You can judge the progress of an industry by its number of sh*tty first drafts.
And if we have any hope of getting to gigatonne-scale carbon removal by 2030, we need a greater diversity of ideas in the CDR space. We need entrepreneurs who dare to think differently. We need more sh*tty first drafts.
So, what can we do to encourage this kind of radical risk-taking in carbon removal? Where can entrepreneurs, investors, and carbon removal buyers go to generate their sh*tty first drafts and then iterate on each other’s ideas together?
Adina Mangubat and Tito Jankowski are Accelerator Director and CEO, respectively, at AirMiners, a community that empowers people taking risks to accelerate the reversal of climate change through carbon removal.
On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Tito and Adina join Ross to discuss the AirMiners Launchpad business accelerator, explaining how it serves early-stage carbon removal startups and why it supports companies across the spectrum of permanence.
Tito describes his role in unlocking capital for early-stage CDR startups, exploring how AirMiners helps them sell future carbon credits as a complement to traditional equity investment.
Listen in for Adina’s insight around what buyers are looking for in carbon removal startups and learn how you can get involved in the AirMiners community and contribute to the queue of sh*tty first drafts we need to save the planet.
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 going.
Resources
AirMiners Launchpad Startup Accelerator
AirMiners ‘How to Sell a Carbon Credit’ Event
Anne Lamott’s Idea of Sh*tty First Drafts
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Adina Mangubat: [unclear] the language of the body. I think you’d like it — it’s like a low-rent Tony Robbins kind of deal that you would go to, called Language of the Body. It’d be like five thousand dollars for a day and a half and you would learn about the language of the body. I was gonna fly into Minneapolis for it. I was like, yeah, it’s gonna be a thousand dollars.
Ross Kenyon: That’s low for Tony these days, isn’t it? That’s like Tony’s toenail clippings?
Adina Mangubat: Yeah, it’s like — well, this is like the second or third rate Tony Robbins. It’s not — okay. Yeah, yeah. Someone just starting out who’s trying to teach his new all-encompassing system for living.
Ross Kenyon: This might be the weirdest intro to the show ever. [unclear] I don’t know. No, I’ll have to figure it out.
Well, thanks for listening to whatever that was. I’m Ross Kenyon and I’m one of the co-founders of Nori, which is a carbon removal marketplace. I’m the creative director over there. Tito Jankowski, CEO of AirMiners, here — putting him in a weird spot, where you caught the beginning of that conversation. Hi, Tito, welcome back. It’s been several years.
Tito Jankowski: Hi, welcome to you too, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you. You know, whenever someone welcomes me to my own show I sometimes feel sad about that. Thank you for doing that. And then, making her debut, Adina Mangubat, Accelerator Director at AirMiners. Hey, Adina.
Adina Mangubat: Hi. Hi.
Ross Kenyon: We’ve not had you on the show yet. And then also Jason Grillo, in absentia. Sorry Jason couldn’t make it today, but we’re thinking of you, Jason. He’s running an event right now so he’s got a good excuse. He’s listened to, I think, more of the show than many people. I feel like he has earned the right to come on here at some point. Next time, Jason, we’ll just have you on. Just consider this an open invitation. AirMiners is doing cool things. We’ve talked about AirMiners so many times on the show, we’re huge fans. The resources that you’ve made have shown incredible leadership over the years. We use them to onboard people — like Boot Up, the Slack community. The number of people that I’ve met through there that I still talk to on a regular basis is super high. But someone listening might not even know what AirMiners is. So why don’t we start at the basics here? What is AirMiners?
Adina Mangubat: I think maybe it makes sense to start with kind of like what we’re worried about, like why we’re doing this. So for us, it’s really about challenging the status quo and thinking differently when it comes to climate change. So we’re really interested in empowering the people that are taking risks to accelerate the reversal of climate change via carbon removal. And so, what that looks like is we do a bunch of different things. We have a startup accelerator program. We have a huge Slack community of innovators. We have Investor Academy to educate investors. We have buyer demo days. We have a bunch of different things, and we also happen to have a fund as well. So it’s an organization that’s really designed to aid in removing a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, cumulatively, by 2030. So that’s what we’re up to.
Ross Kenyon: I love that. One of you told me that that was a somewhat new mission change, or you maybe put a finer point on it recently, that that was the goal.
Adina Mangubat: Yeah, we really decided that we wanted to be specific, because before we were saying we want a thousand shots on goal on carbon removal, and you’re like, well, it’s not just any shots — you want shots that actually make goal. So let’s be specific about that.
Ross Kenyon: How important is that? Does it actually cause — have you made a decision differently after changing that, being specific in that way?
Adina Mangubat: I mean, I think that we’re definitely changing — we’re thinking about scale, that’s for darn sure. Like, as we think about the number of companies that we need to be able to scale our programs for, and thinking about what those companies need and the investment that those companies need and the programming that we’re offering to make that investment available, that’s all new within the last year, based on that change.
Ross Kenyon: Tito, you’re tapped over in this fund development area. They don’t let you out, you just have to talk to investors and raise money and get companies founded. Is that your job now? Is that what you’re doing, you’re the finance guy now?
Tito Jankowski: Unlocking capital for the early stage companies getting started is a critical piece of that, getting to a billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2030, for sure. That’s why I’m digging in.
Ross Kenyon: We’ll talk about that later. But in terms of, yeah, how do we unlock everything like that? Capital from investors of all sorts. I don’t want to make fun of you too much, Tito, but this is seriously the most reserved I’ve ever seen you. Where is the screaming Tito, the “go” with a flaming heart, Tito, that I’ve come to expect? What is — [unclear] — do you need Adina to start swearing to let you out of your cage?
Tito Jankowski: That’s right, let’s go. Let’s go. Remove a gigaton of carbon.
Ross Kenyon: I’m sorry, just making him blush. Now, Adina, do you agree with me though that we could — we could use — we could turn the Tito up a little bit?
Adina Mangubat: I really think so. I, you know, it’s a complicated thing, right, with investors, because there’s like a whole world of what investors expect and like looking good and avoiding looking bad and expecting like a certain level of professionalism, and all of that stuff. And so it’s a question of why, how do you walk that fine line between giving investors confidence and also just being who we are, which is definitely got a certain wacky component to the whole thing.
Ross Kenyon: So yeah, I have a thesis for that. I think it’s almost like the losses feel so much worse than the gains feel good. I feel like — the bigger the company is… Is that Warren Buffett? I think he does. Doesn’t he say that? This is not — this is not me being original here, this is a common sentiment. But I feel like the bigger a company, an organization is, the more they’re worried, like, we might get a nice press release and a couple pickups, but if it goes badly the risk is much greater than the return. I think there is kind of a conservatism in that.
I mean, that’s true, but you’re way more versed — and I think you have a couple exits and you went through Y Combinator and you’re a much fancier startup person. But I don’t know if you agree with this. As a business culture thing, is that even true?
Adina Mangubat: I mean, I think that people definitely over time are trying to minimize what they have to lose, right? The more successful you are, the more you have to lose. So I think that there’s definitely a culture to that, but it’s a choice. It might be an unconscious choice, but it’s a choice that people make, and you don’t have to run companies that way. And there definitely are companies out there that have gotten quite big that don’t adhere to that. I mean, gosh, I remember meeting Tony Hsieh, who’s the CEO of Zappos, and he built the wackiest, craziest culture I’ve ever seen. We were invited to his company’s, I think it was like quarterly board meeting, and it was held in this gigantic auditorium, and there was like a game show situation and, like, I don’t know. So it doesn’t have to be buttoned up, but I think that there is definitely that narrative that the more together we are, quote unquote, the more serious we have to be, or something like that.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve liked working in AirMiners and carbon removal, especially with you, Tito, primarily. Because there is — I have to cut this, it’s okay, Tito — but there’s a sort of goofiness and there’s a humor. I always find it to be, like, kind of a — it’s a very smart community, the collective IQ in there is pretty overpowering at times, but also there’s a lot of laughs and a lot of good fellow feeling. I don’t feel like that takes away from the seriousness of what we’re doing. I think if you’re too serious, it’s not really that fun of a place to work. It’s burnout, it’s bad.
Adina Mangubat: I think it’s also necessary to keep the levity of, like, if you let yourself get too bogged down in the seriousness of what we’re — I mean, you know, we’re just making sure the world doesn’t go over two degrees Celsius, and that all of these island nations don’t get flooded, and crops fail. And, you know, I mean, we’re just casually doing that. Like, if we go there all the time and take it too seriously, I think that it’s kind of crushing in a way. So I think the humor brings something to it.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, humor is key. I’ve always said that the memes channel is one of the most powerful channels in AirMiners, because it’s how we express what’s meaningful to us about carbon removal — through images, through talking about it — and it steels us to then be able to face that serious bit, and not to be numb to it, not to hide in charts and numbers. And, you know, this needs to happen. It’s go time in 2023 for carbon removal. It’s time to take a culture that we’ve built and scale it to pull a billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air and beyond.
