Building Sustainably with Nathan Silvernail, CEO @ Plantd

Oh, today on the show we have Nathan Silverail. Nathan is the one of the founders of a company called Planted. They are to not sugarcoat it or anything, inventing a new kind of wood. They've invented a new material that has the potential to replace wood as we know it.

Uh, not much else needs to be said about that. That's that's uh pretty insane in itself. So other than discussing how you come about uh such a transformative um scientific invention uh and then what it means to uh validate that get a patent grow a business on top of it. Uh we also

talk about uh how to approach problems. Nathan uh worked at SpaceX for seven years and uh he discusses uh a number of the frameworks for approaching problems um that allowed SpaceX to be what it is and allowed Planted to be what it is. Uh I definitely learned a lot about uh and was inspired to do so uh about how to

address problems differently. So I'm excited for you to hear. Thank you as always to the sponsors Clean Techch Growth Lab. If you're looking to grow in clean tech, those are the people to work with. And the producers of this podcast, Craz Friends. And with that, I give you Nathan.

Oh, back with another episode. Thanks to the sponsors mentioned just before we hit record. Without them, it would not be possible to interview awesome people doing awesome things like Nathan. Welcome. Thank you. I appreciate you having me. Oh, yeah. So, no introduction. I'm just going to let you do all of it because I

don't want to I don't want to take any time away from the questions that I have for you. So, if you could give a brief introduction of yourself and Yeah, sure. Yes. CEO of Planted Materials. Uh got a background in engineering. I spent the better half of the last decade working for SpaceX

building rockets and humanrated space vehicles among few other small projects. uh left there in 2021 and started planted, invented a new type of uh wood, doesn't come from trees, carbon negative, and then had to go on to invent everything else to actually make it, which has been a journey. Um, and then yeah, that's fast forward to

where we're at now and happy to dive into those details. Nice. So, uh, first question, uh, a small one, but a burning one because it's, uh, something I feel passionately about. How did you come up with the name? Was that a grind or did that come naturally?

Planted. Actually, my co-founder uh Watan, he's the one that came up with it. It's funny you ask about that because uh he just named it himself in the early phases. And um originally he wanted to make climbing uh climbing I forget what they're called. Climbing holds. He he's really big into rock climbing. I'm not

cool. uh climbing holds out of out of a different type of of biomass and he originally had that called planted and then when we started this and we realized we wanted to make you know building materials. We had a vote and it was it was like the first six of us that started with the

company and and we had a vote to be like oh what do we want to name it and we had all these crazy choices and whatnot and at the end we're like well we like planted let's just keep it that.

So that's kind of how it how it came about. I'd say it fits. It certainly fits. Well, I there are hindrances to it though. No, the um I I mean the reason I ask is because uh I mean naming I think I mean I like the name I came up you know the

the Grove orthon where these things like they're actually cool first time for things I've started and when I saw your guys usually I see people that are just like omitting you know letters or vowels or something. I'm like okay they didn't really try. But for whatever reason, I felt like you, you know, the approach

you guys took, I actually liked it and I was like, "This is interesting." You know, this is something that I typically look at. I don't know. You're just executing it well. So, well done. I'm glad I appreciate that.

I'm glad the book came out that way. Um um so some something that I I love asking people is when you start companies um have you always have you always seen yourself as someone that was going to start a company um that was going to be a founder or was it something that just uh changed at some

point? Yeah. No, literally never. Literally never. This was pure happen stance. I'd say I wanted to be a fighter pilot first and astronaut second. I still want to be both those things. Maybe I will be one day. Um, I really want to go to the moon. I still have that ambition as well. Um,

but no, it it it kind of took a different form. I think I got to a point in my early adulthood where I had worked my ass just completely off for Elon and SpaceX where I basically donated about seven years of my life. Um, and just got to a point where I was so

out of aerospace, it was not sexy to me anymore. So bureaucratic. And I always like the idea of doing the hard thing, right? And I was like, now everybody wants to go to space. Well, okay, let's go do something else. And I ultimately just wanted to do something that was maybe a little bit more close

to home and a much larger problem than anything I'd worked on. And so, uh, originally when we were starting this, I was meant to just be purely an engineer, kind of lead the engineering team, build the build the hardware and all that. I think if you fast forward as soon as I kind of as soon as it started

to take off and we got like our first million bucks, it kind of just unfolded the way that it did and I got very entrepreneurial. I had to, you know, build the company. I think the the in the early phases, the early days, how you navigate a startup is just infinitely difficult. like it's

infinitely complex and I treated it like a really high level engineering problem and solved it in a lot of different ways uh than you would normally I I suppose um which I think was good but also had its complications like for example on like our financial models I did all our own financial models when we raised our

series A which is unheard of and I'm going to investors and showing them these models and they look like engineering engineering charts not like financial models at all but I'm like it still applies. It's the same thing. And I think they actually kind of fell in love with that at least in the beginning

till they made me get a CFO. But yeah, so to answer your broader question, no, I I definitely did not have plans for this. Okay. So, so if it wasn't founder, was it always engineer or was there something also that like something happened and you said I want to do this?

Yeah. I know. I always wanted to be an astronaut, man. And I wanted to be the pilot that piloted the space shuttle. And then what killed that dream was they decommissioned the space shuttle in 2011. Um, and then at the same time, I wanted to go the military route. I wanted to be

in the military and fly F-15s or 22s or something like that. Um, but I when I first go into college and I went into the ROC program, it took about a week for me to realize that I was not cut out for the military. I was like, "You guys do not like my

personality." And it turns out my personality is really good for business. So, um, I think ultimately I just decided to go the engineering route as kind of like a fallback and design planes and spaceships and be the guy that might be like a mission specialist or something like that one day on the on

a either the shuttle or a different vehicle. Um, but that's kind of where it originated, I'd say. So, so then uh as someone who is not an astronaut or uh like a you know a space engineer for seven years you know like how much uh but this is a question that I would want

to know if I was uh thinking about doing these things is is how much did school prepare you for your career for the time that you spent at uh in aerospace at at SpaceX. Not getting to to planted yet but just the type of engineering that you were doing how much is prepared in

school and how much of it is you know brand new when you get there. Excuse me. Yeah, it's not not at all, man. Like, it's kind of weird. I think I think there's a an assumption, at least in the United States, that when you go to school, you're like getting to learn all this

stuff that's going to be super pertinent to your degree. And I think engineering might be a special little snowflake in that regard. But like, you certainly learn math, you learn the physics, you learn how to dissect something from a first principal standpoint, but you can't apply it at all. I think for me,

I've spent most of my time in school, not going to school. I started a business. I guess I I guess I've always kind of had it in my blood because I started my own business when I was in grad school. Um, and I did just so much engineering work outside of school while I was in school

that that's really where I learned it all. Um, and then SpaceX was the ultimate university. like you you'll never learn to be a better engineer than just getting thrown in this giant cluster fire of of hard things. So that was pretty much it.

So another was there anything um so so you mentioned school and you mentioned SpaceX. Was there any you know before I ask the next question was there any other uh professional or professional adjacent uh experience that you had that was that had a significant impact on you? the I would say the investment

side. Um when I first started SpaceX, they were the only aerospace company at the time that was giving you stock in the company which was super attractive to me and one of the reasons why I went there when SpaceX was like nobody knew what SpaceX was, nobody knew Elon. Um he had that particular model and so I was

really really interested in investments and all that good stuff. I come from a very poor background. So, um, never really had the benefit of having money. And so, once I got to a point where I was like, "Okay, money is important in life." Turns out I better learn as much as I can. I had pretty much just put

myself through my own little investment school while I was working at SpaceX to really understand the backgrounds there. That's really helped me starting my own company. Interesting. Okay. Well, you foreshadow a little bit. Great job. So I was um so my my my next question was going to be um you know within the grad school

within the engineering uh uh you know the the the SpaceX University type of engineering or the the financial piece that you just spoke to. I I would say I I want I want to pick two things and and you picked them that most significantly impacted how you navigate building planted.

Hm. I mean, I'd say the most impactful thing would just be the first principles mentality, you know, at SpaceX. It was kind of interesting how Elon really dissected some of the problems that we had. And I'll get the fairing recovery system is a really good example, okay? where I remember one day him saying something like, you know,

this fairing is falling out of the sky and for whoever might not know, the payload fairings at the top of the rocket encapsulates the spacecraft. It separates into two halves once you get uh through the atmosphere. Um, and then it just falls back to Earth. It kind of burns up and breaks up as it's falling

very very quickly. It's not aerodynamic. And then it lands in an ocean or, you know, on some continent. Um, and so the fairing halves I think cost like four million or five million bucks and they just were thrown away every time. And he had this saying where he's like, if $4 million was falling out of the sky, why

wouldn't you catch it? And nobody does, right? It's really, really difficult problem to solve, but he has that lens of like, well, I'm going to launch thousands of these rockets and that's $4 million every time. Look how much money I could save. And so if you kind of take that approach and you wipe away the

slate, there's like don't even think about what's been done, what people do now, think about what makes the most sense for the problem you're trying to solve and approach it from that angle. And that is ultimately how we build planted. You look at the lumber industry, you know, when we were really getting into this, talking to customers,

contractors, you know, talking to the folks on site that actually build the houses, you really learn a lot about how the home building industry works and the the lumber industry works and just the built environment in general. And it doesn't make any sense. It really doesn't. He's like, you're like, wait, this is really a problem and you guys

just deal with it? You don't you don't solve it? Like, well, who's going to solve it? I'm like, "Oh, I guess that's fair point." You know, when it came to la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la

la la la la la la la la la la la la la la launching rockets and recovering fairings. Like, who was going to solve it? Elon's like, "Well, I'm going to solve it." And that's how I want to do it moving forward. And, you know, ultimately, if he didn't approach things from that standpoint, he didn't have

that lens when he built SpaceX. It would not have it wouldn't be the SpaceX that you would see today. Um, so that pretty much guides every single thing that we do here. Well, so I'm I know I asked for two, but I'm going to interrupt because I think that is really [ __ ] cool,

that idea and also that specific example. So, if there's any um is is there another example that you could pull from? I mean you could even go deeper into like the the genesis of the of the idea for planted because you referenced it but it you know is is there another you know just to because I

think it's a cool concept you know just to bring it uh to tangible is there another place that you've uh applied that I mean if you look at the idea of planted as a whole that's kind of what I was referring to but if you want to kind of whittle it down if you will

the way that we originally came up with Excuse me. The way that we originally came up with the idea was kind of the broad problem like, okay, well, human beings living on this planet sucks. We build stuff. We pollute. We have trash.

Like, we we don't do anything correctly. How do we change that? Like really that's ultimately the the problem you're trying to change is like how can humanity continue and posterity how can they prosper without harming the earth perpetually.

Mhm. And so that's kind of where we dug in and it's like if you make that your overarching problem and you say all right wipe everything away like trees doesn't make sense. Why cut down a bunch of trees? They all they don't they don't even really exist in the size that they used to to make it actually efficient to

build a house. Um, you know, the logistics behind building a house are complicated. Uh, the way that companies go about, um, you know, scheduling those houses has a lot of fluctuations in it simply because of a bunch of things that they can't control. So, if I'm like, okay, well, if you're reinventing wood

and you're reinventing the way you create a material to build a home, how do you go about that efficiently? And so, that's what's basically spawned all of the way that we do things. So it spawned the material, it spawned the plant that we use, like moving away from trees, it spawned the way we actually

produce. The way we produce is orders of magnitude different than the way that traditional engineered lumber is made. Um, that gives us so many advantages and it'll continue to give us advantages as we move forward. So even taking those machines that produce all this raw material and being like, no, I'm not going to do it the way that everybody

else does it. I'm not going to even like lean on those experiences. I'm going to reinvent this for myself because none of it's made sense so far. And you know, even the way that we drive the belts on our machine, the way that we apply pressure, it's all very unique and it's all very specific to what we're doing

and the problem we're trying to solve. Well, uh, okay. So, you know, before we get uh into uh the the solution, the technology, stuff like that, were there any other like broad ideas that you guys were like, "This doesn't make any sense.

It needs to change before you honed in on uh redefining wood." Um I guess kind of so originally it was like, okay, we wanted to get into carbon capture. Okay. At that point in time, the amount of companies or the the the solution that companies were bringing to the table didn't make any sense. Like

Bill Gates had just invested in some like I forget what it was. It was like some direct carbon capture project. And you're like, "Oh wow, they're literally investing in companies that are taking the proverbial problem, the carbon, capturing it, and then burying it.

They're getting paid to bury it." Like, how is that this this doesn't make any sense? And the way if we're going to continue to approach it that way, we're just going to continue to do stuff that doesn't make any sense because we're a capitalistic society that's focused on nothing but making another buck, not

actually solving the problem. I'd say that ultimately was that when that light bulb went off and was just like, "Okay, nobody's actually going to try to solve this in a way that makes sense, in a way that can solve it perpetually. Uh maybe we can, you know, take a stab at it." Got it. Okay. So then so then with that

with that little that that that pin in in the timeline. So so you guys have that you said if it doesn't no one else is going to do it in a way that makes sense we should do it. Did you already have uh a direction were there was there already a literature were there a group

of people that had done research into reinventing wood in this way or um you know was it completely from zero that you guys were you know how many different directions did you go to try and solve this? Yeah. No not at all actually. We made the first product we ever made, dude, was a table out of mycelium. We were

like mycelium. Mycelium. Yeah. It was like, you know, we were, the idea is like, okay, how do you capture as much CO2 as possible using a really efficient process, you know, photosynthesis. You're like, all right, we'll find plants that grow really fast.

Ultimately, trees don't trees don't meet that description at all. One of the things that grows really fast is myelium, and you get a lot of biomass and whatnot from one plant. So, we originally went down that path and made a really badass table out of it, to be honest.

Where's that table now? Um, honestly, I don't know. This was like years ago. Oh, man. It's probably somewhere. Um, but no, we we we went down that path and we were like, "Okay, let's make high-end furniture grade like stuff out of out of a biomass that can sequester carbon really quickly." Cool. But you know, as being a business

is, we couldn't figure out a way to make that profitable. You couldn't scale that to a to a degree that would be How long was that period though? Was it like a year and a half, two years, or were we talking like a couple months?

You guys No, it was about three years, I'd say. Not from the not making a first table or anything, but like going from we have the idea that we want to use carbon capture and biomass to change the solution or to change the problem to here's we're in reinventing wood. That was about three years.

Got it. Wow, awesome. That's so cool. So then at the end of the uh the mcelium uh journey, you know, what was I guess the next uh hypothesis that you went after? Yeah. Um I would say at that point in time, Wada had been we were both still working at SpaceX.

Um Wada had recently he left SpaceX first and he started to explore just different types of biomass. Um, and then at the same time, uh, we were starting to practice with hemp. We we had like a bunch of hemp in our garage. I had a bunch of mcelium and we were just kind of throwing things at the

at the wall. And I think he had gone to a site, an actual home building site, and just happened to talk to some folks and was like, "Hey, you know, this is what I'm looking to do." And and kind of would spitball it with them. And I think the idea for, you know, a new type of

OSB kind of came to fruition at that point. And then the question was, well, what do if we were going to do that, what would we what would we make it out of? Um, and so we had to explore, you know, that that's kind of when I think the the first idea really took off,

like, oh, this is scalable. This is something that could get to a really high tonnage that could sequester a lot of carbon. We can make a huge business out of this uh that could potentially be global. Okay, so that's when we go into the material side and try to understand what can I make it out of. It takes a

long time to invent a new type of material. There's lots of tests, prototypes, all that good stuff. Every time you choose a biomass, you also have to figure out how do you process it to get it into the form that you need to make the material in the first place.

So, I'd say once we got to that point, we were at about maybe like 9 months to a year of development to actually go through all the biomasses that we could think of, run through all the testing, and then finally landed on the product that we have today.

Wild. So, what Okay. Okay. So then what did it mean I guess uh for you to land on the product? Like was it just uh you know you guys creating like you said you're just going through this this pretty awesome time? I mean I you know for you guys probably like what we need

to find this it's so stressful you know but from you know for me listening to it I'm just like hey this is cool. You guys are trying it out for months a bunch of different you know experimentation but what does it mean to actually land on something? Is it just a series of tests

that it that it passes and you're like whoa hey this is working now we can move on to the next stage you know now we can worry about like licensing or or sorry uh like a patent for this technology or something like like what what is that process from when it works to the next

step that's a good question we were like I was like kind of inventing that process as we went because I was you know I wasn't in business at all so I had to like understand like okay well what are the things that it needs to be needs to be important obviously you're building a

material that you want to be structural so you can certify it. Okay. Well, what does that mean? Like what are the what are the requirements for certifying it? And then it's just a matter of taking that biomass and creating the material out of it and putting it through structural tests. That part's easy. That

part is like really easy to understand, really easy to conduct. The hardest part is like, okay, well, I take this material before I can actually I take the biomass before I can even put it into the material form. How do I process it? And most of them were like damn near impossible to process or you had like

90% waste just by trying to process it to get it to a usable format in the first place. So yeah, it got to a point where it was like every single thing we tried, it was either too hard to process or processed really well, but then the board made kind of sucked and it wouldn't meet the

structural requirements or um you know, you'd eat through your saw blade so much that when you really did the math, like your your ability to process that material in a meaningful way financially would break all of your profit margins. So you had to we basically created a model where the material had to pass all these different

aspects of it not just structurally but also you know commercially viable and all that good stuff. Got it. Okay. Well, so thank you for that because because now now that we have this uh um this process now you know you're in a headsp space of okay I've never ran a business before but now

I need to start worrying about either the finances or the businesses. So you know how how long has it been? Actually, let's let's say that how long has it been since, you know, you guys decided on a material and have been developing the company since?

Well, we've been in business for 5 years. I'd say it took us about a year before that before we were It was Yeah. four years before that of us spitballing and still working and then about a year of us saying, "Okay, we're serious. Let's go ahead and give this a shot." And then once we got

to a point where we were like, "Here's the material. We definitely think we have something. Let's go ahead and incorporate." That was about 5 years ago. Five years. Cool. So then if you could just run through uh you know whatever milestones are meaningful to you, you know what what have the last five years

looked like? Yeah, I mean well to kick it off the first thing that we did was we made the we actually made a material that had a higher strength to weight ratio than steel. We made a really solid material.

We were really proud of this and we're like, "All right, cool. This is ultimately what we want to make it out of." Um and the most meaningful point honestly was was really serendipitous. We actually got contacted by Dr. Horton. Um you know they had found us I think through their their environment and the sustainability

arm um cuz we had just started we had just formed our company. We had just kind of publicly announced that we were going to make carbon negative building materials for homes. So, they had reached out to us for a conversation and they're like, "Oh, we're, you know, we'll be there in, you know, 30 days.

We'll come on site. We'll visit. We'll see what you got." And we're literally sitting here in this like really just crappy warehouse. No tools, just a couple of us being like, "Oh, wow. This is a really big opportunity." So, I went and I built this design studio of like like we had at SpaceX. And instead of a machine or a

spacecraft, I I I basically put a bunch of renderings on the wall like what we have back here of what the machines are going to look like in the future. All the samples, a lot of the different structural tests and moisture tests that we did to prove the samples are good and all that. And they came and they just

really loved it. They I think they fell in love with some of the physical properties of the panel. They they saw immediately how it could have a lot of benefits for their customers and whatnot moving forward. And um yeah, pretty much right off the bat were willing to sign up and give us some cash to to get

started and and to do some more, you know, testing. Wow. So, what has that relationship been like uh over the years? It's been phenomenal. Honestly, I I I've been really I've been really happy with with how that relationship's been going. You know, very very close. Even through the years, like the support never ends, you

know. So now at this point they've they've put a purchase order in for 10 million panels. Um so we're effectively just trying to get to scale to satisfy the endless demand that they and other customers are providing. Um they give us constant feedback. They help move needles when it comes to like certification and testing. They really

helped us with that. Obviously they're investors in the company so they own a portion of it. Um yeah, just it's just been amazing. Super cool. So something something that we also didn't touch on because we spent a while about the uh the material itself. There was uh there's a process of create of uh producing the materials.

You said there was a lot of inventing that had to that had to go on as far as the equipment that you're using. Um yeah what you know what can you say about that? Did you foresee that happening?

Was that something that you you know you guys ran into in year one, year two yesterday? I don't know. No, I'm like basically what we did is imagine taking a problem where there's literally zero solution that you can piggy back off of.

So like the material is brand new. There's no commercially available plant for you to make this material out of. And then at the same time there's no machines for you to make it out of. So it's like we had to invent the material.

Then we had to go and invent the supply chain for the material which is still going and quite difficult all on its own. And then you have to build invent all of the hardware to do it. Um, but when you look at the hardware itself, the biggest thing that you'll you'll notice right off the bat is the size of

it. You know, if you look at a regular OSB mill that uses like southern yellow pine or Lolly Pine, it's the size of a small neighborhood. It's huge. You know, it's a $400 million piece of equipment that is bought from Germany, shipped here, set up by German technicians and engineers, and then takes six months

just to turn the machine on. You don't ever want to turn it off, right? Um, and ours is very different. Ours is, you know, it fits in 150,000 foot warehouse, three of them. Um, you can reconfigure it in an hour to make a different product. You can turn it off and on in 30 minutes.

Um, and then ultimately, you know, you can feed in whatever kind of format of biomass that you want. It's not really restricted in that sense. So, okay, it's very it's very different. It's a very much so embodies the first principles approach. Well, so in in like like in in the perspective of saying

okay, you know, we've invented a new material and you know, our business model is going to be around producing this material and then you run into the uh you run into the hurdle of well, you know, there's nothing available to produce the material. So now we need to literally invent brand new products, you

know, and effectively. I mean, I guess if you wanted to like like totally brand new uh uh like a business or business is so you know when when you're when you have this idea of your uh your early you know your time restrained and and and your your money constrained like how do

you make those decisions to invest in in developing like the equipment out you know outside of you know developing based on this this material? Oh man that I mean honestly that's a good question. I don't know. I think for me it's I mean, every single day of my life is spent making a really big decision on

either what to do or what not to do. And it is I in especially in the early days, I would just I just would work 24/7. I would work in the office with, you know, everybody during the day and then at night I'd go home, I'd pour a glass of whiskey and I would sit at my computer

until sunrise just making all of my financial models or whatever I need to help advise this strategy. Um, but it's definitely, you know, I either spend $200,000 on this or I spend $200,000 on this. Whatever I don't spend money on does not move forward. And no matter what you time is time is, you know, the

clock is ticking. Time is running away from you. So, there's definitely been a couple of times where I made the wrong call, you know, looking at it in hindsight and be like, man, I should have put a little bit more money into that one at this point. I wouldn't be where I'm at now.

But then you're, you know, you really just have to kind of take those take those hits as they come. But yeah, there's no solution to it. It's it's very much so figuring it out as you go. Yeah. I I think as far as uh you know like relating to the experience of being

an entrepreneur and and building and things like this um is there is there a specific situation that you could speak to where you made a decision and and either it was a failure that you look back on it and actually question before that do you look at things and process them as failures because you you you

introduced this this framework of thinking the first principles things from SpaceX and stuff does that include looking at things that that went wrong and saying that was a failure and we're learning from or or is that is that not language that you guys use?

Oh, no. Yeah, fail all the time. Yeah, it's the perfectly fine language to use. In my mind, it's Yeah, you you want to fail. It's the failing that teaches you how to not fail, really. You know, it's it's pretty um cliche, I'd say. But, you know, when we especially when you're going through

hardware development, you never get it right on the first try. Never. Okay. Yeah. There's so many different variations of ways that you can apply a load or whatever that looks like to where you really have to get comfortable with failing. And that's what I teach all all my engineers and and and staff

is make a move, right? Most people just don't start. They're so worried about failing and making the wrong decision. Like I don't really give a [ __ ] Like this sounds like it'll work. Take a shot. it. 99.9% of the time you fail, you learn, you iterate, you fail again, you learn, you iterate, you fail again.

And as long as you're willing to not stop that process, you will eventually get to the point where you have a solution that works. With the machine that we've got now, it still doesn't work out every time we turn it on. It still has issues, right? But doesn't have as many issues as it did last week.

You know what I mean? And eventually, it'll get to the point where it doesn't have anymore. It's being able to juggle the mistakes, the the bad calls, the hindsight, and still having the time and the money to move forward. That's the real trick.

Is there is is is there a a specific experience you could speak to where you you made a decision and it failed and you learned from it? Um, yeah. Yeah, actually, I would say on the agricultural side, it's that's that's been incredibly difficult. Um, you know, I could give you a million references on

hardware, but they would all be pretty much the same thing. But on the A side, it's it's really one of those things where you're like, okay, well, we've got this plant. I need to establish thousands and thousands of acres of it as quickly to yesterday as possible. How do you do that? And by the way, you have

a really limited amount of money to do it with. And so, in the initial phases, I was I was doing things that were very uncommon uh for the sake of it being quick and cheap. And there was I could either start from the very beginning doing it the the way that the industry typically

does it especially with tissue culture cloning plant divisions and and all of that or I could take this kind of other approach that's much quicker and much you know more risky and I went ahead with the riskier quicker cheaper approach when in reality it didn't work.

It it it ultimately got me to a point where I had about a year of time with no results. Um, and so I ended up having to go back and be like, "Okay, well, it turns out this is this is much harder than I thought it would be." Was that It was a year.

It was a year. Yeah, it was a year. And then it just You get to the point where you're like, "All right, well, we tried it. I I definitely needed to demonstrate that it didn't work at least so that I could I could know that I need to move on to that next step." And then

you go and you employ a different strategy. And I did that at three or four times before we got to a point we're like, "Okay, you know, this works. Well, I think the the uh I mean I definitely resonate with that. I think the stakes are a little lower, but you know, every question I'm like, wow,

there's like 10 questions I could ask, you know, in this for the for this next piece of the conversation. I only choose one. So, uh but anyway, I I think that's a that's a super incredible and also well articulated uh uh framework of thinking uh that's really useful. So, I appreciate that. I only have uh uh three

more for you. And my my first one is what are the objections that you've uh that you've received around the development of this technology? Any like uh argument against you know where you guys are going? No, honestly the most objections we get are like we just can't go fast enough.

Um, I'd say like in the in the very very beginning there were questions around are you even able to are you even going to be able to get the biomass to the scale that you need? Things like that.

But the the actual material itself, it constantly gets accolades. It's constantly being promoted as like a really solid um solution to the problem. even from folks in the industry. Like I've got people that'll hit me up that have been in the lumber industry forever and they're like, "Dude, yes, this is exactly what we need." Um,

well, I guess to to to piggyback off that then, where where are we going? Where is what is the vision for planted? So, it's growing for sure. I would say right now specifically for the planted uh building material, um, we're just trying to expand as much as we possibly can. like literally the amount of demand

that we have from that in both the home building market and the furniture market I couldn't fulfill for the next 10 years even going as fast as I think we can go. Um so just trying to go as fast as possible there. Uh we've also got additional avenues now. So we're all about sustainability at the core heart

of planted is how are you efficient, sustainable and keeping carbon sequestration at a max, right? How are you being as carbon negative as you possibly can in all fronts? So, it's really in the lens of sustainable manufacturing. So, you don't want any waste. Obviously, when we make our panels, when we harvest our raw

material, there's waste. How do you deal with that? So, now what we have is we've actually been instituting um pyrolytic and gasification processes to actually turn that waste, that biomass waste into useful products itself. Um, a number of those are are carbon products that can go back into soil as a form of as a form of fertilizer. We're

working for with uh to design plant-based anodes for lithium polymer batteries, get into the graphite market, and then even get into the rare earth elements refining market, which is huge now, especially with everything kind of going on in the economy and the geopolitical scene. Um, and we're approaching all of that. The idea here

is like, okay, we started with wood. We're going to make a product that comes from the waste of our wood product that can go into concrete and make that more sustainable. It can go into steel and make that more sustainable. It can go into batteries and make that more sustainable. And then ultimately getting

to the point where we produce so much wood that you can pretty much offset any of the engineered lumber that you're really making in any sort of building, not just single family homes, but multif family homes, commercial properties.

We've got a huge amount of interest um from Meta in in in um data centers. Obviously, data centers are a big play right now and they're already really bad for the environment. So, they're looking at ways to like offset a lot of that.

Um, and so that that's really like the ultimate vision is span that out domestically, really ramp up the kind of byproduct market, solve additional building material problems in the sustainability world and then ultimately move on to other countries. I do have a lot of interest from other countries for setting up the entire system that we've

designed um so that that country can produce its own lumber which is going to be would be a huge game changer for that country that always imports it always has to eat the tariff cost or whatever those those you know revolving hidden costs are and the changing economy. Um this gives them the ability to make

their own wood control their own destiny when they're building houses um and do it in a sustainable way. Yeah, I mean that that's that incredible. First of all, thank you for sharing that. And uh the thing that I'm glad that you uh that that you embody or the business model embodies the vision embodies is that

being sustainable is also good good economics. I mean there's so there there's so much uh I guess you know from a a completely nonsustainable whatever if you don't care about greenery uh you know you're literally producing waste and you're making money off of it. So it's it's almost like the the the SpaceX

thing like if that's exactly it. Yeah. you know, if if if there's $4 million of waste, why don't you catch it? So, um, you know, so I'm glad that uh that you guys are are really uh living through that. That's really cool. What's the biggest hurdle?

I mean, you mentioned it and uh you know, if if it's the same answer, then that's fine, but what's the biggest hurdle for you right now um with Planted and how's it also an opportunity? Oh, man. What isn't a hurdle? Um nice. Honestly, I'd say right now we're really moving to expand our agricultural

footprint. I've got about 350 acres established producing material. We're still getting the data from how how quickly the fields mature, what kind of yield we can expect per acre, at what year planted it was, and all that good stuff. Um, but this year I'm trying to lock in 10,000 acres. We're going to be

able to fulfill a,000 acres um a year by the end of this year and then 5,000 acres a year by the end of next year. And so I'm trying to lock all that in now and really figure out like, okay, how do you rapidly expand a huge agricultural footprint in a really, really, really efficient way with all

the variables that are included in running a company? Um, and it's an opportunity predominantly because like there's so many ways to to chalk that solution up. uh you know you can work with individual farmers, you can buy land yourself, you can start a REIT and buy a huge amount of land. You can go to

other countries that are willing to farm for you. You know, Dr. Horton has a really interesting um strategy in which we could actually go to potential land sites that they've already procured and are going to develop in the future. And then I establish those and I grow the all of the biomass on those fields that

are going to be used to build all the houses that then occupy that land. Um, so there's a million ways to to to really do that. And I think ultimately I'm really excited to see how that part really starts to shake out. Um, and it is one of those things where on the

hardware side, you know, we control our own destiny, but when you get into the agricultural side, you've got a lot of things that you can't control. And so optimizing that is going to be really, really tough, but also going to be just a huge game changer once we once we really nail it.

Yeah. Crazy opportunity. We believe in you, man. I believe in you. You guys can do it. Uh la last one for you. I mean, it's crazy, you know, what you guys have built, all the investment that you've had in it, all the work that's uh uh that you need in order to get to where

you're going. Uh so, I'm curious, what inspires you? What inspires me? Honestly, I'm kind of like uh David Gogggins in a way. Like you know David Goggginsen, you know how he's he's really motivated by pain. Y I'm kind of similar in the sense that I really love the idea of taking a problem

that's just really horrible and just incredibly painful to work on and real no obvious solution to um and really just diving in and trying to figure out how to solve it. And when I'm not doing that, I get pretty unhappy. I I get bored really really easily. So, I think I just get inspired by seeing all of the

complications, especially in the world today. You know, there's definitely a weird kind of um aura that that exists. I think all of that really inspires me because it's it's it's definitely an opportunity for improvement. It's a it's a challenge personally and I think you know culturally um that just really gets me excited to be able to solve all those

problems and you know keep waking up every day with with something meaningful to to provide. Nice. Well, David Gogggins will be proud. That's great. I can't run though. Yeah. Well, that's okay. Mentally, I guess you're doing the same, right?

Mentally is the equivalent. Well, cool. Well, this has been super awesome. Like I said, you know, I got like branches of like a million different questions. So, uh, I appreciate you answering the ones that we did talk about. Uh, it's super useful the framework of thinking that you that you employ. Um, the problem

that you're solving, the invention that you guys made. I mean, all of it is just super interesting. Uh, and it's really cool that you guys are seeing all the demand that you are because I I believe you guys deserve it. So, if anyone else uh was inspired to follow along or get in touch, what's the best way to do

that? Yeah. Um, I mean, they can always email me or check out our socials. Uh, you know, our planning materials.com is is up and running all the time, so they can reach out that way or anyway. Cool. Well, do it. Highly recommend, Nathan. Thank you so much. I'm excited to see you guys go.

Thank you. I appreciate it.