December 3, 2025 • 42 mins
How can you adapt your pitch on the fly to a potential customer, to an investor, or to a generalist audience? Today you can listen in on a live consulting session where I help a founder crack this question.
In this episode, I'm consulting Oliver Siegel, the co-founder and CEO of the deep tech startup Magmatic Bio. Magmatic designs synthetic proteins that separate critical metals from each other.
Connect with the host:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/schmidt-marina/
marina@r2g.media
Need help communicating your tech?
Check out Magmatic
Connect with Oliver
https://www.linkedin.com/in/siegel-oliver/https://www.linkedin.com/in/siegel-oliver/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:03):
How can you adapt your pitch on the fly to a potential customer,
to an investor versus to a generalist audience?
Today you can listen into a liveconsulting session where I help
the founder crack this question.This is a new format which I
came up with thanks to Esther Perel.
Esther Perel is a premier relationship coach and she has a
(00:23):
podcast where she does one off therapy sessions with couples.
I personally love hearing real world examples and experiencing
someone's aha moment. So I thought, why not apply this
to communications? Why not fix some pictures and
some narratives live? So in this episode I'm
(00:45):
consulting Oliver Siegel, the Cofounder and CEO of a fascinating
deep tech startup, Magmatic Bio.This first Test turned out
pretty well. It was probably one of the most
productive 1 1/2 hour sessions I've had in a long time.
You're listening to scaling nerds.
Scaling nerds help science and tech founders master the
(01:07):
essential communication fluff ofVC backed growth, from branding
and storytelling to media strategy and investor decks.
I'm Marina Schmidt. Let's jump right in.
In terms of the communication side, what angle should we look
(01:28):
at today? Very personally, I find
switching contest texts difficult.
I think I can relatively easily lock in on a narrative, but that
narrative may or may not be the right one in a specific context,
so I feel sometimes rigid and not sufficiently flexible and
(01:48):
playful to actually adapt to theaudience I have.
Where it gets really hard is picking someone up essentially
in an elevator, so on the streetand explaining not knowing what
their background is in simple terms, in such a way that they
start asking questions. And there was a recent encounter
(02:10):
with you, Marina, which actuallyopened my eyes to that because
we just sort of randomly met. You asked me that question.
I did not know what your background was.
And your response to my blurb was sounds complicated.
And I had heard that response quite a lot, right?
And I knew at that stage, OK, it's not a compliment.
(02:32):
It's the opposite of a compliment.
Yeah. Well, to be fair, when we were
speaking like, was it a portfolio day of a biotech
investor? And I had by that point
moderated 5 days of events back-to-back.
So I moderated the largest food fair in the world.
(02:53):
And then I came to Berlin to moderate briefly this biotech
investor day. And I was like, floored, right?
So this is a good specific case study we could work on now.
And, and, and really open my eyes because, I mean, evidently
you sometimes have a very interested investor who has done
his reading and already had donehis research.
(03:13):
And at that stage it becomes easier, but really to get
someone quickly interested and curious to ask the next
question, the following question.
I don't think I do that very well because I always assume
people know all the stuff I already know, which of course
they don't. OK, do you ever ask before you
(03:34):
tell them? Like how much they know about
the space. I do not always.
I don't do it consequentially, but I do it sometimes and it
does help to categorize if someone knows something already
or whether I need to start from scratch.
Yes, that does help. Yeah, yeah.
OK, cool. Let's get started.
And what would be your question?My question would be how much do
(03:59):
you know about critical minerals?
OK, cool. And now we're going down the
path of they are generalist investor or they are a
journalist who doesn't know about the specific topic too
much. How would you usually keep
going? What would you usually say to
explain what you're doing? I would usually say we are
(04:21):
mathematic. We build materials, bio based
materials that are very good at separating metals.
And the reason why this is so critically relevant is that
metal separation is the technology that you need to
produce any material that goes into a technical application,
(04:44):
such a lithium battery, such as an AI chip, such as a computer,
maybe a quantum computer, maybe an energy device.
It's all about the materiality of metals and that's what we
support. If you describe like the status
quo, if you can describe the alternative to your approach,
how does that look like? Today, any metal that gets
(05:08):
produced and used for this technical application and
perhaps is mined somewhere in the world gets eventually
shipped to China for refining. And China then uses the material
for further processing and production of different devices.
And you have to imagine that around 90%, actually more than
(05:28):
90% in some cases of the refining happens in China.
So it is the processing step that is critical to everything.
And that's where we feel the geostrategic independence OR
dependence and the stranglehold sometimes that China has on us.
So I make the listener feel the weight of the problem, and
(05:51):
that's relatively easy because everyone intuitively understands
that that creates dependencies and fragility of the supply
chain. I then say next, and guess what?
Despite the fact that these refineries in China essentially
are almost monopolies, they makeno money.
What? They make no money?
(06:13):
No, they make no money. And the reason for that is
twofold. Their customer base is even more
concentrated and they exert enormous pressure on their
supply chain. And the second thing is, is they
use technology that is 50 years old.
So we need new technology to make refining profitable again.
(06:36):
It's interesting how you were describing it.
I think you were intuitively using an approach that is
oftentimes also used in content production where you kind of
describe a Riddle, right? So you were saying, well, 90% of
the refining happens in China, this is the processing step.
And even though they have monopolies, they make no money.
(06:59):
How can that be? This is actually really good,
like as an archetype of explaining something.
This is a really strong framework that you can maybe use
also in other areas because it drives curiosity.
People lean in when you describea kind of Riddle like how can
that be? And then you answer connected to
(07:23):
your company, right? So in this case, you were saying
2 points. One of them is that their
customers are even bigger monopolies and the other one
that the technology that they use is 50 years old.
I would ask whether you need to say both points because if you
(07:45):
just centralized one point, you have a stronger narrative.
Like you bring it down to, well,the technology that they use is
50 years old, boom. And then you can lead into how
magmatic is approaching that. Very interesting.
It would work. My intellectual resistance goes
(08:09):
away in the second because I start to realize that the first
point that I'm making is actually a relevant point.
Because if a monopoly, if two oligopolies basically sort of
keep each other in check, it becomes a moot point.
It's not actually relevant anymore.
So the real reason why they makeno money is because the
(08:31):
technology is not good. I want to tell you about what it
does to me as a founder to actually make this discovery.
Founders generally want to show honesty and transparency and
rigour in thinking, and the reason why I used both the
argument of oligopoly and technology at the same time was
because I wanted to be rigorous in my thinking and giving up
(08:55):
that point comes at the cost of do I appear superficial or not
thinking straight And what happened in my mind.
Why I accepted your point was because I realized that it is
actually because two oligopolieslook at each other and as a
result they don't have anyone who has an excuse for the
(09:17):
oligopoly. They should actually be able to
exert power and they can't, which cancels it out and means
it's really technology point. So the reason why I'm saying
this is because emotionally if you start to think you are lying
or you're dishonest, intellectually you are less
convincing. And as a result I need to work
(09:40):
on the belief level. Why?
I could accept what you just said, and when the belief
happens, I will very easily be able to adopt it.
Interesting. I mean, in this case it's ideal
because this entire first point kind of fell away in terms of
it's logic. If in a case where this wouldn't
(10:00):
be the case, where let's say thefirst point would be still
important but it would be less important, a way to still
communicate it is to say one of the main reasons is that the
technology is 50 years old. And just by adding a little bit
of nuance to say, well, one of the main reasons, not the only
(10:21):
reason or not the main reason, it would still be possible to
structure the narrative and condense it without feeling like
you are oversimplifying too muchor being dishonest.
That's what I just said may be relevant to other parts where
(10:41):
situations where you may want togive context, but where it's
clear that trying to say all thereasons or all the causes, so
all the points would be overloading.
So regarding the next points, right, like more problems to
cover, do you ever talk about the pollution, the wastefulness
of these processes? Like what are the actual
problems that are caused by the usage of such an old technology?
(11:07):
Very problematic conditions for the workers and for the
environment where these processes occur.
And specifically these processesproduce enormous amounts of
discharge salts that need to be disposed and the disposal today
mostly happens by putting them into the sea.
(11:28):
There is a very, very long list of environmental damage that
mining in general does, and. Absolutely.
Yes, there is, but I find it a very double edged sword because
we are talking about making mining a little less, polluting
a little less, but it remains anextractive activity.
(11:50):
So I think it's the struggle of finding the right balance in
putting the activity of mining and extracting minerals into the
context of our modern life. It would be also oversimplifying
reducing it to environmental impact because there is a a
trade off. We would like electrification.
We think electric mobility is the solution to CO2 and the use
(12:15):
and discharge of CO2 from combustion engines, but as a
result cause environmental damage in mining.
And so if one I think speaks tooheavy weighted about the
environmental consequences of mining in general, it leads and
(12:36):
I think distracts from the original topic by people leading
all of a sudden having the question of, OK, if mining is
actually that environmentally friendly, why don't we just keep
driving our petrol cars? And then you end up in an
ideological or semi technical ideological discussion that
completely distracts from what I'm pitching, which is why I'm
(12:57):
very careful talking about environment too much.
Yeah, yeah. OK, I get that.
Now let's look in another cornerregarding the importance of
critical minerals. So can we draw some kind of
follow up here? Yeah, we can, but it goes in a
different direction. The sentence I normally use is
(13:20):
that this is where we particularly feel the
geostrategic dependence from China, leading to a lot of the
rhetoric that is publicly being used at the moment by
governments, by countries, against each other.
And now imagine we had a situation where resources were
more equally distributed. Imagine a situation where we
(13:43):
were a little less dependent on Chinese refineries, where we had
the ability to actually process outside China and as a result,
let more people participate or more geographies participate in
access to resources. Wouldn't that make a better
world? I find it really interesting
that you are zoning in completely on the geopolitical
(14:07):
topic, and that may be totally sensible.
I'm just poking around because once you start building a
narrative, right, where you kindof start with the core is very
important because everything else that you say after is based
on the problem you choose to tackle, right?
What are we talking now in terms?
We need to look at the use cases.
(14:29):
Are we talking mostly about thistechnology being used at the
virgin extraction process to refine virgin materials or how
much are you also looking at using it for recycling?
What's kind of the main usage point?
The use is ubiquitous in any process.
So virtual materials that come out of minds and need to Polish
(14:54):
the materials to strip them off these problematic elements.
But the same is true for recycled material, because
recycled material has essentially the same issue.
How much do you ever talk about the recycling issue?
I frame the foundation of mathematic around circularity of
metals and recycling. Really our sort of foundational
(15:15):
idea was that we are were inspired by the idea that we
want to achieve ultimate circularity of all elements, not
just to select few elements. To basically come to a maybe
utopian perspective on completely managing our
(15:36):
inventory, our human inventory of materials in the most
efficient way so that we can actually at some stage stop
mining altogether. So what I see is that you have
these like 2 potential major narrative strands and a
narrative trying to find a metaphor to like describe a
narrative. It's like little magnets that
(15:58):
line up in a row. The different pieces of the
argument kind of pull towards each other, and your other
narrative strand is repelling, like it's not vibing with your
first narrative strand. And that's normal because that's
how narrative works. And what we need to make sure is
that we separate these metals into clear narratives because I
(16:23):
think there's a lot of potentialhere.
Both. Also if you think about media
angles, but right, it can be applied to anything like the way
that you pitch. For some people, your
geopolitical narrative is going to be more interesting, and for
other people the recycling aspect is going to be the major
driver. Absolutely.
(16:44):
And I've tried that narrative attimes and I actually played with
it. But, and the big but of course
is that you make a promise so intimately make that promise
that you're going to fix that problem.
And we want to fix that problem.But the time horizon is such a
long one because it's not a trivial problem.
(17:04):
It's actually a very complicatedproblem that I need to bridge
the gap between the this is happening in 10 years time to
particularly in fundraising. This is happening this year and
next year and the following year.
And so I at the moment prefer the geostrategic strand because
our use case is at the moment ofhighly actionable one that we
(17:29):
want to implement at scale. And that's why the recycling arc
becomes repelling on the use case that we I subsequently sort
of present to them, which is whyI at the moment favour the other
strand. When you say it becomes
repelling in terms of the use case, are you talking about that
specific conversational instanceor in greater terms, you know,
(17:53):
is it mostly about it's just toofar away, right, Yeah.
What time horizon are we talkingabout?
You said like 10. Years.
Well, this is a very big pain point because we really as
founders mean what we say and wereally love that recycling use
case so much that we go at greatlength to actually make it
(18:15):
happen amongst others by hopefully participating in a
very well publicized project called the Transition Metal
Challenge by Sprint, which is a large Funding Agency in Germany
that has basically made one of those very daring challenges
essentially the e-waste challenge.
So we support that and we submitted to that and we also
(18:39):
have a customer that actually wants to go the other strands.
So we kind of have done the artsthe the arts sin if you want by
actually following two use casesor not completely doing just one
thing. And that of course to investor
sometimes can be confusing to say the least.
If not, breakdown the full confidence into a team, into a
(19:03):
project. What could be something to
explore here is contextualizing it on a timeline, so making
clear that the focus of the use case is mostly in the refinement
of virtual materials. And that's the potential and the
(19:24):
long term vision would be in being part of the solution to
e-waste. And you are focusing on that
one. And with an eye on the long term
future, you're doing this, you're exploring this like side
project to make sure you keep track of it.
And that's where you were. Eventually, what you're working
(19:45):
on at the core can be applied to.
Yes. What we've done right now is we
looked at the different narrative strands that you can
have, and the narrative strand always starts with a problem at
the beginning. It's like the beginning of the
strand is a problem, and we've established that the
environmental strand is tricky. Because of complications with
(20:06):
right, who your customers are. And it's just like a bit messy
and it's, it's not a clean narrative.
So we have deprioritized that one for now, even though
circularity is super important, right?
And we, we thought of, OK, we have these two strands and we
have established that one of them is more applicable for your
(20:26):
current situation and one of them is more of a long term
shot. So what we're doing now, instead
of having them in parallel, we put them next to each other on
the timeline. So we say we're talking about
the geopolitics of this situation and and the importance
of improving these processes. A 50 year old technology and
what this work can eventually lead us towards is to also fix
(20:52):
this massive problem of electronic.
Waste. Very interesting.
It's exactly like that. And when I think about when I
pitch the cover page of our pitch, I use to introduce the
idea of circularity and the longterm vision and I then say
(21:15):
sometimes the sentence. But of course, this is such a
long term project that we have decided to focus on initially a
specific use case and then I introduce the use case.
But what I don't do, and this isI think where I make a mistake
is that I don't then at the end of the interim step put it into
(21:35):
the context of the big vision again.
I think that makes a lot of sense because that's then
missing. And so they say, well, he talked
about the circularity and then he talks about geostrategics and
the refining and all of that understand.
But what happened to the big vision?
So, so very much towards the end, I think that actually
(21:56):
making that kind of turn again and basically say, and you know
what, by doing this we actually support that, yes, that makes AI
think a big difference. And I have another iteration on
that. So there is a concept if you
think about the archetype of the.
But what you were just saying iswe want to fix E way.
(22:19):
So if we want to reach this big vision, but because this is too
daunting, we are right now goingto focus on doing this first
step. The archetype of a but is that
the second part of the sentence negates the first part if you
right. Absolutely it does.
(22:40):
It is exactly that. It's.
It's not a but. Like I love you, but we can't be
together. Like, OK, you don't love me then
I don't care what you said in the first part.
Like the second part is really what's important.
So what we want to do is we wantto avoid switching or creating a
(23:02):
but scenario. And what you can do is instead
of going vision, actual approachand vision, which would be
already version 2, right? Compared to like vision, but
actual approach, the version three that would be even better
is to just go, this is our actual approach and this is the
(23:26):
vision. This is where it can lead to.
So you're building on top like an improv theater, right?
An improv theater baseline of, of acting improv, which I've
done over the years here and there and I've always loved is
you always want to go yes. And so you want to build on what
you've said. You don't want to negate what
the other person said. You want to be like we are doing
(23:48):
this and yes, and we are doing, we are reaching towards
narrative too. So do I understand correctly
that it changes the sequence? You wouldn't talk about the
problem initially. You would just basically go
straight into what you're doing.Then you would say, why is this
relevant? You would say, uh, well, it
actually fixes, uh, that we can talk about the geostrategic and
(24:13):
geopolitical, but what's even better is eventually we will use
this for recycling and circularity.
Nearly there. What I was referring to is that
beforehand you just said in kindof the pitch that you have, you
would usually kind of talk aboutthe big shot of OK, we went to
fix e-waste. We want to achieve circularity,
(24:34):
but because this is such a big topic, we are first focusing on
this more concrete solution, which is pretty much the
archetype of any impact startup.You cannot just go for the big
elephant immediately, right? Go instead directly into the
real niche problem you're solving, which in this case is
(24:57):
the geopolitical issue and the inefficiency of the technology
being right now actively wasteful.
OK. Yeah.
And then solution market da, da,da, da, da and then you you say
this can also be applied eventually.
(25:19):
Our long term shot is this is the basis for creating
circularity in metals. This is the basis for enabling
us to recycle our e-waste. This is where we are eventually
heading toward. You can say this is the basis or
this hour long shot is our vision for this.
(25:42):
It's so interesting because within close proximity, we are
debating this at the moment. And maybe two hours ago, I got
up from lunch with my colleaguesand I basically said, how do we
communicate to investors now that if we win the tech metal
challenge that we're now doing this, everyone will be
surprised. And had we already pitched it
(26:05):
the way you propose it, it wouldhave been fantastic because
people would say, oh, look at, they talked about it now they
actually said an action. They haven't even talked about
that action. But now they're doing this with
that misplacement or the way theargument has been strung.
So to to date, because we're currently into fundraising and
come as a negative surprise, they've talked about the
(26:28):
refining case, now they're talking about the recycling.
They're all of a sudden they do this recycling thing.
I don't understand that. And that will cause confusion.
So I need to actually correct that.
That's that's an urgent action. Yeah, it's important.
Isn't that fascinating? Isn't that fascinating that
(26:51):
like, because the narrative was out of line, what is actually a
true accomplishment? Seems like you're off track.
You're just spinning your wheels, but this is what you're
actually doing this for. And I think that points to such
an essential challenge that so many companies face because what
(27:14):
you start out doing is usually not what you want to be doing in
5 to 8 years, right? But you cannot start with what
you want to be doing in 5 to 8 years.
And that's how to bridge it to like be like, this is our
business case. This is where we saw the entry
into the market. And this is where we see a
(27:35):
viable growing business. And that will be the foundation
for us to step by step get to our eventual vision.
It's fascinating, and it's fascinating because every
founder has exactly the same pain.
It's not a walk in the park to do what we're doing.
And of course you need a purpose.
And my purpose was circularity. And you don't even think about
(27:56):
it because the reason why you get up every morning is a big
vision. It's not about tackling a
specific technical problem. It's the biggest thing.
And where it then falls apart isthat you forget to tell people
your journey in your thinking. And if you then participate, let
them participate only in the usecase X and don't put it into
(28:17):
context, you lose the person. And I think creates an effect
that is adverse the way we just described it.
But in fact, in fact, should be completely normal and it should
be the best thing that happens. You know, the founder doesn't
even know exactly what he does, but he hasn't communicated the
right way. Yeah, yeah.
And that also creates then clarity within the team, right,
(28:38):
Because then it's clear why you're working on this as an
interim step and interim focus. I think it goes both ways,
right? Like for some stakeholders,
having the focus on the vision is going to be important, right?
To really clarify, this is wherewe're heading.
And when you're talking to customers, just like with
talking to investors, the big risk is over focusing on the
(29:01):
vision or starting with a vision.
And they're like, well, but how does that work?
What problem does that fix for me right now?
Like my problem is not, I don't wake up in the morning and I'm
like, Oh my God, circularity. Their problem is wake up in the
morning and X especially for customers, right, which we
haven't gotten into because another topic would be like who
(29:24):
would actually be you're paying customers for this first part of
the business? I love the question because that
is opportunity for the problem that we just laid out.
My answer to that is minus refiners, recyclers and at that
station, oh, you do recycling aswell.
And we say yes, because recyclers have exactly the same
(29:45):
problems. And that of course is a good way
to actually bring it back to thebig vision because by developing
even the small first step solution into recycling, we
become intimate with customer base.
That customer base actually today has that problem and needs
partial solution, partial solutions from us.
(30:08):
And I think that's where then itkind of ties nicely back into
the big vision. Which of these 3 customer types
is the one that most readily going to adopt the approach, be
willing to pay for it, and will be an easy entry market?
For you, the miner. The miners, what would be #2?
(30:32):
The refiner, then the recycler. Is there a significant
difference in the why of the miner versus the why of the
refiner? Yes.
The miner is used to producing an OK material that needs to go
into refining and that is unpleasant for the miner because
(30:54):
the material that he produces has mediocre quality.
And pricing of that material hasa lot to do with spot markets
and what the current supply demand balances are.
And it makes it somewhat unpredictable for the miner to
actually monetize what he actually mines for.
(31:17):
Had he the ability, would he have the ability to produce
material that can readily go into a factory for further
fabrication of something, say a battery?
Could he make long term off takeagreements with automotive
companies? It would become a lot less
problematic, difficult. He could have more planning of
(31:40):
what prices he can get. He can actually manage his
financial risks a lot better. OK, super.
That sounds like a really strongexample and like a really strong
case. We won't have time to get into
this in detail, but something for you to like, just think
about is specificity in terms ofexamples is better than generic
(32:04):
collections or generic statements right now, like when
you were talking about the customer groups, right?
You have these three pillars. And if we have 3 pillars,
intuitively, we think like we perceive them to be somewhat
equally important. And in terms of clarifying the
use case of what you're doing tocustomers, what you just said
(32:28):
like made it super clear to understand why the hell a minor
would care about using what you're offering.
It's a very strong sales case. If you're in a, in a
conversation with an investor and they're like, well, what
about the commercial side, right?
Instead of saying, well, we havethese three groups that we can
(32:48):
sell to and like kind of brushing over their reasons
individually, if you can say we can sell to miners, refiners and
recyclers. However, to begin with, we are
focusing on miners because they have a very urgent problem,
right? And the problem of the miners is
(33:11):
This is why they're they wanted,right?
And so we are getting into a deeper level of the problem,
right? You have your higher level
problem, which is the geopolitical dependence of
China. And that is something, this
higher level problem is something that is going to be
relevant to the media. It's going to be relevant to a
(33:33):
journalist audience. It's going to be relevant for
this conversation that you're going to have initially with
somebody. But what's important is that
when you actually get down to business and you're talking to
somebody who really wants to know what is your business case,
you cannot spend too much time on the geopolitical thing.
(33:54):
You kind of drop deeper into thecustomer problem with that
mining example and you're like, this is the business case.
And then once you have that template and you convince them
that there's one customer group that really freaking wants what
you are offering, you can just add, well, this is the case for
miners and it's also relevant for refiners and recyclers per
(34:17):
extension. So we basically dissected that
the geostrategic point, it's sort of a relatively general
point and it may resonate sort of and raise interest
principally. But in order to really motivate
and move someone, it would be promising to actually really
(34:38):
make the listener feel the customer problem and and making
the audience feel the customer problem and why that actually
could activate someone felt extremely natural to me,
although I hadn't actually done it before.
And I haven't done it before because it's to me very obvious
why miners would actually do that.
(34:59):
Yeah. So if you're talking to a
journalist audience, you're you usually will stay a bit higher
up the chain of narrative. You will talk more about the
geopolitical topic and you will talk about what's even higher up
the vision, right? If you're talking to somebody
who's more specialized or to an investor who is like trying to
(35:20):
understand what the hell is actually your business case,
like great, you have this vision.
Great you this is relevant. But like, how the hell are you
planning to make this a viable, scalable business model?
You need to go down the chain ofnarrative a bit deeper and spend
more time on like, clarifying, look, this is the problem for
(35:44):
the minor. This is why they are going to
take our technology like it's hot cookies on Christmas.
You know, this is a level of detail that you may lose a
generalist audience with, though, because I don't care
about minors. Like I, I don't care a single
cent about the problems of a minor and it's nothing I have to
(36:05):
do with, but I do care as a journalist, as somebody in the
space who could connect you withrelevant people.
I personally do care about the geopolitical aspect to an extent
and even more about your long term vision.
I'm just iterating that to like clarify, like when you kind of
go up in the chain and when you want to go down.
(36:25):
And what you need to decide is am I going to go up in the chain
or am I going down in the chain depending on who I'm talking to?
OK. It's like a ladder, so it
becomes a lot less. Yeah.
So actually you made my problem a bit smaller because previously
the way I was thinking about moderating the way I speak about
(36:46):
my project or our project was, oh, there's different verticals
and so I need to completely change it.
Now what I actually start to realise it's, it's just I climb
up the ladder, up or down depending on the question and
the audience and what the audience and the result in
question. That makes it a lot easier.
It's actually, it's great. I mean, I thinking about it as a
(37:07):
ladder thing, up or down, I can easily do that.
That's great. Yeah.
And that means that they're coherent, right?
It's all in one linear direction.
Generally, in your case, you don't want to climb up right
from the very top. This is the vision, but we're
focusing only on this part. You rather want to kind of your
(37:31):
main entry point most of the time is going to be the
geopolitical ladder step. For generalized audience, you go
up into vision. For an investor or like a
specialized audience, most of the time you will go down into
the details and then at the end you'll come up and be like the
vision, by the way, like here atthe very top where we can
(37:54):
overlook the horizon. Now that I've gotten you down
into the details, the vision, this is where it what is
possible long term. And that means that
communication conundrum that I identified previously that very
soon I might have to communicateor might want to communicate.
(38:16):
Why the Sprintec Metal Challengeis an interesting opportunity.
I frame it differently in the sense that it actually serves
the long term vision and that what do I do with the miner
today, instructs on the recycling tomorrow.
And that way I can take an audience that has already bought
(38:39):
the mining case and take that audience up the ladder by
basically saying by doing so we support the bigger goal.
And that isn't that an even morebeautiful goal.
Yeah. And in investor speak, you say
this is what we're doing to be able to scale.
Yes. Yeah.
Doing this at this moment is going to set us up to be able to
(39:02):
long term actually scale into these other verticals, though we
are so focused on the mining application because you do want
to have that strategic emphasis on a first target group.
OK, cool. Happy.
I'm super happy. I mean, quite literally, I
walked into the room and it really sort of dawned on me this
(39:26):
morning. And not because we had this
disappointment, just because theway the investor discussions at
the moment go, I'm in the thick of it at the moment.
I'm just really doing this on a day-to-day basis and I see where
I'm misaligned and I walk into this room and we planned this
what, weeks ago this session andit came so incredibly timely.
(39:47):
Marie Days, you can't imagine. It's fantastic.
I really, I love it. You really helped me.
I mean, it's, it was probably one of the most productive 1 1/2
hour sessions I've had in a longtime.
Really, really cool. Amazing.
Yeah, it's super fun because I haven't had anything to do with
(40:10):
mining or rare minerals. And it's interesting because
while I do think it can be really helpful to have industry
expertise for like doing like marketing strategy and and like
communication strategy to break down the top level narrative.
I don't need to understand the mining industry to help you with
(40:32):
creating that top level narrative.
Maybe having an incredible background in mining would
actually have made it harder forme, most likely right?
I was about to say that I think a detailed knowledge is probably
more detrimental than it actually helps.
And so I think I perceived our conversation was you basically
(40:54):
structured the problem on a metalevel, not on a detailed level.
And you can only do that if you can abstract it in a way.
And so you abstracted the problem to a very general
problem. And you used my terms, and you,
by the way, used them extremely skilfully.
So I even thought you knew something about mining and
(41:15):
refining. Good, no, I just of course have
an eye on the words. Feel free to connect with our
guest or me, myself and I on LinkedIn.
You find the links in the show notes and I always always always
love to hear from listeners. Each episode requires a lot of
(41:37):
work and we cut it down from like 60-70 minutes to the best
bits so you get episodes filled with insights.
Because I know you're busy. It's no fluff, only signal as
Mr. GPT would say. If you haven't had the chance to
leave a review yet, it just takes 30 seconds.
It helps us a lot, and it personally also means a lot to
me. Thank you.
(41:59):
My name is Marina Schmidt and this is Scaling Nerds.
How can you adapt your pitch on the fly to a potential customer,
to an investor versus to a generalist audience?
Today you can listen into a liveconsulting session where I help
the founder crack this question.This is a new format which I
came up with thanks to Esther Perel.
Esther Perel is a premier relationship coach and she has a
(00:23):
podcast where she does one off therapy sessions with couples.
I personally love hearing real world examples and experiencing
someone's aha moment. So I thought, why not apply this
to communications? Why not fix some pictures and
some narratives live? So in this episode I'm
(00:45):
consulting Oliver Siegel, the Cofounder and CEO of a fascinating
deep tech startup, Magmatic Bio.This first Test turned out
pretty well. It was probably one of the most
productive 1 1/2 hour sessions I've had in a long time.
You're listening to scaling nerds.
Scaling nerds help science and tech founders master the
(01:07):
essential communication fluff ofVC backed growth, from branding
and storytelling to media strategy and investor decks.
I'm Marina Schmidt. Let's jump right in.
In terms of the communication side, what angle should we look
(01:28):
at today? Very personally, I find
switching contest texts difficult.
I think I can relatively easily lock in on a narrative, but that
narrative may or may not be the right one in a specific context,
so I feel sometimes rigid and not sufficiently flexible and
(01:48):
playful to actually adapt to theaudience I have.
Where it gets really hard is picking someone up essentially
in an elevator, so on the streetand explaining not knowing what
their background is in simple terms, in such a way that they
start asking questions. And there was a recent encounter
(02:10):
with you, Marina, which actuallyopened my eyes to that because
we just sort of randomly met. You asked me that question.
I did not know what your background was.
And your response to my blurb was sounds complicated.
And I had heard that response quite a lot, right?
And I knew at that stage, OK, it's not a compliment.
(02:32):
It's the opposite of a compliment.
Yeah. Well, to be fair, when we were
speaking like, was it a portfolio day of a biotech
investor? And I had by that point
moderated 5 days of events back-to-back.
So I moderated the largest food fair in the world.
(02:53):
And then I came to Berlin to moderate briefly this biotech
investor day. And I was like, floored, right?
So this is a good specific case study we could work on now.
And, and, and really open my eyes because, I mean, evidently
you sometimes have a very interested investor who has done
his reading and already had donehis research.
(03:13):
And at that stage it becomes easier, but really to get
someone quickly interested and curious to ask the next
question, the following question.
I don't think I do that very well because I always assume
people know all the stuff I already know, which of course
they don't. OK, do you ever ask before you
(03:34):
tell them? Like how much they know about
the space. I do not always.
I don't do it consequentially, but I do it sometimes and it
does help to categorize if someone knows something already
or whether I need to start from scratch.
Yes, that does help. Yeah, yeah.
OK, cool. Let's get started.
And what would be your question?My question would be how much do
(03:59):
you know about critical minerals?
OK, cool. And now we're going down the
path of they are generalist investor or they are a
journalist who doesn't know about the specific topic too
much. How would you usually keep
going? What would you usually say to
explain what you're doing? I would usually say we are
(04:21):
mathematic. We build materials, bio based
materials that are very good at separating metals.
And the reason why this is so critically relevant is that
metal separation is the technology that you need to
produce any material that goes into a technical application,
(04:44):
such a lithium battery, such as an AI chip, such as a computer,
maybe a quantum computer, maybe an energy device.
It's all about the materiality of metals and that's what we
support. If you describe like the status
quo, if you can describe the alternative to your approach,
how does that look like? Today, any metal that gets
(05:08):
produced and used for this technical application and
perhaps is mined somewhere in the world gets eventually
shipped to China for refining. And China then uses the material
for further processing and production of different devices.
And you have to imagine that around 90%, actually more than
(05:28):
90% in some cases of the refining happens in China.
So it is the processing step that is critical to everything.
And that's where we feel the geostrategic independence OR
dependence and the stranglehold sometimes that China has on us.
So I make the listener feel the weight of the problem, and
(05:51):
that's relatively easy because everyone intuitively understands
that that creates dependencies and fragility of the supply
chain. I then say next, and guess what?
Despite the fact that these refineries in China essentially
are almost monopolies, they makeno money.
What? They make no money?
(06:13):
No, they make no money. And the reason for that is
twofold. Their customer base is even more
concentrated and they exert enormous pressure on their
supply chain. And the second thing is, is they
use technology that is 50 years old.
So we need new technology to make refining profitable again.
(06:36):
It's interesting how you were describing it.
I think you were intuitively using an approach that is
oftentimes also used in content production where you kind of
describe a Riddle, right? So you were saying, well, 90% of
the refining happens in China, this is the processing step.
And even though they have monopolies, they make no money.
(06:59):
How can that be? This is actually really good,
like as an archetype of explaining something.
This is a really strong framework that you can maybe use
also in other areas because it drives curiosity.
People lean in when you describea kind of Riddle like how can
that be? And then you answer connected to
(07:23):
your company, right? So in this case, you were saying
2 points. One of them is that their
customers are even bigger monopolies and the other one
that the technology that they use is 50 years old.
I would ask whether you need to say both points because if you
(07:45):
just centralized one point, you have a stronger narrative.
Like you bring it down to, well,the technology that they use is
50 years old, boom. And then you can lead into how
magmatic is approaching that. Very interesting.
It would work. My intellectual resistance goes
(08:09):
away in the second because I start to realize that the first
point that I'm making is actually a relevant point.
Because if a monopoly, if two oligopolies basically sort of
keep each other in check, it becomes a moot point.
It's not actually relevant anymore.
So the real reason why they makeno money is because the
(08:31):
technology is not good. I want to tell you about what it
does to me as a founder to actually make this discovery.
Founders generally want to show honesty and transparency and
rigour in thinking, and the reason why I used both the
argument of oligopoly and technology at the same time was
because I wanted to be rigorous in my thinking and giving up
(08:55):
that point comes at the cost of do I appear superficial or not
thinking straight And what happened in my mind.
Why I accepted your point was because I realized that it is
actually because two oligopolieslook at each other and as a
result they don't have anyone who has an excuse for the
(09:17):
oligopoly. They should actually be able to
exert power and they can't, which cancels it out and means
it's really technology point. So the reason why I'm saying
this is because emotionally if you start to think you are lying
or you're dishonest, intellectually you are less
convincing. And as a result I need to work
(09:40):
on the belief level. Why?
I could accept what you just said, and when the belief
happens, I will very easily be able to adopt it.
Interesting. I mean, in this case it's ideal
because this entire first point kind of fell away in terms of
it's logic. If in a case where this wouldn't
(10:00):
be the case, where let's say thefirst point would be still
important but it would be less important, a way to still
communicate it is to say one of the main reasons is that the
technology is 50 years old. And just by adding a little bit
of nuance to say, well, one of the main reasons, not the only
(10:21):
reason or not the main reason, it would still be possible to
structure the narrative and condense it without feeling like
you are oversimplifying too muchor being dishonest.
That's what I just said may be relevant to other parts where
(10:41):
situations where you may want togive context, but where it's
clear that trying to say all thereasons or all the causes, so
all the points would be overloading.
So regarding the next points, right, like more problems to
cover, do you ever talk about the pollution, the wastefulness
of these processes? Like what are the actual
problems that are caused by the usage of such an old technology?
(11:07):
Very problematic conditions for the workers and for the
environment where these processes occur.
And specifically these processesproduce enormous amounts of
discharge salts that need to be disposed and the disposal today
mostly happens by putting them into the sea.
(11:28):
There is a very, very long list of environmental damage that
mining in general does, and. Absolutely.
Yes, there is, but I find it a very double edged sword because
we are talking about making mining a little less, polluting
a little less, but it remains anextractive activity.
(11:50):
So I think it's the struggle of finding the right balance in
putting the activity of mining and extracting minerals into the
context of our modern life. It would be also oversimplifying
reducing it to environmental impact because there is a a
trade off. We would like electrification.
We think electric mobility is the solution to CO2 and the use
(12:15):
and discharge of CO2 from combustion engines, but as a
result cause environmental damage in mining.
And so if one I think speaks tooheavy weighted about the
environmental consequences of mining in general, it leads and
(12:36):
I think distracts from the original topic by people leading
all of a sudden having the question of, OK, if mining is
actually that environmentally friendly, why don't we just keep
driving our petrol cars? And then you end up in an
ideological or semi technical ideological discussion that
completely distracts from what I'm pitching, which is why I'm
(12:57):
very careful talking about environment too much.
Yeah, yeah. OK, I get that.
Now let's look in another cornerregarding the importance of
critical minerals. So can we draw some kind of
follow up here? Yeah, we can, but it goes in a
different direction. The sentence I normally use is
(13:20):
that this is where we particularly feel the
geostrategic dependence from China, leading to a lot of the
rhetoric that is publicly being used at the moment by
governments, by countries, against each other.
And now imagine we had a situation where resources were
more equally distributed. Imagine a situation where we
(13:43):
were a little less dependent on Chinese refineries, where we had
the ability to actually process outside China and as a result,
let more people participate or more geographies participate in
access to resources. Wouldn't that make a better
world? I find it really interesting
that you are zoning in completely on the geopolitical
(14:07):
topic, and that may be totally sensible.
I'm just poking around because once you start building a
narrative, right, where you kindof start with the core is very
important because everything else that you say after is based
on the problem you choose to tackle, right?
What are we talking now in terms?
We need to look at the use cases.
(14:29):
Are we talking mostly about thistechnology being used at the
virgin extraction process to refine virgin materials or how
much are you also looking at using it for recycling?
What's kind of the main usage point?
The use is ubiquitous in any process.
So virtual materials that come out of minds and need to Polish
(14:54):
the materials to strip them off these problematic elements.
But the same is true for recycled material, because
recycled material has essentially the same issue.
How much do you ever talk about the recycling issue?
I frame the foundation of mathematic around circularity of
metals and recycling. Really our sort of foundational
(15:15):
idea was that we are were inspired by the idea that we
want to achieve ultimate circularity of all elements, not
just to select few elements. To basically come to a maybe
utopian perspective on completely managing our
(15:36):
inventory, our human inventory of materials in the most
efficient way so that we can actually at some stage stop
mining altogether. So what I see is that you have
these like 2 potential major narrative strands and a
narrative trying to find a metaphor to like describe a
narrative. It's like little magnets that
(15:58):
line up in a row. The different pieces of the
argument kind of pull towards each other, and your other
narrative strand is repelling, like it's not vibing with your
first narrative strand. And that's normal because that's
how narrative works. And what we need to make sure is
that we separate these metals into clear narratives because I
(16:23):
think there's a lot of potentialhere.
Both. Also if you think about media
angles, but right, it can be applied to anything like the way
that you pitch. For some people, your
geopolitical narrative is going to be more interesting, and for
other people the recycling aspect is going to be the major
driver. Absolutely.
(16:44):
And I've tried that narrative attimes and I actually played with
it. But, and the big but of course
is that you make a promise so intimately make that promise
that you're going to fix that problem.
And we want to fix that problem.But the time horizon is such a
long one because it's not a trivial problem.
(17:04):
It's actually a very complicatedproblem that I need to bridge
the gap between the this is happening in 10 years time to
particularly in fundraising. This is happening this year and
next year and the following year.
And so I at the moment prefer the geostrategic strand because
our use case is at the moment ofhighly actionable one that we
(17:29):
want to implement at scale. And that's why the recycling arc
becomes repelling on the use case that we I subsequently sort
of present to them, which is whyI at the moment favour the other
strand. When you say it becomes
repelling in terms of the use case, are you talking about that
specific conversational instanceor in greater terms, you know,
(17:53):
is it mostly about it's just toofar away, right, Yeah.
What time horizon are we talkingabout?
You said like 10. Years.
Well, this is a very big pain point because we really as
founders mean what we say and wereally love that recycling use
case so much that we go at greatlength to actually make it
(18:15):
happen amongst others by hopefully participating in a
very well publicized project called the Transition Metal
Challenge by Sprint, which is a large Funding Agency in Germany
that has basically made one of those very daring challenges
essentially the e-waste challenge.
So we support that and we submitted to that and we also
(18:39):
have a customer that actually wants to go the other strands.
So we kind of have done the artsthe the arts sin if you want by
actually following two use casesor not completely doing just one
thing. And that of course to investor
sometimes can be confusing to say the least.
If not, breakdown the full confidence into a team, into a
(19:03):
project. What could be something to
explore here is contextualizing it on a timeline, so making
clear that the focus of the use case is mostly in the refinement
of virtual materials. And that's the potential and the
(19:24):
long term vision would be in being part of the solution to
e-waste. And you are focusing on that
one. And with an eye on the long term
future, you're doing this, you're exploring this like side
project to make sure you keep track of it.
And that's where you were. Eventually, what you're working
(19:45):
on at the core can be applied to.
Yes. What we've done right now is we
looked at the different narrative strands that you can
have, and the narrative strand always starts with a problem at
the beginning. It's like the beginning of the
strand is a problem, and we've established that the
environmental strand is tricky. Because of complications with
(20:06):
right, who your customers are. And it's just like a bit messy
and it's, it's not a clean narrative.
So we have deprioritized that one for now, even though
circularity is super important, right?
And we, we thought of, OK, we have these two strands and we
have established that one of them is more applicable for your
(20:26):
current situation and one of them is more of a long term
shot. So what we're doing now, instead
of having them in parallel, we put them next to each other on
the timeline. So we say we're talking about
the geopolitics of this situation and and the importance
of improving these processes. A 50 year old technology and
what this work can eventually lead us towards is to also fix
(20:52):
this massive problem of electronic.
Waste. Very interesting.
It's exactly like that. And when I think about when I
pitch the cover page of our pitch, I use to introduce the
idea of circularity and the longterm vision and I then say
(21:15):
sometimes the sentence. But of course, this is such a
long term project that we have decided to focus on initially a
specific use case and then I introduce the use case.
But what I don't do, and this isI think where I make a mistake
is that I don't then at the end of the interim step put it into
(21:35):
the context of the big vision again.
I think that makes a lot of sense because that's then
missing. And so they say, well, he talked
about the circularity and then he talks about geostrategics and
the refining and all of that understand.
But what happened to the big vision?
So, so very much towards the end, I think that actually
(21:56):
making that kind of turn again and basically say, and you know
what, by doing this we actually support that, yes, that makes AI
think a big difference. And I have another iteration on
that. So there is a concept if you
think about the archetype of the.
But what you were just saying iswe want to fix E way.
(22:19):
So if we want to reach this big vision, but because this is too
daunting, we are right now goingto focus on doing this first
step. The archetype of a but is that
the second part of the sentence negates the first part if you
right. Absolutely it does.
(22:40):
It is exactly that. It's.
It's not a but. Like I love you, but we can't be
together. Like, OK, you don't love me then
I don't care what you said in the first part.
Like the second part is really what's important.
So what we want to do is we wantto avoid switching or creating a
(23:02):
but scenario. And what you can do is instead
of going vision, actual approachand vision, which would be
already version 2, right? Compared to like vision, but
actual approach, the version three that would be even better
is to just go, this is our actual approach and this is the
(23:26):
vision. This is where it can lead to.
So you're building on top like an improv theater, right?
An improv theater baseline of, of acting improv, which I've
done over the years here and there and I've always loved is
you always want to go yes. And so you want to build on what
you've said. You don't want to negate what
the other person said. You want to be like we are doing
(23:48):
this and yes, and we are doing, we are reaching towards
narrative too. So do I understand correctly
that it changes the sequence? You wouldn't talk about the
problem initially. You would just basically go
straight into what you're doing.Then you would say, why is this
relevant? You would say, uh, well, it
actually fixes, uh, that we can talk about the geostrategic and
(24:13):
geopolitical, but what's even better is eventually we will use
this for recycling and circularity.
Nearly there. What I was referring to is that
beforehand you just said in kindof the pitch that you have, you
would usually kind of talk aboutthe big shot of OK, we went to
fix e-waste. We want to achieve circularity,
(24:34):
but because this is such a big topic, we are first focusing on
this more concrete solution, which is pretty much the
archetype of any impact startup.You cannot just go for the big
elephant immediately, right? Go instead directly into the
real niche problem you're solving, which in this case is
(24:57):
the geopolitical issue and the inefficiency of the technology
being right now actively wasteful.
OK. Yeah.
And then solution market da, da,da, da, da and then you you say
this can also be applied eventually.
(25:19):
Our long term shot is this is the basis for creating
circularity in metals. This is the basis for enabling
us to recycle our e-waste. This is where we are eventually
heading toward. You can say this is the basis or
this hour long shot is our vision for this.
(25:42):
It's so interesting because within close proximity, we are
debating this at the moment. And maybe two hours ago, I got
up from lunch with my colleaguesand I basically said, how do we
communicate to investors now that if we win the tech metal
challenge that we're now doing this, everyone will be
surprised. And had we already pitched it
(26:05):
the way you propose it, it wouldhave been fantastic because
people would say, oh, look at, they talked about it now they
actually said an action. They haven't even talked about
that action. But now they're doing this with
that misplacement or the way theargument has been strung.
So to to date, because we're currently into fundraising and
come as a negative surprise, they've talked about the
(26:28):
refining case, now they're talking about the recycling.
They're all of a sudden they do this recycling thing.
I don't understand that. And that will cause confusion.
So I need to actually correct that.
That's that's an urgent action. Yeah, it's important.
Isn't that fascinating? Isn't that fascinating that
(26:51):
like, because the narrative was out of line, what is actually a
true accomplishment? Seems like you're off track.
You're just spinning your wheels, but this is what you're
actually doing this for. And I think that points to such
an essential challenge that so many companies face because what
(27:14):
you start out doing is usually not what you want to be doing in
5 to 8 years, right? But you cannot start with what
you want to be doing in 5 to 8 years.
And that's how to bridge it to like be like, this is our
business case. This is where we saw the entry
into the market. And this is where we see a
(27:35):
viable growing business. And that will be the foundation
for us to step by step get to our eventual vision.
It's fascinating, and it's fascinating because every
founder has exactly the same pain.
It's not a walk in the park to do what we're doing.
And of course you need a purpose.
And my purpose was circularity. And you don't even think about
(27:56):
it because the reason why you get up every morning is a big
vision. It's not about tackling a
specific technical problem. It's the biggest thing.
And where it then falls apart isthat you forget to tell people
your journey in your thinking. And if you then participate, let
them participate only in the usecase X and don't put it into
(28:17):
context, you lose the person. And I think creates an effect
that is adverse the way we just described it.
But in fact, in fact, should be completely normal and it should
be the best thing that happens. You know, the founder doesn't
even know exactly what he does, but he hasn't communicated the
right way. Yeah, yeah.
And that also creates then clarity within the team, right,
(28:38):
Because then it's clear why you're working on this as an
interim step and interim focus. I think it goes both ways,
right? Like for some stakeholders,
having the focus on the vision is going to be important, right?
To really clarify, this is wherewe're heading.
And when you're talking to customers, just like with
talking to investors, the big risk is over focusing on the
(29:01):
vision or starting with a vision.
And they're like, well, but how does that work?
What problem does that fix for me right now?
Like my problem is not, I don't wake up in the morning and I'm
like, Oh my God, circularity. Their problem is wake up in the
morning and X especially for customers, right, which we
haven't gotten into because another topic would be like who
(29:24):
would actually be you're paying customers for this first part of
the business? I love the question because that
is opportunity for the problem that we just laid out.
My answer to that is minus refiners, recyclers and at that
station, oh, you do recycling aswell.
And we say yes, because recyclers have exactly the same
(29:45):
problems. And that of course is a good way
to actually bring it back to thebig vision because by developing
even the small first step solution into recycling, we
become intimate with customer base.
That customer base actually today has that problem and needs
partial solution, partial solutions from us.
(30:08):
And I think that's where then itkind of ties nicely back into
the big vision. Which of these 3 customer types
is the one that most readily going to adopt the approach, be
willing to pay for it, and will be an easy entry market?
For you, the miner. The miners, what would be #2?
(30:32):
The refiner, then the recycler. Is there a significant
difference in the why of the miner versus the why of the
refiner? Yes.
The miner is used to producing an OK material that needs to go
into refining and that is unpleasant for the miner because
(30:54):
the material that he produces has mediocre quality.
And pricing of that material hasa lot to do with spot markets
and what the current supply demand balances are.
And it makes it somewhat unpredictable for the miner to
actually monetize what he actually mines for.
(31:17):
Had he the ability, would he have the ability to produce
material that can readily go into a factory for further
fabrication of something, say a battery?
Could he make long term off takeagreements with automotive
companies? It would become a lot less
problematic, difficult. He could have more planning of
(31:40):
what prices he can get. He can actually manage his
financial risks a lot better. OK, super.
That sounds like a really strongexample and like a really strong
case. We won't have time to get into
this in detail, but something for you to like, just think
about is specificity in terms ofexamples is better than generic
(32:04):
collections or generic statements right now, like when
you were talking about the customer groups, right?
You have these three pillars. And if we have 3 pillars,
intuitively, we think like we perceive them to be somewhat
equally important. And in terms of clarifying the
use case of what you're doing tocustomers, what you just said
(32:28):
like made it super clear to understand why the hell a minor
would care about using what you're offering.
It's a very strong sales case. If you're in a, in a
conversation with an investor and they're like, well, what
about the commercial side, right?
Instead of saying, well, we havethese three groups that we can
(32:48):
sell to and like kind of brushing over their reasons
individually, if you can say we can sell to miners, refiners and
recyclers. However, to begin with, we are
focusing on miners because they have a very urgent problem,
right? And the problem of the miners is
(33:11):
This is why they're they wanted,right?
And so we are getting into a deeper level of the problem,
right? You have your higher level
problem, which is the geopolitical dependence of
China. And that is something, this
higher level problem is something that is going to be
relevant to the media. It's going to be relevant to a
(33:33):
journalist audience. It's going to be relevant for
this conversation that you're going to have initially with
somebody. But what's important is that
when you actually get down to business and you're talking to
somebody who really wants to know what is your business case,
you cannot spend too much time on the geopolitical thing.
(33:54):
You kind of drop deeper into thecustomer problem with that
mining example and you're like, this is the business case.
And then once you have that template and you convince them
that there's one customer group that really freaking wants what
you are offering, you can just add, well, this is the case for
miners and it's also relevant for refiners and recyclers per
(34:17):
extension. So we basically dissected that
the geostrategic point, it's sort of a relatively general
point and it may resonate sort of and raise interest
principally. But in order to really motivate
and move someone, it would be promising to actually really
(34:38):
make the listener feel the customer problem and and making
the audience feel the customer problem and why that actually
could activate someone felt extremely natural to me,
although I hadn't actually done it before.
And I haven't done it before because it's to me very obvious
why miners would actually do that.
(34:59):
Yeah. So if you're talking to a
journalist audience, you're you usually will stay a bit higher
up the chain of narrative. You will talk more about the
geopolitical topic and you will talk about what's even higher up
the vision, right? If you're talking to somebody
who's more specialized or to an investor who is like trying to
(35:20):
understand what the hell is actually your business case,
like great, you have this vision.
Great you this is relevant. But like, how the hell are you
planning to make this a viable, scalable business model?
You need to go down the chain ofnarrative a bit deeper and spend
more time on like, clarifying, look, this is the problem for
(35:44):
the minor. This is why they are going to
take our technology like it's hot cookies on Christmas.
You know, this is a level of detail that you may lose a
generalist audience with, though, because I don't care
about minors. Like I, I don't care a single
cent about the problems of a minor and it's nothing I have to
(36:05):
do with, but I do care as a journalist, as somebody in the
space who could connect you withrelevant people.
I personally do care about the geopolitical aspect to an extent
and even more about your long term vision.
I'm just iterating that to like clarify, like when you kind of
go up in the chain and when you want to go down.
(36:25):
And what you need to decide is am I going to go up in the chain
or am I going down in the chain depending on who I'm talking to?
OK. It's like a ladder, so it
becomes a lot less. Yeah.
So actually you made my problem a bit smaller because previously
the way I was thinking about moderating the way I speak about
(36:46):
my project or our project was, oh, there's different verticals
and so I need to completely change it.
Now what I actually start to realise it's, it's just I climb
up the ladder, up or down depending on the question and
the audience and what the audience and the result in
question. That makes it a lot easier.
It's actually, it's great. I mean, I thinking about it as a
(37:07):
ladder thing, up or down, I can easily do that.
That's great. Yeah.
And that means that they're coherent, right?
It's all in one linear direction.
Generally, in your case, you don't want to climb up right
from the very top. This is the vision, but we're
focusing only on this part. You rather want to kind of your
(37:31):
main entry point most of the time is going to be the
geopolitical ladder step. For generalized audience, you go
up into vision. For an investor or like a
specialized audience, most of the time you will go down into
the details and then at the end you'll come up and be like the
vision, by the way, like here atthe very top where we can
(37:54):
overlook the horizon. Now that I've gotten you down
into the details, the vision, this is where it what is
possible long term. And that means that
communication conundrum that I identified previously that very
soon I might have to communicateor might want to communicate.
(38:16):
Why the Sprintec Metal Challengeis an interesting opportunity.
I frame it differently in the sense that it actually serves
the long term vision and that what do I do with the miner
today, instructs on the recycling tomorrow.
And that way I can take an audience that has already bought
(38:39):
the mining case and take that audience up the ladder by
basically saying by doing so we support the bigger goal.
And that isn't that an even morebeautiful goal.
Yeah. And in investor speak, you say
this is what we're doing to be able to scale.
Yes. Yeah.
Doing this at this moment is going to set us up to be able to
(39:02):
long term actually scale into these other verticals, though we
are so focused on the mining application because you do want
to have that strategic emphasis on a first target group.
OK, cool. Happy.
I'm super happy. I mean, quite literally, I
walked into the room and it really sort of dawned on me this
(39:26):
morning. And not because we had this
disappointment, just because theway the investor discussions at
the moment go, I'm in the thick of it at the moment.
I'm just really doing this on a day-to-day basis and I see where
I'm misaligned and I walk into this room and we planned this
what, weeks ago this session andit came so incredibly timely.
(39:47):
Marie Days, you can't imagine. It's fantastic.
I really, I love it. You really helped me.
I mean, it's, it was probably one of the most productive 1 1/2
hour sessions I've had in a longtime.
Really, really cool. Amazing.
Yeah, it's super fun because I haven't had anything to do with
(40:10):
mining or rare minerals. And it's interesting because
while I do think it can be really helpful to have industry
expertise for like doing like marketing strategy and and like
communication strategy to break down the top level narrative.
I don't need to understand the mining industry to help you with
(40:32):
creating that top level narrative.
Maybe having an incredible background in mining would
actually have made it harder forme, most likely right?
I was about to say that I think a detailed knowledge is probably
more detrimental than it actually helps.
And so I think I perceived our conversation was you basically
(40:54):
structured the problem on a metalevel, not on a detailed level.
And you can only do that if you can abstract it in a way.
And so you abstracted the problem to a very general
problem. And you used my terms, and you,
by the way, used them extremely skilfully.
So I even thought you knew something about mining and
(41:15):
refining. Good, no, I just of course have
an eye on the words. Feel free to connect with our
guest or me, myself and I on LinkedIn.
You find the links in the show notes and I always always always
love to hear from listeners. Each episode requires a lot of
(41:37):
work and we cut it down from like 60-70 minutes to the best
bits so you get episodes filled with insights.
Because I know you're busy. It's no fluff, only signal as
Mr. GPT would say. If you haven't had the chance to
leave a review yet, it just takes 30 seconds.
It helps us a lot, and it personally also means a lot to
me. Thank you.
(41:59):
My name is Marina Schmidt and this is Scaling Nerds.
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