CleanTechies Podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit cleantechies.substack.comWoo Hoo! Episode #200 🎉🎉🎉 First of all! Thank you SO SO much for your support all the way to episode 200! It’s been a helluva journey. Here is to the next 200… and beyond! 🚀NOTE: if you’re a free subscriber, you can get the full 52-minute conversation by upgrading to paid today. 🌎 Welcome back to CleanTechiesThe #1 Podcast For ClimateTech Entrepren…

What’s a construction worker’s favorite type of music? Heavy metal! 🌎 Welcome back to CleanTechiesWe are The #1 Podcast For ClimateTech Entrepreneurs.* Convo’s (x2) with top climate entrepreneurs each week 🎙️* In-depth takeaways for each ep to distill the core lessons 🙋* Companies to watch lists weekly(ish) 📝* Monthly show with Somil & Silas 🤓ClimateTech Investor? Entrepreneur? Maybe an aspiring one? Service provider?If what you do touches early-stage ClimateTech, this is the place for you. 🤝Too busy to listen? Check out the transcript below 👇 (if you’re reading in email, check out the full transcript by reading on Substack)Today, we are talking to Vivin Hegde of Zacua Ventures.Vivin Hegde is a visionary in the built environment space — from leading innovation efforts at Hilti to co-founding Zacua Ventures, Vivin is on a mission to redefine how we think about construction and infrastructure. In this episode, he dives deep into the challenges and opportunities of investing in the built environment, sharing his journey from managing corporate venture capital at Hilti to launching Zacua Ventures, where he backs early-stage startups focused on decarbonization, productivity, and infrastructure resiliency.Vivin unpacks:* The importance of "gentle disruption" in the construction industry 🛠️* The strategic shift from corporate innovation to independent VC investing 💼* How global perspectives inform better investment decisions 🌍* The key traits he looks for in founders, especially in the construction tech space 👥Convinced that you should know more about this? Well, you’re in luck. Tune in to todays episode to learn more…🎧💡📺 Watch on YouTube | 🍎 Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Spotify | 🗣️ Join the Slack ChannelThe Guest: Vivin Hegde* Vivin Hegde is the General Partner and co-founder of Zacua Ventures.* With a rich background spanning 6 years at McKinsey, and 8 years at Hilti, Vivin brings over a decade of experience in construction tech, industrial innovation, and corporate strategy.* At Hilti, Vivin played a pivotal role in driving innovation, leading global sales teams, and managing the Hilti-Trimble joint venture, where he spearheaded projects in robotics, software, and construction technologies.* Vivin is passionate about reshaping the built environment and leverages his deep industry expertise to support startups that are tackling decarbonization, productivity, and infrastructure resiliency challenges on a global scale.The Company: Zacua VenturesOne Liner: A global venture fund driving innovation in the built environment by investing in early-stage startups focused on sustainability, productivity, and urbanization* Zacua Ventures focuses on transforming the built environment through strategic early-stage investments* They integrates deep industry expertise with strong corporate partnerships, offering startups access to global networks and resources to accelerate growth* Zacua is led by partners with more than 30 years of combined industry experience and who have been investing in construction tech for the past decade * With regional presence in San Francisco, Madrid and Singapore, Zacua helps entrepreneurs to build and strengthen their value proposition and scale their businesses globally, leveraging deep corporate networksGot future guest suggestions or topics? Leave a comment!Unable to support financially but still want to help? Share this post w/ 3 ClimateTech (or aspiring) entrepreneurs. Sharing is super helpful to us, and it costs you nothing.📝 Show Notes:Topics* 02:04 Intro* 03:08 Defining the Built Environment* 04:56 Automation and Robotics in Construction* 08:40 Sales and Building Relationships* 24:59 Supporting Startups at the Earliest Stages* 26:35 Investing Globally to Fund the Best Entrepreneurs* 31:55 The Importance of Sector Specialization* 42:53 The Role of Data Centers in the Digital Age* 44:27 The Potential of Mass Timber in Construction* 45:48 Addressing Challenges in the Design Space* 47:22 Impressing Investors: Deep Understanding, Knowledge, and Learning AgilityLinks* Vivin Hedge | Zacua Ventures* Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn* Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn* @Silas & @Somil_Agg on X * This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.Text Transcript 👇🏽Somil Aggarwal:Thank you for coming on. What time is it where I'm finding you? Are you based on the East Coast?Vivin Hegde:I'm based on the West Coast, and it's about 4 PM now.Somil Aggarwal:Okay, very cool. It's about 7 PM here. I'm very excited to be spending my evening on this because getting the chance to talk to you is very topical for me. The listeners know that I'm a huge built environment investor and enthusiast, and you guys have made some key investments, including one of our previous podcast guests, Pathways. So, it's a bit of a collision of worlds here, and I really appreciate having you on.Vivin Hegde:They had some good things to say about you, so I'm excited to be here.Somil Aggarwal:Amazing. High praise—I hope we follow it up. But before we get ahead of ourselves, please, I know who you are, but the audience doesn’t, so could you introduce yourself?Vivin Hegde:Sure! I'm Vivin Hegde, a General Partner at Zacua Ventures. We're an early-stage VC focused on the built environment. We invest from pre-seed to seed stages globally. I manage our investments in North America and India, while my partners are based in Madrid and Singapore. We also have team members in New York, Mexico, Dubai, Melbourne, and Madrid. I’m excited to be here and would love to talk about everything we do.Somil Aggarwal:Great! When you say you invest in the built environment, what does that mean to you? Because there are so many different definitions out there.Vivin Hegde:For me, the built environment includes anything around us that doesn’t move. It could be buildings—commercial, residential, infrastructure like roads, airports, data centers, or wastewater treatment plants. All of this is part of the built environment for us. Our focus extends from design and development to construction and operation. However, as a fund, we don’t spend much time on the prop tech side, such as mortgages and lending. Everything outside of that, though, is fair game for us.Somil Aggarwal:So, technology in the built space around us—I'm seeing that as the theme.Vivin Hegde:Exactly. And that includes supply chains, too. We look at supply chain decarbonization and productivity. We focus on areas like cement manufacturing, steel, glass, and everything else. It's all within our scope.Somil Aggarwal:That makes sense. So, clearly, you’re focused on decarbonization, productivity, and infrastructure. Just to give you some context, by the time this episode is posted, we'll have had a good run of built environment companies on the podcast. One of them you might have heard of—Urban Machine. They build a giant robotic arm to remove metal fasteners from wood to make it reusable.One of the coolest things I learned from them is that there was a lot of iteration involved in making the robotic arm to reduce wear and tear on the machine. Do you generally agree that wear and tear is the biggest issue facing robotics? And what are you looking for when evaluating robotics in this space?Vivin Hegde:It really depends on what problem you’re solving. Wear and tear was crucial for Urban Machine because they're doing repetitive motion in their module, which required specific movements at certain angles. I've seen different versions of their robot over the years, and because they’re based nearby, I visit their facility often.However, for a company like Dusty Robotics, which does layout robots, wear and tear isn’t the biggest issue. It's more about precision—how accurately they print and how precise the lines they’re printing are. For companies like Canvas, alignment and steadiness are bigger issues. For example, they find it challenging to install systems when there's a lot of drilling happening nearby. So, how do you ensure stability and alignment under those conditions? It’s very use-case dependent. For Urban Machine, wear and tear is a significant topic, but it’s not always the most important issue for every robotics company.Somil Aggarwal:That’s interesting. So, it really varies based on the specific problem the robotics solution is addressing.Now, speaking more broadly, robotics and automation, especially in the built environment, are often seen as key solutions to labor issues—whether it’s labor cost, availability, or scalability of operations. As an investor, how close do you think we are to automating some of the labor required to build buildings, or even automating some of the processes in between? Are we still a few years out from seeing this hit the market?Vivin Hegde:As much as I like robotics, I’d say we’re getting closer, but we’re not there yet. We're making progress every day for a couple of reasons. First, the cost of robotics is coming down. Technology platforms like LIDAR, mobility, and payload systems are getting cheaper. Second, we're attracting more talent into this space, and labor is becoming more expensive. So, from a macro perspective, everything is trending in the right direction.But there are still some bottlenecks. Today, we design for humans, not for robots. Construction sites are not yet optimized for robotic consistency and repeatability. Robots excel when they can perform a single task very well over a period of time. Eventually, we’ll get there, but we're still in the process of making that transition.Somil Aggarwal:That makes sense. Thanks for that perspective. We kind of jumped right into the deep end, so let’s take a step back. You’ve spent a lot of time in and around construction materials and tech. Your journey is super interesting because you did some cool things before joining Zacua Ventures that I'd love to talk about. But first, when you finished your six years at McKinsey, how did you decide to transition into the construction tech space?Vivin Hegde:To be honest, it wasn't a completely deliberate choice to focus on construction. It was partly coincidental. At McKinsey, I did a lot of work in infrastructure, oil and gas, mining, and similar sectors, so I was exposed to the space and had a good understanding of it. I had also worked on acquisitions for one of the largest construction players.When I joined Hilti after McKinsey, it was as much an industrial play as it was a construction play. Hilti is an industrial company that needed someone with a management consulting background who understood the industrial sector. I was looking to join an industrial company with a global footprint, and Hilti fit that bill perfectly.It just so happened that 95% of Hilti's products are sold into construction, so there was a significant overlap that helped me understand the space well. After two years at Hilti, I moved into sales and spent every day on construction sites, which fully immersed me in the industry.…Tune into the episode for the rest 🎧💡 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cleantechies.substack.com/subscribe

Why did the electric car break up with the gas station? It found a current affair at the EV charger!🌎 Welcome back to CleanTechiesWe are The #1 Podcast For ClimateTech Entrepreneurs.* Convo’s (x2) with top climate entrepreneurs each week 🎙️* In-depth takeaways for each ep to distill the core lessons 🙋* Companies to watch lists weekly(ish) 📝* Monthly show with Somil & Silas 🤓ClimateTech Investor? Entrepreneur? Maybe an aspiring one? Service provider?If what you do touches early-stage ClimateTech, this is the place for you. 🤝Today, we are talking to Kieran White of Curo.Kieran is a friend of the pod, as we’ve known him for about a year. Originally from the UK, and like Silas, a college opt-out, he had a different start to his career. Originally, he hustled his way into a job with Tesla when they were not hiring anyone under 21. After some time there, he went to a recycling startup (Lasso Loop) and later decided to start Curo. In places like California, there is a lot of pressure to electrify fleets. The problem is that most fleet owners can’t afford to build the charging infrastructure required. Sometimes because of cost, sometimes because of space. They help solve this problem by identifying underutilized charging infrastructure. After scouting it out, they contract it, and then their customers can charge. Often, this happens at night when the daytime tenants are not using the charging. They get most of their customers set up in days. If they built their own infrastructure, it could take weeks or months. Today’s call is super fun. We discuss:* How he got that job at Tesla* The effect this exp had on him and how it led to him launching Curo * How they help fleet owners find reliable charging without building infrastructure * And how they help existing charging owners maximize their infrastructure It’s a great show so enjoy! 📺 Watch on YouTube | 🍎 Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Spotify | 🗣️ Join the Slack ChannelEvery ClimateTech Entrepreneur needs a reliable partner for their legal needs. Why settle for less than the best? 💪🏽Reach out to Goodwin Law today; the law firm of choice for hundreds of ClimateTech Entrepreneurs worldwide. They have you covered from funding docs to offtake contracts to IPO and M&A support. GoodwinLaw.com  (and tell them CleanTechies sent you!)Got future guest suggestions or topics? Leave a comment!Unable to support financially but still want to help? Share this post w/ 3 ClimateTech (or aspiring) entrepreneurs. Sharing is super helpful to us, and it costs you nothing.📝 Show Notes:Topics* 01:56 Intro* 04:23 Journey to Entrepreneurship* 06:20 The Problem Curo is Solving* 08:22 Challenges and Ops in EV Charging* 17:05 Policy, Incentives, and the Future of the Industry* 19:33 Navigating Ideas / Staying Focused* 23:52 Growth Hacks * 27:07 Tracking Progress / Systematizing* 30:17 Dealing with New Ideas* 32:57 Climate Startup Ideas* 34:26 Future of EV Charging* 38:38 Fundraising Advice & Closing ThoughtsLinks* Kieran White | Curo* Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn* Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn* @Silas & @Somil_Agg on X * This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cleantechies.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit cleantechies.substack.com🌎 Welcome back to CleanTechiesWe are The #1 Podcast For ClimateTech Entrepreneurs.* Convo’s (x2) with top climate entrepreneurs each week 🎙️ * Companies to watch lists weekly(ish) 📝 * In-depth takeaways to distill the core lessons 🙋 (paid)* Monthly show with Somil & Silas 🤓 (paid)* Slack Community 🤝 (paid)

How did the corporate giant announce their green initiative? By sending out millions of paper flyers about saving the rainforest! 🔖🌎 Welcome back to CleanTechiesWe are The #1 Podcast For ClimateTech Entrepreneurs.* Convo’s (x2) with top climate entrepreneurs each week 🎙️* In-depth takeaways for each ep to distill the core lessons 🙋* Companies to watch lists weekly(ish) 📝* Monthly show with Somil & Silas 🤓ClimateTech Investor? Entrepreneur? Maybe an aspiring one? Service provider?If what you do touches early-stage ClimateTech, this is the place for you. 🤝Too busy to listen? Check out the transcript below 👇 (if you’re reading in email, check out the full transcript by reading on Substack)Today, we are talking to Edo Perry of Elements World.Edo is a rockstar individual — from tackling the lack of green employer incentive problem to building climate tech communities across the USA, Edo joins us to share his journey from working in sustainability at Apple to founding Elements World, making it possible for employers to hit their sustainability targets through their employees. He discusses the unique challenges and opportunities in addressing Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions by leveraging the often-overlooked potential of employee-related activities, such as business travel, commuting, and work-from-home practices.He breaks down:* Their shift from a B2C to a B2B model 📈* Shares insights on fundraising challenges 💰* The importance of gaining traction before approaching investors 💵* The role of AI in optimizing their offerings 🤖Convinced that you should know more about this? Well, you’re in luck. Tune in to todays episode to learn more…🎧💡📺 Watch on YouTube | 🍎 Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Spotify | 🗣️ Join the Slack ChannelEvery ClimateTech Entrepreneur needs a reliable partner for their legal needs. Why settle for less than the best? 💪🏽Reach out to Goodwin Law today; the law firm of choice for hundreds of ClimateTech Entrepreneurs worldwide. They have you covered from funding docs to offtake contracts to IPO and M&A support. GoodwinLaw.com  (and tell them CleanTechies sent you!)The Guest: Edo Perry* Edo Perry is the CEO and co-founder of Elements, optimizing corporate sustainability through employee engagement. * With over 12 years of experience in climate tech, Edo's background includes work with NGOs, political campaigns, and sustainability roles at Apple. * At Apple, Edo Perry worked on sustainability projects including waste management, energy efficiency, and employee engagement in sustainability initiatives.* Edo Perry organizes intimate climate tech events that foster cross-industry connections and community building for organizations like Voyagers and ClimateHack.The Company: Elements WorldOne Liner: AI-powered tool that helps corporations optimize resources, cut operational costs, and reduce Scope 3 emissions from employee activities like business travel, commuting, and remote work* Elements World focuses on optimizing corporate sustainability through employee engagement. * The company aims to help organizations reduce carbon emissions by addressing employee-related activities such as business travel, commuting, and work-from-home practices. * Elements integrates into existing corporate systems to gather data and offers solutions like community solar and energy-efficient technologies to employees. * By creating a new standard of "climate benefits," Elements seeks to become an essential component of corporate sustainability strategies worldwide.Got future guest suggestions or topics? Leave a comment!Unable to support financially but still want to help? Share this post w/ 3 ClimateTech (or aspiring) entrepreneurs. Sharing is super helpful to us, and it costs you nothing.📝 Show Notes:Topics* 02:31 Introduction and Background* 05:23 Understanding the Employer Problem* 09:16 Transition from B2C to B2B* 13:13 Working at Apple and Decision to Found Elements World* 16:43 Fundraising Journey* 22:26 Using AI in Climate Tech* 27:26 Building and Scaling the Team* 33:06 Creating ClimateTech Communities* 35:44 Future Goals and Closing ThoughtsLinks* Edo Perry | Elements World* Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn* Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn* @Silas & @Somil_Agg on X * This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.Text Transcript 👇🏽Somil Aggarwal: Yeah, great, I'm super happy to have you on. I know who you are very well, but the audience doesn't, so please introduce yourself.Edo Perry: So I'm Edo, the CEO and co-founder of Elements. Born and raised in California, lived in Israel for the last 14 years. Recently moved to San Francisco, so I'm based currently in San Francisco. I've been in climate tech for the past 12 years, from NGOs to political campaigns to working at Apple on sustainability, to starting Elements in different communities. And that's pretty much it.Somil Aggarwal: Yeah, you're a huge community builder. Can't state that enough. And I'm gonna ask you a couple of questions about that before we get into it, but let's start off. We're gonna get into what Elements World does, but I think the coolest thing that you guys do is you try to tackle the employer problem. So just generally speaking, what is the employer problem?Edo Perry: I think that when companies today look at carbon emissions in general, and with all these new regulations coming out—like SB 253 in California, the CSRD in Europe, and the SEC's evolving standards—there's a lot of regulation that companies need to address. They've also put out these net-zero goals, and measuring all these emissions is very hard. Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions are a very challenging area that companies need to face. We specifically focus on the employee side, which we see as an untapped area. If we can utilize that in the right way, we can create value for both companies and employees, helping them reach their net-zero goals much quicker and more effectively. That's what we focus on.Somil Aggarwal: It's very clear that employers have a lot of agency in determining the carbon footprint of their employees. The way you go about it is not immediately obvious, but there are inherent decisions that employers encourage that affect that. And that's exactly what you tackle, right?Edo Perry: Yep, that's exactly it. We try to optimize resources. Companies spend a lot on business travel, commuting, and work-from-home expenses. We can help reduce these expenses and operational costs while also reducing carbon emissions. So, there's a win-win on that side.Somil Aggarwal: Let's start basic. If I'm a big company, let's call it Orange, and I want to decarbonize and meet my decarbonization goals, how does Elements World help me do that? How do you engage with that kind of company?Edo Perry: That's a great question. Usually, we work with chief sustainability officers, sustainability teams, and also CFOs or COOs. We integrate into their existing tech stack, such as HR, business travel expenses, and commuting systems like Uber and Lyft. We gather data to have accurate and granular information on emissions. The second part of our solution is the reduction aspect. We help optimize and find the right solutions to reduce business travel, commuting, and work-from-home emissions. We offer solutions like community solar, heat pumps, and smart meters. For example, one of our providers is Arcadia. We can offer community solar to employees or energy-efficient technologies. That's what we do with different companies.Somil Aggarwal: When we first sat down to talk about Elements World, you walked me through how you guys found the employer model. It's not necessarily a straightforward model. Can you tell us about the experimentation that led you to targeting employers?Edo Perry: Yeah, that's a great question. We started out B2C, wanting to make renewable energy accessible for everyone. We wanted to find different solutions and educate people about the financial value of solar, heat pumps, etc. But B2C is really hard, and we didn't see the market moving in that direction quickly enough. So, we shifted to B2B, realizing that if we want to make a bigger impact, we should go through employers. For example, Apple has 164,000 employees, which means 164,000 homes we could potentially reach. Companies have regulations and sustainability teams, making them more educated about these issues. So, it made more sense to go through the B2B route.Somil Aggarwal: In terms of messaging, you were originally thinking about the consumer, but then switched to the employer. What were the major differences in the language and approach that you felt?Edo Perry: It had a lot to do with finance, showing returns. Companies introduce new software for three reasons: making money, saving money, or due to regulation. The B2B side focuses heavily on regulation and cost savings. So, we changed our vocabulary to match their needs.Somil Aggarwal: You mentioned Orange as a big competitor to Apple a couple of times now. I think it's an especially potent example here because you used to work for Apple. Before we dive into that, I want to get a little bit of your journey. You were working within sustainability at Apple and decided to leave and start your own company. What was the decision to do that like? You're leaving what's presumably a relatively secure and cushy job, right?Edo Perry: That's true, and it was not easy. But, at some point, I felt that as much as I enjoyed the work there, Apple's focus on consumer electronics didn't align with my passion for sustainability. I thought I could make a much bigger impact outside Apple. I left on good terms and continued as a consultant for them. We've even worked with them through Elements. It just felt like the right decision to make.Somil Aggarwal: What were the biggest takeaways from your experience at Apple? Walk me through what it was like working in sustainability there and what you learned.Edo Perry: I was in Israel, working in R&D, and was the first to focus on sustainability and climate there. I handled projects around waste management, water, energy management, employee engagement, and getting buildings to LEED Platinum or Gold standards. Apple’s approach to sustainability and climate investment is incredible. Working with incredible people and seeing how they prioritize these issues was a big takeaway. Companies like Google and Microsoft are also good examples, but there are only a few companies doing this at such a scale.Somil Aggarwal: Definitely makes sense. So, you're a founder who's recently started this company. Would you consider yourself a first-time founder?Edo Perry: For sure. Yep, first-time founder.Somil Aggarwal: What was that experience like? Especially since your business model isn't hardware-heavy, how do you become a connective player in the ecosystem?Edo Perry: It's very early, and I like to say it's a first-mover's market. There are quite a few players in Europe, less in the US. We defined a term called "climate benefit for employees," similar to health benefits or pension funds. It's a new term that requires market education, and we haven't seen too many folks doing that. We aim to create a new standard in every company worldwide.Somil Aggarwal: There's a lot of white space for that. You've seen companies like Carbon Collective focus on bringing sustainability to 401ks. It doesn't feel like an employee's responsibility to figure that out. By engaging with employers, you remove a huge hassle.Edo Perry: For sure. Brean is a great example of a company we partner with. We try to offer their green 401k plans to employees of our clients. There's a lot of synchronicity in that space.Somil Aggarwal: What was it like fundraising for Elements? Fundraising is one of the hardest things a first-time founder faces.Edo Perry: It was not easy. As a first-time founder in a down market, it was one of the hardest challenges. We decided to bootstrap the company initially. I personally invested, and we had some family and friends help out. We focused on getting early traction and design partners, which our investors wanted to see. Once we had those big logos, like Lemonade, Estee Lauder, and Apple, investors took us more seriously. We eventually closed a pre-seed round with Fusion VC and other investors.Somil Aggarwal: That's incredible. What stood out to investors when you bootstrapped and then approached them with progress? What would you do differently next time?Edo Perry: Traction was key. Once we had large companies working with us, it showed investors we were serious. I recommend focusing on clients early on and getting substantial traction before meeting investors. We spent too much time meeting investors early without enough traction. Also, focus on the MVP and understanding company needs before building out many features.…Tune into the episode for the rest 🎧💡 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cleantechies.substack.com/subscribe

Water you waiting for? Dive into the latest in H2Oh-mazing technology!🌎 Welcome back to CleanTechiesWe are The #1 Podcast For ClimateTech Entrepreneurs.* Convo’s (x2) with top climate entrepreneurs each week 🎙️* In-depth insights to distill the core lessons 🙋* Companies to watch lists weekly(ish) 📝* Monthly show with Somil & Silas 🤓ClimateTech Investor? Entrepreneur? Maybe an aspiring one? Service provider?If what you do touches early-stage ClimateTech, this is the place for you. 🤝Too busy to listen? Check out the transcript below 👇 (if you’re reading in email, check out the full transcript by reading on Substack)Today, we interview Ravi Kurani, Creator & Host of the Liquid Assets Podcast and CEO & Founder of SutroIn the last episode, we learned how One Pont Five (OPF.Degree) is training 100k sustainability professionals.Today Ravi Kurani teaches us what he’s learned from interviewing some of the leading voices in the water tech space. You see, we had a lot of people asking for more about the water tech space — turns out we recently met someone who interviews all of those experts. We thought we’d get a 1 for X deal by speaking with Ravi. But first, a little background on Ravi. His Background: Growing up, he worked for his Dad who owned a chain of pool and spa supply stores. In his own words, he was basically a pool boy. After a short stint at NASA (🤯) he ended up working in a VC fund in India. There he was first exposed to the idea of impact investing. Having had a taste for what it took to build a startup, he decided to try his hand at the entrepreneurship game and founded Sutro, a pool sensor company. Fun fact #1: he actually ended up getting to know Sam Parr from My First Million well because they worked out of the same office in SF around this time. Fun fact #2: Sam is one of my favorite entreprenuers and MFM is one of my favorite podcasts.Through building Sutro, he got to know the ImagineH20 accelerator, where he met past guest Tom Ferguson (#178) (that’s how we found each other). Not too long into his journey with Sutro, he sold to Sani Marc, and he is currently scaling up the technology. 📺 Watch on YouTube | 🍎 Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Spotify Seeking a community of serious climate entrepreneurs? — Become a paid subscriber today to join our Slack community.You’ll get (1) high-quality bonus content, (2) special speaker events, (3) ability to ask questions, (4) access to all our paid content, (5) and most importantly a great group of fellow Climate Builders. Fast-forward: He now runs a podcast called Liquid Assets. Because he speaks with top water entrepreneurs, policy makers, and thought leaders, he has a wealth of knowledge. That’s why today’s conversation is so good. A few of the core topics that come to mind are: * The different categories of WaterTech* How the market being fragmented presents unique challenges to building in this space* The major differences between water and energy* How you should GTM in water* And perhaps most fascinating, why he thinks that water needs a new financing vehicleThis was a really fun episode, likely in part because he’s a fellow podcaster and in part because he just really knows his stuff. If you haven’t already, check out Ravi’s pod by going to LiquidAssets.cc—give him a follow. It’s highly worth it. Enjoy the episode! 🎧Got future guest suggestions or topics? Leave a comment!Unable to support financially but still want to help? Share this post w/ 3 ClimateTech (or aspiring) entrepreneurs. Sharing is super helpful to us, and it costs you nothing.📝 Show Notes:Topics* 02:28 Intro* 04:10 Learnings from Liquid Assets Podcast* 08:09 The Categories of Water* 11:20 Where Innovation Is* 13:27 Energy x Water (Policy)* 16:26 Upgrade to Paid Ad* 18:01 GTM in Water* 21:55 Power Dynamics and Wastewater* 24:04 Telecom Parallel* 24:52 Circularity x Water x Infrastructure* 26:33 Owning Wastewater* 28:45 Geo-Specific Challenges* 31:04 Water Isn't Priced Right* 32:20 KPIs for Success in Water* 34:13 Global Water Hubs* 35:35 Why Water is Close Knit* 36:49 Startup Ideas* 37:59 Water Needs New Financing ArmLinks* Connect with Ravi Kurani | Follow Liquid Assets* Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn* Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn* This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.Text Transcript 👇🏽Silas Mähner:Welcome to the show, Ravi. How are you doing today?Ravi Kurani:I am doing good, guys. How are you?Silas Mähner:We’re doing great! It's not often I get the chance to meet our guests in person, so I'm really excited about this one. Before we dive in, can you give us a brief introduction about yourself and what you do?Ravi Kurani:Absolutely. My name is Ravi Kurani. I'm the founder and president of Sutro, a water diagnostics company. We make a colorimetric sensor that floats in swimming pools and measures the water chemistry, providing real-time data on what adjustments need to be made. Besides running Sutro, I also host a podcast called Liquid Assets, where we explore the world of water through the lenses of technology, business, and policy.Silas Mähner:That’s fantastic! I’ve listened to some episodes of Liquid Assets, and you’ve had some really interesting guests. What inspired you to start this podcast?Ravi Kurani:It’s a bit of a journey. As the founder of a water company, I realized how vast and diverse the water industry is. Despite being a CEO in this space, I found there were many aspects of the industry I wasn’t fully aware of. So, I started Liquid Assets as a way to learn more about the industry while educating others. The podcast helps shine a light on the importance of water and the various innovations happening within the sector.Silas Mähner:Through your podcast, what are some of the key learnings or surprises you’ve encountered about the water industry?Ravi Kurani:One of the biggest things I’ve learned is how slow-moving the water industry is. Water is essential to everything we do, from drinking water to agriculture, which makes it highly regulated and resistant to change. This leads to long sales cycles and a cautious approach to new technologies. Another surprising aspect is how overlooked the industry is, despite its importance. Most investment goes into more visible sectors like SaaS or AI, rather than water. Finally, there’s a lot of innovation happening, but it often doesn’t get the spotlight it deserves due to the industry’s fragmented nature and the challenges of scaling up new technologies.Somil Aggarwal:Water is a critical yet often ignored area, especially when compared to other climate tech investments. How did you initially get into the water industry?Ravi Kurani:Interestingly, my entry into the water industry started when I was a kid. My dad owned a chain of pool and spa supply stores, so I grew up learning about water chemistry and testing pool water. After pursuing engineering and an MBA, I worked at an impact investing fund in India, where I saw firsthand the major issues surrounding water access and quality. These experiences combined to give me a unique perspective on the water industry.Somil Aggarwal:For those of us who aren’t as familiar, can you break down the water industry and its main segments?Ravi Kurani:The water industry can broadly be categorized into consumer water and industrial water. Consumer water includes everything we interact with daily, like drinking water, swimming pools, showers, and dishwashers. Industrial water is used in agriculture, manufacturing, and the built environment. Agriculture is the largest user of water, followed by industries like oil and gas, and then cooling towers in buildings. Understanding these categories helps in identifying where innovation can have the most impact, particularly in the industrial sector where water use is highest.Silas Mähner:Given your experience