Why biomining might finally work: How Endolith is using microbes and data to unlock more copper from low-grade ore

I like to say colloquially that we are using Earth's oldest miners, these microbes that have been around for billions of years, to get copper out of ore. As you frame it, is what we need now to keep the lights on, to be able to flush the toilet, it's closer to us than we think. The one thing that everyone agrees on is we are going to need significantly more copper in the next few years, and no one knows how to get there. A funding round, a product launch, a rebrand in a shifting market. 22N Brand are the energy marketers built for these moments. 22Nbrand.com slash WoodMac. Hi everyone, I'm Silvia Leibold-Martinez, Research Director at Wood MacKenzie, and this is Interchange Recharged. Every episode, we bring in the people closest to the biggest shifts happening in energy right now. The researchers, the builders, the decision makers, and we dig in. Today's guest actually used to sit on my side of the mic. Liz Dannett spent years with McKenzie in data architecture and data engineering before leaving to found Endolith, a biological intelligence company using engineered microbes to recover copper from ore and waste rock. And in one of my favorite guest stories yet, the whole company traces back to a Woodmuck podcast episode about copper that Liz happened to hear years ago. We're getting into why copper has suddenly become the bottleneck everyone's talking about, why biomining, despite of decades of false starts, might finally be having its moment, and what it actually takes to convince miners and financiers to bet on a new way of getting metal out of the ground. Please welcome Liz Dennett, founder and CEO of Fendolith. Let's dive right into it. Liz, welcome to Interchange Recharge. I'm so, so excited to have you on the show. I am so excited to be here. This feels almost like Groundhog Day, where instead of being someone interviewing, I am the guest and I love it. It's so much less pressure. It's kind of weird. I've been in a couple of podcasts on the other side and I don't know, I still don't get used to it. It's a different vibe. I love facilitating deep conversations. and so I tend to do that as a guest where I'm like actually I want to double click on this tell me about you but I think hopefully it just makes it more fun for anyone who's listening. Lovely lovely so before diving in on what you do at Entholet I wanted to start with something that we discussed during during our prep call and it's like this company's origins traces backs to a Woodmuck podcast episode which blew my mind so please just tell me more about that. Yeah, so like insert dramatic montage music here. So way back in the day, which was probably four years ago, I had the privilege of hosting the Horizons podcast with Wood Mac. I was, just for context, I was a VP of data architecture and data engineering. I was spending a lot of time in Scotland building a team that was doing incredible things. If you're listening, you know that Wood Mac has the best data out there. There's so much of it. It's in so many different shapes. I joined Wood Mack after a stint leading data architecture at AWS. And it was such a cool role. Especially the research teams are just brilliant. So I had the privilege of hosting this podcast, the Horizons podcast. And every month we would take a topic and interview world leaders on the topic. We had one on plastics that to this day still lives rent-free in my head. And we had one on copper. You can Google it. I'm sure you can put it in the show notes. But it was really focused on the copper gap. And I remember making some ignorant comments at the time about like, well, are copper's going to pennies? And how can copper be this much of a problem? But it planted the seeds. And then later that week, I was at a pub in Edinburgh talking about like, you know, the things that are going to cause a zombie apocalypse. And I was really doubling down that it was going to be water. But thanks to some very smart people at Wood Mac, I came to learn that it's actually copper. Copper is the critical mineral or critical piece of the landscape that should be keeping everyone awake at night. And it's kind of one of those one-way door decisions where once you learn about that, everything else shifts and you start seeing copper everywhere. Like this microphone has copper. These lights are copper. My electric car has so much copper. It is the foundational thing for everything. So Liz, did you know in that precise moment that this would become endolite, that it would become a company? Or did it take longer, you know, to simmer around and then actually become what Endolith is today? It definitely took a long time. I mean, this is probably four or five years ago, and we've only been a company for two and a half years. But to be fair, my goal was always to be a CTO. I wanted to be the best supporting actor for the coolest technology out there. Ever since I finished my PhD in astrobiology, my end goal was to have a positive impact on the planet, bigger than anything I could personally do. And the road that I thought would take me there was by being a CTO of a really innovative, cool startup. And that's what I've been optimizing