The a16z Show - Building a Marketplace for Carbon

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

In part 1 of our carbon removal series, we talked to Nan Ransohoff — Head of Climate at Stripe — about what it might take to jumpstart the market of carbon removal solutions. But what happens when there is a true, thriving market of buyers and sellers? How will suppliers effectively reach the right buyers, and as more solutions become available, how will buyers effectively vet the options?In part 2, we address these questions and more, together with Brennan Spellacy, co-founder & CEO of Patch – a growing marketplace for carbon credits. We also cover many evolving market dynamics, like the potential differences between two sets of tons delivered, the opportunity and challenge of effectively educating buyers, the integration of software like Patch's API, verification solutions and their current limitations, how even the voluntary market is being held accountable for their carbon claims, and the role that Patch is playing to help develop this nascent industry.By the way, if you like this episode, be sure to look out for part 3 of our series where we get into the nitty gritty of 3 emerging carbon removal solutions — ranging from biomass pyrolysis to carbon mineralization. Resources: Patch’s website: https://www.patch.io/Follow Patch on Twitter: https://twitter.com/usepatchFollow Brennan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bspellacy_ Stay Updated: Find us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.  Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Banks want to view all carbon is the same. Every ton of it's created equal, regardless of the underlying metadata. We now know that is fundamentally not true. Welcome to part two of our carbon removal series. If you miss part one, we talked to Nan Ransahoff, head of climate at Stripe, about what it might take to jumpstart the market of carbon removal solutions. But what happens when there is a true thriving market of buyers and sellers? How will suppliers effectively reach the right buyers?

and as more solutions become available, how will buyers effectively vet the options? In this segment, we address these questions and more, together with Brennan Spellasy, co-founder and CEO of Patch, a growing marketplace for carbon credits. We also cover many evolving market dynamics, like the potential differences between two sets of tons delivered, the opportunity and the challenge of effectively educating buyers on these differences, the integration of software like Patch's API, verification solutions and their current limitations, how even the voluntary market is being held accountable for their carbon claims,

and ultimately the role that Patch is playing to help develop this nascent industry. By the way, if you like this episode, be sure to look out for part three of our series where we get into the nitty-gritty of some of these emerging carbon removal solutions, ranging from biomass pyrolysis to carbon mineralization. For now, I hope you enjoy this episode with Brennan. The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.

For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Brennan, thanks for joining us today. Let's start with the basics. In super, super simplified terms, what does Patch do? Thanks for having me, Steph. So in super simplified terms, patch builds software that makes it easier for corporates to interact with environmental markets. So what actually means is we partner with a wide variety of what are called carbon removal

and carbon credit developers. These are organizations that either abate emissions or remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through a variety of chemical pathways. That's reforestation, it's a direct air capture. It's a huge amount of breadth on the platform. We actually call their capacity or ability to sell back to carpet sequestration or carbon payment in our software platform and then expose it to corporates. So through the lens of a buyer, if you're something like an afterpay, for example, which is a customer of ours, Pats looks a lot

like a B2B marketplace for climate action. But if you're a seller, we look like a platform to help you scale your business. So we almost look like two businesses depending on the type of organization you are. Got it. And we're seeing a bunch of attention being drawn to carbon removal. And so what I'm curious to know is whether this is new, this idea of a marketplace of connecting buyers, and sellers, is this something that already exists? If so, if these do exist, what aspects of Patch are net new or unique? Yeah, that's a great question. So before Patch, really what existed was this idea of the long-star carbon credit exchange.

So very often what you would see is primarily banks and some oil and gas organizations, they would have a carbon desk where they would buy huge tranches of carbon credits on the scale hundreds of thousands and millions of tons. And in the case of the banks, they'd actually be speculated, so they'd be buying moldy and then flipping them for some sort of yield. What Patch actually does as takes an completely different approach to carbon. We don't actually treat it like almost the security, which has historically been treated as where banks want to view all carbon is the same.

Every ton is created equal regardless of the underlying metadata. We now know that it's fundamentally not true. So whether you're removing carbon through natural solutions like reforestation or human engineers, solution like director, capture, enhanced weathering, there's a huge amount of variability in both the price per ton, but as well as the rate at which that carbon can be removed and for how long that carbon can stay removed. Patchesport ethos as a platform is to aggregate and standardize presentation of that information to provide a new level of transparency to that historically has been possible. And this is really with the intent of showing buyers the kind of information they need to

actually understand where they actually transact with. Because before, if you looked at some of these exchange platforms, it would simply be a digit, a couple lines, you know, a thousand times, maybe a leak identifier and maybe a little bit of metadata on the underlying carbon project. But there's so much information that's been abstracted away that has resulted in people buying things when they thought they were buying something else. Yeah, on that note, I mean, I've been learning more about this recently, but for example, if people pay for a certain amount of forest to not be torn down,

well, what if the government regime changes? What if a forest fire happens, right? There is some time dimension that's important here. And so I'm curious to know from you two things. One, how are you validating this information? Are you actually going out and researching these companies and digging into their processes or operations? So that's the first thing. How are you validating the companies on your platform and what they're doing? And then I'm specifically curious about this time dimension, right, where there are certain types of carbon removal, which are extremely permanent. And then, you you know, at the other end of that scale, there's maybe a question mark around the permanence. And of course, within that question mark, you don't know. It might last 100 years or it might last 10. So how are you thinking about that and also representing that to the customer or the buyer? So first and foremost, the goal is to service all this information you're actually describing. Whether it's the associated risks with the particular project, so if it's in a government or in a country that's not stable, that's an associated risk with the underlying grip.

