Luncheon and fireside chat with Jessica O. Matthews

Jessica O. Matthews is the Founder & CEO of Uncharted, an award-winning MWBE-certified company on a mission to raise the standard of living for everyone, by accelerating the equitable development of smart, sustainable infrastructure. Jessica will share her story and discuss how she discovered her "why" in the infrastructure industry.

Transcription:

Caitlin Devitt (00:08):

I'm very happy to be here with Jessica O. Matthews, who's the CEO and Founder of Uncharted. It's a company that develops technologies. She's gonna give a long description, she's gonna help us understand it, but it develops technologies to help cities, municipalities manage and deploy their infrastructure faster, better, smarter. She works at the intersection of broadly speaking, technology and infrastructure data. This is an area that's increasingly important to us in the muni market. Cities are trying to figure out where they're at. They're also trying to figure out how to get a piece of the huge amount of federal money coming down the pike, where in a national moment of rebuilding. And in my opinion, companies like Jessica's are gonna be very important to helping us take advantage of this moment. And in particular by generating and contextualizing data for municipalities. So a little bit about Jessica before she talks. She's two degrees from Harvard. No big deal. She has 12 patents. And if we have time, we might get a chance to talk about a couple of 'em. She won a Harvard Foundation Scientist of the Year Award. She's a member of the Electricity Advisory Committee of the US Department of Energy. And hopefully she'll talk a little bit about that. So, hi Jessica. Hi. Thank you so much for being here.

Jessica O. Matthews (01:37):

Really glad to be here.

Caitlin Devitt (01:40):

So tell me a bit about yourself and about Uncharted.

Jessica O. Matthews (01:43):

Of course. Well, thank you to Alma and the Bond Buyer team for having me here. Or they're awesome. Sorry, we're biased, but they're, anyway, talk more about it. So a little bit about myself. Normally, when I'm not speaking at a public finance event I describe myself as the love child of Beyonce and Bill Nye, the science guy. Oh, okay. Haven't been getting the vibe on this room. Not sure that's gonna make sense to everyone. Well, hopefully who Beyonce is, and you better know who Bill ni the science guy is, or where I'm getting up right now. But I think ultimately when I reflect on my career and the way I approach my work, I often consider myself to be an empathy, empathy driven technologist. And that's very critical because there are a lot of people who call themselves technologists. And I do think it's been quite interesting to hear the comments about technology or perhaps the lack thereof grasp of technology in this space. And so I'm excited to speak on that a bit. But in terms of being an empathy driven technologist, it ultimately means that instead of sitting in a room in Silicon Valley thinking I'm the smartest person in the world, and then coming into other rooms and just kind of bashing my ideas over someone's head I like to exist in the rooms with the people who I think are doing amazing and brilliant work. And I listen and I listen and I listen. And most of the technologies that I've developed or that I've developed with my company have come from incredible intentional listening. And so to the extent that we're now bringing that to the space of public finance and in particular to the space of infrastructure development for municipalities that's been very exciting. In terms of my work, you've said it, I'm the founder and CEO of Uncharted as well as currently actually the youngest member of the electricity advisory committee for the Department of Energy. It doesn't mean as much cuz there is a bit of a I believe you call it a silver tsunami, is that what you call? There is a bit of that as well. And I will also say though, that I felt kind, I do have a couple of grays, they're just hidden. All right. The pandemic did it to all of us. There are many millennials walking around, slightly broken, but that's not why we're here. But in that work for the Department of Energy, I serve on the Smart Grid subcommittee and specifically have a focus on advising the Department of Energy on how to accelerate the deployment of electric vehicle charging stations. And specifically in looking at the value of data interoperability in doing that, all data interoperability is cuz I recognize that I may drop a couple of jargony things during this though. You guys deserve it. Me and my team were googling the entire time yesterday just saying all these different things. So right back at you. But data interoperability is just dealing with all the different technologies that have to go into a new smart grid and how they speak to each other. They don't speak the same language. And what happens when you put a bunch of people in a room and they don't speak the same language, there's a lot of mayhem and that's what's happening with the grid right now. We're dealing with mayhem and we're out here looking at babble and trying to translate things. So I spent a lot of time with the electricity advisory committee working on that. And then my company, uncharted as you said, we serve municipalities specifically, we work right now with the municipalities that are sometimes often forgotten. The smaller ones, we actually have a specific focus on municipalities.

(05:50)

So that's towns, villages, and cities. If you make the mistake of calling them cities, they will let you know. But towns, villages, and cities that are under 50,000 people specifically, we also now have been primarily working with municipalities that are designated as environmental justice communities or environmental justice areas. Again, I think everyone here should be pretty familiar with Justice 40 Initiative and the different screening tools and the idea that many municipalities either have all or several of their census tracks falling within that designation. And so we tend to focus there. We tend to focus on those that are the most fiscally stressed as well. The idea is there's this concept called kind of human innovation or the kind of humanist design where they suggest that you focus on the user that's at the most of the extremes, the one that's going through the most pain. Cuz if you can design a product or a technology or a solution for the user that's at the most extreme, it's actually a lot easier to have it fall in for those who are more moderate. And so we found that developing technologies for municipalities that are the most fiscally distressed allows us to be incredibly innovative really think outside of the bots, but also they tend to be the most accepting of disruption as well because the system isn't working for them. Right. And so, I mean, could share a little bit more about what we do, but

Caitlin Devitt (07:28):

Well before I do want definitely wanna dig into that. But before we get there you referenced the silver tsunami, which came up several times yesterday. And I know you got your start very kind of young and you have an interesting start. So just give us kind of an overview of your background and how you got your start.

Jessica O. Matthews (07:45):

Sure. Yes. So I got into the infrastructure space not because I did a bunch of research and realized that it was a growing space or anything like that. I very early on realized that for my own family the ability for them to live a life as full as possible was 100% dependent on what infrastructure they had in their community and their environment. And I also recognized very early on that oftentimes things masquerade as socioeconomic issues, but in fact they're infrastructural issues. And so as a dual citizen of Nigeria in the United States, I spent a lot of time growing up, going back and forth and seeing my cousins have a better cell phone than I did because of the leapfrogging of mobile technology. And yet finding that they struggled sometimes to charge that cell phone and not understanding that dichotomy, knowing that there were technologies that existed, but knowing that they just didn't have access to them, knowing that they were paying more kilowatt hour than we do in the United States for whatever system they had for energy, for light. But knowing that it just wasn't reliable. And so when I was about 18 years old my family had one of those really just tough years that sometimes families have where we lost three members of my family all within that same year. My aunt who was younger than I am now, my uncle and my grandfather. And we lost them all from things that could have been at least delayed, if not fully avoided if they had access to reliable infrastructure. And I kind of remember sitting down in my AP psych class, I always just remember, cuz I remember distinctly not listening to the professor and sitting down and thinking about how much pain this was bringing my family. It was my mom who had lost her baby sister, her dad, and her brother-in-law. And I remembered thinking that this could not be life when you're young enough to still believe that life just, it can't be this. And so at that moment, I told myself, well, I listen, I can't cure death, but there must be something that I can do to change the lives of people in my family who aren't only passing prematurely. They're probably passing with this belief that this is the status quo, that nothing can change and they just have no hope. And when you don't have hope in your environment, when you feel like you have to leave where you're from to get where you're going, and if you're stuck in that place, if you're stuck in that community, you've just started to write your eulogy yourself.

