The Entrepreneurs for Impact Podcast: Transcripts
#147:
Over 15 Years and 150 Investments in Climate Tech Companies — Dawn Lippert, the CEO of Elemental Excelerator
PODCAST INTRODUCTION
Chris Wedding:
My guest today is Dawn Lippert, the CEO of Elemental Excelerator, partner at Earthshot Ventures and Senior Climate Advisor at Emerson Collective. Elemental Excelerator advances solutions to climate change and deploys them in the communities that need them most. Each year, they fund 15 to 20 companies up to $1 million to improve systems across categories such as energy, mobility, water, agriculture and beyond. To date, they've invested in over 150 companies.
Earthshot Ventures is a VC firm, backing entrepreneurs making a dent in climate change, and it spun out of Elemental in 2021. And Emerson Collective was established and led by Laurene Powell Jobs, and is working to renew some of society's most calcified systems creating new possibilities for individuals, families, and communities. Certainly, climate fits in those buckets.
01:10
In this episode, we talked about how her work with sea turtle conservation in Puerto Rico and off-grid solar work in India led her to where she is today. Why it's so important that the 150 companies they have funded form close partnerships with local communities for project development.
The genesis of Earthshot Ventures had an experiment to combine top-quartile VC returns with nonprofit support. How their love of experimentation more broadly has enabled them to create eight or nine financial products to meet the various needs of climate founders, essentially filling gaps, basically. Speaking of gaps, they're focused a lot on FOAK finance that is First-of-a-Kind, as companies go from VC funding to project finance, that is a big valley to cross.
We covered their obsession with moving more capital into climate, especially because 50% of the solutions we need to meet our 2030 climate goals have not yet been commercialized. How to balance urgency with importance in our calendars and strategic business planning. Why joy is so essential in her work and company culture. What she looks for in founders that they back and a whole lot more.
Hope you enjoy it. Please give Dawn an Elemental Excelerator, a shout out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks.
PODCAST INTERVIEW
Chris Wedding:
Dawn Lippert, many roles here, many roles of impact. CEO of Elemental Excelerator, founding partner at Earthshot Ventures and Senior Climate Advisor at Emerson Collective. Welcome to the podcast.
Dawn Lippert:
Thanks so much for having me.
Chris Wedding:
So, I was joking that we've talked a lot before, phone, whatever, email, chat, et cetera, but never face-to-face. So, a great excuse of a podcast is to meet friends you haven't met in person. Here we are.
I'll start by saying, you've had this fun career path that started in many ways with doing sea turtle conservation in Vieques, Puerto Rico, or solar commercialization perhaps in rural parts of India, and now moving lots of capital and other resources to CEOs in the space. Maybe let's go back to the start here. Maybe tell a story or two about either your experience in Vieques or with Terry in India that now influences how you spend your time, Dawn.
Dawn Lippert:
Sure, I'd be happy to. I was fortunate enough when I was in college to have a couple of really transformative and meaningful experiences. One of them, as you mentioned, was working on sea turtle work in Vieques off of Puerto Rico and who doesn't want to work on the beaches, on animal conservation, it was a dream role.
01:32
When I was down there, I was designing an experiment to try and figure out, why were the sea turtles dying across Puerto Rico and what was happening to their eggs? Why was the population going down? I designed an experiment to try and figure out, was it humans, was it predators? I made them fake nests and set them up, set up lots of cameras, lots of data collection across the whole island around what was happening with the sea turtle nest.
In that summer, started collecting data, a number of things were going on, but about halfway through the summer, a huge storm came through and decimated the beaches in Vieques and decimated all of the nests that I was monitoring, as well as the fake ones that I set up as decoy nests. It really brought home to me the fact that no matter what we were doing in conservation, how we were solving these particular problems for particular species, climate change was essentially coming in to overwhelm so much of the conservation work or other kinds of work that could happen on a local scale.
And so, I really switched at that point, I finished my senior thesis, but I really switched my focus to working on climate change and working on renewable energy as one of the key drivers of climate change and transformation of our energy systems. That was what led me then to the next summer, like you said, working on energy technology commercialization.
