• The importance of Kelp Forests
• How urchin barrens form and become toxic for the ecosystem including for themselves
• Japan’s pioneering of the blue carbon credit space
• How sometimes the best entrepreneurs piece together technology rather than create it
• Farming Uni
• How uni are what they eat and what Urchinomic’s feeds them
• The global uni market
• When we’re all going to be able taste Brian’s uni
• Prioritizing speed even when it might seem too ambitious
• Leaving a climate legacy

To hear my conversation with Brian, tune in on Apple, Spotify, or Google. And don’t forget to subscribe on your platformto get automatic updates. If you like what we’re doing, please do spread the word.

Brian Tsuyoshi Takeda
Urchinomics

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 is focusing on cracking that nut.

In this episodes we hear:

• Why Harry left the practice of law to focus on nature positive business 
• How policy for the climate and impact business is evolving in the UK faced with BREXIT, a new Prime Minister and a new Head of State
• What is Natural Capital 
• How nature can bounce back if we let it 
• How Harry plans on accelerating the blue carbon agenda in the UK and beyond

In the short time since he left his law practice to focus on Bright Tide, Harry has helped dozens of startups get to the next level and advised many established corporates on how to be pro-nature and truly sustainable. His is also a story of personal drive to make the planet a happier one.

UNDP Sustainability Goals
Bright Tide
Harry Wright

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, fashioned after carbon credit exchanges, in order to tackle the problem of plastic waste. It’s the first of its kind and they are going global.

I love this story because Nanette’s path is so varied and because the Plastic Credit Exchange came about in order to solve a problem she felt she had created by trying to solve another problem!

This is a meaty episode where we learn not only how the exchange came to be but we also talk UN Basel Convention, Greenpeace, incineration 2.0, Extended Producer Responsibility, and why the perfect can be the enemy of the good when it comes to impact entrepreneurship.

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 up with The Lobster Institute. 

In this episode we learn:

• How a personal tragedy can lead to a profound desire to do good
• How two university students stumbled into a skincare solution
• How science majors may be particularly well suited for entrepreneurship
• How grants can provide important early funding for startups
• Why it's nice to have a co-founder
• How this company is using PR to drive sales
• How this company is pushing off fundraising as long as they can.

Mentions in this episode

Patrick Breeding
Amber Boutiette
Marin Skincare
MTI
The Lobster Institute
Luke's Lobster
Luke Holden

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 pivot and in doing so transformed his potential customer base from a subset of aquaculturists to virtually any harvester or dealer in the global seafood market. Sometimes it takes getting in to find the right path.

I’d like to thank Maine Venture Fund, a two time investor in BlueTrace, for sponsoring this episode. 

In this podcast we’ll learn the following and more:

• When Chip knew it was time to pivot - and how he did it
• Why digitizing the seafood industry is urgent 
• How racing lasers is good training for entrepreneurship
• How Chip raised money in this terrible fundraising climatee

Mentioned in the episode:
BlueTrace
Maine Technology Institute
Chip Terry
Maine Venture Fund

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 Lench is also a SIPA alum. 

In this podcast we’ll learn:

• How working for yourself is a game-changer
• How Lisa’s European heritage and experience are helping her create award-winning products
• Why Americans should eat more seaweed and why it should be locally farmed 
• How seaweed is grown and the respective merits of different strains
• How seaweed sequesters carbon
• Where Ocean’s Balance is in their growth cycle and what it’s like raising money.
• Why Maine is a good place to start a business.
• Lisa’s advice for fellow entrepreneurs.

Also a huge thank you to Lisa for being my first guinea pig on this podcast. There was a bit of a learning curve and we had to do a second take! A supportive friend!

Mentioned in this episode:
Lisa Scali
Ocean's Balance
New England Ocean's Clusters
Gulf of Maine Research Institute
Maine Technology Institute
Katapult VC
Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs

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 combo seems to be working. 

In this podcast we’ll learn:

• What is biomimicry?
• How sea urchins inspired Finsulate?
• How the French used to think "innovation" was heretical and how - fortunately - that has changed.
• How they are going about rolling out this business?
• What’s different about startups in France and the US
• How Finsulate is raising capital.
• What advice Bernard has for other entrepreneurs.

Finsulate
Bernard Hidier
New England Ocean Clusters

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 space. Like any good entrepreneur, she set out fix the problem. And in doing so, she seems to have started a trend! Blue tech investment is finally getting its moment!

GMRI
Gulf of Maine Ventures

Also mentioned:

Sea-Ahead
Ocean's Balance
BlueTrace
American Unagi

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 just the tip of the iceberg of what they think they can do….

Learn how antibiotics became standard issue, giving rise to big Pharma, and how, by looking back at techniques used before the discovery of penicillin, we may have found the way forward to a new post-antibiotic age. I hope you find this conversation as fascinating and hope-inspiring as I did.

Company website: 
https://www.organicinscientific.com

Mentions: 
www.sea-ahead.com
www.techstars.com

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 technology and development, Sullivan has twice been a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Resident Fellow. He is a graduate of Harvard University and The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and resides in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.

To learn more about fisheries and blue technology in New England, I highly recommend reading his book. It is a who’s who of New England’s blue economy, and a few of the players figuring in it will be featured in upcoming Happy Planet podcasts.

A few mentions: 

www.blue-trace.com
https://www.newenglandoceancluster.com
Iceland Ocean Cluster @oceancluster

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 of the late 60s and 70s compare to our concerns now.

Bill's Website

BOOKS:
EXTREME NATURE

MENTIONED
Scripps
National Geographic

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. Our first season will treat the ocean economy where some of the greatest environmental impacts are being forged  from business innovation.