The Entrepreneurs for Impact Podcast: Transcripts
$54M+ and a $100/Ton Target for Carbon Mineralization – Shashank Samala, CEO of Heirloom
PODCAST INTRODUCTION
Chris Wedding:
My guest today is Shashank Samala, the CEO of Heirloom. Heirloom is a VC backed startup with over $54 million in funding for carbon mineralization with a goal of removing 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2035, and achieving this at a cost of $50 a ton. Just the kind of goals that we need.
02:12
In this episode, we talked about lots of things, including carbon offsets versus carbon removal. Combining nature plus engineering for quicker, low-cost direct air capture. How to use the 45Q federal tax credit to finance carbon removal projects. The evolving capital stack for carbon mineralization project finance. How key customers like Microsoft are helping them bring their technology to market. Their company culture of persistent optimism and radical honesty. Who they want to hire for high impact jobs right now at Heirloom and lots more. Hope you enjoy and please give Shashank and Heirloom a shout-out on LinkedIn or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks.
PODCAST INTERVIEW
Chris Wedding:
Shashank Samala, CEO of Heirloom, welcome to the podcast.
Shashank Samala:
Thanks so much, Chris, for having me.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I was clarifying before pressing record what exactly is you-all's name, so maybe folks have heard Heirloom Carbon or the word technology somewhere, but now we're just Heirloom.
Shashank Samala:
We're just Heirloom today.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, that's right. Maybe let's start there. What's the origin of the name, Heirloom, Shashank?
Shashank Samala:
Great question. This is a backstory and I don’t know how many people know it, we used to be called EquiOps, it's your short name for equal opportunities. I can talk about exactly how I came up with that, but at some point, some investor told me that that doesn't really have a ring to it. So, we went back to the drawing board and we had something like a hundred names on the board and Heirloom, as soon as it came up, we were pretty excited by it.
Heirloom as a word means protecting something and passing down for future generations and here we thought it was the planet, it was the nature and all the diverse species that we live around. So, we wanted Heirloom to signify our planet. Also, because we're a direct air capture company, it has heir in it and Heirloom, there is a ring to it now.
04:27
Chris Wedding:
Nice. It's a great name. Well, why don't you give us the elevator pitch for Heirloom?
Shashank Samala:
Sure. So, Heirloom is building a direct air capture technology to permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere, with the goal of having a real path towards removing a billion tons of CO2 by 2035. That's really the mission of the company, to really accelerate our society to a carbon negative society.
So, this specific technology rapidly accelerates the natural ability of minerals to absorb CO2. Compared to some other processes, we have focused on enhancing ability of natural minerals to absorb CO2 from the air from what would otherwise take years down to days. We are about 60 folks based in San Francisco.
Chris Wedding:
So, geology-based versus say nature-based, is that fair?
Shashank Samala:
Yeah, there is a good combination of nature and engineering in this. We are trying to find the best properties that nature gives us and we think that lies in geology. Specifically, the field is called carbon mineralization, which is, there are a bunch of rocks out there, specifically carbonates that have already pulled trillions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere over geological timeframes.
You're talking limestone or magnesium carbonate. Just like trees, they have pulled carbon out from the atmosphere to help maintain the carbon balance. The problem is that they're very slow at it. So, what we do is figure out how we can make that go much, much faster on a human timescale so we can actually fight climate change within a reasonable period of time.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, and this approach has gotten a lot of smart investors excited about this possibility. Can you tell us about maybe what makes them interested in what you're doing? How you're funding the growth of this cutting-edge approach to lower cost and carbon sequestration?
Shashank Samala:
Sure. I think the promise of this team and the approach is really around three things. One is you're leveraging filters. Fundamentally, if you're trying to remove carbon out of the air, there is one molecule out of every 2,500 molecules that you're trying to catch and it's very hard to catch them, so you need a really good filter.
So far, a lot of the tries, attempts have been around building really custom engineered filters and that's what's contributing to the high cost and lack of scalability. What we've said is, okay, let's start with something like super, super simple, limestone in this case and see if we can get low economics for the entire system. Compared to engineered chemicals, engineered filters, limestone costs 50, 100 bucks a ton, compared to 50 to a hundred thousand dollars per ton for say engineered chemicals. Fundamentally, the low-cost filter is really the big promise.
