Episode 117: Reinventing Wood Without Trees

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody In The Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood.

This week, let's start the new year being audacious, shall we? I mean, a lot of what we do on this show is imagine a future that could exist if we had the will and the support and, of course, the technology.

Here are a couple of things we know we need. We need to decarbonize the built environment, building materials like wood and concrete and steel. We need a ton more houses. We're short millions of homes in the US that we can't build fast enough or affordably enough, and we need resilient supply chains and decentralized production that are better for the planet and not at the whim of geopolitical, mm, bull hockey.

So today, let's imagine a world where we replace the most foundational building materials with something that is scalable, cost-competitive, and actually better for the planet. Let's create a tree-free alternative to wood. Right?

It's ambitious, it's a little unhinged, and it makes me think maybe the theme for 2026 should be reinvention. Let's go.

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah. My name's Nathan Silvernail. I'm CEO and co-founder of Plantd. We're working on building, um, uh, creating sustainable wood. Basically a wood alternative, doesn't come from trees, fully carbon negative, and we're developing the material in-house, all the technology to mass produce it, and we're using a sustainable lens to create all of our technology.

Molly Wood: I guess give us the... This feels like a, I want to know the background story here. What, what l- led you to this? What's your background, and what, you know, pointed you in this direction?

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah. So I originally come from SpaceX. I spent a better half of a decade building the Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon vehicle. Uh, had a major focus on thermal control systems and environmental control systems specifically for that vehicle. In that process, got a lot of experience working on, you know, lithium hydroxide systems for carbon sequestration within the atmosphere of the vehicle itself. And, um, you know, kind of really started to focus on the world as a whole.

I think for me, my passion has always, you know, drifted towards aviation and space, and it's been really kind of like a selfish way for me to spend my time. Um, and so I kinda wanted to tackle something that I think the whole world could benefit from, and find a problem that maybe not, not everybody's working on.

It's not the super sexy thing at the time. It's not AI, it's not fusion, but it's a really, really, really difficult problem to solve, and it's something that, you know, will really benefit posterity moving forward.

Molly Wood: You know, it's kinda interesting, Nathan. You are not the first former SpaceX person that I have had on the show who has effectively said, "I was working really hard at getting off this planet, and it made me appreciate this planet."

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah. It's interesting.

Molly Wood: Like , are there gonna be just, like, a lot of amazing climate founders coming out of SpaceX for this exact reason?

Nathan Silvernail: Maybe. I mean, I guess I've always looked at it like, SpaceX, Elon really shoves the Mars thing down your throat when you work there, to be honest.

And I love that, don't get me wrong. I love walking in and seeing these, like, really inspiring murals and be like, "This is the path we're marching towards." But at the end of the day, I can never really get behind it. I, I get going to the moon, I get going to low Earth orbit, manufacturing, data centers, energy creation, all makes sense. But Mars, no, it just really doesn't. Um, I think that might make sense one day, but we're not quite there.

And for me, I always struggled with, like, why am I, why am I solving all of these really, really hard problems to solve a problem that's, like, a millennia away, if anything, when we have so many problems here on Earth that are just really difficult?

And you know what's really interesting is I used to kind of have this perspective in my mind where I would sit down and really visualize what it would be like to live and work on Mars. And I'd be eating my lunch just looking at one of these murals that Elon had up. And then, you know, I'd, I'd ... maybe I'd go on Instagram or, or something for a second and I'd see this really beautiful image of, like, Maui or, or somewhere here on Earth, and then I, l, you kind of forget about that. Like, well, that's just right over there. Gosh. Maybe I should put my effort into, like, keeping it really nice. So that's kind of, that's kind of how it started to form over time.

Molly Wood: Yeah. Okay, so then, th- then what? So you were like, "I wanna focus my attention on this planetary problem." Did you then do the thing where you thought, "Okay, now I'm gonna try to make a bunch of Venn diagrams and figure out which problem to tackle"?

Nathan Silvernail: Ki- kinda. Not really. I think at that point in time, I had a pretty solid understanding of where the issues lie. Um, it doesn't take long to figure out, like, how is humanity really polluting the Earth? What are the industries that we're in that, you know, we just do a really bad job at?

And I think for me, when I started to really try to dissect what solutions people were bringing to light, I was just so massively disappointed. And as a human, as a, as, as the human race goes, everybody's looking to make money. And I don't think anybody actually really wants to solve problems. They look at a problem as an opportunity to make money. At the end of the day, that's what most, most of us are doing. And it really became obvious. I think I, I think I really dug into a lot of the solutions that I noticed, and like things Bill Gates was investing in, and all I could think of was like, "This is obnoxious. This doesn't make sense."

Like, you're literally taking a problem, and you're monetizing, you're literally monetizing sweeping it under the rug. And for some reason, everybody's rallying behind you, and the government's subsidizing your efforts. And I'm just, you know, sitting here from a, you know, 10,000-foot view looking at it like, "No, we need to turn carbon dioxide into something useful and then monetize that." That's how you affect that level of change.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Nathan Silvernail: And so I think for me it was just a massive amount of disappointment, a massive amount of distrust. I think, you know, coming from the aerospace industry, having a lot of experience working on spacecraft, you really learn the whole like maybe like trust but verify model.

Whereas you, you kind of look at other people's solutions, and you trust that, that, that they're doing the best that they can. You trust that they have a good lens and good intentions, but, you know, verify. And when we went in to start doing the math, my Wa- my co-founder, Huade Tan, um, him and I really sat down for like six months and just, and analyzed every aspect of, of, you know, the wood industry, the concrete industry, the steel industry, emissions, all those good things, and really learned a lot of the truths that aren't broadcast.

Molly Wood: Hmm.

Nathan Silvernail: Um, and it was just really sad. I think ultimately I came to a point where I was like, "Man, I actually really view climate change as a problem. I believe carbon sequestration and the CO2 levels in the atmosphere are a huge problem, and there doesn't seem to be anybody that's working on it in a way that I myself can understand and trust."

So I'd like to, you know, throw my hat in the ring. I think there's a way that we can contribute. Um, and that's kinda how Plantd was born.

Molly Wood: Love it. Okay, so then, uh, let's talk more about the product. What, what was it that you then decided to create as a result?

Nathan Silvernail: Oh, man, we had no idea. Uh, we- It took us a while. [Laughs]

Molly Wood: I mean, this is like, it's amazing how this is sort of consistently the delightful startup process, right? You're like, "Okay.. this is definitely the problem. Now what?"

Nathan Silvernail: Right. Yeah, no, we had no idea. I think for us it was like- Oh, for us it was, it was really looking at, like I said, everything everybody else was doing and, and nobody was really trying to address the timber industry.

So we looked at that as an opportunity, but at the time, you know, you go back five years, five and a half years or so at this point, we didn't really know where to begin. And we knew, like, okay, carbon, we need to use carbon in a useful way, we need to sequester it quickly, and we need to make a product that's useful.

And then we actually started to, like, try to understand how quickly we could affect that change, you know, using just, like, a first order calculations, and we realized the timeline was impossible. I'm like, "Oh, wow, you need an extreme amount of volume in order to affect this level of change that we need to see."

And so kind of coming to that realization really helped us tune our perspective, and gave us the, the idea at that point of like, "Oh, well, what if we approach the lumber industry in a meaningful way?" And it was Huade that actually came up with the, the primary idea of what we're building now, the, the oriented strand board, um, replacement.

We actually just started going to job sites on, and, and stopping by houses we saw being built and talking to folks and trying to learn a little bit about it, and kind of told them what we were curious about working on and, and, you know, got the idea that way.

Molly Wood: So actually, wait, let's back up a little bit more, because why timber and why lumber?

Like, what was it about that…

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah ...

Molly Wood: That was appe- I mean, I... 'Cause to be honest, like, you're, you... I can tell you guys are solve hard problems people. To be honest, it feels almost like it would be easier to tackle something like concrete as opposed to, like, we're gonna just, like, try to replace this natural material that humans have, have used to build stuff for… ever.

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah. Don't get it wrong, we're actually working on concrete too. We're working on steel too.

Molly Wood: Oh. Okay.

Nathan Silvernail: That, that's definitely in the works. Um, we want to affect as much change as possible. However, we're starting with the lumber industry, and there's a lot of greenwashing that actually goes on, and you don't know it unless you actually go in and try to re- repeat their calculations.

Molly Wood: Hmm.

Nathan Silvernail: And most people don't understand what it takes to create OSB or why it came to be created in the first place.

Molly Wood: What's OSB stand for?

Nathan Silvernail: Oriented Strand Board. So it's, it's basically..

Molly Wood: Got it.

Nathan Silvernail: Like a composite engineered wood. Yeah. So it's take a tree, break it into a bunch of pieces and glue it into whatever shape you want. That's OSB.

Molly Wood: Got it.

Nathan Silvernail: Um, engineered lumber came from c- was born out of need, right? It was born out of necessity. Back in the 1950s, you know, uh, we had a bunch of massive 700-year-old trees that everybody's like, "Hey, this is perfect. We could build houses out of it." So what do we do as a species? Naturally, we overreach, we go cut 'em all down, we build houses out of it, we use the wood for whatever.

But where do, where do we co-, where do we get more? It's a, it's a finite resource. It is a finite resource. People wanna look at like, "Ah, it's a tree, I can grow another one." Yeah, you can, but it takes a really long time. Okay? You can't get the biomass from a tree overnight. It takes 15 years to get it to a point where it's big enough to process into OSB, let alone get dimensional lumber or beams out of it.

Um, and so effectively we got to a point where there just wasn't big trees anymore, so people started cutting down smaller trees and smaller trees, and there was just no solution. So engineers realized say, "Hey, if I take these little stick trees, I can break them down into, uh, into whatever shape I want and then glue them back together and build houses that way." So that's how oriented strand board was born.

Now, in order to process a tree, you have to cut it down. You're leaving a large amount of waste on the floor. You're leaving bark, you're leaving leaves, you're leaving a lot of branches, um, sawdust from cutting it down, and a large stump, right? So…

Molly Wood: Right.

Nathan Silvernail: You're leaving a lot behind. You still have to dry the tree out. It needs to be a particular moisture level for you to create the panel, so you have to spend energy. Where do they get that energy? They take 20% of the tree and they burn it, right? What does that do? That creates emissions.

Now, if you omit that step in the calculations, yes, it shows that trees and timber-based OSB is carbon neutral, right? They'll say, "A- as soon as it leaves our factory, it's carbon neutral," but in reality it's not. In reality, it's still carbon negative, and it's quite gratuitously carbon negative. You account for the tooling, the gas for all of the machines. The logistics alone in the timber industry is massive. Very few companies actually own timberland. A lot of them actually outsource their timber acquisition from small farmers.

You know, here in North Carolina, you see loblolly, um, tree plantations all the time. You know, you own 10 acres of land, you wanna make some money on them, you go and plant trees, and every 15 years somebody will come and pay you for them.

So there's a lot of greenwashing going on. There's a lot of like pushing things under the rug, just like every other industry, and, um, we just started to dive in. And when you look at that and you look at... At, at the time, I think there were people working on concrete and, and things like that that were like, "Okay, we're gonna let them, them handle that. We're gonna try this sector."

Molly Wood: Yep. Yeah.

Nathan Silvernail: Um, in the process of doing what we've done, we've actually found some interesting solutions. So like I mentioned concrete earlier, but, um-

Molly Wood: We'll get there. We’ll get there.

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah.

Molly Wood: Yep.

Nathan Silvernail: Yep.

Molly Wood: Okay, so then talk about your OSB, because it's not... It's a, it's still a natural material, right? Like it's still a plant.

Nathan Silvernail: Yep. Yeah. Yeah, it's kinda like one, the one thing that, one of the things that I really, really learned from Elon was first principles, right? In, when you'd be in like a design meeting with him, and the way that he thinks about things is really interesting and it's, it's...

Just imagine nothing exists in the first place and you're starting from scratch. And your only real requirement is to do it the most efficient way you possibly can. It should be as many, as, as few pieces as possible, it should take as little time as possible, consume as little energy as possible, et cetera, et cetera.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Nathan Silvernail: And so that's what we did. We're like, "All right, throw it all away. I don't care how they make it now, I don't care what plant they use now. Here are the problems that I'm trying to, trying to solve for."

One, I wanted to sequester a huge amount of carbon. That's one high-level requirement that I can't budge on. Two, I need a lot of volume. You know, how do I, how do I make that level of volume in that short of a time?

And the moment you ask those two questions, you realize trees are just not the answer. Um, and so we went on this search for, like, I wonder if there's a biomass, I wonder if there's a plant that we could find that we could actually convert into an OSB, uh, format and still at least have a drop-in replacement for it.

Uh, at least meet the structural, structural certification that it has now. Meet, at least meet some of the performance parameters that are there while being able to step away from trees and use a biomass that's far more efficient. Um, and you know, we can talk more about what that process looks like, but, uh, that's ultimately what kinda led us down that path.

Molly Wood: Yeah. Uh, uh, yeah, now, yes, let's talk more about... So then, so then you go through this exercise, you identify an exi- an existing biomass, like you haven't exi- in- invented a new kind of plant, I assume, um, genetic modifications aside. What did you start to do?

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah, so, um, there's several things, questions that you have to answer when you get to that point.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Nathan Silvernail: At the end of the day, it is a capitalistic society we live in. I'm trying to run a company. I need revenue. I need positive margins. How do you get positive margins? You create a product that you can sell for more than you make it for, right?

So I needed a plant that was easy to process. I needed a plant that was like, okay, it's strong enough, it has a, a large enough lignin content that I can process, but it's not so large that it just demolishes all the tools and takes forever to dry or, or whatever that looks like. So that was one thing that we had to answer.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Nathan Silvernail: And then of course the performance aspect of it. How fast does it sequester carbon?

Um, and then you've got harvesting. You know, you've gotta be able to have direct access to it. It's gotta grow quickly, I've gotta be able to cut it down quickly. I can't be planting a seed every, every six months. Um, things like that. And so…

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Nathan Silvernail: Once we went through that exercise, it took us a long time, we made plenty of samples, we learned all sorts of how to not do it, um, and it really found, we really found that there was just one way to do it. There was one plant to use, there was one very specific way to break it down into its fibers, reassemble it in a way that was cost-effective, get those performance characteristics, and then kind of you're off to the races.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, more on this entirely self-contained process and all the innovation it could lead to down the road.

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We're talking with Nathan Silvernail, CEO of Plantd, and I want to acknowledge here what a lot of you are wondering, which I was also wondering, which is, "Cool. Okay, w- what's the plan?"

And pending some intellectual property resolution, Nathan doesn't want to say at the moment. I told him I will allow it, but not for long. Back to our chat.

Molly Wood: At what point then do you, do you determine that instead of kind of trying to access existing feedstock from somewhere, which I assume would be complicated and emissions intensive, like, you are now in the, the ag business, right? You're growing and processing and creating this product.

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah. Yeah, exactly, which I think a lot of... It's really interesting to think about this for a moment, and there's two really cool things about it that I adore. One, it is an immensely difficult challenge to solve. You're... I'm creating a materials company that, that is effectively created a material that's never been, never existed before, never been to market before. Gets a... any amount 

of engineer wood outside of trees gets a lot of pushback, so there's that aspect of it.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Nathan Silvernail: Two, I've gotta create all the machinery, all the technology to actually manufacture it, and then three, I have to create the supply chain. I don't have millions of acres of trees that I'm gonna go, you know, molest in order to start producing material.

