The following interview is a conversation we had with Ben Christensen, CEO of Cambium Carbon, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $5.5 Million Raised to Build a new Category of Sustainable Wood

Ben Christensen
Thanks so much. Yeah, excited to be here. 

Brett
No problem. So let’s start off with a quick summary of who you are and just a bit more about your background. 

Ben Christensen
Yeah, so we’re a company that’s focused on addressing climate change in a really big way, that also rewrites some of the inequalities in our world. So focused on people first, climate solutions. We do that by making it really easy for large national material buyers, think people in the built environment or large product companies to source materials locally and to use waste to value materials, helping to keep waste out of our waste streams, and then also really connecting local economies and local jobs back into the new green economy. We do that first with wood, so we make it really easy for folks like Patagonia, National Geographic, Microsoft Room and board to source locally. And then we help local processors use wastewood instead of cutting down virgin trees. So that’s what we do, sort of my background. I was born and raised in New Mexico. 

Ben Christensen
Really grew up in forestry and in wood products. Spent a ton of time in the shop with my dad, and also have been really focused on addressing climate change for my whole life. Went through a number of different iterations of that. Never really thought that the two would come together, but they have, and really excited about what we’re building and have so many great folks around me who’ve helped us get where we are. 

Brett
I saw on your LinkedIn that you’re working to achieve global carbon negativity by 2060. Do you think that’s realistic? Are we on track? 

Ben Christensen
We are not on track. I would not say that. I would say that. One of the biggest things that I believe is that you don’t solve impossible problems without believing in them. And I think as soon as you stop thinking about, okay, what would need to be true in order for us to solve a problem, you stop solving it. And so I’m a huge believer in pushing that. I also think that’s what our world needs to stay in a 1.5 warming scenario that’s going to be less catastrophic. And so that’s been my life’s work. I’ve had that date and number in mind for a long time. Obviously, a lot of other people have a similar thought. So I think there’s a lot that we can do. 

Ben Christensen
I think it’s realistic in the sense of there are real solutions that are not crazy for us to do to get there. Are we on track? Definitely not. 

Brett
And a few other questions I like to ask. And the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick and what inspires you. So first one, what founder and CEO do you admire the most, and what do you admire about them? 

Ben Christensen
I would say one of my favorite founders, and I’ll say this, which is maybe, I don’t know, a different example, but one of my favorite founders is Phoebe Yao. She runs a company called Paredo. One of the things that she does that is really incredible is a consistent sense of directness that I think is really pervasive. But it’s a sense of directness that is also coupled with a really high emotional availability for her team. And that’s something that I’m always trying to strive for, is, how do you balance both of those? They’re still a fairly young company growing really well, but something that she just does very consistently is deliver direct feedback and couple that with a really effective sort of understanding of the emotional topography of her team. I’ve seen her do that in many different cases. 

 

Ben Christensen
And, yeah, something I really look up. 

Brett
To is that, like, the radical candor approach, or how would you summarize the approach? 

Ben Christensen
I mean, I think there’s this great. I think lots of folks have thought about these different things, but it’s the idea of trying to be more direct about what a culture of excellence actually means. And I think that doing that, it’s not a crazy idea for founders. I think these are things that we think about all the time, as you know, but correctly identifying a problem, quickly engaging and being direct in that problem, but also being savvy enough emotionally to make sure that what you’re putting forward is heard and understood and actually bought in on. There’s a ton of different approaches to that. Radical candor is part of it, but I think that’s sort of like a holistic coverage across those three points. 

Brett
And what about books for you? How I like to frame this, and I stole this from Ryan Holiday. He calls them quake books. So a quake book is a book that rocks you to your core and really influences how you think about the world and how you approach life. Do any quickbooks come to mind for you? 

Ben Christensen
I’ll say one which completely changed my approach to life, and then also to startups is deep survival, which is sort of about the neuroscience of why certain people survive and why others don’t. In backcountry scenarios. I spent a ton of time outside. We were talking about ultramarathon before jumping in here. But one of the biggest things that Lawrence Gonzalez, the author, talks about is how do you correctly build mental maps, and how do you have a fluid mental map that actually adapts to situations that you are dealing know, low resources, high constraint, high stress environment, which is building a startup. And a ton of the sort of insights that he has from neuropsychology on how people actually survive in these tense outdoor situations, I find also really applies into startup scenarios. 

Ben Christensen
A good example of that is he talks about the power of humor in high conflict scenarios and in high stress scenarios, and how there’s actual data and science on how that changes your approach to those problems and improves your ability to engage with them. I think that’s one example, something we try to employ in high conflict scenarios and turning those into low stakes components. 

Brett
And as were talking about there in the pre interview, tomorrow is a big day for you, doing 100 miler up there in Canada. What has ultra running done for you, and how has ultra running shaped you as a person? 

Ben Christensen
Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I find that the pursuit of understanding yourself, that comes from that type of distance. I mean, you know this, you’ve got a 50 lined up, you’ve spent the time in the pain cave that comes when you’re in an event like that. I think you learn about what you are really capable of. You also learn perspective. And I think one of the biggest things that I’m always trying to do, and I am trying to fight vehemently against, is I see so many founders who raise a lot of money, get caught a bit in the hype train, and just get soft and soften their emotional resilience, soften their ability to give to other people, soften their focus, soften their drive, soften their commitment. 

Ben Christensen
And I find that ultra running is a way that I stay really disciplined, because a big part of it is there’s race day, which is a lot about learning about what you’re capable of when things are really hard. But a lot of it is about creating execution and focus and discipline in the six months leading up to race day. Right. You eat better, you sleep better, you’re more focused. You have to use your time more effectively within your company because you have to get your training in. And I find that builds to a much more full life. And so it’s been really transformational for me to have that within my sort of yearly cadence. 

Brett
Yeah, it’s very surprising to me, or I guess not that surprising, but how many founders come on the show and they’re either ultra runners or they’re doing Iron Man’s? It seems like a lot of founders have something where it really challenges them, puts them in the pain cave, and they have to work their way through it, which I think is just very interesting. And it’s cool to see this pattern with a lot of the founders I speak to. 

Ben Christensen
Yeah, I mean, there’s got to be a correlation there, right? There’s something that is inherent, I think, about entrepreneurship that is tied into seeking and trying to understand. Can I, and can we as a group collectively create something that is new and is at the boundary? And that’s ultimately what ultra running or doing iron Mans or these things is. It’s the same sort of explorer spirit of seeking. Can I actually do something as audacious as running 100 miles or as doing an Iron man? And then I think the other thing that I love about founders in that space is that they know that you don’t just do it. You have to build to doing it. And there’s so much process, there’s so much support. You need the team. You need the people in your life who are going to get you there. 

Ben Christensen
And I think that is. I don’t know. It’s an amazing thing to be around that community. So it doesn’t surprise me that’s who you get a lot of. 

Brett
Yeah, absolutely. Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive a little bit deeper into the company. So I know we touched on it there a little bit at the start, but I’d love to go back to that origin story. So I saw on LinkedIn, I think it was December 2019. Take me back to December 2019. What was going on? What were those early conversations like, and how did you decide this was the problem that you wanted to pursue and this was the product that you were going to build? Yeah. 

Ben Christensen
So as I mentioned, I’ve been focused on addressing climate change for my whole life. I think something, I think about a lot there is, what can I do as an individual with a unique background and unique skill set that is going to make the most marginal impact, because we really need everybody on such a big problem. I was working on federal carbon policy. I was feeling a ton of excitement in the sense of understanding new solutions that we had to addressing climate change. And in 2018, 2019, carbon removal was getting more and more thought about, but was still way under the radar compared to where it is today. Carbon removal is actively taking carbon out of the atmosphere versus just limiting the amount of carbon we put into the air. And so what I really realized was that there’s all of these different solutions. 

Ben Christensen
There’s a big opportunity in forestry, but there’s this gap, and there’s so much focus, and this is something I really would love to see across the climate tech space, but there’s a lot of effort into enabling solutions and a gap in actual solutions. And so what I was seeing there is there’s a lot of new finance coming into the space that is trying to take carbon out of the atmosphere. There’s a lot of new platforms that are trying to create the market conditions. Think about carbon offset trading and the marketplaces that go underneath that to create that. There’s a lot of work going into data platforms that create those pieces. But there was a real gap in actual solutions that were going to actively be dealing with atoms and not just bits. 

Ben Christensen
And so within that, I wanted to really be part of the sort of project development solution that was actively addressing the problem. Discovered a really overlooked problem in urban wood waste. It’s a problem that sort of smacked me in the face that I could not believe was as big as it is. But it’s 46 million tons a year in the US. There’s more wood that comes down in our cities every year that’s salvageable than our national forests. It’s a crazy volume of wood that we pay over a billion dollars a year as a country to get rid of. And we could be harnessing somewhere around $50 billion in value if we captured all that material. 

Ben Christensen
And then if you scale that out, then you look globally, it’s a gigaton solution, just keeping carbon and wood instead of letting it be spread out and off gassed. And so there’s a really big opportunity. Felt really lucky to stumble in on it. Felt like I also had a deep understanding of the wood and forestry space. And yeah, I started in 2019. And I think one of the other things that I would say, just from a personal perspective, is my whole life I had struggled to fully commit to things. I was one of those people who had a good idea, did fairly well in school, but never did something all the way through. 

Ben Christensen
And so I was in therapy for the first time in grad school, had a great experience, and I was really understanding that about myself and recognized I want to actually commit to something and commit to something until you have to truly pull it out of my hands. And that was the other impetus, and I think that really served me. Going back to 2019, there were so many moments. I mean, every founder knows this, but there are so many moments when there are easy walk away points, especially in the early days when it’s very clear that people don’t believe in your idea and you haven’t created the traction enough to build conviction there, that it’s very easy to walk away. And so that was also a really big part of my starting journey. 

Brett
Do you have any examples of stories that were just really painful in the early days or near death experiences, or just any examples of when it got close to you, just walking away? 

Ben Christensen
Yeah, sure. I think a big moment for me was I had initially pitched it to a boss, and I got some initial support for it, came back to grad school. So I sort of started working on this in my summer internship. In between years in grad school came back, and I had gotten funding so that I could actually fund independent study work for other students to join me. And what happened was I felt really confident. I had a great sponsorship, had an interesting idea, could actually pay people to work on an independent study. It was like the lowest risk opportunity ever to join and start something. And I brought in about ten of my closest friends and folks who I thought would be in on the idea, pitched it to them, and they all ended up saying no and walking out of that. 

Ben Christensen
And that was a moment where, yeah, I felt totally demoralized. I mean, I think another part of my journey in this is I had gone to grad school, and I went straight in from undergrad. I was the youngest one in my program, and felt fairly consistently like I couldn’t get my foot in the door. I had applied to all these jobs in grad school, didn’t get any of the jobs. That was part of the reason I was trying to figure out something for myself. And so that was just another level of kind of driving, which is something that we all feel in our own ways, but driving the impostor syndrome, driving the not good enough home. And, yeah, it was a really dark and hard time. 

Ben Christensen
I think the turnaround moment for me was I then called my best friend from growing up who was just getting back from a fellowship and said, hey, I got this thing. What do you think about coming to work on it? And he was like, yes, sure. Didn’t hesitate. And I think that was a transformational moment of, you get somebody who is willing to take an early bet on you, especially after a lot of other people aren’t, that moves you forward. So that was a pretty near death experience, for sure. 

Brett
Yeah. Those are the things that founders like to hear about. Not all of the funding news and the cool, exciting projects. They want to hear the real stories and the painful stories, because it’s a painful journey, and every founder goes through something similar. I think there’s been very few founders I’ve had on the show who are being honest and say, it’s just been great. 

Ben Christensen
Yeah, I think it’s totally right. And I think something that I’ve realized as I’ve gotten deeper into this journey is that especially early days and especially in your first company, I mean, I assume I haven’t started a second company yet, so I guess we’ll see if it’s different. But I think you lack perspective on how many options you actually have. When you are faced with something that feels like an existential challenge, usually there’s 100 other things you could do to try to solve that problem. And even though maybe the first two things that you’ve done have come out really poorly, so many more options. And that maintaining that perspective and not being quite as emotionally focused or attached to the immediacy of the moment is something that you can’t know when you start out, because those moments, as you’re saying, feel so difficult. 

Ben Christensen
But then if you zoom out on them a little bit, I think you can understand that you’ll get there as long as you do all of the enabling components. 

Brett
Yeah, totally agree. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a podcast production studio that helps b two B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Now, something I want to go back to just to make sure I’m clear on the definition. Can you dive a bit deeper into urban wood waste? Can you just explain that? Maybe I’m slow. It’s a Friday, but I’m having a hard time understanding what that is exactly. 

Ben Christensen
No, it’s a great question. The core of it is the US. Our world has a lot of trees, and a lot of those trees exist in managed scenarios, right, where an agency, our government, takes care of them. A forestry company manages those forests. A landowner manages those forests. But there’s also a ton of forest land that is unmanaged or it’s not managed to be harvested. And you can think about that as primarily wood from cities and the surrounding areas. So think, like suburbs and sort of peri urban areas. Think around rivers, riparian corridors, sort of the wood that is around utility lines. There’s a massive amount of wood that is not actively managed. And what happens is that wood, for a number of reasons, ends up coming down. And so those reasons really include death. Old age trees are living things. 

Ben Christensen
When they reach a certain age, they die. There’s also a good bit of disease. So a good example is emerald Ashbore is a disease that has been. It’s a pest that has spread across the country, and it’s really led tons and tons and tons of trees coming down. We also see trees coming down because of new development. So as our cities expand, when we build new parks and communities, we take down the trees that are there. And right now, across all those scenarios, we see that wood primarily getting wasted. And so another good example of that is disasters. When you think about a hurricane coming through or tornadoes or extreme flooding, often that results in tons, literally tons of wood waste coming down. That’s the wood that we’re talking about. 

Ben Christensen
So I would encourage, just as you’re walking around, and to any listeners out there, next time you see a tree coming down or see an arborist company, notice what’s happening to it. Most likely they’re mulching it, which is cutting it into small pieces, which we then spread out and off gases. And there are certain times when mulching makes sense, but in lots of cases, we’re really underutilizing a resource that could be used for much higher value. 

Brett
Super interesting. Now I feel like I’m going to see just trees falling down everywhere I go when I walk around. 

Ben Christensen
Well, I know it’s one of those things that’s sort of like, now that you’ve heard it, you can’t notice it. 

Brett
Yeah, it sounds like it. Now, I know you mentioned some really exciting companies there, and on your website, I see them listed. Is there maybe one case study that you want to pick and just talk us through to help visualize what the product is and what that end product is that you deliver to customers. 

Ben Christensen
Yeah, absolutely. So I think a great example that I’ll highlight is room and board. And so a great example, really large, amazing furniture company. They do tons of great work across the country. They do a lot of domestic manufacturing. So really trying to build locally, what we help them do is instead of sourcing material from a managed forest where you’re actually cutting down a tree and then you’re logging it, you’re moving into a sawmill, and then you’re shipping it, often really far. What we help them do is access a local waste to value product. So one of those trees that was already coming down at scale and then connecting that into their supply chains. So good example is we have our first product launching with them in August, where we are sourcing wood, all local, all reclaimed, all verified and backed through our technology. 

Ben Christensen
So you can actually see how every board moved through the system, and we’re able to tell that story really clearly to them as well as to their customers. And that’s the thing that gets me really excited, is one of the biggest challenges within sustainability always is clarity and transparency. And what we really help companies like Rumin board do is both access a new value chain that’s much more sustainable and creates local jobs. But also, you don’t need certification in the same way with it, because you need a certifier when you have a third party coming in, because you don’t actually know what’s happening in the supply chain. For us, we’re able to help them see with total transparency, each step of the process, down to every single board that moves through their manufacturing. 

Ben Christensen
And so that completely changes the ability to track and visualize and communicate around those products. 

Brett
Super fascinating. Something else that I watched last night was your TED talk, and it was really engaging and a really well delivered talk. The question there, I guess, is more on the business side. How did you secure the opportunity to do the TEDx talk? And have you seen any business outcomes come from that? Because that’s something I see a lot of founders talk about, is doing a TED talk is kind of like this ultimate thought leadership moment, and everyone wants to do one. So what was that experience like for you? And what was the business impact? 

Ben Christensen
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it’s one of those things where thought leadership is always something that’s hard to measure and something that I’m always trying to get better on. I think it’s good that I rewatch my TED talk, and I think, man, I think there’s a lot that I would improve and update today. So hopefully that’s a sign of growth, I think, on the actual business and sort of mechanics of it. I just was really fortunate from a network perspective to have somebody who invited me to that would seen me speak and was excited about opening it up for the event that they were putting on with TEDx. From a sort of business mechanic perspective, I would say yes. For other founders, highly valuable in terms of getting into other spaces. 

Ben Christensen
I did that and then I got into speed south by southwest and have a number of other sort of doors that have opened from that. It’s always a little bit hard to track the direct value of it because it’s a little harder to measure, but definitely a really valuable thing for us. 

Brett
And in your fundraising journey so far, what have you learned along the way? 

Ben Christensen
So many things. I guess I’ll just say a couple and then feel free to push me in any direction here, Brett. But I think that one of them is, I really felt like a complete outsider in the funding space. I started with basically zero was all my friends and all my network were people in climate and not people in climate tech or in climate vc. And it took me about nine months to raise our precede round, which was a $600,000 round that we really sort of scrapped together. And I think the biggest learning there is that it was about getting reps and it was also about following some of these things that are fairly intuitive but really listening well, really trying to understand feedback and also spending a lot of time. 

Ben Christensen
And I think this is very true in fundraising and very true generally, but it’s the old adage of you ask for advice and you get money, you ask for money and you get advice. And I think approaching especially a first fundraise for me asking for advice on, hey, how can we position this better? How do you think we could be focusing on this strategically really translated into a lot of learning that was very important because obviously we needed it. So that’s one big thing I would say a second bucket that I’ve really learned is, and I think a lot of great founders talk about this in their fundraising, but it’s doing a really good job of relationship building and also really understanding vcs, making sure that you are building relationships with people you actually want to work with. 

Ben Christensen
And I think there’s a lot of different tactical ways which I try to do that and try to understand and approach conversations with people, but primarily it’s try to really get to know them, try to get them to answer just as many questions as they’re answering for you, but they have to be questions you actually care about and learning from them. 

Brett
Now, let’s imagine that you were just starting the company again today from scratch. What would be the number one piece of advice you’d give to yourself? 

Ben Christensen
It’s a great question. I think the number one piece of advice would be to triage really effectively. And I think that we all have a tendency as founders, maybe not everybody, maybe I’m uniquely afflicted in this, but to want to build everything, and there’s great strength in that. I think there’s greater strength in building in a stepwise manner where you’re able to take something that will get you to the next level and see it all the way through, and then actually step to the next level. And I think that resulted in, for us, particularly in our first couple of years, of being slower than we could have been if were more diligent about committing to an idea and following through. We have a saying on our team now, which is don’t do good things, because we should only be doing great things. 

Ben Christensen
And so committing to a few bigger bets and seeing them all the way through, I think, is the number one thing that I would say super useful. 

Brett
And final question for you here. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s that vision that you’re building? 

Ben Christensen
Our vision is to make it easy for any large company that uses materials to be able to source them in a way that is carbon smart. So what that means for us is in a way that is good for the planet and actually good. So having an ultimate carbon storage footprint, not having some net neutral or net positive, but actually storing carbon in the materials that they’re sourcing, being able to do that really easily. So a big part of what we built and what are continuing to build is making it a lot easier for folks in the built environment and in manufacturing to source materials really efficiently with price, visibility, and all the other components that go into that. 

Ben Christensen
And that ultimately, in doing so, we’re creating and sort of transforming how materials are sourced in a way that is something that still facilitates a global economy, but also really facilitates local economies in a much bigger way. Reducing shipping burden and then also just bringing jobs back to so many american cities is definitely a big part of our vision. I think the last thing that I would say that we think about a lot is sort of a deeper existential thought and how we approach what we’re building. But we just live in this world where so many things are optimized to be the same. We are pushed to be the same as people. All of our products are exactly the same. And we really believe in sort of rethinking that and rethinking the uniqueness of products, the stories behind products. 

Ben Christensen
When we all are in our houses, we don’t talk about something that’s there that is just the same as everybody else. We talk about the thing that is unique or has a story. And we believe that there is an opportunity to scale that sort of fascination with story and with uniqueness, to utilize waste streams in a totally different way because it allows you to approach material instead of having both so much waste on the front end and ignoring all of the waste once it’s already produced, because it’s not exactly the same, you can rewrite that and actually value that in a much bigger way. So that’s our bigger vision, is to create products that people want to talk about and care about and will cherish in a way that is very different from how we do it today. 

Brett
Amazing. I love the vision. Well, we are up on time, so we’ll have to wrap here. If any founders or investors that are listening in want to get in touch or follow along with your journey as you continue to build. Where should they go? 

Ben Christensen
Yeah, absolutely. Feel free to send me an email. Ben@cambiumcarbon.com feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on social at carbent. You know, not like carbon, but carban. Not my best work, but hey, it’s okay. 

Brett
I love it. Ben, thanks so much for taking the time to chat about what you’re building, talk about ultra running, and of course, share this awesome vision that you have. This has been a really fun conversation. I’ve really enjoyed it and wish you the best of luck in executing on this vision. And of course, best of luck in your race tomorrow. 

Ben Christensen
Thanks so much, Bret. Appreciate it. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit Frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for category visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode. Our.