This Week in Startups - Raising a VC fund in public + Brilliant Planet's Raffael Jovine on the power of algae | E1552

Episode Date: September 4, 2022

On VC Sunday School, J+M discuss why Jason is planning on raising LAUNCH Fund IV in public! (2:38) Then, Raffael Jovine joins to discuss how Brilliant Planet is growing algae and using it to sequester carbon (39:25) (0:00) Teeing up today's topics (2:38) J+M discuss Jason's plain to raise LAUNCH Fund IV in public (10:44) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist (12:18) LP relationships, partner capital requirements, and more fund talk! (20:16) Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist (21:42) Teeing up Molly's interview plus an ESG chat! (38:10) MasterClass - Get 15% off an annual membership at https://masterclass.com/startups  (39:25) Raffael Jovine joins Molly to discuss how Brilliant Planet is growing algae and using it to sequester carbon Check out Brilliant Planet: https://www.brilliantplanet.com FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Welcome to Sunday. Get your coffee, get your latte, have a bagel, relax, relax, have a bagel, relax, relax, relax, relax, and enjoy. VC. Sunday School, we're going to talk about raising a fund in public. 506C is our topic today. Yep, if you are a fund manager, a brand new VC, trying to understand how the LP relationship works, if you're a potential LP, this is a super interesting conversation. And, of course, it's Sunday, so it's this week in climate startups. Molly is going to interview the founder and chief scientist of brilliant planet. What do they do, Molly? Yeah, this is so interesting.

This is a company that is figuring out how to grow algae in ponds. They use seawater to create the perfect conditions for big algae blooms, not the dangerous kind, but big algae blooms, which are evidently massively more efficient at sequestering carbon than trees. So it sequesters carbon. They dry out the algae. They bury it and sequester all this carbon. Gigatons, by the way. They're literally talking about two gigatons of carbon, which is a massive scale. Once they get there, they've raised $25 million and they're going to make money by turning all of that into high-quality carbon offsets and selling it on the open market. And in between the two segments, we have a big conversation about ESG and like you do.

Climate denial. It's like a little 20-minute detour, but you're going to love it. It's going to be a great show. It is. Stick with us. This weekend startups is brought to you by Open Phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back. But using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them. Open Phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team. right on top of your existing devices. Visit openphone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six months. O-Doo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever,

and right now, O-D-O-D-O-D-O-O-O-O-O-O-S off your first implementation pack at O-D-com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-O, dot com slash twist and masterclass learn from the world's best minds anytime anywhere and at your own pace get 15% off an annual membership to masterclass at masterclass.com slash startups rising grind it's sunday it's time to learn and one of the things that you're going to get to learn about is we're raising our fourth fund at launch. And I can say that because we're doing a public raise as opposed to a private raise. So I guess that was your question for this week.

Yeah, pretty much because when funds talk about funds, it is super secrety. And this was something that I always wondered about as a journalist, which is like, why can't you tell me how much money you raised or who you raised from? Right. Nobody talks about their LPs. Nobody talks about how much they raise. You are not allowed to say that you're going to raise. And evidently now. And we've talked about this, of course, on the Angel podcast with first time fund managers and the different ways you can raise this 506B and 506C. But I thought it would be really useful, especially since we're

about to start doing it to talk about how this all works and why it was so security before. So the whole time, I was a journalist as well, you know, I had at some point Fred Wilson and Jerry Colon, I was interviewing. And I was like, oh, and I was like, oh, I hear you're raising you front. They're like, to turn the microphone off. And we really panicked. Like, we can't talk about that because if we do, then you have to certify that everybody in your fund is, in fact, a qualified purchaser or an accredited investor.

So this is this general solicitation rule. It's regulation D of section four of the Securities Act. Now, if you're doing a fund or whatever, don't take my advice here. I'm just going to talk about it in general terms. You have to have a lawyer. You have to do this stuff right. But basically, there's two's designations, 506B, 506. 506C. And if you Google this, you'll find tons of documents. When you do a 506B, you can raise an

unlimited amount from up to 2,000 qualified purchasers. Qualified purchasers are people with a high net worth, millions of dollars. But you cannot raise in public. You can't mention a tweet about your raise. And the reason for this is to protect people from making investments in risky vehicles like we've talked about, like crypto and all that kind of stuff. And all of the Also, people can self-certify that they are what they say they are and credited investor, etc. That's my basic understanding of why they created, the why behind this. That leaves the 506C, which is general solicitation. This means you can raise in public.

You can tweet about it. Now, you can't tweet about your performance or future-looking things. There's still other rules, and you can still have an unlimited amount of these qualified purchasers, and you can raise up to $10 million from 250 accredited investors. you might want to keep that to 230 in case people change the names of their entities, which happens sometimes they have like a family trust or an individual or a divorce happens or they transfer the ownership. Anyway, long story short, I decided after seeing so many people doing public raises

that I would, for Launch Fund 4, instead of having to ask people, hey, you know, my friends who have funds, can you introduce me some of your LPs? I'll just say it here on the pod. We're raising Launch Fund 4. And if anybody would like to come to a meeting about that, just email me. And I'll get you invited to a presentation where I talk about our fund and our plans for launch fund for and maybe what the results of the first 10 years of my angel. First 10 years of my fund investments have done. So, okay, so let me break this down a little bit more.

So 506B previously, this is the super secret one. And in that case, you could not raise in public. You could not mention it. You could not tweet about it. And you could only raise from qualified purchasers. And accredited investors, but they would self-certify. Yeah. And then, which means they say I'm an accredited investor.

A qualified purchaser is like a higher income level. Qualified purchaser are like, I think it's $5 million. $5 million. Yeah, $5 million in investable assets. The notice took us up. And then, okay, so 506C, general solicitation, that was introduced with that big kind of set of Obama era rule changes? Yeah, I think it's always existed.

The number of people you can have in the funds has changed around a little bit. But the key thing here is they have to send you a note or go through a service that says, I am in fact a qualified purchaser, I am in fact an accredited investor. You can't just take their word for it. So it does create a little extra work for everybody. But the benefit you get, I think, is huge, which is, I can publicly talk that, hey, we're raising lunch fund four, some of listens to this podcast, they listen to All In, they follow me on Twitter.

