Will Foulkes is Co-Founder and CEO of Stabiliti. Stabiliti is a globally scaleable carbon removal solution. Full end-to-end transparency across carbon offset lifecycle, live transactional offsetting accurate to the gram.
''We're the first generation to feel the effect of climate change and the last to do anything about it.''
Will talks about climate, carbon offsetting and the immediate changes we ALL need to make. Also his journey from Lawyer to Tech Founder and his secret weapon...
Transcript
Alicia Teagle 0:00
Good afternoon. It's Alicia from Tech for Good Southwest Podcast. Today. I'm absolutely buzzing to have Will speaking with me today. And I won't go into too much because I think he is the best at selling what he does himself. He's currently with his cool hat on opposite me today, but yeah, well, thank you so much. We've obviously known each other for a little while. But please tell all our wonderful listeners a little bit about you and what you do.
Will Foulkes 0:32
Thank you so much. Yeah, super pumped to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, very excited about what we do. So I'm Will CEO and co founder of Stability, when are saying stability for our planet. But yeah, we are a company that's focused on carbon removal from our atmosphere, and fixing all the issues that are in that ecosystem, of which there are many, some of which you may have read about recently in The Guardian. And so we're saying our tagline is that we're a globally scalable carbon removal solution. And our mission is to remove one giga ton of carbon from the atmosphere by 2050. So we have our workout for us
Alicia Teagle 1:13
What inspired you to start stability?
Will Foulkes 1:18
Cool, great question. So it really born out of panic from the fact that the world is not going in a good direction, and personal frustration, but I couldn't do anything about it. So there is no doubt that we all need to reduce our emissions.
We need to act more responsibly in how we treat the planet and how we consume and things like that. There is a great book I recommend everyone takes a look at called speed and scale by John Doerr that when I read that, I really realized what what the problems were and how I might be able to do something about it. And that basically says, We need to fix our food supply chain, we need to fix our energy, we need to fix our fuel all of that. And even if we fix and optimize all of those and reduce emissions, we still need to remove 10 Giga tons of carbon out of our atmosphere by 2050. Otherwise, we tip forever into the Anthropocene.
So we are still in the Holocene era, which you have been in for 10,000 years, nice and stable. And if we don't fix the rate at which we emit CO2, and capture a lot, then we will continue to basically start getting warmer and warmer, which you're probably all aware of.
So my frustration was, I can't go out and start capturing carbon offsets the methods and the tools available to me, I didn't trust if it says you want to buy an airline ticket and offset or where does that money go? Is there actually additionality? And it turns out that often there isn't so additionality? Is there actually new carbon being captured? Or actually, is it just overinflated or yeah, basically no visibility about what's behind it, where that money went? And realize that that's, that's also why businesses aren't getting involved with this. And basically a frustration that no one's doing anything about this. We've known about this for a long time, and wondering that if I could get together with some other or some very bright people. Could we actually do something to solve this? I guess, just the motivation.
Alicia Teagle 3:11
First of all, it literally blows my mind. And, and you blew my mind. So I feel like it's all so impressive. But your background is not not this. So just I don't want to I don't want to tell everyone, but just say a little bit about way where you came from. And I'm not saying I'm not saying came from, from the womb, but in terms of your, your background.
Will Foulkes 3:36
Alright, yeah. So my training is I'm actually a lawyer, by I used to be a lawyer by day and entrepreneur by night, but now I'm, I'm entrepreneur by day, lawyer is becoming a bit of a side hustle. Yes, I've been been a lawyer for 10 years, and I specialized in blockchain technologies. I got very excited about how that could change, financial inclusion money. So get rid of banks, making all the money and sitting in the middle and start to actually spread it around a bit more, became very passionate about it, and really started to build my network in that space, then as an advisor, so advising startups from the legal side regulatory aspects of it, but repeatedly have been described by my clients as an entrepreneur Trapped in a Lawyer's body. So I feel like finally, after many years of denial and fighting, I finally succumbed and are doing it full time.
Alicia Teagle 4:29
Love it, love it. And it's so like, you can come from any background, but it's, do you think this has always been a passion of see when we come when we speak about climate change, carbon offsetting and our beautiful planet which is slowly being destroyed, that we all definitely want change, but it's definitely I think, been a very unscrews upon Hot Topic. Over the past, I'll probably say like five, maybe even a little bit longer than but not a huge amount of time. So where's that like passion come from?
Will Foulkes 5:04
Yeah, being honest, I wasn't as environmentally conscious as I am. Now, my wife always says she's Canadian. And she's always been immensely hot on this stuff. And her mum, like his whole school in Canada for teaching children about the importance of protecting the environment. I think, honestly, it was her influence. So we've been married, it'll be our 10th year this year. And that, I guess, just the way that she views life, and, like, always prioritize buying clothes secondhand, and like any toys for our daughter charity shop, if there's nothing there than recently that just that that slowly started to get the message started to get through. And you're right, it has been now maybe four or five years. And I really started to care.
I think having a daughter as well, I mean, as long as that's such a cliche, but having a daughter and I realizing that God like we are, you know, I don't want her to grow up in a in a climate and a world that we you know, that's awful. And I think that that's really changed and brought home to me the immediacy and the importance, I think a great quote I heard was, were the first generation to feel the effects of climate change, and the last to be able to do anything about it. And you realize them that the burden that is on us to act and to do something is actually enormous.
If you look at the First Nations and in America in Canada, so again, my wife has some heritage there. When they make decisions, they think seven generations ahead about how they make policy decisions. And in our culture, we just don't in politics into that there is no thinking about multiple generations ahead is very immediate. And so the reason things like well, Willie McCaskey, if you've heard of him, like our skill, sorry, what we owe the future is a great book about starting to think of this, like long term ism, I think it's called, and how we need to start acting responsibly, not just for us, but for the future. And then how you get people to actually care about that. It's really hard, because it's just really hard to it's removed from us. Sorry, that was a bit meandering.
Alicia Teagle 7:11
It wasn't, it was. It was amazing. And I think I also think like social media has played a big part in it as well, because we're sharing so much more. So everything's so much more visible in terms of, we're actually seeing it from polar bears. And like, I would never have seen that before. But I definitely think yeah, as we're not as progressive as some countries, I think, but equally, we're definitely not the worst. But we all need to do more. I and I'm with you as well, I definitely wasn't as environmentally conscious. It's really impressive. Everything inside your brain is great.
Will Foulkes 7:45
Oh, yeah, I think thank you. I think what when you start looking at and again, we thought, Well, why not like be really audacious with this, like, if we are running out of time, let's let's do something massive and really start to solve a global issue here. And that's where, if I can talk a little bit about that, where I think we've got our secret weapon.
So at the moment, again, putting aside the fact yes, we need to reduce everything and be better humans. If we need to capture 10 Giga tons of carbon from the atmosphere, why isn't why are we not capturing a lot more now, the moments, what's stopping farmers and landowners from planting natural assets, which is still the best way to capture carbon? There are machines like the orchid project, which is great, but they're expensive, and they're not scalable in the short term. How do you actually incentivize these people to do this? And the answer is you need to pay them more at the moment, the money just isn't flowing down to them, because you can buy carbon offsets for three to $4. And actually, it's better for farmers or landowners in Brazil to chop down rainforests and plant palm oil, or in the UK, plant crops and sell them then use their land for planting trees. So we need to shift it and change the economics and make sure they're being paid hundreds of pounds a ton, even if the market isn't there yet.
So not looking to current prices for these things as reference points, but create our own. And the way that we do that is we have a very new way of selling and getting corporates to pay for these things. Because the big from like, so our solution is we solved the trust problem, we've got a platform that maps all these trees onto our platform makes them completely transparent and trusted. So you can see exactly where if you buy one of our assets, you can see where the trees are basically. So there's we know that there really are things there. But our issue is we went out to corporates and said and big ones and said, Look, we've now got these really good premium offsets, do you want to buy them? And guess what they said? No, they're more expensive than what we can get on the Amazon. That's maybe or maybe not there. So no, thank you. We don't have price certainty yet. And at the end of the day, it's a cost to them for doing that. So they didn't want to do it, too.
What we said was, well, instead of us charging you what if we partner with you, and actually we give you the ability to pass on that cost to all of your clients through a small charge in your invoices, whatever service you do, or if it's payments, we add a little tiny costs onto every single payment transaction. So It shared. So for your clients, it's 510 quid on an invoice, it's nothing, it's a tiny amount on kind of on an invoice. And then suddenly, we get a huge amount of money with that, because we have the leverage effect of working with law firms, recruitment firms, marketing firms, we get a lot of money in the top of the funnel that we can then use to pay farmers and projects a lot more money than they're currently getting. And that is where we think we have where we think it's a globally scalable solution. We have a step change in the way that this is going to be done. And that's why we're really excited.
Alicia Teagle 10:38
I know that we spoke about it briefly, but especially within sort of the Tech for Good sector, it's it's booming, and it has done, and especially what we've seen in the southwest, but if you're comfortable speaking about, I'd love to just talk about like investment, because there's a big problem around funding at the moment, a lot of people know. And it's companies can get the multi million pounds for funding, but it's those starting up just getting that small amount who don't necessarily want to have those multi millions over their head, the stresses or worries of paying that back or don't need it. But yeah, I would love to share with our listeners on how you've raised investment or how you're then going to raise even more.
Will Foulkes 11:23
Yeah, there was a great line and Jerry Maguire, you've seen that wonderful film with Tom Cruise. Isn't up at dawn, pride swallowing siege that I will never fully tell you. The fundraising experience? Yeah, so we're very lucky that we worked. So we're incubated by cielo which is one of the really big blockchains and their twin pillars of financial inclusion and the environment. And we were we had this great lady Maria Allegra. And flurry ventures, basically write us an impact check right at the beginning. So we went through their grant program, we showed them that we have the technical ability to build this innovative platform. And we got some grant funding, and then we got her to say, Okay, I love you guys like to trust the team trust of your vision, here's some money. And then through them, we did what's called a demo day, which is where you're better there's a company, that's okay. And then we go in, I think I did a two minute pitch to a bunch of investors that had to be completely scripted, and I COVID at the time, like, literally, like smashed through that two minute thing, and then got a load of investor introductions off the back of that. And then through some of those, we managed to get our funding, the biggest issue that I've come around as a young company is valuation is understanding what the value of your company is, when you are pre revenue.
And pre product. I mean, we've got an MVP out there, but we're not fully. So I always thought you just kind of you work out a number that's proportionate amount of equity you want to give away. And it would be a negotiation with investors, what I hadn't realized is investors, if they think the valuation is too high, even if they love you, we'll just walk away from you. And that and there isn't a discussion. And I guess the big learning that was that when we raised our precede rounds, recording precede rounds, last year, in March, the market was very different. And right now the market is very depressed. So the there is not much liquidity, so not much money floating around and the valuations are being pushed down. So investors can be much more aggressive with their terms. So we've actually said no to several investors that are coming in and trying to be too aggressive and saying that actually, and we didn't give too much away.
So I don't have an easy answer. I'm afraid there's an incredible platform that I love called sweep funding.com, that I give a plug for, because Carrie, there has been fantastic. You pay them a small fee, but they have a great network of investors, and they help you put together your pitch, also pitched up space, seconds platform for creating a pitch deck, again, very small fee, but they'll help you create the materials so that you present yourself in the right way. I have both been extremely helpful. And I'm pleased to say now that we are getting some, some positive replies and it looks like we should be fine. But yeah, it's it's it's challenging. It's a challenging process to go through that.
Alicia Teagle 14:14
Cool. No, I really appreciate your honesty and openness on that. What? And again, this is a pretty broad question, but because you're in the southwest, you're very much Tech for Good company. But what does Tech for Good actually mean to you?
Will Foulkes 14:33
That is a good question. I suppose using technology so I'm I've heard blockchain for good for a long time. But yeah, using technology to improve the livelihoods and well being of others. So anything that where you have this network effect if I build something, it will help other people either be the best versions of themselves or live a better quality of life. That certainly we see the halo effects of what we're doing is financial inclusion being a big one.
So if we're able too, one of the key things we do is reduce the barriers to entry for carbon projects. So if you are a small holdings farmer, normally you have to pay 300,000 pounds to get verified through there or gold standards about that kind of money. And to take 18 months to three years, we charge a tiny, tiny fraction of that, and it's free to come on to our marketplace. So if we start to do that, in fact, ultimately, we'll even be able to do it completely for free, we can start to get small African farm holdings on board. And then you have a way a new revenue stream and a new way for them to make money, which previously just wasn't there at all.
I have a very long term vision, this is a next year plan, I guess I can tell you this, basically, we want to make it possible for anyone with a garden to start making money from carbon. So using Google, we're actually starting a project with Imperial College London, to start using AI, machine learning and Google map data to start mapping pupils own carbon capturing assets, and then financially incentivize them to plant more trees. So you get an app. And basically, your trees will be paid for by running this app. And then we can do really cool things with local offsetting emissions. You imagine, like an Uber journey, and your Uber emissions are offset by the gardens that you drive past? Is that is the angle, then we think we have something really stable. Still about listening?
Alicia Teagle 16:20
I would say yeah, no, no, listen, great.
Will Foulkes 16:24
It's fine. But if someone else did that, I wouldn't mind like it. The main thing is that we solve this problem. And that's why when people say, Oh, who your main competitors who say actually, we don't see it like that, and the community is very different. Like everyone's super collaborative and friendly. And we all try and add value to each other. So yeah, it's a nice space to be in Definitely.
Alicia Teagle 16:46
Definitely. And I I really like that. And I completely agree. I think this competition, quick get it copyrights, and no one's stills, anything kind of vibe. Like we're trying to save the world. And that's the most important thing, otherwise, there won't be anything to copy. Which is another way of thinking about it. So okay, amazing. I'm really good answer. Love it. And what? And you've probably answered this throughout. But if there was one change to make, what would you most like to see? And then what do we need to do to get there in terms of change?
What change would you make to the world?
Will Foulkes 17:33
One? Okay. Yeah, one ask or one. One change that we're hoping to try and affect is that this is just to see how businesses view this and to change the way that they're involved. Toms Shoes, if you've heard of TOMS Shoes is a really great story about to the founder of TOMS Shoes went to Argentina. So a lot of kids today without shoes and realize that charities weren't able to solve this problem, they weren't well enough. And it needs to be business as a for profit enterprises that were able to solve this, which is why his company does make profit, but it also for every pair of shoes that you buy, he gives a pair of shoes to an Argentinian kid, what I want to the change that I want to see is that the idea of paying for carbon removal by businesses does not come out of a marketing budget. It's not a PR thing. And amazingly, the number of companies who speak to that is how it works really want to be more sustainable. But it's come it's a marketing cost.
So the change that I want to see is to get businesses aligned with us and to work with us. So that and so that we can start helping them pay for this, because again, our pitch to businesses is we will this through this inclusion of a charge in the way that you charge your clients, we can actually share some of that with the businesses that we work with. So that they can put that towards their own sustainable goals. So that we can actually help them pay for so it's not it doesn't have to come out of an existing budget, we can create a new revenue stream for them that they can use. Obviously, we say they have to use it for something that not Ferraris, but that they actually put it towards owning their own woodland, for example. And then of course, we're happy for them to get the marketing and the PR buzz out of that. Absolutely. So yeah, I guess the change I'd like to see is a shift in mentality with businesses to get them on board with this. And to the extent we can remove the obstacles and the the the economic restrictions and doing so then that'd be great.
Alicia Teagle 19:30
Awesome. Love it. Anything in terms of not what's next for stability? Like what's next? What's happening tomorrow?
Will Foulkes 19:40
Next week? Well, in hopefully, six days or five days we'll be launching our marketplace. So we're saying it's like the Airbnb for carbon projects. And we are going to that's basically gonna help carbon projects and tout their wares and start selling their stuff. So that's one thing to look out for. Hopefully that will all go away. without a hitch, but yeah, I guess what we really want to do is start partnering with companies who want to make a difference, and give them the tools to do so.
So we're looking for friendly, like we haven't got it all figured out yet fully transparent about that we need businesses who basically want to work with us in the early stages to integrate into their systems. It's not a huge time cost at all. We just need a couple of calls with your tech team. And then yeah, hopefully get get rolling because the more people that are willing to stand up and be pioneers, others will follow in droves. We know that will happen. We just need a few few bold people to get get the things moving.
Alicia Teagle 20:38
How can people reach you?
Will Foulkes 20:42
You can email me directly, I'll give you my email address, because I'm still that big a deal. Yeah, so I'm, I'm Will at stability, which is stability, spelt with an ISBN because we're a tech company.io. And that's fine. Otherwise, reach out on LinkedIn. And we'll folks are just bombarded Lucia with messages that she can afford.
Alicia Teagle 21:04
I'll put links below so you can go and enter that desert island. Three people go. Let Deborah. Yes,
Will Foulkes 21:17
Definitely. Yeah. Because I think it'd just be too much. I should probably say my wife. Yeah, gosh, that's put me on the spot. But Tim, Tim Ferriss is like a guy who's inspired me so much and taught me so much to his podcast is so well read across so many different subjects. I think I would never be bored if I was there with Tim Ferriss. And then I can't say can't say Obama. I do like Obama, but not sure that because he could think how they would all get on together as well, haven't you?
Alicia Teagle 21:48
I mean, you can Are you can have MySpace back if you'd like.
Will Foulkes 21:54
No, no, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna push you out with it.
Alicia Teagle 21:58
I mean, I'd say I'd say that I've been
Will Foulkes 22:01
okay. Someone else who is I think I wouldn't get bored talking to is navall. Rava Conte who? Yeah, if you read any of his stuff, particularly because he's so in on web three, I'd really enjoy listening to him. He's the founder of Angel List. Super smart guy. Yeah. Is that three? I guess the three of us I shouldn't be the only one.
Alicia Teagle 22:22
That okay. Oh, it's just, I've never even thought about do I have to say you because you've big question. Did I probably say like Tom carriage because then I can eat really? Well. That's true. I thought about Yeah, I'd be fed really, really well
Will Foulkes 22:43
kind of cuisine. Are we talking about on the island?
I'd probably say like, maybe we could do like cuisine would be like rough and ready Michelin star. Yeah, like a fish wrapped in coconut with a Yeah, be a Tom carriage. So we eat really, really well. And I really like him as a chef. I would then say Robin Williams. Yeah. Robin Williams. And then I would probably say, I don't want to say Michelle Obama. Even though I do love her. I think she's great.
I really like Will Smith.
Alicia Teagle 23:38
Could be do you know, Michael Jordan, I've literally just watched the last dance. And I think that's why like not only he'd be able to get the coconuts from the tree, like just fly as you would as well, as you are very tall. By the way he could be the coconut. Weirdly so nice to have
Will Foulkes 23:55
like someone who could climb a tree with BP. So yeah, I mean, he's good at climbing.
Alicia Teagle 24:04
No, I don't. But anyway, that's for another day. I'll have a thing and I'll come back to you. Thanks. Well, thanks so much. That was awesome. Like so much knowledge. It was also brief but intense. Yes. Loved it. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai