#38: Jose Puga (ChucaoTech) – Patagonia Special 3/3 – Nanobubbles to Remediate the Seabed
This is the third and final part of a special series I recorded as I was connecting with ocean founders and experts in Latin America. Each episode is a standalone interview, so if you’ve missed the previous two, that’s absolutely fine.
This time, my guest is Jose Puga, Co-Founder and CEO of ChucaoTech. This is a start-up based in Chilean Patagonia that uses nanobubble technology in aquaculture. Injecting nanobubbles provides oxygen to the fish but is also used to remediate the seabed from the pollution caused by open-net fish farms.
We’ll dive into this innovative and award-winning technology, but we’ll also hear Jose’s entrepreneurial journey, which is a really cool story. A mechanical engineer who was in the world largest radio telescope (working with oxygen masks up at 5000 m or 16000 feet in the Atacama Desert), he moved to the UK as a consultant, to then come back to Chile and start his own business, which was not without some tense and dark moments.
Jose's Bio:
Mechanical engineer, Master of Science in Engineering (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile) and a Master's in Industrial Systems (University of Cambridge, UK).
With more than 10 years of experience in Chile and abroad in the implementation of various projects and design of products in sectors such as aquaculture, astronomy, mining and consumer products.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Introduction to The Ocean Age Podcast
00:00:32 - Guest Introduction: Jose Puga of ChucaoTech
00:02:03 - Defining the Problem in Aquaculture
00:05:48 - Seabed Remediation Problem
00:08:49 - Nanobubbles Explained
00:13:07 - Customers and Market for Chucao Tech
00:23:05 - Jose's Background: ALMA Project in Atacama Desert
00:28:48 - Transition to Cambridge and Product Development
00:35:01 - Founding ChucaoTech
00:42:03 - Pivot to Seabed Remediation Service
00:47:03 - Difficult Moments and Financial Strain
00:49:35 - Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
01:10:23 - Ocean Concerns and Environmental Purpose
01:12:59 - Difficult moment: From 65 to 13 People
01:14:29 - Final Message and Contact Information
Useful Links & Resources:
Jose Puga on LinkedIn
Get in touch with The Ocean Age's host Fed DeGobbi on LinkedIn, X or by emailing directly at fed@oceanage.co
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The Ocean Age Podcast is produced by Charlotte Raffo and edited by Nebojsa Lešević. Sarah Carpenter and Giulia Leanza are our research assistants.
Please send in your feedback: what do you want to hear more or less of? Any suggestions? Would love to hear what you think!
Fed DeGobbi:
Hello, and welcome to The Ocean Age. I'm Fed DeGobbi, and my job here is to interview the best players in the ocean space, extracting the strategy, the frameworks, ideas, and actionable insights that made them who they are. Insights that you can apply in your own ocean journey. This episode is the final part of a special series that I recorded as I was connecting with ocean founders and experts in Latin America. Each episode is a standalone interview, so if you've missed the previous two, that's absolutely fine. This time, my guest is Jose Puca, co-founder and CEO of Chucao Tech. This is a startup based in Chile and Patagonia that uses nanobubble technology in aquaculture. Injecting nanobubbles provides oxygen to the fish, but it's also used to remediate the seabed from pollution caused by open net fish farms. We'll dive into this innovative and award-winning technology, but we'll also hear Jose's entrepreneurial journey, which is a really cool story. a mechanical engineer who was in the world's largest radio telescope, working with oxygen masks up at 5,000 meters or 60,000 feet in the Atacama Desert. He then moved to the UK as a consultant to then come back to Chile and start his own business, which was not without some tense and dark moments. All of this and much more in my wide ranging conversation with Jose Puga. Enjoy. Because of what you do and the technology behind your company is so key, I think maybe we start from there. We start from maybe even by defining the problem. What is the problem that your technology solves?
Jose Puga: I think we could take it from two sides. If I'm pitching the company, I define the problem as a lack of efficiency in productive processes that are related to water and gases in water. In aquaculture, it's pretty straightforward because everybody knows that fish need oxygen. And when you are growing fish in high densities, you will need to inject oxygen into the water to allow the fish to breathe, right? So injecting the oxygen has cost, an energy cost, and an economic cost. And doing it with nanobubbles, with our technology, reduces that cost. And also, it gives the fish an extra something that accelerates the growth, reduces the feed conversion and creates a better environment for fish welfare. But the same thing happens in other industries as well. So we're also working in agriculture. And in agriculture, I have been seeing increasing information about how the problem with the nutrient density, for example, in the produce has to do with the soil and the fact that it's been overworked, that it's been compacted and so on. The reason for all of that is that eventually you don't get enough oxygen into a root zone and the oxygen is needed by the microbes that do all the nutrient interchange between the soil and the plant, and so with the nanobubbles you're able to reach the root zone with the oxygen in a much more efficient way than tilling for example, and so on. So there's different industries. And I said at the beginning, there's two sides, because then there's my personal, original purpose, which was basically based on technology. I've always been fascinated by technology. I've also always been attracted to nature. So I ended up in this beautiful place where the main industry is salmon farming, and which, to the person that doesn't live here, seems like a very basic industry, but actually It's pretty high tech. So when I started working here, I identified that oxygen injection was one of the things that hadn't been improved over the years as other things had. So that's why I started looking at other ways of doing it.
Fed DeGobbi: So essentially, more in general, the technology is about injecting oxygen into a matrix of some sort. You apply it to different industries, one being aquaculture, as you said. Agriculture, is there anything else? And mining. Mining, okay. And specifically around aquaculture, why is it important to inject oxygen and to do it properly?
Jose Puga: Yeah, so like I said, if you're growing fish in high densities, the water is not going to have enough oxygen to sustain the fish, and you need to inject it artificially. That comes with a cost. In land-based facilities, that cost can be pretty high up in the priorities, and so it's important to do it as efficiently as possible. So that's where we started. We thought, OK, let's try and find a way of injecting oxygen as efficiently as possible. We identified nanobubble technology, which was very new in 2018 when we started. And it was a very hard sell because it was new. The hardware was expensive. The hardware wasn't as efficient as it has become over the years. And so we weren't very successful at the beginning. at pitching the technology for just oxygen injection for the fish, which was the main problem in terms of the amount of oxygen that you need to put into the water. But we came across this seabed remediation problem. The problem is the seabed pollution, right?
Fed DeGobbi: So this is from salmon farms basically being on top of that particular area and then polluting the seabed.
Jose Puga: This is inevitable. If you're going to have open cages in the sea, you're going to have sedimentation onto the seabed. And you could argue all day about… whether the environment is able to recover or accommodate this extra organic matter or not. But the fact is that you're putting something that wasn't there into the seabed and there's no argument about that. So when we started in 2018, there was a bit of a scandal because the seabed sedimentation and the pollution of the seabed and what you can do about it in the salmon industry in Chile is highly regulated. and there was a scandal with a company that adulterated the seabed to basically pass the test. Ouch. So it was kind of a high-profile thing and every company was very worried that whatever they did was had to do like by the book because it was in public opinion and also the agencies were looking very closely at what companies were doing. And so we were on the right timing to propose a solution. And we started working on a way of applying nanobubbles into the seabed and we realized that we had something quite powerful because we were able to accelerate the recovery of the seabed using nanobubbles without incurring into negative side effects like suspension and basically changing what was there in the first place.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah that's interesting and I wonder if we need to maybe give a little bit more background for people that might not be aware. Incidentally, you know, my background is very much around industrial wastewater and industrial wastewater treatment, so I understand exactly what you're talking about. But for somebody who is not familiar, why would you need oxygen to treat anyway? And what are nanobubbles?
Jose Puga: So when you have organic waste, you need to reduce it, to reincorporate it, like mineralize it and reincorporate it into the the environment and that there are different processes but the main process which is considered more healthy is the aerobic process in which you have organisms and microorganisms that use oxygen to metabolize the organic matter and produce CO2 and other compounds that are stable. And so when you have organic matter going into the seabed, which happens in nature as well, when like maybe more famously when a whale dies and it goes into and it falls down on the on the it will feed a lot of organisms and microorganisms and they will require oxygen to to feed on on whatever falls in there so the problem is that when you have too much organic matter more or more than what the environment is used to there's more use of oxygen which eventually gets depleted and when there is no more oxygen the microorganisms and the bigger organisms that are using the oxygen to metabolize the organic matter, they die. And then you start having other reactions, which are anaerobic, which produce substances that are toxic to other organisms, and it gets worse and worse. So you get methane, what do you call it in English? Sulfuric acid, like, you know, all this kind of nasty stuff. You know, the rotten egg smell. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide, yeah. And so a way of avoiding this anaerobic condition is putting oxygen into the seabed. But it's difficult because, well, if you did it like the more intuitive way and just put holes with oxygen into the seabed, the bubbles will float up and they will create like a welling current and it will resuspend all the all the sediment and that can make it even worse because the underlayers of the sediment are more anaerobic and they're carrying all this nasty stuff that can really make it a lot worse for the environment. So whatever you do, you need to not touch the sediment. So in come the nanobubbles. So nanobubbles are very tiny bubbles, nanometric, so less than a micron. usually around 50 to 200 nanometers in diameter, and they have a set of physical and chemical properties that are quite unique. The main ones are related to the size, the specific surface, so the amount of surface that they have relative to the total volume is very, very high. which means that they can interact with the water in a much more efficient way because the interchange of gas from inside the bubble to the outside happens through the surface. They don't float, so generally a smaller bubble will have a lower buoyancy force. For nanobubbles, that buoyancy force is so small that it's comparable to even like the repulsive forces between the bubbles, and much smaller than what the currents and the changes of temperature can influence on the bubble. So in practice, they don't rise up. That's incredible.
Fed DeGobbi: essentially that doesn't float up.
Jose Puga: Yeah, so they behave more like particles, like a colloidal, very small particle. They have this electric charge, which means that they repel each other because they're all the same polarity sign.
Fed DeGobbi: So they don't combine.
Jose Puga: So they don't come together and create larger bubbles. And the same electric charge makes them very, they have like an affinity to some ions and particularly to organic matter. So they stick. So they tend to not only to stick, but they are attractive. So I always explain like in the classic theory of gas dissolution, you always think about the efficiency of getting the gas into the water. But there is no mention of the efficiency of getting the gas that it's already in the water into whatever you're trying to use it for. So in the case of nanobubbles, that efficiency seems to be much higher than it's it's still a matter of academic research so I can't really say like a number but yeah so when you inject water with nanobubble oxygen on the seabed you know it doesn't go into the sediment we just put it like you know 50 centimeters above the seabed in a very low current so that it doesn't create any resuspension
Fed DeGobbi: So it's not even touching, it's like suspended a few centimeters?
Jose Puga: We put a diffuser with some legs, so it touches in three or four points, but then there's a flow of water going down from the diffuser, which doesn't affect the Siemens, it doesn't create any resuspension. And the oxygen that's in the water, as dissolved oxygen, but also as nanobubbles, is very efficient in transferring into the sediment. And so we can get changes of first pH. So if the seabed is anaerobic, usually the pH is very low. ORP, which is the oxygen reduction potential, which kind of explains what kind of reactions are happening in the in the sediment goes up, so you start seeing aerobic reactions. Eventually the microbiome is going to shift from anaerobic to aerobic and then you start seeing a reduction in the organic matter and it's working and it's basically absorbing the environment, it's absorbing the sediment in a much more healthier way.
Fed DeGobbi: It's almost like you're creating a little bioreactor in situ.
Jose Puga: Yeah, but it's 60 meters under the surface of the water. So yeah, before nanobubbles, there was one company here in Chile that was doing seabed remediation in a legal way, so to speak, which basically moved a lot of water from the surface, which is oxygen rich, to the seabed and tried to emulate the water currents. But it was slow, it was very energy intensive, and the amount of oxygen that you could get onto the seabed was much smaller. So we basically accelerated all of that in a much simpler way.
Fed DeGobbi: And if we look at aquaculture specifically, I'm really curious to understand who are your customers, so who actually buys from you and why do they do it? Because what I've seen in my experience is that water treatment is usually done because a regulator tells you to do it. Rarely there is a business case for doing it.
Jose Puga: Yeah, I understand. So this is the same case. There's a regulation. So the salmon farming here in Chile is what is called all in, all out. So the fish go into a site and after it grows to harvest size, it's harvested and then the site is followed. So it basically rests for a few months and that's all regulated. Before you can stock it again with new fish, you need to pass a test on the seabed. And so they measure, they basically measure that the seabed is still, has enough, it's aerobic. It's undergoing aerobic reactions on the organic matter and it has enough oxygen for those reactions to keep going. Which is a way of measuring whether the environment will be able to cope with the extra organic matter that's going to come down on the next cycle. If it doesn't pass the test, then you cannot stock it.
Fed DeGobbi: Meaning you're losing production, you're losing that.
Jose Puga: You're losing production because the licenses for the farms are limited. In Chile they are mostly what they are, there's no new licenses.
Fed DeGobbi: Okay, so you can't just move and go somewhere else. Exactly.
Jose Puga: So the bigger companies do, and this is one of the reasons that the industry tends to consolidate, because it's very beneficial for the farmers to have a lot of sites to choose from. But yeah, nobody has infinite sites. And of course, there's some sites that are better than others. And so yeah, there is an incentive to try and, let's say, I would like to say keep the seabed healthy, right? But yeah, the big incentive is to be able to pass the test so you can stock the fish in the sites that are more convenient for the next cycle. So to answer the question, our customers are the salmon farmers, the salmon producers. But they buy it because they need to pass this test.
Fed DeGobbi: Who do you normally talk to within the salmon farms? Is it like the operation managers? Is there like a head of environmental compliance or something like that that you relate to?
Jose Puga: There's always, depending on the farmer, there's different structures, but usually there's a technical department and within the technical department there is the environmental manager, which sometimes is the same as what they call the concessions manager, which is the one that is responsible to have the concessions certified and so on, so that the production can come in and do their thing. Operations can build the site and then production can come in with the fish.
Fed DeGobbi: Right, so it's licensing and environmental compliance.
Jose Puga: So they are our internal clients within the salmon farmers. These are all big companies, there's no small salmon farmer. There's of course different sizes, but the smallest is still a pretty big company.
Fed DeGobbi: This might be a bit of an aside, but why is there no small salmon farm?
Jose Puga: for exactly the reason that I was saying. So if you're a small company and you only have like two or three licenses, you have no legroom for movement. And it's a difficult coordination because the fish that are going into the sea, they have already been growing for a year. So if the time comes for them to be stocked in sea and you don't have the site, you're basically screwed. Yeah, yeah.
Fed DeGobbi: Where do they grow before coming to the sea farm?
Jose Puga: Yeah, so salmon have, if we go back a couple of steps, salmon, the life cycle of the salmon has freshwater stage and a seawater stage. In nature they will the eggs will be laid in fresh water, they will hatch, they will spend season in fresh water, and then they will undergo physiological change which is called smoltifying, smoltification, which is when they change so that they can go and live in seawater. So then they go down the rivers to the ocean, And then, yeah, in the normal life cycle, where they're not harvested, they will eventually come back on the freshwater to reproduce again.
Fed DeGobbi: Okay. And in an industrial farming situation, what happens instead?
Jose Puga: Yeah, so in industrial farming situation you have a stage in fresh water, which is usually done in tanks.
Fed DeGobbi: Okay, so this is on land?
Jose Puga: Yeah. Well, originally it was mostly done in the lakes. So if you go to the Yankee Bay Lake, you still see a couple of farms. There is like a schedule to take them out of the lakes because of the same pollution problems and the public perception of this problem as well. So now most of it is done on land in tanks. And then there's two main ways of doing it. One is the flow-through facilities, which basically take the water from the river and then they put it through the tanks and the water goes out of the tanks back and gets filtered to comply with the regulations and the quality of the water can go back into the river and the water goes back into the river and then follows through the downstream. The other way is the recirculation facilities, which are probably the biggest change in the industry in the last 10-15 years, where water gets recirculated on different amounts, usually around like 98%, 95%. And then you have a water treatment facility in the site which removes the solids and the ammonia and the CO2 and so on. And so you can reuse the water many times before discharging it. And then you have some benefits like the main original benefit was being able to control temperature. because fish are cold-blooded animals, so if you're able to control temperature, you can control growth, but also you can use well water, for example, like groundwater, because the amount of water you're using is much, much smaller, and you can have other sources of water.
Fed DeGobbi: And this on-land phase, how long, you said about a year, and then how long is the sea phase?
Jose Puga: Between 12, well, depending on the species, it could be around like nine months to 18 months. So depending on the type of salmon and also the temperature of the water. So if you go down south where the water is colder, it takes longer to grow. But yeah, so, you know, from egg to harvest, it can be anything between two and two and a half years.
Fed DeGobbi: That's, to be honest, that's longer than I expected.
Jose Puga: Yeah, yeah. No, it's a long cycle. So if anything happens in between, it's very difficult to plan.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah. Which goes back to the fact that there's no small…
Jose Puga: Yeah, exactly. There is a little bit of a market for buying smolts, like fish that are ready for sea, but usually the companies are kind of naturally forced to integrate vertically and they will grow their own fish from egg to harvest.
Fed DeGobbi: Staying on the technology for a little longer, I was wondering if it's applicable only to salmon or whether you work with other species?
Jose Puga: Yeah, well, it's applicable for all the aquatic species, to be honest. Here in Chile, it's all about salmon. There's no other, well, there's a few kind of experiments in the north with other species, but in terms of fish, it's 99.9% salmon. But we have been working with tilapia, which is a big industry worldwide, and shrimp. But yeah, any intensive culture will need oxygen. Shrimp is still quite extensive, especially in Latin America, if the main producer is Ecuador, of course, and it's still very extensive in the sense that you have large ponds that have very relatively few shrimp and they will just rely on environmental oxygen to survive, but there is always the incentive to put more shrimp into the pond, and if you put oxygen, you can do that. So we've been exploring, but it's not as developed as the salmon.
Fed DeGobbi: When I did some research in preparation for this, I was just looking at your background a bit. I think there's a couple of interesting things that you've done there. It'd be really cool to go through it. So, you're one of the co-founders, Chuukau. Yeah, perfect. But that started in 2018. What happened before that? And there was one thing that I have in my notes which caught my attention, which was the world's largest radio astronomy project in the Atacama Desert. I've got to ask you about this. Come on.
Jose Puga: Yeah, so I'm a civil mechanical engineer. That's my profession. That's what I studied in university. Like I said, I've always been attracted to technology. And ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, they do these things with the telescope names, where they do acronyms. And that was my first real proper job after university.
Fed DeGobbi: I see. And you started in Santiago?
Jose Puga: In Santiago, yeah. Yeah, I'm originally from Santiago, so that was, I think, around three years during the construction phase of the telescope. That was the largest radio telescope in the world at the time. I think it still is. There's larger projects, but they haven't been realized yet. And yeah, so I was part of the assembly integration and verifications team that received the antennas. These are like parabolic antennas like you see in the movies.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So those huge, like almost as big as a building type thing.
Jose Puga: Yeah, yeah, yeah. In this case, it was around I can remember it was around 60 or 90 antennas that you could move around an array, so you could put them all together to get different depths of vision into the universe, or you could put them apart by kilometers. It was interesting. The landscape was probably as different as it can get from what we see here.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, we should say we're in Puerto Varas, in your really cool office here, and we've got this view across the hills. You were saying in a good day you can see the volcanoes.
Jose Puga: You can see the lake. Well, you can kind of see the lake. Oh, yes. And over there you will see the volcano on a clear day, yeah. Sorno volcano.
Fed DeGobbi: The scenery is very green, there's a huge amount of forest and you've got the lake and it's very green. I guess there's a lot of rain coming through from the Pacific. whereas up in the Atacama is like Mars.
Jose Puga: No, up in the Atacama, the place where we live, because I worked in shifts, eight days on, six days off. I lived in Santiago, so I flew over every Wednesday. I flew either to work or back from work. The site was at 3,000 meters above sea level, so quite high. That's where we lived. The telescope itself was at 5,000 meters.
Fed DeGobbi: But you don't want to live at 5,000 meters, so… How do you cope with the altitude sickness? Yeah. Because if you're living in Santiago… Yeah, which is around 500 meters. 500 meters. And on a Wednesday, you go at 3,000. Yeah. And then telescope is at 5,000.
Jose Puga: Yeah.
Fed DeGobbi: Doesn't that mess with your body?
Jose Puga: I guess so. How old was it? I was younger.
Fed DeGobbi: You could take it.
Jose Puga: But yeah, whenever we worked at 5000, we used oxygen. So we carried an oxygen bottle and these tubes. Not only because you feel the altitude sickness, but the lack of oxygen messes with your judgment.
Fed DeGobbi: Sure, of course. Yeah, you can be a very good engineer.
