The following interview is a conversation we had with Kaitlyn Albertoli, CEO and Co-Founder of Buzz Solutions, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: Nearly $6 Million Raised to Build the Future of Infrastructure Inspection
Kaitlyn Albertoli
Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So, to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
Absolutely. So I’m Caitlin, Co-Founder CEO here at Buzz Solutions. And at Buz Solutions, we are an AI powered platform analyzing visual data for infrastructure inspections. I know that’s a lot of buzwords, but basically we take in visual data from drones, helicopters, fixed wing aircraft, ground based imagery, you name it. We want to be the one stop shop for analyzing that data, turning it into prioritized, actionable insights. Our first market is utilities, and we launched Buzz about six years ago from Stanford. I’m a Stanford grad, and my background is in the space of economics, finance, and sustainability. Prior to Buz, I ran a nonprofit in the sustainable food space, and that was one of my initial interests in energy and sustainability, which is one of the reasons I decided to co-found Buz with my Co-Founder.
Brett
And I was looking on your LinkedIn, and I saw that you had founded a company called Bless your bark. As a proud dog parent and dog father, I have to ask, what was bless your bark?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
Bless your bark is actually a chocolate bark business that I’d started with an old family’s recipe, and my whole mom’s side of the family is actually from Tennessee. And so growing up, bless your heart was always a common phrase. So we decided to have a play on that called bless your bark. It was something I decided to start selling after more and more people every year would ask, oh, I love that chocolate bark. Can I get the recipe? And so we actually started selling it, which was quite a fun time and a great introduction to entrepreneurship.
Brett
Oh, that’s funny. So it wasn’t dog related, then?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
No, it was surprisingly not dog related, although we did get several questions about that from people wondering if were starting a dog food business.
Brett
That’s so funny. And would ten year old Caitlin be surprised that you ended up being CEO of a tech company?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
I think in some ways, yes. In some ways, I think it was interesting to start a company. As someone in school, in college, that was quite an interesting time. But I was always really entrepreneurial, and I have always been really passionate about entrepreneurship for creating some sort of actionable change. And so I think that’s been consistent in my personality from the time I was a kid.
Brett
Nice.
Brett
Super cool. And two questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and as a leader. First one is, what CEO do you admire the most, and what do you admire about them?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
It’s a great question for me, it’s hard to pick one, although I will say I heard the Founder of ring, Jamie Simonoff, speak at an event back in the fall, and I just found his story so inspiring. He started with a very local issue that he was passionate about. That was a personal issue to him, and he was able to create a company around that and then create a company vision that was so impactful. So I found that story really inspiring.
Brett
Nice.
Brett
I think he was just on 20 vc. Is that the interview that you watched?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
No, I was actually at a small conference with him in the fall, which was really great. I mean, just hearing his story and being able to be a part of that QA was super exciting.
Brett
Nice.
Brett
That’s super cool. And what about books? There a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a Founder.
Kaitlyn Albertoli
So I think there’s been several books that have had impacts on me as a leader and then also that have driven me to be a better, I guess you’d say Founder. One of them was the power of Broke by Damon John. I think that book is just so inspirational. It talks about continuing to persevere and keep going to just have that very hungry mindset. So that was a great one. As a true sports fan, I really love Lou Holtz, and I also think Lou Holtz’s book on wins, losses, and lessons is a really inspirational book as well. It kind of just goes through his life journey, but then it talks about just the power of perseverance, and that, to me, has always been really inspiring. Nice.
Brett
I have not heard of that book, but I’ll have to check it out. I’m very bored of business books these days, and I’m looking for other areas to explore, and sports books seem like a good place to start. That’s at least what a lot of guests have been telling me.
Kaitlyn Albertoli
I think there’s a great way, a lot of great lessons that as leaders, we can take from sports and athletics. And I think that I like to look at great leaders either as founders or as leaders in other industries, other areas. And so that’s where I also like to get some inspiration.
Brett
Nice.
Brett
I love that. I know you touched on this at the start of the conversations, but if we can go back and if you can just provide maybe a high level overview of what Buzz Solutions does and what the product really looks like.
Kaitlyn Albertoli
Yes, absolutely. So we launched Buz Solutions, as I was mentioning from a launchpad course at Stanford University. And that’s where my Co-Founder, Vic and I met and shared mutual interest for the energy and sustainability space. And in order to really understand where our company came from and its founding story, it’s important to understand what was happening in the landscape at that time for infrastructure, but more specifically for utility companies. Many utility companies were facing the pressures of aging grid infrastructure, of the need to electrify, and of many renewables coming onto the grid, as well as climatic impacts as well, that have caused greater stress and strain on the grid. A big part of all of those kind of situations created a perfect storm where utilities feel that they need to inspect more of their infrastructure, modernize and upgrade their infrastructure.
Kaitlyn Albertoli
And at that time, were seeing drones were becoming a common play on the scene, where more and more inspections were being conducted with drones. And we ended up interviewing 35 different power utilities who all had the exact same narrative. They said they were collecting so much more data of their infrastructure and didn’t have a seamless way to analyze it. And so we stepped in, said, what if we solved that pain point of helping you analyze all of this data, which historically has been manually analyzed by Lymen field technicians looking at each image, and when they’re collecting hundreds of thousands of millions of images, that’s just not sustainable or scalable.
Brett
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Brett
And when it comes to adoption and growth, are there any metrics and numbers that you can share?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
Absolutely. So we commercially launched into the market in 2019. Since that, we’ve been serving many utilities across North America. So some of our notable customers include the New York Power Authority. We’ve done a great deal of work with research institutions like EPry, the Electric Power Research Institute. We’re working with a utility in the Midwest, one out here in Southern California, which is where I currently am. And then we’ve done some work with several utilities in Canada as well.
Brett
And what’s it like selling to these utilities? Are they open to new technologies like this? Are they scared of, know, what’s that typical profile look like and what do those conversations look like?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
That’s a great question. We see that many utilities know that there is a real need for a solution to help analyze their data. Our platform, we’re able to analyze all of the images very quickly with aipowered, machine learning, computer vision algorithms. And we see that many of these technologies are newly being adopted by utilities. So a big part of our conversation that we have with these utilities, how and where can we plug into their existing workflow, as of course, many of these utilities have been working with the same process for decades, the same workflow for decades. And so coming in with some of these new technologies can be a big transition. And so that’s why here at Buz, we’ve really focused on providing a plug and play solution.
Kaitlyn Albertoli
We show up with pre trained algorithms that can start working on day one, can start analyzing data on day one, and can plug in directly into the existing workflow. And that’s been a very big benefit for our conversations with utilities. It’s definitely a very open and receptive to this type of solution coming in to help streamline some of these processes of making sense of all this data that they’re collecting, turning into prioritized, actionable insights.
Brett
And one of the things that all startups struggle with is that trust and credibility when you’re early on in the journey, and how to build trust and credibility. And I’m sure for you it was especially important because this isn’t like a little software widget for an e commerce tool. This is some pretty serious technology.
Brett
So what did you do early on.
Brett
To build that trust and credibility with these utility companies?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
We see that showing a utility how the solution works, how the AI works, and then the results that we’re able to generate is much better than any words that we could say or any marketing that we could put in front of them. But we’re a big believer in actually demonstrating how our solution works. So that was a big part of how we have continued to validate our solution. And then, of course, we love to have our customers be able to share their testimonials, be able to share, use cases of their experience working with Buzz, and then with our technology as well.
Brett
And I saw on the site some crazy numbers. It was like 50% cost savings, 70% time savings, and I think five or $6 million in savings. That’s super impressive. What do you think is holding more companies back from buying and working with you? What’s that roadblock for me, and obviously I’m not from the space, but it seems like a no brainer with numbers like that.
