Refurbished GPUs, Real Infrastructure: Powering the AI Boom

Transcript generated automatically from the episode audio and lightly cleaned up (filler words removed, misheard names corrected where clear). Speaker labels were added afterward and may contain errors.

Rob May: Hi everyone, I'm Rob May. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Neurometric and you're watching the AI in NYC show. Get started. All right. My guest today runs I think this super interesting, fascinating company. I got to tour their facility. That's how we met. And so lots and lots of questions that we're going to talk about. It's very cool. They they refurbish old computer equipment which in this AI age has become very very hot. So welcome to the podcast today, Harris Edelman.

Harris Edelman: Yes. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. Good to see you again and spend time and I am the founder and CEO of Ombligo. Which means belly button which means belly button in Spanish and the genesis of that name was you can assign human characteristics a lot of computer parts right the brain could be a CPU a monitor could have an arm a keyboard could have a foot but there's no belly button because computers are made and they're not born yet and so we are the belly buttons moving these these data center units around

Rob May: that's awesome that's a great analogy we're going to get into some of that but I want to start to start with a political question so you're a lifelong New Yorker born and raised in New York and a lot of my friends who aren't from here you know when Mamdani got elected people are like how does the global epicenter of capitalism elect a socialist but I think it's an interesting I'm not sure people know know what socialism is anymore and so I want to give you an example something that happened today I don't know if you saw this on Twitter no it's I don't know 100 degrees today we're shooting the show and Mamdani comes on and says and tweets like hey help us out set your air conditioner to 78 all this kind of And like MAGA goes nuts on Twitter. This is socialism. Set your set your your your thermostat to whatever you want or whatever. Meanwhile, MAGA is talking about on the same day on Twitter taking a 5% stake in OpenAI for the Trump administration. I'm like that is actually socialism. So I'm I'm really curious like tell me about the like as you've been here for a while like like what do you make of this like current New York political climate and this kind of issue in particular?

Harris Edelman: Well I am while I'm a born a native New Yorker born in Brooklyn raised in Manhattan I now live outside of the five boroughs although I work in Brooklyn so I was not able to not vote for Mamdani I just don't think I think New York is bigger than any one candidate. I think I graduated high school as Giuliani version 1.0 know because Giuliani now is kind of spun out of control. But I feel like New York City is always this swinging pendulum. It's always in motion. And we got Giuliani in part because we had David Dinkins previously. And so I think all this sounds good like you know free stuff sounds great when you're a kid and no one's really thinking about who's paying for that. But as a business owner who employs people and pays taxes Yeah. I have to worry about this stuff now. I mean, so it's disconcerting. I don't think he understands how businesses work. I'm not sure if he's ever run a business, but few politicians have. [laughter] Correct.

Rob May: Yeah. Yeah. Fair. Fair.

Harris Edelman: But yeah, so I don't I think New York survives. It will survive. You know, not to cue cue the soundtrack of the disco era, but New York will survive in spite of Mamdani,

Rob May: but do you think that do do you think the we toss around these terms social I mean he is a vowed socialist, right? So like but do you think more broadly like we toss around these terms a little too loosely now or do you think they've changed meaning from maybe maybe like when we were growing up in like the Reagan era and what it meant?

Harris Edelman: I think people don't know what these terms mean. I mean, I think very simply put, they think things are trendy. I think he grew up very privileged. He had a multi-million dollar apartment. I know some, folks that grew up more well-healed, you know, from wealthy families. I don't discriminate against my rich friends cuz they didn't grow up having made that money. They just kind of had around them. But I also didn't discriminate against folks that didn't have as much money. So, I think that New York really doesn't want socialism. I think it got it because it doesn't understand it. But this will be a great education as to what New Yorkers really want. And most folks that we meet want a job and they want to work and they want to get paid for a job well done. And you know, I just it's unfortunate, but just as we had Dinkins, we'll have someone awesome when he's out of office.

