Believe

If you believe what we believe'?

I first heard this statement working with the team at @Tenacious Ventures, and as I am want to do with words that capture what I want to say but cannot craft alone, I've made them my own.??

In 2018 I believed that we would be able to take insects TO the waste and in doing so we would be able to solve the inherent and persistent issue of waste management - distribution.

A lot has happened since that first belief.? So many changes.

The first ‘robot’ was a weird shelf thing with bathroom scales - we made it for mealworms.? Which was, at the time, a massive fail, because they aren’t like BSF at all.? And so we made tech for the wrong waste, and the wrong insect.? We made the choice because it was ‘easier’.?

It’s not supposed to be easy.

Since then, we’ve grown and stretched and tore at the edges and grown and stretched and torn some more.? The stories of our failures, the ever present ‘maggots on the ceiling and the food waste on the floor’ are in pretty much every pod cast I’ve been on.? Those stories share the omnipresent fear and trepidation, climate tech founders are experiencing as we? wander the ‘ecosystem’ looking for the people who believe what we believe.?

Goterra’s? changed a lot since 2018.?

That first prototype V2.0 shelving was balanced on a 4x4 beam spray painted silver.? True story. But she worked, she still works and that wood beam is still there, still silver.?

We were so confident then.? We thought we'd figured things out. We just didn't realise how small we were. ?

Then we hit our first acceleration which meant? on Fridays the ENTIRE Goterra team found themselves depacking waste by hand using steak knives.?

Sea transport during Covid was… well it was something else and somewhere out there in the blue ocean was a depackager that we desperately needed.?

Just when we thought we couldn’t take it any more - the depackager arrived. It was terrible and broke ALL THE TIME. But it sure was better than doing it by hand.

The next growth spurt happened and we realised at scale the waste wasn’t going to be fruit and veggies. It was oily things, end of life things, coffee grounds. Things that are REALLY hard to manage.??

The frass was oily and weird - we had to manage it differently.??

Felt like a failure.

That blasted depackager couldn’t keep up and its supposed more functional replacement was now ALSO on a boat from far away.

Felt like a failure.

People we loved, moved on.

Felt like a failure.

Couldn’t raise a round.?

Felt like a failure. ?

Today I have mixed emotions about failure. The ever present threat of the climate crisis seems to amplify mistakes somehow.?

The reality is, dear fellow climate tech founders,? these things are not really failures.?

This is just what it looks like to build tech for the most important ship date of our lives.

I believe we need to keep going.

I believe it's worth pushing on.

I believe we'll make it.

See you at work.