From Vision to Reality: Virginia Klausmeier Journey with Sylvatex

Welcome to the Wisdom of Women show.

We are dedicated to amplifying the voice of women in business.

A new model of leadership is emerging and we are here to amplify the voice of women leading the way.

I am your host, Coco Salman, five time founder, impact investor and creator of the Force for Good system.

Thank you for joining us today as we illuminate the path to unlocking opportunities and prosperity for women led enterprises.

And by amplifying the voice and wisdom of women today, we have a barrier breaking energy architect in our midst.

Virginia Klausmeier is the founder, president and CEO of Silvatex, an advanced manufacturing company revolutionizing how batteries are made by transforming the most expensive and carbon intensive component, the cathode.

With more than 20 years bridging chemistry, engineering and business, Virginia has led Silvatex to develop a breakthrough waterless process that dramatically reduces cost, energy use and waste while strengthening the global clean energy supply chain.

So awesome.

Along the way, Virginia has navigated the road of industrial innovation, securing major backing and more than 15 million in non dilutive funding to scale a technology the world urgently needs.

She is a committed mentor and ecosystem builder, championing the next generation of diverse founders while proving that climate solutions can and must deliver both impact and profit.

Welcome, Virginia.

Wow.

You are hired.

That was the best intro I've ever heard.

Yay.

Who is this woman?

Such a good job.

You are a lady dragon slayer.

I mean, come on, Virginia, you're doing really big, impactful, super smart stuff and you're doing it as yourself.

What is a book written by a woman that has significantly influenced your life?

Yeah, it's easier than you think by Sylvia Boorstein.

I think I read it like every year.

It's a really fast read.

Every time I'm like, oh, this is too hard, it's my cue to pick it up.

Just start reading it.

I have to get this book.

Send me your address.

I'll send it to you.

It's focused on inner work and then the ability for like minimizing the struggle of like the external.

Right.

So it's just, it really is showing that balance of kind of getting back to gratitude and things that are working and focusing your energy on where things are working.

It naturally pivots, but it's, it's interesting.

I, I, yeah, I learned like one of the big things I've learned from meditative practice is Emotions are information and energy.

So when you're feeling something big, like frustration, anger, a lot of the time it's more of, okay, let me get the energy out of that feeling.

But then what is the information it's trying to give me?

And then usually that helps to better align faster with the movement.

That's gonna be more in flow.

Love it.

And.

And, you know, I think.

I love that you brought this up because it's so connected to what creates the internal mindset that you need to have the internal chemistry, the internal experience you need to cultivate in order to create big things in the world.

Right.

I love that.

I think it's really powerful.

It's easier than you think.

I'm gonna go read this book.

Virginia, I'm speaking to the listeners.

Here's this woman who has done some really freaking hard stuff.

We're gonna unpack what the business is, but super hard.

I love that you're coming back to this wisdom of it's easier than you think.

Even when it's really hard, it's easier than you think.

Right.

I always like to tell myself, I can always take the next break.

Brave step.

There's always a next step.

What is it?

Right.

And so I love it.

I'm gonna read it.

And.

Cool.

Next question.

In life, Virginia, on our show, we like to get to know our leaders, right?

We like to know more than just their success, because, as you know, success is moments.

But there's a lot that goes on before the people.

So in life, there are moments that shape who we become, what makes us strong, what makes us wise, what makes us great.

So what are those moments that have provided the most learning for you?

Looking back, what are three defining experiences that brought you to where you are?

Could be from your childhood, could be from your teen years, could be from anywhere in your career, could be from whatever you want.

But what are three moments that have shaped you?

This is a good question.

I have looked back at pivotal moments, but I'm going to try to summarize three.

One was a very acute moment.

Those that maybe know a little bit more about my story.

My parents are incredibly brilliant, and my dad moved us to Bangkok, Thailand, when we were in elementary school.

We lived in Bangkok.

There wasn't very many foreigners there.

Definitely not.

You know, everyone that was there was working for the embassy.

So we were weird children.

We lived in a gated area, but it was only a gated home.

And then you go into more of the streets.

It was amazing exposure to see the third world living right of like A American child coming from, you know, maybe low income or medium income home and then going to Thailand, it just really changed the ranks.

It was so crazy.

I remember being young and wanting something for Christmas and then we moved to Thailand, right?

Because all my friends got this fancy stuff and then moved to Thailand and no one had anything, you know, and they were wanting water or something to wear on their feet.

I remember going outside of our house and I just couldn't believe kind of the state of the land.

And I decided that our whole block, I was gonna sweep it and take all the trash and pretty much make it clean.

And it was interesting.

Like it gave me, you know, I connected with a lot of the locals.

They thought it was funny that there's white girls sweeping.

We formed a community there with a lot of the locals and we could run around and do whatever and everyone took care of us.

It was really eye opening on just how you're born into privilege.

And also that even in the US we see a lot of homelessness, a lot of low income.

It is so different in different parts of the world.

And I think that was just really, really eye opening.

And pollution and waste and toxicity is the foundation of what really affects that.

Like a lot of those people who are the poorest on the planet, I don't know.

That really stuck with me.

I met this woman in grad school.

She was from Nigeria and we were studying biomechanical engineering.

I came to learn that she was the first Nigerian woman to be a trauma surgeon.

She had been a practicing trauma surgeon, Nigeria and had 20 years of experience there.

She ended up meeting this gentleman and fell in love with him.

And he was a janitor at the University of Oregon.

She came back with him and started her education all the way up.

And now she's a doctor in Atlanta, which is crazy, but so she retrained, but that's a different story.

And they started a life together and had a child.

She did all that in her 40s.

I met her then and I was in, you know, early 20s.

And she was telling me about how she would do these surgeries with one, you know, one screw to fix somebody's broken arm.

And they had so little access to hardware.

And so these people, after their bone was fixed, walked many miles to come to her to have it removed.

In the US and in most of the world, we don't extract those types of screws because it's another surgery to extract them.

But there they don't have access to the hardware.

So it means that you can't support more people.

She extracted them out, and then she would cleanse them and then reuse them, like, five times.

And so she would do her own testing on them to make sure that they were strong enough to support.

And she would, like, have a system of use it in, you know, different bones or different densities of different people.

It was unbelievable to hear.

She told me at that point, if you go to these companies that make these screws, their marketing people have hundreds of screws sitting at their desk that will never be used.

That shocked me.

That's what led me to work at one of the largest medical device companies to change that, which I did, which is awesome.

That was a big shift.

That was really foundational, both of these experiences, right?

You're being exposed and attracted and awake and aware of things going on outside of you.

So I think having this concept of spilling out of my head lately that you so important to care about things and have passion about the things that matter in the world, because care is innovation.

When you care about something, you can innovate.

When you talk about this Nigerian trauma surgeon figuring out how to innovate and whether these screws are strong enough, care is innovation.

Right now, you're going on to the next thing.

Go ahead.

I'm trying to figure out how acute I should go.

I really think back to interactions that are pivotal for me.

Frequently, people and interactions are at the heart of insights and shifts and change.

It's definitely something I really love.

I guess I'm gonna have to say the next one was when my father passed away, because I think that, like, he was an exceptionally smart human being that I think also had a lot of care.

He just didn't have the other layer of business sense and capability.

And so he surrounded himself with people attracted to him that took advantage of him as his child.

My experience was growing up poor, and dad didn't realize his dreams.

But in my adult life, having all these successes independently, I looked at him differently, and I was able to say, oh, I have skills that could help you.

Let's see what we can create.

He got pancreatic cancer and passed away within four weeks.

So that was pretty fast at that point.

Of course, that's lots of pain, but it was beautiful and perfect.

I mean, he went fast.

He.

He got a.

He got to settle all of his grievances or, like, his stuff.

And that was amazing.

He was also a very accomplished, beautiful artist.

I threw him a big art show and brought together the whole family to have a living wake.

That was probably one of my Biggest successes in life.

But he, you know, I think that experience, you're broken open, right?