Ross Kenyon: Speaking of, there’s a new cohort of Launchpad participants — the applications for that are closing soon, and at least part of the impetus for the show is that you’re trying to gather the stragglers, right? Last chance to get into this cohort — is my read right?
Adina Mangubat: Yeah, definitely. So we do quarterly Launchpad offerings. Launchpad is our accelerator, and our deadline for this coming one is February 10th. So be there. I mean, we always love seeing the newest and coolest ideas, and so we’re really fortunate that we get to see that. But we also want to get the word out because there’s just so many people participating in this industry that weren’t participating before. And so the more of those folks we can reach and the more of them we can empower, the better.
Ross Kenyon: No, absolutely. It’s — I can’t even keep track. We’ve talked about this on the show a million times. It’s a new place, which is thrilling. Which stage companies are you considering for Launchpad? Is this ideation? Is this something that’s written on the back of a napkin? Is it that they have customers, that they have a product? Where are they when they go into Launchpad?
Adina Mangubat: Yeah. Between the two kind of extremes that you offered. So usually they have something done from a technical perspective, like lab prototype, some early results. Might have a customer, might not — more often than not they probably don’t. And that’s one of the things that we talked about, is like, how do you sell a carbon credit? There’s an event coming up about that too. So for listeners out there that are entrepreneurs that are asking that question, they can check that out. But yeah, that’s a big, big component of it: how do you sell carbon credits? How does this market even work? Because it’s kind of a weird Wild Wild West situation and it’s constantly evolving. I mean, gosh, what it was last year and what it is this year is just completely different, January to January.
Ross Kenyon: Is that the primary means of monetization that you’re seeing for these startups? Do you think they should be looking at carbon credits, or are there other alternatives that should be on the table?
Adina Mangubat: That’s the majority of what we see, but it’s not the only thing that we see. I mean, we definitely see combo plays, like where they’re selling a product and removing carbon at the same time. So they’re selling super duper carbon-negative protein that can be used in the production of, you know, hamburgers, and then that protein was pulled from seaweed, and then they take the remnants of said seaweed and then pyrolyze it, and then it’s carbon negative and they can sell carbon credits for that. So you can definitely get combo situations like that where they have a product that they’re selling and they also are selling carbon removal credits.
Ross Kenyon: Hmm, are they all pointing towards extremely long-duration carbon removal and they’re looking forward to qualifying for net-zero? Are there many projects that are more like carbon storage? The terminology, all this stuff, could use a fine-tuning, I think. Are you something like Frontier, where you’re saying, well, don’t come to us unless maybe there’s a thousand years at some point?
Adina Mangubat: No, no, no, no. We definitely support carbon removal companies along the spectrum of permanence. So everything from the soil crew all the way to the thousand-year mineralization crew. And part of that is that I think that our thesis is, we need it all. So carbon — or even biochar — may not be like ridiculously permanent, but it pushes the time horizon out with regards to the amount of carbon we need to remove from the atmosphere. And if you just look at how much carbon has been pulled so far and what we need to get to, I mean, the gap is vast. So even if we can delay needing to close the gap by 10 years, 20 years, 100 years, that helps. So we think that all methods are valid, necessary, in order to make it so we don’t overheat the planet.
Ross Kenyon: Everybody agrees that it’s at least a hundred years, could be longer, and the scientific community is still out on that.
Adina Mangubat: So I’m not saying it couldn’t be longer. I’m just saying that the general consensus is 100 years, not longer, currently.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, well, that’s only because there’s a strong anti-biochar conspiracy happening at the highest levels of academia. If you knew the truth… I observe something true and then I amplified it and made myself available for extra criticism. So fun. Where do we go from here? See, get me back on track. Tell me about a cool company I don’t know about.
Adina Mangubat: [unclear], help me. There’s lots of cool companies, there’s lots of cool — I mean, I don’t know, we see companies that are kind of acting across the board. So we’ve got a bunch of DAC companies, lots of modular DAC, everything from pH swing stuff all the way to being able to powderize sorbents and then float them through like a fluidized bed reactor to make the reaction go really, really fast. Like, there’s just a bunch of really interesting stuff happening on the DAC side of the house. Lots of ocean — I mean, we’re big fans of the ocean stuff, and we know that the science is still out with regards to, does it really stay down there and does it mess anything up if you do that? Like, I get it. But it also has huge potential in terms of its removal. So we’re seeing a lot of robotics with regards to seaweed cultivation, seaweed collection, seaweed sinking.
Ross Kenyon: I think that’s one of the reasons why I really love this work, is that it is not boring. For sure it is not boring. You get to see all sorts of different things, and to see the innovation that people have in solving this problem is incredible. When you’re working with these potential buyers and doing things like having a demo day where buyers come in and look at these companies, are they really interested in the high-quality MRV and tracking so that they can claim negative emissions? Or are they more looking to brag about supporting early-stage tech and are less concerned with the carbon accounting business? Which one of those is doing most of the movement? And this is to you both.
Adina Mangubat: For sure. It kind of just depends on what people’s goals are, right? So I would say, within the buyer community, you kind of have two-ish ends of the spectrum. One end is: look, I’ve got emissions, I need to zero that situation out, I need highly credible removals in order to do that, and I need it to scale. So I’m going to buy the highest quality scalable removal credits I can possibly get my hands on. And then there are people that are on the other end of the spectrum that are like, that’s great, but if we do not have supply, then this entire conversation is moot. So I get that there is a bunch of things that we need to do to get to really high quality MRV and all of that stuff, but if we don’t fund the early stage — we’re not totally sure yet, we’ve got some science that we still got to work out — stage companies, then we’re never going to get there. And so we definitely see people on that end of the spectrum, and so it just depends.
Ross Kenyon: I agree with the seriousness of this, of having assets that qualify as truly negative, especially if you’re trying to cancel out fossil fuel emissions. But I also love the idea of just supporting companies where they don’t know — it’s a cool idea, we want money to test it, we need to get this going, don’t count it on your carbon balance sheet because that’s inappropriate to do so, but this is something that will certainly help scale. I feel like this whole conversation has been — like, we’ve been made extremely path dependent upon carbon accounting, and the only way people can think about this for the most part is, I emitted x tons, I must remove or deal with x tons. I feel like it’s a failure of creativity and imagination here to think otherwise. I’m seeing signs of that changing. It sounds like maybe you are too, but it bums me out sometimes as well.
Adina Mangubat: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. I think that the super early vanguard folks have been there for a while. They’re like, we’re going to just try some stuff, like act now, perfect later. But I think that you also have to get really creative about how you fund these companies. It is complicated to fund really early stage companies in this space, because there’s a lot of things that investors don’t know. Like, what are the exit prospects for these companies? Like, are these going to IPO? Like, is there even a market for that in the future? Are they going to be profitable? Is somebody going to acquire these? There’s a lot of questions. And so solving for how do you get money into these companies early is something that we’ve done a lot of thinking about that Tito can speak to in great detail.
Ross Kenyon: I’d love to hear from both of you. I’d love to hear more about how that works, because so much of the carbon removal discussion has been on just, does that tech work? And a lot of it takes place at the level of hardware and less at the level of finance. There’s some exceptions here, but yeah. How should these companies be structured? Are they headed towards acquisitions, or are they trying to be the next major corporation that breaks through, becomes a unicorn that stands alone — who’s going to become the Kleenex or Google of carbon removal? Which of these models should companies even be pointing toward? And Tito, do you want to take a stab at that? Or Adina — you can go any direction you want with it, Tito, seriously. Lots of stabbing.
Tito Jankowski: Let’s go. Like, I think that’s emerging, in that sense. It’s like, which direction should these companies go? It’s up for them to start to figure out. I mean, that’s what we’re seeing from buyers, what we’re seeing from investors, from these sort of risk-takers, from the corporate side, from the investor side. What they’re trying to figure out is, like Adina is saying, is there a market for this in the future? Is it profitable? What’s it look like for these companies to persist? Is it going to be, you know, 100,000 different suppliers and there’s a NASDAQ-style marketplace and exchange? Is it going to be that? Is there kind of one that predominantly wins? Those questions right now, I think, are big blockers, specifically for investors. When you’re investing into ownership of a startup company through equity, is that something that’s going to work out for you long term? Is that something that’s going to make sense for you long term?
I think the answer from us is the market’s there today, it’s growing quickly, and it has to be there by 2050. And so really it’s these questions around market. I think are still spreading to the investor community — is part of why we have the Investor Academy sessions, in terms of helping investors that are new to carbon removal come, you know, hear about how it works and how we think that it’s going to come together. But ultimately there were some gaps that still need to be filled at the very early stages of startup formation. Getting capital, whether it’s seed stage capital or capital from buyers, is still something that’s emerging.
Adina Mangubat: I think that your question of, like, should people be aiming for unicorn size — I mean, I think there’s definitely room for a lot of unicorns. I mean, if you just do the math, like, by 2030 we’ve got to be removing 10 billion tons a year of carbon, and most people are aiming for about 100 bucks a ton. So you can do the math on that and be like, oh, that’s a good trillion dollar market right there. So there’s definitely room for a bunch of unicorns, for sure. And what timeline is that going to happen on is the big question, right? And at the same time we still need carbon removal companies to get started now, because if we don’t, we are going to be hosed as a human society. So I think there’s this question of, like, well, how do you de-risk it enough to make it palatable given the uncertainty of how this whole thing is going to shake out in the future? And I think we have some interesting answers to that, and I’ll let Tito kind of elucidate on that a little bit more. But yeah, I think that there’s some creative financing options for sure.
Ross Kenyon: You just go ahead, T-Dog. Be happy to learn from you on this one.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah, totally. So the traditional one is we’re bringing together these startup companies, we’re helping them get to traction, getting their science communicated and figured out, getting the unit economics figured out. And so de-risking companies at that stage makes a lot of sense. And so of course we’re starting a traditional fund there to invest back into these companies. What’s nice about that is it’s a way to support and participate in these companies when they’re young, like you’re saying, pre having all their MRV figured out, pre being on the field. And that’s one way. But we see that the number of investors doing that — there’s still some hesitations about, you know, how big is the market going to be, what kind of risk they’re taking on.
And so one other thing that we’ve seen that we’re exploring is, what about helping early-stage companies sell their future carbon credits? So we know that one thing that brings together these carbon removal companies is they’re all either directly selling carbon removal credits, or they’re assisting in some way. So if you’re a direct air capture company or a storage company or a biochar company, the product that brings them all together is that it’s carbon removal credits. Maybe some of them have a, you know, a physical product — they’re selling their biochar to farmers or they’re making food from the seaweed. But the thing that really unites all of these carbon removal companies is that they are removing carbon dioxide from the air. That’s the fundamental thing.
And so what we’re seeing is the benefit for early-stage companies is they know what product they’re going to be developing, and it’s the same benefit for investors — you know what product these companies are going to make, they’re making carbon removal credits. What if there’s something that we can build around that? Like, we know who the customers are, we know what the product is. There’s not many kind of startup industries that have that kind of certainty. In a way, if you’re a software company, sure, you’re going to be making software, but you don’t really know who your customer is, you don’t really know what the pricing is. Whereas this carbon removal — we’re going to hit a 10 gigaton, 10 billion tons per year market. We’re going to need to hit 10 billion tons per year market, and it’s going to be something around $100 a ton. If you look at the projections from Bloomberg, for example, they have it spiking to $250 around 2030 and then slowly descending to 2050. So yeah, there seems like really curious stuff in there around, like, what if we can help investors and startups have a stronger intersection around selling future carbon credits, kind of as a complement to buying equity in these companies?
Ross Kenyon: I see some deep thoughts happening over there.
Adina Mangubat: Yes. What should I make for dinner tonight? There’s a podcast going on. No, there is a lot to think about there, so many different angles.
Ross Kenyon: You said something to me related to this the other day, Tito, which was the size of investments in carbon removal marketplaces was quite high in some regards relative to other investment opportunities. I’m not sure exactly on the metrics on that. Maybe one of you can explore that a little bit. But do you think people, including Nori — we’re a marketplace — do you think we’re too early? Do you think that marketplaces can be doing something to help in a less traditional kind of way? Marketplaces are about throughput and volume, right? And given that there’s not a lot of that, what should all the money that’s going into marketplaces do, or should marketplaces be using that money to do something differently?
Tito Jankowski: I’m kind of trying to say this in such a cautious way. I don’t want to spill the beans on what I’m thinking about it. But [unclear]. I think anything you can do to unlock supply — that’s where we’ve seen, our whole focus is around, is how do we unlock more supply? Whoever wants to help solve that, marketplaces or anybody else, I think that’s the key to getting to these billion ton levels, at least in 2023. That’s the bottleneck: who’s going to actually pull this stuff out of the sky, and how are they going to do it, and, again, have funding to do it.
Adina Mangubat: Yeah. And how do you — and how do you get funding to do it, in a sense of, like, being able to quit your job and start prototyping a thing? By the time you’ve got your MRV figured out, like, cool, yeah, you’re much more — it’s much more easily funded. But there’s a gap at that really early stage where there’s not enough buyer cash going around. Forms of pre-purchases are able to pay sometimes even like 50% up front or something, but most of them, you know, the amount of pre-purchase cash that you get, slow investor capital — again, pre-MRV, pre-kind of starting to scale up — there’s a really big gap there. Yeah, so I don’t know if marketplaces — like, to your question, Ross, can marketplaces play a role in that? I mean, I guess it depends on how willing y’all are to take risk, right? And I think that has a lot to do with who your buyers are and who you’re serving. And I don’t know that it is a marketplace-solvable issue to deal with that particular section.
Tito Jankowski: This is essentially the crossing-the-chasm gap, right? Yeah. You’ve got to sort that out. And so we see this opportunity to basically say, okay investors, what if you were to invest in carbon removal future credits now that are deliverable by 2030, and we’ve got a pretty darn good idea of what those things are going to sell for? And so you basically get the arbitrage between them. And it’s good for the startups because it’s non-dilutive capital, and it’s your signal that there is demand for those credits, and it helps the suppliers [unclear], and that gets more suppliers online faster. So that’s how we’re thinking about it.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a fine idea. What do you think is coming next? Like, right now it’s all about various ways of doing forward financing, is mostly what I’m seeing. A lot of this is the CDR.fyi site — as much as I love it, it freaks me out whenever I look at it, the tons bought versus tons delivered. I’m like, oh my God, this has a long ways to go. Tons delivered has a long ways to go.
Tito Jankowski: Yeah. So that is still like small. Yeah, I think with the gap, that’s the opportunity here. Is it, like, in a sense these early buyers are there — these pre-purchasers are in this sense trying to help with this crossing-the-chasm thing. But they’re not really trying to do that. Like, they’re trying to buy carbon, you know. Like, you’re trying to purchase carbon, but you also want to help these companies bridge this gap. And that’s where this, you know, this idea of, like, helping startups get early capital by pre-selling carbon futures at a discount, that’s where it’s like, okay, now you can actually, you know, invest comfortably, you’re buying carbon credits, you’re getting this discount, it starts to make things make a lot more sense.
Look, there are buyers that really get the, you know, the risk that they’re taking on. I think Shopify’s a great example. That’s right, they’re going in there like, these purchases, we’ve got a five million dollar a year sustainability fund, it’s intensely catalytic capital that’s meant to get companies over the gap. But all buyers aren’t that, and they shouldn’t need to be that. They should be able to just buy carbon. And so we need to be able to set up this system so that buyers can buy carbon, investors can take risk and support early stage companies, and early stage companies can get the financing and credits and customers that they need to get off the ground, to get to, you know, MRV stage, to get to scaling up stage. And so bridging that gap is really, really key. Because in a sense we’re inviting all these people to start companies, and being able to bridge the gap from, you know, you’ve got an idea and a prototype to being up and running when you have a team — that gap is really, really important for our ability to get to this billion tons by 2030 and 10 billion tons removed every year by 2050.
Ross Kenyon: Do either of you have any sense on which family of technologies will best achieve that goal of scale and cost?
Adina Mangubat: No, you don’t even want to know. That’s the whole thing. That’s the little gap right now, right? Is, you’re throwing diligence at a wall and trying to figure out — you’re trying to pick winners when there’s not even a baseball field yet, right? Like, we haven’t even invented baseball bats. Like, we’re just so early in this market that you can say, look, we know this market needs to be big, and by 2050 it is going to be big, but the gap there is, well, how do you say that? How do you invest like that? How do you design your career around that? If you also look at the scale of the problem — the scale of the problem is insane, right? Like, I don’t think that you’re going to just get it done with the direct air capture companies, or just get it done with the ocean companies, or just get it done with the biochar companies. Like, all of those have very real scalability potential, but the scalability in one sector is not sufficient to meet the 10 billion tons required to save the planet. It’s not going to happen otherwise. So that’s part of the reason why we think it’s really important to have a diverse portfolio of companies that are attempting to make this happen.
Ross Kenyon: There’s, what, 3,000 people maybe working in carbon removal?
Tito Jankowski: 4,000, at least on the supplier side — that’s my estimate.
Ross Kenyon: It’s nothing. It’s nothing. You can probably work together some crazy half-baked idea you just had listening to this show, bother Tito and Adina with it, and before you know it, you’ll be in the Launchpad. Just kidding. [unclear]
Adina Mangubat: It’s probably more than that. And I can think of two companies though that have come through like that. I mean, we have our Boot Up series, right? Which is like, you’re brand new to CDR. And I did this program, by the way — it’s how I ended up in Tito’s virtual office being like, hi, I want to do this. We have Boot Up, which is like, I’m brand new to CDR, I don’t know what’s going on, like, tell me about all the things, tell me about all the methods, what are all the problems? And we have teams that come out of that that go on to form companies and, x number of quarters later, apply to Launchpad and get in. And so, yeah, it’s a real thing, and it’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. And if you are inspired to try and take this particular task on, let us know how we can empower you. We need as many people as we can get in this boat. It’s going to take a monumental human effort to achieve what we’re trying to achieve.
Ross Kenyon: You guys seem pretty excited about your work. Does it ever get you down? Are you mostly pretty optimistic? [unclear] What do you think?
Tito Jankowski: There’s this guy Hans Rosling — he framed himself as a possibilist. And so it’s when you’re grounded in — like, we’ve had 70-plus startup teams go through the AirMiners accelerator, right? So we’re very grounded in what’s possible. When you’re grounded in what’s possible and you look forward, people may think you’re an optimist, but you’re just really speaking the truth of what you’re seeing. I think that’s going to be obvious looking back, you know, 2030, 2050. We’ll look back and it’s the risk-takers that are going to be the ones to figure out how to make this happen. This sort of idea of, like, oh, somebody’s going to come up with some random idea, that is likely what is going to gigaton-scale carbon removal.
Whether you call them Eureka moments, whether you call it somebody from the outside coming to the inside, this bottom-up approach, whether you call them entrepreneurs, whether you look at investors, whether it’s buyers — bottom-up approach is true. Like, if you look at the new carbon removal companies that have gotten started, these people are climate scientists. They’re not, you know, experts in carbon removal — there aren’t any [unclear]. And, you know, it’s people that say, hey, you know, they’re looking at direct air capture machines, they say, hey, I know the design of that motor really well, there’s 10 different ways you can make that motor better, and I’m going to go do it. And you’re like, well, I didn’t even know they had a motor, right? So it’s just bring people into carbon removal. I think that’s how we’re going to get to this billion tonnes by 2030, and that’s why having an accelerator program is so key for that — we’re able to meet founders where they are. People with that idea, people with something that can become a solution, and without so much judgment around, like, oh, we think this will be gigaton or not. It needs to emerge. That’s the thing that you need to support and give resources to, to start figuring out whether the thing is going to work.
Adina Mangubat: Yeah. And I think that there’s also just, like, you know, they always say it’s lonely at the top, right? It’s like, okay, it’s lonely at the top, and then you pick an industry that is of the size that this is, right, and then it’s like, just continue to persevere by yourself, right? Like, that is not kind of a perk. So I think that a big part of what we do is we actually provide a space for people to authentically connect and talk about this half step of being an entrepreneur — but not just the test of being an entrepreneur, it’s being an entrepreneur in carbon removal at this point in time. It is a unique set of challenges that does not exist for most entrepreneurs. If you’re starting a software company or an app company or whatnot, it’s just not the same. And I think that having a community of people where you’re in the same boat together makes a huge difference for being able to not just share knowledge but also share the [unclear] emotional and mental journey that this is. Because these are the crazy ones that are saying, I’m going to do this. And we love those folks. That’s why we do what we do.
Ross Kenyon: AirMiners has always struck me as a pretty friendly community, especially to admitting uncertainty, Tito. I never felt bad about asking a quote unquote bad question or stupid question, and I always liked that. Culturally, Nori’s big on that too. Whenever we run meetings, we always try to make it so that — I oftentimes try to throw out the worst idea possible at the start of a meeting, especially a brainstorming one, just so that there’s a baseline, like, you can’t have an idea worse than this one. But oftentimes, like, that idea, it won’t be like, not — this is not that good of an idea, but what about this? And you’re like, you have a good laugh, and you’re like, but wait a second, what about this? And of course all the best ideas come out of that, like, this pitch is bad and then a riff on that has made it amazing. I don’t know, but I love culture like that.
Tito Jankowski: We need to see more of that. That’s Anne Lamott — sh*tty first drafts is the concept. And you just get these sh*tty first drafts out of the way. We would love to see more sh*tty first drafts, like, whatever it is you’ve got, whatever the concept is, whether the idea is — you can judge the progress of an industry, and I’m thinking judge the progress of carbon removal, by the number of sh*tty first drafts. And we need to see more sh*tty first drafts, we need to see a wider diversity of ideas and concepts that really seem like, is that really going to work? Whether it’s something from the capture, storage, removal, marketplaces, MRV, or a new category — you know, dare to think of something that’s going to actually get us to gigaton-scale carbon removal, with the goal of a gigaton by 2030.
I mean, if you look at the charts, we’ve pre-sold something like a million carbon removal tons. That’s one-tenth of a percent of a billion tons. Like, we really do need radical risk-takers to come along. And again, that’s risk-takers in terms of entrepreneurship, starting startups, making investments, making purchases. And that’s how we’re going to get there. It’s really exciting. [unclear] It’s freaking cool. Like, looking through, meeting new teams working on some solution you’ve never thought of, never heard of, working on a problem that you’ve never thought of or heard of. I mean, that’s one of the benefits, I think, of this kind of second generation of carbon removal companies: you could potentially go interview everybody at Climeworks, ask them what problems they’re seeing, and then go out and build a solution that you can partner with every direct air capture company to provide a solution for it, right? So you start getting these — you can solve industry-scale problems. You can directly remove carbon yourself. Bigger opportunities there.
Ross Kenyon: Adina, are you cool with the Launchpad being associated with so many sh*tty first drafts?
Adina Mangubat: I like it, because you know what? Like, becoming sh*tty first drafts and, like, gosh, the amount that you can accomplish in six weeks is amazing. It really is. You know, from the — like, that pressure cooker, like everybody’s in the same boat driving toward a common goal. There really is something about community providing that foundation and that space for creating what — I mean, often it’s like the miraculous. You know, today we were working on pitches, right? There’s this one team that I’m working with, and I remember their very, very first pitch, like two weeks ago, and it was a pile. And then they came back and I was like, yeah, this is good. Yeah, I think you’re ready. I’ll call up Shopify, like, go do that, right? So it really can be a quick turnaround.
And I think the community aspect also, just having talked to a lot of buyers — I think that AirMiners is an odd place in that it’s not like we’re isolating into one silo, like we only talk to the entrepreneurs. Like, no, we talk to the entrepreneurs, we talk to the investors, we talk to the buyers, we talk to the marketplaces. We understand what all of those folks are kind of looking at and what they’re concerned about, etcetera. So we can help these teams tell their story in a way that’s compelling, understandable, et cetera, to all of these different people that are going to be relevant for their success. And so I think that those things in combination, plus being able to provide a real platform for people to talk about what they’re doing via the investor demo days or the buyer demo days — it’s totally okay to have a sh*tty first draft. We will get you to the place where you can have successful conversations with the folks that are going to matter to you.
Tito Jankowski: It’s working. I mean, that’s like 70-plus teams have come through, 23 million dollars has been raised. Three of the teams won milestone awards from the XPRIZE carbon removal prize, two of them won student prize money. This is the approach that we need. We’re proving it out. And again, of course we’re adding on a fund, of course we’re looking at how to deploy capital to these companies. It’s working, and we would love to see more people giving it a shot.
Ross Kenyon: I love it. Links to all of those things are in the show notes. If you’ve been thinking about a carbon removal idea, why not apply? Why not try to get involved in AirMiners? Boot Up is great, so many good resources here. Also, thank you both for maybe titling the show — I think I might have to call it something with sh*tty first drafts. I don’t know, I’ve never sworn in an episode title, but maybe I need to. I don’t know.
Well, we’ll see. Maybe it is an explicit content warning. I think it finally got there. I feel like if you had to bleep out sh*tty 50 times in a row, it would be unlistenable. So I’m not going in that segment. I’m not. Thank you both for being here. Big fan of what you do. I think what you do is so important. I love AirMiners. It’s my favorite place to hang out. I’m kind of more of a lurker now, just because I feel overwhelmed and more quotidian duties, but I’m a big supporter, and thanks for what you do. Take care.
Tito Jankowski: Thanks for having us on, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Hey, thanks for listening. Send this to a friend. Send it to a friend with a great carbon removal idea. Give us a great rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify — it helps us a lot to get this to more people. And thank you so much for listening.
Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts, or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
