 Good afternoon and welcome to today's energy seminar. We're really excited to introduce our speaker today, Natasha Cave. Natasha, like many of the students watching, was a Stanford student up until about six years ago. She received her PhD in mechanical engineering but worked with Tom Hormille's lab on electro catalysis, primarily on how to convert carbon in recycle carbon into usable products. She then went out on to co-found Opus 12, a middle-aged but highly successful startup so far. Just to give you a little view of Natasha's words, she was an Excel innovation scholar and Echoing Green fellow at Smithsonian Institution innovators to watch in 2018. And that into a fair named Cave, one of the 26 women of color diversifying entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley media and beyond. And I think probably her next job coming up real soon will be something like Starship Captain as a Star Trek fan. I would like to acknowledge both the Stanford Technology Ventures Program for helping out Natasha as well as Brian Bartholomew is in the Innovation Transfer Program for the Tomcat. And those two groups were two of many groups that strongly recommended having Natasha come speak to us today. So she's going to talk about what they do at the company and how they got there. It's a very interesting and innovative story. Just to give you an idea how interesting it is, not many companies get highlighted and featured in both Rolling Stone and the New York Times. So I'm sure that there's an interesting story behind that. So at this point I'd like to turn it over to Natasha to give her energy seminar today entitled Building a Clean Tech Company at a Capital Constrained World. Natasha, take it away. Yeah, thank you so much, John. Really appreciate that highlight. And yes, I would love to be in space some day and hopefully our technology can be one part of a future space mission. How did I know that, right? Wild guess. Yeah, so I'm really going to talk today about the roadmap to creating OPUS 12 really as a informative view to share our journey such that others can eventually follow. And the problem that we face as co-founders when we're first starting out is that it's really challenging to bring hard scientists into a commoditized world, especially an energy where the electrons that come into your house, the electricity that we use is very commoditized. You're not paying a premium for expensive electrons. People get that electricity and they want it to be as low cost as possible. And so if you have this innovation that you're trying to bring into the world, there is this big gap between kind of where you might be with the science and where you need to be with the product. And crossing over that gap just can be done but it requires some strategies of some of which we've leveraged and there's many, many ways to do this. And then also require the creating the ecosystem. And so, I'm really gonna focus on, how does one bring a capital intensive kind of hard tech company to fruition? And I say this is not as like it's the way again, it's just a way. And I hope that there's some bits of information that could be taken from that. So before I start off about the roadmap, I just wanna just give a high level description of what does Opus 12 do to make sure everyone is on the same page. And so, Opus 12, we basically are building a CO2 electrolyzer that takes in carbon dioxide, water and electricity and uses metal catalyst inside the system to create in products that can be fuels, liquid fuels, for example, or other types of compounds, materials, even we can make polymers. And then we also make carbon dioxide. That's gonna be oxygen in that process as shown here in the slide. Now, when I was a grad student here, we studied the basic science side of this process. So we worked with a computational group, we published papers where we theorize of how this reaction is working. You can see here, this is the CO2 to methane step and the computational group we worked with really identified each different step looking for ways to gain understanding in the reaction. And then my group in Tom Hada Mio's group, we did more of the experimental side where we took some things from theory and said, okay, how can we implement that? Use that understanding to gain more knowledge around CO2 lecture reduction. And so when we were thinking about, sorry, the company that there were a bunch of technological innovations and understandings that had come through the many years that I was here during my PhD. But there really was one factor that determined whether or not it would make sense to start a company. And that one factor was really economics. We saw that there was a trend in the electrolyzers that we would be building where their costs are coming down. And then we also saw this trend around renewable electricity or carbon-free electricity where that cost was also coming down. In some case, I have this 10X advantage from where it was say 20 years ago. And that has really been the key driver. That trend is what we are leveraging the most to really build our company that we can provide these liquid fuels and these compounds and costs that are comparable to the petroleum equivalent because we can take advantage of these trends as we start to build our company. And I really wanna stress that because as I've talked with other people who are looking to become founders, really the first step is understanding the techno economics, understanding how that 10X increase that you got in the lab on the technology side, how does that translate into the economics? Does that get you to a break-even point? Is it what the customers care about? How much are the customers willing to pay? And these questions, we're part of the questions I actually learned through several entrepreneurship courses here at Stanford. And then also the Excel Scholars Program is where you talked a lot about how do you understand what the customer wants and build the technology for that. So beyond kind of what Opus 12 does, I'm gonna start to talk about kind of our journey to creating the company. So it really started off, again, towards NMI PhD, I approached a fellow lab mate, Kendra Kool. She and I worked together during our PhD time and we both studied different metals, but both worked on CO2 lecture reduction and had similar levels of knowledge acquisition around the reaction. And so I approached her and said, hey, what do you think about starting a company around this? Like, we are one of the very few people in the world who could bring this technology to fruition. What do you think about starting that? So we started to work in our free time and got together and started mapping things out. And then later on I went to a clean tech event where there was Nichols Flanders who I actually met previously at a space club event at Stanford. And at this clean tech event on a Saturday, they had business school students and engineering school students come together to talk about clean tech challenges and how we can overcome them through entrepreneurship. And so I pitched at that time which is graduate research and said that there's a business plan competition we'd like to do. So Nicholas joined on board. The three of us started Opus 12 and that was a handful of years ago. And as we were kind of thinking about how to build this company, we kind of, Willie's eyes sort of passed naively thought that, okay, well, we'll just go down Sandhill Road and start asking for funding. We're three Stanford students. We have some neat ideas and there was an app around that time that had just raised a million dollars. And the app, you pushed a button and it sent a yo to someone else who had the app. And they raised a million dollars for this. And I'm like, okay, we could at least raise a million dollars for our idea, which should have much larger impact. And we quickly realized that wasn't the case that many VCs and institutional investors at that time were not really investing in clean tech because they had in essence lost money on this initial wave of clean tech companies that happened in the early 2000s, around like 2008, 2009 timeframe. So we had to then sort of be very strategic about how we were gonna get to receive funding. And there were several players in this ecosystem that we could tap into. And the first member of that is the Tomcat Center. And Brian Bartholomew, I initially met at a clean tech event and told him like, look, we have this graduate research we're working on, I'm not sure if it's suitable or if it can be ready for industry. And he really encouraged me to think about, okay, just think about how you would translate that into industry and then think about applying for a Tomcat grant. And so we did. And that gave us the funding to get supplies to sort of think about building our first prototype. We also got into a program at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab called Psychotron Road. And they now are part of a larger group called Activate. And through that particular program, over the course of two years, we were able to receive a million dollars of fellowship support that would help us to build this prototype. So we got in-kind support, such as lab space, access to equipment at the lab. We also were able to get mentorship through the program. And then we also got fellowship support, so direct funding through salaries and supplies and travel grants and the like. And we could use that funding to build our first prototype. Then we also could leverage the fact that we were at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab to then get additional early-stage SBIR funding. So the federal government has this Small Business Innovation Research Program, or SBIR. And pretty much every agency that does research has them. The National Science Foundation, they are really focused on creating deep-tech scalable companies. They're pretty technology-agnostic and just want to see more deep-tech companies in the US. So that would be the first place that we started. And I would recommend anyone starting at that is looking into an SBIR grant. We then were able to apply for funds through NASA because our technology can be used in space. Methane is actually the rocket fuel of choice for going to Mars. And so we could make methane from the atmosphere on Mars, which happens to be 95% carbon dioxide. And then we could also apply for funding through the US Department of Energy. And so these additional grants that we were able to bring in really allowed us to hire our first set of employees and really start to shift from an idea-centric kind of proof of concept to more of a prototype. And next, what we did is we also were able to leverage early-stage commercial partnerships. So Shell has a game changer program where you apply for a grant. It's very similar to the SBIR program, in fact. And we were able to receive money to support the work. SoCal gas was also really interested in supporting our work to build a road in which the CO2 emissions, say from dairy farms or from biogas can be converted into more like low-carbon or carbon-neutral synthetic natural gas. And so with these two early commercial partners, we were able to show to any potential investor as we were having conversations with investors that there was some interest from larger and bigger companies. And so with having some funding from the federal government to build our prototype and philanthropic funding and also now to have kind of early interest from commercial partnerships, we could start to think about maybe raising money in the private sector. And so our first step into that was actually getting into StartX, which was really helpful in helping us think about what are other companies at our stage, what valuations are they getting? What type of investors are they talking to? How does one go about fundraising? And a lot of these really practical lessons were really great as we started to think about raising our own round. So in raising our round, I would say we started to go into a phase that I'm calling commercial R&D and pilots. And for that, we were able to bring in new partnerships. So we were able to approach various family offices and deep tech institutional investors. So the Dolby family is one representative family office where they have money, where they wanna deploy it to make lives better or create impact on climate and other major problems in the world. And they're a lot more patient than a VC fund which has maybe a 10 year fund that has to make a certain return within that time period whereas these family offices are more looking at things in more of a longer term horizon. They still want a return but doesn't need to fit within a 10 year timescale. DCVC is a deep tech institutional investor. They invest in space companies and other deep companies so very mission aligned there where they understand that the growth for deep tech is very different. And then evoke which is backed by Canadian oil and gas companies that are feeling a lot of pressure from the Canadian government to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, they're actually being taxed for their carbon emissions. And so they created this investment arm that focuses on companies such as ours to back in the future, reduce greenhouse gas emissions. So we were able to bring in this private funding that's still very mission aligned still not the kind of traditional venture capital funding but folks that really understood what we were doing. And we only could do that though once we had built the prototype and show that early day that it could work and leveraging that early funds to do that. So at this point, we had leveraged the private funding to really package and create our first sort of commercial unit and here it is shown. This is about two years ago now, our team in the lab and a little fun fact, this is the idea. So the day that our unit came in from our manufacturing partner was the same day that Bill Gates happened to be visiting to do a film for Netflix. So if you've ever seen the Netflix special Bill Gates Brain if you go to number three and if you're very careful, there's like two seconds where we're shown in that image show. It's a little fun fact. But now that we had our unit built we could then start to think about doing some engagements with corporate partners to really build relationships. And one engagement we did was with Daimler. So Daimler has interest in building a carbon negative vehicle. So from day one, it has some carbon that's already sequestered within it. And so we were able to use our system to build this internal car part made out of CO2 So if you look up in the upper middle of the slide you can see there's this part called the C pillar. And we made that with our system. And in general, we are trying to do more of these because one thing that's really can be challenging with a company where you have one and only one sort of commercial product that you don't want to descend to one of many commercial partners. The question is how do you build a relationship and how do you progressively show that you can provide value to this company and kind of go through this much longer sale cycle? And so part of it is really breaking down and saying like, what is something we can do now to really show the potential of our part and show that we can make something on a smaller scale and then that can grow into much larger scale and having something that the customer can see and touch and hold is super valuable. And getting to that point was really been a key moment for us to really build these relationships that would have longer time horizons. And speaking of longer time horizons and we have still many miles to go before we sleep, we built our first unit that unit I showed previously it's about the size of a dishwasher. And we're currently scaling up to these larger units which are shown here. So the most largest one, number four is the size of an entire building and size number three would fit into a shipping container give you a sense of size and size number two would be like an industrial refrigerator size. And so as we're scaling up, we still have this sort of a valley of death that's been touted for companies like ours where we have kind of early stage indications of a prototype that works, we have a team, we have a kind of first of the kind unit but we're still not quite at the level where we're fully deploying our system. And so luckily for us that there's been an ecosystem that's also developing to help companies cross that valley of death. So we've seen in the Department of Energy for example, they've started creating larger programs that are focused on, okay, you know, let's do a scale up to your larger system, let's look at getting it out into the field. And so there's been programs through Dunetto and Fido that have been larger ticket grants. RPE recently had a program, it's still ongoing that's called Scale Up where it's for previous RPE recipients to now get a larger grant to do their first of the kind in the field deployment. And then there's a US Air Force, which I've been really impressed with some of the changes that they've made within the Air Force in this AFWORKS group specifically, which is more of a Moonshot kind of Skunkworks group where they are really wanting to get more innovation in the US and with the focus on getting it into the military where they said, okay, you start off and you'll get a phase one that's a much smaller grant but then you'll have a phase two that's a bit larger and then we'll work with you to get a phase three which could be sort of $10 million on that level to really get your unit out into the field. And so that's still in the works with the US Air Force but in talking with some of the folks who are running that program, they really are focused on being very founder friendly and focused on getting innovation as smooth as possible and removing friction to do so. So really this stage is kind of where we're at now. We're kind of in that sort of valley of death and we're starting to cross into the next stage of sort of commercial integration where we do our first of a kind much larger plants. And so I talked previously about how we've leveraged philanthropic and federal funds and also got some early commercial partners to kind of get us to this point. And so now I'm talking about how we can continue to be capital light as we start to really build on our system and build our larger scale units. And so there's two ways in which we kind of focus on that. One is leveraging existing manufacturing facilities and the other is project financing. So with manufacturing facilities, this is a picture of a manufacturing floor. It's not the entire floor but it's a fraction of it but this facility costs $100 million to build. And if we think about us as a company, we'd have to raise another $100 million to replicate this exact manufacturing floor. But instead we could say form a partnership with this particular company and say, can we use some of your excess capacity? Can we help you build out additional space within your manufacturing floor to basically produce our system? And that allows us to basically focus on our core technology, which is shown here in the upper right. Our core technology really is just the electrode that goes into these electrolyzers. The analogy that we often use is that in your laptop, you have a CPU or chip that's made by, say, Intel. And Intel just makes a chip. They don't make the entire laptop. They sell those to other manufacturers. So we're the same way. We make the electrode and that electrode goes into these reactors that are already built at scale. And so that has allowed us to really save time and cost. And we're not the only ones that have done this. I've heard of other companies, like in the food industry, for example, leveraging other contract manufacturing. And so that's sort of one question I often bring to other founders is like, how can you leverage existing assets and existing manufacturing capacity to bring your technology to market very quickly and very cheaply? The second, as I mentioned, is project financing. So there are some new entities that are coming in the ecosystem to really support companies in the clean tech space to do project financing. As some of them are focused on the first through fifth sort of initial projects. And then some of them are private only, some are public private initiatives. And with project financing, we're able to support a larger installation without having to use equity financing. So without having to dilute our cap table, we can basically use debt to build out that capital. And what allows us to potentially leverage capital financing or project financing, that should make it clear that we haven't actually done this yet, this is in the future. But what makes it possible to leverage project financing is that we can get a contract for the inputs and a contract for the outputs. And when you have a multi-year contract on both sides, that is something that's very much attractive to a financier because they can run the model, look at the cost and can charge some costs of capital to do so. And what that would look like as we start to grow is that you could imagine our system here. So here's the shipping container size system that would be housed at a existing polymer manufacturer, which here again, we're not having to build out the entire polymer manufacturing ecosystem. We're just an add-on to an existing system where we're taking their CO2 admissions that they already have on site, piping it into our system. And then the output of that would be the same molecules that they're already using to make polymers and we can just make it from their CO2. But that is a capital improvement and a capital investment. And so we would couple a project financing as we approach a customer and say, we have project financing lined up, would you like to host our system? And then we can do things like charge per molecule so that the polymer manufacturer doesn't have to take on the burden of finding this new capital to bring up this new system. So as we think even beyond kind of crossing this valley of death and that we get to the point where we're at scale, there's still ways in which we can be very strategic about how we deploy our systems. So first is there's many different types and geographical locations where there's CO2 admissions. And so we can sort of think about what are the lower hanging fruits? Where can we go to get CO2 admissions that would be the cheapest CO2 that would be concentrated, that we can pipe into our system? And even beyond the United States we can also think globally. There's a lot of movement in Europe where they're looking at rebuilding their infrastructure even prior to COVID but certainly now that COVID has happened and they're looking to boost their economy. The question is, can we rebuild infrastructure with having CO2 admission, CO2 utilization built in? And so we can sort of think about how to be strategic within that space. There's also some really interesting policy that's coming through on the US side. Of course, with our recent election this could potentially change. But there are some laws that are on the books that have been established. So the 45Q, which is a tax credit for the use of carbon dioxide either through sequestering it or utilizing it. And that is on the books, that's in law. There's also some legislation that was in the works and that has to do with utilizing CO2 through maybe a carbon dioxide pipeline, building on infrastructure around that, leveraging Department of Energy to create grants for CO2 utilization. And so there's a lot of excitement and we're looking at new trends around this policy landscape which absolutely helps when we engage with other parties around this carbon tech and clean tech ecosystem. And most importantly, we've seen a lot of corporates put out pledges. So Stripe did pay for their carbon offsets and they paid a pretty high cost per ton. They paid up to $600 per ton for the carbon, which was great. Even though one million is a small amount in the grand scheme of things, but it really sends a strong signal that there's companies out there willing to do that and hopefully other companies will follow suit. And Microsoft, of course, made this really big pledge which included this $1 billion climate innovation fund. And so again, just like stronger signals coming out of corporations that they want to take an active role in reducing your CO2 emissions. And so we see that as new trends that we can take as we move forward with the company. So in conclusion, before we take companies, I mean, I'd say as I look through the roadmap of our company, we basically are leveraging an industrial ecosystem that's being put in place from the very beginning where we were leveraging philanthropic and federal funds all the way up to leveraging corporate grants. And then as we move into a space where we're now leveraging existing manufacturing capacity, both to build our system and to deploy it. And now as we go into the future, we'd be looking at leveraging CO2 policy that's coming out of the federal government globally as well as corporate pledges for CO2 abatement. So one of my favorite things that we calculated is we figured out how we compare to trees in terms of CO2 conversion power. And so within the size of our scaled up unit, so a single stack, it's about the size of a checked in suitcase. And we can put the CO2 conversion power for about 37,000 trees in a stack that again has a footprint of a suitcase. And so just like a tree operates within an ecosystem, we also have an ecosystem which we're leveraging to really build out our company and bring it to market. Thanks, Natasha. That was fantastic. I feel like I had a class in entrepreneurship and another class in chemical engineering all wrapped into one talk. So we do have a number of questions. I'll try to gather them together. For me, I'm kind of a technology assessment modeling type guy. So there are a number of questions regarding, and it's very nice that you had this nice flow. When, if ever, did you have to actually produce kind of economic numbers apropos of your early graphs on comparative technologies? I assume at the beginning, people were willing to let you prove out the technology and so on, but do you now have to, or at what point did you have to have specific inputs and products and kind of cost everything out in a spreadsheet or something like that? Yeah, I would say from the very beginning really, because when we applied to psychotron road, part of that application was focused on, okay, what are the techno economics? And in Elon Gerr, who's the director of the program, we had met actually through a business line competition prior to applying to psychotron road. And he was the biggest proponent of sitting down and really doing a thorough techno economic model. So having Nicholas, who had a background at McKinsey and was used to doing modeling and really dove in very quickly and built out a techno economic model, we improved upon that and have more details and more resolution, but it was absolutely critical from day one to show that we could have a pathway to be cost competitive with petroleum. So two follow-ups to that. Are you able to tell us which products look good then and which ones look good now? And a related but more macro question is, when do you anticipate you'll be turning quote unquote, turning a profit? Yeah, so when we first got started, the product that we were looking at was direct CO2 to ethanol. And part of that was that it was a huge value proposition for corn ethanol producers. So when you make corn ethanol, which 10% of what you put in your car is ethanol mostly from corn. And when you produce it, for every ton of ethanol you make, you make a ton of CO2. So we could take that CO2 and increase their yield by 50%. And the CO2 that comes out is already super concentrated. It'd be really cheap and easy to pipe that CO2 into our system and then make ethanol from it. The reason we pivoted from that was because we, it's kind of this like valley of death problem. It's like our first system for a corn ethanol producer would have to be on the order of $100 million. And we had seen from previous companies that had some type of novel green fuel and tried to raise $100 million for their first unit that that was where they oftentimes no longer became a company. And so in some ways I would say we had like last mover advantage in that we could see that that was clearly gonna be a downside. And so we kind of went back to the drawing board, leveraged the lean startup methodology, which Steve Blank, at least back then taught here at Sanford. I actually took that course from him when he taught it. The hacking for? Oh, that was called a hacking for? Yeah, that's what he calls all those classes now. Hacking for entrepreneurship, hacking for defense. That's right, yeah. It's like a huge, and actually he's proliferated those courses around the world I think, so. That's right, yeah, because we also did it through NSF iCOR program. But yeah, but I mean, going back to those principles of just doing customer discovery and customer interviews, we were able to find that by actually making carbon monoxide out of carbon dioxide, that there would be smaller markets that we could go into. And so we could build a smaller system, put it out into the world, bring in revenue from that system, and then also show that the technology works and de-risk the technology early on. So that's our first product right now. And just to be clear, because carbon monoxide is often something you hear about as something you don't want at your home, but it's a pretty useful industrial molecule. You can use it to make liquid fuel. You could use it to make polymers. There's a whole range of things that you can use on various scales. So we found a way in which we can very economically compete with the petroleum equivalent. So that's what we pivoted to. As far as when will we become profitable? Yeah, I think, you know, we certainly have a roadmap to when that would happen and I think there's several pathways in which we would get there. But we're targeting within the next five years to have a profitable company. The thing about our system is like once we scale up to these larger systems, they are pretty large. And so that it does bring in a lot of revenue because we've been able to be very capital light and basically leverage various sources of funding. We should be able to get to a point where we would be profitable much quicker than had we just solely had to take equity financing. Well, one way to go that may be an interesting challenge for you all to decide is acquisition. Are you now on people's radars? It seems to you might be for some of the big petrochemical and oil company firms. Are you in, have you been approached about being acquired by a big, say a big Fortune 500 type company or maybe a more new wave company that isn't in the Fortune 500 will be soon? Well, I'll say. To the extent you can actually talk about what I do. Yeah, I'll say that everything, any entrepreneur likes to keep all pathways open. And so we find the right partner and the right partner approaches us, we would definitely consider that. I'll leave it at that. Okay, then there's a number of questions about flows. You had that very nice map with all the sources, which I really liked and that tied into the regulations. So I guess there's a big range of one that's less concentrated is the air itself. Is there a version of this technology that could be used for direct air capture on the one end? And then if you add up all the industrial uses that you could reasonably expect to do, how big of a dent in the carbon, if you could call it that, the carbon gap with that make. I'm assuming you've probably scoped that out. Yeah, in fact, we've worked with a couple of direct air capture companies to write joint grants together. And so if we're aware of those grants, we'll be working together to build what could be the first like integrated direct air capture CO2 utilization system. But that's TBD. We'll see what happens within that grant process. But yeah, absolutely within our vision is to eventually couple with direct air capture and scale that up and have a pathway to make the liquid fuels, coupled with a direct air capture system. And then if you can do something like that, you're really amplifying the impact that direct air capture has by displacing petroleum-based fuels or displacing material or getting materials that are carbon negative. And in terms of potential impact, I mean, if you look on the global scale, about 25% of the CO2 emissions that we see are ones that fit into this kind of industrial category of are pretty concentrated, can be readily piped into our system and molecules can be created that can be distributed to other off-takers. And then when we look at kind of like our sort of 10-year horizon, we see a pathway where we can be converting, within the U.S. have like single digit percents, I'd say 8% CO2 and pathway. That's if we're very much like at full scale and really turning the crank. There's lots of potential to be able to utilize and reduce and convert CO2 emissions. I'm sometimes hesitant to give numbers because there's so many pathways. There's so many ways that this can go. We could decide as a country that we really want to take on this and then it's a much faster pathway or we could not and in which case, it'd be a lot slower. Maybe this week we will decide to do so. So you did mention early collaborations with Shell and whatnot. It seems to be a lot of industrial emissions as you well know are outside the U.S. So do you have any potential collaborations? Maybe they're included in the work with the internationals in China, India, you name it outside the U.S. where there's a lot of industrial emissions right now. We don't have any strong partnerships in China or India but we are very much looking at Europe. We've gotten lots of inbound requests and interest from European companies and so much that we're really looking at, okay should we think about having a subsidiary in Europe and should we really be involved and really go after some of that funding and that's being available from the corporate side and in the EU or kind of larger federal side. But with China and India, we have had some initial talks with companies. It's a little bit, sometimes a bit tricky because we are very early stage that we've been doing these early pilots with companies that where we can make a specific piece and kind of have that be the start of a larger engagement where I think for other markets like China or India, we don't have a ton of experience and knowledge in those regions and also the companies we've talked to in those regions tend to want to buy a system once it's ready to go. Then we have a few kind of hardcore strategy questions. Who are your competitors and how are you different than them? Obviously some of the technology things are one piece and then you're leveraging financing and facilities would be just from listening to your talk but to the extent you're able to do so, can you talk about that a little bit? Who are the big competitors and why do you think you're going to win the race other than having Bill Gates drop by which seems like a pretty good strategy. I would say our biggest competitor honestly is the status quo. It's still in most places free throw away CO2. Even though there might be a revenue positive pathway, they're still, you still have to deploy capital, they're still business risks you're taking even if we completely erase the technology. And certainly now there's technical risk as well. And so I would say that's really our biggest competitor. Now in terms of other CO2 utilization companies, I mean there's companies that fit in the, that you say like a biochemical process or thermochemical process. And in comparison to those categories, we think electrochemistry, which is what we use, we'll have some really strong advantages and strong position because the cost of electricity of renewable electricity is coming down so much. And we're, we are creating a world in which there's more wind and solar and in carbon free electricity that's more and more available. Our system can operate intermittently so we can actually take electricity that is lower costs because it's at a low demand time it's being produced at a low demand time. So for a biochemistry or thermochemistry type technology you don't necessarily have those advantages in leveraging the cost of electricity. I should also make clear that there's like so much CO2 out there that like I think it'll be a situation where there's like multiple players. I don't think there's gonna be a silver bullet that like one company or even one like type of like CO2 utilization play will win. But I do think we have some very strategic advantages and for very specific places we can be the clear choice. Now within the, there's a couple other companies that are doing electrochemistry. And I would say there it's just, we see clear technology advantage which I would be happy to go into the weeds with but that may not be as interesting but I would say on a high level that our system which is a PIM system so polymer electrolyte membrane that system has been around for decades in the water electrolyzer space. So we're able to leverage a lot of technical know-how a lot of cost reduction on the manufacturing side. And so we really see that as giving us a huge advantage. I have another question that a few people were wondering about. So you did go through the helpful and maybe there are some unhelpful government policies and regulations just coincidentally I've done pretty big studies on 45Q low carbon fuel standard, et cetera. We could have a green no deal back on your infrastructure side there could be a form of the green new deal that's heavy on infrastructure. Why would I think that this week? So I guess the question for me is how closely do you attract that? Do you have like a government affairs person on your team already? Or do you just use personal contacts? Obviously that could affect these spreadsheet calculations that you all do for what's gonna be a good way to go. And this is part of the Michael Porter international version of corporate strategy studies as well. Yeah, so we're a bit too small to have a dedicated corporate affairs person. I'd love to see the day when we can have someone that's focused on that because it certainly will be an impactful force as we grow our company. But right now as we're really small we're able to leverage groups such as carbon 180. They're a nonprofit group that is looking at the carbon tech space as a whole and sponsoring studies and sponsoring even entrepreneurship programs and really kind of looking to seed this carbon space broadly which includes all the types of technologies and not just one specific one and even looks at like sequestration and kind of how that can play into carbon free or reduce carbon world. And so we're able to leverage some of the work that they do and keep abreast of the policies. There's also other groups and even going to kind of conferences around the Department of Energy can kind of pick up things here and there. So it's all still very scrappy in that sense that we kind of pick up things here and we're certainly keeping an eye on it for sure. Great, we're running out of time but I would be remiss if I didn't ask one question on behalf of all the students and this comes in a bits and pieces is based on what you've done and what you've learned so far what advice would you give to the students in the audience, particularly bloody entrepreneurs particularly things I think I saw in your ETL talk you had a bit of this on what things did you do that were really a good idea what things that you do in your career so far it's amazing how far you've gotten that were maybe not as successful as the other ones. Yeah, I could do a whole seminar on that. I'll bet you could. Well, I think you almost did one but I thought for this audience it would be nice to get a summary of what you said. Yeah, I would say, Stanford is a huge resource and I would, I leveraged it as much as I could when I was there, but I would if I could go back and do it again I would kind of earlier on add in some entrepreneurship type courses like I mentioned Lean Startup, which I took and then they sell scholars program programs such as that, even Tomcat I mean, there's all these resources there and it's amazing how quickly you get cut off from them once you graduate. And so, I would say, taking some time to think about the bigger picture and kind of plan out what you wanna do as an accept before you do graduate. That was one thing that I did a little bit of before we left, we started the company before I had graduated and that was a huge help and a huge resource that we could leverage for kind of knowledge sake and strategic value. Things I would do differently is think about personal finances. And I'm not sure how this myth kind of goes around the valley but certainly for clean tech founders, it is not, it's a very low in salary because you are being raised crappy and like, you can't just like pay yourself really high amounts of money. You still have to report to your investors and especially if you're getting government grants there's, you have to like keep your salary within the national average. So when I graduated, you know, like my personal finances weren't the best that they could have been had I been thinking the whole time that I would start a company, as opposed to thinking the whole time I would go get a really nice job by like Google or Facebook, in which case, I, you know, it was like, well, let me just spend some money now so that, you know, once I get this job and I can pay it back really easily. So I had a little bit of debt when I graduated, which I was able to eventually pay off. But if I had to do it again, it would have been nice to not have that financial anxiety when I was starting to help you. Great. Well, Natasha, thanks so much. Now a bunch of very lucky Stanford students will get to talk to you a little bit more up close and personal after we shut down here. So thanks for an inspirational seminar and giving us all hope for the future. Thanks again. Yeah, thank you.