E174 Ed Thorne & Greg Robson: Relationships Can't Be Automated

Greg Robson and Ed Thorne founded Sand River three years ago with a simple but radical premise: the companies solving the ecological crisis are the best businesses on earth — they just haven't been funded that way. Both came from operational backgrounds. Neither had the next great idea to save nature. What they had was the judgment to find the people who did.This conversation goes deep into how you invest in a market that barely exists yet, what you actually look for in a founder, why valuation is mostly theatre, and what happens when AI — the thing everyone says is terrible for the planet — turns out to be nature's most powerful advocate. Greg draws a line that most people in this space are too cautious to say plainly: if we continue treating nature as infinite and free, and we build an intelligence more sophisticated than ours before we've fixed that, we will have earned what comes next.There's also a genuinely beautiful argument in here about partnership, about the moment you stop doing what you're told is valuable and start doing what you believe is valuable, and about why the best time to get on the playing field is exactly when the problem looks too big to solve.