Biotech hits the Backcountry: Checkerspot & WNDR Alpine
BLISTER Podcast
BLISTER
4.8 • 560 Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2019
⏱️ 63 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What does biotech have to do with backcountry skiing? What does microalgae have to do with skis? And why did the founder of 4FRNT Skis, Matt Sterbenz, agree to get involved with a new startup ski brand, WNDR Alpine? We sat down in Blister HQ with Checkerspot co-founder and CEO, Charlie Dimmler, and WNDR Alpine founder, Matt Sterbenz, to talk about the creation of WNDR Alpine; its relation to and the mission of Checkerspot; and more.
TOPICS & TIMES:
- Why does Matt Sterbenz hate vowels? (2:00)
- How Matt got involved with Checkerspot (5:17)
- Checkerspot’s mission & innovations (10:00)
- Charlie’s background: from Wall Street to Biotech (17:41)
- What Checkerspot is doing with microalgae (23:20)
- Why make skis from new materials? (26:02)
- Effects on ski performance? (32:28)
- Sustainability as a design constraint (41:00)
- Other possible applications of microalgae (48:50)
- How has launching WNDR affected Checkerspot? (58:24)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Blister podcast, a program dedicated to interesting people, the great outdoors, and a bunch of other stuff we like. |
| 0:08.0 | I'm Jonathan Ellsworth, the founder of Blister, and you can check out everything we're doing and reviewing over at blisterreview.com. |
| 0:18.0 | Today's episode wades into some pretty deep waters and asks some pretty unusual questions, |
| 0:25.0 | like, what does biotech have to do with backcountry skiing? |
| 0:29.5 | What does microalgae have to do with skis? |
| 0:32.6 | And why did the founder of Forefront Skis, Matt Sturban's, agree to get involved with a new |
| 0:38.5 | startup ski brand called Wonder Alpine? |
| 0:42.6 | So in order to get some answers, we sat down in Blister H.Q with Charlie Dimler, the co-founder |
| 0:48.6 | and CEO of the Berkeley California-based biotech company, Checkerspot, and Wonder Alpine founder Matt Sturban's to talk |
| 0:57.8 | about the creation of Wonder Alpine, its relation to, and the mission of Checkerspot, and more. |
| 1:04.9 | So get yourself ready to dive deep and to think big in this one, and without further ado, let's get right to it. |
| 1:14.3 | Matt Stervance. Welcome to Blister headquarters and to Crested Bute. Thank you very much. |
| 1:22.0 | Super pumped to be here. My first time here was when the X Games was here. And so what year was |
| 1:26.8 | that? |
| 1:28.6 | Oh, man. |
| 1:31.6 | I mean, it's probably 99 or 2000. |
| 1:31.8 | Yeah. |
| 1:34.4 | You know, I can tell you that Candide Tovex was 16. |
| 1:36.1 | I don't know how it is today. |
| 1:39.0 | And it was during the filming of 13, |
| 1:43.9 | which you see a lot of the big air clips from that contest in the movie. So it's kind of fun to |
| 1:46.6 | come back, look around, you know, and enjoy this town not blanketed with snow. Yeah. So it's a unique |
... |
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