Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] Chris, welcome to the business for good podcast.

Chris Oakes: Thanks, Paul. It's awesome to be here.

Paul Shapiro: I am so glad because it's really great to have somebody who I know listens to the show to be a guest on a set on the show. So it's always really a great honor for that. So, congratulations on making it on. And I'm eager to talk about how that came to be.

Chris Oakes: For sure. Well, I guess I'm, I'm Chris Oakes. I'm the CEO of ReefGen and we're building automated solutions that will really mechanize planting operations in the aquatic environment. All right. Starting in seagrass and corals, but we see big opportunities just in in your shore operations.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, cool. Well, let's get into that.

So, 1st of all, you're talking about robotic planting of seagrass 1st of all, what is the problem? Why do we need to plant any of them in the 1st place?

Chris Oakes: Well, as a lot of folks have probably seen in the headlines, especially with the super warm water in Florida this past summer, we've got an El Nino event coming on.

[00:01:00] We've lost about half our corals on the planet since about 1950, and we're on track to lose 90 percent of those corals by 2050. Corals grow really slowly, and it's it's going to take a lot of effort to mitigate the Damage caused by that loss. coral reefs are connected to Oh, about about a billion people get their protein from coral reefs and about 500 million jobs are created from coral reefs alone.

But coral reefs don't exist in isolation. Everyone likes the colorful fish. But there are other ecosystems out there that are super important. And one of those ecosystems is our, well, they're seagrass meadows and seagrass meadows are, if you think manatees or dungongs, there are these nice gentle ecosystems, but they are the nurseries for oh, about 20 percent of our commercial fisheries.

So all the [00:02:00] baby fish start there. So if we want to have healthy fisheries in the ocean, we also have to think about the seagrass meadows and the baby fish then swim out to the coral reefs. So these, these ecosystems are interconnected. So we've lost about 40 percent of our seagrass meadows on the planet.

so the plight of seagrass meadows and coral reefs are significant.

Paul Shapiro: You mentioned warming waters. Chris, is that the primary reason why seagrass and coral reefs are dying? Or are there other factors that are also aiding in that, in that

Chris Oakes: murder there? Oh, well, warming water doesn't help. ocean acidification doesn't help.

Pollution and overfishing are also parts of the problem. Coastal development. it's, it's hard to have society without impact. And so I'm really interested in how do we. Build good businesses that can help restore the world to, to a better place. [00:03:00] And, and reef gen is really focused on doing that.

Paul Shapiro: I'm eager to get into how reef gen is doing that.

But first, I just want to ask about something that you said, Chris, so you said, you know, it's hard to have society without having impact, but you also said that. Really, apparently from 1950 to the present is when we've had huge, huge losses and needless to say, we had society for thousands of years prior to 1950 was the problem only that we had a lot fewer humans on the planet prior to 1950 or is there something else about what we're doing now?

Is it? Is it just as too many of us or excuse me? And or is it something unique about what we're doing that people in the past didn't do?

Chris Oakes: Well, I think the industrial scale of extraction. Thank you. Changed after World War Two, we saw major declines in fisheries because we got really good at taking things out of the ocean.

And so that's a big difference. More people. we've gotten really good at taking things out of the ground and out of the ocean. and so I want to apply that same mechanized approach to [00:04:00] putting things back into the ocean.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. Okay, cool. So, you know, we had on in 2018 and we'll link to this in the show notes at business for good podcast.

com Coral Vita. Do you know those guys? So yeah, Sam and Gator. Yeah. Yeah. So we had Sam on and it was a, it was a riveting episode because what they were doing was essentially breeding corals. At the time that, you know, this is, you know, five years ago. So I'll have to check in with them and see if they're still doing the same thing.

But at the time their business model was essentially building or excuse me, breeding corals in captivity, so to speak, like not in the ocean, so that they would grow like 50 times faster than corals just out in nature do, and then they could plant them. Along reefs to or barriers to try to create a new reef much faster than they would generate on their own.