Now they know I'm doing this. And they can say, hey, you know what, I would like to be in your fund. I would like to go on that adventure with you. Can I come here about your vision for Launch Fund 4? And so, you know, there are some pitfalls here, of course. Yeah, could do that because I was going to say, it seems like everybody would just do this, but there must be some reasons why you wouldn't want to other than the certification process, which is probably pretty onerous somewhat.

I don't think it's super onerous, but it is, you know, the people who operate the fund, you know, people who work for our company who have to do this, now they have to have three, four, five hundred people certify. So, yeah, if that takes an extra, an hour each, it could create 400 hours of work. It seems like a lot for a venture fund, you know, worth 50 million, 100 million, 200 million dollars, you know, who cares? That's a, that's cost to doing business in my mind. But yeah, there might be, like many things in life, you know, it might be a lot of work, but not for me. And, you know, for operations people. And so that's always one of my favorite lines.

People are like, that's going to be a lot of work. And I always go, not for me. Which, you know, is. Do you want that to be your favorite line? Oh, I love it. I think it's hilarious. It's a great dad joke. That's like a dad CEO joke.

But, you know, if you are, you know, a chef at a restaurant and you're like, I would like to have each of the potatoes cut a certain way and be a certain exact size. And people are like, well, that's a lot of work. And I'm like, yeah, not for me. And that's going to make the plate look really good. that they're all symmetrical. You know, that's maybe why you're going to come here and we're all going to get paid more, to be clear.

Like there's a reason. We're not just being... There's a reason to do it, yes. And so the reason for me is I would like to meet more LPs more efficiently. And, you know, I really want to meet certain categories of LPs, like people I think are doing great things in the world. Like, I would love to have, you know, an endowment working on cancer research or something like that. Both my parents are cancer survivors. So I want to be able to do

meaningful work for LPs, you know, if we're going to triple or quadruple, hopefully, you know, hopefully we get some good return. I can promise anything, obviously. You do the best you can. But if you're going to put all that work in with that goal, you would like it to be for people who are going to put it to good use, not just to buy another Ferrari or, you know, a fifth home.

So not that I mind, you don't have a problem with Ferraris or fifth homes. So the doors open to all. Well, the door's open to all to hear the pitch and meet us if they're an accredited investor or a qualified purchaser. Now, you really don't want a bunch of randos. in business with you because they could cause downstream problems. So you'll have people who are like, maybe it's their first venture fund.

And so I try to be very open about these things. That's the whole point of the syndicate. Hey, you know, if you don't know Angel investing, there's this book, Angel, and we do a course, Angel University. So I like to educate people and teach them as much of we've learned. And I'm very open to new people being involved in stuff we do. A lot of other people are like, I don't want new LPs. I'm on my seventh fund.

I'm benchmark. I'm benchmark famously had the same LPs for every fund. since the second, I think, and they only had one person rotate out during a down market. That person didn't pony up for the down market fund, and they didn't invite them back for the five subsequent funds, like really disastrous, famous story. Yeah. And so when you get going and you have the big LPs, you know, and they're putting in 50 or $25 million or $10 million or $100 million, your fund kind of gets filled up.

You built the relationship with Yale or Harvard or Morales-Long Kettering or whatever college or institution is for a foundation, they just have earmarked 10% of their endowment for venture and you're a part of their 10%. And so they just kind of go along with you. All right, everybody on the phone today is Open Phones founder, Darina Kuya. Welcome to the program, Dorena. Thanks, Jason. Great to be here. What about the situation where you have, you know, a phone number that's a common number. So customer support number or maybe you wanted people to just be able to call you and generally talk to the sales team. How do you handle that when you have a group number, a shared number? That's actually one of the super unique things about

the way we've built open phone is that we allow you to have a shared number for your team. First of all, when you call into that shared number, you can set round robin if that's applicable or by default, everyone's phone would ring. The first person to pick it up will be able to have a wall. I like that for customer support. Wow. Exactly. Exactly. And also if I am on a call with a customer, I don't want to be interrupted. There are other people who can pick up new calls coming in. But I also really think what's very cool is that this workflow works as well for text messages. And not only can you just like share responsibility for responding to text,

but you can also use this as a training exercise because the way that it works is that if I am a customer support rep, there is a text message from a customer. I don't know how to answer. I can actually tag my teammates privately on that conversation and get help. say, hey, is this okay to say or how would you respond? Okay, everybody, twist listeners can get 20% off any plan. For their first six months at OpenFone, just go to openphone.com slash twist. If you got an existing number, they'll put it right over for free.

Head to O P-E-H-O-N-P-H-O-N-E dot com slash twist today for 20% off. A lot of people don't want to deal with ever meeting new LPs. And so when, you know, these top funds, it's like most people can't get into them. The idea that you could get into Sequoias Fund or a benchmark fund, like, yeah, maybe 15 years ago you could have, but you can't now. And so, you know, our first. It's a relationship, too, right? It's a relationship. It's a relationship.

Like, your LPs are your bosses. That's your board. They are your partners. And then if it's a big check and they're 20% of your fund, yeah, it could feel more like they're your bosses, I suppose. Especially if you have a giant LP, like 50%. That's why the advice I got from a lot of my mentors was, nobody should have more than 10% of your fund. No more than 5%.

So if you have a $100 million fund, the biggest check you should take is 5 or 10. I think that's not very practical. But ideally, then you've got this diversification. So if anyone or two people don't come in, you don't have to replace a $25 million check. You'd have to replace a $5 million check a little bit easier to do.

In my case, it might wind up with too many investors. We already have too many accredited investors. So we can have 2,000 of those qualified. We only have 250 of the credits. We're going to fill that up pretty quickly, instantly, in fact. So we'll probably, like last time, have to have a bit of a lottery for, you know, people put their request in. You know, they put in a 50K check or 100K check. We'll come up with some size, and that 10 million will fill up real quick.

