The Entrepreneurs for Impact Podcast: Transcripts
#116
$100M to Create Chemicals Using Light – Trevor Best, CEO of Syzygy Plasmonics
PODCAST INTRODUCTION
Chris Wedding:
My guest today is Trevor Best, Co-founder and CEO of Syzygy Plasmonics. Syzygy is commercializing a deep decarbonization platform dedicated to cleaning up the emissions heavy chemical industry. They use breakthrough technology pioneered in the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice University to harness energy from LED light to power chemical reactions. This new tech has the potential to partially or fully electrify the chemical industry, shifting it to renewable electricity and cost effectively reducing its carbon footprint.
02:30
In this episode, we talked about how he raised over $100 million to fund the company. What photocatalysis means. How a case of beer and rare astronomical phenomenon were key in deciding the company's name. Their work in ammonia cracking, blue hydrogen and dry reforming. And yes, if you feel like you need to go back and redo some chemistry courses from college, I feel you. We talked about the projects they're launching this year with multinational companies from Asia and the US. The massive cost, energy, and carbon savings made possible through their technology and he gives you plenty of stats along the way.
What the children's movie, Frozen has taught him, oh yeah, I'm serious. How his love of science fiction translates to lessons and startup leadership. What the dog tags he had made around his neck, what they say and why they're important for him staying focused and optimistic as a leader of this company and a whole lot more. I hope you enjoy it and please give Trevor and Syzygy Plasmonics a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks.
PODCAST INTERVIEW
Chris Wedding:
All right, Trevor Best, Co-founder and CEO of Syzygy Plasmonics, welcome to the podcast.
Trevor Best:
Thank you very much for having me, Chris. It is an absolute pleasure to be here.
Chris Wedding:
Awesome. It's always so fun to let listeners know about what happens pre-record and your last statement was, “I was born ready. Let's do this effing thing.” Anyway.
Trevor Best:
Yeah, let's go.
Chris Wedding:
Great attitude. Hey, I want to start with a place where we connected on our last mastermind one-on-one call, which is something that you wear around your neck, dog tags of sorts that you had made. Can you share with listeners what's on those?
04:33
Trevor Best:
Yeah. It is kind of funny because I don't tell many people about this, so this is like a first time reveal if you all want to know what's going on in here. So, this dog tag I made for myself back in the early days of Syzygy. I've had this around my neck pretty much every day for four years now. On one side it says, “Never give up, never get discouraged,” because this stuff can be really discouraging sometimes. And on the other side, it says, “Begin saving the world by saving yourself first.”
This is like, if the plane is having trouble, put your mask on first and then somebody else's mask, but there's always a lot going on and it is stressful. There are all kinds of things happening with climate and it's just a reminder that if you want to really do good for the world, you got to do right by yourself first.
Chris Wedding:
As you know, but for listeners, when we had our last one-on-one call, I was showing you this Memento Mori coin, this heavy brass coin that I carry in my pocket most days, which says, “You could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think.” Then you shared the dog tag and I think it's just such a great reminder to folks listening where it's like, oh, well here's Trevor and his team in Syzygy raising tens of millions of dollars on super cool IP tech with real household name customers. But guess what? Still hard as shit and you’ve got to remind yourself each day when it fumbles around your sternum or you put it on, right?
Trevor Best:
Mm-hmm, it's like that daily practice, what are you doing every day?
Chris Wedding:
Perfect. Okay. Now, let's get into the business. So, Syzygy, what is Syzygy?
Trevor Best:
Syzygy Plasmonics is a company that is commercializing some really cutting-edge technology out of Rice University. Two researchers there, Professor Hollis and Nordlander developed the world's first really high-performance photocatalyst. And so, Syzygy is commercializing that catalyst and also building the chemical reactor around it that enables us to do chemical reactions.
Long story short, through a number of technical innovations, we help to electrify chemical manufacturing, do things like low carbon hydrogen, CO2 to value, et cetera, using renewable electricity in a way that is more efficient and cost effective than current solutions.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. Would Syzygy have worked five years ago or maybe it's 10, given how the cost of renewables has fallen so dramatically?
Trevor Best:
10 years ago, definitely not. This is a market conditions question, and it's also a technical readiness question. So, go back 10 years, I don't think the market was ready. I don't think the renewable electricity market was ready. I don't think the energy industry was ready to do the transition. Then from a technical standpoint, the photocatalyst had not been invented and we're at right at the leading edge of human knowledge. And so, the science that our reactor uses to work had not been discovered yet. The artificial lights we’re using like the LEDs and the other light sources, they had not hit efficiencies that were exciting it. And so, there's this really awesome coalescence of market forces and science and engineering, all kind of mashing together right now that gives us a really exciting opportunity in the future.
08:13
Chris Wedding:
So, photocatalyst, I think folks know what a photon might be and a catalyst might be. Let’s go one level deeper on what a photocatalyst is.
Trevor Best:
A photocatalyst is a material that uses light instead of heat to perform chemical reactions. And so, there's different methods to do photocatalysis. If anyone has worked on that in their graduate research or at a company that’s probably based on semiconductor type photocatalysis. These are materials like titanium dioxide, we specifically do plasmonic type photocatalysis where we're using the plasmonic effect to generate high energy or quote unquote, hot electrons in the presence of traditional catalysts materials. These are your transition metals and using that plasmonic effect to drive chemistry. This is where the Syzygy plasmonics piece comes from.
Chris Wedding:
Got it. Okay, so now the audience maybe understands plasmonics a touch better. It makes me want to go back to my minor in chemistry days a few decades ago. How about the Syzygy piece, what's that about?
Trevor Best:
As with a lot of great things, the name Syzygy started with a case of beer. So, my co-founder and I were sitting around trying to figure out, what the hell are we going to call this thing? This is back in 2017 and there was an eclipse around that time and when we're like googling about the eclipse, this funny word syzygy comes up. What the word syzygy means is the alignment of three planetary bodies. And so, an eclipse is a perfect example. The sun, the moon, and the earth all line up in a straight line and whenever that happens, that is called a syzygy. And so, we're like, oh my goodness, we are the alignment of three things that are shaping the future, energy, technology, and sustainability, and where these three things line up, you get syzygy. So, it was kind of perfect.
Chris Wedding:
Amazing. I'm thinking about three other words in the industrial slash manufacturing world, which is heat, beat, and treat. That sounds like a lot of pollution, a lot of energy, a lot of effort, a lot of time. My guess is that your photocatalyst process is much different than a heat, beat and treat approach to producing stuff. So, maybe describe how your tech works versus business as usual.
Trevor Best:
There’s the science piece and there's the engineering piece. And so, going back to the science piece, just catalysis in general like how we traditionally do large industrial catalysis is you just heat up these catalyst materials to really high temperatures. We're talking like a thousand degrees Celsius kind of thing for certain chemical reactions. Just that brute force approach of getting it really hot can give it the energy it needs to help drive chemical reactions.
11:17
With ours, we use a different mechanism, the plasmonic effect. So, we're sending photons, our plasmonic nanoparticle like catches the photon and turns it into a high energy electron. That high energy electron can then go directly make or break chemical bonds. And so, just even down to the core fundamentals of how we are doing catalysis, our method is different.
Then on the engineering side, when you're using photons, this is radiant type energy, it just interacts with its surroundings very differently than like heat. Heat is like convection, conduction, radiation is generally a very small part of that. Radiant type energy, there's photons, they go where you send them. Convection, conduction work in a way that they spread through contact or a media like air. And so, to drive a thermal reactor, you have to heat the whole chamber. The whole chamber is white hot and your catalyst is like a piece in the middle.
When you're using photons, we emit the photon, it passes through the glass. We use quartz and it hits our catalyst directly and there is really no energy loss from source to point of contact, the catalyst. And so, we are only energizing the catalyst and nothing else. It's a much more elegant directed approach. This is one of the reasons why we're able to see higher efficiencies than what they have in industries just because what you can do with radiant energy versus thermal energy.
Chris Wedding:
Wow, it reminds me of my green building, green real estate roots, radiant flooring, so heat coming up through heated liquids and tubes under your floor just feels different than typical forced air heating. And by different, I mean, awesome.
Trevor Best:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Versus windy heat coming at you and maybe not heating you quickly. Talk to us about, what is being produced exactly? Maybe just describe initial customers perhaps. What's the output of your photocatalyst process?
Trevor Best:
Before we get into the inputs and the outputs, I'd like to talk a little bit more about some of the science.
Chris Wedding:
Let’s do it.
