S6 | Episode 9 | Tommy Ricketts of BeZero Carbon: Raising A $50 Million Series B Round In Silicon Valley

 Hello, and welcome to the Startup Diaries, brought to you by Burns Sheehan, a leading technology recruitment business in the UK. In today's episode, we have Tommy Ricketts, CEO and co founder of B0 Carbon. In this episode, Tommy talks us through what exactly a carbon credit is and what role it plays within net zero transition.

He talks us through how they rate carbon credits at B0 and why it's so important. He jumps into how technology plays a key role within the business of B zero carbon and he finally he talks us through the 50 million pound series B fundraise that he did It actually went out into the us to do this and journey through silicon valley So he talks us through that process.

Welcome tommy. Thanks for joining us Thanks for having me. Do you want to start by telling us about yourself? And the story of b zero Sure, so i'm tommy I'm originally from new zealand grew up in london And started my career in politics Then went to work in sell side research where I met my fellow co founder and we both did all the Brexit coverage together.

I was doing UK equities. He was doing, guilts, and that, you know, forged a friendship, which obviously has come to come to pass for a new career. But then I moved to New York and I was looking a lot at the rise of ESG in, in capital markets. And as, as I mentioned, I actually started my work in the green party in the European parliament.

So I'd always kind of been thinking about this idea of the green economy and Try to understand how things worked but 20, 20, 2019, 2020, it became clear that as generational shift in money. So the boomers no longer had the wallet. Actually the, the gen the millennials did, millennials have very different investment habits, increasingly looking at ESG behavior, climate risk in terms of sort of physical impacts was becoming increasingly obvious.

I think nine out of 10 displacement events globally are climate related. That year you saw some of the biggest listed companies actually, you know, having huge issues because of the wildfires. And so this idea that climate was this other thing, you know, was, was sort of, you know, was becoming more day to day.

And I started doing some work in the themes of the 2020s, and it just became clear that there just really wasn't actually any industry for this climate transition. There was some early infrastructure, you know, solar and renewables, but for all the sort of, you know, more, you know, more sort of down to earth traditional transition type work, which you've seen the big rise of footprinting companies is an easy example.

It didn't really seem to be very much. And then, you know, so what I'm saying is massive demand case, very little supply. And I was kind of looking at what to do next in my career. And it became clear that we should do something in the climate transition. And you know, the, the real story is I was actually at a rugby game with a musician and he said, how do I decarbonize my global tours?

And three pints down, I started explaining to him how carbon credits work. And then for some reason, that was the. The light bulb and I called up my now business partner from Japan and said I've got it I've got it something to do with this that I did a ramble on him Spent six months campaigning for him to quit his job with me and then we started the business you wouldn't be surprised how many times we have a conversation where someone starts having a conversation in a pub and it generates a Business, so it's good to hear that Pubs still play a big part in founders ship Do you want to explain to us then?

What a carbon cred? Credit is and what role it plays in net zero transition. So the carbon credit is an instrument that's supposed to deliver a ton of avoided or removed carbon. So think of it like a, you know, a liter of milk and in that milk is supposed to be this thing called CO2. And the reason it's useful is that organizations, individuals, countries pollute, consume you know, CO2 is always emitted from moving and making things.

And. transition and hit the Paris you know, Paris targets, you need to decarbonize. So that's, you know, reducing your emissions in general and substituting activities that have low intensity. But there's an enormous residual, which even in 2050 is supposed to be 10 gigatons or a fifth of the total emissions that we, that we generate today.

And That needs to be dealt with by increasing the carrying capacity of the planet and active processes that Who point to whose purpose of rhythm vetra is to remove carbon? And so, you know if these instruments are effective I carbon credits are effective people can use them to kind of offset or match the liability that they are creating by by polluting and Therefore, you know, how do you look at the, you know, the utility of that?

And if they're effective, they also accelerate the transition. So you need to build an industry around this. Another thing to it, which is a bit more, a bit more financial macro is, you need to find a home for all this money that sits in capital markets, which currently is geared towards extraction and depletion of resources.

So as you find a home for it, which is in the restoration and preservation of resources and you create a value shift, then you're also not trying to kind of create war with lots of industries, you're just trying to repurpose industries. So there's the kind of dual mandate, I think, about carbon credits.

How would you then go about rating carbon credits and why is that important? So traditionally a carbon credit is accredited. So a body will say, here's a methodology. And if you pass the methodology as verified by an independent assessment, we will let you issue credits. Now, that's great. That's, that's quite robust.

And they have to do lots of disclosure for that. But in that world, quality is binary. Either is or is not a credit. And the problem is, is it's very, very difficult to prove this point. You can't deliver carbon. You can't observe it. And most of the analysis is what's called counterfactual. So it's scenario based.

Would this have happened? Would it not have happened? Then you're crediting against that. So the rating is more similar to how you would think about financial markets in the other accounting process. And then you have a kind of an assessment and analysis process. And I'll, you know, our view is if you can open that kind of paradigm up, so it's called distributional analysis to say, where in the, you know, zero to one, do you think it is, you both build more confidence in the claim, and you start to use sort of incentivize more investment and sort of, you know, more, more, more use of these credits, because you're sort of humbly saying, you know, your confidence intervals.

Moderate or strong you're not definitively saying this thing is the perfect delivery and actually if you link that to the current sort of Greenwashing, you know kind of media environment one of the issues with The binary quality approach is it either is or is not perfect So anything that's chosen in perfection by definition is therefore that instrument is imperfect But in this outcome is more like you embrace that there's variety you embrace that there's changes and you let what you're doing The price mechanism do a lot of that work for you.

And so that's what, why ratings specifically, we think, you know, it comes back to this point about scaling the market. If you, if you can show and build trust and confidence in the climate claims of these instruments, then more money will go to better projects, better projects will get, you know, we'll create, you know, more impact and then you will accelerate the whole process.

Great. Obviously, we're a technology focused podcast largely. So what role does technology play within the business itself? So a huge role. So we obviously sell our service as a software enterprise platform. So from the front end, it's visualizing the data is, you know, understanding the analytics that go into it and making that a kind of digital interaction from the back end.

actually probably a lot of resources right now, but the majority go into the internal tools and analytical technologies that we use. So there's a whole geospatial team, which has a whole data science and machine learning department. So they're building algorithms to forecast different types of ecosystems and different types of levels, canopy high, you know, forest change, biomass, dynamic baselines, these sort of things.

You also have the whole kind of code base, which is about understanding the data, representing it back to our analysts so they can use it more quickly and building the whole efficiency cycle of actually how do you rate a project quicker and, you know, and better. Yeah. And, and then, you know, ultimately we're also doing stuff like API integrations and trying to kind of sell our information to other providers.

So those are the main ways that the technology interacts. So what size is your tech team at the moment then for you? Across data product and technology, you're talking about 35 people. Fair, sizable then. Well, awesome. Well, one of the things that I'd love to kind of dig into as well is that I know you've raised Series B to 50 million, which is obviously a rather nice sum.

I'd love to dig into what the process was like and where you see the business going after this investment's dropped in. Yeah, so fundraising was something that coming from a sell side background where our job was to advise or rather get beaten up by hedge funds and pension funds about our view of the world.

We were, Seb and I, both reticent of and also reticent of the reluctant to kind of engage in the VC. journey effectively. So we spent a lot of time bootstrapping the company with a footprinting consultancy while we did R& D just to figure out what we wanted to do. And then from summer 21 to summer 22, we did three investment rounds and raised 74 million and went completely back on that on that kind of view.

And I think what, what helped, you know, they were kind of, for me, somewhat blurred into one, but what helped was Discipline of what we're trying to achieve and it really forces you to say, okay, I am this I'm not I'm not this Teaches you what investors are interested in theme. I think there's another question later on, but it's theme team and timing You know at this point, there's no real valuation assessments going on It's really just you know, how attractive are you to this thing?

And then you know the series B was fascinating because we just launched we had really good early traction Got some great partnerships out there got about 15 or 20, you know high profile clients. I looked at the funding environment I looked at the you know, the, the general global economy, you know, Ukraine was kicking off and we went to the U.

S. to kind of see if we could find a U. S. investor and we're going around the both the West East and West Coast and, you know, Bloomberg almost comically had sort of arrows pointing down and things were really started to move and things were blowing up in, in, in you know, in Ukraine and we were like, well, if we want to run as hard as we want to, we need to try to, to get along a large round and, and then it was just a Trying to find the right investor fit and I think interestingly, and this is something that old times in finance always used to say, this is really the first.

pullback you've had in financial assets since the financial crisis. So a lot of people don't really know what to do in that, including many people in the VC community. So it's potentially not surprising that the people that did invest in us ended up being of the older generation who had seen multiple cycles and were actually leaning in to the current the current pullback and actually deploying capital just when everyone was pulling away.

I think so potentially interestingly that that kind of shift from Lenny Ortega. It's a boomer to millennial from the investment mandate had changed, but maybe some of the, you know, the wise hours were still around to hopefully back the companies and, you know, in a, in a rather fraught environment. I saw a piece in a, on a climate tech VC article talking about series B for overvalued semi revenue.

Climate tech companies was basically the called the valley of death. And so that's basically what, what that funding environment was like last year. Why did you go for like the U. S. investment? Was there a reason behind that? Yeah, we had a really good European and U. K. base from our, from our C and A round.

And you know, the future of any financial service is always dollar, you know, is always the U. S., but also I think we just wanted to get some, you know, we want, we are hiring and adding staff in the U. S. And we wanted someone with. You know, I had exposure and experience in that market, I think. And so it was, you know, it was, it was a pretty, actually it was a bit of a toss up between Singapore and the U.

S. So we had, we went to various ICs and I think we went to something like five ICs in that period and some were based in Singapore and some were based in the U. S. And we were fine with either, but it was about going beyond Europe, basically. Yeah. Interesting. One of the things you referenced in there was kind of finding the right fit with the investor.

What were you kind of, what does that mean to someone? You know, what are you looking at? What do you, what do you want from an investor? You know, do you want them to be instructive or didactic? Do you want them to be someone to talk to when you need them or someone that's going to force you to do things that you didn't want to do?

You know, it's, I think it's down to the personality of the founder or the founder group. From our perspective, it was someone that was committed. That saw the bull case of the theme that the voluntary carbon market need needed to be a an essential part of the net zero transition. And he wanted to so interesting, interesting piece, apparently one of the biggest pieces of DD that they did on seven, I, I'm 35 and said to 31 was our age, which I didn't, which I thought was very interesting.

I don't think even that they know that I know this, but so, you know, I, I, I, I, I Yeah. I mean, just wanted to find the right fit. Basically, someone that was going to be supportive was going to push us. And I think this phase of our growth is about professionalizing all facets of the business, because the next time we raise, they're not going to be asking about how good is your team, they're going to be asking for 20 data points.

And we've got to be able to build those in the right system with the right lens. And you want to have this, the guy we ended up bringing in was one of the heads of all bird pink to us. He's I think he'd been done billions of trades, billions of investment over his lifetime. And he's a really like, Great wise out was the other ones a bit more impact and sort of younger.

And so it's a nice balance across the board as well. Did you think that your background as your reference before helped you with that process? Are you more prepared for it? I don't think I wasn't emotionally prepared for it. Right. Okay. I, you know, it's, it's a real emotional rollercoaster fundraising.

In terms of being able to pitch with conviction, for sure. I mean, I did thousands of meetings in politics and in finance, where you walk into a room and the person is, you basically got to convince this person of a story. So yes, in that instance, for sure, I was definitely I was definitely well prepared.

But rejection is never easy. Yeah. And, you know, and people are erratic. And I think that the interesting thing from my perspective was, there's a real. personality cult and brand cult in the VC community. And, you know, there's a real it children of either startups and personalities in those worlds. And ultimately, you know, what do you do with that?

Like, do you want to be one of them or do you take your own journey and not just find the right people? I think, you know, you've got to look beyond. Cool money and just find the people that you want to work with and ultimately, you know we raised a lot bigger round than we were we could have done and You know, you got to have the board that would basically take, you know That's obviously dilutive to the, to the investor, the cap table, who also think that, you know, they want, they see this as a 10 year project, you know, you don't want people who are just going to look to exit in two years and, you know, and force you into making as much money as possible as quickly as you can.

