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Turtle’s innovation leader Teesee Murray and Triangle CEO Darren Wolfberg join Jim Barrood to share their journeys from global tech and finance to driving the energy transition. They explore Turtle’s 102-year legacy, Triangle’s patented carbon-credit technology, and how authentic corporate–startup partnerships can fuel sustainable innovation, transparency, and long-term growth.
Teesee Murray: I've led scale ups, turnarounds, startups globally across almost every industry. I turn complex legacy operations into modern technology enabled growth engines. I do it with partnership with inspiring, a shared vision, and with a lot of teamwork.
Jim Barrood: Awesome. Darren?
Darren Wolfberg: I am co-founder and CEO of triangle. I basically bring 20 years financial service experience, alongside, technology background, designing products, commercializing products.
And, day to day I am. The developer of technology, the head of sales, and, the guy running the show.
Jim Barrood: Wonderful. All right. Look forward to learning more about that. Tc, tell us how you got to where you are. You have an amazing background. Take us right from college.
Teesee Murray: From college, I was fortunate enough that my physics professor, who was my mentor and I was his teaching assistant, got me my first job.
So it was wonderful to graduate and walk right into a job with incredible people as a consultant managing large complex projects. From there, I got recruited to join a global software company called QAD, headquartered in my hometown of Santa Barbara. It was just a few months before we were going public.
We needed everything we needed, systems, process, controls. I was given global responsibility to build operations and technology. I had no budget, so I had to build a lot and it taught me a number of things. And every few years I innovated myself and I transferred to different roles and fulfilled strategic projects across the company.
In one year, I was given a sales team. I'd never been a salesperson. I was given a huge quota and a big scary objective, and I had to go out and accomplish it with my team. With humility, I said, I'm not a salesperson, but here are my capabilities. Let's understand yours. And that first year, we all crushed it and it inspired me to take on greater challenges.
From there, I went on to build the first cloud solution. I joined Infor and was recruited to their team to help launch Enterprise. Solutions on AWS cloud. And in 2014, nobody knew what AWS was. So we did some tremendous innovation and brought great value. And from there I've just continued on the journey of leading transformation teams and uniting across a shared vision and bringing, the top technology that we can in a very cautiously optimistic way to deliver real value for customers, for partners, and for the teams that I'm part of.
Jim Barrood: That's awesome. And then you came to, turtle. When did you get to Turtle? I got
Teesee Murray: recruited, yes. And so a few years ago after I was leading a 30-year-old process optimization company. I took a break. I just lost my dad and I was thinking, what's this next journey? And Jane Millard, who's the most amazing woman, she's the fourth generation leader of Turtle, and a friend and colleague, introduced us.
She was looking for an innovation leader. It wasn't something I was thinking of doing. I thought I was going to another PE and. In the course of talking to Jane over several months, I thought she's amazing. She's a visionary. She has such a high IQ and eq, and I loved her goal of leading through the energy transition, bringing technology inside of Turtle, but also outside to serve the marketplace.
And this new initiative she had started Turtle X, which was a sustainable marketplace accelerator. And when I put everything together, what Jane had outlined was just too compelling to not say, yes, I want to join your journey and be on this mission driven change that is at the forefront of everything we need right now with more energy.
Because there's not enough juice in the system. And Turtle is a 100 and 2-year-old. Electrical distributor, industrial supply chain optimizer and technology solutions. So very large scale projects that touch everything across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and a wonderful time to join a transformation team and lead that growth, but also help these transformational projects that are being.
Created like the AI data centers.
Jim Barrood: Awesome. Let's come back to that. But let's talk to Darren first and hear about his brilliant background in, in a different sector. For sure.
Darren Wolfberg: Thanks Jim. Yeah, so my background start off, really 20 years of institutional finance, first at Morgan Stanley on the institutional equity desk, trading stocks, managing risk, developing technology for the desk to do those things, more efficiently.
After almost 10 years there, recruited over to bnp Parabas, where I ran cash equities program trading, electronic trading in futures in the Americas. Prior to finance, I was in technology, designing and developing products for Sony. This was in the late nineties, was moved into their venture capital group, and this was during the internet boom.
I saw a lot of really interesting things at the time that led me to eventually leave Sony, to start my first venture backed software company, which was a company called Broad Form, stood for broadband platform. And it was cloud seven years before cloud was a term. And I even go back to those first days when I first saw Hotmail, as an application on the web.
Going from not just your. You're all right, this is what the company does now you actually do something on the web and really step in, in the venture capital group and in, in product design, you're always having to look three to five years out. And so putting myself in that lens was really taking the function out of a pc, making it web-based.
