Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts

#213:

Julian Ryba-White, CEO at Mark1 – FOAK Finance. Low-Carbon Project Development as a Service. RMI, Flour, and Deep Science Ventures Partnership. TRL vs ARL for Climate Tech.

Podcast Introduction

Chris Wedding:

My guest today is Julian Ryba-White, Co-founder and CEO at Mark1. Mark1 is a public benefit corporation focused on accelerating the commercialization of emerging industrial technologies and climate solutions. Spun out of Deep Science Ventures and RMI, Mark1 offers early-stage project development support, front-end planning, and catalytic capital DevEx for innovative companies by bridging the gap between technology development and project development. Very different, both important, they help startups navigate the complexities of project financing, offtake agreements, and regulatory processes.

Julian was previously a principal at Nokomis Energy, senior director at 10K Solar, and a manager at SolarCity.

Here are five topics we covered:

Number one, bridging the commercialization gap. He explains the unique challenges companies face when transitioning from technology development to project development. Lots of VC funding, let's say, but pretty new to infrastructure, real asset project funding and how Mark1 bridges this gap.

Number two, Adoption Readiness Levels. Julian talks about these ARLs, as well as the TRLs (Technology Readiness Levels) that come out of NASA. The adoption and readiness levels come out of the DOE more recently to kind of place a company on a maturity scale to know when they're ready for funding for project finance.

Number three, we covered catalytic capital. Julian details their development capital funding approach, offering $300,000 to $500,000 for pre-FID, pre-NTP stages when the real capital comes in to fund the whole project. Development capital is tricky and tied to milestones.

Number four, holistic project development. Mark1's bespoke program identifies gaps in technology, finance, and equity, helping these startups with co-development agreements and services.

Finally, we covered career advice for emerging professionals. Julian emphasizes the importance of patience, family time, and human connection despite how busy we are in balancing personal and professional growth.

Please give Julian and Mark1 a shout-out on LinkedIn or X by sharing this podcast with your people.

Podcast Interview

Chris Wedding:
Julian Ryba-White, co-founder and CEO at Mark1. Welcome to the podcast.

Julian Ryba-White:
Thanks for having me, Chris. Great to be here.

Chris Wedding:
So when I first heard about Mark1 being launched, I thought, what a cool freaking idea, right? As we discussed on our prior call, you know, the kind of companies you're helping, they're amazing at taking a tech from an idea to largely de-risked through a bunch of venture capital dollars and lots of PhDs and engineers and all the rest. But then building a project, wow. Like a whole set of new skills, vocabulary, risk, return, investors, all the rest. So maybe let's go kind of deeper on that problem. Define the problem, stats, scale, et cetera, that Mark1 is solving.

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, thanks. I think it's called, when I said, what we like to say is like, you know, technology development is not project development. Project development is not technology development. And they are, they are kind of those different skill sets and different languages and things like that. If I'm to kind of back up and talk about where, you know, Mark1 comes from, where this idea comes from, we're a, we're a public benefit corporation being spun out of Deep Science Ventures, the venture creator out of London, and Rocky Mountain Institute RMI, the policy think tank here in the U.S.

Both arriving at a very similar thesis about this messy middle first of a kind, like what's going on with Climate Tech 2.0. And when we look at this space, we see exactly what you're saying. Amazing founders, amazing teams, technology that's brilliant and is getting to TRL 5, 6, 7, kind of 8 world where, you know, you can say, hey, there's real-world operating data here, this stuff works. What you see from there though, is just a need to do more in that space to make sure that the late-stage commercialization and early-stage project development skill sets are in place.

These are very hard skill sets to define specifically. And I think that's one of the things that's hard here is it's hard to write a pure, specific formula. It's hard to know, well, why did you need a head of sales and what kind of person did you need and what is project development really doing on this project? Because on that project it's a totally different thing. And so you end up with this desire, this belief that there's this kind of monolithic exercise. And in reality, every project is its own unique creature. And that's the kind of skill set you kind of are looking for.

In pure stats and thinking about this really big picture here, the IEA says that there are something like 600 different technologies we need to fully decarbonize our society. And somewhere in the 50% range have not reached this first of a kind of commercial demonstration scale, and we're all familiar with a lot of these things, whether it's sustainable aviation fuel, certain types of hydrogen, industrial heat, cement, concrete. There's a lot of these spaces where like there are technologies we need there for them to decarbonize and they're not mature enough yet to really just run, but they also don't necessarily have clear business models with them, and that's often the commercialization piece of it.

And so when we look at that, and then we go talk to a bunch of founders, people who have been through this cycle, we've talked to hundreds of companies that have either successfully or unsuccessfully navigated, you know, this, this journey, this kind of, you know, commercialization valley of death per se. We hear a lot of the same things, is that they weren't prepared and they didn't appreciate the level of complexity that was required when you think about financing, offtake and origination, siting and regulatory, even technical management as you go forward with EPCs and things like that. And it was hard for them to then go easily find the types of partners that they needed in order to solve those problems. The right EPCs, the right engineering firms, the right law firms, et cetera.

So RMI and Deep Science Ventures both come to this conclusion, let's call it 18, 24 months ago, that something in the project development layer is missing, something in that late-stage commercialization is missing and we need to do more to support companies there. And so this is the origin and the genesis of Mark1. A lot of people talk about the first of a kind problem. That term has kind of become a term of art over the last couple of years. And I think, you know, we're, we're definitely thinking about that same space here in the sense that the capital-intensive technologies are not right for venture capital to cross this gap.

You need to be far enough along where we really understand that we have some data that we can kind of analyze for you. And then from there you need a really good clear plan that thinks holistically across all of the risk profile of a project, all of the risk profile of an offtake agreement, and has the team and expertise that can actually navigate that thing through the project finance or growth equity exercise that project's going to need to get feed FID, you know, and FID type funding and so it's that early, it's that early-stage project development that is so important.

And what we heard from a lot of these founders is where they could use the most help and where there was the least appreciation. And so that's what we set off to do is to say, okay, let's see if we can't help these technologies, these founders, these brave companies with skill sets specific to that moment and with an ecosystem of partners organized to come quickly to aid when those problems or challenges are identified. And so that's the exercise that Mark1 is working on. It's a combination of bringing human capital, project development, commercialization talent to these companies as they reach this kind of planning stage for their commercial scale projects and an organized ecosystem so that they can get access to the, you know, the best, the brightest, the, the firms that are best suited for what is needed across all the different capabilities within a project.

Whether that's, you know, just legal, whether that's siting, whether that's permitting, whether that's environmental, whether that's traditional engineering, insurance, etc. Instead of them having to go out and source those partners, can we bring them more of those partners to them so that they get both that holistic decision-making and evaluation and planning exercise that is what professional project development is. And they get access to a bigger ecosystem than they could access on their own to be able to kind of quickly find those right partners and have best success on a project.

Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Amazing, amazing setup. Let's unpack a few things, both that you said and that are kind of from your old public presence, TRL, just to find TRL for folks that are less familiar with this fund. NASA scale.

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, yeah. Technology readiness levels are a scale that as you mentioned, NASA put in place many years ago primarily to evaluate technology as it's, you know, ready for, for space flight and usage. And they've been adopted more readily across the technology development space, you know, by lots of firms. I'm sure there are a lot of venture capital firms, government entities, accelerators that all use kind of TRL scales. And they just think about TRL 1 is very early IP. TRL 3 might be that you've proven how to do this at lab scale or bench scale. TRL 5, 6, you're starting to say I have a pilot with real-world operating data. TRL 9 is the top of the scale and is where things like solar and wind and stuff are at now on top of like much more traditional technologies, say like gas plants or smartphones or things like that.

And Mark1 is not kind of necessarily leading here, but Mark1 takes a slightly more sophisticated view here. In our opinion, the most important thing about emergent technology is unit economics and pathways to adoption. And so if you're familiar with some of the work that say Vanessa Chan and the Jigger Shaw and the DOE and the OTT has been doing around adoption readiness levels, Mark1 is very much a believer and a subscriber to. You know, you need to look at these adoption readiness levels. You need to look at the permitting pathways and the regulatory environment and the community environment and the supply chains and not just does the tech work. And I think you see a lot of places where like you make tech work but it never gets adopted. And that's because you didn't have that whole story. You didn't have the business case, you didn't have the full pathways to adoption. And so you can have the best plan, you can have the best technology, but you don't get a permit, you'll never build the thing. And that could be why, you know, your first of a kind project dies. And you know, these are things that in the front end planning exercise of, you know, traditional project development, we spend a lot of time mapping those things out.

And so back to your point about TRLs, our view is that TRL is kind of one access or maybe one of three dimensions that are very important along with adoption readiness levels and kind of the specific team and location, everything you're going to try and execute on. And so it takes a very sophisticated view there in order to really appreciate the full risk profile of a project and feel like you really have a plan that, you know, you can run to, that run all the way to, you know, COD on.

Chris Wedding:
Well, you read my mind with bringing up the adoption readiness level score as kind of a, you know, maybe more mature, different version of TRL. I think having been in enough, you know, conference rooms with, with Vanessa rightfully kind of highlighting this, this alternative view, it's like, it's like a, a mantra, right? Let's go to the next one. FID. So just for folks not in project finance, what's FID?

Julian Ryba-White:
So FID is final investment decision. And so, you know, it's interesting as I've kind of stepped into this space and you know, my background has been traditionally in solar and storage. We often don't use FID in that development cycle. We would use things like NTP as an example, but they all kind of mean the same thing. The capital that is needed to build the plant has now been made fully available or made available to the point where you can begin construction. So in traditional industrial cycles you'll see more of like a front end loading a feed an FID. These are kind of the different stages and you might in say solar wind development or power generation development. Think of these more of like, you know, origination, early project development, notice to proceed, you know, things like that. So FID, final investment decision.

Chris Wedding:
So I'm just realizing I have a bunch more questions obviously, but maybe before I even get to those, to unpack what you all are doing, how about just, just highlight the announcement. You have that, look you're open for business. Please folks go knock on your door, right?

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So Mark1, January 13th. Open for applications for our first cohort of companies. We're looking to partner with anywhere from, you know, three to six probably companies in our first iteration here and work with them through kind of front-end planning of that commercial scale project and then the early stages of project development to help bring them in a accelerated fashion, hopefully to that feed stage where they can raise the capital for the late-stage project development and then of course onto FID and construction. So we'll be open for applications through February 28th.

And what we're really looking for is those companies that are sitting really right at that moment or slightly before that moment of starting to go pursue their commercial scale project with pre-bankable technology that you need the capital that you need, capital that you need to have capital that venture, you know, venture capital is not going to carry you through that project. Right. So it's capital intensive and you may need blended capital stacks or things like that because traditional project finance may not be ready to carry you. This is the true messy middle. This is the, what a lot of people mean by the FOAK problem or the first of a kind problem, the commercialization value of death.

Once you've done the first one, the second one, the third one, it's easier to think about traditional capital structures. But that first project is just so risky in many ways for traditional capital. And so we need to bring more projects to this moment so that we can have, and we need to do a better job of helping capital and everybody understand the profile. And so that's really what Mark1 is here to do, is to help these teams, give them additional firepower, help them from a project development and commercialization lens. We can play roles including kind of lead the project development exercise holistically for the project. We can play more of a seconded role where we're part of the team, we have some of our team playing certain roles within the team. And we're bringing catalytic capital in the form of development capital to those projects to help pay for site control and legal fees and permitting matrices and all of the costs of devex early that there aren't traditional development capital, a lot of development capital vehicles out there for this type of thing and companies often end up spending their venture capital on it.

So our goal is really to find the best companies, the brightest companies at this stage, and make sure that instead of them trying to get through this on series A by themselves, they actually have a project development partner, which isn't a traditional model in the space. There's really no such thing as a FOAK project developer because the risk profile of FOAK projects, you could never survive probably on just that portfolio. And so this is what we're here to do and why it's initially a catalytic play coming to market.

Chris Wedding:
And how do folks apply? Julian?

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, so go to our website. You know, you can go apply right there. It's about 35 questions. Just click the button, get in, you can go see it now. You can save your progress while here in process and asking your team how you want to respond to questions. But what we're really trying to get to is an understanding of you in kind of five basic places. So, you know, one is what is your technology readiness level? Where is the technology at? 2 is, you know, where is the team at? How mature is the team and how much do you appreciate what it means to staff and resource and go execute a project?