Kaitlyn Albertoli
Yeah, it’s another great question. Our cost savings and time savings are big drivers of why utilities are adopting our solution. But beyond that, many of these utilities have significant labor constraints as well. And there’s more and more data that they’re collecting. And these Lyman field technicians don’t need to be sitting behind a desk analyzing data. These are very highly skilled, highly trained individuals that need to be out in the fields conducting this maintenance. And that’s where we’re at today, is we’re seeing that more and more utilities are coming to us and looking to adopt our solution, because they are looking for a way to help streamline their workflow and help analyze data faster so that we can turn those people back out into the field doing the jobs that they’re meant to be doing, which are the more reason based, action oriented tasks.
Kaitlyn Albertoli
But I think that as an industry, there’s definitely hurdles that we’re overcoming now with how do we use AI? What is the true state of where artificial intelligence is today? What are its strengths, what are its weaknesses? And how can we help improve the efficacy of this type of solution in our workflow? And so that’s a big part of the conversation that we’re having with many of our existing customers, and then also prospective customers as well.
Brett
And how do you think about market categories? And what is that current category? Is it infrastructure inspection or what is it?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
Yes, we think of ourselves as analytics tool for infrastructure inspections. We started out in the utility space, started out with transmission, which is high voltage inspections, distribution, which is lower voltage or city line type of inspections, and we’re also doing substations. But we see this technology applicable to many more sectors just beyond the utility industry. We see that infrastructure more broadly is the category or the market, as you’d say.
Brett
And if you reflect on your journey, what’s one thing you wish you knew before you had started the company so.
Kaitlyn Albertoli
Many things, it’s hard to narrow it to just one. I think that resilience is just a really big part of being a Founder and knowing how to quickly get back up again and to keep going, but also how to harness that feedback. Because as a Founder, you’re constantly getting feedback in so many different directions, and being able to take in that feedback in a very constructive way and turn it into actions and to help me become a better leader, to help me help improve the company even more, something I wish I’d known, just kind of turn that into action even faster, I’d say. That’s one thing I wish I knew when I started out. But then the second thing I would say beyond just how to have great resilience is how to be patient.
Kaitlyn Albertoli
Because especially in this market, in the utility industry, patience is required. And being able to have the right amount of patience, but also the right amount of drive is really important too.
Brett
Yeah, it seems like an industry that, I’m guessing the buyer cycles or buying cycles are pretty long. What’s like a normal buying cycle for you?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
We see 18 to 24 months can be the typical life cycle, I guess you’d say, or purchase cycle for a utility. But there are ones that are much faster than that when there’s some sort of driving event. We are seeing that this industry is facing a lot of constrained timelines and compressed timelines to adopt new technology. And some of the driving factors of that are of course, as I was mentioning earlier, the push for electrification and also the aggressive goals we have for onboarding renewables at such high rates. So we are seeing that the utility sales cycle is actually shortening. And a big part of that is the driving factors that are requiring faster utility adoption of new technologies.
Brett
Nice and final question here for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years from today. What’s that big picture vision for the company?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
We want to safeguard the world’s energy infrastructure. That’s our vision here at Buzz, and that’s how we want to have impact. We want to start out with providing really strong positive value add and impact for utilities, but we see that there’s so many other use cases for where we can really affect positive change and where we can significantly help as a part of other workflow processes. So that’s our long term goal. Specific to utilities, our vision is to help reduce wildfires, reduce power outages, and reduce force shutdowns from failed grid infrastructure, while helping utilities unlock capacity of electrifying and onboarding renewables. At even more accelerated rates. And so if we’re able to even just have a small sliver of an impact there as a part of that bigger picture, then we think that’s a huge win.
Kaitlyn Albertoli
And so we’re really excited to continue down that road and continue with that vision.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. We are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build and execute on this vision, where should they go?
Kaitlyn Albertoli
They can follow us on LinkedIn. We’re buz solutions on LinkedIn. Or check us out on our website to sign up for our newsletter.
Brett
Thank you so much for taking the time to share your journey and talk about everything that you’re building. This has been a super fun conversation and we wish you the best of luck in executing on this vision.
Kaitlyn Albertoli
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a great conversation.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. Keep in touch.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionariess is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. Our.
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