Sarah Lamaison from Dioxycle explains why technical founders need to rigorously evaluate their technology, process, and costs instead of becoming attached to their initial approach. She argues that climate tech companies must achieve economic performance alongside sustainability, not sacrifice one for the other.
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So once you've done all this, I think one of the traps you can face is you don't ask yourself the hard questions. So now the problem is, you know, if you're a technical founders founder in particular, you have a technology you've been working on for five years, you really like it, you think it's really great and you know, you really want to push this technology and I think uh, you have to make sure you don't blindly hang on to uh, to this technology and uh, instead actually analyze it, compare it, benchmark it and perhaps even change it if you need to change it. And I'm, I'm saying that not lightly. And you know at the beginning we started with, with David working on CO2 to CO so conversion of carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, which is a precursor for jet fuel. And so like we really pushed the performance of the technology to top level. We really delivered on the different milestones we have set for ourselves. And at the end of the day we did the math, we did the techno economics and even then with the best performance possible, we realized perhaps it wasn't so better than other options that people would actually take the scale up risk and pay for that scale, scale up risk. And so at that point in time, which was very early on, we were like okay, let's go back to the drawing board and we looked at the different products we could make and we decided to go to ethylene, which is a much higher added value product, harder to make. But we were like if there's a play, it's there, it's where it's hard, where no other technology can, can, can have a, I mean can deliver on that. And so I think that's really, really important. And not only you have to like coldly look at your like own technology block, but you also have to coldly look at the full process and make sure you look at the full process. When you think about our technology, electrolysis, so you're converting, you know, you're making a product but it's like mixed with unreacted carbon emission. And so you know there's, there's always a question of, you know, you want to separate this unreacted reactant from the products. And, and so there's a balance for example to strike between the yield of your reaction and the separation cost at the end. And so you want to really make sure you're analyzing your full process and not just focusing on optimizing one thing in the middle so that at the end you're really optimizing for industry relevant metrics. And so I would say if you're a scientist perhaps bringing a process engineer early on so that someone is really like telling you about the balance of plant which is, you know, all the auxiliary systems that are around a central technology. So, so now you've made all these things, you've, you've bet on the right technology, it's, it's, it's working. But you know, you've made the analysis of the process and you realize it's a bit, it's still a bit expensive. And so one of the trap you can fall in right now is, is to think that people will actually pay more for a sustainable alternative. And they will probably do if it's like for like a customer product that is very high end. But like most of these products they have tiny markets and so you're not going to have a big carbon impact by addressing a tiny market. And so like the mistake is when you're like oh, I'm going to make ethylene or E fuel and it's going to cost like four times the price of fossil fuel and it's going to be fine because people are going to pay forever. The fact is, you know, perhaps the government is going to subsidize for a while but at some point the most energy efficient and cost efficient technology will have to win and you better be on the side of like the most efficient technology or have started doing something else at that point. And I think this, we can kind of summarize by this, this sort of diagram where you know, you have on one side the goodwill and there is goodwill in the world. That's great. And you know, climate philanthropies are in this category and it's really important the work they are doing. But you have, I mean, I think it's really important, but that's my opinion to see business as a separate category and not try and mix these two categories and see really climate tech businesses in the business categories where you really have to have like economic performance in addition to your, to your sustainability performance.
