Pod Insights a16z Podcast Building a Marketplace for Carbon About this episode In part 1 of our carbon removal series, we talked to Nan Ransohoff — Head of Climate at Stripe — about what it might take to jumpstart the market of carbon removal solutions. But what happens when there is a true, thriving market of buyers and sellers? How will suppliers effectively reach the right buyers, and as more solutions become available, how will buyers effectively vet the options?
In part 2, we address these questions and more, together with Brennan Spellacy, co-founder & CEO of Patch – a growing marketplace for carbon credits.
We also cover many evolving market dynamics, like the potential differences between two sets of tons delivered, the opportunity and challenge of effectively educating buyers, the integration of software like Patch's API, verification solutions and their current limitations, how even the voluntary market is being held accountable for their carbon claims, and the role that Patch is playing to help develop this nascent industry.
By the way, if you like this episode, be sure to look out for part 3 of our series where we get into the nitty gritty of 3 emerging carbon removal solutions — ranging from biomass pyrolysis to carbon mineralization.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 Bangs, one of you, all carbon is the same. Every ton is created equal regardless of the underlying material. We now know that is fundamentally not true.
0:10 Steph Smith? Welcome to part two of our carbon removal series. If you missed part one, we talked to Nan Ransohoff, head of climate at Stripe, about what it might take to jumpstart the market of carbon removal solutions. But what happens when there is a true thriving market of buyers and sellers? How will suppliers effectively reach the right buyers? And as more solutions become available, how will buyers effectively vet the options? In this segment, we address these questions and more, together with Brennan Spellacy, co-founder and CEO of Patch, a growing marketplace for carbon credits. We also cover many evolving market dynamics, like the potential differences between two sets of tons delivered, the opportunity and the challenge of effectively educating buyers on these differences, the integration of software like Patch's API, verification solutions and their current limitations,
0:55 Steph Smith? how even the voluntary market is being held accountable for their carbon claims, and ultimately, the role that Patch is playing to help develop this nascent industry. By the way, if you like this episode, be sure to look out for part three of our series, where we get into the nitty gritty of some of these emerging carbon removal solutions, ranging from biomass pyrolysis to carbon mineralization. For now, I hope you enjoy this episode with Brennan.
1:19 Speaker 02 The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.
1:47 Steph Smith? Brennan, thanks for joining us today. Let's start with the basics. In super, super simplified terms, what does Patch do?
1:54 Speaker 00 Thanks for having me, Steph. So in super simplified terms, Patch builds software that makes it easier for corporates to interact with environmental markets. So that actually means is we partner with a wide variety of what are called carbon removal and carbon credit developers. These are organizations that either abate emissions or remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through a variety of chemical pathways. That's reforestation, it's indirect air capture. It's a huge amount of breath on the platform. We actually call their capacity or ability to sell that carpet deconstruction or carbon impairment into our software platform and then expose it to corporates. So through the lens of a buyer, if you're something like an Afterpay, for example, which is
2:36 Speaker 00 a customer of ours, Patch looks a lot like a B2B marketplace for climate action. But if you're a seller, we look like a platform that helps you scale your business. So we almost look like two businesses, depending on the type of organization you are.
2:48 Steph Smith? Got it. And we're seeing a bunch of attention being drawn to carbon removal. And so what I'm curious to know is whether this is new, this idea of a marketplace of connecting buyers and sellers. Is this something that already exists? If so, if these do exist, what aspects of Patch are net new or unique?
3:06 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's a great question. So before Patch, really what existed was this idea that belongs to Carbon Credit Exchange. So very often what you would see is primarily banks and some oil and gas organizations, they would have a carbon desk where they would buy huge tranches of carbon credits on the scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of tons. In the case of the banks, they'd actually be speculating. So they'd be buying, holding and then flipping them for some sort of yield. What Patch actually does is takes a completely different approach to carbon. We don't actually treat it like almost a security, which has historically been treated as where banks want to view all carbon as the same. Every ton is created equal regardless of the underlying metadata. We now know that is fundamentally not true.
3:50 Speaker 00 So whether you're removing carbon through natural solutions like reforestation or a human engineered solution like direct air capture or enhanced weathering, there's a huge amount of variability in both the price per ton, but as well as the rate at which that carbon can be removed and for how long that carbon can stay removed. Patch's core ethos as a platform is to aggregate and standardize presentation of that information to provide a new level of transparency that historically hasn't been possible. And this is really with the intent of Showing buyers the kind of information they need to actually understand where they actually transact with. Because before, if you looked at some of these exchange platforms, it would simply be a digit,
4:32 Speaker 00 a couple of lines, you know, a thousand times, maybe a weak identifier and maybe a little bit of metadata on the underlying carbon project. But there's so much information that's been abstracted away that has resulted in people buying things when they thought they were buying something else.
4:45 Steph Smith? Yeah, on that note, I mean, I've been learning more about this recently, but for example, if people pay for a certain amount of forest to not be torn down, well, what if the government regime changes? What if a forest fire happens, right? There is some time dimension that's important here. And so I'm curious to know from you two things. One, how are you validating this information? Are you actually going out and researching these companies and digging into their processes or operations? So that's the first thing. How are you validating the companies on your platform and what they're doing? And then I'm specifically curious about this time dimension, right? Where there are certain types of carbon removal, which are extremely permanent. And then, you know, at the other end of that scale, there's maybe a question mark around the permanence.
5:28 Steph Smith? And of course, within that question mark, you don't know, it might last 100 years or it might last 10. So how are you thinking about that and also representing that to the customer, the buyer?
5:39 Speaker 00 So first and foremost, the goal is to service all this information you're actually describing, whether it's the associated risks with a particular project. So if it's in a government or in a country that's not stable, that's an associated risk with the underlying grid. If the actual chemical pathway can only support a certain amount of what's called durability, that's the characteristics that you're describing, which is setting how long does that environmental benefit last for? There are some durability kind of numbers that are really well understood, and there are some that are kind of more approximations based on distribution. Soil carbon typically follows this, where you'd have some soil carbon that only can stay sequestered on a scale of five to 10 years, and then some that can stay a little bit longer. So first things versus patch works with third parties to actually collect all of this
6:21 Speaker 00 data, the risk data, the associated kind of underlying evaluation of the projects themselves, and we put it all in one place to service this information. So patch is actually not going into the field ourselves to generate this data. What we do do is we basically give a Series up data and reporting requirements to our supply partners, they have to actually input into the platform and maintain over time. And the reason incentives like that really comes back to incentives. So it's really critical to think about incentives at scale. Historically, voluntary carbon markets are incredibly small. They're on the scale of two, three billion dollars a year, but they're poised to grow to the mid-level tens of billions of dollars by 2030, and then hundreds of billions of dollars by 2050.
7:04 Speaker 00 And so when you have not much throughput, you have to make sure the incentives are well balanced. And so if you think about patch as an exchange, we could kind of make the relationship to financial markets. It wouldn't really make sense for us to be the credit rating agency or the auditors, right? So if you had Nasdaq also be the Deloitte and the Booties, that's a bit of a conflict of interest. And so it's really important to us to have very clear boundaries today on who's responsible for what. So that as we scale of market, we can scale it in a healthy and ethical way. So to give you an idea of why does a patch grow on the ground, the key element there is really making sure that at scale, patches are incentivized to say everything's good because you make money off throughput. So structurally, we will never do that. We have to make sure that kind of line and the same is very clear and never crossed.
7:49 Steph Smith? That makes sense to me. Is there a standard in place that exists in the industry? I know a lot of this is really, really nascent. And I also know that, as we've already discussed, a lot of these chemical pathways are very different. So I'd imagine that it'd be difficult to really compare apples to apples. You're really comparing maybe different kinds of apples, maybe other kinds of fruits. And so how are you able to get this information and present it to the customer? Is there a standard in place that you're able to kind of borrow from other agencies that you can apply to patch?
8:21 Speaker 00 So there are many carbon credit standards that are emerging right now, both in the kind of historical carbon credit market. So organizations like Vira with Gold Standard, but as well as new age organizations that kind of act like credit rating agencies like Silbera, D-Zero. And we actually would send both of these data sets together. That being said, the outputs of these organizations are actually all fairly similar. So all the standards and the methods in order to get to a particular output are different. The actual end result is the same. So typically, when you think about perfect, people are typically caring about what's the underlying kind of pathway? What's the geography, the price, associated vintage? So vintage is the year that impact takes place. Is it a future vintage? Is it a past vintage? The durability or permanence? How long is that positive environmental benefit last?
9:07 Speaker 00 The idea of additionality? Does that incremental dollar spend result in new climate impact that otherwise could not have happened? And finally, leakage, which is, does this positive environmental effect that's taking place here not result in the same emissions or even more emissions somewhere else outside of your boundary condition? So those several attributes are all the same regardless of standard today. So the standards are actually dynamic and evolving, but what they're attempting to do is actually quite similar. So that's where a platform like Pats is actually incredibly valuable because we can present those four, five, six, seven data points in a standardized way. But we can react to the highly dynamic market because there are new standards cropping up all the time.
9:49 Steph Smith? Yeah.
9:49 Speaker 00 And that's what's actually really interesting, why a marketplace like Pats is actually so important is because the underlying ecosystem is so turbulent. And so if you go in with one partner that will not change and will react like they have, it gives you as a sustainability leader, you're trying to leverage.
10:05 Steph Smith? I will say some of these aspects of the standards probably aren't familiar to the average buyer, right? Like they don't understand some of the metrics that you just explained. Let's say they go on Airbnb, they're like, okay, I understand what I need. I need internet speed, I need it to be in this locale, I understand the price point. And so how are you seeing the buyers on the platform engage with this information? Are they really fixated mostly on price? Or is there some level of education that they need to understand these different metrics and these different standards? And again, just curious to know anecdotally what you're seeing people latch on to? If there's certain metrics or standards that people really care about and others that they seem to care less about?
10:45 Speaker 00 Really, there's just a huge amount of variance in understanding from buyers today. Where there are a lot of people coming to Patch thinking every ton is the same. Not even understanding that the idea of commissions avoidance is different than a mission server full. So like very fundamental concepts. And then you have some that are incredibly sophisticated. That kind of dive into all the project documentation, present Patch all the metadata. And actually like something like Patch because it enables their power user type behavior. And so what we're seeing is there's always going to be some level of education. Coming in to the platform because of essentially that gap between where most people are. Because this is still a niche problem. Like climate change is obviously a huge problem. Interacting with carbon markets is still kind of a niche behavior.