if the actual chemical pathway can only support a certain amount of what's called durability. That's the characteristic you're describing, which is stating how long does that environmental benefit last for? There are some durability kind of numbers that are really well understood, and there are some that are kind of more approximations based on distribution. Soil carbon typically follows on this, where you have some soil carbon that only can stay sequestered on the scale of 5 to 10 years,

and then some that can stay a little bit longer. So first things versus patch works with third parties to actually collect all of this data. The risk data, the associated kind of underlying evaluation of the projects themselves, and we put it all in what place the surface this information. So patches actually not going into the field ourselves to generate this data. What we do do is we basically give a series of data and reporting requirements to our supply partners that they have to actually input into the platform and maintain over time. And the reason it's set up like that really comes back to incentives.

So it's really critical to think about incentives at scale. Historically voluntary car markets are incredibly small. They're on the scale of $2, $3 billion a year. But they're poised to grow to the mid-level tens of billions of dollars by 2030 and then hundreds of billions of dollars by 2050. And so, when you have, how much throughput, you have to make sure the incentives are well-balanced. And so if you think about tax as an exchange,

we can kind of make the relationship to financial markets. It wouldn't really make sense for us to be the credit reading agency or the auditors. Right? So if you had NASDAQ also be the Deloitte and the Moody's, that's a bit of a conflict of interest. And so it's really important to us to have really clear boundaries today on who's responsible for what so that as we scale of market, we can scale that healthy and ethical way. So to give you an idea of why does a path scroll out the ground that kind of key element there

is really making sure that at scale, patch are being set up to say everything is good because you make money up through foot. So structurally, we will never do that. We have to make sure that kind of light and the same is very clear. I never crossed. That makes sense to me. Is there a standard in place that exists in the industry? I know a lot of this is really, really nascent. And I also know that, as we've already discussed, a lot of these chemical pathways are very different. So I'd imagine that it'd be difficult to really compare apples to apples. You're really comparing maybe different kinds of apples, maybe other kinds of

fruits. And so how are you able to get this information and present it to the customer? Is there a standard in place that you're able to kind of borrow from other agencies that you can apply to patch? So there are many carbon credit standards that are emerging right now, both in the kind of historical carbon credit market, so organizations like Vinerra with gold standard, but as well as new age organizations, like kind of act like credit rating agencies like Silbera and D-0. And we actually represent both of these data sets together. That being said, the outputs of these organizations are actually all fairly similar.

So all of the standards and the methods in order to get to a particular output are different, the actual end result is the same. So typically, when you're thinking about carbonic people are typically caring about what's the underlying chemical pathway, what's the geography, the price, associated vintage. So vintage is the year that impact takes place. Is it a future venture that past vintage, the durability or permanence, how long is that positive environmental benefit last? The idea of additionality. Does that incremental dollar spend result in new collections?

have an impact that otherwise would not have happened. And finally, leakage, which is, does this positive environmental effect that's taken place here, not have resulted in the same emissions or even more emissions somewhere else outside of your boundary condition? So those sabbiter rate attributes are all the same regardless of standard today. So the standards are actually dynamic and evolving, but what they're attempting to do is actually quite similar. So that's where a platform like pass is actually incredibly valuable because you can present those four or five, six, seven data points in a standardized way, but we can react to the highly dynamic market because there are new standards cropping up all the time.

And that's what's actually really interesting. Why a marketplace like Patch is actually so important is because the underlying ecosystem is so turbulent. And so if you go with one partner that will not change and will react on your behalf, it gives you as a sustainability leader you're trying to leverage. I will say some of these aspects of the standards probably aren't familiar to the average buyer, right? Like, they don't understand some of the metrics that you just explained. Let's say they go on Airbnb. They're like, okay, I understand what I need. I need internet speed. I need it to be in this

locale. I understand the price point. And so how are you seeing the buyers on the platform engage with this information? Are they really fixated mostly on price? Or is there some level of education that they need to understand these different metrics and these different standards? And again, just curious to note anecdotally what you're seeing people latch on to. if there's certain metrics or standards that people really care about and others that they seem to care less about. Really, there's just a huge amount of variance in understanding from buyers today. Where there are a lot of people coming to patch thinking every time is the same,

not even understanding that the idea of emissions avoidance is different than emissions are before. So like very fundamental concepts. As you have something incredibly sophisticated. That kind of died, it's all the project documentation, presented with the patched all the metadata, and actually like something that that enables their power user type behavior. And so what we're seeing is there's always not be some level of education coming in to the platform because of essentially that gap between where most people are.

