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Another ClimateTech Podcast
Explore the fight against climate change through interviews with climate tech founders, investors, activists, academics, artists, and more.
#Climate #Climatetech #Cleantech #Sustainability #Environment
Another ClimateTech Podcast
Volcanic Rock as a Carbon Sink, with Anastasia Pavlovic of Eion
Anastasia Pavlovic is the co-founder of Eion, a carbon removal company that accelerates Earth's natural rock weathering process to lock away CO₂—permanently. Eion works with farmers to deploy enhanced rock weathering (ERW) in agricultural fields, creating a carbon sink disguised as soil amendment, with benefits to landowners and climate alike. Anastasia joined the podcast from Detroit to talk about carbon, kids, and the importance of remembering to eat.
In this episode we talked about:
🪨 How volcanic rock dust turns farms into carbon capture sites (and why the best rocks might be in Norway)
🌽 How Eion aligns climate goals with farm economics
🚢 The surprising math that makes ocean shipping rock across the Atlantic more carbon-efficient than it sounds
💰 Why climate tech founders need to think like infrastructure financiers and not just software bros
📉 How Anastasia regulates the highs and lows of startup life—with a side of mac & cheese
#Climatetech #CarbonRemoval #Agtech
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
📈 B2B content to create and capture leads: book 30 minutes with Tom for free at grizzle.io/climate
We use a technology called Enhanced Rock Leathering ERW, as it's known to people in the field. It uses a natural process that rocks many special rocks on Earth go through to regulate our Earth's climate. But we speed up that process and we work with farmers and landowners to incorporate this into their existing agricultural practices, so it slides right into something that's happening already on Earth, which is important for scale. And all of this helps permanently remove carbon from the air and from our atmosphere and at the same time, it brings economic value to rural communities who are focused on farming and land management.
Ryan Grant Little:Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast introduced with the people trying to save us from ourselves. Anastasia Pavlovic is co-founder of Eion, a company that uses rock weathering for carbon removal in agriculture. We talked about working with farmers the importance of nature-based solutions in combating climate change and why financing is just as important as technology in the climate tech space. I reached Anna in Detroit. I'm Ryan Grant Little. Thanks for being here, Anastasia. Welcome to the podcast.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Thanks for having me.
Ryan Grant Little:You are the co-founder of Eion, a CO2 removal company working with the agricultural industry, and I wonder if you could just take a minute and, in a nutshell, set the scene and tell us a bit about what Ion does.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Of course, Eion is a carbon removal company, as you said. We build technologies that fit into existing industrial systems or existing value chain systems so that we can remove carbon instead of emitting it. We use a technology called enhanced rock weathering ERW, as it's known to people in the field. It uses a natural process that rocks many special rocks on earth go through to regulate our earth's climate. But we speed up that process and we work with farmers and landowners to incorporate this into their existing agricultural practices, so it slides right into something that's happening already on earth, which is important for scale. And all of this helps permanently remove carbon from the air and from our atmosphere and at the same time, it brings economic value to rural communities who are focused on farming and land management. So it's a really cool company. I'm excited to share more with you.
Ryan Grant Little:Is ERW. Isn't that also the airport code for Newark?
Anastasia Pavlovic:Indeed, okay, erw.
Ryan Grant Little:Okay, fair, okay, can you talk a bit about? So this is a new concept for me as well and I dug in on it a little bit rock weathering it's really cool. I wonder if you can. I think probably for our listenership it's going to be a new concept as well and I wonder if you can dig in a little bit on what that is and how it works and what's special about it.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Yes, so there are you know, call it nine or 10 cousins of rock types which are volcanic in nature, and these special rocks are prolific on the earth's crust. They remove carbon from the atmosphere very slowly, and some do it faster than others. But imagine massive portions of the Earth's crust that are rock are very slowly over time interacting with the atmosphere and actually removing carbon slowly, and that carbon is stored into sediment that eventually goes down to the bottom of the ocean and that helps regulate our natural climate cycle. So rocks do this, laying around on Earth the way that they are. What we do is we speed up that process. That happens naturally. So we take some of these special rocks, we grind them up to be a fine powder that increases their surface area and so it allows them to remove carbon way faster than they do by just laying around in their regular rock form.
Anastasia Pavlovic:And then, if you can find uses for those rocks in industrial practices, you basically can speed up carbon removal, but without having to alter the rock's natural properties. So it is like a natural technology on earth, and essentially what happens is that you put those rocks down, so in this case they go down on farmer's fields and they replace agricultural limestone, which is a product that farmers use to regulate their soil pH. Farmer applies this instead of their agricultural limestone. It looks very much the same. It goes down, rain and atmosphere interact. Those particulates start to dissolve and move through the soil column just like they do with limestone, and as they're moving down through the soil column they're removing carbon inorganic carbon by forming bicarbonates, and because that's an inorganic bond, those bicarbonates are stored for a very long time and make their way down to sediment in the bottom of the ocean. 10,000 plus year permanence in terms of carbon removal.
Ryan Grant Little:And you mentioned that some rocks perform better than others. Was this sort of like a known quantity before? Is there some basic research that's done that you accessed and made decisions about which kinds of rock to use based on that? Or were you also kind of doing some R&D on that side of things?
Anastasia Pavlovic:A huge amount of this was sort of happening in like climatology research. So probably eight years ago or so there was a big paper that came out in the UK which was could we harness these different types of rocks to do this at scale, sort of thing. And that got a lot of people thinking, and so Adam, my co-founder, was one of the people who was like, can we start a company related to this and think about this? But that was right. The big questions were which rocks best perform to do this and why? What speed do they remove carbon and why, based on what they're doing and interacting with in the environment? And then how the heck are you going to measure that accurately to be able to prove how much carbon is being removed in a system like soil? That's otherwise very complex? So those are sort of the big questions and if we could answer those questions, companies could easily start to use this technology to scale. So that was sort of the origin of the company.
Ryan Grant Little:And can you talk a bit about. So you mentioned agriculture. Does that mean your customers are farmers themselves, or who are you selling this to?
Anastasia Pavlovic:Yes. So we sort of have think of it, as you know, two customer bases, and I say this because it is incredibly important to me that, even though I would call us like a climate technology or a carbon removal technology company, if this doesn't work for farmers and landowners that we partner with, none of this happens. So I very much view farmers as our customers, our partners. Every business I build in agriculture I focus that way. So customer on one side is the farmer, customer on the other side is the carbon buyer, and so we'll talk a little bit about each of those.
Anastasia Pavlovic:But for the farmers, they are essentially that's right buying a product from us which is this rock product, and we'll talk about how the value share from the carbon buyer goes to them. But essentially it subsidizes the product for the farmer, so they get a cheaper product that works like their lime, and that is incredibly important as we talk about adoption at massive scale, because you want the decision for farmers, landowners, users of these technologies to make sense for their bottom line and be easy for them to decide quickly, so that it's not hard for them to adopt something like this as a new practice. And then the carbon buyer on the other side is the person who is purchasing the resultant carbon removed for their net zero claims or their fossil fuel emission claims, etc.
Ryan Grant Little:It's such a fascinating business model I'd love to understand a little bit about, kind of how it works from end to end. So I think I read somewhere that the best rock for this comes from Norway, and so you're bringing it in from Norway, which you know. At first glance, you'd be surprised that shipping something as heavy as that you, you know, basically across the ocean makes sense. But then when I read something like and I think you already mentioned this 10 000 years, right, so you can, that's a pretty long amortization period, if you want to think of it that way, right? So the full life cycle analysis is you're bringing this, this rock, in from norway, you're grinding it up, you're spreading it on the fields, it's replacing something that farmers need and are paying for already, and then you've got, basically, I mean, you know, a really interesting, very, very long term durable carbon sink. And so I wonder if you could just you know sort of talk about the calculus behind this and throw some numbers my way.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Yeah. So everyone asks this and it is. I agree. I love businesses that are counterintuitive and that are sort of based on secrets that we know and can understand if we are willing to dig hard enough into the numbers. And so it turns out that the things most impactful for how you could think about this LCA or the life cycle emissions of doing this process, so you have.
Anastasia Pavlovic:When I started, I assumed that quarry, like rock quarries, must be the most heavy emitting part of this process, which is like not actually true. So you essentially have a portion of emissions that comes from quarrying the rock. You have a portion of emissions that comes from grinding the rock to a powder, but those industrial processes are already actually quite efficient. You have a big bucket of emissions, which I would call from moving and transporting those rocks, not just on ocean transport but also on barge or like rail vessel, if you use rail, for example, and I'll talk specifically about that because that's very important to the total carbon economics of all of this. And then, of course, you have like what I would call the last mile logistics, which are things like trucking to the farm etc. And then, at the very end, you have what we call the downstream losses, which are some parts of the carbon, are actually like released through the chain, and this is this is true of like every carbon removed technology. There are, like losses that have to be accounted for very carefully, and if all of that math emitted more carbon than it removed, this would not make sense as a carbon removal technology. This is what people often ask me. So you do all of the math on every piece of that process and the only way this works to be a scalable carbon removal technology is if you can remove way more carbon than you emit from doing the process and that it's cost effective to be put to work in a real industrial environment. So, yeah, that's the rough overview. The places I would point out the most are Everyone asks about ocean shipping, so when I got into this, everyone would ask me well, and it's crazy, shouldn't all of the rocks that do this be next to the farm?
Anastasia Pavlovic:And then you have this perfect scenario where your rocks are moving like really close to the farm. It's like, yeah, but do you know what the industrial fertilizer business looks like? And regardless of our ability to reduce that, reduce our reliance on synthetic fertilizers, the truth is like the value chains and supply chains for how those products are distributed are very centralized, and they are great at getting to massive scale and being very centralized. And so what was interesting to me is, rather than think of this distributed network of small rock piles near farms, can you make this look like the industrials business because the supply chains are so efficient? And so, to give you an example, in the case of ocean shipping, it's incredibly efficient to do ocean shipping If you can load the rocks into a deep water vessel you don't have like a train or something in between them Incredibly emissions light and then you're shipping over in as big a vessel as you can in one load. That's making your per ton cost and carbon emissions really low, and so it's very counterintuitive.
Ryan Grant Little:You know most people can't, so it's very counterintuitive, you know most people can't believe it until they see the bath and the rocks that you have in Iowa might not be volcanic in nature relative to the ones coming from you know fjords up in Norway.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Absolutely Same reason that our potash in the US comes from Canada. You know, most of our minerals are mined from other places and brought in and then are blended and perfected in the US, but they don't come from there Exactly.
Ryan Grant Little:I like that you talk about it as a sort of hybrid between an engineered and nature-based solution. I mean, I think I've got a pretty good sense of that just from your answer so far. But do you want to talk a little bit about you know why this is important and why you see it that way?
Anastasia Pavlovic:Yeah, I got really into this concept, why this is important and why you see it that way. Yeah, I got really into this concept. My last company was focused on soil organic carbon, so doing things that build up the sinks of soil organic carbon in our world soils regenerative and conservation, ag practices and things like that and what I loved about this was our earth has the ability to do these things and these systems. So we talked about the rocks removing carbon on this really slow geological timescale. We think about soil processes having mitigation to help climate resiliency, like what, better tested, proven technologies than ones that have, like, been essentially evolving and adapting for millions of years on earth, right as, like, our earth's environment has changed, changed, and so I got really into this idea of, like, the best technologies and it doesn't mean no, no shade on our like engineered solutions like direct air capture.
Anastasia Pavlovic:They're all an important part of this, but for me personally, it's like, can we find the technologies that earth has perfected by testing them for millions of years and have arrived at this really elegant solution? And then can we just figure out how to speed those up or perfect those without totally changing them? And what I love about that is. You're essentially using the systems that have made sense on Earth for millions of years, way before humans were around, and speeding them up and adjusting them in ways that are like safe and beneficial, and to me that was like this magic sort of like mixed ground. That is like where I love to think about spending my time. I also I thought about doing more engineered solutions when I was deciding about joining Ion, but this combination of these pseudo nature based, pseudo engineered solutions was like. That is what I think is really exciting.
Ryan Grant Little:Some of your customers are large tech companies like Microsoft, and I think it's been interesting that we've seen in the past couple of years like a lot of commitments from companies, some of the net zero goals also from the tech companies, especially as kind of the AI appetite for power has, kind of, you know, reared its head, and also, of course, with how you see the state of play for the possibility of a net zero tech sector, and also maybe just you know, to give your two cents on the political context in general as it relates to climate tech.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Of course you know, before the last the Hillary Trump election cycle, my uncle said to me this has really separated on either side of the aisle your moderates from your extremists, because you can see this sort of like peeling out of how different people are thinking about this, and I think the same goes for sort of this climate space. So in one day, to give you an idea of the things that I talk about, I will have calls with some of our industry alliances. There's a lot of really amazing people that came from Obama's climate team who are now running carbon removal companies, policy organizations, and they're all kind of a really close group and there's some really bright minds, and so you know you can have a call with one of those folks who is on the Hill dealing with all the stuff that's going on Really scary, really hard times. Yesterday, for example, there were some notes going out that the OSED, which is the Office of Clean Energy Demonstration, and DOE they were doing cuts to the tune of $9 billion to just the OSED program. The scale of the stuff is unbelievable. So there were some notes going around about the impacts of that and everyone was thinking about that. Really scary stuff and people are really really taking it hard in our community, for sure. On the other hand, the next hour I have a call with, like example, the Microsoft team that we have done our first project with and are excited to do more.
Anastasia Pavlovic:The AI piece, as you mentioned, has done nothing but bolster their long-term view that they are going to have to do more, not less, and I think the way they're looking at it is, if they're not buying more and investing in these technologies now to drive the price down and get the supply chains up that are needed, you're never going to get close to your 2030 goals, especially when you know Microsoft did an announcement a few weeks ago that, like, their targets are actually increasing because of AI right, and so, rather than say like, oh, we're walking this back for political favor, we actually see that, like, our goals were already aggressive and they weren't even aggressive enough. So we've seen things from those folks like we are going to. All of these contracts that we write have what's called in common and other types of industry commercial contracts, some sort of write a first offer or write a first refusal so that those buyers have the chance to purchase more. Should you have more come available commercially?
Anastasia Pavlovic:Microsoft and others have said look, we're going to start negotiating earlier on these right of first offers than we expected because we know that we have to secure the supply and there's going to be no other choice. Especially when you're talking about very permanent carbon removal. There's more of other ranges of types, like soil and forestry. When you're really talking about the hard, permanent carbon removal, the supply is so small compared to what those folks need to buy, and so you see this weird like terror and bullishness, and I think there's opportunity here for us. If you can, you know, keep your stomach strong enough to deal with it.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, if you can have the long-term view. I know working with corporates on this before. It's kind of like this musical chairs effect where no one wants to be the last one standing if the chairs are high-quality credits. I guess this is how things work a lot in the corporate space and as anticipating regulations coming down the pipe many years ahead, but nobody wants to be the first, nobody wants to be the last. Everyone wants to be kind of like, you know, well-protected and kind of like moving along with the pack here, and so I mean it's great. I mean I guess some of the companies that you are working with actually are leaders in this and so different rules apply. There Is the messaging any different about how versus six months ago, when they're announcing that contracts with you and the reasons why they're doing this.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Definitely and this is funny too. From some of our industry groups there were memos sent around about things like how to position your technology, you know, with senators, like what words to use versus not how to change your framing. Crazy to like read an email that says this stuff for me, yeah, it's all the same stuff, but yes, that is very real. I think the way that a lot of folks are looking at it is you don't have to make the arms reach to climate change technologies and, in fact, like I use this a lot with farmers and agriculture, like my messaging was always, I'm not an activist and you, I don't care what you believe. My job is to bring you a commercial program that incentivizes you to do a thing that's going to help you and help the planet, and you make your choice based on if the program works for you. I don't care what you believe. I'm not here to preach to you about this or that, and I think this is similar Finding ways to talk about this, as it is grid resilience. It is focused around farm resilience, which is important.
Anastasia Pavlovic:If you start to talk about impacting what we import as a country, you know there's a lot of ways that you can sort of like position. This that aren't. These are technologies that exist for climate change and climate change alone, and the fact is, like they don't, like the industrial sector sees that they're going to have to do these things. Yes, there are organizations that have more or less desire to do that, or more or less pressure to do that, but I think I view this as absolutely inevitable, and it's just a question of how fast. Like you said, who's going to lead, who's going to follow, and can you soften the messaging in the right audiences to make sure that this doesn't get totally cut? In a lot of ways, we're closer to agriculture, which is good in times like this, because ag is the great aisle crosser in almost every state. Every state has some sort of reliance on their agricultural supply chain, whether it's a red state or a blue state, and so ag is kind of like a nice place to be when craziness is happening.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, when I worked in biogas and in the arts also, it's something that touches, you know, actually more so ag than power in a lot of ways, and I would, you know, when I was talking to red state governors, it was always about energy security, food security, jobs creation, and I think that applies here as well, because I mean these kinds of things, you know, as you say, like it's this perfect hybrid between engineered and nature-based solution that makes sense on its own right, like independent, in a lot of ways, of political systems. It's something that just makes a lot of sense and so you can generally get people on board. There are enough ways to pitch it that everybody can be convinced of this type of thing.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Definitely, definitely. And you know, in our case, like for some of these programs that are being considered to be cut or being altered or paused indefinitely, it is not a hard calculus for me to do to show how cutting these programs is taking dollars out of pockets of real farmers. Like you don't have to believe in magic to see like this is a very easy few step process that cutting this is just cutting money from farmers who could participate in these things and that's meaningful. You know, regardless of sort of like your political views, which I think is helpful.
Ryan Grant Little:I'd love to switch gears for a minute and just ask you kind of a few questions about some of the things you said in other interviews. One, for example, that you've touched on a topic that I think is really important and under discussed in our sector, which is the need to get the financing right and to understand that there's a, you know, pretty hard line between venture capital and project financing, and I know your company is venture funded and probably a lot of the deployments of these projects looks for you need project funding.
Ryan Grant Little:I wonder if you could just talk about how you know and maybe package that some advice for climate tech founders listening, who you know aren't thinking so much about this, or maybe just on the venture capital track and not necessarily thinking about what the project delivery side of things looks like.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Yeah, of course. So when I A little bit of backstory. So I did engineering in school and when I left school, software was still super hot. Everyone was moving to San Francisco, cool stuff happening in startup land and that really called to me. So everything I did save a few things in my time in the federal government space in DC everything that I did was predominantly software-based and predominantly venture-funded. I love the speed and fail-fast mentalities. It just spoke to me as a vehicle to start new things and it's great at that. And the US is known for this high drive, high stakes ability to do this.
Anastasia Pavlovic:So I very much came up in that space and I ended up going to Yaro, which is this massive fertilizer company based in Norway, which was my first view at what it really looks like to do this inside huge global organizations and I'm really thankful I did that because it was the opposite of what I was trying to do in the startup space. I was trying to sell into those types of businesses to create change and I wanted to learn why it was so difficult and what it looked like on the other side of that. But I say all that because I think that most people like me who came in this from some venture or entrepreneurial type odds onward sort of thinking, unless you worked in renewables or you have a biogas company, something similar. The project finance side is just not something you've played a lot with in your SaaS business realm. Even when you have some sort of facilities or asset backed, that's kind of like craft the bankers deal with, you're not thinking a lot about that. It's not a core focus.
Anastasia Pavlovic:When I entered into the rock weathering space and to some extent in the soil carbon as well, the things I saw and I think listeners who are working on similar technologies will have some shape and semblance of similar problems Basically what I saw was this huge capital outlay spike as you're starting to do some of this stuff. So whether that's front loaning farmers money to change some of these practices in the case of soil organic carbon or, in our case, physically building the supply chain, even when you have partners that, like ION, isn't doing that, all ourselves but like someone has to get all the pieces together and no one's going to individually foot the bill for all of that, and so at least in the next like year, I believe you're going to have to do that, and so you have this huge capital outlay at the beginning. The office of the company is tiny because you have these 10 to 20, 30 person companies. It's not like you have a huge software shop in San Francisco and you're trying to maintain your office space and whatever. The office of the company is tiny.
Anastasia Pavlovic:But most of the stuff we're doing now is working capital, not asset-backed facilities building, which is really hard to raise debt against, especially in an early market. And so when I started to work on these first deals so the Microsoft deal and then the Frontier deal that we just announced two weeks ago, which is in the realm of $30-plus million over five years you're talking about $20-30 million in working capital across that time horizon and putting that on the balance sheet with venture money at a time when our venture environment is so People are scared LPs are pulling back. It has been tough ever since big growth in 2021-2022. It's been tough. I was like how can we possibly even think about using equity dollars to do all this? I mean, this is like. This just doesn't make sense to me. But I didn't have a background in like project finance, so thankfully, my um one of my colleagues, mike, has been like working on climate finance for a long time, and so what we started to develop are um, what are the types of debt that are flexible enough to have some part of equity contribution from us and potentially from the financier there? Take some other venture dollars to bolster the equity side and then allow you to have a suite of debt options that can help you get through this phase.
Anastasia Pavlovic:My advice to others is you will read there's in the CTVC newsletter. They did a really great a couple months ago climate tech, valley of death kind of thing, which is this series B phase, where you're big enough that you need way more capital, but you still have several years before your tech gets to scale. How do you get through that challenge? Everybody's talking about that, but there's not enough people doing stuff.
Anastasia Pavlovic:So my advice is figure out what you think the capital needs and the capital stack are and get people who know, get somebody who did this in renewables in the 90s and talk to them about what did this look like at that time? How are you thinking about capital? What was risky, what was it? And start to build ahead with some vision on that, because the truth is, this looks very different than the venture process and you can't just turn it at a dime. You have to be thinking, preparing, but yeah, there's not enough financiers, investors, focused on this place. So, between I need a $20 million check of equity and I have the hybrid infra guys who are like I'm not even going to spend an hour with you if this isn't $100 million check or more, there's like nothing in between and there's not enough people playing in there and the small private credit shops that are developing and are exciting there's like five of them and we need like 500 of them developing and are exciting.
Ryan Grant Little:There's like five of them and we need like 500 of them. I talked to a lot of climate tech founders who are really dialed in on the technology risk and the market risk and thinking about this and it, just like you know, the financing is not even on the agenda, right, in terms of like the creative approach to I mean, for us in biogas, it was that ended up being the make or break and we put together kind of like the Frankenstein's monster of vendor financing and debt and grants and equity and all these different things Right, and to make it work. And, yeah, you're right, there aren't enough players, but there's not enough conversation about it. Right, there's that you've got to get ahead of this really, really early on. If you're doing something that has you know hardware to it.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Definitely, and, you know, like I think, even more so for those really build structure around, like how money can flow into DAC in a variety of ways. And then you have, like you know, a lot of people doing the same now with nuclear. So lots of people are really excited about 20 year duration, duration, nuclear development. But the unfortunate reality is there's 100 other extremely promising technologies, not just in carbon removal but in low-carbon materials, that are probably not going to have that kind of clout and they need real capital options that aren't based on money falling down from the sky from angel investors.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Most of us may be only lucky to have that happen once in our careers. It's something that requires a lot of hard work and I certainly did not have a background in it. I think sometimes it can be easy to listen to these things and think like gosh, how the heck am I going to learn all that? To me it was just find people who know it and get it, bring their experience in early enough to be able to learn from them and like, figure out how to do this you've also said that what this industry needs is scrappy founders and figure out how to grow companies and sectors that aren't totally understood.
Ryan Grant Little:so that's definitely you and coming from kind of also traditional tech startup backgrounds, and I mean you've got an extra wrinkle here and that you're a mother to young children. What is it like to be launching a startup with a four and 23 month old at home as well?
Anastasia Pavlovic:On top of it all, it is no, life is crazy. It it is awesome, and I often ask myself why do I love? You know, I didn't realize I was doing this until probably like my fourth startup, and I had this moment where I was like I am actively seeking out super esoteric niche, high tech, high subject matter, you know, a data scaling component, a human element in markets that essentially, like, don't exist yet. Like that is what I love to do, and it is the absolute hardest, because your belief system is you're looking so far out into the future and you're trying to create dynamics that our current system, like isn't set up to do. And so, you know, a lot of people talk about like in carbon removal, like public good, and so you know, I often find myself frustrated that it's hard to capitalize some of this stuff because the returns don't look like software SaaS returns. The profile does not give returns in two to three years. It's going to take longer to scale. There are these pieces that our system is just not incentivized to be excited about, and I have days where that is deeply frustrating to me in my heart and in my spirit, but I wake up the next day and I still think this needs to exist, so I fight. I think the thing that matters most to me and I'm sure that other founders feel this way too the thing that matters most to me is these technologies should exist, and on a great day. So two weeks ago we announced this $33 million offtake, which is bankable. We're raising around, or raising debt like huge milestone for the company. We did a little celebration internal with our team.
Anastasia Pavlovic:But like it is hard to get excited sometimes because you're already thinking about the next hurdle. You know like, well, I have to go raise money to do this, I have to do this thing, I have to do that thing. I think then you'll have a day where you wake up and it just feels like everything's going wrong. Like six people messaged me in the first hour of my day about something that like exploded, that didn't work right, and what are we going to do about it.
Anastasia Pavlovic:And I've learned that it's sort of like on the good day it's like you're running a marathon. You wake up. A good day it's like you're running a marathon. You wake up, you run, great stuff happens. You feel stoked. You go to bed. The next day, a bunch of bad stuff happens. You're running a marathon. You get through it. You sit down at the end of the day. You're tired, you go to bed Like you just keep going. One of my mantras is no feeling is final, just keep going. And it's like no-transcript, like I am responsible for little humans who hopefully will grow up and also go do important stuff in the world. And, uh, that is hard for me to be like I can't do three more hours of calls because I got to like feed little people and make mac and cheese and get them juice and stuff. But it's cool.
Ryan Grant Little:I have this theory that, like you know, good founders, good entrepreneurs, are all about the next problem and then solving it right. And so once you've solved something, you generally don't stop and dwell and, like you know, in a good way, and celebrate it and stuff like that. And so this is the challenging thing, and I catch myself doing as well, like the thing that I've been working on for you know x number of years or months, as soon as it's achieved, I'm like done with it, I'm like I don't care now what's the next thing, and it's not really conducive to good quality of life it's no, and we need to be better.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Something that I like state regularly with the teams and like have tried to make a practice both in like my life and with the teams, is like you do have to take pause to notice because, like, the good moments and the bad moments are coming regardless and life is all about moments, right, and so you have to take a minute and, just like, lean into the good ones too oh, and be like, look at you know, do you remember?
Anastasia Pavlovic:when we thought about doing this achievement? It seemed so far away. Many of us thought we would never get there. We couldn't do it. Like, here are the things that happened that, like, allowed us to get here. But correct, the other side of the coin is also true that sometimes because I think the great art of this is like regulating yourself through the highs and lows there are also times when someone is freaking out about something and I think they perceive that if I'm not losing my mind, like screaming, crying, whatever, like saying oh my God, that I don't see it, or that I'm not freaking out about it and I just view it as the only way to continue and survive, is it's just another problem. We're here to solve another problem. That's our job, and if you can take the freak out away from it, you can just kind of get down to the like what has to happen here and let's go and let's do it. But yeah, it can definitely be hard for people when you get better at like regulating in a weird way.
Ryan Grant Little:I just finished reading the book 4000 weeks, and that's a pretty core concept of it as well. It's like we're just here to keep solving problems like you're never done, so you might as well enjoy the process it is.
Anastasia Pavlovic:It is so true. And I'm a uh by nature, I'm a like, I'm a very sensitive person. So I I feel and perceive my way through many things and you know the engineering side of me and the logical side of me. I have trained through great practice to marry the two, but I personally am my own hardest critic. There is nothing anyone can say to me that is a negative surprise. I have told myself all those things tenfold and I think it can be difficult to make your lowest, low moment and your stairs back up to your great, like operating level shorter because you're like hurting or you're processing or whatever. And I think the great key is like practice at making that stair step back up to your like great, excellent operating level shorter, so that like disappointments, mistakes, like stuff's gonna happen, they're gonna drop down and you have to be like faster, to get up faster, to say this is just something I can learn from and not take it so to heart and just like get back on the bike and keep going.
Ryan Grant Little:Okay, I'm thinking snakes and ladders and just run up that ladder and that's a great place to leave it. I've really enjoyed talking with you. I love what you're doing. Thank you so much.
Anastasia Pavlovic:Thank you. Thanks for having me. That was super exciting. Thanks for sharing our good news out in the world.
Ryan Grant Little: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 climate tech podcom. Find me, ryan Grant little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.
