This Week in Startups - How to manage competing portfolio companies (VC School) + Energy Impact Partners' Shayle Kann (Climate) | E1448

Episode Date: May 1, 2022

Sunday double-header. First, in VC Sunday School Jason discusses competing companies in the portfolio, when it's ok, when it's not and how to manage issues in good faith (01:52). Then, in This Week in Climate Startups, Molly interviews Energy Impact Partners' Shayle Kann (19:42) about "Deep Decarbonization," the carbon management industry (33:37) and more. 00:00 Jason and Molly intro today’s show 01:52 VCSS: Can you invest in competing companies? Where to draw that line? 11:55 iTrust Capital - Visit https://itrust.capital/twist to create your Crypto IRA today 13:11 When to give a “no” to a company 19:42 TWiCS with Shayle Kann 22:19 Cyvatar - Get your first 2 months free at https://cyvatar.ai/twist 23:35 Deep Decarbonization 32:21 Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist 33:37 Defining the Carbon Management Industry 49:18 The nuts and bolts of Shayle’s fund 56:57 Shayle’s podcasts: Carbon Copy and Catalyst Check out Energy Impact Partners: https://www.energyimpactpartners.com FOLLOW Shayle Kann: https://twitter.com/shaylekann FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody, welcome to Sunday. Hey, Molly, how you doing? Happy Sunday. Sunday, happy Sunday, everybody. Enjoy your day of rest and what I'm calling our day of learning because we have VC Sunday school today. Awesome. Yeah, we're going to talk about conflicts for VCs.

How do you manage meeting with a dozen companies in the same vertical and some of them being competitors? And then how do you manage when one company in your portfolio then pivots their idea and then maybe becomes competitive with a, another company your portfolio. And can VC's invest in competitive companies? We're going to hash it out for about 15 minutes. Yeah, it's good stuff. When do you have to put up that big, big wall? And then I explore, I'm very excited about landing this interview with Shale Khan of Energy Impact Partners. He also hosts the pretty popular among climate nerds like me podcast called Catalyst.

We're talking about the core challenges of deep decarbonization. It's nerdy. It's a nerdy climate tech. All right. It's going to be a great episode. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by ITrust Capital. Did you know that you can invest in crypto through your retirement account and still get the same tax advantages as a traditional IRA? Visit iTrust.capital slash twist to start investing today. Scivatar. Implementing cybersecurity for your startup can feel overwhelming and expensive, but it doesn't have to be that way. Civitar is startup friendly, fully managed, all-inclusive cybersecurity subscriptions.

Twist listeners get their first two months free at saivatar.aI.i. And lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget. Hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for the first four weeks. Hey everybody, happy Sunday. Molly and I, we set our alarms for 5 a.m. And we just made our coffee.

We did yoga. We went to Bickram Hot Yoga. Farmers market. Farmers market hit the farmer's market. And here we are. We got ourselves glowed up, took a shower, got the hair set, and we're ready to do VC Sunday school for you. We give up our Sundays for you. No, we tape it on Fridays.

You have a day of rest. We do not. There's a really big fly in here. I'm just going to keep it cool. So everybody loves VC Sunday school. We're going to make these into a super cut so you get them all at one time at some point, put it on the YouTube channel or something.

But what have you been dealing with the past week or two, Molly? What have you been thinking about? As you're now in your fourth, fourth month of investing. You had your first climate syndicate, the syndicate.com slash climate, which was, I think, 2x over subscribed. Yep.

Great feeling, great company, real legit company. Great outcome. Great outcome. That's nice for us to slide in a quick milly or two into a company and we have one of the companies you found in the accelerator. So things are heating up here for Molly in her first year of venturing into venture capital. What's your question this week? It's all happening.

And this is like, now I have reached embarrassment of riches stage, which gets me to this fundamental question of what the hell do you do when you're talking to competing companies? And I know that this leads to it, especially in an early stage, this big question of like, what do you, how is it, can you invest in or should you invest in companies that do the same thing? And even more importantly and saliently, where's the line? Like at what point does it feel is it unethical to be sort of down the road farther with one company, but talking to one that does the same thing and being like, wait, I know things about both your business plans and yikes. Yeah.

Okay. So, um, the feeling for a founder when you invest in a company that's directly competitive is, rightfully annoying. So if you invest in Uber, you don't get to invest in Lyft, you don't get to invest in Uber, has been how the Valley's always worked. And there's a very practical reason for this.

They're competitors. Right. And if you're at both board meetings or have information from both, well, it's sort of like you're seeing, you know, the pregame coaching session for the Warriors and the pregame coaching session for LeBrona, Cleveland.

like you have this information and then who are you rooting for to win and how do you manage that? So in a venture capital firm, you won't do this. Now, sometimes in a venture capital firm, you will have a pivot. So some company starts, they say, hey, we're going to make enterprise software. Another company says we're going to make consumer software. But they're both addressing, you know, adjacencies, you know, they're both in education. So one's doing an education startup where they teach people math, the other one's doing a platform for teachers to teach Matt so they don't actually touch consumers.

Okay, two different businesses, but they're kind of adjacent. Now, what if one business works, one does it? The other one pivots to the other one's model. That is a unique situation. And what you have to do in that situation is have a discussion with the founders and say, Molly's going to be on this board, J-Cal is going to be on this board. There is a what we call the Chinese wall in the business, a firewall. Chinese wall is an acceptable term, by the way.

It is a tribute to the Great Wall of China, the greatest. wall ever built. Is it actual wall? A really big one. It's actually legit. You do not have to cancel me. It's actually a compliment. I looked it up.

Chinese people are quite delighted when you use the Chinese wall to mean a strong wall between two locations. So. In this case, you're saying the wall needs to be that big and that strong and that tall. And that long. Yes. It needs to be the best wall in the world. Yes, it's a compliment.

Did you see that? It's the size of a hummingbird. So does that make sense? It definitely does. Okay. So sometimes, but so then there is a point, it seems like, where you just sort of have to say,

like, listen, I was talking to both of you, one of you moved to diligence, one of you then, we got to stop talking. Okay, so now, before you've invested, it is well within the right of a venture capitalist

to meet with the 10 people doing mathematical education on the internet in this example. So they met with brilliant, they met with Con Academy. ConAndor's a nonprofit, but you get the idea. They met with 10 different companies,

and then they placed the bet on the one they like most. The thing you obviously would not do and would be career ending, unethical, and just silly would be to send the materials of one company to the nine companies to the one company who won. Sure.