Because there's still a niche problem. Like climate change is obviously a huge problem. Interactive with carbon markets is still kind of a niche behavior. So there's a huge amount of education that actually happens within the platform. And at the end of the day, a lot of these attributes, most people can actually understand if it's presented in the right way. It's actually more a B-U-X problem. If you're actually explaining the concepts in very plain English

and the strengths and weaknesses of going with one solution versus another. And what you have, things actually compare it to one another. You can understand, oh, if I can pay $100 for a ton and get more durability versus paying $10 a ton for less durability, and not only understand what I'm paying for it. So I can make it trade off one way or another. That's why transparency is so critical. And so what we're seeing is, although a lot of people are coming to the patch

with a very limited understanding, the actual education takes place of a platform by interacting with the patch team, typically gets them a point where they're no enough to be dangerous, if you will. The other model we've actually seen happen more and more, which is actually what I expect to happen in the majority of cases,

the actual organization is working with consulting firms. So I actually believe that the big four, if you will, we're going to be doing the carbon accounting for a lot of these firms, the EYs, the KPFGs, the Deloits of the world. These are the organizations that are actually going to clean up big time when it comes of doing the carbon accounting for the Fortune 500 organization.

And they're actually using Patch and curating on top of Patch. So they use all the Lego brakes that we give to create a particular bespoke solution for their client. And I actually expect that to happen much more often. So the Fortune 500 might pay, but it's actually the Deloitte to their PWCs that are doing curating using the tools we're building. I think you're right that each company, we're especially smaller and medium-sized businesses. They're not going to have an expert to be able to understand these markets to the degree that they might. want to. And so, yes, having specific like carbon experts, we're actually doing an episode, which maybe this will be applicable to, of thinking about the jobs of the future. And you could

imagine a carbon buyer, a carbon strategist or something like that for these companies might be something that emerges more or maybe, yes, it'll be absorbed by the big four. Speaking to that, I've heard you talk about kind of four steps. There's calculations, so calculation of the offsets that a company is producing, reporting, then some sort of reduction or decarbonization. And then finally, offsets, which we've been talking about. But can you speak to maybe across that full trajectory? Are there other areas other than being the marketplace at the end that Patch is involved? Yeah.

So that's really where patch starts, is that kind of compensation piece, that last step. The one kind of exception is actually with the reporting elements. So we're now just beginning to see organizations like the SEC who want climate disclosures, starting to have requirements on, well, you also have to disclose what type of renewable energy credits or public credits you're purchasing as well. And so perhaps we'll be playing a role there because if the transacting takes place in our platform, we'll be responsible for some level of reporting. But just like going back to the other steps, the commission footprinting and reduction

strategies were actually never going to do. And the reason we said actually was back to an incentive point we were talking about earlier, which is a different time of incentive problem at scale, where if you wouldn't want your doctor getting commission on medicine and prescribing you, right? And so because we get monetized on volume to pushing the platform, we have a take rate, it would be highly unethical for us to tell people how much to buy, because we then have these satellites to buy more. And so again, having that separation of concerns is really, really important.

Where we do actually play a lot is a lot more on the supply side. So we really do these kind of suppliers to carbon fit developers as our poor customer. A patch where we build and invest a huge amount of our R&D dollars on building software and systems to help their business become more transparent and more scaled. Can you speak a little bit more to what those tools look like specifically for those suppliers? Yeah, absolutely. So huge focus for Patch is really making incredibly easy

for suppliers to scale their business commercially. And so when you think about all the things any company needs to do that's not related to the core service they're offering, in this case it's putting carbon underneath the ground or avoiding emissions in a particular typical pathway, there are things like collecting payment, managing inventory, managing FX, localizing content, and multiple languages. These are all things that software is really, really good at, that these organizations,

which are primarily composed of operations, finance, and chemical engineers tend to not want to actually spend a lot of their focus time on. And so anything that we can do to take work off of their plates, the better. Are you seeing a particular facet of that be especially valuable to the suppliers? is there an area where they're like, wow, we really can't find this elsewhere? I mean, if I think about payments as just an example, feels like there are other payment solutions out there. So is there, again, a facet of the supplier solutions that you're providing,

that you're like, wow, our suppliers are really in need of this? So I'd actually argue that it's actually a collection of functionality that makes it really valuable, right? Because it's almost like a form of verticalized SaaS, where it's software built for their particular workflows that have the context of their domain built into it. So there are definitely other payment providers. There's also other localization providers.

There's other ways to manage inventory. But there's nothing that really sings or plays in harmony together, like Patch does, for different forms of carbon and mobile developers. So it's really the kind of, there's actually not one killer feature. If you will, it's actually them all coming together that creates this ecosystem. It makes it not easier to run a skill your business. If you just have one or two, it tends to feel incomplete. Let's pivot to the buyer's side.

So you're building technology on both ends. Something that I've heard you talk about before is your API. So can you elaborate a little bit more on what this API does and how a company might use it to either calculate their footprint or use it for some other purpose? Absolutely. So there's what we call feature parity between the dashboard products of Patchfield. So those are the user interfaces.

That's the web application and the API. So anything you can do in the dashboard, you can do in the API and vice versa. The reason that's so powerful is because in a lot of cases, people want to own their end user experience. So whether you're an e-commerce company, enabling organizations state climate action or a corporate accounting platform, those software, those B2B software platforms we were talking about earlier that do the reporting, reduction, and removal, or patch of powers the removal element, this Lego brick of interacting with carbon markets is actually really valuable for a lot of experiences for folks who actually want to control that end user journey. And so a really concrete example is an organization like AFPAPA, where they've made the claim that having some sort of integrated climate action

within their product of service will help them drive loyalty, acquire new customers, and result in a better overall buyer experience. So instead of directing people to patch and then coming back to the AFPAP experience, what they do is they use patches API to integrate a form of climate action within the AFPA app. So that way you can actually integrate with the broad patch network without ever having to leave the comfort of, in this case, the AFPA. And we've seen that happen in logistics, in e-commerce, FinTech is actually meeting some crypto applications.

And so there's a huge, wide variety of folks who have the programming prowess, if you will, as well as we want to take some sort of climate action embedded in their products. And they're right down the fairway, if you go, for using Patch's API products. And just to paint a picture, is this what I'm imagining to be similar to what I see with Stripe, right? when you're going through a checkout process, it's like you can offset with this amount of trees or X percent can be allocated to this purpose. Is that what it looks like for these other companies?

Or can you paint a picture of what that UI might look like for their user? So there's a huge amount of variability. And so in the case of Africa, that's a B2C application, right? Where we're selling to Africa, which is a business and then they're selling to end consumers. For them, it actually looks like a location within the AFPA. where they're actually tracking the associated negative environmental externalities associated with their shopping that took place on afterpay or through any sort of after pay payment

experience across the web. And then they give you the ability to select them in this case six projects that Africa has curated that they feel matches their sustainability strategy. And then they expose that by API and then the end user can actually decide which of the six do I want to select. But you then have organizations like EasyPost, for example, which is actually a B2B to B sales motion where they've actually exposed in their API the ability to launch corporate neutral shipping, but they themselves are an API. And so they've actually added a flag

within their API per shipping label. And whenever that's turned on as carbon neutral, that calculation is that on their side. And then the compensation happens on patch. But the end user of that experience is also someone ready code. And so again, it really depends on the kind of end customer and what you're trying to do because there's a huge amount of variability. That's kind of the power of APIs. You have these Lego Bricks and you can build really whatever you want, whether it's another business application, consumer one, or even if they're just automating the back office of your own company. I really like the analogy of Lego Bricks because it does allow these companies to just integrate it

into their platforms or their companies or their processes. And for the end user, they don't necessarily know that this company like AfterPay is using Patch, right? It's kind of opaque in this case to the end user in terms of what that company is utilizing. Is that right? It's really up to the integrator. So in the case, of Afrika specifically, they actually broadcast the fact that where they're using Patch, viewing it as a little bit more of like an Intel inside, if you will, where they're alluding to the facts that this experience is powered by someone else, kind of like what like Wellfront does with Plaid or even like if you check out with stripes sometimes it says there's a little

powered by stripe in the corner. AfterPate is something very similar. And most people actually do something like that with Patch. There are a few select instances though where people completely white label patches tech and there's no mention of this. patch branding or infrastructure underneath the hood. It's nice that they have the option. How many suppliers and how many buyers are you looking at today? Yeah, so on the buy side, we have a little bit over 150 customers now, ranging from small startups.

Most of these listeners probably haven't heard of, or maybe we'll hear of eventually, to large corporates and to very large banks in Canada and North America. So here's a amount of variability there in terms of size and scope. And then on the supply side, we have around, I believe, 50 suppliers on the platform representing over 100,5 adaction projects, spanning 15 different project types. That's very cool.

I'm curious to know on the buy side, if you've heard from customers, why they're pursuing this? Is it just, you know, someone within the company has determined this is important? Is it some sort of corporate action and some sort of legislation that they need to meet? How are these companies making the decision to decide, okay, I'm actually going to integrate into these carbon and removal solutions. Yeah, I know. It's your question. It really actually goes back to

his broader secular trend we're seeing, where in the last, call it, decade, we've not entered the period where the first two generations who are going to be materially affected by climate change

are entering their prime spending years, and prime earning years, as well as beginning to vote. And those are millennials and Gen C. And when you have that, when you have kind of the masses beginning to care about the problem that two to three decades ago

was it kind of a niche problem, And now it's becoming a mainstream problem that changes a lot of different things. So typically, the things that are most reactive, organizations that are most reactive are actually businesses, right? They see their sales drop. They see competitors winning business over them. They may look into why that is, and we're realizing that sustainability and operating sustainability is one of those key elements. That was actually why in an industry like Buy and Al Pay Later, which is incredibly competitive, they're always looking for ways to differentiate from one another. And one way to do that to acquire younger spenders is to operate more sustainably.

The next kind of group of people that typically moves are investors. So investors, if you're investing on a 5, 10, 15-year time horizon, they see, oh, well, these are how individuals are changing their behavior. That's what effect how businesses perform. So now we actually have to change our investment strategy, right? Are we going to prioritize companies that operate more sustainably because we think they'll actually yield better returns the next 5, 10, 10, 15 years? So then the investors capitulate.

And then that'll actually look like some organizations coming to us because maybe they got bought by a private equity firm and it's been mandated. We actually work with quite a few private equity firms, three are the largest in the world. Or in some cases, it's actually the private equity firm driving, or the investor driving the commitment because they made a commitment to their LPs. Right?

So another past customer EQT, they have a net zero commitment by 2035. And they've made a commitment to their broader LP base, which are institutional, solid of wealth funds, et cetera, is saying, hey, we're going to actually invest in this particular way and help our companies operationalize this investment thesis, which is operating sustainably because we think in the long run, it'll yield better returns. And then finally, the most lagging indicator of public sentiment is policy.

Right. And now we're just beginning to see some of that take place with both the chips act and the IRA. And that right now is actually primarily coming in the form of incentives, primarily tax incentives, right? If you do this sustainable thing, we are going to either give you a tax credit or actually giving money in order to fund that or enable that.

But we're expecting to see more and more. We have a few carrots today. We're expecting to see a couple more sticks come out as well. And we're going to begin to see that in the SEC playing with the idea of evaluating climate disclosures, right? Where you have these investors with this sustainable thesis saying we think sustainable companies are going to perform better. And then corporates make net zero claims, right? And say, hey, we're going to, this is going to be a sustainability strategy. And we want to attract all the ESG dollars or sell.

all the wealth fund money that maybe was only going to sustainable businesses. And now if there's not meat to that strategy, there isn't a materiality to that net zero strategy. That's misleading investors, which is why the SEC is beginning to look at this. It's not because the SEC cares about sustainability, particularly, but it's because the CEOs and executive team of these organizations are making a claim to attract retail and to attract institutional capital. And if there's no grounds for that claim, that's misleading investors. And that's why the SEC is going to be involved.

So it's almost three phases. So I was to say, I can really bring it back, it's who are they stealing to the heat from most? Is it customers? Is it capital allocators or is it regulators? And sometimes it's a mix.

Sometimes it's one, sometimes it's self-rate. That's actually a very clear but also interesting way to frame it in that a lot of people view these markets as purely voluntary. And in a way they are, right? If a company is saying we're going to hit net zero,

they're not forced to do that. There is maybe some pressure from their customers. But once they say that publicly, I like that you brought up this regulatory aspect of it where, you know, if they're signaling that to their investors, they actually do need some proof. They need analytics. They need to show the data behind what they're saying is net zero at some point. And I know we're in the early stages of that, but I like that you brought that up because it isn't purely voluntary. There are repercussions of some of these statements or actions. I'm curious to know how you see specifically the marketplace approach that Patch has decided to pursue. how you see that evolving. And one lens on that perhaps is cost, because something that I'm curious

about is, you know, I imagine, you mentioned you have maybe 100 or so different solutions on the platform that people will naturally migrate to cost. I could be wrong, but within a marketplace, if I use Airbnb as an example, there's many cities that it operates in and there's many facets to homes that someone might look for. I do wonder whether over time the buyers with carbon and removal will naturally gravitate just towards, okay, what is the lowest cost solution on this platform? And let's just go with that. But I'm curious to know what you're seeing there

and how you think about keeping the marketplace competitive across many solutions, if that makes sense. I actually don't think that's an unreasonable prediction in that folks will navigate towards the least expensive thing they can buy. But I think the thing that's important to qualify that with is, well, what is the thing they can buy? What I mean by that is there's going to be two competing dynamics. There's going to be availability.

So it's actually, we're beginning to see this now. There's a huge amount of supply compression. So what was historically the most affordable form of carbon is now beginning to become more expensive. And we're going to have this kind of simultaneous effect of these human engineers solutions as they traverse the cost curve becoming less expensive. We actually expecting their meat in the middle at some point in like 2030, effectively, where the thing that's the cheapest today won't exist in five or ten years. and the most expensive things today will be far more competitive. So it's kind of that dynamic of,

okay, what is the lowest cost thing and where is it going to end up? There's a huge amount of speculation on where that's going to land. Most numbers are between $50 to $200 per ton. So even today is a huge amount of variability. But for context, there's even more variability on Patch today

where the least expensive thing is around $15 per ton and the most is $1,000. So at the much wider brand and it's going to be expensive to tighten over time. Now, the other piece is price, is the only thing that's important if you have you called it as a commodity, which we firmly believe

that it is not. So if you're thinking about commodities like soybeans, for example, not features or derivatives based on commodities, but rather to be purchasing them the commodity itself. There's not that much variability. There's maybe the geography of growth around, maybe the specific genus or species of soybean, but there's actually not that much variance. But if you look at tons of carbon, there's a massive amount of variance. That really is what drives the price, whether it's the underlying technology type, the vintage, so that'll be a year that the actual credit is delivered, People typically buy both historically sequestered carbon as well as future commitments to kind of buy their way in line, the maturity of the technology, the geography of the technology, the underlying durability, which is how long is that positive environmental effect lasts for? Depending on your climate strategy and how you're going to tell a narrative on how you're achieving your particular climate strategy, that's going to actually dramatically filter down what you can actually buy.

And so if you have a huge narrative around perhaps farmers or agriculture, you might index towards a set of inventory that's agriculture focused on the platform. Or if you're really focused on national excellence, if you will, maybe you want to make sure all the spending happens in your particular country. Right. And so depending on that segmentation, there's only going to be a certain amount of inventory available to, and that's going to have a huge amount of price variability within it.

And so it's not going to be just what's the most affordable option to me, because that's not going to typically fit within your sustainability strategy. Right. Now, within that kind of tearing down, I think it's fair to say people are going to want to go the most cost competitive option, but that won't be the most cost competitive in many cases globally. Can you just clarify on the spectrum, the lower end where you're speaking to something that's $15 a ton? What does that look like? Is that planting trees or what is that solution?

And can we compare that to maybe an example from the $1,000 end just so we can have concrete examples for the audience to understand what those different solutions might look like. So a really great example is something that's giving me the $15 to $20 per ton range is something like greenhouse gas destruction. So like chloro-fluor carbon destruction or methane destruction,

which are two other types of greenhouse gases get talked about less often, but that have, in the case of chloroferocarbons, 300 to 350 times the global heating potential, and in the case of methane, 25 times the global heating potential, of one molecule of carbon dioxide. So said plainly, one molecule of carbon dioxide versus one molecule of this other type of greenhouse gas,

the carbon dioxide as far as potent from a global heating potential, but there's far more of it getting emitted than in the atmosphere. So in that case, that's a form of emission abatement. So you might have an old mine that falls beneath regulations, where the EPA says you can only emit a certain methane. It falls beneath that. They're allowed to emit it. And so how do you actually prevent those emissions from getting emitted in the first place?

It's by using some sort of climate finance. on the more expensive end of the spectrum, maybe something like direct air capture, which are basically these large fans that suck in ambient air from outside and blow it through some sort of reactant. Typically, it's either some sort of liquid or solid. And the CO2 will stay behind in various forms, depending on the type of direct air capture,

process it is, depending on the type of chemistry that's happening. And pure, primarily nitrogen and oxygen and like a little bit of argon will come out at the end. I wanted to ask specifically on durability. Is there any sort of guarantee or how does Patch position that with the buyers? Are you telling them, okay, we are actually guaranteeing that this carbon stays out for one year? I know some of the technologies say that they can keep the carbon out of the atmosphere for hundreds, if not thousands of years. So, of course, there's no way that you can sell that with a guarantee.

But I'm curious to know how you're representing that to the customer and how they can have certainty to some degree that what they're buying. if they are, I assume, paying more in some cases for these longer-term solutions. So how are you positioning that and how are you thinking about that? So the core element with this is really transparency in the ecosystem and really being very clear about what we do know and what we don't know and what evaluations have been run on the underlying projects and which have not been. And so in the case of durability, that's typically coming from some sort of third-party standard or evaluator that's actually evaluating the carbon problem.

So patch actually does not do that. So in order to get onboard onto the platform, we have to get evaluated by a third party. And then that data, that's both durability data, but also comes with a bunch of other data related to kind of the real and verifiability of the underlying project, gets pulled in the patch and standardized.

The guarantee, if you will, actually falls in the standard in that case. But if we are given information that is untrue by the supplier, so if the supplier misleads patch or misleads a buyer intentionally, then patch will actually get involved. So in order to actually list on the platform, we have to go through basically an onboarding assessment, as well as sign up on a series of indemnities, which is basically saying, if you break this rule, these are the repercussions associated with breaking that particular rule, which is why people like working with Patch. Right. It's because there are more guardrails in place rather than maybe a traditional broker,

which is once the transaction is done, the broker washes their hands clean and the buyer is left responsible for the outcome. That seems really important because there are so many solutions out there. And I know you're also relying on third parties, as we talked about, for some of that verification. But it seems really important that if people are investing in these services to remove carbon, that they're actually getting what they're expecting. Absolutely. It's absolutely critical. But I think it's also important to understand that, I mean, that was a lot of the time, we need actually attempt thousands of technologies or solutions.

There's only hundreds are going to work and tens are going to truly scale. And so there are going to be technologies that don't work. And like really understanding, like, which types of technology. who have R&D risk and are contingent versus what types of technologies have matured and have an established operating industry is actually really important. So that's actually laid out in the platform to help people understand, well, do I want to work with someone that's operated for three decades or do I want to operate with an upstart? Because there's a huge number of upstarts working on some really novel and exciting technology. But as an upstart ourselves,

startups are inherently more risky than a company with 30 years of operating history. And so it's really important to understand that nuance. And so I think it's absolutely critical. But I think when you start dealing in absolutes, especially in absolutes when it comes to chemistry and national systems, which are always operated on distributions of probability, I mean, that's when you can get into a situation where people are overcommitting themselves. So I think it's really important to understand that this is chemistry. Chemistry by default falls on a distribution. Even residence time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere falls on a distribution, right? Where there's some molecules to get emitted into the atmosphere and get taken out immediately by the biosphere,

and there's some that linger for 150 years. And really understanding the fact that everything is a distribution, sometimes it's normal, sometimes it's soluble. There's many types of distributions is really important. Yeah, I like that. And I think that shows, I guess, the additional value add that Patch gives as a platform because a lot of this information is not clear to the layman, right?

They wouldn't know what those distributions look like. They wouldn't know what verification services to use with these different suppliers. So I think it's clear that there is a value add there, Now, I want to understand a little bit more about how Patch makes money on the other end of that. So how are you currently making money today? And do you see this evolving in a way as the industry itself evolves over the next few years? Yeah, it's great question. So we make money in two ways.

The first is through take rate, like most marketplaces, right? So it's actually percent of volume to the platform. Something is a little bit different about patches, we actually only charge take rates to buyers and not to sellers. So that's piece number one. And the second piece is actually we use a platform feed, which looks at the little bit. like more of a subscription model, where you pay a month for your annual fee. And that's going to really depend on

what types of features, functionality, API, users you're actually putting through the platform. I don't see the shape of Patches Business Model changing materially from those two dimensions. I do see the magnitude of those two numbers changing. For like enterprise clients, typically there's take rate compression and platform fee expansion. For smaller companies, typically inverse

or you don't want to fix costs per year, but you're okay, stomaching the higher case. take rate. So I expect that kind of status and variability within those two dimensions, but the overall shape of the business model, I don't expect to change for the foreseeable future. Is there any risk that if these technologies do go down the cost curve substantially, as we've see with many technologies, that patch having a business model functioning off of take rate actually loses the revenue growth that you might expect? You know what I mean? You're kind of battling against that cost curve in a way. Because I assume,

And let me know if I'm wrong, the companies that are on the buy side are deciding how much carbon to buy based on, let's just say, their net zero goals. They're not saying we're allocating a million dollars to this. They're saying we need to remove X number of tons from the atmosphere based on the carbon that we're contributing. Is that correct in terms of the way to think about how buyers are determining how much to spend? And then if so, again, returning to this idea of the technologies going down the cost curve, is there a scenario where actually, patch loses its revenue growth potential because of those reductions? The answer actually depends on the type of customer you're referring to because, like, an enterprise, for example, has a little bit more of a rigid budgeting exercise,

which if they're making some sort of net zero commitment, they actually will probably be allocating a fixed dollar amount that they're prepared to spend annually or maybe even a percent of revenue or profit. And then that will basically inform what can they afford per ton, and then that'll form what they buy. And so what we've seen is typically what they could afford per ton is typically of the scale of the average price per ton bottom patch is about $70 today. The terminal price per ton of all the different technologies, that's actually within the range we were talking about already, right? It was that 50 to 200. And maybe it goes up a little bit, maybe it's a little bit lower, but it's kind of in that

ballpark. And so what we actually expect and what we've seen is people who have a lower price per ton budget are typically spending on patch. And then as they decarbonize, keeping the their total gross budget fixed and ratching up their price per ton budget. So they're actually moving up on what they're prepared to pay per ton as they decarbonize. And when you think about going down the fuss curve, that's actually the most beneficial thing. A lot of these technologies are going to drive a larger gross amount of spend. A lot of enterprises are actually very priced inelastic,

where they cannot afford to pay more than $60, $80 per ton for one unit of carbon. So as the folks in the $5, six, $700 range coming out of like $200, the amount of spend on that particular product is actually going to go up dramatically. All of that is to say, you're very confident in the patch business model. Let's take a step back and just talk about the industry as a whole. So we are seeing many different entities come into the carbon removal ecosystem. As you said, regulation has played a role here. Public sentiment has played a role here. But really, this is a moment for carbon removal, or at least it feels that way.

And this ecosystem is evolving every day. How do you view Patch's role within that wider ecosystem? And how do you see that also evolving with time? It's still very, very early days for the broader ecosystem. Like, we're not even spending the right order of magnitude. Actually, we're off by two orders of magnitude on like annual CDR spends. They actually hit our kind of five to ten gigantong bowl at $100 a ton. So we have a lot, a lot of work ahead of us.

So it does feel like maybe the starting gun has gone off, if you will. But this is a hundred meter race. I don't know if we're even out of the blocks yet. People have even stood up straight. we have a lot of work ahead of us. As far as the role we think past from play, when you have markets that get really, really big very, very quickly, there's a lot of information complexity

and a lot of operational complexity associated with that. And software is okay in managing operational complexity, but really, really good at managing information complexity. And so that's really what we view our role as being, where we are not actually going to be setting up the frameworks or the verification standards. We're going to be meeting on the nonprofit, the NGO and the kind of regulatory communities

in order to enable that. But what software and patch is going to be really good at is once that framework is put into place, operationalizing that and scaling that with the kind of both buying supply side reach that we already have and will continue to grow is where we really view our role coming in. So anyway where it makes it easier for a buyer to understand what they should be doing, a seller to understand what they should be doing,

or making sure a regulator has having their rules abided by or respected is really what we view Patches role as. It's really underlying piping, if you will, of a very fast-growing market. Yeah, and one facet of a fast-growing market or one indicator is that there are just so many problems to be solved. And so it sounds like Patch is already focused on solving many of those. But as you're deep within this industry, I'm curious to know if there are other areas in the infrastructure required that you're noticing as opportunities and perhaps things

that Patch isn't going after, are there things that you're like, wow, this is really missing, and this is an opportunity for other builders to get involved. I think the biggest piece is understanding how to do insurance, actually. That patch will not do, but I think it's really important. Because that's going to be what actually enables a lot of folks to take on meaningful R&D risk and traverse. Oscar is going to be through some sort of financial engineering and insurance of the underlying project. So you imagine a world where I'm a corporate and I have some sort of net zero commitments. And in 2025, you know, today is 2022 or 2023.

And in 2025, I'm prepared to make a bet on an upstart or maybe a promising technology, folks who just come out of some lab and they're building some sort of pilot facility. How do you build an instrument that enables that buyer to take that risk, but not to bear all of the risk on their own? I think it was probably an opportunity for insurance or reinsurance to be had here because, you know, expert models are actually pretty good at predicting the outcomes with some of these things. And that's certainly not something Pat should do

because that kind of the economics and kind of structure the business don't really make sense in that way. But I think that would actually be really, really compelling because that's something that's prevented a lot of Forbes from actually diving in where they've kind of stuck with the technologies they know and love, if you will,

because they don't want to be the ones that go first. And so how do you make going first easier? Because at the end of the day, even with the tools in front of us, we're going to make a lot of great progress, but we can make more progress more quickly if we continue to get more shots on goal. And how do you make it less scary for folks to, you know, take a step up to that soccer ball and swing hard and one of those ways to have a slightly softer landing with some sort of insurance product?

And that can come in the form of getting paid out either with shrimp cash. So we've actually spent on that different form of carbon removal or in an in-a-kind type of payout where you're actually getting carbon credits or tons from a similar shape type of carbon removal developer. Do you see other financial instruments? Like I can almost imagine, not an ETF, but more so bundling of technologies. You know, if you were to want to invest in, let's say, direct air capture and there are many companies doing that, do you foresee some sort of instrument that would allow you to, as you're saying, hedge that bet and say, hey, I think this technology is going to work, but I don't know which company is going to succeed within that realm. Do you see products like that also becoming important or necessary? So it depends on we want the outcome to be because it really just spreading kind of your purchases across a bunch of folks in which case you can actually do that with Patch where people can build portfolios

and kind of not put all their eggs one basket, if you will. If you're referring to if those other two providers, for example, don't work out or one doesn't work out the other to pick up the slack, then that might require a little more financial engineering. If you think back to how a lot of utility scale, wind and solar got off the ground, this actually typically came in the form

of having buyers last resort as well as taking equity positions in the underlying projects themselves. And so I could essentially see a world where infrastructure funds lean in here a little bit more and then start saying, hey, you know, I'll be left to remedy this problem. But if you end up defaulting, I'm going to own 10 or 20% of you, either structured equity or kind of SBB type model there. I can see that happening as well because it's precedent for when PVs were far less of a good business model 15 years ago.

Yeah, it'll be very interesting to see how some of this evolves because I think there's the obvious solutions that need to be in place. And then there's always the non-obvious companies that arise in, again, one of these really important moments, one of these industries. As you said, at the very starting line, or at least it feels that way. Let's wrap up with a general question just around, as someone who is deeply involved in this field, who's creating within it, what makes you hopeful, given the fact that we are at those initial starting blocks? Are there early signs that make you really hopeful about maybe the next five, ten years that others can draw from? Honestly, I think the biggest source of hope is actually seeing the kind of initial cohort of of all 1,000 to 2,000 people working on this particular problem.

I think this renewed excitement and kind of inflow of people I actually find it really, really exciting. There's been some folks who historically have been highly under resource doing a lot of research and work in this ecosystem for the last, in some cases, two decades. But it's been stuck on a bencher's been stuck in the field and not really actually productionized and operationalized. and seeing all these really fantastic, talented people come from really incredible companies say, hey, I just want to spend all my time on this particular problem, is actually the greatest source of hope backer if you have. I'm a big advocate of like if you actually just get, in case the climate change, it might be like

100 million people rowing in the same direction, but however many people you need to rowing in the same direction, if you just focus on a particular problem, I can't think of very many problems where everyone was aligned and focusing on something for a decade or two decades and the thing wasn't solved, actually. And so that's the thing that I'm the most bullshod. Maybe Fusion is one that's kind of left people down in a little bit. But I think a lot of things have actually turned out to be comfortable by human ingenuity. And I really don't see this being any different.

So having that initial strong cohort founding markets, if you will, I think it's really important. Because that's going to be all those talented people, no other talented people, and they'll pull more people into the ecosystem. And so that makes me very optimistic. I could not agree more. We did an initial episode with Mark on this topic on why technology, still matters. And that was a reoccurring theme that there really hasn't been very many, if any, examples in history were just a mass of people who are excited about something,

get together, and try to solve it. I think the one example that he could come up with was alchemy. So trying to produce gold. But I mean, in terms of the present day, there aren't many examples of a ton of smart people coming together to try to solve something and not succeeding. It's typically just a matter of time. So I think that's a good place to end off on. Brennan, thank you so much for walking us through what Patch does and the carbon removal ecosystem at large. I think it's fascinating to see so much being built. And I think one really important aspect of it is what Patch is doing and the infrastructure. A lot of people focus on the solutions, but there is this infrastructure layer that needs to be built. So thanks again for taking the time. Awesome. Thank you so much

to having your staff. Really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend. We also recently launched on YouTube at YouTube.com slash A16Z underscore video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time.