Transcript

Matt Heine (MH):

Ben, welcome to the show.

Ben Krasnostein (BK):

Thanks, Matt. It's great to be here.

 MH:

Always really interested to hear, how is it that you ended up doing what you're doing?

BK:

It's been a long, quite unconventional career progression, one might say. Not necessarily focused on investment management to start with. Started off down a typical pathway through university and graduated law and commerce and all of those generic things back in the day and probably spent a fair bit of time... Well, I was going to say probably too much time post-uni, travelling the world and experiencing things and that led me down different pathways.

I remember actually went to the articles interviews at Mallesons in the CBD in Melbourne and had done a summer clerkship there. Walked out and rang them as I was walking out and said, "Look, give up my spot if I'm going to get it to someone else, it's not for me." It wasn't. At that point in time, I wasn't ready to pursue a career straight out of uni into a big law firm. I wasn't inspired by it so left that behind much to the chagrin of family and others who thought that there's a square box for me to tick, which I didn't.

From there, pursued my own interests. Entered into a first marriage, had a child quite early so I was 26 when I had my first kid, and these days relatively young. Just explored my own journey and travelled a bit up and down the coast of Australia and ended up settling up in Northern New South Wales. From there pursued what I've referred to as Bohemian entrepreneurialism, which is I guess a phrase for pursuing one's own journey but focusing on how we can try to make the world a better place through commerce.

Did my own of self-funded activities up there. Ran a few small food businesses and that was great. Ended up helping another ex... Well, old friend of mine run a reasonable-size enterprise up there, which is a food production business. After probably three or four years of that, I decided that I was up for another intellectual challenge, went back to the law. Did my post-grad article, so to speak.

Ended up working in a law firm in a little old town in New South Wales, which was pretty awesome actually from an experiential point of view. That took me back full circle into doing property transactions and a whole range of legal matters which gave me a lot of experience just dealing with people and different circumstances and having to deal with clients with various issues from criminal law or family law and a range of other matters and set up my own little practise.

That was again a challenge. I think it's an interesting one, Matt, because I got to a point where I was constantly setting myself challenges and probably not letting myself settle into the flow enough. I recognised that probably in my early to mid-30s, I thought, "All right, you have to take stock because if you really want to make a difference and you really want to start to succeed commercially, you've got to stick to your guns a bit and back yourself and don't necessarily create hurdles where you don't need to."

I had a good look at my potential pathways and then decided to bring my skills and my client base from a legal point of view back to Melbourne. Teamed up with another mate I went to uni with. We essentially combined practises. It was a small boutique law firm just up here in Collins Street. From there I then progressed into general counsel roles, ended up in a general counsel role at funds management business, Impact Investment Group.

That was the start of a reawakening for me of the potential to combine profit and purpose. I'd always thought about how I could personally reconnect with the world around me and do something about some of the problems that I'd seen arising when it comes to land use and climate change and these things. Found myself then in a pretty senior position at a funds management business with my finger on the pulse and then was able to start to I guess realise my own, as I said, personal ambition to combine impact with profit.

That then led me to various discussions in that business. Got great experience leading deal teams and doing all sorts of transaction across renewables, VC, commercial property and then generally building team and culture. We sat down in that business to try to then create a new PE division that didn't work for various reasons. Well, actually just didn't work because the timing wasn't quite right.

There was even some internal fracas that led to that not working so I stepped out of there and set up Kilara where I am now, which is an investment management business focused on deep impact but also deep commercial returns at the same time.

 MH:

Ben, that's a fascinating journey and we'll come back to Kilara in a moment because you're doing some great work. Many of the guests that we've had on the show have typically built their career in large institutions and they talk about the mentors that they had or the people that they worked with. For many years there you were basically flying solo. I'm going to take a guess that Northern New South Wales was Byron Bay, would that be?

BK:

Yeah. Close to Byron. The law firm was in Mullumbimby, good old Mullum.

 MH:

What was it that motivated you and how did you stay motivated? What was the community around you at the time?

BK:

Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, the community there had and probably still does change and evolve pretty quickly. When I first went up there, it was early 2000s or even late '90s and it was still pretty raw and dominated by kind of... I don't say hippies because it wasn't so much that anymore. It's more of a generic term, but there was just a lot of transient people that went through there.

That was the real challenge because whilst there's a strong community or was a strong community when I was there, it was also quite transient so it was hard to lay your roots down and connect with people because then they were gone. Of course there wasn't a massive focus on entrepreneurialism or commercial outcomes or profit-seeking. Having said that, by the time I left there in 2010, the place had changed a lot.

As you probably know, the property bubble there continues to grow and grow and that was always a source of wealth for people. Then I think towards the late 2000s, so '07, '08/'9, some things started to happen there where people would be migrating from Sydney and Melbourne brought commercial ideas with them, the industrial parks and estate started to thrive and it became a hotbed of creativity and that started to then turn into people who were launching some pretty cool businesses out of there.

So I found from a law firm point of view, it was interesting because I was able to pick up clients who were pretty dynamic and I learned a bit about IP. Yeah. It was a great place to spend that time but when my time was up, it was up and I'd had my fill so to speak, and was very happy to come back to the big smoke. My roots are here. I got a lot of support when I came back from family and friends, so that was the other challenge up there because you are quite isolated.

 MH:

So having come back to Melbourne with that experience and starting Kilara you had an opportunity to basically start with a blank piece of paper. You've talked about deep purpose and also deep profit. What were some of the other things that were important to you when building a firm? You talked about setting the culture or building a culture. What was the culture you were trying to achieve?

BK:

Look, I think to an extent we're still not developing what that culture is, but we're creating systems to embed people in it, if that makes sense. I've set out to create an environment where it's very people-focused. It's people first. I'm a big believer that one of the greatest measures of success is being able to recruit people into a business that are smarter than you in certain areas. No one's going to be smarter than you always in everything you do and vice versa.

So I've tried to create a people-first culture. I'm probably a strong people person if that makes sense from a leadership point of view. There's others who have different skills. I focus on that. It's something I'm not scared of putting out there and hopefully people respond to that. I guess that's a way of saying we really try to focus on what motivates people and then also put the opportunity in front of people to create and share wealth.

I take a very strong partnership approach to the people that are in our business, whether that's becoming partners in various venture capital offerings or offering up equity stakes for people in the head count. I want to create an environment where people feel like they can create themselves. It's a bit of co-creation, people first, but also with very strong processes and not being scared about success and not being scared to talk about creation of wealth and creation of profits.

I think that's one of the potential points of difference for us. It's being able to be confident about two things. One, that it's okay to talk about both things together and two, to now show that we can do it and it's possible based on track record, which is, it's been hard for the, call it, for purpose sector I think to transition from that, call it, philanthropically minded motivation or attitude to be comfortable talking about achieving outcomes that have commercial returns.

In fact for us the last bit to that question, Matt, would be to say that we believe there's a flywheel effect at play here. I'm not sure that plays to culture, but it's a bit of philosophy. Impact and profit need each other and the more profitability or top line sales you have, the more impact you can have for the businesses we're investing in, so let's go after that and you should if you've done the right things in terms of embedding sustainability in your practises, see that flywheel take shape.

 MH:

We've had a couple of discussions on the show around impact and a number on ESG, so Kate Temby I think you might know, one of the Netwealth directors is very passionate about both impact and ESG. How do you distinguish or describe impact to potential investors and how do you really define it more broadly in the marketplace?

BK:

It's a good question. I think one way to think about it is it's a deeper version of ESG and ESG is a starting point and a very important starting point and provides the building blocks from which you can deepen your approach to investing and it really focuses... So that's one comment. I think impact and ESG are part of the same spectrum. I remember having some good chats with Kate about this. We build that spectrum and try and demonstrate what that looks like in the market.

I think ESG has been becoming a very widely adopted principle when it comes to reporting and embedding those practises in an organisation. I think when we look at it, we say to ourselves, "We need to do more," but at the same time we've got to make sure the products we put in the market are reflective of traditional commercial principles because they're one and the same. We don't separate being commercial from being impactful.

If we look at the spectrum and we put ESG on one side and deep impact on the other, or in fact before ESG you probably got what they used to call CSR, corporate social responsibility into ESG into some broader concept of sustainability, focusing on one of those really two environmental/social and then you've got different grades of impact. Yeah, I think it's part of the same spectrum.

I think the fact that ESG reporting and ESG intention is now being embedded in most business is a great thing, but I don't think there's a huge difference when it come... Well, there's a difference when it comes to the application of it, but I think investors and businesses don't need to be afraid of deepening their approach to this. We still need to develop taxonomies to determine what is impactful and what is not.

We still need to determine the reporting frameworks for discerning what is impact and what is ESG and what's the difference. We're getting closer, but we realise you do need to develop those taxonomies, you do need to develop the square boxes. You do need investors to be able to tick them. Again, that's what we're trying to work hard on, Matt. It's like we're not just saying impact investing is great.

