Emma Ulveland: 00:32

Hello everyone and welcome back to Work It, a UVic career exploration podcast. On this season of the show, we're talking with amazing UVic alumni who are making a huge splash in the working world and have some incredible career trajectories. We also talk to knowledgeable career educators who offer advice on how to find or create a career that you love.

Emma Ulveland: 00:53

I'm your host, Emma, and a fun fact about me this week is that I really got into liking seafood when I started eating sushi, which happened once I moved to Victoria. So that's a little bit about me, and now I'm hungry. I'm gonna pass it over to my wonderful co host, Katy.

Katy DeCoste: 01:11

Hi, everyone. My name is Katy, and it's great to be back with all of you. If we're going on food-themed fun facts, I am also a big sushi appreciator, and my absolute favorite is a salmon roll. Nothing like it. Before we jump into today's conversation, I want to acknowledge that at least Emma and I today are recording at the University of Victoria, which is located on the traditional territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən Peoples.

Katy DeCoste: 01:39

We want to extend our gratitude for being here as uninvited guests on this land and want to acknowledge the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSANEC Peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.

Emma Ulveland: 01:51

On today's episode, we are super excited to connect with Ashley and Robert Roulston, siblings, UVic graduates and business partners who cofounded Industrial Plankton in 2010, the same year that Ashley graduated from UVic with a Bachelor of Commerce specializing in entrepreneurship. Ashley was a member of UVic's women's golf team and was named one of BC Business Magazine's top 30 under 30 and is now the chief marketing officer at Industrial Plankton. Robert holds a Bachelor in Science and Biology from McGill University and a Bachelor of Engineering and Mechanical Engineering from the University of Victoria. He combined his passion for aquatic organisms with his background in industrial automation to create technology that produces quality live algae, a bottleneck for many industries. Welcome to the show, Ashley and Robert.

Emma Ulveland: 02:40

We're so excited to have you here today.

Robert Roulston: 02:42

Thanks for having us.

Ashley Roulston: 02:44

Thank you.

Katy DeCoste: 02:45

So as you may have noticed from our introductions, Emma and I do not have science backgrounds. In fact, between us, I think we have 3 English degrees. So right off the bat, I would love to just dig into the algae of it all, and I'm hoping that you guys can share with us how algae is used in different industries and how industrial plankton is addressing that need working in that space.

Robert Roulston: 03:10

The 2 major industries that use it are aquaculture and then biotechnology. So aquaculture uses it to feed their baby animals. It ends up being the foundation of the marine industries. If you're feeding shellfish or shrimp or, you know, marine finfish, that type of thing. Definitely on the shellfish side, we've done very well.

Robert Roulston: 03:30

So we're in half of the shellfish hatcheries in North America use our equipment. And so if you're eating an oyster or a mussel, especially here in Victoria, there's a very good chance that it started its life being fed on what got output from our equipment for the 1st two weeks of its life. You guys are talking about your love for sushi.

Katy DeCoste: 03:49

So we have you to thank.

Robert Roulston: 03:51

And then biotechnology uses it to do all kinds of stuff, whether it's making medicine or fertilizer or feeding baby honeybees, all kinds of strange things. And so we help them by providing the piece of technology that just pumps out the algae they need very reliably, which is a tricky part of the process.

Emma Ulveland: 04:12

I didn't realize that there was such a diverse need for algae. That's really interesting. And I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about that technology you were mentioning. What is it and how do you use it and what does it mean for all of these different industries that you're providing to?

Ashley Roulston: 04:30

So we manufacture equipment called LG photobioreactors. It's essentially a biological process happening in something called a bioreactor. And we provide this equipment to mainly shellfish hatcheries, shrimp hatcheries, and they use it to feed their baby animals for the first life stages. There's also a lot of our clients in the biotech sector, and they can be anything imaginable. That's what we make, LG photo bioreactors.

Katy DeCoste: 04:55

Very cool. I love hearing the sheer number of places that something like this can be applied. It's definitely goes a lot further than I would have anticipated, but I wanna do a little rewind. So it's 2010. It's the era of colorful jeans and, like, mustache tattoos.