Rob May: Yeah. So, so, so let's let's use that to transition to the early days of Ombligo because you and I talked about this. We ran into each other at a hardware super nerded out hardware event and started talking about building companies and how hard it is and a lot of people don't understand how hard it is. So, I wrote during the 2016 election, I wrote this famous piece called Dear Bernie Sanders, I'm sorry, I'm the problem with the United States. And I talked about people don't understand the sacrifices that you make. And you know, people just look at your success and they go, oh, you made 10 million bucks. Like, and it's like, well, do you know what I did to get there? Like I like for for two years I did I did not take a single day off work. Not I didn't work all day every day but like literally Christmas Eve the first year of my first company like I was doing customer support like make a lot of sacrifices.

Harris Edelman: You destroys relationships. It destroys your health. It's like anyway look my my first marriage is at 4 uh2 and my first child was at 43. I didn't have a life before my company was solid enough that I could not be obsessed with it every single day. So, you know, I put my whole life on hold. I mean, I was fortunate to meet the love of my life later and we have a beautiful family now, but I didn't have a social life because I was I was married to the company and that was my Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Like there's no other thing.

Rob May: So, what was the So, tell us a little bit about the founding story because you've ended up in a spot that I that is like super hot because of AI GPU refurbishment and everything else that like you probably didn't anticipate 20 years ago.

Harris Edelman: No. What I did believe that technology was going to improve. There was going to be faster smaller and less expensive technology. I believe that was true. And I believe people would want to spend less on technology. And so because what I what I thought was there was going to always be an upgrade cycle. I didn't realize the velocity with which that would increase.

But I always felt like the there was always going to be another phone. I mean I had a Motorola Q before the iPhone came out. And then when the iPhone came out, I was like, "Okay, this is an amazing ecosystem and this is the iPhone 1 and now we're we're up waiting for the 18 to ship." so we're basically long the tech sector and we're short every generation. So we understand that those cycles are valuable to the secondary market. So the first user is the company that can afford to be the bleeding edge leading edge. And so we help those kind of first tier customers maximize the value, minimize the risk from their old equipment. So we're basically converting a cost center which which used to be throwing the computers out to a revenue stream by refurbishing and reselling that and sharing the revenue with those companies. So the thesis was always solid. I just had no clue as to how fast it was going to happen. I mean it took we're an overnight success 20 years in the making.

Yeah, I lived in the back of a warehouse in South Brook South Brooklyn, Williamsburg. Which later became the place that was right above a rehearsal studio, which was which was great theoretically because it was like a cool vibe underneath us, but the sounds were not properly insulated. So, depending on the day of the week, it was TV on the radio. I'm not sure if you remember that band or Karano of the Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They were rehearsing underneath our space where we're refurbishing computers and I was andor trying to sleep. So yeah it was exciting times in the beginning but in order to do what we did at scale we had to figure out how to build a system that would allow us to test inventory and sanitize data from all this data center gear we're pulling out because like I said in the beginning there were no real rules about it. Now there's there's a regulation which we're happy that there is one. So you can't just throw a piece of electronic equipment in the garbage.

We have certifications that are not required but desired. But what we found was providing an infrastructure to help companies decommission their old IT equipment and then provide the reconfigured IT equipment to the next user is they used to call it end of life. We just call end of use because there's a second user for every piece of equipment that's pulled out.

Rob May: Yeah. And so I imagine you got started primarily with like PCs and then moved to servers and then when was the first time that like because GPUs have been around for a long time. Yes. But they've only been used in AI workloads maybe for the last 10 years or so. And so when was the first time that you started seeing some decent like GPUs come back on the market and you thought oh we could actually sell these.

