Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#210:
Elise Strobach, CEO of Aeroshield — $25M for Super Efficient Windows. 4x Faster Payback. 40% Lighter. MIT and NASA Science. How to Ignore Criticism.
Podcast Introduction
Chris Wedding:
My guest today is Elise Strobach, founder and CEO of AeroShield. AeroShield is unlocking the next generation of energy efficient windows. They do this by developing the world's most transparent silica aerogel inserts for windows.
Reducing energy loss through windows by 50%. Elise's prior experience includes roles at Johnson Controls, Activate and a PhD from MIT where research on these aerogels began. In this episode you will learn four important takeaways. Number one, how windows lead to 35% of energy loss in buildings and how much worse they are in insulation relative to building walls and insulation and such. Number two, how they're using $25 million in funding to expand beyond their pilot facility and scale up next year. Number three, how to make this super insulating material called Aerogels AKA Frozen Smoke, which should be the name of their company. And number four, why you should ignore criticism from people from whom you wouldn't proactively seek advice. Elise also shares, let's see, three books and one, I guess, documentary to check out as well.
The first is Dare to Lead: Brave Work, Tough Conversations and Whole Hearts. Number two, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. And number three, the People's History of the United States. The documentary series she recommends is Nature on PBS. Perhaps a reminder of why we do some of the work we do and or how ecosystems can be great teachers.
For us as well. Finally, please give AeroShield and Elise a shout out on LinkedIn, Slack or X by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks. All right, before we hop in, I've got a challenge and I guess an invitation for you. All right, first, the background. My goal is to empower 250,000 entrepreneurs, investors and university students to tackle climate change through startups, finance and personal growth. Is that enough? I don't know. It's a lot. Maybe it'll grow. Anyway, the podcast is one way to do that. To that end, the sector needs more inspiration, tools and tips from CEOs and investors in this space. Conveniently, as you may guess, these folks are precisely my guest on this podcast. So here is the challenge. If you and five of your friends rate, review and follow this podcast on Apple and Spotify and share your efforts with me on LinkedIn or in response to my newsletter on Substack, I'll hop on Zoom and brainstorm a climate, tech, business or investment challenge or opportunity with you. Now, is that a reward? Is that punishment?
I don't know. There it is. This is the best way for new folks to learn from the CEOs and investors on this podcast. If the process is unclear, as it was to me in the show notes, you will find a link explaining how to do this. I read every single review. So please tell me and all of us which guest insights you like the most. Thanks so much. Hope you enjoy it.
Podcast Interview
Chris Wedding:
Elise Strobach, founder and CEO of AeroShield. Welcome to the podcast.
Elise Strobach:
Thanks Chris. Excited to be here today.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, so most listeners will have already read the summary hopefully about the podcast and what you all do. I think before that they may have thought, wow, you know, windows. I mean, I like seeing outside my building but, you know, kind of boring. Now you and I know that's not true. Tell us why windows are super exciting.
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, so I think we all appreciate being able to sit next to that window and look outside. But it might come as a surprise that 30 to 40% of the heating and cooling energy that you're paying for in your building is also going out that same window that you're enjoying the view with. So I think it's often surprising that, you know, we love windows so much that just 15% of the area of the outside of our home can be responsible for 30 to 40% of these energy losses. And yet we still make sure. We demand, we make sure that those windows are in there. It's actually one of the number one things that when you ask somebody what makes a building comfortable, you know, that natural lighting and being able to see the environment makes it at the top of that list all the time.
Chris Wedding:
It's ironic, right, that windows make a place comfortable in quotation marks, because if you're losing 40% of your heated or cooled air through those, it's actually less comfortable, potentially, maybe.
Elise Strobach:
Why?
Chris Wedding:
Why is it so bad? I mean, I think people get like, oh, they're thinner than a wall would be, but maybe a little more kind of nerding out. Beyond that, why are windows so bad at kind of keeping the heater cooler inside our buildings?
