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Climate Takes Sea Robots
28 Plays2 months ago
Welcome to Carbon13's podcast "Climate Takes" where we ask special guests for their "takes" on their industry and climate challenge, as well as setting a call to action, asking what will it take to solve the climate emergency?
This episode is all about the ocean and the technology revolution taking place far beyond the landlubber's horizon. The fact that our guest's venture is backed by the European Space Agency tells you how we should be thinking of mankind's next frontiers.
Climate Takes Sea Robots speaks to Joyeeta Das, CEO and Co-founder of Samudra Ocean, a robotics and AI company for ocean-based carbon capture. Samudra was named winner of the 2024 COP29 Global Green Innovation Challenge People’s Choice Award, is nominated for the Earthshot Prize, and is a recipient of the 2024 Prix Bulles Pierre Cardin.
Joyeeta herself has founded three successful startups and serves on the boards of global companies, passionately advocating for the use of technology to drive social good. She has been recognized as an Innovate UK Women in Tech Ambassador, featured in the Financial Times BAME 100 list, and honored with the UK Pioneering Woman in Tech award from Diversity UK. Joyeeta’s influence as a speaker extends to prestigious platforms like the UN, the World Economic Forum, and the Scottish Seaweed Industry Association
Why does oceantech matter? The ocean is the primary source of protein for 3 billion people, its economy is estimated at over $2 trillion, it absorbs 25% of carbon emissions and could become one of the greatest weapons in the fight against global warming. Welcome on board, we hope you enjoy the podcast.
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Transcript
Introduction to Climate Takes
00:00:13
Speaker
Everybody and welcome to Carbon Thirteen's podcast, Climate Takes, where we ask our invited guests ah for their takes on their industry and their climate challenge and also a call to action. What is it going to take to fight the climate emergency?
Innovations in Seaweed Farming with Robotics and AI
00:00:29
Speaker
Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Joyita Das of Samuda Oceans for this episode of Climate Takes, Sea Robots.
00:00:37
Speaker
We're no longer just thinking of land, which is less than 30% of the planet. We're thinking of the biggest resource on the planet, 70%, which is the oceans. We're saying that we're not just going to do more of what you've done. We're going to do it in a radically different way, which is robotics and AI. If you look at the seaweed industry in the West, and then we say, has there been change? Then the answer is yes.
00:01:01
Speaker
But did I love the ocean? Hell yeah. It is absolutely what I love. I'm a really bad swimmer. Like, I can barely stay afloat. I will die if you throw in water. But I will be the one to volunteer first.
00:01:20
Speaker
Welcome, Dorita. Welcome. Thank you so much, Sarah, for having me. so very welcome A quick intro to Samudra Ocean. um It's Earthshot nominated. They're backed by the British Design Fund and the European Space Agency. Joita Das is herself a serial entrepreneur and fabulous speaker, um having spoken at places like the UN, the World Economic Forum, and recognised on many lists of influential women in tech, including by Innovate UK, I believe. Joita, super looking forward to this. Shall we start with a quick fire round?
00:01:55
Speaker
Yes, let's do it. FAB, name of company. Samudra Oceans Limited. What do you make? Robotics and AI for seaweed farming. Who do you sell it to? To people who own seabets, farmers, aquaculture specialists and anyone looking to play in the ocean. You have seaweed farms off Scotland, Cornwall and Jamaica. If you could magically teleport to any of those places right now, where would you go?
00:02:21
Speaker
Well, Jamaica for selfish reasons, but I do love our open farms in Scotland because so it's just a very special place. Not of Scotland, it's just magical. It's magical. And then final quick fire question, is Samuja a climate company?
Why Every Company is a Climate Company?
00:02:34
Speaker
Every company is a climate company. I suppose especially us, but who's not a climate company? We take all resources from the climate, we give back to it in a negative way mostly. So who's not a climate company?
00:02:48
Speaker
100%. If we look to like anybody who's starting a business or investing in a business, you need to be looking at the 2030s right now for for when this company hits scale. And if we look at the net zero targets, no company can operate in the 30s and beyond without considering their impact, and both any extraction or damage they may cause, but also the opportunities to have ah innovation to transform an industry for the better and also for commercially better. And we're going to dive into that ah with Joita later on. Joita, when we scale seaweed farming, what are we actually achieving?
Benefits of Scaling Seaweed Farming
00:03:30
Speaker
We're achieving some pretty awesome things. We are achieving scaling CVG. Yeah, sure. But why is that awesome? Well, CVG kind of takes out way more carbon than even tropical forests. So it's a big carbon capture mechanism. The second thing is it normally ends up providing a lot of jobs to to tier two, tier three economies that are coastal and at the forefront of the climate crisis.