07:50
The limestone is the second biggest commodity after water or something like that. It's incredibly abundant. It's actually used in cement production, so using that as our central base to capture CO2 molecules is really the big thing that folks are excited about.
Number two is we're trying to build them in a very modular way. If you want to iterate quickly and we want to come down the cost curve quickly by producing these at scale in factories. Number three is the technical maturity. We've actually not been around for that long. In about less than 18 months, we have gone from grams to kilograms to tons to now many tons just in that period of time. Most of that is because the technical maturity of all these subsystems are fairly mature. We're using industrial automation, which has been around automotive or agriculture for a long, long time and applying them to direct air capture.
Chris Wedding:
It was your Series A, I guess, right? I mean, pretty healthy raise for a Series A. As you went out to the market to get feedback, what other kinds of feedback did you get as you eventually landed on, what was it, I think 53 million was you-all’s raise?
Shashank Samala:
Yeah, we've raised a bit more since then too. Easier question, what other feedback have we gotten in terms of technical risk, scaling risk, that type of thing?
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I think investors here, a fair number of pitches around some version of carbon offset or carbon capture, et cetera, and understanding what's real, what's now, what's permanent, what's low cost, et cetera, versus what maybe is not. It can be hard for an investor, I suppose, that kind of feedback, perhaps.
Shashank Samala:
Yeah. Unfortunately, one of the things that direct air capture overall actually has going for it is that it’s highly permanent. It's incredibly high-quality carbon removal. This is not an offset. You're actually removing CO2 from the air. You can quantify it to the third decimal place. We have literally flow meters in the CO2 gas line. You can see exactly how much CO2 you have pulled and it's verifiable.
It's permanent because we are putting the CO2 underground in geological reservoirs that store the CO2 for thousands of years. Eventually they actually turn into stone so it's as permanent as you can get. Generally, these investors were excited that, hey, eventually humanity will move to a really high-quality carbon removal solution and direct air capture is as good as it gets. So, the question for them is, hey, what is the lowest cost and highly scalable method within direct air capture? And this was the one that they've done very, very deep technical diligence. I mean, I've probably lost a bunch of years just going through that technical [crosstalk – 00:10:56].
Chris Wedding:
Right over the coals, yeah.
Shashank Samala:
You know about Eric Toone, Breakthrough Energy Ventures?
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I do.
Shashank Samala:
Incredibly smart people. They really understand what it takes to go from lab and prototype to really high scale. They ask really, really thoughtful questions, things that are around the corner that you haven't yet. So, having gone through that, we've learned a lot about what it takes, what technical risks we should focus on, et cetera, but it is very exhausting. A good process though.
11:31
Chris Wedding:
I think on your site, perhaps you talk about maybe a near-term goal of $50 a ton to have this high-quality permanent storage of carbon sequester from the air. Maybe just tell us more about where 50 bucks a ton ranks in the spectrum of carbon offsets or carbon dioxide removal.
Shashank Samala:
Yeah. Just to be clear, carbon offsets are very different than carbon removals and I think this is what you're referring to, that there is quite a lot of press now. John Oliver just did a smackdown on carbon offsets, exactly what that needs to be done and there should be a lot more of it that needs to happen. Carbon offsets are these promises to avoid emissions from a project and most of the times, the data shows that 85-90% of these projects are not actually additional. They would have likely otherwise happened anyway without turning this carbon offset project into a financial mechanism.
Carbon removals is a way to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere, actually address the legacy emissions. It doesn't just help us decarbonize and mitigate climate change, but in fact, carbon removal is the only thing that helps us reverse climate change. Actually, cool the planet back down because we put a couple trillion tons of CO2 in the air already in the last couple hundred years.
I talk about the contactors, these machines we're building as time machines because we cannot go back in time. We don't have the technology to turn back the time yet, but we do have these machines to turn the clock back on the atmosphere. So, that's the really important distinction between offsets and removals.
