A 4Nature Podcast Interview with Kevin Webb and Tom Quigley, co-founders of Superorganism, the world's first venture capital firm for biodiversity.

 

 

David Meyers:

Welcome to 4Nature Podcast. Very excited to be here with Kevin and Tom, the founders of Superorganism.

And I guess I'll start off with the sort of first question that you, you know, come to this from different backgrounds and experiences.

How did you two meet and choose to create Superorganism?

Tom Quigley:

Thanks, David. We have kind of a meat-in-the-middle style origin story where Kevin has spent a long time in venture capital and let him tell about his arc here, but he kind of went from venture to nature, and I went from nature to venture.

So I started my career as a conservationist, trained as an ecologist.

I spent three or four years in the field, both in terrestrial, some desert, some urban, some species rehabilitation, but mostly marine on coral reefs in Australia, Madagascar, and Cayman Islands.

And so I saw a lot of conservation from academic to bench lab to applied, a lot of different cultural contexts, as you can imagine, from living in a tent in Australia and a small, small, remote island in Madagascar to the Cayman Islands, extremely different day-to-day.

And I was getting more, just learning more about some of the challenges and getting more convinced that a lot of the challenges we were seeing in conservation were actually economic challenges.

And I wanted to just move in that direction. And so I moved into tech in 2014.

I've been in tech ever since. I helped launch a startup called Real Vision, built that up over the next few years, and really went through those early days of a startup being in the trenches.

Doing everything as employee number two, and seeing it go up that curve of growth over the next three years.

So now having spent time both in the field and in the startup world, moved to a group called Conservation X Labs, where we're able to just work on innovation and technology and applications of those for conservation challenges.

And it felt like I was getting closer and closer, but one of the things that was still really challenging when I left CXL in 2021 to me was thinking, okay, why is climate tech over here seemingly having access to the best talent and the best investors and millions of dollars in funding?

What are they getting? Right.

Over there dealing with the climate crisis that isn't connecting for the biodiversity crisis which is a crisis of the same size, it's the same existential risks to our global markets and has these kind of through lines that look very similar to climate tech and yet we weren't seeing all these nature tech startups get funded at that time and so that was kind of my point of exploration at that point. Kevin reached out to me a few years earlier through some of my work and community at Conservation X Labs.

And we kind of wove it together in 2021.

So now I guess, Kevin, why don't you just flash back to the beginning of your career and where we wove in?

Kevin Webb:

Yeah. So I've been in venture my whole career. So I helped get started a fund called the Web Investment Network.

We did a lot in marketplaces, enterprise software, fintech. I was very fortunate to work with some incredible companies. So businesses like Turo and Ironclad and Verkata and Goat, a number of others that have gone public and had all sorts of interesting outcomes.

I did that for eight and a half years. I loved the work. I was lucky to be an angel investor alongside.

So I got to see Ginkgo Bioworks early on. I saw some really cool startups that were touching synthetic biology.

And I realized that a lot of the businesses that I was increasingly drawn to were actually much closer related to what I had gone to undergrad for, which was really more focused on ecosystems, specifically humans and changing environment and infectious disease.

And I realized that these companies that touched climate, sustainability, food, synthetic biology, all had this really interesting through line of they were working toward a future that could work for humans while also adding more potential capacity for nature.

And so this became kind of an obsession of could you use venture capital, this tool that is able to drive a lot of change in a short amount of time to really help nature in an interesting way.

So I ended up quitting. I moved across the country. I went back to grad school.

I studied sustainability science at Columbia and a new master's program there.

I started angel investing.

I really wanted to see if there were opportunities to invest.

And I wanted to see if there were founders who were starting these types of businesses and then really understand what types of challenges they face that maybe your stereotypical Silicon Valley company doesn't.

And that was honestly a lot of what drew me to reaching out to Tom in the first place. He was one of the few people I met who came from a conservation background, but actually knew what it was like to be in a tech startup.

So reached out, we stayed in touch. We reconnected periodically as I was a mentor for CXL and the timing worked out where he was ready for his next steps.

I was ready to level up from angel investing.

We reconnected. We basically worked out of my apartment for a good chunk of 2021.

And then the rest is history.

Tom Quigley:

David, you know this as well, that the amount of people that were thinking at that time around what it would look like to do venture capital for nature was basically none. I mean, there were a small handful of different groups that were running accelerator programs and thinking about how to action this.

And here was Kevin with this extremely ambitious view on what nature tech meant, how it cut across the entire economy, and what types of startups could actually really have a dent in extinction drivers.

So we spent 2021 wrestling with different thesis areas and talking to founders and really just building conviction across this different areas that something like this would work.

And now was the time. And by the end of the year, we'd proven to ourselves, at least, that there were founders out there who were incredibly excited about what we were doing.

The mission resonated, the support system resonated, obviously the money resonated because many of them were going out and trying to pitch to climate tech investors or regenerative ag[riculture] or other types that maybe they somewhat fell into those thesis but it was much more clean and clear from a nature and planetary perspective and you know 2022 was really the start of it all where we went out with SuperOrganism and said, we're here and we're funding and supporting nature tech startups.

David Meyers:

Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. And so I'm going to sort of dive in and say, okay, now, can you explain what Super Organism is to the listeners?

And you talk about nature, investing in nature tech.

And I think that there is a large area of investing in food systems and and things like that, but how do you, what's your differentiation?

How do you choose what your priorities and maybe some examples?

Kevin Webb:

At SuperOrganism, we're the first VC to be entirely focused on biodiversity.

Our view is that biodiversity, much like climate, cuts across the whole economy, like Tom said. And so we use that lens to look across the whole economy.

We've divided our investing for priorities into three big thematic areas.

So the first is we look at existing industries that have largely been responsible for extinction over time.

And we evaluate them through the lens of extinction drivers.

So pollution, invasive species, habitat loss, over-exploitation.

We're looking for startups that use new technologies, new approaches to be able to disrupt or to help these companies transition.

Next big category for us is the overlap between climate and biodiversity.

So we're looking for opportunities that maybe couldn't have been possible 10, 20 years ago, where nature could be an answer for excess CO2, or where we can use nature to help adapt to warming temperatures or rising sea levels.

We're also very interested in things like wildfire, soil, water, where there's a climate story and a nature story.

And last, very intrigued with how do we make a net zero or a transition in a way that doesn't compromise nature.

So where are the places that technology can help us achieve both objectives at the same time?

Final thematic area for us is on enabling technology.

So things like AI, satellites, genomics, places where conservationists can benefit, but where they don't have to be the primary audience.

So that's the overall fund idea. We're investing at pre-seed and seed.

So we're normally second or third biggest check in rounds of maybe the first million to five million dollars that a company is raising.

We've made 13 investments to date. Tom can talk about some of those.

And then we've built out a pretty incredible mentors network of some great luminaries across conservation and entrepreneurship who can really help these companies to grow and scale.

Tom Quigley:

One of the really important things that we look for is making sure that the companies that we invest in have both global impacts to biodiversity and look venture profile into what they can eventually become.

And so we're looking for companies that really drive value within industries and make these kind of no-brainer, double-win type of opportunities.

And so a couple of companies from our portfolio that we've invested in that we think are really good ways to highlight these different thesis areas.

We invested in a company called Funga recently, where this is a body of work by the founder, Dr. Colin Averill, who has studied the above ground and below ground flows of carbon and forests and the effects of mycorrhizal fungal networks and the microbiome of the soils of forests for his entire career.

And through that body of research found that on average, these trees with a rich mycorrhizal fungi and microbiome in the soils will grow 64% faster.

And so Funga now works with commercial timber and managed forests to rewild their soils, which have often been degraded over years of continued tree growth on those properties, to rewild those soils and lead to significant timber and carbon benefits from a pretty simple application and rewilding process for those soil bases.

Really exciting company. Another great example is Inversa Leathers, which creates luxury leathers out of invasive species.

So they work with the fishers and hunters in the Caribbean hunting lionfish, in Florida hunting Burmese python from the Everglades, and in the Mississippi River Basin fishing for Asian carp.

And they turn that into leather and they provide it to these really high-end France and Italy luxury leather companies that are turning them into shoes and handbags.

And they're actually replacing their exotic leathers with this type of leather.

And the really exciting thing here is that if you are, let's say an alt leather startup, then to be able to really have impact, you're trying to replace leather at scale on all car seats, for example, and really have that level of impact there.

But because invasive species are so harmful to so many species in their invaded range, by drawing out those individuals from those habitats, you're having extremely leveraged benefit to the environment.

So the impact is really on the supply side, not on the demand side.

And it's a huge market to be able to work within.

We have companies like LVMH and Caring as some of the largest companies in the EU and groups that have multiple different fashion brands beneath them.

There's a lot of opportunity to grow through some of those large companies.

Kim Bonine:

That's great. I'll jump in here. It's been so interesting to hear about your journey and the real innovations of putting together this new vision of how to approach this.

And I'm sort of curious about, I guess, two things.

First is, have you found it difficult to kind of identify and find those different companies or sort of people who are ready for that even pre-seed or seed stage?

I know that's something we've heard a lot when we're thinking about impact investment or angel investment related to biodiversity or conservation.

There's this pipeline problem or there's this gap of our lack of readiness.

So I'm just curious to hear about that process of kind of finding those opportunities to invest.

And whether at any point you thought about other types of traditional kind of conservation finance versus kind of the VC approach? It's really interesting.

Kevin Webb:

In terms of opportunities, we've been really pleasantly surprised.

And that was one of the first things that we had to investigate as we started working together is, are there enough opportunities to be investing?

And the answer overwhelmingly is yes.

I think our view is that venture is capable of driving a tremendous amount of change in a short amount of time.

And when we're talking about some of the biggest industries on the planet that are responsible for loss, our view is that we should be investing in companies that are similarly ambitious.

And so after we launched, we had 100 different companies from around the world reach out.

We found amazing deal flow through our VC partners, who often bring us in as a complementary partner to really de-risk these companies when it comes to things like access to land, access to policymakers, access to conservationists who can help understand what some of the risks of the business might be and help them make sure that they're building the company in the right way.

We've also gotten a great amount of deal flow from our extended network.

So the mentors I mentioned before and the informal community that we've been really building out over time.

Tom Quigley:

I think it's also important to note that we're not trying to replace any other types of traditional conservation finance.

We're trying to build a new asset class that will be able to support those startups that are really trying to work on reducing nature loss at scale and restoration at scale.

And so we're aiming to be complementary. And there were a few venture capital funds that had biodiversity as one of a handful of their mandates or were a couple of people in the firm that were interested in biodiversity and how they could make investments into that area.

But until we launched Superorganism in 2023...

A full stack entirely dedicated venture funds for those founders hadn't existed before and so you know we were hearing from founders that how much of a relief it was to be able to join these VC conversations and not have to explain what invasive species were and those dynamics and not have to you know explain that there were tropical rainforest deforestation impacts of cocoa and that those had impacts not just for climate, but for biodiversity and why that mattered.

And so when we were thinking too about what do we start and what is our basis of where we're coming at this, venture capital actually looks like a really nice chart for the type of change we need to drive in the world over the next 10, 20, 30 years.

If things go according to plan and the classic venture capital chart is that J curve up and to the right in under 10 years at global scale, that's all of what people talk in impact about the solutions that we need to see are decade and within decade and global scale type solutions.

And that's what venture capital drives in its successful areas now a lot of venture capital funded companies will fail that's the nature of that game but with a portfolio approach, if you're taking a couple of companies that are really hitting home runs or even base hits and the impact is really locked into the business model then you can drive a lot of very positive change very fast.

David Meyers:

I always like to say how, you know, if you look at what we're spending on nature globally and what sort of the rest of the economy is spending, the rest of the economy sort of swamps it.

And most of the rest of the economy, like, I don't know, close to $100 trillion is investing and spending their money on things that are at best neutral to nature, but generally harmful to nature.

And so the transition to the sustainable future, the balanced nature, you know, positive future we want is enormous in terms of the need for, as Paul Hawkins says, you know, rethinking everything we build.

And so as much as I would love to see venture-funded nature-based organizations grow, there's this time lag that startups take time to grow and reach scale.

So how do you balance out the sort of urgency of the need for transformation with the need for innovation that you're supporting here?

In other words, what's the path to societal transformation that we need?

Will it happen in time? And how are you contributing to that?

Tom Quigley:

So there are no silver bullets. We're not the entire solution.

Nothing will be. We need to have policy and regulatory shift.

We need to have market shifts.

We need to have competition and disruption happen within individual industries.

We need to shift more of those industries into sustainable practices and disrupt the pieces that just won't shift and really need to move those and find levers to move those least sustainable practices and markets either entirely away or into these new practices.

And we need to continue to do the extremely important conservation work that happens on the ground and significantly increase capital going to those different efforts. So those are all things that need to happen.

And we're just a single part of this ecosystem.

But like I said before, the entire universe of venture capital for nature was extremely small prior to, and still is, prior to Superorganism launching.

And Kevin and I often say that if in 10 years, we're still the only ones out here as a dedicated nature fund, we'll have totally failed because we need significantly more capital and effort going into working to make our global economy more regenerative and balanced.

And so if you're talking about those large industries that are at best neutral, like you say.

Venture capital is a really good way to move quickly through those individual industry pillars and disrupt them and force change within those industries.

So we think that we're actually at a really good leverage point to be able to move the most harmful impacts of those industry from nature.

David Meyers:

I think that the focus on technology and technology solutions as part of this is a way to get at the scale that you need to transform these companies.

So I think that you're really choosing the right focus here because we work with a lot of investing in nature-based solutions and companies, and you're looking at moderate returns.

These are natural resource-based companies, sustainable fisheries, sustainable aquaculture, things like that, where you can get a positive return and have sustainability, but these are not venture opportunities, right? So more debt-type things.

So I think that your approach is really interesting.

And I just wanted to share that.

Kevin Webb:

Yeah. And just to be clear, we view all that type of work as being extraordinarily critical to maintain and continue doing.

The new pieces, we think venture can also be a part of the suite suite of solutions.

And frankly, it's astounding how much has been achieved through the amount of capital that we put into conservation writ large.

You know, it's a tiny fraction of overall philanthropy, and yet it's achieved so many wins over the last century and a half.

Yeah, we're very deeply respectful and inspired by the people who are working on these on-the-ground, front-of-line projects.

Kim Bonine:

I was curious, you were mentioning that, you know, you really hope in, say, 10 years from now, there's a lot more, you know, venture capital firms doing similar work.

And I was curious, what perhaps were some of the challenges you might have faced in launching this firm?

And what do you imagine might be some of those barriers for others who, you know, might want to get into this space?

You know, how could we get those numbers up in the next 10 years?

Kevin Webb:

First challenges are the same challenges that anyone starting up a business would have. There's not enough hours in the day.

We always want to be able to do a lot more, I'll start there. But specifically to starting a biodiversity-focused VC.

So Tom told this great story of my unusual nest.

But I had a few years where when I talked with my friends who are VCs about how I thought that biodiversity was a great investment area, the most knowledgeable among them would say like, oh, like climate.

And I'd say, no, no, more like biodiversity. It's related to climate, it, but it's this whole suite of other issues.

And then they'd kind of stare off in the distance and change the conversation.

And then meanwhile, if I were talking with my conservationist friends, and I would say, I think that venture capital can maybe help on some of these challenges, I'd get a similar result.

I think one of the things that has been really gratifying to see since starting Superorganism with Tom has been a lot of secular momentum.

And we've had a small role to play in that.

And I think there's been a lot of secular momentum and policy changes that have been really exciting and transformational in this category.

But along the way, we've had to do our fair share of educating.

We put out a newsletter every month. We now have a substack that it'd be great to be able to share with your listeners, where we try to distill everything that's happening in the nature tech ecosystem.

So that people see it's not just us, there's this whole momentum building, there's more companies getting started, there's new regulations, there's new corporations that are making commitments in really exciting ways.

And then the other piece is, like we just talked about, this ecosystem is maturing in real-time.

So nature tech is years behind where climate tech is.

And climate tech has mature financial stacks, right?

There's not just a few VCs, there are VCs at multiple different stages, there are different debt facilities, there are different policies for financing, there's different resources.

And we see that same momentum being possible within nature tech, but part of what makes it so fun and interesting is that it's all emerging and it's all happening in real-time.

Kim Bonine:

One of the challenges I've heard in trying to compare, you know, say, biodiversity, finance, or, you know, climate finance, climate tech, et cetera, is around kind of measurement and verification and issues around, you know, identifying key performance indicators.

Or, you know, when you're thinking about biodiversity and thinking about, you know, investment in, you know, how to measure and verify what results you're getting, it's so much easier with climate or measuring carbon in so many respects.

And have you seen any sort of progress or innovation or a court of breakthroughs in being able to do that?

Because that seems to be one of the big barriers, just to kind of in terms of that measurement process or even identifying what that even means.

Tom Quigley:

So it's true that there isn't a CO2e type equivalent in biodiversity, but we do know how to measure biodiversity.

And that's something that's really key as a piece of messaging to move through is that a lot of times when we're talking about this and we say biodiversity measurement is hard, sometimes people hear that and they hear hard as we don't know how to do it.

But we do know how to do it. It's why we know that there's a problem in the first place.

It's just hard because it involves a lot of leeches and boots on the ground and deployment of technology into the field where the batteries die or it gets waterlogged and we lose the - whatever it is, right?

You know, the slogging around in the bush is what makes it hard.

And new types of technology can really improve our ability and our sampling rate and the quality of data that is coming out of the field.

And so we really are getting into a new era where we're going to be able to measure biodiversity in ways that we previously have been extremely manual and involved a lot of bug spray.

And in terms of comparison of those metrics across the board, there are some people that are working on different efforts to be able to standardize.

You might have seen that the Natural History Museum in London and Bloomberg recently announced a collaboration to create this Biodiversity Intactness Index.

There are also other types of metrics like mean species abundance and other types of things you can do to be able to measure and compare across different ecosystems.

But at the core, it's hard to compare a coral reef in Cambodia to a rainforest in Brazil.

What we really want to make sure as a message that goes out, though, is that you can do it.

And there are a lot of things that can be done now.

And we don't need to wait for there to be a standard measurement across all types of biodiversity, which we may or may not ever even see.

But there is a lot of things we can do now because we know what the problems are and we're seeing a suite of solutions that are coming to be able to help solve those problems and we can support those solutions in the work that is happening exactly at this moment.

David Meyers:

And possibly the work that's going on all around the globe right now to try how to figure out this nature credit or biodiversity credit approach may end up, the biggest benefit may end up being standardization of metrics, really.

So that's something that we're all keeping our eye on.

I want to get back to a little bit of what you mentioned before.

You've got this monthly newsletter, which I received, and I've been part of your community.

And I would say that you've really built an amazing community around nature investing and nature tech.

And how important is that community to your, your business?

And are you, do you have other plans to grow that? And is that going to evolve into something additional?

Because I really have been impressed with the, with your outreach.

Tom Quigley:

Thank you. And it's been fantastic to have you as part of the community.

You've been so supportive and, and beneficial to many of the founders and, and conversations.

I remember at one event that we hosted in New York, we went around the room and made introductions and somebody went, oh, I'm a PhD lemur scientist in Madagascar.

And David went, oh, you too?

And they just like went off into a corner and talked about lemurs for the rest of the time.

Kevin Webb:

On the high level, community has been something super important for both Tom and me.

It was a big part of my role at my last fund, and then with Tom's role at CXL, it's something that is integral here, especially when we're doing something like Biodiversity Venture, where it can't just be us, right?

You need an ecosystem of founders, but you also need to connect with all the people who have been building careers, figuring out how to do the right thing by nature.

And so what that means is you have to be very consciously building bridges and connections because I'm going to paint with a very broad brush here, so please forgive me in advance.

I have found that most of my ecologist friends do not consider themselves to be very plugged in into the financial or startup world.

And meanwhile, while I do think there are a lot of founders and entrepreneurs coming out of Silicon Valley who care about nature, maybe haven't had that kind of training or experience before.

And so we try to make spaces when we're doing something physical and in person where people feel included, welcome, where we make sure that they're the center, not us.

Our newsletter is built to serve. We try to put in content that we think would be interesting and useful.

And we try to keep that mix of, is it entrepreneurial? Is it science-y? Is it nature-y?

And so that's really how we're holding this space. Tom, anything else you would add?

Tom Quigley:

There's a lot more to come on the community side. Watch this space.

Kim Bonine:

And do you see that gap closing or maybe the chasm being breached of the, you know, your VC sort of friends saying, what do you mean biodiversity as an investment?

And ecologists saying, well, you know, business is the problem.

You know, do you kind of see those, the Venn diagram starting to overlap with people becoming more comfortable kind of with different maybe viewpoints or even, a lot of times it's just terminology even, that's the barrier.

Tom Quigley:

You know, when we launched publicly in September of last year, one of the things that I was aware of was as we get this press and this media attention the spotlight comes on to this approach are we going to start having some of that criticism come out as well and actually some of our loudest supporters were conservationists that were clapping and saying this is so exciting these are solution types and approaches that we've been wanting to see. We're really excited.

And who knows? I'm sure that there are other opinions.

I know that there are, but we've been really buoyed by the support from the conservation community around what we're building.

And we've been very, very active in bringing them in and engaging them.

We engage them during our due diligence processes when we look at new investments. We engage them to support our portfolio companies as they continue to grow.

And some of the most exciting and rewarding moments that we have are when our portfolio companies come to us and they say, we need to hire an ornithologist, or we need to hire a marine ecologist, or we need to hire someone with expertise in nature data.

And we just get to go, okie dokie, you asked for it.

And starting to see some of those ecology-trained, conservation, wildlife biology-focused people be able to plug into these early-stage startups is extremely exciting and gratifying.

David Meyers:

I did want to ask if you'd be willing to share some advice to budding nature entrepreneurs that are heading down the venture path, let's say.

Any suggestions, guidance, lessons learned?

Kevin Webb:

First is aim big. We need wins on the board.

We need people who are ambitious and hungry and building businesses that are meant to last.

And there are going to be beacons of hope that show, yes, you can build businesses that are compelling and interesting and hire people and that also benefit nature in a very material way.

One thing I would say specifically because you asked about raising from VCs, is venture capital is a very specific financial model.

So not every business needs to raise capital from venture capitalists.

The basic stereotypical standard that we're looking for is a company that can hit, call it $100 million a year in revenue, and maybe exit, maybe go public someday, maybe sell to a very large company.

That's how our economics work.

That would break a lot of businesses that maybe are doing really, really impactful work.

Maybe it's closer to a place. Maybe it's closer to someone's individual expertise.

And it's completely wrong. And it'll pull you in the wrong direction from what you want to be doing.

So first, be really conscientious of when you're going after VC dollars.

Then beyond that, if you do decide that, make sure that what you're building is solving a real customer need. Understand who they are, why they're willing to pay, what you're doing for them now.

We tell our founders to look for opportunities that exist today.

We're very excited about some of the things that are coming into existence with policy, but I think you need to both be looking out at those future opportunities and still be delivering value today.

And then last is stay centered.

You know, a VC just mathematically is going to say no almost every time.

And that's because for every one deal they do, there's maybe 90 that they're saying no to.

Keep a level head, stay true to what you're doing, believe in yourself, someone's going to resonate.

And if they don't, there's always a next time.

Tom Quigley:

One of the most valuable things for me in my career was spending time both completely embedded within conservation and completely embedded in a startup that had nothing to do with nature or conservation as well.

And I'm a big fan of that type of lived experience because there's so much that you learn from osmosis, both on what went right and what went wrong.

And if you're looking for lessons, you can learn from both of those things.

So if you are, you know, take a self-audit.

And if you're more on the conservation or wildlife biology side, if you are able to get a couple of years in at a venture-funded startup.

In kind of whatever role, just to get this osmosis and learn what the pace of daily life is like, learn what the expectations are in terms of delivery, learn what it's like to run a fundraising process from the inside, and what happens before, during, and after that capital comes in, and how to strategically say yes and say no to different types of initiatives.

That's really, really valuable to be able to do.

The same is also true on the other side of things. If you come from more of a Silicon Valley background, and you're interested in starting a nature tech startup, go spend time in that area that you are interested in having impact in.

So if it's coral reefs, go work on an island somewhere.

If it's forests, go work at a timberland investing group or some type of a forestry company or in a rainforest.

Whatever it is, try to understand the real detail of the problem and spend a few years, if possible, in those places to just deeply learn.

And if you're able to bring those two things together, then I think you'll have a much deeper understanding of what needs to be done and just the culture and the opportunity that you'll start to see things that other people don't see.

And that's where the exciting startups will come from.

Kim Bonine:

Love all those sentiments. I think you're emphasizing such an important aspect of really needing to break down some silos and sort of question assumptions.

And having that lived experience is a really powerful way to do that.

And, you know, imagining people studying wildlife ecology and it'll just be par for the course, learning about investment and finance or vice versa, and having those bridges and really being open to learning, I think, seems...

Like such an important part of what you're doing in the world, you know, creating that education and that sort of scale, you know, having more people, you know, this moment, this transformational moment we're seeing in the world, I think a lot of it is around awareness and people not only being aware of the problem, but being aware of the necessity of these interdisciplinary sort of multifaceted approaches of breaking down these traditional camps who were kind of sort of fighting each other or antagonistic and I see what you're doing is really helping break down those walls.

Tom Quigley:

And I would encourage you know, all businesses on either side of that kind of continental divide to start posting jobs and hiring on those other types of job categories as well. If you're a business with supply chains in agriculture or forestry or that touch nature in some way, start hiring early on ecology and conservation people with those backgrounds so that they can start being able to come and see what it's like working in some of those multi-directed businesses and vice versa.

If you're a conservation group, bring in some of those…

There's a lot of tech talent out there that's really excited to try to help in different ways.

And being able to kind of post those positions really, really just increase what we're able to start seeing in terms of innovation as those lines start to melt.

Kevin Webb:

I also think as more private sector capital starts coming into this market and this space that has traditionally been oriented toward people from a conservation background, it's really incumbent on conservation programs to be putting out people who are able to influence and who have the skills and the financial literacy to be able to plug in and understand what it means to be operating in the private sector.

David Meyers:

All I can say is, you know, there's so much doom and gloom in talking about nature these days.

It's so great to hear the optimism and the future vision that you guys are bringing to the table because, you know, that motivates people.

People get excited about the positive and you're really bringing that.

And so we thank you so much for joining us at For Nature.

And thank you so much for the work that you've been doing.

And wishing you the best of luck and huge success.

Kim Bonine:

Thanks for joining us.

Tom Quigley:

Thank you all.

Kevin Webb:

Thank you so much.