Harris Edelman: So the a lot of times the smartest guys in the room are are the hedge fund guys. And there are some highfrequency trading platforms and there have been books you know the written by the these guys that figured out if you were closer to the servers for NASDAQ or nice you would trades would execute like 13 nconds faster right than like how to normalize the distance by coiling fiber optic cable if you're next to the server or if you're a mile away everyone has the same distance so you know kind of manage the speed of how you can interact with the market. So those guys were using gaming GPUs in the PCIe slots first because they found a way to kind of make something faster than a CPU for their high frequency trading platforms.

Rob May: That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah.

Harris Edelman: But I mean that was the first we saw it now. We have, you know, A100s, H100s, B 200s that we're starting to see.

Rob May: So what's the process? So first of all, do you typically go call on data centers and say, "Do you have any old GPUs?" Or are you guys well known enough now that people just call you and are like, "Hey, I got I got these GPUs and then what's the process?" Right? So walk us through you have you have a data center and it's in like Phoenix, Arizona. How does it get to you and what do you have to do with it?

Harris Edelman: That is that's a great question. So reverse logistics only because this is, you know, graphic but it paints a kind of clear picture. Is kind of like throwing up like people understand how to you get something it's perfectly in a box you get a meal your body processes it and you can expel it. De like taking stuff out of a data center is very complicated because everything is built to put it in there and then to remove move it carefully without disturbing the flow of the other stuff in the data center is a lot and we carry a lot of insurance and we have rules and regulations of how we do things internally so that there's no oops I just shut off your entire mail system in you know with a flip of a switch. So, we've figured out how to decommission equipment in a way that is as as you know, helpful and not disruptive to companies.

But the fact is there's a lot of like homemade boxes that are now molds that we've developed in order to pull stuff out of racks and how you organize things from a data center in Arizona and bring it to our facility in Iowa, which is closer to Arizona than New York. And then if it's in the tri-state area, we bring it to New York.

Rob May: Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. And so, and so what do you what do you have to do to it and what are the rules? Like, I think you mentioned something. So, I had to tour your facility and, you mentioned something about like the truck has to stay locked and people can't get to like like what are some of the rules around that that people might not expect?

Harris Edelman: Well, I'm not there's less rules or regulations about it, but just best practices I would say. We have GPS locks that are auditable. Like you can see where the lock is, you can see who opened the lock and who locked the lock cuz there's a code in and out. So it's kind of like a lockout tagout procedure they have in warehouses where you have you know forklifts and such. But we have a pretty tight chain of custody. All the folks that work for us have background checks. If they're going to a data center u we know what time they got there. We know what information was scanned into the truck and locked and then we know what's information what what equipment was pulled out of the truck and scanned into the warehouse. So it's a pretty tight ship. No truck stops in between the pickup and the drop off. And you know it's there's a lot of small moving parts that in our industry because it didn't exist 20 years ago. We're kind of I don't want to say making it up as we go along, but we have learned best practices from having read about problems that you don't want to read about.

Look, we were early enough to the game where we were doing work for which which had a bid. They they had someone take care of their desktop laptops. And I remember talking and this was years years ago. I remember talking to someone at thinking, you know, these guys, I don't know what they do with it, but the pricing they're giving you is just unrealistic. Like there's a cost of labor to do things a certain way. And then there was a you know data breach and all of a sudden the IT asset disposition partner was not properly sanitizing or taking the stuff taking good care of it and the chain of custody was was broken. So that that is a big exposure to companies. The short answer is they didn't I guess they you know they cared or didn't care but you know they paid a fee and they moved on with their lives.

Rob May: Yeah. Do you do you see some of the same equipment over and over? And do you try do you have anything like this is the part that's been through the most number of times? It's been here 14 times or any do you have any metrics like that?

Harris Edelman: We don't, but that's a great idea to keep track of. We do have some return customers. We do we do have a trade-in program. The fact is each generation seems to be used longer and longer in production. And so one of the things we were looking at is how often you know RAM or hard drives or you know GPUs come through our office but you know this a round trip of the same thing is happening but at such a small level at this point.