But you're doing something very different than that. Right? So I'd love to know, how do you differ from Coral Vita? And is there some collaboration between what you're doing and what they're [00:05:00] doing? That could be had.

Chris Oakes: Sure. It's, it's a great question and we're all working on the same challenge. We're just working on different parts of, of solving that challenge.

We need to have the biology figured out. We need to have seed stock. So baby corals, especially. Breeding corals that are heat tolerant, and can survive more effectively in warmer waters. That's super important. And there are coral nurseries all over the world. What we do is we enable the outplanting part of these operations where you breed the corals, you do it in a nursery, but then you need to put it out into the world and divers can do that.

drill a hole into a dead coral, take a coral plug with a live baby. Coral that's grown in the nursery and then plug that into the dead coral and wait for a period of time. Corals grow fairly slowly, but wait for a period of time and you begin to put the [00:06:00] reef back in order. These things take a long time and what we're trying to do is scale up the outplanting component by our estimate.

It takes a diver and I'm a diver. I've been diving my whole life. I've done this. It takes. You know, 5 to 7 minutes to go through that whole operation where you get the drill out. You're moving around,

Paul Shapiro: 5 to 7 minutes to plant one baby coral. It

Chris Oakes: can take that long. Yeah. And so you take the plug, you drill into it, you steady yourself, you, you, you put the plug in, you make sure it's there and then you swim onto the next one.

That, that takes some time. to.

Take that mechanism of action and build a robot that can do that cycle in 15 seconds. Now I'll talk about seagrass too. So we have the plight of corals. We have the plight of seagrass. It takes a team of divers, up to, you know, four weeks at times, or biologists [00:07:00] that are stomping through the mud, to plant it.

Roughly a hectare of seagrass, and usually we're planting seeds by hand. We've engineered a robot, and it was deployed out in Wales just this past summer, and we're able to do that in about 70 times, 75 times faster. We're able to plant about. A hectare in in less than a week, we can we did a fifth of a hectare in a day, which is really if we think about the scale of loss, we're talking about 5 million hectares of seagrass meadows.

And just countless millions of hectares of corals lost. And so the scale of, of outplanting that's needed is so far beyond what manual labor is going to be able to do. even to, to stop the bleeding, it's, it's just massive amounts of, of outplanting effort that, would take, you know, just. [00:08:00] Thousands and thousands of people for sure.

Paul Shapiro: No, I want to be clear. Chris, you said that you just did this in Wales and you mean W. A. L. E. S. Not W. H. A. L. E. S. Is not inside of Wales that the citation but Wales is in Great Britain and what happened like so you're planting seagrass out there who paid for you to do this.

Chris Oakes: So this was done in partnership with the philanthropic effort and Project Seagrass, our partner in Wales.

Project Seagrass is focused on restoring seagrass meadows around, Wales and the, and the UK, broadly. The plight of seagrass in that part of the world is, is significant. Some estimates suggest 90 percent loss of seagrass. Meadows in in kind of the British Isles. And so I'm really looking at how do we restore the ecosystems there?

There are a number of ways to plant seagrass. You can plant the seeds, you can plant shoots, you can take bags [00:09:00] called Hessian bags and put those into the into the sand or mud. we're focused on planting seeds. We've got a seed planting robot, and we've also developed a shoot planting robot, which was piloted also on Catalina Island.

a couple of years ago.

Paul Shapiro: And for those not initiated, Carolina Island is off of California. So yes, so you're in the Pacific Ocean. You're in the Atlantic Ocean, and that's pretty cool. So just just to be clear, Chris What ReefGen's innovation is, is the invention of these robots that can plant seagrass or corals dramatically faster than a human could.

What is the business model though? Like, so, you know, you just did this in Wales. You said that it was funded by somebody engaged in philanthropy. But reef gen isn't a charity. It's a for profit corporation, right? So what is the plan on how the company will actually eventually make money by getting people to pay it to utilize those robots?

Chris Oakes: Sure. It's it's the most important question. For any [00:10:00] startup, who's the customer? Our customers are the project developers and restoration firms that are out doing the work. They're out doing the work manually and by and large. And we are bringing robots as a service to the restoration and project developers.

Paul Shapiro: I like that. R. A. S. robots. Service. That's good. I have not heard of RAS before. Okay. So you're a RAS startup. No offense to the SAS startups, but I like for somebody like me who doesn't know a lot about, you know, this topic, like you're saying that there are already people out there who are doing this or are they doing it?

By because of philanthropic reasons, or is there actually a profit motive? Is there somebody out there paying them to do this?

Chris Oakes: Yeah, well, understanding the restoration economy is like the way I try to think about this. And there are a number of factors that create demand for restoration, and that includes regulatory mechanisms, public [00:11:00] procurement.

So municipalities, will actually realize that, Hey, if we spend a dollar, we get, 1. 6, for example, in ecosystem services for, near shore habitat restoration. And that will bring the fisheries back. It will bring employment back. And so it's a force multiplier.

Paul Shapiro: because I could see, I mean, it's kind of a tragedy of the commons problem, right?

Like you just have like, nobody is really that incentivized to restore. Individual, like, no individual company is that incentivized to restore, whereas everybody is incentivized to take right to extract to take fish out of the ocean. And so the question then becomes like, who is it who wants restoration?

Well, I could see, you know, the tourism economy benefiting coral reefs. Right? So you could see, like, the resorts that are on the beach. Maybe they would pay to have coral reefs restored that have. Died around them, right? Is that one potential customer for reef?

Chris Oakes: it is one. We've, we've done some voice of the customer studies.

sadly, that's not [00:12:00] looking like the primary, source of a customer base today. hopefully that changes, but it's, it is a tragedy of the commons, situation.

Paul Shapiro: So then if it's not the tourism economy, then it's the people who are looking to fish, right? Like they like the, the folks who want to engage in fishing.

And so are the companies that are in the fishing industry paying for restoration right now? Is that part of their business expense?

Chris Oakes: the, the source of a lot of restoration projects can be somewhat opaque. what I can say is in working with our, now commercial partners, we see big comp, there are large cement companies, large mining companies that have operations that are paying for restoration.

efforts, private investments by, corporations, I think Mars, you know, it has, it has the million, you know, plant a million corals initiative. So there are

Paul Shapiro: companies. These are basically offsets for them and they're, right. Is that, that's what I'm, that's what I'm hearing.

Chris Oakes: generally, yes.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, interesting. [00:13:00] Yeah, because that's similar. you probably are familiar with the company seeded drone. and so we had their CEO grant on. We'll link to his episode in business for good podcast dot com. But in short, You know, what they're doing is trying to do what you're doing, but on land, right?

They're trying to automate the planting and reforestation of areas that have been deforested or have had major forest fires and so on by drones that go around and plant much faster, or at least drop seeds much faster than humans can go around it and put them in the ground. And so it seems like what you're doing is kind of similar to them, except obviously underwater and their big technology is the drones and the software associated with the drones.

And that's the same for you guys, right? Like the innovation here is the robot. And so I saw you guys have filed for at least one patent on your robotic technology. and tell us a little bit about that. Cause you know, you're a marine biologist, you're not a roboticist, but how many people work at reef gen and how many of them are roboticists who are actually driving this core innovation that brings [00:14:00] value for the company?

Chris Oakes: Great question. And I appreciated that particular podcast. And I, I just have to, to give a shout out to, to grant as a, as someone who is focused on the aquaculture problem, looking at aquaculture, feed alternatives to, to wild caught ground up fish. I, I got my career going in that space as well. So interesting to guys focused on aquaculture feed, got into drones for habitat restoration.

