Pod Insights Equity Podcast Here for influencer-branded mac and cheese About this episode Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week under the guidance of Chris and Grace, meaning that we were running full-strength for our roundup of this super busy week.
Before we hop into the topics, you can follow the show on Twitter -- all the cool kids do! -- and keep in mind that on Mondays Equity provides a short kickoff to the week, we chat a single topic on Wednesdays, and Fridays are when we go through the full week. Make sense? Hell yeah:
Fiveable
Cobalt raised $2.8 million to help creators build and sell more stuff. As part of our continuing focus on creators more broadly, we had a few questions!
Found came out of stealth with $32 million in total funding from GV, Atomic and Define Ventures. The startup is focused on "weight care management" and it's notable that the co-founder of Atomic, which incubated this company, also co-founded hims and hers -- which also has a telehealth component. Found's new CEO is the former COO of Bumble, who drafted its S-1 while getting chemo treatment for stage 3 breast cancer.
From there we dug into trends! First up was the trend of startups going full-stack, which we kicked off with a look at AngelList's new Stack -- har har -- product. It's a bit like what Carta and Stripe offer, which gave us some good angles to chat about the news from.
Next up was consolidation, which echoed our first conversation. Discussing a recent deal in the RPA space, the Equity team made predictions about which sectors in the startup world are the most likely to see consolidation in the coming quarters.
And we closed with climate tech, a startup niche that could bring a small sliver of hope to our heating planet.
WITTY CONCLUSION
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
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Transcript 0:10 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's venture capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. My name is Alex Welham and I'm joined today by the Friday crew. I have Natasha Moskrennis here. Natasha, hello. How was your week?
0:23 Speaker 01 My week is good. This is the least stressful part of it, though. So now I am peaking.
0:28 Speaker 00 I just got, I just got Twitter shamed by Frank Shaw of Microsoft into catching up on DMs. If you want to know how I'm doing. We also have Mary Ann Azaveto. Mary Ann, hello. And same question to you.
0:37 Speaker 02 I'm actually doing great, Alex. Thank you. It's been a good week.
0:41 Speaker 00 I don't think you're allowed to say that on the podcast.
0:43 Speaker 02 You never be very negative the entire time.
0:46 Speaker 00 That's a first, actually. I don't think anyone's ever said that before. Okay, well, we're breaking new ground today, guys, but there's a lot to get into. We have three funding rounds that we're all very excited about. And then we have three themes. So in the funding round world, fiveable, cobalt, and found, not the podcast, found the company, found turns out. And then we're going to riff on some angel list news, what it means to kind of go full stack or horizontal in the modern startup world. We're going to talk about consolidation in the RPA space and what that may signal for other startup categories. And then we're going to talk about something that's very depressing, but could be quite nice, which is climate tech and how maybe startups will save our bacon. Maybe not. We'll have to see. Anyways, we're going to kick off with fiveable. Natasha, this was an ed tech company I loved. Tell the people what's going on.
1:26 Speaker 01 Yeah. So this is a Milwaukee based startup, which already makes it pretty cool. They just raised 10 million in a series A to become, per the founder, the hallways of the educational internet. So put differently, they're basically trying to be like a social learning space for high schoolers to come hang out, study together, talk about things that they can't find peers to talk about with people across the country or globe even, all in an online space, Discord in some ways.
1:52 Speaker 00 That's what I was thinking about. But Mary Ann, you're the resident parent of the three of us. So thinking about your children, how stoked would they be to have digital hallways with which to bully one another?
2:00 Speaker 02 You know, honestly, I'm skeptical about this model. I'm not sure if it's going to work. I guess it really depends on the student. You know, there's a lot of them are finally getting back in person. And I'm not sure about this idea of a virtual hallway. I'm not sure I get it. Like, is that going to be a model that will be successful in the long run?
2:19 Speaker 01 So what I just described, Fiveable being is their moonshot. Where they are today is there a place where students go to study together for exams. So growing up, I would get on Skype with my best friend, stay on all night, just for moral support to practice AP US History flashcards. They're trying to create like a more focused space where you kind of do like sprints with each other. It's kind of trying to take advantage of like already existent study hacky culture that happens with high school students.
2:49 Speaker 02 But what's different from getting on Discord? Just wondering.