Trevor Best:
What we found at Rice was actually a platform in that these two professors had come up with a method of coupling the traditional catalyst pieces to the plasmonic pieces. And those traditional catalyst pieces, this could be any of the transition metals, iron, nickel, the platinum group metals, palladium, platinum, ruthenium, rhodium, et cetera. But that adaptability allows them to perform many different types of chemical reactions. So, what Syzygy does is we make the catalyst and we make the reactor and then we license that process, but we are a platform, we can do many things.
So, specifically the three that we're going to market with today are photocatalytic ammonia cracking, so we're taking in ammonia, this is NH3 and we're splitting that into nitrogen and hydrogen. Very interesting for countries that have to import a lot of their energy. Ammonia is a very interesting energy carrier. As the hydrogen economy develops, it is a very interesting way to get hydrogen around the world. It's actually much easier to transport ammonia between countries, import-export level, than it is hydrogen.
14:45
The next reaction is dry reforming, so this is CO2 plus methane. We are taking the two most potent greenhouse gases, combining them into syngas. Once you have syngas, we can contract with another supplier to do Fischer-Tropsch or methanol synthesis. And ultimately this gives us a pathway where we can take those greenhouse gases like CO2 and turn them into value added products like methanol.
Finally, the last pathway is blue hydrogen, so this is photocatalytic steamer forming. So, we are taking in methane and water and we are making hydrogen and CO2. This makes about 40-50% less CO2 than traditional steam reforming and so very applicable for like blue hydrogen. Basically, if you want to compare us, it is like blue hydrogen with a lower carbon footprint and an overall lower cost. So, those are the three we're going after today.
Lots of focus on where we get those feedstocks because ultimately your carbon intensity is determined by what feedstock you're using. There's a huge difference between like renewable natural gas that's coming from a landfill or a dairy farm and fossil natural gas, and then LNG that's been transported around the world. Those are three completely different tiers. Same with renewable electricity, there's huge differences in carbon intensity between hydro and wind and solar and biomass. Of course, all of those are much better than fossil sources of electricity, but very important to take that into consideration to do what we are set out to do, which is reduce emissions.
Chris Wedding:
Well, earlier today, I was prepping to teach one of my Duke University courses, but right this very second, I feel like I'm being schooled, Trevor. Thank you. That is taking me back decades to the hard sciences, which I have forgotten most of, but it's tantalizing.
Trevor Best:
Listen, I talk very pretty. Everything I'm doing is I'm repeating something I have heard from someone much smarter than myself.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, you must be in the right rooms. That's all I can say, right?
Trevor Best:
Definitely.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, so the question I want to ask is, what's the percentage reduction energy, let's say, in a you-all’s process versus business as usual? I appreciate that's at least three different answers, but it's much more complicated than that. How do you talk about to your investors, the range of reduction of either BTUs or maybe it's the carbon footprint? Again, it varies like a million ways, but break it down for listeners. Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Let's split this in three ways. One, let's talk about the science and we'll talk about overall energy efficiency. Second, let's talk about the economics because you can be super-efficient at using something like unobtainium crazy material, but if your inputs are super expensive, it doesn't matter. Then let's talk about the carbon footprint aspect of it, and I'll get a little bit more into life cycle analysis.
17:51
So, on the science side, energy efficiency, I mentioned just the differences between radiant and thermal energy and how we're able to focus the energy on the catalyst bed, we're seeing pretty dramatic improvements in overall efficiency. So, if you think about like a big refinery or a chemical plant, at their heart, they have this thermal reactor with lots of burners that makes lots of heat, that unit actually only operates at 40-50% energy efficiency. That's just because thermal versus radiant, heat goes everywhere.
What they do is they implement lots of heat exchange, and with lots of heat exchange, basically they capture that heat and they recycle it through the system, they're able to get the overall system efficiency up above 70%. What we're seeing in our lab is because of how we handle energy and we're able to focus it just where we need it, it actually enables us to get a higher efficiency at the component level. We are seeing efficiencies upwards and above 70% even before any kind of heat exchange or recycle or anything. So, we are beating their overall process efficiency at a component level before we implement any of their tricks to improve efficiency. That's very exciting for us.
Chris Wedding:
Just to translate. So, really your 70% number is comparable to their 40-50% number?
Trevor Best:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
So, really, it's like, I mean, not quite double, but almost.
Trevor Best:
Yeah, at the component level going from 40-50% efficiency to like 70 plus. We're predicting that at the system level, we should be able to get up into the 80s over time.