But you see a lot of people, Mac, were you on the call with Mac when we interviewed him? No, I listened to it, though. Oh, you listened to it. Yeah. So Mac met me, and I think I'm an LPMX fund. I LP'd maybe three or four of these funds and I just put in 10 or 25K checks just to be supportive

in bill relationships with people who are public raising I would not have known about it I mean I do get people emailing me please don't email me I do like one new fund a year I got like I get like two of those for you if you want no more please I got to put it into our fund you know I'm going to be on the hook for putting a lot of money

into our funds so I have a question about that too I'm speaking a bonus question somebody emailed the other day and asked me a question I was talking to a friend or something and said, like, who said, what is your capital requirement for working as a VC? And I was like, what are you talking about? You're not a partner yet. You're a managing director. But when you're a partner, like, you were expected to be. The standard would be. Yes. So they want to see skin in the game. They're

realistic about it. So, you know, a Sequoia fund, you know, Doug Leone and Michael Moritz, like maybe they're expected to put millions of dollars. So it's a 300 million dollar fund. They might expect the, and let's say there were five partners in that fund. they might expect those five partners to put in $2 million each $10 million. So that's only, you know, if it's $10 million on $200, it's 5% of $10 million on $400, it's only 2.5%. But it's a big number. It's a lot of cash to come up with, you know.

It's not de minimis. And then you're doing it every three years, so you've got to come up with more money. With a new fund, you know, like these $10 million micro funds, you know, $20 million funds, they might only expect, they might expect nothing if it's a first-time fund manager, and then over time, they might expect more. And so in our funds, I was typically in the $10 million funds, I think I was two or three percent. I'm trying to remember, like, so I put $200,000 of my own money. And so I think for me as a solo GP, general partner with a bunch of MDs and folks around

me, maybe 1% is what people would expect me to put in. If it was five partners, and eventually it will be, they would expect each person to put in 1% maybe or a half a percent. And they would have some flexibility. You know, if you're Mark and Drison and Ben Horowitz and then you hire somebody who's a billionaire, those three might put $2 million each into the fund. And then you have three other partners who are up and coming.

They might say $2.50 each. But just some skin in the game to feel good about it. Nick is pointing out in our chat that apparently Tiger Global Partners committed a billion of their own cash to invest in seed funds that focus on back in the youngest startups from March of this year. Interesting. The Tiger Global Partners

1 billion of their own own cash. I wonder how much the whole fund would have been. It says Tiger Global Partners famously put in almost their entire billion dollar fund. Oh, they put it in their entire billion. They did it almost like a family office. Yeah. So, you know, and that's, I think that's what Chimot does. He's got like a family office kind of approach right now. And if you watch billions, you can see. Fascinating. Facts go from wanting to have other people's money to having his own and vacillating back and forth. So just some skin in the game is I think what people are looking for. And, you know, for me, I'm really interested. see how it goes. You could get, you know, people who are hard to work with like any other partners. The good news is if they have only a small amount in the fund, you know, you can not invite

them back to the next one. Is it hard to get? There are certain things that you have to get LP consent on, right? So I would, I could imagine that could also be a thing if you have lots and lots of LPs as a result of something like this. You generally set those things up in advance and it's a three-year funds. So if you were going to make any kind of change, like I don't think I've made any changes to our fund structure. And so I would just wait to the next fund and do a different structure, right? Got it.

So you're better off just waiting because going and collecting a bunch of signatures and explaining it to people would be kind of hard. I do think sometimes people will, like, I think we talked about recycling, like, hey, the first 10% back, first million dollars back we can recycle. I think I had one fund that I was in said to me,

hey, we want to, we didn't add recycling, we want to add recycling because we think it's in our best interest and all the LPs best interest. Yeah, of course, go ahead, do that. Right. Right. Because they didn't know about recycling. That's why VC Sunday School exists, so that fund managers and investors can learn together. Absolutely.

We're all learning. Also, apparently. We're raising a fund to everybody. Apparently. Launch fun for it coming. Yeah. And I'll, uh, you know, everybody knows my email address, Jason at calicanus.com. You know my DM.

And, uh, well, there'll be some formal announcement about it as well. And I'll pin it to my Twitter like, hey, the next three weeks. I like this. It's a relief. I don't like not talking about stuff. I'm going to basically do like three web. where I'll just get on a Zoom and people can go and, you know, then they can submit questions and ask questions and I'll just talk for 45 minutes or an hour about what our plans are. You'll get to

listen in on those. And then I, you know, I may want to go on the road and meet a couple people because, you know, I did meet with some of the top endowments over the first three funds, but the funds were smaller. So there really wasn't room. You know, their minimum check size was 50 and the last fund was 44 million. The two funds before that were 10 and 11 with a little recycling. So, you know, this one will go for a little bit bigger, I think, and we'll see how it goes, you know, and I'm going to be raising during a down market. I fully expect, you know, I'll fill up, you know, all the small checks or the medium-sized checks, but it might take six months, perhaps even a year in this kind of a market for me to get the, to round up the bigger checks, but I'm okay with that. I think my understanding is fund managers

used to take a full year to two years to raise a fund. So they would start raising the funds, start investing. People would look at the performance of the first six months of investments, and then that would incent more people to come in because they get a little more. insight into how you're doing as a fund. But the fund does need to close. There's a reasonable window, and I think the reasonable window is one year. So I'll be kicking that off in September, and then going

for a year, and I'm going to have to go get on planes and go meet people and shake hands in all kinds of cities and maybe even internationally and say, hey, here's what we're doing. You want to put a chip in and be partners with us. And I'm kind of excited to do it because I never sell. I never go out and sell. I never take credit for what I do. I'm not after selling.

And I'm excited to go out and see and pitch people and say, hey, here's what I'm doing. Like, is this exciting to you? Would you like to put $5 or $10 or $25 million into this fund? I'm kind of excited about it. Yep. I love it. And raising in public, I'm sorry, is just on brand.

It's just more on brand for you. It's the way to go. I think it should be better. Hoping for the best. Listen, if you're a founder or an employee of a startup, it's critical that you become capital efficient at a time. like this. Fundraising, really hard. And your burn rate, hey, that might make you unfundable and you want to make that runway last as long as possible. Well, one great way to do that is to cut

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O-D-O-O-com slash twist for $1,000 off. That's O-D-O-O-O-com slash twist. All right, well, that's it for BC Sunday School today. Next up, of course, this week in climate startups. This is a fascinating one. I think you're really going to love it. Raphael Jovin is the founder and chief scientists at a company called Brilliant Planet. And Brilliant Planet is using seawater to create the perfect conditions for algae blooms. And it turns out that a coastal desert with a big pond with a bunch of algae in it can sequester a crap ton of carbon. That's a science word. And then they just dehydrate this algae and bury it.

And then the way that and they turn that into superherty. high quality carbon credits. Huh. And sell those. Yeah. Trees and algae. Sequestor carbon dioxide naturally. Yeah.

And algae apparently is way more efficient than trees. Ah. Yeah. Trees are slow. Massive amounts. Yeah. Fungus. It's like it just grows like crazy.

So you basically build a pond. You put algae in it. And then you bury the algae. Yep. Yeah. Makes sense. And then you generate carbon credits and sell it. I mean, it's like printing money in a weird way.

It was, it's kind of fascinating. It was very fascinating. Well, you know, feeling hopeful about the, you know, the climate stuff, specifically around nuclear, you know, there's this nuclear power plant here in northern California. Yeah. That they're going to crack the name of it here. It's a famous name. Diablo.

Diablo. And it looks like we're going to keep that online. And then I was reading about a desalinization plant in the Bay Area that is now pulling water out of like that briny bay that we have that, you know, the Bay fills up every day from the ocean. We shouldn't be even worrying about. about energy and desalization and water, energy and water should be free. We should have a nuclear power plant next to desal plants. If the energy, if we have too much energy, do a bunch of desal. So if everybody's asleep and we can throw off more energy or the solar day and the wind days are so powerful,

we could use that extra capacity at a nuclear power plant to desal a bunch of water and dump it into the Colorado River or send it to the Central Valley to make almonds or whatever we're doing with all this water. So, you know, it feels like the solutions are here and we're now in this implementation phase. Yeah. And we're starting to be in a, what I love about where we are right now and I am hopeful for all those same reasons is that we're also at the incontrovertible stage, right? It's just like, look, you can have one whole political party right now pretending that climate change doesn't exist. Fine. Honestly, it does not matter because banks know it exists, investors know it exists, homeowners, property owners, one-third of Pakistan. The right has changed there.

Right. Hasn't the right voted on this climate change bill, right? They voted in support of it some number. No, none. None did? Not a single Republican voted for the latest inflation reduction act. A couple of them, a few of them voted for the Chips Act, which has a lot of climate provisions, but that's not why they did it. And right now, Texas, in Florida are literally out here saying if you're a big investment, if you're Black Rock and you're invested in ESG funds, then we, the Florida Pension Fund will not be allowed to participate. Well, that's because that ESG. They're going harder.

That's because of the G, I think. They're going harder on anti-climate. They really are. And yes, it's because it's like wrapped up in social stuff and they think it's like woke to be. Why did they put environment with the social stuff? It seems like unnecessary to, it's a mistake. It's a little bit of legacy. I wish I.

could, if this is going to be my least popular TED talk ever, is that we do probably need to figure out how to separate the E from the S and the G. Like, we really do, because we are not going to solve racism before we have to address climate, because the time to address climate is actually 100 years ago, but we should start today. And so we do have this, like, we have a situation where equity is becoming a blocker for some environmental forward momentum. And it is giving Republicans an excuse to be against climate change, which is extinction level behavior. Right? And so it just, it like, it's, and frankly, it just makes it all the more reason that you could never vote for one. Like, it's just like, look, if you want us all to die and that's your

party position, that's a loser. The Republicans are living in states where they're being impacted by climate. So they're changing their position. Especially when they start. Yeah. And they're also like, hey, I need funds to fix these problems. Right. So they can't anymore. It's not sustainable to be anti-climate, pro-business, and not having to put the, because they're seeing the cost of it, like you're saying. The cost is apparent.

And so when you see the heat waves and the grid's coming down. And they want to, they want to get that government money. So if they say that climate is, you know, climate change is not real. Right. Then how can they get the money to fix the climate stuff? Right. They'll be saying that they're on like an, and, you know, it's a disaster. It's disaster funding over and over, but what they're letting happen is the disasters that are

killing people. Why not prevent the disaster? Why not? Right. Exactly. Anyway, I think they're, I think they're getting there. And I think the interesting thing is like, it's a good lesson. They're going to have to get there, but they're going to get dragged there.

What they, what they need now isn't out, right? Like, they need an off ramp to this totally unsustainable extinction level position that climate change is not real and it's not happening, but you're seeing that rhetoric only increase from the GOP right now. There's a clear, I think there's a clear middle ground here, which is, oh, yeah, the left and the environmentalists are like, we get that nuclear isn't ideal compared to renewables, but we'll put that in the mix. A lot more people have accepted nuclear.

So I feel like nuclear could be the common ground where the two sides could be like, you know what, we can't be, you know, fighting with Putin and the Middle East and, you know, OPEC. So even people on the left I'm hearing are like, yeah, a little bit of natural gas as a bridge to get a nuclear to get us to sustainability. I'm okay with, which obviously I'm okay with. Like, yeah, sure, burn a little bit extra. Now, if we're investing in nuclear, if we're investing in all these other sustainable things, I'm okay with a little bit. You know, if it's clean, you know. I mean, listen, all I'm saying is we're always moving. They're never moving. So like, at some point, I think they've moved a little bit. I think they have moved zero. They have moved in the other direction. Like, I'm serious, I am serious when I say that the rhetoric about climate change has only gotten worse from the GOP. In fact, there was a big article about how like 10 years ago, it does, you know what, it doesn't matter. Find your own fucking off ramp. It's not my job to figure, like, right? Like, you can say, you, if they're going to sit there and say it's because of the ESG, but not fund anything to save people's lives from climate change.

