Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#80:
Profitably Reclaiming Critical Minerals from Waste and Mining — Megan O’Connor CEO of Nth Cycle
Chris Wedding:
Megan O'Connor, Founder and CEO of Nth Cycle. From here in my backyard-ish of Duke University to Boston and raising lots of money from really smart investors to change how critical elements and batteries don't just go away, but get reused. Welcome to the podcast.
Megan O’Connor:
Awesome, thank you so much for having me, Chris.
Chris Wedding:
No pressure, having said all that, right? Tell the audience what Nth Cycle does. We’ll start with the short version and we're going to go back up to meta and ask some questions that'll be relevant to lots of listeners. Nth Cycle, what makes you guys unique?
Megan O’Connor:
Absolutely. Well, I started Nth Cycle about five years ago now to really redefine the way that we mine, recycle and capture the critical minerals that we need to really transition away from fossil. So, things like cobalt and nickel that are the critical components in lithium-ion batteries that will power all of our electric vehicles and the critical minerals that are in, say motors that power wind turbines, we don't have enough of those minerals to truly transition away from fossil. And so, we're working on a technology to help solve that problem.
Chris Wedding:
Excellent. Okay, the audience clearly is hooked. So, let's zoom out a little bit. You're a CEO, have been at it for five years. You certainly have interacted with lots of other CEOs. What is a mistake that you see lots of folks in your position making, maybe we're not to make that for those listening?
Megan O’Connor:
I think the number one thing I see some other founders and CEOs in this space do is they think that they have to know it all and they try to do it all. They don't either delegate or find the right team members to take the burden or the skill sets they might not just be that good at. I tried to learn early on what I was good at and what I wasn't good at, and bring the right team members in. And so, I think that's a big thing that I think a lot of CEOs could do better.
Chris Wedding:
I think there's a story about Henry Ford, or maybe this is a romanticized version of Henry Ford's story, something about he doesn't need to know everything as long as he has the experts who do know everything within a phone call away kind of thing, which I think makes a lot of sense.
For me, either as I evolved or grew or had the PhD beaten out of me in private equity, I recall learning it’s okay to say you don't know, which is not what I feel like I was trained to do. Certainly, not in dissertation defenses, but boy, how liberating. I don't know, but I'll get you the answer in this process within X number of days, which is empowering, huh?
04:18
Megan O’Connor:
Absolutely.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, one more on the meta, if you will, I suppose. Can you tell us a story from you-all’s path, you-all’s progress here? You're looking backwards you're like, “Huh, in this particular fork in the road, maybe I could have taken the other path and here's why.” Any tangible examples come to mind, Megan?
Megan O’Connor:
Yeah. One of the biggest lessons learned that I've had and it might not seem significant, but it does make a big impact is not implementing a project management tool soon enough thinking that everybody was as good as managing time as I was. So, that was definitely an interesting and hard lesson learned on my part.
Chris Wedding:
Well, what tools did you settle on and what did you try?
Megan O’Connor:
We tried things like Asana and those aren't really a great fit. It was almost like too much functionality for us as a young startup and with only five, six people. We're now 13 and we finally settled on Microsoft Project, which I feel is just one of the oldies, but goodies. Now they've redone it and I feel like it's much more user-friendly in terms of people who may not be as familiar with Microsoft Teams, but we found that it's very helpful. You can add as much detail as you want, but you're not drowning in that level of detail that I saw in some of the other tools that we tried.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. Well, I was positive you were going to say Trello, which is my love affair, but I'll let it go. Okay, let's go back to Nth Cycle. You all had a fun announcement in February, your Series A. Tell us about the Series A, maybe who invested if you want to, or what milestones you hit to allow for the Series A to take place and we'll start there.
Megan O’Connor:
Yeah, absolutely. If we look back about a year and a half ago, we closed our seed round with Clean Energy Ventures, which was just over $3 million. The milestones that we had to hit to make it to Series A were really scaling up the technology from the bench to the commercial unit. So, very proud and excited to say we scaled 100X in a matter of nine months to close our Series A, getting our first customer MOU and then developing the technology.
