Hi. This is Paul Zolizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I am thrilled to introduce somebody I've been trying to get on the podcast for about a year, maybe more, Carlos Pereyo.

And we are talking about rethinking agriculture as a climate solution. Carlos is the CEO of Teddaveta, a company dedicated to making it easier for farmers to grow valuable crops without the use of synthetic pesticides. They're often linked to major environmental damage and health issues in our food. Their solutions are people, plant, pollinator, and planet friendly, and can unlock significant profitability. Carlos is particularly excited about the work they are doing to help save the honeybees. And as soon as I got to New Mexico and moved to Albuquerque, people are like, you need to talk to Carlos, and he's doing awesome work about food in general and bees in particular. Carlos, welcome to the show.

Paul, it's a pleasure and an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

I literally just got a message for, I don't know how many, the 5th time. I'm looking at you, Sandy Hirschberg, who said, Paul, have you interviewed anybody from? I was like, I'm talking to Carlos on Monday. So that was on Friday. New Mexico wants us to talk, Carlos. And before we get into the specifics of what you're doing and how agriculture can be a climate solution, you've had you you're the serial entrepreneur. You've had a few interesting rodeos. So give our listeners a little bit of a taste of your serial entrepreneur journey.

Yeah. Just a brief background. So I'm a New Mexico born and bred. I say I grew up here and went to school here, got an engineering degree from UNM, and then was fortunate enough to go to business school in Silicon Valley at Stanford, and that kind of unlocked the first part of my career, which is really in the technology sector. I was interested in technology and how it could be applied, but ended up at a large company Intel, but figured out a way to get from Silicon Valley back to New Mexico and that meant I got into manufacturing and out of marketing and staff type of roles in Silicon Valley. And then really have the taste of entrepreneurship though and you know Silicon Valley will do that and I think naturally inquisitive people kind of veer this way often. So I went to go work for other companies in Silicon Valley mostly in the semiconductor space and that was interesting, but I really always had the passion for doing my own companies and also for being back in New Mexico. So in the 2004 or 5 time frame, I had the brilliant idea to get a group of investors to back me and a partner and I told them would find a company to buy, would relocate it to New Mexico and unbeknownst to them and me I found a company in New Mexico to purchase and that company was Mioxx and Mioxx was doing water treatment for the US military.

So in a weird way, I became an impact entrepreneur by accident merely by following this opportunity to go treat water. The goal of MYOX was to treat water anywhere, anytime, and make it drinkable. Had been developed extensively for the US military and the navy in particular and we took it out commercialized it in a number of ways and the value properly was to make water safer and to have less byproducts than chlorine and traditional treatment methods. So we scaled that company and had a brief interlude into somebody else's company, a publicly traded company, which got me into the legal cannabis space and then lo and behold that got me to Teravera, which is a story unto itself, but Teravera was really born out of the idea that we could treat agriculture with products that are safer for people and planet and pollinators as you mentioned, but mostly because I worry about what's on my food and I think most of our viewers or listeners hopefully do the same.

And when did you start Tarradar?