(10:43)

I was very fortunate in that moment, at a very young age to find the thing that I'd be willing to dedicate my entire life to fighting. And so from there, it all just became a question of what I would do. And at the age of now, like 18, 19. I thought that the reason why there were some communities that did not have access to all the infrastructure that they needed, was that there just weren't enough people who believed that there could be something that could be different, that could be better. There weren't enough people who were motivated to be part of the conversation. And so leaning on my degree in psychology, I wanted to create a technology that would inspire people to realize that they could change the status quo, that would engage them in feeling like they could be involved and have a meaningful impact without needing a certain amount of training or a certain number of years in this field or that field. And so I invented something called the socket. The socket, yes. It was an energy generating soccer ball that could harness the energy from play or the kinetic energy the energy of motion and store that power inside of the ball so it can be used as an off-grid resource. And the idea was not for this ball to power a whole room or a whole house, but specifically to inspire people like my cousins in Nigeria, to inspire anyone who loved the game of soccer, which is the most popular sport around the world, knew how to play at least enough. My cousins are notoriously below average at sports actually, but they love the soccer ball. But ultimately for them to realize what you see isn't necessarily exactly what it is, this is more than a soccer ball. And so that's how I started inventing and creating things and getting my PhD in Google as I like to say, because I Googled a lot to get to that point. And from there I was in there. I was in this space. I started to listen. I started to understand, this is when I really started to listen because I couldn't even believe that I got into this room and got the point where I was invited to join first President Obama on stage during the American Events Act in 2012. Then in 2013, I joined him on his first Africa tour and he said all these amazing things about how this is the future of energy. And I'm like, me? What are you talking? I'm like, I'm here with GE Africa and the president of Tanzania, and they're looking at me like, you're getting all the credit. They can't believe this. We put a billion dollars into this infrastructure. And I'm like bouncing my ball around. And so I'm there though, and I start to listen and I start to listen and listen a lot more. And I began to develop different technologies that I thought would help. It took some time to get some guts to actually jump into infrastructure from play, but I guess I could share this story in this room. We didn't go through any of this. I'm just pleased too.

(13:51)

I finally decided that I would start to look at technologies in infrastructure that could actually help the way we scale smart and sustainable infrastructure. And that is the mission of the company to accelerate the equitable development of smart and sustainable infrastructure. Ultimately raising the standard of living for everyone, not just some but it was actually the 2016 election that inspired me to jump into infrastructure and infrastructure technologies. I have no idea how this is gonna play in this room, but we're just gonna go for it. Right? Go for it. Okay. So when Donald Trump was elected obviously I have a team of young people a company of people who perhaps thought that someone else was going to win let's just say that. And so when we woke up and we saw that it was a different world I had to think about what I would say to my team. And I decided that I would use this opportunity to inspire them. And I told them, Hey, why are we so afraid of doing infrastructure? Oh, because no one looks like us because the average age of the person working in energy infrastructure is 55 and that we are not but why are we ultimately so afraid? Why are we waiting for someone to allow us into this room and start thinking about what we can do? Look at Donald Trump. He has no experience, no one invited him into this room, and yet he's the president of the United States. And I told them, oftentimes people come to me and say, weren't you so inspired when Barack Obama won the first black president? Do you now believe you could be president? And I would always tend to them and say, no, I don't think I can be president just because a constitutional scholar who's one of the most brilliant politicians of our time became president. But when Donald Trump won,

Caitlin Devitt (15:54):

A role model, a real role model.

Jessica O. Matthews (15:54):

And someone asked me, do you think you could be president? I immediately said, yes, I do. You could ask me right now. Yeah, I mean, I don't think I'd be the worst at it. And I'm just being honest. And so in 2016 when that happened, we began to transition to developing infrastructure technologies because if Donald can do it, can I? And that was truly the way we jumped in. I don't know if he realizes that I find him to be the most inspirational president we've ever had but I do.

Caitlin Devitt (16:30):

I Like it. And he has a big announcement to make today. We don't know when he's gonna make it. So, it's very timely.

