Worst Day on the Job: How Amielle Lake of CarboNet navigated the pandemic

The co-founder of Vancouver-based industrial water treatment company CarboNet shares her COVID-19 story

Vancouver-based CarboNet is working to treat wastewater more efficiently. Amielle Lake helped launch the company alongside Barry Yates, Bill Schonbrun and Michael Carlson after Carlson originally presented the business idea to local incubator entrepreneurship@ubc. The four co-founders, together with a team of 25, spent a long time developing CarboNet’s water treatment technology. But just when they were about to set sail, the COVID-19 pandemic poked a large hole in their plans. Lake walks us through what happened, what their strategy was and how CarboNet not only survived, but also grew to dominate the sector.

March 17, 2020. That time probably ­creates a feeling of unease in most people. We had completed our first commercial deployment, and we had just issued our first invoice in the oil and gas sector.

We had a board meeting shortly after. We’re sitting, chatting before the meeting started, and we hear, “Oh, the nhl is cancelled. The nba is cancelled. The mlb is cancelled.” We’re kind of watching the whole world shut down.

The market we were targeting was fracking, and the Permian Basin [in Texas] is the largest producing oil field in the world. It’s very important to the U.S., and there’s just a massive consumption of water—like 20 billion barrels a year of dirty produced water—that has to get addressed there.

Our market disappeared overnight. Eighty-five percent of the market, overnight. We had spent a year proving this technology—I mean, I can’t tell you how many trips I made to West Texas in the year prior to issuing that first invoice. It was like they ripped the rug out from underneath us.

We were lucky in that we had recently closed a financing round (we’d raised around $5-7 million) so there was a bit of comfort knowing that we had some cash. But we were pretty uneasy because we didn’t really know how long this would go on for. You can’t just turn into a new market overnight. And we had already invested: we had a team down there; we had distribution set up there. We were ready to go and take over this market, and then it lite­rally just stopped. So, the four founders, we were worried about what that meant for the company, and, most importantly, for our colleagues—what it meant for their futures.

I also had a young daughter at the time. She’s now nine, and my husband has a stable job, but it was very unnerving because I contribute to our household income. All of a sudden, I was trying to figure out how to get this company going and how to look after my daughter. So many mothers faced that incredible stress of trying to balance the needs of the home—yes, fathers took that on as well, but for a lot of working mothers, it was insane.

We did a few things that I think worked really well. One is, we got together, the four of us, and we agreed that we were going to double down on the oil and gas industry. Perhaps it was counter-intuitive, but we knew we had something special—we had already invested in it, and we strongly felt that, no matter what, we were going to need to use oil and gas. So we decided to stay the course and focus. And we actually had no layoffs in that period.

A big lesson for us was getting aligned. Because we’re a remote team, even if we didn’t have a lot of activity in the business, we met on a regular basis company-wide. Sometimes we had topics to focus on, sometimes we didn’t. But that togetherness really helped keep the company aligned.

Another lesson was placing a bet. Too often startups will go, “Squirrel! Squirrel! Squirrel!” and try to be all things to all markets. That doesn’t work. You need to focus. You need to carve out a beachhead market; you need to really identify your customer group where you satisfy a blood-spurting pain. You are the tourniquet to save their lives, and you need to focus on deploying and dominating that position. And that’s exactly what we did: we developed very close, trusted, credible relationships with our customer targets, and when our customers started to come back in July, we were there. We were there to treat the water, to supply our chemistry that they would use to treat the water, and the market grew.

We are the largest supplier of chemistry for treating produced water in the Permian Basin, which is the largest oil field in the world. And we’ve now diversified into other markets. That bet paid off 100 percent.

This interview has been edited and condensed.