WebMD co-founder Kittu Kolluri of Neotribe Ventures invests where bits meet atoms

I spoke with WebMD co-founder and veteran VC Kittu Kolluri of Neotribe Ventures to talk about what he’s investing in, the importance of board governance, and what active investing actually means.

We touched on:

🐉 The potential of technologies like hydrogen, ammonia synthesis, and cold fusion

💼 The role of boards in ensuring good governance and avoiding conflicts of interest

📈 What software VCs need to do to become hardware investors

🤝 The importance of active investing and the value it brings to young entrepreneurs

#climatetech #venturecapital #governance

Promo partner for this episode is Grizzle, helping B2B ClimateTech companies generate demand and customers through high-quality content, social media, and SEO services. Podcast listeners can book a free consultation here.

Transcript

Ryan Grant Little: 0:06

Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. K Kaluri is the founder and managing director of Neotribe Ventures and one of the 100 most influential investors, according to the New York Times. You might not know his name, but you definitely know one of his products he's the founder of WebMD. You might not know his name, but you definitely know one of his products he's the founder of WebMD. Kittu is investing in some serious deep tech, looking at areas like hydrogen generation, ammonia synthesis and cold fusion. I reached him in Menlo Park, California. Please take a moment while you're listening to this episode to rate and subscribe to the podcast. It's really the number one way people find it. I'm Ryan Grant Little. Thanks for being here. Kittu, welcome to the podcast.

Kittu Kolluri: 0:51

Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan Grant Little: 0:52

Thanks for having me. You are the co-founder of WebMD, as well as a seasoned VC, and in fact, the New York Times called you one of the top 100. So you're really Silicon Valley royalty, and these days, the main hat that you wear is as the founder of Neotribe Ventures, which, as you say on the homepage, invests in breakthrough technologies that stretch the imagination. Can you talk a bit about the fund and how it's evolved over the past seven years since you founded it?

Kittu Kolluri: 1:20

In terms of the thesis with which we started the firm, that hasn't changed a whole lot, ryan, when we say we invest in breakthrough technologies that stretch the imagination, we like to invest in companies that are solving hard problems, hard technology problems, but are also kind of looking around the corner reimagining the world and creating new product categories, and so about two thirds of our capital goes into companies in the software space up and down sort of the enterprise stack insurtech, fintech, a little bit of the web, three more on the infrastructure side, and then the rest goes into companies at the intersection of bits and atoms, as I like to describe it.

Kittu Kolluri: 2:06

So these are companies that are leveraging AI and computer science, data science, et cetera, to innovate in life sciences, climate tech, robotics, 3d printing, things like that. So that's kind of what we invest in and, in terms of how it's evolved, there are certain sectors that come in and out of fashion at any given time and so, depending on what's more in vogue, we probably tend to invest a little more in that, but it kind of evens out over a longer period of time evens out over a longer period of time and I feel like a lot of VCs who have been investing previously in the software or SaaS space over the past kind of 10 or 15 years, a lot of them are trying to shift more into hardware and I know that you're bullish on hardware.

Ryan Grant Little: 2:57

You're not afraid to kind of jump into that space and I'd be really interested in getting kind of your view on that. We'll come back to that in a moment. I'm interested, so two thirds that I'm interested, maybe in the other one third as well. So you've invested a lot in deep tech, but you've also invested a lot in climate and you've been in climate for a long time. So I'm thinking of your 2001 investment and I forget what it was called before, but Bloom Energy. I remember them.

Kittu Kolluri: 3:24

Used to be called ION America when I first invested in it.

Ryan Grant Little: 3:27

Yeah, I remember them, I mean when I was in renewable energy in the mid-nots and they were a big deal back then. So I was, you know, a founder in the space between 2006 and 2010. And I'd be curious to kind of know. So you know, most of the people who I talk to, who have invested in the space, who have been in the space, haven't been, you know, haven't written the first check 23 years ago, and I wonder kind of how your view on investing in climate tech has changed, evolved, stayed the same since then.

