Welcome back to Grid Connections, the podcast where we explore all things transportation, clean energy, and our power grid connecting all these systems together.
This week I'm on the road, but I'm thrilled to chat with Josh Dorfman, co-founder of Plantd the startup pioneer in carbon negative building materials from super fast growing
grass, and co-founder and host of Supercool, a media platform exploring the future of climate innovation.
In this episode, Josh dives deep into how he and his SpaceX team harness first principles thinking to produce stronger, lighter and greener alternatives to traditional wood
products.
We also talk about the importance of a consumer friendly approach to sustainable tech, covering everything from streamlined solar installations to how everyday homeowners can
effortlessly embrace cleaner, more efficient energy solutions.
We cover everything from how Plantd is revolutionizing building materials with carbon negative technology, why Supercool focuses on telling consumer driven stories about
climate and clean energy breakthroughs, real world examples from installing better HVAC systems at no upfront cost to creating demand response powerhouses that cut carbon and
boost profits.
Also some quick updates and announcements for this week and next.
I'll be at the EV Charging Summit in Expo in Las Vegas next week.
Let me know if you'll be there.
We'd love to meet up.
And I'm also recording a couple of new podcasts right from the summit.
So this week and next, expect probably just one episode each.
We'll get some fantastic content coming your way though straight from the event floor as I'll be recording some there.
Enjoy today's conversation.
Please share this episode with at least one other person who would enjoy these insights as well.
Plus, don't forget to leave a pause review on our podcast page.
It helps more curious minds find us.
And make sure to sign up for our brand new newsletter using the link in the show notes to stay plugged into the latest on clean energy, charging, and cutting edge climate
solutions.
With that, enjoy.
for those listening who may not be familiar, can you just kinda give a quick overview about Supercool and how it came to be.
Yeah, absolutely.
So about a year ago, I was just rolling out as the co-founder and CEO of a company called Plantd that makes carbon negative building materials.
And I started with a couple of guys from SpaceX and we had this thought, could we figure out a way to pull carbon from the atmosphere and turn that into something useful and
durable?
So we invented a way to commercially grow like this grass that kind of grows like bamboo and then mechanically harvest it.
and build a factory, actually a modular production line to turn this grass into like plywood or oriented strand board type product.
And then we got D.R.
Hoarding, the largest builder in the country to invest and buy our first 10 million panels.
yeah, so it kind of like three to four years rocket ship, so to speak, really exciting business.
And when I left about a year ago, kind of picked my head up after looking at construction and the building industry and home building.
It started asking like, well, what else is happening around climate innovation?
you know, what's the state of the industry, so to speak, or industries.
And what I started seeing was kind of.
You had a decade of technologies that had had, you know, this runway to move, go from pilot stage to commercial stage and now scale.
And so you had lots and lots of technologies that were, that were really starting to take off, cut carbon, boost the bottom line, make life better in the process.
had more cities.
embracing climate action and climate action plans and really turning themselves into living laboratories for change.
And of course, you had the tailwinds of the, you know, the IRA and the government, the money that the federal government was backing behind these different technologies and
other incentives and, you know, pools of capital coming from elsewhere.
And so it just seemed to me we're in this new era of climate solutions that are actually here scaling with a real business case behind them.
But yet a story that wasn't being fully told or appreciated.
So super cool really is that media company.
that aims to tell those stories, share the business case, really understand what are the innovations that enable these types of solutions to grow and scale, and kind of de-risk it
for other businesses and business people or policymakers who are saying, this climate's increasingly encroaching on my world.
I have to deal with this.
I'm not necessarily steeped in this, but now I can find things that are real, actually like deliver an ROI.
I could go bring the solution to my CEO.
And so we really shaped Supercool as this business to business media brand to deliver that kind of value.
That's great.
And I completely agree with you that it's something that's kind of much needed because over the years I've just seen so many great kind of products that appear and then kind of
slowly they're disappear, disappear overnight even.
And unfortunately just don't get the kind of visibility that they deserve.
So I think what to you is right now what we're seeing kind of like
stand out the most or like what would have been kind of some of the, is it really just the visibility that's a challenge or what, what to you is the thing that needs to be, really
kind of help these companies kind of stand out and get to that next level or specifically anything you look for when trying to cover a company on super cool.
Yeah, that's a, I appreciate the question.
I would say there's a few things.
What's, what's really top of mind is today, you know, we're having conversations with, well, maybe I would say it this way.
You know, we end up having a lot of conversations that move toward, you know, of course, electrification of buildings.
And when we're talking to companies, like we talked to this company called Butterfly, which is B-U-D-D-E-R-F-L-Y.
And this guy, Al Sabloui.
Anyway, not a climate guy.
I mean, that's not by background, really great entrepreneur.
And he started seeing this opportunity to build an energy as a service company, right?
Where he could say, okay, we're going to come into a restaurant and we're going to be able to replace all the old stuff, give you a new HVAC system, new refrigeration, really
modernize and upgrade.
And we're going to drive so much energy savings and there's incentives and we're going to put this financial stack together, right?
That we can build a really exciting business around this and share in the savings together, et cetera, et
So that's all well and good, but what Al did that was really interesting was he went to Popeyes, or he would go to six Popeyes or Sonics on Long Island.
He'd be like, have I got a deal for you, zero money down, I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse.
And so he goes into Sonic, gets six of them to agree, their energy bills, creates a better customer experience, and then.
Popeye's headquarters calls and is like, hey, we got 7,000 franchises, or we got thousands of, right, and he does it for McDonald's and KFC and Pizza Hut and he's everywhere.
And so he's grown his business from effectively zero stores to 7,000 stores in about five years.
And then that conversation goes to this next piece.
And I see this no matter what company we're talking to.
The next piece is, and I'll just say like, we talked to this company Brainbox AI just got acquired by Train, where they're using AI to like,
drive down HVAC costs and buildings by 25%, take over everything.
All these guys, once they start talking about like we get penetration, we're in thousands of buildings, now we're gonna create the world's biggest virtual power plant.
We're gonna control all this energy, right?
All this demand from the grid that we can now control, dial back, sell back to the grid if they need it.
And this is the massive, massive play.
And no matter what company we're talking to, it almost all goes to this point of demand response.
And I find that fascinating.
So that's something that's really top of mind for me, because I just see it over and over again across industries, people kind of seeing the same thing that is a huge financial
opportunity and hugely important for the future of the grid.
Yeah, that makes sense.
But I mean, that's a huge kind of realization to have what was there any one in particular that kind of made you kind of realize that's what it was or what was kind of the common
factor or use it just it just sounds like it just keeps coming up and up.
But I'm kind of curious if there was any one that really like made it stand out like, okay, this is what what we need to focus on.
Well, you know, it came up.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you.
So here's how we started thinking about it initially.
I think it was just even our second episode we'd launched last summer.
And, you know, we're trying to tell stories.
Also, one of the things that delights me is telling stories where this type of momentum is happening in places where you just wouldn't necessarily expect.
It wouldn't be
It's not left coast, right coast.
You just wouldn't necessarily anticipate that some of these places are really these hotbeds of innovation.
And I came across the story of how the utility in Utah, Rocky Mountain Power, was trying to avoid the situation that had happened to utilities in California by incentivizing home
solar to such a degree that now you had too much solar flowing onto the grid that you couldn't use it.
And a lot of that had to be curtailed, just wasted.
And so Rocking Pound and Power was trying to figure out, well, what are we going to incentivize?
And this is about five years ago, they said, you know what, we're going to pull back on the home solar incentives, but we're really going to improve and increase the battery
incentives.
And when they did that, because that's actually, we'd like to see homeowners put more batteries in their homes.
And if we could control those batteries, then maybe we don't have to fire up the natural gas peaker plants.
when everyone comes home at five o'clock at night and everyone's using energy and that's not just carbon, that's also cost, right?
Because to turn that thing on, right, drives the race.
And so like 90 % of the solar companies packed up and left the state when that happened.
But I'd read about this one company, ES Solar, like Eric, Sam, ES Solar, that was like, well, we're going to stick or like, we're kind of from here.
We don't really have anywhere else to go.
this is our market.
Right?
Like, I guess we got to figure out how to go sell batteries.
And they did really successfully.
And now like 96 or some odd percent of every battery that's sold connected to this Rocky Mountain Power, you know, essentially is a virtual power plant where they can control to
degree those batteries if they need that energy or dial it back, is installed by ES Solar.
They learned a ton.
They're now expanding across the, you know, the west of the western side of the state from this little company.
And that really got me thinking like, wow, what's so interesting here is when you align the incentives of the utility and kind of that intermediate, the solar or in this case,
grid battery storage company and the homeowner around the incentives, financial incentives to make this work.
You can really build some very powerful infrastructure and do what's right for the homeowner, do what's right for those businesses that sit in between and do what's right
for the utility, which ultimately keeps costs low for all rate payers in Utah.
And then that just, I just thought, wow, this, this is really, this is fascinating.
This is something that we're going to continue to keep our eye on.
Yeah, that's a very interesting story because I think, yeah, mean, just personally, I even worked in the solar industry about a decade ago and you have heard a lot of kind of states
or the solar industry in particular kind of have a pullback in certain areas.
So that's a really fascinating way to see how, and so even though was a little chaotic that there was that opportunity to move to the battery side of stuff to really help power
and kind of find that solution.
I think.
One one thing I guess when this kind of topic comes up usually around like controlling the battery or people's energy.
I always hear all sorts of kind of I don't want to say full on conspiracy ideas whether there's a little bit that American like I don't want somebody telling me I can't use my
power with that.
I I'm sure those are kind of conversations you probably hear with some of these products a lot too and
I've always just found that this podcast has been kind of a pretty powerful way for people to like, Oh, I didn't think of it that way.
And I'm kind of curious with your own podcast and some of these conversations you're having about what are some of those kind of changing points or kind of different ways that
people like, Oh, I mean, obviously I think this has always been the case for solar and even EVs is like that total cost of ownership or kind of like, Oh, okay.
So I, there, there is something I'm getting back from this.
There, there is a,
I give and take, it's fair.
so I'm kind of curious if there's stories like that or other things that kind of stand out.
We're just with the topic of batteries or just in more general.
Well, the topic of batteries, I mean, there's two things that trigger for me Chase.
