#77 Navigating Net Zero with Co-founder of BeZero Carbon, Tommy Ricketts

0:00Basically, how do you create an economy that actually values the environment? that's kind of what I was obsessed with and I felt actually that the Greens at that period were all about very un-economic ideas for environmental change.

0:19Passionate about sport, politics and especially climate change policy, Tommy Ricketts wanted more from his career in policy advisory at a major global bank. Whilst on a trip to Japan to watch his beloved New Zealand play in the Rugby World Cup, Tommy couldn't resist calling up his friend and soon-to-be business partner to talk about this business idea of setting up a carbon net zero consultancy. Fast forward four years and they have now scaled to 150 staff and they are really making a difference in this nascent industry as a global carbon ratings agency. We talk about his career in policy and banking, the cultural differences between the London and New York banking bubbles.

1:04We discuss greenwashing and how committed corporations really are to reducing carbon footprint. And we also talk about the use of technology and AI in the carbon net zero crusade and his dream of making a documentary about sports referees, which I really like talking about. and so much more. It was a fascinating conversation. Very important industry that is growing exponentially. Great guy. This was a really good one. It's Tommy Ricketts.

1:34Tommy, thank you so much for coming on the Tech Leaders podcast. We haven't had a guest on in the space that you guys operate. So I'm really excited to unpack some of the amazing work you guys have been doing recently and the ridiculous growth you've experienced in the last three years and so much more in terms of your background as well. So thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Let's start with the immortal question we always ask at the beginning of the Tech Leaders podcast. What does good leadership mean to you? I guess that that's changed, actually. I think before I came to this, you know, came to position I'm in, I'm currently employed about 150 people.

2:14Good leadership meant my experience in playing years and years of competitive sport. it meant high energy it meant being inspirational it meant trying to galvanize people and be sort of you know dynamic but i think as you get more entrenched and entwined with the myriad personalities and backgrounds of people that you work with i think actually it's more about listening it's more about trying to be emotionally balanced so that you can encounter every situation on the same terms which can be very difficult when you're stressed and you're working very hard and the thing that I always tell managers at the company is try to be the boss that you wanted to have what that meant to me was not clock watching respecting that I'm always going to put in the extra shift I didn't if I wanted to leave early that was my prerogative but obviously more than that and also just you know trying to actually create a sense of momentum for people and feeling like they're being appreciated so I think yeah good leadership to me now means much more sort of sociocultural things as opposed to before which was probably a bit more kind of competitive and and personal yeah absolutely brilliant answer by the way and tell us a little bit about your sporting background then Tommy so I am the youngest of six children and basically just wanted to run around chasing various shaped you know balls in various different types of outfits for as long as I could essentially so I played a little rugby football and cricket swam a lot they've locked tennis I think cricket and cricket and football were really always my my big things and that's what I continue to play at only an amateur level but yeah religiously you could ask if you ask only my friends up until really my daughter was born at the end of last year and in the early days yeah I mean look it was I was very lucky I got what's called an assisted place so it meant a government scholarship to a private school in London and was just very lucky to have kind of an amazing education which had all those facilities and to benefit from those.

4:11What did you want to be when you grew up then, Tommy? Why did you choose to do history of economics? And what did you want to do? So my parents are academics. I was born in New Zealand and my parents divorced when I was about four. And I moved to England with my mum. And my dad's an English professor. My mum has had various jobs, but it's currently a social historian, I guess. And genuinely, I only knew up until I left university, it sounds really stupid this, but that there were kind of three jobs. Either you're an academic, you're a doctor or you're a lawyer. That's kind of it, basically. Honestly, it was a toss up between geography and history.

4:43So it's economic history, which is a type of history. Yeah, I actually started my degree doing geography because what I love was human geography. And then went to university and got very frustrated. And then I started doing the economic history modules. And it was like the history of British industries. It was the history of living standards and the working class. It basically changed my degree after the end of the first year and then focused on And basically lots of modern history, which applies very much to my worldview as I have now. I'm always using the theories that I learned from university and then onwards in politics and in finance.

5:17And it's really, this is for me, the beginning of the new economy. And what does that economy look like? So having the perspective to go back two, three hundred years at the different economic cycles is really helpful. Yeah, absolutely. So do you still use the sort of economic models and things that you learned at university then in your everyday running of the business? because you operate in a very macroeconomic world now, don't you? My business partner is the better economist. He studied economics and then worked at the Bank of England. So I defer to him on my GDP modeling and stuff like that.

5:47I used it more. So economics is two things. There's a lot of models, but the other one is basically a social science. And a lot of it is really about motivations, I think. And so, yes, in that sense, I think about it a lot because in very simple terms, climate transition is about pricing an externality that an externality is our impact on the environment and the brief history of climate change is that we haven't ever priced it into our economic activities and that's why there's so much impact and what people refer to as the antipasine which is the human impact on the climate which has basically kind of gone stratospheric since the 1950s but you know can date back to to before that with the the use of fossil fuels and you know it's all basically a very simple economic problem which is we don't price nature and so yes in that sense I do very much use use that sort of theory but when it comes to the data you know models that we think about and I'll come on to explain this I say we probably come they're more informed by an element of financial risk as opposed to economic risk yeah in terms of that theory.

6:54And so I left university and went into politics. I spent five years working in what's called public affairs and started my career with my godfather, actually, who was and is a big inspiration for me. He was technically the first ever elected Green politician in the state parliament in Hamburg in the 1970s for the Green Party. And he was one of the founders of the Green Party when the Green Party was really a big German student anti-nuclear movement, really. his sort of one of his most famous claims to fame was he was the first president of the greens in the european parliament but he also did this protest which has kind of led him to be somewhat exiled from germany where the nuclear general from the this is in the newspapers by the way the nuclear general from the the american army came to visit the parliament and as a activist i think he was like 30 anti-nuclear campaigner he basically drew the short straw through a bucket of pig's blood on the general this is the general this is the guy with the red button in the in the box right right long story short my actual thing was all about this trying to take over the legacy of this guy that I massively revere called Frank Schradberhoof and and his his sort of green agenda and I spent a lot of my time interning with him over the various summers from when I was 15 all the way to when I was 23 and so actually came out of university desperate to work in politics and then spent the next four or five years working in lots of infrastructure, energy and banking type policy.

8:25And then actually, I was coming to the end of that period. And I was like, look, you know, basically the actions in financial markets, that's kind of where it all takes place. And actual central banks set a lot of economic policy these days anyway. And how do I get into that side? And by total chance, my boss in politics was leaving the place he'd been at, had previously spent 20 years at Deutsche Bank and at hedge funds. And he said to me, oh, I'm going to be head of research for European equity strategy at Bank of America. And I genuinely didn't know what that sentence meant. I had no idea what that sentence meant.

8:58I didn't know what that job title meant. I didn't even know that. I just said to him one simple text, which basically changed my life, which was that, can I come with you? And he said, well, maybe, but, you know, you're 28. You haven't done maths since you were 16. You know, you're going to have to do this thing called the chartered financial analyst exams, the CFA. And I was like, fine. So I wouldn't have my interviews at B of A. was hired as an associate. And then I remember turning up on my first day at the bank in March 2015. And they put me in, you know, they put me in, they logged me into this Bloomberg terminal.

9:28And I don't know if you've ever seen a Bloomberg terminal, but it's not a normal keyboard. And it's like, my boss didn't join for a month. And I just sat there watching the cricket. No idea what was going on. And then I had to do my financial exams at the time, my FCA exams. And so I sat there revising my FCA. And I think that summer there was lots of cricket on. there was New Zealand there was the ashes yeah most of my time just just basically not knowing what to do and and having to learn but then in that first year I did what's which is I don't advise anyone I did the CFA level one and CFA level two back to back so you can do this December and then June and so I kind of put myself on this accelerated course to teach myself financial markets and by the end of that first year I was really kind of I could I was back up to speed basically you know the only thing I was any good at was basically talking about and writing about political trends so yeah sure that was very in vogue at the time and so I spent a lot of time advising and writing up the implications both financial and economic of of Brexit and then was lucky enough to get moved to New York where I worked with a guy called the global investment strategist who's who's really the arch storyteller of the research department and that led me to a point of just basically saying having had an education in politics having kind of felt like I spoke pretty fluent financial markets.

10:45It was now, and he said this to me and he probably won't remember this, but he sort of rather pointedly called me a pop star without an album. He was basically trying to have a go at me and say I was like Billy Big Shoes, you know, as a 31 year old living this nice life in New York, but I hadn't done anything proper. Like what was my actual body of work? What was my contribution? What was I really going to be known for as opposed to writing the old piece and getting sent to New York for a couple of years? How did you end up in New York then? Can you tell us about that, Tommy? I turned up to work one day and my boss sent me an email, the head of the department, and said, can I meet you this afternoon?

11:18And I walked in and he said, we're moving you to New York. I'm assuming you didn't argue or put up much resistance to that then. It's not a bad place to be relocated though, is it? I love New York personally. It wasn't. I remember when I turned up, I got asked a very good question by someone. So I turned up, I was just turned 30, and they said to me, you know is this the first time that you've ever lived away and obviously i went to university i studied at edinburgh but with everyone you know it's kind of still the uk and that was true so i actually turned up in new york as a 30 year old where no one knew me totally starting again in a job with a you know nice christy sort of like good job but also with a very demanding boss and actually was kind of a bit of a new chapter you know if you will in in the life and it gave me a lot of perspective yeah and it was finishing school i think really for me it was finishing in school socially, mentally, but also professionally and emotionally.

12:12That's a good way to look at it. That's a good way to look at it. I mean, it's kind of, I worked in Toronto for a year myself. I grew up a lot. Let me ask you this though, Tommy, what about the cultural difference between London and New York from a working financial services perspective? So I think the UK financial services, banking research culture was so much more intense in terms of the working hours, the appetite, the ambition. I would think it'd be the inverse. Absolutely. Because financial markets are always open for the UK employees, you come into Asia and you leave with the US. And then in the middle, you have the European markets.

12:51You're just always on. And there's always something to be doing. Whereas in the US, come 4.30, the world is closed. And also the interesting thing there is very, very few people actually live in Manhattan. Everyone in London who works there works in London. So they'll go for drinks after, there'll be things going on, there'll be lots of dinners. In New York, that just wasn't the case. They all live upstate or they live on that train that comes into Grand Central, Westchester, etc. And so I found the working culture was quite masochistic in the sense that people never take holidays and they're always doing things.

13:25But I actually had a British boss. I was British with only two Brits in the whole department. I came and went as I left, basically. as long as I, you know, I always did my work. So there was never a problem with, you know, back to the point about be the boss that you want to, you know, be the boss that you want to have. You know, it was very, very simple relationship. You know, he asked, he said, jump, I jumped. But if he didn't say it, I wouldn't, you know, and it's my own ambition was taking me places and was doing things. So, you know, I probably worked 50, 60 hours, but I would come in at 8.30.

13:56In London, if you weren't at your desk at seven, then, you know, the head of the research department would be walking around taking taking numbers you know that that was it was a completely different type of type of approach is that because of the boss though and the team you were in as opposed to the work culture of the city do you not think or was or was it was that representative were you in a microcosm of the way it was everywhere in new york or london at that time well i think in but so maybe it's you know i can't speak to all i wasn't in investment banking right so people think about banks they think about investment bankers they think about m &a think about deals like markets is a very different part of the bank it's constant right you know there's always things to respond to but the market always opens the next day and it always closes that day whereas you know deals get done and quickly so the people that kind of brutalist 25 hours you know type days you know go home at 3 a.m come back to the office at nine that never happened because i was never working on deals so that's just one different point the other one was it's all about who's your your manager in research because some managers want and this is a great line given to me in my interview actually at the bank I said you know what makes a good analyst to the deputy director of research and she said well I don't give an f what you're good at just be the best at something yeah that's actually a really good thing to from a career perspective yeah yeah you don't need to be everything to everyone but know what you're good at and be really really really good at it and then make sure you're working on other areas yeah great advice that that's also comes out by the way back to the point about the bosses which is for some people and i think probably maybe slightly meanly the less intellectually capable creative it was all about industry it's about working their absolute socks off because it was the volume of information it was the amount of things they're doing it's the amount of touch points with clients it was the availability that was their real selling point and you know i say that site probably slightly arrogantly but you know for us it was about the quality of our work it was about those about the ideas that we were saying it was about the that stuff and they speak for themselves a lot of it and so actually i think that's that plays a part of it if you if you're in a team where they see success as being putting in the hardest yards as opposed to the best quality of work it can get a very different experience for you pre-april 2020 okay what would you say the main milestones in your career were that took you on the path to setting up B0 in early 2020?

16:21I think starting in the European Parliament and I've got all these random pieces of paper in a memory box somewhere with like my theories of basically environmental capitalism like how basically how do you create an economy that actually values the environment that's kind of what I was obsessed with and I felt actually that my godfather and the greens at that period were all about very un-economic ideas for environmental change so a lot of the founding idea came about it's like well you know i yeah capitalism whatever it's got it's got its problems and yes there were some there are better ways of doing it but i can't change everything all at once all the time like let's pick off what stuff we can chew and having an economic philosophy was really the thing that i felt was missing from the green movement and i still think you know to a large point is yeah and And so I think, you know, my first milestone, again, I treat myself in a very peculiar way, but like it was, can I get a sense of what governs the body politic?

17:19Can I get a sense of, you know, how do people think? How does this, how decisions made? How is influence created? I'd like to say I had this master plan about going back into the green economy. And then in finance, it was all about the message of the markets. It was the psychology of the markets that I spent a lot of time doing. And so the common thread between the both the political side and the financial side was the psychology of behavior of people, of what motivates people. And a friend of mine who I was just on holiday with, he's a musician, a band called Jungle, and he was doing this big world tours.

17:46And he says to me, we're in Japan watching the rugby. And he's like, how do I make my tours more environmentally friendly? And I've no idea why, but that's the question that basically created a kind of like thunderbolt through my head of all these years of experience and doing these things. And I actually, it's all about the climate economy and his 50 million business ideas. And he didn't know what I was talking about by the end of the conversation. But in a mean way, I just was like in my completely own world of like, of thinking. And I basically spent the next week just writing. Like I wrote like books of just ideas down, of just stuff.

18:20And I called my business partner from Japan on my mobile. And basically said, I've got it, I've got it. I hadn't worked with him for two years. He was in London. I'm assuming this was the Rugby World Cup, was it? You were on a lads holiday and you were doing business ideas. I'm not very laddy, but yes, I mean, essentially it was two friends drinking an awful lot of Guinness and traveling around and going to like weird onsens trying to hide my tattoo. And then, yeah, me talking about whatever. Because, you know, to answer your question, I was really coming to the end of that journey in financial markets.

18:56The next step up in that is really to be a careerist, which means like a particular way of moving towards managing director. I wasn't up for it. I'll be honest, it was, I wouldn't take some time out, move to Italy and write a TV show about football referees. That was my plan. Really? And then the idea is, absolutely. That's a bit of a curveball I wasn't expecting. Are you a referee, Tommy? No, but anyway, I'll just give you a little hint of it because basically the football referee is the only person in the entire stadium that the game couldn't happen without. and it's the least explored and and um part of the kind of footballing and social culture narrative but also is an absolute goldmine for comedy because referees are absolute oddballs and you know so just all kinds of questions so i wanted to write a mockumentary called whistleblowers where whistleblowers would tell the story of they'd whistleblow on being a whistleblower and it's just stuff anyway so i had this whole thing mapped out i would have a year off i'd been exhausted and then this idea for the green business came along.

19:57Sorry, Tommy, before we move on, I think that's a great idea, by the way, and I'm really keen for you to keep me posted on that because if you do manage to do that, I will happily pay to go and see it or we'll watch it or whatever. I don't know, it's a very unexplored vocation, I think, isn't it? You know what I mean? We don't know much about referees. No, no, just two comments on that, though, just to sort of highlight the peculiarity of them. One, where do referees go to drink after a game? I just love to know what they talk about. They sit in their room, I suppose. No, no, no, they do. You know, you go to the dog and whistle or some sort of pub like this.

20:32And then, you know, the other one is like at half time, they always walk off the pitch talking to the linesman. Now, an even better one, linesman. Their only mate. Yeah, it's brilliant. I'd be playing football in some like quite Aggie league in North London. And then, you know, people kind of like really quite aggressive on a 10 p.m. on a Tuesday, shouting things to the linesman because they're given the decision of the way, which you wouldn't say to your worst enemy. And then, you know, I'm thinking, what makes you want to come out at 9.30 to be screened at by abusive people in their late 20s for about£20 an hour?

21:07These people are just brilliant. Yeah, they're heroes. So as you were saying, moving on from the referee stuff. Yeah, so I can give you the official pitch. So yeah, so look, the thesis for BZERO at the time was really this confluence of three trends. it was that financial markets 2019 financial markets were obsessed with this idea of esg and i used to do this thing called fund flow analysis which looked at where people were putting their money and where people put their money is a really good indicator of what's going on in the world and risk etc and it was clear that esg as a theme was becoming this mega trend and you know there's all the black rock stuff about this and why it's because there was a demographic shift between boomers and millennials.

21:52And boomers capital was much more focused on stuff like dividends, stuff like security, but millennial capital wanted to be a bit more impact orientated. And so as I looked at ESG solutions in the marketplace, from a financial perspective, they were very limited. But from an economic perspective, like an actual industry perspective, it was like the tidal wave of interest coming to actually a tiny, tiny subsector of an economy, which needed to become a huge part, like a mainstay of the economy. So there was this disconnect, which was just absolutely huge. Secular, essentially, is the word you'd describe.

22:27You'd use it. Then there were two other things. Firstly, there was this big shift in the politics. So climate change was now seen, at the time there was Trump and a few other things, but it's seen as consensus, right? Not only change is consensus, but dealing with it is consensus. In most elections, it's typically, or hopefully it will continue to be in the UK. it's typically seen as not something that's that debated and it's actually something that's very consensus. The only needle inside is cost of living stuff which is a bit more of a recent thing. So there's the political consensus. There was this huge tidal wave of financial interest which is the money that will pay for it all.

23:02And the third bit was that you were starting to see the actual economic impact of stuff like forest fires destroying one of the biggest utilities in California or large parts of Australia being on fire. And this is getting worse and worse in Europe these days. But nine out of 10 of the biggest migration events were climate change related. So whether it's flooding or fires or whatever. And so you're seeing this kind of huge confluence of activities. And I just really felt that it was the time to go and try to put my money, limited savings that I had in terms of investing in business, but also put my skills behind the agenda that I most believed in.

23:43And I think that there's still a pitch for people that come work here. It's like the biggest climate activists, in my opinion, are those people that actually vote with their careers, because that's really where you're putting the day in day and activity. It's not, you know, it's all very well campaigning. But, you know, my pitch internally is their data team, they're arguing about the validity of some sort of forest in South America and the finer points of this or this trend. It's like, for me, that's a thousand times more climate activist than stopping traffic in a street. You know, because you're actually trying to do the right, the actual work, which creates an economic solution, which creates a trend.

24:23Talk us, how did it actually come about? Who did you set up the firm with? And what is your raison d 'etre? It came about from this spontaneous moment in Japan when my friend asked me about carbon neutral touring. and then very quickly became a conversation with my very close friend, Seb Cross, who's my co-founder, who I called up and I'd always said to myself, you know, if there's one person I was going to start a business with, he's the smartest person I knew, so I would want to go and do it with him. And then actually there was a friend in New York who worked at one of the big tech companies and there was actually a Welsh guy that we met, believe it or not, in the smoking area at a match in Japan.

25:02but very quickly those two for various reasons didn't like didn't continue on the journey and so you know we came back I actually resigned the week before COVID happened and so I didn't sort of resign into COVID and the isolation I resigned just before it and then I moved back on basically like a UN flight in April from New York with me and like 20 other people and I remember the air hostesses could only give us bottled water that was the only thing they were allowed to give us for like the whole flight back from New York and then came up to London came out to London moved back and we basically just started spending about six months just trying to figure out what we thought what was the view how did it all work which of the areas we're most interested in we didn't have that journey where it was like I want to do this really specific thing and that's what I'm going to get business around it was very much more intellectually curious than that not that's not intelligent curious but it was the foundation was how do I understand climate transition there's really the liability side which is how much impact am i making how do i calculate that how do i have a strategy to reduce that then there's the the the asset side of it which is what are all the solutions the new industries the the the types of markets that are going to be needed to service that that production journey and it was really about figuring that that kind of both sides of that balance sheet out in the meantime we were bootstrapped so we didn't have any external investment, we span up a footprinting consultancy.

26:28And so the name B0 makes a lot more sense if we do carbon footprints, makes much less sense as a carbon ratings agency. But that's why that's why it's called B0. Very early 2022, to the end of 2022, we basically ran a full board net zero consultancy, worked with about 80 clients, really proud to work in lots of very interesting consumer goods products, particularly focused on life cycle assessments, which means that you're assessing the impact of a good from essentially from the ground all the way through to the end of its life and try to work with various organizations to reduce it. At the same time, my business partner had been completely obsessed with this idea of what is a carbon credit and isn't it just a financial contract?

27:12And isn't it, what is this market? And he used to work in the biggest market of all, which is the bond market. I used to do like multi-asset strategy. So, you know, both of us love talking about this type of thing and it's all about getting capital investment into this space. And so like our interest, I'm not saying our interest wasn't on the footprinting side, but our real passion was this intersection between capital markets and environmental assets and the start of this big kind of journey there. And we basically used the footprinting side to spend on the R &D of the ratings idea. And then, you know, we wrote this thing the first like first of its kind sort of thing called the white paper on carbon ratings i think it's very funny because i used to work in uk politics right and so anyone that works in uk politics knows what a white paper is but you now have american companies calling their things white papers like well you probably didn't respond to white papers when you were 24 so there's no reason why you should be a white paper today but that's just an inside joke for anyone in the climate space but basically we got called up by goldman sachs and city the day we put this out and like basically summoned to their offices and said like, you know, what is this?

28:19What are you doing? And so it wasn't, it was like pushing on a completely open door, but it was all about this key challenge, which I can explain. Carbon credits are treated typically like a commodity in that every carbon credit is, represents one ton of avoided or removed emissions. And they call it carbon, but really CO2 equivalents. So it can be methane, it can be nitric oxide. Who is responsible for measuring that, for making sure that one ton equals one credit? That's essentially the entirety. That's like the North Star of my business. There's no uniformity, basically, is what you're saying.

28:55There's no transparency or uniformity. It's very difficult to guarantee that every instrument is exactly a ton of avoided or removed carbon. and I don't think it's even desirable because you don't tend to have scaled financial markets other than physically delivered quantities i.e. if you put in order to me to order 10 tons of coffee beans someone, you or someone at the end of the value chain is going to get delivery of 10 tons and they could count every bean if they were so inclined the problem with carbon is it's not physically delivered so it's really hard to know that it's exactly a ton and the other thing is it's not financially settled so a financial instrument like a bond is financially settled so at the end of it you pay you basically either pay back your debt or you don't right and so you have this weird thing which is not that it's not this but it's being treated like a commodity and the very simple thing is you have a project that says i've got this intervention i want to save a forest from deforestation i want to plant and restore a mangrove i want to build this carbon capture scheme or i want to pay for cookstoves to be used in rural communities which use indoor charcoal fires which can be very noxious and particularly bad problems for health of women and babies and you know i want to make these big interventions and if i can show that revenue from selling carbon credits would make this project essentially work because it would plug the funding gap then i can i can issue credits against it and then they and then they have to follow methodologies yeah which are set by these bodies called standard bodies who say okay if you want to issue credits for a forestry project of a certain type you have to follow this exam paper and if you pass the exam paper as approved by them and by third party verifiers every single unit that you issue will be equivalent to one time now that's how the market had operated for like 20 years and we basically came along and take you back to where we were in 2022 we were doing this consultancy and we were doing butting up this idea yeah we were like, well, the big idea, as far as we're concerned, was that quality wasn't binary, that the quality of this instrument wasn't necessarily guaranteed to be a ton.

31:07And that's equivalent to a financial rating type research offering, which is a very, very, very valuable part of how people assess risk in financial markets, particularly in bond markets, but other types of markets as well. And that could be the secret sauce, in more specific terms, a risk-based approach to assessing quality or a probabilistic approach to the distribution of quality would be a much more scalable solution to how we actually scale capital into the carbon markets and all these amazing interventions these projects than the current system that they had long story short we basically were kind of courted by a very lovely vc called illuminate financial who spent very patiently about three or four months with seb and i arguing that we should sort of focus on this rating agency and not do all the other things that we were doing.

31:57And we were like, oh, we'll do six things. Of course we do six things because every company should be doing six things. They're like, no, just do one. Maybe just focus on one. And then we went on this journey of like, should we go on this kind of VC scale up mission or should we basically just stick to doing some nice consultancy and going home at 6 p.m.? And I think we've both felt, why not? Push it as far as... Let's go hard basically because we're both young. Yeah, why not? We were both childless, both very passionate. And we thought, might as well. And then we were very, very lucky. I mean, seriously lucky because we basically went, we did a seed, an A, and then a B within about 14 months.

32:37We raised about$75 million. But at the same time, basically went from a 30-person, predominantly footprinting consultancy to building a product from scratch, launching a rating agency as a software solution, and essentially then scaling from about repurposing a lot of those people, but scaling from about 30 to like where we are today, 150. And, you know, just entering our second year of trading and have nearly 100 clients worldwide. And, you know, lots of what we can talk about business today. But that was really came down to this one decision when we were sort of sitting, having a virtual beer with each other.