Podcast: Clean Tech Entrepreneur Tyler Wood

Highlights from the Conversation

I’m thrilled to be here with Tyler Wood, who is in Florida. Hey, Tyler, how are you doing?

• Good, good, Richard.

I’m really looking forward to the conversation today. We’ll dive into your work in just a minute, but there’s a story here that I think people need to know about, and you’ve written a book about it. I would love to hear about that from you first hand.

• Sure, sure. Well, it’s been a few years. Halloween 2021 was the seventh anniversary of rescuing my son from Bangladesh, after he was abducted by his mother.
• I was forced into a situation where I had to go there, find the resources on the ground, make the human connections with people that cared, and that would go out of their way to make a difference to do something. And it was amazing. I made friends out of the whole thing that will last forever.
• So, it was a bit cathartic for me to write a book about it, and the foreword is kind of a mini-manual on how to avoid or resolve international parental child abduction.

There must have been a deep impact on you as a person, as a father, and as a human being from what you went through. Can you talk a little bit about that?

• Sure. I think it was mostly an exercise in patience. Ultimately, whenever I confront problems, I end up thinking, “That wasn’t so big a problem”.
• It forces one to think about being the best parent you can be. I think some parents may have their kid half the time, and they just set a timer—they’re not really present. And I think that being present and enjoying their life, watching them grow and spending that time with them is irreplaceable. So, we skateboard around the lake all the time, we go play on the beach and go paddle boarding. We have a beautiful, beautiful life together.

I have a very close friend of mine that went through something similar. Has there been any reconciliation with the mom in any way shape or form?

• Well, I think there was reconciliation with the family as well as to some extent the mother in terms of communications and reorientation. It’s something that eventually will happen when everyone is older, and we don’t have to deal with such extremes.

What an ordeal to go through. And it’s a life changer—you see life itself from a different view, as you describe, coming out of something like that.

• I think most people would see that this would be a challenge: when your four year old child figures out how to Skype and says, “Daddy, I just want to come home”. That’s when you program yourself to get the job done.

For listeners, there’ll be a link to the book. I just picked it up—it’s just one of those stories that most people don’t get a chance to hear about how something like this happens. Putting that aside, let’s talk about how your very interesting career path led you to where you are now in what you’re doing and carbon recapture. Let’s set the stage in terms of how you got here.

• Well, I started 20 years ago in the hedge fund industry.
• At first, it was a basket of eight traders that had a minimum of 25 years on the floor. They were known as the best risk managers on the planet, and I got to learn about their trading styles.
• Then everything shifted towards systematic, algorithmic and faster frequency trading.
• There is a lot of medium-to-long term trend-following in commodities and the raw materials of civilization.
• So I started tracking the supply chains, and what’s important and what makes the world run. I was kind of forced into learning this tremendous and amazing trade thesis over that period of time.
• That led to identifying what we’re going through in this transition as the biggest opportunity in the history of mankind to shift from a linear extractive economy into a circular regenerative one.

You and I are pretty close in age, so I’m thinking this is sort of the ’90s when you were doing the hedge fund thing?

• Yeah, late 1990s, and following into it. I was a student of money, and the rise and fall of monetary systems.
• I was living in Martha’s Vineyard at the time, and you know, in the winters, you can choose to either be an intellectual or an alcoholic.

My goodness, I was just across the bay from you in Nantucket. I lived there for a full winter.

• I love it, it’s a great place. But you’ve got to figure out what to occupy your mind with in the winters, and studying the rise and fall of civilizations and money fascinated me. Then it got me involved in the hedge fund industry, working with a firm out in New York.

Hedge funds can focus on anything, so what were your hedge funds? How did you end up in an area that led you into commodities, which led you to raw materials and supply chains, and then into circularity? I mean, it was that by design, or did you just fall into it?

• Maybe it was by design in some way, but I was following my natural inquisitiveness into what’s happening.
• The farm bill happened in 2018, including the hemp legalization that led us into understanding the lack of infrastructure and the supply chain of that, as well as the processing of all the biomass.
• That led us into the most advanced, indoor, vertical, high-density bio factory in the world that captures carbon more efficiently than any other process.

Somewhere in 2010-2013 you made a transition away from investing, hedge funds, and investment banking to get into what you’re doing now, which is focused on sustainability and carbon recapture. What precipitated that change?

• It all started to change when I met our CEO Allen Witters.
• I’d met a lot of people with brilliant trade thesis and implementation of the trades, but until him, I’d never met a brilliant operator that knew how to build multi billion dollar companies and large $300-$400 million CAPEX and OPEX budgets and building critical infrastructure.
• That really was a different mindset to what I had dealt with before. Whenever I’d introduce him to people, he always seemed like one of the most experienced people I’d ever met.
• We developed a great friendship over the years, and then, about three years ago, formed Gravitas Infinitum.

Let’s talk about Gravitas Infinitum—that’s a pretty unique value proposition. Can you give us a description of what that’s about, and how you got into that at a more fundamental level?

• We really looked at it as trying to build the best company on the planet. It takes a lot to just to say that, and a lot to actually implement.
• We went about really looking at impact, ESG and sustainable development goals, and took that into account with the goal of creating zero-waste closed loop systems that are circular.
• I’ve learned so much; I’m honoured to be working with such an amazing team. It isn’t just Allen—it’s our whole team; it’s almost turned into a family because we’ve all worked so hard at creating what we’re creating.
• It’s kind of like when you’re at a music concert, and you’re the only one dancing and you’re thinking, “Man, this music’s great”, but no one else is dancing—they just haven’t tuned in to what you’re listening to.
• Then, all of a sudden, it becomes the energy centre of the whole party.
• At this point, I think that we’ve got a real party going on, some exciting momentum, and the scale that really moves the needle for what we need to do for climate change.

Let’s talk about what Gravitas Infinitum does. I know there’s a parent company with a couple of interrelated things going on. But unlike most people who are doing carbon accounting, or carbon offsets, you have actually gone directly at the problem and said, OK, if there’s 0.04% carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we’re going to pull carbon out, and reuse it to make things. Can you give us some more details on that?

• Well, we know we have to shift our supply chains from hydrocarbons, which we pull out of the earth, to bio carbons, which are part of the existing natural carbon cycle.
• The problem with some bio carbons is that you can’t be monocropping corn for ethanol, for example, and driving up all of our food prices.
• Within a 100,000 square foot footprint, we’ve got the equivalent of 25,000 outdoor agricultural acres growing 24/7/365. That’s actually mining carbon right out of the atmosphere incredibly efficiently using hemp plants.
• Instead of taking the outputs of carbon capture and burying them underground (what’s known as sequestration), we’re actually creating nano bio materials that are extremely high value, and are critical to helping with climate change because they’re carbon negative.
• In the future, everything that we now build from hydrocarbons from the petroleum industry will be built with bio carbons.

Can you help us understand the difference between a hydrocarbon and a bio carbon? What are the use cases for biocarbons?

• So, hydrocarbons are essentially fossil fuels that have been trapped in the earth for millions of years. They were no longer part of the natural carbon cycle, but we’ve been adding them back to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.
• Bio carbon is something we’re pulling from existing biomass, like trees, except we’re doing it with hemp. You can also use it with other feedstocks.
• We process those hemp plants, and a certain percentage is fuel, and then the rest is biochar.
• Then we process the biochar down into activated carbon, graphite, graphene, and even diamonds, all of which are useful.

I think I know the answer, but I’m kind of curious, how is that carbon negative?

• The critical component of it being carbon negative is that it was taken from the atmosphere. That reduces the total amount of carbon dioxide in the air, which is causing the greenhouse effect.

So, what you’re actually doing is, first and foremost, hauling the carbon out of the atmosphere, therefore reducing that footprint of that atmospheric carbon dioxide level of 0.04% . That carbon is then a means to create a product that is infinitely more circular that original hydrocarbons. But then you mentioned the biomass that’s used. Is that a part of the equation to create the outputs?

• That’s correct, and yes, the plants are the “catcher” for the carbon dioxide. The ultimate technology that we’re relying on is photosynthesis. We’re allowing the plants to do their work, just like trees capture carbon out of the atmosphere, except we use hemp plants so that when we process them we don’t diminish the biodiversity of our land.
• It’s incredibly efficient, and it moves the needle.
• We’re basically mining carbon out of the atmosphere at less than the cost of mining hydrocarbons out of the Earth’s crust.
• The interesting component about drilling for oil is that you have the initial proven reserves, and you have a decline rate. And that’s the mathematical parameters that they’re bound by.
• But for us, we’re mining carbon out of the atmosphere so we have unlimited proven reserves and we don’t have any decline rate.

So your output is an alternative to all this other carbon stuff in the supply chain, that’s not only more environmentally friendly and sustainable, but arguably more economically beneficial. And potentially, especially if you’re dealing with graphene, a better product from a qualitative or quantitative perspective.

• Yeah, that’s been the biggest problem with graphene. It’s hard to capture any serious market share because it’s been so expensive.
• Each of our facilities, as we scale, will be able to provide the world with both graphite and graphene, but it’s our trademarked Bio-Graphite™ and Bio-Graphene™.

So you are selling some of that today?

• It’s more like we’ve sent samples to people. But we can get that to a steady state in a smaller facility that’s already been built in a warehouse—we can build one in about six to eight months and then it’s 14 months for a full high-density bio factory. And that’s what really moves the needle for carbon capture.
• There is a lot of mention from Climeworks about their first facility in Iceland capturing 4,000 tons of carbon a year. Our high-density bio factory will do that in less than two weeks.
• Instead of burying carbon under the ground, we produce a material that’s 200 times stronger than steel, 450% more efficient than lithium in batteries, and 1,000% more conductive than copper.
• Then you’ve got the raw materials that we need to modernize.

Does 3D printing fit into the output of the material that you guys are creating? Because to me, it feels like you could either create sheets of graphene, or create a graphene powder for 3D printing requirements.

• Yeah, we can actually produce both top-down and bottom-up graphene, as well as a Bio-Graphite to offer to graphene producing companies, so they don’t have to buy their source material as Earth-trapped graphite in mines.
• We’re trying to move the needle on decarbonizing, so ideally we’re minimizing the need to mine things out of the Earth, with the resulting huge carbon footprint.
• We can air-mine the materials necessary for the next stage of modern civilization.

That’s just such a powerful story; it’s very sci-fi—it feels like something out of the movie Dune or something like that.

• We’ve got some good imagery that’s coming out soon with our marketing guys. You’ll like it!

Right on. Now, that’s not the only thing you guys are involved in. There’s more to the story, so why don’t you tell us about the other things Gravitas Infinitum has going on?

• Well, last year, in the midst of all of the lockdowns we launched T4L: Transportation For Life.
• It’s an incredible company and the timing is so perfect as well. It’s an all-inclusive, electric vehicle (EV) subscription company that provides white glove service, including the charging, maintenance and insurance.
• It saves you 10% to 20% on buying, financing or leasing a vehicle. But you also don’t have to go through all the brain damage tasks, and the time. You just get in your car, ride it, and when you’re done and you want to swap it and get a different one, you do it. It’s like an iPhone: you don’t have to deal with new insurance and do this, and do that, and go to the DMV. None of that is needed any longer.
• So we tested the thesis for that business on Wefunder, and got four times oversubscribed at the crowdfunding round. It’s currently at start engine.
• And we didn’t necessarily do that way for the money, it was more towards test-casing the reception of it. We found that 30% of the investors became subscribers, so it was a great way to build brand loyalty because they’re owners and subscribers.
• As you know, with Hertz just having ordered 100,000 Teslas, our timing couldn’t be more impeccable in regards to this transition.
• Ultimately we’re accelerating the adoption of EVs and distributed charging infrastructure, because each one of our facilities comes with a charger.
• We have plans to build 100 electric vehicle experience centers across the country.

Now there’s a guy that comes to mind—Steve Jurvetson—he’s a big time investor from Sandhill Road and a big fan of Elon Musk’s. The reason I bring him up, though, is it sounds like there’s a cross pollination between creating the Bio-Graphene™, and how that could then be used in the EV ride sharing/car sharing. But where it’s leading me to is that it really sounds like you guys are at the beginning stages of being an ESG incubator, because you got a couple different things going on with a consistent theme with these businesses that kind of interlock with each other.

• Yes. I think that the next 20 or 30 years are going to be all about decarbonisation and electrification. That’s where we’re focusing.
• We had an initial Sustainable Development Goal Assessment at 96.8, and the average benchmark in the US is 37. So there’s a long way for everyone to grow up in the world of creating more value than just dollars and cents.

Going back to what you said about 30% of your investors becoming subscribers for the new EV vehicle fleet concept. If you’re crowdfunding, these are many everyday investors, not the typical institutional high net worth investors—but kind of the average Joes who are putting their money right where they want to see this stuff happen. So in a way, you’re letting the market dictate the company and where it’s going.

• Yeah—that’s the kind of B2C component with crowdfunding. Having that direct engagement really taught us a lot.
• We learned about a lot of questions and scenarios that we wouldn’t otherwise think of simply by talking to some investment banker.
• So now we’re building, customizing, taking from these experiences, and talking to people instead of just creating an app for this total automation.
• We wanted to really see what the customer needs and what they’re looking for. We also had to almost talk them through it, and then provide them with the educational background on how it works, because people don’t really have the educational experience or knowledge. They’re like, “I’m just gonna subscribe a car”.
• So we really had to have a high-touch environment for them to ease their way into saying, “Yeah, okay, and when do I get it?”
• You know, I met the first delivery of the first Tesla. The guy was like, “This is the best ever!”

Oh, that’s so cool. So let’s talk a little bit about the cross pollination of the materials. How is that graphene material then migrating into the EV fleet, whether it’s in batteries or actually the cars themselves?

• It’s going to find its way into a lot of different components, both the battery and the tires, and perhaps even the body itself, because graphene is an additive.
• It can also be used in solar panels to make them 20 to 40% more efficient, and it can be used in batteries.
• There’s an electric car that was released in China that has a graphene battery with a 620-mile range that can be 80% charged in just eight minutes.

Just to clarify, it’s a traditional lithium-style battery with graphene mixed into it? Or how does that work?

• There’s a few different techs that are looking at both a solid state graphene battery and a kind of a hybrid lithium-graphene type of battery. I don’t know exactly the style of battery on the Chinese car, but I was fascinated with the distance as well as the recharging speed.
• So we’ll see more and more of that; there’s already graphene in a lot of things that we just don’t even realize—like our phones—but it’s been prohibitively expensive so far. And for that reason we haven’t been able to produce it on a large scale, maybe 50,000 tons a year of graphene globally.
• It’s not a vastly produced commodity and it’s very dirty—it has a very intense carbon footprint.
• Being able to mass produce the most hard to get, expensive supermaterial for hundreds of applications will be impactful for generations to come for sure.

What’s fascinating about the material is that not only is it an additive material to all sorts of products, there’s still applications where it’s 100% pure graphene.

• We’re just at the very beginning of the applied material science of graphene and its applications, especially as we are able to bring the cost down. That will really put it on the usability map for anything from concrete to semiconductors.

I get a strong sense that you guys have a roadmap of multiple companies that could spring out of your efforts over the next 10 years. At a global corporate level, the umbrella is kind of a sustainable tech incubator.

• Yeah, that’s pretty much what we are. We launched the first carbon-negative green bond in the world a couple of weeks back. It’s a $100M green bond—and out of all the billions of dollars of green bonds, until now none of them have been carbon negative.
• It’s pretty incredible, and it’s convertible, so the people that participate at the bond level and convert into equity actually own all of these things that we’re building and doing.
• It’s really exciting for people, because a lot of the time green bonds just didn’t have a really big yield. You basically had a debt instrument.
• Now, you have some debt protection, but you don’t get the loan-to-own aspect of it, and the kicker of that participation over the long run.
• We envision thousands of Carbotura facilities as being necessary around the world, and we’re basically looking at it like a Coca Cola bottling/licensing/franchise scenario where we can get that speed to scale around the world.
• If we’re going to move the needle on capturing as much carbon as we need to prevent more climate change, we need 100,000 of these.

So instead of going out to the venture capital and private equity world, you took your experiences from hedge fund and bond to management and launched a $100 debt instrument. This bond funds all the activities you’re doing in the incubator, and people can come in and buy chunks of that. And there’s a small yield on it like any other bond, but people have the option to convert that into equity. If I’m not mistaken, that’s a pretty unique model—I don’t know of anything like that in investment circles.

• In fact, it’s an 8% coupon. Then it’s a 2x conversion of both the interest and the principal into equity. Ultimately, it comes out to about 193% return on a secured debt at conversion.

As a former banker/investment guy, I’m not sure I’ve seen a model like that before. If I look at your typical incubators, they’re not floating $100 million debt instruments to fund their activity, which is then also convertible into equity for people to jump into.

• It allows people to go for a really big ride, especially at conversion.
• There was a video that was done about us that went viral over the summer, and then in August, we were selected as one of the top 50 most innovative new companies in the world out of 130 countries. So the timing was quite good.
• We have had a lot of people reaching out to us asking if they could have these facilities in this country or that country or this island. We created a dedicated, all-inclusive island plan for helping them get rid of plastic waste, provide food, renewable energy, water, and a lot of the things that would help them be more resilient at the frontlines of climate change.

I’m assuming anybody can get involved in it?

• It’s for accredited investors.

But there may be a chance at some point to open it up through something like Robin Hood?

• Well, we’ve already signed term sheets for tremendous investment at IPO for both T4L and Carbotura.
• In the next couple of weeks there will be some announcements showing our relationship with a multi-billion dollar investor.

That is super exciting. So let me let me let me kind of bring it forward a little bit, because when I look at your LinkedIn profile you kind of have the aura of an investor. But then when you peel the onion, it’s more of an incubator/operator.

• They’re more operators. I’m working with seasoned operators that have built really large companies.
• I’ve always been dealing with relationships and capital formation; connecting brilliant people with a brilliant trade thesis to brilliant people with a lot of money.
• They can communicate with each other, and I try my best to just be quiet and listen and try and retain 2% of the brilliance exchanged between the brilliant parties that I have managed to bring together. But here and there, those 2% bits rub off and it starts adding up!

You’re also a frequent speaker and you’ve got a great story to tell. Are you finding that there’s any group that’s better than others for really bringing the globe’s focus to what you guys are doing?

• We found some great reception and some interesting areas.
• We’re actually talking right now with Reuters; they are excited about our carbon negative green bond. We’ve finalized a relationship with them for their upcoming Responsible Business USA from November 16-18, and then also in April 2022.
• Those are some really big events, and they’ve got massive reach. Reuters has been covering the green bond market for some time; they’re a bit more mature in Europe.
• This is the perfect time and the perfect story for carbon negative investments.

Without divulging state secrets, is there anything else in the future that you guys are looking at? I imagine there’s almost unlimited applications that you could develop.

• There’s a lot of applications, and we’re in the process of acquiring a graphene company that has a number of graphene patents. This allows them to provide a recipe for Bio-Graphene™ to their Fortune 5000 clients, and it’s basically ESG graphene. Those Fortune 5000s need to decarbonize their supply chains, and so, who better than someone that has dozens and dozens of patents in the space? It just made great business sense in that regard.
• We’ve also had great discussions with the Department of Energy for both Carbortura as well as T4L.
• Because the speed at which we need to transition to electric mobility and the speed at which we need to decarbonize are so massive, what we did was we started a nonprofit called the Hot Planet Repair Team.
• Everyone can just join in and sign on; we need everyone on the planet on board. And we were attaching it to a sustainable impact donor-advised fund that goes directly to decarbonisation and eliminating plastic, remediating water, being as efficient a project as possible in its implementation, not the advocacy or the lobbying of it, but the actual projects itself.
• People can donate anything—they can donate real estate, art, collectibles, crypto, cash, and they get the tax write off at the appraised value at that point. They don’t have to actually sell it, and then pay the taxes on it, and then make the donation. They get to donate it and then carry that forward on their taxes. And we’ll match all those donations.
• That’s going to be a blended finance model—I think I called it “impact alchemy” so we can really move the needle on getting the supply chains retooled.

Great name, I love that. Obviously graphene is the heart and soul of what you guys are producing. Are there any other materials that you guys are flirting with as an output of your direct carbon capture?

• Bio-Graphite™ is another. That allows us to instantly draw into a multi-billion dollar industry as carbon negative graphite at a price that’s more competitive, and with higher quality output.
• But we can also focus on activated carbon for air and water filtration in supply chains already. I think, really, it’ll be graphite and graphene mostly.
• Since I’m more in the capital stack, the mad scientists are probably laughing at my limited answer!

Hey, we’re not here to get you on the chemical engineering and material properties and all that! But as an investor, though, you’re looking forward and trying to find use cases for Bio-Graphene™ and Bio-Graphite™. We’ve talked about EVs and about adding it in 3D printing potentially. But is there anything else on the horizon that you guys are looking to push other than just the raw material?

• We want to be the producer of the raw materials, at least for now.
• From the standpoint of our acquisition of the graphene company, that was a very strategic play. And I think it ultimately is perhaps something of a target as we grow and find companies that are innovators.
• But Allen has been involved with about 40 or 50 M&A transactions, so he speaks that language of deal-making and strategic alignment and collaborating and team building.
• So it’s really been a phenomenal learning experience to be by his side and see the input and value of our team in our meetings. There’s no substitute for grey hair!

Exactly! I just want to wind down a little bit, but I also want to recap. So Gravitas Infinitum is the parent company if I’m not mistaken, and then Carbotura is the direct carbon capture from the air?

• Yeah, that’s a subsidiary division. And then we have T4L, which is the EV subscription service.

But then the nonprofit is the Hot Planet Repair Team.

• Yes, the nonprofit is basically our blended finance approach to solving the problem and allowing everybody to participate at any level they wish.

Another great one. I don’t know who’s behind the marketing stuff, but you guys have some great names!

• It’s a very entrepreneurial set we’ve got!

As we get into 2022, where will you guys be spending your time? Where are you speaking—in Europe, North America, Asia, or all of the above?

• It might be all of the above, but we really want to focus on the US right now. We have had interest overseas and from island nations to participate. We’ve had some international interest in expanding T4L also.
• But we live in Naples, Florida, and we have our teams across the country and even around the world now. So we really wanted to focus on the US first.
• At this speed to scale, however, we’re not shy of bringing this to the world, especially on the Carbotura front with its impact, its project finance ability, and the scalability that’s necessary.
• There’s 1.7 million active oil wells in the United States alone, and we capture carbon out of the atmosphere at a third the price. So, you figure out how many of these are going to be around.

I mean, Bernard Looney from BP should be your best friend, given his emphasis on getting off fossil fuels for the entire company. Well, I’m going to wrap up because we’ve hit the hour, but I could have spent the next 10 hours with you easily! It was just a wonderful conversation, there’s just so many little stories in here that you could really expand. I mean, it’s really pretty amazing.

• Well, I think the only book I’m going to write is the one about rescuing my son from Bangladesh. The next is going to be history because we’re changing the world!

That’s awesome! Thank you so much, Tyler, for spending time with us. Really wonderful conversation, and we’ll be talking very soon.

• Fantastic. Thanks, Richard. Take care.

Connect with Tyler Wood

You can connect with Tyler on LinkedIn.