Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#105:
New “Climate Finance Tracker”, To all the carbon tech haters, 15 money-winning climate tech pitch decks
Chris Wedding:
Howdy folks, it is Chris Wedding here, solo show today and if you hear a bit of a nasally tone to my voice, you're correct. That is in great thanks to my three children who love to bring home lots of goodies that are microscopic from school. Anyway, happy Thanksgiving. Hopefully everyone's finding time to spend time with family, friends, and rest a little bit, recharge for a powerful end to the year. I'm going to walk through some of my musings, reflections, et cetera, research curation, pick your term from this month that you might've seen or hopefully we'll see through LinkedIn or the Substack newsletter.
The first is a pretty cool “Climate Finance Tracker,” in quotes. So, it's this super visual tool that tracks more than $200 billion going to more than 6,000 companies and organizations creating climate solutions. In the words of the creators, you can get the big picture, so spot hot areas for climate investments, think emerging opportunities, and you can visualize the ecosystem of climate-related organizations and ventures that are making these bets. You can grow your network, finding more founders, funders, and partners, and then bridge the gaps. Try to find white spaces where your capital can make the biggest difference to tackling climate change.
Some of the groups behind this include Vibrant Data Labs in partnership with Candid, Cisco Foundation, Crunchbase, Hopper-Dean Foundation, ImpactAlpha, One Earth, primer.ai and SidePorch with lots of data from Crunchbase, Candid and LinkedIn. Again, Climate Finance Tracker, if you search that term with Vibrant Data Labs, let's say, or ImpactAlpha or Entrepreneurs for Impact, you can play around with that. Pretty cool stuff.
Another one is from Chris Sacca. In this intro here, “The wham-bam billionaire investor Chris Sacca.” The title to this says, “To all the carbon tech haters,” and if this were a YouTube recording, you would see that I'm supporting a winter flannel shirt, not necessarily in honor of Chris Sacca's style, but look, it works for this portion. And I quote, this is again, his response to the carbon tech, carbon capture, et cetera, haters and doubters out there. So, in the voice of Chris Sacca, I'm sure less nasally than this is right now, “I love the naysayers and I'm kind of like, ‘All right, stand back and watch.’ I'm at this point where I kind of don't give a shit, either you're helping or get the fuck out of the way.” By the way, his words, not mine. I would never drop the F bomb except on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturday, Sundays.
Anyway, back to Chris Sacca, “Bless anybody who says that shit. They just haven't been in the lab. They haven't seen what's happening and they're literally betting against what we're seeing as a rate of change in technology that is steeper than ever before. It's compute power. I mean the amount of compute power that a team of three scientists now has available for them would have cost half a million dollars just eight years ago. So, now in a lot of our industries, experiments that used to take one to two years to design, to execute, and digest can be done hundreds of times per week. It's literally that steep a curve.” If you want more of that inspirational, in-your-face from Chris Sacca, I love him, there's a good TechCrunch video. I think they did this at the SOSV Climate Tech Summit, maybe in October or so, but free to watch. We're going to diverge from climate startups and finance for a second, then we're going to come back to it.
04:16
But one of these diversions is a reference to a new tablet, quote unquote, “to kill your pen and paper.” So, during a recent climate CEO retreat that we held through Entrepreneurs for Impact at a beautiful spot in Nashville, North Carolina, one of the members that pulled out this tablet and wasn't intending to sell it to others, but within 15 minutes, one other member had purchased it on the spot and now several other members, including myself, have one of these devices.
It's called reMarkable. The reMarkable tablet. Just Google it. Unfortunately, no sweet deals for Black Friday, a tiny deal for Black Friday, but no sweet deals there. Basically, it’s, think about an iPad that comes with a pen that feels like writing on paper. It can convert handwritten notes into text unless your writing is as shitty as mine is. You can send notes to certain folders and so forth in say Google Drive or otherwise to keep things organized. You can upload templates, think PDF templates for reviews or interviews, et cetera, and fill them in with handwriting. This thing's got two weeks of battery life. Anyway, something cool to maybe boost your productivity as 2023 comes upon us.
One more story, not about climate tech startups and finance, but maybe about being a better manager, friend, parent, et cetera. The title is, “We have two ears and one mouth for a reason.” I go on, “As great leaders understand, we should seek to listen more instead of being heard,” and I joked that they may have forgotten to include that prior line in the famous prayer of St. Francis, which I'll read here in a second.
If you want to be a better listener, as all leaders should, there’s a great blog I linked from the John Maxwell team. John Maxwell, a name you all might know, one of the greatest, I guess, leadership communicators, coaches, authors, speakers, et cetera, out there. If it sounds like a super easy and obvious skill, that is being a better listener, and your calendar is just too full to practice it more, well, that means you really, really need to read that post because it may mean you need to pay more attention to that. We all do. Look, listening is an acquired skill. It's an active practice for sure.
I'm going to read this. It's called the prayer of St. Francis. If you're not a praying type, don't worry about it. I'm not going to ask you to get on your knees, though not a bad thing. It's really a reflection on, I suppose thinking of others needs versus ours primarily. Oh, by the way, that can be a great thing for you as a leader as well.
Anyway, it goes on, “Make me an instrument of peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, in parentheses, let me sow faith; where there is despair, hope.” By the way, you may be reflecting if you're a founder, a CEO type or a board member, how this applies to you as well. “Where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is dying that we are born to eternal,” aka, this is my term, super sweet life. Anyway, maybe encouraging us all to think more about our teams, their needs, their fears, et cetera, versus our own. Again, by the way, great thing for our teams to move forward. Let's move back to the climate tech front.
08:15
So, here's one that's right in my lap, if you will. I was able to co-launch a new anti-GHG 501(c)(3). So, NGO in the States, in the US called Terraset, T-E-R-R-A-S-E-T. As I go on here in the newsletter, “A perfect marriage, high permanence carbon removal plucks plus tax deductible donations.” We're focused on essentially AMCs, so Advanced Market Commitments, something that we've seen work in the vaccine community, that is to create demand for things where there is not enough clear demand. Such that the good that is desired can be produced, maybe in this case, project financed.
So, the background here, you all are listeners to this podcast, so you get it. We have to suck more GHGs out of the sky for centuries and there's a 2021 study in the journal Nature Climate Change. It notes that carbon pollution already in the air is expected to increase global temperatures to about 2.3 degrees Celsius, almost four degrees Fahrenheit. This phenomenon is called committed warning and it should scare, I think a lot of us. That the implication there is we're already past our goal.
In our launch blog through Terraset, a few more words on the why behind what we're doing, we need to throw everything at climate. Policy, corporate action, venture capital, philanthropy, we need it all. Climate philanthropy has attracted more attention in capital lately, which is great, but less than 2% of total giving in philanthropy goes to climate and it can do so much more with the trillions there in philanthropy.
Co-founder here, Alex Roetter, GP, General Partner at Moxxie Ventures, so a seed stage investor in things like AI or health and certainly climate tech as well and Erzsi Sousa, who is our interim director. Some of our early donors include Tim Ferriss and Segment Co-founder, Calvin French-Owen. Initial donor recipients include carbon removal companies like Heirloom and Charm.
Also, a shout-out to some rock star Duke University and Stanford University students, Emily Zhao, Nick Valby, Kevin Beel, Saif Ali Nasir, Griffin Rodkey Clark, and hopefully others. If you have interest in carbon removal, CDRs or AMCs, if you're maybe a family office, a foundation and you want to support the growth of this sector, look us up online at terrasetclimate.org where you'll find ways to volunteer or donate and we're looking forward to hearing from you. All right. Moving on.
I've got a link to the slide decks for 15 companies in climate tech that have raised millions of bucks. And so, if you're in the process of creating your first or maybe your 17th deck to raise capital, here are companies in sectors you care about that have worked, obviously a pitch deck alone will not raise the capital, but ways to tell a better story. Again, similar to a few topics ago, we're going to go away from climate into the productivity or a life better lived section of the newsletter for a second here.
The question is, are you becoming better or bitter? And I go on, “Life can be a bitch or a blessing and given humanity's negativity bias, it's often easy to focus on the former. Hopefully this pose can be like a fire alarm at 2 o'clock in the morning. Time to clean the metaphorical gunk out of our eyes, stumble outside of your hotel,” hang with me for a second, “and instead of moaning about the late hour, hug somebody nearby, thankful that it was just a drunk 21-year-old's prank.” By the way, yes, this happened to us in Denver during our summer vacation. We didn't immediately choose gratitude, but ultimately that was the choice.
More literally that is, when life serves us up the dish of the day, maybe we could ask, what can I learn instead of what did I lose, by the way, talking to myself here as well. One more, and then we're switching back to climate tech, be aware of think washing. So, you've heard of greenwashing, SDG washing, impact washing, lots of other washing. None of them are a good thing. Sink washing, by the way, that is like paralysis by analysis.
13:15
So, there's this great Wired article, which I linked to. It says, “Think washing keeps people from taking action in times of crisis. When it comes to issues like climate change, they go on too many, let the perfect become the enemy of the good while the world burns.” I've got two excerpts I think that are important from the article. One just defining what think-washing is. “It's a combination of willful ignorance of existing knowledge, policy perfectionism and an all-or-nothing position on the role of technology in society. It is not a helpful contribution to the discourse or an essential injection of skepticism. It's a way of obscuring the basic fact that complicated intellectual questions can often be answered, at least in part, by straightforward moral imperatives and a pragmatic approach to the future.” All right. Sobering for sure.
So, what do we do about it? The article goes on, “It’s so hard to distinguish from virtues like healthy skepticism and due diligence. The answer lies in techno pragmatism, emerging of the philosophy of pragmatism, which states that the reason we think is not merely to describe, but ultimately to predict, test and act with the churn of technological innovation. Given that risks are inherent, but action is essential, the world would benefit from carefully studying new technologies in small trials or specific communities instead of needing every new device to prove itself on a global scale.”
Look, it's the power of pilots and betas and all the rest, but we've got to do all those things and fail and iterate much faster given the clock that ticks latter and latter. All right, let's do two more here and then we'll call it a day, I believe. The first is, it's a headline which says, “Pitch decks helped me raise $1 billion.” All right. Well, not me exactly. I'm the messenger for Brett Adcock, Founder at Figure, another company Archer, which had a 2.7-billion-dollar IPO, and Vettery, V-E-T-T-E-R-Y, with a 100-million-dollar exit.
In 15 ridiculously succinct tweets via LinkedIn, he says, “Look, basically steal my pitch deck framework for free.” So, I've got two clippings here in the newsletter. I'll read these as teasers, but I've got a link, or you can just search them up from the newsletter on what these 15 tweets look like.
One is, “Declare an enemy. You want to create common ground immediately in a pitch. Don't make it your company versus the investors. Instead, make it all of us versus the problem. Put the investors on your side ASAP. For example, the common enemy for Tesla is fossil fuels.” Pretty good advice. I think too often we go into meetings with investors thinking about terms and valuation and all the rest versus we're in this together.
The next one I excerpted was, “Talk long-term. Investors need to know that this is a 10-year,” he says minimum, “10-year project for you and your team. Commit by showing your massive plans broken down by milestones. So, for example, in year one, we accomplish X, year five we will accomplish Y, et cetera.” I think that is great advice to think long-term. I think the flip side of that is investors and funds that are managed like a VC fund, whatever, private equity fund, they need to see a path to liquidity, ideally sooner than 10 years given the way they're closing the funds. Yes, for sure more focus on thinking long-term.
17:12
All right, last one here, “$53 million for female founders in climate tech. Did you know that 49% of all businesses started in the US each year are led by women, but 2% of all venture funding goes to women-led ventures?” Yikes. “We need a solution that's as easy as a package being delivered to your front door.” Oh yeah, you know what name I'm going to mention. “Amazon has recently committed 53 million bucks within their Climate Pledge Fund to focus on the following. Female entrepreneurs doing work in transportation and logistics, energy generation, storage and utilization, manufacturing and materials, circular economy and food and ag.” Basically, any sector you can imagine, I think within climate tech. The capital is also going to fund some climate tech startup incubators and accelerators, such as our friends at Greentown Labs and Elemental Excelerator who already do and can do, will do more to support female founders.
So, how big is Amazon's Climate Pledge Fund? 2 billion bucks last I checked. How many women led companies have they backed in their first 20 investments? I think zero. This is based on a summary out of an excellent GreenBiz article by Heather Clancy, which does a deeper dive on gender equity plus climate tech. So, check that one out.
Maybe not quite the time to celebrate. However, the following saying is relevant, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is, you've heard it, right now. So, a baby step, but progress nonetheless.
All right, we're going to call it there. If you enjoyed any of this, come check out more goodies on the newsletter and Substack, Entrepreneurs for Impact or on LinkedIn, Christopher Wedding, the long formal name. Anyway, hey, peace you-all, talk to you next week.