The Entrepreneurs for Impact Podcast: Transcripts
#144:
Carbon-Negative Power with Vegetarian Rocket Engines from Ex-SpaceX Engineer — Brad Hartwig, CEO of Arbor
PODCAST INTRODUCTION
Chris Wedding:
My guest, today, is Brad Hartwig, CEO and co-founder of Arbor. Arbor is a carbon removal and storage company delivering carbon-negative power that converts organic waste, that is usually true waste, as in like how you thin a forest to prevent wildfires. Anyway, turning this organic waste into clean energy and fresh water. Their CTO, Andres Garcia-Clark, and lots of other team members bring lessons learned from SpaceX and big energy giants.
Brad was also a former manufacturing engineer for Crew Dragon Engines at SpaceX. Test pilot for Kitty Hawk's 100% electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle. Chief Propulsion Engineer at the USC Rocket Propulsion Laboratory and member of the Marin County Search and Rescue. So yeah, total slacker. Doesn't care anything about giving back. Ha-ha-ha, quite the opposite.
01:32
In this episode, we talked about how his work in search and rescue showed him the devastating personal and social impacts of climate-induced natural disasters. What he means by vegetarian rocket engines. Nope, not a typo. What they did to eliminate the smokestack from their power production systems. How the earth breathes, quote unquote, each year by absorbing some 100 tons of carbon dioxide each spring and summer and biomass growth before releasing much of that back to the atmosphere in the fall and winter, I think through the decay of some biomass.
We also covered their ability to produce zero-cost, clean baseload power through monetizing other revenue streams like carbon removal credits and the 45Q tax credit in the US. Their modular design, which is meant to be quote unquote, hardware that you can hug, not that you need to or want to, but size-wise. What surfing means to him as a way to recharge as a CEO of a climate tech company, knowing whether you're climbing the right ladder and a whole lot more.
Hope you enjoy it and please give Brad and Arbor a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks.
PODCAST INTERVIEW
Chris Wedding:
Brad Hartwig, co-founder and CEO of Arbor, welcome to the podcast.
Brad Hartwig:
Thank you so much, Chris. Great to be here.
Chris Wedding:
So, as we discussed earlier, our mutual friends, Cody and Brent have told us at various times we had to connect and so finally it's happening despite me being late on a phone call talking to one of those kind fellows. Anyway, here we are and for those listening, they may not yet know about what Arbor is about, but I think they'll be intrigued to know they're listening to an, I think I'll use the word, almost astronaut who lived on a sailboat for two years. So, the super obvious route to being a climate tech CEO, right?
00:52
Brad Hartwig:
Yeah, absolutely. I think definitely not a linear path to being where I am today, but it's interesting how life works out like that. I think through the work I was doing en route to becoming an astronaut, ultimately is what pushed me in the direction of focusing on our home planet, earth. What we're seeing is actually a growing number of folks that have been very set on colonizing Mars, in many ways using the same thinking, even technology that we've developed to get off this planet to now ultimately help us save it.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, there's a group here in the Chapel Hill, Durham area called Plantd, minus the E at the end of that word, who you probably know, former SpaceX folks and a friend here, Josh, and they're crushing it using some of that engineering skill finesse from SpaceX. But in that case, I think they're using, I hope I get it right, hemp to replace wood and OSB paneling for home building.
Then I hadn't thought about it, but our oldest, our 17-year-old has forever wanted to work with anything in outer space, I think just reading tons of sci-fi and loving the sciences. But this summer, he's got an internship with a startup in the EV space. So, maybe he’ll find, either one's fine, but interest either in outer space or in fixing our home planet.
Brad Hartwig:
That is so cool. Yeah, I know Huade very well from Plantd, their co-founder and CTO. When I was at SpaceX, he was at the time working on the environmental control and life support system for the Crew Dragon spaceship and I was working on the propulsion system. And it's interesting because in a lot of ways, we're working on the same thing, which is scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere. Very different approaches, but we very much like to think of that now as Earth's life support system. So, rather than at a small spaceship level for a couple of astronauts, it's environmental control and life support for the entire planet and some eight billion occupants of spaceship Earth. It's kind of cool, same stuff, just different application.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, right on. Can you say more about your study or advancement to become an astronaut? What about that led you to realize that you wanted to focus on tackling issues right here on planet Earth?
