The Entrepreneurs for Impact Podcast: Transcripts
#117
AI-driven Discovery of New Low-Carbon Materials -- Jeff Erhardt, CEO of Mattiq
PODCAST INTRODUCTION
Chris Wedding:
My guest today is Jeff Erhardt, CEO of Mattiq. Mattiq is a materials discovery startup delivering innovative electrochemical solutions to decarbonize the fundamental building blocks that power the world. By 2024, they plan to have screened one trillion materials for deployment in real world systems, such as cleaner fuels and chemicals. In addition, Jeff is the former Executive Vice President of Intelligent Systems and Industrial AI at GE, former CEO of Wise.io, which GE acquired, former COO of Revolution Analytics and creator of two sabbaticals for himself, the last one lasting two years.
02:06
In this episode, we talked about how they are commercializing the work of a leading scientist at Northwestern University, Chad Mirkin. Their focus on minimizing and mimicking larger systems in order to speed up novel chemistry discoveries. Why culture eats strategy, and how startups need to hire fast and fire fast, contrary to the common phrase of hire slow and fire fast. What it means to include AI and machine learning in their processes beyond buzzwords, that is. Similarities between their work and genomics and synthetic biology as parallels.
Their business model of going to market with big chemical and energy partners via joint development agreements that allow for some cash up front, plus revenue or profit sharing down the road. Recommended books from his two-year sabbatical. Why you can't be a good executive unless you understand history and a whole lot more. Hope you enjoy it and please give Jeff and Mattiq a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks.
PODCAST INTERVIEW
Chris Wedding:
Jeff Erhardt, CEO of Mattiq, welcome to the podcast.
Jeff Erhardt:
Thanks, Chris. Glad to be here.
Chris Wedding:
As folks will have heard in the intro, this is not your first rodeo and in one of the most recent rodeos, the company you sold to GE gave you the space to take what was going to be a year and then a little over two as a sabbatical to look, think deeper thoughts, read a bunch, get healthier and have more clarity. With that clarity, here you are at, Mattiq, combining two of your worlds, material science and deep tech AI. Lucky man, Jeff.
Jeff Erhardt:
I am. As the joke goes, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good, but thanks for that intro. I think you said it exactly right. This is the second time I've done it. As I think many people know that I've built early-stage companies, it can take a lot out of you. I've become a big believer in really the value and the importance of when you've built something, and particularly when you've had a successful outcome, to take a step back and to reflect and to learn what it is that you're good at, what you enjoy doing, as well as what you want to do next. As you said, I was lucky to be able to do that to think about and reflect back upon my career.
04:27
Originally having been trained as a material scientist, starting my career doing semiconductor R&D and learning really those complex processes, but also the power of being able to apply data and software driven techniques to them, which was the second half of my career, building some enterprise software in deep tech companies. And so, as I took my time off, really explored, thought about what I wanted to do, what I was good at, I got lucky.
I was lucky to connect with a brilliant scientist out of Northwestern by the name of Chad Mirkin, who's founded a number of different companies and had a tremendous technology in the material science space upon which we could then do some of the things that I knew how to do, building software systems. And so, the chance to bring those two together and then apply them to one of the great challenges of our day, which is sustainability and the climate crisis that we're facing, it was really a dream come true. So, really excited to be here and excited for the journey we have ahead.
Chris Wedding:
Great. Well, first, let's continue that thread. Give us the short pitch on Mattiq.
Jeff Erhardt:
Sure. So, we're a materials discovery company that's focused on decarbonizing the fundamental building blocks of the world. And so, what does that all mean? There’s starting to become an increasing awareness that if you look at the transition to a more sustainable future that the world needs to go through, that there's key fundamental materials that are a bottleneck in many of the enabling technologies. It may be because they're scarce. They could be geographically concentrated or they could be functionally insufficient.
