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🌎 Welcome back to CleanTechies, Founder edition.
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Today, we are talking to Ben Christensen of Cambium.
🚨 Too busy to listen to the whole thing? We get it! That’s why we’ve included the text transcription at the end of this post - check it out 👇🏽
In our third installment of sustainable building materials, we’re taking another look at lumber.
We’ve already called reclaimed lumber “the superpower building material you’ve never heard of”.
As a refresher, lumber, processed wood from trees, is a versatile and widely used building material known for its strength, durability, and workability.
So why isn’t there more of it in our buildings? Well, as great as lumber is, usable lumber from our buildings only comes from a few places — in the USA, it comes mainly from the Northwest and Southeast. For this reason, lumber is an expensive building material.
But all hope is not lost. Last week, we covered Urban Machine, a company turning waste wood reusable by removing objects from it.
This week, we’re covering Cambium - a hot 🔥 startup pioneering regenerative, local supply chains for wood by converting waste wood into reusable assets for the lumber industry. Not only do they have their own white-labeled wood called Carbon Smart Wood, but they have an innovative SaaS platform that can function as the source of truth for the entire supply chain.
Convinced that you should know more about this? Well, you’re in luck. Tune in to todays episode to learn more…🎧💡
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The Guest: Ben Christensen
Ben Christensen is the CEO and co-founder of Cambium, a company focused on transforming supply chains for materials in the built environment by sourcing wood from salvage sources instead of cutting down new trees
He grew up in a construction background, with his father being a carpenter, and has always been passionate about wood and sustainable practices
Ben has a background in research and academia, and previously secured a grant from the Nature Conservancy to study wood waste in cities
Ben is also an ultra runner, which contributes to his gritty and determined approach to building and scaling his company
The Company: Cambium
One Liner: Converting waste wood into valuable building materials, all centralized on their innovative SaaS platform
Cambium Carbon is a company transforming lumber supply chains for materials in the built environment.
They source wood from salvage sources, diverting it from landfills, and repurpose it into valuable building materials.
Their platform connects the entire supply chain from sourcing to processing to logistics, ensuring transparency and efficiency.
Cambium Carbon partners with cities and local communities, focusing on job creation and environmental sustainability, and can fashion the wood into their own branded product, Carbon Smart Wood.
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📝 Show Notes:
Topics
02:10 Introduction
06:24 Challenges in the Lumber Supply Chain
14:04 Deciding on the Founder Venture-Fact Operating Model
16:26 Guaranteeing Offtake and Ensuring Supply
19:03 The Value of Waste Wood
29:03 Competing with Incumbents
34:09 Scaling the Local Approach
45:32 Advice for Founders
Links
Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn
@Silas & @Somil_Agg on X
This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.
Text Transcript 👇🏽
Somil Aggarwal:
Alright Ben, welcome to the show, how are you?
Ben Christensen:
Doing well, thanks so much for having me.
Somil Aggarwal:
Thank you for being on here from your day job of saving the forests. This is a huge pleasure to have you on speaking on the podcast today. So this is super fun.
Ben Christensen:
Excited to be here. It's gonna be great.
Somil Aggarwal:
I know who you are, but the audience doesn't, so please don't leave us in suspense.
Ben Christensen:
I'm Ben Christensen, CEO and co-founder of a company called Cambium. We're all about transforming supply chains for materials in the built environment. What does that actually mean? We help source wood from salvage sources instead of cutting down new trees and forests. Basically, and I'm sure we'll get into all of this, but we save fallen trees that were going to landfills or going to end up as mulch.
We transform them into valuable building materials that can be used to build buildings, for furniture, for architectural elements. Our brand is called Carbon Smart Wood. And then we built out this technology platform that actually traces the full piece of it. We connect the sourcing to processing to logistics, and then ultimately to the end customer. Once you've got a data layer that connects all of these dots, it gives you really clear carbon data and pricing data across the supply chain.
Somil Aggarwal:
So you're a combination of sort of a supply chain software with a really innovative approach to how you retrofit waste wood to start with and somewhat of a playbook that might be able to scale broader than that based on maybe a quick foreshadow you gave there. But let's start basic, why did you start with wood? And I guess specifically here, waste wood in the first place.
Ben Christensen:
The story to coming to waste wood is interesting. I grew up in wood. My dad's a construction worker, carpenter. We have a three-car garage at my home that never had a car in it. It was always filled with wood and all kinds of different tools. And so I spent a ton of time in that space growing up. I never thought about waste wood in any big way. I always felt like recycled material, salvaged wood was kind of this nice thing, a good thing, but a small thing.
And then in grad school, I started to understand it more and more. I recognized that this is actually a crazy big overlooked opportunity. From the unmanaged forests, think city trees, the trees around cities, there's about 46 million tons of material that comes out of there every single year that is currently being wasted. So there's this gigantic amount of wasted material in the U.S. and nobody's really solving it.
One day I was at a local sort of waste yard, a place where people bring logs to then dispose of them, to turn them into mulch or a lot of that ends up being sent to landfill. I was there, I was talking to the people, I learned about it. Then on a hot summer day, I went over to the grocery store to get something refreshing. As I was walking in, there was firewood in front of the grocery store. This was all in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I grew up. That firewood in Albuquerque, which was about a mile away from this big waste yard where we're throwing all this wood away, was from Estonia.
It was a real quick moment where it was like, what are we doing? A mile away we're throwing wood, we're shipping wood in from Europe, it doesn't make any sense. That was the moment that really pushed me into diving in and recognizing how big this problem actually is.
Somil Aggarwal:
And so that's the imported wood at a local forest store. It's that story. I agree, it's equally mind-blowing. You have something that's locally sourceable, which I know is a big thing for you guys. So we're going to get into that. You're paying this premium for things that you don't need to pay a premium for, which is so dumb. Going into a new supply chain, going into wood, I'm sure you having grown up with it had a certain understanding of it. Then you enter a logistical nightmare of what is supply chains in this world. From your experience now being a founder in this space, what are the major challenges within lumber timber and moving it around?
Ben Christensen:
A couple of key challenges. One is that it's heavy. This is a material that is big and it's heavy, so transportation costs really matter and how you move it really matters both from price and from a carbon impact perspective. The second is that it's a really complicated and fragmented industry. We often think about wood as just something that sort of exists. It’s a card in Settlers of Catan, or it's just part of a table that we sit at. We don't actually think about wood. Usually, whatever desk you're sitting on, somewhere between eight to ten businesses have to touch that material before it ends up in your home or before it ends up in the walls of our houses or buildings.
Those eight to ten businesses look really different. They are in different places. They transact often in really archaic ways and they don't actually have any connectivity. So what that means is you've got these supply chains that are long, they're complicated, and they don't really have technology that serves them. As we got into this more and more, we recognized that there's this big opportunity to bring those together. It's also pretty hard to do because you're dealing with lots of different stakeholders in a legacy industry. So plenty of challenges in actually building.
Somil Aggarwal:
Generally speaking, that means that your solution, and again, jumping ahead here, your solution is not only making it from a reuse perspective better for the environment, but then also, this comes from my view as an investor in the space and just looking broadly at what we need to get mass timber into supply, transportation, like you said, and locality is a huge issue. It's located in two pockets, essentially. You're either in the Northwest or the Southeast, right, if you're in the US.
Any place in the middle has to pay a pretty high premium to get it in high supply. With that backdrop, when you're looking at entering the space, was it, you come from somewhat of a background. So I don't know if it probably felt this way, but did you feel a challenge like getting into the supply chain, right? And kind of entering at a certain point and how did you grow your ability to deliver?
Ben Christensen:
Definitely. This is a challenge and it's still something that we are very much working on as a company. We have now sourced tens of millions of board feet and are scaling in some pretty big ways, which is really exciting. But there's lots that we're still continuing to dive into because it is such a big industry. At the start, one of the big things that we would face is really just learning how to talk to different folks.
We have people who are arborists, so people who actually take care of managed trees. We work with cities, people who actually own the trees in many cases. We work with lumber folks. We work with sawmills. We work with trucking companies. Each of those has a little bit of a different way in which you communicate to them. One of the things that we learned really early on is rather than coming in and trying to say, here's our value proposition, this is why you should be part of this bigger solution. We’ve really learned that the way to do that is to be super, super listen first on everything. That’s been our approach is help us understand what your pain points are, all of those things. Some of that's pretty intuitive. I think a lot of companies do that. But when you're doing this more systemic approach where you've got lots of different users, it's really important to get that right. We talk about it all the time, listen for sales. That's been really important in terms of entering this industry because people often are not that interested in new solutions, but they actually are interested in telling you about their problems. So that's a great way to enter, and we found that to be really successful.
…Tune into the episode for the rest 🎧💡
#191 Wood Supply Chains, Creating a Brand, Fragmented Industries, Securing Consistent Offtake & More w/ Ben Christensen (Cambium)