The Paxtier Podcast
The Paxtier Podcast
Antoine Erwes Reveals All - Seaweed Industry Bottlenecks, Data Difficulties, and 3 Biggest Mistakes
Antoine Erwes is the founder of Seaweed First, a non-profit think tank focussed on delivering actionable intelligence for an impactful and scalable seaweed industry.
In this episode of The Paxtier Podcast, Antoine reveals all about seaweed industry bottlenecks, data difficulties, and his 3 biggest mistakes.
Let us know what you think!
Highlights:
1:25
Antoine's journey into seaweed and oceans
4:59
Booming and busting in seaweed markets
7:20
Geographies of interest
10:14
Seaweed First's sustainability index
12:00
Bringing the right people to the table
13:14
NOAH Regen and coastal zone management
15:48
Collecting data for Seaweed First
17:57
3 biggest failures/mistakes
25:51
Challenges for the seaweed industry
32:48
Favourite books and best advice
https://seaweedfirst.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/erwesantoine/
so on this journey you chose to do Seaweed First as a nonprofit. Why was that?
Antoine:That was a big question. That was a very big question when we started, and the simple answer is that if we wanted to work with people openly About these different topics, about sharing information about coming together and working for common goals, you couldn't be a business or it would be harder as a business because people think that you're gonna profit from it. And so this is why we took this route. So it is harder but in, in the end, I think we have a healthier relationship with the people that we work with thanks to the position that we took. So worth it.
Peter:Welcome everyone to the Paxtier Podcast Today we spoke with the brilliant Antoine Erwes, who's the founder of Seaweed First, which is a think tank focussed on delivering actionable intelligence for an impactful and scalable seaweed industry. Enrico, how did you enjoy that catch up with Antoine?
Enrico:he has some really, really interesting insights on issues that the seaweed industry is currently facing. And I think none for me were more important than what he said about data collection and how there's simply just not enough data. And I'm not gonna spoil the surprise and now everyone has to listen.
Peter:Really hope you guys enjoy the episode. let's dive right in. Not so long ago you told me your story in this space. How did you go from Chinese, into luxury high end to then ocean and seaweed. That's quite a fun journey.
Antoine:Yeah. There, there is no links between all of this or a very thin thread, so it's really hard to explain how I actually got here. When I was a kid. I really loved speaking different languages and being understood wherever I go. Ended up learning Chinese and so went to work in China. Unfortunately, didn't see seaweed over there. But when I came back to Europe just continued working. Ended up working in luxury. So I did an MBA and started working in the luxury sector where I saw there was an opportunity in the sustainability side of luxury. And one thing led to another and I ended up working for a high-end luxury skincare line based in California that was using sea Cucumber collagen for their, for their product line. And helping them out on their sourcing, on their sustainability strategy to promote it. And during one of my sourcing missions in Mexico, I actually stumbled on Sargassum when I saw people burning seaweed on the coastline. Burning biomass without trying to create any value from it. So at that point, I went back home, started digging into seaweed, understood that there was a huge potential, and just started reaching out to different people, helping them out, whether it's on sales, strategy, comms. And from there just started launching different seaweed initiatives. I started with alliga, I think two and a half years or three years ago which was a way to try to help accelerate seaweed cultivation by corporate sponsorships. Unfortunately that was, a bit too early for the time. And then covid hits. So, of course, you know, it was complicated to, to actually create that unified front, especially on the seaweed side. So just continue looking after that. And about a year and a half ago, I launched Seaweed first. And the goal is to address certain bottlenecks within the seaweed industry, identifying the necessary data to move forward and then bring the right people around the table, not just to talk, but actually to create an action plan that will actually solve these problems. We've done several actually in the past year and a half. The last one was in Tunisia a few days ago. Which went pretty well and very promising. I think there's gonna be a lot of news coming in the next month around the seaweed space regarding the different people that were there. So yeah, that, that's mostly where we are today. Little side note as well. We were crazy enough to do seaweed around the clock as well, which was a 24 hour telethon to promote seaweed. So we started New Zealand and ended in French Polynesia, and every hour we change time zone and change topics. It, it was a great experience. We met a lot of people. We had the opportunity really to open the eyes to people from different backgrounds, which was very interesting, especially to the general public. But it was very ambitious. Staying awake for 24 hours was rough. I, I didn't do it. I, I did 22 hours. But yeah.
Peter:What happened with the final two hours you had to drop out?
Antoine:N no. It, yeah, at one point, at one point I just crashed. I, I couldn't coffee couldn't keep me awake, so, so yeah, because there was a stress the night before, but I, in theory, I think I was awake more than 24 hours because I didn't sleep very well. But the initiative was really good, and it, it really showed me that the awareness is good, but we need to stick to facts. And it's useless to overpromise because one day or another, it's just gonna, it's like a boomerang. It's gonna hit you back in the head. So you just need to be smart about it, promote in the right ways, and attract the right people so that the product can move forward.
Peter:On the topic of overselling and boom and bust, what's the outlook there? What are your sort of quick hot takes on, on booming and busting? Cause it comes up a lot. And what do we have to be aware of
Antoine:I've been in the space for basically less than five years or five-ish. So I can't speak as an expert because some have been working in the field for over 20 years and I think they have more of an image and a vision of what the seaweed industry has been and will be in the future. What I can see from my perspective is that You know, the industry has been working great before, you know, this big explosion. I think two years ago. I was astonished beforehand to understand how much seaweed was really in all the daily products that we can see, whether it's through alginates, agar, or carageenan. So its presence was already there and it was kind of this silent majority hidden everywhere and really making that impact. The, the boom that happened, I think two years ago was good. It's good to put seaweed on the map and promote it, but unfortunately at one point it started getting a bit out of control where people were starting to oversell it Like this silver bullet or the thing that's gonna save the oceans. I just saw another article this morning where people were saying, if we plant 10% of the oceans, we're gonna save the world with seaweed. And so you're like, okay. Yes, in theory perhaps, and it's not even guaranteed, but still putting those numbers is is hard for people to imagine. Like 10% of the people are like, eh, it's not that much. But in reality it's huge. It, once again, it's just like we want, what we want to do with seaweed first is now it's the time for action. And so there's been all this excitement, which is good. It's put seaweed on the map, but now investors and people have understood that, you know, there's the potential, but we need to get to numbers and this is where it's gonna start hurting because there's a lot of companies that have been, you know promoting a lot and focusing on marketing, which today I have to actually change your perspectives and so, It can work, but in some case, I think for a lot of them it's gonna be hard and I think it's gonna be the case for the next few years for all these companies to start building everything up. And I think the next two to five years, there's gonna be the first success models for the seaweed space that are gonna inspire the others and, you know, attract investment and everything else.
Enrico:So I, I have an interesting question.
Peter:Or you, you have an interesting question. Well, I mean, it's so funny that you
Antoine:frame it like that.
Enrico:It sounds like, it sounds like I'm writing like a dissertation or something again. So obviously 98% of seaweed is produced in the Far East. Are you focusing on a specific location? Are you gonna be the Atlantic Africa? Are you gonna bring it into the Mediterranean? Is it a specific area you want to promote seaweed expansion?
Antoine:I don't think we should hoist one area. I think, you know, seaweed grows everywhere. So there's it, it just depends what you want to do. If you want do Browns in Brazil or in Tanzania, probably not the good good strategy. You just need to say, okay, this is, and I think this is also a mistake, is that everyone started rushing. There's plenty of producers that said, I wanna start cultivating seaweed. And so they just started cultivating, doing, you know, doing kelp, but. I, I think there was a mistake that was made is that a lot of people rushed into the business without finding a product and some clients beforehand to understand exactly how the, how the supply chain can work and how they can actually guarantee a scale up in the future. And and I think it's important for seaweed. Yes, seaweed has different applications. Yes, seaweed has plenty of benefits but without the right strategy in going in and saying, okay, I wanna do this seaweed for this reason, because there's these different things. Yeah. Locally, there's these types of partners. I have these types of clients and they would be interested in these conditions regarding my production. Yeah. And from that point it makes sense because you're like, okay, it's gonna be hard, but at least I know where I'm going. But some just jumped in a bit, I think, and to, you know, we'll see where it goes. It's an adventure, which is interesting because, you know, entrepreneurship is an adventure, but, you know, seaweed is hard. It's complicated. I've spoken to seaweed farmers and it's, it's, it's a really hard job and it. You know, it's, it's not for everyone. I, I respect them for doing that because I clearly couldn't do it. But yeah, I mean, for the work that you're putting in, you want to have some results. So you need to be sure that you know it's the right direction. So to jump back to your question there is not one place afterwards. I think, you know, Asia has it's domination, but I think today people are gonna be looking towards new markets. Africa has a potential, but of course some downsides as well. South America used to be a very powerful market with Chile, Peru, and all that. It kind of dwindled down over the years, but I think there's a new potential to come forward. North America has a bunch of reasons as well with the space, the funding and, you know, the opportunistic American entrepreneurship. Europe too. Europe has a lot of companies, a lot of businesses. The, the EU Green deal and all these new. Initiatives are pushing towards more sustainable businesses and more sustainable economies and activities. So I think it's going in the right direction. It takes time in Europe, unfortunately, as y'all know. So, but it has its potential. I think everyone's gonna have the role to play. It's not going to be one central hub. Everyone's gonna have their area of expertise.
Enrico:I was having a look at the seaweed sustainability index, so this kind of like, like a holistic vision of how you're going to create cultivation anywhere.
Antoine:Yeah, exactly. I completely forgot to, to mention that, but yeah, so we developed the, we developed the index last year in 2022. The objective was to find a way to. Kind of de-risk seaweed farming by providing the right KPIs and right data sets to investors and to buyers to be reassured that, you know, that this farm has the necessary standards to actually work with or to invest in. So there's the, there's the production side that we had, which is, you know, the quality of the product, how they produce everything else. There's all the esg, so environmental, social, and. Governance side of, of the farm. And we also integrated finance because we realized that plenty of businesses claim to be sustainable, which is great, but when you look at the financials, they're just terrible. So investors today, they don't wanna lose any more time. They also want to be sure that, you know, the, the financials work and that there's a business model behind it. So the, we created that last year. Right now we're trying to test it out in different countries. It takes time because, you know, the seaweed farmers are very busy today. They're, they're either in the water or looking for funding, so it takes time to really test it out. But I think there's, there's a future for this because people need guarantees. People need traceability and transparency. So I think it's in the right direction and yeah.
Peter:We, we, we've touched on quite a few things there, and one thing you mentioned was Tunisia. How much are you allowed to divulge right now? Have you got one hot take from that that's really quite fun?
Antoine:Tunisia was was really good. We brought the right people around the table. We had different, you know, we had academia, we had industry, we had producers, we had government. And. What we saw is that if there's a common vision towards certain goals, people are willing to, you know, work together and, and create something bigger than just themselves, which I think is, is the way to go for seaweed because it's better to have like 2% of a hundred million dollars than 100% of$0. And I think this is what people are starting to understand is that each one has their own goal and their own role to play in the entire story. And by combining skills together and these businesses, you can actually create something much larger that can actually have a positive impact, not only on cultivation, but on processing, on even on governance. Because when you have this cohesion that's being built, Governments listen because you're like, okay, there's this huge economic interest for us now, so we're willing to see exactly how we can support that. So it's a beginning. It's a beginning. And hopefully in the next month there's gonna be something interesting. But I, I, I don't wanna project myself yet because, you know, there's still some work to be done.
Peter:And beyond seaweeds, we haven't even touched on your whole other career. Which is your NOAH Regen story as well
Antoine:the NOAH regen is interesting because today what I realized is that unfortunately, with all the excitement people have kind of channeled themselves just into seaweed, and see, seaweed has a single solution to solve all of our problems. Once again, the oceans don't work like that. The planet doesn't work like that. Nature doesn't work like that. So you need to take an ecosystem as a whole. Yeah. And so this is the work I've been doing with Noaha is so we work in developing countries and island states, and the goal is to say, how can we use natural assets? Through conservation and restoration in order to generate wealth and support economic activities such as fisheries, tourism, waste management and generate other ones that they're not expecting. So for me, it was a good way to expand beyond seaweed because at don't, at a moment, it's nice as well to to see other things. And no, it's good. And so right now I'm actually working in the Caribbean. There's plenty of different challenges, and we're only working with one island at the moment, but hopefully it's gonna become a more regional approach where we're gonna bring several countries together to focus on this, on this same vision. It's the idea of coastal zone management. It's, it's how do you optimize your marine spatial planning in order to, on one side regenerate natural assets, but at the same time ensure that the coastal communities that live there can still, yeah. Live off the oceans. Especially when you're talking about island communities. So of course there's different businesses. There's also the approach of marine protected areas. That is, that is a very complex issue today because you know, as someone to say, okay, we're. Closing down an area to protect it, but they don't take all the economic considerations saying, well, people used to live off this area. How do we make it really work so that everyone benefits from it? It's not just closing an area just to, you know, say, oh, we're trying to protect the ocean. What's also important is that when you close a place off, it's really hard to get data from it because you know, there's less and less interaction. So it, it's all about thinking, rethinking marine spatial planning, rethinking about how we interact with our coastline. In order to build resilience, so to prepare the next generation towards climate change, because waters are just gonna keep heating up. Biodiversity is going to change. Climate is going to change with, without, you know, increasing storms. So it's how can we prepare them for this so that there's, we don't suffer like severe consequences in 20 years for no action.