The problem then becomes, the status quo for identifying and developing new solutions or alternatives to those rare, scarce, functionally insufficient materials is slow, fragmented, and linear. And so, the world really needs a better way to do that and that's what we're doing. You can think about us as doing much what the genomics guys did in drug discovery a decade or two ago, which is thinking about mimicking and miniaturizing an end system. Then doing massively parallel experimentation at the nano or at the chip level to be able to explore millions of combinations of unique materials in the context of real-world systems to solve specific problems.
Those specific problems we're initially working on is around the clean production of chemicals and fuels, i.e., both decarbonizing the production of those, as well as starting to create a circular economy where we can actually convert things like biomass or waste CO2 into products of value for the world.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. We're going to put a pin in this materials discovery company using AI at a nano scale.
07:18
Jeff Erhardt:
Yep.
Chris Wedding:
Awesome. The audience's appetite has been wet. Let's go back to 30,000 feet for a second. So, here you are having done this a time or two before having this time off, I just wondered, a couple of sabbaticals you're going to think more clearly about what you should be doing. Tell us about one or two things you strongly believe in, Jeff. Those can be work related, they cannot be work related, but I think often the latter influences the former.
Jeff Erhardt:
Yeah, I think probably one of the most important ones that I'll start off with, which is what I always start off with as we're writing a white paper or a strategy document internally, I always lay out, as you said, some core beliefs and guiding principles. The first one that I always write down is that I believe that results follow people. And so, what do I mean by that?
I mean, fundamentally, that great businesses center around great people. And so, with that in mind, what it means is that my most important role is attracting excellent people, articulating a clearly aligned vision of where we need to go, i.e., setting that North Star, establishing a framework for interaction amongst this diverse group of talented people, what I refer to as creating an organizational API, and then to get out of the way.
And so fundamentally, if you can get that right, all of the other hurdles that are involved with building an early-stage business become far easier. So, if I were to distill it down into one thing that guides me, it's exactly that.
Chris Wedding:
I'm smiling because sometimes when I meet folks just in normal life, on the weekends, whatever, they're like, “Well, what do you do?” And I mention part of what I do is working with some climate CEOs in this peer group program and sometimes they say, “What do CEOs do anyway?” Because I think implicit in that is, we, the folks on the front line, we're doing the work, what is that person in the top doing? But I think it's easy to miss the magic in what you just said, finding great people often means not only you, of course, are something great and building something great, so that's the attraction part, but even as you seek out those people, boy the needle in the haystack, if you will, right?
Lots of folks to talk to find the right people and then orchestrating the measurements and this organizational API, bringing you back to that question I get in the weekends, what do CEOs do, getting out of the way, right? Once you've brought the right people on the right systems to do what they're great at, which often the CEOs are not the best at some of those things, right?
Jeff Erhardt:
Absolutely. You said it better than I can, which is, ideally, everybody below me should be better at something specific than I am. My goal is to not be the best at doing any one particular thing within the company, number one. Then number two, what you said that was so beautiful is that, when it happens, when that flywheel starts to turn of getting those people there that are self-motivated, know what to do and feed off each other, it becomes magical.
10:39
Chris Wedding:
Okay. So, let's look backwards, let's forget about my Mattiq for a second. You've done this a time or two, maybe describe a lesson or two you've learned, a pattern maybe in what you're great at. Well, one of the things I think I hear you're great at is taking ideas from very smart academics and labs and commercializing them.
Jeff Erhardt:
Yeah, I think that's right. I could say two things. So, really my expertise and people always like to ask, what are you? What are you good at? What is my fundable expertise? I'm trained as an engineer, but I call myself a recovering engineer. I'm good with customers, but I'm not a salesperson. Really, if you were to bucket me into a category, it would be a product person i.e., how do I create a bridge between great technologists, as you just said, in between the marketplace? How do we package together innovative, cutting-edge technology into something that solves a major problem for an end customer and then helps the business to be able to generate enterprise value over time?
