Startup Series: Charm Industrial

Today's guest is Peter Reinhardt, co-founder and CEO of Charm Industrial. 

This conversation was recorded as a live session during Climate Career Week, a series of talks, local meetups, and office hours designed to help people make the transition into climate-oriented work. Climate Career Week was organized by Climate Draft, Terra.do, Work on Climate, and MCJ Collective. 

Given the nature of the audience, today's conversation focuses heavily on Peter's own journey into founding one of the most prominent companies in the climate tech space today. Peter also offers his thoughts on how certain key job functions may slightly differ in a climate tech company as opposed to a software tech company. And he would know. As Peter was working on Charm Industrial he was also the active co-founder and CEO of Segment, a software business in customer data management, which he eventually sold to Twilio in 2020 for $3.2 billion. In fact, Charm Industrial operated for multiple years while Peter was running Segment as his primary full-time role.

In addition to the career path discussions, we cover what Charm Industrial is and does and why it matters. We also talk about how he imagines the business expanding in the coming years to take on adjacent problems in the emission space. And lastly, we at MCJ Collective are proud to be multiple-time investors in Charm Industrial via our venture capital funds. With that, we hope you enjoyed this conversation.

In this episode, we cover: 

• [2:12] Peter's background and path into tech
• [3:53] His motivations for dropping out of MIT and starting a software company 
• [6:11] How Peter discovered the problem for Segment's software solution
• [7:35] Learnings from becoming a CEO  
• [9:55] Peter's motivations for working on the climate problem and how Charm Industrial came to be
• [18:01] An overview of Charm Industrial
• [22:01] An overview of pyrolysis and Charm's process 
• [25:07] How Peter views the company's core innovation 
• [28:58] Biggest risks and challenges with putting bio-oil underground 
• [31:14] Customer side of carbon sequestration
• [34:24] How Peter sees Charm evolving 
• [40:21] Key job function differences between a climate tech company vs a software tech company 
• [45:10] Biggest lessons learned in transitioning from leading a software company to a carbon removal company 
• [46:16] How Peter approaches permitting including exploring jurisdictions and finding consultants 
• [47:31] Biggest choking point today and where MRV fits in

Get connected: 
Cody Simms Twitter / LinkedIn
Peter Twitter / LinkedIn
MCJ Podcast / Collective

*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Episode recorded on January 27, 2023. Watch the video here.

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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant