Climate change ‘codeswitching’ for business, with Planet FWD’s Julia Collins
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Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. If your business is driving innovation, delivering exceptional experiences, or making a real impact on society, or maybe all three, we want you to apply for the Masters of Scale Business Awards. These awards celebrate bold organizations of all sizes and across all industries. Award recipients don't just get a trophy, although yes, there are trophies.

When I first came to Silicon Valley, it was very clear that I was a fish out of water.

On many levels. I showed up in like Diane von Furstenberg dresses when everyone else was wearing hoodies. But of course, also, I was this sort of very feminine presenting woman and black woman. And when I first got to Silicon Valley, I really tried to pattern match. I tried to listen to the podcasts other people listened to. I tried to emulate them. It was a total failure. It didn't work in any way. You weren't being you. I wasn't being me.

Julia Collins is a serial entrepreneur who has thrived at the intersection of tech and food.

Her latest venture, Planet Forward, is a B2B platform focused on fighting climate change. As she embarked on this phase of her entrepreneurial journey, Julia realized that standing out was better than fitting in. And I think once I realized that, I started to also have a better mindset because I thought being different is actually my superpower. And I stopped second-guessing myself as soon as I stopped trying to pattern match on other people's success.

This week on the show, Julia shares hard-won lessons from the failed unicorn she co-founded. Hint, it involved robots and pizza. And how, in her new business, she's scaling solutions to climate change that are also good for her clients' bottom lines. You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing.

This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Berman, your host. Julia Collins has always wanted a career that gave her a chance to serve people while solving big problems.

We started by talking about the scale journey she's in the midst of with her latest company, Planet Forward. Julia, welcome to Masters of Scale. It's so good to be here. I've been so excited about this conversation because there's a lot for us to talk about. I want to start with what you're doing now. Can you tell us about Planet Forward?

Absolutely. So Planet Forward was founded with a really simple mission, which was to tackle climate change by decarbonizing the global greenhouse gas emissions that come from our consumer products. Okay. Can I just pause you right there? What does it mean to decarbonize it? Right. So as you know, climate change is caused primarily by an excess of greenhouse gas emissions coming from just about every part of life. What we eat, what we wear, how we travel, AI.

But what is true is that we can actually reduce the greenhouse gases emissions related to all of those things. And we call that decarbonization. It is the opposite of emitting too much greenhouse gas. It is the act of reducing the greenhouse gases that are emitted by all of our daily activities. And what's an example of how a company does that? Yeah. So say, for example, you're a large food company. Because let me tell you something. Most people don't think about food that.

Right, right. We hear about cows and their contribution, but beyond that, not much. Okay.

collectively around the supply chain of all of these goods is about 90% of your overall company footprint. So if you're a large food company, the best thing that you can do is to look at that 90% coming from your supply chain and look for ways to make smart trades and swaps to reduce the impact.

For example, you might choose renewable energy at one of your manufacturing processes. You might switch from a conventional ingredient to an organic ingredient. We did this with one food company and they were able to reduce their emissions just by making smart swaps in their supply chain.

Wow.

Working with Just Salad, what we did was use artificial intelligence to analyze their supply chain. So not doing this in spreadsheets, but really using artificial intelligence to essentially create a digital twin

of that company's supply chain, showing them where their greenhouse gas emissions were coming from all the way from the field to the fork. How much is coming from the growing of the ingredient versus the processing versus the distribution, the consumer use, even the end of life? Is it composted? Is it landfilled?

And as you could imagine, that kind of very detailed, fine work is hard to do manually. It's hard to do for just salad. It's hard to do for Unilever. It's hard to do for every company with a large and complex supply chain. That's what makes it such a perfect problem for machine learning in particular. Yeah, it sounds like an incredible use of AI, but where I get stuck on the logical leap, and this is why I love this job because I get to ask dumb questions of smart people.

It's not like you can just say, upload your supply chain and we'll analyze it, right? So how does it actually work? How do you do it? There's so much information that lives in the financial transactions of a company. Imagine, for example, that we could get receipts from every single purchase that you've made over a given time period. What you bought, how much it weighed, where you bought it from.

then we can do all of this inference around that data point. And we can even work with external partners to do some additional assurance around those data points. But so much information coming into our solution comes actually from the purchasing records of companies. Have you heard of the word cradle to grave? Yes. Right. So cradle to grave is the system boundary of a life cycle assessment. It tells you from the very beginning of that product all the way to end of its life what the impacts are.

The big innovation at Planet Forward is we've now done tens of thousands of these life cycle assessments, but we've stored not just those life cycle assessments, we've disaggregated all of the building blocks, labeled and trained those building blocks to be able to create new life cycle assessments using algorithms. And this is one of the big innovations at Planet Forward. We think it's a fantastic use of AI to help save the planet.

it. There's no silver bullet. We have to work on other sectors. But decarbonizing the consumer products industry would really give us a fighting chance. I mean, this is a really big swing. Where did this idea come from? Oh, my gosh. You know, for me, I've always been really interested in food and food systems. It goes all the way back to my grandparents who

who had roots in the deep South, you know, and were scientists, well, they were dentists, who moved from the deep South to San Francisco to start their dental practice. - What brought them to San Francisco? - The Great Migration, as you know, was this time when millions of black people moved from the South to the North to take advantage of new economic opportunities, many of them around wartime industries.

But this was also a time when those northern cities were segregated. And so they didn't have dentists or doctors that could serve all people, including black people. So my grandparents moved to

to the Bay Area to be a part of that class of people that built practices for everyone, everyone of every race. But the reason why my story about Planet Forward begins with them was they really moved to the Bay Area to be of service, right? They were trained as dentists, but they moved to San Francisco to be of service. And so I have always had this passion for serving people. So why is this related to your question? What better way to serve people right now

than to create operationally sound, scalable solutions to address climate change. Like there are so many ways to have an impact, but for me, I cannot think of anything I would rather be doing with my life right now. Were your grandparents influential figures for you growing up? They were incredibly influential figures for me growing up. How did they show up for you? How did that manifest? Let's take my grandpa. So my grandpa used to wear a button. He would wear a little button that said, serve people.

And it was a homemade button. And when the button would wear down, he'd make another button. And it said the same thing, serve people. He was this incredible man, strapping man, six foot four, beautiful man. And he worked with so much humility, despite the fact that he had incredible academic training, that he was really talented in his field.

He just worked so hard for the people who came to his practice. Sometimes people didn't have money to pay him and it didn't matter. He was about serving people. And so I think seeing someone who was absolutely the best in his field, but who never lost his humility and never lost that focus on taking care of others was hugely influential for me. This is also a man who could eat a whole apple pie in the city. Yeah.

When did you start Planet Forward? Started Planet Forward in 2019, but it looked a lot different than it looks now. How so? When we started Planet Forward, we always had this vision for using the power of food and other consumer products to tackle climate change. Now that looks like a software company. But in the beginning, it actually was a snack company. Say more. The first product that we built was...

was a brand. And the idea was before we go and build software solutions and put them in the hands of other food brands, maybe we should understand what it actually is to be a food brand. We knew that we could build a set of products that could really create a category around, let's call it climate friendly consumer.

And we knew that there would be some enabling technology that needed to exist to make that happen. How did we know that? Because we couldn't find what we needed. Right. I didn't know that I was going to build a B2B software platform that worked with companies like Amazon on decarbonization. I didn't know quite that. But I knew that there was always a something else, some kind of enabling technology. Initially, Jeff, I actually thought it would be a marketplace platform.

a marketplace for procuring more sustainable goods and services to build your products. Only it's hard to build marketplace businesses. - Nothing is easy. - Nothing is easy. - Nothing is easy. So what was the product that you built?

