1401: Renaissance Park Corp: Blockchain, Hemp, and the Future of Clean Manufacturing with Environmental Sustainability and Leadership Development Expert Pankaj Srivastava

Robert Plank 0:01 He quit his job, risked deportation, and jumped into tech with five weeks to make it. It's Pankaj Srivastava, and he turned that leap into a $23 million in revenue, and he scaled a cyber security business to $1 billion and now he's the CEO of Renaissance Park Corp, and he is using natural materials and blockchain to reinvent manufacturing, get us to a healthier planet and so much more. So we have so many fun things to talk about, right? There's the making money part, but there's also just the saving the world part. So we're excited to jump in. It's the marketer of the day with Robert plank. We're sponsored by dfypodcast.com where your podcast becomes your most powerful conversation and authority asset. Now, Mr. Pankage is here to talk about perhaps some life changing lessons, some Silicon Valley adventures, the material intelligence platform he's building, blockchain and so much more so. Mr. Pakaj, glad to see you,

Pakaj Srivastava 1:02 glad to be speaking with you. Robert, appreciate the time and the opportunity to talk about my lessons as well as Renaissance. Thank you for having me.

Robert Plank 1:12 You're very welcome. Lessons are important, right? If you go through all these things and you wonder, what was it all for? What did I learn? And, sir, you learn a lesson, but you keep it to yourself that's selfish, right? We need to tell others what our struggles and adversities have resulted in. And so what are you all about? What are your struggles? What's your focus and your passion these days?

Pakaj Srivastava 1:33 Yeah, so you know, actually, what you said is a is a huge lesson in itself, right? Lesson applied is Lesson multiplied, right? And the way to apply lessons is to be promoting and evangelizing the lesson that you might have learned through a mistake, most likely with others, right? So that itself is a huge lesson that you know, you got to use, utilize and promote your own lesson so it amplifies the impact across, you know, different people, different teams, and eventually, you know, make an impact that is meaningful. So my, you know, history has been filled with a two things. I would say. Number one, I've been very, very fortunate to actually have the opportunity to work with some of the smartest people in the world, and that always gave me the motivation to continuously learn. I think that's my number one thing continuously learn and failure, to me, is reframing opportunity. Right? Every time you make a mistake, you can view it as a mistake, or you can view it as a lesson learned. So that orientation has been the biggest lesson that the valley, Silicon Valley, has provided to me, and has been foundational in my own career. I made many, many mistakes, you know, I'll just give you a quick anecdote on a mistake that I made that has served me very, very well. So, you know, I made a decision. I was very young exec in a cybersecurity company, and I made a decision on a Thursday evening that cost the company $9.6 million through the weekend, right? So we lost $9.6 million in four days. So I, you know, called the team on Saturday, and we were working to fix the problem, stuff like that. Monday morning, I usually had my one on one with the CEO of the company, and I sat across with him, and I had typed in my resignation letter, and I took it with me to that one on one, expecting me for him to ask me for my resignation. And I walk into his office, and the first question Robert he asked me was Bill asked me, what did you learn? And I answered. He said, Why would it not happen again? And I told him, of all the measures we have taken, the checks and balances we have put in, so this mistake cannot be repeated. And the third thing he asked me to do, which irritated the hell out of me, but I learned that lesson over a period of time. And the third thing was, he said, Okay, now go back to your desk and tell the company, everybody in the company the mistake that was made that was 3000 people. Till then, it was contained within like six people. So six people knew of my mistake, and he asked me to tell it to 3000 I said, oh, so he didn't ask me to resign. His way to punish me is to admit that I made a mistake to the entire company. How wrong was I? He gave me two valuable lessons with that one thing. So the first thing he did was he did not ask me to resign, which meant that the learning, my learning, remained inside the company, so he didn't lose the learning if he had just fired. The person who learned a valuable lesson, he would fire the lesson. He prevented that. And the second thing, when he asked me to send an email to the entire company regarding my mistake, he amplified that learning 3000 times, and the responses I received from the company team members was very, very encouraging. They thanked me. They said, plank, thank you for sharing this with us. I could apply this here and here and here. So that was a super valuable lesson. So mistakes are great, if you can understand you know, two things about them. One, what is the impact of that mistake? And number two, how can you amplify that impact?

Robert Plank 5:50 Very nice, that's very helpful. What's, what was the mistake, and how can you amplify that impact? And you think about the Silicon Valley is full of mistakes, right? And it's like we, of course, we'd like to, you know, not make the mistakes that are easily avoidable and not make the same mistakes. But it's a better alternative than not trying and not taking a risk than making it work. And so what does that lead to? Like, what is your current company? What has you so excited? What's your project?

Pakaj Srivastava 6:20 Oh, it's probably the most meaningful thing I will ever get to do, Robert in my life. It's completely different from anything I've done in my career. You know, I was kind of done, so to speak. I was kind of semi retired. I was writing my book, I was teaching in business schools, I was mentoring a bunch of companies, and then the founder reached out through a common connection, and I got seduced by the vision. It is a humongous vision, and a vision that we must support and evangelize. So what we are on a path to is our mission is to replace toxic ingredients with natural materials across hundreds of products, we believe the fastest way to a healthier planet is by altering at a fundamental level how we build stuff. And that's what we're about, right? So we're looking at a variety of natural materials, industrial hemp, rice straw, indigo, flax, jute, and finding opportunities or utilizing those materials across hundreds of products, across industries like skincare, wellness, building materials, biofuels, bioplastics, and also electric batteries, which are highly toxic if you think about them. So very, very inspired vision, not mine, my founders, so thank you for coming up with the vision, but I'm inspired to do it and help him get us there.

Robert Plank 8:03 Very nice, very exciting, because you think about how ridiculous it is to use oil, but we need it, right? We need the oil and the plastics for the electronics and the fuel. But then it's just, it's dinosaurs, and there were a finite number of dinosaurs, and you use it all up, and it becomes harder, more expensive to get out of the ground, and then you wish you had planned ahead for several years to redo the infrastructure and figure out a better way than just completely stopping. And so we want to know and be educated about these alternatives. And what do you hear if someone says, oh, like, you know, rice jar or hemp? Like, isn't that flimsy? Or if you make a battery out of it. Doesn't it work like it seems like it's it's so easy to poo poo the non fossil fuels. And I don't know if we're just too so used to it over a decade, centuries, or what the deal is. But when you tell people about these alternative building materials and biofuels and things like, Do you get any pushback or or jokes, or anything like that.

Pakaj Srivastava 9:01 Absolutely, absolutely. So the two keys to success here, right? Number one, you know this ideological debate around climate right? A vast number of people believe there is no climate change, and a vast number of other group of people believe there is climate change, right? And the one thing I've learned in my life about ideology is you cannot fight it. You can't fight and win an ideological debate. People seldom change their ideology, right? So the key for us and for the world and for this planet is not to have that debate at all. How do we do that? How do we do that? And that leads to the second point, what if we were to deliver functionally superior products? Utilize. Using natural materials in the first place. So for example, a hemp building is a better building. It's fire resistant. It takes 50% less energy to run. It's just a better building. An electric battery built with natural materials is a better battery because it costs less, it stores twice the charge of a lithium ion battery, and it's completely recyclable. You just bury it in the ground, right? So we are focused on not having the debate on ideology and saying, let's do something about the climate, and you must pay more for a product. No, that will never work. We are completely different. We are reframing this challenge more of as an opportunity. We are asking a different question. The question we are asking is, what if everyday products could heal the planet, right? And that's where we are focused on. We are utilizing natural materials that lead to functionally superior products. I'll give you a quick, very fun example, something that I learned before I joined the team a couple of years ago, when I was doing research on, you know, these natural materials, I found a YouTube video, you know, and for your audience, you know, I would encourage. It's a fun video. If you just type in hemp car on YouTube, you'll find the video I'm talking about. So 1940 Henry Ford, the car guy, right? He built a whole car built with industrial hemp. First of all, why did he even think about him? Right? Because, in 1940 right, World War Two was going on, all the steel being manufactured in America was being utilized to build tanks. He had no steel to build his cars. So he could find an alternate he landed at industrial hemp. And why industrial hemp, hemp fibers fabricated in a certain fashion, are six to 10 times stronger than steel. In this video that I alluded to, you will see that a person takes a hammer to this hemp car and never could make a dent. That's how strong hemp is. But nobody knows. Nobody knows, right? And he powered that car with hemp biofuel, because hemp could be used as a biofuel, right? So I think the second challenge that we have, one I mentioned, is ideology, right? And we have made a conscious decision not to talk about climate. We will talk about better products simply, right? And the second is creating awareness. Creating awareness as to what a superior product actually looks like, right? How we extract, build, consume, recycle, recircular component,

