One question we at TARTLE get a fair amount is why on earth we are located in New Mexico. After all, we got started in Delaware which is near a lot of creative and technology hubs. If for some reason we wanted to be somewhere else, why wouldn’t we just relocate to Silicon Valley, Texas, Denver or up and coming Nashville? Isn’t New Mexico just a massive swath of desert in the middle of more desert?
There are a lot of reasons. One is that all those other places are already saturated with tech companies. From the massive household names to a ridiculous number of startups you can’t swing a stick in those places without hitting someone working for a tech company. Out there, we would be competing with all of those companies for talent, resources, and attention. In short, we would be a small fish in a big pond. Out here, we have the chance to be the big fish, the biggest talent magnet in the area. Yet, there is also plenty of talent around. As it turns out, New Mexico has a ridiculous number of PhDs, actually the highest concentrations in the country. Yet, because it doesn’t have the reputation as a tech hub, the people aren’t very pretentious. That itself is extremely valuable as having to massage egos and defuse situations is not what we should be worried about at work.
The history of the area is also something that is both personally appealing and fits well with TARTLE’s vision. How so? It has an ancient and rich history with Native American cultures and is also the home of Los Alamos, one of the major places the first nuclear bombs were built. It is a mix of the old and the new. This reflects TARTLE in that we want to bring back a time when people had control over their own data while using the latest technology to do it.
The local culture as a whole is also fantastic. It’s one that is very laid back, very personal and very willing to engage with new ideas and new companies like ours. This creates a more flexible culture than what is found in most of the major technology centers, a culture that works very well for us here.
Another great advantage of New Mexico is that the government out here is very interested in getting new businesses into the state. While they have been an oil and gas state for a long time, they’ve realized that those resources won’t last forever and in the meantime it doesn’t hurt to have a more diverse economic base. They’ve made it easy to work with a lot of the government research facilities out here (those labs are the big reason there are so many PhDs here) which opens up a massive amount of intellectual capacity and past and current research. They’ve done a lot to make it easier to do business in New Mexico than it is in a lot of other places. Others are noticing this as well, many of the big tech companies are already planning on moving out here. TARTLE is ahead of the curve.
We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the fact that practically speaking, it almost doesn’t matter where we are based out of. We are a tech company working in the digital age. Given how easy it is to work remotely now, it would be unnecessarily restrictive to limit our recruiting to whomever is available locally. And if we can work anywhere, why not live somewhere that you want to live instead of going to a big city so you can rent out a shoebox for the price you can own a house somewhere else?
So, why New Mexico? Because it is a great culture, with an amazing history and a wealth of opportunities from a business and personal perspective that fits perfectly with TARTLE’s own culture and mission. TARTLE is proud to call The Land of Enchantment home.
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There are a lot of reasons. One is that all those other places are already saturated with tech companies. From the massive household names to a ridiculous number of startups you can’t swing a stick in those places without hitting someone working for a tech company.
Presenter (00:07):
Welcome to [Tartle Cast 00:00:08] with your hosts, Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and source data defines the path.
Jason Rigby (00:18):
What is up Alex?
Alexander McCaig (00:25):
What's up Jason?
Jason Rigby (00:26):
You've got the Japanese pen there.
Alexander McCaig (00:28):
Yeah, no. The pen is nice. Thank you for this.
Jason Rigby (00:30):
Yeah, yeah, no, I love those.
Alexander McCaig (00:31):
You know what this is?
Jason Rigby (00:35):
I just like when it makes you want to write, because it's just so smooth.
Alexander McCaig (00:37):
Writing's an interesting thing. There's a different neurological pathway that happens when you're writing something by hand versus typing it on a computer. So I appreciate taking the time to write things down and think. It creates a better conscious connection for me, but writing utensils are big because when you get a lousy one, you don't... I don't know.
Jason Rigby (01:01):
I know. If you have an idea and then you can't get it on paper.
Alexander McCaig (01:03):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (01:04):
And then it's like one of those crappy free pens that you get.
Alexander McCaig (01:07):
Yeah. But this, in Japan, it's also like a big thing. They're all about really high-quality writing utensils. So I appreciate the craftsmanship they put into things like this.
Jason Rigby (01:18):
Yeah, even just even a small disposable rollerball pens.
Alexander McCaig (01:22):
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:01:23] And they're always about, did you see the balance. on that? The thing's got great balance, so that's why I... Yeah, I really enjoy it anyway.
Jason Rigby (01:29):
So I want to ask a question and I feel like this will be something that people need to understand as far as philosophy of Tartle. I know you moved from back East.
Alexander McCaig (01:40):
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Massachusetts.
Jason Rigby (01:41):
Yeah, and you started Tartle, I mean, it was in your brain a long time ago.
Alexander McCaig (01:45):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (01:45):
But the company has its address and physical location here in New Mexico.
Alexander McCaig (01:52):
In New Mexico, yeah.
Jason Rigby (01:53):
What made you choose, out of all the states and underlying provenances, all the...
Alexander McCaig (02:00):
All the ways you could have gone? Why didn't you go to any major tech centers or hubs?
Jason Rigby (02:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alexander McCaig (02:04):
Why are you not in Denver, Boulder, the Carolinas? Why are you not in Raleigh?
Jason Rigby (02:10):
Yeah, or California,
Alexander McCaig (02:11):
Boston or Silicon Valley? First of all, they're so saturated. This was my initial thought. Outside of my personal choice to come here, from a business perspective, if you think about it, if it's so under-saturated in terms of technology startups, it's easy to be the biggest fish in the pond out here, but everywhere else, it's easy to be a nobody.
Jason Rigby (02:41):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (02:41):
And you're like wasting this time going against this technologies-for-startups social ladder that you have to climb. You've got to do all this political nonsense with certain groups. Do this, do that, please these people, "Did you go to Harvard? Did you to to MIT?" "No, I didn't." "Well, you're not in. You don't come from a family of money," all those other things. And typically, that's what you find out there. They're all investing in themselves, it's very incestual.
Jason Rigby (03:10):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (03:11):
That whole sort of tech group in those major areas, so from a state of separation, I don't like those types of regimes. When you look at New Mexico, I was like, "Well, I don't want to be a small fish in a huge pond out there that's oversaturated. Why don't I just be a bigger fish in a pond of my own here in New Mexico?" So in terms of visibility, it made sense to move here.
Alexander McCaig (03:36):
And it's been quite beneficial from the local standpoint of getting to know everyone. It's much more personal out here, business, and you can really know everyone here in this area. Truly know all of these people and they all know you. So it almost raises the bar for the quality of what you're doing, because you can't just be a low quality person doing low quality work and trying to get away with it. It demands a higher quality and a better interaction with that local business environment. So that's just one sense of it.
Alexander McCaig (04:11):
And then the other sense is, when you look at New Mexico, no one ever really talks about this place.
Jason Rigby (04:16):
No, it's kind of under the radar. Some people think it's part of Mexico.
Alexander McCaig (04:19):
Yeah. They think it's part of Mexico. It's not, it's a relatively young state, but it has a rich availability of business resources, which is quite surprising because they want business to come to this state. It's begging for it. It's been an oil-and-gas state for so long, but they need to make that transition out of a dying age to the new thing. They want to have those tech unicorns to come out of here.
Alexander McCaig (04:48):
So they offer a great availability of resources of working with the state, working with the national labs. The great part about the national labs is that in New Mexico, we have the highest concentration of PhDs. Who would have thought?
Jason Rigby (05:03):
Yeah.
Alexander McCaig (05:04):
They're all hanging out, quiet in the desert, unbothered. Right?
Jason Rigby (05:06):
I know. Los Alamos has the highest concentration of millionaires per city.