It was a cracker company called Moonshot, which we sold to Patagonia two years ago, which was a wonderful experience. And I still eat them under the Patagonia brand. What was different about them was we did everything we could to minimize the greenhouse gas emissions related to making the product. That's not a very sexy consumer positioning. So we had to think about what was the right positioning for the product.

We named it Moonshot so it would have this feeling of like uplift and you're fighting for something and you're taking a chance. They were delicious. They were beautifully packaged. But underneath the surface, we were shortening supply chains. We were sourcing from farmers who were practicing regenerative and organic agriculture. We were using renewable energy. We were lightweighting packaging. And we were measuring all of that.

The measurement of it is what became the foundation of the Planet Forward platform. What was the inflection point where you said, oh, wait a second, we actually should be building a B2B software company to serve...

massive and a massive range of companies to lower their carbon footprint. You know, I don't know that there was one specific day when I like smacked my palm to my head and said, oh my gosh, there's a bigger opportunity. But it was really just the culmination of so many times realizing that the tools that consumer brands needed to build climate positive companies just didn't exist. Or

Or they existed if you had $100,000 to pay a consultant. And I have this like impatient optimism. Like, yes, we can get this done, but only if we work around the clock. And I felt so impatient that it seemed like somebody's got to solve this, you know, and it probably should be us. I mean, I love that framing of impatient optimism. I feel like that's something that entrepreneurs across the board share, right? Especially mission driven. So why?

Had you raised money for what almost sounds like a different version of the company that was making Moonshot? We had. And how did you go about raising money for that? And then how did you go tell your investors, actually, we're doing something totally different here? So what the early investors were betting on, I think, when they bet on Planet Forward V1 with Moonshot as the first product is...

Julia has a vision for something bigger and she's impatiently optimistic and incredibly driven. And we think there's going to be a bigger opportunity here. That was sort of like the pre-seed and seed thesis. I think it was a big bet on me and it was a big bet on, well, the magnitude of this problem is so large, climate change and consumer products related climate change, that there's probably more business to build here than the snack brand.

The tricky thing was really going from the seed to the A. And that was a hard pivot. Why is that? We still had Moonshot and Moonshot was growing like a hockey stick. It was like that classic hockey stick growth, but it was growing as a CPG business. So it was growing with CPG margins and CPG operating complexity.

which is, I think, a great super investable business. But the investors who wanted to look at Planet Forward as a software company are looking at a much different profile. They want 80% margins. They want massive margins. They want SaaS economics. Yeah, SaaS economics, triple, triple, triple, double, double unicorn. And we knew that we could get there with the software platform, but the hard thing was holding those two businesses together. I don't have a magic answer for how we got it done. I can only say that

We were fortunate to have investors like Acre Ventures, like Congruent Ventures, who co-led that round, who really believed in the larger opportunity and who trusted me that I would figure out the best value-creating way to spin the two businesses off. There was also a bit of luck. Still ahead, lessons learned from a failed unicorn tech company, which involves the robots and the pizza.

Meet Romeo Regali, a Capital One business customer and chef and CEO of Roz, a plant-based restaurant with two locations in New York. We started talking about our own restaurant. I don't know if she thought I was serious, but she said, you know, let's just do it. Let's just start our own brand from scratch. Romeo's recalling the moment when he and his wife and co-founder Milka Regali decided to take a leap of faith.

I started working as a server at Milka's mom's restaurant. I fell in love so much with the industry, and that's what sparked it. Romeo and Milka weren't certain how they would bring their dream to fruition. But they were certain of one thing, their passion.

We knew we had a vision and we found a space. We had to gut the entire space and build everything from scratch. The kitchen, gas piping, and the restroom, the sound system, everything. We really believed every detail matters. As they broke ground on their first Roz location, Romeo and Milka soon faced the financial reality of building something from scratch. They looked to Capital One Business to help navigate the fiscal burden of making their dreams come true.

We used a Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One. The no preset spending limit really had a big role in helping us finish the project. We're very happy with what we have accomplished. We want to expand more. To learn more, go to CapitalOne.com slash business cards.

At Masters of Scale, we talk a lot about innovation. It's an essential skill that all industry leaders absolutely have to develop. Our community looks to us to stay ahead on the latest trends in commerce, and more and more, we hear of businesses turning to Ohio. That's right, Ohio.

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Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel. Long before Julia Collins founded a snack brand turned tech platform, she started her career working in the food business. I always wanted to be in food. What?

I just have always felt most at home when I'm eating or with people. I'm like the person who will read a cookbook at the beach or like go to the grocery store just to watch people shop. I'm obsessed with food and food culture. Anytime I had like two nickels to rub together, I'm like buying a plane ticket to go see the hot new chef. Oh, wow. Just always loved it. But my grandpa, who, as you know, was really influential in my life, was like,

You can do anything except for just don't go into food. Because why? He said to me one time, you want to go into food, you might as well just go pick cotton. Oh my. Because coming up, when he came up, those were the jobs that you could have as a black person. And so he associated me being in food with his sort of roots in sharecropping. That was the association that he had. Wow. Yeah.

I think also, you know, for anybody who's got this story, if you're an immigrant, if you are somebody who came from a humble background, if you are a person of color, the grownups who raise you really try to keep you safe. Of course, all parents try to keep their children safe, but I think it's doubly true.

if your parents have some of that intergenerational trauma or your grandparents have some of that intergenerational trauma around that lived experience. And so I think he also was like, please just be a doctor. If you can't be a doctor, be a lawyer. If you can't be a lawyer, can you please be an engineer? So I like went off to Harvard to study biomedical engineering because then maybe grandpa would be happy. But I just...

it wasn't what I wanted. I really wanted to be in food. So I went back to him after I graduated from Harvard and I said, again, grandpa, I really, really want to be in food. And he said, again, please don't. Whatever you do, don't go into food. And I was like, okay, what if I get another degree? He's like, yes, if you get another degree, then I think you'll be fine. So what are you going to get? Are you going to get an MBA? And I said, okay, I'll get an MBA. He said, if you go to Harvard or Stanford,

Only those two jobs. Only those two. Then grandpa will pay for half of it. Grandpa had high standards. So that is what we did. You ended up at Stanford. I ended up at Stanford. And then finally, you know, I was like, I got a job as an intern for the most luminary, the best of the best of the best in food. His name is Danny Meyer. Yeah.

I think I've made it grandpa. And he was like, okay, baby doll. Okay. But what I do think is when he passed away, he knew that I had found my thing and he knew that my thing was about serving people. And I think that felt really good for both of us. That carries on his legacy. Exactly. What did you learn working with Danny? Oh, first of all, Danny is everything that he appears to be.

So one of the things that I learned about Danny was to walk your talk. I really learned from Danny Meyer to walk your talk in all interactions. Like,

If you are going to be someone who believes that culture is the key to success, that has to flow through consistently the way you show up in every interaction. And I've known Danny for decades now and it always does. And to a person, I don't think you'll find a person on the planet who doesn't say the same.

So I really learned from Danny the power of walking your talk. I think I also learned from Danny, like now we sort of take for granted that culture is a key competency of an organization. But I learned that when I read Setting the Table. His iconic book. His iconic book, which they teach at business school. It's not just for the hospitality industry. It's for all businesses. So for a lot of people, you have a dream of working in food. You have a passion for the category. Yeah.

You're now working for Danny Meyer. You're there. You're aspiring to be the Olympics. You made it. Right. But you decided to leave and go start a company. I know. Okay, so this is a very simple calculation. So I'm working for Danny Meyer, which is just my dream. I wouldn't have cared what the job were as long as it were in his organization. I would have stacked books, washed dishes. It didn't matter.

But when I looked to my left and my right, there were a sea of other incredibly talented people who all had more experience

I just thought to myself, it's gonna take a really long time to be an owner. It's gonna take a really long time to be an owner. And there's a sea of people who are frankly more qualified than me to take that next spot. And I just didn't feel that I had the patience. And so I knew that I could work within Union Square Hospitality Group for a number of years and gain some really good core skills.

And then I just had to go out on my own. Yeah. So how did MexiQ come to be? I was set up on a friend date with these two incredible guys, Thomas and Dave. They had built a food truck called MexiQ. It was...

The most successful food truck. This was like when the food truck thing was really happening in New York City, when you would like go on Twitter, not X, Twitter, and you would tweet where your food truck was and you'd pull up and you'd have a line around the block and then the cops would shut you down. And so it was like, it was the place, you know, I was working in restaurants, which was cool, but food trucks was like...

I mean, this is the movie Chef right here. This is...

It's a story that you do see over and over again where you have people who are more on the creative side who just desperately need a business partner who's got the structure and can handle the legal, the finance, et cetera. And it sounds like it was a really nice marriage of skills and passion. And that is my passion. I love the structure of the business. That is actually what gets me excited is like really building in margin and like all of the financial –

tweaking that you can do to a business in the early stage so that when you're scaling, you're scaling a healthy business. People think that's crazy. They're like, wouldn't you rather be the one doing the creative things? But I think building businesses is incredibly creative. I actually consider myself to be a creative. It's just that my medium is business building. It also takes a certain creativity and skill set to be

who can put those things together and work with people who are deeply creative and don't have that part, right? I mean, there's almost a translation that has to happen in there for most people. If you can speak both, you can kind of make magic happen. I think it is magic. It's like peanut butter and jelly. You know, if you have the data person alone, they're just dry. They're substantive, but they're dry. And if you have the storyteller alone, you know, it's just jelly sandwich. It's sweet, but it leaves you hollow. You have to put the two together.

So, I mean, you step into the role of MexiQ. Presumably you could have used that as a platform to build a lot more, but you went and started another company. What happened there? So do you remember how you asked me before, well, you know, you're working for Danny Meyer and that's kind of like the sine qua non of, you know, working in the food business. Why were you still not satisfied? And it was because I wanted to be an owner.

And I wanted to do something that had a much bigger impact. Yeah. I mean, to go back to Danny Meyer, there are precious few shake shacks that scale that way and a lot more, you know, Manhattan's or at best a daily provisions where you're going to have a little bit of scale, but you're not going to get big.

Absolutely. And I wanted my Shake Shack. I saw the early days of what it was and what it became. And I will tell you, I absolutely thought, I wonder if there's a Shake Shack in me, a Shake Shack-like thing. It might not be a physical restaurant, but a thing that could scale and have that much impact. Okay. So, and to be clear, Zoom is not Z-O-O-M, the video conferencing app that we all use after COVID. It's Z-U-M-E, which...

Which was what and how did it get started? Yeah. So the problem that we were trying to solve at Zoom is similar to the problem that we're trying to solve at Planet Forward, which is essentially how do you feed the planet without ruining the planet?

And the thing that we wanted to do was to use technology, all types of technology, hardware, software, everything in between to rebuild the food system from the bottom up. Mind you, this is also 2015, right? So this is when we're seeing the beginnings of DoorDash. Like this is when we're seeing Uber start to launch Uber Eats. Like this is a really juicy, fruitful time to be building anything innovative in the food space.

And so we did. You know, I met my co-founder on a Skype call. He wants a CEO to run it and he's scouting for CEOs. And there I was. And so I think we had a similar ambition and a similar point of view on what the food system could be. And it was, again, just right place, right time. And what was that vision?

It was that we could rebuild the food system from the bottom up to make sure that we could create healthy, delicious, affordable food without ruining the planet. And part of that involved robotics. Part of that involved robotics. So how did that become part of the vision? Because it really became a huge part of the story, right? A huge... Well, when you put the word... Robot is a sexy word. And pizza is a sexy word. And when you put robot and pizza together, people lose their minds. Like it is...

Even though there was so much more to the business, that part, it's just indelible. It's the chocolate and peanut butter. It's just two great tastes that go great together. Go great together. And so, you know, have you ever worked in a kitchen? Have you ever had a kitchen job? I've served tables. I've not worked in a kitchen. And you know, when you even cross the precipice of that kitchen, it is hot and it is hot.

It's hectic.

So that those humans can be doing other things. It wasn't about automating the job of being a cook. It was about automating the tasks that were a drain on safety and that were frankly repetitive, like sticking pizza.

in and out of an 800 degree oven for an eight hour shift. Because we were able to get the robot styled in, it really improved our logistics. We could do much more predictive inventory management and creation of product because we could code that into the robots. And we had much more consistency around the product, which made it easier for us to distribute. And if I remember right, part of the concept of the pizzas was also

you would do assembly in one location and then the pizzas actually bake on a truck on a way to be delivered. Do I remember that right? Totally. So the robots were something that we co-created together. This idea for baking on the way, I give total credit to my co-founder. But he was solving a real problem, which is anytime that you get delivery food, it's never as delicious as if you got it at the restaurant. What if we cook the food on the way to the customer? And pizza is a great place to start because it's flat.

So Zoom got big. Really big. You raised how much total? More than $500 million. That's a lot of money. Yeah. And you got to a valuation of... $2.25 billion. $2.25, okay. I mean, that's a massive, massive business over a fairly short period of time, right? This is over just a few years. Just a few years. What...

You were obviously catching a wave, which is easier than creating a wave. But I mean, this is a massive play. How did you get to that scale that quickly? Well, I will say that one of the things that we did very well at Zoom was to understand that there were multiple technologies that we could build that would be reinforcing of each other, but across different commercial verticals. So we had an opportunity around technology

a pizza business that we thought could scale to Domino's Pizza Hut proportions. We had a technology around packaging

using robots to create compostable packaging. That's a massive industry. We had a technology around logistics, kitchen management systems, kitchen display systems, in real time inventory management, which is a big problem to solve in any delivery company. That was a massive business. And so these were all the technologies that we built in parallel that reinforced each other.

but that had huge addressable markets, any one of them. And so I think investors thought there's seven bets on the table. Even if one of these bets is true, it's going to be a massive business.

but we like the odds of more than one. You know, sometimes it felt like a well-oiled machine. Sometimes it felt like a Rube Goldberg device. And I think it just depends on, it depends on the day, frankly. Yeah. So Zoom ended up not working out. It didn't end up having its glorious exit. What did you learn from the rapid rise and then the fall of Zoom? Yeah. I mean, one of the hardest things for me and the story of Zoom is that I left Zoom

And so, so much of what I would have loved to happen, I wasn't there to be able to really see it through. And that's hard. I think it's hard for any founder to put that much of yourself into a business and have to leave. Yeah.

But I will say a good lesson that I learned is you can't judge yourself or measure yourself based on the valuation of your company. 2.25 billion valuation company. That made me the first black woman to ever become a unicorn. That isn't going to be on my epitaph.

That isn't the thing that I hope my boys remember about me. It is absolutely how many jobs did you create? How much good did you do? How did people feel about the work that they did for you? How did you help people grow their careers? Did you return investors value? And so I also will say,

I think because of that failure, I have like a little chip on my shoulder, which is incredibly motivating because I still feel like I have so much to prove. And so if we were to kind of link where we are now with where I was with Zoom, I think kind of that bridge is some of the investors who came with me and some of the employees who came with me. And that's very grounding for me. You and I are sitting here having this conversation, the first quarter of 2025. Yes.

Climate change is a political thing right now. How do you think about running a business that is both obviously clearly meant to make money and you're a capitalist and also serving a profound social mission? Does it change how you talk about it? Does it change how you pitch it? What's different in the current world for you?

What's different in the current world is I do think we have to be more careful about positioning and really being willing to use the words and phrases that create a big tent.

you and I can sit here and say, we don't believe climate change is a political issue. And I really believe that. But for many, it does feel that way. And I have customers across the country. I have customers in many, many pockets of the world. And I am totally willing to adjust my language so that I'm speaking in a way that feels resonant for them. I don't have to talk about decarbonizing consumer products. I can talk about building healthy soil. Mm-hmm.

I don't have to talk about fighting climate change bite by bite. I can talk about building more resilient supply chains. I don't have to talk about sustainability being the new ethos. I can talk about improving efficiency.

Because what's beautiful for my business is that's actually true. Using less resources is a great way to save costs. Improving the health of your soil and the health of your farm system is a great way to build resilience. Ensuring that you still have coffee to grow and almonds and cashews, well, isn't that a good risk mitigation strategy if you're a coffee or a chocolate company? So that is what has changed. I actually feel lucky now.

that I have the knowledge and the know-how to code switch a bit. I think it's something that you learn, you know, if you have the opportunity to be in diverse populations, is you learn to code switch. I think this is a code switching moment. And so one of the things I've learned about working within this consumer product space is you just always lead by listening. You never lead by telling. And I think that's what you're saying.

The thing that I do worry about in this moment really is misinformation around climate. This actually is my great worry. And I don't know that I have a solve for it. Why is that your great worry? Here's an analogy. Do you remember the ozone layer problem we had? We've kind of solved that. And it was because the world and governments, private sector, public sector, and

People. There weren't a lot of people saying, oh, that's not true. Right. There's no whole note. Very few. Yeah. You would look like a flat earther if that were you. Yeah. There were very few large companies or governments. I can't recall any who were saying, this is not a problem. We don't have to fix this. Yeah. But that's not where we are with climate change. We're in a space where people are still trying to disprove climate.

What's true. And so my great worry is not so much about repositioning solutions so that we can continue to accelerate and do great work. My worry is about kind of the larger scale disinformation that's going to make it harder for everyday people to stand up and get involved. Do you have a theory of the case as to how we address that in the context of climate?

I mean, my greatest hope really is young people. You know, I have a seven-year-old and a three-year-old. I was brushing my teeth and had the water on the other day and he raced across the bathroom and turned it off and I was so proud. What's next for Planet Forward? Next for Planet Forward really is scaling across all categories of consumer products. We have a really good foothold in food and beverage, fashion and apparel, but we want to get into consumer electronics. We want to get into every single category.

The other big push for us right now really is global expansion. You know, I think there's still a market here in the United States, but the market's really being made in the UK and I and in the EU. You have a seven-year-old and a three-year-old. Yes. When you think about this legacy of service that has been passed down from your grandfather to you, what are you hoping to pass on to them? I mean, I really am of the mind that your job as a parent is to

emulate your children more than having them emulate you. I really believe that. I'm not sure if that was

Khalil Gibran, there was some really great poet that said that. Be more like your children than you aspire for them to be like you. And I believe that. So I think my greatest aspiration is to just create the conditions for Mosey, my seven-year-old, to be fully Mosey and for Olu, my three-year-old, to be fully Olu. I will say, though, that they're brothers and they're two of them. And I think the greatest job that they have is to protect and care for one another. ♪

It's beautiful. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for having me. Julia Collins' approach to her business is innovative and her politics are pragmatic. Let's hope that that combination can unlock real results in her mission to fight climate change. One of the best parts about sitting with Julia and entrepreneurs like her is that their mission is composed not just of doing well, but of doing good at the same time. Let's hope for more of that.

I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening. The Lobatical is for any employees who have been with us for five years to take a vacation. They get a week of extra PTO. They get to pick anywhere in the world that they want to travel, and we allow that to happen for them.

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