Startup Series: Charm Industrial
Today's guest is Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Charm Industrial.
This conversation was recorded as a live session during Climate Career Week, a series of talks, local meetups, and office hours designed to help people make the transition into climate-oriented work. Climate Career Week was organized by Climate Draft, Terra.do, Work on Climate, and MCJ Collective.
Given the nature of the audience, today's conversation focuses heavily on Peter's own journey into founding one of the most prominent companies in the climate tech space today. Peter also offers his thoughts on how certain key job functions may slightly differ in a climate tech company as opposed to a software tech company. And he would know. As Peter was working on Charm Industrial he was also the active co-founder and CEO of Segment, a software business in customer data management, which he eventually sold to Twilio in 2020 for $3.2 billion. In fact, Charm Industrial operated for multiple years while Peter was running Segment as his primary full-time role.
In addition to the career path discussions, we cover what Charm Industrial is and does and why it matters. We also talk about how he imagines the business expanding in the coming years to take on adjacent problems in the emission space. And lastly, we at MCJ Collective are proud to be multiple-time investors in Charm Industrial via our venture capital funds. With that, we hope you enjoyed this conversation.
Get connected:
Cody Simms
Peter Twitter / LinkedIn
MCJ Podcast / Collective
*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded on January 27, 2023. Watch the video here.
In this episode, we cover:
[2:12] Peter's background and path into tech
[3:53] His motivations for dropping out of MIT and starting a software company
[6:11] How Peter discovered the problem for Segment's software solution
[7:35] Learnings from becoming a CEO
[9:55] Peter's motivations for working on the climate problem and how Charm Industrial came to be
[18:01] An overview of Charm Industrial
[22:01] An overview of pyrolysis and Charm's process
[25:07] How Peter views the company's core innovation
[28:58] Biggest risks and challenges with putting bio-oil underground
[31:14] Customer side of carbon sequestration
[34:24] How Peter sees Charm evolving
[40:21] Key job function differences between a climate tech company vs a software tech company
[45:10] Biggest lessons learned in transitioning from leading a software company to a carbon removal company
[46:16] How Peter approaches permitting including exploring jurisdictions and finding consultants
[47:31] Biggest choking point today and where MRV fits in
-
Jason Jacobs (00:01):
Hello, everyone. This is Jason Jacobs.
Cody Simms (00:04):
And I'm Cody Simms.
Jason Jacobs (00:05):
And welcome to My Climate Journey. This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:15):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help.
Jason Jacobs (00:26):
We appreciate you tuning in, sharing this episode, and, if you feel like it, leaving us a review to help more people find out about us so they can figure out where they fit in addressing the problem of climate change.
Cody Simms (00:40):
Today's guest is Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Charm Industrial. This conversation was recorded as a live webinar as part of Climate Career Week, a series of talks, local meetups, and office hours designed to help people make the transition into climate-oriented work. Climate Career Week was put on by Climate Draft, Terra.do, Work on Climate, and MCJ Collective.
(01:04):
Given the nature of the audience, today's conversation focuses heavily on Peter's own journey into founding one of the most prominent companies in the climate tech space today. And toward the end of the conversation, he offers his thoughts on how certain key job functions may be slightly different in a climate tech company as opposed to a software tech company.
(01:22):
And Peter should know. As he was founding Charm Industrial, he was also the active co-founder and CEO of Segment, a software business in customer data management, which he eventually sold the Twilio in 2020 for $3.2 billion. In fact, Charm Industrial operated for multiple years while Peter was running Segment as his primary full-time role.
(01:43):
In addition to the career path discussions, we cover what Charm Industrial is and does and why it matters. We also talk about how he imagines the business expanding in the coming years to take on adjacent problems in the emission space.
(01:57):
And lastly, we at MCJ Collective are proud to be multiple-time investors in Charm Industrial via our venture capital funds. With that, I hope you enjoyed this conversation.
(02:07):
Peter, welcome to the show.
Peter Reinhardt (02:09):
Thanks so much for having me.
Cody Simms (02:12):
So Peter, with this being a career-motivated session, I want to start by understanding your path to working on this. So as I understand, you grew up in Seattle. You were even, I think, a lab assistant at Blue Origin in high school, and then you went on to an aerospace engineering degree at MIT. Talk to us about your early days and your path that got you into tech in the first place.
Peter Reinhardt (02:37):
Sure. I mean, if you go back far enough, I was really into rocks, really, really into rocks. I went garnet-hunting, I think, when I was five. It's like I was digging up red garnets and stuff like that. Anyway, so that was maybe my first love, was rocks, and then from there, it kind of morphed into rockets, and from there, into math. So I went really pretty far in math in high school at the University of Washington. And then it started to feel kind of abstract, and so when I went off to MIT, I was like, "You know, I'll do something a little less abstract. I'll do physics." And by that time, yeah, I'd been an intern at Blue Origin and with, actually, a local company that wrote software for medical devices, which was really interesting.
(03:12):
And then after maybe a semester of physics, I was like, "Ah, this is a little abstract. Maybe I'll do aerospace engineering after all. This is more concrete." So anyways, after two years of that, I was like, "Ah, I feel like I'm just kind of becoming an engineer trying to optimize 1% out of a jet engine, and that's not really what I want to train for." I personally enjoy the sort of free fall of trying to figure out what's going to work in a business and trying to figure out something from scratch, and so took a class called Founder's Journey at MIT that had a whole series of weekly seminars where different founders would come and share their stories, and that got me really fired up, and so I dropped out after my junior year at MIT and started a software company.
Cody Simms (03:53):
And let's talk about that journey. So you basically were inspired by this class at MIT to go be an entrepreneur and went all in. That company, I presume was Segment. How did you come up with the idea for Segment in the first place, and what gave you the confidence to drop out of a super prestigious university and go all in?
Peter Reinhardt (04:14):
So two things, one on what gave the motivation or permission to do it. The first speaker at Founder's Journey was this guy named Adam Smith. He had founded this company called Xobni, he'd raised like $40 million, and I was totally in awe. And we were kind of milling around after he gave his a little seminar and my co-founder, roommate at the time, and then later co-founder of Segment, Ilya, was like, "We should just ask him back to the dorm for beers." And I was like, "Ah, don't do that. That'll be embarrassing. He's not going to come. Don't do it." And he's like, "Screw it, I'm doing it." So he walked over and he's like, "Hey, you want to come back to the dorm for beers?" And Adam's like, "Yeah, sure." And so I was like, "Whoa, it's a normal dude." There's something about that that was so human and accessible. I was just like, "Oh, this isn't like some magical different thing. It's just like a thing that people work on."
(05:03):
So that was part one. It was like that made it feel accessible. And the second was MIT is actually very forgiving in a pretty important way, I think actually, for kind of stimulating people to go try founding things, which is they're basically like, "Look, if you come back anytime in the next 10 years and you can justify that you were doing something worthwhile, you're welcome back." It's like there's no risk. So I actually didn't feel like I was taking that big of a risk, to be honest. I mean, even if it failed, it was like, "Whatever, come back to MIT."
(05:28):
So that's part one. Part two of how we found the idea for Segment, we actually started as a classroom lecture tool. Failed miserably for a year and a half, and partly, that's because all of the idea was heavily vision-based. I was like, "This is how the world should work," and honestly, people don't give a shit how you think the world should work. Even later, after many successes, no one really cares how you think the world should work. The world just has problems that it needs solved, and it took us like a year and a half to kind of flip around to that mentality of like, "Oh, the problem that people actually have, it turned out, that we stumbled across was getting data out of their websites and mobile apps into many analytics tools." Like I couldn't have told you that a priori that that was a problem, but turns out that's a problem that people have, a really big problem.
Cody Simms (06:11):
How did you guys discover that problem? What created that insight for you?
Peter Reinhardt (06:15):
In trying to build the classroom lecture tool, we built a little library for ourselves that took data off our website and sent it to different analytics tools, and we open-sourced it, thinking nothing of it, and it started to get some traction on GitHub, and then my co-founders convinced me to launch it, and so we launched it and it took off. So it was effectively something we built for ourselves.
Cody Simms (06:35):
Had you raised money for the classroom learning tool or it was a side project?
Peter Reinhardt (06:39):
Yeah, we'd raised about 600K at Y Combinator Demo Day in the summer of 2011 and then burned very, very slowly through that over the course of a year and a half.
Cody Simms (06:47):
And so Segment was essentially an accidental side project of your main company that you'd gone through YC for and then found some insight that said, "Hey, actually, there's some demand here"?
Peter Reinhardt (06:58):
Yeah, it's a pretty classic pivot, I think, where you tried building something and then it turns out that the tool that you made is actually the more useful thing. I think Dropbox and Slack were the same way, so it's pretty common.
Cody Simms (07:10):
Peter, the dorm room founder who, from Boston, finds way into YC, ends up pivoting on the side. It sounds like a cliché tale, but in reality, it's actually really rare, right? It's kind of the founder that we all think is the normal founder, but it's actually pretty rare to be a 20-something founder who ends up building a really large business. How did you learn how to be a CEO as you went along that path?
Peter Reinhardt (07:35):
Yeah, I think there's a good reason why the success rates are much higher as like a 30, 40, 50, 60-something starting a company, which is that pretty much all the skills of actually running and building a company are non-existent in a 22-year-old. So yeah, it was definitely drinking from the fire hose, as they say at MIT.
(07:52):
And one super helpful, to have forgiving people around who will be supportive even when you're clearly screwing things up. An example is when we were maybe 40, 50 people, we had a part-time HR consultant and a part-time CFO, and the two of them literally stopped me in the hall, shunted me into a room, and they're like, "Peter, what are people supposed to be doing right now?" And I was like, "What do you mean? It's clear to everybody." And they're like, "Nope, it's not. Write it on the whiteboard." So I wrote it down, and they were like, "Great. Now present that at all-hands next week." And so I felt terrible about that because I was like, "No one wants to be told what to do," but it was like I wasn't giving any clarity. So there were a bunch of lessons like that where people were very forgiving and generous, I think, with showing me my errors and sort of coaching me through how to grow.
Cody Simms (08:38):
If you have realized this, at what point did you realize your biggest skillset was less being a technologist and more being a leader? How did that evolve for you?
Peter Reinhardt (08:48):
Well, I think I started with this mentality that product and engineering was everything and that nothing else was that hard, that like if you got the product on engineering right, it would be easy, and that's just not true, it turns out. That was a pretty tough lesson to be learned multiple times. And learning in particular, like at some point, around like 10 million in revenue at Segment, I think the biggest problem was not product. The biggest problem was sales. And it took me probably until like 80 million in revenue before I really internalized that, and so I grudgingly worked on revenue until then, and then after that, it was like, "Oh."
(09:23):
Yeah, it's just hard and it just takes work and learning. So the second time around, I think most second-time founders internalized a similar thing. So second time around, I'm like, "No, no. From day one, we'll be selling carbon removal. From day one, we're going to try it to operate. From day one, we're going to have a bunch of things that we're learning in parallel because these things take time to figure out."
Cody Simms (09:45):
Well, let's get into your second time around. So Segment, your first job, right? Like from 20-something until you ended up ultimately having a very significant acquisition by Twilio, and yet, for the last two years of running Segment, you had already started Charm Industrial, as I understand it. And so, at some point, while you were running this runaway train with Segment, you sort of decided, "I want to focus on climate change. I want to go build a company that can make a difference." Walk us through how you got motivated by the problem in the first place, how you got up to speed, and how you decided what to focus on, and how you did this. Well, you were running a company that was generating hundreds of millions, I presume, of dollars in revenue.
Peter Reinhardt (10:32):
Yeah, in 2015, I think, we were at like 10 or 20 million in revenue, I forget exactly, at Segment, and as part of the recruiting pitch and also just doing the right thing, I felt like we should start offsetting our emissions. And so I worked with my assistant, we figured out roughly what our emissions were, and then went and purchased offsets, and they were like forestry offsets.
Cody Simms (10:53):
What triggered that? Did you feel like you had a big emissions problem, or like were you seeing other peers doing it?
Peter Reinhardt (10:58):
I mean, certainly, some other peers were doing it. I don't know. I actually don't know what triggered that. I guess it just felt like the right thing to do, but I couldn't tell you why or where that came from. Probably just reading about the climate as an ongoing emergency and just being like, "Well, we should at least be doing our part."
Cody Simms (11:11):
Yeah. Interesting.
Peter Reinhardt (11:12):
Especially at that point that we had reasonable revenue.
Cody Simms (11:14):
Yeah.
