Speaker 2
And then your first company that you started was in the food and drug space to be the right way to describe it. Boy, I'm sure you had quite a steep learning curve going to build that. Yeah,
Speaker 1
totally. It was companies called Sun Daily started as Sundots. We were threatened with a lawsuit by the owner of the dots trademark. So I can go deep on trademark conflict and the existential uncertainty of renaming a company midstream. But that was in many ways the same exact story of yardstick in that it was science commercialization. In this case, it was a dermatology researcher from Harvard Medical School here at Boston, credible woman named Amelia Jivorsky. But it was totally different in that it was a consumer product. It was brand led. It was subscription e-commerce. And much similar, much in the same way the yardstick forms, she was like, hey, here's literature. Like this totally works. The premise was an ingestible sun protection product. So there were gummies. It's edible sunscreen. It's a pretty trippy plant compound called polypodium leukotomos extract, not trippy in the psychoactive sense, but trippy in the incredible sense. And she's like, hey, here's some literature. Like you eat this and it works like sunscreen. And I was like, that's nonsense. But I'll read the literature. And then I read the literature and it wasn't nonsense. I was like, holy moly, this is a game changer. We don't have enough time for me to sit on the therapist's couch of everything that made Sun Daily painful companies suffice to say a lot of it was as you suspect a steep learning curve to figure out how to run a company that's got a foot in dietary supplements, which is almost categorically like a pre-bullshit market and a foot in the beauty sector because the most passionate sun protection consumers in America are largely women buying in sort of like a skincare cosmetics beauty angle. It totally worked. I sold the company in early 2020, but to this day, more than three years later, like my kids take it. I'm bringing some to Hawaii tomorrow with my family. So it didn't sell the company because I wasn't confident in the product. It's totally legit. It exists in this awkward nether realm of supplement drug interaction stuff, but was a remarkable first founding CEO experience of just all the fundamentals of how to build a company. And when I sold that company, I was like, that was awesome. I never want to do another consumer product, but the parts that were awesome were this like science commercialization premise.
Speaker 2
You sold the company in 2020 and yardstick was founded in 2020. So you made a pretty quick personal pivot into a totally different space. What did that entail? Yeah.
Speaker 1
So according to the state of Delaware, we were founded January 1st, 2021. Relationally, it started in 2020. Much thanks to you and the broader MCJ squad. This is maybe June, July, and the acquisition of the company was a brand acquisition. Like they didn't want me. I'm a mediocre e-commerce entrepreneur. The acquirer grow of collaborative online retailers for the whole foodsy. They had plenty of those. So my earn out was pretty brief. And I decided I definitely want to do that again, that being co-founding a company alongside a scientist, but I only want to look at climate. Summer 2020 was not like ideal networking phase, shall we say. So whereas I would normally be trying to buy postdocs a beer around Cambridge instead, I was like, uh oh, I've got the internet. How can I use that instead? And so the MCJ Slack group was sort of my hunting ground. And I approached it in a pretty mercenary sense. Like I wanted to start another company. And so I was just looking for people who could be my counterpart. And I found one. He is my now illustrious hardware co-founder Kevin, our CTO. And he had already built a relationship with Christine Morgan, the lead scientist for all this work, who has been toiling in the lab for pretty literally 15 years before we came along. So MCJ, Summer 2020, I like, I love working on meaningful things. So like, especially some of the like existential angst of COVID, like what am I doing? Am I contributing? I was very happy to get back into a full-time experience.
Speaker 2
I can definitely attest to in those lockdown months of 2020 when so much was going on in the MCJ Slack. And you know, I remember weekend meetups around different climate topics that we were all jumping onto Zoom's for and whatnot. And you were there at every single one of them. You were so plugged into what was going on.
Speaker 1
I was. It's also a good fit for my personality. I love meeting other people. I love learning from other people. Some people like don't like networking. And I'm like, I get it. You don't. I do. You do, you've got the strength, if you go get this exact name in. In this way that we're doing, like in June, 10th, April, as you moving on to COVID, almost including COVID with fast road shaking surge. in January and then close a pre-seed in February 21.
Speaker 2
Which MCJ of course was excited to participate in and we're very grateful that you included us from the very
Speaker 1
beginning. Very much so and more than participate but participate. Relationally pull other people in. I have my relationship with lower carbon to thank MCJ for. That was a pretty remarkable few months of pulling it together and the sense that we were building a cool thing in the Boston area too. Despite the fact that we're remote first company and I'm the only one here. I love the sort of like always underdog vibe of Boston. I think we are higher performing per capita than the Bay and it was really neat to pull together Petrie and MCJ and BV who have a very strong Boston premise to kick off the company in early 21.