Latest / Second Nature / E196 Manuel Pinuela: The Most Undervalued Asset Might Be Right Under Our Feet

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E196 Manuel Pinuela: The Most Undervalued Asset Might Be Right Under Our Feet · Second Nature

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: We should probably start by telling people who you are and what you do.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Rich.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I'm Manuel Piñuela.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm the CEO and co-founder of Cultivo.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: And everything that we do is how to accelerate investment into nature.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Very specifically over the last four years, we've really focused on rangelands in North America and define North America as Canada, US, and Mexico.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: So really working on how to regenerate grasslands.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we work a lot with ranchers and associated communities.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Where does your connection, appreciation, love for that part of the world and those environments come from?
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: It comes from stories from my family.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: My family a hundred years ago was really everyone was at the at the ranch, what would be now consider a ranch.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And uh through historical changes across Mexico, um, mainly the Mexican Revolution, everyone stopped being in a ranch and uh and being a landowner and started to become either a medic, a lawyer, or an engineer, and I'm an engineer trying to go back to the land.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Talk to me about the engineering chapter of your career.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so so I've always saw my parents say that I always wanted to be an inventor.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And that word doesn't get used enough anymore, does it?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think so.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: You should bring that back.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: But to me, it was all about just making up inventions and things that solve problems.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so I decided to become an electrical and electronic engineer at the National Autonomous University in Mexico.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's the largest university, and it has a lot of resources to be in front of very difficult challenges.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that I probably more than the lectures, the thing that I love was that there was always a problem with a very tight economic constraint.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, one was how to create a neonatal incubator with less than five dollars.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And and I was able to do it, and that was my first very quick reaction of, oh my god, I can do this.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: And because the bounding box was so tight, it spurs innovation in my person in my perception a lot uh better and a lot with a lot more focus.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so that really was just a catalyst to what then I discovered was okay, taking that invention, solving a problem.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then I was always with this uh engine of then I wanted to be outside and helping uh or solving the problem for many people, Ergo and Entrepreneur.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that was really the catalyst of it sounds like the applied element of the invention was really important.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think that triggered about you in terms of the sideke that that meant that was it?
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: What because uh, you know, in your mind, you could have been a theoretical physicist instead.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: What was it about the applied element?
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh actually, during my undergrad, I loved physics so much that at some point I thought I was going to become a physicist.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I was in this accelerated program for uh top of the class.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And in that university, they exposed me to advanced maths and physics.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then I discovered that when I was in those classes without the engineering component as to how to apply it, there was something that was missing for me.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: It was fantastic to be solving a very tough problem, but there was something that was missing.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And my dad is an engineer and said, Well, I think what you're missing is the application.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh try to always figure out how you can use that theory or that problem-solving skill into something.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: I um so I don't read fiction because I don't see the point.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's not helping me improve anything or get better.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I really learned to love reading once I had a business to be able to apply the concepts.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I I I I worry what one day, if I ever retire or exit the business or whatever, and I've suddenly got loads of time to read, I which I would like to read more because every time I read, I feel like I get clever.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: Every time I watch something, other than a few podcasts, I feel like I get less clever.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I worry that I won't love it at that point because unless there's a forum to apply it to, it just feels a little bit too nebulous.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I uh thanks for sharing that.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because to me, the reading side, I have to break it in two.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: One is the application and the learning, but I realize that back to the creativity piece, to me, creativity happens a lot through fiction because it takes me to something so different that disconnects me completely to the bounding box where you and I are, and then it sort of stretches.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: I have wondered that.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: I have wondered if it's something I'm missing because um I love the um Moonshots podcast.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: Do you ever watch that?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's US Tech podcast um on the sort of front edge of the singularity, obsessive about AI, tech, robotics, everything in that regard.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: And they talk about a particular uh series of future-focused books, but they're written with a level of granularity that it makes you feel it's real.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_01: And they refer to we're seeing things like that present.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I do wonder am I missing an element of creativity and invention by because perhaps our minds don't know if it's real or not in terms of what we're reading, because if you're trying to visualize something, almost even for your business, what you're visualizing is not real.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: You're creating an act of fiction to start with and dragging yourself towards it.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe you um have a think and recommend what is the first fiction book I should read.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, you're on.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I've read Harry Potter.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: Istof Eden.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Back to back to the topic of grasslands and rangelands and degraded lands.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Eastofiden is based in the in the valley of California, and it talks a lot about the dustball and problems on communities because of land degradation.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: So, but you know, Steinbeck is just marvelous with a pen.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, I think you will enjoy that.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Love it.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we touched on creativity and innovation and invention and the importance that parameters and restrictions have from allowing that to present.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you need to create within that box.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Can you talk to how important having those boundaries are for you so you're not just completely free reign when it comes to invention?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I think the first one is because of that, the main uh driving force that we found at Cultivo that makes institutional investors or any type of investor to say, hey, you know what, I'm going to put dollars into this funky thing that Manuel just told me.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: That honestly, seven, seven years ago it was a bit like family, friends, and fools.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then as we are proving and building that track record, the title of the podcast, haven't you?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Family, friends and fools.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: There's because there's an element.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: People need to believe in what we were pitching to them.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And and the concept of that in investing in something that is in principle degraded, um, needs a lot of untangling to make sure that it works.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that back to the bounding box.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you say, well, hold on a second, what I'm trying to hit is this investment return.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm trying to hit are this very specific KPIs from a biome perspective on water and biodiversity and, of course, carbon, with certain constraints on that community, what it makes actually is it simplifies a problem to, well, this is my movement area.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it doesn't mean that you cannot throw back to invention things from left field that all of a sudden move the needle a lot.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I think if if you don't have the bounding box, let's say the bounding box of the investor to be able to deploy more capital, then you start to spend too much time in innovation that doesn't drive to a very specific outcome.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: So the bounding box of the investor plus the bounding box of what the ecosystem can actually, and this is what nature is so ruthless at is what is the time and the constraints that you have with the state of the ecosystem in front of you and what you can throw it to it.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: You cannot just throw everything that you can because it's actually might not react.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so it it has some type of hysteresis to it that you can just not apply a lot of investment to it to see if it accelerates its regeneration.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: There are some things that will move it faster, but it's still constrained.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that helps you then figure out, for example, if you need to complement those returns with other activities.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so that to us is that bounding box that we've been honing now for close to eight years as to what works and very specifically what works for rangelands, right?
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: And as you know, each biome is just very different.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: Do you get the question that people say to you, quote unquote, what do you do with the land?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: Assuming it's one answer, and it's like sure, everyone's different.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um I I um I've always loved the idea of constraints being catalytic to creation.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: Love the alliteration there.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Found that one on the way past.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I always remember the white stripes um saying they would go to the studio when they were recording, and the producers would break one element of an instrument, they'd take a string off a guitar, they'd take something kind of a drum kit away because it forced them to do something different and to invent and not just go through the process.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I love that you set your restrictions and boundaries early.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think that leading with the investment parameters.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think you're the only company in the sector I've heard do that.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone else is will proudly lead with it's all about impact, it's all about environment.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: And they might not even get to what the investment lots of companies in our sector don't.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: They they kind of bring investment in at the end.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that's a unique thing that you led with that.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that's an element of why you've been so successful so quickly?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think so.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it did well, let's put it this way.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think it has tremendously helped us because when we started with a lot of hubris, honestly.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: What year did you start?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So we started in, well, as an idea behind a napkin in 2018, uh, officially 2019, and we had this, James Michael founder and I, this big idea.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to save the planet, right?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to regenerate nature.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it's, hey, it's 1%, but it's it's a lot.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's 150 million hectares.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't constraint in the sense of we had an investment criteria because of the conversations that we were having with institutional investors, but we didn't have a constraint on a geographical constraint or a biome.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just too big of a challenge to figure out.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the solutions, to your point, were very different.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: And when you want to replicate and speed the amount of capital that you want to deploy, you want to make sure that you're hitting as much as possible that target all the time.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: So even when we were looking broader, when it was not as polished as rangelands in North America, we still needed a bit of replication on the answer to how do we get to that return?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: And what has happened is that over the last four years, after seeing so many different types of ecosystems that needed investment across so many geographies, we started to see, well, actually that geography there is going to be very difficult, that ecosystem there is going to be very difficult.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we started tightening that box to one that we said, okay, what's your time horizon?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: What's your investment return?
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: What are the thresholds?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: What are your the other particular investment criteria that some of our investors have?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then we were able to hit it consistently.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um my word of the summer has been coherency.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I think what you're articulating there is a very well-defined, well thought out, coherent proposition.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: You can attack it about scale, you can attack it about land use, you can attack whatever angle you ask a question about, the proposition is coherent.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: It makes logical sense, it's holistic in its offering.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um allow me a digression on this one.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: So uh we took the kids to uh Disney World, Florida over summer.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um do you have children?
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I do.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: How old?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: One seven-year-old.
• 12:33
  unknown: Okay.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: Have you done Disney World?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Not yet.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, personally, I have.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_01: So you go to Disney World, Florida, everything is coherent.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: The logos, the branding, the positioning, where the bins are, how the smell of it, everything is coherent.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: You have a feel and experience when you go in.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: It is magical.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: My wife, who is a first-class mathematician, she's uber logical.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: She doesn't like anything that doesn't logically make sense.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: However, she adores Disney.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: You go up the road to Universal Studios, costs more money, it's newer, the roller coasters are better.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's just not coherent.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Things aren't finished, the quality of stuff's not there, the branding isn't there.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: So the whole thing doesn't have the same soul.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I've come back over summer realizing from a business perspective, if your narrative, your commercial strategy, you're offering, if it's incoherent, and you often find that with exciting startups, that they have a fragment of an idea or a bit, but it falls down after you ask two or three questions, unless it's coherent and can be attacked from every which way, and you've got the answers and the concepts, it just doesn't stand up to it.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: And what I love that you got to is over time you simplified, solidified, and you're still dealing with a complex challenge, but the whole thing's coherent.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's what gives an investor confidence.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: I I couldn't agree more.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that's the thing because the at the end of the day, hopefully, what happens when you're being coherent is that if then that investor or that, let's say now pack of investors say, Hey, we're loving this.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Can you do more of this and can you do faster?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: That the answer should be, yeah, actually, I was there a year ago, but let's do it.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I think there's that simplicity, and everyone tells us, right, as an entrepreneur, you just keep it simple.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: But it doesn't simple's hard.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And and but but also the fact that the solution is super hard.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like nothing of what we do is for the faint of you know, but you cannot come into this industry thinking it's going to be simple.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: People ask me what's what's the hardest thing, and I just say everything.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Every all of it's hard.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Every day.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think even at the personal level, what the team always asks me is can we keep it as simple as possible?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Knowing that this is hard, just let's keep it simple.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and so, yeah, it that resonates a lot, Rich.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Coherence is is is also difficult to achieve.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: You've given me the next iteration of that as well, because I think it's the coherency builds confidence in people.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: So um, before we leave your engineering side too far behind, talk to me about the PhD.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: How did that come about, and what was your experience of the process?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so so I was so I had a startup uh in Mexico City, and that was a modest following undergrad before undergrad, a startup, modest exit, but I saw the impact we were putting street lamps remotely controlled um from a normal thing called Google Maps.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it worked.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I didn't even know what was an exit, that was a modest exit.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: And then I joined a very large corporate, uh following my my future wife, uh, to Houston, Texas.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_00: That's a cultural change, isn't it?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: That was a cultural change.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: And both at the at the business level, like what I was doing on a on a daily basis, but also going to Texas.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we had an amazing time.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: But it was during uh the uh 2008 recession, and even though my role as an engineer was there, I saw two signals.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: So in one day, this is how brutal some corporates in the US can be.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: In one day, I could I saw about 2,000 of my colleagues go.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like in one day, one email, boxes, goodbye.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, what I realized was that I was not inventing anything.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was a very comfortable life, but I was not inventing anything.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so that to me was uh the spur, as well as to my wife, to decide to do a PhD.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so we were lucky that we got accepted over at Imperial College, and the the PhD was an amazing experience.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yet again, it was super hard.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: It forces you to have one idea or one challenge, perhaps multiple ideas as to how to solve it.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but you go into this magical cave where you have almost endless resources, not financially necessarily, but endless resources of mostly your time.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: You're your own boss.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I I loved it.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, my my PhD was in optical and semiconductor devices, figuring out how to power sensors wirelessly.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and more importantly, with the the goal of could you sense back then?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: It was can we put sensors that are sensing the environment?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Water pollution was a very important one.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I then realized when you have a sensor that's always on, there's not enough human power to be looking at it.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so that triggered the the need of developing my machine learning skills and coding.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so that ended up with several patents that became a company and then a spin-out, and that provided an exit that gave me the bandwidth and the resources to to start cool Twitter.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that's an amazing story.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: Is the the coding and the appreciation of data in tech, is that the best thing you got from your PhD?
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, the best thing I again I think it's gigantry and problem to tackle, and just building that confidence that I can tackle.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: I um I I don't think I really enjoyed mine.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I um I was a reluctant academic.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: You made a coherent choice to go do a PhD.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: I just wanted to keep playing sport, and I was young and immature, and they said, look, if if you're still a student, we'll pay for you to play American football.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, Cool, I'll do a PhD.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: I had no idea what I was doing, didn't know what one was.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I I remember waking up in the middle of the night, I I was staying at my parents again, woke up halfway through the PhD going, I am screwed.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because I hadn't done anything, I'd just played football and been to the gym, and I was like, I've got 18 months left to do this PhD.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I think the best thing I got from it, and it's it's almost a skill you don't need now as much, but it was the ability to synthesize all this information and bring back this bit, the ability to do that.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and picking up coding, that's why I asked about the coding bit.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: That was that was really valuable for me.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: So mine's um, I made tiny GPSs when they were first commercially available.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: People won't remember this, but up until the early 2000s, they were a military-only tool.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: You put people couldn't have them.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they got released.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: We made tiny little GPSs that we threw into rivers, recorded ones and zeros, and I wrote the code to model how water moves.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: And and effectively that's that made a cellular model of everything to do with a river system, and I've just applied that in every different world, and that's how we find land now with a cellular-based model to land valuation and things.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but very much a reluctant academic.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: What's your what's your views of PhDs now?
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: So if you had a talented young person, we have some sat in the room, hello team.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if they said, Oh, we think we might do a PhD, with how fast the world's moving now, would you give up four years of your life to go do a PhD?
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: You would still now.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: In that second, I would love to do one now.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because like you just said it, right?
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: So the first year, at least on my PhD, was spend a year reading.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what else what is it that everyone is doing so that you don't repeat someone else's role and then you're actually moving the field?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's an amazing point.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: How many people have you heard pitch businesses that already exist?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: We we get I don't think it's intentional, but entrepreneurs get quite arrogant.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: I must have been the only person that's thought about this.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: Every week I find three or four times going, should we just check?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Should we just check someone's not already doing that?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: And they always are.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the things have been done.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, correct, but then is that perhaps the answer is in the nuance.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: The innovation is in the not so thing.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and so imagine a PhD right now with everything that's around.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: You could do a literature review probably in three weeks, that would be better.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then the rest of those four years would be about the innovation.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: And then imagine Tom Cralver, he's an amazing academic.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: He's out in Zurich now.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: He was at UA.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: So he was on the podcast a few weeks ago.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: Me and him have been emailing back and forward whether we think you could do one in a year now.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think the right thing now, you couldn't have anything that needed seasonal field work or anything, or had biological boundaries that meant you couldn't do it.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: But the right thing I think you could do in a year now with the right supervisor and properly embracing AI, like literally almost you side by side document how you list anthropic or whoever is your uh second author on the paper.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: You literally call it out and say, I think you could do it in 12 months now and absolutely have a great experience.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I think maybe that's why the my answer was so fast, because I could tell that what I don't know back to the personal experience, is if you would be able the output might be there, but would you be able to actually live through all of those things that make up the PhD that is not the thesis or the paper that he published?
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: The output probably is through the roof, but Uh, as in the personal growth journey, that that I don't know, because in in my case, it was a PhD and I wanted to create the next company.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it was with a fellowship at the business school with the Royal College of Art, and there were so many humans involved in that that I learned so much about design thinking, and and so all of that it would remove the element that I started with, which is this marvelous cage of or cave of four years, uh, that that you have full control of.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: And as a young person, I don't think you get that now.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: No, you're right.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um Sam Altman came out last week and said, I don't know if you saw it, but he was like, I was wrong about how fast the world would change with AI.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: I underestimated how fast the technology had changed, I overestimated how quickly people would change.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's your point about you needed the four years as a person.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: The research maybe didn't, but you did.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: I certainly did through academia, so I was there like eight years back to back degree, because I did degree straight to PhD.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, gotcha.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the person that walked, I was three different people throughout that period.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's I I often think it's funny now because people think the person they meet is the person you've always been.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, like people that meet you now think you're always been the CEO and founder and and all these things.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: They don't know the 18-year-old you.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: The 18-year-old me was a car crash, but I was not employable.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: I would not get an internship with us now, not a chance.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, because I needed that time to mature and progress in things.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: And and so what I think is a someone doing a PhD PhD right now probably would be encompassing what perhaps in our PhD was.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and the next thing would be this and this and this of my research, but you never do it unless you stay as a post of or something like that.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, shout out to Joseph if you're listening to this.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: So, one of our amazing interns has just gone to do a PhD at Oxford.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, awesome.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: I know he wants to be an academy.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: I persuade him, try to persuade him to stay because he's awesome, but he's right to go.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Fair play.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh one of the other interesting things about your time throughout that journey post-PHD.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you met some really influential entrepreneurs and business people that I can only assume had a big impact on your career.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: Can you talk to that a lot?
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sure.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so I had this amazing luck of meeting uh Lord Paul Dreson, former science and technology minister, and an entrepreneur from head to toe.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I still remember that original prompt of, hey, do you want to show your invention to Paul?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, yeah, sure.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: I it was late, no one else was in the lab.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And moral of that story, say yes.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: When you're early in your career, just say yes and turn up.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Two best pieces of advice were work hard, turn up, and say yes to opportunities.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and and so even from the day I was pitching that, even though I had trained for the, you know, during the business school pitch, et cetera, I had a pro tool version of what a bit what I thought was a business plan.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but it was so bad.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: But he was able to see the value of the idea and how to implement it.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: And and I still remember that conversation when we were already thinking about it.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Well, what do you want to do with this?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because I I was already going to go back to the US.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the the patents were going to be sold.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: And and he said, No, why do you want to go if what you want is to have another business?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: Give me the answer for the business.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, I'm the CEO, you're the investor.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, No, I'm the CEO, you you grow and I'll put money.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was the start of that amazing experience that was then Did you have the ask in your mind before the conversation, or that's the ask you came up with on the spot?
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, the it's on the spot.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: I so um again, I'm borrowing stories from a 20 VC podcast.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: It was one of the Sequoia partners.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: He said he missed on investing in either 11 Labs or Revolu.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think it was Revolu, because he turned up to the meeting and just went through the flow.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't turn up with a plan.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I think as I've gone throughout my career, I've tried to make sure that I've always got an ask, an offer, and a plan for a meeting.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, my advice to young people would be don't ask for anything.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: Just have a great meeting, build relationships, be patient.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: However, if the other person like you had said, what do you need?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: What would help?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Have an answer.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because being like, uh, I don't know, you might never get another conversation.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: So have an answer, don't have an ask.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, don't always use it.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: But if it comes, have the thing that you would ask for.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: So with whatever the however bad the calendar looks like now, try and have a point of going, what is the plan for that meeting?
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: What would I like?
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: What does a good look like?
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: And now we've got some resources at our disposal and some amazing estates and landscapes and the podcast.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: I can offer things as well.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: So it's nice to be able to do that to say, would you like this or would this help?
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, always turn up with a plan, I think.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, compinky.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's only taken me 43 years, mate, to get to that.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: There you go.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: Back to time, right?
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: You you need that time.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's a dead.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: And and and so look, it's just between Paul and then the people that had worked with Paul because it was not his first business.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I met other serial entrepreneurs, those serial entrepreneurs joined the business.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: One of those serial entrepreneurs is now my co-founder at Cultivo.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so you're building the circles of people that have gone through tackling really difficult challenges that have a lot of scars.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I built my scars with them, I've been in the boiler room with them.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so you start to figure out what type of entrepreneur or business person you are and what works and what doesn't work.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not everything that Paul or some of the people that I met uh is in my style, but but it also, to your point, helps form or it definitely helped me form uh who I want to be, uh who I wanted to be, as for example, a CEO.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually I got there, but I had to learn what worked and what didn't work with my style.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that that was another thing that it definitely helps that I had a really positive uh experience as an entrepreneur.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it's not that I'm a masochist, it's just that I'm gonna go with.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: But that's the next t-shirt slogan, I'm not a masochist, correct?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: I might be a founder, but I'm not a masochist.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: But it works when you think back to the younger you and the first iterations of you having a business.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: What did you intrinsically do well in business and what did you do badly that you got better at?
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was good at being focused, but not necessarily great at filtering the challenges in front.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think it it was about uh, you know, I I had thirst for a challenge, right?
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: So if there's a challenge, I want to tackle it, versus stopping and saying, Well, what's the point in solving that?
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: Is it going to move the needle?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: So over the years I've I think I've developed a muscle to say, okay, that's a interesting challenge, and then apply a certain criteria of is it worth my time or the business time?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think I was tackling too many challenges.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: What's the um what's the things you think you still need to get better at?
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um the first one is that I would like to even to be able to synthesize a lot better the the ask to an institutional investor.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: The narrative is really good right now, but I would just like to be to know a lot more about what they need to shorten that discovery period of what is it that they need us and uh to make what we do a very investment, investable case.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: It to your point, it needs patience, but you're building a relationship to feel out all those different things that matter to the individual.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think it's easy to your point to do the prep work about what is it that the institution needs, but learning what is it that the individual investment manager needs, uh it takes it takes a long time.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, but I but back to your question of people that I met, for example, my chair, uh Brace Young, uh, who believed in cultivo right from the first idea, he just has this uncanny ability to figure out already what is it that that person has.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now he has many, many years of experience and being in banking that I wish I it's almost that I wish that he can be, he's with me in many sessions, but I wish I could have that ability to figure what the investment person is looking for because it's even difficult for sometimes for them to articulate.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: How long was your chairman?
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: Did you know your chairman prior to this?
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, briefly.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it was about uh when I was already circling with James about the idea, and it was one of those people that said, I love it.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: Once it's real, give me a call.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um for people who might not have worked with an experienced chairman, talk a little about the value they bring to a business.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: I I think it's actually the most important thing that you can do.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um the chairman and the board.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: I I've learned um that a board is not, in my experience, the Silicon Valley type of board where you know every person in the board has put a check in the business.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_00: What I've learned is that creating a board, ideally with a chairman or chairwoman, that helps you bring people that actually care about the mission is very important as even as a contention barrier.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: It will help you grow the business naturally because those individuals would be directly connected to what you're doing.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it there's nothing like an introduction from someone in the industry or someone in an adjacent industry that has built a relationship throughout throughout a very long career and likely a very successful career.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also this protection barrier where you're not on your own.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: And you probably want to have someone that is very experienced that says there's a cliff, there's a cliff, there's a cliff, don't go there, you're going to mess up.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and they're doing it with a lot of space to be able to be critical.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so my suggestion would be for the love of God, get a more than and get a good chair person.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so this is gonna be a slightly emotional love letter to our chairman.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um we we haven't talked about this.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I had a pretty shitty childhood.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: So don't speak to my family, abusive parents.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: I've not really ever had male role models in my life, not in a meaningful way, not in any way I could like ask for things.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: And our chairman's a gentleman called Benny Higgins.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: He is one of the most influential, amazing businessmen Scotland have ever produced, but an incredible, articulate, super bright human being.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: He orchestrated the business plan when RBS with this tiny bank and they went and bought Nat West in a hostile takeover.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: He did the planning and the instruction, the delivery of that of that business.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: And he's done everything.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: And there isn't a scenario you can talk to him about that's gonna fluster him because he's seen them all.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: And he told this story last night about uh a colleague he'd worked with in the past who was giving someone some advice, and they walked into an office and said, You don't want to do this.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen the end of the movie and it doesn't end well.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: And he explained, You can only say that from a position of 50 or 60 years of experience because you know you've you've seen that it ends badly, and I think what Benny's brought like has made me better in every single way, and the ability to have those conversations and never be afraid to pick up the phone and go, Okay, so this has happened, and the answer is brilliant.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: What are we thinking about it?
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's there's never a criticism or uh, you know, there people like that are best when there's a crisis or a problem.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: So I agree with you.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_01: I have seen it the other way.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: When I worked in the public sector, boards were not chosen for ability or networks or talent, they were chosen for other reasons, and it was just awful.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was performative and people weren't engaged in it, and it was very it was made to slow things down and stop change happening.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas a good board, I suppose it's like any form of talent.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: You get the right talent, it accelerates, you get poor talent, it has a negative effect on things.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it probably goes also uh hand in hand with what is the board that you need for the stage of where the Yes, exactly.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think I don't think a board needs well, one has to be static or should be static.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I think a good back to your point of where's the starter?
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, a chairperson and the founder or co-founders are really important as the glue, but it has to be evolving like the business of what is the business doing right now?
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: What is, for example, if you're increasing governance because you're managing more or the business is growing, you will definitely need a lot of more experience on how to do that.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: So, but my experience has has been in boards where like from idea in a napkin to uh IPO.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: I've been on a few boards and I I tend to be on the side of like not on my businesses, on the side of the innovation, the problem solving, rather than the governance side.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: Can I play the governance side on the audit?
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: But there are, to your point, there are people that have done that so many times I would see more pitfalls than I could.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I think, yes, I think for young people or whatever type of age I would put it of a startup, you need a good board rather than people saying, I'm going to take a seat.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: And this to me was the punchline.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: James and I really wanted to build a board based on the board that is there.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: Look at this board.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is the board that's going to take us all the way to the biggest output that this company has.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: And we were able to convince them now to grow with us.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: It can change, it can add more, but if you want to come into that board as an investor, one of your check should encompass that, but make sure that you're at that level.
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_01: Where is your in your mind as we sit here, where is the end point you can see for the business?
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, uh to me, the achieving that mission, right?
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: Where we're deploying billions of dollars is the end point uh listing or an exit or through a merger with another larger entity.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh this I go back to my sports analogies, which is I I love baseball.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like when you stand up at the pad, you don't you're not thinking about the home run that comes on its own.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: You're just thinking of hitting that board as big, as hard as you can to the right direction.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: So given given your story about your sports piece, that that definitely resonated with me.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you mentioned earlier about how you wish you could understand from the individual what they needed in terms of unlocking investment on a almost a personal level.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because the way our business is structured, we really think about it in three pillars.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: So under the oxygen platform, we've got the capital side of the business that raises, deploys, and manages money.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: We've got the conservation side of the business.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I know you work in partnership a lot.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, we have delivery partners, but we do the vast majority in-house from changing the landscape to protecting, monitoring, measuring, et cetera.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we've got the capital conservation, and we've also got the intelligence side, which is our AI stack data platform, monitoring, reporting and verification, everything in that way.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: When I talk to a person, I wish I could give them a survey ahead of time and saying, Would you like me to tell the story to you through the capital lens, the conservation lens, or the intelligence lens?
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because about two or three five minutes in, I realize, oh, right, you actually want me to talk about this with tech analogies and how it equates to being a frontier model.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: Or, oh, wait, this is all about impact for you and you want to know the stories for local communities and environment.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: It would just be easier if they picked a colour and we went down that.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: We even traded online uh the in a previous version of our website when we had we we have a lot of inbound.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we were trying to categorize and just a bit like what you were saying, Rich.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the reality is that even if you ask that, you're sort of leaving the witness.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: So you we don't get the right-sometimes they don't know as well.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: They pull a thread.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, I didn't realize we could talk to this yet.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: So interesting.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and the other thing on the institutional side, uh you and I had happened upon almost a convergent evolution of thinking.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: So um I don't think your model's a little different to ours.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: There are echoes, but differences.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think UK-based natural capital as a sector is quite ready for the pension funds yet in terms of what we're offering, because at a premium end of the spectrum, so our carbon sells at over£100 a ton, our BNG units we're getting record prices on, but we're the only price point.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: So for an institutional investor, they're reaching for other examples, and we're our own proof point.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: So to get that through a series of investment committees, that takes a bit of a leap in a in a corporate or a more in an institutional setting.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we're a bit of time away from that.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: So one thing I've thought about, and we've had some lovely offers of help, is as well as a board, is whether we actually have an advisory group that is made up of institutional investors that help give us advice about how to adjust the model and the product ready for them in the future.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: So a bit like what you were saying on an individual level, but this more being about the industry.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that's something we're looking at at the moment.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: That makes a ton of sense.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is a thing, right?
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: They want to be able to do it.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that they're saying no, they just want to see that the book is thick.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: In London Climate Week, I went to an event with BlackRock where their global managing director on this side of the business went, We think this is a fantastic growth area.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: We want to be in.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: Five years ago when we started, so we started in 21.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: The joke was when BlackRock won to meet in with us, the sector's got enough credibility that it's actually an investment class.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: I literally wrote a piece on the back of it saying I literally went to the place that was so ridiculous it was a joke.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like because the market has moved so far in five years.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: What's really interesting is so um we're doing a load of work exploring different geographies in Europe at the moment to see our next acquisitions.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: And Paige is in the room who's leading on some of that strategy work.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: So thank you, Paige.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you go to Europe now, so we've been to Spain and Portugal, and we're going to Norway next month.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: You start talking about natural capital, and it's the same as it was five plus years ago in the UK.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: People are like, oh, do you mean forestry?
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, we're thinking more about nature and broad.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, we don't do that.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: So it's literally going back to 2020 and you're having the same conversations again.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's really interesting how the because for me that makes the opportunity greater because you haven't seen in the UK, we saw an uplift in land values as a result of natural capital.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_01: In Scotland, acre values doubled.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: Europe isn't there yet.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: So if you can get there early, you can already get a significant return before you even touch carbon or BNG or nature or all those things.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the opportunity in Europe's really exciting right now.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: So takers from uh entrepreneurial chapter, you said 2018 was the genesis of the idea.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, when did it first appear to you and how?
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: At the celebration that my wife and I had after the IBO.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: So we were um Peak District, and we were going through, we we discovered hiking here.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: And and we were hiking in this amazing landscape, and all of a sudden we come to I don't know, Mordor type landscape.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and it and and I had already been drafting a couple of ideas or challenges that I wanted to tackle, and and my wife just says, Come on, not one of those anymore.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: Let's fix this.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we were also at the personal level of figuring out if we wanted to do a PhD the same time you did.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: What was hers then?
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: In uh chemical engineer.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so it it at the personal level it was highly connected to are we going to have a family?
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it was okay, so if we're going to have a family, we need to figure out if we can tackle this.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_00: Let's make it was as simple as can we stop this in front of us happening?
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that was uh the start of the idea that hike after you know a thigh in our life from an exit.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: So uh the good thing back to being in an entrepreneur network is that I started speaking to people and figuring out what the problem could be, and and finding my co-founder who we I had just continued to speak to uh on ideas.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: We were in this sort of incubator that we built.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it was like, yeah, this idea keeps coming back.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: That this one works, this might work.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: And and we just keep chipping away.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: Is there one that was a close second that sat on the shelf for later?
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and honestly, it was so bad.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: We've got a bad one as well.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: Go on, what was yours?
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: No, well, one it was about tracking a lot of uh infrastructure based equipment across large landscapes.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it was about implementing some of the technologies that I had developed, but just in a very large industrial landscape, because we were seeing that there were so many uh policies defaulting on equipment that it just felt like really.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Relatively easy, track the equipment, highly connected to insurance.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: The time from deployment to getting payment was really fast.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: But it had zero, zero impact.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like the world could live without that thing.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was one of those, like, yeah, great, probably a good business.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: Let's let's move to the next one.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: So from uh Mordor and uh an idea, uh, give us an idea of the scale of the business now in terms of the acreage, the value, the team.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: What are we talking about today?
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so so we are um getting close to two million acres in North America.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's astonishing, isn't it?
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_00: That is so cool.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: And and it it takes a while.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: And to most people, and it really took me a while to learn what two million acres looked like.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you can be flying over it for several hours and you're still going through it.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was about okay, so making sure that we were getting the speed and momentum back to coherence and convincing institutional investors, convincing also large corporates to deploy into the landscape.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also about this um figuring out what are the land management practices that actually make sense at such a large scale.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think the things people won't realize when we're going from 2018 with you and 2021 with us, I think people will view it in the context of today and they won't appreciate that nothing existed.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: So, no business logo, no name, no documentation, no uh measurement practices, no best, no ability to build for like literally nothing.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: When you start a startup in a new sector, you are even building the language to communicate what you're doing, and none of it exists.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: And people arrive at it now eight and five years in, it's like this thing's massive.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's got a creative team, a media agency.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, there was none of that.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: There was just us sat there with an idea trying to figure stuff out, and and and and but but it's also very grounding, right?
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that we are doing this uh more and more efficiently with a team of 40 and goes back to being able to focus, but also on the fact that that once you're into a community and a geography, there is a flywheel effect.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_00: And and that flywheel effect really, really mattered to us, uh, definitely to our investors, and it and thankfully it continues to be a positive loop.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I was looking down because I've got a t-shirt that reads um momentum compounds.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think once you start building that, it keeps going.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: As far as you could keep this is a thing back to to your the last part of your question.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: How do you measure all of that?
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_00: And how do you continue to hit all those targets in terms of KPIs?
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_00: Is that because of what we do, and it has a component of nature, and a big component of nature, it's not that the target is always static, like in many other different types of infrastructure environments.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think what matters a lot in institutional investment is how do you get, even if the target sort of moves, that back to the pounding box, that you're hitting it despite things changing.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: And and developing that resilience at the team level with then the communities that you work with is is one that I think is fundamental to achieve speed.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: And again, I wouldn't know how to do that in in a very vast set of landscapes or geographies that were spread out.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh the evolution of the business has been how do we increase that acreage or hectare?
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_00: How can we continue to improve the economics?
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore, I'm also a sucker for as lean of a team as I can, but also because it's a it's a loop to demonstrate that we're ever increasing the iron or seeing the opportunity.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um anyone who anyone who views the size of a team as a vanity number is a lunatic.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: Because um keeping a team as lean as possible makes sense on every level in terms of keeping the talent bar high, keeping the relationships tight, keeping the culture in the right way.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we've got a brilliant head of people who has a PhD in performance psychology.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_01: And he will say it is possible to scale a team and the culture to improve as you get bigger, but we both agree that only works to a point.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's ultimately a point where it falls down.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_01: And every really successful entrepreneur I talk to says it's somewhere between 70 and 100.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: Once you break 70, it's not one business anymore.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_00: I I agree.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: My in the previous business called her to have many.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: How many?
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: So you have 40 people now?
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: Almost two million acres.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, where are the people based?
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: The majority in the US?
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: Are they all across the globe?
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're quite evenly split in between the US and the UK.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we have also a team in Mexico, um, but uh we tend to be highly concentrated in between New York and London.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, because of where we operate, we have a lot of people across uh states west of the Mississippi.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_01: And does that 40 include those people you have on the ground?
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: And do you think about the sort of landowners and partners you work with?
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: Do you effectively have uh another FTE count that's there as well?
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe 40 in the central team, but you're the people on the ground is another 10, 20, 30, 40 actually delivering things?
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, at some point we we thought about accounting for that, but the reality is that in this in what we call the light asset strategy where we're not buying land.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: We we describe ourselves as asset heavy.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there you go.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so in the light asset, those ranchers are our partners, but given the dynamic of, you know, the it might be a super large ranch with a lot of people, it it fluctuates a lot in terms of the land management practices that we just never were never able to figure out we can account for the impact of how many jobs that's creating, but not directly connected to can we account that for an FTE for the business.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so we've just decided to back to that, keeping it simple and and just realize that sometimes we just need one counterparty on the other side that might be managing a large set of branch hands.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if that makes sense.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: But they it makes perfect sense.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: We've uh a bit like yourself, we were we started with a lot of partners that they were doing many of the things that now we have completely vertically integrated.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so we are still in a journey of more integration and more integration.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: Part of the acquisition that we did a few months back was to do that vertical integration, both also at the land access level.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: But back to coherence.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: If what we did was simpler, maybe partnerships all over the place would work, but we need to control everything.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, because there is an enormous amount of expectation that as cultivo and probably yourselves are in the middle of everything, like the investor, the land, the off-taker, everyone is in the expectation that all resides in Cultivo.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: And you.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so I need to be able to see everyone and say, yep, under control or not under control, but this is how we're going to fix it.
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not dependent on where suffix.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um I want to come back to that acquisition in a minute because um I think that's fascinating.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: Over the eight years, do you think about have the has the business been in very definitive chapters or states?
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like, do you think about those eight years as eight chapters or has there been four sections, or when has the business fundamentally changed from your personal perspective?
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think a big, big change was when we said, you know what?
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: This thing of rangelands, this is us.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_00: Was that early?
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh about four years ago.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, interesting.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's longer than I thought you were gonna say.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_01: So that almost if we graphed that, that means the acceleration has been really steep then over the last four.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_00: But it because of that clarity.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and then the the next one was actually, you know what?
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's North America.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: Do we do we have expectations for a global yes, always will be there.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it was North America is where this really works is where we've learned all of these things.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is where we have scars and where we're building this uh positive loop, but right, and and so as as the feedback loop gets richer and richer, uh, the more we can grow there.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so those probably would be the those two chapters, the deciding it's Rangelands, and then the deciding it's North America.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and of course, from a financing perspective, going from our first institutional check, even though we were working with first family offices that of meaningful size, but then an asset manager that was fantastic, the next asset manager, but jumping to the institutional space uh with an amazing partner just made us grow up so much.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: Did you enjoy the process of growing up?
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh candidly, not at the beginning, but they were so patient, um, but also creative, that it wasn't a you have to grow up if you want.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was okay, how do we it was a problem-solving experience.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_01: So what's your favorite thing about being at the scale you are now compared to when you were small?
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: What for you personally, what's better?
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that I can actually see how we're achieving our ration.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like I can see nature being regenerated.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_00: That is the thing.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: And what's what do you miss about the smaller number of people, the smaller team?
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, even if it's looking back with rose-tinted spectacles, what do you kind of feel like you miss and would go back to?
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um what I miss was honestly the feeling that we could do this across the planet.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: I miss that because I didn't have almost that unbounded possibility and optimism.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: Then my naivety about the whole landscape was so big that I thought, yeah, you know, we were going to tackle this.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I miss that unreality-checked approach of, you know, we can we can tackle all of this.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_00: But what I love right now is that I can actually see the impact.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm okay to not have your daily pattern of how you work changed dramatically as the business has grown?
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_00: I I used to spend a lot of time uh speaking to ranchers.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I was speaking to ranchers to convince them, to paint them this picture at some point where we're going to.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: For you to learn as well.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you learnt lots about.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: So when I we've seen more than a hundred estates to buy 12, I learned something from every estate viewing.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now the learning curve decreases, you're learning fewer and fewer and fewer as you go.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_01: But those early ones taught me so much.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, correct.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and but but what I can now talk to them rather than let's say five years ago, which was, can you please believe in me?
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I promise we're going to give us money, uh, is very different now, which is well, now a team that is out there all the time, it's an endless pipeline of ranchers, and we're filtering them.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's very detailed.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's this is for you or not for you.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's super candid.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_00: Ranchers are like that, they're super straight shooters.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: So there's nothing um that gets contentious.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: But what I love is then being able to target those conversations on what's the state after the closure of the ranch.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and what the so therefore, if I'm not doing that, what I'm doing a lot is spending a lot of time with investors.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm loving now is that the ability of running so many of the things that I think can change the business.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm developing product and skills, and you name it, from an AI perspective that continue to help move the efficiencies across the business, is I find it probably extremely rewarding just because of the setup of who I am as we were building this, right?
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: I I love the fact that I can now do that, even like just as I'm doing the rest of my day.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna take you back to four years ago.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_01: So 2022.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that was just about GPT 1, maybe a similar time period.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um how lucky are we that the things we chose to build next have only been helped by AI and not completely blown away?
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: Because if we'd have picked another idea, it could have come and just been completely irrelevant.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's by, you name it.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: Completely blown away.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that also goes to, and this is maybe dangerous, Stier, but follow the thing you're passionate about.
• 57:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because you just don't know how the world's going to change.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we had no idea it was coming at the pace it was.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: Even the people that were involved.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, geez, um, DeepMind invented the Transformer, and even they didn't release it.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we didn't know AI was coming in in terms of the pace it is.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we're really lucky that we had that.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: The other bit is how much it's changed the business already.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I had coffee with a private equity firm yesterday morning, not unusual.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh their lead partner on technology joined the organization in January.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: He had a signed-off business plan that would see him bring in five individual engineers and developers to build their internal software and technology offering.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: He has hired none of them.
• 58:32
  SPEAKER_01: He has not made a single hire.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: He is running everything uh agentically with um various external partners who are who have set up really elegant memory solutions and recursive self-learning options, which themselves have been built into frontier models anyway.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: He said he's got the most needy workforce he's ever had because they keep asking him questions on checking on things, but he hasn't hired a single person.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that's changed so dramatically fast, hasn't it?
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_01: Completely.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it goes back to the fact that it makes our businesses a lot more efficient, it makes the running of the project a lot more efficient.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: Back to those are all the signals that every investor wants to see because you're showing that if for the same product, you're making the margins higher, you're moving faster, and back to culture.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_00: You're keeping that culture where you are like to me, the the biggest punchline of what that journey that you mentioned has done for us is that I remember being like it's in the evolution of the industry, the bar of quality and audit and compliance has grown so much that I would start to reference that almost to pharmaceutical development and approval.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: And in other industries, the answer to that would have been in the past, well, I now need to hire, you would now have an army of people that just does that.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_00: The culture of that is very different.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it sort of started to happen to us many years ago.
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: And the main punchback that I get, and I call it the punchback because it was, well, I'm here to regenerate nature, not to just going be going through standards and compliance, but it's like, well, that's the game.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now we that team is spending more time doing land regeneration, plus all of those things, with without uh without skipping a bit of a personal check of am I working in cultivo to regenerate nature?
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: We um we weren't we weren't there at the time, but I imagine when people were offered Excel for the first time, some would have been, no, I'd rather just use pen and paper.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's much better the old way, you know, this is things are gonna drop away.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's just the natural evolution of things.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: Although I I think um I think we're probably on the rarefied side of this for founders and CEOs, still, not in the pure tech space.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think people in not pure tech, I mean you could argue that we are in tech businesses and I choose to, but um, I think it is rare still that most founders and CEOs are not playing and not building things.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um they aren't integrating AI, certainly not even scratching the surface about what it can do yet.
• 1:01:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, although I yes, I agree, but I think that there's maybe it goes back to that special sauce that you and your business has, and what I believe we have, which is that we really like us from a cultural perspective, that everyone in the business, what they have asked us was to be doers.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a bias in even our hiring to get people like that.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so when that's culturally embedded, yeah, then all of a sudden the the ask of keep building, sure, you might be managing people, but you're also a doer and you're also running operations, I think is something that is and has to be a cultural decision rather than then it can just sort of naturally happen to the business.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_01: We literally surveyed the entire team and asked them why they chose OC.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: What was it about the offering?
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the biggest, and um, you could select multiple things, but the the biggest thing was the mission and the impact for everyone, irregardless of whether they were economists or data scientists or ecologists, everyone was was mission-led in that side of it.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you mentioned about the sort of bias in terms of where you look for talent.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_01: What what do you get really excited about when you see it in a potential candidate for a role?
• 1:02:44
  SPEAKER_01: What are the things where you're like, that's a person who will be really successful here?
• 1:02:48
  SPEAKER_00: To me, the the the best signal is when someone is passionate about what they do.
• 1:02:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like it even if so that could be across across any of those fields that we need, right?
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so because we work in so many different fields, if you're not passionate about your field when you come into the business, you're sort of lost.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: You need to become the expert that everyone relies upon for that specific thing, either on finance or you know, software development or biology or ecology or how to handle ranches.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so if someone is not passionate about what they do and how they train to be who they are, that's it, it's it's easy.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_00: And actually you can tell when someone is just looking for.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: Do you still meet every hire?
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_01: Every yeah, me too.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: I we just brought in a brilliant head of technology, and he um he was actually taken into Volkswagen just after their emission scandal issue, and he rebuilt the the tech side of things out in Europe.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_01: He was higher number one and he built up to 200 people.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the first thing he said when I met him, he was like, Look, I've listened to some of your podcasts, you've asked the question about how long you should keep meeting new hires for, and he went, never stop.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_01: I did, never stop.
• 1:04:11
  SPEAKER_01: Really interesting.
• 1:04:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you a number of times have referenced the scars picked up along the way of your journey.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_01: Why is that so important?
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't think if you remember your scars, you just don't learn.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, and and my co-founder and I build this from the get-go.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's like we actually have a very long database of mistakes and lessons learned.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think that that's scars physically exist as a database.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_00: And and and it could be as simple as messed it up on meeting X or a massive miscap, but it but it's always connected to mistake, how was it solved, and what were the impacts of of that mistake and or the solution.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it has always been there because I've messed it up all my life.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so knowing where I messed up and remembering those moments is is just became a natural thing for me many, many years ago that has helped.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I think it also keeps you very real with what are what are you good at and what do you suck at?
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I suck at many things.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: So has the logging and the learning helped you emotionally process the mistake?
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, completely.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're speaking about how you messed it up.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_01: Have you um got better at forgiving yourself faster?
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_01: It takes the time, doesn't it?
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um I haven't mastered it completely, but I'm getting better.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_01: Where I do think I have Bias on this, though, is I undervalue experience, which is ironic because I'm 43, I've got lots of calluses and scars and remember it.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I actually think cost benefit-wise, in a business, you're expected to overpay for experience, and talent is undervalued.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: So if you look at our age structure on the team, outside of me, and there's a couple of us in our 40s, but it's like mid-20s is the average of the team, and only just into the 30s if you include the management team.
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_01: And that's because I think young, talented people are such efficient hires these days in terms of cost and talent and ability and delivery.
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I've actually gone to the point of almost underestimating experience.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_01: What does your sort of age distribution look like?
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, quite even.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_00: We do we definitely have a lot broader scope, and I think we have more a lot more people in their 30s and 40s.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_00: But just to add to what you said, I think that the part that I'm looking for the most with both with that passion is just their ability to be resilient.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_00: Suffering.
• 1:07:11
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's it, because you need to be ready for a life of suffering for this.
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that the rewards are amazing.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_00: It they're daily, they're there, but screening for that, it that I would put it as we the reason why we have, I think, um, I've never thought about it this way, by the way, but just going with the flow is that I think that the reason why we had such a broad spectrum of ages has more to do with the fact that we found that resilience across different groups.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_00: And and a specific age group is not representative for that type of resilience.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that resilience uh is needed on every team, that maybe one team has someone that is extremely resilient.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_00: And with someone that's resilient, it just brings that seed into that group and and it and it festers.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_01: So on CVs, I look bottom up.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I want to know what are the hobbies, what are the interests, what are the things you choose to put yourself through for fun?
• 1:08:15
  SPEAKER_01: If you are, and I have a rule.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_01: If you're an international athlete, you're getting an interview.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_01: If you are a concert level musician, you're getting an interview.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you've done something ridiculous that's taken years of sacrifice, of punishment, of turning up at so we have a lady in the team who's astonishing, the Duke, Ellie Millington, Penny's favorite person, uh, almost an Olympic swimmer, came really close to swimming in the Olympics.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_01: From being a child, she had to stand at the front door at 5 a.m.
• 1:08:45
  SPEAKER_01: ready to go.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_01: Her parents' rule were we are never waking you up.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you are ready, we will take you.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_01: If you are not, we're not going.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_01: She did that for a decade.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you have dis if you have exhibited that you can achieve that and you choose to be here, you're gonna be successful.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_01: So it's those two tests.
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_01: Can you show you can suffer to achieve something really difficult?
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_01: And do you have that passion?
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_01: Do you want to be here?
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: If you tick those boxes, they're gonna fly.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we literally describe Ellie.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_01: We talk about when we get a new hire, is she this year's Ellie Millington?
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_01: Because Ellie was the bar for so long in terms of that.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_01: I love recruitment, it's my favorite thing.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_01: I um we're 50 people now.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_01: We've had 31 people through our intern program.
• 1:09:25
  SPEAKER_01: 10 of them secured permanent jobs with us, and another seven of them are still with us now at the moment.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it's just such a it's it's um in a sporting context, it's a feeder league, it's a B team or whatever that's coming through.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_01: But we we have a big advantage, I don't know if you're finding it in your UK hires.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_01: There's not that many exciting places in the environment sector for young people to work.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_01: So they can work with you, they can work with us, maybe with Rob at Rebalance, but it it's a target-rich environment.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's not that many places that are cool to work.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_01: So we're getting some incredible talent, and that's got easier over the five years.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and also um I what I love about what you're mentioning there is that you're building your bench, right?
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think what what we're seeing because of all the different pressures that the let's call it, the nature-based industry is going through, is that sometimes there are a lot of extremely talented people coming into the workforce, or let's say switching from their maybe they were in a government entity or in a NGO.
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And one of our estate managers in Scotland was a commercial pilot and switched across.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we've had a guy who's a legitimately was a signed musician, rock star who's an estate manager.
• 1:10:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we've got a come um a sponsored mountain biker who's got a PhD in amazing people.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_00: So there's there's I think to your point, the mission is driving a lot of people into this and sometimes switch complete industries, but many of those skills are transferable, or you have the others that have been, I don't know, I can make the joke relatively real of recovering hedge fund managers.
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, you know, they're they're there.
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_01: We've got to get that in a job title, haven't we?
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Wanted recovering hedge fund manager.
• 1:11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Love it.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we touched on your use of AI on a personal level.
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_01: What's the the key functions the tech side of things provides to the business?
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because it is a fundamental part of what you do.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so so it goes from there's AI in data gathering, there's AI in data processing, and there's a lot of how we are managing every single workflow uh across the business from land or land uh origination all the way to uh issuance.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so the some of the most impactful drivers are to streamline those workflows, but the other ones are, for example, we we used to have a metric where we had a manager at the business level.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_00: We we thought like about five years ago, okay, so we think that we can have, we don't call them project managers completely, right?
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_00: But we can have eight project managers per wrench.
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_00: That bar just keeps growing.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like the and the amount of ranches one single manager can take is growing.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because there's a full ensemble of both agents as well as data streams and processes that have been automated that allow us to process all of that in uh what I call the you know, the like an IC unit dashboard.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so is that how you like to receive reporting as well?
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's really visual.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh not quite not anymore.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_00: I I think I definitely have colleagues that love that.
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_00: I I just like to interrogate that data, but not necessarily visually.
• 1:12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um as in I don't need a fancy um dashboard.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Our investors sometimes need that.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I um I insist on giving our investors every other slide in our board pack is a photograph from one of our estates.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Multiple times they've gone, oh, we don't need to see that.
• 1:13:19
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, one of them gets a photo less pack as well.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_01: They can't get to these estates, and I don't want them to forget what we see in terms of the impact and the changes and the visuals.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_01: So even the process of them having to turn a page or flick past it, an element of their brain will connect with a photo from a place or grab them and pause them or something.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like our third hire was a photographer because we haven't got a time machine, so we have to document the changes we make over time.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I just I just think there's something subliminal there on it.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_01: And every so often one of them will be like, Oh, what was that thing on that photo?
• 1:13:55
  SPEAKER_01: So they are noticing, even if they're just moving past it.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's so important.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_01: I love that I might steal that.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_01: Please do.
• 1:14:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna steal lots of stuff from you, my friend.
• 1:14:04
  SPEAKER_00: But but yeah, so so the at the end of the day, back to the team.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_00: If we weren't doing all of this full stack uh that started with just organizing data, but gathering data, so we have so much field data, including telemetry that's coming through our like every animal in our fields, we know where it is, how it's moving.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And and so all of that uh and virtual fencing colours, uh, ear tags, uh water levels across every trough, plus all the soil samples that we take, biodiversity monitoring, and then all the omnitype type of data on social media.
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_01: Ask the guys to run the total number of data points you've ever collected.
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_01: So right now we've got 500 billion over five years.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that's spatial data, telemetry data for water, carbon, every data point of every kind, 500 billion data points.
• 1:15:11
  SPEAKER_00: And if you then take all the remote sensing data, then it goes through the roof, right?
• 1:15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And and so it's one of those where I just when someone asked me, do you use AI, I now think it's a good thing.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Not even a question, how would you run this?
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because from the beginning, some of our algorithms were uh the it's been a while since I've since I done those, and honestly, now they're not great.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but it's changed so much that even from the beginning we had machine learning embedded into our system.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_01: So our um our deployment tool, our acquisition screening tool.
• 1:15:48
  SPEAKER_01: So we we've built, and it's why I mentioned cellular models at the start of everything.
• 1:15:52
  SPEAKER_01: So we've built a model that analyzes every square meter of land in the UK, runs it against more than a hundred environmental variables, and we play money ball for the environment, and we shop in the gap between what a land agent thinks it's worth and what we know the natural capital potential is.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now that gap has narrowed ever so slightly as people become more aware of natural capital, but no one's looking at UK landscapes with the same level of data that we are.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_01: So we've still got a massive asymmetry on that.
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's what's allowed us to deploy 150 million in the last um just over three, four years and put together the biggest natural capital portfolio in the UK because we could be really selective about those landscapes.
• 1:16:30
  SPEAKER_01: But I look back at the first model I built and compare that to what the intelligence team, I'm not allowed on the current one.
• 1:16:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's so many orders of magnitude better and more complex.
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking at Maria, who does get to play with everything, Claudia, but I don't.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it just means so we'll get a call from a land agent and they'll say, Oh, we've got 5,000 acres in Perthshire that's available.
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_01: I will message 5,000 acres in Perthshire while they're still talking.
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_01: I will get a site back an evaluation of it.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's just the speed that we can do things that weren't there before.
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also back to the asymmetry, right?
• 1:17:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we are like we've developed a search engine that looks for this, and it has the hopper of the search engine plus the hopper of this flywheel that I mentioned about getting in front of a rancher that introduces us to another rancher.
• 1:17:13
  SPEAKER_00: But that asymmetry of not only knowing what what's the state of the land right now, but also having the ability to forecast more and more so with better precision, that's your data, right?
• 1:17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that ability to forecast where the alpha is going to be and what are the potential betas that you find, I think that's what drives a lot of the value for sure for us.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_00: But it's it's the one that unless you are collecting the data at the field level, you're never and of course then doing the land management to achieve it.
• 1:17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Have you had any approaches about licensing or purchasing your data from you yet?
• 1:17:57
  SPEAKER_01: Similar spot.
• 1:17:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think um we currently on our balance sheet haven't got a value for our data sets that we've collected known, and we maybe should, but it's not there at the moment.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when we think about natural capital products and services, we talk about carbon, woodland, and peakland, which we have the world records for nature-based ones on of those two types, of BNG units in England, of nature credits in Scotland.
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_01: We think a water market is coming and love what Rob Gardner's doing around there.
• 1:18:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think data is the next string of that bow because if you do want to build a genuine world model that's looking at these things, you need real data sets.
• 1:18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like you can't synthetically yet well demonstrate the behaviour of soil carbon, for example, because it's just um so I think it's gonna come.
• 1:18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um to persuade the intelligence team to put a number on it.
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_00: But but it's also the fact that whoever says that you can do what we do remotely, just remotely, they're they're trying to sell a story that doesn't stick.
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_01: We went to visit an estate that remotely had screened beautifully for tree planting.
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_01: We got there and it was a cork oak plantation.
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_01: But because of the way the trees are distributed and the granular, almost someone had laid out a grid so it fit perfectly between the trees.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_01: So it was genius.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you can't there's no there's no substitute for the feet on the ground.
• 1:19:16
  SPEAKER_01: And we wouldn't want to either, right?
• 1:19:18
  SPEAKER_01: If you couldn't physically put your feet on the ground, we wouldn't be doing this.
• 1:19:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, correct.
• 1:19:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I'm not sure of my exact timeline, but but you've had an acquisition recently.
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Talk to us about that.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_00: So we uh met the so I met the co-founders of Kateri, was the name of a company like four years ago.
• 1:19:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I met them because they have been in the ranching space for a very long time.
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they're both young people, but what I mean by that is that they had been selling to ranchers or in the ranching community for a while.
• 1:19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And when they started their business, uh it was like great, we want more brains like that.
• 1:19:58
  SPEAKER_00: So we it was a very friendly relationship.
• 1:20:00
  SPEAKER_00: And about two years ago, we started working commercially.
• 1:20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And as that was allowing both of us to hit our art to hit our goals, it was a very simple conversation of, well, one, I knew the two uh co-founders, I knew what they wanted, they knew what I wanted, and we realized how complementary our skills were.
• 1:20:24
  SPEAKER_00: And more importantly, we saw that we could just be having a lot more acres under management if we were combined.
• 1:20:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so by the time that the acquisition happened, uh with all the things that happened that are needed from a financial and structure perspective, but it was a very it's the easiest MA that I've been involved with.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that I have many, but from a cultural perspective, everything was there.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And we've we are definitely beyond the honeymoon period, and it's still still there.
• 1:20:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um so is this the first time you've been on this side of the table in terms of buying another business?
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 1:21:03
  unknown: No.
• 1:21:03
  SPEAKER_01: What are the what are the key bits?
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_01: So having sat on both sides, as uh a seller, what are the key learning points?
• 1:21:10
  SPEAKER_01: And as a buyer, how has it affected your behavior to make sure the deal works well for both parties?
• 1:21:15
  SPEAKER_00: So it goes back to knowing what are the motivations of the individuals, of the main individuals.
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you have their motivations, I think it's easier to for them to then do their championing of the deal.
• 1:21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I think this applies both seller and buyer.
• 1:21:31
  SPEAKER_00: But it takes a while, right?
• 1:21:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't know that team, uh it's really difficult to know what are really those motivations.
• 1:21:40
  SPEAKER_00: But once we have that, the other part that from uh and sorry, uh Rich, just I've always been the buyer.
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_01: And at that point Were you you are you part of an IPO previously?
• 1:21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, but I uh but I didn't merge with anyone.
• 1:21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_00: But as a buyer of someone else's business is it for the long run?
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_00: For me, it was is the acquisition there for are this two co-founders that just want to exit, or is this you know, this is an acceleration to their own mission?
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_00: But then the other one was could both businesses together, your typical MA goal, which one plus one is not too well, sure, but show me how uh was really important because we could see, and this is where we spent close to six months just figuring out how would the business look like.
• 1:22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Normally, a lot of people do that after the acquisition.
• 1:22:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you need to be really sure that both sides want the deal, right?
• 1:22:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, from a co-founder to co-founder perspective, we were this deal is happening.
• 1:22:51
  SPEAKER_00: How and how are we and when are we going to achieve it?
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know.
• 1:22:55
  SPEAKER_00: But it was really easy with them to achieve it because there was a lot of trust on the line of you know, think lawyers and you name it, they're going to throw spanners in the works, but we knew we wanted to get it through.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_00: So knowing what we wanted even before the acquisition was done and finalized really helped.
• 1:23:16
  SPEAKER_01: How much of the um just before we fully leave AI and things, how much of the stuff that you use internally do you build versus products you're actually licensing right now?
• 1:23:27
  SPEAKER_01: Like do you still use Salesforce and things like that, or are you everything you're building bespoke internally?
• 1:23:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, definitely.
• 1:23:34
  SPEAKER_00: We also have a um a bit of a mantra of not reinventing the wheel, right?
• 1:23:40
  SPEAKER_00: So the CRM is an example.
• 1:23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh now for something like virtual fencing colors, an electronic engineer would love to tackle that.
• 1:23:51
  SPEAKER_00: And we we've touched that on the recording.
• 1:23:55
  SPEAKER_00: I won't do that.
• 1:23:56
  SPEAKER_00: But what we wanted to make sure was that those partnerships with those service providers are really tested.
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so when we need more consistency on supply chains that we need for the projects, we tend to partner with many that are suppliers to those uh that provide us those those feed points.
• 1:24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um but on what we're building are the ones that are fundamental to the business and are very close to the dollars and the returns.
• 1:24:25
  SPEAKER_00: So from anything that has to do with the processing of the data, the uh everything that has to do with the land management itself, all of those workflows and the associated tools and skills and plugins we're developing completely.
• 1:24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the other part that has changed is we used to rely on a lot of external experts to what is it that we should be doing to this landscape.
• 1:24:59
  SPEAKER_00: And there are a lot of experts, but I think it goes into the point of when you get an advice for a landscape and you dare say what should happen to that landscape, you need someone that is committed to make that landscape change happen.
• 1:25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so that is one of those that we've internalized more.
• 1:25:18
  SPEAKER_00: It seems that you've had a couple of scars there, or calluses as you can.
• 1:25:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think the echoes are funny.
• 1:25:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we will both the um we haven't accu hired or done an acquisition yet.
• 1:25:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting chapter because I think, and we'll come back to this question, but I think we're about to see quite a lot of consolidation in our respective parts of the industry.
• 1:25:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:25:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because the money that was fleet free-flowing in 21-22, in fact, when we were out in San Fran, this was the narrative I kept hearing.
• 1:25:49
  SPEAKER_01: I was hearing like if you'd have been here 21-22, you couldn't not get written a check if you were working in carbon because people were so desperate to get into something.
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that's running out.
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_01: The runways are running out.
• 1:25:59
  SPEAKER_01: The people who haven't built the most sustainable businesses, who perhaps haven't been as lucky or haven't worked as hard, are ready to exit.
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_01: So there's gonna be lots of things that are available in in both parts of that.
• 1:26:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I think passionate, dedicated founders think their team are the best and think the other team are just not very good.
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I was as you were talking earlier on that, we both would absolutely swear blind our respective teams are the best.
• 1:26:23
  SPEAKER_01: And for us, they probably are.
• 1:26:25
  SPEAKER_01: But when you try and integrate those things, that's really challenging and difficult because the cultures are different than the behaviors, and even the definition of good gets difficult.
• 1:26:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when it comes to partnerships, that's another thing.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_01: We end up things that we've asked for, we end up redoing it anyway, or rebuilding it, or rewriting it in a different way.
• 1:26:43
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like we we exactly so whereas I use Salesforce as the example because I know a lot of US friends who are founders who were like, oh look, we redid Salesforce.
• 1:26:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and then we just bought it back again because ours is dreadful because we realize we're not a leading software developer.
• 1:26:57
  SPEAKER_01: We were just having fun with it.
• 1:26:59
  SPEAKER_01: So there is a difference.
• 1:27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like uh for those of you playing with AI out there, don't try and build a word processor.
• 1:27:04
  SPEAKER_01: Word's fine.
• 1:27:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's like it's it's doing what it needs to do.
• 1:27:08
  SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
• 1:27:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what's next?
• 1:27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so what I love where you're catching us is that because of how big that community of ranchers that are on rolling our programs is, what we How many ranchers total now?
• 1:27:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we're north of 60.
• 1:27:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what is happening is that the same type of land succession that is happening across the world is happening in our landscapes in North America.
• 1:27:37
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're seeing is this our ranchers are coming to us, and in many cases, the best ranchers are coming to us and saying, Hey, I love this relationship.
• 1:27:46
  SPEAKER_00: My ranch is bouncing back.
• 1:27:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um by the way, I'm loving every part of this partnership.
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_00: What if we could do it on my neighbor's ranch and the next one?
• 1:27:59
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore it's Becomes a while your neighbor's ranch.
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because my neighbor doesn't have kids or succession or actually doesn't want to stay there.
• 1:28:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but because there's a relationship, that person wants to sell it to me.
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I as a rancher might have not might not have the cash right now.
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_00: Can I partner with Cultivo to go and do that land acquisition?
• 1:28:22
  SPEAKER_00: And to us going into a community where we know we can now acquire a plot of land side by side, somewhere from the community that we trust that we know is going to manage the land as we want it, is really powerful.
• 1:28:36
  SPEAKER_00: So you're catching me at that point where we're now growing our pipeline of hard assets or asset back to grow in the same landscapes that we're working with.
• 1:28:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so then the revenue stack changes and the technology stack is also expanding for the same thing.
• 1:28:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna borrow a question from um Harry Stebbins from 20 VC.
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_01: So uh to put to be the dick in this discussion um and and to reflect it back on us actually rather than that.
• 1:29:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you're gonna at the minute you've got the clarity and the consistency of the asset light model.
• 1:29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:29:11
  SPEAKER_01: We've got the asset heavy model.
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_01: We've been approached multiple times about adopting the asset light one, and I'm really worried that that's gonna take away the coherency and the clarity of everything I've been saying about why it's important for us to own land.
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_01: Have you played through the risk that has to your current structure?
• 1:29:29
  unknown: Yes.
• 1:29:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so to us, it's been thing because of so we've been at this for actually being very kind of cultiva started as can we buy that lot of land?
• 1:29:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then we realized that we needed to learn so much on how to regenerate it, and because of that bounding box that I mentioned, and in the absence of the capital I was so fortunate to secure, we'd have gone asset lie because we wouldn't have had a choice.
• 1:29:55
  SPEAKER_00: Very likely.
• 1:29:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so just by those sequence of events, where we are right now is where I'm seeing both now the community, we now know how to regenerate that landscape.
• 1:30:07
  SPEAKER_00: We now have the asymmetry to know is there a delta here?
• 1:30:11
  SPEAKER_00: Is there an alpha?
• 1:30:12
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also the fact that we're seeing many investors that are saying, hey, hold on a second, I love your speed.
• 1:30:18
  SPEAKER_00: Can you go faster and can you deploy more?
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so back to the top mission.
• 1:30:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:30:25
  SPEAKER_00: Can we accelerate more capital towards nature?
• 1:30:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, but would it ever turn into just an asset back or just an light asset?
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think they're complementary.
• 1:30:38
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yes, for sure.
• 1:30:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, we're not we're not convening.
• 1:30:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh also because the dynamics at each pipeline are different.
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what now we're seeing institutionals that would like both.
• 1:30:51
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 1:30:51
  SPEAKER_00: But can mean both?
• 1:30:53
  SPEAKER_00: Different, different vehicles.
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's um it's a mad analogy.
• 1:30:58
  SPEAKER_01: It takes us all the way back to the start.
• 1:30:59
  SPEAKER_01: So I read the um, there's been a new book about Super Nintendo released about the Nintendo company and how it developed over time.
• 1:31:06
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of it echoed your start, and I almost mentioned it in your opening because their rule was um they never their business model didn't allow them to chase the newest technology, the most expensive chips, the most powerful computing, because it was too expensive.
• 1:31:21
  SPEAKER_01: So they worked with the generation of technology they had.
• 1:31:24
  SPEAKER_01: How do we make the best games for the customer within the box and the parameter?
• 1:31:29
  SPEAKER_01: And also, they're the only providers still, uh historic computer game manufacturer who still produces the hardware and the software.
• 1:31:37
  SPEAKER_01: So they need to be vertically integrated because they say if you don't, you can't optimize or be efficient on both sides of it.
• 1:31:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 1:31:44
  SPEAKER_01: And when you said can we go faster, you do need to own the land to go faster.
• 1:31:47
  SPEAKER_01: That is the thing that's allowed us to go at absolute pace because you um you still need a social license, you still need community support, but you can make the decision at your pace, not at someone else's.
• 1:32:00
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think then for us, so yes, and what was really, really uh fundamental now that I look back on that strategy, the flawback then was I can't without due diligence my boots on the ground.
• 1:32:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the what the light asset has done for us is that it has filtered really, really good ranchers.
• 1:32:25
  SPEAKER_01: The um so I met uh call with Martin Wilder from Pollination.
• 1:32:31
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know Martin?
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:32:33
  SPEAKER_01: So um I was having a call with him the other night.
• 1:32:35
  SPEAKER_01: The bit I envy about their model that just doesn't fit for us in terms of the structuring was because of his background, the advisory side into corporates they had first, because the elegance of literally setting the exam paper and saying, Well, you're gonna need these offsets and this solution.
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_01: Would you like some help with those?
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's beautiful.
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I wish we maybe should have had that first.
• 1:32:57
  SPEAKER_01: Although we didn't have his legacy and background to be able to do that, but I love that part of it.
• 1:33:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um who else are you excited about in the sector, parallel to it, or from a completely different realm?
• 1:33:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what are the companies who you're excited about might offer wrinkles that allow you to do things differently?
• 1:33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I'm going to stay to nature, but what I'm really liking are those groups that are doing closer towards soil remediation at an effective level by using other types of tech CDR approaches.
• 1:33:40
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen a couple of really interesting enhanced rock weathering new technologies beyond basalt that operate in many of the landscapes that we've seen really need a lot of love where you know it it's the certifying uh and and it needs a lot of inputs for that landscape to bounce back.
• 1:34:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm really excited about seeing solutions in the certifying landscapes that actually can scale.
• 1:34:12
  SPEAKER_01: My my brain jumped to a kind of sister business model to um isomorphic labs.
• 1:34:21
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got the spin-out of DeepMind that are trying to come up with every form of medical intervention and solution.
• 1:34:28
  SPEAKER_01: You could see a AI-led real-world application whereby you could partner whatever the chemical and structural composition of a soil is, what is the partner intervention anywhere in the globe that would be the right answer for that and almost solve for them all in the same way that they folded every protein.
• 1:34:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then that gives you a model to go, okay, well, that's come available, the solution is this, and then you're into just what your supply chain logistics are and moving the things around and things.
• 1:34:56
  SPEAKER_00: Correct, because you're clustering patients back to that analogy, right?
• 1:35:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're clustering patients to what is the right clinical outcome for that type of patient.
• 1:35:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if you partner that with what we're seeing, for example, on an atmospheric water level, atmospheric harvesting for us, I think in the future is going to be really, really relevant.
• 1:35:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so that could be super cool.
• 1:35:17
  SPEAKER_01: Have you guys done any thinking about the pending super al Nina we're getting and what that might impact business wise?
• 1:35:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, we have that in many of our models as to what are the practices that we should be changing.
• 1:35:29
  SPEAKER_00: And and it goes into the actually the the underwriting of our deals.
• 1:35:36
  SPEAKER_00: But what we're seeing a ripple effect is not so much about our landscapes, but what is doing to supply chains.
• 1:35:43
  SPEAKER_00: For example, supply chains that we're adjacent to, such as cattle.
• 1:35:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you have a drought like the one that North America is going through right now, potentially compounded by a superior niño, then you need to start to figure out what are the herd sizes and how do we see plant productivity, and does it does it correlate with how much water, how much resting we're doing?
• 1:36:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so we, yes, short answer is absolutely, but it's having significant impacts in the communities that we work with.
• 1:36:15
  SPEAKER_00: So that's also another part that we have to manage all the time from a social perspective, is how do how much can we support those communities with the data that we have?
• 1:36:25
  SPEAKER_01: Have you um have you guys had lands hit by wildfires yet?
• 1:36:29
  SPEAKER_00: Not directly, um, but yes, in many of the adjacent areas, some of the like let's say in these ranchers are uh are really, really big.
• 1:36:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and some of the areas that are not perhaps in the project area, they might have a forest there.
• 1:36:48
  SPEAKER_00: Those have been impacted.
• 1:36:49
  SPEAKER_01: How um of uh give me give me one example or almost the median estate if you can?
• 1:36:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh how big would a ranch be and what proportion of that would be in a project with you?
• 1:37:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it it depends.
• 1:37:02
  SPEAKER_01: So so fully appreciate there's a range.
• 1:37:04
  SPEAKER_00: But uh as a more or less, think about it, north of 30,000, 40,000 acres, of which about 70 to 80 percent is project area.
• 1:37:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's ri okay.
• 1:37:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean that's uh that's more than half the size of our entire portfolio on one site.
• 1:37:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's just night and day, isn't it?
• 1:37:23
  SPEAKER_00: It is but it's also if if uh you know one, it it's just the vastness of it makes that productivity very much and the global geography as well can be completely different.
• 1:37:35
  SPEAKER_00: But but all of the other parts of uh back to this, to your question about what excites me is that rather than just seeing this very human-led methodology-driven approach of here's your project area for this type of intervention, in reality, we have this very vast landscape that we are now seeing how we can treat them differently in a mosaic approach rather than just on a one-on-one basis.
• 1:37:59
  SPEAKER_01: We we had a really good conversation with one of the leading tech firms about our view on climate change and and and existing climate models.
• 1:38:09
  SPEAKER_01: And the general agreement was no one believes any of them because they're all linear and nothing's behaving like it should, and it's all just blowing through it.
• 1:38:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's really interesting how you begin to predict future scenarios where everyone goes, Yeah, the models are just constantly underestimating.
• 1:38:22
  SPEAKER_01: No one agrees what the future will look like.
• 1:38:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's just gonna be worse than the models think it is.
• 1:38:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really interesting to bake that in.
• 1:38:28
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 1:38:29
  SPEAKER_00: And and if you can bake that in, let's say, an extreme drought, okay, how what is the water hydraulic infrastructure that we will need to support something like that?
• 1:38:37
  SPEAKER_01: Would an extreme drought be worse for you than a wildfire in terms of soil carbon?
• 1:38:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:38:43
  SPEAKER_01: So for trees for us, the wildfire would be worse.
• 1:38:46
  SPEAKER_01: Devastating, yeah.
• 1:38:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um we we came really close this year, so uh Abernethy, which is a reserve owned by the RSPB in the Cairngorms in North Scotland, the wildfire took out thousands of acres.
• 1:38:58
  SPEAKER_01: It stopped a kilometre from our boundary.
• 1:39:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, once we start recording, I'll show you some images of going up there.
• 1:39:03
  SPEAKER_01: But I was there the the morning afterwards.
• 1:39:07
  SPEAKER_01: It was apocalyptic.
• 1:39:08
  SPEAKER_01: You stood on this landscape, the fire was broadly out, but under tree roots, it would still start um igniting again.
• 1:39:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I was on the hillside for only for a few hours, and days afterwards my eyes were sore and throat hurt and things.
• 1:39:21
  SPEAKER_01: What our um shout out to Bryce and Ian, our rangers up there, thank you for everything you did to fight the fire, and because the communities come together and help try and try and keep it there.
• 1:39:31
  SPEAKER_01: But the reality is it's the coldest summer we're ever going to have.
• 1:39:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna get more, wildfire risk is gonna increase dramatically.
• 1:39:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we're not gonna stop this.
• 1:39:40
  SPEAKER_01: We need to come up with resilience and solutions for making things better in terms of access and firefighting.
• 1:39:45
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, the thing we can say is by restoring natural processes, by planting more native broadleaf, by restoring peatlands, we are making the site as resilient as it's naturally possible to do.
• 1:39:55
  SPEAKER_00: Completely.
• 1:39:56
  SPEAKER_00: And and as you're designing those land management practices, you're creating all those things that will make the landscape resilient, right?
• 1:40:03
  SPEAKER_00: What is the for our in our case, when you're dealing with a range, most people think about a prairie that it's just grass.
• 1:40:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the case.
• 1:40:11
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a lot of savannah components, and and so part of the land, the landscape management that we look at is how can we remove some of those species?
• 1:40:20
  SPEAKER_00: How can we reduce the fire risk?
• 1:40:23
  SPEAKER_00: How can we, even if if it's on areas that are not necessarily, let's say, on an S soil organic carbon project area, how do we make sure that the neighboring areas are resilient as well, right?
• 1:40:34
  SPEAKER_00: So they're both biodiversity corridors, but they actually have a direct impact on the returns.
• 1:40:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that that I think is to your point of how do you get quicker to the institutional investor that definitely needs a couple of sessions to get there.
• 1:40:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's coming.
• 1:40:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Manuel, I've enjoyed every minute of this conversation.
• 1:40:56
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:40:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'll I'll end as I always do.
• 1:40:58
  SPEAKER_01: Is there one question I haven't asked you you wish I had?
• 1:41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh likewise, Rich.
• 1:41:04
  SPEAKER_00: This has been great.
• 1:41:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, just I think that maybe more for the audience is you you mentioned you're on uh forests and peatlands.
• 1:41:17
  SPEAKER_00: What I mean by rangeland, um the question is why rangelands?
• 1:41:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's the one that sometimes I get a- I think we're so close earlier as you were opening up.
• 1:41:27
  SPEAKER_01: I almost went why rangelands, but I I I you were in such a lovely flow, I didn't want to interrupt.
• 1:41:31
  SPEAKER_01: So please do go why rangelands.
• 1:41:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:41:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's just that to us, it's one of those uh landscapes that is really uh underinvested, where we've seen to what we've discussed here, a big delta uh of what a degraded asset to a performing asset could look like.
• 1:41:50
  SPEAKER_00: And in in the geography where we operate, that's more than 40% of it.
• 1:41:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so from a speed and a scale is really, as we've been demonstrating, really ready for institutional capital.
• 1:42:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's a fundamental part of the whole of the Midwest infrastructure for water, resilience, supply food chains.
• 1:42:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so that has been the reason why rangelands for us in North America have been so important beyond the personal offer.
• 1:42:18
  SPEAKER_01: Love it.
• 1:42:18
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 1:42:19
  SPEAKER_01: Really appreciate you coming in.
• 1:42:20
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.