Enrico:Yeah. Leading onto to that, you, mentioned taking data from a protected area is quite tough, but actually kind of linking to seaweed first Is there a specific way you taking data? How does one go about collecting data on such, like a large scale and what kind of things are you looking for?
Antoine:A bit of everything, to be honest. Data is king, but data is, is hard to get when you really want to. What we realize is that a lot of people don't like doing Google research and you know, when you have to start digging into all those yeah. 30, 40, 100 page documents that have all these kinds of details, no one really wants to make the work so, I, I won't say we enjoy doing that, but you know, in our team, we, we, we have specialists that actually do a lot of that work. And even, I like reading these reports because that's where you, you learn a lot about these different aspects of the seaweed industry. The, the second aspect is just talking to people. Okay. Of, of course there's industry secrets and you know, today a lot of people wanna learn more about how much is being how much is being processed, how, what are the prices? Yeah. What what are the main applications, who your clients are, and all this. But it's, it's really hard to, to share these information because it's still a competitive space. It's very niche. So people are trying to make their own, their own little space. So people are not gonna divulge this information. And we faced a similar challenge with the index because people were saying, wait, so how are you gonna use this information? Is everyone gonna see this or is it just for you? So, Data is a massive issue today and, and data privacy, data security it, it is a big issue, We do it because we, we need to understand where the bottlenecks are, but we're still a very small team, so we focus on what really interests us and what we like to do is think a bit differently because there's so many topics you can do around seaweed and we like to go kind of off course and explore topics that no one likes to. No one likes or no one thinks about in the C space. Yeah. It's always like a,
Peter:a lovely surprise when I see one of your posts. It's like, oh, that's a nice way of looking at it. Yeah. Actually, sorry, sorry to interrupt Enrico and your line of questioning. I'm gonna jump onto a different line of questioning. Indeed. Indeed do. But cuz I actually had a question I wanted to ask Antoine. Have you got a couple of big failures that you've had that you built on, you learned from, that you, you'd, you reflect on as being really big? Learning steps.
Antoine:So we're gonna get philosophical here, but I don't think I've had any failures. I, I don't think, you know, Life is a just you, you keep progressing, you keep learning from mistakes. I've made plenty of mistakes, that's for sure. But I, I don't see them as failures because every time I at least learn from it, I, I, it allows me to move forward. However, the, the three big mistakes I've made in my life that are quite general, the first one is not being patient enough. We live in a world where everything happens so fast. Now you can get like, You can get food in 10 minutes, you, you can access any movie you want with a, with a snap of a finger. So it, it's hard for people to take the time and say, okay, this project is gonna take more than two months to actually work. And it, and goes to the same for nature. When people say that we're gonna save the planet in two years, it just makes me laugh because nature works in decades, centuries, or even. Even more in some cases. So patient for me was the big one where I really needed to learn to take the time, look at everything going around me, identify how things are working on, and, and, and it gives you more space to anticipate and also to see where the opportunities are actually arriving. So that was a big one for me. The second one was being too kind, I saw people as very nice all the time before I had too much hope in human kindness. Yeah.
Peter:If you met Enrico early, you probably would've changed that. Oh, come on.
Antoine:But yeah, it's, you have to be realistic in, in some cases, and that some people have certain agendas and you just need to be, you just needs to be aware of that. So it's just reading people better, understanding what their priorities are and sticking more to people that have your, your vision of things.
Peter:Have you developed a toolkit for assessing people or is it just intuition now based on past burns?
Antoine:It, it's not perfect. I, I don't think it'll ever be perfect, but yeah, you just learn from people. You start understanding, you know, there's certain personas that you start building in your head and saying, okay, he's more like that type of person, everything else. So I'll probably write a book about it someday. No, I'm kidding. But it's, it's yeah, it's, it's. It just comes down to the vision. And for me it's when you start talking to people, you have to, it's like what Simon Sinek used to say. Like start with why. If you start, if you see their why and you really have the same why, more or less things generally work out. But if the guy has, you know, starts with the what or the how, and, and for him, the why is not important. There's a tendency that you might be a bit disappointed in the end. So that was the second one. And the third one would be, I think to be creative. Just keep on, I, I was super creative as a kid and you know, when you start getting into the, the business world, you tend to start, you know, getting in line and, and just focusing on your work and everything else. And I think that's a big mistake. A lot of people tend to, you know, lower themselves down. And I think being creative, keep on learning pushing yourselves, you know, if you have some crazy ideas, test them out. Sometimes you never know it can work. We need a bit of creativity. We need a bit of imagination and inspiration to move forward without going too crazy, for example, and saying no crazy stuff about seaweed. But yeah.
Enrico:So is that, what, is that what you say you focused on in the last five years? you were in the luxury in industry. Did you feel that you were getting in line a little bit too much and he thought I need to take a step back and redirect into, something a little bit more creative where I can expand myself?
Antoine:Well, at the time in the luxury industry, when I was there, sustainability was more of a marketing KPI than actually a supply chain kpi. Unfor, well, thankfully it changed very fast because today, you know it's part of their main considerations. But yeah, for, for me, there's yeah, certain ethical things and that I thought was, were important. And for me, if it was just, you know, Saying you're sustainable to increase the price by 50%. That that wasn't the kind of vision I had in mind.
Peter:That's actually a really interesting backstory that I don't think you've divulged too much but I think we mentioned before, working in these big retail luxury brands. Sustainability being not a real measure.
Antoine:Once again, it's, it's how you position yourselves. You can be in the, you can be in the seaweed industry, you can be in the, in the cattle industry, you can be in different industries. It's just how you position yourself and what your end goal really is. Even in the seaweed space, there's some people that are not really there for the environments and that have more just a single profit vision that want to cash out in three years and, and just pass to something else. Luxury is the same i I in the luxury space. There's also plenty of businesses that, you know, hold sustainability to heart that try to do the best and, and, and wanna work in the right direction. So I, I wouldn't pinpoint one industry or the other. It's just once again, how you position yourselves regarding those, those different questions. I have a motto, more or less is that if you wanna change society, change humans first. Yeah. You, you can create any type of technology you want. You can create a shuttle to Mars. You can create underwater cities or anything like that. If the human, if man is still man in most cases, as he is. Nothing will change. So you really have to change the mindsets. And this was kind of the vision of what we had with seaweed first is try to inspire people to take action in the right way. And this is what we wanted to do with seaweed with seaweed around the clock and all these different things is how we can inspire people to change. Of course, it's, you know, it's, it's something big plenty of people try to do. I'm not alone, thankfully in this mission, but yeah, for me it's, you have to change the mindset before using the technology because, or else, you know, you can end up with iRobot
Peter:So on this, on this journey you chose to do seaweed First as a nonprofit. Why was that?
Antoine:That was a big question. That was a very big question when we started, and the the simple answer is that if we wanted to work with people openly, About these different topics, about sharing information about coming together and working for common goals. You couldn't be a business or it would be harder as a business because people think that you're gonna profit from it. And so this is why we took this route. So it is harder because in, in many different ways, the struggle harder. But in, in the end, I think we have a healthier relationship with the people that we work with thanks to the position that we took. So worth it.
Peter:Yeah, it does seem like that. Finding that balance is seems to be quite important
Antoine:It's a bit tricky because I, I think what we need is, A gray zone with everything today. I think for-profits need to think more like nonprofits and nonprofits need to think more like for-profits and we need kind of that mix because when you're a nonprofit, it's hard to scale, it's hard to make an impact cuz you're always looking for ways to fund yourself. You can't get those investors, you rely on philanthropy or, or different activities that you have. And from the business perspective, sometimes you just get so much into the. Business side of things that you don't really care about everything going on around you, so you need that middle. But of course, the middle is not attractive for the moment because it makes it too risky for, for whether it's philanthropists or investors to say like, mm. He's not gonna be fully committed to the business because he's looking to help other people. Or in some cases, like, ooh, he's trying to make money, so the impact is not going to be there. So it, it's a bit tricky, but ideally, what we've loved is to have that middle structure where we can do the profit side, while also focusing on, on helping people as much as we can. Yeah. And in terms of challenges,
Peter:right? So we, I think everybody has already covered a couple of them, but. What challenges major pain points exist for seaweed at the moment?
Antoine:I
Peter:think we've covered things like supply, but is there anything else in particular that's crops up as, as like a big challenge that
Antoine:we need to fix? I mean, the supply chain is a good area to start in saying how can we optimize it in the sense that on one side we need producers that have a long term vision saying we're not just gonna jump ourselves into producing seaweed. We need to think the entire supply chain through on the other side, I think we need to. In some cases, we, we should have a bit more commitment from the corporates in supporting cer certain initiatives. Not necessarily from like an investment point of view, but in some cases from an r and d point of view. Because when we have partnerships between a small seaweed producer sometimes and a large corporate, the corporate says, okay, well you do all the research, you do all the things, and when you have an idea, just come back to us and we'll talk. When in reality, I mean the big corporate could do that work in, in half the time with all the teams they have and actually probably get a better understanding of the question because they have a more holistic view of how the market works. So this is where I see probably a bit more collaboration and things moving in the right direction. Linking to academia, I think is essential. A lot of scientists are passionate about seaweed, but that always remain in that. Test phase and don't try to create something out of it, which is a shame because there's plenty of brilliant minds in this space. From a marketing point of view, I think we have enough. I think people are starting to understand the right things. The message is starting to pass, which is good because there's plenty of ambassadors doing their work. And now it's just how do we get, how do we get to work? For me, that's the big question. How do we get to work seriously and how do we make successful business models that will attract investors that will de-risk so that there's other, other industries that can join us. And, and also linking DC with industry to other sectors such as, you know, fishing, tourism energy, all these different ones because there's so much competition in the ocean space as well that seaweed can't work alone. You, you need to work with the others. You need to be smart about it. Yeah,
Enrico:Is there an obvious step that everyone's missing for now?
Antoine:Well, there's, you know, people are claiming the chicken and the egg thing where, you know, we're not producing cause there's no buyers. There's no buyers. No one's producing. So the, I I think the, the reason for this is in the middle, it's very opaque. There's a lot of intermediaries. In some cases, there's a huge lack of transparency about how things work, how the pricing works, how the standards are operated between all these different partners. And I think this is slowing down because. From a producer perspective, you don't know what's, how the actual process goes above you, and when you're the end buyer, like, I do not know how the seaweed came to me, or I don't know how it really works. So I think there's a huge work to actually understand clearly how the middle, the, the middle section of the supply chain works in making it more transparent. Of course, it's gonna be super tricky because, There's so much to lose But I think transparency is going to help massively for the industry to move forward and afterwards, as I said, regarding the project in Tunisia, it's not for one company to do everything. Vertical integration can work, but probably in the long term. But in the first step it's identifying the right partners. With whom you can build this vision with and build the supply chain with as a start. Because I mean, starting a seaweed business is very expensive.
Peter:What's your take on vertical integration? You're saying long-term, yes, you need the financing, but there is like this big. Conflict of opinion here. Some folks are like, we need it. Others are like, it's not realistic. Is there a, a, a middle ground? What do you think about that?
Antoine:So there, there is a big debate between vertical integration locally or, you know, globalization model where you import you, you import everything from, you know, developing countries and. Can you process everything somewhere else? I think there, there's not one single solution. I think you need to adapt to the needs and the challenges locally. If you're in a remote area with very little infrastructure, with very little space, there is ways to do primary processing, but then rapidly export to somewhere as close as possible to do the rest. That's logical. However, if you're in a space with a lot of r and d a lot of industry, a lot of people like that. Why bother selling it elsewhere when you can develop a local business, a local strategy, and develop everything locally so that everyone benefits from it. So, once again, it's just about the vision and understanding the local, the local assets that you can have at your disposal. And in terms of
Peter:enterprises that you've mentioned, a couple of companies that you think could getting pretty big in the next couple of years, is there anyone in particular that you're like, oh, these guys have a great team, I'm definitely gonna follow them in the future. Who, who in particular has caught your eye?
Antoine:For me, it's too early to tell it. It's really still too early. I mean, a lot of these businesses are still super small. A lot of them are promising. I could get a view, a very huge list of promising businesses, but I think it's too early to tell if, you know, things are going to be working in the, in the right way or not. It's very promising. I meet, I meet constantly, plenty of entrepreneurs and seaweed growers, you know, that are forward thinking that have this good vision of the seaweed industry, that they're, they're in there for the long, the, the long haul, and saying that we're not here for five years. We're really here to build a long-term business, and they're looking to build applications linked to all this. So I'm not scared about the, the different types of companies. I think there's so much amazing stuff going around. But it's still, or too early to tell. Maybe Hatch will know a bit more.
Peter:We'll have to ask Karlotta and NItzan if they'll and, and, okay. I dunno, we've already covered failures, right. But I really wanted to hear how that ties into advice and potentially some literature that you've come across over the years that you would've gifted to your younger self starting out five years ago.
Antoine:Younger self. I'm still pretty young, so there's not many years to, there's not many years to teach. But from a book perspective in the seaweed space, there's not one book that inspires me. There's plenty of amazing reports but people just need to search according to their needs. I, I wouldn't recommend reading these huge 30 page, 40, 50 page reports. Sometimes that can be a bit daunting. I think once again, I'm a huge fan of history and also philosophy. I prefer reading those books because they teach us more about the human mindset and, and mistakes of the past. And strangely you see history repeat itself very often, so it allows us to have a, a broader perspective of things and, and go beyond seaweed.
Peter:Any examples of history and philosophy books?
Antoine:I'm a big fan of Marcus Aurelius, so. Little shout out to him, even though Yeah. You know, he, he's very old. it's almost two it's almost 2000 years old and, and it's, it's almost as if it was written yesterday. The, the human mind hasn't changed much and there's still a lot of work to be done. And I think by focusing on these different aspects, What I was saying, changing the mind before changing the society and changing the technology. I think that's the way to go.
Enrico:As it happens, I'm also currently reading that, but I'm a very slow reader, so I, I've been reading,
Peter:the slowest reader in history.
Enrico:I, I'm the slowest reading two years. Be reading that book.
Antoine:Oh, I'm not gonna spoil the yet then, how did you bring your team together for seaweed first? Obviously you have, you come from this super family working in seaweed Biomarine. but was it very organic? You coming together with your brother with seaweed first more or less, yeah. The, my brother, he ended his job and he was working as an analyst in the Navy. And he, he was really hooked up with seaweed because he was working in he was working in South America at the time, so, He was starting to see all the Sargassum story, so he saw a huge interest in that. So he joined me afterwards. And regarding the others that joined we just started talking and we matched. We were like, wait, we have the, we're thinking the same. And so we started talking and that, that's how they got on board. We have Rachel who's part of the team. She's amazing. And yeah, that's mostly how it happened. We just talked and we were like, There's something here. Yeah. So do, do you have, when you have family meetups and you have dinner, you guys are bombing great ocean ideas. is it all very high level thinking philosophy about the oceans? Or, or is it kind of, you always talk about seaweed too much. Let's chill out. Let's, let's Just talk about food for a bit. I'd like to say yes, but no. I mean of, of course we, I mean, we talk, we talk about the oceans because we're all more or less into that sector, so we kind of catch up from time to time. But no, thankfully we talk about some, a lot of other things or else it would be. It would be hard. It would be hard. Peter and I, Peter and I would love to say that we only talk about seaweed as well, but we just talk about what's the biggest newt you've seen in the pond kind of thing. yeah. I often find that sometimes if someone brings up seaweed, it's like, okay, I'm spending all my time looking at seaweed. Sometimes I do need a little bit of a break. Can we talk about football? Something like giant Salamanders? Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and work. Working as a family is something. Amazing on one side, but also very challenging because you know, you know the people by heart. You know what their defects are, you know what, how, what their strong suits are. And so in some cases you can be less tolerant to certain things.
Peter:You see the f-bombs? I was dropping a lot of f-bombs on Enrico before this cuz they recording my WiFi's, messing up. sweet as, I mean we've covered so much today, Antoine, where can people find you as well? What's the best place for people to find you? Well, they can come to or bayan in the BA country in France if they wanna meet physically because it's a beautiful place. And always happy to talk seaweed there. But apart from that, no. We have the website and always happy to, to talk about seaweed at the oceans with anybody. So shout out to anybody interested in talking. And yeah, thank you for the opportunity. It was great speaking with you guys as always. And yeah, thank you very much. Thanks. That was, that was great fun.