S2E9: Transforming Lives through Digital Innovation: A Conversation with Merritt DeGraw

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Hey, everybody, welcome to the purposeful prosperity podcast. I'm Seth Waters. And I'm here with Jack Smith. And you know, Jack, Jack is an entrepreneur, founder, investor, and world-changer, Jack, excited to be with you today.

Jack Smith (Host): I'm really excited too, Seth.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Yeah, today we have a conversation with Merrit DeGraw. And what a great conversation that was.

Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely. One of my favorite and oldest friends. So I'm grateful to have him.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): I love that. You know, one of the things that Merrit talked about was that he shared that in 2005, he was part of the fastest-growing company in North America. Yeah, he talked about this idea of figuring out how to do a lot with limited resources. He talked about how when you grow that fast, it doesn't mean your resources grow that fast. You're just growing like crazy. So he talked about that idea of doing a lot with a little. Jack, how do purposeful leaders stay agile and able to respond when opportunity comes?

Jack Smith (Host): Well, I think the key to all of this is first thing you got to stay curious, right? Try to figure out how to be of service, how to be of use with the limited resources that you have. Your customers are obviously needing more from you and your team and things are happening faster than the dollars are coming in. And so you have to really get to that simplistic triage, right? How do you, we talk about it at Fortuna, right? Grow through simplicity. It's not that you can't grow, but you need to just the minimum amount to continue to get the maximum impact. We talk about that a lot here as entrepreneurs, right? We talk about impact and there's no more agility than trying to stretch a dollar into a million dollars.

Seth Waters (Co-Host): Right, right. Wow, well, that's really good. And I think this conversation with Merrit brings out this idea of developing with what we have starting where we are, and growing by leaps and bounds. I'm looking forward to that. With that being said, let's jump right into our conversation with Merrit DeGraw.

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Jack Smith (Host): Hi everybody, welcome to Purposeful Prosperity. I'm your host, Jack Smith, and I'm really excited today. One of my longest and oldest friends, Merit DeGraw. He's a digital transformation leader. He's my right hand. And every time I need a technologist for a company, the trouble that we cause. Thanks so much for coming on the show today, Merrit.

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): Hey, I love being here talking to you, Jack. This is, you know, you and I have been planning on having to have conversations around building teams together for the longest time. So pleasure to be here.

Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely. This is almost 20 years in the making, my friend. Speaking of 20 years in the making, you are a digital transformation leader. You're the person I trust most where business meets technology. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about how you've kind of come to garner that expertise?

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): Yeah, perfect. I, you know, again, it started, it's been a long journey now, date myself a little.

Jack Smith (Host): We're not that old, just keep going.

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): I keep telling myself that. You know, again, starting with, you know, again, back in the day, I used to do a lot of volunteering through church, et cetera, right? So faith is a big component of how I grew up and how I've matured. But that also led, you know, again, I kept them separate for the longest time until I, you know, went to work at a company called The Invasive Technology and they create the tools for minimal access spinal surgeries. And really it kind of opened my eyes to how you could blend both making money, but also your faith and helping people, right? So I think that's a big- it's kind of what I kind of grew up into as I've gone through the process and matured as I've gone through my journey in my career. You know, again, starting off these two, we were changing people's lives. We are allowing them to get back to doing stuff that they weren't able to do before. So at NuVasive, we were able to create technology that allowed you to do nerve detection and direction that would allow us, using cannulas, to go in at better operative quarters, allow a larger operative corridor for those tools to be able to do the spinal surgeries. So we were able to get larger devices in, we were able to get, you know, packed with allograft, autograft into the process. So it was a, you know, again, heavy focused on changing people's life for the better and making money doing so. So I think that was a, you know, again, a really great experience to kind of help, you know, shift me into more, you know, using whatever prosperity that I have to be able to help out communities and or people live better lives.

Jack Smith (Host): Wonderful. And how has that transformed your career since your time at NuVasive?

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): Yeah, you know, most of the jobs I take now, you know, I look at opportunities where I'm able to both, you know, make money, of course, but also transform people's lives, you know, working at a SAS-based air medical emergency response solution. So we were able to track aircraft that would basically help you on transporting a patient and be able to give them accurate billing from that perspective. So, you know, one area. Another area is in education, you know, as you and I work together at Bridgepoint Education, you know, helping transform people's lives through online education opportunities where they can't, you know, sit in a local facility. You know, again, helping transitioning into consulting areas where actually, well, consulting areas and moving with you know, in with the Indian communities, right? So be able to help provide them opportunities and better utilize technology to help their communities, right? Also, you know, working with, you know, fair collection solution with Cubic that we were able to do and move a fair collection solution to the cloud and make it a little bit more resilient than, you know, kind of what it typically had been in the past. So, really focusing on areas where I could help the community and or help people just live better lives, right? Easier lives.

Jack Smith (Host): I love it. Right. That's what technology really does, right? It's an augmentation of our lives. It's here to make us easier. The same that we're doing as we're leading the way with AI and trying to learn how to develop those types of things. You say that, you know, you've developed world-class IT departments and global-scale data centers. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Because we talked a lot about kind of the technical solutions that you help enable and facilitate, but you have a large infrastructure background as well.

