Business for Good Podcast

There are several dozen startups, including one that I cofounded, laboring to scale mycelium fermentation to a point where it can start making a dent in demand for animal meat. One company though, has been doing this for decades: Quorn Foods. 

While most alt-meat is made from pea, soy, or wheat, Quorn dominates the portion of the market made from mycelium, controlling more than 99% of the mycoprotein-based alt-meat sector. Partnered with companies like KFC, Quorn is the number one alt-meat brand in the EU, even though it’s still a smaller part of the US market. That may be changing soon, though.

In this conversation, we hear from Quorn’s CEO Marco Bertacca about where the company’s been and where it’s going, including its plans in the US. He reveals which fungi protein startup Quorn recently invested in, whether Quorn intends to build its own fermentation assets in the US, when the company intends to remove all egg whites from its products, and why he thinks Quorn seems better suited as a chicken alternative than beef. Interestingly, he also claims that Quorn is already competing on cost with some chicken products today.

I was impressed by Marco’s humility in this interview, including when he’s talking about where he thinks Quorn has come up short in some of its expansion plans. Interestingly, he and I also chat about why he felt it was important for him, when starting as CEO four years ago, to work for weeks undercover as a factory worker in a Quorn plant before getting behind a computer.

The job, Marco claims, has been very gratifying for him, noting that he’s married to someone who never eats meat, and he’s become someone who eats meat only once per month. Marco even notes that his children are more proud of him today than ever before because of his work to create a more sustainable food system. 

I think you’ll appreciate that sentiment even more after listening to this conversation with the man at the helm of the fungi fermentation revolution—enjoy!

Discussed in this episode

• Paul’s new talk on the TED website about fungi fermentation.

• Paul’s favorite Quorn products are the Spicy Chiqin Patties and Fish Sticks.

• The history of Quorn.

• Quorn was acquired in 2015 for $831 million by Monde Nissin.

• Monde Nissin’s 2021 billion-dollar IPO for Quorn.

• Quorn’s 2021 announcement that it would invest $335 million in the US market.

• Marco’s first weeks on the CEO job were spent as a factory worker.

• The Fungi Protein Association, of which Quorn is a founding member

• Our recent episode with Prime Roots CEO Kimberlie Le.

More about Marco Bertacca

Marco Bertacca joined Quorn Foods as CEO in January 2020, bringing over 25 years of global food and drink experience to the company. 

Prior to moving to the UK to undertake the role, Marco was based in the Philippines where he was the Managing Director of Alaska Milk Corporation, a Friesland Campina Company, for over three years. He first moved to South East Asia in 2013, taking the role of Business Development Director in Singapore for Friesland Campina. He went on to hold a number of MD roles across Singapore and Thailand. Before joining Friesland Campina Marco was President of Europe at CSM Bakery Products, and began his career working for Unilever for 10 years, leading the company’s supply chain operations.

Marco joined Quorn Foods with the ultimate goal of encouraging more sustainable diets, for the health of both people and planet. Under his leadership, the business announced it will be the first major food brand to roll out carbon labelling on its products, and has committed to achieving Net Positive status by 2030, by which time he has set the ambition to serve 8 billion servings of Quorn a year, the equivalent of one serving for every person on the planet.

Twenty years ago, Jason Matheny was a public health student who in his spare time was crusading to create a meat industry that would be less reliant on animals. 

In 2004, after he founded New Harvest to popularize cultured meat, his fame grew. The New York Times profiled him in its annual “Ideas of the Year” feature in 2005. That same year Discover magazine named cultured meat one of the most notable tech stories. For the next several years, Jason was the face of the movement to grow real meat without animals, traveling the world to persuade governments and food companies alike that they should be investing in a future where people would eat meat, but not animals. 

By 2009, now armed with his BA, MBA, MPH, and PhD, Jason began turning his attention toward preventing the more immediate and potentially catastrophic risks humanity faces. After leaving New Harvest, he eventually rose to become the director of Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a federal agency that develops advanced technologies for national intelligence. Running the federal intelligence agency would eventually lead Jason to helm a national security center at Georgetown University, followed by a high-profile national security role in the Biden White House, to now being the CEO of the Rand Corporation. He was even named one of Foreign Policy's “Top 50 Global Thinkers.”

As you’ll hear in this interview, Jason shifted from his work on cultivated meat toward national security as he became convinced that technology can vastly improve both human and animal welfare, and that the only real threat to technological advancement is an apocalyptic catastrophe like a synthetic virus or asteroid. He still cares about the welfare of those of us living today—human and nonhuman alike—but Jason’s primary preoccupation has become reducing civilization-threatening risks so that our species can keep progressing into the deep future.

I think you’ll find this conversation with this leading thinker as riveting as I did. Jason even talks about what technologies he hopes listeners will pursue to mitigate existential risks, so be sure to listen closely!

Discussed in this episode

• Jason recommends reading The Precipice by Toby Ord.

• Jason passed the New Harvest torch onto Isha Datar, who was our guest on Episode 42.

• Our Episode 89 with Rep. Ro Khanna regarding his legislation relating to national security implications of losing the alt-meat race.

• Paul’s thoughts in The Hill on government funding for alt-meat.

More about Jason Matheny

Jason Matheny is president and chief executive officer of the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. 

Prior to becoming RAND's president and CEO in July 2022, he led White House policy on technology and national security at the National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Previously, he was founding director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University and director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), where he was responsible for developing advanced technologies for the U.S. intelligence community. 

Before IARPA, he worked for Oxford University, the World Bank, the Applied Physics Laboratory, the Center for Biosecurity, and Princeton University. Matheny has served on many nonpartisan boards and committees, including the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, to which he was appointed by Congress in 2018. 

He is a recipient of the Intelligence Community's Award for Individual Achievement in Science and Technology, the National Intelligence Superior Service Medal, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He was also named one of Foreign Policy's “Top 50 Global Thinkers.” 

Matheny holds a Ph.D. in applied economics from Johns Hopkins University, an M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins University, an M.B.A. from Duke University, and a B.A. in art history from the University of Chicago.

You probably already know that using animals to make materials like leather has a lot of downsides. But using petro-chemicals and intensive crops like cotton, while better than animal products, is still pretty suboptimal for the planet.

