CiC 2024 Year End Wrap Up: Impactful Storytelling

Hi folks, I'm Connor Gahn and welcome to Consensus in Conversation, a podcast where we're talking to the innovators, entrepreneurs and thought leaders who are committed to building successful businesses that also help us build a better world. Well, hard to believe it's time for me to say this already, but 2024 is almost at an end. It's been a whirlwind of a year for everyone, I'm sure you'll agree. As we go into the momentary pause of the holiday season, I always think it's a good time, along with rest and celebration, to look back and reflect on the journey we've gone through during the past 12 months. Amid all the nonstop hustle that comes with being an operator, one constant for me throughout the year has been how much fun it has been to get to do this show. I feel super lucky that part of my job is to chat each week with such cool and interesting business leaders, and I'm always inspired by the passion our guests bring to building businesses and organizations that strive to make our shared future look brighter. Every episode, I like to ask guests how they defeat defeatism and continue to stay optimistic about the future in the face of the seemingly endless parade of doom and gloom headlines, particularly when it comes to climate. And I've said this before, but it bears repeating. My own answer to that question is is that it's by doing this show, by meeting all these incredible innovators and hearing their amazing ideas for businesses that can make a difference. I learned so much from these conversations, so I'm grateful to have gone to spend another year doing them. Whether it's motivation, education, or just the entertainment value of listening to really smart people talk about their ideas. I hope you've been able to get as much from listening to these chats as I have from doing them. And I want to thank everyone for listening. So with that being said, as we look back on another year and some 40 odd conversations, it's time once again for our consensus and conversation year end wrap up episode. It was a lot of fun doing a general best of type show last season, but this year I wanted to try something a little more focused. We've had a number of recurring themes in our interviews this season. Usual suspects like regenerative agriculture, the hydrogen economy, carbon storage and credit markets, and also some broader ideas like hidden economies, data analysis around climate risk, and of course, the role of AI and sustainability. But as I was sifting through the material from the season and trying to figure out a unifying theme for the episode that would cover as many guests in as many fields as possible. It suddenly struck me that the very act of doing that, I'd be participating in one of our biggest themes for the year, the process of storytelling. And so, as I hinted at a couple of weeks ago in introducing the first part of our conversation with Ronaldo Brutico, storytelling is what we're going to focus on in this year's compilation. As a media operator and podcaster, I obviously think storytelling is important. It's part of what I do for a living. But I want to convince you that storytelling matters for a lot more than just entertainment. It's an essential business skill. Part of being a great entrepreneur is being a great salesman, and part of being a great salesman is being a great storyteller. Now, being a great business storyteller doesn't mean becoming PT Barnum and selling BS to everyone. Truths and facts benefit from good storytelling just as much, maybe even more than nonsense does. Of course, it'd be nice to live in a world where every idea rose or fell purely on its own merit. But let's face it, even when it comes to impact businesses, it's a crowded market. Not only do you need to convince potential customers and investors that yours is the best solution to a problem, but quite often you need to help people understand if there even is a problem in the first place. And when it comes to fields like clean energy, circular economies, or regenerative agriculture, that can be a real challenge. Innovators face serious headwinds from established legacy industry. Lots of people, even with the best intentions, are just resistant to change, regardless of what change means. And many of the challenges we face as consumers, as citizens, as a planet, well, they're really complicated. Scientists earn PhDs and build whole careers working to understand just pieces of the climate issue, let alone the whole thing. And many facts that are indisputably true in the aggregate still don't necessarily jive with our individual scale experiences day to day. As I write this, it's about 30 degrees outside and my fingers are freezing. I have no doubt in the science that says global warming is real, but I sure get that it doesn't feel like it sometimes. That's where storytelling comes in. Data and facts can only take you so far. When people don't see or feel or connect with a problem in a way that feels very real to them, it can be really, really hard to sell them on the value of a solution to that problem, especially when the solutions themselves are pretty technically complex. This is one of the reasons that Keith Norman, Chief Sustainability Officer at Lighten, whose groundbreaking 3D graphene technology is poised to revolutionize the EV battery space, identified storytelling as an essential skill to recruit for when building a new technology company.

I got asked on a panel not too long ago, what are the skill sets that you absolutely need as a company as you bring in new technology? And it was very quick that I never thought about it before, but when you're on the spot and on a panel, sometimes the best thoughts come to your head right there. And so there's the obvious answer of hey, we need the best scientists and engineers and technologists and know PhDs, which we do. Absolutely. They're just none of this could happen without that. But there's a second piece which is we need storytellers like we need people that can take this, the complexity of that and boil that down to why that matters, why that matters to you as an individual, as you as a company, why that matters to the consumer. What will be the impact if we're successful and do that as a simple sort of emotionally connect to a way as possible. And you talk about raising money, you talk about trying to get that first facility built, you talk about trying to work with local governments to get your permits. You know there's one part's the science, but in equal or maybe greater part is is the story and the narrative that you are able to tell that allows people to get it. And that's, that's been a lot of my focus coming in of having that engineering background, enough of that engineering skill, enough of that history to understand this and to be helpful and ask hard questions, but also to then translate this into something that can go influence people.

On the one hand, storytelling is critical for education. On the other hand, it's also essential as a means of inspiration. A founder who speaks very powerfully to this aspect of storytelling is Jasmine Crow Houston, whose startup Goodr uses advanced logistics to save businesses money while tackling food waste and hunger. And her eloquence on the topic is no surprise at all. Jasmine is an author and multi time TED speaker on the topic of food security in America. I've been deeply moved by Jasmine's talks. So when she joined us on the pod, I had to ask for her advice on storytelling for entrepreneurs. You're just this incredible public speaker and incredible communicator on really important topics, including that of hunger. So I'm curious like as you think about studying from an academic perspective, communications, now that you're a multi time founder, what kind of communications advice would you have for impact entrepreneurs about telling Their story, shaping their message for audiences. How would you coach other budding impact entrepreneurs to be better storytellers?

Yeah, I think storytelling is so imperative. And one thing that's so funny, a lot of people don't know this. I was never really a public speaker, if you will. I was really shy of my voice and just kind of really teased about it as a kid. But 100%, telling the story of why you want to make an impact and also why you're the person to solve this problem is so critical, because people need to not buy into your story, but they need to believe that you could do it, and you need to believe that you can do it. And you have to have a why. And again, this is, in my opinion, there's a why. You want to solve hunger, or you want to make sure that our water quality is better, or you want to make sure that, you know, we have a beautiful earth to live in 100 years from now. There's a why. And people need to know that why specifically if you want them to join.

You on the mission.

So I always consider that I am the voice of people that are experiencing hunger, and that's who I want to enter the room with me anytime I'm talking to someone about doing business with Goodr. Because ultimately, in some way or some form, we're going to be feeding people and I want people to know what it's like on the other side.

So, okay, storytelling matters in business. You want to get people to understand what you're doing and you want them to believe in you doing it. The question is how? Well, some folks are lucky. They're just born with a gift of gab. Take a listen to our recent two parter with Ronaldo Brutico to see what I mean. Ronaldo is a born storyteller, but what if you're someone like many of the founders we spoke to, who are more naturally inclined towards the math and science and engineering side of innovation? The good news is that storytelling is a skill you can master like any other. To begin discovering how it pays to take a first principles approach and ask the most basic question of what story are you telling? And for insight in answering that, I'm turning back to a guest who's not only an expert on the topic, but who really helped us crystallize storytelling as a major theme this season in the first place. Jay Kapoor, general partner at VSC Ventures. I think we saw it during COVID 19 and the spotlight on the Creator Economy. Like a preponderance of businesses coming into the world what's harder than ever is to be noticed and to tell your story and those two things obviously intimately related. So it makes a lot of sense, this concept of having kind of a venture partner that knows and understands the power of storytelling. If you think about whether it's from your portfolio or just in general, what you're learning and seeing in the market, is there anything that you can kind of point to that you think are the key elements of a good story for a startup?

Yeah, it's something we think about a lot. I think a good story for a startup can be split into two things. There is a good story for the company itself. Why does this company need to exist? Who is it for? What problem does it solve? What toothpick and bubble gum solution is it replacing? So that's kind of the startup story. But more important than that, and often overlooked, I think, is the founder story. And I hear this so often because founders, now especially founders, are really well coached and they come prepared and they're ready with the pitch and they're ready to hit all the bullet points. And then I find myself in these hour long pitch conversations, sometimes stopping the founder and saying, almost like you did on our conversation, hey, before we dive into that, take it back for me, why is this the business that you want to dedicate the next decade of your life to? What is it about this problem that really compels you? A lot of founders get thrown off by that sometimes because they came prepared to talk about their business and their market and their customer. And I almost made it like a therapist couch. Like, hey, take it back to your childhood. What did you learn? What did you see? So kudos to you for taking us there. One of the things that I have told a lot of my founders, I'm a huge movie buff, and one of the things that always resonates with me is this idea of the hero of a Thousand Faces. Folks may have heard of this book by Joseph Campbell. If they haven't heard of the book, they've certainly seen his theory applied in real life. George Lucas wrote Star wars with basically the principle of a hero of a thousand faces. And so the idea is simple, that there are these foundational myths in our human sort of collective time on this planet that are foundational for cultures that never met each other, that lived thousands of years apart. But the stories have very similar beats, right? There is a reluctant hero. That hero is charged to go on a quest. They refuse the quest. They say, I'm not the right person. But then something changes in their life. That compels them to say, it is my duty, my responsibility to go take on this quest. As they go on the quest, they find people that support them and give them the tools they need to actually go and enact the change. They have apotheosis and all these sort of learnings, and then at the end of it, they are changed for the better. I'm summarizing a 2000 page book, but ultimately I tell founders, your founder story is not that different from Luke Skywalker's or Harry Potter's or whatever, right? You have to tell your story in a way where it is so inevitable to the listener that this is what you would be doing. There should not be a doubt in their mind that you are the best person to save the galaxy, or save the wizarding world, or save the world of concrete and construction, or whatever it is that you're doing. So it's almost this working theory of a founder of a thousand faces, which is, every founder story is kind of the same, but it has different beats because your lived experience is different, your childhood is different, the companies you worked at, the founder market fit that you gained by working at those companies is different. But how you tell the story has some of the same beats. And so I gave you that very long anecdote to bring you back to the question you asked. The components of those stories often results in a couple of questions. Why me? What is it that I know and have learned that I don't think most people know how to do? Why me? For this? I could be doing so many things with my skillset. I could be making $500,000 working for Amazon or Apple or wherever, but instead I'm cutting my salary, you know, by. By 40%, 60% to come work on this problem. Because this is the problem that's going to define our generation. Climate change has actually been really beautiful for me because so many of these folks are just so compelled by it, right? And a lot of these stories, especially for founders that are in their 30s or something, say, you know, I was working at this software SaaS company and then I had a kid and I looked at my daughter and I was like, I got to go work on something that's meaningful for her life. And you don't have to be a parent. You just have to find your own connection to why you're working on this problem. And here's why that's doubly important. Because it's not just about selling that story to an investor. When you go out and recruit your first 10 employees, provided you don't just, you know, grab them from the last company you worked at. You have to convince them that this is something that you're going to work on, that you're committed to, that you're going to be the hardest working person in there. And you have to convince them to give up more lucrative opportunities to come work for you, because the equity that you're building together is going to be worth something.

Yeah.

And so I think those aspects of why you, why you for this, why now? What is the earned secret or earned knowledge that you have that somebody would have to go spend 10 years in the mining industry to pick up? But, but you've spent those 10 years. Those are all aspects of this founder of A Thousand Faces. Right. It's all the same. The beats are the same. How you fill those beats is ultimately unique to you.

Yeah. Let's now take a second to listen to what I think is a fantastic example of a founder doing exactly what Jay described in that clip. Filling out his unique story Beats in a way that doesn't just tell you, but shows you in low key, awesome and pretty hilarious fashion that this is a founder you can count on to be the hardest working and most resourceful guy in the room. It's a story we heard from Nico Pinkowski, co founder and CEO of Nitricity, about the crazy experience he and his team had during the first field trial for their decarbonized fertilizer production system.

The folks who work these farms are tough because it is really grueling conditions and it is dusty and there is black widows and rodents and it was a tough environment to build this system, but we got it done. And then also the big thing is the whole community rallied around us. They were so supportive because they saw these crazy kids out there working all day long on this weird. I'll share one story in particular. As our whole system went down and we didn't know what to do and we couldn't find a replacement part and there's a race against the clock and someone had an idea saying, like, hey, a toaster has this specific type of resistor and let's just go buy one at Target instead of waiting for this like legitimate resistor to come in. So, you know, to get the project on track and on timeline, we go to Target and buy a toaster and we're planning to like destroy the toaster and take out a resistor.

And.

And the lady was like, do you want a warranty on this toaster?

And I said, I said, no, ma'.

Am.

We're going to destroy it.

And then we go smash the toaster, take out a resistor, put it into our system.

Everything is working just fine.

And, you know, it worked for another month.

It sounds like within that period, there were some days where you didn't have the confidence that you're going to beat the control. How did you kind of push through those moments of uncertainty? Oh, I think just madness. It takes that to be an entrepreneur. It takes a little bit of that.

At this point, we were just delusional and crazy. I mean, the most important thing is you just have a really good group that's excited about something and you have.

A lot of people rooting for you.

And you don't want to let them down. And you're having kind of a good time, even though it's a lot of suffering too, because you're together.

So if you're working with a good.

Team that's like really excited about solving a big problem and you have some support, you know, it was no question.

As a founder, it's important to be able to tell your own unique story. But equally, it's also sometimes important to think about yourself and your company as part of a broader story and to learn how to speak to that connection. We hear a lot these days about the importance of representation. I was super stoked this year to be able to host on the show my good friend Lindsay Davis Stover and her co founder, Shivam Malik Shah, who together are currently blazing a trail for women in the field of tequila with their 1953 brand. And so I wanted to hear from them directly on why storytelling around representation is so important. I mean, not to be like too blunt on it, but for the listeners who are, you know, not fully bought in, like, just put it out there. Like, why is it so important that the world has a female founded, female run, female fronted tequila or spirits brand in general? Because I think it's super important. But I also think having you guys give the reason in your own voice hopefully will open some ears, some eyes to some folks as well. Like, what's the significance here? Because we think it is, but give.

It to us, we see this every day. Women have the power to change the world. It's why we're called 1953. And when you look at global development, when you look in local communities, investing in women is investing in communities, it's investing in families. Creating opportunities for women is creating opportunities for everybody. And anytime there are folks whose stories are not told who are behind the scenes, you have to ask yourself why? Why when they're doing the work and it's the product of their hard experience, why do they not get the recognition they deserve? I mean, there is tons of research that will tell you diversity in leadership, diversity in so many ways leads to better outcomes. This is one small way of contributing to that story. And I think for us too, we don't want to stop here. Like how we build this company and grow this company will be based on how many opportunities we can continue to provide for women along the way. And I think too, it's important that women are in industry, especially when it's run by a patriarchal system. It's important that younger generations see women in every industry right. And even if they aren't able to see themselves doing that, it's important that they see women can do it right. And I think also ensuring that the legacy we built and this company continues to provide opportunities for women and open up doors for women at every level is really important to our growth. We're seeing that with our distillery. And just when we meet with people who are working at the distillery, we see the pride they have in the product. We see the excitement they have that their stories are being told. We know that leads to a better product. And over time, it just makes sense that businesses should be run this way. Again. We're not huge yet, but we will be one day. And even before we are, we, we hope larger companies take note too. I mean, part of what makes Tequila such an attractive segment is there are margins in there where you can still run your business in a really beautiful, morally responsible way and still turn a very sizable profit. And so you don't have to choose. And the more we can remind just by leading the way that we want to lead, but the more we can have that conversation continue, the better we'll have for everybody.

The personal founder story, the company story, the collective story you play a part in representing, all of them are unique and important to consider in building your company's voice. But one founder this year mentioned a type of storytelling that, quite honestly, I had never really thought about in this context. The story embodied in an object. This idea came up in conversation with Ben Christensen, co founder of Cambium, a startup which reduces CO2 by transforming waste wood into, like, trees felled by storms, into carbon negative building material and unique furniture pieces. Hearing about some of those examples, I think is a really good opportunity to dig in a little bit more and help folks understand this notion that you can take wood that others may have thought was just discardable and create High quality, high impact product help people understand how products that some may think died in a disaster or through disease, how they're still perfectly usable, super high quality products. Like, is that part of the sale? I mean, I guess the sales pitch to partners. And how is that sales pitch laid out? Because it's such a great reminder that there's such value in things if you know how to think about it differently or how to look at it differently or how to break it down differently.

For sure. I think there's two big parts of it. The first is a little bit more existential, which I think about a lot. And I think this is something we've kind of gotten wrong as a human race is we've just been optimizing for sameness. Like we want everything to look exactly the same always. And we end up just kind of removing the soul or intrigue into anything. You know, if you go to Ikea, there's hundreds of thousands of the exact same looking thing. That's all the same. It's the same, it's the same, it's the same. But that's not actually like who humans are, right? Like we care about stories, we care about being unique. We are interested in things that have a history. Think about, all right, you've got people in your house, like, what is the one object you're going to tell them about? You're not going to tell them about something that looks exactly the same as everything else that you got off shelf at Target. You're going to tell them about your grandfather's kitchen table or you like got this cedar chest during some travel or whatever it is, you're going to tell them about something with a story. And I really fundamentally believe that people care about products differently when they know their stories behind them. And so when we actually focus on that, what we're trying to do is trying to create the same scale of the sort of sameness economy, but with the power of story and a focus on uniqueness. And so what that is, is that's really brand education on, hey, we are using waste material, right? This is a waste stream. This is not going and clear cutting forests where you're getting exactly the perfect log every single time and then you're wasting a lot of it in the process. In order to get these perfect boards, we're very focused on, we are taking what we get and, and we're processing it in ways where it might look a little bit more unique, there's more character. You know, it might have a different piece, but that's actually Something that we want, right? You actually want to be able to say, yo, look at this table. I got like, it's amazing. It came from this place, you know, this person built it along the way. It like came from the tree that my parents got married under or, you know, it came from the city that I grew up in. Whatever it is, you know, there's places and ways to change that perception and so we really focus on that.

I loved Ben's answer there so much for two reasons. One, because he made me think about something I hadn't thought of before and that's incredibly valuable. But two, behind the poetry of the idea. I love what a clever piece of business storytelling that answer is on Ben's part. He takes something that could be perceived as a negative about his products. The lack of uniformity and unpredictability that comes from being made from salvage materials and flips that exact same quality into a unique, positive selling point by connecting it to the idea of storytelling. A pretty neat double whammy lesson for those of us who are always looking to polish our pitch game. And it's an important lesson to internalize for anyone with a climate or impact adjacent business. Because let's be real, shifting negative perceptions around the necessity and viability of the field is going to be a significant and inevitable part of our capital raising process. When I caught up earlier this year with Grant Quasha, a college friend of mine who moved from commodity trading to to run eco material technology creating green cement from coal industry waste, this fact was something he was quick to flag about his own experience in the capital markets. When you go out to the market to raise more money, how are investors viewing this opportunity?

It's interesting that you mentioned that, because there was a perception that investors would look at it negatively and it was something that I had to fight quite a bit. We had our business, the green cement business, and we wanted to raise more money to create more green cement. And so we had to go out and talk to everyone on Wall street or the big players on Wall street, and I will tell you, there were more than a few meetings I went to when they said, nope, this has the C word associated with it. It's got coal associated with it. We're not doing any coal deals. And you walk them through and say, yes, I understand these materials were created by the burning of coal. However, if folks burned coal then or now, this basically was a waste stream that we figured out actually how to turn it into a really good thing. And we've actually even figured out how to Take the old waste dumps and turn them into a really good thing. So don't tar me with the brush of the industry that is polluting and that you don't want to invest in. We are going to face the realities of the market, which is people are still burning it and there's billions of tons of this stuff in the ground and we're going to make the best of it. We're going to take the last two generations trash and we're going to turn it into the next couple of generations roads and highways. So it's not the simplest story, and it's one that frankly, we were successful in convincing a couple of big institutions to support us. So it showed you the amount of interest that folks had. The folks that took the time to really understand the value proposition here, both from our earnings, but also more broadly to the ESG market. It was really a really nice validation of the work that we had been doing and the pounding on the table that we've been doing to say, forget about the fact that it was associated with coal. This is the most scalable way to decarbonize one of the biggest industries in the world.

As Grant mentioned, the challenging part in getting investors to see the value proposition is often that these are complex stories to tell, especially to the layperson. Figuring out how to do this. Translation is a big part of the growth process from scientist or engineer into a business leader for founders like Peter Goddard. Peter is a literal rocket scientist. He first ideated the technology behind his energy storage startup, Found Energy, while planning Mars exploration missions at NASA. Having been on the other side of the table in more than a few meetings in my day, I was curious to hear from Peter how he approached getting folks like me to grasp what he's doing well enough to even make an informed decision on whether to back it. Speaking of that business acumen, I'm curious what the process has been like to be out there in the market. What was it like for you to be out there in front of venture capitalists and in the capital markets and particularly when you have such in some ways an esoteric and technologically complex story.

Yeah, you hit on a really interesting dynamic of this process. So at the end of the day, it really is storytelling. But people come like the listener comes with all of this, with different background information. And so the story that I would tell in academia is very different from the story I have to tell to a VC or to someone in heavy industry, a potential customer. And it took me a long time to realize that as a society the concept of a fuel is actually very well hidden from the average user. Right when you go to the pump, you know, you're just like putting this thing in your car, you're waiting some amount of time. You know, you probably know gasoline is going in there. But at the end of the day you're not really thinking about like what's the energy density and what's the power density of that system and what's the supply chain that's required to get that energy to you and why is it so difficult to do anything different from that? And so like I find I spend a lot of time just teaching people what a fuel is, what a redox reaction is. Like some things that are like perfectly acceptable for people to not know because it's at the chemistry level, it's actually quite complicated. And if you don't use it in your day to day life, why would you need to know about it? So that's been fun and I spent a lot of time in education throughout my life. So thankfully I actually enjoy educating people and teaching people about some of this more basic chemistry. But it means that these conversations can take quite a bit of time. You really have to be patient.

On the flip side, I also think it's really valuable to founders to understand the perspective of investors and allocators and learn what they're listening for in terms of good storytelling. Zol Billimoria offered us some awesome insight on that front. Sol is the co founder and now solo GP of Refactor Capital, a seed stage VC firm that specializes in impactful bio and climate tech startups. In a field crowded with incredible sounding possibilities, Zahl has some pretty practical wisdom on how he separates the great ideas from the great businesses. It's so funny how storytelling becomes such an important part of the startup game. These technologies, it must be just so fun to be in your shoes because you talk to these folks and you hear what they're doing and it sounds like science fiction. It's so cool. And every day you get to look at these deals like what are you looking at now that's getting you really excited? What's kind of out there that's going to blow our minds?

Yeah, but I mean before I want.

To, I want to talk about science fiction for a second because I think.

It'S really critical to understand which companies.

Are trying to espouse science fiction versus science reality. I like that because as a seed investor, I cannot be believing in something that is going to commercialize 10 years from now that is that it does.

Not work with a venture fund.

Because by series A, those investors that want to write a 20, $30 million.

Lead check in year round, they want.

To see product market fit, they want to see a couple of contracts, they want to see your first product built and actually producing revenue. And you've identified what the business model.

Is going to look like.

Right. And so a lot of scientific founders.

That come to me, maybe they're spinning.

Out of a lab or they're at some university or they're at another company. I could tell that they're not necessarily ready to be CEOs and start a company because they talk about projects and experiments and, you know, trying to go raise a 250k SBIR from the government.

To go in, like that'll give them.

Two and a half years of Runway. And you're just like, okay, you're not thinking at the speed and the sense.

Of urgency required to build a company.

You're thinking about this as a science project. That's fine.

Especially if you think that, you know.

We need two to five years of work in the lab before spinning out a company. Come back to me when you're ready to start a company in that sense. And so I'm actively screening for that. People who actually want to build companies versus building projects. But like, in terms of what ideas I'm really excited about. When I get excited about ideas and not founders, I make mistakes. So I have to believe that the founders are amazing. Like, they're technically and commercially gifted, They've.

Got that sense of urgency.

They could be true company builders.

And then they're magnets for three types of people.

Customers, talent, and investors.

What you're looking for are people who can actually sell not only products, but shares in their company to people like me. One founder who managed to convince Zal that he was precisely the type of amazing leader and builder that Saul's looking for is Pavel Yaramic, CEO of Ather Biomachines, who we'd actually had on the podcast prior to meeting Saul. The technology Pavel is developing is pretty incredible, potentially world changing, actually. Nanoscale protein machines that can rearrange matter at the atomic level for everything from mining to manufacturing. But it's also really, really complicated and abstract. One of the most challenging to get your head around. What does this even mean? Ideas that we've explored on the show so far. But listen to Pavel talk about it and you'll hear exactly what Zahl was talking about. Whatever the technology ends up being most useful for, this is a guy worth investing in. Not only does he know his stuff? To an incredible degree, but he's also great at telling the story of what it could be. Just listening to you describe the products and the way you think about them and it strikes me like when you think about the scientific and technological complexity of what you do, it's really important for you to be able to tell the story. I'm already picturing how my mom will interpret this whole episode. Right.

So tell me about that. What have you learned in the process of fundraising, of communications with, you know, folks that aren't going to have PhDs in the engineering, scientific or technological fields about not just how you tell your story, but just the importance of being able to do it?

Yeah, I think there's definitely been a ton of lessons learned there. Right. I think one of the things that's important is trying to pull the tangible examples as quickly as possible. A problem I had early on was kind of like something you said earlier. You know, there's so many potential applications of this technology. I think early on when I was telling the story of Aether, I was kind of blinded by all the potential applications. And so my narrative and my pitch would be exciting but vague because it would be like, yeah, I can rearrange atoms, so the world's my oyster. But that isn't helpful when you're trying to educate someone who has never thought about this before. Because I don't think a lot of people think very much about the fact that literally everything that we are and that we touch and we interact with and the whole history of our lives and the history of our species is made from little patterns of atoms. So I think even something as fundamental as that constant understanding, because people don't think about it, if I just say I can rearrange atoms programmatically, it doesn't click immediately. Why would that be so impactful? So I've always found it helpful to go to very specific, tangible examples like with mining and say, hey, this is a little machine, it floats around, it's like a mousetrap and it just grabs onto lithium and pulls it out for us. And I'm going to be able to do that for any metal. And you're going to see super environmentally friendly, low cost mining happen anywhere. And every metal is going to be a dollar a pack or something. And you're going to see if titanium is cheap as steel, you're going to see skyscrapers that are miles tall. At that point, that's what's going to start happening. So I try to pull it to the kind of Macro scale applications and the tangible output of that. Like on the material side, one of the examples that I found to be super helpful. Like our main product in the material side right now is actually a product that makes a plastic that everyone wants to use manufacturable. Because this plastic has a lot of really good properties, but it's almost impossible to melt. And you know, that's kind of a problem because that's how we make things out of plastic, is we melt them into the shape we want. So our additive actually, actually makes this material more meltable and it strengthens on the back end. That's an okay example, but it's still kind of abstract and a little vague. But in theory, this additive should also allow for materials to heal themselves. So you can start. The tangible example that I think is a lot more legible to people is say, well, imagine a plate of armor that after it's impacted after a couple hours is fully healed and is ready to operate again. And you just have planes or tanks or soldiers where they're as safe as they can be because their armor is literally healing every time it's impacted by something else. Trying to tie to those applications that are as understandable as possible. I think that's really, really key.

As Pavel mentioned, moving quickly to tangible examples is a great strategy to get people to understand your technology and get excited about it. In some cases, however, you need a way to translate what the technology or product actually does in a relatable way before you can get to potential use cases. And there's an excellent storytelling trick for doing that one, which Pavel actually used in that last clip. It's a technique that Jay Kapoor also flagged as something he specifically looks for when being pitched and teaches when coaching his founders using analogies. One other question I want to ask on storytelling you mentioned in your example, I think concrete, which especially because we have this a lot in the climate tech space right now. Material science companies, industrial companies who are working on industrial decarbonization, where the product, the service, it's not an easy story for your run of the mill consumer or your kind of mom and pop, or, you know, God bless my parents who still listen to the podcast episode even when it's someone talking about, you know, biochemistry and my mother's like, I don't know any of the words that were just said in your entire podcast episode. And maybe this comes down to you and I as kind of intermediaries as we are the interviewers or the, you know, the working on the publicity and PR strategies, like what's the storytelling or the communications vehicle. What is the trick to communicating in some of these more, I don't know, wonky, esoteric industries, sectors, et cetera.

You have to find the analogies that relate to everyday life. In that regard. I'll give you an example. From our portfolio, we invested in a company called Pepper Bio. The core thesis behind Pepper is a lot of money is wasted on drug trials because they get to a certain level and then fail. And today it's just faster for people to move on to the next trial. Once one fails, there are learnings that are trapped in those failures that nobody extracts. Right. And one of those learnings could be, well, if it succeeded at point A, and then a little bit later it failed at point B, what happened between point A and B that we would be able to change? And based on that change, extrapolate if instead of point B we go to point C and it becomes more successful.

Right.

What am I describing? I'm describing route finding on something like Google Maps or Waze. And that's exactly how the founders described the company when they pitched it to us. They said, we are Waze for drug discovery. If there's a roadblock ahead, if there's a traffic jam ahead, we extrapolate how long it's going to take, what a better route might be, and what some of the ways that you should actually take it. Right. And once you dig in a little bit further, Connor, it is much more complicated than what I just explained to you, but you don't get passed over on the first conversation.

Right.

There are aspects where the playfulness with how you tell that story shows two important things. One, you understand your business well enough that you can relate it to the real world. Two, you respect your audience. You understand that they haven't spent 15 years in grad school, PhD industry to come do this. And if you understand your audience, when you're pitching me as an investor, it gives me confidence that you understand your audience when you are pitching future employees, future investors, and then even customers who may not be technically as savvy or complex. Right. It gives me confidence as an investor that you know how to tell your story because you're able to make it relatable in a way that the average person can understand. It's difficult. It takes a skill and oftentimes it takes somebody outside of your business because to you, you're working in it every single day. It's obvious to you.

Yeah.

And so you need that objectivity sometimes for someone to say that that thing that you Said right there. That was the most compelling thing to me. That makes sense to me. You've now explained your story to me in a way that I want to engage with it further.

For a perfect example of a founder using analogy, just as Jay describes, I want to turn back to our conversation with Karthik Balakrishnan, co founder and president of actual. ACTUAL is a capital planning platform for resilience and sustainability transformation, which I don't know about you, but that technical description, however accurate, didn't exactly give me a great understanding of what ACTUAL even is at first, let alone get me excited about its potential usage. But that's okay, because Karthik has absolutely nailed an analogy that as soon as I heard it, instantly made clear to me exactly what ACTUAL is and what it could be used for. Take a listen.

We started to see a repeat thread which is that the details of sustainability, the details of transforming our real world, are extremely technical. They rely on data and science from a lot of different sources. But the people making those decisions, generally they're very smart financially. But they're not the technical expert.

Sure.

And they will never be the technical expert because each of these domains is a specialty.

Yeah.

And you're an expert on water or on supply chain or on agriculture. But the CFO has to make a solution that satisfies all of these requirements. So the CFO has a generalist.

Yep.

And so the question then is how do you take all that specialist knowledge and break it into one place so that a financial generalist can make a financial decision?

I'm curious how you would summarize the product, the service in an elevator pitch right now. How would you describe ACTUAL in an elevator?

So think about us like SimCity. If you've played the game SimCity, which is interesting because the folks who are CFOs and folks in that thing are now of kind of the age where they would have played SimCity growing up. So they get it. Well, what if SimCity was multiplayer and had real science behind it so you could very quickly understand your capital plan and be confident that was correct? Yeah, very visual, interactive map based interface where you see the real world, you see the projects, you see the investment options. And in the same way as SimCity, hey, I'm going to do a nuclear power plant versus solar. Why not do that with the real science behind it? So very, very easy for someone to come in and toggle in our charging network. We're going to put L3 charge instead of L2 chargers, your utility, and you're looking at a net zero neighborhood. Are we going to do geothermal versus heat pumps versus air source heat pumps? That's a very technically complex question that you can reduce to a slider so that the CFO can understand the implications of very technical decisions. They're like, hey, I was playing with this thing last night and it actually made me more excited for my own project. Like, here is somebody who has spent the last 10 years trying to build and build relationships and work with cities and get the permits and all these kind of things. They know the details, but seeing the thing on a map that was interactive, not in a PDF, not in a bunch of Excel files, they were like, you know, I'm more excited to work today.

Yeah.

And then they showed it to one of the apostle investors. And at that point they were having a conversation about the details of investment within about five minutes, because the investor knew what the project was about. Typically you'd have a long pitch and then you'd leave the PPM and the investor would be busy and they wouldn't get around to reading the ppm. You'd follow up five times and, you know, like, who's going to read the 100 page thing? No one really. But in this case, they got into the details because you'd look at the map and you look at the real world and you're like, oh, you're doing X.

Here's another example of a great product analogy, this one from Lauren Dunford, co founder and CEO of Guidewheel, a data analysis platform for increasing manufacturing efficiency and sustainability. So from that moment to kind of your current elevator pitch, how do you now describe the product or how do you describe Godwell in general and kind of how do you pitch into markets now?

Yeah, definitely. So depends on the person, of course. So I'll talk to you as if you were a VP of Operations across a bunch of different manufacturing plants. And what we would say is, first tell me about your day to day. Do you have a bunch of different. And you know, these are going to be leading questions for you, but hopefully we would ask them in a way where we would actually learn the true state and figure out, hey, do they have a problem we can solve? Because this is all about a puzzle fitting together the person who has the problem that we uniquely can solve. We'd say, do you have different plants, different types of machines, ages, makes models across those plants where because it's such a patchwork of patchworks, you end up tracking manually on the core things that matter most, which is, is your equipment running at the right time? Producing the output that you're selling. So looking at the key bottleneck machines, how do you track those today? If it's pen and paper, the reason you track with pen and paper might be because the only solutions in the past were heavyweight, expensive, requiring experts that you didn't have in your smaller plants or across every plant. And what we've got now is a way to connect every asset in minutes and have the real time foundation on which we can then drive improvements in productivity. 41% improvement in productivity on average. And the way we do that is a little bit non intuitive, but like a Fitbit can clip around your wrist in minutes and measure your heartbeat and tell you, connor, you are running or you are hiking or you are in deep sleep or REM sleep. A remarkable amount of information about your activity from a very simple analog signal which is your heartbeat. Guide wheel can clip around the power going into any machine or component within it. With a sensor that's as simple and non intrusive as a smartwatch measuring that current draw and then Guidewheel's algorithms and software turn that into meaning and action. So we can reduce changeover time, set up time, we can get ahead of any problem a machine might be having. We can pinpoint the challenge all with a shared source of truth that a CEO all the way up, down around to operators, plant managers, VP of ops. Everyone can share the same understanding and second by second granularity into what their machines are doing every single day. And we're going to first use that to help you drive a huge increase in production. We're going to have AI powering it and making it smarter with every machine, every user in every factory and then from the start we've got the data to be able to track and reduce emissions and improve sustainability as well as we'll build that into your workflows because we know that that will be something you care about and probably are required to have over the next few years, but it'll be built into something you do care about, which is production versus a separate system.

I love the analogy of the Fitbit. I think it makes it so real for the lay person.

Fitbit for factories. It sounds a little overall. So I still don't know if it's the right analogy to use, but boy, it is how we start.

One other piece of great business wisdom for founders that I want to point out from what Lauren said, besides the awesome Fitbit analogy, is her highlighting the value of asking questions when pitching. Not only do you involve your listener and potential customer more actively and make them feel uniquely heard. But you also learn more and more about what your real world customers, partners and investors are looking for, allowing you to iterate on your pitch to be sharper and sharper as you incorporate what you learn from them. In closing out the storytelling exploration, I want to go to a set of thoughts that came up in my conversation with Vince Romann, Founder and CEO of Gradient. Vince's work is pretty specific. Gradient makes super efficient and beautifully designed electric heat pumps to help decarbonize the H Vac space, especially in urban housing infrastructure. But when I asked Vince for his approach to communicating the importance of sustainability in his work, his answer surprised me. He reminded me that all of this work is part of a much bigger picture, a story that we all play a part in together.

I was at this great talk by Tom Steyer where he made what now seems like an obvious point that in the early 90s you would say that you were working for an Internet company, right? The Internet was a new thing. And so you'd be like, my company does something with the Internet. You wouldn't say that today the Internet is so deeply embedded into everything about how we live that it is the waters that we swim in. And I think that is becoming true for climate. I think that almost everything that we do, especially from a business standpoint, has some effect on the climate. If it's not emissions, it is how we as people in our daily lives respond to climate. And with that broadening definition, we see climate efforts show up in different ways, right? We see it around farming, around local ecologies, around food waste. And I think the exciting part is this more holistic view on climate change that is causing us to think about the sort of adaptation effects of climate change and how we can fix them. It is causing us to think about jobs and economic opportunity and it is leading to all of this exciting wave of climate companies that isn't just about cars and electricity generation. It's about how we eat, it's about how we live. And so all of the work, I think, in food, both production and waste, is really interesting to me. I think all of the work that is very community based is particularly interesting to me. I think there's a lot more community focused climate efforts. I think this more holistic, connected people focused view of climate is what's most exciting to me.

It also makes me wonder if that perspective, which feels broader and more inclusive of other parts of the economy, other parts of business, also is an invitation to more people to become engaged, right? It'll touch more sectors Everyone will have someone they know who's working in the Internet, while now working in climate tech, clean tech, in ways that I think hopefully will encourage us all to kind of adopt or understand and appreciate, hopefully adopt a perspective that leads towards solutions.

We're finally wrenching the climate story from the hands of the scientists and engineers whom I love because I am one. And it is now becoming a story of the communities and the community leaders and the people in their homes, as it should be. I think climate change change wouldn't have been as controversial if we started off not talking about the polar bears, but talking about the people, about the public health challenges associated with it. And I think we are getting there today.

At the end of the day, I think what Vince said is really the secret behind, well, kind of everything. Storytelling, sustainability, business, you name it, it's all about people. But it's especially true of storytelling. Storytelling is about making a connection. It's about putting yourself in someone else's shoes, learning what matters to them and finding a way to speak to concerns you both share in a language that they can understand. For those of us that are passionate about creating positive change in the world, it's worth developing our storytelling skills to better communicate why that change is needed and how it's going to benefit us. Because again, let's be honest, when it comes to topics like clean energy, esg, climate change, there's a lot of misconceptions, resistance and fear out there. But I really honestly believe that behind all the talking points, nearly all of us want basically the same things. We want a clean, safe and abundant planet to live on and to pass on to our children and grandchildren. We also, and I don't think there's any shame in admitting this, want to make money. We want to be comfortable. We want the freedom to be generous. We want to enjoy the amazing things our modern technology has created. We need money to do those things. That impulse isn't wrong in and of itself. It's human. And the truly amazing thing is that there are right now so many talented, driven, visionary innovators and entrepreneurs out there who are developing solutions that will allow us to build a future where those goals of sustainability and success don't need to be in competition. If we can learn to tell that story, the one where brilliant thinking and hard work are put to building the technology that makes it possible for us to really have it all and learn to tell it so that everyone can really hear it and connect with it and believe it's possible, well, then I believe that we have a good shot at seeing that future realized. Let's take these ideas and work together to tell that story in 2025. And on that hopefully optimistic note, that's a wrap for us at Consensus in Conversation this year. As always, you can reach us by email@ciconsensus-digital.com that's ciconsensus-digital.com or you can connect with me directly on LinkedIn and ThreadSK. Gone. That's KGone. Please reach out with any questions, comments or ideas sparked by this episode or any episode this season, or if you have a great suggestion for a future guest. And if you've enjoyed the show, please consider spreading a little holiday joy by giving us a follow, a Like, or leaving a review wherever you listen. It really helps us to grow our reach and to keep bringing you more conversations with the business and thought leaders you want to hear from. Once again, thank you all so much for listening. It's been a true pleasure bringing you these conversations throughout the year. From all of us at Consensus, a very happy holidays to you and yours. We'll see you on the other side.

Consensus in Conversation is hosted by me, Connor Gahn, an executive produced by me and Jeff Rock. Our producer is Will Gatchell, with editing by the team at Reasonable Volume. Special thanks to the Consensus team, including Creative Director Kate Tucker and Greg Herrigal on research. Consensus in Conversation is a podcast by Consensus Digital Media produced in association with Reasonable Volume.