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): Yeah. You know, if you look at my career, NuVasive was a good example, right? So we had multiple facilities across the U.S., we went and expanded internationally. So again, building out a centralized management capability. Again, we didn't have a large budget at the time. We went from $15 million to, I want to say it was $500 billion in about three years. And so it was a really rapidly growing company. In 2005, we were the fastest growing company in North America, or Deloitte and Touche's Fastest 500. So it was a really expansive growth. And I had to build a solution out with minimal resources to be able to facilitate that global expansion. So, you know, having to build out that team, having to learn new ways to manage people from remote, that was an interesting journey. But, you know, again, I think that was the start of my global experience, you know, in areas where we had software development capabilities in Europe and Asia. So again, I think there's that kind of utilizing my skill sets to expand from what I've built off from, like, say, starting at NuVasive, starting at Akamai back in the day before that, you know, kind of a global company and a large network footprint. So that's kind of how it kind of, you know, that's kind of how I built these teams out over time.

Jack Smith (Host): Awesome. And how are you using those teams to make a positive impact on society? Or did you use those teams?

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): Yeah, I think a lot of it is, you know, again, it's still focus, right? The prosperity side of the conversation, but it was also, again, building teams in those locations to be able to facilitate growth, right? Again, at a more cost-effective manner. So again, the business side, but also the prosperity side, opening it up to communities where people may have not had the opportunity that, you know, North people would always kind of- then they would ever have. So again, it's opening up new possibilities to different locations. And giving people a chance, right, I think is what it's about.

Jack Smith (Host): How do your achievements align with the broader mission of using prosperity to change the world?

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): Yeah, I think some areas that, as a recent, again, focusing on demand response solutions in disadvantaged locations, right? We're using Bitcoin mining as a way to be able to manage power allocations so the communities are able to buy more power at a lower cost. That way they don't get hit with overage prices when they go over their allotment. So, for instance, air conditioners kick on, those type of things at certain times of the day, we are basically able to shut off our systems and then allow them to be able to kind of keep on at the lower power, but still, you know, provide that community with the service to stay up. So I think that's a very, again, it really impacts the whole community because they're able to buy power at a cheaper price and lower the costs associated with power for the constituents.

Jack Smith (Host): The entire community, right?

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): The entire community, yeah.

Jack Smith (Host): I think it lowered it by four cents a kilowatt hour or something for the entire community.

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): Yeah.

Jack Smith (Host): One of the things I love most about that technology is it's like a living battery, right? It allows for the power that's needed at peak demand without having to use fossil fuels or other expensive peaker power. And I think that's really both environmentally transformational as well as societally transformational, right? Cause now you don't have to live with air conditioning when it's 110 degrees outside. You don't have to, it's a brownout or a blackout. You don't lose your entire refrigerator's worth of food because our batteries turn off long before the grid ever goes down. That's very cool.

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): And I think you want to think also that, you know, if you look at it, people put a bad name and it does use a lot of power in terms of how it does it. But in terms of how the Bitcoin gets mined. But, or again, that could be also used for AI, right? Because really, it's just a power utilization. They're very power-hungry systems. So really, you know, again, people put a bad misnomer on them or put a bad connotation associated with Bitcoin mining and or AI, or any sort of data center itself, right? It's not, again, it's in how you use it and building the right workload to be able to facilitate that transfer right back and forth so people can keep their power because there is a lot of wasted power if you look at how much energy is kind of just setting there because they can't really store the amount of energy a lot of these places are producing. And so it's really you use it or lose it. And so being able to utilize more of it at a cheaper price, I think it's really transformational for more communities.

Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely, I agree. Well, you know me, man, I love doing good and making money. And that sounds like a glocal impact if I've ever heard one. So I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for sharing your journey, Merrit. Is there anything that you didn't get a chance to share with our audience today that you'd like to?

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): You know, I think we're also forward-looking in terms of some of the things we're looking at in terms of, you know, Hydrogen, being able to do, you know, power generation, you know, creating those, you know, hybrid grids to be able to supply power for it, whether it be Bitcoin mining, whether it be you know, indoor farming, right? So vertical farming, I think, is the word that a lot of people use today. So really being able to utilize and, you know, people talk about global cooling, global warming, again, climate change. So if we look at climate change, we're going to be able to produce food in disparate ecosystems, right? Or I should say in disparate temperatures, whatever it be, you know, whatever path it goes down. So really, some of the things we are working on is vertical farming using not just leafy greens, but moving into some of the value crops. I think that's one area that we're heavily head focused into. And then some of the graphing and nanotechnology stuff that we're putting together for water purification or batteries and those types of things we've been digging into those areas also to kind of help, you know, usher in a system that could actually support that future growth, right? And challenges that the communities are going to experience.

Jack Smith (Host): Absolutely. You know, we're building that pathway for veterans to those new emerging technical capabilities, right? They've got all this great training and technology that the military gave them. But now we're going to help them deploy that in these new emerging technologies.

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): Correct. Yeah. And again, I think it's a huge opportunity, both for the military, for underserved communities to be able to like, you know, again, if you look at how things are transitioning with AI and how AI comes into play, really what we're, you know, people are going to have to do different jobs, right? So again, the mundane things that you, you know, used to do may not be, but so being able to help them transition, you know, from older methodology of doing business to a newer methodology and being more, you know, impactful with what they can do and focus on, versus the mundane things that are getting solved through AI, through automation, robotics, et cetera. If you look at a lot of what's coming to the marketplace, people have to transform their way of thinking, and providing that pathway is very important.

Jack Smith (Host): Well, I always appreciate the pathway you provide for us and myself in particular. So I'm always grateful for your time, my friend. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. And thank you for being here at Fortuna with us. We appreciate it.

Merrit DeGraw (Guest): Yes. Thanks, appreciate it.

Jack Smith (Host): Thank you guys for listening to Purposeful Prosperity today. Tune in next week where we will introduce you to another amazing world-changing entrepreneur. Until then, please like, follow, and share, and keep doing good in the world. Thanks for listening.