Elise Strobach:
Yeah. So fundamentally, we can think about it as, you know, a window has to do two things. It has to provide that transparency, that visible light communication, but you also want it to stop that thermal communication. So whether your inside is hot or whether your inside is cold, you want to keep it at that ideal temperature, regardless of what's going on outside. And the kinds of materials that can do both of those things, just from a, you know, a fundamental material science perspective, is really challenging to achieve. So, you know, with glass, a great visual experience, very robust and durable, very low cost relative to other things that you could consider that are clear. But its thermal properties are, you know, 100 times worse than some of thermal insulation materials that we use in our walls.
So from that standpoint, we either then have to choose to reduce that visual experience, which we just mentioned is very important to people, or we have to think of a way to be clever with those transparent materials that we have, make them as insulating as possible. So, for example, in most of the windows that you see today, you'll have two panes of glass with an air gap actually sealed inside. So they're trying to then use air as that insulating material. There are limitations to that because air can start to flow. So just the kinds of materials that you have that are transparent and insulating, very limited. And right now, we're using what we can at scale. Perfect.
Chris Wedding:
All right, that's the setup. Now spike the ball. Elise, what does AeroShield do? How do you solve this problem?
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, so we want to cut those energy losses through those windows in half. And the way that we do that is by actually taking that same kind of glass material and restructuring it by making it in a completely different way. What we make is called an aerogel. So AeroShield makes transparent aerogel insulation. And an aerogel is basically a nanoporous material that is very nanoporous, and that allows them to be one of the most insulating materials in the world, you know, a thousand times more insulating than glass, for example. And what happens is that when we make that aerogel material out of silica, out of glass, we can actually get both of those properties that we talked about that we wanted. Those little nanopores do all the work of insulating and creating this just extreme thermal barrier.
But because it's that glass backbone material, it still lets that light pass through without being interfered with. And that was really AeroShield's unique contribution is during my PhD at MIT, we were studying this kind of hazy or not truly clear yet silica aerogel for use in solar thermal energy harvesting. We found a way to make it truly, visibly clear. And from there, we said, you know, windows definitely have been waiting a long time for this material. Let's switch our focus and commercialize and be able to reduce those energy losses by 65% over a traditional double pane window and without bringing in any other added barriers like thickness, weight, or challenges with durability.
Chris Wedding:
Great. Nanoporous. It's a big word. That's a good Scrabble word. Break it down. What does it mean?
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, so in the same way that you think of porous in a, say, a sponge material, where you can actually, you know, see those pores formed around that matrix of the backbone material. You can imagine that same structure, but now much, much smaller, down to this nanoscale, where the sizes of these pores are on the order of, you know, 5 nanometers. And in addition, the majority of the material is made up of these pores. So in AeroShield's case, our material is actually 95% pore or air. And that means that the majority of what, when you pick up a sheet of our material, it's almost like it's not there. And that's those nanopores, so tiny little pores and lots of them, and they gotta be at that nanoscale.
Chris Wedding:
Interesting. You know, this morning I was listening to, I think it's called The Way of Zen by Alan Watts. And you know, in it, talking about emptiness is form and form is emptiness, which is kind of a quintessential, you know, Zen teaching. Anyway, I imagine picking up your material, where suddenly this Zen, you know, spirituality or whatnot, feels like it's relevant to AeroShield's solution. Maybe your new tagline perhaps, at least.
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, we sometimes call it frozen smoke. It definitely is a very exotic material. And yeah, it's a great suggestion. We'll have to think about that more in our branding.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, please don't. But anyway, let's see. So is my memory correct from many years ago that nanoporous materials or how astronaut spacesuits maybe are insulated? Or is this a different material?
