The traditional “College for All” pipeline is broken. Right now, over half of recent graduates are working in jobs that don't require bachelor's degrees, and a decade into their careers, 45% of them remain underemployed. Meanwhile, high-paying, fulfilling, and AI-resistant "gray collar" jobs are sitting empty. Don Smith, co-founder of Tanager Holdings and the builder behind Gray Collar Collective, joins us to explore how he is building the infrastructure to route students into these high-growth careers and why "Gray Collar" is set to be the defining term of 2026.

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We discuss:

• The “broken pipeline” and why the traditional education system is failing the modern student

• Defining Gray Collar and why these roles are the ultimate hedge against AI disruption

• Don’s non-linear journey from the Air Force Academy and law to fintech and venture studios

• The “Elevator Pitch” and real-world stories of engineers finding six-figure success in the trades

• Building the infrastructure for self-discovery, training, and placement in the skilled workforce

• The Jacksonville innovation ecosystem and the importance of hubs like the Jax Innovation Hub

• Hard-earned intuition and why Don’s top advice for founders is to “validate aggressively” and let the market “kick your baby”

Featured Resource Stack:

• Gray Collar Collective: www.graycollar.com

• Jacksonville Innovation Hub: https://www.jaxinnovationhub.com/

• Perspectiv (Meagan Skerchock): https://www.getperspectiv.com/

• Champion Now (Terry Iverson): https://championnow.org/

• Cardinal Manufacturing ( Craig Cegielski): https://www.cardinalmanufacturing.org/

Big influencers are charging over $1,000 per reel while delivering engagement rates below 3%. Meanwhile, 76% of everyday social media users have fewer than 10,000 followers, and 88% believe they deserve a reward for authentically promoting the brands they love. Swayze Co-CEO & Co-Founder Phi Long Bui joins us to share how his platform is bridging this gap by turning everyday restaurant-goers into powerful nano-influencers, completely flipping the script on local digital marketing.

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We discuss:

1. How a background in strategy consulting led to the founding of Swayze

2. Why traditional influencer marketing is broken for small businesses

3. What a “nano-influencer” is and why they drive better ROI than celebrities

4. The stark differences between scaling a startup in Poland versus New York City

5. How partnering with intermediaries will accelerate their B2B growth

6. The future of social rewards and why retail is the next big frontier

7. Why his ultimate advice to young professionals is to just start building

If you’re running a waste business, your biggest headache isn’t the trash, it’s the office.

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the invisible infrastructure that keeps our world turning. After exploring robots in data centers with Boost Robotics and computer vision for construction via Scout Out AI, it was only a matter of time before I looked at the fleet.

The “Open-Air Factory”

CEO Mark Hoadley once described the reality of this business as “running a factory with no roof and no visibility into what’s happening in that factory” (TechCrunch via aVenture). In a traditional factory, you have sensors and quality control. In waste hauling, your factory floor is the entire city, and for decades, that floor has been a total black box.

Hauler Hero is building the Central Operating System that finally puts a roof over that factory. They’ve replaced fragmented legacy tools with a single, cloud-based hub. But their true Wall-E moment comes from their AI agents. Hero Vision uses truck-mounted cameras to see the world in real-time, automatically documenting every pickup. If a bin is overloaded, the AI tags it and the customer is billed, moving the industry away from vibes-based pricing toward data-driven accuracy.

The Infrastructure Supercycle

To understand why Hauler Hero is a heavy hitter, you have to look at the current Infrastructure Supercycle. We are seeing a shift toward hard-tech solutions that solve boring, massive, trillion-dollar problems. Waste management is a $145B industry in the U.S., yet it’s one of the last to be digitized.

By saving office employees an average of 14 hours a week, Hauler Hero isn’t just a convenience, it’s an operational necessity. But the real Aha moment for owners is the found revenue. Early partners using the system have reported 19% faster cash collection and a 15% reduction in customer service calls. By automating not-outs and overloaded bin detection, they are moving away from vibes-based pricing and recapturing thousands in fees that used to simply leak away. As the market sees massive consolidation, independent haulers are hungry for this high-tech armor to help them stay competitive.

Physics vs. Algorithm

When we talk about AI in the dumpster, we have to ask the hard questions about how this survives the real world. Computer vision is notoriously finicky when it leaves the clean environment of a server room.

In the waste industry, clean data is an oxymoron. We have to consider the Dirty Lens Problem, where the AI must differentiate between a truly overloaded bin and a camera lens covered in North Florida mud or morning frost. The architectural choice between edge or cloud will quietly determine whether this becomes infrastructure or remains a pilot project. A waste truck is not a server room. It’s vibration, glare, mud, and spotty signal. The AI has to survive physics.

Finally, there is the vulnerability to vibes. While the system aims to end subjective pricing, AI models still struggle with depth perception and visual clutter. A system needs to be incredibly sophisticated to tell the difference between a bin that is legitimately over-full and one where a single piece of cardboard is just sticking out at a weird, misleading angle.

The verdict

Wall-E didn’t just move trash, he cleared the path for a new beginning. That’s exactly what Hauler Hero is doing for the waste industry. They are taking the unsexy work of estimation and routing and turning it into a high-tech operation. In the world of infrastructure tech, they aren’t just riding the wave. They’re clearing the path.

⚡ The Wave Report

• Founders: Mark Hoadley and Ben Sikma

• The Scale: 35M pickups annually and over $300M in annualized GMV

• The Mission: Building world-class technology with easy-to-use design for the "hardworking heroes" of the waste and recycling industry.

• Find them: haulerhero.com

Right now, if you want to price out a kitchen remodel or a full home renovation, your Day Zero doesn’t happen on the job site. It happens at 9:00 PM at your kitchen table. You’re squinting at a set of PDFs, wrestling with a tape measure, and trying to guess if you need 40 or 50 sheets of drywall.

It’s called a takeoff, the construction version of a master shopping list, but it feels more like a prison sentence. It takes hours. It’s prone to error. And if you’re off by 10%, your profit margin for the entire month just evaporated.

In a world where we can generate an entire video from a text prompt, why are we still doing construction math like it’s 1950?

Enter Scout Out

I’ve been digging into the “unsexy” side of AI, the kind that actually “touches” dirt and wood, and Scout Out (Y Combinator W26) caught my eye for one reason: They want to kill the manual estimate.

The way this actually works is surprisingly human. You don’t have to be a tech wizard or spend an hour uploading blueprints.

Instead of fighting with a scanner, you just talk to the app like you’re talking to a partner. You tell it what’s happening: “Hey, we’re looking at a 200 sq. ft. master bath gut-reno. We’re doing a walk-in shower, double vanity, and we’re going with marble tile.”

That’s it.

The AI isn’t just processing data. It’s actually listening to the logic of the build. It knows that a walk-in shower isn’t just a shower. It knows exactly how much thin-set and grout you’ll need to make that marble stick. It understands the labor hours that go into a double vanity.

In about 60 seconds, it hands you back a professional, line-itemed proposal. Think about that for a second. While you’re still standing in the client’s driveway, before you’ve even put the truck in reverse, you’ve handed them a quote. You aren’t going home to work the night shift at your kitchen table anymore. You’re already done.

But is the math right?…

This is the part that usually makes people lean back. If an AI hallucinates the price of 500 square feet of marble, someone is losing a lot of money.

But Scout Out is built as a Co-pilot, not an Autopilot. The AI gives you the baseline in 60 seconds, but the contractor still has the final word. You can go in and adjust your markups or tweak the labor rates to match exactly what you pay your crew. It’s not about the AI being 100% perfect on day one; it’s about it being fast enough to get a professional quote to a client before they even call the next guy.

Why is this a game changer?

The “Aha!” moment here is speed. In construction, the first person to get a professional quote to the homeowner usually wins the job. Most contractors lose work because they “get to the math” three days too late. Scout Out turns the estimate into a conversation you have on your phone while the lead is still hot.

Additionally, Scout Out is currently on the ground in Los Angeles, working with contractors on the high-stakes rebuilds following the Palisades and Eaton fires. In an environment where families have lost everything, speed is everything. If you can’t get a quote out, you can’t get insurance money, and you can’t start building.

By automating the boring work of estimation, they are clearing the path so the builders can actually get back to work.

The verdict

The more I explore these startups, the more I realize the Intelligence Age is finally hitting the pavement. Scout Out isn’t just measuring a room. They’re fixing the foundation of how we build.

They aren’t just riding the wave. They’re clearing the path.

⚡ The Wave Report: Scout Out

• The Problem: Contractors spend 14+ hours a week on “unpaid” office work (estimating).

• The Solution: Text-to-Estimate AI that builds quotes in <60 seconds.

• The Edge: A mobile-first CRM that lets you bid, sign, and manage leads from the truck.

• Check them out: scoutout.ai

But as the world looks at the screen, nobody is looking at the floor.

Data centers are the massive, overheating warehouses that make your ChatGPT prompts possible. They are the beating hearts of 2026. Right now, a quiet crisis is brewing inside them. It isn’t a software bug or a bad algorithm. It is a physical limit.

The AGI Bottleneck

As we scale toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, AI that can perform any intellectual task a human can), the sheer volume of hardware required is exploding. We are moving from clusters of 10,000 GPUs to campuses with millions of them.

These facilities are loud, they are hot, and they are miles long. When a server rack fails or a cooling pipe leaks, a human has to walk those miles in 100-degree aisles to find the fault. In a world where compute is the most valuable commodity on earth, we are running out of humans who can work that fast.

This is where the “Day Zero” energy lives. While the mega-caps are throwing money at models, a two-person team in Boston is building the mechanics that will keep the lights on.

Who is behind Boost Robotics?

I’ve been tracking the Physical AI wave in Boston, and the team at Boost Robotics caught my eye. Hans Kumar and Hardik Singh are a two-person squad with a background that suggests they know exactly how hard this problem is to solve.

According to their Y Combinator founder profile, their bond goes way back to 2015, when they met as engineering freshmen at CMU. They actually spent years together on a competitive Bhangra dance team before they ever built a robot together.

Hans was a Staff Software Engineer at Boston Dynamics (the world leader in mobile robotics), where he worked on productizing the Spot inspection robot. Hardik was the robotics lead at an agtech startup where he successfully pivoted a product to market in just one month.

The Market Landscape

To understand why a tiny team like Boost Robotics is a heavy hitter, you have to look at the 2026 market. We are currently in an Infrastructure Supercycle, which is a multi year investment phase where companies spend more on “the foundation” - buildings, power, and hardware - than on the software itself. Global spending on AI is forecast to reach a staggering $2.52 trillion this year. Within that, hyperscalers like Microsoft and Google are expected to spend over $500 billion specifically on infrastructure.

The industry has moved from the Training era, where the focus was on building models, to the Inference era, where those models are actually deployed for users. This shift requires “always on” reliability. The biggest threat to the boom isn’t a lack of code, it’s now a lack of uptime.

The Verdict

The East Coast is becoming a powerhouse for Physical AI. We are seeing a shift away from “another SaaS app” toward hard-tech solutions that solve boring, massive, trillion-dollar problems. Keep an eye on Boost Robotics. They are moving fast to ensure the physical world can keep pace with the digital one. They are not just riding the wave. They are building the surfboard.

⚡ The Wave Report

• Team: 2 founders (Hans Kumar & Hardik Singh)

• Status: Active (Y Combinator Spring 2025 Batch)

• The Mission: Build autonomous mobile robots that perform manual tasks in data centers

• Find them: boostrobotics.ai

Every great journey starts with a single spark. Before the Series A rocket ship, and before the Seed round’s powerful engine, there’s the Pre-Seed stage.

In the ecosystem of innovation, this is arguably the most exhilarating and foundational period in a startup’s life. It’s the “garage phase”, where your idea first learns to drive.

The Napkin Sketch & The Garage

Imagine you have a brilliant idea for a revolutionary vehicle. You’ve got it all sketched out on a napkin. You believe it can change how people move, but right now, it’s just a sketch. You need capital to buy parts, hire a skilled mechanic (your co-founder!!), and build a working prototype in your garage.

Pre-seed funding is the fuel for that prototype. It isn’t about market dominance yet, it’s about proving your core hypothesis. It transforms the “what if” into a functional Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

What Matters Most at Day Zero?

At this stage, investors aren’t looking at your revenue spreadsheets, they’re looking at your trajectory. Specifically, they are betting on three things:

1. The Founders: Can this team actually build the vehicle? They look for grit, obsession, and technical “founder-market fit.”

2. The Problem: Is this a minor inconvenience or a massive pain point? The bigger the problem, the more room your vehicle has to run.

3. The Prototype (MVP): Do you have a plan to build a version that actually moves? It doesn’t need a stereo system yet, it just needs to get from A to B.

Where Does the “Fuel” Come From?

Unlike later rounds led by massive VC firms, pre-seed capital usually feels more personal:

• Friends & Family: Your day-one believers.

• Angel Investors: Experienced individuals taking early-stage bets.

• Specialized Pre-Seed Funds: Micro-VCs like First Round Capital or Pear VC that specialize in this “niche” chaos.

From Garage to Gear Shift

The ultimate goal of the pre-seed stage is to gather enough evidence to prove the car is worth driving. Once you’ve clocked those first few miles and gathered user feedback, you’re ready for the Seed Round, where you get the fuel to finally hit the highway.

The Hook

I first felt it in a crowded hall during a grad school pitch competition. I was standing there, defending an idea, and I realized that I wasn’t just interested in the business model—I was addicted to the energy of the room. It was that specific, high-stakes electricity of an idea meeting reality for the first time. I haven’t been able to shake that feeling since, and it’s exactly why I’m launching this project.

The “Why”

I’m starting this Substack and Podcast because I’m tired of “hindsight” content. Most startup advice is written by people looking back from the finish line, which makes everything look like a clear, logical path. I want to talk about the build while it’s still messy.

I care about these topics because:

• The Rush of the Messy Middle: The real thrill isn't in the $100M exit; it’s in the high-stakes adrenaline of the week a founder almost missed payroll, or the lightning-bolt moment they realized their product had to change.

• Building is a High-Stakes Craft: I view startup growth as an art form. From the way a founder tells their story to the way they hire their first employee, there is a craft to it that deserves to be highlighted.

• The Energy of Innovation: Ever since that pitch competition, I’ve been fascinated by the “Day Zero” hustle. I want to spend my time with the people who are brave enough to start something from nothing.

What you’ll find here

This is a hobby-driven project, which means I can be honest. You can expect:

1. The Growth Playbook: Real-time analysis of how early-stage companies are finding traction in 2026.

2. Founder Conversations (The Podcast): I’m sitting down with founders to talk about the stuff they usually edit out of their LinkedIn updates—the doubts, the near-misses, and the gritty details of scaling.

3. Zero-to-One Deep Dives: Breaking down the specific frameworks that help a startup go from an idea to a growing entity.

The Build Continues

I’m here to learn as much as I am to share. If you’re a founder, an early-hire, or just someone who loves the puzzle of a new venture, I’m glad you’re here. Let’s get into the build together.

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