Behind the Book: Caltech Magazine Edition - Jess Adkins and Julie Schoenfeld - 5/31/23

foreign and welcome to behind the book Caltech magazine Edition my name is Omar shamutz and I'm the senior editor of Caltech magazine tonight we're introducing a new component of caltech's behind the book series that will give you a chance to hear more from some of the people covered in Caltech Magazine's print issues and also to dig deeper into their work and experiences all of our magazine

stories are also available online at magazine.caltech.edu this first installment of behind the book Caltech magazine Edition is titled from scientist to CEO and our first panelist is Jess Adkins The Smiths family professor of geochemistry and Global Environmental Science he's also the CEO of calcarea a startup aimed at decarbonizing the shipping industry our second panelist this evening is Julie schoenfeld who is caltech's entrepreneur in residence for

physical sciences within the office of Technology transfer and corporate Partnerships our moderator is Lori de Jose a Caltech alumna and a science writer in the office of strategic Communications Lori wrote the feature story in our spring 2023 issue about decarbonization the panelists will also field some audience questions at the end of the event so if you'd like to submit a question please do so through the

Q a option within Zoom finally I'd like to introduce Michael Alexander caltech's campus arts and culture liaison Michael couldn't be here with us in person this evening but he did record a video message so take it away Michael we want to thank our sponsors the Caltech employs Federal Credit Union and the friends of Beckman Auditorium whose support makes programs like this possible and whose support has

also made it possible for us to do a number of programs for young people students are coming out for the junior Watsons they're getting a chance to hear grad students do some incredible presentations on our science Journeys programs as well so we encourage you to check out our archives when you go to events.caltech.edu and you can sign up to be on our mailing list as well

so that you'll get notice of upcoming events our next event is going to be part of the movies that matter series and that's happening on July 11th I'm sorry July 25th and it is going to feature the film chasing Coral this is an important film dealing with what is happening in the ocean to Coral and other living matter because of the growing acidity of the ocean

and because of the rising ocean temperatures so now it is with great pleasure that we welcome Lori de Jose in conversation with Jess Atkins and Julie schoenfeld thank you so much for those introductions Omar and Michael my name is Lori Dao Jose and I am today I am so delighted to be speaking with Jess Adkins and Julie schoenfeld about entrepreneurship at Caltech so Jess and Julie

welcome thank you nice to be here so Jess you have been a professor of geochemistry for decades and recently you've made this makes me feel old recently you've made this pivot from the lab bench to starting your company calcarea so why did you decide to make this big leap yeah I'm wondering that a lot these days as I make my way into work on the Metro

instead of uh just coming down the hill to Caltech um it there's a lot of different reasons um uh the pandemic actually had a lot to do with it we've talked about this a little bit before where uh we we all were sent home right and I ended up sitting in the back of my garage where there's a little office there and you write as many

review papers as you can you get all the data out and then you start thinking like what am I going to do with this time and one of the like truly amazing things about Caltech and I find inspiring all the time is that it's really our job to think of the most important thing that we could possibly do and we had had a series of results

in in the lab that we can talk about that led towards us realizing that we had a shot at sequestering CO2 at scale and the climate problem is the problem of our generation at least from a technical point of view of things that my skill set might have something some ability to solve and it became a little bit of like an ear worm of can I

really solve this problem with uh with continuing research about it or is it time to try and go make a larger impact on a wider swath of the world and that earworm just grew and grew as I sat there in the back of the garage um I had a few people like Julie here sort of kicking me a little saying that is a good idea you

should think about doing that uh Kevin Tidwell at Grantham Foundation is another one they had been funding us at Caltech on the basic research that led to us spinning out um and uh he kept saying this looks pretty cool Jess like why wouldn't you want to make this into a company and uh I think eventually I just sort of said they're probably right like if we're

gonna really go after the Caltech thing of making as big impact working on the most important thing you can that means trying to bring this out into the world as a company yeah so Julie as one of caltech's entrepreneurs in residents you've helped commercialize a wide range of Technologies from photonics to medical devices to you know working with Jess's company and all of these startups that