Elise Strobach:
Oh, you're totally right. Actually, aerogel as a class of materials was developed by NASA almost 100 years ago. And not just space suits, but also looking at spacecraft things that are going to go into these extreme environments where you need again, things like super insulation or in our case, we're making them out of glass because we want to have that transparency. But you can make them out of all kinds of different materials. You can even think about, you know, substrates or catalysts as a place where all those little pores create lots of sites that reactions can happen. So definitely lots of use cases. And original one was, yeah, by NASA, thinking about space applications.
Chris Wedding:
Amazing. So that relates to another question which is, you know, you talked about this, the source for this being during your MIT PhD. I think with most kind of hard tech PhDs or just academic research, there are a lot of government dollars that go into going from pure science to applied science. My question was going to be, or maybe it is how many years, or let's say maybe non-dilutive government type dollars have gone into what you're now commercializing.
Is that a fair question?
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, yeah, no, it's a great question. Especially because when you look at the history of AeroShield, we've been, you know, we spun out a lab about five years ago, but I actually joined that lab at MIT 10 years ago and built on a legacy in our lab of really understanding thermal and fluid heat transfer and modeling and then bringing in that aerogel expertise. But you can imagine that we actually started, I joined the lab to join a project from ARPA-E DOE funding. It was called the FOCUS Project, which I'm sure I'm going to get the acronym wrong. But something like Fully Optimized and Concentrated Utilization of the Solar Spectrum.
Chris Wedding:
Round of applause. She did it.
Elise Strobach:
Just don't fact check me there. But the concept was to take the sun's energy and think about filtering it and then passing some of that light that would best suited to electricity generation into a PV panel and then sending the rest of that into something that could collect that as solar thermal energy. And we needed the aerogel in between to allow that sunlight to pass through, but to keep that thermal energy where it needed to be collected. Yeah. And so when we first started with the material, it was hazy, but super transparent. So if I recall, that was about $3 million in funding to get that project started. And the project was actually quite complex when we started.
You know, you were not only collecting the sunlight, but then trying to filter it and then pass it through to these different devices, collect it, and then decide what to do with that energy, whether it got stored or used. And as we advanced through the project, we got so good at making the aerogel that it actually made our device optimization push it all to the solar thermal. So then we got rid of the photovoltaic, and then we really started to focus in on this aerogel. So that's really where I see the start of, you know, AeroShield's kind of journey to finding an application in market was sort of that pivot in the realization that the aerogel was pivotal. And so then after that, we had about three years to develop under that grant. So around 2017, we were wrapping that up.
And by then, you know, under the grant, we had noticed that this aerogel was very important. So really focused on the optical properties there and had something that was quite exciting now for other applications like window retrofits. So that was our next grant, actually, through some internal MIT funding, the Deshpande Center, and then had two years of funding there. And that was, I think, on the order of about 100,000 to $150,000 over those two years. And then we received a local Mass CEC Catalyst grant in the final year. And that was sort of wrapping up the MIT research portion. And then as we transitioned out of the lab, that was when we started to apply for things like NSF grants, Small Business Innovation Research grants, SBIRs, as well as a lot of other non-dilutive funding sources.
A few opportunities from the Department of Energy as well. And then I will fast forward because it's about five years of AeroShield applying for a spread of these grants to develop multiple aspects of our technology. And then recently we actually were just awarded from ARPA-E again their scale up grant, which is awarded to legacy ARPA-E projects. So it was really important that we had that original ARPA-E grant from MIT where that patent on that clear aerogel material came from. And now that's allowed us to apply for and be awarded 14 and a half million dollars to be able to build a production facility and bring a first product to market in 2016.
Chris Wedding:
Very exciting. So, I mean, ballpark, I don't know, 20 million bucks or something of non-dilutive funding going into.
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, probably. Yes. Yeah, I would say about 20, 20 million in grant and probably closer to 23 to 25 million in total non-dilutive funding.
Chris Wedding:
Got it. Wonderful. Okay, so you just mentioned that this new funding will allow you to maybe you tell me where you are in kind of building this first factory to produce windows that can reduce energy loss by half.
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, so we actually just opened up a pilot facility in Waltham, Massachusetts that can produce. About our beachhead product is actually entry doors. And so those window panels that go inside your entry doors can make about 5,000 of those per year. And the goal is, you know, kind of getting first samples out of that and then we'll be building about 300,000 square feet. So that's about 30,000 of those door units. We're going to be starting, hopefully picking a site and starting construction on that next year.
Chris Wedding:
Got it. And I think it'll be, it'd be helpful for you to explain why you're starting with entry doors because when Aaron, your partner there at AeroShield was on a panel I moderated at BIRD this year, he told the audience, you know why you all picked that as your beachhead market. And I thought, wow, that's, that makes so much sense. Anyway, you could have picked a lot of places to go for your beach.
Why? Why entry doors?
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, so entry doors in particular within the larger residential window and door market, they meet a lot of the same specifications that window applications have. So in terms of meeting the larger market, they are very exciting. And in October 2023, Energy Star, or the major driver for rating and certifying windows, and a major honestly driver for consumers to know how and what to pick for an energy efficient product, it applies to entry doors for the first time. And that means that the current technologies, double pane windows, can no longer meet those minimum requirements that unlock things like tax incentives for people looking to invest in a more energy efficient product. And some of the reason that it's so hard and why Energy Star potentially hasn't applied the doors before is you can just think of how operable they are.
And if you wanted to make a triple pane window in your door that gets so heavy, it gets so thick, it gets so expensive. So for a lot of reasons, entry doors are very much in need of our thinner, lighter solution. We can reduce the weight and thickness by about 40% over a triple pane technology.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. I just think it's so interesting that beachhead markets really are often obscure, tiny, not thought about too often. That's part one. Part two is just watching for policy inflection points.
Elise Strobach:
Right.
Chris Wedding:
That make, you know, a new innovation feasible. Where before it was less feasible.
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I will just share that, you know, for us, doors were sort of crossed off early because of the size limitation. So, you know, even along our journey, getting an understanding of the difference between what people who really hadn't worked with aerogels before thought the big risks were versus what they actually were. And then to your point on the regulatory. So surprised even in the five years that AeroShield has started and made it to this point. Those Energy Star influencers and other regulatory pieces have changed. So some of the assumptions that we had when we first made a guess, there are new opportunities. So we constantly have to be looking for those.
Chris Wedding:
Can we go back a little bit to the nanopore stuff? Can you break down the science a little bit to say, like, how you actually produce this frozen smoke, if you will?
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, I can give a little bit. So the one caveat is that I'm going to talk about our aerogel process, which is one of the simpler chemistries and simpler fabrication processes, all things considered. So, generally, what ends up happening is we basically mix two chemicals together. And they start to react. And they start to react everywhere, all at once, and forming little particles. And it happens so quickly that they all sort of, you know, turn into this. These little particles form everywhere and just barely connect. It almost looks like beads on a string. Right. Just barely touching, but connected. And this forms what we call a sol gel, a solution gelation sheet of material or a wet gel. And it's got the texture of jello. It's a very bizarre thing. And basically, what we formed there is an aerogel.
But it's got all this water in those pores that we need to get out. Because the water is going to conduct all that thermal. And so we need to replace those with air or some other insulating gas. And the question is, how do you do that? It's pretty tough from a nanopore because it turns out that the same surface tension that when you look at a glass of water on the counter and you see that meniscus trying to pull itself up the glass, that is surface tension. And as you get into smaller and smaller sizes that the water's trying to climb up out of that surface tension becomes relatively, very strong. And it will break all the material.
And so that means if you were to leave this wet gel out on the counter and just let it evaporate, that it would crush, it would just turn into tiny little particles of. They wouldn't be aerogel and they wouldn't quite be glass. They'd be something in between. So instead we have to have a process step that extracts out that liquid without damaging the structure. And we use that, we use a process called critical point drying. So in the same way that you can actually think of a strawberry and you might have a sun dried strawberry and it sort of gets crushed and wrinkly and looks different. And then you have a freeze dried strawberry and that structure is sort of, it looks volume wise, it looks the same size as strawberry and it's sort of crunchy.
In the same way you can think about the critical point drying step as freeze drying this strawberry. But we don't go to low temperatures, we actually go to high temperatures. And we go to the critical point using CO2 actually that we can recycle. We actually use the CO2. We bring it in as liquid. We replace that solvent, whatever that liquid is, and that wet gel with liquid CO2. Then we can take that CO2 in a big pressure vessel with a big lid that fits these whole sheets of aerogel inside. We can then replace, we take that liquid CO2 and then we can extract it using its critical point. So then what you get out is a, is a sheet of aerogel that then is 95% air and clear and insulating.
Chris Wedding:
I feel like we should applaud right now. Yeah, that was fun. That was a great kind of, you know, hearkening back to a minor in chemistry many years ago. Thank you for that.
Elise Strobach:
I appreciate that. I have a mechanical engineering background, so I often worry about representing the chemical processes correctly.
Chris Wedding:
So, yeah, I'm sure no one will correct us. Hey, what's been one of the hardest parts building a venture like this?
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, I think it actually probably comes from the, a little bit of the, you know, coming from the technical background, you know, I even looking back on how far I've had to come in the, I'm going to say the extroversion category, you know, linking back to that true definition, or at least what I see as the true definition of just where I draw my energy. I'm actually. I love working with people and I love the team and I love the mission. I love the impact. It's almost. I almost love it a little bit too much of. It's easy to give everything and then, you know, you do that too often too repeatedly. You sort of. You sort of don't have anything left. For example, when the, you know, the company day ends and you've sort of given all, you know, what is left.
So I think that there are some pieces around setting the boundaries and probably setting. Setting boundaries around, you know, what's important to me and how I'm going to grow in this. In this longer journey. I think making sure that I do those things when I'm in a. I'm going to say the right frame of mind to be able to balance the different needs of the business and how much I care about those things, but then also my natural nature and maybe some limitations of just who I am that allow me to have strengths in the role, but also means that I need to. I need to take care of myself in terms of the expectations.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, and we're going to touch on those parts again in the second part of the pod. But maybe let's just go from how what you just said translates to, you know, establishing a certain culture, work culture at AeroShield. How do those two relate, I wonder? Kind of balancing almost like overwork or burnout, perhaps?
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, I think it's definitely. It's definitely something that I know I've struggled with on the journey of the duality of, you know, I have to take care of myself to be able to make good decisions and see the right things. But then there are also some things that only I can do. And I also recognize that how I model things for the team is oftentimes more important than what I say. So it's really hard to say, take care of yourselves, make sure you eat, go home on time, and then, you know, have me at the office not following those rules. So I'd say that's. That's been hard.
But at the same time, you also want to be, you know, as the leader, I think you want to be the last one out the door, making sure everybody gets taken care of and everybody goes home. So I would say that I've been really appreciative of the culture that we've grown. And I definitely want to give credit to my two co founders, Dr. Kyle Wilke and Aaron Baskerville Bridges, because I think that there's also an aspect of. I think if I'd have done it alone and not had somebody else to see struggling with the same things, but maybe at different points in time along the journey. I think culturally having multiple examples of how you deal with burnout, how it manifests and that in.
I also think that the clear theme amongst us is that you have to pay attention to it and you have to be aware of, I think about it from an engineering perspective. Energy in compared to energy out. You can't be drawing energy out if you're not making sure that there's energy going in.
Chris Wedding:
I like that. Tell us about the five year vision of AeroShield. What's it look like?
