I'd like to introduce our first speaker today, who is a Stanford alum, actually a Baskaran, actually met him about 10, 12 years ago when he took my sophomore seminar, in which he was an ace student. He subsequently here, even before he left, did a dynamite honors thesis at the Center for International Security and Arms Control, which is a big departure from chemical engineering, which is his major at that point, and did look it up a dynamite thesis on this little province, it's actually a big province, a low-income drought-prone agronomic corner of China up in the upper left-hand part of China, which also happened to have a very good geology for shale gas. So you might imagine some merging of technical issues with international relation-type issues for those of you on the IR side of the house here. So since then, Akshay has become, I guess, a serial entrepreneur, but a very thoughtful one, and done some consulting at Bain for a while, and then startups in the water sector, even before impossible foods, the alternative fuel food sector, and the alternative cement sectors, I don't want to say anything more about that, because he well, and most recently joined a company called Gravity, not the John Mayer song, not the song in the movie Frozen, but a company that does consulting about how to do carbon accounting and how to set up businesses for a lower net zero carbon ish. So with that said, please join me in welcoming Akshay Vaskaran to our podium today. Thank you. Thank you so much. Can you all hear me all right? Good, good. Yeah, thank you for coming in person. I'm probably easier to listen to on 2x, so I still appreciate you coming in person and not watching me on the live stream. So yeah, so my goal today is to tell you a little bit about my journey, starting at Stanford here as a chemical engineering student, working with Professor Wyatt on my honors thesis, and then talk about how I transitioned to climate tech, working at multiple different startups, and I'll save a lot of time at the end, so you can ask me questions about those experiences directly, but my goal is to share some of the lessons I learned along the way. I also think it might be interesting to hear my perspective as someone who doesn't believe that climate change is caused by human activity. I'm just getting this April Fool's show. No, no, no, obviously, yeah. It'd be hard to make a career in climate if you believe that, but yeah, let me jump in and talk first a little bit about my Stanford background and Stanford experience. So I studied chemical engineering here, as Professor Wyatt said. My advisor was Professor Hermio, and I worked at Suncat for about three and a half years under Jens Norskopf, Professor Norskopf in the area of theoretical evaluation of catalysis, of catalysts. In addition, so first of all, I think I really valued that chemical engineering background, even though I didn't end up practicing as a chemical engineer. When I was in Impossible Foods, I spent time reviewing process flow diagrams, building models to simulate manufacturing plants, and then at Brimstone, the chemical engineering credibility helped me communicate our technology to our investors and to customers at the end of the day. So I'm very grateful for that chemical engineering background, even though I sold my soul and left technology. I also had a little bit of background in policy, as Professor Wyatt alluded to. I interned at the U.S. Senate for Senator Marion Cantwell over there in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and I also pursued an honors thesis on the energy and water challenges in Northwest China, as you mentioned earlier. In general, I think I'm very grateful for my Stanford experience. I think it provided the right foundation for me to build the rest of my career, and it has laid that groundwork for all the decisions I ended up making on my career journey. So actually, I started my career not in climate, but in management consulting. I worked in San Francisco at a company called Bain & Company, working for utility clients, for private equity clients, for technology and pharmaceutical customers. Those experiences were really great in that they built a very strong business foundation for me. But ultimately, I wasn't working on what I really was passionate about, which was fighting climate change and working on the things that mattered to me. That said, I made some of the closest friends that I had from those experiences at Bain, and I wouldn't have gotten the jobs that I got without that foundation. And so some of you who are Stanford students might be asking yourself, should I go into consulting? Like, I care about energy, I care about climate. Is it right for me? And that's a very personal decision. But I might lay out the framework for why consulting and why not consulting, because it might be useful to you. I'm happy to also answer any questions you have about that afterwards. But I think if you really want to build a strong business foundation, and you don't have one coming out of undergraduate, it's a great way to do so. And you have a strong brand behind you in one of the major consulting firms, and it could really lay the groundwork for a career in business, if that's something you care about. There's also great exit opportunities. These consulting firms have huge networks across a lot of different businesses, and I probably got roles after consulting that I wouldn't have been able to get, even with equal number of years of experiences at startups. And so it is a way to fast track your career. You also get broad exposure to many different types of business problems, and in many ways it's sort of a paid MBA. So those are all reasons you might want to go into consulting. And the other reason why not to do consulting is if you really care about climate and want to dedicate your career to climate, it is unlikely that you'll be able to dedicate yourself to only working on climate projects. And it's really hard work, and if you are motivated by a specific mission, it's hard to work on projects related to that mission when you have less control over the projects you work on. So that's some little bit about consulting. I thought it might be helpful if anybody was interested in it, and considering it. But yeah, that's a little bit about why I did consulting. I ended up leaving and going to a company working in strategy called Impossible Foods. And so some of you may know Impossible. Impossible is a company that makes the Impossible burger, and it creates plant-based meats in the beef, pork, and chicken sectors. As you probably know, if you're in this class you might be aware of this, the animal agricultural industry is incredibly destructive. It contributes an enormous amount of emissions over the for the for the planet. And I think there's a great graph that I think is worth talking about to talk about the size of the price here, the amount of emissions. And hopefully it's large enough to see this graph on the page. But this is something called a Sanky diagram. Some of you, definitely Professor Wyant is familiar with it, a Sanky diagram is a diagram that shows how like the flow of goods, and in this case the flow of emissions. And in a Sanky diagram here, this is actually a little bit out of date, it's a 2010 Sanky diagram. You see the total emissions in 2010, which adds up to about 50.6 gigatons of CO2 equivalent emissions. This diagram breaks it down by the the contributions to those 50 gigatons of emissions by final service, for example the food sector, the construction sector, the thermal comfort sector, or you can break it down by the individual sector like meat and dairy or vegetable foods or cement or chemicals. And I really like this graph because it's a really great way to show size of the price. Like if you really want to make a huge impact on the climate problem, this is a great starting point to say, hey, it's what I'm focusing on really going to make a dent in the overall impact on the planet. And as you can see here, if you look at the graph and I'll focus in on it, the meat and dairy sector here, at least in 2010 represented about 5.7 gigatons of CO2 and that's about 11% of global emissions. That's a huge amount of emissions just for a single sector in the food industry. And the reason why is that animal agriculture requires an enormous amount of land, water, and energy. I think a great way to like understand why that is is look at the efficiency of the sector. So when you look at this graph called conversion efficiency, you'll see different parts of the animal agricultural sector and it shows the conversion of calories in to calories out for human consumption. It also shows the protein in versus protein out for human consumption. And on this graph you can see that for beef, if you put 100 calories in to beef, you only get three calories out for human consumption and for 100 grams of protein, you only get five grams of protein out. This is a highly inefficient system and it's a great way to represent how we're putting so many resources across land, food and water and energy into these animal agriculture systems and getting less out for human consumption. And I think that is a great way to say like because these animals are so inefficient, plant-based proteins that can successfully reproduce the taste and texture of animal protein without sacrificing price could have a huge environmental impact. And this is what really motivated me. This is what drew me to the mission and impossible foods. So hopefully you can see why I cared about this and why it's a big problem. I also want to talk through some lessons that we learned along the way and the possible foods. Specifically the big challenges coming from a small startup when I joined to a much larger company making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and manufacturing hundreds of millions of dollars of product. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the manufacturing scale-up and a very unique challenge associated with manufacturing products for consumer goods. So there's something that like my friends and I called the supply and demand pendulum and when you are rapidly scaling up a manufacturing company you are constantly going back and forth with this pendulum between being supply constrained and demand constrained. And I think a great way to show this is to start from the early days and talk about what it was like to start to scale up. So in the early days when we launched our product in 2016 we had that point in time just developed a specific ingredient called heme which is the magic ingredient that made meat taste like meat and at what what made impossible our products taste more meaty have that incredible color change where if you cook the the red product it end up turning changing color just like regular meat did. The way we did that is we had a by manufacturing process that we created in-house and we had to build some pilot plants both for the manufacturing of the heme but also for the manufacturing of our core possible burger product. Pilot plants are small and so you create a small amount of product for sales and it takes about 18 months typically to scale up a pilot plant. So over that time you only have a small amount of product that you can sell to customers and so if you're thinking if you're us on the business side what do you do when you have only a small amount of product you dedicate that product to very high impact high buzzy like brands and so we launched with brands like David Chang's Mumu Fuku and Tracy de Jardinair a fancy restaurant in San Francisco and that allowed us to get a lot of chef credibility at that time where people realized oh impossible foods that's the hot new thing that's really good it's because we only had a small amount of product in the first place we might as well dedicate it to high end restaurants where we can get the most like bang for your buck in many ways. Yes, yeah go ahead was that like just he like didn't he used it or was yeah it definitely was a partnership so I think in the early days we had these co-marketing campaigns where we we definitely sold the product to them but we both put in money in marketing and it was a great opportunity for David Chang at that time actually Mumu Fuku Nishi he had removed all meat all vegetarian items from his menu making it like I think he famously said that it's hard to make a good vegetarian food and then he brought the pasta burger on the menu and it got a lot of buzz at that time so this is the type of the strategy that we had at this time where we were very supply constrained the limited supply that we had we had to dedicate to a few customers yeah I think it's a great question you'd get a lot of in balance and you try to build a pipeline but ultimately it's really hard to sign a contract when you have uncertain timelines for a restaurant business so I think one of the unique aspects of like a restaurant is that they don't actually update their menu whenever they want it's not like a digital menu they have specific times when they can actually change their menu out especially for these larger chains so you the goal is to get the supply at the right time so that you can get on their menu and so there's a little bit of matchmaking involved but I think the simple answer to question is that you can use the sales force and other tracking tool keep tracking leads but I think we didn't do as good a job as we could have at tracking all the opportunities here for all the sales pipeline but because we knew we were supply constrained of course after building out the pilot plant we began construction of our manufacturing plant in Oakland and that was going to massively scale up our supply and help us grow to many more customers so in 2018 that pendulum swung to the side of demand where suddenly we were no longer supply constrained and we were a demand constraint we had the manufacturing plant built out in Oakland and we started launching with these better burger chains these fancier burger chains like white cat not white cat's not fancy but like gotts red robin white cast was great don't get me wrong but not not I wouldn't call it fancy wall burgers and fat burgers I think these are like the ten dollar burgers at the time that you'd see versus a burger king or a McDonald's we were having some moderate success with better burger chains but again sales started to slow and we like we wouldn't be we weren't able to fully max out capacity and I spent a lot of time in manufacturing when you're under utilizing a manufacturing plant it hurts you put a bunch of capex which is capital to build out that plant and you're not able to spread out the cost of that capital because you're under utilizing it you have the labor they are paying for that you're not actually using most efficiently and so it's costing our business a tremendous amount of capital so as a team we all rushed over we're focusing on scaling up sales how do we get the problem fixed how do we really solve this problem and we did we did but thanks not to our classic sales efforts but because of a genius work by our marketing and commerce department when we launched a new 2.0 recipe possible 2.0 and that's when we technically really they said like we won CES we like had the best products in CES which is an absurd proposition given we're not a consumer electronic company but they give us the best product launched at CES and at that time because of all the buzz around a new recipe we also won the Burger King account where we were launching with them for the impossible whopper but because of that our sales grew immensely at that time we won about 10x our sales over that period of time and so we shifted back to the manufacturing team and said okay you have underutilized capacity I'm sure you can handle this amount of product and they couldn't we realized our manufacturing system was absolutely broken it wasn't running efficiently and we had a wildly publicized supply constraint we had like multiple articles on almost every journal talking about how you can't get impossible burgers anywhere we were on allocation our customers are really bothered and frustrated with us Burger King was frustrated because we were delaying their launch it became a massive challenge we were worried about the fate of the business if we couldn't sell the product that we had promised all these customers would they just stop buying from us and so it was an all hands on deck I basically for a period of time was just like living in Oakland it was like all hands on deck it was incredibly interesting to like learn more about the manufacturing environment but we realized there are a lot of room to grow at getting manufacturing discipline and growing our capacity after about a year after a lot of hard work bringing a lot of experienced team members in and really making a more disciplined manufacturing capacity a capability and then also leveraging partnership with external contract manufacturers we were able to grow our supply chain grow a manufacturing footprint and then ultimately successfully launch with Burger King and Starbucks and some retail grocery chains as well so you can still get our product at Impossible Opera and Impossible Breakfast Sandwich at Starbucks and that's thanks to a lot of the investment we put into building out our manufacturing footprint at that time we had a couple other constraints later on but in general I think the business is less supply constrained because of the work we put in to build that manufacturing capability so I think one of the macro takeaways I'd say at this time is that when you are thinking about building a business in the consumer consumer manufacturing space you have to keep in mind that you have to be ready for the swing of that pendulum if you're in the manufacturing business you should if you are supply constrained as you called out successfully you got to build that pipeline of sales keep track of it make sure that when you're done with that supply constraint you can lever that sales up and then when you are demand constrained make sure that the the manufacturing environment is run in a disciplined way so that when you have to go back to scale up manufacturing you're not caught by surprise I think the other thing I'd say as a macro takeaway is you want to recognize your strengths and weaknesses we had a really strong R&D department that developed the product itself and really strong brand that people really perceived as a high quality brand and partnerships with Burger King and Starbucks but we had under invested in the manufacturing know-how and if you don't have that in-house at the minimum try to find the right partners like we brought on OSI who was a helpful co-manufacturer that helped us build out our capabilities in manufacturing to get a question yeah so based on what you said about the pendulum the market is cyclical is it like between supply and demand or it's not always cyclical I think that the challenge is when you are scaling up a software business you can often just increase number of AWS servers it's like a very different business where you can very quickly ramp up supply when you have a manufacturing business the lead time for expanding capacity depending on the business can be anywhere from three months to two years right and so that represents a major challenge and if you over invest in manufacturing capacity you are you're losing money every day you're under utilizing that business and so the big challenge for many businesses in the space is how do you pull the dial in the right way so that you're not under utilizing your asset and that you're not supply constraint and so that's I think that leads to the cyclical nature if you get it wrong and so I think what you should the goal is obviously not to have a pendulum that swings at all to be right on target I think in reality it's really hard to do but that's I think that one of the big takeaways here is that be prepared be building both sides of that business and investing in it because you don't want to get it wrong we were I mean remember when we were in supply constraint environment in 2019 we were like losing like a million dollars of opportunity every week because of unproduced product and that hurt that hurt when you're a fast growing startup because that means every time we weren't selling a single pound that was four burgers that could have gone to a first chance of customers trying our product that could have won those customers for life and so that was like it really hurt us as a business it hurt our customers who are restaurants mom-and-pop restaurants who are trying to sell burgers and it's a painful learning to have when you're growing its business yeah what sorts of factors go into making that decision about how much you invest in manufacturing or is there like a set list or is it more subjective yeah so what you're describing is called like an estinope process sales and operating planning process and it is very difficult and it's very difficult for a lot of businesses specifically in hard tech and there's no like perfect answer I think there's people who are trying to bring in the latest data to inform on what the forecast could look like you often do Monte Carlo analysis where you create a bunch of different forecasts and you plan for the 70th percentile scenario or the 30th percentile scenario but ultimately it's a judgment call that you like the CEO at the end of the day the head of supply chain manufacturing has to make a call for how they want to invest in the business and there has to be like a shared responsibility for the team to execute but if you under call it you're losing out on potential sales if you over call it you're losing money because you're underutilizing plant it's a tough thing it's a thing that even big tech companies who are building data centers for AI workloads also struggle with they're like I'm not sure how this new chip is going to perform and how many data centers I'll need to be able to support my AI work for my business it's exact same type of thinking is like what are the different scenarios I want to plan to how do I want to think about uncertainty should I sign a contract with Nvidia for this length of time because I want to have a de-risk it for I want to hedge my bet here and so that's a lot of these hard tech businesses have to think about it in an SNOP process yeah what are the most common mistakes that hard tech companies make in that SNOP process I think one of the things is like you have to be nimble I think often you build the SNOP process too late I think it's something that when you start realizing you're building a forecast that forecast has a real impact on how you plan the business I think in early days people are like oh just build a forecast for the investors call and we'll plan to that we call it a day it should be more sophisticated than that like the forecast that you're communicating either to investors or internally ends up resulting in a supply plan where people are actually buying product they're signing agreement agreement with a sorry producer to buy X amount of ingredients you don't want to be sitting in your warehouse and then code or expire that's like really bad for your business and so I think in the early days when you're scaling up a startup it could be easy to take the like the forecasting process lightly what I'd say is try to build a more disciplined SNOP process earlier when you're like in a high growth manufacturing startup yes yeah I have a question about your original goal of actually reducing admissions yeah when you have these like decisions to actually have more plants more manufacturing plants how do you actually value your like reducing ambitions with added manufacturing that could increase those emissions like what are those processes that you like actually have to balance yeah great question so one could say with every manufacturing plant we build it takes some emissions to set up the manufacturing plant and our products produce emissions I think for impossible foods we were very much of the mind that every burger that we sell or actually I'd say like .9 burgers of every burger that we sell is displacing a regular meat burger because at that time the data suggested the alternative that people would be eating was actually not a veggie burger it was like a regular burger because we're getting a lot of people who are flexitarian trying to buy our product the alternative is so much worse for the planet so our accounting I think I showed you some graph around this like ratio of calorie conversion like the impossible burger is about a 50% calorie conversion ratio in that we are inefficient in that we take some parts of the soy plant some parts of like yeast etc that we'll need to put in the product or coconut oil or whatever and there's some waste associated with that but it is massively more efficient at like 50% than ground beef which is at like 3% efficiency so I think it's for us it was always compared against the alternative versus thinking about the emissions that the product alone is having now let's say our product was not supplanting a destructive product and it was just another product that people could buy a purse or something like that that would just add to someone's closet maybe we'd think about it differently but I think as a whole for many folks in the climate industry you're thinking about displacement you're displacing a destructive product and that's the advantage does that answer your question? any other questions on impossible before I jump into cement yes real quick so impossible is isynthetic kind of meat so what are the nutritional challenges compared to natural food and also compared to just say eggs or milk we sure see more efficient than beef yes yeah I'm not a doctor I'm not a nutritionist but what I'll say is the impossible burger isn't the healthiest product it is not a salad it is closer to a ground beef product in nutrition than it is a salad much much closer it's very close to nutritionals to like the regular 80-20 ground beef the reason why it has to be that way is because what makes ground beef delicious is those nutritionals like it is 80% protein 20% fat that fat which is like a like fat that melts when you put it on the grill creates the Maillard reaction has a little bit of char that's that that chew that bite that that fat is what makes it delicious and if you're trying to convince someone who'll be eating a burger to go to salad we've already failed right like they're not doing that already they've had that option for 30 40 years you know at every restaurant available but our goal is to convince them to go to a plant-based diet and so I'd say historically the impossible burger has not been nutritionally that much better no cholesterol no trans fats that's better but it really has been close to the animal analog eventually they're trying to improve the nutritionals without sacrificing taste quality texture things like that but ultimately if you lose a customer it doesn't matter right and so I think impossible foods focused on creating a best-in-class tasting product first and foremost and then always saying hey we're never going to be worse nutritionally our goal is to get better nutritionally that was a strategy at that time yeah yeah but I think there's a big push towards like whole foods diet and these products are not that and I think they'll never be that because you cannot make something that tastes like ground beef from whole foods that's just that's just part of the part of the world we live in how are you doing on time okay oh good to go all right I'll maybe I'll blast through it yeah we have uh so we uh the next thing I want to talk about is brimstone so I worked I joined as the head of BD and finance at a company called brimstone and brimstone's main goal is to decarbonize the concrete and cement sector sector so if you look at the cement industry it's around 2.8 gigatons of co2 in the sankey diagram which roughly is equivalent to 5.5 percent of net greenhouse gas emissions and of the concrete industry as a whole 90 percent of emissions come from cement which is the glue the binder that holds the concrete together now the reason why that problem exists is because the traditional process uses limestone calcium carbonate clay and sand source of silica puts it all on a kiln grinds it up puts in the kiln raises it to very high temperatures to release co2 form calcium oxide as an intermediary and then ultimately form the clinkering compounds try calcium silicate die calcium silicate try calcium aluminate and tetra calcium aluminiferate so those four clinkering compounds are key to making something known as ordinary Portland cement that is what everybody uses as cement today and it is like an important like benchmark for building materials across the United States the brimstone process aims to use calcium silicate rocks with calcium silica aluminum and iron a new process that they're developing to form the same clinkering compounds and something known as supplementary cementitious materials another core ingredient in concrete as a whole now this is a new process and it's very challenging to scale a new process and brimstone is in the early days what I'd say is these hard to bait sectors like fertilizer, steel, cement, chemicals they're very challenging but they can be very rewarding because they represent a huge part of the overall climate problem now there's some challenges I want to call out about scaling like hard to bait tech like this that I would say is even harder in many ways than plant-based meats one of them is that the scale up requires a tremendous amount of capital when you start you start at the lab scale which is like you're spending some time with research scientists building a process eventually after you refine that prove it out then you go to a pilot scale where everything acts a little bit differently and that takes about 18 months to build a pilot plant once you're there you have to operate it for a period of time learn from the pilot plant and then ultimately build a first of a kind commercial plant that takes typically two years with permitting and approvals and building out the plant acquiring the the equipment takes a long time to build that first of a kind commercial plant that's also sub-scale you're still not at full scale yet after that is operating you're you're you're showing that you can produce it at a slightly larger commercial scale that's when then you've just de-wristed sufficiently to build a full industrial scale plant the pilot plant can cost anywhere from five million dollars to 50 million dollars it's pretty expensive a first of a kind commercial plant can range between a hundred million to four hundred million dollars in total costs that's a ton of capital and then a full-scale industrial plant can be upwards of a billion dollars plus especially in the chemicals cement and steel sector that's an enormous amount of capital that's very hard to raise by VC alone the other thing you can get is debt you can raise debt to fund these projects but one of the challenge and that's what's been historically done in the solar industry in the wind industry but the challenge is it often requires a pre-purchase agreement with a customer or also known as a off-take agreement these are things like a power purchase agreement for wind energy or solar energy that's traditional in like the energy space but not traditional in cement and steel if I'm a concrete manufacturer I just call my buddy at the at the cement manufacturing plant tell him how much I want he sends over an invoice and we're good to go it is not a contract you do years in advance that's what makes it challenging to get debt in these industries the other thing is anything before you're at the full-scale industrial plant production will likely require a premium even if your design of your process ends up making a prosperity process because you're operating at a sub-scale so you're going to need to find customers that will in the play pay a premium for your products which is hard to do in sectors like cement, steel and fertilizer where the farmers or the concrete manufacturers don't really want to pay a premium I think the final thing is these products are actually quite cheap per ton and that means it's very expensive to transport you often need to co-locate supply with demand and if you're in the small scale at a first of a kind commercial plant it's really challenging if the people that want to buy a product are spread all over the world or even all over the United States you can't transport everywhere so these are some of the main challenges to building companies in this hard tech sector but there's some ways that can help to get you around it one of them is being pursued by a number of different companies and these are called book and claim credits or inset credits and they're like renewable energy certificates or sustainable aviation fuel credits it's where you separate out the virtual low carbon attributes of the product from the physical product so like let me explain so let's say I make one ton of cement I, my person who, my customer who let's say Stanford is my customer who wants to buy the cement and I'm making the cement in the Midwest I can transport from the Midwest to to Stanford the typical transportation radius is about 300 miles for for cement instead what I'll do is I'll find a local concrete buyer to buy the cement and say buy at normal price and I'll tell you it's normal cement it's just a regular little cement it's a high carbon amount and then Stanford I'll sell the virtual credit associated with the low carbon nature of the asset and that represents the premium of the product in the early days and so a lot of people are trying to separate out the virtual asset of the premium product associated with low carbon nature from the physical product in order to get around this issue of co-location one of the big challenges here is making sure you don't double count because if you double count count you lose all credibility and so they're trying to build the right systems in place to ensure an in-setting carbon system for steel, cement, for fertilizer and things like that the other way that you can help scale hard tech is applying for federal grants Brimstone recently won DOE Office of Clean Energy the demonstrations project grant for 189 million dollars those types of grants are huge and enabling you to build out plants like this that's that's a little bit about Brimstone very briefly I'll talk about 10 minutes left is that right actually I should probably stop for questions five minutes all right all right I'll take a couple minutes here I think Gravity is the company I'm at now where I'm leading the scale up with our customers we enable everybody from private equity firms to enterprise customers to industrial manufacturers to very easily measure their carbon emissions across all of the different sites across all of the different portfolio companies as you know probably many requirements exist now by the SEC and by governmental entities in Europe to really show that you're measuring your carbon emissions Gravity allows you to very quickly do that the other thing that we do is we work with our customers to evaluate ROI positive projects that help enable decarbonization and there's a really cool graph that I want to talk to you called a MAC curve some of you may have been familiar with it before this is a marginal abatement cost curve it's a little bit confusing to look at but what it is is on the top line you see five gigatons of CO2 as the the opportunity to get you back to to the levels we want to hit our global targets that's how much CO2 we have to remove on a yearly basis from being produced if you look but earlier ahead of the zero dollars on the base on the on the X side of the access you can see that you can get about one and a half gigatons of CO2 avoided below the zero dollars in the access what that means is there are things that actually pay back that pay you money that actually reduce about a gigaton and a half of CO2 emissions now if you want to put 50 dollars per ton of CO2 into carbon dioxide credits you actually can remove much more CO2 by deploying technologies like electric vehicles solar photovoltaics onshore wind things like that so this mat curve shows the the size of the prize of new technologies across the cost curve what's really great is that actually over time more and more things will make ROI positive sense as they come down the cost curve and our goal at gravity is to help work with our customers to find the right technologies that make ROI positive sense to deploy right now and those some of those technologies like H-FAC retrofits vehicle electrification they already exist and we're helping our customers do that final takeaways I know we probably have to stop now but the last minute is large corporations are leading a lot of the climate actions today we still need to bring the long tail of smaller enterprises and industrial manufacturers we need to find ways to engage them and find ROI positive ways to help them decarbonize the other thing is for consumers climate is still not a top factor in purchasing decisions we didn't get into this that much but there is more we need to do to educate customers on the challenges around climate change and how it connects to their behavior in the real world like the food that we put on our plate actually has a direct impact on the planet and the last thing is the one motivator for all customers and the consumer space is improved performance and lower cost if you can align your your climate company or your climate work with any of those things a better performance or lower cost you're much more likely to be successful so I think I should probably stop there I think sorry I went a little bit over but thanks for all your questions there but now I'll open them up for some questions the tour de force thank you very much any remaining questions I know we have a lot of good questions so how do you set the limitation like the structures policies within a company to manage employees set how do you set the policies to manage employees or policies within the company to manage employees or preventing your those trained employees from being stolen by competitors oh for IP it's the labor but not the capital oh sorry sorry sorry oh it means like for the labor to go to a competitor is that what you're asking so you know when you start a company right the most important thing is to manage people but so there are people there should be a structure of managing them how do you avoid how do you activate the bright side of human nature to motivate them and avoiding the dark side of human nature and how do you set that kind of structure to activate the bright side that's a great question I don't know if I'm qualified to answer it I'll try to answer it just I can't I think one benefit working climate is that everybody I've worked with typically has had a shared mission and I think that's one of the blessings of the work that I've had to date is that everybody has been excited about the work you're doing because you think it's going to have a positive impact on the planet on the planet I think the other way I think you can help motivate people is be an empathetic and kind manager recognize what motivates them try to support them and their goals and their dreams make sure that they work their doing feels constructive and productive and pay them a fair wage I think if you do those things generally people will be happy if you start acting out and not treating people with respect if you don't pay them a fair wage and what they deserve you'll lose employees but that's I think that's the best I can do at least to answer that question Is the company trying to stay in your employees? Yeah I mean just be better I think ultimately like the best outcome is to like out execute your competitor and be a better culturally competitor I think there's always going to be someone who tries to pay your highest value employee a crazy amount of money to steal them right but are they going to be able to give your employee like the best working environment give them the long-term likelihood of success if they if your employee thinks our company is going to go succeed in a much higher valuation at the end of the day they're going to be motivated to stay around even if they can get paid an annual salary that's better somewhere else and so I think my answer is just out execute be a better company be a better leader and hopefully they'll choose to stay but if they don't I think that's also reasonable yeah How was the public sector maybe like government intervention in this space made your life more difficult or have it been like helpful like what's one thing you wish they would do to make your life better Yeah it's a great question I think I'm pretty optimistic about a lot of these grants I think what we've found based on scaling hard tech companies like this is you need a tremendous amount of capital and VCs are it's hard to get that much capital from VCs alone and they expect returns at a faster turnaround and timeline than then often is possible with like hard tech companies like this grants are enabled oh an enabler for this and they're a good way to do that to like to help scale I would also say is but you also don't want to bet on policy administrations can change very quickly and policies can change quickly so your goal is to plan without any policy support and maybe plan for headwinds in terms of policy and then if you end up getting tailwinds that's just a benefit and hopefully you're set up to take advantage of those tailwinds So you mentioned that like you don't want to bet on policy but it seems a lot of the ways to make some of this stuff viable is through betting on policy and making sure the government is providing incentives Yeah Are there areas you think I don't know like for example like grab like grab what gravity is doing it's dependent on number one companies wanting to port ESG you guys are doing parts of ROI things which is good like companies who just care about the carbon stuff Yeah Like are there specific sectors which you think are immune to needing any type of political tailwinds Good question There are definitely so I don't know I don't know I think it varies by a lot of industries the large corporations seem motivated to do this on their own and I'm grateful that's happening I wouldn't say that's the case for all sectors I think my mission now is to try to activate the long tail of people who wouldn't be taking these actions otherwise and I think that is like the place that is like under resource and under focused on and I think that's why we focus on ROI positive things I think we'll benefit from like more ESG requirements from a government entity but the goal is our work should be providing bottom line business value and that is universal and I think that's kind of what we focus on Appreciate for impacts for sectors my question is How do you find or design a role that fits both your background your passion and also like what the company needs Great question I don't know I don't have a good answer I think I've gotten lucky at my roles to date In early part of my career I wasn't unsure when I joined Impossible Foods I started out working a lot on sales strategy but then very quickly shifted over to manufacturing scale up and I was just drawn to the biggest problem for the company at the time and I think that has actually proven well for me that like I'm interested in having an impact a personal impact and that means just focus on what the biggest problems are over time I've now shifted more on the commercial side because I'm just like not technical enough to be as strong as like a manufacturing leader but I feel like I'm much stronger on the commercial side and that's where I've ended up going I've been fortunate I don't have a great answer unfortunately in the back there What do you think large corporations care more and consumers are too high yeah well it's a great question I think not all large corporations care more maybe there are certain corporations that tend to have high margins that are caring more and they can afford to care more so companies in the tech space are buying up to our capture carbon credits they're buying up nature-based offsets all of these things if you're a low margin business but buying these things you'll be quickly stopped by your shareholders and your board of directors so I think the people that are motivated to do this right now are people who just have a tremendously high margin and it's probably probably differentiator for their investors and for their customers and that's why they do it or they're motivated by some internal sense of good for consumers it's just not top of mind I think that's the big problem is just it's not top of mind for them I also think this is not a consumer problem I think most of this problem is caused by industry and like heavy industry and corporations that are consuming the resources of our planet so I don't want to put all of this on to the consumer I think we need to focus on taking our hard-to-bate sectors and decarbonizing it and I hope I hope you understand that how big the opportunity is for that does that sort of answer your question? Yeah I had kind of two questions with Bridgestone how hard was it to convince purchasers that this cement is the same and that it's going to hold up the same ways and is that all pretty much standardized in terms of how this stuff is tested or is that like a thing just from now? Yeah, no actually luckily there's an ASTMC150 standard for ordinary protein cement and it sets a bunch of experiments around compression testing the chemical like makeup of the cement and if you meet that threshold it is ordinary protein cement ASTMC150 ordinary protein cement and I think once we proved that at Brimstone it was a good check mark that said there are other I think we're sublime speakers coming later in this quarter they have another cement product that is not ordinary protein cement but if they can have prove that they meet the attributes that they need to show to customers that they are good for certain use cases they can also be very successful I think Brimstone strategy was really focused on ordinary protein cement that isn't to say that that's the only strategy to succeed in the space Just kind of related to that Brimstone process does that still require a lot of heat? It does require heat and electricity but because it doesn't produce any process carbon and actually because magnesium is in the rock there's some carbon that could be captured as a part of the process it ends up being much more efficient Let's do two more quick ones one back here and one back in Is Brimstone possible? I feel like it's hard to kind of get to the curiosity do you guys have the percent of people within the company that actually buy impossible? So the question was do we have a percent of people at impossible buy impossible? I'll say when I was at impossible I ate impossible every week maybe a couple times a week but I never bought it because I just get it for free So it's a hard question to ask because we would just go to the kitchen in the company I still buy impossible every week today even though I left a few years ago so I don't have the number but I guess it's pretty high up there The impossible chicken nuggets if you haven't tried are pretty dang good pretty dang good Yeah This is more about your general career path but it seems like the traditional knock against consultants from people in the start of industries that they don't know what's like to work on something of their own So would you say there are certain lessons that you learned working at Brimstone Impossible and Gravity that you could not have learned as a consultant? Absolutely I'd say that one of my biggest challenges with being at Bain was not seeing the project all the way through and going from the recommendation to all the way to implementation because actually when you get to implementation and then see the after effects there's fall one work to fix the problems associated with your recommendation to like get to the end result that you want and that was only learned when I was at a Boswell when I was at Brimstone and so that definitely is something you don't really get off in in a consulting environment and I think I wasn't as fulfilled and consulted because of that but I think a lot of folks who are really interested in solving problems and just love problem solving love consulting because it's all problem solving and then you move on after the recommendation's over so it all depends on how you think if you really like to get your hands dirty and see the result maybe consulting is not right for you Great, with that said Akshay, thanks for words of wisdom and a great talk and thanks to the audience for an equally great set of questions I think you would agree with that Yes, definitely, thank you so much