So, that's sort of where I am and how I fit in. I think you asked the question, so what have I learned or what are some trials and tribulations that I've had over time? It's really the inverse of what we were just talking about, really the importance of people and high-talented, self-motivated, and more importantly, good people, i.e., people with good attitude and good behavior, not just good skills.
And so, when I was first doing this 15 years ago, one of my mentors told me, “Look, the mistake you're going to make because everybody makes it, is you're going to wait too long to make the hard personnel decision. There's going to be somebody that's not working out and you're going to let it fester.” And I thought, “No, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to recognize it, I’m going to be tough,” and you know what, I made that mistake.
And so, the reason for this is that it's hard and people are people, and you’re developing relationships in a small team, but as the cliche goes, culture eats strategy for lunch. The best lesson that I've had to learn and I'm still susceptible to it is that even in a situation where somebody is delivering great results, but is corrosive to the culture, those situations never end well. And so, by the time you've made the decision to do something about it, it's too late. I got that advice. I give that advice to other people, but I need to remind myself as well.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. I mean, it sounds a little bit like that maybe truism of hire slow and fire fast, which is again, easy to say and hard to do because these are people and you have relationships with them.
Jeff Erhardt:
Yeah, that's right. The one that I've heard though, the corollary to that for startups is hire fast and fire fast just because we move on startup time. So, sometimes you’ve got to take a risk and that's okay, but then take a risk with the concept that, if it's not working out, startup time is like dog years, it goes much faster.
Chris Wedding:
Oh, that's the fun one. If only I could write more quickly on this little remarkable tablet over here, which I can't. Okay. Let’s go back into the weeds. So, we're back to Mattiq.
14:06
Jeff Erhardt:
Sure.
Chris Wedding:
I think it feels somewhat obvious to listeners why you're better than competition, but I think competition is business as usual, not some other new tech. I don't know whether it's like time it takes or dollars it takes. I mean, it's certainly space, but I think more it's time and dollars. How do you compare to business as usual? Maybe you can give like a specific example of a molecule, a [crosstalk – 00:14:31] or something.
Jeff Erhardt:
Sure, we can give a couple of different things. So, let's focus on this world, which we're initially focused on, of the clean production of chemicals and fuels. What does that mean? There's a couple of different examples we can think of. One example that's getting tremendous amounts of investment broadly in the ecosystem is the production of hydrogen as a fuel, and particularly green hydrogen.
And so, the way that green hydrogen is developed is through a process called electrolysis or electrocatalysis, i.e., you're using electricity to produce this fuel from water effectively. The key material that exists in that is iridium or iridium oxide in this place is the catalyst. And so, if you look at green hydrogen production, the projections say that if the world is successful in transitioning to this clean fuel, the amount of iridium that is needed to produce all of that is something like 10X more than is what is known to exist on the planet.
But again, the problem is the alternatives or solutions, people are obviously trying to do things like reduce the amount that is used, to re-engineer the systems and potentially to do some experiments to identify alternative catalysts for the production of green hydrogen. But the problem is all of those are effectively doing experiments one at a time.
A smart person tries something, sees whether it works, moves on to the next thing. What we're able to do is we're able to look at that holistic system, i.e., as I said earlier, think about mimicking and miniaturizing that electrolysis system, shrinking it down to a nano level and now doing millions of experiments at the same time. As a result of that, we're able to radically compress, both the development cycle, as well as the results that can be achieved in this first application. Then very importantly, as we start to apply our expertise around data and AI to this, we can then apply those learnings to other fields.
For example, things like conversion of biomass into clean fuels, things like the conversion of waste CO2 into other products of value. Because while these chemical reactions are all a little bit different, there's a lot of underlying commonalities that we can study and understand. And basically, use this combination of massively parallel experimentation plus data and AI to really accelerate the implementation.
Chris Wedding:
It sounds really tantalizing. I think when you say AI, a lot of folks think, “Okay, I've heard about AI for many years. I still can't tell you what it really means aside from maybe it takes over the world.” What does AI mean in this context, either now or in the next coming years for you guys?