So whether you're at home, at school, your friend's house at the library, you can access your information applications from anywhere. What I find really interesting and compelling about that moment in time as we went from web one to web two, is that today we're at a very similar inflection point going from web two to Web3.
And when we talk about energy transition, I see a lot of parallels as well. I remember back in the late nineties, we all knew broadband was going to come. We all knew that there would be a handheld that would have your software, your ISP and hardware all embedded in one. And who knew it would become the iPhone.
And today in energy transition, we see similar growing pains. Capacity of the grid. One example. And there's lots of innovation that's going on right now, but what we have focused on a triangle, is delivering high fidelity data linking to auditability and verifiability of assets.
Because that is the true underlying, kernel of having confidence in markets. At Triangle we're building upon, a lot of my background in finance and in technology, merging them together, in an asset class that we think is going to be the next large asset class, which is carbon credits.
Jim Barrood: Awesome. And so tc, what attracted you folks to triangle and talk a little bit about the history of Turtle, fourth generation family business. Very unusual. Only about 5% of family businesses make it to the fourth generation. I know that because I used to run a family business forum and I come from a family business.
So talk to us about what Turtle was traditionally and what it's transforming into under your leadership.
Teesee Murray: Sure. And the beauty of Turtle is that it's fourth generation led, but the fifth generation B Clark is also in the business now and she's leading the focus on sustainability and social impact.
And so I have the ability to collaborate with Jane and Bee and Co CEO Lewis Falls. And the executive team. So Turtle, being a 100 and 2-year-old company, was primarily an electrical distributor. Its initial catalog cells. We sell everything to everybody, and they did. But one of the unique things of being 102 years old is that innovation is in your DNA.
You have to continually reinvent yourself as industry shifts come. And one of the things that. Doesn't change within Turtle is just that strength that lies within the culture and the People. Turtle's culture is rooted in integrity and partnership and long-term vision. So we don't just deliver products, we deliver outcomes, and we embed ourselves into those customer workflows and future proving their investments.
This led us to start looking at what's new and truly innovative. I've talked with so many startups. There were many potential partners. That we could have worked with. But meeting Darren, he's the real deal. You can tell by talking to him. He's got that deep financial expertise. He's lived the pain of the product that he's now created, that it's that he's solving in the marketplace.
He's bridging the gap from traditional finance to a carbon market where some people view it as a carbon tariff. It's been called many different things, but what it is doing is providing a new asset class that solves this big conundrum we have about how we monetize this shift in some of the carbon reducing activities that we see within the partners that we serve and the customers that we serve.
So it's an exciting time and. Turtle X really is our incubator where we partner with startups and just a precious few startups, and I think that's a really unique things because being 102, we have what every startup needs. We have the operational capability, we have the customer relationships, we have the stature and the breadth and scale to really be of assistance.
That foundation of reliability and resilience is. I think of keen benefit when collaborating with Darren and the Triangle team.
Jim Barrood: That's awesome. And Darren talk more about the business and how it's evolved, and how you saw, the potential partnership with Turtle.
Darren Wolfberg: Yeah. So I'll say, it's been a rollercoaster ride, and I'm sure every entrepreneur has their version of it.
We've had to pivot a few different times. And I think we've pivoted well. But when we started to become a digital asset company. We saw a lot of the momentum in Bitcoin and Ethereum, the tokenization boom that happened in the late teens, 20 17, 20 18.
And when we got into that, I had some reflection points. One, there's a lot of brokers that are out there, so how are you going to be different? And we had a, I was connected with a professor at the University of Michigan, Dr. Peter Adrian's. And Peter had done a lot of work in infrastructure and he was telling me about work he was doing for the Great Lakes Water Authority.
How they were using meters at different hops of the network to identify pressure differentials. And where there was a pressure differential, it means that there was a hole in the segment before. And so they were using cameras and all of that in order to diagnose how do they fix this problem that they were losing 25% of every gallon of water in transit.
And that's a big number. And so when you think about that and this was one of the first aha moments that we had. This was taking this smart meter and linking it to a smart contract. Today, if you have an API, data from the edge comes into the operating and the data stops there. Okay? What we did was, let's say you have an independent stakeholder, so data from the Edge connects to the SMART contract.
Now the data from the edge can triangulate to that end stakeholder because this stakeholder has the smart contract in their wallet. And so, by the holder of the smart contract, sharing the ID with the wallet, now this stakeholder can see all the information from the edge and the triangulation of information began.
That was a first step of rewriting how you route information from APIs to now our way for doing it, which we think is just more efficient because once you set it up, once you can distribute nth number of times. As opposed to having to write an API every single time after that. And so that was a key innovation.
One of the things that we realized is that, yes, this is great for infrastructure, but nothing happens fast in infrastructure. Infrastructure is like waiting for paint to dry. And so if you're a startup, you need things to happen fast and infrastructure's probably the last market you want to go into.
While this was going on, climate started to become a thing, and in my experience in financial services, there have been a handful of instances where things weren't a thing, and then they were a thing. A-M-L-K-Y-C was one of those. Dodd-Frank was one of those. Reg NMS was one of those, and the list goes on.
MiFi two was one of those. And so Carbon and climate started to become a thing. And I had seen precedents whereby one important regulator adopting a regulation change. Every one of the asset managers, top 200 asset managers needed to comply. Otherwise, they would no longer be able to manage the money from that jurisdiction.
Today, it's not just one regulator. 73% of regulators, 73% of global G-D-P-X-U-S now has carbon reporting requirements, which means that if you are a public company, if you're selling your product in those markets overseas, if you have insurance, all of those are three key economic levers of why you need to do this stuff.
And so all of this has just continued to piece together in, I guess in a storybook fashion. But like other entrepreneurs who knew that our software team, which was based in Ukraine, would have Russian invade them. And that was a thing. Then you had, the, the crypto winter. And there were probably a couple crypto winters there.
And now today, we have some administration. We have an administration that is not as friendly to climate as previous administrations, but either way, what we see is a voluntary market-based ecosystem where private capital is allocated. And in order to allocate that capital, you need data. I come back to the saying that the head of ESG for Allianz said at COP 26, not until climate and finance can speak the same language, will there be a solution to the climate problem?
And in our minds, we are the translator. And so we are bridging data, climate data, which is a big data problem. And we use our technology to solve that data problem with the world of finance so they can speak the same language. And so in working with Turtle. There are a few things that we found super interesting.
One, it's hard to ignore the fact that they are 102 years old Okay. And have been through many cycles. And as Teesee mentioned to last 102 years, you can't be the same horse and buggy that you were back 102 years ago. You need to continue to evolve. And so we're constantly evolving, and so we thought a partnership with them would be great.
We have a kit that we think helps their customers and I think what we both recognize is at the end of the day, we have customers and we need to solve problems for customers. And so whether that is figuring out how to get more grid bandwidth to that facility, whether that's being more efficient in that facility.
All of that comes down to data. And how do you aggregate that data, serve that data, in as quick and as seamless a fashion as possible. And so that's how we are identifying opportunities and prosecuting them.
Jim Barrood: That's really fascinating and Teesee from your perspective and Turtle's perspective, you're scanning all tons of companies to partner with.
How did you know Triangle rise to the top and talk to us about that partnership.
Teesee Murray: Sure. I talk to many startups. It's fascinating, right? Because I do believe more than ever we need each other. The times are so complex, and I'm a geek at heart. I'm a technologist, and I believe that we need technology to be our BFF to solve these complex problems.
So looking for solutions that can scale and they go across many industries as I have. I thought this is it. So Darren had mentioned A-M-L-K-Y-C, which is anti-money laundering. Know your customer. It's all about process and connecting data in a regulated environment. That's what Triangle does. I've always loved serving regulated environments because they have to do something and typically it's very difficult to connect all those dots and to come up with the solution.
Turtle serves many industries, including manufacturing a lot on the electrical and industrial side, and I could see where not just our customers, but our partners could use the solution that Darren was creating. And that really led to many further conversations with some of the biggest companies on the planet, and as we use more technology, we're going to need more of what Triangle has, because Darren's connected the dots from proving the carbon reduction and activities that are done to being able to monetize that as a registered digital financial asset.
Triangle holds the patent on that. And I believe this is a tremendous opportunity to do great carbon reducing activities and re financial rewards for it. So this is not just for Turtle, it's for our partners, it's for our customers, it's for our planet. It's beautiful.
Jim Barrood: That's awesome. And so let's just look forward to five years.
Where is this relationship? What's the sort of. Best case scenario and how you've going to take over the world.
Teesee Murray: Do you want to start, Darren? I believe it's growing together, right? So we collaborate. I talk to Darren and text with Darren. Significantly unlike anything I've ever done with another company that we've partnered or started a startup with.