each just started as an idea so in your view what are the common qualities that make an idea promising enough to take from the lab to the marketplace well it's first you have to recognize at a university you're starting very very early so many times investors want something that's well on its way that's proven in the marketplace but at a university you're looking at some research

you're looking at what is potentially breakthrough research and then you have to ask yourself what problem are you trying to solve and I spend a lot of time trying to sort through or help inventors sort through that question we we have a saying here that these are all hammers looking for nails in that is they have a great piece of technology but we're not quite sure

what to do with it so the common theme that I look for is what problem are you trying to solve how is it being solved today and why can you do it better so you start with those three questions and then as all good scientists you take this as a hypothesis and then you need to test the hypothesis so you want to go out and talk

to people talk to people who have this problem talk to 100 people who have this problem and see if they react the right way and so that's kind of the common theme is find a good problem to solve make sure you can solve it better and then make sure that a lot of customers want it yeah this is actually ripping off that's so true about some

of the stages that we went through uh we were working on the problem of the dissolution rate of calcium carbon in the ocean for a decade we being me and my good friend and co-founder of calcarea will Burleson at USC and uh we stumbled onto a catalyst we thought that was really cool because it helped us think about the chemical mechanism and it was literally one

of those like in the shower moments when I had one of these transitions you're actually talking about several different transitions but I had one of these transitions where I was like wait we are making the reaction go faster like the this is the reaction the planet uses the buffer atmospheric CO2 what problem are we trying to solve right maybe we've got like and I jumped out

of the shower and like wrote down this back of the envelope like uh sort of calculation on what size Factories do we need and how many factories and this kind of thing and it wasn't a crazy number that you would need something like 6 000 Walmart superstores right to uh to running 24 7 all over the world to full of limestone and CO2 to do this

and that was sort of an aha moment of oh this could solve this problem at scale and every so much of what I've been learning about since then is that's not the issue the issue is who actually wants it right right now today and then it would be great if they were willing to pay you for it but getting out of that mindset of this is

a problem that the globe needs and that we need to that like is very much the scientist approach and getting more towards a customer focus of who is this person who owns Six ships and what are his or her problems that's been an incredible transition that I think Julie is sort of talking about like what it's not okay it's not enough just to know that you've

got a thing about a good enough problem exists to be able to solve to sequester CO2 at scale but the first thing we have to do is sequester CO2 for somebody first and and learning that lesson has been a real like switch for sure I don't know it just so much of what you said resonated with me I just started riffing yeah so along the that

line what are some of the common challenges you see folks facing when trying to start a business well it's it's trying to to make that shift um to to going from wow this is a huge problem and I can solve it 100 times better but the world may not be ready for that solution and so making that shift is one thing another thing um in the

University environment the university environment is very collegial it runs at a certain Pace startups run at a different pace and depending upon what you're doing they there's an impedance mismatch between universities research and startup activity and so that can be a bit of a challenge the other thing is that on University campuses people are are encouraged to publish and startups shouldn't publish because you don't necessarily

want your competitors to know what you're doing so there's a few sort of cultural shifts that University startups have to make in order to really step into this new world of startups yeah and on that note of you know the university culture as we've covered in this issue of the Caltech magazine student entrepreneurship is actually really supported and kind of baked into the undergraduate experience here

at Caltech so what do you find most rewarding about working with student entrepreneurs in particular so one of my favorite elements of being an entrepreneur in Residence at Caltech is an internship program that we created three years ago and it's primarily for undergraduates it's a 10-week summer program and we try to pair up undergraduates with some of the startups that we've just brought out or we

asked the undergraduates to help with the business plans of ideas that we think are coming out it's like the startup surf yes yes and um I've been running intern so I've LED four venture-backed companies I've been running intern programs from the very start of doing startups because when I was in college someone gave me an internship and it changed it changed my life what I have

