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Where are you marketing the EcoRock? Is this for buildings or homes?

It'll be available in 1/2 inch and 5/8, fire rated, so it's for both commercial and residential, and will be available throughout North America. If the architect specs it or the designer specs it or the builder or the building owner specs it, the subcontractor won't see it as any different than regular drywall, they just hang it up.

We've got a channel of thousands of dealers that stock our products, and it took five years to build that channel, but that's crucial. You can't enter this industry and not have a channel. And you've got to have some deep pockets. You're bringing products to market in very, very, very, very large industries.

And in order to make a dent on the climate, frankly, you've got to go after big industries, that's the first thing. You need to change the way those industries work, or else you can't make a dent on things. And number two, you really have to have deep pockets because ultimately you have to build 20 or 30 plants.

That's how you begin to impact the environment in an absolutely appreciable way. Otherwise, if you talk about "I'm going to go make tables in a new way," maybe kitchen tables, that's nice, but the number of kitchen tables you could possibly make is just not going to impact the environment enough.

So you have to get the things that are billions of pounds of CO2 on an annual basis, and then you have to attack those billions of pounds, not by having one percent market share, but by having a large percent of market share.

I would certainly encourage other manufacturers to start thinking about this, and startup companies that want to go after this in material science have to think about these facts. They should be going after cement and glass and metal. Big things. Big. Items that generate billions and billions of pounds a year of CO2. That's how we can have an impact.

Looking at your bio, there's a lot of software and technology in there, but no construction. How did you end up here?

I entered the industry five years ago, and before that I was a tech guy, and most of the company is built with tech people, not of construction people. The primary reason for that is we're a Silicon Valley company, and I think when you want to make these kinds of strides, you really want to walk through walls, Silicon Valley does that best.

It does not take anything away from people who spent 20 or 30 years in this industry, which we respect and admire, but there's an awful lot that can be done, and has been, in many, many industries, in sort of the Silicon Valley mentality of "go make it happen."

I think it's difficult for older line manufacturers to execute in this way, because they have infrastructure to protect, and people's egos to protect, and all kinds of things.

A Silicon Valley company doesn't have that. You've got very smart people and very smart scientists that are told to go do things that have never been done before, and they giggle and laugh at you at first and then they go, "I get it, this is important to the environment, we have to do it." And they just do it, and that works.

Will your factories be made with your own drywall?

Well, we don't have any drywall in our facilities, so that's probably the best answer. We're going into existing, old, unused warehouses. We don't want to build anything, because by building something, we're also causing carbon to go into the atmosphere just from those materials. So to the extent that we can have no materials, and essentially be brownfield, not greenfield, that's the best thing we can do. We reuse structures that haven't been used in a long time. A lot of people can't do that for their processes, but we can.