What kind of leader does my CDR company need me to be?
Advice on reinvention and commercial strategy from one of carbon removal's most successful entrepreneurs
This is episode #400 (?!?!) of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to it/watch it in its entirety right below this paragraph.
Quick Takeaways
Vaulted Deep takes contaminated organic waste—sludgy, PFAS-laden, moisture-intensive material—and permanently stores it thousands of feet underground via deep well injection, a technology commercialized over 15+ years in oil and gas waste disposal before being applied to carbon removal.
Julia Reichelstein came to carbon removal from venture capital, not from a lab. She was at Piva Capital investing in climate and deep tech, went down the carbon removal rabbit hole, and couldn’t stop.
The business model is waste management first. Vaulted gets paid to take waste that currently goes to landfills, incinerators, or land application. The carbon removal is real and durable, but the waste disposal revenue is what makes the business sustainable and scalable.
They don’t compete for clean biomass. Their feedstock is genuinely contaminated material like biosolids and PFAS-laden sludge that has no productive alternative use. This sidesteps the looming biomass competition problem entirely.
Scale is real and accelerating. Over 25,000 tons of durable carbon removal to date, on track for roughly 50,000 tons in 2026 alone. They went from two trucks a week at their Kansas site to fifty trucks a day.
The Microsoft deal is transformational. A nearly 5 million ton contract signed in 2024, extending to roughly 2040. Combined with the Frontier deal (~115,000 tons through 2028), this gives Vaulted the demand signal to build new sites. The company’s north star is a megaton by 2030.
New site development is now the main focus. Vaulted looks for co-location opportunities right at the paper mill, wastewater treatment facility, or landfill, where there’s good geology, available waste, and a local environmental problem to solve (PFAS contamination, nutrient runoff, odor, methane).
Julia’s leadership philosophy centers on a question: “What does the company need me to be?” Rather than shaping the company around her strengths, she adapts to what each stage requires. The skills for painting a vision and raising a seed round are different from the skills for scaling operations and managing a growing team.
The spinoff model is unusual and difficult. Vaulted spun out of co-founder Omar’s existing company, Advantek. The process took over a year and required convincing the parent company that spinning off would create more value than keeping the technology in-house. Julia now runs a spinoff founder support group because so few exist.
Spirituality and intuition play a real role in how Julia leads. She talks about “front of brain” (analytical, action-oriented) versus “back of brain” (connected to broader wisdom), and how her trail runs (now up to two hours) are where the best decisions come from.
What kind of leader does my CDR company need me to be?
There’s a version of the carbon removal origin story that goes like this: brilliant scientist invents novel pathway in a lab, raises money, struggles to commercialize it. Julia Reichelstein’s version goes differently. She was a venture capitalist who got so obsessed with carbon removal that she couldn’t talk about anything else at work. She met someone who had been doing large-scale carbon removal for years without anyone in the CDR world knowing about it.
The largest carbon removal project nobody had heard of
That someone was Omar Abou-Sayed, her now co-founder, who had commercialized deep well slurry injection for oil and gas waste through his company Advantek. One of their projects in Los Angeles handles 20% of the city’s biosolids every year (human waste, post-treatment), pumping it over 5,000 feet underground where it stays permanently. It was great waste management. Julia saw immediately that it was also great carbon removal.
This is the kind of insight that comes from looking through a different end of the telescope. Most CDR founders start with a technology and ask how to commercialize it. Julia started with a question about what actually makes a viable, scalable business and found a technology that fit. The venture capital training of pattern recognition around what makes companies succeed gave her a lens that most climate tech founders don’t have.
Nobody’s outbidding you for PFAS-laden sludge
What makes Vaulted’s position distinctive is the feedstock. They take genuinely contaminated waste: biosolids, PFAS-laden sludge, moisture-intensive material that can’t easily be dewatered for energy, can’t be used as fertilizer because of contamination, and currently goes to landfills, land application, or incineration. They don’t call it a byproduct or a residue. They call it waste, intentionally, because they get paid to take it just like a landfill would.
This matters for a few reasons. The biomass competition problem that looms over much of the bio-based CDR space doesn’t apply here. Nobody is likely going to outbid Vaulted for PFAS-laden sludge. The waste disposal revenue stream gives the company a real business independent of carbon credit markets. And each site solves a tangible local problem: communities dealing with odor, groundwater contamination, or the downstream effects of land-applied sewage sludge get a better option.
Two trucks a week to fifty trucks a day
The scale numbers are striking for a company that’s technically only two and a half years old (four if you count the spinoff process). Over 25,000 tons of durable carbon removal delivered, with roughly 50,000 tons projected for this year. Their Kansas site went from two trucks a week to fifty trucks a day. The Frontier contract covers about 115,000 tons through 2028. And the Microsoft deal—nearly 5 million tons extending to roughly 2040—is the kind of demand signal that lets you start planning ten new sites rather than optimizing one.
What does the company need me to be?
But what I found most interesting in this conversation wasn’t the business mechanics. It was Julia’s answer to a question about CEO survival. Most founders get replaced at some point because the skills that start a company aren’t the skills that scale it. Julia framed it differently: “What does the company need me to be?” Not how to shape the company around her strengths, but how to continuously evolve to match what the business requires at each stage. The storytelling and vision-painting of the early days gave way to operational excellence and team management, and she expects it to keep changing.
