Ep. 191 - Coral Reefs Are Dying. Can Clay Castles Save Them?
SHOW NOTES
If you’ve listened to this show for some time, you know that I’m usually bullish on geoengineering to help protect the environment. Essentially humanity’s been running an uncontrolled geoengineering experiment for millennia since we started deforesting and warming up the planet. Why not actually use our intelligence to reverse some of the damage we’ve already caused?
Many geoengineering solutions are pretty controversial, like blocking sunlight to cool the planet. The geoengineering proposal in this episode, though, is one that I doubt will be controversial at all.
Coral reefs are dying, and not slowly. In just a few decades, we’ve watched some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth collapse at a staggering pace. Warming oceans trigger mass bleaching events that kill corals outright. Acidification is literally dissolving the reef structures they depend on. And once those structures crumble, everything else—fish, invertebrates, entire food webs—goes with them. What remains in many places isn’t a degraded reef. It’s just… empty seafloor.
And that’s the problem this episode’s guest is trying to solve.
Ulrike Pfreundt is the co-founder of rrreefs (it stands for rethinking, rebuilding, regenerating coral reefs), a company rebuilding the physical architecture of reefs using modular, 3D-printed clay structures—what you might think of as “underwater castles”—that give marine life a place to come back and rebuild. Instead of only focusing on growing coral in labs and then transplanting it into the ocean, rrreefs is asking a more fundamental question: what if the reason reefs can’t recover is because the habitat itself is gone?
Their answer: 3D printed clay castles that can be affixed to the seafloor and create new reefs. The result so far has been pretty wild. Within only months, thriving marine communities have moved into the castles and are making a living there. Already they have buyers in the form of both hotels that want tourist-friendly reefs as well as companies seeking not just carbon credits, but in this case coral credits.
What’s especially interesting is how they’re funding it. In addition to working with corporations and hotels, rrreefs is now opening up a community-based investment round, allowing everyday investors to own a piece of reef restoration—and potentially help scale it globally. Yes, that means you can own a piece of this company.
This is a conversation about whether we can not just protect nature, but actually engineer and rebuild it.
DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE
You can invest in rrreefs via this investment campaign.
Ulrike recommends reading Connect the Dots and The Serendipity Mindset.
Ulrike hopes you may start a company based on sphagnum.
Cool video about rrreefs’ work in the Philippines.
An article with some cool photos of rrreefs’ reefs in action.
GET TO KNOW Ulrike Pfreundt
Ulrike Pfreundt is a German ocean scientist, nature conservationist, and impact entrepreneur dedicated to ocean health and biodiversity, with a focus on coral reefs, and a recent fellow of The Explorers Club. As an alumna of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Silicon Valley’s Singularity University, Ulrike brings a unique blend of scientific expertise and entrepreneurial vision to ocean conservation.
She co-authored over 20 scientific publications, including expeditions to the Red Sea, New Caledonia, and the island of Socotra, Yemen. Today, as Co-CEO of rrreefs, Ulrike and her three female co-founders lead efforts to rebuild coral reefs globally and restore marine biodiversity through open-source, community-driven approaches and innovative financial models. rrreefs’ 3D-printed terracotta structures are already catalyzing reef regeneration in five countries across four different oceanic regions.
TRANSCRIPT
Ulrike Pfreundt 0:00
By rebuilding those clay castles, I love how you say clay castles, we can kickstart a process that nature hasn't been able to start itself.
Paul Shapiro 0:09
Welcome to the Business for Good podcast, where we spotlight people making money by solving some of the world's most pressing problems. I'm your host, Paul Shapiro, author of a nationally best-selling book on food sustainability, and CEO of a company in the same space. On this show, I speak with founders, investors, and thought leaders who prove that doing good and doing well can go hand in hand. The biggest challenges facing humanity are solvable and are often profitable too. My hope is that this podcast informs, inspires, and maybe even helps propel you to build a business that makes the world a better place. I'm glad you're here. Hello, friend, and welcome to episode 191 of the Business for Good podcast. If you've listened to the show for some time, you probably know that I am usually pretty bullish on geoengineering to help protect the environment. Essentially, humanity's been running an uncontrolled geoengineering experiment for millennials, since we started deforesting and warming up the planet. Why not actually use our intelligence to reverse some of the damage that we've already caused? Many geoengineering solutions, though, are pretty controversial, like blocking sunlight to cool the planet, and something that we've discussed on this show before. But the geoengineering proposal in this episode, I don't think is that controversial at all. Coral reefs are dying, and they're not dying slowly. In just a few decades, we've watched some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on earth collapse at a staggering pace. Warming oceans trigger mass bleaching events that kill corals outright. Acidification is literally dissolving the reef structures they depend on, and once those structures crumble, everything else - fish, invertebrates, entire food webs - goes with them, what remains in many places isn't just a degraded reef, it is simply an empty sea floor, and that is the problem that this episode's guest is trying to solve.
Paul Shapiro 1:49
Ulrike Freundt is the co-founder of Reefs, that's R R E E F S, that stands for Rethinking, Rebuilding, and Regenerating, a company building the physical architecture of reefs using modular 3D printed clay structures, what you might think of as underwater castles, that give marine life a place to come back and rebuild, instead of only focusing on growing coral in labs and then transplanting them into the ocean. Reefs is asking a more fundamental question, what if the reason reefs can't recover is because the habitat itself is already gone? Their answer, d print clay castles that can be affixed to the sea floor and create new reefs. The result, so far, has been pretty wild. Within only months, thriving marine communities have moved into the castles and are making a living there already. They have buyers in the form of both hotels that want tourist-friendly reefs, as well as companies seeking not just carbon credits, but in this case, you guessed it, coral credits. What's especially interesting is how they are funding it. In addition to working with corporations and hotels, Reefs is now opening a community-based crowdfunding round, allowing everyday investors like yourself to own a piece of Reef restoration and potentially help it scale globally. Yes, that means that you can own a piece of this company. First, for this episode, here's your wild fact. Did you know that coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, but support about 25% of all marine life? A healthy coral reef can host a more species per square meter than a tropical rainforest does. And coral reefs generate an estimated 370 5,000,000,003 75 billion with a B in economic value every single year from fisheries, tourism, and coastal protection. Okay, now here are your three takeaways from this episode, as I see them. First, structure matters as much as biology. Without the right hydrodynamics and habitat, coral simply can't take hold. Second, nature can recover faster than you think when given the right conditions. Derrated areas can return to healthy reef-level biodiversity in months, not decades. And third, the future of conversion, the future of conservation may look a lot more like business with emerging models like coral credits and private sector funding driving restoration at scale. Okay, with all that said, this is a conversation about whether we can not just protect nature but actually engineer and rebuild it profitably. I'll let Ulrike tell you the story.
Paul Shapiro 4:03
Ulrike, welcome to the Business for Good podcast.
Speaker 1 4:06
Thanks for inviting me, Paul. It's nice to be here.
Paul Shapiro 4:09
Hey, it's my pleasure. So, hey, listen, in a different lifetime for this podcast, many years ago we had a company called Coral Vita, which I'm sure you're familiar with, that is mass producing living coral, right? They're trying to actually basically grow in a lab coral much faster, so they can implant it onto dying reefs. You're doing something very different, though. You're trying to rebuild the actual structure of the reefs, like the way that I was thinking about is like companies like Coral Vieta are focusing on growing more resilient coral faster. You're focused on building entire reef structures, like undersea logos, so why, why, why are legos better per se than than what they're doing?
Ulrike Pfreundt 4:47
Yeah, and of course we know Corvida well, and I've just seen Sam actually last week at a conference, Earth X in Dallas, which was nice. We focused on rebuilding the reefs structure of. Framework, because in a lot of areas that is actually missing, and people who are doing coral gardening or working without plants partially don't even have space to put their corals, because the reef is literally crumbling away, be that at the edges of islands, at coastlines like Florida, especially also in the eastern tropical Pacific, if the reef is made of very many branching corals, that underlying reef rock just deteriorates super quickly, so we have to rebuild the habitat, and we're doing it in a way that actually allows the coral larvae and the fish larvae and all those other animals to come back really quickly and rebuild that resilience of a natural ecosystem,
Paul Shapiro 5:43
So what you're doing is essentially 3D printing these clay structures that it will include photos of them on the show notes for this episode at Business For Good podcast.com but it's essentially you're building like clay castles, right, that are pretty large and intricate, and fish and coral will set up shop in them, so you're not putting them necessarily on a dying reef, you're putting them in an area where there might be nothing on the sea floor, right?
Speaker 1 6:09
Yeah, we could use them both to repair reefs that are partially dead or in a dying, degrading state, or in areas where reefs have gone, maybe 20 or 40 years ago, for example, through blast fishing, or in the Galapagos, through like a big warming event in the 80s, and the reefs have just been gone since then. And by rebuilding those clay castles, I love how you're saying clay castles, we can kickstart a process that nature hasn't been able to start itself because of that missing structure, where you can also think of it from a physical perspective. On a coastline, you have a water flow all the time, essentially. And if you remove the natural reef, that water starts flowing much faster, and all the life that this water brings, or should bring, kind of can't take a hold, both because it's moving too fast, but also because there's no habitat, no structure for all those animals to settle, so we're both bringing back those right physical, those hydrodynamic conditions, and also the habitat for the life to take a footing.
Paul Shapiro 7:11
Okay, so what does it cost to build one of the clay castles? I see that you have, how many of these are actually deployed in an ocean right now? Like half a dozen or so.
Speaker 1 7:19
So you can't, I wouldn't go by numbers of castles, because the first one was actually a castle that's in Colombia and San Andres, and the locals called it El Castillo, but the shapes that we're building have evolved since then, so now we're like building smaller ones, of which we have already deployed many, but they're smaller, so let's not go by numbers, right? I think it's more important to look at an area that we'd be regenerating, and then we're doing whatever that area needs. Let's say you have an area of 100 square meter, or for example, right now we're looking at an area of half a hectare in Panama, and it depends what that area needs, it might still have some correlate, and then, of course, we need less of our structure to regenerate this area. If there's nothing left, we need more of our structure to regenerate. So, it all really always depends. We'll work with nature to just do the best we can.
Paul Shapiro 8:15
So, let's talk about the economics of this. Then, if you're doing half of a hectare, what cost is it to you, and then let's talk about who's paying you to do this, like first, what's the actual cost to produce the castle, and why would anybody buy it?
Ulrike Pfreundt 8:31
Yeah, why would any buy it, and what does it cost? The cost depends, right now, still depends a lot on the location in the Philippines, where we've set up our largest operations. We have a local production, we have awesome capable people down on the ground there that do the implementation, the actual building for us. The cost has actually come down quite a lot, and we can give that away at a much lower price point to our customers. For example, in corporates for biodiversity action, biodiversity impact, that's one customer segment that we sell to, but if we're working with hotels, we obviously have a bespoke location where we're looking at different prices and also at different costs, because it may be a country that we haven't worked in, so there's a lot of political work involved in the beginning,
Paul Shapiro 9:22
yeah, I can see why a hotel would want to pay for this, because they want tourism to for people to snorkel by a coral reef, or they maybe want some type of a barrier to prevent erosion of their beaches, and so on, and then you're, but what you said earlier was newer to me, which was that corporate corporations that have some type of biodiversity claim, it's almost like you're talking about instead of climate, like carbon credits, they're talking about like coral credits. Is that the way that you're thinking about this? That basically they will pay for these, what I'm delving, coral credits.
Ulrike Pfreundt 9:55
Yeah, so exactly. I mean, right now they're not cold credits, right now it's still put. Project-based, because those credits are not really established yet the way that carbon credits are. So, right now, what we're doing is, say, we're talking to a Zurich Insurance Group or a Melitta Coffee Company, saying, "Look, it's great that you want to venture out into biodiversity impact. We'll try and make it really easy for you, because we understand that this is in addition to all the carbon work that you have to do, you know, getting your company climate neutral, and it is complex, this topic of biodiversity. So we just really try to provide an end to end service, where saying if you want to do biodiversity, we'll do everything for you until you have those quantified impact numbers on your desk, along with awesome images of what has been happening in this area that you finance, and the difference to credits, where we're heading is that here we need a prepayment of the project implementation, and then ongoing yearly payments for monitoring. It's great for us, because it gives us recurring revenue for the monitoring and reporting, but it still a higher hurdle for companies to actually do it, because they have to prepay the project implementation. If we're looking at credits, we're financing that differently, right? And then we're selling the credits, but obviously credits, reef credits, whatever you may call them, as they arise.
Paul Shapiro 11:19
Yeah, I'm calling them coral credits, just because it's alliterative, but okay, yeah, very cool. So you mentioned awesome images. I looked at some of these images online, and we'll again include them in the show notes for this episode, but it's really amazing. It's an area that is totally barren, and then the reefs core, like castle, goes up, and within a matter of months it's a thriving ecosystem, it's pretty remarkable. So, am I right that it is only months before ocean dwelling inhabitants find this castle and set up shop there?
Ulrike Pfreundt 11:52
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, our team, when we came up with all this, like five and a half years ago, we were surprised by the first results, and just so happy to see that this actually works. We're getting coral settling, depending on the area, and depending on when the corals spawn between three and nine months, and then they start growing from there, and it's only upward, both in numbers and in size. And then we, in terms of fish, it's even more staggering. We're seeing that two to 10 times increase in the fish biomass on our regenerated areas compared to a similar area that we didn't regenerate within six to 12 months.
Paul Shapiro 12:35
Wow, so you're saying that the natural reef is harboring a 10th of the fish life than the artificial reef that you're creating
Unknown Speaker 12:45
The natural reef in its degraded state, so our baseline, right? Of course, there may be around an island, for example, there may be another area, maybe 10 kilometers away, that still has healthy reef, and then that healthy reef has roughly the same fish biomass than ours does, but yeah, we are reaching those healthy reef levels, and that's just amazing. It makes us so happy. And if I may, little, a little scientist plug in here, because that is my background. I think the reason it works so well is that in our system, we're having all these spaces that allow for invertebrates to flourish. That's all those little critters that no one's that interested in, except for a lot of divers, like nudibranchs, crustaceans, or like little crabs, little shrimp, a ton of worms, and like just all those critters that make up the base of the reef and our food to a lot of fish, and if we, because we're having enough space for those, I think is why we're getting so much fish.
Paul Shapiro 13:50
So, you mentioned you had this idea several years ago, and that you come from a scientific background. I do want to ask you about that, but the idea of creating artificial reefs is not a new one, right? Like, people have tried to do this with tires, they have tried to do it with cinder blocks. What is new? Is it just that it's made out of clay? Is it that it's 3D printed? Like, what is the actual new technology that Reefs has invented that is creating these really astounding results?
Ulrike Pfreundt 14:16
The big new idea in the beginning, or the question that I started with when I was still at university here in Zurich, doing my postdoc, was really the one about hydrodynamics. Most of the artificial reefs that we had in the past were made only for fish, and fish react like certain types of fish react pretty quickly, just by having some structure and having some shade to hide in, so a lot of these reefs were large with smooth concrete walls, some geometry that includes a smooth concrete wall, and often not a lot of cavity. So we took all the ecological principles we know diversity creates diversity, but also. So you need diversity in hydrodynamics, or in kind of spaces where water is fast, spaces where water is slow, where it recirculates, and we just took all of those and put them together and said, look, we can't forget the physics, because we're not only going for fish, we're going for those tiny coral lobby, we want nature to bring the coral back, so we have to give nature a chance to actually put the coral there, and that includes a tiny lava that's only a millimeter long to be able to settle and put some glue down on this new rock, and that glue is not that strong, so if you have forces of the water movement that move this small coral lava away with too much force, it won't be able to sit, so that's the first thing we looked at, really.
Paul Shapiro 15:46
So, what is the defensible technology? Is there some patent protection, Ulrich on what you're doing? If somebody says, let's say you start making some real money, and hotels are paying for this, and companies want the coral credits, and somebody else comes along and says, all right, well, I'm going to create a printed artificial reef. It's going to have lots of nooks and crannies, lots of little cavities in it. What protects you from that type of competition?
Ulrike Pfreundt 16:09
At this point, I'd say what makes it hard to replicate what we're doing is both the complexity of the whole process, which includes not just the building, the government work, the contacts, the networks, and then, of course, all the building had to set this up locally and make it work at low cost. We didn't protect the system itself, frankly. If you look at this module and you have a 3D clay printer, go ahead, you know, do it, and give us more reefs in this world, like that's not what we want to stop people from. If we have a motivated person that wants to put down their own reef rabbit habitat, please do it. Please take out training to know that yours will be hurricane safe, as ours is. Most of the recent intelligence went into making this sturdy and anchored because this is where this system really wins. It needs hardly any material, and we don't want that material, because we want cavities, right, for life, so not mass cavities, but that means we need to anchor it really solidly down into the ground to not have it swept away with the next hurricane or typhoon, and this is at the moment, this is a secret, I would say. How we do that, but we're still contemplating, like right now, we're talking to our IP lawyers, what the best way is for us to set up a social franchise that allows actually parties across the world to replicate this, but just making sure it's done at the quality and with our brand, so social franchising is what we're aiming for, and more impact is the most important part for us.
Paul Shapiro 17:50
Sure, so you're speaking like a scientist who is out on a mission to save the world's coral reefs, you're not speaking like an entrepreneur who is out there to make as much money and defeat your competition as best as you can, so if I'm an investor and I'm thinking, okay, well, should I bet on reefs? What is the argument to say, okay, I'm going to bet on reefs because I think that other coral restoration aren't going to be as financially successful as reefs is. Is it because there's a licensing model where you're going to have some protected IP, and people will pay you for that licensing to create the material that is, as you described it, capable of being anchored in hurricane-proof.
Unknown Speaker 18:30
I would say, if you're an investor, we want you to invest in us, because, a yes, you do need that passion for the ocean, you know that for sure, but we're very well positioned, because we have four to five years of impact data that show that how we're doing it works, and our brand is kind of positioned at the forefront of this type of technology in this type of work, but we're selling a service, so we won't be going out there and selling reef bricks or license making reef bricks. If an NGO wants to make reef bricks and build reefs, this will only elevate our brand. That's kind of the open source idea, right? It's only going to be good for our business, because our clients sit in large corporations, sit in hotel groups and hotel management groups that won't go for a random business coming up with a similar idea, they want to go for the proven brand that has shown that this works and shown that they can deliver a good service. So I'm not worried at all here, actually, and frankly, there's so much to do. If there would be three or four others, I think the market's still big enough. Now, I know that's not ideal for venture capital, and we're also not going for venture capital. Our ideal investors are angels and family offices that don't look at maybe four to 5x returns, or even higher in five to seven years, but that kind of want to stay with us in the long run. On and grow this as a solid global business that's really making making a difference for reefs.
Paul Shapiro 20:06
And so to do that, you're not only talking to angels and talking with family offices, but you're also crowdsourcing your fundraising, right?
Ulrike Pfreundt 20:14
Yeah, so we're launching a community-based investment round in June, was Republic in the EU, but we can take investors from outside the EU as well, just not with as small of a ticket size as we can do in the in the EU, because the costs are higher. So we're starting at 10k outside the EU, and it's fun because we've been carried by our community since the start. We actually started five years ago with a crowdfunded reef in Colombia, just to get something in the ground, and then we convert it into a company, hence Switzerland, but we still now we just want to give a part of that company to our community and want them to be co-owners of reefs, and it's been great fun preparing that campaign. It's going to be live in june, 1, second of June, I think, will open.
Paul Shapiro 21:03
Okay, so beginning of June 2026 Anyone who's got 10k that they want to invest in reef restoration, this is your opportunity now. Ulrike, you mentioned you want to make them hurricane safe, which seems a very smart idea, but how are you making them tolerant of heat, right? Like a lot of the problems are coral reefs, is just these heat waves you mentioned, one in the Galapagos, that are bleaching reefs, killing lots of these animals, making it an untenable living environment for them. Do your reefs have some method of cooling, or is there some way that you can be more resistant to heat waves?
Ulrike Pfreundt 21:40
The major point here is, well, twofold. One is the habitat that I mentioned clay doesn't actually dissolve in the acidify notion, whereas the natural reef rock sadly does. Once it's bare, it's calcium carbonate, so it starts slowly dissolving, so the habitat will stay, even if corals may die on top of it, now for coral resilience, the resilience of the actual animal coral to hot waters, there are a few avenues we don't have the silver bullet, but what our system does is by attracting the lobby of coral, that's actually the offspring of survivors, right, because we work in degraded areas. The corals that are still around and ready to make larvae to make offspring already have a higher resilience. So, those babies that settle on our reefs on average have a higher resilience. That doesn't mean none of them die. And this is all so where we work, where we love the work of coral vita, and frankly, everyone who does coral gardening in a clever way is because that allows to specifically grow heat-tolerant corals by selecting them, fragmenting them, and we can always use partial out planting on our reefs, so we rebuild the structure and we build islands of more resilient corals, and that way we get perfect mix, we get larger heat resilient corals that really kickstart the growth of that reef, but we have enough space for those natural larvae to settle down as well to keep the genetic diversity high, and to just allow for nature to decide where it wants to put its corals, that's always my worry. If we decide too much, I'm going to put this coral here and that coral there. I mean, no wonder so many of the out plans die, right? I think there needs to be a good mix.
Paul Shapiro 23:31
So, you're mentioning something that seems like a very interesting proposal for me, so you know, coral vita is essentially breeding coral strains that can tolerate higher heat. You are creating artificial reefs. Do you think that we're just now entering an era where humans have to actively manage nature just to keep it alive? Right, like we've done so much to degrade nature, to cause mass extinctions, to heat up the oceans and the air, and it feels to me like basically the premise of companies like yours and Coral Vita is saying, yeah, look like we have no other choice but to actively manage nature in as a way to keep it alive. Is that, am I accurate in assessing tha?
Unknown Speaker 24:20
I wouldn't put it as like general as that. The topic of coral reefs is a very specific one. We've got a deadline in about 25 years, that's very soon. At coral reefs are about to tip, so we're losing them super rapidly, and that distinguishes this ecosystem to my knowledge, and in my opinion, from most of the others. So, here, yes, I think we have to actively manage that. Also, includes conserving those reefs that are maybe still super healthy, and we don't know why, just, you know, just. Let's keep our, let's keep out of there, let them do their thing, it's few enough, and for those that are degraded, I think, yes, we do, we need to rebuild habitat, and if we can grow some heat resilient corals, but we, from a biological perspective, we just have to be very careful not to overdo it either, so if we can let nature do as much as possible, and really just try and put in a few of the puzzle pieces that allow the ocean to unfold this huge regenerative capacity that it has, in my view, that's the best, that's the best way.
Paul Shapiro 25:36
What's it going to take in order for you all to, let's say, reach, let's just say, like, $100 million in recurring revenue annually. Does that mean that you're putting out 1000s of meters of artificial reefs on an annual basis, millions of meter of square meters? Like, what is it going to take in order for you, one, to make the dent at your social mission that has animated your life of trying to restore the oceans, but also just to get the company to be where you want it to be, in terms of a real financial powerhouse.
Unknown Speaker 26:09
In four to five years, we need to get to a point where the capital is flowing in such a way that we can, I like to measure this in kilometers of coastline, because reefs protect coastlines, and I think long term that will be one of the big markets, so kilometers of coastline of reefs rebuilt, so let's say I don't know, 10 kilometers down the coast of Florida, so and just make sure the reef structure is roughly rebuilt in that area, now that doesn't mean populating an era of 10 kilometers by 100 meters full of new blocks of reef, but it means cleverly positioning habitat where it's needed with spaces in between, because those spaces are also important, but yeah, it's I would start measuring it in kilometers of coastline, and then a certain width of new reef rebuilt, and that width depends on what we need in order to say get reduce the wave height and reduce the impact of the water on the coastline, so we're about to publish a white paper, we're about to exaggerate it, but hopefully end of the year, beginning of next year, a white paper on how we can use small and fragile structure, not big rocks, not big concrete walls, to actually reduce erosion on the coastline, and how many meters we would need, kind of meters of new reef to achieve that. So, I've totally danced around your question, but 100 million dollars in recurring revenue.
Unknown Speaker 27:44
What do we need to get someone to pay for regenerating kilometers and kilometers of coastline? That's the main question. And I think it's going to come in the end, it's probably going to come from companies. If companies, and this might get technical in a field where I'm not an expert, but if sorry, if nations, if sovereigns are able to activate on their sovereign balance sheet the natural assets that they have, because it gives the country long-term security, safe coasts, fed people tourism income, then suddenly the such an expense on the government side is not actually an expense, right? It can be activated, and I think, and we're there already, like this, this option exists, and if more companies that are reef dependent, for example, start doing that, I think there may be good traction there, and then of course the regulatory frameworks that are connected to financial risks, supply chain risks for all the companies that have to do with the ocean and are somehow touched by ocean biodiversity, and this may not - this is not only companies that harvest fish, it's for example shipping lines that need docks and might not get the access to those new ports or might not get those ports if they're not putting some money towards regeneration because ports are also not that good for the environment so I think there's a lot happening in the regulatory in the regulatory space that will push this forward tourism industry, of course. I think that market kind of works on its own, because for tourism the reefs are an actual asset.
Paul Shapiro 29:27
Well, I certainly hope you're right, and I hope all that comes to fruition. You've led quite a journey, Ulrike, from being a scientist and marine biologist and somebody who is just passionate about protecting the oceans to somebody who actually is starting your own company to try to make money by protecting the oceans and have a lot of work ahead of you. There's so much degraded reef and so much dead reef that needs to be rehabilitated. So, have there been resources for you that have been helpful in this journey that you've been on to better understand. What it takes to run a startup, or any other things that have been useful that you want to recommend for others who are interested in the topic.
Ulrike Pfreundt 30:05
Um, maybe not so much of what it means to run a startup. There, the resources have just been people, awesome people that I've met along the way that have been entrepreneurs, are entrepreneurs, and kind of shared their journey. I've struggled in the beginning, I've struggled a lot with what does it mean to be a CEO, like, what are the things you need to do, and what are you allowed to do? Where's your time well spent? But something that I really loved is this, the concept of serendipity, and I'm not sure, maybe feels misplaced to some here, but serendipity has brought me a long way, so just the thought that random connections with people usually have a great outcome, because there's something you connect over. There's some amazing thought that this person has that you just met, maybe you didn't even plan meeting them, you know? Usually you didn't. So, and there's a book that's called Connect the Dots that talks about serendipity and the science of serendipity, and why some people kind of experience more of it and some experience less of it, but you can train it, and I've really tried to follow that and be open to opportunities along the way wherever I go.
Paul Shapiro 31:19
All right, yeah, that's an interesting concept. So I will certainly link to the book, Connect the Dots, in the show notes for this episode at Business for Good podcast.com I will say, like, it is hard for me to overestimate the power of just showing up places and seeing who you meet, and you never know, so much of life seems to be who you get to know, and it's just remarkable to me, just how showing up, you know, there's this, there's this cliche saying that showing up is half the battle. I think that's true. I certainly think that's true. Nice. So, finally, Ulrike, obviously you've now spent half a decade or so being a CEO and running your own startup. What are other ideas that you hope somebody else might start? My experience is that typically people running startups usually have lots of ideas for companies. Sadly, they are most of the time incapable of running multiple companies and have to just focus on one. It's not always true, but most of the time that's true. So, because you are now tied to running reefs and creating this business is going to be doing 100 million in ARR. Where are the other ideas? Should other people who want to be entrepreneurs, who are inspired by your story, what should they think about doing if they want to make a difference?
Unknown Speaker 32:33
You know, my first love with the rainforests of this world before I started diving, and there's awesome. I just want people to work on business cases to regenerate ecosystems, like truly regenerative. How can we, for example, one idea that I had that I'm not sure would work, but it maybe it's crazy enough for someone to follow up, is there's this moss called Stagnum. I'm also a bit of a nerd, and I love mosses. Stagnum is a very wet, awesome-looking moss. It can soak up, I don't know, maybe 20 times its weight in water, and I think it's probably a great raw material for lots of things, and maybe we can innovate things that people need made from stagnant, so we can regenerate now. What's the English term for that ecosystem? Like swamps, like deep swamps, land-based swamps that capture a lot of carbon, and they tend to have a lot of this moss. So, if you always take only part of it out, maybe there's a way to regenerate, regenerate swaps.
Paul Shapiro 33:44
Yeah, or maybe there's a way to commercially farm it and take pressure off of off of the rainforest too. So, if it's a good, good enough material, that could be an interesting thing to do.
Ulrike Pfreundt 33:55
So, I mix rain for us with swamps. Now, it's just, just saying that rainforest, swamps, coral reefs. There's so many ecosystems that need our help, and I think that can be business models in all of them, and it's just great and good fun to look out for business models to regenerate ecosystems.
Paul Shapiro 34:11
Very cool. Well, I appreciate what you're doing, and I certainly hope that you're successful, Ulrike. It is very sobering to me to see the massive die-offs in coral reefs that humanity has been causing for decades now. So I will be rooting for your success, and I hope that your crowdfunding campaign is a wildly successful one.
Ulrike Pfreundt 34:30
Thank you, Paul.
Paul Shapiro 34:31
Thanks for listening to the Business for Good podcast. To explore more conversations like this one, visit Business for Good podcast.com and be sure to subscribe, so you don't miss future episodes with founders, investors, thought leaders, and more, turning global problems into powerful opportunities. And if this episode resonated with you, please share it with your network. You never know who you might inspire to be in the business of doing good.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai