A bonus episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify (subscribe there for ad-free), Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen.
Paul Gambill, Alexsandra Guerra and I on the seed round and where the money was going, which mostly meant people.
I am not going to pretend this is anything other than what it is. It is a company announcing good news about itself on its own podcast. It goes up because the run of Nori-era episodes has a hole where it sits, and because somebody reconstructing how this market got built will want the date.
On this bonus episode of Reversing Climate Change, Nori CEO Paul Gambill and Director of Corporate Development Alexsandra Guerra join Ross to talk about the $4M seed round Nori just closed, what that means for the company, and how hiring will proceed. Tune in to learn more about Nori careers and what is happening at the company.
Resources:
Coverage of Nori's round in TechCrunch and GeekWire
The Medium post Paul wrote about Nori's round
More from the show
Ad-free episodes and other benefits come with a paid subscription.
Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still goofing around.
The books that come up on this show are collected on my Bookshop shelf.
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Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate
Paul Gambill: Change Podcast. I'm Ross Kenyon.
Ross Kenyon: Today I am joined for this bonus episode by two of my Nori colleagues, Alexsandra Guerra and Paul Gambill. Hey, Alexsandra.
Alexsandra Guerra: Hello.
Ross Kenyon: Hello. And Paul, hi. Hi, Ross. Hi. Alexsandra is the Director of Corporate Development. Paul is the CEO of Nori. We have a Two pieces of news that we wanted to share on this bonus episode for people who like tracking what Nori is doing and following our progress. We just closed a seed round, which is very exciting. Indeed. That feels very, very good. And then also we're going to talk a little bit about how some of that money is going to be spent, how we're thinking about hiring and talk about those jobs in case someone out there listening is a diehard Nori fan. Who's been waiting for their chance to jump on the team.
So yeah, let's start at the top. Paul, why don't you tell us about your fundraising adventure?
Paul Gambill: Yeah, so I'm really excited to announce that we closed on a $4 million funding round with some really amazing investors. The round was led by a fund called Placeholder, which is out of New York, and they're a blockchain-focused fund. It was led by Chris Berniske. So if you are in the crypto world, you probably know Chris Berniske's name. Really excited to have them, and I'll come back to this in a second. They were followed by another blockchain fund called North Island Ventures, as well as an ag tech fund out of Australia called Tenacious Ventures. We had an individual angel investor named Josh Felser, who used to be a partner at Freestyle.
We had some of our past angel investors join and then we also had a large agribusiness join the round. So we have a pretty broad backing from blockchain and ag and tech, which is really where we sit at the center of a very strange Venn diagram. So it's nice to have our investors reflect our kind of unique position in the industry.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Did you think that you would get blockchain VCs leading the round or agriculture or were you just open to whichever configuration appeared?
Paul Gambill: Well, open to the configuration that would make the most sense for us. And when we started raising the round, we were starting to think that, okay, because of the blockchain aspect of it, that's the part where we need to get a really good blockchain fund backing us first. And then we can start adding in the ag side of things. And that's actually exactly how it went.
Ross Kenyon: Very nice. And how do you imagine this money will be spent? How are we thinking about hiring? Alexsandra, since you're so involved in that process, why don't you run us through how that might look?
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah, I feel so great in this job because like Paul spent, I don't know, a year and a half, a very long time trying to raise money. And he's here like having run a marathon, passing the baton. I have like one lap around the race and I'm like, yeah, I get to spend all the money. I'm kidding. No, we're working together as a team to build out the team. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] The ones that are currently up are for two senior software engineers. We're hiring two of them. We're also hiring two supply account managers in agriculture.
And then... Pretty soon we'll have up one position for a UX designer. I hope that will be up by the time this airs. If not, just keep checking that page and always subscribe to the newsletter if you want to get any updates on any new positions because there might be a few more that we put out on that page. But would you like me to talk about some of the roles or the teams?
Ross Kenyon: Definitely. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] There's also a little widget on the homepage too. It's probably on most of the pages. But yeah, why don't you run us through some of these jobs themselves?
Alexsandra Guerra: Sure. So, I mean, it's worth talking, like if this is a bonus episode to talk about fundraising and hiring, just what are the teams within Nori? So we have the product team. These are The designers and engineers who build the thing that supports all the other aspects of the marketplace like the supply team. So we have supply and methodology, supply team. This is more relevant to the supply account managers roles that we just posted. These are the people who are working Face-to-face or computer-to-computer screen with farmers to get data in or data managers to get data in to get and create projects in the knowing marketplace that could get paid for sequestering carbon.
So entering farmers' data, working with those data managers to do that. Say customer service and business development role, also a lot of data entry. So keep that in mind. I think it is a fun dynamic role because you will be working with customers. You'll also be, you'll have to be a pretty proactive person to figure out what will work or doesn't work and suggest new solutions to the team and even the product team. And then Of course, there's the methodology team. We don't really have any hires for that, but you'll work with them if you're looking to do supply account management because they're the ones who set the requirements on, you know, what exactly goes into the methodology, but you'd be a key stakeholder inputting information to that.
Ross Kenyon: Real quick, Alexsandra. Sure. If you're listening, this is going to be coming out. In some weeks, but I might bump it up because it's relevant to the hiring process. But our supply account manager now, Rebecca Carlson, she is going to be on the show talking about her job, how agronomy works, and just run us through some of this technical side of how software interacts with farmers in a productive way that helps them track and change their carbon management. I'll probably scoot that up just so people can get a better sense of what that job actually looks like. So yeah, continue running us through the teams and I'll stop saying running through.
Now I'm self-conscious.
Alexsandra Guerra: No, I got to strike that. Well, that's actually a really good point. I didn't realize you were doing that with Rebecca. So anybody listening should definitely tune in. But yeah, from the product team side, right now we have two engineers. One of them is one of the co-founders, and we're going to be hiring, again, two more senior software engineers. We're looking for people who have a lot of experience, who are wanting to work on a team with a startup, help mentor and onboard new subsequent hires, because we do plan to grow beyond this at some point. But really, you know, I'm not the best person to talk about this, although I am an engineer by background.
Somehow now I just do biz dev and sales. But, you know, you got to be able to help work through tech debt. You got to meticulously comment and document your code, work collaboratively with the team, really, really familiar with agile development. And... Yeah, I'm not sure. Am I missing anything there that's relevant to those two positions, Paul?
Paul Gambill: No, I don't think so.
Alexsandra Guerra: Yeah. And then the other teams, just because we're a company as a whole, the other teams included in the company are sales, which I'm the only person on. Hopefully, we'll be hiring for more people in the next wave. And then we have executive team level. So that's Nori. And I think we're a pretty fun crew. We've been a small team so far. We've been nine. We're going to grow, but we're still very much a startup. And anybody who's interested in working on climate change or agriculture, blockchain, should definitely apply. Share it with your friends. And remember, this is like a startup. And I say that from the perspective of you got to be quick about things.
You got to be proactive. And you really have to be able to communicate and listen with empathy. Those are the types of people we're looking for.
Ross Kenyon: I think it's fair to say that before COVID, we were already pro-co-location. And we're not big on the work from home remote thing. I think we're much more serious about it being a Seattle location. Go for it, Paul.
Paul Gambill: Yeah. Yeah. You want me to add? So yeah, because of COVID, we are not working in our office right now, but we do intend to go back into the office. And so the hiring for this is going to be for roles in Seattle. So if If we hire someone who doesn't live here already, I don't think that relocation is necessary until we are back in the office, which seems, I don't know, thumb in the air sometime in the spring. Yeah, we're definitely not going full remote forever. We want to be back in the office. We want to be collaborating with each other in front of a whiteboard and being able to share ideas with each other in real time.
I really miss that social interaction. So looking forward to working with someone who's out there listening today in person.
Ross Kenyon: I had that thought this morning. I remember like doing meetings and working on the whiteboard and throwing out ideas and how much fun that was. I'm like, wow, it's been Is there anything else we should cover?
Paul Gambill: I don't think so. I think we've laid it out there. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] Share it with your friends. And maybe you'll be a nori knot soon.
Ross Kenyon: Woohoo! Yeah. At one point, I was thinking of using the term nori knot as a fan demonym. So people who like nori could be nori knots. And actually, it's now strictly reserved for people who work for nori. Yes.
Paul Gambill: Yeah, I put the kibosh on that.
Ross Kenyon: It's an exclusive club and you can potentially become one. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] If you're looking for future job postings, they will certainly be in our newsletters. We want to find you. We would love to have you here. It's a fun place to work. If it wasn't, we wouldn't be doing it. And anything else, Alexsandra, you content with that? Yeah. Yep. Okay, well then I'm going to close it. So thanks for listening and tell your friends you may be a good fit for what we're doing here and thank you again.