Darren Wolfberg: We're going to co-host another event, New York Climate Week, and what we're doing is we're creating our own partner ecosystem. So this whole connecting the dots, it's also connecting people. It's connecting use cases, it's connecting the regulators, the consultants, the technologists, and everyone that hears what Triangle is doing says.
Wow. Now that's pretty amazing. And so these are some of the biggest banks, the biggest hyperscalers, who are looking at it with interest, saying, I need to figure this out. And it is complex and it does require leg registration. Regulation, sorry. As well as registering the work that's being done on carbon reduction.
One thing that's interesting and unique are the new acts that have just recently gone into law, the Clarity Act, the Genius Act. This is different, and this is what really I think is going to be the propellant behind the triangle growing at hyperscale, and that is the ability to take a carbon credit and to convert it to a registered digital financial asset.
On the blockchain, on the triangle platform that then actually could be on the balance sheet. It could be sold to monetize it, or it could be something that's offsetting an existing, carbon footprint for reporting purposes. And the beauty of this is. The transparency. It's using technology to do good and to prove, yes, we are actually reducing carbon.
And let me show you how. So it avoids the greenwashing that has been so damaging to a lot of other efforts and that everyone's probably read about, especially in Europe. And so this transparency of being rewarded for carbon reduction across all different industries, whether it be no-till cover crops or for manufacturing of EV chargers.
Or solar or something as standard as that, but it could be alternative energy use or it could be capping oil wells or digesters for methane or utility. So there's a broad set of use cases that I believe will get to scale quickly.
So I'll give you a snapshot of time. It was five years when I was in finance and I had just started on the institutional equity desk at Morgan Stanley.
We were sending orders down to the floor and a broker would go up to, a specialist would give the order, and you would get a fill back. That was a totally different price. Okay? And lo and behold, it was probably six months into my career at Morgan, we started electronic trading. And so the one thing I would say is don't underestimate how quickly finance will move when you can save customers money.
While making money doing it. And so here in this instance, I think we're at a similar inflection point in time in climate, meaning that today and looking backwards, you had a lot, you have a lot of toll takers, that are extracting more economics than they should. And so what we're able to do is create carbon credits as regulated financial instruments that now allow a qualified custodian, meaning a bank, a trust company, a prime broker, to hold this asset and taking this, this world, this market that we have today, which.
It is not regulated, does not understand high velocity, is not part of modern finance, and we're taking this archaic product and we're giving it institutional rails. And we're doing that at a time when 73% of global GDP has carbon reporting requirements. We're doing it at a time. PWC estimates that by 2030, $160 trillion of assets will be subject to these reporting requirements.
And so that's just a really big number. Okay. And so we've created, we, I, we are in, I, in my opinion, and I believe the only company globally that can take these carbon credits, convert them into regulated financial instruments. And we're doing that today, and we're doing it for counterparties that provide an unlock instantly first.
Now, a CFO can buy these assets. And bank 'em today. We were asked by a top five market cap company in the US. They asked us, when can we put these on The balance sheet? Tells you a couple things. One, today they're only buying these assets and they're retiring these assets. They're not buying these assets, they're not banking the assets because they can't hold them on the balance sheet by creating a regulated financial instrument.
Now, they could be held on a balance sheet because the bank is gonna give them a statement every month that says, these are your holdings and this is the notional for it. Okay, and so that's unlock number one. Now, every CFO, the top 10,000 companies in the world that are all part of SBT, I can now add these assets to their balance sheet.
Here's another fun fact. Commodity markets, 30% of all trading activity is the corporates themselves that are buying the commodities. 70% is asset management and speculation. And so take the 10,000 companies that haven't bought a carbon credit, now lop onto them. The 70% of the asset managers of trading volume that haven't bought these either.
And this is an inferno that's about to be unleashed. And right now, again, we're the only company that can deliver these assets in a regulated format. There will be more, but that comes back to our patent. A lot of these assets originate from data from iot sensors, smart meters, satellite, et cetera, internet of things.
That data originates and substantiates the value of this underlying asset.
Jim Barrood: How big is your company in five years?
Darren Wolfberg: Big.
Jim Barrood: Okay. We like the trajectory. That's what I like to hear. All right, awesome. All right. So
Darren Wolfberg: Yeah,
Jim Barrood: go ahead. You can make prediction. Yeah. No. Five years from now, where do you want to be?
Darren Wolfberg: I think we could be a publicly traded company if we're not bought beforehand by either a large bank asset manager, systems integrator.
Data company. We have the patent that links smart meter IOT sensors to smart contracts for the creation of securities, loans, bonds, carbon credits, and recs.
Jim Barrood: Amazing. Amazing.
Teesee Murray: Which are awesome. Finance regulated financial instruments, right? That's where the real scale comes. It goes across all industries, across all regions, because Sharon mentioned SBTI and for those people that don’t know it, that's science-based target initiatives, which is, a global body that companies and financial institutions use to set greenhouse gas emission reduction targets.
So they're that standard that everybody uses. That's awesome. Triangle uniquely has the patent to help them.
Jim Barrood: Amazing. And this has been a great conversation. We usually do some quick tips. So just one tip for entrepreneurs who are looking to collaborate with corporate partners,
Teesee Murray: Transparency?
Show up and be your authentic self. Demonstrate what you do know, but be authentic and don't oversell. Don't say, I know everything. I could tell Darren's deep expertise. Understanding of product creation as well as finance made him a true great partner. But sometimes you hear people overselling.
They've got a vision. You hear so often, we're super special. We're gonna be a billion dollars in five years. And I've probably heard that more than anything. And so I really love that approach where someone will share where they are, what they know, what they need, and how together in partnership, they have a vision of how to execute it.
Got it. Darren?
Darren Wolfberg: I think you need to have patience. I think you need to and also have transparency. Look, when you're working with a larger company, they have tools in their kit that will make you better. And you need to be aware of those tools. And the only way that happens is with transparency.
But also, you need to recognize a startup. You can pivot on a dime. These large organizations cannot pivot on a dime. And the people the organizations that they work with do not pivot on a dime. And so you need the patients in order to hear what they're saying, understand what are the steps that it takes in order to go from A to B2C to D, and have that perspective.
And as a startup I know that everything will take longer. They're not going to work on your timescale. You need to work on their timescale. And that just requires more perspective. And you get more gray hair, but that's the name of the game.
Jim Barrood: Got it. Alright, we're going to ask some lightning questions. If you could add any fictional character to join your innovation or your startup team, who would you choose?
Teesee?
Teesee Murray: I'm going to say something very non-standard, Jim And that's Nemo, the Little Clownfish. It's one of my favorite movies and very big characters, right? Because that optimistic problem solving, I'm going to get it done. He's out there swimming with the sharks, right? I want to be out there with the sharks swimming and surviving, but thriving and his optimism and persistence just make him to me the best teammate because he also has the fun factor.
And I think that's something that just. Is a vital importance to all successful endeavors is you have to look for how can we make this fun? It's hard, it takes a lot of teamwork, but if you focus on how we can make this good together, you'll go farther. I love that Darren. I would take Tony Stark.
I'm a fan of technology. I'm a fan of innovation, and I think we're much closer to a world that he has created than the alternative.
Jim Barrood: Got it. Okay. Next question. What gadget tool or app do you use every day that you can't live without? Teesee?
Teesee Murray: The tool I can't live without is a window.
I know it's not a digital tool, but for me it's essential. It changes my perspective. I spend a lot of time with my devices, my laptop, and my phone watch. But looking out, seeing the beautiful world, the sunlight, the change in view, that long-term perspective, it not only helps my eyesight, but it just refreshes me and reinvigorates me.
Love it.
Darren Wolfberg: I'm gonna go with the Nespresso machine. So I think. The computer, the iPhone are probably standard stakes and everyone can't live without. But I find the morning coffee usually gets me off in the right step.
Jim Barrood: Nice. Okay, last one. What's one business book, podcast or thinker that has deeply influenced you?
Teesee Murray: The book, mindset by Dr. Carol Dweck I think is incredible. But in terms of just the person that I would wish that the whole world knew about is Dr. Sji Nakamura. He won the 2014 Nobel Prize for physics, for his invention of blue LED lights, which led to the lighting revolution. I think he's the greatest humanitarian, environmentalist and scientist and business person, and he's very humble.
He's brilliant, and he's transformed our world and nobody even knows who he is. He's an incredible person with a good sense of humor.
Jim Barrood: Darren?
Darren Wolfberg: I would go with Atlas Shrugged by Ann Rand. The free market is the most efficient allocator of capital. And so I believe that there are forces that just need to get out of the way, and let the market do what it does.
So I think that's what I would go with.
Jim Barrood: Okay. That sounds good. This has been a great conversation. We usually end with a poem, a saying, a quote. So ladies first, tc, go ahead. What do you got?
Teesee Murray: Dr. Suji Nakamura Real innovation is doing something no one's done before. Just inspires you to keep thinking, nope, it's not the status quo. Got to keep going.
Jim Barrood: Got it. This has been great. Thank you so much guys.
