Zach Dell

So basically, kill two birds with one stone, on the order of a billion people in the world, we don't have access to sanitation infrastructure, and then also don't have access to reliable, affordable power.

And so if you could build these systems to allow them to process waste into compressed methane, they could power things like lamps and stoves and lights, etc.,

And I spent basically all of college working on that.

And about halfway through college, I realized after some long, sweaty summers in New Delhi, this isn't a business.

This is like a cool project, but this is not a company.

I don't actually really know what excellence and true high-performing businesses really look like.

And that was what I wanted to learn.

I went into finance because I wanted to see what that looked like and learn how to analytically dissect a business.

And I was always...

really interested in markets and investing and studied to great investors.

And that was always a hobby for me.

And I figured like, okay, I'll just go study in finance until I find the pitch to swing at.

And at the time, Blackstone was one of the only firms that was hiring undergrads right out of college on the buy side.

I really wanted to work on the buy side.

So I applied for an internship there.

I got the internship on the private equity team.

And when I was an intern at Blackstone, one of the guys on the team was working on an opportunity to carve out a lithium mine from a public company.

And I went up to him and I was like, hey, Sam, awesome guy.

Sam Young, super sharp investor.

And I was like, hey, Sam, I want to work on this with you.