Nori has ambitious plans to reverse climate change by using the blockchain to pay the people who draw down CO2 from the atmosphere. And the team is in the process of building the infrastructure necessary to make that happen. But how do they go about talking farmers, for example, into using the platform? How do they convince companies to buy CRCs? How do they make the business case for carbon removal?
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast with Nori. I am Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gamble. We are in a very rainy Seattle. Is it going to be like this all winter, Paul? Is this winter? Yeah, we’re here. It started?
Paul Gambill: It’s actually about a month late.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, it’s a month late. Yeah, that too. Because fall seemed pretty doable for me. It’s my first season up here and I was like, oh, I could live with this. It’s a little drizzly once in a while and now it’s just curtains of rain. You bought your happy light, right? Yeah, yeah. I have the light on. I’m taking the vitamin D. Kristoff, are you all up on that too? Are you just suffering?
Christophe Jospe: No, I’m in the same way that I cold train. I think I rainy weather train. So I just let my deprive myself of vitamin D. So my body self-regulates as opposed to putting artificial supplements.
Unknown speaker: Interesting approach.
Paul Gambill: Very innovative. I thought you were making a jazz reference there.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I didn’t really get the first part of that. Okay, get us out of this blather and introduce our guest.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, well, it is wonderful to be sitting here. This podcast will actually air in 2019. So happy 2019, everyone. It’s time travel. But we’re recording it in 2018. And sitting across from us is Nori’s newest advisor and generosity. I’m super excited to have her on here. She comes with a wealth of experience as a serial entrepreneur. She has made all the mistakes that we don’t have to make because we can learn from hers and go on and make some other mistakes.
Ross Kenyon: Very optimistic.
Christophe Jospe: She didn’t ask me to say too much more about her. She said, oh, you know, just I’m general partner of the Cibilla Masters Fund. Everything else is in the past. But one of her great achievements is she’s a co-founder of Moz, which I did not know what that is. So I went and I googled Moz and then I suddenly started getting fed Instagram ads to join Moz and maybe... Maybe there’s some inner workings around what that all is about. Maybe we’ll find out. But without any further ado, Gillian, we usually kick off the podcast with people’s story.
Something about what led them to where they are today, which is sitting on the Reversing Climate Change podcast. But for you, I’d like to take it a little bit differently. Really want the kind of core of when you first knew you were an entrepreneur and there was no going back after that point.
Gillian Muessig: I don’t think I’ve ever been a good employee. I was the kid who sat in the back of the room and disturbed it. I was the kid who always had a different idea and was not shy about telling people what I thought, including teachers. It never went well. And I think that as I graduated college, I fell kind of rear end backwards into marketing and so on at a record company. But it lasted a very short period of time. And then I branched out. We moved from New York City, my husband and I, with an infant between us at the time when they didn’t really have car seats.
It was kind of just a little carry thing and all of our worldly possessions in the So we moved from New York to Seattle and I settled in. I was glorified unemployed for many, many years as a consultant. I raised three children under my desk. Never occurred to me that I would make a good employee. So I didn’t. But as the children grew, so did the company. So I had a small consultancy. It was regional stuff. And in 1994, the web showed up. And that was the big disruptive thing. It turned out it wasn’t calculators.
It wasn’t computers. It wasn’t any of those things. They were all just building to the serious disruption, which was the web itself. It was a universe unfettered by the laws of math and time, and it showed up conveniently at the end of a millennia so that we had millennia questions and conversations, intellectual BS all over the place. It was wonderful. How would we populate this universe unfettered by the laws of math and time? So that was great. I got involved with MarketLink International, which was the first international commerce center on the World Wide Web.
We were so full of ourselves. We scanned business cards in full color and popped them on that fresh new web. It was about three weeks old. And I was the grand dame of internet marketing because I was there four seconds before the next guy. It was a whole lot of fun. It was wild. It was crazy. I spent some money, didn’t make any money on that one. I learned a hell of a lot about startup, but certainly nowhere near enough to get seriously involved. And yet I fell rear end backwards into it anyway.
I had neither degree in business nor in finance. I had graduated in fine arts and architecture at a time when architects were 25 I didn’t get a job in that field. But as I was in 1994, 96, 97, by 97, my eldest son, Rand Fishkin, joined the company. I had no idea he had an interest in it. But he was already casting about for what to do with this web and how he would leave his mark there. He went to school at the same time and we built, you know, buddy want to buy a website.
Want to buy a better one? We’ve got Flash now. And then buddy want to buy another website because it turns out that the pages of the web should be read by search engines. That was 1997 when that became evident. And search engines couldn’t read Flash. So we went through the whole iteration. And then 2001, I went out to make the rainfall, you know, you want to buy a website. Nobody wanted to buy a website for love of money. And basically it was, you know, I have no more capital expenditure. I’ll see you when this is over.
Ross Kenyon: This is when the dot-com bubbles bursting?
Gillian Muessig: That was the dot-com bust. That’s right. It was very tough times. I saw dozens of me go down in flames. Some of them sold snake oil and deserved it, but many were honorable competitors. Very difficult time. And we were still a services company. So I went... I went out, as I said, to make the rainfall. And I would hear, I have no more capital expenditure. But now and then I would hear, well, I have operating capital. If you believe what you’re telling me, and this is not a flash in the pan, this web thing.
And it was not at all evident to the general population that it was not a flash in the pan at that time. If you believe what you’re telling me, then put your money where your mouth is. And I said, well, now I know what that is. That’s commissioned sales online. I did not even have the words affiliate marketing to wrap around that concept. But I’m a quick study and I figured it out. And at that time in particular, I The only way to make money on affiliate marketing plays, if you will, was porn, pills, casinos, and the worst of them, ringtones.
And it’s a whole other conversation as to why ringtones were so bad. But nominally, they targeted children. And they were operated by the most major multinational phone companies. It was really awful. So a whole nother conversation. Nevertheless, we got involved in that and I thought, all right, I can’t get involved in affiliate marketing, but I can bump this So we could increase their gross online revenue. By, you know, hundreds of percent. And of course, you know, they’ve got eyes like saucers now. Anybody would want to work with us. But we could not even get so much as 5,000 bucks to, you know, put down, if you will.
You had to design and develop and author and market and maintain, deploy this thing for nothing. And then when you made a buck, you got a corner off the dollar. So we went quite deeply into debt to make those things happen. We had one absolutely godawful project that we handed back when I could very ill afford it. And we had some that were okay. One was extremely good. And we began to come out of the darkness, if you will. At that point, we could pay the bills. You could move the needle on a search engine in those days very quickly, one way or another.
But that was not our specialty. We built the websites. We marketed for companies. SEO, I farmed out to everybody else. And it was only when nobody could perform. They couldn’t get the job done that Rand, my eldest son, Also known as the Wizard of Moz, right? That he said, I have to learn this stuff. And he did. He did very well at it. And he became, if you will, the quintessential white hat SEO. Remember, it’s an entirely new industry. Did not exist before the search engines existed. So that was, you know, 1997 nominally as they seriously established their power.
So knowing that, he kind of, how should I say, the web was not built by . gov, . org, and . edu. It was built by Porn Pills and Casinos, PPC, it stands for something else. So knowing that this is kind of a new industry, therefore, it’s where the angels fear to tread that these people would go, right? They lived on the edge of society, on the edge of law and reason and so on, and they raced in when others would hold back. All of the commercial sector of the world would hold back.
And so that’s why it was built by that sector first. Then finally the commercial sector showed up and it was time for that quintessential white hat SEO to show up. Black hat says, oh, there’s an algorithm. How do I scan the system to be number one? I can sell a few things here or there and then they throw this website out of the algorithm, out of the list, if you will. Don’t worry, we’ll come back in again. And so they did. They had warehouses full of domains that could be used in the SERPs or search engine result pages.
But if your customer is the universityofwashington. edu, then you can’t do that. And you have to deserve to be in that list in that search engine result page for the next thousand years. Now it’s a business question. This is not a legal question, not an ethical question. It’s a business decision. How shall I deal with the algorithm? There’s the algorithm. How do I deserve to be there? How can I remain there for the next thousand years? Remember, this is not a utility. You have no rights to this. It’s a private corporation.
It’s called Google, right? Now it’s called Alphabet, right? But it’s a private corporation. They can put you in their list or they can take you out of their list. So you better figure out how you want to deal with them. That’s what we did. And we did very well on services. But at some point we had built a number of tools to help us do our work. Then we shared those tools. And from there we decided to build tools. And that was the insanity of entrepreneurship. Not that I went into debt the first time.
But that I did it again. And at that point we had other people’s money and that was where equity investment became a thing, if you will. So I made all the mistakes one could possibly make and still the company survived. Only enough right decisions to make it survive. And I swore to myself, if I ever climbed out of this morass, this darkness of the early days of entrepreneurship, that I would give back. And that’s where this CEO coach thing comes from, which I started, I believe, in March of 2009. So every week, all the mistakes I ever made, so you don’t have to make them.
I’m still at it. Have you noticed? Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: And for those listening, CEO Coach is a podcast. If it wasn’t apparent already, Gillian was there first in just about every space. And she was into podcasting before podcasting was cool. You know, Nori, when did we come in? I remember being a kid and waiting for a page to load and being like, I’m going to have a glass of water and come back and see how it’s doing. Remember, you’ve got mail.
Gillian Muessig: Oh, my. Yeah, AIM.
Ross Kenyon: And yeah, I remember being on that. So I love hearing stories from the early days of the Internet. It does feel like a Wild West. And in some ways, the cryptocurrency world has a little bit of that feel to it, too. So it’s nice hearing your inside stories of it.
Gillian Muessig: That’s right. Building a new industry is always interesting.
Christophe Jospe: In listening to the podcast, I forget which podcast you referenced this, but about entrepreneurs, the sort of unique thing around the entrepreneurs is they’re doing something that someone hasn’t done before. We’re effectively pioneering it. Here we are at Nori. We’re building a new industry for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And we haven’t done this before. We’re figuring it out as we go along. We are testing, iterating, saying here’s how we think this might play out. We then see whether it plays out in that way or maybe it doesn’t.
And then we sort of improve about how we make something better the next time. But I wonder, since we’re so happy to now have you on the advisor, if you maybe can advise us on air a little bit, what are some of the elements that good entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs have that make them a successful entrepreneur and ultimately result in a successful company?
Gillian Muessig: Well, I’d say the first thing is some of what you’re doing is very new. And some of what you’re doing already has a template. Somebody has done it successfully and many somebodies have done it not successfully. One of the things you’re doing, of course, is building a company. So that’s about corporate culture, about how you deal with employees or whether they’ll be independent contractors, about how you put your vendors together. The very platform of Nori, for example... Is a time-honored tradition already in the web, right? You’re taking vendors and consumers and putting them together at the moment of decision.
That’s pretty easy. So we can be selling anything. How are the people who sell something doing well at it? That’s one of the things where, again, you can find those good templates. Marketing, the same thing. People are looking to say, how do I get more consumers on here? How do I get more vendors on here? How do I optimize their value? How do I reduce the barriers to communication, to entry, to decision-making, to transfer of capital? What parts are we going to do on this platform? What parts will we leave to the general consumers themselves?
So again, take a look at what those templates look like and what the best of them have done and then take what is applicable to your particular space. You’re not a consumer space in the definition that would say general consumer, right? You’re not like an Amazon, which is business to consumer. You’re a business to business marketplace. So what you take will be a little bit different.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. So the templating option sounds like don’t reinvent the wheel. You know, we’re doing enough complicated things. You should just take those templates that you can and go on.
Gillian Muessig: Right. Invent the wheel. Don’t reinvent it. Find those who have done really well on the components that you And most of that is about your business process. The thing that’s completely different is the idea that we might stop shuffling around little cards of paper or if you will, virtual paper that says, okay, you can have this much right to pollute and I’ll take that much right to pollute and I’ll sell you my right to pollute for this or that. It doesn’t really help anybody. You’re actually moving them. So I think what you’re doing is significantly different.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, it is. And then there’s, of course, I already mentioned the word blockchain. And so I think we need to go there. It’s worth noting that it’s not like we found out about the blockchain and then said, oh, we need to build a company around the blockchain that can use this. Rather, our mission, and we know we’re not doing it alone, is to reverse climate change. Climate change is relatively straightforward. There are 200 greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. We need to work on pulling those back out. It just so happens that when you can use blockchain technology to create...
Create new monetary policies, new incentive structures that sort of incentivize people to start doing activities that they hadn’t done before. And you suddenly have a system that requires virtually no middlemen because you can trust what’s going in as long as you can point to here’s how, in Nori’s cases, we’re able to estimate and quantify the amount of carbon dioxide removed. You can trust that a carbon removal certificate is valid and everyone can now see here’s how it was made, here’s who owns it at what time. The blockchain kind of opens up this whole new world of opportunity.
Gillian Muessig: So you mentioned several times you’re using blockchain and I think maybe So defining it in a very generic way is a really good idea. Blockchain is used when two or more parties must trust each other and do not trust each other. The blockchain replaces the middleman trust process, right? In general, for example, if I want to send you cash, I put it into a bank and the bank sends it to you. The bank is, if you will, that center of trust. A blockchain replaces it and says, well, I can send it direct to you and a thousand people will have a ledger that says, yeah, that happened instead of one bank.
And we know that one location, central location of trust can be breached very easily. If there are a thousand computers that have to be breached in order to change the message that something had happened, that’s a whole lot more difficult. And that’s why blockchain is used in a number of these things. So in your case, what you’re saying is you’re using the blockchain to provide a trustworthy resource of information that says this has happened and you can believe it, right? That means that somebody can buy the services of a company that will pull the carbon and other particulates, I guess, out of the air.
Right. And they can trust that it actually was done. Otherwise, how the heck do I know it was done? I’m sitting in an office at company A and companies B, C, D, and E are all doing this work for me and I’ve paid for it, but I have no idea whether they really got it done. Somebody has verified it.
Ross Kenyon: Making my job real easy.
Unknown speaker: Do you want to just take over Nori from now on?
Gillian Muessig: No, I just want to advise. Okay. No, I’m counting on you guys to actually get that wizardry done, you see. The piece I know is the business part. What you guys have is the knowledge of actually how to move the needle on moving stuff out of the air. I think maybe we should also talk about kind of this conversation that I said I’d had with my husband, who has a deep understanding of this space. And he put it into some really tough perspective. He said, well, yeah, but when Mount St.
Helens blew or any of the other ones, you know, it’s like, it doesn’t really matter. You know, it Just blows out of the water any effort we have made to pull these particulates out of the air. So why bother is the question. And I would pose that to you because you go in with your eyes open. You all know that this exists. What makes you continue even in the sight of, if you will, the smallness of our existence on this planet?
Paul Gambill: Well, I think one thing that really pushes us here at Nori is the fundamentally different approach that we’re taking towards climate change and dealing with it, which is instead of what the vast majority of efforts that people have taken towards climate change in the past, We’re saying there are greenhouse gases that are up there. And we’re working on different ways to remove those and draw them out. And the amount of greenhouse gases that are up in the air are still continuing to increase because everyone everywhere is still continuing to emit and maybe a volcano explodes and emits a lot more at a time than was going on.
So we just kind of accept the fact that emissions are going up and we’re working on drawing them down. And if something like some sort of natural disaster happens, wildfires, volcanoes, whatever, that emits more carbon dioxide, well, that just means we have a little bit more work to do.
Gillian Muessig: And sometimes a whole lot more work to do. So I guess what I was driving at is the massive amount of kind of pressure on the opposite side that happens and our small ability to pull these greenhouse gases out of the air today. And I think perhaps the perspective is, here’s a good way to think of it. A gardener is busy in the king’s garden. The king comes by and says, I got that tree a while ago. When are you going to plant it? He says, why are you worried? It’s going to take 600 years for this thing to flower.
He said, then you better get it in this afternoon. I would say the same thing. It could take us 600 years before we really have a handle on how to get significant amounts of greenhouse gases out of the air. We better get started this afternoon.
Paul Gambill: Right. And people always discount the rate at which technology changes exponentially. Bill Gates has one of my favorite quotes about this, which is, we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction. And so what we’re doing is just trying to create a space where all of the incentives are working together towards each other so that more and more activity happens in this place. And as more activity happens, everyone who’s been participating benefits, which makes them want to participate more and brings in more people.
And so it’s a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop that should actually build up to us having the ability to restore the carbon balance this century.
Gillian Muessig: So restoring carbon balance in the century, I think, is absolutely doable. I would agree with Gates that we underestimate what is going to be possible. A lot of your success lies in the hands of the people over whom you have no control, if you will, right? Right. Their success is dependent on having a platform in which this commerce can take place. Because if there is no capital to make it happen, there’s no way they’re going to make that leap to the next technology capability. So pretty exciting stuff. And I guess that’s why I’m here.
Christophe Jospe: I really like to use the metaphor to describe what Nuri is doing as a form of garbage collector. Today, putting our CO2... If you think of CO2 as garbage, carbon dioxide is garbage, and we’re just sort of freely putting our garbage out in the street. And Nuri is saying... Okay, we’d like to live Companies go to great pains to do emission reductions. And then a new company might come in and, or a new president might come in and say, you know what, we don’t care about any of this. I’m just going to rip it all away.
And all of those great gains are suddenly gone. And Nori is one option for them to still say, well, not all is lost. You can still come and pay to take your trash away. And the price actually motivates you to start thinking about shifting your I kind of wanted to just get that metaphor out there.
Gillian Muessig: I think it’s a really good metaphor. And it kind of brings us to that second piece where, as my husband said, as he managed all of these energy things and the reduction of energy and these attempts to be more efficient, he was told you’re one quarter of 1% of a portion of the budget of just the Puget Sound area and so on. We really don’t give a damn. And so knowing that, again, there have to be other motivators involved and there has to be So when he began doing this work, the impact would have been rolling brownouts would have shut down his company if they had not reduced their carbon footprint, their usage of energy.
So that made it a much bigger impact than just your tiny portion of the budget. So helping companies to look beyond the budget is an important piece and often it is about their buyers, whether it’s B2B or B2C, so consumers or business buyers, their buyers view of whether or not they want to do business with a company. That nominally litters, as you point out, or litters in great volume and doesn’t clean up its own garbage. I think as the consumer view changes on that worldwide, as people see the really horrific effects of having all of this particulate in the air, these greenhouse gases and so on, I think that many companies, even B2B, will be urged to change their habits.
Otherwise, they have to put up with this kind of PR and it may hurt their bottom line. The more we can hurt the bottom line, the more important it’s gonna be to them.
Paul Gambill: And a lot of these companies are already doing this. We’ve been doing a lot of research into different potential customers and companies that are dealing with their carbon footprint in some way. And the first thing that everyone does is not go out and buy offsets. What they do is they try to figure out ways to reduce emissions in their own operations and supply chain. So they’re often going out there and buying 5, 10, 20-year power purchase agreements for renewable energy or building their own renewable energy to provide energy to their different facilities and so on.
And then carbon comes a little bit later. Their approach makes a lot of strategic How do we make small investments right now so that we don’t have this continuing cost down the road? And then eventually they’re going to get to a point where there’s just not much more they can do. They can’t wring any more carbon out of what they’re doing and so they have to go to the garbage collection metaphor to deal with that.
Gillian Muessig: Right. There’s another piece involved as well as I look at the industrial sector. In the second half of the 20th century, certainly for a long time before as well, companies were polluting water, ground, air, kind of with dispatch, you know, with impunity. So there was no consequence. After a while, they were told, you know, if something was particularly awful, you’d better put it in liners and the liners would go into the ground and so on and so forth. These companies would do this work and would do it to the letter of the law, exactly as they were told.
And then when those liners began to leak 50 and 60 years later... The deep pockets belong to these major industrial companies, and the governments came back to sue them to clean it up. And some of these things were nuclear waste. They were really grim. Not everything was, but a lot of it. These nuclear waste sites are leaching and need to be cleaned up, and many of them have. There’s an awful lot of debris just here in Puget Sound that we know about. The port of Seattle deals with that on a regular basis, and they’re called Superfund sites.
A tremendous amount of money goes into cleaning up these Superfund sites, and at the same time, an entire division of the port, which coincidentally includes my own daughter, has to go out and collect those funds from the polluters. And the polluters are often not known anymore, if you will, right? A lot of it could have been small companies. They don’t have deep enough pockets. So where do we go? We go to the monsters again. And Boeing is constantly on the line here in Puget Sound because it’s one of the largest industrial companies.
But there are many others as well. It doesn’t protect a company to say we have followed the letter of the law. It doesn’t protect them to say we reduced our energy. The only thing that will help to protect them against these kinds of things is that they have literally pulled it out of the air at their pace, at their budget, and at a cost that’s known to them. Otherwise, the government will do it for you, and it will cost a whole lot more.
Christophe Jospe: So I learned a phrase a couple of weeks ago at a conference called companies versus climate change called future proofing. And what you’re describing is effectively that people realize they have a liability and they want to future proof against the future date where someone’s going to come after them to say, hey, you knew this was a problem and you didn’t do enough about it. I’d like to shift slightly. And for people who have been longtime listeners, hopefully this is enjoyable to you because you’re going to hear some things that you already know about Nori, but you’ll also hear a little bit more where we, Nori, get to reveal to you, Gillian, our go-to market strategy and how we think that we can take this company from a small startup to a booming force that needs to be reckoned with when it comes to building a market.
Gillian Muessig: Right, then you become exactly who you were targeting. That’s interesting, isn’t it?
Christophe Jospe: Great plot twist. And in listening to a few of the podcasts on the CEO Coach podcast, which I really can’t say enough about, please listen. Good. Worth a listen. You mentioned Elizabeth Yin, who talks about sort of know your positioning and where you sit. And I think it’s important for us at Norway to say, okay, you said we’re a B2B play effectively. I mean, we are. That’s where we start. But also we have this kind of grandiose mission of wanting to reverse climate change. And oh, well, that affects everyone. Like there are consumers too.
But ultimately, how do we get out of the gate? How do we build something that allows us to provide a service that people would like, provide a value that So where do we begin? We start, we looked far and wide and we said, it’s agriculture. Why agriculture? Well, there are farmers who in sort of current projections, continuing to practice the techniques that they’re doing, have about 60 years left of harvest. And then on average, the nutrition of the soil is gone. We’ve just depleted it. But they do not have an incentive that will drive them to want to sequester more CO2 in their soils.
And so then- Which would help.
Unknown speaker: Which would help and would- So you mean the garbage is usable. The garbage- There we go.
Gillian Muessig: The garbage- Energy is a little bit tenuous in that way. It’s an economic input too. It is a point though that I wanted to get to because we have talked about so many things in our history as humans as garbage and then found that it was actually useful. I mean literally you can burn garbage to make energy and there are companies that do that too. So knowing that CO2 is actually a usable product is huge.
Christophe Jospe: So, unfortunately, no one in Nori has a long history of being a farmer. So how, in God’s name, do we even get in front of it? Get in front of farmers who are traditionally technology averse. And so we’re a software company and looking at... Let me just get two more points. And Paul, I think you’re saying call on me.
Paul Gambill: Yeah.
Christophe Jospe: All right. Go ahead, Paul.
Paul Gambill: Well, so looking at this broad landscape, there’s a problem that’s called what Christophe was just referring to is called soil erosion. And so as farmers continue to do large scale monoculture, so that means that they’re growing like one single crop. And so, that’s degrading. Yeah. And we call that collectively soil organic. So there’s a desire from the agricultural industry to figure out how to increase those carbon levels in their soil because that’s going to improve the quality of their crops. So at Nori, we’re... Talking with food producers. These are companies who rely on commodity crops to make the foods that they sell that we all eat.
And these food producers really care about the quality of their supply chain. When you talk about future proofing, Kristof, that’s something that they want to see their supply chain. They want to see the increased crop yields that can come from this regenerative agricultural movement. So they’re the perfect customer for us to begin this process. It’s not just them paying for carbon sequestration because they’re trying to do it for the PR or marketing effort. Now, that is something that they want. That’s a benefit to them. But paying to sequester carbon in soils is a way to ensure that they have products that they can sell to us in the future.
So this is something that they really need. They value carbon removal.
Christophe Jospe: Thank you, Paul. I’d like to take it a couple steps deeper into, all right, now there’s the strategy. How do we get people who want to do this or might be doing it? How do we get that data that ultimately makes carbon removal claims, which are then turned into carbon removal certificates? How do we convince someone? Indeed, it’s these agriculture companies that have agriculture in the supply chain. So we talk to them and that’s a very straight business development. Okay, speak to your favorite big ag platform. It’s really exciting to actually mention because we put out a press release a couple of weeks ago.
So that we’ve been working closely with Granular, which is the farm management information software that is collecting a lot of the data that we need. So we already are networked in to millions of acres through farmers who are using this software and then could see that it can also monetize in that way. Ross and I are going to a few conferences this month in January, where we’ll be meeting with farmers who’ve been practicing no-till and some farmers who maybe they have like a sort section in their field and they’re going to now say, all right, I’m going to do...
I’ve done this 1% and learned on practicing no-till, planting cover crops. Now I’m going to transition the rest to the whole regenerative space and I will only do it if I know that I can get paid for carbon and then it’s kind of helping them understand you can now do this. So the go-to market strategy in order to get those quick wins is to say farmers who have been historically doing this will be able to generate carbon removal certificates and get grandfathered in. So we’re helping monetize this thing you haven’t yet monetized.
Work with us, work with us to make this data into something real and sellable. So far, so good. Was that great?
Gillian Muessig: Okay. So it costs farmers to get off this wagon train of literally antibiotics, right? And it’s biotics that we require. It seemed like such a good idea at the time in the 1940s and 50s, but every action has its, you know, So to get off that gravy train of the fertilizers and the pesticides and so on means that their crop yield is reduced significantly for a number of years. I don’t know how many years that is, but I was just recently reading an article from somebody who had done it, essentially, and now was providing organic produce.
And so this piece of information in their little history was interesting to me. Knowing that it costs you in lower yields means that there’s a financial hit, and that’s what you’d addressed when you said, well, the farmers are going to need to be paid for this because they have to make up the balance, otherwise they just fold. Okay. Even those, I think, that work with the major ag players. Remember, it really does boil down to yet an individual farmer managing a field under a brand name of somebody else. It never is somehow a single brand that owns all of this land, if you will, right?
It is individuals who operate it for them. So knowing that, we have to pay them a sufficient amount to do it, and we may have to even incentivize them to pay them more to do the right thing. In other words, what happens if you could do well by doing good? Now you have people’s attention. And that’s a process that I’m using even at the Sibylla Masters Fund, for example. Again, you know, companies that have at least one female founder, right, outperform their all-male team counterparts by great deal. The same would be said about any all-gender, all this, all that, right?
What we’re saying is diversity is an important issue. And that’s kind of what you’re saying here too. Diversity in the soil is an important issue. Put a lot of living things in there and stuff will happen, right? It’ll grow. So as we look at that, I would say convincing them really is about the bottom line. Focus on the cash, right? It’s a little bit like talking to venture capitalists. So if I look at a company that is beginning its business process and would like to be funded, I have to say exactly the same thing.
And as a matter of fact, the SEC takes a pretty dim view if I don’t. I could literally lose my freedom if I do not look to the financial and legal health of a fund. Similarly, at your end, if this farmer does not look to the financial and legal health of his organization, he will lose that farm, or she will lose that farm, and their children will lose that farm.
Unknown speaker: So you’re saying they’re interested in Right.
Gillian Muessig: And then you’re going to have to show them some data from those who have already done it, right? And there are those, you know, hardy folks who have done it themselves that say, when this kind of dip is over, this is what the health of the soil will then yield. And when it does that, this is your bottom line. If you cannot make a business case for it, nobody’s buying.
Christophe Jospe: That was great advice and point well taken. And then I guess we have the other side, we’ve got the buyers. And the buyers need to see the value in paying for the carbon removal certificate. And one of the shifts that we’re trying to make is... is to say something that previously was a liability actually could be revenue generating. We’ve built in a structure with something called a forward contract auction where a buyer and a supplier can bid in a price. And if the price of the Nori token exceeds that bid, the buyer and the supplier actually split the difference, which introduces this kind of key idea of a buyer.
It’s in their interest to see the price of that token going up.
Gillian Muessig: Correct. And that’s a piece that we didn’t talk about in the use of the blockchain. We talked about the blockchain in terms of trust. We didn’t talk about it in terms of the cryptocurrency, about creating a token and tokenizing the value of the service that’s created, if you will.
Unknown speaker: So the tokenization Yeah, these aren’t futures.
Gillian Muessig: Yeah. So that’s fine. As we look at that, again, you’re making a financial argument to the buyer. And I would say if you boil it way down to the end, if the board of directors does not direct the company itself, right? And a CEO and every other C-level executive and everybody below them works at the pleasure of the board, right? So if the board of directors does not say this is an issue, work on it, It is not an issue and it is not work done. Therefore, your sale must really be to the boards of directors of the corporations you would like to do this.
Now, they’re not writing the check. They are not actually participating in any way. They could be somehow beneficiary because they tend to hold stock. I get it. But truly, those are stakeholders whom you have to convince first. If it comes from there, it’s going to get done this year. If it doesn’t come from there, it just kind of floats around in the middle and maybe it gets reported up to the board and the board goes, yeah, right. No power. You want teeth in this? Find the board directors and convince them individually that this is worthwhile doing.
There’s a stick and a carrot. The stick is future-proofing. We’ve talked about that. And the carrot is, it could be a piece. Those are the ones you talk to.
Christophe Jospe: That’s amazing advice and something that we should probably think about that more. It reminds me of a comment that came up when we had an interview with someone who works at a large publicly owned utility. And he said, you know, you can talk to us till you’re blue in the face, but convince the public utility commission because we do what they tell us to. And so kind of same idea.
Gillian Muessig: Find the one who tells them what to do, whoever that is, right? Yeah. That tell it what to do people. Now, it might be that you never get in front of, personally, any board of director member. So then your question is, in company A, who has the ear of the board of directors? Do I need to get to the CEO or COO or CFO? Do they sit down with the board of directors and say, you know, guys, we haven’t talked about the risks and the, So, what do you think about this?
All kinds of ways to get there. Find out how you get in front of the board member, even though you will never have face-to-face conversations.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, this is great advice. Is there anything else that we should consider as it relates to Nori’s expansion and evolution? I want to pull up a phrase that I learned on your podcast also called founderitis. And you were kind of talking about founders in terms of having Legos and good founders know when to give those Legos away because it kind of helps scale the company. As we expand and go to market strategy, can you connect the dots a little bit? Does that... Does that relate here?
Gillian Muessig: Yes. And it’s something that I’ve always struggled with. So I’m happy to talk about it a lot. You wear all hats when you start with your company. I think there are a few amusing commercials in which guy physically puts on different hats. Hello, shipping. Hello, finance. Hello, this. Hello, that. Right? And he’s always the same guy answering the phone. Very amusing. But over time, the company grows itself physically with a number of people who manage the work of the company. So the question is, who can you train and then deputize to do whatever it is you do today so that you can do things that are ever more strategic and higher level?
The first thing that’s critical inside a company that has to scale, you’ve worked on your product, right? And that’s the important piece so that it really does what it needs to do. Now, the second piece is to get those consumers on there as well as your vendors. I would start with the vendors. If there are an insufficient number of vendors, then the consumers are not going to come on and your consumers are B2B clients. The vendors are eager to hop on because they have not monetized this ability yet or they have monetized it and here’s another place to monetize it.
One or the other, right? They are financially incentivized to get on there. So put them on first. The second one comes in. Now, once you’ve done that, the question is who else can go out to the major corporations and talk to them and get through that chain up the command and so on. If you have the understanding that really the bottom line is you’ve got to get to people at the board of directors in sufficient numbers so that they tell the C-suite to go and do this and then the C-suite makes it happen, right?
Then you’re going to have to train another person who is kind of a salesperson, if you will, or business development even to make sure that they are wiggling up and finding out whether or not they talk to Joe on the board of directors or they have to make those arrangements themselves. That’s something you’re going to have to give away over time. So it means that you have to, again, hire those you trust and then trust them. If you do that, then your focus can be on which companies will we approach next.
If we are in a stream of companies that we’re approaching, Everybody in aerospace, everybody in, I don’t know, utility management, everybody who is in high tech who have all these massive farms, you know, for computers because we don’t really have a cloud. They’re actually hard material and they generate a tremendous amount of heat. Whatever field you’re in, then you say, okay, we’re going to go deep into this and I’m going to deploy people in my company to go manage that sale. Now, which next industry are we going to deploy? Or are we going to go across the board in different ways?
You’re going to design how you’re going to approach markets. Somebody else is going to have to approach the market. Today, you’re in the middle of approaching that market. You’re busy convincing people to get something done. What you learn today is what you will teach tomorrow. The faster you can do that, the faster the company will scale. That’s the concept of giving away your Legos.
Christophe Jospe: That was a great response. I’d like to put you on the spot. What is your favorite mistake that you’ve made in your career?
Gillian Muessig: A favorite mistake? Now, there’s an interesting way to describe it. Oh, I’ve made so many. Here’s a mistake that I made just recently. I have seen it made by many people. And when I did it myself, it brought me up short. It was, if you will, favorite because it was mitigated by somebody else. So, and it’s kind of two pieces. It relates even to giving away your Legos. One, I have always had a hard time doing that. You know, you feel very competent in whatever the hell you do and you know what you’ve got your hands on.
It takes longer to explain somebody else to do it. So you might as well just do it yourself. Big mistake. And I constantly did that. Finally, I began to work with people who were extremely powerful. And it is such a Heat sink. You can breathe out. You tell somebody to do something or somebody says they’re going to do it and they actually get it done and they get it done at least as well as you, if not better. It’s an amazing feeling. So that would be the first. The second piece was always knock on that door one more time.
For many, many years, I have... If you will, graciously given away time, effort, wisdom, whatever the heck it was. And I’ve built up this huge volume of folks who might do something kindly towards me and so on. That’s great. But then I was trying to knock down a door. And so now I needed somebody else to Be kindly to me to answer that, if you will, sales pitch, right? This call. And at some point, you know, we went through a little bit of this and that. And at some point, this mid-level manager just said, there’s kind of no way we can do this.
It’s kind of the wrong way. You’re going to have to go to another division. And if that division can’t do it, we’re done. And I took her at her word. And I just said, you know, I just don’t want to bother her anymore. She’s done what she can. We’re finished. This is it. And my colleague said, Knock one more time. Let’s go see her one more time. Let’s ask a few different open-ended questions. Maybe she can find the way in which we can accomplish our goal. And we went on a Friday afternoon at three o’clock and it turned out that at six o’clock that evening, there happened to be a committee meeting in which they were addressing five different initiatives and the one they didn’t have addressed was funding.
And we fit every last piece of what was required to do that thing. And suddenly, a little bit like your token, there was another layer over the entire system that could move money into that middle layer. And that middle layer could move money to make what we wanted to have happen. We had not imagined this additional layer in the middle. We had not imagined a different way to fund the whole thing, to get things accomplished and so on. But somebody else had already. They were missing us. And this gal said to us, you know, I hadn’t talked about this before, but this is happening.
And if you could just stay, I know it’s only three o’clock, but if you could stay to six and we both got on the phones and said to our spouses, you’re on your own for dinner. And we sat around and ate potato chips and fresh water and that was it. And we were there until six o’clock. So always knock on that door just one more time. And I was brought up short because I work with others who CEOs go through a tough time, as we talked about before. Many CEOs do.
It’s very dark. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. And so they get, if you will, a little grumpy, a little exhausted, mentally exhausted. And I always push them through. Keep going, keep pressing. Even when you don’t see that light, the only thing you can do is walk one more step and one more and one more. And when I push them forward so they don’t say, well, they don’t know what they’re talking about or it’s no use anyway or they don’t give a damn or whatever. No, it’s not everybody else.
Just do it one more time and still be gracious. Be, how should I say, authentic, honest, transparent, all the things that you’ve been talking about. And you will see extraordinary things happen. That would be, if you will, my favorite mistake, not doing it one more time. It cuts the wheat from the chaff.
Christophe Jospe: Excellent words to close with and an answer of a true entrepreneur. We’re very fortunate to have you on our team, Gillian. Thanks for coming.
Unknown speaker: Yes, thank you.
Gillian Muessig: The honor is mine.
