Episode 110 of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Spotify (subscribe there for ad-free), Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen. Paid subscribers get the ad-free version right here on the page.
Michael Leggett is Nori’s Director of Product, Jacob Farny is the team’s Principal Product Designer, Jaycen Horton serves as the Principal Blockchain Architect, and Software Developer Richie “never writes code with bugs" Farman. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, the Nori product team joins Ross for a product update, walking us through what they’ve been working on and how their priorities have shifted since last summer.
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Full Transcript
Announcer: Everyone, welcome to season two of Reversing Climate Change. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I'm Ross Kenyon. This is a Nori internal bonus episode. So I am here with the product team of Nori. We did one of these back in April of 2019.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, so we should probably be doing these a little bit more often.
Ross Kenyon: We did some bonus episodes around the lightning sale in the fall and that gets kind of a similar vibe here. We caught people up on what is happening at Nori, but we want to do another one because a lot's been happening on the technical side and that is why we are here. So thank you for joining me, Nori product team, four of you.
Michael Leggett: Thanks for having us.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I guess how should we do this? Maybe walk down the line.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, there was debate whether or not we should use a soundboard and incorporate that into this. Ultimately decided against.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I don't know. There's still time. We're all at the start of the podcast. That's our director of product speaking who is the one distracting us all with a soundboard.
Michael Leggett: That's right. That's really my, that's what I try to do day to day.
Ross Kenyon: They're allowed to be subordinate during the podcast once it's over. I don't know what happens to you, but.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, so floggings begin. So we'll just go around the table. I'll kick it off. Michael Leggett, director of product.
Jacob Farny: Jacob, product design.
Jaycen Horton: Jaycen Horton, kind of leading up the engineering side.
Ross Kenyon: Who are you, Richie?
Richie Farman: Sorry, I was waiting for my intro music.
Ross Kenyon: This guy, I knew he was gonna be trouble on the show, so. Okay, Richie, what do you got?
Richie Farman: Yeah, long time Norinaut, first time podcaster. So it's good to be here.
Ross Kenyon: Do we, is Richie senior enough to be on this episode? We could just get rid of.
Richie Farman: I will behave I promise.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, thank you for being here guys. I guess we're gonna split this into, we're gonna go seasonally, right? That's how you want to tell people about this.
Michael Leggett: I thought, well, I think looking back over the last year,
Ross Kenyon: So we're gonna really enjoy sharing this, my chicken.
Michael Leggett: I think looking back over the last year, that Techstars sits squarely in the middle of it. And I think it's interesting to kind of think of what was going on before Techstars. So since the last podcast through the spring and early summer, and then through Techstars and then after Techstars, what did we learn out of that and kind of think sense. And so it's a real interesting kind of story arc when I look at that that way. So I thought that might be a good way to break things up into seasons of sorts.
Ross Kenyon: Sure. Well, I guess kick us off. What's the first one here? I see act one, last summer.
Michael Leggett: Last summer. Yeah, we've got some notes we passed out. We like to be organized here at Nori.
Ross Kenyon: Normally I do this, so it's nice that someone else did.
Michael Leggett: There you go. So last one, I think back last summer, we were, I think in general as a mindset, there's two things that stand out at me and I'd please anyone like try them in to add color to this. I think part of it was there was a lot of divide and conquer. So different people, different sub teams were kind of working on their corner of things and working hard, but we were all kind of working on our own thing and it didn't feel like we were all working on the one thing because it wasn't really clear what that one thing was. There was just so much to do and so many different things that seemed valuable to help move things forward. And I think we were kind of thinking more of a longer arc, right? We're going to launch the market in 2020. And so we've got a full year and, and you know, maybe if it takes longer it takes longer, but we should really get it done soon. But you know, so I think there was just kind of thinking longer arc, people working on different things.
And specifically what we were working on was we were working on like, okay, we've been working on how to get farmers into the app, how to collect their data, how to quantify how many tonnes of carbon they've pulled down. Well, somebody's going to turn on them, buy this stuff. How is that going to work? And all the thinking to that point had been there's going to be these auctions and there's going to be this kind of spot market or first in first out market. And the spot market is more depending on the token. So we really should get to work on the auction. So we were spending a bunch of time trying to build up the auctions and we did. We built up auctions. We did like test auctions where we'd all sign into multiple accounts at the same time. And so that's a lot of what we were working on. And it seemed like this seems like, you know, the most important thing to work on at the time. And then Techstars hit. And so we'll get into what happened when Techstars hit, but I'm curious if anyone else has anything to add to what that time, like or other things we were doing or.
Jaycen Horton: Adding a little flavor there, you know, Nori, the topics of which we work on, you know, climate change, blockchain as part of this, we have a whole bunch of like nascent topics and technologies that we work with. And so on top of that, we also have a pretty unique team where a few of us aren't from software backgrounds. A few of us haven't necessarily taken products from a completely brand new idea into something that's used by mass users. We have all these moving parts where we've got the unique team, the nascent topics, and a lot of last year was spent trying to figure out how do we tackle these things? How do we build an entirely new two-sided marketplace that has not existed really in this kind of shape before? So I think as we kind of get into this conversation, keeping that in mind is going to be kind of something that keeps coming up. It's one of the things that we have to keep checking on, making sure that we're still headed in the right direction and all the things that we do.
Richie Farman: And for what it's worth, like working on the auctions, that's something that is essential. I think we all agree, for our marketplace to kind of get into the place where we want it to be. But of that realization as we were working on it was that shouldn't necessarily be the first step we take towards building that marketplace, and that's where things start to change.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I imagine that's true of any company I've made. I've prioritized some things only to learn later that that was maybe not the most efficacious way to use my time and then had to do a little bit of a pivot. That's just, I guess I've never worked on the engineering or technical side of a company like that before, but that's common, right? So happens.
Michael Leggett: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
Jaycen Horton: And then sometimes important discoveries get found out during those quote unquote mistakes too. You never know.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, I think it quote unquote is right. I think it's kind of the idea of like fail fast. I think what's hardest about this and about our product in general is it's one of those products where it's like not every person is necessarily the person that would use the product. So I can't necessarily just go down to Starbucks and say like, "Hey, so you're going to buy tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide removal in the next auction on behalf of your company. How would you use this interface?" And they're just like, what the hell are you talking to? So to some extent, it's really easy when you're in that kind of product space to lean even more on your subject matter experts, right? The people that have been in the trenches or have worked in these spaces and really put a lot on their shoulders to direct where should this go, what should it end? And that's kind of your shortcut to feedback and helping with direction and stuff. And I think that, it's kind of on any product team, do not go too far on that. That's a valid way to build products. But I think you still want to try to be getting user feedback or build something even better so that users are actually using it or not using it. That's the ultimate feedback. People show up, did they pay? Vote with their feet kind of thing. What happened where they get stuck? And how do you learn from that?
So I think that that was, as we zoom into kind of Techstars, the big pivot that happened, if we're going to jump there, I'm going to jump there, because I think that's where it gets interesting, is we were asking people to kind of take on too much like new concepts all at once. So like we were really kind of pushing the idea of like carbon removal is this way of dealing with climate change and it's one way that allows you to not only deal with mitigation but actually removal, removing past emissions once you're actually at zero emissions, truly zero emissions. So we think it's really interesting, but also we have this, there's this whole, and we've done podcasts on around the token and the role of the token and making that market, you know, liquid and allowing speculation and allowing, you know, a commodity that can only be, or an asset that can only be sold once and not resold and how does all that work? So without getting the mechanics on that, it's just a lot to kind of wrap your head around.
And so I think the big aha was let's just sell these for cash. Let's get this like actually functional, sell them for cash and see what we can do.
Jaycen Horton: And the actual carbon removal.
Michael Leggett: The carbon removal. Yeah. Let's sell the carbon removals for cash and let's make it happen. Let's make it happen like in three months.
Jaycen Horton: Without the token really being involved.
Michael Leggett: Yeah. And the token was somewhat involved, but it's very much in the background. So the supplier, Trey Hill of Harborview Farms, did get one token per Nori Removal Tonne or NRT. So the token was somewhat involved, but the buyer didn't have to buy tokens or transact in tokens. They just showed up, put in a credit card number and got carbon removals. No one needed to understand what the tokens were or how they worked in order to buy. You can sign up for an ordinary account.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, like so we dramatically simplified things, which made it easier for us to actually launch something sooner, which made it easier for people to actually participate.
Michael Leggett: Like it just lowered the floor and it also was a pivot to some extent to anybody who wants to buy, right? Like to consumers or to small businesses. It wasn't just like, hey, let's do these big deals with big companies that are coming in and spend lots and lots of money. We still think that that's where a lot of the transactions or volume is going to happen, but it also let us kind of open the door to anyone and get some traction, and traction we got, and a lot of learnings. And it was crazy, you know, a few months, felt like kind of running a marathon trying to get that out the door.
Ross Kenyon: But this is, you're referring to the summer period?
Michael Leggett: Yeah. So this is getting to like late summer, early fall. So the kind of August through October timeframe.
Ross Kenyon: That's in the heart of the Techstars time.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, that was Techstars.
Ross Kenyon: So you guys were kind of split. I guess Jaycen, you're in Phoenix all the time anyways, but.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, and the heart of the Techstars bits, of all the people in this room, I think I was one of the people that was there most during the actual Techstars stint. So while being remote isn't anything new to me, what was new for me and what was new for Nori was we started to, and I don't know if we were ever consciously aware that there were kind of like these silos inside of our company where BizDev was working independently. We have BizDev kind of heading one direction and product stays closely tied with meetings here and there, but there was never really like an entanglement. There was never a need or disruption where we're like, "Okay, well, we've got things being said here and we've got things being built here and they're not really." And so when we went to Techstars and when the few of us that were out there full-time, it was me from the product team. And then we had pretty much everyone else who was out there was from the biz dev team. So this, it was kind of like a brand new mashup of, well, here's a whole bunch of things that that's going on that we're not, for just, just because of the nature of, you know, silos.
So yeah, I think, I think Techstars was a phenomenal experience. And I think it really did put us in the right track by just kind of like shaking us up and saying here, think about it this way, or here, here's a little bit of chaos, additional chaos to what you've already got. And I think that little bit more allowed us to get a little bit more focused, allowed us to think about product releases in a way that wasn't, we didn't think we needed to release something perfect, right? We could release something as we're going to get that more iterative type release, which is very important. And I think that external pressure was critical, specifically because it was like we were again going back to the all the different topics being super complex subject matter.
Michael Leggett: It was a good disruption. It's definitely lowering the bar on quantity, not quality. Let's do less. We'll do it well, but let's do less so we can get something out sooner. We don't need to build a marketplace to sell carbon removal.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, or not as complex a marketplace.
Michael Leggett: Yeah. Yeah. I think the experience that Techstars, or the experience of Techstars, was held a little bit differently depending on whether you were there or whether you were not. I think we've done lots of retros on these topics, but I'd be curious how you all perceived what I was just describing from operating still in Seattle as that was going on.
Richie Farman: Well, I mean, I was one of the folks that stayed behind. I chose to stay behind. It was my choice. But as a person that wasn't at Techstars, yeah, there were a lot of conversations about like, you know, now we've got two camps and we've got to pass information back and forth and make sure that we're all still working together. And that was difficult. But I definitely look back at that time where people were at Techstars and feel pretty good about it because all of a sudden we were allowed to have certain kinds of conversations that before were kind of no fly zones. Like even the idea that we're gonna start selling this stuff for cash, I mean, that was, I don't know how many times that was brought up before Techstars, and then all of a sudden Techstars happened and that was a possibility. And that was super positive, and I think we'd be in a much different place today if that wasn't a thing.
Jacob Farny: I think that was something that we had been floating product for a long time because our priority was just kind of to get people involved with what we were doing. And with business development, they had been working on gathering requirements for the carbon markets that exist today. What do they look like? What do we have to do to get to where they are? And it was a nice surprise to hear, after they had spent some time at Techstars, that like, okay, we now see that in order to reach our goals, it's starting to make a little more sense to take a step like this.
Ross Kenyon: Funny for me to hear this from you guys, because I've heard glimpses of this, but this is a great joke that I really like from "Bored to Death," where John Hodgman and Jason Schwartzman are arguing. And Jason Schwartzman says, "It's like Rashomon. We all remember things differently." And John Hodgman says, "That's not the Rashomon I remember." So I love being on the inside of hearing how you guys experienced this. And then of course we read that book, "Play Bigger," which led to this idea of doing a lightning strike event, which became the lightning sale, which was Nori was offering for the first time to consumers where people were able to buy carbon removals from us. And I know that put a lot of pressure on you guys to ship very quickly. It was a whole thing. That's where we're headed now, right? Are you content to move to this?
Michael Leggett: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think we're in the thick of that.
Jacob Farny: And I just echo what Jaycen was saying and part of what you were asking of how, what was that experience here in Seattle? Because I too was stayed in Seattle.
Ross Kenyon: You got Kirk Cameron.
Michael Leggett: I liken it to, I think things were more fragmented, right? Because it used to be seven of the 10 of us were here in Seattle. And then Jaycen was in Arizona, Aldyen's up in Vancouver, and Ryan's in Chicago. So we were a Seattle centered company to basically three of us in Seattle. And then Paul and Ross to some degree were kind of going back and forth. So we were more remote of a company, which had its own challenges and was challenging. But we felt much more like a single team working towards a single goal, which is we're going to have this lightning sale. We're just going to focus on Harborview Farms in Maryland as far as our supply, which we got about 14,000 NRTs out of, ended up. And we're going to get that from all the way over the finish line. We're going to get through quantification. We're going to get through verification. We're going to get through issuance. We're going to then sell them for real money to real people. The clarity of that, the simplicity of that, we could all just hold that in our heads and it's very easy to prioritize. Is this helping us do that? No, it's not. Great. Probably needs to go on the back burner unless there's really good reason for us to keep working on that. Like that was gold. And so I think that that was worth whatever pain there was in the complexities of collaborating and whatnot.
Ross Kenyon: Do you think before that happened with the lightning sale that there just wasn't a coherent goal as much to come together around, or?
Michael Leggett: Absolutely not. No, it was, I mean, I think that there just wasn't. It wasn't coherent enough. Was there goals? Were they somewhat coherent? Sure. But I think it just wasn't nearly that coherent and it wasn't coherent enough. And we needed something that crystal clear. Like do or die. You got to do this. Well, it's not even like the urgency I think is also valuable. It's really nice to say, hey, we want to do this in two to three months. We want to have this done by demo day so we can get up on stage and say we sold them. And there was even some stuff we wanted to do, some deadlines even earlier that we didn't fully hit. We figured out how to stagger that, but we didn't have any, like all of our deadlines were like, yeah, we'd like to launch the market in 2020 or like late 2019 would be good, but you know, 2020. And like, I think that the level of urgency picked up a step. And I think of all the people that have worked on products before, we were all like, heck yeah, like that feels fantastic. Let's turn up the juice a little, but also let's get like sharper in what we're focusing on. Was that your experience too?
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, I mean, it was also, I mean, there was more from the product team. I think that was very well received. It was like, okay, yes, finally, right? For others, that very well could have been a nerve wracking thing, right? It's scary when you're building a market around a new idea, speaking from a non-product perspective and kind of assuming that role. You've got all of these ideas that you want to try out, but you haven't got all of the little details that are really worked out. Very scary or whatever else to be like, okay, well, we're just gonna launch this with half of the rules figured out, right? 'Cause then it's like, well, what if something goes wrong? Like we gotta start over, right? That can be the assumption or the mindset that you go into it if you kind of haven't done this kind of iterative type release before. But I think we've gotten past all those hurdles and I think we're now working in a very efficient and seamless way that was not how [unclear].
Jacob Farny: I think there's that idea that don't let perfect be the enemy of done, or of, so I think that what we're working on is no doubt a very complex beast. And so I think we were methodically working through things and trying to get it just right. The lightning sale really forced us to do is we need this to not be perfect. We need this to be done. And it needs to be good. And we need to make sure we're not boxing ourselves into a corner.
Michael Leggett: We need to kind of like go faster. And in doing that, we uncovered things that we thought we had worked out. There were other things that we thought were gonna be really hard that turned out to not be hard once we really dove in and said, let's lock this down. So like just that forcing function really pushes through a lot of interesting open issues and it was just so satisfying to close up so many of those.
Ross Kenyon: What else was happening during this period? I see that you have a bunch of various issues denoted above of struggles you had as a team. Why, you, someone walk me through this crack at this list of pain points.
Michael Leggett: Throughout a few, because I thought it would be interesting to talk about what are some, at least from the product or technical side, what are some of the things we struggled with? And so some of the ones I threw out are, you know, Jaycen [unclear] wants to speak to blockchain. We talk a lot about how that's an important part of us being transparent and open.
Richie Farman: I'll just open up with implementing this kind of transactional service that allows people to pay money to receive carbon removal tonnes. That was the easy part in all of it, like scaling up this whole new service, this whole new side of our product.
Michael Leggett: Was like took a,
Richie Farman: Yeah, took a few days. It's a very common kind of pattern in software, but it's all those weird elements of how we were doing it where things got tricky. So with the lightning sale, it was how are we going to collect the demand that we have for this product without being able to deliver it until a later date.
Michael Leggett: And it took us a while to get that figured out. We basically, we wanted, we were ready to start taking orders and we wanted to take orders and collect them. We were still working through getting through verification and we felt confident enough that that was going to work out, but there was still like things we were working out and how verification works and making sure. And so it was taking longer than expected. And so we were confident enough to take people's credit cards. We weren't going to charge them until we actually had them in hand, but we didn't want to start giving them out until it was fully, fully done through the process.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah. I mean, I was just going to say there's so many, it's kind of strange, you know, looking back and if you were to try to like expect, okay, which of these things is going to be the most difficult or which of these things is going to take the longest or the shortest. Sometimes it's very hard to really estimate. And it's not what it would be. It's just not obvious, right? And so while we had a lot of success with the Stripe integration, that was a pretty smooth process. I don't think there were really any massive, crazy things. It's like, oh, we got to go and study a whole brand new topic and figure out what does this new tech look like? Or what does this thing, how did these two together?
Where we've got, you know, for the two years or so running up until the lightning sale, we had this whole idea of a fully blockchain marketplace, right? Like everything being tokenized and having all these different moving parts of larger nascent. And so one of those is one of ours or one of our kind of, you know, Achilles heel, if you will, is the blockchain. And so trying to figure out a lot of these things and how we're going to actually get something to our users without having to spend a year plus in this development cycle of like, okay, well, this thing's too slow or this thing crashes or like, how do we deal with cards being charged out of sync with what's happening on the blockchain and what about refunds. And there's just a whole bunch of moving parts when you've got too many things.
When you're working with some of the newer technologies, Stripe's also new, but it's very widely used. It's a common thing that has a lot of support. It's got a massive team. It's got lots of docs. It has to work seamlessly. It's one of those things that, whatever things it needs to abide by for a mass payment system. And then you've got the blockchain and you've got like no support system. You've got no one you can call up. You've got docs scattered because everything is very open source and you've got kind of this nature of open source systems. It's a fascinating thing, but again, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is not needing to release the perfect thing first. And so when we're dealing with all of these things, we're like, okay, what minimum version of this working on the blockchain or this working for cash payments or tokens or whatever it is, can we achieve to get it out to the users? And I think we did find a good balance that it's certainly not perfect. I wish the listeners at home could see how frustrating it is to put this stuff on the blockchain. It is very much a nightmare. But it is what it is.
Ross Kenyon: What are some of the short, like you talked about lack of documentation, but like you said, like a credit card transaction is near instant, whereas a blockchain is not instant.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah. I mean, think about like that. That's the whole latency. I could go on on that one, but I think a more interesting one, or more one that might be a little more easy to receive from listeners, would be like the fact that when you swipe a credit card, you're purchasing something, right? But it's that's not the end of the story. That's not the end of the road. You swipe the credit card and you get the goods and you go home with a receipt and you've got this receipt now and it could be a 30-day grace period, let's say. You're at that 27th day and you're like, "Okay, well, I'm going to return this now and I'm going to go and get this item back and my credit card is going to get refunded." It's not that easy with some of the stuff that we're having to deal with, right? We've got the fact that that can happen and then we've got this stuff that's being put onto a decentralized system of which we effectively don't control, right? It's just we're participating in it. And so while we have things in place that we can, there are things that are possible and things that we can do to sort of undo things by effectively erasing it by some blank data, for instance. It's not quite the same or it's not quite as easy as that. There's all kinds of fees involved in kind of undoing that and then there's a crazy amount of.
Michael Leggett: I mean, for the most part, it's not, I mean, the whole idea behind blockchain is you can't undo it. It's immutable. Right. So it's been written there and you could try to write over it perhaps, but like there.
Jaycen Horton: It's immutable.
Michael Leggett: And so like without even involved this thing on a return policy and like, which there isn't one once you buy it, like that's, and that seems there are other markets that have similar things with carbon offsets. So there were just things for us to work out.
Jaycen Horton: Right. Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at, which is there are so many things that you just need to play out, right? But again, it can get you into that vicious cycle of like, do we need to perfect this thing? Like, do we need to work out all of these rules right now? Understanding that we just needed to know enough, right? We needed to know enough about the various ways that we can approach it rather than needing to build out all of the systems that are necessary to actually enact those steps. Finding that balance is a very critical part, I think, in building any product, really.
Richie Farman: Building a system that accommodates for something like refunds is obviously something we wanted to do. But when the question comes down to what do we need to do, put this out there, it was pretty clear that this was the right thing to do.
Michael Leggett: Yeah. And one additional thing there is even the refund thing aside, you deal with the serial numbers, right? Serialization.
Ross Kenyon: What even is that?
Michael Leggett: If you would have asked me at the end of last year how long it would take for us to build out a serial system for these NRTs.
Ross Kenyon: What is an NRT by the way?
Jaycen Horton: The Nori Removal Tonnes. So the carbon removal that users are buying. Effectively what happens is we stamp on it a serial number, right? Like similar to a barcode on a product or something like that, which gives it some kind of tracking and some human readability-ishness to it. And so what we're doing is effectively saying, okay, we've got some NRTs that are being issued by our suppliers. They've removed carbon and we sample a serial number on that we say. It was from this location and it was on this field and it was a range of NRTs 1 through 100, right? There's 100 of them. Now when a buyer comes along and they're purchasing those NRTs from the supplier, they also get a serial number that's stamped on that that shows, okay, it was from this one, or it was coming from here, but also it's got kind of like a numbering system as well. So it's serial.
And what becomes the problem there is as soon as you're dealing with this type of serialization, the type of serialization that we, I wouldn't say rushed, but it was, I think we spent as much time as we should have on it. And one of the quirks of it is that it is that sequential numbering. So it's, you know, if I buy one through 50 and the first purchase, the next person who comes along with the second purchase might buy 50, but they get numbers 50 through 100 or 51 through 100. And effectively what that means is let's say two people order these things at the same exact moment. Well, you've got to order those things before they go through, which when you've got centralized and decentralized systems going on, the blockchain and Stripe, you've got to figure out how to synchronize those. It's kind of like orchestrating a really weird symphony.
Jacob Farny: And that wasn't even like, the landscape there that you painted sounds pretty nightmarish. And there's so many things that we had to discuss and pick apart to figure out exactly how to implement that idea. But we even had issues as a team coming together on like, how are we articulating what we're selling? Is it a thing that people want a stamped ID on, or is it, are they paying for a service? Are they paying for removal? And we had really lengthy conversations about like, what is this NRT? What does it mean to people? What are the different flavors of our customers? Who are we trying to serve? Yeah, it was really gnarly on the technical side. It was really gnarly on the business side to figure out how we're selling it and how we're messaging it. And I think we're still grappling with a lot of those issues.
Michael Leggett: The name used to be a carbon removal certificate or CRC. So like that was even that. Like when you say, you know, we gave Trey 14,000 NRTs, right? He pulled down 14,000 tonnes. Is that serial number one, and then the next farmer come in and gets serial number two and then somebody comes in and buys some of those and they get a part of serial number. Like what are you even putting a number on was like part of it. And so I think some of our nomenclature I think made that even harder. Like, oh, it's a carbon removal certificate. Well, actually, the certificate is the thing. I often likened it to you buy shares in a company. You get a stock certificate for 50 shares. And so really the thing people are buying is shares. They're buying tonnes of carbon removal. And the certificate is the thing that tells them how many tonnes they got and which tonnes they got and from where by that.
Jaycen Horton: Not to mention even the implications that then has on where we can take our product next, right? We have tons and tons of things in the works. And one of the things that we've been talking about for a long time is like the API for reversing climate change, right? It's the, how do we enable this for mass scale? How do we allow the operator of some ride share program? Each of their users, they get to the end of the ride and they want tied into this API system. Or what if we want that baked into an Amazon product, right? You get to the checkout and it's part of that. When we've got the serialization thing, we've got to start thinking about, okay, well, can we preallocate a serial number range? Can we give that and say, "Here, you can sell that and put it in whatever asynchronous system you've got"? Or what exactly do we need to do? There's all kinds of moving pieces there when we get into all of that and put it on the blockchain.
Jacob Farny: Boy, these serial numbers sound really complex. I wonder why we thought this was something we needed and not something we just wanted.
Michael Leggett: For the future. I'm going to push it through, we're going to figure out how to do it and I get it's a pain in the butt, but we're just going to do it. I think one of the reasons to do it that I think is easiest to relate to is you are buying something that is not a physical good you get to hold in your hands. You may get a physical certificate at the end of the day, but if my certificate looks just like yours or like Jacob's, it makes it feel less real to me. So I think that part of the challenge is not only in our being successful is not only propping up a market, being honest, transparent, doing the right thing, all the things that we're gonna do, but also perception is convincing people that we're doing the right thing and that they're buying something real. And so to me, the serial number of I got numbers 50 through 100, what'd you get? Oh, you got number 150 through 200. And then I can go back and look at Trey's farm and say, "Well, how many did he get? We got 1,000, and here's a list of who got each of those." And nobody else has numbers 50 through 100, builds confidence and helps. It also helps down the road with larger businesses and accounting of them keeping track of what they allocate and if I bought a bunch and I'm giving some to my offices and here are some of the offices there. There's other reasons that I think we get into, but to me that was the more human reason. I'm trying to make this intangible thing feel real.
Ross Kenyon: Oh man, we've had so many conversations on the other side of the office about this too. What happens when you have multiple farmers? Is someone buying carbon removals from Nori? Are you going to be content with three from this farmer, seven from this other guy? Because the customers now that buy offsets, I think many of them, they're used to being involved in the project development. They want to know, we are shepherding this from start to finish and we know these people, as opposed to buying something that's closer to a barcode. But we want to get to a barcode area because that's much more scalable than the bespoke development process. But then how do you compensate for that? How do you tell that story? And that's where you come in, right? Jacob, this is a lot of what you do, is presenting this information in a controlled, desirous kind of way.
Jacob Farny: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely tough. Like if people are used to coming in and shopping for a project, if you come to what we have right now for our registry, which is beyond bare bones, but if you find these profile pages after you buy something, like you get the narrative after the fact. You're not coming to our website and saying like, "Oh man, yeah, I really want to buy these NRTs from this farmer, Trey. He seems like a cool dude. Let me get NRTs from him." Like that's just not, that's just not how it works. So we have to try to kind of prop up the idea that our product is different from other people from a quality standpoint by making those kinds of comparisons before we actually get into the more interesting, more human story of like who is Trey and where does this stuff come from? I think we do a good job trying to help people understand how you're helping people like Trey before they hit the purchase button. I think that that is fair to say that we do a decent job there. I think we could do more. But this problem is only going to get more complicated the more suppliers we have in our ecosystem. So it's definitely an evolving thing. We've taken a first stab at it, but there's a lot more work to do.
Michael Leggett: Two small things to add on that. I liken it to like Priceline, right? Like you're buying plane tickets on an airline, but you don't necessarily know in advance. You're looking for a good price or a good product or other attributes. And it's not typically how people have bought them. And I hope that we have more, even more success with it. And we're not trying to say, oh, this is bargain basement. You're trying to get the cheapest price. And we're not going to tell you who it is, but it is just kind of back to like how this scales. When I go buy a toothpaste, I'm not looking for was this the one that was made in Mexico or this is the one that was made in like, you know, South Mexico or this one that was made in like Texas, or like, I'm looking for, you know, is this Colgate or maybe a brand. So this is like Nori carbon removal. And you know, the exact story and narrative like Jacob said comes after.
Ross Kenyon: I knew you were a Colgate guy.
Michael Leggett: I'm actually a Tom's guy.
Ross Kenyon: I'm not surprised. You could tell when you're having to get that close together. I can smell the minty.
Michael Leggett: I do think there's more we can do and I think we will. I think it will get more interesting. I think that this is how it scales, right? Like you imagine the microtransactions of you just finished your rideshare ride, would you like to offset the footprint of that? Cool, pick a project. And now I'm going to sift through these and I'm supposed to figure out which one? That's ridiculous. So I think especially when you think the microtransaction level, that just doesn't work at all. And I think even for large companies buying this, can all large companies afford to pay someone full time to go out and visit all these projects? Or if large companies want to, like Microsoft just announced they're not going to just remove their current emissions and even not just scope one, but actually scope two, scope three and past emissions, at that scale, when you get to that scale, can you afford to go visit the like hundred different farms that are doing this and like shake hands with it? Like, no, you can't. So at the scale to deal with climate change, that doesn't work anymore. So we're trying to skate to where the puck is going.
And I know the other thing I was going to say is we still want to try to honor the desire to support local projects or support the people you know, or like, so I think in the auction, I think eventually we will have an auction and eventually we will let you say, I'd love to buy from this state or this county or this location. Like I have a preference. And if you can meet that preference, great. If you can't, that's okay. Or maybe even if you can't meet that preference, I don't want to buy. So I mean, I think there's ways of letting people try to say, I have a preference of buying in this area, this region. I don't know if it gets down to like this specific supplier, you know, long-term, but I think that we can still try to honor what people are like, there's good intentions behind that. And it's not to say we think they are foul or bad, but I think that they don't work with where we think we, where we see this going. And so we're not trying to prioritize them.
Ross Kenyon: Has been dropped. Anything else in here? I assume it's supposed to be a CH not ack.
Michael Leggett: No, it's like ack.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, oh ack. Credit card fees. Okay. I don't know if there's anything to talk about that other than like.
Michael Leggett: We are a very low margin business. We take 10% additional fee to the buyer and three of that, of the 10. So 30% of that goes to Stripe. So we love you Stripe. You've been very easy to work with. And I, you know, I'm part of that to Visa and whoever like the credit card, right? But like also piece. So yeah, we're still trying to figure out what we're going to do about that, because that's a big chunk out of.
Ross Kenyon: All right, why don't you take us to act three here? I guess this is the live sale, which is getting, we're in this phase now, technically, where the live sale is still ongoing, but this is the beginning of the live sale. That's the next big step you guys had.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, I mean I think that this sort of happened towards the end of Techstars. The live sale to us, this is like internal semantics, on we had a pre-sale and then we had a live sale. Pre-sale was, hey, we're trying to wrap, and I say we are trying to wrap up verification, but really the verification was done by a third party verifier. So we had very little to do with that other than setting the guidelines. So that was more of Trey and the verifier working through that and making sure all the owners signed on to the projects being registered. As that was playing out, we're taking these pre-orders or something that we were fairly confident we would have, then we had it, then we executed those pre-orders. And then we took a week or two to kind of finish revamping things so that as soon as you order, you get the certificate immediately and Trey's amount gets [unclear] immediately.
Michael Leggett: So that we launched in December, mid-December, right before--
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, the day before we left for [unclear], if I remember correctly.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, a little kind of, not typically--
Jaycen Horton: Just in time, just in time, just in time.
Michael Leggett: Well, I think there was a lot of us going back and executing the presales and making sure everything was going to blockchain right and getting the serial numbers right. That was a lot of, there's only so much QA you can do, but we're also doing these very carefully and making sure everything is working correctly. Our I's are dotted, our T's are crossed. And then at the same time as we're ramping that up, I think, especially you and I, Jacob, we're working a lot on kind of planning and doing the retro on like, okay, we just did this whole thing. We can't just keep doing it this way, right? Like that is not gonna scale. How are we going to do this better? What can we learn? So that was a whole nother.
Ross Kenyon: Talk about the live sale first. Maybe throw it at Richie and Jaycen. Jaycen, you said you can remember the joys of closing up the pre-sale and switching into the live sale.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, I mean a lot of my memories there, you know, Richie did handle a lot of the live sale migration when we went from the pre-orders to the actual live sale. And a lot of my nightmares and fears and the like had to do with closing out really. So that was things like, you know, chain and making sure everything goes right. And we've got to think about building out that system for what we're doing for the live sale, or really rather where we're trying to move this or what direction we're trying to move this further into the live sale.
Richie Farman: Yeah, moving from the pre-sale, the lightning sale, to the live sale was definitely a little bit of a sweaty transition. Not just by virtue of the time constraints we put on ourselves, but also because the nature of the lightning sale meant that we could execute on these pre-orders at our own pace. We could be in control of that process and have oversight on it from beginning to end in case, God forbid, something went wrong. When it came to launching the live sale, it wasn't really going to be an option anymore because someone was going to be able to come to the website. They wanted to buy X amount of, and then get the certificate and be able to see that. And like, simple idea, but as we've discussed, there's a lot of complex things that are happening when you're purchasing this product. And there are a lot of moving parts. All need to move perfectly together for all the people that are going to come to this page and check out.
Jaycen Horton: Yeah, like there were tons of tools we had to build in our back end. We have a little tool that helps us kind of manage and view. And we were going through that kind of migration from preorders to live sale. We built out the admin tools for preorders, which is, it's shockingly different than how it happens for the live sale. You've got like kind of like a multi-step process where like, okay, click good or expire, swipes though, which is happening. It's like, okay, swipe the card and we start building it. Do we have some kind of error reporting? Do we have some kind of Slack integration?
Michael Leggett: Yeah. I mean, in the end it turned out well.
Jaycen Horton: Oh yeah. When great. We survived, but it was, uh,
Michael Leggett: Richie doesn't write code with bugs. So that really helps.
Jaycen Horton: Not once. It's very convenient.
Richie Farman: I have some evidence. So not true.
Michael Leggett: What?
Richie Farman: Yeah, don't go through our commit logs.
Michael Leggett: But the short of it is still like back to the serialization and the blockchain. Like those two and just like--
Jaycen Horton: It's still unsolved, yeah.
Michael Leggett: Those two things were part, like a good shorthand for what makes this hard. Right. And like we've got in a good place, but there's still work to be done there that we will continue to do. Yeah, it's like, it worked for us. It's been going pretty darn well. We're about to sell out if we haven't already. We've got a chunk set aside for some big purchases coming in. And this might shift into scaling up in Q1. And that's been exciting. And I don't want to steal Alexsandra's thunder. And I don't think we're ready to talk about any of those. But we definitely have had, it feels like the sales side and demand side has been picking up. And there's people showing up, continue to shop at the website to buy smaller chunks, sometimes bigger chunks, but there's definitely people showing up to buy thousands through direct sales and through Alexsandra. And we did virtually no marketing for most of this.
Ross Kenyon: Hey man, what are you trying to say?
Michael Leggett: Well, I'm trying to say we have no marketing budgets. We didn't do a whole lot of marketing with our zero.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, there's a whole lot of that. Let's move on from there. I prefer it that way. Isn't it? You were hinting at this though about scaling up. So this is now the current phase that we are in.
Michael Leggett: Yeah. Just trying to just scale and keep developing the tech that you've deployed. And this is all hands on. I think that, I likened it to like we finished a marathon and then immediately changed our shoes and started running an Ironman. And so I think that we were able to get things done, but we knew that wasn't scale. And so immediately we turned like to the work of launching a live sale. So we're not babysitting this thing and it's kind of running on its own with us running support and making sure. And then immediately after that, we turned to like all this stuff that Jacob and I working with Ryan and Christophe kind of laid out as what could have gone better with the lightning. So where did things go slow? Where can we make things faster? And prioritizing that down to a subset of, okay, what are we actually gonna make better in Q1? And that turning into priorities for development and for product and for supply as well and how product and supply works together. And so we're in the thick of that.
I'd say like a good shorthand for all the way out, three things that we're doing. One is one of the big bottlenecks is to quantify how much carbon was removed. We use a model based approach, a partnership with Comet Farm and the DayCent model, which is one of like 45 different empirical models and tables that they use to estimate how much additional CO2 is brought down through the change of practices. So new practices versus old practice on a specific field for specific set of time. To run that, we need a fairly detailed history of how the land was managed at the field level going all the way back to the year 2000 and then even some high level questions before that. Getting that is very challenging, very challenging. And we also need a projection of what do you think, how do you think you're going to manage it over the next 10 years? That's easier to get on vacation because we aren't giving you NRTs for what you might do in the future. We're giving you NRTs for what you have done in the past.
So getting that full history, I think is a big part of what we're doing to scale up is to how do we make that easier? The farmers, step one is we've got great partners like Granular where farmers are using that to manage their farm and we work with them to import basically the history that they already have. So let's say I get five years or eight years of history out of something like Granular. That's great. That gets us me all the way back to 2012. What happened before then? The farmer step in and say field by field, year by year, input by input. And this is how much fertilizer I put on in 2006 on the corn and on this field, but it was different on this. Like, sure, that's great if they've got the time to do that. And we certainly welcome to do that. But we are finding other ways and working with also the methodology team and Aldyen on what is acceptable, what needs to be verified, what impacts the model, to basically use other tools like the CDL, Cropland Data Layer, which uses their satellite imagery, detects what crops were on the field at various points in the past. I could go on and on and on about this and I don't want to go on too deep into it, but like the shorthand is import what we can from platforms we have partnerships with, try to detect the rest and see how far that gets us and see what holes remain and how I figure out how to ask the farmer to fill in those holes in kind of more high level ways, walk through a wizard instead of filling out all the detailed fields for every field. So that's a lot of what we're working on on the supply side.
Jacob Farny: [unclear] I think, Michael, you asked me this interesting question. It really stuck with me. I think you've asked me this more than once, but it was kind of like, Jacob, when you joined this company, did you realize how much you were going to need to learn about farming? And I think I always answered like maybe a little bit, but like, no, not to this degree. I mean, we're getting into the super fine-grained details of what people are doing on their fields and how they apply fertilizer and manure and all of these things that are basically like we've all had to become as a team somewhat well-versed in how this stuff works, at least enough to talk about it and how it relates to model and quantification and all these other things. Pretty wild stuff and I'm actually pretty impressed with a group of people that had no knowledge have ramped up on a lot of these things. Yeah, I mean, I'm from Indiana, so like I grew up next to a cornfield, but that doesn't mean I know like how any of that stuff works at all. I just know how corn smells. So that's where I started.
Richie Farman: Yeah, I'm from Texas. I know what a cow looks like.
Ross Kenyon: There you go. You're fully qualified to work at Nori, it sounds like.
Michael Leggett: No, but you're right. I mean, you have to understand the boundaries of what is possible and likely to support that in the product, right? We've been getting into perennials lately. I'm like, yeah, I planted this in 2011 and then I didn't really remove it from the field until 2017 and I did harvest. I'm like, "Oh, okay, how are we going to capture that?" And we thought we'd taken care of that and we didn't fully grab it. And so we're closing that gap. So finding those gaps and it constantly re-informing how do you write software for farmers, you know, and for everyone else. So you're very smart, capable people. And we just don't have the expertise that they have. We don't have the knowledge base that they have. And then how do you bubble that up into this is why our product quality is better than other things, like the taking it from that super low level all the way up to this is what defines our product, is an ever-evolving story that we are constantly trying to figure out how to, how to say it better.
Ross Kenyon: I think I'm going to pat myself on the back a little bit here. I think the podcast is good because I'm often programming content that I think is good and I would want to listen to. But how do you build a product for someone that you don't actually, maybe they were your neighbors once upon a time growing up, but you are not a farmer. How does one even do something like that? Smelling corn.
Jacob Farny: Yeah, you smell corn, you [unclear] cows. Boom, you're done.
Michael Leggett: There's more to it. You talk to him.
Jacob Farny: I mean, Michael does this more than anybody else on the team. I mean, these calls go on for hours where we sit down and onboard farmers and say, hey, what are you doing? Let's go through all the different things that are required for the model. When's the last time that you made a shift of this kind in your practices?
Michael Leggett: I mean, we started with no script. And every time we talk to somebody, I feel like it gets a little bit better. But that is kind of the intersection of where what I would call our supply team meets our product team.
Jacob Farny: So this is one of the other really great outcomes that came from Techstars is that that wall is now dissolved and we're working a lot more closely together than we ever have before, which is really great. It feels really good to be where we are right now.
Ross Kenyon: You're pretty well integrated with Ryan and Christophe and Aldyen and you're coming together and finding ways of building out these designs in the software so that it actually makes sense from the user experience that you do not directly have. Is that broadly correct?
Jacob Farny: Yeah. And I think one of the misconceptions with how product works for people that aren't product people is you're going to come in and you're going to hit a home run. And that's just not how it works. Like you come in, you create something interesting so that the right people can use it. You can watch them use it and then learn from it. That's the much faster way to get to something quality than saying like, "Hey, we're not going to release this to people until it's 100% right." And that's definitely a shift in our thinking, not just as a product team, but as a company. Like even going back to the lightning sale, like that's, we had very grand ideas. This is a company of visionaries. And we have very big ideas about where we want things to go. I think it's very hard for us sometimes to take the first step because we're constantly looking at version 20, version 40, whatever you want to call it. Lately we've been talking about a leveling system. I won't get into that. But yeah, I mean, it's just really like, there's this really a great quote, I don't know where it comes from, but every designer has heard it, is if you release a product and you feel good about it, then you waited way too long to get it out there. Like you're supposed to be embarrassed when you put this stuff in front of people and they start using it. Like that's how ideally it goes, but it's, you know, like it can be painful. I'm working on it.
Ross Kenyon: What do you have to look forward to with the rest of the quarter?
Michael Leggett: I feel like we're absolutely, whereas we started this podcast and we started this, you go back a year and some change at like the forward contract auction, which I think is an important piece, but not the piece that we should have been working on at that time. There's no doubt in my mind that we're working on the absolutely right things right now. So I'm really excited about that. I feel like we're working a bit better together. And I'm just excited about looking forward to the fruit of that, working on the right things, working better together to scale up, you know, so I want to see more supply, I want to see more farmers, and I want to see the rate at which, you know, how many people are, OKRs or goals for this quarter are around like certain rates of enrollment, certain rates of quantification, verification, and those are pretty audacious. And so I'm excited about achieving those. And the net effect of that is a more healthy marketplace that continues to mature and grow, and then allows us to come back and add things like auctions to allow even more people to work with us and be part of this in other interesting ways, as well as like APIs or microtransactions, another really interesting slice of this whole thing. All of that works out of this thing continuing to mature and grow.
Richie Farman: We've learned a lot since last summer. And this next quarter is breaking all of that new information down, all this great signal that we've received from launching our lightning sale and going and selling our product.
Michael Leggett: Yeah. The way I like to think of that, and Richie and I have talked a lot about this kind of metaphor of how we built the engineering side of, or the product side really. We've got now a foundation and we've got up the scaffolding and now we're trying to, you know, place that are better than.
Richie Farman: Now we get to execute on all those things that we learned.
Ross Kenyon: I'm not sure what kind of person listens to an episode like this. I don't know if they're just a completist who wants to get through the entire every episode ever, or because different episode topics definitely have different.
Michael Leggett: Are you telling me we just wasted our time, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: No, I am not. What I'm saying is this episode is more highly niched than other episodes that are more for a general audience. So I imagine that there are more people listening now who may be in a relevant field to product and maybe on the job hunt. And I know, we're coming for you, job seekers.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, we're still working on fundraising and in the next coming months, hopefully that's done for the foreseeable future. We'll have enough funding to really grow the product side of the team.
Ross Kenyon: What kinds of people are you looking for, both roles and personality traits or how do they think? What kind of people would make up a future Nori product department?
Michael Leggett: Make sure that they have strong opinions and like to talk.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah.
Michael Leggett: Yeah, we don't. No. Strong opinions hold them loosely. Yeah, I think that's, I often like to say that. I think I frequently have strong opinions and I try to hold them loosely. I would say we have a culture of getting into the weeds together and really trying to let the pertinent people weigh in. We do not drive to a waterfall method. I think as far as specific skills and roles, like engineering, man, we have a designer and two engineers and then a product director, whatever, that used to be a designer. I'm not used to working at those kind of ratios. So we need more engineers. So I think some senior engineer, you know, engineering director, you know, I think those are some of the roles we'll be looking for first.
Ross Kenyon: Yes. And then we'll obviously announce this social media. If you follow us there, if you subscribe to the Nori newsletter, I'm sure it'll come up on the podcast too. So it sounds like engineering. You don't need any more designers floating around at the moment.
Michael Leggett: That will come to, like right now I think Jacob's holding down the fort pretty well. I would say, and I'm not, and we've got some design mining people. I think Richie doesn't do too, he's not too shabby. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] But yeah.
Ross Kenyon: I'm sure we'll post at various places too. There's a cool new site you may have heard about called climate.careers.
Michael Leggett: There's also jobs if you're looking right now and you're not had to wait for whatever Nori has to come.
Ross Kenyon: There's a bunch of jobs that are going up all the time over there that I keep getting their announcements and it seems like a good place to look. Yeah. Thank you for listening. Is there anything else that we should even say? Anything you're going to feel bad about not saying, everyone is happy slash silent?
Michael Leggett: I mean, thanks for the listeners here who have used our product in any capacity, supported us through purchasing tonnes or enrolling data or showing interest and spreading the kind of energy that we need to launch this thing. And our suppliers for providing us a place to build the markets and partners, Granulars and people who are involved, the buyers, the suppliers, our partners, none of this would be possible.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you, Trey.
Michael Leggett: And listeners like you.
Jacob Farny: Harbinger of the NRTs.
Michael Leggett: Harbinger of the NRTs. There's a really funny office meme that Richie made. Maybe sometime it'll end up on the website as an Easter egg.
Jacob Farny: The Super Saiyan one.
Richie Farman: Yeah, I just have awesome pictures of Trey. I'm a big Trey fan. What can I say?
Michael Leggett: We're all big Trey fans. Trey is awesome. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's one of the things that is the most joyful moments in working here is talking to pretty much anyone, especially anyone outside of this company. Not that the people inside the company are bad, but it's such a team sport. Working on climate change is going to take so many different people from so many different roles. And so it's just really exciting to get to know anybody working on a slice of this, whether it's learning about what they're doing through the podcast or otherwise, or actually getting to work with them, having their work contribute to making this happen is just really, really exciting.
Ross Kenyon: Cool, well thanks for being here, walking down the hall, putting on headphones, saying things that will be on the internet in perpetuity.
Michael Leggett: That's good. Thanks guys.
Jaycen Horton: Unless you're putting on blockchain, it'll eventually go away.
Ross Kenyon: [unclear] Wow, what a callback, okay. If you like the show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or on Stitcher. Tell your friends, tell someone who is looking to work in climate change, who works in software currently. There's actually a lot of people who are moving that direction. People want to be doing stuff that makes a difference. Send this their way. Maybe they'll start their own company. Maybe they'll come work here. Maybe they'll find something else. And thank you so much for listening.
Announcer: Thank you so much for listening. If you like the show, please rate and review it in Apple Podcasts and or Stitcher. It really helps us a lot, get this content to a wider audience. If you think what we're doing is useful, interesting, fun, hopefully all three, we'd certainly appreciate your rating and review. [Nori promotion cut from the transcript. It’s still in the audio, but it no longer applies.] And thank you so much for your support.