Katy DeCoste: 05:13

And, Ashley, you're finishing your commerce degree, focusing in entrepreneurship. And, Robert, you are getting close to finishing up your bachelor of mechanical engineering. At that time, how did the 2 of you put your brains together and come up with this idea and start industrial plankton?

Ashley Roulston: 05:31

I didn't know what I wanted to do a degree in, so I was in the general pre business type of classes on the golf team, as you mentioned earlier. So I was naturally slightly better at hanging out with humans than Robert, the more inventor engineer was. But we knew that he was a mastermind and had brilliant ideas. And Robert knew that he needed a good business partner. So he encouraged me to do the business degree, the entrepreneurship specialization.

Ashley Roulston: 05:57

So that's what we did. And I think since day 1, we just knew we were gonna start something out of this. We weren't exactly sure what it was, but

Robert Roulston: 06:04

I wanted to save the world. I actually wanted to make a lot of money between the 2 of us. She's amazing with people, and I'm really good with technology. Yeah. Just made sense.

Ashley Roulston: 06:12

That's how we got started.

Emma Ulveland: 06:14

That's fantastic. And clearly, your collaboration and partnership has sustained into something pretty extensive. So I wonder if you could tell our listeners what working with a partner is like and maybe if there's any advice you'd give to students who are looking to collaborate on entrepreneurship ideas.

Robert Roulston: 06:36

If you're not siblings, then definitely lay your share structure out ahead of time. I've seen so many situations that everything's fine in the beginning, but once something starts to be worth money, you lose some friends over that. Get everything clearly laid out ahead of time.

Ashley Roulston: 06:51

I heard a good one. It's not an agreement that you're signing. It's more of a disagreement that you only have to bring up the things that you're signing when there's a disagreement. So I think that's pretty funny whoever came up with that. Yeah.

Katy DeCoste: 07:01

It's like a prenup. Yeah.

Robert Roulston: 07:04

I was very lucky with Ashley, and there's obviously an intrinsic trust there being family.

Ashley Roulston: 07:09

I'd say for forming your team, once you know you wanna do it, choose people with complementary skill sets, not the same skill sets because then why are you bringing them onto the team? Like Robert and I, we're all going towards the same goals even if we don't have the same skills at all. So it's nice knowing that he's got my back for these type of tasks, and I've got his back for other type of tasks to get everything done.

Robert Roulston: 07:29

That's a really good point because you tend to gravitate towards people that you understand. But sometimes the people that are the exact opposite to you, they're the right people for the task. They're not the people that you gravitate towards. So

Katy DeCoste: 07:41

I think that touches on something so important, though. Being able to have that self awareness to, like, see where your own gaps are and what the complimentary skill set that you even need is is really important. And I think, too, in talking about planning for future contingencies from the start of a partnership, you touched on another thing that can come up, I think, for a lot of students who are attracted to the idea of entrepreneurship, which is that going out on your own, especially at a younger age, maybe when you don't have a ton of experience, you're just finishing up school or recently graduated, it can be really daunting. And a lot of people might feel like they have a great idea, but they don't know what to do to start or how how to get the ball rolling. What did your journey look like when you teamed up and first started moving on your business partnership?

Katy DeCoste: 08:33

And how did you leverage your contacts and resources that you had here at UVic?

Robert Roulston: 08:38

Well, we started with some business plan competitions at UVic, which were incredibly helpful. And UVic staff, Maya and Brent and Brock. In particular were just so supportive. So it was a really nice platform to pitch our business ideas and and get really constructive feedback. That aspect really helped warm us up to the real world and the harsh criticism that you're going to get from real angel investors or VCs when you start talking to them.

Robert Roulston: 09:03

So it was a really nurturing environment at UVic and in these business plan competitions, and those were instrumental to us moving forward.

Ashley Roulston: 09:11

In those business plan competitions that Robert mentioned, we won the first one that we went into, and we won $5,000, which was a ton of money when we had zero money at the time. And then I think we leveraged that into getting a loan from the bank, and then we leveraged that loan from the bank and getting money from angel investors, and we leveraged that matching funds for government grants. And we've just kept that ball rolling since, also producing lots of revenue now. But in the beginning, it was just one project after another and stacking that money to help pay rent and hire employees.

Robert Roulston: 09:41

Yeah. Ashley, you forget we got 2nd place in the first time we went in that, and we were so bitter. Really, because we got $2,000 and we're like, no, we're gonna win next year. Next year, when got 5,000. And then, yeah, within a year, we leveraged it into 80,000 and won another business plan competition and just rolled from there.

Ashley Roulston: 09:58

And Victoria was just such a good ecosystem to start a business in. We had Rob Bennett there at ViaTech, who's just volunteering all of his time for any questions that you had. And as Robert mentioned, all those nice professors in the business department, and then we had some in the engineering department as well that ended up being great mentors.

Emma Ulveland: 10:14

I'd love to know more about how you were pitching some of these ideas because I can imagine that you would have had to have a really solid foundation and a great way of marketing that idea to then get those investors and get those grants. Can you tell me a bit about what that process was like?

Robert Roulston: 10:31

If I had have known what I know now, I would have not even started, but we are too naive to know any better. And so then we started, and then we were in too deep, and we had to make it work. And we did. And then we just went for it.

Katy DeCoste: 10:43

Yeah. I think that also, like, really speaks to your time as a student and as a young person can be a really good time to take that plunge because you probably don't have a mortgage, probably don't have dependents. You can take a little more risk and have a little more space to fail. That was all 14 years ago. And now you've been doing this together for 14 years.

Katy DeCoste: 11:06

What does your team look like today, and how have things changed from year 1?

Robert Roulston: 11:11

I don't get to build anything anymore, which is tragic because I love that part. Now I just am in a position where I don't know what I'm doing every day because it's always new. We're up to 22 people now, and we've shipped bioreactors to 33 countries. We've been growing at over 30% a year, year over year for the past 6 years. So, actually, we just bought our 1st building, 10,000 square foot warehouse out in Langford.

Robert Roulston: 11:35

We're building that out now for a 3 times facility expansion.

Ashley Roulston: 11:38

In the beginning, we were wearing all the hats. I had to do the payroll and the bookkeeping and all those admin things that I'm not a fan of, but they were delegated to me. And Robert was doing all the things and figuring out business licenses and tax. Now we have people that are better at that than us to do those jobs, but the problems don't go away overnight. Your problems just get bigger.

Ashley Roulston: 11:59

That's the position that we're in now. Now we have people problems and all those fun things, but it's all what we signed up for.

Robert Roulston: 12:05

When everybody's working well and excited, it's one of the most satisfying feelings in the world. I wanna have a company where it feels like when I was a kid and my friends would come over and we were building a tree house together, and nobody was getting paid for it. We were just building this thing because we wanted to, and we were working our asses off. You know? We were just hauling boards up into the woods and climbing things and getting all covered in pine bark.

Robert Roulston: 12:24

And but it was just so much fun. And we get moments where it feels like that. And those are what I go for.

Katy DeCoste: 12:30

The people that you want to be bringing in are people who also really value that feeling of curiosity and discovery and collaboration. What kinds of employees are you looking for in your team? Like, what skills make someone a great asset to industrial plankton?

Ashley Roulston: 12:47

People that are willing to work in a fast paced environment. Since we built this right out of university, we don't have formal corporate job training. So we're doing what we think is right at the time, and sometimes our priorities pivot. So we need the rest of the team to be on board with the decision and the direction that we decide to pivot into.

Robert Roulston: 13:04

People that push the envelope. I need people that are willing to put in a big push when push comes to shove. You get people there and they're just so excited about some weird specific healthy thing. And, you know, I'm trying to write a report, but they're telling me about something. So I'll get a bill.

Robert Roulston: 13:18

It's actually pretty cool.

Emma Ulveland: 13:21

Passion's important, it sounds like.

Robert Roulston: 13:24

Like I'm wearing a shirt. I love algae.

Emma Ulveland: 13:27

I love that. Is this something you can buy from industrial plankton? I feel like you guys need a merch line.

Ashley Roulston: 13:33

Some are on our website, but they're, more obscure seaweed ones because that's our newest product line, the seaweed ones, which are gonna definitely help save the world.

Robert Roulston: 13:41

Yeah.

Ashley Roulston: 13:41

So we do have that on the website, but so does your address after. We'll see what we can do. Oh, that's so cool.

Katy DeCoste: 13:49

Let's go. It's seaweed time.

Emma Ulveland: 13:52

Let's loop back a little bit. I wanna talk about your experiences in the co op program and what you took away from those experiences that helped you in creating your business.

Ashley Roulston: 14:04

As we mentioned, I was on the golf team for UVic. So my first couple of co ops were for the Canadian Golf Academy in Prince Edward Island, and then my next one was at Canada Snowboard, they're called. And that was during the Olympics. So I got to be in Vancouver 2010 on the ground. It was amazing.

Ashley Roulston: 14:21

Through those co ops, I just got to see that everyone had their role and everyone owned their role and got things done. I'd never worked somewhere where if you have a question about your computer, there's someone that helps answer that question. I don't need to figure it out on my own. So that was just cool to see how the larger organization worked.

Robert Roulston: 14:38

I did 2 co op terms. And then I realized I would prefer to build my own things. And so then my last two terms, it is entrepreneurial coops. I would just make a bunch of money designing things for people on the side and then spend this whole coop term just trying to invent stuff. Spending all my student loan money on r and d, which after about $15,000 of that, I was like, is this actually going somewhere or am I actually a crazy person?

Robert Roulston: 15:05

I wasn't sure. Turns out it did segue nicely into what we did. Just go for it. And I had I had no kids. I had no mortgage.

Robert Roulston: 15:13

There wasn't much to lose.

Ashley Roulston: 15:14

It's okay to make mistakes because you're a co op student. It's semi expected, and that's okay. People will forgive you.

Emma Ulveland: 15:24

Make the mistakes early.

Ashley Roulston: 15:25

Yeah, I can't make as many mistakes now.

Katy DeCoste: 15:27

It's very cool that you got some experience in a more traditional co op, and then balance that with following your own ideas and getting to experiment through this entrepreneurial piece. Looking on the other side, what do coop students bring to your team now? Like, why do you bring on coop students? What excites you about working with them?

Robert Roulston: 15:50

They've been part of our workforce forever. At this point, I believe we'd hired maybe a 130 co op students, which is pretty incredible. They're fresh and excited and we have a good process. We're used to training them. So we give them things that aren't going to be outside of their capability to do, but are also still challenging.

Robert Roulston: 16:08

And it's satisfying that they get to learn a lot. Everything from wiring to plastic forming to different kinds of metal and small hand tools and etcetera. I think it's a really rewarding experience for them, and they're a legitimate part of our workforce.

Ashley Roulston: 16:23

Amazing. I almost see the co ops too as part of our farm team. If we were a baseball team, like, they're the up and coming future employees for us and lots of our current staff are former co ops. And the ones that aren't, we wish them the best, and many are doing amazing things. But a couple I know are engineers at Tesla, and one has a great company on his own.

Ashley Roulston: 16:41

Some of them become part of the family at the end of the day too, and we do wanna keep up with their lives.

Katy DeCoste: 16:46

Well, yeah, it kind of reminds me about what you were saying about finding people that are really values aligned and, like, gel really well with the work environment. Co op is a nice way for recruiting, so that's also super cool.

Ashley Roulston: 17:00

Then if we have, like, a big push for production at Christmas, we'll go through all of our co ops for the past couple of years and send out an email to say, can anyone come in to help us with this production push? And we'll get, you know, a handful of the keen ones coming in. So I think we have a good relationship with our past and present coop

Emma Ulveland: 17:16

students. That's fantastic. There's clearly many different types of positions that you have at Industrial Plankton, but I'm wondering if you could walk us through, at least for you, Ashley and Robert, what your typical day looks like on the job. Day in my life, a

Ashley Roulston: 17:32

lot of it is ruled by my inbox for what inquiries are coming in, setting up demos. I occasionally get to travel for trade shows, and that's a love hate relationship that's exhausting but rewarding at the same time. We have a installation and training customer support team, and they have a pretty exciting life. They get to travel all around the world doing installations. For Robert and I, it's still a lot of government bank type meetings.

Ashley Roulston: 17:56

Maybe less exciting than the early days, but still rewarding.

Katy DeCoste: 17:59

Different type of excitement. Mhmm.

Ashley Roulston: 18:02

More like looking into big World Bank reports about the future of seaweed and the direction of that and scaring ourselves about climate change. That's more our daily life.

Katy DeCoste: 18:11

Weirdly, that's part of my daily life too, and I don't even work in this sector.

Emma Ulveland: 18:14

Yeah. So relatable.

Robert Roulston: 18:16

Yeah. My day, maybe a month of my year is traveling. So I have a pillow with a, like, a pillowcase with a handle on it. So I bring that because it really helps if anyone's doing a long trips. So a lot of just keeping up with everybody's needs because everybody is just asking you questions all the time.

Robert Roulston: 18:36

And then if I get maybe 15 minutes of the day to actually think about the future, then that's my favorite part of the entire day. That's like the self actualization part where you get to kind of rise up above all the chaos and actually plan something good for the future. Like, maybe we hire that new person or maybe we raise some money or maybe we move or maybe we develop this product.

Katy DeCoste: 18:58

Yeah. I think about that so much even in, like, my own position. Like, being in comms, you can end up in this mode of you're only working reactively to stuff that's coming in. And so then when you get those moments where you're able to be proactive and, like, dream and ideate and, like, plan, it feels so good and everyone needs that. But it unfortunately can be too rare that we get that time in that space.

Robert Roulston: 19:22

Yeah. Oh, that's really well put. Yeah. Working reactively versus proactively. Yeah.

Robert Roulston: 19:27

That's exactly it.

Ashley Roulston: 19:29

And it's like the age that we live in. There's no shortage of things to do. Yeah. So, yeah, to make that time, it's a good reminder.

Robert Roulston: 19:36

I look at my phone. There's, you know, 10 different types of messages from 10 different apps and, you know, I can never even get into the bottom of one of them. Like, I can't even get to the bottom of my emails anymore. So it's, yeah, it's really hard to step away, but I'll just grab a coffee and go up on the roof of my house when I used to have this really nice view, and I would just stand there for 20 minutes every morning and think because that's the only break you got.

Katy DeCoste: 19:58

So we touched on this at the start of the episode. And now if we're able to, I'd love to dive a little bit deeper into some of the most exciting applications that you've seen your technology be applied to and some of the most interesting and maybe unexpected unexpected problems that you've seen it help solve? In the beginning, we got into this

Ashley Roulston: 20:16

just to feed oysters. That's what we have in British Columbia in our backyard, oyster hatcheries. And now we're in shrimp hatcheries and sea cucumber hatcheries. So we're helping feed all these people around the world. So, that's a neat one.

Ashley Roulston: 20:30

Another one is human health supplements. It's called nutraceuticals, is the industry that we're in. So, our equipment's being used in that. It's being used to feed honeybees. It's being used to feed other insects.

Ashley Roulston: 20:41

Cystic fibrosis research they're doing at a university in the States in New Zealand at a Cawthron Research Institute with Boston Children's Hospital. They're doing algae based opioids to make it so that people don't get addicted to opioids. They can have this algae based one that's less harmful to them. Oh, the soil enhancement so that crops grow better and they need to use less fertilizers.

Katy DeCoste: 21:02

But it goes so far beyond, at least for me, like a person that is not really like in this space. I hear plankton and I'm like, oh, this is probably all related to like oceanography and, like, aquaculture. But it really goes far beyond that, which is super exciting.

Emma Ulveland: 21:17

What are your future plans for you and Industrial Plankton? What's coming up?

Robert Roulston: 21:24

Yeah. So moving into our new facility is a big one. So that's a 3 times expansion of our current place, which is great because we're super cramped because we've been growing like crazy for the past 6 years. We're also likely going to raise, let's say, $5,000,000 on a venture capital round so I can get more engineers and just keep this momentum going. And with that, we're gonna push our seaweed bioreactor line that we started maybe 2 years ago and essentially make baby kelp plants.

Robert Roulston: 21:51

And then a little 2 liters, and it'll make, once you put it out in the ocean, about 60,000 kilograms of kelp. Pretty amazing. So that's our new product line. Sold a a decent number of them to a bunch of clients last year, but we need to build larger versions and also just streamline the production of these so we can actually get more into the world. That for me is a really impactful thing that we can do because if we can provide a platform to produce seaweed seedlings, then all these seaweed farmers can now just have a infinite amount of seaweed seedlings, and it just takes that one sketchy part out at the start of that whole industry.

Robert Roulston: 22:28

And without that, the industry is not gonna grow very quickly. And that industry actually has a giant potential to impact climate change, so I would like to remove that barrier for it.

Emma Ulveland: 22:37

That's so cool. And it sounds like there's potential maybe to harness this technology to maybe even do some ecological restoration projects, and that's where my interest is right now. So, yeah, that gives me so much to think about, and it is so cool.

Robert Roulston: 22:53

Yeah. I believe some of our clients are doing that, Ashley. Yeah.

Ashley Roulston: 22:56

Yep. Reforesting the ocean.

Robert Roulston: 22:58

So they'll just take the baby's seaweed that comes out of our equipment, and then they use it to seed the tiny little piece of gravel. So It just starts a little piece of seaweed growing on a little piece of gravel and then they just grow it on a boat and just start tossing around little pebbles of this seaweed laden gravel and you just start giant seaweed forests. But you need to be able to pump out the seaweed seedlings reliably and at cost to do that. So we're helping with that part.

Emma Ulveland: 23:23

That's awesome. Alright. So now we're moving on to our rapid fire segment. This is the part of the show where we're gonna ask you some questions about your time at UVic, and we just want you to answer what the first thing that comes to your mind. Are you ready?

Emma Ulveland: 23:42

What was your favorite study spot?

Ashley Roulston: 23:45

I stole Robert's computer science engineering card to get into that building after hours, so I would study on the 2nd or third floor of that building. That was my favorite spot. And I met some great friends that are still friends today. Love it. Yeah.

Robert Roulston: 23:57

I would sit outside the exam room for the first 29 minutes of every single exam because they'll cut you off after 30 minutes. And so I went into every single exam 29 minutes late, and I would just listen to death metal for 29 minutes and learn a chunk of a course.

Ashley Roulston: 24:14

Yeah. Remember, Robert was on his 2nd undergrad at this point too. We'd already finished the one at McGill, so we had it figured out a bit more than myself in 1st year.

Robert Roulston: 24:24

Yeah. But I would learn every course in 2 days because the rest of the time I was doing what I called experiments.

Katy DeCoste: 24:30

Amazing. Playing with aquariums.

Emma Ulveland: 24:32

Yeah. You clearly went in the correct career path.

Ashley Roulston: 24:36

We weren't trying to get into law school. We weren't going for grades.

Katy DeCoste: 24:41

Yeah. Did you live on campus? Or did you commute?

Ashley Roulston: 24:45

I did the 1st campus, then the cluster housing, and then we were Fernwood kids after that. And then I actually lived with Robert and many other people in Fernwood.

Robert Roulston: 24:54

Yeah. To start our entrepreneur house.

Katy DeCoste: 24:57

Yes. I love that idea. It's like a little incubator in Fernwood having your crazy ideas. I think that's awesome.

Robert Roulston: 25:04

Yeah. It was 6 people in a hot tub, and, you know, it was nice.

Ashley Roulston: 25:09

Did you

Emma Ulveland: 25:10

have a favorite snack or food item that you would get on campus?

Ashley Roulston: 25:14

I like the muffins. It might not even be there from the coffee shop right outside of center. Yes.

Emma Ulveland: 25:20

Munchy bar.

Katy DeCoste: 25:21

It is still there. And I don't know if they're the same muffins, but the muffins they currently sell there are excellent.

Ashley Roulston: 25:27

Yeah. From a local bakery. That would be my go to snack. There's like a meal. Yum.

Robert Roulston: 25:31

Yeah. It's like a brick. Oh, just pierogi pizza for sure. Yeah. In the engineering building.

Robert Roulston: 25:39

I don't know if they still sell that, but yeah.

Ashley Roulston: 25:41

From Hot House Pizza, I think it was at the time or

Katy DeCoste: 25:43

villages. Amazing.

Robert Roulston: 25:46

Yeah. I just melted cheese. I'm a sucker for the cheese.

Emma Ulveland: 25:49

Yummy. Now I'm really hungry.

Ashley Roulston: 25:53

We

Katy DeCoste: 25:53

do have to stop putting questions about food in here because I also always get hungry. This may end up being like

Ashley Roulston: 26:00

a little bit of

Katy DeCoste: 26:00

a blast from the past, but you do not need to confine yourself to songs that were out when you were at Yubick. If you could choose any song as a soundtrack to your time as a student here at Yubick, what song would it be?

Ashley Roulston: 26:13

I have the answer, and we listened to it so much when we lived in that entrepreneurial house. I think we had it going for 24 hours on repeat at some weekends, and then it was also played at my wedding. It was played at Robert's wedding. Robert, what song is it?

Robert Roulston: 26:25

Kid Cudi song.

Ashley Roulston: 26:26

Yep. Kid Cudi Pursuit of Happiness. Amazing.

Robert Roulston: 26:31

Yeah. That came on on a cab like a year ago and I cried. I don't know. Because it was like we'd have really hard days with the whole group of us in that house and we'd just play that and we're just like, yeah. I don't know why.

Robert Roulston: 26:45

It just kinda spoke to us.

Emma Ulveland: 26:47

Aw. I love that.

Katy DeCoste: 26:48

I love that. I love that that's a song that you both, like, share. That's so awesome.

Ashley Roulston: 26:53

You might even have a separate song, but that was my song that I pick. But I think it's your song too after your answer. Yeah. Unless there's some death metal I don't know about.

Katy DeCoste: 27:04

That's the b side.

Robert Roulston: 27:06

Yeah.

Emma Ulveland: 27:08

Okay. Are you both tea or coffee drinkers?

Ashley Roulston: 27:11

Coffee and hot chocolate.

Robert Roulston: 27:14

Yeah. I don't touch tea.

Emma Ulveland: 27:16

Okay.

Katy DeCoste: 27:17

I think that anyone who can end up being an entrepreneur without being a coffee drinker is built different, and I need to know their secret. You know?

Robert Roulston: 27:25

No. It doesn't exist. Our office just we turn through a ridiculous number of pots of coffee. I gotta put a halt on things.

Katy DeCoste: 27:33

So here in Victoria, we have both of these relatively close. Mountains or ocean? Ocean.

Ashley Roulston: 27:40

I could look in tide pools all day.

Emma Ulveland: 27:42

That checks out.

Robert Roulston: 27:45

Yeah. Definitely ocean.

Emma Ulveland: 27:46

Okay. Now this is kind of interesting. Do you feel more productive in the morning or at night?

Ashley Roulston: 27:52

I'm for sure morning end. As a side note, I remember one business plan competition, Robert stayed up till 4 AM working on it, and then I woke up at 4 AM to finish it.

Emma Ulveland: 28:03

Man, you guys are the dream team.

Robert Roulston: 28:06

But, yeah, I'm a late night person. I could just stay up until things are done.

Emma Ulveland: 28:10

Yeah. Me too. I submitted my final assignment for a course last night at 1 AM, so I agree.

Katy DeCoste: 28:17

I cannot relate. Even when I was in grad school, I would be starting my work by, like, 9, and I would be done by, like, 6 because after 6 PM, I'm completely useless as a functioning member of society. Like, I it's just over for me. Well, thank you both so much for spending time with us today and sharing your expertise and telling us about what you do. It's been such a blast, and I feel like I have learned a ton.

Emma Ulveland: 28:41

Yep. For sure.

Ashley Roulston: 28:43

Thank you guys for organizing this.

Robert Roulston: 28:45

Thanks.

Katy DeCoste: 28:47

Workit is developed and distributed by Coop and Career Services at the University of Victoria and hosted by Emma Obeland and Katie DeCoste. Today's guests were Ashley and Robert Rolston, UVic graduates and founders of Industrial Plankton. Our theme music and art were created by Emma Obelund with audio editing by Emma Obelund. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to WorkIt wherever you get your podcasts and you'll never miss an update. To learn more about career possibilities and resources from UVic, visituvic.cadashcareerdashservices.