AN EMERSON COLLECTIVE PUBLICATION
Cover: Aerial view taken in 2021 at the Great Salt Lake in Utah, United States. Related: Extraction of lithium is currently under exploration in the Great Salt Lake. Emerson Collective portfolio company Lilac is deploying an advanced, proprietary ion-exchange technology to extract lithium from brine in a significantly more efficient, effective, and environmentally friendly way as compared to conventional processes.
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Introduction Twelve rePurpose Global Redwood Materials Pilot Unite Us Aurora Solar
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The following pages offer a snapshot of what we do and a window into what motivates us. Human potential. Profound scale. Partnership anchored in shared values and shaped over time. We follow problems wherever they lead us. We seek out builders with the ingenuity and transformative tech to tackle them. We expect urgency, acknowledging that patience is often required. At Emerson Collective, we are investors. We believe deeply in the power of entrepreneurship. We believe consequential companies drive generational impact through the growth of their businesses. We believe in a Positive Sum world, one rooted in abundance. We see opportunities, everywhere.
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Twelve Seeking gigaton-scale impact through nanoscale technology. 06
Dr. Etosha Cave, Co-founder & Chief Science Officer
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Carbon-based chemicals are the foundation of our modern world. That foundation has been built upon fossil fuels, and it is crumbling before us due to the very carbon we rely upon. But there’s transformation in the air. Twelve™ is taking carbon from the atmosphere instead of the ground and using it to manufacture carbon-based materials, from jet fuel to sunglasses. Think of it as an industrial photosynthesis process that (1) takes CO2, water, and electricity, (2) breaks apart the CO2 and water, and (3) uses catalysts to recombine the elements to make new products otherwise created from petrochemicals. The bedrock of everything around us is set for a transformation by a factor—or rather, a company— of Twelve.
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CO2 Electrolysis 101
Just like a plant uses CO2, water, and sunlight to make useful carbon-based products, Twelve’s electrolyzers are engineered to convert CO2 into any molecule one can make from carbon, hydrogen, or oxygen. At the heart of the technology is a novel CO2-consuming catalyst that electrifies CO2 and water, producing only oxygen and water as outputs. 10
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E-Jet: Fossil-Free Jet Fuel
In what may read like science fiction, Twelve’s E-Jet® is made with an electrochemical reactor and a proprietary catalyst that electrifies CO2 and water, creating synthesis gas (CO + H2) that it refines into jet fuel. It is drop-in ready and certified with the same quality and performance as traditional jet fuel, with up to 90% lower life-cycle emissions. 13
As of summer 2023, Twelve had entered into agreements with multiple partners—including Alaska Airlines and Microsoft—to work toward demonstration flights powered by Twelve’s E-Jet.
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From Experimentation to Commercialization
Co-founders Dr. Kendra Kuhl, Nicholas Flanders, and Dr. Etosha Cave (pictured left) have been growing a team of nanotechnologists, polymer chemists, and engineers out of Twelve’s Berkeley, California, facility since 2018. In fall 2023, the company added a stateof-the-art space in Alameda, enabling it to produce commercial-scale products starting with its sustainable aviation fuel, E-Jet. 17
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The Fossil-Free Chemical Company
From your running shoes to your kids’ LEGO® bricks, carbon-based compounds are the basis for so much of what we use every day—as well as the carbon footprint in its wake. Twelve is reinventing what it means to be a chemical company in the climate era, on a mission to eliminate global emissions and build a fossil-free future. 20
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REPURPOSE GLOBAL Building a new category of certified plastic neutrality, and enabling local plastic removal in the process. 22
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As a species, humans produce 881 billion pounds of plastic waste per year. In 2017, college classmates Svanika Balasubramanian, Aditya Siroya, and Peter Wang Hjemdahl co-founded rePurpose Global to solve this pervasive plastic problem. rePurpose works with companies to analyze their plastic footprint, purchase plastic credits (akin to carbon credits) to offset their plastic production, and help them change supply chains to reduce virgin plastic. Most important, rePurpose creates these plastic credits by partnering with refuse-removal organizations— now in 20 cities across 7 countries—to divert plastic to recycling streams that may otherwise find its way to landfills or the oceans. In the pages ahead you can see the people of Green Worms, one such organization in the Indian state of Kerala, at work with better safety equipment and higher wages thanks to the rePurpose partnership.
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Today, 881 billion pounds of plastic waste are generated each year. Approximately 36% of all plastics produced are used in packaging, 85% of which ends up in landfills or as unregulated waste.
According to rePurpos of plastic leakage coul with existing solutions Source Credit: UN Environmental Program Report
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According to rePurpos of plastic leakage coul with existing solutions
se Global, 80% ld be eliminated s.
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The Green Worms team at the Chokkad Material Recovery Facility in Kerala pose with plant manager Ibrahim A.K.
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Redwood Materials Extracting valuable metals from dying batteries to power a more sustainable economy. 32
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To meet the world’s electrification ambitions in the near future, we need more batteries. The good news: Critical metals within declining lithium-ion cells never degrade, and most of them can be recovered and recycled to make new battery parts. Founded in 2017 by Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel, Redwood Materials is architecting a closed-loop system in which minerals extracted from recycled battery cells are refined and remanufactured into key components of batteries, from copper foil to a voltage-producing mixture of lithium, cobalt, and nickel. When the new components return to the supply stream, they boost the supply of batteries and also drive down the cost of lithium-ion packs. Take a look inside Redwood’s Campus 1 and its quest to make sustainable battery materials a gold standard in clean energy.
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The 21st-Century Mine
A recent $2 billion loan from the Department of Energy will finance a fully electrified build-out of Redwood’s Campus 1 near Reno, in the high desert set against the Sierra Nevada mountains. The site will eventually produce 100 GWh per year of high-quality battery materials recovered from recycled end-of-life batteries, enough to power approximately 1 million EVs. 34
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Prospecting and Processing
Activating multiple streams of production scrap is key to bridging the gap between the country’s current battery-recycling capacity and the batteries available to recycle. Among Redwood’s partners in this operation are Volkswagen, Audi, and Rotary Clubs across the country, which have set up drop-off boxes at dealerships and events to collect obsolescent consumer devices.
How are critical minerals extracted from recycled batteries? First, batteries are broken down into a powder concentrate of metals. Then, in a process called hydrometallurgy, acids are used to leach out targeted elements—in this case, copper, lithium, cobalt, and nickel. These refined metals are then remanufactured into battery materials.
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Copper
Redwood produces super-thin copper foil—at 6 to 8 microns thick, the material is 10 times thinner than a human hair—for U.S. battery manufacturers to use in anodes. Redwood sources its 100% recycled copper from not only batteries but also electric wire, plumbing, and other scrap. 40
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Cobalt, Nickel, and Lithium
Once Campus 1 is fully operational, Redwood will be the first large-scale cathode manufacturer in North America. The cathode is the most expensive component of a cell, containing cobalt, nickel, and lithium formulated into cathode-active material. Redwood is producing 100% of its cathode from recycled batteries. 42
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Refined and Remanufactured
Manufacturing batteries Stateside with homegrown and recycled materials is advantageous for many reasons, not the least of which is America’s energy independence. The Inflation Reduction Act builds momentum toward this goal by offering U.S. automakers a $7,500-per-vehicle tax credit to assemble EVs domestically. Battery recyclers like Redwood are also richly incentivized, since they are eligible for a 10% tax break under the same legislation, signed into law last August. “The writing is on the wall,” says Jackson Switzer, Senior Vice President of Business Management and Market Strategy at Carson City, Nevada–based Redwood Materials. “Recycling will take over and everything will exist in this closed-loop economy.” 46
Eddie Herena, Photographer, Account Support Specialist at Pilot
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PILOT Creating a competitive advantage with a unique hiring strategy.
Eddie Herena discovered his talent for photography while serving a life sentence at San Quentin State Prison. San Quentin is California’s oldest and bestknown correctional facility, located about 10 miles north of San Francisco, in Marin County, on a bluff overlooking the bay. In October 2015 he earned a job at the 432-acre prison’s media center as a photographer with the San Quentin News, an in-house media outlet staffed by incarcerated people. At first, his camera was a Nikon D90, which he says was “all right.” But eventually, the News upgraded to the Canon 5D, a legendary camera among serious photographers. Herena relished shooting with it. Now out of prison, Herena uses a newer version of that same camera for his freelance photography work. “It’s something I learned to love,” he says of photography. “A way of expressing myself.” Before going to prison at age 21, Herena had no interest in cameras. In prison, though, this “heartfelt desire to change started welling up in me,” he says. After barely making it to class in high school, Herena earned a college degree at San Quentin. Through the prison’s local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and assignments for the News, he met people from across the media industry. At the time, he didn’t see these meetings as networking. “I went on a journey to just make myself better,” he says, “and that ultimately led me to people like Jessica.” Jessica McKellar attended the same monthly SPJ meetings as Herena. “I knew she was a super-genius because I used to tutor algebra, and one of the guys I was tutoring had a good relationship with her,” he remembers. “He told me that she was just hella smart, a computer wiz.” Herena didn’t know McKellar was a co-founder and the Chief Technology Officer of Pilot, a San Francisco-based digital bookkeeping company whose software tools streamline all manner of accounting services. He didn’t know that Pilot has garnered a reputation in tech for recruiting formerly incarcerated people while forging a strong talent pipeline and business. He didn’t know anything about Pilot at all—let alone that one day he’d work there. At that point, Herena didn’t even know whether he’d ever get out of prison. In 2018, after almost 14 years at San Quentin, Herena received a parole date. His desire to change had paid off: Good behavior and the work he’d put in to further his education, earning both his GED and an associate’s degree, knocked years off his sentence under a state law passed while he was incarcerated. As his date approached, he pondered future work plans. He was confident he would find a job, even if it didn’t match the skill set he developed while serving time. “What I
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Jessica McKellar, Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer, Pilot
Simon Liu, Software Engineer & Founder of Bay Area Freedom Collective Eddie Herena, Photographer, Account Support Specialist at Pilot
was afraid of was going back to the stuff I was used to before I went to prison,” Herena says. “Moving companies, digging ditches, pulling a wheelbarrow full of concrete—I didn’t want to do any of that stuff.” At San Quentin, he’d earned an education, fell in love with photography, sharpened his interpersonal skills, and made new connections. Now, he wasn’t worried about unemployment—he was worried about underemployment. After being released, Herena found a job within two weeks, defying the systemic societal failures and discrimination among employers that leave most American men in their 30s with criminal records unemployed, per research from the RAND Corporation. He was hired as a shop hand at Little Giant Lighting & Grip, a truck and production equipment rental company, after reconnecting with an employee he’d met while working an event at San Quentin. While he loved the job, it paid minimum wage—hardly a decent income in the gentrifying San Francisco Bay Area. A few months later, Herena received a call from Emile DeWeaver, a News staffer who’d become one of Pilot’s first formerly incarcerated employees. DeWeaver shared a job opening at the company, which was quickly growing. Pilot’s account managers needed help with bookkeeping and other administrative tasks. Herena read the job description, thought it was too far out of his wheelhouse, and turned down the opportunity. Then he heard from McKellar directly. They emailed back and forth, and she convinced him to interview with Pilot. He got a job on the support team in March 2019. At Pilot, Herena leaned into his personal growth. And while the job didn’t require his photography skills, it gave him the freedom to pursue photography gigs on the side. In the years since joining McKellar’s company, he’s reflected on the fundamental problem he was lucky enough to escape. “There’s a lot of people who had lives before they went to prison and were successful and have skills,” Herena says. “Doctors and lawyers and all in between. And it sucks that when you step into these places, society forgets about that.” McKellar and her colleagues think a lot about this erasure. For them, inclusive hiring—extending to people with criminal records—is both a moral good and a competitive advantage. McKellar believes employing people from diverse backgrounds is not only a way to build a fairer world, it’s also a way to draw on a huge untapped talent pool where others see stigma and risk. Eddie Herena, Photographer, Account Support Specialist at Pilot 54
Her approach is working. When Herena joined Pilot, it was 2 years old and had 50 employees. The company now has thousands of customers across sectors and business types and completes billions of dollars of bookkeeping transactions annually. Still, McKellar wants formerly incarcerated folks reentering the workforce to find job options beyond her personal network, so that the fear that prospective employers won’t look past people’s records to see their talents becomes a thing of the past. Through Pilot and her other endeavors, she’s helping build an ecosystem to support people like Herena in the Bay Area and beyond. ** Pilot is the third startup for founders McKellar, Jeff Arnold, and Waseem Daher. The triad already knew the value of creating a diverse team, and ensuring their commitment to inclusion is reflected throughout the company. As of 2023, the management team is majority women, the engineering team majority people of color, and the overall company 15% Black. This diversity is unique in an industry where, despite some recent progress, the workforce remains predominantly white and male. Pilot’s founders insist on an expansive definition of diversity: They believe the demographics of any company that aims to be rooted in its surrounding community should reflect that community in as many ways possible. This includes returning citizens, who— given imprisonment rates of about 100 to 200 per 100,000 residents in Bay Area counties, according to data from the Prison Policy Initiative—constitute a significant portion of the local population. At Pilot, formerly incarcerated people work in roles ranging from engineering and operations to sales and support. Recruiting formerly incarcerated people is also part of Pilot’s strategy for efficiently building high-performing teams. Studies show diverse teams perform better because of the varied perspectives and experiences they bring to problem-solving, and emerging research indicates people who have spent time in prison are no exception. “Evaluate job candidates based on what they bring to the table today, not who they used to be. Otherwise you are missing out on qualified candidates,” says McKellar, who began to delve into these issues after her first visit to San Quentin early in her career. “Especially in this labor market.”
Eddie Herena, Photographer, Account Support Specialist at Pilot
Felipe Melendez is a case in point. He joined Pilot as a software engineer after serving nearly 13 years, which derailed his early promise as an award-winning engineer in the semiconductor industry. His time in prison helped 56
him develop skills he hadn’t accrued earlier in his career. “In prison we’re all MacGyvers,” says Melendez. “You have to do a lot with very little. It’s an exercise in creative problem-solving. I developed an ability to find solutions, find information, talk to people.” Melendez also thinks there’s a link between the company’s inclusive hiring practices and its success. “Every possible perspective is present within Pilot,” he says. “That’s one of the things that makes them great at solving very difficult challenges, and it creates a really cool culture.” But recruiting isn’t just about assembling a team, it’s about maintaining team cohesion over time. Pilot’s employeeretention rates are higher for returning citizens than their peers without records, and the amount of money it spends on recruiting returning citizens is significantly less. These data points underscore why companies would want to cultivate a sense of belonging among employees, regardless of their background. McKellar also knows that sustaining Pilot’s success— and spurring the company’s hiring practices to catch on elsewhere—is a bigger challenge. There’s a pipeline problem: People returning from prison benefit from holistic support as they develop their skills and seek employment. They should receive the benefits people entering the workforce from, say, college (and the recruiters that vie for them) take for granted. Consequently, for McKellar, building an ecosystem of support has meant looking beyond Pilot. ** In 2020, Rick Wolter co-founded a nonprofit organization called Underdog Devs to help upskill aspiring software engineers from economically disadvantaged backgrounds or who served time. After he was released from prison in 2016, he picked up coding and, after a short stint as an aide at a coding boot camp, began his career as a software developer. Other formerly incarcerated people approached him for employment advice, and he made it his mission to ensure they had access to the skills and connections needed to get jobs in tech. Today Underdog Devs provides pay and training to participants in its flagship Project Underdog program. Wolter had cold-emailed McKellar in 2019, before Underdog Devs was founded, asking how he could contribute to her efforts to support formerly incarcerated people. They failed to connect at the time, but later caught wind of each other’s work via Twitter and linked up. McKellar, who co-created Project Underdog, also invests time as a mentor, meeting weekly 57
Inclusive hir a moral go competitive Eddie Herena, Photographer, Account Support Specialist at Pilot
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with her mentees to assist them with coding assignments, portfolio projects, and interview prep. She has worked with dozens of people, often offering tough love. “Your goal is to get a job, and I will kick your ass if necessary to help get you there. We do frequent, rigorous assessments and give honest feedback so mentees know what they need to do to be competitive in the job market,” she says. This collaboration has benefited all involved: Pilot has hired three Project Underdog graduates, proving that coders from diverse backgrounds—trained outside of the typical channels— can succeed at a venture-backed technology company. The need for helping formerly incarcerated people reintegrate back into their communities and the economy remains great. That’s why, in 2020, McKellar and Simon Liu, then a software engineer at Pilot, founded the Bay Area Freedom Collective (BAFC) as a grassroots support group for returning citizens. Liu served 21 years in prison, beginning when he was a teenager. When he was released at 37, he’d never been employed. He wound up at Pilot after working odd jobs, attending a coding boot camp, and getting personal coaching from McKellar, whom he’d met through a mutual connection at San Quentin. Liu, now 42, reflects on what afforded him this unique opportunity—an opportunity so many of his peers never received. “It was having stable housing, a network of friends, and just never getting discouraged because you have strong mental support,” he says. This is the goal of BAFC. The group assists returning citizens with accessing social services and employment, and pairs members with volunteers for 3 to 6 months. It also owns a house in the Bay Area with room for up to 8 people to live as they transition back into society—a considerable investment, given local housing costs. Both Underdog Devs and BAFC pour resources into serving people who often struggle without support, no matter how talented they are. High recruitment costs are no rarity in tech, but they’re typically targeted at computer science majors, experienced programmers, and wunderkind college dropouts. “I can tell you categorically from the aggregate data I have from Pilot, my time at Dropbox, and other companies that there’s great engineering talent in many, many places,” McKellar says. “And if you actually believe that, then you allocate resources differently. That’s the thing that I’m trying to make happen.”
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UNITE US
Integrating social determinants to improve healthcare outcomes in communities nationwide. 62
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One of the best-kept secrets in healthcare is that nonmedical factors affecting people’s health—such as economic status, education, and environmental surroundings—play a major role in our well-being. Unite Us, a New York City–based software company founded in 2013, exists to address these social determinants of health by predicting care needs, making referrals and enrolling people in services, and paying for those services. The company is facilitating wraparound help for over 18 million people in 40 states with communities including nonprofit organizations, health systems, insurers, and state and local governments. Here is a selection of stories from Unite Us customers and teams from across the country.
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Farmer and Community Farm Director, Pitney Meadows Community Farm (Saratoga Springs, NY)
“Unite Us helps us connect to community members who benefit from everything the farm offers through referrals to and from our community partners. We strive to see our community thrive.”
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Managing Director, Veterans Services of the Carolinas (Asheville, NC)
“ Unite Us allowed us to scale to where we are today and better identify gaps in social services across North Carolina. The company’s technology helps us bring the best resources to the table with datainformed care. We’re improving the overall health of our communities by accurately targeting gaps in specific zip codes.”
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President, Institute for H.O.P.E. (Cleveland, OH)
“We know treating the whole person is critical to our patients’ and community’s overall well-being. We find the Unite Us platform very helpful in connecting our patients with community resources to address the social drivers of health. Building these connections helps our patients live their healthiest lives.”
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Managing Director, Oregon Health Leadership Council (Portland, OR)
“Our work with OHLC members and Unite Us to launch Connect Oregon represents the best of our commitment to promote whole-person care. It’s a critical part of OHLC’s mission to co-create a healthcare system that’s equitable, accessible, high-quality, affordable, and sustainable for all people in Oregon.”
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Executive Director, Tides of Change (Tillamook, OR)
“This is the first community-based referral connector system we’ve seen that will meet our qualifications and ensure survivor safety. Normally, we cannot use other platforms because they could jeopardize the safety of survivors of gender-based violence. Unite Us worked closely with us to ensure their platform works for our population.”
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Director Tribal Affairs, Unite Us (Bethesda, MD)
“This is what Indian Country has been waiting for. Unite Us can help with service bottlenecks for issues like transitional housing, food, and mental health. If you’re on the network and see a nearby organization provides the services someone needs, you can refer them to it right away. The tribes I speak with see many potential applications of the Unite Us platform.”
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“Our vision is to build a world of connected, collaborative communities to improve people’s health and well-being. Ultimately, we need to align multiple sectors around a common goal, align investments with social care and social services, and provide long-term health improvement for our stakeholders.” Daniel Brillman and Taylor Justice, Co-founders & Executives, Unite Us
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Aurora Solar Lighting up the future of renewable energy.
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The “solar coaster” is often used to describe what it’s like being a solar installer, with all the ups and downs. And yet the ride seems to be worthwhile, given one extraordinary number: 2022 was the 6th consecutive year of record growth for residential solar, skyrocketing past 2021 by 40%, according to SEIA. Aurora Solar exists to simultaneously solve this growing consumer demand for reliable, renewable energy by dramatically streamlining installers’ process of designing, selling, and delivering solar projects. Its 3D building models and solar system design, powered by satellite and LiDAR data, make design and installation a smoother experience for both installers and homeowners, saving them time and money. Aurora is creating a future of solar energy for all. With 10 million projects designed and counting, the company is well on its way.
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THE SOLAR LANDSCAPE ( DATA S O U RC E : S E I A )
H OM E OW N E R S
Q1 20 23
77%
54%
OF ALL NEW ELECTRIC CA PAC I T Y A D D E D T O T H E G R I D CA M E F ROM S O L A R
H AV E S O L A R O R A R E INTERESTED I N P U RC H A S I NG I T
I N 2 02 2, T H E S O L A R I N D U S T RY G E N E R AT E D OV E R
$17.2 billion in revenue (C R E D I T : I B I S WO R L D)
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S O L A R I N T H E U N I T E D S TAT E S
Half of U.S. states have now installed 1 GW or more of solar, compared to only 3 a decade ago.
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RESIDENTIAL SOLAR MARKET
In 2022, the residential solar market experienced its 6th consecutive record year with 5.9 GW installed, representing 40% growth over 2021. OV E R T H E L A S T D E CA D E
The cost to install solar has dropped by more than 81
5.9 GW
50%
“Our company w passion to bring so And our drive to h the energy indust push us fo
was born from a olar energy to all. help democratize try is what helped orward.” Chris Hopper, Aurora Co-founder & CEO
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‟ The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
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© 2023 Emerson Collective. All rights reserved. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Photography by: Tom Hegen (Cover) Barbara Kinney Deanne Fitzmaurice Ulysses Ortega Justin J. Wee Illustrations by: Rebecca Clarke
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