SPEAKER_00: all right everybody it is sunday which means vc sunday school and this week in climate what do

Jason Calacanis: we got on deck molly yes uh super interesting conversation in vc sunday school we're going to talk about tam sam and a new thing for both of us som s-o-m and also just how to calculate the potential for growth in your startup in a way that's credible to investors one of the most

SPEAKER_01: important discussions we have as founders and investors when we work together and collaborate on business building is what is the opportunity and the opportunity manifests itself in the total addressable market so we go very granular into examples of total addressable markets that were underestimated and then lazy tams that were overestimated and why you as the founder can do a better job and nail this discussion with investors and maybe 10x your chances of getting an investment and then for investors this is the secret to how sequoia and benchmark hit two of the biggest hits of all time and i'm going to explain in detail how they found two of the most important companies of

SPEAKER_06: the last 20 years by looking at the potential tam of these companies and getting it right

Jason Calacanis: and then i am going to talk to a founder who got it right and who wants to pursue an even bigger market opportunity i've got brian halligan the co-founder of hubspot who is now the founder of a new climate tech investment fund called propeller focused specifically on the ocean

SPEAKER_01: brian is amazing he's been on the pod before so congratulations on your second appearance

SPEAKER_07: for two different acts in your career hubspot what a great accomplishment and now propeller really focused on the ocean which is such an important part of the climate solutions food transportation god the the ocean is such an important platform and we'll get into that it's going to be a great show

SPEAKER_09: again molly i gotta say it's so great it's so great stick with us this week in startups is brought

SPEAKER_10: to you by house of macadamias is the next big health trend get 20 off your first purchase at

SPEAKER_12: house of macadamias dot com slash twist by using code twist 20 and age tech collaborative startups your go-to market team is waiting age tech collaborative's cutting edge accelerator program connects you with investors test beds like-minded innovators and industry expertise they're taking age tech to the next level join them at age tech collaborative dot org slash twist all right molly

SPEAKER_03: it is sunday this is your time to shine mm-hmm technically it's kind of your time to shine

SPEAKER_15: because you're the you're the jedi master here oh okay yeah okay padawan uh but you're learning quickly

SPEAKER_06: and uh you haven't lost any limbs yet so tell us about yeah well when you when you get that company shut down and you're like oh i like my left hand yeah well i guess the mechanical one will be okay um what's on your mind in terms of learning how to be a venture capitalist and make great investments

SPEAKER_21: that change the world and return 50x to the fund uh so okay this is an almost hilariously basic topic

Jason Calacanis: okay but i think is still a really interesting conversation so obviously whenever you talk to a company you talk about tam total addressable market easy easy peasy but recently i've had two companies

SPEAKER_23: have on their slides tam sam and som som which was a phrase i had never heard before so i looked it up

Jason Calacanis: of course sam serviceable available market aka the segment of the total tam targeted by your products and services within your geographical reach and then this new thing som serviceable obtainable market or the portion of the sam that you can capture and i wanted to talk to you about it because i just think that it's super interesting to talk about how to evaluate a company's potential reach the most honest way to do it and yeah when tam doesn't necessarily have to be huge it can be really valuable like this whole kind of concept of what does the audience look like for yeah a startup perfect so

SPEAKER_07: let's take two quintessential uh companies that exceeded their predictable tam uh airbnb and uber in the early days of airbnb they would look at a city like paris they say how many hotel rooms are there uh how many nights do people stay in paris in december you can get that information you'd say okay the tam uh for airbnb in paris is those hotel rooms or those hotel nights and when you look at a company like uber you'd say okay well how many cabs are in the city easily obtainable how many livery cars also known as black cars also known as car services are available in that city seemed like a very good way to say okay well then what is the serviceable available market to uber or airbnb okay well people who stay in five-star hotels for business travel are not staying in an airbnb and people who like um you

SPEAKER_01: know uh who like having a rent a car because they have a family and they have a bunch of luggage and they want to be able to travel when they get to the airport they're going to do a rent a car they're not going to do ubers everywhere because they're going to the grand canyon there's no ubers

SPEAKER_06: available there so we'll take those out right uh so and already there you started to see examples

SPEAKER_01: of wait a second that wasn't a cab you just went over into renter cars wait oh so some renter car people might actually do ubers instead you said the one going to the grand canyon wouldn't because they need the flexibility having the car with them and there's no ubers available but maybe the person who's just spending 48 hours in san francisco or 72 hours in manhattan they'll actually just use uber they're not going to rent a car people go to a major city they don't rent a car

SPEAKER_06: it's completely impractical that's the first thing they tell you when you come to san francisco don't rent a car 50 bucks to park every night accurate 75 bucks to park every night and you you can't park it anywhere you go anyway it's you will sit in the garage for three days and you just rack up this huge bill now in la it might be different so that's where the total addressable market sometimes

SPEAKER_07: exceeds it and then exceeds what your expectation was now sometimes people pick a tam that's too broad so if you were to look at uber eats and postmates and doordash you have the problem of okay all food if you took all food that you is eaten in the united states supermarkets fast food restaurants delivery restaurants grocery stores fast casual convenience stores you put all that together that's not actually the market for doordash doordash is not going to replace people going to restaurants it's not going to replace people cooking at home it's not going to replace fast food restaurants we know that so you have to have some intellectual honesty and what i think they're trying to do here with tam sam soam and i actually haven't seen this in a deck so it's interesting that it's happening is because i think so many people didn't buy the tam right the case of uber going up against rent to cars and public transportation and car ownership was not obvious the only person who really saw that early was bill girly that's why he was able to make that investment and had the confidence he said i think the tam is different than cabs yeah i think the tam includes these other things so i'll stop there for a second all right listen my favorite nut macadamia my favorite chocolate dark now i have in my office a nice box of macadamia bars and dark chocolate and i got dark chocolate covered macadamias a perfect snack for jcal i get a nice cup of black coffee and i treat myself and that company is house of macadamias the founders of this company brandon and carmen they've been listeners to this podcast this week in startups for a long time and they told me i kid you not that they started their company after they were listening to this week in startups and they read my book angel they used the returns on their first angel investment i kid you not this is amazing uh to start this macadamia nut business and uh look all nuts are not created equal here are the health benefits of macadamias compared to peanuts almonds cashews and walnuts macadamias are high in omega-7s which have been linked to fat loss which i need right and natural collagen so you look nice they also have more healthy fats and less carbs every product is vegan keto and paleo since yeah you probably have two or three of those uh on your list take it for me i eat these macadamias all the time every week two three times a week i eat them they're delicious my little treat for myself and uh again for me it's it's dark chocolate for you it might be one of the other flavors they got spicy nuts they got sweet nuts they got everything they got ones that are spicy and sweet here's what i want you to do go to house of macadamias dot com slash twist right now get 20 off by using the code twist 20

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Jason Calacanis: the somme calculation we've talked on this show before and you've talked a lot about this idea of bottom-up tam like tam is often presented in a way that's not honest like you're saying or not intellectually honest right it's hopeful it's like well yeah okay but you're not gonna you're not gonna sell this ev charger to every house in america that's just not gonna happen it's gonna be uh houses that have you know can potentially install it don't have a test like whatever right you start to you start to slice and dice and then you think about how many people are actually going to buy that and you get to a more realistic tam so i liked this idea of the song because it feels intellectually honest but does it then risk thinking too small and like missing the potential for the airbnb breakout or uber breakout you know it's like a double now it's a double-edged sword this is one

SPEAKER_01: of the great things in venture capital and entrepreneurship uh this is a great thing for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to have discussions about this is part of the art of investing in companies is you don't know what your tam is the market's going to tell you over time because there's another rub here which i have looked at very often which i call inducing a market to exist right there's a concept of induced traffic you build an extra lane you build a bridge so when they built the golden gate bridge the number of people going from san francisco up to napa increased dramatically why well because it was possible you induce them to do so by the nature of building a bridge if you start doing transatlantic flights and people can go from europe to the united states by a plane has a you know in a couple of hours as opposed to on a boat for a couple of days you've induced that traffic airbnb and uber and doordash induced people to take longer more exotic uh and more trips so you instead of going for three days you might go for five because you could afford it yeah you might go to a more exotic location because the reviews and you know this really cool looking house with great reviews in some weird place just seemed very appealing to you and the price was great so a lower price uh more optionality and a better product can induce traffic clear i mean i did not i used to go to the grocery store last night right i needed some things and instead of using instacart i used ubereats for going to safeway and i ordered some haagen-dazs ice cream and some you know diet sodas and milk and other things we needed for the house came within you know under 90 minutes maybe 60 minutes and so that's the in the inducing of a market to exist so these are all great things to debate and discuss about your product is it going to take a subset of the tam which tam are we talking about are you talking about the tam of all automobile sales well or should you talk about all miles driven and i think uberpool and lift line if you remember those products not everybody does but that was you know i take a lift and i'm going to the airport on the way i go five minutes out of my way to pick up molly then we go another six minutes out of our way to pick up nick and then we go to the airport and then that's three rides to the airport if the total value of those rides was 150 we each we we actually put it down to 120 we each save 10 bucks we each get inconvenienced by somewhere between 12 5 or 0 minutes depending on which stop on the uber or lift line it was a brilliant product requires network effects could have increased the tam of ride sharing massively it didn't work

SPEAKER_14: where it rarely worked and uh one time and it was almost a disaster it was the worst

SPEAKER_07: ride to the airport of my life you know i do it in new york city separate well i did it i did it leaving sfo going to san francisco every single time for like a month or two and i did it like five times three out of the five times it didn't pick up a second person the two times it did

SPEAKER_06: uh it was a little annoying and i realized i saved five or ten bucks and i got inconvenienced by like

SPEAKER_07: 10 minutes or 15 minutes it wasn't worth it for me yeah um but i i felt like i should try it because i was an investor and i felt like um i should do it because it's better for the environment that's

SPEAKER_45: how i felt too i was like well it's really it's more sustainable and then i was like nope but you know then people were people are weird and so i just and they're sitting on top of you i was like no no

SPEAKER_60: no i would i went right to the front seat yeah i was like i would rather have an escalade well by the