Front of brain, back of brain
She credits the people around her (board members, mentors, a coach) but also something less commonly discussed in carbon removal circles: a spiritual practice. She talks about “front of brain” and “back of brain,” where the front is the analytical, action-oriented mode that startup culture celebrates, and the back is something quieter and more connected to broader wisdom. Her trail runs keep getting longer the more complex the company gets, and she’s clear that those runs are where the best decisions come from.
This might sound like it belongs in a different conversation than one about waste injection infrastructure, but I think it’s actually deeply relevant. Vaulted is building real industrial operations with real safety implications for workers at sites, for truck drivers, for communities living near facilities. Moving fast and breaking things is not appropriate here, and Julia argues that the intentionality that comes from a more contemplative leadership style is actually a better match for infrastructure-scale carbon removal than the Silicon Valley default.
The spinoff nobody thought would work
The spinoff story is its own fascinating subplot. Vaulted spun out of Advantek, Omar’s existing company, and the process took over a year of picture-painting and analysis before getting the go-ahead. The parent company had to be convinced that creating a separate entity would generate more value than keeping the technology in-house. Lowercarbon led the seed round and helped navigate the intellectual property valuation. Julia eventually started a spinoff founder support group because she couldn’t find one, and the fact that one didn’t exist should have told her something about how rare and difficult the model is.
The range this industry needs
What stays with me from this conversation is the combination of hardcore operational ambition—a megaton by 2030, fifty trucks a day, sites co-located at paper mills and wastewater treatment facilities—with a genuine openness about the interior life of building something this consequential. Julia wonders whether a new wave of leadership is coming that leads from a different energetic place while still building big, profitable businesses. I don’t know if she’s right about that, but I’m glad someone’s trying it while simultaneously pumping sludge five thousand feet underground. That’s the kind of range this industry needs.
Transcript
Ross Kenyon: That’s me drinking water on the record.
Julia Reichelstein: Am I allowed to drink coffee on the record? Then?
Ross Kenyon: You are allowed to drink coffee on the record. Yeah. Thanks for coming on, Julia.
Julia Reichelstein: Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to chat.
Ross Kenyon: I’m too, I was happy we got a chance to hang out in Vancouver at Carbon Unbound. It was really nice to get a chance to meet in person. I always like going to those events too. So many of these people I see, it’s like the disembodied torso of everyone I know. And then I get to see the rest of everyone, which was really nice.
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah, it’s awesome and it’s fun to see what feels sometimes like an old group of friends. We were there, a lot of us were there at the beginning of an industry and it felt really magical and pretty unique in terms of this call to action of, we need carbon removal and the IPCC report came out and we need shots on goal as Frontier says. And then there was just a lot of people that heeded that call. And so now I feel like, in those early days of the market, there were not that many suppliers and you could look around the room and you’re like, I kind of have been in these trenches trying to help collectively grow this industry with these people for five plus years now and that’s pretty special. I feel like I have never been a part of an industry like that before and I feel pretty grateful to be a part of it.
Ross Kenyon: You came in through a strange way too, where you were an investor and I think you probably cycled through ideas. Engineered something that would get to the right volume and price dynamics. People don’t really do that for carbon removal. People usually start with like, I really like biochar and I live in Oregon and therefore I’m doing biochar in Oregon. Or there are scientists who came up with a novel electrochemistry pathway and then they’re going to commercialize that. And you had the benefit, I think, of that extra layer of what actually makes sense to do, that’s a viable commercial enterprise. Am I reading you correctly? Is that how you did it? This is like your mythology that I’m recounting to you.
Julia Reichelstein: I mean, to some degree, honestly, it’s giving me probably more credit than is due. I didn’t have a spreadsheet of a hundred ideas and the cost benefit analysis. But yeah, I was a venture capitalist before I started Vaulted, co-founded Vaulted. And just being a VC in general is the most magical job to be a founder, right? Like, I couldn’t imagine a better job if you want to be a founder because you’re getting this bird’s eye view of businesses in general. And I was at PVA Capital, so we invested in climate and deep tech across all industries, anything that sort of touched climate or deep tech. And so I was seeing companies grow, everything from seed to I think series C. So pretty good stage of development. But you just get to discuss businesses and what makes them successful and theories of how they’re going to win and how they’re going to attract the right capital, how they’re going to grow. HR, people, all of it together. And that was a pretty magical experience to be like, oh, I understand now some pattern recognition of how the companies paint that through line of growing up and getting to be big and successful and hopefully have a good exit.
And so I already had that in my brain after a couple of years of just being a venture investor in general. And then I got pretty lucky. I was at PVA at a time, like 2020 when carbon removal markets were really starting to take off and Stripe was putting $8 million. I remember the first $8 million purchase, I think from my now board member, Ryan Orbuch. And he was like, we’re going to put this forward and start purchasing durable carbon removal. And yeah, it was just this huge call for innovation and so I got pretty deep down that space. I kind of went down the rabbit hole and all of a sudden that was all I wanted to do at PVA was talk about carbon removal and talk to carbon removal companies.
And it was early days and I remember talking to Noya and Charm and Heirloom and just understanding all the business models. And then I got pretty clear that I wanted to kind of join them. I was like, this is such an exciting space. We need it so badly. There’s so much room here for innovation. There’s great new ideas kind of coming out every other week. And I loved being an investor, but I had always wanted to be a founder. It was deep in my heart. And so I left, and they were so supportive. They agreed to sort of support me as an entrepreneur in residence for I think almost an extra year. And so that was incredible. And it was actually someone at the fund who introduced me to my now co-founder.
And so it was this pretty serendipitous thing. We actually got introduced about something totally different. Not about carbon removal, not about the technology at all, but my co-founder Omar sort of took an invention by his father, which is slurry injection—deep well slurry injection. And he really had commercialized that in the oil and gas sector using it for oil field waste disposal. And he was sort of telling me about most of the oil field work. It wasn’t quite relevant to what I was thinking about at the time. But then he told me about this project in the city of Los Angeles that takes 20% of the city of LA’s biosolids every year. So it’s human waste, post waste water treatment facility. And he was kind of telling me about this and it was like, it’s really good for the environment. We’re taking that waste, it’s co-located, it’s right there on site. We slurify it, we put it 5,000 plus feet underground. It stays down there forever. It’s safe. It doesn’t cause earthquakes, it doesn’t leak. We’ve been doing it for 15 plus years safely. And it’s just much better for the environment, right? Anything that site doesn’t take gets trucked almost 300 miles round trip to the Central Valley where it’s kind of spread on land, not productively used because it’s human waste. So it has PFAS, has other contaminants in it. And that’s going into, obviously it’s decomposing and back into the atmosphere. So the CO2 is being rereleased, there’s methane, and then obviously anything that’s in that waste is going back out into local land, air, and water as it’s just sort of decomposing and going into groundwater.
And so there’s some climate change benefits from putting it underground, right? You’re obviously trapping that carbon really deep in the subsurface. You’re avoiding methane and then you’re also helping protect local land, air, and water because those pathogens or anything that’s in that waste is not going back out into local communities.
Anyway, he was telling me all this and he was like, yeah, it’s the first project in the world to do deep well injection of organic waste. We’re the first company to try it. Never been tried before. And I remember on that phone call, I remember being like, whoa. I thought I had talked to every two guys in a lab thinking about carbon removal, and I feel like I just met this person who was doing, to some degree, one of the largest carbon removal projects that nobody had ever heard of. And I was like, take a step back. This is waste. He was a waste management company. He’s like, yeah, we get paid to put it underground. It’s really good waste management. We’re saving disposal and processing fees and we’re helping protect local environments. And I was like a hundred percent. It’s great waste management. It is also great carbon removal because it is durable, it is measurable, it has co-benefits. It’s low cost, it’s efficient. And we know it can work and it’s safe. And I just was like, that is a great carbon removal idea. And we kind of just linked up. He came with the tech and the operating side and I came with the like, this is how you can think about carbon removal markets and the sales aspect and how you actually build both a CDR and a waste management company.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. What was the idea that preceded it? What was the top contender before you got into contaminated biomass injection? Is that even, can I say it that way? Is that allowed or am I wrong in some way?
Julia Reichelstein: I just say deep well disposal. Yeah, waste disposal.
Ross Kenyon: I think what I like about it is so many other companies that deal with biomass in the future, they may be competing for biomass that has alternative uses that are pretty fine. Maybe you’ll compete with pyrolysis for biosolids. Maybe that’s a future I would like to live in, a future where people were actually trying to bid that resource up. That might actually be a future that was net positive in some way. But you’re not going to be fighting over forest residue, sawmill stuff. That’s not going to be you. And that’s sort of a nice place to be.
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah, I totally agree and I use the word waste pretty intentionally. We really are taking real waste. And I say that like I know it’s a waste because for the most part, we get paid to take it. And we are a waste management company that does waste disposal as a service. Just like you would pay a landfill to dispose of your waste, or you would pay a waste management company to dispose of your waste.
And I like that better for a number of reasons. I like those wastes, one because they happen to go really well with the technology. A lot of the waste that we get paid for are moisture intensive, so they’re sludgy. I say the word sludge. Moisture intensive, oftentimes contaminated, pretty aggregated. And so they don’t make great energy feedstock because you’d have to dewater them. They don’t make great fertilizer because they’re oftentimes contaminated. And so right now they’re going to landfills or land application, maybe incineration.
And so I like taking those wastes because yeah, they don’t have a better use. You can get paid to take them, which is really important, I think, to build a scalable, durable, profitable company. And you’re solving a really tangible, local problem. When there is a waste management issue, you’re solving a tangible, local problem for that company that has the waste. And then also for that community that’s feeling the impacts of wherever that waste is going today. You put it in a landfill, it’s not gone, you still smell it. There’s still leachate issues. You spread it on land, you’ve still got groundwater issues. Incineration, you’ve got air quality issues.
So I really like the specificity of waste because it’s saying, yeah, that local problem, they’re paying for it. And then, yeah, it’s not, I don’t call it a byproduct. I don’t call it a residue, because we’re really focused on literally the waste piece of it. Does that make sense?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Waste as a concept here is something that’s a little bit too nebulous. I think liability biomass is maybe a better term for a lot of this, but then also all of the same stuff gets lumped into it. And also the endless taxonomical churn, it doesn’t really matter what we call these things. Half the time people think if we found the one right phrase, it’ll unlock all of the social dynamics around who has to host these projects and why. So whatever, waste, liability, whatever. Okay. I want to go back to this question though of what preceded it. Were you already in the biomass gang? Were you like, this is a category that I want to explore further? Or were you even considering direct air capture, other pathways previous to Vaulted?
Julia Reichelstein: No. I almost wish I was as methodical as maybe the question implies.
Ross Kenyon: Are you kind of gut driven? Are you pretty intuitive? Is that what it is?
Julia Reichelstein: Yes. I’m very gut driven. Yeah. I’m very gut driven and I’m very, I do this work because I am impact driven. I feel that very strongly. To me, impact is what is the good you’re creating in the world, multiplied by the scale you’re doing it at. And so while I’m very impact driven, I am very business driven at the same time, because this actually ties to your question. I spent the first part of my career in international development. I lived in Peru. I lived in Nairobi, Kenya for a bunch of years, and I was working primarily with the unbanked population, people that don’t have credit scores and don’t have access to formal financial services. And I was working with a lot of smallholder farmers in rural Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, a little bit in Somalia. And doing sort of parametric crop insurance or financial inclusion, FinTech work, which was amazing and I loved it.
But I saw kind of two things. One, I saw climate change is very real in that part of the world and it’s happening now and it’s causing a lot of distress in terms of droughts and floods and food insecurity and conflict and migration and a whole host of stuff that we know. So that really led me to want to work on climate. But then too, I saw a lot of smaller social enterprises that had great impact intentions that could never really get profitability there, and they never really scaled.
And so for me, I felt very clear, I want to build a very impactful business, but it needs to be a good business that is profitable, that can make a lot of money, that can really hit the scale that’s important for climate change and important for what I wanted to build.
So my lens was in that vein a little bit more. And actually the other idea I was working on was, I actually went back to Nairobi for a couple of months in that time and was looking at how to build some of the infrastructure layer around getting carbon projects in emerging markets better access to the VCM and to registries and doing more of the MRV quality stuff.
So it was totally different. It wasn’t going to be a project developer specifically, but I really loved—one of the things I love about carbon removal is it’s fungible in some ways. You can remove a ton in East Africa and you can remove a ton in California and the atmosphere doesn’t care where it comes from, which is an amazing potential opportunity for emerging economies. And ways to build economies in that way and have investment and job creation there. So I was really interested in that. And I was sort of looking at something there too. But then once I started really working with Omar on Vaulted and we sort of got it going a little bit more, it became clear that was the thing that I really wanted to spend my time on.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. But there wasn’t another carbon removal pathway that maybe you felt called to intuitively, but to a lesser extent. It was sort of taking a broad survey, less methodical than maybe I’m presenting it, but then once you came upon this organic slurry injection, you’re like, this is the thing I’ve been waiting for. Everything else I’ve been looking at previously was on a similar plane of curiosity, and this is the thing. Is that an appropriate characterization?
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah. I also would say I met Omar three days after leaving my job. So it was really kind of serendipitous, magical timing. And yeah, I think in my mind, you’ve got to listen to the timings of the universe. I’m pretty instinct driven in that way too, so I kind of listened to it.
Ross Kenyon: Let’s talk about that. I am also that way. I’m pretty analytical too, but I often think I make my best decisions when I’m able to access things that are less articulable, things that kind of just feel right. I try not to betray myself. There have been times in business where I’ve allowed myself to be talked out of my gut by colleagues in various ways. Those I look back on like, I really wish I had stood my ground, even though I didn’t always have the perfect convincing language to do so. And you’re nodding your head, you probably feel similarly. How do you know you’re doing that for the right reasons though? Because I can imagine someone also weaponizing this intuition and vetoing things that maybe they’re doing for the wrong reasons. How do you actually ferret out what’s happening and when is your body really smart and when is it not really that smart?
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah. Wow. I love that question. I think for me it’s a hard one to get right. And I think for me it’s how do you get enough space to really sit with it. I think as a founder, as a CEO, there’s a lot of pressure and a lot of instinct to move super quick and be super action oriented and you’re facing opportunities and threats and distractions all day, every day.
And I think for a lot of us, being in execution mode is actually more comfortable, right? We’re good at it. I love action. I love moving fast. I love being on that super quick speed. And in some ways it feels amazing and you can feel like you’re getting a lot done. I think what it can do sometimes is disconnect a little bit from the gut when you’re moving so quickly.
And so I think for me, I’ve had to learn, and it’s been a journey, like, okay, how do we move slower from a human perspective? Me, as Julia, as the CEO, how do I create enough space so I can really sit with it? And then really ask yourself those hard questions. Where is this really coming from? Is it really that good gut instinct and you want to listen to it? Or is there some ego in there? Is there some fear in there? Is there something else clogging those gears that you should maybe really look at and reflect on and say, hey, we’re going to sit with this a little bit more.
So I don’t know. I try and do that. For me, I’m a big trail runner, so I do that a lot in nature. Even as CEO, it’s been crazy the last couple of years at Vaulted. The crazier it got, the longer my runs got. I started, at first it was like half hour, then I started doing an hour. Now my runs are like two hours. People are like, how do you find the time? And I’m like, it’s the best thing I do as CEO, go on those long runs and really meditate on some stuff. And try to really keep yourself honest, like really what is happening here for me. Try and make the right decision.
Ross Kenyon: I think people would imagine that for project developers like Vaulted or some of the other very successful carbon removal project developers, the job gets easier at a certain point. You have major offtakes, you have some amount of financial security, it is presumed by outsiders. Things are probably going well enough where, I don’t know, if the teams at Frontier or Microsoft or Google have vetted you enough to link their reputation to yours, you’re probably on the right track, and therefore it’s easy. But I know enough to know, I know many of these people and it isn’t really like that. One, why do you think people do think that? And what is it really like? Why are your runs getting longer? Surely they should be getting shorter. You should just be going on a five minute, let your dog pee in the yard kind of walk at this point. Isn’t it good for you now?
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah. It’s just different. It’s just different. I don’t know if it’s easier or harder. It’s different problems and I think it takes a different skill. And I think actually that’s one of the coolest things about being a CEO and being a founder is there’s so much personal development that happens because you have to learn how to be the right CEO for that stage of business.
In the early days it was like, okay, the skill sets were storytelling and painting a picture, painting a vision that people could understand and get behind. Because all there was was a pitch deck. It was so early. And convincing people that you were going to be a good steward of their money and a good investment. Or, for us, we spun out of my co-founder’s company, so there was a lot of, how do you—that company had to decide that they wanted to bless this spinoff and that we were going to create not destroy value. And of course that took time and sort of vision painting. So there’s storytelling and then obviously early team formation. It’s a lot of doing it yourself. And there was a lot of just doing. My days were jam packed and I was moving a mile a minute and I was trying to do a lot myself and then get early people on board.
And then as the company grows, yeah, it’s much more about human development and being a good manager and figuring out how to be the right leader for the right stage of company. For your leadership team and developing that team and making sure that you’re functioning really well as a team. Good organizational health, good management systems, good boundaries, a good culture.
And then I think for us, really continuously learning. The early stages were really getting our existing sites ramped up, and I think we did a pretty good job of that. We’ve got two sites we work with. One in Hutchinson, Kansas, our Great Plains facility, and then one in Los Angeles, California, the one I mentioned before, which we work with Advantek, the company we spun out of, our partner on that one.
But both of them now are really ramping up and so there’s a lot of, okay, how do you really operationalize carbon removal? How do you get from that site in Kansas, when we started, was doing two trucks a week. We do fifty trucks a day. So how do you do that ramp up? And there’s a lot of operational nuts and bolts learning that takes a really different team than the team that’s going to take the playbook and execute over ten sites.
And so I think there’s just been different stages of the company and of the progression. But to me, one of the coolest and hardest things is, what does the company need me to be at each one of these stages and how can I figure out how to be that leader that’s effective at that stage? Because it’s night and day from two years ago, frankly, from a year ago. It’s night and day. It hasn’t stayed the same for more than a year. So I think that’s a really cool part of the job too.
Ross Kenyon: It mirrors what you said earlier about selecting Vaulted and this particular pathway where other people come in looking through the other end of the telescope and they’re like, I have this technology, how do I commercialize it? And I think a lot of people make their companies in their own image for better or for worse. And sometimes that results in CEOs that last the duration and get to—what’s the old line? You rarely get to be both rich and the king and only a few people get to be both. Zuckerberg is one of the people who gets to be both. And it’s not that common. A lot of CEOs get fired by their board much earlier because the person who found something is not the same person who’s necessarily the best at growing it. But I think a good portion of the way that one might be able to blunt that threat as the CEO is to ask a question of what does the company need me to be? Not how do I fit the company around my strengths and weaknesses so much as, okay, I’m a person who can learn and grow, how do I be the right leader in this context? And I don’t hear people ask that question that often. I think that’s a really emotionally and intellectually wise way to do things. You could have that beaten into you by experience, or how do you possibly learn such a thing?
Julia Reichelstein: I am so grateful to the people I have around me, honestly. Some of my board members, my mentors, my coach. I’m pretty spiritual, my spiritual life and that practice. I have a huge team that’s helping me figure this out. And I feel endlessly blessed to have them and have them in my ear and have them supporting and coaching. But I also think, and that’s honestly like 99% of the answer, and then I also think there’s something in there of what I actually said earlier—I think you’re right—is I do this work because I want to be in service. It’s really important for me. The reason I’m doing this is because we want to have a positive impact on the world and be in service of a planet that is habitable and safe for everyone, for generations to come.
And so the reason I did this work and started this work was to be in that service. And then I’m like, okay, the point is about the company. The point is Vaulted and Vaulted being successful because I really believe in what we’re doing is so good for the planet and so good for community health and for local environments. And so it’s like, what can I do to be in service to the company so the company can grow and be successful? And as much as I can change and try and be an effective leader, let me do that. If there’s a time where I’m not the most effective leader, no problem, Vaulted is first. That’s the very clear north star that I feel and that I actually think the team feels too. And that just keeps us focused and grounded.
Ross Kenyon: Great answer. Less common than maybe one would hope. Alright, since you dropped the hard S, I have to ask though. Spirituality—this impacts your work. You’re like a hardcore nuts and bolts, operational excellence, scaling a company. Are you even allowed to talk about spirituality? Julia, how does it impact your work at all?
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah. Am I allowed to? Yeah. It’s a huge part of who I am and I think it probably does show up in the company. It must. I think a lot of being spiritual for me is about feeling that connection to the broader world, the universe. I mean, you can take that in whatever way you want. If you want to say God, if you want to say the energy flows, if you want to say just humanity, whatever. I just feel it and I can tap into it. And I think when you feel how connected we all are, if you really see yourself of, we are really the same, we are one. And you can feel that to some degree.
Then it makes it pretty clear. It comes to the service part. Of course we want to help each other, and of course we want to contribute because it’s not me being benevolent and saying, hey, I’ll help out over here. It’s like we’re the same. It’s fulfilling in that way. And I think it’s good for our souls to be a part of contributing too. So I think it must show up really prominently in the ethos here.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I feel pretty similarly. I connect to that too. I’m smiling. I hope you don’t read that in a patronizing, mocking kind of way. I also think this is a big part of the work and people are better off when they can acknowledge it in their own way. Okay. But then I have to take it to one extra level, which is a little bit stranger. So it’s also possible this doesn’t make it into the show, but this focus on big, hard questions requiring more exercise, more being in a condition of physical extremity or exertion at the very least. Do you ever feel like some of these ideas, solutions, things come to you that don’t feel endogenous to your own brain, but maybe more like answers that come to you in a spiritual way outside of just, I’m super smart and I’m running? Does creativity find you? Do you resonate with this at all?
Julia Reichelstein: A hundred percent.
Ross Kenyon: I like that too.
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah. I kind of have this, we can figure out if we want this in the show or not, but I kind of have this front of brain—
Ross Kenyon: This is like front of house, back of house.
Julia Reichelstein: The back of house that’s connected to this broader wisdom and this broader universe. That’s where the magic comes. And so I think a lot of the time I’m like, my job is to quiet front of brain so I can hear back of brain. And that’s where the best things come from and also the things that are rooted in the right stuff. It’s not the ego and it’s not the fear and it’s not that stuff that can get cloudy. So a hundred percent.
Ross Kenyon: I’ve said this on a number of podcasts previously, but so much of my life has been about cramming more knowledge into my brain, and I think at some point in the last couple years I realized there are serious diminishing returns from that. And actually I need to be cultivating open space, intuition, wisdom, and noticing how different those two things are. And I’m working on trying to develop that because I feel like I have the raw ability to harness that. And I actually think that’s a universally, democratically accessible way of processing information. It’s not like you have to be special or touched by the divine in some way to do that, but I’m trying to create more space for creativity to find me and for the less analytical, more intuitive part of my processing to take over because some really important insights have come from that. How can I better harness that? And what advice might you have for people listening who, this might sound a little bit woo, or at least semi-woo as Emily Swaddle recently called it, but I think it’s also true woo, as she also called it. How do you actually do that and operationalize it in a way that makes actual business sense that you can say with a straight face to your very serious board of investors?
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah. How do you create it? I think that’s a muscle and a practice and a prioritization. That is, what is your spiritual practice? For me that’s, I go to church, but I also trail run, and that’s just honestly just as much a part of the religious practice as the church part. And space. And then, do you create that time? And you honor it. There’s ritual there. You have to protect it, and you have to honor it, and you have to believe in it and put some work into it. So I think all of that.
But from a business perspective, honestly, one of the things that is really important, I think, for what we do, for what Vaulted does, is remembering, a lot of waste management companies or carbon removal companies, this is real tangible infrastructure and jobs and lives and safety. It’s safety of humans at an industrial site. It is safety of truck drivers. It is safety of local environments. When you’re doing something new with where waste goes or where carbon goes. And you have to be really careful and intentional and safety oriented and thoughtful. It is not a move fast and break things industry, or it shouldn’t be. I think there is a lot of danger there. Danger not only for people in environments that we’re trying to protect—I mean, the point of what we do is to try to protect humans and environment—but also danger for the industry. If you move fast and break things and you’re a young industry, you’re not going to build the credibility and the proof point that you need to grow.
And so the intentionality, I think, that spirituality brings and that clarity, it’s a little bit slower maybe than a Silicon Valley software startup. And it’s a little bit deeper. And I think that’s a great match for what we do at Vaulted and a lot of other developers do, which is real world operations. Care for the humans that work at the company and around the company and the environments as well. So I almost feel like it flows really well. It’s almost aligned from a business perspective of what we should be doing and also where it comes from.