17:28
Jeff Erhardt:
Yeah, that's right. Well, in some senses, that's really an underhanded pitch for me to use the term machine learning rather than AI, which as the quote AI guys will tell you is a much more meaningful term about what is going on. Specifically, really what I think of machine learning as is the process of teaching computers to mimic human decision making around particular problems. And so, what does that mean in this field and how are we applying it? What does it actually do? There are really three concrete things that we can do.
First is to be able to better design experiments based on past results that are more likely to lead to good outcomes that we're seeking. That's number one. Number two is to effectively mimic the expertise or the decision-making on how to interpret very complex, large amounts of data in the way that an expert scientist would. That's the second thing. Then the third thing is really to be able to extrapolate or predict beyond that set of experiments that's being done today, say a single chemical reaction, what is a better catalyst for green hydrogen production?
Then ask the question, can I predict how a certain chemical reaction might behave that I didn't study today? I think of that as synthetic discovery or synthetic experimentation where I can apply past learnings in one field and better be able to predict what might happen in an adjacent field. So, really three things. Better experimental design, better and faster interpretation of results in a very highly dimensional complex data space. Then eventually starting to be able to predict, not just what's happening in what I explicitly studied, but what may be happening someplace else in the future.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, that's helpful. When I think about a materials discovery company, I think I know the answer to the following question, but you-all’s mimicking and miniaturizing, does it only relate to essentially inorganic or chemistry, or could it relate to biology as well? What organisms can transform this to that, et cetera?
Jeff Erhardt:
Yeah, fantastic question. So, our expertise, and thank you for asking, we are focused on inorganic materials. As I'm sure you're aware, I think you've probably interviewed some of them, over the last five to 10 years, there's been some very successful companies in that field of synthetic biology. Companies like Ginkgo, LanzaTech, et cetera, who are tackling similar things with what you said, using organisms to drive these types of reactions. So, think of us as doing a very similar process, developing platforms, solving similar problems, but with inorganic materials rather than these living organisms.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, that's probably why I thought about it is two of the members of this climate CEO peer group community, Charlie over at Checkerspot in the Bay Area, and then Moji down in Houston with Cemvita factory, both doing really cool things with biology.
Jeff Erhardt:
Yep.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, how about your business model? So, let's say you're great at discovery, how do you get paid and who pays you?
Jeff Erhardt:
So, think of us as having a business model, very similar to early-stage biotech company working with Big Pharma. Basically, we have expertise in certain things. In this discovery, in this experimentation, in certain amounts of going into the commercialization pipeline, there's complimentary companies that have different expertise, large scale manufacturing, go-to-market, et cetera.
21:11
So, the short answer is we engage in joint development with large established players within the ecosystem, solve a particular problem, and then take it to market together where we share in the success of that solution in the marketplace.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, so I'm less familiar with that world. In this joint development, this is like a JDA, right, joint development agreement?
Jeff Erhardt:
You got it.
Chris Wedding:
So basically, you all are going to get paid something to do the work, but then you're also going to get a piece of the either revenue or profit as they go to market and sell this thing?
Jeff Erhardt:
Correct.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. Are JDAs typically tied to a royalty like top line or a profit share of net profit?
Jeff Erhardt:
It can be all of the above. So, as the lawyers might tell you, you can do whatever, you can write down on paper and so all of those are good. The way I would answer your question this way is the most important thing is to align incentives. And so, in certain places, yes, it may make more sense to align with what the top line revenue is. In certain other situations it may make more sense to align with, what is the effectively profit coming out of this because some of these innovations that we're doing can drive different things. They can open up entirely new markets where one doesn't exist today. In other cases, it's actually reducing the overall bill of materials in a system, making it more profitable, even though the overall revenue may be the same. So, it's really situation dependent, but it can be either or both.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, and maybe talk to us about a stage of the company, and that can either be a capital story or it can be a customer traction story.
