Innovating in unexpected places
Recorded at Climate Con 2021 on November 10, 2021
Innovating in unexpected places
Fresh takes on old problems are at the core of finding paths toward a cleaner, healthier future. Meet entrepreneurs stepping up to bring forward innovative technology in stagnant and even unexpected spaces.
A conversation with:
Benjamin Parker (Lightship)
Kelly Hering (Charm Industrial)
Paul Gross (Remora)
Leah Ellis (Sublime Systems)
Susan Su (Toba Capital)
Full transcript
Susan Su: Welcome to Climate Con Deep Dive on innovating in unexpected places. We have a panel of four truly inspiring innovators joining us to share more about their personal as well as professional paths to climate action, I'll run through some quick intro. So you know who everybody is. Leah Ellis is the co-founder and CEO at Sublime Systems where they make low carbon cement using off-peak renewable energy.
Paul Gross is the co-founder and co CEO at Remora whose solution captures the CO2 emissions from long haul semi-trucks for industrial use or for long-term storage. Ben Parker is the co-founder and CEO at Light Ship where they are building absolutely stunning looking battery electric RVs, and Kelly Herring is the CTO and co-founder at Charm Industrial where they're removing carbon from the atmosphere by converting bio mass into a liquid format for permanent underground storage. And finally, I'm Susan, I'm a partner focused on climate tech, investing at Toba Capital. And I'm also the course creator instructor for a class for VCs on Climate Change called Climate Change for VCs. And with that, let's jump into the panel. All right.
So each of these founders, what was that? Oh, did I hear a little echo? Okay. So each of these founders and their companies is doing something absolutely incredibly frontier and very exciting from both a tech perspective, but also from a business and business model perspective. But for today's panel, we are going to hear about.
These founders road to climate action than any of us can follow. Whether you are trained as a data scientist, like Paul or a mechanical engineer, like Kelly or even if you're not trained at all. And so actually on that note, I want to start with Kelly. How do you explain to your mom? What it is that you do given that it's deep tech, there's a science component.
How do you explain this to your mom or anybody's mom?
Kelly Hering: I think at a base level we try to boil it down to, we are making oil from plants and then we're taking that oil and putting it back into ground where it belongs. But I think what we try to, like when we want to explain the full system, it's really understanding that there's a closing a loop of the carbon cycle.
So we know that the climate crisis was generally caused by the production of fossil fuels and the burning of fossil fuels. Those were ultimately that those fossil fuels were created by plants and animals, under many layers of earth over thousands of years being heated up and compressed. And so when we started burning them, we just had this open loop of carbon being admitted into that atmosphere.
And so what we're trying to do at Charm is close that loop by basically using the best thing that we know that can remove that carbon from the atmosphere, which is plants, and then taking that plant, using a machine to do all of that high temperature and compression that the earth was doing for dinosaurs and plants over those thousands of years and creating the oil from those plants on a much more accelerated timescale.
And then from there, we pump it back underground to where that oil came from. So we can use all the different infrastructure that has already existed for like the oil industry generally, and take advantage of a lot of that work. And so we're closing that loop.
Susan Su: I love that starting with something that everybody knows what it is, plants and dinosaurs.
And then speaking of things that most people know, then how has your family, the fact that you are part of this movement? You're really at the forefront of it because you're an entrepreneur driving change. But really reinventing something that most of us have seen on the road. Most of us are familiar with in such a unique, enjoyable way.
Is there, does this make it, are you going to be talking about this at Thanksgiving? How does it come up? Maybe aunts, uncles, all.
Benjamin Parker: Oh I'll definitely be talking about it at Thanksgiving cause I'm going to meet my, my girlfriend's family this Thanksgiving, so that, high stakes and we're we're going to be RV down through California to philosophy, I to stay in, in her extended family's driveway which is called boondock.
By the way, or it's actually the moose doctrine. We're driveway surfing in that in RV lingo. And yeah, I think in general, the kind of the the nice thing about working on RV electrification is that it's really familiar. And relatable to people. It's like, as American as baseball and apple pie and things like that to dig our being.
And I've been lucky that's been the case working on electric vehicles in general at Tesla before this, that I don't have to I don't have to explain what's going on too much, because these are products that everybody uses.
And I think Jack maybe generally speaking to how my family thinks about me working on, on, on electrification in vehicles. They Th they really think about it more from a product perspective, which I think is the the, this that has been the silver bullet in.
And probably one of the reasons why vehicles have electrified first because the idea is that if you can make a better product and it happens to be electric then it will be adopted. And you can make. Better vehicles that are electric than are run off of gas or diesel.
Susan Su: I love that when you have a product that you can point to, it's definitely a lot easier as a conversation starter, as well as a lifestyle that you can personally exemplify. By driving down in an RV and living in somebody's driveway. But lay us, speaking of lifestyles, I know that for you, like most of us here, our climate action is not just your job, but it's also personal.
It's know, it's a lifestyle choice. You've mentioned that you've been a really long time environmentalist, but I'm curious, how do you balance this tension between personal action? The things that you yourself can do. Reduce, reuse, recycle, and so much more. And then also coming at it from this really research technical career angle.
How have those choices on both fronts influenced the other people in your life around you?
Leah Ellis: Great question, Susan, I think like many of you, I was grew up wearing, save the whales t-shirts and I've always really cared deeply about the planet. So when I was an undergrad, I worked my way through school by working at an organic food store and re learning chemistry in class was always really dry and bookish to me.
I've always been driven by the motive of having impact. And when you're just in a class, it's sometimes hard to see the impact. So there was always been a tension of this earthy lifestyle that I wanted to have and feeling like I was having a climate impact through my lifestyle. But then as I grew older, I realized that not everyone has what it takes to live a really earthy lifestyle and maybe being a professional tree planter is not going to have the biggest climate impact.
So when I started to do grad school I started developing this new theory of how to have a climate impact, and that was to lean into the innovating part of being a scientist and learning to invent stuff and flexing that inventive muscle.
And hopefully coming up with a technology that can be commercialized and have a climate impact so that anyone can have a climate impact without being earthy and dialing back their lifestyle, their quality of life. So that's my two pronged approach to having a climate impact.
Susan Su: Paul, you've also similar to the story that Leo is sharing.
You've also had an evolution and how you've thought about your way to have a climate impact. You cared about climate early on. Like most of us have, or not everybody, but some of us have, but you ended up studying data science for politics. When you're in school. How did you at that time think that would tie into climate and what ultimately pushed you to switch over to a very different application. Be evermore.
Paul Gross: Politics is this incredible lever because the federal government and state governments as well, have so much power to make an impact on climate and to incentivize companies to do the right thing, to reduce emissions. And we're seeing that now. The government is doing great work.
I think for me personally, I thought maybe I could have. Figure out how we can turn out voters more effectively and how we can persuade voters more effectively through randomized experiments and through data science. And that work was really exciting, but I just personally got frustrated by the slow pace of change in politics, especially when it comes to climate.
And I felt that maybe a better pathway for me initially, would be to start my own company into. Instead of trying to have a broad impact, maybe go really deep on a very specific technology and put all of my effort into that one space. Because I'm early in my career, I don't have an amazing network.
I felt that really, that was potentially the extent of the impact I could have is just really putting my shoulder behind this one solution. So that's what I decided to do. I decided to move away from the political work and to focus on starting a company. But through the company, I've still seen the incredible impact that government can have.
So I still really respect and admire the people that are activists that are pushing government, the policy makers who are working daily on this. So I think both sides are really important.
Susan Su: Paul you summed it up really nicely. Like I realized that I wanted to focus in this other way, so I decided to start a company.
We know that it wasn't as simple as that especially not a kind of like hardware. Deep tech company, such as Remora. Can you tell just for anybody who else who might just be like on the Paul path, can you tell us what were some of your specific steps for looking across all of the different potential things that you could be doing that, that led you to Remora?
What was the tactical pathway for you?
Paul Gross: I started out with a lot of research and, just operationally. I read a bunch of reports from the UN, from other just public reports online to figure out what would be the highest impact pathways. I read that transportation was the largest sector of emissions in the US and I tried to take as much of a data-driven approach as I could.
I also red about how important carbon capture would be to get to zero. Every UN report talks about carbon capture and carbon removal, but I really didn't see many companies working on a scalable approach to carbon capture at that time. I think a lot of the carbon removal work was just centered around.
Retrofitting power plants with carbon capture systems. And that just didn't seem to be happening even though the technology had been working for decades. So I started thinking about how I could maybe unite those. And I got really obsessed with this single question about, why can't we capture.
Carbon emissions from a vehicles tailpipe, especially for the vehicles that are going to be very hard to decarbonize in any other way that, know, the semi-trucks, the cargo ships, the locomotives. And I just tried to understand why this wasn't happening. So I wrote out a list of. Possible reasons that this wasn't feasible.
And I did a lot of research on why it could be not feasible. And then I just, and there were a lot of articles out there arguing that this wasn't practical. So I, I made a list and I just went through each one and did my own math on w is this actually possible? And all those concerns. I just didn't really think applied.
It seemed like they weren't really going to be obstacles to this technology happening. And the big moment for me was when I came across my co-founder Christina's dissertation online she did her PhD to invent this field of mobile carbon capture. Really was the visionary behind this technology that we're developing.
And I reached out to her and just, we started talking and that's really how I ended up deciding to start remora along with Chris.
Susan Su: Thanks. Another great co-founder story to come, but Kelly, you yourself, you also didn't start out as an entrepreneur and I'm sure you did not go to bed at night as a small child thinking I'm going to be doing bio oil, seek registration.
When I grow up I'm sure you didn't even know those words before you like suddenly found yourself, pitching them to a VC, right? So I'm curious, like how did you get there? And you and I have talked about this like concept of engineer's mindset. There are so many engineers with all of this specific and relevant training, but that maybe don't think that crazily to me.
Cause I'm not an engineer, but crazily, they think that they can't apply that, but you used to be that person. Yeah. So what kind of got you over that hump? And what like made you see that? Okay. Wow. There's like really a fit for me here through something called charm industrial. What was that path?
Kelly Hering: Yeah, I think that the engineer's mindset can be really tricky because you can end up in the situation where, as an engineer, you want to have all of the answers to all of the questions that might come up about your business. And so it tends to put you in this like risk averse mindset where you really just.
Not sure how far to push marketing that vision before you have those answers. And so what really got me there was, as I was working in a mechanical engineer in different startups, I did get exposure to like seeing that vision being marketed and like seeing the steps that it was going to take as an engineer for me to get there.
So that was a really great opportunity working through. Startup specifically in the space sector and seeing how we were reinventing what was a kind of a slow industry to start. I also had a lot of great experiences for my parents cause they were both entrepreneurs. And so seeing them build the business was a really great experience for growing up.
And being able to take that leap was a combination of seeing that be done, being able to participate it in it, within different companies, as a mechanical engineer finding co-founders who could also help support in that, like growing it as a business and figuring out how to market that vision.
And then ultimately having the climate crisis. The motivation behind that mission be the thing. That's what you're just like, you need to figure out how to solve this problem. And so you're going to have to throw away a little bit of that. Any worry or like lack of confidence that you might be able to solve it and just have to be like, we need to solve it.
So if this doesn't work, we'll figure something else out. And just jump in with like your skillset effectively and join the.
Susan Su: Thanks. Kelly been, you were previously working at Tesla, you weren't exactly sitting around non making a climate impact. You're doing something already. But what took you from Tesla to RVs?
Was it. Something like Paul's very systematic review trying to take himself down and realizing that he had to just go for it or was it a different process?
Benjamin Parker: Yeah. Paul pre am impressed by how methodical you were about, figuring out what to do about this. I was no, it was more, it was very, it was a very winding sort of approach and it was a lot of, it was just me.
Thinking about what was, what were the opportunities to to impact the climate problem that we're, within my reach or field of view and and hopscotching from, I was lucky to find, I was luckily lucky to become convicted around, around climate, through, through the Tesla experience.
And a lot of my thinking that, when I was three years and I spent about five years there, total was that Kelly, like you, I had a lot of inspiration from my family. My dad and grandfather are entrepreneurial, small, small business. And I, so I knew that, I want to start maybe working on this problem from an entrepreneurial perspective.
And had been thinking a lot too about how I think that there was so much knowledge kind of cutting edge technology and knowledge being, being developed within Tesla about vehicle electrification and I, I, the thought grew in the over time that there should be more people who are on the cutting edge, fanning out to, to address, a lot more opportunities to reduce carbon emissions then than Tesla alone could do.
There's it's like we face such a broad problem. And yet there are a lot of like very in society is taking in and business are taking these really in-depth targeted approaches to solving climate from my problem. So I, yeah, I thought there should be more, I should be one of the ones to go.
Find a new problem area, which I I stumbled into RV because I was working on electric food trucks to begin with, which again was basically within reach. Cause I would go and get get any EAs at the at the Tesla headquarters every day and scream over a gas generator to to get the order in.
And it was just, it was basically a starting problem. I just started working on okay. How do we get rid of a gas generator on a food truck and made a bunch of relationships with food truckers around the bay area. And then that, that led me to, people were starting to say to me, people were advising me, friends, things like that.
Maybe food trucks is not the right place to go, but but our being is a, is an adjacent problem. With a, with a bigger market, there's a bigger opportunity to have impact there. As that I hopped over to that and started working on that. And Yeah.
After I took a summer long road trip last summer in an RV to make sure I wanted to work on this and learn more about the pursuit in the industry and that that ultimately got me to a point of, okay, I want to do this for a decade. And and I was convinced that there was, there's potential for real impact there.
So yeah, not going where the winds took me and trying to use the, the skills and knowledge and connections that I've made along the way to to attack a new adjacent problem.
Susan Su: You are literally going to be able to go where the wind takes you when you are in a light RB and B grid powered as well.
Leah, a lot of people are drawn to like, all of us here are drawn to innovation as a solution to the climate emergency. But. Not everyone. Can turn leading edge academic research into a business the way Paul's co-founder was able to, and the way that you and your co-founder have been able to through sublime, what gave you not only the hard skills to do but also just the personal courage. There are so many, and I know some of them personally, brilliant researchers and academics that have all the solutions to sometimes in their heads sometimes literally sitting on a shelf somewhere. But they're not you, they're not sitting in your seat.
So what do you think was it for you that enabled you to get here?
Leah Ellis: Yeah, I think what Kelly said earlier about the scientific mindset or maybe the engineering mindset where we're really obsessed with being right all of the time and being a hundred percent factually accurate, like you really risk your scientific reputation by going out.
On a limb. But what you supposed to do as an entrepreneur is sell a vision and that's very different from being factually correct all the time. So I think the gap between, inventor and visionary entrepreneur is courage. Like you said, I wouldn't have had that courage. Especially because being a battery person, there are a lot of battery companies that have really bad reputations for overselling, what they do and people make fun of them.
There's also Elizabeth Holmes and that's a really famous example of someone that lost face by doing a startup. And I would never have wanted that to be me and I still don't want that to be me. But for me, the enabling factor was my co-founder who, this is his seventh startup that he's co-founded.
So he recognized when we had all of the parts in place that, it was time to spin out. So I needed that, push it wouldn't I would never have thought that we were ready. Looking back we were ready, but I would have wanted to stay to postdoc for longer, make bigger and bigger spreadsheet models done the business plan all by myself.
It was time to spin out, hire people to work on the models, hire people to work on the business plan. So I think the way that you get that confidence to spin out is by networking with other founders. So finding where the founders hang out, whether it's like a local incubator accelerator programs, like pitch competitions.
Just get real with people who have made that jump. And then you'll learn that maybe if it's doable for you. And then as for the hard skills that it takes to be a CEO and a founder, I was really lucky to get support from an activate fellowship that helps PhDs and people with science backgrounds learn how to be an entrepreneur.
And I think there are a lot of programs like that accelerator programs that expose you to people who thinks strategically so that you can learn how to walk the walk and talk the talk as you transition.
Susan Su: Thank you, Leah. Okay. I have a quick bonus question for all of you right now. So it's interesting in the climate investing world, we often hear investors.
There's a whole bunch of activity. There's lots of money coming online. You guys all know this. And a lot of people will say, oh I want to do climate investing too. But asterisk, only if it's software. Now, one thing as I was like listening to each of you, that struck me, none of you guys are doing software.
You're all going for the really hard everybody says it can't be done, has some kind of crazy manufacturing or project development or like scale challenge hardware, deep tech, like really going for moving those atoms. I am curious and maybe we can. Taken off with Paul, because you were a data scientist, you could easily have just done software.
Why do you believe that hard tech hardware is the way to go? Why are you here? And I don't know, you don't have to knock on software. You guys will all have a software component to what you're building, but any thoughts on that?
Paul Gross: Climate change is a hardware problem. It's, there is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and we need to stop putting new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and that requires hardware. There's just no way around it. And it's going to be not just like a little hardware, like a ton of hardware because this transition is happening so quickly. So that's why I decided to focus on it. It just felt like a much higher impact place to be.
Susan Su: Anyone else want to jump in on that one?
Kelly Hering: Yeah, I guess I fully agree with everything that Paul said, but I think that also is just that yeah, it's very tempting because of the amount of investment that went into software. It will. I think people, I think there's like that barrier to entry for hardware that can be really tricky for people.
And luckily I've been in hardware, so that wasn't as much of a leap for me, but I think people don't realize that they can change that career like that. You don't necessarily have to have been trained in hardware to, to find that accessible those tons of supporting roles within an organization that can support a hardware company.
And a lot of those skill sets can be transferred over. So that's like. Hardware, it takes a lot of like logistics and supply chain. And that's really like an organizational problem that like everyone who has done software or has done like any sort of business role can jump into with very little gap, I think.
And then of course, for everyone who is like starting in their careers or starting in their studies, just having that like ability to think about where the roles can be in climate tech, in the hardware space. And maybe they didn't initially think that they could do it, but now they have this like the climate as like a push to consider that as a career, as opposed to going into what has been booming for the last, whatever 10, 20 years, which is like these software companies in the valley
Susan Su: Leah, can you add something else? .
Leah Ellis: I agree with what Paul said about the climate change problem is a hardware problem. It's a physical problem. And I think people are starting to realize, but it needs different types of funding mechanisms. We're in the middle of what people are calling clean tech 2.0 with a lot more people willing to put more money, to develop harder projects and wait longer to see the results of their investment.
And I think that's really encouraging because it's not easy to do a hardware startup. There's a lot of technical risk upfront. So I think it's really encouraging that the market's willing to bear these technological risks and wait longer.
Susan Su: There was a great comment in the chat from Tom Ward.
He says software, didn't get us into this mess. So it's hard to believe that it'll get us out of it. I haven't thought about it like that before, but it's true. You cannot really blame software for climate change. And that's just a helpful framing. All so I want to get into our last round of specific questions and then take questions from anybody here.
But Ben, one of the most charming things that I found after LinkedIn stalking you was that your first and I realized your longest job that you have ever had in your entire life. What is in service and hospitality. What would you say to all of the majority of people out there who aren't scientists, who aren't software developers, who aren't technologists of any kind or even, finance people, politicians, policy makers, who aren't in any of those, like immediately applicable or relevant to climate action fields?
What can they bring to the table for climate action?
Benjamin Parker: I was going a little bit about this. I think I don't want to sound cliche, but like it is a consumer choice. Problem as well. So literally what you put on your table matters in terms of your climate impact. I love eating lamb.
For instance, I've had lamb all my life. Lamb is also think it's 40 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram, per two pounds. Of lamb 40 kilograms released into the atmosphere, which is like days of driving. It's like a hundred miles of driving your passenger cars. Yeah just the, all of the choices that we make around the products that we buy a lot of which there's this idea of.
Carbon has an unpriced externality being we're, we're not paying for the societal costs of carbon in the products that, that we buy. And so choosing products that maybe cost a little more, but are made in a more sustainable manner or lower CO2 emissions manner.
Your choose clothing. Your cars and all of that stuff matters, matters a lot. And, if done by anything, everyone has huge impact. And I was, yeah, I I was laughing at the software didn't get us into the end of the mess hardly that will get us out of it.
Cause I think in some ways I think that like actually in some ways capitalism got us into. This mass global capitalism has been a driving force for consumption and thus as a by-product CO2 production. And I think that in some sense, global capitalism will also get us out of this mess or is a force that can get us out of it the fastest just by totally, create a new incentive structure, a new economic and incentive structure around what we buy and what we produce.
Yeah, that's my I guess my point there is, I think consumer choice is really important.
Susan Su: Thanks, Ben, Paul Dan Lewis, who's the CEO of convoy has a great story of how he spent six months before founding Convoy spent six months of roaming from Truckstop to truck stop all around the country. I'm speaking to truckers and trying to understand their problems as not to profile, but as a young technologist founder, working on a product that you're ultimately going to be selling to truck owner operators and then, these other incumbents in the industry, what steps have you taken or are you continuing to take. In order to understand those folks as consumers to build insight and empathy.
And I guess what has made you feel like you actually belong there among them? Or is that.
Paul Gross: Oh, I think it's incredibly important. I spend a lot of my time talking to our customers and I have learned more about trucks in the last year than I ever thought I would know in my whole life. I've returned to my five-year-old self where I look out the window at the semi-trucks passing me on the highway and I now know all the terminology and, I think that's just, that's not just like a marketing thing.
That's essential because I constantly learn things from our customers. They say, Hey, what about when the diesel particulate filter regenerates like that melts my trailer, that's going to be really hot for your device. And then I take that back to our engineering team and say, are we thinking about when the exhaust comes out?
500 degrees C during this really, unusual moment in the truck's lifecycle. And those types of questions are what allow us to build a product that's really going to work for this use case. One of our most core values is we constantly go and visit the places that we're doing pilots. We're constantly talking to Everett on the ground.
In those places, my co-founder Eric also was a diesel mechanic for 70 trucks for a decade. So I think he also really has a great perspective on, truck drivers and folks that, spend a lot of time with trucks. I'm never going to get there. I don't want to pretend that I know the industry super well.
But I think it's just really important then to be like, as humble as possible. And just when people ask questions to really take them seriously and not just assume that we're coming in with this kind of silver bullet solution because I think that's many times where these climate solutions.
Fall short is that they're really brilliant in theory, but then when you actually put them in practice, it doesn't work for the people that you're helping to decarbonize stuff that I guess that's why it's so important to us.
Susan Su: Thanks, Paul. Okay. So examine your own lifestyle, then all become obsessed with your space, your customer, and really conceptualize it as you are helping them to decarbonize it. That phrasing layout. What do you think that the future layout to be that's out there. I'm a few steps behind you right now.
What do you think she can be doing to prepare herself to jump into entrepreneurship or, maybe entrepreneurship turns out not to be the right path. Maybe it's joining one of your companies or something totally else. But what do you think that person should be doing?
Leah Ellis: Great question. I think that someone who wants to be an entrepreneur or an inventor, you should definitely try and flex that inventive muscle. Like I really do think it is something that gets better over time. So I know other inventors also, they have a notebook and every day they like to write down one crazy idea that could be an invention or it could be a business model and you just keep going.
You just force yourself to do it every single day. And then maybe after six months you like start and reread your ideas and half of them are going to make you laugh and some of them might make you think. And I think that looking for those opportunities, like I forget what the saying is like, luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
So I think, strengthening that muscle, like getting yourself ready for the right opportunity, being well networked and in the startup community helps for sure. Working at a startup help. I think it's really great to work at early stage high growth startup because you have a lot of exposure to what everybody else is doing in the company.
And everybody has an impact on the company's growth and participates in these strategic discussions. And because the company's always growing you like your role is can also grow within the company as you lean into it. I would position myself for being at a startup and yeah, I think that's a great path to being an entrepreneur.
Susan Su: Thanks, Leah. Yeah, lots of new opportunities, whether you want them or not in startup land. All right, Kelly, you woke up to the climate crisis at a very young age, but didn't use to think that there was a way like, again, crazily because you have so many skills, but there needs to think there is a way that you could be directly impactful.
Whether generally, or if you have a specific moment, what changed your mind about that?
Kelly Hering: Yeah, I think what you're referring to is I had this science guy come into our second grade classroom and he told us that Manhattan would be entirely underwater in 10 years or something. And I remember just like being horrified and going home and crying about it.
And I'm sure my mom just told me like, oh, they don't know what they're talking about. Probably. Cause she was also an uninformed about the climate crisis at the time. But as I was going into learning what I wanted to be what I grew up and becoming an engineer in college and whatnot the different paths that you can take as an engineer, like none of them said oh, this will bring you into solving this problem, which is climate.
A lot of them was like okay, if you go into electrical engineering, like you might be able to like, Designed electrical boards for a product, or you could get into I think maybe now I could see where that could get you into like electrification and batteries and those types of things.
But at the time, it wasn't there wasn't that pathway of, okay, if you're a mechanical engineer, this is how you solve. The climate crisis with your like mechanical engineering. And if the closest thing to it was like the chemical engineering world, but so many of my like different friends in college when they went into chemical engineering and they actually just ended up in oil and gas, like there was just not that clear connection.
So it was hard to see that path. What I got the opportunity to is as I went into startups and got to work there and what Leo was saying, like actually seeing what the different opportunities were and how to build a company. I realized that my set of skills was very transferable between industries.
And so like things that I was learning in space from a first principles perspective. Could we then use to innovate within a chemical engineering space as a mechanical engineer. And so that really changed my mind. Just understanding that my skills were transferable. That just because I ended up in one industry doesn't mean I can't move into another.
And just seeing that this new climate industry has really started to bloom different companies are coming out and hiring. And so many of us. Not from the climate check industry because it's and it's such an infancy. And so I think people think that there's like, how do I get into this industry?
But it's so new that like you can build it just by being interested in it. And by finding the company that resonates with you and figuring out like that where your skills can be transferrable to that company.
Susan Su: Thank you, Kelly. Alright, awesome. So just to wrap up do we Radica or any other folks from climate con, any questions that we want to surface?
Just ping me. If so, but I think as on a last note here, I'd love to hear from each of you outside of this conversation is supposed to be out about innovation. We've talked a lot about tech outside of that, what is like one thing that you're currently focused on? Too, because I'm sure that you're all working on a climate action in other ways, too.
What's one thing else that you're focused on. And then we have some questions that will grab from.
Leah Ellis: It's a question. What's one other thing that we're focused on.
Susan Su: Yeah. Here, I'll start actually. So I'm very interested in dark money and politics. I think that's got a really direct connection to climate in action. And so that's one area that I'm studying and something that I think everybody who's got a voice in the U S can work on. What about you guys?
Kelly Hering: I'm really interested in women and girls rights. And I think when you think about the climate crisis, it can really affect them disproportionately and that kind of blends in with climate justice in a way too. So that's something I've always been interested in for at least since I was a teenager and I have supported that in different ways, from different types of nonprofits and ways that you can increase education and in developing nations.
Paul Gross: I already tipped my hand, but like you I'm, I think politics is so important to it's important to stay involved and to understand what filibuster and like the budget reconciliation process, what those things mean for our democracy. We're about to see a new cycle of gerrymandering because it's 2021.
These like these mechanical things are so important. So I just try to stay on, stay involved and to keep understanding what's going on there because if we don't fix the mechanical part of our democracy, we're not going to get the results that we want downstream.
Susan Su: Yeah, I think a lot of folks focus on the messaging and miss the structural elements that actually are really what make it work or not a layup.
Leah Ellis: I'm afraid. My answer is not very interesting since I'm totally absorbed by my job, but I would say that my focus outside of work is definitely on people and relationships. I feel I am a people person and my community matters to me. Right now, beyond my family, just my family at work and broadly the entrepreneurial community.
So finding other founders that need encouragement, finding founders that are a little bit ahead of me and I can learn from their mistakes. And yeah that's what takes a lot of my time outside of work.
Benjamin Parker: Same lines. I do try, I basically try to evangelize, the climate caused almost anybody I talked to which maybe is a slightly separate form, but I think, the more, the more you can spread that knowledge. I've also, I crossed my, my. Job and lifestyle has been pulling me more and more into the outdoors recently.
And the town that I grew up in, it was a kind of a strong environmental conservation movement. And so it's like an adjacent thing that I'm learning about is you know, how to do environmental conservation.
Susan Su: That's awesome. There's nothing that bugs me more than people who say, oh, I care about climate change, but I'm not an environmentalist.
I'm like, why not? What's wrong with being an environmentalist. Something happened there between the nineties and today. Awesome. Thank you all so much. I do have one to get to one question. If you saw time, do we have time moderators other moderators? Are we good on time? All right, so let's go to Sean Roach has a question about your knowledge gaps.
Did you know your knowledge gaps when you found your co-founders and then Holly let's like actually bundle these together. If anything around knowledge gaps are that Holly's question is around. If you're focused on product innovation, is there anything that you should be doing differently that you've chosen to do differently that you think really led you guys to be breakouts here?
Because it is really hard to do what you're doing and to raise money from VCs and to like even get to the point where, every company here is very early. It's very hard to get to this point. So what do you think in terms of knowledge, acquisition, or really product innovation, product development, do you think had to be a different approach this time around.
Kelly Hering: I think that in the climate tech space, you really have to focus on your life cycle analysis, like first and foremost. So whenever you're developing, you really understand where all the, where the carbon is, where your energy outputs and your energy inputs and so on and so forth. And so where we integrate.
Charmaz initially working on biomass to hydrogen instead of to this bio oil. But when we really focused on that life cycle analysis, and we looked at like the transport costs, for example, of some of the biomass and hydrogen solutions, it was just so clear what wasn't going to close which allowed us to focus and be like, okay, like how do we solve that problem?
And that led us to making the intermediary of bio oil and then rethinking bio oil entirely from being this transport solution to also not necessarily being a fuel. And then we were coming in undergrads. So innovation comes from those moments when you're like, oh, this isn't going to work. And I feel like those moments need to start at the lifecycle analysis for a lot of climate companies.
Or just even before you start applying to a company, like looking at a process that you think really does need to be decarbonized and where those those like big areas of opportunity are to solve them.
Benjamin Parker: The first question, I think, cause I lost, I had. I was working solo on, on light ship for a eight or nine months. And before for me, my wonderful co-founder Toby and I had written on the whiteboard in my home office find business co-founder find business-minded co-founder like in big, bold letters knowing that, I come from the engineering and product side and it was gonna be really challenging to build a business that build and manage a business that does, consumer big, complicated consumer products without having someone, a new commercial finance and like the other big, vertical to cover and, making an RV manufacturing business.
Yeah, I think it's, I it's really important upfront to set out the skills matrix of this is all the stuff that our business needs to be good at to to grow. And then figure, I, I just tried to figure out what. What can I cover here? In fact, I figured out what, w what can I cover here?
And then I tried to do the other side for her for about six months and realized I didn't have the network or the experience to do it. And then, made the right decision and, went on a search for Toby.
Susan Su: Thanks everyone. Thank you so much for being here at Paul. Did you have a last thought don't want to put you off? You always have awesome things.
Paul Gross: That's very kind. I was just going to say in response to Holly's question, I think trying to go as fast as possible, like hardware, the iteration cycle is just slower than software, but still trying to iterate as fast as possible and get just something out there.
Even if it's not perfect. This is what I really admire about charm. They like delivered the largest carbon removal like of all time and just a couple of years and other companies have been working on this for so long. And so just if you can get something out there sooner I think that can be really impactful, especially because climate change is so pressing. We can't wait for the perfect solution to be ready in 20 years.
Susan Su: Thank you, everyone. This was so awesome. Super helpful. Very inspiring to just get to speak with each of you and hear from you all today. Thanks everyone for being here and for taking time out of the middle of your week. Who's just attending and being a part of the community. This is really awesome.
And we will see you around this is a small world, so I'm sure we'll be seeing you in plenty of other places. Go out and enjoy the rest of climate con and we'll catch up with you again.