In terms of cost, generally under 100 bucks a ton for removing one ton of carbon out of the air is the holy grail for the entire field. Actually, we just talked to Naeem Arshad in a different podcast about just what it takes to get to under a hundred bucks a ton. It's not easy. I mean, it's one of the biggest engineering challenges and scaling challenges humanity has ever taken on, right up there with renewables and batteries and so forth.
We think that there is a really legitimate shot for this specific technology to get to even 50 bucks a ton. A few years ago, we released a paper in Nature that has a detailed TEA, techno-economics, talking about the cost of feedstock versus the cost of the surrounding infrastructure and OpEx, the energy it takes to remove carbon. We showed how it's possible. Since then, the architecture has changed for the better even. Generally, I think if you can be in the 50 to 100 bucks a ton, including storage and including cost of measurement and verification, puts you in a great place for the planet. Chris Wedding:
In the recent Inflation Reduction Act, my understanding is there are some more attractive incentives for carbon capture and storage. What do those look like? How material are they for what you're doing versus what others that are maybe doing related things, perhaps?
14:48
Shashank Samala:
Inflation Reduction Act, just stepping back from my seat as a CEO, but just as a citizen concerned about climate and who had climate anxiety before starting the company, as you know, I think you've shared a lot of this optimism too, Chris, this is probably the biggest step humanity has taken on as a collective to make a dent in climate change. I know all the people who came out on the streets, protested, and brought their voices out for the last couple of decades. Hats off to them because they were really the ones that we should thank and be proud of. All of us coming now to take advantage of these incentives to start companies, the last few decades, a lot of other folks have done the work, the NGOs, the citizens, the concerned climate folks, to get us here. So, I want to share that, how grateful I am to those folks.
Secondly, I think, IRA is just helpful across the board. We can talk about a whole conversation just on that, specifically for direct air capture. Direct air capture is a carbon removal method that IRA is incentivizing to scale much, much faster and there are a couple of different dimensions for how it's doing that. One is a lot more funding to help accelerate deployments early on by just direct deployment funding. So, cost share,
40-50% cost share on early deployments that are high cost. Early deployments will be more expensive just because they're earlier on in the cost curve and the technology curve, technology learning scale, so that's really meaningful.
The second thing and probably the most powerful thing is that they've changed the 45Q tax credit, which previously was about 50 bucks a ton for every ton of CO2 you remove from the atmosphere and store underground. They've increased that from 50 to $180 per ton. That itself is pretty massive, but what's even more important is that this is stackable.
When we sell credits to Microsoft, let's say, on top of that, for that same credit, we get a subsidy from the government. What that does, it essentially makes these earlier deployments closer to profitability so that we can go and finance them through traditional financing, venture financing, which is highly dilutive, high cost of debt, which would increase the cost per ton. You can go after project financing, infrastructure financing that really our entire financial system is built around. You can go after those traditional financing because you have a clear way to service that debt now that you have an extra lift from the government. Overall, I think this is a pretty massive accelerant for direct air capture, but as IRA is for many other sectors of climate, for direct air capture, it's really meaningful.
Chris Wedding:
That's super helpful and appreciate the gratitude as you started that out, not as just a CEO, but as a citizen. We are standing on the shoulders of lots of folks, for sure, to do what we're doing right now.
Shashank Samala:
Absolutely. A lot of people have said, “Wow, you really timed this well.” And one is, a few years ago, it didn't seem like that. It actually felt sort of crazy to try to build a company removing carbon.
18:08
Chris Wedding:
Agreed.
Shashank Samala:
Honestly, the optimism at that point came from looking at the younger generations, folks who are standing up and knowing that, and having a positive bet on humanity. Humanity will take this themselves to solve. I actually thought something like that I would take probably a decade to get to, but I've been pleasantly surprised to see all of the changes that happened in the last few years.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Hear, hear. Let's go back to your example here where the government now through this 45Q tax credit can reward carbon capture projects with 180 bucks a ton and project developers, project owners can sell the same ton to Microsoft to help reach their carbon negative goals.
If you can share a little more. I mean, I have a sense, but what are corporates paying for these earlier stage, not quite scaled, therefore inherently more expensive permanent carbon removal? Like 180 plus X equals a number, but I think I hear you saying it's still not profitable for you or maybe peers because this shit's so early still, right?
Shashank Samala:
Yeah. Imagine the car industry in like 1905 or solar industry in like 80s or 90s, we are so early and we are trying to figure out methods to accelerate, literally put this thing on steroids in a bunch of different ways to try to get to a scale where it actually matters for the planet. Again, like if you're not at the gigaton scale, this really doesn't matter what we're doing.
Generally, early on the technology curve, we're building these by hand, not in a factory. There is lots of refinements in design and technology and efficiency process improvements that need to happen and we need time for that. During that, there's these things. So basically, the price per ton for a lot of these high-quality CDR technologies are in the high hundreds of dollars per ton and that's what these customers are paying.
The whole purpose of the deployment funding, not just the subsidy, but also the deployment grants help us quickly get to a bunch of deployments, four or five, six of these, so that we can learn from them. Understand a lot of the times, for example, early technologies are not just early and in small volume, we're also over instrumenting them. We got all sorts of sensors. We are oversizing a bunch of different parts of the technology because you don’t want to take risks on because you don't know yet about the process.
So, it's really about maximizing the rate of learning, which fundamentally just exponentially increases costs at the beginning. You make that investment because you want to come down that cost curve as quickly as possible.
Chris Wedding:
That's helpful. I think about project finance and certainly the debt for sure and probably the equity, they want to know that there's X number of years of contracted revenue, predictable revenue let's say. So, tell us more about the 45Q, how many years can projects receive those benefits? And how long are customers willing to sign up to buy these removals as well?
21:36
Shashank Samala:
Great question. The way the DAC subsidy works is that it's 12 years from the initial commissioning of the project. In order to qualify for that 45Q credit, you have to begin construction on a plant by end of 2032, so the plant that you build in 2032 can extend to 2044 in terms of how long that plant will receive the 45Q credit.
We're talking between 12-22 years from now that this policy will be around for and that type of long-term predictability is exactly what a product financier looks for. That predictability also encourages a customer like Microsoft to say, “Hey, we know that this credit will be around for a long time. We can also write a 10-year contract at X dollars per ton for X and Y volume,” and that's exactly what we need. We need to write these carbon purchasing agreements that are very similar to power purchasing agreements on the solar and wind side.
That’s one of the important innovative financial tools that really enabled solar and wind to grow like they have and come down the cost curve like they have. That’s exactly what we need to do on the carbon side of things. We need long-term predictable carbon offtake by companies that have good credit, along with a predictable policy incentive like the 45Q to encourage a lender like a Macquarie or a Goldman to say, “Hey, this project is going to make money. I will give you X amount of millions of dollars to go build this project so it's actually financeable.”
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, it's neat to see this evolution because as you say, it's been done before just in other industries. I mean, part of my background is real estate, private equity or solar project finance and here you have leases and you have these, as you say, power purchase agreements, which are really the PPA. It's a business model innovation converting CapEx to OpEx and transformed who could fund these projects, get these things built.
So, Shashank, let's say you build a project next year, so you have 12 years, let's call it, of predictable revenue. Flash forward, year seven, eight, nine, 10, what is visibility on revenue do you think look like for those projects? How does the financing change for those projects once your current capital stack, if you will, expires? Does that make sense?
Shashank Samala:
Yeah, I think the question here is around just how the capital stack evolves from now for the next five, 10 years generally. So, right now, many of these climate tech companies start out mostly venture and maybe some grants layered in. I think you want to get to a world where it's 80% project financing, so basically debt and 20% project equity. So, folks who are lowered down and liquidation preferences, but then basically have rights to all the free cash flows that generate after that debt is paid out. That's how a lot of these wind and solar projects are financed today.
What happens in the middle is really what climate tech needs to figure out and I think for every technology, every company, it's going to be different. For us, the way we think about it is starting to layer in grants and deployment funding available for these initial first of a kind plan, still venture some of it. Then start to layer in some project equity. So, not project debt yet, but project equity. Then slowly transition that into just deployment grants from the government and project equity, start layering in some project debt, and then phase out grants. So, it's an evolution. It's going to take 5-10 years likely and how we do that is as important as building the technology and selling these credits.
25:46
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I think what you're describing, others could call or a buzzword is folk financing. So, first of a kind financing where you all are not alone, very well-funded with venture capital company, removing tech risk. But to get scale to matter to the climate, you've got to go from corporate finance to project finance, but that's a big leap. I think you did a good job describing how that capital stack is going to evolve.
For those listening who have an interest, this is one of the toughest nuts to crack in the lifecycle of climate technologies, this folk financing or this blended finance models, where as you're describing, you’ve got some government or maybe foundation or concessionary return capital that takes a lot of the risk. Then allows for market rate capital to come in the door, first equity, then later debt.
Shashank Samala:
Yeah. One of the things that I think a lot about, having started a company and hardware and electronics manufacturing, which is very CapEx heavy to now in climate tech, one of the things I realized early on was there's three main pillars that you have to get right, and all of them have to really work well together. That's capital, policy, and technology.
Capital has to be fairly well aligned with where the technology is, how much technical risk there is, and how much policy risk there is. Or if there's policy tailwinds, how you can leverage those to really magnify what capital can do for the business. I think one of the ways to think about capital is, how does that evolution of the capital stack look like?
That’s why good finance leaders, good structured finance folks in the company, your finance arm is going to look larger than a SaaS business with their own finance team because they're as important to help you scale. There are quite a few thought leaders on this, but yeah, this is an important value of death that you need to solve.
Chris Wedding:
You mentioned team there. Let's drill down a little more on that. Maybe describe the kinds of team members, or I guess departments team members background skill sets that are currently part of your 60 FTEs. Then maybe who else you're looking for to join the team. I'm sure you're hiring.
Shashank Samala:
Yeah. One of the things with climate tech I realized too is that just the breadth of the skill sets you need to even build one prototype, we need everyone from research scientists, process engineers, chemical engineers, electrical, mechanical, controls, computational fluid dynamics engineers, it's mechanical, it's literally everywhere. You also have to build your HR teams, running finance and commercialization. I think that's where we are.
We are basically always recruiting across all of those teams, especially if you're a mechanical engineer or know some mechanical engineers, feel free to look at our job sites. We're heirloomcarbon.com, always looking for great folks who really align with our culture and our culture is really about three main principles. One is radical honesty, being able to challenge each other and pursue the truth and being able to be kind with each other and really build each other up in pursuing this journey.
29:26
The second one is persistent optimism. We really believe that this is a really long journey and the problems are going to be really hard, technical, commercial policy, whatever it is and you need a lot of perseverance and also one that is grounded in optimism. Not necessarily willful ignorance or false hope, but rather in calculated bets, in calculated optimism.
Number three is maximizing learning rate. We believe very, very highly that being curious learners and always being open for new ideas and ensuring that our learning rate is compounding over time, that's the only way we can get to a billion tons. The technology that we use today may not be the technology that gets us to a billion tons, or maybe the design choices or the architecture choices. So, we have to be nimble and agile and learn quickly. If you identify with those three principles, we’re the place for you.
Chris Wedding:
I like those a lot. The persistent optimism. It's interesting how you have the word persistent because we're all going to get knocked down, but it's like, what is the trend of your mentality? Is it generally pessimistic doom and gloom, anxiety, or is it optimism?
Shashank Samala:
Yeah. One of my favorite sayings, pessimists are usually right, but it's the optimist who changes the world. There's so much truth to that. We should all have a healthy dose of pessimism and pragmatism inside us, but which side of us we let dominate I think it should be optimism. Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
The radical honesty piece, and actually also in your last goal, the maximized learning, I heard this curiosity. It reminds me, this morning I was looking back at some underlined notes in this book called Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty. I forget what he was referencing, but the soldier versus scout mentality. The soldier, they have land to defend, so it's very subjective, defensive. The scout is objective. Just tell me the facts, baby, super curious. I was like, what an interesting difference in how we can approach our work, frankly, our personal lives as well. The scout mentality is what we're after, I think.
Shashank Samala:
That's awesome. That's really cool. That's a great framework.
Chris Wedding:
Let's switch in our last five or six minutes to the personal or reflection side, if you will, Shashank.
Shashank Samala:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Thinking back to your younger self, tell us one or two pieces of advice you might provide.
Shashank Samala:
Sure. Just as a context, I grew up in Southeast India. Growing up, my parents sacrificed a lot for our education, I'm very, very fortunate. Also, growing up, I saw first-hand impacts of climate change and wanted to see how I can help. I'm very, very lucky to have had the opportunity to move to the US and went to good schools and have the opportunity that I have.
32:38
If I went back, mostly I would have said, “Hey, be more grateful for what you have,” because yeah, I’ve definitely been very fortunate. I think a couple of things I would probably tell myself if there was some constructive critique is just not to conflate my definition for happiness with other people's definition of happiness. I think that socially we've evolved to being groups and have the mimetic theory, conflating what we think from what other people think. It's a trait, but I think following your gut, following your heart, really listening to what makes you happy versus what other people say it is. So, that's one.
Once I've realized that it changed my experience of the world, the kinds of things I focused on and being able to take big risks. To others, it may be big risks, but for me, it's the natural thing to do. I cannot see any other way because I think that really gives you clarity about who you are and who you're not, but it's a hard one though. It's easier to be said than done to be able to tune out other folks' voices and really listen to yourself.
The other thing is be careful of the hedonic treadmill. It's also a tough one because we've evolved to go after always wanting more, always desiring more for yourself.
I think the book Sapiens talks about the luxury trap. Once you are used to a level of well-being, a standard of living, you get used to it and then once you add elements to that life, yeah, you keep on going. Then it's really hard for you to come back down that standard of living.
For me, what I realized is, you just can keep going up that luxury trap, but eventually it actually reduces your optionality about what things you can do in life because there's a big burn rate, personal burn rate every month and that reduces your flexibility for the kinds of things you want to try. Fortunately, I haven't gone up that trap too much to have said, “Okay, I want to start another company.”
Chris Wedding:
Right. Someone said that our happiness is a ratio of appreciating what we have in the numerator versus thinking about what we want in the denominator. So, haves over wants, which is a nice mathematical representation. On the deciding what your version of success or happiness is, a question that I try to ask myself or pose to our CEO members as we've thought is, what are you solving for? It's probably not what your peer is solving for, perhaps. What are you optimizing for?
Shashank Samala:
For me, it's three things. More or less, I've learned that this framework actually works for a lot of people. For me, it's long-term happiness, medium-term happiness, and short-term happiness. Long-term, it's about working towards something that's beyond yourself. I think humanity is just a firefly in the cosmos, so insignificant that we are, we still like to work on something that means a lot more to the world and helps others reach the level of happiness that you have by giving them the basics of what they need. So, long-term that's that.
Medium-term, I find that working towards something with a team, with a group of folks who are very passionate about the same things that you are, and making progress towards them and feeling like you are contributing, you are reaching those milestones in the medium term, I think that is an important part of what makes me happy. And in the short-term, in a day-to-day, we should still wake up looking forward to that day-to-day challenge of being intellectually stimulated and having challenging problems, whether it's policy, commercialization, technical. I think if you layer all those three things together, you make for a really good framework for happiness.
37:00
Obviously, relationships for me are definitely going to that second category, whether it's working on something much greater than me with a team, or whether it's my personal relationships as well.
Chris Wedding:
That's a good framework. On that last piece around needing or wanting a challenge, and I always struggle with a little bit, it reminds me of this story from, I think, Biosphere. I can't recall whether it was one or two, but after some number of years, the trees there started leaning over. The scientists were like, “What is going on here? All the nutrients are right, the air is right,” and they realized there was no wind. There was no wind to give them a backbone to stand up straight. I was like, “Huh, I guess we need a little challenge in life perhaps,” or at least that's what I tell my kids. “Yeah, you got a challenge, good. Suck it up, you're building a backbone.”
Shashank Samala:
Yeah, that's really cool. That's a good way to think about it.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I know we're about out of time here, Shashank. Is there a book or a podcast that you might suggest folks could pick up post listening to this?
Shashank Samala:
Book or a podcast, yeah. I'm a big fan of Jim Collins' books, Good to Great, building enduring companies, and then reading Beyond Entrepreneurship, BE2.0 right now. Just a really great strategy thinker and has done quite a lot of research around what endures companies for a long, long time, for decades.
When it comes to climate tech and carbon removal, and I think about that a lot, it's 20 years from now, guess what? We're removing carbon. 50 years from now, guess what? We're still removing carbon. So, how do you build a movement, a culture, a company around that ambition? I'm sure you get this a lot from other folks, Kim Stanley Robinson's, Ministry for the Future, one of my favorite books. It's quite amazing how much of that fiction is now coming to reality. It's quite interesting. My go-to tool is actually just the Notes app on my iPhone. I think that's one of the things you mentioned here, like the tools that I love.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. For me, it's like you capture ideas while you have them so they don't escape you in Notes versus you wait to put them somewhere else or to some notebook somewhere.
Shashank Samala:
Yeah. That Notes app is the most valuable thing I have, period. Obviously, there’s my personal relationship. It’s quite amazing just seeing how you evolve as a human, just going back and reading thoughts from many, many years ago. You also asked for quotes.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, give us one, go for it.
40:02
Shashank Samala:
One of the things I've been reading a lot about is leadership. One simple thing I recently came across is leadership is not doing things right, it's doing the right thing. When I look back last 10 years of my leadership experience, it's evolving from a manager into a leader, I think that's so right. The statement goes after it. How do you set the right strategy? How do you set the right mission? How do you get folks to focus on things that matter? By moving all the bottlenecks and the challenges.
Doing things right is still important, but for CEOs especially, it's really important to bring in great leaders and managers who can help you do things right, but also, for you, the entire focus is about ensuring that what you're doing is the right thing. Obviously, easier said than done, but most of the mistakes I've made as a leader in the last 10 years is distracting the team, chasing after things that really don't matter as much.
Chris Wedding:
Well, it's hard, but knowing there's a difference is a great place to start, right?
Shashank Samala:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Well, hey, Shashank, we'll call it there. We could go on for another hour or two I'm sure. Hey, look, we're all rooting for you-all’s success at Heirloom.
Shashank Samala:
Thank you so much, Chris. It was fun talking to you and yeah, we'll do this again.
Chris Wedding:
Awesome.
Thank you so much for listening. Seriously, the world needs you and I know your time is super valuable. If you want more content like this, please subscribe to our weekly newsletter at entrepreneursforimpact.com. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I read every single one, I promise. These reviews are the number one way to draw more attention to the world-changing climate CEOs and investors that I am lucky enough to be interviewing on the show. And each month I pick one listener review for a one-on-one brainstorming call with me. Who knows what can come of those?
Finally, if you're a growth stage climate CEO looking for a confidential peer group to share best practices, expand your network and scale your business, then please apply to join our climate mastermind programs at Entrepreneurs for Impact where our current amazing members have created over $4 billion in company value to mitigate climate change. Until next time, keep on fighting those good fights.
ABOUT OUR PODCAST
We talk about #ClimateTech #Startups #VentureCapital #Productivity and #Leadership.
And we’ve become one of the top 3% most popular podcasts in the world.
Why do climate innovators love us?
Because of our inspiring guests — dozens of climate tech CEOs, founders, and investors that are raising or investing tens of millions of dollars and removing millions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere.
Why should you listen?
To start, grow, and invest in businesses with impact, meaning, and profit.
Learn about our guests’ career paths, founder stories, business strategies, investment criteria, growth challenges, hard-earned wisdom, productivity habits, life hacks, favorite books, and lots more.
Who is the host?
Dr. Chris Wedding is a 4x founder, 4x Board member, climate CEO peer group leader and coach, Duke & UNC professor, ex-private equity investor, ex-investment banker, podcast host, newsletter author, occasional monk, Japanophile, ax throwing champ, father of three, and super humble guy (as evidenced by this long bio). 😃
Learn more here:
Climate CEO peer group community: www.entrepreneursforimpact.com
2-minute newsletter: https://entrepreneursforimpact.substack.com
DIY course about startup capital raising (170 slides, 70-item library, 250-investor list): https://t.ly/QCcl5