Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So if you think about the big ideas out there to fight global climate change, like we often do on this show. What we're talking about fundamentally is reducing the overall amount of carbon dioxide CO2 in the atmosphere. And a big part of that is finding ways to stop adding carbon dioxide to the air in the future, like with clean alternatives to fossil fuels.

But another part of the equation is to remove CO2 that's already been released. And this is where direct carbon capture technology comes in. Back in November of 2023, the first commercial direct carbon capture facility in the US opened in California, and it uses a new method that's fast, relatively inexpensive, and it can be scaled up. Pretty quickly.

The company behind the facility is calling and its co-founder is Shishank Samala. Even though the company was only launched in April of 2020, by the end of this decade, Shishank says Heirloom's technology could start to make a meaningful dent in removing CO2 worldwide. Shoshank's background in business began in 2013 when he was just 22 years old. He co-founded an electronics manufacturing company call automation, which built circuit boards used in everything from rockets to medical devices to consumer electronics. But even though Tempo had contracts for major clients like NASA, After a while, Shishank found himself wanting to focus on something bigger.

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