Jessica O. Matthews (16:38):

It should be fun. Let's see, But from there, I think I went again on a listening tour. We created some really cool hardware technologies along the way but it was around the pandemic that we realized that the ultimate thing, it was actually a listening tour. We went on with 67 different municipalities, different stakeholders from municipalities to understand, well, what is it that's ultimately slowing down infrastructure development? What is it that's making it so expensive? And there are a lot of answers to that. But what we found, the commonality, I think, in every single municipality, domestically and overseas, was an issue around data. And it was very surprising because no one ever called it a data problem. But every single time it was a data problem. And so we looked at all of our hardware and we said, well, this is exciting and cool in this situation, in this situation, but this is the problem that undercuts everything.

(17:45)

And specifically when I say data, here's how they would explain it. They would say something like, I'm gonna, quote them. So a lot of times, like the smaller municipalities, they curse a lot. So I'm just gonna say how they say it, but I'm not me. Don't kill the messenger. So one city administrator will say something like, I know I paid for that consulting report two years ago. Where the is it? Where is it? Do you know I'm not gonna pay for this thing again. Do not make me pay for this thing again. And that's a pain point of just literally finding information, finding the data that they had already pulled out for something with their water infrastructure, their energy infrastructure, their combined sewer overflow, and not being able to find it. That takes an incredible amount of time, an incredible amount of time. And so we started to look and peak at those kind of think and hearing these stories. So, when they're saying, they wouldn't call it a data problem, they would call it a siloed issue. Another person would say, I remember one city planner was like, oh, each time they keep coming to us, a city hall, they keep coming to us during the council meetings complaining that there's not enough parking, but we know there's enough parking, but they can complain there's not enough parking. Okay, we're thinking about getting more parking meters. I gotta figure out how many parking meters we have. And I'm like, how are you gonna figure that out? He's like, oh, that's easy. I'm gonna walk outside my office and I'm gonna walk around. I'm gonna walk around in a couple weeks. I'll know the number. That's an easy one, Jess. And I was like, that's not, what are you talking about? What do you mean? Who knows how many parking meters you've ordered? I think someone at D P W, but there's gonna be a whole thing. And that at the end of the day, we realize that in the best case scenario, public administrators and municipal staff are spending at least 50% of their time tracking down information, confirming that information, correcting that information. The other 50% of the time they're shooting from the hip, the quote shooting from the hip. And so within charted, we said, okay, well this, wow, this is the thing. How can we solve this? And so we again, started to ask more questions. Why aren't you guys using some of the data science tools that people are using the commercial market? And they were like, who? Who's a data scientist? Who's a data analyst? They're like, I try to hire a data analyst. And three months later he went to go and work for Facebook.

(20:18)

I can't afford to have these people. I can't afford to go through three months of training. I don't have the time and I definitely don't have the time for my government to again, be siloed by the people who know how to use this data platform and the people who don't. And so that's when we realized, okay, the key would be to create something as tangible and as accessible as a soccer ball, but for data. And so the uncharted platform that we created is basically like a Google search, Google Maps and Google Drive for government infrastructure, for municipal infrastructure. And the idea is when they're doing a project, any project, instead of it just to be a consulting report that goes on the shelf somewhere and then gets lost, all of that information, we actually ingest into the platform for them. We fuse it so that it's searchable and has awareness of each other.

(21:16)

We go and actually do asset mapping so they know where all their water meters are so they know where all their parking meters are. And then there's actually backend analytics. But the key and the exciting part is that no training required, no dashboards, no. And I quote, no spreadsheets. Do give me another spreadsheet, Jessica again, Hey listen, they're color, it's colorful, it's a colorful time down in the 50,000 below. It's a good time. It's as long as you know how to use Google. As long as you're passingly literate you type in what you're looking for and it just shows up. So we, it's natural language processing as the technology. And I think I have a video that I can show. Let's see what happens if I click this. Let's click it again.

