SPEAKER_00: Okay, everybody, we've got an amazing interview for today in our This Week in Climate Startups segment. And I'm going to join Molly for it. VC legend John Doerr is back on This Week in Startups for his second appearance. And he joins us with his co-author Ryan to talk about their new

SPEAKER_02: book, Speed and Scale. It is. I mean, there's no other word for it. It's so great. It's such

Jason Calacanis: a great interview. You're going to love it. And before that, we've got another edition of VC Sunday School, where Jason is going to break down cap tables. Not a boring basic part, although I'm still looking for that perfect spreadsheet to calculate the math, but specifically how cap tables can get messy. And then when they get messy, when it's so messy that you just need to walk away

SPEAKER_07: like call or call in FEMA to clean it up. Yeah, clean up time. Okay, it's going to be an epic, great show. Stick with us. Stick with us.

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SPEAKER_13: All right, everybody. Welcome to my favorite segment and yours. VC Sunday School. J Cal's

SPEAKER_14: taking me to church on the basics of the business. I can't tell you like people are so excited about this segment, which makes me so happy because it's not just me. Yeah, everybody's going to be in

SPEAKER_15: the future. Everybody will have a podcast and a venture capital fund. It's incredible. You know,

SPEAKER_13: it's incredible. And we want you to know that VC School is going to go on after this segment where

Jason Calacanis: J Cal and I are talking because we have an incredible legend interview today. Legend. It's really arguably briefly the clash of two legends with these two come together. John Doerr has a new book out on tackling the climate crisis called speed and scale. We talked to him and his co author

SPEAKER_23: together and you just let me put it this way. J Cal and John Doerr are dropping some really good origin

SPEAKER_25: stories here. Yeah, then please don't call me a legend. You know, like, I mean, I might be like,

SPEAKER_00: some people have said like, Angel Jesus, but that's not for me to say. It's not for me to say. I mean, in a way I do give. And I'm selfless about this. And I'm on a mission, very similar to Jesus in that way. But not for me to say. Did you ever see get him to the Greek? But Russell Crowe is like, I'm

SPEAKER_31: kind of like an electric electric African Jesus and Russell Brand Russell Brand. What did I say?

SPEAKER_33: Russell Crowe. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. He's a gladiator. Anyway, Russell brand and get him to the Greek is amazing where he starts comparing himself to Jesus, but he says it's not for me to say, but I'm kind of like an electric African Jesus. We'll probably have to stop blaspheming at some

SPEAKER_17: point here. But it is Sunday church. It's Sunday. But give me another 10 years before it's Sunday

Jason Calacanis: school. Yeah. All right. Well, anyway, we're going to talk about this. And then yes, there's going to be great stuff coming up. So first, I want to talk about some basics. And then we're going to talk about we've got two topics here topics. First one is gonna go go quickly. The fundamental of investing is the cap table, of course, where you figure out how many shares how much ownership everybody has in a company and at what price. But what is becoming interesting to me about cap tables or capitalization tables is that recently I've been part of a couple conversations where we talked about whether the cap table was too messy. And so I kind of want to understand what are red flags that you can find inside a cap table? When is it too messy? What can happen that even makes it messy? How does it get messy? Who's throwing their underwear all over the cap table? Like I don't get it? Yeah. So it's pretty

SPEAKER_51: simple. At the early phases of a startup. The equity is precious. And you need to have the founders really incentivized and the team incentivized to keep building the company because it's going to be a

SPEAKER_00: 10 year journey. Now when a company is public, people can trade the shares freely. And it's a different dynamic. But in the earliest part of this, of the journey, what founders can do is they need money, maybe they're a bit naive, and they sell the equity very cheap, and very often. And in fact,

SPEAKER_51: there was this whole brouhaha is, you know, Y Combinator worth it now that they're adding the second check and they own 10% of the company. And we talked about that on previous episodes. But you know, 7% to an accelerator doesn't really break the cap table, because the cap table at the accelerator phase would look like 7% to the folks at Y Combinator or Techstars or even ours launch, we take 6%. Then you maybe would earmark 10 to 15% for employees, let's call it 15% really super generous, 15 plus seven 22% 22 from 100. You know, now you're sitting at 78% of the company is owned by the founders. Okay, how many founders are there? Okay, there's four, they own roughly 20% each, they you know, there's two of them, they own 40% each great. Now they raise a seed round, they do they dilute 15% again. Okay, now you've got 15% taken from 80% or so. So you're taking off roughly 12 points there. Now it goes down. And you know, maybe the founders are at 70% 72%. If there's two of them, they own 36%

SPEAKER_54: each, okay, they're still in the game. 20% reduction again, and then another 20% reduction. Okay,

SPEAKER_00: they went from 35% each down 20% minus seven, you're at 28% and another 20% in the next round. Okay, so you start seeing what happens five rounds of funding, three rounds of funding, on average 15,

SPEAKER_51: 20%, you put this all into a spreadsheet. And what you'll find in a two founder company, which is most often if they split it equally, that by the time you get public, Larry and Sergey own 10% or Zuckerberg owns 20% or Elon owns, as a solo founder, 15%, whatever it is, things get diluted. And then hopefully you have a billion or multi billion dollar company, and each own 10%. And then sometimes like, famously, Aaron from box, I think owned only 4% when it went public, and people were like, Oh, it's too low. And it was like, he was like, I'm fine. It's worth, you know, 5 million, I got $200 million. I'm good. Don't don't feel bad for me. So now imagine a scenario where somebody sold 20% of the company to, I don't know, their friends and family. And they sold, they gave 25% to a dev shop. Now we've lopped off 45% of the cap table. And the two founders own give to 15% to their team. Now they're at 40% each 40%, 20% each at the start. Right. And then you start doing this 20% dilution. What VCs will do is say there's not enough equity for them. They need to be over 50%. You know, after the seed round, some might say 70%. Why is that so that they have enough control or

SPEAKER_03: motivation or both motivation? Because they don't want them to quit. Because what happens

SPEAKER_52: sometimes is a founder owns 10% of the company in the series B. And they're like, you know what, I'm gonna start a new company. I sold some of my shares in secondary got $5 million in the bank.

SPEAKER_00: I'll start a new company. And this time I'll do it right. And I'll me I'll keep ownership of 60 or 70%. Hmm. And, you know, I'll be a solo founder, right. And that is why people look at these. And then there's also a little bit of animosity. A VC might look at it and go why did this person build like the the really crummy MVP for the app and take 20%. Well, when you're a founder, you have nothing. And you're like this dev shop will build my app. And I just gotta give 20%. Great. That gets me in the game. So what we do and other venture capitalists will do is we'll say, wow, this looks really messy.

SPEAKER_51: Here's two choices. One, we'll invest a million dollars. But we want to do what's called a founder refresh, the founders own 30%. Now, we want to award the founders 30% more of the company. And we want that to dilute the previous investors, not us. So that will occur before we put our million in, we're going to put our million in to buy 15% of the company. But we want all of you to take a 30% hit, we're going to double the amount of shares for the founders, we're not putting our million dollars in. It's a little bit gangster, but it's also a little bit pragmatic. You will see this happen later on. Sometimes adventure capitalists will use this technique in a nefarious way. I've had this happen two or three times where in order to win the deal, they'll say to the founder, Hey, you're at 40%. I'll invest, but I'll insist that you get 10% more, we get 25% more, we get you up to

SPEAKER_52: 50 points. And it will come out of all those VCs and angels, and the accelerator that got a better deal than we did. So screw them. And then the founders like, Okay, I'm going to take the deal with this person, because they're giving me equity. You know, what I always say in that situation is, okay, let's, let's bifurcate, let's separate these two moments, employee comp will be done by the board. After we do this financing round. And sometimes I win that argument, sometimes I don't.

SPEAKER_00: In other words, if we are going to give the founder 10%, you invest your money, and then you make that decision with your receiving 10% dilution, which would seem more fair, wouldn't it? Yeah, definitely. If you listen to this week in startups often, you've heard me talk about Odoo suite of business apps a lot. Well, they are going to give you your first app free forever and $1,000 off your first implementation pack at Odoo.com slash twist. Here is why Odoo is great for startups. Their suite of business apps helps run your entire company on one platform. And they'll streamline workflows by bringing all your information together. This eliminates annoying repetitive tasks, like entering data across multiple platforms. Plus, if you only need two or three apps to optimize your workflow, that's all you're going to pay for Odoo won't charge you for apps you don't use Odoo offers over 30 main apps and over 16,000 apps from their open source community. Their apps include bookkeeping sales, CRM, website builders and more. So again, your first app is free forever. But Odoo is also offering you a $1,000 credit on your first implementation pack, which you can get at Odoo.com slash twist. That's

Jason Calacanis: odoo.com slash twist to get that $1,000 right now. Okay, so among the red flags that you might see in an otherwise promising startup, where does a messy cap table sit? Like how big a problem is that? Because it

SPEAKER_03: actually sounds like it's pretty fundamental, I'd say it comes up in the stage where we invest, you know,

SPEAKER_51: the accelerator stage and early one out of 10 times one out of five times, you know, it happens. And then it is only so broken if like, let's say the founders own under 60%, under 50% at that earliest stage, that's when it's really broken. And it's pretty easy to fix. Because the people who invested early, if they did get some crazy deal, we might say to the dev shop, Hey, you own 20%. This company's not getting financed by these famous people, unless you go down 5% ownership, and we'll pay you 250k for

SPEAKER_74: that 15%, which is what you would have gotten paid if you had built the app. So now you own 5% of the company, and you got made whole, it would have cost 250 to make the app, we'll give you the 250. And

SPEAKER_02: I've seen that actually work. Have you ever been pushed out of a search dog asks actually no to gang search dog? Have you ever been pushed out of a big position by one of these deals?

SPEAKER_01: Not a big position, but I have been diluted significantly when somebody did that. And it was so underhanded that I basically wrote off the company, and the founder let it happen. So I wrote off the founder to Wow, we know the way I look at it, Molly is in this game, it's about morals, ethics.

SPEAKER_52: And I always feel like if I'm going to have your back, you've got to have mine. And if you're going to screw me, I'm just got other companies to focus on. And I one of the things I learned in life is the

SPEAKER_51: people that screw the people who helped them get here. They just wind up screwing everybody along

SPEAKER_00: the way. And they're so close minded. They're so petty, that they wind up failing. Because what we do is about making everybody rich and everybody having equity, and growing the share price together. What this manipulation is doing is we're saying, you know what, instead of us all winning together by increasing the share price, we're going to dilute your shares while giving us more. The better thing to focus on is, let's just raise the share price, it's a share set of prices at a dollar, let's get it to two. So everybody doubles their money.

SPEAKER_83: But I can certainly see then why a company with a cap table that has a really low founder ownership

Jason Calacanis: percentage is a big red flag, because you know that then there's the potential even if they just made a mistake, right? They just did it wrong. Because they're doing it wrong. Typically, they did it wrong. If you invest, and you end up in a position where a future investor might come along and try to dilute you, I could see why it's a red flag, like doing this is a case where doing it wrong, could cost you an investment from a VC who's like, you know what, this is going to be a mess down

SPEAKER_83: the road. Yeah, and I don't want to have that fight.

SPEAKER_52: And so VCs are very good at cleaning this up because they have a chip stack, and they'll just do a secondary offering, which we talked about in other VC schools. So this is where a secondary comes in. And so we recently were going into a deal, it was a little bit of a messy cap table,

SPEAKER_51: we wanted to put a million and a half dollars in, we had that much demand from the syndicate and from our fund. So but they only had like a million available to us. And we said, Well, what if we gave you 500k, and you offered it to the early angels and early employees, and did a secondary offering for them, and then we would retire those shares and then issue ourselves, in this case,

SPEAKER_52: for chairs, would that be of interest to you? And they're like, Sure. And so those people got liquidity, it was at a nice valuation, maybe 1520 million dollars. And so the people who invested at one to $4 million were getting this great return. And they had been in the company for four or five years, because it was meandering trying to find product market fit couple of pivots, you get the idea. Yeah, so it's it's you can clean it up. But you need everybody to want to clean it up.

SPEAKER_77: Yep, totally. And that feeling. So it's a negotiation.

SPEAKER_02: I feel like we should leave it there and toss it door and his wonderful co author because this is

Jason Calacanis: like, listen to it twice. Listen to twice. And you're gonna get some VC Sunday School out of the interview too. On top of all of the other fascinating conversation about, frankly, the freaking roadmap that they put out for how to solve the climate crisis. So without further ado,

SPEAKER_83: john and Ryan, and Jake Allen, Molly learning, chopping it up, chopping it up.

SPEAKER_51: Now, every year or two, we get to have a legend on the pod. And today, for a second appearance, john doors here, I mean, to give john door an introduction, Molly is, it's almost disrespectful, but I'm going to do it anyway. He's the chair of corner Perkins. You might know some of the companies he invested in and helped build over the years, Google, Amazon, Intuit, Netscape, Twitter, Uber. I mean, the list goes on and on. And what a storied history came to Silicon Valley in 1975, got an internship, joined Intel as they invented the eight bit microprocessor. I mean, he basically has been here for the entire history. And we're really excited to have him back on because he wrote a book, another book, and he's got his co author with us. So Molly, let's introduce

SPEAKER_99: the co author here. Exactly. Legend in the making, Ryan Panchadsaram, the technical advisor to John Doerr, also co founder of the United States digital response in response to the COVID crisis. Previously,

Jason Calacanis: deputy CTO of the United States. Okay, 14 to 2016. We're delighted to have both of you because along with co author Angeli Grover, you have written a new book on tackling taking john, of course, your legendary OKR methodology and bringing that to the climate crisis in a new book called speed and scale. Welcome both of you first of all to the show. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_51: So let's talk about the climate, I guess, and why you felt we should write the book, john. What is the

SPEAKER_109: state of the climate now? And you've been on this for decades. Are you more optimistic now less optimistic? Obviously, you're believe in the power of technology. But you know, I vacillate sometimes I see incredible progress, Tesla, fusion, maybe some people are even considering building nuclear power plants again. And then sometimes I see what's happening in the weather. And the fires we have in northern California and the snow receding,

SPEAKER_94: you know, in Tahoe, and I get super depressed. Are you depressed, enthusiastic somewhere in between?

SPEAKER_112: Well, the state of the world is our planet is in peril. And so the headline is that what we're doing is not enough. It's not nearly enough. It's not aggressive enough in its ambition, or its sense of urgency. I have having said that doing the research for this book, and it involved hundreds of interviews and

SPEAKER_115: detailed fact checking, assembling, really the best thinking of experts around the world,

SPEAKER_116: led me to the view that I'm hopeful, I may not be optimistic. But I'm hopeful and there's an important difference between those two. What's your view, Ryan?

SPEAKER_117: Uh, my view is that so much has changed in the past just three years, right? If we tried to write

SPEAKER_119: speed and scale three years ago, so many things wouldn't be true, right? We are, Jason, in this environment where you've got incredible publicly traded companies that are in the clean tech space,

David Friedberg: the end phases, the beyond meats, the Teslas. You've got solar and wind finally at, you know, a price that's cheaper than natural gas and coal, right? These are projections that folks like Al Gore were saying was going to be true and now they are. And so you've got this momentum on our side. And so

SPEAKER_119: for me, that's the hopeful, hopeful side. You're starting to see the signals that so many people have preached were to be coming true at some day and they're here.

Jason Calacanis: Well, and this is, um, such a useful book at this exact time when you have, for example, brand new investors like me trying to build climate tech portfolios at very mainstream funds, like launch, helping to normalize this conversation, which I think is really valuable. And here you come with a manual that among other things, you know, to that point about fact checking and the sheer technicality of it, attempts to quantify this problem in a way that frankly makes it less depressing and scary and more easy to tackle. Like when you give us notes on a napkin, we could do that. Which I think, John, is kind of the whole point, right, of OKRs, make it first quantify the problem so that you can

SPEAKER_125: start to work on solutions. But it's so why is it not that simple all the time?

SPEAKER_115: Well, I think we have lots of goals and lots of targets. And when we set out to write the book, we said what we'd like to contribute is a plan. It's a kind of blueprint. It's a field manual. And the big objectives are really clear, carefully chosen. And they're each supported by a half dozen or so, what Andy Grove at Intel called key results, which are very specific, time bound, measurable ways to tell that we're making the progress that we need to. So all in all, there's six big areas where we can and must reduce emissions. We've got to do that on a timescale. And so there's four accelerants ways to go faster. Six objectives, four accelerants. And all in, there's some 55 or so of these measurable key results. For your listeners, this whole plan is available for free right now on the website, speedandscale.com. So if you pause the podcast, download that, you can follow along our discussion about this bold plan to merely transform society. That's what we've got to do.

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SPEAKER_54: coupons right now. And the first one up here, we've got six gigatons of carbon that could be eliminated on our OKR list from electrifying transportation. This feels like thanks to Elon, and a lot of other people too. But let's face it, he's the tip of the spear here, in terms of making electric cars, you know, sexy for people and desirable. Maybe you could speak to what he's

SPEAKER_94: contributed here, in terms of flipping the script from, you know, people looking at the Prius is like kind of a lame car to all of a sudden, just young people, older people just cross generations, want to own an electric vehicle because it's a better experience. And it makes them feel good about, you know, themselves for maybe contributing to solving this problem.

SPEAKER_112: Well, Elon made a huge contribution. To be sure, he's now built a company that's more valuable than

SPEAKER_139: the next 10 automobile companies in the world. And so, not only did he make one of the most

SPEAKER_112: valuable companies in the world, and not only did he popularize the whole notion of electric vehicles, but he put the rest of the industry on notice. And I guarantee you, Mary Barra, who we interviewed for the book of General Motors, the CEO of Ford, they're paying close attention to what the market is

SPEAKER_139: saying about it. And honest truth is, most people are buying Teslas because they're better vehicles, not for the climate benefits, which come from them. So, we're very clear in our goal setting that

SPEAKER_115: for this transformation of society to occur, we've got to dramatically lower costs across every technology

SPEAKER_139: that is green. Our friend Bill Gates talks about the green premium. Well, Ryan says we've got to turn the premiums into discounts, green discounts, because that's the only way we're going to get this done at scale, and at speed. The way I like to put it is, we've got to make the right outcome, the profitable outcome. So, it's the probable outcome to achieve all of our climate goals. Ryan, why don't you cite a couple of the key results in the electrification of transportation?

SPEAKER_117: Sure, of course. So, Molly, Jason, a lot of your listeners know about OKRs, right? They have a set of key results that we've picked. One of them is around price parity,

David Friedberg: right? We have to get to a point by 2024 where an electric vehicle is price parity with a fossil fuel vehicle and then continues to get cheaper, right? If that doesn't happen, this green premium exists in the market, forces don't take control. Another KR that we have as well, too, is tracking

SPEAKER_143: the miles driven on the road. Are they fossil fuel? Are they electric? That's the real measure

SPEAKER_119: if the gigatons have been reduced. So, this price parity one is telling us if we're on track, and then the miles one is truly where the reductions come from. And so, we have a handful of key results that capture that six gigaton drawdown. And we've done that for each of the sectors, not just in transportation, but for the grid, for our food system, for nature.

Jason Calacanis: Right. If you run us through those, if you wouldn't mind, the O's in OKR, because you do have

SPEAKER_02: six of them, and then we can sort of dig into the key results.

SPEAKER_150: Well, I wanted to double click just on the miles question there, right? Of course.

SPEAKER_51: Is what's happening now is we have a lot of rich people buying Teslas and other electric vehicles,

SPEAKER_109: and then maybe the cars that are on the road more often, cabs, taxis, trucks, they're the ones that really need to flip. We need to get every taxi, every Uber, every Lyft, every DoorDash to be electric, because they're the ones who are putting the high mileage

David Friedberg: on the roads. You're right about the mileage piece. So, you know, the Bloomberg NEF folks have projected out, right? Their best curves show that the number of fossil fuel miles driven today will stay the same till 2040. For that fact, Jason, while the number of drivers will grow on the road, those will buy EVs. They're still buying fossil fuel vehicles. And so unfortunately, we're still faced with this fact that we won't see a reduction till 2040. And so we need to get to work. But there's hopeful signs as well, too, right? If you look at the pace of EV sales, right, as percentage of all cars sold, you know, in 2020, it was 3%. You know, every year before that, it was just two or one or barely nothing right before 2015. Last year, sorry, 2021, it got to 6%. And then last year, we closed out at 10 and a half percent of cars sold or electric. Like that curve looks like something worldwide. That's the curve that we're looking for. Exponential growth is real. But you're right, Jason, we got to get these fleets off the road. The turnover is real. One of the recommendations we make in the book is, if you can afford it, right now is the time to switch. Do not buy another fossil

SPEAKER_111: fuel vehicle that stays on the road. You did ask about these six big objectives.

SPEAKER_160: Yeah, let's do that. Let's get to go through the structure for a second.

SPEAKER_115: We ought to go through those. But I want to preface it by saying, any one of these is a world, it's a realm, it's a book, it's a docu-series, all unto itself. And they all have to happen in parallel. So this is a mobilization, a transformation for which the best analogy is the mobilization around World War II. You know, for four years, the US stopped making automobiles and appliances. And in those factories and with that infrastructure,

SPEAKER_112: what we made were warplanes, airplanes and battleships, 280,000 aircraft.

SPEAKER_115: That same kind of transformation is required across six big objectives. Number one, electrifying

SPEAKER_112: transportation. Number two, decarbonizing the grid. That means powering our electricity through

SPEAKER_115: renewable sources like wind and solar and safe nuclear. Number three, there's seven gigatons to

SPEAKER_112: be gained by fixing our food systems. That means lowering the consumption of beef and dairy, not eliminating them, but just lowering them. And then reducing the emissions that come from

SPEAKER_115: how we farm, whether it's rice or other uses of fertilizers and food waste. 35% of the food we produce

SPEAKER_112: is wasted. We need to cut that number down. Objective number four is to protect nature. For example, stop deforesting the Amazon. There's seven gigatons of emission reductions

SPEAKER_115: in the plan there. The fifth, one of the hardest, is cleaning up industry. That's how we make steel and cement. Steel and cement are vital to our developing world. We're not going to stop making them. We've got to find low carbon ways to do that. The sixth, and most ambitious of all these, is removing the carbon that we can't eliminate. Whether we do that with nature-based solutions like planting

SPEAKER_112: more trees or growing kelp, or engineered removal, we call it direct air capture. Literally sucking the

SPEAKER_115: carbon out of the atmosphere, which I want to emphasize today is impractical and uneconomic. We don't have a way to do this today. There's a number of ventures that are funded and vigorously pursuing it. So six objectives, transportation, the grid, food, nature, cleaning up industry, and

SPEAKER_112: removing carbon. And then four accelerators. Do you want to touch on those, Ryan?

David Friedberg: Yeah, of course. So the objectives that John covered get us from the 59 billion tons of emissions down to zero. But we've got to make that happen faster, right? That could happen by 2100, but we need it to happen by 2050. And not just that, we need to cut emissions in half by 2030, right at the end of this decade. And so there are four objectives there. We call these the accelerants. We've got to win the policy and politics, right? We've got to make sure that policies are passed, not just commitments made, the follow through and money come from that. We've got to turn movements into action. Everywhere from the ballot box to the boardroom, we need candidates elected that believe in this. We also need CEOs to commit to making their companies net zero by aggressive targets. The third is around innovation, right? How do we get these incredible technologies down the cost curve, turning that green premium into the discount? And then of course, fourth and finally is around investment. We need to deploy more R and D or venture capital and more project finance to see

SPEAKER_166: this transition happen. So those are the four accelerants. If you're looking for really qualified

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Jason Calacanis: Well, it seems like two of those are what are directly relevant to us in our audience. And there are, of course, key results around all those things. But let's bring this home to us in some ways because there are real questions, I think, about how we deploy capital, how we deploy it soon enough, and where we place the big bets. Like, is it the goal of this book to say, if it's not in one of these six categories, if it doesn't meet the filter of one of these six objectives, let alone its key results? Keep stepping? Don't look at it? You know, like, from your investor lens, John, are you saying, this is a filter for you? This is where you can deploy capital to the best possible effect?

SPEAKER_115: Well, this may sound harsh, but we're fast running out of time. And so our mantra is,

SPEAKER_112: go for the gigatons. Do not get distracted by bright, shiny objects. We need individuals

SPEAKER_115: to change their light bulbs to LED bulbs if they haven't. But the time for individual action, which is necessary and frankly assumed, has passed. We now need collective action. We need leaders in every walk

SPEAKER_139: of life to invest, or to innovate, or advocate, or galvanize, or catalyze collective action, because that's the only thing that will get us at scale to cut our emissions in half by 2030. Half by 2030,

SPEAKER_112: a 50% reduction in a growing world where growing emissions means, per compound numbers, we've got to reduce emissions 8% in this great year of 2022. And then again, eight more percent in 2023, and 2024, and 2025, every year between now and 2030. Those are the laws of the compound numbers.

SPEAKER_164: Molly, when do you think the last time is that we reduced emissions on our planet?

SPEAKER_175: Oh, I mean, it has to be pre industrial, right? It's never happened. It's never happened.

SPEAKER_99: I was gonna guess never. Great.

SPEAKER_177: So, so what do you think are the odds that we're going to cut emissions by 50%

SPEAKER_51: by 2030? Yeah, it seems low, we're going to need to really act in unison. And that's, I guess, one thing I wanted to double click on you with you, John, you know, policy movements, innovation, investment, got it. We look at something like nuclear, right? And I remember when I was nine years old, you were, I think, 28, 29, John, the no nukes concert, and I saw Bob Dylan, I didn't go to it. But I remember Bob Dylan, and all these folks, Bruce and the E Street brand, they were like, Hey,

SPEAKER_109: no nukes, this is bad. And they had good intent. After Fukushima, the Germans started shutting

SPEAKER_94: things down, again, good intent. But I got to think, if we want to think big here, nuclear has to be a major part of this. And we see our guy, Billy G is putting a lot of money into his nuclear companies, there's a lot of innovation in that space. But policy and movements, it does seem like nobody is anti nuclear anymore. But what's the policy here in the United States? Why are we not building 25 nuclear power plants? And it seems like China's understands this, France understands it. France is 80 90% nuclear. Tell me, John, if you, if you could wave a magic wand and make nuclear a major part of this plan, would it be one of these things that could actually reduce 8%?

SPEAKER_112: Nuclear is part of the plan.

SPEAKER_115: It will not scale just the physics of building new nuclear power plants rapidly enough to have a meaningful impact on climate until 2040. So nuclear has some amazing qualities. It can be located anywhere. It's available seven by 24. It's baseload power. And we have starved this sector of the innovation economy for far too long. The book highlights work being done not only in safe nuclear fission, but also nuclear fusion, that we generate heat, and therefore electricity in the same way that the sun does. But I think we have to look to solutions that will scale more quickly to get to a 50%

SPEAKER_51: reduction by 2030. Brian, you have any thoughts on nuclear? I mean, these small modular reactors seem like such a game changer. And I just got to think at some point, the people who are anti nuclear

SPEAKER_109: are going to look at this and say, You know what, we got to put more of these around town, we got to put more of these around and have essentially free energy. I mean, I don't understand why France gets this. The French do not seem like the most, you know, techno embracing culture. No offense to my French listeners. But if the French could go 80% nuclear, why can't America go 80% nuclear or Germany or any of these countries? China seems to be on their way. What do you think, Ryan?

SPEAKER_15: I mean, the tides are changing, right? Like 10 years ago, there would still be you know,

SPEAKER_119: all of us on the call might be negative on nuclear, but I think we've learned how safe

David Friedberg: it can be. This whole category of Gen 4, right? All the reactors that exist are in this Gen 3 bucket. And so for any of the innovators out there, you go down this pathway of what Gen 4 means. It's all the other approaches that are safer, right? The message we try to push in the book is that we both need the now and the new, right? So to cut emissions in half by 2030, deploy all the solar, all the wind, all the EVs, get the batteries, like storage pieces out there. But that's only going to get us maybe 70% of the way, right? For that last 30, we need long duration storage that doesn't exist. Jason, we need the nuclear power plants that you're talking about to exist, to fill in that, you know, 10 or 20% part of a grid. And so I think with the urgency that we can is to, one, fund companies that are doing great work in this space, but to really clear up the regulatory hurdles in the United States, right? I do not believe a new style power plant has been

SPEAKER_186: approved yet. So I think it's this question of, how do you get the US back into the mode of saying

SPEAKER_112: yes to these projects and doing it safer? From page 248 of the book, nuclear is the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on

SPEAKER_115: earth, that's been proven to work at large scale. Who am I quoting there? Bill Gates. Bill Gates. Yeah. What's the obstacle? It still costs too much. And so we haven't invested in R&D. We haven't

SPEAKER_112: invested in deployment. There's monies in the infrastructure bill. We're commencing the building

SPEAKER_115: of one of the first new nuclear plants in Wyoming, TerraPower with the Bill Gates venture. Yeah. So it will be part of the solution. We just have to focus on those that can be done at scale and with

SPEAKER_54: speed. I had a crazy idea for it, which was if any, if the people around the nuclear plan approve it,

SPEAKER_00: they all get free energy. Like, you know, because that's always been one of the things I don't want it in my neighborhood. So if you just said everybody- It's a minor regulatory bribe. Just bribe them. Like it's free, right? Like if you live near, you get free or even like you get like a tax break. They give essentially a UBI in Alaska for, you know, the oil revenue. I just think

SPEAKER_177: economics could also play a role here. Economics and policy is incredibly important. And as you

SPEAKER_112: probably know, we're right now debating a complete revision of the incentives in California, the fifth largest economy in the world for rooftop solar. The investor-owned utilities and some of the environmental justice advocates have come together and made a proposal which the governor's put on hold for further debate that would basically stall that industry, remove the incentives. So you have to be adept, not just at inventing and scaling these innovations and technologies, not just at raising money

SPEAKER_139: for them, but getting all the policy levers aligned for World War II-like deployment.

SPEAKER_200: Yeah. And then, you know, it's so gross because they're all in the pockets of big oil, coal.

SPEAKER_94: And I just don't know how these people sleep at night and how they can look at their kids and their grandkids knowing that just to stay in office, they're willing to take money from an oil company or a coal company. I mean, in the face of all this, how could you fight against solar? How could you fight against Tesla? How could you fight against nuclear? I mean, how do these people sleep at night? It's just so

Jason Calacanis: infuriating. Jason and I had this conversation just the other day, actually, about the utilities and these incentives and incumbents and the fact that utilities themselves, not to derail us completely, because we're about solutions here, but the fact that you do have incumbent interests who, in the case of utilities, could be the ones to turn this on, right? I mean, they could be the ones to just say, we're decarbonizing our grids. We're turning this on at scale. And we're not. And that makes me wonder when you look at these accelerants, which of the four could be the biggest decelerant, right? Is public policy the blocker? If you had to pick one of the four that could stop us, not cold,

SPEAKER_115: hopefully, but too much, you know? I'll be interested in Ryan's answer. My answer to your question is just what you proposed. It's that public policy is the biggest impediment. Right now, the innovators, the businesses, the investors, the impassioned youth, private sector are well ahead of the public

SPEAKER_112: sector and for good reason. It's hard for a political leader to make pledges that his population won't support. So key result number 8.1 in the all-important objective of turning movements into action. Key result 8.1 says, we're going to make the climate crisis a top two voting issue in the top 20 emitting countries by 2025. What's a good example of that? Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who in 2018 was alone outside the parliament striking from school on Fridays to draw attention to the problem. A year later, by 2019, she'd sparked a million person demonstration in 100 cities around the world and importantly, not just the demonstration, but made the climate crisis a top two voting issue

SPEAKER_115: in the European nations. It is not top two in America. It is not top two in China. It is not top two in India. I say that because it's a challenge because it's an opportunity. Yeah. Our plan calls

SPEAKER_15: for that to be changed. Let me just look at coal miners like we're talking about coal miners in every election. And then I looked it up at some point. It's like there's less than 50,000 of them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_109: Like how about we pay them to like learn another trade or we just pay them to stop going into coal mines. Like we're really that is the issue. Like we're going to save coal miners jobs. Like it's 42,000 jobs. Like we've had millions of people on unemployment during the pandemic. Like we can absorb 42,000 people not digging coal out of the ground. But then these politicians get some sort of incentive. And then all of a sudden they think coal miners have to be protected. Coal miners are if you want to protect coal miners, get them out of the coal mines. That's in their best interest. These

SPEAKER_94: politicians here, I think I would agree. I'm with you, John. I think this policy and these politicians are the blocker here in America. And it has to be that they don't get an office unless they back

SPEAKER_115: clean energy and climate change. I want your audience to know that this is a global plan. And so it's certainly written by co-authors in the US, but there's 2 million coal miners who work in China. And so it's a different trade off. Yeah. Yeah. Those are real numbers in other parts of the world.

SPEAKER_112: Key Result 8.2 says we get a majority of government officials around the world, whether elected or

SPEAKER_115: appointed to support this drive to net zero. That's the mother of all OKRs here. The mother of all

SPEAKER_112: objectives is to take net emissions down from 59 gigatons to zero and to do that by 2050.

SPEAKER_190: Ryan, what's the blocker for you? What's the blocker for you?

SPEAKER_218: Yeah. Policy, movements, innovation, investment.

David Friedberg: The blocker will be cost, right? It's that green premium. You know, John is talking about policy being the big decelerant. That is totally true. But the other piece of the coin will be, will these technologies still be too expensive? Right? And so that's why for the KRs around

SPEAKER_119: innovation, they're all around cost, right? The one for electricity doesn't say pick nuclear or geothermal or solar or wind. We give a cost target. And so we're agnostic, whichever one of these

David Friedberg: technologies can work their way down the cost curve and can beat, you know, the fossil fuel equivalent and become cheaper. That's the one that's going to win.

SPEAKER_225: To your point, Ryan, you tell me if this is correct, but I was just told by some people in

SPEAKER_109: the energy sector that like just in the last 18 months, 24 months, this new solar panels, the cost of putting in a solar power plant just became less than a coal plant.

SPEAKER_119: That's right. You look at data from Bloomberg, NEF, as well as IEA, we have finally crossed that

David Friedberg: threshold. So that means, right, you know, for the power load that's, you know, on top of the curve, you can pull and use solar and wind for that. But, you know, on demand power, solar and wind still doesn't fit that completely. There's a big question we get about the developed versus the developing world. Well, Ryan, you know, China emits the most and the developing world is the one that's using coal.

SPEAKER_119: I think it's pretty clear the United States, we are the alpha emitter. We have emitted the most historically, more than double than China has in its history. The Europe is alongside us as well, too. So our message to the United States is we've got to go first. And we do it also for selfish reasons as well, too. If we go first, we get to innovate and invent and scale the technologies and

David Friedberg: industries that matter. And by doing that, it drives down the cost curve and makes it more affordable for the developing world to use it and adopt it. And so that's a big charge of speed and scale.

SPEAKER_119: We've got to go first. We've got to innovate and let those industries be ours. John, you have a story

SPEAKER_115: from solar on the solar wars. Well, two stories from the solar wars that are in this book, one of which is what a German legislator did when he established something called the feed-in tariff, which basically said for a long period of time, 30, maybe 40 years, German utilities would buy solar at a price, a fixed price, so that people could make investments. Herman Scheer is this legislator's

SPEAKER_112: name. And Germany became the leading place for solar to be deployed. It coincided with a strategic decision that the Chinese made, which was they were going to supply, be the world's leader in solar panels. And that combination of demand and supply is what led to the fantastic reductions over 90% in

SPEAKER_115: the cost of solar. I describe that in the book as Germany's great gift to the world. Well, it became

SPEAKER_112: so strategic to China that they viewed it as a jobs program. And they indeed provided national funding, so that every region, every province of China would have a local solar panel manufacturing champion. And that ran headlong into seven different entrepreneurial groups that my partners and I funded to make new innovative solar companies, because the Chinese would sell below cost. When they

SPEAKER_115: ran out of money, they would reorganize the company, refund it with more state loans, so they could continue as a jobs program. Long story short, all seven of Kleiner's solar panel

SPEAKER_112: generation companies were crushed. One survived. Its name is Enphase, today worth some 30 billion

SPEAKER_115: dollars. They make the micro inverters that make rooftop solar economic. And so if you take a long view,

SPEAKER_112: you understand this requires a lot more capital, you're smart about the incentives or subsidies or

SPEAKER_115: national risks that are in place, you can build companies that'll make a difference to the climate and succeed as long term players in the worldwide economy. But if you're not careful about those things,

SPEAKER_109: you can get your head handed to you. Well, I was about to say, you know, the venture, a window tends to be a decade per fund. And you have LPs who are, you know, let's face it based on the industry that you helped create and define john, they're on this like 10 year, you know, fun cycle. They when they got into solar, they must have looked at it when you were making these bets, year seven, eight, or nine and said, john, what's going on here, you're the home run hitter. And you're not even on base with some of these companies. What was that like for you, in terms of a gut check as an investor, you know, you're making the right bets. But correct me if I'm wrong, the time horizon was

SPEAKER_167: different than investing in Google, which, you know, started printing money in year four or five.

SPEAKER_115: The time horizons are very different. And so it raises the bar for the founders, entrepreneurs and backers to be expert at raising money, you're constantly raising capital is something I like to say. It, it ups the ante in terms of the amount of capital that you're going to require. And most of all, I think the rigor, the intellectual discipline, to be ruthlessly honest about where the key risks are in any given venture, and make sure that they are upfront and

SPEAKER_112: removed with the early dollars. And if a venture doesn't fit that formula, it's not appropriate for

SPEAKER_139: venture capital, and it ought to be funded some other way.

SPEAKER_54: So what was it like for you, though, on a personal basis, as like, listen, what we do is like gambling,

SPEAKER_94: we're placing bets, and to like lose every hand for a little bit? Did you start to like wonder, like, do I

SPEAKER_54: not have the Midas touch? Or, you know, it must have been a gut check for you at some point, correct me if

SPEAKER_115: I'm wrong? Well, it was, these were big bets, weren't they? These, these were meaningful investments, meaningful to me as an investor, but even more meaningful to the founders, and the entrepreneurs, for whom it wasn't part of a portfolio, it was their careers, it's their mission, it's, it's their passion in life. And so, frankly, I'm a stubborn optimist, and we stood by these companies. And over the course of about a decade, put $1 billion in some 60 or 70 ventures, those investments today are worth

SPEAKER_216: $3 billion. So, if we, you know, beyond, beyond me, it is an example of, of one of those investments,

SPEAKER_115: Nest, a successful investment, Enphase, which I've mentioned as another one.

SPEAKER_242: I wonder how, never, you know, I don't think very many people know, I didn't know until I read the

Jason Calacanis: book that your $1 billion in investments were worth $3 billion, because the narrative in Silicon Valley became, clean tech was a bust. And then there was a lot of fear about reinvesting in this industry for a long time. And I wonder if you can reflect on that. And also, though, talk to us about the risk, as investors now, of, I don't know, accidentally bringing a Theranos into the world and setting this

SPEAKER_105: industry back all over again, you know? Well, I think there's a very low tolerance for Theranos

Jason Calacanis: style investing. Right. But a Solyndra, like, you know, I mean, there could be a high profile failure, and we would hate for that to happen, and then make clean tech have a bad name all over again.

SPEAKER_115: You know, you can only lose one times your money. And, and so I, my partners and I made a bet on

SPEAKER_220: Fisker, instead of on Tesla. Tesla was a struggling venture at the time we made the wrong choice.

SPEAKER_115: It wasn't clear where the funding was going to come from. Deposits from prospective buyers were

SPEAKER_112: being used to fund development costs. The government came through with a Solyndra style loan for Tesla,

SPEAKER_115: which Tesla repaid early. And that single investment, the decision to back Tesla or not,

SPEAKER_105: the decision to back Google or not, is transformational for the returns of a leading fund.

SPEAKER_220: So we are good returns for our limited partners, even in spite of having picked the wrong electric

SPEAKER_253: vehicle starter. I have a funny story about that. So I'm talking friends with Elon, obviously, and

SPEAKER_54: I'm talking to Elon and the 100 roadsters that sold out. But I guess Ray Lane was the guy you were working with who did the fiscal investment. He had put a deposit down. He had number 16 of the roadsters. And Elon said to me, you know, we're having dinner or something. Hey, do you want a roadster? He's like, gotta email us Blackberry. And Ray had said, Listen, I don't feel comfortable taking the roadster. We have the Fisker. So he basically said, Can you take back my deposit? And uh, I said, Yeah, I'll take it because there were only 100 available. And sitting in my garage.

SPEAKER_27: That's how you got your car. It was Raylan's. I have I have Raylan's roadster.

SPEAKER_26: There's a pretty funny story, right? But I mean, those companies,

SPEAKER_180: there were so many moments where Tesla went out of this Fisker. I mean, it was so dicey, like watching

David Friedberg: Elon, just, you know, be on the edge of the cliff. Yes. For years was brutal. I think people take for granted sometimes how, you know, you look at Tesla, you look at Enphase, you look at Beyond Meat,

SPEAKER_117: you look at Sunrun, the fragile moments in their history, the amount of grit, each of those founders, right? The like, how thin of a line they were skating on, right? Like, I mean, we're lucky that

David Friedberg: today we have these role models of companies that we can point people to, to show. Look, what's possible. Look at their market cap. Look at what it takes. You know, Malady, your point about Theranos. It's like, John's right. The appetite for that is, is low these days, because it's really about cutting emissions, finding more efficient ways to do things. And then the magic silver bullet things, those get put to the side, at least for the sophisticated investors in here that are like, Nope, there's an emission I see,

SPEAKER_109: and we've got to cut it. I got to know how you were able to make that Beyond Meat bet, because

SPEAKER_51: I had seen these companies, I was talking to Evan Williams about it, because he like is quasi vegan, and he was back in those companies. And I was like, when I met with them, they said

SPEAKER_54: something like $16 a hamburger. And I said, Wait a second, you're telling me people are going to pay,

SPEAKER_109: you're going to charge people $16. But we'll eventually get down to eight. And I was like, yeah, but you can go to In-N-Out and get a burger for four bucks, five bucks, pretty great. So you're telling me you're going to eat something that tastes like sawdust for $16. It's gonna be better than sawdust. I was like, I still don't get it. How do you make that bet, John? How did you get

SPEAKER_54: the firm around? People will pay more for this burger than they would pay for a hamburger from,

SPEAKER_271: you know, five guys?

SPEAKER_112: They'll pay more in transition for a brief period of time. But you described the way we made the bet.

SPEAKER_115: The only thing you left out was the passion of the entrepreneur. We saw Ethan Brown. When I first met him, he said, My vision is to create an animal free McDonald's burger. And guess what's available this very month of this broadcast? The McPlant across the country. It's incredible.

SPEAKER_117: What's interesting about that story as well, too, sorry, John, to jump in there as well as,

SPEAKER_119: you know, not just the passion of the founder, but you have a lot of venture capitalists that listen to this as well, too, right? The passion and fire of an associate, you know, Amol Deshpande, believing

David Friedberg: that the world was going to be scarce of protein, right? Like, it takes, you know, the two to tango in a venture environment. Sorry, John.

Jason Calacanis: You need your internal Greta Thunberg though, right? At every company. Yeah.

SPEAKER_186: Yes.

SPEAKER_54: You know, there's actually, I got to pause on the book and the whole climate change thing and just ask you investor, you know, 10 year investor to legend. What, what have you learned about when

SPEAKER_94: you look in the eyes of those founders, and you hear them talking? And then John, at some point,

SPEAKER_89: your gut just tells you, that's the, that's the one, this is, this is the team. And you make that bet. Because you've done it so many times. Is there some signaling you can say to this next generation of investors that like, Hey, when you see this, when you feel this, this is when you pull that trigger and you write that check, because you got that signaling, can't be luck.

SPEAKER_115: The first criteria that I have, the question that I'd like to answer as early as possible is, would I mind being in trouble with that founder or not? Because no matter how things unfold,

SPEAKER_112: my experience has been, we always get in trouble. Something doesn't work out according to the plan. Of course.

SPEAKER_115: Uh, then, then, then there's five factors that I think distinguish the truly great ventures from

SPEAKER_220: those that are, are just successful. But that's probably a topic for another conversation.

SPEAKER_283: No, no, no, no, no, no. You gotta give it to us now. No, no, you gotta give them to us now. This is, we'll talk about climate, but I gotta get a little of that investment history here.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Exactly. Or just give me some of them off the top of your head. I'll give you some on top of head. Give me some of them.

SPEAKER_191: It starts with technical excellence. And I don't mean published papers or PhDs,

SPEAKER_115: but the attitude that we're going to have the best technology in the world. And that enables us to recruit and retrain the teams that'll build a really great first electric vehicle. So technical excellence is one. The second is a commitment to outstanding management. And that's when the co-founders really are determined that it's going to take a team of people bigger than themselves to change the world. The third is strategic focus on a large, unmet, unserved market need. Jeff Bezos had this at Amazon. Books were the very best first item to sell via e-commerce, but his vision wasn't limited to books, I'll assure you. Not long after we invested, he and I were walking the aisles at Fry's and answering aloud, what is there here in Fry's that we wouldn't ultimately sell in Amazon, whether it's CDs or television sets. Well, we wouldn't sell firearms. That's one. And we wouldn't sell live animals. But other than that, this was all really pretty suitable for Earth's biggest store. What else? Reasonable financing. So that's an important factor. And then finally, the fifth is sense of urgency. Now, no venture, no founder possesses all five of those in equal measure. But if you believe you wouldn't mind getting in trouble with her, and that we can build the strengths where they need to

SPEAKER_139: be added as the venture grows, then you've got a real shot at changing the world.

SPEAKER_200: So double click on that reasonable financing. Yes, please. Because I understand financing is

SPEAKER_54: critically important. You got to put fuel in the tank, these things are not cheap. And you said,

SPEAKER_94: Sure, you got to have great management, which costs money. But what is the reasonable qualifier?

SPEAKER_115: You can raise too much money as well as too little. I think overfunded ventures lose discipline.

SPEAKER_220: But for sure, you don't want to run out of money. That's when you fail.

SPEAKER_291: Yeah. Game over. Game over. Game over. So when you look at the funding environment today,

SPEAKER_51: and listen, this has been what 13 14 year bull run, we didn't see I don't think you saw this in any point in your career this long of a bull run. And you see these crazy financings happening. And

SPEAKER_109: the amount of performance to financing seems way out of whack. What do you think? Are you appalled?

SPEAKER_112: Are you inspired? Are you like, Whoa? I think generalizations don't work here. The specifics really matter. And we can cite a bunch of ventures. For example, we work that were overfunded and under

SPEAKER_115: managed. One when I was involved in is DoorDash, which came to the local commerce local delivery competition is maybe the last entrant with a lot of capital, but deployed it and today are the share

SPEAKER_112: leader with the widest selection, the best financials. And so sorry to say this, it depends.

SPEAKER_180: No, but when you when you started when you because I know Tony from DoorDash, and then you know this

SPEAKER_109: maniac from we work, and you look at your framing, reasonable financings, right? And then you say, Oh, the ability to have like a sense of urgency, like Tony has a sense of urgency at DoorDash. Yes, you just see that in that entrepreneur. Did Adam Neumann have a sense of urgency? No, that guy was distracted by everything that he did not seem focused. He didn't have world class team around him. He broke all your rules. He was the anti five. I didn't invest in him. Oh,

SPEAKER_07: tell me about the meeting. Please. You didn't take the meeting? I didn't take the meeting.

SPEAKER_180: Oh, okay. Tell me your best Bezos story. Come on. There's gotta be like, he's he wasn't always Bezos or was he always Bezos? Like, at what point did you realize this guy is just next level? There must

SPEAKER_109: have been a moment where in your brain working with him all those years that you're like, this guy's an alien. He's on another level entrepreneurship. I don't know if it's my best story. But one of my

SPEAKER_115: favorites is my first meeting with Jeff, where I headed up to Amazon's first office outside the garage, which was in a two story loft opposite the free needle clinic in a pretty seedy part of Seattle. And Jeff came bounding down from the second floor to the first floor, greeted me with a great big hug and open arms. He and I are both nerds. He from Princeton, I from Rice University, computer scientists. And he took me on a tour around the place. There was one Vax 750. Yes, which was being used to do all the software development with one of his early employees, Shep. We directed he directed on top of Sawhorse's doors from Home Depot that were used as staging areas to cross dock the books, which would be ordered the night before from Ingram Micro D, which had a distribution center. And Jeff made, if you'll recall, a very fast, high performance website that mostly worked over dial up modems. That was the way we got to the internet in those days. But it was fast. And it had the largest selections of books that you could get anywhere in the world. I asked Jeff, so what are the revenue trends? And I could really tell he was the kind of entrepreneur I wanted to work with when he stepped up to his terminal on the Vax system and typed in a Unix grep command to get the very answer to my question.

SPEAKER_54: Yeah, so that's that is next level. Like when you don't need to ask somebody, you just have it right there. And you just know your business from the beginning to the end. It's Yeah, I mean, I literally was to tell another Elon story kind of relates to your philosophy. I was driving with Elon in my Model X or my wife's Model X. And there was some wind noise. He's in the passenger seat. We're driving. He's

SPEAKER_109: he's like trying to do something with the window. And he's like, I know this problem. Like, this thing got displaced. And this it's this washer. And he's literally fixing, trying to fix the window while we're driving up to 280. I say, Elon, I bring it in for service. I fix it now. It's like,

SPEAKER_112: it's okay, buddy. It's gonna be fine. When you when you first met Elon, did you have the instinct

SPEAKER_109: to invest in him? What was your thinking? I was not an investor at the time. So I was just an entrepreneur, right? And so I was like, I can introduce you to he was like, I'm trying to raise some money with this thing. So I was like, Oh, let me, you know, email this person, email that person. So I'd emailed a couple people. And they're like a car company. Are you crazy? Jacob? Like, that's, that's how people rich people lose their money is making movies, car companies, you

Jason Calacanis: know, in sports teams, like it's I mean, it's literally in this book, capitalists never invest

SPEAKER_318: in something that has wheels. Yeah, it's the conventional wisdom. Exactly. Well, you know,

SPEAKER_51: it's all the conventional wisdom until somebody does it. I mean, I think the Uber investment was when I introduced Uber to 21 people. And that's when I just became the first Ohio Scout. And I made that investment. And I had a very famous venture capital, someone say who say,

SPEAKER_54: you know, Jake, I'll invest in this, you just got to convince Travis, to make it enterprise software, and to sell it to the cab companies. Because we don't want to be involved with these drivers and the cars, it's like too messy and dirty. And think about how many cab companies are he could sell this to like 100,000 cab companies and enterprise software is like such high margin. I was like, you really kept companies are the enemy in this like they're capturing all the money. And that's, you could take that out and be better for everybody. He's like, No, I never brought it to Travis. He was already on a mission. I didn't want to embarrass this venture capitalist by telling

SPEAKER_115: Travis the story. But yeah, that was a great story. Well, you'll recall around the launch of the Netscape browser. I was running around the world shooting off my mouth saying the internet had been under hyped. And it kicked up, kicked up quite a controversy. And I have a similar message for

SPEAKER_112: today. And that is, I think the climate crisis has been under hyped. Or at least we are underestimating it in two really profound ways. The first is, it is the greatest economic opportunity of the 21st century. It's going to create more than 25 million new jobs. The market for advanced for batteries for electric

SPEAKER_139: vehicles is estimated at $400 billion per year for the next 30 years. Just think about the size of

SPEAKER_115: that number. That's what it's going to take to transform to electrify transportation. And so there's multiple companies working at it. But the other way to look at this is, if we fail at this, the costs are staggering. The human costs, the economic costs, it's already created tens of millions of climate

SPEAKER_112: refugees, people who have to change where they live because of climate change. It's wrecking whole economies. Last year, flooding alone cost China $30 billion, Europe $35 billion. Hurricane Ida

SPEAKER_139: in the US now estimated at $100 billion of damages. And so you've got to ask the question, how much of this devastation are we going to endure before we accept the fact that it's cheaper

SPEAKER_47: to save the planet than to ruin it? Yeah, I mean, it's just so well said. And the opportunity for

SPEAKER_109: entrepreneurs is so great. And just think about how amazing it is to go to work every day and have purpose. And what you're doing is not only going to make money. Sure, that's great. Not only going to,

SPEAKER_51: you know, build a big company, that's fine. But, you know, you could actually take this. It's not an existential challenge anymore. Like this is like an acute challenge, as you're saying, like, cities are going to be underwater. And this whole concept that this is being overblown. I just don't understand how there are still some people holding on to this is overblown. What do you what do you say to those, those people, Ryan, when they kind of, there's it because we you did bring this at the beginning of the book, like, hey, there's a lot of facts here to make the OKRs, we need the data. There's people who are denying this is still happening to this day. What is the way that we deal with

SPEAKER_109: that was Molly and I talk about this thing all the time is the denial, whether it's not that big of

SPEAKER_119: a deal. Well, that's what they shifted to Jason, right? The denial is kind of shifting on a spectrum

David Friedberg: before it was it doesn't exist. This warming isn't happening. Now it's well, it's happening, but it's not going to be as bad as people say, or the one that I'm hearing quite often now, it is not worth the economic damage to make the transition, right, which are all both those two thoughts are, you know, sure, the world is not going to end, but it is going to certainly be warmer. And with warmer comes global weirding, different weather patterns, economic, you know, migrations of people and areas where drought, like, there will be a lot of places in the world where life won't be able to

SPEAKER_119: continue as normal. That is a truth on the economic piece. I think the message that John is saying so clearly is there will be more jobs created because of this, every country needs to see this as a national priority. Because if you don't get ahead of this, you are going to be left behind, right? If

SPEAKER_120: you don't invent the industries of the future, someone else will. Yeah, you know, one of the things that

SPEAKER_220: really struck me as we did the research for the book, and I dive deeper again into the field,

SPEAKER_115: is the whole notion of climate justice. And climate change amplifies inequities, it makes them worse. Those who suffer the most are those who've done the least to cause this problem, and they're least capable of dealing with it. And so as history's biggest emitter, the U.S. has got to decarbonize first. We've got to show the world that this is possible, and we've got to drive costs down for everyone else. More broadly than that, the U.S., Europe, and China have got to fund this transition

SPEAKER_112: in the developing world's economies because they don't have the money to make it.

SPEAKER_115: As we stop using fossil fuels, we're going to see jobs disappear in communities. They're going to be hard hit. They're going to evaporate. And so we've got to get them their fair share of the good paying jobs. In other words, I love the closing quote of the book, which is an interview with Laureen Powell Jobs. And she says, you know, John, I think this climate crisis is in fact a great gift.

SPEAKER_337: It's the best thing that could occur to humankind to let us deal with these longstanding inequities.

SPEAKER_18: Hmm. Yeah. I mean, it's you talk to anybody who's affluent. Oh, yeah. You know, I lose money on my

SPEAKER_54: house in Miami. I'll just move to other great place. I'll buy a place in Costa Rica or Cabo. Like

SPEAKER_167: that's not affecting you as an affluent person with your second home. It's an inconvenience at best.

SPEAKER_125: Although I do like that the book is so pointed about saying that this is unavoidable. This is the

Jason Calacanis: thing that we you know, it is the only imperative that we have and that nobody is going to be immune to it. I don't know, you know, sort of separately, I don't know how big a bunker you think that you can build if society collapses around you. It's just not going to work.

SPEAKER_58: And it does seem to the people who built vibrant economies off of fossil fuels. We are in a way

SPEAKER_109: saying to this next group of people, you don't get that advantage of the cheap stuff you can pull

SPEAKER_54: out of the ground, you got to use this more expensive stuff, more complex stuff. And I understand. I don't agree with obviously, you know, people saying like, well, we got to use this cheap, the cheapest option. I understand why they're saying that they're developing economy, they're trying to protect their 2 million coal farm coal miners, whatever it is. But we do have to recognize that as the West and the people who did admit a bunch to get to, you know, where we are, we're on third base right now, these people are just getting in the game, we have to help them.

David Friedberg: On the coal piece, Jason, you talked about earlier, right? If you go to West Virginia, there is a different sentiment between the coal miner and the coal mine owner, right? The coal mine owners are the ones that want to drag out their revenue streams just for a bit longer. When you look at the coal worker and you do, you know, there was a recent survey done of the fossil fuel industry. More than

SPEAKER_119: half of the people say they want to get out and that they see the future is renewables is the cleaner,

SPEAKER_117: greener stuff. Yeah. You know, if an alien, you know, race came to the world and alien species came here and looked around, they'd be like, you've got the sun. You've also got this really hot ball

David Friedberg: inside earth that you can get energy from. And you're relying on this black tarish gunk that, you know, your planet took millions of years to create, like, get over that, make the transition. And that's actually maybe another message to share too, is I think for us in the technology industry, we see

SPEAKER_119: transitions every five, 10, 15 years, the energy transitions that have happened historically, Vaclav Schmiel categorizes them very well, they take 70 plus years. And so for these leaders in

SPEAKER_186: these industries that, you know, sit on top of energy and transportation and others, yeah, that book,

SPEAKER_350: it's a great book. I only have this because of Bill Gates's book. And then now I'm, you know, heaven help us. In the rabbit hole,

David Friedberg: Bill Gates down the rabbit hole, energy and civilization is the book that Molly, Molly held

SPEAKER_119: up. And, you know, so for those, those leadership teams, they're not used to transitions, right?

David Friedberg: They can't see, they haven't seen one coming. And I think the message now is look at the cost curves, look at what things are getting financed, look at the hunger of entrepreneurs and innovators. These transitions are coming. It's going to happen during our lifetime.

SPEAKER_350: All right. If we could give you could give while I have you because I'm brand new here, right? There

Jason Calacanis: are a bunch of people like me, a lot of people getting into the climate tech investment and startup space, thank goodness, right? That seems like a net positive. What is your advice, though? Where should we focus our energies? And where should we not waste our time?

SPEAKER_115: Wow, what a great question. I would focus my energies on the plant. These are the gigatons.

SPEAKER_220: I, I wouldn't get distracted by something that won't scale. Right? Yep. Planet size solutions.

David Friedberg: Totally. And there's a good lens that the KRs give, you know, focus you on these challenges,

SPEAKER_119: right? Where are the cost targets? Does the innovation that you are going after, can you move it down? Yeah, right? People will pay a premium upfront, right? If you know,

David Friedberg: there are government subsidies, it's a performance product, but you gotta work your way down. But there's also a graphic we have in the book. It's on 241, which shows the technical quest that the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, this is the group behind Breakthrough Energy Ventures. And these are different technical quests that we haven't solved yet, right? Like next generation nuclear fission all the way to low emission fertilizer. Like there are so many places to

SPEAKER_186: disrupt and they're going to take not just incredible scientists and engineers, but they're going to need great operators and people that know how to scale. I'll make a closing offer to your audience, Jason.

SPEAKER_115: Yes, sir. Please. I'm, I'm new in my relationship with Molly, but I really admire the leadership, the vision, what you've done for entrepreneurs over the decades that I've known you. And let me just invite any of your listeners to write to either Ryan or me. I'm john at speedandscale.com. I'm pretty sure Ryan is ryan at speedandscale.com. And if you've got an idea or a question, or you're looking

SPEAKER_116: for an opportunity or a direction, we'll return your mail message. Amazing. That is just the spirit

SPEAKER_51: in which Silicon Valley was built. And john, you helped build this place. We're standing on your shoulders. And it's just an honor to have you back on the program. I want everybody to just take a moment, load that Amazon, which john helped put on this planet with Jeff wouldn't have been here, you know, capital allocators and entrepreneurs work together. You go do a search

SPEAKER_109: for speed and scale right now. And there's a drop down there. I don't want you to buy a copy, I want you to buy two, three, four, five copies, and just hand them out, give them to people as a gift.

SPEAKER_94: This is a serious situation. And we can do it together. And that's, I think, john, the great gift you're giving everybody is, we can get this done together. And you're making it real with the OKRs, you saw those OKRs up close and personal, you know, change companies, and let's do this, let's change the fate of humanity together. And what a great book, everybody go buy it.

SPEAKER_54: Ryan, thank you. Great to spend time with you. And john, just good to know your brother. And thank you for everything you've done. And you've always given me great advice myself. So appreciate you

SPEAKER_76: coming back on the pod. Thank you, Molly. Thanks, guys. All right, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.