On a practical basis, there's probably nothing that proprietary of these businesses. Most people want to believe that their business has some huge proprietary ideas that are not obvious. The truth is, smart entrepreneurs going into the business of

teaching people math, there's a finite set of ideas and features. And they're all probably on a list somewhere. So when people are like, oh my God, they stole my idea. It's like,

number one, you really think you're the only person with the idea to have math tutors online. There's probably nothing that major there. And then also it's probably on your website. Your ex-employees are probably interviewing at the other competitor and telling them all your plans anyway,

unethical, but probably not illegal. depending on their non-competes and agreements. So the fact is, it's probably the information in those early stages is not that important. The second thing that's not that important, the second thing that's practical is, as a VC, why would you risk it?

Why would you risk it? If the information is not that important, why would you risk it? And there's ways to mitigate against this. So what I've seen VCs do, I'm not saying I would do this but if they met with a company and they met let's say they met with the two

mathematics companies in this and one of them had this great idea Met teachers in America teaching math students in China and they get to do it off hours and there's actually a company that does this I forgot the name of it where they matched American students I'm sorry Chinese students who wanted to learn English and math with American teachers it was a really cool company so you look at that company all you would have to do as the VC

is to say, have you heard of this tutoring company? You don't have to send them the deck. Have you heard of this company and point to a story about them in Crunchbase? Nothing illegal about that, nothing unethical about that.

You're just pointing them in a direction. And there's much better ways to get corporate information. Like looking at the job hiring board, who are they hiring for? That kind of tells the story, right? That's how people found out. Apple was, you know,

or confirmed Apple was working on Project Titan because you could see all the people either changing their LinkedIn's or the job descriptions. So there's much easier ways to do a corporate expression. Now, so that's how it works in a fund.

Yeah. There are funding sources that are different and we can talk about those. But any questions on that with the fund? Follow up on that? No, I mean, it seems like definitely it seems very clear

that you don't invest in competitors. That's just obvious. That would be a bad business. call. I think what is less clear is when you kind of go like, listen, I think, I guess you just are giving a polite no in that case either way. If you're like, look, I like this one company, there's two of you, they're virtually identical. I like this one better or they're farther along or they meet our, they're in our Goldilocks zone and you're not. I think what I'm still a little unclear on is when do I say company A, we picked company B or company I got to bow out now because

I don't want to put myself in a position where I might be thinking about this too much. like a journalist, but... I think you just... It's always important to say we're not going to invest at this time. You're not under obligation to say you pick the other company because it's that company's job. It's a great question.

Actually, I never even thought of it. But thinking out loud here, it's not your job as the investor to announce the fundraising for the startup you invested. Some VCs get high on their own supply and they write their own press releases. We invested in Com, we invested in Uber.

We don't do that. Some people are a little thirsty. and they're just, you know, making these announcements. And I've seen people make these announcements. They invest in a company. And they never thought, well, I wonder if the founder of the company was going to do a press tour about the announcement. And they steal the thunder.

Or they write a press, sometimes I'm the lead investor in a company. We're the lead investor. We put in a million dollars. And I know some other fund put in a hundred. And they were the last money in and they just were filling in a hundred of the three million round out a million. And they write their own press release. And they're quoting people about how great.

the companies and I'm like, you barely have any skin in this game. You're just following on, you know, you were whatever percent of the round, two percent of the round. Like, it's a little weird. That raises actually a whole other question because I literally was thinking today, there's a VC in my same space who's very effective at using LinkedIn and being like, this is why our company invested in X. Yes, I used to do that.

I wrote the famous why we invested $378,000 in Com because I wanted to explain it and them some press but I asked the founder if it's okay and I showed the founder Alex you know the post before I posted it off right do you think it's worth my time to like get a little magic assistant to write those up for me you're right at yourself you're a good writer Molly and I'll with this well you can writing 400 words you do very long for crying out of 300 800 words I would do it I would think you should do it actually I think it'd be good discipline cool because if you just do you know the com.com one you can see my and then people

have on record my thinking, which when you have the victory is pretty great. But you do want to have the founder buy-in when you're speaking about their company because they have messaging they want to do. If you are listening to this podcast, I'm betting you already have some exposure to crypto. Certainly we all talk about it enough. And it turns out you can now invest in crypto through your retirement account. That's right. With I trust capital, you can buy and sell digital assets from a crypto IRA. This means you'll actually get the same tax advantages as a traditional IRA. And I Trust Capital has over two dozen of the most popular cryptocurrencies to invest in.

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It's like if you move one company into diligence and you're talking to a competitor, you got to say no to the first one. Oh, of course, yes. That's the moment. That's like the point. When you're just like, this one's there. When you move to diligence, Molly, you're basically only moving to diligence if you plan on making the investment is the general hygiene.

So that's kind of another question into it of itself is when do you move to diligence? And then if you do due diligence, are you obligated to invest and when can you back out with diligence? And the answer is, you? you can back out for any reason until you sign the deal. You can leave bad feelings. If you do a massive diligence, it all turns out great. And then you back out of the deal and you say, well, in diligence, it wasn't what we felt.

Then you don't have a really good reason. If you go into diligence and they say we have these five customers and they have four, by all means, like they misrepresented 20% of the customer base or the number one customer or things aren't what they seem. That's why diligence exists, right? And so I think everybody understands that. If you move to diligence, yes. I think stop talking to other people

because you're in all likelihood going to do the decision. Totally. And then's it. Diligence. We made a rule. I love a rule. Exactly.

Oh, just, you know, a heuristic. You know, you could be, you can bend it. That's a good word. Some people give you all the information before you do diligence, and diligence is like, okay, we just need to see your incorporation documents

and your IP assignments and just make sure there are signed documents in a folder somewhere. Yeah. So our LPs are protected. And we do our diligence. Other times, asking people to see their P&Ls for the last, you know, 24 months,

uh, that might only happen in diligence, right? So what gets into the diligence folder and how quickly founders give them over is not a perfect science, yeah, uh, as well. Now,

there are two exceptions or three exceptions in today's world for funding. If you run an accelerator, there is no, uh, belief that you need to have exclusivity by category in any way and not have competitors. because the companies are so nascent, they're figuring out product market fit. So why combinator launch accelerated tech stars?