(22:17)

So here you can see again, it's a analytics platform. I want to know you type in information of what you want to know as a question in natural language, natural language, which is huge. And you get the answer immediately. And so what we do is we actually become this kind of ongoing data partner. The data always belongs to the municipality, but now they're not concerned about staffing, they're not concerned about training. They feel like they can do more with less. They feel like they can keep up with the bigger guys. And of course they find out how much is actually feeding into the system. Just through looking at the sources and the search history. The idea was radically simple. And I remember when we were talking to our marketing team, should we call it radically simple? And we're like, not really people in government, they don't like the word radical. But funny enough, the municipalities that are the most fiscally distressed that feel like the system isn't working for them, that are complaining about the fact that financiers, rating agencies are according to them, according to them, don't kill the messenger using data that's two years old. They feel like they need a radical shift. They're like, if you can help us get a handle on our real time data, as I was telling you earlier, go from a Pandora's box of nonsense digital files, paper files all over the place into something that's centralized, infused in one place so that you can model what's going on in your municipality. And then you get to the point where you have a shadow. So there's digital models, digital shadows, and digital twins. What we're doing is getting these municipalities on the path to having digital twins so that you have real time data about what's going on so that now they can go and say, Hey, I know you think that I'm not credit worthy, but tap into this and you tell me again what you really think.

Caitlin Devitt (24:17):

And to be happening at this moment when we're seeing so many federal funds and this is gonna really possibly know. A lot of the municipalities are looking to get a piece of that. And this could help them mean, are you hearing that when you talk to city officials or to municipal officials? Yeah. You hearing is we wanna get ourselves sort of in shape to and using data to help us get some of the federal funds and also possibly come to market, get our ratings up.

Jessica O. Matthews (24:46):

100%. We've actually built out a team of we focus primarily right now in New York state and then we'll be scaling. And so with our different municipalities in New York state, we've built a team of grant writers with incredible experience securing about 200 million dollars in grant funds over the last 10 years, really understanding the nuances of this specific type of grant and what's happening with EFC distribution and things like that. And so we come actually in a bundled way because these municipalities, and then as much as they know they have a data problem, they will always see that their money problem is the biggest problem. And so we come in, we say, okay, we're gonna get you millions of dollars right now and in doing this and in actually looking at how we're getting your data organized through the grant process, through any additional financing that you might find that you need, which they're now realizing that they need, even the ones who have been afraid are recognizing that they need to secure matching funds. But then as they go through, again, the process of the infrastructure development management monitoring, what we're seeing as well is that we're preparing them. I don't, it's almost like a practice credit card because what we're doing is we're preparing them now to be a much stronger issuer in the market. We're giving them the data that they need to also argue that point in these spaces and getting them more comfortable in their ability to model their success in terms of repayment and things like that. And so that's something that I think is very exciting about our work. Even though they are smaller municipalities, we have this once in a generation moment with all of this money flowing, they're gonna spend it no matter what. But if we can show that we help them spend it more efficiently, if we can show that they have a certain type of organization that has allowed them to leapfrog in some ways over the rest of the market now it becomes a very interesting thing for everyone else in the market to say, well, before I didn't pay any attention to this group, but now I have the data to model my risk a little bit better, to understand this opportunity better. And ultimately to grow the market in general

Caitlin Devitt (27:00):

And to be able to predict using the data, being able to model out our future energy needs, our future infrastructure needs. And a lot of the stuff they have to do anyway. I mean, I think we talked before about with the infrastructure law, with the lead pipes, they have to map, and I think it was, I don't know if it was Philly or there was some place, it was kind of what you were talking about. They were trying to find these old records. They were in basements. I, but that's a requirement. You have to inventory all of the lead pipes. So this is the kind of data that they're gonna need. That all want to be competitive.