00:03:54
Speaker
But it also has some other benefits that are directly connected to biodiversity. So for instance, it serves as a hub for biodiversity. So you have baby otters using it as a nursery because their mums leave them wrapped up and then go hunting. And then it also reduces ocean acidification.
00:04:12
Speaker
which is a huge problem right now but the most amazing thing is it actually reduces ocean electrification so all the nitrates that leach in which is like a big problem right now in the world they get absorbed and the seaweed actually likes it and get better gets better because of it so it cleans up the water and it loves it so that's great. With all of these benefits in the ecosystem I mean you can only think that it's a good thing The other thing to know about is when you are scaling seaweed farming, what are you really scaring scaling? You're scaling a ah product, a substrate that serves as the basis of so many um products that need to be substituted like bioplastics.
00:04:50
Speaker
biofertilizers, ah meat substitute burgers, alginates. like You can only make good things with seaweed. What can you actually make that causes damage? You actually end up making things that's a good substitute for things that cause damage, like plastics and fertilizers and meat. And so in a way, you're you're not only growing something that takes carbon out, you're creating this value chain in this world, which is a very sustainable, ecologically positive supply chain.
00:05:19
Speaker
that can serve as the basis of future biomaterials.
Oceans as a Resource for Growth
00:05:22
Speaker
um And the last thing, which is probably a big bias on my side, but the thing that I absolutely love about it is it gives rise to a new paradigm of growth. We're no longer just thinking of land, which is less than 30% of the planet. We're thinking of the biggest resource on the planet, 70%, which is the oceans that is completely underutilized. And instead of thinking that when we run out of land, we have to go to another planet,
00:05:47
Speaker
we are thinking when we run out of land we can explore the rest of the continent the rest of the world which we haven't yet actually used up at all so it's a brand new way of thinking it's like um the closest analog analog analogy i have to it is from the world of art ah you know negative spaces we are always trying to create paintings and drawings and we are talking of the thing in the forefront and we forget the background But then there are charcoal artists and people who paint in the negative space and because they're using the bigger available space and thinking less of what's just the small dots, the forefront. So humanity is obsessed with land because that's where we were born and we live and we created a habitation. But we came from the ocean. That was the primordial soup, you know, and that's where majority of life species still exists. So it's a different paradigm of thinking on the planet. And I love that.
00:06:42
Speaker
You've really made me think, because we're so used to seeing the map of the world that's that Mercator projection. But that's like only like half the actual planet Earth. like The whole back of the map is dark blue, if you look at a globe. Yes. We really live in a blue planet. The green is just dots, as you see from space. It is not a green planet. It's a blue planet with some green dots.
00:07:09
Speaker
got you.
Impact of Ocean Acidification
00:07:10
Speaker
And therefore, the ocean is actually one of the biggest carbon sinks and ah that we have. um It's both vast, but also incredibly delicate. because So I know that increased carbon dioxide causes acidification of the ocean. Why is that a problem?
00:07:32
Speaker
the tiny tiny little creatures the copepods the the lava of say crabs and prawns etc can't form their shells and they if they collapse you cause the collapse of the entire food chain up up to your blue whales nitrates you mentioned nitrates though why is over nitrification of the ocean a problem Well, because it really damages biodiversity and life. more of you know It upsets the chemical balance. and And the ocean, just like land, has some ideal ratios that it needs to achieve in order to support the life forms that grow in the various strata.
00:08:08
Speaker
Let's say you have a layer of land that has excess magnesium. What's going to happen? You're going to lose all the worms and everything that lives on that layer. So it's the same. If you stuff up the ocean with nitrates, you're going to massively damage many parts of the ecosystem. um You can also have things like algal blooms. So you can have these unwanted microalgae that can suddenly grow because of these nitrates leaching in and create these huge vortexes.
00:08:29
Speaker
that we're talking about. um There's a huge stargassum issue which is full of plastic and dead bones and stinks a lot and is the size of a mini city, floats around the Caribbean, destroying all there. Sometimes wherever it ends up going it actually ends up destroying the the tourist potential of that region and that's all because of algal blooms. Things have not been controlled, it has grown out of you know proportion and control. It's basically like any other monster when you dump ah chemicals into a ah biohabitat, it just creates all sorts of imbalances. It encourages organisms that weren't supposed to grow to that level and discourages those for whom that is the home.
00:09:10
Speaker
Interesting. So we've just spoken about impact, by the way. We've just spoken about remove it the impact of removing carbon dioxide. We've spoken about nitrification already. We've just spoken about jobs, economy. We'll deep dive into that a little bit later.
00:09:28
Speaker
um Even without selling a single bit of your seaweed, there's already different parameters of impact. We're going to get on who you sell the seaweed to in a bit more detail in a little bit later. There's just one final thing I'd love to talk to you about because there's something called blue carbon, which I think our listeners would love to hear more about.
Blue Carbon Credits and Market Challenges
00:09:50
Speaker
Blue carbon is very interesting because it is carbon. We call it blue because of the fact that it belongs to the ocean ecosystem. And in many ways, it's supposed to be, at least in the carbon credits world, assumed to be sometimes even more important than land-based or terrestrial carbon, because it actually, every way that you can think of capturing this carbon ends up being very, very positive for biodiversity.
00:10:17
Speaker
and for the rest of the ocean. So you're not only capturing carbon, you're directly encouraging life forms as well, which all contribute to the climate thesis, climate solution thesis. And so blue carbon is very, very powerful. That way you can capture blue carbon in seagrass, in marshes, in swamplands. um Sometimes bibles and crustaceans can grow in an ecosystem that can do that and mangroves and of course seaweed. So It is therefore an intended revenue stream of Samudra that you will sell blue carbon credits.
00:10:50
Speaker
Yes, it's one of our ah big revenue streams. We've already started selling. We've sold a contract to Shopify, which is, you know, they have a carbon credit fund and we are looking at a few other partnerships, so manufacturing, airlines and shipping. um And perhaps we will have a big consumer brand coming on board as well. So these are all forward selling contracts. We are fulfilling them in the next few years. Carbon credits that we sequester off of the back of our farms.
00:11:22
Speaker
And here's a little ah vocab help right here. Sequesta in carbon means that you're able to store carbon for a very, very long time. We're talking ideally hundreds of years, I believe. Yes, over a hundred for sure, but maybe even a thousand. as permanent as we can make it, sequester. And then also anybody who's interested in carbon credits, which is somebody is paying to for the removal and capture storage and sequestering of a ton of carbon. um Measurement reporting and verification, MRV, which you'll hear a lot.
00:12:03
Speaker
is vital to actually make sure that you can accurately measure the amount of blue carbon being taken out, ah report on that accurately, and then also have it verified. So a company which is able to do MRV of blue carbon is very much needed by the industry.
00:12:20
Speaker
yeah um okay let's We've spoken about ah some of the climate benefits. Let's look at the industry as a whole, the seaweed industry.
00:12:31
Speaker
Has the seaweed industry changed in the last couple of years? So is yes and no, depends on how you define change. It's a relative question. So if you look at the seaweed industry in the West and then we say, has there been change? Then the answer is yes. But if you look at it relative to how any other industry is growing, Has there been change? Yes, there's been change in the demand, but not in the supply. So it's a very constrained industry. I would say the changes are in terms of mindset. There's been lots of bioplastic companies coming in. There's been meat substitute companies coming in. I don't know if you've heard of Flexi and Nopline, Betafish and Bezios. It's a packaging company. So lots of new companies have come in that are wanting to use seaweed. So there's been change in that regard. Where has it not changed? The method of delivery has not changed. So
00:13:23
Speaker
um We are pretty much growing it the way we've always done. um So seaweed is a pretty old industry in the east for China. It has been for hundreds of years, but perhaps thousands even. It has been grown in Japan where there's a big crisis because the farmers are very old. They don't have new people and that's like an actual problem there. They need automation.
00:13:43
Speaker
then um and Then you have Korea, then you have Indonesia and Philippines. So it has been growing for a while. China produces almost 70 to 90 percent of the world's edible seaweed right now. So it it has pretty much been doing that forever. It's all the sushi, nori, everything that you eat, the wokame and all of that.
00:14:00
Speaker
In the West, though, we've just only recently started getting it into an organized way. Small boutique quantities had been grown in Wales and Scotland and and ah north of Ireland and in Norway forever, but they were boutique quantities. So if you know things like love of bread, that's a very old form of Welsh food. That's always, that is seaweed, you know, that that that they eat. So we have been doing boutique quantities near the ocean economy, near communities, but it has never been full scale.
00:14:27
Speaker
And now what's happened in the last few years is there's been a lot of demand for it. So people want to grow, but it's kind of the Ford situation. Henry Ford said that if I asked my customers, what do you want? They would have set a faster horse. You know, they didn't think of a car or like Steve Jobs would say, no one thought that they wanted, they needed this phone. They were like, you know, um and when he went to homebrew with his computer, as is famously known, they said like, there's a market for probably three for PC.
00:14:54
Speaker
um So the problem is now that we're trying to scale the supply, the idea so ah for existing practitioners is they're gonna scale it the same way it has already existed, just do more of it. And our point is just by doing more, you're not gonna meet this big radical change in demand. It has to be a completely different paradigm. So you can't do more castellations, more ropes, and more people on boats. That's not gonna work. You have to just move to 2024. So if an alien landed on this planet today,
00:15:24
Speaker
Okay, have you read stranger in a strange land, one of my favorite books of all times highly recommend anyone listening. It's incredible. It's an alien who lands on this planet in modern day age, a fully grown man who's in humanoid form or is a human probably very intelligent.
00:15:39
Speaker
and just lands in the middle of this planet, and then wants to understand everything. And the way they question it is is opens up your mind. I love that book. A gift to me from someone who was studying physics and philosophy, and he said that you really have to read it, and it changed my mind about how I think about the world.
00:15:54
Speaker
Anyway, this book does what I'm trying to say now. If you landed in 2024 and you were told with all the knowledge of the world dumped into your brain um that seaweed industry has so much demand and now this is such a great useful solution for the world, what are you going to do?
00:16:13
Speaker
This person would not say, let's just put in more ropes and more bolts. They'll look around the ocean like a giant and they'll say, hey, what are the oil guys doing? Hey, what is shipping doing? Hey, what's offshore wind doing? Why can't we do that technology for agriculture, for seaweed? They're not going to use the same thing. They're going to use the most latest thing that's available and apply it.
00:16:36
Speaker
That's what we do in every industry. You take the most latest tech and then use that. You use chat GPT for everything today. you're not trying to use a You're not trying to make an AI from scratch that will talk to you. You're just building on top of it. That is the mindset we are bringing and trying to change in the CVID industry. We're saying that we're not just going to do more of what you've done. We're going to do it in a radically different way, which is robotics and AI, completely automated farms, completely automated monitoring, and flatback farms that are preceded, pre harvested. So it's not a gradual incremental change. It's a step change in production. So you're basically saying that the seaweed industry is a bit like horse and plow in Victorian times. And Samudra is not just bringing the tractor, you're bringing a self-driving tractor.
00:17:27
Speaker
Yes, we are bringing Tesla. You know, just put in the coordinates takes you where you want to go. well That's what we're trying to do.
00:17:40
Speaker
Love it.
Personal Connection to Ocean Conservation
00:17:43
Speaker
Did you always love the sea or is this was this a new thing for you?
00:17:49
Speaker
ah secret Yes. But in a way, no. So it's weird how subconscious memories live in our brain. My mom is a conservation botanist and mostly are around the ocean. So I basically grew up sampling with her from a very young age, like tiny. And I never thought to take it up as a profession because I wasn't going to be a biologist ever. or She's a full on, you know, ah ah She taught for a long time. She's still like um teaching girls in STEM and she's a scientist and she's very quiet on her microscope doing samples all day long for plants and all kinds of flora. And so that was in the background of my head. I didn't realize it is. But did I love the ocean? Hell yeah. It is absolutely what I love. I'm a really bad swimmer. Like I can barely stay afloat.
00:18:34
Speaker
I will die if you throw me in water. But I will be the one to volunteer first. That's the kind of love I have for it. It's like Charles Bukowski said, find something you love and then let it kill you. That kind of love I have for the ocean, I cannot survive in it. But God, I will volunteer to die in it first. And I think a game changing moment for me happened in the ocean when um I went to French Polynesia.
00:19:02
Speaker
I was in Bora Bora. And I, for the first time, went completely underwater. Not diving, it's something called ocean walking. You can walk and you have this thing. And you know um and someone taught me how to do it. like You clean it, you bring it to the right temperature, you put it on your face, and then you go. And I went underwater completely, all around me, on top of my head, under my feet. my head I was inside water.
00:19:31
Speaker
It was a moment I'll never forget. I think I felt like I'm in a primordial womb of some kind. it was There was like fish all around me. And I know everyone has a great experience at scuba diving or whatever. For me, it was beyond that. It was a spiritual experience. I felt like Oh, my God, I want to do something that requires me to do this a lot. This is what I want to do. um And then coupled with my love for climate and then my background with my mom being this whole botanist person um and then going to carbon 13 and meeting with all of you and meeting my co-founder Alex at the time.
00:20:07
Speaker
who's not in the kofaner anymore but he was also from the ocean world in jamaica basically it just all came together but it's so funny how the pieces we put in motion in our lives come together in future in a really strange way you don't see it coming together but it all comes together as a giant puzzle. Looking back, the dots join, but you don't know it when you're standing there. That day in Bora Bora, I did not know I'll make a climate company in the ocean. When I was capturing samples with my mom as a six-year-old, I did not know I would grow up and use this knowledge. I didn't know I'll call my mom to understand species 20 years from that day, but all of that came together.
00:20:45
Speaker
I think that's so true and I think one of the joys actually of as as as we get older is so much more planned serendipity happens and all of the you you all of the bricks you've been building in sort of the wall of your life are building and the foundations are are building to a culmination um which which the the it takes well for the fruit to come, right?
00:21:08
Speaker
Yeah, because there's a Latin saying, isn't it? Child is the father of man. All that is to happen. We've already seeded by the time we've arrived at it. They're all just growing and flowering in future. But with every moment we are already creating your future, you've already set it out. Exactly.
00:21:25
Speaker
um
00:21:29
Speaker
My next question is something completely different to what we've just said, which is actually, I wanted to talk about the state of investment into climate.
Investment in Climate Companies: Challenges and Needs
00:21:38
Speaker
um But actually, and do you know what? No, I'm going to fight for it and say there is a link because there has to be a will to invest in climate companies. And that will comes from humans and their life experiences ah ultimately. So there is a link.
00:21:56
Speaker
You're a serial founder. You've raised lots of money. You're also an investor. I think i can you are an investor. um And you've spoken in the past about climate capital, the difficulty with the current financial instruments for climate capital and that patient capital, its needs differ. Elaborate on that.
00:22:17
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So a couple of really obvious technical challenges investing in climate, looking at it also as an investor, but now that I'm also a founder, one is a lot of climate solutions require rethinking the entire scenario. We're trying to create a whole new ecosystem, right?
00:22:35
Speaker
So there's a lot more deep tech and science than any other sector. It's a lot less, I'll just tweak this behavior and change it, and a lot more deep tech and science, which is my nature of patient capital um and even higher risk profile than even regular venture capital, which is very high risk profile anyway. The second thing is hardware. There's a lot of hardware and infrastructure play, which are more like PE and debt play, things that you don't get in early stage.
00:23:01
Speaker
So early stage instruments that can somehow be modified financially to accommodate debt and peace style play despite being early stage would be good because there's lots of infrastructure and hardware play in climate tech. The last but not least is I fundamentally find markets. So Most of early stage investment is angel or VC. You can have occasional grant or competition, but they're a minuscule part of this investment. And most of that is about playing into big markets. That's what the whole VC thing is about, right? You play into big markets, you're disrupted and you become a unicorn because the markets beyond billion dollar in size. So you capture most of it. Now that does not work for climate because if the world had markets
00:23:46
Speaker
If that were good for solving the crisis, then we wouldn't have the crisis. but We have the crisis today because we have created a world which was only led by pure capitalism. Adam's hand was moving it and not necessarily what creation of markets that restore or value the earth's natural resources. We completely forgot that invisible stakeholder that has silently supported every endeavor.
00:24:10
Speaker
So now if you want to disrupt that market, you can find one player or two. But you're not going to find an overwhelming solution number of solutions that disrupt those markets because what we're trying to do is create a new world, market creation. So market creation is very different from plain to existing markets. It requires a completely different mindset.
00:24:30
Speaker
You're talking of different costs of acquisition. We're talking of a completely different strategy. You're not talking of, this is an existing market, I'll disrupt it and take all the money and become a unicorn, which is what early stage investors want to see. We're talking of, I'm going to make this whole new market, a whole new paradigm of doing this thing, and it's going to change people and it's going to change the world.
00:24:47
Speaker
So you're talking of more capital, much longer patience, and a completely different mindset. The parameters and indicators of success in these kind of plays, which is the majority of the most powerful climate company plays, is not going to look like a standard B2B SaaS company. You're not looking CAC to LTV. You're not looking cost of acquisition to lifetime value. What's the ratio?
00:25:08
Speaker
you're not looking at those things. But that's the template early stage investors are applying to climate companies when they're selecting them and missing out the whole thing. um So I think there's a whole universe of new market creation, new paradigm creation that is completely untouched by any kind of capital and it requires creation of instruments that are a mixture of things, you know, that are safes and notes and banks and P and VC and Angel. Because let's face it, if you're going to make a new world, wouldn't you need new inputs? So if we are going to create markets and worlds that don't look like before, wouldn't they be funded financially by things that did not exist before?
00:25:51
Speaker
it just We're talking of industrial revolution next. you know So it has to be different. um But it isn't right now. I think it'll catch up at some point. But at this point, it hasn't caught up, no.
00:26:05
Speaker
VC is actually a a very young industry. And I feel in all in the work that we do, it sometimes feels like it is as inevitable as a river. When VC, as we know it, venture capital, the idea that you have adventures into starting and scaling companies starts in, I think like the 50s, 60s even.
00:26:31
Speaker
um in in in Silicon Valley. And so it sounds huge what you were describing a market creation, ah a new way of doing capital.
00:26:43
Speaker
But actually you're saying we just need to do something we've already done in the past lifetime of a human, a life today. Yes, I totally agree. And actually what you said is the reason I think it should have been more possible because if you are new and risk taking and always look at upside, then you should not be limited by dogma and template. You should not be limited to institutionalized propaganda.
00:27:07
Speaker
You should actually be saying that since anything above 100 is anyways crazy, I can go as crazy as I like. But sadly, like everything else in the world, there's a lot more hubris and fun of belonging to a label than actually being true to it. So you know what what I mean here. So that is definitely happening. OK, I think there's a lot of food for thought for this.
00:27:36
Speaker
um
00:27:39
Speaker
But what goes hand in hand with having plans and raising capital to fund those plans is actually being sure that you're actually having the impact that you want. With Samudra at the stage that it's it at now, how how have you even gone about trying to analyze and prove the impact that your company could have?
00:28:04
Speaker
I think there are two things we look at. One is how much carbon did we end up capturing and measuring that with whatever farms we've had so far and also our devices. And the second thing we can look at is unit economics. you know How much are you spending on making these machines? How much carbon does it go into making these robotics and AI? And does that beyond offset what you're taking out? you know um And what you're taking out should be, because of them, the carbon capture should be way in order of magnitude higher than what you've spent. So that's LCA, Lifecycle Carbon Assessment. um But in ah addition to that, also, we track a lot of we try our best to track a lot of the side effects. you know What else is happening in the ecosystem when you do that? What else is happening to the life forms? What else is happening to the ocean? What else is happening to the neighboring communities?
00:28:51
Speaker
Those are the data points and then we try and extrapolate that to the future. So if you've captured this much with 20 tons, with 40 tons, with 100 tons, what can you capture with 10,000 tons in five years? What can you capture? If you can do this with one million, two million, what can you do with 100 million? How many can you make and what does that mean?
00:29:08
Speaker
All of those are the calculations we've looked. We are pretty confident of impact. like Impact is like the last part of our concern. like You could literally Google up and you will find a million people who tell you how this restores coastal economy and it shows what is possible.
00:29:24
Speaker
I think it's a question of playing the long game. How do we get here to there, not just in terms of impact, but package it into various smaller packages that appeal to different stages of company creation, which is employee culture and retention. um It is also fundraising. It is also allocation of the funds to get to the next milestone.
00:29:44
Speaker
that appeals to the next set of investors and constantly playing that video game in every level until you get to the last level. Are we confident what the last level is and how it can we can get from here to there? How? No, because we're learning. Sometimes we go a bit like this, a bit like that, all of that. But is the impact guaranteed? A hundred percent. There's no doubt.
00:30:04
Speaker
probably because this is where I think the first question you were asking, switching gears a bit about my childhood plays a role because I've grown up with the knowledge of how the ocean botany works in a way, even though I'm not studied because of my mum constantly being on it.
00:30:18
Speaker
I mean, it is inside me. I kind of know how it plays out. like I know it in my bones how it plays out. And so 100% that I know about the impact. But do I know 100% how we will get to that impact? No, it's a long game. We're looking at 10 years here, so at least. So there's lots of different things that will happen, some of which I know, some of which I'll figure out.
00:30:38
Speaker
um Very confident of the impact, but but yeah, how do we get there at every stage, given the limitations of the financial system and everything else? I think one very important thing here worth mentioning, I don't know if it's helpful for the listeners, but I personally think that when you're making climate companies that are doing significantly significantly harder in step change solutions, it really helps to have seasoned people from finance in the company.
00:31:05
Speaker
may or may not be co-founders, would be good to have them as co-founders, but in the main team. Because this is a bit like impact consulting. You'll see a lot of those people come from McKinsey and really talk to your consulting and then get into it. You know, people are like, oh, it's impact consulting, so I'll just go straight into it. No, actually some of the best consultants go into it later on.
00:31:22
Speaker
because you need to have, it's a jazz music, you need to have already been very good at classical to improvise and do whatever you want on top of it. It's that I think that straightforward financing solutions are not the answer for climate companies. So having that skill set in the form of a senior member is actually really, really important, I think.
00:31:42
Speaker
I think you're putting out a great challenge to any aspiring founder. Listening to this is you're not just telling somebody to create something or invent something. Uh, you're asking them to create a market and just going through my head is just that line from inception that Tom Hardy says where he, he pulls up his massive gun and says, says you need to dream a little bigger, darling. and Yes. Yes. Oh my God. I love Tom Hardy. I love inception. It's like one of my top five of all times. And I love that line. Yes. You need to dream a little bigger.
00:32:13
Speaker
Dream a little bigger, darling. Dream a little bigger. It means you put more at stake. You know, as it is, startups are hard to make. But now you really, really set yourself up for a really hard life. Very, very hard and can be disappointing. But also the most fulfilling thing you can do with your life to to shape the future of the planet. What could be more exciting?
00:32:34
Speaker
It could be more exciting. Do you have a quick lesson for us, just a quick one on a lesson that you learned when you you've described the how and the lessons that you're having to figure out on the way for the how? What was what was a lesson from that where you were like, OK, that doesn't work. Yeah, I think that it's a bit like a blueprint that I learned from my last few classes, even when I was not making climate, but generally. So it's something that you learned in experimental life in science.
00:33:03
Speaker
You basically set out what you're going to find from the experiment ahead of the experiment. Because once you start it and then you start to write down what you're going to find from the experiment, you'll find that you'll influence yourself. You'll bias yourself to success or failure, depending on whether you're an optimist or a pessimist.
00:33:20
Speaker
you have to already be ready with what you're looking to find out before you start the same way you write out a memo for hiring before you start so there's no biases and all the interviewers get circulated that so one of the things we did was we already decided what are the few top metrics we're gonna measure for our first pilot that will indicate to us things are working in the right direction. So we made a list of those metrics and a tolerance range for those and in a very scientific way went about doing our first pilot and then plotted the numbers to see is it fitting in. Even before I started, if I was an outsider and I had written this memo, would this have fit into my criteria of success? Because that's the same narrative I'll be giving to people.
00:34:01
Speaker
who have not done the experiment with me, but are only looking at the data sheet. You know what I mean? So kind of that. So we looked at carbon, we looked at unit economics, we looked at time, we looked at community outputs and all of that, even ahead of first deployment. So that's the how I would say create a blueprint.
00:34:18
Speaker
even before you've gone in to 100% test like a dry run sheet of what should you find to consider yourself successful if you did this thought experiment and you had a magic wand and then you actually do it in real life because if you set out everything after you start, you will vice yourself. We are all human beings, we will do it.
00:34:38
Speaker
But then also be a bit flexible. It's not that 100% of what you wrote down was correct. 20% needs to change. But if you don't have anything written, then what are you deviating from? You don't even have a benchmark to deviate from. So have the plan, then do the first pilot. um And the second thing that I've learned from my past companies and again applied to it is Actually, third thing as well, people, and I'll say it again a third time, people, who you have on the journey is so important, so, so important.
Importance of the Right Team in Climate Ventures
00:35:09
Speaker
I think that there is a soft element to that, and there is also a technical element to that. The technical element is overlap of timelines, priorities, skill sets. Where are they in life to be able to take that journey with you? Very, very important.
00:35:25
Speaker
um People doing co-foundership will just go with how they feel. I've seen that many, many times. And while that's a huge indicator, that's the first indicator. How do you feel? Are you comfortable? Are you okay? Are you happy? But then you have to do this technical assessment of where you are at life because those things are not always malleable.
00:35:42
Speaker
Those the rest of the life is not very changeable. And if you end up making decisions based on just how you feel and not where they are at life and you don't match that, then that journey doesn't become very useful or helpful because in the end, the bottleneck is always going to be people for the first five years. It's always people, the quality of the people that determine the output of what you get.
00:36:03
Speaker
So that's a big, big piece of how as well. um And I think that, you know, Carmen 13 gave us this questionnaire that was, I think, very useful to ask co-founders and go through that. To be fair, INL did not ask those questions of each other. We asked half, and it was very useful. But um I would recommend people to do that. I think lots of actuators do that. if i'm If I'm not wrong, I think Entrepreneur First does it, Antler does it. I think Y Combinator recommends you do it. I don't know.
00:36:29
Speaker
but um But I think having a hard technical assessment, not just of co-founders, by the way, but eat for the first 10 people. yes of like The first 10 people are a co-founding team, they'll have substantial equity. But that is a lesson I carried from my past into this, and I continue to take it seriously, that you're only going to be as good as the people that you have.
00:36:47
Speaker
um And last but not least, um I would say, and this is probably going to get me in trouble because it's not very, I'm i'm personally a super liberal person.
Entrepreneurship Driven by Passion
00:36:57
Speaker
I consider myself very left. So I'm not going to be a little not woke here, which is not great.
00:37:02
Speaker
um I think there is absolutely no way not to do hard work and be successful in this game. Like anyone who says that it's going to be very comfortable and very like work-life balance and going to make it. Good luck. I'm yet to see it. I've heard those sentences. I followed them up. I didn't see them succeed because Because the truth is you're trying to do a thousand people's work all by yourself with no money. And so the first few years are going to be insanely hard. They have to be. And if you're not feeling it, if you're not feeling that, then I don't know if you're on the right track. So so that's the other lesson that you can believe on the shortcuts that social media is trying to tell you. But I don't know how many of them have ended up making a startup that worked, because if it did, yeah the the person, the people behind it did work insanely hard for a few years.
00:37:56
Speaker
we need We need that. Only those who are in the arena can really tell us something about that. um yeah You cannot learn swimming by correspondence. You just have to jump in. There's just no other way. And I i think I've heard a definition of entrepreneur as an entrepreneur is someone who does. And I really hated that definition when I first heard it because it's just so inadequate and short. But the more I work with entrepreneurs, the more I think it is actually true. An entrepreneur is literally someone who is literally doing something. ah You meet a lot of people who talk about doing something.
00:38:33
Speaker
And in order to be somebody who stands up and does, I think you have to either be really motivated to do a company and actually you've got the freedom where you're not so obsessed with the problem, you want to do the journey and you find an exciting opportunity and you take advantage of it. But the other kind of founder who's very common to come onto to Carbon 13, of course, is those who are really pissed off about the problem.
00:39:04
Speaker
and they're angry that nobody's solving it, and they're passionate that nobody's solving it, and they love working on solving that. And so if somebody's like, oh, where do I find a good idea? I i ask them, what pisses you off? yeah Because that's gonna drive you.
00:39:22
Speaker
Yeah, a long time. ah long time like You have to feel the personal bond, either it pisses you off or you love it. You know and you just love it. like For me, I love the ocean. You can seat me next to the waves and you can come back in six hours. I'm still just sitting there. Just sitting there.
00:39:43
Speaker
um a person like me not saying a word, just sitting there. Like you come back. So I just, I'm driven by my love. Like I just love the ocean, honestly. I would, if I don't care how long or how difficult this is. I do it one day, one way or the other.
00:39:59
Speaker
And I'd also always said that and someone was like, oh my God, with all these boat trips and everything in the middle of the night, the tide is at 3am. You're in a five millimeter wet suit. You guys are diving. You barely even know how to swim. Like you're going to die in the North Sea or something one of these days. And for a second, I considered his sentence when he said you're going to die in the North Sea or something.
00:40:18
Speaker
considered it, and I knew I was doing the right thing, because you know what I felt? I was like, we're all going to die anyway. What is better than going back to the ocean where we were born? That's where I came from. That's where the prime primordial cell came from. And I was like, it wouldn't be bad at all. And when I said that, I realized how much I love the ocean, how much I love it. And so either it pisses you off or you love it so much that you know you just have to go for it. That will kind of drive you a long time.
00:40:46
Speaker
If you're listening to this and you're listening to Joyita and you're going, oh my God, me too, even if it's not about the ocean, if it's about anything at all, where you're like, I would happily lie down and die by a hydrogen plant. Oh my God, how cold, what am I doing? Then you should explore entrepreneurship.
00:41:10
Speaker
I think entrepreneurship is intensely a self-sabotage act, to be honest, on a personal level. And as Farnham Street has proved many, many times, it is people who are a little bit broken in their heads because otherwise it just doesn't make any sense that you would do this to yourself. um I would say it's slightly different for impact entrepreneurship and climate because we are driven for things beyond our personal success. We're driven for a greater good and a bigger common mission and goal as well.
00:41:36
Speaker
But in general, it is not a very comfortable life. It is a slight act of self-sabotage at an individual level. So you have to be that kind of person who's okay with a little bit of nihilism, to be honest. You have to be realistic about what your life is going to be.
00:41:52
Speaker
And yes, you have to be realistic and tailor all your decisions around it all because entrepreneurs are like the business is business professional, but the people behind it are personal because we're people. So you will be tailoring a lot, if not All of your life streamline to this, from your holidays, to your partners, to your friends, family, how much time you spend, whether you're able to see relatives, if they're sick or dying, the festivals, the gatherings, the dates, the shopping, the movie, you think of anything. It's all going to change. And it does 100%. And so it is definitely not something you want to do if you're looking for just a really good job with a calling.
00:42:40
Speaker
That's all my questions, Sriita. Thank you so much.
Call to Action for Climate Responsibility
00:42:43
Speaker
um Sometimes I ask, well, what's a call to action that you want our listeners to take? But I think you've just described that. I think a lot of people are going to be sitting back listening to this and having a lot of food for thought. And I recommend that they go and find an ocean to look at to consider it. i i and' say I'd say the same thing that I said in the middle of this call. ah Charles Bukowski, find something you love and then let it kill you. Yeah, absolutely right. um For anybody listening and you would like to know more, whether you're exploring joining ah a climate startup, starting a climate startup, investing in a climate startup,
00:43:24
Speaker
Please do reach out to us at Carbon13. We're a very open, friendly community. And if we can't answer a question, we'll know somebody who can. um And I just want to wrap up by asking everybody listening to really have a think about what it's going to take to solve the climate emergency. It's going to take the ocean. It's going to take robots. It's going to take new market creation. um It's going to take some anger. And it's going to take you.
00:43:53
Speaker
And a whole lot of love. And a whole lot of love. Yeah. That's a song, isn't it? A whole lot of love. That's a number somewhere. I think so. A whole lot of love. A whole lot of love. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye.