 I'm so excited to be here today. I want to start telling you all a little bit about the place that I come from. So behind me you can see a picture of my home Colorado. It's also in the mountains very similar to here and nature was a huge part of my upbringing. We spent time on hikes, we did adventures, we explored rivers. We got to know the earth of where we were from and that is some of the earliest memories I have of kind of connecting with my family and and figuring out my purpose and what I was what I was put here to do. I wanted to tell you a couple of stories. So I was from Colorado but my parents were sailors. I don't know how they ended up there. They were both teachers. They taught high school and they actually built their relationship, racing small boats on lakes in Colorado. And so in addition to being from the mountains I spent many many many many months and years on the ocean and for me the ocean was a source of strength. It was an endless expanse. You can't see the end of it and it felt it felt so vast. I just I couldn't imagine the places that were at the other side. After having spent a lot of time with my family on the ocean I was really excited with my new family also to be bringing Orion to the beach and to the far far reaches of this place. Next I want to tell you a little bit about how I've taken that connection to place and started building businesses. So I started my career. I actually studied science in school. I was like okay I'm gonna I'm gonna help the earth. I'm gonna go into government. I'm gonna make a change and then I got there and discovered all these brilliant people working on policies that took forever to happen and often you know there were cycles and there were cycles and so then I said okay I'm gonna work in nonprofits like these guys are gonna do stuff these guys are gonna make a difference and when I first some of the big organizations I started working with again there was a lot of talk but no action and so I turned my attention to business and the very first business I built was in the water space. It's a social enterprise called Sahaglobal. It's still working today in Ghana and what we took was a bunch of learnings about the needs in the water sector there. There was a lot of implementation projects that had happened to provide clean water to these communities that had failed and the reasons for the failures were not technological. So we were engineering students but it was not a technological failure it was a social failure and so we worked with some of the communities where we had done our research and we said what do you need what is needed in this place and developed a community scale system for the sustainable treatment of water. So basically we come in we implement spend a couple thousand dollars in that community and then women from that community own that center sell the water to the other members of the community and the systems continue. So every business we've implemented is still in operation and there's now 130 of those businesses across Marulgana and we're really scaling up and I started that business with a young woman who I was in school with and she said I want to own this and I want to do this for my career and for me there was there was more I wanted to do and so I actually went back to school and got a business degree and started working in the technology sector for me particularly the energy space. Climate change I believe is the issue of our generation and I just saw it getting worse and worse. When I was studying my undergrad I said oh I mean someone's gonna have gotten a handle on this by the time I you know get to grad school by the time I get ahead and in every year the picture just looks more bleak. So it was a space that I felt like I wanted to dedicate my life to making a contribution to and so then I started building technology businesses. The first one was called thin six and we built small energy efficient power converters so basically between every electronic device in the wall there's a power converter and so we made those really small and efficient and then I did that for a number of years and have now moved to another company called Ocean Works. I want to tell you a little bit about that in the moments we have remaining. So I started with the ocean I want to close with the ocean. Our oceans are in crisis. You've heard about ocean acidification, the impacts of climate change and also the waste that we're throwing into them. So there's 8 million metric tons of plastic going into the ocean each year. Many of you have probably heard those statistics but it's hard to envision. It's the same as three to five plastic bags of trash on the entire shoreline of the world flowing into the ocean every year. So that ocean that looks so vast now starts to look really small. It's getting filled up with this waste, our waste that's just exponentially growing. So what can we do? Where we started, my team started at Ocean Works is looking at how can we make this regenerative. What can we take this waste and make it valuable? Can we make it into products? We started with buttons and sunglasses and each of those items we labeled with the place from which that trash was collected so that the people buying the products would know where their things were coming from. There's tons of different inputs and tons of different products that you can make from this material and what we're looking for is products that can scale. Buttons and sunglasses are nice but you have to make so many billions of buttons to solve this problem. We need things that are bigger, looking at kayaks, looking at packs, and even looking at bricks, concretes, anything that can help this scale. One of the big challenges we've seen as we made these sunglasses, I should mention, a lot of brands started coming to us and saying, hey, you guys did this. I want to do this. I want to put this stuff in my products. How can I source this material? One of the biggest things brands worry about is that they don't know where it's coming from. They don't know that this is real. So many of these supply chains have counterfeits flowing into them. They're telling their customers, you're getting this ocean plastic jacket, but really they're just getting a jacket made in China. What we do for our partners is we go and audit the collection points and then we do a chain of custody from that point into the product and then help those brands share that story with their customers, hopefully building a movement around this space. So this is what our interface looks like. We're still building it. So anyone who's working in this area, we'd love to partner. But we want to be able for people to go in, buy something, understand where it comes from, and understand where other products are that are helping solve that problem. And for the brands to be able to track that data, to be able to say, hey, we removed this many tons of plastic and this is the carbon impact of that. The last thing I just want to close with is there's so much more to be done. So products are nice, products are sexy, but the solution has to be bigger than that. And so there's tons of different ways. I'm just going to put them all up here that I want to do more. And so one of the things I am eager to work with this community on is people who are excited about these spaces, thinking about circular design, thinking about what regulations can help in this space, thinking about how to measure and visualize this data, this impact to help share the story and get the message out. I'd love to collaborate and figure out what we might be able to do together. So thank you. Thank you for welcoming me here. And I hope that we have a long journey together.