What do you do when you're a venture capitalist who can't stop talking about carbon removal at every meeting? You quit and start a carbon removal company, obviously. Three days later you meet the person who's been quietly running one of the largest carbon removal operations nobody's ever heard of. And then you build a company that just signed a nearly 5 million ton deal with Microsoft. That's... a lot of tons.

Today's guest is Julia Reichelstein, the co-founder and CEO of Vaulted Deep. They take contaminated organic waste—the stuff nobody else wants, the sludgy, PFAS-laden, moisture-intensive material that's going to landfills or getting spread on land—and they pump it thousands of feet underground where it stays forever. They don't compete for nice clean biomass. They take the actual waste, and they get paid to take it. That's a business model I can get behind.

I wanted to talk to Julia because her origin story is unusual. She didn't start with a technology and try to commercialize it. She came from venture capital, from international development in Kenya and Ethiopia, from a place of asking "what actually scales?" And when she found deep well disposal through her now co-founder Omar, she recognized immediately that this was both great waste management and great carbon removal—and that the combination was the thing.

But this episode went somewhere I didn't expect. We got into intuition and gut decisions, into what it means to lead a company from a spiritual place without losing business rigor, into "front of brain" versus "back of brain" and why Julia's trail runs keep getting longer the more successful Vaulted gets. I brought up the question of whether CEOs who founded their companies can survive the transition to scaling them, and Julia gave one of the best answers I've heard: "What does the company need me to be?" Not "how do I shape the company around my strengths"—the other direction entirely.

We also talked about the mechanics of spinning a company out of an existing one, why there aren't many venture-backed spinoffs (and why that should have told her something), and what it actually looks like to go from two trucks a week to fifty trucks a day.

This Episode's Sponsors

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Listen to the RCC episode with Lev Gantly about the history and current status of CORSIA⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Resources

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