found is that no matter how much I put into the internship I get more back because students bring an energy they bring a different way of looking at the world they bring a whole new joy to sort of the process of Entrepreneurship that I find just really exciting students have been crucial to calcarea our first employees Melissa Gutierrez this is a Caltech undergraduate somebody who worked

in our labs and I had heard that she was leaving a job she was in before and I thought well this is available this would be fantastic right so getting more contact with students has been incredibly important for calcarea so my my favorite thing is that uh so you know I come from a day and age where we were we use we use email and then

all of a sudden everybody was started using slack and so I had my last crop of interns and they were like slack that's that's old news we use Discord now now things are changing so fast that each new generation each new grade has a different set of tools so uh interns help you with nothing else to keep up with what the latest activities are that are

going on so that's absolutely true yeah no yeah I've had to sort of give up on email plan this out right that like here we're going to have email for this kind of thing slack for this kind of thing phone calls for that kind of thing it's like so much management that I can't do it So speaking of management um let's pivot a bit and talk

about the role of a CEO so Jess this is your first time running a company how is it different from running a lab yeah um uh uh there there is a skill set to both that you might find in really good camp counselors um uh that and so in that sense they they sort of overlap those who know me and know my love of Summer Camps

will know where that uh reference is coming from but uh there are some really important differences and I've been thinking about this a little bit there there's one on like research like what does it mean to do research and you were touching on the pace of it and that's absolutely true and one of the ways that the pace switches is that I became a lot people

become professors for different reasons but a lot of us become professors because while we were students or post-docs or whatever along the way there were just too many things that we wanted to work on and they're only 24 hours in a day and one of you and you just couldn't pull it off and you want a group like you want a to be able to seed

all these ideas with these people that are smarter than you and are going to go learn more about it and then come back and teach you and it's this centralized spoke relationship right like at least in my group we don't all sort of it's not like everybody's piled on to the same problem people are working on different ones from the outside world it might all look

like the same problem of the history of climate change or something like that but to us they really seem separate and they're individual relationships about what the project was doing at calcarea the whole point of the research is uh uh to work on the one thing of the company going forward and that you have to like really stay focused that way um and that leads to

a very different tenor of how you divide things up and how much people need to be talking to each other as they're working on these things that's on just on the technical side and then there's this aspect of the talking to 100 people or more right this like business model research like this who are the customers out there and what do they actually want and uh

that has been a lesson in learning how to shut up because and I'm not very good at it I'm still practicing as you can tell uh but um I realized how much we are like little sales people in academics like any time we sit down we start talking about this great new discovery we have about coral biomineralization or whatever we're selling this like idea that we

have or there's an innovation we have to ever the audience is and if I I've done this now with getting on the phone with customers and you have to sell yourself to some degree to get the conversation to begin with but at the end of a 45-minute call if I've spoken the whole time I know exactly the same amount about that company that I did when

the when the call started and calcarea is no further along right and learning how to seed the conversation and then just try to hear what are their problems led to uh our first new patent uh last month right because we realized that there is this acute pressure on the industry that they care about getting just a few percent of their CO2 decarbonized on a short time

scale compared to me thinking about 50 100 of the shipping industry kind of down the road that aspect of switching to listening from switching to selling has been a big one um and then this part of related to the research has been a change in leadership style that I'm still getting used to that how you lead a group that is sort of a hub and spoke

model is actually quite different than how you lead a group that everybody's focused on the same goal and you're trying to get there as fast as you can um it it is it is tugging on my management abilities for sure like I'm really having to learn about that and Julie you've been a successful CEO at multiple companies so you've led many different groups what are some

of the common challenges you've experienced as a cu well I'd like to riff off of what Jeff's just said about sales you said you had to switch from sales to listening and what I would argue is that you're a great salesman and the great sales people are great listeners too because you spend you a lot of time listening so um at the Midway in my career

when I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur I somebody encouraged me to go get a job as a bag carrying sales rep so I went from being an executive of a public company to a bad carrying sales rep and a startup and uh this is a job in I think everybody who runs a lab who's trying to raise money but you knock on the door