Rob May: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think a lot of people would be surprised. So anybody building an AI company has this problem where unless you have a ton of money it is it's hard to get GPUs. Like you can you can get approved to request so many at Amazon or GCP or whatever, but if you ask for the GPU on spot instance like you'll probably not get it, right? And everything else. And so I'm sure a lot of people would think like it's like who doesn't want an H100? Who's giving you an H100 and what are they doing instead? And why are they getting rid of it? Because that seems crazy to a lot of people, right?

Harris Edelman: So there's two two customers we have. One is they're getting to the H100 because they have B200's coming and they need to make budget space for the B200. So, some of it is a cost problem they're solving. So, they're generating real revenue because they still have real market value, which is also where a lot of the smart folks in the room understand that with regular refresh cycles, you can generate real money from accelerating a threeear cycle to a 2-year cycle or one year cycle. And so they are using that that to finance the newer thing because as they figured out a new way to train a model, they wanted the extra speed of a B200 instead of H 100 or something.

Rob May: Interesting. Yeah. And is there a certain type of customer that's primarily buying these refurbed GPUs, servers?

Harris Edelman: Strangely we have or not strangely I guess if you understand specs we are your best customer best partner sorry so we have two parts to the business one is we bring stuff in through umbligo and then we sell stuff that's reconfigured through techmike NY so what we learned was a lot of folks in the IT asset disposition space decommission a hyperscaler pull the RAM the GPUs the procs and they wholesale all the parts different discrete sectors. What we do is we reassemble all those parts. So we buy from our competitors and reassem reassemble servers on TechMike NY on a retail side. So what is interesting is the demand for all these parts in a in a configured format is different for every user whether it's a university whether it's a hedge fund whether it's a it's a gamer at home.

So what what we needed to do was create a platform for someone to reconfigure the stuff that we have, which are literally hundreds of thousands of SKUs on TechMike Y and that allows them to configure to a spec. So the people that understand how many cores they need, how how much speed they need, how much RAM they need, how much hard drive space they need, what RAID or what GPUs or whatever they need, they can find it and build it on TechMike and Y. Understanding that we do a lot of Frankensteining and we stand behind that build because we've built tens of thousands of servers. Yeah. And so things that you might not know were possible because it's really, you know, certain hard drives that have a certain block size need to be reconfigured, but you can use a 520 formatted block size and reconfigure it for 512 block size, which would work on a server. The these are nuance deals but we allow our customers and this is also how we help generate revenue for our consignment partners is that they can or customers end users whether it's a university or a second or third tier hypers scale or data center really they they can they can build servers on the site based on what we have in stock.

Rob May: Super super interesting. And did you Yeah, this is a business that kind of like you could see people from both sides of the political aisle really getting behind this business because Republicans are like you're making a market in something that didn't exist. It's capitalism. You're you're you're giving people something they were looking for that was hard to find before. And you can see Democrats being like but you're keeping stuff out of the landfills longer and you're giving our life cycle and that's better for the environment and everything else. When you started this, did you have did you have a mission bigger than making money or was the environment part of it or were you just like here's a business opportunity?

Harris Edelman: Well, I believed and I still believe today that you can do well and you can do good and those goals are not mutually exclusive but I think inextricably linked and that really good business takes a lot of things into consideration. In fact we were given awards by a Harvard MBA. I do not have an MBA but a Harvard MBA professor sorry not a student and he wrote a seminal paper Michael Porter is the name of one of the professors and Mark Kramer it's called creating shared value and in creating shared value they basically said philanthropy is dead so someone should let the mayor of New York know that giving people money doesn't work in perpetuity helping people generate revenue or value right creating shared value is a sustainable model so the corporate social responsibility of Harvard's 1950 era was replaced with a much more reasonable I think platform which is creating shared value. And that's in fact what we do. And so, we do politically appeal to both candidates. And when the next guy or gal runs for mayor, we love to have him or her tour our facility and show them people want to work, people want to do good, and the output could also be reducing electronic waste, providing more affordable computers, and let's go out for a beer after.