Jeff Erhardt:
We're an early-stage company, so the core technology of our company was developed at Northwestern over the past decade or so. They had the chance to really debug that, refine it, improve it with a number of different commercial customers, both in the military as well as some other commercial partners. Then it was spun out in, let's see, what are we now? We spun out in 2021. And so, as a commercial enterprise, the company is a little over a year and a half old.
I formally joined almost exactly one year ago to help start building out what you would think of as a true enterprise. Then we raised our first institutional round of capital over the summertime, which has certain other implications with it. How do we start to build things out? Then just over the last week or so, we had our Hello World event, i.e., announced ourselves to the world, where we said, “Hey, here's what we are, I'm helping to lead this thing, and here's the market and the problem that we're going after to solve.”
23:52
So, with all that in mind, think of us being about a year old, taking a well-proven laboratory technology, scaling it into robust manufacturing use, and then engaging with a number of early-stage partners that we can't name yet, but starting to think about the problems that I was just laying out to you. Alternative catalyst for green hydrogen production, biomass and clean fuels. Then how do we deal with this challenge of waste CO2 and converting it into products of value? So, engage with all of those and you'll see those starting to come to market and see announcements over those over the coming years.
Chris Wedding:
And so, for folks that either see the press that has come out over the last week or that hears this, what's the profile of the kind of partner, let's say JDA partner, that you want to hear from most?
Jeff Erhardt:
It’s really companies in the energy or the oil and gas or the vertically integrated chemical spaces. You could think of that as being vertically integrated chemical companies doing their own R&D. It could be those that rely on others for R&D. Could be energy companies that are going through this transition and thinking about, how do we transition off of fossil fuels and what's our new energy initiative, et cetera? So, we've got engagements and relationships with all of those categories, but think industrials, chemicals, fuels.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. What is the hardest part, either over the last year or for the next year for you guys?
Jeff Erhardt:
Sure, it's exactly what you're asking about, I used to say deep tech, now I've heard people using the words hard tech. These are hard problems and the science itself is hard, but more importantly, the industries themselves are hard because they are slow to move. They have tremendous amounts of existing invested capital. And so, this combination of really identifying, again, to use the Jeffery Moore thing of crossing the chasm, those early adopters who are forward thinking and understand the importance of taking a risk and developing for the long-term, even though it may have some timeline associated, may have some transition costs associated with it, is the most important thing where we are right now and the biggest challenge.
Because this is not like doing a pure software business where the switching costs are low and the development costs are low. This is hard science, hard problems, and a slow-moving industry. So, the challenge is, how do we line all of those things up and get people who can help us move this faster?
Chris Wedding:
Your earlier analogy to what happened in genomics, which I don't know much about, do you think that they had similar problems and what do you learn from their path and now your path?
Jeff Erhardt:
They did have similar problems. That's exactly right, which is, if you look at the success of companies, whether it's Genentech or people after that, the [inaudible – 00:26:51] of the world, the status quo wasn't working. It was slow, it was linear and efficient and it's the natural evolution of companies. Large companies have tremendous skill sets and advantages, but disrupting themselves, being nimble, being agile, taking risks on new things isn't part of their skill set.
27:11
And so, if you look back and you study those case studies and compare them, why did those companies be successful and why did they eventually get acquired by Roche, why is one accessible in the marketplace now, it's because they provided that compliment to those large companies and really started to develop an ecosystem. And a thoughtful process and platform that was willing to acknowledge the way things were done, but not be bound by it such that it could be accelerated over time. That's really what we think of as mimicking the footsteps in, which is we understand these spaces. We have deep expertise in these markets so we can understand that, but we're not bound by it.
Chris Wedding:
Have there been big successes, companies I suppose like yours in genomics that when you go talk to investors, you really yeah, look, early stage, hard, hard, hard, but by analogy, look at these three companies and look how big they've grown,”? Has that timeline already taken place to give you a thing to point to?
Jeff Erhardt:
It's starting to, yeah, and I think certainly the genomics one is a good example that is now mature, which is you look at the timeline, the investments and how those underlying investments then start to compound and have nonlinear returns over time. That's number one.
I think the second more recent one that you also hinted at was the synthetic biology companies over the last five to 10 years. What they've done, how they've started to become successful and the impact that that has had. So again, you can start to pattern match and see how these things go. So, genomics, synthetic biology, now what we're doing in this world of inorganic materials as applied to chemistry.
Chris Wedding:
Hey, it's Chris. Just a brief message from our sponsors and we'll get back to the show. Just kidding, we don't take sponsors. On the other hand, I do have the privilege of leading the only executive peer group community for growth stage, CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. With monthly group meetings, annual retreats, and one-on-one executive coaching calls, our members help each other boost revenue, impact, capital raise, clarity, confidence, work-life balance and team effectiveness. Today's 30 plus members represent over $8 billion in market cap for assets under management for climate solutions. If you're interested, go to entrepreneursforimpact.com and join the waiting list today. All right, back to the show.
Well, harkening back to my chemistry minor, I want to ask a lot more nerdy questions, but for time purposes, let's switch as we do from the company, Mattiq, to the person, Jeff Erhardt. So, what I would normally go to, my core questions around the person here I'm interviewing, given that you've been rather unique in having a couple of sabbaticals that were very intentional. I know you've written some about this for your own reflection, what are some insights or maybe what are some challenges or like how to do it thoughts come up that you'd like to share?
30:27
Jeff Erhardt:
Sure, I could do a couple of them. We could take this in many different directions. Maybe I could share some personally about my personal growth. I could share a little bit about building companies and thinking about what's worked there or not, and certainly more broadly about business and learning. So, we can take these any direction you're interested.
One might be, what is one of my core beliefs or what is something I wish I knew when I was younger, how to be more effective and businesses building careers. One thing that I spend a lot of time thinking about, learned early on, but it took me a while to truly understand, was that sometimes you can go faster by going slow. What I mean by this is, I can tell a story, which is, I started my career, I think as I mentioned earlier, I was a material scientist, I was a semiconductor guy, I was doing R&D.
My first job was being responsible for taking a new cutting-edge technology and then transferring it into manufacturing and production, simultaneously into Texas and into Japan. Those are two radically different cultures, radically different ways of doing things, radically different places. You could say which one is good or bad, that's really not the point, but they're just different.
One thing that's, well recognized, well understood is that the Japanese are well known for very meticulous upfront planning and preparation. A process that from an outsider, especially an American seems painstakingly slow. But what I learned and I saw happen over and over again, was that they often reach the finish line first. Even though they were slow out of the gate, they got to the end faster. It really taught me the power and the value of upfront preparation, setting a foundation, and then really starting to leverage that magical power of incremental and systematic improvement that compounds over time, such that you can look back. Every day you think you're making little steps, but then all of a sudden you look backwards and that change is very large.
So, that's probably the first one that I would think about is that, it's neat, it's natural for driven people, for successful people to always want to go fast, to do something, to want to do more and sooner. This ties back into the question you were asking before is, why is it sometimes valuable to take some time off to sit back and reflect? Whether it's taking the weekend off, taking six months off or taking a year off is to put some of that foundation in place to go faster in the future.
Chris Wedding:
I love that applied to a business context. You also alluded to the fact that there were some personal growth takeaways from the sabbatical. What might be good to share here about that?
Jeff Erhardt:
A couple different things. First is simply health, which is goodness. The nature of work, especially work these days, is that it's intense and that you naturally get sucked into it especially doing early-stage companies. And so, one of the very important things that I learned of it was just coming back to health, whether it's physical health, mental health. For me, for a long time, that was cycling. I love that. It's getting out into the Santa Cruz Mountains or the High Sierra, spending the entire day out riding, et cetera, has always been good. I've always enjoyed that, but it's important reflection to get back to that.
