Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#76:
118 Climate Tech Startups to Watch + Join My Live Class June 1 to 14
Chris Wedding:
Hey, good morning. It's Chris Wedding here. If you're a regular listener to this podcast from Entrepreneurs for Impact, great. Good to see you again. If you're new, I'm the host, but also the Founder of Entrepreneurs for Impact, where we help CEOs, investors, and entrepreneurs to tackle climate change through mastermind peer groups, online courses, newsletters, and of course, podcast.
I am trying something a little new today. I guess three things. One, I want to maybe mix it up a little bit and try coming to you all, most weeks, maybe not every week with a shorter show here. Not a guest, just me carving topics that may be of interest. One of those topics that could be of interest is a bit of an audio version of the newsletter that I write each week. I probably won't cover everything in it, but maybe a little more color commentary. The other is to mention a new course that I'm launching through maven.com. We'll get to both of those here in just a minute. Let's go first to the newsletter.
So, this came out on May 11th, so pretty close to the publication here. What we cover in this one, really, 118 climate tech startups to watch, that's the hook to get folks into the newsletter. Big picture. It's a three-minute summary of climate tech startups, better habits and deep work. So, let's go into some of those climate tech startups to watch. Really, they come from two places.
The first is the Diamond List, which some of you have heard about before. They're tracking 56 early-stage climate startups. It's a cool concept here. They're modeling this after the Black List, Hollywood’s Black List for under-the-radar screenplays. So, since 2005, as they say, the Black List has uncovered hidden gems such as Argo, Juno, Slumdog Millionaire, and The King's Speech. Those Black List films have grossed over $25 billion and have been nominated for over 240 Academy Awards, winning more than 45. So, holy cow. Great, they weren't overlooked.
In a similar fashion, the 56 early-stage startups in climate and cleantech that the Diamond List tracks, they're often deemed a little too early for most VC investors. And clearly, there are some VC investors who love pre-seed and seed stage companies, but some are even earlier than that. The other method here of picking these startups on the list is that they were nominated by qualified climate investors. So, good process to vet and pick them.
I'm not going to obviously read 56 names here, but I might just go to the list here for a second. It's all available through the newsletter or online Diamond List. What you'll see is an Airtable and some of the startups. We've got one here called 1point8, so this is carbon capture at a gigaton scale. We've got archiREEF, I think I'm saying that properly. A-R-C-H-I and then the word reef. They're hoping to bring back corals and restore degraded marine ecosystems by planting corals with 3D printing, pretty cool. We've got a company like BasiGo, B-A-S-I-G-O, so EV technology and financing company looking to bring the electric bus service to Sub-Saharan Africa.
03:46
So, long list here. At Carbon Collective, some of you have heard of friends of mine here, building and managing investment portfolios aligned with the climate transition. Just a few of the names here to tease perhaps. ElectricFish Energy, Dollaride, CyanoCapture, CarbonChain, Buzz Solutions, Beyond the Dome, AtmosZero, Enduring Planet, another friend finding a way to finance startups, not through taking equity, but revenue-based financing. It's the EnZinc, GreenPortfolio, Gridware, Kubic, Malachite Technologies, Mote, Olukun Minerals, OzoneBio, Phykos, planblue, Pronoai, another cool company in the energy storage space. Anyway, you get the idea. I'd encourage you to go to the Diamond List, check out these companies.
In the Airtable, it's got a brief description, of course. It also shows the startups goals around their GHG impact in 2030. Got the website. Got the sector here, it's color coded. You've got an ask as well from the company, CEO's name, their email, pretty cool. Usually, it's the business email, sometimes a generic email, and also where they're located. All right, so there's 56 to check out, and thanks to Olya, Cassandra, Zeina, and Jeremy, the folks behind the Diamond List, you can check out their bios also highlighted in the newsletter on May 11th through Entrepreneurs for Impact.
All right, 62 more world-changing companies tackling the climate crisis. This comes out from Fast Company. I believe they also do this each year. I think these companies tend to be a little further along, at least the ones that I know. Some of them are also nonprofits, so a different flavor of lists. Just going to read through some of these to give you, again, a taste, but encourage you to go over to Fast Company. I've got a link in the newsletter, of course, to these companies.
Climate Vault, so we've got carbon reduction and removal. Cemvita Factory, so this is Moji, the CEO member of our Climate Mastermind group here. So, using microbes to do things that sound impossible, more responsible mining as an example with supporters, including United Airlines and others. Some more companies here, Mash Makes, Dryad Networks, FutureFeed, Pixxel, P-I-X-X-E-L, Polestar, Twelve. Twelve, they are converting captured carbon dioxide into usable products. Think jet fuel or I think they list contact under auto parts, lenses, specialty chemicals and the like. Colossal, working on the Woolly Mammoth De-Extinction Project, just let that one sink in for a second.
Other honorable mentions on the list, Modern Mill, Air Company, Arcadia, cool company here. Their new Arc product. Twig, Energy Datametrics, The Urgent Company. I like that, a lot of urgency for sure we often don't feel enough in climate change. Sweep, CarbonOff, and I think we'll call it there. Again, long list, just a tease to get you there, but you can find those companies at Fast Company.
All right, the last article here from the newsletter and then we'll get over to this course coming up, which might be of interest to those of you looking to raise capital in the climate tech space. This last one I've titled it, can you jump 44 inches into the air and dunk a basketball? Obviously, well, I say obviously, probably not, not most folks can. I'm talking about, of course, the NBA basketball pro, Ja Morant. So, I don't watch much NBA, I don't watch much TV, but the teenage boys are into it. So great, let's do it. Certainly, grew up watching lots of basketball being from Kentucky and living in North Carolina would be a sacrilege not to.
So, I've got a video from YouTube of Ja Morant with a, as they say, massive dunk from Game 5 of the playoffs. And even if you're not into basketball, you got to watch this video. It's just a feat of nature. However, I'm not mentioning this video because I think all of you are into basketball. I'm mentioning it because, man, this person plays to their strengths. Now I'm taking a bit of artistic liberty here, but the point is, I think a lot of us are encouraged to try and improve our weaknesses versus to focus more on improving our strengths.
08:30
If you're a fan of Tim Ferriss as I am, his book, The 4-Hour Workweek, I think it's that one, he talks about, if you want to really grow your impact, grow your business, your revenue, et cetera, focus on your strengths, which is as if you're playing with multiplication in the world of math. In contrast, if you try to improve your weaknesses and become more well-rounded, that's positive in general, but it's more like you're working with addition, let's say. Clearly, multiplication is a much better way to grow faster than just simple addition.
I've got two resources I'm suggesting here to remind you of your strengths. Maybe you know, maybe you don't know. They are two books, but importantly, both books have a code where you can take an online test. Maybe it's 20 minutes, I forget, 30 minutes. I've done it maybe 10 years ago. One book is called StrengthsFinder 2.0. Again, StrengthsFinder 2.0 and I've got a link here in the newsletter. The other is called StandOut. All one word, StandOut. It's subtitled The Groundbreaking New Strengths Assessment from the Leader of the Strengths Revolution. Again, both those books are helpful because of the report that they spit out to you after you take these short tests.
So, StrengthsFinder, if I recall correctly, will tell you your top five strengths out of maybe 30 plus, this is going on distant memory for the total list of strengths, and then StandOut will pick out your top two, I believe.
I'll tell you, when I got the results years ago, it was like someone had been screening my emails and recording my phone calls. I mean, just so spot on to what I either knew or as I read it recognized were what I would consider my strengths. I just was refreshing myself looking through these two books where I had dog-eared the descriptions of the certain strengths that applied to me. And even, again, 10 years later resonates really strongly.
The ones in StandOut as an example were connector and creator and boy, do I love growing my network and matching folks across the network who have something important to talk about. Or the creator, I don't know, an addiction, I just can't stop creating new projects, peer groups, et cetera, newsletters, podcasts, online courses, whatever in this climate startup space. I would encourage you to go check those two books out. Again, StrengthsFinder 2.0 and StandOut, well worth 20 minutes.
All right, so that's the spoken version of our newsletter from May 11th. Let me go to the second topic here, which is this new course that I'm launching through maven.com. So, maven.com is a pretty cool platform because they've recognized that online learning is growing like crazy and there are these wonderful programs or platforms like Coursera, like Udemy, et cetera, that are reaching millions of students with experts around the world. I've done this too.
I had put a course on Coursera through Duke University, I don't know, seven, eight years ago called Renewable Energy and Green Building Entrepreneurship and somehow 62,000 folks have taken the course. Super inspiring, but the change here with the Maven courses is that they're live, not recorded, and they're cohort based. So, they're launched at a specific time with a limited number of seats. And so, what you get, you get peer to peer learning. You get a community forming for some period of time, which just really enhances the learning, the accountability.
12:20
For me, although I run these climate CEO and investor peer groups for growth stage executives where maybe they've raised 10 to $300 million or they're managing two to 400 or $500 million, that's really impactful and super rewarding for me. But boy, there are so many folks, maybe some of you listening, that are pre-seed or seed stage entrepreneurs. Or maybe you're trying to finance the first-of-a-kind project maybe in anaerobic digestion or green hydrogen or carbon capture. Or maybe you're a future entrepreneur, or maybe you're a career switcher who said, “Look, I've got 20, 30 years in,” fill in the blank, “finance, but I want to apply that to help early-stage entrepreneurs to get their climate solution-oriented startup to market.”
