From Olympian to AI Entrepreneur: Craig Buntin's Bold Reinvention

Episode Overview:
Pat speaks with Craig Buntin - who shares a powerful story of reinvention, going from Olympic figure skater to AI-driven sports tech entrepreneur, building Sportlogiq, an NHL-backed analytics company, and now Founder of RiseCO2, tackling climate change with carbon-negative homes.

In this episode, we dive into Craig’s journey, from his challenging upbringing, to his unconventional MBA acceptance, to securing investment from Mark Cuban and pivoting, to sustainable innovation. If you’re into AI, sports, or entrepreneurship, this one’s for you!

What You’ll Learn:

• How Craig transitioned from elite athlete to successful entrepreneur.
• The mindset shifts needed to navigate major life changes.
• Why failure and resilience are essential for growth.
• How AI and sustainability are shaping the future of business.
• A roadmap to embrace uncertainty and “just go for it.”
• Why gratitude and balance matter just as much as ambition.
• Planning and goal setting like a CEO
  
  

Social Media:

• After Peter Pan Podcast: 
  • Facebook
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  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
• Craig Buntin:
  • RiseCO2 
  • Sportlogiq
  • LinkedIn

Chapters

• 0:00 Hook & Intro
• 2:00 A man in a red leotard
• 3:15 The Chaos of Entrepreneurship
• 7:45 Embracing Fear and Courage
• 10:22 The Athlete's Mindset
• 12:49 Overcoming Failure
• 15:24 Upbringing and Early Influences
• 17:59 The Path to Figure Skating
• 20:54 Family Support and Gratitude
• 22:58 Challenges and Addiction Awareness
• 23:50 Facing Addiction and Personal Growth
• 26:46 The Impact of Parenthood on Sobriety
• 29:19 Balancing Life and Work Responsibilities
• 32:59 Finding Balance in Life and Work
• 39:14 Health as a Cornerstone of Success
• 40:17 The Genesis of Sport Logic
• 46:51 Transitioning Leadership at Sport Logic
• 51:20 Influences and Role Models in Life
• 52:38 Coaching Styles and Their Impact
• 54:38 Growth Mindset in Sports /The Myth of the Self-Made Athlete
• 1:00:39 Tackling Climate Change: A New Venture
• 1:05:49 The Journey Towards Affordable CO2-Based Homes
• 1:11:52 Outro

Transcript

Craig (00:02)
you're going to get hit. you're to get a hit with something every week, every month. And as an athlete, when you put everything on the line and that one performance is the one thing that's going to qualify you for this next thing. And it's all you want in this world and you lose. You get into that rink at, at five, 6am the next morning. And with that, that fire in your gut to come out better than you were the day before.

that fire after getting knocked down and the pace at which you get up. I was, I was an athlete for 20 years. And when I look at the people who were around at the end of my career, who lasted that whole time and the ones who were champions over time, seldom ever were they just the most talented or even just the most hardworking. was the ones who, who gained momentum out of failure.

Pat Tenneriello (00:46)
Welcome to the After Peter Pan podcast. I'm your host, Pat Tenneriello. In today's episode, I sit down with Craig Bunton, an Olympic athlete turned entrepreneur. His story is one of reinvention, taking leaps of faith and gratitude. After leaving the world of elite figure skating, Craig was a fish out of water, having to completely reinvent himself. Embracing curiosity and courage, he dove into a master's program.

with only a high school degree while simultaneously pursuing his first startup, TeaBean. He went on to co-found Sport Logic, an AI sports analytics company that was picked up by the NHL and got investment from Mark Cuban, growing to over 400 employees. Lately, he's tackling his biggest challenge yet, building carbon negative homes to fight climate change.

This story is not just about a successful entrepreneur and successful Olympian. It certainly is that, but we also dive into a difficult upbringing, relationship with drugs and alcohol, and all sorts of practical advice for goal setting and planning and getting into the mindset of an Olympian and a CEO. There's so much in this episode. I'm really excited to share it with you.

I hope you enjoy it.

Pat Tenneriello (02:01)
Look, I thought I'd start by showing you something.

just take just take you down memory lane for a moment here

Can you see my screen?

Craig (02:08)
can.

my god.

Pat Tenneriello (02:10)
Hahaha.

So for people who are listening to the podcast and can't see the video, this is a segment of the MBA games of 2011 with Craig Bunton in the middle of the screen dancing to Beyonce in a red leotard, me flanking him on the left I think we took second place in this opening music.

segment of the MBA games which is a competition between all the MBA programs across Canada. Thought I'd show this to Craig, this was, so this is what, 14 years ago man.

Craig (02:46)
This is my worst nightmare,

Pat Tenneriello (02:48)
You

Alright, we'll put a stop to that.

Craig (02:53)
I had but one hope is that that video never would have seen the light of day.

Pat Tenneriello (02:57)
What comes to mind when you see that?

Craig (03:00)
my God. comes to mind is like, I wish I wasn't on YouTube, number one. two, was a crazy, crazy time. mean, it was just pure chaos in my life and in everything that I was doing around then.

Pat Tenneriello (03:14)
Let's get into that chaos a little bit actually. So first of all, I remember you were the first student in the history of the McGill MBA program to get admitted without an undergraduate degree. How did you pull that off?

Craig (03:26)
I'm just daily thankful that McGill took a chance on me. I think if we're being honest, really what it was was they saw something that maybe even at the time I didn't see really took a leap. former life, I was an Olympic athlete, I had retired. I was just coming out of sport and I decided to start a business.

That time I kind of didn't really know what type of business I wanted to start. I just knew I wanted to start my own thing. And so I had spent probably about six months or so building this coffee company. And it was like bootstrap, credit cards, know, banging on doors. And I actually wasn't looking to get into the MBA. What I was really just looking to do is like figure out what I didn't know about business.

And so I went and I was applying for night courses, like night courses in accounting, night courses in marketing and business communications. And, and I just happened to meet, Omar, Omar Toulan from, from the, from the MBA. And, and I was kind of, you know, telling him my story, telling him about, know, what I was looking to learn, what I didn't know, how I felt like I was kind of, you know, sinking in the middle of the deep end with this company. And, the company was, was taking off and it was running and I was kind of like,

You got to remember coming out of 20 years in sport, knowing nothing about the real world outside of this little sport bubble. and you know, I guess as I was talking to him about what I was doing with my business, he must've kind of probably seen all the components of a business that I was actually building in a way that I didn't really see it. And so he said, well, why don't you try applying for the MBA? And at that time, I didn't even know what an MBA was. I didn't, you know, I'd been out of school for 12 years, high school education. And, and so he kind of just said,

explain the program and the people that were in it. It sounded fascinating. It sounded totally unattainable. And he said, look, just in the application, and we'll see. your application, talk about all the things you just told me, all the things in your business. And so I basically closed myself in a room for a couple months and studied for the GMAT. And I guess did well enough on the GMAT.

put in the application and like I said, I think they took a bit of a leap.

Pat Tenneriello (05:36)
And tell us a little bit about the company that you had launched at that time.

Craig (05:41)
I actually had taken an idea that I saw elsewhere and was bringing it into Montreal. So if anybody's ever had coffee out in these little like drive through coffee shops in Seattle or in and around the Seattle area, there's this stuff called white coffee. It's kind of like an under roasted baked type coffee bean. And these roasters, they basically just turn the flame on really, really low and they dry the beans out and it makes this

this white coffee bean tastes nothing like coffee. It tastes kind of like the sweet peanutty tea. And they make these lattes with them and they add flavors and it's amazing. And it's got way more caffeine than coffee. So it's like this caffeinated latte that doesn't taste like coffee. And I had that while at, I think we were competing at Skate America the year before and I just sort of discovered it.

