Innovative Financing for Climate Solutions and Water Infrastructure | Liquid Assets Podcast
Innovative financing models are essential for the development and scaling of sustainable infrastructure, particularly in the climate tech sector.
Traditional funding methods often fall short, leaving breakthrough technologies struggling to achieve large-scale deployment. To address this challenge, new approaches are emerging that enable climate tech innovators to retain more equity while accelerating their projects' growth, especially those ready for commercial deployment beyond the pilot stage.
In this episode, Liquid Assets host, Ravi Kurani speaks with Wayne Byrne, a seasoned entrepreneur with 19 years of experience in cleantech and climate tech. As the founder of Method Capital, Byrne shares his insights on bridging the gap between promising technologies and their wide-scale adoption. His company’s unique financing model emphasizes the importance of building strong teams, fulfilling investor commitments, and positioning technologies as the least risky options in conservative markets. This strategy has proven particularly effective in risk-averse sectors like water treatment.
The discussion also delves into the unique challenges faced by the water sector, where scaling innovative technologies often encounters resistance. Byrne shares the success story of a wastewater treatment solution that pivoted from a containerized approach to a drop-in application, enabling rapid capacity increases with minimal infrastructure changes.
Additionally, emerging contaminants in water treatment, such as PFAS and other hard-to-detect pollutants, are identified as critical issues. Throughout the conversation, the importance of innovative thinking and a multidisciplinary approach to solving complex environmental problems is emphasized. By leveraging creative financing and strategic pivots, climate tech solutions can overcome barriers and achieve meaningful impact on a global scale.
What you'll hear in this episode:
- The challenges of scaling climate technologies, especially in the risk-averse water sector
- How Method Capital is bridging the gap between innovation and large-scale deployment
- The importance of team building and making credible promises in early-stage startups
- Strategies for becoming the "least risk option" in conservative markets
- The future of emerging contaminants and water treatment technologies
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Meet Wayne
Meet Wayne Byrne, a seasoned entrepreneur and innovator in the climate tech space. With over 19 years of experience, Wayne has navigated the evolving landscape from cleantech to climate tech, founding and successfully exiting four startups along the way. His journey has taken him from software to waste management, renewable energy, and finally to water technology, giving him a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities in sustainable infrastructure.
As the founder of Method Capital, Wayne is revolutionizing how climate solutions are funded and deployed. Drawing from his experiences as a founder, he recognized the critical gap between developing innovative technologies and scaling them for real-world impact. This insight led him to create a financing model that allows climate tech innovators to retain more equity while accelerating the deployment of their solutions.
Wayne's approach combines the acumen of a successful entrepreneur with the vision of a climate advocate. His ability to identify promising technologies, understand market dynamics, and structure innovative financing deals makes him a valuable voice in the fight against climate change. Wayne's journey exemplifies the power of being a generalist in a rapidly evolving field, allowing him to connect the dots across industries and drive meaningful change.
Transcript
00:00
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to Liquid Assets. I am your host, Ravi Kurani. Liquid Assets is a podcast where we talk about the intersection of business, policy and technology, all as it looks at water.
00:12
Wayne Byrne
You can't build a bridge until you build a bridge where you start and the team you start with is really going to set the pace for whether the company is going to be successful or not. And I used to really envy people who were great at something, whether it was music or whether it was. I desperately would have loved to have one thing in my life that I was truly expert at. But I suppose with the passing of time, I have begun to realize that actually being a generalist is an advantage and has been advantageous to me in my life. My name is Wayne Byrne. I am involved in both climate, infrastructure and water, and very much looking forward today, to spending time talking to Ravi about my experiences and sharing some thoughts and views about my journey.
01:03
Ravi Kurani
Wayne, how are you doing?
01:05
Wayne Byrne
Good, good. Thanks so much for having me, Ravi.