So I love the parallels.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, that's pretty interesting. I, you know, I had forgotten until you mentioned that, but we did talk in that episode about prior to, to his company, he was involved in that, in that other industry that you just mentioned. So yeah, that's quite interesting. Okay. Well, all right. So let's hear about it.

How many people work there? How many are engineers or roboticists as opposed to a biologist like you?

Chris Oakes: Yeah, it, it's, it's a, it's a material question. my, I have one other biologist on staff, so there's two, marine biologists on staff and the rest of the team are, ocean roboticists and ocean [00:15:00] engineers.

we're, we're a small team right now. We're still a pre seed company. We've been primarily grant funded to date. I've got six, engineers on staff, but what I want to give a shout out to is the good machine studio that reef gen. Came, came out of and the good machine studio is a venture builder studio run by, Dave Solomon.

and then the, founder of reach and is Tom Chi. and so the company, Emerged from good machine. We're still housed in the good machine studio. And so we have all the advantages of the engineering staff. We've got all the machine tools. I've got the equivalent of a team of about 12 with with those resources literally next like I can shout at them.

so it's really helping us be a lean company, move fast, build prototype and everything. just in San Francisco, Thank you.

Paul Shapiro: Very cool. That's very cool. And so, let me ask then [00:16:00] about you because you've got these dozen or so folks with whom you are working, but you are relatively new in the CEO slot.

You've only been there for a few months now. And so it's, you must have had a pretty interesting life, Chris, because you're a marine biologist who somehow got into venture capital. Who then found himself as the CEO of a startup working to restore oceanic environment. So first, how did a marine biologist get into the world of VC?

Chris Oakes: Well, a long circuitous route, for sure. one of my favorite times in my career was, was when I was. Actually, a scientific diver getting paid to count fish, do seagrass, restoration and monitoring work in Southern California. but my focus was always the business of biology. I wanted to figure out how to make money while doing something that's going to drive conservation in a more effective way.

I got into aquaculture early on in my [00:17:00] career looking at sustainable sources of supply of a natural marine food. Product used in pharmaceuticals. my uncle was doing aquaculture for most of his career. So I got exposure to that through him and I'm forever grateful with that. I started to really get into biotech and look at how do you develop products?

That will be adopted. we had a sustainable source of supply of of this underwater snail blood. but the market ultimately didn't didn't let we didn't enter the market because of clinical trial failures. so I took a pause and said, you know what? I want to go learn business and I entered the corporate world.

I stayed for about seven years at, LabCorp, which is a big medical diagnostic company. And I was looking at the failures that we had experienced with the vaccine technology and realized that. Companion diagnostics and diagnostic technology, may unlock [00:18:00] the, the vaccine technology. I also wanted to learn how to get paid and make money.

So I kind of earned my stripes, became a manager, got corporate training, got to see corporate best practices, but then realize, you know, what? I'm an ocean guy. I got to come back to that and had a good opportunity, to join, the firm liquid robotics, back in 2013, prior to their exit, with Boeing and got to see what a scaling ocean robot company looks like from the inside, looking at their fisheries and aquaculture, product line and really helping develop that out, with the engineers.

So then started to do the rounds in product. Management, commercialization and, made a jump to the world of synthetic biology after liquid robotics focused on. Alternative protein sources for aqua feeds, with the company Nova nutrients, which, which when we met Paul, we, you know, we were, we were talking about, yeah, right.

I remember food and feed from CO2, which is, which [00:19:00] is just super cool. And I, I realized that my place is in the startup world. I really like being an operator. yeah. But had an opportunity to, to team up with, after getting regulatory approval for our, for our product, it's use in animal feed and an opportunity to team up with, with the venture builder, studio, deep science ventures where we were focused on standing up companies from scratch, using first principles to identify problems, deconstruct problems and develop the solutions.

And then recruit and hire the founder, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial minded PhDs. And I love doing that. we helped stand up a number of companies in the agriculture sector, the aquaculture space, aqua feed space. But I really like being an operator. And so when the opportunity came up with ReefGen, I, I like building teams, leading teams, and it just seemed like a fit.

So, I'm fortunate enough to be at the helm. I'm, I'm proud and honored to, to be [00:20:00] working with, with, Dave, mind you, Maddie, Justin, Nate, Tom, the whole team.

Paul Shapiro: So it's quite a lot of, chapters to your career, Chris. Like the, the tide has turned for you in many different directions. And now you are the captain of this new ship.

you mentioned that it's still pre seed largely grant funded. When will you start bringing in venture capital? Like when do you want to actually start scaling this? So you're not doing pilot runs in Wales or Catalina islands, but where you're really developing something that can. Essentially do much more than what you're doing right now.

So I guess how I put it,

we,

Chris Oakes: we, we are right at the cusp. I'm really excited to share that. We've closed our 1st commercial contract with a major project developer on the East Coast. Congratulations. It should it should run for 10 years. And then there are guarantees of millions of dollars of revenue each year, plus funding for the engineering work.

[00:21:00] So we are off to the races right now. Okay.

Paul Shapiro: that's pretty, that's pretty enviable guarantees of millions of dollars of revenue. Okay. I could see why somebody would be interested in that

Chris Oakes: to, to really help expand the top line revenue of, of our commercial partner. The bottlenecks are planting speed. And so if you can, if we can increase the planting speed, we can increase the scale of restoration projects that can be service.

I will say

Paul Shapiro: it sounds like you're like, you're not going to name who this partner is. But is it someone who is in the phishing space or somebody is just seeking to get offsets to do this planting? Like, what category of customer is

Chris Oakes: this? So the customer is a project developer. we are so their customers are municipalities, corporations, other philanthropic groups.

So they handle the permitting, the project planning. We bring the robot, to do the service. Now, with that said, we are also. actively raising a [00:22:00] seed round. it's open. I've got first money coming in in the coming days, which is super exciting. But, we are at that point in, in, in a, in a startup, in a startup's life cycle of raising capital to expand the team to be able to service more markets.

Paul Shapiro: That is exciting. Congratulations. Well, if, I don't know the kind of capital that you're raising, like when you're talking about this seed round, like, are you looking to raise 7 figures, 8 figures? What do you need in order to get off to the races?

Chris Oakes: we're looking at a 3 million seed round right now, that will help us deliver on the development timelines that we, we, want to and need to, in both the coral space and the, seagrass space.

Paul Shapiro: Interesting. Okay. I learned in, in researching for this episode that, these baby corals are not called seeds, but I think it's called a planula. Is that right?[00:23:00]

Chris Oakes: I think of it as coral plug from, from the, from the, from the robots perspective, we install the plug and then got

Paul Shapiro: it. Okay. Well, the reason I was saying it is because instead of a seed round, you might be able to generate more interested in calling it a plug round.

and I thought about this because in my own world of where I work at the better me code doing fun documentation, I often wish that we would have called our seed round a spore round to be a little bit more fungally correct. But in your case, you have a chance to call it a plug round right now, Chris.

So if folks want to a rollover. Is it too late? No, no,

Chris Oakes: no. It's not. Not too late. I would would welcome, would welcome folks that are interested. there's much room for improvement in, in all

Paul Shapiro: things. Very nice. What a fun guy. Okay. So if folks want to get involved in the plug round for reef, Jen, they can go to your website, which will include it on the show notes for this episode of business for good podcast.

com. But importantly, Chris, let me ask you, you haven't been involved in lots of different podcasts. Ventures and lots of different areas of your [00:24:00] life. I presume that even though you are now running reef gen, that you have ideas for other types of companies that you wish existed. So if you could snap your fingers and have somebody listen to you on this show right now, start their own company doing something, what do you think that that person should do?

Chris Oakes: Oh, well, there's so many things to do. one of the things that we see as a need in the. Seagrass restoration space, is the production of seeds and shoots. And so folks that are looking at restoration markets, there, there, there is a need for, for the. Production for the aquaculture side of things.

seagrass nurseries are, important there. And I'll just, I'll just sort of cite something interesting that's being done with, with seagrass seeds. there's a chef Leon at a restaurant in Spain. who's making a really [00:25:00] Cool risotto out of, seagrass seeds. And so if we think about the future of food on the planet, that we have, it's not just rice that grows in the water.

If oceans are going to rise and we're going to have a lot of salty water, on our, to, to contend with, well, if we can change our food system and work with things that grow in the ocean nicely, that, that could help improve our food security in the long run.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, very cool. So if somebody listening, you were talking about starting your own company that might do some good thing about doing your own seagrass nursery, and you can sell those seeds not only to companies like reef gen, perhaps, but also to chefs who want to use something in replacement of rice, you're going to have to grow something that's heat tolerant, though, because, you know, as you mentioned, Chris earlier, like, it's not Good enough just to plant coral plugs that are going to have the same problems by the original coral reefs died, right?

Like in the same thing with seagrass, if, if acidic water and warming water killed them in the first place, presumably these babies are going to have to be super tolerant. So you've got to have some type of a breeding [00:26:00] program. That's going to make them heat tolerant that can have the proper pH. Like they got to be able to withstand acidic environments.

So you're, you're really breeding a brave new world of seagrass and corals here as well. So it's not just a, the seagrass nursery. You got to come up with the breeding programs too.

Chris Oakes: And, and I say that because I think of, of what grant talked about and the drone seed experience of, of eventually having vertical integration where the outplanting requires the seed stock and the biology we're focused on the hardware today.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, right. And yeah, and grant acquired another company that was providing the seeds that they do. So maybe that'll be in reef gen's future. So if you start your own seagrass breeding company, reef gen will be your natural acquirer in the future. Okay, cool. So finally, Chris, I want to ask you about resources that you think somebody else might benefit from.

Are there any books or anything else that you have consumed in your experience in your life that have been particularly helpful for you that you think if you're going to start your own company or even join one of these socially [00:27:00] conscious companies? You ought to read or experience this.

Chris Oakes: Well, I really liked Tom Eisenman's, why startups fail and the, the sort of the way he talks about a startup life life cycle, how he describes idea and conceptualization, commitment and planning, development and launch, and then growth and scaling.

he really gets into what. It takes to build a startup and what to keep our eyes on. so it's not to become a zombie firm, right? There's so many companies that just don't quite, they make it, but they don't quite thrive. and I think being able to recognize that is, is an important part of any entrepreneur's journey.

And then I, yeah, I mean, that, that's, that's, that's one of my recent reads. cool.

Paul Shapiro: Okay. We'll, we'll include that in the show notes for this episode. why startups fail. It looks like you were about to recommend one more thing though. I don't want, I don't want to cut you off because

Chris Oakes: I like being an operator.

[00:28:00] getting things done by David Allen, I think is, is such a great framework for staying organized and how to manage. To do's and not to do's and to create some structures. So for me, as, as a manager, that's been a really helpful tool, to come back to. So, is, is, is really changed the way I, I looked at my work day.

Paul Shapiro: All right. Getting things done and why startups fail the two recommendations. On resources and starting your own seagrass nursery, with the proper genetics, that's going to be a new company. And hopefully whoever starts that company is going to come on the show in the future and look forward to, you becoming at least a customer of theirs and maybe even an acquirer.

So Chris, it's really great to talk with you. Congratulations on a new role as CEO of reef gen, obviously we're going to be hoping very hard that you guys are able to scale up quickly and get your robots out into many, many oceans so that we can try to undo at least some. Of the damage that humanity has caused to the blue parts of our planet.

So [00:29:00] thanks so much. And we will be rooting for your success.

Chris Oakes: Thank you, Paul. It's been a pleasure to be here.