Our investment in Heirloom

Direct Air Capture (DAC) is one the big engineering challenges of the century, and if solved will play a significant part in reversing climate change.

The problem, though, is it still costs too much. It requires expensive carbon dioxide-collecting materials known as sorbents, and fans that consume power.

Heirloom Carbon has a solution that changes this. Their passive DAC process requires no high-power fans or expensive sorbents. Naturally occurring minerals in rocks—alongside forests, soils, and the ocean—are one of our planet’s most vital carbon sinks, and this process, known as weathering, is what Heirloom has replicated and accelerated for carbon capture.

By turning carbon dioxide from air into stone, Heirloom will remove CO2 directly from the air and store it safely and permanently underground, replicating natural processes.

Heirloom uses “looping” to reuse mineral inputs dozens of times, and employs renewable energy and electric calcination so no fossil fuels are needed. At scale, it can achieve gigaton-scale carbon dioxide removal at just $50/ton—less than half the cost of powered DAC, and low enough to be a profitable business on the global market, starting with the United States.

Heirloom is accelerating towards a demonstration plant that will prove that their system can operate with a durable cost advantage. Among its first customers, Stripe will buy nearly 250 tonnes of removal from Heirloom. They are hiring for roles in hardware engineering, chemical/process engineering, and operations.

Heirloom’s open positions:

Process Engineer
Hardware Engineer
Hardware Engineering Lead
Head of Hardware Engineering
Operations Manager

Stay up to date by following Heirloom on LinkedIn and Twitter. Yes VC is pleased to be investing alongside Breakthrough, Prelude, Lowercarbon, and other great investors, and we look forward to helping Heirloom grow, and work on behalf of all of us.

Caterina a top female early stage investor

Congratulations to Yes VC Partner Caterina for being one of Business Insider’s top 25 female early stage investors!

NBA Top Shot maker Dapper Labs raises $305M

Today, our portfolio company Dapper Labs announced a major financing round.

It is getting a lot of pickup because NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties—their digital collectible trading platforms—made non-fungible tokens (NFTs) part of the mainstream. Collectors have bought and sold over half a billion dollars’ worth of NFTs on them.

NFTs are what we call social objects. A video clip, image, literally any file can be minted into an NFT and bought and sold like a physical object.

For artists, musicians and creators it’s life-giving. NFTs have a feature that will pay the originator a percentage every time it is sold or changes hands.

Digital trading cards are fun but not the whole story. Others are now building on Dapper’s Flow blockchain. It takes hard things, like building your own blockchain and wallet, to make something fundamentally new, like NFTs, easy and accessible to millions.

Let’s make the future, let’s do great things. Yes? Yes!

Caterina speaking at Harvard’s online event

Yes VC Partner Caterina Fake will be speaking online at an event for Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, “Hindsight is 20/20” Caterina says she would have called this “Foresight is 20/20 in. Please join us!

Date: Mar 16, 2021

Time: 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM ET

Here’s a description of the event:

We are still in the early days of the Internet, but there is a growing sense that it’s creating more problems than it’s solving. This wasn’t always the case. There was a time when we shared an overriding optimism in the Internet’s capacity to make the world a better place.

Creator platforms and social media platforms saw us migrate our social lives to the Internet. While allowing us to share and interact with people we never could have before, it also fragmented our experiences and relationships. There’s an endless list of unintended consequences.

Today’s platforms were inspired by the many that preceded them — but along the way, we started to go astray. How can we make sense of where we are today? What can we understand about the decisions that were made and the structures we had in place? And, most importantly, how can the builders of new platforms that also intend to “bring the world closer together”, “give everyone the power to create” or “organize the world’s information” do it better?

Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr, David Bohnett, founder of Geocities, and Nancy Baym, Sr. Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research, will reflect on the current state of creator platforms and social media as part of a long lineage and series of decisions that have made the Internet what it is today and discuss what today’s builders should consider in the next iteration of the web. This conversation will be moderated by BKC fellow Jad Esber.

This event will be recorded. Video and Audio will be available soon after the event.

Caterina speaking with Index and Antler VC on Clubhouse

Yes! We are on Clubhouse, and giving talks there. This one will be in partnership with Antler VC and Index Ventures, called on building thriving online communities, something for which Caterina has long been known. We look forward to seeing you there!

Join us Wednesday, February 24, 2021 from 10:00 –11:00 AM EST.

Jyri Engestrom on Investor Connect

What do we look for in a founder and their product at Yes VC? Jyri answers this question, among many others, on Investor Connect.

A Conversation about Human-Impersonating AI

The most interesting deals we look at here at Yes VC almost always have an AI component. AI is a huge part of the conversation at Yes VC, and we have done some deep thinking about what it can and can’t do–and what it should and shouldn’t do. Human-impersonating AI is a particular area of great potential but it comes with many possible outcomes, good and bad, that should be thought through. Some of these have been discussed in the most recent episode of Should This Exist? which involves a discussion of an app-based human-impersonating therapy AI intended to alleviate depression.

The first question was ask a founder is why they’re building the companies they’re building. We’re early stage investors, and so much of what we invest in is the ability, smarts and character of our founders. AI, with its tremendous transformative power, is a particular area where the founder’s character and motivation is of utmost importance. Listen to Should This Exist? and join us in thinking through AI and its implications.

Should This Exist, our new podcast

The first episode of our new podcast, Should This Exist? is out! It’s a brand new kind of pitch show, where the entrepreneur pitches not just the business case, but the human case for their technology. Please listen and subscribe!

Caterina’s guest in the first episode is neurotech entrepreneur Daniel Chao, CEO of Halo Neuroscience. Halo is a headset that enhances the neuroplasticity of the motor cortex in your brain. It could bring about the dystopia of Gattaca, where only a select few get superhuman abilities… or usher in a new golden age where millions are virtuosos.

The show is produced in partnership with Quartz – here’s Caterina’s Quartz article on the question of our times, setting the stage for the show. The Executive Producers are June Cohen and Deron Triff, co-founders of WaitWhat, the media company behind Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale (June and Deron formerly ran media at TED for a combined 16 years).

Each episode will introduce a new entrepreneur pitching their technology, and there are some game-changers in the pipeline!

Introducing David Pickerell

Welcome to our latest team member David Pickerell, who joins as an Associate. David has played many roles in Silicon Valley and brings a wealth of financial, investing and fundraising experience to Yes VC. Some highlights from David’s background:

Grew up in Hong Kong
Was President of the China Club at Harvard
Set up Uber’s Las Vegas operation
Helped Nauto raise $159M from Greylock and Softbank
Worked as Analyst at Primavera, a Chinese private equity firm
Joined Yes VC as an Associate on Jan 1st, 2019

Welcome!

Healthy foods for all

Our portfolio company Public Goods launched its line of low-cost organic foods. One membership now gets you all of the essentials that people need and use every month. Give it a try!