Peter Reinhardt (11:15):
And so it wasn't a big footprint. It was like a thousand tons or something like that as an entire company.
Cody Simms (11:20):
Almost all server costs, I assume, right? Like for the most part?
Peter Reinhardt (11:24):
Yeah, it was like people commuting. Food was a big portion of it, that we serve in the office, because you've got beef, and then you've got methane, and so on and so on. Yeah, servers were in there. Actually flying salespeople around is pretty big. So that footprint. But there weren't really companies like Watershed, Persefoni, Supercritical, and all these companies that do carbon accounting. Didn't really exist at the time, so it was pretty hacked together.
Cody Simms (11:43):
You did it internally, just did it yourself, like-
Peter Reinhardt (11:45):
I mean, we did our best estimate, yeah.
Cody Simms (11:47):
... put an ops person on it and said, "Hey, let's go try to figure this out," essentially?
Peter Reinhardt (11:50):
Yeah, Courtney, my star assistant, did the heavy lifting there, yeah.
Cody Simms (11:53):
Cool.
Peter Reinhardt (11:57):
And so we found some offsets together, which were like Indonesian rainforest and Amazon rainforest protection and so on, and I was fired up about it.
Cody Simms (12:04):
So this was you and Courtney? So this was like a CEO pet project at the time, if I understand it?
Peter Reinhardt (12:09):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like, yeah, not a big project. And we spent like 10 or 20K on purchasing the offsets. It's like great. We told the company internally, where everyone was really fired up, and then like a year later, we were like, "Hold on, what happened when we made that purchase? It's Earth Day again. What do we tell the company about like what happened last year and this is why we're doing..."
Cody Simms (12:29):
Where did you purchase them? Where did you find the offsets?
Peter Reinhardt (12:32):
I don't know, some sort of set of rainforest alliances, eco something-something.
Cody Simms (12:34):
Okay.
Peter Reinhardt (12:36):
And we then went down the rabbit hole of trying to inspect like where exactly did those dollars go, like which patch of rainforest. And the level of opaqueness was absurd. It was like 70% of the dollars went to marketing in the US, and I was like, "Uh-oh. Okay," and then 30% actually went through to do something somewhere, but untraceable, and it was like, "Ah, geez." Like hopefully, this had some good ecosystem impact, but then the deeper I got into the carbon accounting as well, I mean, there's like, that year, there were huge forest fires in Indonesia. I have no idea of what we protected is on fire, et cetera. And so I was like, "These products are not good." And I felt like it was a regulatory problem, and my guess is 2016, we got the presidential election cycle going on, and I was like, "Great, Clinton will be elected. She'll fix it. It's a regulatory problem, whatever," so I think we bought more rainforest offsets or whatever again. Actually, maybe we purchased higher-quality refrigerant destruction, where it was more traceable. Not scalable, but traceable.
(13:36):
Anyways, we know how that election went, and it was a naive thought on many, many levels. But after the presidential election, I was like, "Well, carbon is not going to remove itself, and it's certainly not going to get fixed from a regulatory perspective anytime soon. So is there a profitable way to remove carbon from the atmosphere? Because if there is, then that would be interesting." And so I spent all of the Saturdays in 2017 with some friends looking at different potential pathways that might change an existing industrial process into one that removed carbon instead of adding it. And there actually are quite a few interesting examples of this now that have come out, like Monolith materials that's like methane pyrolysis and they get out solid carbon and generate hydrogen.
(14:19):
Anyways, we came across an interesting path for us, which we thought was to take waste biomass, sort of gasify it and separate it into syngas, which we would use in an industrial process, and char that we would put back on the field, and that was pretty exciting. And in January 2018, I was like, "Well, this seems like it might work," but I kind of have this full-time thing running Segment, so I tried hiring a CEO, tried to convince some friends to run with it and was not successful, and I was like, "Well, I think I'm going to regret for the rest of my life if I don't just find a way to make this happen anyways."
(14:57):
So I went to my board and I was like, "Hey, this is a key part of my happiness. I'll restrict it to a half day a week. It is what it is," and they're like, "Go for it." So I helped get Charm off the ground, then in 2018, we hired a couple engineers and things started moving. We pivoted a little bit since then, but the sort of gist of industrial decarbonization and carbon removal being the core focus of Charm is still there.
Cody Simms (15:20):
And when you made that call in 2018 to formalize, had you built... Back to what you said earlier about product and engineering, sales and operations, like A, had you built any product yet, and B, did you have any buy signs from the market other than your own experience at Charm?
Peter Reinhardt (15:36):
No, we had no buy signs yet, and I basically was like, "Look, these are commodity. These industrial markets are commodities." So it's not hard to figure out what the billing price is. The question is, can you hit the price? And the spec is also recently well-understood. In that case, it was for hydrogen or syngas. Could pretty easily figure out what those specs and prices were, unlike software, where you have to do a lot of customer discovery to figure out what the value proposition is and so on. So the sales side, in some ways, felt easier and it was really a question of like was it possible to build the machine. So that was where we focused in terms of de-risking the company.
Cody Simms (16:10):
Were you at all nervous that your board would say, "Come on, buddy. You're running a big business here. Why would you go do this?"
Peter Reinhardt (16:16):
Yeah, I was nervous, but it resolved itself quickly.
Cody Simms (16:20):
And you're on the board of Arcadia now, I think, so you also understand how to think about that now from the board director perspective in addition to the CEO perspective. I'm curious, just as an aside, how those dynamics are different for you.
Peter Reinhardt (16:33):
It's really interesting being on the board side at Arcadia. So for those who don't know, Arcadia offers a couple things, one, community solar deployments, and they provide all the customer acquisition for community solar deployments, so they really drive massive solar adoption in sort of very healthy community ways. And then they also offer this API that gives access to utility data, and super cool, growing very quickly. And what I loved about it and I think what Kiran was excited to get me on the board was, it's basically APIs like I had learned at Segment but of a climate problem, and so what I cared about but also from my past experience. So it has been interesting and fulfilling to try to help in that regard. I would say, I've generally found that being a board member is not very satisfying to me. It's very high-level, and I love to get in the weeds in a way that is not appropriate for a board member to do. So I'm definitely an operator at heart, not a board member.
