Reflecting On My Time in Ari Global
Reflecting on my two weeks in Ari Global building the next big thing in climate tech
After spending more than a year outside of any accelerator or development programs, I joined Ari Global’s “next big thing” cohort, which was a 2-week sprint to figure out what was the next biggest thing in climate tech.
In those two weeks, I feel like I grew more than I have in the last 2 months. By the end of it, I began building a project to make carbon capture profitable by converting captured CO2 to carbon black (will touch on that soon).
As I look back on those two weeks, here are my personal learnings, + takeaways from my time at Ari Global.
I maxed out each part of my happiness equation without sacrificing anything.
Everything during Ari Global happened to fit so well into my life. I was able to build a routine that was filled to the brim with what I enjoy doing each and every day, work on interesting projects, and meet new people.
Every day, my daily routine would go like this:
Wake up at 9 and have a slow morning, where I listen to mellow r&b as I brush my teeth.
Drink tea with my mom and spend time with her before I go off to university
Eat something around 1pm
Start working around 2pm
Ari global session starts at 3:30pm, ends at 6pm. Meet people, do research sprints, etc.
decompress for 1 hour
Muay Thai training session at 7:00pm, ends at 8:30pm.
Get home, shower, and eat by 10:30pm
Play video games w/ da bois till 12.
With this schedule, I got everything I was looking for in a daily routine: interesting work, family time, social time, physical activity, and very little clutter. As I had high agency over my time (no school!) I was able to spend time on what I actually want to spend it on. In the future, I’ll be using these 2 weeks as a benchmark for building a schedule.
A result of those two weeks was BlackCarbon Labs
Ari Global culminates In a 3-day sprint where you use all of the skills + knowledge that you built over the past 11 days to figure out what the next biggest thing in climate tech is. I believe it’ll be carbon valorization (the process of converting captured CO2 into another product). My partner, Piram Singh, and I spent the next 3 days figuring out how we can do that with our project BlackCarbon Labs.
By 2050, we need to capture an additional 8 billion (out of a total 10 billion) tons of co2 yearly. Partially to avoid a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees C, but mainly to enable impoverished nations to grow their economies by using the same cheap energy sources that International superpowers used to gain their dominance.
Currently, carbon capture is prohibitively expensive, at $180/ton, it’ll cost $1.4 trillion yearly to capture the 8 billion tons of CO2 that we need to. Obviously, that’s unsustainable as that money would be effectively buried in the ground along with the captured carbon.
That’s why to scale up carbon capture it needs to be profitable. By using the captured co2, we can create different carbon-neutral products that can be viable sources of revenue for carbon capture plants.
This is the goal of BlackCarbon Labs: to make carbon capture profitable with an inherent source of revenue (that isn’t carbon credits.)
If you want to listen to the 4-minute pitch that we gave to the judges, I’ve linked it below for you to go deeper.
You would be surprised at how much you can improve in two weeks
Ari Global was structured as a 2-week sprint with 1-1 coaching, daily sessions focusing on emerging climate tech + CEO skillsets, a community of like-minded people, and a final 3-day sprint).
The first research sprint that I did at Ari Global, I was out of practice! The slides were sloppy, the problem framing was shakey, and the pitch was surface level. Throughout the sprints, I was able to build better research habits and increase my work capacity allowing me to create a better product in the same amount of time.
This slide was the first one we made in the program.
This slide was for the final pitch in the program.
While we had more time for the latter deck, the point still remains that the LK99 slides are super ugly + not functional. There were a lot of visual + content improvements in between the two slides.
I feel like I was able to improve so quickly because of how many intentional reps and feedback cycles we had. For the first week, each daily session was a research sprint followed by a presentation of what you built. Presenting 5 different decks, and getting feedback on each deck drilled in the habits that worked and the skills that still needed work. By reinforcing high standards, and what it takes to achieve high standards, there’s no excuse for building a shit product.
Feedback is a gift
Not to be redundant, but I also want to highlight how important feedback is. Feedback is a gift, and you should treat it as such. After being out of TKS for a year, I’m starting to value feedback far more. I used to take it for granted, but I started to realize that great feedback is literally concise advice intentionally packaged for your growth. if that’s not a gift I don’t know what is. So during Ari Global, I was intentional about jotting down each piece of feedback that I got (as I have a bad memory) and constantly looking back to see if I’m applying it in my next iteration.
While that is a simple takeaway, when I was taking in feedback from coaches with high standards and constantly implementing them, I was able to grow more as I was actively training with each rep rather than passively coasting along.
How you frame a problem, is everything
Something that I always struggled with during the NeuraDAO days was problem framing and as a result, ambiguity. With bad problem framing, comes ambiguity, which brings on all types of other problems. A large issue with NeuraDAO was that it was unclear exactly what it was we were trying to solve -> academic funding? neurotech data scarcity? DSM-5?
At the start of Ari Global, I started to frame problems in the same way that I did with NeuraDAO. I looked at Twitter, Googled around a bit, and saw that LK-99 was interesting as it had large potential implications. While that’s true, the process of figuring out the optimal chemistry for a room-temperature superconductor likely required a Ph.D. in material science + wafting through an incredible cloud of ambiguity. With a prompt like “How can you create a room-temperature superconductor?” Where the hell do you even start?
On the other side, “How can you make carbon capture profitable?” Is a lot cleaner and straightforward. The framing of this problem allows you to break it down into increasing revenue or reducing costs. From there it was easy to see that reducing costs was extremely difficult and several companies were working on it already, however, nobody was working on increasing revenue from carbon.
Now, the framing for the problem was “How can we create a source of revenue from carbon capture?” That’s simple, you can use the captured CO2 and sell it somehow. Eventually, we were able to break it down fully through this line of thinking -> “how can we extract the most value from the CO2 -> convert it into something more valuable -> “What is the most valuable product that we can make from CO2?”
This final framing of our problem opened up our thinking and the way that we could come up with solutions as the problem was simple + clear at its core.
“Economics first!”
When evaluating ideas in climate tech, my good friend Ahmed Hassan has always been quite adamant about looking at the economics of an idea first before even proceeding with anything else. The reason behind this is because if you look at an idea from first principles, and see that if you have to break the law of conservation of energy so that your energy costs are low enough for your process to work, it’s not gonna work.
The ability to do clean, concise napkin math to (in)validate ideas is a must if you’re looking to build something in climate tech. Looking from first principles, we were able to determine the absolute limits of profits in different markets that we were exploring for our captured CO2. Very quickly, it was clear what markets made sense and what didn’t. For example, certain markets like synthetic fuels don’t make sense, as the current costs for natural gas are so low, and current co2-based synthetic fuels are 5x more expensive than the status quo.
When figuring out our process for turning captured CO2 into carbon black (an industry that we found makes sense), we had to ensure that our process would be profitable and that we wouldn’t be more costly than the market rate. As if we were to create a product that was even 20% more expensive than the status quo, there would be no economic incentive anymore.
Profits are king, and basically everything else comes second.
1-1s with Michael + Quinn
The 1-1s with Michael and Quinn were so influential that I believe that they need their own section.
Each time I had a 1-1 with Michael, I got new insights into the direction of my project or something that I was directly working on. I have several pages of my notebook filled w/ michaels guidance for a reason. Each time I implemented his feedback, the quality of my outputs became at least 5x better. This article is a prime example of that.
Michael was the one who showed me how pivotal good feedback can be. Originally for black carbon labs, we were looking into potentially reducing costs for carbon capture (repeating the same mistakes that I made previously), but he made the recommendation to focus on profitability as that’s what the sector is currently lacking. That help with the framing allowed us to make incredible strides in 3 days. Reducing the costs for carbon capture would’ve been a nightmare! But with good feedback, you can make 3 weeks’ worth of progress in 3 days if you work hard enough.
When having 1-1s with Quinn, I got to level up as a PM/CEO. After sunsetting neuradao I’ve been digesting the lessons from that project (still) and thinking about how i could’ve made decisions differently for the future. however, there’s only so much you can learn in a black box without any outside input. Quinn was that outside input: When asking Quinn questions about bringing cofounders onto the team, giving feedback, maintaining momentum with a strong team, etc. he was able to not only give me concise answers + advice but also gave me several resources to dive into after the session.
Quinn is the reason that I’ll have a CEO coach if I’m ever a founder again.
What’s next?
I’m still trying to figure out what’s next w.r.t university, but for the project, there’s still a lot of research left to validate:
what is our capex?
plasma pyrolysis chamber
seperation chamber
sabatier reactor
catalyst
monitoring equipment
what is our opex
does it cost money to use our catalyst
energy
reactor gasses
co2
h2
o2
what are the quality standards for carbon black?
can we use our carbon black for tires + rubber or is there some standard that we have to meet?
what needs to be true to scale up to a billion tons of carbon black?
how much carbon black is needed to fulfill an industry standard contract w/ michelin (for example)
what is the turnaround time for 1 ton with our process? what about 1000 tons?
is this vc-backable? we require a lot of initial capital
how long does it take to create 1 ton of methane?
I’ll figure this out sometime soon, but in the next month, I’ll be moving into university for the first time so that’ll be my focus for now.
To summarize this reflection:
Ari global is a 2 week sprint where the goal is to figure out what’s the next biggest thing in climate tech
During those two weeks, I was able to live my best life, maxing out my happiness equation with full agency of my time
The final sprint for ari global culminated in me starting a project to make carbon capture profitable via converting captured co2 into carbon black
Other the two weeks I learned that: feedback is a gift, economics is king, how you frame a problem is everything
Michael and Quinn are amazing directors, and 1-1 coaching is another major needlemover for individual growth.
If you got this far, thank you! I appreciate your time
—AK