The one with batteries, last week our guest was Mary Powell, the CEO of Sunrun.
they're the large, it was fascinating, but we didn't get into like, tell me the history of your solar company.
We got into like, okay, you're the first company to get to a million solar panel customers.
And now you're the leader in like,
battery storage sales, like 62 % of their new customers in last quarter in 2024 bought batteries to pair with their solar systems.
That's like a mind boggle.
That's so fast, right?
That's so fast it gets almost two thirds of Americans.
And so the conversation was really about how do you do that?
Like what are you doing differently in terms of sales and getting to that adoption, particularly of batteries?
we started having this conversation.
She was saying, we brought on this other expert, Jessica Bergman, who's a marketing expert.
We started talking about productization.
was like, okay, you can have all the clean energy innovation in the world you want.
If you can't figure out how to actually create a delightful customer experience around adopting it, then you're always going to stay in a niche market.
I didn't know this.
I only knew it when we started researching the episode that you take the most...
Prevalent kind of smart home technology that exists or one of them at least you didn't around energy You would say well smart thermostats like a nest thermostat or an ecobee and
there's a million others, right?
Those are only in 16 % of homes So it's beyond like early adopter, but not too far beyond early then and they've been around forever So the question is like how do you actually get
that in?
You know great majority of beyond right and so what she was saying she's like, yeah, of course we have to change
the way we talk about this stuff, we can't keep talking about kilowatt hours and just how awesome the tech is.
And she was really saying like, we're not selling solar and batteries anymore.
We're really trying to sell peace of mind.
And if you're in Houston and barrel came through or you're somewhere else and your power got knocked out and utilities are increasingly unreliable, this is a hedge, right?
To give you peace of mind.
you'll lock in your energy rates or you'll have a sense of what you have.
It was basically like, we're gonna give you control over this piece that's getting more expensive, right?
So it's peace of mind control over your life in that way.
And she was saying that's really what we lead with it today.
But the other thing she said that I actually thought was more interesting, what came up was, okay, like if you wanna get solar and batteries today, like what do you do?
You go on the web, you start doing a search and you're instantly like overwhelmed and confused and you don't know.
who to trust or, you know, it's just like a terrible experience, right?
And that's just like trying to, you know, and people just throw up their hands.
And so, you know, if Sunrun can get you past that, one of the things that came up was they're basically adopting the Domino's pizza tracker for solar installation, right?
It's on your apps, like, right?
So that it's so, so you build the trust, you know, where you are in the process, okay, the panels are on the truck, the permit's been approved.
They're coming to your house, they're going up, the connection's been made.
so bringing that transparency, I feel like, to that process also gives people that comfort level, that, this company's real, I can trust this process, I can feel better about it.
I think those things are really important to overcome a lot of the hesitancy.
And just really, the clean energy industry needs to start thinking like consumer products companies and not like technology companies.
No, I think that's a great call out.
And that's something I just kind of haven't played with electric vehicles for as crazy as it sounds over two decades now.
That's become so true with so many of the people coming into the space and also very true of a lot of the stuff I'd seen with solar was just like, okay, we can talk about
kilowatts.
We can talk about PV and AC to DC integrations and at 97 % efficiency.
And that's really great for people like who have trouble sleeping.
It's not really great for like actual adoption and people using the technology.
I, I'm kind of curious if, I mean, 62 % is a really wild.
It's, it's crazy to see that number.
Cause, especially when I was doing it about a decade ago, actually longer than I know, but having a battery and obviously a big part of that has been kind of like the EV revolution
and just how many batteries are now at production at scale.
But back then it was extremely rare to ever see a battery backup system.
was usually, it would be some sort of off grid in the middle of nowhere kind of thing.
And it was a bunch of lead acid batteries, but I'm kind of curious.
Did she share what is holding back from 90 % instead of just 60?
Is it the cost or that that's really interesting to me because it makes a lot of sense to pair the two.
If you have scale to do it, especially if you're kind of selling that hedge, but I'm curious if she shared it all.
What is kind of the last thing kind of holding back more people from adopting it?
Yeah, unfortunately, we didn't get that far in the conversation.
I think it's great question.
mean, she would probably say, you know, I mean, she's pretty great.
She's, to me, she's just of a lot of the folks we've had a chance to interview kind of across Clean Energy.
She's the most customer attuned, customer centric, right, CEO, which I think is really important.
I think that's, it's a good question.
I'm not sure.
They've doubled where the rest of the industry is.
It's at about a 28 % attachment rate.
Now I've been meaning to reach out to her actually, because yeah, I I've listened to a couple of her conversations.
It's just the way they you're totally right.
The way they position how I think for a while it had been kind of Tesla was doing a really good job of showing that kind of integration and how this stuff works together.
But unfortunately, that just seems like they still do solar, but it's been much more focused on kind of the forward looking things.
And so seeing a company like that, that's still really
getting that dialed in and I think that was been the missing piece for a while.
But I'm sorry, what were you going to say?
no, I agree with you on all of that.
I actually was going to give you a different example of kind of a breakthrough, something that we've seen in an entirely different use case industry, if that's okay.
Okay, okay.
So, you know, with our show or with my...
What I'm looking to understand is how are we building a low carbon
future that's not just about solving climate change, but it actually like life gets better, right?
Like to me, it's like if we're going to go through all the effort of what even what we're talking about with like solar and so we're going to do all this.
Like it shouldn't in my mind, it shouldn't just be like, we don't die.
That's, and that's also like a pretty bad marketing campaign, right?
But it's like, no, like all that sci-fi or all that, whatever, like you think what the, what the future could be like, let's go do that.
Not that it all has to be super sci-fi, but one of the
We brought on, I brought on this other guy, Kyle Wagonchutes, and he caught my eye because I'd come across an article about him that he had figured out a way to get bike lanes built
in cities three times faster than anybody else in the country.
so the thought was like, like, yeah, know, bike lanes, most people want them, not everyone.
Most people want them.
do like enhance quality of life in the city.
Good for commuting, good for health.
But they're very hard to get built.
so I reached out to this guy.
was like, hey, I'd love to talk to you.
And so it turned out he was kind of a bike advocate in Memphis, Tennessee, which was actually when he was there, the year before he actually went to work for the city for,
well, two years running, I think it was like Bicycling Magazine.
named Memphis the worst place to bike in America.
And so this new mayor had come in and for whatever reason, Kyle got the job.
He was like, I could have gone to any of me or any of my friends, but I got the job.
And the mayor was like, you have one assignment, get Memphis off the list.
And so he was like, great, know, let me go see if I can figure that out.
And so he started to figure it out.
He got Memphis off the list.
They started to build some bike lanes.
They started to get some infrastructure.
The White House recognized him in 2015 as like a champion of change.
And then you got this opportunity, I think with People for Bikes, this national organization that promotes bike riding, to go do work on this assignment with New Orleans,
Denver, Pittsburgh, Providence, and I think Austin, Texas, five cities.
Could they speed up bike lanes?
Could they get these things actually built?
so we brought them, and then they did it.
They built like, it would take decades.
They built hundreds of miles in like 24.
And so I brought him on the show, was like, how'd you do it?
Right?
And he's like, well, he's like, there's a lot of things that we tried, but like really what you have to do is you have to build a tent.
You have to build a bigger, like broader coalition of the willing and support.
And what you don't really need to spend a lot of time on are all the obvious people who obviously want bike, like bike riders.
You don't talk to any, any cyclists, right?
What you need to go do is convince all the car drivers who are never going to ride a bike.
that this is something that's in their self-interest too.
I was like, okay, well, how do you do that?
And he's like, well, you know, we try a bunch of things, right?
Because if you can get them to say, yeah, like we want this, then you're generally gonna like smooth the wheels of like city hall, right?
And like, you won't get stuck with meetings where people are showing up and like putting a cog in the wheel to be like, hey, you know, not so fast and everything grinds to all.
So he's like, well.
He's like, the thing that actually worked the most was appealing to nostalgia.
Do you remember when you were growing up, when streets were a little bit slower and people could play outside and streets were shared with bikes and other most, and it just was
like, and it was just a more, you know, welcoming, you knew your neighbors and it was more, and so they started building these types of campaigns and found that they could
actually convince a lot of people's minds.
They built that, like, you know, so they built that bigger kind of tent of like who was in support with some unexpected people.
And he's like, that was really one of the keys to getting the thing through.
So I found that pretty interesting.
Yeah, that's actually extremely fascinating to me.
I lived in Portland, Oregon for a decade, which I think for a lot of cities has kind of looked as the biking Mecca and trying to like what can be done, but it's been interesting
because even, I don't live there anymore, but even over the past few years, it it's they've run into funding issues and all sorts of things to that have kind of been pulling
back the cover, kind of this, not, wouldn't say necessarily the support, but how efficient like their implementation of biking has been.
And that's a really interesting thing.
Cause I think they've probably done the opposite of that and kind of overly weighted towards what the bike riders want.
And so that actually does kind of, I think this was even a thing when I lived there kind of does create that tension between people who don't want to deal with that or don't ride
or commute in the city versus like, what, what are the people that either probably won't ever bike, but are have a maybe potentially shared interest in like, how do you get them
on board and how do you.
create that kind of coalition to like execute and make it happen, which that's that's really interesting here.
I hadn't heard that before.
What?
Yeah.
And it was People for Bikes that ran this.
I think it was called the Final Mile was the campaign.
So now CityThread is doing this for cities on a regular rotation now where they're bringing companies to do this.
And I think the piece that's really exciting about that is it's just saying, how do we be really level-headed and practical and take the steps that are just going to lead to what
the end result is we all want?
Let's just go figure out that playbook.
Let's set aside our ideologies or our like, you know, us first them or whatever.
Let's just go figure out what is it really gonna take just to move forward and do it as quickly as possible.
So I love that.
You know, I love, I love solutions like that.
something we really try to kind of shoot for on the podcast is as much as possible, avoid the politics and just kind of like look at the facts or explore different ways of trying
to make that happen.
So I guess I'm curious.
That's that's a really fascinating take on the bike.
Are there any others like that you can share?
Because I think that's a really interesting experience to have someone approach it from a completely different way.
Well, so I guess, so this actually, what's triggering for me, this goes back to our first episode because I felt like what's exciting to me is to think about, and I've thought
about this for years, years ago I had this TV show called The Lazy Environmentalist, it was this like reality TV show and I go around trying to help lazy Americans go green
without working very hard.
so of course I'm always thinking about like, how am I gonna like position this so you,
customer, homeowner, whoever see this in your self-interest, it works for you.
And one of the things that I've always thought was really interesting is this research that looks at like hospitals and says, okay, people in hospitals, if you're in a
recovering room where you have access to more daylight, if you can see nature out your window, study exercises, you're gonna recover faster, better.
That's just like amazing to me, right?
Cause daylighting, great.
Daylighting is like a green building strategy.
You don't have to turn the lights on as much, but like it also enhances, you know, quality of life for people in the building.
And so we found this, healthcare system, Gunderson health systems, which is headquartered in Wisconsin and with cross in La Crosse, Wisconsin has a footprint, in several states in
the, in the Midwest.
Over, I want to say right around the,
maybe right after the financial recession or the Great Recession or maybe going into it.
can't quite remember now, the CEO, think it was during that moment where the CEO realized like, you know what?
We've got all these buildings.
We've got this big footprint.
What we really need to do is cut our energy costs and we need to cut our carbon because that's pollution in the
cities where we operate.
We are the local health provider and as a health provider, we have an obligation to try and make the air as clean as possible and we have a responsibility as the operators, we
gotta bring our costs down so we can deliver the best healthcare at the cheapest price.
And so he had this small team of engineers who was like, go figure it out.
That's your mandate, go figure it out.
Go figure out.
whatever, if we got to change the energy, how do we, and so this team was kind of empowered by the CEO.
And in a matter of year, I think less than a decade, maybe half a decade, they got to 100 % renewable energy for their healthcare system.
And they did it by like going to the local brewery and saying, hey, you're flaring a lot of, you know, it looks like methane or you're flaring something coming off your, you know,
the pipes of your brewery.
What if we grab that and run a pipe?
and get that going into our buildings for heat.
Or like, you guys are the local dairy.
We could actually take these cows and we could actually put a biodigester out here and we could also take this gas and use that.
Let's go do economic development.
Let's go figure this out in a way where we're going to empower our communities, boost the economies, cut our carbon, and get to the zero carbon footprint, save a lot of money.
And they figured it out.
And the way he described it, was like, I was like, dude, you're working for a healthcare company, but you're like, what?
You're like a wind energy developer now, and you're like, you guys are developing all these patents on these different processes.
He's like, yeah, you know, that's just because this is how we fulfilled our health mandate.
And I was like, I love that.
Yeah, that's wild.
And I think that's really interesting because I've I mean, I've always found that there's such a big disconnect with kind of headlines and where things are going and like the
stories of people like that who are doing really interesting things.
And one of the things we try to focus on the podcast is just like, once again, kind of taking apart and looking at the the facts and kind of the things to be optimistic about.
mean, like that number of 62 percent with battery.
I mean, that's a huge delta.
And that's a lot of
solar energy that's now being saved in batteries instead of just not going to anything.
And hearing that about the healthcare company that's now got all these patents and doing this kind of completely different thing from their business model being high impact.
And so I'm kind of curious with someone who started your own company, Planet, and now doing this, what are some of the things I'm sure you probably have friends to sometimes
like get either cop on the headlines or like the negativity?
What are some of the ways that you kind of focus on like the things to stay positive about when people?
Aren't unfortunate.
I mean, it's great what you guys are doing and obviously people listening It's in today's show notes but like getting that word out there about the actual things happening versus
like The biases or other things that just really don't align with what you're saying
Yeah, I wish there was some secret that we knew other than the same thing that you do, just the hard work, the passion you try and build your audience.
We do the podcast, just for us, we do our newsletter, which is, the newsletter is growing very rapidly.
I think that, one, yeah, so we're living in a moment where most of the...
the stories are, unfortunately, stories are negative, Or just we live, right?
The social media is just tends to have this negative bias, people that kind of gets clicks.
And so you're coming along, saying, hey, here's innovation, here's this really cool thing.
And I think the challenge is even for someone who's might be interested in that and open to that, it's just like brand marketing.
I've got to tell you the same thing seven times.
Right.
it actually like, you know, often right before it actually registers and you're like, wait, what are you doing?
What are you doing?
Right.
And then the seventh time it's like, cool.
I'm going to go listen to her.
I'm to go, you know, sign up for that.
And so I, what we try to do is wrap these, you know, I think compelling business cases in cool narratives and then put compelling data around it.
And usually a financial story since we, of course we live in
a capitalist society where, know, dollars and cents kind of are, you know, very paramount on everyone's mind.
And so we try and wrap the innovation in things that make it easy to digest, fun to digest and important for audiences, but based on what matters to them.
You know, and that's, you know, that's our approach.
It's working.
Do we want to go faster?
Always.
So that's, that's, that's what I would say.
I that's at least the playbook that we tried.
No, that's great.
with, I guess like, I would love to also just learn more about your previous business, if that's all right, because I think that that's such a fascinating thing.
I think obviously solar is kind of the solar and there's a lot of things in the building world.
That's kind of the sexy stuff.
Like, I want to get that in my house.
I want to get that.
But there's so many other components that actually like are so key to, I think the saying I was saying was like, you could either spend $20,000.
On solar or you could probably save 20,000 or you could spend $20,000 on just doing general home improvements and it'll be kind of either the same or even a bigger impact.
And so I think a lot of these things just don't get, and I mean, I get it.
Like one, it's the sexy thing to let go.
can say when people walk by like, I got solar in my house now I'm doing all this stuff for the environment, but it's really, it's a lot harder to share.
Like, I just put a bunch of insulation in my house or something.
I'm trying to help the environment.
when it's these things you can't easily see as much.
So I just, I'd love to hear a little bit about just your experience in that industry, but also specifically like how you got involved with Planet and how that all kind of connects.
yeah, thank you.
So going back for about two decades, I've been a sustainably driven entrepreneur really since like 2004, 2005, I started this modern design, sustainable furniture company about
20 years ago.
And so, you know, same through line, always thinking like, how can I get consumers to be interested in sustainable products?
me make them beautiful and modern and awesome.
Maybe that'll work.
Yeah, and it worked pretty well.
And so it's kind of, been a through line.
So I started my second modern design, sustainable furniture company.
I want to say around 2018, 2019, I was living in Western North Carolina and North Carolina is traditionally like the furniture capital of the U S in some respects had been of the
world in terms of manufacturing prowess.
And so I, you know, so anyway, so I started this company and I'm going to localize all my production.
were manufacturing this North Carolina using forest stewardship council certified plywood.
you know, just anything we could do to localize and kind of like, affordability.
And it was kind of like Ikea style, knock down flat pack, put it together yourself, but really kind of beautiful.
And it was, it was fun, but, during the pandemic, I couldn't get material.
we couldn't even make new product.
mean, eventually our business started to get really, really at first it was great.
Everyone's buying desks and that was good, but then we just started to get impacted.
And the biggest thing that was impacting me and I started thinking a lot about was material.
And I thought, okay, I'm paying a lot for this plywood.
It's supposedly the best you can buy from an environmental standpoint.
It had been high quality, but the quality was going down, the price was going up.
And I started thinking like, you know what, it's Forest Stewardship Council certified, but I'm not sure I really believe that actually does a whole heck of a...
I'm not sure that that's like such a...
I'm not fully bought in, even though like I know I'm supposed to be, I'm just not bought in.
And so I was in this kind of period of questioning, thinking about material, feeling very frustrated.
And I'd spent four years building, Asheville's startup community called Venture Asheville.
was actually working with our Chamber of Commerce and our economic development group.
And it was really, really fun.
And so I knew a lot of folks in the area and someone was like, Hey, you should talk to this guy down in Durham, North Carolina.
He's doing a little manufacturing thing too.
Well, I looked at his site and I'm a very, it may come through and how I'm talking about my business, very focused on aesthetic and brand.
And I was looking at his crappy little site and I was like, yeah, I don't need to talk to that guy.
But that guy is very persistent.
This guy Wada.
So eventually he got in touch with me.
We got on the phone and he started saying like, wow, imagine you're to build this great big furniture company.
It's going to be eco-friendly.
You're to do all this good for the world.
And I was like, no, no, no, no.
I'm like, if it gets big, I'll do wonderful things for me and my family.
But no, I don't really think we're doing any particular good for the world.
And he's like, why?
I'm like, you know, this FSC thing.
I don't know.
It's still cutting down trees.
And he's like, well, what would you do differently?
I'm like, maybe I think we should build a materials company, maybe use something else.
And he's like, what?
I'm like, there's, I don't know, but there's hemp, there's this, there's that.
And he was like, well, he's like, I got six giant trash bags of industrial hemp in my garage.
And I was like, okay, hold on.
Like, what's your deal?
What's your deal, man?
and he's like, well, I just moved here.
spent, I just spent the last eight years at SpaceX and we just moved to Durham.
And I was like, wait a second.
you moved from California to North Carolina and you spent eight years working at Edson.
Why?
He's like, well, I put a spreadsheet together of all the places in the country to live, had my criteria and like Raleigh Durham kind of came to the top.
We visited, we liked it.
And so we moved here, right?
Very engineer mindset.
And so I was like, well, look, here's what I think we should do.
I'm going to shut my company.
think you should shut your company and we should go build a materials company together.
And also, Elon Musk had just announced this XPRIZE for carbon removal.
if you could, right?
And so, and I'm like, we should figure out something that grows faster than trees.
We should pull carbon out of the atmosphere and we should turn in the materials.
And I think you and I should start this thing.
And can you get more SpaceXers to come to North Carolina?
And he was like, okay, yeah, let me think about that.
So two weeks later, we basically started that company.
So from the beginning, what we felt, so this was about four years ago, probably this time four years ago, March, 2021, we said, well, one, let's go talk to home builders and
basically say, like, hey, like we're going to build something in a factory that's going to be engineered out of something equivalent to wood.
What should we build and what's wrong with the things you got?
So it was like immediately like, well, oriented strand boards is like the most widely used product in a house.
Okay, well, what's wrong with it?
Well, it's really like if it gets wet, you got big problems.
We're like, okay, water resistance.
You're like, anything else?
Well, know, like, you know, fire, if it could be more, you'll have like greater fire retardation.
Maybe that would be a good thing.
This, that, okay, cool.
Well, we got, we got some problems to solve.
We got a SpaceX team.
Let's go figure this out.
And so eventually we started to figure it out all trial and error.
And, um, but so the premise was let's go figure out something that grows faster than trees.
start with hemp.
Hemp was interesting, eventually we just thought, you know what, like the economics on hemp are not going to work if we're getting into this commodity OSB bottom of the barrel
market, right?
We need something that grows way faster than that.
And so we found this grass similar to bamboo that will grow, you know, basically nine to 10 times faster than trees.
And we got the permits to it in North Carolina.
We started working with commercial farmers.
SpaceX team came in, we built.
a modular all electric production line that essentially can go in any warehouse in America.
You just plug it in, there's no smoke stacks.
So we're pulling carbon from the atmosphere with this grass and we're not giving it back in our manufacturing process because it's all electric.
And so we get to carbon negativity.
And early on in the process, we raised $2 million in our seed round in 2021.
And then Deira Horton, we got introduced to them, largest home builder, and they put some money in and...
gave us a pretty big order out of the gate and just this past fall gave us this order for 10 million panels, which is going to take us quite some time to actually fulfill.
It's like 90,000 homes.
So right place, right time, incredible team.
It's pretty exciting business.
Yeah, that's really fascinating because like living here in Oregon, mean, traditionally we'd been known as kind of the timber state and there's still quite a few sawmills, but
it's definitely not to what it used to be even a couple of decades ago.
And so I'm kind of curious, like, do you see this being just OSB or do you see it kind of expanding to like a lot more of the kind of the building products that this could kind of
fill that gap for and to what size do you see it expanding outside of like North Carolina or?
Do you see also the growing of the product being more regionalized as well, not just the manufacturing of it with the new product?
The core technology that enables this is this continuous press, right?
So we have grass, we cut it down.
mean, it's like, quite like, I yeah, in some respects, you kind of like mow it, but it's, the reason why this works is because the grass has so much more, you're pressing so much
more fiber than you are if you're doing a plywood or an oriented strand board, right?
Where like you're pressing maybe three or four layers of fiber.
we can press like 25 layers, give or take, of fiber.
So when you can press that down, you get something that's much stronger.
It happens to have really great water resistance characteristics.
so imagine a press about 40 feet long.
So you can build, you can create engineered pieces of wood that can become two by fours, that can become headers, can effectively, anything engineered in the house, can replace
all of it.
We're starting to do some development.
development work in that regard.
And because you can get these pieces that are 40 feet long, you can then start to think about mass timber or cross laminated timber replacement products.
really, yeah, so the future from a production standpoint and product standpoint could be incredible.
And so that work's starting to be done and the R &D is taking place.
And then, there's a greater opportunity to expand for sure because it's a
The key is, since it's a modular production system, maybe like 120 feet long, and we can put it in many different places, the key is to grow near that facility because there's a
reason why OSB plants are in certain parts of the country.
They have to be near the trees.
If you have to transport trees really far, they're heavy, kills your business model.
In some respects, we're working on understanding we may not have all of those constraints.
But there's some, so we want to make sure that we can move our production and be close to really opportune places to grow.
No, that's great.
And it's interesting.
You start talking about like cross slam and these other kinds of opportunities to replace existing wood.
I mean, then you start getting into some like really serious structural needs for that.
And how, does that kind of fit into like the testing of it and what the durability and how, I mean, yeah, I guess now my head's like spinning with all sorts.
I mean, I'm just fascinated about this because I've just grown up with a lot of contractors and stuff.
So, and so then my end question is like, how do you.
Is there anything you really have to position this differently to like a contractor about like, this is the same as a regular two by four or yeah.
So I, realize I just threw a lot at you, but I'm kind of curious about all of that.
I appreciate all the questions.
the vision and I'm going to imagine now, so I started this with guys from SpaceX who'd been there for a very long time, right?
So I tend to have a lot of vision.
Imagine like, they're not Elon Musk disciples, but imagine people who've been trained in the, like they went, right?
First principles and went to SpaceX because they also want to go to Mars, right?
So before going to Mars, the whole idea is we're not just going to replace lumber, we're not just going to replace trees, we're going to replace steel, we're going to replace
concrete, we're going to build a material strong enough, light enough, durable enough that changes the economics for all built environment.
And everyone at the company would tell you the same thing.
That's the vision for the company.
How do you get there from a, how do you build trust and confidence in that along the way?
Yeah, we do a lot in terms of certification, third party certification.
And I caveat all this to say we're just four years old and really, you know, working on serving our, you know, our first really big, you know, customer, happens to be a wonderful
first customer with DR Horton.
But we do a lot with certification.
We do a lot with testing and there's still a lot to be proven out, but fundamentally,
because of some of these just underlying dynamics just in terms of like, again, like how much fiber we're able to compress and some of the, you know, the features of this, this
grass and keep in mind like this grass, it's, we tissue culture it, we greenhouse it, we put it in the fields or we bring it to the, who grow for us.
So like what we realized was to actually do this because it's kind of, it might sound like it makes sense today.
Maybe it does, or maybe you're saying, I don't know if this makes, four years ago.
It really, you know, it took a lot of faith to buy it.
So we realized like, man, if we want this, we're just going to have to be vertically integrated because no one's no one's going to do this with us, you know.
But with that level of insight, you know, we do feel like this is a product that those certifications will come in and we're talking to, you know, commercial companies and big
building and construction engineering companies.
You know, it's always a tricky thing to break into that market in some respects.
Home building, I don't know that it's actually easier.
But there's fewer people who have to say yes.
Big commercial construction with your architect and then the construction engineering agency and the client.
There's a lot to break through there.
But I do think I have the confidence too that we're going to.
That's super fascinating.
at a, I mean, you say it kind of grows like bamboo, but it looks, it's kind of more related to grass.
I mean, if I saw a regular, I know what an OSB board looks like.
If I see one of these, is it green?
Cause it looks like gray or like, is there any like visual difference to it pretty substantially or?
No, and in fact, so it's Plantd, it's P-L-A-N-T-D.
And so for listeners who want to check it out, if you go to plantedmaterials.com or find us on social, you'll see installations where there's roofers holding these panels.
And other than the fact that they have our branding on them, it looks like a regular OSB panel.
And that also in some sense goes to the philosophy of the company, which is we know, kind of like how we started this conversation talking about, you
solar or batteries or how do you gain adoption?
In our market, we need to build a product that is a drop-in replacement for what builders use today.
And no one should even know the difference that they're, or be able to even tell they're using something different, unless it's just a slightly better installation experience,
because maybe it's a little bit lighter or maybe there's something about it that actually is better.
But otherwise, no, I mean, it's designed to,
to function, operate, look, but most importantly, install exactly the same as what builders are using today.
No, that's great.
mean, I actually just went.
And yeah, you're totally right.
mean, just looking at this, if I saw it at Home Depot or, pretty much any other kind of home building supply place, I would never even notice, that it looks really different from
an OSB board or, even, don't, mean, I doubt most people would be even tell the difference from, plywood and stuff like that.
So that that's great.
So, I mean, I, I'm kind of looking.
At the site and it, one of the things that mentions is it's stronger.
And so that is due to the fibers.
that also due to maybe kind of the pressing the way you press it?
I'm just kind of curious.
Cause I mean, that's great that like you said, it, if you're a builder, you really wouldn't notice much of a difference, but I've just even said on your side, it's stronger
and kind like you said, more moisture resistant than obviously carbon negative two.
And it's all kind of down for the same price.
So I'm just.
between the strength and maybe even like you were mentioning the fire suppression and those kinds of things like is that is it a mixture of your of using the grass or is it
that plus kind of some of the material sciences that you guys are using for kind of bringing this all together or just a mixture of things
There's definitely a bit of secret sauce in there beyond simply pressing fiber, but it's not built on, let's go pump this thing full of a high percentage of adhesives and
therefore we'll just use more toxic crap in there and it'll just have strength, right?
Because there's more glue.
It's the opposite of that.
So yeah, so there is some secret sauce in the engineering of how we do it.
But otherwise than that, it's largely based on the principles that I told you.
We are the only ones building this supply chain in America.
And that was one of the tricks too around the grass was we had to say, okay, well, if actually going to, if we're gonna use it, we have to figure out how we stand up a supply
chain to do it.
It had been looked at probably now about a decade ago, maybe a little bit more as a potential replacement of.
torn from biofuels because these growth rates are so extraordinary, but none of those projects ever materialized.
so, yeah, was kind of, we were looking everywhere at everything, every type, and we just eventually started looking at kind of the grass family stumbled onto something through a
lot of research trial and error and just sometimes a little bit of dumb luck and then just made the decision to go for it.
You know, sometimes with startups, what I've found is we were really all in on hemp for about six months and we were building little boards and testing and in some respects,
we're starting this business.
It's a crazy idea to take.
Everybody has a hard time.
Most everyone has a hard time raising money.
was hard for us.
It took a long time to find investors, but had we gotten the money earlier, we probably would, you we might've made a decision to go down the path of hemp.
And that would have been a dead end.
And so sometimes these things align in a way that you can't always predict, right?
Where we got more breathing room to really make sure we had the right solution to go all.
No, that's super fascinating, Josh.
And I think we could probably talk about that for its own podcast, but I realized we're kind of coming up on the time today.
So yeah, we'll have links to all of that in today's show notes.
But I mean, for anyone who's curious, what what's the best way either to connect with you or learn more about what you are doing with Planet or at super cool.
Absolutely.
So get super cool is the place to find what we're doing around the podcast and using the weather.
Soon you can find us on social.
I'm easy to connect with them on LinkedIn, quite a lot of where you can find me.
Plantd is planted materials.com.
Of course, we'd love for your listeners to check out that as well.
yeah, I appreciate, know, this is a really, for me, it's a great opportunity to speak to you.
I really enjoyed the conversation.
Thanks for tuning in to this week's Grid Connections podcast.
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If you'll be at the EV Charging Summit Expo in Las Vegas next week, let's connect.
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With that, this is The Great Connections Podcast signing off.