Robert Plank 13:01 very nice. And it speaks a lot to the psychology, the persuasion aspect of it, right? That, of course, we're Americans, we're selfish. That's just how it is. Some of these opinions won't be changed. And the the whole idea of climate change, like it's it's so huge and big to get your head around it, right? You're talking in decades, centuries, scale. And it's frustrating too, because of the lag time, isn't it? They say things like, Well, the next that we have now are from 3050, years ago. And then if we stop now, we won't see any change for 3050, years. And then you think, Well, then why even stop? That's the next generations to deal with. So it just messes with you in all the wrong ways, right? So instead, it's like, well, what's in it for me? Okay, so if you can, like, bypass that issue and say, Well, you know, climate change won't agree on it, you won't change your mind on it, fine. Well, then here's the a functionally superior product, right, stronger than steel. And then the whole benefit that you can just bury it in the ground, that's an added plus. But the real selling point is that it's better than what you're already currently using. And so as far as just getting educated about it, like hemp, I don't know anything about it. Like, is it like a plant, a weed that they refine? Where does it even come from?

Pakaj Srivastava 14:15 Yeah. So you know, humankind has been using hemp for 5000 years, right in the middle centuries, right when the Spanish and the British and the Portuguese were sailing their ships conquering the world, the sails and the ropes of those ships was built with hemp, right US Constitution's first draft was written on hemp paper. Because hemp paper is better than paper we get from regular tree pulp. It doesn't age with time, it doesn't crumple, and hemp pulp produces four times more paper than regular tree pulp in. Nobody knows this, right? So, in the late 1800s and early 1900s somebody invented, you know, something like, you know, in the 1700s cotton started scaling up. And the reason cotton started scaling up was somebody figured out a cotton gin. They put together a cotton gin that basically allowed the cotton plan to be stripped off into multiple components and utilized for different applications, right? Something similar happened for him, and that's when it started scaling. But that led to a few very, very powerful people worried. They got really worried. You know, William hurts, the guy who owned monopoly on media in the 1900s in the in the US. He had like 80, 90% monopoly on newspapers and magazines back in the day, and he was feeding his media empire by lumber farming. Right? It takes 30 years to grow a tree. It takes 100 Days to grow hemp. If hemp had taken hold, his entire decades long investment would be wiped off like that. He got worried he did not want hemp. The story I told you about the hemp car, Henry's steel friends came to him and said, What are you doing? You can't have another alternate to steal. Right? The DuPont family, which was heavily into petrochemicals, one of the byproducts of petrochemicals are acrylic fibers, synthetic fibers, stuff that we wear in our clothes, right? Nylon, polyester and like hemp, fiber is better for our bodies. Actually, there's research 50 year old research now not 50 year old, but started 50 years ago, but combined over 50 years, that suggests that the clothes we wear in America has lowered male fertility rates because they're so toxic. Synthetic fibers are laden with petrochemicals, and they don't biodegrade, right? So when these powerful industrial tycoons were worried about scaling hemp. They created a controversy around hemp, and they worked with two people in the US government to make it illegal. That's what happened. Vested interest. Right now, there's more awareness in 2018 the new farm bill made it legal, and now, since the industry is in very nascent stage, people like us have to step in and create the robustness that is required from a demand standpoint, from a supply standpoint, to get this industry it's, you know, proper footing, so we can actually start replacing toxicity in a ton of different products that we use on a daily basis. Right? So there's a huge history of hemp. We have known of its advantages for a very long time, but, you know, powerful vested interest came in and interrupted that story of hemp, and similarly, for other natural materials as well, because they were a threat to incumbent businesses. Now people always ask me, Hey, plank, if that's the case, why would not happen again? Why would Western interest not come in? And what gives me hope is the fact that now, with all the research that has happened in the last you know, several decades around national materials, these incumbent industries can actually create a trillion dollar opportunity for themselves and take advantage of the younger generations call for action. So I see this as a pivotal moment where the younger generation is coaxing us and telling us they want something to happen. And if we remove the obstacle of an ideological debate by providing functionally superior products, there is a much greater likelihood of incumbent industries to embrace these natural materials, because now it's $1 opportunity, not an ideological debate. So that's where we are right now.

Robert Plank 19:26 Oh, very cool. Well, it's fascinating to think about right the twists and turns in history where, like, here's path A, where it maybe would have made more sense for the greater good to go in, but then we went and said path B, because of those vested interests. And you hear stories about that all the time, like ripping up the public transportation in Los Angeles because the car companies wanted to keep their monopoly. Or you hear the stories about the plastics or the Teflon and these things that aren't good for us and get in our blood. And it's like, hey, maybe we should have gone a different path, but hey, now we can, because there's more awareness. US, and especially if we can show the economic upside is more advantageous by using these alternative materials. And so this is such a cool conversation, I feel like we could talk for three hours about it, but I wanted to make sure that we cover what you think is important. So in these last few minutes of our conversation, here is there a missing question that I should be asking you. I just don't know what to ask you.

Pakaj Srivastava 20:26 So you know, one of the cool things about my history has been the fact that I've been fortunate to work with a ton of entrepreneurs across the world, across all continents, and that has given me a very unique perspective around you know, how to build something of significance, something that endures, right? You know, when you think about it, grand scheme of things, time is your work, your worst enemy, and time is also the best test, right, right? If you can endure something for a long period of time, you've done something meaningful, right? So, you know, one area of discussion perhaps we could have is, you know, how do I think about building companies, right? What advice I've offered to other founders in my career, so they can actually build enduring, lasting companies.

Robert Plank 21:30 Oky, so what is the secret? How do we build those enduring, lasting companies?

Pakaj Srivastava 21:36 So, you know, just to go back in history, so, you know, I've helped build five companies. I've done a couple of turnarounds and and a variety of different, you know, industries and segments. But there's a common thread, and that common thread has always been curiosity over experience, right? When we orient ourselves, and hence, because of it, our teams to be curious, to not worry about what they've done in the past or not done in the past. We create magic, right? So I'll give you a couple of quick examples. So when I was recruited by McAfee right the cyber security company, back in 2001 we were building a subscription business. There was no blame playbook to build a subscription business in technology, so we had to kind of figure it out. And I looked at myself and the team that I had, we're very similar in our educational backgrounds, professional experiences, and to some extent, you know, personal experiences as well. And I said, you know, how will we ever ask different questions? We all have similar backgrounds. So one of the first things I did there was to actually hire a journalist, a musician and an ex football player on the team, because I had no idea what question they will ask. All three of them had this exact same job description, which was a single sentence, ask us questions. And my god, they did, questions we could not have imagined based on those questions, we ran 800 experiments in seven months to figure out what a technology subscription is going to look like. We turned that business from 80 million a year to a billion in revenue in five and a half years. That is what curiosity can do for you. So when I talk to founders, they worry about results, and I tell them to refocus their energy on learning through curiosity, right? So that's probably the single biggest lesson of my career, that learning always leads to enduring companies. When you're curious, you do magic, right? The other thing you know I talk about, you know, this comes from my personal experience as somebody who was not very good at math, right? In high school, I was I was working on a calculus homework, and I was struggling. I was 17 years old, and my dad kind of saw that struggle. He came to me and he said, what's wrong?

Pakaj Srivastava 24:35 I said, it's so damn hard.

Pakaj Srivastava 24:39 And he said something that has stayed with me that was a long time ago, Robert, he said, Son, sometimes you do things because they're hard, yes, right? So if you apply that to the startup world, what does that really mean, right? If you look at the enduring companies, the value. Ali has built, and there's, you know, hundreds of them, they have focused on solving a hard problem, because unless you solve a hard problem, you don't create substantial, meaningful value, right, right? So that changed my orientation. When I was 17 years old, I started looking at hard problems as not hard problems, but as a way, as an opportunity to create more value. And that reorientation is positive, right? Because you say, it's a hard problem, I got to solve a heart problem. Damn. It seems like too much work and too much stress. And instead of that, you say, Whoa, if I solve this, look at the impact I will make. And now you're positively oriented. And if a leader of a company is like that, the whole team loves it, right? Because at the end of the day, all of us as human beings want to make an impact. Give that opportunity to create an impact to your team, right? So those two curiosity over experience and looking forward to solving a heart problem. To me, those are the linchpins for building enduring, lasting, meaningful companies.

