Climate Tech Insights [Entire Talk] - Sarah Lamaison (Dioxycle)

Welcome everyone to Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. The Stanford Seminar for aspiring Entrepreneurs ETL is presented by sdvp, the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneurship center and bases, the Business association association for Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. I'm Anthony Ruth, I'm the Director of Strategic Communications at STVP and today I have the pleasure of welcoming Sarah Lamason to etl. Sarah is the co founder and CEO of DIEC Cycle which is pioneering sustainable chemistry by building breakthrough technologies that convert industrial carbon emissions into everyday chemicals with unprecedented energy and cost savings. In 2021, Sarah received the L' Oreal UNESCO French Young Talent Award for her research in CO2 conversion and received the French National ILAB Innovation Prize. With her teammate Dr. David Wakerly, she was selected as a Breakthrough Energy Innovation Fellow and that was in 2021 and featured in the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2023. Sarah also holds a Bachelor's from Ecole Polytechnique in France and a Master's from the University of Cambridge. And she carried out doctoral and postdoctoral studies between Stanford and College de France. Everyone, please join me in welcoming Sarah.

Well hi everyone, it's a great pleasure to be here and I mean as it was said, I'm fortunately pleased to be here after spending two years here between 2019 and 2020 which were like really amazing research shares with my co founder David. So yeah, very very excited to be discussing what we have been doing so far. And so today my goal is for you to leave with like three takeaways. So first, an overview of the carbon utilization field and high level vision of the different technologies and approaches. Second, an overview of what we are doing in that field at dayog cycle and and finally some learnings gathered in the making from myself as a researcher transitioning to a climatic entrepreneur. So yeah, so first, what is carbon capture and utilization and why does it matter? So as you know we do need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions and remove CO2 actually from the atmosphere to stay way way below the 2 degrees Celsius 2 degrees Celsius trajectory. And so here as you see in the background, the stripes, the color stripe represent the level, the atmospheric level of CO2 that have been going from 280ppms in the 1800s pre industrial area to right now 420ppm which is far above the 350ppm level where you start to have adverse climate impacts and all these greenhouse gases effects. And so one question some of you might have here, if you're familiar with the question of climate change is why have I put 2 degrees C as a target and not 1.5 degrees C, which was the target set by the Paris Agreement in 2015. And the reason is, I mean, quite sad and simple. It's because we've, I mean, there is actually an open debate right now on whether we can still reach the 1.5 degrees C, because we have been too slow already over the past years at reducing our carbon emissions. And so it's really a question of now trying to limit this global warming to 1.7, 1.8 degrees Celsius, which is already going to be a challenge. And so how do we inflect that trajectory? How do we reach net zero by 2050? Well, I have a good news, which is the fact that the first answer to climate change is sobriety. And it's like each of us who can have an impact, you and me, by changing our daily behavior and reducing the frequency of our flights, eating less meat and doing different things like this. And so this 5% is the projection of emission reduction we can target by 2050 by just sobriety. And so, just to give you a few order of magnitude, today, on average, the average carbon footprint of an American is between 15 and 20 ton of CO2 per year. And so we emit equally 1 ton of CO2 when we do one round trip flight between New York City and San Francisco, when we eat twice a week, a steak, beef steak, all of that for a year, or when we commute 15 miles per day to work for one year. And so by changing any of these behavior, by cutting down any of these, we can actually already diminish by 6% our personal carbon footprint. And of course, even more if we do all these different things, the second, the second path we have to reduce these emissions is through the massive deployment of existing technology, technologies like electrification for industrial usage, for example, the deployment of the use of a heat pump in your house, or light electrification as you know that, sorry, the development of renewable energy, developing solar or windmill. And so again, to give you a few order of magnitudes, by upgrading a house with a heat pump, you can save up to 8 ton of CO2. So quite significant, again, if you compare that to the carbon footprint of an American, or if we shift now to 100% renewable, our own electricity, personal electricity consumption, we can save up to 4 tons of CO2 per year. And the last thing, and here is actually a picture of one of our lab, we have two labs, one in France, in Paris and one in Menlo Park. And the last one, the last option is by using technologies that are currently still under development and so of course we need to deploy massive research to deploy these technologies so that they meet this 45% reduction target by 2050. And so as I said, these new technologies are going to be needed to, to cut down the emission of what are called hard to habit sectors, which are the industries that are really difficult