Ep. 179 - From Oil Wells to Oak Trees: Ben Dell’s Half-Billion-Dollar Pivot to Carbon Offsetting
SHOW NOTES
What if planting trees could be not just good for the planet, but also a profitable business?
In this episode, I’m talking with Ben Dell, the founder and CEO of Chestnut Carbon — a company that’s raised nearly $400 million, including $250 million of that in 2025, to turn farmland back into thriving native forests across the United States. And he’s already forging major carbon removal deals with the likes of Microsoft and Mercedes F1.
Ben’s journey is a fascinating one: he began his career in oil and gas private equity, helping fossil-fuel companies optimize their operations. But during the pandemic, he had what you might call a carbon epiphany. Seeing how few trustworthy carbon-removal projects existed, he decided to create his own — one that would make measurable, verifiable, and permanent carbon storage not just possible, but investable.
In our conversation, Ben explains why carbon is a commodity, and how to prove you’ve really stored it. He talks about how Chestnut buys up marginal cattle-grazed land and restores it into biodiverse forests — with already more than 17 million trees planted. And he goes over why he proudly calls Chestnut “conservation for profit” — a business model that needs no subsidies, just land, good science, and a lot of patience.
Ben also talks about the challenges of scaling a nature-based startup, the importance of grit over glamour, and why he believes restoring forests can be one of America’s most investable climate solutions.
So if you’ve ever wondered how capitalism might actually reverse deforestation — not cause it — this episode will give you a hopeful, grounded look at what that future could look like.
DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE
Ben is a managing partner at Kimmeridge.
Business Insider profile and a Wall Street Journal profile on Ben’s work.
Our past episode with author Mike Grunwald.
You can see Chestnut’s patent, “Systems and methods for forest surveying,” here.
Chestnut’s offtake partnership with Microsoft and a similar agreement with Mercedes F1.
Ben recommends podcasts such as Lex Fridman’s and Invest Like the Best.
MORE ABOUT BEN DELL
Ben Dell is a Managing Partner of Kimmeridge and oversees investment activity across the firm. He is closely involved in the screening of new geological opportunities and in the negotiation and execution of investment strategies.
Prior to founding Kimmeridge, Mr. Dell was a Senior Equity Research Analyst for Oil and Gas Exploration and Production (E&P) at Sanford C. Bernstein, where he was ranked first three times in the Institutional Investor Research Survey for coverage of E&Ps. Mr. Dell was also ranked for Natural Gas and for Oil Services and Equipment coverage. Mr. Dell joined Sanford C. Bernstein in 2003. Prior to joining Bernstein, Mr. Dell was employed at British Petroleum (BP) in its M&A and finance group. Before moving into the finance field, Mr. Dell also held positions as an exploration geologist and geophysicist across several of BP’s regional business units.
Mr. Dell is currently CEO of Chestnut Carbon, a nature-based carbon removal developer and is on the Board of Caturus HoldCo, LLC., a large private natural gas producer in South Texas. He previously held positions as Chairman of the Board and interim CEO of Civitas Resources, Inc. (“Civitas”), a company that formed from the merger of Extraction Oil & Gas, Inc. and Bonanza Creek Energy, Inc. Mr. Dell earned an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree in Earth Sciences from St. Peter’s College, Oxford.
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome friend to episode 179 of the Business for Good podcast. Have you heard that investors are no longer interested in climate? Well, today's episode may just change your mind. What if planting trees could be not just good for the planet, but also a profitable business? In this episode, I'm talking with Ben Dell, the founder and CEO of Chestnut Carbon, a company that's raised nearly $400 million, including $250 million of that in 2025 alone.
They're turning farmland back into thriving native forests across the United States. And he's already forging major carbon removal deals with the likes of Microsoft and Mercedes F1. Ben's journey is a fascinating one. He began his career in oil and gas of all things. He was in private equity, helping fossil fuel companies optimize their operations. But during the pandemic, he had what you might call a carbon epiphany. Seeing how few trustworthy carbon removal projects existed, Ben decided to create his own.