I was looking for it everywhere. It was super popular there. And I was just like, this is something that could really take off. So, you know, I, I went back to Seattle on my own and rented a car and sort of drove through town, stopped at every coffee roaster along the way and looked for people who could either help teach me or help join and kind of learned enough about what it was and came back to Montreal and drove to five or six different roasters, told them what I wanted to do. They all thought I was nuts and ended up finding a partner on the South shore and

Um, and sort of, made a few batches together. I had started banging on doors and, and, know, knocked on well over a hundred different cafe doors across, the province and the country and got into kind of a little over a hundred cafes over that first, uh, six months. uh, it was, uh, chaos, I think is the right word. It was fun. It was fun.

Pat Tenneriello (07:17)
Sounds like lot of fun though.

Craig (07:21)
But it's, you mentioned you're in a transition period, right? So this may resonate, but the, anytime you're transitioning out of something and into something, there's this combination of fun and excitement and sort of the futures is open. And then there's this terrifying sort of pit of, my God, what am I doing? I don't know anything. Nothing I'm doing is working. think that feeling,

I can only speak for competitive athletes, but coming out of sport, that feeling is exponentially worse than just sort of, you know, going from one job to another. Because when you retire from being an athlete and you transition out of that, you lose your entire network, your entire, you know, your sport family. You lose your all the support systems that you've had around you for well over a decade. lose, you know, your

your funding, your coaching, your everything. And so when you step out into the real world, yeah, TeaBean was a lot of fun, but it was also this constant sense of I'm lost, I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm alone. And that feeling, it took years to get through that transition from being an athlete.

Pat Tenneriello (08:33)
Wow, that does sound...

Craig (08:34)
It dove in pretty heavy

there right out of the gate, man. Sorry.

Pat Tenneriello (08:37)
can totally relate to the terrifying feeling. we talk about fear a lot on the podcast and it's not that fear goes away. It's that I think people who are willing to confront fear, it's that they're willing, it's willing to practice courage And like anything, the more you practice something, you get better at it. And the more you develop.

And that's what helps you to conquer and overcome that terrifying feeling. I can, I can relate to that feeling. Why did you choose after leaving, figure skating, why did you choose to dive into something so terrifying right off the

Craig (09:09)
the idea of like, when you say terrifying, you got to realize as an athlete, you, you work for one thing and you either go out there and you win and you go home and they throw you a parade or, or you lose and nobody cares. And you have no funding and no nothing. Right. So it's always all on the line for you to perform. So you're always betting on yourself. so that idea of.

If I work harder, if I work smarter, if I'm better at what I do, I'm going to win. That was actually the only thing that didn't feel terrifying to me. That was the only thing that I could hang onto that didn't feel foreign. So it would have been far more foreign to me to go into an entry level job and have a paycheck and go to work on a consistent basis for some amount of predetermined money, right?

That would have been far more terrifying and far more foreign to me than starting this new thing. As odd as that sounds. it wasn't the actual starting the business that was terrifying. It was the like everything from getting groceries to, I don't know, taking a bus to get around town as an athlete.

All of your life is planned. You've got your gym, you've got your schedule, you've got your coach who makes the plan, you've got all this support around you that helps you solely focus on the one thing that you need to achieve, right? And that stuff just drops off right out of the gate. No career advice, no coaching, no confident person in front of you guiding the way. was that that was the tough part. The actual starting a business and just hustling and running was actually, that was the fun part.

Pat Tenneriello (10:51)
So let's get into that. Like to get to the highest level, way that you did, like what did it take? You talked about structure. talked about having a coach that really, you know, regulated your day to day. You didn't have to make those day to day decisions the way that a typical person would, but like what, what did it take to get to that level and what did you have to give up?

Craig (11:11)
fundamentally if I had to pin it to one thing and then kind of work to the others, the first thing I'd say is, the ability to get knocked down, but, get up really quickly. So take the hit and as soon as you hit the ground, get up sprinting, right? That, that second you take a hit, you're immediately going, how do I come out of this with more forward momentum? and you know,

It, that is a grind because you're going to get hit. you're to get a hit with something every week, every month. And as an athlete, when you put everything on the line and that one performance is the one thing that's going to qualify you for this next thing. And it's all you want in this world and you lose. You get into that rink at, at five, 6am the next morning. And with that, that fire in your gut to come out better than you were the day before.

And so it's, it's that fire after getting knocked down and the pace at which you get up. That's the thing when, you know, I was, I was an athlete for 20 years. And when I look at the people who were around at the end of my career, who lasted that whole time and the ones who were champions over time, seldom ever were they just the most talented or even just the most hardworking. was the ones who, who gained momentum out of failure. And, and I think that was kind of the one thing that I.

either learned or adopted or somehow had in me.

Pat Tenneriello (12:32)
So the idea that those who could embrace failure and turn it into a learning opportunity or be hungry for failure knowing that that failure was going to help them to improve that much more quickly.

Craig (12:45)
I don't know if it's a hunger for failure. I don't think anybody's hungry for failure, but the...

something about not staying down long, right? And I don't know if it's a, I embrace failure or I look forward to it or I know it's there and it's gonna make me better. I don't know if I ever had that thought once. It was more just the fact that anytime there was a something that knocked me down, I knew I had to get up running. I just intuitively knew for the sake of doing it that I had to get up running. And that always kind of drove more fire in the gut was just, it can't be, I can't just sort of,

licked my wounds and wait a couple days and then come back in. I got to get back in the gym tomorrow morning. Like that was the thing that I think most champions that I knew over the course of my career had.

Pat Tenneriello (13:31)
And the reason you had that fire in your belly was because you knew that if you didn't, someone else was going to be doing that

Craig (13:38)
That was a big part of it. always knew there was somebody somewhere in some area of the world that was going to be working at the same time that I was resting.

But I don't know what, I think if I were to try to figure out where that came from, I might have to go back a little bit further and like talk about maybe just growing up with my mom and the decisions that she made and what she had to do to raise two kids. I think I'd probably kind of point to that. Yeah, I think part of it was learned and part of it was sort of, I don't know.

Maybe bred into me early on, I'm not sure.

Pat Tenneriello (14:11)
Well, I did have a question about your upbringing and growing up because this whole podcast is about growing up and transformation. know, in my case, the whole show is called after Peter Pan, because, you know, I kind of had that Peter Pan, I don't want to grow up sort of Neverland mentality for a while. And so I did want to go there. If, if you're comfortable with that, what was your upbringing like got you into the Olympics and figure skating?

Craig (14:33)
my,

my mom raised my brother and I, single family home. We spent our early years in Surrey, BC, sort just outside Vancouver. I don't what a neighborhood looks like now, but growing up it was a pretty rough neighborhood. like it was, you didn't wear a pair of Jordans because you were probably gonna get beat up or stabbed. That was the situation. There were,

you know, metal detectors in the high schools. And it was a, it was a tough place. We, when I was 10, my brother was 12. My mom just, she was, you know, single mom working, working two jobs and doing everything that she could just to kind of get by. And some of my early childhood memories around that time in that neighborhood was like, when you donated food to the, you know, to whatever local food,

distributor is in your neighborhood around Christmas time, they came and knocked on our door and gave us food at Christmas. And I remember her, I remember specifically this one Christmas where somebody came to the door, gave us this beautiful big box of food. And I remember her after they left closing the door and just crying. And I don't think it was tears of joy or tears, maybe to some extent appreciation or relief, but I think it was also this feeling that

She was sort of had to be helped. And I think in some sense that was really hard on her. And so, you know, that fear of being at that point, that fear of sort of, my God, what if I can't get food? What if we can't pay rent this month? That fear from very early on, it was around that time. was just somewhere in and around that period.

this fear of failure, this fear of, my God, what if I don't get to this next thing? And I think, so it probably impacted me around that time where there was this sense of like, I have to succeed, I have to, whatever the thing is that I'm doing, I have to do it well, I've gotta be great at it. I think that sort of was implanted in me around that time. And...

And I think the other thing that, call it a gift that I received around that time from her and from my brother was that this idea of taking leaps, leaps of faith. When I was 10, my mom basically rolled out a map of Canada and said, okay, we're leaving this neighborhood. I don't want you guys going to these high schools. I don't want you growing up in neighborhood that is, you know, you may be in.

I don't know, gangs or whatever. We're just going to find a smaller town. We're to go somewhere that's a great place to go to high school. Let's pick a town. And the three of us sort of looked at the map. And, you know, for me as a 10 year old, that was great. It was a lot of fun. But, you know, try to imagine being a single mom with, you know, it's not like she had a lot of savings. So the leap of faith that she was actually taking at that time was was unimaginable. I just looking back on it.

She was close to my age now and I couldn't imagine myself making that decision. So we basically packed everything we had up into our red Chevy Chevette. We decided to move to Kelowna, which is like a five hour drive out of Vancouver. I know now she had about enough money for like three months of rent and she had to find a job. And that was the amount of security that she had when she took that leap. we got into Kelowna, first day of school.

everybody was talking about hockey and I had never met anybody who talked about hockey. It was just never a thing where we grew up and I was like, you know, what is this? And everybody had these hockey cards and they were watching the games. And so I decided, all right, I'll learn how to skate and I'll join hockey because that's what everybody's doing. And, you know, I joined skating lessons and kind of never picked up a stick. That's the sort of starting point there.

Pat Tenneriello (18:23)
You

And so you, you learned how to skate. obviously enjoyed it. most people who start doing something like playing a sport and enjoying it, realizing they like it, they, you know, they turned that into a regular hobby. might play it recreationally. They might even play it competitively, but it doesn't become like the central thing in their life for a decade. So how did figure skating become that for you?

Craig (18:49)
The short answer is I don't know. I look back at the last 30 years and it's like I tend to take these 10 year missions. I mean at 10 years old, I don't know, I was a really late starter. So usually if you're starting skating, you're whatever, five, six years old. I was 10 the first time I put skates on. I joined this like, learned to skate program, it a can skate program, which was in Kelowna.

the instructors were about my age and on the first day in my hockey skates, I was trying jumps. I saw them do some jumps, so I tried some and think everybody was just so excited and they called everybody over and I just like had all this attention. I was like, it was a lot of fun. And I think I got my badge either that day or the next day, the first skating badge. So there was like number one, it was something that, you know, as a kid in a new town, no new friends or anything, having this sort of thing that instantly you're sort of.

doing well at and you're being encouraged and you got people around you. I think there was something there. I think I had a natural knack for it, maybe because I was just a little bit older. But I just really took to it. I love the feeling of flying out of a corner at full speed and doing a jump. just something about that feeling was just totally liberating. I immediately felt that on the ice in a way that I hadn't really experienced that with anything as a kid.

I just really, really fell in love with it and almost immediately, I mean, I'm going to say within the first few weeks, maybe first month or so, my mom got her first bill and skating is not a cheap sport. And you know, times were pretty tight. And she asked me at that time, she was like, look, if you really want to do this, know, if you really, if this is something you want to do, you want to dive in and this is your thing, I'll support you. I mean, a hundred percent. I'll never question it. if not, look, there's a million and one other things that we can do.

Like there's soccer and there's all these other sports and there's things that we can do that don't cost as much as this. And I was just like, no, this is my thing. This is it. I'm in. I think, you know, look, as I'm, as the words are coming out of my mouth, it occurs to me that, it is. It never occurred to me until right now, but yeah, it probably is. But I, I since learned, I found out five or six years ago, like not long ago that, that she was actually a competitive swimmer when she was a kid.

Pat Tenneriello (20:36)
That's a lot of pressure.

Craig (20:54)
and couldn't continue because they didn't have enough money to do it. She had mentioned that sort of almost in passing at one point. I think maybe some of it came from that. But I don't know. I never saw the pressure. It never occurred to me that that was. I just always knew that if this is something I want to do, mom's in my corner, my brother's in my corner, and I'm going to be able to do it. So yeah, was basically Olympics or bust from that point on.

Pat Tenneriello (21:20)
I'm sensing just hearing you talk about your upbringing in this story, I'm sensing a lot appreciation and gratefulness, gratitude for your mom. And it's reminding me of the episode I did. My last episode was with my dad it was really nice to carve out some time just to communicate that gratefulness and that love and that appreciation for all the sacrifices that he's done for me. And just hearing you tell your story, I can tell that you.

You know, you feel something similar for your mom.

Craig (21:47)
For sure, for sure.

Pat Tenneriello (21:49)
did your brother have a similar story or what came of him?

Craig (21:53)
my brother was always a worker. This guy, when I was skating, he was helping to pay the bills. He was working a couple of jobs on his own. He was snowboarding, going to And he was actually helping to support the family. At the same time I was, were both working. So he was always kind of my rock. He was always the guy who was there in my corner.

know, figure skating in a small town, there's no shortage of guys who willing to make fun of you in high school. My brother was always there going, nope, you're not gonna make fun of my brother. So he was always kind of the rock in my corner. He, geez, eight, nine-ish years ago now, had a small...

small surgery. They gave him some of these pills that are the epidemic across the country and that put him on a pretty tough path. So he's sort of still dealing with some of the issues around that right now. I appreciate it, man. look, I hope that everybody across the country, across the world who's suffering from that

Pat Tenneriello (22:49)
Sorry to hear that.

Craig (22:58)
gets back on their feet and I hope the healthcare system manages to sort itself out and make that right because it's awful.

Pat Tenneriello (23:06)
I've heard too many stories like the one that you just shared. Drug use, even recreationally today, is debunked. It's not like it used to be. Legalizing marijuana since 20, it's been at least five years now, I would assume. You smell it everywhere. It's not a big deal. People just treat drugs like they're not a big deal, but even soft drugs.

Like marijuana, people can struggle with. think the stat like one in 10 people will get hooked on marijuana. I was one of those people. I smoked marijuana daily for about a decade and it was really, really hard for me to I'm not alien to addiction and I know how difficult it can be and how much of a sickness it is.

Craig (23:50)
Yeah, look man, so I've been sober for eight years now, so I actually didn't realize that about you, but yeah. I think any form of addiction, regardless of what it is, it's like people kind of look for things, whatever they are, whatever the addiction is, fill a void or to otherwise help them escape pain, right? And you know, mean, there may be a whole bunch of different versions of that.

But I think the idea that whatever the addiction is, I think the ailment is having this pain that you're otherwise not able to sort of work through, right? And for whatever reason, and it's maybe a broad statement, but I can at say in my own experience, this idea of growing up and actually facing.

facing all of my own faults and all of my own issues, that experience was all part of, yeah, just quitting drinking and facing my own life. Like I said, I feel like we're kind of going all over the place here. I don't know if this is...

Pat Tenneriello (24:57)
No, that

is really, this is great. Sorry, great. mean, it's, it's important and sober for eight years, you may consider someone may consider a bigger accomplishment than making it to the Olympics or starting a 400 person So, just.

Craig (25:13)
never would

have been able to do the latter without living the life that I was living. For me, it was sometime five, six months after my first son was born. was kind of just...

anybody who's ever started a company knows you're always selling, You're always, you grab a drink with somebody, try to sell your product, grab a drink, try to raise your fund, and you're always out at these events, and it's just constant, constant, constant. And I assumed that that was sort of part of the process, that you've gotta just, you gotta be the life of the party, or the central part of whatever conversation you're in to sort of drive these sales and business, and that's just kinda how it works. And I was so locked onto that being necessary, it just never occurred to me how much I was drinking.

You know, at one point I was looking at my son and this cute little kid going, I'm missing out on this kid's life.

Either I'm missing out on his or he's missing out on mine, but either way there's something here that shouldn't be. Like this little guy should be the priority in my life. And I kind of just made a decision and that was it. What came after surprised the hell out of me. This idea that I had to face life, I had to face difficult challenges, I had to face stress, I had to face all these things.

Stone Cold Sober really forced me to do a lot of work personally. And I think it's that work ultimately that's kind of led to the success of the business and sort of me being who I am today.

Pat Tenneriello (26:47)
You know, my story around alcohol and drugs is very similar to yours in that when my wife got pregnant, everything changed for me. I had this fear for a long, long time when I would smoke pot that

I would be that dad who like would put his kid to bed and then like just go and get couldn't wait for that to happen. then God forbid, the little guy wakes up and you got to go to his room and like console him and you wreak a pot. So I just had this fear that I would be that dad. And I'm like, I never want to be that dad. so that was kind of the motivator when my wife got pregnant. It gave me the strength that I didn't have before to be able to make some

monumental changes and you know, being a dad's hard enough, without having to deal with a hangover in the morning, right? Like my, little guy wake up at 430 sometimes he's like, he's ready to go. He's like, dad, I want to go play with the cubes. Dad, I wanted to sing and dance. Like, I couldn't imagine doing that with a hangover.

Craig (27:50)
yeah, a hundred percent. Number one, and it's just, I mean, these are the moments you never get back to. Like the spending that time with your kid, these are the moments we're gonna treasure for the rest of our lives. But on my side, this was around the time too. So I kind of had that resolve when my wife was pregnant and when the little guy was born, just was never able to kind of pull the trigger and do it. For me, was like, I was, this was like 20.

15, we were raising our seed round for, for sport logic. our first two employees had joined the company and they had actually just quit their jobs to join. They had kids. So I just kind of felt the, the weight of the world on my shoulders with, with getting this company off the ground, which was no longer just some crazy fun dream. I had, you know, my mom wasn't well, there was, I was taking care of her. my wife was, you know, it was a difficult pregnancy. sort of like,

And I was just like juggling all these balls and not realizing it just never occurred to me that me going out and doing these sales pitches or otherwise just going out and getting drunk was me just running from that responsibility, whether I knew it or not. there's a certain satisfaction now that comes from just knowing that I just faced responsibility. I faced heavy situations on a daily basis head on. And once they're dealt with, they're dealt with. And there's just such a...

relief that sense of impending doom or that sense of weight is is gone

Pat Tenneriello (29:16)
So when I left my last full-time job,

I've always had this desire to play more complicated, more challenging games. to meaning in the next step I make in my career, I want it to be more, I want it be more challenging, more difficult, more. But I, I knew, and I still know that in order to be ready to play those challenging games and to up my game, I needed to get my house in order. Like I needed that foundation.

And getting my house in order for me meant having the relationship that I wanted with alcohol and drugs. being at a place with myself where I'm, I'm, I'm well, I'm healthy mentally, physically, that I have the right habits and the right routines so that I have that solid foundation to be able to compete in whatever I step up to do next. In your case, it sounds like maybe you were kind of doing both at the same time. You were steering the boat as you were building it.

and maybe taking on some water, but bailing yourself out. Like, how would you describe that?

Craig (30:18)
It's probably a version of what you just said. the biggest difference between like tackling a big challenge as an athlete and tackling a big challenge kind of in the real world is that as an athlete, you have one goal and everything you do is centered around that goal, right? So it's like, I'll train, I'll eat what I need to eat specifically so that my body does what I need it to do tomorrow. I will go to the gym today and do the specific exercises or go to the physio for this specific

you know, area of my body that needs to perform tomorrow. And sort of everything is a function of your performance. Whereas in the real world, and look, you can only train, I don't know, if you're a real nut, maybe what, train six hours a day, More than that and you're detrimental to your work tomorrow, so you know, everything is a function of specifically that training that you're doing. In the real world, it's 24 hours in a day, right?

And if I need to get a deck together, I probably could spend the next 20 hours working on that deck straight through and get it done, right? That kind of animal instinct to perform can get that done, but I'm not gonna get the sleep that I need. I might get sick. I might have kids who don't get what they need and a wife who's upset and tomorrow everything's kind of falling apart. So this idea of like, I never looked at it as like, I'm gonna get my house in order so then I can just go.

do better at some, you know, the work I've got to do. But it was always like, if I have this mission, if this company has a mission and everything I'm doing has to be a function of that. So I know that I have to have these things done by tomorrow, but I've only got to prioritize these one or two because I have to have this amount of sleep. I have to have this food. I've got to, I'm going to have to take this half hour or hour and go for a quick run or, or go to the gym or just do something.

has a function of my ability to perform tomorrow. it's so much more clear cut as an athlete, but functionally, it's the same thing. So it wasn't necessarily get my house in order so I can then go, it was that like, what is the right amount of everything I need to take care of so that I can continue to perform this thing I'm doing with work right now?

Pat Tenneriello (32:29)
both as a figure skater and even as an entrepreneur now, like how do you stay disciplined? How do you stay

Craig (32:35)
you started the podcast and you asked what I think of when I looked at that video or that time around 2011, it was a total lack of balance. Around that time, I was working 18 hour days. It was insane. And I ultimately, after about two years, totally burned out. I just couldn't keep up that pace. And I'm talking 18 hours, seven days a week. was nuts.

when I started finding that balance, I can't say, like, I mean, I, in some way, yes, I'm disciplined, but it's not the same thing. I see my health as equally or more important than my mission because, you know, if I don't have my health, everything else is gone.

Some of the work you do every day is going to be a grind, but you can also do some work that is fulfilling and meaningful. And there's going to be a mix of both, right? So there's the discipline to go get through your inbox or, you know, go do that accounting that you don't want to do so that you can then get out in front of an investor with your new pitch and the pitch might be fun, right? It's like, so there's a balance that I try to strike. I set goals every month, every week. And the goals that I set every week are some combination of, here's

80 % of the 70 % of it I don't want to do, but I'm going to get it done. But the rest is fun. And if I do it, I'm going to be really happy. And so I've managed to find that kind of balance now more so than discipline. So maybe it's, yeah. I know I struggle with the term discipline. Equal parts discipline and not discipline. I'm not sure.

Pat Tenneriello (34:10)
Yes, some people don't like that word discipline. They view it as a negative word. What comes up for you?

Craig (34:15)
It's been a positive word my entire life. But I think it can be seen as something where it's like, no, just get out and hustle and work. That's not discipline, right? Discipline is like if you've got some momentum, you're doing really well, but you know that you're not gonna get that 20 minute run in and you've made the plan to do that run, you get out and do that run, right? So like setting the plan and sticking to the plan, I'm very disciplined. But my plans right now give me a lot more space.

than they used to. When I set my weekly plan, I've got space for Craig in the plan. That's something that's really only a handful of years old.

Pat Tenneriello (34:55)
interesting that you have cadences of plans. you said you set weekly plans and you might have a quarterly or six month or an annual, maybe you have multi annual. Do you write these down? How do you structure that?

Craig (35:05)
I write them down. I look at them every day. Yeah, I mean I did that since I was tense I learned how to do that as an athlete I got a little nerdy in the MBA and I love spreadsheets so I have a spreadsheet that I have my annual goals and I carve out a day or two every year to kind of have my own little planning session goal up to three but usually one and then I've got three quarterly goals that I set for myself and

call those rocks. I'm going to have, you know, we do this at Sport Logic, but there's rocks and there's sand. The rocks are kind of like the big things that are going to move the needle forward. Sand is kind of like all the other stuff you got to move. And so there's three rocks every quarter and every quarter I have my personal rocks that I want to move. And I, every week I kind of set my, here's the things I want to achieve. And then here's my to-do list, which is always way too long. But the things that I want to achieve, take

half an hour every week to look at them and look at where they tie into my quarterly goals, my quarterly rocks, and look at do they make sense? Do I need to achieve these things faster or can I hold off on these few things another week, another two weeks? And I've got kind of the key things mapped out at least a few weeks in advance.

Pat Tenneriello (36:16)
Well, that must, that sets you apart. I mean, I can't say that I have that level of structure in my planning and in my goals. This year I set New Year's goals. I worked on this year compass that I found very helpful because you kind of say goodbye to last year and kind of take stock of what you accomplished and you set your goals for the new year, but they're not broken down quarterly or weekly.

they all career focused or they are also personal?

Craig (36:43)
No, I got like 20, 30 things that are kind of just on a list that I look at once a quarter. And I'm just like, you know, and they're all sort of themes, whether it's my health or whether it's my spiritual health, my meditation, or it's, you know, specific career objectives, or if it's objectives in my relationship or, know, whatever it is and very broad.

What I give myself is like every quarter when I kind of sit down and review these and try to set them, I try to take a little bit of quiet time and I try to kind of let the feeling deep inside tell me what is it that I need to focus on this quarter? Did I really burn the candle at both ends over the last three months and maybe I actually should take some time and set some personal rocks that are really more just like me time or is now the time to...

really burn this thing and get in and really achieve these career things over the next three months. Right. And I give myself enough flexibility to not try to control those until until it's kind of time to put them down on paper. So, you know, I found there's a generally a time in the year that I'll focus more on. I don't know, financial goals. There's a time of the year that I'll focus more on health goals. There's a time of the year that I'll focus more on kind of like mission and career objective goals.

Pat Tenneriello (37:41)
Okay.

Craig (38:06)
to follow the same types of months, but I'm not really tied to them, so long as it's the right mix of all of them.

Pat Tenneriello (38:13)
How effective are you at reaching those goals? Do you allow room for failure?

Craig (38:16)
Oh yeah,

70%. every great achievement I've ever achieved in my life has been a disappointment. I've always reached so high that I almost get it. Like I didn't want to go to the Olympics. I wanted to be an Olympic champion. I was really disappointed. And so I think there's something to that. There's kind of the right mix of reaching too far and not getting it and getting some.

Pat Tenneriello (38:29)
Hahaha.

Hahaha.

Craig (38:46)
But if I look kind of like on balance, probably hit about 70 % of what I aim to do on any given year.

Pat Tenneriello (38:53)
talked now about when you were in the MBA and, Tea bean, you were going 18 hours a day, you burnt out and now you seem to have a much stronger balance in your life and you prioritize your health. Could you share few things that are like cornerstones to your health today that have enabled you to find that balance?

Craig (39:15)
it's a combination of exercise and food, time with my family and mission driven career goals. I've always sort of operated on the assumption that like money for me, just just flat out here, make more money has never been a good enough driver. Money's kind of got to be a function of all of that other stuff.

So like, I want to make enough money that I can invest in a number of new climate technologies. I want to make enough money that I can fund my own business in this in this next venture and really drive it. Right. So so it's like I always money always tends to be kind of the lower of them.

think it comes down to sort of mental and spiritual health, physical health, which is exercise and food, and then time with my family. And then when it comes to the mission of my career, it's building something that matters. think kind of like you could get some combination of those things and they sort of flux from quarter to quarter.

Pat Tenneriello (40:16)
it. Tell us about the story of how you came up with the idea for sport logic and how it took off.

Craig (40:23)
Yeah, look, if there's an entrepreneur out there listening to this, I tell this one story about kind of the genesis of the company and I encourage everybody to try to follow this because we have we have an incredible advantage in Canada for a lot of our early research and technology. did an independent study, it was the last six credits of my MBA, and it was really a broad study of just sort of,

what new technologies will change the world, right? And it was just like a, I'm not gonna put any direction on this thing. I'm just gonna go look at IP, look at academic journals, look at industry trends and see if I find something. And at this time, I actually wrote three business plans. I ended up shelving two and one of them turned into Sport Logic. This was a, this is 2013 and I discovered sort of

stumbled across machine learning, computer vision, pattern recognition, all the things that we now call AI. At the time you couldn't call it AI. was a taboo term. And I ended up sitting in the back of the room watching my now co-founder defend his PhD thesis. He had built a technology in computer vision that did anomaly detection and security surveillance video. And I was basically spending that entire time walking through the engineering department.

walking into rooms, sitting down with people who were building robots going, hey, tell me what my name is Craig. I'd like to change the world. What are you building? You know, and and sort of I just sort of spent almost six months doing that and happened to sit in the back of the room and watch him defend his Ph.D. thesis. I looked at that and intuitively knew how that could impact sport. I also looked at it and said, look, this is the type of technology that's going to enable self-driving vehicles. It's going to enable satellite imagery. It's going to enable like all of these big

new technologies. But I knew that I could find a beachhead in sport. knew that athletes use video and I knew that if you could sort of automatically tag video, you could do a whole bunch of different things with it. So he and I got together. We joined Tandem and Accelerator here in Montreal. sort of we originally thought we were going to build a self-driving vehicle company. tagging video.

And I think the video that we were tagging was like football video because as technical, but as a, a, if you're going to try to build a new technology, you want to try to start with something that is very simple. And so we were just trying to tag people's feet in video. was the thing that was the initial algorithm we were trying to do. So we built up all this data by manually clicking on video and just tagging XY coordinates. And if you're going to do that, you know, getting people using self-driving vehicle footage is very difficult.

by using football footage, you're trying to tag the foot of a guy who's wearing a jersey, it's got a number on it, he's running across measured lines. It's an easy technology problem. So we tagged all this video, I think we spent weeks tagging it and we were sitting there at the end of it, sitting there with a pizza and beer going, we're exhausted. And we took a quick look at the data and just a quick cursory view, was like, my God, those are all the running paths of these teams. Like for sure the coaches don't want us to have this information.