to decarbonize, that you cannot electrify easily, et cetera. And so these hard to habit sectors include the following. Cement, steel and aluminum, aviation chemicals, heavy road and shipping. And so, for example, the reason why steel is hard to decarbonize is because in steel making, the first step of the process is actually the conversion of iron ore into iron. And so to do that you basically need to pull out an oxidant from your iron ore. And the way it's done right now, it's in big blast furnaces where you have a reducing gas such as carbon monoxide that is produced from coal in situ that is going to pull out these oxygen furnace from your iron ore to just leave behind the metal iron. And so you're converting your iron ore into iron, but in turn you're emitting one molecule of CO2. And so it's very difficult to decarbonize because now like you're, I mean you have to really change the full process if you want to stop emitting this CO2 molecule, which means reinvesting a lot of capex and really changing your infrastructure. And so basically the way we are going to decarbonize these different industries is either by developing completely new processes. And so it's done in steel right now. I mean there are a lot of projects going on to replace these carbon monoxide reducing gas by hydrogen or by deploying sort of ad hoc solution which is like for example, carbon capture utilization and storage, also referred to as CCUs. And so in carbon capture, utilization and storage what happens is that you have a first step of capture. So you're going to capture either like your emission on the point source. So as I was talking about like for steel you would capture the CO2 emissions and it's very concentrated emissions, so it's kind of like energy efficient. Or you have another pass where you're now capturing CO2 directly from the air. Of course it's much more diluted as a stream and so it's much harder to do in terms of energy consumption. Once you have your, your carbon emission, your CO2, you're going to transport that either through pipeline or through ship. And you have two options. Either you're going to store it underground in geological formation Onshore or offshore or you can utilize it. And so if we zoom in on the utilization, well, there are many things you can do with utilization. Um, so these are all the different, all the, all the blue items here. And so the first thing you can do which is the oldest way of using CO2 is using it as is. So basically you just take your CO2 molecule and you do something with it as is. And so the first thing, the most obvious thing that you can do is use it for food and beverage beverages, for example, to make the, your soda sparkling. Uh, then there are industrial use it use of it such as enhanced oil recovering recovery where you're basically pumping CO2 down depleted oil field to push more oil out of it and hopefully leave the, the CO2 in there. It's quite a controversial use of course, but it's not, it's not the topic today. And, and so like apart from using it as is, you can also convert it. And so in terms of conversion, the less, I mean the, the, the use that requires the less energy is by mineralizing it. So you're basically going to convert your gaseous CO2 in a mineralized form and this is often like useful to make additional building material. And if you're now like willing to do some, a product that is a bit upgraded, you can go to synthetic fuel, but of course it's going to consume more energy or finally you can convert that into chemicals. And so now if we zoom in again on the chemicals, it's actually very interesting. And carbon utilization is particularly suited for the chemical industry to reinvent the chemical industry, which is the industry of carbon. You know, right now you can't make textile fiber, plastics, windows, frame without carbon. It's a question of matter, you know. So that's really where carbon utilization makes a lot of sense. Reinventing a carbon cycle where you source like sustainably your carbon in order to invent everyday products and so on. The, I mean, what is interesting about that and a good way to phrase it, and hopefully you can remember that is, you know, the chemical industry cannot be decarbonized because it's the industry of carbon, but it can be defossilized. And by this what we mean is that when you look at today's, in 2020, the source of carbon in the world's chemical production, you see that 85% of this carbon is coming from a fossil source. There's a lot of studies that say that by 2050 we could completely displace that proportion of fossil source of carbon with sustainable sources of carbon. And really reach a world where your carbon come from, either recycled plastic or material, but also carbon emission derived carbon and bio based, I mean biomass derived carbon. And so if we now zoom in again on this thing and really deep dive on how we can make a sustainable chemical. Well, the way to look at it is very simple. You just have to think about what is a chemical. A chemical is basically a long carbon based molecule. I mean a carbon based molecule that is filled with energy. And so understand where your energy come from, you understand how you can make a chemical and a sustainable chemical if your energy is sustainable. And so on this graph, basically on this diagram, I've represented just different sources of energy to make this chemical. So in light green you see biomass fermentation. Here your energy source is your biomass, it's already filled with energy. And so you can just basically take that biomass and further upgrade it to a chemical. Then on