with both the consumer and industrial sides, where do you see the most significant innovations happening?Ravi Kurani:Innovations are happening across both consumer and industrial water segments. For instance, there are smart shower systems that help hotels and motels manage their water use more efficiently, and drone-based systems that monitor agricultural crops to optimize water and fertilizer use. Companies like Rainstick are working on gray and black water remediation, which is crucial for recycling water in various applications. Despite these innovations, the challenge remains in getting these technologies adopted widely due to the industry's slow sales cycles and regulatory hurdles.Somil Aggarwal:Water and energy are closely linked. Can you explain the energy-water nexus and its implications?Ravi Kurani:Absolutely. Moving and treating water requires a significant amount of energy. This connection means that reducing water consumption can also lead to energy savings. For example, using less water for irrigation or in industrial processes reduces the energy needed to pump and treat that water. Therefore, innovations that improve water efficiency can have a dual benefit of saving both water and energy.Silas Mähner:Policy plays a big role in the water industry. What are some policy challenges and how can they be addressed?Ravi Kurani:Water policies are often outdated and fragmented, which complicates effective water management. For example, California still uses water laws from the 1800s. Modernizing these policies is essential to better manage water resources and support new technologies. Additionally, there’s a need for policies that incentivize efficient water use and infrastructure upgrades to handle water recycling and reuse more effectively.Somil Aggarwal:You’ve mentioned gray and black water remediation as important areas for innovation. Can you elaborate on what these terms mean and their significance?Ravi Kurani:Gray water is relatively clean wastewater from baths, sinks, washing machines, and other kitchen appliances. Black water is more contaminated wastewater from toilets. Remediating and recycling these types of water can significantly reduce fresh water consumption. For example, using treated gray water for irrigation or flushing toilets can conserve a substantial amount of potable water. This kind of water recycling is crucial for sustainable water management, especially in areas facing water scarcity.Silas Mähner:It sounds like there are many exciting developments in water tech. For those interested in the field, where should they start looking for opportunities?Ravi Kurani:There are hubs for water tech innovation, particularly in areas with significant water issues like California. Organizations like Imagine H2O are great resources, as they connect startups with policy makers, corporates, and other stakeholders. Additionally, anywhere there is a critical water issue is a potential hub for innovation. For example, South Africa during its Day Zero crisis or Mexico City, which faces ongoing water scarcity challenges, are key areas where innovative solutions are needed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cleantechies.substack.com/subscribe

Why did the job seeker apply for a position at the bakery? Because they kneaded the dough! 🍞🌎 Welcome back to CleanTechiesWe are The #1 Podcast For ClimateTech Entrepreneurs.* Convo’s (x2) with top climate entrepreneurs each week 🎙️* In-depth takeaways for each ep to distill the core lessons 🙋* Companies to watch lists weekly(ish) 📝* Monthly show with Somil & Silas 🤓ClimateTech Investor? Entrepreneur? Maybe an aspiring one? Service provider?If what you do touches early-stage ClimateTech, this is the place for you. 🤝Too busy to listen? Check out the transcript below 👇 (if you’re reading in email, check out the full transcript by reading on Substack)Today, we are talking to Matthias Muehlbauer of OnePointFive.We have the pleasure of covering one of our good friends, Matthias Muehlbauer at the powerhouse firm OnePointFive. Matthias is a Founding Partner at the firm, where their activities range across two operations:* They provide diligence and climate advisory services* They train sustainability professionals They’re bringing a level of success and professionalism that is beating MBB (top 3 consulting firms) at the sustainability game.From operating such a dynamic business from day 1, Matthias has picked up a lot of great knowledge about the space:* The Future of Work in climate* Where sustainability is headed* The power of bootstrapping* What you need to know to be successful in getting a job in climateConvinced that you should know more about this? Well, you’re in luck. Tune in to todays episode to learn more…🎧💡📺 Watch on YouTube | 🍎 Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Spotify | 🗣️ Join the Slack ChannelEvery ClimateTech Entrepreneur needs a reliable partner for their legal needs. Why settle for less than the best? 💪🏽Reach out to Goodwin Law today; the law firm of choice for hundreds of ClimateTech Entrepreneurs worldwide. They have you covered from funding docs to offtake contracts to IPO and M&A support. GoodwinLaw.com  (and tell them CleanTechies sent you!)The Guest: Matthias Muehlbauer* Matthias Muehlbauer is a Founding partner at OnePointFive, a New York-based climate advisory and training firm. * Originally from Australia, he began his career at PwC in mergers and acquisitions and strategy consulting, primarily in the resource sector. * Matthias holds an MBA, with studies split between a Japanese government scholarship program and Yale School of Management. * His journey into the climate space began in earnest during his time at Yale, where he became involved with Cambium Carbon, a climate-focused startup, as head of finance. * He co-founded OnePointFive during the pandemic, successfully building the firm into a significant player in the sustainability consulting and training space.The Company: OnePointFiveOne Liner: Climate advisory and training firm helping organizations develop and implement decarbonization strategies* OnePointFive are your climate experts in residence, helping to grow your business without destroying the planet.* They develop intentional solutions across Climate Finance, Climate Technology, Training, and Sustainability Services to future-proof your organization and decouple emissions from business growth.* OnePointFive is recognized as a Forbes Next1000 company, with 2-3x year-on-year growth from 2020 until now. Their global network of 350+ highly vetted sustainability and climate experts are on-call to solve your project challenges.Got future guest suggestions or topics? Leave a comment!Unable to support financially but still want to help? Share this post w/ 3 ClimateTech (or aspiring) entrepreneurs. Sharing is super helpful to us, and it costs you nothing.📝 Show Notes:Topics* 03:12 About OPF* 12:22 Differentiating Ed in the Market* 13:49 From Expert Network to Education* 15:45 Workforce Transition* 18:43 Mid-Career Pivoters* 27:16 Bootstrapping & Being Nimble* 31:02 Embedded Sustainability in the Workforce* 40:14 Clean Energy and the Future of Fossil FuelsLinks* Matthias Muehlbauer | OnePointFive* Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn* Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn* @Silas & @Somil_Agg on X * This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.Text Transcript 👇🏽Somil Aggarwal:Alright, Matthias, welcome to the show. How are you?Matthias Muehlbauer:I'm doing great. Super excited to be on the show. I've been following the great work you and Clean Techies have been doing in the space. So, excited for today.Somil Aggarwal:I appreciate that, man. Those are a lot of nice words. I don't know if you'll feel the same after I catch you up on a soundbite or two later on, just saying.Matthias Muehlbauer:No worries, I'm an open book. We have a PR team that can clean things up if needed.Somil Aggarwal:He came in with the PR team! There we go, they're official, guys. They're official. Well, you guys are big enough to have a PR team, which means we should be knowing who you are. So, who are you and what is OnePointFive?Matthias Muehlbauer:Great, I'll start with a few things. Let me go through some of our business models and share a bit about our origins. OnePointFive is a New York-based climate advisory and training firm. We've been in operation for about four years. Essentially, we have two main focuses. One is our climate advisory side, where we work with multinational organizations across the US, EU, and APAC. We help them decarbonize their strategy and operations. We do a lot of Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions measurements and develop decarbonization plans and climate strategies to help them reduce their emissions.We also work with funds, helping them build their climate investment strategies and conducting due diligence on their investments. On the other side, we focus on training and skills. We run an eight-week cohort-based accelerator around sustainability consulting skills. Sustainability consulting is a term we use after some A/B testing in the market. It's essentially a Swiss army knife of skills needed in the sustainability space to help organizations achieve net zero.We launched this program in February last year, 2023, and since then we've had four cohorts, with about 600 people graduating from 40 different countries. We have around 15 local hubs where people can meet up in real life. These hubs include the US, the EU, the UK, and also places like West Africa and Latin America. We even have a guy in Mexico City heading up our efforts there. Our next step is world domination!Somil Aggarwal:Nice. Is this your personal travel list? Is that how you decide on new spots?Matthias Muehlbauer:Exactly, exactly. We open up Airbnb, look at all the sweet guest-nominated places, and figure out where the next hub should be. No, we have an online process for advertising our platform. We're fairly notorious on LinkedIn and have a bit of a presence there. As a result, we've got people from all around the world signing up. About 30% of our cohorts have been from the global south. We see a huge opportunity to upskill these sustainability skills in a corporate sustainability context.Somil Aggarwal:Amazing. So you guys do a lot. You do some advisory, you do sustainability consulting, which is kind of a catch-all for many things probably. You work with funds on diligence, and you're also focused on the climate transition. Where do you fit into all of this?Matthias Muehlbauer:I'm a founding partner at OnePointFive and have been here since day one. The two models are really connected. The advisory work informs our training content by bringing real-world practitioner insights into our courses. We're doing the research and building this content, presenting case studies from our advisory side to our academy. This ensures our education is relevant and practical, differentiating us from other players in the market. Traditional academic sustainability education often doesn't translate well to real-world corporate sustainability work.In our nascent field, the body of knowledge keeps evolving. Here's an analogy we like to use: if you start a sustainability degree and finish your first semester in three months, you're already out of date with current practice due to the rapid regulatory changes in sustainability. This is why we believe practitioners need to lead the education, matching the speed and nature of the field with micro-credentials and cohort-based learning programs.…Tune into the episode for the rest 🎧💡 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cleantechies.substack.com/subscribe

Why did the startup hire a fractional CFO? — Because they needed someone who could divide and conquer their finances! (rate our cringe in the comments)🌎 Welcome back to CleanTechies We are The #1 Podcast For ClimateTech Entrepreneurs.* Convo’s (x2) with top climate entrepreneurs each week 🎙️* In-depth takeaways for each ep to distill the core lessons 🙋* Companies to watch lists weekly(ish) 📝* Monthly show with Somil & Silas 🤓ClimateTech Investor? Entrepreneur? Maybe an aspiring one? Service provider?If what you do touches early-stage ClimateTech, this is the place for you. 🤝Too busy to listen? Check out the transcript below 👇 (if you’re reading in email, check out the full transcript by reading on Substack)📺 Watch on YouTube | 🍎 Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Spotify | 🗣️ Join the Slack ChannelToday, we are talking to Dimitry Gershenson of Enduring PlanetAfter three back-to-back episodes about sustainable timber/building materials, we dip our toes into the ClimateTech-Specific Services space. Building in climate has several unique challenges. One of those is the complex business model options. Some companies pursue an IP licensing route, some build their own manufacturing, and others work through partners. Is it about being capital heavy so you can borrow against it? Do you need to optimize for project finance? There are many paths to commercialization, so not having a CFO early on can be detrimental. But as we all know, cash is tight; fractional is the way to go. This is the first problem they solve. The second is providing working capital. When you land a grant, it can take a long time to get the money. They’ll forward you the money at favorable rates. If you sell to governments, it can take a long time to get paid because they often pay upon completion of the work. If you’ve got capital-intensive hardware, you’re going to need some cash to get things rolling. They also solve this problem. Every ClimateTech Entrepreneur needs a reliable legal partner. Why settle for less than the best? 💪🏽Reach out to Goodwin Law today; the law firm of choice for hundreds of ClimateTech Entrepreneurs worldwide. They have you covered from funding docs to offtake contracts to IPO and M&A support. GoodwinLaw.com  (and tell them CleanTechies sent you!)In our conversation with Dimitry, we cover the problem and how they are solving it in detail. We also dive into:* When to hire a Fractional vs Full-time CFO. You might be surprised by the answer. 👀* The need to make VC more inclusive. For reference, black founders received less than 1% of VC dollars last year (climate is slightly better than tech in general). 👨🏾‍🦱* The importance of Catalytic Capital. How philanthropic capital and other grant funding are the key to unlocking more capital. Some companies are willing to take the short straw to help build confidence for others. * ClimateTech’s political resilience. He’s confident that climate has a strong enough pull that a lot of the government funding won’t be too much at risk regardless of the administration next year. Check out the episode to hear why. We also get some time to go through Dimitry’s background from Facebook to Enduring Ventures (yes, they are partnered closely) to founding Enduring Planet. He’s got a fascinating journey. Another fun fact is that he’s been heavily involved in various community-building projects, such as Climate Vine (shout out to Candice Ammori) and Climate Curious, a network for Portland, Oregon’s climate people. They are doing great work helping enable climate tech companies to reverse climate change. Know of any other ClimateTech-specific service providers? Drop us a note. Enjoy the episode! 🎧PS: stay tuned for a new format of takeaways in a separate post where we highlight notable things and draw out themes to help you learn how to be a better ClimateGot future guest suggestions or topics? Leave a comment!Unable to support financially but still want to help? Share this post w/ 3 ClimateTech (or aspiring) entrepreneurs. Sharing is super helpful to us, and it costs you nothing.📝 Show Notes:Topics* 2:30 Introduction and Overview of Enduring Planet's Services* 4:10 The Importance of Supporting Climate Entrepreneurs* 8:47 The Gap in the Ecosystem for Finance Expertise in Climate Tech* 12:31 The Importance of Getting Finance in Order Early* 14:51 Timelines for if iFractional CFO and Hiring Full-Time Finance Talent* 17:22 Navigating Finance Challenges in Hardware Climate Tech* 19:18 Transparency in Lending* 46:17 Building Local Climate Communities* 50:47 Addressing Capital Gaps in the Climate EcosystemLinks* Dimitry Gershenson | Enduring Planet * Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn* @Silas & @Somil_Agg on X Text Transcript 👇🏽Silas (00:00)Alright, welcome to the pod, Dimitri. How are you doing today?Dimitry (00:02)So good, man. Thanks for having me.Silas (00:04)Yeah, absolutely. Really a pleasure to have you on. I've heard a lot about what you guys are doing. Some people are very big fans, so we're excited to uncover it a bit more. Tell us, what's the high-level summary of you and what you're doing?Dimitry (00:18)Yeah, so I'm the co-founder and CEO of Enduring Planet and we provide a mix of working capital and financial advisory services to climate entrepreneurs. Most of our working capital work is really focused on climate entrepreneurs that currently work with government. So folks that have large government grants or sell to government and they're looking for cash flow or liquidity support for those projects because generally the government tends to pay on pretty long timelines and that can be really painful. It also can impact the speed with which companies can execute on those projects. It impacts their ability to do their core work as well outside of those engagements. And so we provide pretty critical liquidity support, cash flow support for those companies with our sort of government advanced product. And then as of January, we started providing fractional CFO services to climate entrepreneurs as well, because we saw a really deep need in the market and had built a lot of expertise internally around doing that work through our lending business. It's been going really well so far.Silas (01:35)Nice, man. Well, why is this important currently? Why is this type of business and this service super important now?Dimitry (01:42)Well, I think that the needs are slightly different across the two businesses. You know, within the sort of working capital universe, there's just not enough money in this space. And there's particularly not enough money supporting climate entrepreneurs to do this kind of work. You know, most founders, their options are either raise really expensive dilutive equity capital to support their working capital needs, which is not good, lots of reasons. We're not a replacement for VC money, but we are a means for companies to dramatically reduce dilution and sort of their cost of capital. And then for the CFO work, I think our experience in the market has been that one, there's not enough of this kind of help in the ecosystem, but also the help that is available from some of the larger, more established players is often not tailored enough to the sort of the needs of climate businesses, right? It's a lot of kind of template cookie cutter b******t that just isn't good. And it doesn't help people make good decisions.Silas (02:42)So specifically on the topic of like why fractional CFO just for climate tech, you're saying it has to do with some of the specific things that they tend to deal with on a regular basis or is it also that plus the combination of the big guys just don't want to work with them because they're not familiar?Dimitry (03:12)So, I mean, I think you can hire the likes of Pilot and Bench as any company, right? But what you get is this kind of like... I don't know what to call it, whether it's a template or a premade model. And I think in a lot of cases, that works fine. If you have a really standard SaaS business, you sell B2B, you have one type of customer segment, you have three plans, whatever, that will probably work for you. Although I still have questions about the quality of the models and the assumptions. But as soon as you start to introduce complexity, which is really common in climate businesses, right? Maybe they sell to government and they have different pricing regimes for different government clients and different onboarding processes with a pilot and then, you know, phases and all this stuff. Maybe they get grant income. Maybe it's a hardware business and they want to do hardware as a service and want to introduce complex financing to model out what a working capital facility looks like for financing heat pumps, or maybe they are a carbon rule company and they need to add project finance to their model. Or maybe it's like a really young technical founder, or not even a young technical founder, just a less experienced technical founder who doesn't know a lot about finance. A lot of the elements of building a model, thinking through the pricing structure, thinking through the assumptions, thinking through the different levers that a company... that they can pull to drive revenue or reduce costs. Like that tailored help is not available in the market except from very limited number of very, very high quality specialized fractional CFOs that we personally know, but they only have capacity for three to four clients at a time. Right. And even they don't want to do accounting. They don't like, it's not also a great use of their time to build models necessarily. Like those people are expensive and their expertise and value really comes from that like hands-on working with the CEO, et cetera. And so what we found is that there's a pretty big gap in the ecosystem for this type of expertise around accounting, around FP&A. There's also all these accounting needs around grants and sort of reporting for government funds, which most bookkeepers are not really well positioned to do. And I think we do pretty well. And so I think in general, it's a question of like one availability of high quality services at our price point that's accessible to startups, which I think ours is very accessible. And then two is this like tailored, customized, bespoke help where what you're getting is like something that truly represents your business. as opposed to this like cookie cutter thing you get from everyone else.Silas (06:10)Yeah. And I guess just on the high level, what are the – you mentioned a number of things there, but what are the high level categories that climate tech businesses, especially in hardware, have to deal with? What are the topics that they need to be familiar with when it comes to this kind of financing?Dimitry (06:27)Maybe you can help me understand the question a little better. When you're talking about like, what is unique about raising money for these types of businesses, or are you asking what's unique about having to think about internal finances for these businesses?Silas (06:41)Yeah, what are the specific finance topics that somebody has to be familiar with to really navigate climate tech, especially as a hardware founder, well, like project financing, you mentioned some specific accounting things around dealing with obtaining grants. What are those key categories that you guys see?Dimitry (06:57)Man, it's, it's the list is long, right? Like having, yeah, I think that oftentimes people put off thinking about their finances at any level of detail until like the series A. We see a lot of founders who sort of get by with the bare minimum. And then, you know, decide like, we'll, we'll think about this when we have more resources. This isn't. You know, we need to really think about product. We need to really think about the customer. And I actually would argue that understanding your capitalization journey and in detail is important from day one and decisions you make really early on as a founder can shape how you get to build your company in perpetuity. So whether or not you buy equipment or lease it, whether or not you start to create structures for off balance sheet finance early. what you track and how you track it, how you price things and how you structure relationships with customers to get sort of