SPEAKER_07: time mine i was the second pickup and yeah i'm like i go i go front seat put the headphones in put the sunglasses on i carry a baseball cap now if i want to go incognito because you know selfies and so i'll put the baseball cap on the sunglasses on and the air pieces airpods on and i don't get

SPEAKER_06: recognized i take it off i get recognized which is great i love to take it off at this time when i'm on a phone call i don't um anyway that's tam so that's how you think about tam about talk about the

Jason Calacanis: idea of bottom-up tam and then how to sniff out because because the art can be tricky right there's also there's the art of of course a company is going to tell you well we think we can capture all of this i just talked to a company recently that was like oh yeah we can capture market if we do this and this and i'm like yes you definitely i see what you're saying and also don't to what extent do i need to evaluate you based on especially at our stage based on the thing you actually have

SPEAKER_07: right now so you can look at what is reality today uh so and how are people solving the problem today so if somebody says you know we are going to do a scooter company like bird or a lime okay and they say yeah the number of trips is uh you know all the ubers and lifts and cab rides that are under a mile you can reasonably do any 20 block journey on these devices so anything under a mile which is 60 percent of the rides and i said okay however how many days a year is it rainy or cold how many rainy or cold days are there okay that's 20 so you take out 20 for that number so let's just say the number of rides was a million uh in this category in you know los angeles okay so we take out now we're down to 800 000 okay and uh let's say uh people of a certain age are not interested in this okay what

SPEAKER_58: percentage of our oh they're half the rides okay now we're down to 400 000 okay uh and um let's say

SPEAKER_07: people who are uh you know maybe of a certain body type they don't want to be on it or business people

SPEAKER_01: you know maybe if you were obese you wouldn't want to be on one of these things maybe if you like

SPEAKER_07: or a disability sure literally can't literally okay sure so maybe that's five percent literally can't and then maybe obese is a third of the country and don't you know care to be doing physical activity ride a a city bike or do a lime scooter it's just too physically stressing for a person um they don't want to show up sweating or whatever all right so now whatever we just off the top of our heads we narrowed a million down to 200 000 right that's where the intellectual honesty of the exercise comes in what an entrepreneur would like to do is show you in some

SPEAKER_01: cases an intellectually dishonest or an intellectually lazy more likely or a radically optimistic or desperate founder any of those could apply could be desperate could be hopeful could be delusional could be whatever yeah it could be sloppy sloppy lazy would probably be the largest category they're not thinking these things through because they're doing one company and we are evaluating 15 000 per year as a company so we have a different level of rigor and it's important to realize that right we're going to be more rigorous than they are and that's our job so if you're a founder listening to this you got to be rigorous you got to put yourself on the other side of the table that whole steel mining idea where you do the other person's job like do our job do you buy the number and what can you take out of the tam even a bottom-up tim so what i like to do is say who have you sold the product to okay we make enterprise software for dentists now you just track all their patients great how many dental offices

SPEAKER_07: are there in the united states there's 30 000 great okay now how many uh how many of those have you sold into now we have 20. tell me about those 20. oh yeah they're all dental offices that have four or five dentists in them uh and have over this number of patients okay uh so it doesn't work for a single or a double dentist why like yeah they kind of they don't need it because they've only got 250 customers they keep them in a google excel or whatever like it's just it's easier for them to just do it manually they they have the folders right behind them that you see when you go there okay great of the 30 000 dentist office how many are solo oh half are solo so okay now we're talking about 15 000 so i'm looking at who's already using the product why they say yes so this is where go to market and the idea customer profile come into play you'd explain the tam now you explain the idea customer profile and we can figure that out it'd be like salesforce saying hey we sell crm and sales how many sales people are on are there in the united states oh there's 25 million okay how many of them work behind a desk at a computer oh well 5 million but what who are the other 20 000 oh they're used car sales when they're on a lot oh they're sales people at retail so they just got the 25 million sales people and they never looked at what gartner group or whatever group made that number and did that report they included retail in that report they included car salesmen they included you know people selling door-to-door encyclopedias whatever the number is okay so it's really 5 million okay of those how many of them sell more than 500 000 a year in product because if you sell under 500 000 a year in product you're not spending you know five thousand dollars installing this maintaining it etc so you can really start to look at totally where did this number come from that's why i prefer bottom up bottom up is okay you sell to dentists and you sell specifically to author

SPEAKER_01: orthodontists how many orthodontists are there in the united states great what cities are they in great who's the ideal customer profile what's your go-to marketplace and all of a sudden you can eliminate

Jason Calacanis: groups etc ironically i think that gets you to some i think that gets you to this new thing this serviceable obtainable market i like having founders this is my note to you because i think i've now seen this twice but definitely once i like this tam sam som thing because it tells me who you think you can really get immediately but it also gives me the larger universe of possibility yes i'm into it

SPEAKER_84: tam sam som do it have don't be lazy with the slide there is a and look at this slide right in your deck

SPEAKER_07: look at this discussion be specific yeah be really specific and do bottom up do you know top down don't find one number and say i'm going to get five percent of it you're going to look like somebody from like the peak height of the market who doesn't understand their market you want this discussion to show your deep understanding of the market so that you when you saw molly and i going back with these examples know more than us about your market and you're educating us when we're in meetings you'll have somebody educating you on the market explaining to you the nuances of it who would be perfect for your product who is not going to do buy your product those are important discussions to have and the more intellectually honest the more rigorous the more thoughtful you are in a tam discussion the more likely you are to get investment yeah because the more you try to massage the data the less likely you are to get an investment and as a vc the more rigorous you are about tam and thoughtful the greater the chances of like bill gurley or the airbnb investors you're going to find an outlier that's why sequoia figured it out for airbnb and that's why benchmark and bill gurley figured out for uber

SPEAKER_06: i actually didn't make that calculation i didn't make a tam calculation i made a bet on my friend

SPEAKER_51: right and on the product hey everybody it's time for a special interview with an old friend of mine rick robinson he is the gm of age tech collaborative which is brought to you by our

Chamath Palihapitiya: friends at aarp which i think rick correct me if i'm not at 52 as of last week am i able to be in aarp now you are you are welcome to join oh man you and i got old what happened this is amazing you guys are really excited uh about engaging the startup community in building technology for folks who are

SPEAKER_98: getting up there in age yeah it's really exciting for us developing the age tech collaborative to try to put a focus on what we call age tech and you might be wondering like what is age tech well it's uh it's the intersection of longevity and technology really these are health tech companies these are fintech companies these are wellness companies essentially it's going to be almost every company because the market 50 plus is becoming so enormous that they can't be ignored and then you've got a lot of people who are supporting that market who can be any age it's kind of a white space because not a lot of product developers and marketers and startups and investors have put a lot of focus on this but it's huge and it's growing in fact it's around eight and a half trillion dollars in terms of

David Friedberg: economic value in the us right now all right thanks rick when you're selling into the 50 plus market having relationship with aarp gives you a bunch of credibility of course in the meantime you

Chamath Palihapitiya: can go learn more about the age tech collaborative at age tech collaborative dot org twist and join us

SPEAKER_102: later in the program and you hear more about the age tech collaborative and how they help innovative

SPEAKER_104: startups succeed all right fascinating we have uh today's this week in climate startups is a founder

Jason Calacanis: but a founder who has moved on to vc i spoke to brian halligan co-founder of hubspot oh yes yeah exactly he was actually on episode 997 back in november 2019 he was the ceo of hubspot for 15 years stepped down as ceo and is still chairperson in august 21 to do the hot new thing pivot to climate tech love it but he did a bottom-up tam to try to figure out his impact basically how he could have the greatest impact and where he thought his his intention and time should go and he actually started a fund um decided to where is that fund gonna focus it is this is what's so fascinating last you know we talked about the wildfire tech fund this one is all about ocean tech it's uh fund called propeller and it recently announced a 100 million dollar raise in partnership with woods hole oceanographic institution and is the first investment fund ever solely dedicated to improving the quality of the oceans which is you know compared to wildfire tech a big wide open fascinating opportunity i like it and you know i'm obsessed with this like this is one of those things i think in 10 years we're going to look back and be like that's actually where a lot of the climate solutions really where it's a huge carbon sink there's a bunch of food in there like there's all this algae and vegetable life and it's super interesting um and also just kind of kind of fascinating to see

SPEAKER_14: a founder do this like really really intentional decision making process and determine like this

SPEAKER_07: is where i can have the most impact there's so much opportunity in the ocean there's so much bounty in the ocean yeah and it's something let's be honest humanity has abused and been callous totally and not been thoughtful about so you take those two things together this huge opportunity and the fact that we've been very cavalier thoughtless and you know cruel to the ocean man if we could align those things a little bit better and stop dumping stuff in the ocean cleaning it up making it more sustainable more bounty would come from it this makes total sense to me what a great mission yeah

Jason Calacanis: it makes energy like wave energy i mean it really is like it absorbs the sun right you could there's

SPEAKER_07: all these ideas of putting mirrors on large portions of the ocean in order to reflect the sunlight to

SPEAKER_01: lower the temperature i mean the dropping of we had uh the company that drops the kelp uh after absorbing all that carbon puts it at the bottom of the ocean so the ocean is like a platform you know and the platform you know could deteriorate like a bridge does or a highway system or it could really help move things around in a positive way and that's why sail plan one of our investments is trying to make those

SPEAKER_00: ships a little more um uh efficient less toxic efficient in terms of fuel use and carbon emissions

Jason Calacanis: and they're doing it for ports too and yeah i mean it's a like it this is a really really interesting conversation i love the idea the platform is the perfect word yeah perfect right let's protect the

SPEAKER_114: platform let's evolve the platform yeah here's brian halligan well done molly can't wait for this one

SPEAKER_23: brian halligan is the former co-founder of hubspot current founder of the climate tech investment fund

Jason Calacanis: propeller welcome to this weekend climate startups thanks for having me and congrats on the 100 million dollar uh raise for propeller and tell us okay tell us about the thesis i've been super interested into these like very specific thesis driven funds we talked to a fund that's just doing wildfire tech you're specifically focused on this category that's being called blue tech right oceanic oceanographic oceanographic investments yeah we're not going to call it we're not going to call it that again

SPEAKER_122: ocean stuff ocean stuff ocean stuff we're doing ocean stuff well i was though i'll tell you the whole

SPEAKER_127: story i was i was humming along nicely at hubspot running nabs the ceo and it's going pretty well and then i had a i had a really bad snowmobile accident molly and very nearly killed myself on a snowmobile and i had a lot of time to think in the long period of time in the hospital and long period of time in a wheelchair and i've had a climate itch and wanted it in climate and um i decided i wasn't getting back to being ceo there was a wonderful woman who took over from me when i was gone she's doing great so she's ceo now and and i had some time and energy and i'm like i want to get into climate and i started doing some research on it and the funny thing about the research i met with a a lot of founders and venture capitalists that i met with a lot of professors and the more people knew about climate change the more depressed and pessimistic they were about it until i visited woods hole oceanographic and the oceanographers are pretty darn optimistic about climate change the ocean's gotten us out of some big climate pickles before and it's doing a lot of the heavy lifting

SPEAKER_120: and so that's how i sort of headed down the ocean path it's uh it was around that optimism i felt

Jason Calacanis: around climate change from the ocean people okay so tell me more about the optimism before we get into the nuts and bolts that is it the sense that the ocean is such a massive resource and carbon sink

SPEAKER_133: like where did that where does that optimism come from the size of it for sure it's 71 of the surface of

SPEAKER_127: the earth it's 90 of the biomass it's already uh producing half our oxygen consuming half the carbon dioxide that's getting spit out it's doing a lot of the heavy lifting today and i think it's the only thing of scale that can do more and oceanographers can believe if you are very very careful with the

SPEAKER_120: ocean it can solve the crisis and the and the careful part is very very important but uh oceanographers

SPEAKER_127: are optimistic about uh the ocean doing a lot more around absorbing more carbon dioxide and really

SPEAKER_23: helping us out of a jam here and then so in terms of raising the fund you partnered with woods hole oceanographic institution right yes so we ended up with a deep partnership with woods hole

SPEAKER_127: where part of the funding goes into their highest potential laboratories uh where we think there's uh big big opportunities to solve climate problems and we'll get a you know a first right of refusal on that technology and then they're an lp in the fund so it's a deep deep partnership i think it'll help a lot as we're looking at deals we'll have lots of experts to call on our portfolio companies will be

SPEAKER_134: able to leverage their facilities the the partnership's actually already really paying off really happy with it so it's kind of like a corporate vc but not really not really no i don't i don't think of it as that they don't think of it as that like we can do a business with uh

SPEAKER_127: companies coming out of woods hole or anyone else in fact there's a company we just funded out of caltech that's a company we're looking at usc we funded a company out of mit so it's not sort of

SPEAKER_138: captive to woods hole but i think we'd like to do some great stuff with woods hole we think there's

SPEAKER_23: amazing technology coming out of there so um tell me about let's go back to the snowmobile accident for

Jason Calacanis: a minute and the path from founder to investor what made you decide it sounds like you know you could have founded another company maybe and and what was the kind of thinking behind like no investing is

SPEAKER_143: the best way forward here to tackle this problem i wasn't sure i wanted to invest by any means um no i uh the thing about hubspot is we always say that we want to build a company that our grandkids

SPEAKER_127: will be proud of and that's sort of my mantra that i needed to people said and people rolled their eyes at me when i say i'm sure at this point i've said it so many times and i think we're on our way i mean we're a lot of people say we're the best place to work in the united states and we have a hundred thousand customers and millions of users and they tend to be quite happy and so i feel like we're having relatively positive impact on the people we touch and want to keep that going and as i was thinking about my body of work in my life and like well when i'm older and i look back at my life what am i proud of what if i left i thought i wanted to get into climate it's it's a much you know it's a big impact area obviously it's a big lever where now it's like where could i find the biggest lever in climate and as i looked at i was like i could start a company i could go join someone's companies i could sit on boards there's all kinds of stuff i could do but i was drawn to the ocean there's a gap there no one was really building sort of an independent venture fund in the ocean it felt like the answer could be there and that somebody needed to do it and if it's not me then who you might as well uh give it a go and it felt like investing seemed like the right way to go there's a whole series of technologies that you can invest in in the ocean that are quite interesting and so uh i thought i'd give that a go and so i i when i was a small child i didn't want to grow up

SPEAKER_150: and be an ocean climate investor it's sort of i went on a journey to find it and it sort of found me

Jason Calacanis: where i mean did you grow up around the ocean was it literally like i mean because it sounds like it was a very intentional path to try to find the exact right place to land and have impact um do you also have like an affinity for the ocean i would tell you a secret i haven't told this to

SPEAKER_154: anyone on the podcast or anything i get seasick

SPEAKER_156: i kind of avoid boats uh you know people invite me to go sailing and scuba diving and all this kind of stuff and i'm like you know i i i'm good i'm good you know i'm kind of indoorsy i'm all set on that yeah i like to swim in the ocean i'd take a little boat ride here and there but if you said hey let's go on a cruise around the across the atlantic i'm good on that the reason i'm doing the ocean is i

SPEAKER_127: think the answer could be in the ocean and that's where the biggest lever is and so it's a very practical reason it's i think most people just assume i'm sort of a sailor or scuba diver not at all

SPEAKER_104: i wondered i thought like oh for sure you've got some like backstory that's like oh a wind swept house in maine and then you know no i have a house in cape cod but i just like looking at the

SPEAKER_23: ocean from a distance amazing i kind of i really i kind of love that all right well let's um let's talk about the the investment part of it it sure is a tiny fraction right of of vc dollars

Jason Calacanis: in climate tech are going to blue tech or ocean related tech why do you think that is i mean it's not other than the part where it's like this huge resource that we and we know more about space than

SPEAKER_138: we do about the ocean there's that and then part of the reason why i'm doing it is it is a tiny tiny

SPEAKER_127: tiny amount of dollars going into it um i mean i i think it's one of the it's sort of like hubspot remember when we first started hubspot we were pitching it to investors we i can't tell you how many no's we got across series a through e like we had a heck of a time raising every round everyone thought we were crazy going up small meeting business it'll never work you're going to be the salesworth.com good luck like we just got no after no after no but 10 years later people like you know that was a really obvious idea that hubspot thing why didn't i think of that idea i think it's going to be one of those things that 10 years from now people are like why did i think of that that's a really obvious idea and i think people have been hesitant to do it the ocean's a harsh environment to work in and so you have to have your act together and you have to have hardened technology if you want to put it in the ocean i think that's challenging to people i don't think there's a lot of know-how about it um so i think people have hesitated to do it i think you're going to see more and more i think there'll be a lot of ocean funds after propeller i think a lot of people will do it i'm noticing from all the other climate tech funds they keep throwing us ocean deals to look at so people are seeing ocean deals as a there's a lot of activity in the ocean the startup community in

SPEAKER_120: the ocean is it's booming and we there's a massive amount of deal flow we're seeing and we're seeing a lot from other investors and just from entrepreneurs in general so i think we'll be the first of many

Jason Calacanis: yeah um what kinds of deals are you seeing can you talk a little bit about the types of technology that people are trying to deploy sure the thing about the ocean that it's that about investing in the ocean

SPEAKER_156: that's cool and and also hard like i come from the software as a service industry and you think about

SPEAKER_127: you're an investor in software as a service everything kind of rhymes the business models rhyme the go to market rhymes the people are the same moving back around between the companies the ocean has like we counted 13 different kind of tech verticals where there's some sort of disruption going on in the verticals and there's three in particular that we like we like the idea of carbon sequestration how do you get more of that carbon dioxide in the air sequestered at the very bottom of the ocean there's a lot of companies and technologies around that would like to build the picks and shovels to enable that industry to happen ocean organics so everything from aquaculture to new types of creating um seafood in a lab for example food for fish the fish populations are crashing the the food that fish eat is really crashing so stuff around that uh kelp and products that come out of kelp you feed the animals and humans mushrooms things like that lots and lots of interesting stuff there and then just ocean industrials everything from desalination uh plants to you know underwater energy wave energy uh tide energy things like that so lots of stuff and

SPEAKER_134: they're they're all really different technologies and different business models which makes it really

Jason Calacanis: challenging and interesting how do you even tackle that like what kind of team have you put together for research and diligence you know what's your learning process been like well i have a very

SPEAKER_183: ocean-y team um they like boats they like them they like boats they're all scuba divers and sailors

SPEAKER_156: and all that kind of stuff but by the way now that i'm doing this everyone invites me to go sailing

SPEAKER_23: and it's like i'm good i'm good i'm good yeah i made a i made an investment that involves a board meeting on a boat and i'm like you know i'm i don't i mean yeah okay yeah i'm with you on that one i highly recommend a medication called bonine related to drama makes it makes it tired no bonine

Jason Calacanis: doesn't make you tired oh bonine doesn't make you tired yes it's like a super sick because i love whale watching but i get super seasick and bonine is the jam all right i got it yeah no that just puts you

SPEAKER_127: right to sleep totally yeah i'll give you an example of one of the partners it's a woman named julie pullen she's an oceanography professor climatologist and she's terrific a deep domain expertise expert on the ocean she's an adjunct professor at columbia around oceanography and we poached her out of a startup that was doing a bunch of climate research so she's sort of a ocean researcher oceanographer climatologist but also very startupy she was doing too much angel

SPEAKER_120: investment so that's the type of person we have our team you know that deep deep deep domain expertise and then we have access to all the terrific scientists at hui who can help us out

SPEAKER_51: on the due diligence as well hey everybody it's time for a special interview with an old friend of

Chamath Palihapitiya: mine rick robinson he is the gm of age tech collaborative which is brought to you by our friends at aarp so how does the collaborative work how do you help companies and investors kind of

SPEAKER_98: access these companies and these markets so essentially what we do is we look for companies we incubate them we invest in them and then we bring them into this new environment we call the age tech collaborative community so yes we have pitch competitions that we run throughout the year themed and some of them are open mic style and it's a way for us to source and find great early stage companies usually pre-series a we invite some of them into our accelerator program which is extremely high touch eight weeks four times a year where we bring in aging experts we help get them best prepared to deliver their product or service to the market and as i mentioned we often invest in these companies and then they graduate into the age tech collaborative community which is an online platform that makes up an ecosystem that we're developing that includes of course the startups investors testbed organizations enterprises and business services all in this one online environment where they can support and draw from one another great so there's an online community people can go

SPEAKER_80: visit they can go visit that at age tech collaborative dot org slash twist age tech collaborative dot org slash

Chamath Palihapitiya: twist and so if you want to build in that market if you want to sell into that market if you want to invest in that market this is a great way for you to partner with aarp correct absolutely yep can you talk

SPEAKER_209: about investments that you've made so far how long have you been deploying i just should have for a

SPEAKER_143: couple months i can talk at a high level about a few of them we had we had an interesting process

SPEAKER_127: we're seeing a lot come in and we decided to run something we call an ocean mba which is a week-long class we run in partnership with mit that's a bunch of the curriculum you get with an mba with a very salty ocean-y spin to it and i teach a bunch of it the guy who runs uh energy ventures at mit teaches a bunch so we brought a bunch of the professors in to teach it it was awesome we had 24 entrepreneurs come in they learned a lot we learned even more we had breakfast lunch and dinners with these entrepreneurs while they're learning we got to know their chance or go to markets pretty much everything about their businesses they pitched us at the end and then we funded four of those companies i can tell you about a couple of them that i like yeah uh there's one in particular i like that there's uh two women from the desalination industry uh which is unfortunately a very fast

SPEAKER_120: growing industry to keep up with the freshwater demands of the earth and it turns out the ocean is full of just dissolved lithium and dissolved magnesium and dissolved very important metals and all

SPEAKER_127: these are just washing through these desalination plants so they've created a specialized filter that will effectively turn every desalination plant into a lithium mine that's kind of one that i like a lot there's another gentleman an mit professor is leaving his job and he's starting an mrv company and being able to sell carbon credits in the ocean whether that's a mangrove project or a giant kelp farm or whatever the project might be that you're running in the ocean can i wait can i interrupt you

SPEAKER_138: for a second what's mrb oh i forget what it stands for but it's monitoring and verifying the information

SPEAKER_120: in the ocean uh of what's going on and people are doing this on land like there's a terrific

SPEAKER_127: company called pachama that uses satellites that will look at tree stands and see okay how much carbon dioxide are really being absorbed by the trees so he wants to build a monitoring and verification system for the ocean so let's say you're building a kelp farm or you're building a mangrove project and you're selling carbon credits off it are you really sinking that carbon dioxide to the bottom of the ocean are you doing something weird to the fish are you throwing the ph balance off of the ocean he wants to create kind of the moodies for the ocean to do that kind of thing so those are the types of companies that we're looking at investing in early stage stuff and so far so good no shortage for opportunities i think this is going to be a winner how early are you looking super early the both those companies are for founding teams you know beyond the card table but

SPEAKER_138: we're we're really first money in and we're putting between a half a million million and a half to

SPEAKER_220: work on both of them okay and is that your kind of standard check size yes yes seed precede we're

SPEAKER_143: doing another one that's very interesting that's in the shipping space the shipping industry all those

SPEAKER_127: amazon packages going back and forth from uh uh china that's about three percent of the carbon dioxide spewed into the air but it's a lot and that industry is quite serious about getting the the carbon dioxide levels down and there's a couple ways to do it one is to switch the whole darn industry to ammonia which is a big expensive project there's a professor at caltech who's got a very interesting project where he takes the output of the smokestack on one of these ships and he runs it through a limestone process limestone process and turns that carbon dioxide into an inert material that you can drop right into the ocean and so that's the third one we're doing and we're

SPEAKER_120: syndicating with a few other venture capitalists on that so that's a larger deal look people want to do ocean stuff we're seeing lots of interest in syndication yeah absolutely i mean i'm with you i'm

Jason Calacanis: i know you must have read eat like a fish which is i found myself on a podcast sometime earlier this year saying almost the exact words you just did about how in 10 years it was the obvious podcast and i was like yeah in 10 years it's going to be obvious to everyone that this was this like massive resource but as you say it's sort of hard to build in like when what is your thesis around frontier tech or hardware or you know it sounds like some of it is picks and shovels but some of it's going to be you know weather hardened wave generation machines right yeah like some of the stuff i described like

SPEAKER_143: the that first company um is turning the um desalination plants into lithium that's a filter company

SPEAKER_127: that's not it's hardware and it's software but it's not doesn't have to like sit in the ocean but it's got to be super sturdy that's going to be a very well engineered product the second one the sensor companies those are going right into the ocean so those sensors they're very small but they have to be super super rugged most it's like i think of the iphone yes it's a piece of hardware but it's really a piece of hardware that wraps software that's kind of what that is but it has to be super rugged the third one the the ocean liner company that's actually going to sit on the maersk ship let's say so it doesn't have to be as rugged but it's a piece of hardware it's engineered and software that's

SPEAKER_138: together so definitely some engineering some hardware involved as well some software in these companies

SPEAKER_168: i definitely want to talk to your uh moody's company by the way okay we'll connect after cool he's

SPEAKER_23: a great guy and then tell me a little bit more about the entrepreneur in residence program and this

Jason Calacanis: this idea of sort of also incubating this space because there's a lot of interest but maybe there are entrepreneurs who want to do this and don't know how to get started yeah so uh we've got two

SPEAKER_127: entrepreneurs in residence right now they happen to be both former hubspotters so i would never take anywhere from hubspot but they have both left and they're both very oceanic one of them i'll tell you a story one of them's named kevin kevin walsh he ran ai for hubspot for the last eight years terrific and i bumped into him on the sidewalk in boston i'm like hey what do you i heard you left hubspot what are you doing he's like i'm about to sail across the pacific well i got an idea for you once you when you're done sailing across the pacific come hang out with us and so he's starting an ocean company and another woman who who used to work at hubspot and then we have about four or five other ones that are going to come in and work on stuff and some of them have ideas that we'll work on inside of the propeller others will match with the team inside of woods hole oceanographic so there's a bunch of labs inside of woods hole oceanographic doing really interesting stuff for the most part those scientists are really interested in their technology getting out into the wild but they didn't grow up wanting to be entrepreneurs per se they grew up wanting to be scientists so we'll

SPEAKER_120: team them with a scientific team we'll pull that technology out create a company that scientists will remain our advisor and they'll become ceo of that company so that's a model i think we'll see a lot of

SPEAKER_23: as part of the ocean thesis by the way i love that you're calling people oceany like it's there's two kinds of people in the world oceany and not oceany um as part of the thesis have you identified specific threats like are there specific problems you're trying to address or is it or are you

Jason Calacanis: sort of more generalist in terms of like it's ocean just work within that it's ocean it's big enough

SPEAKER_199: it's broad enough there's enough stuff going on in the ocean there's enough startups where we're

SPEAKER_127: sticking on the ocean we have core competitive advantage and i'm a big believer in building hubspot like we have some core competitive advantages you gotta lean into your strengths versus run away and

SPEAKER_120: and go to other adjacent areas so we've got core competitive advantage our team is super oceany we have the partnership with woods hole and so we want to be the world's first and best ocean investor is the

SPEAKER_130: idea so yeah we're very much focused on it what do you think about this idea of it seems like like i

Jason Calacanis: was mentioning i talked to a venture firm that's specifically doing fire tech you're sort of specifically doing ocean solutions do you think that as we start to see more money in climate tech that

SPEAKER_248: this kind of single thesis firm is the way to go or one of the many ways we could go i think it's one of

SPEAKER_250: the many ways you could go i heard about the fire tech firm i think it's super cool i also just think

SPEAKER_127: you've got people like me that want to have an outsized impact and so they kind of pick a lane and

SPEAKER_134: they go very deep on it and i don't know who founded the fire tech firm but i thought that was an awesome idea really really cool idea bill clarico um yeah also a former founder yeah the thing that i find

SPEAKER_143: interesting about climate tech let's call climate tech 2.0 i think it's going to work this time for

SPEAKER_127: a couple of reasons one just the obvious the obvious urgency around the problem is up and the

SPEAKER_120: knowledge around the problem is up but wow are there a lot of people from the tech industry moving into this industry and a lot of money moving it so just in the ocean eric schmidt has a huge initiative going on inside of the ocean larry page has a big initiative going on mark benioff's got a big initiative going on there's a bunch of us that are just doing ocean stuff and i kind of think that's going to matter the money's going to matter some of the talent will matter some of the technology will

SPEAKER_143: matter to bring to bear on these big problems so i count me as an optimist about all this stuff yeah

SPEAKER_23: and then when it comes to this kind of big greenfield opportunity what do you one thing i've been asking

Jason Calacanis: in a lot of these interviews is like what do you think you're seeing there is a huge rush obviously in and money in climate tech 2.0 what do you think people are getting distracted by maybe wasting a little time on when there's a whole ocean to work within i that's sort of exactly what i was going to

SPEAKER_127: say i think the ocean is the very obvious opportunity that people have missed uh i mean there's only so many trees you can plant a lot of the surface of the land in earth we're going to need to grow food to feed the 8 million plus people who are living on it and so like there's a lot more space out there in the ocean and there's a lot of green stuff growing in the ocean there's a lot of photosynthesis going on like it feels like a really obvious idea to me that people aren't doing it i don't think anyone's got anything wrong but it's like i think there'll be certain pockets where people will figure stuff out and things will get unlocked like the software industry there's certain pockets that got unlocked sas got unlocked you know the iphone really unlocked the mobile industry i think you're going to see a new generation of wearables that'll unlock ar and dr i think artificial intelligence is

SPEAKER_120: about to be unlocked there'll be unlocks that will happen in climate it's hard to predict what they are but i think unlocks will come over time and maybe it's some of the same unlocks maybe it's artificial intelligence applied to some of these problems that really unlocks it brian halligan is the former

Jason Calacanis: co-founder of hubspot and current founder of the climate tech investment fund propeller deploying 100 million dollars into the ocean whether you're on a boat or not brian thanks a lot for the time

SPEAKER_07: thank you all right everybody thank you for listening this is the start of the week we start the week on sunday we warm you up for the week you know what's going to happen tomorrow it's monday you're going to need to get the pod you put the alerts on hit the bell on youtube be ready for anything it's going to be chaos again we're going to talk about it all on this week and startups this week five six days a week every week molly and i break it down for you we will be here for you we

SPEAKER_23: know yes the knives are coming fast and furious we're here to catch them all but in like a good way we're here for you all right see you tomorrow