HAPPY PLANET
Can innovation, entrepreneurship and investment make the planet happier and healthier? Abigail Carroll thinks so. Known as Maine's Oyster Lady, Abigail sold her aquaculture and tourism business NONESUCH MAINE in 2021 and has since been advising and investing in high-growth start-ups in the US and Europe that seek to help solve some of the world's most pressing problems, all while turning a profit. Through conversations with founders, investors, and thought leaders, Abigail shares this thought-provoking and hope-promoting world with her audience. And always with a little humour.
Episodes
I am really excited to introduce you all to Steven Fox, a founding Partner of Propeller VC, a new early stage venture fund that invests in and builds ocean-climate companies that use science and technology to address the climate crisis. Propeller is the brainchild of Hubspot Founder Brian Halligan and it was designed to be the venture partner for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution otherwise known as WHOI, one of the foremost ocea...
There are a few things that separate winning startups from those that crash. Some of them are pretty obvious: Good leadership. A Good Market Fit. Sufficient Cash on hand to grow. But you also need a good story. And that’s not always easy for entrepreneurs to formulate, especially in an increasingly crowded field like climate or blue innovation where the big picture corporate missions are often overlapping. They all want to save the...
This week we meet Edwina Tanner and Jill Storey of Whale X, an Australian company competing for Elon Musk’s X Prize, a multi-year competition resulting in the awarding of $100M to the best carbon removal project.
Whale X’s solution? Fertilize the ocean with synthetic whale poop. Before you write that off as silly, know that they are currently in 60th place out of 1,000 applicants. And frankly, who better than Elon Musk to support a...
This week we are going to speak with Rob Cobbold, COO of Beach Collective, a company that is building a digital platform that merges some of the most abstract and immaterial aspects of the web, like Cryptos and NFTs with some of the most tangible and physical activities on the planet, like community building, ocean conservation, and trash pickup.
Beach Collective is disrupting what they see as a flawed financial system and using the...
This week’s guest, Christophe Maier, Founder and CEO of Lagosta. Christophe was raised in Switzerland, on lake Geneva, but once he discovered the Mediterranean he couldn’t get enough of salty waterbodies!
Fast forward to adulthood and Christophe raises spiny lobsters, not for the European luxury food market as he originally expected, but for the pharma market which is turning out to be a very lucrative pivot. And he doesn’t even ha...
We’ve spoken to a lot of entrepreneurs from around the world in the past few months and there is one thing they all have in common - a corporation. The precise structures of corporations will vary from company to company and country to country but a relatively new corporate certification is working its way around the planet and creating a global standard for how businesses should behave. It’s the B Corp Certification and it’s gaini...
Watch out NEMO there’s a new clownfish in town and he’s a lot smarter than you are! Today we are talking to Liane Thompson, co-founder and CEO of Aquaai (Uh-qu-why)- which merges the words aqua and the term AI together.
Liane has an incredible bio including stints in war reporting and television producing. And she knows a good thing when she sees it. She put Alan Bordain on TV. Today she has been named one of 50 Most Powe...
This week’s guest, Tore Enger, Founder and CEO of the group TECO 2030, is pioneering the fuel cell stacks designed for green hydrogen in trucking and shipping, industries traditionally reliant on diesel fuel.
After speaking with Tore, my worldview on renewables started to broaden. I’d love to know what you think after you listen to the episode. Please feel free to email me with your thoughts.
One note about this episode, I break dow...
Today we cross the pond and speak with Harry Wright, Founder of Bright Tide, a UK-based consultancy helping businesses achieve their milestones and sustainability goals through hackathons, accelerator programs, and advisement.
Harry is particularly interested in fostering the nascent blue carbon market where carbon sequestration can be much more impactful, but where it’s notoriously hard to measure. His current accelerator cohort i...
This week we meet Nanette Medved-Po, a Philippine entrepreneur who began her career as an actress and became a regional celebrity thanks to her role as the local version of Wonder Woman. Since then she has employed her education, smarts, and star power to help others and the planet.
Nanette is a board member of the WFF Asia and was named one of Forbes’ Heroes of Philanthropy. Most recently she founded The Plastic Credit Exchange, fa...
As promised, Happy Planet is kicking off 2023 with an interview with Patrick Breeding, the young founder who says he’s building Maine’s next “unicorn.” And he’s doing it with a lobster based skincare product that is flying off the shelves.
His company is Marin Skincare, a Maine-based company founded by couple Patrick and his girlfriend Amber Boutiette who met at the University of Maine and whose lives changed when they got hooked u...
Meet Chip Terry, Founder and CEO of BlueTrace, a Maine based software company aiming to digitize the seafood industry where the vast majority of tagging, tracing and reporting is still done with pen and paper.
Smart and funny, Chip was a lot of fun to interview. But his story also resonates with many entrepreneurs because the problem he is solving now is not the one he set out to solve originally. A couple years in, he made a full ...
Meet Lisa Scali of Ocean’s Balance, a seaweed-based food startup specializing in staple pantry items. This is a particularly fun episode for me because Lisa and I met in graduate school at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) many years ago. Since then our paths have crossed again and again with us both ending up in Maine aquaculture! And to add to that, Lisa's business partner Mitchell Lenc...
In this week’s episode of Happy Planet we meet Bernard Hidier, Co-Founder of Finsulate. The serial impact-entrepreneur shares his story of how the sea urchin inspired his company’s totally unique approach to marine anti-fouling.
Bernard is a French-born entrepreneur living in the US. He’s a brilliant, energetic serial entrepreneur who is as philosophical in his approach to business building as he is pragmatic. And that c...
This week we speak with Blaine Grimes, the woman behind Gulf of Maine Ventures, the investment arm of Gulf of Maine Research Institute. I really enjoyed my conversation with Blaine. She has a broad perspective on the ocean economy as well as a take-charge attitude.
During her tenture at GMRI, Blaine realized that important innovations were sometimes not making it into the market due to a funding gap in the blue economy startup spac...
In Happy Planet’s third episode we meet Griffin O’Driscoll, the young CEO of Organicin Scientific. Griffin joined forces with his professor Dr. Margaret Riley to commercialize her 25+ years of research on bacteriocins, anti-microbial proteins that kill bacteria in a targeted way. Organicin is now creating products for the aquaculture industry, both to keep seafood safer for consumption and to reduce mortality in farming. That’s jus...
Meet Nicholas Sullivan, author of Blue Revolution, who helps debunk some of the myths around wild caught seafood versus aquaculture and tells us about new blue technologies that will make both industries fare better.
Nicholas is a Senior Fellow at The Fletcher School’s Council on Emerging Market Enterprises and a Senior Research Fellow at its Maritime Studies Program. A writer and editor focused on the interplay between t...
Meet Bill Curtsinger, a pioneer of underwater sea photography. He has many “firsts” to his name including being the first to photograph a narwhal.
Bill was also my neighbour growing up in Maine and his stories and photographs made a life-long impression.
I wanted to reconnect with Bill to frame our ocean series discussion. In addition to uncovering his tales of adventure, I was eager to hear how the ocean ecology issues o...
Welcome to Happy Planet where we speak with entrepreneurs, investors and thought leaders driving the impact economy. I am your host, Abigail Carroll. For a long time I was best known as Maine’s oyster lady; now I work with other mission-driven start-ups pursuing both profit and planetary health.. This work is so exciting and hope-inspiring that I decided to share the stories of some of the incredible people I’ve met along the way...
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