01:07
Ravi Kurani
Of course. Thank you. I think this one was one of my cold LinkedIn outreaches. I was just like, hey, Wayne, you look like an awesome guy. I need to have on the podcast. I'd love to have you on. We were having an extremely insightful conversation. Before I hit the record button, I want to dive into the first thing here around innovative financing for climate solutions. So you have founded method capital. Let's just dive into that. Talk us through what is method? What are you looking at investing in? And one of the questions and why this kind of came up was I asked you were in Sweden. I was like, hey, are you at World Water Week? You made this statement to the effect of the real innovators are not at the big events. You're having to turn over stones at the fringe events.
01:53
Ravi Kurani
So if you can walk through also, what is the process that you use in finding these innovative companies as well?
01:58
Wayne Byrne
Yeah, no problem at all. Maybe just to qualify. I don't mean to say for one moment that there aren't amazing innovators at the mainstream events. It's just in terms of the stage at which I'd like to catch them is typically more appropriate when I go to somewhat the fringe events in North America or Europe. So it's really just, I suppose, an opportunity to intercept with. Founders are maybe at a point where they're more open to, I suppose, potential investments or potential reconsideration of how they maybe go to market if alternative forms of capital were available. In terms of maybe a kind of a lead in what might be useful to some of your listeners is for me to characterize as to how I got here with meta capital. So I suppose maybe just a quick tour.
02:46
Wayne Byrne
In terms of my own founder history, I've been in the cleantech or climate tech space now for about 19 years, and they didn't call it that back then, I don't think. Anyway, I moved actually out of the software sector into what I considered a more tangible career path. Wanted to get involved in kind of waste utility. I had an opportunity to get involved in a waste business. Waste took me into waste energy, waste to energy took me into renewables, mainly biogas, both on the project development side and the operation side, principally with clean feedstocks. Got curious then about alternative feedstocks, which kind of took me down the water rabbit hole as I was thinking about how waste sludges could be used as a form of feedstock for anaerobic systems.
03:37
Wayne Byrne
And yeah, I spent the next 1314 years in water and wastewater with, I suppose, early stage ventures and scale ups, and ultimately finished off on clean water. Photonics, actually. And the one thing I realized during the kind of, when I looked back at my career path, I had been reasonably successful in terms of raising capital for various ventures, and I was very fortunate to have exited out of four of them. And my last exit was a company called Oxymem, and it was to Dupont. And I realized that actually getting a technology to tier online, that's really challenging, right? But it's nothing like the challenge that lies ahead when you want to commercialize specifically on an international basis. It's really difficult to secure those beach heads and ultimately maintain the momentum that's expected by your bunder.
04:35
Wayne Byrne
And that can be quite grueling on your balance sheet. And so when I reflected back at many of those founder journeys, I realized that actually, I took a real hammering as a founder as I used up my balance sheet capital or my hard earned or hard fought equity to fund projects in order to meet the test of, you can't build a bridge until you've built a bridge. And so I really started thinking about how I wasn't the only one, and that there probably was a better way, or certainly another way to help innovators who had got past first of a kind and were thinking about how they might take their solution on a kind of an exponential trajectory.
05:19
Wayne Byrne
And I think was saying to before we even started the quote, the conventional wisdom feels an awful lot more like incremental growth, and that in a time of crisis like we are now, I just feel that incremental scale up is not compelling when the crisis is looming as large as it is. So I came together with three other co founders and we really started to think about how we could reimagine scaling capital for deployment infrastructure. And that's really how method capital was born. We, and we're effectively a broker model. So it's not our own fund that we're tapping into. We work typically with large article nine funds that are open to the possibility that there are compelling innovators out there with fantastic project irors, that under a very strict construct, could represent a very good return on capital for a relatively low risk.
06:18
Wayne Byrne
And so essentially, this strict construct effectively moves away from the idea that you need to come up with 30 or 40% of the project equity. And in fact, there are funders out there that will fund 100% of the project. But in order to do that, you have to step back from the conventional kind of asset model and you have to think about contracted cash flows. And so we ultimately build our thesis around the fact that there are end users and off takers that really are willing to enter into long term meaningful contracts, or a very compelling outcome that ultimately is being delivered by that piece of infrastructure. That's essentially how the business was born. We started with a single funder, and today we actually have forum. We're currently fifth.
