The Entrepreneurs for Impact Podcast: Transcripts

Listen on Apple | Listen on Spotify


#133:

Stanford Ph.D. Scaling Carbon Removal with Olivine and Agriculture — Adam Wolf, CEO of Eion


PODCAST INTRODUCTION


Adam Wolf:

We work with farmers and ranchers to remove carbon permanently at scale using existing infrastructure. We take a rock, in this case, it's olivine, that if you pulverize it and add it to those soils, it does something for the farmer, which is condition the soil to have a better pH. And then when it dissolves, it pulls carbon dioxide and keeps it in solution for about a half million years. So, if we're really going to use this as a substitute for emissions, we want solutions that are permanent.


PODCAST INTERVIEW

 

Chris Wedding:

Welcome to the Entrepreneurs for Impact podcast. My name is Chris Wedding. As a former environmental private equity investor, four times founder, climate tech CEO, coach and professor, I launched this podcast to share the entrepreneurial journey, practical tips and hard-earned wisdom from CEOs and investors tackling climate change. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. This is the number one way that listeners can learn more about the climate CEOs and investors interview. All right, let's get started.

My guest today is Adam Wolf, Founder and CEO of Eion. Eion is an enhanced rock weathering startup that works with farmers and ranchers to safely and permanently pull carbon out of the air. They use a rock called olivine, which is the most abundant rock on earth and by 2026, they will be on track to permanently remove 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere per year. 

They've got some extra support with a $12 million Series A last year from investors such as AgFunder, Trailhead Capital, and Orion Corporation. In addition, Adam is the former Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist at Arable Lands and a former Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University. He's also got a PhD from Stanford University, so total slacker, ha-ha, and is learning to build a studio in his backyard using traditional building techniques. So yeah, this guy likes to build stuff. Keep listening here. 

02:31

In this episode, we talked about how their company name came to his co-founder in a dream and turns out has three or four relevant meanings depending on how you pronounce their company's name. Why this olivine rock is so powerful as a carbon removal tool. How they utilize existing infrastructure from farmers and ranchers to mainstream their solution at scale and lower costs in the process. 

Why they spent two years figuring out how to get the measurement process right to assess their carbon removal. The critical role of Norwegian fjords and rock crushing in scaling their company. What he means by a BS counterfactual carbon baseline. Why the Department of Agriculture's Climate Smart Commodities Program is so important. The benefits of voracious self-learning, and lots more. Hope you enjoy it, and please give Adam and Eion a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks. 

Adam Wolf, Founder and CEO at Eion, welcome to the podcast. 

Adam Wolf:

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. 

Chris Wedding:

Let's start with the name. Where does the name Eion, which I tried to say improperly, Aeon, Eon, where does it come from, Adam? 

Adam Wolf:

Well, we couldn't incorporate until we had a name and the truth is that it came to my co-founder, Elliot, in a dream. When he woke up and looked it up, it turns out it references a decisive battle in the Peloponnesian War and I thought like, “Okay, well, that's good enough for me.” But then, backing up for a second, we think like ion, like I got my eye on you, I'm keeping my eye on this carbon. Eon it's going to stay out of the atmosphere for a long time. Working with ions, we're chemists, so we never stop talking about ions. So, it really feels like it works for a bunch of different reasons, even though it came out of the subconscious. 

Chris Wedding:

That's a much better story than I even had thought about. That's great. So many possible interpretation. It makes me laugh a little bit because when I look at applications of CEOs or investors who may join the climate CEO peer group that I run, I ask them in the application, where did you learn about us? And it's the obvious stuff like, “Oh, well LinkedIn,” or, “The newsletter,” or whatever and one option is divine intervention while you were sleeping last night? Looks like that’s two peas in a pod anyway. 

05:12

Adam Wolf:

It's why we all need to be getting more sleep.

Chris Wedding:

Nice tie into a question later, which is about habits and routines. All right. So, we have Eion. What's the pitch, man? What do you guys do in the CDR space? 

Adam Wolf:

It's easy. We work with farmers and ranchers to remove carbon permanently at scale using existing infrastructure. So, my whole life, I've been working with working lands, agricultural landscapes. Really seeing them as a way to leverage that vast acreage towards environmental good. And, in the case of Eion, we take a rock. I mean, it's really not super complicated. 

A rock, in this case, it's olivine that if you pulverize it and add it to those soils, it does something for the farmer, which is condition the soil to have a better pH. So, think of it like TUMS. And then that also, when it dissolves, it pulls carbon dioxide and keeps it in solution, and most importantly, it keeps it in solution for about a half million years. That turns out that permanence ends up being a really key piece of the puzzle because a lot of approaches to taking carbon out of the atmosphere, like growing forests has a finite lifetime. But the CO2 we put into the atmosphere is there for about 35,000 years. So, if we're really going to use this as a substitute for emissions, we want solutions that are permanent. 

Chris Wedding:

And you held up a physical specimen, the rock olivine. How would you describe that to folks who are listening? 

Adam Wolf:

Well, I am a bit of a rock salesman, so I've got this rock. If you like green rocks, it's quite a charismatic green rock. This is a sparkly white rock; it comes from Canada. This is called wollastonite. So, when you're in the rock slinging business, you come to get into a lot of different variations. This is a deeper green rock. This is still olivine, but looks a little closer to serpentine, which is another one of these silicate rocks. 

All of these rocks, what they have in common is that they have a lot of calcium and magnesium. When the calcium and magnesium are liberated, the rocks dissolve, they come into solution and that's what creates this alkalizing effect. And that's also the charge that calcium magnesium have is what keeps the carbon dioxide in solution.

All of these rocks, even the gravel in my driveway, if you pulverized it, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Just some rocks are better than others and some rocks are better just because they're closer. 

08:28

Chris Wedding:

You mentioned the reference to TUMS. Maybe just go one or two steps further with that analogy. 

Adam Wolf:

Yeah. So, pH ends up being one of these master variables. I think Linus Pauling got a Nobel prize for all of his work in vitamin C. And so, in the case of plants, soils, older soils in particular can be very acidic and when soils are old and acidic, two things happen. One is that there's a lot of aluminum in solution and aluminum is detrimental to the plant growth. This is true in the tropics generally. The other piece is that a lot of the essential nutrients that plants need to grow is unavailable. So, it precipitates or binds to some other element and the plant can't get at it. 

When you add in these alkalizers and calcium carbonate, chalk is another alkalizer, it's quite common to put into soils, old seashells, this raises the pH and so it puts that aluminum to rest. And it also makes all those essential nutrients more available. Turns out the bugs in the soil are also a lot happier. So, there's all kinds of bacteria, fungi, little worms and critters that all are happier when the pH is closer to neutral. So, just a pretty simple, adjustment and suddenly the whole system is happier. 

Chris Wedding:

So, a good reminder for any of us with teenagers to say, “Yeah, look, chemistry does matter. I promise. Keep studying.”

Adam Wolf:

No, I learned in chemistry that I had tuned out even when I was in grad school and suddenly it's like, “Oh my God, the rock cycle.” I went into agriculture because I was really drawn to things that were kind of human scale. I didn't go super deep into microbiology or molecular biology. I also didn't get super big into atmospheric science, climatology. There's something about working at the scale of plants and fields and bugs and people that I find totally intuitive. Really, there's a lot of chemistry of the soil or of the earth that operates on really long-time scales or really large spatial scales. And so, it's pretty easy to tune out even climate change when you think about it. 

It’s so vast and that's one of the problems with dealing with it is that our human brains are hard to put together those kinds of signals. This is why I think agriculture is such a powerful lens into solving climate change, because we can all relate to food, we can all relate to driving past or even spending time on farm fields. Then to see, well, that same thing that happens on that field, if you multiply it, would be large suddenly makes the problem feel more solvable. Otherwise it's so giant as to be intimidating. 

12:00

Chris Wedding:

The other interesting thing appears to be that your all solution is not just about carbon removal. In fact, in many ways that's a side benefit from the farmers perspectives. They said, “Look, I want to grow more crops, healthier crops, quicker crops to take to market, et cetera. And to get there, I'm going to apply this dust to my fields.” I think the other thing which sounds different for you all is you recognize that the distribution essentially of the product, that's at the cost, it can be a high cost, but if you utilize the farmers and ranchers’ own infrastructure, you cut at that cost, which I presume both of those factors can lead to a lower dollar per ton for the carbon dioxide removals, dot, dot, dot. Is any of that true? 

Adam Wolf:

Yeah. Well, a lot of the obstacles that you're describing are as much to do with a shift from what anybody's doing now. So, just the fact that we can use the preexisting infrastructure, let alone having it be cost effective, it's just very powerful to say that this is a drop-in substitute for something that you're doing already. And, the appeal to growers is that they don't have to not do anything. So much of the approach to addressing the climate carbon problem in agriculture is around not doing things, not harvesting forests, not cultivating lands. And as somebody who's never really succeeded at dieting, it’s hard to not do things. 

What I really like about this is that from a farmer's perspective, they are still farming and they're farming in a way that is familiar, but they're substituting one product, which in the case of ag lime it emits carbon dioxide with another product, which in the case of these silicate rocks, removes carbon dioxide. And that just feels close enough that it’s a pretty easy reach for most folks. 

It turns out that a lot of the places that most need this ag lime, let's say where the TUMS is wanted the most, it's least found. So, old weathered soils of the South, Southeast, those are the places where ag lime is not very abundant and so it turns out those are places where there’s the greatest desire for this kind of solution just from an agronomic perspective. 

14:54

Chris Wedding:

So, you raise another good point here, and that is where is the rock, right? So, where do you find olivine? 

Adam Wolf:

You find these rocks really everywhere where continents collide. So, the coastal range on the West and the Appalachian range on the East. All of this is chock-full of these silicate rocks that are high in magnesium in particular. Olivine is kind of unusual. It's the most abundant rock in the universe. I've got a meteorite with olivine granules in it and yet it's almost entirely within the mantle. 

So, it's a hundred or more kilometers below the ground. It starts to come up as the oceanic floor, so all the oceans have these plates that start in the middle of the ocean with that spreading center, that's serpentine. It's like a cousin of olivine and that eventually collides with the continent. Usually, it's heavier and so it's subducts, but sometimes it crumbles up and ends up on the land. And so, there's all kinds of these kind of basaltic or other silicate outcrops in these mountain ranges. So, when I reference the gravel in my driveway, it's just from a basalt quarry up the street from me. In other ways, it's as ubiquitous as the quarries that are used in every county for building and road construction materials.

Chris Wedding:

And so, you mentioned the Appalachian, you mentioned the Southeast as one of the spots where the soils are old and acidic and in need of some more love with these amendments. That's where we're based as it happens in North Carolina, so in our backyard. You talked about these quarries being in each county, something like olivine, would that be not evenly distributed across the Southeast? I guess how evenly distributed or how concentrated might it be in places like the Appalachians, let's say? 

I'm just thinking about a listener’s question, which I'm sure is, “Hey, look, rock's heavy, sounds great for the climate so far, but how do you get heavy rock to where it needs to go on fields?” 

Adam Wolf:

There's, I would say a lot of mineral resources that are okay. So, your local rock quarry is a great example and that may be able to be cost effective within 20 or 50 miles. That may cover parts of a county depending on how much of this fine powder is left over from the quarrying. In our case, we're working with this rock called olivine that is situated miraculously on a fjord, and so they’re able to transport it and load it directly onto a large bulk vessel and put it almost anywhere in the world with virtually no emissions. So, when you're putting 50, 75,000 tons of material onto a boat, the emissions from that boat become extremely small. In fact, most of the emissions are in that last mile once they get loaded onto a truck and distributed out to the farm. 

18:46

And so, you end up with something that looks like the modern fertilizer industry or even the not modern fertilizer industry. We used to use guano for phosphorus that was harvested from islands where bird droppings had accumulated and those would be transported across the world. In the same way we get sulfur and phosphorus and potassium at these unique quarries in different parts of the world and transported where they need to go. What makes these quarries special usually is some miracle of geography. So, in the case of this one in Norway, just happens to be a large outcrop that sits on a deep-water port. 

Chris Wedding:

All right. As you think about some of the challenges remaining to get your all's solution to scale, what comes to mind? What's not quite solved yet? 

Adam Wolf:

The old challenge was one that we started the company around, which is how to measure it. We founded the company under two principles. One is to make a vertically integrated company. So, oriented around a specific resource that we would bring to market and we really saw this as a way to bring it to scale cost-effectively. And two, we would have to measure it. And so, I spent a lot of time in the agricultural organic carbon context and there the market was really difficult to develop because it was hard to measure and it was hard to model, it was hard to simulate. And so, there was just a lot of ambiguity. 

If you were a buyer or if you were a seller, how much carbon am I buying? Or how much is going to be delivered if I manage my land this way? And so, for us, part of what I loved about the system is that, it's really bounded. Like I can put on one ton of rock onto one acre of land and I know exactly how much carbon is eventually going to be removed. Then I need to take some soil samples to verify that and so that verification, we spent the first two years developing all the fingerprinting techniques that we use to prove that. 

So, you could say, “Okay, great. You figured out how to measure carbon removal with enhanced rock weathering. What's your biggest challenge?” Just like the question you just asked and here, nobody ever overrises these rocks at this scale. So, if you're making concrete, you're pulverizing calcium carbonate and calcining it into calcium oxide and there's a whole set of processes there, but in general, these silicate rocks are not pulverized and they're very hard. So, they're a lot tougher to break down and therefore the machines haven't really been developed for creating this product. 

22:13

And so, we actually spent a lot of time really on the mechanical engineering of how to smash up the rocks, which the machines themselves have already been invented, they're kind of ubiquitous. But all of the material handling aspects of it and loading it onto trucks and getting it applied evenly, all of which has to be done safely so that workers aren't exposed to dust hazards and things like that is not trivial. And so, that's where a lot of our engineering is focused. So, it's exciting to be at the frontier. That's like the best part of this job is that there's frontline science and engineering to be worked on, which is just thrilling. 

Chris Wedding:

Well, coming from chemistry to geology, I wasn't expecting to hear that this is a logistics and mechanical engineering challenge, but I guess the deeper you go, the more problems to uncover and solve and create value out there for sure. On the measurement, so is there a third party, protocol or method for enhanced rock weathering that you all can use to get help buyers to buy with more confidence? How does it work? Or maybe I guess, what's coming perhaps?

Adam Wolf:

No, it's an interesting topic. We're deep in that right now and it takes a little bit to figure out even the market map of who is doing what. It turns out it's not enough to have a methodology that says, “This is how we're going to measure the carbon.” The best methodologies belong to standards with a capital S and the best of those standards are certified by an organization called ICROA. And so, there exists a finite number of these ICROA certified standards. So, Verra, Gold Standard, Puro. These are what people are used to thinking and so each of them is spending some time on methodologies. Then those methodologies, there's two layers to it. 

One is, can we all agree on how nature works and this is what I think of as essential for us and all of our peer companies to come to some agreement on, and not just peer companies, but the buyers and the various NGOs and scientific stakeholders if we can all agree, this is how nature works. Like there's emissions when we extract it, transport it, distribute it, apply it. There's carbon removal when the rock dissolves and then it ends up in the ocean where it's stored on some timeframe. So, how does nature work? 

25:16

Then within that you could picture every company has its own flavor of how to implement that and how to instrument nature. I could have some device that I stick in the ground and monitor all of these biogeochemical processes. I could have a soil sample. I could have a little accumulator that sucks up the bicarbonate that is produced. So, there's a lot of different variations and this is also an area where besides every company figuring out how to do the logistics part, they're also figuring out the system for, how do we measure all the key steps so that we can do this at some scale? 

The insight that I had, and I probably am not unique on this, but in agriculture, it doesn't like things in fields. Like soil sensors, things like that, it's just very hard to maintain instruments. We played a little bit with putting like a resin ball in the ground that would suck up ions so you can measure all these reaction products, but then you'd have to go back and get that little resin ball. What we ended up with is a soil sample and a soil sample is appealing because many of America's acres and certainly in Europe as well have soil samples. Not just the occasional soil sample, but gridded soil samples and those gridded soil samples serve to make recommendations. 

Make sure you go to a doctor's visit, you get an annual physical, there's a routine set of tests that you do, so adding on one more test becomes pretty easy. This enables us to add in some separate chemistry that is done in the same lab, but looks at some different elements that collectively we call them immobile trace elements. Those end up being a record of the rock application, the dissolution and its loss, ultimately removing carbon dioxide with it.

Chris Wedding:

Got it. Another question I'm sure listeners are asking is, how do you make money, Adam? 

Adam Wolf:

Well, that's a great question. This is a market that is starting from catalytic buyers and so there's buyers like Stripe and Microsoft and Shopify that looked at the existing offerings in carbon offsets three, four years ago and found them to be problematic. The key way that they're problematic is using BS counterfactual baselines. 

So, a lot of carbon is like, well, what if I had a forest that I told you I was going to cut it down and you paid me not to cut it down? Well, then maybe you can claim that carbon dioxide that was prevented from getting into the atmosphere. You can see that on the surface, it makes a lot of sense and resulted in the conservation of a lot of intact forests through the REDD+ program in particular, but it's very hard to decide on what that counterfactual baseline is, or ought to have been.

29:12

And so, this is where buyers wanted to get into this truly additional carbon and why companies like Charm and Climeworks are at such a premium is because the carbon that they remove is truly additional. If you paid for it, you get it. Now, it's recognized that those early catalytic purchases, it's at a price that does not scale or, many people could not stomach. So, the average American, our budget is 16 tons of carbon dioxide per person. That's like the emissions of America divided by the population. And so, picture is it $2,000, is it $1,200, is it $500, for most people, those are big numbers, eight grand a year for your carbon removal. So, those are essential to bringing down the price where the next cohort of buyers are large emitters that are legitimately just trying to pay competitive prices as a way to balance their carbon budget. 

Then long-term, I think what you're going to find is that a lot of supply chains are going to account for these emissions internal to their budgeting, it’s called insetting. So, instead of buying offsets from some third party like Eion that, let's be honest, what business do we have in common with Stripe or Microsoft, that's an offset. But you can imagine that there's a lot of emissions within the food and ag industry that naturally this starts to change the carbon budget of the foods we eat. And ultimately, people pay for carbon, either through our taxes or as consumers, and I believe that ultimately this is all going to be through the products we buy. And so, we'll see that this is an insetting solution at scale. 

Chris Wedding:

Okay. So, in addition to companies paying within their industry or outside of their industry for the carbon removals that you all create, is there any scenario where farmers would pay you in the same way that you're replacing something they would normally pay for to provide a clear benefit to complete in their business growing crops?

Adam Wolf:

Yeah. I'd like to think that everybody buys something if they think it's a deal. Like, I pay $16 a pound for coffee and it's outrageous, but I don't ever not buy that. So, I must be getting something out of that $16 a pound of coffee and in the same way, for something to work within the supply chain, every person has to benefit. And so, the farmer is certainly at the center, they're the most important person, but there's also the barge operator and the mill workers and the truck drivers and the agronomists, certainly the farmer, the guys who are running the applicators. So, every person in that whole supply chain gets paid and the way that that's paid for in the traditional agricultural sense is that, all of those inputs create value in the form of props that are sold to processors who buy it.

33:02

The reason why those inputs have value is that they produce more benefit than the cost and what we've seen with our prop applications, farmers have seen a 10 bushel increase in their soybean yields. I think, like a $12 a bushel soybean cost, that's a benefit of around $120 per acre. So, lime prices are in the 20 to $50 territory in the South and picture that farmers may get benefit from the yield that's produced. Ultimately, I'd like them to get a price premium on the props that they produce. This is the whole premise behind the USDA's Climate-Smart Commodities program is to de-commodify farm products so that they have more value. 

Picture 25 or 50 cent premium per bushel can also start to add up and that has value and why does that bushel have a price premium? Well, maybe it's being put into a product that itself commands a premium. So, the most profitable parts of the grocery store are the organic, the non-GMO, the products they're in some way differentiated. Maybe they're using an heirloom variety of tomatoes and a bottle of ketchup. All of those create value for the farmer and they're all ways for the consumer's desire to have a better product, to go back to the farm. 

What I see is that the big opportunity of our time is that our awareness as consumers that are our food dollar goes somewhere and does something, it actually creates the farming system that we want to have. And so, we've seen it in organic and I think we'll see more of it in the climate space. 

Chris Wedding:

Well, I heard a lot of important things there, Adam, but most importantly, I should be drinking coffee with you for this podcast, given the kind of coffee you buy. Anyway, the DOA, Department of Agriculture program you said was Climate-Smart Commodities, is that right? 

Adam Wolf:

Yeah. The USDA had a Climate-Smart Commodities program, and they really just wanted to open the doors to innovation without picking one or another program as being the right approach. They created a mechanism for a lot of people to propose and some of it is carbon programs and conventional crops like corn and soy. There's some that we have seen for beef and other kind of meat products. Some focused-on alcohol, cotton. Picture, there's anything that can have a value to the consumer. 

36:22

Chris Wedding:

Yeah, I'm with you. I think listeners should look at what Department of Ag is doing as a trend that could show up in other industries. Creating distinction in what happens in the production of commodities. They're not all the same. Think green steel, all sorts of green industrial products as well, not just what we eat.

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 raised, 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.

Okay. Let's switch over from Eion to Adam here. So, Adam, reflect back here, advice you might give your younger self. Give us a couple of tidbits here. 

Adam Wolf:

My younger self, I was just voracious to know how to do things. For me, the people that I like to hire, everybody knows how to do a lot of different things and to really just be voracious about self-teaching is really what I see as -- It's so hard to give advice to my younger self without it seeming like do the thing that led to my own success. But ultimately, young people don't have it easy right now. It’s a challenging world in a lot of ways. The template has been set, but really out of this inspiration to know that you can change things if you know how to create things is I think the most powerful lesson. 

Chris Wedding:

Voracious self-teaching. I like that sound bite. I may bring it up over dinner with my kids tonight as well. Tell us some habits or routines, Adam, to keep you healthy, sane and focused as a CEO of startup. 

39:02

Adam Wolf:

Well, I used to run and then I find that the more I run, why am I always sore and always tired? Oh, it's because I'm running too much. And so, I switched to weight lifting and stretching. And so, my current routine is barbells, kettlebells and abundant flexibility, my hamstrings and hip openers. And on the weekends, I'm always making things. It’s construction projects, it's photography, it's art, so I try always to let my brain relax in things that have nothing to do with work, but it always gives me the inspiration to have 10 more ideas when I come back to it. 

Chris Wedding:

Yeah. You're clearly a builder. What's an example of an art or a photography project you got going right now? 

Adam Wolf:

Teaching myself timber framing for a structure we have in the backyard and then having put in the most part of the timber frame, now I'm shingling. Then I cleared out my basement. I spent a bunch of time in Russia, so I'm trying to remember how they plastered the walls and got them so beautifully multicolored in St. Petersburg. It's like archaic building techniques. 

Chris Wedding:

Okay, and what's the use of this structure going to be? 

Adam Wolf:

It's whatever's not a man cave. I want it to be like a community space, do art, do music, have dinner. I really like the idea of public space where people get to spend time and creating space for people. In some ways that's what I most like about having a company is creating the space for everybody else to be able to do what they want to do in their life. And the same thing with having a nice space in the yard is like, well, what if we had a space where we could do art, do performance, make food, have a workshop? 

Chris Wedding:

Yeah, like a studio slash venue of sorts in the backyard. I like that. Regardless for who knows what, right? 

Adam Wolf:

Yeah. Exactly.

Chris Wedding:

Hey, maybe the last one here, I know that your daughter is going to expect you at the playground shortly. Give us a couple of ideas on books, podcasts, tools, or quotes maybe that you think listeners may benefit from. 

41:38

Adam Wolf:

There's a couple books. One is called The Emerald Planet by David Beerling and the other is a book by Wally Broecker called How to Build a Habitable Planet. I know there's a newer version, but there's a really old version with a super hokey cover. What I like about them is that they both talk about this world we're in as this like coupled system that includes life and non-life. There’s physics and chemistry and all these like abiotic processes, but you, me, we're humans, we're organisms. We react to things and depending on what our mood is, we might react to different things differently. That's true of every living thing on our planet is that they're reacting to the changes in circumstances.

For me, it really reinforces some of the wonder of what it is that's on this world and why am I spending my life trying to keep it intact is really around this miracle of evolution and biology. 

Chris Wedding:

It’s well said. It makes me think about folks that leave SpaceX, let's say to come work on something in the climate tech space where the sound bite is something like, “I realized I was creating technology to take us to a different planet yet we've got a pretty damn good one right here. We just need to find more solutions a little more quickly.”

Adam Wolf:

Totally. I mean, who doesn't love looking at the stars? It’s like we are in that universe. That universe is extraordinary and yet Mars is barren. We have such a rare gem in our hands that you spend a little bit of time contemplating what it's going to be like to live out there and realize like, “Gosh, I should spend more time trying to preserve what's down here.”

Chris Wedding:

Yeah. Preach on. Hey, Adam, we'll call it a day with that one. We’re rooting for the success of Eion and eager to have these crushing and handling and marketplace challenges resolved and see this get to scale. 

Adam Wolf:

Let’s hope that in 12 months, I will still be here and will be crushing it.

Chris Wedding:

I think you've used that line before, but I'll take it. It's a good one. All right, Adam. 

Adam Wolf:

I never got a laugh, but it's true. All right, thank you very much. 

Chris Wedding:

You got it.

44:29

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.


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  

Live online course about startup capital raising (coaching, peer feedback): https://t.ly/V6xcB 

DIY course about startup capital raising (170 slides, 70-item library, 250-investor list): https://t.ly/QCcl5