If you’re not in construction or in the middle of a renovation, you might not think much about wood waste but in 2018 alone landfills in the US received 12.2 million tons of wood. Most of this is useful material that could be reused, but the lack of infrastructure means the wasted wood can't always reach the developers, woodworkers, and creators who need it. This week on Found, we're talking to a founder who has a SaaS solution for this broken supply chain. Ben Christensen is the founder and CEO of Cambium, a company that is reimagining the wood supply chain and reallocating previously wasted wood to be used in new building projects.
If you’re not in construction or in the middle of a renovation, you might not think much about wood waste but in 2018 alone landfills in the US received 12.2 million tons of wood. Most of this is useful material that could be reused, but the lack of infrastructure means the wasted wood can't always reach the developers, woodworkers, and creators who need it. This week on Found, we're talking to a founder who has a SaaS solution for this broken supply chain. Ben Christensen is the founder and CEO of Cambium, a company that is reimagining the wood supply chain and reallocating previously wasted wood to be used in new building projects.
In this conversation they cover:
(0:00) Introduction
(1:42) What Cambium is all about
(5:01) Climate change and wood recycling
(11:36) Developing the software
(15:54) Sourcing sustainable wood
(18:41) Going from grad school to founder
(20:01) Fundraising journey
(23:59) AI and supply chains
(25:49) Building the team
(30:15) Learning from logistics mistakes
(32:30) Staying grounded while building climate solutions
(36:40) Host conversation
Dom Davis 0:02
In 2018, landfills in the US received 12 point 2 million tons of wood. Most of this is useful material that could be reused. But the lack of infrastructure means the wasted wood can't always reach the developers woodworkers and creators who need it. Luckily, the system is changing. We now have the ability to source track and relocate wood to mitigate this waste and give it new life.
Becca Szkutak 0:24
You're listening to found TechCrunch his podcast that brings you the stories behind the startups. And today we're talking to Ben Christiansen from cambium, a company that is reimagining the wood supply chain and reallocating previously wasted wood to be used in new building projects. I'm Becca ScrewAttack. And here to talk about what happens to trees in their second act is my fabulous co host, Dominic
Dom Davis 0:44
Midori Davis. And of course, before we get into our conversation with Ben, we have our two truths and a lie. So listen closely to see which one of these statements is not true, is it that Ben used to work as a backcountry guide that only five to 10% of wood ends up getting reused? Or that bins first company was selling firewood to campers for $10, a bundle?
Becca Szkutak 1:00
All of those sound interesting. So listeners, you'll have to keep listening to today's episode to find out which is true and which is not. Before we dive into the conversation with Ben, if you wouldn't mind taking a second our lovely listeners to rate and review the show on whatever podcast platform that you are currently using. We would greatly appreciate it the more feedback we get helps us with the show. And now we'll move on to today's episode. So here's our conversation with Ben.
Hey, Ben, how's it going?
Ben Christensen 1:30
doing pretty well? How are y'all?
Becca Szkutak 1:32
I am doing well. Are you based in DC jimick that up? Yeah,
Ben Christensen 1:36
in DC and Baltimore.
Becca Szkutak 1:37
Fabulous. Have you gone out to see the cherry blossoms are they as amazing as everyone says,
Ben Christensen 1:41
I have and they are. They're spectacular. It's been a great year for them.
Becca Szkutak 1:46
I love to hear it tried to see the ones that Brooklyn last year, but some spring storms had ruined them before I got there. Unfortunately,
Ben Christensen 1:52
you're always a little finicky.
Becca Szkutak 1:54
Speaking of storms. And speaking of trees, kind of a nice little segue into what we're going to be diving into today, maybe you want to start by telling us a little bit about cambium
Ben Christensen 2:01
absolutely happy to talk, what we really do is we build regenerative supply chains. And we do that for wood. What that actually means is we're helping to create better technology for this really big industry. So wood, you know, obviously it comes from trees. And it's all around us. It's in our desks, it's in our floors, it's in our buildings to $215 billion industry. It's a massive part of our world. Today, we sourced that primarily from Virgin timber. So we cut down trees and forests, we send those oftentimes all across the globe, we don't have any tracking really there, there's really a limited software stack that actually connects the dots there. And instead, we're building a better value chain where you can use local material, you can use salvage material, and all of that is connected through our technology. So that's what we do is we deliver carbon smart wood, locally salvaged wood tracked on our technology to large buyers to build buildings to build furniture to use any sort of thing that you use wood for. And we do that in a really efficient and cost competitive way. What is carbon
Becca Szkutak 3:11
smart wood? Why is this a better option than say maybe what people were traditionally using? Yeah, absolutely.
Ben Christensen 3:16
So the big problem that carbon smart wood solves is this waste material problem. So if you think about steel, in America, we actually recover around 95 to 98% of it. So we're going to take steel, it's coming down. And ultimately it's going to be reconstituted, and used again, for wood, it's somewhere like five to 10% of that actually ends up getting reused. And so there's this massive, massive volume of wood waste. And that wood waste comes from a few different places that comes from trees coming down in cities, trees or living things that's hard to be true in a city. And so when trees get older, they die. And at the end of their life, usually we chip them up into mulch, or we send them to landfill or we burn them. We also see a lot of wood coming out of buildings through deconstruction. And then more and more we see wood coming out of places for you know, sort of fuel load reduction. So you know, in the American West, when you're trying to address wildfire, you're taking a lot of material out of forest right now a lot of that material is all being wasted. So what we're really addressing with carbon smart wood is taking that wood that's already local that's already there is currently being wasted and helping to salvage that to save that material and turn it into you know, beautiful conference tables, the material that you actually build buildings out of and a lot of different components like that. So carbon smart wood fundamentally is it's wood that was wasted, that is salvaged and has full chain of custody tracking and then also reinvests in new trees as well.
Becca Szkutak 4:49
I'm curious what got you interested in this space to begin with? Have you always been a lover of wood supply chains? A lover of trees?
Ben Christensen 4:56
Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's one of those things where you look backwards on And then it all sort of falls in line. But while you were living, it didn't really know which direction it was going. For sure, I was born and raised in a really small town in rural New Mexico. So about 200 people up in the National Forest. And when I was about seven or eight got hit with Pinyon, pine bark beetle. And so basically, all of the trees around my house died. And my mom is a scientist, she helped me understand that that was really connected to climate change. And so from as basically as young as I can remember, I've seen my life's work to be addressing climate change in a biggest way as possible to always be cared a ton about climate the same time. My dad was a woodworker and a carpenter, he was somebody who, you know, had me in the shop all the time, grew up around wood, and really fell in love with it, but never thought that that'd be something I did full time. You know, from there. I also just like loved teams, I've always loved teams, I started my first business when I was seven. You know, I've always brought teams and found group dynamics to be fascinating and leading teams to be something that I'm really, really passionate about the kind of took all three of those and worked at the National Labs first addressing climate change more on the technical side, and then focus really on the team side as the back country guide, and then ultimately realize there's this massive problem of you wasted material started seeing that, that could be something that would plays a really big part in and was like, wow, there's a big solution here than in particular, there's a solution that really requires new technology and can create a lot of scale. Well, I gotta ask,
Dom Davis 6:34
what was the business right? What was
Ben Christensen 6:38
my first business? Yeah, yeah, so my, my dad, and all my family, friends are old time folk musicians. So I grew up playing old time folk music, and we would go to the psych folk festivals, essentially, lots of musicians camping in the woods. And it's summertime. And basically, there's these camps, and people are there for a week. And everybody needs ice for their coolers. And so I learned as a kid that I could bring, I could charge people to go pick up ice from the ice machine that was like a half mile walk, bring it down for them, and they would do it. What I ended up learning is that if I actually went and bought the ice up front and brought it to them, I could get an even better price for them. Because I could walk around, I could sell it directly. Eventually, in my second year of it, I hired an employee who was I think, a seven year old, who was my first employee. And with that model, unfortunately, my first employee ended up leaving our inventory out because you know, he got distracted and was playing or doing something that you know, a six year old, seven year old does, and all of our inventory melted. So we lost, you know, all of our capital, it was a great, great early lesson in business building. That's
Dom Davis 7:49
so funny, though. Oh, my God. Not to keep harping on this. But what were you charging people,
Ben Christensen 7:54
we would charge? Basically, we would charge $10 A bag if we went and got it. But if we were walking around, we found that we could charge $20 A bag. I also think that's a crazy price that people were paying for ice, but it was really hot. And I think we were sort of had that kid adorable factor, you know that it was like, maybe not a fair market that we are totally operating in?
Dom Davis 8:17
That's a lot. Yes. But you know, something I did want to ask since you kind of come from a wood background or woody background, the way that the issues of wood recycling is addressed now, have you seen it evolve over the years? Because I know that it's obviously an issue that people are still trying to work with, but has it at least gotten better from like, when your dad was a woodworker, you know,
Ben Christensen 8:41
when you think about the history of wood in this country, there's lots of different sort of moments there, we've largely been almost all of our material today comes from cutting down virgin timber. And there's times where that's great. And that like makes a ton of sense. There's also times when that really doesn't make sense. So what we're trying to do is bring in this new way where you can also source locally, if you think about the last 20 years, there's been this really big growth of people seeing the same problem and working to salvage that material. And these are a lot of people that we work with, and that we serve with customers on our technology platform is there's all of these local wood products, businesses, and many of them are starting to try to salvage material, but they have their own challenges. They don't have technology that serves them, and they don't have access to large consistent orders. So that actually makes it pretty hard for them to scale. So what we're really doing that's different is we're trying to stitch all of the different pieces together within the full supply chain. And that's what's really transformative. But we truly couldn't have done that 20 or 30 years ago, because the basic components of that supply chain, they just didn't exist. So that's been a big transition, you know, in the last 20 years as well. I think the other thing that you'll note, you know, what is this massive industry, it's $215 billion industry in the US. It's also going through this sort of generational change Ange, I mean, my dad's great example. Not software native, you know, if you try to talk to him about technology, good luck. I've tried, you know, see how that goes. But there's a lot of sort of the next generation of people who are taking over family businesses who are getting into the space, who are really adopting the tools and seeing the efficiency and benefits of that as well. And I
Becca Szkutak 10:21
got to ask, before I dive into the actual tech, but has your job said anything about the fact that you ended up working in the woods space? Like, what's the like, oh, I always knew you'd come around or anything like that?
Ben Christensen 10:31
Yeah, I mean, my dad was a stay at home dad, my mom worked growing up. So we've always had just a really special bond. And, you know, for me, my dad is has always been my best friend. And you know, getting to do this and getting to work on something that connects me to him is incredibly powerful. And the biggest thing is that I can just talk to him about it, and he is just so innately excited. It's really nice to be able to call somebody and I feel like really blessed as a kid to get to call a parent and talk about work. And they just are like, endlessly interested. And that's such a, you know, such an amazing thing. So he's, he's definitely really excited about it, and really proud. And you know, a lot of other parts of our family are in wood. And we just kind of, that's what we do as a family in many ways. And so it's been a really cool way to stay connected. And to really learn about that as well.
Becca Szkutak 11:20
I love that. I feel like we talked to a lot of founders on the show who make jokes that they're like, Yeah, my parents still like, don't get what I do, or like VCs who are like my parents still, like, wish I was a doctor, even though they don't count him doing this, like, really great high profile job. So that is really interesting to hear about. But I wanted to ask about the actual software piece of this, when you came up with that idea. How did you build that out? Or kind of like, how did you know what to include? Or how to make it into what it is now?
Ben Christensen 11:47
Yeah, no, that's a great example. And sort of to what we were just saying, my dad gets that it's with wood gets that it's good for the planet definitely doesn't understand the supply chain technology that underpins it. So that's the that's the new part, what we really understood in this space, and I'm a huge believer that you follow problems, you don't follow your idea of solution. And one of the big things we talked about as a company is listened first. So we actually started addressing this problem thinking it was city specific, we thought we needed to help cities, but all of this wasted material, find a better way to use it. And then what we found was that there was actually a lot of local businesses and sort of medium and larger scale businesses in and around cities that could or were trying to use that material. But the fundamental problem was a lack of connectivity, and then a lack of consistent demand. And so we really saw that in two ways. We saw that connectivity problem through our software. And what that actually looks like is its inventory management, its business ops, its point of sale that connects each of these different businesses. So something I always like to share to sort of like help conceptualize that is, you know, a lot of us have desks that are made of wood, or a table that's made of wood, probably about eight to 10 Different businesses had to touch that material before it ends up in your home. It's like 45,000, wood products manufacturers in the US. And each time, you know, they pass a board to a dry producer, they have to exchange information, like there's a transaction there, they have to sell those pieces. And so that's what we really facilitate is we make that a lot easier. But we didn't start there. We started by sort of following the problem listening to the problem, and realizing, wow, this is a really underserved market that needs technology to actually connect those dots. What does
Becca Szkutak 13:31
feedback like when you first started, I know you mentioned like folks like your dad, or like that kind of generation didn't necessarily like adopt technology here, but especially with climate companies. And maybe this is just because I've been a reporter for a number of years, which has made me slightly pessimistic that it's like, okay, build a great climate solution. It seems so obvious. But do people adopt it? Is the industry like ready to embrace those kinds of things? So I am curious what it hasn't been like not necessarily selling the software, but kind of getting people excited or interested or like what feedback you have gotten from the folks who would use it. So
Ben Christensen 14:00
the nice thing about our solution compared to some others, I'm a huge believer in climate do you need everything, you know, a couple of pieces that differentiate us is we're really selling into an existing market. So the wood demand side already exists. And there's also sort of growing trends that are pushing to adopt software role. So we have that going for us, you know, what we really learned, then this goes into sort of the two parts of our business. So we have the supply chain technology, which helps us source this material. And then we sell this material, carbon smart wood, like we talked about at the beginning to those large buyers. And so what we're able to do is when we source that material for somebody like a room and board or for Patagonia, some of our customers, we then have strong orders that help us bring people onto the platform. So the big difference there is if you start initially with Hey, you know, you enter this sort of traditional space, it's a lot harder to start a conversation and say, Hey, You should buy our our software you should get on this people are like a little bit hesitant more and more, we're seeing people jump on. And we're seeing a lot of organic growth there, because we've sort of turned the corner on adoption. But initially, you know, a lot of it is if you start a conversation with, hey, we want to buy material from you, we have an order for you. And we can bring you a lot more of these orders, if you use this platform that really helps drive that sort of conversion cycle. And so that's part of why we've built our business like that is because the demand side, people like really, really want to buy this material, we've been really overwhelmed with demand there. And that helps us get sourcing and volume onto the platform in order to go and meet that demand.
Becca Szkutak 15:42
more from this conversation, right after a quick break.
Dom Davis 15:49
And something I was interested about, cuz I'm just trying to like, imagine it in my head, how do you source the wood? How does that work? Do you like work with people? Or like, do you just go to the forest? How does it work? Yeah,
Ben Christensen 15:59
it's a great question. So if you think about sort of the four steps of our business, so you have to source the material from somewhere, you have to get it to somebody who can process it and turn it into, you know, usable table or flooring, you have to sell it to somebody. And then for us, you also reinvest in local climate solutions and workforce development. So really focused on creating a sort of fully circular model, that sourcing step, we really do a couple of things. So we work with cities, we work with states, we work federally to help people who manage trees, and ultimately are wasting lots of that material, understand where they can put it. So a good example is like a large developer who's building a new, you know, housing development, oftentimes, trees are going to come off that site, that's part of our city's growing. And so that material right now is going to be wasted. We work with them on the front end to say, hey, we actually have, you know, 10 different local processors in the area, here's the three that are closest to you where you can go and take that material. And then we can also work with them to say, if you want to actually put that material back into the building, if you want to turn you know, the tables and chairs that are going to go into your your office, from material on site, we can do that full service for you as well. And so that's sort of how we think about that sourcing component.
Becca Szkutak 17:19
Is there any type of wood that you guys can't use? Like I would assume, obviously, like trees that maybe are, like heavily damaged in a wildfire or something like that. But is there actual scenarios where like, what's been treated a certain way, or anything that makes it not a good fit for this? Yeah.
Ben Christensen 17:34
So we really think about it. A good analogy for us is, if you're familiar with misfit markets, or imperfect produce kind of this movement to use, they've been on the show, yeah, there's very good, but to use that material that's being wasted. It's the same thing that we're doing. But the big piece there is you have to find different uses for it. And so you can utilize pretty much all of this material, not every single piece of wood that is coming out of a city right now can be turned into a beautiful table, some of it should be turned into something like a ceiling, which you don't see, you don't look at in the same way, or can be turned into a material like mass timber where that's actually inside a wall. So you don't actually see what it looks like. And so there's a lot of different grades for material and ways to use it. So generally, you can use pretty much all of this material, but you can't use it for every end product. So that's how we really think about it. Definitely.
Becca Szkutak 18:31
And switching gears a little bit, I want to ask about what your journey has been like and deciding to launch this company. I know you had your really lucrative a startup, so not your first startup. But when did you know it was the right time to kind of launch back into startup plan and kind of what was it like making that decision about timing, and obviously, starting a company is very different than say, working for a larger corporation.
Ben Christensen 18:53
Basically, the core of it for me is I was in grad school, I had actually gone straight from undergrad into grad school, I was the youngest person in my program. And I really needed to find work in order to be able to thrive, get through that. And I couldn't get any jobs because I was competing with people who had a ton of experience. And I was like a month out of undergrad, I never thought that I would go straight into grad school didn't think that was really on the table for me. And then I was like, Oh my God, this happened. I'm here, I need to figure out how to pay for it and to sort of be there. And I couldn't get my foot in the door anywhere. And I tried, I tried and I tried and I just like couldn't get my foot in the door. And so what I was really focused on was like, alright, what can I do? And there was this interesting moment where I was seeing that, you know, I've always focused on building teams, and building businesses, but there's a really big opportunity to do that in a space that had a lot more resources and could really unlock sort of near term value for me, so I ended up starting the company while working at the World Resource Institute. You and was able to go after that in a much bigger way.
Dom Davis 20:03
And something I meant to ask before, as you were getting the company together, getting everything organized, what was fun raising this like, like, how did investors respond? I'm really I'm really interested.
Ben Christensen 20:15
So a couple of prevailing dynamics, you know, initially, we really didn't know anything about fundraising and venture capital, we've now raised about 10 million really understand the space, understand how to speak the language, but initially, a lot of it was about learning at. And so we had to do some of that initial learning curve, you know, in our sort of precede, fundraise in our initial rounds. And then we also had to really get people to start to understand the space. So wood, right? It's this massive, massive industry, huge technology, opportunity, huge climate solution. There's all of these pieces that fit there. But people don't really talk about it. This isn't a mainstream idea, this isn't something that people often intuitively understand. And so our largest experience with investors is that once they understand it, they're very interested. And you know, now, because we have so many proof points on the demand side and have these much larger sort of off, take contracts coming down the pipe that we're really excited to announce later this year, it's really changed the fundraising dynamic, but in the, you know, sort of starting phases, a lot of it was getting literate. And getting people to understand the scale of this problem is massive, because when you say recycled wood, I think we all intuitively think, Oh, that's a small problem. But it's actually we spend billions of dollars a year as a country throwing away material, like paying to get rid of it. And if we salvaged all that material, you know, you're looking at 20 to $40 billion, depending on what you scope that material with that we could actually be no salvaging. So there's this gigantic opportunity there. And once people understand that, then they tend to be really, really excited.
Becca Szkutak 21:57
That makes sense. Yeah, we're always interested. I feel like we talked to founders a lot, who not say exactly that. But there's always like this education piece. I'm curious, like, Did you pitch a lot of like climate focused investors? who probably would have understood and understood the problem a little bit faster? Or did you go more the generalist route or because we've had people on before it said, they were in an area where there were funds dedicated to that and had trouble raising from them, but did not have trouble raising from generalist and vice versa. I'm, like, always curious, like how that processes?
Ben Christensen 22:24
Yeah, I often find with the VC space, that it's pretty hard to map, what you think somebody will think of your business to what they actually will think of your business. So we definitely see a good bit of variability there, we've ended up you know, having a fairly diverse investor set. So we really hit the sort of SaaS investors, people who are very interested in pure, you know, and very software centric solutions, because what we're doing, then our business model is really creating technology for an industry that is fundamentally lacking it. And then we also played really well in the climate investment space because of the speed to market with the climate solution wasted. Wood material, biomass off gassing is over a giga ton and that are globally today, there's a giant opportunity to really address that at scale. And we have investors who are very, very focused on climate. And then we also have folks like Joe Tsai, who's the co founder of Alibaba, who's really understand supply chains, and how to make technology, you know, happen there. And so we've been able to pull in a pretty diverse set. That said, a lot of that is how we think about what kind of investors we want. And so I've always been a really big believer that we want to be really selective about who we bring in. And we want people who can fill in gaps, who can help us understand what we don't know, when we don't know a lot of things. And we're very aware of that as a company. And so we really focus on bringing in people who can help us see around corners that we we don't already. So we often are trying to focus on that diversity within our investor set to be able to answer those forward looking questions.
Dom Davis 23:57
Awesome. I feel like I have to ask this, where's the AI angle? Your company? I know it has to be there. I know, it's there.
Ben Christensen 24:03
It is. It absolutely is. And we're actively working on it. The big opportunity for us is when you think about the future of supply chains, and you think about the regulatory pressure, when you think about having you know the pressure from people who want to know where their material comes from, to consumer pressure. And then you think about actual business operations plus or to being as efficient as possible within your supply chain, a lot of that is ultimately tied into dynamic data that could actually track the material. So in our case, a board from the tree that it came from, through the trucking company, to the primary processor to the secondary processor to the kiln dryer, you know, all the way through the process in order to actually reach the end customer with real data with real time updates on tracking and timing and can actually facilitate the transactions of each of those components. So that's the future and that's a platform that we're really building that dynamic Data Layer both has, you know, tons of opportunity for optimization. So there's big AI application in terms of optimizing those supply chains. And then the second opportunity that's really big, and that we're working on the near term is taking that data, this data that we already have for lots of our customers, and translating that into Impact Reporting into environmental product declarations into, you know, aligning with their sort of impact and emissions profile. So doing all of that is a great application for AI as well then sort of the near term, and then long, long term, it's taking all the supply chain data and optimizing that and being able to really understand very, very clearly what is the most efficient, both economically and environmentally way to bring material to market and
Becca Szkutak 25:44
thinking sort about building the actual company itself. What has it been like hiring and kind of what has it been like bringing people into the business to kind of grow to where you guys have gotten so far, it's been
Ben Christensen 25:55
great. I mean, I feel incredibly lucky to have so many smarter, better folks around me. And I think that our team really has benefited from a very different in sort of diverse group of thinkers, you know, folks who approach problems differently, but share us core set of values. You know, one of the things that we've noticed from a hiring perspective, and this is one of the great things about our solution is it can check a lot of different boxes in the sense that it's a really big climate solution. It's a really big software and technology solution. It's also a really big jobs creation solution, and a really big social sort of equity solution, because we're focused on creating access to jobs in cities, you know, really bringing back manufacturing to the US. And so we end up fitting in a lot of different places. And I'm a huge believer that in order to bring on people who are going to create long term consistent, really created value for you as a company, you need to make sure that what you're building and your company narrative fits within their life and personal narrative very clearly. And so one of the advantages I think we have is that there's a bunch of anchor points, that different folks on our company are really doing this work for the same overall reason, but for different personal reasons. And those personal reasons are very strong. And so that's been a big part of bringing in people and having incredibly low turnover as a team, you know, really having a core group that is staying very focused and is very, very committed, who's your first hire. So our first hire was actually one of our advisors. So we got really lucky, and I'm a big believer in this generally, is that I like to work with people, if you can figure out a way to do it before you actually bring them on full time. So we ended up working with one of our advisors for about a year before we ended up bringing him in full time. He's our VP of growth. Now. He's amazing. His name's Joe McDonald's, he's a huge part of what we're building,
Becca Szkutak 27:53
and sort of thinking about building the company culture and things like that. It's way too easy for you always have to ask these kind of questions like, Are you guys remote? Are you hybrid? Are you kind of fostering the company culture as you've been working to build the company? Yeah, it's
Ben Christensen 28:07
a great question. Obviously, it's one that you know, you have to invest in. And I think one of the biggest things I learned being a backcountry guide. So spending a lot of time in these pretty intense outdoor environments are intense sort of wilderness medicine scenarios, is that before you're dealing with the challenge, or like the acute trauma of whatever's happening, that's when you actually are investing in the problem. So what I mean by that is, before you get on the trip, or you know, before you get to a point where things are really bad, that's where you have to really be investing in communication, resilience, all those core components. And so we really believe that and so it can often feel, and I'm guilty of this, like, wow, it feels like sometimes we're over investing in the communication or in the culture building. But then we see that payoff, like not having turnover, or not having really any significant cultural or like conflict issues. As a company, I think a lot of that comes from this mentality, we call it putting cards in the deck, but really trying to consistently put cards in the deck. And so we do that in a few different ways. We're a company that was founded and you know, sort of started working on it during COVID, and then fully founded in 2021. So definitely coming into the world in the remote era, we also have a physical presence in Baltimore. So a core set of our team is there, we try to have, you know, this, this balance between allowing and enabling, you know, hybrid work, and then also really facilitating in person co creation and sort of the creativity that comes with that. I'm also a really big believer that kind of this is another end of one problem. People relate to their work very differently. And sometimes you really need a full team. We have plenty of folks on our team who work incredibly well remotely. We also have plenty of folks on our team who don't and I think those are things that we try to match a little bit more person to person rather than having You know, hey, here's ubiquitous, this is a one size fits all solution within our team.
Dom Davis 30:05
Definitely. What would you say has been the craziest wildest memory you've had? throughout the journey of this company? I'm thinking like maybe like a moment where not like failure, but like, where you're like, Oh, crap, how did that happen? Or what's been the wildest thing that's happened? Because I imagine there's a lot of fun stories that could come from working what
Ben Christensen 30:23
yeah, I'll give it a good one is from a simple past, obviously, we have have learned our lesson. But a good example of just being like, Wow, I like never thought this would be a thing that I was dealing with, or our team was dealing with. But we ended up early on getting a customer in Canada, who was looking to buy material. And basically our model is we sell material to an end customer, we then use our technology to go and source it. And so we sort of stitch together that order. And we ended up shipping it to them. And we got a call from this trucking company that is like, I'm stuck at the Canadian border, I have all of this wood, and they won't let me into Canada. And we ended up having to do this just like ferry extended complicated Canadian customs. And like the size of the log was too long. And there was all of these crazy logistics that went around that dealing with like the Canadian border patrol, and just never thought that would be something that we had to deal with. We ended up sorting it out. And we learned that there's some really, like efficient ways to do that, and some really inefficient ways. And so that was like a very early startup story of being like, Oh, right. That is the type of customer that actually we should say no to until we're really ready to service them. Wait,
Dom Davis 31:39
that's actually crazy. Like, where were the Canadians asking? Or like, What were they saying? Because they said the wood is too long. Like they have trees there. They like what yeah,
Ben Christensen 31:46
it was more about can you bring in material and a lot of these are Import Export laws. And then it's also a lot of it is like agricultural products, laws. And so you know, if you think about the rules, like you can't fly into different countries with, you know, fruit, because you might bring in a pest or you might bring in one of those pieces. We're also dealing with that because there was questions about how dry was the material? Was it dry enough for Canadian standards versus US standards? There's a lot going on in that process. Border
Becca Szkutak 32:15
stuff is so fascinating to me the different rules again, people who listen to the show probably think I have the most boring interests of all time. And unfortunately, that is one of them. But we only have time for about one more question before we wrap. So I do want to ask you, you are building obviously, in the climate space, climate change is something that you've long been interested in isn't the right word, but passionate about or sort of passionate about finding solutions for and building in a company like this? Does the concept of climate change? Is it daunting? Or does it inspire you because it is such a huge issue? Obviously, we feel the effects about the fact that it's getting worse, like seemingly every day? How do you kind of wrap your head around working toward a solution for a problem that really is big, and sometimes does feel like it is continuing to grow?
Ben Christensen 32:59
I mean, I think that it's two things. I'm a huge believer in being really honest and being direct. And understanding that climate change, the impacts of it are going to be horrendous. They're also going to be really disproportionately impacting people based on sort of existing socio economic inequalities. So it's going to be way worse for certain groups, and not as bad for others. But it's going to be really catastrophic for us overall. And that we need to be very honest about that. Like, we need to own that we need to reckon with that. And I'm a huge believer that we only gets to solutions if we believe that we can. And so I actually am fascinated, you know, my co founder and I, we have gotten into ultra marathons, we're doing this run in the Sahara, actually, next week. It's six marathons in six days across the Sahara Desert also supported and we do these things, because they teach you about how do you go after something that feels impossible, like running 100 miles in a day that we did last year, in a way that actually gets you there. And what we've learned in that is that the only way you go and address something as audacious as an achievable as these crazy ultra marathons or something like climate change is it's about getting little things, right. And it's about staying very focused on consistency. But it's also about like putting yourself in the race to possibly finish. Like you're never going to run 100 miles in a day unless you sign up for a race to run 100 miles in a day. And I think that's the same thing with climate changes. We're never going to build the type of climate solutions that I think we want to see which are really addressing climate change, but also doing that in a way that is not just like recreating the same economic system that we have, we want a better, more equitable one. We only do that if we believe that that's possible. So staying connected to that belief and also being I'm very honest that getting there is going to be very, very hard, like, I know this race next week, it's going to be horrible, it's going to be awful, there's gonna be so many moments are going to be incredibly difficult. And that's where we need to build toughness, sort of, and build resilience within ourselves as individuals within our teams within our society to be able to deal with those things. So that's how we think about it. But I really believe we can get there, I think it was only going to happen if we're honest about how much work has to go into it. And that we're going to have to make some very serious changes to our livelihoods to be able to have the benefits of not having a world that totally has catastrophic climate change.
Dom Davis 35:38
And the last question, before we wrap, of course, we have to ask, Do you have a favorite type of tree?
Ben Christensen 35:44
I do? Do you have a favorite type of tree? i My favorite type of tree are aspen trees. And the reason is twofold. One is because I grew up in the mountains in New Mexico. And so I was always surrounded by them, and you know, spent a ton of time with them. The other reason is because they're actually you know, the largest living organism in the world. So Populus tremuloides, which was a species aspen trees are actually when you see like a grove of Aspen's, they're all connected. It's all one tree, which is really, really amazing. So the biggest organisms in our world are actually it's one tree.
Dom Davis 36:22
Oh, that's so funny. We were like taking a bet. We're like, what trees are gonna say we think we thought it was gonna be pine. But guess
Ben Christensen 36:28
that's my number two. Yeah.
Becca Szkutak 36:31
Well, perfect. Well, now that we've got the most important question of the day answered, we do have to wrap up. But thank you so much for coming on the show. This was fun.
Ben Christensen 36:38
Thank you so much. Appreciate it.
Becca Szkutak 36:46
And that was our conversation with Ben. And before we dive into the outro, quick situational awareness if we sound a little manic, a little crazy, a little insane on the outro is because we just are recording this during the earthquake in New York. So you're unaware of New York got a 4.8? Earthquake on Friday, April 5. We had an earthquake. What the heck, we're having an earthquake.
Dom Davis 37:13
Are we having an earthquake? Yeah,
Becca Szkutak 37:14
we are. Which
Dom Davis 37:15
they do. Um,
Becca Szkutak 37:21
so does that mean my flight was gonna get cancelled? But anyway, back to your regular scheduled programming. Dom? What was the lie?
Dom Davis 37:31
We're gonna put? Yeah, we're gonna pretend like the Earth did not shake. And we're in a skyscraper. Yes. So the lie. The lie was that Ben's first company was selling fireworks to campers for $10 a bundle. He was selling ice.
Becca Szkutak 37:44
And it's still $20 For the most of it did make me think of I once was traveling with my family. And we stopped by ice. And my aunt was like, Oh, well, I have cash to like, let me just like, why don't use up the cash for this. She's like, I don't know how much six bags of ice could cost. So like, here's $60. And the six bags of ice was $13. So I always think about that. That's very, very expensive ice.
Dom Davis 38:09
Six bags for 13. That's a good price. That's a good price. $20 is like luxury ice at buffet.
Becca Szkutak 38:16
I really liked this conversation because we've had like recycling companies on before and recycling. Obviously, it's a big thing that people talk about. But I always forget how much stuff gets wasted beyond like the obvious. Like, of course, wood gets wasted when building gets torn down or something like that. But it never really like occurred to me, like how much wood would get wasted are kind of like how large of a problem this really was.
Dom Davis 38:39
Yeah, remind people when we were talking to Glacier about the robots and recycling, and it made me realize that I really don't know what happens to wood after I see it in a tree. Like I have no idea what we do to wood. I don't know the lifecycle of it. I'm not surprised that what we're doing now might not be like the most sustainable, but I'm also really happy and not surprised that people are quickly addressing that issue and making it more sustainable. Because yeah, I mean, I I literally know nothing about wood, I guess. Yeah,
Becca Szkutak 39:07
cuz I guess when I think of like, in my mind, like, quote, unquote, like wasted wood, I just think of like things that have burned. But of course, like, there's so many other things. I don't know, I would have thought that like the wood wouldn't be able to be reused if it had certain like varnishes on it or paint or something. But it sounds like none of that stuff's really an issue. Yeah,
Dom Davis 39:23
I know. Now I'm like is the whole time and there probably is not any in relationship at all. But I was thinking about vibrant planet because I was wondering, I was like, Is there a crossover with the wood? And he was in wildfire at AIS, I was like, Is there something going on? Because it seems like this is it's just really interesting. I never I just never really thought about it. I loved his backstory. I love that it was coming from someone with like a history of wood. It reminded me of when we were talking to all those like the people trying to get into the farming tech, and they were like, Yeah, you know, the farmers were like really cliquish because we were outsiders. And then you had this guy Ben, who's like He's like, No, you know, my family's in wood. We're wood, you know, like, we're like wood guys. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, he knows that he knows the industry. Yeah.
Becca Szkutak 40:08
And it also was just like him becoming a founder and launching this company. And we were asking him, like, why did you know the timing was right? And he was essentially like, well, I couldn't get a job. And I had this idea. And I'm like, Huh, I wonder how many times that's the real answer. And people don't.
Dom Davis 40:24
It probably is more often or not the real answer,
Becca Szkutak 40:27
because that's like a good that is a good time. Like, if you'd like you do have an idea. And you don't have like an obvious other thing to be doing. Like, it's not weird to say that it just like, I feel like, that is a funny way to launch a company and take on money and stuff like that. But yeah, it's good to hear about their fundraising journey to that. Because you never know. Climate stuff is always funny in that way, where it's like, in my mind, I'm like, well, investors would see why this is needed. So obviously, like, it's a climate solution, and like, they can see everything going on whatever, like, even regardless of because everyone's a little more political about it than they actually invest by like most majority of people know that climate change is real, even if they vote for people who say otherwise. But it's just like, I'm always surprised when people have luck. They don't have luck. There is the educational element there isn't. You never know what VCs like, know about these different things.
Dom Davis 41:16
Yeah, no. And that's why I was I was actually like, looking at how much he's raised. I think it's like around 8 million right or something. I was actually expecting it to be more than that. It could seem like he would raise it seems like climate tech is kind of hot and vibrant planet raised a lot of money. And so I was like something like this. Even glacier I think raised a little bit more, maybe not. So maybe not then I guess also depends
Becca Szkutak 41:39
on like, how the company is doing. I've covered a few rounds recently that were not related to this space at all, but they were smaller rounds. And it came up and like both the conversations I had with the different companies one was short hold trucking, and one was SAS for guided hunters. And it was like, well, we're profitable. So we just like don't need as much money. We don't need to like give up as much equity and seven like he didn't say that about himself or whatever. But I'm like yeah, if you got a lot of demand, like you don't necessarily need as much capital to expand.
Dom Davis 42:06
Yeah, I guess. But you know, I was also thinking about what a glacier times this crossover because the robots maybe we could have robots doing something with wood I don't know it's an early idea. You're like I'm still working on it. I'm still working on it but it's like the whole time I was like a robot could like be near a tree and source out the wood I think Yeah, cuz especially
Becca Szkutak 42:29
with this It's definitely like the foundation for how this could like continue to grow because like just having this way to connect people and like just it sounds like it's kind of just a starting the supply chain to get this like quote unquote wasted wood to the sources you need it so like there's so much stuff that could be built on top of this that could be interesting like adding on a company that like physically goes and does recycling itself and things like that. So it's like this is definitely a good base thought. Either if cambium wants to grow off of or if they don't want to stick in a lane and they want to partner with companies and grow off of it like there's just so much you can do from here. Found is hosted by myself. TechCrunch Senior Reporter Becca Skuta alongside Senior Reporter Dominic Midori Davis found is produced by Maggie Stamets with editing by Cal our Illustrator is Bryce Durbin funds audience development and social media is managed by Morgan Liddell Alyssa Stringer, and Natalie Kreisman TechCrunch. His audio products are managed by Henry pic of it. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai