A note from Cruz Foam CEO, John Felts
‘Last week I attended an event hosted by one of our investors, the climate impact investment group, Regeneration VC. As the answers to our climate and pollution problems seem in disarray, The ReAssembly convened solutionists to bring the pieces back together.
As part of the event, I was invited to keynote and share a bit about our work here at Cruz Foam, as well as introduce guest speaker Sarah Luisi, Vice President of Group Strategic Sourcing & Operations America’s Sustainable & Responsible Sourcing, LVMH Americas.
You can view a video of my remarks below, reframing the conversation about sustainable materials and our place in the supply chain.
“Cruz Foam isn’t packaging”. Packaging is the problem we are working to solve. Our deep technology solutions eliminate the need for these forever materials.
Our belief is that we can create incredible things in harmony with nature, rather than destroying it, and in doing so redefine our relationship with life on this planet.’
We’re also excited to announce that Tom Chi has stepped in as the new Executive Chairman of Cruz Foam. A long-time investor and advocate for our mission, Tom is the founder of AtOne Ventures and a founding member of Google X. His passion for innovation led him to leave his previous ventures behind to dedicate himself fully to planet-saving initiatives.
“At AtOne Ventures, we’re very focused on winning unit economics because ultimately if you have the best unit economics in the room, you become the industrial default.
So if you want to go solve the plastics problem– you have to beat the unit economics of petrochemical plastics.- What’s been taking so long is that the cost structure of anything physical falls into three categories: feedstock cost, processing cost, and transport logistics cost. And relative to petrochemical plastics, the reason it’s called the petrochemical industry is that the feedstock cost for these plastics are basically zero. Almost all of the raw materials that go into our plastics are residuals from refining oil and gas which is why those industries came up together. So we can’t beat the plastic industry on feedstock cost, but their one Achilles heel is the processing cost.
To go and do the thermal processing, crack these things down to monomer and start assembling the various polymer chains that are used for all the different plastics, you typically do that at relatively high heat & in that one step, that’s their achilles heel. If you wanted to go beat petrochemical plastics, you need to find a relatively cheap feedstock and can process into the final product with low thermal or mechanical processing then you have a shot at beating the petrochemical plastics head on. If you succeed at beating the unit economics of petrochemical plastics head on, not only do you defeat them in packaging but the same thing that happened to plastics will happen to the biomaterials that get there- in that we made everything plastics, because it was the cheapest thing around and once this gets to the point where it’s the cheapest thing around it will be used in everything as well.”
Overall, I just wanted to extend a heartfelt thank you to the Regeneration.VC team for the ‘Gravitude’ of this event. The magnitude, gravity, and caliber of attendees in these rooms were truly unparalleled and we are so incredibly grateful to be a part of the Regeneration family. NYC Climate Week 2024 was a resounding success!