And it was just this kind of aha moment that we actually could take some of that training data and actually start building sport products with it. Neither Mursan nor I was was sort of a big hockey fan, but we knew if we started a business around hockey, we'd have an advantage because we'd hire great people who know hockey and great Canadian tradition. So so we started we just chose hockey and we started there.

preface this with every entrepreneur should do this, but this is what they should do. So, Mursan and I didn't know how to commercialize technology. We no idea. We went to McGill, because that's where he did his PhD, and we said to McGill, look, we want to license this tech, we want to own it, and we want to build a company around it. We have no money. And so, what we did is we signed a two-year option agreement with McGill to acquire the technology.

in exchange for a percentage of the company that we were going to start. So if you think about that, it's like they give us the tech in two years time. If the tech's working, we exercise it, they own 10 % of our business, great, we all win. If it doesn't work, tech goes back to the university, no harm, no foul. We signed that deal. That basically got the entire thing rolling for no cash, right? So we had this incredible new technology, patents are being filed.

Pat Tenneriello (44:36)
Hmm.

Craig (44:50)
We put a bunch of computer vision projects around it at McGill. We then went to the Canadian government and said, look, we just took five PhDs at McGill and we're now working on new technologies around this. They're going to have these great technologies we're going to either license or buy. We're probably going to hire these guys. We're keeping all this tech in Canada. Can we replicate this? We ended up getting a half million dollar grant from the Canadian government and we replicated that project across 12 university labs across the country.

And so by the time we ever went out to really raise capital, we had this amazing foundation of university technologies working to build these products. And it was such a simple success story for getting tech out of university. I credit Tandem Launch and I credit McGill for being forward thinking in the way that they sort of put that together. But it was a...

phenomenal way of getting deep tech out of universities and working in Canadian startup. So I encourage any entrepreneur looking at doing technology to think about licensing or working with a technologist at university and pulling that tech out and starting something.

Pat Tenneriello (46:01)
fascinating story.

And sport logic took off. during NHL games. think you could see the logo lots of sporting, different sporting leagues and teams used it. The company grew tremendously. I think you got investment from Mark Cuban.

Craig (46:16)
did. That was very early

on, actually. That was that was like in 2015. Actually, right after we licensed the tech from McGill, it was like once we had the tech and the team and we kind of had some interest, I sent him a cold email. I found his email address online and I just sent him an email like, Hi, Mark, my name is Craig. And, you know, here's this tech and here's what we're doing. And half an hour later, he responded. So so, yeah, he amazing, amazing tech investors in the tech and the sports space as well. Just so

grateful that they believed in us and leaned in when they did.

Pat Tenneriello (46:48)
long were you at sport logic and why did you decide to leave?

Craig (46:52)
was founded in 2015. I had been working on it since about 2013 and some gray area in there, so call it about 10 years right or almost 10 years. Yeah, well, and again it was organic. It was natural. I didn't force anything, but maybe there was this moment. Actually, you know it right when COVID hit where the company had to tighten up because sport.

Pat Tenneriello (47:02)
Your 10-year rule. Yeah, okay.

Craig (47:17)
shut down and we had to really, really focus on our core business. we became became kind of a different thing. We became like this machine with really good processes and, you know, really good metrics and like all the things that you want in a business. This thing had hit. And I don't credit myself for that, by the way, I credit our COO and our CTO and our chief commercial officer. But the.

this team was just an executing team. Two things kind of happened around the same time. One is that I love taking things from zero to one. Like I love taking this sort of crazy idea and piecing the things together and turning it into something. And at Sport Logic, there was always a sandbox for me to live in with that. And there was a few things that I kind of had to get from zero to one before they could enter that machine. And I got really, you know,

management team and I sort of worked really well together in that capacity where I was kind of given the room to do that and not distracting the team too much. And when the time was right, introducing it and kind of guiding the products to get up. But at one point, it didn't make sense for the company for that to happen. Right. There was maybe one or two small little things that needed to be done. But I was looking at it going, this thing's running really well. Like it's this thing's doing what it should do. And and I actually think there's probably a leader

who can take it to that next level. There's this step that this company needs to take next. And I think there's somebody out there who is probably more experienced and who frankly could do it 10 times better than I could. And I'm better off learning from that person. And it's going to be a better decision for the business to have that person come in and do that work. And I just knew that that sort of crazy zero to one thing was not what it needed. so that

That idea kind of started creeping in. The second thing that happened is that I've been passionate about environmental sustainability for, I don't know, pretty much since my MBA. of that was my, my focus was in strategies in sustainable development. I was always doing these environmental sustainability things as volunteer projects kind of on the side. And, and I started getting, started getting this itch to that I wanted to kind of pull an old idea off the shelf or I wanted to kind of

piece some things together and start getting going and align my career with that mission. And so, it was kind of organic, but they sort of started happening around the same time. So yeah, so I stepped into the executive chair role, promoted our COO up into CEO, a slow transition to have him running the business and me as the executive chair of the business, which is where we are today.

Pat Tenneriello (50:04)
What would you say were your main takeaways from your experience there?

Craig (50:08)
I think, I I was had a knack for hiring great people. So don't know if that was a takeaway, because I think that was something that was kind of part of our skills early on.

Don't be afraid to realign the business and move people around more frequently. think maybe maybe as a learning that I took away, like when COVID hit, we needed to be a different beast very quickly. And we were not the right people in the right place to be that beast. And I kind of started moving around. we're going to remove this division and we're going to do that. And when the the now CEO, came in,

He was an experienced CEO. had built and sold multiple businesses and he's got 20 years experience on me. He came in as COO and he just came in overnight and boom, boom, boom. We have this initiative, we're gonna do it. And he just moved at a pace that I had never experienced in terms of structuring and setting objectives and achieving those objectives. And sort of this idea that don't be afraid to break things and break them fast.

That's something that I learned and I will 100 % take with me for rest of my career.

Pat Tenneriello (51:21)
That's great on the topic of inspiration. would you consider a role model growing up? And even now, who do you, who do you look up to? Who's influenced you?

Craig (51:29)
the coaches that dedicated their lives to improving me as a person, because that's really what a lot of these figure skating coaches did. They weren't there just to make a champion. They were really invested in

me being a better person. I think every coach that I had in figure skating and frankly, every parent thinking about putting their skater in their kids in figure skating or in sport do it for that reason. I point to my management team early on in sport logic and

we always had a really strong moral compass as a group. And sometimes we had like very difficult decisions that we had to make and we always came back to our values to make those decisions. And I was really inspired by that from them. And that really helped guide a lot of decisions that I made along the way with Sport Logic. And I think that's something where, again, the entire management team at Sport Logic, you know who you are. point to each of them. It's not a big group.

Pat Tenneriello (52:23)
Mm-hmm.

was your favorite coach when you were in figure skating and why? What was it about that coach, their style, their mindset that really resonated with you?

Craig (52:38)
have to point to two, because there was sort of two sides of the same coin. Wirtz was a coach that I had early on. So Jamie McGregor was a coach I had in Kelowna for years and helped sort of shape me as a young man surviving in this world. But when I moved to Montreal, Paul Wirtz was hard trainer, well known across the sport as this is the guy you go to who is going to drop the hammer.

You're going to work like you've never worked in your life. You're to work till you throw up. He's going to yell at you to stop throwing up and you're to go back to work. And from the age of 18 to 20 was exactly what I needed. I learned how far I could push myself. I learned the boundaries of my own physical and mental capabilities. kind of just after that, my partner and I moved to Montreal and we began taking from Richard Gauthier.

Now, Richard was the opposite side of that same coin. We had to do the work. Richard was all about enriching the lives of his athletes and making sure he was bringing out who they were as artists and as people. he was just so focused on your happiness and your the joy that you brought on the ice that that kind of something that I didn't even know was in there kind of came out on the ice. And like I said, I call that two sides of the same coin.

Pat Tenneriello (53:29)
you

Craig (53:53)
because you really kind of need both. And maybe you need both at the same time or maybe you need both at different times in your life. But those are sort of the two people I would really point to as my main coaches.

Pat Tenneriello (54:07)
like they couldn't have been more different just that where you in your life at that time that just clicked with your needs were.

Craig (54:14)
Yep. Yep. 100%. And look, as a junior athlete learning, you got to put in that work. There's got to be a phase in your career where you do that work and you learn where your limits are. Because as much as we think we know them, really, until somebody else can push them, you don't know. And I think that's really important. It was important early on in my career.

Pat Tenneriello (54:38)
I read this really great book. I don't know if you've heard of it. It's called mindset by Carol Dweck.

Craig (54:44)
I assume it's good.

Pat Tenneriello (54:45)
There's

a section, there's a whole section on sports, sports, the mindset of a champion. And this whole book is basically around having a growth mindset and what a growth mindset is, you know, being willing to learn, treat failure as a learning opportunity. Contrast that with a fixed mindset, which would be, a natural, I'm already smart. And so then every time I get something wrong, like I feel judged, I feel weaker.

And I just want to, I just want to bail and either find an easier challenge so that I could feel like a winner again. And so in the sports chapter, she contrasts certain well-known athletes like Michael Jordan and how Michael Jordan, wasn't so much that he was a natural talent. He got cut from his high school basketball team, for example, but it was just the sheer effort that he put in, even after games where he'd win championships, he'd be practicing right after the game because little bit like that fire in your belly that you talked about.

In the beginning, it's like, that's, that's what it takes. And so I just thought I'd read you, a few lines from, from the sports chapter. starts off where she talks about natural talent, right? Like you hear a lot in sports, like that guy's a natural talent or that that girl's a natural talent. And, and so in this, she says, as much as our culture talks about individual effort and self-improvement deep down, he argues this being, Malcolm Gladwell.

He argues, revere the naturals. We like to think of our champions as idols, as superheroes who were born different from us. We don't like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary. So Craig, would you say you're a superhero who was born different from us?

Craig (56:24)
No, no, no, no, no, from it. No, no, no. I agree with his statement, Malcolm Gladwell's statement there, but I think it's unfortunate that we somehow revere these individual athletes because it's not, right? I bet you could go through Michael Jordan's life, and I haven't. I've never read his biography. I'm not sure, but I know the athlete and kind of the beast that he is, but the...

I think you could probably point to moments in his life and people in his life who shaped that. There was definitely something there, definitely, right? Like, Kobe kind of had that same thing, that sort of like beast mode mentality. There was something there, but at the same time, all of those other pieces and all of those other people had to be there in order to bring that out. There's no such thing as a self-made man. It's just, I think it's a fallacy. I don't know why we revere it. I...

Maybe it's just easy to point at, right? It's easier to be inspired by one person out there. Maybe that maybe resonates with us personally, but yeah, I just, don't think it's a thing.

Pat Tenneriello (57:24)
Fair enough. in your, tell the telling of your upbringing and your story, I feel like you could have gone one direction or the other, right? you had a tough upbringing. There were moments where, you know, you guys, you didn't know if you'd have enough money to put food on the table, you could tell that story and be like, and I, you know, despite all that, became,

You know, a plumber, which is by the way, there's nothing wrong with being a plumber, but in your case, it lit a real fire in your belly. Like what do you think pushed you in one direction?

Craig (57:53)
By the way,

if I look at it, I think the reason I'm not out on the street right now, totally self-destructive is because I actually had people around me, like good people who supported me. And if anything,

I'm fortunate to have been born around those people or otherwise put around them by my family. Right. And that's something that not everybody can say. I had no control over that. It is just flat out luck. Right. I born in the right place with the right people around me. Yes. All of those other things were sort of shaped and pushed and went in that direction. Yes. I picked up the baton and I ran with it when I could as fast as I could. But there is this there is also this

humble realization that, that yeah, I, I'm also just very lucky that I had the right support around me when I did. Um, but you're not wrong, man. That, that is, there's probably a fine line between, you know, pushing to greatness and totally falling off.

Pat Tenneriello (58:59)
podcast is also about finding purpose and meaning. You talked about how money for the sake of money just doesn't do it for you. you talked about some of the things that do it for you, but maybe if I asked you a bit more directly, what, what brings you the most meaning in your life?

Craig (59:17)
Oof.

think just making an impact. think, you and I, you could look at that 50 different ways. You know, when I look at, I look at my kids every day and I think through what is the impact that I'm making on their lives, right? Is it this thing I'm doing right now? Is it positive? Is it negative? How will they be impacted and how will their lives grow from here by, my impact, the impact that I have on them in my career? What impact will, will my company have on this world? Right?

the generation from now, how will it be impacted? How will it make it, you know, and will it leave the world better than when I arrived here? I think this idea of making an impact and making a positive impact is important. And it's something that I don't think there's a day goes by that I don't think about it. And I think pretty much every big decision I make kind of ultimately narrows down to that.

Pat Tenneriello (1:00:16)
Good answer. You alluded to your next chapter in your life is helping to tackle climate change. That obviously brings you meaning and can certainly have an impact. I guess you could have picked a harder challenge to work on. mean, if I were to.

Craig (1:00:32)
Yeah,

yeah, it's weak.

Pat Tenneriello (1:00:35)
But

maybe could you tell us a little bit about what you're working on, what kind of impact you think it can have?

Craig (1:00:39)
That's everything I've...

you know, this exercise you go through in entrepreneurship generally where it's like, you know, what problem are we tackling? And I kind of, during my MBA was just looking at like, you know, what is the answer to that question? You kind of, you try to bring it up to first principles and primarily what is the challenge that we need to tackle in our generation, right? And then when I say like things we're going to build or accomplishments we're going to make, which ones are going to matter?

And you could pretty much boil those down to a very small handful of things. And the one that I that, you know, resonated with me was climate change. And so, you know, climate change is a big, broad subject, but you could ultimately boil it down to the CO2 problem. You want to debate whether it's manmade or volcano made or forest fire made. I don't. OK, I don't care. There's a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere. There are a lot of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the earth is warming up. And so that's the problem. And so.

There are right now a bunch of companies doing what's called carbon capture, basically running air through a massive filter and pulling the CO2 out of the air. A lot of the technology is maturing. There's billions of dollars going into it. And I believe that the actual technology is there today to actually take all of the CO2 out of our atmosphere in our lifetime. The technology exists. And so that's without me ever doing a single thing. I could sit on a beach today and that will happen.

The challenge that I think that that entire industry has is how do you fund it? Right? Like taking CO2 out of the air and putting it in the ground is a cost. And that cost is going to be up against every other dollar we spend in, you know, globally. And believe me, in a time where there's economic turmoil, there's infrastructure that needs to be built because of climate change, or there's, you know, food security that needs to be invested in, there's all these other things that are going to demand our money.

Nobody's going to invest in infrastructure to capture CO2 and put it underground. It's just not, not at the scale that needs to happen. So what I'm tackling is how do you make carbon capture profitable so that we can continue to invest in that infrastructure? Right? How do you have it be profitable? So if I'm going to make an investment of capital into capturing CO2 out of the air, how do I make some money back? Right? And I think if you can somehow crack that nut,

globally, we'll have a reason to do it. And you'll start to see budgets unlocking and you'll start to see it actually happening. So my thesis is this, at the entire global economy, 200 some odd products that are mined or produced or manufactured and looked at the weight of those products. And then from there, if you look at the chemical composition, we actually have over 20 billion tons of CO2 molecules in all of the products around us every year that we spend money on.

