The following interview is a conversation we had with Virginia Klausmeier, CEO and Founder of Sylvatex, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: More Than $15 Million Raised to Build a Better Class of Sustainable Materials and Drive the Green Revolution.

 

Virginia Klausmeier
Hey, Bre, thanks for having me. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before begin talking about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background? 

Virginia Klausmeier
Yeah, so I think a few things about me that are probably useful and important. One, I grew up in Asia. I grew up in Bangkok, Thailand, before I moved back to the States. And that really left a pretty big impression on me from seeing sort of the large gaps between how people live in different parts of the world and definitely different parts of that country. Another thing that I think is probably useful about me is that I grew up from a young age, was a very competitive gymnast. So I’ve always had pretty strong, I’d say ambition coaching, but also just kind of like, worked on that muscle a lot on how to be pretty competitive and work towards things that were hard. And then I think a little bit more of how that manifested as I grew up was I was just super curious and quite honestly, good at math and science. 

Virginia Klausmeier
So I focused my attention on more of math and science areas in the more academic setting. And kind of that led me to where I guess I got into my more professional career and today and I. 

Brett
See on your LinkedIn that you did the executive program at Singularity University. What was that like? That’s been on my list for a long time and something I’ve been wanting to do forever. How was that? 

Virginia Klausmeier
Yeah, no, it was great. I mean, I actually met some of the guys a long time ago, I’d say, like, eight years ago, seven, eight years ago. And I challenged them because there was a lot of really good exponential thinking in all these different areas besides kind of clean energy and energy in general. And so they said, hey, come, we’ll fund you to go through the executive program, which was phenomenal. I mean, it was probably one of the best ways to leverage learnings from all these different sectors, from medicine, from economics, from finance to biotech and be able to apply them into other markets with the whole goal of how do you grow or create a business that can grow and make exponential impact? And it literally is like a muscle and an exercise. So it was pretty cool to get that, I’d say, early on in my entrepreneur cycle and also just get exposed to all these things that we learned about that were probably five years out from being more mainstream. 

Virginia Klausmeier
And now I hear about it every day and it’s pretty wild. So I definitely highly recommend it. 

Brett
Nice. That’s awesome. Now let’s talk about just a few things that will help us better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. So first question that we like to ask is what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about that? 

Virginia Klausmeier
So, I mean, CEO is kind of hard. I’d say like, I resonate a lot with underdog stories of, say, the few that came to mind really quick. So Chris Gardner, I’ve been a big fan of his. Just sort of big underdog story of how to overcome and then come to immense wealth and just be a really happy human. I think that’s just like, I constantly follow him. Serena Williams is actually somebody else who I really love and admire. Of course, now she’s adventure, so that makes more know. And I think her sort of story from where she was before to where she is today is just like amazing and phenomenal and definitely I love to use it as my inspirations. 

Brett
Yeah, I just finished the movie. I can’t remember the name right now, the Will Smith movie. And it was such an amazing story. 

Virginia Klausmeier
You know what’s actually funny is that Will Smith is a common thread on both of those movies right. With Serena Williams and then the one where he plays Chris Gardner and is on what’s that movie that he and that’s also with Will Smith. 

Brett
Wow. So it all ties back to Will. 

Virginia Klausmeier
Well, he chooses mean, he also is somebody who I admire. I don’t know if he’s the CEO of anything. Also, I mean, one that I’ve really been loving and see small clips around. Michelle Obama is just phenomenal. I just call it like CEO. I’m sure she’s the CEO of like 5 million things, but yeah, just a very inspirational leader and how she describes learnings and overcoming ambitions and obstacles, et cetera. 

Brett
Yeah, for sure. I like to avoid politics on this podcast, but I have to say that whenever I hear these rumors that she would run for president, that gets me excited. I think she’s such an outstanding leader. 

Virginia Klausmeier
Oh my gosh, I’m going to be so impressed. Being president sounds like a horrible job. A horrible job. I feel like a lot of founding CEOs too, feel similar. It is just like the most wonderful, privileged position, but it is also just so much. 

Brett
Yeah, absolutely. I can’t imagine the pressure that they’re under. It probably makes building a startup feel. 

Virginia Klausmeier
Like a joke when you’re oh, my gosh. 

Brett
Yeah. 

Virginia Klausmeier
I would never want to be president I would be so impressed if the Obamas come back because I imagine they know how hard it is. 

Brett
Absolutely. 

Virginia Klausmeier
Without the politics. Without the politics, of course. They’re just good people. Inspiring. 

Brett
Yeah, 100% agree. Now let’s talk about books. So are there any specific books that have had a major impact on you? And what I always say is these can be like the classic business books, but what we’re really interested in, and I stole this from someone else, is like they call it a Quake book. So it’s a book that really just rocks your worldview and changes how you view the world and think about the world. Do any books like that come to mind for you? 

Virginia Klausmeier
I think the book that is the first top of mind is definitely The Alchemist. So I don’t know if you’ve read the Alchemist longtime story really does a great job of a simple story teaching you about sort of the essential wisdoms of life and heart and all of these paths and how following your dreams and also looking inward and paying attention to your intuition and how it all really magically works out. I have a tradition of reading that book every year, and every year when I read it’s kind of weird because it’s kind of like a new book. I think how it relates to me in my life is different. 

Brett
Yeah, there’s a number of books that I do that with as well. At one point, I was kind of chasing new books, and then I reflected a bit and was like, okay, what books have really had a huge impact on me. And if they’ve had that big of an impact, why don’t I just go back and reread it again? And I always make notes and highlights in the book, and it is fun to see the things that I highlighted and resonated with myself three years ago compared to the things that at that point I skipped over. But today I read it, I’m like, wow, that’s worthy of a highlighter. That’s super interesting. So I like that process. 

Virginia Klausmeier
That’s great. I like that one. Probably I’m not going to names, but I have read a bunch of books about the happiness, advantage, things like that are more around how do you grow and evolve to think and just generally be happier, which creates more of positive feedback loops in all ways in life. 

Brett
Yeah, those are the types of books that we like to hear about. A lot of people come on and they’ll just say, like, Good to great, or The Hard Thing about Hard Things and Undeniably, those are excellent business books, but they’re just obvious. Yes, of course those are great books, and of course they’re helpful for founders, but I like the ones that are really about your perspective. And The Alchemist, we actually just had someone on, I think, two weeks ago, and their company, I think they’d raised like $400 million. It was like an $8 million company. And he said that was his go to book. 

Virginia Klausmeier
That’s their go to book at all. 

Brett
I went and bought it on Amazon and now I have a long flight coming up tomorrow, so I’ll be reading that on the flight and I’m super excited to read it. 

Virginia Klausmeier
No way. Okay, well, definitely send me who said that as their response. One other shout out I’ll definitely give to you is everything Renee Brown is just definitely I digest very well. 

Brett
What are some of her books? I’m not familiar with her. 

Virginia Klausmeier
Was most well known for the power of vulnerability, Ted Talk, but then she’s written out a bunch of books on leading with vulnerability. Definitely all about leaning into discomfort, and just a lot more around how to grow yourself and the more kind of like open you are and vulnerable you are as you as a human is actually the most powerful as you as a know. And I think that’s it’s really incongruent with a lot of professional training, you know, what mean and like, especially kind of being like a Silicon Valley based CEO, a startup. There’s a lot of, I would say, armor that people definitely put on. So I’ve really appreciated a lot of her work and listening in and practicing it there. 

Brett
Nice. That’s one of the joys of doing this podcast. I get so many good ideas for new books to read, so I’ll go down that rabit hole sometime soon. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Now let’s switch gears and let’s talk a bit more about the company. So can you take us back to the early days and let’s talk about the origin story? 

Virginia Klausmeier
Yeah, I think like many companies, we started out of sort of a blend of the intersection of frustration, having some type of unique technical background and then luck or specific situation that kind of was a catalytic event for me. I’d say my background of having a father who was brilliant. He is like double PhD, MD, was an amazing quantity chemist. He just saw the world of chemistry. The world was actually just all chemicals and it was just like formulated in a specific way and it could be improved. Right. So he thought about the world definitely as like systems, big system thinking green chemistry, using all bio based, moving away from petro based and toxic chemicals. And I just grew up that way. It wasn’t probably normal. He had a lot of background and focused on started journey like circular systems and clean energy. And after he passed away, kind of frustrated with seeing the world and how inefficient it was in big organizations like kind of where I was in my late 20s career, working in big industry and then sort of losing my late father, I think was a catalyst event. 

Virginia Klausmeier
It made me really look at some of the work that he had done and I started the company with some of that background that he had developed and more of like looking at energy and big industrial chemical systems. 

Brett
Super interesting. Now, can you tell us a bit more about the products and what problem are your customers paying you to solve? That’s another way that I like to frame that question. 

Virginia Klausmeier
Yeah. Today just kind of give a little bit of foundation. Today the EV energy storage markets are growing like crazy. And really at the heart of those markets are batteries. Batteries at the heart of the clean energy industry. The industry which are I’d say all of our customers are kind of the EV OEMs and battery manufacturers. Batteries need to be lower in cost, they need to be abundant, and they need to be made with a much lower carbon footprint. So we at Sylvatex, we solve all of these pain points for our customers, which for this conversation, right now we’re targeting large EV OEMs, but it definitely is a broader group than that into energy storage and over and beyond. 

Brett
Super interesting. And when you think about market size, how do you begin to say the market size or what’s the total addressable market? Where do you even start with that? Because I imagine that can’t be easy to come up with. 

Virginia Klausmeier
I mean, it’s definitely getting easier. But I think we are targeting and right now we’re targeting making the material that’s the largest bottleneck for industry, which is cathode material. And we’re making these materials in a way that literally is much lower in cost. It requires the lowest amount of capital potentially possible to get up and going. So we’ll make it more abundant and is literally the lowest carbon footprint possible. So our target market is looking at the cathode material for the electric vehicle markets, which is targeted to be about 250,000,000,000 by 2030. So it’s one of the largest growing markets. It’s growing at a rate something 30 plus year after year percent growth. So it’s growing very significantly. 

Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. And I know I introduced you as a renewable nanochemistry platform, which I think I pulled from somewhere on your website, or maybe French Face. Can you explain that? Like I’m five. How do we explain that in basic terms? Just assume that I know nothing about this stuff. How would we explain that in very simple terms? 

Virginia Klausmeier
Completely. Yeah, and I think just for what it’s worth, we should be upgrading that language. But we make industrial chemicals. So we make materials that are going to be used, pretty much touch everything that you look at on daily life in the most efficient, lowest carbon green way possible. So the way that we do that is with using smart chemical systems. And most of the materials that are going to be at the foundation of the energy sector are nanomaterials. And traditionally, these materials are challenging to make. So they take a lot of energy, they require a lot of water. It’s a multistep process. And we kind of went backwards and redesigned them and said, okay, these are important materials to unlock these markets. We’re going to make them in the most efficient way possible. And so we actually applied large industrial thinking and green chemistry thinking into these making, the actual process of making these materials. 

Virginia Klausmeier
So I would say it’s somewhat of a new novel area. It’s not just advanced manufacturing. It’s kind of like future proofing manufacturing. 

Brett
Got it. That makes sense. And what’s it like selling this as you bring this to market? It sounds like complex technology, and it’s not like a little chat bot, widget SaaS tool. Right? It’s heavy tech. It sounds like. So what’s that look like trying to sell this technology to your target customers? 

Virginia Klausmeier
Our target customers are going down to the end markets. We’re a b to B. So we’re selling to large EV, OEMs, cell manufacturers, cathode manufacturers, et cetera. We pretty much go, here’s the basic conversation. Oh, okay. Your market is growing like nuts. You need a lot more of cathode material, is that right? Yes. And you need that material to be lower cost. Yes. You need that material to be made a lot more abundant, a lot lower cost. And it has to be as close to net zero as possible as far as a carbon footprint. Yes, that’s true. Well, we solve all those problems. Great. Sign me up. And then we get into the problem because then we have to actually produce the material. And that’s kind of the struggle we’re at right now, which is our supply. It’s just a supply game. So we now have to grow rapidly, fast, because there’s so much movement in the marketplace. 

Virginia Klausmeier
Right. There’s not a single one of those conversations with anyone that you talk to that does not need better, cheaper, lower carbon battery materials. It’s like people. So then the focus is then focus. Right. So we’re targeting domestic for obvious reasons. We’re proximity located well, but also the US market and the North American market is growing very rapidly. And there’s a big push to domestic supply and existing techniques. You can’t actually get to the end goals at all with existing techniques. Right. So it’s actually impossible. So we offer a very important, viable, but also best in class solution. 

Brett
Got it. Makes a lot of sense. And what’s that competitive landscape look like today for you? 

Virginia Klausmeier
For one, I think that we started somewhat early ahead of the game, like in 2019 on targeting this market mostly because we definitely saw the swing for the fence. If the EV and energy storage market started to take off then these materials were going to be needed in abundance. So manufacturing of them was going to have to be much more efficient. Right. So that was kind of our thesis a while ago and now you kind of fast forward post COVID and there’s a lot of build back better that occurred where a lot of major markets are focused on the EV and energy storage revolution. So no longer do we have to say hey, this is coming, we support that. Now everyone says oh, it’s here. The biggest bottleneck is for sure the manufacturing of the materials for the batteries and doing that domestically for energy security purposes. 

Virginia Klausmeier
Right. So there’s a lot of I know we don’t get political but bipartisan support for this industry to really thrive, which I think has been the breakthrough, quite honestly. So for us that was significant and getting into where is kind of first mover advantage as far as being in the background, working on this early on before it was really a true broader market problem. Now you’re starting to see in mainstream media a lot of conversation about batteries, battery supply chains, domestic supply chains, making these materials, making them more efficient, recycling. All this is literally covered page news all the time. So our biggest competitive, I’d say advantage is that we’ve been focusing on how to do it in the most cost effective way and also carbon light way and I don’t want to say luckily, but by design those requirements I think are coming. Bubbling up to the top is the most important. 

Brett
And as you’ve been developing this technology, what would you say has been the greatest challenge you’ve faced so far and how do you overcome that challenge? 

Virginia Klausmeier
Yeah, I mean for us the greatest challenge so far has been scaling at the rate that’s been needed. I mean, quite honestly, were on stealth, somewhat on stealth mode until fall last year. So we worked with very targeted collaborative partners and our supply wasn’t that much that significant. But now the demand is so high because of a Mildred effects. I mean one, we’ve come up with our messaging, we just have a lot of inbound interest. But also the markets are growing very rapidly too because of a lot of political and financial incentives. All the roads are kind of leading to these types of solutions. So scale right now is our biggest challenge, how to make more of the right stuff faster in a way that is going to be healthy for us as an organization and also capital efficient and also derisking the technology and scaling as fast as possible. 

Virginia Klausmeier
So sort of all of those elements that go into scale are what we’re currently struggling with. 

Brett
And what would you say excites you most about the work you get to do every day. 

Virginia Klausmeier
We can create huge amounts like gigawatt hours of substantial change. We can reduce the amount of carbon from this industry as it evolves in such a positive way. I think that is really the foundation of everything that excites us and who we work with. And that’s one element I’d say the other element that I don’t want to say I’m having increasing interest in, but one is as a Founder that’s developing. Everyone seeks out to having a huge multibillion dollar business, right, and having big exits, et cetera. But I think one of the things that I’ve gotten really passionate about along the way is bringing the right people in because they are working for Sylvatex and they’re making a chunk of equity and that equity should be so much more valuable over time than their salary, right? And that’s really exciting. So it’s like, who do we want to bring in and plant into our organization that’s of course going to make us thrive and accelerate, but also make them incredibly wealthy and being thoughtful about that choice? 

Virginia Klausmeier
Who do we want to be the next first players of the Facebook, right? Who are those people that are going to have lots more wealth that then is going to be able to be ripples of effects throughout the economy in the next sort of decade to come. And that’s exciting to me as I’m hiring and as I’m thinking about how to bring on capital and think about our growth models and exit opportunities, et cetera. 

Brett
Amazing. And last question here for you. Let’s zoom out into the future. So let’s say three to five years from today. What is the company going to look like? 

Virginia Klausmeier
We are thinking about this a lot right now, but we will be at commercial scale. We’ll be supplying cathode material that’s likely going to come from domestic recycled supply chains. And we’re going to be supplying cathode material to probably one of the most progressive, successful domestic electric vehicle, automotive OEMs. And our company will be more than 50 plus people directly with your price, a lot more indirect. And we’re going to be looking at multiple exit opportunities. I mean, that is definitely where we’re positioning ourselves to be in a very healthy, exciting way. 

Brett
Amazing. I love it. We are up on time. I’d love to keep you here and keep asking you a bunch more questions, but we’ll have to save that for round two. Now, before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build and execute on this vision, where should they go? 

Virginia Klausmeier
Yeah. Definitely go to Sylvatex.com. Also can find me on LinkedIn. Virginia Klausmeyer on LinkedIn or Sylvatex on LinkedIn. Definitely follow us on both. Trying to be a bit more proactive on those platforms and then hoping to get more into the digital age in Twitter and things like that. As we grow. 

Brett
Amazing. I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story and talk about everything that you’re building. This has been a super fun conversation and I’ve learned a lot and you’ve got me very excited, so can’t wait to have you back on. 

Virginia Klausmeier
Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. Have a good day. 

Brett
Yeah, you too. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.