Colorado Is Losing the Critical Metals Race — with Hugo Schumann

In this episode of The Bear Roars, Dan sits down with Hugo Schumann — founder and CEO of EverMetal Capital and former CFO of Boulder's Jetti Resources — for a conversation about the chokepoint most people miss in the critical metals story. Hugo opens with getting sent to the Congo at 26 to build an iron ore project, an AK-47 pointed at him at the airport, and a mountain hike that took the company from $20M to $400M in a couple of months.

From there he makes the case that mining was never the bottleneck. There's ore in Chile, Brazil and the US, but almost all of the refining that turns rock into usable metal happens in China, which spent the 2000s building that capacity while the West shut its own down. Dan and Hugo get into why that hands China a switch it can flip both ways, and why doing this work here is better for the environment than doing it there. Then it gets local: Colorado has the School of Mines, a Denver mining cluster and the talent to match, and is still watching these plants go to Texas and Oklahoma. Plus Hugo's super-alloy recycling roll-up, and a candid exchange on using AI in dealmaking.

Learn more about Hugo's work in critical metals: https://www.evermetal.capital/hugo-schumann Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book

To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com