Peter Reinhardt
Co-founder and CEO, Charm Industrial. On 4 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestor@reinpk ↗LinkedIn ↗rein.pk ↗
Peter Reinhardt is the co-founder and former CEO of customer data platform Segment, which was acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion in 2020. He currently serves as the co-founder and CEO of Charm Industrial, a carbon dioxide removal and clean-tech company.
4shows
3appearances
58statements
11resolved
8supported
0contradicted
73%fully supported
26said about them ↓ Everything Peter Reinhardt said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
The Airbnb myth of persisting without product-market fit is destructive
“Yeah, I think one of the most destructive myths in Silicon Valley is the Airbnb story and myth, because the story is basically that they hung on and didn't have product market fit, and then just eventually things started going well, and they didn't really chan…”
Reinhardt: Fixed pyrolysis facilities break unit economics compared to mobile units
“When you start moving away from a mobile piece of equipment into a fixed facility, You do get some economies of the construction, but you actually take on a lot more risk in every facility that you build. You have all the balance of plant, you have permitting,…”
Reinhardt: Charm's capex per ton is under half of state-of-the-art pyrolysis plants
“If we look at the capex, for example, of our system today on a, Per dollars capex per ton basis, and compare it to, say, like, state-of-the-art pyrolysis facilities, we are already less than half of that cost on, on a dollar per capex basis, and that will decl…”
Reinhardt: Biomass is best utilized for carbon content, not energy
“What's interesting about it is that relative to almost everything else, it's very carbon rich. And so the use cases that rely either on the chemical availability of carbon or on, ah, the sort of physical availability of carbon, those, or like in the case of ca…”
Reinhardt: Removing carbon is cheaper than $2,000/ton building decarbonization retrofits
“It's gonna cost, like, 2000 dollars a ton for me to go, like, tear down a building and rebuild it with, like, a proper HVAC system that does, like, heat pumps, you know, it's like, and have clean concrete, like, you know, at some point you get down to this, li…”
Founders must set aside their vision until they understand market demand
“But for the most part, like the world honestly couldn't care less what your vision is. It just doesn't care. And a business is about solving other people's problems. I think it's actually super important to set aside a vision until you actually understand what…”
Executives lacking humility have peaked in capacity and must be replaced
“I think if someone lacks humility, at least on some of those dimensions, yeah, they're not going to grow, so they're stagnant in their capacity, whatever that is. So to me, it's a huge warning sign, actually. If there's someone in the company or one of my dire…”
Segment co-founder Ian Storm Taylor predicted a massive business behind Analytics.js
“I think there's a big business behind Analytics.js, which is this routing library.”
Reinhardt thought building a business on Analytics.js was his co-founder's worst idea
“And I was like, that is literally the worst idea I've ever heard. Like, it's 500 lines of code. You've grown a little bit. It's 500 lines of code and it's already open source. I have no idea how you build a business around that.”
Reinhardt: True product-market fit is unmistakable and creates uncontrollable growth
“Frankly, I think the really big product market fit moments for every company are pretty unmistakable. Like, the Dropbox founders have called it stepping on a landmine. I just, I really don't think you can mistake it. It really happens in a way that you lose co…”
Reinhardt: Reaching product-market fit through multi-year iterative grinds is extremely rare
“My feeling is that that's extremely rare and that, again, this is a really dangerous place to be because you can stay in this iterative mode for years. And it is unlikely that the iterations are going to get you to a good place. So I remember very clearly earl…”
Reinhardt: Finding initial product-market fit is not a repeatable process
“The problem with the first product
And product market fit is that you can move the product and you can move the market because it's fit between these two things.
And so what's unclear and they move in some crazy multidimensional space.
And so what's the issue …”
Reinhardt: Waiting until $10M in revenue to hire experienced executives is disastrous
“So we went from literally zero management experience, aside from what had been picked up along the way, growing from zero to 50 people, to having someone who really knew it, or two people who really knew what they were doing. That was hugely impactful, and we …”
Reinhardt: High EBITDA per ton companies will lead carbon removal adoption
“If you look at a sort of chart of, like, profitability per ton or EBITDA per ton, like, it's the companies that have a lot of EBITDA per ton that are going to lead the way on helping things down.”
Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson spent 18 months convincing Reinhardt to sell
“No, you know, it took Jeff about 18 months to convince me that it was the right thing to do.”
Startup acquisitions trigger an intense emotional rollercoaster of grief and relief
“An acquisition is a mix of every emotion, and then the question is, I mean, like literally, like you feel relief, you feel excitement, you feel sadness, you feel loss, like significant loss because you are losing control. Like every emotion under the sun I fel…”
Charm Industrial is now the world's largest carbon removal operator
“I helped start a company called Charm Industrial that is actually now the world's largest carbon removal operator, and so I hope we can get it to a gigaton of CO₂ per year kind of scale.”
Reinhardt: Traditional CRMs are inadequate for modern digital customer interactions
“But now the world is moving much more to a Warby Parker kind of world where you're not interacting with a person. So a CRM doesn't even make sense. It's like not the right technology for understanding what interactions you're having with the customer, and inst…”
Reinhardt: Experiencing genuine product-market fit feels like you are losing control
“And it feels very much like losing control, right? Like, Previously, you're like building a thing, and you roll it out, you're building a thing, and you're pushing it out, and all of a sudden you like put a thing out there, and people start running away with i…”
Reinhardt: Founders enter a death spiral when iterating for inactive users
“I think a lot of founders get caught in this sort of like all the death spiral of user feedback. Where they keep going and showing someone their product and asking them for feedback. They give them, you know, some feedback about how they could make it better, …”
Reinhardt: Direct customer conversations teach a thousand times more than landing pages
“When you actually go and talk to a customer, if you have that conversation in the right way, you'll learn a thousand times more from that conversation than you will from than from putting up a landing page.”
Reinhardt predicts that third-party data brokering will eventually die out
“There are plenty of other companies out there that, that do stuff like that. It's gonna go away and die eventually.”
Codecademy launched three days before YC Demo Day after 12 pivots
“They started and killed, like, 12 ideas over the course of Y Combinator, and then three days before Demo Day launched Codecademy, and got to 300 and something thousand signups in the 72 hours before they presented at Demo Day.”
Depth-first research builds superior mental models faster than surface learning
“I guess the way I approach things is very depth first. I think using a narrow curiosity to maximum benefit to just go insanely deep, In an area. So like, for example, if I have a meeting on diversity, equity, and inclusion, I'll go try to like read a few piece…”
The other half of the tape: Peter Reinhardt's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 24 times in 11 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Zhenya Loginov 4Calvin French-Owen 4Harry Stebbings 3Pat Grady 2Michael Seibel 2Jack Altman 2Eric Migicovsky 2Ali Rowghani 2
Statements about Peter Reinhardt, by other people (2)
Grady: Passing on Segment and Revolut Series A rounds were terrible mistakes
“I met both of them at the Series A, and both of them told me the entire story in like five or 10 minutes. And it was super clear. And at the end of the five or 10 minutes, I couldn't think of any questions to ask because they had already answered any question …”
Seibel: Founders should establish demand benchmarks that convince company skeptics before continuing
“Identify a critic in the company. Identify a sign that would either, that would even convince the critic that there's something here. If you can't hit that sign within a period of time, you should move. So, like, don't trust The faith of the optimist, like, tr…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 16
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 8
2024 2 mentions in 1 episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- YC SUS: Michael Seibel and Eric Migicovsky discuss How to Launch an MVP · Y Combinator
- 20VC: Retool Founder, David Hsu on Why YC Is Helpful Pre Product-Market Fit but Not Post and Why VCs Are Not Helpful Pre-Product Market-Fit but are Post, Why it is Difficult to Become Unprofitable if You Set Yourself Up For Profitability Early & Why VC Th
- 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2018 4 mentions in 1 episode
2017 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: YC's Ali Rowghani on Leadership Lessons From Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull and Jack Dorsey & The 3 Traits All Truly Successful Leaders Share
- 20VC: What Is Core To The Best Investor - Founder Relationships, The Biggest Risk For Founders In The Early Days & Why EQ Is The Most Important Trait For Managers with Jack Altman, Founder & CEO @ Lattice
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Peter's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Charm Industrial | 1 | 35 | 100% 3/3 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |
 TOP FOUNDERSLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Charm Industrial | 0 | 0 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Top Founders → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Charm Industrial | 1 | 13 | 50% 2/4 | full record on 20VC → |
 CATALYSTLEDGER | Co-founder and CEO, Charm Industrial | 1 | 10 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Catalyst → |