Keel Labs thinks it has a better idea. Rather than relying on animals or terrestrial plant agriculture, it’s seeking to use kelp—yep, seaweed—to make the next generation of materials. Kelp grows much more quickly than land-based plants, sucks C02 out of the air, requires no water, fertilizer, or pesticide inputs, and generally speaking makes the oceans healthier. 

Conceived by undergrad students in 2017, the company has now raised nearly $20 million from venture capitalists betting that kelp will be the next big thing, has two dozen employees, and is making kelp-based yarns at its North Carolina headquarters.

In case you're as maritime-challenged as I am and don’t know what “keel” means, a keel is the structural spine of a ship, from the bow to the stern, functioning to create balance between the ocean and to keep a ship's momentum moving forward.

The B2B company doesn’t intend to sell its own kelp clothing as much as it intends to produce the natural yarn that fashion designers can use to create humane, climate-friendly materials. 

Are the tides turning for sustainable materials? Keel Labs co-founder Aleks Gosiewski thinks so and sees an ocean of opportunity in kelp. Enjoy hearing her inspirational story.

Discussed in this episode

• Keel won the Biodesign Challenge competition.

• Keel Labs went through the Indie Bio accelerator.

• Horizons Ventures invested in Keel Labs.

• Keel Labs was once housed in the same space as Modern Meadow.

• Modern Meadow spun off the cultivated meat company Fork and Good.

• Our past episode with Pinatex (leather from pineapple leaves).

• Aleks recommends reading Bio Design, Material Ecology, Shoe Dog, and Steve Jobs

• Aleks thinks you should attend the Design Indaba conference in South Africa

• After the interview, Aleks confirmed that the organisms that Kelsun is exposed to during composting or landfilling are much more varied (and suited to use carbohydrates as food) and numerous than the organisms present during regular wear or use of Kelsun. She says Keel has further validated this by conducting in-house vermicompost tests and official marine and landfill biodegradation tests.

More about Aleks Gosiewski

Aleksandra Gosiewski is the Co-Founder & COO of Keel Labs, an innovation platform expanding the potential of the ocean to accelerate the planet’s development towards a more sustainable future.

With a background in fashion design and economics, Aleks is driving the development of Keel Labs’ business and R&D operations to scale the production of Kelsun, the company’s flagship product. As a systems thinker, Aleks connects the dots between supply chain logistics, financial planning, and business development. Aleks is a Forbes 30 Under 30 member, a testament to her unique and pioneering perspective on the intersection of science and design.

In 2021, a lengthy analysis was published by a now-defunct online news outlet concluding that cultivating animal cells at commercial meat industry scale was simply a pipedream. Josh March didn’t really disagree. But he thought if you could bioengineer the animal cells to get more comfortable at production scale, and add those finished cells into otherwise plant-based meats, you could both commercialize meat cultivation and make animal-free burgers taste even better.

Not only did March persuade himself of it, but he persuaded investors, too. In 2022—a very difficult time for startups to raise VC cash—March’s startup, SciFi Foods, raised $22 million to bioengineer better animal-free beef.

Of course, many in the cultivated meat world shy away from talking about or practicing bioengineering for fear that it will turn consumers off. But not March. He’s betting big that technologies like bioengineering and CRISPR are actually the only path to success in this field, so he’s going all in. 

In this interview, we talk all about Josh’s story, including two previous startup acquisitions, his motivations for doing this work, and what he sees as the future of meat.

Discussed in this episode

• Josh became interested in cultivated meat after reading The Singularity is Near and Player of Games

• We discuss the 2021 Counter story on cultivated meat’s prospects

• Josh recommends reading How to Get Rich

• Paul recommends reading Tender is the Flesh

• Josh is currently reading Mythos

• Paul references Circe as a female-centered retelling of Greek mythology

• BTW, Josh is the author of Message Me: The Future of Customer Service in the Era of Social Messaging and Artificial Intelligence

More about Josh March

Joshua March is the co-founder & CEO of SCiFi Foods, on a mission to disrupt the $1.2T meat market by leveraging the power of genetic engineering to make cultivated meat (real meat grown from cells) a commercial reality. He was previously the Co-founder & CEO of Conversocial, a digital care platform for messaging that works with many of the biggest brands in the world (acquired by Verint).

The Business of Being an Author and Influencer with Toni Okamoto of Plant-Based on a Budget

This is a special episode of this podcast, because the guest is not only an entrepreneur making money by making the world a better place, but she also just happens to be my wife. Toni Okamoto is the founder and CEO of Plant-Based on a Budget, and she has her fourth cookbook coming out right around the time that this episode drops!

Long-time listeners will recall that Toni was actually the co-host of this podcast for the first 20 episodes, and medium-time listeners will recall that she was an interviewee two years ago on episode 51 when her last book came out. It was a fun interview that I recommend going back and checking out, but this is even more fun and doesn’t require knowledge of the first episode to enjoy.

When Toni and I first met, Plant Based on a Budget was just a passion blog she did in her free time. Fast forward to today, and with no external investment, just through revenue generation alone, Plant-Based on a Budget is now a profitable company employing five people and reaching millions with a message of how to save money by eating in a way that’s better for you and for the world. 

In addition to talking about Toni’s latest book, Plant-Based on a Budget Quick and Easy, we also talk a lot about the business of being an influencer, how being the CEO of a profitable company that puts her in the spotlight has changed her life, and more. I had fun doing this interview, and I hope Toni did too. You be the judge. 

Resources discussed in this episode

• You can get Toni’s new cookbook here.

• Our past episode 51 with Toni.

• Toni recommends listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast, including a recent episode with Toni about her business.

• Our past episode with Moby and his new documentary Punk Rock Vegan Movie.

• Alfonso Revilla’s stellar photography.

• Paul recommends following science and engineerinfluencer Mark Rober.

• Vox’s story on the trend of kids wanting to be influencers.

• Investor Seth Bannon’s tweet arguing that influencers aren’t creators, but rather entertainers.

More about Toni Okamoto

Toni Okamoto is the founder of Plant-Based on a Budget, the popular website and social media platform that teaches millions how to save dough by eating veggies. She’s also the author of the Plant-Based on a Budget Cookbook, and the co-host of The Plant-Powered People Podcast. Okamoto’s work has been profiled by NPR, NBC News, Parade Magazine, and she’s a regular presence on local and national morning shows across the country, where she teaches viewers how to break their meat habit without breaking their budget. She was also featured in the popular documentary What the Health. When she’s not cooking up a plant-based storm, she’s spending time with her husband and their rescued dog in Sacramento, CA.

President Biden recently signed into law the FDA Modernization Act 2.0, new legislation that ends the FDA’s mandate that all drugs be tested on animals prior to human clinical trials. The new law doesn’t prohibit animal testing, but it does give companies the choice of whether to conduct animal experiments or not, and could lead to many fewer animals being used as test subjects. 

If we don’t use animals as test tubes prior to human clinical trials, what should we use? Emulate claims it has the answer. The organ-on-a-chip company’s CEO Jim Corbett testified before Congress in favor of the new legislation and says his company’s products deliver much more reliable data than does animal experimentation. 

And why shouldn’t it? We all know that rats (the most popular animal on whom to experiment) have pretty different biologies than humans. For example, people with pet rats are regularly warned not to give their rats onions since it can sicken them. We all know dogs are apparently not supposed to eat chocolate. Yet humans do just fine eating these foods that are toxic to rats and dogs. 

So what if we could test on actual human cells that have been placed on chips which mimic the functions of a human body?

In this episode, Jim discusses Emulate’s technology, its promise to slash the number of animals used for testing while delivering safe drugs to market more quickly, who opposes their efforts, and where this is all leading us. 

Emulate so far has raised a whopping quarter-billion dollars of venture capital investment, so someone believes that these folks are onto something big. Time will tell, and for now, their CEO will tell you the Emulate story.

Discussed in this episode

• Emulate was birthed from Don Ingber’s lab at Harvard with funding from DARPA

• Fast Company and WIRED on Emulate’s work.

• Nature Communications Medicine Performance assessment and economic analysis of a human Liver-Chip for predictive toxicology (2022)

• Science Translational Medicine Reproducing human and cross-species drug toxicities using a Liver-Chip (2019)

• Jim recommends the book Endurance to would-be startup founders

• Jim credits the Center for a Humane Economy with leading the passage of the FDA Modernization Act 2.0.

More about Jim Corbett

Jim Corbett has served as a leader of successful international businesses across diverse sectors, including biotechnology, medical imaging, analytical instruments and in vitro diagnostics. His experience ranges from Fortune 100 companies to entrepreneurial start-ups. 

Until becoming the CEO of Emulate, he served in leadership roles at PerkinElmer during an 11-year tenure, including Executive Vice President and President of Discovery & Analytical Solutions. His other roles at PerkinElmer included President of Diagnostics & Life Sciences, Senior Vice President of Life Sciences Solutions, and Vice President of North America Genetic Screening.

Prior to PerkinElmer, Corbett was President of ViaCell, Inc. which was acquired by PerkinElmer in 2007. Previously, he co-founded CADx Systems, a company focused on the oncology market, where he held the position of Executive Vice President and Director with responsibility for worldwide sales and marketing, technical support and business development. Following the 2004 acquisition of CADx by iCAD, Inc., he was named Chief Commercial Officer. 

In addition, Corbett worked for Abbott Laboratories for 14 years in a variety of sales and marketing positions including Worldwide Marketing Manager for Abbott Diagnostics Immunoassay Systems and Region Manager for Abbott Diagnostics. Corbett holds a Bachelor of Science from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

You’ve heard of the companies seeking to build new brands of animal-free meat, but you hear a lot less about the B2B companies working behind the scenes to give those pioneers the tools they need to succeed.

One such company, Matrix FT, recently debuted what it’s calling Ohio’s first cultivated chicken nugget, featuring chicken cells grown on the scaffolds and microcarriers it produces. Via a technology called electo-spinning (more like this than this), Matrix FT is creating edible, animal-free, cost-effective ingredients that cultivated meat companies can use in their media to more effectively grow their meat. And now the company’s starting to work with plant-based meat companies to improve texture, as well.

Recently Matrix FT’s founder and CEO Eric Jenkusky stepped down from his role, and their executive Teryn Wolfe assumed the helm of the company. In this interview, we talk with Teryn about what circumstances in her life led her to be running an alt-protein food tech company, what she views as the big hurdles in the space, and why she thinks it’s taking longer for cultivated meat to reach your plate than many had predicted.

Discussed in this episode

• Using electro-spinning for plant-based meat (cool tech here on this too)
• Using electro-spinning for cultivated meat
• Teryrn recommends the Good Food Institute’s deep dive into cultivated meat science
• She also recommends New Harvest’s resources

About Teryn Wolfe

Teryn Wolfe is the Interim CEO at Matrix Food Technologies, where she was the former Vice President and Director of Corporate Development and Strategic Relationships. Before joining Matrix F.T., Teryn founded and managed Measurement Matters, based out of  Colombia. She is also the founder of a startup that helps female artisans and entrepreneurs get their products to market, and a NGO. She is  Fulbright Research Scholar Alumni, a former Adjunct professor and possesses a diverse, international professional background, marked with unique experiences that have been driven by curiosity, determination and desire to deliver on creating meaningful, positive change in the world. Teryn lives in Columbus, Ohio with her son, Adrian, and her dog, Penny Lane. She spends her free time reading, cooking, playing, conjuring up new business ideas and planning logistics of adventures to come! 

Usually when you hear about meat’s connection to methane, it’s about all the methane that cows are emitting into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. What if, however, you could capture methane before it goes into the atmosphere, and feed it to microbes which in turn convert it into protein-packed ingredients to make alt-meat?

Sounds like magic, but it’s not magic, it’s science! And it’s a science that Dr. Ezhil Subbian and her team at String Bio are advancing right now.

The India-based company in 2022 closed its $20 million Series B round and is now scaling up to commercialize its microbial protein ingredients.

In this interview, Dr. Subbian and I talk about how she started the company, why she moved it from Silicon Valley to Bangalore, India, where they get the methane to feed their microbes, and much more.

It’s a fun conversation with someone passionate about fermentation and seeking to scale it in a part of the world where it’s desperately needed—where meat demand is rising the fastest: Asia.

So enjoy this conversation with a real pioneer in the microbial fermentation space as she tells you her story of going from biotech researcher to startup CEO.

Discussed in this episode

• Our past episode with Zero Acre Farms.
• Ezhil recommends Meditations by Marcus Aurelius 
• Paul’s favorite quote from Meditations: “Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it’s unendurable … then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.”
• Ezhil recommends The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee 
• Finally, Ezhil recommends Good to Great by Jim Collins

More about Ezhil Subbian, PhD

Ezhil is a scientist, innovator, thinker, hiking enthusiast and a citizen of the world. Ezhil is driven by a passion to leverage the power of biology to deliver sustainable and cost-effective solutions. Her experience in biobased product development over the last 20 years helps her bring deep technical expertise to the work at String. Ezhil’s work was most recently recognized with the Women Transforming India Award 2018 from United Nations/NITI Aayog.

Ezhil completed her degree in Industrial and Biotech engineering from Anna University, Chennai, and then went on to do a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. She then worked for over 12 years in Silicon Valley’s Bay area as part of the biotechnology industry. She worked as a scientist and technical lead across multiple companies before becoming a consultant and then starting up.

Ezhil is a scientist, innovator, thinker, hiking enthusiast and a citizen of the world. Ezhil is driven by a passion to leverage the power of biology to deliver sustainable and cost-effective solutions. Her experience in biobased product development over the last 20 years helps her bring deep technical expertise to the work at String. Ezhil’s work was most recently recognized with the Women Transforming India Award 2018 from United Nations/NITI Aayog.

Nearly none of the plastic we use gets recycled. Even the plastic we throw into the recycling bin often ends up in landfills since it’s just not economical to recycle the plastic, especially now that China has banned imports of American plastic waste. So what are we going to do with the vast oceans of plastic we love to use?

Shelly Zhang has an idea. As you’ll hear in this episode, the death of Shelly’s father led to the birth of her company, Molten Materials. Armed with her PhD in engineering, Shelly has pioneered a method of taking plastic waste and upcycling it into pavement sealers, asphalt rejuvenators, and more.

In other words, she’s betting that she can take our trash and turn it into her treasure, all while solving the pressing problem of what to do with all our plastic waste. 

Already, Shelly’s earned seed investment, hired a dozen team members, filed for various patents, and is now readying her first-ever product, an upcycled-plastic DIY pavement sealer you can use on your own driveway or other cracked surfaces. 

Her story is an inspirational one, moving to the US from China, earning her PhD, and now founding her own company. I think you’ll be impressed, so let me allow Shelly to tell you her story herself.

Discussed in this episode

• Shelly recommends Shoe Dog by Phil Knight
• Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, by Richard Feynman
• Our past episode on nuclear waste with Deep Isolation CEO Elizabeth Muller

More about Shelly Zhang

Shelly Zhang earned her PhD from California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 2020 Shelly founded Molten Materials, her vision is to create a clean and sustainable world for future generations by replacing big oil. She believes that through technological innovation, it is achievable to solve the toughest problems our world faces."

Is Sugar by Another Name Just as Sweet? Ali Wing and Oobli Are Fermenting Their Way to a Sweet Protein Future

We all know that eating too much sugar isn’t good for us, but millions of years of evolution led us to love sweet foods. After all, they provide us with a quick boost of energy needed in an ancestral environment where we were largely active throughout the day. Of course, today most people in the developed world are far from being active all day, yet we still crave sugar and eat it in an abundance far greater than what was available to our distant ancestors from whom we descend.

There’ve been plenty of attempts to create sweetness without the negative effects that go along with eating the refined sugars we seem to love so much. From older products like aspartame to newer ones like stevia or allulose, a pot of gold awaits those who can help humanity satiate our sweet tooth without contributing to the health crises we now face.

To that end, we’re talking today with Oobli CEO Ali Wing about her company’s efforts to commercialize the world’s first sweet proteins. Yes, you read that right: sweet proteins. In 2022 Oobli closed a $25 million Series B round, bringing the company’s total fundraising to date to $40 million. 

So, how do they create sweet proteins? As you’ll hear Ali describe in this episode, some plants naturally produce proteins that happen to be sweet as an evolutionary trick. It’d be difficult to mass produce those plants, but via microbial fermentation, Oobli has figured out how to produce the bioidentical proteins themselves. 

I had the pleasure of enjoying some of Oobli’s pre-market products and I certainly couldn’t tell the difference myself. I was especially excited to try the company’s chocolate bar which tastes as sweet as a full-sugar bar, but with 70 percent less sugar. 

It’s an exciting way to sweeten the food industry without turning our health sour. I think you’ll enjoy hearing Ali tell you the story of how she and her team intend to make your life, and your health, a little bit sweeter.

Discussed in this episode

• Paul recommends Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott
• Ali recommends Loonshots by Safi Bahcall
• Ali also recommends John Doerr’s books
• Ali mentions this study about the metabolic impacts of alt-sugars

More about Ali Wing

A growth CEO, Ali is best known for tackling big consumer problems, brand strategy & building high performing, agile teams. Specializing at the intersection of consumer brands, technology & healthy living, Ali’s value creation track record crosses CPG, retail, technology, healthcare & biotech. 

Ali is currently the CEO & Director of Oobli, Inc., a food technology company leveraging precision fermentation to disrupt sugar. Prior to Oobli, Ali served as the Chief Consumer Officer of Bright Health Group, EVP of Digital/Chief Brand Officer at Ascena Retail Group, Founder/CEO/ Chairwoman of giggle, an EIR for a variety of venture-backed consumer software & technology companies & a Corporate Securities Attorney in the Silicon Valley. 

Ali launched her career at NIKE in brand leadership & strategy. In addition to her operating role at Oobli, Ali currently serves as an independent director on the boards of Casey’s General Stores (NASDAQ: CASY) & Worldwide Orphans (WWO), & acts as an advisor to several growth technology companies. 

Previously Ali served as an independent director for Bazaarvoice (NASDAQ: BV) until it was sold to Marlin Equity in early 2018. Ali lives in the California with her husband, has an only son in college & holds a dual JD / MBA from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. 

Ali has completed Harvard Business School’s 2020/2021 Corporate Governance Certificate Program & was recognized among Women's Inc Top 100 Corporate Board of Directors in 2019.

The inside of the earth’s pretty hot. How hot? As hot as the surface of the sun. Seriously. 

That heat could generate unbelievable amounts of clean geothermal energy to power our civilization—if we could reach all the way down there. You see, to get to fossil fuels like oil and gas, we only need to drill down a couple kilometers. In places that have volcanoes, like Iceland, you can fairly easily reach down into hellish parts of the earth to harness geothermal energy, but most human populations tend not to be crowded around active volcanoes for obvious reasons. 

In the places where power plants typically exist—near human civilization—we’d need to drill more like 10-20 kilometers down, which just isn’t really possible with conventional drilling techniques. 

Enter Quaise Energy, a four-year-old startup that’s raised $70 million so far to drill deeper than humans have ever gone. Their plan isn’t to use mechanical drill bits, which are limited in their utility at such deep depths, but rather to vaporize rock using microwaves. 

Their plan is as bold as it is simple: Drill thousands of these eight-inch-wide but super-deep holes right next to existing power plants. That way, the plants can run on geothermal energy and stop using coal to create the energy we all use daily. 

If it works, it’s a rapidly scalable solution to quickly slash our fossil fuel use and avert the most catastrophic climate scenarios.

Our guest in this episode is Quaise Energy’s CFO, Kevin Bonebreak, a guy who spent most of his career in the conventional energy investment world, and is now working to bring about a cleaner, safer, and saner way to power human civilization. 

Discussed in this episode

• Kevin recommends books by Vaclav Smil, including his works on energy
• Kevin also recommend reading Loonshots
• MIT on Quaise’s holes
• Bloomberg on Quaise’s gameplan
• Quaise’s latest (2022) financing round of $52 million

More about Kevin Bonebrake

Kevin Bonebrake is the CFO of Quaise Energy. He joined the startup from Lazard, where he was a Managing Director in the financial advisory business focused on the energy industry. Prior to joining Lazard in 2017, Bonebrake was a Managing Director in Morgan Stanley’s Global Natural Resources investment banking practice and was a Vice President with Citigroup’s Global Energy, Power and Chemicals investment banking team. Bonebrake completed his graduate research in industrial laser applications in the Naval Architecture department at the Helsinki University of Technology and was a member of the intellectual property licensing team at Delphi Automotive.

This is a cool episode, because Grant Canary has found a way to make money by cooling the planet—with trees! In episode 98 with Maddie Hall, we learned about how her startup, Living Carbon, is bioengineering trees to grow faster so we can reforest the planet faster. And in this 101st episode, we’ll hear about a different approach to reforestation.

Every year, millions of acres of forests in the US burn down, and the number of acres burning is increasing annually. We know that trees not only provide critical wildlife habitat, but they’re an important part of keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, yet literally billions of trees burn up in wildfires each year.

Regardless of how fast those trees grow, just imagine how much time it would take to hand plant enough seeds to replace billions of burned trees. Enter Drone Seed. Founded in 2016, the company's raised well over $30 million from venture investors so far to essentially automate the reforestation process. 

Rather than planting seeds by hand or even randomly from the air, the 100-person startup’s drones survey the burned land, plan the mission, and then strategically drop pucks filled with seeds and the nutrients they’ll need to grow in the areas they’re most likely going to take root. 

The company is already selling carbon offsets to companies like Shopify, proving that sometimes it can be more profitable to grow a forest than to cut one down. 

Discussed in this episode

• Grant recommends The Lean Startup, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and Multipliers
• Shopify’s Planet app
• Mark Rober video
• TechCrunch story and CNBC story about Drone Seed

More about Grant Canary

Grant Canary is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of DroneSeed, which reforests after wildfire using heavy lift drone swarms. It was founded to make reforestation scalable and mitigate the worst effects of climate change. It recently acquired subsidiary Silvaseed which has been expanded to be the largest private seed bank on the west coast. The company is now a one-stop-shop for reforestation providing seed, seedlings, aerial seeding, and financing via carbon credits.

Grant has focused his entire career on sustainability—working at Vestas wind energy in China, the US and Denmark, and for the US Green Building Council in its infancy.

He has had one prior acquisition. He founded Biosystems Co., in Bogotá, Colombia that utilized food waste to feed insect larvae for use as industrial fish feed— alleviating overfishing pressure and utilizing food waste. He worked with the acquirer to scale that company to a 60k sq ft insect protein factory which is going strong today.

Grant is a pacific NW native growing up in Oregon playing chess, then poker, then improv. By virtue of DroneSeed he is a Techstars Seattle Alumni ('16), Mulago Foundation Fellow, and Grist list of 50 Fixers.

If you’re familiar with the Silicon Valley world or venture capital space, Steve Jurvetson is a name that needs no introduction. For the rest of you, Steve’s a legendary venture capitalist perhaps best known for his early backing of companies like Hotmail, Skype, Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, and more. He sat on Tesla’s board of directors for years, and currently sits on SpaceX’s board, too. These big bets he’s taken on then-risky and out-there companies have led Steve to astronomical financial success (pun intended), but also to become an influential thought leader on space and technology issues, along with others. He was also an early backer of the cultivated meat industry, investing in Upside Foods’ Series A.

In 2016, President Obama appointed Steve as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. Steve’s also been honored as one of "Tech's Best Venture Investors" by Forbes, and as the “Venture Capitalist of the Year” by Deloitte. The dude’s a pretty prolific photographer too, it turns out, as I’ve learned. In fact, if you enter his name into Google without hitting enter, one of the dropdowns you get served is Steve Jurvetson Flickr! 

Today, Steve runs a venture capital fund called Future Ventures with his business partner Maryanna Saenko, and for full disclosure, as you’ll hear in this interview, Future Ventures is an investor in my own company, The Better Meat Co. But as you’ll also hear in this interview, that doesn’t stop us from discussing taboo topics like Steve’s personal wealth, how he spends his money, and more. 

Other interesting topics we explore include:

• What led a deep tech investor like Steve to invest in alternative meat?
• How many startup pitches does Steve hear weekly? 
• What makes a good pitch, and what gets him to cross the finish line to actually wire investment dollars?
• What company does Steve want you to start and pitch him on?
• What does Steve think you should look for in a cofounder?
• For what does Steve think his future self will condemn his current self?
• What would be one of the greatest discoveries ever, in Steve’s view?
• What happened in his life when Steve stopped drinking?
• What does Steve suggest you try as “the funniest google exercise”?

In all, it’s a riveting conversation with one of the most consequential names in business, including businesses that are seeking to do good in the world. 

Resources referenced in this episode

• NASA’s Planetary Protection Division and Paul’s thoughts in Astronomy magazine about its implications
• Massive liquid water oceans in our solar system, such as on Europa and Enceladus
• Europa report, which Steve still needs to see
• Steve’s thoughts on Boston Consulting Group’s report on where best to invest for the climate
• Steve’s review of Paul’s book Clean Meat (which he reviewed before the two knew each other)
• Other books Steve’s enjoyed: Steve Jobs, The Founders, and Code Breaker

More about Steve Jurvetson

Steve Jurvetson is an early-stage venture capitalist with a focus on founder-led, mission-driven companies at the cutting edge of disruptive technology and new industry formation.  Steve led founding investments in several companies that had successful IPOs and others that were billion-dollar acquisitions, representing $800 billion of aggregate value creation. Some of those early VC investments include Planet Labs, SpaceX and Tesla. Before co-founding Future Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, 

Steve was an R&D Engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where seven of his chip designs were fabricated.  He also worked in product marketing at Apple and NeXT and management consulting with Bain & Company.  He completed his undergraduate Electrical Engineering degree at Stanford in 2.5 years, graduating #1 in his class, and went on to earn a MSEE and MBA from Stanford. 

In 2017, Steve received the Visionary Award from SV Forum. In 2016, President Barack Obama appointed Steve as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. Steve has also been honored as one of "Tech's Best Venture Investors" by Forbes, and as the “Venture Capitalist of the Year” by Deloitte.

As we continue to empty the oceans, our species’ demand for fish only seems to increase. But what if we could eat all the bluefin tuna and salmon we wanted without having to harm fish and other aquatic animals?

That’s the vision that companies like Wildtype are working toward. Founded in 2016, this cultivated fish startup has raised $120 million so far and now has 60 employees who are growing real fish meat without the fish. I’ve enjoyed their product now twice, both pre-pandemic and recently, and enjoyed it both times. 

Wild Type salmon that I recently enjoyed while in their San Francisco HQ.

Today, Wildtype is building serious cultivation capacity to help turn the tide for the oceans, and in this episode, we discuss the company’s origins, the role bird poop played, and what the company’s up to today. We even discuss the co-founders’ first company idea which they abandoned in favor of Wildtype: a redesigned Neti pot that would’ve been called The Schnozel. (They never trademarked this, so maybe one day you’ll be able to buy that Schnozel of your dreams.)

In addition to chatting about whether it’s faster and cheaper to grow fish cells compared to mammalian and avian cells, co-founders Justin and Arye open up about what impact it’s had on their personal lives to have gone from normal jobs to running their own company. We also talk about the perennial question in this industry: If the FDA gave them approval today, how soon would it be before we see Wildtype fish on restaurant menus?

Discussed in this episode

• Our past episode with BlueNalu
• New Harvest founder Jason Matheny recently became CEO of the Rand Corporation
• The 2018 book Clean Meat (still highly relevant!)
• Bored Cow’s great chocolate milk made with Perfect Day’s animal-free whey protein

More about Justin Kolbeck and Aryé Elfenbein

Justin Kolbeck is co-founder and CEO of Wildtype, which is on a mission to create the cleanest, most sustainable seafood on the planet. Before Wildtype, he spent nearly five years as a consultant at Strategy& (not a typo!) helping companies develop and launch products, grow into new markets, and operate efficiently. Justin started his career as a Foreign Service Officer, serving in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Australia, and Washington DC.  He is a graduate of the Yale School of Management, L’Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, and UC Berkeley.

Aryé Elfenbein is co-founder of Wildtype, where he directs the company’s scientific research. Aryé completed his MD and PhD at Dartmouth and Kyoto University; he completed his clinical training in internal medicine and cardiology at Yale. Prior to Wildtype, he completed a fellowship in regenerative cardiovascular medicine research at the Gladstone Institutes / UCSF. He currently practices cardiology in the critical care setting.

What’s the most old-school way to capture carbon from the atmosphere? Trees! But is there a new school way to help trees stand up to the task of quickly removing the carbon humanity’s been spewing into the atmosphere in recent centuries? 

Living Carbon is pioneering an exciting new field in which it’s enhancing trees’ natural ability to photosynthesize, causing them to grow dramatically faster and therefore capture carbon more quickly.

You see, trees are essentially just big columns of carbon, and when we cut them down—something humans seem to like to do quite a lot—all of that carbon in the trees, and much of what was stored in the soil underneath those trees, gets released back into the atmosphere, heating up the planet. One problem with relying on tree-planting to recapture that carbon is just that trees take such a long time to grow, and we just don’t have the luxury of time as the climate heats up. So Living Carbon is bioengineering trees that just grow a lot more efficiently at the beginning of their lives, and in turn making money in part from the carbon credits they can generate.

Now, there are other benefits of trees aside from carbon capture, including that they provide critical wildlife habitat, shade, and more, and it’d be better if we had millions more large trees without having to wait a large number of years. That’s where Living Carbon comes in. This three-year-old startup has raised $15 million and has successfully engineered two species of trees to grow so quickly that they have up to 53 percent more biomass than comparably aged trees of their species. 

They’ve already done trial plantings and their CEO, Maddie Hall, says in this interview that they intend to plant 4-5 million of their enhanced trees before the end of 2023. Not too shabby, and that’s just the start. They’re also working on drought-resistant trees so we can still have forests in places that climate change is drying out.

In this interview, we talk about what Living Carbon is doing and why, we discuss the controversy over whether anything “natural” is better than “human-made,” and of course, why it’s a good idea to genetically engineer trees that will help fight climate change, something that as you can imagine, elicits a number of differing views. 

Discussed in this episode

• CNN short video on Living Carbon
• Bill Gates’ book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster
• Maddie recommends Nonviolent Communication
• The number one cause of deforestation: meat production

Not plants, and not animals, fungi are an entirely separate kingdom of life, and they can do some really amazing things. For example, two episodes ago you heard from a startup called Funga that’s seeking to implement fungal transplants in forests to enhance the carbon-capturing capacity of the soil. And you may know that my own company, The Better Meat Co., uses fungi fermentation to recreate the meat experience without animals. 

But Bosque Foods is putting fungi to work in a very different way from what I do during my day job. They’re not fermenting fungi in stainless steel fermenters. Rather, they’re practicing what’s called solid-state fermentation to create high-protein foods that will be center-of-the-plate for sure, but they’re not seeking to mimic meat per se.

They’ve raised $3 million in venture capital so far and are making products that at least from the photos I see online, look fungally fantastic. 

In this episode I sit down with Bosque Foods CEO Isabella Iglesias-Musachio and chat about her lifelong passion that started her on this path. We discuss all types of cool things, including what to call the products she’s making, how she intends to upcycle agricultural byproducts as a feedstock for her fungi, her pathway to commercialization, and more.

So if you’re interested in yet one more way fungi may save us, enjoy this episode. I think you’ll be inspired by Isabella’s story.

Discussed in this episode

• Our past episodes with Funga (fungal forest transplants), Perfect Day (animal-free real dairy), and Aqua Cultured Foods
• Isabella recommends the How I Built This Podcast
• Article in the journal Nature on biochar from human feces

More about Isabella Iglesias-Musachio

Isabella is a passionate citizen scientist with an academic background in sustainability and agriculture, and a proven track record in helping tech startups scale internationally. She’s now forging her own path in the food & biotech industry, with a focus on alternative protein and fermentation.

At TechShop, as General Manager and then Director of Operations, Isabella played an essential role in building and managing multiple makerspaces in the United States and in France. Alongside the CEO, she oversaw the first international TechShop expansion to France, and gained experience in adapting an innovative startup to a new market and culture.

More recently, Isabella decided to combine her skills in business development and expansion with my academic interest in food systems and agriculture. She joined Infarm, a leading ag-tech startup in Berlin, to build and head their first new market expansion team, and to establish their operations in the United States, Canada, and Japan. Beyond managing an all-star team to meet our growth goals, she was a key stakeholder in partnership building with major international retailers in North America and Asia (Kroger, Sobeys, Kinokuniya).

Isabella’s a life-long learner of food science, biotechnology, sustainability, and fermentation, as well as a passionate foodie, brewer, and fungi enthusiast. Today, she’s merging her passions with her skills in business management, and forging her own path as an entrepreneur. Isabella’s ultimate goal is to help accelerate the world's transition to environmentally sustainable, equitable, and animal-free protein.

Sure, we need to stop emitting greenhouse gases. But even if we stopped all emissions today, there are so many that we’ve already put into the atmosphere that we need to remove them. Some folks are trying to build massive machines to suck C02 from the air, but Kelly Erhart has a different idea: just accelerate the earth’s natural geochemical processes to remove that same C02 and safely deposit it in solid form at the bottom of our oceans.

How to do it: Turns that when water touches this volcanic rock called olivine, the rock naturally removes C02 from the air. This process takes eons normally, but if you grind the olivine rock into a fine sand and spread it out over beaches, you can greatly accelerate the carbon-capturing capacity of the rock, while also protecting coastal communities. 

Sounds like a noble idea, and when you combine it with the capacity to sell carbon credits, it sounds like a profitable idea, too. That’s why Kelly Erhart founded Vesta in 2019. Her company’s raised $6 million in equity so far (along with an additional $6 million in philanthropic dollars) and is now poised to raise a much larger Series A round so they can get into the olivine sand spreading business. 

They’re already conducting pilot programs in the Caribbean and say they’ll soon be ready for much bigger footprint—or sandprint—projects that will make a tangible dent in the climate crisis.

Discussed in this episode

• Our past episodes with Phoenix Tailings (valorizing mining waste). Funga (soil carbon capture), Global Thermostat (direct air carbon capture), and Coral Vita (regrowing coral reefs).
• TED talk by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson: “How to find joy in climate action”
• CarbonPlan: Data and science for climate action

More about Kelly Erhart

Kelly Erhart is Co-founder and President of Vesta. A believer in humanity's ability to become a "net-positive" to nature, Kelly has spent her career commercializing sustainable technologies and climate solutions through creative non-profit, for-profit, and hybrid organizations. Vesta is developing an ocean-based climate solution called Coastal Carbon Capture. Coastal Carbon Capture has the potential to be a billion-ton-per year NET solution with co-benefits such as lowering ocean acidity and helping to protect vulnerable coastal communities from sea level rise and erosion.

You’ve heard of flora (plants). You’ve heard of fauna (animals). But have you heard of funga? That’s the relatively new way to describe this third kingdom of life on earth: the vast number of species of fungi which aren’t plants nor animals, but are a different branch on the tree of life.

And it turns out that fungi are a lot more important than many in the past have realized. In fact,  they seem to play a major role in just how much carbon the soil is storing. Certain fungi, it seems, are particularly effective at sequestering carbon than others and in making trees grow a lot faster. Some even say that a one percent increase in soil-based carbon could be sufficient to stop an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere.

Enter mycologist and entrepreneur Colin Averill and his new startup Funga. Having just raised a million dollars of seed venture capital, he’s seeking to start reforesting depleted land and converting it into biodiverse carbon sinks much faster than would otherwise occur. 

Think of it kind of like a fecal transplant (yep), but instead, it’s more like a fungal transplant. It may sound disgusting, but we know that you can take feces from a healthy person, inoculate (aka insert) a sick person with them, and the good microbes populate the colon of the sick person, turning them well. Similarly, you can take rich, biodiverse soil from a healthy, old growth forest and inoculate agriculturally depleted land with it, and biodiverse life returns, causing trees to grow up to three times faster than they normally would (wood?).

So, how do you make a business out of reforesting ex-agricultural land? Let Colin give you the scoop (of soil) on how he and Funga are going to monetize this type of carbon capture. 

Discussed in this episode

• In a Vox story on deforestation, they note: "It’s not toilet paper or hardwood floors or even palm oil. It’s beef. Clearing trees for cattle is the leading driver of deforestation, by a long shot. It causes more than double the deforestation that’s linked to soy, oil palm, and wood products combined, according to the World Wildlife Fund."
• Local FOX coverage of Funga’s work.
• Our past episodes with Global Thermostat (direct carbon capture) and Coral Vita (rehabilitation of coral reefs).
• This CNN story about a startup called Living Carbon making faster-growing trees.
• Colin loves the book Entangled Life and the podcast My Climate Journey.

More about Colin Averill

Dr. Colin Averill is a Senior Scientist at ETH Zürich’s Crowther Lab, where he and his team study the forest microbiome. How does incredible microbial diversity affect which trees are in a forest, forest carbon sequestration and climate change forecasts? He focuses on the ecology of mycorrhizal fungi - fungi that form a symbiosis with the roots of most plants on Earth. In addition to his academic role, he is the Founder of Funga PBC, a new startup harnessing forest fungal networks to address the climate crisis. He is also co-founder of SPUN – the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks – a non-profit dedicated to documenting and protecting mycorrhizal fungal life across the planet.

At age 18, Jeff Nobbs founded an ecommerce company, building it into a valuable enough startup that it was acquired in what Jeff calls a “life-changing” event. After then opening a restaurant that now has two locations in the Bay Area, Jeff decided that there’d be a third entrepreneurial act in his life, this time focused on fixing fat.

What’s wrong with fat today? Well, Jeff argues that the way we grow plants to make oils like palm, soy, coconut, canola, and more is just pretty taxing on the planet. It’s often not that good for us, either. So instead of farming plants to extract the tiny amount of fat that’s in them, why not just farm microbes that produce vast quantities of fat and save a lot of land in the process? It would be especially beneficial if these microbes were adroit at making monounsaturated fats, or the so-called “good fats” we associate with avocados, olives, and so on.

It turns out that producing fat via microbial fermentation is pretty efficient. A life cycle analysis conducted by Jeff’s new company, Zero Acre Farms, found that their fermentation process uses far fewer resources than farming soybeans, which are a pretty efficient plant.

Founded in 2020, Zero Acre Farms now has three dozen employees and just closed a $37 million dollar financing round. Its first product, a cultured oil, is now available to purchase from their web site. I tried it in my own kitchen and can attest that indeed, the oil performed and tasted quite good.

It’s an impressive journey that Jeff’s been on, and with tens of millions of dollars now at the mid-30s CEO’s disposal, it’s sure to be quite a ride as they scale up and see how many acres they can free up by switching the world to their lower-footprint fats.

In this episode, Jeff recommends 

• Dale Carnegie’s books
• Peter Drucker’s books
• Think and Grow Rich
• Scaling Up
• High Growth Handbook

More about Jeff Nobbs

Jeff Nobbs is the co-founder and CEO of Zero Acre Farms, a food company replacing destructive vegetable oils with healthier, more sustainable oils and fats made by fermentation.

Jeff has co-founded several startups to offer better quality ingredients and nutrition-forward food to people and communities, including the fast casual restaurant chain Kitava. In 2020, after seeing a drastic decrease in accessibility to fresh food, Jeff co-founded HelpKitchen to connect food-insecure individuals with partner restaurants for a free meal via SMS. Jeff also served as the chief operating officer for Perfect Keto and General Manager of Rakuten, which acquired his first company Extrabux.

Jeff writes about health, nutrition, and sustainability at jeffnobbs.com and @jeffnobbs.

You know how you put all your recycling—cans, bottles, cardboard, etc.—into the same bin? Well, have you ever wondered how all that stuff gets sorted out at the recycling factory? It’s done mostly by humans. 

If you watch a video about how it’s done, rest assured you’re not likely to apply for this job. These folks are standing at a conveyor belt with recyclable trash whizzing by them at every moment and they need to pick pieces off the line to put into the proper bins at a rate of 40 items per minute! It’s tough to watch the work for 30 seconds, so imagine how tough it must be to do that work for hours every day. 

Well, Matanya Horowitz had a different idea. He’d been obsessed with robots since he was a kid, and fresh out of his PhD program, he wondered whether he could teach robots to sort trash more effectively and efficiently than humans. 

The dude started in 2014 by dumpster diving with his girlfriend to get trash which he could start training his AI on. Then he got some government grants to hire himself and a couple others. Fast forward to today, and Horowitz’s AMP Robotics has raised $75 million from investors, employs 250 humans, has deployed a similar number of robots at recycling factories on three continents that have now sorted billions of pieces of trash, and has even opened their own recycling factory in Ohio. 

Their robots pick at a rate of anywhere from 80 to 120 pieces per minute, don’t need breaks, don’t get covid, and importantly, they alter the economics of recycling to make it far more likely that what goes into the recycling bin actually ends up getting recycled.

In this episode, we talk all about the economics of AMP’s robots, the trajectory Matanya took from being an academic roboticist to becoming a CEO, the role venture capital has played in the company, what mistakes along the way were made, whether he thinks robots will ever become sentient, and more.

It’s an impressive and inspirational story from a scientist who’s using his business to help solve a pressing sustainability problem for humanity.

Discussed in this episode

• Matanya is influenced by the Jewish tale of Golem

• He’s also a big fan of Isaac Asimov’s work

• And he recommends reading The Innovator’s Dilemma and Paul Graham’s essays

• Matanya gave a cool TEDx speech about robotics

Want to read a transcript of this episode? You’re in luck! 

More about Matanya Horowitz

Dr. Matanya Horowitz is the Founder and CEO of AMP Robotics™ an industrial artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics company that is fundamentally changing the economics of recycling, by lowering processing costs and extracting maximum value from waste streams.

Matanya developed and commercialized AMP’s breakthrough AI platform, AMP Neuron™, and robotics system, AMP Cortex™, which automates high-speed identification, sorting, picking, and processing of material streams. AMP’s machine learning technology continuously improves performance adapting to the complex, ever changing material characteristics of municipal solid waste, construction and demolition (C&D), e-waste, and metal scrap. Recognizing attributes down to the SKU and Brand level, AMP can provide unprecedented data transparency and insights on waste streams to inform decisions and unite the value chain of circularity.

Matanya was just individually recognized as Waste360’s ‘2019 Innovator of the Year’ award, in addition to being named to their ‘40 under 40’ list. AMP has received numerous awards and international recognition, including The Circulars 2018 Award for ‘Circular Economy Top Tech Disruptor’ at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the NWRA’s (National Waste and Recycling Association) ‘2017 Innovator of the Year’ award.

Matanya earned multiple degrees including a BS in Electrical Engineering, BS in Computer Science, BS in Applied Mathematics, BA in Economics, and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder. Matanya holds a PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology with publications and research in control theory, path planning, and computer vision.