Meet Our Speakers:
👤Lindsey Schultz, Our Host, CEO of MRC Recruiting
🎙️Daniel Rau, Founder of Kunin
This conversation was really about what happens when someone new to mining looks at the industry without much patience for the usual excuses.
Daniel Rau did not come up through a traditional mining path. He started in chemical engineering, spent time around hydrogen and other energy transition technologies, and got hung up on a simple question, do the economics actually work? That question kept pushing him away from ideas that sounded good and toward problems that felt real. Lithium was the turning point. Once he understood how much metal the energy transition actually needs, and how much cheaper those metals will have to be produced, he was in.
What gave the conversation weight was not just that Daniel is young and building a company. It was the way he described seeing a structural gap in the market. In lithium and other critical minerals, he kept running into the same issue: Western producers often do not have process technology that is cost-competitive enough to move projects forward. In his view, that is not just a technical problem. It changes which assets get built, who controls supply, and whether byproducts ever become worth recovering at all.
That is where Kunin comes in. Daniel’s company is focused on ion exchange technology, with the goal of helping mines recover more metal, especially metals that are currently left behind because the recovery economics are too weak. He talked about this in a very practical way. Many mines already contain additional value in side streams, residues, raffinate, or tailings, but if recovering that value only adds a relatively small amount of revenue compared with the main commodity, large operators often will not prioritize it. So the challenge is not only making recovery cheaper. It is making the opportunity investable and simple enough that a company will actually act on it.
One of the more honest parts of the episode was Daniel describing how the original university technology he started with did not end up becoming the business. They discovered they did not have freedom to operate and had to start over. That mattered because it showed the difference between having an interesting technical idea and building something that can survive in the real world.
The conversation also kept circling back to a bigger issue, mining still does a poor job explaining itself. Daniel and Lindsey both made the point that students are often interested once they see what the work actually is, but the industry rarely tells that story clearly. That matters because the industry is short on people, short on trust, and trying to solve harder problems with an aging workforce.
The useful takeaway here is pretty simple. Better mining is not just about finding new deposits. It is also about recovering more from what is already there, making technical decisions with economic discipline, and getting much better at showing new people why this work matters in the first place.
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS: ⏱️
0:00 – Introduction to Daniel Rau and Kunin
0:42 – Daniel’s Accidental Path Into Mining
1:17 – Exploring Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and Energy Transition Technologies
2:05 – Economic Reality Check on Hydrogen Fuel Cell Trucks
3:08 – First Taste of Lithium Through Oil and Gas Brines
4:10 – Falling in Love With Metals and Battery Supply Chains
5:15 – From Battery Recycling to Arcadium Lithium
6:13 – Catching “Lithivitis” and Going Deep Into Lithium Markets
8:07 – The Entrepreneurial Spark Behind Kunin
9:09 – Daniel’s Accelerated Career Path at 23
10:08 – Understanding the Lithium Cost Curve Problem
11:20 – Why Western Mining Technology Struggles to Compete on Cost
13:09 – Vanderbilt Professor’s Lithium Extraction Technology
14:16 – Winning the NSF Innovation Corps Grant
15:24 – Industry Discovery and Early Customer Conversations
16:18 – SQM Accelerator Program and Chile Pitch Opportunity
17:05 – Patent Roadblock and Pivoting Toward Kunin
18:21 – What Kunin Does: Helping Mines Make More Metals
19:08 – The Role of Ion Exchange in Metal Recovery
20:15 – Shrinking the Footprint of Ion Exchange Technology
21:24 – Unlocking Byproduct Recovery Across the Periodic Table
23:06 – Becoming the “SunResin of the West”
24:07 – Building Kunin With Fresh Eyes
25:17 – The Highs and Lows of Entrepreneurship
26:38 – The Most Rewarding Part of Building a Team
29:03 – The Hardest Parts of Entrepreneurship
30:22 – Educating Capital on Mining and Process Technology
31:45 – Becoming an Ambassador for the Mining Industry
32:18 – Growing Student Interest in Mining
33:20 – Finding Purpose Through Mining and Metals
34:30 – Bringing Daniel’s Sister to SME
35:37 – Mining’s Communication and Image Problem
36:23 – Why the Mining Industry Needs Better Recruiting
37:05 – The Talent Gap and the “Great Tsunami” in Mining
39:07 – Mining Companies Need to Communicate the “Why”
40:09 – Everyday Products Depend on Dozens of Metals
41:25 – Why Mining Needs Better Social Media and PR
42:23 – Creating University Relationships to Build the Talent Pipeline
43:48 – Changing Student Misconceptions About Mining Careers
44:38 – Competing for Talent Against Tech and Finance
45:44 – Combining Process Technology With Streaming
46:30 – Why Byproduct Recovery Is Hard to Prioritize
48:05 – Solving the Investability Problem in Mining
49:07 – Total Ore Body Effectiveness and Byproduct Opportunities
50:13 – Why Streaming Could Support Kunin’s Growth
51:10 – Re-Mining Tailings and Recovering Value From Waste Streams
52:08 – Target Projects: Raffinate, Smelter Residue, and Tailings
53:13 – Smaller Mining Companies as Ideal Technology Adopters
54:05 – Mining’s First-Adopter Problem
55:03 – Building Countercyclical Value in Mining
56:15 – Capital Deployment, Mining Tech Hype, and Market Cycles
57:21 – Hiring Challenges and Building at the Right Time
58:09 – What Gives Daniel Optimism About the Future of Mining
59:15 – Urgency, National Labs, and Researcher Momentum
1:00:33 – Moving Fast and Solving Big Problems
1:01:21 – Mining’s Role in National Security and the Economy
1:02:13 – Daniel’s Interest in Becoming a Mining Ambassador
1:03:08 – Making Kunin a Family Business
1:03:41 – Where to Find Kunin and Daniel
1:04:15 – Hiring Process Engineers and Hydrometallurgists
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