Jose Puga: A safety thing, yeah, exactly. But we also had to take a physical test every year, I think, or every six months, I can't remember. And you could see your red blood cells count going up year over year, because you start to get adaptation. And so eventually we could, you know, people that started work were very tired all the time. Eventually we were playing football and everything at 3,000, not 5,000, but it was like just normal environment. It's like a training without… Yeah, I used to run a lot and that was probably my peak performance. Also, I was younger. But yeah, you know, like people who do kind of endurance sports, they always train in altitude because they train the capacity to use oxygen for performance.
Fed DeGobbi: That's fascinating. And was there anything… I mean, it must have been a hell of an experience. Is there anything that you've learned that you still think about?
Jose Puga: I think probably what they call the soft part of the work was more meaningful to me than the actual engineering part because I learned to work in an international environment, a multidisciplinary environment as well. We worked with astronomers as well as the engineers. different disciplines. So that was a really good experience for me to get exposure to. And I think it had, and you know, also like the high profile of the employer also helps. I'm sure when I applied to Cambridge, they took that into account. And so it opened doors. Yeah.
Fed DeGobbi: You mentioned Cambridge. Yeah. So what happened next?
Jose Puga: Yeah, so after a few years, I was kind of done with the shift schedule.
Fed DeGobbi: Well, you lasted three years. Yeah. Always doing that weekly schedule of flying up.
Jose Puga: Yeah. So, yeah, it was a good experience, but I didn't see myself doing that for the rest of my life. Of course.
Fed DeGobbi: And you must have been mid to late 20s back then?
Jose Puga: Yeah, I think I was 25 when I started.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah. So you're now 28.
Jose Puga: I was about 28 when I quit, yeah. Yeah, and then I started looking at what was next. I wasn't ready to look for… At that time you still looked for the job that was going to be your life for the next 20 years. Probably now it's a lot different. Nobody expects to be in one industry or one job for the rest of their lives. And I wasn't ready to do that. So I think also working in Alma kind of opened my eyes to the world. So I wanted the experience to live abroad more than, you know, learning something in particular or even like the place. I wanted that experience. So I applied to a bunch of programs. around the world. There was a scholarship program here in Chile that was pretty good. It was called Becas Chile, where they basically financed your postgraduate degree abroad. So I applied to a few places and I got into Cambridge. So yeah, I got married and so I went with my wife.
Fed DeGobbi: So you both traveled to Cambridge and spent some time there?
Jose Puga: And I did a one-year degree in Industrial Systems Manufacturing Management, which was another thing that I wanted to… In Alma, I quickly grew up to sort of, not management, but I was managing people, right? And that was really not a part of my professional degree, so I was I have a good way with people, but I have no tools, right? And so I wanted to study something more on the part of management and to have some tools for that. But mostly I wanted to live abroad.
Fed DeGobbi: Well, I mean, you managed to combine the two, right?
Jose Puga: So my wife and I, we moved to Cambridge. I studied for a year, then she got a scholarship to study as well, got into a program in Cambridge as well. and I got a job. So I worked in Cambridge for three years and that was, I still think that was the best job that I've ever had.
Fed DeGobbi: Really?
Jose Puga: Like, employed work with the Cambridge consultants. Great school. I think most of what I still apply in terms of product design and the way that I approach this kind of work comes from that school more than university.
Fed DeGobbi: That's fascinating. Tell me more about that. What was it that really stuck with you?
Jose Puga: Well, these guys had, I was, it was the people mostly, so Cambridge Consultant does, or did at the time, basically product development for Assa Consultants, so for other, for clients. And And anything from coffee pods for the Nespresso machine to really high-tech sensors for oil and gas. I know right now they're, of course, into artificial intelligence and quantum computing and really high-tech of whatever is happening at the moment. As a mechanical engineer, I was involved in the mechanical side of things, but I was always working with physicists, electrical engineers, electronic engineers, programmers, software development, and so on. And it was just the level of creativity of the people that worked there. the way to approach problems that are like on the edge of human knowledge. Yeah, it really did a lot for my professional development.
Fed DeGobbi: And you must have seen and you must have been put into contexts and situations that were dramatically different one from the other.
Jose Puga: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Fed DeGobbi: So stretching the limit of what you know and what you can
Jose Puga: Yeah, like I said, I work with, you know, a lot of these projects never made it to the market, but as a consultant, I didn't really care much about that because my job was to deliver on the project and many times the clients were, you know, like technology or marketing technology departments for the companies and they wanted to have these projects in their portfolio, but not necessarily all of them made it to the market. But I worked in coffee pods for a European coffee company, developing the most espresso-like drink for a certain technology platform for making coffee. And I also worked for oil and gas companies doing borehole sensors that go into the oil wells and measure a bunch of different parameters and other things in between.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, that's amazing. Was there any interesting, funny story that you still tell people at dinner parties from that time?
Jose Puga: Well, everything was pretty confidential, so I couldn't tell a lot of what I was doing there, but… That must have made you even cooler.
Fed DeGobbi: Sorry man, I can't tell you.
Jose Puga: Yeah, I don't know. I think, well, I was married at the time, so I didn't use the stories as much as I did when I was the telescope, you know. Talking about the stars and stuff. That had another twist to it.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, definitely. Look, I want to ask you about the market thing, because as I'm sure it's top of mind for you now as an entrepreneur, developing a product for which there is no market is pretty pointless. But as a consultant, if a company came to you and said, look, we want a compostable coffee pot that tastes of mint, would they at that point know whether there was a market for this thing or not? and was at any point part of your job to worry about that? Or you just delivered on the specifics and then it was their problem if there was a market or not?
Jose Puga: For me, at the level of seniority that I had at the time, it was of no consequence. We had a bunch of technical specifications that we needed to deliver. And we stuck to them and it was up to the client to see if that had any sense for the consumer, if it was a consumer good or for the industry, if it was an industrial product. And yeah, I think I wasn't really exposed to the need to market anything until I became an entrepreneur, which was a big challenge for me because But I think it has also changed in the way that they are teaching engineering right now in my same university. I never took a course in sales, for example. So sales, marketing, business was never… Well, business, yeah, like finance and that kind of stuff, but not on the front end of how do you do a marketing plan or how do you approach a sales meeting or anything. How do you assess the market? I didn't have any training on that.
Fed DeGobbi: How did that, obviously you're using the past tense, how did that transition go?
Jose Puga: I still haven't had any proper training, but of course it was a hard transition. When we started with Tomás, my partner, the company is officially called Chucao Technology Consultants.
Fed DeGobbi: Right.
Jose Puga: And we thought, we haven't touched on that period of my professional life, but I was, my job Before this, I was managing a project for a circulation facility for salmon for the freshwater stage.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, so that's sea land aquaculture. And so we've got to say that you basically moved back from Cambridge to Chile.
Jose Puga: Yeah. So, well, if we go on with the story, I was in Cambridge working for Cambridge Consultants. I had studied in Cambridge with a scholarship from Corfo, which is the Chilean development agency. And I needed to come back to the country to basically repay the scholarship. Not in cash, but the commitment was that you had to come back.
Fed DeGobbi: Bring your skills and yeah, yeah, yeah. That's an interesting way to do it. I mean, from their point of view, that's a really smart way to do it.
Jose Puga: Yeah, I think it's worked really well for the country as well. Especially in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, if you talk to the people that are in the ecosystem, chances are that they, at some point, went out, studied with these scholarships, and came back. That's really cool. I'm sure. I haven't seen any proper measurements of the impact that it has had on the country, but I'm pretty sure that they are pretty high. in terms of impact.
Fed DeGobbi: And I mean, you're still here, so obviously you, then Chile obviously gained from that experience that you brought back in.
Jose Puga: I like to think that it did, yeah. But when we moved back, my first son was born in the UK. We moved back, we didn't have a house, we didn't have a job. So we said, OK, it's the time to decide where we want to live, because we are free, right? We don't have any constraints. And we came here because we liked the idea of living more in nature, in a smaller place, with a slower pace, and so on.
Fed DeGobbi: Rather than going back to Santiago.
Jose Puga: Rather than going back to Santiago.
Fed DeGobbi: I can see the appeal. I mean, I've only been here a couple of days, but it's stunning.
Jose Puga: It was also, there was an incentive from Corfo to move to the regions rather than Santiago. So if you moved to any place other than Santiago, the period that you had to stay in the country was shorter, which didn't have any consequence on the long run. But it also came to our minds that, you know, if we come here and it doesn't work out, we only need to stay here for a year and we can move somewhere else.
Fed DeGobbi: So it could have been just an experience. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. What would have happened if you didn't come back?
Jose Puga: I would probably still be working for KEMET Consultants.
Fed DeGobbi: I like to think. No, that's fair enough. But in terms of the deal that you had with Corfu? If we didn't come back, yeah.
Jose Puga: Well, in legal terms, I think I would have had to pay back the money that they put. And that's a lot of money.
Fed DeGobbi: Okay, I think you've done a good job of covering the whole story, and we're now getting to the founding of Chukaotec. So basically it started as a consultancy.
Jose Puga: Yeah. So I ended up here, started working for this Porcelain Agriculture as kind of chief engineer for project management. And I was doing all these like improvement projects and expansion projects and so on. My idea was that I could do that externally for more companies, right? Kind of the push that gave me the reason to resign as an employee and try to do this was my second daughter. It was making it very difficult for me to balance family and work. The fact that I was working like 100 kilometers south from here. So I was driving every day one hour south, one hour back.
Fed DeGobbi: One hour south from here? Yeah.
Jose Puga: Where was that? In Pargua.
Fed DeGobbi: That's where you take the ferry to the… Yeah, I was gonna ask you, because the road doesn't go far. Well, it's 85 kilometers. Yeah, so you have to take one ferry?
Jose Puga: No, no, but not to work. So when the road ended, that was where the hatchery was.
Fed DeGobbi: Right. So before on the Carretera Austral.
Jose Puga: It's on the other side. Towards Chiloé. Yeah. So I was basically, when I was at work, I was worthless for the family because I couldn't pick up my son from school or if he was ill, I couldn't stay home for my wife to be able to do her job as well. So I said, OK, I need some flexibility and I'm sure I can do this as an external consultancy company for… And I met Tomás around that time. Both of our wives were pregnant. He was coming back from the UK as well. He had the idea of doing consultancy in the sort of sustainability area. We thought, you know, let's help each other out, basically. So we started the company as a consultancy, started trying to sell consultancy services. It didn't work.
Fed DeGobbi: Why not? Because I mean, from where I'm standing, it sounds like a good idea. I mean, you were doing that for an employer. You're now saying, well, I can do the same thing by myself, offering the service as an external. Why did it not work?
Jose Puga: So the few projects that we did sell, I think we spent like five times more hours selling them than doing them. And so it just, it was not financially viable for us. But it worked out in the sense that because we talked to a lot of people trying to sell a consultancy, we learned a lot about the issues and the problems of the industry. But eventually, we saw that we had to have a service or a product that we could repeatedly sell. Because developing something like, let's say, the quotation process took a lot of the development hours, and then it was already developed and nobody was going to pay you for that time, right? So you needed like a… Whereas if you solve that again and again, then it could work. And that's how we started doing the Civil Remediation Service, because originally we thought, you know, we know about the problem, we know what the solution can be, let's tell people and they can they can do it and we will just help them as consultants but yeah it was not like economically it wasn't very positive for us because once you teach people to do it then how do you sell it again And also the companies didn't have the inner capacity to do it themselves, even if you sold them the equipment or whatever. So we saw at some point in the late 2018, we started in January, and around December we said, you know, let's just go all in and develop this as a service and sell it as a service, like a turnkey solution.
Fed DeGobbi: Instead of telling people how to do it, you would just say… Instead of doing like the consultancy thing… You would just say, okay, here's the hardware and this is how to use it, essentially.
Jose Puga: Yeah, and that never worked like that in seeder remediation. We never sold a consultancy service for seeder remediation. But every single farmer that we talked to had the same issue. So we realized that there was potential there. And then what happened? And then, yeah, we started developing the hardware. Initially, we started with third-party hardware, so we didn't develop our own nanowire technology until later. We bought a bunch of machines that were available in the market, and we developed the hardware in terms of everything else that had to go in there. Pumps, hoses, see-bed diffusers, so on. and the regulation part of it. So a lot of the time that it took us from late 2018 until 2020 when we went commercial was due to the fact that we had to get like a resolution from the fisheries department. to be able to apply this service into the CDEP. And that took around about a year to get the first permission. At that time, you had to get a permission for every single site. So every single site that you wanted to work for, you had to apply for this resolution, and it would take anything between… The first one took one year, and then it would take anything between three to six months.
Fed DeGobbi: And that's not the case anymore?
Jose Puga: No, because when we started in 2020, there was no competition. Everybody wanted to work with us. We started with one or two sites. At the peak of the demand, we had eight sites going simultaneously. And in 2022, I also believe that it was because we were doing this successfully and it was working for the salmon farmers, it was working for the environment because we were being successful in recovering the seabed under the sites. the fisheries department released a general resolution that regulated the activity. So they said basically any company that can demonstrate that they are doing silver remediation, they even spoke about nanobubbles, this and this and this way, they can sign up in a register of companies allowed to do this and they can do it without having to undergo this three to six month process. Now you basically, if you're in this list, you just need to announce that you are doing remediation in one site a couple of weeks in advance and you're good to go.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, and then you just turn up and do it.
Jose Puga: Yeah. And so after that, in about 6 to 12 months after this resolution, there was 8 companies doing the same thing. And now I think there's around 12. So the good thing was that when we started, we were using third-party technology. We were still looking at other applications for nanobubble technology, but like I said, the hardware was too expensive. It was energy hungry, so it used a lot of energy, so that becomes a cost, of course. and we ran into difficulties with our suppliers and so we started developing our own version. Our thought at the time was everybody was talking about how many nanobubbles per milliliter they were making, how small the bubbles were, but there was no evidence that making I don't know, a billion nanowatts per milliliter was better than making 500 million. And so we said, you know, let's try stuff out and see if the sieve that remediates as quickly with maybe less. Because at the time we thought, you know, it's going to be very difficult to catch up with a level of development that these companies have. So we started trying stuff. And the other thing was reliability. So the main problem with the hardware that we had from other companies that are now our competitors, was reliability on the field. So they would get clogged, the seawater would corrode stuff and so on.
Fed DeGobbi: And these are all companies from around here or global? No, no, no.
Jose Puga: So we work with a big North American company. I'm not going to say the name, but yeah. You Google and you will find it.
Fed DeGobbi: Okay, okay. What have been the most difficult moments in your journey with Chukau Tech as an entrepreneur or as a person?
Jose Puga: Yeah, every month around this time, you need to pay salaries.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah.
Jose Puga: Now, I think for sure the most difficult moments were at the beginning, because I basically ran with no income for about two years, which was a strain for my family. It was a personal strain for my, you know, anything from my self-esteem to like being able to, you know, for my mind to be at rest that I'm able to provide for. I had, like I said, I had a newborn daughter. And it was, yeah, it was hard. I remember that when just a couple of months before we started with the commercial service, we already had the clients. They were waiting for us, but we didn't have this resolution from the Fisheries Department. And it was, you know, every month was, yeah, maybe next month, maybe next month, and so on. And around November, I told Tomás, if nothing happens by the end of January, I'm going to start. Yeah, this is it. I need to find a job because I can i can't keep this up and yeah it was maybe two weeks before the end of january that we got the uh the resolution and then everything started flowing but yeah then then of course there's been challenges there's always challenges but it's it but it's It's not been as close to the end as it was before it even started.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, it's almost like a constant stress, constant reminder that it could just, everything could just end tomorrow.
Jose Puga: And then at the beginning, you know, we've never done, like doing maritime services, like services at sea, has a lot of challenges. I've had everything from, you know, personnel issues where people that are living like 14 months, 14 days on a small vessel with, you know, not a lot of space. There is fights and stuff. The sailor mentality is a special mentality as well. Calls in the middle of the night that the boat is stuck in a sandbank or whatever. Yeah. That was a lot in the beginning when we were gaining experience with this. And it's 24-7. It doesn't stop. So that was very challenging, especially in the beginning. Now it's more we got a hold of it and it's become easier.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah. I guess you learn more from those moments than you learn from the good ones. And I was going to ask you, what sort of advice would you give to an entrepreneur or even a younger engineer that wants to follow your steps and do something similar? They're passionate about technology. They're passionate about engineering. They're passionate, perhaps, about the ocean. And they want to do something. perhaps in an entrepreneurial fashion, you know, bring a solution. What would be your advice?
Jose Puga: When I talk to people, I always tell them about this, like whether they should or should not be entrepreneurs. And a lot of times the limitation that they see is that I don't have this great idea or I don't have this great sense of purpose. And there is a lot of you know, if you go into social media and of course what you see there is the bigger faces and the bigger purposes and the greatest success stories and so on, but behind them there's millions like us that don't necessarily have this world-changing purpose, but we at least move in the right direction. That's what I feel. And also, when you start, that sense of purpose doesn't necessarily converge with the kind of ideas that you come up with. But if you don't start, you're not going to know. And so when I talk to younger people, for me, it would have been so much easier to do it before I was a father, right? Because the kind of commitments that I had to my family weighed on me at the beginning, especially, and it was so hard to balance that. And so, you know, many people will tell you, like, you know, build your career first, learn from the industry. I don't think I learned a lot of, like the things that I learned from the industry, they are valuable, but they're not necessarily the things that have allowed me to, I don't like to use the word succeed because that's like the end of, to keep alive, right?
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Survive.
Jose Puga: To survive, yeah. Survival is a success, I guess.
Fed DeGobbi: Indeed, yeah.
Jose Puga: Yeah.
Fed DeGobbi: So you wouldn't, if you had to do it all over again, you'd do it sooner?
Jose Puga: I would do it sooner. Yeah, for me, it's the thing, the question I ask myself when we ask ourselves with Tomás, when we are going to a new territory or new industries, it's not like, yeah, there needs to be a mission and a purpose and so on. Is it aligned? That's the easy question. The most difficult one is, are we going to be able to do it better than the rest of the people? Because if not, just let somebody else do it. And that's what I feel is like the big sense of purpose. Yeah, it's a big banner and it keeps you focused in the right direction. But really just find the thing that you're good at and try to align it to that purpose. That's what's going to be valuable, I think.
Fed DeGobbi: And I take your point, it doesn't need to be this massive thing. It doesn't need to be necessarily that when you're starting, you're starting the thing that you will be doing for the rest of your life and that's your life purpose. Basically start small, start with something that can move the needle in the right direction.
Jose Puga: Yeah, just make sure that the needle is pointing in the right direction. So yeah, I don't have a very high opinion of people putting all this effort in the next, well, it's not anymore, but there was a time where everybody was doing like delivery apps and online retail sales and stuff. And I was like, what? We don't need that. Yeah, what's the point? But still, people buy it and the market doesn't necessarily prefer things that are better for everyone. So for me, it's just make sure that you're pointing in the right direction and then just exploit what you do best. Because if not, it's very difficult to succeed. You need to be better than the rest of the offer out there.
Fed DeGobbi: I know that you recently won an award in Dubai for your innovation. And you were in Valencia in Spain last month, and you were in Norway for Aquanor. So how has been your experience of representing a Latin American startup globally? Is that something that is even in your mind, or you don't really think about that?
Jose Puga: Not too much, to be honest. Yeah, we've won a bunch of awards over the last couple of years. That was by design, to be honest. Because before that, we did very little marketing. Our clients are, you know, down the road. We knock on doors and we… pick up the phone and we can reach. There's only like, I think, around 17 salmon farmers in Chile, so you could talk to all of them in a week. So we didn't think that we needed to do a lot of marketing, but then we started growing. We started looking at Europe, some industries in Europe, other industries. We wanted to see also, like, if there was a pull from other industries, from the technology, and we realized that nobody knew about us. And so, you know, the knocking on doors is not very efficient. Like I said, I'm a mechanical engineer and Tomas is a lawyer. We had no training in marketing. On 2024, we brought someone in that had for communications and marketing. And one of the things that we saw an opportunity in doing was applying to all these awards. And I got to say, much to my surprise, we started winning some of them. But the point was getting visibility. Right? So the awards in itself, they don't… Well, the one in Dubai carried a little bit of cash, so that was nice. But in general, they're just a recognition. And what they give you is visibility and, to some extent, validation. So the first one we won was the Aquaculture Awards in Scotland last year. And that put us in the space of the European salmon industry. So, you know, when you go and talk to somebody and you mention the company name, And it's funny because the company name is very Chilean. The Chukau is a Chilean bird. Oh, is it? It's very difficult to pronounce. My father told me, don't use that name because someday you're going to go international. But, you know, when you when you go and talk to somebody abroad and they already know, oh, you were the one that won this award in Scotland, it opens the door and accelerates the conversation as well. Right. So, yeah. Personally, I don't think about, you know, I'm like the ambassador of this Chilean technology abroad. We are just trying to grow and trying to make as much impact as we can. Yeah, Valencia and Aquanur are more like commercial efforts. We were in Valencia because When I went to Aquanur, I was just visiting. We have a commercial director in Europe, Bob, who lives in the Netherlands. Aquanur is a huge exhibition. It's expensive to exhibit, so we went there as attendees. It's so big that in three days we weren't able to talk to everybody that we wanted to talk to. but Valencia is a smaller, it's a conference, it has an exhibition on the side, it's a smaller exhibition, it's less expensive to exhibit, and also a lot of people that attend there are not necessarily salmon farmers, so there's a lot of farming of other species in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Turkey, yeah, Germany, Poland.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah. So it's a bit of exposure to other markets.
Jose Puga: Yeah. So that's why we went to Valencia. And we've done a bunch of exhibitions on the agricultural side as well. So that's our effort to get out there and put the product in front of the buyer and get visibility for the company.
Fed DeGobbi: What do you find is the most difficult thing in getting that visibility and going out there?
Jose Puga: Well, in many cases, this technology is not something that people know that they need. So it's a slow process. The sales cycle is so long. And it begins with an education of the buyer. So, for example, in salmon for breathing oxygen for the fish, everybody knows they need oxygen. There are other oxygen injection systems and this is a better one.
Fed DeGobbi: And it's a regulatory requirement.
Jose Puga: For the seabird remediation it's a regulatory requirement.
Fed DeGobbi: So it's a no-brainer.
Jose Puga: In Chile, it's not the same regulation in Norway or Canada or Scotland, and so the conversations are different. But when you go into the agro-industry, for example, farmers know that they need air in the soil, but they've never done anything to put the air in the soil. It just happens. Or they till it, right? They turn the soil around to aerate it. This is not an input that they knew that they needed. And so it takes a lot of time to educate on this and then, you know, create the awareness, the need, and eventually the urgency and the sale. I've got to say, we haven't done all the work in that sense. The competition has also been great in terms of pushing on the same direction and creating a market that wasn't there before. Because 10 years ago, there was no market for nanobubbles. If you went and have a nanobubble device, nobody was going to come and buy it.
Fed DeGobbi: So you need to go out and… So in a way, it's good that the competition is also going out there and making a case for it, because then it creates the market, rather than you single-handedly trying to… Yeah, exactly.
Jose Puga: I've got to say that we've reading that way, because we're much smaller still than our biggest competitor. And so they've spent a lot of effort in that marketing. Yeah.
Fed DeGobbi: But hey, you're winning all the awards.
Jose Puga: Ah, there's a lot of awards going along, to be honest.
Fed DeGobbi: Two relatively quick things that I wanted to check with you. What are the advantages and disadvantages of being here for you? I mean, one that comes to mind, obviously, you're close to your salmon industry customers. Is there any other advantage in being in Chile, specifically? And, or disadvantages?
Jose Puga: Yeah, so for our initial line of business, so working with the salmon farmers in seabed remediation, this was and is the perfect place because, well, we worked with the regulatory agencies, we already know the space. Like I said, our clients are down the road in Puerto Montt, 15 minutes from here. The region is technologically advanced enough that we can build things here, we can manufacture things here.
Fed DeGobbi: So the supply chain is good?
Jose Puga: The supply chain is doable and it also makes sense in terms of cost. It's not a huge disadvantage that we need to import some of the materials that we are then transforming. The salmon industry has built a supply chain as well. So you have, I don't know, like 15 flights going into Puerto Montt. Puerto Montt is the second busiest airport in Chile after Santiago.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, and for people that don't know, Puerto Montt is like an aquaculture hub. Not just for Chile, but also for South America in general.
Jose Puga: Yeah, for the world. We are the second largest salmon producer after Norway. Salmon is our second export product by value after copper. And probably 95% of the salmon that is produced goes out by air in the airport. And so the connectivity is good. It's not that we are isolated. But having said that, once you start looking at other industries, yeah, it's not a huge advantage. Like for agriculture, for example, there is a lot of agriculture here, but they don't irrigate because there's a lot of rain. And so, yeah, it becomes a little bit more uncomfortable to be here and not in the central region, for example, if we're talking about agriculture in Chile. We do have an office in California, we have one sales rep over there, and we have a person in Europe, so yeah, we're not doing everything from here. On the other hand, Puerto Varas has become kind of an entrepreneurial hub, Especially after the pandemic, like I said, a lot of people came to live here attracted by the environment, not necessarily by the opportunities, but today it's increasingly easier to live wherever you want, regardless of what you're doing. And there's people trying to cash on the attractiveness of the environment, even to make it a reason to be here. So companies are basically saying, you know, if you work for us, you can come and live in this beautiful place. And so it's like one of their benefits.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it makes sense. It's a bit like Silicon Valley, you know. If you live there, you get California.
Jose Puga: So the ecosystem is not as developed as in the Silicon Valley, but eventually I think it will, because right now one of the issues is that universities are very few and not top rated, but that's probably going to change within the next 20 years. If you start seeing a lot of talent here, they want to send their children to a good university. There's going to be an incentive for them to move here. And so there's something happening. And we like it here. So we get a lot of questions like this, especially from the mining industry, because the mining industry, of course, is in the north of Chile, in the desert, or most of it is. There's like a natural urge to be close. But when you put it down in numbers, it's not entirely necessary, I don't think. Because right now, if I need to go to Antovagasta, for example, up north, I can be there in four hours by plane.
Fed DeGobbi: So it's, yeah, it's connected, well, it's well connected. It's well connected, yeah. And does, I mean, you lived in the UK and so you know how relatively easy it is to start a company there, you know, and, you know, the sort of business infrastructure makes it relatively easy to operate as an entrepreneur. Does Chile feel like it's a good place to start a business? Is it easy enough to incorporate a company? It's super easy.
Jose Puga: Well, I was never an entrepreneur in the UK, but I'm going to guess that it may be easier. You can start a company in a day. The banking system is good. It's easy to work. It's modern. Internet connectivity is great. I don't think that's a limitation. I think, yeah, like I mentioned ecosystems, of course in Cambridge the ecosystem was, you know, it's like they call it like the Silicon Fen as opposed to Silicon Valley, but it's like a hub for technology innovation as well. When I was in Cambridge, if I wanted to, you know, find a supplier for whatever, like high-tech material or like really specific high precision machining or whatever it was in a 15 mile radius here is not as developed and so it makes it a little bit harder when you're trying to find specific things or even like recruit specific abilities and so on it's more difficult and it will be the same maybe less so in Santiago but still not the same as Cambridge or San Francisco or whatever but yeah If we all move away and say, you know, the conditions are not the best here, so we are going to establish our companies in the UK or the US or wherever, then it will never get developed. And so there is also an incentive and a sense of pride, which was what we were trying to tell with the name. you know, we come from here and we're proud of it. And so, and there is also a sense of purpose of, you know, we can do like deep tech and things that can have an impact in the world and even like in highly developed economies from the south of Chile.
Fed DeGobbi: And I guess, like you say, there are enough positives to make it worth it.
Jose Puga: Yeah, no, the positives are there, there's limitations, but I haven't seen that those limitations and difficulties have weigh us down or made us less competitive, I don't think.
Fed DeGobbi: And you know, sometimes constraints and limitations can be the trigger for innovation and creativity. Would you recommend entrepreneurs that are not necessarily from Chile to move here and to set up shop here? Yeah, that's an interesting one.
Jose Puga: Well, of course, if we're trying to solve a problem that is here and your customer base is here, I would say, yes, it's doable. I think it can be a little bit daunting to try and work the system if you are from somewhere else. And that happens if I go to the UK or any part of Europe. Still, there's a learning process of who does what and so on. But it's doable. It's not impossible. But yeah, if your customer base is somewhere else, it's difficult. I don't know. Like I said, there are some companies that have most of their clients are not here and they are selling They're recruiting with the theme of, you know, come and live in this beautiful place. It's still a hard sell, I think, but it will get better. If a lot of people that have high expectations of a health system, a school system, a university system, come and live here, there will be development and eventually I think it can become a hub that attracts people from other parts of the world, of Chile and the world, to come and start their companies here. The potential is here, it's just a lot of stuff to figure out.
Fed DeGobbi: And it's possibly still early days, and I guess you can feel that. But at the same time, personally, I find it quite energizing to be in a place that is going somewhere, that things are happening, becoming something a bit. Are you talking to anybody in the biotech hub? Tell me more about the Biotech Hub.
Jose Puga: Yeah, there is a formal thing called the Biotech Hub in Puerto Varas.
Fed DeGobbi: That's its formal, that's the official name, Biotech Hub?
Jose Puga: Yeah, Patagonia Biotech Hub. Our neighbors in this same floor, they are part of this hub and many of them have to do something to do with the salmon industry or dairy farms or stuff like that, but a lot of them don't and they are still here. And they're here because it's a nice place to live. And they believe that we can develop this place as a hub of innovation.
Fed DeGobbi: Attract enough talent. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, I didn't know them. I'll reach out to them for sure.
Jose Puga: And there's some things happening, like if you go to Fruity… Have you been to Fruity Yard yet?
Fed DeGobbi: No.
Jose Puga: So if you go to Frutillar, which is Puerto Vallarta, then Yanquibe, which is the town you see down here. One town up north is Frutillar. Frutillar has a theater called the Teatro del Lago, like the lake theater, which sits on the lake. You need to go there. It's beautiful. This is a world-class theater. Like, you go there, it's really world-class. The acoustics, they have… People coming from the best orchestras and ballet and opera in the world, they are coming here. Why? Because somebody built the theatre, right? It was philanthropy, but it happened and it's happening and it's become hub for music. So yeah, it just depends on the will of somebody.
Fed DeGobbi: To build the theatre. Exactly. That's a really cool concept.
Jose Puga: Yeah, and these guys with the Patagonia Biotech Hub, I think they're on to the same kind of stuff. You know, we can build Biotech Hub here in Puerto Varas, regardless of whether our customer base is here, or even like the talent pool is here, or we can bring people in.
Fed DeGobbi: It can be done.
Jose Puga: It can be done, yeah.
Fed DeGobbi: I think this is probably a good time to wrap this up. Is there anything that you are particularly passionate about or interested in that you wanted to talk about that we haven't mentioned yet?
Jose Puga: Regarding the oceans, yeah, I've become increasingly worried about the situation with the oceans and coming back on that sense of purpose. So about two years ago I started reading about the, you know, how these forever chemicals and microplastics and so on are basically killing life on the oceans. And that was even after I started working with the seabed remediation, which was for me like a very particular problem of one particular industry. When I started reading about this, I think I was depressed for like two or three months when I saw like the level of damage that we've done on the oceans and how gloomy the future seems to be on that sense. But yeah. going back on that purpose, eventually I realized, you know, I'm not going to solve this single-handedly, so just make sure that I'm at least pointing in the right direction, right? So, of course, if I can do more, I'll do it, but at least keeping the focus on the right direction of improving, you know, and not just doing stuff because it could be a good business, it could be good money, maybe, but you know, at this point we cannot be indifferent and just do stuff because we like it or it could be profitable. Needless to say, if you are, you know, rowing on the wrong direction and the stuff you're doing are hurting the planet more, yeah. But even like being indifferent and doing stuff that, you know, it's just for entertainment or whatever, we are beyond the point where we cannot stay indifferent. And it doesn't mean that you need to have that great idea that will save the world, but at least, you know, go on the right direction.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah. Is that almost like a code or a filter that you keep in the back of your mind in running your business, that it needs to align with those values and you need to push in the right direction?
Jose Puga: Yeah. Alignment, you know, like alignment on the same exact direction, but just keep it, keep it on the right side of the aisle, right? Because of course you're, everybody's worried about their individual problems and we all need to feed our families and, and so on. But yeah, just being completely indifferent or of course going on the wrong direction is just, we are beyond the point where that's, we cannot, we cannot do this anymore.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah. Jose, that was a really cool conversation. Thanks so much for your time and hosting me here. This has been the best view I've ever had in an interview. This is going to be hard to beat.
Jose Puga: Yeah, so we didn't talk about the office, but yeah, it has a story.
Fed DeGobbi: If you want to tell it, I mean, I've got time.
Jose Puga: Yeah, it's the offices. So last year we were on the peak of seedbed remediation or well, actually, you know, two years ago, like I said, there was a regulatory change. At some point, we were 65 people in the company and working in this office, we had 25. And right now we are 13. 15 overall. So we externalized all the operational logistics of the seabed remediation and reduced the headcount. That was super painful. We didn't keep the subject of what were the challenging times. That was one of the challenging times. About a year ago, we had to make really tough decisions. And so, you know, the office seems a little bit empty right now, but yeah, it's got this great view and eventually as we go into other industries, I think we're gonna fill it up again. It's just this rollercoaster of entrepreneurship. You know, they teach you about the valley, the valley of death, you know, the death valley of, yeah, but it's the same as like in real life when you're climbing a mountain that you think you've reached the summit and there's, you're still climbing.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, so there's potentially more than one valley of death.
Jose Puga: Yeah, it's not smooth.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, cool. Thanks for that. Just to close it off, do you have any final message, call to action? Do you want to point people to any resource or website in particular?
Jose Puga: Well, everybody's welcome to check out our website, Chukaotec.com. But no, one of the things that I enjoy about what I'm doing right now is meeting new people. So I'm always open for a conversation. I don't use a lot of social media. I just have my LinkedIn. I'm not on Instagram or Facebook, but do find me on LinkedIn. And if you want to have a chat, I always think that my personal greatest resource is the network that I can build. I always think that if my company doesn't work out in the long run, at least I've got my network. So, yeah.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, that's a really good point.
Jose Puga: I'm happy to chat in person or online.
Fed DeGobbi: Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes. It's got to be said that on LinkedIn, you're Jose P. I have no idea what my… I know because I struggled to find you a couple of times. All right. You gotta put the P in. So we'll put a link on the channels. Thank you so much, Jose. All right.