11:30 Speaker 00 So there's a huge amount of education that actually happens within the platform. And at the end of the day, a lot of these attributes. Most people can actually understand if it's presented in the right way. It's actually more a UX problem. If you're actually exploring the concepts in very plain English. And the strengths and weaknesses of going with one solution versus another. And when you have things actually compared to one another, you can understand, oh, if I can pay a hundred dollars for a ton. And get more durability versus paying ten dollars a ton for less durability. And now I can understand what I'm paying for it. So I can make a trade off one way or another. That's why transparency is so critical. And so what we're seeing is although a lot of people are coming to Patch with a very limited understanding. The actual education that takes place in the platform and by interacting with the Patch team. Typically gets them to the point where they're ill enough to be dangerous, if you will.
12:12 Speaker 00 The other model we've actually seen happen more and more, which is actually what I expect to happen in the majority of cases. The actual organizations working with consulting firms. So I actually believe that the big four, if you will, we're going to be doing the carbon accounting for a lot of these firms. The EYS, the KPFGs, the Deloitte's of the world. These are the organizations that are actually going to clean up big time. When it comes to doing the carbon accounting for the Fortune 500 organization. And they're actually using Patch and curating on top of Patch. So they use all the Lego bricks that we give to create a particular bespoke solution for their client. And I actually expect that to happen much more often. So the Fortune 500 might ping, but it's actually the Deloitte's or their PWCs that are doing curating, using the tools we're building.
12:56 Steph Smith? I think you're right that each company, or especially smaller and medium-sized businesses, they're not going to have an expert to be able to understand these markets to the degree that they might want to. And so, yes, having specific like carbon experts, we're actually doing an episode, which maybe this will be applicable to, of thinking about the jobs of the future. And you could imagine a carbon buyer, a carbon strategist, or something like that, for these companies, might be something that emerges more, or maybe, yes, it'll be absorbed by the big four. Speaking to that, I've heard you talk about kind of four steps. There's calculations, so calculation of the offsets that a company is producing, reporting, then some sort of reduction or decarbonization, and then finally offsets,
13:37 Steph Smith? which we've been talking about. But can you speak to maybe, across that full trajectory, are there other areas other than being the marketplace at the end that Patch is involved?
13:46 Speaker 00 Yeah. So that's really where Patch starts, is that kind of compensation piece, that last step. The one kind of exception is actually with the reporting element. So we're now just beginning to see organizations like the SEC, who want climate disclosures, starting to have requirements on, well, you also have to disclose what type of renewable energy credits or carbon credits you're purchasing as well. And so Patch will be playing a role there, because if the transaction takes place in our platform, we'll be responsible for some level of reporting. But just like going back to the other steps, the commission footprinting and reduction strategies, we're actually never going to do. And the reason we're interrupting is that, actually goes back to incentive point we were talking about earlier, which is a different time of incentive problem at scale, where you wouldn't want
14:28 Speaker 00 your doctor getting commission on medicine and prescribing you, right? And so, because we, again, monetize on volume through pushing the platform, we have a take rate, it would be highly unethical for us to tell people how much to buy, because we then have rights to have them to buy more. And so, again, having that separation of concerns is really, really important. Where we do actually play a lot is a lot more on the supply side. So we really do these kind of suppliers, the carbon credit developers, as our core customer at Patch, where we build and invest a huge amount of our R and D dollars on building software and systems to help their business become more transparent and more scalable.
15:05 Steph Smith? Can you speak a little bit more to what those tools look like specifically for those suppliers?
15:10 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely. So a huge focus for Patch is really making incredibly easy for suppliers to scale their business commercially. And so when you think about all the things any company needs to do that's not related to the core service they're offering, in this case, it's putting carbon underneath the ground or avoiding emissions in a particular pivotal pathway. There are things like collecting payment, managing inventory, managing FX, localizing content in multiple languages. These are all things that software is really, really good at that these organizations, which are primarily composed of operations, finance and chemical engineers, tend to not want to actually spend a lot of their focus time on. And so anything that we can do to take work off of their plates, the better.
15:53 Steph Smith? Are you seeing a particular facet of that be especially valuable to the suppliers? Is there an area where they're like, wow, we really can't find this elsewhere? I mean, if I think about payments as just an example, feels like there are other payment solutions out there. So is there, again, a facet of the supplier solutions that you're providing that you're like, wow, our suppliers are really in need of this?
16:15 Speaker 00 So I'd actually argue that it's actually the collection of functionality that makes it really valuable, right? Because it's almost like a form of verticalized SaaS where it's software built for their particular workflows that have the context of their domain built into it. So there are definitely other payment providers. There's also other localization providers, there's other ways to manage inventory, but there's nothing that really sings or plays in harmony together like Patch does for different forms of carbon and mobile developers. So it's really the kind of, there's actually not one killer feature. If you will, it's actually them all coming together that creates this ecosystem and makes it a lot easier to run and scale your business. If you just have one or two, it tends to feel incomplete.
16:54 Steph Smith? Let's pivot to the buyer's side. So you're building technology on both ends. Something that I've heard you talk about before is your API. So can you elaborate a little bit more on what this API does and how a company might use it to either calculate their footprint or use it for some other purpose?
