Ryan Grant Little: 0:42

Welcome to Another Climate Tech Podcast conversations with the people trying to save us from ourselves. In this episode, I spoke with Jonny Everett, founding partner at Marble. Jonny and the team at Marble are launching future Climate Tech gigacorns in sectors ranging from energy to materials to minerals. They're at pace to have launched 25 companies by 2025 and have gained a very loyal following among climate tech investors and influencers worldwide, myself included. I reached Johnny in Paris. Jonny, great to see you. Welcome to the podcast, thanks.

Jonny Everett: 1:15

Ryan, excited to be here, excited to chat with you today.

Ryan Grant Little: 1:18

So you're the founder of Marble, which you describe as a venture studio that combines talent with high impact ideas to fight climate change, and it's also Europe's only deep tech studio focusing exclusively on climate. Let me just start with what is a venture studio, because this will be a new concept for some people. Sure.

Jonny Everett: 1:38

So a venture studio typically describes a company that builds other companies. So in the world of, I guess, venture capital or company builders that are designed to support venture capital, you have different elements within that. So you have the traditional venture capital fund and they focus on different stages. Precedes, seed, you probably people understand those quite well and you also have accelerators, which are typically for early stage companies where there's an existing team, there's an existing concept and maybe there are some stage where they would benefit from strategic advice, strategic support, resources, access to capital. Potentially things like textiles would probably sit in that bucket. Then you have incubators, so these would be even earlier stage than that. But again, typically these are individuals with an idea or a concept or something that they are trying to do specifically and they need help in doing that.

Jonny Everett: 2:30

And what venture studios do is start even before all of those processes. So we come in before there's a team, before there's often an idea and in many times before there's any technology there whatsoever. So we're not looking in our world as a venture studio. We're not looking for specific IP, we're not looking for specific technology. What we're really looking for is individuals that we believe, with the right help, support and guidance could find and solve an exceptionally large problem in climate, and venture studios come in many forms, so there's different flavors, different styles, different approaches, but what we do is really focus on this founder problem optimization piece and only in climate technology specifically.

Ryan Grant Little: 3:11

And how did you come to this? I hear about a lot of people want to start companies, a lot of people want to start funds. I mean this is very brave work, right you. It's a lot tougher.

Jonny Everett: 3:21

Whether it's brave or stupid, is ready to be seen.

Ryan Grant Little: 3:24

Yes, hopefully it's brave. That's more of a horse shoe shape than a spectrum, I think, sometimes Exactly. But what were you doing before that? What's your background? What's your kind of education? I mean, how do you know? How do you say, yeah, this person's going to be able to build a successful carbon sequestration company?

Jonny Everett: 3:40

So let me start maybe with my background and then we can try and talk about how we know if someone's going to build a successful carbon sequestration company. So I'm British. I currently live in Paris, france, which is where Marvel's based. My background is actually business, so I studied business at university. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and so I did what most people did and became a consultant. So I joined Accenture Hub University, did their grad scheme, fell out of love with that pretty quickly. I think it took me about under two years to realize that I didn't want to make spreadsheets and PowerPoints for the rest of my life and was looking for an exit. I'd always wanted to start a company.

Jonny Everett: 4:19

Being an entrepreneur I've been an appealing thing for me from a young age. My mother had been an entrepreneur, my father at some point had been an entrepreneur, my grandparents at some point had done entrepreneurial things, so entrepreneurship was something I was excited about. But I had no money and no idea, and so in that particular scenario I didn't join an Accenture Studio which maybe would have been a bad choice back in 2000 or whatever. But I met a guy who was a friend of a friend and we just started talking and one day he said you know, I'm gonna start this company. And I said cool, would you like some help? I'd love to join.

Jonny Everett: 4:50

And I was basically the level of depth and thought that I gave to creating my job and try to start company. And so we built. This company was in nothing to do with what I do today was in software and services. We were doing live chat and chat bot, so I was doing chat box before. It was cool, which is a mistake, so that's one thing is make sure your make sure your timing is better than mine.

Jonny Everett: 5:09

But I did that for eight or nine years and that taught me a lot because I was actually bootstrap business right and anyone that's what is your business is a different organization to kind of build the scale. That's about hundred, twenty people across the us and then actually at the end of two thousand eighteen, I had quite a catastrophic burnout and mental breakdown after that period. So I've been working extremely hard. I have been looking after myself for a long time. I'm my body caught up with me and said, okay, enough is enough and I like to. Six month period of taking time out, and part of that time out was realizing I didn't like what I was doing. I wasn't happy in my role in the company for a bunch of reasons. So I decided to exit that business and figure out what's next. So I had no grand plan at that point. I was kind of putting that situation by meeting to find a change and so what I concluded was well, look, I spend the last eight years building a company. Company's been pretty successful. I would love to work with other start up founders and see if there's something I could give back. I wasn't ready to start company. I was in a position of transition. Out of that thing I didn't want to jump back into the trenches. I look for opportunities where I could help people start company, but not start company myself, and I kind of take you naturally down the road of accelerators, incubators and company builders. I end up applying to work on the program side, entrepreneur first. So I'm sure first you don't know is another company building as large scale company building every six months I'm for some reason. They said, yeah, we've got this role in paris you can apply for. And I said, great, I don't speak french and I live in london, I don't worry about it. Like, will be in touch. And I thought I was never gonna hear from them again. But I did and I did the interviews. I think, much to my surprise and the paris team surprise, I got the job between both of us. You know like. You really want this job, you really wanna give me this job. You every day. So I moved to paris, did I, was a mentor and then ran the program they call form there and just absolutely loved it.

Jonny Everett: 7:08

And a few things happen to you that were quite transformative on my journey. At the ultimate doing marble one was I completely fell out of love with software. So, yes, was my first exposure really to these p? Hd's, postdocs, deeply, deeply technical founders who all seem to want to do things from a point of helping the world be a better place. And for those of you, open the software is, a lot of people want to make a lot of places. Also, a lot of people just wanna make money. I just become really rich and famous, which is also okay, but I was just so in avid by the drive of these individuals and how mission driven they were and I found what they were doing so much more exciting, interesting and intellectually stimulating. So is one thing.

Jonny Everett: 7:51

Second thing was I actually found out that I could help them. I actually found out that all the things I learned over the last eight years, all the mistakes I made, especially the early stages, were very, very useful for them translating specifically their technical skills and thinking into commercial application. So is commercial guy rose in sales and Marketing and these kinds of things, and I think that mindset really help them cut through some of the noise and really think about how do you create company around this technology around, said yeah. And then the third thing was it gave me my first shot, I think, of doing something that is like non bullshit for climate, and what I mean by that is something that isn't a software platform short, talk about that later but something that I could do For climate, get involved in a way that was meaningful, purposeful. And I decided that the best way of doing that is taking all those things and package them into a place that was designed from the ground up To build the technology companies in climate.

Jonny Everett: 8:46

So I started exploring that, speaking some of the funds, I knew who work in climate and then one day one of those founders said to me I just met this guy who, ben tank, you really need to have lunch with this guy. So me and ben had lunch sisters back in, I think. Twenty twenty. I think, yeah, end of twenty twenty ish. And it just happened that ben was looking at building a deep time. I'm in the studio in paris, france. The ben brought to the table all the stuff that I miss.

Jonny Everett: 9:13

The ben is an absolute wizard when it comes to climate tech, is like a wikipedia of climate tech, I think is one of the biggest people in the space, for sure my opinion and I really knew I needed someone like that. I wasn't coming from a huge amount of depth in this world at that point, and so I need to find someone that could bring that sort of thematic thesis element really dive into. Where should we build? What should we look to do? And ben was actually looking someone like me, right, someone who is more on the operator, venture, entrepreneurship side, and so it was just a classic case of the universal lining, and I'm just deciding to ultimately collectively take this journey for us together and ultimately launch my one september twenty twenty one.

Ryan Grant Little: 9:53

Okay, that's awesome. So I mean I would also argue that you're consulting experience so that even if you didn't like being there, you're used to jumping from one industry to the next and Very quickly diving into like okay, what are the moving parts here, what are the key drivers within an industry? So you combine that kind of experience with bootstrapping and that feels like a really good like combo for starting a venture studio. Yeah, sure, I haven't pitched like that before.