One that would make measurable, verifiable and permanent carbon storage not just possible, but investable. In our conversation, Ben explains why carbon is a commodity and how to prove that you've really stored it. He talks about how Chestnut buys up marginal cattle grazed land and restores it to biodiverse forests with already more than 17 million trees planted. And he goes over why he proudly calls Chestnut conservation for profit, a business model that needs no subsidies, just land, good science and a lot of patience.
Ben also talks about the challenges of scaling a nature-based startup, the importance of grit over glamour, and why he believes restoring forest can be one of America's most investable climate solutions. So, if you've ever wondered how capitalism might actually reverse deforestation, not cause it, this episode will give you a hopeful, grounded look at what the future could look like.
Paul Shapiro (02:08)
Ben, welcome to the Business for Good podcast.
Ben Dell (02:10)
Thanks Paul, appreciate you having me on.
Paul Shapiro (02:13)
Hey, great to be with you. You guys have, in what I would say, defied the odds, right? You raised a lot of money in 2025 for carbon offsetting at a time when it hasn't been as popular as it was in the past. So first, congratulations on your big raise.
Ben Dell (02:30)
Thank you, I appreciate that.
Paul Shapiro (02:32)
I want to get into that raise and how it went because raising a quarter billion dollars of funding is it for carbon offsetting, let alone in 2025 is a major feat. But first, I just want to ask you, Ben, how this happened for you because you started your career in oil and gas and private equity. What motivated you to pivot into nature-based carbon removal with Chestnut Carbon? Like what led for you to go from oil and gas to planting trees?
Ben Dell (02:59)
Sure. Yeah, I mean, the story behind that is we actually made an investment originally at the beginning of COVID in an oil and gas company out of Colorado. It's called Extraction, arguably one of the worst named oil and gas companies ever. It is.
Paul Shapiro (03:13)
Yeah, yeah, it's like they're trying to fulfill the parody. That's right. Okay. Yeah,
if only they called it dirty extraction, that might be better.
Ben Dell (03:21)
They weren't far off. But if you know, the Colorado market, essentially a lot of those operations are around the city of Denver and up towards Boulder. And there'd been a lot of pressure on oil and gas activity in Colorado associated with that. We saw an opportunity to come into that company, take control of it. And really our view is that we could set a standard for the industry. We wanted to create the first net zero EMP.
on scope 1 and scope 2 emissions. We wanted to introduce 24-hour.
Paul Shapiro (03:50)
Sorry, man, define EMP for those who are not initiated.
Ben Dell (03:53)
⁓ expiration and production company. so we wanted to create the first EMP that was net zero on scope one and scope two. We wanted to put in place 24 hour mission monitoring. We wanted to work with the community, look at communities, solar converting the trucking fleet over to EVs, bringing in electric rigs. We really wanted to set a standard and sort of walk the walk, talk the talk. When we went in there,
Paul Shapiro (03:56)
Exploration of product? All right, got it.
Ben Dell (04:21)
We looked at the cost of carbon abatement. We looked at all the opportunities to reduce the company's footprint from really 170, sorry, 1.7 million tons a year. We saw a pathway to bring it down to 700,000 tons. But when we looked at the really hard to obey areas, we looked to the carbon markets and wanted to buy carbon credits. And essentially what we saw is that the market was limited in terms of high quality carbon removal credits.
And I think we weren't alone in that position. I think a lot of public companies struggle with this idea, which is they want to offset their footprint with removal credits, especially things that they can't offset. And when they look in the market, there's just a lack of credits out there by reputable operators that they can trust.
Paul Shapiro (05:11)
Yeah, that has been this perennial problem, right, with these types of projects is basically you don't really know if you're offsetting carbon and there's been a lot of accusations about greenwashing in this space. Why did you think that you could do something different?
Ben Dell (05:27)
Yeah, that's a great question. And honestly, we could spend an hour on this conversation. mean, having come through a geology degree and having spent a lot of my time in the sciences and in the commodity markets, one of the things I point out is that, you know, carbon is a commodity. And if you are paying me to remove carbon, I have to show you that I can store it, that I can count it, and that it is there in perpetuity.
You wouldn't pay anyone for a storage facility without knowing that it existed and that you could fill it up. And that's essentially what a carbon removal credit is. It's molecular accounting for the removal of that carbon. And when you think about that, you can either put that underground, you could put it in a storage tank, it would be expensive, above ground, or in our view, you can put it in a tree. But when you do these things, you need to know that the facility is there.
And then it's storing that molecule carbon in perpetuity. The market has got somewhat confused about having the removal market, which is what I would argue I've just described and the avoidance market. The avoidance market is one where it says this would have happened if you hadn't done this. This tree would have been cut down if you didn't pay me not to cut it down. That to me is a very different market. And I think ultimately what you're going to see here is the two markets have to separate.
to really get the quality improvements you want.
Paul Shapiro (06:58)
Mm-hmm. okay. Yeah, so you're making an excellent point just as a reminder, know, a tree is basically a pillar of carbon, right? That's what the tree is. It's just stored carbon in the form of wood. So you're talking about the difference between preventing deforestation, which of course is a noble goal but hard to measure, and actually reforesting land, right? So you guys are taking land that doesn't have trees and putting them on there, right? Okay.
Ben Dell (07:25)
Yep. Yeah.
Paul Shapiro (07:26)
So what type of land is this? Where are you finding land? Do you have to purchase the land? How do you actually accomplish that mission?
Ben Dell (07:34)
Yeah, so when we started this business, one of the first things we said is we wanted to make sure our projects were bulletproof, so to speak. We wanted it be the highest quality. We wanted it to be authentic. We wanted it to be verified. We wanted our customer base to know that what we were doing, you could trust in. And the core component of that is you have to buy the land. can't lease the land. You can't have fractional ownership. You know, we wanted to own the land. We wanted to know what was going to happen on that property.
The majority of the land we buy is what we would refer to as non-performing farmland. A vast majority of time that's cattle, where the pasture's been used for cattle grazing for a long period of time. Nutrients have been drained from that land. They wouldn't sustain any other crop. And essentially we're taking those properties, acquiring them, and restoring them to biodiverse forests with anywhere between 15 and 30 different species of hardwood and softwood.
Paul Shapiro (08:31)
Yeah, you know, it's funny you mention this because we recently had a guest on the show, Mike Grunwald, who's the author of a book called We're Eating the Earth, and he makes the point that right now, a lot of the times when people look at pasture land, they think, ⁓ that is so beautiful. That's nature. But that's not nature. That is where a forest once stood that was deforested to make pasture land for cattle. And what you're doing by actually reforesting that land, presumably after centuries after it was deforested, presumably, is returning it to what would be a natural state.
Ben Dell (09:00)
Yeah, I mean, the vast majority of the US was native forest originally and has been converted into farmland. on a very small scale, what we're doing is converting that land back.
Paul Shapiro (09:11)
Yes, and so you raise an interesting question. You said it's like 30 species, right? So you're not monocropping trees here. You're creating a biodiverse environment. How do you ensure, as you said, that the storage unit stays filled, right? So if you own this land, presumably nobody can come in and log the land. Is the land used for anything? Like are people, like are hunters allowed to come kill animals on the land? Like what is going on there aside from just a forest? Is there anything happening at all in terms of human activity?
Ben Dell (09:39)
Yeah, so if you look at how our projects are built and they're registered under gold standard, which we would argue is one of the highest quality exchanges, they do have third party audit and verification just to put that in context. We'll take that property. We've done a very large amount of data analytics around what native species would be, what will grow best from a hardwood, softwood to your point. These are not monocultures, what was originally there.
We'll restore these properties back. always say they look like conservation projects. And ultimately we will manage the property in its early days, know, thin the property necessarily for good forest health. So we want a healthy forest. But ultimately there's no commercial logging on those properties. So the forest is left to grow in a natural state. We do make the properties ⁓ available for hunting, fishing, recreational use.
I think that's actually one of the biggest benefits for the communities that are out there. Not only the engagement and the employment that we have amongst the local communities, but that our associated neighbors actually get to use these properties. I was telling a story only very recently. I was sitting at home on a Sunday and I got a phone call on my cell phone from a landowner in Mississippi who asked me if I bought the property next door because he had had a 25 year hunting lease and his family had been maintaining the property.
year after year for 25 years. I one of things we see is the neighbors, the local communities, are some of the best stewards of these properties to make sure they are being preserved in the state that you want them preserved.
Paul Shapiro (11:07)
Okay.
Okay, I want to come back to this point in a bit, Ben, about how you preserve this land and make sure that the trees remain standing, but I just want go back to something you mentioned. You spoke earlier.
about carbon as a commodity, right? It has to be measurable and verifiable. And this has been one of the issues that's plagued these carbon offset programs for some time. in practice, Ben, like what have been some of the biggest operational hurdles in making that happen for you and actually measuring it to make sure that you can sell carbon offset credits that are somehow tied to some metric that is provable?
Ben Dell (11:43)
Yeah, I mean, the first thing I'd point out is we have a patented technology, essentially a handheld device that can go back on a phone that does visual imaging of these properties on the ground. It allows you to run the data analytics to know what the carbon stock is in the property by species. So we actually have a very large data analytics platform sitting behind what we do, where we can evaluate almost any parcel in the US within about 15 minutes for what
its carbon yield could be, what the existing yield is, what the growth could be, and then projecting that out by species so that you could select which tree species you want to plant or change the mix shift and look at the impact on that. The second thing, as I said, these are all registered on exchanges. They are voluntary exchanges like old standard, but they do have third party audits and verifications. So we do our own measurement systems, but you also have third party people coming in and auditing the land.
When I talk to investors, I always sort of give this framework, which is if I had a parcel of land and it had nothing on it and I filled a cube up that sat on the land with water, I'd know how much mass is in the tree stock and the answer would be zero. And if I came back 50 years later and filled that cube with water where there's a whole bunch of trees in it, I would know the exact mass of the carbon stock in that cube of water.
The reality is, if you think about a single tree, people make the point, well, a tree can die. But when you talk about having the sort of position we have, which is now 60,000 acres, 31,000 acres planted, 70 different parcels, 17 million trees. As that unit grows in 20 years and 30 years, one tree may die, one tree may grow, but the overall stock.
of that storage mechanism is plus or minus 0.01 percent. And look, the measurement of that is something that's got to be refined. But the reality is, you know that carbon stock exists. You know it's going to be there in perpetuity because we own the land. And ultimately, that's what we're about, which is delivering a high-quality verifiable credit.
Paul Shapiro (13:34)
Hmm.
You can.
So you mentioned that you own 60,000 acres, 31,000 of which are now planted with trees. I presume the other 29,000 are set to be planted. that the... Okay.
Ben Dell (13:59)
In the process, you
asked the question, one of the biggest challenges is seedling, sapling supplies. We work with lot of nurseries, particularly on the hardwood side. It's hard to get hardwood seedlings and saplings, ⁓ but we have planting windows and have to hit those.
Paul Shapiro (14:12)
Huh, interesting. Well,
million trees already planted there. That's a lot of trees. I feel like when I plant a tree in my backyard, like I'm some great environmental hero, but 17 million trees, you know, that's pretty good.
Ben Dell (14:28)
Yeah, I think we've got to be outside of the some of the big forestry businesses, probably one of the biggest acquirer of seedlings and saplings. think I may get the number wrong, but I think we've lined up nearly a third of all the seedlings and saplings in the southeast in the hardwood species.
Paul Shapiro (14:36)
Yeah.
Wow, that's pretty amazing. Okay, what happens if these forests burn? We have forest fires all the time right now, not only in the US but around the world. So if I'm one of your customers and I've paid you to offset my carbon and one of the chestnut forests actually goes up in flames, what happens?
Ben Dell (15:01)
Yeah, it's a great question as I'm sure you imagine, not one I haven't been asked before. I'll take a couple of points. First of all, there's 70 different parcels of land within our 31,000 acres. So as this business grows, the reality is you're not having a forest fire that's going through your entire portfolio of properties. Second thing I'd point out is the majority of our properties are in the Southeast. So we try to avoid, you know, fire prone areas.
But if you think about a scenario where you have a hundred properties and you lose one, you might lose 1 % of the stock. When you look at the gold standard requirements, 20 % of our credits go into a buffer pool automatically within gold standard. Then within that, we sell the client 70 % of the remaining credits. So what we're really...
delivering to clients is a little bit over 50 % of the total carbon credit pool. 20 % sits in a buffer for events like the ones you were talking about. But ultimately, we've seen very little fire risk in our properties today. We have a large portfolio and as that portfolio grows, the actual risk of that impact decreases significantly and easily covered by the buffer pool.
Paul Shapiro (16:16)
Yeah.
Interesting. Okay. Yeah, I didn't realize there was a buffer pool there. So let's then get into your customers, So it seems like Microsoft is your marquee offtake, right? It looks like there's... Is that right or no?
Ben Dell (16:32)
Microsoft,
but also Mercedes F1, which I think is on the cooler side of the spectrum for many people than Microsoft. Microsoft are our biggest customer.
Paul Shapiro (16:36)
Okay.
Okay, yeah. So what I read is like seven million metric tons of US-based carbon removal credits over 25 years that they have an offtake with you on. That's a pretty big deal, right? So how did you negotiate that? you know, for if there are other folks who are looking to negotiate off takes for their own startups, like what advice given that you've just done this massive quarter century offtake agreement with Microsoft and presumably a similar one with Mercedes F1, you know, how are you doing this?
Ben Dell (16:51)
Yes.
Yeah, I would say it's not easy. It takes time. Perseverance and grit would be two of the best descriptions I have. You know, from my perspective, the starting point was we wanted to go out with the highest quality project, right? And I think that helps, right? One of the things I say a lot of times is try and remove all the reasons someone can say no, as much as sort of creating the reasons for why they can say yes. So...
We went out to make that bulletproof project. originally went into, think Microsoft had an RFP that we completed. So we were requesting people to put in proposals for carbon removal. Interestingly, our project didn't fit the framework of that proposal until. So we took the proposal, we changed it and submitted our own proposal. And then we did. And then ultimately we spent time with Microsoft walking them through what we were doing.
Paul Shapiro (17:55)
You rewrote the RFP.
Ben Dell (18:02)
showing why it was really an institutional project that you could trust that we were going to deliver. Because to your point, this is a 25 year commitment. You want to know that the counterpart of you're working with is going to be in existence and that they're going to want to their delivery schedules.
Paul Shapiro (18:18)
Right, so you guys are a startup that was founded three years ago. Most startups, of course, fail. Probably nine out of 10 fail. Why does Microsoft think that Chestnut is going to be around 25 years from now?
Ben Dell (18:30)
Yeah, I mean, it is a startup, but it's within the overall Kimmeridge private equity platform. I'm obviously one of the founders of Kimmeridge and I sit as the CEO of Chestnut Carbon. And I sit there because it is critically important to what we're doing and our reputation and our brand and what we think we can build. So to a certain extent, you know, it's a startup in an institutional world.
And that's, that certainly gave us a leg up versus some of the competition you've seen in this space.
Paul Shapiro (18:55)
Okay.
Understood. the backing of Kimmeridge basically gave them some ⁓ safeguard feeling like, you guys are not going to let this thing go under essentially.
Ben Dell (19:10)
Yeah, and we have a significant amount of our own personal capital tied up in it. I one of the things is we have very strong alignment and interests along with our partners.
Paul Shapiro (19:14)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, okay, interesting. All right, so you guys aim, Ben, to remove about 100 million tons of carbon over the lifetime of the projects, reportedly. That's the equivalent of removing about 22 million cars from roads each year, right? So 22 million cars produce about 100 million tons of carbon. So what you're looking to do is to take essentially offsetting 22 million cars annually. It's, course, early days for Chestnut right now, but how close are you to that goal? Are you?
5 % of the way, 10 % of the way, like if that's your goal, 100 million tons of carbon, where are you now?
Ben Dell (19:52)
Yeah, so just to give you some broad brush numbers on a single acre, we would imagine that on an annualized basis, that acre will absorb somewhere around five tons a year. And obviously, depending on whether it's hardwood, softwood, species mix, growth rates and locations, yeah, that will occur for nearly 50 years. So when you look at an individual acre, it'll consume around 250 tons.
over the lifetime of that property. So, you know, to get to your hundred million tons number.
Paul Shapiro (20:27)
Not mine, I think yours, but yes, that's right. I'm with you. I'm with you.
Ben Dell (20:31)
Yeah, we'd like to have nearly 250,000 acres that are being put into this program. Obviously, we're 60,000 acres into that. We're not all the way. We had a lot of ambitions to how to continue to build that out and the number of customers that are looking at the space with us. But look, it's an ambition and I think it's a realistic ambition that we can actually go out and execute that.
Paul Shapiro (20:56)
The 250,000 acres, will they all be in the US?
Ben Dell (20:59)
Yes, I mean, today we've done everything in the US. We have a lot of clients who have emissions in the US and obviously there's a desire to keep these projects in country. We're obviously watching what's happening in some of these emerging markets like Brazil, but you do that comes along with property risk. Do you know that property is going to be there in a hundred years? I think in the US you obviously have a degree, a higher degree of certainty of that if you're doing it in OECD countries.
Paul Shapiro (21:28)
Okay.
If you look at the political climate today, it's radically different from three years ago. Three years ago, climate was a big focus for a lot of people. Today, much less so, right? How has the current political climate been made these type of corporate carbon offsetting projects maybe less attractive to your prospective buyers? Is there as much interest as there was before? We talked earlier about the concern about greenwashing and how measurable these offsets really are. In your case, you're saying that is resolved because of your patented technology.
technology. The question is though, is there as much of a demand to offset carbon at all now? These are voluntary programs. There's no legal requirements for the most part for these companies to do it. Have you seen any change in demand in the last year or two?
Ben Dell (22:11)
No, it's interesting. I actually would tell you that we haven't really seen a huge shift in the corporate engagement level. You know, I think how vocal people are about that and how much they're touting it from a media and a PR standpoint has obviously shifted. I think that's part about sort of not putting yourself in the crosshairs and, you know, not really setting yourself up. I think where you were rewarded three years ago, now you're getting punished and
corporations are trying to live within these different frameworks. What I tell people about our business is our business requires no tax subsidies. It requires no government subsidies. It was not a beneficiary at the IRA. It is a standalone, standalone economic project. And we're unashamed about the fact that we do conservation for profit. And as I point out, if we can do it profitably, then we'll accelerate what we're doing. So.
Paul Shapiro (23:07)
Mm-hmm.
Ben Dell (23:08)
You know, I think we've built a product that kind of doesn't really attract a lot of negative attention because we're restoring land for the communities that they live in. We have an arms length transaction with an off taker who's willing to pay us for what we do. We don't require the government to help us out in any way to get it done. And these are verifiable high quality projects that corporations can stand behind. look, I the market for us hasn't changed. I think if you take the market for some of the more questionable
carbon removal techniques that require large government subsidies, that clearly has changed.
Paul Shapiro (23:43)
Okay, and are there jobs created by these? So obviously there are jobs in planting the forest, but after they're planted you mentioned auditors, are there, you know, anybody who's actually, you know, getting a permanent job in this forest from these programs?
Ben Dell (23:57)
Yeah, there is. mean, not only are we providing permanent jobs because we're quite frankly, permanently planting trees, but we're also managing those properties on a go-forward basis. I'd love to tell you we can buy a property, plant it up and leave it alone and nobody goes on that property or does anything on the property. The real world's not quite like that. So we do require ongoing property management. We have a large team of foresters ourselves. We're obviously monitoring these projects.
Paul Shapiro (24:19)
Mm-hmm.
Ben Dell (24:24)
So there's both local community investment and also expanding the Chestnut team.
Paul Shapiro (24:30)
Okay, all right, cool. Well, that's encouraging to hear, So let me ask you, you've done a lot in your life. You have a scientific background, have the PE background, you're doing this startup now. The company has raised, I think about $400 million in the last few years in total. First, how much more do you need to raise before the company can become profitable? And then second, I want to ask you, where do you see the future?
Going is it gonna stop at a quarter million acres? How will you see it? So right now you guys are you know raised a ton of money Do you need more is the plan to become profitable on your series B or will there be a chestnut series C?
Ben Dell (25:13)
Yeah,
so if you think about our business, from the time we buy the land and plant the trees, it's usually five years before we start generating revenue. So there's a big trough that you have to get through. Fortunately, we're three years through that trough. So in 2027, that first revenue generation will be coming off our forests. Obviously, the more land we buy, the more money we have to raise. As a rough rule of thumb, we're buying land at three or $4,000 an acre. So if we need another 100,000 acres, we need another
three or $400 million. Ultimately, on an ongoing basis, outside of buying new land, we will be cash positive going into 27. I think this is just my personal belief that this is a business ideally suited for the public markets because I think there is an investor out there and a retail investor out there that wants to invest in a business that is doing good, that is restoring properties.
that is conservation for profit. The ability to invest in a business that can be profitable, but also restoring native forests in the US, to me seems like a pretty rewarding business. Now I'm in it and I've enjoyed being in it and I found it very rewarding. So I hopefully would like to take that out to the public market at some point in time. But look, the amount of capital we're gonna need is gonna be driven by our growth rates and...
more successful we are, the more capital, the more land we can buy, the more forest we can restore, and the more carbon we can ultimately remove.
Paul Shapiro (26:43)
Yeah, so free cash flow is not going to fund future purchases of the land, at least for the foreseeable future.
Ben Dell (26:48)
Not in the near term, just because the scale at the land operation is so big.
Paul Shapiro (26:53)
Okay, Ben, you've seen a lot, you've done a lot in your career. What resources have been useful for you? If somebody's sitting there thinking, wow, this guy Ben has really done some cool things. I really appreciate everything he just said doing a business that's making money by actually helping to avert the worst effects of climate change. What resources might you recommend that they should check out?
Ben Dell (27:11)
Yeah. So the ongoing joke in this office is that I don't read any books. I was going to say, fortunately, technology has helped me out in the last few years and I spend more time on podcasts. Lex Friedman I love listening to just in terms of the educational side of getting into areas that I really don't understand. There's a podcast, Investlight the best.
Paul Shapiro (27:17)
Well, could be a podcast, speeches, anything.
Ben Dell (27:37)
which I think is very interesting to listen to major leaders talk about how they deploy capital. I've been very fortunate that one of my investors was Sequoia and I've had the benefit of being at some of their events and learning how they think about venture and startup. So those would be the big three for me, but ultimately when I think about starting up businesses and we've done a few now, look, I think there's a lot of very smart people out in the world.
There's a lot of smart people can show you a vision, but startup businesses are never a straight line and grit and perseverance are critical in the execution.
Paul Shapiro (28:13)
Yeah, for sure. I can't tell you how many startups I've seen who seem to have great ideas, you know having a great idea is not enough, right? I could have had an idea to have a supercomputer in your pocket. It doesn't mean I invented the iPhone, right? You know actually actually making it a lot different. Speaking of great ideas, Ben, finally if there's somebody out there listening who wants to start their own company and thinking I want to do something that's going to do something good in the world.
What does Bendel think that should exist which either doesn't yet exist or nobody's done it yet well enough that you think somebody should go start this company?
Ben Dell (28:47)
There's two things that have always amazed me is number one, there should be a land title bank in the US. When you think about it, the amount of times people run title on land in the US is incredible to me. A lot of these title records sit in microfilm in different county records. And the reality is there should be a single source point that you could go and pull that data from.
Paul Shapiro (28:54)
you
Ben Dell (29:11)
⁓ The second one to me is about solving the power situation in the US. There is a massive amount of wasted power globally because of the failure to integrate systems, the failure to optimize systems, whether it's from the home and the combination of your home heating, your geothermal, your solar, putting that against battery and regulating and optimizing it, or whether it's on a large scale grid basis. Those both seems like
seem like massive opportunities to me.
Paul Shapiro (29:42)
Okay, that's pretty interesting. I never thought about a land title bank and it's why you mentioned microfilm. I am old enough to, when I was a school child, to have used microfiche, which today the people I work with, literally never even heard of microfiche. But I remember microfiche and it makes me sad to think that there are still records being kept only on microfiche. That's pretty outrageous. So hopefully somebody will take you up and try to use, this is a job for AI to take all these microfiches and...
turn them into some more of a usable database for us here. But for now, Ben, I want to say thanks so much. That's great. 17 million trees planted. Hopefully, there will be many tens and hundreds of millions of trees more that you're going to plant. So I'll be rooting for your success. And congratulations not only on your fundraising success, but also on creating this new company that's already doing a lot of good.
Ben Dell (30:29)
Thank very much, appreciate the time.