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Growing Lean
Exploring Climate Entrepreneurship with Drea Burbank, CEO of Savimbo
Are you ready for a deep-dive into the world of climate entrepreneurship with an extraordinary guest? Meet Drea Burbank, the visionary founder and CEO of Savimbo, a company fighting deforestation and climate change through the innovative use of technology and fair trade climate credits. Drea's fascinating journey leading her to the helm of Savimbo is nothing short of inspiring - from a childhood off the grid, firefighting in forests, traversing medical school to high-tech consultancy, every step has been a stepping stone to her current venture.
Savimbo is not just a business but a mission fuelled by a love for our planet and a desire to preserve it for future generations. Imagine running a high-tech operation in the heart of the Amazon, where the tools at your disposal range from smartphones to satellite monitoring. That's the daily reality for Drea and her team, who work tirelessly to strike the perfect balance between running a profitable business and maintaining environmental sustainability. A part of her incredible work includes collaborating with local indigenous leaders, ensuring that the local economy benefits from the efforts of her company. Drea also discusses enriching opportunities in the climate industry, providing insights for those aspiring to make a career in this field. Don't miss out on this captivating conversation about blending business acumen with environmental responsibility.
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Welcome back to the growing lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Deej. I'm very happy to be here with Draya Durbank, founder and CEO of Sevimbo. Welcome, draya.
Speaker 2:Hi, nice to meet you.
Speaker 1:You too, thanks for being here. So to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about your history and how you ended up in the business you're in today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I grew up off the grid in central Idaho, so kind of like 1800s almost. I started fighting forest fires when I turned 18. And I was a forest firefighter for nine years. Then I went to medical school. After medical school I fell off the deep end into high tech Consulting for about 10 years, built my own consulting group. We specialized in emerging technologies and then after a while we started doing serial entrepreneur. This is our fourth company and it's called Sevimbo and it's a climate company. We sell fair trade climate credits.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, that's quite a background you've got, and you've obviously always been into the environmental things. You say you grew up off the grid. At what point did you realize that this is what you wanted to focus on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I feel like if you're a weirdling and that's actually a title at our company If you're a weirdling, you don't always know what you want to do or what you're made for when you start. I grew up in a social class that was more kind of extractive of environment, so logging, hunting forest fires even, was kind of like a good job. If you were, instead of logging, you'd go to forest fires. When I turned 30, I started to get interested in climate, but I fell overwhelmed by it and this opportunity came across my plate to protect Amazon jungle and I just really always liked nature. I feel like there's an artificial distinction between people who work in nature and extractive economies and people who can serve it, and most of the time it's economically driven. They might still love nature, whether or not they're following a tree or putting their arms around it and trying to protect it 100%.
Speaker 1:And how have you? Can you just run me through how you've turned this passion into a business? How do you, how do you make money from it? Because I think, yeah, we saw the economic.
Speaker 2:We saw the economic opportunity first because I guess Maybe it's like martial arts you know, you, you wait for the right time, and then you wait for a full grammar balance and then you, you direct your energies in a way that's gonna be the most efficient. So, even if I felt Strongly motivated to conserve, I didn't see an economic, economic opportunity to do something scalable or big enough to make a real difference. When I stumbled, when I went to the Amazon jungle, I was on walkabout and I was just visiting. I wanted to visit the shaman and see their traditional ceremony and you know, kind of see what indigenous lifestyles were still like, because they had never been colonized there. But when I got there they were talking to me about the microeconomics of deforestation and I knew a little bit about different emerging markets and I knew that carbon markets were on the way up and I thought, hey, why don't you guys just tap into that market to do what you want to do? I didn't think it would be that technically difficult.
Speaker 2:But a lot of businesses start with a good idea, and then you find out the technical challenges later 100%.
Speaker 1:So are you doing this? You obviously work for companies, right? Can you run me through your, your business strategy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're a novel economic play. So our development group has always worked on taking Intractable problems like deforestation in the Amazon and then applying emerging technology or science to solve the problem. So kind of just new opportunities to solve old problems. The emerging science and technology we knew about was when I got to the jungle and saw the indigenous leaders. They were all in what's up. They all had mobile phones, smartphones, and they were all in what's up, and I also knew that satellite monitoring had improved a lot. So we saw an opportunity to directly connect them economically with digital banking and with Satellite MRV so that they could get paid and just kind of disintermediate an entire industry, which is a great opportunity. So we decided to act on that.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's amazing. And how? When did you start this business?
Speaker 2:A year ago and I've had fast-growing businesses before, but this one is really fast. Yeah, it's a big industry. So right now with carbon credits, the brokers take between 60 to 90 percent of the margin. So it's a big margin. It's about a trillion dollar industry in eight years. So it's been growing a lot faster than expected. We started growing 10 percent. It's a two-sided marketplace. We started growing 10 percent on the ground. We just doubled in size last week. So as far as the buy-in from the Amazon, it's been really intense. They were all prepared, they just didn't know how to access the market. So there was all this market energy built up on both sides Simultaneously, like the big certifiers and the corporate buyers. They're tired of the margin too. They're like we know the locals aren't getting any of this money and a lot of the projects were failing because the locals weren't bought in.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing. And so you say you've grown super rapidly in the past year. Can you run me through a couple of milestones that you've hit? That's, that's a couple of milestones that you've hit. That's.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I felt you so we started with I I. I've had a lot of experience with Tech market mechanisms, so what you want to do is you want to build something that's scalable and can double in size and the double in size, and the double in size. So we started with two farmers, made them super happy, and then we had four farmers and then we had eight farmers. So our first milestone was like a thousand hectares, because that's when it was first financially viable and it really isn't. Wasn't financially viable until after we hit ten thousand Because of the cost of certification. But once we hit ten thousand and not only ten thousand, but ten thousand, growing fire Lee I was like okay, this is the thing, we can do this. So at first it was just experimental can we do this? And then it was like oh, my god, we're gonna do this, which is a different business really.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. And have there been any specific tools or tactics that you've used that have helped you scale the business?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're the worst. We're like magpies. We pick up everything. Um, so we've actually used. We've used everything satellite monitoring, drones, ai. We've applied. We do a lot of low code, because it's just faster than building your own code. Yeah, wow, so we have both. You know device tech, so we use a lot of iPhones on the ground and then a lot of stuff that's just really well proven. We use game cameras. We did look at like infrared drones and more experimental stuff, but they weren't viable in the Amazon. So one of the things we're really good at is figuring out what high tech can be applied in a low tech environment, and so there are some stuff that was that looks great like ENA, but it's totally useless in the deep jungle, and then you end up using something that's as old as a busional game camera because it stands up to the weather 100%.
Speaker 1:So what are you? What would you say, are the main, your main tools that you use that have been the most successful?
Speaker 2:Definitely smartphones. So we use both Android and iPhone depending on what we're doing. So Android has a really good Topography map. That doesn't work on iPhone, probably because of legal legal restrictions around geolocation, but we really liked the iPhone for pictures and videos and stuff like that and that's just super mobile, stands up to weather, is useful in all settings and then satellite MRV. So there's a lot of satellite mapping companies. We found one of the better ones and we know enough about tech not to buy the bad stuff. So if you've got an emerging market like satellite quantification of carbon, you got to be really selective about what tech you're willing to use so that you use something that actually works 100%.
Speaker 1:That's amazing that you guys are using something as simple as smartphones and that is working so well. I love that, and I'm sure you have had some challenges in getting to where you are today. Can you run me through some of the challenges you've faced and how you've overcome them?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so first up, we're in a really strange location. So we're in former FARC territory in the Colombian Amazon. If you look planet-wide, you wanna solve climate problem, 25% of the carbon is stored in the Amazon for land carbon. It's scientifically impossible to quantify ocean carbon right now, so it's really hard to make an economy out of that, even though there are threatened ecosystems along the coast as well that involve locals. So if you look at the whole Amazon, you're looking at basically from the east coast to the west coast.
Speaker 2:On the east coast you have in Brazil, you have kind of all that war between indigenous groups and small farmers. On the west coast in Colombia, the indigenous groups and the small farmers are much more collaborative, so it's a lot easier to not only work with indigenous groups but also jump the border, work with the small farmers and go back and forth, and deforestation is kind of almost always occurring at the border of those two groups. So we were able to get an area that was collaborative. The challenges were that it's former FARC territory, so there was all kinds of challenges from industrial and market trafficking. The locals weren't that open to working with foreigners at the beginning, so we had a lot of barriers with trust to overcome Language was a real barrier. We made the company bilingual about two months and we started speaking Spanglish.
Speaker 1:OK, that's super interesting, and how many people have you got on your team in the ground and how long do you spend in the Amazon forest?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've been in the Amazon jungle for the last year. I strongly believe that in order to build a good technology for a population, you've got to be embedded so that you can actually see how it affects them. So I've been embedded on the ground. My consulting group. We have 300 people in 27 countries and 15 languages that have been working together for about 10 years. We only took about four or five of them at the beginning, because we only bring in the people who are the most useful at any given time and as the company grows, those people change. So we have a virtual company and on the ground company. We went up to about 50 when we were doing carbon studies and then we went back down to closer to 20 right now.
Speaker 1:OK, amazing. And is this all self-funded or do you have investors backing you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really interesting. We had two VC backers. We looked at corporate structure early on and one of the things that me and the indigenous leaders who co-founded the company with me both the great on from day one was that had to be a for-profit company. In the last 20 years the only for-profit industries in the Amazon are extractive Petroleum mining, logging and anarchotrafficking are extractive industries. And then the ones that were preserving or conserving jungle were nonprofits and they have a huge margin. So they weren't very efficient, like not a lot of the money was setting the ground and in 20 years they haven't stopped the deforestation. So the indigenous leaders who had watched all these industries come and go and then meaning we're both adamant that it had to be a for-profit company, but it needed to be a B Corp so that we didn't you know that we could recycle stuff back into the local economy, because they weren't quite prepared to have their own business.
Speaker 1:OK, I love that. That's super interesting. So, from a business perspective, how do you measure the success of your business? Do you have specific KPIs or metrics that you use?
Speaker 2:Day one, man, it's like it's one on one for startups. If you don't stay hardcore, focused on your KPIs, you end up just going off into the woods. It's really hard and there's a lot of chaos in an early stage company because you don't really know what you're doing. So our three metrics are revenue, land conserved like land under contract that we have a 30-year contract for, and then carbon stored.
Speaker 1:OK, amazing. And where do you see? Firstly, where do you see the industry heading that you're in? It's quite a niche industry, but hopefully it won't be in the future. And what are your goals for the company in the future?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think the New York Times said climate was going to be a $21 trillion problem in the next 20 years. It's a huge problem. So that's the problem we're trying to solve. As far as climate solutions, or climate credits, which is the monetized version of natural capital, it's estimated to be about $1 trillion in the next five to eight years. So that's the industry we're in, our niche. Product within that industry is that we're a two-sided microplace. On one side, we stopped deforestation in one of the five planetary tipping points and on the other side, we saw climate credits.
Speaker 2:Carbon credits are a difficult industry. On a basic science level, they're probably going to be the metric we use to track progress in kind of rebalancing the planet. But on an emotional level or a public level, they're down. Right now, on the Gardnerheim cycle, people are like oh, that's over, it's going to go away. Yeah, I don't think it's over, but the markets have dropped. The voluntary markets have dropped mostly because of poor science and measuring it. We started about six months ago and based on signals from the deep Amazon, to build biodiversity credits. I don't think there's much a functional difference in terms of planetary ecosystem between the two credits. As far as what they do in a good project on the ground. And that's kind of one of the reasons we were like if you guys want to buy biodiversity credits, which is simply a different way to measure what you're doing versus carbon credits, it doesn't matter to me Because, at the end of the day, what we're doing is we're preserving primary jungle or extending it.
Speaker 1:Okay, 100%. And who are you selling these carbon credits? To? What types of businesses?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been really chaotic and that's because, well, for biodiversity credits it's a frontier marketplace. So we're working with the UN, World Economic Forum, McKinsey and CME Group to do price experiments, to even figure out what that pricing would be and who would be buying it and what's the structure. For carbon credits, it's an established marketplace but the buyers are really variable. So do you want to know about carbon credits or biodiversity credits? They're totally different marketplaces.
Speaker 1:Tell us about both.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have a really weird signal. So we originally thought we were only selling to corporates, so B2B, and so we were doing enterprise sales structuring, doing LOI structuring. You know it takes a little while to certify up to three years for a carbon project and biodiversity is going to take us till December to certify that and most of the corporates want to buy certified credits, which is we could talk about that afterwards. But so we were doing this B2B stuff and then we started getting all this website traffic and people were like starting to follow us on Twitter. We were getting 1,000 users a day or 1,000 followers a day on Twitter. We're like what's going on? There was this huge consumer signal. So we kind of opened up for consumer sales and we've had a lot of consumer presales and honestly, I'm not sure we're a year in, we're still not sure if we are B2C, b2b.
Speaker 2:You know, small business, big business. I'm getting sales from all of those market segments and if you look at our website, we have traffic from every country in the world, like literally every country in the world, and that's insane to me. Like I when my friend said you're a small multinational. We're very small multinational. Our buyers are right now the ones that I'm talking to are in Dubai, switzerland, singapore, the US, latin America. Like these are corporate buyers, so yeah, and then our company is incorporated in the US, but our primary base of operations right now is in Columbia, although we're going to be jumping the border to Peru and Ecuador pretty quickly.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. Wow, that's super interesting. I'm excited to learn more. I'm definitely going to go do some more research after this. So have you had any specific partnerships or collaborations that have helped you grow your business to where it is, and can you talk about them?
Speaker 2:So our early investors were Sputnik UTX. There's a venture capital firm that does an accelerator program and they put us through. It's a little bit like Y Combinator for Austin, and they gave us some early access to tools, education, that kind of thing. I I feel like it was my third company by then, so it wasn't all new information, but it was really good mentoring and I think it was the mentoring that helped me the most, especially things. We had a novel business and they'd seen a lot of different businesses coming through so they could help me with a new, a new market, because we had to do like.
Speaker 2:Financial models are really important for our business, but they're incredibly complex and the last business that wasn't necessary. So I felt like that was good mentoring at the beginning. Recently we got into Google startups for sustainability and that's an amazing partnership. So the way it works is Google mentors startups. They put their whole talent pool to work for you. They can do anything and that's a really, really broad and skilled talent pool. And then and then when your SDG targets, they, you measure them and then they claim those SDG targets as part of their contribution. So it's really awesome.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing. And what advice would you give to other business owners looking to succeed in this industry?
Speaker 2:Oh wow, it's a really tough industry right now. A lot of my competitors are going out of business. Wow, would you want that from a scientific perspective? Because, like, one of the reasons we're still in business is we're very strong scientists and we've got a strong background in chaos theory, chaos and complexity theory and a lot of the businesses that we're going into the natural capital side they are not applying advanced scientific metrics. They're still trying to use linear science in a complex system. So I would say, take a really good look at complexity theory if you're trying to build a business in the natural side of things, because that really helps you with metrics, kpi, how to succeed.
Speaker 2:On the investment side, 80 to 90 percent of venture capitalists invested in mechanical solutions to a natural problem. So they were investing in exchanges to sell my supply I think I talked to one or two O day talking to me about buying it and a lot of those exchanges are growing out of business or never operated in the first place. They were also investing in mechanical caption, carbon capture and things that made sense to them, but most of them lost a lot of their money. So venture capital is really cooled off of carbon. We're in biodiversity and that, like I said, it's a frontier marketplace. We don't really know what that market's going to look like yet.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing, and so I think we're running out of time here, but I just wanted to say thank you for being on the show and, before we go, firstly, what's the best way for people to understand more about this topic including me and what's the best way for people to reach out to Dreia Durbank in case you have any offers or if they just want to follow your story?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'm on all channels Dreia, burbank, and, as one line, that's my name, and then also our company is on all channels Savimbo or Savimbo's with a V. We do a lot of posting to inform on climate. I really like I follow Eric Wilburn on LinkedIn and he does good short, concise posts that are super informed on the industry. And then if somebody's just getting into climate and I feel like climate's a big problem, there's going to be a lot of people going into it and we're going into it and we don't have time to train PhDs in it. So in the near term, so we need technical people from biogeochemistry, biology, geology or chemistry to switch disciplines into climate and apply with there. You know, terrado is a really good place for people to go learn about climate. It's got a formal structure and mechanism for teaching you about the industries and it also is a good place to hunt jobs.
Speaker 1:Okay, amazing. Well, thank you so much, dreia. I really appreciate your time and your insights. You've given me a lot to think about and go and research. I'm very excited and, yeah, I hope to see only good things in the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I really have a lot of hope for a planet worth more species. If we try, we'll be fine.
Speaker 1:Amazing. I love that Awesome. Well, thanks again, Dreia. Thank you.