Well, we're saying that and we're also saying we think we can create the boundaries pursuant to which investors from private high net worth all the way through to institutional can look at the same box and assess whether or not that works for their risk return profiles or reporting obligations and then provide those frameworks. That's very important to us. We're trying to create the rigidity around the system and then report on it back to people.

 MH:

One of the easiest ways I think for people to get their head around the difference maybe between impact and ESG or just what impact is, is to talk about some of the companies that you work with and that you partner with and invest with as that might bring it to life and I know something you're obviously passionate about.

BK:

With reference to the product that is in the market at the moment, which is our first private equity fund, growth fund, there's four companies in there that we define as impactful. We define them as impactful because we've got our screening process that we undertake, which is backfilled by globally-recognised protocols. I think that's another thing too, important recognise around impact. It's that we need to set standards that we all abide by and then we can compare ourselves to.

It's like an PE manager should be able to sit in front of investor and compare their financial returns and their multiples and at the same time you should be able to compare how you're delivering on your ESG or impact or how... Depending on where you're on the spectrum. Those four companies we think are all impactful. A good example is JET Charge. That's the latest investment we made working backwards.

That's a very exciting business EV charging infrastructure looking to develop into a slightly different model where they're able to control the assets that they have in the market and those assets are thousands of battery... Well, vehicle charging devices which then can control batteries in cars. They do a range of other things, but chances are if you've got an electric vehicle and someone's installed a charging station at your home for you, that it's these guys.

They've just got a great vision and version of how that mobility sector is going to evolve. They're building the infrastructure ahead of the transition and their fundamental premise is to do a few things including increase the uptake of renewables in the grid and electrify everything. Electrification of transport, electrification of homes, electrification of buildings, electrification of industrial processes they're massively important initiative to decarbonize our economy.

Those sectors, transport, housing, industrial and C&I account for a massive amount of our emissions. For us, our version of impact is really planetary which for us means carbon, greenhouse gas emissions and a range of other metrics. We say that businesses that are contributing to those outcomes are impactful. Another group might talk about, and there are plenty of others probably well-known to you that are doing things in the social arena.

Lots of social housing, lots of disability housing, lots of interesting health and medical tech that play to a more socially-minded investor or outcome. We like that stuff but that's not what our first fund's about. It's about the environmental/social planetary outcomes that we can achieve by investing in these types of companies, so JET Charge is a good one.

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MH:

Given that it's an unlisted private company, what's the typical structure or how are you investing into these businesses to make sure that they continue to perform as they should?

BK:

Just a structural piece here we like to take significant minority positions in these businesses, try and get board seats. Actually JET Charge is one where we've got an observer right rather than a board seat because we came in with a relatively small check and the valuation was a bit higher.

That was our slight tweak or quirk on that one but the reason we did that actually is because we've got well-established relationships into the founders and executive team and in fact our investment director who pulled that deal together was a former contract CFO to them. There was a range of other connections.

Point being we like to have significant minorities. We like to work with the guys and roll our sleeves up and get in there and advise them but also be sounding boards for them. We're not passive PE investors particularly for this first one. We, for example, recently based on... They've got a crunch in equities markets and valuations coming off private companies and all those things that you'd be seeing all the time.

We went in there... We're still in the process of it with one of the investing companies. We went in there and we sort of... Not demanded but really firmly suggested that we should be doing some scenario planning, which was a bit different to how they'd looked at it previously and they along with others were very responsive to that. We do like to establish those relationships so that we can then go in there, do some scenario planning and essentially it's about runway at the moment.

That was the core premise. Guys, we want four scenarios which demonstrate runway out 24 to 36 months based on various growth things happening or not happening. That was a challenge for some of these businesses because they'd never really had to think about it or didn't know how to think about it because we'd come out of a climate where money was cheap, there's plenty of it. Growth was what people were focused on, not fundamentals and not profit.

That's being a bit simple about it, but that was the core premise. So it's been a challenge in the last six months dealing with investee companies and saying, "Hey, we've got to talk about fundamentals, we've got to talk about runway, we've got to talk about resilience and balance sheet and this thing called profit." Luckily we're... That's a bit sarcastic.

I mean, we are investing at a later stage so we do expect that in these companies for this fund because we're focusing on more growth rather than earlier stage stuff. Yeah. It is remarkable how many founders out there are still scratching their heads as to how to make their companies profitable rather than revenue-focused.

 MH:

You've actually just finished a bit of work with Sayers on this exact topic we had Luke Sayers as in for the previous episode.

