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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. 

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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!

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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!

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All kids want is for their parents to be less stressed, and to get off their phones, it’s often been noted and research has shown. Kids have attempted to flush their parents’ phones down the toilet and have thrown them out of car windows. “Only Connect,” E. M. Forster wrote, a phrase appropriated for many columns and articles about technology, but for families this means something different, and usually means removing the interceding technology. How can we better give our time and attention to our children? How can we meaningfully connect with them?
One solution has arrived, which Yes VC is proud to have invested in: Lovevery, a parent-child engagement miracle. It is a direct-to-consumer business started by Jessica Rolph, an Idaho-based serial entrepreneur, who previously founded Happy Family, an organic baby food company acquired by Group Danone for $300 million.
From birth, Lovevery children and their parents will receive at different stages of their development a box of toys, books, games and activities they can play together. The products will span from birth through early childhood and include a guide for parents for each developmental stage and its milestones. The products are beautifully designed, colorful, friendly, and we would say in the Scandinavian style exemplified by Marimekko and other Nordic companies. One thing that stood out to us at Yes VC when we were handling the products was how they emphasized parents’ participation, guidance, and engagement with their child. Jessica has partnered with Roderick Morris, a world-class marketer who focused on growth at prior startups. We’re excited about this investment and its tremendous potential not just as an investment but for its contribution to families.

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Last week, Caterina was awarded the Visionary Award by Silicon Valley Forum, along with academic Vivek Wadhwa, Black Girls Code founder Kimberly Bryant and Google X “Captain of Moonshots” Astro Teller. This award has been given for 21 years now, and many Valley legends have received it– Bill Gates, Donna Dubinsky, Kay Koplovitz, Elon Musk, and Reid Hoffman to name a few.

Each of the Visionaries talked about how the Valley has strayed from its path, how its idealism has been lost. Right now the Valley is going through a period of self examination–like an adolescent coming into self awareness for the first time. It is a time when leaders are questioned and some toppled, but also carries within its disillusionment a new chance for the next wave of founders and builders to create things that are better. In Fast Company, Caterina summed this up: “With the poor reputation of the Valley right now, there couldn’t be a bigger opportunity to correct mistakes and reinvent the future.”

When we called our firm Yes VC, what were we saying yes to? In her acceptance speech, Caterina presented a vision of a reborn Silicon Valley, and how to bring it about:

“Astonish us with your genius. Inspire us with your creation. Fight lies, promote truth. Expand possibility. Dream, create, struggle, prevail. Work with one another. Bring everyone you can with you into the future. Share your privilege. Be loving. Be generous. Be compassionate. Be brave. This is your work.”

Yes to a humbler, more generous, more loving, braver Valley.

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