And I also, this is a little bit of a tangent, but I think we have an opportunity right now of just leaders, especially in America and globally, maybe leaders figuring out how to lead in a different way. I’ve seen, I think we’ve seen a style of leadership for the last 20, 30 years that has been a little bit more, I’ll call it nuts and bolts, business perspective. This is what we should do, action oriented, a little more front of brain. And I think one of the coolest things that I’m interested in right now and a part of my job and one of the most rewarding is, how could you think about being a different type of leader that leads from a different place and is still incredibly effective and still builds a great big profitable business? But come at it from a different spiritual place, different energetically, and what could that mean for the company that you’re creating and the business that you’re trying to build. And I don’t know what the answer is to that yet, but to me that’s the most exciting journey that we could be on, that I could be on in terms of my own career.
Ross Kenyon: What is it about saying something like that that puts you in a position of vulnerability that you may want to take it out of this show? Is there—I feel like what you said is totally sensible. I would want to work with someone who was tuned into this stuff and emotionally not a maniac. And I’ve worked with plenty of CEOs who are straight up maniacs and I would not take another job if I caught a whiff of that. At this point, I’m like, I don’t want to do this and I don’t think we’re going to get along if I do this. And so you telling me this makes me trust you more. I’m like, okay. Julia is someone that I would follow into this with because I know that the matters of the heart that are so important that people always neglect and say are for big, stupid softies are not appropriate for a leader. That’s like, we need someone who’s really good at making hard decisions, and that’s not someone who’s soft. I actually do not think that’s true at all. It’s a bad meme. I would like to see that meme replaced with something better than it, but you feel like even if you know it’s true, it’s hard for you to say that out loud in a business context.
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah, and I totally agree. There’s, to me, there’s nothing—maybe there’s a softness and an intentionality in part of it, but there’s not a, we’re not going to make hard decisions and we’re not going to make the tough calls or have those tough conversations.
To me, there’s how do you lead in a place where you’re just as if not more effective from a business outcomes perspective? You’re not losing. To me again, the north star is it has to be a big, impactful, profitable business to matter on an impact scale. So I’m not in conflict there. And that’s one of the things I love most about Vaulted is there is that really deep alignment. We make money when we put tons underground, which is the impact that we want to have. So it’s colinear in the TPG framework.
But I think there’s a keeping a focus on being a really effective business leader that is building a big, profitable, successful company. Could you actually do that just energetically from that different place? I have this instinct—I’m talking about instinct—I have this instinct that this is where we’re headed. My hope is that this is where we’re headed as a society. That maybe we did decades and decades of this old leadership style that caused a lot of people a lot of pain, and it was very profit over everything and it was profit maximizing. And I’m wondering if there’s a new wave of leadership coming that I would be excited to be a part of. That thinks about it differently. And that’s kind of when I think about the world in 20, 30 years, I’m like, maybe we’re headed in a really cool direction from that standpoint.
Ross Kenyon: What is happening at Vaulted now, what’s next for you all? And then we will find ourselves at the conclusion of this episode that went in a bunch of unexpected ways, I think, for both of us.
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah. Sure did. I loved it. I absolutely loved it, but it was definitely not what I thought we were going to talk about. Me neither. That’s awesome.
Okay. What is Vaulted doing now? So as I mentioned before, and as you know, Vaulted, at the core of it, we’re really a waste management company. We take organic waste that today goes to landfills, incinerators, or land application, and is really just being disposed of. And we take that and we find a better home for it. We put it really deep underground where it’s permanently stored. And that’s better for climate because we’re locking away all that carbon and it’s also healthier for local environments.
And so we’ve been doing that, as I mentioned, in both Great Plains and our Hutchinson, Kansas site, as well as with our partner Advantek in Los Angeles. So a big piece of what we’ve done in the last couple of years is really showing that we can do carbon removal at scale from those operational facilities. We’ve done over 25,000 tons of durable carbon removal to date. We’re on track to do, I hope, fingers crossed, something like 50,000 tons this year alone. I’m really here for scale. If it’s not here for scale, to me it really matters that we can show it.
Ross Kenyon: You’re big. Those are non-biochar numbers too. Those are good.
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah. And that’s also one of the great gifts of being a spinoff. We’re only four years—technically we’re only two and a half years old. I’ve been working on Vaulted for four years because the spinoff took some time, as you can imagine, to get right. But one of the magical things is that we spun off with a mature technology and these two sites that we were able to kind of press play on really quickly. So we kind of, my co-founder did 15 years of tech development so we could get to a place where we could press play and get to that scale.
So we’re really focused on just continuing to make it more and more efficient. We’re finding new ways to get more efficient, even at our current sites and ramp up trucks and figuring out how to lower emissions with every ton. So there’s more processing there in terms of efficiency at those operating sites.
And then what we did the last couple of years was really, as you know, build that carbon removal reputation and brand and had some good success in selling to some of the bigger buyers. So with Frontier, we signed with them, about 115,000 tons that takes us I think 2024 to 2028-ish. And that was sort of a really good chunk of our first deliveries out of our operating sites. We then had sort of a landmark deal with Microsoft of nearly 5 million tons, which we signed last year. That really gets us nearly to 2040.
And so that’s just this magical, revolutionary, I really believe it, contract where we can then say, okay, we know we have demand to really do this at scale. We know we have a technology that works. Let’s go build those sites. Let’s go get more sites online so we can really do this. A megaton by 2030, that’s the north star of the company.
And so most of the company is focused on new site development. Most of the company’s going and finding, okay, across the US and North America. And then the world one day. Where are those good sites? Good geology, waste, where we can actually solve that problem. Ideally there’s a local problem to be solved. Maybe there’s a PFAS issue, like forever chemicals. Maybe there’s a nutrient runoff issue. Maybe there’s an odor issue or a methane issue. Where can we go in and actually say there is a local environmental contamination issue because of waste that’s being disposed of? We can come in and be that partner that’s not only better waste management and a better disposal solution, but also we can solve that local environmental contamination issue or community health issue. So we can come in and really say, there’s a reason why we’re here. We’re not just here to fight climate change broadly. We’re here to help you not smell that on the way to work or not have PFAS in your drinking water.
And that also really helps to get the trust and the engagement with the communities. And then of course we always work under class five permits with EPA. So then of course we’re always finding, where’s there a permit? Where’s the waste and where’s the geology?
And so most of the team time now is, okay, let’s go look at those sites and work with our waste partners to go find those really good co-located sites. So we like to be right at the paper mill or right at the wastewater treatment facility or right at the landfill so we’re not trucking. And it’s the most efficient, cost-effective waste management and carbon removal that we can be.
Ross Kenyon: What’s it like having a company spin out of an existing company within carbon removal?
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah. Does—
Ross Kenyon: Does that work?
Julia Reichelstein: Yeah, it’s its own thing. It’s its own thing. I’ve actually now started a spinoff founder support group where there’s only founders that have done spinoffs.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. How many others are there even?
Julia Reichelstein: Not just in carbon removal, in general. Mostly climate tech founders, but it’s a really different, interesting journey.
So I could talk about this for a long time, but yeah, it’s pretty different. You get this amazing headstart in a lot of ways, depending on what you’re spinning off, if it’s a technology or a team or a plant or whatever it might be. And then there’s also a lot of dynamics that come with that. You’ve got a company that you spun out of that has their own perspective and thoughts and feelings and needs from all sorts of angles.
And I think you have to be really clear about why you need to spin off. What can you do as a separate organization that they couldn’t do or didn’t want to do or that you could do better at? And so you’ve got to get really clear, really early. I think it forces a lot of good intellectual rigor around what are you trying to build? Why are you trying to build it? What can you bring that other people can’t bring? What’s your theory of change? All of that was forced pretty early because I couldn’t just be like, okay, we’re going to get going and just start doing stuff. You had to do a year and a half of picture painting and analysis to get the go ahead to spin off. So it was an interesting journey.
From that perspective, I think it forced a lot of really good discussion and a lot of alignment with the existing company. And then you also have to get capital that understands that journey. And I will say Lowercarbon led our seed round and they were fantastic partners to be a part of that journey with us to help us understand, how do you value intellectual property and how do you think about the value of this intangible thing within the company and then outside of the company? And sort of be a capital partner as we unlocked that spinoff. So it’s very interesting. There’s a lot of dynamics as you can imagine, with multiple stakeholders.
But if you can get it to work, which is a big—I think one of the things I learned was I stepped back at some point. I was like, oh. You actually don’t see that many venture-backed spinoffs. And that’s for a reason. I was trying to find, I was trying to find this support group that I started eventually, and I was like, ah, it doesn’t exist. I can’t find it because there’s not that many. And that should have told me something how hard it was. But I didn’t know. So I went ahead and we figured out a way at the end and I think we’re all glad we did.
Ross Kenyon: I love doing shows on alternative means of founding, funding, and exiting, and this has not been one of them. Is there a lot of opportunity to do this spinout model, or is it just pure luck that you’re here? It sounds like it probably is closer to that than anything, but are there opportunities that if people were looking in the right places, they might be able to find deals like yours and duplicate them?
Julia Reichelstein: Maybe. I think you definitely need some luck and you need, I think at the end of the day, you need a company. If you’re spinning out of a company, you need a company that can see and appreciate the vision of what you’re trying to build and why you need to spin out.
Because the status quo is that company owns a hundred percent of the thing. And I think a natural starting place is, why wouldn’t we just do it? We could build another business arm or we could have a subsidiary. Why would I go give up a hundred percent ownership to have this be its own little organism that then I don’t fully control and I don’t own a hundred percent of? And if it is going to be this really big, magical, valuable thing, why would I take that trade off?
And so you have to find, I think, a team on that company side that understands the value you can create when you’ve spun off. And make that really clear. And frankly, a lot of leadership teams, one, they’ve got to see it, which is hard. Takes some vision and some trust. And then they really have to trust you that you’re going to be able to do it. And you’re not going to go spin it off and then fail in two years and hey, they could have kept it.
So I think there’s some trust building that’s really important in that journey.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for being on, Julia. Really appreciated having you, and thanks for letting me ask you some frankly bizarre questions. I’m glad we got to do this.
Julia Reichelstein: Thanks, Ross. I loved it. I had a great time and it was really interesting and thought provoking, so thank you for asking those questions. I don’t get asked those every day, so it’s pretty cool.