Rob May: Yeah. Yeah. It it makes a lot of sense. And yeah, I'm curious. I mean, talk a little bit about the types of people that you hire. I mean, I assume you need everybody from people that know how to program and do stuff to people that are just strong and can lift heavy boxes and everybody in between and h how have you built a culture that mixes together lots of different types of people like that?

Harris Edelman: Well, that that is a that is an art and not a science and we're still learning and feeling our way out. But we feel like if you have a can do attitude we do have people in programming that obviously have discrete skills with programming and we have people in accounting that have accounting backgrounds but it's more for the attitude that we hire for that we really feel like if they I never thought anything was beneath me when I started the company and we never raised a dollar. We still have never raised a dollar which is rare for for a New York City company or any company to have gotten to our size. Yeah. With two locations, 35 employees in New York without having raised money. And the reason is we felt like if you provided a good product and service, you could generate enough revenue to fuel growth. I don't recommend it. It's not for the faint of heart. Remember my my my my life started later.

Rob May: Yeah.

Harris Edelman: In my 40s. But the company started in my 30s.

Rob May: Yeah. Yeah. So talk a little bit about the evolution of New York technology ecosystem. I mean were you when you started ongo were you were were were you in the tech ecosystem here? I mean it was so to give you some context I looked at New York in 2010 when I moved to Boston as a possible place and New York was far behind Boston. And now sitting here in 2026 New York is three times the size of the Boston tech ecosystem.

Harris Edelman: Sure. So as as a as a as a New Yorker, I just felt like New York was always home to me. So, and I also felt like there was this this not grittiness, but this like this mentality where you could get things done here. And you know, we shared a story. We shared a story earlier about how you're you're out at, you know, 11 12 at night and you want to play pool, you can. Yeah. And so, for a city that doesn't sleep, it also provides a lot of opportunities. And so I always felt, I mean, this was my home. And so, I felt building the company here was important.

And, and not the least of which is the first kind of semblance of New York becoming a tech city was way back in the day, internet 1.0. Was when there was something called Silicon Alley which was you know our response to Silicon Valley and it was kind of a joke. It was the beginning of it. I was working in the city. I was working for a company called Urban Box Office which which did not meet a great end but it was a you know if you're a pioneer sometimes you get an error. But we did meet some really impressive people like Fred Wilson from you know Union Square Ventures was an investor and this was before you know you know things were were big. But we learned a lot and I feel like New York City as a backdrop is a is a great partner always in any company for tech.

Rob May: Yeah. I you know talking about being out late night I a couple weeks ago there there's a restaurant near me on 7th Avenue called Cafeteria.

Harris Edelman: Oh yeah.

Rob May: And Yeah. And it's like you can go in there at like midnight on a Tuesday and get like salmon, right? Like and it's good and it's like how many cities in the world can you do that? Right. It's like it's crazy, right? But that vibe also gets you to people that think differently, right? I mean that's really important in technology.

Harris Edelman: Right. Exactly. And so what's interesting is these these campuses again I went to high school I mean we talked about this earlier on on 18th between 8th and 9th which which doesn't really exist anymore. They kind of disbanded to a lot of little schools now but across the street from my high school was the Covenant House which was a place for you know teens that had lost their way to kind of find themselves and get back on a good foot. And then you had the projects between 9th and 10th Avenue that were pretty rough.

Now, interestingly, this whole time the interconnects were in the Google building on 16th Street, I think, between 8th and 9th. Also, like all that was all around and you had the meat packing where they actually packed meat. Like that was really like there was blood in the streets. It was like a scene at a Rocky except it wasn't Philly. It was it was downtown meatacking. And so all that is to say that New York provides so many experiences that allows you to see things in a light that that exposes you to life outside of a bubble. And I and I always felt like even visiting some of the most amazing campuses. They're beautiful. It's like, you know, these cities on a hill almost, right? Which which which is which is a beautiful great place to be. But the but the insulation never felt to me like it was worth that sacrifice.

Rob May: You see places here that ideas that people are testing that they're testing in New York because there's so many people here that if you're testing a very targeted idea, this might be the only place in the country where you have enough people to do it. So, so but you see a lot of people place like Luck and Coffee has come here sort of first and all that and people try a lot of ideas here and so I like that as I like that as well and I think every city has a feel, right? Like like it's like you go to you go to Seattle and like people kind of dress a certain way and you go you go to Boston and yeah I was there for 14 years everybody wears glasses and like everybody looks a certain way and think certain way whatever and you come to New York and there's so many people I feel like everybody's trying to stand out and be different and there's no it's just you it's the least homogenized place I've ever been. I think that's great for innovation.

Harris Edelman: Yes, absolutely. I mean our company looks like the city we do business in. I mean we have you know a very diverse you know group of people from many many different backgrounds from different countries. I think we speak eight languages in the c in like eight languages like fluently like not like oh I took a French class like people speak this natively eight different languages which I think is systematic is emblematic sorry of what it is to have a company in New York City and if and if you don't have that you're doing it wrong then then you should go to a campus somewhere and no disrespect to Silicon Valley because it's beautiful and it reminds me of like these you know you have the mountains and the ocean and but it's a monoculture

Rob May: you can disrespect them a little bit for the monoculture

Harris Edelman: But no, [laughter] but yeah, I mean the diversity not just of soio economic diversity, although there really is none in certain neighborhoods. But the fact that you could walk across the street in New York City from where, you know, things are one way and then you walk across the street and you have to, you know, pay attention and you have to, you know, look out like it it's a big city, but and it's a safe city, but you also have to be aware and of what what you're doing, which also helps companies always be aware of what they're doing and how am I interacting with a customer and what what opportunities do I have to innovate on what we're doing because the greater the concentration of different ideas, the more innovation you can you can create.

Rob May: So, when you think about the growth that you want to achieve maybe over the next few years at Ombligo, do you do you think the refurb market is growing fast enough and big enough that you, you know, you're like, we're going to stick with this, we're going to hit all our goals, or do you ever have the inclinations where you're like, we see all this stuff, we've done some Frankenstein hardware product, like we're just going to start making our own servers. We're going to start doing some you know, are you going to become an OEM? Like, what do we [laughter] what do you think about these things? I'm sure you guys have these discussions all the time, right? It's like you what are we this is what business owners do.

Harris Edelman: Yes. You Yes. And to everything we so we have learned over time that we understand on a very basic level how all the parts of a server for example work together. Which allows us to take a part that wasn't necessarily intended to be in a specific configuration to work. And we validate that because we stand behind it with our warranty. So we do consider building techni servers. We do understand that if you want a if you're a Dell shop, you want only Dell, we can we can build that Dell for you straight up and use your Dell remote access card and the Dell dashboard and everything will light up perfectly. No amber lights. If you're an HP shop or super micro shop, we get all that. But we also respect the innovators that have a time crunch and a spec requirement. And if you have a time crunch and a spec requirement, we can make something happen for you very quickly. If you wanted to trial something, but we yeah, we do think that there is a great opportunity there.

And look at your the folks at Meta. Based on the DDR5 RAM shortage, they figured out a way to squeeze a DDR4 chip into a DDR5 motherboard. Like they like they just said, "Oh, well, we can't get enough of it or at the right price or you know, maybe they're now worried about costs." they figured out how to do that. I don't know how to do that, but what we can do is we can change the block size of a hard drive or we can we can take an you know, SXM GPU that's on a motherboard and we can convert it to a PCIe chip and then put that in a in a PCIe slot on a server. So there are things that we've learned how to do that these things weren't initially intended for that purpose, but we have enough experience in building thousands of servers for different discrete purposes that allow us to kind of grow that way. But yes, we do consider ourselves in the future a future OEM.

