Stubborn on vision and flexible on details

Jeff Bezos famously said, “We are stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”

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Teams start with ideas and as they go, they de-risk different aspects of their business:? technical feasibility risk, customer value risk, business viability risk, usability risk, etc.

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But you always start with a vision – ideally around how you want to make the world a better place, not just how you want to make money.? And sometimes, in the process of de-risking those 4 risks, you find out that your assumptions were wrong.? And then you have to find a new path to achieve your vision.? Or find a new vision.? Or go out of business.

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Tom Meijeraan, co-founder and COO at Arctic Reflections is an extreme example of this.? Arctic Reflections wants to preserve the Arctic sea ice.? Arctic sea ice is important.? And not just for polar bears.? Arctic ice reflects the sun’s rays back into space making it the refrigerator of the planet. ??

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This is a super-strong vision.? But how to make it a reality?? There are a lot of risks and assumptions behind this vision.? Specifically, they need to test their technical feasibility and business viability risks and either de-risk them or find new approaches.

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Technical Feasibility Risks:

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Arctic Reflections wants to save the arctic sea ice by thickening it.? In wintertime, Arctic seawater freezes as it's between -20 and - 40 degrees Celsius (-4 to -40 degrees Fahrenheit). ?But then this layer of ice insulates the seawater below it, especially when there's snow on top. ?Under this insulating layer, it can be around zero degrees and the ice stops thickening. ?

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But, if you drill a hole in the ice, then it will freeze very quickly, because it's suddenly exposed to -20 to -40 degrees Celsius air.? Or, if you pump water on top, this water will freeze rapidly as well. ?

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And the thicker the ice is in winter, the more likely it is to survive the warm summer months.

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But will this really save the arctic sea ice??

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There is actually a lot of science to back this up.? Academics in Germany, the Netherlands, UK, and Sweden have been writing papers about this.? So, in the lab, this concept has been proven to have the potential to work.?

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Arctic Reflections needs to prove the feasibility of doing this at scale in nature.? And there is some real-world experience here they can build on as well - for example, Canadian oil engineers back in the 1980s-90s were playing around with this concept to create ice barriers to protect oil drilling rigs.? And communities in northern Canada and Sweden create ice roads over water by thickening naturally forming ice.?

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So the Arctic Reflections team is building on this and moving forward.? They recently went to Svalbard, Norway to prove their lab results work in the real world.

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And then finally, they need to prove it works at large scale and try to thicken 10 to 100 square kilometers of ice. ?That is for next year.

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Step by step, they reduce the technical feasibility risk.?

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And if they ever get to a point where it does not work, they say fine.? We will try another approach.?

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Stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

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Business Viability Risk

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Arctic Reflections estimates that they will need billions of dollars per year to pump enough water to stabilize 100,000 square kilometers each year of Arctic Sea Ice.? How will they get the money?

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They are taking a hybrid approach.? First, they started with government money.? They received 700K Euro (750K USD) funding in December 2023, just enough for their current stage of development.? It allows them to take the next steps to de-risk the technical feasibility risks and do more customer discovery on their business model.

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They know government and non-profit funding alone is not a big enough lever to achieve their mission.? The most they estimate they can get is maybe 10M Euros / year.?? And maybe they could get more from philanthropists or impact investors, but not billions of dollars per year.

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So they founded themselves deliberately as an impact-driven for profit company. ?

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Their idea is to sell ice credits.? An ice credit is similar to a carbon credits - sea ice creates a heat shield by reflecting energy back to space, unlike dark oceans which absorb it.? They have calculated that restoring 1 square kilometer of ice and making it last one extra month during summer has the same cooling effect as removal of one kilo ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere for 20 years. ?

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If they get certified, they can express the impact of their work in carbon dioxide equivalence and sell this at the voluntary carbon markets.? Arctic Reflections has submitted all the required documentation to get certification to Verra, the largest carbon certification organization in the world.?

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But, this is a new concept, so that takes time – an estimated 2-3 years.?

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Other business models involve working with corporations who not only want to become carbon negative, but also want to protect ecosystems. These are companies that truly focus on getting their emissions down to zero and have set an internal carbon price for all emissions still left. They use the funds generated this way to spend on projects supporting positive change across multiple environmental topics. Like Microsoft, Disney, GM, or Delta.? Originally, Tom thought consumers would be putting pressure on companies, but his customer discovery has led him to understand that it is the investors who are applying the pressure.? So he is talking with investor relations now along with ESG and CSR officers and marketing teams.?

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They are still trying experimenting to figure it out. ?They are in Customer Discovery. Yet, they are gaining trust already because of their willingness to share their data and findings during this process. They even recently got endorsed by the United Nations Ocean Decade programme.

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Stubborn on vision and flexible on details.? They are really driven by the vision of saving the Arctic sea ice.? And how to do that, that's completely open.