Alexander McCaig (05:10):
Yeah, which is crazy.
Jason Rigby (05:11):
Which is where the Los Alamos National Lab.
Alexander McCaig (05:13):
Yeah. We have Los Alamos National Lab. We have Sandia National Lab here, but the mobilization of that intellectual capacity, it's very open here. It doesn't feel very pretentious.
Jason Rigby (05:28):
Mm. Yes.
Alexander McCaig (05:28):
It's just intelligent people that have come together to do intelligent, very scientific things. So you can appropriate resources of those labs and that intellectual capacity towards projects you care about. New Mexico has got an interesting history. It's a place where we've had... Aztec culture has moved through it. We've had the Native American culture with all the pueblos. And we've also had the highest technology like the nuclear bomb.
Jason Rigby (06:00):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (06:02):
So the dynamic here is quite interesting, is that when we talk about Tartle, we have a deep respect for what it means to be a human being and putting our data together to solve problems for the benefit of humanity as a whole. When we have the labs, they're solving very technological problems. Before, it was for a wartime efforts. Now that those have passed, they're towards other sorts of scientific advancements, but butted up right against it is this old, rich culture of what it means to be human being and be one with the land. So the dynamics here are a lot different than you find than just being in a city: very rigid, very finite. It lacks any sort of flexibility, so we have the ability to work and understand the flavor of high intellectual, high funding, all that capacity in the more depressed areas.
Alexander McCaig (07:02):
When I say "depressed," it's economically depressed, like the pueblos and their history and their understanding of the local area. So you get a better perspective of how humanity is actually blending our evolution of technology, but it seemed to have left other groups behind that needed to come with it but didn't get that advantage.
Alexander McCaig (07:24):
So being here affords us the opportunity of a grander perspective on how we can evolve with the technology that we're creating. And New Mexico offers a wide availability of resources to bring that sort of tech lifecycle together, so that it not only helps the business, but it helps the people here in the local area. And I think that's a very important thing that we need to champion.
Alexander McCaig (07:48):
Tech companies will go, the larger ones, where it's just beneficial to them, but without a thought of the history or the people within that area. We've seen in New Mexico, because of the generous benefits that the state actually offers for technology companies, we've seen Amazon has come in, Facebook has come in, Netflix has come in here and they're doing it because they see it from economic benefit.
Alexander McCaig (08:16):
But for us, it has to step beyond that. It has to step, "Well, how is it that we can show here, even in a localized area, the benefit to people that need that benefit and still also benefit the state through being a technology company here in this last hidden gem of America?" And I fundamentally feel that New Mexico will be the next major tech center.
Jason Rigby (08:40):
Yeah. I agree a hundred percent. It has everything. It has all the availability. It has land-
Alexander McCaig (08:46):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (08:46):
... that's inexpensive. It has great weather.
Alexander McCaig (08:49):
Yes.
Jason Rigby (08:50):
You have no natural disasters.
Alexander McCaig (08:52):
No, it's a geologically stable. It's beautiful. And I think the culture of how we as a society are developing and how the workforce is changing, this is the type of environment that the new age workforce is looking for.
Jason Rigby (09:08):
Yeah. It's informal. It's laid back.
Alexander McCaig (09:11):
Yeah. It's laid back. It's not lazy.
Jason Rigby (09:13):
No.
Alexander McCaig (09:13):
It's just laid back. It is informal. It's not so uptight. People are willing to help one another. And when you're done with work, you can go ski on top of the mountain. And then when you're done with that, you can go mountain biking down to the bottom.
Jason Rigby (09:24):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (09:25):
There's a better availability of work-life balance. When we looked at moving Tartle to New Mexico, it wasn't just thinking about what's the benefit to us right now, but what's the benefit to other people later that join us and the people that are actually interacting with the company? New Mexico just had this beautiful mix of reasons why we should come here, just as beautiful as the mixes of high technology and the pueblo culture.
Jason Rigby (09:50):
Right. And I mean, there's just things about New Mexico that are absolutely unique and just amaze me. Just alone, the weather. Yesterday, what was it? 55, 56? But it wasn't... It was cold in the morning and brisk and then the sun comes out and we're at such a high altitude, especially here in Albuquerque. We're at such a high altitude that you can just feel it radiate off your body. You're getting the-
Alexander McCaig (10:18):
Even though it's cold outside, there's like a warmth that comes through you.
Jason Rigby (10:24):
Right. When you talk about humanity, that's something that we want at Tartle, And I know it's extremely important to you, is to be able to have that flavor of warmth and caring, and we're here for humanity, and if we have to fight these battles, we're going to do that because this is ultimately what we want. We want the best version of you.
Alexander McCaig (10:45):
Yeah. That culture, just the Native American culture, the protection of the land, family, all that other stuff, that carries through into your business.
Jason Rigby (10:56):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (10:56):
Especially if you're paying attention to it, and those are great values. I am proud to be here with you and the rest of the people that are a part of Tartle to carry that culture forward and share it with the rest of the world.
Jason Rigby (11:08):
It's needed nowadays. I mean, you've gone to Boston, Silicon Valley, you've gone to all these areas and it's just this shark-infested waters. You look at it and they've written all these books about how it's mainly white male, like females trying to enter an attack, and thank God we've got... What's the main lady that's championed all that from Facebook? Sheryl Sandberg.
Alexander McCaig (11:39):
Yeah, I think that's it.
Jason Rigby (11:40):
Is that? Yeah, I think that's her name. I want to make sure I pronounced... But she wrote that book and it was amazing, I read it, but it's this whole idea of allowing everyone and humanity to be equal. You're not "less than."
Alexander McCaig (11:52):
No.
Jason Rigby (11:53):
That we're all together "greater than."
Alexander McCaig (11:56):
Yeah. I have been greeted with more smiles and hellos and truly a question of, "How are you and what's going on with you?" And people taking the moment and taking that time here in New Mexico than I have anywhere else.
Jason Rigby (12:09):
Yeah. And instantly, with your East coast accent, people know you're not from here.
Alexander McCaig (12:13):
Yeah, they're like, "Where are you from?"
Jason Rigby (12:15):
Right.
Alexander McCaig (12:16):
I try and suppress it, but it comes out when you're you're talking in that group, but there's a sense of warmth here and culture and value in art. There's so many good things about New Mexico that need to be carried forward into technology and companies that choose to adopt this area as their home.
Jason Rigby (12:38):
Yeah. We've talked about this off-camera, but I just don't see myself personally, and I know you said the same thing, being anywhere else.
Alexander McCaig (12:44):
No, it's hard. Never even thinking about this place, because New Mexico, frankly, doesn't advertise itself very well. I get it. It's not terribly the wealthiest state, it's not by any means, but they have... When you come here, it's hard to erase the feelings and emotions and visions and attitudes that you become inundated with and interact with.
Jason Rigby (13:16):
Yeah, they have it, "it's a land of enchantment," but people make jokes and say, "it's the land of entrapment."
Alexander McCaig (13:20):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (13:20):
Because once you're here... I've talked to people that have moved away from here and came back.
Alexander McCaig (13:24):
Yeah, because it is so enchanting, it does entrap you. People are like, "Why would you want to live in such a dull place like the desert?" But there's more to that. When you hear, you feel it. And I want to make sure that when people use Tartle, they're not just using it, it's like, "Oh, it's [inaudible 00:13:44]," they feel it. They're actually, truly a part of it. They're a part of the culture that we have infused into it, where it's a part of preserving the best parts about humanity and channeling that across the globe. And New Mexico just has a lot of those great characteristics that we live in right now that say, "This is some place that I want to have a business."
Jason Rigby (14:08):
Yeah. And in this desert landscape of tech, to be that oasis, that refreshing, that moment where you think, "Is this real or not?" Because we get a lot of comments online about that. "What is this? Is this a scam?"
Alexander McCaig (14:22):
"Is this legit? Like, New Mexico? What's going on?"
Jason Rigby (14:24):
Yeah, and then, "You want me to sign up for what?"
Alexander McCaig (14:27):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (14:28):
So for us to be that refreshing part in tech, where we're saying, "We don't need you." We're not looking at our attribution channels and saying, "What's our greatest ROI?" We're looking at, "Is this helping humanity in the best way possible?"
Alexander McCaig (14:46):
That's correct.
Jason Rigby (14:46):
And that's our first filter.
Alexander McCaig (14:49):
That's the very first thing. If it doesn't meet that benchmark, we don't do it.
Jason Rigby (14:54):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (14:54):
And if you think about a lot of other tech companies, they go to these major hubs because that's where funding sits, but anybody can fund a crap idea. So it just increases their probability of funding. But from our conscious thought, we're here. If you're doing the right thing and you're doing it well, the right people pay attention.
Jason Rigby (15:13):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (15:14):
And they have, and that shows. It shouldn't be a function of, "Oh, here's how it's probably going to be here. I'll get the funding for my pizza delivery service, be on the phone, whatever idea, does a scooter rental, lamb." New Mexico is and will be the definition of what it means to have that life-work balance. It will be the definition of technology in the future like it was in the forties. I think it's coming back into its own again and will continue to develop into something quite beautiful just like Tartle is developing itself.
Jason Rigby (15:51):
Yeah. I agree a hundred percent. And I'm so happy that we're here. I'm excited about the future of New Mexico. I'm excited about the future of Tartle. And I think at the end of the day, when we look at the approach that New Mexico is taking, the approach that Tartle is taking, that it's... And I hate to be so simplistic, but it's just good.
Alexander McCaig (16:12):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (16:12):
It's good.
Alexander McCaig (16:13):
It wants to evolve.
Jason Rigby (16:14):
Yes.
Alexander McCaig (16:15):
You can feel that urge to be more and in other places they just think they already have more.
Jason Rigby (16:22):
Yeah. It's presumptuous.
Alexander McCaig (16:24):
Yeah, so when you have that, it almost makes things a little myopic, but here, just watching a sunset, there's nothing ever blocking your view.
Jason Rigby (16:32):
No.
Alexander McCaig (16:32):
It's just infinite creativity.
Jason Rigby (16:34):
Just infinite.
Alexander McCaig (16:35):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (16:35):
And I think that's a great word, two words, to say about New Mexico: infinite creativity.
Alexander McCaig (16:41):
Yeah.
Jason Rigby (16:41):
The landscape lends to that.
Alexander McCaig (16:43):
And if you ever come here, and I hope people do that who listen to this, you'll feel it.
Jason Rigby (16:48):
Mm-hmm (affirmative), a hundred percent.
Alexander McCaig (16:49):
Just slow down for one moment and just watch everything that's going on around you.
Jason Rigby (16:53):
Yeah, go up the... What's the trail you just did? The Laloosa trail?
Alexander McCaig (16:56):
La Luz trail. It's right over here on the Sandia mountain range.
Jason Rigby (16:58):
Yeah. Go up that trail and get to the top. Prepare yourself, bring some water and-
Alexander McCaig (17:03):
14, 15 miles.
Jason Rigby (17:05):
Take 10 minutes to meditate. Look out over the city and you'll-
Alexander McCaig (17:09):
You'll feel what we feel.
Jason Rigby (17:10):
You'll feel, yeah.
Alexander McCaig (17:10):
Yeah. Thank you guys.
Presenter (17:22):
Thank you for listening to Tartle Cast with your hosts, Alexandra McCaig and Jason Rigby. When humanity steps into the future and source date defines the path. What's your data worth?