Cody Simms (17:26):
I mean, what's interesting is, looking at the company you built with Segment, like Arcadia would be a more natural sort of climate business for you to go do. Of course, Kiran was already doing it, so you've found the next best way, which is to plug in and help him in that way. I guess to some extent, Charm goes back to some of your original interests of rocks, aerospace engineering, physics, and some of what we started the conversation talking about. So it's interesting how people's journeys go full circle, to me at least, and it seems like-
Peter Reinhardt (17:55):
The joy of being five again. You get to play with rocks.
Cody Simms (17:57):
Yeah, you've hit it again. So on that note, what is Charm Industrial?
Peter Reinhardt (18:01):
Yeah, so at Charm, we are focused on the combination of industrial decarbonization, specifically steel decarbonization, and carbon removal. And today, we deliver a product on the carbon removal side, which is we take agricultural residue, so waste, corn stover, forest fuel load reduction, stuff like that, we cook it into a liquid called bio-oil, and then we inject that liquid bio-oil deep underground. And that carbon comes out of the atmosphere into the plants, into the oil, and ends up permanently sequestered underground, where it solidifies and so on deep below the surface through like EPA-regulated underground injection control, kind of safe injection practices.
(18:41):
So yeah, that's the idea that my co-founder Sean hit on about three years ago now, a little less than that, and we completed the first injection in January 2021, the day of the Capitol riots, which is an interesting time to be in Oklahoma. Since then, we've scaled up. I think for deliveries that we've announced were about 5,500 tons of CO2 underground, which I believe is about 90% of all permanent carbon removal deliveries to date, and we are, this year, trying to really scale up bio-oil supply chain and so on. So anyway, that's what we do. We can also, in the future, we plan to use bio-oil as a reducing agent or reaction to replace natural gas or coal in the iron-making process. That's about 8% of global emissions, and if we can eliminate those emissions, that would be awesome. Plus, out of our process in the iron-making, we'll get a pure CO2 stream that's injectable. So we'll actually still deliver just as much carbon removal through iron-making, but we'll get fossil-free iron popping out the side.
Cody Simms (19:35):
So just on the side, I grew up in Kansas and actually grew up a few miles from, I think, some of your original pilot facilities in Andover or Augusta, Kansas. I don't remember which of the two cities, they're right next to each other, that you were in, but-
Peter Reinhardt (19:49):
Yeah, there's a couple locations throughout Kansas.
Cody Simms (19:51):
Yeah. Like literally, my family's houses are, like my mom and my dad are separated, but they live right there. It's pretty cool. And when I've tried to explain Charm to my parents, I say, "We're investors in this really cool company. They create oil and put it back underground," and their eyes go cross-eyed like, "Wait, what?" Like people whose entire lives have been like, "The US needs more oil, we need more energy independence, we need to drill more," to have a cutting-edge company creating oil and putting it back in the ground doesn't make sense to people. How do you explain that when folks are just trying to understand the very basic premise of Charm Industrial in that regard?
Peter Reinhardt (20:33):
Yeah, I should probably just change the name from bio-oil to barbecue sauce because it's not really oil. It's actually if you take the aqueous fraction of it and dilute it by 50x, it's the liquid smoke in barbecue sauce, so it's extremely-
Cody Simms (20:45):
So it's almost more like vinegar, to some extent?
Peter Reinhardt (20:49):
No, no, it's like the smokey smell that you smell in barbecue sauce. It's literally that. It's like super, super, super concentrated barbecue sauce. And when people-
Cody Simms (20:58):
In Kansas, saying you're putting barbecue sauce underground is also a sin, and in Texas.
Peter Reinhardt (21:04):
Yeah. But the point is that it's not really oil and it doesn't have the same energy content as oil. If you take a kilogram of oil out of the ground, it has three times the amount of energy content as the one kilogram of bio-oil or barbecue sauce that we put back underground. So it's not insane from an energy perspective, but what's cool about bio-oil or barbecue sauce is that it's extremely carbon-rich and it solidifies down hole, so you get this extremely permanent kind of structure, and so a million years from now, we will have created some very weird coal, I think, where it's like sandstone formation with coal interleaved in it. It'll be a mystery for the million-plus-year archeologists trying to figure out what happened there.
Cody Simms (21:43):
So yeah, maybe at a high level, when I think of plant-based oil products, obviously, oil is made of plants. It's just really, really old plants that have been compressed over the years and gone through different chemical processes. And then you have corn and kind of ethanol. You use corn for your bio-oils as well. But there are differences here. Just making sure I understand it. The big difference is you're burning it upfront. Is that correct? Not really. I guess pyrolyzing it is maybe the correct way to explain it.
Peter Reinhardt (22:08):
Yeah, [inaudible 00:22:09], yeah.
Cody Simms (22:09):
Pyrolyzing. Thank you. So maybe explain what pyrolysis is and what that reaction does to the plant biomass that you're sourcing.
Peter Reinhardt (22:18):
Yeah, so ethanol production would be bacteria chewing and pooping out ethanol. Our process is a thermal process. So if you heat biomass to a relatively low temperature relatively slowly, that's called torrefaction or slow pyrolysis, and low here is like 450 degrees C or something like that. And out of that, you primarily get char, and that's great. Char can go back on the soil, it can help improve soil content or soil health, and so on. The challenge is that the permanence is not super clear, or how much stays, how permanently, for how long, it's not super clear. So we also produce char, but we don't take any sort of carbon credit for it because, again, we're not sure of the permanence.
(22:57):
If you go to a very fast thermal process, so where you heat the biomass from zero to 500 degrees C in like two seconds, think about tossing a piece of biomass like clicking water on a pan, basically, like flick biomass into smoke, and then we condense that smoke, and that condensed smoke is the liquid smoke in barbecue sauce, also pyrolysis oil or bio-oil, and that's what we put underground.
Cody Simms (23:23):
And to do that, you're generating heat. Heat requires, in most cases, some sort of combustion. Is there an emissions footprint to your pyrolysis process?
Peter Reinhardt (23:34):
There is at startup and then it becomes self-sustaining thermally because you can actually effectively use some of the biomass sourcing gas as the heat source. So most pyrolyzers are self-heating.
Cody Simms (23:46):
Got it. Do you use just a methane gas to get it going? Is that the initial spark?
Peter Reinhardt (23:51):
Yeah, a natural gas propane. You can also do electrical running off a generator. A bunch of different ways of doing it.
Cody Simms (23:56):
We're going to take a short break right now so our partner Yin can share more about the MCJ membership option.
Yin (24:02):
Hey folks, Yin here, a partner at MCJ Collective. Want to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast.
(24:14):
We started in 2019 and has since then grown to 2,000 members globally. Each week, we're inspired by people who join with differing backgrounds and perspectives. And while those perspectives are different, what we all share in common is a deep curiosity to learn and bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change.
(24:32):
Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community. A number of founding teams have met, nonprofits have been established, a bunch of hiring has been done, many early stage investments have been made, as well as ongoing events and programming, like monthly Women in Climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early-stage founders, climate book club, art workshops, and more.
(24:52):
So whether you've been in climate for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the Members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (25:04):
All right, back to the show.
(25:07):
And so do you view Charm ultimately... I mean, obviously, if you ask people what is Charm, they'd say, "Oh, it's a carbon sequestration company." But it feels like really, what you have built is a pyrolysis company or a bio-oil company. I'm curious how you, I don't know if it matters how to define it, but how you think of the true core innovation and core moat that you have as a business.
Peter Reinhardt (25:32):
Yeah, my mental model for all kind of business moats is based on the book 7 Powers, which is like the only business book that I would ever recommend. And his thesis is that there's like only seven actual real moats.
(25:44):
So in the short-term, we have a patent on bio-oil sequestration that's been issued now, so if you want to put bio-oil underground, that's like a Charm special thing. In the medium-term, there's like scale economies from mass manufacturer of pyrolyzers, and being down the cost curve in a commodity industry really, really matters. So those are the two moats that I would think about. One is a very short-term one, and the other is a more meaningful long-term one where it's like as we drive down the cost and make it more accessible and higher volume, customers benefit and Charm gets some market protection out of that.
Cody Simms (26:15):
So you're doing something special in your pyrolyzers that a biochar company today doesn't do? Is that a correct-
Peter Reinhardt (26:22):
It is significantly more complicated to produce bio-oil than it is to produce biochar. We have like maybe double or triple the number of systems, subsystems required to do that. I mean, it's fundamentally like a volume game, which is like how many can you make and how far does that drive you down the cost curve. In terms of what's weird about what we're doing, it's very unusual to make mobile pyrolyzers is the first thing, and then it's also very unusual to use agricultural residues. I think there are some folks in the char world trying to do this, but at least for bio-oil production, this is very weird, and the reason is that historically, people have been trying to make bio-oil as a drop-in replacement for crude oil. It sort of naturally comes out of the name as like [inaudible 00:27:04].
Cody Simms (27:04):
Before you go there, just to make sure I understand, when you say mobile, so basically, you're saying, "Hey, we're not going to have like two plants that you have to ship all this stuff to. We're going to be out on the field at different agricultural processing sites." Is that correct?
Peter Reinhardt (27:15):
That's right, yeah. So if you're going to optimize for, and I'll explain this in more detail, so if you're trying to optimize for energy production, you would go to the highest-quality feed stocks, which is sawdust, which then takes you to sawmills, which then you have a fixed facility that you're mapped to, and so you're going to build a fixed facility there, and it's going to be on the order of a couple hundred tons a day of sawdust coming in and bio-oil coming out. You're going to dry the hell out of that sawdust because you want to be very low moisture content, et cetera. And that gets you your highest quality primo bio, from an energy perspective and low water content. But we don't care.
Cody Simms (27:49):
That's if you wanted to burn it? That's if you wanted to-
Peter Reinhardt (27:50):
Yeah.
Cody Simms (27:52):
... use it to create... I don't even know what the use cases for burning bio-oil are today, but that would be the-
Peter Reinhardt (27:56):
Crude oil replacement in certain use cases, yeah.
Cody Simms (27:57):
Okay.
Peter Reinhardt (27:58):
Like heavy crude replacement in industrial heating and stuff like that. It's not a big market. But we were like, "Well, if we're just going to shove it down a hole, who cares?" Like it can have as much water [inaudible 00:28:09] you mix with water down the hole. Now, there's a limit there, but who cares? If it has low-energy content, again, who cares? Like it's [inaudible 00:28:14].
Cody Simms (28:13):
It doesn't need to be able to burn well, basically, is what you're saying? Like it can have-
Peter Reinhardt (28:16):
We don't want it to burn.
Cody Simms (28:17):
It can have oxygen in it, it can have whatever in it, it doesn't really matter?
Peter Reinhardt (28:21):
Yeah. The whole thing like-
Cody Simms (28:23):
Yeah, you don't want it to burn. Yeah, good point.
Peter Reinhardt (28:25):
Yeah. So we're happy making the shittiest bio-oil on the market, basically, according to everyone else's standards, as long as its carbon content is high and the yield is high. And so that leads to a whole different set of optimizations where you're like, "Okay, well, actually, I don't want the expensive sawdust. I want the cheap corn stover." And if I want the cheap corn stover, there's not actually that much per unit of area because there's not a centralized facility that it's already being produced in, and so now, I want something that's smaller that moves between sites, spends a week here, a week there, and a week there. And so this leads to different architecture decisions, different packaging, different operating model, et cetera.
Cody Simms (28:58):
And what have you had to de-risk along the way as you've gone out and built this unique and more complicated pyrolyzer platform?
Peter Reinhardt (29:06):
I actually think the biggest risk was not really in pyrolysis. It is hard and complicated in many ways to repackage it, and there are challenges with using corn stovers and feedstock because it has high ash content and so on. So there are certainly engineering challenges on the pyrolysis side, but by far, the highest risk when we were starting was like, can you inject bio-oil? Like no one has ever done that before. Like what happens when you do? And there's all kinds of weird stuff that happens, like bio-oil wants to solidify. You better be damn sure it solidifies down hole, not above hole, because if it solidified above hole, you're screwed. If you have-
Cody Simms (29:38):
What happens? If you solidify above hole, what happens? What does that mean?
Peter Reinhardt (29:42):
Then you have a monument, I guess.
Cody Simms (29:43):
Okay.
Peter Reinhardt (29:44):
You're not going to inject it, for sure, at that point. There's no way to. So there's actually a lot of operational learnings that go into actually putting bio-oil underground in different well types, like figuring out how to permit that, because again, when you show up to a regulator and you're like, "Hey, we want to put this stuff down hole," they're like, "No one's ever done that before," and you get into this chicken and egg situation where you're like, "We want to see some data before we allow you to inject it," and you're like, "Well, yes, but I can't get the data," and so you go back and forth and figure out paths forward there. So that actually has been, I think, the little low key, like we don't spend a lot of time talking about it, but figuring out how to inject bio-oil has been probably the highest risk thing that is now like a retired risk.
Cody Simms (30:21):
And also, I assume there's plenty of risk on the customer side because this is an emerging market, right? The whole notion of buying carbon removals is still very, very nascent. And as you mentioned, you said you sequestered, I think you said, 5,000 tons to date, right? And yet, you are considered a market leader in this space, and we need orders and orders and orders of magnitude more sequestration over the next couple decades. So let's look at the customer side, maybe today starting with carbon sequestration. We'll talk about maybe some of your other use cases you mentioned you're planning to go after as a leader in pyrolysis and bio-oil production, including steel. But starting today with carbon sequestration, who is the customer, what are they buying, why are they buying it, and how do you know, and how's this going to evolve?
Peter Reinhardt (31:11):
Yeah, so maybe we need to connect two dots. One, if you look out at 2050 and you say like, "How much carbon removal is required?" it's like on the order of 10 billion tons a year, and you look back at the last two years and you say, "How much was delivered?" it's probably about 6,000 tons across the carbon removal industry as a whole, so okay, we need to grow by 2 million x over 27 years. That's 70% compound growth for next 27 years, twice as fast as software. That's what's going to be required. Okay, gulp.
(31:41):
Now, if that's what's required from a climate perspective, now put yourself in my old life as a buyer, say a software company, and you're also going through this realization that, "Oh, shit, maybe these offsets that we've been buying are not actually doing that much." They may be doing great things for ecosystem, but maybe not doing that much for carbon, and if we're trying to have carbon impact, let's be clear it's not doing that much. And then you're like, "Uh-oh. Okay, well, what can I buy that's higher quality?" And there isn't anything.
(32:11):
And that's basically the realization that like Stripe, Shopify, Microsoft, other big banks, financial services, and software companies have all gone through over the last few years and realize like, "Oh, shit, we have to stimulate this industry. Otherwise, when we get to 2030 and we've made a commitment to net zero and when we're required to actually remove some of this stuff in a net-zero way, not just with offsets, then I'm going to be screwed. I'm not going to have supply." And so I think a lot of it is people thinking very far in advance, which is awesome to see, and realizing that they're going to need this stuff, and so financial services, software, in particular, have relatively low footprints from an emissions perspective and high margins and employees who care. And so those three things kind of make those the magic markets.
Cody Simms (32:52):
So the why they're buying it is, to some extent, market fomentation, right? Like, "I need to get this market stimulated because I know a decade from now, I have already committed to my shareholders that I have to have a plan to get my company to true net zero, and if there's not enough volume of this stuff available by 2030, we don't have a path to hitting the commitments we've made," is what I'm hearing you say. And so if I can help get this market going now, I can help these companies de-risk all the stuff that you talked about, you having to figure out how to de-risk and get up to volume. They're also going to want to sell to me first, starting in those years. I'm going to always have kind of a front row seat into available supply.
Peter Reinhardt (33:35):
Yeah, I think there's that strategic long-term thinking and I think there's also like a philanthropic wonderful intent to just do good in the world, and the combination of those two things is what drives it.
Cody Simms (33:45):
Is there a PR sort of defensive reason, too, which is like, "We don't want to be lambasted in the press for claiming we're net zero when we've been buying offsets that have been debunked in some way, shape, or form"?
Peter Reinhardt (34:01):
I think that will happen more and more, but I don't think that's the driving thing. I don't think that's the driving motivator behind most companies right now.
Cody Simms (34:03):
Okay. And then just quickly, I want to spend a bunch of time for the end of the interview here talking about some career-related suggestions you have for folks since that's the reason we're all together today. But before we do that, just make sure we've hit on how you see the company evolving. So today, you're selling direct carbon removals to these forward-thinking companies who are trying to incite the market, and yet, you also see a market emerging, I believe, in some really heavy-emitting industries, like steel, where you can be a true solution to those companies and be one of the only ways they can actually get to net zero in terms of their direct operations. Can you explain what that looks like?
Peter Reinhardt (34:44):
Yeah, so broadly, I look at kind of market sequencing for bio-oil based on how much premium we can derive in that market over time so that we can calm down the cost curve in parallel to a premium price on the buy side. So the most premium market today is permanent carbon removal, and we can just kind of break even there, so that's where we're starting. From there, we'll go from voluntary carbon removal into regulatory carbon removal. But then when you get out into this really big, bigger volumes and lower parts of the cost curve, the question is like, what's the big market there? And for us, we think that that's the steel or iron-making market, and it's huge, like absolutely vast quantities and huge, like hundreds of billions a year kind of markets.
(35:25):
And the challenge with iron-making today is that there are a very small number of shots on goal to try to decarbonize it, and it's thrilling that there are a few of them, right? You have like Electra, which is like an electrochemical process based in Denver, you got Siderwin, which is another electrochemical process based in Spain, you got Boston Metal, which is a high-temperature electrochemical process in Boston, H2 Green Steel, which is hydrogen-based process in Sweden, and Charm. Maybe there's a couple more that I don't know about, but I think anyone looking in from the outside who's like, "Oh, there's a multi-trillion dollar industry that's going to have to go through a massive transformation over the next 27 years and there are five shots on goal?" All right, let's double it. Let's call it 10. There are 10 shots on goal? This is insane.
(36:09):
It's baffling to me that there aren't more people trying to jump into that. It's like, "No, no, I'm going to go build another web app." It's like, "All right, it's a super crowded market." All of software. Just to be clear, I'm super motivated by the impact, but let's also be clear on the economics. All of software is 500 billion a year in revenue. All the industries that have to turn over during decarbonization is like 10 trillion in EBITDA. A staggering amount of stuff that has to happen, and so anyone who's not dialed into that economic opportunity, in addition to the impact...
Cody Simms (36:44):
We say at MCJ all the time like what has to happen over the next couple decades is a complete rewiring of the global economy, right? And so what's the market size for that? Just to make sure I understand the steel-making issue, in order to actually create steel, you need extreme amounts of heat. And today, is it mostly coal that's being used to generate that heat?
Peter Reinhardt (37:04):
So to reduce iron oxide to metallic iron, you need actually a reducing agent, something that will rip the oxygens off. That's typically carbon monoxide or hydrogen, and that reaction occurs at temperatures between 900 degrees C and 1,500 degrees C. So typically, coal is used to provide, in 93% of production, coal provides both the heat and also burns into carbon monoxide that provides the chemical reagent to do the removal of the oxygen. You can also do it with natural gas, where you convert the natural gas into carbon monoxide and hydrogen and then it provides both the heat and the removal of the oxygen. Our process is honestly not that different from... The natural gas is the other 7% of production globally. We basically take bio-oil, we gasify it into carbon monoxide and hydrogen, and then it's like the same process as natural gas.
Cody Simms (37:55):
Got it. So you had said earlier your bio-oil doesn't need to burn to solve the sequestration use case, but in this case, you can gasify it, and that needs to burn, and that's just basically a syngas replacement for existing methane.
Peter Reinhardt (38:05):
Yeah. It burns where the oxidizer is rust, basically. So rust is providing the oxygen in that reaction.
Cody Simms (38:12):
Great. Super helpful for me to understand.
(38:14):
Okay, so what I want to dive into here is a little bit just on career-related content for folks here who are thinking about, "How do I move into climate work?" Most people probably don't have the resources or network that you had as you dove into this exploration. And so let's start with known issues. What roles today are the hardest to fill at Charm?
Peter Reinhardt (38:39):
Roles today that are hardest to fill, senior mechanical engineers. I think generally, rewiring this entire physical world is a lot of mechanical engineering, and so if going back and learning a whole new skill is an option, then that's definitely an area of problem. We see a lot of transitions from oil and gas and related industries into oil and gas, ag, and food kind of businesses into our operations roles as well as our engineering roles, and yeah.
(39:10):
I guess, maybe, you said something there which is like, "Oh, you probably had this great network that helped," and for sure, but also, I don't want to give people the sense that that somehow made it super easy, because it was not a network in steel and it was not a network in industry, and so in those cases, I was also starting cold, and it can still work. I just want to give you the encouragement that even if you are starting cold there, it can work. It's like cold emailing refineries in the Bay Area, and they were happy to have me come on site. I also cold emailed ammonia producers at one point, and they were less open to meeting.
(39:46):
And sometimes, the chain to get to someone in these other industries can be super painful. Like to get an introduction to ArcelorMittal, one of our investors introduced me to one of his investors, who introduced me to his college roommate, who introduced me to his older brother, who runs the family finished steel products business in Ohio, and then he introduced me to the Canadian Steel Association, who connected me to some scientists at ArcelorMittal Dofasco, who then connected me to the environment at another ArcelorMittal facility, who then finally got me in touch with the direct reduction furnace operator at that facility. So it was like 10 hops, and it took like six months.
Cody Simms (40:21):
So I'm hearing, for everyone, like don't discount your hustle skills are a critical part of figuring out how to build your network and build your learning in the space. What skill sets do you see your customers, partners, or ecosystem companies that you work with in the space, where do you see them needing help?
Peter Reinhardt (40:38):
I think an adjacency for people who are coming maybe from software, I think it's tempting to look at like, "Oh, well, in what way can software directly just immediately solve the problem?" and I think that leads to basically the same four companies or a handful of companies getting started again and again and again and again, which is a carbon accounting company, a some kind of like Web3 blockchain thing, a carbon exchange marketplace. Like there are more marketplaces, Web3 blockchain carbon things, and carbon accounting companies than there are companies delivering carbon removal, and this is just not actually the current bottleneck on the system.
(41:15):
So I'd encourage not to do that, and I might encourage actually stretching skills a little bit away from like web application-type software. So maybe something just a little lower-level, like learning C and doing firmware development or PLCs, which are like logic controllers used in industrial automation. It's still software, and a lot of it is very easy to translate into, but the amount of PLCs that are going to be deployed to deal with that potentially is staggering. So these are areas where I think software can have a really big impact, but they're slightly different software than web application development.
Cody Simms (41:50):
Awesome. You've started down the next question I was going to ask, which is, from a function perspective, where do you see skill sets at Charm being different than skill sets at Segment? So I don't know if that's your full answer on software engineering, but that was helpful, and maybe I'll go to the next functional area, which is product. Like where do you see product management at Charm being different than product management at Segment?
Peter Reinhardt (42:11):
So we don't have product management at all at Charm. The product is pretty clear. It's like carbon renewable or steel, and these are moving towards commodities or commodities. So I guess maybe another way of saying it is I'm still the product manager in terms of testing the market and figuring out how to package it and so on. But we do have program managers, and this is actually, I think can be for the right mindset, a really interesting transition, which is like leading by influence still, working with a technical team still, helping deliver the product or the technology that supplies the product, but very tightly managing schedules and all of the complexities and ins and outs of hardware. And so I think there's a really strong need for technical program managers to help an engineering team execute on these really complicated integrated systems that make all this possible, so I think that can be a really cool transition.
(43:01):
Another example is in HR. Typically, in a technology company, you don't necessarily have different types of workers to a very significant degree. This is maybe a little different in some of the gig economy-type things like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and so on, but in most of the hard tech infrastructure companies, you do have both employees working in the field, in factories, manufacturing, or whatever, as well as like HQ. And how do you manage that culturally, how do you manage that from a recruiting perspective, how do you keep everyone engaged in some common things, I think, is an interesting problem that people can get exposure to or spend time thinking about in transitioning, for example, in HR into these places.
(43:40):
I think in finance, there's a lot more structured finance that goes into deploying hardware infrastructure, like debt, project equity, and so on, with many layers of like insurance and all sorts of other things stacked on top of that, loan guarantees, you name it. So the complexity on the finance side is actually much higher, so on a per-company basis, there's probably a lot more finance people in a hard tech company than in a software company, and I think it's really interesting finance problems. So getting some exposure via maybe a stint in private equity or investment banks to help think about some of these more structured type of things could be an interesting way to transition in.
Cody Simms (44:20):
What about sales, marketing, PR, comms, like the front end of the business?
Peter Reinhardt (44:25):
Yeah, I think that's actually fairly translatable or almost a direct transfer. I don't know that there's much that has to be relearned there aside from there's a lot of cool pictures in the hardware world. So in some ways, it's easier. You don't have to get inventive with GPT, Stable Diffusion, or whatever to generate fanciful images. It's like they just come out of the operations.
Cody Simms (44:44):
And then government relations, I suppose, is also an area that you all need to spend some decent time working on at Charm.
Peter Reinhardt (44:51):
That's right, yeah. It was actually, I think, our like 17th or 18th hire was Nora, our head of policy, and actually came through Climate Draft. And she's doing awesome, meaningful investment for us very early, and that's just because carbon removal is definitely driven by policy. But that's not something I really had any exposure to on the software side.
Cody Simms (45:10):
All right, let me pull open our Q&A and see what questions folks have. I'll kind of go here. Looks like Jeff is asking, "For you, Peter, what's been your biggest lesson learned in transitioning from leading a software company to leading a physical world carbon removal company?"
Peter Reinhardt (45:26):
One of the more interesting things for me has been on the R&D side, like hardware R&D or hard tech. Like in deep tech, hardware development is very different rhythm to it than software development. Software development is like, "Yeah, we push code to production a hundred times a day," and with hard tech, that's not the case. I mean, you might push software a hundred times a day to your device or whatever, but you're not going to ship iterations that quickly because you have shipping time, which might be like a month or two months, and so you end up being forced into a world where you try to parallelize a lot more, where you're like, "Well, I don't know the answer. Any of these three options could work, so I'll buy all three, and then when they all arrive, I'll test all three and downselect to one." And so you can accelerate your learnings by parallelizing as opposed to by sequencing quickly. So some things like that are just very differently structured and require a different type of planning.
Cody Simms (46:16):
There's a question further down the list on permitting, and we talked a little bit about this, but I'm guessing permitting as a skill as a CEO and as a team at Segment, you didn't have to think a lot about. And part of you mentioning Nora joining as the head of policy, permitting for Charm is life or death, right, to some extent? How have you approached that, and what have you had to learn there about what you're able to do and not do and how you need to approach that?
Peter Reinhardt (46:42):
The first learning was that permitting varies massively by jurisdiction, and so the easiest thing to do is just go to jurisdictions that are not insane. So California is insane. I mean, it's just like you get sequined all these things layered on top that drive timelines.
(46:57):
You know, when we were trying to get an injection well in California, where we started, they're like, "Ah, it'll be like three to 10 years before you can start operating this thing." I was like, "I'm sorry, that's not going to work," like, "We're full out. We have to go find somewhere else. We'll circle back to California later."
(47:11):
So that's really the first learning, is explore the jurisdictions. And the second is, find a really great consultant, because there are people who do permitting for a living and they know the regulators, they know the ecosystem, they know everything about what's going on, and a really great consultant for the thing that you're trying to get permitted in the jurisdictions that you're looking at is worth their weight in gold.
Cody Simms (47:31):
A question here from Amy, which is the biggest challenge that your business is facing at your current stage and how you scale, and then kind of a follow-on from Zachary, which is actually probably where I'd like to see you start, which is that question but for the entire sequestration sector. So what's the biggest choking point today? And maybe to even throw a softball, we haven't even spoken the words MRV at all, and so I wonder to what extent that becomes part of your answer.
Peter Reinhardt (47:59):
So I'll tell a little story and then I'll answer both. When we delivered our very first slug of carbon removal, I remember excitedly calling Ryan Orbuch, who's now a partner at Lowercarbon. At the time, he was at Stripe Climate. And I was like, "Ryan, we did it. We put the carbon underground," and he was like, "Cool." I'm like, "Now what?" Like there's no manifestation. We didn't drop it off at a loading dock. How does he know? And I was like, "Oh, shit. I should know that." Like I had this experience as a buyer where it was super opaque. What the hell happened, right?
(48:29):
So anyways, fast forward a year, we went to a great extent building out the Charm registry, where you can actually see every single delivery to every single customer, the amounts of tons to every customer, when it got delivered, like FedEx-style delivery history, it's all public, and like a lifecycle analysis unique to that delivery of how it was calculated. And that was really important to me, and I think, hopefully, a push forward in the sector's measurement, reporting, and verification expectations or standards quite a bit for transparency.
(48:55):
However, it is still unique. No one else has done anything like that yet, although no one has actually even publicly claimed tons of delivery yet. So circling around to that is the biggest problem in the industry. We're not delivering as an industry. 6,000 tons in the last couple of years and dominated by one company, that's not an industry. So we as an industry have to start delivering, especially given how much hype has gone into carbon removal. Like over the next two or three years, it's like, "It's go time." And it needs to be transparent, it needs to actually cite tons, it needs to really be out there, and that's the biggest gap. And even for ourselves, it's great that we delivered 5,000 tons, but it's a drop in the bucket. So we need to expand bio-oil production capacity, and so our bottleneck is actually the same bottleneck as the industry, which is just producing more is the number one thing, and it's hard. I get it. For everyone, it's really hard to expand production capacity, and that's our number one bottleneck.
Cody Simms (49:54):
Peter, I'm so grateful for your time today. For folks who want to dive deeper on Charm or on your work, what do you suggest they spend time doing?
Peter Reinhardt (50:03):
There's a bunch of podcasts that probably go a little deeper, and certainly have some blog posts that have some fun pictures and stuff which is probably fun to look at.
Cody Simms (50:10):
And for anyone who wants to dive into CDR or carbon dioxide removal generally, actually, just last week, My Climate Journey Podcast went deep on that topic with two leading experts, one from Breakthrough Energy and one from Carbon180, and so lots of questions on that topic in particular that we dove into that Peter and I didn't get a chance to cover today at all, so feel free to dive in.
(50:31):
Peter, thank you so much. Jonathan and Climate Draft team, thank you so much, and can't wait to see what's next for Charm Industrial.
Peter Reinhardt (50:37):
Thanks, Cody. Cheers.
Jason Jacobs (50:40):
Thanks again for joining us on the My Climate Journey Podcast.
Cody Simms (50:43):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem-solving capacity. To do this, we focus on three main pillars, content, like this podcast and our weekly newsletter, capital to fund companies that are working to address climate change, and our member community to bring people together, as Yin described earlier.
Jason Jacobs (51:05):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at www.mcjcollective.com. And if you have guest suggestions, feel free to let us know on Twitter, @mcjpod.
Cody Simms (51:20):
Thanks, and see you next episode.
