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May 26, 2023
Creative Angel Investing in Climate Tech

A few weeks ago, I had the honor of presenting to Golden Seeds, one of the largest angel groups in the US (and arguably the largest focused on investing in women-led businesses), on climate tech. I was struggling a bit with figuring out a topic until I started thinking about the role of angel investing […]

April 6, 2023
Climate tech theme to watch: decentralization

I’ve been looking how we might be able to create a financial ecosystem tailored to growing and scaling climate tech and what themes might impact that kind of financial ecosystem. One of these themes is this concept of decentralization. Many different climate tech sectors rely on decentralized models of producing goods and services, following a […]

February 13, 2023
A climate tech map

I thought it would be a good "New Year" exercise to update the FEST map and add some thoughts on each climate tech sector. As a reminder, FEST is a framework, inspired by Bill Gates' book, that illustrates the impact of climate tech on the different parts of how we live. Emissions can broadly be […]

January 20, 2023
IRA: Timing is everything

Happy New Year! I spent some time over the holidays making a fun little reference timeline for the IRA credits. The various effective dates can be confusing and I figure it would be helpful to have a birds eye view of when each provision comes into play. From this angle, we can observe that there […]

December 1, 2022
The emergence of specialist climate VCs

There’s been a LOT of money poured into climatetech over the last few years and even with the recent downturn, new money keeps coming in. According to CTVC, 2022 has seen an uptick in the number of new climatetech VC investors announced (45 -> 47), despite rising interest rates and a broader market slowdown for […]

November 4, 2022
Wave energy pt 2: the wild world of wave energy converters

Last time I looked at the history of wave energy and what lessons we can draw from past cycles that could be relevant to today’s climatetech challenges. This week I wanted to create the actual wave energy market map, in part to get a better sense of the variety of wave energy converters (WEC) that […]

October 21, 2022
Wave energy pt 1: lessons for climatetech

After looking at the breadth of ocean-based climate solutions last week and having a better understanding around the potential of the ocean, I thought it might be informative to look at wave energy more specifically. Four things that are worth noting about the wave energy space: The resource is huge. As mentioned last week, wave […]

October 14, 2022
Why ocean-based climate solutions need more investment

Most of what we talk about in climatetech happens on land – hydrogen production, power generation, carbon sequestration, grid optimization, industrial decarbonization, residential energy efficiency, etc. This is because the majority of technologies get deployed around people’s homes, in city environments, or industrial complexes, all of which largely occur on land. But what about the […]

September 29, 2022
The case for a FOAK-focused fund

This week I had a grand plan to write about the economics of first commercial facility / FOAK commercial and why it makes complete sense to invest in these projects. But it was much more difficult to make the numbers work than anticipated. Even if a company gets over the FOAK hurdle, the lengthy time […]

September 15, 2022
How much FOAK funding do we need?

After discussing types of FOAK last week, this week I wanted to see if I could find a good estimate for the amount of FOAK funding we need. One way to look at this is to try to pare down estimated infrastructure spend to what will be spent on FOAK technologies. Most infra spend estimates […]

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