SPEAKER_00: hey everybody welcome back to sunday you made it to sunday first up vc sunday school we're going to talk about your ownership percentage and why certain vcs say in order to do this deal we need a certain ownership percentage or else we're out and then molly has an amazing interview i do have

SPEAKER_03: an amazing interview i interviewed dana gibber the ceo of flow carbon the one that is associated with adam and rebecca newman but they're doing some really cool stuff it's a great conversation it's

SPEAKER_07: going to be a great episode stick with us this week in startups is brought to you by open phone as a startup founder a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back but using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them open phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team right on top of your existing devices visit openphone.com twist to get 20 off your first six months snack magic and swag magic are global gifting platforms and the most stress-free and customizable way to delight employees or customers get 10 cash back up to one thousand dollars until october 15 with code holiday see more at snackmagic.com twist and micro acquire the startup acquisition marketplace start the right acquisition conversations at your own pace get free and instant access to over 100 000 trusted buyers with total anonymity say goodbye to brokers and meet your ideal buyer today go to try.microacquire.com twist okay molly it's sunday

SPEAKER_08: welcome everybody to sunday hope you're having a relaxing weekend and now just to increase the

SPEAKER_00: relaxation and adding a little namaste to your day let's do some freaking math let's do some math let's

David Friedberg: get some spreadsheets up in here bees let's go all right now you had a question uh i think that came up so you were talking to some people some randos i don't know i was talking to other investors in the

SPEAKER_03: climate space investors of various stripes and approaches yeah and i was talking to one investor about this idea of minimum target ownership percentage and uh the question was posed like should vcs even

SPEAKER_13: have that is there a situation situation in which you were like we're gonna get a 500x return but you know we're only gonna own one percent so we're out was part of that question is there a deal you

SPEAKER_03: wouldn't do because of minimum ownership percentage and as a general rule should vcs have that and why or why not yeah which is a lot interesting because yes a lot to unpack there so as a general rule in

SPEAKER_17: venture capital there is the power law right your top investments pay for all the other investments

SPEAKER_22: that either fail go to zero um or return you know some small amount of capital back so we all understand the power law you can look up the power law some people call this like the 80 20 rule

SPEAKER_24: whatever uh 80 of your value comes from the top 20 it's even more pronounced in venture so let's

SPEAKER_00: all acknowledge that the power law exists so now if you exist if the power law exists if you know you have a winning company you want to own enough of it so that you can maximize returns for your lps your limited partners as a venture capitalist and you only have a certain amount of time as a venture capitalist most people would say old school vc firms you know they raise this three or four hundred million dollar firm you got five vcs in it they're doing series a investments or maybe four partners okay they each have to deploy 300 divided by five or 300 divided by four 60 to 75 million dollars so you're making maybe a dozen investments each just use the let's just use the number 10. okay so if you can only make 10 investments um you know that's going to be let's just say we'll pick a number five million each and then a little bit to go on top if you have a couple of winners right you have five million in each you got 25 million left over to go into the winners maybe the

SPEAKER_27: top two winners uh get the extra 25. so if you were to say you know what i want to own half as much

SPEAKER_22: and let's say that five million bought you you know i don't know how much in a series a but let's

SPEAKER_33: just say 10 or 20 percent okay let's say they only take two million of your dollars you only own four

SPEAKER_00: percent okay now you're going to be on twice as many boards you got to have twice as many companies and let's say you're stacking funds so every year you go through three every three years you go through a fund over 10 years you got three funds deployed

SPEAKER_22: now instead of having just 10 companies you instead of having 10 per fund you have 30 as a partner now you got 60 it becomes overwhelming now of course some are going to die over that time period and shut down but this is why vcs and their time becomes the issue hmm okay so there's a time issue here if i'm going to join the board i'm going to do it am i going to do it if i only have two or three percent ownership it's not enough because i only have a certain amount of time to

SPEAKER_03: give to companies but interesting so that's one reason is there yes definitely before we get to the math is there a reason that you wouldn't do a small percentage deal though there must be something there must be some deals that come along where you're like yeah it's worth it to have one or two

SPEAKER_22: like a bite of this part of this is posturing so you want to have the position we're not going to do this deal unless we can get 10 minimum okay so that the founder doesn't say well i want sequoia and kleiner to do the series a of google you can take it or you can leave it either you split it or you don't and that was famously what happened with google if you remember from sebastian's book the power of law he recounts this very well known in silicon valley that sergey and larry said split it and if either one of you doesn't want to split it too bad you're out and so vcs will take this position we want the whole thing if they can't they'll fall back so they just keep that posturing up so there's a reality to it but then there's posturing so hey if uh you know elon's starting a new company or i don't know travis is starting a new company they would get to dictate and they would tell people here's what you can have and all of a sudden that rule would magically disappear now that rule would appear for a first-time founder and be like we're we're setting our ways so there is some flexibility there okay all right so that's one yeah i'd say

SPEAKER_00: that's the number one reason the vcs time now some vcs take the approach we don't want board seats and they can take a more uh an approach of having three four or five percent of a larger number of companies right so instead of having 10 companies uh with 10 ownership in each they could have 30 companies with three four percent ownership in each you could take that approach as well right and then look for the winners and you'd have more diversification right um but you don't have board seats which creates a whole nother set of problems and you might since you own a small percentage not have what's called major investor rights major investors get pro rata they get to sign off on a sale they just have more what they call protective provisions control provisions so if you start to own under five percent you have less ownership this means you lose this collection of protective

SPEAKER_22: provisions like preferred shares uh party pursue the ability to buy secondary shares first if they become available in the market all of these uh collection of things and you just basically don't

SPEAKER_52: have a seat at the table all right so that makes sense some of it is so it's information it's the

SPEAKER_03: right to keep investing it's time it's a little bit of uh control or insight into the company and it sounds like there are firms that obvious i mean obviously there are firms that have different approaches that do do more of a scatter shot or even like a moneyball approach as opposed

SPEAKER_22: to definition you have moneyball in a in a fund right four partners five partners you know doing uh in a in a traditional venture firm where it's you know the five partner structure and the same five dudes do a fund every three years and that's what we saw in silicon valley you know uh and widely criticized for a number of reasons but also it's unbelievably effective because you're dealing with a human dynamic right each individual is making these bets each individual is responsible for their book but you have five individuals who balance each other out so one or two of them are screw-ups and one of two of them are high performers so you have like two layers of diversification you have the five diversification of partners so if two of the partners are like living in the old paradigm and there's two new ones in the new paradigm one person's a screw up maybe the fund can withstand that right yeah uh you have people aging out so the you know you might have somebody who's a 60 year old vc who just doesn't understand you know web 2.0 or they don't understand the mobile revolution or whatever so there's like that diversification hopefully of ideas thoughts whatever uh and the and paradigms and then you have this diversification with 10 companies so you should have both those things working there but losing those rights and then if you're a good picker you know if you are too diversified well then you have to hit a higher multiple to hit the power law so there is some

SPEAKER_00: optimization around there and that's where you know it's instructive to maybe look at how a

SPEAKER_60: percentage ownership gets diluted over time all right everybody on the phone today is open phones founder darina kuya welcome to the program darina thanks jason great to be here now what mistakes

SPEAKER_62: do most founders make with phone numbers in their startups great question first one is

SPEAKER_64: they use their personal phone number for their business and it's an easy mistake to make because you don't necessarily think about it much you know you incorporate your company you put your phone number there's all these forms you fill out it very quickly goes from being your personal number to being the number for the company and when that happens there are all these data aggregators and all kinds of services that take your number and put it everywhere yeah suddenly now there is this uptick in spam text messages it's the worst yeah and people just wonder like how are others getting my number well let me tell you you put it in different places and it kind of snowballed from there so that's the first mistake yeah the second which is initially as a founder you're the sales person you're the only sales sales rep and then you hire a first sales rep and sometimes founders let that person use their personal phone number oh no that number the data everything that happens is just fully belongs to

SPEAKER_72: the sales rep and if that person leaves you lose the entire history with your customers yeah and then

SPEAKER_60: what if that sales executive goes to a competitor exactly yep okay everybody twist listeners can get 20 off any plan for their first six months at open phone just go to open phone.com twist if you've got an existing number they'll put it right over for free head to o-p-e-n-p-h-o-n-e.com twist today

SPEAKER_00: for 20 off our team made us this nice little chart and what this shows we have a seed round in column b here and then we go to series a series b series c in this hypothetical example then it goes to an ipo and then we've shown here because sometimes venture firms hold their shares after an ipo before distributing them maybe two years post ipo what happens with the value of the company then we have the valuation of the company from 10 million dollars in a seed round to 25 million in the series a 100 in the series b 1 billion in the series c an ipo of 5 billion dollars and becoming worth 10 billion in uh two years post ipo let's say this is a seed firm like ours let's say the c firm had incredible

SPEAKER_27: conviction in this company put two million dollars into it for 20 ownership so that's what you see in

SPEAKER_78: column d dollar valuation yeah at a 10 million dollar valuation so the two million dollars bought

David Friedberg: you 20 let's say they raise another bunch of money at a series a of 25 million and you maintain your 20 ownership you take your pro rata right we talked about that so you put a little bit more money in so you still own your 20 okay so what's your moink your multiple on invested capital it's 2.5 you turn 2 million into 5 million okay great looking good let's say you get to the series b your firm is fully deployed you don't take your pro rata and you get diluted 25 it's a particularly onerous round everybody gets diluted 25 since your 20 ownership goes down to 15. then let's say at a billion dollars they raise a hundred million you get diluted 10 so minus 1.5 then you get diluted again they they raise 20 in the ipo you get 20 dilution you're at 10.8 let's say you don't sell your shares you're still at 10.8 percent by the time you ipo so you went from 20 ownership and at the ipo you had roughly 10

SPEAKER_22: you can start to get an idea of like what this would actually look like for a seed fund uh you know you'd own a billion dollars right because you still own 10 of the company

SPEAKER_27: right even though you got diluted by half and most people think you're getting diluted by half

SPEAKER_13: so i could imagine taking from this that a minimum target like a percentage ownership would be more

SPEAKER_12: important for a seed firm in some ways because you know you're going to get diluted or does is it the

David Friedberg: same well if you jumped in at the series a you were series a firm you might not be able to own 20

SPEAKER_00: let's say you own 10 or 15 so you can imagine if you own 15 and then you maintain your pro rata maybe for one or two more rounds okay maybe you wound up at seven percent at the ipo eight percent whatever it is you're going to get diluted at some amount because you're not going to be able to protect

SPEAKER_22: that entire position in all likelihood because most funds do not have you know the ability to do these giant mega late stage growth rounds right that's one of the things that happened with bill gurley and they talk about in the power law and benchmark talks about oh my god masayoshi uh san

SPEAKER_00: is coming in and taking yahoo is taking uber and putting these big chunks of capital in we're getting disrupted by these late stage investors jury milner's coming in and coming over the top

SPEAKER_22: of everybody so that was you know part of the tension here in silicon valley over the last decade or two

SPEAKER_51: is that those big uh giants yuri milner making billion dollar event you know investments masayoshi son putting in 20 10 or 20 billion dollar slugs well yeah and they and a smaller firm just can't

SPEAKER_05: keep up and and frankly isn't expected to right like right there's no expectation that we would

SPEAKER_54: participate for example as a c to series a firm in the c or d probably around whatever you know you

SPEAKER_22: might probably not you might pop up in spv and then say to all of your lps hey is there any huge lp here who wants to put in a 50 million dollar slug okay so you're a 150 million dollar firm you obviously don't have the ability to put in a 50 million dollar slug to defend your position right yeah but there might be one of your lps who does so in this case here with the series c you're getting diluted 10 it's a billion dollar valuation so that one that 10 means they put in a hundred million uh for that billion dollar valuation which means your 1.5 dilution you know to be 15 to maintain your 15 you're gonna put in that uh 15 million you gotta be 15 of the round you might find one of your lps wants to put that 50 million and you get carry on that so some people will do these specific

SPEAKER_51: spvs to to maintain those positions at later stages right uh because you still have the right but but you might also be selling in that round you might also be sellers yeah true you know

SPEAKER_03: there's lots that can happen in the later rounds but it seems like dilution is somewhat of a given

SPEAKER_13: so would that explain like do when you're fundraising like do lps want you to have

SPEAKER_00: a target for ownership yeah because of this i want you to own as much as possible in the winners pretty obvious statement um and you know when they look back on my career you know when i was a scout they're like why didn't you own you know five percent of or you know three percent of uber and i was like

SPEAKER_22: well because i was just doing seed investments for sequoia that wasn't the nature of the program they just wanted us to do one bet not take the pro rata and then move on so you know i didn't get that criticism early in my career like hey why don't you do multiple investments why aren't you following on why don't you do more and i corrected that in my game later on i was like yeah let's keep investing in these companies let's keep putting more money in go pro rata or even super pro rata try to increase our position in them because it's very rare that a great company comes along so if it is rare which is the definition of the power law one pays for many they don't happen too often part of being a great investor is not just finding great companies it's maintaining or increasing your ownership in great companies that is an equal part of the game if you were to have done like let's say in this uh ownership scenario you didn't defend your pro rata for the first round or two let's say you only put in 10 all of a sudden you can see what a missed opportunity it was and the truth is when you're an investor in a company you find out in the first two or three years sometimes four or five but definitely within five if you got a winner or not it's very rare that a company breaks out in year six or seven even figma which had a slow burn you kind of got the sense that this was a great team they were getting traction twitter had a little bit of a slow burn but it wasn't like year seven burn you know it's like year four burn or something year three uh these things start to accelerate so it's super important when you do have a winner to recognize it and you

SPEAKER_00: see on our investment call a decent portion of our time is talking about in the portfolio did we get any updates is this company 3x revenue year over year is it growing 10 month over month five percent and we struggle over those you know metrics and getting them to make sure we understand of the existing bets we placed how many of them are breaking out if they are breaking out well can we get more money

SPEAKER_05: into that company because we know it's a winner and always your question always every time company after company after company and that to our meeting is what's our ownership percentage how much do

SPEAKER_00: we own how much do we own hard to calculate because a lot of these things are notes they haven't converted into equity we've talked about this before the convertible note the safe these are essentially we're giving money to a company we give them in this case the two million dollars for 20 ownership in this uh scenario that might be on a convertible note in other words it's a loan that converts at a 10 million dollar cap that's the maximum it can convert at so you find out oh you own 20 at this point in time but you might also oh they did two more notes and you got diluted another four or five percent they didn't tell you about those notes and you actually don't own 20 you own 16.5 because they raised these other notes and you didn't have pro rata on those notes you had pro

SPEAKER_24: rata on the next price round so yeah there could be all kinds of shenanigans that occur different interpretations of these documents mistakes made by attorneys or accountants you got to stay on top of this ownership percentage maybe they did an employee stock option pool maybe they bought some shares back from an employee maybe they gave a contractor five percent of the company and you got diluted five percent so your 20 went down to 19 but you're like hey when did this happen so even knowing your

SPEAKER_00: ownership percentage can be a little bit hard that's why cap table software that's come out since this time has become you know super critical for people because they can run their cap table in real time and see it it used to have to ask your attorneys hey attorneys uh can i get my cap table how much do

SPEAKER_24: i own of my own company and now you just press a button and you know with modern cap table software they should run this scenario for you so fascinating so good so good so interesting so much awesome math

SPEAKER_03: um but we have to call it there for vc sunday school because we have a long and really interesting interview today and i cannot wait for you to listen to this one wait for this one yeah rumors that flow carbon had ceased operation uh after one of its primary investors launched a company with a very similar name are inaccurate all right so i talked to the ceo of flow carbon the company uh that was

SPEAKER_13: founded alongside what by dana gibber who is the ceo alongside carolyn klatt elon stern and adam and rebecca newman got it flow carbon of course came back into the news because there was this big oh they have this new company and it makes it easier to trade carbon credits by putting them on the blockchain and we were already like what come on and then adam newman comes out with this new company flow same name pretty pretty much yeah pretty much similar name and everyone goes oh i guess flow carbon is no more no more but it turns out that's not true flow carbon recently raised 70 million dollars

SPEAKER_12: led by a16z's crypto arm got it not to be confused again with clo who flow who also raised from a16z

SPEAKER_22: adam newman of course the founder of we work who then is doing this new flow which is going to be a lifestyle apartment brand and there's also flow carbon which is blockchain carbon so you were talking to the ladder the carbon blockchain company today exactly exclusively here on this week in climate

SPEAKER_13: startups exclusively on this week in climate startups and oh my god two things happened one i've been a skeptic of carbon credits and offsets and you know i've been a skeptic of putting climate solutions on the blockchain and god help me if i didn't walk away a little bit sold on both you're gonna love it

SPEAKER_33: great let's let's roll the tape let's i want to i want to hear this i'm in let's go all right listen i

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SPEAKER_13: dana gibber is the ceo of flow carbon a company we have been so curious about thanks for coming on

Jason Calacanis: thank you for having me excited to be here uh i have to dispense up front with so you co-founded the company alongside carolyn klatt elan stern is that right yep um and adam and rebecca newman so we're just going to start with that and then move on how did you meet and what is the kind of

SPEAKER_143: level of involvement of those two with the company yeah um so about two years ago so very beginning of

SPEAKER_144: january 2020 um a group of five of us came together so that's when um i met the newmans for the first time they had been um quietly involved in quite extensive conservation efforts from a philanthropic standpoint um they funded a lot of conservation and they had gotten exposure to what's called the voluntary carbon market um through their conservation efforts and essentially the the voluntary carbon market which i'm sure we will go into is this phenomenal means of creating a market incentive for scaling uh projects that have real climate action and in particular um the preservation and restoration of our natural carbon sinks i.e conservation in a lot of ways and so they um got exposure to this market and became um or heard about it and became excited about it because it it really is the way to scale these these kinds of projects these these projects are phenomenal but absolutely not happening at the scale that we need to see them happening and the vcm or the voluntary carbon market is is a market that can really when implemented properly um can really scale these efforts and so they wanted to dive into this market um i got a call so caroline and i previously co-founded a software company together um it was ai-powered chatbot technology we sold it to a private equity fund in 2020 uh and we got a call from somebody at adam's family office to ask if we wanted to do a deep dive into this market given you know relevant background that we both had and did so really became fascinated by this market both in what it could accomplish um and from an impact standpoint um and also a lot of the key challenges that were preventing it from scaling and continue to prevent it from scaling although it's been a very very exciting and frenetic time since then in the voluntary carbon market um and so we we saw a real opportunity to do do good to use technology especially new emerging technology blockchain in particular to address some of the key challenges we saw in the market um and adam's family office provided our seed check uh so they're not he's not operationally involved at all but um you know we're grateful for that investment capital and then i'm not trying to

Jason Calacanis: put you on the spot but of course then there was this announcement that confused all of us i think this is actually how we originally got in touch because now there's the new residential uh company called flow yeah adam announcing got a bunch of funding for and how are we cool with that like i i think it led a lot of people to think that maybe your company flow carbon had gone away and so this is

SPEAKER_148: our chance to be like no no right both of them still are happening so we haven't gone away we're more

SPEAKER_144: active than ever we've done we've done a lot of really exciting uh things uh recently even we we announced uh we make a lot of announcements quite actively um but yeah the name thing is kind of it there's no real connection between the companies it's just kind of a naming uh development that emerged what's funny is there's also a blockchain called flow um and nba top shots which is a kind of famous crypto project is on that blockchain and when adam made that real estate company announcement um i think the that token the flow token that's associated with that blockchain moved up by like five or six percent something like that right so so yeah it's it's a good word i think it works in a lot

Jason Calacanis: of contexts and good word yeah totally but it did create and so i'm really glad that you're here to clear this up in purpose in person because it really did create this confusion about like oh is that what did flow carbon become flow and we're here to say no absolutely not two separate companies yeah 100 its own thing and now okay great now that we've gotten the newmans out of the way um to be clear we unironically love them here at this show true story um but now that we're we've gotten that out of the way please tell us what you are still and actively doing at flow carbon yeah happy sue um so let's talk

SPEAKER_144: about the the market that we are in for a minute which like i said before is the voluntary carbon market so this is a market that essentially um identifies projects that have a measurable carbon reduction or removal effect so think of conservation reforestation afforestation a bunch of tech projects where you're removing carbon from the atmosphere or preventing it from being emitted in the first place now a lot of these projects are not financially viable you need a revenue stream going to projects like that and so what the voluntary carbon market is is basically a global market created by a bunch of global institutions that basically provides two projects something called carbon carbon credits in the exact amount of the carbon there that the project is reducing or removing and those credits are this you know basically unit that are created by these global non-profits um who evaluate the projects look at the measurable carbon impact present them with these credits and they now can sell these credits um into the market uh the market is basically the carbon offset market so the buyers on the buy side are corporations predominantly who have made commitments related to their carbon emissions which really means um quantification and disclosure so you use you know a major accounting for you you do your carbon quantification across your um direct indirect supply chain emissions you quantify it you publish it you undertake reduction measures so you have you many of them are publicly disclosing their reduction plans which are often phased plans we will reduce x percentage of our emissions you know until a certain we hit a certain target a lot of these are called net zero commitments so they want to be net zero by 20 30 40 50 etc yeah and then oftentimes the the last part of this process is um buying carbon offsets so the offsets are where the net comes in exactly yeah you um you yeah you basically pay for carbon reduction or removal that's happening beyond your value chain happening you know in the developing world at a project that is doing this work and what's really really essential to know about this market is as follows about 23 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions globally come from nature it comes from uh basically clear-cutting slashing and burning nature for agriculture for grazing for uh timber lumber etc right we destroy nature at an astounding rate um the famous stat is one football field worth of old growth rainforest is destroyed every six seconds so it's an astounding amount of nature and the biodiversity within it that we are destroying for economic reasons and the only counterbalancing economic model that will prevent this is this market that basically provides a revenue stream for keeping these natural carbon sinks standing and restoring them so this is a market that at its core is super super um imperative important um and has historically had a bunch of issues so there's a lot of criticisms

SPEAKER_167: leveled at this market um rightfully so in fact and yeah i think it would be good to sort of like

Jason Calacanis: pause there and explain a little bit about what those are one of those criticisms has been even just the existence of offsets as a way to get to net zero right that you didn't decarbonize your entire

SPEAKER_05: supply chain or all of your buildings you bought offsets and those so it's criticism one and then criticism two is those offsets themselves may be of sketchy origin or hard to verify which is where you

SPEAKER_144: come in yeah that's actually a really nice way of framing the issues so one is like the very existence it's a philosophical conversation about offsets in general right then if you believe the threshold like that's the threshold question right if you get beyond that and say yes we believe that these these instruments should exist then it's well okay let's look at how how this market is being implemented and all the loopholes and shenanigans that maybe have historically gone on um and in some small way there there are remaining issues so the threshold question is really a philosophical one and you could have a lot of scientists really science is converging around um the idea that we need our natural ecosystems for a whole host of reasons not just for carbon emissions but for um there's major impacts on water systems and food systems and local socioeconomic um uh forces that all center around ecosystems so we must preserve these ecosystems and this is really the only way of doing it so that's you know pay people to preserve them full stock yes i'm not pretending to be to not have a point of view here i very much believe nor should you yeah yes exactly so um and when implemented correctly about 30 percent of the solution to climate change can come from our natural ecosystems um and so in my view and in the view of a lot of very smarter people than me this market is a fundamentally essential market that has a real role to play in our overall um climate impact strategy globally um as a society and it's really just about getting the implementation right so i think let's move to that and so for companies i'll i'll go back for one minute and say today with the amount of oversight on corporations nobody the the era of greenwashing to the extent it existed is really a thing of the past because you have the sec mandating uh emissions related data and climate disclosures for public companies you have a tremendous amount of oversight in the media from watchdog entities from stakeholders

SPEAKER_05: on what companies are doing so you're really consumers even for sure from consumers all out

SPEAKER_184: culture has come for greenwashing totally activist investors i mean we see it everywhere so really

SPEAKER_144: what's happening is is a responsible and very transparent effort to quantify which is very hard the quantification is super hard but there's a lot of new tech innovation software products carbon accounting softwares that are propping up a lot of consultancies advisory firms specializing in this so the quantification is one then you have the reduction um measure so you will not see any corporation really of any size but certainly one that is at all relevant putting out a plan that says we're going to quantify and then offset the entire thing right that would call out culture i mean that's a no-no so they they have a very clear phased um decarbonization strategy but there's always going to be the hard to abate or impossible to abate residual tail emissions and that's where offsets

SPEAKER_167: can and should come into play um and this is all becoming much more standardized um so what first

Jason Calacanis: let's start with what are the parts about the carbon market that are voluntary we hear this phrase voluntary carbon market a lot let's now we can move into sort of breaking down like the parts of the carbon market that need fixing so that it can continue to be a more and more powerful solution

SPEAKER_05: so one is what do people mean when they say voluntary carbon market super super important question

SPEAKER_144: thanks for asking it so there's basically two types of carbon markets a compliance market or a voluntary market a compliance market exists because of regulation so in europe and that's where you're trading allowances so in europe you have the emissions trading scheme where you trade every company is entitled a certain allowance of carbon emissions and then they can trade um to emit more basically and it's a very um very structured and very mature market and we have in the us we have a number of them most notably in california where it's a compliance market here we call cap and trade

SPEAKER_188: there is the phrase people are familiar with yeah exactly exactly um and you have you know trading

SPEAKER_144: desks these are these are units that are traded and it's it's because of regulation so these companies have to the voluntary market is uh it's some some now within the market call this a misnomer because you have so many forces converging on corporations um that aren't in a cap and trade environment so they don't they are not required to do any of this because of global or national regulation it's these esg commitments um that make them quantify decarbonize and then sometimes buy offsets um they're doing it because of pressure from investors from consumers from stakeholders um from peers all kinds of pressures are converging on corporations that are leading them to be responsible with regards to their emissions and part of that is buying offsets but it's not it's not to be compliant with any regulatory or legislative scheme and so that's why it's called the voluntary market um and so when they buy offsets it's entirely voluntary right if that money wasn't spent on offsets it you know it it's voluntary they're doing it as part of a voluntary pledge that they've made um although getting getting less and less

SPEAKER_192: voluntary less and less voluntary exactly whether it's because of sort of social pressure customer

SPEAKER_17: base like on and on and on local regulation micro acquire is a startup acquisition marketplace and it cuts out everybody in the middle this basically means they help startups get acquired quickly and at the best price and do it efficiently if you're a founder looking to sell your company your project your side hustle micro acquire is free and it's private and it involves nobody in the middle and in a down market like we have right now or a little bit of turmoil m&a activity can pick up people might be looking to do what they call in the industry tuck in acquisitions they love your team they love your revenue the potential of your product and you can cash in right now micro acquire has helped hundreds of startups get acquired and facilitated hundreds of millions in closed deal volume they have over 120 000 buyers on the platform and those buyers you're wondering like hey how does this work how do they get on the platform will they pay 390 a year now you're like whoa that's a lot of money not for an acquirer if they're gonna acquire companies 390 is like that's what they spend on lunch like a nice lunch with a bottle of wine there are thousands of vetted startups currently listed for sale on the site and you will stay totally anonymous on the other side of the marketplace again if you're a buyer get in there 390 a year i pay for it you can find really great deals micro acquire once again helps startups find buyers it's really that simple buyers can browse listings for free and the platform is free for sellers sign up for premium right now 390 a year to access all the deal info if you're a buyer try.microacquire.com twist once again t-r-y dot m-i-c-r-o-a-c-q-u-i-r-e.com

SPEAKER_02: slash twist okay so then we have the question of offsets themselves how they're created uh what

Jason Calacanis: who who verifies them what quality they are how how old or new they are right can you run us through kind of the problems that you're trying to solve with respect to offsets specifically and the quality

SPEAKER_184: of offsets totally and i'll try to do this efficiently while highlighting some of the sort

SPEAKER_144: of historical challenges in the market so if we take the example of a conservation project because that's an easy use case right somebody will identify an opportunity to do a what's called a carbon project um it's often in the developing world if it's nature-based right that's where we still have our old growth rainforests and the biodiversity within them so somebody has to put down capital to secure an area of rainforests an interesting stat is um i can't i i can't stand behind it because it was told to me but somebody smart told me that right now in the amazonian uh in the in the amazon right in the brazilian rainforest you can buy a hectare of land for about 200 us dollars the minute you slash and burn it its value goes up to 1200 so but if somebody yeah um it's right that's that's the economic incentives as they exist right now so somebody will identify an area of you know the the amazon and will put down capital to secure it and in so doing they need a revenue stream so what they do is they will um there's there's a the way the market works is they will employ a an auditor basically a vvb a verification body who will review everything about the project both the carbon measurements what is the carbon that is preserved within this um this environment that they just conserved but also what's called additionality which means if i didn't do this project this land was going to be slashed and burned because look at all the surrounding plots look at the historical deforestation rates in this area this this concept of additionality is essential for getting carbon credits issued to you you have to show that the land was really under threat so um they will put together the whole uh all the data involved in showing the carbon impact you know measurements soil samples historical deforestation rates a lot of national and and regional level data about the area that you're in and then we'll submit it to basically a global non-profit there's four main ones that have basically are recognized as issuing uh credible carbon credits one meaning carbon credits that have credibility it's uh you know they have the same credit i'm using it twice um so uh they will submit the evidence to the standard the standard will review the evidence certify the project as being a project that meets the methodology you know has provided all of the requisite evidence and gets issued carbon credits in the exact amount of the metric tons of carbon that the project is either removing from the atmosphere or preventing from being emitted in the first place um often on on a schedule so every year that project gets issued its carbon credits commensurate with that year's impact in in carbon and then they have to sell those into the market so what has happened historically this was a tiny market until recently so this was a 300 million dollar market in 2018 which is basically not a market that's you know that's barely a market it's a two billion dollar market this year just about which is a very very small market as far as markets go so still a very small market which meant um you had very little innovation you know it was the earliest innings of a market and they were going kind of slow so you had the opportunity for all kinds of loopholes mainly in projects overstating the carbon impact that they were having you know i'm not really conserving 100 metric tons of carbon i'm conserving 200 metric tons of carbon and you can fudge the data a little bit and the standards which are non-profits in a tiny market don't have you know maybe that that kind of thing got through so that those are called inflated baselines that happened historically you've had issues with double counting where a project or somebody in the middle a broker would sell carbon credits twice right and again the the standards that create the credits are also the registries that track them and technology has gotten dramatically better and especially technology in a booming market as opposed to a really stagnant slow early one right and so a lot of the innovation is focusing on preventing double counting on transparency and traceability for credits which is where blockchain comes in in a big way on measuring now you have in the last few years um really the last year you have a lot of um remote sensing and iot technology internet of things technology plus lidar drones that measure tree cover a lot of digital technologies that are going to actually um oversee and verify um you know double checking triple checking the measurements at the project level so drones looking at tree cover sat you know geospatial satellite imagery looking at tree cover iot devices and remote sensing that are on the ground in the soil all kinds of things so um a lot of the historical uh you know challenges i would say that have led to a lot of criticism of this market are being dramatically uh addressed as we speak right okay so then as we kind of continue our story arc all

Jason Calacanis: the way to solution there's also this question of pricing like yes who sets the prices and what does it cost let's say you're buying an offset equivalent to a ton yeah how does that pricing get set so that this is a market that really works as a real incentive yeah so this market is really

SPEAKER_144: at an inflection point moment um because you have the demand finally lining up where you have corporations that are making more and more esg commitments which includes often net zero commitments which often include or and will include the buying of offsets so finally you have the capital ready on the demand side to deploy into these kinds of projects and what you need to create is an efficient transparent liquid market for um buying these things and making sure that they're um they're being traced back to the source which is the project that the project has the integrity and the carbon impact that it says it has but also that the market for these things is transparent and there's price transparency in particular so right now the way it works this market is 80 or so over the counter through brokers so if you're a corporate buyer you you know you've you've gone through all the steps and you're finally ready to procure some offsets as part of your overall decarbonization strategy it is an unbelievably opaque um experience and transaction you are basically using consultants who are getting in touch with a bunch of brokers who have relationships with other um intermediaries who are going to projects the pricing is absolutely non-standardized at all now it shouldn't be a hundred percent standardized there's different project types a conservation project um is different than a tech removals project is different than a landfill gas project like there's different project types

SPEAKER_03: right and there's other variables there's not even standardization within the project types nothing nothing and then isn't it the case just to throw a quick wrinkle isn't it the case that some of the brokers are also the verifiers that there's some conflict of interest that occasionally happens in

SPEAKER_144: this industry so sometimes well there are project developers who do their own sales so you're the project developer and instead of transacting with intermediaries you're doing your own sales but you might also be using a broker like we have as flow carbon we're very active in the market as we try to you know innovate in this market and we've we've seen the same credits on the same day being sold by you know different intermediaries at different prices for example um we've and with wildly different spreads

SPEAKER_167: by the way um there's the the value extraction from project developer to buyer um can be as high

SPEAKER_144: as 30 and that's not uncommon so the project developers who are actually doing the great work on the ground and should be able to expand their projects invest in the local communities on the ground they're often in the developing world um you know they are losing a lot of value to this web of really inefficient intermediaries um until you get to a buyer so what flow carbon um is is doing is really two things one is what we're really known for which is advocating that these carbon credits that reside with project developers in their registry accounts but have to get sold to corporate buyers that these um be be made into tokens that basically a token functions as let's call it a warehouse receipt or a depository receipt of these carbon credits that are um very hard to move around and have no transparent or liquid trading environment right now and that once you have basically the warehouse receipt or the depository receipt i sometimes explaining as a dry cleaning receipt for the carbon credit but that can that can be grouped together with other similar dry cleaning receipts or warehouse receipts um uh so that you get liquidity within certain kinds of carbon that can trade at a transparent price um so you get liquidity you get price transparency you get the ability to access a lot of new buyers so you molly me dana we are not going to buy you know 10 carbon credits from a broker to offset our you know the flight that we took or the vacation we just took so retail individuals have been totally um the market has been totally inaccessible to them same for smbs even mid-sized corporates have a really hard time navigating this web of intermediaries there's you know no contract standardization there's a lot of counterparty risk it's just a really messy market whereas a tokenized representation solves all of these issues because a token plugs immediately into blockchain infrastructure that hundreds of millions of people already access so if you can go and buy one carbon credit on coinbase a tokenized version of a carbon credit on coinbase or on an exchange um at the same price as everybody else all of a sudden you start to have real price transparency liquidity a lot more access for um segments of the market that aren't participating at all um and and we think will help scale the market significantly um amazing okay let's break that

Jason Calacanis: down now this is like this is my dream conversation by the way we have such a logical no pun intended flow to it's a good word it's just like it's all coming together okay so in theory a couple things here one i could have my warehouse receipt my dry cleaning receipt for my uh mangrove preservation project beautiful project type yes and then i could combine that with a bunch of other receipts for the exact same type of project because i know that those would have similar uh impact and therefore pricing and then i could be and then that basket of tokens representing multiple mangrove preservation projects could be sold exactly right bundled and sold and then a company of any size or even me molly because i'm gonna fly to europe could buy that on an exchange that's totally that's just consumer

SPEAKER_184: facing retail facing exactly right so small project developers have to sell bilaterally it's very

SPEAKER_144: difficult and challenging for them so this allows different project developers that have the same kind of project i think the example you gave is great blue carbon is in very high demand in the market right now um so you could group together a bunch of blue carbon projects maybe put some geographical constraints on it or issuance year constraints on it you know you every basket or bundle gets gets its own design and this is all part of flow carbon's token architecture um and then they all trade together so instead of um this small project developer needing to you know shop his piece of paper around through a bunch of intermediaries to find some buyer on the other side and pay a lot in legal fees and lose 30 percent instead exactly he's accessing the market directly he or she i should say is accessing the market directly um through a crypto exchange that already has adoption right hundreds of millions of people have access to these exchanges and have wallets where they can custody the asset okay so then is

Jason Calacanis: there a blockchain verification part of this the token is a big part of what you do is there also validation

SPEAKER_184: built in yes so so this is a major movement in the voluntary carbon market as we speak um i just last

SPEAKER_144: week was climate week here in new york city we flow carbon hosted the first ever climate week blockchain summit um and then spoke at the the um aida which is the international emissions trading association had their two-day um annual climate week summit where this was a major topic at all of these things yeah so what what you're what you're talking about is as follows using digital means of verifying these projects as part of the certification process having the cert so basically project developer uses all these tech tools to aggregate the data about what's happening on the ground the ones i mentioned before satellite and drone and lidar and iot and remote sensing all of it um and this has historically been done on pdfs and excel spreadsheets right so this is really new using these devices on the ground having the data from them be submitted as part of or almost the entire application to the standard these standards are vera is the most well-known one the gold standard is um you know the other major one um and uh this data then results in certification right so now the certification process is data driven through um technology as opposed to pdfs and the carbon credit itself could be um issued the way it is now which is as a like a you know line of code that goes into this registry account and women to token backed by that line of code or it could be issued as a token in the first instance that's a big topic in the market right now native tokenization at the standard level and then those can trade and you can trace each of these carbon each of these tokens back to its source carbon credit and then from there the data can go back to the source project so you can see all of the data associated with the

SPEAKER_167: project where is the project um the documentation associated with it etc is that what you were suggesting

Jason Calacanis: yep yep exactly so that you could say we know this project exists we can actually keep tabs on it like adopt a forest um we can verify that for example the credit's still valid the project that you know the rainforest or the mangroves had not been cut down in the interim and nobody noticed right is that what we're talking about in terms of traceability exactly right yeah and it's it's

SPEAKER_144: amazing how much technology can come to bear in this market um to um create a really close connection between the buyer and the source project and the very credit from that source project um now again it's not happen like you know it's not a today thing but incrementally it really can be tomorrow and the next day and the next day this is very a lot of this is real ready to deploy and it's just a matter of um the sort of governing institutions in the market um getting uh getting together and creating the frameworks for doing it in a way that maintains integrity and especially environmental integrity

SPEAKER_52: um so before i ask about adoption i want to ask about um retiring credits because that's a big part

Jason Calacanis: of this conversation too and i would imagine you're not building your business necessarily on the active trading of offsets in an ongoing way right because it seems like there's this it feels like like when google buys an offset they retire that offset so that no one can keep claiming this climate benefit yeah

SPEAKER_144: exactly right so one thing i want to note i think it's important is that flow carbons tokenization protocol which really um means we um can warehouse the underlying carbon credits mint the tokens backed by those carbon credits create the bundles um that allow them to trade together with liquidity and then plug them into an ecosystem of a lot of use cases so we've announced a lot of partnerships with other protocols about what you can do with a tokenized carbon credit like you know we have an ev charging company that's using it in their loyalty rewards program offsetting transactions as part of their rewards we have nft platforms offsetting every drop things like that so all of this architecture we don't really make money on we charge a two percent tokenization fee to essentially cover costs but we plan to this is an open source protocol anyone can use it there are small fees for doing transactions within it to cover the costs of maintaining it but we plan to um build businesses on top of this open protocol so tokenizing carbon credits not a great business um at least when you don't charge any money to do it which we're not um so um because we want project developers to be able to tokenize their carbon credits with you know basically no cost to them and to utilize this infrastructure so that more money goes back to them more projects getting done but that i i bring this up because of your question so um retiring carbon credits is the whole purpose of this market right these units are bought by end buyers they can be traded but ultimately um they are retired which means the token is burned and taken out of commission right it no longer exists and um the underlying carbon credit is retired and that's when the buyer can claim the offset you don't claim an offset you cannot you have no right to claim an offset until you've retired the carbon credit um and so the tokens yeah the tokens immediately trigger an actual retirement of an underlying carbon credit

Jason Calacanis: in yeah okay great so the idea that's this seems good this is very good to clarify because the idea is that we're not creating an active trading market for the same credits to go back and

SPEAKER_05: forth they're bought retired more tokens are created as more offset projects are incentivized yeah i think

SPEAKER_156: that um it's more it's definitely more complicated that when you create right when there's an when

SPEAKER_144: there's a demand when there's when there's a growing market for what is essentially a commodity right there is going to be trading there's already all every most of the major financial institutions and banks were in touch with a lot of them have trading desks all of the oil majors have trading desks there's a lot of trading that happens in this market and as this this becomes a commodity that's in more and more demand there will definitely be active trading that happens um what's good is that there is a shelf there's there is a shelf life on these in that their value really goes down over time so um the market is sort of cohering around a five-year shelf life which was driven by an exchange that created a five-year um futures contract but basically um they they retain their value up to a point and then as they get older they lose their value so they're likely will be trading um in some ways some of that is is pretty healthy for you know growing this as a commodity market um but then they will be retired and must be retired like that and we are very active in finding these use cases um with loyalty rewards programs and nft platforms and all kinds of protocols a bunch of dows that want to use them to offset their historical emissions like we are very active in finding end users of these things but that doesn't mean that there won't be a trading environment in the middle there already is and

Jason Calacanis: there there will be as this market grows okay this is so this is so complicated and i'm glad you're so good at explaining it talk to me about these other businesses that you're going to build on top of this

SPEAKER_144: protocol like how is flow carbon going to make money yeah great um so a couple of ways first so there is some some small fee revenue i don't i want to be really clear about that there's a 2 fee for tokenizing there's a fee for you can take the if you buy the token you can pay a fee and actually collect the carbon credit if you have the ability to custody it so it's a on-chain off-chain um architecture which maintains the the connection between the on-chain and off-chain trading environments that's you know imperative for a healthy a healthy market but what will flow carbon do a few things one we are very getting active and are active and helping finance new projects so we are finding great projects around the world doing really um high quality work whether it's nature-based or not but we we really um we believe in our quite passionate or at least i am about in the nature-based projects um and so like you said there's a lot of um new blue carbon projects main grove restoration

Jason Calacanis: um projects there is we should be clear as ones that are related to water water yeah exactly totally

SPEAKER_267: just just making crystal easy color by numbers yeah exactly no i mean i think i this this phrase has

SPEAKER_03: starting pop started popping up but i've seen a lot of people on twitter being like i don't know what you're talking about so it seems good to yeah super morning blue blue carbon is really in really

SPEAKER_144: high demand because mangroves um i don't want to get the science around here but basically something like sequester more carbon um per uh per hectare than like to by an order of magnitude more than anything

SPEAKER_05: else um so there's i can't remember the exact science either but yes mangroves are the ish when

SPEAKER_272: it comes to sequestration totally scientifically speaking awesome yeah so um and blue carbon is in

Jason Calacanis: really high demand so you're trying to find and finance yeah exactly not just blue carbon projects but

SPEAKER_250: great projects all over the all over the world that um we think have really high integrity um and

SPEAKER_144: are are great projects we are financing projects so that's one we're also um so and that's a big one and we actually did something really cool where we helped finance a forward contract on chain a few weeks ago um through a partner protocol called centrifuge so we think that there are ways to bring blockchain structures and sources of capital in to invest in new projects um that's that's another

SPEAKER_167: opportunity that we're it's a related opportunity that we're marrying um so investing in traditional

Jason Calacanis: ways and then do you get like a fee do you take a portion of the financing like how does that generate

SPEAKER_144: revenue for you yeah any of it's any of the traditional ways you could there could be an origination fee we could be part of the investment pool where we identify the project syndicated on chain allow on-chain investors to come in and we either take a fee or we participate in the investment we would only be putting in investments that we think are good investments and so we you know we participate in the investment so a lot of helping originate and finance new projects is one two is we have a very active corporate sales team so corporates are increasingly need a lot of assistance in navigating this new era of quantifying decarbonizing and possibly buying offsets and um are a lot of them are putting together carbon portfolios but absolutely don't want to subject themselves to reputational harm um so want to do it in a way with the that has the utmost integrity um and you know is basically identifying high quality projects um so we are active in working with a lot of corporations on these efforts and so is that consulting it's um a lot of carbon portfolio management so we help them identify offsets and provide the offsets to them um a lot of them are interested they are blockchain curious yeah um and you know getting their feet wet some are more intrepid than others um and so a bunch of them have innovative uses for tokenized carbon that they're exploring that we're thinking about with them so i think i think the next like 12 to 24 months we'll see uh not only a lot of activity in the carbon market in general but a lot of corporates waiting in more in designing their own bundle for example that sets the standard for their industry um in making tokens available to their end consumers so like a b2b2c model things like that and when you and when you say you'll help them

Jason Calacanis: design that will you i mean are you creating financial products for these companies or so

SPEAKER_218: mostly it's the technology layer right so the tokenization layer um and the carbon procurement

SPEAKER_144: to go into the token um so it's that but certainly we play we play a role in the financing and bringing

SPEAKER_167: in partners whether they're corporates or other investors or financial institutions is definitely

SPEAKER_285: something we do so i would say yeah structuring investment opportunities yeah and then let's talk

Jason Calacanis: about the the kind of the token and blockchain part of it because i will confess that when we first met i was like this is the part i'm skeptical about why is this better you know two questions one why is this better on chain than off chain like what is the singular benefit that could not be accomplished without

SPEAKER_288: the blockchain and tokenization behind this singular that's very hard molly but there are so many

SPEAKER_167: benefits that you can't even list them all yeah well i can but there's like 10 of them so uh so basically i

SPEAKER_144: think probably the most important one is this we i mentioned our climate week blockchain summit that we put on on last tuesday we opened the day with congressman richie torres who actually he's a congressman from new york he's really phenomenal very articulate and has like taken up this idea of tokenizing carbon credits in a big way he wrote a letter to the main standard vera advocating for them to release their framework allowing this and why as he explained at our summit because he said this market is a market that needs to scale by something like 10 15x really really fast this is a market we don't have the luxury of time with this market right i mentioned the astounding rate that we see deforestation happening we are like quickly headed to the disaster zone from a climate standpoint and so this is a market the vcm it only exists to like for climate impact it's a whole market that has that has been created to effectuate climate impact right whether it's nature-based or others and if we don't do it in the time period that we need we might as well not do it at all right and so blockchain immediately allows you to scale a market really quickly blockchain is great for building markets you have hundreds of millions of people and entities that are already connected to exchanges and to wallets where they can custody these things the technology around other use cases can can happen instantly so we in the last year have about i don't know 30 partnerships with other protocols that want to take tokenized carbon and use them in a variety of ways so i would say that the the speed at which you can scale um this market is is probably the the thing that i think makes blockchain the best underlying technology infrastructure for improving the market is it the only one no but i think it's the best one because of that there's a lot of other cars like how hard is it for a project

Jason Calacanis: developer to onboard you know what do they have to do on the back end to make sure that they are participating in something that will create a token that their data is like on the blockchain you know what are the how does this appear to the end users yeah so um on day zero right it's nothing so what on

SPEAKER_144: day zero in flow carbons architecture again the market is like kind of figuring out the frameworks for doing this but um just but yeah right with us on day zero basically a project developer signs a contract with us it's the same contract for everyone which makes us able to receive their carbon credits into our registry account basically our warehouse right you drop the coat off at the dry cleaner we hold it we then mint it and that's it that's all they have to do we then mint the token that

SPEAKER_272: represents those carbon credits and it gets listed on exchanges and they they they just receive payment

Jason Calacanis: basically when the card you said to like deliver the carbon credit in the coat how do they get the carbon how do they like make the coat in the first place they do it the exact same way they would yeah uh-huh yeah as they preserve the mangroves they get the certification from vera and they bring

SPEAKER_152: that and they just sign up on your app yeah yeah yeah on our website yeah thank you have projects

SPEAKER_144: ongoing now the market um forget the blockchain piece given the boom in the market meaning all the corporates that have made these net zero commitments um it has galvanized a lot of great new projects to get started um again there's a financing bottleneck that is you know has been a big challenge in scaling the market also because until you get your credits it could be two three years and there's a bunch of challenges but nonetheless in the aggregate there's a bunch

SPEAKER_52: of new projects that are coming up and in the traditional way i'm assuming you're going to mint financing tokens at some point right so that i can buy a token that will help to finance a project

SPEAKER_184: we so that was what we like the the the pilot that i mentioned or the project that i mentioned

SPEAKER_144: that we concluded a few weeks ago did something like that so it took a forward contract and um basically allowed accredited investors on a fully compliance platform to um basically buy um parts of the junior or senior um this was this was a collateral instrument so it was it was more of a debt offering but yeah there's a lot of financing that you can do on chain whether it's an equity investment using these carbon credits or forward contracts on you know credit projects that haven't reached issuance yet you can use them as collateral and allow the project developer to borrow against them at favorable rates so that they have a little some cash earlier on that was the that was what animated this particular pilot and it was very successful sold out um you know very quickly and we see expanding that in a real way so there's ways to leverage blockchain to finance projects earlier so that you see more and more projects happening but that's the sort of animation and scale and activity that this market needs all with transparency so i don't want to downplay the challenges in this market this market rests 100 on integrity if people don't think that this market has integrity meaning that the climate impact is real and there is no market and so the number one most important thing for anyone in this market is to maintain integrity which itself rests on transparency um making information available you know doing a lot of oversight using all the tech tools available to us to oversee projects make sure that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing make sure that risks that are like force majeure risks so like fires etc are being mitigated so there's new insurance

SPEAKER_167: products that are coming up the pike the standards always like reserve a bunch of credits as like an insurance pool it's called a buffer pool there's integrity is absolutely like without fail the

SPEAKER_144: number one most important thing in this market but um i think that there's a lot happening to address the integrity related challenges um and blockchain helps with a lot of it and then finally um what

SPEAKER_121: super energy efficient chain are you using timothy's tokens great question so but we're in a post merge

SPEAKER_181: world which is a great world to live in exactly now you have two options right so lana are you i love

SPEAKER_144: this world now we're launching on a blockchain called cello so cello is a it's a blockchain that's it's a layer one that's been carbon negative since its inception which means it's always been on a proof of state consensus mechanism it has very um very low uh emissions and has been offsetting whatever emissions it has more than its actual emissions so that makes you carbon negative um and they actually bought 10 million dollars worth of our token so 10 million dollars worth of tokenized carbon offsets essentially um and they're phenomenal because they have a whole ecosystem of what's called the refi movement refi project so there's basically means um blockchain companies focused on climate and refi stands for regenerative finance but in my mind what what this group of companies has in common um is an emphasis on climate and cello has done a lot to support these companies so it has what's called the climate collective it's a bunch of companies on this blockchain all focused on using blockchain to effectuate um positive climate solutions fascinating i have no more objections i can't believe

Jason Calacanis: this i'm so happy to hear it no where um where are you now like where can people find you what's the

SPEAKER_184: sort of status of your of your projects yeah we get in touch awesome uh our website flowcarbon.com um

SPEAKER_144: anybody can email me at any time dana flowcarbon.com we're on twitter where we announce all of our uh everything we have going on and we're doing a lot we're you know very actively involved in all of these various policy making conversations in the voluntary carbon market at the standards in particularly in particular around tokenization but we're also financing projects um both on blockchain and off and getting ready really helping create um or helping the market identify the the most secure and um effective tokenization architecture which you know we think is what we've built amazing

SPEAKER_121: dana gibber ceo and co-founder of flow carbon thank you so much for the time today i think this is

SPEAKER_05: really going to go a long way toward demystifying big chunks of this i hope so it's a big one the

SPEAKER_144: voluntary carbon market is is a great market and it's all about proper implementation integrity um but when those things are are there this can be major um it can help us go a major uh step of the way towards the climate impact that we need to see love it love it thank you thanks for having me all right

David Friedberg: thanks for listening everyone stay tuned for next week we'll be back with another crypto roundtable with sunny and vinnie uh and another episode of the next unicorns tons of stuff going on next week huh

SPEAKER_13: what do you got for oh yeah next unicorns i have been if you'll pardon the language kind of ballin in the

SPEAKER_03: interview department because i got to interview the ceo of liquid death oh yes which seems to be on its way of course this is the awesome canned water company that raised 70 million dollars at a 700 million dollar valuation this is a great interview this guy is right on brand for liquid death you're

SPEAKER_31: gonna love him oh it's gonna be a great great week we'll see you tomorrow monday when i'm sure

SPEAKER_107: the deluge of news will continue until then umbrellas out kids bye