E117: Reinventing Wood Without Trees

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Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head on. I'm Molly Wood. This week, let's start the new year being audacious, shall we? I mean, a lot of what we do on this show is imagine a future that could exist if we had the will and the support and, of course, the technology.

Here are a couple of things we know we need. We need to decarbonize the built environment, building materials like wood and concrete and steel. We need a ton more houses. We're short millions of homes in the US that we can't build fast enough or affordably enough. And we need resilient supply chains and decentralized production that are better for the planet and not at the whim of geopolitical bullhockey.

So today, let's imagine a world where we replace the most foundational building materials with something that is scalable, cost competitive, and actually better for the planet. Let's create a tree-free alternative to wood. Right? It's ambitious. It's a little unhinged. And it makes me think maybe the theme for 2026 should be reinvention. Let's go.

Yeah, my name is Nathan Silvernail. I'm CEO and co-founder of Planted. We're working on building, creating sustainable wood. Basically a wood alternative, doesn't come from trees, fully carbon negative, and we're... developing the material in-house, all the technology to mass produce it. And we're using a sustainable lens to create all of our technology. I guess give us the, this feels like a, I want to know the background story here. What?

What led you to this? What's your background and what, you know, pointed you in this direction? Yeah, so I originally come from SpaceX. I spent a better half of a decade building the Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon vehicle. I had a major focus on thermal control systems and environmental control systems specifically for that vehicle.

In that process, got a lot of experience working on lithium hydroxide systems for carbon sequestration within the atmosphere of the vehicle itself. And, you know, kind of really started to focus on the world as a whole. I think for me, my passion has always, you know, drifted towards aviation and space. And it's been really kind of like a selfish way for me to spend my time. And so I kind of wanted to tackle something that I think the whole world could benefit from.

find a problem that maybe not everybody's working on. It's not the super sexy thing at the time. It's not AI, it's not fusion, but it's a really, really, really difficult problem to solve. And it's something that...

you know, will really benefit posterity moving forward. You know, it's kind of interesting, Nathan, you are not the first former SpaceX person that I have had on the show. who has effectively said, I was working really hard at getting off this planet and it made me appreciate this planet. Yeah, it's interesting. Are there going to be just like a lot of amazing climate founders coming out of SpaceX for this exact reason? Maybe. I mean, I guess I've always looked at it like...

But SpaceX, Elon really shoves the Mars thing down your throat when you work there, to be honest. And I love that. Don't get me wrong. I love walking in and seeing these like really inspiring murals and be like, this is the path we're marching towards.

At the end of the day, I can never really get behind it. I get going to the moon. I get going to low Earth orbit, manufacturing, data centers, energy creation, all make sense. But Mars, no, it just really doesn't. I think that might make sense one day, but we're not. quite there and for me i always struggled with like why am i why am i solving all of these really really hard problems

to solve a problem that's like a millennial way, if anything, when we have so many problems here on earth that are just really difficult. And you know what's really interesting is I used to kind of have this perspective in my mind where I would sit down and really visualize what it would be like to live and work on. mars and i'd be eating my lunch just looking at one of these murals that elon had up

And then, you know, maybe I'd go on Instagram or something for a second and I'd see this really beautiful image of like Maui or somewhere here on Earth. And then you kind of forget about that. Like, well, it's just right over there. Maybe I should put my effort into keeping it really nice. So that's kind of how it started to form over time. Yeah. Okay, so then...

Then what? So you were like, I want to focus my attention on this planetary problem. Did you then do the thing where you thought, okay, now I'm going to try to make a bunch of Venn diagrams and figure out which problem to tackle? kind of not really i think at that point in time i had a pretty solid understanding of where the issues lie

It doesn't take long to figure out how is humanity really polluting the earth? What are the industries that we're in that we just do a really bad job at? And I think for me, when I started to really try to dissect... what solutions people were bringing to light.

I was just so massively disappointed. And as the human race goes, everybody's looking to make money. I don't think anybody actually really wants to solve problems. They look at a problem as an opportunity to make money. At the end of the day, that's what most... most of us are doing and it really became obvious i think i

I think I really dug into a lot of the solutions that I noticed and like things Bill Gates was investing in. And all I could think of was like, this is obnoxious. This doesn't make sense. Like you're literally taking the problem. And you're monetizing, you're literally monetizing, sweeping it under the rug. And for some reason, everybody's rallying behind you and the government's subsidizing your efforts. And I'm just, you know, sitting here from a, you know, 10,000 foot view looking at it like.

No, we need to turn carbon dioxide into something useful and then monetize that. That's how you affect that level of change. And so I think for me, it was just a massive amount of disappointment. a massive amount of distrust i think you know coming from the aerospace industry having a lot of experience working on spacecraft you really learn the whole like maybe like trust but verify model whereas

You kind of look at other people's solutions and you trust that they're doing the best that they can. You trust that they have a good lens and good intentions. But, you know, verify. And when we went in to start doing the math, my co-founder, Wada Tan, him and I really sat down for like six months and just. It analyzed every aspect of the wood industry, the concrete industry, the steel industry, emissions, all those good things, and really learned a lot of the truths that are broadcast.

And it was just really sad. I think ultimately I came to a point where I was like, man, I actually really view climate change as a problem. I believe. carbon sequestration and the co2 levels in the atmosphere are a huge problem and there doesn't seem to be anybody that's working on it in a way that i myself can understand and trust

So I'd like to, you know, throw my hat in the ring. I think there's a way that we can contribute. And that's kind of how Planted was born. Love it. Okay, so then let's talk more about the product. What was it that you then decided to create as a result? Oh, man, we had no idea.

It took us a while. I mean, this is like, it's amazing how this is sort of consistently the delightful startup process, right? You're like, okay, this is definitely the problem. Now what? Right. Yeah, no, we had no idea. I think for us, it was like...

Oh, for us, it was it was really looking at, like I said, everything everybody else was doing and nobody was really trying to address the timber industry. So we looked at that as an opportunity. But at the time, you know, you go back five years, five and a half years or so at this point.

We didn't really know where to begin. And we knew like, OK, carbon, we need to use carbon in a useful way. We need to sequester it quickly and we need to make a product that's useful. And then we actually started to like. try to understand how quickly we could affect that change, you know, using just like first order calculations. And we realized the timeline was impossible. Like, oh, wow, you need an extreme amount of volume in order to affect this level of change that we need to see. And so.

Kind of coming to that realization really helped us tune our perspective and gave us the idea at that point of like, well, what if we approach the lumber industry?

in a meaningful way and it was wada that actually came up with the the primary idea of what we're building now the the oriented strand board replacement we actually just started Going to job sites and stopping by houses we saw being built and talking to folks and trying to learn a little bit about it and kind of told them what we were curious about working on and, you know, got the idea that way.

So actually, wait, let's back up a little bit more because why timber and why lumber? Like, what was it about that? That was, I mean, because to be honest. Like, I can tell you guys are solve hard problems people. To be honest, it feels almost like it would be easier to tackle something like concrete as opposed to, like, we're going to just, like, try to replace this natural material that humans have used to build stuff forever.

Yeah, don't get it wrong. We're actually working on concrete, too. We're working on steel, too. That's definitely going to work.

We want to affect as much change as possible. However, we're starting with the lumber industry. And there's a lot of greenwashing that actually goes on. And you don't know it unless you actually go in and try to repeat their calculations. Most people don't understand what it takes to create OSB or why it came to be created in the first place. What's OSB stand for? Oriented strand board. So it's basically like a composite engineered wood. Yeah. So it's take a tree.

Break it into a bunch of pieces and glue it into whatever shape you want. That's OSB. Got it. Engineered lumber came from, was born out of need, right? It was born out of necessity. Back in the 1950s, you know, we had a... bunch of massive 700 year old trees that everybody's like hey this is perfect we can build houses out of it so what do we do as a species naturally we overreach we go cut them all down we build houses out of it we use the wood for whatever

But where do we get more? It's a finite resource. It is a finite resource. People want to look at like, ah, it's a tree I can grow another one. Yeah, you can, but it takes a really long time, okay?

You can't get the biomass from a tree overnight. It takes 15 years to get it to a point where it's... big enough to process into osb let alone get dimensional lumber beams out of it um and so effectively we got to a point where there just wasn't big trees anymore so people started cutting down smaller trees and smaller trees and there was just no solution so engineers

realize, hey, if I take these little stick trees, I can break them down into whatever shape I want and glue them back together and build houses that way. So that's how Oriented Strand Board was born. Now, in order to process a tree... you have to cut it down you're leaving a large amount of waste on the floor you're leaving bark you're leaving leaves you're leaving a lot of branches

sawdust from cutting it down and a large stump right so you're leaving a lot behind you still have to dry the tree out it needs to be a particular moisture level for you to create the panel so you have to spend energy where do they get that energy they take 20 of the tree and they burn it right what does that do that creates emissions now if you omit that step in the calculations yes it shows that trees and timber-based osb is carbon neutral right they'll say

As soon as it leaves our factory, it's carbon neutral. But in reality, it's not. In reality, it's still carbon negative. And it's quite gratuitously carbon negative. You account for the tooling, the gas for... all of the machines the logistics alone in the timber industry is massive very few companies actually own timberland a lot of them actually outsource their timber acquisition from small farmers you know here in north carolina you see loblolly tree plantations all the time.

you know you own 10 acres of land you want to make some money on them you go and plant trees and every 15 years somebody will come and pay you for them so there's a lot of greenwashing going on there's a lot of like pushing things under the rug just like every other industry and um

We just started to dive in. And when you look at that, you look at, at the time, I think there were people working on concrete and things like that that were like, okay, we're going to let them handle that. We're going to try this sector. In the process of doing what we've done, we've actually found...

some interesting solutions so like i mentioned concrete earlier but um we'll get there we'll get there yeah yep yep okay so then talk about your osb because it's not it's a it's still a natural material

Right. Like it's still a plan. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like the one thing that one of the things that I really, really learned from Elon was first principles. right in when you'd be like a design meeting with him and the way that he thinks about things is really interesting and it's it's just imagine nothing exists in the first place and you're starting from scratch

And your only real requirement is to do it the most efficient way you possibly can. It should be as many, as few pieces as possible. It should take as little time as possible, consume as little energy as possible, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's what we did. All right, throw it all away.

I don't care how they make it now. I don't care what plant they use now. Here are the problems that I'm trying to solve for. One, I wanted to sequester a huge amount of carbon. That's one high-level requirement that I can't budge on. Two, I need a lot of volume. How do I make...

that level of volume in that short of time. And the moment you ask those two questions, you realize trees are just not the answer. And so we went on this search for like, I wonder if there's a biomass, I wonder if there's a plant that we could find that we could actually convert into an OSB format and still at least have a drop-in replacement for it. At least meet the structural certification that it has now. At least meet some of the performance parameters that are there.

While being able to step away from trees and use a biomass that's far more efficient. And, you know, we can talk more about what that process looks like, but that's ultimately what kind of led us down that path. Yeah. Now, yes, let's talk more about it. So then you go through this exercise, you identify an existing biomass, like you invented a new kind of plant, I assume. Genetic modifications aside, what did you start to do? Yeah, so...

There's a number of questions that you have to answer when you get to that point. At the end of the day, it is a capitalistic society we live in. I'm trying to run a company. I need revenue. I need positive margins. How do you get positive margins? You create a product that you can sell for more than you make it for. right so i needed a plant that was easy to process i needed a plant that was like okay it's strong enough it has

a large enough lignin content that I could process, but it's not so large that it just demolishes all the tools and takes forever to dry or whatever that looks like. So that was one thing that we had to answer. And then, of course, the performance aspect of it. How fast is it?

sequester carbon um and then you've got harvesting you know you've got to be able to have direct access to it it's got to grow quickly i've got to be able to cut it down quickly i can't be planting a seed every every six months um things like that and so

once we went through that exercise it took us a long time we made plenty of samples we learned all sorts of how to not do it and it really found we really found that there was just one way to do it there was one plant to use there was one very specific way or break it down into its fibers, reassemble it in a way that was cost-effective, get those performance characteristics, and then kind of you're off to the races.

Time for a quick break. When we come back, more on this entirely self-contained process and all the innovation it could lead to down the road. Will Wiseman, CEO of Climatize here, and we're sponsoring today's episode. Climatize is an SEC-registered platform that lets people explore investment opportunities and renewable energy projects across the United States. To date, in a more hands-on way. And this is one. In episode 10 of Everybody in the Pool,

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where you can get a $50 referral credit with the code EITP50. You'll need to complete your profile to claim the credit, and when applying the referral bonus, a $5 minimum investment of your own funds is required. I hope to welcome you to our investor community soon. Now back to the episode. Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We're talking with Nathan Silvernail, CEO of Planted.

And I want to acknowledge here what a lot of you are wondering, which I was also wondering, which is, cool, okay, what's the plan? Pending some intellectual property resolution, Nathan doesn't want to say at the moment. I told him I will allow it, but not for long. Back to our chat.

At what point then do you determine that instead of kind of trying to access existing feedstock from somewhere, which I assume would be complicated and emissions intensive, like you are now in the ag business, right? You're growing. And processing and creating this product. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Which I think a lot of it's really interesting to think about this for a moment. And there's two really cool things about it that I adore. One, it is an immensely. difficult challenge to solve your

I'm creating a materials company that is effectively created a material that's never existed before, never been to market before. Any amount of engineer wood outside of trees gets a lot of pushback. So there's that aspect of it. Two, I've got to create all the machinery. all the technology to actually manufacture it. And then three, I have to create the supply chain. I don't have millions of acres of trees that I'm gonna go molest in order to start producing material. And so...

It's just an incredibly difficult challenge, but one that I think most people would never really try to approach. Like, you're going to solve all three of those things at the same time and somehow be successful. and ultimately we started with no information on how to do it i had no idea how to grow plants i didn't know what cloning was or tissue culture or any of that stuff and then you know we formed a fantastic team here in north carolina it's incredibly friendly towards agriculture

And it took a number of years. I'm not going to lie. We made a lot of mistakes and we definitely did things the wrong way. But now we've got it really locked in. We've got about 360 acres. of our own fields of our own biomass i've got hundreds of metric tons available we're shooting for another thousand acres this year and then we're just going to blow it out of the water as we move forward

Yeah, I mean, I'm glad that you said it because as you describe it, I mean, it really is like, this is audacious in the best way to sort of say like, all right. When you go to, I think a lot of people talk about going to First Principles. And then they hack the process to use the existing context. And you were just like, no, we're literally going all the way back to the beginning. It doesn't work.

yeah yeah it just flat out doesn't work but i mean the beautiful part about that as difficult as it is you get the the maximum amount of control so all of the variables all of the input maybe with just like a few aspects of it you have pure control over so when i'm looking at full logistics we're at scale i'm i'm producing at a very high rate i'm delivering building lots of houses

I can control where my farms go. I can control where my manufacturing plants go. I can control the logistics and the lumber industry simply doesn't have that. And that aspect of it, solving for that on the carbon sequestration side and the efficiency side. was one thing but then it opened up this like really crazy long list of benefits that we're doing to impact the industry and how business is done and that's ultimately what made it take off i'd say

Okay, let's take that one thing at a time, too. Okay, so you said you're at scale. What scale are you at? To what degree are you able to produce building materials right now? Yeah, right now we're still in the pilot scale. So we've got one full machine. We've we had to.

to kind of break it up into milestones so that we could prove out the process as we went. So the first step was, okay, design the material, do all of the hand calculations and the preliminary financial analysis to make sure that it was capped. We could capitalize on it. We could make a commercial entity around it. And then it was, okay, let's go ahead and go prove this out on a larger scale. Can I actually build a house? Can I get through the permitting problems? Can I certify it?

as a structural building material? That hasn't been done. Can I build a press to make it? That hasn't been done. Where do I get the material? Those types of things. We had to answer those first. We went ahead, went through that process. It was extremely difficult. We built a kind of... one-off R&D version of our press that allowed us to build enough panels to build a house. We worked with our partner, D.R. Horton, to build that very first house.

And it was fantastic. It was it took a while. It took a long time to get to the. to the end of that but we went through and totally certified the building material just like standard osb would be certified we built the house we got feedback from the the home builders just to you know make sure that our product was great and

One of the ideas here, and not to digress at all, but there's a lot of people, a lot of companies in the world that are trying to change the way that we build, right? And I admire that so much because we definitely need to make it more efficient.

Home prices are insanely high. There's things that we can do as builders and material providers to bring those costs down. But everybody's really trying to reinvent the wheel. You're 3D printing houses now. I'm like, hey, that's cool. I'm not knocking it. It's cool.

But at the same time, it ain't going to get anywhere. Human beings don't like change. They see a house. They want that house. They want to be able to build that house. They want it to look like they did when they were a kid. Yeah. OK, I get it. So our main goal is build a material. That was a drop in replacement for what you see now. You shouldn't change your nail gun pressure. It should handle screws the same way. It should look the same.

all of that stuff and so we accomplished that went through that first phase built a house all that stuff and then it was off to okay can i actually mass produce this now and so the first step there is actually producing it on a continuous press whereas before it was more of like create a panel There's a panel. We can make like...

Pretty artisanal. Yeah. Yeah. We could make three a day. It took nine months for us to make one house's worth of this material. And so the next step was like, can I produce it at scale? Can I actually make it continuously? And so that's where we got to. about earlier in 2025 is that machine turned on for the first time. We went from producing enough for a house in nine months to now I can produce it in one day, right?

so that was fantastic we went through the uh effort of certifying that machine we had to understand like how do we maintain quality and all that good stuff but then ultimately we have to go into that phase where it's easy to to build a go-kart that drives 100 feet but it's much harder to build a car that can drive 100,000 miles. So that's the phase that we're in now. We're going from, okay, we sprinted. We proved that we can do it on a continuous press.

Again, checked all the boxes on those milestones. Now we actually have to go into the hardware and build the 100,000. mile car and so we're at the tail end of that we've had a lot of optimizations on some of the subsystems obviously in order to move quickly you are you have to be very scrappy you have to develop and iterate on hardware quickly and test very often. And so we've gone through that campaign for about six months.

and we've gotten to the point where our machine is much more reliable much easier to control and a lot of the issues that we'll see when we're working or when we're producing panels has diminished and then we're going to start building our first production unit which ultimately will be give us a huge capacity. It can produce a panel a minute. We can operate it 24 seven. The maintenance requirements on it are significantly lower than the machine that we've got right now.

Just based on all the lessons learned and design improvements we've maintained for, you know, reliability and all that. And then ultimately, it's one single machine. It's modular. The beautiful part about the way that we've set this up is. I can put two machines here. I could put three machines here. I could go drop a machine out in the field next to my farm. I can put it pretty much anywhere. And so when we talk about what scale means, in order for me to compete with what we would call a...

medium, kind of mid-size OSB mill. I need about 25 of the presses that I'm building now. And so that's the goal. By the end of the decade, I want to have that capacity. We're probably looking at like five different facilities across the United States with five manufacturing lines in it.

or sorry, production lines in it, all the fields that we need for the raw material. And then the facility that we're building here in North Carolina right now will actually become our production facility for our machines and our subsystems that we use to distribute to wherever else we go. Got it.

What is the, you know, there is a kind of a maxim about climate solutions and one of them involves like how much land does it require? Like what is the amount of input and the landmass required to support? where you would like to be at the end of the decade and like you know is that land currently in use how do you acquire it like that feels like a lot like we said you're doing a lot It's a lot. It's a lot. I think...

You know, the numbers, especially to somebody kind of not in the industry, they're going to sound really big, but they're actually a fraction of what's actually available. So I want to get about 20,000 acres planted by the end of the decade. That's not just to support our current output, but it's...

it's to support our expansion plans after that i mentioned you know 25 lines the moment that's on and the moment we've hit that i want to 3x that right and so you say ahead of the game on the agricultural side plants take their time to grow as you can be the smartest person in the world and it's still very difficult to influence that um so we get ahead and then climate change might come along and make it harder which is so fun right

Yeah, exactly. And it actually is changing that. I've already seen changes on that in the country as far as that goes. It's pretty interesting to see like, okay, where it can grow and where it can't grow based on certain changes that we've seen in the last decade.

sugar cane and sugar cane moving out of south texas for the for example is a really interesting example but um yeah so we're going to be shooting for about 20 000 acres by the end of the decade that is a drop in the bucket to the amount of agricultural land that is available interestingly enough

which I think is really serendipitous, is the tobacco industry is dying. Everybody knows that. Everybody vapes now, right? Like tobacco is old school. And so lots and... of tobacco companies have gone out of business the facility that i'm in right now and i'm converting to our production facility is actually an old santa fe tobacco warehouse

They went out of business about a month before I needed this facility. And I just so happened to be the, you know, just, it just lined up perfectly. And all the folks that grow tobacco. aren't growing tobacco anymore. So you've got a lot of farmers that are out of work and looking for ways to diversify and move into different crops. And so we've got a lot of opportunity in that regard.

And it's just a one for one replacement of their fields. It doesn't really doesn't require special land. It doesn't require a whole bunch of special farming equipment. Anybody that grows strawberries or soy or corn or sugarcane or tobacco can grow with us.

um and then there's the opportunity of brackish land so we do have the the beautiful part about our plant is it's incredibly hardy it can grow in all sorts of different conditions that most plants can't so we can take advantage of that and so there's there's plenty of plenty of land to go around

Fascinating. Okay, so then talk about the co-benefits because, you know, it sounds like all by itself, you're building a business that has been deemed to be venture scale, but there must be more because I know VCs. Yeah. It's interesting and it's evolving every day. And what's really cool is the raw material supply chain and us owning that, being vertically integrated, gives us a really, really unique advantage.

in competition space with a lot of the other kind of climate change companies. I mentioned concrete, for example. There's different ways to influence concrete to make it more sustainable, but you'll never beat the logistics problem. It's just the way it is, right? You're not going to make concrete in one vicinity and then ship it 2,000 miles across the country. It's just never going to happen. So it's a really difficult problem to solve. And we can approach it from a different way.

you know we we have a biomass we have a manufacturing facility that converts that biomass into a useful product but no matter what we do there's waste right there's waste in biomass we it causes creates uh we need electricity to actually

create the panels, all that good stuff. And so what we've done is we've actually identified a way to take all of that waste and create it in a carbon, pure carbon, right? Varying levels of biochar in the early phases where we can work on soil health for all of our farms, for the plants that we grow.

and farmers in general no matter what you're growing you can benefit from it and then we can actually go on to create much higher levels of carbon uh 85 pure and above end up that allows us to address a million different markets right now i'm actually really focused on like the rare earth elements market there's a big shift on the production of that from china to the united states obviously You know, there's about it.

I think it's China maintains like 85% production of those materials, and then they're starting to actually throttle the amount that they are willing to outsource to the United States. So there's a big push internally for us to increase our domestic production of those materials. And, you know, I can't address that market specifically, but I can address adjacent markets. They need specific components and compounds to refine their minerals and their elements, right?

we're going to be able to create all of those products out of our plants and basically be a zero waste facility. And then at the end of the day, the creation of that carbon creates energy.

and while we're not there yet we definitely believe that we can develop a system that utilizes all of that energy created through that process feeds it back into the original manufacturing step and allows us to create the initial product at either a sustainable rate with no added electrical input or a highly subsidized rate.

It'll bring our costs down. And then those are margins that we can afford to other people. And then again, we're not using grid power. We're not using any sort of fossil fuels or anything like that. How, like, what is the timeframe of your...

I'm just wondering about the time horizon of your plan. Like you seem like a person who does not have a five-year plan. You have like a 50-year plan. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely developed, I'll say. It changes all the time. I mean, our pace of execution.

it's interesting actually i used to get so irritated with elon when when you would push these like just impossible schedules down our throat we would work so hard to hit it and i could never understand it and when i started running my own company i was like oh it makes sense like you have to think 50 years out and you really need to dial all that back in and you got to maintain some some resemblance of a schedule um and so it's it's definitely in the near term hardware development takes time

There's a point where you reach this critical mass where it goes from R&D mode to production mode, and you can really start expediting those builds. But I think ultimately... I'm looking to really close the loop here in North Carolina, have a facility that's got all of the air space that I need for the raw material supply. We do all of our tissue culture and cloning here. We do all of the manufacturing of the subsystems here.

but i want to prove out a three to five press manufacturing facility easily within the next two years and then start basically replicating that on whole as a whole get into 2030 where we're just really really going hard and as fast as I could possibly go to get to that 25 line capacity that I was mentioning before we've already got order

millions and millions of tens of millions of panels need to get produced to fulfill the orders that we've got now. But the moment we actually have the capacity to fulfill those orders, we'll get those orders on an annualized basis.

um which means we have conceivably hundreds of millions of dollars of unrealized revenue at our fingertips ready to extract the moment we can turn all of that on and so it's really just a race to get there and then the moment we get there our margins are fantastic the roi on our machines are unbelievable we'll be able to move at a pace that you

you really wouldn't imagine. We'll be able to replicate that capacity in threefold in probably the same amount of time it took just to get to that point in the first place. Awesome. Okay, what keeps you up at night? What are the things that you need to solve? That's a good question. It changes. It really does. I don't sleep most nights. There's always something keeping me up at night. I think for me...

You know, every now and then it'll bounce around money. I think running a startup, especially a startup like this, it's very CapEx intensive. which it's very difficult to develop hardware. Hardware is hard and all the other, you know, very ambitious challenges that we took on.

there's always something that pops up that's just like oh man i wonder if this is going to break my model i wonder if this is going to break how you know i'm thinking about things i wonder if i'm gonna have to readjust my strategy um and it does it does it does happen it happens on on occasion but

You just get really good at pivoting. You get really good at identifying whatever the issue is, and you get really good at solving it. Nathan Silvernail is the co-founder and CEO of Planted. You need sleep. I'm just going to like, just let me mom you real quick before we go. You've got to rest. You're a thoroughbred. You're LeBron James. You need naps. Fair enough. All right, Nathan. Thanks so much for the time.

Thank you. That's it for this episode of everybody in the pool. And thank you for joining us for what is now the fourth season of this show. I love it. And this year I want to make you. a much bigger part of it. So please email me with a voice memo in at everybodyinthepool.com. Send me your thoughts, your ideas for reinvention, your day-to-day actions, your product recommendations. I will take them all.

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