🌳 Issue #104: Can We Make Better Trees?
Living Carbon CEO Maddie Hall talks about an early experience that sparked her interest in climate change and how her biotech startup is working to create better trees to fight the climate crisis.
💬 Welcome to issue #104 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. A few months ago, NASA announced Summer 2023 to be the hottest summer on record…
This week, Living Carbon’s CEO Maddie Hall talks about her founder journey, an early experience that sparked her interest in climate change, and how Living Carbon is working to create better trees to fight the climate crisis. It’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh, Miles, Pat
👤 Community Spotlight: Maddie Hall & Living Carbon
Claremont grad and Forbes 30 Under 30 Maddie Hall (CMC ‘14) is the co-founder and CEO of Living Carbon – a biotech startup that leverages synthetic biology to enhance the carbon capture capabilities of trees. Maddie started Living Carbon with a mission to rebalance the planet’s carbon cycle responsibly using the inherent power of plants. Living Carbon is now backed by leading climate investors, including Felicis, Lowercarbon, Homebrew, and Toyota Ventures. Maddie’s company continues to scale its swiftly-growing partnership base of sustainability leaders. They were also featured by Forbes, CNN, The Business Journals, and several other publications as one of the top startups to watch following their $21M capital raise this year from Temasek Holdings.
Maddie was recently on the Climate Capital podcast, where she shared how her early experience witnessing methane leakage in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge sparked her interest in climate change, navigating the carbon project development landscape, and overcoming the added challenges and pressures as a female founder in a male-dominated field.
Climate Capital: Trees are Great. How Can We Make Them Better?
Living Carbon's mission is to develop and deploy a synthetic biology carbon removal solution that maximizes the amount of carbon captured per acre. Rather than focusing on crops, as much of the existing field work does, Living Carbon has chosen to concentrate on trees, drawing on methods used in the early 2010s for poplar engineering for biofuel production.
Navigating the carbon project development landscape has been one of the greatest challenges for Maddie. The complex and often varying interpretation of methodologies, coupled with an element of in-group mentality among legacy nonprofits and old-school carbon product developers, has presented hurdles. However, Maddie believes that the market needs to mature and that mission-aligned companies joining forces can help change the system from the ground up.
As a female founder in a male-dominated field, Maddie also discusses the added challenges and pressures she has faced.
Looking forward, Maddie envisions Living Carbon playing a dual role: being the 'picks and shovels' that allow for the scaling of the nature-based carbon capture market, and developing first-of-its-kind projects to demonstrate the feasibility of their approach. She encourages anyone interested in the field or looking to contribute to reach out and join the journey.
Listen to the full podcast from Climate Capital to learn how Living Carbon is leveraging synthetic biology to create superpowered trees. 👇
📣 Claremont Announcements: 8VC Engineering Fellowship’s 2024 Cohort
Claremont grad Drew Oetting (CMC) is a founding partner at 8VC – a technology and life sciences investment firm that builds and invests in the world’s most ambitious companies. They recently shared that they are now accepting applications for their Engineering Fellowship’s 2024 cohort.
Now in its seventh year, the 8VC Fellowship has been an unforgettable experience and career accelerator for hundreds of participants. Each Fellow spends the summer completing a technical internship at an 8VC portfolio company, working with dedicated mentors to ship real features and products. Concurrently, Fellows enjoy weekly events and programming featuring unique opportunities to learn from great entrepreneurs, technologists, and 8VC Partners.