They'll accept 10 different meditation apps, 10 different Airbnb, you know, swings at the bat with different flavors. They might not want to accept somebody who just photocopies the site because that's kind of lame, but not because of some rule. And then there are platforms. So Angelist, the syndicate R platform, Republic, Seed Invest, none of them are under the obligation as a platform to be non-competitive. So with our syndicate and with our accelerator, we don't have exclusivity, both our funds we do. And then there's just a practical basis of any

time there's any kind of conflicts, you know, I don't, I will disengage from one of the two companies and then have you or Ashley, Jackie, Savino, Kelly, whoever take over the board seat for that other company. Totally. Love it. If we have a board suit. So anyway, it's a pretty, pretty pretty straightforward approach. And communication is important. And this is why Ryan Breslo's claim that Stripe collected all those investors in order to block them from investing another one.

That was the most honest piece of that. You know, and some of it was a little bit of silliness. But that actually is direction correct. I mean, Uber, Airbnb, and others collected investors. and it was very clear. If you invested it in Uber, you weren't going to invest in Lyft and vice versa.

If you had invested in Lyft, you were never going to be on team Uber. And rightfully so. Right. It's a good lockup strategy. It is a brilliant locked up strategy. A brilliant lockup strategy. All right.

I love it. Well, there you go. V.C. Sunday School, learning together once again. And now it's time for this weekend climate startups. Who do you have an interview with? Tell me. I'm pretty excited about this when I was happy to land this.

Because again, And like I'm in this tiny world where there's these big names, Jason Jacobs we had on. And the other big name in this space is Shale Khan, who's a partner at Energy Impact Partners, and also hosts a podcast called Catalyst, which is really deep climate stuff, specifically around this. He invests and talks about this concept of deep decarbonization. So it's very like frontier of climate tech. It's a really hard stuff. Deep carbonization as opposed to decarbonization. Yes, deep decarbonization.

Deep decarbonization as opposed to just plain old decarbonization. Exactly. That plain old decarbonization, fine. Any old idea you can do that. Hydrogen, fusion, total systemic transformation. This is energy impact partners. These are the hell marries. These are the super impacts.

Yeah. And this is a fun energy impact partners with the $2 billion to put behind. I like that. You know, it's like some people are trying to do the blocking and tackling. Some people are looking to do incremental. And some people are looking to go swing for the fences. In your opinion, what's the best strategy or do all strategies have validity to them? You know me to be a fan of every possible solution.

What I would say, and I like to see climate tech investors talk about, is avoiding the FOMO effect. Like just because, and I think Shale sort of mentioned this, like, just because everybody is into hydrogen right now doesn't mean they shouldn't still be looking at, I don't know, wave energy, right? or something that's somewhat less popular. So don't necessarily, because if we all follow the crowds to the same exact solutions, we'll miss something.

Yes, there is a marketplace of ideas. Best ideas win, but sometimes you do get a lemming-like effect, and then you get a category that's overfunded, and then other ones are underfunded. But the great thing about capitalism is then that's an opportunity for somebody

to then go on that vertical without any competitors. Exactly. So be the one who notices, you know, the budding vertical off to the side over here while the lemmings are over there. there's like a nice back, juicy slug or whatever lemmings ate. No blinders is what I would tell people. Don't put any blinders on.

You know, you want to never underestimate anyone or any idea. You know, give each idea a little bit of bought and give every founder, you know, your full attention because, man, I've seen people, you know, just meander for years. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, yeah, by the way, I found a gold mine. And I'm like, you want to be partners on the gold mine? And I'm like, yeah, okay. Yeah, sure. You've been wandering in the forest and you found a diamond mine?

Okay, let's go. All right, great job. Happy Sunday, everybody. Happy Sunday, everybody. ShaleCon is a partner at Energy Impact Partners and host of the podcast Catalyst. One of, I shouldn't admit this, considering the industry I'm in, but one of the very few podcasts I listen to regularly. I'm excited to have you on. Oh, thank you so much for having me.

And that's high praise. Thank you very much. You know, time is a precious resource in the world. and it's a really, it's a great show. So I'm thrilled that you're here. Thank you. I guess I want to start by with sort of two basic questions. How did you come to this?

How did you come to this world of climate tech and how long have you been leading these efforts at energy impact partners? Yeah, well, so I came to what we now call climate tech, but back when I first got into it was definitely not called climate tech yet. At that time, it was, I don't know, clean techers, this is possibly even before the clean tech boom. So I first got into it in college, actually. I was a psychology major, and I was studying all sorts of unrelated things, but I ended up randomly taking a couple of courses. One that was called Strategic Natural Resources, that was like

an introduction to the global energy ecosystem. And we read Dan Yergen's books. And I just like learned how energy worked and found myself weirdly fascinated with it. And then what really cemented it is I I took this evening course that was taught by a former Southern California Edison, the utility government affairs executive, who was like moonlighting as a college professor for whatever reason. And he was teaching a class on public utilities regulation. And he would walk into class, it was like a 7 to 10 p.m. once a week thing. He'd walk in a class, he would chug and O'Dul's, slam it on the ground, and then spent three hours talking about public utility regulation.

And like, I was the only person in that class who was interested in it. But I found it super fascinating. So I just discovered this weird fascination, initially just with energy that has then, like, expanded beyond that into all these complex markets and ecosystems that drive 50 gigatons of global emissions that we create every year. And early in my career, I was like, well, I don't know what I want to do with my life. So I will try this because I know I'm interested in it. But someday I'll probably get bored of it and want to do something else.

And then fast forward, it's been 15 or so years. And I've never gotten bored of it. And in fact, I find it more interesting as time goes on. So it's all I've ever done is what we would now deem climate tech. But I've done a bunch of different things within it. And the EIP version of it, where I am now on the investor side, I'm four years into that journey. So I joined EIP in early 2018. Here's a problem a lot of startups face.

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I was reaching over to my bookshelf to grab this book because I feel like you must be one of the few people who has read. I've read the energy and civilization. Buck-Law-Lav-Mil. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As you can see, I made it like this far. Yeah. It's not the easiest read. I will say, Dan Yergan's stuff is at least more readable. And there's some other ones that I really like that are like big compendiums that are actually easy to read. A lot of this stuff is like very cerebral, I think. And also, uh, it's very, is very historical.

I feel like he doesn't actually appreciate the pace of change that we are seeing now. Okay. I appreciate that. I feel let off the hook with respect to that particular book. Um, so you currently lead. I want to, I'm going to sort of like start with the firm and then come around to the podcast. We'll go all over the place a little bit here. But so you're currently leading these efforts at what you're calling deep,

decarbonization, investing at the frontier of climate tech. And I read a good post where you sort of defined that as five core challenges. Talk to me about what you mean when you say deep decarbonization, and then we can dig into some of those challenges. Yeah. So the fundamental premise here is that globally, we need to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century or earlier. I mean, I think anybody in this sector would agree that that is the bare minimum that we need to achieve to mitigate the calamity of climate change in any significant fashion. Getting to net zero means there's a lot to do to get there, right? As I said, we were at whatever it is, 50 gigatons, 50 billion tons of annual emissions of

greenhouse gases this year, and we need to get that to zero on net. So there's a bunch of stuff that we could do today using technologies that are commercial and mature and have been deployed at scale and just needed to be deployed at much greater scale. Take wind and solar, for example, is the clear obvious examples of that. But that's not going to get us nearly all the way there for a variety of reasons. So deep decarbonization to me is solving the next set of problems. What are the things that once we've solved the very first challenges of decarbonizing our global economy that are then going to be faced after that? And that can be both, you know, kind of solving the rest of the problem in electricity. Wind and solar

can get you a good chunk of the way there. What happens? How do you get the rest of the way to 100% clean, reliable, ubiquitous, affordable electricity, but it's also, how do we solve the problem of decarbonizing all of these other sectors? You know, electricity is 25% of end-use energy demand. What do we do with the other 75%? And energy itself is not all global emissions. There's emissions from other sectors too. So deep decarbonization is just, you know, the simplest version of it is like solving the biggest thornyest problems of climate change. Right. And then how big, just as a level set, how big is, how big is that? is energy impact partners. Are there other parts of the energy puzzle that other partners are

trying to solve? Or is it just you? No. Yeah. So we're bigger than just this effort. So energy impact partners in total is a venture capital firm with a little under $3 billion under management in total across a number of different funds with different strategies, both in North America and in Europe. And the thing that makes EIP kind of unique and that unifies everything that we do across strategies is our LP base, which is we have about two-thirds of our capital comes from a coalition of over 40 large strategic investors, big industrial companies, basically, energy companies, mobility and transportation, built environment, technology, et cetera. And so EIP has this kind of unique model that we've honed over seven years to work with these big strategics and use our investing capabilities

and the visibility that we get through the work that we do to try to help them move faster toward decarbonization and digitization advancement of their own technologies. So we have a number of different funds with different strategies within that. And my little chunk of that is this deep decarbonization effort. Got it. Can you tell us who some of those strategics are? Sure. Yeah. A bunch of them Republic. Not all of them, but many of the largest utilities in North America, so companies like Excel, which is in Colorado and Minnesota generally, Southern Company, which has territory in the southeast of the US, Avista, Alion, MG&E, Fordus, which has like 10 utilities, some big ones in Europe, like EDF and a bunch of others in Europe.

And then separate from just the utilities, we've got, you know, big real estate companies. We've got Microsoft on the technology side. We've got Enterprise, the rental car company. So it's actually a fairly wide array of different strategics. Gotcha. Yeah. So they serve as obviously like a built-in customer base for some of these investments, but presumably not the only. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, you can think of it as like we try to bring the value as if you, when we invest in a company, we're bringing the value as if you had 40 strategic investors in your cap table, but without any of the burdens that having a strategic investor puts on your cap table. So we're not driven by strategic demands, but we can deliver all the value that a corporate VC would have.

awesome does that change any of your otherwise traditional LP structure like do they have a longer timeline do you get any flexibility there are you still trying to operate within that 10 year horizon we're operating in a traditional venture capital model you know everything about us is is traditional financial investor the only exception to that is in my fund the deep decarbonization fund we have a 15 year fund instead of a 10 year fund um and that is specifically has nothing to do really with our LP base and much more to do with the types of things that we want to invest in and how long we want to be able to ride with them as they come to market. Some of these things are going to take a long time. Others will happen sooner, but we think that the real sort of big

magnitude impact is more on a 10 to 15 year horizon. So most of our investments, we don't expect to hold nearly that long, but we want it to give ourselves that kind of flexibility so that we can make investments in things like nuclear fusion and decarbonizing steel and some of these really big categories. Yeah, totally. How big is your fund, the deep decarbonization fund? Yeah, so we launched it a little over a year ago and we'll do the final close on it in a few months. So the target size of the fund is $350 million and we're most of the way there now. Gotcha. So sort of double congratulations are in order on your new fund and your new baby, right? Like not, if you don't want to talk about that, we'll take that out. But I just remember as you were talking, I was like, oh, you've got these two big,

you're birthing two things right now. Oh, man. Oh, I didn't. I personally didn't birth either of them, which has made my life certainly easier. But yeah, thank you. We have a two-month-old son and I have a 15-month-old fund. And both need roughly equal amounts of attention. I mean, currently it leans toward the sun over the fund. I would hope that that changes. But not a lot of sleep either way.

Yeah, that's exactly right. They both cause me to lose sleep for very different reasons. Well, let's talk about the five-core challenges, because I think, this is, it seems like what it does is double as your thesis, right? Or at least your sort of set of operating funnels, which is to sort of quickly sum up, low cost abundant, reliable, ubiquitous zero carbon electricity, tackling big industrial emitters, solving transportation, no pressure, building a carbon management industry from near scratch and then decarbonizing Maslow's basic needs. Is it fair to say that this is sort of like your operating thesis?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I mean, the other way to think about it, in some ways, those five core challenges are really just a fancy way of describing the big buckets of greenhouse gas emissions. So, you know, climate change in my mind and climate tech, this category that we've decided as a category is in some ways really, really complicated because it's not a sector in the way that lots of other sectors are. It is actually just a problem that we have across most of the big sectors of the economy. and there's not a lot in common with the solutions across a lot of those sectors, except that they're solving for the same problem, which is tons of CO2 equivalent. But in some ways, it's also relatively simple because the emissions that we have globally basically come from five sectors, which is energy, transportation, buildings, food and agriculture,

and industry. And so those are the five problems we need to solve. And then you can just add a sixth, which is we need to build this carbon management, system, capture, removal, sequestration, utilization from scratch. So I think of those as being the sort of five and a half strategies within our fund. And each of one of them represents sort of a different problem set that you can tackle. When you're scaling your startup quickly, hiring engineers can slow you down like nothing else, don't I know it? Well, here's some good news. Lemon.io will find you the perfect candidate in 48 hours. What's lemon.io, you ask? Well, they're a marketplace of engineers from Europe. They're going to match you with a candidate within 48 hours,

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Are you also talking about marketplaces and offsets having help us? Yes. I mean, I think all of that. Yeah, what I mean by that is that carbon has been, you know, CO2 has been sort of an exogenous problem. generally speaking, historically, and we need to make it endogenous to everything. And that is going to range from just better accounting of it and visibility into where the emissions come from and how decisions that we as consumers or we as businesses make will affect them. So there's a good chunk of that. It's just what I've called carbon transparency. But then obviously there's the actual emissions themselves that we need to abate. And as many folks will tell you,

You know, the reality is that there's almost no scenario where we get to true zero emissions globally in time. And so we're going to need to remove probably billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere as well. So I consider all of that within this big bucket of, it's an industry that if you added it up in aggregate today, all of the tracking and management and actual physical removal and sequestration and so on, sub a billion dollars probably, full scale. scale market today. And if we are to achieve one and a half degrees Celsius of temperature rise, then there's kind of no way it's not like a trillion dollar market in 2050. So, you know, getting from here to there is building that industry from scratch. How, well, actually, before I move on to check size, I want to ask you about Maslow's needs, decarbonizing Maslow's basic needs, food and housing? Yeah, I mean, it's a, yeah, again, it's a one of the things that's,

daunting about mitigating greenhouse gas emissions is that we produce them in order to do the very most basic things that we need as humans. And this is why I think framing it as Maslow's basic needs is good. You're probably familiar with Mazla's hierarchy of human needs. The bottom of the pyramid are the things that we need the most. We absolutely cannot survive without. And two of those needs represent big chunks of global greenhouse gas emissions, one being food and the other being shelter. And it turns out that, as I said, of the five sectors that produce most of the emissions, food and ag is one of them and buildings are another. And so it just gets to the like the root of the climate change problem is the very basic underpinnings of our modern society. And so that's what makes it so challenging to overcome.

Yeah. So really, as you look at this, you're sort of in everything, it sounds like. I think about that sometimes. Well, this is one of the reasons that climate. I'm like, okay, so you haven't narrowed this down at all. Well, yeah. I mean, the thing that's tantalizing about climate tech, I think one of the reasons that it's so hot now within Silicon Valley is, you know, in the same way that like Mark Andreessen coined the term software is eating the world long ago, you can easily imagine greenhouse gas emissions mitigation eating the world over the next few decades because you add up those sectors, every single one of them that I mentioned is, you know, globally a multi-trillion dollar sector. So it's, it's, it's, you know, not hard to get to massive total adjustable markets for any significant climate mitigation technology. And so it's, you know, it's tantalizing from that perspective just because there's such

big opportunities. I think about it sometimes the only like big economic sectors that I think are kind of orthogonal, like not really related to climate tech or like healthcare, basically, pharmaceutical industry and healthcare. but name another really big sector of the economy that isn't going to get touched in a substantial, like a transformative way by decarbonization. I think it's actually kind of tough. I'm sure that there are massive scope three impacts when you come to pharmaceuticals too. There must be. Right. Like there's chemicals and they all use little plastic tubes and I mean there's

we may have just spawned a startup, I hope. Well, no, and it's true. And in the process of producing chemicals, you know, there's we use a lot of petroleum to produce chemicals. and also the actual process, there's process emissions. You know, we tend to use, like, natural gas boilers to create steam and stuff like that. So, yeah, maybe it is literally the entire economy. A lot of little, like, what do they call them, Clay, Claves, the little ovens. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Stuff in.

Right. All right. So if you're out there, founders, bring us your- off with your health care plus climate, deep tech ideas. Is it really? I know. I mean, I sort of keep saying in an only slightly joking way that this is actually a total addressable market.

of an entire planet. So why are we around with so much crypto? Yeah, basically. Yeah, crypto is going to be affected. I could tell you that for sure. Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, that's, but that's again, why it's sort of a weird sector, because again, it's not a single market. It's not a single sector. It's just like a common challenge faced by basically every sector. Yeah. I wonder, too, then, as we look at these as investable opportunities, there is some debate about what parts of this are venture scale and what aren't and what can be

accomplished with capitalism versus governments, for example. And I wonder how you think about that. I think there's two different questions in there, right? One of them is this question of, can we do this stuff with venture capital dollars and the constraints that venture capital places on things? And that, I think, you know, that's a remnant of the, what I view as sort of misguided lessons from the first clean tech boom and bust a decade ago, which a lot of people, the lesson that they took from how that all went down was, one, this stuff is too capital intensive and isn't a fit for venture capital and two that it takes too long. And it's not a fit for venture capital. And I don't actually think either of those two things are true inherently for reasons we can get into if you'd like. I would love that. Okay.

Well, we could do that in a second. The second question, though, is that... The second question is, can this be done through pure capitalism? And I think nobody would say it can be done through pure capitalism. Like, there's... The role of government in particular cannot be overstated as it pertains to global climate change mitigation. It should be the layer that underpins all of these technologies that enables them to come to market, that partners with the private sector to accelerate their adoption.

And there's, you know, I think equally no realistic path to one and a half degrees or two degrees Celsius that doesn't involve like substantial government intervention across the board. With that said, it also is true that it's not going to be, it can't be government alone and that there's an enormous amount that needs to be done by the private sector. So I don't know. Those debates about about is this a capitalist enterprise fundamentally? or anything like that. I sort of feel like you're just beside the point. Like, this is all hands on deck. And wherever you sit, you have a role to play here.

Yep. Everybody in the pool. Well, then let's break down these sort of two historical arguments, which I think you do sometimes still here that, that, you know, I mean, you have a 15-year time horizon, for example. Although I often find myself arguing, like, why are you worried about a 10-year time horizon? Because we need solutions to happen a lot sooner than 10 years.

We do. We need to do. There's some things we need to do yesterday. Yep. And there's some things that we're going to need to do in five years, right? And there's some things probably we're going to need to do in 10 or 15 years as well. But yeah, so timeline and capital intensity. Those are the two big lessons. First of all, timeline, you know, things take a long time in lots of sectors. Pharmaceutical is another good example of it could be a really long drug development can be a really slow process and can take a very long time for a drug to come to market.

The reason that it's investable and that everybody's fine with it is that the promise on the other side, if the opportunity is big enough and the risk profile is well understood enough, the pathway to commercialization is clear enough, then you can do a risk reward calculus. And you can say, well, it is going to take a little bit longer, but if it works, it's worth it. And I think that that is increasingly true in the big swaths of this climate tech arena too, where some of these solutions, at least the ones that are tackling really big problems, the prize is big enough that it justifies the time that it's going to take to come to market. And the second thing is it can come to market faster now than it used to be able to for a bunch of reasons.

One is technological. Like we just have tools we didn't have a while ago. So, you know, we can iterate faster. We could scale faster. We can do design on a computer rather than have. to iterate physically on everything all the time. And the second is that there's just a ready and willing and salivating buyer universe for basically any technology that is a decarbonized alternative to a traditional solution or process, as long as it is cost competitive or better

for some other reason. So if you can check those boxes, you know, everybody will line up to buy your stuff today. And that's much more true today than it was than it was decade ago. So I think for those reasons, you know, timeline is important, but I don't think, I think that we can, we can make significant enough change at a global scale with the technologies that are going to be coming to the market over the next couple of years within this decade that it should meet a venture capital timeline. What about capital intensive? So this stuff is capital intensive generally. Yeah, like that part is true. But the question is, is that inherently a problem. Again, there are other things that are also capital intensive too. The reason is why,

yeah, turns out, it turns out. It turns out an app-based marketplace, phenomenally capital-intensive. Yeah. And just look at, you know, tigers writing, you know, multi-hundred million dollar checks into software companies literally multiple times a day. It's not like that stuff is not capital intensive. The, you know, so what you need in order for that capital intensity of an early stage opportunity to be attractive nonetheless is, one, you need to have some measure of certainty that the capital will be there. That was something that wasn't true last cycle, right? There has been an absolute flood of late stage capital into the climate tech space over the past couple of years, whether it be these massive growth funds that like TPG rise has a $7 billion

fund. They have to deploy, focus on climate. There's a bunch of those. So that stuff all the way through infrastructure capital. So you can be pretty confident that if your, if your technology is proven and it pencils and, you know, there's a buyer on the other side of it, you can capitalize it even up to really big amounts of money. Commonwealth fusion systems raised a $1.8 billion round, right? Yeah, that's been up.

For a fusion reactor. I'm just sorry I did not have this job in time. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the capital will be there. And then the size of the prize needs to be big enough. because if you are going to raise a lot of capital, and especially if you're going to raise capital at an upround every single time, and at the end of the day,

it is true that you're going to have a preference stack that is pretty big, and your investors are going to demand a really, really high outcome exit valuation. And so you've got to be, I think what it has done for me is it has refocused me on if this is a capital intensive business, the opportunity set needs to be huge. You can't compromise on that. because otherwise those two things will end up mismatched. So you're saying if you're doing deep science,

it better be able to solve something at the gigaton scale. Or it better be fusion where it changes everything, kind of. It better be, I think it better be, a gigaton is a good proxy for, you know, multi-billion dollar scale,

which is really what you have to be thinking about. You're going after a really big sector. The TAM is huge. As long as that is true and the thing that you are doing is going to transform that sector if it really works, then it's a big enough prize that it justifies a, you know, something that basically is going to have to build manufacturing capacity and so it's going to be expensive to do. Right. We're talking at a moment when our industry is starting to consider whether valuations are going to come down, whether it's going to be harder to raise money. And I was having a conversation the other day with a friend about climate investing.

and my hopeful view at least is that this will not be seen as optional in a downturn. I wonder how you imagine LPs and investors, though, thinking about this going forward. Like if things tighten up, what are we going to stop funding? And hopefully it's not climate. I think that both things can be true. I think that, you know, in an environment where there is tightening generally, that obviously will affect this sector as it will. will affect others. I also think that there's a specific thing that is not exclusive to climate

tech, but climate tech is probably disproportionately affected by it, which is climate tech companies were among the biggest beneficiaries of the brief but wild SPAC boom. And I've, just for fun, have this like Google Finance tracker that I monitor that I call SPAC track that's like 35 climate tech companies that have despaq, right? It's a big, that's a big number for this sector. That window has largely closed, though they're not entirely closed. And so, and those companies, many of them, though not all of them, were still, you know, pre-revenue, pre-product, pre-commercial. And so some of what was happening in the private market during that time was sort of, you'd see a lot of companies for a little while who were saying, well, we're raising a pre-spac round, which was usually a red flag

for me in the first place, but it did happen in a bunch of cases. And so these companies that were expecting a relatively near-term public market outcome despite not having a product yet. Those are the ones that are probably going to be hurt the most. With that said, you know, climate tech is a relatively, unfortunately, because we, this problem isn't going away anytime soon. It's a long-term secular trend. And if you believe that the world will, first of all, get worse before it gets better, and so the problem will become more apparent. And second of all, that we will remain become increasingly serious about adopting solutions,

then you probably will see some ups and downs in valuation along with the broader market, but you won't see the kind of collapse in the sector that we saw in Clean Tech in 2012, 2013. Yeah, I mean, I think that might be partly what I'm alluding to. Like, it's not all going to go away. That's not going to happen again. I mean, I would be incredibly surprised if like the world just sort of, if investors got turned off by climate tech two years from now because valuations started to get shaky, right? It's we're not, investors are not going to turn away from enterprise software just because valuations are down there too.

Right. Well, the weather alone, not to oversimplify, would suggest that that wouldn't be a good plan. Yeah, right. What is, before I ask you about the podcast, what is, what are the nuts and bolts? What's your check. like what kinds of companies, you know, what stage are you looking at? Yeah, so within this fund, which is our frontier fund, the focus is, you know, sort of the intersection of deep tech and climate. So we're looking for revolutionary technologies that can meaningfully contribute to climate change mitigation. We're investing early stage from a technology development standpoint. So we're looking for something that, you know, is not just an idea on paper.

We'd like there to be some technical validation, at least at small scale in the lab. But not yet fully commercial and mature and at scale in the market. So if you're familiar with like the TRL scale, which it was popularized by NASA a very long time ago and now has been adopted by the scientific community as like a proxy for how advanced the technology is, it's a one to nine scale. One is basically an idea on a napkin. Nine is at scale in the market fully commercial. We're sort of three to eight, right? So there's some proof, but it's not ready yet for the market. From a venture capital stage perspective, that can vary.

It tends to mean we invest at C or Series A, but we've made some exceptions to go both earlier and later, depending on the situation. Again, we care more about technology maturity than anything else. But seed and series A is sort of the sweet spot. Check size can range sort of anywhere from initial check, anywhere from like $2 to $15 million, depending on the situation. and we reserve a fairly large amount for follow on. So we intend to follow on with companies that we think have continued promise. And we recognize that it's going to, particularly in this kind of deep tech world, these are, as we said, capital intensive enterprises generally, and they take some time.

And we recognize that. We think it's worth it. So we want to continue to support the companies as they develop. What are you super into right now? Or, you know, what's in your portfolio that you're most excited about? Are you in that fusion company? I can't remember. Not in Commonwealth Fusion, but we are in a FUSION company.

Yeah, we're in a company called ZAP Energy, which is a really cool approach to nuclear fusion that is probably not worth getting into what's different about it now. But yeah, I mean, so we've invested, we've got 10 companies soon to be 12 in the portfolio now, equally excited about all of them, obviously. Yes, probably. But, you know, if you want to name a couple that I think are particularly cool,

form energy is a good one to talk about. batteries. I'm obsessed with batteries. Okay, yeah. Lots of reasons to be obsessed with batteries. Most of the reasons to be obsessed with batteries have to do with lithium ion batteries. But there's a few use cases where lithium ion batteries are incredible and they're going to take over the world almost entirely. But there's a few use cases where they will not take over the world. And specifically the main one that we've been focused on is as you add more and more renewables to the grid, you face all these challenges to do with their intermittency.

The obvious one is what happens on a daily basis when the sun sets. That's what lithium ion is well suited to helping to solve. But you also start to face challenges on longer time horizons. So what happens if you have a cloudy week when you are on a very solar-reliant grid or if you take it to its extreme, we generate three times as much solar in the summer as we do in the winter here in California. So if you're in a very solar-heavy grid, you have seasonal challenges you face is you get to really high penetrations.

And so you're going to need a different kind of battery to solve that sort of thing. Batteries that last hundreds of hours, not four to eight hours, which is typical for lithium ion. Form Energy has a technology that is going to do that. And the way the economics work out, if you're trying to use a battery for hundreds of hours at a time, it only makes any economic sense if the capital cost of the battery is about an order of magnitude less than lithium ion, so about a tenth the cost. that it has to be that cheap from a capital perspective for it to make sense. So that's what form is doing.

So their batteries are incredibly cheap relative to lithium ion. That allows them to operate them for super long durations. And are they iron-based? Or is that, am I thinking of a different company? They are, right? No, you got it. It's iron air. Yeah.

So the iron is the anode material, air is the cathode. I did a documentary podcast series called How We Survive about lithium extraction and battery technology, digging into some of those, no pun intended mining projects and the geothermal stuff in the Salt and Sea. And we geeked out pretty heavily toward the later part of the season about different kinds of battery tech. Yeah. Battery world is totally fascinating.

It is completely, like, it's weirdly everything. Yeah. I don't want you to diss any sector, but I wonder, like, there are a lot of new, brand new, myself included climate tech investors. Like a lot of people coming to venture to do this job. And I've sort of been asking everybody in this series, like, what should we not waste time on? Honestly, I think I'm going to get so much hate for this. So I feel worried carefully.

Sorry. I wouldn't, it's not that I think this is a total waste of time, but I think you can wait a year before you start trying to figure out what the hell's going on in the crypto climate nexus. I don't think there's any reason unless you're already, you know, like deeply embedded in crypto world, I don't think there's any reason that you need to deal with it today. Because it is, you know, there's a bunch of interesting projects going on there that some of which, you know, have the potential to do something new, particularly around carbon markets, but it is a mess. It's, you know, it's not that hard to spin up one of these projects.

There are so many of them. They're all tackling different versions in every early iteration. has like a lot of hair on it. And so I would wait for that to shake out a little bit before I really dig into it because it's a heavy investment to try to get involved in that stuff. I mean, and to be fair, most of them I consider to be almost like an anti-offset. Certainly some of the earlier, I mean, there's actual evidence. Carbon Plan had this good report recently of what we've seen through Klimadow, which is like the main, the one that's probably garnered the most attention so far. And, you know, for, I think they, they had a good idea.

in part, which was we will, we'll use this protocol and this Dow to basically buy up the floor. We'll sweep the floor of the carbon market of projects that are verified on the Vera standard. So we'll take all the bad stuff out of the market. That'll raise prices in the market, which did kind of happen for a bit. And then that'll make the buyers have to pay more for higher quality stuff. But instead, that was assuming there's a fixed supply of offsets. But instead, what happened is that a bunch of projects that were, not generating offsets because it wasn't worth it to them, suddenly started generating offsets.

And these are projects that are like a hydroelectric project that's been operating for 15 years and doesn't need the credits. Right. And so it turns out that it's actually, and I'll say I have strong opinions about this because early in my career, I was doing origination and trading of carbon credits and like the first wave of that stuff. So I have an appreciation for how complicated it is, like really complex market, really difficult to make it robust and transparent and all the trustworth. all the things that you really need. And so the projects, the crypto projects that just come in and think like,

oh, I can, I'm going to, I'm going to put this in a ledger and make it tradable and fungible and transparent. And, hey, I've solved all the carbon market problems. I think they're just like missing the bigger picture. Yeah, totally. Well, I will not bait you anymore on that topic, even though I want to. What? Then tell me about the podcast.

I got very excited to see two climate-focused podcast launch, effectively. at the same time, Carbon Copy and then your show, Catalyst. What was the genesis of that and how are you enjoying it? Were you a podcaster before? Yeah, I was. So Catalyst is sort of the new incarnation of a podcast that I'd been doing for six or seven years before that even. That was called The interchange. The backstory has to do with sort of my career trajectory, which was prior to to EAP, prior to being on the investing side, I ran a firm called GTM Research, which was a market analysis firm, part of a company called Green Tech Media. We were focused on sort of tracking and forecasting the future of clean tech at the time, what became climate tech. And, you know, so our job

was to sell our expertise, and we were sort of a combined digital media company and market analyst firm. And so we had a whole media platform. As part of that, we launched podcasts. And one of them was this one called The Interchange that was sort of intended to be the, like, you know, the way that I think about it is like our target audience knows what a kill a lot hour is. already. So it's not for the layperson. And we don't shy away from getting into the wonk because I can't avoid that hard as I try. But that, you know, sort of explains the complexities of what's going on in this whole space. So I'd been doing that for a long time. We sold the company, GTM, to Wood McKenzie in, which is a big Scotland-based energy data and

analytics firm in 2016. Kept doing the podcast for a few years after that. But eventually it was time to move on, but fortunately, most of the team from the media side of GTM had since left and joined Canary Media, which is owned by the Rocky Mountain Institute and is this cool nonprofit newsroom focused on this space. So we teamed up with them and basically just relaunched a new podcast with a new name, but doing a similar kind of thing, trying to get into the kind of nuances of climate tech. Gotcha. Well, it totally worked because I discovered your pre-existing podcast for the first time that way. I mean, look, however you discovered it, I'm happy.

Exactly. Is it related to EIP at all? I mean, I, it's interesting. Like, I, EIP is my job. Like, I'm, I'm an investor in deep tech climate stuff for EIP. That is what I spend 120% of my waking hours thinking about. And so the podcast is naturally aligned with that and that, you know, the topics on the podcast are the things that I am thinking about day-to-day, which are what exactly the things that we are investing in. So it aligns perfectly for that exact reason. But the podcast itself is sponsored by Canary Media. Right. And I would imagine, I mean, for the same reason that we do this weekend startups and this weekend climate startups, I would imagine it is useful for you in terms of deal flow. Like everyone has to be a brand.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And the other way that I think about it is like, I don't know how you do this, but the way that I generate topic ideas is it is literally like, I'm, looking for the perfect episode for me is something that I know is important and I just have not had the time to like fully understand. I couldn't walk through the narrative of it. Like we just recorded an episode on on battery minerals this morning where I got into like the nuances of, oh, what's going to happen with nickel demand when we, if we shift from NMC batteries to LFP batteries? And it's the kind of thing that has been bouncing around in the back of my head for a while, but I just haven't dedicated the time to. And so the podcast is just a perfect way to project.

to the universe, like a thing that I am interested in. And what comes back to me is a whole bunch of stuff, deal flow for sure. But in addition to that, just other people who are smart and who know more about me or more than me about that topic. So I love it as just a learning mechanism in addition to being deal flow. It's really like it's the best way to instead of sitting around reading white papers. Just get somebody to tell you. In addition to reading white papers. In addition to reading white papers, of course. I want to go back to as a quick follow up before I let you go, is there room for more of the EIP model in terms of corporate LPs? Like that sort of feels like it sort of feels like every company should be doing a version of that.

Like they all need this. Why aren't they all just spinning up funds like crazy? Or are they? Some of them are. A lot of them are finding opportunities to work with folks like us to, you know, sort of collaborate with each other and get a bigger platform. Yeah. I mean, I think that investing is one thing that every large corporate should do.

There's a variety of other things too, right? It's becoming clear that if you are a big corporate, you need to figure out how to do really good emissions accounting. You need to set science-based targets. You need to have a clear roadmap for how you're going to achieve those targets. You then need to like operationalize that within your organization. And you need visibility into the next generation of technologies that are going to help you achieve those things.

And so there's like a portfolio of stuff that should be falling under the, how do we deal with climate change within our organization bucket that I think of of EIP or whatever other equivalent being kind of one spoke in that wheel. Jill, where can people find you? They can find me on Twitter. How much would you like them to find you? Yeah, that's a good question. Depends what they're doing. If they're super cool, they can definitely find. man, Twitter, I'm at Shale Khan.

They can email me if they really have something awesome going on in the Deep Tech Plus Climate Nexus. My email address is my last name at energy impact partners.com. I may or may not regret that. I know. That was really bold of you. You can email us later if you want and be like, I changed my mind. I regret that, yeah.

I mean, I'm not making any promises to respond to everything, but I want to see cool stuff. Exactly. Yeah, those are the places to find me. What do you wish someone would email you about? What's the like, if you could order up the cool company that doesn't exist yet, but you want it to exist? Other than the pharmaceutical startup. Yeah, pharmaceutical startup. I might have to put more thought into it.

I can't give you a specific answer. I mean, I can say the type of thing that I get really excited about is when somebody emails me or gets introduced to me or something like that and says, like, look, I have been, I've been thinking about this problem as it pertains to climate for a really long. long time because it is thorny and nobody else has solved it. And I've put all the thought into it. I've done all the customer or market discovery that I need to do. And I think I found the solution. And here's what it looks like. What I don't like is people who are like, hey, I don't know, I think that like this technology is cool. And it should, it seems like it should have a big impact on climate, but I don't know yet. That's less exciting. I like people who've really done the legwork. show con also just in this copious spare time hosted the podcast catalyst thanks so much for coming on

thank you for having me i'm a big fan of your uh your show as well so it's nice to nice to swap notes on it totally and we can swap companies now that we know yeah let's let's do it yeah totally i got i got i got a couple super nerdy things that i need to yeah okay someone smarter about there's another way to the stuff that really gets me excited. It's like a combination of super nerdy and like, oh my God, that would be like, that's wild. You know, like the like, but what if it works metric? It would have been called like, whoa, that is ambitious. Like, I like that kind of thing. It changes everything. Yeah. There's this weird company that I've been bouncing around that's trying to genetically engineer bacteria to consume carbon dioxide and excrete textiles, like thread.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep. That that appeared, the consensus seems to be there headed for us. scientifically that they're just not totally aware of. But I just can't get them out of my head because I'm like, yeah, but whatever it works. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the like CO2 to value stuff is kind of like that. Yeah. Like, one of them's going to hit. Yeah, probably. Maybe.

There's an interesting question there as to do we need to be turning CO2 into value or should we just be, like, or do the, from a climate perspective, the size of the sink, the total amount of CO2 that you could use to create textiles may not be. that big from a global emissions perspective. This is kind of the argument against the like CO2 cured concrete stuff, for example. It's true. But then is it offset by the amount of, by the industry you could replace? Yeah, maybe, right. That's what it makes a bigger difference, right? Like if it's a big solution for that sector, then it could still be a big business.

Yep. Do you know the Magrathia metals, guys? Yeah, that's a, you know Alex, right? So funny. That's exactly what I was thinking of when I was like, the ones that I love are the ones where you're like, whoa. I was thinking of Alex specifically. Really? That's hilarious. Yeah, I love. So Alex, I met through the pie. He was a source on how we survive.

Sure. Yeah. I've just kept in touch ever since. And I literally was like, I'm so close to putting my own money into that company. But I'm going to wait for their series A. It's bananas. But it's pretty interesting. Yeah. I agree with you. Yep. Okay, cool. All right. Good. I see the thesis. I will be in touch. Hey, everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS syndicate. If you're a founder of a SaaS company with a product and market, our investment team wants to talk to you. Head over to the syndicate.com slash SaaS, SAAAS to apply to raise from the Sass Syndicate. And you can join Jason's syndicate of over 9,000 accredited investors at the syndicate.com. Producer Justin here, know a cool startup? Check out openscouting.com, where anyone can refer a startup to our investment team here at launch.

Even if you don't know the founder, if you're the first to flag a company for us and we decide to invest, you'll get 5K in cash or 10% of our carry. Hey everybody, producer Rachel here. Are you an early stage startup that has product and market, some traction, and are looking to raise at least $500,000? Apply today to Remote Demo Day for your chance to pitch to over 9,000 investors in Jason's syndicate. Submit your application at Remote Demoday.com. Our next event is on April 27th.

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