The Entrepreneurs for Impact Podcast: Transcripts
#140:
Tibetan Inspiration, $72M, and Better Lithium Production — Amanda Hall, CEO of Summit Nanotech
Chris Wedding:
Welcome to the Entrepreneurs for Impact podcast. My name is Chris Wedding. As a former environmental private equity investor, four-time founder, climate tech CEO, coach, and professor, I launched this podcast to share the entrepreneurial journey, practical tips, and hard-earned wisdom from CEOs and investors tackling climate change. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. This is the number one way that listeners can learn more about the climate CEOs and investors interview. All right, let's get started.
My guest today is Amanda Hall, Founder and CEO of Summit Nanotech, which supports the electric vehicle revolution by capturing lithium ions at brine using nanotechnology. In their proprietary process, they shorten the average industry rate of lithium production from 18 months to one day. They also dramatically reduce the amount of water, pressure, heat, and chemicals needed to responsibly mine this valuable input for battery storage. To date, they've raised $7 million in grants and $65 million from investors such as Capricorn, Evok Innovations, Volta, and Grantham.
In this episode, we talked about how her training as a geophysicist in the oil and gas industry trained her for this job. Why she felt compelled to travel to Tibet, that's not a typo, and why that led her to come back, quit her job, sell her home, sell her oil and gas stocks, and rethink her contributions to the world. What the human kidney and biomimicry taught her about early designs and ambitions for Summit’s technology. Her advice on trusting her gut to make tough decisions earlier rather than later. The importance of trusting and verifying the data we all rely on to grow our companies. Why they are vertically integrating to, not just provide this technology, but also to own land and own lithium outputs.
02:48
What they look for when hiring new team members such as humility, relentlessness, and a desire to do the impossible. Her favorite quotes, book recommendations for CEOs to better manage their team's growth, and lots more. Hope you enjoy it and please give Amanda and Summit Nanotech a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks.
Amanda Hall, Founder and CEO of Summit Nanotech, welcome to the podcast.
Amanda Hall:
Thank you, Chris.
Chris Wedding:
I want to make sure listeners understand where Summit Nanotech is right this second. So, we're recording in July and earlier this year, you all raised a very healthy Series A of $50 million from, I'll say household names in Climate Tech VC, Capricorn, and Evok, and Volta, and others. And that brings you, I think, to some $72 million in addition to your 10 million bucks of grants. So, boy, things are working it seems. You're solving a problem, it appears, Amanda. Yeah?
Amanda Hall:
Apparently so, yeah. This is a big problem to solve, however. So, I still feel like there's a long way to go, but we've made amazing progress in five years.
Chris Wedding:
Right, so before pressing record, you mentioned, you were, I think you used the word lowly, humble geophysicist working in oil and gas before you suddenly had this idea, related but different. So, maybe tell us that story, how you went from that role, that job, that vision to where you are right now.
Amanda Hall:
Yeah, so being a geophysicist was actually an incredible training ground to be a CEO because I was basically given large budgets of upwards of six to $10 million and told to go find drilling locations for oil and gas wells with very little data. So, incomplete data sets, huge budgets, and go make a decision and stand by your decision from a scientific perspective.
04:58
And so, having that training for my mindset makes me a better CEO today, but what happened was that I was drilling oil wells and doing mining in Saskatchewan for about 15 years before I was on a holiday in Tibet. And had climbed a mountain and was in a monastery and saw a monk pull a cell phone out of his pocket. It kind of changed my world because I started to look at the future of energy and the lithium-ion battery with a very different lens from that day forward.
I knew that given my geophysics background, that I could make a difference in the lithium mining space using all of the knowledge and expertise I had gained over many years working as a geophysicist.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I feel like we should take this podcast in an entirely different direction because of what you just said. I was not ready for you to say holiday in Tibet. Some listeners will know that meeting some Tibetan monks 25 years ago, which is what got me started on meditation. My summer reading includes many books about lamas and monastics and so forth in Tibet. Obviously, not what it once was. Okay, we're going on a slight tangent. We're going to come back, I promise the listeners. What made you decide to go on holiday in Tibet?
Amanda Hall:
I was drilling some oil wells in Alberta, Canada and the geologist put a map on the table and said, “We're drilling into this specific basin. Here's its depth. Here's its oil in places blah, blah, blah, blah.” And then he said, “A modern-day analog to this drilling location is this plateau in Tibet.” He pulled up a picture of this Tibetan plateau and I just fell in love with that picture.
In my mind that day, I said, “I want to go there. I need to go there.” It wasn't a want; it was a need and within, I think, six months, I had booked a ticket to Tibet by myself and I had to go. I had to do it. I don't know if you've ever had those moments in your life, Chris, where it feels like it's out of your hands and it's something you cannot do and that was one of those moments.
Chris Wedding:
Now, I’m scared to ask the next question, but did visiting, whether the landscape or the people or whatnot, how did it fair with your expectations?
Amanda Hall:
It was not at all what I expected. I didn't expect to see Chinese military presence everywhere I went. I didn't expect the level of oppression and the quiet nature of Tibetans. They don't give their opinion because they're not allowed to give their opinion about the way their country is being run today. And so, it was striking for me also learning that lithium was a commodity that is produced in Tibet by force, by the Chinese. It's not something the Tibetans want, but they're being exploited in a way that just didn't seem right from a geopolitical perspective, but as a geophysicist, seeing the way lithium was extracted there, it just shook me at my core.
08:19
I felt a responsibility to change that mining narrative. That was the moment I said, “I want to create a mine of the future,” and it was a real seed for me seeing that Tibetan. Yeah, just it moved me. It moved me incredibly and to the extent that I came home, quit my job, sold my house, sold every oil and gas share I owned and started Summit Nanotech.
Chris Wedding:
That is such a great development in the story. It's almost so good it feels like you're making it up, which I know you're not, Amanda, but wow. Well, your friends really set up a great podcast today. All right. So, you come back, was not what you thought. I had a feeling it might have been that way and sold all your oil and gas stocks, sold your house. So then what?
Amanda Hall:
Well, and I'm a single mom so that was the other aspect of the decision.
Chris Wedding:
[Crosstalk – 00:09:11] of business, right?
Amanda Hall:
Yeah. It was super challenging. I studied some nanotechnology on the side. I'm a scientist through and through. I studied for 12 years physics, biology and geophysics and so I sat down with a blank piece of paper, having read every single article I could get my hands on, on nanotechnology, lithium extraction, and understanding the way that it had been extracted in the past. I started doodling the human kidney and ways that we could leverage the intelligence behind what Mother Nature has put in our bodies to transport molecules and ions and salts over barriers inside our own bodies. And so, by almost honoring that process at a nanoscale, I started drawing what we could do at an industrial scale that could emulate that, but also be extremely operationally validated in the field.
So, having had a lot of dirt on my work boots, operating in the field for quite some time, even underground mining, I know how hard it is to get equipment to work. And so, I wasn't naive enough to think that a very fragile human kidney could operate at an industrial scale, but the principles of physics surpassed scale. You can take a physics principle at the nano scale, and it works at a macro scale too. And so, I was leveraging my understanding of the human kidney to figure out a way to have low energy, low temperature, low pressure processes at an industrial scale, moving ions across barriers to isolate lithium away from impurities and in so doing improve the process of extracting lithium from brine.
11:06
Chris Wedding:
Okay, so why did a geophysicist start studying biology that is a kidney versus just the nanotech, I mean, just, just the nanotech on the side?
Amanda Hall:
Just the nanotech. I took a humanities course once and I remember the professor teaching me that nature is our best teacher for science. I studied, it's funny, well I didn't study, I read the book on fungus. You can learn so much from fungus and how it operates underground and connects to so many different things in science or in nature.
And so, I thought the best way to start as an innovator or from an invention perspective, was to start with what was proven and what was known, which is nature. And so, the human kidney seemed like the logical place to springboard from. We didn't end up doing a human kidney. Five years later, we completely changed the technology, but it was the starting point and the muse for setting our standards of performance.
Every time one of my engineers said, “What you're asking for is impossible,” I would point to the human kidney and say, “No, it's not.” So, it was a great way to level set expectations in the company too.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I can picture the faces right now of an engineer saying, “But someone else built the kidney, not a human.” I mean, kind of both anyway. All right. So, were you studying anything in the realm of biomimicry more broadly? That is kind of what we learn from nature systems, or you just arrived at what worked of the kidney as your original inspiration?
Amanda Hall:
Yeah, I just arrived at it. It’s funny, I left 12 years of higher education university and felt really dumb coming out into the real world because the application of science to the real world requires you to have a human lens and a human perspective and I didn't study that in school. I studied science and so I felt coming out of university that I had a whole other realm of study that I had to do, which was humanities. That is what took me down the pathway of the human kidney and biomimicry and nanotechnology and lithium ultimately.
13:24
Chris Wedding:
Wow. This resonates a lot. When I was undergrad, I was just pure environmental science major, biology-chem minor, because at that point 25 years ago, it wasn't common for business to be a companion, a collaborator, a force for good. Now when I talk to some of my Duke students, I was like, “Well, what's your major-minor?” at least for the undergrads. And what they tell me, it's these two very different fields, science and econ or something, well not science, but whatever, environmental science and econ for their major-minor. I think, “Amazing. That's what I should have done. You're so much smarter than I was.”
Amanda Hall:
I know. I totally agree. Yeah. The power of business and science goes beyond what you can do in any laboratory.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Okay. So, let's come back to Summit Nanotech. It's not the model of the kidney, right? You all pivoted, you learned, you pivoted.
Amanda Hall:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
What is the model? What is the business model for Summit Nanotech?
Amanda Hall:
So, the way we make money is by taking our technology and arriving at a customer's mine site, deploying the technology, integrating it into their existing process, and then collecting an operator's fee. So, it's like a tolling fee for producing lithium. But I can back up very broadly and say the way lithium is produced from a saltwater reservoir is very, very similar to the way we produce oil and gas. And so, you drill a hole in the ground, you put a submersible pump at the bottom, you pump the brine to surface, you take the brine, you run it through a separation process, and then you put everything back underground that is not useful to you as a commodity.
And so, with that in mind and having a very holistic approach to the way we would put a mine site together, we set standards for the performance of the technology that were unlike industrial standards to date for the incumbent process and unlike what our competitors were doing, which was less focused on the holistic needs of a project and more focused on the chemistry. I'm not a chemist and I thought that that would be a downfall for me, but it wasn't because it forced me to look at operations from a very different perspective.
15:38
And so, one of the very first things I said when we were developing our technology was that I wanted to minimize water use because we're in a desert and there's not a lot of water available. And in Northern Canada, where I was used to operating, the water’s frozen, so it's like, good luck getting that water out of the tundra. And so, having that perspective, knowing we couldn't use a lot of water set us apart from our competitors, because everyone else's technology was a water hog. Immediately, we had customers saying to us, “Wait, what? What is that you just said about your water use? How is it so low? And show us more.” And so, it was a real hook for them to start using our technology, even at a pilot scale because we set that standard early on and that was again, just based on my resource extraction experience.
Chris Wedding:
And so, how much lower is your water use then? I don't know, either business as usual or what maybe other funded startups are proposing?
Amanda Hall:
From business as usual, so for the incumbent evaporation pond process, we use about a third to a quarter of the water that they do and our water recovery process is really low energy because it's an electrically driven process, just like the shaming kidney. It's not a high-pressure reverse osmosis type system or a thermal process where you boil the water off. So, we don't do that. We keep it low pressure, low temperature, low greenhouse gas emissions.
The beauty of that is that, when you're trying to run a resource extraction program up in the Andes in South America, getting power to site is challenging. And so having a low energy need process is really attractive to our customers too. So, item number two was, we use less water and less energy than everybody else. And so that those are the two things that get us in the door when we're showing the technology to customers. Then like everybody else, we double yield, which is again, a huge hook from the economics perspective. We give twice as much product for every barrel of brine that we pull out of the ground.
Then another differentiator compared to our competitors is that we don't use a lot of chemicals. Again, that was by modeling the human kidney, where there's no chemistry happening across the barrier in your kidneys. It's just an electrically driven process. So, we don't need to use chemicals for our extraction process. I'm comparing us to ion exchange right now. So, with ion exchange, you need to add acid and base to get the lithium to load and unload off of the material. For our materials, we just use water and that's it. So, the lithium loads onto a sorbent just by an osmotic pressure with a high TDS brine, a high total dissolved solid brine and then to unload the lithium, we just rinse it with water and the lithium comes off. So, because we're not having to transport acid and base to site, our reagent use is lower, our energy use is lower and everything's just simpler.
18:45
Chris Wedding:
So, when you talk about lower water and lower electricity, or even no assets, no basis, certainly it's easy to understand that that is a lower cost operation.
Amanda Hall:
It is.
Chris Wedding:
But I wonder, is that the real driver, or it’s because of those things allow for a project to be permitted to begin with?
Amanda Hall:
It's all of the above. It's better OpEx, better CapEx even. We cut CapEx almost in half compared to the traditional process and then of course, community relations in terms of the Indigenous communities that are involved in permitting projects and giving permission for projects to go ahead, they look at our technology and they have. They put their eyes on it and their hands on it and they've seen it and touched it. They see a process that's just water moving through a machine and going back underground instead of adding chemicals, high pressure. Nothing's boiling, nothing's gaseous, there's no potential to explode. So, for them it's a relief to see this type of an extraction process.
So, it makes community approvals better, faster, easier. It makes governments happy because we're doing ESG check boxes and it makes the customer happy because we're logistically simpler and lower OpEx.
Chris Wedding:
I get that the kinds of climate tech VC firms that invested, they're specialists generally, they understand and they want us here. But by comparison, maybe it was five, six years ago, I was helping with the capital raise for a fund focused on lithium and cobalt supply. It was a fund, so I was approaching limited partners, pension funds of diamonds, et cetera, and many said, “Oh, well, we don't invest in mining because we have this growing sustainability focus.” Maybe he said ESG, but it was more kind of sustainability.
20:40
Obviously, I see you on the camera smiling right now for obvious reasons, but as you think beyond the sophisticated investors, private capital to grow you right now versus future, maybe it's public markets, maybe it's other kinds of generalist investors, do you ever hear pushback like, “Oh, we're focused on ESG, therefore we cannot invest in extractive industries,”? Yet, boy, oh, boy how does renewable energy or how did electric vehicles scale? Do you come across this still today or maybe do you think you will come across it as you grow, Amanda?
Amanda Hall:
No, in fact, it's the opposite. I think our investors are so sophisticated. They're physicists. They're smart and they see what the needs are of a growing EV sector. They see the needs of a lithium-ion battery, whether it's solid state or normal or regular and they know that that material has to come from somewhere.
It's funny because when we first started Summit, we were joking around as a team, “What's our hashtag going to be? Greenest lithium on the planet?” And then one of our engineers said, “How about making Tesla drivers feel less guilty?” And that's exactly what we're doing. We're sustainably supplying lithium for lithium-ion batteries so that when you drive your Tesla, it's not as impactful to the environment as one that is produced using not sustainably sourced metals and minerals. So, I think today's investors, today's impact investors know how imperative it is for us to have better control and oversight on our mining practices.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I'm going to pretend that I bought my Tesla years from now, which you used your process for the lithium. I love that. What are some of the pushbacks that you still get? Maybe pushback is the wrong phrase. What are some of the frictions whether it's on the customer side, the supply side, the scale up side, potentially? Where is it still harder than you'd like it to be?
Amanda Hall:
I would say the customer side is the hardest. Although they love what our technology does in principle, the commercial application of it still has to be proven. And so, we're moving right now from a pilot scale, which was a 40-foot sea can in the field processing a thousand liters of lithium a day. We're moving from that to designing a demonstration scale version of the technology, which is 25 meters cubed per day processing flow, but it needs to be in the thousands to be commercial.
23:16
So, we're stepping towards commercialization and we're working with the customer to design and develop what that flow sheet needs to look like, but it's hard. It's expensive. The setbacks are usually related to supply chain. Like we have to wait a year to get a PLC unit so that we can control the automations and control all of our process. So, the supply chain is challenging. The access to brine is challenging because a lot of these expansion plans that existing producers have haven't even been drilled yet. And so, we're waiting around for brine to be available so we can test the larger versions of the technology, learn from it and scale again, but we're in the valley of death. Like that's what startup life is all about.
We can only go as fast as physics will allow us to and we are capital constrained at all, like raising that 50 million on top of all the other money that we've gotten so far, it helps us to move quickly, but I'm one of those entrepreneurs that it feels like we can't move fast enough. I have a hundred employees and they're all working their asses off and it's still not fast enough. And so, finding that balance of encouraging and motivating and feeling like I'm proud of my team, but at the same time saying, “Faster, faster, we got to move,” it's just such a challenging message to get across to a team.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I think you fit right in to the startup CEO world where you’re just super impatient, because you know what you have has such potential. I mean, there's this great Japanese koan style quotes that says like, go slow to go fast, which I get there's logic. Like don't screw things up and therefore you shoot your future in the foot, but boy, anything regarding slow for an entrepreneur is just very painful.
Amanda Hall:
It is, agreed.
Chris Wedding:
So, I have a question on how you all scale going forward. I get that in the interim, you have to go from pilot demonstration and then even larger scale, you've got to have boots on the ground. You got to be the operator, but if you flash forward, four years, five years, is that still your same go-to-market or do you move to a licensed model so that more of your tech gets into the field more quickly?
Amanda Hall:
Yeah, you have to be so agile with your business model at this point that basically like, don't tell my customers this, but I’d do it for free if they'd let us onsite, we charge them. So, yeah. We started off saying, “Extraction is a service, is our business model, take it or leave it,” and now we're like, “Well, okay, maybe you can license.” Never license, because we control the construction of those units, but we're starting to say to customers, “Okay, we'll teach you how to operate it and then we'll take a maintenance fee, a licensing fee, a tolling fee of some sort, but you can operate it,” which is completely different than what I had envisioned years ago.
26:26
The other thing that's changed is that we're now buying our own land concessions in South America and preparing to run our own mines. This was by necessity because the major producers aren't moving as quickly as we'd like. And so, in order to keep up with the technology needs and the scale-up needs, we need to have our own site. So, we currently have a 25,000 square foot facility in Santiago, Chile, and we're scaling the technology there. And in the meantime, we're purchasing our own land and setting up JV partnerships with existing mine owners so that we can become the technology partner and use our technology to earn into a project. Then own that lithium so we can all take it ourselves to whoever we want to give it to.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I'm most happy and sad that you beat me to the next question, which was, have you thought about vertically integrating? If you can't move quickly enough, just go further upstream, if you will to control the land, but you're going upstream and downstream. It's both, get the land and it's only lithium to sell and monetize on the other side. Right?
Amanda Hall:
Yes. And you'll love this, Chris, like we want to be so vertically integrated that one day -- One of my advisors challenged me and said, “What's the holy grail of lithium, Amanda?” And I said, “Well, it's to not extract at all, it's to recycle.” And he said, “Well, then that's what you should be focusing on as well.” And so, we're actually developing a recycling technology at the same time that we're scaling our extraction technology, because someday we want to stop extracting and all the knowledge we gained from our extraction years in the field can be translated over into the recycling space. And so, we're setting up partnerships right now with battery companies and making sure that someday we'll be totally involved and ingrained in the recycling space as well as the extraction space.
Chris Wedding:
Well, you might already know this person, but one of the members of our climate CEO peer groups at Entrepreneurs for Impact is Megan O'Connor at Nth Cycle. You're smiling really big, which must mean, you know Megan, but anyway, great person to collaborate with perhaps on this.
28:38
Amanda Hall:
Yeah, very excited to work with these amazing women. There's also Emily O'Dean, who is doing lithium metal production. Anyway, yeah, we collaborate as much as possible. It's that philosophy of together you go further, alone you to go faster, which I can totally relate to. I'm one of those people that's like, get out of my way, I'll do it myself, but then sometimes I have to sit back and think, “Okay, if I bring in these partners and we work together, we can accomplish a lot more and move and go further.”
Chris Wedding:
Well, and from one parent to another, it's just like doing dishes at the house. I can clean the dishes much more quickly, but unless my kids learn to do dishes, we can't get as much done.
Amanda Hall:
That's right.
Chris Wedding:
You got a bunch of dry powder, you got a bunch of cash, you're growing, which I'm sure means you're hiring. What kinds of people should come knocking on you-all's door, Amanda?
Amanda Hall:
Oh, my goodness. We have about 13 criteria by which we select people and none of them are related to their education. It's about attitude. It's about decision-making capacity. The ability to self-assess and examine, not only what's possible, but what's impossible and can we go into that impossible realm, those are the type of humans that we're looking for. Ideally, they have some sort of resource extraction experience and/or some sort of technology scale up experience. But right now we've got a really solid R&D team, a solid engineering team, but we're always hiring more engineers, more operators in the field. We're building our finance team and our commercialization team, as well as our strategy team. So, it's all hands-on deck. It's every aspect of a company we're growing at. We're bursting out of all seams.
We've got two giant buildings in Calgary. One is focused on R&D. The other one's focused on manufacturing of our materials. Then I told you, we have our scale up facility down in Santiago, Chile, where we're scaling the technology. So, internationally, we are doing a lot and then we're piloting in the USA. So, there are no borders for our hiring strategy. We're hiring in South America. We're hiring in the USA. We're hiring in Canada. I haven't hired in Europe or Australia yet, but I wouldn't be opposed to that. With today's virtual reality, you can hire people from anywhere and have a good solid team.
31:11
Chris Wedding:
And the kinds of engineers, are there any types that you're after specifically?
Amanda Hall:
Mostly it was chemical or process engineers, but we just hired a mechatronics engineer and man, he's amazing. That's because automations and controls, machine learning, data, analytics and robotics are all part of our process. We've invented our own sensor. It's an inline lithium sensor that can tell you exactly in a split second what the composition of a brine is at any point in our process. And so, the application of that sensor into our flow sheet is something that we need optics engineers for. Like all engineers, we need all brains on deck, essentially.
Chris Wedding:
And those 13 attributes of the kinds of person that belongs at Summit Nanotech, is that on a website somewhere? And if not, can you maybe give me another example or two? I think it's a really fun approach to hiring.
Amanda Hall:
Yeah. A lot of it is based on our acronym, HEARTS for our values at summit. H-E-A-R-T-S, so humility, empathy, adaptability, relentlessness, transparency, and safety. Safety is not just physical safety, it's psychological safety too. Basically, we take those attributes and we pull them apart and define 13 characteristics of the kind of people we want to hire at Summit, how we will performance manage at Summit, and how we will release people if they're not measuring up at Summit.
Chris Wedding:
So good. Let's switch from the company to the person. So, Amanda, looking backwards, what advice might you give your younger self?
Amanda Hall:
Oh, boy, at my age, I'm turning 50 this year and that's a big one for me, but God, I wish I could go back to my 20-year-old self and unload all my wisdom. But if I could start the company over, I would have told myself to trust my gut a lot faster than I did in the early days. And an example of that is, well, I started the company with a co-founder and after about a year of seeing how wrong we were as partners, I finally pulled the trigger and fired him. We were 50-50 partners, so firing your co-founder when you're 50-50 partners is not an easy thing to accomplish, nor is it an easy decision because we were friends, we went to university together, but it was the right thing to do. It took me a year of gut checking to actually follow through with it.
If I could go back and trust my gut more and act on things a lot sooner, it would have saved me a lot of time and pain. So, that's one lesson I would have definitely taught myself.
34:12
Chris Wedding:
That's the proverbial kind of rip the band-aid off in a sense. Not that we need our gut to make a decision, but nonetheless, if an action is needed, do it now.
Amanda Hall:
Yes, definitely. And then the other one that really jumped out at me was just that whole notion of trust, but verify. So, you have this amazing team working for you or you've got great collaborations with customers, strategic partners, investors, whoever. And I'm naïve, so I often take what is said to me at face value and move on with my strategic decision making. But at some point, you have to stop and verify what you heard to be true. Whether it's about the technology or about geopolitical scene or what a customer actually wants or needs or is willing to do, verifying that, not just trusting the words, but verifying it is so important. Again, it's taking a moment, taking a beat to assess and then it allows you to go faster and with more certainty. So, that would be something else if I could go back and start over, I would have done better.
Chris Wedding:
I like those and interesting to note that both involve the action verb trust, trusting.
Amanda Hall:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. Tell us some habits or routines that keep you healthy, sane and focused on what is a really busy job growing a company with a hundred people and raising tens of millions of bucks and being a mother.
Amanda Hall:
I use and abuse the mountains all the time. I'm in Calgary, Alberta and the Rocky Mountains are only a 45-minute drive away. And so, that is my blood supply or my life source, our spiritual supply, I don't know what you want to call it. But if you look at our logo for Summit Nanotech, it's three mountains and I have three daughters. So, it's a little nod to my daughters, but that feeling of summiting a mountain, I do it all the time. Like almost every weekend I'm out summiting mountains and that feeling of standing at the top of a mountain, knowing how hard it was to get there, knowing how complex and how you get lost on your way up to get lost in the trees, take a wrong turn, slide down a mountain sideways, all of that effort to get to the summit, it's a feeling that I'll never stop trying to strive for.
36:38
And even like the concept of finding us a false summit where you think you're there, you climb up on top of this little ledge and then you look up and it's like, “Oh my God, there's still more.” I know that feeling all the time as an entrepreneur where it's like, “Yeah, we did it. We finally got here,” and then you look up and it's like, “Holy shit. There's still so much more to do.”
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. That’s a great analogy for sure.
Amanda Hall:
It is. Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Not that the following answer needs to be an analogy, but when you get to the top of these summits, what do you do?
Amanda Hall:
I usually turn around pretty quick and go back down because it's so freaking cold up there. Even in the middle of summer, I pack a toque and mitts when I hike because it's so cold at the top of the mountains. You get there, you look around, put your shoulders back, smile, and then you leave.
Chris Wedding:
Got it. All right. Well, I'll just say because it's so cold, that must surely be the only reason you don't sit and savor climbing a mountain, right?
Amanda Hall:
Yeah, usually, and plus if the sun's going down, you got to hustle to get back out again.
Chris Wedding:
You don’t want to get stuck in the mountain when it's dark.
Amanda Hall:
No, I've done that too many times. I've learned my lesson.
Chris Wedding:
What are some books or podcasts, tools, maybe quotes that you think listeners would like to check out?
Amanda Hall:
Oh, my goodness. I have so many. I'm such a lifelong learner and reader, but the one I'm reading right now actually is called The Trillion Dollar Coach and I absolutely loving it.
38:11
Chris Wedding:
That’s a great one.
Amanda Hall:
Yeah, like sports-related coaching advice, but applicable to running a company. You start to see patterns in all these books where it's like, wow, if all these mentors and authors are seeing similar things, then you know you're on the right path. That you can apply those lessons across the learning journey that you're on.
One of my favorite quotes is, we're always more ignorant than we are wise and that comes back to that humility part of our values here at Summit. Nobody knows everything and we know so little as humans, it's crazy and we really are on a transgenerational journey. I love your podcast title for that because for me, what we're doing at Summit is just passing a torch to the next generation to keep going. And if we can just nudge the future a little bit onto the right path, then I feel like it's a success.
We don't have to do it all, we just have to keep that torch going from one hand to the next. That notion of transgenerational problem-solving allows you to just do your best and be happy with what you've accomplished. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, I'd die a happy woman knowing that I did everything I could to push the future into the right direction, but who knows what the future holds, so I'm excited. I wish I could live forever so I could see what the future holds.
Chris Wedding:
That's beautiful. The last part, you wish you could live forever, I think for me and many listeners, this idea of lifespan is great, but health span is even better. Like, be summoning mountains until like the week before you peace out. This morning, I heard a new one called Joyspan. Like, can you be happy and content for the whole period of your life as well? So, in case listeners weren't already overwhelmed with extending healthspan and lifespan, here's a new one for you, joy. No pressure.
Amanda Hall:
That one's more in your control though, I think, because it's psychological. Joy is psychological. Health and physical wellness are not so much your choice. So, yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Especially when buses or gyms are in effect.
Amanda Hall:
Exactly.
40:30
Chris Wedding:
Well, Amanda, we'll wrap here, but is there any final call to action, cheer, guidance, wisdom, you want to pass on to listeners in the climate, entrepreneurship, and investing space?
Amanda Hall:
Yes. If I can do it, you can do it, that's one thing I'd like to say to all scientists, no matter how old they are. And then if you ever come up against that feeling of this is something I cannot do, don't ignore it. Just jump in with both feet. It's a lot like swinging on a Tarzan rope, you got to just hold on and see where you land. It takes courage, but it's worth it. It's worth the swing.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I'll be curious to hear slash wait for your announcement that you've gone from a finalist of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award to being a winner. I can certainly see why you were selected for this. I'll look for that. It's still the finalist right now. I'll look for that.
Amanda Hall:
No problem. I was going to say, do you have a crystal ball because I haven't won yet.
Chris Wedding:
For listeners who can't see, Amanda, she’s looking to her PR friends and saying, “Wait, did we already win? Or is Chris off his rocker?” I'm just projecting, Amanda. That's all, I'm projecting.
Amanda Hall:
Thank you. I like that. We like that.
Chris Wedding:
Well, listen, we are rooting for the success of Summit Nanotech. We surely need this to be at a commercial scale.
Amanda Hall:
Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Chris Wedding:
Thanks for listening and if you want more intel on climate tech, better habits, and deep work, then join the thousands of others who subscribe to our Substack newsletter at entrepreneursforimpact.com or drop me a note on LinkedIn. All right. That's all, y'all. Take care.
ABOUT OUR PODCAST
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