The New Industrial Revolution: Veronica Breckenridge’s Vision for Biology-Based Manufacturing | Venture Capital Series

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codaspote, and today’s guest is Veronica Breckenridge, founder and managing partner at First Byte Ventures. They are a Houston-based venture capital firm dedicated to advancing and commercializing industrial biotechnology.

Their goal is to support early stage biomanufacturing companies that develop sustainable solutions for the world’s pressing challenges. Under Veronica’s leadership, First Byte Ventures has invested in multiple groundbreaking startups and secured $70 million in funding across seven companies from the US Department of Defense. Veronica brings over 30 years of institutional investing and operations experience, having played key roles at Tesla,

Apple and Hone Capital. She believes in building a better future through technology and innovation and her passion for sustainable practices is evident in every aspect of her work. She’s also passionate about mentorship and ensuring the next generation of innovators can thrive. We’re excited to explore her insights on the future of industrial biotech. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Ad Back Benefits Agency.

where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. Imagine being able to give your employees free access to doctors, therapists, and prescription meds in a way that puts more money in your staff’s pockets and the company’s too. As an example, one recent client with 450 employees boosted net profits over $412,000 a year. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the founder and managing partner of First Byte Ventures, Veronica Breckenridge. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Veronica Breckenridge (02:09)
Well, thank you very much, Anthony, for having me.

Anthony Codispoti (02:12)
So Veronica, before we talk about the inspiration for starting First Byte, I want to hear about a couple of your more formidable stops along the way. I understand you played a key role in discovering Siri, the voice assistant that Apple iPhones use when it was just sitting on a shelf at Stanford. Can you walk us through how you identified this technology’s potential, and especially at a time when others weren’t seeing value in it?

Veronica Breckenridge (02:43)
Yes, it’s actually a really interesting story almost I feel in the realm of when you think about Xerox, you know, really did the first graphical user interface and Apple ends up being in this case, case is similar kind of beneficiary be the first one who actually introduced it into ⁓ market. And it’s a typical story of how potentially incumbents.

may not be well, despite all the resources they seem to have, may not be well sort of positioning adopting new technology. When I was at Motorola, this was when I was at Motorola, I was part of a group that was called X product. This was 2005. And at that point, and if you are like me who are old enough to remember Razor was the hot thing that ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (03:35)
yeah, the small flip phone, super tiny, slipped right in your pocket. Yep.

Veronica Breckenridge (03:41)
and

So Motorola was at the height of, I would say, its mobile device. I was part of the mobile devices. However, we also recognized that moving forward, the phone will need to deliver more experiences. It’s not going to be a voice only device. So Motorola actually had the recognition that that was going to happen. I was part of the group that was called X product and X stood for experience. So we knew in the future it’s going to be experience centric.

We didn’t know what it was going to be, but there’s going to be new experiences that has to be created to make that device richer. So I was a part of that group. led what we called sort of ecosystem. Basically my job, my team’s job is to go out and look at new technologies that could deliver differentiated experience. And then that potentially we can introduce to our devices. So at Motorola, when I was looking at ⁓

I was looking at lot of different ⁓ innovations. A lot of them are actually quite interesting and they are real now. I really felt like it had the crystal ball for 10 years into the future where the world was going to look like. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (04:55)
And how were you accessing these or

seeing these before they came to light? You’re just talking to sort of the young startup companies that are coming up with the ideas.

Veronica Breckenridge (05:03)
Yeah, we were talking a lot of the startups. also had someone in Silicon Valley. So I was actually going to Silicon Valley. yes, a lot of entrepreneurs and people were bringing technology and had a team there that was actually scouting also these in terms of also talking to VCs, telling them what we wanted. ⁓ And they would surface interesting technologies to us as we look. And one of the areas that we were looking at was we felt there needs to be a new user

interface and the new user interface could be a voice-driven interface and that was an area that we were interested in. However, the solution at that point that most people have provided was a chip. The chip would be on the mobile devices. Excuse me, I’m going to turn off this mic. ⁓ So when, ⁓ but the problem was at that point this is, you know, think about it, 20 years ago. ⁓

So the phone actually had very limited memory. If you had two meg of memory back then, that was a two, $300 phone, right? So very little memory, very little processing power. So if you had a chip and because voice technology actually requires a lot of processing, as you know, so you could never really deliver a really nice experience. There’s lots of people who try to use the chip and compress the processing into so that you could be mobile.

But it was never a great experience. So from that perspective, was like, here’s this voice, you know, if the voice interfaces we see in a lot of these science fiction movies, it would be nice. the experience that the technology was able to do was just never going to get there. And then I was introduced to back then this, it’s called Stanford Research Institute, SRI.

And I was introduced to them and I paid them a visit and they were basically, obviously before that we prepped there. So this is the objective. We want to see technologies that you have that might create differentiated experience. And they showed us a number of different technologies. One of the technology that showed us was actually this.

what we call client server. And if you understand the technical understand is a client server technology. So it wasn’t a chip. was essentially using, assuming the bandwidth of the network will actually grow. And it was basically sending your voice packet. was just recording your voice and sending the voice packet to the backend. Cause server has a limited processing capability and cheap.

Anthony Codispoti (07:46)
So

at the time, the phones, they weren’t very powerful. They didn’t have a lot of memory. They didn’t have the processing power. And so the idea was send this data over across the cell phone tower waves to a server on the other side that are super beepy, very powerful. Do the processing there.

Veronica Breckenridge (07:58)
Over. ⁓

And the other thing I think the paradigm or the disruption if you will that enable that inflection is you have to assume that the network will become much broader, broader bit Bob and because given that trend that was going because if it was the small narrow network then the speed at which you’re sending that packet.

and coming back that experience would not be great because it’d be long delays, right? But the assumption is as this technology matures, also the infrastructure won’t get there. So it’ll be fast enough that it can come back really quickly. You use the server to process and then you pump the response back to your device. So now all you needed was the network.

and the server, which both are way cheaper than developing a chip and also doesn’t take any resources from your device. So it was just a beautiful architecture. And when you think about scalability, like this can scale immensely. Their demo was very simple. Their demo back then was actually based on the

was actually searched for a song, because iPod was a thing. And so it was really just, tell them, it could be any, and the nice thing is that they also context-dated. So what happens is it was limited to all songs. So in the backend, you can have all songs, right, in your database. And then you can have maybe part of a lyric, or it’s not even the right lyric. You can have part of the name of the artist or part of the song, and you can go back and ask it, and it will come back. And it was 99 points.

some like percentage factor. So it was incredible, double. It was an incredible.

Anthony Codispoti (09:45)
That’s impressive. So this so how is

it that Motorola didn’t end up with this and Apple did?

Veronica Breckenridge (09:53)
So this is where I mentioned is a great story of how incumbents don’t have the capabilities to actually incorporate new technology. So we love the technology. I brought our product team there. We built the first commercial prototype.

of this technology and the prototype was actually we back it integrated with at that point OpenTable and we integrated with ⁓ GPS on the phone. So you could literally take that device and ask it say Japanese restaurant within five miles of where I am. It’ll come back with a list and you can say book me a reservation at this restaurant at this time. It’ll go back to the

open table, you know, sort of server and then book your and come back with. So it was actually a beautiful demo too. Everybody loved it. Right. And at that point, what we realized, unfortunately, when we said, you know, can we put it on our device? Motorola never had an operating system.

truly an operating system because Motorola, remember the phone, Motorola invented the phone because of the antenna technology. So Motorola was really good. is why Motorola had the Razr, incredible mechanical engineer, incredible antenna engineer, not software engineer. So their device, the way we brought our device to the world, every device is an individual product.

We never had a software platform. Software was an afterthought because when we started the phone, there was no software technology. You just cobble together some codes and make it work. And it was simple. was just making the voice work. And most of the software capability was all what we call the stack software, which is the communication network. You needed to make sure the communication worked with the network and, ⁓ and the voice quality was extremely good. Back then a good phone.

Definition of a good phone is draw call quality, but you don’t draw calls.

Anthony Codispoti (12:02)
So, sorry for jumping in Veronica, but just to kind of clarify the ultimate reason that we didn’t see this technology, sort of the Siri voice technology on a Motorola phone is because they didn’t have the operating system. They didn’t have sort of that ⁓ software or OS infrastructure in place to layer this on top. And they thought it was too big of a lift to kind of go down that.

Veronica Breckenridge (12:29)
Correct. They thought integrating that feature would be incredibly hard. The result was like we could put it on a Windows mobile phone or we could have put it on a Symbian phone, which is a Nokia operating system, but we didn’t have an operating system to put it on.

Anthony Codispoti (12:29)
of developing one.

Veronica Breckenridge (12:46)
So ⁓ it was gonna take way too long to incorporate that feature and that ended up, yeah, we ended up not doing it. And in fact, what was interesting is the product manager that actually worked on it, as I left, Motorola, he left and joined SRI as a EIR there and ended up taking that technology, commercializing, raising money. And then three years later got bought by Apple.

Anthony Codispoti (13:12)
⁓ okay, so that’s how it all unfolded. Interesting. Okay, so let’s fast forward. ⁓ You’ve had so many cool experiences. I think we could probably do an interview on each one of your career stops, but I wanna spend the bulk of our time really talking about what you’re doing now. How did you come up with the idea to start First Byte Ventures? What was the gap? What was the problem that you were trying to solve?

Veronica Breckenridge (13:36)
Yeah, when you look at what I want, one of the constant themes I feel like my career has been is identifying what and when a disruption could happen. And there’s a lot of to your, know, as we use that sort of series story, if you will, you have to see a number, there has to be a number of, call it sufficient conditions for a disruption to happen.

And it doesn’t just, one of which is the cost of the technology has to get to a reasonable point and you have to believe it will get there within a reasonable timeframe. ⁓

Second thing is the technology development curve has to get to something that you could leverage other, like in the case of Siri, really, we could leverage other ⁓ sort of server-based technology, like OpenTable and other services that’s already existing that you can connect to so you can provide more value than just the technology. So this technology is really a conduit to achieve more applications.

that can be available there. ⁓ And then the final thing is when you look at disruption is oftentimes there is you have to believe there is a

large enough market that’s at a lower cost that would benefit from it, that couldn’t really benefit at the earlier stage because when it was really expensive. as costs come down, it really unlocks a large market. For instance, the internet. If you think about it, the internet started in the 50s by the government, and then big enterprises were using it because computing was expensive and they were the only people who could afford it. However, as the internet…

come to and become more adopted by ⁓ consumers really as a cause come down with personal computing, with the network being there, finally, eventually, the adoption of the internet and what drove the growth of the internet is really consumer and personal applications, right, before it now becomes SaaS and it kind of comes back to the enterprise space to force them to change at the speed of ⁓ consumer adoption. So those things have to, those I think are the three critical

elements you have to look at to say is a disruption going to happen at that time because timing is really important because otherwise you started investing in internet in the 50s probably not a great you know have to wait your whole lifetime

Anthony Codispoti (16:14)
You

Veronica Breckenridge (16:16)
So, and when I was looking at, this is back in 2021, looking at the industry, there are three things that I noticed. One is as we think about computing, the cost has come down significantly, but the cost of biology has come down even more so because not only did the cost come down,

to in terms of understanding biology, but also the tools have been developing in terms of understanding biology for the last 20, 30 years. So the cost of biology has dropped actually over 100,000 times.

Anthony Codispoti (16:55)
Can you explain what that means,

the cost of biology? Because I think of biology, I’m I’m biology, like the plants are biology, like, I don’t know, cost the same amount to grow a tree as it always has, but I’m missing something.

Veronica Breckenridge (17:08)
Okay.

Yeah, sorry. So sequencing a genome, let’s use that. So bioengineering. So sequencing a genome costed over $100 million. Now it’s maybe $1,000. Actually, it’s in more hundreds of dollars now. So it’s actually dropped because of this exponential curve, if you think about it. It’s

Anthony Codispoti (17:15)
Mmm.

Veronica Breckenridge (17:32)
The cost of computing has come down and it’s accelerated the discovery of new bio path biology pathways and bio engineering. But the tools have also been developing because the pharma industry had a lot of money and had been pouring money in terms of discovering new bio pathways more in search of things like cancer, curing cancer and things like that, which are basically have no price elasticity. When you talk about life, there is no price elasticity.

So they’ve been developing all these tools. So the tool development and the cause has been really now what’s also way faster. took us, know, first genome, I think when we sequenced it took almost a year. Now it’s like you’re talking about minutes, right? So the speed of which has also accelerated and the cost has accelerated. So now we’re talking about

Anthony Codispoti (18:22)
wild.

Veronica Breckenridge (18:30)
we’re in a place where as this technology continues to go down, we’re going to start the discovery and the cost is going to continue on that exponential curve. And this is one of the things that people always say, you know, we overestimate the present and underestimate the long term. And this is because every technology is an exponential curve.

We overestimate the short term because we only think linearly. We don’t think exponentially. When you hit that exponential port, it’s going to accelerate at a much faster speed than anybody can imagine. But in the short run, it just doesn’t look like it’s moving, right? And this is where I feel vital.

Anthony Codispoti (19:18)
And are we at

that inflection point now or did we hit that a few years ago where it’s now in the exponential curve?

Veronica Breckenridge (19:20)
That’s one of the things I feel like. I think the tools

with the cost and with the understanding that now that we have, are finally at, it’s my personal opinion, but.

I feel like we’re about to hit that inflection point in terms of discovery. And that’s the perfect timing for investment because you don’t want to invest when the valuations already are up and because you’re not going to make the actual, it’s right in front of that inflection point is the right time to enter the market.

Anthony Codispoti (19:36)
We’re about to, okay.

What are you seeing on the graph, Veronica, that suggests to you that we are about to hit that inflection point?

Veronica Breckenridge (19:59)
⁓ Like I said, this is, it’s a much more.

Anthony Codispoti (20:04)
Just you sort of have a holistic view of everything kind of going on in the space.

Veronica Breckenridge (20:06)
I would say if you look at

these conditions, so what that cost curve was one of the reasons. The second is if you think about where, just like the example we use with Siri, where broadband is going to be deployed, where the trend of technology is going, how is this going to happen? When I looked at it, think about with all the data centers that are being built, with the the drop in

data storage cost, the drop in computing cost, that’s going to continue to happen. And when you think about the data set in terms of what’s the biggest data set that we have that we have not been able to collect because it was too costly, because a lot of the algorithms, I’ll be honest, that people get very excited about AI. I tell people this is nothing to be excited about because guess what? The algorithm we knew, we just didn’t have.

cost effective tools to do actually do any analytics on it because it was cost to do it. But now we can do it because it’s cheaper now. Exactly. And what’s the biggest data set? Biology is the biggest data set. When a person can create terabytes of data, right? On your your your single person. And if we think about

Anthony Codispoti (21:13)
Because the cost of computing is so much less expensive. Got it. OK.

What do mean by,

what do mean by that Veronica? You’re talking about like my, my genome, my DNA, like that’s terabytes of data or something else that I’m doing. Okay.

Veronica Breckenridge (21:37)
Yeah, yeah, just your

basic code of you, if they were to actually sequence everything, all the molecules and things like that, it’s a huge amount of data that we don’t, we used to not be able to store cheaply or analyze cheaply. so as we

If you think about, we are still probably only at the first 1 or 2 % of understanding of biology. We think we understand a lot, but we actually don’t in terms of human biology. Human biology is also probably the most complex of them.

And so the unlock of biology is going to create huge value because we’re basically think of it as we’re at the early stage of the internet. There’s so much more that we can do around the world. So the value of unlock is going to be enormous. So that’s the second thing I look at is how as technology trends, how is it going to fundamentally

almost use the existing technology, it’s just because the cost and everything else around it going down, we’re going to be able to unlock a lot more knowledge to give us value on that particular industry.

Anthony Codispoti (22:51)
So use your same crystal ball that you had before when you were looking at Siri and other technologies and kind of the mobile phone market and tell us what you think it looks like 10 years from now in the biotech space. What are the big unlocks that are likely to

Veronica Breckenridge (23:09)
So I actually, this is part of the reason I decided to go into industrial biotech instead of going to pharma. I do believe human DNA and biology is very complex. It is an exponentially hard problem as well. ⁓ which I commend the… ⁓

pharma industry and all of that trying to solve it, it’s still going to take a long time. ⁓ And even with the exponential development, it’s one of those things that it always looks, everybody thinks it’s almost there, it’s still going to take a longer time.

However, where I think it’s interesting, and this is also what we talked about, the third thing was what’s gonna drive most application? How many people, I mean, everybody maybe eventually gets cancer, but it takes a long time for them to get there. It’s very specialized application.

It is a very value creating because it’s saving lives. But what’s the most common things that we use that actually biology could solve that is every day? And that’s when I started to look at, well, that’s everyday chemicals, everyday products. Think about we use these products, we whether it’s the cosmetics that we use, whether it’s the ⁓ food we talked about, food that we eat, ingredients, flavor, fragrance.

⁓ There’s clothing that we wear, everything has chemicals in it. Our physical world is full of chemicals. And right now, most of that chemical is based on one single food stock, which is petroleum. Yes, that’s why petrochemical is such a huge industry, right? 90 % of all these chemicals came from petroleum. And so if that…

Anthony Codispoti (24:50)
Petroleum. Okay.

Veronica Breckenridge (25:02)
to me and if we can change, think about every chemical plant, we can make them biological. That’s a huge industrial revolution and it’s something, it’s producing a product that everybody needs, everybody uses. And how do we do that? So we don’t change how people uses them, but we change the process of which we make them to make it better for people. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (25:26)
So you want,

rather than a lot of these chemicals being derived from oil that’s sort of pumped out of the ground and processed through dirty kind of mechanisms, you want to use biology or ⁓ process plants or plant waste to produce the same types of chemicals in a way that’s more earth friendly. Is that a good summation? Okay.

Veronica Breckenridge (25:51)
That’s a very good summation.

Yeah, so that’s the industrial biology site where we sort of start to see. the biggest challenge, we can leverage all these tools that pharma had developed and invested to help us to unlock that. The other thing that makes it a little simpler than pharma is that these are microbes, bacteria, fungi, or organisms.

that we can control if we can manage we know how to industrial

I’ll call it manufacturing scale manufacturing that process if we can master that to produce millions of tons of this stuff, right? That’s that’s what we need and pharma doesn’t need that because pharma as you know, the applications are milligrams ⁓ So pharma doesn’t need that kind of scale. So pharma the one problem pharma hasn’t looked into is how do we industrialize that process?

so we can go into scaled production. And that’s an industrial problem. That’s a manufacturing problem. So it’s much less about the basic fundamental science because I believe with tools, we’re going to continue to develop new organisms and discover more things.

But industrializing that process is the fundamental bottleneck now. And if we can figure out how to actually manage that production and consistently produce these chemicals in a scaled production, that’s possible. Now we can unlock a lot of, because there’s lots of bio waste that we can use to convert into, different organisms that we’ll discover to convert into chemicals.

Anthony Codispoti (27:36)
So let me see if I’m hearing you correctly, It sounds like you’re saying some of the tech to do this exists now. We just don’t know how to do it on a cost efficient large scale. Is that right? And the hope is as we continue to ⁓ research and develop these technologies, we’ll come up with new organisms or new biology that will make some of these processes even more efficient.

Veronica Breckenridge (28:05)
Yeah, it’s a manufacturing problem, right? So it’s like think about chemical industry essentially had over 100 years.

of development to get to where it is, to set up the first plant, then have transportation, have infrastructure, all of that needs to be feedstock and result, but it’s a process, right? So it’s not gonna happen overnight, but I think the timing of which we’re now at is we could unlock this huge market. And that’s one of the reasons also I picked Houston, because to unlock that market, you actually don’t just need biological sort of biology talent.

You need chemical talent, chemical engineering, chemical process engineering, because a lot of challenge of biology is it doesn’t just produce one specificity of chemical, which is what the chemical industry actually needs.

They want specificity and they usually it’s a broth that has lots of different chemicals or the ones that you’re interested in will still need to be purified and taken out of that broth to get to industrial quality. And having that full process to be cost effective is really important, not just the biology part. there is a lot of, ⁓ if you will, the we need cross disciplinary

talent to make it happen.

Second thing you hit right on the nail is cost effective. So we cost effective workforce, cost effective land. ⁓ We also need ⁓ to build these plants, which means we need a business friendly environment where you can actually build these plants as quickly as you need to to test out these technologies. And this is one of the things I really feel Houston is very unique in its geographies because we have the world leading.

chemical engineers that’s concentrated in this geography.

Anthony Codispoti (30:02)
And is that because

of the oil production that’s so needed? Okay.

Veronica Breckenridge (30:05)
Very

much so, and it’s a petrochemical hub for America. And then you also have ⁓ biology, because we actually happen to have the largest medical center in the world, Texas Medical Center, that sees 10 million patients a year. You have MD Anderson, have some of the top ⁓ medical industries, of ⁓ biological research institutions that are here.

And you have a very cost-effective land. You don’t have as much regulatory. If you were trying to build a plant, I think in California, would take you five years to get the permit.

And you know, I think order of magnitude more expensive. So when you think about we need proof of concept and we need pilot scale, need a place where the natural talent exists, because it’s hard to attract talents when you’re a startup. So you need to, if you’re able, if you think about this, I think the secret recipe of Silicon Valley is over time, it has become the world best software engineers will go to Silicon Valley.

They will choose to be in Silicon Valley. I feel Houston, where the world best engineers already come here, we already have a great talent pool for biology. ⁓ Those are the talents we need to tap into. We don’t need to attract anybody, we just need to the local talent to love this. Exactly. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (31:30)
You don’t have to get people to move. They’re in your backyard.

Veronica Breckenridge (31:35)
the cost effectiveness of the land. There’s plenty of land in Texas, as you know. And so there’s a lot of advantages to just build it here. And you start with smaller scale to validate your technology and your manufacturing process. And over time, you can scale it to massive commercial scale.

Anthony Codispoti (31:56)
So when we talk about ⁓ accessing biology, are we talking about growing plants specifically for the purpose of whatever this harvesting process looks like? Or are we talking about using ⁓ waste products from other existing manufacturing processes?

Veronica Breckenridge (32:18)
It is both. So we could be using a crop or like I said, corn husk. So it’s a waste of an existing agriculture product.

Or it could be ⁓ one thing I mentioned like food waste. It could be something that we are already producing that’s an existing waste stream that we take as part of the feedstock. One of the nice things about using biology is think of a brewery. That is a bio manufacturing process. We’re basically using an yeast for an organism.

We’re putting feedstock in there. We’re letting the yeast work in a bioreactor. And as microbe engineering or bioengineering gets even more efficient, the idea is we can actually engineer these microbes that specifically just produce a certain type of ⁓ chemicals, broth, or certain type of reaction that is biological that produces this stream. And then we can purify that to specific chemicals of interest. And that’s really

you know, think about the brewing or the winery, you’re brewing it and then you’re doing the distillation of it.

Anthony Codispoti (33:28)
I if we’re at a point yet where there’s sort of ⁓ an example, like a case study where the technology has advanced enough to the point where it is now cost-effective compared to cost-competitive compared to other ⁓ petrochemical alternatives and is producing at an industrial scale. Are we at that stage with anything yet?

Veronica Breckenridge (33:56)
⁓ Well, if you think about it, so in pharma, already have great example, insulin is a great example, everybody uses that as a, you it used to cause like, ⁓ I think it caused like a ton of pancreas for us, you know, whether it’s cow or whatever that we used to squeeze out, we’re talking about kilograms of insulin. ⁓ But ⁓

The pharma industry actually has been using precision fermentation. They created organisms that creates insulin that they can distill it into insulin and made it a lot cheaper. And also we don’t need so much pancreas from animals. And that’s a whole expensive process. It was really expensive and now it becomes much cheaper. And insulin is still not cheap, but way cheaper than it used to be. And it’s obviously way faster. It’s on demand production versus you have to wait for the cow to grow it.

and have actually a pancreas that you can take out and die. So that’s a great example in pharma. And there’s already some flavor and fragrances if there are players that are using bio-based fermentation for some of this. So this is not new technology. Yeah, for flavor, for fragrance, and things like that.

Anthony Codispoti (35:10)
to replace like petrochemical alternatives or okay.

Veronica Breckenridge (35:16)
So we already have examples where there’s high value chemicals that are being ⁓ produced through biology. the challenge right now is really just to scale those and making it more cost efficient so that you can be competitive to petroleum alternative. they benefit. The other thing is, you

One of the companies that I invested in actually has a proprietary technology to get to microplastic free isocyanate and polyurethane. So what that means is, polyurethane is actually applied for, if you think about it, your furniture, seat cushion, coating materials, your shoe, your tennis shoe, the shoe sole of your tennis shoe, coating materials for ⁓ many, many, many, for clothing, for bath,

pack for all kinds of things, they all use polyurethane. And there’s a lot of microplastics that now it leaves. And they can produce a microplastic-free, and that’s also 100 % biodegradable. So instead of, you know,

Anthony Codispoti (36:28)
So is it still considered

polyurethane or it’s an alternative that has sort of the same properties that manufacturers need?

Veronica Breckenridge (36:34)
It

is still polyurethane, it’s ⁓ obviously the molecular structure is slightly different, ⁓ but it’s just from a performance base, it’s just as durable as everything.

microbes are only break down when you kind of you have to bury it into know landfill or something because it has to have a concentration of certain certain enzymes to break it down but it can be broken down and in fact it was kind of interesting they there’s a business insider video that they did a study on their product for two years in in comparison to a number of other leading brands that claims to be biodegradable or bio-based.

They did a two-year ⁓ degradation study and ⁓ at the end of the two years the shoes that this company produced obviously degraded mostly and whereas a lot of the other brands, some of them you can barely degrade it at all.

Right? and think about if we can use, and this is the other benefit, this means that we don’t need to change people’s behavior. You can use the same things. You don’t have to sort, you recycle things. You can just toss it back to the environment and the earth is the largest, cheapest recycling plant that we can use, right?

Anthony Codispoti (37:53)
Bye.

Veronica Breckenridge (37:58)
And it’s the most healthy. So in fact, they also did a study where because the way that they, the molecule they create has more hydrogen, no, sorry, nitrogen. So when it degrades into soil.

And they did ⁓ study on the plant so that you can plant. It’s actually healthier for the plant. The plant grows better because it has more nitrogen in it. So that’s more nutrient ⁓ for the plant. So it was a very interesting study that they did. And this is the benefit of if we get, I human ingenuity is the one thing that I would always think is the biggest sort of value that we have and also the biggest, you know, we can make things

way better for everybody ⁓ if we continue this path and then we can live in a world where we doesn’t need us to change how we consume things or how we just need to change how we make things. And that’s the other thing I fundamentally believe, You’re trying to expect different outcomes when you’re doing exactly the same thing, you know, just because we recycle something to change it. No, it doesn’t. That’s why we have not achieved all these goals, sustainability goals, so-called, ⁓ because we

We haven’t changed fundamentally how we make them. How do we expect that it’s going to actually make a difference? If we really want to move the needle to change for the environment for the better and for survivability for human race, we need to change how we make things. And biology is the best way.

Anthony Codispoti (39:27)
So this material

that you’re talking about, Veronica, the advantage of it, this biomaterial, is that when it breaks down as compared to a traditional polyurethane, it’s going to at some point break down completely. You don’t have the microplastics. It’s easier to dispose of. You don’t have the microplastic problem. You don’t have the long-term landfill issue. So what needs to be overcome? How do we get from

We can make this and we know that it’s ⁓ a suitable substitute for polyurethane to now we can get rid of polyurethane because we can produce this at scale and it’s cost competitive. How do we bridge that chasm? I know that that’s what you’re working on, kind of paint a picture for us. Like what’s the big block in the middle?

Veronica Breckenridge (40:20)
There are a few things that I would say probably three key things that we’re looking at helping. One is a lot of what we do is to make sure, and this is how to make sure that they, a lot of these founders are scientific founders. They don’t know how to run a company. So.

We need to either make them business managers or get them the right business talent to work with them so that they understand how to run a company to be successful.

if they continue to just focus on developing the science and because a lot of them also are scientists so they don’t think commercialization or application is interesting science. But guess what? You’re never going to commercialize something if you don’t work on that. So ⁓ part of it is making one of the disciplines that we put on is have a focus on commercialization. The second thing we actually spend a lot of time and it’s becoming I think this is another reason we think it is engaging

aging

corporate strategics because these are scientific founders. They’ve never built a plant. They don’t know how to build a plant. And if any of them want to build a plant or think they can build a plant, they’re wrong. then so working with strategics is really, really important. You want to work with people who actually build plants.

Anthony Codispoti (41:36)
complex process.

Veronica Breckenridge (41:50)
who do this for a living, who deliver products to these chemicals to end user could be a Luria or brand or things like they do this for a living. Those are the people and the talent and potential partner that you should partner with in de-risking the technology for industrial scale. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (42:08)
And so are these strategic

the same companies that this new tech might sort of replace?

Veronica Breckenridge (42:16)
Some of them could be, and some of them are looking for it, like I said, because they are, for instance, microplastic could be a huge, just like nicotine could be a huge litigation issue for a lot of these petrochemical companies. So to hedge.

They need to think about alternatives. like I said earlier also, regularly, there’s already in Europe, there’s a lot of petrochemical based like food dye or, you know, petrochemical based materials is being banned, right? Gore-Tac is being banned, right? So you can’t use it in materials anymore, literally. So what is an alternative? They need to find alternatives to those things because consumers are still going to want it. Now it’s just a matter of how do you…

get something healthier so it’s not toxic to consumer, right? And whoever solves that, if you can solve it cost effectively, you can make probably a pretty much more profitable business out of it. So there’s definitely strategic interest. There’s also other type of partners. And certainly one of the things with the corporate, ⁓ lot of the corporate are starting to look for sustainable materials like Goodyear. just talking about Goodyear has made corporate

commitment to 100 % of their tire is going to be from sustainable material. So they are very interested in ⁓ by 2030. That was, you know, that’s not very, very many years. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (43:34)
What?

That’s right around the corner as

we record this in mid 2025.

Veronica Breckenridge (43:44)
Yeah, that might get pushed out, there’s a lot of corporates who’s committed to use more sustainable materials or have better.

⁓ better sources for their bio-based and increasingly certainly in personal care we’re seeing whether it’s food or it’s personal care anything that we put on our body cosmetics or creams and there’s increasingly more and more people asking for bio-based ingredients right people are starting to I definitely have a husband who doesn’t use anything that has ingredients that he can’t or understand what they are right so so from that perspective we’re

seeing the industry is hitting sort of this point where it is looking for alternatives. So brands like L’Oreal, like ⁓ P &G and all these companies are looking for alternative ingredients to their products. So they can do the formulation of the product. So there is an industry ⁓

more of an industry, I think, support to fundamentally unlock this. The other thing that is very interesting that’s happening right now in the US is, I think, just recently, in fact, just last week in the US, we have formed a congressional caucus on biotech, because we’re starting to realize

Three of my companies, mentioned actually a number of companies received DOD grants. Why did they receive DOD grant? Because this is national security. Some of these critical chemicals are actually right now produced by China is the biggest, largest chemical manufacturing. They produce over 50 % of the chemicals that we use. Most people may not know that. So a lot of these are strategic chemicals, which from a ⁓

national resilience or security perspective, we need to have domestic manufacturing capacity here. And certainly the current administration is looking for manufacturing, manufacturing jobs, because that helps with economic development. It also helps us to protect our technology. We lost the semiconductor technology because we led the discovery and all the early technology advancement in semiconductor. Now we have lost our leadership because we had given away

manufacturing and technology and R &D goes away when you lose manufacturing. learned that lesson. It’s a hard lesson for ⁓ For biotechnology, we’re currently leading, but China is very close. There’s a number of

And if we are going to move our manufacturing offshore, which right now is the risk, we’re at risk of losing our leadership in biotechnology as well. So we have a national security reason both for having domestic capacity so that we are not beholden to

Anthony Codispoti (46:39)
So that’s why the DOD has gotten involved.

Veronica Breckenridge (46:46)
people or states that we might not be friendly with in terms of just basic materials that we need to produce ourselves for economic development reasons and for just our protecting our national leadership in technology, right? All of those reasons makes it very important. Plus, if we’re going to bring manufacturing, we’re not going to bring the dirty chemical manufacturing back to the United States. Nobody’s going to want that.

⁓ The only way to bring true chemical manufacturing that is actually better for us, well it helps with the economics, the jobs and everything is actually, manufacturing is a path to get there.

Anthony Codispoti (47:29)
So part of what you do at First Byte is you’re obviously investing funds into these startups. You’re helping them get access to other funds, for example, through the Department of Defense. You’re partnering them up with strategics, folks that can help them, more established companies who have the large-scale manufacturing experience. When that takes place, are those strategics taking equity? What’s in it for them?

Veronica Breckenridge (48:01)
So there’s multiple ways that they could engage. There’s definitely part that’s equity. There’s also other potential partnerships you could look at because for even if it’s not equity, they could engage.

in getting first rates or some kind of preferential rights to access that technology that they can commercialize or incorporate into their future products. So it’s very much based on production, on negotiation and also how much effort they put. This is also where a lot of the startup need guidance on how do you structure a…

Partnership that is mutually beneficial. So it helps you to do risk the commercialization of your technology And this is where we need to have people everybody understand 100 % of a zero is still a zero So that partnership is what’s going to create value even though you have a smaller piece of the pie It’s really going to help commercialize and make that Real real a real pie for people to actually share so structuring those

Anthony Codispoti (48:57)
the pie becomes a lot bigger then.

Veronica Breckenridge (49:06)
partnerships is really important. There’s also offtake from like a good year they don’t manufacture chemicals anymore but they could say I want this chemical for my material right so they could sign an offtake agreement to say I’m gonna commit to buying this material if you can produce it at this price.

So there’s multiple ways that strategic could get involved early on, both in terms of understanding and they will be part of validating, do you have the right specificity? Do you have the right purity so that we can incorporate this material into our industrial process?

Right, so there’s a lot of ⁓ technical work, early validation, they can get engaged. And that’s one of the things we also try to foster. And part of the reason we created this nonprofit accelerator BioWell.

which is specifically focused on helping to bring different parties ⁓ to the table to help startups and contribute relevant expertise to help guide these startups on their commercialization path.

Anthony Codispoti (50:13)
So this nonprofit BioWild that you’re talking about, this is not necessarily you investing funds through this entity. It’s more like a matchmaking service between folks who are developing the tech and the folks who probably have some of the expertise to either help them advance that or they can be customers of it down the road once it gets to a certain point. Okay. ⁓

I want to make sure that we paint the full picture of the value that First Byte is bringing to the startups that it invests in. Are there other services that you offer that we haven’t already touched on,

Veronica Breckenridge (50:55)
I think one of the key things we really help them to do also is their commercial roadmap. ⁓ One of the failure points I believe that happened, by the way, that’s the other thing that we didn’t mention.

A lot of times right before the inflection, there is a lot of over excitement and investments are made that probably made errors so that they weren’t able to succeed. But we have a lot of lessons learned though, right? So biofuel was a great example of an effort that tries to get there. And it was a heroic effort. And today now it provides great lessons.

that’s learned for us. It failed because I believe it tried to go to a commodity product that basically the cheapest you can make with petroleum and try to substitute for that. And it’s, guess what? A new technology is, it’s very hard for any new technology to get there that quickly.

you always start, know, Tesla introduced the Roaster and then introduced a Model S, which are all way more expensive ⁓ than ⁓ any other car. ⁓ And if you think about, ⁓ you know, when Chrysler introduced or ⁓ GM introduced Bolt,

Bolt was trying to get to a cheap car and it never really was a success. So you don’t go for the cheapest product that you could make with your existing technology and try to use the new technology to do it. It’s almost impossible.

Anthony Codispoti (52:45)
You need to

build in some higher margin in a more premium product because you’re not going to be cost competitive right out of the gate.

Veronica Breckenridge (52:52)
Yeah,

exactly. And also scale, you’re just not going to be able to get to that scale to enjoy.

the economy of scale, right? So identifying the right product of how you commercialize and to your point, the higher value items that you can use that technology for and grow that scale over time also helps to de-risk your commercialization. So lot of what we do with these companies is to, in our vetting and also ⁓ after we get engaged, is to look at do they have the right product they’re working.

Do they have the right technology? And have they thought about that whole, the second thing was the whole process, not just the biology, but the downstream. Have they thought about the whole process? How feasible is that whole process? What is the economic viability of that whole process? Can you get to cost parity to the products that you’re trying to make? Is that aligned and the scale that is needed? So that way we really have a full understanding as do you have a chance of competing? ⁓

commercially viable even though you

because you have very similar, and that’s the other thing we focus a lot on what we call dropping chemicals. So there are similar molecules that we already know the market will take. So we’re not taking product market risk. And we want to take them to molecules that’s already people are wanting. There is clear commercial demand. We know the market size and have them produce that, but it’s in a non-toxic way. Your property is non-toxic to human beings.

being regulated out so they need an alternative now you have a cost-effective alternative to that in that’s bio-based. Now these are markets you can go start tackling and go first that will actually get to commercialization.

Anthony Codispoti (54:47)
This is interesting. kind of to explore this part of the conversation a little bit more. Obviously, you’re trying to help these startups get to the point of commercialization, of profitability. ⁓ And so it makes a lot of sense what you’re saying to focus on a more premium product to start with. There’s more margin there, right? So you’re going to be able to get to a point where you can compete and make some money quicker. ⁓

But still to get there, they need a lot of the outside investment that you’re bringing. They need like the DOD dollars. ⁓ Is there space for, or should there be space for even more government involvement to kind of help bridge these gaps? Or do you feel like this really needs to be ⁓ sort of capitalism, private industry that is making this work?

Veronica Breckenridge (55:44)
I think on the infrastructure side there is a need and the US government is starting to recognize that.

Because the capex, it is a capex heavy industry, which is one of the other reasons that why people are realizing it is very capex heavy and a lot of the early equity capital that invested to fund a lot of the capex, they’re realizing it doesn’t produce a return because it’s capex, right? Cappex is not going to produce the same equity returns or there’s less investor appetite right now.

So one of the things we have been doing, is one of the reasons why we’ve been accessing DOD money, is how do you use that equity capital really well to de-risk and leverage government dollars or other ways, because there’s also other ways like project finance when you’re building a plant, and other ways that you could leverage non-dilutive, if you will, dollars to actually build plants. And think about these big chemical companies. They don’t spend all their own cash to build these.

⁓ large plants, right? They borrow from the bank and they have project finance, other type of capital that actually finances those large plants. We can’t do that in biology yet because a lot of them are new technologies. So that means you’re building a plant that’s new. However, if you are partnering with a large company, like one of our companies called the Salas, so they have a bio pathway to get to isoprene and also solvent. ⁓

they’re partnering with Xeon Chemical, which is a Japanese chemical company, and they’re building a first of its kind plant for a bio-based isoprene in Southeast Asia. And this is where Xeon is going to build the plant. So Xeon is going to put in the money, so they’re the large Australia, so they’re going to put in the money to build the plant. They’re going to do an off take on the monomer that these guys produce and they’ll do build it. So now that becomes

Anthony Codispoti (57:37)
Wow.

Veronica Breckenridge (57:48)
more doable, right? You have, first of all, we overcome that we talked about. You have someone who actually build plants, manufacture products, they’re building that plant, there’s a lot more. And Xeon’s a much bigger company, guess what? They’re gonna be able to find non-dilutive dollars to…

Anthony Codispoti (58:03)
And they’re going to bring so much credibility

to the product right away.

Veronica Breckenridge (58:07)
Correct. So there are ways to figure out how to develop these companies and the company will license their technology to ZEON. So ways to partner with large companies so you could de-risk and make that equity capital return much more efficiently. there is no light capital model, but I think there is a light equity capital model.

that that’s also part of differentiation that we do, we really help to make sure that the company is growing and using that equity capital smartly and efficiently. And we’re able to leverage other capitals to help you risk, even though it’s still, it’s going to be a CapEx heavy sort of commercialization path.

Anthony Codispoti (58:51)
So this company that you just mentioned that has this ⁓ isoprene tech that comes from biotech, is this probably the company in your portfolio that you would guess is probably closest to a cost competitive ⁓ commercialization strategy?

Veronica Breckenridge (59:10)
Yes, this and the microplastic free polyurethane, those two companies are currently having very

solid, I would say commercial conversations with large corporates, as well as ⁓ decent scale that they have already demonstrated in terms of production that I think they are closest to commercialization.

Anthony Codispoti (59:36)
If you were to look into that magical crystal ball that you have, Veronica, are we looking at five years, 10, 15 before that actually materializes?

Veronica Breckenridge (59:48)
think we’ll have products in the market in the next five years for sure. But to completely transform the industry, that’s probably still going to take 20, 30 years. But I definitely believe in the next five years.

if these companies and there’s already also other companies who are seeing are ⁓ innovating on the process. This is the thing, right? So when computing first started, everybody was on a network, but you’re using your own, you have to build your own server back in and then data center came up and then everybody now become variable costs instead of, you you put up all this CapEx costs. So, so we are seeing players who are looking at investing in that infrastructure. So almost like a TSMC model, like have

the CDMOs in this industry is called ⁓ Contract Development Manufacturing Organization. So they would actually be the, they would set up the infrastructure and if you have a new organism, you can actually use their capacity, they’ll do the manufacturing for you to be efficient. So they’re just going to be really good at efficient bio manufacturing. Precision fermentation, there’s a company called Liberation Industries that’s already, they have a plant in Indiana right now and that’s supposed to go into production.

this fall, it’s protein, they’re going to be focused on protein production. There is also innovation on ⁓ continuous fermentation because one of the traditional issues with fermentation is it’s batch based. So which means you have to stop and you have to collect and you have to clean and you have to put in which

⁓ When you think about equipment utilization, want it to be the more utilization that you get obviously the better that you will have in terms of productivity and lowers your cost. ⁓ And there’s a company from Australia that’s also building, they’re building a continuous fermentation process and they have ⁓ also gotten DOD grants. looking at building plants in America to based on their continuous fermentation technology and they can work with different organisms.

and the same thing that they can, that’s innovating on the process itself to drive for cost efficiency, capex efficiency, all of that. So like I said, the great thing about this time is we’re seeing there’s new bioreactors, one of the companies we invested, that turn fruit waste into lubricants. They have a very modular infrastructure where it’s a column, it’s lower capex, but it’s also more modular. Same thing for the polyurethane.

companies much more modular. So instead of building these billing dollar plants, you can build a local plant that is co-located with your waste source or your bio source and produce locally and then distribute locally that chemical that you need. So there’s lots of different ways of solving this problem to get to cost efficiency. I do feel like right now is kind of that time where you start to see this ecosystem developing and all of these are going to

reinforce each other, right? As the process technology becomes more efficient, new novel reactors, hardware, that becomes more efficient, and the science continues to develop, and the cost continues to come down in terms of bioengineering and manufacturing process. We are definitely going to get there, but like I said, I think in five years, we’re hoping that we’ll start to see success. Because right now, one of the challenges we have in the industry is there was

a

lot of great science that was kind of hyped in terms of what it could do, but didn’t get there in terms of actual product. then, you know, they did get to a product.

Anthony Codispoti (1:03:33)
And so some people have

got a bit of a sour taste in their mouth because it didn’t work out.

Veronica Breckenridge (1:03:37)
Yeah, so ends up being 10x more expensive, so nobody’s going to use it, right? But I think with a practical now, the industry has learned a lot of hard lessons as well. So people have gotten smarter on how to get there. We’re seeing more developed technology around addressing that cost issue because everybody recognized cost is the biggest issue. So how do we make it more cost effective in manufacturing this process? And with some

success, think some of the success even like I said the portfolio companies we have built in the path we have been on we have a very unique path from anybody else in terms of how early we want the corporate to get engaged and how much we want the corporation partner with these companies.

that we think as we see success, hopefully that will start that virtual virtuous cycle again. And definitely, I believe when we already have products, have the poly the microplastic polyurethane product is not 100 % bio base yet. It’s about between 70 to 80 right now that we have is on the market, actually. They’re producing products, they have partnered with people. And so I think with a manufacturing where it’s a real plant and

next two to three years, we’ll definitely see in five to six years some products in the market and people start to hopefully change perception of yes, it’s possible. Yes, we can get there and then hopefully attract.

Anthony Codispoti (1:05:07)
Yeah?

Even more great stuff is coming. Now,

Veronica, I’ve just got one more question for you, but before I ask it, I want to do two things. First, all listeners, take a second, just pause, hit the follow button on your favorite podcast app. I’ve had a great conversation today with Veronica Breckenridge from First Byte Ventures, and I want you to continue to get more great content like this. Veronica, I also want to let people know the best way to get in touch with you or First Byte or to follow your story, what would that be?

Veronica Breckenridge (1:05:41)
Well, I have my email. have a website, firstby.com, so people can come and look at what we do, our portfolio companies, certainly. And there’s email investors at firstby.com. So we’d love to talk to more people. And if you’re just interested in learning more, we are planning to do some events and ⁓ online seminars. We’ll be sending that out. So you can sign up to our newsletter on our website and then we’ll be sending

out more information.

Anthony Codispoti (1:06:13)
We’ll include those links in the show notes for everybody, but if you’re listening, a byte is spelled B-I-G-H-T. So first byte, B-I-G-H-T. So Veronica, last question for you. I’m curious to hear about a serious challenge, either personal or professional, that you’ve overcome. How’d you get through it and what did you learn?

Veronica Breckenridge (1:06:37)
I always go back to my first year at McKinsey. this is, and maybe a little bit of context is that I come from an academic family. So when I chose to leave academia, I was pretty much the black sheep of the family. And ⁓ my parents had no…

Confidence that was going to be successful at all. I have to say I probably didn’t either because I was doing something completely different from but I really just didn’t like academia and I said I need to do something else and six months into Mackenzie I had ⁓ At McKenzie people know Mackenzie after each engagement you sit down with your engagement manager

and have a conversation, give you your performance review. And my engagement manager basically, at that point, McKinsey started the new program, which they call Advanced Degree, because before this, McKinsey only did MBAs. And so they started to expand into what they call Advanced Degree recruits, those early stage of that program as well.

And ⁓ he basically sat down with me and said, you know, with MBAs, we can pretty much tell because you’re on this curve. We can tell very early on whether you’re going to make it because McKinsey is an up or out culture, right? Whether you’re going to make it to the next stage with PhDs, they’re kind of in this curve and they inflect. so so early on, you can’t tell. And. And you’re pretty much like he basically said, I can’t tell.

Anthony Codispoti (1:08:17)
Hmm.

Okay.

Veronica Breckenridge (1:08:27)
And it was the first time. It was first time in my life, I’ll be honest, because I was always very good with math and math just come natural to me. So I always did really well at school academically and my family come from academics.

Anthony Codispoti (1:08:29)
Nobody’s boosting your confidence here so far in this story, Veronica.

Veronica Breckenridge (1:08:45)
And I was terrible in humanities, but I was always good in engineering and math. And it just came easy to me. I never needed to study really hard. I just got it. ⁓ It was the first time someone tells me like, you might not be good enough. And I was just devastated, devastated. And ⁓ I literally thought about leaving. That was my first thought. ⁓

And then there was, it was right before Christmas and I was sitting in my, I think cubicle, I was probably sulking. So one of the EM, engagement manager, probably either he felt something or he just happened to like come and talk to me. And we had this chat.

And he pretty quickly kind of realized that I was on this path, like I was thinking about leaving, right? And he kind of said, here’s the thing. You know, I McKinsey is a hard place. First of all, get it right. McKinsey is a hard place. Lots of smart people. You’re just in a different pool of people maybe. That’s one thing. And plus you’re coming from academia. You have no business training. You didn’t understand a lot of that. So give yourself a little more time.

⁓ And and he also I mean I think he lied to me But it did make me feel better because he said you know every week there’s someone coming to my office crying because McKinsey just is very high pressure so If you have a little time don’t worry about it ⁓ you know a year and McKinsey will not kill you and ⁓ At least you have another year to stay before we are able to tell and see how it goes and I was like

Okay, I guess that’s that that’s true. Six months is not really enough time for me to give something. ⁓ That’s not a real try. I should try it again. And I should give it a year. And of course, the rest of his history. And so one of the things I always I learned from that anytime and later on, and I always say this is probably more failures, the more successful people are the more failures that they’ve actually experienced.

Anthony Codispoti (1:11:00)
Mmm.

Veronica Breckenridge (1:11:02)
But every time that I had challenging time, I look back at that experience and I go, okay, I’m just gonna need a little more time. So let me push through this. And so far it’s worked for me. Whenever I continue to go with my conviction and push through things, we’ve gotten there.

Anthony Codispoti (1:11:24)
I think that’s such a great story for me to hear, for our listeners. I think it’s a really powerful reminder that when you hit something hard that’s not the time to stop, there can be lessons on the other side of that really hard obstacle that seems impassable in the moment. I think sometimes as human beings we think, there have been times in my life where it’s easy.

There are times in my life when it’s hard. If it’s hard, it must be the universe or God or somebody trying to send me a signal that this is not what I’m supposed to be doing. And oftentimes quite the contrary. When you get into hard spots like that, that’s where I think the real growth is possible.

Veronica Breckenridge (1:12:07)
That’s exactly right. think that’s when you’re growing and then you should be learning what you’re, ⁓ I think I always say you learn more from failures than you learn from success. So as long as you take that as a learning lessons and try to improve, in fact, human potential is unlimited.

Anthony Codispoti (1:12:25)
I love that. Veronica Breckenridge, First Byte Ventures. I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Veronica Breckenridge (1:12:34)
Thank you very much, Anthony. It was a pleasure.

Anthony Codispoti (1:12:36)
Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.