Chris Wedding:
Sweet. Okay. That's part one.
Trevor Best:
Yeah. So, that is a little removed from economics and so each one of our systems and our competitor systems, they all have inputs. Like if you're looking at our processes, our inputs are like electricity, CO2, methane, water, ammonia, et cetera. You look at competitors' processes, they also use different inputs.
In general, we use less electricity, one fourth to one fifth as much as the other electric options. We also use less feedstock than other options, so like versus steam reforming, we use about 40% less methane because we don't have to burn any. Versus ammonia splitting, we use about 30-40% less ammonia, because we don't have to burn any. We use a little bit more electricity than both of those, but in the right economic conditions, we have a pretty strong advantage. In versus processes like electrolysis, we use about one fourth to one fifth the amount of electricity to make the same amount of hydrogen.
Of course, there's trade-offs and we don't win in every situation. If you can get basically free electricity, you should do electrolysis in other pathways. If your electricity is incredibly high and you can get free methane from a landfill, maybe you don't use our process.
20:51
What we found is that it is looking like our process should be the cost and carbon intensity leader in 60-70% of scenarios around the planet. So, if you go look at all the scenarios around the planet, we have a very competitive disruptive option in 60-70% of those scenarios.
Chris Wedding:
Wow. Very compelling. I love all the numbers. I can imagine that your investors also love all those numbers. Maybe tell us that story a little bit. Maybe it's your process, maybe it's lessons, whatever you want to tell us about raising lots of capital to do hard stuff that matters a lot.
Trevor Best:
Yeah, so I want to pull out that dog tag again and start with the never give up, never get discouraged. I know we just closed a 76-million-dollar Series C. That's very exciting.
Chris Wedding:
Hear, hear.
Trevor Best:
Very exciting lead investors with Carbon Direct and participation from other investors, but it wasn't always like this. We heard no like 999 times before we got the first yes. We won a lot of pitch competitions last year, but we lost the first 200. So, it's been a journey. Back in 2017 when we really started pitching this, the energy transition wasn't materializing the way it was.
So, it was rough in the early years and some very thoughtful angels in Houston, very thoughtful VCs like Evoke Innovations backed us in the early days, very small, lean, got less than a million dollars, four people in a supply closet with a fume hood kind of thing. Got support from the Department of Energy, prototypes worked, raised 10 million, brought the engine in, learned how to pitch better. Yeah, I can see you go through the history.
You asked about learnings and so I would say, the biggest learning that we've had along the way is probably around the process. And so, fundraising is a pretty specific process. Like if you go talk to an investment bank, they run a process and your odds of having a successful fundraise are much higher if you run the fundraising process well. You can have a great tech and a great company and if you fundraise terribly, it's pretty tough.
There's a lot of questionable companies that have been very successful fundraising. I'm sure everybody's seen news of startup founders who were less than forthright with what was going on in their company, but they ran a good process and were quite successful. You want me to go through that process really quick?
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, go for it.
Trevor Best:
First, you prep all your materials, you get your investor list ready, you get all your diligence materials ready, then you go hit everyone up at the same time. It's pretty important. You go hit as many up as you can, and this is a numbers game, to increase the number of people who might be interested. You walk them all through diligence. This is step three, you walk them all through diligence at roughly the same rate. It's like herding cats, pretty difficult, but if you can keep them all in roughly the same point in diligence, then you get to step four, you push for the term sheet. The more people you have at the table interested, the higher your odds of getting a good term sheet. If you can get a good term sheet from a handful of people, you have a competitive fundraise.
Then fifth step, you work with your lawyers to finish all the closing documents, but that one's downhill.
24:26
Chris Wedding:
Mm-hmm. If only those five steps were as easy as they sound, right? I'm sure there’s hundreds of investors that were approached over the years to raise the money that you guys have raised.
Trevor Best:
Yeah, altogether our success rate is about one in a hundred. So, for every investor that has ended up investing in us, we have talked to about a hundred.
Chris Wedding:
Wow.
Trevor Best:
It's about one in 10 that get interested and have real conversations with us and then from the people who have real conversations is about one in 10 that invest. I think the odds were worse in the beginning, we had to talk to way more. Now, man, we're doing much better. Now it's much higher than one in a hundred.