Jonny Everett: 10:21

But yeah, why not? I think, yeah, there is that, I guess, systems view, and I think the other thing that Maybe I overvalued but I think is useful sometimes is that yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, if you understand what the objective is, but you don't necessarily get caught too much in you know the wise and the where falls, you stay quite focused on what are we trying to achieve here. I think sometimes having the kind of More technical inputs that we have from our science team and the people that work really understand whether this is gonna work or not. I'm not my kind of simplistic questions of like how could we make this like cheaper, or how can we make this faster, or so on, so forth. I think that creates a nice balance Between those two objectives that needs come together to build successful ventures in the space yeah, I totally agree and I feel like there is more need for that in the sector.

Ryan Grant Little: 11:06

There are a lot of, as you say, scientists who are doing really great Work that can probably change the world, and I need people like us, who don't have scientific backgrounds, who can be like what? What does that mean? Like you know, dumb it down to, kind of like the so what questions?

Ryan Grant Little: 11:21

exactly we, yeah, and I mean it really matters, and this stuff is super complicated. We need to find ways, we need to choose the right metaphors and agree on the right Language to the nomenclature to use within the industry so that we can get this somehow mainstream, which is where the stuff needs to go. Wonder if you could just talk a little bit about, like, how marble actually Work. So I know you work with three stages called explore, create and build. Can you walk us through this a little bit?

Jonny Everett: 11:49

Of course, so marbles we talked about as a venture studio and we focus on this idea of Bounder problem fits an optimization. So some ventures studios actually bring founders into work on existing ideas or concepts that are quite well defined flesh. We actually like to come in a step before that. So the way we start is actually by scoping things that we call opportunity areas. So these are areas within climate technology that we believe are yet unsolved, white spaces that really need to be sold. These are things we really need to figure out and that typically always gonna sit in the bucket of hard to abate missions, hard to abate sectors and solving those really, really intractable problems. We identified as areas and we start them and we start to understand Very well what are the key challenges, what are the key issues and, critically, what are the types of science or disciplines that could potentially unlock solutions in that space. So we have ideas already jumping off, points and directions of travel and that's what we would call a guest opportunity area. Once we have a space well understood and well defined and understand the types of science and types of technology that could potentially find new solutions, we then go and try and build small cohorts of typically five to six first founders in residence to join us in what we call the explore phase, and in the explore phase, each of those individuals is coming to explore their area of opportunity, this intersection with their skill set and the climate impact that we've identified. I'm gonna take three months just to ask ourselves a question of what would be the most incredible thing that we could possibly think of doing that could offer a very total solution to this particular problem. Three months a lot of that is Technical ideation, whiteboarding, napkin economics, going really wide and then starting overtime to narrow in on a potential approach and technical solution that could Offer something meaningful in the space. And at the end of three months, if we find something with that found in the opportunity area, we then continue working with them into create. Great typically takes around nine months and really in that journey we're trying to go from okay, there's this kind of kernel of idea.

Jonny Everett: 13:59

There's a few things we pulled together that we think could be interesting and exciting. There's an angle that we can see taking shape how do we go from there to something that we can invest in, a pre seed, and so there's a lot more development of that into something concrete. There's a lot more customer validation, expert validation. We start to get ready into the economics and the good old techno economic analysis to risk assessment. We understand how we finance this company from pre seed all the way to series a. What are the milestones, the gates, the objectives that he need? How are they gonna go to market? Who is that first customer?

Jonny Everett: 14:29

And, critically, we also go and look for a co founder. So if you remember each founder just working on their idea, we want to bring in someone complimentary, come and join them in that company to take that project forwards. Part of the reason we do that, ryan, in a sequence rather than at the start, is it gives that first found a lot more latitude into the different areas that they can explore and the different technologies that they could bring to bear in order to make that solution work. So if you have a founder in the first phase, for example, like we have in the past looking at how do we solve for a money production, there are chemical risk for doing that. No biological risk in that. Right, if we immediately paired them in a team was like one founder who's a deep tech see your type profile. One found the ball just looking at the biological solutions right. So it's gonna focus that thinking, sure, but it's also gonna channel away from other potential opportunities. So we like to give them maximum, like see them.