2:52 Speaker 01 I think it's the fact that you can connect with students all over the world. One student will host like a seven hour AP US History. I keep thinking of APUSH because that was like my most triggering subject growing up. They'll create like a study room around that for seven hours. I think it's kind of trying to be camaraderie and focused, honestly.
3:12 Speaker 00 Well, reading your story about the company, Natasha, Fiveable started off life as an AP-focused service. And if you don't know, if you're not in America, what the hell is AP? It stands for Advanced Placement. It's kind of like smart kid classes in high school. And then there's a series of tests you can take if you're a dweeb. I was one such dweeb. And you can get extra little bonus points on your college application resume if you are desperate to find some way to stand out. What you actually end up doing is fitting in with everyone else who took AP classes. But hey, and AP US History, a class that I also took, is a classic of the genre. It's, it was a less crappy education on our national history, if you will. Natasha, the company they bought was called Hours. Who built that?
3:48 Speaker 01 So it was the 16 year old. His name is Calix Wong. And students that were already on Fiveable were talking about Hours all the time. They acquired it in May. And that's when the co-founder Amanda told me she realized that before they were having like teachers come on the platform and like give lessons to students. They realized after acquiring hours that students just wanted to hang out with other students in a space that felt built for them. So I think, Mary Ann, you're spot on with being curious or even like wondering if there's a huge difference between Fivable and Discord. I think the difference may just be like the DNA of like students feeling like they're special and they have a place that's like branded for them. I don't know if that's optimistic, though.
4:27 Speaker 02 I mean, I think, I think, yeah, it sounds cool. Like in theory, it's cool. I'd love to see how how it plays out.
4:33 Speaker 00 As a data point on this, we should move on, but there are 7.3 million students that have joined the platform, which, you know, that's material traction. So they've done a good job of picking up their demographic. So I guess points to them, Natasha. Is that number going up quickly? Do we know?
4:46 Speaker 01 It's going up quickly. And I think even the more interesting metric, and another reason why it maybe differentiates from other places you can go to hang out online, since there are so many, is that 50 students are interns at Fivable right now, paid interns notably. So they're literally giving their opinions for product decisions all the time. I would love to see more of that because so much of ed tech is adults talking to adults about what students want. So more students in ed tech, please.
5:11 Speaker 02 That's a great strategy. I like that.
5:13 Speaker 00 All right, let's move on and talk about Cobalt. Cobalt's a company we covered this week. They just raised $2.8 million in seed. And the headline from TechRunch, written by our own Amanda Silverling, was that it's going to help creators launch products. So as everyone's favorite expert in all things creator and e-commerce, I had to get a little help with this one. So I talked to Amanda about the company's business model. It's going to take a small cut from connecting influencers to people who can help them build products and also take a small cut from experts who help creators. So it's kind of sitting in between people who can make stuff and people who want to make stuff. We have a couple of questions about exactly where it's charging and how much and how big the cuts will be and so forth. But it's not incredibly expensive and it fits into the idea that people who have online followings don't just want to promote products from other companies. They want to
5:58 Speaker 00 have kind of their own stuff, merch, if you will, at a higher level perhaps. But that's kind of the general idea. This feels, this is going to sound kind of weird, a little bit a few years ago, like when kind of Instagram was was blowing up. But at the same time, maybe that just means it's mainstream now. And that's where the influencer economy is kind of going.
6:13 Speaker 01 And one of their decisions that they've made is really Not focusing too much on fast fashion or merch as one of their products, which to me is like the more interesting part of what they're doing. Like they're trying to be a little bit more ambitious in the kinds of products that you'll buy from influencers. Some of my favorites have done everything from skincare products to like mac and cheese brands. So I do see a market for this and I guess I like that it's a little bit more creative than a sweatshirt with a creator's favorite motto on it.
6:40 Speaker 02 I like the idea of just giving people a chance to kind of monetize ideas. And it's not that easy to do that, right? So giving them a way to do it that's simpler and not so complicated. You know, there's an inclusion component there when you think about it.
6:53 Speaker 01 One person who's I think has killed it from creators, starting their own products is Emma Chamberlain. She created her own coffee brand because in each of her videos, she just drinks a lot of coffee. That was like one of her just like quirks, like five cups of coffee a day. She's not even 21 yet, I'm pretty sure. Her doing coffee felt really in line with who she is as a person. The danger with Cobalt or where Cobalt, maybe I have to draw the line a little bit is like, we don't want everyone to be making coffee brands or we don't want everyone to be, I don't know, creating skincare brands. Like, how do we make sure it's in tune with what a creator naturally would sell anyways?
7:27 Speaker 00 And then also, how do you differentiate? Because if everyone wants to make a thing, like a candle, for example, there's only so much kind of remixing of the things that exist in the, in the world of like private label products you can work on.
7:37 Speaker 01 So true.
7:37 Speaker 00 And so I'm going to be curious to see how this shakes up. But raised 2.8 million, so has capital behind it. It has let in some creators and is about to open the door to more of them. So I think we'll have a better idea of kind of where the business is going. I think it's a cool idea, but I think I'm slightly too old to enjoy it. And I'm trying to not let that color my overall perspective, but founder is L. Shelley Black. This is a data point because you're going to look her up and we will have to see. And Natasha, before the next thing though, we have a little bit of a PSA.
8:02 Speaker 01 So for everyone listening in, just a trigger warning. If you are sensitive to conversations about weight loss or have a tricky relationship with eating disorders, feel free to fast forward. We're going to talk about Angelus in a few minutes. But first let's talk about a story you wrote, Mary Ann, called Found.
8:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, so Found is this company that's just come out of stealth. It's been around for about 18 months. Incubated out of Atomic Venture Studio that Jack Abraham started. Found is focused on what they describe as weight care management. They claim to be focused on body positivity, holistic weight care, and note that they use the word care as opposed to loss. But yet they do tout that they've already helped hundreds of thousands of people lose over 200,000 pounds in about an 18-month period.
8:47 Speaker 00 And that was my first struggle reading this was if you're going to talk about weight care and then your non-GAAP metric is number of pounds lost. It does seem to be slightly dissonant, Mary Ann, but let's presume good intent. What's the difference between weight care, if you will, and weight loss?
9:03 Speaker 02 Found combines a few different things. Clinicians, it has a telehealth component. You can get a prescription if deemed necessary. There's a community, so you can talk to other people who are also trying to manage their weight. I was trying to understand, how does this differ from Noom? Which seems to have a very similar premise behind it. And from what I can tell, I think that one of the biggest differentiators is the telehealth component. Found has a separate entity that provides the telehealth component. By the way, that's, that's just a customary thing, FYI.
9:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, a bit like having a segregated data center in China. Some things have to be kind of broken into two bits so everyone's happy.
9:40 Speaker 02 Right.
9:40 Speaker 00 That was probably not the best analogy, now that I've said it out loud, but it has to do. One data point that caught my eye, Mary Ann, when I was reading the story is that Abraham said that 70% of the US population is overweight or obese, and that number is increasing. So essentially, this is a way to help people and also to arrest a kind of societal issue we have around, around being overweight.
9:59 Speaker 02 There's some positive aspects to what they're, what they're touting. And Sarah, the new CEO, is very enthusiastic. I really, really loved her, so I think it'll be interesting to watch this company.
10:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I definitely, just to add on, like, sometimes the biggest disruption is just like thinking of something in a more modern, thoughtful way. And I feel like with weight management, viewing numbers, I just blogged about this on my Substack, about like viewing numbers as like a milestone to hit versus something to subtract from yourself is like such a powerful concept. And the more someone can like articulate it to you earlier on, when you're trying to lose weight or get healthy, the best it is because growing up, like all you think of is like scale, get less, instead of like distance, get further. I love that they're framing it in that way, and I think that content could go super far.
10:44 Speaker 00 I'm also very sympathetic to helping people end up with a healthier body that they're happier with because back in, you know, especially mid 2016, when I reached my personal peak of out of shape and overweight, life was just hard. Like everything was harder. And, you know, over the last, I guess, five years, oh my gosh, it's been ages. I've worked a lot on that. And just having some functional strength and slightly better cardio and weighing a little bit less has been just huge to my day to day happiness. And so that that makes me very excited. But I'm going to be fascinated to see what else they can layer on to caloric control and increased movement. Because anything that's going to improve your cardiovascular health and, and also help you lose some weight is going to include those two components.
11:25 Speaker 00 That's why weight loss is hard. So I'm hopeful they can do cool stuff and get people motivated. But like, it's still going to be hard work. There's no easy.
11:33 Speaker 02 Absolutely. It's not like a magic pill and all of a sudden you've lost 20 pounds. But combination of things appealed to me, the concept, the people involved, quite frankly, I feel like in their backgrounds, really make it impressive. GV co-led their latest round, which is a $24 million Series A. They've nabbed the VP of Product from Headspace as their Chief Product Officer. So it's interesting and I'm looking forward to watch their progress, I guess, is what it might be or might not be. But I'll be paying attention.
12:02 Speaker 01 Totally. I know you will be. I mean, I trust you to be on this story. And I feel like in general, what it takes to launch a venture backable business is these days is a conversation we're surrounded by all the time, which is why Angelist was such an exciting story to write this past week. So I will self introduce the fact that I wrote this story, if that's okay.
12:20 Speaker 00 I was gonna throw to you and then you just grabbed the baton and handed it to yourself.
12:25 Speaker 01 To myself. But I wrote a story this week about Angelist launching a suite of founder-focused products. Traditionally, lost me talking about Angelist on the podcast, there's a lot about their investor services. They are the people behind rolling funds, for example. So them venturing into the founder world and doing everything from how to end to end incorporate your business, how to put on business banking, and how to deal with all the legal stress of starting it was kind of a surprise to people in my DMs on Twitter. Even I'm sure Angelus, if you asked them 12 months ago, if you're going to expand into founders, I mean, how did you guys feel when you saw Angelus, something that literally has angel in the name, go to founders?
13:03 Speaker 00 Surprise was my first thing. And then my second thought was, oh, are they taking on Carta? And then my third thought was, oh, are they taking on Stripe Atlas? Cause it seems like there's now a couple of things out there that will help people go from idea to successfully incorporating a company with proper documentation and the avoidance of easy legal mess ups, you know, like getting the right paperwork in place, right evaluations, equity and so forth. Like there's now a couple of tools that do this, coupling it to Angelus, where there's already investors and founder activity. Ah, it made some sense to me. I mean, that wasn't that shocked.
13:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's what I would say. I would say I was surprised, but at the same time, like, it's not a bad idea. And you know, whether or not they're going to be able to compete with Carta, I don't know. Maybe it's different founders they're going to be appealing to.
13:45 Speaker 00 I'm curious about that, you know, because when I think about Carta, Stripe and Angelus, it's kind of people in our world, you know, I don't know if, and Angelus probably is the most inside of our little bubble versus Carta kind of in the middle and maybe Stripe's the most mainstream, just given how broadly it's used. So I wonder if Stripe is in the best position to expand to Pi, if you will, Mary Ann, and these other two are more kind of like concentric circles that are smaller, if that makes sense?
14:10 Speaker 02 Yeah. And you know what? There's a lot of founders out there. So it's one of those, doesn't have to be a winner takes all categories. I think another thing that's interesting about what Angelus is doing is like, where everything is fintech these days and because that's what they're now also becoming a fintech, right?
14:25 Speaker 01 Totally. I mean, I don't know if I explained it properly yet, but the announcement called Angelus Stack is getting into filing paperwork, consultation, banking tools, Mary Ann, like you're saying, so they're creating deposit accounts with interest and debit cards, and they're doing a cap table tool, which to me was this huge sub tweet at all these companies because it's like, oh, no, no, no, your entire business is yet a feature of Angelus. It's one thing we'll provide you. And when I asked their CEO about how they're going to compete with a company like Brex or Ramp in fintech, they were like, there's a lot of creative attempts being made at point solutions, but founders want one place for everything. And I don't know. I mean, how do you guys think? Do you guys think founders want one place for everything? Obviously, the valuations of these other companies mean that a feature is a big business.
15:10 Speaker 00 Well, look, let's rely on cliche because it is Friday morning. And I'll just say this, all of technology is just bundling and then unbundling and then bundling again and then unbundling. Like Angel List took on a particular slice of the venture capital world, did a good job deconstructing that, and then ended up building a product that bundled investors together into one place. Now it's building tools that are going to allow founders to do quite a lot in one place, competing with the point solutions. This is going to be a thing we talk about a lot, but I will say, if I was a person who had limited resources, AKA someone who was starting a business and needed this kind of help, I think a more holistic solution makes sense.
15:46 Speaker 01 And it's free right now.
15:48 Speaker 00 It's free?
15:48 Speaker 01 It's free right now, minus the money you've just spent to incorporate your business, which is like 500.
15:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I agree with Alex. Like if you're, you know, if you have everything available to you in one place, it just makes everything so much easier. I mean, you're already probably feeling very overwhelmed. But having said that, if the quality of this holistic offering is subpar, then it's not really going to matter, right? I mean, you've got to still prove it, it's still got to be good. But definitely, I think people love the idea of getting everything they need in one place for the most part.
16:16 Speaker 01 And to other dynamics in startups these days, venture is also going the full stack approach.
16:22 Speaker 00 So, look, so we were talking a lot about horizontalization and bundling in the prep meetings for this show. And one thing we have seen is venture capitalists go increasingly full stack. Venture capital firms are having funds for seed and growth and late stage. We're seeing VCs take on more and more services over time, not just recruiting, but also branding and marketing help and so forth. And so it seems that, you know, where there's capital pooling, there is a lot of work being done to expand services, which kind of undercuts the point solution argument from before, even though I agree with you in general, Natasha. That's my take. Marian, what are you seeing from the VC stack side of things?
16:57 Speaker 02 I think it's an interesting trend. We've talked about it, like some of these firms trying to do media or content, for example. I don't think I need to name the primary firm that's like kicked that off, or do I?
17:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, go for it.
17:11 Speaker 01 Do we give them, do we give them space or not?
17:15 Speaker 00 Oh, everyone knows, well, no, Marian, just say it.
17:19 Speaker 02 A16Z.
17:22 Speaker 02 Future, future site. I'm not sure what the goals are with that. And it feels a little bit like brand journalism and some conflicts of interest there, but I don't know, maybe founders love it.
17:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, maybe we'll see. There's this broader theme of consolidation, though, that we're talking about. And one place we saw that this week was actually in an acquisition from the UK. I'm going to talk about RPA for just a minute, and then we're going to get back to the theme here. But roll with me, everybody.
17:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:47 Speaker 00 RPA, robotic process auto. No, not you two. You two are stuck with me. I mean, everyone is listening to the show.
17:52 Speaker 01 I was like, I'm here for it. Okay, sure.
17:54 Speaker 00 You can't leave until I.
17:57 Speaker 00 Friends, RPA is robotic process automation. It's a method by which computers can take over rote tasks that humans do, like copy from this cell, drop into this invoice, hit submit, create file, like it can kind of do that for you. And you've probably heard of a company called UiPath. They blew up in the last couple of years doing this. They went public last year. Huzzah. One of the smaller players called Blue Prism just sold the private equity for just about 1.1 billion pounds. I don't know what that is in human currency, but it's probably about 1.25 billion euros, somewhere in there. Anywho, this is kind of fitting into our theme of consolidation. Because one thing that the three of us have seen is a lot of players in a lot of spaces.
18:36 Speaker 00 BNPL is one location. I would say Mary Ann Payments, especially B2B Payments, seems especially crowded these days. Banking as a service, but we're starting to see consolidation in this maturing market category. And so my question to you two is, where do you think we're going to see more startup consolidation in the coming quarters as kind of a prelude for all of our friends listening in?
18:56 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, I think there's no question that we'll see more consolidation in the fintech space. There's just too many fintechs out there. Let's face it. I mean, way too many. And a lot of them are doing very, very similar things. So they're either going to have to die or they're going to have to consolidate. One of the interesting things I'm seeing, though, within fintech and Ryan Lawler, one of our writers, covered it recently. It's not just incumbents buying up the startups or the fintechs, but there's fintechs now buying the incumbents, and I find that fascinating as well.
19:25 Speaker 00 Fintech startups are buying kind of like traditional players in the financial space.
19:29 Speaker 02 Yes, exactly. Which is fascinating, really, when you think about it.
19:33 Speaker 00 Okay, Natasha, over to you. And if you say ed tech, you get five points.
19:36 Speaker 01 I was gonna say ed tech, but then I'm gonna change it and say health, digital health, because a lot of digital health is selling to employers and I would say like 40%. Of my calls these days are just about how tired employers are of more point solutions getting pitched to them as benefits for their employees that they're desperately trying to cling on to. There's just so many different ways that startups are trying to like, I don't know, get into the few slots that employers provide. So there has to be some sort of like us stitching together that happens.
20:05 Speaker 00 A question about that. So to make sure I'm following, this would include companies like Carrot that does kind of fertility benefits for employers and they sell that as kind of like a point solution, if you will.
20:14 Speaker 01 Yeah. So like Carrot was the point solution. And then Maven, which we talked about on an episode a while ago, was the end to end solution. So it's doing Carrot as one of its features. And so Maven became a unicorn recently, and it was an example of, okay, finally employers don't have to go to each solution independently. They can go to one company that can do it all.
20:33 Speaker 00 So Maven is the startup that's bundling the unbundled startup point solutions into a corporate friendly basket, but it's not buying them. It's just consolidating them.
20:45 Speaker 01 Yes, exactly. It's consolidating them.
20:48 Speaker 00 It sounds in the fintech world, like we're seeing kind of like the small fish eat the whale. And then in the health tech space, it sounds more like we need to have kind of aggregation of point solutions. But all this just goes to show to how many startups are out there these days, how many technology products, because all this money we've been talking about is going to, it seems, more startup creations. We have more net companies out there competing for attention dollars and so forth. I mean, it's
21:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. I mean, as one investor likes to remind me all the time, there are more exits that happen through acquisitions than there are through IPOs. So we should get more excited about acquisitions.
21:25 Speaker 00 That investor should invest in more companies that go public. So then they're not cross with us when we cover IPOs. That's my take there.
21:30 Speaker 01 It was. It was a little bit of a pointed comment. I agree.
21:34 Speaker 00 Well, I'll make that investor a deal and I'm not going to bug you about who it is because we are recording. So I'll ask that.
21:39 Speaker 01 I'll tell you offline.
21:43 Speaker 00 I'll just say that, you know, I would love to cover more M and A transactions if they'll tell me anything.
21:49 Speaker 01 Yeah. Like how much, how much are they paying for the company? Like was it a soft landing or a wave? It was like, I mean, we can't just cover, hey, this company bought this company.
21:59 Speaker 00 Well, actually, you know, we could do, we could start doing one sentence posts.
22:04 Speaker 00 Just ship it.
22:05 Speaker 02 That's great.
22:06 Speaker 00 I mean, like, but Mary, you're dead on. I hate it when companies are like, we're acquiring this company and they're cool. How much of the staff are you keeping? We're not disclosing that. Are you going to integrate the products? We'll get back to you. What was the price? We're not going to tell you. I'm like, so what have you done? Like that? Why are you talking to me?
22:21 Speaker 01 Why a decision that hasn't even closed yet, probably?
22:24 Speaker 02 Yeah.
22:25 Speaker 00 All right, let's go ahead and put on our optimism caps, if you will, and talk a little bit about climate. Now, Natasha Kirsten from RTM wrote a baller piece. Tell the people what her takeaway and thesis was.
22:38 Speaker 01 She wanted to remind everyone, I would, I'm going to paraphrase here. She wanted to remind everyone that climate tech isn't just a thing that is bubbling up. It is probably going to be the conversation we're having for the next decade. And so in her story, she talked a lot about the tensions and a lot of the innovations that are coming that's going to make it more of a priority for every founder. I thought she did a really great job talking about how climate tech isn't just going to impact other climate tech startups, but it'll impact how healthcare companies work, how education companies work, even how fintech companies work. So a lot of that was just talking about how pervasive climate tech is today.
23:14 Speaker 02 One of the things that struck me in her piece is it sort of reminded me of AI or artificial intelligence where like everyone's claiming that they're an AI company. And I think that's what the VCs that she references say too, that like, it's so easy to say you're a climate tech company, but like, are you really? Like, can you prove it? Can you make a significant impact?
23:33 Speaker 00 You know, I almost want to flip that around and say, you don't have to be a pure play. If you can have a positive climate impact as part of your overall, your just normal business operations, that's great. I wouldn't call it climate tech, but I wouldn't say, don't try.
23:45 Speaker 02 No, no, don't try, but like, maybe just be careful about your claims. That's all.
23:50 Speaker 00 Or maybe, maybe don't not try. There you go.
23:52 Speaker 01 Yeah. Make it part of your, yes, don't not try. Part of your thought. That's what I meant.
23:57 Speaker 00 I led you astray. You were just, you were just saying what I said. And then I was like, wait a minute, that's the opposite of what we had in mind, actually.
24:02 Speaker 02 Thank you for reading my mind, Alex.
24:04 Speaker 00 No, no worries. Well, we're literally on Zoom right now. So I can actually see your eyes. One day, we're going to get back to doing video, everybody. I don't know when that's going to be, but it'll be the week I have to wear real shirts to the Recording. All right. We have a couple of startups in this space that we wanted to quickly touch on, just to give you guys examples of startups that are working in what we've considered the climate tech space. So Mary Ann, first up, I believe you have Fairmat.
24:26 Speaker 02 Fairmat's a French startup. It wants to create a new material based on recycled carbon fiber composite. Now, I'm not going to pretend that I completely understand what that means. But what I think is interesting about it is that they're saying that they're taking waste that would have just been dumped into a landfill and trying to make it a new material that they say is lightweight, is robust, it could be lighter than wood or metal, and that could offer a better carbon footprint compared to like some virgin materials.
24:53 Speaker 00 My question is, how much carbon fiber composite waste is there? Because carbon fiber is a famously expensive material. Just to give people an example, like, a lot of F1 cars are made of carbon fiber, because it's super light and super strong. But it's also super expensive. So, love this. Curious to see how much material there's going to be to use, but I like it. Natasha, another example we have is, I'm just gonna go ahead and roll with Semios here?
25:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, so they are helping farmers manage their crop yields and access data. I thought this story did a great job of reminding us that even though COVID was a lot of uncertainty, for people who are working on farms, like, uncertainty is just like a Tuesday. There are legit just storms that you can't predict, and weather conditions that are very hard to work with. So this technology is all about how to help them better navigate the storms.
25:41 Speaker 00 Yeah, no, I think it's well said, and you're dead on. Farming is incredibly hard, and part of the reason is because you can't control everything. And they just raised $100 million. So obviously, they're on to something here, because that's an enormous round for an ag tech company, a space that frankly, like everything else, we should pay more attention to, I guess.
25:58 Speaker 01 I think they're starting to hit, like, critical mass. A lot of these companies were raising and getting attention around the time that I started working on ed tech, and I had an option to go ed tech or ag tech. And I picked ed tech because I just knew the consumer brands more. But now ag tech is coming back, and I'm like, did I, I didn't make a mistake, but like, should I have also paid more attention? Probably.
26:17 Speaker 00 I think you nailed it because you you hopped on the ed tech bandwagon and then covid hit, which meant that you literally like you sat on a bus and in turn the bus was actually a race car. You know, like, I mean, it was a great beat for you last year. I will say ed tech is cool. One more company in the climate tech space that we're looking at is Drone Seed. They just raised a $36 million series A round and what they do is they shoot seed pucks out of drones to help reforest the planet. And there's there's nuance to this, but that's kind of the gist of it. And it's awesome. And I will just say, as a small boy, when I was in Cub Scouts, I took part in many a tree planting day. So I had done this by hand. And it sucks. You're out there in the middle of the woods and you know, it's hard to get there and it's muddy and it's gross. And apparently people don't want to do it very
27:02 Speaker 00 much and the pay isn't great for planting trees. So Drone Seed will send drones around that will repopulate forests for us. And given what's happened to California recently and the drought across the United States and other parts of the world, pretty important, you know, and it has drones. So how can you, how can you say no?
27:17 Speaker 01 I was gonna say, like, I feel like, I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but it's like, it feels like the startup of the week to me. I mean, like,
27:23 Speaker 00 We can say that.
27:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, okay, it's startup of the week. They raised a 36 million A round led by Social Capital and 776, which is Alexis Ohanian's new-ish fund. And they also got investment from Shopify, Spear Ventures, all these really interesting people and Ashley Mayer.
27:38 Speaker 00 Ashley Mayer, from, yeah, he used to run BoxComms?
27:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, and Glossier Comms.
27:43 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I met her back when she was originally at Box. Now she's doing something. What else, what is she doing now?
27:47 Speaker 01 I don't know. I don't know. But she's investing in Drone Seed, the startup of the week. And that is really exciting.
27:52 Speaker 00 Sadly, we have to go away now because the producers are telling us that we're out of time. But I would stay with you guys for the two hours if we could. But Mary and Natasha, as always, a distinct pleasure. Have a lovely weekend, everybody. Stay safe. And we'll see you on Monday. Bye.
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