10 years on, that’s all changed. For the first time, the science behind cell cultivation has progressed to the point where mass production and consumption of meat from cultivated cells is possible at a price point that’s on par with traditionally farmed meat.

An Israel-based biotechnology company Pluri, is at the heart of this transformation. In 2022, Pluri established a joint venture with Tnuva, Israel’s largest food producer, Ever After Foods, to utilize Pluri’s technology to create a pathway to bringing cultivated meat to the consumer market.

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In tough-to-disrupt industries, going for size and scale can sometimes be the only way to truly rewrite norms and shake up supply chains that are at odds with people and planet.

This was the realisation that green techpreneur Boris Wullner Garces, CEO at Green Coffee Company (GCC) – Colombia’s largest producer of Arabica coffee – came to in 2021 when he set out on a scale up journey: “value share is very important for us: everything we do, we are not only doing for us as a company, we are also doing it for the coffee growers. We’re getting away from intermediaries and going directly to the consumer so we can pay a better price to farmers. But to do this, you have to have scale.”

Despite the coffee sector acting on sustainability initiatives, commercial practices still often exploit farmers with only 10% of coffee’s total value staying in the countries of origin. The coffee market is largely steeped in a power imbalance where coffee farmers are disempowered by intermediaries who control access to buyers and take the majority share of profits, while the coffee farmers are often left struggling to pay for education and healthcare.

“If you can buy green coffee at $1.09 per pound, and the roasters are selling you a bag of roasted coffee in the U.S. at $12.99 in the supermarket and it is only 12 ounces, who’s getting the money? Not the growers and they’re the ones doing everything,” says Boris.

In six short years since it’s founding in 2017, Columbia-based Green Coffee Company has not just grown into one of the largest coffee producers in the world, it has been on a fast-track growth journey to cut out intermediaries, disrupt, reshape, own and green every aspect of its supply chain.

“We’re thinking completely outside of the box: we are being disruptive at every step of the chain, from the nursery to the dry and wet milling to the roasting. We’re reducing our operating costs all across the chain….we’re attacking all the old parts of the chain that normally are not tackled by growers.

Today, GCC has more than 12.5 million coffee trees. Its size and scale gives it the bandwidth to successfully disrupt an often exploitative industry and its proving that the green economy is also better for business.

It implements cost-saving, cutting-edge technologies to green its supply chain and is a circular economy pioneer, adding new product lines by repurposing coffee cherry waste to produce ethanol (used in gin/vodka) and cascava flour.

“The company generates something very important in the agricultural sector: a mirror effect,” explains Marcela Urueña, Colombian government chief advisor for coffee affairs.

"I see them as an 'anchor producer' that sets the coffee business dynamics in the area …from delivering information about technologies to centralising purchases of fertilisers to get better prices for all producers around the region, sharing these economic benefits with all the small producers and coffee farmers around GCC. It is a truthful generator of enriched social networks that should lead to social and economic stability in the region where it is located."

GCC has already raised a total of $65 million of equity, and is currently seeking $65 million of institutional debt capital to execute expansion plans. By 2026, the company projects it will be in a position to launch a U.S. IPO exit.

Here’s a look at what it took to scale up and transform supply chains to put social and climate justice into the heart of your next brew.

How did you first get involved with GCC?

I'm a biological systems engineer. I've always been involved with agriculture. I spent over a decade working in the Colombian flower business, primarily in sales and marketing. Following that, I led Invest in Bogota, a startup incubator focused on bringing international business to the region. Before joining GCC, I held a position at a university as the Vice Dean for Biological Systems Engineering. I also took on consultancy roles and helped the Colombian palm oil industry improve their sustainability efforts.

When I was invited to join GCC in 2020, we talked extensively about the transformative changes they envisioned for the industry, I thought, ‘this is what I've been waiting for.’ We discussed the goal of becoming a highly profitable yet inclusive company. It seemed like the only way to change the culture in Colombia and provide growers with a sustainable income. These past 3.5 years with the company have been nothing short of amazing. We've accomplished so much.

How are you disrupting norms in coffee production?

We own the entire supply chain, the roasting, milling, byproduct and harvesting processes and then we go direct to consumers into mass market supermarkets in the U.S. and around the world.

We've been completely reimagining our approach to production. When we first embarked on this journey, the wet mills in the coffee industry felt like a trip back in time to the 1910s and 1920s. Today, we have state-of-the-art mills, fully optimised with cutting-edge technology. This transformation ensures not only profitability but also consistency, which we've incorporated into every step of our supply chain. We're disrupting the nursery process, we're disrupting wet milling, and we're even disrupting dry milling.

Sophisticated processing machinery in GCC’s wet mills recycles water so it uses just 0.3 liters of water per pound of green coffee compared to 20 liters per pound used in traditional processes.

We reuse coffee waste to create new product lines

We take a close look at every point where waste is generated and explore ways to turn that waste into an additional industrial benefit or reduce its environmental impact.

To produce one kilogram of coffee, you typically need five kilograms of cherries. Out of these five kilograms, approximately 2.5 kilos are considered waste or Cherry Cascara. We ferment and press the Cherry Cascara to extract cherry juice, which is rich in sugars. Through fermentation, we produce pure neutral ethanol. This ethanol will be available for commercial use next year, potentially in the form of spirits like vodka or gin. We also use the cascara to produce baking flour.

We’re exploring using the waste from our fermentation process; drying the waste material and subjecting it to a pyrolysis system, which would allow us to create biochar and generate energy.

Worker benefits

100% of our workers are formally employed with benefits and health insurance and they only work five days a week, 40 hours - not 7 days a week like all other growers in the area.

Cutting out intermediaries

Our journey began with internal sales to exporters in Colombia. Later, we expanded our reach by selling directly to U.S. importers. Last year, we introduced our green coffee brand to the European market, started a pilot programme to sell our specialty coffee brand online, and we're making steps to offer white-label products in the U.S.. We now have complete control of the supply chain and expect to sell millions of pounds of roasted coffee by year-end.

What’s ahead for your supply chain expansion plans?

We're diligently working on the necessary preparations to sell roasted coffee in the US: including hiring a sales representative, establishing a delivery structure, and ensuring we have all the right resources in place to sell directly to supermarkets.

We're taking a deliberate and careful approach to prevent any disruptions in our relationships. Building and maintaining strong relationships, especially with supermarkets, is crucial.

We want to ensure that when we establish these relationships, we have a seamless supply of products without any hiccups. Our strategy involves careful planning, relationship building, and steady growth as we continue to expand our presence in the coffee market.

What has been the hardest part of the innovation journey?

In Colombia, coffee growers are not accustomed to using a centralised wet milling facility. Instead, each producer has their own small, technologically dated wet mill, resulting in low efficiency. Convincing them to sell their cherries to a central facility to improve traceability, consistency, and quality was initially challenging because they weren't prepared for such a change. It took two years of training and teaching. This process has involved a complex cultural shift, as we needed to explain our approach and change how we communicate information to these growers.

Changing established cultural practices has been a challenging aspect of this endeavour, but it's ultimately proving successful.

Change requires audacity

What drives me and our team is determination, particularly when it comes to leveraging technology and adopting a circular economy approach. As a biological systems engineer, I have a knack for identifying ways to transform one thing into another.

When I spot opportunities, I act swiftly, but it requires a strong sense of determination. Our company culture thrives on constantly seeking ways to improve and disrupt the norm.

What does the future hold?

We weigh in on the cost of an investment, but if we see a compelling opportunity, such as the distillery project, where we're investing $8 million, it's a no-brainer investment because we anticipate recovering our investment in less than two years. For us, it's about seizing these opportunities and moving forward.

Our ultimate goal is to create a fully automated roasting process. This project represents a significant investment, totalling around $25 to $26 million.

Whats your mantra or life philosophy?

My faith as a Catholic deeply influences my approach to life. I believe in striving for excellence in everything I do. My motivation comes from my desire to lead a life that aligns with my faith, aspiring to be a better person and ultimately seeking a place in heaven.

In my professional endeavours, I always aim to do my very best, delivering the highest quality of work possible. As a family man, I endeavour to be the best husband and father possible.

When I was a kid, my Father always told us – and he was a very good guide – that regardless of your role, even if you're a garbage collector, always strive to be the best at what you do. This principle has become my personal mantra. I approach life with passion and give my absolute best.

………………………….If Boris could teleport himself into the future, and be anywhere, doing anything he’d be “doing the same thing, putting all my effort into what I have been fighting for – shared value – giving the community back what they are giving to me.”

Further Reading:

Harmony is Finally Coming to the Carbon Markets: How This Marketplace Platform Delivers Clarity

Meet the College Graduates Bringing Breakthrough Solutions to End Fast Fashion Waste.

How to Scale a Niche Product While Navigating Being Business and Life Partners

Make a Connection

Whether you’d like to find a mentor, an employee, a job, a business partnership, or just meet someone new over a virtual coffee who’s just as passionate about building greentech businesses – hit the button below and I’ll post a shout out for you in the next newsletter.

Thank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.

Have a great weekend! 🥂

#SparkTheTransition,

Marianne

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In this Green Techpreneur episode, I spoke to the Co-founders of Gimme Seaweed to share how their journey of infusing passion, love, and a personal touch - connecting with customers as you would with friends and family - became keys to growing a household name brand that’s both delicious, nutritious and good for the planet.

“I’ll never forget that feeling I had, in the early morning, it was 6 a.m., I was 35 and at the farmers market and feeling like I was in charge of my life and about to go on this very refreshing journey. And that became Annie Chun’s and the start of all that transpired. It was based on really wanting to be myself and sharing the love and experience that I have. Based on this, I always make sure to connect with myself, who I am, and what I have learned.”

Annie Chun is the pioneer of an organic seaweed US snack brand, Gimme Seaweed, that has shifted what was a niche product into the mainstream market. She immigrated from Korea as a young woman in 1976 - but it was in selling homemade produce at a farmers market in 1991 that she found her North Star as a green techpreneur. At the time, she would never have imagined that her humble outdoor market beginnings would lead to building a household brand name.

So how did she beat the odds to build an exceptional business from the ground up?

“You're not really calculating, I'm going to put that into the US market, I did it truly as a friend, as a neighbour, one by one. And by doing so, I learnt a lot about what American culture is, how they connect, what they like. It just came to me naturally through that experience, and I think that's the base of our reach to our market and our buyers.”

Along the way, she met her husband and co-founder, Steve Broad. They launched Gimme Seaweed in 2012, where Annie brings her Korean roots to the US with the introduction of seaweed as a snack. Together, they created the world’s first USDA Certified Organic, non-GMO Project Verified seaweed snacks.

“I couldn't have built the business by myself,” says Chun. “It was almost like that was the path we had to walk together.”

Seaweed is the underrated story of our time – it’s the ultimate regenerative crop – and along with shellfish, it’s one of the few farmed foods with a net positive environmental impact. 

In a world of water scarcity, it provides valuable nutrition without use of freshwater, and if farmed organically, it helps keep the oceans clean and fights climate change. Seaweed farms sequester carbon and improve water quality: one ton of seaweed can sequester over 1 ton of CO2 annually – a stark contrast to the heavy toll traditional agriculture takes on the environment. But it’s also a commercial success story: since 2018 the seaweed category has grown by 63% with strong double-digit growth YOY.

Today, Gimme is on track to double its business sales since 2021 and deliver 40% year on year growth. It’s the #1 organic seaweed brand leading the way in online channel sales with a 60% category share on Amazon and can be found at major US and Canadian retailers including Wholefoods, Kroger, Publix, Target, Safeway, Sprouts and HEB. 

What sustainability practices does Gimme Seaweed employ?

Annie: Our commitment to sustainability starts in the ocean, Gimme was the first US company to offer organic, non-GMO seaweed.  We worked closely with seaweed farmers in South Korea and in close cooperation with the Korean National Federation of Fisheries Cooperatives to develop the standard for organic, non-GMO seaweed that is widely used today by the industry.

It was a lot of work for us to coordinate between the Korean Control Union and the USDA and then to find a supplier – because organic wasn't in the vocabulary in Korea, nor non-GMO, and it took a lot of time. In recognition for helping transform the seaweed industry we received a Supplier of the Year Award for Organic Commitment from Whole Foods Market. We use 250 tons of dried seaweed a year which requires 2,500 tons of wet seaweed, this absorbs 4,265 tons of CO2 per year.

How were you able to take a niche product and introduce it in a mainstream market?

Steve: Understand what you have as a product and understand where the consumer is and what they're seeking and how you bring that together.

* What helped us was starting at the farmers market and directly speaking to the consumer as opposed to just looking at a data story and then figuring out what needs to happen.

* Then you create the brand with the values you embody to create that consumer love that's really where the magic happens. 

* We built a brand that was more mainstream than the seaweed market had previously been.

Annie: It's been a great journey. Finding myself, connecting with people, and sharing my passion and love. The customers teach me a lot as well. It's just a cycle of learning.

Where there key moments that were pivotal to your success?

Steve: It took luck meets hard work opportunities to get it going.

Annie: When we first started, I was the creator, and Steve was a business partner. I was also the salesperson making cold calls. There are times when it is very challenging to persuade the buyer even if you know you're doing the right thing. You get a lot of rejections and then you run into someone who just helps you right there. If I didn’t walk this path, I would not have had the break. 

You encounter a lot of rejection and failure, but it’s not failure, because you just get up and keep walking that path again and again – it may take you four or five years, but then the door opens for you.

Here's what I learned: no matter what happens, you need to walk on that path, then you will have a break, and failure is not a bad thing because you make your situation much better from that learning.

How do you navigate being both business and life partners?

Annie: It's essential to have a common goal. You almost have to be one person even if you're two separate people. You have to ask if beyond marriage and beyond business, just as individuals, ‘can we walk this path together if we have a common goal?’

It certainly hasn't been easy but we've known each other for 35 years now, we have two beautiful grown up kids – young adults - and two businesses. So one can only imagine lots of ups and downs and tears and sweat but it's important to see that light at the end of the tunnel, and that is the goal that you have, and then we can just walk the path together. And we're actually best friends, we think alike.        

Steve: It’s certainly love and mutual respect and we also have complementary skills, it’s bringing these things together where the genesis happens.

What do you love most about what you do?

Annie: Seeing people enjoy the product is a blessing. It’s also amazing to see the wide range of ethnicities that enjoy the seaweed and how it makes a difference in bringing healthy nutrition into American diets – especially for children.

What advice would you give to other green techpreneurs?

Steve: Make sure you're in touch with what the actual economics are of what you're trying to do and ask, ‘what's that market going to look like?’ It's easy to jump in and then all of a sudden you're spending money and then you don’t have an understanding of what the future is, where you're trying to be, or what you need to accomplish. 

That economic/financial piece is always tricky. Also knowing what kind of capital you bring in and how it might support you or not after you put in so much hard work to get to a certain place. Have the answers, but without trying to constrain yourself, because you know what the answer is, if you don’t get started.

How would you describe your journey in 3 words?

Steve: Amazing, challenging, rewarding

Annie: Dream, visualise, work hard

What’s your mantra or life philosophy?

Steve: Work hard, respect others, listen and learn constantly. Appreciate others, from your suppliers to your employees to your customers.

Annie: In the past seven years or so, through my journey, I had to learn to be patient and try to take the higher road.

Do you have any daily rituals that keep you grounded?

Annie: I normally play with my dog – she makes me run around and throw balls on her walk. I try to walk every day and I remind myself ‘I’m good in this moment’, and I just focus on this moment and on now.

……………...if Annie and Steve could teleport themselves into the future and be anywhere, doing anything, they’d be in Italy or Hawaii; “we’d have a difficult time choosing one or the other,” says Annie, “I’d learn to cook, learn to surf, learn to paint. I love how warm and hospitable people are, I’d love to share that and learn about their cultures and I’d love to explore…we haven’t gone to New Zealand or Australia yet.”

The proof is in the pudding:

Thank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.

Have a great weekend! 🥂

#SparkTheTransition,

Marianne

P.S. If you enjoy reading the GT, please share this article to help spread the word!

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In this Green Techpreneur edition I spoke to Going Green Media to share their insight on how to effectively communicate your climate innovation with the world and gain customers and loyal followers!

For climate tech businesses that want to connect with consumers and inspire action, creating compelling stories online is a crucial marketing tool. Going Green Media is a growing media platform that does just that.

Founded by a creative duo –Ben Brown and Ciara Doyle – the project boasts over 200,000 Instagram followers and creates inspiring films that showcase innovative green projects around the world.

Like many Green Techpreneurs, Ben founded the business out of a frustration with the status quo: “I was a student of architecture and getting really frustrated with lecturers talking about modernist designs with no sustainability credentials. So I bought a second hand camera and travelled to locations to film sustainable building projects, in the hope it would encourage the lecturers on his architecture course to teach the principles of environmentally-friendly construction.”

Little did he know the initiative would change the course of his life – “it became a viral hit on Youtube, and I realised it wasn’t just the architecture space that needs to get up to speed on environmental innovation, it’s the whole world.”

Ciara joined Going Green Media in 2020, and the brand has since steadily grown, working alongside organisations as varied as the WWF, Mastercard and The Olympics.

“We film green projects that inspire action,” says Ciara, “we go visit climate tech projects and allow them to tell their story. We translate often very high-tech projects and make the average person understand them and get excited about them.”

Winning followers and fans online is especially important for climate tech startups that want to connect with Gen Z and Millennials: according to a 2021 survey by the Pew Research Center, this demographic is far more likely to care about environmental issues than previous generations. They’re also more likely to engage with sustainability content on social media: some 56% of Gen Z reported seeing at least two posts on climate action during their weekly scrolling, with 45% of respondents in that age group engaging with the content.

Ben and Ciara share what it takes to communicate effectively and build community in a virtual world.

What are the goals of Going Green Media?

Ciara: Our tagline is: ‘We film green projects that inspire action’. We are fortunate enough to find incredible green solutions from around the world, whether it’s an organisation or an individual who has come up with a solution to a big climate problem and help them tell their story using video.

The second part of our business model is to inspire people to take action for the environment in their own lives and get involved in their community in any way they can.

Ben: We feel like a lot of the climate news out there is so negative. That’s why all the content we produce is hopeful and inspiring. And that’s why we feel we’ve been able to have this success so fast, because people want to see content that makes them feel hopeful and like a better solution is possible.

What’s a project you’ve worked on that stands out?

Ciara: One big moment was back in early 2021. We went to visit a small greentech startup called NotPLA. They were making plastic alternatives from seaweed.

It was a really small team at the time. They were in a little office but they were so knowledgeable. Fast forward to the end of 2022, they won the Earthshot prize, which granted them a million pounds toward their project.

It’s those incredible startup transformations and journeys that are so amazing, and we hope we played a part in that.

What are your tips on creating content and growing online?

Make your content personable and accessible

Ben: The most successful climate tech startup stories that we’ve seen have made their content personable and accessible. So, taking a wider perspective and looking at ‘what is the problem we’re trying to solve? And then relaying that by breaking it down for people, making it easy to understand, so it’s not in this complex language.

Connect your service or product to an individual person

Ciara: Put a person behind [your product] and say: ‘this is how I use it in my daily life’, or, ‘this is what it’s done for me’. Make that connection to how the product benefits the individual.

Collaborate as much as possible

Ciara: I think collaboration is undervalued. If you have a niche, find someone else who is doing something similar. That collaboration obviously isn’t only good for reaching new audiences and reaching new people, but also puts you in touch with more like minded people.

Ben: People in this space tend to be so welcoming; everybody’s working towards the same goal. We all want to make the biggest impact possible: reach out to other companies, influencers or content creators that are in these niches and collaborate on content and cross-promotion.

Passion and enthusiasm matter more than perfection

Ben: The first videos I created connected with people, I didn’t have the production quality, but they saw the enthusiasm was there. People connect with passion more than perfection in content.

Make the algorithm work for you

Ben: Follow the trends that are happening on social media. The algorithms are constantly changing, so you have to make them work for you. If you’ve been posting images for a long time and you’ve not seen it working, stop and change that. Reels on Instagram are just blowing up for both creators and businesses right now.

Build community through consistency and mutual engagement

Ben: Make sure you’re active on your stories – share the real aspects of your life to build connection and community.

Ciara: Building a community around your brand is so important, whether you’re an individual or a huge team. Engage with your followers, if they comment, respond, start a conversation.

What’s the biggest mistake you see startups making on social media?

Ben: The biggest mistake is making things too complex in explaining your topics, or not putting a person behind a story.

Ciara: Keeping it simple is the most important thing. As a creator, or as a business on social media, you have to create the type of content that you yourself would want to see or that you would want to take action from.

Do you have a mantra or life philosophy you follow?

Ben: Leave the earth better than you found it.

Ciara: We don’t need ten perfect, sustainable people doing absolutely everything they can for the planet. We need millions and millions, and billions of people living sustainably but imperfectly.

We’re human, we’re imperfect. It’s about having that little voice in the back of your head pushing you to be a little bit more conscious in your day-to-day life that makes such a difference long-term.

What daily rituals keep you grounded?

Ciara: We fortunately have a park in our neighbourhood. At the end of a really long day, even if we have a million things that we have to do, we take 15 minutes to go outside. We have a favourite bench that we like to sit on. So we’ll go back to the bench, just breathe a little bit and then come back to it.

What does the future hold?

Ben: I’d love to get into documentary filmmaking and long form content, maybe getting into Netflix and the biggest streaming services.

Ciara: Our dream is to be that point of reference for people, if they’re having a bad day, or they’re feeling really weighed down by not just the climate crisis, but the news in general. We’d love to be a place where they can get some inspiration and feel hopeful again.

💥 Find out how you can stand out to attract enquiries & investors…

For details visit...becomemorevisible and book a call.

Check out these pre-vetted startups seeking investment

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITY – From The Green Techpreneur Marketplace

Greentech Innovators has already secured $10 million in phase II funding, they are now asking for 750,000 Euros in convertible loan note to match grant funding of 750,000 and a tax grant of 19%.

PRODUCT: We use food waste to produce a growth media used for fermentation for production of micro-algae high in omega-3 oil and protein that can substitute fish oil. We act as a service provider for waste companies and charge a gate fee for the raw-material we use. Learn more here.

Ourobio is a synthetic biology and circular economy company. We're using fermentation to turn agricultural byproducts into low-footprint biodegradable plastic resins and colorants. We are currently looking for partners interested in adopting more sustainable materials and waste management practices and investors for our current and future round(s). Please check out our site and reach out if you are interested in learning more!

Further reading:

Failure is not Failure, but being Foolhardy can be Your Downfall

The Green Techpreneur is Partnering with Climate Marketplace to help Climate Startups Fundraise

Follow the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

If you enjoy reading the GT, please share this article to help spread the word!

Thank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.

Have a great weekend! 🥂

#SparkTheTransition,

Marianne

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The Green Techpreneur (GT) will provide you with the tools, resources and connections you need to make your mark on the planet with your climate tech business! Every other week, I interview extraordinary climate tech entrepreneurs, investors and sustainability experts to share practical advice on how to build, grow, and thrive. Follow the GT podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

As an architect from Syria, Anas da Kassas, Founder and CEO of INOVUES, has come a long way. His journey into green techpreneurship took him from Damascus to Dubai where he worked in architectural facade engineering and manufacturing before moving to Boston to get a Master’s degree in architecture. 

Along the way, Anas caught the entrepreneurial bug. He wanted to create scaleable solutions for buildings that could help tackle the climate crisis: “the problem for me was that you invest several years in every project, but it's a one-off prototype. You go to the next project and you face the same challenges again.

He was staring out the window of his apartment, brainstorming ideas that could have a big impact, when the window itself became his source of inspiration: “I thought, ‘what if there was a way to transform these windows into smart systems without having to remove or replace anything at all? I was thinking about ideas from my multidisciplinary experience in architecture and facade engineering.”

That was the day INOVUES –  innovative views – was born. Anas’ idea has since grown into a multiple-award winning startup that has already participated in several accelerators including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy and is ready to take on a global $9.5 trillion market opportunity for more energy-efficient buildings. 

It's the only patented solution in its class that can transform building facades with the latest energy-saving and smart glass innovations without rebuilding or replacing any parts. INOVUES retrofits a second window pane to existing windows using adhesive structural material, creating a 10x cost reduction compared to existing methods, and reducing energy inefficiency of buildings by up to 40%.

And with the push of the energy crisis and inflation putting pressure on energy costs and the strong pull of incentives from the US’ Inflation Reduction Act or the European Green Deal’s energy efficiency directive which requires EU countries to collectively reduce energy consumption by 9% by 2030. Anas is bringing a right place, right time, solution to conquer a real estate retrofit market that’s largely untapped.

How does your solution work?

We don't use mechanical fasteners in our system, we rely on structural glazing materials. The system integrates with the existing facade and does not require drilling or altering anything. It's a very clean and easy installation process, we can add a window to create double pane windows.

We use 70% fewer materials compared to existing methods and prefabricate the system off-site so installation costs are cut by up to 80%, reducing the total cost of window upgrades buy up to 10 times.

We’re pushing the boundaries of facade engineering on many aspects…transparent photovoltaic or dynamic tinting or vacuum insulated glass. All of these now can be available for existing buildings at a fraction of the usual cost. There’s no disruption, and no need to replace anything. 

How big is the market opportunity?

Experts estimate that about 40% of all US buildings still have single pane windows and a lot more have low performing double pane windows, so 70% of existing building stock is in need of an upgrade. Globally, there are estimates that this is a $9.5 trillion market opportunity. The potential impact on the climate and carbon reduction is huge because windows account for up to 40% of the energy loss in buildings.

Through our installations, we're reducing carbon emissions by 100 tonnes annually, and the potential impact, at scale, is close to half a giga tonne to a giga tonne of reduced emissions.

These efficiencies means we can disrupt the built environment which has been painfully slow to retrofit ageing infrastructure in commercial real estate. INOVUES has already installed upgrades for leading industry players like Saint-Gobain, 3M and the University of Minnesota.

2022 was our breakout year. We finished some major pilots and got $50 million of potential projects in our pipeline.

What were the make or break moments you faced in getting started?

I had quite my job in Boston and moved to Houston so spend 1 year doing my architectural Master thesis on the INOVUES idea. That got me a year to devote full-time to it, but I was not making any money. We moved in with family to cut costs to almost nothing. But after a year, I told my wife: ‘if by the end of the next month, we don't secure any funding, I'll stop and put this on the back burner and find a job.’ At that point, I was ready to give up, although it's not part of my personality or nature to do that, but it was too challenging to continue alone without any sort of funding.

My wife was fully supportive of this, it made me able to push through these tough moments. She acted as my co-founder in the early days, she was the primary person I would talk to about any challenges or pain points.

The first 2-3 years was purely R&D on a shoestring budget

There was literally blood, sweat and tears at almost every step of the process of the R&D phase. It was on a very, very tight budget, almost bootstrapping. There where moments where you spend a year or more of work then know that everything could fall apart because the next few tests are very important. And if I failed in the test, I didn’t have the money to repeat the tests. And that would’ve been a kill switch to the entire thing.

Imagine devoting time, resources and everything you have for two years, and then there's this key test that you're waiting for. And if it passes and succeeds, we're moving forward, if not, I’m going back to finding a job in the industry and starting over. There were a lot of these moments.

How did you first secure funding?

Being a foreigner who came to the US, I didn't have the network here. My English is much better now than it was a few years ago, but imagine trying to explain what you're trying to do as a foreigner asking people to trust you and give you money. It was very hard and we started small. I went through the Cleantech Open accelerator programme and one of the advisors wrote our first check and then more people followed him. He’s on our board of directors now and has invested five times.

I tell him ‘you’re a true angel investor in the literal meaning of the word.’

Because without that first check, there would be no interview today. It was a $50,000 check that enabled me to fund the next few months and build the first system and pass the first test and then get the funding from other angel investors. And then we won the International Award from Cleantech Open which gave us more validation.

How do you keep your team engaged and focused on the mission as you grow?

Transparency

It's very important to keep everyone involved in everything that is happening in the company and tell them where we are, what kind of challenges we have and how everyone's role make a significant impact on the overall mission.

Trust

Trusting people to be leaders in their roles and giving them authority and ownership of what they're doing.

What’s ahead for INOVUES?

We're looking to raise a $10 million Series A in the next few months to scale up our team and operations so we can execute on multimillion dollar projects in our pipeline. We're excited about 2023 and 2024.

What’s your mantra or life philosophy?

I'm an eternal optimist. I believe in the Law of Attraction, so I'm always positive. I belief that with hard work and dedication anything is possible.

What daily rituals help to keep you grounded?

Meditation and exercise. These are very, very important to me on a daily basis. Without them, I wouldn't be able to push forward.

Is there a mentor or role model who has been highly influential?

My Dad was a true entrepreneur and I watched him push forward on new ideas and new solutions and new businesses throughout his life. And I worked with him in multiple phases, so I experienced exactly what it takes to bring ideas to fruition.

If you could teleport yourself into the future and be anywhere, doing anything, where would you be and why?

I want to leave an impact on the built environment world and have the resources to work on a few things related to my home country, improving education and improving the situation in Syria to make things better for future generations.

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Further Reading

In case you missed it, check out these recent fascinating GT interviews…

An Inside Look at How Flashfood Revolutionised the Grocery Shopping Industry

Why Imperial College Launched a Climatetech Pre-accelerator

How to Work With Sustainability Influencers

And here’s one from my Forbes column:

Going Global: 4 Considerations for European Climatetech Startups Seeking Media Coverage in the US

Check out the latest climatetech jobs from our friends at Work in Green

Thank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.

Have a great weekend! 🥂

#SparkTheTransition

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Hello there 👋🏼

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Flashfood is on Fast Company's annual list of the world's most Innovative Companies for 2023, coming in at first place for Social Good. The Canada-born startup tackles food waste with a digital marketplace and app that alerts consumers to discounted and near end-of-date food products.

Customers can buy bargains directly through the app and then do a same-day pick up from a Flashfood designated store zone. Within 7 years since inception, the concept has spread to 1,600 stores across Canada and the US.

Flashfood founder and CEO, Josh Domingues, had always wanted to tackle environmental issues; “you turn on the TV and there's just a different city under water or there’s a horrible storm. Whatever I was going to spend my time on through my working career, it was going to have to be something with the environment.” 

But it was after he heard about an incident at his sister’s workplace that his journey as a Green Techpreneur began: “My sister was a chef, she called me after a catering event and said ‘I just threw out $4,000 worth of food.’ I started laughing; ‘Polly, you idiot. Why would you do that?’ She said, ‘oh, this feeling sucks, my boss was over my shoulder making me do it.’

“So I started reading about food waste and I learned that if international food waste were a country it'd be the third leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions behind the US and China.

“That led me to talking to store managers in Toronto and I learnt they're throwing out fresh food that still has two or three days of shelf life because consumers won't buy it. The idea I had was if there's a way for the store to mark the price of the food down and send me a notification so I could see the deal on my phone, pay through my phone, and pick up from the store the same day – people would shop like that all the time.”

As it turned out, Josh was right: as prices surge today, his idea has helped many thousands of people navigate the cost of living crisis. To date, saved shoppers over $150 million on grocery bills, and diverted over 65 million pounds of food from landfill.

“We're still so early in our journey in terms of what we can accomplish, it's really humbling to think about,” says Josh.

“I don't want to come off as if it was easy the whole time. This was basically impossible, this has been so hard to do at so many different levels. And even to be named in Fast Company’s list of most innovative companies…this was just an idea seven years ago and now looking at where we're at, it's just a wild journey.”

How does the Flashfood app work?

The Flashfood app shows which grocers in your area have partnered with the startup. It enables consumers to browse deals – directly from their phone – to save up to 50% off high-quality items nearing their best-by date, such as meats, dairy, seafood, produce, bakery items and more. When retailers partner with Flashfood, they enter into a revenue sharing agreement.

How did you first market the app and gain early adopters?

We offered free pizza to students

We got our first set of users by organising an information session and offering free pizza to students. Sometimes the simplest marketing tactics can be the most effective, especially when you're just starting out.

We leveraged local Facebook groups

I leveraged local Facebook groups to promote the app. It was a great way to reach potential customers in our target market and establish a presence in the community. I went into hundreds of local Facebook groups and said “I'm Josh, we're building this company that's trying to solve food waste by partnering with your local store.” I had to keep changing the location on my Facebook to be accepted into the groups. That’s how we got lots of our early users.

Apps can be a saturated market, what gave you the conviction that the idea can work?

Prior to this, I was a management consultant and we did a project for a demolition company and all these companies were bidding $12 or $13 million to bring down a building. My company bid $3 million, got the job, and by the time they resold all the precious metals because there was so much copper in the walls, they made $20 or $22 million. That got me thinking there's value in waste.

The value proposition is just so meaningful

Anything that drives the customer into a grocery store is valuable for the grocery store, and on the backside, the customer can save 50% off groceries, I just thought that value prop on both ends is so obvious if you can get this to scale.

We didn’t go into it thinking ‘we have to have so many downloads,’ it's just make this process simple and easy and valuable to the end-user and it should theoretically work and fortunately that's been the case. 

What are your top tips for other Green Techpreneurs?

Keep asking why your idea won’t work

You have to be so bloody honest with yourself, especially in the early days. You have to come at it from the lens of ‘this thing's not going to work. I shouldn't do this.’ In the earliest days, we got people to poke holes in the business from so many different angles to make it better, and ultimately, the value prop stayed strong enough. Money has to flow to a stakeholder in a meaningful way for environmental companies to take off. It's unfortunate, but it's still capitalism, somebody really has to benefit financially.

Refer back to your mission and vision daily

Early in my journey, I thought mission statements were just fluff. Now we're at 100 people and the mission of the company is to reduce the environmental impact of food waste and feed families affordably. You need to refer back to these things daily, especially with remote working, for people to remember why we're doing what we're doing. 

Authenticity and belonging brings people along for the journey

When I sit down with grocery executives, I show them nobody cares more about this than we will on behalf of their company. When it's authentic and you want to make an impact, that comes through and people want to be a part of the journey, everybody wants to feel like they're belonging to something.

What were the elements of luck that made the business work?

Every time you hear about an entrepreneur speak about building a business, it often comes back to…’a few things just worked out in our favour’ and I believe in luck and that you have to work to build your own luck. 

I got a chance introduction to a former executive at the biggest grocery chain in the country. That was just happenstance. I told her the exact same story I'd been telling everybody else for three years and she decided to give us a chance. We started with a three-store pilot and it turned into a massive opportunity to scale up the business and expand to 400 stores in just 5-6 months. It's a testament to the power of networking and being ready to execute on opportunities when they arise.

If that introduction didn't come and that executive didn't take a chance on us, we would have never been talking today.

Did you ever feel like giving up?

Oh yes, like everyday. Every day in my life is the best day of my life and every day in my life is the worst day of my life and it's just based on what email comes in. You just have to be even keel at all times and never get too high, never get too low. 

What’s kept me going is the knowledge that if we don’t pull this off, nobody will.

I like seeing what our shoppers have said. One of our shoppers is a young mother with three kids. Her husband got laid off during COVID and she wrote us that without Flashfood she couldn't afford to feed her kids. For Christmas we were able to get her kids a whole bunch of candy stocking stuffers and they didn't expect to have anything, and their faces just lit up.

What does the future hold?

We have several innovations in the Flashfood app. The app is now accepting snap and EBT as a payment method, which are digitised food stamps in America. This is a significant development for the app's partners as it expands their customer base and makes it easier for people to access affordable food.

Secondly, the app is ingesting data around dynamic pricing and progressive markdowns, which will help retailers understand what price points are most effective in different markets. This information will enable retailers to make more informed decisions about what products to stock and how to price them. This could also help reduce food waste by identifying products that are not selling and adjusting prices accordingly.

The app is gaining the trust of retail partners, which is opening up opportunities to connect them with other circular economy services over time. We have global ambitions to tackle food waste and help people save money on their food.

What daily rituals keep you going?

Exercise. If I don't focus on challenging myself physically once a day at least, than over a span of 2-3 days, everything else gets worse, I’m more edgy. I don't listen as well.

Do you have a favourite quote or life philosophy?

Yes. It’s tatooed on my arm – hold on to happiness.

My sister-in-law passed away after battling cancer for a few years. She had a playlist that we listened to in her last days and one of the songs was ‘Hold on to Happiness’.

You'll have ups and downs, there're going to be good times, there’re going to be awful times, but you decide the outlook you have in any situation and even when things get really difficult with the business; take a step back. Remember that we're trying to do a really hard thing and we're trying our best. And in the back of my mind, I remember to Hold on to Happiness and do what makes you happy because we don't have a lot of time.

Would you like to support the GT and place an ad?

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Further Reading

In case you missed it, check out these recent fascinating GT interviews…

Why Imperial College Launched a Climatetech Pre-accelerator

How to Work With Sustainability Influencers

How to Crowd fundraise and Build Community

And here’s one from my Forbes column:

A Marshall Plan for Building Back Green in Ukraine

Check out the latest climatetech jobs from our friends at Work in Green

Thank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.

Have a great weekend! 🥂

#SparkTheTransition

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, sign up below to join a high-value network of over 2,100 climate tech entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors.

The Green Techpreneur (GT) will provide you with the tools, resources, and connections you need to make your mark on the planet with your climate tech business! Every other week, I interview extraordinary climate tech entrepreneurs, investors and sustainability experts to share practical advice on how to build your business. Join us for connections, advice, ideas, and mentors. Follow the GT podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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We’re looking for a sponsor with an aligned mission and vision to collaborate on content and promotions over a 6-month period. It would suit a climate tech investor, accelerator, or a B2B climate tech business. Get in touch at: marianne@thegreentechpreneur.uk

Imperial College has just had a star-studded lineup with Bill Gates and Rishi Sunak helping to kick off the climate tech accelerator Undaunted which is for full-time founders ready to run with their ideas. But it's got another first-of-its-kind programme that has just launched for students with brilliant entrepreneurial ideas who want a chance to sharpen these ideas in a supportive environment.

For pre-accelerator Co-founders Filippo Varini and Elliot Queisser de Stockalper, a passion for protecting nature came from life experiences that were close to home. While growing up in Geneva, Switzerland, Elliot saw ecosystems, quite literally, melt away: “watching the snow, the glaciers, the little details from my home region dramatically changing, it made a difference. It pushed me to address these problems and these unmet needs in a tangible way.”

In Italy, Filippo had always been in close contact with the sea as a sailor, fisherman and a free diver; “I witnessed it firsthand – the depletion of the sea – which brought me to start to look for solutions into the area of biodiversity and climate change.”

“It was so nice to find each other because we had this passion that was so raw for everything climate, sustainability and entrepreneurship,” says Elliot.

They developed the idea for the pre-accelerator programme last summer after noticing that many students who wanted to make a difference and help solve climate change had entrepreneurial ideas that died on the vine: the pressures of needing to find work and repay student loans immediately after graduating meant many would-be founders never got started.

Their solution? Provide students with a complete support system for validating and testing their ideas, building a team and network, and pitching to institutional investors – a pre-accelerator.

“We wanted to set up something that will be heard,” says Elliot, “but also something that will inspire people and give clear opportunities and possibilities at the end. That's how we came up with the pre-accelerator to help student founders get investment-ready and validate their idea.”

How do you help student founders validate their ideas at the pre-accelerator?

Elliot: We give student founders every tool in hand to propose either an MVP at the end of a programme, or at least a solution that has the possibility to become a startup in the future.

We have programme sponsors, collaborators, mentors and partners on board to help in shaping the idea. We’ll have a series of workshops, challenges and pitching days and we’ll finish with Demo Day, where teams will present in front of investors and partners, show what they are addressing, and how that idea compliments a gap in the market sector. It’s an opportunity for them to speak about something they’re deeply passionate about at their first pitching event and build on these capabilities in the future.

How many student founders are in your first cohort?

Filippo: We’ve had 200 applications and have launched our first cohort with 100 students – from PHDs to undergraduates – after opening up applications to students from universities including Cambridge, MIT, Oxford, the Royal College of Arts and LSE. Half of the people we selected already have a team and idea they will want to work on and half of them are unsure about what to work on and need to find a team. We have a multidisciplinary cohort because we believe something great happens when you mix perspectives from different backgrounds.

What are the benefits of starting young as an entrepreneur?

Filippo: I think the benefit of starting young is that you have energy and you also have the beginner mindset that lets you approach a problem with a new perspective and sometimes that can lead to authentic solutions.

However, you don't have experience and your network or skillset can't compare with people that already have experience. But it depends on the personality, if you can learn by doing and you're a resilient person, those qualities can help you succeed. Obviously, you will need help from mentors and a good dose of enthusiasm to learn everything as you go along, but it’s totally doable. 

Elliot: One of the advantages is that in our outlook or perspective, we're allowed to be very spontaneous, very creative, and we can just come in and propose something and the pressure and judgment is less heavy because we are trying our best and aiming to tackle something at a young age that is very close to our heart.

Is this an idea you see spreading to other universities?

Elliot: it’s one of the things we’ve talked about – my motto is Carpe Diem. I think the pre-accelerator has the potential to shape the entrepreneur journey for lots of students and be able to touch a wider community, not only in London but across the UK. We’ll take things step by step, but there are all the ingredients for it in the future to be implemented on a wider scale.

Who are your role models?

Elliot: Jacqueline Novogratz is certainly one of my role models. She's the founder of Acumen and what I respect in her journey and her ethos is the intersection between entrepreneurship, activism, inspiring people and the power of speech.

Speech can unlock lots of doors and it has something very subdued, it can really touch you emotionally – the gestures and also the words can make the difference.

Filippo: the first one is my Grandfather because his life and connection to nature are an inspiration for me, and the second person is Astro Teller, the Captain of Moonshot X, which is part of our summit.

I look up to him and his company’s mentality of radical creativity and disrupting current technologies with a beginner's mindset. It’s something I've always believed in even before hearing about him.

I recommend people look him up because it inspires people to be creative and find radical solutions to problems.

Do you have a favourite quote or a life philosophy you follow?

Elliot: Being able to enjoy the present moment. Reflect on the past and have good objectives for the future, but I feel like time is the modern-day missing piece.

I think it's how you can accomplish all your goals in life – understanding that in the present moment there's so much happening and you don't have to overthink, sometimes you just have to go with the flow.

Filippo: More than a quote, I have a story, which is from a book by Paulo Coelho. He talks about a voyager who goes into a Master’s castle to learn about the secret of life. The Master gives him a spoon with water and tells him to explore the castle. The castle is amazing and he runs around and comes back and asks again about the meaning of life, but now the spoon is empty.

And so it says the meaning of life is to enjoy the beauty of the castle without losing the water in the spoon. That resonates with me, because I think there are so many important things in life, that you should always be balanced and not lose sight of what is right in front of you.

What do you do when it’s time to unwind and relax?

Filippo: I love surfing, so I never miss an opportunity to surf. I enjoy free diving as well, which is something you can do in London.

Elliot: I love to read and it's something that really shaped me as a person. Given the literary background of my Mother, I'm very sensitive to the arts, thanks to her. I also enjoy handball and windsurfing.

If you could teleport yourself into the future and be anywhere, doing anything, where would you be?

Filippo: I’d be working on ocean conservation and restoring marine biodiversity and global biodiversity. It’s a problem that I fell in love with many years ago and it's something that still intrigues me to solve.

Elliot: I’d like to be somewhere where lots of different questions and problems are addressed; being able to unite people around the power of discussion, communication and awareness-building around different themes and proposing concrete solutions for it. I've been always very interested by the intersection between life science and diplomacy; that's something I will be considering in the future…and I hope to still be the person I am today.

Would you like to support the GT and place an ad?

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Further Reading

Check out these posts from my Forbes climate tech column:

A Marshal Plan for Building Back Green in Ukraine?

Through Pandemic and War: the Inspiring Story of How a Belgium Scaleup Brought Net-zero to Food Roasting

Thank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.

Have a great weekend! 🥂

#SparkTheTransition

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If you’re reading this and haven’t subscribed, sign up below to join a high-value network of over 2,100 climate tech entrepreneurs, industry leaders and investors.

In The Green Techpreneur (GT), I interview extraordinary climate tech entrepreneurs, investors and sustainability experts to share practical advice on how to build your business. Join us for connections, advice, ideas, and mentors. Follow the GT podcast on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

GT Collaboration Opportunity

We’re looking for a sponsor with an aligned mission and vision to collaborate on content and promotions over a 6-month period. It would suit a climate tech investor, accelerator, or a B2B climate tech business. Get in touch at: marianne@thegreentechpreneur.uk

In 2022, influencer marketing was a $16.4 billion industry and it’s due to 5x to reach $84.89 billion by 2028. This phenomenal growth is down to just how effective it is; influencer marketing content delivers 11X better ROI than traditional marketing tactics.

Why? 92% of consumers trust influencer marketing over traditional advertising.

So for climate tech startups that need to make every dollar count, quickly spread the message and attract clients, a carefully targeted ‘guerrilla’ influencer marketing approach could deliver more and cost less than a PR campaign.

Influencer marketing expert Gordon Glenister is the author of Influencer Marketing Strategy and a columnist on influencer marketing for the London Evening Standard.

He stumbled into the industry “by accident” – “I couldn’t find a book that explained influencer marketing, so I wrote one and started the UK influencer industry with my business partner.”

In this Green Techpreneur episode, he breaks down how to select and work with influencers as a climate tech startup.

How do you judge whether an influencer is a good match?

Look for shared values and engagement

What’s important to your business? Does that reflect well in the type of content that you're seeing from that individual?

Another thing to look for is their level of engagement. How responsive are they to their followers? And are they good at creating a conversation and growing their audience?

Look into the relevance of their followers, where they're coming from, it's not about numbers, it's about quality.

Are they working with your competitors?

The last thing you want to do is work with an influencer who's working with all of your competitors day in day out. That's not going to make you feel special within your own brand.

Ask for their media deck

The first thing you should do before engaging them is to ask for their media deck which is equivalent to a CV, you want to know how they've grown their audience, what their level of engagement is, what type of campaigns they've worked on before.

Focus on long-term collaboration

Understand what sort of success criteria you want, but also what the influencer wants. There's a reason we use the word collaboration because that's exactly what it is. It's about actually joining at the hip because there are two things that an influencer wants: one is a reward for the work that they've done, and also anything that sustains and grows their audience. So look for how you can create and help them with exclusive content, opportunities to come to your events, or something where you could bring them onto a panel.

The more you brief the influencer and help them with understanding the markets in your area, the better. You wouldn't hire a salesperson and say ‘off you go and do your best,’ you would properly brief them.

Don’t think transactional

Don’t think transactional, like ‘should I employ an influencer for one post?’ Think about the bigger picture and be creative and involve them. Think about ‘how can I help you? We're a startup we don't have huge amounts of money, but what I could do is I have this, I have that, and I have this’ and the influencer may say ‘wow, that's super cool. I can do some really good things with that.’

How can you co-create an immersive experience?

Oxfam brought influencers to one of their big hub centres and showed them the entire back office system of what they do when clothes come in the recycling centre. They gave them a complete, ‘behind-the-scenes’ experience, and that got huge amounts of engagement on the influencers content and on Oxfam's engagement as well.

“I believe in immersive content. If you're talking about climate change, can you go somewhere together? Think about the impact you want from this. You can do some amazing things with influencers.”

What types of content campaigns benefit from using influencers?

* Co-created content

* Podcasts

* Inviting the influencer onto your podcast

* Sponsored posts and videos

* Competitions and contests

* Tik Tok has been great for challenges

* Tutorials and reviews of your products/services can be really successful

* Social media takeovers - hire an influencer to work with you on your social media campaign

* Anything where there’s a sense of momentum, and it encourages others to get involved

How do I measure the success metrics of an influencer engagement?

Set your goals and objectives right at the start. Influencer marketing is not a silver bullet, sometimes people think, ‘I'm gonna work with this influencer and pennies are going to come down from heaven’. That’s not the case if their audience doesn’t know your brand, and that is why long-term partnerships can be a really effective way to engage with influencers.

What advice would you give to climate tech startups on growing their own audience?

Go for slow, consistent growth and authentic content

We engage with emotion, more than any other attributes. So you want your customers or your target prospects to really feel that that you give a damn about this.

Slow, consistent growth and relevance in your content is hard. Don't get me wrong. It's harder to build an Instagram following right now than it ever was before. But if you are consistent in your posting, if you use reels and video content, if you bring your authentic self to the channel so people can really feel, you’ll see growth.

Look at the content that works for your competitors

Deliver content based on what you know works, not what you think works. Before you accelerate your content plan for 2023, look at 10 of your competitors that are in a similar industry to you.

Look at their last 10 posts on whatever channel you want – LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook – look at the type of content and note down what reaction they're getting, put that into an Excel spreadsheet. Do that with 10 posts with 10 competitors and look at what is working best.

Who is your role model?

My biggest influence is Sir David Attenborough. 

Articles are important, but in a multimedia world, podcasts, videos, photos, those are ways to really grab emotion and draw the audience in a bigger way. It's those moments, those images, those metaphors that grab emotion that are going to create influence.

Do you have a favourite quote or motto?

Your brand is what people say about your business when you’re not in the room.

What do you do when it’s time to unwind after work?

Badminton is my passion when I get a moment and I enjoy having dinner with friends. I live close to 5 lakes which is a bird reserve, which is lovely to walk around on a lovely day. It’s so important to keep positive and do different things.

If you could teleport yourself into the future, and be anywhere, doing anything, where would you be and why?

When I was in my early 20s, somebody said I should be on stage. I love presenting but I've never worked in theatre or on a film and I'm getting closer and closer to that space now, so I think the future is going to be something in television or in film.

Would you like to support the GT and place an ad?

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Further Reading

Check out these posts from my Forbes climate tech column:

Nets, Plastic, Underwater Crime - How to Stop Ocean Pollution

5 Steps to Effective Storytelling as a Climate Tech Startup

3 Fast Growth Climate Tech Startups to Watch in 2023

Thank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.

Have a great weekend! 🥂

#SparkTheTransition

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GT Collaboration Opportunity

Before we launch into today’s episode, I wanted to share an opportunity to partner with The Green Techpreneur as a platform sponsor. We’re looking for a sponsor with an aligned mission and vision to collaborate on content and promotions over a 6-month period. It would suit a climate tech investor, accelerator, or a B2B climate tech business. Get in touch at: marianne@thegreentechpreneur.uk

“Investing in equity and entrepreneurs was this really hard to access, illiquid asset class which has been the bastion of the elite, and that hadn’t really changed in over 100 years: somebody who wanted to invest in ships to import spices would go to Mayfair and find an investor. 100 years later, an investor looking to fund their startup would go to Mayfair.

“With the invention of the internet, there was an opportunity to open the market up, and now 12 years later, the world looks somewhat different,” says Jeff Kelisky, CEO of Seedrs.

Seedrs - is an equity crowdfunding platform that enables investors of all shapes and sizes to invest in ambitious startups, its helped startups raise a total of £2.3 billion, with 1,870 deals funded so far.

To get started as a crowd fundraising platform, Seedrs faced the challenge of needing to get cooperation from industry incumbents: “investing is very different in the sense that it defines in some ways coopetition. A lot of the founders get funding from multiple sources from the big institutions to the retail investor. So we participate alongside private equity and alongside angels, so we needed to be accepted as an equal or value add platform.

“There was this tarnished view of crowdfunding because it was retail investors, and not necessarily professional investors, so building credibility was one of the fundamental hurdles to overcome and that took time because it was reliant on relationships which were reliant on proof.”

Today, Jeff says, climate tech is Seedrs’ fastest growing investment vertical - clean energy saw 40% more investors on Seedrs in 2022 compared to 2023: “that news spreads each of those investors becomes a storyteller to their network so that will only accelerate.

Jeff believes in 2023, we’ll see an investment growth trend in all forms of EV’s - cars, bikes and boats as well as in renewable energy.

What type of startups succeed on the platform?

There are over 17 different sectors represented, from climate tech, data analytics, consumer products and food and beverage, and there isn't any one sector that represents more than about 12% of the total. That said, the fastest growing sector right now is climate tech – energy, and sustainability as a category.

How do companies benefit from using crowd fundraising?

They want to use the opportunity to create brand ambassadors, to actually turn customers into evangelists of who they are, and in some cases, to also acquire new customers and bring on board new members of their community. That community dimension becomes an important part of making a round successful. 

Be creative about how to harness your network

We had a small group of founders who put together a business around ice cream. They'd recently won a contract with Waitrose, but it's a small business, and so there was no way they could actually see how that contract was rolling out across all the Waitrose stores in the UK. So they gave their investors a mission; ‘next time you go to your local Waitrose, please take a photo of the ice cream on the shelf, because we'd like to know that it is on the top shelf, and the label is facing forward, which is part of the contract.’ Three things happened: they got photos, their community of investors and customers felt connected to the business, and the third thing is, they probably bought the ice cream!

Is Crowd fundraising better for B2C or B2B startups?

It's definitely easier as a B2C business to tell your story in a way that's understandable and as something that consumers can relate to. That being said, B2B represents 40% of what we do, so it is absolutely not exclusive. We've had very successful software accounting companies raise capital. One thing to look at is how what you’re doing has a strong emotional connection. Increasingly, investors are millennials and Gen Z, and are making investment decisions which connect to who they are, their values, the things they're passionate about. But whether you’re B2B or B2C, you need to tell your story well.

What are your top 5 tips for effective storytelling?

* Show us your roots - The most endearing stories are those that give us that moment of inspiration and/or personal experience. For example, the story of Mr Lee’s Noodles (a healthy pot noodle business) told investors of the Founder’s inspiration for healthier noodles following his battle with cancer where he craved for healthy comfort food.

* Align your vision with your community - consider how your business’ beliefs, mission and values align with the community’s desires. For example, Ripple, which enables households and businesses to part own large scale wind farms and (in the future) solar parks, met many people’s desire to be part of something greater and make an impact.

* Translate your mission creatively - A brand’s creative can be done on a shoestring and still hold a powerful role when it comes to connecting with an audience. It can visually create an immediate emotional response and a consistent and unique visual brand identity, illustration style, and even brand ‘characters’ help cement space in people’s minds from day one. Look at the sustainable hygiene B-Corp Cheeky Panda - their logo and style is instantly recognisable.

* Make them feel involved, bring them on the journey - This is key to forming an exceptional brand experience. Developing key touch points through newsletters, social media channels and events are effective ways to get closer to your audience and make them feel engaged as you scale.

* Be known for openness and transparency - Be open and transparent about your company’s culture, realistic for your valuations and give insight into how the company performs that is clear and easy to understand. Don’t be afraid to talk about your failures. Most of our successful entrepreneurs are “phoenix founders” on their second or third startup. Being open about the difficulties you’ve faced and the learnings is a critical part of telling your entrepreneurial story.

Do you have advice for startups on building community?

Connect with your existing network

First, it’s about connecting with the founder's existing network, it’s very much about the story being told and how to do that and then getting introductions to the right groups to do that. 

So if you're in a particular space, who are the institutions that would also be interested in joining and anchoring around that?

It's about honing your story for different audiences. And again, that sounds perhaps an obvious step that all founders have to do anyway. But you're doing it in the context of a broad crowd and therefore it needs to be consumable at scale. 

Build Momentum 

Build momentum in a campaign. There's a lot out there for people to invest in. There's a lot out there for people to be distracted by, especially in a social media context, so getting attention is something you should manage. And while it takes a lot of effort, the construction and sequencing of a campaign is important.

Have you seen a decline in investment due to the recession?

Last year, we saw over 141,000 individual investments in 324 campaigns and just over half a billion pounds raised. We served more entrepreneurs last year than we did the year before.

The biggest challenges were less from the direct retail audience, it was more that institutions were more timorous. So that reduction in the institutional side or anchoring side was where we saw a difference; it wasn't the retail participation.

Uncertainty Breeds Entrepreneurship

There's one common truth and that is uncertainty breeds entrepreneurship.

It is often when entrepreneurs are born. In some cases, they're born because they have something they want to do and say and they see a problem, and sometimes it’s because necessity meets opportunity. We've seen the birth of more entrepreneurs during difficult times.

We've seen it with the Ukraine war, the outpouring of communities looking to solve problems, and get behind founders who have solutions to some of those problems. So that gives me hope, entrepreneurship is not in decline.

Who are your role models?

It's hard not to answer that question without bringing both my parents into that answer. My Mother, who passed away many years ago, will be very happy that we are having this conversation. She was absolutely a woman of nature, of the environment, supporting ecology. The fact that my professional life is intersecting with something that she spent so much time putting her love into probably fills me with enough energy to go through most obstacles.

I started my career in a corporate context in IBM. At the time it was a 50,000 employee organisation and it was going through turmoil. In the early 90s, it declared the largest ever loss by a company, which was $53 billion. And a new CEO came in by the name of Lou Gerstner and he solved that problem of saving IBM. It was an impossible task, because the only thing you could do was to break it up into small units, and I got to see his work from the inside.

To see someone wrestling with an almost impossible corporate challenge was phenomenal to watch. He was very much about, ‘we need to harness the power of all the parts of IBM to do something nobody else can do’, rather than take the easy path which is to break it up into separate units and everybody does their own thing. Communities came together and integrated to become stronger, so he was someone who inspired me.

Jobs in Climate Tech

Below are some job opportunities from our friends at Work In Green – there are 6,000 job opportunities listed on the global job board, so check them out if you’re job hunting.

Based in Europe

Octopus Energy is looking for a Commercial Finance Director

Octopus Energy Group is made up of 10 businesses spanning 6 countries across 3 continents, including: Octopus Energy Retail, Kraken Technologies, Octopus Energy Generation, Kraken Flex, Octopus Electric Vehicles, and the Octopus Centre for Net Zero.

CarbonChain is looking for a Lead Product Designer

CarbonChain enables companies to track, report and reduce their supply chain emissions, covering the most carbon-intensive industries and products (metals and mining, oil and gas, agriculture).

Fluence is looking for a Marketing Associate

Fluence is the leading global energy storage technology and services company, created and backed by Siemens and AES, two industry powerhouses and pioneers in energy storage. Fluence unites the scale, experience, breadth, and financial backing of the two most experienced icons in energy storage.

Based in US

Natron Energy is looking for a VP of Product Engineering

Natron Energy is the world's leading developer and supplier of high power, long life, and low cost Prussian Blue Sodium Ion battery solutions for critical power and industrial applications, including data center UPS systems and electrically-powered materials handling equipment.

Climax Foods is looking for a Chief Marketing Officer

Climax Foods is a data science company innovating the future of food. It has developed sophisticated machine intelligence tools to unlock smarter paths from plants to products, creating a new generation of plant-based foods that will out-compete animal-based predecessors.

If you’re looking for help with obtaining your goals and growing beyond expectations in 2023, I’ve got a great opportunity for the right climate tech company to receive support and leadership from an executive with over 25 years experience in: technology, cleantech, funding, earn-outs, M&As, angel investors - series A, legal, sales.

I can personally vouch for his exceptional people management skills and passion for helping climate tech businesses succeed. If you’ve got a fast-growing business and need someone to help with management in a non-executive role (part-time), request an intro and I’ll connect you!

An experienced Account Executive, Joe Chandler, is seeking a role to help a climate tech company grow their client base. Reach out to him on LinkedIn.

Would you like to support the GT and place an ad?

Consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $100 a year or $10 a month.

Further Reading

Check out these posts from my Forbes climate tech column:

Meet the Startup Tackling the $22 billion super pollutant - nylon

The World Would be 25% Hotter if the Ozone Layer Hadn’t Recovered

These Next Generation Wind Turbines Double up as EV Chargers

Do you have a job or an investment opportunity you would like to advertise?

Get in touch and we’ll publish it in The Green Techpreneur.

Where ever you are, have a great weekend. 🥂

#SparkTheTransition

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Dear Santa,

I don't need toys and I don't need sweets. I would just like a lamp that stays on when there is no electricity." 🎄- boy in Ukraine at NGO Care in Action's creative Hub writing to St. Nicolaus.

It's been 25 years since my parents first set foot in Ukraine to start Care in Action, the team pivoted quickly since the war - helping vulnerable children find safe homes, continue education, and overcome trauma.

For this Christmas special edition, I spoke to Maria Boiko, the Director of ‘Turbota V Dii’ - the Ukrainian branch of Germany-based Care in Action.

For Maria Boiko, this will be a Christmas unlike any other. Like millions of Ukrainians, her life was turned upside down at Russia’s shock invasion.

“And a lot has changed since February 24th. We work with children in care and with foster families and vulnerable youth. But within a week of the war starting, we expanded our work to support internally displaced people. Many, many people have come to L’viv since the war, one of the reasons is because it feels safe as it's the most western part of Ukraine. And the other reason is that it’s a cultural hub, and it has a lot of opportunities.

“From March onwards we started renting out beds in hostels to accommodate people who had to leave their homes. Sometimes we would accommodate 200 people at a time and we added new services for internally displaced people. Because after the shock, the main thing people needed was a secure place and food.

“Many people needed psychological support, because they mentally refuse to believe that the war will last for a while, and they didn't want to look for a job. Like ‘why would I look for a job. If I'm not going to stay here. I will go home back home soon.’ So we got a psychologist to help people recover. We hired a social worker in July to accompany families to help them with a range of needs, like legal advice, medical treatment, getting needed documents with a certificate of internal displaced person or getting a child into school. Some people decided to emigrate as refugees and we helped them with transfers to the border. We also started a care centre, which provides 20-30 beds for women and children,” says Maria.

But despite the tragedy of war, the chaos of blackouts, and living through an energy crisis where the country has lost 40% of it’s electricity due to Russian attacks on the grid, Maria says Ukrainians remain determined to celebrate Christmas in style:

“On Christmas, we traditionally have 12 dishes.”

In honour of the 12 disciples, the traditional Ukrainian Christmas lays a feast with 12 dishes; verenyky (dumplings), Holubtsi (rolled cabbage), compot (dried fruit compot), fish, borsch, pancakes, pyrizhky (hand pies), Kapusniak (sour cabbage soup), Kutia (sweet grain pudding), peas, Pampushky (yeast bread)…

“We also put Didukh…wheat stalks on the table - it symbolises the spirit of our ancestors,” says Maria.

“Children go Christmas carolling, they sing for their neighbours and its a chance for them to earn some sweets and coins. We also have a nativity skit tradition, where a crew dresses up and goes door-to-door to perform.

“For believers, the most important thing is to go to church. There are some Christmas services that last all night.

"To keep our spirits high, Ukrainians don’t want to give up traditions which make us happy, and celebrating will be a sign that Ukrainians are unbreakable.”

What impact have the energy grid attacks had on Ukraine?

Let's start with the bigger picture. It’s had a big impact on business, and some businesses had to stop. Others had to learn how to survive, and maybe they had some shortages in the companies or had to raise prices, because now it's big expense to buy generators or other things to make it work.

And I was reading an article, that one big company which works with in the metallurgy sphere, they had 5,000 employees, and now they have 20.

It is expected that by the end of this year, 30 % of the population will be without work.

We have regular scheduled power cuts. And power cuts often last for four hours – sometimes you can have at least eight hours a day without electricity.

But sometimes there are also emergency power cuts which are unexpected. So sometimes you have 16 hours a day without light, it affects hot water and cooking.

There are some buildings that don't have a gas supply and they fully depend on electricity, electrical stoves, and heating – so they would not have heating or be able to cook so people come up with alternative solutions like a portable stove.

I guess when there are many children in a family, it's really difficult to do everything within the four hours of having electricity. A lot of children have long-distance education, and it’s really difficult to keep up with school because of the power cuts – you don’t have WiFi, you don’t have heating.

How has your personal life been affected?

In my personal life, at the office, we are able to work because we always have light. There are some rumours that there is a court office or something important nearby. We have a creative hub with a daycare for children so it's not affected.

But I live just three minutes walk from here, and we have power cuts and my husband works remotely teaching English so when we have power cuts, he can't work at all. He would be out of work, but luckily, because we have WiFi at my office at Creative Hub, when there is some space here he comes here.

Our heating depends on the light, we tried to put an electrical heater when there is heating so because the gas heating doesn't give much warmth. And also we just sleep under a huge warm blanket, so it's warm under the blanket, but if I just touch the top of my head, I can feel how cold it is.

How have you been supporting people through the winter?

We’ve been providing people with warm blankets, sleeping bags, and camp lights which can last up to 24 hours when there is no light, and it’s really helpful. I use it to cook, read, and when I go to the bathroom or have a shower.

Just this Monday I travelled with a colleague to family-style orphanages to bring a displaced family a generator. A family is starting again here after their home and the hospital and schools were destroyed in Mykolaiv. They don’t intend to go back - there are no prospects for the children with the school completely destroyed.

The Father is an electrician so they made a plan for how to make it work at home with the generator. The generator will help the kids to keep up with their education, because the power cuts impact education a lot, and they have several teenagers. One of the teenagers is taking an English course which will give her access to take part in an exchange programme in the US. So for her it's also highly important to do that course and learn English, so they were very happy.

What’s the best way for readers to help with donations?

You can check our Care in Action website, and donate via bank card or through Paypal.

Karolina Ottspodina, Founder of We Do Solar, is a Ukrainian entrepreneur based in Berlin. She is on a mission to make home grown renewable energy available to everyone – whether or not you own a home.

The We Do Solar kit consists of 8 solar panels that can be installed on your balcony, they’re super lightweight and thin and they’re easy to install. We have an app where you see how much CO2 you’re saving and how much electricity you’re producing.

“We launched in February this year. It was a complete coincidence that the war broke out at the same time. It definitely was a super hard time because I also have family, and a lot of friends in Ukraine. I was going to the borders, picking people up, developing my product, talking to investors, and it was just a completely crazy time. But now it's a bit easier because I know that everyone is at least safe,” says Karolina.

“Right now, we’re shipping to 24 countries in Europe and we will have the UK on that list very soon. There is huge demand for the product and of course, when the war broke out, our demand went up.”

Is this a solution that could help people in Ukraine?

Absolutely, in the future. We are in contact with the government in Ukraine and can launch in Ukraine when the time is right.

Right now, what is needed in Ukraine is generators which are off-grid. My solution works when the grid is there.

How much of a cost reduction do people get with your balcony-installed solar solution?

It depends on how much you can install in your home and every single country has its own regulation on how much you can install by yourself without an electrician. So for example, in Germany, it's 600 watt and this is what our set currently provides. It's 600 watt, and that can reduce up to 25% of your electricity bills.

Of course, if you want to install more and you have the space also to install more, you can do so with the help of an electrician.

How will you be celebrating Christmas?

I do celebrate Christmas of course, but it's nothing big. It's more having a meal with your loved ones, rather than anything else. So I guess for me, it's just calling my family and making sure that they're okay and just having a conversation.

And because of some of my beliefs, I don't have a Christmas tree. I have a palm decorated in my home because we don't need to cut down trees I think for this holiday. I hope that many people will change their ways as well and will realise that it's not really about having a tree in their household, but it's more about family and just being together. And that's what's most important, not to harm our planet but to do something, which is good for the soul.

Looking for investors

Soltiles developed an aesthetic, highly efficient and affordable solar roofing tile with curbside appeal, that generates 40% more power than comparable and with Li+ battery. It provides energy 24/7.

BIPV is expected to reach a market value of nearly US$100 billion by 2031 - PV Tech the building-integrated PV (BIPV) market is expected to reach US$94.4 billion by 2031, up from US$11.7 billion recorded in 2021.Most researchers agree that Climate Change is a crisis that will have severe effects on earth starting 2030. The $500Billon annual damages currently will increase to $2.0+ Trillion in 2030. Putting solar roofs on every home will reduce GHG by 38% and UP TO 55% if we power all electric cars via our roofs.

The opportunity

Quasi Equity/ for product certification Institutional capitalInstitutional capitalTotal10,000,000$ 95,000.000$ 95,000,000$200,000,000$1. Offer: Soltiles is selling Preferred quasi-equity shares in manufacturing its solar roofing tiles. Investors will receive all profits before any other distributions are made.2. Request: Soltiles is requesting scaleup investments of 10M€ to 85€++ quasi-equity, it will be matched by an institutional fund after product certification.3. Financial Benefits: The Investors will receive at least 5 bottom line benefits: 1) 18-40% return on equity investment,2) 946 Million tons of Green House Reduction,3) Created over 1,500 job equivalents (direct, indirect and induced jobs) 4) Creating 4.6€ Billion economic growth5) Meets Fiduciary Golden standard.6) Awarded Solar Impulse Foundation Economic Soundness Award. 7) Awarded Two H2020 Grants4. Market Drivers for 250MW manufacturing facility in France and USA:a. 30% Manufacturing investment Tax Credit for solar and LI-Ion batteryb. 100% finance for solar products made in France at 0% interest ratec. 100% waiver on electricity tax for our customersd. 100% waiver of social security tax for manufacturing up to 200€M in revenuee. 80% of French people want to make their OWN electricity according to a public survey.f. Request: Soltiles is requesting scale-up investments, it will be matched byinstitutionals.g. Europe has Green Deals for converting society to 100% fossil free by 2045. h. Moderate business risk offset by favourable energy transition market.5. SOLTILES IN THE LEADSolar remains a favorite target for negative commentary and doom and gloom pundit predictions, however, the company remains stubbornly successful overall. It's had a couple of ... days, but its valuation remains above $350Million.

Soltiles has a first-mover's advantage that's hard for rivals to challenge, let alone beat. It has positioned itself as the Ultra High efficient solar tiles market leader at a time when a historic pivot from Fossil Fuels to solar power and batteries looks extremely likely in the near future. It has a very prominent name despite having close to zero advertising budget, and it is proposing investing in two factories aimed at meeting surging demand, and likely to help capture market share once the electric metamorphosis "takes off."

News out of Europe indicates approval for certification and demonstration will come in the immediate future, with Soltiles third generation Tandem cells built starting in Fall 2024 and Level 4.0 automated manufacture ramping up from there. In the US, another vast potential market, planned expansions likely to soon increase this to another 250MW to 500MW. Soltiles, where it recently relocated its headquarters, is a facility expected to come online by 2024's beginning, which will supposedly be producing 250MW to 500MW annually.6. Soltiles roof system includes a Breakthrough new battery chemistry that we have added to our product. We present a low risk high reward IMPACT investment opportunity that is 2x more efficient than standard Li-ion battery.

Contact Soltiles about investing at: tfaust@soltiles.net

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I’m looking for 20 Green Techpreneur readers who want to become GT Founding Members:

A Founding Membership costs $500 and benefits include:

*    LinkedIn for Sustainability Leaders Course

* Free advertising on The Green Techpreneur newsletter (1 ad placement)

*    Exclusive invites to members-only online events

* A GT website article (1-dedicated article subject to Terms & Conditions)

* Boosted networking in the GT online community

* Your name and company listed on the soon-to-come Founding Members’ section of the GT website

….and you’ll have my gratitude and some gifts and surprises! 🙂

Hello Green Techpreneur readers,

After interviewing countless founders and investors and writing about their founder launch journey, I figured it was time to share my story and tell you why I started The Green Techpreneur. I’ll join my interviewees in the vulnerability arena and reveal the behind-the-scenes blood sweat and tears, the hustle and grit that lies in front of, and behind those who choose the entrepreneurial path. Fasten your seatbelts and get ready for a wild ride.

The truth is that in March 2018, when I quit my job as a reinsurance journalist and moved from Brighton to London, I didn’t set out to build an online business or have any dreams of starting The Green Techpreneur. I set out to not be miserable.

I had worked two jobs for one year after finishing my MA in Multimedia Journalism: juggling a part-time, back office job at American Express alongside a 6-month unpaid internship and then a part-time role as a video journalist at Brighton’s local broadcast TV channel – LatestTV. In that chapter of life, two worlds collided.

The corporate world was well-organised and well-managed. I had monthly one-on-one meetings with my manager: a performance review where I was given a chance to discuss any training I wanted to progress in. My work was dull but voluntary overtime was paid 1.5x normal rates, and cake was often passed along the long rows of desks – there was always someone who had a birthday in Amex’s giant, shiny European HQ.

In a chance encounter, I had met someone at a party towards the end of my studies who referred me for an internship at LatestTV. LatestTV was a pub by night and a broadcast studio by day. It smelt of beer, musty furniture and sweat. Equipment was old, heavy, and often missing a piece or breaking down. LatestTV was born because magazine owners in Brighton had gotten a 2-year startup BBC grant to launch a news channel – it was part of a nationwide attempt by BBC, backed by some MPs, to bolster the dying local news sector.

Sadly, the programme was largely unsuccessful, and nearly all fledgling local news start-ups collapsed when the grant money ran out. What it did do, was offer an army of young aspiring journalists a brief window of opportunity to get their foot in the door of a highly competitive, struggling sector.

I would often work a half day at Amex and then run out to LatestTV, pick up a backbreakingly heavy old camera and tripod and whiz off on a news mission, writing the script for the 2-minute news package as I took a bus to the shooting location or interviewee. As a one-woman show, I learnt how to shoot, edit, write for broadcast and self-record my piece-to-camera.

My first paid job with LatestTV was to report on the controversy caused by a photo of Brighton’s naked bike ride. I spoke to local charities, priests, scientists, businesses, residents and politicians. I was paid £60 per day and had to produce two 2-minute news video packages a day. This left me often spending evenings and weekends doing unpaid overtime to catch up on video editing. It was tough, but my heart was in it.

For LatestTV, however, the writing was on the wall. BBC grant money was running out and the company was edging closer to bankruptcy. And after over a year of juggling two jobs, I was running out of energy. I’d gotten my foot in the door of a media career and it was time to move on. But across the UK, media was in trouble. It was incredibly daunting to be running towards an industry that was increasingly fighting for survival.

During my MA, I had done a one-week placement at a local London newsroom and had stayed in touch with one of the reporters. She had been out on the street protesting when her newsroom closed down not long afterwards and she’d begrudgingly gone on to get a job at a tabloid. It was a global phenomenon: in the booming age of social media, tech giants had become the winners and newsrooms the losers. Companies were spending advertising dollars to pay for ads on social media, not newspapers. Many media outlets have since transitioned to putting up paywalls – but less freely available, verified reporting comes at a cost to democracy.

I found that more jobs were going in finance-related journalism than most other news sectors. I got a role in a reinsurance news startup and moved into the world of risk management, cat bonds, insurance-linked securities and…churnalism. There was little to no original reporting. I regurgitated, rehashed and respun press releases, industry reports and articles. I churned and churned and churned – under pressure daily to spin out article after article – produce, produce, produce.

At least I had my weekends free. I tried to write a blog about environmental issues on the weekend. Two years earlier I had gone down the rabbit hole of learning about climate change and I couldn’t unsee what I saw. I had stumbled on an article that shocked me and then I dug in and dove deeper and deeper: oceans close to collapse, soil degradation, soon more plastic than fish in the sea, climate chaos, floods, droughts, freshwater depletion, an existential crisis ahead. I was shocked.

This was before the climate crisis had become front and centre of the news agenda. Why weren’t people talking about how bad things were? Why was most of the world walking around with their head in the sand? Why were people carrying on with life as normal? It was madness.

From that point on I became an activist. I made lifestyle changes to live more sustainably and started encouraging others to do the same. At the Amex office Starbucks cafe, hundreds if not thousands of disposable coffee cups were thrown away daily. I talked about it with my manager; ‘if everyone could keep a mug at their desk and take it down to the cafe, we wouldn’t have to produce so much waste.’ It was easier to create this change at the reinsurance news startup and the boss did buy reusable cups to keep at the office and replace disposables.

As time wore on, my churnalism role ground me down. I regurgitated content at speed day after day, had burn out, and lost all enjoyment I had once had in the creative process. I robotically moved through each day, counting down the hours until work was over and I could go home. In evenings and on weekends I felt exhausted and brain-dead. What had it all been for? Taking out a loan to do an MA in Multimedia Journalism, long evenings spent practising shorthand and studying media law, unpaid internships – to become this low-paid – (I was on 19k a year) – content factory worker? I became increasingly miserable and despondent. I had to break free.

After several months of trying to find a new role in London, I decided to quit my job. I felt I had nothing to lose.

I moved to London with £4,000 in savings and a promise to myself that I would never again live a life of existence. I would do whatever I had to do, but I wanted to truly live each day, not count down the hours until it was over.

I moved into a property guardianship – a scheme where empty buildings waiting to be sold are converted into temporary homes and rented out at a discounted price. I had a room in what had been an office block, and a makeshift shower and kitchen. I was elated. I remember snow falling in a cold winter spell in London and the sheer joy of being in the city with all its diversity and bubbling aliveness. The run-down grungy areas, the elegant parks, the modern skyscrapers and the old pubs.

I had an open highway ahead of me, a clean slate, and it was mine to write on.

I started applying for jobs and had gotten an offer for a role I knew I didn’t really want, but then a friend gave me a ticket to a tech conference that he’d been unable to attend and suggested I use it as a networking opportunity. I had often thought of freelancing as a better alternative to churnalism, but I imagined it would be nearly impossible to achieve – a far-off dream. But what if….what if the self-employment path was possible? I had to try.

Armed with a business suit and business cards that stated the areas I could write about, I made a point of speaking to as many people as I could, passing out my card and asking them if they needed a freelance writer. When I told a conference goer I had quit my job to move to London and become a freelance writer, he said, “it’s a bold move,” I replied that “fortune favours the bold.”

In that conference, someone referred me to a contact who gave me some unpaid work which led to me quickly finding paid freelance work. I had done the thing I thought was impossible, and the red sea had parted before my eyes. I was over the moon with my luck and I became more bold. What if the things we think are difficult are actually easier than we imagine and if we just take the next obvious step in that direction in faith, the next step will become clear?

So I kept on, pushing through fear and uncertainty, stumbling forwards. I quickly learnt that I could get into just about any conference if I requested a media pass. I loved learning about the latest innovation at tech conferences, and I’d look for and approach editors and ask them if they worked with freelancers. I joined and got support from the National Union of Journalists and started sharing my experiences in their panel discussions about freelancing. I joined Google campus’ co-working club and made a friend who was developing a business idea, she suggested I join The Allbright – a private members co-working club for women.

I’d meet these impressive, ambitious women, many of whom had quit the corporate world to pursue a business idea, and felt sheepish introducing myself as a freelance copywriter and journalist. I’d return to my makeshift home in the property guardianship and listen to and be inspired by podcasts about entrepreneurship.

I allowed myself to dream and created a vision board and goals for different areas of my life.

At the Allbright, I was matched with a mentor. I had three business ideas related to the environment, building networks, content and activism, but I was in analysis paralysis, afraid to run with one idea out of fear I’d make the wrong choice. My mentor helped me select an idea. Six months later, when the pandemic hit, my life changed; a window of opportunity emerged and The Green Techpreneur (GT) was born. It led to me getting a Forbes Contributor role to write about climatetech.  A year later, another mentor appeared who consistently supported The GT’s growth and encouraged me to grow my support base with board members.

I’ve long since been a fan of motivation and marketing coach Brendon Burchard. Two of his quotes have stuck with me and become my business mantras:

·      However small you start, start something that matters.

·      When you are willing to learn and believe in your ability to figure things out, then fear becomes tameable.

I’ve bootstrapped The GT – gradually building it as an online resource, podcast and network for climatetech. The course of my life has been shaped by chance encounters and referrals and I believe in the power of creating networks. You never know when one new contact will be transformative for someone’s business or life.

I’ve often rallied against the negative, fear-based bias in the media. Studies have shown it creates anger and frustration that can lead to populism and apathy. Why do we hear so much about murderers, criminals and random accidents, and not enough about all the amazing people and incredible visionaries working on solutions? We need to regain a sense that problems are solvable and that taking action delivers results to combat apathy.

By building The GT I’m creating the change I wish to see in the world. And this is what I love about climatetech innovators – they’re creating the change we need, not just sitting around talking about problems.

I built The GT over 2.5 years while juggling other work. When progress seems slow, I remind myself that I’m building something that matters, and when the way forwards is unclear, I believe in my ability to learn and figure things out. I’m still stumbling forwards.

This year I launched The Green Techpreneur website to transition from the newsletter and podcast into a one-stop shop for climatetech with features to encourage networking and business growth (a jobs board, publishing lists of startups looking for funds, a B2B advertising platform, a Youtube channel).

I’ve focused on plugging my knowledge gaps by taking courses in building an online business, marketing and lead generation. Along the way, I discovered that I’d spread my efforts too thin and I am learning to be more streamlined and strategic and focus on the route to profitability.

The progress I’ve made so far has been down to learning how to effectively use LinkedIn for audience growth and business development: I’ve built a valuable network without spending a penny on ads.

With comparatively little input, LinkedIn makes so much possible.

Here are a couple of stats:

·      The GT newsletter on Substack and LinkedIn has nearly 4,000 subscribers

·      The GT podcast has had 15,500 downloads

·      I have 8,700 LinkedIn followers in the climatetech sector

And although I’ve seen some climatetech leaders excelling at their LinkedIn game, the majority don’t have a consistent messaging strategy or the tools they need to succeed. That’s why I created a course – LinkedIn for Sustainability Leaders – where I’ve combined my own learning curve and observations about what works. If I’d had this knowledge when I first launched The GT, I would have saved many, many hours of time and grown faster.

I’m looking for 20 Green Techpreneur readers who want to become GT Founding Members and purchase the LinkedIn Leadership course for $500.

Founding Member benefits include:

*    LinkedIn for Sustainability Leaders Course

* Free advertising on The Green Techpreneur newsletter (1 ad placement)

*    Exclusive invites to members-only online events

* A GT website article (1-dedicated article subject to Terms & Conditions)

* Boosted networking in the GT online community

* Your name and company listed on the soon-to-come Founding Members’ section of the GT website

….and you’ll have my gratitude and some gifts and surprises! 🙂

Let’s #SparkTheTransition!

What the course covers:

·      Profile Optimisation

·      How to stand out as a sustainability leader – worksheet

o   Your mission, vision, and unique selling points

o   Share two types of news stories

o   Use global climate change influencers

* Purpose-driven posting

o   Relationship-building

o   Sales-oriented

* How to structure a post

* How to boost engagement

* How to use video

* How to research, select and use hashtags    

* Use AI tools to consistently grow your network and company followers

* Use AI tools for business development

* Tackling the algorithm

* How to share your story and founder launch journey

o   Proven viral messaging tactics

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As a fourth generation farmer, Pablo Borquez Schwarzbeck is acutely aware that in farming industries, long-term security and resilience needs an urgent overhaul.

The climate crisis and Russia-Ukraine war exacerbated food insecurity issues this year, leading to a $2.3 billion World Bank designated food security fund, but farmers aren’t getting the support they need to secure their produce and business in the first place.

“Farmers are often in a group that is largely taken advantage of,” says Schwarzbeck, “they take on 90% of the liability that comes with growing crops – it doesn’t really make sense for produce farmers to take all the risk and not get the majority of the return for that commodity.

“Most of the products that we consume come from emerging economies, and often the emerging economies are the ones that have the most fractured and broken or least accessible capital markets.”

But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure – what if there was a better way to support farmers so their harvests and income was sheltered from climate and macroeconomic shocks?

The question plagued Scharzbeck. He had travelled extensively throughout North and South America to meet farmers: “that’s where I really understood that the issues that I saw back home were the same issues everywhere,” says Schwarzbeck.

Agricultural commodities are often sold through intermediaries which means only a small percentage of the profits remain in the hands of the farmers: “a lot of the farmers will fail to make the product available to the end consumers because they don’t know where these consumers are ultimately – the clients that are willing to buy the product,” says Schwarzbeck.

The average piece of produce travels 1,600 miles to your plate, is handled x4 – x8 times due to non-value add middle-men, is rebranded x2 due to a fragmented market–making it extremely difficult to trace where produce has come from. Produce is marked up x3 – x6 as a result of changing hands so many times.

Was it possible to disrupt and eliminate these intermediaries to put more power in the hands of the producer?

Schwarzbeck set out to find answers. He launched ProducePay as a fintech and digital marketplace solution that gives farmers access to capital and connects produce-growers directly to the end buyer.

ProducePay also helps growers find end buyers in its marketplace and underwrites the farming and trading risk for growers, which involves weather, logistics, etc

Within 8 years since inception, ProducePay has helped 700 farms – worth about $4 billion of produce – get access to capital and receive the best return on their commodities.

What services do you offer farmers and how are you disrupting the market?

ProducePay provides Pre Season Financing from $200k to $5MM up to 12 months before harvest. It offers a new Quick-Pay service, which is a first-of-its-kind  Quick-Payfinancing option that allows growers to maintain cash flow by getting up to 96% of the value of their shipments within 24 hours after a buyer accepts the product.

How does ProducePay strengthen farmers’ resilience?

We build strong technical infrastructure that connects farmers to the consumers and services to allow them to reach customers. As the alternative solution for farmers, we provide strong markets of consumption, strong pricing, along with the capital and the infrastructure to reach those clients – this we believe is the formula for maximising long-term yields.”

We built a mechanism for traditional funds in the United States to reach farms all across the world. And by doing so we help the people that are best equipped to grow the fruits and vegetables to reach global consumers.

The startup venture and investment world now looks at agriculture with a very different light because they have seen what the world without access to food looks like. And it’s very scary, right?

During the pandemic where access to food was in question, it was our ability to ultimately help these farmers get the product to these places like Los Angeles that allowed us to make sure that we brought healthy food to the local communities that we work in.

How does your sustainability programme work?

As part of its support offer for farmers, our sustainability and decarbonisation programme evaluates and offers support on:

EXPERTISE

Do they have the expertise, the company infrastructure, accountants and other experts to help them manage effectively?

COMMERCIAL

Do we need to help this person have the proper relationships to be able to move and sell the product?

SUSTAINABILITY

What we ultimately focus on is whether something could theoretically be done in perpetuity, or if you’re doing something that is creating short-term gain at the expense of the resources of the community.

 Sustainability includes social responsibility. Are they doing things that ultimately make sure the people that consume this food will do so in a way that is healthy? Are you preserving the water to the point you’re not exploiting those resources?

We’ve launched the first decarbonisation initiative in fruit and vegetable farming, and by that we ultimately partnered with different experts to figure out how to help farmers understand how their particular commodity can reduce the carbon footprint of their farms – depending on the crop they’re farming. This includes anything from how they irrigate, what they apply to the soils and ultimately how they tilled the land.

What sort of growth have you seen?

In the last 18 months, we’ve tripled our market share. A lot of that has to do with our ability to take our model and successfully replicate it across different countries in the Western Hemisphere.

We’re very happy to see our model resonating with other geographies across the world. The produce industry has become largely globalised, and a lot of produce today is being grown in emerging economies. So it is essential for the success of our business and for the network effects that we can replicate our model across different different geographies. 

We’re very excited to follow this through until we can bring a new reality that is largely available to the farming community across the world. We’ve grown from North America and the Americas and our next expansion is mostly focused in Europe. 

If you were to look back in 10 years’ time, where do you want to be?

I’d like to be sitting down with my daughter and telling her once upon a time, the farming industry was much more impaired because they they lacked the technology or the data.

Ultimately, I think I can feel proud that I’m passing the baton on by showing her that everyone can help their industry in their own way. I did it by creating better technology, infrastructure and availability of resources. In some ways we can all help, so hopefully I can be passing the baton to my daughter, so she can start thinking about what she can do as a fifth generation farmer.

Do you have a mantra or a life philosophy that keeps you going?

My mantra is Be Better. I think humanity’s best moments or best innovations come from pushing yourself to exceed beyond our former self. It’s about having the humility to understand that regardless of who you are, how successful, or how enlightened, you can always learn something. If you can always see yourself as being one step before your next step to self improvement, then you can always be kinder or more philanthropic.

I think intergenerationally. Is this something that I would want my children to see me do? If the answer is yes, it means you’re doing something that you can feel proud of.

If you want to connect with ProducePay, reach out to: info@producepay.com 

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“When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.” —John F. Kennedy

Few crises are as pertinent today as the energy dilemma as we enter what is looking to be a lean winter. With millions of Europe’s most vulnerable facing the option to ‘heat or eat’ without government intervention for unbearable energy costs, the vulnerability of nations that depend on autocratic regimes to meet their energy needs has been laid bare. Energy independence is an immediate matter of national security and an environmental and social necessity. But a time of great crisis can also be a time of great opportunity; this is proving true for the transition to renewable energy – a climatetech sector that’s seeing growth like never before.

Anthony Agnew, Development Director of Yoo Energy, a sustainable energy fund and developer, working in wind, solar and battery early stage projects in Western Europe, has worked in renewables for 12 years. His clients span the globe stretching from Greece, the UK, Spain, Italy, Zimbabwe and Holland to the US and Latin America.

Anthony first discovered an entrepreneurial streak while studying Mechanical Engineering at uni – along with a friend, he built and developed a vodka business which grew in popularity. Shots sold far beyond the university bar: “at its peak, we were employing 36 people and selling vodka in China. It was a fascinating, interesting time, but it wasn't really where my heart was. I always wanted to go into sustainable energy.”

His next venture – an attempt to commercialise construction technology – was stopped in its tracks by the 2008 crisis. But it turned out to be the bend in the road he needed to move into where his true passion lay. He took the cue and launched his journey into green techpreneurship. Anthony set up a renewable heat and power installing business including solar pv, solar thermal, biomass & heat pumps and went on to find his niche as an enabler for renewable energy projects: “with any sort of project development or funding it's a case of just putting people together and making it work – it's all these disparate parts that you can bring together to create value.”

This year, he says, has been pivotal for renewable energy; from new government policies to an acceleration of investment, technology and projects, momentum is without doubt on the side of renewables.

“It's not a case of investor sentiment is quiet, renewables have been one of the highest performing sectors globally and it's a part of the super cycle. All of the government policy points that are coming out are increasingly helping that.

“So whilst the initial invasion of Ukraine certainly caused a bit of a pause on things, two months later, people realised that actually, it's going to drive up those power prices and certainly for the medium to short term, those power prices are going to stay high – that's the expectation for the next couple of years.

“Renewable energy and power generation is countercyclical, so it doesn't go up and down as stocks do; we always need energy and energy demand is typically going up anyway. There's now a greater demand and a greater return on investment in renewable energy power projects.”

Where is the renewable market headed?

Long-term planning for renewable power has really stepped up as a result of these high fuel costs. If you look at the US’ anti-inflation bill, it’s all about sustainability. The impact that can have in the US is huge. So it’s really exciting to see these things come forward as a result of the world suffering and showing that we can address some of these issues.

We're certainly seeing on the project side, in delivering sustainable assets, huge influx and growth.

And the COP agendas are furthering that. We've already seen New Zealand in 2018 banning all new offshore rights. We saw Quebec this year in April ban all new oil and gas licences, which for Canada, one of the top five oil and gas producers globally, is an incredible thing to state. That's huge. This is the ball rolling, there's the carrot and sticks and we're seeing more and more of that coming.

And aside from being forever a hopeful optimist, I'm seeing as I work on the forefront of all these technologies, that deployment rates are quickly and continuously on the rise. So we're seeing more people want to do renewables, in more markets, and more money coming into it – the whole thing is just growing and growing.

Where do you think there's a lot of potential, both geographically, and in the type of renewable energy?

I hope we’ll see a bigger upsurge in concentrated solar power because when you store heat in liquid salts, you can run it for an extra 4-8 hours and potentially almost get 24-hour power generation. This can be hugely effective in high solar yield locations like southern Spain. Solar with battery, wind with battery, anything with batteries helps the market.

I think we can get to 80% renewables deployment, without baseload power. You've got baseload power, which is something that generates power 24/7, like a nuclear power station, and then you've got intermittent power, like wind and solar, which is only going to create power when the wind blows and the sun shines, and then the batteries work to balance the load on those intermittent powers.

I believe it's absolutely possible to switch to running the world using fully sustainable sources. It's just a question of building momentum and also building these large networks of people who come together to make it happen.

What do renewable developers often get wrong and how they can improve?

For project development, you need to derisk the project as much as you can and you need to have five things lined up:

1. It's all about taking as much risk off the table as you can.

The investors are looking at it in terms of how do we get it past our debt providers and past the board?

2. You need to have the land and agreements for it in its place

3. You need to have the proven energy resource

- which is going to be the sun, the wind, or the supply of waste from a waste plant.

4. You’ll need to have the build permits

5. You need to have grid connection

Once you've got those five things, you've created value and it's pretty much plain sailing, then it's just engineering and construction which isn't risk by comparison to the early stages.

A lot of it comes down to making sure those parts are done really well. It’s showing the expertise you need to to derisk whatever it is that you're trying to do; having local people who have local knowledge and connections and who know how to get those permits as well as specific technical knowledge. Once you put those two together, they're quite potent.

Do you have any tips on derisking projects and getting the messaging right?

A lot of it comes down to the message and story; making sure it's presented in the best way possible.

It's always worth understanding your own strengths and weaknesses, because an investor will know or understand what your weaknesses are likely to be. You can say, ‘look, I'm not good at this, we need to get this part and we've done everything else.’

Keep it simple, don't over complicate things. If you have too many words on an investment memorandum you're going to lose everyone because investors are looking at 10-15 of these a day.

What type of support is needed to further accelerate renewable uptake?

The boulder is already running downhill. We just need more people to push the boulder and get obstacles out of the way. We already have the technologies we need to deliver.

There are so many fantastic technologies coming into the market. One of my clients is working with a technology to separate methane into hydrogen. If you run methane through an electrolyser it creates water and electricity – fantastic stuff. And they are sequestering the carbon into high value graphene. Graphene is this bonkers wonderful material, 10 times stronger than diamond and more conductive than copper. You can add it to concrete as an additive and you can get rid of reinforcing steel, for example, or you can use 40% less concrete, because it's that much stronger. 40% less, that use case alone, if it was fully deployed in the industry would create a 2% saving globally on carbon.

You always need support from the government to make it happen. But right now, you can build solar in the UK purely based on the current market pricing, and that's before Ukraine happened. You can build these without any support and they make money, so it's already happening, that ball is rolling. If it makes more sense to put solar on your house than not put solar on your house because you're going to live in a house for six years, then suddenly the world gets covered in solar.

UBS, for example, are advising their private wealth clients that renewable energy is where you should invest not because you like sustainability, not because you believe in the environment, but because it's outperforming everything else. And that's the perfect news story.

Do you have a philosophy or a business mantra?

Do the hard thing first. I think the most important thing is just to do the next thing, whatever is in front of you, just take that step and keep going.

Are there any mentors who've been influential in helping you on this journey?

One of the biggest influences in my life has been my wife. She's a trained executive coach and Head of Philanthropy at Barclays Bank. Having someone who thinks that well and that clearly is a huge challenge in your relationship and it can be very hard to take that advice in, but when you can set the child aside and be a bit grown up, there’s also huge potential for growth. She's been a wonderful engine in how I see the world myself and trying to basically get out of my own way all the time.

What do you do when it’s time to unwind after work?

I've got a four year old son who's just gorgeous. So playing with him at the end of every day is fabulous. I love food – so we often go out to Borough market. I'm a massive feeder, so having people around for supper and creating and cooking is a huge pleasure for me.

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Rhizome2 Hydrogen, Traceless, Utility Bridge, Everdye, Kyomei

Beworks Automation, Cultivated Bio, Phase Biolabs, Salient Energy

Further reading:

How Earthbanc is Helping Finance Mass Adoption of Land Regeneration

How to Transform Waste into Energy and End Fossil Fuel Dependency

www.thegreentechpreneur.uk

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From converting their office into a makeshift school for Ukrainian refugee children to planting 25 million trees to seeing 20% YoY revenue growth – Ecosia has continued to thrive and contribute throughout a year that’s been rocked with macroeconomic crises.

As a not-for-profit search engine, Ecosia punches above its weight in terms of impact; it’s planted an incredible 153 million trees, transformed entire communities and brought degraded land back to life. It’s a tribute to how the cumulative power of small actions taken by the collective over time does create truly powerful global change.

And it all started because as a teenage boy, Ecosia Founder Christian Kroll was touched by the plight of the poor during a trip to India and determined he would use his future career to learn how to harness technology to drive positive impact.

At university, Christian had created a comparison website and was earning money from commissions: “I realised how much money I was spending on online advertisement and that Google is a really good business model."

His university side-hustle became the idea from which Ecosia was born, but Ecosia’s explosive growth would only come after Christian persevered through several failed projects – it was his third attempt at building a search engine.

Today, Ecosia is the world’s largest not-for-profit search engine and one of the best-known cleantech companies of our time. Supported by 15 million users worldwide, it plants millions of trees every year across 26 countries and powers its engine with 100% renewable energy.

The Green Techpreneur caught up with Ecosia’s extraordinary founder, Christian, to share insight on how they’ve navigated today’s fast-changing business climate.

How has the last year been for Ecosia?

In terms of trees being planted, we’re at 153 million at the moment, so that’s roughly 25 million more trees since last year. Of course, if you compare this to the number of trees we need to plant, it’s still much less than we need. We’re planting more trees than ever, but we would like to plant much, much faster! We hope more people use us so we can plant more trees.

Do you have statistics on your year on year growth?

We’ve had about a 20% revenue increase compared to one year ago - all our progress and statistics are publicly available in the financial reports we publish. Everyone can check the numbers on our website.

What’s the goal that you’re working towards?

We need to plant a trillion trees as quickly as possible. We’re still far away from achieving that – by we, I mean not just Ecosia, but we as a global society – we have to scale up.

We calculated that if everyone used us instead of Google, we could plant around 300 billion trees every year and we would get to that 1 trillion very quickly – it’s not impossible but we need more users to do it.

How have you navigated the challenges of this last year with all the crises globally?

Covid is still a problem and we’ve also been affected by that with people not being able to come to the office and also people spending less online which means less revenue for us to some extent, but I think it’s affected us much less than other industries.

The other big crisis was the invasion of Ukraine by Russia – that was a big shock for us. As a company, we committed to upscale our investment in renewable energy to do our part to transition away from fossil fuels and all those autocratic leaders that hold us hostage.

In Ecosia, we made investments into renewable energy to not only power our own service, but multiples of that – 500% of what we consume ourselves. We calculated what Google could do if they did the same, they could almost finance the entire transition away from fossil fuels in the European Union within just a few years.

So if other companies did the same, we wouldn’t even have this problem, we would be energy independent and this invasion would probably not have happened.

Now with fossil fuels getting expensive and it hurting our economy, it’s a consequence of us not taking the measures we should have taken 10 years ago. Now we have to deal with it and we’re trying to do our part with investment in renewable energy.

We transformed parts of our office, which were not in use because of the pandemic, into a temporary home for Ukrainian school children and we supported a project that helped refugees find accommodation.

But one of the issues is that the climate crisis has gotten much less attention over the last two years. It’s always the elephant in the room. Yes, we need to deal with COVID. Yes, we need to deal with this war. But don’t forget about the big monster that is waiting for us. Our house is on fire and we should talk about that every day and act accordingly.

What strategies did you use to rebrand Ecosia?

When you build things, after a while they get outdated. Design-wise we had some old looks and things didn’t really fit together and nobody had the time to look at it.

We put in a joint effort to update it and make the brand a bit more exciting. We wanted to make it clear that this is more than just a search engine, it’s a big movement, it’s potentially the biggest movement to solve the climate crisis online.

We wanted to be bold in not only the looks but in the communication on our website, and we highlighted a few things that we felt were underrepresented.

Often, we get the question, ‘yes, you’re planting some trees, but you keep the profits for yourself?’ People misunderstand that very often and we have to correct it and say ‘no, we give 100% of our profits to solving the climate crisis, and this will be true forever. It’s impossible to take any profits out of the company. It’s impossible to sell the company.’

The new, more bold visual style fits better with what we’re trying to do at Ecosia.

You’ve just launched freetree.io as a new browser extension, was this something you built based on feedback from users?

To some extent, it’s something that we incubated within Ecosia.

Freetree.io is a browser extension that you can install in your browser and it allows you to plant trees when shopping online without having to pay extra.

For example, say you’re purchasing cat food in an online shop, if this shop is a partner, then freetree.io will automatically pop up and a share of your purchase value will go into planting trees. The good thing about it is that users don’t have to pay extra – it’s the shops that give a share of the purchase value.

The concept behind it is that online shops often pay commissions to partners to drive traffic; if I bring traffic to that shop I get a commission, we used that concept for tree-planting.

It’s super easy to install and it’s a great addition to Ecosia. Instead of just planting trees through searches, you can plant trees when browsing other websites: we have thousands of partners, so freetree.io works when, for example, you’re booking a hotel, purchasing something online, or subscribing to a service. If someone is a partner, you’ll automatically get a popup that asks you if you want to plant trees.

We’ve received good feedback so far and would like more people to use freetree.io – the more people use it, the more trees we plant.

What are the social impacts of tree planting with Ecosia?

We pay people to plant trees in very low-income countries, so the income financially supports the people there and it regenerates the degraded land so it’s fertile again. Many of the trees that we are planting generate income later.

We not only plant trees, we plant hope

We start a positive cycle. People realise, ‘this degraded land that has gotten worse and worse over time, I can turn this around.’ This is super inspiring - especially for younger people. We have community collaboration so people understand that the trees we’re planting are important for soil fertility, for stabilising the local water cycles and for the well-being of the entire community. All of that combined has a massive impact.

I sometimes think of trees as our superweapon in the fight against many different crises.

Do you have Ecosia forests made up of all the trees planted?

It’s more of a mosaic than one big Ecosia forest; we have more than 20,000 different locations where we’ve planted and most of them are a maximum of a few hectares big.

If you look at the circumstances on the ground, there’s often no space to plant one big forest, so it makes sense to have lots of small pieces.

What message do you want to leave the readers with?

The final message is to take individual action, whether it is reducing your carbon footprint, offsetting your CO2 emissions, or participating in environmental projects.

We have to be a lot more active when it comes to solving the climate crisis and it’s urgent that we do all these things and go beyond the small changes to approach the big topics.

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Sometimes a random encounter is all it takes to change the course of your life. This was certainly true for Uruguayan Santiago de los Reyes and Chilean Danilo Perez who met at a Latin American community networking event in New Zealand.

The two hit it off and together with mechanical engineer Freddy Gonzalez they started working together to bring Danilo’s innovation in energy-efficiency to market.

After years of painstaking research, Danilo had successfully turned his idea into a patented technology that makes anaerobic digestion and fermentation processes more efficient and faster to deliver, ultimately offering better quality renewable biogas energy at lower cost.

Vertus Energy technology unlocks an extra 60% energy from the same waste, and it does it three times faster than the current processes in place, reducing all ongoing costs while increasing both the quantity and quality of biogas processed. 

Benjamin Howard later joined the co-founding team, bringing expertise in commercial construction and a plan to help bring Vertus Energy technology to the UK.

“We all converge here in New Zealand as four migrants trying to do some good for the world. We got on pretty well and all have the mindset that we have to do something. It’s not an option to not do anything about the current energy situation that we live in,” says Santiago.

“Essentially, what we are trying to do is to develop a biological platform to make renewable gas more affordable and achievable in this energy transition era.

And with rising energy costs placing increasing financial pressure on consumers and businesses and the REPowerEU strategy aimed at reducing Russian gas imports significantly in 2022 and weaning Europe completely off of Russian energy by 2030 – the pressure is on to fuel the energy transition. Vertus Energy is ready to rise to the occasion.

What impact does your technology have on the energy industry?

Our technology impacts the biogas industry in two key ways:

BRIO is a small but powerful unit that lives inside the anaerobic digester. BRIO allows AD plants to process three times more waste in the same sized tank while delivering biogas with 60% more energy potential than ever before.

Our second technology, BODA, is carbon sequestration and conversion technology. BODA can either be used to “upgrade” the biogas from AD into Bio-methane or it can capture raw CO₂ and convert it into Renewable Natural Gas. BODA is a strong and powerful unit that eats CO₂ and H₂ to produce Renewable Natural Gas. 

Our technology unlocks an extra 60% energy from the same waste, and it does it 3 times faster than the current processes in place.

What challenges have you faced in setting up Vertus Energy?

We were looking to be that infrastructure company that would deliver the full anaerobic digestion plant along with our technology. However, with limited funding and resources, we decided to change our focus to developing a technology that can be implemented into existing anaerobic digestion plants. 

New Zealand is quite behind in the anaerobic digestion industry. Hence, one of the challenges we have right now is to develop a way to help regions that don’t currently have a mature biogas industry and to push the biogas industry forward.

Why is biogas a crucial part of the energy transition?

Biogas is the only fuel that can be upgraded and provide a direct drop-in replacement for Natural Gas without having to change any of the current distribution methods. This means that it can be one of the fastest renewable fuels to be implemented within the decade to help us towards net-zero targets and it keeps it affordable for consumers as we transition.

It can be produced from organic waste, which as humanity grows, is only going to increase. Biogas is very versatile. It can be used to produce electricity, heat, upgrade to renewable natural gas, replace many traditional fossil fuels in the transport sector and even provide sustainable aviation fuel from a carbon negative perspective. Its applications are truly endless. 

What are the opportunities for expansion for biogas as an alternative energy?

The biggest opportunity for the future for biogas would be to address energy security for communities that do not have reliable access to energy from renewable sources, but have organic waste that could be treated.

Currently biogas is used for a multitude of applications, but the Vertus technology will enable existing plants to deliver more biogas at higher energy quality, resulting in more fossil fuels being displaced. It will enable new plants to be much smaller and still deliver the amazing benefits of waste to energy.

Vertus could power schools, communities, households, restaurants, and the list go on, with energy from their own food waste. 

Who are your clients or pilot projects?

Large energy corporations who want to go green

We want to be working with any large corporations who want to decarbonise their energy production, distribution or assist their clients achieving energy security. The likes of Aramco, Shell, Exxon, Engie and those corporations who could really make a wholesale change for good in the fastest time possible.  

Existing biogas plants

We are currently working with a multitude of potential partners around the world. We are developing partnerships with some large existing biogas plant builders and owners in Europe to accelerate Europe's move away from Russian fossil fuel reliance that is currently causing so many issues.

Communities and local partnerships with cities and farmers

We are in partnership with an influential figure in Africa to establish how we deliver energy justice and energy security for communities and regions there. With our current base being New Zealand, we have developed many local partnerships. For example, an inner-city school which has a small educational farm, we now process some of their waste for them to prevent methane emissions.

The gas from our laboratory is going to be used to recharge electric scooters in the city and provide them with off grid power. We are working alongside several farmers who have a waste and renewable energy problem. We are surrounding ourselves with key partners that can help us scale our technology offering and we're working towards our purpose of energy justice for all. 

We want to be an energy innovation hub; we want to collaborate with everyone that wants to make this world a better place.

Can you give me 5 surprising facts about biogas?

1.     The most surprising fact is that it can be a carbon negative energy source and thus aid global cooling.

2.     It comes from a completely natural process that was first identified by the Egyptians nearly 4000 years ago. The first use of biogas in the UK was in 1895 when it powered streetlamps in Exeter from Sewage waste.

3.     It can either create and/or store energy for decades without losing any of its power.

4.     It's versatile. The energy it produces can be used in a wide variety of cases. From electricity generation through to Sustainable Aviation Fuel.

5.     It solves many societal and environmental problems in one application. It comes from organic waste and delivers high power renewable energy. Interesting fact: there is enough organic waste in Africa to provide the 600 million people that live in Sub-Saharan Africa with renewable electricity for life. 

Does your technology work with existing infrastructure?

Yes. In our business model we pay for the installation of our technology into existing infrastructure. It can have a real impact because it can be distributed through already established and well-connected networks.

Biogas and biomethane is an amazing part of the transition because it can utilise the current infrastructure without need of new engines because it can directly replace natural gas.

Why is it important that various alternative energy types are used together?

We could produce enough solar power in summer to power New Zealand throughout the whole year, but there is no storage capacity for that, and gases like hydrogen and biogas could provide an option for easier energy storage capacity and winter supplies.

There's a reason our energy matrix is so complicated and so intertwined. You have some renewable energies, you have some biofuels, and they all have their inherent best applications and their best delivery methods. And there needs to be that crossover to achieve what we need to achieve in the timeframe that we have available to us.

Scientific data suggests that if we only stick with carbon neutral technologies we have a 50-50% chance of averting climate disaster, essentially. So we have to start focusing on carbon negative fuels, which inherently is anaerobic digestion, and where that waste comes from.

So let's utilise waste and turn it into a resource and a valuable fuel that stops carbon and stops emissions from reaching the atmosphere. 

What is the most frustrating part of your work?

The thing I've struggled with most is getting across and really articulating how vital this type of technology is.

What gets you up in the morning?

Santiago: “What gets me out of bed every morning is that I'm sure that I’m going to get a new email in my inbox saying, “Yes, I'm really interested in what you're saying, let's have a chat.”

Benjamin: “As a team, we all come from different backgrounds and different cultures but we all have our own individual purposes that the company really feeds into, and I think as we grow and scale it will allow each of us to realise those personal purposes within Vertus Energy as part of the bigger purpose. We live at the bottom of the world, and we work with people everywhere in this planet.”

What difference do you hope Vertus Energy to have made in 10 years’ time?

I think the biggest difference is to have realised that change with decentralised energy networks that have brought the biogas and renewable gas industry to where it can be and where it needs to be to provide what the world needs.

Do you have a favourite quote or motto?

Santiago: I’ve been reading Atomic Habits the last few months and everyday do 1% more is something that is on my mind very strong right now. And that is what I’m trying to do in the lab, in the office, and in every relationship that I’m building with other people – everyday is 1% more.

Benjamin: ‘Sola Virtus Invicta’, which means courage is invincible.

As a team we’re already delivering on that, delivering a brand-new technology and gaining funding for the first time and everything that we went through last year. I personally feel that kind of epitomises what we're doing at Vertus Energy and that's what keeps us moving forward and making those big, courageous decisions to take those steps forward.

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Skyfri’s technology targeted a genuine market pain point and within just a few months of launching, company growth soared by 500%. And with Skyfri’s solar asset management solution offering immediate savings of operating heads by 20-30% for power plants that were previously manually managed, their skyrocketing growth is hardly a surprise.

Backed by climate investors SpeedInvest, Singularity and Link Venture, Skyfri manages about 185 sites worldwide and is dramatically accelerating growth through targeted acquisitions.

Pratik says there was a strong element of right place, right time serendipity to Skyfri’s growth: the solar market was in desperate need of a better management solution, to a point where money and investors may have started to flow out of the space if more efficient ways of operating weren’t found.

But the most important component of Skyfri’s success, he says, was not the market or the service or technology they provide – it was the people behind the name.

“What’s the most important thing I’ve seen in my journey as an entrepreneur?

“It’s that your team is your biggest asset.

“Most of the time you fail as an entrepreneur because you just don’t have likeminded people. You don’t have people who you can depend on. Because you alone can’t be a one man army.

“For me, having a co-founding team, not just a co-founder, was the key for Skyfri.

“I do my 10% of the work, they their 90% of the work and we all do it together. If we hadn’t found that team, we probably wouldn’t be here,” says Pratik.

To launch and build Skyfri just before the pandemic shook the world, the co-founding team had to take a leap of faith; “we started recruiting people to work remote, that’s how we grew. It was six months before I even met my co-founders in person – by then we had already raised funds.”

His motto? “The entrepreneur’s job is to make the receptionist rich.”

In this Green Techpreneur interview, Pratik talks all things growth, solar and team-building.

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Where did the idea behind Skyfri come from?

My co-founders were all serial entrepreneurs in Oslo, Norway. We’ve known each other since almost five years now - since 2017 when I was working as Head of Global Sales in a manufacturing company in Munich. They wanted to develop a solar project. I went my way and became a global asset manager in London, but we always kept in touch and thought we could one day do something together.

And incidentally, we found we were all facing similar issues. In 2020, we started connecting with each other; we had these solar power plants that didn’t work. We didn’t know what was happening, it was like a black box that we didn’t understand and our investment was at risk. So we decided to do something about it and we had a breakthrough from a technological point of view and that’s how Skyfri was born.

What are key elements to working together successfully as co-founders?

The most important thing is, you all share a common vision, you all have the same pain points, and you all are frustrated with the status quo. You have to be frustrated with the status quo to start something new. There’s no way the world moves ahead with incremental changes, you have to change things overnight, or at least have the ambition to change things.

What does your technology do?

We wanted to make solar plant management more systemized, we wanted to modernise it with automation. We target and transform three key underperformance areas:

We identify energy losses in real-time

When reporting happens on the asset management, you get a report after a month or a quarter and you suddenly realise that some of your plants didn't work. Something burnt out and needed replacement and by the time you know you already lost revenue and need to spend more to fix the issues. So we wanted to know exactly when things fail, or even futuristically predict when they might finish or start showing signs of underperformance. That's real-time management. 

We break the silos

We wanted to fundamentally change the system of operations, accounting and monitoring as siloed systems to have this be a single source of truth in a single integrated platform.

We do all of this autonomously 

The algorithm runs on machine learning, deep learning setup, and it monitors solar plants and does things automatically that previously needed a 20–30 member team depending on portfolio size. So the final value proposition to the investor goes back in the form of increased rate of return.

What’s your knock-on impact on the solar industry?

20 years ago it cost 5 million Euros to build one megawatt of solar power – now that figure is just 0.5 million Euros per megawatt: because of the immense drop in capital expenditure, it has already become a mainstream class asset but what would have derailed its potential is the lack of management of the solar power plants – and that's where we come in. We are seeing an increased amount of investment and we want to not only sustain that money, we want more to come in to reduce global warming.

If we had not done it, we probably would see the capital drain out of renewable energy investments.

What is it about entrepreneurship that gives you that kick, and makes you go ‘yes, this is what I want to do!’?

You of course have your freedom of thought, everyone has it in a free world. But the freedom of execution to channel the energy that you have without having to stick to a frame structure which already exists is what's most interesting.

And the second thing is, at the beginning of entrepreneurship, there’s a lot of energy and that's what makes you get up in the morning, and like my wife says, I’m less of a thinker than a doer. I like to do things, so there’s no better avenue than entrepreneurship.

Can you describe your entrepreneurial journey in three words?

Extremely busy, very interesting, very scary

What’s the scariest part about being a climatetech entrepreneur?

The scariest part is, ‘what if the team doesn’t feel the same way tomorrow?’

I’m not worried about the market, because it’s clear, the market is there, but I want the team to be equally passionate and what if tomorrow we wake up and start to see a lot of disconnect in the team? That’s the scary part. To keep everyone motivated in the team – that’s our biggest asset by far – I cannot overstate this.

The team has to stick together. Family is a cliche, but it’s a common vision, common mission that the team has to always feel, to always want to stay ahead of the curve by asking the most critical and even unpleasant questions – this is the motivation I want to see everyday in my team.

How do you create that team spirit?

We dislike the idea that there’s a value statement – because no one reads them – and the values may change over time.

What we think is there’s one value that doesn’t change and that is a sense of care. Care for each other, care for the people with whom you spend 85% of your waking time with.

And that care automatically translates into care for your customer. If you care for the customer and stand by them when they need help the most, that’s when you create lifelong loyalty.

And you can’t write it on the wall, so someone reads it and says; ‘I’ll be caring, I’ll be caring, I’ll be caring.’ It has to be your natural self, so he or she sees that care happening in the company all the time.

In the face of climate chaos, what gives you hope for the future?

I give a lot of credit to the youth of today. You have Greta Thunberg and she has inspired a whole generation of youth. They don't have the data points, but they just get it with the snap of a finger, that this is not sustainable, this is not how they want to live. That’s the movement that is happening in front of the line.

The second credit goes to the community of scientists that have been working tirelessly to prove beyond shadow of doubt that climate change is happening and we should do something about it.

If you could teleport yourself into your future, where would you be?

The company Skyfri would still be creating a lot of value as one of the most trusted and dependable in the internet enabled space. We will try to win the solar world and we’ll play a role in virtual power plants, the smart grid, anything that is on the supply side.

I don’t know what management capacity I’ll be in 10 years from now, because it’s nice to make room for the next generation to manage the company and we as co-founders step down at some point in time. I believe in that. But I want to be involved with everything that has to do with encouraging a sustainable lifestyle.

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He lived out on the land, in the vast, sun-kissed Australian outback, in an extended family farming community that would gather to help each other with the harvest:

“It was such a great time in my life, working together on farms in rural Australia. It was really instructive for me to learn about how nature works and some of the complex systems that farming operates within.

“There's moments of great beauty in nature and being immersed in it and just appreciating nature for its own wonder and amazement that we have so much biodiversity, so much abundance, and that's what really inspired me to this day to love nature the way I do, and do the work that I'm doing.”

“My mother was a positive influence on me, as a child we would pick native seeds and gum nuts, and make Christmas wreaths for people’s doors, to spread the Christmas cheer. We would sell these ornate Christmas wreaths at weekend markets out of the back of our family Holden station wagon.”

But Tom’s rural idyll was shattered by a boding realisation that extreme climate events were becoming more and more frequent. From a young age, he noticed a worrying pattern of the land increasingly being ravaged by more fires and more floods.

“Our farming businesses was hard work, long hours, and sometimes less than spectacular returns if there were extreme weather events.I could see the changing climate and water and soil fertility conditions on our farms deteriorate over the years - this was my wake up call.”

He decided he would be more than a witness to nature’s destruction and channelled his deep-rooted connection to the land into a life-long dedication to regeneration.

Fresh out of university, he travelled to Inner Mongolia and to the North Central Plains to work on large-scale grassland restoration projects.

After 15 years of working in land restoration he learnt that it’s “complex, difficult, it needs grassroots up as well as policy and incentive top-down to really succeed.” 

He noticed a disconnect between how we value, finance and incentivise regenerative and sustainable land management practices:

“I worked on some pioneering ecosystem service markets in Australia where farmers would bid to provide ecosystem services to improve water quality, biodiversity values and sequester carbon. 

“That project raised about $300 million and showed me that you could develop and deliver ecosystem services markets, but there just wasn't enough scale.”

For Tom, this was both deeply hopeful and deeply frustrating.

The solution to stopping runaway climate change was not only within reach, but in sight:

“By transitioning to regenerative agriculture across 2.5 billion hectares, humanity could sequester all of our global emissions every year.”

Yet there was no mass adoption of land regeneration; “it was still just the domain of government policy units and ad hoc programs, and when a government changes, the program might get scrapped or be toned down.

“I saw that there was a need for a mass market approach to financing land regeneration, and the creation of new incentivisation models.”

Tom founded Earthbanc – a digital green banking investment platform – as a groundbreaking private sector solution to bring regeneration to mass markets.

Earthbanc is bridging the market incentives gap with viable, proven and profitable investment solutions that are dramatically advancing the transition to a regenerative, sustainable future. Earthbanc’s climate fintech innovation was recognised last year when it won the Mastercard Lighthouse FINITIV program in Spring 2021, and the company is now ready to scale to the next level in the booming climate and fintech sector.

How do Earthbanc fintech solutions solve the problem of how to finance mass adoption of regenerative agriculture?

Finance has been missing from carbon project developments in a big way, and Earthbanc is solving that problem.

Earthbanc makes climate action profitable for any stakeholder.

It offers:

1. Verified carbon credits

2. Corporate and private investment accounts to invest in a carefully curated and audited portfolio of land regeneration/carbon removal projects

3. A regenerative finance (Refi) revolution for the masses: a soon-to-be launched app will enable anyone to easily invest in and profit from land regeneration projects.

Earthbanc’s green investments finance agroforestry, regenerative agriculture, mangrove and sea grass restoration, kelp forest protection, holistic grazing and more.

It’s aim is to enable sustainability-fuelled abundance as a core incentive for all of humanity.

It’s something that we need to live and we know that aligned incentives allow many different stakeholders to start moving in the same direction and toward the same goal.

A major problem that Earthbanc solves is providing the infrastructure and aligned incentives that not just allow trillions of climate finance funds to flow each year, but encourage it by verifying the climate and carbon reduction claims of the finance - enabling investors to trust in the outcomes by examining the data and claims. 

We sell carbon credits on our fintech blockchain platform

Earthbanc can be described as a carbon bank. We're the first fintech blockchain platform where you can deposit your carbon into a bank-like vault that sits on a blockchain. 

Farmers register on the Earthbanc platform, and we measure the carbon sequestration in the landscape of that farmer. 

How do you verify and measure carbon sequestration and credits?

Despite the growing corporate commitment to net-zero, its been difficult for carbon buyers to find third-party annually audited carbon credits. Earthbanc is solving this by offering the world’s first continuously audited offsets.

We use AI models that are trained on satellite remote sensing data from the European Space Agency, we then get that carbon credit verified as a true carbon reduction.

With venture backing from the European Space Agency, Earthbanc leverages AI, web3 and data science to annually audit the underlying carbon asset in carbon credits bringing increased transparency and credibility to carbon markets.

The company  has audited the carbon stocks of over 13M hectares of forest globally using satellites and proprietary remote sensing technology.

Who buys Earthbanc carbon credits?

We have large corporate buyers who are buying carbon on our platform every month. We’re selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of carbon, so a farmer can get paid for their ecosystem services.

What makes Earthbanc’s solution so potent in combating the climate crisis is its basis on expert knowledge of land restoration and paying farmers in areas of the world where the impact is the greatest – both for nature, and for people.

How fast is the carbon credit market growing?

Last year there was a 969% increase in nature-based solutions carbon futures contracts. It was hard to find a 969% growth in any asset class in 2021 – but it the growth was in futures contracts on nature-based carbon solutions which is what Earthbanc measures.

We mint the carbon on a layer one blockchain, and when we mint those carbon credits that are then available for sale on our market platform.

To democratise sustainable abundance through climate investing, Earthbanc is launching an app

The Earthbanc app will provide a carbon bank with easy on and off fiat ramps for users globally, including for the unbanked, bringing the next billion users into the regenerative finance revolution.

It's a desktop app that you can access on your laptop computer. It's not a mobile app yet, but once you sign up on our existing carbon investment platform, there’s a portfolio of carbon projects that you can purchase.

We've got a waitlist for the blockchain-based investments app, which is going to be launched soon. So we encourage people to sign up on the waitlist and register their email so they’re the first to find out how they can get access to these amazing opportunities.

Our platform will enable investors to access 8% fixed - 15% variable APY yields and finance nature-based carbon removal projects globally.

What impact do Earthbanc investors have?

At the individual level, Earthbanc makes investing in climate action easy and we make climate action profitable for those who are sequestering the carbon. They get the incentives that they deserve for carrying out regenerative land management methods.

There's a win for the farmers who are doing the hard work on the ground, getting their carbon incentive payments, and investors are able to benefit from the rising demand for carbon removal.

Earthbanc works with a network of NGOs and finances regeneration projects that protect the most vulnerable people and vital ecosystems at the forefront of the climate crisis

For a farmer on the ground in India, for example, if we talk about our mangrove restoration project, if someone buys carbon from that project, those farmers can start receiving a 91% increase in their annual salary.

This is just life changing for those people. These are some of the most climate vulnerable people in the world who are subjected to hurricane-driven storm surges washing away their homes, destroying their agricultural infrastructure, their power infrastructure. They're very vulnerable people so they need all the help they can get.

Planting mangrove trees prevents people from becoming climate refugees

By planting mangrove trees, it's creating a green wall against those hurricane-driven storms. This slows down the rush of water that comes every hurricane season, to a level where, by the time it reaches the villages it's just a steady trickle. That's incredibly important to protect those people's homes and pay them the carbon incentive to protect the most vital ecosystems on the planet so they don't become climate refugees.

Mangroves are where 50% of all fish clusters are born

In mangrove ecosystems in rivers, in estuaries, just like the Sundarbans in India, 50% of fish clusters are spawned. It's incredibly important for healthy oceans that we protect mangroves. For every 100 euros invested in this kind of project 200 euros of ecosystem services is created. This protects homes, creates livelihoods, and supplies fisheries with new fish stock every year, which is just vital for the health of oceans, and the communities that live off of oceans.

So that’s what a person who signs up to the Earthbanc platform contributes to in a really meaningful way. Now is the time that this is needs to happen in this decade of ecosystem restoration. We only have 5 or 10 years to avoid runaway climate change and this is a really meaningful way to help achieve that.

Where do the returns on land regeneration investments actually come from?

For a regenerative project like the planting of mangrove trees, which is the sort of core element of the project, it’s sequestering carbon.

Mangroves sequester carbon five times more densely than an average tropical rainforest, so your yield per meter squared is much higher in terms of carbon. That means there's more carbon revenue for these farmers, once we start measuring and auditing the carbon and a third party independently verifies it, the carbon credits are minted and sold and carbon revenue flows back to that farmer and its revenue that they otherwise would not have gotten

We're also supporting those farmers to start expanding their honeybee production and organic wild craft honey production and financing that. So once you've got your honey production and you're selling organic honey at a higher premium price, the income you're receiving from just that activity alone, is making more money for you than the $2 a day you're getting paid to deforest the trees to sell for firewood.

We are excited to scale up carbon markets with our technology and onboard millions of farmers around the world to help them monetise their carbon, and give investors access to this fast growing asset class.

Is there a daily routine, favourite drink, or habit that keeps you going as a climatetech entrepreneur?

My daily routine is made up of meditation, fair trade organic coffee and food, music and dance to get the body moving - and then into work mode teleconferencing with our team all around the world to kick start our day.

Do you have a favourite quote or motto?

I do have many quotes I like from philosophers and poets like Rumi that inspire about having wonder in nature, but there’re also some quotes that are fighting words.

“Do not go gently into that good night.”

That was used in a film called Interstellar, where humanity was destroyed by introducing novel, genetically modified organisms that started turning the soil into a source of toxicity, rather than fertility for growing food.

There've been a number of lab-based research done by genetic modification companies to release exactly those organisms into the agriculture industry.

So I look at the storyline of what Interstellar is telling us. It's incredible what humanity can do with its technology. We’re exponentially increasing technological capabilities without the exponential increasing of wisdom to manage it appropriately. When you combine those two things, you have a scenario where it takes a lot of energy to muster to fight this trend of absolute degradation of all ecosystems. So that's why I like that quote – ‘do not go gently into that good night.’

Dear Green Techpreneur reader,

If you have a job or product/service you would like to advertise, or are interested in being featured in an upcoming interview article or exploring an ongoing branding partnership in the beautiful GT magazine, please get in touch.

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This 5-star web design agency based in Cardiff did an amazing on The Green Techpreneur website and I can recommend their design talent! You can contact the creative director, Daniel Jenkins at: Dan.Levitate@digital

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2-4 times a month I interview extraordinary climatetech entrepreneurs and investors and share insight on how to build your business and find funding. It’s insightful, actionable and fun to read or listen to.

This week I’m venturing away from the usual Green Techpreneur interviews to publish a special Easter edition about a topic close to my heart – Ukraine.

I lived in Ukraine for a number of years as a child and feel compelled to share my experience and shed light on Ukraine’s culture and history. It’s my little way of showing support and solidarity with Ukraine as they combat the horror unleashed by Putin.

…….The rugged, potholed dirt road in front of our house had a large water pipe that would break so often it almost seemed precued to leak, releasing a steady trickle of water that would deepen the rut that ran down the middle of the road.

The dirt road may have been a navigational nightmare for the car driver - bouncing passengers would have to steady themselves by gripping the sides of the vehicle – but to nine year old me, it was a playground.

My parents had moved to Ukraine to build a charity, Care in Action. As foreigners living in L’viv, we stuck out like a sore thumb. Just walking down the street speaking English would elicit stares.

It wasn’t long before our house became a meeting spot for a small group of neighbourhood kids that lived along the dirt road on the outskirts of L’viv.

Our Ukrainian friends would gather by our house in the afternoons - knowing we would be coming out to play. We played Badminton, capture the flag, catch, tag, and football in summer. In winter, we built snow castles and had snowball fights.

The neighbourhood kids were keen to practise their English. I remember when I first met Christina who lived down the street. It was winter and the dirt road was covered in snow. She used a couple of artificial-sounding, memorised English phrases she had learnt in school - “the weather is so chilly.” After a few years of playing together, our friends would take pride in speaking ever-more fluent English.

The girls would ask me to listen to Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys songs and write out the lyrics - so they could learn to sing-along to their favourite pop songs in English. When bell bottoms were all the rage in the West, they made sure they were on trend.

For Christina, there were a few surprises: I remember her shock at once coming to our house and seeing us eat tomatoes in winter - it was something she had never seen before. Like many Ukrainians, Christina grew up eating seasonal food, often grown in a backyard or plot of land, or purchased in an outdoor Ukrainian market. Some food is preserved for the winter in jars.

Christina’s family bred rabbits in a backyard cage. When I asked her the rabbits names, she told me that they were for meat. For many Ukrainians - living in the poorest country of Europe meant that you had to know how to survive.

She had some minor bone deformities because her Dad had been exposed to Chernobyl radiation, and some damage had been passed down through the genes.

Another surprise for Christina was that we had cooked meals - our Ukrainian friends thought Westerners ate mostly fast food. Their point of reference for life in the West was movies and pop culture; for most Ukrainians at the time, leaving Ukraine to visit Europe required a visa that was not easy to get. 

They lived in a country that bore the hallmarks of Soviet oppression - an entire system of governance built on corruption. Survival of the ‘haves’ and a small gang at the top at the expense and degradation of the ‘have-nots’. A bribe can get you most places, but without one your hands are tied.

Babuschkas would stand in markets for long hours, selling berries, jam, milk - whatever they could source from their land. In the biting cold of winter, a vodka bottle would help them withstand the cold. Their legs were thick and stubby, their deeply weathered faces shone out from behind their headscarves. I remember a Babuschka breaking down in tears of gratitude and relief when my Dad paid her more than what she asked for. For many Ukrainians, the reality was that winters were bitter and cold and poverty was grinding. Life was hard.

It’s hard to truly describe what oppression feels like. It’s an invisible blanket of misery that hangs in the air. A depression so thick you can feel it in the atmosphere, in the Ukrainian cultural love of the melancholy - an adopted sense of the dignity of suffering. It was like the land itself kept secrets - hidden tales of sorrow and tragedies that run so deep they dare not be revealed. Whispers and sighs that almost came out of Ukrainian fields and forests.

The Ukrainian experience of the Holodomor - the widespread famine that ensued when Stalin stole their wheat - was so harsh and so alive in their memory, that even as a pre-teen, it was something I picked up on.

A bitter memory of absolute cruelty and injustice; when millions of their own starved to death, because of the mechanisms of a bigger, more powerful neighbour next door. But along with that memory lay something else - something remarkable in the Ukrainian national consciousness: an ironclad determination to survive. An almost obstinate inner pride, an unbreakable, patriotic sense of being fiercely bonded in collective resistance, and in needing to defend what was theirs. Ukraine may have been the poorest country in Europe, steeped in problems, oppression and corruption- but it was theirs - their Ukraine. Their story.

I remember exploring deserted railway tracks on the outskirts of L’viv, balancing my way along the tracks; they were overgrown and led mysteriously through forests and meadows. What stories were they hiding? In that vast, fertile land, bordering Europe and Russia - with its birch trees, its crows and its fields, deserted railway tracks lay as remnants of old projects that had started and stopped and gotten nowhere.

Rusting skeletons that spoke of having been trapped between consecutive invading powers that pushed in from both the East and the West. Empires that were built and then crumbled. Only Ukrainians had been left behind, always picking up the pieces.

Now a generation of Ukrainians had grown up entirely outside of the Soviet Union.

I wasn’t in Ukraine during the watershed Orange revolution, but I remember meeting a Ukrainian student, an acquaintance of my parents, who had been studying in Germany. She was passionately, wholeheartedly and zealously involved in supporting the revolution. In Olga, I saw that underlying Ukrainian patriotism and fire come to the fore. A nation that summoned incredible determination from its history of struggle and rose up.

In 2014, once more, tens of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets in protest as Yanukovych threatened to steer them off the path of Europe and freedom. Many were beaten, some were tortured. But their choice was clear and they would not waver. They had looked across their borders to both the East and the West. They saw a union of comparatively free and prosperous democratic nations to the West and yearned for the same freedom and privilege. To their East they saw Russian neighbours living in dictatorial oppression. When President Yanukovych bowed to intense pressure from Russia to scrap Ukraine’s association agreement with the EU, they chose to fight for their future.

In ensuing years, I heard of a Ukraine that sounded very different from the Ukraine of my childhood. For ambitious, intelligent young Ukrainians, there were remote jobs in foreign technology companies. Travel abroad had become easier, new airlines and cheap flights had brought tourists to L’viv.

They had overthrown the Russian puppet regime and elected their own leader who would work towards the Ukraine they dreamt of. There was something fresh in the air, a bubbling vibrancy - was this what hope felt like? A spring-like feeling that things were getting better after a long dark winter.

I will never forget the feeling of absolute dread I felt the night before the invasion. ‘Russian troops are now 100% in attack position’ - was the last thing I’d read.

And then the shock of waking up to see that the Russian army had launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine.

‘Not Ukraine,’ I thought, ‘my God, not Ukraine.’

I felt absolute devastation.

Horror, anger, agony, rage, heartbreak.

I had lived in Ukraine. I had seen their poverty, their struggle. It was all the more painful to know how incredibly hard their upwards climb had been.

It was like watching someone who you knew had suffered deeply, but who had painstakingly clawed their way up into a better place, being battered and beaten back down just as they had come to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Memories of Ukraine came flooding back.

Christina, Beata, Olena…childhood friends. What had become of them now?

Were poor, historically oppressed nations destined to remain that way? Is change possible if you fight long and hard enough?

Here I am, in my 30s, engaged in the rollercoaster ride of building a digital magazine. It’s not easy, but the incredible opportunity I have to build my own future and live in a free, democratic country isn’t lost on me.

Meanwhile, my old childhood friends in Ukraine are giving their last breath to defend the right to have a dream: to determine their own future and the future of their children in a free, sovereign country.

Once again, that vast land between East and West is battling imperial tyranny. And the battered bodies, psyches, and homes of a new generation of Ukrainians - once filled with hope - will become a living witness to the brutality of their continued struggle for freedom.

“You crucify freedom, but the soul of man knows no bounds.”

Russian bombs may be falling in Ukraine, but the attacks on the most precious thing we have: freedom, democracy, and social cohesion, are shaking the earth beneath all of our feet.

This Easter, please consider supporting Ukraine in their – and our – fight for freedom:

You can support Ukrainian refugees by donating to my parents’ charity.

In March Care in Action paid for 1,636 beds in hostels to help mothers and children fleeing conflict. Six apartments and a large house allowed 9 families at a time to have a secure place to rest, and 3,500 children and adults received 783 boxes of aid deliveries. Right after Easter, Care in Action will open an its own shelter and care centre for refugees.

In a world increasingly controlled by authoritarian regimes, Ukraine is bucking the growing tide of totalitarian oppression by bravely choosing to defend their right to freedom, democracy, and sovereignty.

In doing so, they are helping protect our democracies from one of the greatest threats today: an expansionist Russia and Russian attempts to destroy European and US democracies by funding disinformation campaigns, far-right political parties, and fuelling nationalism and anti-EU sentiment.

“The European Commission has identified Russian disinformation campaigns as the EU’s greatest threat because they are systematic, well resourced, and perpetrated on a larger scale than similar campaigns by any other country, including China, Iran, and North Korea.

“Even today, Russia is promoting an anti-EU campaign related to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, designed to spread panic and distrust in European governments.

“Most often, their posts on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Telegram) and other online platforms (YouTube, Google) question the EU’s democratic legitimacy and play up sensitive topics in public debate such as migration, national sovereignty, and values.” – Carnegie Europe.

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“Just weeks ago, someone who had been my boss at a company I used to work for, told me; ‘you know what, Danijel? I would never have expected that something comes out of you because you've always been a dreamer.’

“And I was like, ‘Okay, think about this sentence. Maybe it’s because I'm a dreamer.’

Danijel Visevic is Co-founder of the recently launched World Fund, Europe’s biggest climatetech venture capital fund.

To setup a climatetech fund of this scale, the World Fund would have to operate differently from the get-go:

“We did a pre-closing, that's something very unique. Usually as a venture capital fund you have a first closing, then you invest, and you have a final closing a year later.

“But we knew if we want to raise 350 million Euros as a first time fund, we need a portfolio, otherwise, those institutional investors who can invest 10-20-30 million won't invest. So we needed a portfolio and we decided to do a pre-closing and ask investors to give us money before the first closing so that we can build a portfolio.

“Basically, we asked the pre–closers to take risk earlier, not to take any interest rates from those who come later. 

“And everybody told us, ‘nobody will give you money and go earlier into risk,’ and we had more than 150 investors who in a pre–closing gave us 100 million. Now we are very close to closing another 100 million at the first closing,” says Danijel.

His motto? “Just do things. Don't listen to people who say it won't work, you will only know when you have tried.”

Since its October launch last year, the World Fund has on average 9xed the value of its investments; “we really have shown that we can make money out of money, says Danijel, “so that's super important to get the traditional investors on board.”

He puts the funds’ success down to its exceptional, award-winning team: “so Tim Schumacher, my Co-founder, was awarded Best Male investor in 2020. Daria Saharova was awarded Best Female Investor in 2020 by the German Startup Award Association. Craig Douglas, our fourth partner, has been in the climatetech space already for 15 years and they all have a huge track record.

Something else they did differently, which increased investor confidence in their ability to understand and accurately assess the potential of climatetech innovation, was to build a team that consists almost entirely out of scientists; “they all have a venture capital or investment background, but they are chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, we have a nuclear physicist, a chemist, a mathematician.”

Danijel’s route into climatetech investing was far from conventional. He had spent the better part of 20 plus years as a journalist and a Green Party member – eager to make a difference. But he gradually grew wary of the limitations of media and politics.

In 2018 he transitioned from writing about the investment and startup scene to working for one of the most successful venture capitalists in Europe, Project A.

“I asked myself how I can contribute best to help reverse global warming and the climate crisis and save humankind. And I knew that being a journalist and writing stories is inspirational, but you are still, in a way, passive. I learned from politics that even if you deeply understand the consequences of the climate crisis, you can't achieve what's necessary. 

“And I knew that entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas were the most powerful. I saw the huge investment gap in Europe, and thanks to the network I had, we decided to build the World Fund.”

It was after seeing Greta Thunberg’s Friday for Future marches that you say you had your moment of going down the rabbit hole and doing a lot of research and really seeing the full picture and how just absolutely urgent the climate crisis is?

Yes, it’s hard to describe in words. I mean, urgent – whatever word we use – can’t describe what is ahead of us. It’s just catastrophic. It can’t be compared to anything that has happened to humankind before and it already started.

What gives you hope in the face of the climate emergency?

I can boil it down to two things. 

1) I know that humankind is brilliant, we have brilliant minds. 

And I'm lucky to be in a position as an investor to invest in those brilliant founders, who develop technologies that can make a leap and make a difference already within this decade and the next.

So it's possible to reverse global warming before we reach the tipping points and it's super, super, super urgent. But I also see this technology and these people and I see how powerfully we can disrupt with these entrepreneurial ideas. So this is something that helps me and gives me more than just hope, it gives me conviction. 

2) ‘In between the disasters there will be wonderful sunny days where you enjoy life.’

Global warming won't be reversible before we reach 1.5 - 1.6 degrees of warming. That means that what we have today will accelerate no matter what we do. If you read the IPCC report, global warming is not reversible before 2055. And what keeps me positive – it's a psychologist who said this in an interview about climate anxiety – even then, most of the time, there won't be catastrophic situations.

It's important for me because I have children; even then, they will have days and weeks of wonderful life. In between, there will be those disasters, but in between the disasters there will be wonderful sunny days where you enjoy life.

What sort of companies does the World Fund invest in?

We call it the CPP, the Climate Performance Potential, that we first assess before we dig deeper into a startup or a team of founders: 

We invest in companies that can save at least 100 megatons CO2 or equivalent in emissions per year. 

There's powerful climatetech out there that can already make a leap in this decade, and save more than 100 megatons. This is something we are excited about. 

Do you have examples of companies you’ve invested in recently?

I’m pretty proud of Juicy Marbles, a company from Slovenia that has developed a steak fillet mignon that’s purely plant based – it has the texture of, and it's bloody like meat. You can grill it like meat, it tastes like meat and it is healthier. It's made of fermented soya. It's addressing meat eaters, those men who really like to grill. 

The QOA company – a female-led spin off from the Technical University in Munich – have produced something that’s the equivalent of the cocoa bean. Producers of chocolate or anything else that uses cocoa can now use this instead of cutting down rainforests or planting cocoa trees in monocultures.

What’s your investment style? Are you hands on, or do you just invest funds?

We don’t offer operational support, but we do help companies with finding the right people for their team.

We also support companies with implementing their ESG. We, the World Fund, are leading in terms of ESG in Europe. On Preqin, a platform that compares funds, from among 4000 VC and private equity funds, we are the number one.

ESG standards are not just nice to have, they’re risk reducing and it increases the probability of your startup becoming successful.

We also help startups to get several funding rounds through our network of investors and this is very important. We have deeper pockets than other VCs.

If you need a follow-up round, we can reserve up to 30 million Euros per investment per company to make sure it gets to the point of generating revenue.

Are you looking at aligning your investment goals with German government decisions to invest more in renewable energy in light of the Russian/Ukraine war?

We're looking at the energy sector. The emissions we generate as humankind are mainly in the energy and the food agriculture sector – these are the two sectors where we invest the most.

I'm in close touch with German ministries and due to having worked with Angela Merkel, I have some contacts who need advice to understand the climatetech startup ecosystem better. They also want to redirect capital, so there's a Future Fund in Germany that will increase from 10 billion to 30 billion assets under management and that will be invested into startups with a strong focus on climate impact. Energy plays a huge role here and development over the last weeks and months in Ukraine and Russia have accelerated this.

Where do you see the biggest potential for growth in cleantech right now?

Energy

Energy consumption will increase until 2050. It will at least double and we have to get rid of oil and gas faster than we are now planning to. So of course, there's a huge opportunity for everything related to renewable energy, and increasing efficiency. 

Agriculture

There's huge potential in the agricultural sector in regenerative farming. The way we farm today is basically releasing carbon to the atmosphere. 

I think it’s 60 gigatons of carbon that our topsoil is able to save, and used to capture, before we started to do farming as we do it today. 

Let’s go back to regenerative agriculture and then topsoil will automatically save humankind by reducing the equivalent of all emissions 

Biodiversity 

This may sound a bit strange, but biodiversity is a huge market. It's only starting to come to the attention of people that even if we tackle the climate crisis, we could go extinct simply by having biodiversity break down. 

So this is something we have to save and when we, for example, plant trees or remove carbon, we have to ensure that happens in a biodiverse way. Ecosia, for example, the biggest non-for-profit search engine of Europe, is investing into building up biodiversity of forests, not planting trees in a monoculture.

Who are your role models?

Maja Goepel

Maja Goepel was advising the German government for many years on the consequences of the climate crisis and how to tackle the climate crisis. She's just a super positive person and a very self confident woman. She's just impressive, and because of this, she receives hate from old men. It’s not fair, but she has to fight just because she's a strong woman, but she stays optimistic, and she’s just inspiring every time I listen to her. 

The book she wrote was a bestseller for many weeks in Germany last year, Rethinking Our World, Unsere Welt Neu Denken.

Elon Musk

As difficult as this person is and however many people don't like him, it's Elon Musk. 

He has transformed an industry and I know it. I was working for Angela Merkel and I know how hard the German car industry tried to avoid electrification. I know how strongly they lobbied and they played this game for more than 30 years successfully. And then an entrepreneur came, Elon Musk, and disrupted the industry and now his company is worth five times more than all the German carmakers combined. He's kicking asses.

So this is the kind of entrepreneur I would like to invest in. A lot of female entrepreneurs also have this kickass mentality. It's this Elon Musk type of people – this is what will work, it’s the only thing that will save us.

I learned in journalism that storytelling is strong, but it's not active. I learned that politics is a lot of talking, but no walking, but entrepreneurs, like Elon Musk, are walking.

Danijel’s Documentary Recommendation:

Kiss The Ground - available on Netflix, it showcases the power of regenerative agriculture to combat climate change.

Dear Green Techpreneur reader,

I am transitioning this newsletter to a beautiful digital magazine and platform for climatetech entrepreneurs and investors.

If you have a job or product/service you would like to advertise, or are interested in being featured in an upcoming interview article or exploring an ongoing branding partnership, please get in touch.

You can reply directly this to email, it does come into my inbox and I really do read them all!

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Not many people possess that kind of ‘whatever it takes’ determination, but that’s exactly what Top Gear’s Original Stig and ex Formula One driver Perry McCarthy did: “I’m somebody who goes for things. If I think it’s a good idea and there are barriers in front of making the idea happen, the next job is to remove those barriers.

“My approach to pretty much everything – whether in racing or with business ideas – is to either smash through the barriers, dig under them, go over them, go around them, or whatever it is, find a way through the barrier.”

And smash barriers he did.

“Because much of racing is a financially dependent sport, performance is often limited or enhanced by exactly what kind of budget you've got. Every time these wheels go round for a junior formula or a top formula, it's an awful lot of money and money needs to be found sometimes, and I'm certainly not unique here.

“As a young driver I had no track record to even get sponsorship. I got a job working on North Sea oil rigs for two years, which paid me a lot of money. That was two years of working 12-14 hours a day, every week, and then a week off, to get the money together to even start motor racing.

“After all that time the amount of money I had to start, by motor racing standards, was small. I had to maximise it immediately.”

Perry was up against better funded racers who had been driving since they were about 10, and he had to make his mark and get noticed from the get-go so he could attract sponsors before his hard-earned savings ran out.

“When I first came into motor racing, I was very, very fast, but wild. It's important not to dull that fire, but it’s important to temper it to use it as a weapon and become more effective.

“There were a lot of things I was learning on track because I started incredibly late against many guys who have been racing for many years. But I had to make a decision. I couldn't use that as an excuse, because if I started racing at the age of 21, and I turned up with the attitude that ‘I don’t stand a chance because these guys have been racing cars since they were 10’, I’m finished already.

“My job was to turn up and beat them. That’s all there was to it. There was no learning year.

“I was able to do that. And I started winning consistently and then won the British Championship.

His unrivalled will to win took him from unknown underdog to one of the best-known names in motorsports: he drove for the Andrea Moda team in Formula One in 1992 – though never making it into a race – before moving into sports cars, including driving in the 24 Hours of Le Mans five times from 1996 and 2003. McCarthy also portrayed The Stig in the first two series of BBC’s motoring show Top Gear.

Whether Perry won or lost a race, he showed up with attitude – and it made waves – both on and off the race course.

“I did become well known very quickly in motor racing for my driving, but also for my attitude; ‘don’t stand in my way. I am going through anything and everything.’ Even in Formula One teams, when I was very young, people started knowing about this guy who was coming through and who would not stop.”

In this Christmas special edition you’ll learn how to apply the mindset of a champion to your climatetech business through Perry’s own story of success, failure, back-breaking accidents, and show-stopping wins.

What made you say, ‘I’m not just going to think about this very competitive and adventurous career, but I’m going to go for it?’

There are certain things that attract me and it's not the normal path because I often find things a little bit dull.

If I find the idea of something exciting, then it has my 100% focus. I don’t mean to sound bigheaded, but I know that I’ve got a number of attributes, and focus and determination are very high on that list.

I could have have an easier life if I’d set my sights a little bit lower, but that’s of no interest to me, so I’d rather endure the struggles.

What I’d say to anybody who is starting a business with any particular vision is that that's fantastic, and if they are equally determined and focused that is going to be needed. But the number one thing they will need to understand and be able to live with are huge disappointments.

Those who have a dream…you see this pool of contestants of those who have some ability and then those who have real ability but that pool dwindles because sometimes people cannot continue the path of suffering continued disappointment. It does make me smile sometimes when you see The X Factor, and a 19-year-old says; ‘Simon, this is my last chance.’ If you're 19 and you think that, you’re never going to succeed because it's a question of work, application and finding a way through those barriers.

You had a terrible accident early in your racing career, what made you decide to get back in the game?

I had a very, very bad accident which put me out for nearly a year after breaking my back. Then I was back into career asking ‘do I still want to do this, is my mind ok?’ I had to repair the body, I had to find some financing to actually even get back in. So it's challenges, challenges, challenges. The only thing that you do have to make sure is, when fighting all the time like this, you’ve got to make sure that there is a reward built in, and actually this is something you do want to do.

And it’s not just the scale tipping in favour – it’s ‘I'm obsessed with doing this and I absolutely believe that I can get to the top’ – then that was worth it.

Did you actively build a support group, or did it happen naturally?

There wasn't a great deal of sophistication about my approach years ago. It was walked around an industrial state, knock on doors, chat up the receptionist to try and get a meeting with a director. Sit in front of them. Tell them exactly how great motor racing is and where I'm going and just keep talking, engaging people, and just see what can be done. I was just knocking on doors, trying to get people to think ‘hey, this guy is really hungry. We like the idea of him going road racing, here’s a few 100 pounds or a few 1000 pounds.’

It was that imagination and determination, and a lot of people say ‘I can't get sponsorship.’ Did they walk around industry states knocking on doors? Did they send letters all the time? Did they make phone calls all the time? It's no stone unturned and this is what is needed and there was only one person who's gonna make that happen.

It wasn’t just ‘take the money and say thank you very much.’ See, they didn't have to do this really, they've done it for me and now I want to find ways to pay them back. I want to make sure that they’re happy. And sometimes the following year, they couldn’t do it because business was suffering, but I always made sure that nobody once had a bad taste in the mouth after dealing with me.

Was there a race or experience on the track that stood out to you?

I always got a real kick out of setting pole position and being the fastest of the fastest in qualifying. That meant a lot to me. My time in America was very good for that because I turned up to the States with a very small team with a small car against multi multi multi million dollar manufacturers and started tearing them apart. That was noticed big time. There was one particular race where I was in the level just below Formula One. And the only way I could get out there was to jump in a car that was being run from a friend's garden. No workshops, people, or team. We’d turn up with just this car with no testing, taking on some of the biggest stars that went on to be Grand Prix winners.

When you’re fighting for pole position in that, and when you’re fighting for fifth or sixth place in that, that's when people go ‘wow!’ My philosophy is – and it applies to so many walks of life – because so often I've been in a situation where it was impossible to win because of no testing, because of the car, because of no budget. It’s impossible to stand on the top step of the podium.

But you can win. You can win by coming 6th, you can win by coming 10th, you can win by coming 14th. Because if nobody else has been able to qualify that car for that kind of that race, what you’ve shown is you’re the one who’s qualified that car. You’re the one who’s fighting midfield.

If you never give up, and if you show that attitude and you’re dancing on the minute at every single corner, it gets noticed. You haven’t taken the silverware home, but you’ve won reputationally.

People go: ‘did you just see what he just did with that piece of rubbish?’

Perry’s top tips for Green Techpreneurs

Work on getting noticed

There are actually two careers: there's the career that you want to pursue. If it's business, you have to focus, you have to look at any gaps and try to fill those gaps and perform better and produce a better result. But the parallel career is that you have to be noticed.

The parallel career means that you have to get people to see what you're doing to be noticed, so that some of those barriers are removed by other people believing in you and giving you the chances you've been working for. It's no good being the best artist in the world locked up in a studio producing incredible work if you haven't organised an opportunity for it to be seen and desired.

Do you need to adjust what you’re doing, or work harder on getting noticed?

Even in dire moments, so much is what’s actually between the ears. You’ve got to keep thinking; ‘does this fundamental philosophy need adjusting? Or is it just that it needs to get noticed?’ Sometimes you have to tweak it. In any path or idea, if you could go from A to B – that would be ideal. From what I've experienced, it's more like a downhill skiing slalom race, where you have to zig zag and go sideways and then hopefully make some progress. Keep thinking, keep looking, keep developing, because if you don't, you might as well throw in the towel.

……………………With Christmas just around the corner, do you have any Christmas rituals or traditions that you practice? “I love Christmas and I love seeing friends and family.

“We’re very fortunate. A very good friend of mine is one of the most famous turkey farmers in the country – Paul Kelly. Paul and I have been friends since we were teenagers. The tradition is that every year, we get a fabulous turkey from Paul.”

Book Recommendation

Need a jaw-dropping and inspirational holiday read?

You can buy the newly released audio to Perry’s international bestseller, Flat Out Flat Broke here.

Or get a Christmas discount on the hardcover out now!

Make a Connection

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Fired after he had worked very hard to treble the company in just 2.5 years. But let's rewind a little to the beginning of the story. Chris was brought up in a small town in Northern Ireland. He was the son of an Irish Ford garage dealer salesman; his family worked very long hours and they were relatively well-off for the village of about 2,000 people. 

He went to Belfast to study but barely scraped a degree at Queen’s University. The enthusiasm just wasn’t there. But that all changed….“when I found business, I found something that interested me. I taught myself accountancy – if you’re in business you need to be numerate. I also found it was important to understand the law and I learned commercial law.” 

The listless young man was transformed into a powerhouse entrepreneur, determined to succeed. He worked and saved up for years to buy a 50% share in an industrial manufacturer and business was booming; but just 2.5 years later he hit rock bottom:

“One Friday afternoon, an American distributor gave me notice and had already basically stolen just about all of the people in the business. On Monday morning, I decided to make them regret the day I was born.” 

Life had presented him with a challenge so bitter that he at first struggled to move on…”I spent half a lifetime making them very, very sorry. But at some point in time, they became irrelevant to me, and at some point in time, I stopped being angry.”

Chris got back in the game and built a world-class, global greentech company. Now active in 43 countries, AESSEAL builds sealing solutions to reduce energy and water consumption and is leading the charge in net-zero manufacturing. 

And the man who fired Chris? In a strange twist of fate, Chris hired him: 

“I pursued the guy who fired me to Australia, and about 9 years later I hired him. I remember the good in people a lot longer than I remember the bad. I bumped into him at a restaurant, and I told him, ‘one day they’ll fire you, just like they fired me. But you know where the bodies are buried, I don’t. You could add value to my business. Remember this day when you leave or they fire you. Give me a call.

“A few years later he was fired and he gave me a call. They had excluded him from every part of the global business except America. So I sent him to America. He had energy and enthusiasm and he did a great job.”

AESSEAL has invested hundreds of hours in understanding the journey to net-zero and set up Better.World Solutions to help companies do the same.

How do you tackle company emissions?

* Scope 1 emissions are gas and diesel

* Scope 2 emissions are electricity

* Scope 3 emissions are emissions in your supply chain

Our scope 3 global emissions are about 112,000 tonnes – that’s our supply chain, and our avoidance is somewhere between 2-5 million tonnes. Our products cost much less to produce than a car does, and they create vastly more CO2 benefits savings for the customer. But we couldn’t be bothered counting it because it won’t add any benefit to the planet whatsoever if we count up our avoidance. 

An electric car manufacturer has negative scope 3 emissions because they’re making the car – it’s avoidance based on their customers avoiding the use of petrol and diesel whenever they drive the car. 

How do you offset emissions?

We have offsets for our scope 1 and 2 emissions. Offsets are currently very cheap; 57 Euros a tonne in the European trading scheme, which we abandoned when we left the EU. And I believe they’ll end up being about £100 a tonne in the fullness of time. 

There are carbon offsetting schemes in various parts of the world – they’re accredited by the carbon trust. 

What advice would you give to companies going net-zero?

Join Betterworld.Solutions which is a best practice sharing organisation. It's completely free, it's philanthropic. 

The main points of that policy to prevent global warming are to make environmental projects a priority for investment. When they give you the same return as a non-environmental one, it's not very arduous frankly. The key is for businesses to open it up to their own workforce, suppliers and possibly to customers. 

My view is that particularly large businesses are so disconnected from their operations, that they're not destroying the planet on purpose, there's lots of processes taking place that if they just knew about, they’d make an appropriate investment decision and make more money.

Who wouldn’t want to make more money, save the planet, and maybe win an environmental award and get good PR while they’re at it? 

What can startups do to start off on the right foot in net-zero manufacturing?

It depends how big the business is. There’s not much point in greening a building if it's owned by a landlord. I don’t think you’ll find many BREEAM excellent buildings to rent at this point in time. Many startups probably can’t afford to make the appropriate investments to set up a clean factory unless investors give them the money for net-zero purposes for the good of the planet.

It’s going to be relatively difficult for startups, but of course, there are a lot of businesses raising huge amounts of money and if they build a facility, they should build it to BREEAM excellence from the beginning of the process and they should at least have electric company cars. 

But the reality is, these greentech startups are what will save the planet. 

How much are you investing to go green? 

Our supply chain releases 112,000 tonnes of emissions and we've got 4.5 thousand tonnes of Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions globally, we're going to reduce this to 2.5 thousand tonnes because that is under our control and we can do something about it. It will cost us about £29 million. 

Practically speaking, where will that investment go to reduce your emissions?

Well, we've got factories all over the world so we’ll put solar in where appropriate. Where it’s possible to connect to the grid, we've ordered battery arrays which are very expensive, million pound plus battery arrays. 

On this site in Yorkshire we’ve also just drilled 110 meters deep and we found water, so we’ll probably invest in water heat pumps which are a lot more efficient. 

For our Scope 1 and 2 offsetting schemes, this year we already bought 4.5 tonnes of offsets and we’ve got a carbon trust certificate. 

We’re looking all over the world at where we can build from scratch solar plants so we can create a solar plant of up to 12.5 gigawatts. We’re looking at that and a combination of tree planting. We've also looked at peat bog reclamation.

What gets in the way of manufacturers getting to net zero?

It's going to be extremely difficult for most businesses to deal with their Scope 3 emissions in the use of their products. I pity the oil and gas companies because they’ve got Scope 3 costs and they’ve got Scope 3 costs in the use of their products. 

Financial services industries probably don’t have any real Scope 3 avoidance but neither do they have Scope 3 costs, unless you consider the businesses they invest in as polluters. It’s going to be really difficult for some. 

Do you have a motto?

Find reasons to be cheerful. It might have been great before, but if it’s terrible today, deal with today. If you can’t find a reason to be cheerful it’s time to quit. So find a reason to be cheerful. Do all your whining and get as upset and wound up as you feel like, but at the end of the day, no matter how bad it is, find reasons to be cheerful, find something you can improve. 

If you believe it will be better in the future, your own morale is up. Humans need hope and I’m no different to anyone else. 

When it’s time to relax, Chris reads, plays computer games, goes out with friends or goes on holiday; “my mobile phone is never switched on. When I’m not at work, I’m obsessively not at work. When I’m at work, I’m obsessively at work. I’m obsessively here and obsessively there.”

The legacy he hopes to leave Rotherham is a totally digitally connected, net-zero factory of the future: “if we can cut out any unnecessary human interventions we can be demonically slick and give customers what they want instantaneously, that would be something for our little world. 

“It’s a very deprived area. I think if I spend so much money that if the business gets sold they won’t ever be able to close it down, it will be the centre of the town. I think I owe a lot to this town.”

Eco-living hacks I’m loving:

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She launched Goterra in 2016 as an automated biotech food waste management service: maggots in capsules consume food waste at a rapid pace while their AI-powered ‘bot’ managers carefully monitor temperature levels and the feeding process.

It’s an ingenious solution to the 1.3 billion tonne food waste problem and the 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent it releases as it decomposes. Goterra’s method eliminates the composting process, slashing CO2 emissions per tonne by 98%. The byproducts - frass and fat maggots – become valuable fertiliser and animal feed.

When I first spoke to Olympia 1.5 years ago, Goterra processed 10 tons of food waste per week. Today, she says, that figure is at 100 tons of waste per week:

“We’ve grown the colony to service large volumes of waste, we've brought on new clients, we've grown the team from 15 people to 40 – I’ve aged!

“It's all the components that come with a business but under the shroud and challenge of COVID; it has been truly a very odd time. There’s no comparison to this moment in our lives.

“But, on company traction, we deployed our first autonomous unit to go do its work by itself. It’s had zero down days. It sits in a precinct in Darling Harbour and Sydney and manages the food waste from the three towers above.

“We visit once every 12 days to put new maggots in and take the old maggots out. The unit accepts waste, treats it and then feeds itself every day. I can turn it on or off or do whatever I like from my phone and camera. You've got this incredible capability that is deployed from our system into a new market without having to build tons of infrastructure to service it.”

Goterra typically services high-level food waste sites like farms, restaurants, hospitals and city councils, but its now both expanding into residential blocks and aiming to service entire towns with a large capsule stack that can process at least 2 tonnes per day: “You can deploy Goterra stack infrastructure co-located on the waste management facility and unlock waste management capability for that entire city or town,” Olympia explains.

“We've learnt a lot in this past year, and we've made a lot of mistakes. But I think overall, we've really moved some mountains on what it has meant for us to commercialise.”

What impact has the ongoing situation with Covid and lockdowns had on demand?

Through the first wave of lockdown, we saw a real change of focus. So where we thought a lot of waste was going to come from hotels, restaurants, schools – all those things were closed or operating differently. There was this interesting phase where everyone was buying backyard chickens, and in Canberra, the cost of a chicken went from $20 to $65. Everyone was baking sourdough bread, having chickens, and composting. We started getting so many requests from multi-unit dwellings and apartment buildings because they don’t have composting opportunities.

Even though they're a consolidated aggregated load, 200 people in a building, getting 200 people to put the food waste in the right bin, requires specific education and engagement. It was a really good time for us to see if we could crack that difficult problem and find ways to meet those clients where they are and help them with a solution that works.

What have you learnt about driving consumer demand for a sustainable lifestyle and services?

Give people more flexibility to feel like they’re contributing and less restrictions

People want it to be easy. We want to contribute but we don't really want to do a lot of extra work, right, and so that's okay. We found that if we gave apartment block dwellers caddies, we recommended a compostable bag that our process can handle, and we accept contamination of difficult things, that encourages uptake – because people are like, ‘oh, this is super easy. You can just put anything in the bin.’

People's perception of the effort it takes to do good, and their willingness to contribute that effort aren’t the same

People think it's a lot to just to put their food waste in a different bucket.

If you say, ‘ah, but only some can go in there, not this, but that,’ it gets too hard, and they already feel like they’re making an extra effort.

That was a really good lesson for us to learn early: ‘Meet the customer where they actually are, solve the problem they actually have. Don't solve the problem that's easiest for you to solve.’

We're getting great engagement with some customers that really have been largely underserved otherwise.

What’s the biggest obstacle you faced?

The biggest obstacle was that I walked around as a woman in a man’s world demanding that people sell me hardware.

It takes courage to create something different

I think I can't ever underestimate the difficulty of standing up, every day, walking out into the world and just trying to do things differently. Everyone goes; ‘stop it. We don't like it when that happens.’

It is difficult, honestly, to create hardware that has never been created before or hacked and that doesn't exist in the world. When you try to do something that's never been done before, you run up against unconscious bias from the people who are selling you the stuff and the people who generally would install or create those functions.

Air conditioners are a classic example. I wanted to use air conditioners in a certain use case, and every time I tried to get an air conditioning supplier to install one for me they would come out and tell me they would not install an air conditioner in that location because it would void the warranty. I don't give a s**t about the warranty. I don't care if it dies in six months, I want to see if it works. And they were like, ‘no, we don't want to do that, because that's not how conditioners are used.’ 

It can be exhausting sometimes because you're already at the boundary of your own confidence in trying to figure something out. You are already pushing your own perception of what you should achieve, and a person who's supposed to be an expert is telling you you're also a moron. ‘I already hear that every day in my internal monologue, I do not need to hear it from you.’

How has the team grown in the last year?

We had this big hiring bubble and in the space of three months, we brought on 15 new people and after about a month you could tangibly feel that Goterra had grown up: people were using our tenants and values and engaging in meetings in a specific way that we've created. They became our flag bearers. I found that just so profoundly beautiful to see it evolving.

My head of growth is a phenomenal individual, when he came on, he was so energised and people were like, ‘oh my God, I can't keep up, he's just so flat out.’ I said to everybody, ‘he's gonna turn up and make you feel like you're not moving fast enough. Just remember that it's because he hasn't been in the boat rowing as long as we have. He's new, he's fresh, he's rested.’

But that's infectious, right? When you get new people and they’re like, ‘how cool is it to work at the maggot robot company.’ 

I always expected that one day I'll wake up and go, ‘oh, remember when we were in the shed and now we're at 6,000.’ But instead, these little micro growth experiences are beautiful and special.

What has brought you the most joy?

We’ve just crossed some big milestones, and we’ve been in lockdown for two months or so and last Friday we played cricket for a couple of hours. It was the first pseudo-social outing that we got to have. Just seeing the team that we built who wanted to stay at work to hang out with each other having fun and in inside groups talking about the work they’re doing. You can get so stuck in the operations of that team that you can forget sometimes that you’ve built this group of people that are performing at a high level and making connections through and by the company. And that just felt really beautiful to see that in real life, and to know that we've done it. It felt like a real achievement.

How would you describe your life philosophy or motto?

Never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever give up. And all the evers are important.

Eco-living hacks I’m loving:

Whogivesacrap – toilet paper that's good for the planet. It’s made from 100% recycled paper and bamboo and 50% of profits are donated to build toilets for people who don't have any. I love everything about this brand. Check them out with my affiliate link.

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But – as Duncan Grierson, Founder of Clim8 Invest –  believes, vehicles, platforms and regulations for sustainable investment haven’t quite caught up with the surging demand or the urgency of the climate crisis. 

With Clim8 Invest – an app that makes sustainable investing accessible and easy – Duncan wants to help millions of people stake a claim in the green revolution. 

He’s also out to shake up the investment sector, which he says, too often, focuses on ticking boxes ‘to do no harm’, rather than actively sparking change by investing in high-impact projects.

In just two years, Clim8 Invest has grown to a team of 31, raised £10 million in venture capital funding, and attracted over 20,000 members ahead of launching in app stores in March: “We recently got an investment from Channel 4 Ventures. We’ll start advertising on television soon. We're growing nicely.”

Although Duncan has spent almost 20 years as a Green Techpreneur building and investing into a range of cleantech companies – he’s an accidental environmentalist: “18 years ago I was working for an American venture capital private equity fund: I was looking at helping build a platform around environmental consulting – there were a lot of new regulations coming through around pollution control and environmental damage.

“I did a lot of research and got interested in sustainability broadly and climate change. In 2003, I left that fund and started my first company.

“It came from a place of; ‘there's an incredible business opportunity here because this is going to be a growth sector.’ You could see just from the increase in the numbers of consultants that were being asked for advice around legislation. 

“It started from a business premise, but my passion got deeper and deeper over the years. And a little bit further along, I’ve had children. I’ve got a 6-year old and a 10-year old and that has only accentuated my interest. We need to leave a better planet for our kids and grandchildren, the path we're on right now is a very unhappy one. Our kids are not going to have the same kind of lives we've had.

“Wildfires are burning again in Oregon, in California. Germany – one of the richest countries in the world – has been absolutely shocked with images of massive flooding. The richest places on the planet are suffering, right here, right now, from the impacts of climate change. When you see that so vividly, it accentuates that we need to make changes. 

Money is what makes systems work, so as consumers, we have power with our money, not just with what we buy, but also where we invest. And that really needs to be going into companies that are having a positive impact.

 What sparked the idea for your sustainable investment app?

I was fiddling around with different platforms I wanted to build for another business. I came up with this idea to empower anyone to invest in companies that are having a positive impact on climate change. It’s a platform that I would want as a user, as an investor, for my ISA, for my SIPP, for my pension plan and cash savings.

I did some research and couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted it to do.

What are you hoping to achieve with Clim8 Invest?

What we built is a platform, an app, which you can get in the app store or Google play, it makes it super easy for you to invest into companies that are having a positive impact. We’ve got a big mission, and the idea is to make a dent on climate change and to raise awareness that you can make an impact with your money.

There's all sorts of research that actually investing your savings and pension can have around 20 times the impact of behavioural changes like eating less meat and flying less and all those things that we need to be doing as consumers.  

It's relatively low friction, it’s easy to do, we’re empowering and giving lots of people access. You can get on board with our app quite quickly and move some of your cash from other investment products that are not necessarily having the right impact.

Which sustainable investing problems do you solve?

If you go back just a couple of years, a lot of companies were happy to put your money into fossil fuel companies, tobacco, and all these things which were damaging to the planet or to people. They were looking exclusively at the return.

In the last few years, some fund managers use ESG tools for screening. They brand their funds as ESG compliant and negatively screen out companies that are not necessarily doing the right thing in terms of environment, social and governance.

That’s a step in the right direction, but what you find with many of those funds is that they may have screened out fossil fuels, tobacco and arms dealers, but they’re not necessarily investing for impact or putting your money into companies that are having a massive positive impact on climate change. 

We take a different view, we put money only into a product that is having a positive impact. It’s active management and positive impact investing.

 How do you select projects to invest in?

The six core themes we have in our portfolio are: clean energy, sustainable food, water, smart mobility, electric mobility, and circular economy. We only invest in companies that are in one or more of those core themes. 

That’s our USP, we're not just negatively screening out things, we are positively looking for companies that are making a big positive impact. Doing no harm is ok, but we have so little time left, we have less than 10 years now to get our act together as a human race. We need to have systemic change, and that’s top down, from government down, but also bottom up from consumers.

How did you achieve an app launch with over 20,000 members?

We built a waiting list

Over about a year, we built up a waiting list of 16,000 people – that was quite effective, we used social media tools for that. We spent very little money on it. It was largely organic, so again I think it comes back to the interest in the topic. 

We used crowdfunding

 We've launched a series of raises for the company itself on a platform called Crowdcube. That’s been a good brand awareness process which has worked really well for us. A lot of people who have invested in the company have moved on to use the platform.

There’s growing momentum for climate action

We launched with 20,000 members in March and it's growing nicely week on week. 

That's a function of how much more people are more interested today than even a year ago in climate change. COVID has been a bit of a wake up call for a lot of people, people are thinking more about how they might live a different life to pre-COVID; they’re thinking about not having to commute to the office and how they're spending and investing. 

Our portfolio has done well since we’ve launched

Our thesis is that you can make a big impact by putting your money into the right kinds of companies. You can be on the right side of history, but you can also get a great return. We’re the first people to make it really easy to facilitate that by having an app.

The companies we are investing into are literally your future, as people move away from combustion vehicles to electric vehicles, people move away from eating less meat to plant based foodstuffs – those companies will do well. As an investor, if you’re invested in those companies, you’re likely to do well. 

What are your growth goals?

We’d like to have millions of people investing through our platform. We would like to have billions and billions of dollars to invest in the right kinds of companies. It’s a double whammy because you’re moving away from the companies that are having a negative impact and into firms with super positive climate impact.

At the political level, I think we could be doing a lot more with our infrastructure and pensions; if at the highest levels we join the dots between consumers, retail investors, and politicians, it can be quite impactful.

Do you have a motto or a quote that helps you to keep going even when you face big challenges?

One thing that is on my board in my home office is, ‘think big.’

If you’re thinking big, you will hopefully succeed at seeing beyond the challenges of the nitty gritty which has to be done. There are always challenges, you’re constantly two steps forward, one step back. Have the vision in mind and let that propel you and drive you forwards. 

What does your dream house look like?

…………………..….We live in Chiswick, in London, in a place that’s actually pretty close to my dream house. 

We are close to central London so we can get in and out of meetings, but it has a village feel to it. It's fantastic where we live; we have a good garden, which means we have space for our boys and dog. We get a lot of pleasure out of the garden and like to have a drink in it. The praise goes to my wife, she discovered this area which is a little haven and it's great. There are lots of independent, local shops as well. It’s just brilliant living.

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Eco-living hacks I’m loving:

Whogivesacrap – toilet paper that's good for the planet. It’s made from 100% recycled paper and bamboo and 50% of profits are donated to build toilets for people who don't have any. I love everything about this brand. Check them out with my affiliate link.

Community Notices

Share your product, services, book, or announcement to the Green Techpreneur. Must be a good fit for the climatetech and entrepreneur community.

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“When you invest in a company, it's about the best-case scenario, you paint this rosy picture of how the company is going to perform and how the markets are going to unfold, and what the profile of customers are going to look like.  

“It's never exactly how you think it's going to turn out. Sometimes it's better, sometimes there are roadblocks and obstacles in the way, and it's really about the tenacity and the ingenuity of the founders in the management team around how they handle that.”

Pangaea invests in companies that are leveraging advancements in material science, chemistry and biology that help move the needle on big global challenges related to climate change, food and water security and healthcare. 

For Sarah, working as an investor is the fulfilment of a long-standing, teenage dream to work with for-purpose, climatetech businesses: “I studied environmental science and I went back to school to get my MBA in Business and Sustainability to refocus my career into environment and climate business.”

She was interviewing with consultancy firms that had sustainability practices when she stumbled into investing through an introduction to the Pangaea team: “I didn’t know a single thing about venture capital. I just thought what they were doing as an organisation was so interesting, to be at that nexus of breakthrough innovations and have the ability to accelerate their growth and adoption in the market. 

“When I joined Pangaea in 2012, it was just the start of the hype in the industry. Shows like Silicon Valley were on TV.  Dragon's Den and Shark Tank were just starting.

“It wasn't until I jumped into working with Pangaea, into the deep end with both feet, that I also discovered I was comfortable living in this world of ambiguity and entrepreneurship.” 

Sarah sums up her investor role as “dynamic, intellectually curious and people-based.” 

Her life philosophy revolves around “waking up every day and genuinely loving what I do, but also having balance – it's not all about work. For me, balance means getting out of the office or house, spending time in nature.

“I get my bike on the road, take the dog to the dog beach, have dinner with friends. If it's wintertime, I grab my snowboard and head to the local mountains.”

Do you have a memorable experience as an investor that stood out, where things didn’t go as planned?

Pretty much every experience doesn't go exactly as planned, whether it's around the initial deal structure or things you will learn in due diligence.

To help ensure that when things go in unexpected directions our team and the teams we invest in are best equipped to handle it, we spend a lot of time in our due diligence process.

We drill down into the teams that we're investing in: how do they work together? How do they make decisions? How do they react when things don't go well? What is their default behaviour in times of stress? And then how can we work to support them to get through their roadblocks as they're navigating challenges in building the company?

What is your ideal relationship with the companies you work with and invest in?

We work very closely with all of the entrepreneurs that we invest in as a team.

On a structural level, we are often on the board of the companies that we invest into, that sets up that formalised relationship, but we're talking to the CEOs of our portfolio companies regularly, depending on what's happening in the business. It could be a weekly, or biweekly catch up call, or it can be monthly.

One of the things that I've put a lot of emphasis on is building long term relationships with founders – whether or not they're in our portfolio. Most of the companies we've invested in we've gotten to know over two or three years sometimes before we even have that conversation about writing that first check. 

And then there are many Founders and CEOs who we will never invest in, but still maintain very valuable relationships and we might add value to their business in other ways.

Who would you like to receive a pitch from?

We invest in commercial-stage companies that help solve one of the big global challenges that we're focused on: so companies that have already gone through that lengthy research development cycle and have at least one strong reference customer, and companies that have a lot of conviction around their unique technology and value proposition, and that are bringing a commercially ready and economically viable solution to the market.

What’s the best pitch you’ve seen?

The best pitches are with teams that are prepared and have a good understanding of who we are, what we do, and what we invest in. They know their market, have deep conviction around what it is they're doing and understand the economics of their business. It has to be cost-effective and there has to be a customer there. 

What are common pitching pitfalls?

There are two big mistakes that I see founders making.

One is not understanding your audience, so founders that reach out and try and pitch me on their e-commerce or SAS startup. It's not what we do, so it's not a good use of their time.

The second mistake is founders that don't understand the market or who feel like they have pressure to know all of the answers, as opposed to saying, ‘great question, I don’t know, but let me find out.’

What's the number one question that a founder should be prepared for if they're pitching to you?

Number one is ‘do you have a customer and will they buy again?’

We're not going to get into the weeds on how the technology works in the first, or maybe even the second meeting. What's relevant is that it's a big market, it's growing relatively quickly with a strong tailwind behind it, and trying to drill down and understand your customer buying behaviour. Do you have that customer profile persona down pat, or are you still trying to figure out that product-market fit?

What areas of climatetech do you see as having the biggest growth potential in coming years?

I think both decarbonisation and plant-based proteins are going to continue to grow. But looking at climate-related events in the last six weeks, extreme flooding in parts of Europe, Germany, in particular, massive heat waves across Canada and in the U.S. – it’s going to dramatically impact how and where we produce food.

Agriculture is also a substantial emitter when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, so I think that's going to be where we'll see a lot of focus, both from a climate change, resiliency perspective, but also thinking about how we can reduce our footprint and how we feed the world. 

Have you worked with any startups in those areas that you thought were pretty outstanding?

Absolutely. We've got several investments in the agriculture agritech space; we have a company called Prime Roots out of California, they're in the plant-based protein space. 

We just invested in a company called Tidal Vision, and they’re a circular economy company taking seafood waste from the fishery industry. Waste shells from lobsters, crabs and other crustaceans which would otherwise end up in landfill or be tossed back in the ocean. They extract a naturally occurring biopolymer from the shells called chitin and it's used in a myriad of applications from wastewater treatment to textile processing or as a soil additive to increase agricultural yields. 

We've also have investments in companies like Calysta which is using methane to produce protein for animal feed.

What’s your advice for Green Techpreneurs looking for investment?

I know that it's very, very tough for a lot of these cleantech startups to find the investment they want. So don’t get discouraged. Just because you hear 10 - 50 nos from investors, doesn't mean that there's not a viable business here. It's just not the right fit for them. We see 1,000 investment opportunities a year.  There’s a lot of reasons why we say no, or not right now, and other funds are in similar boats.

Especially if this is your first fundraiser, collect feedback you're getting from investors. Listening to that feedback will help you refine your pitch and better target the investor group that is the right fit for what you're doing. 

If you had a magic wand and could make one change in cleantech, what would it be?

It would be on the energy side – figuring out how to make fusion and nuclear work cost-effectively. Nuclear works, but there's a lot of environmental and regulatory considerations to make fusion work. It would solve a lot of our problems around transport and energy fuel and transportation. We'd have this perpetually working global source of clean energy where your byproduct is essentially seawater. 

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Sarah’s book recommendation

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez

“I highly recommend it for anybody who's interested in looking at the world through a gender lens.”

Eco-living hacks I’m loving:

Whogivesacrap – toilet paper that's good for the planet. It’s made from 100% recycled paper and bamboo and 50% of profits are donated to build toilets for people who don't have any. I love everything about this brand. Check them out with my affiliate link.

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Share your product, services, book, or announcement to the Green Techpreneur. Must be a good fit for the climatetech and entrepreneur community.

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With a nature-loving Mum and a banker Dad, his love for blending sustainability with finance and business started at an early age:

“My Mum comes from a farmer family in the countryside of Brazil, where they used to grow large scale organic citrus fruits. So I would always go visit the farm, and my Mum would take me out into the forest and nature.

“I was raised in a family that cultivated nature as part of our way of life, and my Dad worked for banks in the financial sector – so I’ve got both the financial background and the nature-loving, agricultural background.”

As a young man, Felipe’s passion for nature and business had taken him across the globe in search of nature-based innovation that he could get behind. But it was a trip a little closer to home – the Amazon rainforest – that became his defining moment.

“I decided to go explore the richness of nature around Brazil. I got to know each biome and its context. I saw how much richness and knowledge people living across the Amazon have and how they can produce their own food, fibres and medicine.”

Like many other green techpreneurs, Felipe’s big idea started with spotting a major problem and then finding means and ways to turn solutions into profitable products and services.

“I was amazed by how Amazonians treat and respect nature. Then when I left the Amazon, I saw massive deforestation for soybean cattle ranching industries, and I asked myself why we need to harm nature to produce our major global commodities.

“I wondered if there was a way we can produce agricultural commodities while preserving the natural environment by including trees or forests into the design process?

He found that despite an abundance of science backing the benefits of agroforestry and regenerative farming for both the environment and farmers’ bottom line, it wasn’t practised in mainstream agriculture.

In 2018, Felipe went on to launch reNature together with his Co-founder, Marco de Boer, to change that. He has since appeared in Forbes 30Under30, become Strategic Advisor to the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS), delivered a TED talk, and dedicated his entire life to changing the way we produce Agri commodities worldwide.

reNature’s goal is to ensure the growing global population will have access to high quality and sustainable food while regenerating the land. It’s already rejuvenated over 40,000 hectares of land and works with major corporations as well as smallholder farmers looking to green their supply chains.

What change are you hoping to create in agriculture?

The traditional farming industry makes farmers less resilient and more vulnerable to climate or price volatility. Frost or an intensive dry period creates big losses on yields; just now in Brazil, coffee farmers lost 80% of the harvest because of frost. In France, 60% of viticulture farmers lost their grapes for wineries because of heavy frost. 

Across the globe, there's a common-sense that climate change is impacting our agricultural commodities and there is urgency for farmers to start changing how they manage soil. Regenerative agriculture plays a key role because you support farmers in getting away from monoculture and you diversify farms to produce multiple crops so farmers can mitigate and spread these risks.

How did you get your first clients?

We started with testing the waters around local communities and smallholder farmers to showcase projects so we can communicate the benefits of such practices. 

The biggest win came when we saw the appetite for regenerative farming from large corporates. Now, we are working with Nespresso, Danone, Unilever, LVMH, Chandon, LUSH and others. This is something that is now not just a nice concept, but it’s really being applied to business operations.

What key messaging did you use to sell reNature’s services?

We have two main messages: we show the inspirational side of the things – why this is good for the farmers and the planet so – looking from the perspective of impact and future generations.

Every corporation has individuals inside the organisation, who also have kids and who care about the future. 

We make a clear business case; we're focused on communicating the economic benefits, so companies can see this is not a romantic concept but there's economics behind transitioning towards regenerative agriculture.

We make infographics showing the economic benefits for multiple crops like coffee and cocoa. Companies and farmers see this as something they should look at, if we can make more profit by using a principle that works in favour of nature, why wouldn't we do that?

How far or close are you to achieving your goal of regenerating 1 million hectares of land by 2030?

In 2018, we were able to regenerate around 335 hectares, by 2020, we regenerated around 4,000, and now we are at around 40,000 hectares. We're growing fast. 

 Our impact matrix is not only based on land but also on farmers and food security – social impact. We have a 10 million farmer transition target; it means we need 2% of total smallholder farmers to transition by 2030.

What kind of partnerships do you need to achieve your goals?

We have a very vast network of farmers and communities and possible projects in our pipeline that request support, both technical and financial support.

reNature provides technical assistance, but we are looking for financial institutions, banks, investors, or philanthropic organisations. Some of our projects are early stage and need financial capital. We're now looking at possible investment funds and grants for projects as well as looking at possible corporate partners.

We’re also looking to expand our portfolio across industries; so not just work with the food industry but also the textile industry, fashion brands, cosmetics, perfume brands, the pulp and paper industry, the timber industry.

What are the biggest challenges in achieving reNature’s growth targets?

We have the capacity and knowledge to change the game in this industry. My founding partner and I wake up every day with the confidence that we can do this.

This work brings us a lot of inspiration, but of course, there are some challenges: one is that a lot of organisations are very fresh and new with this topic so we have to spend a lot of time, effort and money on educating the market about the concept.

We have several meetings with organisations to explain from a technical and financial basis what it means for them to transition. It's really challenging to turn that conversation into something concrete as a project – we go through lots of discussions and it can take a while to close a deal.

Another challenge is our rapid growth and hiring! We want to make sure we take the right steps and develop a process before hiring new people, instead of hiring people and then developing a process. We’re really focused on the quality of our hiring process.

We hired some senior people from recognised organisations that can bring us some experience – this gives us a lot of relief that we are not alone as entrepreneurs.

What advice would you give to other green techpreneurs?

The only way that we can succeed in reaching net-zero and having a positive impact at scale is if we collaborate with multiple actors in the supply chain. Build a network of people that can support you in reaching your goals, collaboration is key. 

If you had a magic wand and could change one thing in the world, what would it be?

I would turn every single piece of degraded land we have today into regenerative agriculture. I truly believe that there is no healthy society if there is no healthy soil. We cannot live as a healthy planet and a healthy society if we don't treat the soil right.

We humans need to use sunscreen to protect our skin from the sun to not get burned – the soil is the same. It needs a layer of vegetation and greenery to protect it from the sun so that you can keep it moist and keep the soil nutrients rich.

………….…..……...if Felipe could teleport himself into his future, he’d be on the borders of the Amazon, converting all the land that has been deforested into forests and regenerative cash crops.

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Innovate Climate is an online community centered around a weekly newsletter that highlights startups to the broader climate and sustainability ecosystem. Innovate Climate's mission is to help startups succeed and create impact, specifically by providing visibility to others in the sector and facilitating introductions. Innovate Climate launched in January and has already attracted hundreds of startups and investors.

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Now, he says, there’s a shift towards approaching cleantech investments less like SAS or tech startups, and more like traditional companies with a focus on teams with a good idea of where and how to commercialise and implement products.

Kevin moved into private equity two years ago and is at the forefront of investing in sectors of greentech which, not long ago, were struggling to turn a profit: “We made an investment in China's largest thermal energy storage company. I realised that the cleantech space in this sector is entering a transition phase where it's not only helping the environment, but also becoming profitable. It’s taking on less government subsidy, despite there being more subsidy.

“There's a general shift in mindset from what is ‘out there’ to ‘what can we capture currently’ and that’s very exciting. For the cleantech space to not lose heat as it did for the past years, it needed that boost in active, commercialised projects – something more concrete.”

With a love for science fiction and a background in applied mathematics and business administration, for Kevin, investing in the green revolution is about conquering our own planet and laying a solid foundation before we enter the next era of space exploration.

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What do you see as high growth potential areas in greentech?

I see smartgrid and microgrid as very high potential.

In terms of infrastructure, most metropolitan areas already have great energy and utility services in place, but as you move into more rural areas, there’s plenty of energy sources but not a lot of infrastructure in place.

Smartgrid is an area we are currently actively looking for portfolios in.

That as well as energy efficiency. In terms of cleantech, one aim is to make the energy source more clean, the other is to reduce the cost and energy used. A lot of buildings in New York have an energy efficiency rating of C, so there’s huge room to improve that. 

I’m slightly biased towards energy storage.

It’s very underutilised and there’s huge potential. Half of all energy worldwide is spent on heating, and there’s virtually no coverage on energy storage compared to battery storage, so I think as soon as investors realise and come to terms with just how big the market is, as well as how quickly the market can be captured, there's going to be a huge profit on this.

There’s a shift towards renewable energy projects, wind, solar, and in order to do that, we’ll need a massive amount of energy storage. The focus right now is battery because it’s how energy providers can provide electricity as well as transportation.

Who would you like to receive a pitch from?

We're looking for mature companies that are strategically aligned with our portfolio IP and clientele, which is energy storage and storage management. About 10 years ago we made investments, very early investments, in a lithium-ion battery company, and we built one of the largest large-cell battery factories in Russia.

In terms of IP alignment, our portfolio uses heat pumps to capture energy from the environment, that can be in terms of air, it can be recycled energy, or geothermal, and if any entrepreneur has any IOT, for example, they’ve developed a blockchain marketplace, we’re happy to look at ways where we can expand beyond thermal energy storage and move into a marketplace. If your IP is IOT we can think about ways to bring two companies together and improve energy usage. There are a lot of different ways, and you can be very creative in terms of IP – if you think your IP could interact with energy storage.

If you have clientele that have heating needs, say you’re providing microgrid services to some remote locations, and they have an unstable grid and they’re actually looking for ways to smooth that out – those are the type of clientele that are readily convertible to us. 

In the next 3-5 years, we will be looking at microgrid and smartgrid. There’s going to be huge commercialisation of energy generation. We’re also going to be looking at technologies related to photovoltaics. I think the PV industry has been experiencing the morse law – it’s really pumped for a quantum leap in terms of efficiency and cost reduction.

What three tips would you give to green techpreneurs pitching to investors?

The goal of saving the planet and making it a better place for our children is noble but we want to look for entrepreneurs as well as owners that have a good understanding of the market and know how to capture it.

How your product or service is 10-15%  better than your competitors is not very convincing to us, because we’ve seen some products being 10-15% inferior to other ones, but if they can sell better, that makes for a better business. 

Be very business-oriented when pitching

Make sure the idea of your product is properly conveyed, but ensure that you know how to capture the market as well as how to commercialise and scale, it's very very important.

Have presentable information

We've run into a couple of instances where they had a great team, but when we asked questions they were scrambling through documents. Make sure you come in prepared.

Be very prepared to address the question; ‘how easily can your product or service be leapfrogged?’

If you’re looking to scale, scaling is not a matter of a year or 2, it could be 3-5 years and in that time, the exponential decay of product costs could definitely replace your market share. Be ready to address the leapfrog question. Do you have a great sales team?

If you have a great product, we’re willing to buy your IP, but a great company requires knowing how to sell the product.

What’s the number one reason you think a pitch fails?

It’s simply being underprepared. It happens a lot. Be detail-oriented and organised in your thoughts. You need to have the details sorted and the story has to make sense before someone like us will look further into your documents.

Do you have a favourite quote?

You make the road by walking. If there’s something you want to do or explore without distracting from your main focus, I think you should definitely take that journey.

Is there a philosophy you follow?

Be slightly delusional with the ability to execute. Make a grandiose plan, and engineer solutions and a path there. Even if you don’t get there, you’ll get somewhere pretty close. 

What’s your advice to green techpreneurs?

Don't be discouraged if you make a pitch and someone goes ‘isn't this target market too small?’ If you can occupy a niche, that’s a great footing from which you can expand into other areas. 

If what you’re doing is below the pay grade of whoever you’re pitching to, it probably isn’t going to end up working anyways. There are always PE firms and VC firms that are happy to be involved in whatever you're working on, so don't be discouraged, keep it up and try to ensure you develop a sellable product and you’ll have success.

………………….if Kevin could teleport himself into his future, he’d be in Singapore making investments in leading-edge technologies; “on the current trajectory most of the tropical and subtropical regions are projected to be barely liveable, and Singapore has always defied logic in that sense. They're building infrastructure that specifically addresses climate issues to ensure it’s liveable and future-proof, that’s somewhere I’d like to see.”

His dream house would be tech-filled, futuristic, and have an energy-efficiency rating of A; “I want something exciting and modern; maybe some water would come from the building to cool the surface.”

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Share your product, services, book, or announcement to the Green Techpreneur. Must be a good fit for the climatetech and entrepreneur community.

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For Ecosia Founder Christian Kroll the answer was to change the plans that he had for his life. At the age of just 16 he had started trading stocks and envisioned a future as a stock broker. But after travelling through India as an 18 year old, he decided his career would be more than a career – it would impact the planet.

After graduating from university, he spent one and a half years living in Nepal, India and South America searching for answers to the question that still haunted him….how would he impact the planet? “Living in South America, I realised how much we’re destroying our ecosystems. The rainforests are being cut down and replaced by soya plants or grazing fields...I really wanted to do something about it,” says Christian.

At university he had created a comparison website, and was earning money from commissions: “I realised how much money I was spending on online advertisement and that Google is a really good business model.

“I wanted to do something to help solve climate change and use my experience in tech. So I put those two things together. That’s how I created the search engine that plants trees.” 

With 15 million users worldwide, Ecosia is the world’s largest not-for-profit search engine – it’s planted more than 128 million trees across 26 countries and powers its engine with 100% renewable energy. It may be one of the best-known cleantech companies of our time, but Christian’s initial attempts at building a non-for-profit search engine failed. 

“I tried to find a few developers in Nepal and build a search engine with them to make money for social projects. The idea was pretty stupid because it was not possible to make money.

“On some days we had just four hours of electricity. I didn’t know how to start an online company and how to manage people. I didn’t understand the search market, my cash situation wasn’t great, every month I was losing money.”

Ecosia’s explosive growth came after many failed side-hustle projects, and was Christian’s third attempt at building a non-for-profit search engine. Here’s what he learnt on his rollercoaster journey to resounding success as a green techpreneur.

What made you stick with the idea of creating a non-for-profit search engine after your first attempts failed?

I looked at the opportunity cost, because I finished university with very good grades, faster than I needed to, and companies were interested in hiring me. I could have made a decent salary, but making money wasn’t so important to me. I wanted to give this a try, I believed in it, and then I just wanted to keep going.

At some point, my Mum said, you’ve been doing this for 1.5 years now, maybe it’s time that something works...I had a lot of freedom, but also realised that I can’t do this forever, at some point, something needs to work.

What did you do differently with Ecosia that led to its success?

We focused on the right audience and have a message that is compelling to everybody. Helping projects in Nepal may have been interesting to a few people, but helping solve climate change is interesting to everyone.

It was that, and tweaking the idea until it really worked. If you do something for the third time – you gain experience, you don’t make the same mistakes again. I had great support in building up the company, so it wasn't so dependent on myself. 

Which growth and marketing strategies led to Ecosia’s explosive growth?

Ultimately, we built a product that really meets user needs. There are a lot of people who care about solving climate change, and Ecosia is one of the easiest things that you can do. We calculate that each search actually absorbs one kilogram of co2. If you do thousands of searches per year, that’s tons of co2 being removed – that's a significant part of your carbon footprint. And it takes 1-2 clicks to change your search engine. People understand that and recommend it to their friends – this is our most powerful growth channel. 

We also use traditional marketing. We put advertisements on Facebook, YouTube. We try posters as well for out-of-home advertising.

A few of our campaigns were very successful. For example, we wanted to buy an ancient forest off of a coal company in Germany, and that generated a lot of attention and our user numbers went up. We wanted to send out a message that coal should stay in the ground. 

These are things we can do as a non-for-profit company that are a bit different. It really builds trust and a great brand, and then, hopefully, people come to you. 

If you could go back in time and build Ecosia again, what would you do differently?

I would call my friend Tim. Tim joined in 2013, four years after I started the company, he is an experienced business angel who has already built various successful companies. At first he was quite involved on an operational level, now he has more of an advisor role. During the early years, he really supported the building of the company. 

I wish I had called him earlier, because in the early years we were doing quite a lot of circles instead of going in one direction. 

I think if you bring somebody on board as a mentor who really has done what you want to do, this really saves a lot of time, and also intellectually it's just great to have someone you can learn from.

What advice would you give to other green techpreneurs who are just starting out?

Validate your product

Build something that a significant amount of people really want so that you get traction for your product. A lot of entrepreneurs have good ideas, but then people don’t really use it. So validate your product. I tried many, many things until I founded Ecosia, which did what I wanted and also what the users wanted. 

Think twice about taking investors on board

Ecosia belongs to itself, it’s impossible to take profits out or sell the company – that is very important. We could not have done this if we had taken venture capital in the early days, people underestimate how much freedom they're giving up. Sometimes the trade off is needed, but not always.

I see a lot of companies that at some point fall apart, or the founders leave, because they basically lost ownership or control of the company or feel like it's not going in the right direction anymore.

“We don’t have shareholders in the classical sense, and that gives us the freedom to do the right thing.”

We had to finance everything with our own cash flow. That's a very important restriction for me, it granted us the freedom to not have to pay any investors or look at how we can do a big exit. 

We found this model of what we call a purpose company. Shares can only be given to employees, they can never be sold. Even if Microsoft or Google put a billion dollars on the table – we would not be able to sell it – that’s legally binding. Protecting Ecosia like that is very important to me, it’s impossible to take profits out of the company. I earn a normal salary and that’s enough for me. 

A lot of companies are purely focused on shareholder value maximisation, I don’t believe this will lead to a good future, what we’re creating is a counter model to that. I never wanted to be a billionaire, if someone gave me a billion Euros tomorrow, I would just plant more trees.

Can you describe your green techpreneur journey in three words?

Persistence, purpose, and people.

What are your plans for scaling further?

Helping people make carbon-friendly consumer choices

Ecosia is a search engine that uses profits for planting trees, and that’s great, but we also want to use the search engine to help people make carbon-friendly choices. 

Let's say you want to travel from Berlin to Munich by plane, Ecosia would tell you, ‘hey, that’s not such a great idea’, why don’t you take a train and save a couple hundred kilograms of CO?’ There are things like shopping and travel where this value proposition could be useful. We can have a big impact on our users CO2 footprint. Again, it helps that we are not a profit maximizing company, because we can tell people, ‘don’t buy this.’

Impacting the tree-planting sector

Where we can have a big impact is on the tree planting sector. Tree planting is one of the biggest things we can do to solve climate change, forests are super, super important. The sector isn’t well developed at the moment – it isn’t very transparent.

We want to raise the bar for tree planting and give donors certainty that if they say put money into tree planting, it will really have an impact. We have 16 projects in over 15,000 locations and we are monitoring that with satellites, mobile apps and machine learning to ensure we have high quality. We make this portfolio available to external companies, so if somebody wants to do tree-planting, they can do it through us. 

In coming decades, we need 1 trillion new trees, but currently we’re still losing billions of trees every year – we’re far from achieving that. 

Do you have a life philosophy you follow?

I want to solve climate change, and that’s a really difficult nut to crack. I’ve been working on this for 12 years now, and especially in the first 10 years, I just didn’t understand why people don’t wake up. This is the biggest existential threat the world has ever faced. It can get depressing, but at some point I decided, I’m going to give it my best and still have fun and enjoy my life while doing it. Because, ultimately, this is a marathon.

……………to stay grounded, Christian meditates and cycles, “cycling is a nice way of getting started with the day, and ending the day. If you’re a founder of a startup, you need to take time to recharge.” His dream house would be built with clay and would bring nature indoors with “a lot of plants and maybe some vegetables growing inside it.”

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👉🏼 Pratik Dattani, Managing Director at Economic Policy Group, helps cleantech companies in their journey from R&D to commercialisation, working closely with founders to build multi-million dollar revenue opportunities, and marketing and communications strategies. He has deep market understanding of, and has worked closely with governments and regulators in, the UK, India and East Africa.

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“It's the fact that nature can irrigate the inner parts of vast arid continents through clouds – if you think about what a cloud is – the concept of evaporation, the huge movement of water. The water cycle and water itself as a chemical is very, very unusual. 

“If you think about all human existence. Most towns and human civilisation have been built in relation to water for food and transport. People have a primal connection with water – humans' relationship with water has been forever.” 

In the face of a looming water crisis, Jacob says there are two things that give him hope: a huge amount of tech coupled with a vast entrepreneurial spirit to solve wicked water problems, and grassroots activism for the quality and preservation of water. 

“We all have a fixed pot of water that we're all reusing and you have to look after it. We think the oceans or water are places we can just dump stuff, and that we can use as much water as we'd like. Maybe if we considered that the planet has a finite supply of water, we would look after it properly and be good stewards of that water.”

As the Founder of an accelerator hub that matches watertech innovation with investment and market demand, Jacob’s on a mission to transform the way water is used and managed, and he knows how to craft a pitch that ensures both climatetech companies and investors are talking the same language.

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How are you hoping to solve issues of watertech innovation in your accelerator?

We set up the accelerator to see whether we can ensure that the tech is right for the market, and the market is shaped so it can accept the tech. A lot of tech companies devise something they think is amazing. And quite often it is, and it'll solve these world water problems. ‘Okay, that's lovely, but where's the money coming from?’ You need to think about the market and how that's going to be implemented. Who's going to buy this technology? That's the really difficult part, quite often tech entrepreneurs don't think about that. 

In your experience, what are investors looking for?

What investors are looking for is 50% team, 25% tech and 25% marketing and business plan and yet most tech companies think it's all about the tech. That's great, but you need the right team and to have thought about your pipeline and who's going to buy this. 

We see people who spend ages and ages making the tech better. But what they should do is spend ages and ages making it cheaper. 

Often, 90% of what they've done is good enough for the water company and what they should do is make it either cheaper or more robust, or easier to fit. And instead they work on the tech side. I spent a lot of time as an academic and that's what you do, but it doesn't work in the market, you need to turn your tech into a product. Just because people have a great idea and really good tech – it doesn't mean it's going to sell.

What’s the number one reason a pitch fails?

We tend to work with European companies and I hate to say this, but quite often, it's almost lack of ambition. This is very generalistic but if you talk to American tech companies, and say ‘what's your market?’ It's,‘well, it’s a global market and we're going to do this and we're going to do that.’ Whereas if you talk to a European one it’s ‘well we've sold two of these to the local water company and maybe, if it's good enough, we might be able to sell another one.’

What’s a pitch that ticks all the boxes?

Be ambitious. Ensure that you talk about the business plan, the team, as well as the tech. The number of times you see investors’ eyes glaze over when people talk about the tech too much... 

Most important is the team and their background and showing that they've had success in this area before. The technology has to work. You have to show progress, you have to show a pipeline, you have to show traction, and you have to show vision, and ultimately, how is the investor going to get their money back?

Could you describe the best pitch you’ve seen?

Enthusiasm and self-belief

My colleague and I were talking to a tech company where we were both amazed at the end and we loved it. But then when we sat down and thought about it afterwards, they didn't actually have anything. Physically, or in terms of IP, there wasn't anything there yet. It was the enthusiasm, it was the team they had put together, and it was the vision they had. And we have investors who are interested in this. 

Sell the vision

You have to be able to sell the story and sell the vision. It was almost as if these guys are so passionate about this, they've got the right team, they'll be able to do this. And you know, the tech is just filling in the blanks – you will get from here to there.

It's the opposite of a company with really good tech that they've spent ages working on, but they're almost apologetic about. 

Don’t bore your audience

Define the problem you're going to solve. Frankly, if you're a tech company with really good tech, then the story bit isn't that difficult. That's the point people always miss.

I've seen so many presentations where it's just unbelievably boring. Once you get onto the 14th slide of how the tech works, I don't care, just tell me why and what it's going to do. I don't need to know how, I will afterwards, everyone does their due diligence. But tell me a compelling story first.

Who would you like to hear from?

I’m on the lookout for European watertech that's looking to grow. We're in that space between tech entrepreneurs, investors and customers and we may be able to help you.

Do you have a favourite quote?

‘That'll Do, Pig.’ Which is what the farmer says to Pig when he's rounded up the sheep and done a decent job. To me, it sums up contentment and playing your part.

……………..If Jacob could teleport himself into his future he’d still be busy connecting the watertech market: “Take off the limits, I’d be in a castle by the seaside somewhere warm, doing the same thing I’m doing now.”

For now, as lockdown lifts, he’s looking forward to going to the pub for a quiet pint...

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