Today's guests are John Bissell and Rich Riley, co-CEOs at Origin Materials, a carbon-negative materials company that turns carbon found in biomass into chemical outputs.
John co-founded Origin Materials as an undergraduate at UC Davis in 2008. Rich became an investor in Origin in 2010, and joined as co-CEO in 2020 after a successful tech career, including most recently as the CEO of the music startup Shazam, which he sold to Apple in 2018. So what kind of opportunity brought a wunderkind chemical engineer and a seasoned software technology executive together? The way they tell it, it's the once-in-a-century opportunity to rebuild the world's material stack from one built on petrochemical inputs to one built on biomass.
Recently, Origin Materials went public through a SPAC merger and is now finishing its first commercial plant, Origin One, in Canada. In this podcast episode, Cody delves into John and Rich's backgrounds, how they met, Origin's theory of change, its technical processes, the market it operates in, and the chemical outputs its customers purchase. They also discuss their vision for scaling the business.
Almost everything we use in our lives is reliant on fossil fuel-based chemicals. However, Origin Materials is striving to change this by transforming the industry, as the world moves away from fossil fuels. Tune in to discover how they plan to achieve this goal.
In this episode, we cover:
- [2:44] John's time at UC Davis and what prompted his idea for Origin Materials
- [6:23] Rich's story and how he got involved with the company
- [10:52] The decision process behind John and Rich's co-CEO structure
- [12:49] Original insight behind the company's focus
- [19:13] How Origin Materials fits into the value chain
- [20:26] Challenges of working with biomass and Origin Materials' process
- [23:52] The company's different product streams
- [27:22] Use cases and how Origin Materials works with partners and customers
- [35:09] The infrastructure side of the business
- [38:39] How the company raised funds for its first plant and the evolution of talent they're bringing into the company
- [42:43] Origin Materials' unit economics strategy and what's next
Get connected:
Cody Simms
John Bissell / Rich Riley
Origin Materials
MCJ Podcast / Collective
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Episode recorded on March 17, 2023.
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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant
