Episode 90: BioLite: camping stoves and the future of energy

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 one more success story from Kickstarter demonstrating how crowdfunding can help climate tech startups get the attention and financial runway they need to succeed and to bring much-needed solutions to market. 

In today’s conversation we’ll talk about how BioLite and its founders hacked the funding model to give themselves that room 

And at how a big idea to bring decentralized renewable energy to the developing world led to a pretty sweet little camping stove that led to a slew of products for recreation 

that also are bringing renewable energy resources to the developing world. 

Let’s take that journey, shall we? 

Jonathan Cedar

Okay, sure. So my name is Jonathan Cedar. I am the founder and CEO of BioLite and we are an off-grid energy products company working to protect people and the planet through access to renewable energy.

Molly Wood 

Awesome. All right, now we get into specifics. What does that mean?

Jonathan Cedar 

Okay.

What does that mean? Okay, so I started BioLite back in 2010 around trying to solve for off-grid energy poverty in developing countries. Obviously an enormous problem, one that we were not going to solve the entirety of by ourselves, but originally started by working on clean burning wood stoves. So today half the planet still cooks their meals over smoky open.

essentially campfires in their homes and the smoke from those fires kills more people every year than HIV, TB and malaria combined through smoke exposure, right? So it's kind of like 3 billion people smoking two packs of cigarettes a day is sort of an equivalent level of smoke exposure. And we certainly understand very well what smoking two packs of cigarettes does a day, you know, for people for people's health, right? It's very similar.

But the question was, as I was getting really excited about working on that problem, was, well, how do you deliver a solution for this? one layer of that was technical from a product standpoint. How do you make stoves that can use locally available fuels, which are mostly wood and charcoal, but do that in a way that's much lower emissions? So there was a technical problem. But then there was a huge financial.

problem, right? Like these are really low income folks living in hard to reach places. And so the question was, how do we, as a business, have enough time to refine a problem that difficult over a long enough period of time that we can actually make a dent in it? you know, so in the early days, I was really thinking about, well, this sounds like a public interest public health problem.

Jonathan Cedar

Obviously it had some climate over, you know, climate relevance overlap as well. But it was like, okay, well, this sounds like something for philanthropy, right? That that's how you solve public interest problems. Incredibly hard and unpredictable to raise money from foundations. And even when you do, this is not a problem that was going to be solved in a year or two, right? This is, it would take us several years to crack the nut on the technology and distribution models and consumer pricing.

To reach that and then you know, these products don't last forever. They need to be replaced every four or five six seven years And so it really felt like philanthropy wasn't going to be an effective model for solving a problem that exists for three billion people and You know, then there was sort of some of the early one-for-one models. This was a right around the time, you know in 2009 and 10 that Tom's shoes

Molly Wood

Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Cedar

was becoming a well-known brand or Patagonia is 1 % for the planet commitments, had pre-existed for a little while. It's like, okay, interesting. Maybe you build a commercial business and off of the profit of your commercial developed market business, you can kind of power your impact oriented work. But it was just really hard to figure out how to generate enough profit that quickly, that reliably. And so ended up settling on a model called

you know, social enterprise, right? So really trying to be driven by the value that we deliver for the consumers or, you end users that we serve. But for us, how do you get enough startup capital to work a problem for five or six years before you're going to have any real revenue? And that's where we came up with this model called parallel innovation, where we jointly developed

products for outdoor recreation consumers who kind of have similar needs to cook beyond the grid and limitations on fuel and energy availability. Could we build a profitable business in our recreation market in a way that gave us enough staying power as a company to keep working and refining the challenges in developing markets to the point that they could stand on their own two feet sustainably?

We call that, I think as I mentioned, we call that model parallel innovation and it's really been the core unlock for us for how you can dedicate a team of skilled professionals to public interest problems over long periods of time without needing to turn a profit on day one in those more public interest oriented settings. And so we were venture backed starting in 2012, or sorry, 2011.

and immediately went to work pursuing products for both markets. And, you know, we were able to generate revenue by 2012 in our recreation markets with a small camping version of our clean burning stove. And that really gave us the staying power to last until 2016 or 17 when we finally started to generate meaningful, self-sustaining income in our developing markets, selling products there. And so it's through this

Jonathan Cedar

It's not a cross subsidy like a Tom's where it's like buy one, give one, right? Like that would never scale to billions of people, but it's a model that allows BioLite to focus and dedicate 50 % or more of our total company resource to public interest problems in a way where we really control how much time we have to invest in those problems to eventually get to a place where they self sustain. what I'm really proud of is 10 years after we started, so 2021.

The Africa market side of our business is now the majority of income for the company. have served over 15 million people with first access to energy through a mix of cooking and lighting products. And all of that has been delivered in an economically self-sustaining manner. But it's because we had that recreation business that allowed our company to be stable that we could.

get to that point where eventually our Africa business is self-sustaining.

Molly Wood

I wanna hear so much more about the products and how you're getting them into people's hands, but let's go back to that. I mean, it's so fascinating because you effectively just sort of hacked the adoption curve. Like with climate tech solutions or tech solutions in general, you tend to talk about, okay, there's gonna be a set of early adopters with a lot of money and that will drive the cost down for everybody and then you can distribute them widely. And that's why, for example, on the show, I'm like, hey, rich people, I'm talking to you. You need to buy this so that it will become affordable.

Jonathan Cedar

Yeah. Yeah, that's Yeah.

Molly Wood

So the parallel approach is really interesting. And then also you're here as part of a series of conversations about Kickstarter and sort of alternative funding models. So it sounds like, I mean, you did a couple of clever things, right?

Jonathan Cedar 

Right.

Jonathan Cedar 

Yeah, and would I would sort of argue, we kind of hacked the venture capital model, maybe as much as the the adoption model, where, you know, when you sometimes, sometimes investors refer to it as being on the clock, right? Here's, here's a million dollars. You've, better get yourself to a place where you can pay your own bills before that million dollars is gone. Right. And and so

Molly Wood

Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Cedar

The challenge for entrepreneurs is you just hear the clock ticking so loudly all the time. And when you're out trying to solve a really, really hard problem, like delivering cleaner energy access to really low income folks in far off places, you need a lot of time to figure that out. You don't get that right on your first try. And so what I would argue is we figured out a model that stretches a venture capital dollar much longer.

because you can subsidize it with an anchor revenue stream. So it is a little bit like an early adopter model like you're describing. It's just that our early adopters happen to be an ocean away and much, much higher income as opposed to, you know, like cell phone early adopter models where it was like, you know, it's still people from within the same community. It was just affluent people in the same market followed by less affluent people in the same market. Here, we had to touch consumers.

who we're gonna use the product a little bit differently and we're in very different geographic settings.

Molly Wood 

Right. And then say more a little bit about the funding for just to be more specific. The biolite, the recreational product is what you put on Kickstarter, right?

Jonathan Cedar 

Yeah.

Jonathan Cedar

Yeah, so it's been our recreational and most recently actually we've diversified into home resiliency in the US. And so the most recent Kickstarter campaign we did, was I think our, I think it was our fifth campaign. So we'd run four previous ones for our recreation business with lanterns and headlamps and a fire pit and kind of toys for the outdoors.

Renewable energy toys, right? They'd give people like really cool renewable energy experiences, but fundamentally we're not like, they're not climate solutions. They're like teasers for how renewables might be more appealing in your life. The most recent Kickstarter campaign was to help us launch this new business unit in domestic resiliency. And maybe just to speak about that for a second. the October Kickstarter was for a product that we call Backup.

Molly Wood 

Please do. It's my favorite.

Jonathan Cedar

And what backup is, essentially a battery in a form factor that kind of looks like a pizza box, right? So it's really slim. You hang it on the wall behind your fridge or you slide it up on top of your fridge and it's a self-installed backup for the most important room in your home. So when the power goes out, your fridge automatically keeps running and then you can plug in your microwave or your laptop or your router to have a you know, 24 to 48 hours of resiliency in your home. And what we really, the reason we settled on that is we saw, you know, at the high end of the market, there's, you know, $20,000 gen sets and Tesla power walls. Those are big capital expense programs for the home. need permitting and electricians and 20 to $30,000. And that like, that's just.

First of all, no renters ever gonna do that. That's 48 % of the US residential market or renters. You after that, no one, you need to have like some pretty serious disposable income to be able to afford a resiliency scenario like that. On the other side, you sort of have these kind of cooler shaped portable power stations, but they live in closets. They're oftentimes not ready in the time of emergency. They're certainly not automatic or integrated. They speak to a much more technical audience.

And so what we said is like, isn't there sort of a, if you're techie enough to install a flat screen TV on your wall, you should be, you know, and you can afford a thousand dollars for a flat screen TV. There should be a resiliency option that kind of fits a consumer who might make a decision like that. And that's, that's where backup came from is, you know, can we be instant and automatic and affordable and not have the, encumbrance of needing a professional installation for resiliency.

Molly Wood

Right. Is there, and then is there a Tom's Shoes version of that? Like does every one of your sort of consumer facing products then have a corollary, a public good corollary?

Jonathan Cedar 

I would say at the category level, not so, so what, like, if you look at, I think our first stoves were like the best example of this, right? Our camping stove used the same clean combustion technology to reduce emissions that are developing market product use. which we called the home stove. So it's the camping stove and the home stove. They had the same technology base, the same supply chain. but one was the size of a five gallon bucket, cause it's meant to cook for

you know, a family of five to seven people using larger uncut logs. The camping version is like the size of an algein bottle and uses tiny little broken up twigs, right? So it's like the technology inside is the same. The infrastructure as a company and the know-how as a company is the same, but they're gonna get used differently in the two different market settings. And so they're different. So for backup, yes, we have, you know,

Molly Wood 

Right.

Jonathan Cedar 

a 1.5 and three kilowatt hour backup solution for our Africa markets. But the way in which that product is different is it has a payment system built into it that helps enable these micro loans where you pay down the product over time, right? So it's like the energy tech is the same, but the way you purchase it is really different and that drives a change to the physical product.

Molly Wood

Right. OK, so just as a quick level set, are the products now? Like there obviously is the stove and the resiliency solution is relatively new. What sits in between?

Jonathan Cedar

Yeah, yeah. So today we work across three categories of technology. We describe it as cooking, charging and lighting. For us, the North Star is if you look at everything you do in your kitchen at home, I think that's a pretty good description of how energy keeps you safe, productive, connected, comfortable, fed. How do you create that kind of energy enabled?

environment in off-grid places, right? Like that's kind of what we try to achieve. And so we work today across cooking, charging, and lighting. Eventually we think that could stretch into refrigeration, perhaps water purification, but we're really across those three today. Cooking was where we really concentrated in the first five years of the business, really developing that portfolio. Then we moved into lighting. And so probably the most, if you looked at our Africa markets impact,

Probably 75 % of where, you the 15 million people who we've reached with energy access have been through our solar home lighting systems. And about 25 % have been through our cleaner cooking solutions. And then what we're just stepping into are things that look more like backup where these are, you know, yes, our lights and stoves were able to like charge phones and really small electronics. But we're now moving into

kilowatt scale power delivery where you can do more productive use oriented things, whether it's running a refrigerator, running fans, running a small welding machine, running a sewing machine, right? Really starting to deliver more productive functionality at the household level. And that's, that's, think the, what I would describe as like the journey that we're just starting on as a company.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll talk more about quantifying the impact of BioLite’s products the company’s expansion into home backup products and how it’s reversing the way we usually think of tech transfer taking products designed for energy resiliency in Africa and bringing them to an increasingly energy insecure America. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Jonathan Cedar from BioLite

Molly Wood 

What caught you into this? I have a million questions about the products, but where did this particular passion come from?

Jonathan Cedar 

Anyway, yeah.

Jonathan Cedar

Yeah, so for me personally, I would say there's an altruistic element and then there's like a sort of curious scientist attribute. So I'm an engineer by training. I studied engineering and environmental science in college and have always been really curious about the way that energy sits at the intersection of.

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Jonathan Cedar 

of functionality for people and a resilient climate. It's always been clear that the way we use energy is walking us towards catastrophe as a society. And so I've always been really curious about it, never in the first part of my career didn't have the opportunity to work in it. So I worked as a consumer product developer for the first five or six years of my career making mainstream consumer durables for brands like Oxo.

was like ergonomic household tools, or we did beverage machines for Pepsi, or we did printers for HP, right? Kind of like taking existing products and making them incrementally better, incrementally more usable. Learned a huge amount about how things get made, how brands think about connecting the problems they solve to the sort of identities of the brands, like sort of came up in that consumer product development world.

And BioLite was a night and weekend project. You know, as we, as we started to build a fascination with, you know, the, need for clean cooking and developing countries that at some point, I just felt like I couldn't ignore anymore. I just felt like the problem was too exciting. And, know, I think the reasons it's exciting for me is one, it was an opportunity to kind of switch and work on energy and the environment, but from an engineering and product lens. And two.

you know, this is where the nerdy science part comes in. It's like, I feel like every engineer I know is like, if I'd only lived 100 years ago, I would have invented that. And what's so exciting about working in the African markets where we work is there, there aren't incumbent technologies yet to displace, right? Like we are the first inventors. We are the people who are starting to define the standards of how modern energy gets used in households, gets afforded in households. And so

It's just this extremely exciting environment to work in where it's not about incremental change. Like you are the first access to electricity. You are the first access to electric lighting. You are the first access to smoke-free cooking. You are the first time someone's going to have a fan or a refrigerator in their home. And that's just, it feels like such a privilege to be a part of that invention process in markets where this stuff, or in segments of markets where this stuff just fundamentally doesn't exist yet.

Molly Wood 

Yeah. Wow. Yes. When you put it that way, let's all work on that. That's remarkable. Let's talk about the inventions. Tell me more about the, you know, how the energy systems work, especially, you know, the cook stoves and the solar products and turning waste heat into energy and the bio part. You know, it's all fascinating.

Jonathan Cedar 

Yeah.

Jonathan Cedar

Okay.

Jonathan Cedar 

yeah, for sure. So, okay. So let's start with our, we'll go chronologically, but also our cook stoves actually have the most climate impact of anything that we do. so, you know, where we start started the conversation, there's 3 billion people who cook their meals over, smoky open fires. That stuff is all locally collected wood or charcoal. And for those who don't know charcoal, when you make charcoal, as you chop down a tree, you light it on fire and you bury that tree under some dirt. So it's smolders.

And for every 10 pounds of wood you put into that smolder system, you get one pound of charcoal out the other side. So charcoal is like 10 times more deforesting than, than raw wood cooking. And what it turns out is the average household who cooks on open fires with unsustainably harvested wood or charcoal, emit about five tons of CO2 per year through, you know, making their dinner. Right.

And that's just a necessity, right? Like everyone's got to cook, everyone's got to eat. This is just the best of what's available. And so what our stoves do are two pretty interesting things to solve that problem. One is they highly insulate the heat from the fire. So we're still using the locally available wood and charcoal, but we put a ton of insulation around that so that rather than, you know, 10 % of that getting into your food and

90 % of that being wasted to the environment as the hot gases just move around your pot and dissipate into the room, we're able to concentrate that and get like 20 to 30 % of that heat into your food instead of 10%. And so through that process, you're kind of somewhere between doubling and tripling your energy efficiency. And what that translates to is you use about half to a third of the amount of wood or charcoal you would have used otherwise.

So therefore you're cutting down fewer trees and therefore there's less deforestation and that translates to a carbon savings. So that's the first thing that our stoves do and that's where the carbon benefits come from. And I'll talk about how we engage with carbon markets in a second around that.

Molly Wood 

Look at you just reading my question list, just ready to... Anyway, yes.

Jonathan Cedar 

so this, the second things that our stoves do, you know, you can make a stove 50, 60, 70 % more thermally efficient, but that doesn't change, or it reduces, but doesn't eliminate how much like smoky particulate and carbon monoxide are coming off. And those are the health relevant pollutants, for people, right? The things that, that, that cause all these respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. And so what our stoves do is.

They turn a small piece of the heat from the fire into electricity using a technology known as thermoelectrics, which are essentially tiny solar panels for heat instead of light, right? So we've put these tiny little heat solar panels up against the fire. It generates just a couple of few watts of electricity, enough to power a fan. And what happens is that fan goes in and swirls the combustion mixture in a way that burns up what would have turned into

particulate smoke or carbon monoxide, it reacts it down fully to CO2 and water vapor, which are the products of complete combustion as opposed to soot and carbon monoxide, which are the products of incomplete combustion. so through this really neat technology, we're actually able to then essentially burn off the things, know, 90 plus percent of the things that would have become toxic health pollutants. So that's how the technology works. But what we found is that

it's a little bit expensive, right? And we're talking about very, very low income people. 60 % of BioLite's customers live below their national poverty line. So like in Kenya, that's about $3.10 a day, right? Like very, very low income customers. So one is, typically these customers require some sort of consumer financing so they can pay down the product based on avoided expenditure of fuel, charcoal and wood purchasing.

Um, but the other thing is that we're able to access carbon markets to help subsidize the price of purchase for these low income consumers because of that avoided CO2, um, that comes from the less less deforestation. And so what we can do is we can take a stove that might've sold to a customer for 40 or $50. If you fully burdened it with the factory costs, the distribution costs, the importation costs, you know, by the time it reached the consumer, it's 50 or $60. That's out of reach for

Jonathan Cedar

a fair number of customers in these low income markets, we can take that and reduce it to 15 to, know, somewhere between 10 and $20, depending on the market, by using carbon credits that we sell to carbon offsetters to help make these solutions more affordable and accessible to the low income customers. And so that's, that's how we're able to leverage global carbon trading markets to help scale what is ultimately a climate solution.

Molly Wood

Right, amazing. And then that means you have metrics too. Like you are able to quantify.

Jonathan Cedar 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to date we have offset a little bit over 5 million tons of CO2 through the distribution and continued usage. And that's not just taking our word for it. We have to have independent auditing because otherwise we can't generate, you know, saleable carbon credits. And so, you know, it's actually a nice virtuous cycle there where like it requires, you know, annual independent last mile household auditing to show that.

This wasn't just what we said, it's what you could actually measure at the end of the day.

Molly Wood 

So what are the other innovations since the stove?

Jonathan Cedar

Okay.

Okay, cool.

Okay, so yes, so the stoves were our foundation or our founding. Then we moved into lighting. So again, with a dual market model, we launched lanterns in their recreation markets to kind of have a stable platform because we didn't know how quickly our lights would sell in Africa. And then what we're called solar home, what are called solar home systems. So sometimes I describe it as like a grid in a box. it's like picture a shoe box and inside of the shoe box is like

a little battery box that has a keypad on it that you use to unlock it from month to month as you make your lease payments on it. So it has, you make a mobile money-based payment on your cell phone. We send you back a text message that says, you so much for your payment. Your system is now unlocked for the next 30 days. Type in this code, 12345678910, and then your system will shut off.

you'll make another payment, we'll send you another code and eventually the system is yours outright once you've paid down the lease. And so it's a way to be able to make loans to folks with low or no credit history and help secure the cost of capital within that system. So that's one really innovative piece that's inside of our solar home lighting systems. And that's part of the battery box. And then you attach a small solar panel that you put up on the roof of your house and then

Jonathan Cedar 

three or four little hanging lights with wall switches. And so for about $100 total cost of ownership, you can electrify three rooms of your house with lighting that'll run a full eight hours through the night. And then also you can charge your mobile phone off of a USB port on the device. So that's been the most voluminous product. And as I mentioned, of the 15 million people we help bring energy access to in Africa, probably.

Some between 10 and 12 million of those are from our solar home lighting kits. And the other three or four million are from our cooking solutions. And again, the reason we've struggled to scale the cooking solutions is because the carbon markets are so limited in their current size that we still just struggle to get the prices low enough to get enough carbon transactions. It's slowly getting better year after year, but that's one of the big reasons for the difference. People are just super psyched to go into pocket to get these modern

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Jonathan Cedar

bright LED lights that click on with the switch. You know, for folks who are cooking on open fires, they're like, well, we've done it this way forever. you know, it's like the willingness to pay is a little bit lower. Unfortunately, you need that climate subsidy to help get people over the hump. So yeah, so solar home systems are the next largest layer of things that we do. And then as I mentioned, now we're starting to work on larger scale kilowatt hour size batteries.

to start to do more significant like small business powering or more affluent homes, homes that may be weekly electrified and in addition to just fully unelectrified where maybe the grid's down 50 % of the week. Yeah.

Molly Wood

That's pretty much me in Northern California. Well, mean, but literally, right? Like I have solar, but not a battery and I have PG &E, so I don't have power as much as I would like to have power. Yeah. I want to buy your thing and subsidize it.

Jonathan Cedar

Yeah, there you go. Well, and then that's part of, and that's what we saw was like, we're like, there's all these Americans who have insecure energy access now because of all these grid outages. And that matches up super well with what we see in our African markets in terms of rolling blackouts that have always been the case. And now we understand the consumer finance model is better there. And so like, it really fit our model of parallel innovation to be starting to work this kilowatt side, but that's just, it's more relevant for residential in the domestic markets than it is for camping at that size.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, totally. I want to ask just because this is sort of a big picture topic that I'm obsessed with actually, this idea of decentralized energy production. I'm sort of loosely calling it bring your own power. How do you see the role of decentralized renewable energy evolving? Like this is a big underlying sea change, I think.

Jonathan Cedar

Yeah, yeah.

Jonathan Cedar 

I so too. And it's another reason I think the pairing of our two markets is so interesting because in so many ways we are building the American future in Africa and then porting it back to America. Like it's so wild from that standpoint. So if you looked at our very first pitch decks for raising capital for the business, we said, this is what an American kitchen looks like. This is what everyone deserves to have access to from an energy standpoint.

Cook, charge, light, clean water, refrigeration. The second slide was, and we have a model for how this happens, and it was cell phones, right? Like in Africa and other parts of the global South, like we never replicated the model from the West of stringing up copper wire miles and miles and miles to carry telephone signals. We went straight to mobile, right?

I think it's the exact like exact same analog for power, right? It will not make sense to string, you know, to have huge centralized power plants. One is these governments in those settings don't have always the capital to run those well. But also it's just incredibly expensive to reach far distances with transmission like that. And what we're showing in Africa is that these models where the energy is owned and operated at the household level are actually quite

functionally effective, economically effective, like it's much cheaper to electrify someone's home with a decentralized solution than it is to connect them to the grid. And I think we're starting to see that in the energy transition in the US now, where, you know, I don't think we're going to fully unplug from the grid anytime soon, but we're seeing that the grid can't manage the load peaks in the way that it's happening. One is, you know, renewables are coming online and creating this huge glut of energy during the middle of the day. And a lot of that energy is getting curtailed because we can't use it fully in that center of the day. And then you have this like huge trough of supply in the evening hours where you need something to come and fill that. so, you know, some of that is starting to get affected with demand response technologies, things like, you know, smart thermostats.

Jonathan Cedar 

But I think more and more we're seeing that batteries are a big piece of the solution here where we can suck up all this curtailed power during the middle of the day hours and deliver it at the household level. And then when you have this dispatchable at the household level, you can really control congestion on the grid. so, you know, is it exactly the same thing we're doing building a decentralized network of energy without a grid in Africa? No, not exactly.

But so many of the lessons there about how bite-sized pieces of energy at technology scales that can be owned and operated by the individual are so effective. I think that's building a lot of the confidence for how we're going to move people onto these networks in the US.

Molly Wood 

Agreed. Jonathan, where can people find out more about the products that exist now and what's coming up by late?

Jonathan Cedar 

Yeah, thank you for the great question. So folks can find out more about us on our website, [bioliteenergy.com](http://bioliteenergy.com/). It's B-I-O-L-I-T-E, [energy.com](http://energy.com/). And there you will see both our recreation market products as well as our home backup product backup. And then if you click on the mission tab, you can learn more about the work that we do in our Sub-Saharan African markets.

Molly Wood

Ha

Molly Wood 

Are there active Kickstarters right now?

Jonathan Cedar

There are not, we've wrapped up the backup campaign and we are running full speed to get that delivered. That's gonna deliver late summer this year.

Molly Wood

amazing. Jonathan Cedar is the CEO and co-founder of Bylight. Thank you so much for the time. This is wonderful.

Jonathan Cedar 

Thanks, Molly, appreciate it.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: 

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening. This was a big conversation and I loved it I’d love to know what you all think about reverse tech transfer hacking the VC model and whether you’re feeling energy insecure where you live. 

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.

Thank you to those of you who already have. See you next week.