So, drum roll, the course I'm launching is called Fund Your Climate Tech Startup. It's being taught from June 1st to the 14th, so starting here in two weeks or so. The course will be capped at 25 entrepreneurs, so really small group. Again, it's live, it's cohort based, it's online. Let me just tell you a bit about the course.
First of all, why should you care? I think you already know this because you're listening to this podcast, but over a hundred billion dollars has been invested in climate tech startups since early 2020. That's an insane number. Something like 14% of all VC dollars are flowing into climate tech companies and again, that's just the VC story. Project finance, a whole ‘nother story as well. And so, my question is, well, gosh, maybe some of you listening should get a piece of that action to grow a good idea that you have, or a good startup that you have.
So, what will entrepreneurs get in taking the course? Well, hopefully an outcome will be a lot more confidence in a smarter two-year funding plan, whether that's through outside capital, whether it's through, again, private capital, whether it's government funding, revenue-based funding, project finance, non-profit, or philanthropic, catalytic capital perhaps.
I'm also going to give students a list of 500 climate investors including emails. This is across both project finance and corporate finance. The third item is a five-step process for raising capital, which I hope I've fine-tuned from many years in private equity and investment banking. I'll give you all four tools for assessing your competitive advantage. Look, every company's got competitors. If not, the investors won't believe you, even if competition is just business as usual.
Next, I'll teach, I suppose, a nine-step method for refining a one-page business plan. No one reads long business plans and oftentimes, the first place investors want to go is, what's the summary on one page? I'll talk through 10 startup funding mistakes to avoid, and I've made probably all of them and many, many more and again, a network of peers to support you.
So, some of the current students are entrepreneurs at a seed stage. Some have raised half a million, million bucks. For some, this is their second or third venture. Others are coming from a long career in say a corporate setting or a large global financial firm. So, lots of opportunity to soundboard your startup, your pitch, your funding strategy, which investors may be a good fit for you, et cetera.
16:00
Two more pieces here. This is the first cohort, so it's a bit of an experiment and because of that, the class size is super small, capped at 25 students, if we find the right ones. The other is that because it's the first cohort, well, frankly, it's a lot cheaper than cohort two is going to be when or if I launch it in fall two, sorry, in fall. My brain is in the MBA world where I also teach. So, again, super small class size, so lots of high touch and a cheaper tuition, if you will, tuition. I wouldn't quite call it tuition, investment in increasing the probability of raising capital for your startup.
The last thing I'll say about the course is that, how would you compare this to alternatives, right? Well, one alternative is you continue to raise capital on your own and that's fine. Plenty of folks are successful. It's also pretty hard, lots of dead ends and very time consuming. Another option is you come study this topic of climate tech startups and investors with me at Duke University where I teach a course on this topic, as well as ESG investing and energy finance and others.
Now, probably most of you, especially if you're an entrepreneur, you're not going to go back and get a graduate degree, nor make that kind of investment for two years. Cool. That's fine, but if you are, you know where to find those two schools. And lastly, you could pay an investment banker a 5% fee on a whatever, $5 million raise it’s a lot of money, a quarter million dollars. Now, probably at this stage, you're not going to get an investment banker, nor should you probably have any quote unquote, finders as well. I should note, I spent some time as an investment banker as well.
Anyway, look, if the course is for you, awesome. It's going to be a fun group of 25 to learn with. The classes, we're probably only going to meet maybe three times or so per week. Some class time, maybe 90 minutes or so, some live optional Q&A sessions where things can get pretty specific to your circumstance. Then there's some opportunity for the students to continue to talk to each other, learn from each other in a community platform set up through Maven.
So, if this is of any interest, I've made posts about it through LinkedIn, which is Christopher Wedding, through Twitter, which is D-R and Chris Wedding, as in Dr. Chris Wedding, or through my website, entrepreneursforimpact.com or at Maven, maven.com. Again, the course name, Fund Your Climate Tech Startup. I think the enrollment deadline is May 25th. Have to check me on that, but again, we start June 1st, so just two tight weeks here.
All right. We're going to call it right there. If you liked this more casual, informal conversation, if you will, format for the podcast, drop me a note on LinkedIn or on Twitter and we'll call it here.
For me, it's Saturday morning, kids are all asleep, cannot get this podcast recorded before they all wake up and we start seven hours of being in the sun for a soccer tournament. I hope so. All right, I hope you all enjoy the weekend. Peace.