This Week in Startups - Women in venture capital + SpringEats.com CEO Anukampa Freedom Gupta-Fonner (Climate) | E1460

Episode Date: May 15, 2022

In VC Sunday School we discuss Pitchbook's data on women-led VC funds (03:16), how much money they've raised and how the industry is evolving. Then, Jason explains why new fund managers often have more success with individual LPs than institutional LPs (27:12). In This Week in Climate Startups Molly speaks with Anukampa Freedom Gupta-Fonner of Springeats.com, a zero-waste grocery service (38:31). (00:00) Jason and Molly introduce today’s show (03:16) VC Sunday School: PitchBook gathered a bunch of data for The Information about women-led VC funds (13:08) ActiveCampaign - Get 10% off your ActiveCampaign subscription today at https://activecampaign.com/promo/twist (14:19) VCSS: Q1 2022, 199 funds raised $73.8B in commitments; 8% of total funding raised from women-led funds (25:52) Reforge - Apply for their next cohort at https://reforge.com/twist (27:12) VCSS: Taking the backdoor for raising (34:43) Liquid I.V. - Feel better faster. Get 25% off at https://liquid-iv.com using promo code TWIST (35:47) Wrapping up VCSS (36:37) Toss to This Week in Climate Startups (38:31) TWiCS: Molly speaks with Anukampa Freedom Gupta-Fonner of springeats.com (zero-waste grocery service) Check out Spring: https://www.springeats.com FOLLOW Anukampa: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anukampafreedomguptafonner FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

All right, everybody, we have got a great big, fat Sunday show for you. So, of course, Sunday brings you VC Sunday school and this week in climate startups. I'm super excited about our interview today because I'm talking to my first founder. Literally as soon as I said, I was leaving for VC, she hit me up on LinkedIn before I'd even started this job. Anukomta, Freedom, Gupta Foner of SpringEats.com, who is in our accelerator now. What is SpringEast.com? Maybe you could explain. Yeah.

An amazing mission. Bringing its sources and deliver zero waste groceries. So they bind them, they package them in reusable packaging, and they deliver them in refillable, returnable, plastic-free jars and bags in electric cars. And plus, freedom herself lives a zero-waste life. So you get these tips on how to, like, cut plastic and packaging out of your life. It's fascinating. I just fell in love with this concept.

When you brought it to me, it's an operationally hard business, but it's one the world needs. imagine you get your pantry and your refrigerator stock with a bunch of mason jars. Just that's but one example of a container. And all of a sudden you open it up and it's beautiful life, your flour, your sugar, whatever you got is just nice and clean. And then what do you do? You rinse the jars, you give them back. They sanitize them and you bring them back and you never are ripping open plastic. I mean, just cereal boxes.

Come on, people. They're wasting card. Then that's cardboard. Cardboard with plastic on the inside. It's inside. Come right. Yeah. Just give it to me in a mason jar.

Give it to me in a glass bottle or something. And let's save the goddamn planet. But before we get to that, we have a great, great VC Sunday school. We go over all the statistics about the great change. We'll debate if it's enough or if this is a fast pace or slow pace. But the pace of female-led, woman-led venture firms is extremely. accelerating and that's great news. And we also get into a discussion about the new lane in venture, how you as an

underrepresented, underestimated, whatever term you like, can kind of take your own lane and get and break into the VC industry. It's going to be a great episode. It is a great episode. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Active Campaign. The hardest thing in business is turning a. lead into a customer, into a repeat customer. Simplify the process and start creating repeat customers

with 10% off your ActiveCampaign subscription today. At activecampaign.com slash promo slash twist. Reforge. Reforge is a career development platform for top two professionals in growth, product, marketing, and engineering. Their summer cohort starts July 18th, so apply for membership today at reforage.com slash twist. And liquid IV, making hydration a priority will help you feel better on a day-to-day basis. Get 25% off at liquid iv.com by using promo code twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Sunday, VC Sunday School. We're just looking at the numbers, actually.

Specifically, Pitchbook gathered a bunch of data for the information about women-led B.C. funds. We've been sort of wondering when some of this imbalance was going to correct itself in the world of venture capital here. Yeah. Well, and it has, which is great news, right? We're starting to see some changes in 2021, the number of U.S. V.C. funds raising money, where the most decision makers are women rose to 52 up from 29. And that's an important qualifier there. They're not saying there's a decision maker. They're not saying there's a female in the building. people played with those stats. This is saying where most decision makers, the majority of decision makers, which to me would be a, dare I say, a female-led fund. Yeah, probably, yeah.

Those funds, so that, as we mentioned, was up from 29 in 2020, almost doubled. Those funds raised $3.7 billion, which again was more than doubled the $1.8 billion in 2020. And in 2022, so far, women-led fundraising has already surpassed last year. Wow. So we're moving on a clip. This is an undeniable trend through mid-April 16 women-led funds have already raised 4.5 billion exceeding last year's total in under five months. This year's jump was largely due to 2.5 billion being raised by two women-led funds. So it looks like I'm trying to look up how many VC funds exist in total so that we can put this number into some context, which I think is valuable because it's, nice that the number almost doubled, but the total number of firms listed in the USA real quickly seem to be 1,816. Right.

So of those 1,816, the number of U.S. funds where most of the decision makers are women is 52. Yeah, I mean, every 10 is 1%. Improving. Yeah. But it's 52. There's going to be a drag here, Molly, because you have so many funds that were historically male led or 100% male in some cases. And those changing, as I've always said, you know, the last three years funds typically. So you might add one partner every two funds or three funds.

Most funds, you know, people retire after doing four or five funds. So if you have five partners, that means every year, on average, one leaves. So for it to become female led or to, you know, even, you know, have any kind of balance here. It just takes, you know, long cycles. And so, in fairness, to the numbers, the change is slow in this. It's not like a company where you're adding 1,000 employees a year. You had very small, you had very, you only add partners or swap them out every couple of years. Yeah. So this is more like the presidency of the United States or an administration where it changes every four to eight years. So if you think about it like that, that's the pace of change you're going to experience

unless starting new funds because new funds can be started anytime and they start with a blank slate and that's what we're seeing is the changes in the new funds. Women have had enough in my mind. They don't want to go work somewhere. In fact, Katie Hahn of Hahn Ventures and she raised that big giant crypto fund.

She was at in Tris and Horowitz. We don't know why she left, but that would be a great example of a male-led fund. the two founders are male, probably the first five or ten partners. I don't know this to be exact, but to my memory, where it was overwhelmingly male

when they started adding people already in Driesen Horowitz, she'll have to start her own. So I don't know your interpretation or what the back channel is, Molly, now that you're in the venture game, but am I correct that the back channel would be,

what's to start our own? It's exactly what you're saying, right? It's like women either don't get promoted to partner and they don't know why, and so they end up leaving, or they don't get promoted partner because of what you said, which is that these firms are like we have, you know, if it's a replacement theory situation and these firms are like, well, we already have eight partners.

So we can't do anything about it, right? Then they're going to leave and start their own. And that is also a slow process. And I don't mean to, you know, I mean like that is amazing, right? This year's jump in fundraising among women led funds is because two of these women, Katie Hahn and Kirsten Green at forerunner ventures together raise $2.5 billion more money than all of the women-led funds did in 2020. So I'll take whatever creep, but I still want to acknowledge it's a creep, right? Never be satisfied. Like, celebrate your wins, but never be satisfied. 52 out of 1800 is not a stand-up and cheer. Well, I may take the other side of it because I feel like this is going to, this is accelerating, which is another good trend. And, you know, some of those. But some of those,

funds might have to boot the poor performing number eight to make room for a woman. And so my question is how many of them are willing to do that? If you got one who's like mediocre and coasting, you make the car. It's hard to fire people who are partners in something, right? It's really hard because they own a piece of it, essentially. So it's very hard to remove people from a partnership, which is a good observation on your part. Firing doesn't generally happen. They get pushed out, which means pressure. So it's not a strict, you know, firing. You can't really do it that way.

That's a good extra BC Sunday school thing, by the way, though, is like how hard is it to get ready to partner? How hard is it, right? And, you know, I think what we're going to see is now also micro funds, smaller funds, like I did, my first fund, 10 million, second one, 11, third, 44. We'll see what the fourth one is. It'll probably be a, you know, a triple of that, I would guess, double, triple, quadruple.

You have to build up credibility over time, even myself, you know, as a very high profile, you know, very successful angel, it took me time. Took me a decade. And I'm a white now. So if this is about privilege and about signaling, even for me, it's taken time. And so if women are, you know, maybe, you know, if there's still some bias against women from LPs, I don't know that's the case. I think it's kind of the opposite. I think LPs are rooting for this change now.

A lot of LPs are backing this. That's what we're seeing. The LPs are. I agree with that. Sure. No, I can expect, actually, we're going to do it in VC Sunday, so what I'll say is independent LPs, like high net worth individuals, very much we want to see this change. And that's what's driving this.

And then selectively at the big LPs, so I'd say the majority of the people who are writing their own checks for money, they overwhelming want to see this change. That's why we're seeing so many people of color, so many women raising funds, you know, these new small funds, one solo GP, two GPs. you are correct that the big institutions maybe aren't moving as fast, Molly. So then you have to ask, why aren't the big institutions moving as fast? Right. Valid question.

With the big numbers. And that's actually a more complex one as well, which is they're just not adding more managers because they have too many managers. So there's indigestion there as well in the cycle. But if but 10, I would say that 1800 numbers a little bit misleading as well. So I would say the number is more like there's a thousand viable funds, firms out there. If there is a thousand viable firms and we add 10 to 20, it means one to two percent change a year, which means

this is going to quickly change. And I think it's accelerating. And so I am super optimistic about it. But I can understand keep going. I can understand as a woman you being like show me. Show me. I think the context

really matters. Like I just, I'm, you know, that's my deal. I just want to put these numbers in context. So it is great. I agree with you that it's accelerating. I do think that there's more value being placed on it. It is not, I don't want to like read off that number and be like, it more than doubled and be like, we're done because we're not done.

No, no, no. It's, it's clearly accelerating. Like, in the first five months, we've already exceeded last year, that's accelerating. So, and the fact that there are examples of billion dollar funds being raised by women is another high watermark, right? That's amazing. It didn't previously exist. Full stop.

Yeah. In one way that, see, this is the thing with numbers, especially when things are nascent like this, people can then shape the numbers to fit a narrative. So a lot of times people say, well, what about venture dollars going to work? The majority of venture back dollars are going to work in mail-run CEO companies. Okay, well, you use the term CEO, not founders. Okay, so that's a qualify. Take that qualifier out and just say with a female founder, it's going to be a different number.

And then there's the overhang. Young companies raise small amounts of money. The survivorship bias of the big companies from 10 years ago raising now, when there was a lot of bias in the system, I mean, there weren't a lot of female founders, and you put the caveat of CEO-led. You've netted out a bunch of women who are co-founders in the company. And because they survive, they raise larger amounts of money. So 10-year-old companies are raising hundreds of millions or billions. And month old companies, two-year-old companies, are raising hundreds of thousands and millions.

So you've got to look at the number of deals being done. That's what I think, if you want to be intellectually honest. What are the number of deals? Right. And I think-call us. We have a request. Well, yeah, I mean, but you understand my point about this? I do.

I know it's a subtle point for people, but I encourage people to be intellectually honest about this. Because also with the funds, the number of funds being created, if you did it by dollar amount, well, the latest Andreson or Sequoia or whatever billion dollar fund is $110 million funds. So when you look at the number of funds being created, it paints a better picture. When you look at the dollars being raised, it paints a worse picture. Totally. You've got to look at both of these things. I always try to look at both. right?

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ActiveCampaign.com slash promo slash twist. And you're going to get 10% off if you go to that URL. Well done, Active Campaign. All right. And there's some more data here from Q1 of 2022, which I think furthers our discussion, Molly. Maybe you could summarize it. Yeah.

More great context. In Q1 of this year, 199 funds raised $73.8 billion, almost $74 billion in commitment. Which, by the way, the slowdown hasn't hit yet. total funds in Q1, 8% of those funds raised were women-led, $4.5 billion out of that 74. And the dollar amount of commitments in Q1, 6% of total funding was from women-led funds,

16 out of 199. So again, better. Keep going. Keep going. That's what I'm saying. Keep going. To your lead. And I will, I'll say something else.

Women have to start their own funds. I've been saying this for a long time. I think waiting, and I also think people of color, and it is hard. I'm not saying it's easy. And I'm not saying I didn't have it easier. So caveat, caveat, caveat, caveat. I know it's hard. I know I had it easier.

Not looking for a cookie, but we're just talking facts here. Yeah, yeah. And there are people who had it easier than me that went to Stanford instead of Fordham. So everybody's got a different starting point in this. But I actually believe it's easier as a path to either join a new first year fund as somebody who is underrepresented in these numbers or to start your own. And, you know, we've had countless people, I think our last season of Angel, we had so many underrepresented fund managers.

It was just amazing. And when I started that series four years ago, it wasn't easy to find people of color or women-led funds. And you know this as somebody in journalism who is looking for subjects. Or, you know, you're looking for speakers at conferences or, you know, you're like, we need to have more diversity in guests. I can tell you just anecdotally from booking these and working with producers on booking 10, you know, folks, it's like, oh, we had that person on. We had that person on.

We were cycling through the same 10 names. Okay, alienly, okay, this person, okay, this person. And it was like, all of a sudden these new faces started showing up. And so this is trending in the right way. And the rules have changed in a way that makes it easier too. you can now do these public fund raises, right? And you can... 506C, great observation.

5O6C has, I think, made a massive difference because you can raise in public in that way. You can build like a brand out of it. And you can do it on the back of an Assure or an Angel list where you can totally do a $10 million fund, deploy capital, without having to support an entire staff. Like there are just mechanisms that it seems like have been created that I have learned about from the Angel series.

that have made it much more viable for people to rates our own fund. So rolling funds or just doing SPVs. You know, listen, we've done 250 plus SPVs now. We just crossed that threshold this past week. And, you know, I was like, whoa, we've done a lot of, 250 is a big number. But I saw 250. I was like, well, so I guess that means we're going to hit 500.

I was like, wait a second. We're going to hit 1,000 at some point. Good job. That's extraordinary, you know? If you just think about it, you know, a thousand at a million dollar average would be, Oh, I have no idea. I don't, I don't do math on the fly. A billion.

A billion? I know. I'm totally like 100 million journalists plus numbers equals mistakes. Listen, I do this all on a calculator. I do this to people all the time, but I know, I'm like, just add the zeros. Just add the zeros. I did some math in a, in a founder meeting yesterday. You would have been so proud.

Back of the envelope. I'm going to buy everybody, I'm going to buy everybody a calculator. I was like, well, an average of, but I can have to buy a calculator that does billions and trillion. for folks. The long and short of it is, yes, 506C exists. And so remember I said before, individuals want to support this and can support it easier than institutions. So if you want to paint the worst picture of this, here's what you do as a new fund manager. Try to go after the giant institutions and get them to back your first-time fund. Guess what?

I'm going into my fourth fund. I don't have any of those big institutions. I have fund of funds. I have, you know, other venture firms. I'm high net worth. Like, not to be a jerk here, but I'm Jason Gallaganis. I wrote the book on Angel Investing. I don't have Harvard. I don't have Yale.

I don't have calipers. I mean, I'm also a solo GP, and I've taken a different path. But you can really paint a horrible picture of this, and you could hit a brick wall by trying to get giant, you know, endowments and universities and retirement funds to try to back you as a nobody. Yeah. And then you would think the whole world is biased against you. Then you can have a completely different experience.

You try to get 100 people to give you $25,000 or $10,000 each. Get 100 people to give you $10,000 each. It adds up. It's a million dollars. Then put a million dollars to work, 50K at a time, 20 companies, and then do SPVs with the best. And then you'll get a totally different experience. So people are going at this strategically. And I had this beef one weekend when I was in LA, you might have remembered.

And one person of color was, you know, arguing with me over this. And another person of color, 10 other people of color who actually raised their funds were backing me up on this. And I was like, you're running into a brick wall, like head first that you're never going to knock the wall down with your skull. But if you go this way, you can literally walk around the wall, find a hundred allies who want to give you $10,000, and then build a track record. And they're like, I don't want to build a track record. I want to convince those people they're racist. And I'm like, or sexist or whatever it is. I'm like, I think you're tilting out windmills here.

And there's an easier solution. Let them slowly die and create a new system. Or build up or build up your own track record and make it undeniable. And, you know, that's what I did. People did not want to back me in the beginning because they were like, Jake Halsis, this kid from Brooklyn, he's too rough around the edges. And you know what I said, Molly? I said, I'm going to be so good.

You will have to deal with me. That's what I said. I said, oh, you don't, I took it as such an affront when I got the nose. I said, okay. Yeah. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to build the world's largest syndicate. I'm going to get to 10,000 members and I don't need you.

And I've literally said it to one of them. I said, I just want to let you know, now's when I need your support. Launch fund, too. And they said, yeah, we realize if we don't support you now, you know, you might, you might not take our money for three or four. I said, now is the time for you to make a bold bet on me. and they were like, no, we can't. We need to see more performance.

That's not our business. We don't make bold bets. And they just laid it out for me. And I said, you understand. I have like almost a thousand people in my syndicate. I said, when this book drops, where my book comes out, it's going to go to 10,000.

And then I won't need you. And I'm going to remember, you didn't support me here. And the person looked me dead in the eyes and said, we understand that, actually. We understand that we can't support you now, that we need more of a track record. What you need to understand, Jason, is we're an institution, and I have to go twice a year in front of a board of directors with my endowment

and explain to them. This is somebody who I had a little bit more of a candid personal relationship with. And they said, listen, I have to go to them, and I have to justify my existence and my job here. And I'm able to basically go to bat for one new fund a year, one a year to add to the collection. And that one, I have 10 of those right now that are on their third or fourth, funds that have 10 times the track record of you, J-Cal.

I want to support you. I'm not designed to do it. There were limitations to my job as an LP. And that's when I was like, okay. And I said to him, I said, I'll let you in for launch fund three, four, five, six, seven. And that I just totally changed my thinking because I was like, you know, me. I'm a little. And I was a little more, you know, when we got into our spat back in the scene that day,

so than gadget. I was a full contact guy. I was like scorched earth. Yeah. And I said to them, I said, I really appreciate you explaining it to that man. I totally have empathy for how you have to do your job. I'd be honored to have this institution in Launch Fund 10. I'll still be here.

You'll still be here. I'll talk to you in five, 10 years. I'll come to you with every fund and get your, I appreciate you taking the time. I appreciate all the advice. I totally flipped it with them. I said, and even when I don't need your money,

I would love to make this institution money. And I would be proud to help your mission. and I just totally became like mega gracious JCal. And I have remained that way with LPs. It's an honor to even have the audience, even have you consider it. So for all the people who turned us down, I'm like,

I totally get your job. There's a thousand. He said before, there's 1,800 funds. I think there's really like 1,000 because there's all kinds of like, I think there's double counting of funds in there and stuff. Put the number at 1,000.

You got 1,000, and you can have 20. So you can have 2%. If I become 2.1, 1%, or a part of the 2.2% at some point or some, you drop a fund. And by the way, they don't generally drop funds. It's very rare for them to drop a fund. When they go in for a fund manager, these big LPs, Molly, they stick with them, they tell them we're going to commit to three or four funds. So our biggest LP, I would say who it is, they told us, hey, we're going to put the 10 million in this fund. We want 25 million in the next one. Would you guarantee us that? I said, absolutely.

And they're like, we want to be with you for three funds. We want to build this relationship. once we go through the work to vet your fund, then we want to be with you on the journey for a couple of funds, right? And so I think that's, this is the stuff where it feels to an outsider, and rightfully so, and I was an outsider, that they're against you. And I tell this story because, let's face it, the system was biased. So you could feel like it's biased without having the empathy for what they're doing as well, right? And both of these things can be true at the same time.

They can add funds at a radical pace. They're not designed to do it. And there could have been institutional bias. And people could be changing the institutional bias, but because they only had one or two funds a year, they already added their one female-led fund and their one underrepresented fund. Right.

And maybe they made them the same thing and same investment. So there's no more room in the, yeah, yeah. And they did, they can only absorb one or two based on their mandate. therefore you might, as a first-time fund manager, just might not have enough track record for them. Or if you were the fifth with a track record, they've already added their two. And the third, fourth, and fifth can't get in.

They can't have five funds a year. They just don't have the manpower, the staffing, sorry to use the second term. They don't have the resources. They don't have the infrastructure to just manage those relationships, certainly not with small funds. That's the other thing is they write big checks.

So I was like, I was also telling this person, and they were a person of color, and we're having like a full contact, you know, discussion. And they were calling me a racist. And I said, but you're also a little bit naive here. You're raising a $10 million fund. You don't have a track record. You haven't invested in any companies yet and you want them to give you $100 million.

Like, you're being completely naive. And I just had this like candid discussion. Like, you told a black person who's trying to be a fund manager that I've even. And I was like, okay, I've been naive in my approach as well. I'm just trying to help you here. It was a pretty interesting discussion. I felt the person was not having a good faith discussion. All right, listen, Reforge is a career development platform for top tier professionals,

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Well, sometimes, I mean, you know, not to derail us, but sometimes when you have a lot of scar tissue built up, yes. It's, you don't want to, right? It's hard to engage in that. It's hard to engage in that intellectually and not emotionally. Correct. Because there's a lot of real pain and harm and it's hard to let go with that. And I had a smaller version of that.

I had a chip on my shoulder coming in. And I was like, I don't want to be disregarded because I didn't go to an Ivy League school. You know, I'm the kid from Brooklyn. I want this Ivy League school to give me some money from their endowment. And I took it personal. And I was like, was it because I didn't go to. Harvard or Yale or, you know, Stanford? Is that the reason?

And they're like, no, we know who you are. We watch your podcast. We've read your book. We respect you. You're not listening to us. You don't have a long enough track record. Get to your sixth, seventh, eighth year. Get to your second unicorn.

Right now you have Uber and Uber and Uber. Like, we can't tell if you got lucky once or if you're good at this. Like literally somebody gave me, because I asked them, I said, I give you complete permission Be as candid as you can. And they're like, this is how LPs are going to look at you. Did you get lucky on Uber because you knew Travis and you were friends with him and got an allocation? Or can you get hit a second Uber?

And I was like, okay, let me get back to work. And then it was like, grin, density, you know, and they're like, oh, you don't own enough. That was the other thing they told me. You don't own enough of Uber. So we don't believe you could get a big enough allocation. I was like, oh, is that right? Okay, 2% are superhuman, 5% of density, 12% of grin. let's go.

5% of com. Let's go. Okay. What's the issue now? And then when I go out and you'll come out with me for launch fund for and you'll be in the meetings, now it's going to be like, okay. Now what's the reason? Why can't you back J-Cal?

Right. Oh, you're not adding funds this year? Okay, fine. I'll take it. That doesn't matter to me. I'm going to raise my phone way or the other. If I have to raise $50 million funds every two years instead of $150 million one every three, it's no sweat off my back.

So I think you have to. to, since we're here in V.C. Sunday schools, it's a bit of a deep rant here. You have to look at this strategically as an under, as somebody without performance yet, no track record, or a person who is underrepresented, underestimated, whatever term you want to choose in their loaded terms. I don't know if people find underrepresented or underestimated as, you know, insulting or inspiring. Putting it all aside just real thing, but yeah. I think that's right. Underrepresented is fine.

If you're an underrepresented founder, and that could mean your race, your gender, your age, all of those things. Country of origin. Country of origin. It may be a different path. And I think what we're saying now is the most important takeaway here is those different paths exist. Yes. Previously they didn't. And now they do.

So go get it. That's, I thank you for saying it that way. Because, you know, when I say it, people are like, like I said X, you know, or or a guy who got lucky on Uber said, why. And, you know, I'm really coming at this from like, there's a back door. There's like this back door over here. You don't have to go through the front door.

Just do an SPV. And it's not lesser. The back door is not lesser. It's not, you know, I mean, I think that's what's important too. There's not the, there's not, you're not cheating. You're not cut, like you can just sort of say, this system is not working for me at this moment and doesn't want to. and I'm going to find a thing that does work for me.

Like, that's... They're all equally good options, and in fact, some of the new ones might even be better. I just told everybody, when I came in the game, I made my own lane. Period. And people were like, oh, how could you quote Kanye? You know, whatever.

It's like, because it's the truth. Like, there is a lane here, and you can make your own lane and be so good that they can't deny you. And you know what? Everyone's like, oh, you're putting small dollars to work. Not to the founder. Not to the founder.

That first 50K, that first 25K, the 100K, that's an early commit, is more valuable than the last 250 where there were 10 late stage companies who were throwing money at the founder. The founder, when they get that, they're like, oh, okay, I got one term sheet, two term sheets, three term sheets. Yeah, they're just pick one best terms. That's not how the angel round is. And if you go out there, you say to the founder, I'm going to, if you give me a 50K allocation, and I'm going to raise it in an SPV one to 5K at a time,

but I believe in you. I want to be an advisor. I'm going to go out there and sell the hack out of your company. I'm going to get an SPV with 50K in it. You might end up getting 250. And all of a sudden, and that's what happened to me with Com. Calm was going to shut down, I found out, after Alex told me the story. It made me very emotional when he told me the story.

Because he said, you know what, Chekhan? I need to tell you this. He told me on stage. We had pitched 40 VCs. They all said no. you were so enthusiastic and believed in us so much. And then you showed up with $376,000. $50K from the launch fund won, $328,000, I believe, from the syndicate.

The first syndicate I ever did. He said, we couldn't believe it. We almost didn't want to take the money from you because we're like, he's the only person who believes in us. Nobody believes in us. We're going to fail. And then we're going to take Jake House money. They kind of felt like almost like if nobody believes in us and we burn Jakehouse money.

And I was like, wow, it's so obvious you're going to make it work. You got the domain namecom.com. You created the million dollar homepage. The product is excellent. People are getting value from it. You've made $10,000 already.

I was like, let's go. It's a 150 million dollar position for us now or something in that range, depending on, you know, where the value is. We won 5% of the company.

Yeah. And I got that by passing the hat. There were 60 people in there on that, and that SPV, there were 60 people, 6K each. I'm trying to tell you you could pass the hat for six cage

I didn't know anybody in the syndicate these were random people who also believed in it and believed in me and that could be you that could be you with an SPV just go do it go to ashore.co we own 5% of Assure, we invested a million dollars

in the company I think we're the only outside investors you go to assure.com you learn how an SPV works and you go past the hat and what if you hit com like I did on your first shot out on the bat or any variation on that. Now you're a legend.

Look at Arlen Hamilton, sleeping in an airport, homeless, black, lesbian, not from the Valley, not from the Ivy League. She went on Republic and raised $5 million, not for her fun, just for her operating company. And she raised it in like a day or two. People believed in her so much the world of a bunch of small folks backing somebody. is what, you know, we're seeing, you know, in politics as well. You know, a bunch of these $50, $100,000, $1,000 checks to support somebody. It adds up.

All those people who put Bernie on the map, I know he didn't win, but he became very prominent. Andrew Yang, those small reoccurring donations, they really change things. Crowdfunding changes things. GoFundMe, Republic, Kickstarter, Patreon. You look at those, that dynamic, that's in venture. It's called an SPV special purpose vehicle. So here endeth the lesson. Listen, when you push your body really hard,

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Or you can get 25% off at liquidiv.com by using the promo go twist at checkout. That's 25% off anything at liquidiv.com with the promo code twist. We should just always play when I go on one of these tirades if we want to have a drop. It's literally take the drop I have. From the Untouchables,

this is like one of my favorite Sean Connery characters of all time. Sean Conner is teaching Elliot Ness, Kevin Costner, about like his job. And job number one, when you're a cop in Chicago, is to get home alive and get home to your family. family alive. Here end it the lesson. Now you're supposed to play the drop producers. Here and it's a lesson.

If you give them that permission, they're just going to start playing it. Can't end it. No, this is whenever I go, but yeah. I'm just, I'm doing it with my team. I'm doing it on Twitter. You just, I'm giving them, I'm filibustering here, giving me a little bit of time to upload the video clip. Here end it's a lesson. Yeah, I don't think it's coming. It may not come. You have to have that one. But that'll be one of our drops. Here. While we, while we wait for that, we will get to an interview with actually, An awesome,

a woman of color founder. Here we go. It happens to be my first one, my first founder, Anucampa Freedom, Gupta Foner. For the Sunday, this week in climate

startups. Fantastic. What do you guys talk about? We talk about her company, spring eats.com and her experience in the accelerator. She's in our accelerator right now. And her experience growing up in India, a country that has so much less waste,

that when she came to the United States, She was like, what is wrong with this country? And then just got to work trying to fix it. Love it. All right. Enjoy the interview, everybody. And happy Sunday. We're here for you every Sunday.

We haven't done Saturday yet, but I think the heads are going to sell out yet. Here, Molly, we're going to need to head Saturday. Should we do SaaS Saturdays or this week in BC Saturdays? I have two options. Maybe the audience will tell us, email us. What would you like to hear on Saturdays? Or this week in VC. You can bring this week in VC back.

Maybe Mark Suster does a Saturday interview. I've been talking to him about that a little bit. Or we can do Sass Saturdays. Or we could do 50-50. We could do it every other week. We could do 50-50. We could do streaming Saturdays because it's like the weekend. Like we could have a long do a segment on streaming.

Saturdays, it's not a bad idea. Can you imagine that this podcast is almost seven days a week? Pretty great. It's bonkers. It's always my dream to be, you know, to Howard Stern days. I always love having my own morning show, my daily you know, morning edition thing. And then here we

are doing it every day. You love it. It's ubiquitous. I got a lot to say. I got a lot to say, partner. All right, everybody, enjoy the show. Here end at the lesson. Here end at the lesson. Here end of the lesson. All right. Anukampa Freedom Gupta Foner. Thanks so much for joining me on the show. Molly, thanks for having us. You bring out the best to me. And thanks for joining us at launch. You're in the accelerator. how has it been going?

It is phenomenal. Just learning, absorbing. And it's like the launch team has our back and I couldn't be more excited. Oh, I'm so delighted. And other founders, we talked about this, I think, once offline, I said it's almost like when you have a baby and you join a mom's group because it's such a singular experience

that it feels like being able to talk to other founders even a little bit in Slack is to must be really magical. Yeah, no, it feels great. The content, the energy, the feedback, just the ability to sharpen things. That coaching has not happened for us. So I'm just grateful for the opportunity. I'm delighted. I'm so glad it's going well.

And you're doing well. And now this is the part where we should probably talk about the company or the founder and CEO of Eat Spring. Do you call it Spring or Eat Spring? Actually, Spring Eat's. Spring Eat's. So neither of those. SpringEats.com. Tell us about SpringEats. What are you doing?

What are you building? Sure. So springeats.com is an online grocery store. We do zero waste deliveries from farm to table. Essentially, it's a waste-free hyperloop for bringing you the best quality produce and foods that exist in a region in a community and getting them to you without any single-use disposable packaging. So you get everything in non-toxic, reusable, refillable, returnable packaging.

You use all of that packaging, and on your next delivery, return the packaging back to us. We'll take it, inspect it, clean, it, sanitize it, and recirculate it in our system. And it's a waste-free circular grocery experience. Talk to me about the amount of waste-sick, because I get grocery delivery and it's appalling. And it is probably part of the way they keep produce separated

from somebody else's produce to produce. put it in all the small plastic bags, which I would never do when I go there. But it's like you're solving two problems. One is packaging in grocery. And then two is the additional packaging that gets added on through delivery, right? The whole system is pretty darn inefficient. What you just described to me is a byproduct of a 120-year-old vanguard industry. I'm serious.

The last innovation, the last big innovation happened in the grocery industry, in the late 1920s. The shelving and the stocking and the grocery stores that you see today, they're a product of a different generation, a different time. What we need to do, and what we are doing,

is make this transition to 21st century waste-free grocery stores and supply chains. And yeah, that's what we're up to. Yep. Let's do some nuts and bolts quickly before we talk about how you came to this. Currently, I know that as soon as I heard this, I was like, where can I get it? You're only operating in D.C.

How is that going? And tell me about the sourcing. Sourcing is the heart of the product. So we're working with local farmers, local producers, local bakers, and essentially taking away one of their biggest pain points, one of their biggest costs, and that is the dumb single-use packaging. On average, 10% to 30% of a product's cost are the packaging. So when you go into the grocery store, you just paid like 10% to 30% of the tea.

Like that was the packaging, right? That was not the actuality. That was the packaging. And it's a huge problem for small producers and makers. So we're removing all of those inefficiencies for them by giving them good quality reusable packaging that they can use. And again, we source the top 2 to 3% of all of the produce in the market. That's what we offer to our customers.

The quality of this, the sourcing of this is at the heart of this. And if we want to win this, we have to build the infrastructure on the supply side. And our energy right now is focused on building that infrastructure. When you say building that infrastructure, what does that look like? A system of suppliers, a delivery mechanism, all of that? all of the above. So just think about this, Molly. At this point in time,

if you are farmer Martin from Pennsylvania, to come from Pennsylvania to Washington, D.C., to sell your strawberries and your raspberries, you have to make 200 stops. 200 stops. And that's because he's a small farmer. He cannot make a grocery store. He cannot pay the shelving fee,

the stocking fee. It's just way too expensive. So he's making all of these stops just to offload his strawberries. and raspberries and all of these are packed in single-use packaging. You can imagine how expensive that is. He has to market on his own. He has to figure out where he can set up a booth, what farmer's market he can go to.

It's pretty inefficient with Spring. He has to make one stop because we'll buy all of his strawberries and raspberries. He doesn't have to buy any more single-use packaging because he uses our reusable packaging as a service. And life is easy. I got the best produce from a local farmer. It's less than 200 miles away. And people in the district enjoyed freshly picked strawberries sometimes from the same day.

So we picked them up in the morning. We're delivering in the evening. Like, that's how this works. And like a beautiful glass container or a reusable bag of some sort. For the strawberries, we actually are testing out stainless steel clamshells. It's pretty amazing. because there's a pretty deep user experience side of this. I mean, think about this goddamn plastic clamshells.

Half the time, they'll cut your fingers. They're so difficult to open. They need some type of glue to be put in there. Like, there's this packaging rage, rap rage. It's real. People are struggling with it. And with good design, good reusable design, you achieve two things.

One, we save costs. I can amortize my packaging thousands of times. My stainless steel clamshell is like a subway car. It's not a personal vehicle, right? It's going to be used thousands and thousands and thousands of times and we'll keep washing it and reusing it and because it's made of one material, right?

Single material, even at its end of life, it'll give me value because it can be melted and remade into a similar product, right? That's the beauty of just thinking through the design element of this. The second problem this solves is it's obviously better for the end user. You're giving them an aesthetically pleasing experience. The refrigerator doesn't look like a little junkyard. It's actual food without the garbage packaging.

So talk to me too about the, I really want to come to your design lab and see all the different packaging they're experimenting with. Are you actually experimenting with producing and creating that yourself and having it manufactured? it can work two ways. And we have done both things. So think of like 10 to 12 standardized packages in which you can fill 5,000 to 6,000 products. So it's not like we're going and making new things for everything. I need 10 to 12 good types of packaging.

It could be stainless steel, I'm sure, it can be a glass jar, it can be a bagget bag and a produce bag. and once we have that sweetened place, you can just use it for pretty much anything. Now, in our first version, we have made a lot of it in-house. And the reason we had to make so much of it in-house is the system, the current system of lamiarity, is like all built on disposables.

So what is available in the market is disposable packaging. The reusable packaging that I need just doesn't exist. So a part of that packaging had to be built from the ground up. But a part of that packaging, we were able to source from other parts of the country, other parts of the world, where reuse has been a norm. They just believe in the fact that you should be eating out of non-toxic clean reuse rolls and these are durable products. So it's been a mix of both.

But the packaging element of this is pretty damn innovative. In fact, we have a waste-free. labeling system as well that we're testing out. So I'm not sitting here and printing like 15 labels for like 15 homes, like Molly's home is number one and and Jason's home is number two and Nick's home is number three. And like let's print and like put stuff on the bag. We're not doing any of that. We have a reusable labeling system that we can use. So we're not even printing paper. So yeah. Wow. And the unit economics of buying goods that don't have to be packaged, not having to pay that cost is partly what gives you actually an advantage over other grocery delivery services,

right? It absolutely does. I mean, going beyond the environmental impacts of this, this is actually a good business. This is the definition of mission meets business because the most wasteful element in all of this is single-use packaging. And then you have created, on top of that inefficiency, a system of stocking and displaying and customers picking things up and then re-bagging those things

and checking those things out. It's just endless, just for context. A product that you see in the aisle of a grocery store before it got up there, it had to change like five hands, five different times. And then when it was put there, it's again going through you and then it's going through a cashier.

So it's like pretty broken end. to win. And when you remove that inefficiency, that unnecessary label from the supply chain, you come out winning. 40%. I just saw a note actually from the producers, 40% of plastics consumed are single use. Oh, it's... Or you're like, it's so much worse than that. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So just for context, right? over 90% of all of the plastics ever created,

they still exist, it cannot be recycled, that's a joke. We all know that. Majority of this plastic was produced in the last 20 years. So our dependency on the single use has only gone crazy in the last 20 years. And overall, 29% of our country's carbon emissions, national carbon emissions, are a result of our packaging and waste. All of this takes a lot of energy, a lot of resources. And when you become efficient with this, when you become smart with this,

you're running a good business, you're taking climate action, and more importantly, you're democratizing climate action. Because, I mean, what power do I have to deal with a freaking hurricane or a wildfire? I can't do anything about it, but can I control what comes in my kitchen and how I get it. If I can make that happen, I think that's a big deal. What do you imagine in the future, like to stop the hand changing? Like, do you imagine that stores go away or do you imagine that stores all become wholesale and you package on the spot? Like, if you really were just like, we're taking off, we're redesigning all of it.

Wow, I love that question. We're imagining a couple things. first, every seventh vehicle on American roads is a trash truck. That's in a sane. We don't want every seventh vehicle to be a trash truck on American roads. We want that to go away. We want to stop the production of single-use plastics and single-use packaging. So inherently, you're transforming the way fossil fuel industry works. And the third element of this reimagination is there are over 44,000 grocery stores in this country.

We want this to take off where the aisles of grocery stores. Right now they're filled with single-use products. We want to see them filled with reusable, refouable, returnable packaging. And that's the norm. That's what customers get. That's how they use things. That's how they return things. So that's our big picture vision, right?

like just transform some of these inefficiencies into these bread and butter industries. Yeah. So even if, for example, I wasn't getting my groceries delivered, there would be, there could be a future where what I see on the shelf is a stainless steel clam shell or a glass jar. And I buy that and then I bring that back to the store. It's sort of, I mean, it's milkman. You've described it as the milkman model. Absolutely. And the beauty of building the infrastructure for this, Molly, is.

like all of these other 44,000 stores like can make this happen because we build an infrastructure for this. So there will come a time when probably 10 years later we're just assisting these giant big stores, use the infrastructure we have created to transform their operations. They can't do this right now. They're unwilling to do this right now. That's just a fact. Nobody wants to self-destruct. no great innovation is going to happen in the, you know, in the vanguard industry.

Like no executive wants to make changes, such drastic changes. But once you prove that this is what you're going for, you want to change the way food moves in this country and even internationally. I mean, this is a global problem. You'll have people who can sit on top of your infrastructure and do the same thing in their own stores. I love it. I just want it all to happen.

What I want to ask about, if you are not watching this interview, if you're listening to it, I want to describe, or at least maybe just sort of give the example that the first time I talked to freedom and we got on a Zoom, I said, are you, did you just move? Are you in an empty house? And you were like, no, I just don't have any stuff. You are actually living the lifestyle that you describe now, right? You live in effectively a zero-waste home. That's right. And I mean, just to do this right, to be a good designer, to empathize, to understand, we believe we have to be subjects of our own experiments.

None of this happens without that. So, yeah, my husband, Clifford and I have made some radical decisions and taken some radical steps. It's been about six years now that our journey started. And we live in a home that doesn't have a trash can. And it's about 60% empty since the last time we spoke. It's still the same. I think I added a stool for my piano because that was an infrastructure piece that needed to be fixed. But yeah, that's true.

So what do you mean, what do you mean by radical? Help walk us through this because I feel like zero waste as a concept is starting to take off. But when you really look around, when I look around this office and I think about, I don't know, just the box that the Kleenex came in or the little like my lotion came in this joby. Like what did you have to do and where did you even start? Oh boy. It started off with a very simple product in the coffee industry. It started off with the coffee sleeve. And this was you and you started off at the clock.

You started on like a war on the coffee sleeve. This is a big part of your background story. That's true. So, I mean, I've always been excited and I've always worked in the environmental space, just a little bit of the background here. Yes, please. But there came a time when I was very disillusioned, just so disillusioned that I didn't want to take any action because I felt like this is not even a drop in an ocean.

It's like you take five steps forward today and then you're taking 15 back. and I was in the front lines, Molly. I was working in conservation. I've done all of those things. And I decided I needed to go to graduate school. And my time in graduate school was very clarifying. I learned, I asked questions, and I came across this idea that waste is an error of design. And if we could solve the waste problem, you're not solving an ancillary problem.

You're solving a core issue because you can solve. solve for water, you can solve for soil, you can solve for wildlife habitats. Let me give you some context. In the production of single-use packaging, all of these things are impacted negatively. Air, water, soil, wildlife habitats, whatever environmental issue you care about, that's probably being impacted right now in the production of single-use packaging. And obviously, there's the disposal side of it. So for me, this is like a big systems issue. And when you start tackling it from the lens of waste, that's how you start solving it. When that happened, we started just thinking about what to do, how to figure it out waste.

And the coffee sleeve from Starbucks said that intended for single use only. And my literal question was, why is it intended for single use? And I caddied that sleeve with me for over six months. Clifford and I traveled to probably 50% of American states. And I still used it every day. I put it in my notebook. I put it in my pocket. Nothing happened to it.

I know it's just a sleeve. but hey, we're experimenting, right? And it eventually left me when I jumped in the Shenandoah River and it was gone, right? So it started out with a coffee sleeve, but after that it went to the cup, after that it went to,

how am I buying shampoos, how am I buying conditioner, what's coming in the home? And the kitchen was the mother of it all. Like, that's the black hole of waste in your home. If you can fix stuff in the kitchen, 70% of the waste that you produce in your home is like gone. Wow.

Okay, give me some specifics. What do you? So I'm assuming you're buying in bulk, right? You're at the like bulk food aisle. Yeah. Are you bringing your own containers? Like, what does this? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So, and there's a wiki how on this that we created. I'll share that with you after the show as well. So, I mean, if you don't have spring near you, you're basically taking like 30, 40 jars to the store. You have like 10 to 15 grocery bags, produce bags to the store.

And you go there and you start filling up your mushrooms and your Brussels sprouts and like your apples, your oranges. You start filling up your little produce bags. Then you have the bulk bins in some stores and you start filling those bins up, your jars up from those bins. And you want to make sure everything is tear weight. So, you know, if the jar is a pound, you want to make sure you write that it's a pound,

but the bag is 0.15 pounds because otherwise you will end up paying double for everything. Right. And the system is so frustrating. I mean, this is the worst. But, again, options are limited right now. So, you know, I would fill all of this stuff up and we'd have about two full jars, two full grocery carts that one, Clifford is pushing one, I'm pushing one. there's some glass milk bottles or some stuff like that.

And then you go to the cashier and you're like, you want to make sure it's one of the cashiers who actually knows how to do bulk because very few do. And then they'll like pick it up and like weight of the bag. Then I created a slip for them. Standards weight for every bag and printed weights of the bags on the bags, printed weights of the jars on the jars. And then they would like literally stand there and one pound subtracted

from the overall weight. And this has to happen for 15 or 20 more jars. This has to happen for 15 or 20 more bags. And then I'm on the other side. And it's frustrating, right?

Yeah. But that option just didn't exist. And we did this, not just here in the District of Columbia. We've done this in 47 different states. And... Like done the shopping trip that you just described. That's right. That's right.

That's right. in 47 different states. And you're like, how is this normal? Like, this is the most inefficient thing. You can't do it this way. And when the pandemic hit, I was getting a little sick of the coffee industry. I have to tell you that.

When you start trying to sprinkle reusability, circularity, even sustainability on linear supply chains, you can only go so far. They were designed for something entirely different. And after the pandemic hit, it was like, cannot do any of this anymore. Grocery and food is where our heart is. Let's figure out how to do this for our neighbors. So that's how that Vicky Howe came by.

Share it with a couple neighbors. And they're like, love this. I'm sorry, we have no patience to do this ourselves. But if you bring it to me, I will pay you. And yeah. So I started taking orders on Excel sheets. Put everything that we could from a grocery store on an Excel sheet. This is 2020.

We're still testing stuff out. We didn't have a grocery partner. We didn't have like space, et cetera. So we started taking orders on Excel sheets. So just had a couple neighbors. And it kind of blew up from there. There's an overnight waiting list. And it was pretty unique because that had never happened to us.

us before. Every time we're like sitting there and pushing ideas and pushing stuff and hey person, this is how a reusable coffee system works. Hey person, this is how behind the thing behind the bar stuff works. And with this

people just came to us like I want this and I want this and like okay so we found some space in a local food co-op to do our private beta and like had our own garage and built like a website. We put like 500 products on Shopify and started figuring out how to do deliveries.

And we have an electric vehicle that became Springs official EVE. And it was just packed to the gills. And I was standing there at 4 o'clock, 5 o'clock getting deliveries and like packing bags and like making sure everything's going to the right person. And there's a sense of efficiency that goes into all of this. And Clifford created data models in the back end. Like how do we price the stuff? like what's the unit economics

how are we going to figure this out how are we going to figure that out like the engineering that went into every delivery like to me that was pretty freaking awesome and it came to a point that oh brother like I think we may need to raise some venture capital

to actually scale this because you know I just told you the house has been empty this is how it has been the garage was a different story There were like 50 banker boxes in the garage. And we had a partner for all the washing and the cleaning. So we contracted a facility that had like food permits and other things. And they would wash everything for us.

And I would find myself just on the road washing, cleaning, collecting deliveries, doing deliveries. And I'm like, this needs to happen under one roof. Like what is so hard to understand here? And yeah, it came to a point that we're like, we've got to put together a presentation. for this. Like, how do you communicate this idea? You know, like, how do you figure out what you're going to need to get, like, the whole of D.C. on board.

So that's a little bit of the backstory for you. It's amazing. And then one of the things I found so interesting is that you said your customer acquisition was effectively just finding buy nothing groups and people who want to be people who just want to reuse. Absolutely. That's the best part. I mean, people are hungry, no pun intended, people are hungry.

And they are hungry because subliminally, we all understand that we've had enough of greenwashing, we've had enough of single-use packaging. There is a sense of frustration. What do you do with all of this stuff? So we partner with grassroots organizations who are very happy because we are an authentic mission. We're not sitting here and saying something and doing something else in the back end. And I have to say this. The word zero waste is getting bastardized. I came across a zero waste service that sells single-used waters, single-use diapers. I'm like, you have no idea what zero-waste is.

People are going to eat you alive when you actually try and scale this because people are beginning to understand what this really means. And for us, to be able to come from this innovation background where we wrangled our heads to work in the coffee industry in the back-end supply chain, front-end supply chain, and farmers markets, how do you get rid of waste? And like such fragmented supply chains, when we built our own, it just made sense to people.

And yeah, that's been fascinating and truly gratifying. And you're really building a reverse. We're sort of all over the place between your zero-waste life and your business, but clearly there is not that much difference for you. You're now building effectively a reverse supply chain. That's exactly right. It's reverse logistics at its core, and it has not been done at scale anywhere,

except from where I come from. India is a great example for this. My inspiration is the Mumbai Daba Waller. Molly, this is a delivery service, a lunch delivery service that started over 100 years ago. go in India. And they make one mistake for every 6 million orders.

And it's a 6 Sigma lean process. And none of the people there went to any crazy Ivy League schools. They just understand how the system works, what operations means. There's a sense of excellence in like making something like this happen. There's a sense of resourcefulness that is needed. And that's what we're bringing to. to the table. I mean, my grandmother never had single-use disposables.

Like, can you believe that? I have seen that. I have seen her kitchen. I have seen her pantry. Just being in a different part of the world and now living in America, the juxtaposition is crazy. So, yeah. Is the lunchbox delivery service that you're talking about?

It's also in reusable containers. This is literally the model. Like, you were like, I know this exists. And it's in a city as big as most. by so we can definitely do it here. Absolutely. It's all stainless steel and, and, you know, chiefs from FedEx and UPS go and study that model. They have written Harvard Business School chase studies on the model. There is so much innovation in parts of the world where resourcefulness is your only way to survive. Well, that's one of the things that you said to me

when we first met, that when you were growing up, you just did not see that when you came to the U.S. you were just astonished by the amount of waste in general. Sootans and wrappers and everything. Food waste, my goodness. Food waste is a part of the tech puzzle we're trying to solve here. Grocery stores waste an immense amount of food. When we change the way at spring, how Farmer Morton is going to bring us strawberries to us. We fundamentally also, like, inadvertently, but in a good way,

we've changed the way the food waste equation works, because you have a more like a push system rather than like, I want this, I want that. I'm working with what the farmer is giving us. So there's a very good positive externality, and that is solving for food waste while working on this, while working to solve the packaging problem. Yeah. How do you scale this? When I brought this to Jason and said, this is a great company.

I'm super into it. He said, well, it's awesome. We all agree we wanted to exist. It might be operationally insane. How do you overcome the sheer operations challenge, not just in one city, but ideally, you know, all of them? Yeah. So just conceptually, right, Molly, the way we think about it is you're building a railway track. When you've built the railway track, anything can write on it, any type of car can write on it.

That's how we think about scaling this. So right now in the District of Columbia, we're working direct to homes. The way to scale this, take this to the next level, is you bring on board campuses, restaurants, commercial kitchens. All of these people need a supplier for their food. They all need a supplier for their backing kitchen. When you've built the system, you don't just go deliver to a home. You start delivering to bigger organizations and bigger systems who need your products.

essentially you become a food distributor for a group like that. And when you have a regional warehouse, a regional backend system, I don't just have to serve in Washington, D.C. I can take that to Alexandria from the same place. I can take that to Arlington. I can take that to Baltimore. Suddenly I'm covering like six million residents of the Washington, D.C. metro area. Of course, there's physical infrastructure that is involved in it,

but that infrastructure doesn't have to be inefficient. It can be made efficient by doing all of these things that I just shared. So there's a math, there's a science to scaling this, and it starts by truly getting into one market, like acquiring every part of that market that you can and from there they're going to adjacent markets, where you can leverage the existing system that you build and you keep building upon that.

That's the way you scale something like that. this. Yeah. All right, now I want to do a little bit of a lightning round of zero waste categories. But I want to leave us with some tips. So the kitchen, I think we have sort of like, sounds like groceries generally covered. What about beverages? Like how do you get zero waste wine?

In a bottle that is filled with wine and the bottle is returned to us and the winemaker packs the bottle again. and this is such a big problem. Like two backhand contexts, very important. The world is running out of sand to make glass. That's real. So we have a huge raw material shortage to make glass. So you will have to use and reuse your glass before throwing it away or before recycling your glass.

It needs to happen. In your own state, there are bottling bills. coming out from the state legislature, which are forcing beverage makers to use, reuse their wine, beer, kombucha bottles, like fill them up again. So there's a legislative framework, a policy environment that is really propelling the work that we're doing. And I'm so grateful for that because we need that assistance to get more partners on board. But you get wine the same way you get pasta or the same way you get strawberries or the same way you get your baguettes. So if I'm, but if I'm in Oakland and I don't have spring yet, then I could try as a consumer to

potentially find a winery that would refill my bottles for me. That's right. If you're willing to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you could look that up and that's possible. And again, legislation, not just in California, in multiple parts of the country, it's happening. I have to say this. This is one of those issues.

I'm saying this softly because I don't want to jinx this. So I'm like really like keeping my fingers crossed. This is a non-partisan issue. Everybody hates trash. I heard lightning. Everybody hates trash. From the staunchest Republicans to the most liberal people. So legislators around the country are taking note where nationally we are running out

of landfill space. This is all real. So you're saying a policy environment where consumers, will be equipped to do more and more and more propelling businesses just like I was. What do you do? I'm going to continue on the categories. So I'm assuming that you don't, do you have a TV?

Do you have like a remote control with batteries? What do you do there? So for batteries, I actually have rechargeable, reusable batteries. Okay, that's a easy one. Yeah. And I don't have a TV, though. We do have a computer to watch stuff on. Yeah.

Yeah. What about like, I'm just looking at, tissue and hair tides and stuff. It's just reusable, right? Do you use hankies? I'll show you my hanky. I don't really wear without my hanky. She got a hanky.

I knew it. There's a hanky. I have a hanky. You know, handkerchiefs were all the rage. You look at like these, there's a New York Times piece on this from two years ago, whatever happened to the handkerchiefs. It was a symbol of classiness.

This was so real. So I have got handkerchiefs from Clifford's Great Grand out. They are beautiful. They are so pretty. So handkeys and and towels at home for any we don't have single use towels here. We have all reusable towels for the kitchen for for everything else. Yeah. For the bathroom? For the bathroom. So by by the bathroom do you mean a toilet paper or do you I do I mean yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we have badees everywhere. That's that's that's what we've got. I knew you're going to say bidet. I was texting with rachel about that. I was like I bet it's bidet, which I have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's all Badaise. But I do have a point about the, about the bathroom. So I know for some folks, Badaes may be like, like, hey, this is too new for me and things like that. But the problem, if you want to use like traditional toilet paper, my urge is don't use traditional toilet paper. The biggest TP-making companies in this country are cutting down old growth forests. to make toilet paper.

So Canadian burial forests are cut to make freaking single use, like, toilet paper. If you need toilet paper, bamboo toilet paper is a better alternative. Because we need all these trees to just naturally capture the carp and we don't need them to clean our bumps. So is that too exclusive for your show? Not in the slightest because I was going to, because like maybe offline I'm going to ask you about period because I looked up zero waste period. I can tell you right now. Oh, there's a disc. I bought the disc.

There's a whole bunch of stuff out there. I can talk to you about zero-waste period. Please. It's freaking fascinating. It's awesome. It's been four years. I found the period solution that I should have found when I was

12 years old. Clifford has not had to run to a late-night pharmacy for me because I have the ultimate tool at hand. So I have reusable period pads and they have reusable slip-ons in them. I use them for my period every month.

I wash them. I clean them and I use them again. It is pretty awesome. And even from a point of view of like how much chemicals the everyday woman exposes herself to through single use period packs, it's all gone. My period packs are organic cotton and I wash them every time I use them. It's great. I think I bought like 15. I still have all 15.

Wow. Yeah. And you just could work, yeah, I live with 15. Yep, I got the cup. The cup. Yeah, the cup is cool. The cup is cool. Yeah, I mean, I think that people are taking these kind of baby steps.

And once you have started taking your baby step, it snowballs. It snowball so quickly. Exactly. Exactly. And we need to influence consumer behavior. You have to give consumer something to buy, which is what you're working on. Yeah, yeah. And in your rapid fire, right?

So I'll give you an example of how the vacuums and this, housework and how the air filtration system works. None of it is single-use filters. So the vacuum has got a washable filter in the vacuum. So I'll pull it out every couple months. I'll wash it. The same thing with the air filters. I don't have single-use air filters.

It's a stainless steel air filter. You just hose it off. You dry it. You put that thing back on. So stuff like this can happen. Alternatives exist in the marketplace. You just need like one place to start. Like you said, once you say,

Once you start, you kind of can't stop. It's pretty addictive customer behavior. It really is. Well, and then tell me about the greenwashing part of it. Because if you start, you know, putting zero waste into Duck, Docko, then you get zero waste kits. And there's all kinds of things that people want you to buy that have this name on. And some of those things seem legit. Others maybe aren't.

Like, how do we know when we're getting greenwashed? There's a formula for this. Okay. Okay. Okay. if the product that you're buying will help you get rid of single-use products 150 times, you made a good purchase. I say 150 because you've kind of beaten every other environmental metric by that point.

So when you're buying like a toad bag, they say you should use it 30 times to actually beat the environmental impact of making that toad. and then you keep using it more and more and more, and you've basically surpassed everything that went into making it, and you made a good choice. I'm saying 150 because we've got to transition away from this idea of fast fashion and cheap products to buying things that are actually durable that will last.

That's the first way to understand if you are being light to, if you're being fooled. The second way is single use, anything does not beat reuse. This includes single-use compostable packaging. Single-use is single-use. There is water, energy, soil, air, habitats, resources that have gone into procuring the raw materials for this, making the stuff, and somebody will have to process its end of life.

So single-use nothing will beat reuse ever. A way to make sure you're not being greenwashed is go for reuse, go for that product that you can reuse like at least 150 times. All right, I have one. I think I'm going to stump you with this one. Dog poop bags. Oh, brother. That's a very hard one.

I know. That's a really hard one. Okay. We're going to have to get somebody on that. The challenge here is not just the bag, though, Molly. There's something we've thought about, just in terms of thinking through product design of stuff. It's the poop itself. I mean, you know, if it's like cow poop,

and horse poop, you can put it back in the soil and use it as manual, etc. With dog poop, with cat litter, you can't do that. You can't leave it out in the elements. Like the product itself is a problem. So like the package around it is a problem. So the end of life, the product has to be figured out first and then the packaging around it. Yeah, totally. Yep.

All right. Well, we're still, you know what? That's okay. That just means there are more problems left to solve for future entrepreneurs. Freedom. for the time today. And we'll be, we'll be stalking you through the accelerator. Molly, thank you so much for having us. It's a pleasure. Take good care.