Kittu Kolluri: 3:57

Yeah, great question mention. My foray into climate tech and investing in climate tech started in 2001, when I first made a personal investment in a company called Ion America, which is now known as Bloom Energy. Just to give you a little bit of my background, I'm a mechanical engineer by training and then kind of moved into computer science, and so I have this interesting combination from an educational background point of view and, truth be told, some of that was just accidental, but in hindsight that combination has helped me a great deal in not only understanding some of the technologies behind climate tech but in better underwriting them as well. As you know, a lot of climate tech involves material science chemistry, thermodynamics, things like that and those are fields that I had some exposure to from my undergrad days and I think those were helpful.

Kittu Kolluri: 5:01

But if you ask me how my view on climate tech has changed over a period of time, I think back when I was first starting to invest and when I joined NEA as a general partner. A lot of the climate tech investing that I did then revolved essentially around material science. It was around, you know, how do you find better materials to capture energy or sunlight or things like that, you know so photosynthesis and things like that, or photovoltaic. Rather, you didn't get paid a whole lot for innovating on the material side, and I'd say where my investment thesis has evolved is sort of at this intersection of bits and atoms that I talked about earlier. It's about taking information technology and seeing how that could impact some of the more traditional fields like material science, like chemistry and things like that.

Ryan Grant Little: 6:07

What kind of convergence are you seeing? Also, I mean, I'm wondering if you've been investing a lot in the kind of medtech space or kind of biotech space, do you see a convergence there with some of the climate tech space as well? I mean, as you kind of point out you mentioned, you know, if 10 years ago most climate tech investment was on the energy production side, do you feel like there's more of a convergence between these two spaces now? As someone who looks at both of these spaces as an investor, yeah, I think.

Kittu Kolluri: 6:36

Great question. Again, I do think there is some convergence, more to it than meets the eye, like, for instance, you know I'll give you an example of you know a microbiome related innovation and how that can be used to break down wastewater. That's something that's been done for a while. But also how can you use microbes to synthesize ethanol, and this is something that's actually today. It's more sort of, I'd say, in the scientific domain, in the universities, but I wouldn't be surprised if that starts to become much more mainstream and gets commercialized in due course.

Kittu Kolluri: 7:19

So that's an example, you know, but sort of the application of microbiomes in the food and agri-tech space, but also in the area of synthesizing clean energy in some shape or form. You know that's something that how do you store electricity using microbiomes from electricity that exists, sort of clean energy, and how do you convert that into alcohol. That's something that, by the way, you know, at the bottom of the ocean. That's something that bacteria have done and now that's starting to be researched heavily and people are looking into how can you take clean energy produced from sunlight or wind or ocean and store that using microbiome. So that's something that's an interesting area.

Ryan Grant Little: 8:10

I feel like I have lots of episodes these days about energy storage and different ways of doing that on the podcast now and it feels like where 15 years ago we were trying to unlock the best ways to produce the energy. Now we're trying to unlock the best ways to store it. That's probably a good sign.

Kittu Kolluri: 8:25

That's because a good sign. That's because clean energy is intermittent, so we need to find effective ways of storing energy. Yeah.

Ryan Grant Little: 8:32

So you invest where bits meet atoms, and that's a soundbite I've come across in some of your interviews before and I find it really interesting. Another one is AI trumps physics. I've heard you say that a few times. Can you talk about that? I've got a suspicion about what that means, but enlighten us.

Kittu Kolluri: 8:49

Yeah. So there have been a lot of climate tech related innovations that have centered around trying to model physics and trying to see if you can somehow mathematically predict something. Or I'll give you an example right. Take one of our investments, heliogen from our fund one. It innovated in the closed-loop solar concentration space. So if you think about solar concentration, there has been for several decades innovation in what I like to call open loop solar concentration, where people have said, okay, let me model how the sun moves across the horizon and doing that using physics and mathematics.

Kittu Kolluri: 9:37

However, as you know, there's a lot of error creep in computers, because computers always have a rounding error and so over a period of time, that error creep results in a diffusion of that energy and so, very quickly, that solar concentration doesn't work or doesn't produce the kind of temperatures you need. This is where Helios innovated and said okay, we don't care what physics is, we're going to put four cameras and look at the reflection of the sun and from that we can tell if the sun is pointing towards the reactor or not. And if any one of those four cameras can see the sun reflection of the sun, they adjust it. If none of them can see the reflection of the sun, boom, it's pointing at the center of the reactor, and so that resulted in an incredibly high amount of accuracy without a whole lot of computation, and so that is what I mean by how AI trumps physics.

Kittu Kolluri: 10:42

So the interesting thing that I've seen across a wide variety of spaces is that if there is an underlying pattern, ai does a fantastic job of unearthing that pattern, and that's where I feel like you know it behooves us to use AI. We have an investment in another company called Aira. That's in the wireless communication space, and it's done the same thing. A lot of people try to model wireless communication, again using physics, but Aira has used machine learning to figure out what the signal-to-noise ratio is on a particular channel, and so that's another example of where I feel AI has trumped physics. So that's what I mean by that. I hope that those two examples kind of give you some sense.

Ryan Grant Little: 11:33

I think we don't care. What physics says should also be a new saying of yours, or maybe a bumper sticker at the end of that.

Kittu Kolluri: 11:40

Provided there's a pattern.

Ryan Grant Little: 11:42

You provide. Yeah, makes a lot of sense and I mean that's those examples also sound like.

Kittu Kolluri: 11:47

If it's purely random AI doesn't do shit yeah.

Ryan Grant Little: 11:52

Yeah, but I mean very few things are totally random anyway, right? So, exactly, if the data set's big enough, it will find the patterns and that's where the magic happens. I mean, those are good examples also of some pretty great hardware interventions. And, as I mentioned, so you know, I feel like a lot of VCs that made a lot of money kind of investing in the next new B2B SaaS play decided that they can be climate tech investors overnight as well, and I've been involved in some deals recently where they kind of, you know, caused the deal to fall apart.

Ryan Grant Little: 12:21

Well, I mean one deal in particular and you could clearly see that it was because it was, you know, a company that knew SaaS really well and just totally fell on its face when it came to trying to understand, kind of, the horizons and the complexity around hardware and some of these more complex things. And I wonder, because there are a lot of climate tech VCs that are listening out there or people who want to get involved in climate tech, what advice would you have? And I think you mentioned kind of one of the first pieces of advice is to kind of like, have, in your case, you have the basics yourself, but maybe it's about having you know someone with the subject matter knowledge in the team.

Kittu Kolluri: 12:56

Yeah, I mean, I'd say, first go back and dust your chemistry, material science, thermodynamics books so that you can catch up on that, Because you know, when you're investing in SaaS, you probably don't even need a whole lot of technical expertise. You're really investing around business models and things like that, right, and it's really much more at the application layer. When you're investing in climate tech, you actually need to grok something at a much more fundamental level and much more at a fundamental science level, all right, and that's where the differentiation comes from. And so you need to have a certain amount of knowledge at that layer. And so I like to call it this right In the VC world if you don't know what you don't know, that's very dangerous, because with that comes a lot of hubris, and hubris is the biggest enemy of making money.

Kittu Kolluri: 13:57

I advise a lot of young VCs who I mentor and I tell them your goal ought to be to know what you don't know. And so, if you know what you don't know, you know one, what questions to ask. Two, who to ask them of, and three, how to underwrite the risk you're taking. And so that's what I would say to any SaaS VC coming into climate tech start with trying to know what you don't know.

Ryan Grant Little: 14:25

Yeah, I think that's really good advice. And I mean also with some of the SaaS investments, everybody was used to just kind of making so much money from this that that develops the hubris that you can't get it wrong, and we've definitely seen how hard could this be?

Kittu Kolluri: 14:40

A lot of people've definitely seen how hard could this be? Yeah, okay, A lot of people would come out how hard.

Ryan Grant Little: 14:43

Could this be yeah?

Kittu Kolluri: 14:44

yeah, and you know, the thing about investing in climate tech is that there is a hardware component and that brings a certain level of complexity. There are business model differences also. You know, do you go with selling a product or do you do an owned and operated kind of thing, which is kind of similar to SaaS? But the difference there is that there is a working capital issue, there's a CapEx involvement, right, and is there a way that you can attract cheap capital? And those are the sorts of things that you need to think about and worry about, as opposed to using a cloud service provider to host your application and getting things off the ground.

Ryan Grant Little: 15:26

I mean you're touching on financing, which I think is really key to this as well from the hardware perspective, and it's a conversation I have a lot with the founders, you know, because you get a lot of founders who have, you know, decent business sense, very, very strong on the science side, but, you know, maybe haven't built a $10 million pilot plant before.

Ryan Grant Little: 15:44

And you know, I had one conversation not too long ago where I said, look, you're trying to build this whole plant with equity, which is too expensive and, by the way, the plant costs more than the company is worth. In this round You're like, oh yeah, so that's these kinds of challenges, and I think you know my experience also going back to the biogas days, is so much of it was about putting together and like kind of stacking this financing and that's a really, really complex piece. So I feel like for some of these companies, to some of these startups that are very hardware heavy, they probably aren't thinking about it, but their CFO or whoever their kind of, you know, finance person is needs to be really, really strong in a way that maybe a SaaS company doesn't need to be.

Kittu Kolluri: 16:26

Yeah, and you know, one of the pieces of advice that I give a lot of climate tech companies is this which is, separate out the technology piece of your innovation from the project engineering part of your company, from the project engineering part of your company. And what I mean by that is, in fact, you may be better off creating two companies, right, the technology company and the actual solutions company. Because the technology company can attract venture capital, and that's high cost capital. Your cost of ownership there is much higher because your cost of capital is much higher. Venture capital is not cheap, right, but when you start to scale up, that's where you should be able to attract cheaper capital. But you need a lot of capital there, right, and you don't want to drown out your venture investors with a lot of this cheap project capital, right, and so that's why I advise them to split those things into two separate companies, almost where now this technology company is licensing that technology to this project company.

Ryan Grant Little: 17:33

That's really really good advice. That's a path that I've followed as well, and it also protects the IP from going under from a project that goes astray and projects can go astray very easily for reasons that have nothing to do with a great IP. Yeah, 100%. Do you want to talk a bit about some of the deals that you've made, specifically, you know kind of climate or climate adjacent. I'd love to hear about some of these investments and why they made it past the investment committee.

Kittu Kolluri: 17:58

Yeah, so there are certain areas made it past the investment committee. Yeah, so there are certain areas. I'm not going to pick on specific deals, but certain areas that have recently captured my imagination. Ryan, I'm a big believer in the hydrogen economy. I don't think hydrogen is going to be used to power vehicles, but I think hydrogen is going to be a very important part of our clean tech economy in terms of taking clean energy and converting that into hydrogen and then converting the hydrogen into ammonia to transport it better, because transporting hydrogen is problematic, transporting hydrogen is problematic, and so the hydrogen ammonia innovation in those areas are areas that are very interesting to me. You know, whether that be taking methane and doing pyrolysis of methane, but doing so in an easy way and a clean way, and doing so where you're able to generate crystalline carbon as opposed to carbon black. Right, there are technologies today that can do methane pyrolysis, but they're generating carbon black, and now you're just trying to sell hydrogen. However, if you're able to generate graphite or graphene, now that becomes very interesting, because now that more than pays for the generation of hydrogen, right, in fact, that could become the main product in itself, right? So that's one area that I'm pretty excited about and looking for opportunities there.

Kittu Kolluri: 19:38

Another area that I like a lot is this ammonia synthesis area. We haven't seen a significant innovation in ammonia synthesis since Haber-Bosch, and, as we all know, haber-bosch is a pretty pollutive and carbon pollutive technology. So we need another innovation there where we can synthesize ammonia in a clean way, because ammonia, as you know, is not a naturally occurring substance. It is something that is synthesized, but we need better ways of synthesizing that substance or that material so that we can use that to transport hydrogen, as I mentioned, and ammonia, as you know, has a variety of uses for fertilizer, for various sorts of creating inert atmospheres and things like that, and so sometimes synthesizing ammonia at the point of need is actually a very important thing, and so that's another area that I'm excited about. A third area is cold fusion, nuclear fusion at low temperatures. That is still, I'd say, at a science risk stage, but not for long. I think it's a matter of when and not if we crack the code on nuclear fusion. So these are three areas that I'm pretty excited about.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:05

I'm going to send you some links to some past episodes because they'll be very interesting for you and they could be investment targets. So I'll send you that after we get off here and, if any of your listeners are doing things in these areas.

Kittu Kolluri: 21:20

I'd love to hear about it. Yeah, great.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:26

Great so science risk.

Kittu Kolluri: 21:27

That's the one risk that you don't want to take. Is that correct? I'd say? You know we generally shy away from it, although there are exceptions there, like, for instance, we've invested in a company called Aquarius Energy in that cold fusion space, and I'd say that's one. There is some science risk, but the reason I did that is like man, if that company can crack the code on that boy, that could be a huge company.

Ryan Grant Little: 21:47

Yeah, okay, so the serious moonshot potential ones you're willing to dip into the science risk as well, correct, yeah?

Kittu Kolluri: 21:54

I'm unlikely to write a large check into those companies, but enough to get them past that science risk stage.

Ryan Grant Little: 22:02

Yeah, I mean they probably couldn't efficiently use a large check. A lot of them are, at this point, right, 100%, 100%, You're absolutely right. So I was astounded. I counted the number of boards that you've been on or are on right now 53. And that includes some pretty big names like Robinhood, the investment platform, and Box, which was one of the original cloud collaboration companies. I remember using them I don't know 15 years ago, and I'm sure I've never met anyone who's been on this many boards.

Ryan Grant Little: 22:33

And boards is a topic that I'm really interested in. My only unicorn was a nonprofit so not a unicorn in the cash out sense, but I founded called Canada Helps, which processed more than $3 billion for Canadian charities so far, and it's been around for 25 years. I founded it when I was 19. And I think one of the reasons it's done so well and it's never had any kind of controversy or even kind of whiff of it is that right from the beginning we built a really really strong board that was representative of the beneficiaries that we serve. So like the customers and kind of you know, for profit speak, and we really made sure that it wasn't our people, you know, and not kind of just a circle of friends but really qualified people who would hold us to a really high standard, and that tradition has kept through with that board and for me it's one of the most successful boards, you know, full stop.

Ryan Grant Little: 23:24

And so I'm always thinking about this and a lot of times as an investor or just, I see companies. Europe, I think, is even much worse than North America or kind of the common law countries, the Anglo Saxon countries with this, where there's lots of kind of double dipping and you know the managers, managers are the board and maybe kind of they add a friend over time and stuff like that, and you can really see where this causes problems and so. But what I'd love to hear from you is, as someone who has this massive, massive experience, what is the thing or what are the features that the best boards have in common in your experience?

Kittu Kolluri: 24:02

features that the best boards have in common in your experience? Yeah, Before I answer that question, I wanted to say that you know I've been in probably even more than 53 boards, because I've probably not yet put all of my boards on there.

Ryan Grant Little: 24:14

I mean, maybe you just like run out of fields in LinkedIn at a certain point. No, no, no, no.

Kittu Kolluri: 24:19

It's not that I have to go back and see, because I think between my tenure at NEA and now here at NeoTribe, I've been in venture for what is it now over 18 years and I think I've been associated with over 100 companies that are what you know, what I'd call full slot investments for us right, and not just you know, sort of small checks, not a pre-seed kind of checks. And that said, it's been over those 18 years and so, in my defense, it's not like I get on too many boards, although that's a sensitive topic for some of our LPs. But coming back to your question, um, I think boards are very important from a governance point of view and from a steering point of view, and I take my role as a board director very seriously and I think what a lot of board members do wrong is this of board members do wrong is this when you are on a board, you have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that you're taking care of the interests of all shareholders, not just the entity that you represent on that board.

Ryan Grant Little: 25:49

I'm getting goosebumps.

Kittu Kolluri: 25:50

It's such a refreshing point of view, and I think that is one of the big mistakes that a lot of board directors make is they're looking at their role there and their decision making or their advice or commentary, purely through the narrow lens of how does this benefit my firm? Or even, for that matter, if you look at it from the perspective of the founders, they're making the same mistake also. They're looking at it as how do I ensure my interests are taken care of? And I think you need to come at it as saying how do I take care of all stakeholders here? How do I take care of common shareholders, preferred shareholders, my customers and the community All of them? You got to put your hat on to ensure that you're doing the right thing by all of them, otherwise you're violating your fiduciary responsibility violating your fiduciary responsibility right.

Kittu Kolluri: 26:49

Second thing that I'd say is boards are teams, just like management teams are teams. Boards are teams, and so boards need to figure out how they can coexist and work together. How do they divide and conquer, right? There's a division of labor there, and in getting along with one another, there is really important at a professional level, and that's another thing that I feel is sometimes lacking in certain boards where there is too much posturing and too much I say. You know people are pretending to be somebody they're not. They're seeking to impress rather than express right, and so those are times when boards get into trouble. And so these are the two things that I'd say if you are able to avoid, and that's why I like to ensure that there is representation of independent board members once a company gets to a certain scale where you know they're not representing common or preferred they're actually looking out for the company.

Ryan Grant Little: 27:58

That's a really, really refreshing perspective and it's something I've talked about before as well that there's almost an inherent conflict of interest for a VC to be on a board right, because the VC, well, they have the fiduciary responsibility to the company, but they're always prioritizing kind of their portfolio right and their fund, and I've seen where that, how that can play out. As you know, I was I founded a company that was the last investment of a VC before the financial crisis and the tone changed very drastically as they kind of lost commitments from LPs and had to then shift to rescue the companies that they're in deeper with and literally overnight, you could feel the. You know, this conversation of like planning for success is more like why are we burning so much money pre-revenue? And you're like hold on, like hold on, and this is purely because you know they're looking at this from a portfolio perspective, at their own portfolio, which has, you know it's a built-in conflict of interest 100%.

Kittu Kolluri: 28:55

And so you know. My counsel is if you cannot fulfill your fiduciary responsibility, get the hell off the board. If all you want to do is represent your entity as a shareholder, as a stockholder, fine, do that as a non-board member, as a shareholder, then you can vote your shares. That's well within your right to do so, and there are a lot of things that require shareholder votes, right, and so that's the right thing to do.

Ryan Grant Little: 29:25

That's good advice. As an investor, do you generally like to? I mean, I know you like personally to take board seats, but as an investor, do you like to take board seats? Is it a requirement? Are there certain things that you need to see in the boards of the companies you invest in in order to get that check written? We?

Kittu Kolluri: 29:42

don't require a board seat all the time. It depends on our check size, our ownership and things like that, and also what is the value we could bring to the company, right, and based on our experience. And so those are the factors that result in us determining whether we take a board seat or not. And sometimes the entrepreneur says, hey, we'd like you on our board, right, and so that's when we consider taking a board seat.

Ryan Grant Little: 30:14

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Kittu Kolluri: 30:16

But generally speaking, we are active investors, ryan, and so we think having a board presence is helpful, especially. I find that a lot of young entrepreneurs, first-time entrepreneurs, they don't know much about governance, and so that's where we kind of help them with that by having a presence on the board.

Ryan Grant Little: 30:38

What does it mean from your perspective to be an active investor?

Kittu Kolluri: 30:42

Very simple. It's about helping the entrepreneur discover product market fit, and that can manifest itself in a variety of ways, which is okay. Helping them figuring out what are the use cases that create that damn, I cannot not have this product. Helping them with recruiting management talent to the company, helping them with customers, helping them with potential partners and, eventually, helping them with potential buyers. So these are all the things that we like to help our companies with.

Ryan Grant Little: 31:19

Just kind of crystal ball gazing now. So I know the topics that you're interested in. You're talking about cold fusion, hydrogen, things like that Going to kind of a more macro level, about the maybe the investment ecosystem. What do you think? I mean, it's been a hard few years for most hardware VCs or investees, and particularly anything that's not AI in the past couple of years. What do you think? And actually, ai is getting beat up a little bit right now on the markets. We're seeing that, so a bit of backlash happening there. But you know, if you were to look out the next couple of years and recognizing that prediction is a fool's game in some ways, but you know what trends would you not be surprised to see?

Kittu Kolluri: 31:59

Let's put it that way I mean, look, you know, I think if you are in any kind of hardware business, I mean you know Any kind of hardware business. I mean, even if you look at just pure information technology, there are a lot of businesses that have a hardware component, Like if you're building a router or a switch, or if you're building a security appliance, there is a hardware component. My second company was a security appliance, and so we did have a hardware component there too. But what happens is that as interest rates go up, your cost of capital increases, and so, therefore, hardware becomes more expensive, and so you need to figure out how to help finance that, and so that's one of the things that I'm hoping that we get to a quiescent period here in terms of interest rates. I don't think it was ever sustainable to have zero interest rate environment like we enjoyed for the last 30 plus years. It's actually not good for the baby boomers, because they're relying on interest income as they retire, and so you know, interest rates in that 4% 5% range I think is normal and it's probably healthy, and so, and that's kind of where we seem to be landing here, and so I'd say we will have that as something that we need to think through.

Kittu Kolluri: 33:22

Another advice I'd give is to any entrepreneurs is you know, talking about this bits meets atoms? Try to figure out how you can improve your offering, your product offering, with data right and applying something like artificial intelligence. So there are a lot of old economies, companies or sectors, industry structures that have benefited immensely, Like I'll give you the example of computational biology or bioinformatics, right. It is amazing to me what the availability of data and the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning and things like that, those techniques to that data have done to the field of diagnostics, drug discovery, vaccine discovery, medical devices, things like that. And we're just scratching the surface, Ryan, in that area.

Kittu Kolluri: 34:22

I mean, just take the mRNA vaccine. That was as much of a software problem that was solved as it was discovering the right kind of RNA sequence to help fight the COVID virus. So I think you're going to see that in the coming years one of our companies, Billion to One, has done the same thing in the diagnostics area, where they've applied machine learning to cell-free DNA in the host blood for both prenatal testing for single gene diseases as well as oncology. So I think there is a huge amount of opportunity there, and so that's one of the things that I encourage a lot of entrepreneurs to do is to see hey, fine, encourage a lot of entrepreneurs to do is to see hey, fine, I've got my innovation purely from the materials point of view, but with data available, can I improve on that in a significant way? Is there a tectonic shift?

Ryan Grant Little: 35:19

that is possible. I think that's a great place to end this conversation because it's on a positive note and it's looking forward to kind of how AI can support a lot of these things, especially on the health tech and climate tech side. I'm also very bullish on that. I've seen some great progress. I mean, I invest a lot in food tech and some of the opportunities to use AI. For example, you know, biocraft Pet Nutrition, a company that I'm invested in that makes cultivated meat for pet food, was able to use AI to determine really the best, perfect kind of strains of rabbit meat, for example, for pets, and mouse meat for rabbit meat for dogs and mouse meat for cats.

Ryan Grant Little: 35:59

And you know this would have taken centuries to do using kind of more traditional computing methods. Medicinal chemistry kind of approaches yeah, exactly methods, medicinal chemistry kind of approaches yeah, exactly. And, as you know, as a pet parent who would love to be able to feed my pets meat but not from animals one day, these are the kinds of innovations that I think we'll be seeing more of and we need them right. I mean, we can't keep going with business as usual 100%. Yeah, kitu, I will put a link to your LinkedIn and the show notes and encourage. So any startups out there that are fundraising, that are working across the three topics or so that you mentioned, might like to reach out. Kitu, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much.

Kittu Kolluri: 36:41

Thank you, ryan, thanks for having me, and I hope your listeners find this useful.

Ryan Grant Little: 36:46

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