Not just for the battery recycling space, which I think a lot of people view us as just a recycling technology, but we actually work on the front end of the supply chain in the mining space as well. Trying to redefine how we mine raw materials out of the ground, really looking at those raw materials and developing the technology for those feedstocks. So, those were the three big ones that we were able to hit to close our 12 and a half million-dollar Series A.
Now with this money, we're going out into our first two projects. The first one by the end of this year with a recycling company and it was really building out the team. So, we had a very, very small commercial team going into Series A and with this funding, we've been able to build out, get a VP business development. I brought in a CFO and lots of folks on the commercial side to help us get into these different verticals, which I'm very excited about.
07:20
Chris Wedding:
Well, congratulations. Nice to hit milestones. Nice to raise the capital you need to grow because these problems are not getting any smaller or less important. You mentioned that you've got almost like a barbell approach, I suppose. You all can help with the recycling and with the mining piece.
Whenever you first started Nth Cycle, which of those was the focus or was it always both and if it wasn't, what changed? By the way, what a terrible podcaster. I think I asked you seven questions in a period of 20 seconds. All right, pick whatever you want.
Megan O’Connor:
When I started Nth Cycle, it was definitely on the recycling side. It was not on the mining side. I can go into why we decided to go down that path or with the opportunity that we saw. When I was in grad school, that's where the idea for the technology came from, at least to apply it to this industry.
My co-founder, Chad Vecitis was a full-time professor and he had developed this technology. Now, it's over 10 years, maybe 15 years old. I started to get very interested in all things circular economy, but really around metals. I saw a lot of companies in plastics and the issues we had in plastics recycling. Saw all these great headlines about how we were going to transition away from fossil to clean energy with this great electrification movement.
But I wasn't seeing any headlines or even information, anything on the fact that we don't have enough of these critical minerals, which I like to say are the true building blocks of the clean energy economy. If we don't have these metals, we cannot build wind turbines, we cannot build EVs, solar panels, any of it. And so, it really disturbed me that I didn't see any media attention around this.
I started digging into the literature, seeing that we just had this massive shortage on the horizon and I didn't see any companies really focusing in on that. That's really what sparked me to think like, “Maybe I could use Chad's technology to recycle these metals out of used EVs or wind turbines and try to get them back into circulation.” And so, that's what I started the company on and still a massive focus of our technology and of the mission of Nth Cycle, because eventually we hope that there's enough material in circulation so that we never have to mine new materials again.
But if you look at the data and you look at the amount of metal in electric vehicles coming off the road and things like that, even if we were to cycle a hundred percent of EVs coming off the road in 2030, that still only gives us about 10% of the cobalt that we'll actually need in terms of our demand.
So, we have to continue to mine more materials and we cannot continue to make the same mistakes that we're making now in mining and make the same mistakes we made in fossil, ignoring the extraction part and how hazardous it is to the environment. So, we need to figure out a way to do it more sustainably. And so, when I saw those numbers and said, “Look, I think recycling is a huge component of a circular economy, it’s like the whole piece of it.” But the fact that we need to mine more materials to really solve this problem, if we really want to have the impact that I'm aiming for, that the company's aiming for, we have to look at the mining space as well and try to make it as sustainable as possible.
10:23
Chris Wedding:
That's a pretty powerful stat there that by 2030, if all EV batteries were recycled, it's only 10% of the cobalt needed dot, dot, dot to fund the projections for EV growth. Okay.
Megan O’Connor:
Exactly. It’s interesting. I think a lot of folks have thought, “Well, surely it's time to recycle these critical elements and batteries.” And it's like, well, yes, kind of it is. You got to prepare for it. The technology has got to be scalable at that time, but that stat there is helpful.