The third is kind of what I call commercial readiness. How much can we appreciate your, your unit economics? How much can we appreciate? You know, what kind of LOI's or strategic relationships do you have in place for offtake or feedstock or whatever those key things are that are the big risks for your technology? It's important to us that you have a significant kind of CO2 equivalent reduction. You know, there's an importance here, both from an investment thesis and an overall, you know, mission alignment, that these are going to be climate positive projects and technologies that we then want to see scaled. And then we want to appreciate that you have a good project thesis. We want to appreciate that you understand what it means, how you define a project, what it means to actually call something a project, and that you have some appreciation for the elements of it and you don't have to be great at it.

Obviously that's what we're here to help with. But helping go going through that process, even filling out those, answering those questions, even just doing that will help you appreciate how we as a project development shop and as project development professionals think about a lot of the risk profile of a project and you think about and talk about structuring a project and what matters in a project. So go to the website, click the button and apply.

Chris Wedding:
And help listeners understand the right stage. So we heard TRL 5, 5+ as a stage. You mentioned series A. I think somewhere on your website you talk about growth stage. Obviously there's no perfect cutoff. But at what level stage of venture funding or otherwise is the right one to have you guys?

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, I think less of it as very specific to the venture cycle. Although I think probably people who do that think that way. Like we're probably talking about you have a series A and you use that series A to really maybe finish out your pilot or maybe even a demonstrator. For some people that could be a series B. Some people may have gotten there on seed. It depends a lot on the tech. I like to think about it more that you have real-world operating data, at least at what I think of as like a pilot scale. So not like a lab or bench scale.

And this is where like the TRL kind of model is meaningful there and it's kind of this TRL 6 window, maybe it's five or five and a half. You've kind of got your pilot, it's starting to generate data and you're starting to lean in on how to go to scale. It's going to be different for each tech a little bit because some technologies will have, you know, no scale up risk. What you did in pilot is the same form factor and it's modular and you're just going to do a bunch of those to get to some sort of scale. Some technologies will have significant scale up risk where you're saying we're going to do this at 100x of the last time and then you're going to, you're going to strategize your project a little bit differently there, things like that.

But anyone who is really, you know, just commissioning their pilot, just about to commission their pilot or has some good data on their pilot or real-world operating data of this tech out in the real world, you know, we're ready to talk.

Chris Wedding:
Great. You mentioned your initial kind of cohort, if you will, being three to six companies. How long do you imagine working with just these three to six before saying we have bandwidth or capital to take on the next cohort.

Julian Ryba-White:
Kind of couple different angles to that question there. So kind of first one, how long do we expect to work with this cohort? So every relationship with every company is unique. There's a level of cohort-ness in that these are the companies that are kind of in this place at the same time. So of course there's some opportunities to learn and share and I think especially at the executive level, appreciate others going through this cycle at the same time. I think that's important for us. But the program is designed to be bespoke to each company.

We spend anywhere from kind of one to six months. It depends just on the maturity of everything going through that front-end planning exercise. And then in that exercise we will then move to entering into a co-development agreement. And this is where the developer as a service model comes in, where because we've done that front-end planning exercise, we've figured out what the gaps in the plan were, where we think the biggest risks are, where should we have the heaviest resource. We've been able to layer in things like perspectives from project finance, EPCs, insurance companies, you know, we're able to bring that ecosystem to the table early so they can inform the structuring of the project.

And now we can say very clearly these are where the gaps are or these are where Mark1 is most excited to participate. And generally our model is to make sure that we bring some development capital with us to the project, all at 3 to $500,000. And we're looking again to tie returns on the project to milestone-based success and equity. So that goal is to get to that through what's called like FEL-2 or that pre-feed stage in a total of 18 months. And so that's the programmatic, what we're funded to do catalytically, how we're supported. The project of course will happen faster or slower than that and there's a life to the project after that.

So our long-term alignment to the project goes beyond that period of time, especially because we're tied to it from a success standpoint. But programmatically our goal is to engage every 18 months with a number of companies, you know, this three to six number. And if we have more capital and we can grow teams more, we could engage with more companies faster. It's really again a more of a bespoke engagement where we look at the risk profile of the project together, kind of like diligence the project together and deliver them some value, you know, risk-based reports and things like that. A view on the project development plan a view on the FOAP financing strategies and then also an attempt to see if it's right to go co-develop.

So we want to talk to everybody and the more we've got capital behind us, you know, philanthropic or otherwise, the more of these groups we can actually provide our risk-based assessments to and the more we can then have a really good idea of how we could be accelerant to them through our model.

Chris Wedding:
And who's providing the initial development capital. This kind of $1 to $1.5 million to kind of start things off.

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, so we've got some amazing partners I think most visionary there is Builders Bridge, part of the builder's vision team. James Lindsey and they've been the initial supporters, you know, really supporters of us from a capital standpoint. And then Deep Science Ventures and Rocky Mountain Institute have put in a ton of their time bringing this idea and organizing idea to this point. So you know I think there's both the capital that Builders has put in and then I want to, I want to acknowledge but also the kind of almost like pro bono or the work that DSP and RMI has done to kind of mature this idea as well. And then we also have some support both on the capital and kind of advisory side from Flor who is our earliest kind of corporate supporter here. And it's helping us as we look at these technologies.

Chris Wedding:
So how should a CEO of this tech company think of Mark1 that isn't like what's the contract look like? Is it consulting? Is it getting a kind of a whatever a 2x, 3x on the dev capital? What's that look like?

Julian Ryba-White:
Yep, it looks like a simple short-term consulting contract with an LOI for co-development and so we can get to know each other, we can deliver some value in exchange. You know we can have a simple value exchange. We can get to know the project, we can help you make sure that you properly assess the risk of the project. It's almost like preparing you for that moment where you're going to have to go through diligence on this project but trying to do it early so that we set up a view early and then co-development terms will be based on what we learned together there with a general goal of trying to get to that moment within say three months of engagement, perhaps less, but no more than six months.

And so there's no binding to the co-development. We both need to want to go there but you know our ability to be flexible with how we join whether it's we're leading the project or supporting certain deliverables, sourcing, helping to source capital, helping to bring the ecosystem, allow us through that consulting exercise then to be right-sized to what the team needs for co-development and thus try to always be additive and always be able to help, you know, anyone and everyone at this stage if possible.

Chris Wedding:
And what if someone listening says wow, totally get the problem. I totally, I totally appreciate the kind of consulting to dev capital provider model that you all have but boy I'd love to see it, you know 5x in scale it you know, within 12 months, not waiting, you know, 18 months to see these things kind of, kind of play out for the next batch. Is this more of a, of a, if you will corporate funding so you can, you all can build team. Is it more of a debt capital funding consideration? Which, which of those is it or.

Julian Ryba-White:
I mean there's, there's two sources. Yeah, I mean there's, I mean, yeah, I don't know if you're teeing me up here or what but I like the question and I want to talk about it. I want to talk about it. Yeah, there's two uses, there's two primary uses of capital here and really in any, most development shops that's not unique to us is you've got your overhead, your SG&A, project development takes high quality, very capable, experienced people who've been through these cycles before. And those are high value people, they're quality people and they're very much driven by understanding risk and retiring risk in order to achieve economic outcomes. And so you need SG&A for the team.

And so we, the more you want, the more companies you want to offer say consulting services to the more people you need, the more projects you want to develop, the more project development teams you need. And that's heavily people oriented. These FOAK projects are generally not thought of as something where you'd be like oh, we can just scale doing more FOAK projects without having to scale the team. That's not going to be the case and that's not so I think small, highly effective teams is the right model for scaling. And second to that your question about dev capital, you know, dev capital for sure, as long as you know what the companies we're working with value us bringing some of that capital to the table, that will be a key part of it I think.

You know there's going to be times when companies say we want you and your expertise and your support and your network. We don't really need the capital and you know, we'll work on things that way. And then there's going to be times where us bringing the capital is why a project can accelerate and move forward faster and that too. So I imagine if we want to go execute this at scale, whether it's with philanthropic dollars, catalytic dollars or return seeking dollars, you basically need funding pathways both for the overhead of the team and growing the team, as well as the capital that can go into the projects. And that capital can kind of look different depending on how and where it's used in terms of where you source it from.

Chris Wedding:
And is your assumption that the development capital you will provide would be paid back with a return at, you know, FID or NTP? Or does it kind of stay in the deal until the thing's built or does it stay in the deal longer? I'd assume not. But anyway, what's the kind of duration? Let's say.

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, what's going on with the capital? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, there's different types of capital that, you know, you can put into these projects. This stage you have kind of program related investments. These are effectively, you know, grant type capital that may be seeking a basically just a recycled return profile. They have very low return profile. So the capital itself may have, you know, little, little cost associated there. And that's just, you know, that's accelerant capital that we think is one of the most powerful places for nonprofit dollars to be spent to create additionality is in this exact window that we're working this first $500,000 of DevEx on a project.

That's how we can get more projects to place. So those program related investments are one, I think common vehicle you'll see us working with. Another would be, you know, return seeking capital. It's probably got to be, you know, unsecured or it's got, you know, it's got to be fairly risky or it's got to be really excited about the right of first refusal to, you know, to get the feed study or get the project. But I think there's that type of capital out there too that's seeking some type of, you know, traditional DevEx return. But it's going to be very bound to like the things you can spend it on. And it might, you know, those types of things, those are probably the two most common types of capital you'll see us working with to bring into the, into the projects.

And you know, maybe to go back just to the other question you had, I think it kind of answers here too. You know, all of that capital is like seeking some sort of return. But all of that capital is also going to be appreciative of the high risk profile here. And I think that's the same thing with Mark1 too. Like our model is to when that, you know, when that, when that return profile, when we hit that milestone, that triggers the opportunity to pay back, you know, the capital that brings additional capital in the project, that triggers our development fee. That's also kind of generally how we'll think about the capital being aligned too.

So both capital payback as well as our own dev fee kind of of pair that together and you're starting to see just like this developer as a service model where we'll put our time and resources in and then get paid back if milestones on the project will achieve take some project equity or alignment to the project itself as a way to have some upside for the work we did. So a little bit of return on the capital, a little bit of return through the project success, long-term project success. And now you can do any service as long as you're getting paid with that. That's developer as a service.

Chris Wedding:
Yep, I'm with you. One more kind of definitional question. Define what FEED means in this case.

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, I always have to, I have to look this one up. I always get the, I always get the acronym wrong sometimes. But people give it different things. But it means for front-end engineering design. And so a lot of industrial exercises.

Chris Wedding:
Lost your audio?

Julian Ryba-White:
Front end loading or FTL0. It's kind of like preliminary.

Chris Wedding:
I lost your audio for the very first part of defining FEED. So maybe let's start off with defining the acronym. Cool.

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, my earbud switched off for some reason. So. Okay. Yeah, so front-end engineering design, that was the question you asked me. And really this is where you turn your ideas into a detailed design plan. And so it's front-end engineering design is what FEED stands for. And it usually comes on the back end of a bunch of work you've done to mature. Call it the kind of the conceptual design of the project. So you might have, you might start it like the earliest stages, some people call this FEL 0 where you're thinking about just purely the concept. You're kind of sniff testing the business case. Do you want to start to lean in? Then you start to do some preliminary design work, you mature that design work all throughout that you're starting to get a better estimate of your capital costs as well as the engineering requirements to execute on this idea. And then at feed stage, you know, you're doing a full kind of attempting to do your first full engineering package for that plant.

So you can imagine a plant where you're making green ammonia or something, and there's hundreds, if not thousands of processes that may be occurring. And you've attempted to put all of that down in a blueprint in the plan set. And those can be very expensive designs. They can cost a million dollars, they can cost $10 million. It depends a little bit on the project. And so getting to the point where the project has the right bones and everybody kind of feels good enough about it that there's a willingness to commit, say, five or $10 million to do those designs. That's a lot of what you're trying to do, because at that point, you're talking about big sums of capital and you're talking about very serious investment decisions to be made.

Chris Wedding:
I'm with you. Okay. I could continue asking questions, but we have a longer agenda here. Just to reiterate, folks can go to your old's website. Mark, the number one dot build, I believe, to apply to be one of these, you know, three to six companies. Awesome. Well, super exciting model root for all success and eager to see more capital kind of flow into these companies. You've added. Let's go to the personal side of the podcast Julian. So what are two or three pieces of advice that you might give your younger self or other kind of emerging professionals, career switchers, you're talking to?

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah. You know, the thing that I always have told myself, and I remember coming back to this just last week, is I always need to remind myself to slow down. I was reading, I read a great quote from Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist, over the winter break, and he was kind of being asked a similar question. He said, you know, somebody like me, I'm kind of like an anxiety order that's actually just trained to be successful in today's system. And I think that probably most people who have found some level of success or found some level of achievement or are really hungry to go after big, hard problems, there's probably some anxiety. There's probably some push. There's something about you.

And for me, I'm definitely someone who, you know, gets anxious about the problems that we face, desires to solve those problems as fast as possible. You know, I don't want to wait to solve something. I want to solve it now. And so, you know, sometimes that's great, but sometimes you have to tell yourself to take a breath and slow down. And so I think that's something that I hold very close to me, and I tell myself a lot, and I look back at my career, I think in some ways, you know, that that anxiety and that mission that pushes me every once in a while I got to figure out how to step away from that and really make sure that I center myself and then I can understand the issue better, I can evaluate other people's perspectives better. And that moment of slowing down, I think it's an acknowledgement of your humanness and your inability to be purely rational all the time and things like that.

And so that for me is one of my mantras.

Chris Wedding:
You know it reminds me of the book we discussed on your shelf up there. Well, actually not that book, but the same author, a Deep Work by Cal Newport. His other book, which the one Slow Productivity, I believe it's called, sounds somewhat related to what you're saying. It's like I feel the same thing. It's like a kind of a frenetic energy around accomplishing all these things that are on my to do list, which, which I chose and I love, but it's still a lot of things on the list versus thinking more long term. Thinking long term gives us permission to slow down, right? There was a book talked about in my newsletter recently called the 25 Year Framework by Dan Sullivan. I was like, look, if you think about your career, your project, your business in 25 year increments, one quarter is just 1%, you know, and how long is a quarter? It's forever, man. That's like a whole, you know, life.

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, I think there's, I think there's something here that I relate to project development specifically too, which is, and we see this a lot, you talk to these groups that are, they're coming to their folk planning stage, you know, when they're on their series A, they're burning capital. They're not some big profit return machine yet. And so they feel like they gotta go, go, go, like I gotta get there faster. And it's so true. We gotta help them at the same time. This is exactly what we learned in the project development discipline is you spend a little bit more time on that front end planning exercise. It pays off in spades. It's that go slow to go fast, go slow to go far.

And you can look at this whether you want to take individuals, experience, you know, and kind of apply it, or you can go look at the big studies the DOE, the UK government has done where they can show things like you spend a little bit more time planning, you save a lot in time and cost on the project. And so I think this is kind of one of the core messages we think is important here is to make sure that team gets a chance to take a break. That not so much break, but those startup teams take that breath to say, okay, we've proven this thing out. Huge milestone. Now we need to appreciate this different problem that we have to solve, which is a project, and we have to revisit everything as it relates to going and putting this thing in the world. I think that's one of the things that Mark1 wants to help these companies too.

Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I might get this wrong, but I think it's also similar to the military phrase, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Perhaps it sounds so counterintuitive, but it's exactly what you're saying. Let's go to the next one. Give us some habits or routines that keep you healthy, sane, and focused. Building Mark1.

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, I was joking as I was reading this one that, like, my family would be like, you don't have any of those. But definitely spending time with them for me is the biggest. I've got two younger children, and they're just the most fun. They're 11 and 7 right now, so it's just an amazing age. I think, like, as, like, a very specific thing that, like, I've tried to do and I think others could adopt very easily is, you know, we work on a workweek weekend type of structure, and I think those weekends are important. And trying to do some sort of activity on, like, a Friday evening so that you don't go into the weekend with your wheels still spinning on whatever you're working with, and you give your chant, your brain and your body a chance to just disconnect from that week. You give yourself permission to spend the weekend trying to, you know, you know, center yourself or whatever, and then you come back Monday and hit it hard again.

I think that that's something that I don't always do it well, but I always think about trying to make sure we play a game, play some, you know, play some soccer, you know, do something with the kids, maybe go out. So I think that's important for me. And then I'm also an extrovert. I love talking to people. I get my energy from people. So staying in touch with people, not disappearing when, you know, I'm stressed out about something, going and talking to people. Like, I think for me, you know, just being with other people who know how to talk about the things that I'm interested in is important. So finding your people and having your community and sharing with them is another place that just, you know, really helps me be me.

Chris Wedding:
You know, on this, on the last part about staying connected, I'm reading a book, I'm just looking up how to Know a Person by David Brooks, who's just such a great thinker and writer. But, you know, yesterday I was reading or I was listening to the stats from the book about how pervasive loneliness is and of course, the extremes. Right. The violence and so forth. So it's nice to hear. Right. It's refreshing to hear. No, no, I'm, I am making the effort. Right. To stay in touch with folks. It's, it's so needed. Right. I mean, because you're the extrovert. They may not be, but, but that connection you're providing. Super useful.

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, I love introverts. There's so much good insight there and I always wonder if they want me around sometimes because I'm just pushing on them so hard. But, but yeah, I think connectivity is so important. I think whether you're an extrovert, introvert, like humans, or a social creature, and that needs to be in person or that needs to be face to face, that needs to be human interaction. That's part of what makes us human and actually part of what keeps our, keeps us going.

Chris Wedding:
Yeah. I mean, for sure, the in person stuff matters. I'd also look at just like lower the bar for folks who are like, well, I can't be in person. I like the time or the Internet, just like getting a thoughtful text from friends across the country, from college, whatever else. I mean even that it's like, oh yeah, I have that friend I forgot about. I mean, even that's like, oh, yeah, I have that friend I forgot about or I should spend time with. My web of my ecosystem is much larger than maybe I thought when I was kind of myopically focused on my work challenge for the day. Yeah, let's go to the last one. Give us a book or two. Podcast tool quote, something for listeners to take away.

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah. In the energy space. You know, I love listening to Catalyst. I'm a big fan of how Shayle likes to go and understand issues and how they, you know, I love listening that long form, thinking through of stuff. I'm a big fan. The green blueprint is a new one. Maybe just to get a plug in for Laura Pierpoint and the Latitude Crew. I like what they're doing about trying to help, you know, tell the stories of founders in this space. I think that's really powerful and important. So those are some podcasts that I like to listen to in the space. And then I just started reading Range, which is a book by David Epstein. It talks about why generalists succeed in a specialized world. That's kind of the tagline. I think that's really interesting too. And I think it speaks to how we think about the world as specialized. We think about all these technical disciplines.

And that's the easy thing to understand in some ways is that you need to know engineering, you need to know science, you need to know physics, but that the generalist is often, you know, the project manager, the, you know, plays the role in the executive, the project developer as an example, I think speaks to why it's hard sometimes to understand what things like project development are and why you need all these bodies managing stuff. When it's like, well, I have my engineer, I have my finance here, like, I don't want to pay for anything else. And it's like, well, you need, you need the strategist, you need that cross, you know, cross-cutting layer that can connect the dots and move things forward. So that's what I'm reading right now on the, I don't know, personal improvement or work, work front.

And then I've unfortunately also picked up Ministry of the Future, which is, if you're familiar, kind of a sci-fi climate change book. And my partner's read it and she, she says it gets really great at the end, but I'm still in the beginning and it's, it's pretty dark, so I need to, I need to get through that. But that's what I'm consuming. That's what I'm consuming right now.

Chris Wedding:
Yeah, it's a great, it's a great information diet you got there, Julian. Yeah, Ministry for the Future, back when it first came out, whatever maybe three years ago, it was for sure the most popular book recommended on this podcast. Yeah, totally agree. The first part is very hard to listen to. At the same time, it's a great, I mean, you know, the author is so great at what he does to make it seem so real that it's happening right now. It's almost a way to like bring these worst-case futures to the present moment. I think maybe to motivate us a little more. Although I think folks who read it are probably already fairly motivated. It does get better. It does get better. Yes.

Julian Ryba-White:
Right on, right on. I'm glad, I'm glad to hear, I'm glad to hear that.

Chris Wedding:
Well, listen, we're, we're at time here, Julian. Great to connect clearly, I'm excited about the business model it needs to exist. Those who've been successful raising venture capital need help jumping that bridge to project finance, which is, you know, where we get the scale that we need. So kudos on you all and partners building it, and excited to hear the updates.

Julian Ryba-White:
Yeah, thanks for having us, letting us to tell our story. I think there's a lot of people out there trying to do really good work in this space, and I think hopefully we are trying to be additive to that. We really see ourselves as partners. And so looking forward to talking to all the startups, the capital providers, and really the corporate project services that are very interested in being part of the next big kind of climate tech or emerging industrial technology projects.

Chris Wedding:
Amazing. All right, buddy, talk soon.