Brad Hartwig:
Yeah. A lot of the work I started doing when I left SpaceX, I shifted more into an operations kind of a career mindset. I joined the United States Air Force, California Air National Guard, worked as a search and rescue specialist, a test pilot for a company called Kitty Hawk. Through a lot of the work I did, actually through Marin County Search and Rescue team, some of that work was in the middle of fire season. You go to counties that are in the imminent path of a wildfire and try to evacuate those folks, basically have them take those notices seriously. And on the backend, I end up going to these same communities and seeing who did not make it out. That was for me a very powerful experience to say the least, especially growing up in Northern California and having gone to these lakes and forests, backpacking, recreating, boating.
Then of course seeing just these massive landscapes decimated and looking for folks that were unable to make it out in time, definitely it affected me in a very big way where I felt like I devoted my career to getting people off this planet. This is really, by far the best planet we know of and we'll ever have and so I very much remain bullish that we should become a multi-planetary species, but Earth is just so, so special. I think we need as many bright minds working towards preserving it for our posterity, for our kids and grandkids. I think the combination of getting older and seeing some of those effects very close up was for me powerful enough to decide to bet my whole career on it.
05:50
Chris Wedding:
Well said. Yeah, it does sound quite moving where this goes from somewhat abstract or possible or about ecosystems to the people who don't make it out of these wildfires.
Brad Hartwig:
Yeah, and it's tough. I think we've seen again and again, whether it's the folks that have fewer resources, they are poor, they don't know where they would even go if they were to leave their home, elderly who can't make it out because of just the logistics of that move. And that's what we're seeing, just the effects of climate change across the planet is folks that are not able to adjust to changes in temperatures that where 110, 115-degree summer days for months, whereas previously you'd get a day or two of that and folks that don't have air condition. It’s exacerbated for folks who don't have access to some of the modern amenities, so it's especially rough in how those problems compound.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, the social equity piece of climate change, basically. This is not about just protecting panda bears, if you will. You mentioned Kitty Hawk. Was this the same company where Alex Roetter was leading the ship for a little bit?
Brad Hartwig:
Yeah, Alex was my boss, essentially when we moved. Alex has similarly gone hard into the climate space as well, so it's been cool to see.
Chris Wedding:
This is again, some sort of karmic meant to be. So, I joined Alex to co-found this carbon removal nonprofit, Terraset last year, so that's why Kitty Hawk stands out. Anyway, big ideas for sure. No surprise you guys are both trying to make vertical takeoff and landing vehicles happen.
Brad Hartwig:
Oh, my God, that is awesome. Alex actually was the one who introduced me really first to carbon removal. He put me in touch with Shashank, the CEO at Heirloom.
Chris Wedding:
Heirloom, yeah. Yes, he does.
Brad Hartwig:
That was when Kitty Hawk shut down or our program did and that opened my eyes to this world of negative emissions. And I was like, “Oh, wow. Yeah, we're going to need a lot of this.”
Chris Wedding:
For sure. Yeah. Alex is great. All right. So, what in the world is Arbor? What do you guys do? What's the big idea?
08:38
Brad Hartwig:
Our big idea is carbon-negative power and what we see as being a key addition to our toolkit for drawing down humanity's legacy carbon emissions is leveraging waste plant material, something that's now more globally called BiCRS or Biomass Carbon Removal and Storage. And what we see is, the earth actually has this breathing cycle essentially where from kind of April through October, the planet draws down a huge amount of CO2 on the order of 100 billion tons or two to three times as much as humans emit over the course of a year. But then from November through March, essentially, all that plant material dies and it decomposes and it returns that CO2 back to the atmosphere.
We look at, what is a lot of that material? It's agricultural waste, it's forestry waste, it's municipal solid waste, material that's either pile burned, it's landfilled, it's broadcast chipped. It's material that is truly, truly waste. We take that material and rather than having it be burned or landfilled or it becomes methane and it decomposes, we see there's been tremendous value in that captured carbon, that work that the plants did scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere. And so, we use that material as feedstock for, what we like to think of as like a vegetarian rocket engine. The reason we call it that is it relies on actually a lot of similar technology to what we developed at SpaceX, things like turbo machinery, in our case, supercritical turbo machinery, combustion devices, high pressure, high temperature, flows, and gases.