the dark purple you have the hydrogenation technology. Here the energy source you're using is hydrogen. And so you're basically going to use hydrogen, combine it with CO2 carbon emission in a hydrogenation reactor, sometimes with some heat, some pressure, and you're going to really use that energy carrier, that is hydrogen to re energize your carbon emission and convert it back into a chemical. And so on the dark green diagram you have this is biological processes. So here again you can take carbon emissions, but this time you're going to basically use bugs that are capable of sourcing their energy into like sort of metabolic energy source. It can be a sugar, it can be anything in their environment. They're capable of digesting and with that energy they are going to be able again to convert your carbon emission into a chemical. And finally when your source of energy is electricity, well you're, you're, you're in presence of electrolysis. And so that's basically what we do at DIOC cycle. So we develop breakthrough electrolysis technology to convert carbon emission using just renewable energy into sustainable feedstocks and in particular chemicals. So I think by now you've, you've understood that society does need to reduce carbon emission and stimulus still needs to produce cost effective chemical. And so that's what we are focused on with a big emphasis on the cost effectiveness of the process. Because if you really want to trigger fast adoption of a technology, you have to align economic incentive with the environmental incentive, or at least that's what we strongly believe at the cycle. And so the way we position ourselves is that we provide a solution to help carbon emitters decarbonize their process cost effectively by basically helping them to reduce their emission while profiting from the sustainable chemical they are producing. Another way to present it is that we deploy this solution on site, modular solution on site, where we are going to capture the emission and convert this emission into low carbon chemicals. And again, the big emphasis on what we are doing is that we are bringing this technology with a no or negative green premium, which is cost competitivity versus fossil. Whereas all the current sustainable alternatives for this process have a green premium, which is an overhead cost compared to the fossil cost of your chemical, which is ethylene. And so we start, as I said, with ethylene, which is the most produced organic chemical in the world, used in textile fibers, in pvc, in pe, polyethylene piping, plastic packaging for many different usage. And because of the size of the ethylene market and the carbon footprint of the ethylene making process, by displacing the way we are making ethylene, we can actually cut the equivalent of 1% of the world emission and look at a $170 billion opportunity. So it's really like an untapped environmental and economic opportunity. And the reason it's untapped, it's because it's, I mean there's a huge barrier to entry, technological barrier to entry, to actually do that cost effectively. So our team, I mean we were introduced before, but David and I, we co founded the company so in January 2021 after five years of academic research between College of France, Cambridge and Stanford. And now we bring together 20 people, some of them are in the room, from 10 nationalities comprising 70% PhD. Because as I said, the biggest barrier to entry is technological. And we operate from two sites in Paris and Menlo Park. And so in terms of funding, we've raised 26 million to date. Latest round being our series day led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and lower carbon capital and with the participation of Gigascale Capital. And we were very lucky to be part of the Breakthrough Energy Fellowship before. And so how does it work? Um, so how does it work? So basically we developed this novel type of low temperature carbon electrolyzer where we feed in carbon emissions water. And uh, these are gonna be exposed to what we call catalytic core, which are like active surface areas, uh, which are gonna be able to convert this carbon emission, uh, into the product, the main product, ethylene and some byproduct using electricity. And so each catalytic core comprises three elements, an anode that is doing an oxidation separated by a membrane from a cathode doing a reduction. And so after we pile them, we pile these individual cells on top of one another in between these metallic plates that are called bipolar plates. And the role of the bipolar plates is to funnel the reactant ins and the product out of this stack. And so what's unique about us, apart from the product we are making in the electrolysis field, is that we innovate at all level. Since day one, we had a very integrated approach, innovated on the component level, developing high energy efficiency catalysts, super low cost membranes at the system level, by developing novel stack design which are extremely energy efficient and reach high yields. And a software layer also like continuously improving the operation of this stack. And finally, we also innovate at the industrial level by developing integration schemes to really like make sure we integrate these technology within existing processes so that we minimize the overall cost. And we also valorize trended assets which are like the industrial assets you have on these plants. And so by doing that, we are really the first one to put forward the following value proposition which is like producing sustainable ethylene at fossil ethylene price. And so if you remember my little diagram from