So I really was broken open.

And it really was like, whoa, life is short.

Life can be really hard.

And I have had amazing mentors, but a lot of people have shared that you can do the same amount of work to raise a hundred dollars as is to raise a thousand.

Right?

Like, so you sort of scale that to everything if I'm going to work really hard.

Because I knew at that point I was a very hard, outsized worker.

What am I going to apply my attention to that matters?

I took that kernel and just iterated on it 18 months in.

All that pain of what am I going to create in my life?

There was lots of things I did mentally, which was like, I'm gonna have only partners and people that support me and bring me energy and power in my life.

There's a lot of foundations that I laid for myself of how I wanna live and just reflect, which I'm so grateful that I got that time.

I think a lot of people do that in their 40s for the first time.

I did it when.

And probably because the same things, right.

Their parents are starting to feel like they're losing different people.

But I had it earlier, and it was foundational for me.

So those are so many more, but those are three good, meaty ones.

Well, it helps in so many ways for me to understand the person you are and what has been the common thread to help you discover the path that you're in.

The insight I am having in this moment about you, Virginia, is that this is what you're doing now.

But who knows?

You have this incredible wealth of goodness in you intellectually, spiritually.

You have vision, you have passion.

You love your mother, right?

You have two kids.

You know, the life of an entrepreneur is oftentimes not a single stage.

There's lots of chapters.

So tell us about Silva Text and help us understand, what is this company?

Why did you start it?

Where are you on your journey?

I'm gonna ask you some more questions in a minute about some of the challenges and the successes you've had this far.

That's funny.

I love that I'm gonna use that with my children.

The.

Yeah, I mean, so I think, like, just kind of going in with some of these.

Some of these things, right?

Like, I. I started Silvatex, and we were in a space of fuels, which was what my father had been working on.

I quickly realize that the fuels markets are so big and growing incrementally, but not substantially to Bring on innovations.

Even though there's reason to believe they should adopt new tech, it didn't really seem like there was the pressures.

And usually people don't change, right?

So we knew we really wanted to focus on the impact of energy.

So we've always been believers to do stuff upstream, like not to consumers, right.

Upstream of where energy materials are produced and do that in the best way possible.

So you're having outsized impacts as the energy continues on.

So that's the way to really reduce the carbon footprint.

And so we looked ahead and in a nutshell, what we got really good at was using bio based materials or renewable materials to bring materials together on a nano scale.

So if you think about that, there's lots of applications.

We can go into tons of applications.

We got different companies to pay for some exploratory work in different applications.

But none of that really scratched the itch of hey, I'm going to spend 10 years of my life trying to do something that's going to change the world.

Now it's not thinking about something like oh, is it going to bring me venture returns?

It's like, no, I want to change the lives of a billion people in a positive way.

And we want to do it with industrial manufacturing.

We have this approach like what are the different applications that could work?

So we, you know, the.

This is a really fun thing.

I'm not sure if where you're doing video, but this was a magazine I found National Geographic that my dad had kept.

I just found it.

This is from the month I was born, which is insane.

They're talking about the massive demand and energy that's needed.

But there's gonna be a little bit of change with electric vehicles.

Now you look at the projections and the energy utilization is going up.

It's insane.

From what people thought it was gonna be like this.

A lot of that's gonna be driven.

But people didn't know that then.

We had a sense that with electrification of vehicles and other things, you're going to usually vehicles and transportation.

Energy changes the energy sector.

Long story short, we decided to look at batteries.

Battery materials are going to be the next chemicals market.

All the chemicals are going to be sparked from that.

Where could we influence the supply chain the most effective way?

We chose the largest cost sink of the battery.

That's the largest carbon intense sink and making that in the lowest cost way, in the lowest carbon way that could impact economies outside of where they've been concentrated.

You know, so that's more in the west, that's where we focused the cathode material.

And how do we leverage critical minerals that are more readily available in North America or with trade partners.

So a way to do, you know, that's another way of saying we use stuff that's more localized, that has to not move around the world a whole bunch so that you have a lower carbon footprint.

Find something abundant and low cost and bring them together in the best, most efficient process so that you could use recycled materials as they come online.

Use as low amount of energy as possible, and you can have more flexibility in the systems as these things change and evolve over time.

We've been really smart about how we've tackled it and working with industry because we want to create a big solution for them.

To be honest, I think that it is becoming very clear that now is our time.

But it's driven by things that we probably couldn't predict, but we had basic insights around.

There's no way we predicted that AI would create such an energy draw, an energy storage demand need that's coming, you know, having the demand not come from like adoption of electric vehicles or adoption of new technology, but this already technology that's hoisted against like onto all of us, that requires a lot of energy.

That's kind of a machine you can't stop.

Machines you can't stop have lots of money.

They are building and making it happen.

And you have that coupled with the incentives and regulations and everything.

You know, let's just say that people are like, everyone wants to control where the critical minerals are coming from and how they're made into this material.

So you have to have domestic content to make any economic sense.

You need our technology to make AI power viable.

It's not the most obvious.

Like there's lots of ways to work through to understand that, but it is the linchpin which is, which is the.

Urgent problem you can solve.

I think this is important because as founders, we love our solutions.

But if we don't put it in a language that is problem focused, what am I solving for the customer?

It doesn't matter how elegant our solution is.

Yours is super elegant.

It doesn't matter.

Right.

I love that you can articulate it so clearly and it's such a big world problem.

I think that's brilliant.

It takes years to figure out how to do that.

But it is, you know, the thing that's so interesting is that I know I've met other entrepreneurs that have said, you'll see when you.

And I've met investors too.

You'll see, you'll know when you have that traction, when you hit the product market fit and you know you've got the timing right.

And you know, it was sort of like we were on the cusp, but now it is just remarkable.

What does that look like for you?

Yeah, so it looks like you're talking to the highest level at some of the largest companies.

You say, this is something that I think should, you know, you're, you're expanding your battery capacity for and you're doing LFP because you're making batteries for energy storage.

And they say, yes.

And we say we can make this component for you in the lowest cost way domestically so that you can capture all of the additional credits and not have all the tariff and also secure your supply chain because we use domestic feedstocks that China doesn't want the biggest piece for them.

Security, because they don't want it because it's not part of their supply chain.

It doesn't make sense.

All of those conversations go, wow, that is critical.

What's your timeline?

How do you scale how much money do you need?

And just move so fast.

And so now from my practice, I need to get into moving from this sort of scarcity, like operating with peanuts and really changing the way I think to planning for big.

You have to think about those things.

But it's.

There's an energetic shit have to change into.

If, you know, someone doesn't want to come with me on this big ride, I have to find the right partner.

We are probably only going to have one or two big partners, maybe a few small ones.

I have to match that with the right capital that is smart, healthy, knowledgeable, dedicated.

There's undoubtedly going to be bumps, but I really can't have our capital structure working against us.

This stuff is really hard.

Right.

You need to have transparent, open conversations and trust each other.

It makes it so much better versus this traditional venture capital image of showing up and just saying all the things that are super good and never saying that.

You know, it's just, it's not healthy.

It doesn't.

A workable, useful relationship.

Virginia.

Yeah.

So at this point you are still creating product, right?

You're developing the cathode or do you have customers?

Do you have revenue?

Let's ask that question.

Yeah.

So we have quite a bit of revenue, but most of that is from grant revenue.

The government's been a Major investor in our work.

So they look at the progress and material on a monthly quarterly basis and then we get a check for it.

Right, or getting paid for development.

Yeah, we're getting paid for development, which I feel really fortunate about.

Those programs are absolutely necessary for building.

We have some of the biggest customers in the world that we've tested with.

I send them a little bit of material that we make and then they spend about half a million dollars putting into their batteries and assessing the performance of it.

So they can say, okay, on par with what we need.

But we can't do that testing for them.

Right?

We can't say because they're not going to give us their whole battery secrets.

This is a component within a very big system that is highly confidential.

For every company this year we sent out 10 of those samples and every single customer progressed forward.

So we've been able to get like every single customer.

It performed way better than we thought, which is great.

It makes a lot of sense because when you're working with companies that make batteries, you generally will have better performance.

So it's useful to do that versus trying.

You know, we could easily have raised $20 million and try to make the batteries in house and test them before we send out the material.

It would have reduced some version of risk, but it would have taken a lot more money and time.

We took the risk on and said we're going to trust you customer.

This might not be perfect, but we know we're meeting these specs.

Tell us, give us that data and feedback.

And every single one of them progressed amazing.

Okay, so how much have you raised to date?

I know you've been able to get funding from the government through grants and how Women Invest has invested in you.

That's how I met you.

So tell me, how much have you already raised and how will you continue to fund to get yourself to wherever you want to go?

We've raised in total about 30 million with about 16 coming from non diluted funds, which is great.

And how Women Invest has been unbelievable.

Love the crew and the powerhouse.

This takes a village.

So you have to be skilled at leveraging resources.

Is incredibly useful to those networks and that amplification.

I've had a number of great investors, people that have built their own companies and sold them.

A lot of operators and people that are a little bit more high net worth.

Energy Systems 1.0 grew the oil and gas and worked, you know, in, in a lot more traditional structures.

The vision of the future is different and I've been able to enroll Them, which is great.

So I feel very fortunate.

I think the next step, it's very clear to me like you know, we've worked backwards saying we need large scale.

We're going to work with somebody building that that's either a land or some, you know, joint venture of somebody that builds like there's a lot of infrastructure funds.

Our job is to reduce all of the engineering risk and the scale up and also bring the customers along while sampling so we can just do project finance.

So that's been the magic of really working backwards to say okay, how do we compress this as much as possible.

We're fortunate because one of our designs in our company was to use off the shelf equipment which means that nothing we do is too nichy and we don't need hundreds of millions of dollars to prove it works.

We can use other equipment that's out there to quite astley when you're doing big things, this is the thing that I've learned, and I don't know how to say this eloquently is when you're doing really big things, you, you have like, you know, you have to use enough of the things that are the same.

So we make the same material.

Batteries, right.

We're not making novel material and we're using off the shelf equipment so we can leverage all the equipment that exists in those supply chains and everything so we can scale more rapidly.

What we are doing that's novel is different feedstocks and the way we're stitching together the equipment to make it more efficient, that's our piece of novelty.

Everything else is much easier to scale so it reduces the risk it's turning into.

We built it that way but it's becoming very clear with different techniques next year is going to be a breakthrough year.

We haven't come public but we've signed a number of customers up in pathways for MOUs offtake or technology development Pathways with energy storage, defense and ev.

We're getting into the energy storage markets because those, those organizations are having a really big pull.

So you're going to see a lot of activity, be more public.

Probably by Q2 next year we're going to raise, I'd say a large chunk for us, but not a large chunk in general.

Probably sub 10 million this next year.

And then quickly on the heels of that towards the end of the year, probably do the piece that we need to get to commercial.

Time is now.

Time is now.

What's your highest and best use?

When you wake up in the morning and you think about the year ahead.

How do you feel?

What do you think are the levers for you?

What's going to make it happen?

I think the big part of it is being grounded in clear communication.

I've moved my mentality from I need to do this thing, I need to get this money.

That's not what I need.

That will come.

People make their own decisions.

I need to meet them where they're at, give them the information I can provide to see if it's a good fit or not.

Honestly, if it's not a good fit, I don't want to push it.

So that's the piece that it's like getting.

I don't know if you can get to this place I'm at now.

And I think that's just like in your 40s.

That's what happens.

And then I've heard 50s is like epic bliss where you really don't give a shit.

I think I'm like, you know, I still care, but not like, you know, so I can't imagine if I completely shift that over.

That's going to be amazing.

I think that piece is really important for me.

It's a lot of, oh, I get to like, I get to talk to Coco this morning.

I get to wake up at four in the morning, get on a plane and meet this very important person who's flying to meet me and learn about what we're doing.