Thing is we take those CO2 molecules out of the ground. So we take them out as either sand or, you know, we produce things and make cement or we make chemicals or we make, you know, but we're taking CO2 molecules functionally out of the ground, making products with them and selling them. Rather than mine the ground, we should be mining the skies. We should be taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere, blending it with other molecules, turning those molecules into the products that power our economy. And so,

The first, I mean, there I've got a list of 30 different products that can be built from CO2. The first one that I'm building right now are minerals, gravel, sand, a lot of the things that are in our construction industry. So today, concrete is the second most used commodity on the planet next to water. And if we could make our concrete out of CO2, congratulations, we solved global warming.

Right. If you can do it at a price that's competitive and you can build our infrastructure, our roads, our bridges, our homes out of these products made out of CO2, that CO2 gets stored for hundreds of years. Right. Maybe not Quebec roads. How long they stay in place. But we're working on it. But but my point is what I'm doing right now is very similar to what what Tesla did with vehicles, which is

Pat Tenneriello (1:04:38)
Yeah.

Craig (1:04:51)
You know, they built this entire value chain from the batteries to the electric drive trains all the way up to the car, right? And the only way that they could electrify the industry was to own that entire value chain end to end. I'm building CO2 negative homes. So the entire value chain from carbon capture, converting the CO2 into materials, and then using robotics and automation to build homes. So looking to build affordable homes that are built from CO2. And that is...

That's the gist. That's kind of the elevator pitch. Got a long, long pitch right now and it's going really well. We've got our first few products. I've got, she's almost about a million dollars of, of, of revenue in the pipeline right now with kind of some pieces together. so it's, it's going really, really well. super exciting. It's one of the most exciting projects I've been a part of, you know, since, since sport logic. so.

Pat Tenneriello (1:05:50)
That sounds fascinating, Craig. You've married climate change with the housing crisis we have in most of the Western world as well.

Craig (1:05:58)
Look, that will be hopefully we solve, you know, two birds, one stone, hopefully. What I've found in the startup world is generally speaking, if you're trying to solve too many things, you end up solving nothing. So that the one criteria that we will continuously come back to is CO2 based materials that are competitively priced. That will be what it is. It's very early days. So, you know, you never know where these things are going to go. Like I said, Sport Logic was a self-driving vehicle early on.

And so we're now, I'm not sure where this is gonna land, but what we're doing right now is we are raising essentially a real estate slash technology construction and CO2 fund so that the fund can buy the real estate and can give the projects to the home building company to build these new technologies in. So it's very early, but really, really exciting.

Pat Tenneriello (1:06:53)
does it get transformed from a gas into whatever it is you're building?

Craig (1:06:59)
Yeah, so around this time last year I bought a chemistry 101 book and then I went through like all of MIT's chemistry 101 online courses. you can kind of think of it as you have acids and you have bases, right? And from chemistry 101 you remember those things stick together, right? So if you ever put vinegar and baking soda in a fake volcano and it blows up, there's a reaction that happens. So CO2 is an acid and what you need is a base. And this is called mineralization.

Essentially, if you put CO2 with certain types of rocks, it naturally turns into a different type of rock. And so this is the easiest one. There are probably, like I said, 29 more ways that you can do it. But essentially what happens is you have this scrubber of sorts that the air comes through and the base naturally sticks to the CO2 and pulls it out of that air. The air goes out the other side and the CO2 now sticks to this scrubber. So you can then pull that out, compress it.

a liquid tank and from there we put it with other minerals and we turn it into functionally sand is what it is. Then we build a bunch of different products with that sand.

Pat Tenneriello (1:08:09)
is so cool. That sounds really exciting, Craig.

Craig (1:08:10)
I agree. these

people who are smarter than me built it. I take very little credit other than sort of, you know, bringing the right people into the room. But but it is it's a really, really exciting time. It's you know, if we can just build one house that makes a single dollar of profit and store CO2 at scale, the only questions to the investors is then going to be, well, how much profit do you want? Right. Let's go get all the CO2. until that answer is there.

Climate change will always be a problem. We have to turn it into something that is going to be a better solution than the one we have today. And that we're just cracking that nut right now. So.

Pat Tenneriello (1:08:50)
And the idea is that the cost of building the house will be equal less than the costs of the materials that are in use today.

Craig (1:08:59)
It has to be. Yeah, it has. That's our grand challenge. That's going to be the big innovation and engineering challenge that we're going to have for the next decade plus. There it'll always be cheaper to just go get sand out of a river than it will be to synthetically create it. But there are new technologies in biotechnologies, in sort altering DNA of microbes to do new things in reactions. There are new

different types of energy coming like energy technologies coming online. to take some some leaps. But the short answer is yes. When people buying homes, people care about money, right? People care about how much it costs. And that that ultimately is going to trump whether or not the home is environmentally sustainable. purchasing a house is a very difficult thing to do, especially in this day and age.

You have to make these things or you have make them affordable so that people can get into homes. It has to be if they're not affordable or if they're even slightly more expensive than homes are today. Nobody's nobody's buying them. Right. Canadians won't get homes to live in. They own. And I think so you have to solve that problem. And look, we got our first products. We're there for their first with our first few products. We've got enough to begin scaling a business where our product performs better.

Pat Tenneriello (1:10:06)
Mm-hmm.

Craig (1:10:14)
It's less expensive and it's made from CO2.

Pat Tenneriello (1:10:16)
that's super exciting. If someone wanted to learn more about what you're doing, is there a website you can point them to?

Craig (1:10:22)
Uh, yeah, sure. It's a landing page because I put no time into marketing. Um, uh, riseco2.com Uh, it's yeah. Rise is name of the company. Um, at this point it's, it's me and five other people who are sort of working either in, uh, uh, their own businesses where we have commercial agreements or they're coming in as, as partners. So it's very, very early days. We haven't raised any capital yet. I'm hoping to be able to self fund kind of the first

little bit and yeah, it's moving.

Pat Tenneriello (1:10:55)
Well, I wish you a lot of success with that, Craig. If someone wanted to learn more just about you as an individual or follow you, what would be the best social media or way to connect with you?

Craig (1:11:06)
I would get in touch with you and listen to your podcast. can get me. I'm sure there's an info at riseco2.com or there's a... Yeah, we're on LinkedIn. I check my LinkedIn messages.

Pat Tenneriello (1:11:18)
drop those links in the description of the episode.

Craig (1:11:20)
man, this was great. look, it's just it's really nice to be in touch with you. And I'm so happy for you with this podcast. It's, you know, listening to the past few episodes and seeing it grow. It's going to be awesome. And congrats.

Pat Tenneriello (1:11:33)
Thank you, Craig. I appreciate that. appreciate your support. Appreciate you taking the time out of your busy life to be on the show. I'm sure the listeners will really appreciate this episode. I certainly did. I that we'll have you back someday on the show and I hope to stay in touch. I wish you a lot of success with your new venture.

Craig (1:11:50)
Appreciate it, you too. Cheers.

Pat Tenneriello (1:11:52)
That's a wrap on this episode of After Peter Pan. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the conversation, please subscribe, rate, or leave a review. It really helps more people to discover the show. Until next time, keep growing, keep pushing forward, and don't be afraid to take the leap. See you next time.