Chris Wedding:
You've earned that right to have folks knocking on your door versus the opposite. How about some of your customers or partners? What does that look like?
Trevor Best:
Right now, we have three field trials going. So, one is with a very large entity out of South Korea. It is Lotte. If anyone has been to South Korea, you've probably been in one of their department stores, really incredible company that is trying to positively change the world. Yeah, that is with Lotte. And also, Sumitomo Corporation out of Japan is helping to support that project. So, Syzygy, Lotte and Sumitomo working together to deploy our ammonia splitting technology in South Korea. That is due towards the end of this year.
We have another project where we're working with the US energy major. This one is not announced, so I can't give names, but we’re working with a US energy major to do the same kind of thing, ammonia splitting in California. And so, California, very interesting market, like South Korea, they need to import a lot of their energy and starting to look at ammonia and its ability as a hydrogen carrier to bring hydrogen into the California economy. That one also slated towards the end of the year.
Then the third one is actually the first one that's going to get deployed and that is a CO2 to fuels project we are doing with RTI, Research Triangle Institute. Sameer, you're awesome. RTI is a really amazing group. They're a nonprofit. They work with a lot of different energy companies to validate processes and they're viewed as a trusted, non-biased party.
They had a Fischer-Tropsch unit from a Department of Energy grant, and they are letting us tie our reactors into that Fischer-Tropsch unit so we can demonstrate the customers going all the way from CO2 to synthetic fuel. This is backed by Equinor and Sumitomo and also other companies as well. And so, very exciting projects, two zero carbon hydrogen projects and a CO2 to fuels project that we are working on as we speak. That last CO2 to fuels project should be first half of this year.
27:29
Chris Wedding:
Wow, and who knew? I mean, RTI is right in our backyard. I mean, 20 minutes away from where I said, huge, huge group. Okay, Trevor, so it's about this time in the podcast where we switch from the company to the person. So, let's talk more about Trevor.
Trevor Best:
Oh God, let's not do that. Let's not do that to these poor people.
Chris Wedding:
Torture. The first one here is, what advice might you give your younger self to be more effective, dare I say happier along the journey?
Trevor Best:
Oh man, I would probably take a page from Frozen and tell myself to let it go. I am a perfectionist and I hold myself to very high standards, and it has taken me a long time to get to the point where like, you know what, it's okay. I would also tell myself to sleep more. I didn't really start valuing sleep until recently. And so, I would definitely tell myself to sleep more. Well, if only there were a video that goes along with this podcast to look at Trevor, who's wearing a very nice suit and tie, recommending a line from Frozen. Very touching, Trevor, thank you.
Trevor Best:
I hope this one follows me forever. Somebody put me on the spot and I'll do my best to sing it.
Chris Wedding:
Right.
Trevor Best:
I don't know more than the chorus.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, there we go, I feel that. How about some habits or routines that keep you healthy, sane, and focused on the journey?
Trevor Best:
These are kind of new for me. Going back to the, I would tell myself to sleep more, a lot of my habits and routines were focused around high performance. I actually would try and recommend people to hit these things, but if you're responding to people during a fundraise, hold yourself to a 24-hour period. Get back to them and let them know that you have heard them and you're working on it, or send them a response within 24 hours.
I am focusing less on those kinds of goals and more on the kinds that take care of myself. So, a recent habit that I've formed is 11:00 p.m. every night, no matter what is happening at 11:00 p.m. I shut it down. I start winding down, get ready for bed, sleep from 11:30 to 7:30 or so, and then wake up. My meetings don't start till 9:00, so I usually give myself some time to orient and start my day.
If you look the last year, I would schedule meetings at like 7:00 a.m. and I would wake up at like 6:58 and throw on a shirt and then at 7:00 be pitching someone. I'm not doing that to myself anymore.
Chris Wedding:
Well, it relates to what's on your dog tag for sure. I was also thinking on the Tim Ferriss podcast recently, there was a compilation of some of his more popular guests and this guy, I had to look him up here, Matthew Walker, he has a podcast called Sleep Diplomat. He wrote a book, which is on my list here, a list to read that is called Why We Sleep, which was a bestseller. Anyway, it's a very scientific approach to reinforce why sleep is so important for us. I'll share it with you, Trevor, as I had with my wife, it's hard to sleep, when we like to relax, wind down, build companies, who knows?
31:13
Trevor Best:
Yeah, especially whenever you get going. I am naturally a night owl, so it's very easy for me to get a burst of energy at 10:00 p.m. and work until 2:00 a.m. I was always resentful of the world for not working with my schedule. Man, why is everybody wanting to have all these meetings at like 9:00 in the morning? I've finally decided like, man, the world is not going to change for me, I've got to adapt for the world. And so, shutting down at 11:00 sometimes means shutting down right when I'm really hitting stride and feeling good. That presentation, nailed it just right and want to finish the last 10 slides and it's like, nope, to do that, that'll be like 2:00 in the morning before I go to bed and sleep matters.
Chris Wedding:
That's good self-control for sure. On your comment about for some reason, not bending to suit your needs, there's a great quote, I want to say it's George Bernard Shaw, but maybe it's someone else, or maybe it's an Indian philosopher. Anyway, it says something like, we can either cover the entire surface of the world in leather, or we can put on moccasins, we can put on shoes. It's like, okay, which of those seems more reasonable? I think it's choice B.
Trevor Best:
Yeah, I love that quote.
Chris Wedding:
Easy to say, hard to live by. How about some books, quotes, tools, et cetera, podcasts that you think listeners may enjoy, Trevor?
Trevor Best:
This is a good question. So, I actually am pretty terrible about reading any sort of self-help books like the Lean Startup and I'm actually a huge science fiction nerd.
Chris Wedding:
Bring it on.
Trevor Best:
And so, a lot of the lessons that I learned from reading and draw inspiration from come from sci-fi. I'll just give you an example, A Wizard of Earthsea, I think it's in the second book, it's like the wizard, I don't know if you pronounce his name Jed or Ged, I've never actually talked about this. Yeah, he gets caught in this labyrinth of darkness and he can't get out and it is impossible for him to escape.
So, what he does, he's like, “Well, there's nothing I can do. I'm going to lay down and take a nap.” Hey, to any startup founders who are watching this, you know what it feels like to be trapped in the labyrinth of darkness. I certainly know what that feels like. It can be tough to get out of and you're usually not thinking about accepting it and laying down and taking a nap and conserving your energy. Yeah, that's what he does. Someone notices this and comes in to help him out.
34:08
And so, don't beat your head against the wall until you pass out, learn to rest and take care of yourself. This also goes in with the necklace and everything else. I don't know, dare to dream. Someone has to do it. Someone has to think through these problems that the world is facing, dare to be the one.
Chris Wedding:
If not you, then who, Trevor, right?
Trevor Best:
Yeah. We could talk for a lot longer, but the time is upon us here with the next commitments as you're changing the world. What's the final thought maybe, or call to action you'd like to leave folks with?
Trevor Best:
I want anyone to think about this later. I would like them to have a little dash of the hope that I have been feeling recently. This does not come from watching the news or any of that, let me tell you, where this comes from and a little bit of optimism about the future is actually what I'm seeing every day through groups like yours, Chris, and others. I am seeing a wave of momentum behind change for the better. Companies are not just talking about it. They're actively trying to find where they're going to place their bets to clean the future.
The younger generation is fired up and getting involved. With the IRA, politicians and politics are getting involved. There is actually more movement happening in the past like two years towards cleaning things up and making a brighter future that I have seen in a long time, since I've been paying attention to this for the past 15 or 20 years. And so, I don't know if it's evident to everyone out there, if everyone sees it like I do, but there is an army of excited founders and exciting technologies and people in the industry and government motivated to make this happen. And so, yeah, be a little hopeful for the future. It's okay, we're going to get through this. Probably going to be interesting for the next decade, but we're going to figure this out.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, it's contrarian in the best way. The original name for this podcast was Climate Torch, as in like a light in the darkness because when I first started recording these, it was, I think, mid 2020. So, we had a certain person as president, and we had COVID, and the general news was just so dark for good reasons. But my day was maybe like your day, it was all day just talking to founders and investors with cool solutions to climate change. Anyway, yeah, we'll call it there, Trevor. We got to manage our information diet, the seeds we sow in our brand, in our heart to find the optimism. Hey, look, we are rooting for the success of Syzygy Plasmonics. Looking forward to updates, Trevor.
Trevor Best:
Hey, watch us. We're going to be out there making waves and I'll be watching for you. So, if you ever see me at a conference or anything, please come say hi.
Chris Wedding:
Hear, hear. Talk soon.
37:28
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