So I don't know, you know, those, those things, but it's definitely interesting with, you know, do you go for the cool brand or do you go for the people who you hope is the same thing, but the people who you think is going to most help you. And that's often from my experience of talking to other founders, what they're grappling with.

Interesting. Interesting. Do you, do you mind just kind of sharing the vision of the business as well? Sorry, I'm peppering you with left field questions here, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. I mean, right now we're focused on carbon. I think in a, in a world where I sound like a movie trailer, but in a world where net zero is, is, is, you know, it's somewhat achieved and we revalue and reprice the environment and to be seen as something that.

It needs to be restored and invested in you need a huge environmental markets, basically a segment to financial markets. And this is, in my view, the big bang decade of inventing the system and processes that will allow that to happen, whether it's carbon, biodiversity, pollination, water systems or whatever.

And that's really exciting. So the kind of the meta vision is to build markets and environmental assets. Starting with, with carbon partly because, and this is potentially a sort of philosophical point. If we don't see, you know, don't embrace the price mechanism for nature and charge people the externalities of the actions that they're doing, I don't really see a scalable way of solving this issue in the time that we have.

Yeah. You know, yes, there needs to be regulation. Yes, there needs to be behavioral change, but effectively the quickest way to do that is to charge everyone the true cost of the actions they're taking and let the system itself innovate out of that. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I really appreciate that. One of the things that we always asked when we're coming to the end of the, each podcast is there's two questions.

The first one I'd love to throw your way is what's been the biggest challenge for your career then to date? At the company. I think the biggest challenge is no longer. Being in charge of the way you work, being responsible for so many people being having to take account of so many things that are going on and being seen completely separately. You know, you're, you're a bit more, obviously you're seen as a worker normally, but you know, you're seen by your peers, but how you are seen, how you're perceived and how you understood.

becomes so much more different when you're trying to lead. So leadership is probably the biggest challenge. I think adapting to the challenges of that personally and trying to be, you know, trying to balance the instinct to have very high standards with the reality of letting people learn. I think those would be, those would be the things that are, you know, in a very fast moving business, that's a real struggle and creating a culture around that.

Is there anything that's helped you in particular on that journey at all? Yeah. I mean, obviously making mistakes. But we have a really great president that works for us called money. Who is a real, like atypical to have a business like this, you know, he's a man in his early fifties built the ratings industry in India.

I was very senior at S& P and Moody's and as a real kind of sort of, you know, both Oracle strategically, but you know, kind of managerial coach, you know, sort of described by my chairman as like a full time board member sitting inside the company. And I think, you know, that's the kind of, that presence would have been, you know, Very difficult to replicate without that, you know, I think that's been, that's been instrumental to well beyond my personal development, but to the business in general in this past year.

Yeah. And then finally, then what one piece of advice would you give to someone who's looking to start their own business? Really take the time to understand the three T's, you know, timing, theme, and team. Have a great idea and it's too early, doesn't matter how good you are, you know, likewise, if you've got a great idea, but you're not prepared to dilute yourself and bring in the right people to execute it, you can never, you know, the annoying analogy, which is too true, but very annoying, which is you can't scale time.

You know, your time is not, you know, you do need to basically dilute yourself, whether it's financially or in terms of ownership. So I think those are the thing, you know, have high conviction, and then, you know, Yeah. I mean, just, but like, you know, really think of that. Is this what, and also are you good at it?

I think that would probably be one thing. We've definitely pivoted to areas which as we've emerged, as the opportunity sets have emerged, we knew we were able to contribute to wasn't necessarily the that we thought was thankfully in our market. It was the thing that was also thought was the biggest idea, but the biggest idea and what you're good at and not necessarily the same thing.

And so I think there's always something in life, which is sometimes you're good at things. Sometimes you're, you like things and you've got to find the thing that's somewhere, the sweet spot between the two and never more applicable than in your own business. Awesome. No, awesome. Thanks, Tommy. We appreciate it.

Yeah, hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for joining us. Thanks me.

