FIP 013: Planting Trees with Drones, with Lauren Fletcher

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Lauren Fletcher talks us through his startup journey at Biocarbon Engineering, which quite simply, plants trees with drones. He has been a NASA engineer where he designed artificial environments for space shuttles and space stations. He’s studied Mars exploration technologies. He spent 4 years in the desert of Peru studying microbial biology for missions to Mars. And he’s studied Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University where a course in deforestation first sparked his interest in reforesting the planet using robotics. Lauren takes us through his entrepreneurial journey over the last few years, building their ecosystem restoration company using lean startup techniques and methods to help roll out your business. There’s tons of useful nuggets of advice in here for anyone starting out on their journey.

Some of the things you’ll learn on this podcast include:

• How social entrepreneurs should always be stepping back to see how their product or solution fits within the bigger picture, which can, specifically, link you up with those who have available resources to help you go further.
• How Laurent went about finding his founding team, and how he looked for people with exposure and basic understanding of the subject matter he needed.
• Their strategy of finding early capital, where they went after equity, prizes and government grants
• We learn the downside of going after prizes, including how they are a lot of work for not alot of money, but the upside was a viral video that got over a million views that gave them the notoriety to attract seed round investors
• How their product development roadmap panned out, which included building a pre-prototype basic flying planting machine in 3 weeks for the Drones for Good competition in Dubai.
• How they’re thinking about getting their first clients, and the short to long term vision for revenue generation and growth

Resources:

• biocarbonengineering.com
• Link to video

Connect with Lauren

• Twitter.com/BioCarbonEng
• Facebook.com/BioCarbonEngineering
• linkedin.com/lauren-fletcher