We spent $15,000 on billboards targeting one man: the head of all chemical spending at a Texas seawater treatment company. We mapped out his commute and bought every billboard between his home and the oil field. When we finally reached him, he said, “I see your billboards everywhere.” That won us our first oil field contract. Back then, our entire production process was a $10,000 reactor, built with PVC pipes from Home Depot, converting corn sugar into industrial chemicals. People kept trying to throw it away, but it still worked. This leaky reactor spawned a multi-billion dollar company. @ycombinator visited our Houston plant. The original PVC reactor still sits next to BioForge.