According to Global Energy Review 2021, energy-related carbon dioxide emissions may rise by 4.8% in 2021 as the economy’s demand for coal, oil, and gas rebounds. It causes more harmful greenhouse gases to be released into our atmosphere, contributing to rapid climate change and global warming. Our guest in this episode, Kas Farsad, uses his expertise in Material Science and cement technology to lessen the CO2 emissions in the construction industry. His innovative solutions provide an economical way to get twice as much cement out of limestone.
Kas graduated from the EMBA program at Haas School of Business. He started as an R&D tech and now serves as the VP of Corporate Development at Fortera Corporation. By listening to this episode, find out how Kas Farsad developed an environmentally friendly and economically feasible society.
Episode quotes:
What made you pursue a career path in cement technology?
[00:03:41] I went on a couple of interviews, found a laboratory technician job, essentially running analytical equipment, which is something that material scientists tend to do. Stumbled upon a cement company that was trying to change the world, basically develop a new way to make cement that was eco-friendly. Not a lot of people have a lot of cement background. Material scientists are obviously well-equipped. So, I ended up joining. The company was called Calera. Back then I was employee number 5. And that first job actually dictated a lot of my beliefs. A lot of the industries that I eventually started tackling and a lot of the problems that I started appreciating needed solutions, needed innovation.
On the cement industry’s potential to reduce global CO2 emissions.
[00:16:45] The biggest thing we’re trying to do right now is just build awareness around this cement problem, but also the cement opportunity. There’s not that many industries in the world that if you do somehow reduce CO2 emissions, it’s a big number. A lot of people do a lot of small things, recycling, and it’s all important to do. And if we all do it, it’ll add up. But this industry has the ability to successfully adopt a new chemistry that doesn’t release as much CO2. We’re talking 5% of the globe’s CO2 emissions produced. And this industry is so good at adopting. When they adopt a new technology or a new chemistry, they can do it fast. We have all these goals to get to net zero emissions by 2030 or 2050. This is an industry that can do that.
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Transcript:
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:06] Sean Li: Welcome to the One Haas Alumni Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Li. And today we’re joined by Kas Farsad. Kas is the VP of Corporate Development at Fortera. Fortera’s mission is to contribute to the global goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by one Teraton. Welcome to the podcast, Kas.
[00:00:26] Kas Farsad: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:27] Sean Li: Kas, you were class of 2018, right? Executive MBA program.
[00:00:33] Kas Farsad: Yes.
[00:00:33] Sean Li: But before you came to Haas, can you just start with your origin story where you’re from, where you grew up?
[00:00:40] Kas Farsad: I was born on the east coast in Virginia, moved to California at an early age. My parents have Persian descent. They were part of the college students that got stranded in the US during the revolution. And that’s where we started on the east coast, decided to stay migrated to California. My mom had relatives in the Bay Area and I was supposed to be according to them where we were temporarily staying until things kind of mellowed out and been here since.
[00:01:12] Sean Li: That’s amazing. Okay. So you grew up in the Bay Area?
[00:01:14] Kas Farsad: Yeah. I spent the majority of my life in the Bay Area at this point.
[00:01:17] Sean Li: Wow. What did you study for your undergrad?
[00:01:20] Kas Farsad: So for undergrad, I actually went to university of Michigan. I studied material science, but it was one of those things where, when you’re from California, you kind of realize it’s going to be hard to leave. So I decided to go out of state for school just to see what it’s like to live somewhere else and really fell in love with Michigan and the area in Ann Arbor, especially, and yeah, just schools out there. I feel like have a different type of camaraderie and school pride and a really good experience.
[00:01:51] Sean Li: How did you come to pick Michigan of all places?
[00:01:53] Kas Farsad: I mean, I chose it for academic reasons. The Material Science program was just one of the top top programs, but I was also swayed by the fact that it’s a big football school, had a good athletic program. I love the idea of being tied to a school that there’s a reason to come back every football season. I like to make an attempt to come back and watch a game and then just have that history.
[00:02:16] Sean Li: Yeah, that’s awesome. My brother, I think I shared in our email that I went to Michigan state, but my brother’s a Wolverine, so I’m a Spartan, not a diehard Spartan, but a Spartan nonetheless.
[00:02:29] Kas Farsad: Yeah. Outside of Michigan. We’re all from the—
[00:02:32] Sean Li: We’re all from Michigan, outside of Michigan we’re all against Ohio state. All right. So after college, what did you end up doing?
[00:02:40] Kas Farsad: Right out of college I came back to the Bay Area. My goal was as a material scientist, there’s not a lot of jobs. I was on that cusp. One of those college students where computer science was kind of getting popular in the early two thousands. I was still in the mentality that chemical engineering material science is good. Conservative engineers always have a job. Had I known computer science and software engineering would have taken off the way it did. I probably would have had a different major, but got into material science, loved it at my core. If I could, if there was money in it, I’d probably be a philosophy major and material science was the closest thing that I found that had a philosophical background was it was very qualitative. You know, you’re analyzing things that they’re the most minute finest element and there’s something about that that was just interesting.
And when I came back to the bay area with this Material Science degree, I really did not know what I was going to do with it that would be significant and impactful. So I went on a couple of interviews, found a laboratory technician job, essentially running analytical equipment, which is something that material scientists tend to do. Stumbled upon a cement company that was trying to change the world, basically developing a new way to make cement. That was eco-friendly and the founder, he kind of got a hold of me and he loved Michigan and he said, ‘Hey, this is what we’re doing. Not a lot of people have a lot of cement background. Material scientists are obviously well-equipped.
So I ended up joining the company called Calera back then, I was employee number five. And that first job actually dictated a lot of my beliefs.A lot of the industries that I eventually started tackling and a lot of the problems that I started appreciating needed solutions, needed innovation.
[00:04:30] Sean Li: Got it. What’d you end up doing after that?
[00:04:33] Kas Farsad: So that was the beginning of what I would call my, just trying to disrupt the big industrial processes. So I spent several years at Calera in the lab working as an R and D tech and eventually got to R and D manager from there. I jumped to desalination. I saw that as the next big hurdle that needed to be addressed from desalination that organically transformed into fracking. The fracking industry has a lot of dirty water. The metric that sold me was for every barrel of oil that they pull out of the ground, there’s 9 barrels of dirty water. And that water is very hard to clean. So the technology I was working on in the water purification space translated beautifully. I spent several years creating technology to clean up frack water. I’m the early stage prototype development guy. I tend to become obsolete. Once we have a product, I become a distraction. So I have this ability to build a new technology, new space, have an outside perspective, develop a new solution, prototype it out and make sure it works. And then I essentially move on to something else.
[00:05:43] Sean Li: Desalination or the water purification, is that part of material sciences as well. Did that relate to your material science background?
[00:05:50] Kas Farsad: Yeah, that’s a good question. So my material science background gave me good fundamentals for understanding how minerals, ions and atoms behave and a material scientist coming in and trying to be a chemical engineer gave me a fairly unique advantage because chemical engineers and mechanical engineers, they solve problems from the macro scale. They try to build equipment that can do certain things as a material scientist, I go into the same problem, but I can think about the fundamentals and try to design equipment that can manipulate those fundamentals. So taking a technology that might already exist in adapting it to what I needed to do, understanding that chemistry, understanding the propensity of an ion really helps create innovative solutions that sell. I might not have thought of it before or someone was sitting on the equipment that can do that. You just have to use it backwards. So the common thread for these industries for me was an ion, is an ion.
[00:06:46] Sean Li: Well, speaking of ions and desalination, this is something that actually I’ve been quite interested in for quite a while. I haven’t had a bunch of time to read into it lately, but what is the latest on desalination, especially for a state like California?
[00:07:00] Kas Farsad: Yeah. It’s one of the things that you always have a competitor in an industry. Unfortunately, in this case, the competitor is rain and rain falls from the sky. So in California we have a drought problem. But if you really think about it, if you take the entire state of California, you can isolate where we have a water problem, but we’re only a couple hours away from a place that has too much water. I think that’s kind of preventing new technology from being developed or deployed because with the technologies out there, we can desalinate seawater. It’s expensive just to give you, I guess, rough numbers. We typically pay about 25 cents to 50 cents for a thousand gallons of water to process and make clean water for about $5. So as badly as we need it, no one’s going to pay 10 X, especially when it’s so cyclical. The demand is so cyclical that someone would make that type of investment for us to mentally change, to be willing to spend that kind of money. It’s not there yet. We’re not desperate enough. The only reason in the world who has bit the bullet is the Middle East. They have cheap energy. They can make clean water for essentially less money and they need it badly. So, California is in a drop, but we’re not hurting enough yet.
[00:08:16] Sean Li: Interesting. Okay. I did not know that.
[00:08:19] Kas Farsad: The technology really is there. I mean, we have several really slick ways to do it, but the economics just aren’t.
[00:08:25] Sean Li: What is the biggest cost? I know for a while, the biggest cost was the energy factor.
[00:08:29] Kas Farsad: So if you’re doing seawater, the technology itself is kind of exotic. You’re using these really exotic membranes and they don’t last very long. So it’s a very maintenance, intense, there’s a lot of energy. Every gallon has to be pressurized to several thousand PSI to get it through a membrane. And that is the best technology because you’re physically separating out the impurities. The technology that is getting the most traction is distillation where it’s a thermal process. You’re boiling the water. The vapor itself is pure water. The challenge there is capital expense because you put in the energy up front and conservation and energy exists. So if you put thermal energy into the process, you make the steam, you condense the steam, you get all of your heat back. It doesn’t go away capturing that heat and reusing. It became the name of the game. So you have to essentially build 10 of this same reactors. So you can reuse that same heat 10 times. And then all of a sudden you’re economical, but you just built a water purification system. That’s 10 times the size of what it should be because you’re trying to reuse that energy. And it’s a trade off. Now you can use the membrane and it’s cheaper, but the op ex is high. Or you use distillation where it’s op ex is cheap, but the cap ex is really high.
[00:09:47] Sean Li: So tell us a little bit about Fortera just reading this right? Reducing carbon dioxide emissions by one Teraton. Like how much is a Teraton?
[00:09:56] Kas Farsad: Yeah, we roughly put off about 50 billion tons of CO2 per year as a society. I got into the cement space, but 12 years ago at that first company called Calera and Fortera really is a renewal of Calera’s technology. Back then the same goal, reduce carbon emissions. The cement industry is about 4 or 5 billion tons of cement per year, which is about 3 or 4 billion tons of CO2 per year. So the cement industry then itself is about 8% of all CO2 emissions I get admitted. 8% of the Globe’s emissions come from Smiths. Smiths is this sleeper industry that it’s the largest industry behind drinking water. And it just does not get talked about. It kind of just is there. We take it for granted. The industry has been doing a fantastic job being as efficient as possible. It’s the largest production plant you’ll ever see.
So their economies of scale, they’ve maxed out. They’ve done everything in their power to basically make this powder. One ton of cement powder is about $120 and that’s the back of a giant truck is about a ton of powder. And this is a very valuable functional powder. And it’s just $120. It’s the cheapest material you can possibly buy. The raw materials in another industry costs more than the finished product in this industry because they’ve gotten so good at manufacturing it. The problem is the actual process to make cement. You take limestone, which is a carbonated mineral, and you burn it and you release the CO2 for every ton of limestone, your starting material about 0.44 tons of CO2 gets released. So about half of your feed stock gets lost to CO2 and limestone makes up about 80% of the formula and it’s unavoidable.
It’s unavoidable. You have to burn it to make it cementitious. And 12 years ago by Calera, we developed a new chemistry that essentially mimics nature. So when we make cement, we release CO2. When nature makes hard materials, it actually takes CO2 out of the atmosphere. It takes calcium wherever it can find it. The ocean, for instance, reacts to it and creates hard substances, hard materials, coral reefs, any hard shell in the ocean, they all rely on this process where they take CO2, they take calcium, they react and they make this mineral. And the challenge was from the moment CO2 in calcium reacts to where you get a hardened material. It’s a very quick in the milliseconds process, but it goes through multiple phases before that happens. The same way a child is born and then 20 years later, you’re an adult. Supposedly you’re an adult.
We go through these growth phases, but it’s a very fast transition and for a mineral that happens in the milliseconds. So we figured out how to isolate the CO2 in calcium mineral in an intermediate phase where it’s still reactive. It has not grown to its full crystalline stable mineral phase, isolated, stabilize it and do it. So we stabilize it long enough to where we can actually manufacture it, separate it and dry it. Next time you add fresh water to it, It finishes its crystallization journey to a hard material. And at that time, my core focus was inventing that cement in that stabilization process and we were wildly successful. We did it. We actually mimic the way nature would make this mineral. We scaled up the process and the economics just weren’t there. It would cost us a couple hundred dollars per ton to make, it costs about 50 to $70 to manufacture cement.
It’s only worth about $120. So the same thing as the drinking water we talked about earlier, it’s too expensive. No, one’s going to be the first adopter. That’s where, you know, I parked that technology personally, I moved on to desalination, but Fortera came along and then our CEO and CTO, they basically dusted off those patents. And they said, this was a really cool technology. The cement worked, it just wasn’t economical. Could we make it economical? And then they basically call all the thought leaders from their original R and D team and got us back together and said, Hey, we have this theory. If we were to make this cement at a cement plant, all the capital costs would drop significantly. And then now it might actually become economical. Ran the numbers, did the experiments necessary to confine yourself to a cement plant, take the feedstocks they have available, which is every cement plant in the world is built on a limestone quarry.
If we take limestone and we take the CO2 from the kiln, can we make our cement? The answer was yes. And we make it very successful in making it. And then that translated to really competitive economics. The big challenge with the cement industry is it’s been around for 120 years. They’ve got about a trillion dollars in infrastructure. Their economies of scale are just, you can’t compete with it. So they have the largest mining operation, largest grinding operation, and the biggest kilns in the world. Anyone who tries to compete with them, you’re not gonna be successful unless you use their equipment. And that was a game changer. We can make our product at any cement plant in the world. And a cement producer just needs to be interested in our chemistry. It’s changing dials on a grinder and changing temperatures on a lower temperature to produce. On the backside, we take the CO2, we dissolve it.
So we do downstream. We do post-processing where we take their CO2 and we turn it into more product. That’s kind of where we get our economic advantage. They take limestone, they grind it, they burn it. And the output is their cement, but they lost 44% of the weight of the limestone to CO2. We take limestone, grind it, burn it, but the CO2 comes back and is part of the finished product. So instead of having to mine 2 tons of limestone and grind and TeleSign for us, it’s just one time. Wow. So half as much processing at a lower temperature, but more importantly, using their equipment because you tell somebody that just built a $400 million plant that they built 50 years ago. It’s already been paid off twice, that their equipment is no longer useful for our process. They’re not interested.
Absolutely. And that’s the biggest challenge I’ve seen in all these industries, because they’re all big industries with a lot of investments. When you develop a new technology, it’s your operating costs and your cap ex versus just their operating costs. That’s the real calculation that happens in the background. They already spent 400 million on the cement plant. If you’re coming at them with a new technology, it’s CapEx plus OPEX, that has to be more competitive than just their op ex cause they already had some costs. It’s over. This is equipment that lasts 50 to 70 years. So you’re not going to wait them out, but that’s why it was really important to utilize all the infrastructure they had in place. Starting from the mine, even through distribution, our cement, you blended in with existing cement, it meets regulation and it goes out the same distribution channel. And that was important too. You wouldn’t notice that our products are even in there, except it’s a little bit lighter because our products white and Portland cement is gray.
[00:17:06] Sean Li: Wow. That’s a lot to think about. There should be a class on strategy just taught on that, right? It’s how to disrupt industries. Can you get creative where you leverage their existing cap ex?
[00:17:21] Kas Farsad: Engineers and scientists thinking OPEX, and we make processes more efficient, but really smart scientists will make a process more efficient using something really expensive, like a membrane or a catalyst. And you’re always competing with an industry that’s probably just burning things to get to the end product. Whereas our sustainable goals in the green industry, the goal is to burn the least amount possible. The easiest way to summarize it, is there’s breaking bonds and there’s creating bonds. Sustainability is about creating bonds, molecular bonds, whereas consumption is just breaking bonds. When you burn coal, you’re breaking those bonds. There’s nothing left. There’s no more potential energy left because the bonds have been broken. And when you create energy, you’re actually creating a bond that can be broken later. And then trying to find a circular way to do that, where you can create a bond which stores energy and then break a bond, which allows you to capture that energy and do it in a cyclical fashion.
That’s hard, but that is the sustainability we always talk about in a circular loop. As a material scientist, I just think in bonds, circular loops create a bond and make a bond. Create a bond with X amount of energy and get that much energy out of it without losing more than you put in. The energy is there, can we capture it and utilize it efficiently? It’s the reason why gasoline has gotten so far, it’s so convenient. The energy density of gasoline is really high and it’s easy to put in a tank. The tank doesn’t have to be pressurized and you can drive around with it pretty safely and you just burn it as you need it. And it’s energy, conversion efficiency is there. It’s just hard to compete with. Whereas, you know, batteries like lithium ion got there, but before lithium ion the energy density, so it wasn’t worth it.
[00:19:09] Sean Li: I’m curious how you think about this idea that you just brought up. There are clearly industries where the capital expenditure is so high and CapEx is designed to last a long time, making it hard to disrupt these industries. I’m curious to hear how you think about incremental disruption in some ways versus massive disruption. The example I have in mind is obviously speaking of gasoline as electric cars, to be honest, like I’m a pretty lay person about this. I don’t know much about the Asheville economics of electric cars. Is it truly better as a more green than gasoline cars? I don’t know, but when we look at things like cement and what you’re telling me is what you guys are trying to do a stop gap to ultimately creating a new type of cement?
[00:19:57] Kas Farsad: I’ll say for cement, we’ll roll with the numbers and this will very easily answer the question we consume about 5 billion tons per year of cement. And that cement has to come from a mineral and that mineral has to be something that we have access to. Limestone, it’s not a coincidence that every cement plant on the world is built on a limestone quarry. Limestone is one of the most abundant minerals on the planet and by abundant it’s abundant and accessible. So it’s a surface mineral we can actually get to this industry can only thrive and survive the cement industry or just the building material industry. Your raw materials have to be as available to meet the demand of that industry will eventually be a 10 billion tons per year consumption, which means we have to have access to 10 billion tons of this mineral. There’s no other minerals, there’s limestone and there silicates that are available in this quantity.
Most minerals I’d say are just random mineral iron chloride or something like that, they’re available, but they’re in the hundreds of millions. Limestones in the billions. And we have the supply to last us hundreds of years, but more importantly, the mining operations already exist. So my advice for anyone that’s trying to be a fast follower or develop in this space is if it’s not made out of limestone, you’re in trouble already. Because you can’t recreate a 5 to 10 billion ton per year mining operation, the mineral has to exist. And then the actual mining equipment and the rail, it’s almost too late, a hundred years ago, 120 years ago, they laid down all this infrastructure. So when I think of our solution, I think we did a really good job of not only creating a process where the infrastructure is in place, but choosing feedstocks that actually scale with the problem with the industry, right?
If we had some unique cement chemistry, there’s a lot, there’s a lot of really smart cement chemistries out there, but the minerals are based on, you’ll exhaust them and you’ve only done 1% of the market, whereas we can actually scale with the size of this industry. And because we don’t release CO2, every limestone quarry, their life value just got doubled. Originally we were burning half and now we’ve just doubled the life of all the accessible limestone and every quarry, if CO2 was not an issue now is not the main driver. Our story would be, we double our raw material utilization. We are more effective way to make cement out of limestone because you get twice as much out of it. And that would be enough to tell a story, but CO2 is obviously what’s hot right now. And rightfully so literally.
[00:22:36] Sean Li: Yeah, that’s really wonderful. I just realized the flaw in my question and what I was thinking is we have to think about the industry in its totality, the conversation isn’t about cement or some other type of cement. It’s actually like an improvement within this industry. Just like an improvement in the automotive industry as a whole.
[00:22:59] Kas Farsad: Would it make me think of there’s industries that need to exist? And they serve a bigger purpose. Transportation is obviously essential the way we do it might not be the most efficient way for myself. I got pulled back into the cement industry, right? I did this 12 years ago. I was in love with the technology and the cement chemistry to be developed. But I left and I had no intention of coming back. Because I was tackling what I felt like were more, you know, drinking water and health or more tangible goals that I felt like I could achieve. But cement, you forget that cement literally creates civilizations and creates society. We build our dams out of cement. We build our roads. The difference between a developing nation and one that’s been developed is literally how much cement they’ve put down. And the cheaper cement gets, the better people can build their cities and the built environment around them. So cement should theoretically cost about three or $400 a ton given the next comparable product. But it costs 120. If it gets down to 50 or 60 or even less the entire world benefits, because we now have this material that you can build housing and infrastructure west. There’s a direct correlation between how advanced we are and how cheap cement has gotten. Yeah. I would say that the more we can do to bring the price down and make us sustainable, it will grow. It will bring everybody into the future.
[00:24:30] Sean Li: That’s awesome.
[00:24:32] Kas Farsad: There’s a surprising amount of depth there. And you really don’t think about it. And you have to get into the weeds to start appreciating the magnitude of this industry. Nobody goes into this thinking, you know, cement is exciting, but once you hear all the facts and the numbers and the impact and the significance, you’re like, oh wow.
[00:24:51] Sean Li: It makes me wonder. So brand new house, right? Why is my house not cement? Is there a cost reason to it? Is wood cheaper?
[00:24:59] Kas Farsad: Literally in California it’s because of the earthquakes. Cement cracks, we build our houses out of wood and steel and that’s to allow for these earthquakes and kind of want that sway everywhere else. They do build their homes at a brick or concrete where possible.
[00:25:18] Sean Li: That makes sense. Yeah.
[00:25:19] Kas Farsad: But you go anywhere else in the world and they’re using concrete. It’s such an easy material to work with.
[00:25:25] Sean Li: I remember living in downtown LA when they retrofitted a bunch of buildings, especially the building that we lived in. It was an office building and they actually hollowed out the middle and had reinforced concrete poured straight down the center, like a huge block of it. So it’s still useful.
[00:25:41] Kas Farsad: And the reinforced party was the key to put a lot of rebar in the middle that’s what’s keeping it intact. So there’s games to be played there.
[00:25:51] Sean Li: Does a rebar add to the costs I mentioned? If I were to build my house out of rebar and cement, it probably would cost a lot more than lumber, I imagine.
[00:25:59] Kas Farsad: I would say the biggest cost you incur right now is just labor. Lumber just got really expensive lately. But in general, California, we build them out of wood and sheet rock. But our houses yet, they’re not the best made.
[00:26:15] Sean Li: Yeah. That’s how I feel for the prices that we pay.
[00:26:19] Kas Farsad: I’m pretty jealous and they’ll all break houses.
[00:26:22] Sean Li: Yeah, same here. Anyway, this has been really fun, Kas. I feel like I learned a lot, any parting words of wisdom. Was there anything that you wanted to share about Fortera? I know you guys had raised money and was there anything that you wanted to speak about on the podcast or share?
[00:26:37] Kas Farsad: The biggest thing we’re trying to do right now is just build awareness around this cement problem, but also the cement opportunity. There’s not that many industries in the world that if you do somehow reduce CO2 emissions, it’s a big number. A lot of people, they do a lot of small things, recycling and it’s all important to do. And if we all do it, it’ll add up. But this industry has the ability, you know, of a successful adoption of a new chemistry that doesn’t release as much CO2. We’re talking 5% of the globe’s CO2 emissions produced. And this industry is so good at adopting. When they do adopt a new technology or a new chemistry, they can do it fast. We have all these goals to get to net zero emissions by 2030 or 2050. This is an industry that can do that. This is the one that in 20 years they can retrofit every single cement plant in the world.
They’re just so large. There’s about five or 6,000 cement plants, which is not a big number, right? Yeah. Cars, we’re trying to put a battery in hundreds of millions of cars. That’s a different type of challenge is 5,000 points versus 6,000 points versus let’s change the chemistry. And it’ll be about a 5% reduction in CO2, globally. One fact that I always like to talk about is a CO2 molecule that leaves an exhaust pipe in let’s say China within a day or two it’s in California. So this is not a local problem. It’s not a local problem. It’s a global problem. And the rest of the world operates on economics. You have the progressive areas in countries and then regions. And they’re bearing the brunt of trying to reduce CO2 emissions. But it’s because they know this is not a local problem. It’s a global problem. But if we create solutions that are economical and they don’t require subsidies from governments to be sustainable, there’s no reason why everybody will not adopt it. The most important thing for Fortera is can you make this cost competitive with the product you’re trying to substitute in for? And the answer is yes. So I can’t imagine why we’re not going to take off like wildfire.
[00:28:46] Sean Li: That’s awesome. Thanks again, for coming on the podcast, Kas. It’s been a pleasure having you.
[00:28:50] Kas Farsad: All right. Thank you, Sean.
[00:28:54] Sean Li: Thanks again for tuning into this episode of the one hotspot cast, we enjoyed our show today. Please remember to hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast player, but also really appreciate you giving us a five-star rating and review. You’re looking for more content. Please check out our website @hass.fm. That’s spelled H-A-S-S dot F-M. There. You can subscribe to our monthly newsletter and check out some of our other Berkeley Haas podcasts. And until next time, Go Bears!