Thomas Lansing

Head of Product for Reclamation Factory

• As a product leader at a startup, I set product vision, ran customer discovery, and built the partnerships that got our fantasic new baby in front of the right people.
• The startup (RecFac) was about developing automation for plastic recycling systems. This is a genuinely hard problem.
• The cool part of the project was: while testing machine vision for sorting e-waste plastics, our team uncovered and patented a foundational method for sorting plastics by acoustic signature.

The Project:

• Our pilot customer, an e-waste demanufacturer, was swamped with a growing inventory of plastics waste from old televisions and monitors. Material sorting was a major challenge.
• Vision models worked well for most plastics, but fail with visually similar polymers.
• The insight was this: In an interview with a colleague (polymer chemist we were working with), he claimed he could "feel" the difference between polymers. What does that even mean? Well, it means that our colleague can intuit differences in visually identical polymers and we then PROVED that his intuition could be represented as machine learning model.

Building the relationships that shaped the roadmap

• Ran structured interviews with e-waste facility operators to score product opportunities and keep the roadmap grounded in real operations, not assumptions.
• Established systems for deal flow and sales record keeping, preventing information silos and sales inefficiencies.
• Conducted meetings with top 100 USA plastics manufacturers.
• Closed a material-testing partnership with major manufacturer, and a pilot facility partnership with the largest and most advanced material recovery facility in the Northeast.

Developing research into a fundable, sellable product

• Co-authored a successful grant application to the National Science Foundation for $304,000.
• My primary role was in developing the commercialization plan. I wrote the business plan across three product cycles and deployed company wide product prioritization methods.
• Established the business case in terms of CO₂ equivalence to speak directly to mission-focused investors.
• Published whatever graphics were required, like product one-pagers and other sales collateral. These small contributions served as a forcing functions to get our engineers to agree on what we ought to promise customers.