07:07
Wayne Byrne
And it does seem to resonate really well with climate innovators who really don't want to or want to retain as much of the equity as they possibly can. That's how it was born.
07:20
Ravi Kurani
That's super interesting. I'd love to actually unpack a little bit on how the model works, because it's not your typical venture capital model, as you were mentioning. Can you walk us through maybe a tactical example of a product that has built something that's going to go into infrastructure and how that works from what are the parties that play there? Where does the financing move, where do the dollars move from and to, and how does the project get implemented?
07:46
Wayne Byrne
Yeah, I can give you a fairly simple overview, I suppose, in terms of the construct that I was describing at the moment, we can typically deploy capital in Europe, North America and the Middle east. We're typically looking at ticket sizes of between five and 100 million. Although 100 million isn't necessarily a limitation. The counterparty does need to be tier one. So in other words, they can't be a credit risk profile. The inputs and the outputs for any project, I suppose, need to be locked down for the term of the debt. The term of the debt is typically ten years, albeit it could be shorter if the project IRR supported it, the IRRS that we would need that project to deliver would be a minimum of sort of 15, 16%. Not, that's the cost of the capital.
08:35
Wayne Byrne
It's a service fee that ultimately our funders need to make a targeted IRR against, and they want to ensure that the appropriate debt service coverage ratios can be met. So on a 15% to 16% project IRR, that can be achieved, and on the basis that is forthcoming, we really just need two other elements. One would be that it isn't the first, so it's a race to be second. So we need something in the field that effectively we can, I suppose, run technical diligence against and effectively assess that on a modular basis. It could be scaled to meet the needs of that particular project. I'll give you a monetary kind of bench baseline.
09:20
Wayne Byrne
If they had a million dollar project in the field, we're not willing to take technical risk, but we would take scale risk, would look at a ten to $20 million project off the back of a million dollar installation, and that is typically how that kind of hangs together.
09:37
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, really interesting. And so if I just understand this correctly, you're looking at a 15% IRR, ten year term on, if a company has come, you want to be second, not first. If you have a million dollar pilot, you can basically ten to 20 x on the scale of that particular pilot from a commercial skill perspective, not necessarily a technological risk perspective.
09:59
Wayne Byrne
Yeah. I mean, look, there's no question but that there's some technical risk. But if the technology's been deployed and we can run diligence against a deployment ourselves, comfortable as to what the level of risk is. Sorry, I met in terms of. You were asking about the mobilization. It worked on a kind of ten plus two basis, so we account for sort of 18 to 24 months mobilization. So that's rolled into kind of cost of capital. So it's infrastructure, after all. So we would typically not deploy capital against anything that isn't going to take a minimum of eight to ten months to deploy, but more typically 18 to 24 months.
10:41
Ravi Kurani
Sure, sure. That makes sense. Okay. And what projects are we seeing that currently fit this mold in today's. In today's world? Right. Given the fact that you basically need to have a pilot that's out there, your five to 100 million kind of put a project at a minimum of about one to 3 million in just initial pilot. What kind of technologies are we seeing that are in this realm?
11:04
Wayne Byrne
It's really, the gambit is actually inordinately wide. I certainly would say that what's particularly hot at the moment is paralysis, projects char is when high demand. It's an excellent form of carbons, without getting into specifics, but I've seen quite a number of variants in terms of the feedstocks, which is quite interesting. And I know paralysis has been around for a very long time, but some of the newer applications are quite interesting. I would say that factory models are something that we've started to explore in a lot more detail in the last 18 months. That's effectively where the offtake that's been created is being created in a facility, not necessarily on a client side, but the output is in demand from usually a single, or maybe a small number of tier one counterparties. They're much more challenging to fund.
11:59
Wayne Byrne
I would say that it's because the market is really just warming up to the idea. They tend to be quite bespoke. They're not producing a commodity, they're producing a very specific and tailored product, but that it's in high demand usually has very compelling carbon credentials using interesting inputs and so on and so forth. A lot of the more typical, I suppose, clean tech or climate tech applications that you might associate us with it are not things that we pursue. Like we don't do anything in solar anaerobic, we don't do anything in wind, basically because they're very well proven, well worn path to debt that's typically sub 10%, and our debt can't ultimately reach to that.
12:45
Wayne Byrne
So it does tend to be the, I suppose the more emergent technologies service in that space, and that could be alternative chemical compounds, it could be heat storage, but at relatively large scale, there's really a kind of a whole myriad of opportunities. To give you an example, today we're tracking about 550 companies, and they're all at various scale and stages. And our sales cycle is relatively long because we like to go early, we like to engage early. So there's many companies that we're engaging with, for instance, that are just coming out of the university, and we know it's going to be at least three years before there's an opportunity to partner with them against a project that has the type of scale that our partners are interested in.
13:36
Wayne Byrne
But to position our offering at this stage makes an awful lot of sense for us and for them. And so we stay in regular contact with very high touch, and that approach seems to have served us well, particularly as we see people coming back to us after maybe long engagements that have now said we've got to a point now where we really have a very exciting scale that we think you can help us with. So it's very nice to see.
14:03
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, that totally makes sense. I want to flip the script a little bit and go back to the other side of the line. Right. You had mentioned that you had exited four startups, you helped raise money at the early stages, get the company to this point of kind of pilot, but then obviously the point of scaling. Right. Getting capital to scale was the biggest issue, which is very clearly where method fits in. If we look at the inversion of that in the first kind of half of what the equation looks like, can you walk us through mostly from the founder mindset? I think it's really interesting to see what are some rules.
14:43
Ravi Kurani
Like you said, you had a lot of times where there was a lot of stress on you from the balance sheet perspective, also from raising capital, and probably just really interesting strategic and technical changes you've made, too. I think it's always interesting to get into a founder's mind. Is there anything that comes to surface on ideas or any sort of tips for founders out there that are in those early stages?
15:06
Wayne Byrne
Yeah, for sure. And sometimes it might seem obvious with the benefit of hindsight, but sometimes to just articulate it is useful, certainly. Look, from the earliest days, when you are taking a project or a company to market, certainly the thing that is most important at that stage is the team, and the team may only be one or two people, but that really is the thing that ultimately is going to make that a compelling investment. Ultimately, any company that's acquired is really just an aggregation of the human capital that exists within us and ultimately contributes to make a really compelling business. The technology is interesting and often important, but it is not essential. And so I think that where you start and the team you start with is really going to set the pace for whether the company is going to be successful or not.
16:04
Wayne Byrne
And it's certainly a core thesis to burnt Island Ventures, which I support. Obviously, from a venture partner perspective, we very much look at the people involved, because we're assessing companies at a pre seed level, and at that point, there really isn't an awful lot to assess. You have maybe a great idea. It's not necessarily been validated even at a lab or pilot scale. So it's very early. So the people you surround yourself with are probably going to have a profound effect on whether or not you're going to be successful. Once the journey started, I would say that I would logically break it up into you're going to make a series of promises.
16:45
Wayne Byrne
When you source your capital initially from your friends, fools, family, they're very early believers that you're effectively saying, look, we're going to do this particular, these things in a given timeframe, and the capital will ultimately determine how long that will last and whether and what resources you can pull into that early timeframe. If you make and meet or come close to achieving the objectives that you set for yourself, well, then actually it makes the next round of capital raise a lot easier. And so your track record that you're building in terms of making promises against a capital sum for a time frame becomes a cadence that ultimately will dictate whether or not you can continue to execute successfully based on that model. And it really is actually that simple.
17:35
Wayne Byrne
Investors are, you're looking to see how credible you are based on what you did previously, and they're trying to assess themselves whether it's achievable. I mean, there's always certain, there's tolerances built in, maybe 20% more capital than you think you do, or maybe you need a little bit more time than you think you did. But that's the game, right? And I think so long as you understand that it is sort of a series of stepping stones or milestones, it makes it easier to compartmentalize the steps that you're taking.
18:08
Ravi Kurani
I love this idea of a series of promises because you're so right in that sense. Right. You're making a promise to deploy a technology or get to a particular milestone, and that's going to require x amount of capital given z tolerance. When you look at the team and kind of the people that you first came into the room with at your first four startups, two questions there. What are mistakes that you've made that you can talk about and maybe even turn those into tips? These are things that I look for when I find a co founder, or these are the particular elements or traits that I like or don't like, even from a funding standpoint. Any thoughts there?
18:46
Wayne Byrne
Well, I mean, maybe water specifically. I know it's a, it's easily trotted out. It always takes longer and always costs more, but I don't think that's ever been truer when it comes to water. And I think that the, when I entered into the water space, I was pretty naive, certainly was not someone who'd spent a very long time in it. And maybe the naive got me through. But there's such a level of risk aversion that's associated with water and wastewater, and certainly I can empathize and understand, because there's the custodians of our pension funds and they're, I suppose, between us and a healthy outcome, particularly on the potable water side of things. So I do absolutely guess that their nature has to be no risk averse.
19:33
Wayne Byrne
So I think what I learned along the way was that you didn't just have to be, I suppose, more compelling, more cost effective, more efficient, smaller footprint, et cetera. You actually have to be the least risk option, if that makes any sense. And that took me a long time to figure out, actually, and to get to a position where you represent the least risk option, that's very challenging. So if you're really going to challenge the status quo, well, then actually it has to take risk into consideration. And I don't think that you can waste for 200 installations and ten or 15 years to pass. I mean, the need is pressing. So how do you build a go to market model that represents a lower risk option than conventional best available technology?
20:32
Wayne Byrne
I think if you can crack that, you really can move quickly in water. And I think certainly with the time that I spent scaling up oxymem and with my team, once we aligned around that kind of fact, we made an awful lot more progress a lot more quickly.
20:52
Ravi Kurani
That's such anthetical statement. Right? Because the market in which you're launching into is inherently risk averse, like you just said. And by very nature, building technology is just risky because you're challenging status quo. How did you do that at oxymen? What was that shift that you made that kind of helped you turn from something that was incremental to exponential?
21:15
Wayne Byrne
Yeah, I mean, I don't think I ever managed to achieve exponential, by the way, with oxymen. I do think we beat the odds in terms of the time to get to, I suppose, a stable market conditions and find ourselves being in a position to be acquired by a Fortune 100 business. So, I mean, we did that inside of around six and a half years, which was. That was pretty fast. Paul O'Callan would certainly make the argument that it takes around 16 years to do that, to become a mainstream water technology. And I don't think he's wrong, actually. So that's a. It's a good read. And I think that's what, that's the cautionary tale that everyone needs to read before they go into water. I think. I think that.
22:01
Wayne Byrne
I think that what we changed in our commercial model or our technical approach was that we moved away from the idea that actually we would be a turnkey, plug and play containerized solution that would have high impact, small footprint, very low energy, et cetera, it seemed very compelling. And the containerized systems market is a very big market. But it was certainly through our collaboration with Xylem that they really helped us focus on the idea that actually, if we can convert our solution to be a drop in application for medium to large scale wastewater treatment plants, then actually that would be hugely impactful in terms of incrementally scaling the treatment capacity of a plant. And we did fight them on the idea. We certainly didn't believe that it was possible to convert our product into something that could be a drop in application.
23:06
Wayne Byrne
But, you know, when you're in the fields or when you're in battle, you figure things out that you didn't think were ordinarily possible. And sometimes it's luck. And if you're looking for an observing innovation or observing for it when it occurs, well, then you can be very lucky. And we certainly, we had an opportunity when we realized during a deployment that actually we had overcome the impediment that allowed us to go into a full scale wastewater treatment tank.
23:36
Wayne Byrne
And that was a game changer for us, because now we could offer a solution where, you know, a customer running a 20,000 population equivalent plant, who needed to increase their capacity because there was maybe more people living in the area, or because the a regulator had increased their discharge limits, you could literally give them, in 48 hours, the capacity to increase the plant by five or 10% if they wanted to, or 40% if they chose to. And conventional wisdom with activated sludge was that once you built it out, ten years later, when an extra 5000 people had moved into the area, or more industry, or whatever it was you added in another lane, or we increased the capacity of the plant by another 50%. And that was a big mobilization project that people planned for five or six years.
24:28
Wayne Byrne
And it was a big civil undertaking. And we changed that radically. And we did it in a way that was, we didn't interfere with the current processes. We could literally drop it in, give that additional capacity, which should be up and running and functional from a biological standpoint, 30 days. And if the customer expectations weren't met or the performance guarantees weren't met, we could be on site taking the units in 48 hours if they wanted us to. So. And it didn't interfere with operational capacity at all. So we became the least risk option. We became the lowest cost option. And I think that's why MavR has become pervasive in the world. Today.
25:08
Ravi Kurani
And what was the model before you worked with Xylem? How were you initially thinking about it before you made this kind of plug and play sort of model?
25:16
Wayne Byrne
We originally believed that our system was going to go to market based on a kind of a packaged system. So if you needed a 2000 or 5000 or 10,000 pop plant, we could build it on a turnkey basis in our factory and ship it to site and literally plug in your feed and your power, and away you went. And so were very much focused on the smaller end of the marketplace. We saw modularity in our design, but there was a lot of naivety associated with that. But as we deployed and tested the model, we started to realize that we could be more and more impactful with the membranes that were producing. But the real impact came when we get into kind of the medium to large scale plants.
26:01
Ravi Kurani
It's so interesting you say that, because I actually interviewed Julie from Eclarity on the podcast as well, and you're ahead. Your kind of narrative here of what you did with oxymem is very similar to the way that she explained her model and PFAS with eclarity. And so it just. Yeah, I think you're on the board as well, right? Of clarity.
26:21
Wayne Byrne
That's right, Jen.
26:22
Ravi Kurani
Yeah.
26:23
Wayne Byrne
Interesting. It's a super compelling business, and certainly when it comes to PFAS destruction, they're right at the leading edge of kind of best available technology for PFAS destruction. But the macro market, if you like, was new, it's early, it's still, from a regulatory perspective, unclear how it's all going to play out. But what I love about their technology is the fact that it's accepted by the market that electroxidation is the most compelling way to destroy pfas. But the market also believes that it's probably the most expensive. And I think the challenge for clarity is for them to convey to the install or to the potential customers or integrators that actually the market's right, that it's the most compelling way to destroy pfas, but it's actually not the most costly. It certainly doesn't follow the cost base that the market believes it does.
27:20
Wayne Byrne
And the only way that will be done is by demonstrating at scale in the field that this is a super efficient technology, and then to run all of the variants that you're going to see with siding process trains that the guys are involved in. So it's when you're in the field, that's when the exciting innovation really takes place into the applied stuff. So, yeah, I'm excited for them.
27:43
Ravi Kurani
Which actually zooms up to this headline of emerging contaminants. We were talking earlier about your kind of interest in exploring that space as well. Outside of PFAS, is there anything else that you're looking at coming down the road, or is PFAS the only one? Where is your kind of head at there?
27:58
Wayne Byrne
I think if you look just in broad terms anyway, what the European Union are doing and what's going on in North America, I mean, we're looking at. It's often categorized as tertiary four. There is a myriad of contaminants that, first of all, we don't actually have the appropriate technologies to measure, but if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So certainly the diagnostic side of what's in our wastewater is a critical component to ultimately resolving how we're going to treat it and to what standard or level it needs to be treated. So I suppose I've been tracking this for a number of years, and I've been, I mean, a little bit appalled as to how long it's taking us to crack some of these nuts, which things like pharmaceuticals, person's care products, pesticides, fertilizers.
28:47
Wayne Byrne
I mean, there is a whole range of pollutants that we should be concerned about that's entering into our bathing waters, our drinking waters. And certainly, even on the potable side, there's limits to what can ultimately be screened for or treated. And so therefore, I think we're up against a kind of a potential trust issue as well. Because if your consumers don't believe that they've got a high quality drinking water now, they're going to move to maybe alternatives that aren't so compelling from an environmental perspective. I certainly don't think there's any more room in the world for more plastic bottles. So I think it's important that actually, we build that trust in what I described already as an incredibly risk averse market. But I think we need to get ahead of that faster, and so I think there's great solutions.
29:32
Wayne Byrne
I think the regulation, though, is lagging behind in terms of defining what the problems are, what requirements should be on the treatment operators, and what requirements should be on the providers of clean water in order to reinforce the trust that needs to exist there.
29:52
Ravi Kurani
Wayne, I think your background is so diverse. Right when you opened up the episode, you said you've gone from software to wastewater to waste energy to biogas to feed. That then got you into water. I love asking, actually, people with a really diverse background of hindsight 2020. When you look back at even to as back as your upbringing or you growing up, is there anything that you look at now that has had an outward effect on the way that you look at the world, look at what you're doing with method and just trace your journey back? Is there anything that comes to mind there?
30:29
Wayne Byrne
Yeah, I mean, I used to. I often get confused for lots of things. I get confused for a finance person or an engineer. And truthfully, I'm none of the above. And I often say I'm a generalist, a little bit good at everything, but great at nothing. And I used to really envy people who were great at something, like really, like desperately, whether it was music or whether it was matics or. I desperately would have loved to have one thing in my life that I was truly expert at. But I suppose, you know, with the passing of time, I have begun to realize that actually being a generalist is an advantage and has been advantageous to me in my life, and as a consequence, has allowed me to. To be able to move through multiple markets and be successful there.
31:18
Wayne Byrne
So I suppose I didn't realize that certainly 20 plus years ago that would be an edge or an advantage. I see that now, and maybe it would have been better to know it back then.
31:30
Ravi Kurani
Wayne, it's a final question that I ask everybody on the episode. Is there a book or a show or a movie that has had a profound impact on the kind of way that you look at the world or the world of water or the world of climate? I always like to put this on the show notes because people love to pick up the books or watch the shows that we have, that our guests watch.
31:52
Wayne Byrne
Yeah, that's a tough one. I actually, I mean, I think that if I was to think about someone who has been in your, the background and someone who certainly resonates. I have four children, someone who seems to resonate with those. And certainly I never thought really about it until my kids started pointing it out. But we watched an awful lot of David Attenborough. Maybe as we, as the kids are growing up, we seem to really find that an engaging way to spend a bit of time as a family. And as the kind of climate crisis grew and developed, he really had this kind of very special connection with a different generation.
32:29
Wayne Byrne
And I suppose that it does make me sad when I think about it and what he's brought to the fore and ultimately, how my children respond to his calls for the world to take a different path. So I think that is certainly a man that has stood out in my life and has been present and shows that myself and my family have watched over the years that I think has had a profound impact. But I didn't realize it until probably the last, maybe ten years.
33:00
Ravi Kurani
I like that. I love David Attenborough. Yeah, he is. He has a really amazing way of connecting with his audience and connecting with the message and the material that he's presenting.
33:11
Wayne Byrne
Yeah, for sure.
33:13
Ravi Kurani
Wayne, thanks a ton for coming on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure having you here.
33:17
Wayne Byrne
Excellent. Well, listen, thank you so much for having me, Ravi.
33:20
Ravi Kurani
And for all of those of you out there listening, you can find liquid assets wherever you listen to your podcast. You can find a. Find us on YouTube. We now have an Instagram and a TikTok channel where we actually piece together parts of this interview so you can watch them in bite sized chunks. Until next time, again, I'm your host, Ravi Kurani, and you've been listening to liquid assets. Thanks again.