Episode 30: Raising Capital for a Radically Transformational Business with Katrina Spade

Summary: In this episode, Capital Insight co-hosts and securities attorneys Jenny Kassan and Michelle Thimesch talk with Katrina Spade of Recompose, a full-service funeral home specializing in human composting. Listen to catch Katrina’s insight into the process of raising capital for a business that was still not legal when it started and how to stay true to your vision even when you need large amounts of capital to get your business off the ground. Bio: Katrina Spade is a designer and the inventor of a system that transforms the dead into soil (aka human composting). In 2017, Katrina founded Recompose with the goal of offering earth-centric, participatory, and meaningful death care. Recompose has led the successful legalization of human composting in Washington State, Oregon, and Colorado. In 2020, Recompose began offering the service of human composting to the public. Katrina and her team have been featured in Fast Company, NPR, the Atlantic, BBC, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Times. She is an Echoing Green Fellow, an Ashoka fellow, and a Harvard Kennedy School Visiting Social Innovator. Key quotes: “I knew that the world wanted this, and I knew that it was going to take a pretty good amount of capital.” “One of the reasons I did not want to create a for-profit was that I was afraid of losing the values that I had set up in my non-profit.” “I founded Recompose as a for-profit company that has in its bylaws environmental or social goals that sit alongside profit goals. It was a way to start signaling to investors that we weren’t just about profit. Recompose is very much about an environmental and social goal: the environmental goal is creating new soil and saving carbon and reducing the pollution that happens with our [current] funeral practices - creating this beautiful ecological wealth-building practice instead. And the social goals have to do with accepting our mortality and thinking more deeply about how we’re connected to the natural world as humans. That was the first thing we did to signal to investors that this is a different kind of company.” Links/socials/contact: Company website: https://recompose.life/ Company instagram: @recomposelife Entrepreneur instagram: @katrinaspade Company twitter: @recomposelife Email: [email protected] Angels of Main Street: https://www.angelsofmainstreet.com/