Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#73:
Synthetic Biology to Rethink Heavy Industry — Moji Karimi CEO of Cemvita Factory
Chris Wedding:
All right, Moji Karimi, Co-founder and CEO of Cemvita. Hey, after a few back and forth, glad to be connected here in the new year to tell you-all’s story.
Moji Karimi:
Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this.
Chris Wedding:
Well, excellent. Please lower your expectations. Now, as you know, as the listeners know, look, we're just two folks having a conversation, pressing the record button to share that. As we were chatting before pressing record and this idea of using bacteria, in you-all’s case, less common bacteria, which I can't wait for you to get into, I was thinking back to my undergraduate days 25 years ago.
My senior honors thesis was about isolating a naturally occurring bacteria, a Pseudomonas genus that actually could eat diesel contamination in the soil. That was one of those moments where it's just like, man, nature is F’ing awesome. So, I can't wait to dive in and hear what you all are doing to use synthetic biology to facilitate the energy transition from the epicenter of climate tech, which is obviously Houston, Texas, wink, wink, but seriously as well. Anyway, Moji, what in the heck is Cemvita?
Moji Karimi:
Thanks. It turns out people have actually continued on to your research and not only microbes are used for eating oil or a bioremediation job application, but also to then produce other useful chemicals out of scale. So, we'll talk about that and that's really, the vision for Cemvita is to scale those up in industrial setting and help industries that currently are having a big environmental footprint, creating a lot of emissions, reinvent themselves with the power that they could utilize from microbes towards this net zero economy. The way that we do that is through a set of, like we said, microbial solutions across three different themes.
The first theme is for sustainable extraction of natural resources, whether if it's hydrocarbons or minerals for battery metals. The second category is for sustainable production of chemicals and fuels. Then the third category is for sustainable renewal of any waste that's generated within that extraction and production to turn that back into other useful chemicals and materials, and therefore closing the carbon loop. So, it's a new framework for companies applying biotechnology across uncommon industries that were not thinking of biotech as something that they could use, but with this advance of synthetic biology and DNA sequencing becoming cheaper and cheaper, now it's available to them.
Chris Wedding:
Let's hook our listeners, wow us with some fun bacteria genus names or the names of your very niche scientists on staff. Let's give folks some details so they continue to hear the full Cemvita story, Moji.
04:48
Moji Karimi:
Yeah, so the craziest thing that I think it's a real example that we're doing now is, how our scientists took the gene for ethylene production from a banana and engineered it into a microbe that eats CO2. Now that microbe is reprogrammed, so now it's making ethylene from CO2 and we're now scaling up that process. So, that's really an example of the type of things that we could do now.
As you can imagine, we have experts in all kinds of really niche areas, anything from geomicrobologists to biohydrometallurgists to experts in photosynthesis to non-photosynthesizing, but still utilizing microbes. And that's what I really love about my job is to find scientists who are deeply passionate about this specific microbe, but they're hitting a limit with what they could do with it at the academic setting. And bringing them here, connect them with 20 other people who think the same way, but working on different microbes. For all of them to collaborate and bring these microbes to life within this framework of tangible solutions in the industry with a big impact.
Chris Wedding:
My phone call just before ours was with one of our Climate CEO Mastermind peer group members and his company commercializes tech often from scientists very deep in their area of expertise, but builds companies around those technologies to bring them to market.
Having one of my two feet in the university teaching a lot at Duke, so I'm exposed to all sorts of expertise that I think, “Gosh, how can we get some more of that into existing businesses to start new businesses?” So, pretty cool you're creating this platform where that deep scientific expertise can be translated to venture backable, highly scalable solutions.
On the banana example, some listeners may be crystal clear, but all right, ethylene, cool, sounds chemically. Why do we care about ethylene and why do we care that these bacteria now with genes from a banana can produce them?
Moji Karimi:
Yeah, ethylene is the biggest organic molecule that is used industrially. It's basically in pretty much all polymers and plastics, so you don't have to go far. What you're wearing just is going to have ethylene. It's not a product that you would buy as a consumer, but you're using it. What's happening is, consumers are still asking for sustainable lower carbon products.
For example, if you want to buy a cup and then the company that is making the cup has to do that, so they're now asking their own suppliers of plastic. And the people who make plastics, then they go up to whoever they're buying ethylene from and asking them, “Hey, can you make this low carbon?” The way ethylene has been made, a lot of it is using ethane or fossil fuels as a starting point.
What today is called green ethylene is made by a company in Brazil using sugar as a feedstock and that's a drop in a bucket in terms of the overall size of ethylene consumption. So, what we're doing here is introducing a carbon negative pathway for production of ethylene, which is really upstream of all polymers and plastics. So, in terms of impact, just generally for consumers, it's going to be huge within the next two to three decades as we scale up the process and build more plants that operate this way.
08:42
Also, in terms of the amount of CO2 that this process could utilize, only one of these plants at commercial scale would use 1.7 million tons of CO2 per year to produce one billion pounds of ethylene, bio-ethylene in our case, and that's just one plant. So, then you could scale that up from there and the goal that we have is to get that up to one gigaton of CO2 utilized by 2050.
Chris Wedding:
Wow, those are very impressive numbers. You mentioned the current green ethylene producer in Brazil and I think about what's happening like in the hydrogen space where you have all these different colors of hydrogen based on how it's produced and so forth. It's quite confusing. Anyway, maybe you should call yours yellow given the banana reference and totally separate yours from everything else out there. Your free marketing advice for the day.
Moji Karimi:
I think that's a good point. The other one that is more of a nuanced observation, but it's a little bit at least annoying to me is, for example, people say bio-based materials or like bio-ethylene, but there's no definition. Is it bio because the feedstock was bio or [crosstalk – 00:09:56] biomass? Or is it bio because the process was bio? The one that I'm excited about is when the process is bio because using bio like biomass as feedstock, like in this case sugar, you may think, “Oh, that's better than the fossil fuels,” but wait a minute, let's do the life cycle assessment.
When you add up the water use, fertilizer use, land use, transportation, the time that goes into it, and also competing with food basically because those products have other use cases, we have to really think hard. But then you think about using a waste stream like CO2 as a feedstock, there is no shortage of CO2. As a matter of fact, there is a lot of momentum around CO2 capture, but okay, we capture the CO2, congratulations. What do we do with it now?
If you just inject it in the subsurface, that's good, but when you think about companies, that's a cost. No one makes money doing that. So, it's like, there has to always be an incentive, which we have in the US with say 45Q, which pays companies $50 or a bit more for each ton of CO2. But if you really want to incentivize the industry to do more of it, we just have to move towards this utilization model and bio-ethylene is an example. There are many other ways of doing that.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, on that same train of thought, maybe 15 plus years ago, I was really excited about the field of biomimicry. I know that one kind of mantra, a frequent saying in biomimicry is that, instead of using the typical heat, beat, and treat method of producing chemicals, et cetera, why not use the intelligence of biology? I think your example of, look, if you did an LCA, life cycle analysis of green ethylene, it may not look so great because you're still probably heating, beating, and treating versus using bacteria.
Moji Karimi:
Exactly. Actually, so that biomimicry is the genesis of Cemvita. My co-founder, Tara, was writing a book for Springer and the title of the book was Molecular Mechanisms of Autonomy in Biological Systems. In the book, she explains this concept of relativity of code, energy and mass and that's the name of the company like the [inaudible – 00:12:20] and how basically in nature you have systems. Of course, we know about relativity of energy and mass, but when you think about living systems, there is a third element, which is the information that is dictating how energy is consumed, what type of mass is produced, it’s the blueprint. Then that lets you ask, thinking about, “Hey, what if we use microbes as that vehicle?” They're going to have an input in terms of mass and energy, and they're going to have an output in terms of mass.
12:48
Then with genetic engineering, we define, what is the code for the blueprint for that transformation? So, all of this is biomimicry and learning from this four and a half million years of R&D that nature has ahead of us. Now we actually have the tools and they're economical enough for us to explore and reinvent industries in a way that at the end of the day, my goal and Tara's is to create a world where humans could live in harmony with nature and change this relationship that we've had in terms of just extracting because that's just not sustainable into the future.
Chris Wedding:
Well, Moji, I knew we were going to get along on this phone call, but I didn't realize we would trade quotes from the world of biomimicry. Yeah, the one you just referenced is so salient, why not learn from four and a half billion years of R&D, aka evolution on this planet, for how to [inaudible – 00:13:47] it, but in a much smarter, efficient manner. All right, let's pick a different thread.
So, we've gone down the yellow or green ethylene thread. You've got a couple others there, those three buckets of what you all do. Maybe give an example of each for the origin and/or uniqueness and/or carbon negative nature of what you're producing or salvaging, let's say.
Moji Karimi:
Sure. So, we talked about that extraction, production, and renewal, but those things then feed the three verticals within Cemvita as a platform company. The first vertical is carbon negative by manufacturing. That's where we have all the CO2-based chemicals. Bio-ethylene is an example in addressing of the polymers and plastics. Then we have two other categories of projects.
One is for carbon negative sustainable aviation fuels and then the other one is for carbon negative renewable natural gas have a pathway to go from CO2 to an intermediate that then goes to biogas. Therefore, expand these limitations that we've had right now with just being limited to landfills and cow manure as a feedstock to make what today is called renewable natural gas. So, that's the first vertical.
The second one is biomining. That's the idea to use microbes in the mining industry for more sustainable extraction of energy transition metals. Basically, microbes, as they're sprayed on top of the ore that’s been removed from the mine, as they come down, they remove the metals, which then we collect at the bottom. And so, that's called bioleaching.
We’re doing it in two categories for base metals like copper for electrification and then the second category is for battery metals and of course, lithium is a big focus. We're developing biological methods for better extraction of lithium from either clay or from brine so that whole thing was biomining.
Then the last and third vertical is what we call a subsurface by manufacturing. That's my favorite. That's where I've spent most of my time and my background with the previous startup and as a petroleum engineer. So, that's the idea to build chemical plants in the subsurface. If you go to a depleted oil and gas reservoir, turn that into a subsurface production facility for specific molecules.
16:12
The example they use, there's microbes that eat oil. Now we're programming them to then make hydrogen and do it in the subsurface in CO2. And so, that's the main project that we have in that vertical, what we're calling gold hydrogen, which we define as produced biologically in the subsurface that could be produced at a cost actually much lower than green hydrogen, and it's with zero emissions.
Chris Wedding:
I referenced this earlier, but I'll say it again, or something related to it. So, this sounds like a detour, but just hang with me. We have three kids ages 10 to 16 and I don't think they're challenged enough at school, so of course, I got to give them a little more to learn at home.
One of the things that I try to assign is almost anything from the website, which is, I think it's ifls.com. Maybe there's something else there, but anyway, the IFLS stands for I F’ing Love Science. Now, of course, they used to say it out loud, but I just think, man, that what you just ran through is a series of businesses that it sounds like you're just making it up. That's how unique and novel and maybe to your point earlier before we pressed record, synthetic biology, those processes are, I think you mentioned eating the earth, eating something. It's along the lines of the software is eating everything. Anyway, super exciting stuff.
Can you comment maybe on which of those lines of businesses is easiest to commercialize now given other kind of factors in the market and then how you all commercialize? It's great to have the scientists to do the work, but do you also have execution folks, translators, marketers, et cetera, or is that done through partnership?
Moji Karimi:
Yeah, actually because I'm not a scientist, so that's where I spend most of my time, because I view that business model and commercialization, the part of this whole thing is as exciting because it's new. It's like new models being born. So, the one that we brought to life was this platform or model of microbes as a service. Meaning, before we even do any kind of work in house, we need to have a partner that is going to get behind that application. It's going to help us along the way and it's going to scale that up.
For example, for bio-ethylene, that's Oxy that's doing that. So, what we do is we define really what does success look like? What should be the metrics in terms of techno-economic life cycle for this to make sense? Based on that, define a phase zero or phase one study in the lab, build a microbe. Then at some meter we will scale it up a thousand times and that gives us a set of new data at a bigger scale to then -- Basically, what we're doing is boiling down the synthetic biology to chemistry, and then building it back up to chemical engineering. Then to process engineering to get in the case of a bio manufacturing, say to an Aspen model.
Once we have that Aspen model, now that's the common language with any chemical company. Then together we go find what is the right engineering procurement and construction, EPC company that’s going to build this and there is where we're leveraging a lot of existing knowledge for biofuels or fermentation and making these modifications to what we need it to be, and then go on and build that.
19:46
When we talk about in CO2 deployments of synthetic biology, like in the mining or in the subsurface, that's quite different, but it actually could be much faster. It was a surprise to me when I learned that 20% of the world's copper today is already bioleached, I didn't know that. I thought that these guys didn't know as much, but they know that. But then the second surprise was, I thought, “Well, then, I mean, these are really big companies with deep pockets, they must have already known about synthetic biology, optimized these microbes.” No, they have what is called bucket microbiology, species that they have isolated 15 years ago that they still use.
So, the benefit of that whole scenario is when we optimize a microbe, we could just say, “Hey, don't use that, use this,” but we don't have to rebuild the scale system in the field. It could happen faster. Same with the subsurface because think about it, there is really no CapEx because we're utilizing the subsurface. It already has a favorable pressure, temperature, you just have to take samples, see, what are the microbes that could be the soldiers for us? But then what nutrient do we need to provide? What are the bad microbes that we want to block? Then most of the operation is based on what they inject, but once you do that, it could escalate really quickly.
So, we have a really aggressive plan. These applications have different timelines, but within the next three to five years, bringing a lot of these applications to life. Then from there, it's more about scaling and at that time, we're hoping to have most of at least the biotechnology risk off the table and have the rest be more like customized applications in unique settings.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, microbes as a service. I've heard of a lot of things as a service, but never microbes. You better coin that. That's a good one.
Moji Karimi:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
There are some listeners who may be thinking, “Wait a second. You're genetically engineering microbes, genes from a banana and a bacterium now. I don't know how I feel about that.” How do you respond to that concern?
Moji Karimi:
Yeah, I mean, there's a few ways to think about it. One is, the reality of it is, even everything that people are eating today already has touched synthetic biology somewhere along the supply chain. Like how do you think we have tomatoes all year round that also don't have any seeds and they don't squeeze the water and they cut them nicely? So modifications and we're eating them, but in this case, things are not coming in direct contact with humans. It's the products, the microbes are doing the job to then make the end product and that end molecule is the exact same.
So, for example, that ethylene is the exact same molecule as the ethylene that was made with fossil fuel methods. It's also really well established, we're using yeast, we're using E. coli for biofuels. Pretty much all pharmaceuticals are made through biochemical pathways. In agriculture, we've done even more like in CO2 deployment.
Now, all that said, the process that we go through is initially we try to utilize natural microbes and just optimize them, either their food and their environment and really understand their growth curve and how much can we push that? If you could get it there, that's great. If you can't, then the next step is to see, okay, maybe this microbe has the gene that we want, but we just need to express it more. So, then you could go, for example, increase the copy number of that gene by like a hundred times. So, that's not quite still modified because the gene was already there.
23:32
Where the rubber meets the road and is all the way exactly engineering is where you take a gene from something else and you join it with something else. In that case, there is regulations depending on what country and how the microbe is to be used. If it's in an enclosed environment or if it's in direct contact with the environment in the US that's all regulated by the environmental protection agency. There is very detailed descriptions of what you can and cannot do and we have in-house experts on that and we communicate with them along the way. So, very cautious of that.
Going back to that biomimicry is humans learning about the process, but then doing it safely. As we've done in history, there used to be a time where we harvest one pound of insulin from 10,000 pounds of pancreas of pigs and dogs to when we took that gene for that insulin producing enzyme, and generate it into E. coli and do it in labs. This is the same process, but now we want to bring that outside of those very specialty molecules into industrial molecules.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, right on. Let's talk about how you've funded growth. So, these are big ideas, lots of R&D, lots of intellectual capital, probably both the generic sense and patents and so forth. What's that look like, strategics or VC or others?
Moji Karimi:
Yeah, so for us, we went through basically everything. From bootstrapping, when we started, Tara gave up her apartment, moved into our guest house, year and a half just research and what are we going to do? What's the foundation for that? Protecting some of the early IP and then secure our first two clients.
Then once we had those, I knew, okay, now we're going to have a better chance for a successful seed round. So, when we did that, actually the first two customers, Oxy and BHP, we mentioned to them that we want to raise a seed round and they're like, “Well, wait, we want to invest.” So, we just kept it simple and easy.
Chris Wedding:
Nice.
Moji Karimi:
They invested for both CVCs, but then for our Series A, which was late last year, we brought in also now VCs because as you know with CVCs, there's different forces on the cap table. They have their own interests in mind, so we have to have a first mutualizer, if you will. So, other VCs joined, 80-90 ECB, and then on the CBC side Mitsubishi, Sumitomo.
I think I really like the CBC angle for energy transition applications because not only they help you with the funding, but they also help you open doors within their own business units especially like the ones I mentioned where they have a breadth of applications. It's not just like one thing. When you look at our company, it's a platform too, so there's mining, there's oil and gas, downstream, upstream. So, we really like that.
26:34
I think we'll continue to explore those, but for our Series B, which is going to be later this year, I think we'll also shift more towards more of bigger tech sizes in terms of some of the private equity or some specialized banks or that category as well to be involved. Even though we're CapEx-like in terms of what we do, but there is a lot of development to be done and we need people and bigger labs. That’s where the use of funds is going to be.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, it still takes big dollars to build that giant, deep moat around you-all’s unique solution set. Yeah, I think your reference to the CVCs, the corporate venture capital, the strategic partners, is a good one. They have lots of ways to win. It isn't just the financial return from investing in you all, per se, but the way that you all support their existing business lines.
I think, in my experience, CVCs, maybe they're slower perhaps to underwrite, let's say, but the valuations they can give can be higher than purely financial investors because they have more ways to win. But you're right, they have their agendas rightfully so and that means you may not get a competing strategic in the same cap table, but you may want them for other reasons, check sizes that are fit with your business. Yeah, it goes both ways for sure.
Hey, Moji, if you had to pick maybe one area in climate tech outside of what you all are doing that you think is high promise, what might that be?
Moji Karimi:
Yeah, so the one that I really like, even though I don't know enough about it, but I just really like the promise of it is nuclear. If they could generate electricity at lower cost, zero emissions because then that feeds into a lot of our processes also. That we need energy still, but we don't want that energy to eat into our carbon savings, depending on what emissions they have.
I think this trend of going from using a lot of material to get certain amount of energy and how we've gone from wood to coal to like oil and gas, I think eventually nuclear is going to probably be the end there if you could do that safely and at the scale. So, I keep an eye on that. We stay in touch with some of the companies that are doing that and as soon as they come online, we'd love to collaborate with them and utilize their source of electricity. So, that's definitely one.
Then the other one that I like is geothermal. The reason I like that is because it utilizes a lot of the knowledge that existed, say from oil and gas industry, in terms of drilling and capital projects and all of that, but in this new direction. Some of my own friends have started companies in that space, really big fan of geothermal and that's again, another source of electricity that then we could use for our processes. Then there's a lot of other stuff.
In some ways I'm jealous of what you're doing because you get to talk to everybody, but when you're doing something, you get so busy also with the day to day and it's hard to keep up.
Chris Wedding:
Yes, pros and cons for sure of being inch wide, mile deep, and also the opposite. Yeah, on nuclear, we just need Commonwealth fusion systems to turn that $1.8 billion Series B and into power tomorrow. I mean, it may take a little more than tomorrow, but yeah, lots of dry powder to get there. Then on the geothermal, it sounds like you're friends with Tim at Fervo, perhaps. I think Tim's background, maybe it was fracking natural gas, but pivoted that technology to be a rocket ship for geothermal.
30:41
Hey, let's switch from Moji as a business person to Moji as Moji. The person who's out here, we're all people listening to this as well as entrepreneurs and investors. If you could give your younger self one or two tips on how to be more effective, higher impact, dare I say happier, what might some of those things be?
Moji Karimi:
I mean, that's a tough one because you just live your life and you learn as you go. One thing I've tried to do was to just be more self-aware. So, if I could go back, I'll probably ask that even more self-awareness and taking the time to just have those clarity breaks to say, “Okay, what's the big picture here?”
It’s kind of weird, but I think about humanity as like another species next to everything else, but then also about say our body, it's a machine just like anything else. So, how much can I learn about this machine so that it could be run more efficiently, both physically, also the mind? Those are some of the things that I've realized the importance of even more so in the past few years.
If I could go back 10 years more I’ll probably poke myself into saying, start thinking more deeply about that now and how do you define success and happiness? Because if you set short goals, you reach them, then what? Then it's like, okay, you have a crisis, so thinking back early on, I think it's a part of that equation too.
Chris Wedding:
I like those. On the middle one, I think you gave -- My new favorite podcast is the one with David Sinclair, the longevity expert from Harvard Medical. When my kids see me eating some weird thing or fasting or whatever else, it's like, “Dad, why are you doing that?” I was like, “What do you mean? It's so I can be super healthy for more of you-all’s lives little crazy person.” Perfect, yes, self-awareness, totally.
I've been a long-time meditator, but I think some other things like coaching earlier on or more of the personality style tests that like an MBA program would run you through, I think more of that would probably have been helpful for me as well. How about some habits, routines, Moji, that keep you healthy, productive, et cetera, what does it look like?
Moji Karimi:
The thing that I touched on with the clarity breaks, I think that has become a habit. For some reason though, the best time when I do it is on the plane. All these ideas just become clear on the plane. I don't know why, I love that, but apart from that, taking half a day, a month, no laptop, just a notebook, just thinking through. I have a bit of a checklist that I go through about personal stuff like relationships, friendships, family stuff, but then in the company side also and making sure the team is good. Where I need to spend more time questioning myself, am I spending my time correctly? Also getting feedback externally.
Apart from that, just trying to carve out time for workout, eating healthy and that kind of thing. For me, it's actually 0% about looks or anything. It's just, I feel the responsibility, like I can't have a bad day because key decisions being made, expectations are high. For everyone that's leaving their jobs, moving to Houston for the families to do this, so I need to come through. So, that's really why I do it, but of course I want to also live longer and be happier.
34:39
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, no, for sure. The first part of what you're talking about, I might describe as like think time. This was a topic for two of our recent climate CEO peer group meetings where the prompt was for the breakout, “Hey, look, how do you create space and time to just, think, reflect, et cetera?” Because there's way too much to do. You clearly could just do, do, do blocking and tackling versus stepping away, ideally offsite, out of the normal flow of your habits, whether it's work habits or whether it's habits at home. And no surprise, it is hard. It is hard for folks in your position to do that.
I was sharing maybe as inspiration, although it's much easier with what I do to create this time, but I'm now in a routine where in the spring and fall, I take just three days. So, I take a day off, take the weekend off. Of course, I make a trade with my wife, “Hey, honey, you got this coming or you already had it,” and just go to the mountains of North Carolina with books to read or maybe podcasts, but it's meditation, it's hiking. I mean, obviously, the breweries because it's Western North Carolina. Anyway, it's three days to have some of that [crosstalk – 00:35:53] charge.
Moji Karimi:
It's magical what that does because it's like three days that I'm not working on the company or whatever, but once you do it, it's like, well, it could really jump over a lot of issues just with more perspective. So, I'm trying to do more of that this year, so thanks for reminding me. Okay, I need to go make that deal with my wife now.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, exactly. Our joke is that she was visiting family overseas for a month last summer while I had the kids, “Bye folks.” I was like, “Honey, I mean, not to rub it in, but I got some days banked, okay? I'm going to use them selectively.” Anyway, yes, a healthy back and forth.
Moji Karimi:
Exactly.
Chris Wedding:
We got three more here for you. Any recommendations on books or podcasts or ways that you learn, Moji?
Moji Karimi:
For me, I just try to consume everything because you can learn from any scenario, if it's a random YouTube thing or standup or stuff. But the one book that really stood with me throughout, at least the past few years was the Zero to One. Just the mental model of thinking about, not just incremental solutions, but how do we create the whole next framework?
Cemvita is set up that way basically. Nothing that we do is like incremental. It's either going to be huge or it's going to burn down in big flames. We're not going to do the stone study in the middle type. So, that's a framework that I really like, but apart from that, just logging into your podcast, others that are talking with other entrepreneurs, thought leaders or experts in the field of policy, this and that. Because this energy transitioning thing is so new for everyone.
37:42
I mean, I'm looking at the books you have behind you also, a lot of the new frameworks being introduced and I need to consume off that and put it in context to see what's our pathway. And so, yeah, just to mix up everything.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. On the models and frameworks, the guy that wrote Atomic Habits, which is a great book, but also, he's got just a super short and useful newsletter, this guy, James Clear, he's made a pretty comprehensive list of major mental models. Anyway, I'll drop it, the note, Moji. I'm going to be trickling these things into my newsletter as well for the benefits you're talking about.
Moji Karimi:
Yeah, I would love that, thanks.
Chris Wedding:
All right, so two more here. This one's very different. What is one of, not the most, but what is one of the nicest things anyone's ever done for you outside of your family?
Moji Karimi:
Honestly, it was just, our marketing lead, last week I had a bad morning and she just got me two tacos. She went out of her way to find the vegan tacos that I like and it's like, “Whoa, okay, that was nice.” That was a nice touch and that's the one that I remember. So, probably there's been a lot of other people who are listening to this, who’s like, “Hey, what about that?” But yeah, thanks Tiffany for the tacos.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, thank you, Tiffany. Those tacos do sound good, vegan tacos. Well, here's what I hear. If that is one of the most important things that stands out to you, my guess is that you see gratitude in lots of places, not just the big obvious stuff, which is a pretty healthy way to go through life. Let's wrap here. Closing messages or calls to action for listeners. What you got?
Moji Karimi:
I mean, as far as all the things that we discussed here, all of that is available on our website, cemvitafactory.com and please follow our journey because we really intend to make this a huge part of energy transition, hopefully.
I don't think I could give advice to anyone, but one thing that I had this chat with this entrepreneur that I really admire, and I'm always talking to people trying to find out, “What is the secret? You're 10 years ahead of me, like what's up?” I was waiting for him to give me that.
We talked and he didn't give it to me and then right before he hung up, he said, “Believe in yourself and follow your passion.” And I was like, “All right, thank you.” I mean, it's simple and that's what I do and try to do things that I like and is fun. Also, find other people who align with that. I’m giving them the resources in the case of people who join us to really go all the way with what they want to bring to life and have this as a journey for all of us.
It's a life worth living. It’s not just like a work-life balance type of thing. It's just having an impact and doing something good. If it works, great. If it doesn't, it was a nice try and we'll move on to the next thing.
Chris Wedding:
Well, you make it sound very easy, but I think you and I and those listening also know it's not that easy. It’s a lot of metaphorical punches in the gut, but my guess is you-all's vision of the potential here is so large. That why probably helps get you through all the waves, the turbulence of the entrepreneurial journey.
41:21
Anyway, hey, appreciate the positive finish here, Moji. We are rooting for you-all's success and hopefully more energy transition, innovation coming out of Houston and getting more folks in oil and gas to see the job potential in things like what you all are doing.
Moji Karimi:
Absolutely, thank you again for having me.
Chris Wedding:
You got it man. Peace.
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