Rob May: Yeah. So we're sitting here in New York City and we have some some Wall Street people that watch the show and you just talked about the DDR the RAM shortage. Yes. And this is a this is a thing that probably like a lot of people don't understand like why is this happening, right? Why is this so hard? Everything else. What do you what do you think about publicly traded hardware companies in general and how AI is influencing this the server configuration that people want and all that? Do you think it's going to consolidate? Do you think it's going to fragment and there's going to be more options? And do you know do you think we're going to get to the other side of this memory bottleneck at some point?

Harris Edelman: I mean, we have to we have to. That's the short answer. You know, Musk is on it. He's building a terra fab, so don't worry. Micron's building a fab up in outside of Syracuse to help mitigate that. They already have a fab in outside of Washington DC in Northern Virginia, I think, somewhere.

I don't know who is going to figure it out, but what we've learned, especially with the hardware side, is as and going back to necessity is the mother invention, you have folks that don't have access to B300's and so they have access to A100s and I know it's a vastly different chip and I'm I'm not that big of a nerd to understand all the nuances, but I know these are are training chips, right? These are these are these are great in that configuration. And so, I know smart people are going to work on a software fix that will allow you to do things that are similar. Like before you had, Microsoft kind of as this really heavy system that required a lot of RAM and decent compute to get things going. When they came out with a real Linux and open office which was much lighter. You can take an old laptop which is how we kind of started in business. You could you could put you know a Linux or Ubuntu Kubuntu you had a million versions of it but it was a lot lighter for the same hardware spec. So I feel like there are going to be a lot more fixes. I know that the Chinese are on it. If you don't give someone access to something they will figure out how to make it work and they are

Rob May: we've talked about it on show. I think that was a big strategic mistake. I think you want to keep your enemies dependent on you until the so you always have that line to pull when you really need it. And we just beat them up for no reason and they've turned around and got stronger and have done a lot of their own stuff, right? What are you seeing on these do you get any of the who what's the company that starts with an H that makes GPUs over there? Not it's not Hitachi. It's but they're they're they're the new the new Quinn models from Alibaba are optimized for those chips.

Harris Edelman: Yes. Yes. Huawei. Yes.

Rob May: And yeah, and so it's I don't think that's a good thing for the United States.

Harris Edelman: No. In fact, we were involved with ripping out millions of dollars. I mean, that was the retail value and then we just had to shred it. We couldn't sell it. But we were we were hired to rip out a bunch of Huawei stuff several years ago, when that became, you know, a nonpermissible infrastructure part of a system. But yeah, I think it's gonna be it's going to be an interesting ride. I think that look, it's

Rob May: Yeah. Have you ever had the [clears throat] experience of taking apart something where you had this moment where you were like, "Shit, somebody put a back door in this chip." And like because we hear a lot like everybody, we don't use Chinese equipment, they don't want to use our equipment, like whatever. Like does that really happen?

Harris Edelman: So the short answer is yes. It's above my pay grade but it's a it's a small industry so we do hear about these things. The things that we used to see were where engineers would like sign some system boards with like a certain you know logo or or you know kind of a graphic if you will. But we have had to destroy we have a shredder. I'm not sure if you saw the shredder in motion. It's very very loud. But it just grind it turns system boards into confetti. But we do have customers that needed us to not resell anything. So, we physically pulled everything apart, grinded all their system boards into confetti. But we haven't gotten on the software side. Our software, our testing, inventory, and purging system does sanitize things, reset them to factory defaults, but we don't go so deep as to set up the network to see these things. But I do know people that have said, these should not have been shipped from this major OEM with this card in there. Yeah. I mean, whatever that means. I don't know, but I Yeah. There's a lot of people that touch something before it gets into production. Yeah. And so we Yeah, we have not been involved, but I've heard crazy stories, and I'm starting to believe.

Rob May: Yeah. Yeah. How so speaking of a lot of people touch things. Supply chain for the computer equipment industry is complicated and global. What have you seen? What what are the impacts of tariffs been on this industry overall?

Harris Edelman: U everything is more expensive. This is it's so Mayor M as it goes with taxes right if you're listening you can tax things but then they become more expensive and so I'm not a fan of the tariffs because it just makes everything we're importing more expensive and therefore we pass that on to our our customers. But I you know I get it. I do think you know I lived in New York City during CO and it did kind of highlight our dependence on the global economy and what we could and could not get. But I don't think that I don't think we came away with the right lesson. I think yes you should onshore more stuff but if you actually believe in a global economy then every country shouldn't be doing everything. You can rely on some to be more agriculturally dependent and more technology dependent, but it shouldn't be all you shouldn't have no ability to do something, right?

Rob May: Yeah. And I mean, like even like I'm I'm about as free market capitalism as they come, but like I don't think it's wrong for the government to be like we're going to subsidize two steel plants to make sure we can at least make some steel here in case something happened. You know, it's like and you want to keep those there's value in keeping that knowledge around, right? I think a lot of what people miss about onoring is like when you haven't produced something in this c country for 20 years, you don't know how to produce it. You don't you're not familiar with the machines and how to repair the machines and install the machines and run the machines. It's a mess.

Harris Edelman: I mean, one of the things that we kind of, you know, kind of thought about or this is a conversation I had with my my father who's who's a who's a history buff and during World War II, you had kind of an ad to kind of encourage folks to plant a victory garden, right? Because all the produce was being canned and shipped to the to the to the men and women overseas. Yeah. And so it was patriotic to grow a garden if you had the space, not New York City, but you know, maybe New Jersey or Connecticut and or upstate New York. And so during the u the pandemic, we were kind of kind of espousing this. There's a patriotism to refurbishing or buying refurbished because it's already here. Now, it wasn't made here. It was made in the Philippines or Singapore or China, but it was it was it was re refurbished here.

Rob May: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Let's wrap up on on some some New York related stuff. Outside of tech and work, what's what's your favorite thing about New York City? What do you like to do the most?

Harris Edelman: I love just to watch people. I love to sit in an outside cafe with my wife and watch people go by. And, it just it you can hear music. You could hear someone you know, scream out of joy or aggravation. The sounds and the sights of New York City are incomparable and just to walk around the city is one of my favorite things to do.

Rob May: Gotcha. And do you have a you have a favorite bar in Manhattan or Brooklyn?

Harris Edelman: [laughter] I have three kids so as much like I used to I used to have favorite bars. I don't know what they look like today. So, I don't want to, you know, I mean, I do you know, I did spend a lot of time at at the diner which is on in Williamsburg. When I was starting the company, I was living in the in and working in the same warehouse and would would be there often, but that's only because it was like four blocks from my house and it was the only thing on the south side of Williamsburg. Yeah. But that was also 20 years ago.

Rob May: So, if people want to learn more about the stuff that you're doing, in particular, there's some, you know, if there's some AI entrepreneurs out there, they're like, "What? You have A100s?"

Harris Edelman: Like, I mean, we have thousands of A100.

Rob May: Do they go to TechM? Do they go on Bleo? Like, what where do they go to get that stuff?

Harris Edelman: So, techmikey.com and they can in real time you can see, you can build anything you want. A 15th gen Dell server or 11th gen HP server or super micro. To put as many V100s or A100, whatever you want in there and we will validate that it works. But yes,

Rob May: awesome. Well, Harris, thanks for being on the podcast today.

Harris Edelman: Thanks for having us. Yeah, this is a lot of fun.

Rob May: And those of you watching, like us, subscribe, send us guests, send us sponsors, all that other stuff. And, thanks for watching. We'll see you next week. Heat. Heat. Heat. The next stop.