Like, I know they're crazy sometimes, but I look at my crazy uncles as like, I need to like. Sorry, Nick. You know. I said I would swear less. I look at the crazy uncles who are like, it's not, doesn't exist. And I'm like, come on, you know it exists. So let's just get over there. Well, I don't want to have to, you know, have a woman on the board of my company.

And I'm like, okay, fine. You know, I get it. I get it. You don't want the ladies in the board. I don't want to have those conversations anymore. I do not know how we got it. I did the, I was talking nuclear. And then she brought up the ESG thing.

And I wanted to know Molly's position on ESG. I was talking algae. I heard ESG algae. I heard ES algae. That's what they're stuck on is like, don't tell me how to run my company and don't give me goals for diversity. Like, you know, Slueman said like, listen, we want to be diverse, but we need to grow the business first and foremost. So we're just going to hire the best people as quick as we can. We're not slowing down to make the numbers look better.

He was just super-cadowing-dainting. Nothing ever changes. Great. Well, yes. And, you know, it's like that group of people, you're going to have to like give them. Yeah. I just, what else could they? Why would you attach governance and, you know, sustainability and environments, they sound like

two sides of the same coin. Maybe they should be together. Are they the same thing? Yeah, they're the same. That's the same thing. So the ES is the same. The S stands for social. That's not for sustainable.

Yeah. It's environmental, social and governance. And because it's for, because for a long time, like, there was no division in any company or any investment firm related to environmental issues and the environment and just make it three different things. E comma, E period, S period, G period. Everybody can fight over those things separately. Like, what are we going to do? Put religion in there too. E.S.R.G. You know, like, we're never going to get anything done. I see that you're, I see that you're practicing for all in later. I mean, it is part of it. You know, I do have to like, you do have to convince some people.

were actually highly sympathetic to diversity, but we just don't want to override merit. Oh, my God. If I start doing that, I can I get to this. Compromising the company's mission, literally. I could see people interpreting that either way. No, yeah, yeah.

You know what? Because it really does sound like what you're saying is, I am assuming that women and people of color are not as skilled, right? Like, that would be the most cynical. Sometimes you have to work hard. harder to find people who have equal merit. Well, here's this follow-up. We need to come to a more moderate, real place.

There's really no room for the hysteria and the outrage. We're CEOs. We run companies. We have to produce results for employees and our partners and our investors and our customers. We can't get distracted in that mission. When you do, you might as well hang it up and let somebody else do it. I love it. I thought that was going to a certain direction.

Now I'm swearing again, he doubled down. He tripled down. He tripled down. Like, did that say override merit? He's like, I'm not going to be hiring all these dumb women just to look better. You know what? It has to do with... It's not well put.

It's not well put. And the more subtle point is, there might be specific positions or jobs. We're finding whatever kind of diversity you're looking for, a gender, race, geographic. There just might not be as many candidates back to the pipeline problem. So if you were to look at graduate schools right now, majority of graduate schools, it's majority female. So to get a male version of some degree is just much harder. So you might have it go reverse to what people expect. I mean, look, women are 50% of the population. They're not 50% of developers. Like, if you look at, I know, but what I'm saying is I don't have any patience for somebody

being like, it has to, I'd have to hire somebody less qualified or it's overriding. Do the work. Like, do the work. I know, but what about the issue of pipeline? I mean, I, this, I don't know why this is controversial. What he's saying is I don't want to find him and train him. And I think what we're going to see increasingly is that companies are actually going to become the Votex. Like, companies are going to be upskilling people. And so he's just like, I don't have any patience for that. I talked about this on the blueprint. Grow with Google.

Have you seen this, Molly? No. Google obviously cares a lot about diversity, inclusion and all the social stuff. They have five free courses and they're like, I'm guaranteeing of those five courses, probably have some gender race challenges in terms of pipeline. and they made free courses to, I'm going to assume, increase the number of candidates, but also increase the candidates to create more diversity.

So you can do that. I think that's like, if you're doing that, you can do skills matching instead of, you know, if you're just like, let's say you're filtering just by a master's degree, which a lot of developer positions do. Like, I'm not going to argue that there aren't a lot of, that there aren't more male developers than female developers. That's 100% true.

However, we also have all of, these filters in place that exclude skilled candidates without certification. So certification is what's going to probably start to go away. And you're going to say like, oh, I've got somebody who is, you know, is perfectly skills matched to this and this and this, but doesn't have the degree, doesn't have five years experience. And I might have to invest six months in training with them, but I'm Frank Slubin and I don't want to. And so then it's like, oh, awesome, nothing ever changes. Nothing ever changes. Yeah. I mean, a great way to do it too would be to look at, I don't know why this doesn't come up in these social discussions is, what are the

percentage of graduates, you know, for the last 10 years? And then what are our percentages in our company? Right. So if you were to look at MBAs and then, you know, or look at applications, right? That's actually where, like, if you look at Y Combinator, I think they did a really good job of saying, here's the applicants to Y Combinator. And then here's the acceptance. And then they started to say, like, is this problem happening when we accept? people and they took ownership of it, which I thought was pretty brave. Yeah. And they're like, hey, listen, we have 20%, I'm just making a number of it.

Let's say that, you know, five years ago, 10% females, founded companies. Now it's 20%. We're accepting 6%. Okay, where's that other 4% going? You know, is it that the male pitches were that much better? Or is it that maybe the people who are evaluating the ideas are biased or has unconscious bias. Like you are going to have to slow down is the thing. And I say this with all due respect to general Sleutman, like you do have to slow down. You do have to be intentional. You do have to put in

a little bit of extra work. And then you know what you get out of it. Empirically better businesses. Like you get better companies. You have a better, you can reach more customers because you have a literal diversity of thought of people being like, actually, you know who would buy this is this person because I'm that person. And you never considered that before. Like the data really bears out that that's an investment worth making. And so to act like, oh, everything is going so great that I don't, and I'm not saying everything isn't going great for Snowplake, it obviously is.

But to say, like, we don't have time to do that. It's just like, okay, see you in the dustbin. Well, it also costs very little to nothing for a company at that scale, and maybe they have it, to create a training program. Literally, the blueprint I talked about this week was about investing and drafting and developing talent. And you do professional development here,

and you might have noticed that there's an awful lot of females here in that room when we do it. I don't even know. Statistically, aside from female founded firms, of male founded firms, I wonder on our investment team, is it 60% female maybe?

5060? Yeah, something like that. And I wonder on male firms what the average, you know, of more than five people, let's say, so you get 10 people or more, what is the, you know, the average female male ratio. That's interesting.

Yeah. It wasn't by design. I just hired the best people. Oh, you didn't have to override merit in order to get like naturally accidental, totally working divest. Not an investing. If you're saying you're training people, which was what we're doing. Right. So we're training researchers into associates, into principals, into managing directors. It's been a seven-year journey for me. I've got three managing directors. I got a bunch of researchers, associates and principals. But you have to be willing to do development. To be clear, no, de is we're not spending. We're not spending. We're, We're not hiring people.

This is not an expensive that we are training each other. Like, this isn't some huge monetary investment that you're making in training, you know? I mean, what you could do, and I've had people suggest this, is instead of having 10 people with the majority being trained up, just hire two partners or three partners and put all that money towards that. So don't have 10 people, have three. And just pay people three times as much and just get senior people.

But, you know, I, through whatever, you know, these small funds, you don't have a big budget. So you kind of, I kind of built a support team around me that I was like, if you guys want to become VCs and go from, you know, operations people to VCs, I'll teach you. And they were like, yeah, would they, would you? I was like, short. Are you journalists? You want to learn investing? You know, okay. Yeah. Why not? It doesn't seem that hard to me. That's the other thing is I think people also overestimate how hard it is to learn something and underestimate people's ability to learn something if they're motivated. And people are motivated to learn venture. I can tell you that because it's a

great... Not supposed to curse. I know. I'm sorry, Nick. All right. Thanks, everybody. All right, listen, I enjoy the interview. Sorry for the derided... Oh, right. And enjoy the interview. Eat your allergy, everybody. About algae. Don't eat it. You don't eat it. You don't eat it. bury it. Barry your algae, everybody. Listen, Masterclass is the best way to learn

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masterclass.com slash startups for 15% off. Rafael Jovin is founder and chief scientist at Brilliant Planet. And I think it is probably safest, Raphael, if I just let you explain what you guys are building here. Okay, no worries. Thank you very much and thank you for having us. And it's really exciting, actually. So what Brilliant Planet does is we grow algae really cheaply the way they grow in nature.

Half the planet is driven by algae in the ocean, algal photosynthesis, and it is what moves most of the carbon on the planet. And so what we wanted to do is take advantage of a lot of free resources like empty desert land, lots of sunlight. There's a lot of sunlight out there. Deep ocean water, there's more than 50 times the nutrients that we use every single. year on land available in the ocean at any one point in time, and bring that rich ocean water together with local algae in those empty deserts, in those empty coastal deserts, and grow more biology, grow more algae, grow more biomass. And the whole point of it was it was supposed to be additive. It was supposed to be new growth that wouldn't happen by its

And the idea was if we can grow a lot of algae, they will absorb a lot of CO2. We can do that very cheaply. And then we can harvest those algae, dry them with sunlight just the way it is in the desert and bury them to remove that carbon from the atmosphere. So the whole point of it from the very get-go at the very beginning was the first patent was a method of carbon sequestration, and we wanted to be able to use what nature gives us in the way that it gives it to us to do more and increase more nature, more biomass, to draw down that carbon. That's what we do.

Tell me about how efficient these algae blooms are in terms of carbon sequestration, Because when you describe it, you know, all new fields of algae and using seawater and, you know, getting that into the desert and then harvesting and then drying it out, it sounds like not super efficient. So I'm assuming that it must sequester a lot of carbon to make all of that worth it. Oh, for sure. So per square meter per year, we can sequester 30 times as much CO2 than a forest does. And so it is, there are no leaves, there are no roots, there are no trunks, there's no, there are no branches. It's very simple in terms of all of the biology goes into growing more algae that capture more carbon. And so it is a very, very fast system.

What the real invention was, is that in nature these algal blooms happen. very episodically, usually in the springtime and usually in the autumn. And what we normally witness is sort of fish laying their eggs and everything to coincide with those blooms. It's the base of the food chain. And so all we wanted to do was to take advantage of the local organisms the way they like it in those exponential growing, very rapidly growing algal blooms and make that happen in our ponds year round.

The real invention is that we got to sort of perpetuate that phenomenon in our ponds all year round. And we've now done this in South Africa, in Oman. So South Africa is very cold in the wintertime. Oman is really intensely hot in the summertime across huge range of environments. And now we're in a more moderate place in Morocco. And we've now run this for five years in the real world, not in the lab, In actual production scale, we've got the largest Algo Raceway pond in Morocco, probably in the world.

And it has shown us that we can do this even through COVID when there were very stringent COVID restrictions in Morocco. And you couldn't go in and out. But the local team continued to grow things with what nature gives them right there. And so it's been a very good experience in the sense that we've seen this now work through a whole lot of different seasons, a whole lot of different environments with local challenges, of course. And what makes us confident about this is two things. One is the algal growth process works really well. But the other thing is there's an enormous amount. of empty desert land available.

And the reason why I say that is there's virtually an infinite amount of nutrients available in the ocean. Obviously, there's an excessive CO2 right now in the environment. And we really genuinely believe that we can scale this to a really significant level. The other part that makes us confident

is that we've now spent the years of trying to identify all the places where costs creep in. And we've got a collaboration, for example, with Southampton University that has been very, very productive, where they look at our paddle wheels and how we mix the algae in our ponds and keep them in suspension. And they have reduced the cost of that paddle wheel by 90%. We've learned from shrimp farmers how to sort of pump the water once and then percolates through the system by gravity. So we don't have any pumps. We've learned from the miners how to remove the algal biomass very cheaply on these, again, very passive screens that are gravity fed. And so the point is we spent the years to try to strip out all the electricity costs and all the energy costs.

And from a life cycle analysis point, and you make this a very, very low technology, low cost, low operational effort system, so that when we pull that carbon out, that we actually really have a net big impact. Right. And then what, walk me again through the sort of end of life of the algae. Is it just dried and buried or is it used as any kind of a biofuel? No. Of course, we looked at biofuels and when I started this, my mates used to come to me and say, why is it so expensive to grow biofuels? And I thought, well, hang on a minute. Every puddle, every pool turns green if you turn around. So what are we doing wrong? Algae grow for free all the time everywhere on the planet. So of course we looked at biofuels. We looked at aquaculture feed. We looked at human food. We looked at high value products just like everybody else has in the space. But the original idea was to move a lot of carbon. And in the end, that is where we ended up again. And of course, we had our own experiments and frankly very good aquaculture fee. But from a net impact point of view, actually growing the algae specifically for the purpose of carbon sequestrate, and then not processing it, just solar drying it in such a way that it does mummify and it does go into the ground long term, is the most net carbon negative technology we could make.

And there is a huge demand for high quality carbon credits. You know, so we can have this week in startup landfill that you can send Carbon Trust or Vera or. or puro to come and certify. And then they can, you know, we own the biomass. It's not somewhere in the deep ocean. It's not sort of mysteriously injected somewhere. It's not some carbon offset of a bike scheme that may or may not have replaced a car mile. It's something we physically have in hand.

So it's a very high quality carbon credit and it's, you know, very certifiable in that. sense. I feel like that leads directly into my next question, which is what is your business model? And I'm assuming that these high quality carbon credits must be related. Yeah, of course. I mean, the business model is to grow algae as affordably as possible on as biggest scale as possible. So to stay with that for a second, we have developed the technology from a growth point of view. Now we are spending a lot of effort on the sort of engineering scale to really truly industrial scale. We've identified about half a million square kilometers

of really ideal coastal desert land in places like South Africa, Namibia, Southern Angola, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, huge areas in the Mediterranean, western sort of Morocco, places like the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, the Gulf, Australia. And we've identified about a half a million, million square kilometer, really excellent land. And we want to make it that technology accessible

to all those local governments and local environments so that they can then implement this technology on a large scale. So the scale of engineering is also about us being able to anticipate what the local environmental conditions are. So we're very good when it comes to sort of remote sensing technology and sensor technology in terms of seeing how the algae grow. And that scale up engineering is very important. And the other bit is we want to make sure that we enable people to, again, do that MRV, that measurement, that record, that validation and the verification of the technology and the carbon.

And so we're very, very good at tracking carbon in the incoming seawater. how much we pull from the CO, from the air, from the atmosphere, how much of that CO2 is absorbed in our pond as we mix our pond. And so making that available to other companies so they can deliver this worldwide. So the idea, just to break it down a little bit more, so the idea is that your customers directly would be governments? It's actually, for the moment, it's high, it's starting with the tech sector,

people like Microsoft, Shopify, Spotify, Stripe, there's a huge demand for these high quality carbon credits. And if you look at the sort of... So is the product, and with respect to the fact that you're the chief scientist, but is the product then the credits? Correct. Or is the product the actual ponds? Okay, so you work with a local government to install one of these ponds,

do all of this very precise track. and then create high quality credits that companies want to buy. That's exactly right. That is exactly right. And that can be, I mean, that can be a local organization. That can be a subsidiary. Our Moroccan company is a subsidiary today. And it can be government, absolutely.

Gotcha. And then how would you price the credits? So what we are seeing and what we're witnessing is that they're the kind of low carbon, the low value carbon credits have increased in value a lot as people have kind of consolidated and the market has, you know, sort of gone from the $3 to the $18 sort of space in terms of not always so easy to verify or stable schemes, but that the price around $100 a ton is the sort of high quality kind of carbon credit that, that, the demand for is increasing very quickly.

And so that's what we're targeting. We know that we can hit that target. We will not be able to hit it in our current sort of research site or in the 30 hectare demonstrator side that we're planning on building this coming year. But certainly after that, in the first commercial site, we will be able to hit those kinds of prices. Gotcha. And just for context, it sounds like the. algae blooms, you'll grow at commercial scale, will be able to sequester 30,000 tons,

38,000 tons from the atmosphere annually? Is that, are those numbers correct? No, that's, I don't know where that number came from. That's an interesting way. There's 38,000 gigatons of CO2 in the ocean. I'm not entirely sure where that number came from. But, but no, the first 1,000 hectare farm that we're planning on building will, is designed to sequester least 100,000 tons of CO2 per year. Oh, okay. And we have at $100 a ton. Exactly. And so we have 61 square kilometers of land right now, so 6,100 hectares.

So we even on the existing site, we anticipate we can build multiple modules. But just to give you a sense of scale, that sort of, sort of that first farm is going to produce, if we have four or five modules, somewhere between 500,000 tons of CO2 per year. But to really have a big impact, we need to go global, right? And so the 50, the half a million square kilometers that we're looking for that we've identified in terms of that ideal coastal land that's flat in the right ocean environment in politically stable countries can sequester about two gigatons of carbon, two billion tons

of CO2 per year. And so we are very conscious that that first farm is great, but we need to be able to build a lot of them. And in Morocco alone, there's about two and a half thousand square kilometers of that ideal land. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I even identified a 3,200 hectare site in Ibiza in the middle of the Mediterranean and sort of a party island. So the point is, is there's land everywhere.

You'll have a lot of volunteers, a lot of reporters volunteering to come and visit that site, I'm sure, yes. Exactly. Field trips. Exactly. But the point is so, you know, we, we can produce a much more valuable. product in quantity than many salt evaporation ponds and other things that people do in these quite humble environments. I wonder how you are thinking about sort of ecosystems as you grow this.

As I am talking to at this moment in Oakland, California, we're having like a mass fish die off because of red tide algal blooms. Obviously, that's not what you're creating, but I'm sure that you have made many arrangements for making sure that these blooms don't escape somehow. No, it's a really good question. So the first thing is we work with organisms that are not harmful algal blooms. So when I was at Woods Hole Ocean Graphic and I was studying harmful algal blooms, the whole idea was how to stop them. And of course, we're not growing those kinds of organisms. On the harmful algal blooms, they are, they're not many species like that. They're actually quite easy to identify. So it's a familiar territory. But to your point,

we do a couple of things that are really important. One is as we work with local organisms, they're not genetically engineered, they're not modified in any way. They are the way they are in the environment. So even if we were to leak them out, the local fish are happy to have them, they kind of fit into the environment. They're not doing something unexpected. The second thing is we are deacidifying a huge amount of seawater. So we actually help in terms of not sort of local environmental restoration. So we can grow seagrasses, we can grow mangroves, we can grow corals in our seawater.

So our seawater, we do not remove any so-called alkalinity, the stuff that holds the CO2 in the seawater. We just remove the CO2. And so it reduces that acidification that everybody hears about and returns to the ocean high oxygen, very clean seawater that is actually able to make the muscle shells, the clam shells, the oyster shells. And so we've spent quite a lot of time working in the terms of local environmental impact assessment and making sure that there are no unintended consequences.

One of the things that's really important here is we are very, very good at anticipating the quality of the seawater that's coming into our forms that we're actually using, because for us it's the nutrient source. It's where our, you know, sort of the resources that we need come from. And so we've built a so-called finite volume community ocean model. It's a way of building very localized, very specific models for your local environment with the Scottish Association Marine Sciences. But the beauty of that is it also allows us to have the discharge tract and to see where our discharge water is going. And so we're very conscious of the way we interact with the environment.

The reason why I mentioned the Red Sea and sort of the Mediterranean is we are very conscious of different environments of where we are in the Atlantic on the Atlantic coast in Morocco, it's a very nutrient-rich environment. Whereas, for example, places in the Eastern Mediterranean or the Red Sea are very nutrient-depleted environments. And so we have to be very careful to sort of match our. production with those local environments. Right. Does that make scaling more difficult? It sounds like you've clearly solved a lot of cost and infrastructure issues, but it sounds like each installation is going to be a very bespoke situation in some ways.

So the actual method of how we grow the algae, it's really very simple, actually. Take the local algae, we add seawater. When they've used all the nutrients, we add more seawater. and when they get to sort of a certain volume and the pond overflows, we put it into a bigger pond, right? It's really quite simple operationally. Magic, exactly. And then when the biggest pond is full, we harvest it and we take the water and put it back in the ocean.

So the actual local operation is quite simple. But you are right that the timing of the dilution, how much seawater we add, what the initial cell concentration is, what the local light. level is how fast to run our paddle wheels to create that spring, algal bloom feeling in the ponds, right? That is the subtlety, and that's the complexity. And so what we have done is, and frankly, the UK government has been very helpful. We've had a project called Agrisat with Innovate UK.

They've given us five and a half million pounds to look at the fundamentals of the system. And the reason is, is so that we can kind of use those fundamental principles regardless of where we are. So it's truly a platform technology. And the idea is it's something that is quite transferable. One thing that we are very good at and that everybody in our team has done is we're very good at bioprospecting those local algorithms. We got to find those local organisms first. and they have to be the right size and grow at the right speed and do the right things. And that's one of the skills we have.

But the actual dilution sometimes in the wintertime, for example, where we are now, there are not as many nutrients in the water. We may need to supplement those kinds of details. That's the subtlety in the system. Got it. And then finally, what do you need in terms of, you know, carbon markets are still somewhat nascent, largely voluntary. What would you love to see in terms of some certainty around carbon markets?

You've raised $25 million. Obviously, you know, VCs are making a bet on these markets existing and continuing to grow. But I wonder what you would love to see from a business perspective to really sort of secure that business model going forward. And not even business model, right? Like that actual driving force behind a lot of investment that will sequester a lot of carbon? The first thing that would really make our life much better is if there was consistency in terms of how things are measured. And if there were a universal framework or one that is

really clearly defined, what we find is that if we speak with any verification or certification agency, they all have their own quirky sort of approaches with their own kind of experiences. and it is really all over the place. And it is hard to believe some things that get certified and some challenges that others have. So the fact is that kind of structure would be really great. Second thing would be governments have been very, they have their nationally determined contributions,

they have their plans. and they're doing many useful things. I mean, don't get me wrong, we need every solution. We need tree planting. We need decarbonization. We need insulation on housing. We need alternative energy sources, for sure. And so all of those things help.

But the fact is when it comes to things like we are doing, just to illustrate, just to illustrate, And this is not a criticism, but in Morocco to get our environmental impact assessment, it required us to get approval from 27 different ministries. And certainly as a young startup company, I didn't know you could have 27 ministries in the government. And so the point is, it's all for good reason, but the fact is this, that kind of regulatory environment would be super helpful. The third thing that is really, I think probably all of your guests would be wondering about is if there's a carbon price.

A carbon tax, a carbon price, anything that we can orient ourselves would be super helpful. I don't actually mind the voluntary market. I think the voluntary market is adjusting itself quite sensibly. I do think that some of the schemes where people are trying to stimulate innovative. are very creative and very useful. But at the end of the day, everybody is going to buy more of these credits if they can anticipate what the prices are.

And so in that sense, that kind of price regulatory mechanism is something that we still need some help with. Raphael Jovin is founder and chief scientists of Brilliant Planet. You can see what they're working on at Brilliant Planet.com. I'm excited to make that field trip to Ibitha. And it's great to meet you. Yeah, I'd love to have you visit, actually.

I love a gigaton scale conversation. Amazing, Raphael. So cool. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening to the show. What a great week, Molly.

What a great week. Hopefully you are enjoying a day off. The U.S. and Canada are off for Labor Day. And don't worry, we got a huge week coming next week. Yeah, I'm going to have my guy, Keith Rabeoy, on the show, doing his quarterly. every six-month check-in. I like how he... He doesn't tell me this in advance.

He's just like... You're going to love it, Molly. Is it going to be awesome? You'd love it, Molly. He's got a lot of strong feelings about topics that you love. I love it. Can't wait. I just cannot wait.

It is going to be a great week, and then one more reminder. We will see you on Tuesday. We are actually taking a day off. See you then. Two days off in a week. Wow, we did it, Molly. I mean Saturday and Monday. Wow, we took two days off.

Amazing. Good job us.