17:10 Speaker 00 Absolutely. So there's what we call feature parity between the dashboard products that Patch built. So those are the user interfaces, that's the web application and the API. So anything you can do in the dashboard, you can do in the API and vice versa. The reason that's so powerful is because in a lot of cases, people want to own their end user experience. So whether you're an ecommerce company enabling organizations to take climate action or a carbon accounting platform, those software, those B2B software platforms you were talking about earlier that do the reporting, reduction and removal or patch powers the removal element. This Lego brick of interacting with carbon markets is actually really valuable for a lot of experiences for folks who actually want to control that end user journey. And so a really concrete example is an organization like Afterpay,
17:55 Speaker 00 where they've made the claim that having some sort of integrated climate action within their product or service will help them drive loyalty, acquire new customers and result in a better overall buyer experience. So instead of directing people to Patch and then coming back to the Afterpay experience, what they do is they use Patch's APIs to integrate a form of climate action within the Afterpay app. So that way you can actually integrate with the broad Patch network without ever having to leave the comfort of, in this case, the Afterpay app. And we've seen that happen in logistics, in ecommerce, fintech, who's actually meeting some crypto applications. And so there's a huge, wide variety of folks who have the programming prowess, if you will, as well as want to take some sort of climate action embedded in their products.
18:38 Speaker 00 And they're right down the fairway, if you will, for using Patch's API products.
18:42 Steph Smith? And just to paint a picture, is this what I'm imagining to be similar to what I see with Stripe? Right? When you're going through a checkout process, it's like you can offset with this amount of trees or X percent can be allocated to this purpose. Is that what it looks like for these other companies? Or can you paint a picture of what that UI might look like for their user?
18:59 Speaker 00 So there's a huge amount of variability. And so in the case of Afterpay, that's a B2B2C application, right? Where we're selling to Afterpay, which is a business, and then they're selling to end consumers. For them, it actually looks like a location within the Afterpay app, where they're actually tracking the associated negative environmental externalities associated with your shopping that took place on Afterpay or through any sort of Afterpay payment experience across the web. And then they give you the ability to select, in this case, six projects that Afterpay has curated that they feel matches their sustainability strategy. And then they expose that by API and then the end user can actually decide which of the six do I want to select. But you then have organizations like EasyPost, for example, which is actually a B to B to B
19:43 Speaker 00 sales motion, where they've actually exposed in their API the ability to launch carbon neutral shipping, but they themselves are an API. And so they've actually added a flag within their API per shipping label. And whenever that's turned on as carbon neutral, that calculation is then on their side, and then the compensation happens on Patch. But the end user of that experience is also someone writing code. And so again, it really depends on the kind of end customer and what you're trying to do, because there's a huge amount of variability. That's kind of the power of APIs. You have these Lego bricks and you can build really whatever you want, whether it's another business application, consumer one, or even if you're just automating the back office of your own company.
20:21 Steph Smith? I really like the analogy of Lego bricks, because it does allow these companies to just integrate it into their platforms, or their companies, or their processes. And for the end user, they don't necessarily know that this company like Afterpay is using Patch, right? It's kind of opaque in this case to the end user in terms of what that company is utilizing. Is that right?
20:41 Speaker 00 It's really absolutely integrator. So in the case of Afterpay specifically, they actually broadcast the fact that they're using Patch, viewing it as a little bit more of like an intel insight, if you will, where they're alluding to the fact that this experience is powered by someone else, kind of like Wealthfront does with Plaid, or even like if you check out with Stripe, sometimes it says it's powered by Stripe in the corner. Afterpay is something very similar. And most people actually do something like that with Patch. There are a few select instances, though, where people completely white label Patch as tech, and there's no mention of the Patch branding or infrastructure underneath the hood.
21:16 Steph Smith? It's nice that they have the option. How many suppliers and how many buyers are you looking at today?
21:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, so on the buy side, we have a little bit over 150 customers now, ranging from small startups, most of these listeners probably haven't heard of, or maybe will hear eventually, to large corporates, and to very large banks in Canada and North America. So a huge amount of variability there in terms of size and scope. And then on the supply side, we have around every 50 suppliers on the platform representing over 100 climate action projects, spanning 15 different project types.
21:49 Steph Smith? That's very cool. I'm curious to know on the buy side, if you've heard from customers, why they're pursuing this? Is it just, you know, someone within the company has determined this is important? Is it some sort of corporate action and some sort of legislation that they need to meet? How are these companies making the decision to decide, okay, I'm actually going to integrate into these carbon removal solutions?
22:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, I know it's a good question. It really actually goes back to his broader secular trend we're seeing. Where in the last, call it decade, we've now entered the period where the first two generations, who are going to be materially affected by climate change, are entering their prime spending years and prime earning years as well as beginning to vote. And those are millennials and Gen C. And when you have that, when you have kind of the masses beginning to care about the problem that two to three decades ago was a kind of a niche problem, and now is becoming a mainstream problem that changes a lot of different things. So typically, the things that are most reactive, organizations that are most reactive are actually businesses. Right? They see their sales drop. They see competitors winning business over them.
22:53 Speaker 00 They may look into why that is, and we're realizing that sustainability and operating sustainably is one of those key elements. That was actually why in an industry like buy now, pay later, which is incredibly competitive, they're always looking for ways to differentiate from one another. And one way to do that, to acquire younger spenders, is to operate more sustainably. The next kind of group of people that typically moves are investors. So investors, if you're investing on a five, 10, 15 year time horizon, they see, oh, well, these are how individuals are changing their behavior. That's what affects how businesses perform. So now we actually have to change our investment strategy. Right? Are we going to prioritize companies that operate more sustainably? Because we think they'll actually yield better returns in the next five, 10, 15 years. So then the investors capitulate.
23:36 Speaker 00 And then that'll actually look like some organization is coming to us because maybe they got bought by a private equity firm and it's been mandated. We actually work with quite a few private equity firms, three of the largest in the world. Or in some cases, it's actually the private equity firm driving, or the investor driving the commitment because they made a commitment to their LPs. Right? So another past customer, EQT, they have a net zero commitment by 2025. And they've made a commitment to their broader LP base, which are institutional, solid wealth funds, et cetera, saying, hey, we're going to actually invest in this particular way and hope our companies operationalize this investment thesis, which is operating sustainably because we think in the long run, it'll yield better returns. And then finally, The most lagging indicator of public sentiment is policy.
24:20 Speaker 00 Right. And now we're just beginning to see some of that take place with both the CHIPS Act and the IRA. And that right now is actually primarily coming in the form of incentives, primarily tax incentives. Right. If you do this sustainable thing, we are going to either give you a tax credit or actually give you money in order to fund that or enable that. But we're expecting to see more and more. We have a few carrots today. We're expecting to see a couple more sticks come out as well. And we're going to begin to see that in the SEC, playing with the idea of evaluating climate disclosures. Right. Where you have these investors with this sustainable thesis saying, we think sustainable companies are going to perform better. And then corporates make net zero claims.
24:58 Speaker 00 Right. And say, hey, we're going to, this is going to be our sustainability strategy and we want to attract all the ESG dollars or salary wealth fund money that maybe was only going to sustainable businesses. And now, if there's not meat to that strategy, there isn't a materiality to that net zero strategy. That's misleading investors, which is why the SEC is beginning to look at this. It's not because the SEC cares about sustainability particularly, but it's because the CEOs and executive team of these organizations are making a claim to attract retailers, to attract institutional capital. And if there's no grounds for that claim, that's misleading investors. And that's why the SEC is going to get involved. So it's almost three phases. So all to say, go, I can really bring it back. It's who are they stealing the heat from most? Is it customers? Is it capital allocators? Or is it regulators?
25:43 Speaker 00 And it's sometimes it's a mix, sometimes it's one, sometimes it's all three.
25:46 Steph Smith? That's actually a very clear, but also interesting way to frame it in that a lot of people view these markets as purely voluntary. And in a way they are, right? If a company is saying, we're going to hit net zero, they're not forced to do that. There is maybe some pressure from their customers. But once they say that publicly, I like that you brought up this regulatory aspect of it. Where, you know, if they're signaling that to their investors, they actually do need some proof. They need analytics. They need. To show the data behind what they're saying is net zero at some point. And I know we're in the early stages of that, but I like that you brought that up because it isn't purely voluntary. There are repercussions of some of these statements or actions.
26:26 Steph Smith? I'm curious to know how you see specifically the marketplace approach that Patch has decided to pursue, how you see that evolving. And one lens on that perhaps is cost, because something that I'm curious about is, you know, I imagine you've mentioned you have maybe a hundred or so different solutions on the platform that people will naturally migrate to cost. I could be wrong, but within a marketplace, if I use Airbnb as an example, there's many cities that it operates in and there's many like facets to homes that someone might look for. I do wonder whether over time, the buyers with carbon removal will naturally gravitate just towards, okay, what is the lowest cost solution on this platform? And let's just go with that.
27:07 Steph Smith? But I'm curious to know what you're seeing there and how you think about keeping the marketplace competitive across many solutions, if that makes sense.
27:16 Speaker 00 I actually don't think that's an unreasonable prediction in that folks will navigate towards the least expensive thing they can buy. But I think the thing that's important to qualify that with is, well, what is the thing they can buy? What I mean by that is there's going to be two competing dynamics. There's going to be availability. So it's actually, we're beginning to see this now, but it's a huge amount of supply compression. So what was historically the most affordable form of carbon is now beginning to become more expensive. And we're going to have this kind of simultaneous effect of these human engineered solutions as they traverse the cost curve becoming less expensive. Are we actually expecting their meat in the middle at some point in like 2030 effectively? Where the thing that's the cheapest today won't exist in five or 10 years.
28:00 Speaker 00 And the most expensive thing today will be far more competitive. So it's kind of that dynamic of, okay, what is the lowest cost thing? And where is it going to end up? There's a huge amount of speculation on where that's going to land. Most numbers are between 50 to $200 per ton. So even today, there's a huge amount of variability. But for context, there's even more variability on Patch today where the least expensive thing is around $15 per ton and the most is a thousand. So that's a much wider brand and it's going to be expensive titan over time. Now, the other piece is price is the only thing that's important if you view carbon as a commodity, which we firmly believe that it is not. So if you're thinking about commodities like soybeans, for example, not futures or derivatives based on commodities, but rather be purchasing on the commodity itself, there's not that much variability.
28:44 Speaker 00 Because maybe the geography it grows by, or maybe the specific genus or species of soybean, but there's actually not that much variance. But if you look at tons of carbon, there's a massive amount of variance that really is what drives the price, whether it's the underlying technology type, the vintage, so that'll be the year that the actual credit is delivered. People typically buy both historically sequestered carbon as well as future commitments to kind of buy their way in line, the maturity of the technology, the geography of the technology, the underlying durability, which is how long is that positive environmental effect lasts for. Depending on your climate strategy and how you're going to tell a narrative on how you're achieving your particular climate strategy, that's going to actually dramatically filter down what you can actually buy.
29:25 Speaker 00 And so if you have a huge narrative around perhaps farmers or agriculture, you might index towards a set of inventory that's agriculture focused on the platform. Or if you're really focused on national excellence, if you will, maybe you want to make sure all the spending happens in your particular country. Right? And so depending on that segmentation, there's only going to be a certain amount of inventory available to you, and that's going to have a huge amount of price variability within it. And so it's not going to be just what's the most affordable option to me, because that's not going to typically fit within your sustainability strategy.
29:58 Steph Smith? Right.
29:59 Speaker 00 Now, within that kind of tearing down, I think it's fair to say people are going to want to go for the most cost competitive option, but that won't be the most cost competitive in many cases globally.
30:07 Steph Smith? Can you just clarify, on the spectrum, the lower end where you're speaking to something that's $15 a ton, what does that look like? Is that planting trees? Or what is that solution? And can we compare that to maybe an example from the $1,000 end? Just so we can have concrete examples for the audience to understand what those different solutions might look like.
30:28 Speaker 00 So a really great example of something that's giving the $15 to $20 per ton range is something like greenhouse gas destruction. So like chlorofluorocarbon destruction or methane destruction, which are two other types of greenhouse gases that get talked about less often, but that have, in the case of chlorofluorocarbons, 300 to 350 times the global heating potential, and in the case of methane, 25 times the global heating potential, one molecule of carbon to outside. So said plainly, one molecule of carbon dioxide versus one molecule of this other type of greenhouse gas, the carbon dioxide is far less potent from a global heating potential, but there's far more of it getting emitted than in the atmosphere. So in that case, that's a form of emission abatement. So you might have an old mine that falls beneath regulations where the EPA says you
31:12 Speaker 00 can only emit a certain amount of methane, it falls beneath that, they're allowed to emit it. And so how do you actually prevent those emissions from getting emitted in the first place? It's by using some sort of climate finance. On the more expensive end of the spectrum, maybe something like direct air capture, which are basically these large fans that suck in ambient air from outside and blow it through some sort of reactant. Typically, it's either some sort of liquid or solid, and CO2 will stay behind in various forms depending on the type of direct air capture process it is, depending on the type of chemistry that's happening. And pure primarily nitrogen and oxygen and like a little bit of argon will come out at the end.
31:48 Steph Smith? I wanted to ask specifically on durability. Is there any sort of guarantee or how does Patch position that with the buyers? Are you telling them, okay, we are actually guaranteeing that this carbon stays out for one year? I know some of the technologies say that they can keep the carbon out of the atmosphere for hundreds, if not thousands of years. So of course, there's no way that you can sell that with a guarantee, but I'm curious to know how you're representing that to the customer and how they can have certainty to some degree that what they're buying, if they are, I assume, paying more in some cases for these longer term solutions. So how are you positioning that and how are you thinking about that?
32:30 Speaker 00 So the core element with this is really transparency in the ecosystem and really being very clear about what we do know and what we don't know and what evaluations have been run on the underlying projects and which have not been. And so in the case of durability, that's typically coming from some sort of third party standard or evaluator that's actually evaluating the carbon project. So Patch actually does not do that. So in order to get onboard onto the platform, you have to get evaluated by a third party. And then that data. That does both durability, but also comes with a bunch of other data related to kind of the real and verifiability of the underlying project, gets pulled into patch and standardized. The guarantee, if you will, actually falls in the standard in that case.
33:11 Speaker 00 But if we are given information that is untrue by the supplier, so the supplier misleads Patch or misleads a buyer intentionally, then Patch will actually get involved. So in order to actually list on the platform, we have to go through basically an onboarding assessment as well as sign up on a series of indemnities, which is basically saying, if you break this rule, these are the repercussions associated with breaking that particular rule, which is why people like working with Patch, right? It's because there are more guardrails in place rather than maybe a traditional broker, which is once the transaction is done, the broker washes their hands clean and the buyer is left responsible for the outcome.
33:46 Steph Smith? That seems really important because there are so many solutions out there. And I know you're also relying on third parties, as we talked about, for some of that verification. But it seems really important that if people are investing in these services to remove carbon, that they're actually getting what they're expecting.
34:02 Speaker 00 Absolutely. It's absolutely critical. But I think it's also important to understand that, and we talk about this a lot of the time, we need actually attempt thousands of technologies or solutions because only hundreds are going to work and tens are going to truly scale. And so there are going to be technologies that don't work. And like really understanding like which types of technologies have R and D risk and are contingent versus what types of technologies have matured and have an established operating history is actually really, really important. So that's actually laid out in the platform to help people understand, well, okay, do I want to work with someone that's operated for three decades or do I want to operate with an upstart? Because there's a huge number of upstarts working on some really novel and exciting technology, but as an upstart ourselves, startups are inherently more risky than a company with 30 years of operating history. And so it's really important to understand that nuance.
34:47 Speaker 00 And so I think it's absolutely critical, but I think when you start dealing in absolutes, especially in absolutes, when it comes to chemistry and natural systems, which are always operated on distributions of probability, I think that's when you can get into a situation where people are overcommitting themselves. So I think it's really important to understand that this is chemistry. Chemistry by default falls on a distribution, even resonance time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere falls on a distribution. Right? Where there's some molecules get admitted to chemistry and get taken out immediately by the biosphere. And there are some that linger for 150 years. And really understanding the fact that everything is a distribution. Sometimes it's normal, sometimes it's soluble, so there's many types of distributions is really important.
35:27 Steph Smith? Yeah, I like that. And I think that shows, I guess, the additional value add that Patch gives as a platform. Because a lot of this information is not clear to the layman, right? They wouldn't know what those distributions look like. They wouldn't know what verification services to use with these different suppliers. So I think it's clear that there is a value add there. Now, I want to understand a little bit more about how Patch makes money on the other end of that. So how are you currently making money today? And do you see this evolving in a way as the industry itself evolves over the next few years?
36:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's a great question. So we make money in two ways. The first is through take rate, like most marketplaces, right? So it's actually percent of volume to the platform. Something that's a little bit different about Patch is we actually only charge take rates to buyers and not to sellers. So that's piece number one. And the second piece is actually we use a platform fee, which looks like more of a subscription model. Where you pay a monthly or annual fee. And that's going to really depend on what types of features, functionality, API usage you're actually putting through the platform. I don't see the shape of Patch's business model changing materially from those two dimensions. I do see like the magnitude of those two numbers changing. Well, for like enterprise clients, typically there's take rate compression and platform fee expansion.
36:42 Speaker 00 For smaller companies, typically inverse, where you don't want to fix cost per year, but you're okay still making a higher take rate. So I expect that kind of SaaS and variability within those two dimensions. But the overall shape of the business model, I don't expect to change for the foreseeable future.
36:55 Steph Smith? Is there any risk that if these technologies do go down the cost curve substantially? As we've seen with many technologies, that Patch having a business model functioning off of take rate. Actually loses the revenue growth that you might expect. You know what I mean? You're kind of battling against that cost curve in a way. Because I assume, and let me know if I'm wrong, the companies that are on the buy side are deciding how much carbon to buy based on, let's just say, their net zero goals. They're not saying, we're allocating a million dollars to this. They're saying, we need to remove X number of tons from the atmosphere based on the carbon that we're contributing. Is that correct in terms of the way to think about how buyers are determining how much to spend?
37:40 Steph Smith? And then if so, again, returning to this idea of the technologies going down the cost curve, is there a scenario where actually Patch loses its revenue growth potential because of those reductions?
37:53 Speaker 00 The answer actually depends on the type of customer you're referring to because like an enterprise, for example, has a little bit more of a rigid budget exercise, which if they're making some sort of net zero, remember, they actually will probably be allocating a fixed dollar amount that they're prepared to spend annually, or maybe even a percent of revenue or profit. And then that'll basically inform what can they afford per ton, and then that'll inform what they buy. And so what we've seen is typically what they can afford per ton is typically on a scale of, the average price per ton bottom Patch is about $70 today. The terminal price per ton of all the different technologies, that's actually within the range we were talking about already, right? It was that 50 to 200, and maybe it goes up a little bit, maybe it's a little bit lower, but it's kind of in that ballpark.
38:35 Speaker 00 And so what we actually expect and what we've seen is people who have a lower price per ton budget are typically spending on Patch. And then as they decarbonize, keeping their total gross budget fixed and ratcheting up their price per ton budget. So they're actually moving up on what they're prepared to pay per ton as they decarbonize. And when you think about going down the cost curve, that's actually the most beneficial thing a lot of these technologies can do to drive a larger gross amount of spend. A lot of enterprises are actually very price inelastic, where they cannot afford to pay more than $60, $70, $80 per ton for one unit of carbon. So as the folks in the $500, $600, $700 range come down to like $200, the amount of spend on their particular product is actually going to go up dramatically.
39:20 Steph Smith? All of that is to say, you're very confident in the Patch business model. Let's take a step back and just talk about the industry as a whole. So we are seeing many different entities. Come into the carbon removal ecosystem, as you said, regulation has played a role here. Public sentiment has played a role here, but really this is a moment for carbon removal, or at least it feels that way. And this ecosystem is evolving every day. So how do you view Patch's role within that wider ecosystem? And how do you see that also evolving with time?
39:49 Speaker 00 It's still very, very early days for the broader ecosystem. Like, we're not even spending the right order of magnitude. Actually, we're off by two orders of magnitude on like annual CDR spend to actually hit our kind of five to 10 gigatonne goal at $100 a ton. So we have a lot, a lot of work ahead of us. So like, it does feel like maybe the starting gun has gone off, if you will. But this is a 100-meter race. I don't know if we're even out of the blocks yet. People haven't even stood up straight. So we have a lot of work ahead of us. As far as the role we think Patch can play, when you have markets that get really, really big very, very quickly, there's a lot of information complexity and a lot of operational complexity associated with that. And software is okay in managing operational complexity, but really, really good at managing information complexity.
40:32 Speaker 00 And so that's really what we view our role as being, where we are not actually going to be setting up the frameworks or the verification standards. We're going to be meeting all the nonprofit, the NGO, and the kind of regulatory communities in order to enable that. But what software and Patch is going to be really good at is, once that framework is put into place, operationalizing that and scaling that with the kind of both buying and supply side reach that we already have and will continue to grow is where we really view our role coming in. So anyway, where it makes it easier for a buyer to understand what they should be doing, a seller to understand what they should be doing, or making sure a regulator is having their rules abided by or respected is really what we view Patch's role as. It's really the underlying piping, if you will, of a very fast-growing market.
41:18 Steph Smith? Yeah, and one facet of a fast-growing market or one indicator is that there are just so many problems to be solved. And so it sounds like Patch is already focused on solving many of those. But as you're deep within this industry, I'm curious to know if there are other Areas in the infrastructure required that you're noticing as opportunities and perhaps things that Patch isn't going after, are there things that you're like, wow, this is really missing and this is an opportunity for other builders to get involved?
41:46 Speaker 00 I think the biggest piece is understanding how to do insurance, actually, that Patch will not do, but I think is really important because that's going to be what actually enables a lot of folks to take on meaningful R and D risk and traverse Oscar is going to be through some sort of financial engineering and insurance of the underlying project. So you imagine a world where I'm a corporate and I have some sort of net zero commitments and in 2025, you know, today is 2022 or 2023 and 2025, I'm prepared to make a bet on an upstart or maybe a promising technology, folks who just come out of some lab and they're building some sort of pilot facility. How do you build an instrument that enables that buyer to take that risk, but not to bear all of the risk on their own? And I think it was probably an opportunity for insurance or reinsurance to be had here
42:31 Speaker 00 because, you know, expert remodels are actually pretty good at predicting the outcomes of some of these things. And that's certainly not something Patch would do because that kind of the economics and kind of structure of the business don't really make sense in that way. But I think that would actually be really, really compelling because that's something that's prevented a lot of startups from actually diving in where they're kind of stuck with the technologies they know and love, if you will, because they don't want to be the ones that go first. And so how do you make going first easier? Because at the end of the day, even with the tools in front of us, we're going to make a lot of great progress, but we can make more progress more quickly if we continue to get more shots on goal. And how do you make it less scary for folks to, you know, take a step up to that soccer ball and swing hard and that one of those ways to have a slightly softer landing with some sort of insurance product?
43:14 Speaker 00 And that can come in the form of getting paid out either with straight up cash, so what you've actually spent on, that's a different form of carbon removal, or in an in the kind type of payout where you're actually getting carbon credits or tons from a similar shape type of carbon removal developer.
43:32 Steph Smith? Do you see other financial instruments? Like, I can almost imagine, not an ETF, but more so bundling of technologies. You know, if you were to want to invest in, let's say, direct air capture, and there are many companies doing that. Do you foresee some sort of instrument that would allow you to, as you're saying, hedge that bet? And say, hey, I think this technology is going to work, but I don't know which company is going to succeed within that realm. Do you see products like that also becoming important or necessary?
44:00 Speaker 00 So it depends on what we want the outcome to be. Is it really just spreading, kind of, your purchases across a bunch of folks? In which case, you could actually do that with Patch, where people can build portfolios and kind of not put all their eggs in one basket, if you will. If you're referring to if those other two providers, for example, don't work out, or one doesn't work out the other to pick up this slack, then that might require a little more financial engineering. If you think back to how a lot of utilities, like Wind and Solar, got off the ground, this actually typically came in the form of having buyers to last resort, as well as taking equity positions in the underlying projects themselves. And so I could potentially see a world where infrastructure funds lean in here a little bit more, and then start saying, hey, you know, I'll be left to remedy this problem, but if you end up defaulting, I'm going to own 10% or 20% of you.
44:44 Speaker 00 Either structured equity or kind of SPV-type model there. I could see that happening as well, because it's precedent for when PVs were far less of a good business model 15 years ago.
44:54 Steph Smith? Yeah, it'll be very interesting to see how some of this evolves, because I think there's the obvious solutions that need to be in place, and then there's always the non-obvious companies that arise in, again, one of these really important moments, one of these industries, as you said, at the very starting line, or at least it feels that way. Let's wrap up with a general question just around, as someone who is deeply involved in this field, who's creating within it, what makes you hopeful, given the fact that we are at those initial starting blocks? Are there early signs that make you really hopeful about maybe the next five, 10 years that others can draw from?
45:28 Speaker 00 Honestly, I think the biggest source of hope is actually seeing the kind of initial cohort of, call it thousand to two thousand people working on this particular problem. I think this renewed excitement and kind of inflow of people I actually find really, really exciting. There's been some folks who historically have been highly under-resourced, doing a lot of research and work in this ecosystem for the last, in some cases, two decades. But it's been stuck on a bench, just been stuck in the field and not really actually productionized and operationalized. And seeing all these really fantastic, talented people come from really incredible companies, say, hey, I actually want to spend all my time on this particular problem is actually the greatest source of hope I actually have. I'm a big advocate of like, if you actually just get, in case the climate changes, I'd make a hundred million people rowing in the same direction.
46:13 Speaker 00 But however many people you need to row in the same direction, if you're just focused on a particular problem, I can't think of very many problems where everyone was aligned and focusing on something for a decade or two decades and that thing wasn't solved, actually. And so that's the thing that I'm the most blessed on. Maybe fusion is one that's kind of left people down a little bit, but I think a lot of things have actually turned out to be comparable by human ingenuity and I really don't see this being any different. So having that initial strong cohort, founding markets, if you will, I think is really important because that's going to be all those talented people, know other talented people and will pull more people into the ecosystem. And so that makes me very optimistic.
46:51 Steph Smith? I could not agree more. We did an initial episode with Mark on this topic, on why technology still matters. And that was a reoccurring theme, that there really hasn't been very many, if any, examples in history where just a mass of people who are excited about something get together and try to solve it. I think the one example that he could come up with was alchemy, so trying to produce gold. But I mean, in terms of the present day, there aren't many examples of a ton of smart people coming together to try to solve something and not succeeding. It's typically just a matter of time. So I think that's a good place to end off on. Brendan, thank you so much for walking us through what Patch does and the carbon removal ecosystem at large. I think it's fascinating to see so much being built.
47:36 Steph Smith? And I think one really important aspect of it is what Patch is doing and the infrastructure. A lot of people focus on the solutions, but there is this infrastructure layer that needs to be built. So thanks again for taking the time.
47:46 Speaker 00 Awesome. Thank you so much, Alex and Steph. Really appreciate it.
47:52 Steph Smith? Thanks for listening to the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend. We also recently launched on YouTube at youtube.com/A16Z underscore video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time.
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