Elise Strobach:
Yeah. So AeroShield's mission is to enable the manufacture and adoption of these sustainable materials like this aerogel that we're talking about, that really make our homes and lives more comfortable and by 2030, really want to be having mass market impact. So as I mentioned in kind of 2026 and the next kind of tranche of goals that we're focused on are getting that first aerogel product into market to demonstrate all of the impact potential that we know that it can have. And then after that we get the opportunity to take that and then. And then really try and pump that scale up. So trying to think about, you know, other players in the market and, you know, potential partnerships that we can help go even faster to getting to that mass market potential.
But ultimately we see being able to make and deploy about 25 million square feet of aerogel into the market a year. When you look historically at what that, you know, the product that we're talking about in terms of its thermal performance, what that can do to the larger market and its ability to functionally raise the minimum thermal performance of windows, starting with the United States. I think that's really what the five year vision is about, is getting that first aerogel into product, first aerogel product into market. So that way we know how to build it at scale. And then demonstrating to the mass market that this technology is ready to change the industry in the way that we've seen technologies like it changed the industry 70 years ago.
Chris Wedding:
Got it. And is your future uses of AeroSeal, is it? I'll say only, but is it. Is it focused on windows or are there other kind of product applications for AeroShield, you don't need to say yes, by the way. Focus is a wonderful thing and there's plenty, there are plenty of windows out there. But maybe just kind of, is it only windows? If so, is it residentially focused? Does it branch out beyond windows in this kind of, you know, five year vision?
Elise Strobach:
I say that our five year vision is focused primarily on getting to this mass market. And we've identified the residential window market as the right now, the most attractive opportunity for us to get there. But at the same time we are looking at other applications. The nice part is our material actually can integrate high enough up in the manufacturing chain that it's actually called an insulated glass unit. When you seal that aerogel inside of two panes of glass and actually insulated glass units, you start to find everywhere. So definitely residential and commercial buildings, but actually like your grocery store freezer doors, you know, some industrial equipment requires specialty viewports. You can think about, you know, trains, planes and automobiles. So there are a lot of things that we're looking at and are interested in.
We just see right now that getting that mass market capacity demonstrated, which feels right now like we have the momentum in the residential window and door market. I think that ultimately we are excited to not only explore, you know, manufacturing ourselves, but also licensing opportunities because we feel like that could be a way to really scale faster than just what we could do once we have that, you know, ad scale manufacturing figured out.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, that's a great clarification that to reach significant market penetration, it's hard for anybody to control all the manufacturing on their own versus licensing as well. A drop in of sorts. Cool, that's great. Very exciting. Let's switch to the personal side of the podcast here, Elise. The first question is tell us what kind of advice you might give a younger Elise or maybe think about just any kind of emerging professional building your career of impact in this space.
Elise Strobach:
I think my first piece of advice is actually one of my favorite, which is learning to not internalize criticisms from people who you wouldn't go to advice for. I think especially in a career in impact, there are a lot of opportunities to learn from how we've been doing things and a lot of opportunities to look at new ways to try things. And I think being able to learn who to listen to and who not to. You're never gonna, you're never gonna please everybody when you're going for, you know, the mass audience. And I think that sort of, that reframing of just because somebody offers me a piece of advice or feedback or perspective doesn't mean that I have to take it. And I found, hey, would I be asking, if I, if you asked me who I would go to on this topic, would this be the kind of person that I would go to? Being able to say no and then take their feedback and put it in the right place where I internalize it. And I'll say obsess over it. Or in this case, learning to not obsess over it. I think that's been huge.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. There. It reminds me of a couple of things. One is this phrase that love me or hate me, there's no money in the middle, which, not to all after money, but it's enough that we want folks to hate us. But it's like, yeah, if you, if folks really like you can really kind of put yourself. The culture, the vision, the mission out there, if they really like you, they're more inclined to partner, to buy, to license, et cetera. If they're in the middle somewhere. Eh? Right. They're too late to write the check. It's too much. Quote, unquote. Another one is something along the lines of our haters are usually not more accomplished, happier, successful than we are. So you got a question like, what's the motivation of somebody hating on me right now?