before, if you want to produce sustainable ethylene again, you have these four different pathways based on the way you're feeding. I mean you're bringing the energy to make your final molecule. But as you see, none of them, whether it's like biomass, from biomass from hydrogenation or from biological process, I mean none of them right now is cost competitive with fossils. They all suffer from a grain premium. And by contrast, we come in with a value proposition of no or negative grain premium, which again we believe is going to be key to trigger large adoption. And so, I mean, this is again a huge opportunity in terms of like environmental impact and economic impact. Because right now ethylene is made through steam cracking of fossil feedstock, whether it's naphtha or ethane. And the carbon footprint of that process is between 0.9 and 1.7 ton of CO2 per ton of ethylene. Instead, not only by using our process, not only we cut down this, this process emissions, but we also are going to now take some other carbon source from another emission and embed it into the ethylene so that the net difference between this process and the fossil process is between life free and 5 tons of CO2 per ton of ethylene we produced, depending on the carbon footprint of our electricity in terms of total carbon impact potential, given that the ethylene production in the world is around 200 million ton I mean you do the math. It's somewhere around 700 million tons of CO2 per year that can be displaced, which is over 1% of the world's emission. Far over 1% of the world's emission. So that's what we do. And so now in terms of like the learnings, I just wanted to give you like a kind of unpolished. Unpolished. Some unpolished opinions about the traps to avoid when you're starting a climate startup. So I was there before like you finishing my academic studies and the goal is to, I mean what is success when you're starting a climate tech startup? Success is developing a company that is capable of cutting million tons of CO2 per year. So you know, that's, that's the definition of success. And so there's a lot of things that can happen along the way. Uh, and yeah, again these are my opinions. So I think the, the first trap that we can fall into, you know, when you, when you come out from school, is that you think you, you know a lot of things because you went to a top school. And so I'm, I'm saying that laughing because, you know, it's actually a good thing sometimes to, to, to be very confident when you don't know a lot your industry because sometimes you probably wouldn't take the risk of starting a company if you knew like how hard it is later and how little you actually knew back then about everything that was waiting for you. So I would say that was the, that is kind of the first trap that can, that can happen. And so my advice for this would be to always keep an underdog mindset. And by this I mean don't assume that academic knowledge is real life knowledge, although it's very powerful, very important to have it. There's so many other dimension in the, I mean in the rest of the world to optimize for and that are needed to develop. I mean to have a successful career and to do something meaningful that I think it's really important to keep this growth mindset and keep asking for advice all the time early on. A second thing I have perhaps for people joining companies early on, especially in startups, is don't care too much about the title. I mean there's always a lot of inflation around titles. But actually what really matters, I believe, is the team you work with and the mission and how much you believe the team you're working with is capable of delivering on that mission. So I think that's really important. And the third thing I would say that is also probably quite controversial about salary, especially if there are MBA in the room. I've heard they were trained to negotiate their salaries is to not to negotiate too much salaries at the beginning, but instead get in the company over deliver and then negotiate. Because as a founder I see that a lot of people in the company, when they're in and they're delivering, they are so good at what they do, you really don't want to lose them. And then they have much more leverage to actually really ask for something. And if you negotiate too early, I would say that it's a missed opportunity for some startup where they perhaps don't have a lot of resources at the beginning. Uh, so they want to make sure they don't take too much risks in terms of like hiring. And so, um, yeah, I, I think, I think that's a, an interesting way to look at, to look about it. The second trap, I think, especially when you're a technical founder, is to start your company not talking to client until your product is ready. Um, and, and so, you know, like in that case, I think, you know, you can get in the trap of, you know, working on your own to perfect the tech for a lot of years and actually going in, in the wrong direction, wrong direction, spending a lot of resources and actually doing something that doesn't answer any needs. And so my advice for that would be to just like start talking to clients and have this like, very nice cycle where you talk to clients, you make sure there is an actual need for what you're doing. Then you look at technology as a means to get there and really as a means to develop a product. And then based on that, you get some contracts or letter of intents early on that allows you to raise funds and attract talents to have more resources to develop your technology. And so as a result, you're improving your product and scaling it up. And you go again, you go back, see your client as this time your product is answering their needs and you improve based on that. So that was for the second trap, the third, the third trap, and again, I think quite controversial is you've done all these things now, you've talked to all these clients, you've started pitching this to a lot of venture capital and now you like talking too much and you lose sight of what you're here for. And so I think it's important to remind that, you know, climate tech needs much more science than talk. And by this I mean, you know, it's not a, it's not a type of industry where like making an ipod, where like the idea of the product itself is quite genius. Like here the problem and the need to solve is quite obvious. Like we have to reduce carbon emission. Industrial players are happy to do so, but they need something cost competitive. That's quite simple. And the question is who can do it like cost efficiently, energy efficiently, so that they will adopt that at a, at a price that is competitive with what they used to do before. So this is I think quite important and I would say, you know, based on that, the main thing if you want to work in that field to do is to really get technical. And by, by this I don't mean just scientifically technical, just, just like knowing your industry, understanding your industry, understanding even how like sales are done in your industry, but like really understanding your industry from like a process perspective, et cetera. And so I think that, you know, in, in climate tech and it's pretty obvious, but technical breakthrough are the main unfair advantages. You know, you're always asked, oh, what is, what is your unfair advantages in climate? I have a hard time thinking of any other like any other unfair advantage other than, than a technical one. So that you have something that just is, is actually better. Um, the second one, uh, I mean, the second thing also is you. I mean you see that when you talk to, to VCs and you talk to clients, a working pilot, you know, is much more convincing than a slide. So it's also why I think really like trying to deliver technically very fast is really important. Um, and yeah, and, and so that's, that's really important. And so to be again, a bit, a bit boring. But I think in terms of like thinking about, thinking about a career being mission driven, when you really think about it, what, what does it mean? I think it's to, it's to really apply your, your, your skills where they are the most valuable. Um, and so perhaps it doesn't mean founding a company and perhaps it means joining a company that is actually already answering. I mean, working on the topic you're working on. When we started the company Direcycle, there was one company in the U.S. most of what was done was in the U.S. in America. There was nothing in Europe. We wanted to start something in Europe. And so we were like, ok, perhaps we do have to start on our own. But we really ask ourselves, is there another force we can join to help before, before starting a company? Because there's a, you know, because there's a lot of hype around climate tech and I think we, I mean it shouldn't be because it's not, it's, it's not really cool. It's, it's just hard and it needs to happen. So we really have to make sure we allocate the resources where, where they are impactful. And then 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 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 really want to push this technology. And I think you have to make sure you don't blindly hang on to this technology and instead actually analyze it, compare it, benchmark it and perhaps even change it if you need to change it. And I'm saying that not lightly. At the beginning we started with David working on CO2 to CO so conversion of carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, which is a precursor for jet fuel. And so we really pushed the performance of the technology to top level. We really delivered on the different milestone 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 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, these unreacted reactant from the product. 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, 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 plants, which is, you know, all the auxiliary systems that are around a central technology. So now you've made all these things, you've bet on the right technology, 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 to think that people will actually pay more for a sustainable alternative. And they will probably do if it's like for you know, like a customer product that is very high end. But like most of these products, they have tiny markets and so you're not gonna have a big carbon impact by addressing a tiny market. And so like the mistake is when you're like, oh, I'm gonna make ethylene or E fuel and it's gonna cost like four times the price of fossil fuel and it's gonna be fine because people are gonna pay forever. The fact is perhaps the government is gonna subsidize for a while but at some point the most energy efficient and cost efficient technology will, 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 economic performance in addition to your sustainability performance. I think the danger zone is in the middle and it's when people assume you're going to have large long term green premium, which is like people paying much more a long time. And so that's, I mean I was saying for sustainable aviation fuel, for example, well, we really need to take these, the cost of making them down because I mean, are we going to subsidize them forever? What is going to happen? That's A good question. Of course if there's a price on carbon then your non sustainable alternative goes up in price. And so now you have a possibility of saying it's cost competitive. But we have to make sure that you're, you're, you're actually answering the, the right, I mean making the equation work. And so yeah, and so now you've done all this, you have actually a business, you, I mean you, you're sure that if your technology is working then, then the, the, the economic incentive will be aligned and then you have another trap that you can still fall into is that deep down you know, you realize this technology won't scale, for example. So you know, on the lab bench it's working and if everything scaled then it would be working and it would be like viable but actually doesn't scale. And then like one of the problem is if you don't give up and if you keep going, and I think there's a cool citation quote from Phil Knight, the creator of at Nike, who said sometimes you have to give up, sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else is genius. And I think it's true. Especially in a climate tech where we really need people. I mean we really need the talents to be funneled to the technologies at scale so that we meet our emission reduction goals. And so you know, thinking about that, I've thought about like a sort of framework of what are the good reasons to quit and what are the bad, sorry, what are the good reasons to keep going with a tech or business idea and what are the bad reasons to keep going? So I think the good reasons to keep going are first, this technology is fundamentally sound like you know, like fusion, like it's going to be very hard but you know, it can work and it's incredible what it can do and it, it just like it just can work fundamentally then the economics can work soonish or you know, or you have a plan to really back that up for a long time in terms of like funding and finally you haven't tried everything. It's not working yet, but you haven't tried everything. And so there's still hope. And perhaps, you know, you're one experiment away from, from nailing it down. So these are the good reasons. And now the bad reasons to keep going are probably like first in line, the sunk cost. You've invested so much energy that you can't let it go. Like it's like five years of your life and you're like oh my God, like if I stop doing that, what am I going to do. And it's a terrible reason because like, I mean, the cost in the future are so much higher compared to the ones you've already paid for. Then you told other it will work. So now you don't really want to, you know, admit it won't work. Or even worse, you told yourself it would work and you don't even admit to yourself it would work. So I think these are the thing with Dave early on we've kind of made a promise that if one day we stopped believing that we could make this work, we would just stop and go work with a company that had a better idea, like simply said, and that we would kind of watch out for one another egos getting in the way of actually doing something good in a reasonable time scale. So, so now, so, okay, so you've puzzled this. Uh, you still think it's uh, it's gonna work and there's a, a final trap which is, you know, it can work, it's fundamentally sound, et cetera. But now you lose face because you're tired, you're retired, you know, it's possible, but not nothing, nothing is working in the lab and you don't know why. And yeah, and so there's a, I mean, a friend of mine, entrepreneur Sebastian Boyer, gave me a good image to think about that which is like the curse of complex systems. So, you know, you have to imagine your system, when you're working on a complex technology as a sort of series of components and they are all in series. And as you know, in a, from your electric process, when, when one thing is not working, then the, the series line is not working. Um, and so here on this graph, you basically represent the probability of a system comprising n component of working, uh, based on the probability of one component working. And so you see that when you have one component, n =1, it's very easy. I mean, there's a, I mean it's one. I mean it's linear, of course, but then as you increase the number of components, there are more and more probability that the series of component won't work at a given probability of one component working. And so you end up, when you have a lot of components, you end up by having like a very long portion, you know, I mean, a very long time where, where your system is not working. Although you're like incremental, incrementally optimizing each of your components and you have to really reach a threshold where, you know, above that threshold, above that like, probability of working of one component, the series starts Working. And I think that's, I mean that's a very important thing. And we add that a lot also. I mean, at the beginning, I mean we still have systems that don't work. And you know, you, you, you test one hypothesis, you think it's not like you think the result is negative, but it's actually kind of a false negative because there's still something else that is not working. And yeah, and that's, yeah, that's really hard. And the answer to that is to keep, keep pushing. And actually there's a second part to that quote of Phil Knight when he says sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else is genius, which is giving up doesn't mean stopping. Don't ever stop. And that's the answer to the last trap. Thank you.

Hi, thank you so much for coming. I'm curious, what are your thoughts on a public private partnership and have you explored private partners like Generate Capital, which is a public benefit corporation that turns technology projects into infrastructure so customers don't have to take risks, they don't want to take or spend money they don't have to. For reference, Generate Capital operates the electric batteries on Stanford's very own Marguerite buses circling campus right now.

Yeah, so sorry, I'm not familiar with Generate, but well, I would say like public. I mean if you're mentioning partly public funding, I think it's really important to bring in both public and private capital, especially for first of their kind pilots. I mean for example, there's a program, Break Free Energy Catalysts that fund first of their kind large plants and so it allows to de risk a part of these plants for the industrial partner who is like co funding the rest. I mean it's not really public because it's a private institution, but it's like philanthropic money. So yeah, that would be my answer. I'm not sure I'm replying. I'm sorry. So for the audience, I know a little bit. But if you were to frame your journey, you talked about starting in academia where you are now pre commercial commercial on that spectrum of where are you on the journey of really generating revenue as a company? Great question. So we are pre commercial. We do generate some revenues through life feasibility study and really early like customer engagement. But so the goal of our series is to do our first industrial pilot. So that's happening now.

Sarah, thank you so much for your talk. I think it was very inspiring hearing kind of your journey and then all the traps that we can fall into as founders. I Had kind of two questions. What do you mean by being technical? Do you mean like pursuing a PhD in academia or spending like 20 years in industry? And then my other question which you kind of touched on is, do you believe that most people innovating in the climate tech space have to be coming from very like research heavy backgrounds or other ways in terms of like innovating business models or finding different paths to value?

Yeah, yeah, great question. So yeah, when I say technical, you know that I didn't say get scientific because I was actually on purpose, not trying not to say like do a PhD. That's the only way to get there. It's more like know your industry really well. Like, you know, really understand. Like, I mean spend a lot of time in industry, I think is a good idea. Life first, you know, especially on chemical engineering stuff. You probably want to have done some process engineering somewhere. Chemical engineering to understand how it works, which we didn't. But so early on we were like, okay, we have to hire a process engineer, we have to hire someone who is very good at stacks. We have to do all these things. So I mean get technical in the sense that spend a lot of time really making sure you have all these skills in your team if you don't have them yourself. I would say though, I think it's really hard to hire people who are very, very technical if you're not yourself capable of really pitching them something very strong. So yeah, any knowledge you can acquire is really good. Then you have other versions where, I mean, other routes where you can start climate. I mean businesses which have a climate impact, which are a bit less technology heavy, but that's, you know, that's a different story. And here it's more like you can start it if you have a great idea. And that's easy. I forgot your second question. I'm so sorry, you can't touch on it.

But are most like climate innovations based on like research and academia like innovations? Or is it, have you seen like successful climate startups who are like the software space in like foreign markets or other, like innovating like business models?

Yeah, I mean there's a lot of cool stuff to do in the software industry as well then? It's just, it's just, I think it's, I mean carbon accounting, for example, is very crowded, I think as a space. So yeah, I mean I've seen a lot of things that works very well, like watershed or things like these kind of companies. They're great. It's very different. I'm just saying, you know, like, a lot of the things we need is also very. I mean, very industrial, unfortunately, it represents a lot of the. Like, in terms of proportion of the emissions, it's a lot. So we probably need a lot of people to kind of sacrifice and go in there, you know?

Thank you.

All right, you guys, that is the.

End of today's session.

Can we please give Sarah a round of applause?