I sat with Ivan Arbouzov, the CEO of Clear Drop. He builds tools you can put in a kitchen, not in a sorting plant. His bet is simple. If homes prepare waste the right way, recycling gets real.

Clear Drop’s first headline product is a soft plastic compactor. Think bags, wraps, and film, the floaty stuff that clogs machines and blows down streets. The unit packs film under high pressure, then uses a controlled touch of heat so the layers stick to themselves. No stink, no smoke, no chemistry set, just enough warmth to bind a clean block that can travel. That block goes to a named recycler, not to a wish bin. Ivan and his team stand at the plant and watch loads get processed. They refuse greenwash. Either it moves through the system, or they change the design.

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This week on Keep Going I spoke with Zane Witherspoon, the CEO of SuperSet. He builds privacy compliance tools for companies that say they want to do the right thing and need help doing it. His pitch is plain: The law is a maze. The rules shift by state, by sector, and by executive order. There is no single federal standard in the United States. There are many. If you run a business, you do not have the time or staff to track all of it. If you care about your customers, you should try anyway. SuperSet aims to make that effort real.

Zane has been at this for years. His first company was a blockchain protocol in 2017. Big raise. Big team. It went down with the 2018 crash. His second company built data pipelines that let users move their data out of Facebook, Google, and Amazon. That one sold to its largest customer, a hedge fund with a consumer app. It was a modest win and a hard lesson. The market pulls every data product toward ads. He wanted a different path...