you you run as hard as you can to the door and three times you crash into the door and the fourth time somebody opens the door and that's the job of selling and if you can master that job both as a professor or as a CEO of a company you will that is one of the best skills that is one of the greatest predictors of success

because you're selling your idea to an investor you're selling an idea to your employees your future employees you're selling your idea to your customers you're selling all the time so I would say one thing that I would encourage every CE EOS looking at doing a startup is make sure you've got the sales skills because you'll be doing a lot of it the other one is uh

is it's when you're in a startup where you have just a couple of people or a handful of people you always are the only thing you notice is your limitations because what you're doing well you don't notice and some people fall into the Trap of recruiting people they like to spend time with or people that have the same skill set and the trick to making a

startup work is to hire someone with an opposite skill sets because it increases your reach really dramatically especially when you're a small team so Team Dynamics are another one of those critical critical elements yeah we are a bunch of geochemists at calcarea a bunch there's three of us that are employees and then well my co-founder at USC also and I have felt this very acutely and

I've gotten this advice from Julian from other people like you have to go find people right a company requires a team with diverse skill sets and all of you guys are really good at titrations yeah I'm wondering if you can expand a bit more about building an effective team and what are some strategies for doing that well I think the first one is you look around

take notes you look around look around the table or wherever you're sitting uh and does everybody look the same uh right away that's a red flag to me uh I think that diversity uh is good for many things but especially uh startup teams so um looking for people with different skill sets my my big expression for building startup teams is you don't want the tuba player

playing the flute is what you want to do is you want to take a person's natural skill set and extract the most out of that as opposed to trying to have somebody who's great at selling trying to do the accounting as well and so that's a that's a balancing act so it's really recognizing what skills you have and saying okay what do I need to backfill

so you need to backfill your weaknesses that's the trick to doing really effective planning of management teams another thing that happens a lot with startups is you get a couple of Founders together and they get excited everybody gets excited at the beginning it's really fun to name the company and to make the logo and then then you get down the road a couple of months and

maybe things aren't going as well and all of a sudden you realize that none of you have talked through what are you what are you doing here why are you here what happens if something goes wrong what happens if we get into an argument and so it's really important at the beginning stage of a startup at the very beginning is to have a what I would

call a Founder agreement which is to say here's what our goals are and then if I'm not able to deliver I'm going to walk away and give up my shares or just put the parameters down on paper so that each of you know what's going to happen it saves a lot of Heartache down the road and very many Founders will tell you that they wish they

had done it I in some of my previous companies I wish I had done it because once you're once you've raised money in the and the horse has left the the gate you're it's really hard to fix these kinds of mistakes yeah that uh really resonates not because we've necessarily made any mistakes but it truly gave me this advice to add this Founder's agreement and actually

there are three of us that are co-founders uh two of us is me and my and my good friend will we have been working together long enough and that we had had those fights already they weren't about the business they weren't necessarily well sometimes they're about money because we're trying to share uh research funds and will and I know how to fight and uh he can

say things to me that from the outside people would be like that's it those two are done and I know where it's coming from and it was an interesting Dynamic with our third co-founder with with Pierre who brought an absolutely crucial a new skill set and a huge amount of energy so much good uh positive stuff and yet we had this really solid relationship time tested

over decades and this new person coming in and figuring out how that was going to work was uh you're never solved in something like that like there's no oh there's no way to make up for time and really but talking explicitly and actually getting into some fights and saying to like there was a moment where I had to say it appear and I'm sure he still

remembers this right where I was like Pierre I don't necessarily believe that from you and the same way I do from will because I know how I can trust him and we're not there yet and I remember the look on his face it was absolutely this was before we were we had actually signed the papers and were Founders together but I think it helped right because

it was a tense moment and I was telling him this is where I'm coming from like this is where we're at um and really it's to Pierre's credit that he just saw for what it was let it roll off his back we talked about it the next day yeah he's a better person than me so it seems like you can't really shy away from conflict in

a startup it's all about conflict like the I don't know what it is maybe somebody I'm sure like there's so many books written by the way people give you books all the time like you haven't given me any books that's one thing I appreciate you about you um but there's just like there's this whole industry of making money off opinions about these topics right and so

I guess you're getting this one for free over the uh over the web but um there there's so many books about like how to be a leadership or how to do leadership how to do hiring I I think you really have to get in there and make mistakes and just hope that the trust level has been built high enough that you can get over those mistakes

together is there something you wish you had known or read in a book before you started five months into this like there's something I wish I'd done differently like every other day uh yeah like I don't like accounting I don't think I ever will I'm not sure who I thank God they're people out there who do like accounting uh but we're a three-person company somebody's got

to do it but uh uh back you know feel backfilling the weaknesses is this is an exactly a great example of it like it's not something I like doing and so it sort of falls to the side then I'm like oh God we ought to really catch up on the books unfortunately in a brand new startup there is no balancing the books all you do is

spend like you beg me for money people had enough faith in you to give you a bunch of money and then you just need to be able to tell them here's what I'm doing with the money on a sort of regular basis that's the only way that you really do books but besides that you just I felt this way like this is a similarity with the

research I felt this way about research as well the point is to spend the money not to hoard it the whole point that you got the money was to push a thing forward was in research it was to go after this idea or write these papers and then a business one it is in some sense to get to the next day next round right to be

able to get more money but it you have to have a goal for the company calcarea's goal is to sequester CO2 at scale and you need to have that in mind every single time that you make a decision but don't let spending money get in the way like spending money is an accelerant not holding on to money is a break I know investors don't like to

hear that but that's the way I think about it would you have anything to add to that Julie about you know things you wish you had known oh I think about it all the time in fact I think the reason I'm at Caltech as an entrepreneur in Residence is because I learned so many lessons from so many mistakes that I thought who can I who can

I give these lessons to and who better than uh some of the brightest Minds in the world who are trying to solve some of the biggest problems in the world so yeah present company included included for sure so yeah I think in retrospect um you make more you make mistakes every single day but um it's kind of the point yeah it's the like literally if you

don't if you don't make a mistake then you're not actually solving a new problem like it's it's a little like in in on the research side the equivalent would be I'm sorry Julie no go right ahead but the on the research side equivalent would be like well I don't know the answer to that I'm like well that's why it's called research like the same thing is

in making mistakes in the startup like if you're not doing it wrong at first then it's a path that somebody else has already gone down and one of the whole points is to open up like that's the way you have impact is that you're actually doing something new and everybody makes mistakes doing something so one of the um one of the things for sure is as

I can't as now I'm investing in startups I always say I can't pick the winners but I sure can pick the losers and the losers are easy to pick because they have certain traits so one set of Trades one is they don't listen they don't take feedback they're not coachable another one is if you look around at the team and you see the same kind of

face just you know it's it's all one type of person um and uh so when I I think that um that's the sort of pattern recognition from having done it so many times is is uh the final one that I'd say is that a team that doesn't have conflict is headed for an iceberg and I've seen companies where the CEO says X and nobody is able

to question it and those are the companies I I tend to get very nervous about so we're just about to the end of our time before audience questions so I wanted to wrap it up by bringing it back to calcarea for a minute um and Julie you actually invested in calcarea and helped get it off the ground I just told you I was randomly spending your

money okay it's an accelerant it's an accelerant exactly so having worked with many different companies what about calcarea feels particularly compelling and exciting to you that you can say in front of Jess yes well so I'll say my number one statement is Jess um I in my first company a very renowned venture capitalist said to me that they invest in Team market and technology in that

order he said because if the team is great and the market is big if the technology turns not out to be wrong the great team will figure out how to Pivot so he started his thesis and was very wealthy successful venture capitalist was always start with the team so in the case of calcarea the first day that I met Jess he started this company for all

the right reasons he's he said at the beginning this is the existential problem of Our Generation as to how to get rid of carbon in the atmosphere and he believes in that and believes if he doesn't start this company who is going to do it and I really really resonate with that message so this deep deep passion this incredible Talent this ability to sell so all

the elements that make something successful are all there so I don't I don't pick a loser there I see that this one has all upside I I think the first part of what you said like uh is is very true just sort about Caltech in general like if if you're on to a problem that you think is important and it's really kind of our job to

be working on problems that we think are important making progress right is uh uh you have to believe in it like you you have to say you have to ask yourself at some point how can I have a bigger impact right if this problem really is that important whether it's something environmental or something on the on power or something on the on the social science like

uh uh I don't yeah people say oh you're so passionate about this and I've never really understood like yeah why would but then it's infectious and people want to work with you and people want to invest in you because they know you mean it yeah no no we we we're gonna try I mean and I do I've said I've said this before like people with my

sort of background are sort of ideally suited to bring a technical side to the way I think that because it's how the planet solves the carbon dioxide problem when volcanoes go off and so there should be and it's kind of happening actually there should be more oceanographers there should be more geochemists starting companies like this and it's actually it's been kind of interesting at the at

the oceanography meetings like the national meetings they're now Marine carbon dioxide removal mcdr because you have to make an acronym so nobody understands what you're saying uh uh sessions just grown up in the last year when there was nothing like it in fact even the field was a little bit like no no keep business away over here it's been really it's been heartwarming to see how

quickly the The Field's gone there are a lot of passionate people out there I'm not the only one well thank you both so much we'd now like to take some questions from the audience so I can welcome Omar back to the stage to facilitate some audience questions thanks to you both um let's see our first question is uh from Manish bansal an associate professor at Virginia

Tech the question is how do you maintain a balance between running a company and Publishing papers along with mentoring PhD students that's for Julie oh that's for you um yeah you don't I think is the is the short answer to that and I tried that and Julie sort of saw me in this period I tried that for almost two years I thought hey you know professors

like we're only busy 50 of the time it's just every other minute and so how do I sort of reorganize that time I'm on leave from Caltech and I'm on live because you have to focus uh uh nominally I'm on leave 80 calcarea 20 percent um uh um Caltech and that's really like 120 40 or something like that so that's of course always the academic solution

is just work harder but honestly the anneal it's the only way we would have raised money too because investors know this like it wasn't until I said yeah I'm gonna not do this and I'm not gonna do this professor thing for like two years um that we even had any hope of raising money isn't that right yeah that is true okay um our next question is

from an anonymous uh viewer um how do you balance the challenge of having conversations with lots of companies to make sure that there's a market for your solution while still keeping your idea private I this is a this is an interesting one because uh you know I come from the office of tech transfer where we do all the patenting of technology and ideas um and I

for one feel as though people people hold on to privacy of data more than they need to when it comes to building a business model yes there may be secrets and patentable activity that's one thing but what you're trying to accomplish you will you will make far greater errors by holding things too close to the vest and not testing the hypothesis of what you're trying to

build versus being more open with it I have never been burned by being more open with what I was trying to accomplish in my career of running four venture-backed companies and yet there are all sorts of stories and they get a lot of play in the media of people getting burned along this way right and so it's in your head it was absolutely in our head

um and you're a hundred percent right like problems are best source the best involved crowdsourcing like you want to get you have a good idea but you don't have the full it's really hubris and we have it a lot as professors to think that you really got the whole picture right and if you don't get out there and test your idea out in an open way

you're going to go too slow and and you have to have a moat there's a word I didn't think I would ever use right yeah oh God six months ago and IP is a good way to do that getting patents and we calcarea has a couple not just pending patents but patents that we filed uh long ago even before Julie just like Dave Licata helped us

with some of this early stuff he was another really terrific entrepreneur in Residence um uh but absolutely we all make the mistake of keeping it close to our chest for too long the only time I may have seen a few things is when maybe two people from the same lab decide to do a startup and they may have similar ideas but even in that case there