my life for. I like to joke that I girlbossed too close to the sun and ended up being a solo founder and running what I think is the coolest company in the world. So no, it was not a very linear path of one to two. It was very, very meandering and very much a lot of introspection to say, what do I need that gives me purpose that I feel like I have a superpower to do and is really fun? And how can I do that in a way that feels very genuine with our very limited time on this planet? I love it. Love it. And you have a very interesting journey. Like you mentioned, PhD in astrobiology. Then I think you did some work with NASA too, right? And then AWS and then Woodmuck. And now there's more. There's way more in there. We don't have that much time in the podcast. But I'll give you the very distinct level. Worked for NASA for my PhD. I started as an oil and gas geologist at Hess and spent a few years working onshore and offshore, really to get to know what it was like to work at a big company. I mean, I grew up in a town in Alaska where we barely had skyscrapers, let alone showing up and working on the 20th floor of a skyscraper. And then from there, I had my first into the startup right after that and moved to San Diego, which was incredible, before deciding it was time to pivot my career and becoming a solution architect at AWS before WoodMac, which eventually got me here. Part of the research that you did at NASA is like this Mars analog research. How does this really tie to copper microbiology? It seems like a very, very long stretch. Those circles are actually a very big overlapping Venn diagram. So what we do at Endolith is we use microbial communities to get more out of low-grade ore. We plug and play. We have these types of microbes that live at very low pH. They oxidize iron. They oxidize sulfur. They do all kinds of cool metabolic things. And those are these same types of pathways that evolved on early Earth. Some of the earliest life on Earth were these microbes. And so I like to say colloquially that we are using Earth's oldest miners, these microbes that have been around for billions of years to get copper out of ore. How does it exactly work within Endolith? Like you provide those microbes? Like do you own the process? Do you have anything using AI? Because right now I feel that every single... Yes. So let's take a step back and let's pretend that we are standing on a field site. Now, copper, we need significantly more now than in the history of human civilization, demand is doubling between now and 35. and most of the good quality copper has already been extracted. So what we are left with is low quality ore. I am talking like 0.3% copper. And if we're standing at this mine site, what we do is we take those low grade ores, we crush them into giant piles, larger, pretty much the same size as some of these skyscrapers, and then we irrigate them with sulfuric acid. That sulfuric acid causes the rocks to break down, copper goes in solution, it gets collected, it gets electroplated out and directly taken to market. Now, what we do is we grow microbial communities that get hooked up into that sulfuric acid delivery system. These microbes get to go on a really cool one-way journey to liberate more copper. They do it with some unique molecular processes. And then we track everything. It is first principles of how we store the data, how we bring it in, how we bring in real-time, near real-time, in bulk data. We're able to transform it and turn it into something actionable. That, to me, is the really cool, exciting part, even though AI gets all the press lately. Throughout this process, where exactly does Endolith sit in the value chain? Like, is it on the upstream side, close to the ore body, or downstream in processing, or something weird in between? Yeah, so the unique thing about low-grade deposits that are processed using hydrometallurgy is all of it's done on site. So they crush the rocks, they pile them, they extract the copper, and then the copper undergoes SXCW and gets electroplated out on site and then directly taken to market. So it's not like a smelting process where you have to send it away, bring it back. And for us, we exist on site. Our first field site is in Arizona. We have these bio rigs where we can grow up different communities of microbes and put them directly into the field So we are wherever our customers are and wherever the mine sites are And does it look like is it a completely new I don know rig or processing plant that is plugged into the mining site or more of an add-on? Like, how does it work? Yeah, it's actually a little bit anticlimactic when you see it. We drive our field deployment there. Like, it can be pulled by a one-ton truck. It's not even like a big shipping container. It's actually very modular. And we plug and play with the existing infrastructure and the existing machinery. So very little if no downtime, no changes. We are designed to fit within the operating system of the mine and then just lay on top of it and gather data and be able to have some pretty unique insights. And honestly, the secret for that, I hate to say it here, is not that conversation that I had in Edinburgh back in the day. The secret to that is that most of our team have spent 20 plus years in the mining industry, being mining engineers, working in M&A. So our team has the real world experience to help guide what are otherwise really cool CEO astrobiology ideas. Who are you partnering with? Like, does Endolith operate the process by itself? Are you working with someone else in order to to be able to extract that copper from from the ores? Our whole ethos is we want to make it as easy and simple and streamlined as possible. needs to be plug and play. So we are working with five of the largest copper mining customers out there. Publicly, we've done work with Rio Tinto, with BHP and a number of other ones. They run and own and operate the mine. We drive in our microbes and get more copper out. It's really win-win because it allows us to plug in throughout the value chain where we can have the biggest impact. You approach a prospective customer, right? And then what do they want to see as proof that this could work and that they can trust their ore sources to be able to get enough copper out from them. Yeah. And it's a great question because mining is unlike pretty much any other heavy industry I've worked in. There is a desperate need for more material recovery. The amount of rocks we have to mine from are fixed. We have one planet right now that we are mining. And so figuring out the right technologies that can go in is a huge challenge. Plus, if you're a mining customer, You have startups pitching you all day, every day, saying they can do everything. And for us, it's about earning trust. The first thing we do with the customer is say, hey, give us your rocks. Let's bring them into lab. Let's see how they perform with our microbial communities. Let's get data. Let's look at things like chem scan, which tracks the mineralogy before and after we expose our microbes to them. Let's test it against sulfuric acid or other additives to show that we are the right solution. With that, it enables us to really tackle some types of ore that otherwise are very challenging to unlock. Things like ore with high arsenic concentrations or ore where they're using enhanced sodium chloride, something like that. And what's unique about the process is by deploying our microbes, it's able to break down the rocks faster. So for example, for ores that have high arsenic, is it possible, like maybe not right now, but maybe there's a path to explore the way to extract copper from them? Ores that have high arsenic, typically the rocks we talk about, are energite or tenonite. And those are particularly challenging if you want to use smelting. Because if you heat up the rocks, the arsenic can enter the gaseous phase. It can be pretty toxic. And so for us, being able to use hydrometallurgy or that heat bleaching process with our microbes enables new supply. For context, a lot of the work we've done in the lab shows that we are getting almost double the amount of copper out. And when we move to the field, we are hoping to get 10% additional recovery, all things considered. And talking to our customers, if we can get 10%, 8%, 12%, if we can conservatively get something like that, That's actually a massive unlock because the capex has already been spent. The mine is already operating. And if we don't get the copper out, it then just becomes downstream waste or tailings. And for context, right now, on average, heaps get less than 50% of the copper out. So 50% is just a stranded asset that you're in charge of the trailing liabilities for in perpetuity. How does the capex of adding the endolith solution to the mine compare to the capex of the entire mine? I would assume that he's not that much, but... It's teeny tiny. It is a rounding error. It's like when people ask us how much electricity our rig needs. Our rig can maybe run on a 220. It needs 110. It is a rounding error in the scheme of things. Our payback periods are incredibly short, and everything's been designed to be plug and play. One of the biggest confounding variables is downtime or having to fundamentally change how the mine is working, how the agglomeration process is working, how the extraction process is working. And for us, if we can sidestep that and even save downtime, it just goes to really further our value proposition. You mentioned when we just started the episode that microbes are the like the oldest world's oldest miners. They are the world's oldest miners. I always like to open talks with like, I'm going to talk about the world's oldest miners. You might be picturing someone with a hard hat and a high vis vest in Western Australia. But no, we're talking even smaller than that. We are talking microbes. Way smaller scale, definitely. Way, way smaller scale. Then biomining is not new. And there have been versions of this, what, for 20, 30 years? Oh. Why is this the moment that biomining is working? If not longer, Christy, who runs technology and engineering at Endolith, she came in wearing a jacket from one of her former adventures that was like a biomining jacket. And I was like, where? People were doing this more than 20 years ago, which is so cool because the idea has been there. The thing that makes us fundamentally unique is that we are combining the cloud computing aspects, the data gathering aspects, in a way that was honestly impossible just a few years ago. Our newest head of platform, Shannon, joins us from Illumina, which is a DNA sequencing company. And I was really excited when we bought a DNA sequencer to have in-house so that we can analyze what's happening with these microbial communities. But now taking someone that has built that platform of the DNA sequencer and setting her loose on what we can do with our data structures is paradigm shifting. Additionally, the proliferation of tools. And I know people talk very much about AI, about LLMs. LLMs are great for some specific things. They are not the best for the deep scientific pattern matching that we need to do. In fact, a lot of the algorithms are much simpler and much more foundational than that. But what they do help is getting us to build out a whole operating system so that we can create high quality code. We can make sure all of our data architectures are very well designed. And we can do that so, so, so much quicker than we could do without a lot of these AI tools. Starting with really high fidelity data architecture and data infrastructure allows us to do so much with the data that we couldn't even dream about a few years ago. And I think we have seen that all across the board. the last episode that we recorded was on maintenance of wind turbines and all these new sensors incorporating AI into maintenance. Now it makes you spend just like 30, 50K instead of a million that could result from a broken blade. So it's just fascinating to see how AI and new ways of thinking and approaching different processes just creates way exponential value compared to what we have seen even like, I don't know, five years ago. So it's crazy. So much. And I think part of it isn't necessarily just the fact that AI is very ubiquitous. It's very easy to access. But one of our core values here at Endolith is invent your way through. Like when there's no road, you have to invent your way through challenges. We also love type two funds. Safety is non-negotiable. But with that inventing your way through, when you are looking at problems that people tell you are unsolvable, first off, they're probably not. But AI in many ways, and just when I first pulled up ChatGPT a few years ago, it was like this magical black box that really shakes the bedrock or the foundation of how you think about things. And that type of, well, what if we could? What if we could do this? That type of really unique out-of-the-box thinking has inspired so many more questions and lines of reasoning than otherwise we'd be like, well, I don't know if we can do it. It's never been done before. And so I don't want to underplay the cultural nuances of having more prolific AI within the ecosystem. Media relations, brand design, video, paid advertising, and community engagement. They covered it all under one roof. No onboarding lag, no industry crash course. They speak your language on day one. If you ready to sharpen your story and supercharge your marketing find them at 22andbrand slash woodmac We been talking about the impact of endolive in the mine right So that's like the first step. Let's think about the impact on the world. You mentioned that copper demand is going to double over the next nine years. By 2035, it's expected to double. And we need more between now and 2050 than in the history of human civilization. And the best way to get those numbers, if anyone is wondering, is the Woodmac reports. Woodmac has done the absolute best job of quantifying where the copper gap is. Where does biomining move that number? Like how much more can it contribute? And why is it meaningful? Our main target right now are the resources that no one else can touch. The rocks that are left behind, the rocks that are too hard, too messy to process. So for us, that takes our supply and makes it more elastic. It means that the bottom end of what's recoverable is actually potentially significantly different than we thought it was. And that's important because there's, as I mentioned earlier, there's a set amount of copper on the planet. There are only so many deposits. And even when we find a new deposit, it takes on average 10 to 16 years to get copper out of that. But also the world is literally and fundamentally running out of copper, let alone easy to access copper. So to be able to increase supply is one thing. The other key piece here is that copper underpins so much of the grid electrification that me, as someone that grew up in Alaska, I've lived in Texas, I've lived all over, like you take that for granted. It's going to be 100 degrees here in Denver today, which is absurd, but my office is very air conditioned. In both Texas and Alaska, there were significant periods where we would just go days without electricity. And unless you have really lived through that, it's really hard to understand how that changes everything. That changes if you could flush the toilet or brush your teeth or open the refrigerator to get food, let alone cook food. Alaska and Texas have very different reasons for not having their grids be as resilient as they could be. But then when you extend that to developing countries where grid electrification is one of the biggest drivers of socioeconomic outcomes, it becomes really salient. That if you can control copper, you can control so many other pieces of the global landscape that make people's lives better. I like how you frame it. and is the impact that we're seeing. We usually think of copper or metals in general that, yeah, it's one of the raw materials that we need for what was called the energy transition, which is still happening. But now it's like, as you frame it, is what we need now to keep the lights on, to be able to flush the toilet. It's closer to us than we think. And there's a growing chasm because we talked about the supply side. We didn't really talk about the demand side. Demand is growing. Demand is going to continue to grow. But AI data centers, they run a lot of electrons, and those electrons are shuttled through copper wires. Copper is the best non-precious metal for electric transmission. So demand, I don't know about you, but even from my layperson perspective, demand is rising with things like generative AI. It actually comes full circle to those comments earlier. the more we rely on tools like AI, the more we need copper to create the data centers. And I stubbornly refuse to believe that there has to be a trade-off between grid electrification for the rest of the world and being able to use Fable to make really cool videos. That is something I am not willing to accept. And I will spend my very limited time trying to fix that because I want to live in a world where it's not or it's and. Well, I think like that would turn into a very much more complex conversation diving into that. That's the reality is all of these things are so nuanced and so complex. And I find that in my day to day life, there is very much a habit to keep things very superficial to be like, well, you know, it's complicated. Someone will do something about it. But I really am trying to double click and poke at some of the nuances. Like I want to discuss trade-offs with people that are as smarter, way smarter than I am. I want to know how they're thinking about these pieces. I don't want to be an ostrich with my head in the sand saying, well, that's a lot of water. We should stay away from that. Because traditionally at the inflection points of human civilization, progress has required trade-offs. And now we have enough power to help drive those trade-offs and decide what the advantages are, both socioeconomically and from global development. And that being asked as a purple-haired PhD to have a seat at that table is absolutely a privilege. We were recently named a World Economic Forum pioneer. We have picked up a slew of different awards where the tables that we are sitting at as a 20-person startup outside of Denver become increasingly big and increasingly important. So I want to challenge anyone that's listening to this to not just take the superficial level like, yeah, that's complicated, but really double click, triple click, poke at that because I do not believe we will make progress by not leaning into the very hard topics and trade-offs and conversations. Totally. And I think at this point, we are still figuring out what the trade-offs actually look like for the data center side from the like renewable side. So I guess like this is part of what we continue to discuss in the podcast. So really, really excited about it. It's a really great platform for people to get educated and to be able to have these conversations. I do joke a lot that if you're sitting next to me on an airplane and I'm feeling talkative, I am so sorry for you because you are going to leave having the lack of copper keep you awake at night having to talk about like critical feedback. And it is a it's going to be a one way door decision in many ways. But why not have more of those? Like, why not? So we've been talking a lot about copper, but there are other metals that are involved in all this energy conversation that we've been having. What about those? Like, is there a path for endolith to also incurring those into those metals? Absolutely. We are starting with copper because, honestly, it's the thing that keeps me awake at night. The economics are pretty good, and it's something that immediately can impact the planet. If we are successful at our first fuel deployment in the U.S., that is additional copper for the U.S. supply right there immediately. And that, to me, is a very salient value proposition. However, we have done work on many, many other critical materials and critical minerals. Recently, I think a week ago, we are a co-PI in the Alaska Critical Minerals Institute, and we were just awarded an NSF engine grant, which will allow us to leverage our technology in some of these very difficult to get to locations in Alaska, literally in my backyard for where I grew up. So it's very exciting to be able to translate this technology. We've done work on lithium clays, some on lithium brines, some on nickel. For us, though, it's honestly as challenging as a startup. You have to really start with a tractable problem that you can take on, be wildly successful at that, and then branch into being a platform play. Not an easy feat, I'm sure. No, but what else would it be? For those metals, is it the same process that you use waste rock and tailings as raw material and then you put the microbes? And ta-da, you have a medal. Very simple way to frame it. Yeah, at a high level, we are deploying our microbial miners for a variety of different critical materials and critical minerals. The nuances, though, is that for most of these, the flow sheet actually varies significantly. And so how copper heap leaching is done is different than how lithium clays are done. And so there is a lot of nuance within that. But the things that don't change are access to as much data as possible in the cloud, using microbial communities, using these low microbial miners and being able to extract value from what other people leave behind. How does this solution change the time to first copper in this case or first metal in terms of permitting, building a new mine, like something that is way much more, like that is way more infrastructure heavy? Our current deployments now are on brownfield deposits, things that are already being being mined because it gives us immediate ROI and immediate value. We have worked with a number of customers who are looking at those greenfield timelines to see how we can plug in and how we can help to deliver value. The brutal truth, though, is that for us to deploy our technology to something that is towards the end of its life or has been going and maybe they're stuck with some of these lower quality rocks, for us, that's our sweet spot right there. We are looking at greenfield opportunities. But right now, the attraction of adding more copper to supply is just to me existentially much much cooler and more valuable And it seems that the business case is there or at least the solution seems like a very obvious addition to a mine But who is the harder sell? The miners, the financiers, within all the stakeholders that you interact with? Everyone is hard, but for very different, different reasons. We raised a seed round. We raised just north of $5 million about two years ago, and we raised just north of $16 million late last year. And so that was a unique challenge, going out and fundraising for the first time, trying to see what that landscape looks like. It is one of the hardest things out there. Mining customers are a different shade of difficult, though. First off, a lot of them suffer from being wildly successful and being able to keep getting copper. So if they don't use our technology, they're still getting copper. Their shareholders are still happy. And that creates a different value proposition where you have to plug in. Additionally, there's so many approaches and techniques that could be used. Making sure that we stand out within the signal to noise ratio is important, but also really doing it in a way that aligns with us as a company and our values. Safe operation, you know, making the world ultimately one where we can get more copper. Those are some of the challenges. We've had some incredible customers as partners, though, that have really enabled us to show our technology at increasingly large scales. And we have seen something similar on the renewable side that it's difficult to sell this new technology or for existing players that already have established portfolio to embrace new technology. So it seems that more capital sometimes also is linked to a bit more willingness to take on this new technology risk. Is that aligned with what you're saying too? Absolutely. I thought I had a handle on heavy technology scale up with my time at an oil and gas startup. And then I stepped into mining. And it was very, very, very different. First off, mining companies used to have massive innovation teams in-house that would be driving and creating these new technologies. And that has actually shifted even in the past two years. Most of these innovation teams have significantly shrunk or been outsourced. And so that lay of the land is changing, but the demand is still climbing. I feel confident that I can say the one thing that everyone agrees on is we are going to need significantly more copper in the next few years and no one knows how to get there. That universality is comforting, but also a little bit scary. But it does create some opportunities. But at the same time, you can never compromise things like safety or efficacy. Talking from the financing perspective, if like you're talking to a financier, what do you show to them that actually helps you de-risk a project from their eyes? I mean, honestly, the best thing to de-risk projects is nothing I can say they are showing. They are showing our results. They're showing an introduction to our customers so they can hear it from their words themselves. That's ultimately where the rubber meets the road. I do always tell people that you should check but verify what I say as a CEO. You need to be able to really go into the data and talk to our customers. Tying it back to what you mentioned on doing these fundraising rounds, and you mentioned in our prep call, less than 2% of VC funding goes to solo female founders. So like, to me, that's astonishing. And women in the energy industry in general, we tend to be sometimes the only women in the room, right? So what does it actually look like day to day talking to VC funds, talking to the board members of a mining company. How is it? I have learned a lot. When I started my career as an oil and gas geologist, I was working, this was probably 10 plus years ago, I was working this new exploration asset. It was in Guyana. No one, we had drilled one well. We were in the process of drilling a well, which went on to be a very big discovery for Hess. But I remember very specifically, we had a team lunch where we were celebrating something and there were 14 of us going to get Mexican food and I was the only female. And as we were waiting for the elevator, I said to my manager like, hey, how would it feel if you were the only guy with 13 females? And he said something like, oh, I'd be fine if it was an HR conference. And I was like, oh, okay, cool, cool, cool. And that kind of stuck out with me just because it was a very salient way to call it out. I mean, I've had investors say that they won't invest in someone with purple hair, which is honestly just makes me double down and dye my hair even brighter. But it's not the overt things. I appreciate the overt comments like that. It's more the subtle questioning of, hey, Liz, can you walk us through the financial model? Like, do you really know what you're doing or have you thought about what this next phase would look like? I've had people make comments like, do you think you look like you could be the CEO of a billion dollar company? And to me, the only reply is like, why the hell not? But it hits at some very nuanced things that I don't want to shy away from. I want to accept, but in a very uncompromising manner. I recently had a mentoring call with a CEO of the Seed Stage Company. She's great, but her investors told her she really needed a male co-founder to help her because she's spent too much time in academia. I'm like, that to me is a little bit, it's helpful feedback. I never shy away from critical feedback. And the more I don't want to hear something, the more valuable it ultimately is. But it just points out our biases and how you can unpack those in a way that stays true to who you are and what you're doing. I completely agree on, like, we all need feedback and that's what makes us better. But if, like, there's one thing, it's one thing to say, like, oh, you need to, I don't know, pause more when you're talking or something that is actionable rather than you need a male co-founder. Yeah, that's a really hard part. I've been sitting with that too, because my general rule is you only tell someone something if they can change it. Like if someone has food stuck in their teeth, tell them so they can change it. But if it's something that they cannot change, like your hair is very straight. Okay, what am I going to do with that? But I've actually come full circle and found that I value knowing the stuff I cannot change because it helps me paint a more comprehensive picture. I can decide to accept the trade-offs. I can decide whether or not to act on it. And going back to some of the points earlier about shying away from hard conversations, the more you don't want to hear something, the more I find that it actually can give some illumination to what's going on. And the challenge to me, though, is then how you build and run a company in a way that is very true to you and your core values. That literally manifests itself in our core endolith values, like inventing your way through. We love type two funds. Safety is non-negotiable. Another one is say the hard thing, then act. It used to be critical feedback was our love language, but we reworked it a little bit. So really modeling the behaviors you want to see more of. Liz, this has been a lovely conversation, very wide conversation. We covered a wide range of topics. But I would like to wrap up with you. Like you have all this experience. You're founder of a technology company that is way into the weeds and mining and the energy transition and the overlap between those two. What is a concrete, like if you had to give one single piece of advice, personally, I would like say to another woman, right? trying to raise capital in this hard tech environment, non-software space, what would it be? The hard things we do and the things we do not know if we will succeed at are typically the things that tell us the most. So lean into that. Know that you might fail, but that's okay. That's part of us being players within a game where we didn't make the rules, we didn't invent the system, but yet we are here trying to do our best. Don't let the fear of failure or the fear of whatever your worst nightmare there is, don't let that stop you. Because at the end of the day, I always regret the things I did not do much more than the things I did. This was really fun. I've learned a lot. Liz, thank you so, so much for joining me today. Thank you so much, Sylvia. Thank you, everyone. This has been a great conversation. And that's our show for today. Thank you so much, Liz, for being so open and sharing this many full circle stories with me, because this is why I love doing this. If this conversation has sparked something for you, subscribe wherever you're listening, leave us a review and tell us who we should have on next. You can find Wood Mackenzie and myself, Sibyl Evo Martinez on LinkedIn, and we will be sharing all links and resources from today's conversation with Liz and Andalith in the show notes. Thank you so much. Muchas gracias. And we'll see you in two weeks. you