I was drawn to the idea of working in India, where so much of the energy was coming from coal and other fossil fuels, to think specifically about, what were the barriers to implementing renewable energy technology across the country? And spent a lot of time actually with a different translator every week going to different parts of India and visiting places that had either biomass or solar technologies deployed in the field, but for the most part, they weren't working. And so, my job over the summer was to figure out why weren't they working? What had happened when we were taking technology from Europe or from the US or from China or other places and try and deploy it in the India context and how could we fix that?
Because ultimately the idea of deploying clearly technology around the world sounds really good, but in practice, so much of it is broken. So, I got very interested in, how do technologies actually respond to the communities where they are deployed? How are they actually integrated? Who takes care of them? How are people trained to fix them? All the really nitty-gritty details of deploying stuff on the ground and in many ways, those are a couple of experiences that really stick with me today.
Chris Wedding:
Well, that's one more, I guess, commonality in our inner worker trajectories is, we talked about before recording, myself doing similar work, not so much just with turtles, but in the rainforest of Costa Rica and Panama 25 years ago. Then more recently taking MBA students from UNC over to Ethiopia and India working on, how do you increase the reach of small solar systems to replace kerosene for both cost and safety and so forth? Which it's also interesting because you mentioned the communities where these technologies get implemented, we also see that it's much, much bigger than climate change when these communities hit the ground. In fact, arguably in places like India or Ethiopia off-grid, climate change is maybe not even part of the discussion, totally fine, so many other benefits to be had.
05:25
What's also interesting is that I think as listeners, if they haven't already been to the Elemental website, as they go to the website, they'll see again, this similar theme where you all are not just about supporting climate solutions, but also the places in which those get implemented. Whether it's the focus on underrepresented communities or those founding the companies or otherwise, I think right here this is a consistent theme in your work. It's not just tech, it's the people, it's the places where the tech gets implemented.
Dawn Lippert:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we like to say at Elemental, that technology brings half the solution and the community brings the other half. And for those of us who work in climate, I think we've all realized that climate is not just something that exists in the digital world. You can't just push out updates and people uptake it and it’s a simple transaction. It's really complex and takes lots of stakeholders.
I mean, we're trying to change, who's buying which buses? How do we get them to buy electric buses and then how do you get people to ride them? Then how do you fix them and then how do you implement solar and get it permitted and get the electricians in place? And so, a lot of physical things have to happen in the physical world and people are making a lot of decisions, billions of decisions about, what kind of stove they put in their home? What kind of heat pump or air conditioner they use? These are like billions of decisions happening in the real world on climate. And so, just thinking that, well, if we invent a better mousetrap or invent a better battery, we're going to solve climate, literally, that's about half the solution. The communities are saying, “This is what we want. This is what's going to work for us. This is going to provide lots of benefits beyond helping solve climate change and we want to fix it. We want to work here. We want to be part of it,” that's the other half.
Elemental is a nonprofit investor. We have this incredible privilege of investing for impact first and then also we want to see financial returns. We want to see companies grow because that's how we also deliver impact. But in that question of how do you invest for impact first, we've been able to be really creative and thoughtful about how to engage communities in this transition and to apply a lot of resources to figuring out that question and experimenting a ton on the way there.
Chris Wedding:
So maybe we'll back up to defining beyond the words you've mentioned so far, what is Elemental Excelerator?
Dawn Lippert:
Elemental is a nonprofit investor focused on scaling climate technologies with deep community impact. We've invested in about 150 companies so far, Elemental, investing in about 15 a year. So, we're one of the more active and prolific climate investors over the last 13 years. And we also spun out a fund, as you mentioned at the top called Earthshot Ventures, which invests with a very similar thesis, but for top-quartile returns to prove that you can take this similar thesis and be a top performing venture capital fund in the climate space.
Chris Wedding:
Maybe to say more about why you all felt the need to spin out Earthshot beyond the work of -- I mean, 150 companies receiving, I think I saw a note up to a million bucks per company, this is real impact, right? What else made Earthshot Ventures, the VC fund, necessary, let's say?
Dawn Lippert:
Yeah, our team is deeply experimental. Maybe I'll start by explaining one of the things that's really core to our work at Elemental, which is that, as we're deploying solutions, I mentioned that we invest in companies, but what makes Elemental different is that we actually fund projects. So, we're funding with many of those companies deal on the ground project with a focus on frontline communities. I'm happy to give some examples.
09:38
We are the first commercial flight with Ampaire, hybrid-electric airplane technology, kind of like a Prius flying through the sky to get their next level of certification and demonstrate how to do that with lower emissions. We funded some of the early source deployments to make water from just air and sunlight in really remote places. So, instead of having a solar panel, you have a water panel that makes water. We fund a lot of these projects on the ground and when we're doing this, one of the things that we're working really closely with companies on is, how do you engage the communities where these projects are going in? How do you do that in a way that creates business value and reduces risk for your deployment?
One of the models that we've worked on is how companies can actually pay community partners, just like they pay a general contractor or an electrician or anyone else that delivers value to the project. We think this is absolutely core. And when we provide funding from Elemental for a project, we often or almost always carve out dollars for a community partner. Then we help the company find the right community partner which is actually really tricky to do and then help figure out what kind of agreement to have with them. How do you negotiate that agreement? How do you contract a community partner? These two kinds of organizations, startups and communities, they speak really different languages usually, but they may share the same goals.
Like one startup wants to clean up wastewater, a community partner in the same area probably has the same goal. They want to save reefs, they want to clean up wastewater. So how do you have them actually work together for a really productive end is one of the things that we're really focused on.
And so, then coming from that place of working with community partners to build benefit, we wanted to experiment with a new kind of fund that yes, makes returns and does really well financially investing in this huge climate opportunity, which your listeners are no stranger to the enormous economic opportunity presented by solving climate. But we also wanted to show that there was a way to do venture funds that contributes back to the broader ecosystem.
11:50
So, one of the things we have for Earthshot Ventures is we share a portion of the carry or a portion of the profits from the venture funds with Elemental and with another sister nonprofit we have called Launch Alaska for Earthshot Ventures. That's been really important to us because we wanted to show that we could actually walk the talk, not just from the nonprofit perspective, but from a fund as well.
So, the imperative that you asked about of starting Earthshot Ventures is, number one, we have a lot of investors that wanted to work with us and benefit from what we've learned on the Elemental side to invest in companies. We wanted to bring new dollars into climate, that's a huge obsession of our team. Like, how do we catalyze more dollars into climate? So, from corporates, from institutional investors, from others and so Earthshot Ventures is another vehicle to do that. Then we wanted to really prove that you could do this in a different way in venture.
Chris Wedding:
Let's go back to how your dollars are used partly for forming these community partnerships. Maybe give us an example or two of what those community partners do for the project. Well, would a typical investor consider it core to the service they're providing or ancillary? And the ancillary part one could debate, is this core to the returns or is it not? Again, what's an example or two there?
Dawn Lippert:
Yeah, I'm happy to give an example. Sometimes they start as ancillary and then become poor and that's where the highest value is because ultimately if we're going to solve climate change, you cannot do it by solving the fringes of population or just people who can afford the latest and greatest technology. If we're going to really tackle climate change, it has to be for everyone, which means that companies have to access every single community and every single market.
A couple of examples, one is a company we worked with called Remix, which was later bought by Via. I think of it as like the SimCity of transportation planning. So, they take transportation planning from pencil and paper, make it all digital, make it so the agencies can collaborate, different geographies can collaborate and get a sense of, if we're going to put this highway here, what's going to be the impact on the community, if we're going to put this thing over there? And they really wanted to be able to score the projects they were planning and assessing based on equity, based on demographics.
What would be the impact of this project on any given community and on demographics of the area? And their customers, cities, were really interested in this information, but it hadn't made it to the top of their priority list in terms of the products they were going to build out. So, they came into Elemental, they said, “This is what we really want to do.” So, we specifically funded them to do that work and move it up the priority list for their product features.
14:45
Then what we did was brought in a community advisory group, as well as a community partner. In this case, it was Transform Mobility, the East Bay, and a whole set of community advisors to essentially be part of their designing sprint. To help say, what would an equity score look like? The challenge is, a startup on its own would have a really hard time having the credibility to say, “This is an equity score. We think this is fair.” And the community groups on their own wouldn't necessarily have the access to the software to be able to scale their vision of what equity would mean in mobility. But by working together on design sprints, really for the first time for either organization to do it in this way, we were able to come up with an equity approach that felt really credible and vetted. Remix and then now Via was able to deploy and roll out across hundreds of cities that were their customers.