When you describe the technology, I'm curious, is it one technology or is it several technologies given that you're talking about several different metals and therefore the chemical properties and so forth are different? Just tell us about the practicality of maybe, not quite PhD level practicality, but how does it work exactly?
Megan O’Connor:
The beauty and the uniqueness that our technology has over the competitors in the marketplace is that it's the same technology, whether it's cobalt coming out of a battery or cobalt coming out of the ground, the technology sees it the same exact way. And so, we don't have to change the hardware that goes into either of those sites. It makes it easy for us to be in both verticals at the same time.
From a really high level, the way I like to think about how it works is like your Brita filter you have at home. If you filter your water when it comes out of your tap, Brita filter has an activated carbon filter in it, that thing you change in and out. When you pour your drinking water through that the activated carbon filter pulls out all the heavy metals if there's any in your drinking water, all in one stage. We've taken that same idea.
So, we take whether it's dirt coming out of the ground or batteries that have been shredded up out of a car, we turn that into a liquid. We put that into a water-based solution. We pour it through what looks like a Brita filter, so it's a carbon filter, but instead of just having it capture all the metals at one time, we have figured out a way to push an electrical current across that carbon filter so that it selectively removes one metal over another. We have those carbon filters stacked in series. So, as that metal solution comes through, it can pull one metal out at a time because metals react differently to different electrical currents.
Chris Wedding:
Megan, I feel like geeking out here with you a little bit, going back to my chemistry minor back in the day. I'm not going to really, but the science of all this is really intriguing. So often, my day to day is like, well, how does the capital work and what's the go-to-market and blah, blah, blah, in the greatest sense of blah, blah, blah, but it's not the cool science where all this started for me and for you and for lots of others. Okay, of those metals you're extracting, either through recycling or from mining, can you comment on which is more critical, let's say? Is that the right question to ask?
Megan O’Connor:
Yeah, they all have different levels of they call it criticality. And so, the Department of Energy and the EU have actually developed their own matrices of how they determine criticality. It's really supply risk the expected demand over the next 30 to 50 years and there's a couple others in there as well. Always at the top, you always hear cobalt because first of all, it comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 65% of our cobalt comes from over there. So, it's a very unstable supply chain from that perspective.
13:46
It has human rights issues with the child labor that happens over there with the artisanal mining, so the traceability is tough and difficult for companies. Then cobalt is always mined as what's called a daughter metal. You have parent metals, which is usually the dominant metal in the ore and then you have daughter metals that are just along for the ride. So, they're there, but they're in lower quantities. They're really hard to remove from the parent metal and so cobalt is always a daughter metal.
It's never just a cobalt ore. It's usually copper ore with a little bit of cobalt in there or nickel with a little bit of cobalt in there, so it's always really, really hard to extract. And so, that makes it super critical from just where it comes from and how difficult it is to extract and how much of it we're going to need in the future.
Chris Wedding:
If I was not aware that there are two PhDs turned entrepreneurs using the word criticality, I would say we're just making up words right now, but you told me someone else said those words, so I'll trust you on that one. Okay, so cobalt, Democratic Republic of Congo, I get that.
Hard to trace, but gosh, if 65% of the cobalt is coming from there and given the preponderance of child labor or slavery or corruption, how do big, beautiful logo OEMs, how do they maintain their purity, if you will, their white gloves, if you will? Is that knowable or do we just hope it's not traceable, therefore you can't point a finger or what?
Megan O’Connor:
That's a very good question and things that they're thinking about actively, so they call it like dirty cobalt, quote unquote, if I'm using air quotes. A lot of the big, beautiful, sustainable brands that we know, they have been traced back to dirty cobalt and they obviously don't publicize it very much, but it happens. They're trying very hard not to, but a lot of the mining happens so close together in the DRC that it gets mixed together. It's eventually traced back years later. It's very, very difficult because it's such an unregulated territory.
So, it's part of the reason why there's such a big push to bring domestic mining back and I think people hear that and they're like, “Well, I don't want mining in my backyard.” But I don't think people realize how horrendous the process is to get the materials that are in their iPhone or their Apple Watch or whatever brand, Samsung, or Google Pixel. It's something I don't think people realize. I call it the dirty side of clean energy about how awful and dirty it is to make an EV or to make an iPhone or any of these beautiful devices that we use in our everyday lives. We could actually have much more control over it if we did it here.
Chris Wedding:
But wait, so you're telling me blockchain is not going to solve this? I say that partly in jest, but I did hear stories about blockchain being used somehow to trace clean versus dirty cobalt. Is there anything happening there?
Megan O’Connor:
I think there's movement, but I haven't seen anything come out yet. I think we will get there. There's lots of places around the globe that we're trying to mine these materials more sustainably. It's not just here in the US or North America in general, but it's an issue not just for us. It's an issue for a lot of countries that, A, there's just not enough cobalt, B, they don't want to have to worry about this dirty cobalt stream or supporting the illegal mining that happens over there and just trying to get more independence.
17:21
It's not even just about where it comes from or how it's mined. There's been other cases like with rare earth metals, for example, back in, I think it was 2012 or 2011 maybe, where China all of a sudden decided that they were going to cut us off from rare earth metals and the prices absolutely skyrocketed. I mean, it was awful and they could do that at any point because even if the mining happens in the DRC, 80 plus percent of it goes over to Asia and mostly China to be refined into the batteries that we buy. It's different parts of the supply chain that are all controlled. That's also the national security piece of it that we're also very worried about as we try to become leaders in the space.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. I wrote down two comments here. One, you mentioned how pulling some of that mining back stateside at least, that there's pushback, not in my backyard. We don't want more mining in the US. I come from Kentucky. Certainly, coal mines have done their share of damage and it makes me think, some number of years ago, I was helping an ESG-focused hedge fund to raise money for a lithium and cobalt-focused hedge fund, real asset-focused as well, pretty unique play. Some of the responsible investors I talked to said, “I'm sorry, did you say mining? No, we can't do mining. That's not ESG.”
I didn't have a conversation with too many of them that lasted very long, but it's the same idea that you said. Like, to get to a clean energy future, mining is required. Now, look, it's got to be better mining, lower impact and more responsible and all that stuff, but it's easily forgotten for sure. All right. I totally forgot the second bullet because I didn't write it down. Podcasting is a live art. Let's go to your business model. What are you selling exactly, I guess, Megan?
Megan O’Connor:
We’re selling a service. Say for the scrap side of our business, we'll go into companies who have been in logistics games, some of them for 40 years. They’re these family-owned businesses that have been collecting all of our junk, I like to say, for a very long time. Now that they're getting things like lithium-ion batteries, which you can't just sell to the usual scrapper, they want help in chemically processing that material into usable metal. And so, we'll go and we'll partner with them.
We own and operate our assets on site and we just charge them a tolling fee per say pound of battery that we've processed for them. Then we hand the product right back to them, so we don't own what's coming in, we don't own what's coming out. We just help them upgrade that material into something that they can then sell back into the supply chain here, either in North America or in Europe.
Chris Wedding:
First of all, love that. I think for all entrepreneurs, the easier that we make it for a customer to say yes, the better things are. You remove that CapEx, that capital expense. “Please buy this and I promise that's going to produce good stuff for you,” to, “No, it’s fill in the blank as a service. It's mining as a service. It's recycling as a service. If it works, you pay us,” which is a beautiful thing. I did remember what I was going to say a while ago. You talked about national security and I was just going to maybe direct listeners to something that came out of DOE maybe last summer, which you can correct me on, but something like the National Blueprint for Lithium, fill in the blank, which is recognizing this vast majority of the lithium processing, all the different materials that go into these lithium-ion batteries beyond lithium, almost all of it is in overseas and most of it is in China.
21:29
I don't know how many folks are thinking about lithium, cobalt, nickel, et cetera, as national security issues versus supply chain, like cost management kind of concerns, or how green can we become early enough, concerns. Versus no, this can be national security given that clean power will power more of our transportation and grid, yeah?
Megan O’Connor:
Yeah, absolutely. And yes, it was the DOE that did put out that brief. I'm blanking on the name of it, of course, as well, as we talk about this live, but the Biden administration, there was a leak that Biden is considering enacting the Defense Production Act as well for the battery metals, which would basically make it easier for us to fund, bringing back a lot of the supply chain.
So, it’s just more power behind giving a lot of these companies like mine, but others as well, so who people who actually manufacture batteries, manufacture cathodes. The actual mining companies who are digging stuff out of the ground, which would then go into my system. More resources to try and bring those back much faster because of how big of a national security issue it has become.
Even if you just think about the automotive industry, not even thinking about the defense industry and how all of these big OEMs have said they're going to have a fully electrified fleet by what 2035? There's these very ambitious, lovely goals, but they're all scrambling to figure out what their strategy is not just on the recycling side of what are we going to do with all these EVs when they come off the road? Because right now, I have friends that have Teslas, they don't know what to do with them when they reach the end of life. But how are they going to get enough material to sustain operations and to keep up with the projected demand?
Because it's amazing how much demand we have or projected demand we have for electrified fleets. Some of them are trying to take the Elon Musk approach of just buying their own nickel mines. Elon Musk is looking at buying, I think, or if he did buy the new nickel mine in New Caledonia. So, trying to take very bold steps to ensure that they have a secure supply so that they do not have to slow down in terms of operations.
Chris Wedding:
It's hard to keep track of what Elon buys.
Megan O’Connor:
I know.
Chris Wedding:
Couldn’t help it. Let's see. You covered the capital cost and your customer pays just for the service. So, I think that has to mean that you need to raise more money, but maybe that's not true because maybe at some point, this is like a project finance, like equipment leasing solution. I'm asking the question around capital and then we're going to talk about, what does it mean from the customer side versus business as usual?
24:20
Pre Nth Cycle existing and back in the dark ages, what is their business as usual versus with Nth Cycle look like? That's part two. Again, I'm just loading you up because you can handle it with multiple questions. The first part, capital raising, more capital, is it off balance sheet? How does all that work?
Megan O’Connor:
So yes, we do plan on raising more equity rounds. We are planning for RB coming up at the end of this year, but we don't plan on actually funding the projects with the equity dollars. Going into cheaper capital like project finance and the leasing and things like that as we move into projects three, four.
So, the first two, as I mentioned, will be funded with Series A money to really show the technology works, get it out there, develop that nice package that we can then go to these different financing companies as we move forward. So, Series B will actually be used to go over into Europe and so that's our next market is Europe. Right now, we're heavily focused on North America with a wide variety of other use of funds for what we project to be, maybe 30 to $40 million round. Your second question [inaudible – 00:25:26].
Chris Wedding:
The second question is about the customer's perspective, but let's hold on that for just a second. All right, I just want to reinforce for listeners. This is one scenario where in cleantech 1.0, we did things wrong. We continue to use the world's most expensive capital to fund like factories and such. I just want to differentiate you're not doing that. Clearly, the first customer or two, you got to use expensive corporate financing, take dilution, all the rest, but that's the riskier stuff, right?
Megan O’Connor:
Yes.
Chris Wedding:
So, once you do that, what kind of investors or lenders do you plan on bringing in to fund these projects? Not like names, obviously, but just the type of capital that would fund those?
Megan O’Connor:
I think really what we're looking for to fund those projects are companies who are in similar, really heavy asset-based projects, who are used to seeing this, but maybe not at grants. Because we're not going to need hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. We're going to need like a hundred million dollars, at least for the next two to three years, because we are pretty capital light in terms of what our system actually costs to get into a scrap site and folks who can take the risk of just scaling.
I mean, we will have the first two projects in the ground, in the field, so they will see that it works. The technology risk is very minimal. It's really just in helping us scale because there's thousands of scrap companies in North America alone. It's really just helping us capture the vast majority of that market. So, we're looking at some of the integrative producers around the world who are very commodity heavy, but also have their business like this, that like to own and help operate some assets to some more traditional project finance type vehicles.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, cool. Well, I was hoping you would give me like a name and email of somebody, but that's okay.
27:30
I also like that you're like, “We only want a hundred million dollars,” that's fabulous. Yeah, that's the bottom of our goal set here. The other comment I would make mostly for listeners is that if they are also trying to fund first or second of a kind type project, there is a wicked, in the best sense of the word, a great report from Prime and others that has come out recently that is 140 folks that are interviewed. Somehow, they forgot me, ha-ha-ha. Anyway, it's a great report.
I'm recommending it everywhere because this is a huge gap. How do you go from well-funded VC corporate to lower cost, off balance sheet, first of a kind project finance? So, check it out. I forget the full name. It's in my newsletter, but search Prime and first of a kind finance, you're going to find it.
We have about 10 minutes or so before we wrap, so let's switch if we can. We're going to switch as listeners know from the business to the person. This is all about Megan. We're going to dissect Megan's tips and tricks for growing a company. All right, if you had a chance to talk to your younger self, not that you're very old, compliment, what kind of things would you advise early PhD student, Megan, before starting a company?
Megan O’Connor:
Yeah, that's a great question. I would say a couple of things. First, Duke was really great in letting us take classes outside of our -- I was in Pratt School of Engineering and I did not take full advantage of taking classes outside of Pratt School. So, I wish I would have taken, even if it wasn't like a business class, something outside, maybe policy or something to just get me more involved in the space that I'm in now before I was fully a founder and CEO. I think that would have been really helpful.
I went back and forth a lot, whether I wanted to go get an MBA after my PhD and my husband was like, “Please God, no more school.” I did talk to a lot of people and I said, “Listen, I know there's like executive programs you can do on just the weekends and things like that. Is it worth my time?” Ultimately, from the lots of different opinions I got, most people said, “You do not need an MBA. It's helpful, but you can learn a lot of skills as you go. You are very open with what you don't know and so lean on advisors, mentors, those early champions.”
I'd say that's my other thing is, I wish I would have started networking sooner because there is such a great alumni network. I did not take full advantage of that as a student. I sort of waited until I was graduated, which is fine, but there's so many different events and things now that things are starting to open back up and there's more in-person stuff happening. Really, really, really take advantage of the amazing network that your university has, because I think I would have been able to meet a lot of the people I met eventually. I think I would just would have been able to move a little bit faster if I had met them earlier on in my career.
Chris Wedding:
For sure. Well, as a professor at Duke's Business School and UNC, I'm trying to take offense. All that makes sense. How about the next question, what are some habits or routines that keep you healthy, sane, and focused building a company like this?
31:02
Megan O’Connor:
A lot of entrepreneurs don’t do this, but get sleep. It helps you make better decisions I promise. I try my best to have a very scheduled sleep routine as best as I can in this position and then exercise is my outlet for sure. And so, I was a collegiate swimmer, so I was very used to having that very regimented routine. When I got out of that, I had to find something else. So, now I train for marathons, which is also crazy, but running for hours at a time helps me clear my mind. I know, it's crazy.
It's not a fun activity I do. I'm not that person who has fun hobbies, but it helps me think because you got to think about anything else about how many miles you're running. It helps me think about the company and other things outside of the day-to-day tasks and really the strategy and just clearing my mind for what I need to do for that week or that day.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, I think the audience is getting a sense for the kind of personality that you are or have, Megan. You’re like, “Well, let's see PhD, let's consider an MBA now or I was a swimmer,” and I've known some swimmers, that's a pretty ridiculous routine, “let's just run marathons, why not?” Perfect. Let’s get granular. How many hours is good of sleep?
Megan O’Connor:
I try to at least get seven. That's my magic number. If I can get eight, it's like, what a great night.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I like that. I've been criticized by people, let's just say close in my life that are like, “Chris, dude, you're a little rigid on your sleep.” I was like, “I got to get eight hours, period.” How about books, podcasts, tools, et cetera, can you give us two or three?
Megan O’Connor:
Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite books as I was building a team was Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. It's a very short read and I love the way it's written. It's like a fun story to follow along, but really teaches you some, I think, critical things to think about as you're building, especially your leadership team.
Then the other one related to that is The Culture Code. I'm about halfway through that and so far, it's amazing. Part two, I'll let you know how it finishes, but so far it's been really great in thinking about just how to build a company culture and maintain it as you grow fast.
Chris Wedding:
Perfect. By the way, in parentheses, just because you read a book called the Five Dysfunctions of a Team doesn't mean you're dysfunctional. Okay, next parentheses, we're all dysfunctional, but it's like, how do you go in eyes wide open to avoid those or to minimize the dysfunction before they become too extreme?
Megan O’Connor:
Absolutely.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. Two more questions. One is, what is one of, not the, not capital T-H-E, just what is one of the nicest things anyone's ever done for you, Megan?
33:53
Megan O’Connor:
Oh, another really great question. So many things. I would say, which again, it's a very standard thing, but it really touched me of having a mentor that I knew somewhat well, but not to the level I know him now. Somebody who is just a super, super early cheerleader for us, who really just stood up.
In our seed round, I don't want to say a nobody founder, but I didn't have a career before this, so I'm not well known in the industry and no one on my team really was. And so, just having that first person to really stand up and say like, “I believe in what she's doing. I believe that she's in the right position and she could really lead this team,” that was probably the nicest thing that anybody's ever done for me. It’s just to stand up and say like, “Yes, they’re early, there's a lot of technical risk, but I really think this team can do it and the technology has proven itself,” at least of the scale we were at. So that, I think, was probably one of the nicest things anyone's ever done for me.
Chris Wedding:
Well, you either would or would not be surprised, maybe would not be surprised, how often that kind of answer shows up on the podcast. In fact, someone else from Duke, Eric Toone, had a similar comment around that was how pivotal one of his I guess PhD advisors was in crafting his future.
So, for all those listening, mentorship means a lot. Like years, years, years later, be that first cheerleader. Whether you're wearing a skirt or not, be that first cheerleader for up-and-coming talent changing the world. All right, awesome.
Final, final question, any call to action, advice or whatnot for listeners, maybe folks you want to have come knock on your door, whatever the case may be, who do you want to hear from, call to action?
Megan O’Connor:
Oh, my gosh, investors. We're raising Series B soon, so come knocking and then we're looking for amazing engineers. Anyone at Duke, anyone out there listening, we're looking for super passionate people who want to change the way that we mine, refine, and recycle the metals that will truly bring us to this clean energy economy that we're all looking forward to. We're hiring lots and lots of positions right now, so please reach out.
Chris Wedding:
Perfect. Well, we are rooting for your success, Megan, and not just because you're from Duke, for the success of Nth Cycle. Awesome to chat, and I hope you get lots of knocks on the door. Until next time.
Megan O’Connor:
Awesome, thanks Chris.
Chris Wedding:
Thank you so much for listening. Seriously, the world needs you, and I know your time is super valuable. If you want more content like this, please subscribe to our weekly newsletter at entrepreneursforimpact.com. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I read every single one, I promise. These reviews are the number one way to draw more attention to the world-changing climate CEOs and investors that I am lucky enough to be interviewing on the show. And each month I pick one listener review for a one-on-one brainstorming call with me. Who knows what can come of those?
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