BK:

Oh wow.

 MH:

What were some of the key messages or takeaways from that particular booklet?

BK:

Yeah, following on from the great man, I'll let him know that we're back to back. Yeah, that's a great relationship we've got with the Sayers guys. We've been working closely with them for a while now on helping us scale these businesses. Yeah, the paper we did was a good one. We got our heads together and thought, "Well, what are the companies out there looking for when it comes to the advisory piece?" Which is where Sayers comes in, and, "What are they looking for from investors on their cap table and how do we think we can help position them in the context of a changing market environment?"

We sat down, the two teams got together and produced a great paper on resilience, again focused on resilience, focused on runway, focused on some of the core key rocks that need to be uncovered. That's borrowing from one of the other Sayers partners, Pete Mastos, shout-out to him. He's a great individual who's worked with us closely on these things too.

The point is those guys bring a wealth of experience and history of dealing with these companies who have faced cycles before and they've seen cycles evolve. We have too, but a lot of the founders and companies we're working with haven't. Yeah, those guys bring a lot of the boots on the ground, operational assistance that we need. We've got an innovative structure with them where they've invested very supportively into the fund as a group with cash.

They've also committed time in lieu of that that we can then draw on to help these investee companies supercharge and solve for some of these growth challenges. Yeah. It's a great combination. That's probably a differentiator for us as a late VC, early PE manager to be able to call on that resource. They've been super supportive.

 MH:

Thinking about some of the companies that potentially you've invested in or passed on, what are the most common mistakes that you see founders making or small business owners for that matter?

BK:

Yeah. Another good question, Matt. I think it's probably double-edged sword, but ambition is key, at the same time, can't be blind ambition. I think that's one of the things we've seen. We've seen really ambitious founders and executive teams run too far ahead of themselves with good ideas and end up burning way too much money in chasing the dream.

I guess it's about levelheadedness and if you're a founder that hasn't done it before and had a knock or failed, then it's now really going to be a really challenging time. I think that's one of the things. I think the other thing that we look for is for founders who aren't afraid of failure or mistakes.

 MH:

A fine line.

BK:

It is. It is a very fine line. I think it was Nelson Mandela said, "What's your greatest fear? Is it harder to be or is it more of a challenge to be a success or a failure?" What's scarier, essentially? I didn't get the quote quite right, I'll look it up after, but that was the premise. The idea of failure can be quite... There's a well-trodden pathway.

Culturally in this country, if you don't get it right, oh, well you pick yourself up, you have another crack, which is a good attitude but at the same time it's relatively easy socially if you've given it a crack to fail. To succeed is quite different and it's very challenging, particularly in this country. When you look at the culture, you look at the tall poppy notion that we have in this place and it's hard for people to stick their head above the parapet sometimes and have a real crack for fear of that cultural response.

Point being, if you've failed before or you've made mistakes before that you've been able to own and the mission that you're on is something that you really believe in and it's bigger than you, then you're in a much better position. We look for that. We look for that more experienced maybe slightly speckled head/founder, which you and I can relate to. No, you don't have speckles mate. You're looking good.

Yeah, I think that's interesting for us. There's a lot of VC firms out there who've got this notion of what a founder needs to be and if you're not this dynamic t-shirt wearing cool cat, and no disrespect because there's a lot of great founders who are t-shirt wearing cool cats, looks like me on the weekend, you're not investing. We don't have that approach.

In fact, at least two of the founders of our investee companies are what you might call grey-ahead, experienced individuals and so we like that. We look for that level of gravitas in a founder as well. May be harder to change their spots, but being coachable is another thing we look for.

 MH:

Before we move on, what are some of the other areas within impact that you are either looking at or really excited about?

BK:

Just to qualify one view here around impact, Matt, is that we view it as a lens that we can put across all asset classes and in PE or late VC where we are, the sectors we're focused on are inherently attuned to a decarbonization pathway and attuned to solving or being part of the solution for the global challenges we face when it comes to climate, i.e., if you're decarbonizing these sectors, you're going to achieve outcomes when it comes to climate. That's a comment.

In terms of where are we going to find the greatest impact? Where are these areas where we think, "Okay, there's a lens there, but okay now you're focusing through that lens," where's the greatest possibility for change? I think packaging's one, just huge. The circular businesses that deal with designing waste out of value chains, because you're doing two things there.

One is you're being way more efficient with your resource base and you are getting your supply chains right from a carbon point of view and a cost point of view and a risk point of view. That's a really big one. The amount of damage as we know from food waste and from plastics in oceans and all those things are huge and soluble, take time. That's really interesting to us.

Off the back of that comes some really interesting technology around plastics and alternatives for plastics production. We're looking at some really awesome seaweed to plastics businesses with different applications, some here, some in the U.S.. I think that's one area. I'm also super interested in, not so much for this fund, but broadly how do we solve for the protein production challenges?

In that regard, we've already got an investment pre-fund in Kilara. Small syndicate pre-fund in cellular meats, cultured meats business. I think that's really exciting, how are we going to produce meats in... We always produce meats in factories today, so how are we going to change that and be more efficient with the way we produce our proteins? Then the third area for us, which is of continued interest is environmental and carbon markets.

How do we continue to create outcomes with our investing that do a few things, one, improve the natural resource base that we're all reliant on and regenerate that in the process of doing that, how do we responsibly monetize that asset that we have called natural capital and how do we deliver services and promote the delivery of services from that natural capital base in a way that we can get our soil systems happening again and we can get our food production systems and our regulating services that come off our natural capital base all humming?

How do we then, as I say, responsibly monetize that super interesting area? What does that mean in terms of businesses? Project developers, carbon distribution businesses, technology companies that are able to in real time automate the delivery and retirement of carbon for your travel or your packaging at the click of a button. Super interesting.

Then the third one in that space is... I'm going to give away all my secrets, mate, I don't want to give away my... So I don't want anyone listening in and honing in on it. No. The third one is there's going to be a lot of businesses that are going to require compliance and reporting services and therefore who are the best-placed companies to provide that? They're probably extensions of environmental consultancy type businesses. There's three or four.

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MH:

I think there's probably many themes in there that hopefully our listeners are interested in finding out more about. One of the issues with impact investing has traditionally been, and to some extent still is access. The structures that it was available through minimum things. Limited partnerships seem to be prevalent in this space. Do you want to just talk about what limited partnership is and why it's important?

BK:

We're structured that way for our first fund as a limited partnership structure. I mean, one of the main reasons that managers use that structure is based on the taxation advantages. There's a bit of technicality there, but ultimately those structures were introduced to encourage the VC sector and the investment into businesses in that earlier stage. Therefore, what it allows you to do as a manager is to ensure that your performance fees or carry as it's termed, is able to be flowed to you in a tax-effective manner.

That's one reason why managers do it. There's no benefit at all or difference at all for the investee company because you're on their cap table with the dollars and away you go. As an investor, domestic investors, I don't think there's a great taxation or any other real advantage of being an LP as opposed to a say a unit holder in a trust. There are some caveats on that.

It's certainly beneficial if you're a foreign investor to come into what we call a limited partnership structure here because there are taxation benefits that foreign investors get. There's a few advantages there that are relevant for managers. Having said that, there are also then complexities with that LP structure and we discovered some of those in dealing with your great people in trying to get our fund up on platform, which we almost did.

We ran out of time, but otherwise I think we were just about there. Come knock on your door for fund too. That was awesome. Were very thrilled and pleased that for example, on the Netwealth conversation we were able to get the traction that we got because it proved to us that our product and our business was becoming institutionalised enough to be taken seriously by the likes of yourself and your business.

That was really encouraging and I learned a lot from that process actually about your business and your sector. The reason I'm mentioning that is because there are some other complexities with it when it comes I think to those things being on platforms like yourselves, I probably don't know enough yet to make a comment as to why it doesn't or does work. Yeah. There are some complexities there in terms of how you're able to then pull down the product from wealth management platforms.

I think what we're finding now, Matt, is that the flavour of the month is to staple a unit trust with an LP structure. You get the best of both worlds in terms of investing. The other aspect to LP structures which exist in Australia... So there's really only two. The early stage version of a venture capital limited partnership or the venture capital limited partnership itself, which is governed in part by innovation, Australia's regulations, is that there are restrictions on how and where you can invest.

There's limitations on net assets of companies for example. There's limitations in terms of geographical spread. You can and can't invest certain check sizes. There are limits on what you can do with that structure in terms of your checks that you write. I think that's why it's evolved to managers using the unit trust alongside it because that doesn't come with any restrictions at all, albeit that you don't get the tax benefits as the manager to hold your carry in the right tax bucket.

 MH:

I should have known if I was going to ask a lawyer a structured question, it was going to be a long answer. Ben, I'm conscious we're about to run out of time. Maybe a philosophical question and you're inevitably going to be biased, but different debates around the market about, I guess impact investors, ESG investors getting frustrated that a client might only have their foundation invested via impact and if they're going to invest their foundation in impact, why aren't they investing all of their portfolio and impact? How do you feel about it?

BK:

Well, I am biased. Invest your entire portfolio in it because as I said earlier, this is about in many respects growth investing and commercial investing. My answer there is pretty straightforward. When you're investing with us, you're investing firstly for commercial returns that need to and must stack up on an arm's length basis with any other deal, with any other manager or any other product.

If you don't pass that commercial screen, we're not doing the deal at Kilara in its current form and likely for future funds. If you've passed that screen, you then don't pass our green screen, we're also not doing the deal. You must pass that commercial screen first as an investee company. That's one important thing.

I'll use an example of an investor that's in our current fund, a reasonable check, very sophisticated private equity person who decided to invest in the fund. Half of the money came from the foundation and the other half came from his growth bucket of capital. It was super interesting because he was saying, "Look, all this stuff you're talking about when it comes to impact and sustainability is interesting and my daughter's super interested in it and she wants to learn about it, but I don't really care.

I care when it comes to my money about the traditional things. Have you got your processes right? Do you do your DD well? What's your track record like? What are my returns going to look like? How are you managing risk?" All of those things. We don't think there's a difference, when it comes to returns when you talk about financial returns or impact returns, you've got to deliver outcomes and there's risks associated with it.

We talk about impact risk and financial risk because if you don't achieve your impact outcomes then you haven't hit the targets as far as we're concerned.

It's a great question. We fundamentally think that this type of investing, and it's not really a type of investing, this lens that we use is just the norm and as we see these top-down pressures evolve from governments and corporates all over the world around net zero decarbonization targets, supply chain constraints, designing waste data value systems at a value chain, sorry, it just becomes a natural outcome that the opportunity set for investing in impact becomes larger and larger.

Naturally we're going to see more and more deals. It's just going to become the new version of smart-risk adjusted investing by taking into account the risks associated with being carbon-intense. That's one way of thinking about it, and that's not even about being impactful. You don't even have to be an impact investor to start to understand the risks associated with being exposed from a carbon point of view.

That's really where the rubber meets the road for us. You don't have to be an impact investor, you don't have to believe in it or understand it, but if you are interested in and aware of climate risk and carbon risk, then fundamentally you should be looking at these opportunities. I think there's a real shift that's happening now amongst the investor community who are starting to see that.

 MH:

Ben, impact is still quite a niche part of the market, but clearly growing. Are you able to share any great resources for those that are interested in finding out more, whether it's websites or organisations?

BK:

Yeah. Sure. Look, when it comes to the frameworks, the impact management framework or the impact management protocols that have come off the back of significant work done by GIIN, Global Impact Investor Network, is a place to start thinking and looking about those frameworks. There's lots of metrics, the IRIS metrics that also have come out of the work of those organisations and others is something to look up and figure out, "Well, what's Ben talking about when he talks about impact outcomes?"

We're talking about quantitative climate outcomes that we're targeting, that we're seeking. Tonnes of carbon avoided and megawatt hours of electricity generated from a renewable source and kilograms of plastic. We're very focused on the quantitative metrics, which you can see by looking at those two areas. In terms of managers, global managers, some of the big, big groups out there are really starting to talk the talk on this stuff.

Carlyle's one to have a look at, massive global managers as people would know. Their 21 impact report of... or annual report was pretty impressive the way they combined impact and financial reporting. Domestically, there's great managers around including ourselves. There's more coming into the space all the time. There's lots of interesting groups focused on the earlier stage environment.

One group called Climate Salad, super interesting, have a look at Climate Salad run by a very talented individual who's building ecosystem and creating opportunities for companies to expose and deliver these outcomes. Also, I think even the World Economic Forum online system, which is pretty robust has got some really valuable information on decarbonization pathways and even look at McKinsey's report, look at some of those McKinsey reports on these trajectories.

There's carbon pricing. Actually, EY, Ernst & Young, had released a really good report on carbon and carbon pricing going forward. That's another interesting proxy for where things are going from a commodity price point of view or not a proxy. It's a direct crack at figuring out where the price is going to go. There's a few starting points.

 MH:

That's some good homework.

BK:

It is good homework. Yeah.

 MH:

Ben, great talking, as always. We've covered a huge amount of topics. Your insights are always incredible, so thanks for joining us today and good luck building Kilara.

BK:

Thanks mate. It's been an absolute privilege. Great to see you.