We can both change the world together, and we're going to see if that magic happens.

That's really cool.

I get to do that.

So it's a different energetic shift and a mentality shift.

And trust me, I'm not always there, but when I'm there, my ability to resonate and create outsized impacts is significant.

Your wisdom with this is enormous.

Right.

And it takes a different mindset at different stages of building too.

You're at this moment where you've laid the foundation.

I often talk to founders about figuring, you know, sort of as you're building early on and continue to build, you're figuring out what are the things that you need to really have as priorities.

Everything can't be a priority, right?

And there's stages where you focus on one thing and then the next, the pieces fit together over time.

It doesn't help to worry about what's coming down the road in five years.

Just focus right now, all of your energy and attention, what you need to do right now.

And it's what.

What I'm hearing you talk about how you've been wrestling with all of this.

You're taking a moment having insightful conversations and making room for those insights to come out of that.

You, your brilliant mind with your team, talk to us.

Want to know about your team.

I think that's the piece that's interesting is that you know what I found?

I mean, innovation requires a lot of different insights.

It's not just technology, it's how to communicate it.

Who's the right person?

What's the right approach to the business model?

When you grow in scale, it's not just about the technology.

And that's been really interesting for me.

My team, lastly, we've stayed small.

We grew a little bit.

We doubled in size.

So we're just around 15.

It's a perfect size because we're all really connected, we can communicate and we're a moving organism.

I feel really fortunate to have great early partners.

Eventually I have to scale out of.

They've been at the end of their career, so they have a lot of experience.

Some say brought in a lot of people that were representative of versions of my dad but smarter in different areas.

And I'm like, well, that kind of makes sense.

It's like daddy issues in a different way.

You do need to have different partners and trust is a big thing for me.

I need a few feel like I give my whole heart.

What I realize is the best quality about me.

And one of the worst qualities is that I give my whole heart.

And anyone around my circle, I try to make their lives better.

I have to be really conscientious of who I bring into my circle.

Everyone has different love languages of different approaches to communication.

And so the piece is like learning how to work and operate with all these different minds.

We have a really good team right now that has been so dedicated.

I think they also feel the change, you know, and they feel the excitement and the opportunity.

Amazing.

The future vision, the brighter, better future that you're creating in the next five years.

That's fun.

Fun little fact is that my son just said for Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for the opportunity to work at Silva Tex one day.

And I was like, whoa, that's cool.

Because a lot of things that have to be true to make that happen, you know.

But that would be really fun.

That's not five years from now.

So I think the next five years we're going to raise different trashes of money.

We're going to scale very effectively and efficiently in North America.

We're going to have one to three large partners and probably three to four smaller partners that are significant within energy storage Defense and ev.

These markets are going to grow and expand in a natural rate and we're going to likely have probably the second facility making materials in North America and that's going to be much more efficient and lower cost then that's going to be replicated.

We're probably going to have it exit or go public in the next three to five years, but who knows, maybe by then I'll be getting close to 50.

I'm like no, I'm just going to run this company and be a public company and we're going to make billions of dollars.

So I'm open to that change, you know, because there's a lot of like the world needs like you need to maintain good leadership and the world, the world is changing rapidly.

We'll see on that part.

I'm open to all levels.

At the end of the day my goal is to get these key materials to the largest organizations and can and like large like highest volumes all over.

So that we're doing, we're creating a better supply chain, lower cost batteries, lower energy utilization for each piece used and these recycle loops in a much more efficient way.

I'm really excited for the future.

I love it.

And you know, you're changing the world too.

You're making the world better through business.

And innovation comes from business.

You can partner with government or academia.

But as the founder, this is the thing that most excites me about business and women founded businesses.

We can change the world.

We can pick our problem to solve, right in an AI driven world.

You're going to create a way for us to have enough energy in this country and beyond, source it locally, make sure that the carbon piece is balanced.

I can't wait for us to have our next interview because I know and I've been able to watch you and really support you, all of us at how women invest and how women lead.

We're just like holy shit, this woman is really doing it.

For all of you listening, I hope you will check out Virginia, like follow her on LinkedIn.

Learn from this woman.

Like she is heart centered and wise and truly gifted with business.

She's talking about setting priorities, setting values, setting goals.

And then you know, how do you create that infrastructure and at the same time what's most important, highest and best communicate.

It's not going out and running around and doing all these things.

I have to be a great communicator.

I have to hold the space for my company and for the people who come to me.

I'm not desperate.

I have to Pick the right partner.

It's just brilliant.

All right, fast fire round.

Are you ready?

Sure.

So one thing you no longer tolerate as a founder?

I put my energy into a rock and threw it out the other day.

And the no longer thing I tolerate is having somebody and their approach and their state drained my power.

A belief you had to let go of to really scale.

I know how to do it.

What boundary changed everything for you as a leader?

It was the realization that everyone wants to feel human connection.

If you get that right, you can change the world.

People don't say it the same way, but I interact with a lot of men and they're not like, oh, I really care about you.

This is an enjoyable experience.

I can add value, I can support, you know, and like so.

But you know, in general it's connection.

They feel a level of connection that allows for an ease of communication.

What would early Silva Text Virginia be proud of today?

Never, ever give up.

It is unthinkable to see.

It's like I'm breaking out of jail or something and I've been chipping away at it for 10 years.

It's insane.

It's an amazing exercise to work.

And then people now when we get into these big companies, it's so fun.

And they go through this detailed stuff for like two hour diligence meetings and they're like, how did you get here?

You know, I've been thinking about this for a long time now.

The world's got up, you know what I mean?

It's funny.

And they're shocked because it's not what they would expect.

Even in academia, you don't get to work this long on something this acutely.

I feel very lucky that I've gotten the ability to focus on a hard thing for a decade and it's now coming to significant reality.

When you imagine the world Silva Text helps create, what do you hope your sons will say about it someday?

Ooh, yeah, Kind of.

This vision I have is that we go to our first facility we build and it's still operating.

There's people around and it's been able to evolve.

It's like an organism that is, you know, been able to shift with the times.

You know, a lot of these factories especially, especially for these types of things get mothballed within a decade because things change so much.

We're building a system that doesn't like everything's going to build around it, right.

It's going to be ecosystem.

So it's still operating in the cost of energy and water is going to be high enough that it's future proofed against all of those variables I do see a thematic change is going to create more money that people are going to make those things just like they do in Germany those systems much more efficiently and have the supply chains be much more efficient.

But it's going to change because of cost and money and then everyone's going to value the environmental benefits.

I love it.

You have such vision and clarity.

You really do.

And that's what it takes to create new things.

So thank you so much.

I have a question.

How can our listeners support you?

I think your introduction was beautiful and I realized I need help with amplification.

Everything I write on LinkedIn we have no help.

So every time that things get reprinted, posted, you know it makes a big difference and it reaches, it significantly increases reach the more you can be active directly with me and also Silvatex.

LinkedIn is probably our one platform that we've been using but and definitely like our website has some of the content that would be incredibly helpful and I will be connected playfrom so the listeners making these connections to great people.

It is all about making alignment and bringing that great people and it resonates up.

Yeah, I'm on a hunt.

Help me find them.

I love it.

You're going to find in the show notes the links to both Virginia and Silva Tex's LinkedIn as well as the website for Silvatex so you can check it out and I really encourage you follow her and really like learn from her and and then reshare all these articles.

Let's all make sure that those articles and the pieces that she writes we repost.

Start with a, you know, create a new post on LinkedIn link to her posts and shout out for the goodness she's spreading.

Thank you Virginia for joining us today on the Wisdom of Women show.

You have inundated us with your brilliance, wisdom and love.

And that's what the world needs, right?

We need to find ways to deliver our truth and love into the world and into business.

And that's how we can make the world better.

To infuse more of your wisdom into your business, dear listener, take the growth readiness quiz at a ForceForGood biz quiz and you can uncover where your insight is needed most.

The world is made better by women led business.

So let's all go make the world a better place.