Is it because they're already where I want to be or the opposite? Anyway, great start there, Elise. How about, how about habits? Tell us how you maintain your health, sanity, focus, building AeroShield?
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, I think so. So one thing that I just wanted to share maybe as a little bit of a. This is how I operate. I. I find that my habits and routines are. Are changing quite often, actually on the order of about six months. And it would have been something that, you know, when I was going through, you know, grad school, definitely was a very habitual, you know, liked the familiarity and the comfort of those things. But I have found that through this job in particular and the. My view, but also who I am is changing. And I found that just habits and routines have always changed. One thing that I've probably stuck with on more cycles than most is I've actually stopped using my alarm. I use it as a backup only on days when I have really critical meetings that start early.
But just doing the practice of when I go to bed the night before, sort of looking at the clock, thinking about the next day. I'm an obsessor at night anyway, so I was going to be worrying about the next day and what I have to do. So transitioning that into saying, hey, I'm going to allocate how much time I need to address those things tomorrow morning. And then I'm going to make this little mental note, a mental alarm clock of when I want to get up and then I'm going to go to sleep and not worry. And then when I wake up, if I see the clock and that's my first alarm and my real alarm is one to two hours later, I can decide then how I want to use that morning.
Is it still the way that I was feeling about it last night? I find that those reflections of being able to sleep on it, but pulse check really explicitly where I'm at the night before compared to the morning. With enough time then to address however I'm feeling. And it does vary. There'll be weeks at a time when it's. I just need to meditate on, you know, what's going to come that day so that I can feel super prepared and then I won't be anxious. And sometimes, you know, sometimes I do go back to bed. Cause what I really need is a couple hours of extra sleep. And sometimes I'll do something crazy like get up and you know, start, start making something that's gonna, you know, I'm gonna eat for dinner later. Just go, you know, very non.
Work and think about, you know, very personal things or think about hobbies that I wanna work on the next day. But you know, I definitely find that the not waking up with the shock of an alarm, feeling like it's my choice, and then being able to, once I wake up, engineer that first hour or two of my day to set me up for my best, that's just really changed my overall anxiety levels, I think.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I don't know who said it, but something like that. A good morning starts the night before, right? Whether it's, you know, you've got your running, you know, shoes, whatever, shorts laid out the night before. Guess what? The run in the morning is a whole lot easier. I think you're doing something like this, right? Kind of setting the, the stage for a productive morning. Whether that's work or non work. You know, I can totally relate this morning by the way I use an alarm. But this morning my body was ready to get up at 5 because I went to bed early and I was like, you know, I could get up and have a, just a blazing, you know, meditation this morning and I was like, you know, or my body is telling me what you need more is actually, you know, the last hour sleep here. Yeah, last sec was. Was, I'll say less productive, but more. More needed. Let's go to the last one here. What are a couple of maybe books, podcasts, quotes, tools, et cetera, that listeners might find value in?
Elise Strobach:
So I definitely have to put Brene Brown on that list. Huge fan of. I think Dare to Lead is a great book. She's also got Atlas of the Heart, which is a little bit newer. And definitely really appreciate that we've actually had a chance to kind of have a book club at AeroShield and discuss a bit. I would say some of the. Maybe the more surprising ones that are a little less obvious, how they connect in are. I really have gotten a lot of value from A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. And in particular there, I think there's just the. Just the sheer volume of examples of history and what really happened, and the difference between how I was taught a lot of those things and how I had internalized and understood our shared history in the United States compared to the reality of what really happened, and offering those underrepresented perspectives, it keeps me very humble. It also keeps me aware of how some of these biases, how some of these just in the way that I was educated, how that shifts my thinking and some of the assumptions I have around, you know, what leading people looks like and what really good ethical decision making looks like and what the outcomes are from that. I just find actually studying history, you know, post school to be incredibly useful.
And then I'm like, one other random one on the list, it seems random, is I actually really enjoy Nature, the Nature series from PBS. And there's an episode called Serengeti Rules, which is about keystone species. And I find that super interesting because they were looking at ecosystems and trying to say, how do we reverse, you know, some of this ecological diversity loss? How do we restore these places to their former glory? And they found that there were species, I actually think that it started in, like, tide pools with starfish. And they realized that they could make all these other changes and, you know, bring this population up, and then it wouldn't sustain itself. It just would continue to decline. And then they found that if they addressed the starfish, that they were an enabler of the ecosystem. And they have many examples of that.
And it's just very interesting of one, I think it really challenges my assumptions that one, that we really have this very intimate understanding of almost anything the fact that we can have this major insight after we've been doing so much of this ecological study for what I think is already quite a long time. But I think the other aspect of it is you can throw like we could throw everything at those ecosystems to try and fix them. We could throw almost unlimited resources. And if you don't really look to understand that ecosystem and how it's functioning and what the changes that you're making are leading to, you don't ever get to the impact that you want, you're going to miss that keystone species. And almost by trying everything all at once, you may hide that insight.
So I also look at that and I think about those nature documentaries holistically, but this one in particular as a reminder that I'm there to help this ecosystem that we're growing in this company, but also our place in the larger ecosystem of our industry and then that industry's place in our larger global mission as humanity. And it's so interesting that you really have to study and you really have to look at what's going on before you can make changes if you really want to make them efficiently. So I just love that one because it definitely blew my mind and it made me start to really draw this analogy of, hey, the natural world is, actually has a lot of great analogies for leading people and teams.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Listeners can't see you, but if I had to like personify, you're actually levitating right now with like steam coming out of your ears. You're so excited. Yeah. It's contagious. Well done. Well done. I think your starfish example there may also tie back to the Howard Zinn book on the People's History of the US like the almost forgotten, less thought of populations, et cetera, being far more important than we have historically kind of given them credit for, let's say. Anyway, not a perfect analogy, but they feel there's some similarity.
Elise Strobach:
Oh, I definitely agree. I think it's a really great call out. I honestly probably wouldn't have connected those two things before. It, it's almost a little bit of like, you know, finding that, scraping that last bit of knowledge from the pan that, you know, maybe we've missed up until now.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. You know, on your Brene Brown, The Atlas of the Heart, what I found interesting in that book is that she talks about whatever it is, you know, 87 or some number, some large number of emotions, let's say we can feel but that most often in surveys of thousands of people, we express three, right? Happy, mad, sad, like we're freaking in kindergarten. They have to rhyme almost. And then she goes on to say like, you know, the. Or she doesn't say it, but it's some other, you know, whatever, philosopher, thinker. The limits of our language or the limits of our life or something like this. And I think, wow, like our inability to express what we're thinking or feeling in this example of 87 versus 3 is limiting for us to experience life. Look what build companies, build the right cultures, et cetera.
So, yeah, I think there's a reason she gets the attention she gets.
Elise Strobach:
Yeah, I think that's, I think it's a great point. And I think it. There's also, I think sometimes when people hear that language piece, they go, well, then I have to use big exotic words to describe like how I'm feeling and thinking. And I think, you know, as you go through your book, I think you see, no, it's actually, it's. It's be as honest and as simple and straightforward as you can. So I think it's a great example of people don't realize how maybe easy it is to expand, with just a little bit of effort.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, yeah. I think the only big word most folks haven't heard from that list is freudenfreude, the opposite of schadenfreude, like joy in other people's joy I think it is. I think the only big word most folks haven't heard from that list is was it Freudenfreud?
Elise Strobach:
Joy. Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Anyway, listen, Elise, good stuff, far ranging conversation here. We're all rooting for your all's success at AeroShield.
Elise Strobach:
Definitely appreciate that. We're excited to solve this problem, so hopefully that comes through today.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, it comes through. If only we're all on video, but I don't have time for that. Anyway, great stuff, Elise, thanks.
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