And so it's, it's just a, a, an incredibly difficult challenge, but one that I think most people would never really try to approach. Like, you're gonna solve all three of those things at the same time and somehow be successful?

And, and, ultimately we started with no information on how to do it. I had no idea how to grow plants. I didn't know what cloning was or tissue culture or any of that stuff. And then, you know, we formed a fantastic team here in North Carolina, it's incredibly friendly towards agriculture.

And, um, it took a number of years, I'm not gonna lie. We made a lot of mistakes, and we definitely did things the wrong way. But now we've got it really locked in. We've got about 360 acres of our own fields, of our own biomass. I've got hundreds of metric tons available. Um, we're shooting for another 1,000 acres this year. Uh, and then we're just gonna blow it out of the water as we move forward.

Molly Wood: Yeah, I mean, I, I'm glad that you said it because it, because as you describe it, I mean, it really is like this is audacious in the best way to sort of say like…

Nathan Silvernail: Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood: All right. When you go to... I think a lot of people talk about going to first principles, and then they hack the process to use, like, the existing context, you know? And you were just like-

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah.

Molly Wood: No, we're literally going all the way back to the beginning.

Nathan Silvernail: It doesn’t work. Yeah, it just flat out doesn't work. But, I mean, the beautiful part about that, as difficult as it is, you get the, the, a maximum amount of control. So all of the variables, all of the input, maybe with just, like, a few aspects of it, you have pure control over.

So when I'm looking at full logistics, we're at scale. I'm, I'm producing at a very high rate. I'm delivering, building lots of houses. I can control where my farms go. I can control where my manufacturing plants go. I can control the logistics, and the lumber industry simply doesn't have that.

And that aspect of it, solving for that on the carbon sequestration side and the efficiency side was one thing, but then it opened up this, like, really crazy long list of benefits that we're doing to impact the industry and how business is done.

Molly Wood: Hmm.

Nathan Silvernail: And that's ultimately what made it take off, I'd say.

Molly Wood: Okay. Let's, uh, let's take that one thing at a time too. Okay, so you said you're at scale. Like, what scale are you at? To what degree are you able to produce building materials right now?

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah. Right now we're still in the pilot scale, so we've got one full machine.

We've, we had to, to, to kinda break it up into milestones so that we could prove out the process as we went. So the first step was, okay, design the material, do all of the hand calculations and the preliminary financial analysis to make sure that it was cap- we could capitalize on it, we could, we could make a commercial entity around it, around it.

And then it was, "Okay, let's go ahead and go prove this out on a, on a larger scale. Can I actually build a house? Can I get through the permitting problems? Can I certify it as a structural building material?" That hasn't been done. Um, "Can I build a press to make it?" That hasn't been done. "Where do I get the material?"

Those types of things. We had to answer those first. We went ahead, went through that process. It was extremely difficult. We built a kind of one-off R&D version of our press that allowed us to build enough panels to build a house. We worked with, you know, our partner, uh, DR Horton, to build that very first house, and it was fantastic.

It was... It took a while. It took a long time to get to the, to the end of that, but we went through and totally certified the building material, just like standard OSB would be certified. We built the house. We got feedback from the, the home builders just to, you know, make sure that our product was great.

And one of the ideas here, and, uh, not to, to digress at all, but there's a lot of people, a lot of companies in the world that are trying to change the way that we build, right? And I, I admire that so much because we definitely need to make it more efficient. Home prices are insanely high. There's things that we can do as, like, builders and material providers to bring those costs down, but everybody's really trying to reinvent the wheel. You know, you're 3D printing houses now. I'm like, hey, that's cool. I'm not knocking it. It's cool. But at the same time, it ain't gonna get anywhere. Human beings don't like change. They see a house, they want that house, they wanna be able to build that house, they want it to look like they did when they were a kid. Yeah, okay, I get it.

So our main goal was build a material that was a drop-in replacement for what you see now. You shouldn't change your nail gun pressure. It should handle screws the same way. Um… It should look the same, all of that stuff. And so we accomplished that, went through that first phase, built a house, all that stuff.

And then it was off to, okay, can I actually mass produce this now? Um, and so the first step there is actually producing it on a continuous press, whereas before it was more of, like, create a panel… there's a panel.

Molly Wood: Right. Right.

Nathan Silvernail: We could make like three a day. Pretty artisanal.

Molly Wood: Yep.

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah. We could make three a day. It took nine months for us to make one house's, uh, uh, worth of this material.

And so the next step was like, can I produce it at scale? Can I actually make it continuously? And so that's where we got to about, uh, earlier in 2025, is that machine turned on for the first time. We went from producing enough for a house in nine months to now I can produce it in one day, right?

Um, so that was fantastic. We went through the, uh, effort of certifying that machine. We had to understand, like, how do we maintain quality and all that good stuff. Um, but then ultimately we have to go into that phase where it's easy to, to build a go-kart that drives 100 feet, but it's much harder to build a car that can drive 100,000 miles. Um…

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Nathan Silvernail: So that's the phase that we're in now. We're going from, okay, we've, we sprinted, we proved that we can do it on a continuous press. Again, checked all the boxes on those milestones. Now we actually have to go into the hardware and build the, the 100,000-mile car. And so we're at the tail end of that.

We've had a lot of optimizations on some of the subsystems. Obviously, in order to move quickly, you are, you have to be very scrappy. You have to develop and iterate on hardware quickly and test very often. And so we've gone through that campaign for about six months, and we've gotten to the point where our machine is much more reliable, much easier to control, and a lot of the issues that we'll see when we're working or when we're producing panels has diminished.

Um, and then we're gonna start building our first production unit, which ultimately will be, uh, give us a huge capacity. It, it can produce a panel a minute. Uh, we can operate it 24/7. The maintenance requirements on it are, are significantly lower than the machine that we've got right now, just based on all the lessons learned and design improvements we've maintained for, you know, reliability and all that.

Um, and then ultimately it's, it's one single machine. It's modular. The beautiful part about the way that we've set this up is, I can put two machines here, I could put three machines here, I could go drop a machine out in the field next to my farm. Um, I could put it pretty much anywhere. And so when we talk about what scale means, in order for me to compete with what we would call a medium, kind of mid-size OSB mill, I need about 25 of the, the presses that I'm, I'm building now.

Um, and so that's the goal. By the end of the decade, I wanna have that capacity. We're probably looking at, like, five different facilities across the United States with five manufacturing, uh, lines in it, or sorry, production lines in it. Um, all the fields that we need for the raw material, and then the facility that I'm building here, we're building here in North Carolina right now, will actually become our production facility for our machines and our subsystems that we use to distribute to wherever else we go.

Molly Wood: Got it. What is the, the, you know, there is, there is a kind of a maxim about climate solutions and, and one of them involves, like, how much land does it require? Like, what is the amount of input and the land mass required to support where you would like to be at the end of the decade? And, like, you know…

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah, that's a good question

Molly Wood: Is that land currently in use? How do you acquire it? Like, that feels like a lot. Like we said, you’re doing a lot!

Nathan Silvernail: lot. Yeah. It's a lot. It's, it's a lot. I think, you know, the numbers, especially to somebody kind of not in the industry, they're gonna sound really big, but they're actually a fraction of, of what's actually available.

So I wanna get about 20,000 acres planted by the end of the decade. That's not just to support our current output, um, but it's, it's, it's to support our expansion plans after that. I mentioned, you know, 25 lines. The moment that's on and the moment we've hit that, I want to 3X that, right?

And so you stay ahead of the game on the agricultural side. Plants take their time to grow. As… you can be the smartest person in the world, and it's still very difficult to influence that. Um, so we get ahead of the game.

Molly Wood: Yeah, and then climate change might come along and make it harder, which is so fun.

Nathan Silvernail: Right. Yep, exactly. Um, and it actually is, is changing that.

You... I've already seen changes on that in, in the country as, as far as that goes. It's pretty interesting to see, like, okay, where it can grow and where it can't grow based on certain changes that, uh, we've seen in the last decade. Um, sugarcane and, and sugarcane moving out of South Texas, for the, for example, is a really interesting example.

But, um, yeah, so we're gonna be shooting for about 20,000 acres by the end of the decade. That is a drop in the bucket to the amount of agricultural land that is available. Interestingly enough, which I think is really serendipitous, is the tobacco industry is dying. Everybody knows that. Um, everybody vapes now, right? Like, tobacco's old school, and so lots in, of tobacco companies have gone out of business. The facility that I'm in right now and I'm converting to our production facility is actually an old Santa Fe Tobacco warehouse.

Molly Wood: Hmm.

Nathan Silvernail: Um, they went out of business about a month before I needed this facility, and I just so happened to be the, you know, just the... it just lined up perfectly. And all the folks that grow tobacco, uh, aren't growing tobacco anymore, so you've got a lot of farmers that are out of work and looking for ways to diversify and move into different crops. Um, and so we've got a lot of opportunity in that regard.

And it's just a one-for-one replacement of their fields. It doesn't really, doesn't require special land. It doesn't require a whole bunch of special farming equipment. Um, anybody that grows strawberries or soy or corn or sugarcane or tobacco can grow with us.

Um, and then there's the opportunity of brackish land, so we do have the, the, the beautiful part about our plant is it's incredibly hardy. It can grow in all sorts of different conditions that most plants can't, so we can take advantage of that. And so there's, there's plenty of, plenty of land to go around.

Molly Wood: Fascinating. Um, okay, so then talk about the co-benefits because, you know, it sounds like all by itself you're building a business that has been deemed to be venture scale, but there must be more, because I know VCs

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah. It's interesting, and it's evolving every day. And what's really cool is, uh, the raw material supply chain and us owning that, that being vertically integrated gives us a really, really unique advantage in, in competition space with a lot of the other kind of climate change companies.

Um, you know, I mentioned concrete, for example. There's different ways to influence concrete, uh, to make it more sustainable, but you'll never beat the logistics problem. It's just the way it is, right? Like, you're not gonna make one concrete in one vicinity and then ship it 2,000 miles across the, the country.

It's just never gonna happen. So it's, it's a really difficult problem to solve, and we can approach it from a different way where, um, you know, we, we have a biomass, we have a manufacturing facility that converts that biomass into a useful product, but no matter what we do, there's waste, right?

There's waste in biomass. We cr- it causes, creates, uh... We need electricity to actually create the panels, all that good stuff. And so what we've done is we've actually identified a way to take all of that waste and create it in a carbon, pure carbon, right? Varying levels of biochar in the early phases where we can work on soil health for, for all of our farms, for the plants that we grow, and farmers in general. No matter what you're growing, you could benefit from it.

Um, and then we can actually go on to create much higher levels of carbon, uh, 85% pure and abo- and up. That allows us to address a million different markets. Um, right now I'm actually really focused on, like, the rare earth elements market. There's a big shift on the production of that from China to the United States, obviously.

Um, you know, there's, uh, about a... I think it's China maintains, like, 85% production of those materials, and then they're starting to actually throttle the amount that they are willing to outsource to the United States.

So there's a big push internally for us to st- to increase our domestic production of those materials and, you know, I can't, I can't address that market specifically, but I can adj- address adjacent markets. They need specific, uh, components and compounds to refine their, their, their, their minerals and their elements, right? And so we're gonna be able to create all of those products out of, out of our plants and, uh, basically be a zero-waste facility.

Um, and then at the end of the day, the creation of that carbon creates energy and, uh, while we're not there yet, we definitely believe that we can develop a system that utilizes all of that energy created through that process, feeds it back into the original manufacturing step, and allows us to create the initial product at, uh, either a sustainable rate with no added electrical input or a highly subsidized rate. Uh, it'll bring our costs down, um, and then those are margins that we can afford to, to other people. And then again, we're not using grid power. We're not using any sort of fossil fuels or anything like that.

Molly Wood: How... Like, what is the timeframe of your- I'm just wondering about the time horizon of your plan. Like, you seem like a person who does not have a five-year plan. You have, like, a 50-year plan.

Nathan Silvernail: Yeah. Yeah, it's, uh, it's definitely developed, I’ll say. I-

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Nathan Silvernail: It changes all the time. I mean, our pace of execution, uh, it's interesting actually. I used to get so irritated with Elon when, when he would push these, like, just impossible schedules down our throat, and we would work so hard to hit it, and I could never understand it.

And then when I started running my own company, I was like, "Oh, it makes sense." It's like you have to think 50 years out, and you really need to dial all that back in, and you gotta maintain some, some resemblance of a schedule.

Um, and so it's, it's definitely in the near term, hardware development takes time. There's a point where you reach this, like, critical mass where it goes from, like, R&D mode to production mode, and, and you can really start expediting that, those builds. But I think ultimately, I'm looking to really close the loop here in North Carolina, have a facility that's got all of the ag space that I need for the raw material supply. We do all of our tissue culture and cloning here. Um, we do all of the manufacturing of the subsystems here.

But I wanna prove out a, a three to five press, uh, manufacturing facility, um, easily within the next two years, and then, uh, start re- basically replicating that on whole, as a whole. Uh, get into 2030 where we're just really, really going hard and as fast as I could possibly go to get to that 25-line capacity that I was mentioning before.

Uh, we've already got orders, millions and millions of- tens of millions of panels, uh, need to get produced to fulfill the orders that we've got now. But the moment we actually have the capacity to fulfill those orders, we'll get those orders on an annualized basis, um, which means we have conceivably hundreds of millions of dollars of unrealized revenue at our fingertips ready to extract the moment we can turn all of that on.

Um, and so it's really just a race to get there. And then the moment we get there, our margins are fantastic. The ROI on our machines are unbelievable. We'll be able to move at a pace that you, you really wouldn't imagine. We'll be able to replicate, uh, that capacity in threefold in probably the same amount of time it took just to get to that, that point in the first place.

Molly Wood: Awesome. Well, okay, what, what keeps you up at night? What's, what are the, like, things that you need to solve?

Nathan Silvernail: That's a good question. It changes. It really does. Um, I don't sleep most nights. There's always something keeping me up at night. I think for me, you know, every now and then it'll bounce around money. I think running a startup, especially a startup like this, it's very CapEx-intensive.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm

Nathan Silvernail: Which i- i- and it's very difficult to develop hardware. Hardware is hard, and all the other, you know, very ambitious challenges that we took on, there's always something that pops up that's just like, "Oh, man, I wonder if this is gonna break my model. I wonder if this is gonna break how, you know, I'm thinking about things. I wonder if I'm gonna have to readjust my strategy."

Um, and it does, it does. It does happen. It happens on, on occasion, but, you know, you just get really good at pivoting. You get really good at identifying whatever the issue is, and you get really good at solving it.

Molly Wood: Nathan Silvernail is the co-founder and CEO of Plantd. Um, you need sleep.

Nathan Silvernail: [Laughs] Yeah.

Molly Wood: I'm just, I'm just gonna, like, just let me mom you real quick before we go. You gotta rest.

Nathan Silvernail: Definitely.

Molly Wood: You're a thoroughbred. You're LeBron James. You need naps.

Nathan Silvernail: Fair enough.

Molly Wood: All right, Nathan. Thanks so much for the time.

Nathan Silvernail: Thank you.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool, and thank you for joining us for what is now the fourth season of this show. Oh, I love it.

And this year, I want to make you a much bigger part of it, so please email me with a voice memo in at everybodyinthepool.com. Send me your thoughts, your ideas for reinvention, your day-to-day actions, your product recommendations. I will take them all.

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