Jonny Everett: 15:24

Once we know what we're trying to build, it becomes easier to ask ourselves a question okay, who would be the dream co founder for this particular project? And then we need to go find that person. So what's your team assembled? We've answered all the key questions. We then hopefully invest in those companies. We invest 250 thousand. We target 20% ownership of preceed I'm when those companies are ready in the build phase. We then support them with hitting the next major financing milestone, which is some of those companies, is additional capital. Preceding I'm for some of those companies is a fully priced seed round and that's the end to end. I guess life cycle of marble obviously will still be around companies after that but that's the kind of core focus of the program is ready to go from Somebody who wants to do something about climate, wants to buy themselves and taking them on that journey to have an incredible climate tech company. That's finance capitalized and on the way to the next financing round.

Ryan Grant Little: 16:15

And that initial funding from when the program starts with the cohort starts basically through to the 250 K for the ones that are lucky enough to kind of make it through to that. That's is that internal marble funding. Do you have a fund, basically, and you also? Would you also do follow on stuff, or you working in partnership with other funds on that?

Jonny Everett: 16:34

Sure.

Jonny Everett: 16:34

So this first vehicle is marble one, so this is the first iteration of what we're doing.

Jonny Everett: 16:39

For this first vehicle, we raise capital from combination of people majority of those are family offices and high net worse, but the largest single investor in marble one is actually the grant them foundation, the venture capital on the grant them foundation, so that you don't know that one of the leading funders of Carb removal and increasingly just broad time it's at the cutting edge to invest $150 million a year across both equity and grant finance to kind of catalyze climate solutions.

Jonny Everett: 17:06

There are a lot of single investor, which is a great back to have what we're trying to do, any expertise they can bring to bear, and so we use the capital we raise, as my one, to do two things. One is to invest pre company. So this basically means the marble team, the marbles for a chance right, make sure that everyone can get paid and that there's an office and other things. But it also means that during the expiration phase we can pay the funds in residence. The rich family residence receives a stipend in the first three months of explore two and a half thousand euros, and the next nine months of create a three thousand euros a month.

Jonny Everett: 17:39

And that's like it's also available to any co-founders. And in addition to that, we also have some pre program budget, reinvestment budget. This could be that they need to get some IP file. This might mean that they need to go to visit a lab that they're gonna work with. This might mean that they need to go to a really important conference what they're trying to build and we pay for that flight, accommodation, etc. Etc. To do that. We have this budget that we're able to deploy before we spin out, and then we have part of that capital reserve. First checks now in this first week, we don't have any raise capital for one, but our own investor base, all extremely active, the angels of the capitalists in the space, themselves in different roles, different hats, and so we're also able to participate in future rounds through doing SPV's and similar activities and let's see what structure Marble to ends up having a few when that comes out twenty, twenty six, I would imagine interesting.

Ryan Grant Little: 18:31

I hope the founders are having to pay Parisian rent from those stipends, so geographically speaking, they're not necessarily in Paris.

Jonny Everett: 18:39

This is like a global program, so about fifty percent of our founders, I think a French Doesn't necessarily mean they're living in Paris. The majority of our founders tend to try and live and work in Paris, but we don't mandate that. So some of our founders right now been in Germany. We actually have quite a good representation from North America. We've had three founders so far immigrate for the course of program where it was sponsored visas, which is a nice touch as well, interesting, and then where those companies are ultimately built we don't have a mandate on. So if those companies make sense to incorporate in the US and they want to go and sell operations there, they can do that. If they want to stay in France, they can do that. If they want to stay in other European nation, they can do that. So we're able to kind of flat somewhere, reaction and build those companies, which I think is important when you think about the ecosystem they're trying to enter.

Ryan Grant Little: 20:25

I'm being facetious.

Ryan Grant Little: 20:26

I mean, I've seen actually how a little bit of monthly support goes a long way for at this stage and it just takes the pressure off because a lot of times when people are trying to do like the consulting work or the part time job On the side, there are kind of you know that what is it called ego drain or whatever that they're losing all. They're putting all their best, thinking into that and then you're expecting them to come up with the you know, world saving ideas after hours. It doesn't work yet for sure.

Jonny Everett: 20:51

No, you don't need to be worrying about rent when you're trying to save the world, that's for sure. But I mean, even when I started my first company, I think the first year, I had a thousand Towns, a month in salary and no other support. So I also ate the dog food, as they would say, at some point. So hopefully it's sufficient.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:07

Been there, done that as well. I'm wondering, though, a little bit about talk about Paris, because France does have quite a vibrant climate tech scene. They've got a lot of Cool food tech companies doing interesting things. I saw that umami just in Paris just made a, had a big raise recently. What's going on? Can you just kind of center us on the opportunities and the climate tech that sector in?

Jonny Everett: 21:30

Paris. Yeah, of course, as a Brit coming to France, I had no idea what to expect, but I didn't have high hopes when I was arriving in France. I think there's this outside perception of France is where companies might go to die. I think that that's super misinformed based on what's happened over the last eight years. But I must say I also arrived with some of that expectation. I didn't have an idea that there was such a burgeoning, growing scene happening in France right now.

Jonny Everett: 21:58

I think a lot of that can obviously be traced back to Macron and his particular pro-entrepreneurship, pro-business policy agenda that he's been driving.

Jonny Everett: 22:06

There's been a huge state capital investment, largely through BPI France, which is state bank bank which deploys a lot of capital into the scene, and that's been very catalytic both for the venture scene and also for early state startups.

Jonny Everett: 22:17

But I think what I'm more bullish about per see on France and Europe more broadly is, I think that there's just this massive arbitrage opportunity in the ecosystem today, where you have some of the top technical schools, some of the top universities in the world, some of the largest corporate actors in the world, but still we're lagging behind the US in terms of the rate of large scale company creation and climate technology. And I think that if we can bring more how should I term this more, let's say, anglo-american style of operation and ambition and scaling, with the equality of European talent and opportunity that exists here, I think that's a powerful force that we can hopefully bring to try and catalyze the potential of this ecosystem and contribute to it. And already, as you said, there's stuff that's happening outside of marble. We're just trying to play our part within that bigger ecosystem development and try and be a catalyst for exciting new companies to come out of Europe and beyond and offer a bit of a home for those operations.

Ryan Grant Little: 23:19

I finished my MBA in Paris in 2006. There you go.

Ryan Grant Little: 23:23

And back then I would say it was still the two hour lunches with a bottle or two of wine, but I can see it's changed a lot. I've spent some time there in the past few years and there's definitely from the software as a service industry really built up. There's been some pretty big exits, some unicorns there as well, and I wonder if it's tracking at all. The way Germany is where a lot of the millennial entrepreneurs who started their companies in 2010, 2015, sold them in 2019, 2021 and are now setting up and anchoring their own funds in climate tech. It feels like every time I go online there's a new climate tech fund in Germany and I'm wondering if you're starting to see that happening a bit in the funding environment in France.

Jonny Everett: 24:06

I think there's a couple of examples of that. Maybe there's one in mind that I don't think has launched yet. That would fit that bill exactly. But I think something that is still being built in the French ecosystem is the deep tech climate capital piece in the VC ecosystem. I think that a lot of the ecosystem is still trying to maximize the software side of the equation and it's kind of a few years behind that, but I think there's a similar narrative also in the UK to some extent.

Jonny Everett: 24:37

I think really there's some exciting action coming from the US. Of course, I think there's some exciting action coming from Germany as well, but there are still, I think, a handful of funds that I would classify as being deep tech climate. They want to take that technical, scientific risk. They have PhDs on staff. They're really understanding the technical journey of these harder climate solutions. I think that's still not necessarily the bread and butter even of every climate tech fund that we're seeing at the moment, and I'm excited for more funds to catch up and get involved in that adventure as well, because I think it's an important one.

Ryan Grant Little: 25:11

Yeah, it's a bit of a cold shower for the VC industry right now. That's in climate tech. That's realizing that it's different than software. We can invest a little bit of money and then get huge payouts after five years. We're going to invest a lot of money and hopefully get huge payouts after 10 years or longer.

Jonny Everett: 25:29

Yeah, I mean, I always enjoy meeting climate tech VCs and I think having capital into the space is always going to be net-politic. I think that there is a surprising amount of misconception about the level and depth of risk in deep tech versus software. I think really the narrative is much more trading risk. So, when you look at the statistics, the timeline for climate tech companies to get, to, say, unicorn status is consumer with B2B SaaS, right. It's something like seven years on average at the moment for a climate tech company to become a unicorn.

Jonny Everett: 26:02

And the other thing is about the perception of risk. People tend to think that physical stuff is going to be really, really hard. And yeah, it's hard, but it's just a different flavor of risk, right, because if you're building a company, let's say that's trying to do a certain type of fuel or trying to do a certain type of chemical odds are you're going after an existing multi-billion dollar market as well priced, well understood, everything's kind of well established, and so really, what you're focusing on there is the technical risk. Can we get to this scale of supply at this price? That's the risk. I wouldn't worry as much about the offtake, right, because it's gonna be huge market if you get to a certain price, a certain scale, you gonna be able to sell that stuff.

Jonny Everett: 26:44

On the other side we think about software, really, what you're talking about, execution risk yeah, right. So is there anyone even wants to buy this thing? Right, so we can easily launch it. We can do a w? S, we can do a landing page, we can integrate stripe. We can be Operating as a functional technical business very, very easily in that technology skills very, very easily. But the risk is actually execution based, market based. So there's still a lot of risk, just different flavor, and I think people sometimes overestimate one, underestimate the other.

Ryan Grant Little: 27:12

And it's very hard to build a moat right in software these days. For those very reasons, and so I mean, I've seen, you know, legacy b2b sas companies just lose their shirt overnight because google just made a new feature. That is their whole company. So and that's not gonna happen when you're investing a hundred million dollars in pressure vessels and bio reactors. Right, it's different the barriers to entry or higher, but the moat is deeper as well.

Jonny Everett: 27:40

Of course, and I think, is where you have a different, very different revenue trajectory. Right. Where is you know, in software you're looking at incrementally growing month on month, year on year, and you're looking for that kind of hockey stick type curve Indeed take a much more likely to see nothing and then a hundred million dollar contract, and so I think it's just also understanding the different way that that Type of a company gets built, and in some way, I think we've forgotten how to build Physical things, and you see this not just in deep tech or the risk of the perceived risk of investing deep tech. You also see is an infrastructure projects just globally, that people are really struggling to figure out how do we build physical stuff and I think, people struggling to figure out how do we Invest and get healthy returns from physical stuff. But it's extremely possible and I think it's also extremely exciting for the reasons we just talked about.

Ryan Grant Little: 28:30

So Hopefully, the more people will get deep tech friendly as time goes on you talked about white spaces and focusing in on kind of some of these white spaces. I was giving you a hard time a few weeks ago on linkedin About looking at beef herd methane reduction deals, yes, which for me is a bit in the category of trying to make a coal cleaner and you made, of course, about point that beef consumption tracking double until we need to find ways to minimize the damage. But so it made me wonder a little bit, like how do you choose? There are so many problems? I mean, literally, we're talking about the infrastructure of the entire Planet. Right, that's gonna need to be shifted one way or another. And I wonder, like have you selected other certain areas that are no goes, other certain areas that you're most excited about? How do you kind of do that math?

Jonny Everett: 29:16

So broadly, the thesis we talk about marbles hard climate problems and for us, hard problems is where the solution requires new technology or science based innovation to solve. So we're not interested in how do we scale wind and make incrementally better over time, for example. We think that's a relatively solved problem. People gonna figure out how to do that. Then we're interested in massive climate impact, and so when you're talking about either something to do with carbon, then it's quite simple, right, is this like a gigaton scale problem? You can also apply the gigaton scale to other elements like, for example, adaptation, or even enable us everything about adaptation. Is this affecting like a ton of people or is this gonna be a very small scale thing that's only affecting a few people? And if you think about enable is like, for example, for energy. You can also think about how is that Then gonna be the unlock that allows something else is climatically important to happen? So good example of that is metals very freaking, make a crap ton of copper in a way that's really effective. That's gonna be huge unlock for the electrification of everything that needs to happen. And then the last criteria we look at is this gonna be venture scale? So is this going after multi billion dollar opportunity and typically most of time not always, but most of time that insects with the gigaton scale thinking right does this and we look for things in that sweet spot of the three.

Jonny Everett: 30:42

After that, we're happy to work across four main areas. So decarbonization, carbon removal, adaptation and energy abundance anything within that zone that fits within those three circles we're interested in building in Right now. We built three companies with a finish, another four by the end of this year, and the types of topics that we built in I think I indicative of the types of things were also interested in the future. So, for example, we have two fuel and chemical companies. We have a bio ammonia company, we have a reactive direct air capture company, so integrating direct capture into conversion to produce methanol, and then we have a large adaptation company which is actually cooling and terraforming desert lands in the Middle East for agriculture, urban population and solar.

Jonny Everett: 31:25

So that's the types of large, I guess, ambitious projects that we're excited about, things that we've been working on last 12 months. We're covering topics like churches, ultra low energy back, which we've had all before, but we think we have something super exciting that space. We're looking at hydrogen production through geologic hydrogen, so actually producing hydrogen from the subsurface rather than through what such losses. We're looking at ocean data intelligence how can we get smarter, higher frequency, higher accuracy readings from the data for things like ocean CDR and other things? I'm also looking at, by my mind, is how can we actually draw down carbon through things like macro algae but then turn the macro into useful products that we can use, for example, in cementitious materials, that types of things that we like to work on, such things we like to build in things that we're looking to for the future. So one is methane happy to talk more about that and specifically enteric methane, as well as I mentioned early critical metals and minerals.

Jonny Everett: 32:21

We think this is a huge space and a huge unlock for a lot of other critical climate solutions that we need to build. What's the looking at agriculture adaptation right. How do we build more sustainable agricultural crops knowing that the world is only at the moment getting hotter and not cool? We need to make sure that we can. Whether that curve, I guess you say, and a whole bunch of other stuff coming out of the back ends. We really try to prioritize these things based on what we see in the ecosystem, what we think is going to be hard to build outside of marble as well, and where do we think we can really add value by creating a compelling company in that space?

Ryan Grant Little: 32:54

I like the way you put it on your website, which is most importantly. We're freaked out about climate change and we feel that supporting ambitious future founders is how we can maximize our contribution. I think that captures it pretty, pretty well. Where do you hope to be five years from now, if everything goes well? What does marble look like in five years?

Jonny Everett: 33:11

Five years time. So our objective at the moment is to build 25 companies by 2025. So hopefully we have had those 25 bill and launched and in five years, some of those will be hopefully having raised their series A, let's hope and will be on a good track to continue their scaling and growth and delivery of these important and urgent solutions that they're trying to work on. We will be in the second version of marble, whatever that looks like. So, whether that's going to be a fund or a sidecar or whatever, these are all things we need to think about and discuss, but that's going to be an exciting thing and hopefully we'll have also been able to scale our reach, our impact, whether that means other geographies or not.

Jonny Everett: 33:49

I think there's a lot of different exciting opportunities for us to explore, both upstream and downstream, that support the type of work we're trying to do, which I think you could describe as being catalytic to the climate crisis. So trying to figure out how do we get more shots on goal, how do we get more people out of academia and industry and some of these slower moving organizations and into the fast-paced world of entrepreneurship, where we think it's a great vehicle for affecting change of scale quickly. I think if we take that lens of how do we be catalytic to the ecosystem, there are other angles of attack that we can also look at, upstream and downstream, which we might kick off and launch. But watch this space five years away off from here, so we'll see where we are then.

Ryan Grant Little: 34:32

Johnny, if people want to follow or get involved with your mission, where's the best place for them to find you Feel?

Jonny Everett: 34:37

free to follow me on LinkedIn. I post a semi-regularly, not as regular as I should, but feel free to follow me on LinkedIn. It's just Jonny Everett jonny and then Everett Ev-E-R-E-T-T. I have a Twitter, which I don't use much, but feel free to follow me. It's at JonnyChats. Or feel free to connect with us through Marble, so that's marblestudio for the website and also all live careers and opportunities, including opportunities to build with us. So there is a first founder or co-founder you can find at careersmarblestudio. Thanks a lot, Jonny. Thanks Ryan.

Ryan Grant Little: 35:11

Appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Another Climate Tech Podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, Ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.