By day, Fellows work on meaningful, highly focused technical challenges, while after hours, they’re exposed to the full range and depth of the 8VC experience. This includes candid leadership perspectives, lessons from the front lines of industry transformation, a vibrant, tight-knit peer and alumni community, and access to a vast constellation of mentors and advisors. Click HERE to learn more about the Fellowship. If you’re interested, apply below. 👇
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Ben Casnocha
Ben Casnocha (CMC) is the co-founder and partner at Village Global, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in startup entrepreneurs. He also spent a few years working out of the LinkedIn and Greylock offices as Reid Hoffman’s Chief of Staff and was involved in many of the decisions Reid made across the different areas of his work. As an entrepreneur and executive, he has started and scaled several ventures, including Comcate – an e-government software company that currently delivers hosted CRM solutions to hundreds of local governments in America, an online education business, and a top-tier boutique management training business. As a New York Times bestselling author and keynote speaker, Ben has delivered speeches on business and globalization in over a dozen countries and has appeared on the CBS Early Show, CNN, Charlie Rose, CNBC, and other media outlets.
Ben recently announced their new $250M seed fund, Village Global III, dedicated to backing the world’s most tenacious founders at Day 0. Village Global now manages over $500M for their limited partners, who include luminaries who have built some of today’s most revolutionary tech companies.
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Recuro Health & AddGlow
Recuro Health is making Advanced Healthcare Accessible. Their virtual platform includes a curated suite of digital solutions — from primary care and behavioral health to at-home testing and genetic screening. Claremont graduate Julian Feeley (CMC) is Recuro's VP of Product, and he’s hiring an Associate Product Manager to work across Product, Design, and Engineering. Julian is excited to work with more Claremont alums on the journey to make healthcare better for people. For more information and next steps, reach out to Julian directly.
Product Manager (Remote) - responsible for working across Product, Design, and Engineering on everything from strategy to product requirements to development as we bring Recuro's vision to life. The ideal candidate has 2+ years of experience in healthcare, product, consulting, or a similar field.
Ina Herlihy (SC '14) is the founder and CEO of StoryHouse portfolio company AddGlow, a SaaS startup that helps e-commerce brands build a community on their website (think Reddit for brands) to increase their conversion rate and generate additional revenue. AddGlow is backed by strategic beauty-brand investors, and they’ve partnered with named brands such as 4AM Skin (137K followers & 5M likes on Tiktok) to personalize their websites and customer engagement. Ina is hiring an additional Full Stack Engineer to join their growing team of ex-Walmart, Nike, Twitch, and Google engineers. For more details on the opening, feel free to reach out to Ina directly.
Check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s must-watch 📺
Claremont entrepreneur Yohei Nakajima (CMC) shared his thoughts on the opportunity for AI to strengthen human understanding and his insights on investing in AI projects. Yohei is the creator of BabyAGI and a General Partner at Untapped Capital, an early-stage VC firm investing in unexpected founders.
This week’s Claremont financing 💸
Congratulations to PharmaJet on their recent strategic investment from Daicel Corporation. PharmaJet is a company that engineers precision delivery systems that overcome the challenges of vaccine and pharmaceutical delivery. Claremont grad Heather Callender-Potters (CMC ‘86) is the co-founder and Vice-Chairman of the company.
This week’s top listen 🎧
Claremont serial entrepreneur Sam Corcos (CMC) sat down with Alex Lieberman on the Founder’s Journal podcast to break down how CEOs and founders should be spending their time and maximizing their productivity. Sam is the co-founder and CEO of StoryHouse portfolio company Levels – a health tech startup focused on metabolic health using continuous glucose optimizer
Everything else you need to know💡
Our heartfelt condolences to the family of Claremont professor and honorary alum Gary Evans. Gary served as a professor of economics in the Department of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts from 1981 to 2020 and has long championed entrepreneurship at Harvey Mudd College. A memorial service will be held on Friday, November 10, at 4:00 PM in the Strauss Plaza on the Harvey Mudd College campus.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
🏆 The Best In The West….. CMC has recently been named the top small school in the western U.S., according to The Wall Street Journal/College Pulse 2024 Best Colleges in the U.S. rankings. CMC also placed 9th among all colleges in the country, with an overall score based on student outcomes, the learning environment, and how strongly students would recommend the school. It’s a Claremont world out there.
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