  Hello, and welcome to The Start-Up Diaries, brought to you by Burns Sheehan, a leading technology recruitment business in the UK.

In today's episode, we have Tommy Ricketts, CEO and Co-Founder of BeZero Carbon. In this episode, Tommy talks us through what exactly a carbon credit is and what role it plays within net zero transition.

He talks us through how they rate carbon credits at BeZero and why it's so important. He jumps into how technology plays a key role within the business of BZero Carbon and the 50 million pound series B fundraise that he did. It actually went out into the US to do this and journey through silicon valley So he talks us through that process.

 Welcome tommy. Thanks for joining us Thanks for having me. Do you want to start by telling us about yourself? And the story of b zero? 

Sure, so I’m tommy  I'm originally from New Zealand grew up in London and started my career in politics Then went to work in sell side research where I met my fellow co-founder and we both did all the Brexit coverage together.

I was doing UK equities. He was doing, guilts, and that, you know, forged a friendship, which obviously has come to come to pass for a new career. But then I moved to New York and I was looking a lot at the rise of ESG in, in capital markets. And as, as I mentioned, I actually started my work in the green party in the European parliament.

So I'd always kind of been thinking about this idea of the green economy and Try to understand how things worked but 20, 20, 2019, 2020, it became clear that as generational shift in money. So the boomers no longer had the wallet. Actually the, the gen the millennials did, millennials have very different investment habits, increasingly looking at ESG behaviour, climate risk in terms of sort of physical impacts was becoming increasingly obvious.

I think nine out of 10 displacement events globally are climate related. That year you saw some of the biggest listed companies actually, you know, having huge issues because of the wildfires. And so this idea that climate was this other thing, you know, was, was sort of, you know, was becoming more day to day.

And I started doing some work in the themes of the 2020s, and it just became clear that there just really wasn't actually any industry for this climate transition. There was some early infrastructure, you know, solar and renewables,  but for all the sort of, you know, more, you know, more sort of down to earth traditional transition type work, which you've seen the big rise of foot printing companies is an easy example.

It didn't really seem to be very much. And then, you know, so what I'm saying is massive demand case, very little supply. And I was kind of looking at what to do next in my career. And it became clear that  we should do something in the climate transition. And you know, the, the real story is I was actually at a rugby game with a musician and he said, how do I decarbonize my global tours?

And three pints down, I started explaining to him how carbon credits work. And then for some reason, that was the. The light bulb and I called up my now business partner from Japan and said I've got it I've got it something to do with this that I did a ramble on him Spent six months campaigning for him to quit his job with me and then we started the business you wouldn't be surprised how many times we have a conversation where someone starts having a conversation in a pub and it generates a Business, so it's good to hear that Pubs still play a big part in founders ship  Do you want to explain to us then?

What a carbon cred? Credit is and what role it plays in net zero transition. So the carbon credit is an instrument that's supposed to deliver a ton of avoided or removed carbon. So think of it like a, you know, a liter of milk and in that milk is supposed to be this thing called CO2. And the reason it's useful is that organizations, individuals, countries pollute, consume you know, CO2 is always emitted from moving and making things.

And.  transition and hit the Paris you know, Paris targets,  you need to decarbonize. So that's, you know, reducing your emissions in general and substituting activities that have low intensity. But there's an enormous residual, which even in 2050 is supposed to be 10 gigatons or a fifth of the total emissions that we, that we generate today.

And That needs to be dealt with by increasing the carrying capacity of the planet and active processes who point to whose purpose of rhythm Vetra is to remove carbon? And so, you know if these instruments are effective I carbon credits are effective people can use them to kind of offset or match the liability that they are creating by polluting and  therefore, you know, how do you look at the, you know, the utility of that?

And if they're effective, they also accelerate the transition. So you need to build an industry around this. Another thing to it, which is a bit more, a bit more financial macro is, you need to find a home for all this money that sits in capital markets, which currently is geared towards extraction and depletion of resources.

So as you find a home for it, which is in the restoration and preservation of resources and you create a value shift, then you're also not trying to kind of create war with lots of industries, you're just trying to repurpose industries. So there's the kind of dual mandate, I think, about carbon credits.