Jessica O. Matthews (27:37):

Two water infrastructure stories. One is from a town supervisor who very small town, but again, they're getting millions in federal funding that we're helping them get. And I think someone mentioned it yesterday, some of the smaller municipalities are so afraid that they haven't even fully spent their ARPA funds. This is true. So she tells her she's, I haven't even my ARPA funds yet because I'm nervous about compliance. And I'm like, yikes, you gotta spend that. There's new stuff coming. And she's like, well, they keep saying that there's all this money coming from the federal government and gosh, we have to get it. And our constituents are like, Hey, you better make sure we get our fair share. But then I get an email from the treasury saying, please stop calling us because this town supervisor, I will say, she reminds me of the Cardi B of small town, And you don't understand, she's a small older woman but her energy is just, she's wow, she's tough. And so she will call and do whatever she can to get whatever information she needs to help her municipality. And so she gets an email from the treasury saying essentially, please stop calling us. We are defunding the group that can give you information on how to be compliant with your ARPA funds. Figure it out. Here are some links. Figure it out. And so she's like, this is the disconnect. How can you tell me that there's all this money and yet no one's helping me? No one's, no one's at least giving me that edge. And so we are at least coming in and saying, here's how you can move more efficiently with the resources you have because now you might need to spend that money, that consulting money not on finding that report again, but on getting someone who can help you with compliance on the lead pipes as well. We have city engineers who are like, I don't know if they realize how much of a data problem this is. It's a data problem in terms of actually tracking down where all the lead pipes are centralizing that information. It's a data problem to think about freedom of information Act the administration of that because there needs to be some sort of citizen facing information that you share as well as what they call predecisional working group, not subject to foil information. That's the work around the municipalities have on some things there. And that is in itself incredibly daunting cuz then you also have to confirm that information. But it's so critical from the perspective of equity because that's how they're gonna determine who gets the replacements first. And I've actually heard from city engineers the concern that there will be a less than equitable process for prioritizing who gets those replacements if they don't have the data. So it becomes something that I think unlocks not only opportunities in eventual funding and looking at the financiability of certain municipalities, especially the smaller municipalities but also from the perspective of equity and decision making

Caitlin Devitt (30:49):

And all of which dovetails, I mean what you're doing dovetails so much with what the administration and the White House is talking about, which is we don't wanna leave out the small guys. We don't want this big sophisticated issuers to get all the competitive grant money and the Justice 40 initiative, which we've talked about. We only have a couple minutes, I didn't realize, but do we have any questions from the audience? We wanted to see if anybody has anything that they wanted to ask Jessica. It's hard to see. Okay, well why don't you tell me what you feel most excited about. I mean there's a lot going on and like you said, we're at this sort of big moment. What are you excited about when you think about municipalities and what they can do with this data and where they can go with it and how it can sort of change people's lives?

Jessica O. Matthews (31:54):

I think that people have heard about data, I think in the kind of zeitgeist for a while and the power of data here and the power of data there. And to a certain extent it's fair to people to almost be getting a little bit kind of not burned out by in terms of hearing it, but in not necessarily putting all their hopes into it. I think from a consumer perspective, but specifically with our work and the work that we're seeing in municipalities, I think we're going to see an opening of the market, a broadening of the market. I think we're going to see the power of small issuers grow not only because you're going to have more to be able to consider work with them, but because they'll be able to demonstrate that they can do more in line with the funding that they're getting from federal sources as well. I also think that when it comes to technology though, and the consideration of technology in terms of the infrastructure that's actually being developed, it's going to be critical to recognize that for scalability, we're going to have to see data play a massive role in the operations of this infrastructure. And I think we're already seeing it, but the consideration that data will have to be part of the actual operations and maintenance and then it can't be something that's so rote. I think it's going to be important also for understanding kind of labor and where people will go and how people will feel about that over the next 30 years.

Caitlin Devitt (33:32):

Lots of implications.

Jessica O. Matthews (33:34):

Yes.

Caitlin Devitt (33:34):

Yeah, lots of time. Well thank you so much. Course. Thank you. Great stuff. Very interesting and of cutting edge in terms of what you're doing and I'm sure we're gonna hear a lot more about you. So thank you very much for being

Jessica O. Matthews (33:45):

Here. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.