sometimes competition is the best thing for a startup because two two companies going off to solve the same problem generally makes the meat stronger if if that it sounds kind of uh that's a very American approach to capitalism yes foreign another anonymous question what is the best way to research and contact possible investors for your startup well first thing is never call them yourself they expect

you to find someone who will make an introduction so um right out right out of the gate you need to be connected to somebody who's well connected to um to venture capitalists if you're at Caltech you have the our office and that's something that my colleagues and I are able to do is to help professors get a list of really curated Venture capitalists other times you

get to a single VC that you like and you Vibe with and they can make the introduction to others and you know it's really important to know who you're calling on because you don't want to call on somebody that only invests in consumer products if you have a carbon capture company that just doesn't usually work out too well so it's very it's a very good question

it's a very important thing to do is to know exactly who you're calling on and finding someone to introduce you yeah to kind of follow up on that Jess um can you talk a little bit about the funding options right now in the sustainability space and how you navigated those specifically I know there's a lot of public money as well as private money so could you

talk about your experiences there um my experience is that there is a lot of money out there in sustainability or I know the carbon slice of sustainability a little bit better I don't know a lot about the energy sector um uh I I like I tend to go philosophical quickly and go to big scale so I'll start with an answer to the question I wait look

our country has a very large separation of The Haves and have-nots and the haves have too much money and they don't know what to do with it and uh they're looking for places that they can invest so that they can grow their money and so if there are lots of bad ideas being invested in there if you really think you've got a good idea I think

you can pull it off especially in the sustainability carbon sequestration World um we have been bless that's a that's a privileged statement from coming from a place like Caltech where we're blessed with connections uh for sure like they they were super helpful but um uh we were able to get to a point where we had we had a very good relationship with one of our chief

investors the Grantham Foundation from having funded us in our lab ahead of time and so that was a great pathway was a an existing funder who was interested in bringing this out to being something bigger and there Rolodex do people ever say that anymore like their connections there LinkedIn that uh network was helpful to building in calcarea's particular case and so I'm answering this question by

saying there's a lot out there having had that first step already made for us or been facilitated for us but once we started looking around look if you really got a good idea and you think you have a way to go make the case make a 10 slide deck that has the problem listed the team listed and uh just like we've been saying um and you

got a shot have confidence Julie do you have anything else on that I would add that um you know you people saying like how do I find the VC if you find if you get in front of VCS and you find that you're not you don't just don't feel a connection with that person I would encourage you to walk away because when you get money from

a venture capitalist they become like you know it's not a marriage but it's close yeah they never go away and if you don't like them it makes your life very very unpleasant so the relationship with the partner that's making the investment is very important so so that's as a starting point another one is that if you're making if you've made like 50 calls and you're not

getting anywhere stop step back and figure out what's wrong with your pitch because over pitching is uh is not is not a great way to get your company off the ground in the case of Jess he was turning away money so um you know I've been a CEO for five months and we were raising money for the year and a half before then or so so

I don't have a very good perspective anything Julie says is right about this foreign Jess you touched on this briefly this is a question from me but the idea of transitioning based on what the market expects or what the market or your client your customer wants I wonder if you could perhaps walk us through in a little more detail about a situation where you had to

kind of adjust what you were doing or the the product you were offering based on what the customers were were asking for yeah uh absolutely just in the last month or two we've had an example of this so the the big picture part and it's still the first goal of calcareous to sequester CO2 at scale and we think that it's a good match to do that

through decarbonizing shipping but then also using ships to go beyond that and become the garbage men of the CO2 economy we think that we we can store CO2 in the ocean safely and permanently using ships that's calcarea that doesn't get you paid tomorrow right like that that is that keeps you motivated and that's where you need to head and you have to stay focused and so

in talking starting to talk to ship owners and ship operators it became clear that this new regulatory pressure called the carbon intensity index that came online January 1st uh of this year was really bugging them and it's essentially a letter grade like going to a restaurant um and they were fine with the whatever letter grade they got as long as it wasn't an F but to

a 120 million dollar capex investment that they're trying to amortize over 20 25 years or so that they're they're all ears at five to ten percent that was not something I expected at all that was like oh wait we can do that like right now if you have some existing water flows on board the limiting thing about what we're up to is the flux of water

that you can bring in and that totally changed the conversation to what pumps are you running right now where are they instead of how can I re-retrofit your ship when it next comes comes into dry dock that led to thinking about uh sock scrubbers and I can talk about this because we submitted the patent last month um but there are the IMO 2020 is the was

the regular regulation that ships had to reduce their sulfur emissions by a factor of seven and they did it two ways they bought lower sulfur fuel or they installed scrubbers on stacks and they're pumping water all the way up to the tops of the stacks to uh or mid mid Stacks to uh to get the sulfur dioxide out and we can just stick our thing on

the back end of that that is coming out at like pH two or three and so our process you're using Limestone actually neutralizes that acid and so it does something even better than what they're already doing so we can sequester carbon and neutralize what's coming out in January I had no idea in fact sock scrubbers are sort of a problem at the investment raise because they

had a lot of bad press and people saw us as just a carbon version of the socks open Luke sock scrubber and like well no I don't want to touch that um so that was a big pivot for us Julie do you have examples from your own experience oh pivot I I was uh I did a company that was in the ad Tech space and it

required it was it was a a way of increasing the amount of time customers would spend on a page increase the amount of time that customers would click on additional ads and it required permission from Google for for us to to really um make this the the strongest thing that it could possibly be and I was away on vacation and only things only things only when

you're when you're in the startup World you'd never go on vacation because when you do the world collapses I was on the top of the Eiffel Tower and I got a call from my team that Google had shut us down and that was my whole business model was built on top of uh of working hand in hand with Google so you know just like anything else

sit in a room and we created a war room and we figured out how can we deliver the service that we had created without tripping the the rules and it's just you know you you lean on every member of the team including the administrative help and the best ideas come from the strangest places so you're constantly pivoting in this job all right and think this will

be our final question for the evening what is the one piece of advice you'd have for someone thinking of making the transition from scientists to CEO I don't I don't I'm so in the middle of my own stuff that of thinking about like I will say it I will say it first of all I think entrepreneurs are the heroes and I think that if we're going

to solve the climate crisis it's going to be solved through Innovation and The Innovation isn't just coming up with the idea but it's getting the idea out to the marketplace so I think I think you have to view you know research is wonderful curing cancer is wonderful and a lot of that going on here at Caltech but bringing it out to the marketplace and taking the

risk of failing because there is a lot of failure is a heroic Challenge and I think that all entrepreneurs should be applauded and anyone who thinks they want to do it should give it a try yeah I think that that Julia Senate just right they did I would say something similar to that like if you're already at that spot that you're thinking hey maybe I want

to try that do it that would be my one piece of advice because we probably held back too long even with calcarea um humming and hawing about is this the right thing to do maybe I can pull this off while still being a professor getting back to one of the earlier questions if it's in your head it's there for a reason feed it right that was

our last question Laurie thanks Omar and thank you both so much for joining us today I sure learned so much about entrepreneurship from speaking with you both and thank you to our audience for those great questions and engagement and now we will hear some closing remarks from Michael Alexander thank you very much for that really interesting presentation it's now time to just say goodbye to you

but before you go I do want to remind you that you can keep track of our programs by going to events.caltech.edu you can sign up to be on our mailing list you can consider to become a donor and member of the friends of Beckman Auditorium and support our programs for young people we hope you'll be back for our movies that matter program that takes place on

July 25th seven o'clock it's a in-person program you have to be in the auditorium to see the film chasing Coral and we just want to thank again Gloria de Jose Jess Atkins Julie schoenfeld and Omar shamut and thank you all for joining us this evening good evening