Natalie Kuldell (00:03):
Hi, Adrienne. So good to see you.
Adrienne McKee (00:05):
Hi Natalie. It’s great to see you too.
Natalie Kuldell (00:07):
Thank you for joining for this conversation. It’s a great chance to catch up. I have known you for a while now. We can cover that if you want, but really what I’d be super interested in hearing about is what your job is, where you work. You could probably start by introducing yourself.
Adrienne McKee (00:26):
<Laugh> sure. Yeah. Well, thank you. And it’s my pleasure. I have been well. So my name is Adrienne McKee. I work at a company called Checkerspot that is based in headquartered in Alameda, California. So it’s actually a little island off the coast of Oakland. It’s somewhat less exotic than it sounds. But I have a background in molecular biology and genetic engineering. So many years ago I was actually a student of Dr. Kuldell’s and I took her course on molecular biology and it was my first introduction to the world basic in biology that was not visible to me. Before that point I had really focused on plants and really was thinking that I would go into plant physiology and an ecology. And I, I took this course, actually my senior year, which was pretty late in the game on, on molecular biology.
Adrienne McKee (01:28):
And it changed everything for me. I had didn’t really understand at that point that that one could take some of the, the principles of crop genetics that had been so keen in. I, I, I grew up in, in I spent a year in India when I was a kid and my dad is a an engineer, a water engineer, and I got really interested in the ability to, to make crops be better either grow faster, make more. And, but I didn’t know that you could do that for, for other things. And so this was the first course to like, learn about the capability sets there. But fast forward, many, many you know, years, et cetera. I, I went to grad school in the Boston area. I focused really in basic biology, you know at the RNA stage between DNA and protein and, and how much diversity there is in, in sort of the cells to be able to, to take 20 to 30,000 genes and turn that into hundreds of thousands of proteins.
Adrienne McKee (02:27):
What controls that, how does that work? But I was really driven to do something practical. I think having you know, I, I, my, both my parents grew up in with farming in their background. And so the physicality of it was really important to me and having a research paper at the end wasn’t enough to get me motivated. And so I got into, well, what can microbes make? And then I got into the question of like, why are some microbes better at some things than others? And in the course of my in of my postgraduate work I had the, the opportunity to work out here in California, which is how I ended up moving from Boston out here and was plopped down in this wonderful institution that was using a couple of different microbes to make a host of different things.
Adrienne McKee (03:21):
And it occurred to me that the, the, the microbes were it because there’s a billion, billion, trillions, different type of microbes in the world. And some of them are really good at, at, at doing things already. So could we start with those ones that are really good at what they’re doing and then build on there? And that’s how I ended up working with the group of people that co-founded Checkerspot because we found these organisms that are actually microalgae that are really good at turning sugar into fat. And I can totally, I can totally like wig out on how they do that, and you know, the biology is to get them there. But about 10 years ago, I moved out of the lab and into this amazing space between business development teams and R and D teams. And I basically consider myself grout. I’m not the tile in the shower, but I am the like thing that goes around it that holds the tiles together.
Natalie Kuldell (04:23):
<Laugh> <laugh>
Adrienne McKee (04:25):
And what’s challenging is that I’m not good at any one of those things, but I mean, I’m okay. But I’m not, I’m not a trained expert in any one of them, but my days are extremely different which I really value. And so I get to be on the science side. I can contribute on the science side and now I’ve been enough on the business side to be able to say, well, this, these are, these are the markets that are important, and these are the people that we would need to go convinced to bring these two things together. And so Checkerspot is a about a six year old company. And we have a few different products in the market and that’s anyway, that’s kind of a long winding story into how I started and where it’s at.
Natalie Kuldell (05:17):
It’s amazing. I mean, it sounds like a dream job for lots of people, because you get to do lots of things you learn as you go. But it also sounds like you have to be pretty brave, right? How many, how much of the time do you spend out of your comfort zone?
Adrienne McKee (05:35):
Oh, I’d say I don’t even know what my comfort zone is. <Laugh> mostly, and I, I do think that there’s an element of, I just don’t know how hard it’s gonna be. And, and so that doesn’t act as a deterrent. I think I’ve been really fortunate to work with really good people who I’ve, and, and it’s that there have been mentors and, and also people in that have a lot more experience that have decided to, to, to really take what they’re to take a subset of that daily activity that I have, and really hone and focus on those. And so, you know, across that last 10 or 11 years that I’ve been out of, out of the lab you know, I’ve been able to work with a number of people that have you know, that I can go to. And even these are people that, you know, maybe three companies ago that I, that I cross paths with, but am able to rely on to say, I have a specific question in, in this area, and I could go spend three days trying to figure it out, or I could ask one person and they could answer it for me in, in two minutes.
Natalie Kuldell (06:46):
Yeah. It’s funny. Mentorship comes up a lot when we have these conversations. It’s hard to anticipate the role that the mentors will have in your career going forward, but I think people do turn to trusted individuals who almost invariably are very generous with their time and talent. I don’t know if you have a particular mentor you’d like to shout out or a story that you find particularly relevant.
Adrienne McKee (07:14):
Oh, there’s so many I think just in, in, just in the last three weeks. With respect to the kind of materials that that Checkerspot is making. We’re we, one of, one of the value propositions that we have is that we’re using we’re, we’re making oils that can compete against fossil fuel based oils. So we have a process to convert those oils into materials. A lot of companies are interested in renewables because they in, and, and this is a really big point in theory, have a lower carbon impact, but getting into the math and getting into the calculation of how all that evolves is really tricky and involved. And there are people who go to school for it for many decades, just to do this, to do those things. And I’m working with a, a very large European company to evaluate the, the impact, the environmental impact of the oils that we’re, that, that we’re making. And we’re a little early days for what this very old esteemed company is. And, and so I reached out to somebody that I know from a company that I worked at three companies ago, who is an ESG expert, and she just took so much time away from her daily life and her existing job to sit down with me and walk through how to explain and how to understand the questions that I was giving her so that I could, could put forward a proposal for this, for this company.
Natalie Kuldell (09:03):
That’s a wonderful story, cause it is really hard. And if you wanna do a good job, you turning to somebody who would sit down with you and walk you through, what are the right questions to ask that’s exactly where a mentor can really help. That’s such a great story.
Adrienne McKee (09:20):
Well, it also makes me feel very lucky to be able to do that as you know, to up my capacity. In other ways, I’ve had the benefit of working with a lot of other teammates who’ve gone on to other things. And one, he and I worked really closely together on another project. And he’s decided to, to go on to grad school now he’s finished grad school and entering the job market, and he called me up. He’s in Europe. And so he just called <laugh> I didn’t know he was gonna, there was gonna be an answer on the phone, but wanted to go through some of the options that he has to him. And it was really great for just to be able to, to contribute that back in some capacity.
Natalie Kuldell (10:04):
That sounds amazing. That sounds amazing. So do you wanna say just a little bit, you said a little bit about what Checkerspot does. Yeah. Do you wanna say anything else about it?
Adrienne McKee (10:14):
Absolutely. Yeah. So we, as I mentioned, we have this fermentation process and, and I think most people know about fermentation through yeast making ethanol but lots of other microbes will, we can grow. In E coli you can, you can use but there’s a particular form of microalgae that we have managed to figure out how to grow to very large scales. And they are really good at making oils. And so these are the kinds of oils that that you might, you know, you can think of an olive oil or a sunflower oil, or even a, you know, coconut oil. The structure is, is effectively very, these are very similar to each other. We can make custom oils in these microbes. And then from those oils we, we can go into a variety of different areas where oils are used today.
Adrienne McKee (11:07):
And so the major focus for my time is in materials space, and we are, are making a couple of different polyurethanes. Polyurethanes are everywhere. They are, you know, the foam in your, in your car seat, the, the coating on your deck, the adhesive in your shoes if you have a watch band it’s probably made out of polyurethane. And most of that today, almost all of it, not all of it, but almost all of it is, is fossil based. Hmm. And it has been since the thirties, when, when sort of like polyurethanes were invented and through our, we’re not the first to, to introduce these kinds of, of renewable materials into polyurethanes, but we are, we are leveraging this, this really unique and differentiated hero coming from these, the, for coming from microalgae, that we can more readily customize the shape of that molecule that goes into those polyurethanes.
Adrienne McKee (12:06):
And, and so the, the, the benefit is that people who want to build or make, or design or whatever with polyurethanes can, can, can do so with replacing up to, in some cases, 70% of those formulations with bio-based materials. And, and so the you know, the applications are wide spre. And I mentioned that polyurethanes are everywhere. We, as a company learned a lot, many of us work together at a, at, you know, in a, in a past life, what we realized is demonstrating the capability set is, is really, really, really important. And, and it’s so much easier to talk about the end product of what all of that turns into than it is to talk about a bag of polyurethane, right? And so Checkerspot started a direct to consumer brand in 2019, it’s called wonder Alpine.
Adrienne McKee (13:02):
And you can find it online. It’s really kind of a crazy, never in a million years. It feels like we’re just pulling words out of thin air and mashing ’em together. But we’ve got a six 60 person company and, and 30 PhDs and 30 ski builders. And so we worked so Alpine is manufacturing back country skis and snowboards. And in June, we’ll launch our fourth season. What was amazing to me. And so I had mentioned, I I’ve worn a lot of hats and I’m, I’m a grout to a lot of things have been part of the company for almost four years. I was part of our early B and C series raises and working with investors to translate what we’re doing into the impact that it will have kind in 5, 10, 20 years from now, that was wonderful.
Adrienne McKee (14:03):
And, and so eye-opening for me to see is that within a week of us launching the Wonder Alpine brand, we had nine companies from the ski and snowboard industry emailing or writing to us saying, how can we work with you? And we know from our past life that if we had said “we have an oil,” or “we have a urethane, would you like to try” it four years later, we would still not be talking to them. Right. So I think that’s been one of the greatest things about Checkerspot is that material like, I mean, materialization and like the physicality of it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and we are gonna be doing that in a couple of other arenas fairly soon. Right. So you’ll see a personal care component coming, coming very quickly. And then another one to follow and, and, you know, so that one’s a little bit further out, but effectively wherever oils can go, is our areas that we, that we will be you know, showcasing the platform in that, in those specific parts of the market.
Natalie Kuldell (15:11):
It’s amazing. There is so much to be excited about with your company and with this field. It’s amazing where you’ve landed. It’s a very exciting arena, for sure. So, Adrienne, thank you so much for taking some time to talk.
Adrienne McKee (15:28):
Absolutely. Yeah. Be wonderful. If anybody wanted to reach out for questions, I’d be happy to talk with them.