33:53
More importantly though, the one that I really picked up recently that people were recommending to me was yoga as a cross training, both physically and mentally type of capability. Again, that purpose of slowing down, reflecting, stepping back from the daily grind. And so, really the combination of those two together, not from stepping back from your career or stepping back from business, planning and thinking, but stepping back from your life and thinking about, “Okay, well, how can I put these things in place that enable so much more to happen over time?” So, that'd be the second thing that I would really talk about.
Chris Wedding:
What kind of yoga did you find that worked?
Jeff Erhardt:
I really do vinyasa, nothing too advanced, but just the chance just to step away, to really say, “Okay, don't focus on anything, but your breathing. You're here to effectively stretch and to breathe and to think about nothing else other than being in this room and on this mat.”
Chris Wedding:
Do you happen to wear any sort of Whoop or Oura or Garmin that you could see differences between your sabbatical life and your go hard, either GE or startup life?
Jeff Erhardt:
I wouldn't say I see a difference between them per se, but rather it's just helped me to put them in perspective when things are challenging, which is to really be able to step back and say, “Yeah, this is important, but maybe it's not a crisis. Maybe we can take a breath and step back and say, ‘How do we approach this problem in a different way?’”
Chris Wedding:
Your LinkedIn summary of your sabbatical, it says something else. It says, “Helping friends with projects,” or something like this.
Jeff Erhardt:
Yep.
Chris Wedding:
What's an example of ways you got to help and how did it feel? I can imagine how it felt, but what was it like just saying, “Yeah, I got time. Let me help you out,”?
Jeff Erhardt:
Well, it feels good because, again, building things is hard and I've been very lucky that as I've been deep in the weeds, building things, I've had lots of great friends that have helped me in many different ways. Whether it's helping to work, whether it's making introductions, whether it's helping with fundraising or whether it's just being there.
And so, this was really a chance to return some of those favors. What does that look like? It looked like anything from, again, helping people think about their business strategy, helping develop business plans, helping people with connections to funding sources, helping VCs that I know do diligence on different companies where I have expertise. So, all of those things together, really thinking about, and not asking for anything in particular, just saying, “I can help you with this. Would you like me to?”
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. It’s simple, but powerful. Karma, I believe is probably a real thing.
36:44
Jeff Erhardt:
That's probably a good way to say it.
Chris Wedding:
Whether it's cosmic or whether it's just we get back, we put out. You mentioned you had a chance to read a lot on your sabbatical. I'm sure that’s carried forward. What are some of the books that stood out?
Jeff Erhardt:
Boy, we could talk about this one for hours. Again, this is one of the things that I was lucky with relatively early, the first company, the first startup that I did, I worked for a pretty well-known clinical scientist, quite famous political scientist. One of the things he told me early on was he said, “You can't be a good executive if you don't understand history.” Like, okay, that's a pretty interesting statement, that's pretty powerful.
And so, whenever I talk to people or speak in companies or at universities, speaking to young or early career people, I really start to tee up the answer to your question a couple of different ways. They ask me, okay, “What should we read?” Or, “What should I be reading to do well in my career?” And I said, “Look, I like to break it down depending on where you are in your career journey.” I think about three phases.
First is, you got to be an expert in the technical aspects of your career. So, you read things that help you learn your skill set. The second is you need to understand the business context of what you're doing. So, you read business, history content, things like that and then third is you need to understand the context of the world and of society that your business is operating within. So, you think about all three of those.
Then come back and specifically, what are some of the most powerful things, the most interesting things that I've read over the last year or two that fit within different aspects of those categories? You can come up with a bunch of different ones, but first is, I went down a very deep theme of trying to understand the context of what's going on in the US today? Where are we in the context of history? Why are we struggling? Why are things going on that you read about in the news, some of the politics and stuff like that?
So, if you were to take that theme of understanding, some books that I like are the Acemoglu. Daron Acemoglu is an economist. Why Nations Fail, great book. Francis Fukuyama has a book called Origins of Political Order. David Stockman has a book called The Great Deformation. Then more recently, Ray Dalio, his recent book, Principles for a Changing World I think it's called, is really a good survey across all of those.
But the point is, those broadly form a theme about, how do nations rise and fall? What are some of the trends that exist? How do you start to put a lens upon what makes some countries successful or not? Then, how do you apply those to thinking about what's going on broadly in the world, but specifically in the US today? So, that'd be sort of one broad theme that I spend a lot of time on, I find very powerful and people ask, “Jeff, what's your theory of the world?” that would be my reading list for those.
The second one that I might say is, okay, specifically coming back to building businesses, not in the skill sets of reading a specific startup book or things like that. Those are useful, but more importantly about, what does hardship mean? What does struggle mean? Building businesses is hard and that's a struggle. And so, some that I really liked there and really enjoyed, sort of two opposite sides, although thinking about the same era, one is a book called Unbroken, which was about a runner who was shot down over the South Pacific in World War II, captured and tortured by the Japanese. Then the corollary one to that is reading Winston Churchill's history of World War II, and just the inside and the pain and the challenges of this person up against a really, what seemed at the time, insurmountable foe.
40:25
And so, starting to learn and understand what those things mean in terms of hardship, struggle and perseverance really puts a different lens and perspective on, okay, I've got a business challenge or I've got this kind of struggle today. And so, I think it's really good to remember and keep things in perspective that the things that we struggle with, building companies as you're doing, driving podcasts and writing, yeah, we may have had a bump in the road, but compared to some of those other things, it's really not that bad.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. There are problems and then there are problems, right?
Jeff Erhardt:
Exactly.
Chris Wedding:
Capital P.
Jeff Erhardt:
Exactly.
Chris Wedding:
Those are great lists, Jeff. I'm sure the list is even longer than what you shared. I appreciate that. Maybe as we get close to rounding out of here, a closing call to action, a message from who you want to hear from. I'll give you the microphone for the final word here, Jeff.
Jeff Erhardt:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, look, as I said, we're just getting started and you'll be hearing a lot more from us, but we think the world is going through this transition, but it's starting to face this increasingly small bottleneck of driving into a more sustainable future. We have a critical role to drive and we need a lot of help.
What I do believe is that, these solutions aren't going to come from one single company. And so, we really need to develop an ecosystem around us. The people that I'd love to hear from, get connected with are both on that ecosystem side, the industrial players developing the energy companies, the chemical companies, et cetera. People thinking about, how do we drive and become more sustainable in the way that we're building these products, these chemicals and fuels? And how can we work together to make that happen?
On the flip side, we're going to be ramping and scaling and hiring quite a lot ourselves. So, as we think about great chemists, great scientists, people who understand electrocatalysis systems, software engineers, material scientists who understand machine learning and AI, I'd love to hear from all those people, who wants to be a part of this journey to help partner with and solve these challenges with people in the ecosystem today.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I think it's noticeable for listeners with these final words, Jeff, I think you're leaning forward in your chair more, your voice is elevated. Anyway, passion plus the two skill sets I think you bring to Mattiq, pretty cool to see.
42:53
Jeff Erhardt:
Well, fantastic. Thank you for that.
Chris Wedding:
Well, hear, hear. We're rooting for y’all success. Looking forward to what materials you will discover that we need so badly.
Jeff Erhardt:
Absolutely. Well, thanks for the time. I really enjoyed it.
Chris Wedding:
Hear, hear.
Thanks for listening and if you want more intel on climate tech, better habits and deep work, then join the thousands of others who have subscribed to our Substack newsletter at entrepreneursforimpact.com or drop me a note on LinkedIn. All right. That's all y'all. Take care.
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