Gerard Barron

Oh, yeah, totally.

Well, you know, I grew up on a dairy farm.

went to university, had four jobs in my first year, realized there was no time for a fifth, started a company.

And that company worked out pretty well.

And I'd been building companies my entire life.

So I'm kind of naturally drawn to things that are a little bit unique.

And I've been lucky to build some great companies and grow them globally.

And then, as I mentioned, I invested in 2001 in another project, Nautilus.

And then we started this company in 2011.

And originally, I was just going to be a financial backer.

I only decided to step into the ring, you know, in 2011.

formerly i took over in 2017 and became chairman and ceo before that we'd hired someone out of one of the big mining companies and it wasn't working out so well and i thought what do i know about running a mining company a resource company you know you'd go to bhp or freeport to go and find one of them but actually when i started to dive into you know the data behind this resource and how big it was and how

impactful it could be, and to global supply.

And of course, a number of things then came along to help as well, like geopolitics has now made this a really hot topic.

Critical minerals are on everyone's mind.

And if we take a step back and apply some of that first principle thinking, 70% of our planet is ocean.

Yet we don't get metals out of the ocean.

We get a few diamonds, but they're slowly being replaced by lab-grown diamonds.

But we don't get our nickel or copper or cobalt or manganese out of the oceans.

Yet in this one little deposit where we are focused, 70% of the known reserves of nickel and cobalt and manganese sit in the form of these polymetallic nodules.