Dillon Baxter

$30M+ Raised. Over 250M plastic items replaced. Founder/CEO at PlantSwitch. Building the future of plastic.

[Dillon Baxter @dillon_baxter]

I built a factory in the middle of China that makes plastic disappear.

Here’s a full walkthrough of how we turn bacteria into forks, straws, cups, and more that naturally biodegrade in months:

[TBPN @tbpn]

Happy Thursday. On today's show:

- @eastdakota (Cloudflare)
- @kevinweil (Warp)
- @Mclader (Cognition)
- @dillon_baxter (PlantSwitch)
- @DrStarson (Stellios)
- Brian Manning (Xona)

See you on the stream.

[Scott D. Clary @scottdclary]

Dillon Baxter (@dillon_baxter) raised over $30 million to build PlantSwitch, turning agricultural waste into alternatives to single-use plastic. I asked him what it takes to turn that idea into a business: finding people who know more than you, building something customers actually want, and getting through the parts nobody prepares you for.

#Entrepreneurship #Startups #DillonBaxter

[Dillon Baxter @dillon_baxter]

Fixing the only bad thing about Miami thank God

[Bloomberg @business]

American Airlines will invest $1 billion in a concourse expansion at Miami International Airport, a move to help bolster the carrier’s position at its top international gateway https://t.co/wBzaiURxG0

[Dillon Baxter @dillon_baxter]

Accurate, and this applies to hardware too:

- Many VC’s incentivize this short-term thinking by valuing revenue traction over building infrastructure

- This negates the advantage of a private company’s ability to think long-term versus public companies that have to report quarterly earnings

- In hardware, this can be deadly if demand outpaces ability to supply and maintain quality

- Enterprise sales are not usually linear growth, it can be more beneficial for a hardware company to spend 2 years building a product to land one $50M deal than ship a product in 3 months that can only win $500k deals

- Vertical integration (especially in cleantech) is typically better for entering new markets than trying to slot into legacy supply chains, which can take longer but is significantly more valuable long-term

It is almost always better to build towards what you want your business to look like in 5 years vs. chasing short-term revenue growth. More investors need this mindset to be successful in hardware.

[Keith Rabois @rabois]

The AI era will not be friendly to startups who chased revenue traction at the expense of accumulating advantages (or 7 Powers).

[Dillon Baxter @dillon_baxter]

@G_Monet83 Trying to tackle it everywhere! Starting to work with some distributors throughout SE Asia right now

[Dillon Baxter @dillon_baxter]

I built a factory in the middle of China that makes plastic disappear.

Here’s a full walkthrough of how we turn bacteria into forks, straws, cups, and more that naturally biodegrade in months:

[Dillon Baxter @dillon_baxter]

@DegenApe Will do a separate thread and go into the specifics, but hired a team with experience doing it over there and it’s so much easier there vs. US

[Dillon Baxter @dillon_baxter]

@richoffseo He giveth and he taketh

[Alo 🇨🇲 @runMoreWebinars]

This is Dillon one of my IRL friends and he’s lapping 99% of money Twitter. Building a really dope company would give him a follow

[Dillon Baxter @dillon_baxter]

$30M raised. Hundreds of millions of plastic items replaced.

I’m going to start posting here about:

-> Why recycling is the greatest marketing scam ever sold
-> Scaling manufacturing in China vs. US
-> The insane greenwashing in “sustainable” packaging
-> Building a hardware company from zero

Follow along.

[Dillon Baxter @dillon_baxter]

That factory is now 300k sq ft.

We’re vertically integrated, producing at scale across multiple applications, and our technology is years ahead of the competition.

CompostZero resin. Biodegrades in nature - compost, soil, landfill - microbes will eat it anywhere.

Works like plastic. Disappears like a plant.

[Zane Hengsperger @zanehengsperger]

“If we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford,” says Jim Farley, CEO at Ford

China added 295,000 industrial robots last year.
The US? 34,000. The UK? 2,500.

Operation warp speed reindustrialization go go go.

[Naval @naval]

Starting a company is solving a simultaneous equation - you’re convincing the money that you have the talent, and the talent that you have the money.

[Zane Hengsperger @zanehengsperger]

Today I ran an experiment that exposed to what I believe to be one of the biggest threats to America right now

I attempted got an Aluminum 6061-T651 quote from a Chinese mill and from an American mill.

The Chinese mill gave me a price over the phone and even followed up twice during the day.

The American mill had no one to answer. I tried two others same thing. Finally got a hold of the fourth which sent me to their distributor.

So I call the distributor and it was 4.75x the price of the Chinese metal on the exact same lead time.

This is the reality: America is being priced out of its own industrial future while China is making it effortless to buy.

This is why 50% of our customers don't care anymore where the raw materials come from, because they have given up on domestic.

If we want to support reindustrialization and domestic manufacturing, we need a stronger mill supply chain.

Otherwise the factories of tomorrow won’t be American, they’ll be Chinese.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Recycling is pointless