've always used them in transportation events. Originally we started off on terrestrial, so on roads. Uh, last year we were on ships. So we did this big project in Australia with meat and livestock. Australia. And we put our sensors on ships and measured certain gases as animals are being transported, um, from Australia to other parts of Asia. Now we'd like to put our sensors inside of barns because we see a lot of value because of our sensors and the way they're designed and ruggedized. Also proven now because, you know, I think 16 million sensor data points proves that you've got a uh, system that's working and that's very robust and strong. And so yeah, we think getting into, it's called on prem or on premises side the barn. Getting into that market is something that we could easily capture and also work with other sensor manufacturers in order to build a more holistic piece, a data collection piece. We don't really call it a sensor, we call it a data acquisition device. So then people can make smart decisions based on this data that's being collected.

Speaker B: Yeah. And when you, you know, you talked a lot about like this technology for good peace and like making a difference in animals and food and the farming industry and like all of that, but also using your technology to help cut costs. Right. As you talked about like transporting data to the cloud and making sure your costs haven't gone up in that regard. So can you dive a little more into that? Because I know you had some good numbers around like you know how little those costs have gone up over, over the years, especially with the amount of data produced.

Speaker C: Yeah. So within five years our server costs have only gone up by about 10%, mostly because of inflation and then also the currency fluctuations between Canada and the US dollar. But for the most part we have a uh, data delivery mechanism that we've created in order to send data as small as possibly can and as secure as well to the cloud. And that is something that's very important because it can help build a flywheel effect of uh, sensor adoption, having higher quality data and then having the ability now to make better decisions based on all of this so you can go and hyper accelerate the adoption of a sensor. Traditionally sensors, there's always been something that costs the company, company. And then people talk about ROIs and sometimes it's A long way off. If you could minimize some of the costs associated with it, your ROI gets a lot shorter and you can make better decisions on that kind of data point because it's been proven to be unaltered and came from an actual sensor that you have in your system.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's awesome. And you're not just like getting data out of wherever. Right. It's like, you know, it's correct. Keep your cost down, all of that. I love that. I can see like all these exciting projects that you've worked on and you said like, you got two exits, you've got this company, you've got a couple side hustle, passion projects I'll call it. You've got, uh, five patents and I know there's going to be like, I'm sure as we've been talking you've probably been thinking of new ideas as we've been going. I'd love to revisit you in the future and see what's been going on with you and how many more patents you have and companies and side projects to see what you're building next. That would be really awesome to have you back on.

Speaker C: Oh yeah, I'd love to because, uh, I think it's, you know, within more, you know, it's in as innovators and um, programmers, hardware and software engineers. It's kind of who we are and if we try to shake it, I don't think we can because I've tried to shake it. Yeah, I've always tried to be more normal and I'd be like, oh, it'd be nice if I can just do normal things about, you know, things that other people, you know, think about. But it's never really left me and, but also, like, I've been blessed. Was a really strong group of mentors, you know, which I like to big, you know, have a big shout out. Dr. Michael Ngatti from McGill University. We did a really cool project. Uh, you talked about me building robots. I built a machine vision app that was funded by the UN fa Food and Agricultural Organization of the un and this was about five years ago, uh, my first machine vision app. I know it's uber cool now to build these things, but. And we did it for communities in rural parts of the world in order to get nutritional content. So this was a project funded by FAO. Dr. Michael Ongatti from McGill University was the primary, you know, sponsor or researcher. And we worked together. We went to Laos, uh, which is in Asia, representing China, which was also a very unique experience. And then we took. I took a lot of pictures of food, and then by looking at what the villagers ate, we'd be able to calculate what their nutritional content was of the caloric intake. Really important, because even back then. So back in, you know, 2020, before COVID there were still a lot of endemic diseases.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker C: Diseases that their grandparents had were still prevalent in that village because nothing has changed. Nobody informed them to make better dietary choices. And so this is why this was important. And, you know, and that's why, you know, Michael is one of my faves of all time because of all the things that he's done, and he's a great individual and a really loving and caring person. Another great person is Dr. Uh, Terry Fonstad from the University of Saskatchewan. He is also an incredible person to work with. He helped us redesign our sensors in Canada through a program that the federal government of Canada sponsors called mitech M M I T A C S. If there are any Canadian listeners, I'd suggest you contact that organization and then you can be paired with a researcher in order to accelerate an invention or an idea that you may have, and they can help you commercialize it or increase the technology readiness level. Yeah. So Dr. Fonstadt was also really, really important. I think my parents as well. I am from the Philippines and, you know, and wasn't, um, a family that was by any means rich. But having the guidance from my parents to help me out and not be straight too often, you know, was obviously very important. So big shout out to my lots

Speaker B: of great mentors and fun fact, I almost went to Miguel. Uh, it was my second choice. So very cool place. So, yeah, we'll check back in with you, you know, in a couple months and see what else you've invented and grown. But this was a great conversation, and thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker C: Thank you. I look forward to our next meetup.

Speaker B: M. Yes, for sure.

Speaker C: No problem.

Speaker B: All right, perfect.

Speaker A: Thank you to our guest, Joel Sotomayor. To learn more about the exciting work that he and his team are doing, please visitrigo.com if you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to follow Innovators of Things wherever you get your podcasts and share it with someone who's ready to think differently about growth and innovation. Until next time,