Robert Plank 26:21 That's huge, that's beautiful curiosity, plus solving the hard problem and learning, and it seems to even tie into learning from your mistakes as well, and being future, looking forward and focused. And it's like you think about all these hard problems that were solved in the world, right the there's GPS satellites to guide you anywhere. There's cell coverage, everywhere. There's Wi Fi, there's you can buy any music or any movie, because someone went to all that trouble of making all the music deals and all the film deals, and you and Netflix figured out how to stream the video and just all these things that just if you told someone about them 2030, years ago, they would seem impossible, right? But, but someone who was running a business say you're Adobe, or say your McAfee, or someone you're like, Okay, we've got something that's solid. It's working now, but it won't stay that way forever, right? Won't stand the test of time. Now, you have to figure out this subscription service. So the answer is ask and asking questions. And I find that, just like, so valuable, so helpful, right? Because when, like, years ago, I was trying to make a checklist or something, I'm like, Hey, there's this 100 point checklist. If you, if you did these points, you'd have a webinar, you'd have a podcast. And I was, like, finding myself, like, writing, like, sentences and parts of sentences. I'm like, no one's going to understand this. And I said, Hey, you instead of a checklist, you make it 100 questions, right? What's the name of this? What we do for that? What's the decision for that? And that's that, I don't know about you, but that served me so much in podcasting, content creation, video writing, right? If you say, Well, I'm just writing a sentence fragment, nope, figure out what's the question and an answer to that question, what's the next question it leads to? That's a fun narrative, right? It's a fun podcast interview, such as, like we're doing. And so if someone says, Man, this guy plank, he's he's got a lot figured out, right? With the the sustainable materials and the blockchain and the ED batteries and the construction and the Silicon Valley, who are your people? Who is someone that you wish would reach out to you? And how can they do that?

Pakaj Srivastava 28:24 So the number one on my list who I believe could be instrumental in our success and can teach me to be smarter, and the rest of the gang here at Renaissance will be Tom Stier. I just love the work he's doing and his influence, his ability to make things simple, would go a long way to make us successful, and because of it, the fastest way to a healthier planet, So that that would be my number one person. And I've reached out, I haven't heard back, so this can help. That'll be wonderful. And the best way to reach me would be obviously, LinkedIn. I'm a heavy user of LinkedIn. I write about renaissance and our mission and the opportunities that we see towards a healthier planet and a healthy people on LinkedIn a lot, so that'll probably the best way to reach out to me. And you know, obviously through my company, renaissancepark.com,

Robert Plank 29:35 very nice, and especially if you're Tom Steyer, in particular, the philanthropist and the climate investor, hedge fund manager. Hey, Mr. Tom Steyer, if you're listening years from now, you find this on YouTube, or you find us reworking this on an ex post or a LinkedIn post, or whatever social platforms we have in the future, you really need to reach out to Mr. Pankaj Srivastava, and his company is.r enaissancepark.com and you can find out everything on that page about their team and their vision and their mission and what they're all about, because it's very complex topic, but it's so important, right? And it just It blows my mind whenever I hear about all these things that can be done with other materials and recycling and especially just kind of the breakthrough that you brought to us today, which is that it's not if the ideological argument minds can't be changed, well, we put that aside because the end product is better and sometimes cheaper and more long lasting and more efficient and durable and all these other things. So it just blows our mind how amazing things are possible and can happen. So that's renaissancepark.com, and on LinkedIn, that's linkedin.com/in/pnkjs, and go ahead and find Mr. Pankaj Srivastava on LinkedIn, connect with him, send him a message, tell him that you love what he's got going on as far as being a growth driven business leader and entrepreneur with a proven track record of transforming innovative ideas into high impact, scalable ventures. So check out his company. Contact him on LinkedIn, and before I let you go, Mr. Pankaj, it's time for the scary part of the show where I try to stump you. I try to put you on the spot by asking about a powerful quote or lesson that has served you and you share with us so many lessons. But what do you have as far as a final quote or lesson to cap off our conversation?

Pakaj Srivastava 31:34 So it might sound counterintuitive, but it's valuable. Has been for me, and that's be lazy. And if you expand on that, it translates to don't do things, build stuff, right? We get seduced by hundreds of really amazing ideas, and each one of them in isolation is a fantastic effort to work on. But the question to be asked is, if I do this, if I work on this idea, what comes next? And if you don't have an answer for that, you're not building something. So ideas that allow you to stack up another on top and another on top builds something. So I am a pro, you know, a huge proponent of be lazy, don't work on everything. Always ask the question, if I do this, what comes next? And that's the secret to enduring success.

Robert Plank 32:39 Very nice be lazy and ask yourself, if I do this, what comes next? That way you ensure that you have a path in life and that your way, you're growing and building something. And let's consider that as we check out renaissancepark corp.com they are all about scaling nature based materials. This is an amazing time to be alive. We accomplished so much. Mr. Pank has just been so nice speaking with you, and I love what you brought to us. So thanks for being

Pakaj Srivastava 33:05 here, Robert. I appreciate the conversation a lot. Enjoyed it. Thank you for having me on the podcast.