And so, what we're doing is we're basically feeding that waste stream into the engine and we use a process that's similar to the Raptor rocket engine. It's a full-flow staged combustion process. What we're basically doing is we're adding this waste material, we're adding oxygen and what the output is, is we react that and it's exothermic. So, we wrap it and send it through a turbine that we are developing in-house that drives a generator so we put electricity on the grid. But when you do this reaction, the only byproducts of the reaction are water and then CO2, the CO2 that the plant had scrubbed from the atmosphere.
So, you're basically converting that plant material into a form of CO2 that you can now permanently store underground or easily utilize. And thermodynamically, what we see is the most efficient way of pulling CO2 from the atmosphere because you are letting plants do the hard work of scrubbing it from the atmosphere. We let plants scrub it from the atmosphere. We release the chemical energy in the plant, but hang on to the carbon and so we think of it as energy-positive carbon removal. It's kind of two sides of the same coin, carbon-negative power or energy-positive carbon removal.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I'm vigorously taking notes here. A lot of new terms. Have you all yet trademarked this vegetarian rocket engine of yours?
Brad Hartwig:
We have not. Yeah, we need to. Yeah, definitely and we get pretty creative and have fun with the internal naming schemes as well for all of the hardware, I think something we've taken from SpaceX and elsewhere. But yeah, just I think as nerds and lovers of hardware, it's pretty exciting to build stuff that can actually do something for the world.
Chris Wedding:
And how is what you're doing different than what's done before or than what most folks are working on, Brad?
13:06
Brad Hartwig:
So, what we're doing is maybe conventionally known as BECCS, B-E-C-C-S. So as a technology, it's bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and that's been an idea that has been talked about for a couple of decades now as an option for negative emissions technologies. What we're doing is we like to think of it as like BECCS 2.0, which is the fact that BECCS 1.0 has gotten a lot of mixed reviews for a number of reasons, everything from biomass sourcing, where are you getting that material? How do you make sure that it’s truly a waste feedstock? As well as the general, CO2 is just one of the emissions from burning biomass. There's a lot of other particulates. Are you impacting local air quality by burning biomass, even if you are capturing the CO2?
What we saw is it also is just too expensive. We needed to make sure we could deploy a lot of projects and have solutions to all of the complaints people had with prior, either ideas or actual attempts at implementation. Also be able to get the costs down to something that could truly scale to planetary, climate change-relevant size in terms of deployment. So, what we've done is we've really taken a clean sheet, designed it basically from scratch with the idea of gigaton scale carbon removal. What that looks like is, we want to make the system as cheap as possible. We're developing a system that actually has zero on-site emissions. So, by taking oxygen out of the air and doing this reaction that we're developing in-house, you don't have a smokestack.
It’s kind of weird to think about, but the only emissions that come out of the engine are CO2 and water and the water leaves as a freshwater stream and CO2 is coming out in a pure enough form that it's ready for direct storage or utilization. And so, the systems are modular, we're shrinking the size of them by about 90 to 95% for the same amount of power output. So, we're doing that in a few different ways, but we like to think of it as like hardware you can hug. Stuff that we can build in a factory ourselves, things that you can now leverage state-of-the-art 3D printing. You can drastically reduce the part count and simplify the hardware. Allow us to be vertically integrated so we're not relying on lots of contractors and subcontractors.
A lot of the costs of a plant are not actually in the hardware but in the installation of that equipment at an actual project site. And so, having modules that you can deploy to a site and you have a system that's 95% prefabricated in your factory, and then you can just deploy those modules and have a system up and running in a matter of months instead of years, those are all really paradigm shifts for the bioenergy space. And so, what we see is there's an interest now in carbon removal, one that hasn't been there even five years ago. What we see is that the machine wants to look like something very different when you are taking into account that carbon has value. There are a lot of different technologies we're infusing into this machine to make it the best that it can possibly be.
We've taken a team of experts, of combustion specialists, of chemical engineers, of rocket engine propulsion, turbo machinery specialists, of waste conversion, and biomass specialists, where we've gathered them all under one roof, specifically to design a machine that can make carbon-negative power a reality.
Chris Wedding:
Can you say more about the lack of a smokestack? So, I think you make a great point around the BECCS 1.0 of, yeah, it's great to be focused on CO2, but guess what? There are other potential negative environmental outcomes. Certainly, burning biomass is known for its particulate matter at least. I mean, obviously, it's secret, but how do you all get rid of a smokestack when it's been there with business as usual to date?
Brad Hartwig:
The key innovation there, it's something that's been considered a holy grail for a long time for any carbonaceous feedstock that could have been coal or natural gas. In our case, it's for carbon-negative bioenergy, but it's oxy-combustion. And what oxy-combustion is, is rather than burning your fuel with air, when you do that, most of your exhaust is nitrogen. So, you end up still with CO2, but that's maybe on the order of 10-15% of your overall exhaust and all of that ends up going out a smokestack. Previously, there was no value in carbon and no one paid much attention to venting CO2 into the atmosphere.
What we're seeing now is of course that carbon actually in many cases has more value than the energy itself. And so, for us, what we are trying to see is, how do you reduce the energy penalty for getting to a pure stream of CO2 on the backend? So, rather than having to scrub a stream of CO2 out of a more dilute flue gas, could you do all the separation upfront, completely eliminate a smokestack and just have inherent carbon capture? And so, that's exactly what we're doing where we actually take the oxygen molecule out of the air so we don't even introduce nitrogen into the system. That is a lot more efficient to take oxygen out of the air than to take CO2 out of the air. It's several orders of magnitude higher in concentration. 20 plus percent of its atmosphere is oxygen.
20:08
So, we take oxygen out of the atmosphere, you react it with biomass, it's mostly carbon. It's over 50% carbon by mass on a bone-dry basis. The rest is mostly oxygen and hydrogen. And so, you'll have ash constituents that make up a couple of percent. It's especially dirty feedstock, maybe more. Those are the minerals in the plant, but the majority of it is really carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. When you introduce that in the absence of nitrogen to just an oxygen molecule, you can strategically basically oxidize the carbon and the hydrogen so that you're only left with CO2 and water.
For us, we slag out the ash in the biomass, so it's another unique part about our process is it operates at high temperatures. It really, really simplifies the ash management part of biomass, but you basically slag out the ash constituents, and now you are left with just the CO2 and water that goes into your turbine. That's really seen as kind of game-changing because you can just separate water from CO2 by lowering the temperature. Water returns to a liquid at room temperature, and then you just have a pure stream of CO2 and we don't want to vent that out a smokestack because that's like our goal. It’s like we just did all this work to scrub it out of the atmosphere and we want to put it somewhere where it's never going to be contributing to climate change again. And so, that's really how we're accomplishing that elimination of the smokestack. It's something that we've seen is incredibly exciting for all the air districts, the local communities, where we want to put these things. And so, that's overall, how we're eliminating a section that is synonymous with power plants in general since the dawn of energy.
22:26
Chris Wedding:
Well, I tell you, as a chemistry minor in college decades ago, that was a delightful spin we just took, and a great reminder why studying hard science can be so game-changing for these big problems we need to tackle. I mean, it's physics, but it just wasn't the way it was done to combust in a pure oxygen environment. You also alluded to a number of other challenges, the cost. You also talked about the sourcing of the biomass. Can you say a little more about where you all source the biomass now or in the future with greater scale?
Brad Hartwig:
Yeah. We have a roadmap on how we plan on utilizing different ways to feedstocks, but we are starting out in California with the primary waste feedstock being forest thinnings from wildfire mitigation activity. That material has a couple of bonus societal benefits as well as really to the forest ecosystem at large. What we're just seeing more and more is that the forests look very different today than what they did maybe a hundred years ago. A lot of that change has been the result of human interventions that were not well understood at the time. So, essentially folks, timber operators, CAL FIRE, US Forest Service, are trying to thin the forest strategically, to remove all that extra kind of fuel loading, restore the forests back to a prior condition and reduce the risk of these mega-fires.
That material is normally either pile burned or broadcast chipped. The state has a hard time actually affording to do all of the work that is needed to in order to actually reduce wildfire risk because it's not cheap to pay all those crews to go do that work. And so, that's a lot of the material that we're sourcing initially. We're working on a plant right now at the Placer County Water Agency where they treat their own watershed, the American River watershed, trying to reduce wildfire risk, protect some of their infrastructure as well as the communities and that's the feedstock for our early plants. Also looking at existing bioenergy facilities that similarly rely on that material. There's just great transparency on exactly where each truckload of material is coming from.
The logistics in California is already set up to do that, so we see it as a great way to then – The counterfactuals or what would have otherwise happened with that material is very obvious and it creates a model that we see we could replicate throughout the country and the world with a variety of feedstocks.
Chris Wedding:
Maybe talk about some of the lessons along the way, maybe just a couple of examples. I'm guessing what did not happen, Brad, is that you and your buddies decided to launch Arbor, and you figured all this out on your first try. Maybe some processes perhaps on how you iterate to get to this kind of engineering, I don't know, ingenuity.
Brad Hartwig:
Yeah. It absolutely is a process of just feeding as many people as you possibly can and actually going out into the forests and understanding those problems, working with private timber operators and presidents of the economic development division for these rural communities. Going to councils and understanding the number one concerns for these counties. What we've seen is, wildfire risk is the number one concern for a lot of counties. Placer County is considered one of the most at-risk counties in the country and we have continued to work with CAL FIRE, the US Forest Service, the Department of Conservation. We've been working to understand the pain points that they've experienced in recent years as well as where they are looking to mobilize capital, which helps us also assess what is on our roadmap and where can we plug in such that we can be part of the solution that the state's already working towards.
27:16
Yeah, it absolutely takes, a village is far too small of a term in this case to even use. It takes just a tremendous amount of, let's say, tutelage and the number of folks that have been patient enough to work with us coming from the rocket industry and even studying a bit in school energy, climate sustainability, going into the forestry space and other waste management spaces. It's definitely drinking through a fire hose and we've been met with a lot of folks that are very excited to see, just we'll see what we can do really to help out.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I think I hear getting up from behind your desk, getting out from under the safety of the expertise that you've known, getting out of the street, understanding motivations of other counterparties, stakeholders that are maybe similar or maybe different motivations, but the same outcome as Arbor. How about on the funding front? You've raised some capital, I'm sure you will be raising capital for many years as you grow, getting projects built. What do you find is working with getting investors to say, “Heck yeah, I want to support Arbor,”? And what are some challenges that still have to be overcome to get these bigger dollar amounts in the future?
Brad Hartwig:
What we see is, in my early days, I built out a number of techno-economic models to really assess the entire carbon removal landscape and it always came back to thermodynamics and economics. What is thermodynamically the most efficient way of scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere? Because energy underpins all of this. How much energy would it take to remove humanity's legacy carbon emissions and where are we going to get that energy? And the other thing is, which is closely tied to that is economics. How do you get the price, the dollar amount for removing a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere as low as possible?
What we see is, if the global GDP is roughly a hundred trillion dollars, how much will humanity pay for removing all of our carbon from the atmosphere? The lower you can get that number, if you can get it to say 1%, it's a small tax on the planet to remove humanity's legacy carbon emissions, that's something that we see as the world being able to digest and tolerate. But that puts you in the range of $50 to $100 dollars per ton of CO2 and that's really been the North Star of a lot of pretty much the carbon removal industry as a whole is engineered carbon removal in the range of 50 to 100 bucks a ton.
We would like to get as close as possible to the price of nature-based solutions with the MRV and durability of an engineered solution, so kind of a hybrid between nature and engineering. That's really what we're doing is we're proposing an opportunity to get the dollars per ton for carbon removal just far lower than what we're seeing others can. And in part, that's because we are leveraging nature to do the hard work of scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere, but we're also creating power. That's a co-product that you can sell to offset the carbon removal, or you could do it vice versa, where you're using the revenue from carbon removal to offset the price of electricity. What we're really excited about is the opportunity to offer carbon-negative power at a price of electricity or a levelized cost of electricity of $0, what is essentially you could have free carbon-negative power.
31:23
You are selling carbon removal into the carbon markets. Our technology because we are converting the carbon and biomass into supercritical CO2, it's a form of CO2 that can directly be stored underground, we can claim 45Q tax credits for deep geologic storage. When you add those pieces to it, when you monetize the carbon, you can now have carbon-negative power be essentially free. What's also exciting, as an energy technology, it meets a lot of the requirements that one would look for in an ideal energy source. What we see as a 90% or a higher capacity factor, that it can just be on like you would see with a fossil fuel, a natural gas power plant.
Whereas a fossil plant would use either coal or natural gas, we like to think of that as like ancient sunlight. It was at one-point organic matter. We're using basically modern sunlight, so we're taking biomass, we run it through a process to create a material that's essentially is energetically and volumetrically dense as coal, but it's like modern sunlight. And so, we can now have that material stored onsite or offsite, but you have a system that can provide 24/7 baseload renewable power. That's actually carbon-negative and at a price point that no one else can hit because we're monetizing the carbon. And so, that's just a pretty unique offering that we're not seeing anyone else doing and we're doing that with a team that is uniquely qualified to provide that solution. It's a very, very difficult engineering problem in terms of the skill sets that you need to have. It's super critical turbomachinery. There are very few people on the planet that have ever worked on that kind of hardware. It's oxy-combustion devices. Again, it's inside of a rocket engine, it's common, but in the power generation world, it's not.
Even within a rocket company, there are very few people that truly do the combustion physics inside of an engine that really knows how to model those combustion kinetics. It’s easy to burn something, but to burn it with a 99.9% efficiency so that you're truly converting all of that biomass into just CO2 and water, you don't want these trace species in there, that is very difficult. And so, that's really the path where we see ourselves pretty uniquely positioned to bring this solution to the world and that's our pitch as well to the investment community.
I think as far as challenges go, these are projects of infrastructure scale and that means it requires a lot of capital. And so, we are always looking for ways to demonstrate core aspects of our technology and commercial viability as capital efficiently as possible, on as few venture dollars as possible. But at the end of the day, as soon as you start making metal, things get expensive fairly quickly, and as soon as you try to convert that metal now into an actual commercially operating project, it gets even more expensive. What we see is the potential payoff is so big. We are looking at what we see as the next trillion-dollar industry is carbon removal, carbon management, and it's going to take trillions of dollars of investments. We're basically trying to replicate the oil and gas industry at that scale and we need to do it in order of magnitude faster.
We need in a couple of decades to scale up the carbon removal and management ecosystem to what oil and gas has had hundreds of years to do and we have to do it under a much stricter environmental kind of lens. We have obviously social equity, environmental equity concerns for project development are front and center for us. We want to make sure we're not compromising communities that we're deploying into. We don't want to save the planet, but have destroyed our local environments and communities in order to do that.
36:25
So, building stuff is hard and building stuff is expensive and it's always trying to find the right investors that understand that and understand that things take longer. It's not like software where you can iterate very quickly and kind of in a sense for free or just paying engineering heads. It's patient capital folks that are really excited to be a part of the mission and be a part of it for a long time and understand the risks of technology development. There's just not as many investors that can do all of that. It's a different type of investor that is able to diligence a company like that and a different type of investor that is once having processed that is excited to sign on board.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. I mean, you have and will have venture capital investors taking tech risks and then you'll have almost bridge-like investors with the first-of-a-kind finance, and then at some point you'll move to more pure infrastructure project investors. Those three are very different types of investors for sure. So, in summary, you’ve got three ways you could make money. Sell the carbon credit removals, the 45Q tax credit in the US, or the power, electricity and in some ways you can titrate or tweak those to get to whatever project returns you're after. I mean, you don't so much tweak the tax credit, I suppose, but carbon removal prices vary in opaque and so forth, power price. I mean, look, could be amazing to let the first two revenue streams make the power free, but nice to have three options in how you make money versus just one, right?
Brad Hartwig:
Yeah, absolutely. We look at project finance and other ways of funding the vision, it's definitely having cash flows that banks understand and having more pieces of paper that have what really folks are looking for long-term, off-take agreements. Power, it's much more conventional for a power purchase agreement to have 10 or 15-year off-take agreements. Carbon removal, it's not there yet. We're seeing a couple of years off-take like five years at the long end, but basically that industry, we're still shaping as a cohort of companies trying to do this. So, it definitely helps having more diverse cash flows while the carbon removal industry continues to mature.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. I mean, whether it's through our work at Terraset or the work with the companies in our climate CEO peer groups, the carbon removal market, carbon capture market, the price of carbon, it's just also nascent. The idea of a 20-year contract is just mind-blowing. All right, let's switch topics, Brad. I know you're turning into a pumpkin and need to get back on to other things here in a bit. Let's turn from the company Arbor to Brad. So, obviously, we are all human beings listening to the pod here. Tell us one or two things that you strongly believe in and these can be outside of business, they can be part of your business values, either one, just a couple of examples. What makes you slash Arbor tick from a beliefs point of view?
Brad Hartwig:
What continues to be the case for me as I see what keeps me going is having a really strong base, which for me I think of as physically from a friendship or a partner or family perspective, from an intellectual curiosity perspective, from values or spirituality or whatever you have. But I think it's very easy as a founder to become almost monomaniacal where you are very much leaning into this one thing at the detriment of everything else. I just continue to find that everything from having a diverse set of interests in other aspects of life and continuing to spend time with friends and family who in a big way really we're doing this for.
41:37
We've all had employers that we have things that we'd like to take with us, things that we thought were good. A very strong work ethic, ways of pushing against convention, moving fast and there are also aspects of employers we've had that we don't want to bring with us, certain aspects of the toxic work culture. Certainly, something I'm always working on is trying to figure out what that right balance is and it's not always a constant. Sometimes I have more time for hobbies like surfing than others. Sometimes you really do have to put your head down and get to the next milestone, but this is going to be a Herculean effort and it's going to take a long time to do. We really want to, not just save the world, but have a world that's worth saving on the other end of that. That we really see as having a certain level of kindness and love and humility and friends and family and nature, these other aspects of life that we see as making it so worthwhile, trying to make that always front and center to what we do here and me personally, of course.
Chris Wedding:
I think it's well said. You mentioned surfing and balance and this weekend, I listened to a classic in our space, let's say, which I think it's Let My People Go Surfing, the CEO of Patagonia. What a beginning and crazy that I think in his term, he's become this reluctant businessman, this dirtbag turned businessman. But anyway, that's a great book around mission and balance for sure.
On the balance piece, I recall, I think it was last year or sometime, I had Brad Feld on the podcast, and I was talking about what he looks for when he invests through all these companies. I think I might have misused the phrase passion or something or commitment and he clarified, “No, it's obsession,” and he's right. But it's tricky to be so obsessed that you can go through walls because that's what this journey is all about, and yet have the balance to realize, “Oh, yeah, I'm not just a founder, CEO, I'm a husband or a wife or a father, or son,” et cetera. That blends into the next question here. What other advice perhaps might you give to a younger Brad Hartwig, either on the path of working for someone else or starting your own thing?
Brad Hartwig:
A key aspect of what I've found through being an entrepreneur is how much I'm just constantly learning from other people and telling my younger self to find mentors early and often and just remaining teachable. Always remaining open to the lessons learned from others. You can't necessarily take everyone's piece of advice. You always have to view it through your own lens and you'll get contradicting pieces of advice from different people or even from the same person on different days. So, you of course always have to apply your own filter to it, but having folks that have trodden the path ahead of you and done a lot of the things that you're looking to do. I just continue to find that people are very -- If you humbly approach someone and say, “Hey, I don't know how to do this thing and it seems like you've been actually very successful in this line of work. What worked for you? Can you help me understand how to jump into entrepreneurship? Man, how to have a good work-life balance or surround yourself with a supportive community of other founders?”
46:08
There are so many pieces to building a company, to leading a team, to building a team, to developing a technology, to keeping spirits high when things aren't going well. Some of that you definitely learn the hard way, but it sure is nice when you can learn from the mistakes of others and have more people in your court cheering you on. So, I think just continuing to surround yourself with good people. I definitely agree there's a certain obsession that comes from -- It's probably a quality of most entrepreneurs or founders to begin with, and then running a company just makes that more so the case. But making sure you're not alienating people in your life that are your strong support network. And so, building that early, maintaining it, and just constantly being a student is, I'd say just a lot of big lessons to pass along to my former self.
Chris Wedding:
There's a saying, “It's great to learn from our failures. It's even better to learn from others’ failures,” right?
Brad Hartwig:
Yes.
Chris Wedding:
Cheaper, faster, quicker, et cetera.
Brad Hartwig:
Definitely.
Chris Wedding:
Tell us some habits or routines that keep you healthy, sane, and focused beyond the relationships piece, which you mentioned earlier, which is certainly important.
Brad Hartwig:
Certainly, two big ones for me are exercise and nature. For me, I definitely get a little bit of both of those at the same time surfing, so that for me has been a big one. I think something about being in the water and in the ocean. I live in Manhattan Beach in Southern California and so there's dolphins and seabirds and it's just a very, for me, meaningful experience where I feel a bit more connected to the world. I'm engaged in of course an activity. I've just always loved surfing and it's just such an interesting kind of unique experience to be working with nature and in partnership and all. When you're surfing a wave and you get directly matched up with the speed of the wave and you line up with the crest. I don't know, for me, it's very special, both from an almost spiritual sense, but also of course, getting the heart rate up and waking up by being in the water.
I definitely try and get out in the water as much as possible. If not that, then even just lap swimming or going on runs. I'd say those are absolutely key aspects for me keeping, not only my body and physical shape up, but really keeping my mental shape and keeping things in perspective. Then of course, for me, a lot of times it's, whenever I can do that with friends, it's even better. It’s definitely easy to want to shut the world outside of your company off so you can turn down all of the noise, but making sure for me that I continue to keep my friends in my life.
Sometimes I can only do it on weekends, but it's just making sure that maintains or stays a priority in my life, that helps me continuously get a fresh set of perspective so I can come back to work. Really, it's just keeping the main thing, the main thing. Really having the clarity. It's easy to just keep working harder and spinning your wheels, but being able to take a break from that, focus on social or exercise and come back allows you to really cut through the noise a bit and put your energy where it's going to matter most.
Chris Wedding:
I like that. I also like that you're stacking three benefits into one in terms of, surfing, you get exercise, you get connection with nature, and if you're surfing with your buddies, you get the social aspect as well. All three of those things are hard to do, even individually with busy schedules and even better to stack them to make sure they all fit. Well, let's wrap with a final question here, Brad. Tell us maybe one or two books, business or even better yet, non-business, that you think listeners may benefit from.
Brad Hartwig:
It's interesting. One that I try to listen to every year or two, it's called Endurance. It's a book about Ernest Shackleton and his failed Antarctic expedition. That one's really an incredible story of, well, endurance, and perseverance as far as a leader goes. They didn't make it to the South Pole, but just the ability for them to overcome adversity and maintain high spirits, keep morale up and all make it out alive, to me it’s just incredible. And of course, just a story of adventure as well.
Yeah, rather I'd say cliched, but I do think as far as a business and personal leadership book goes, I continue to really enjoy The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People as a book that truly gets to, the way I see it, the root of it all, which is really getting in touch with your values, what really matters most to you and making sure that you basically have an accurate map of your life such that your daily habits are in line with those deepest-rooted values.
52:57
A key aspect that I love about that book is there's this notion that comes up of, you might be climbing a ladder and you think it's a ladder to success, but is that ladder even leaning against the right wall? Have you really vetted that that's the wall that the ladder should be leaning against so that when you start climbing and when you do make it to the top, that it was the right climb? That's a really important part of leadership in general is, not making progress for the sake of progress, but really making sure you're cutting through the right jungle or wandering the right desert. There's going to be a lot of wandering, there's going to be a lot of figuring things out, but I think your job as a leader is to ensure that everyone, their efforts are going toward the right end. Again, I think it's a really great book for helping you keep your priorities straight, and to live an effective life and one that's worth living.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I think listeners see a clear explorer theme here, Brad, whether it's SpaceX, or let's be an astronaut or surfing or find the South Pole, et cetera. Obviously, lots of references to what a startup is as well. Hey, man, thanks for coming on. We're all rooting for the success of Arbor. No pressure, but you got to succeed, Brad.
Brad Hartwig:
Yeah, must go faster is our internal – We go like a dinosaur chasing us and yeah, it's not going to get any better without us working every day to make it so.
Chris Wedding:
All right, man. Hear, hear. Talk soon.
Brad Hartwig:
Thanks so much, Chris.
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