Lars Crama: 0:01

Up next a conversation with Marta Sjögren, co-founder and co-CEO of Paebble. Think about it Concrete is everywhere Our cities, our homes and our roads. But did you know that for every ton of cement we produce, we release a ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Now what if we could flip that? What if concrete became part of the climate solution instead of the problem? Well, enter Paebbl.

Lars Crama: 0:24

In this conversation, we'll cover Marta journey. What did she learn going from investor to founder? What is it really like scaling a deep tech startup that has to build factories instead of just writing codes? And why did she ignore investors who told her co-CEOs don't work? I'm Lars Crama, and this is episode 66 of Start to Scale, the podcast where we explore the journey of remarkable founders. Now. Marta spent over a decade backing startups as a VC, but now she's on the other side of the table, scaling Paebbl across Europe. She's balancing deep tech, innovation, manufacturing at scale and a fast growing team. She's building a company that could change the way we build the world. She's a serial migrant obsessed with frameworks, and here to share her story, Marta welcome.

Marta Sjögren: 1:11

Thank you.

Lars Crama: 1:12

We are in your great office here in Rotterdam. Let me just kick off. What is the one thing no one tells you about? Moving from VC to running your own company?

Marta Sjögren: 1:20

How humbling of an experience. It is there you go.

Lars Crama: 1:24

So all the VCs out there listening. This is the other side of the world, right?

Marta Sjögren: 1:28

that's it.

Lars Crama: 1:29

There we go. We're gonna dive into that a lot more. Um, I had the pleasure of being here a couple months ago, together with constantine, when we looked at your um, your operations. Um, and I think Paebbl is one of the most promising companies in europe today. Um, and you talk about humbling, but I think you're also one of the most promising companies in Europe today. And you talk about humbling, but I think you're also one of the most humble founders I've come across. I'm really curious to dive into your story. We'll start with four statements that you can answer with true or false. Okay, you ready.

Marta Sjögren: 1:55

Yes.

Lars Crama: 1:56

By 2050, Paebbl will be able to restore the planetary carbon balance by a billion tons of CO2. True, let that sink in. Rotterdam is secretly the best city in europe for process engineering. True scaling a deep tech company is just like scaling software. False having two ceos is a recipe for disaster.

Speaker 3: 2:22

False, false, yeah obviously that was easier.

Lars Crama: 2:24

Okay, so maybe let's set the stage here. We talked about you being invested before. Maybe tell us the origin story. What led you to building a company that turns carbon dioxide into building materials?

Marta Sjögren: 2:37

Thanks for that question. So I spent just north of a decade in venture capital, investing in all sorts of industries, all sorts of companies, early stage, always sometimes hardware, but always software enabled hardware. I'd learned quite a bit about managing capital and managing risk as you invest early stage and building portfolios, and that was super fun and I'm very, very grateful for that.

Marta Sjögren: 3:04

That beginning of my career, as I started thinking about the climate crisis or you know kind of what do we, what responsibility do we have as investors into the future that's being built for our kids and, you know, future generations, I started realizing that, as a generalist investor, I wasn't really doing my part.

Marta Sjögren: 3:25

It's great to invest into, you know, accounting, software or music or like whatever, but I felt that for me, with my background of living in pretty broken countries and seeing also kind of how climate change is affecting people very close to me, I started realizing that I needed to do more and I needed to focus the second decade of my career towards aligned company building or company investing, and so I started thinking about what that means and I started creating a framework, one of the many frameworks that I kind of live by, and that framework led me to analyze companies. The idea was that I would start a fund actually in in climate tech and I wanted to have a stringent enough framework such that number one, whatever technology I was investing or partner building or whatever would could not be deemed as greenwashing.

Marta Sjögren: 4:26

Okay yeah that was the most important thing, because I had seen so much money flood into either purposefully or, let's say, unintentionally greenwashing solutions that I didn't want to have anything to do with that makes sense the second filter that I I developed was okay.

Marta Sjögren: 4:43

So if it's not greenwashing, how scalable is it in the coming decades? That was important as well. And then you have a lot of amazing ideas, but they're just going to take a little while longer to actually scale. So I was. I said you know, I'm happy to take on high engineering risk. I'm not happy to take on high science risk against it being a scalable solution within the coming decade. And then the third one is well, technically scalable is one thing, and then commercially viable is another aspect of scalability, and so I wanted to work with technologies that could be viable commercially in the coming decade, even in a bear market. At that point in time this was about five years ago I started thinking about this. At that point in time, we had the longest bull cycle in a long time, I think most of my career. Actually, interestingly enough, the beginning of my career was definitely not a bull cycle.

Marta Sjögren: 5:40

Instead of my career in 2008, as Lehman happened and everything, and I saw a very, very hard time for VC-backed businesses. So I'm very grateful for that, because it taught me how to not see the world just through the rosy lens. But what are some of the hard decisions that entrepreneurs had to deal with? Vcs as well, and that was like the beginning of my career, and then, from 2008 and onwards it it was how shall I say? It was just rosier and rosier.

Marta Sjögren: 6:13

there was the era spring in 2011 or 2012, whatever, it was it was a little blip, but generally the market was just getting better and better and I realized that that was not going to continue forever and that's why I wanted to make sure that the business model will hold up even in a recession. And lo and behold, we obviously entered that, and so that was part of the kind of resilience planning. So once I developed those three kind of filters around what I wanted to work with, I realized that not very many companies actually pass those filters, and one of the technologies that I was evaluating as part of kind of pipeline building of a potential deal flow was mineralization. I realized there was very, very few companies actually working with that, and that's when I decided well, what if you know, what if I help him build that? And actually it was my co-founder, Jane, that sort of pushed me off that cliff and said you know, you know about build like investing, but why don't you do something real and actually build this thing?

Lars Crama: 7:17

Go to the other side. Yeah, that's right, cool, and that's when it's. I think that's a really smart framework, by the way. So just replaying in my head so not greenwashing, making sure it's scalable, but then also making sure it survives in economic downturns. I think any entrepreneurs listening, particularly in this space, obviously well, hopefully they took that into account already, but that's a smart way of looking at it. Okay, then you said so mineralization is a topic that you want to embark on. Maybe for the people that do not know what Paebbl does, can you in really layman's terms explain what the problem is that you solve without giving all the details, but how does it work in practice?

Marta Sjögren: 7:55

Absolutely so. Very simply put, we take captured CO2, carbon dioxide, and we turn it into a solid mineral. And a little bit more elaborated. What nature does in its own right is that the carbon cycle means that the carbon itself goes from one state to another, and it's either part of a short carbon cycle or a long carbon cycle. This is just how nature works, and carbon in the solid phase is called a carbonate, so some carbonates you might be familiar with is calcium carbonates or magnesium carbonates.

Marta Sjögren: 8:38

Many mountains are made up of these carbonates, and so what nature does is also that it takes CO2 from the air, even if it's not humanly emitted, or if it is whatever, it doesn't matter and it will. Through rain, it will bring down those molecules and then they will, over time, solidify. So that's the natural mineralization process. All that Paebbl does is that it accelerates that reaction quite considerably, by millions of times much faster, to force that reaction to happen in a chemical reactor, thereby meaning that we can help nature not only scale itself but also accelerate its own natural reactions, and the output, obviously, is that you get a mineral that otherwise you would have dug up from the earth in any case, but we produce it synthetically.

Lars Crama: 9:32

Yeah, so speeding up nature's process of turning carbon dioxide into a fixed material again, and you have a reactor that is doing that. We'll not dive into all the details, but we're going to ask you for a link to put in the show notes. Maybe a little bit more on those that really want to go deep. But then what kind of problem does that solve? So, on the other hand, what kind of customers problem are you solving?

Marta Sjögren: 9:57

Yeah, so we're solving two problems. Primarily, we have way too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I think that's not news to anyone really anymore and luckily the corporate world as well as governments are waking up to the fact that we've got to deal with this issue. So for anyone willing to get rid of the CO2, the gas we can solve for that and help. Instead of pumping the CO2 under the sea or in some mountain or something like that, which is one of the roots of dealing with CO2, we instead put it to good use. And that brings me to the second solution is that if you're looking for low-carbon materials for your concrete mix, we provide that. Because we utilize the carbon, we produce a very low footprint or negative footprint very soon co2 material, which is carbon storing cool, yeah, that's so.

Lars Crama: 10:58

There's two things. One is the storing, actually, and then turning it into a product and on the desk. Here there's a little well, it's a podcast so we can't show it, but it's a little uh, concrete or cement house that I got when I was here last time. My kids still talk about it because basically it shows how that's um captured co2 sits in a building material you can actually use within a lower footprint. So it solves two, uh, kills boot two. Well, I always find that sound really horrible kills two birds with one stone. That's not very animal friendly, but that's what you do. So cool and again, so I think it's a great company. Maybe let's go to the co-CEO story, because we talked about this beforehand. You have co-CEO in your role, which I think is super interesting, together with Andreas. What got you to decide to go for that model?