So, it's this marriage of taking the community-based organization’s wisdom and experience and trust in a community, and then being able to scale that with a tech company in a way that otherwise it couldn't scale. We see this as the magic of being able to bring community-based organizations together with tech companies.
Chris Wedding:
That's a great tangible example. I'm thinking of a similar one back when I worked in private equity. We were real estate private equity, often redeveloping brownfields, so polluted real estate and we were the capital with some strong opinions. But we worked with on the ground real estate developers and often the developers thought, “Well, look, we need to get whatever, re-entitlements, zoning permits, et cetera, from the city,” but really, other than that, we don't have stakeholders to whose attention would pay a great deal of seriousness or I don't know, rigor, let's say.
But in our projects, we thought, “Well, if we engage some of these community groups early on, it may slow the development process down a little bit.” But what it likely means is they're supporters and so it's unlikely that whatever, four years into development, we have strong opposition from neighbors, which actually can kill a project. It looked like an add-on. It looked like just social impact in a positive way, but it was good business strategy usually as well.
Dawn Lippert:
That's exactly right. I mean, I live in Hawaii, I started Elemental in Hawaii. This is exactly what I've learned being on the ground in Hawaii is really the only way to do a project is with community buy-in from the beginning. Otherwise, like you said, you may get going, but if there're not concrete benefits, at some point you'll hit that pushback. That's way more costly, it creates much more friction in the community, and ultimately gets to a not ideal result as well. I mean, being in Hawaii and my mentors and teachers in Hawaii have been the greatest source of wisdom in teaching in this.
Early on when we started doing this, more than 10 years ago, it was new and investors thought, “Okay, this does feel a little bit ancillary.” Founders, I would say, for the most part, really wanted to be involved in the communities where they're deploying, because they experience this firsthand. They experience what it feels like to be welcomed into, invited into community, and they experience what it's like to have the opposite. So, I think founders understand this.
18:29
Then what's happened in the last year that's been fascinating is all of a sudden, the largest funder, and in some ways almost LP in our space, the government has said out of Inflation Reduction Act, now this is an imperative. You actually have to have apprentice programs, you have to partner with communities, you have to have community benefit plans. And all of a sudden, companies that were doing this because they wanted to, doing it because they found some business value and investors who are being brought along in the process, all of a sudden have woken up and said, “This is absolutely critical to going after huge amounts of dollars that are now available.” So, I think it's changed from something that was nice to have and that some people really understood, to now being an imperative to participate in IRA and other large programs.
Chris Wedding:
Which maybe is an example of why let's say sustainable business strategies can be good business, bigger picture is that you're doing what's not required by law right now, but you're maybe predicting, look, these things could be required, could be mandated later. And that now we're kind of hedging that risk of being unprepared either for risk regulation, price on carbon, et cetera, or opportunity to benefit from. So, you're preparing for the future now or early.
Dawn Lippert:
That's right. I mean, living in a participatory democracy, I think what we will continue to see is an emphasis on stakeholders finding their power in different ways. And for these projects that again, are going into communities, have to really have a social license to operate. Thinking about that strategically, thinking a couple of steps ahead of where you have to be is really a strong business strategy.
Chris Wedding:
So, let's go back, you mentioned that many of your dollars may be go into projects, infrastructure, steel in the ground, et cetera. So, there's a term that maybe many listeners are familiar with, FOAK financing, First-of-a-Kind financing, or maybe another term could be blended finance, let's say.
Maybe talk more broadly about the gap that I think we both see in the space around this kind of financing, First-of-a-Kind financing, going from great, you've got a lot of venture funding, the technology's working, but now you got to build a project, which is super different in so many ways. Maybe just be more broadly to how you're trying to fill that gap with capital or with other tools, what you see coming around FOAK financing, Dawn.
Dawn Lippert:
Yes. This is a huge focus for us. When we look at our portfolio, we continue to see pretty strong equity investment in the portfolio, both in the early stages and the later stages. Just to put some numbers on it, last year, we surveyed the portfolio. At the early stages, we asked folks, “What are you planning to raise?” and then we asked them how that went. And last year, we saw that at the earliest stages, companies actually raised about 150 million more than they were planning to raise. So, we still continue to see good venture activity, good early-stage activity, grant funding from government in the earlier stages and that's pre-pilot or right around the first pilot.
Then at the latest stages where companies already are market leaders, where there's technology maturity, we've been doing this for 13 years at Elemental, so we have a number of companies that are public companies or large private companies and are really market leaders in their space. On that end of the spectrum, we saw them right on plan. They said, “This is what we need to raise,” and that's how much they raised collectively. So, those two sides are on plan.
Where the huge gap was, was right in the middle. So, it's between the first of a kind at scale commercial project to even fifth or 10th of a kind, we saw a 400-million-dollar gap so a really significant gap. And this is just again, across a subset of the portfolio companies, but it's what we see across the entire industry, is that there's a gap here because more capital is needed than necessarily in the early stages, but the ideal capital to have here is not dilutive. It's not equity. It's not diluting the founders and all the team members and all the early-stage investors. It's working capital, it's product finance, it's asset finance. It's other kinds of even development loans for companies, very difficult to get this kind of financing for early-stage climate companies. So, this is something that Elemental’s really been leaning into. We've been pretty creatively thinking about products that we can provide at Elemental on the nonprofit side.
The way Elemental works is that we bring in grants, so it's all grant capital. It's philanthropic, it's from the Navy, it's from corporates, it's all grants that come into Elemental, it's 501(c)(3). Then we take those grants and we turn them into different kinds of financial products. We've done about eight or nine so far at Elemental. We're very creative about this. Two companies to figure out how to plug the next gap that we see in the market and then crowd in other funders and bring in other funders.
23:59
So, once we do dollars to help de-risk a project as well as wraparound services so we provide help with structuring the project. We provide project finance help. We provide sales and commercialization help. We provide community partner help with all different kinds of services to also help make those projects better and de-risk them and the dollar. So, once we provide the dollars and the services, our goal then is to crowd in these other funders from across the spectrum. We're working on a number of things right now around this.
We've announced a series of projects this summer that are taking the next step in First-of-a-Kind financing and providing development loans to our companies to de-risk some of these projects. But this continues to be a huge gap and I think it is absolutely critical to solve this. One reason it is so important to solve this is because we know that half the technologies we need to meet our 2030 de-carbonization goals are not yet widely available commercially.
These are not big technology breakthroughs in the most part that I'm talking about. A lot of it is just around a business model innovation that makes something much easier to do or much cheaper or drives down costs for someone. There's an enormous amount that we can do on financing to help companies go faster that have really strong technology and just need different financial tools to get there.
Chris Wedding:
That's a really helpful explanation. On the innovation you're doing around new products for First-of-a-Kind financing, to what degree are you or do you plan to share, I don't know, blueprints, tips and tools, et cetera from your learnings with your own capital?
Dawn Lippert:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, that's the whole game for us. As a nonprofit investor, if we were learning things and keeping them within our walls, we would not be successful. We think a lot about how we test things and experiment with them, and then how we share them more broadly with the market. So, every single tool and learning we have, we test them. When we're ready, we share it externally, that's our thesis. And I would say our approach has been that, again, we're lucky to be in a space where we think more is more. It's really not about competitors and who's competing. It's actually about how we can work together to do much more, faster.
26:35
We have an enormous mountain to climb here on climate and our competition is fossil fuels. It is not anybody working on anything related to climate. It's about how do we be cheaper, easier, better than fossil fuels in every market and every place on the planet as quickly as possible.
Chris Wedding:
I think listeners will appreciate that was a setup because of course, part of you all’s mission is to share models, tips and tools with these new financial products that you're learning about. Let's see. I know you all finance across a number of sectors in climate. Maybe if you could speak to areas that you think are sufficiently funded relative to other sectors. I mean, no sector has enough funding. Or said differently, where are sectors that need more funding or need more business model innovation to reach those 2030 goals per your earlier comment there, Dawn?
Dawn Lippert:
I think a lot of sectors can benefit from additional investment. A couple of the areas that we're really interested in right now are around virtual power plants. How do we increase participation in markets from regular people? One of our investments on the elemental side is OhmConnect, which is a company that's really active in California and also in other markets. And enables people to benefit from the clean energy transition directly.
So, at peak times of the day, like in the evening, instead of turning on a gas or other dirty power plants, what if people turned down their use, turned down their thermostat and turned off their devices? Then by extension, they become one of the biggest power plants in California and they get paid for that service. So, now instead of paying for gas to come from Europe or paying for gas from the US, you essentially are paying regular people to participate in the energy transition.
There's elements like this where we think they're both really good for decarbonization and really strong for saving costs for regular people. It's particularly meaningful to people in disadvantaged communities, people who live in multifamily households have really high electric bills. So, there's a lot of opportunities like this that we think are a win-win around decarbonization, whether it's new devices or virtual power plants or other solutions like this and I think those need significantly more financing.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, when I first learned about VPPs and worked with companies in this space years ago, it seems so exciting and so possible, yet it's still hard to do, right? This is why we're still talking about commercializing and scaling VPPs. Okay, so there are a lot of entrepreneurs certainly listening to this. I know that you will receive, I'm guessing, hundreds of applicants each year. You fund 15. Aside from, yes, your tech is awesome, yes, you have some traction and so forth, comment more on what you look for in a founder.
Dawn Lippert:
One of the things that's really important to us across each portfolio is the sense of community across the portfolio. One of the things we did very early on when I first started Elemental was, we would convene people for essentially a kickoff to joining our portfolio. We want them to understand the values. We want them to understand Hawaii and our roots, just like we train companies to understand history and context of every community they go into so the history and context of how Elemental developed in Hawaii. So, we'd bring companies to Hawaii and originally, we would bring in amazing investors and trainers and different people to work with and talk with companies. What we realized over time was that entrepreneurs are the best teachers for themselves and you know this really well.
30:43
An entrepreneur who's just went through something a month earlier or six months earlier that you're going through now is by far a better resource than someone who might've gone through that 10 years ago because this market is changing very quickly. The investors are changing, the dynamics are changing, and they're really the most effective resource for each other. So, we have a really sticky community.
We still have a CEO and Leadership Summit every year. We do them in Hawaii. We have very high attendance from across the portfolio, whether a company has exited or is at seed stage, they come to our CEO and Leadership Summit. And so, what we're looking for in founders is the understanding that we want to develop a real positive sum community, where people are giving, they're vulnerable with each other, they're really open, they're sharing what's worked, they're sharing where they made mistakes. And so, that's one of the things that we look for, really, above all.
We had a CEO and Leadership Summit many years ago, where we were talking about sales strategy and fundraising and swapping intel investor, and then one of the founders led a session on founder depression and disappointment and how to make it through. It was one of our best attended sessions and I always spent a lot of time in each CEO Summit on the emotional side of being a founder, the relationship side of being a founder, and being a leader or being a founder and being a parent, all these things that people are really dealing with in real time. We want people who are going to come to the table with something to give and share within the community.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I love all that for obvious reasons, but in the CEO peer groups that we run, we see the same thing. That, yes, I'll bring in great guest speakers, but then it's like, wait a sec, we have amazing guest speakers who are you all, the CEO members, who wants to volunteer to share, right? And so, members, recently it's like, well, how do you build a feedback culture, or how are you more aware of your cognitive bias? And here's why mine got in the way with a recent leadership challenge. You're right, the leadership is among the group already. Let's switch, Dawn. We could talk forever in a very excited fashion about Elemental, Earthshot or Emerson, but let's switch from those groups to Dawn. So, what advice might you give your younger self to be happier and more effective on this journey?
Dawn Lippert:
It's a really good question. One of the challenges of working in climate is that this challenge is so urgent. Every social justice challenge or large pressing challenge of the day is important. The difference with climate is that we are so working against the clock and so it feels really urgent. I think those of us who work on this and have worked on this for a long time should get up every morning feeling that sense of urgency.
34:05
What I've learned over time is, some things require a really high touch urgent response and some things don't. So, I think really moving with urgency toward the right thing is something that's taken a long time to calibrate. That actually not everything is urgent. If everything is urgent, it's difficult to really spend time on the right things. Building a team that shared that sense of both urgency and filtering what is most urgent when is one of the things that I would talk to my younger self about. How do we really filter that effectively and build a culture where, not only me, but our entire team is thinking about this in a way that drives the highest impact?
One of my mentors, my mentor that brought me to Hawaii, his name is Maurice Kaya, he was really in many ways, the grandfather of renewable energy policy in Hawaii. He brokered the first renewable portfolio standard back in the day. He was an incredible leader here and did a lot of unpopular things, but was well loved and respected. Early on and must have been over 10 years ago, he had me do something for him and I did it really quickly and turned it back around to him. He said something that I will never forget and I use all the time, which is that, if you take the extra time to really think through what it is you're trying to achieve with this, it'll go faster in the end. So, take the extra time, socialize it with a friend, get feedback from someone you trust. You never regret taking that extra beat and that extra moment. I've really spent a long time trying to learn how to balance urgency with quality and doing the right things.
Chris Wedding:
I think for listeners who want to go the next level, there's a great version of the first part of what you talked about called the Eisenhower Matrix. So, a great two by two, which you see I'm sure passed along to your CEOs. One access is urgency and the other is importance and you have these four boxes. So, easy for folks to look up online. The last part of what you said sounds like the phrase, which I'll get wrong, but a portion of it is go slow to go fast, which sounds awful to startup CEOs who love to be impatient, they have to be impatient. There is urgency. How about on a more daily basis, Dawn, or perhaps it's monthly, what are some habits or routines in a detailed way here that keep you healthy, sane and focused building what you're building?
Dawn Lippert:
So, one of our key values at Elemental is joyful work. I try to really focus on what brings me joy within work. I don't know if this is a routine, but the most key thing for me in giving me a ton of energy at work is working with people who I enjoy and also spending time with our CEOs. As our work has grown across both the organization and the venture fund, you naturally can get pulled away from spending time with CEOs. So, I have that as one of my OKRs every quarter is how many CEOs I'm spending quality time with and then I really focus on making sure I do that. It ensures that I am learning really at the core all the time, but also that I am doing the part of the job that I really enjoy, which is spending time with CEOs.
Then day-to-day, one of my things I love is walking meetings. I love spending time, whether it's members of our board, either hiking or walking . Wherever I am I try to find a place I haven't been and getting outside, getting exercise while meeting and while working on work things. It usually goes really well. There's also times when we've gotten too carried away. I remember one time Melissa, our Chief Growth Officer and I were in a meeting on Sand Hill and we thought, “Well, great, we'll just walk back to Palo Alto and get our steps in.” We ended up a little sweaty back where we were, so we can get carried away too, but I try and live my life in a super integrated way. Like bring my kids in to work whenever I can, build exercise into my work. It's all integrated to me and that gives me a lot of energy.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I'm smiling for all sorts of reasons. I too have been on long walks while talking for business and come back, especially in the southeast here in North Carolina, very unpleasant to sit next to after that meeting for sure or the kids at work. Luckily, our 17-year-old son, his girlfriend is really into climate change and said, “Hey, can I come sit in on one of your dad's courses at Duke?” And so, the next thing I know, both are in this ESG investing course and I thought, “Amazing. My son is at work. He can have a little help getting here to work,” but anyway, he's at work nonetheless.
Dawn Lippert:
Exactly. Everyone does this differently, especially being a working parent, we do it differently. My kids are little, they're four and one, but my daughter can spot every electric car and she gets super energized whenever she spots solar panels and that gives me a lot of joy too. So, I'm excited to see where that goes. Eventually, I'm sure she'll be in your course too.
Chris Wedding:
Absolutely. When our kids were that age, when they were building Legos and I would look at a spaceship they built, I was like, “What's this right here, this kind of gray rectangle?” They're like, “Dad, that's the solar panel.” I was like, “Okay, it's working. The brainwashing is working.” How about for the second to last question, Dawn, tell us some books or podcasts, other tools, maybe it's quotes that keep you, again, inspired, or opening your mindset or toolkit to be effective in what you're doing.
Dawn Lippert:
I mean, just on the book side, a couple ones that we use a lot here and I think are useful for people who've been in climate and people new to it are books like Speed & Scale. We still use Business Model Canvas a lot, I would say with companies. That book has been evergreen in terms of you keep going back to it and learn new things about customers and about building a business over time. I've been really encouraged by some of the new climate journalism that is coming out, like Heatmap Daily. I'm a big follower of Grist and these other publications, and I learn a lot from some of those folks. So, if you folks haven't found those yet, they're really strong resources.
41:47
Then more on the quote side or something that I use every day, one of our core values at Elemental is kuleana. Interestingly, it's a Hawaiian word and it means the privilege and responsibility. It's a really important word for the two sides of the coin that we experience of the privilege of working on this challenge, the privilege of having access to incredible networks and incredible people working with us. Also, the responsibility to continue to use that for good and to push in ways that can be scary and to make sure you're not held back by fear. So, that's how I really interpret kuleana.
Then last year we had a company come in to Elemental where the founder speaks Swahili. He said there's actually a really similar word, it sounds basically the same and means the same thing in Swahili. So, think about that, all the way from Hawaii and Polynesia all the way to Africa, the same concept and basically the same word and I think we could all do well to be guided by that sense of responsibility.
Chris Wedding:
I like that. I don't know how to spell it, but I'll look it up for the show notes. The privilege piece, or maybe it's both, I think there's a quote that says something like, to those to whom much is given, much is expected in return, which feels very similar and guides a lot of what I hope to do or instill in our kids. It's like, “Hey kiddos, you're living a pretty charm life, which means you have a lot of responsibility to change the world for better as you get older.” Dawn, I don't want to end the podcast, but I think our schedules demand it. What's a final call to action, whether it's the broader climate tech community, whether it's investors, founders? What words do you want to leave listeners with today?
Dawn Lippert:
The one thing that I've been thinking a lot about is, what is our responsibility or our opportunity to create more pathways for people into solving for climate? The one thing that just amazes me every day is the number of people coming from tech, but also from politics, from any other thing they know something about and then want to contribute to climate, from design, from communications, from writing, everywhere.
44:27
So, at Elemental, we've started something called EDCT, the Empowering, Diverse Climate Talent, which is an internship and fellowship program. It is way oversubscribed. We have so many more talented young people and interns and youth than we could ever place in portfolio companies and other companies that have joined EDCT. We've expanded EDCT a huge amount. It has grown four times in the last year or two. And so, we have more than 50 employers that participated this summer and placed more than 75 interns. But I think whether it's participating through EDCT, if you have a company or are finding ways within your sphere to help bring people into the climate, if we all did a little bit more in that way and help people find a role in a way they can contribute; we would make enormous progress.
We actually don't really need every single person doing something on climate to solve this, but we need a whole lot more than we have now. And so, I've been thinking a lot about how to create more pathways and I would love to challenge listeners to create them themselves and to share ways to do that because I think we could all do a little more here.
Chris Wedding:
That’s well said and I think the other part of that is your job wouldn't need to have the word climate in front of it in order for you to be working on climate. Not every job usually, but many jobs can have a climate lens to it and then you were doing your part to tackle this big challenge.
Dawn Lippert:
Yeah, climate is absolutely everywhere in our economy. It's everywhere in our world. It touches everything we're working on and we can all be part of solving it.
Chris Wedding:
Well, listen, it's been fun to see Elemental expand obviously, the companies that you will support each year plus the other manifestations, such as Earthshot Ventures. I’m excited to see you all prove that model out, top-quartile returns while sharing the carry with I guess two sister nonprofits here as part of the family. Anyway, I’m rooting for your success, Dawn. Keep up the great work.
Dawn Lippert:
Likewise. Great to talking to you.
ABOUT OUR PODCAST
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Learn about our guests’ career paths, founder stories, business strategies, investment criteria, growth challenges, hard-earned wisdom, productivity habits, life hacks, favorite books, and lots more.
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Dr. Chris Wedding is a 4x founder, 4x Board member, climate CEO peer group leader and coach, Duke & UNC professor, ex-private equity investor, ex-investment banker, podcast host, newsletter author, occasional monk, Japanophile, ax throwing champ, father of three, and super humble guy (as evidenced by this long bio). 😃
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