How would you then go about rating carbon credits and why is that important? So traditionally a carbon credit is accredited. So a body will say, here's a methodology. And if you pass the methodology as verified by an independent assessment, we will let you issue credits. Now, that's great. That's, that's quite robust.

And they have to do lots of disclosure for that. But in that world, quality is binary. Either is or is not a credit. And the problem is, is it's very, very difficult to prove this point. You can't deliver carbon. You can't observe it. And most of the analysis is what's called counterfactual. So it's scenario based.

Would this have happened? Would it not have happened? Then you're crediting against that.  So the rating is  more similar to how you would think about financial markets in the other accounting process. And then you have a kind of an assessment and analysis process. And I'll, you know, our view is if you can open that kind of paradigm up, so it's called distributional analysis to say, where in the, you know, zero to one, do you think it is, you both build more confidence in the claim, and you start to use sort of incentivize more investment and sort of, you know, more, more, more use of these credits, because you're sort of humbly saying, you know, your confidence intervals.

Moderate or strong you're not definitively saying this thing is the perfect delivery and actually if you link that to the current sort of Greenwashing, you know kind of media environment one of the issues with The binary quality approach is it either is or is not perfect So anything that's chosen in perfection by definition is therefore that instrument is imperfect But in this outcome is more like you embrace that there's variety you embrace that there's changes and you let what you're doing The price mechanism do a lot of that work for you.

And so that's what, why ratings specifically, we think, you know, it comes back to this point about scaling the market. If you, if you can show and build trust and confidence in the climate claims of these instruments, then more money will go to better projects, better projects will get, you know, we'll create, you know, more impact and then you will accelerate the whole process.

Great. Obviously, we're a technology focused podcast largely. So what role does technology play within the business itself?  So a huge role. So we obviously sell our service as a software enterprise platform. So from the front end, it's visualizing the data is, you know, understanding the analytics that go into it and making that a kind of digital interaction  from the back end.

actually probably a lot of resources right now, but the majority go into the internal tools and  analytical technologies that we use. So there's a whole geospatial team, which has a whole data science and machine learning department. So they're building algorithms to forecast different types of ecosystems and different types of levels, canopy high, you know,  forest change, biomass, dynamic baselines, these sort of things.

You also have the whole kind of code base, which is about understanding the data, representing it back to our analysts so they can use it more quickly and building the whole efficiency cycle of actually how do you rate a project quicker and, you know, and better. Yeah. And, and then, you know, ultimately we're also doing stuff like API integrations and trying to kind of sell our information to other providers.

So those are the main ways that the technology interacts. So what size is your tech team at the moment then for you? Across data product and technology, you're talking about 35 people. Fair, sizable then. Well, awesome. Well, one of the things that I'd love to kind of dig into as well is that I know you've raised Series B to 50 million, which is obviously a rather nice sum.

I'd love to dig into what the process was like and where you see the business going after this investment's dropped in.  Yeah, so fundraising was something that coming from a sell side background where our job was to advise or rather get beaten up by hedge funds and pension funds about our view of the world.

We were, Seb and I, both reticent of and also reticent of the reluctant to kind of engage in the VC. journey effectively. So we spent a lot of time bootstrapping the company with a footprinting consultancy while we did R& D just to figure out what we wanted to do.  And then from summer 21 to summer 22, we did three investment rounds and raised 74 million and went completely back on that on that kind of view.

And I think what, what helped,  you know, they were kind of, for me, somewhat blurred into one, but what helped was  Discipline of what we're trying to achieve and it really forces you to say, okay, I am this I'm not I'm not this Teaches you what investors are interested in theme. I think there's another question later on, but it's theme team and timing You know at this point, there's no real valuation assessments going on It's really just you know, how attractive are you to this thing?

And then you know the series B was fascinating because we just launched we had really good early traction Got some great partnerships out there got about 15 or 20, you know high profile clients. I looked at the funding environment I looked at the you know, the, the general global economy, you know, Ukraine was kicking off and we went to the U.

1. to kind of see if we could find a U. S. investor and we're going around the both the West East and West Coast and, you know, Bloomberg almost comically had sort of arrows pointing down and things were really started to move and things were blowing up in, in, in you know, in Ukraine and we were like, well, if we want to run as hard as we want to, we need to try to, to get along a large round and, and then it was just a Trying to find the right investor fit and I think interestingly, and this is something that old times in finance always used to say, this is really the first.

pullback you've had in financial assets since the financial crisis. So a lot of people don't really know what to do in that, including many people in the VC community. So it's potentially not surprising that the people that did invest in us ended up being of the older generation who had seen multiple cycles and were actually leaning in to the current the current pullback and actually deploying capital just when everyone was pulling away.

I think so potentially interestingly that that kind of shift from Lenny Ortega.  It's a boomer to millennial from the investment mandate had changed, but maybe some of the, you know, the wise hours were still around to hopefully back the companies and, you know, in a, in a rather fraught environment.  I saw a piece in a, on a climate tech VC article talking about series B for overvalued  semi revenue.

Climate tech companies was basically the called the valley of death. And so that's basically what, what that funding environment was like last year. Why did you go for like the U. S. investment? Was there a reason behind that? Yeah, we had a really good European and U. K. base from our, from our C and A round.

And you know, the future of any financial service is always dollar, you know, is always the U. S., but also I think we just wanted to get some, you know, we want, we are hiring and adding staff in the U. S. And we wanted someone with. You know, I had exposure and experience in that market, I think. And so it was, you know, it was, it was a pretty,  actually it was a bit of a toss up between Singapore and the U.

1. So we had, we went to various ICs and I think we went to something like five ICs in that period and some were based in Singapore and some were based in the U. S. And we were fine with either, but it was about going beyond Europe, basically. Yeah. Interesting. One of the things you referenced in there was kind of finding the right fit with the investor.

What were you kind of, what does that mean to someone? You know, what are you looking at? What do you, what do you want from an investor? You know, do you want them to be instructive or didactic? Do you want them to be someone to talk to when you need them or someone that's going to force you to do things that you didn't want to do?

You know, it's, I think it's down to the personality of the founder or the founder group. From our perspective, it was someone that was committed.  That saw the bull case of the theme that the voluntary carbon market need needed to be a an essential part of the net zero transition. And he wanted to so interesting, interesting piece, apparently one of the biggest pieces of DD that they did on seven, I, I'm 35 and said to 31 was our age,  which I didn't, which I thought was very interesting.

I don't think even that they know that I know this, but so, you know, I, I, I, I, I Yeah. I mean, just wanted to find the right fit. Basically, someone that was going to be supportive was going to push us. And I think this phase of our growth is about professionalizing all facets of the business, because the next time we raise, they're not going to be asking about how good is your team, they're going to be asking for 20 data points.

And we've got to be able to build those in the right system with the right lens. And you want to have this, the guy we ended up bringing in was one of the heads of all bird pink to us. He's I think he'd been done billions of trades, billions of investment over his lifetime. And he's a really like,  Great wise out was the other ones a bit more impact and sort of younger.

And so it's a nice balance across the board as well. Did you think that your background as your reference before helped you with that process? Are you more prepared for it?  I don't think  I wasn't emotionally prepared for it. Right. Okay. I, you know, it's, it's a real emotional rollercoaster fundraising.

In terms of being able to pitch with conviction, for sure.  I mean, I did thousands of meetings in politics and in finance, where you walk into a room and the person is, you basically got to convince this person of a story. So yes, in that instance, for sure, I was definitely I was definitely well prepared.

But rejection is never easy. Yeah. And, you know, and  people are erratic. And I think that the interesting thing from my perspective was, there's a real. personality cult and brand cult in the VC community. And,  you know, there's a real it children of either startups and personalities in those worlds. And ultimately, you know,  what do you do with that?

Like, do you want to be one of them or do you take your own journey and not just find the right people? I think, you know, you've got to look beyond.  Cool money and just find the people that you want to work with and ultimately, you know we raised a lot bigger round than we were we could have done and You know, you got to have the board that would basically take, you know That's obviously dilutive to the, to the investor, the cap table, who also think that, you know, they want, they see this as a 10 year project, you know, you don't want people who are just going to look to exit in two years and, you know, and force you into making as much money as possible as quickly as you can.

So I don't know, you know, those, those things, but it's definitely interesting with, you know, do you go for the cool brand or do you go for the people who you hope is the same thing, but the people who you think is going to most help you. And that's often from my experience of talking to other founders, what they're grappling with.

Interesting. Interesting. Do you, do you mind just kind of sharing the vision of the business as well? Sorry, I'm peppering you with left field questions here, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. I mean,  right now we're focused on carbon. I think  in a, in a world where I sound like a movie trailer, but in a world where net zero is, is, is, you know, it's somewhat achieved and we revalue and reprice the environment and to be seen as something that.

It needs to be restored and invested in you need a huge environmental markets, basically a segment to financial markets. And this is, in my view, the big bang decade of inventing the system and processes that will allow that to happen, whether it's carbon, biodiversity, pollination, water systems or whatever.

And that's really exciting. So the kind of the meta vision is to build markets and environmental assets.  Starting with, with carbon partly because, and this is potentially a sort of philosophical point. If we don't see, you know, don't embrace the price mechanism for nature and charge people the externalities of the actions that they're doing, I don't really see a scalable way of solving this issue in the time that we have.

Yeah. You know, yes, there needs to be regulation. Yes, there needs to be behavioural change, but effectively the quickest way to do that is to charge everyone the true cost of the actions they're taking and let the system itself innovate out of that. Yeah.  Interesting. Well, I really appreciate that. One of the things that we always asked when we're coming to the end of the, each podcast is there's two questions.

The first one I'd love to throw your way is what's been the biggest challenge for your career then to date?  At the company. I think the biggest challenge is no longer.  Being in charge of the way you work, being responsible for so many people  being  having to  take account of so many things that are going on and being seen completely separately. You know, you're, you're a bit more, obviously you're seen as a worker normally, but you know, you're seen by your peers, but how you are seen, how you're perceived and how you understood.

becomes so much more different when you're trying to lead. So leadership is probably the biggest challenge. I think adapting to the challenges of that personally and trying to be, you know,  trying to balance the instinct to have very high standards with the reality of letting people learn. I think those would be,  those would be the things that are, you know, in a very fast moving business, that's a real struggle and creating a culture around that.

Is there anything that's helped you in particular on that journey at all? Yeah. I mean, obviously making mistakes. But we have a really great president that works for us called money. Who is a real, like atypical to have a business like this, you know, he's a man in his early fifties built the ratings industry in India.

I was very senior at S& P and Moody's and as a real kind of sort of, you know, both Oracle strategically, but you know, kind of managerial coach, you know, sort of described by my chairman as like a full time board member sitting inside the company. And I think, you know, that's the kind of, that presence would have been, you know,  Very difficult to replicate without that, you know, I think that's been, that's been instrumental to well beyond my personal development, but to the business in general in this past year.

Yeah.  And then finally, then what one piece of advice would you give to someone who's looking to start their own business? Really take the time to understand the three T's, you know, timing, theme, and team.  Have a great idea and it's too early, doesn't matter how good you are, you know, likewise, if you've got a great idea, but you're not prepared to dilute yourself and bring in the right people to execute it, you can never, you know, the annoying analogy, which is too true, but very annoying, which is you can't scale time.

You know, your time is not, you know, you do need to basically dilute yourself, whether it's financially or in terms of ownership. So I think those are the thing, you know, have high conviction,  and then, you know, Yeah. I mean, just, but like, you know, really think of that. Is this what,  and also are you good at it?

I think that would probably be one thing. We've definitely pivoted to areas which  as we've emerged, as the opportunity sets have emerged, we knew we were able to contribute to wasn't necessarily the  that we thought was  thankfully in our market. It was the thing that was also thought was the biggest idea, but the biggest idea and what you're good at and not necessarily the same thing.

And so I think there's always something in life, which is sometimes you're good at things. Sometimes you're, you like things and you've got to find the thing that's somewhere, the sweet spot between the two and never more applicable than in your own business. Awesome. No, awesome. Thanks, Tommy. We appreciate it.

Yeah, hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for joining us. Thanks  me.