Marta Sjögren: 11:46

And then also, how does it work in practice? Sure, so again, this comes from both my experience and also other co-founders experience. What I've seen in my career is that companies in my previous portfolio or the portfolios that I was involved in, the companies that somehow had scaled best and were more successful, were usually co-led Either in a co-CEO model or a chairman, chairwoman, chairperson, whatever and CEO model, but duly led. And that got me thinking okay, is this an anomaly? Is this just in our portfolio? It happens to be some kind of a Scandinavian model, perhaps Nordic model, or is it more widely applicable? So I started looking into it and there's increasing research that suggests that actually the CEO role is better handled when it's shared. Then practically you know, I've worked with so many CEOs it is an exceptionally lonely role and that makes it very difficult. And so when Andrea and I knew, by the way, that Andreas was amazing with people and working with teams and building those he had that experience Whereas I didn't, but I the experience and, um, kind of the trust of the investors we decided that to put those two together and say, okay, let's try co-leading this company and then commit to it for two years and then see whether we change the model and we're brutally honest with each other, and that's one of the huge strengths of this partnership.

Marta Sjögren: 13:25

And two years into our journey, we're now in the third year of our journey. Um, we decided to recommit because both of us felt that the model was working so well that we were able to have each other's back. We are kind of we're very yin yang in terms of personalities and that gives us a stronger decision making ability because you see kind of the both the glass half full, glass half empty approach and you're able to mitigate risk but also take take considerable risk as a result cool, yeah, and then.

Lars Crama: 13:57

So you said yin yang, that's one, but then also sharing the loneliness probably is the second part, because you can decide together on where to go. And how did the investors accept that? I mean not everybody. Well, at least here in the netherlands we often see like, oh, we want to have one person who's responsible. How did they respond?

Marta Sjögren: 14:13

we had a lot of. You know, this is um, if I kind of take you from the beginning, from the seed round, we had a whole bunch of investors that were kind of like, no, I don't believe in that. So we just decided not to continue those dialogues. Also, in the series A, we had a lot of not a lot of but we had some kind of pushback from some investors. In both cases we were very fortunate that we were able to choose and we chose to work with people who believed in us being able to decide how to lead our own company. At the end of the day, I wouldn't want anyone deciding for me how I decide how to lead our own company. At the end of the day, that's you don't. I wouldn't want anyone deciding for me how I'm going to lead my own company and I wouldn't want investors who would want to decide that for us either.

Lars Crama: 14:52

Yeah, you want to be the entrepreneur, so you want to be the entrepreneur, yeah moving and over time you've onboarded quite a few prominent investors.

Lars Crama: 15:00

Obviously, your network must have indeed helped there. I think, if I look on deal room, more than 35 million in total and the recent round, 25 million, um, to also make sure you get the plans ready. So there's a well, let's say, traditional vc, there's family offices, there's an industry player like wholesome uh, in there maybe, what has been your approach to finding the right investors to join you on this journey? What kind of? Could you maybe highlight what? What is? What is it that you think made it successful so far?

Marta Sjögren: 15:29

so good question.

Marta Sjögren: 15:31

For us, designing our financing round was something we've done both with the seed round and the series a.

Marta Sjögren: 15:37

With a seed round, it was very important to us to have a set of aligned long-term capital investors. That meant evergreen type of funds or at least longer than 10-year duration funds, or even if it's a 10-year duration fund that you have kind of cross-fund investing type of abilities. So all three of our institutional funds are either evergreen funds and then one of them has the ability to cross-invest. So that gave us the confidence that we wouldn't have to sell the company in the first seven years to meet some kind of timing issue. Also, obviously, from my background I'm intimately familiar with kind of how to think about fund life cycles. So we made sure that all of the funds were early on in their fund life cycle if they did have a life cycle and if they didn't, if they were evergreen that there was enough capital to be invested over the longer term. And that was a seed round and very purposeful on not including any strategics in the seed round, because then they have too much of an input when you're still very, very early on.

Marta Sjögren: 16:46

Yeah, series a was different series a. By the time we raised the series a we or we were starting to raise we realized that we had some risks. Part of this was because we were preparing for the series a and were able to understand also what reservations investors had, but also preempt some of the risks that we know we would face between Series A and Series B. The most important one is the demand side risk.

Lars Crama: 17:15

Right market side.

Marta Sjögren: 17:16

Market side.

Marta Sjögren: 17:17

Yeah, so we knew we were entering a very mature market with very limited risk appetite, long sales cycles, long product certification cycles, basically very regulated market.

Marta Sjögren: 17:32

Not only that, but we were entering a commodity market where price taking is quite to be taken you should assume price taking and we thought hold on a second.

Marta Sjögren: 17:44

We're coming out with something that's quite new in the world and where we want to make sure that we can create a profitable business case that can actually scale so we can get to that one gigaton of carbon balance restoration by 2050. And so we thought we need to partner with really early adopters that get it and that want to be part of this transition. So, together with our investor 2050, we designed a kind of alignment methods on looking at what an aligned value chain might be, and we mapped out kind of the even, the end customer, the asset owners, asset managers, and so who is kind of furthest along in their journey of seeing their own footprint or their own sustainability vision needing to take a few steps forward, and amazon was very much top of that list um, yeah we had a couple more but and we honestly, like we never thought we would get kind of that good of a brand name, a global footprint, um, a truly kind of um demonstrated track record of adopting early stage technology and pushing it forward.

Marta Sjögren: 18:55

So we're very, very fortunate to get them. Then the middle of the chain is usually the most difficult. So when I say the chain, you have the asset owners, managers, and then they have suppliers, such as construction companies building the actual projects.

Lars Crama: 19:09

Yeah, and with assets sorry assets you mean buildings. Yeah, buildings, that's right.

Marta Sjögren: 19:14

And those suppliers, those contractors, construction companies they buy their materials from the cement folks or building materials vendors. And so we said, what if we could get one representative of each part of that value chain to be part of our journey? And not only that, but also for us to align interests for each part of that value chain to be part of our journey, and not only that, but also for us to align interests for each part of the value chain to be part of carbon custodianship. And then we tried executing against that and we're very fortunate to get obviously I mentioned Amazon earlier on In the middle of the value chain we have the Goldbeck family with their impact investment arm. Goldbeck is one of the largest construction companies in Germany and therefore the biggest European market.

Marta Sjögren: 19:57

And then we have Holcim, that's on the building materials, and is globally the leader in this and also has the most advanced agenda, I believe on decarbonizing their portfolio, cool. So that was kind of how we decided we said we need. It needs to be roughly 50 percent um, at least 50 percent financial and the rest can come from um strategics. It ended up being something like that cool.

Lars Crama: 20:25

Basically, that sounds like a very thought out, methodical process of getting and starting with that end line, looking who you need in the value chain and then also, in the end, onboarding them as investors. Right, because you can have that wishlist, but in the end getting them on board, I think job well done. And then the question is so what will be the next round? Because now this will carry you some way, but you already talked about the Series B, so what are you going to need for the next one?

Marta Sjögren: 20:49

Series B. So let's first take why they were raised to Series A. At the moment in time when, as we're talking right now, we are completing and starting up our demo plant, which is a considerable kind of milestone for us. And once we have gotten that demo plant to be operational, the next scale up step is the first of a kind commercial plant yeah this is when you go from.

Marta Sjögren: 21:16

You know, right now we have about a kiloton, uh 1000 tons capacity in the demo plant. That's what it's annually going to produce. That is not, you know, size wise viable because you know even just one project can swallow that amount of material. And that's just one, but we will need to scale up considerably. So to co-finance that and also to co-finance the overall R&D roadmap, both on the product front and also on process technology further developments the Series B will be targeted towards that.

Lars Crama: 21:51

Yeah, okay, okay. Second part. And then that actually also ties into my next question, which is we are now sitting here in rotterdam. You're from stockholm. I think the team is from all over the world. Um, scaling a company like yours is an international play, so maybe can you take us along what your strategy is for scaling. And also then, linking to my question why did you set up a business here in Rotterdam?

Marta Sjögren: 22:14

Sure. So again, going back to my kind of decade plus of working as an investor in Europe, I had seen companies be kind of copied and pasted across borders and countries around Europe time and again. Yeah, so it works in one country, then we try to replicate it in others time and again.

Lars Crama: 22:31

Yeah, so it works in one country, then we try to replicate it in others.

Marta Sjögren: 22:34

That's right, yes, and they usually subscale in terms of talent and capital and overall ambition, and my co-founders had seen similar things. So, when we decided to set on this journey together and, by the way, the co-founders in their own right are from three different countries, we have Paul from and, by the way, the co-founders in their own rights are from three different countries, we have Paul from here, from the Netherlands, not even from Rotterdam, but from the Netherlands, we have Andreas from Finland, and you had Jane and me from Sweden and we realized that was the rational thing was to think of talent as something that is very local in various places and to to design, therefore, a hubs-based strategy to build Paebbl.

Marta Sjögren: 23:17

We wanted Paebbl to be a platform of choice for ambitious operators, researchers, engineers, product developers and similar from all around the world. But it's at least a pan-european and, over time, a global play. So that was like the first ambition flag, if you will, that we, that we planted. And then we started thinking, okay, what makes sense as talent hubs for what we actually need to get done? And the first thing we needed to get done was to take Paul's initial research work and scale that up to R&D state and then over time, to pilot and then demo state. And so we looked at we're very diligent on, we're very data driven on where can you do this? Where do you have process engineering talent?

Marta Sjögren: 24:05

We evaluated I think it was like six or seven different places around Europe. We had a scoreboard on all sorts of things. Like you know, talent is one one thing we were looking at. Another thing we were looking at is a proximity to um, you know, an urban environment, proximity to airports, proximity to other industry, um, and then, last but not least, overall ease of doing business. And Rotterdam was like it was amazing coming here and just seeing how well set up the city was for all of those factors, how deep the roots are in process engineering and how deep the talent pools are. You know you have what is it? Four or five different refineries and all of the talent pools are. You know you have what is it? Four or five different refineries and all of the associated ecosystems around? You have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people in the 50 kilometer radius of rotterdam that come with considerable experience that we needed right, so that's, that's what made sense.

Lars Crama: 25:08

yeah, so talent and and then, and then obviously you're offering, think, an opportunity for maybe those people that have been working in oil and gas or other industries to now, like you, switched from the investment side to the founder side on future-proof stuff. I think also for the engineers that maybe are listening and like, well, I'm now working for a big oil and gas company, I want to build the future.

Marta Sjögren: 25:29

I think that's a great question, or a great point, and I think it's vital also to stress that one of the other strategic decisions we made was that we wanted to build technology that was scalable in the coming decades, and that meant using a lot of established technology, and a lot of that technology actually comes from industry. A lot of that technology actually comes from industry. So the same engineers and same operators that are working with oil and gas, for example, or mineral processing, or chemicals or similar CO2 as well, they can just use the same skill set that they have, but towards a different purpose. Nice, and that's what we are able to offer.

Lars Crama: 26:10

Cool, and that's what we see well, almost behind us here in the different hall. I think we have so many, many more things to discuss, but maybe we'll leave that to the questions coming in soon. The one question I wanted to ask you before we go to the break is also your personal journey, and I think we share a journey there on on burnout and dealing with kind of overwhelm. Um, because, like me, you've been through a burnout before, um, and now you're leading a like fast scaling, scale up, with a huge mission with all these investors lined up and a like a timeline that is pushing you in all the sides. So what are you doing differently this time to avoid that? You would hit that moment again. What? What did you change in your way of working or way of thinking or way of living?

Marta Sjögren: 26:55

Yeah. So this is a very important thing to me and also something I care deeply about with regards to our team. I'm very grateful for my burnout. I'm grateful that it happened to me when I was 35 and not, you know, much later Not that I wish anyone to have a burnout, but it's good education though it is good education, it it shows you that you're not superhuman, you are human.

Marta Sjögren: 27:19

You do need to rest.

Marta Sjögren: 27:21

I learned a lot about my body and, you know, I wasn't feeling bad not or I wasn't aware that I was feeling bad.

Marta Sjögren: 27:27

Let's put it this way I'm a pretty kind of a goal-driven person and I had my goals and I said, you know, I'll just need to sacrifice, for example, sleep, or only sacrifice whatever part of quality lifestyle for a while, because I'm in pursuit of this goal and what the burnout taught me is that sleep is not something you sacrifice. It took me, you know, when I was diagnosed, I went through they were trying to figure out all sorts of kind of like what is actually going on with you. So I went through sleep analysis and what was found that, you know, is my rem, the rapid eye movement phase of the sleep, which is meant to be about 15 to 25 percent of your sleep for an adult, for me was below five percent below five percent, below five percent yeah and you see me wearing this ring, the aura ring, which I love, yeah, and I have my uh also my wedding's watch, and I have a continuous glucose monitor.

Marta Sjögren: 28:22

I'm a very data-driven person as you've gathered by now.

Marta Sjögren: 28:26

So I decided that I don't really trust this. I'm going to test this myself, yeah, um, and the data was shocking, you know, and it got me really to look at my behaviors. It got me to understand that I wasn't really in touch with my body or with my mind really, in particular, I was so focused on my work and also I'm a mother of two and two humans, and I'm also mother of four dogs, four animals, so we have lots of responsibility big family and I realized that I needed to put in place some non-negotiables.

Marta Sjögren: 29:01

And those non-negotiables mean that I need to sleep at least eight hours a night. I do not consume alcohol past a certain hour and, if at all, I've also seen the effects of red meat in my sleep. So, I've kind of cut that out considerably, or not a lot of red meat to begin with, but right now I notice that if I even have it like once, my sleep will be disrupted for the next two days.

Lars Crama: 29:28

Really. So I have all of this data now.

Marta Sjögren: 29:30

That tells me you need to make choices in life. Also, workouts are a very important part of my routine because they help me not only de-stress, but also sleep better, have more energy and similar. So my message here is you know, listen to the data, don't be afraid of the data. My message here is you know, listen to the data, don't be afraid of the data, and you can, you know, alter your lifestyle choices anytime. And it's about the discipline of knowing what is the right lifestyle for you.

Lars Crama: 30:01

Wow, I feel I need to. We are taking notes here, so I think I need to get my data straight again, Because when you were talking about sleep, that was clear. Then the red meat oh okay, that really kicks in. And then alcohol. I still have to work on that, I guess, but many people will recognize. But thanks for sharing that. I think it's important to understand how you've learned from that and how you're now, you know, getting both mentally and physically in shape and ready to run a company like this. We'll go to a quick break and then we'll be back.

Speaker 4: 30:32

You're listening to the podcast of Up Rotterdam. We help startups scale and grow their business by offering access to talent, access to international markets and access to capital. Curious how we can make the network work for you? Go to uprotterdamcom. This podcast was made possible by the City of Rotterdam.

Lars Crama: 30:52

We're back. What a fascinating company you're building. We talked about co-CEO got that out of the way. You talked about data-driven you know becoming a better person founder mentally and physically but we've also dived into the fascinating world of carbon mineralization and how you're growing that company. Maybe before we go to listeners' questions, we talked about scaling up in the next phases of the companies. So what are the, the hubs that you're looking for next? Where? Where are you going to?

Marta Sjögren: 31:19

yeah, so right now we have Rotterdam is our biggest hub. It is likely going to be our biggest hub in the foreseeable future, but what we also have is our Nordics hubs, um, where we, you know, I think it's no surprise that industry 4.0 has kind of blossomed in the nordics more than in most other parts of europe, and that means that commercial talent, for example, finance, legal and, uh, just overall commercial product sales uh is very strong. There's thousands of people around the Nordics that have amazing experience in offtake agreements on how to finance industry 4.0, how to scale those teams and similar. So that's the hub that we're growing quite a lot. Now, as we're going from demo to a potential first of a kind commercial plant, there will be some exciting announcements of people who've just joined us, so stay tuned for that.

Marta Sjögren: 32:15

The other hub that we've grown is our UK hub. We've identified the UK to be the best European market for data science, so now we have, I think, three or four people already there and we'll be growing that as well. We want to be a platform of choice for talent wherever the skills that we need are, so it's likely we're going to expand to beyond this in other European cities and ecosystems in the time to come, but for now, we're 53 people, I believe, right now, and I think we have 25 nationalities.

Marta Sjögren: 32:53

So no matter if you're based in Rotterdam or Stockholm, helsinki or the UK somewhere I would love to hear from you perfect, and then all the vacancies are on the website Paebbl.

Lars Crama: 33:02

We'll put that in the show notes as well. Or, if you're in this region, hackyourcareercom is where we keep all the vacancies of scaleups, but we'll make sure people find you there and then, yeah, I think it's a great proposition. Wherever you live, there's a Paebbl location you can deploy your skills, and that links back to your strategy of going where the talent is right.

Marta Sjögren: 33:20

That's right.

Lars Crama: 33:20

I think that's a really smart strategy. So many smart topics in this conversation. Let's see if the questions are also smart. First question is from Christopher Engman. He's the founder of MegaDeals. His question is ooh, this is a pricing question. What is the per ton CO2 cost you achieve today and what is the goal cost per ton CO2 in the future?

Marta Sjögren: 33:48

So, although I'm not prepared to disclose exact numbers, I can say that right now we're in the roughly 1,000 euros per ton at the scale that we're at right now In the first-of-a-kind commercial plant. We envisage to be in the hundreds or perhaps 100-plus euro per ton, and then, over time, below 100 euros per ton yeah, so that's a huge uh. Yeah, it's obviously I mean it. It it matters a lot how big the plants are.

Lars Crama: 34:21

The bigger the plant, the lower the cost of the co2 sequestration yes, okay, cool, great answer and uh, thanks for answering it, at least on the on the high level. Thanks, christopher, for asking that question. The next question is from uh constantine, who is obviously the um special envoy of tech leap, who was here with the delegation yes yes, hello, hello, hold on there's more princes coming in one second um.

Lars Crama: 34:47

so his question is you're scaling in Europe, in the EU, but Asia and the Middle East, africa, maya, are probably much bigger growth markets, so will you move there, or is Europe still an interesting enough market for Paebbl?

Marta Sjögren: 35:01

That's a great question. Thank you so much for that. So addressing the Global South is a core priority for us. That said, the global south needs economically viable solutions and it needs to have proven technology. So for us, europe, with its commitments to to a clean industry as being the the first step of scaling up, that's a commitment that we have, especially in this political environment, challenging political environment we find ourselves in. The commitment to Europe being the first of a kind commercial plant has never been stronger. That said, the next plant, the second, third, fourth plant we will likely expand to beyond Europe. That's because that's where urbanization is happening more and more, that's where infrastructure is being built and that's where the emissions are going to be coming from. Historically, you know, the global north has stood for most of the emissions. I think the global south will be standing for quite a bit of the emissions going forward and we want to turn that into a climate opportunity as opposed to an even bigger pollution problem.

Lars Crama: 36:11

Right. And then the way that you organize your operations. That means you'd also need to set up there in those locations, right?

Marta Sjögren: 36:17

That's right yeah correct, go local.

Lars Crama: 36:19

Thanks, constantine, for sending in that question. And I have to say this it's funny because I've seen him on two stages and when he talks about companies that are kind of really building the next part of the economy, he always mentioned Paebbl. So thank you, maybe you got one of those little houses, two little Paebbl blocks of concrete that I see here. So next question is from Paul Knops, we obviously know really well, co-founder advisor. His question is how do you promote diversity in the team and female empowerment? His question is how do you promote diversity in the team and female empowerment and how do you think we can get more women in founders positions, especially in tech? And then the following question is how do you get around in a unfortunately male driven engineering world?

Marta Sjögren: 37:05

I love that that question comes from all of all people. So, firstly, I've never seen my gender, either as an enabler or disabler. I think that's the the first starting point. I'm a professional and I just expect people not to care what I am or not. I'm not, um, I faced a lot of male-dominated industries and companies and businesses at the intersection of finance and technology and I'd say now, technology and industry is no easier, let's put it that way. But at the same time, I see a changing world in which role models play a huge role. In which role models play a huge role and just showing that there is representation around the table from all sorts of diversity elements, whether it's gender, age, ethnicity, culture, nationality, religion, whatever. I think that's the way to walk the walk. Here at Paebbl, as I mentioned earlier, we're about 50 people, 25 nationalities, um, we have an age range of, I think the youngest is 25 and the eldest is about 65, 35, something like that. And so we, we walk the walk, you know, and we're we try to recognize talent, no matter where it comes from, and to empower people to show that they are leading the way, whatever it is. That's one side of it.

Marta Sjögren: 38:39

The second level of our organizational design is that we are building, and we want to continue building a flat organization. Mm-hmm, what does that mean? It means that hierarchies tend to promote certain types of personalities, whereas flat organizations promote other types of leadership, and that's what we're doing here, and we are able to also show that. You know, as we've scaled from just what the four co-founders to now 50 plus people, we have brought on leaders that are diverse, of all sorts of diversity, including gender diversity. And creating rules of engagement of how we talk to each other is the third important factor. So the first factor was just hiring people from all over the place, the second one was having a flat organization, and then the third one is our operating principles. Our operating principles involve behavioral expectations that encourage a more, let's say, constructive work environment than a lot of the alpha male dominated, although I don't like to generalize, yeah um, and some of those include things like abc.

Marta Sjögren: 40:00

It means always be constructive okay and then there's like a whole paragraph around what that means and what you can do if you see somebody not being constructive nice. Another one is leave your ego out of the door. This was very important to me because I've seen a lot of toxic behavior happen on the basis of ego, and having your ego in check is actually rationally the best thing you can do, both for yourself and for a company, and so we institutionalize that nice.

Lars Crama: 40:29

And then there's others that I'm not going to go into right now, but we try to create a expected behaviors, uh, type of a situation within Paebbl that does not condone toxic behavior nice and then getting that right over all those generations you talked about, I mean people who are in their 20s entering the workforce all the way to 60 plus in the workforce, have a maybe a different experience coming back. So so then the follow-up question. So there's. So I assume you have this long list of your behaviors that you expect, and then do you get to change them over time or do they evolve? How does that work?

Marta Sjögren: 41:00

absolutely. I mean we are also a learning organization. That's another one of the principles that we have. A learning organization means that, just like a living organism, you need to adapt yeah so, for instance, uh, when we wrote out the operating principles to begin with, like at the very beginning of the company, safety was not anywhere on there and then we, you know, we started working in industry and then the engineers that we brought on board they're like where is safety?

Lars Crama: 41:27

the operating principles. Well, it makes sense. Yeah. Then we realized oh yeah, of course, that was just. Uh, that was a miss.

Marta Sjögren: 41:33

So we made that principle number one.

Lars Crama: 41:35

Yeah, safety comes of course, yeah, in this industry, yeah, yes, yeah, yeah. And actually, when you enter the office here, obviously you have to, like in many, uh, engineering industries, you have to, you know, leave your name and all the details to make sure that everything's followed. So safety's in there now. So you're learning, um, and we'll talk again when you have 200 people. If you still have that flat structure, because that's going to be the challenge, right, how do you keep that flatness in the organization going forward?

Marta Sjögren: 41:59

Well, you know, actually interesting. You should bring that point up. We're right now in the process of planning how we're going to scale the flat structure from 50 to 200 people. So, yes, let's catch up on that in a couple of years time. But we're actively designing for what I call growing challenges, or growing pains that I know every company goes through. You know when you're in venture. We know that roughly things break when you're about 25 people, when you're up 50 people and then when you're around somewhere between 100 and 200 people yeah so if you proactively design around that, yeah, maybe you can escape some of that.

Marta Sjögren: 42:38

But of course there is the real life.

Lars Crama: 42:39

That just happens parts of it you just have to go through. But parts, that's right, you can prevent. Uh, final question this is a fun question from paul, actually, and this is linking back to the prince. He says why did you not continue your tradition to hug royalty in the netherlands? Oh my god, paul, maybe you have to explain where this goes. I know where it comes from. Maybe you have to explain where this comes from so, uh, um, this is a.

Marta Sjögren: 43:05

This is so long. I'm gonna get you back for this, paul. Um, this goes back to maybe about 30. No, hold on a second. This is when I was pregnant with my younger son, so he's 11 now, so it's about 12 years ago.

Marta Sjögren: 43:22

I'm also not natively Swedish and I was invited to present at the equivalent of RVO here in the Netherlands. We have the Swedish equivalent and I was invited to present, kind of just, uh, you know what venture investing is, and at then I had lived in sweden for just a couple of years. I didn't, I didn't come to sweden speaking swedish and I decided to challenge myself, so I decided to hold a presentation in swedish. Little did I know was that this event was kind of a big deal and even the royal prince, like Prince Daniel, was, um, gonna be there. I also didn't. Really, I'm very face blind. I don't know who people generally are, even celebrities. This is a problem I have. And but all of a sudden, you know, as I was going up on stage, there was somebody saying you know, get up for the royal prince of sweden. I was like, oh, holy crap.

Marta Sjögren: 44:14

Um, and then I, you know, I presented and I, I guess I didn't make enough of, or like too much of a fool of myself. And afterwards he and his delegation came up to me and sort of um said, thank you for the presentation and we would love to learn more about venture capital, can we come visit your company? And so I said, I'm sure we can arrange that, I guess. But when they came to North Zone, which was my employer back then, I didn't know how you say hi to the royalties so, and in Sweden everyone hugs. So I just walk up to him and have say oh hi, nice to see you, and hug him and to like the great shock of just about everyone who was there, including like the royal, I don't know, the royal squad or something.

Marta Sjögren: 44:59

And then, um, yeah, that was, that was the first time that happened. I didn't know, I mean, it just like looked a little weird, but I was like I was pregnant and I thought maybe people just think I'm I don't know, big or something uncomfortable, I don't know. But then, behold, you know, I gave birth to my son. And then, a year later, we were at the Slush conference, the conference where my co-founder, andreas, was CEO, and I'm just walking on like just in front of this huge crowd of people and I'm walking towards, I think, the Swedish lunch and then suddenly I see Prince Daniel and his posse walk over not towards me, they were just walking and he comes over and he actually gives me a hug. And then it was like this super weird thing where people around us were like what is going on?

Lars Crama: 45:45

Yeah, it was a funny moment. Fantastic. Perhaps you started a movement of hugging princes. So, constantine, this one's for you. Next time you meet marta, give her a big hug anyway.

Marta Sjögren: 45:56

No, no prince or princess or anyone is forced to.

Lars Crama: 45:58

There's no, there's no pressure, but we will look next time if you do it, but there's no pressure. Awesome. This was a great anecdote, um marta. We can spend much more time, but unfortunately time is up. Thanks for sharing your story here, um. It's been insightful. You're going to be on stage at Epsom Festival as well, so those people who want to see you in real life maybe dive into a different part of your story, come visit us 22nd of May in Rotterdam. We've talked about many things. We'll put the links in the show notes, but the most important thing we close off with is a song that you have selected. So would you like to introduce the name of the song and why you chose it?

Marta Sjögren: 46:33

Absolutely. I'm going to choose one of my favorite songs of all times. May or may not be relevant for being a founder, and not the least with what we're building here at Paebbl. It is called Under Pressure.

Lars Crama: 46:45

And, of course, great song. Thank you, marta. Thank you for listening. Until next time, keep it up.

Speaker 3: 47:20

Thank you, you, marta. Thank you for listening. Until next time, keep it up, thank you. Under pressure, the brains are filled in dry. Streets are failing soon, but people are streets. Eat it up. Eat it up, that's okay.

Speaker 3: 47:46

It's the terror of knowing what this world is about. Watching some good friends screaming let me out Tomorrow. Gets me higher. Passion won't beat up people on speech Chippin' around, keep my brains round the floor, okay. People on streets, people on streets. It's a terror of knowing what this world is about. Watching some good friends screaming let me out Tomorrow. We're going high and high. People, people, people on streets, turned away. We're going high and high, high, high. Keep on, keep it on Streets, turned away from it all, like a blind man Sat on a fence. But it don't work.

Speaker 3: 49:05

Keep coming up with love, but it's so slashed and torn. Why, why, why? So slashed and torn? Why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why can't we give love that one more chance? Why can't we give love, give love, give love, give love, give love, give love, give love, give love. No flesh and blood. And love dares you To care for the people On the edge of the night. And love dares you To change our way of Caring about ourselves. This is our last dance. This is our last dance. This is ourselves Under pressure, under pressure, pressure, pressure. Thank you.