the margins that you want. What are reasonable margins to target? How to think about product development so that you have a business that is financeable, right? I think a common example that I use is I used to work at a very large tech company and people want to look at my LinkedIn and figure out who it is they can. But I used to work at a very large tech company and they were very big bet on providing internet to areas that are unserved with some really complicated drone, wifi technology. And they spent $2 billion on that project before they built a financial model to understand the cost basis and how it would work over time and how to actually have a competitive offering to other services available in the market and they only figured out after two years and a couple billion dollars that the project would have to have a cost decrease of over 100X in order for it to be competitive with even the worst product. And at that point, they scrapped the project. Okay, they could have done that analysis a billion and a half dollars prior. Maybe not all the way at the beginning, but much earlier. And I think like that's a good anecdote for climate entrepreneurs is like, get your finance house in order early, spend the money. You don't have to spend a lot of money. But I would say like, if you've raised a pre-seed round and you don't have fractional CFO help, where they're building you a vision of your future that's relatively detailed and allows you to think about what assumptions drive outcomes in your business, then you should get one. It doesn't have to be us, but like you should get help. And then probably like around... the series A, that's when people start getting full-time talent. But I would honestly hire that full-time talent less for their ability to model or do accounting and more for their like strategic capacity. And then you still can use outsource help for sort of building models, doing accounting work, stuff that's like relatively, like it's hard work. But if you're going to hire CFO level expertise, you don't want them spending their time doing that work. They can guide the development of the bottle. They can tell, hey, analyst, build me this thing. But if you have a really expensive person who costs, I don't know, whatever, 250 grand a year plus, it's not always a good time. And it's not always a good use of their time to.Silas Mähner (10:16)Yeah. So broadly speaking, what you're saying then is there are so many different challenges in this space, especially depending on the business model itself, that it's as a founder, unless you are a wizard with finance and you've already done this stuff before, you probably should have some external support as an advisor because you're likely... There's a lot of, I don't know what I don't know going on.Dimitry (11:01)Yeah, and it's, you know, people are so willing to spend money on like a fractional product person or a fractional marketing person or, you know, just like so many places where people spend the funds. And this is a place that I find is often overlooked. Like people will do the bare minimum. And I think that's a mistake.Silas Mähner (11:22)Yeah. And just to clarify, what do you think is the typical timeline for somebody to bring in a fractional CFO and when does that typically taper off? You mentioned a couple of things around that when to hire a full-time person, but how do you typically view it with the average hardware climate tech startup?Dimitry (11:38)So yeah, so we have clients that range as early as like pre-seed, you know, maybe they've raised some angel money. Maybe they have actually raised a formal, you know, pre-seed round with institutional investors. I would say that's a good time to have. at the very least really good accounting help, but ideally like what I would call FP&A, financial planning and analysis, where you have an operating model that you update every month, where you track cash flow really carefully. You should be able to answer in any given moment to any outside party, whether it's a new investor or your board or whoever, questions around how much runway do you have? What are the factors driving that runway? What are your top expenses? How's your revenue growth working? Like, how are your margins looking? Like a lot of CEOs that we talk to don't have good answers to those questions. And that's like, that's a thing that you should be comfortably able to do. Starting at that point, right? As soon as you have any outside money, you better be very, very cognizant of how these numbers work for your business. And then, you know, some of our clients are as late as like kind of like late series A, early series B. In most of those cases they have internal finance talent already. So they'll have a VP of finance or a CFO and we play a supporting role because our time is less expensive than their time. So, you know, obviously generally folks people have outside accounting teams unless they build an in-house accounting team for quite some time typically until series BEC. But in terms of that FP&A function, I think oftentimes people will hire FP&A talent. to support their CFO. And that's like not always a great investment. I think that unless you have a lot, like let's say you are a project development business, right? And you have to build models every time you spin up a project and you have more than, you know, a handful of projects every month and you have to do a lot of diligence. Then like, yeah, you probably want to have an internal FP and team. But I think oftentimes it's overkill and people then expend a lot of resources on talent that their cost basis doesn't justify the value.Silas Mähner (13:26)Yeah. Well, I mean, also, we've seen really, really commonly that until like even series up to series B, a lot of hardware companies, like especially if they're doing deep tech innovation,They may not know what business model they want to pursue in the long term. So you would hire a different CFO type depending on the business model you're pursuing. So why hire a full-time CFO when you don't even know which direction you're heading and you need somebody to help you kind of figure that out and plan for the options basically, whether you're just going to license the technology or you actually plan to build a facility and produce it. So I think it sounds like I do not want to be the person having to deal with this. I'd much rather outsource it to somebody like you. So I think that it lines up with what we've heard in the pods, I'm trying to say. I guess one thing I want to understand is just broadly speaking for people who aren't familiar, how do you make money on this? Is it just a consulting service and then on the lending side, it's just like an interest rate? Is it pretty straightforward how you guys make money?…Tune into the episode for the rest 🎧💡(or check the full version out in the Substack app) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cleantechies.substack.com/subscribe

Announcement🚨🚨 ATTENTION 🚨🚨 CleanTechies has a new look 🚀We’re entering a new chapter filled with huge steps forward for us as a group (one of which you’ll see in today’s episode 👀). We’ve upgraded our logo and design to match.We’ll be explaining this & more in our first monthly show coming out at the end of July. Wanna stay tuned? Subscribe to follow along 👇🏽How do trees get online?They log in!🌎 Welcome back to CleanTechies, Founder edition. We are The #1 Podcast For ClimateTech Entrepreneurs.Each week, we publish 2x hour-long conversations with leading Founders, Investors, Operators, and Thinkers in ClimateTech to share their insights and tips for you.On top of that, we publish other content like our Companies to Watch series, where we highlight early-stage startups operating in the spaces of our guests. That way, if you find yourself bullish on a space after an episode, you might find a deal you can chase!Whether you’re an active ClimateTech Entrepreneur, an aspiring one, an investor, a service provider…if what you do touches supporting early stage climate tech, this is the place for you. Subscribe today.Today, we are talking to Ben Christensen of Cambium.🚨 Too busy to listen to the whole thing? We get it! That’s why we’ve included the text transcription at the end of this post - check it out 👇🏽In our third installment of sustainable building materials, we’re taking another look at lumber. We’ve already called reclaimed lumber “the superpower building material you’ve never heard of”. As a refresher, lumber, processed wood from trees, is a versatile and widely used building material known for its strength, durability, and workability. So why isn’t there more of it in our buildings? Well, as great as lumber is, usable lumber from our buildings only comes from a few places — in the USA, it comes mainly from the Northwest and Southeast. For this reason, lumber is an expensive building material.But all hope is not lost. Last week, we covered Urban Machine, a company turning waste wood reusable by removing objects from it. This week, we’re covering Cambium - a hot 🔥 startup pioneering regenerative, local supply chains for wood by converting waste wood into reusable assets for the lumber industry. Not only do they have their own white-labeled wood called Carbon Smart Wood, but they have an innovative SaaS platform that can function as the source of truth for the entire supply chain.Convinced that you should know more about this? Well, you’re in luck. Tune in to todays episode to learn more…🎧💡📺 Watch on YouTube | 🍎 Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Spotify | 🗣️ Join the Slack ChannelEvery ClimateTech Entrepreneur needs a reliable partner for their legal needs. Why settle for less than the best? 💪🏽Reach out to Goodwin Law today; the law firm of choice for hundreds of ClimateTech Entrepreneurs worldwide. They have you covered from funding docs to offtake contracts to IPO and M&A support. GoodwinLaw.com  (and tell them CleanTechies sent you!)The Guest: Ben Christensen* Ben Christensen is the CEO and co-founder of Cambium, a company focused on transforming supply chains for materials in the built environment by sourcing wood from salvage sources instead of cutting down new trees* He grew up in a construction background, with his father being a carpenter, and has always been passionate about wood and sustainable practices* Ben has a background in research and academia, and previously secured a grant from the Nature Conservancy to study wood waste in cities* Ben is also an ultra runner, which contributes to his gritty and determined approach to building and scaling his companyThe Company: CambiumOne Liner: Converting waste wood into valuable building materials, all centralized on their innovative SaaS platformCambium Carbon is a company transforming lumber supply chains for materials in the built environment. They source wood from salvage sources, diverting it from landfills, and repurpose it into valuable building materials. Their platform connects the entire supply chain from sourcing to processing to logistics, ensuring transparency and efficiency. Cambium Carbon partners with cities and local communities, focusing on job creation and environmental sustainability, and can fashion the wood into their own branded product, Carbon Smart Wood.Got future guest suggestions or topics? Leave a comment!Unable to support financially but still want to help? Share this post w/ 3 ClimateTech (or aspiring) entrepreneurs. Sharing is super helpful to us, and it costs you nothing.📝 Show Notes:Topics* 02:10 Introduction* 06:24 Challenges in the Lumber Supply Chain* 14:04 Deciding on the Founder Venture-Fact Operating Model* 16:26 Guaranteeing Offtake and Ensuring Supply* 19:03 The Value of Waste Wood* 29:03 Competing with Incumbents* 34:09 Scaling the Local Approach* 45:32 Advice for FoundersLinks* Ben Christensen | Cambium* Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn* Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn* @Silas & @Somil_Agg on X * This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.Text Transcript 👇🏽Somil Aggarwal:Alright Ben, welcome to the show, how are you?Ben Christensen:Doing well, thanks so much for having me.Somil Aggarwal:Thank you for being on here from your day job of saving the forests. This is a huge pleasure to have you on speaking on the podcast today. So this is super fun.Ben Christensen:Excited to be here. It's gonna be great.Somil Aggarwal:I know who you are, but the audience doesn't, so please don't leave us in suspense.Ben Christensen:I'm Ben Christensen, CEO and co-founder of a company called Cambium. We're all about transforming supply chains for materials in the built environment. What does that actually mean? We help source wood from salvage sources instead of cutting down new trees and forests. Basically, and I'm sure we'll get into all of this, but we save fallen trees that were going to landfills or going to end up as mulch.We transform them into valuable building materials that can be used to build buildings, for furniture, for architectural elements. Our brand is called Carbon Smart Wood. And then we built out this technology platform that actually traces the full piece of it. We connect the sourcing to processing to logistics, and then ultimately to the end customer. Once you've got a data layer that connects all of these dots, it gives you really clear carbon data and pricing data across the supply chain.Somil Aggarwal:So you're a combination of sort of a supply chain software with a really innovative approach to how you retrofit waste wood to start with and somewhat of a playbook that might be able to scale broader than that based on maybe a quick foreshadow you gave there. But let's start basic, why did you start with wood? And I guess specifically here, waste wood in the first place.Ben Christensen:The story to coming to waste wood is interesting. I grew up in wood. My dad's a construction worker, carpenter. We have a three-car garage at my home that never had a car in it. It was always filled with wood and all kinds of different tools. And so I spent a ton of time in that space growing up. I never thought about waste wood in any big way. I always felt like recycled material, salvaged wood was kind of this nice thing, a good thing, but a small thing.And then in grad school, I started to understand it more and more. I recognized that this is actually a crazy big overlooked opportunity. From the unmanaged forests, think city trees, the trees around cities, there's about 46 million tons of material that comes out of there every single year that is currently being wasted. So there's this gigantic amount of wasted material in the U.S. and nobody's really solving it.One day I was at a local sort of waste yard, a place where people bring logs to then dispose of them, to turn them into mulch or a lot of that ends up being sent to landfill. I was there, I was talking to the people, I learned about it. Then on a hot summer day, I went over to the grocery store to get something refreshing. As I was walking in, there was firewood in front of the grocery store. This was all in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up. That firewood in Albuquerque, which was about a mile away from this big waste yard where we're throwing all this wood away, was from Estonia. It was a real quick moment where it was like, what are we doing? A mile away we're throwing wood, we're shipping wood in from Europe, it doesn't make any sense. That was the moment that really pushed me into diving in and recognizing how big this problem actually is.Somil Aggarwal:And so that's the imported wood at a local forest store. It's that story. I agree, it's equally mind-blowing. You have something that's locally sourceable, which I know is a big thing for you guys. So we're going to get into that. You're paying this premium for things that you don't need to pay a premium for, which is so dumb. Going into a new supply chain, going into wood, I'm sure you having grown up with it had a certain understanding of it. Then you enter a logistical nightmare of what is supply chains in this world. From your experience now being a founder in this space, what are the major challenges within lumber timber and moving it around?Ben Christensen:A couple of key challenges. One is that it's heavy. This is a material that is big and it's heavy, so transportation costs really matter and how you move it really matters both from price and from a carbon impact perspective. The second is that it's a really complicated and fragmented industry. We often think about wood as just something that sort of exists. It’s a card in Settlers of Catan, or it's just part of a table that we sit at. We don't actually think about wood. Usually, whatever desk you're sitting on, somewhere between eight to ten businesses have to touch that material before it ends up in your home or before it ends up in the walls of our houses or buildings.Those eight to ten businesses look really different. They are in different places. They transact often in really archaic ways and they don't actually have any connectivity. So what that means is you've got these supply chains that are long, they're complicated, and they don't really have technology that serves them. As we got into this more and more, we recognized that there's this big opportunity to bring those together. It's also pretty hard to do because you're dealing with lots of different stakeholders in a legacy industry. So plenty of challenges in actually building.Somil Aggarwal:Generally speaking, that means that your solution, and again, jumping ahead here, your solution is not only making it from a reuse perspective better for the environment, but then also, this comes from my view as an investor in the space and just looking broadly at what we need to get mass timber into supply, transportation, like you said, and locality is a huge issue. It's located in two pockets, essentially. You're either in the Northwest or the Southeast, right, if you're in the US.Any place in the middle has to pay a pretty high premium to get it in high supply. With that backdrop, when you're looking at entering the space, was it, you come from somewhat of a background. So I don't know if it probably felt this way, but did you feel a challenge like getting into the supply chain, right? And kind of entering at a certain point and how did you grow your ability to deliver?Ben Christensen:Definitely. This is a challenge and it's still something that we are very much working on as a company. We have now sourced tens of millions of board feet and are scaling in some pretty big ways, which is really exciting. But there's lots that we're still continuing to dive into because it is such a big industry. At the start, one of the big things that we would face is really just learning how to talk to different folks.We have people who are arborists, so people who actually take care of managed trees. We work with cities, people who actually own the trees in many cases. We work with lumber folks. We work with sawmills. We work with trucking companies. Each of those has a little bit of a different way in which you communicate to them. One of the things that we learned really early on is rather than coming in and trying to say, here's our value proposition, this is why you should be part of this bigger solution. We’ve really learned that the way to do that is to be super, super listen first on everything. That’s been our approach is help us understand what your pain points are, all of those things. Some of that's pretty intuitive. I think a lot of companies do that. But when you're doing this more systemic approach where you've got lots of different users, it's really important to get that right. We talk about it all the time, listen for sales. That's been really important in terms of entering this industry because people often are not that interested in new solutions, but they actually are interested in telling you about their problems. So that's a great way to enter, and we found that to be really successful.…Tune into the episode for the rest 🎧💡 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cleantechies.substack.com/subscribe

Announcement🚨🚨 ATTENTION 🚨🚨 CleanTechies has a new look 🚀 We’re entering a new chapter filled with huge steps forward for us as a group (one of which you’ll see in today’s episode 👀). We’ve upgraded our logo and design to match.We’ll be explaining this & more in our first monthly show coming out at the end of July. Wanna stay tuned? Subscribe to follow along 👇🏽Why did the tree go to the party?Because It wanted to "branch" out! 🌎 Welcome back to CleanTechies, Founder edition.We are The #1 Podcast For ClimateTech Entrepreneurs.Each week, we publish 2x hour-long conversations with leading Founders, Investors, Operators, and Thinkers in ClimateTech to share their insights and tips for you.On top of that, we publish other content like our Companies to Watch series, where we highlight early-stage startups operating in the spaces of our guests. That way, if you find yourself bullish on a space after an episode, you might find a deal you can chase!Whether you’re an active ClimateTech Entrepreneur, an aspiring one, an investor, a service provider…if what you do touches supporting early stage climate tech, this is the place for you. Subscribe today.Today, we are talking to Eric Law of Urban Machine.🚨 Too busy to listen to the whole thing? We get it! That’s why we’ve included the text transcription at the end of this post - check it out 👇🏽Reclaimed lumber is the superpower building material you’ve never heard of (because we’re all up to date on our Rolodex of sustainable building materials, right?). Lumber, processed wood from trees, is a versatile and widely used building material known for its strength, durability, and workability. So why isn’t there more of it in our buildings? Well, as great as lumber is, usable lumber from our buildings only comes from a few places — in the USA, it comes mainly from the Northwest and Southeast. That makes lumber an expensive building material.But all hope is not lost. In comes Urban Machine. By creating reusable lumber from waste sites, they are increasing the supply of usable lumber, making it not only more available but more local.Convinced that you should know more about this? Well, you’re in luck. Tune in to todays episode to learn more…🎧💡📺 Watch on YouTube | 🍎 Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Spotify | 🗣️ Join the Slack ChannelEvery ClimateTech Entrepreneur needs a reliable partner for their legal needs. Why settle for less than the best? 💪🏽Reach out to Goodwin Law today; the law firm of choice for hundreds of ClimateTech Entrepreneurs worldwide. They have you covered from funding docs to offtake contracts to IPO and M&A support. GoodwinLaw.com  (and tell them CleanTechies sent you!)The Guest: Eric Law* Eric Law is the Co-Founder and CEO of Urban Machine* He spent his childhood spare time working on mini construction projects with his family (don’t you??)* With a background in construction and tech, Eric previously built and sold a SaaS company and led innovation programs for large contractors* His expertise spans mechanical engineering, construction technology, and sustainable solutions* At Urban Machine, he combines his experience to develop robotic systems that automate the removal of metal fasteners from reclaimed woodThe Company: Urban MachineOne Liner: Builds robots to reclaim and recycle lumber from construction and demolition wasteUrban Machine specializes in developing advanced robotic systems designed to automate the removal of metal fasteners from reclaimed lumber. These robots use cutting-edge technology, including computer vision and AI, to identify and extract nails, screws, and other fasteners, transforming waste wood into reusable, high-quality lumber. By making this process efficient and scalable, Urban Machine not only reduces construction waste but also provides a sustainable source of reclaimed wood for new building projects. Got future guest suggestions or topics? Leave a comment!Unable to support financially but still want to help? Share this post w/ 3 ClimateTech (or aspiring) entrepreneurs. Sharing is super helpful to us, and it costs you nothing.📝 Show Notes:Topics* 03:14 Building Robots for Lumber* 08:22 Removing Metal* 18:30 Predicting Inventory* 26:27 Challenges of Building a Hardware Company* 28:47 The Economics of Construction* 36:26 The Future of Urban Machine* 40:35 Keys to Success in the Construction Tech IndustryLinks* Eric Law | Urban Machine* Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn* Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn* @Silas & @Somil_Agg on X * This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.Text Transcript 👇🏽Somil Aggarwal:Alright Eric, welcome to the show, how are you?Eric Law:I'm doing great. Thank you for having me on, Somil.Somil Aggarwal:Thank you for being on. For anyone who's tuning in via audio, Eric's background is a bunch of wood, which very much foreshadows what we're gonna talk about. Eric, don't leave the audience in suspense. Please, who are you?Eric Law: So I'm Eric Law, co-founder and CEO of Urban Machine. Urban Machine is about a two and a half-year-old robotics company, and we are building robots for reclaiming lumber from construction and demolition waste. Somil Aggarwal: Very, very easy problem to tackle, right? Super simple. It's why we've had like 10 lumber companies on this podcast, right?Eric Law: Haha exactly. Literally, we are building robots to pull nails. We are automating the crowbar essentially at its most basic step.Somil Aggarwal: And it's like a full robotic arm. It's doing the whole thing?Eric Law: We've got arms, we've got cookers, we've got cutters. It's about a four-step process to get the metal fasteners out. Computer vision, AI, every piece of tech you can imagine, and it's about a 150-foot-long machine.Somil Aggarwal: So at the high level, if I understand this correctly, I watched a video of how you guys do it. You take basically a piece of wood that you want to recycle. They have these like giant metal screws that are still inside of the wood that you need to remove. And then you use a robotic arm to pull it out. Is that right?Eric Law:So there's actually two steps we do before. We've got the videos at the end effectors where we extract it. But for things like screws, long nails, we do kind of what we call a normalization process. We actually cut off all the extra metal. So you end up with just a little short nub sticking out of the wood and then we cook it. We heat it up until it's bright red, charring the wood that's holding those threads in place. And then we can extract a screw just like a nail. Just pull it straight out.Somil Aggarwal:Is that like, this might be a dumb question, but is it safe to be around the process when it happens? Is there any sort of fumes in that situation?Eric Law:It's just like a campfire. So we're charring wood, right? It's just like a campfire or any standard building structure fire. You know, a little bit of fumes come off of the fasteners depending on what they're coated with, but we exhaust that out. So we scrub it and exhaust it.Somil Aggarwal:That's so cool. How did you find this problem? Like, did you go from like, "Hey, I've exited the SaaS company. Let me walk around some construction sites because I'm bored." Like what led you there?Eric Law:After selling the SaaS company, I spent a couple of years with the company that acquired it, running their construction products portfolio. And then I left there and went to a large general contractor where I built an innovation program. We focused on solving the craft shortage problem in the field. The approach we took is you need labor to build buildings. We have a physical product. And robotics is the only tool in the tool chest to physically put material in place, aside from humans.And so we worked with a lot of robotic startups on how to build buildings in the field, how to prefab material in factories, bring those prefab sections to the field, and reduce the amount of labor required because we just don't have enough people going into construction. And people want more housing and more buildings and stuff like that. And while I was there, I got involved with a sustainability initiative where we were looking at the waste streams. Our job sites were generating just tremendous amounts of waste. Think about shrink wrap and lumber and concrete and steel all coming off these job sites. And when we started digging into where it's going, that's where I learned that the wood was getting incinerated or buried in landfills. Nobody's recycling lumber coming off of job sites. And so it's like, okay, we recycle concrete, we recycle steel, why not lumber? Those are the three predominant structural materials. And it was the fasteners.Just the labor involved to get the fasteners out was too difficult and you couldn't do anything with that lumber. You couldn't mill it, plane it, you couldn't feed it back in the lumber process with all these fasteners sticking out. And so anytime I come up with a process where it's highly repetitive, it's dull, it's dangerous, it takes a lot of labor, all right, that's a solution that robots are doing really well at. They love to repeat the process over and over.Somil Aggarwal:That's amazing. And I feel like we kind of jumped a couple of steps ahead because it's hard not to talk about how cool the tech is. So you were sort of in the space looking at, it doesn't sound like you were necessarily looking at it from a sustainability point of view, sort of an innovation point of view, looking at the waste streams of construction. And you saw these fasteners. So fasteners like this metal in the wood, essentially, from previous construction projects likely, right?Eric Law:It was about holding the building together, temp structures, concrete formwork. They all use nails, screws, staples, the three predominant fasteners we run across. And we were looking at it from a cost perspective and a sustainability perspective. You know, what is all this waste? How do we reuse it?Somil Aggarwal:And why, I'm gonna use your wording here, why do you cook screws?Eric Law:So if you ever try and pull a screw out of a piece of wood with a pry bar, one, it's incredibly hard, and two, if it does come out, it tends to shear, where you leave the threaded part in the wood. Screws are phenomenal with holding force and the ability to hold multiple pieces of wood together. And so by cooking it, we're charring the wood and essentially breaking down those fiber bonds that hold the fastener in place. And then it slips out just like a nail. To remove a screw takes hundreds of pounds of pull force if you're pulling straight out. After we cook it, 10 to 20 pounds of pull force.Somil Aggarwal:Wow, so it's more or less just making it, is it looser? Like how would you think about it?Eric Law:I mean, if we overcook them, they fall out. We can cook it so long where you can char the wood, where you shake the wood and the fastener will fall out. But we found about 45 seconds of cook time is perfect. Give it a light tug and out it comes.Somil Aggarwal:Okay, so now you have this ability to cook the screws, build this robotic arm, and take it out. We joked about this. You gotta tell me, how in the world do you get a robotic arm from this idea in your head to a robotic arm in front of you?Eric Law:A lot of testing in the lab. And before that, I partnered up with some really great folks. So my co-founders Andrew Gillies and Alex Steele, I pitched them on the idea. Andrew and I had done some research on other robotics projects before. Andrew's background is agro robotics, industrial robotics. Super sharp guy. And I said, hey, I got this problem. Could we automate with robots? And he's like, absolutely. He's like, we could totally do this. And so within about a month or so, he built the first prototype where he was using a webcam to pull nails out of a piece of two by four. And that's how we ended up closing the first round of fundraising as we took it down the road, showed it off to some investors and they were like, we'll invest in these guys. And Andrew knew Alex before he's like, I know this really sharp computer vision AI guy that we got to bring on the team. And so that's how the three of us got together and formed Urban Machine back in October of 21.Somil Aggarwal:Nice, you got the eyes, the brawn, and the wood guy. Essentially, where do you put yourself in that puzzle?Eric Law:Exactly. I'm the construction. I'm the one that's out trying to sell this thing and get the customers on board and fundraising. They take care of the hardware and the software and the AI and make the magic work.Somil Aggarwal:How do you, I'm curious, like, so you've built this team together. Someone, you know, one of them clearly has previous robotic experience, and then there's the vision component, which is, so how many understand this? Is this under looking at the nails in the wood? Like, are you trying to identify nails in the wood? Like, how much of a vision technology are you doing?Eric Law:The computer vision is set up to identify the location of the fasteners, the type of the fasteners, and then we use that for the extraction process. Because you want to understand the orientation of the fastener in order to extract it. And so we do all that with computer vision. We’ve trained our own models. And keep in mind, over the last 100 years, a lot of different fasteners have been used. Everything from tiny little nails for lath and plaster siding to big nails for concrete formwork, screws, all different shapes and sizes of screws. The key thing is, how do you handle essentially this unknown material? You have no idea. You’re just feeding this machine lumber and it’s got all these fasteners in it. We’ve got to be able to get them all out every time. And so that’s what this multi-step process is for, to ensure that using a combination of muscle, cutting, cooking, technology, computer vision, and extraction with this robotic end effector, it becomes metal-free by the end of the line.Somil Aggarwal:So there’s both the identification, you have to pull it out, and you’re basically surveying the whole piece of wood just to detect these imperfections. And so now let’s say you have a completed piece of wood, you’ve grabbed it, removed it, how are you handling that wood to send it to essentially its next building, its next wall to record a podcast behind?Eric Law:Once it’s metal-free, then it becomes a bunk of lumber, just like virgin lumber, and heads on the flatbed trucks. Before our process, we call it the prickly pear state. It’s full of nails and everything sticking out, so we have to handle it with special mechanisms and special systems. But once it comes out the other end, you can run it on a conveyor, standard rollers. You can load it up on racks, standard flatbed trucks. It’s ready to roll as a 2x4, 2x6, and go back in that lumber ecosystem.Somil Aggarwal:Are you fighting a perception problem? Do people look at your reused lumber any differently?Eric Law: Anyone who knows anything about wood knows our reused lumber is actually higher quality than the new stuff that you get. It’s one of the very few products because the trees that we harvested 50 years ago, 75, 100 years, the farther back you go, they were allowed to grow longer in nature. Today, everything’s coming off of farms. We’re in second, third, fourth growth forests, depending on what you’re harvesting. Those tree farms typically harvest smaller, faster-growing trees, so they have wider grains and are grown for speed. It’s not as high quality as what you got 100 years ago, even 50 years ago. We’re bringing to market a recycled product that’s higher quality than the stuff you get at your lumber yard today.…Tune into the episode for the rest 🎧💡 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cleantechies.substack.com/subscribe