SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. It's the Sunday show. Yes, our first Sunday show. And we're calling these sustainable Sunday episodes, two different parts every Sunday for you, the loyal listeners of this week in startups. First, Molly Wood is going to bring me some questions about her new job, which is investing in startups. And we're calling that making a VC or baby VC. We're going to workshop the idea with y'all. So after we talk about becoming a VC, and today we'll talk about how to put a valuation on a company and how to figure out what stage a company is in and your

SPEAKER_02: Goldilocks zone as an investor. After that, Molly is going to interview somebody who is in the climate space, who is either building something in climate or investing in solutions to help the planet.

SPEAKER_03: Let's get to work. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Odoo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever. And right now, Odoo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at odoo.com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash twist. Superside. Design and creative are crucial for growth. Tech companies like Facebook, Shopify, and Coinbase have found the perfect solution. Superside. Learn how to get quality design at scale at superside.com slash twist. And Notion is one place for notes, docs, projects, and everyday work that goes way beyond a wiki. Go to Notion.so and use promo code twist to get $250 off an annual team

David Friedberg: plan. All right, everybody, I'm going to do a new segment here on the show for our Sunday edition,

SPEAKER_02: where I, as somebody who's been investing for 11 years, and before that was a journalist,

SPEAKER_06: talked to my friend Molly Wood and co-host about her journey. And she's in week one of being an investor and has been a journalist for almost the same amount of time I have. So how's week one

SPEAKER_09: going? I know we got to think of a name for this. I've been calling it baby VC.

SPEAKER_12: And my baby shark dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude, dude. All right. You might have just gotten sued. But anyway,

SPEAKER_14: clip it and loop it. All right. So what could, what could go wrong? So yeah,

SPEAKER_02: where do you want to start with questions today? Because I have been thinking about a point based system for you for how to assess a startup in terms of how viable it is for investment. I don't have written any of it down. I just have it in my brain. So I have that as one

SPEAKER_17: thing I wanted to talk to you about. And then also stages, determining what stage and what react what the reality of a startup is. Totally. Why don't you start with what you want to talk about?

SPEAKER_19: That is almost exactly what I want to talk about is how you determine your I think what you call the

SPEAKER_23: Goldilocks zone of investing and how do you evaluate? I don't know that I ever am going to be the person who's like founder and a PowerPoint. And it doesn't sound like that's a lot of what we do

SPEAKER_29: here. Yeah. But when you look at a company who says they have an MVP, how like M and how V do you want that P to be?

SPEAKER_31: Yes, exactly. All right. So venture firms and

SPEAKER_29: MVP, by the way, minimum viable product for anyone who doesn't know, but I'm sure that

SPEAKER_32: basically just in case.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And that that is part of the lean startup methodology that Steve Blank and Eric restarted, you can read their books, they both have books. And I have a book on angel investing called Angel. Those three books, I've got Steve Blank's book, I know lean startup was Eric's Steve Blank's book, I can't remember. But he's got a bunch of blog posts on this. And so MVP, minimal viable product, the smallest amount of product to go out and test if you have any kind of product market fit, in other words, the product and a person connect with it. So stepping back, when you're an investor, it's important to know what stage you like to invest in. So there is just an idea on a napkin piece of paper, that's really, really high risk, high reward. But you're gonna have a lot of zeros, then you because you're really just betting on the person, their potential, etc. Very hard to determine. But you can determine it. And we'll get into that in a second, then you have they built a prototype, and maybe a couple of members of their team. And then after the prototype, you'll have something like an MVP, where it actually touches consumers, and then you'll have an actual product in market, you'll start to see traction. And I made something called the valuation versus traction matrix, which I'm gonna have the team pull up right now. I had to answer this question, Molly, so many times with angel investors who are getting into the game, that I literally just made an xy chart. And this xy chart kind of explains where value exists in the earliest stage, and where a lot of zeros exist. And you can kind of plot where you want to be for us as a company. I looked at these different stages. And over the last decade, developed a product for each one. Right. And so our product for people who say, I want to be a founder, I have an idea is called founder.university. It started as a two day intensive. And now we made it a 12 week course. It's free. And it's we had 100 people go through it. And we're going to do it three times next year, we'll have 200 400. And then

SPEAKER_17: hopefully 800 people go through the next three classes. And we just teach them how to be a

SPEAKER_02: founder, how to find a co founder, all that stuff. So for us to invest in people saying I just have an idea, given the amount of deal flow, we have the number of people contacting us, that's not efficient. Because there'll be so many zeros. So as an investor, you want to

SPEAKER_40: In this case, maybe we specify you mean zeros in the bad way, not the good way.

SPEAKER_15: Zeros as in they go to $0. Yes. Hey, they go out of business, right? They go to zero. And so

SPEAKER_02: that's okay. You know, we're betting in a marketplace where we expect one out of 100 to return 500x. So you actually hoping for another sounds weird, you're hoping people are being so

SPEAKER_17: ambitious, that a large number fail. Because if you're not being super ambitious, then what's the chance of having an outlier success? If you only do safe things, you can't have the 500x. So it's not

SPEAKER_02: that the individuals are zero, it's that the business turns out to return $0. Yes. Okay, so

SPEAKER_06: let's take a look at this matrix for a second, because this will explain a lot. For folks who are

SPEAKER_02: watching, it's an XY matrix. And on the left, you have the valuation of the company going from, you know, zero to 12. And this is a little dated. So we just in, I think, two episodes ago, talked about how valuations were 15 million at the start. So you could maybe even double these numbers for today's market. The green line is like an average startups valuation along the journey at the bottom, which is traction. So you have, you know, maybe somebody has an idea, a mock up, an MVP, unpaid pilots, paid pilots, and then revenue is being generated. And you can plot where startups exist. So when somebody graduates from Y Combinator, you know, they're gonna be worth 12, 15, $20 million, and they probably have unpaid pilots. And then if you look at this in quadrants, the place you don't want to be is the upper left, a high valuation, so you're paying a large amount for the shares, with very little traction, pretty obvious, right? Yeah. Now, how would you end up in that

SPEAKER_29: situation? Other than just sort of like not good sense? Is that where you get like sucked into a competitive environment? Because everybody's going for is it? Is that a FOMO situation?

SPEAKER_02: Could be FOMO, could be naivete. Remember, founders, self select for charisma. And that could be Adam Neumann, that could be, you know, Elizabeth Holmes, or it could be Travis, or Brian from Airbnb, you know, so they tend to be super charismatic, which means a new investor will be like, Oh, my God, this person is going to change the world. Their, their presentation deck, their enthusiasm, like they could put you into that reality distortion field, where you're like, Well, this is going to be a billion dollar company. So it doesn't matter if I pay two, four, six, 10, or 12 million, or 15 million, right? It's gonna be worth a billion. So I'm gonna make 100 times my money, no

David Friedberg: matter what.

SPEAKER_39: But I have goosebumps. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, gotcha. What you want to do is have some sort of

SPEAKER_02: discipline. Now, where would you actually make this bet on somebody at a high valuation with no traction? That's that little gold line there. And that is serial founders, founders who have done it before. So Evan Williams comes to you, and he's done blogger, and he's done Twitter, or Jack comes to you, and he's done Twitter. And now he's doing this new idea for a point of sale system square that you put on the top of your phone, you slide a card, you'd say, you know what, this person's been to the rodeo before. This is Steven Spielberg. This is somebody who's had hit films before. If you were in

SPEAKER_17: Hollywood, you would bet on Steven Spielberg's next film without even reading the script. In fact, people do, they give them a 10 look deal, a five picture deal, because you know, the person is that good. So that's the little exception there. But for somebody who's never done it before, and then has no scale, no track record, why would you do that, you would want to invest at a lower

SPEAKER_02: valuation. And what does that mean? Well, let's say it's a $12 million valuation, and the person's never done anything before. But we could invest in six of those people in our accelerator. For the

SPEAKER_17: same amount, you would take the six swings at bat versus the one. Does that make sense? Yeah, gotcha. When you go to a when you go to an accelerator, you have no experience, or you have little experience in startups, you're going to an accelerator to get more experience, to sharpen your blade a little bit to be more investors to meet other founders and network. So we have the launch accelerator. So founder University, for us is the top of the funnel. Actually, this week in startups is really the top of the funnel, right? People watch it, then eventually, maybe some of

SPEAKER_02: them go to founder University, and the next stage down, okay, you're starting to make a bit of a prototype, come to launch accelerator, we'll give you $100,000 for 6%, or it's I think 125 for 7% at Y Combinator, that implies about a $2 million valuation, which is very low. But you're going to that 12 week program six in our case 16 weeks, and you're getting that halo of hey, Y Combinator or J Cal or whoever has invested in the company, Techstars, they had a filtering process. So downstream investors go, Okay, if you filtered one out of 100, one out of 50, we'll pay a

SPEAKER_06: little more for those companies. And we're going to give them extra attention, because we know you put

SPEAKER_19: them through your incubator. And so there's almost like a double whammy of improvement for us, let's say, because like you said, you get six swings at the bat. And you have given

SPEAKER_23: these companies some training, making them potentially more likely to succeed.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Correct. And so for us, we want and also we also want to build and we want to build a

SPEAKER_02: relationship with that founder, because if you made it through the accelerator, and that

SPEAKER_17: company fails, which most startups do fail. And when I say fail, I mean, fail to return money to investors, they would be great learning experiences, we can invest in that founder second company. And in fact, Travis, when I invested in him, that was his third company. When I invested in Raul from superhuman, that was the second time I invested in him, I had invested in reportive, which got sold to LinkedIn, we

SPEAKER_69: tripled our money 25k when I was investing then turned into 75 or maybe 100. So I got back my original 25 plus 75k. And I was kind of bummed about that, like hitting a

SPEAKER_17: single with somebody like Raul. I know it sounds obnoxious to, you know, triple your money in five years and be upset about it. But I just always felt like he was 100x founder, yet co founders then. So I said, you know, that's fine. We, you know, we hit a single, just please let me be the first investor next company. He came to me with superhuman. And famously, I gave him, you know, 500k, I think, just based on his idea, which was the take on Gmail. So that's when you place a bet on a founder, with no traction. Because you go, Okay, I know this founder, I bet on them before. So I would like to own we I think we own 2% of superhuman. And so owning 2% of a company that's going to be worth billions, that'll be a great return for our investors, right? I can make that bet. Okay, if you listen to

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SPEAKER_17: So now what we want to do is really, you're trying to get a good price or a reasonable price for

SPEAKER_02: reasonable traction. And that's where that green line starts to make sense. And if you're below the green line in this chart, you're probably getting a little extra value or more swings at bat and the further above it you go, probably you're taking a little more risk. And I tell all of the new angels I work with, do not invest pre product market fit. Do not invest until the product is being used by say 10 customers, 20 customers. Why? Most startups die before they get to their first paying customer. Most startups die before they get to paying customer number one. The ability to get one customer to take out their credit card and pay is colossal. And you have to make sure that's a real customer. So when you actually do your little investigation, you talk to a founder, they'll say, Yeah, we're at six customers. I'm

SPEAKER_17: like, tell me who are the six customers. And they're sometimes taken back. What do you mean? I'm like, walk me through each of the six customers only six, you must know them. Yeah, you got to know them. If you don't, that's a red flag. But walk me through the six. How did you acquire each one? Which ones are your friends? Which ones are your last? And I give them permission. Like, wink, wink, I know how this works. So which ones are your friends, family, previous colleagues, and then which ones did you get organically or through marketing? And they're like, Oh, yeah, so the first three are my frat brothers. And you're like, Great, good job. You got and that's totally valid. You got your frat brothers to try it at their company. Somebody's got to try it. Yeah, they put it on your corporate card. How did you acquire them? But then you go to the fourth customer, like, yeah, the fourth one, we we cold emailed, and they signed up after one email. And the fifth and the sixth, we met at trade show. Okay. Now that you've understood, there are three people, you know, that really made an honest decision to pay for this, you can actually double tap on those three. Tell me about those three. How long have they been paying? Do they pay for one month, three months, six months? And are they actually using the product? What are their engagement statistics? Okay, so they bought Slack.

SPEAKER_02: And they're the sixth customer for Slack, the first three refrat brothers, the sixth one was somebody you met at trade show. How many messages they send today? And how has that increased over time, you can actually have a very nuanced discussion about the engagement. And then if you feel, okay, it's only three customers, they're making $400 a month, I can place a spend. Famously, when I invested in calm, they had $10,000 in revenue, I think total to date, and they were charging $10 for the app. So they had sold 1000 people on paying $10 for meditation. And for me, that was like, great, if you can sell 1000, you can sell a million. And here we are, that company's worth, you know, billions of dollars, and we own five or 6% of it. Yeah. And that's one of our biggest positions ever. So that's how I think about, you know, the early stage. So you met with a company without talking about who the company is, where would they fall on this matrix?

SPEAKER_08: Well, I'm very excited to because I'm like, Okay, all right, because I did get,

SPEAKER_29: I got excited in the founder way. And now I need to know that I also got excited in the fundamentals way, which is that they have had a pilot with several 100 paying customers, that was successful, they have customer retention numbers, and they could tell me their margins, which is that they in fact, were profitable on their orders, like, to the tune of one to 2%, with a path to greater margin.

SPEAKER_02: And so the fact that they can credibly talk about that, and they ran a pilot, now you're starting to push them over to just having a consistent revenue stream, they're right before that. So they did a pilot for some reason, that's a bit of a red flag, that maybe, why would it be a pilot is the

SPEAKER_17: question I would double click on there. It's asset heavy. Ah, okay, fine. Sure. So they ran like a trial, it's asset heavy, great. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: And asset heavy, as we discussed, is when you have to own and spend a lot of money. And then you have to ask yourself, why are they choosing to be asset heavy? So the natural question is, so tell me, why are you buying the cars for your lift drivers and your DoorDash drivers? Why are you buying their bicycles to deliver food and buying their ebikes instead of letting them buy their own and just paying them a little bit more and making it an asset light marketplace? Why don't you do

SPEAKER_17: that instead of having to incur a $1,500 electric bike cost every time you hire a new person, because there are people out there with electric bikes.

SPEAKER_23: This was, by the way, if we talked, what was this our first or second show where we talked about Joker? Yes, that's a specific example in play here. In case you missed that one, hopefully you didn't go back and listen, it'll boost the rankings.

SPEAKER_15: Yes. So anyway, that's, that's how I would think about it. And really, this is what you're

SPEAKER_02: and you can start to feel, let me know, if I was correct in saying, the same feeling as a journalist when you're trying to figure out like, should I actually publish this story about this company? Is it bullshit? Am I going to have egg on my face, that I publish a story, where it was kind of vaporware, and it was smoke and mirrors? Or did I actually publish a story about a company that's real? Yeah, like, we always have that constant fear as a journalist, right? Am I going to be the one who put Elizabeth Holmes on the cover? And it was a fraud, and it didn't exist? Like, there's a group of technology journalists who did put her on the cover editors who are probably thinking to themselves, like, post that every time they put somebody on the cover, they're thinking, let's make

SPEAKER_35: sure this isn't another Elizabeth Holmes. So we don't have egg on our face again.

SPEAKER_29: And you know, what's great is that I went from a very like consumer oriented journalist, right? I was

SPEAKER_23: doing reviews. So there was skepticism and evaluation. But there wasn't wasn't until I really made the transition when I went to the New York Times to a business journalist, that I had permission to ask

SPEAKER_29: rude questions about money. Yes. And then now, even just in my one meeting as a venture capitalist, and it took, you know, I had to like work over, I had to get over that hurdle to ask very specific, rude seeming questions about money that are not that even that journalists don't ask even business journalists are not and and companies won't tell you they will tell you if they want their money. And I was like, this is delightful, I can actually get the real information. And I already felt so gratified by being able to ask the specific questions that would have caused me in the past to weed out

SPEAKER_23: companies as a journalist, like if I had gotten the answers I got today, I would have been like,

SPEAKER_09: I can probably write about this because the power dynamic is different. Totally. In the case of a

SPEAKER_02: journalist, you can give them exposure. And that's probably why they're talking to you. And in the case of being a venture capitalist, you can give them money, right? You know, they're incentivized to BS you

SPEAKER_114: a little bit no matter what? Yeah. But if they want your money, they have to tell you a little bit more of the truth. And I'm already so excited about that, because it just feels like a more honest

SPEAKER_02: dynamic. Yes. And when you're doing journalism, what happens is they're trying to play you, and you're trying to get to the truth. So you're having this weird dance, where it's like, please just tell me the truth. So I can tell the story to the public correctly. And they're like, Okay, here's how we want to spin you. We have no competitors in the world. And this is going to be worth 10

SPEAKER_17: billion. This is great. You know, and you don't really have any recourse, because you're like, you

SPEAKER_02: don't have deep knowledge on each one. But here you could say, who are your top three competitors? Exactly. How much money do they make? How many employees do they have? And when you start asking questions like that, if the person does not get into what I call like the volley, like ever play a good ping pong volley, and you're like, who cares about the score? That was rewarding enough to just hit the ball back and forth 20 times at that speed. That's actually, for me, the founder I want to work with. So when I was talking to Travis about Uber, or I talked to Vlad about Robinhood, man, we were riffing. And all of a sudden, three hours would disappear. And we went to dinner. And then we went to have a drink. And then we went for a two mile walk. And we couldn't stop talking about all the possibilities for Robinhood for Uber for calm. When you get in that jamming session, I had, you know, Alex from calm over to play tennis at my house. And, you know, we were just talking for hours, you know, like, from the morning until the night. And you know, the conversation never ends. And that's the exciting part about being a capital allocator is when you find the right person, they want to tell you that because they're going to respect you and say, I

SPEAKER_17: actually want to have this conversation about unit economics, I want to have a debate about asset light versus asset heavy. And the person is defensive. That's a red flag. But you're asking yourself is, and you know, I hate to bring up the dating or marriage analogies in 2022 is brought with, you know, you know, I mean, all the time, it's true. But it's kind of accurate, because

SPEAKER_02: you're going to spend 10 years with this person building the company. Are you having design

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SPEAKER_00: expensive agencies that charge you an arm and a leg. And let's face it, it disappoints you often or messy talent marketplaces. They help you get qualified design at scale. In fact, superside created a new category called cast internally. That's right, creative as a service. By subscribing to superside, you'll get a dedicated design team built specifically for you and access to a platform that makes it easy for you to request designs and have them delivered quickly. They are a fully managed service and completely hassle free. They work with brands like Amazon, Salesforce and Shopify, you may have heard of them, as well as tons of fast growing startups. Superside only hires the top 1% of virtuosos of designers around the world, and they make sure your team has a full range of capabilities from ad creative and landing pages to motion design and custom illustrations and even memes. Here's your call to action. Go to superside.com slash twist and get 3000 or more in credits when you sign up for an annual subscription. This is a twist exclusive and valid for only the next three months $3,000 in credits when you go to superside.com slash twist and you sign up for an annual plan. It's a really creative idea to solve all your creative problems. Once again, superside.com slash twist. If the person is like a bullshit artist or won't answer the

SPEAKER_02: questions or gets defensive, you got to think like, what is board meeting number 30 going to be like? What is like your five going to be like? Is this person going to miraculously mature? And I've been in the situation where I've been on boards where, you know, a CEO is not maturing. And it's painful. I'm just like, can somebody buy my shares in this

SPEAKER_17: company? And I just tell the founder, like, Listen, it's happened to me maybe three times four times out of 350 investments, where I said, you know, I'm not the right investor for you. And it's almost like breaking up talk.

SPEAKER_02: And I'm just like, Yeah, you know, we own 8% of the company at the next round of financing. How about you buy 4% of it? We'll keep 4% of it will be low the will be below the five to 7% where we want to have a board seat. And we can just have any insurance in the future. And you can get us off the board. I've said that to founders that candidly, because it is a long term relationship, you want to be rooting for the person. And I had somebody who coached me at one point, because I was a bit of a terror as a manager. And I was

SPEAKER_17: telling them about this terrible employee. And they're like, Hey, you're not rooting for this person. I was like, What do you mean? He said to me? He's like, Well, you actually don't want them to succeed at this point. Right? I just thought about it. And I was like, Yeah, I hate this person. And it's like, But you're the boss, you hired them. I was like, Well, I didn't hire somebody else. He's

SPEAKER_02: like, Well, you hired the person hired them. And you're keeping them employed. He's like, If you're not rooting for them anymore, why are they're at your company? And I was like, Well, they're good at what they do. And I need that position filled. And they're like, Really, you can't find anybody else to do it? Like, so you don't want the pain of hiring somebody, but you're not rooting for the person, you have to have somebody in that position, you who you're rooting for their success, not rooting for their failure. It's dysfunctional. And I was like, Ah, this is like a dysfunctional relationship, a dysfunctional marriage,

SPEAKER_17: whatever we've seen, you know, that that couple who comes to the dinner party, everybody's like, Why are you guys still married? Like, all you do is argue, like,

SPEAKER_42: and they're comfortable for us. They've lost the like, the benefit of the doubt. That is such a good. I mean, I

SPEAKER_23: understand the awkwardness of using relationship metaphors. But the fact is that you're what you're talking about is dating the person in front

SPEAKER_137: of you, like they're not going to change.

SPEAKER_09: Yes. Yeah. Or if they do change, be delighted. Sure. And it's on the margin, gonna change. And they're gonna grow because, you

SPEAKER_139: know, building a company is really hard. Yes. Having employees makes

SPEAKER_23: you probably less selfish. And they will, you know, for most people, it will likely mature them. Yeah. But yeah.

SPEAKER_02: This is why some VCs use the term coachable. I like a founder who is coachable. Okay, yeah, people take it wrong. Some people take that the wrong way, like, that the founder is incompetent. What it

SPEAKER_17: means is I wouldn't use the word I don't use the word coachable, because it kind of creates the dynamic, like, I'm in charge, and you're the player, and I'm the coach, and I can put you on the bench or whatever, because that's not, it's not accurate. It's more like, I say, can the person have an intellectually honest discussion? Can I riff with the person? Can I have that volley back

SPEAKER_02: and forth? And they take notes. I take notes, they take notes, and we can have a productive debate back and forth. Like you and I, the reason I think this collaboration is working so well already, is you and I are having private discussions about what

SPEAKER_00: will make the show better? What's an what what do we each want to do? If you can have an intellectually honest discussion? Okay, at least we're not sitting here bullshitting

SPEAKER_17: each other about the reality. And what leaders do at their core is define reality for everybody. And when you're on the board of a company, when you're an investor, you're a leader of that company, you may not be the ultimate leader as the founder is it's their company. But you do have a leadership position, and you have to define reality. And if the reality is we don't have product market fit, well, then we should not be spending money on marketing yet. And we should not be hiring a bunch of marketing and salespeople because the customers are not in love with the product yet, you need to get that first. But I've seen founders and boards who are not defining reality like, Yeah, let's just spend a million dollars getting more customers. And I'm like sitting there on the board going. What's our NPS score? What's our net for sure? What's our engagement? What's our churn rate? If our churn is 30% a month, we really want to be spending money and pouring water into a bucket with two holes in

SPEAKER_148: it. Like, let's fix the hole so the customers don't run out and

SPEAKER_20: then fill the bucket. And so these are the nuanced discussions. And so I think- There's gonna be a lot more of it. I'm so excited. A lot more. I think it's a good start. For those of you who are wondering, every Sunday, Molly's gonna cover her passion, which is broadly defined as, Molly?

SPEAKER_29: Climate solutions. Climate crisis solution. I am a

SPEAKER_23: solutioner. I'm looking for solutions to the climate crisis. We are gonna call it though, I think we have all decided sustainability Sundays. Jason's name is the winner. Listen, if there's a

SPEAKER_09: better name, by all means change. Everybody knows what we're talking about. And that is, I think the key to a good name.

SPEAKER_137: It's better to be clear than clever.

Chamath Palihapitiya: So in your statement there, it's world positive. It's not crying

SPEAKER_17: your coffee Sundays. This is not no woe is me. We're not gonna get through this. This is what's a solution to people who want to

SPEAKER_02: have their homes be more efficient, to have a lower carbon footprint when they're eating food, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah. How do you want to get fossil fuels out of your life? I don't care what the method is, because we need them all. And

SPEAKER_29: it's all sustainable. It's like, look, I'm a I'm like a German girl from the Midwest. I am about getting to work. Hard work, black coffee, get it done. Quit your bitchin' Sundays. Quit your

SPEAKER_17: bitchin' Sundays. It's actually this is why this is gonna be a good collaboration. Because I was looking for a co-host for like three years. And I was just like, Alright, Kara Swisher is obviously not available. And they wanted me to be Kara Swisher's partner in crime. And they couldn't get me or Chamath. And then they went to the number one. They went to the number one on

SPEAKER_02: the B list, which was Prof G. So Bankoff was like, you got to get Chamath or J Cal. That's the perfect. And I was like, listen, I already my dance cards falling on my own pockets. I don't need to go work for somebody. So they went with it, which is great. I think Prof G's turned out okay. He's entertaining. I mean, he's wrong, but he's entertaining. But the hard work ethic that you have. It's great because the people who were working on our team here at This Week in Startups are hardworking, but they're like, this guy, Jason's a bit of a maniac. He's texting us on the weekends. We have a group

SPEAKER_00: thread, and he's texting on the weekends. And then you come in, week one. And I'm like, I just type one little suggestion for

SPEAKER_163: the show this week on Sunday. And then I go skiing and I come back. I'm on the lift and I look at there's 80 messages from

SPEAKER_114: me. I really used to be so much better about boundaries. You guys, I'm really I will respect your time. I believe in

SPEAKER_165: everyone's entertainment, but also the benchmark black coffee,

SPEAKER_167: Germans, Midwest. Let's go. Not really true. We sent texts on the

SPEAKER_168: weekends constantly. You do you do. But this was a little bit of a

SPEAKER_169: high watermark to have to have another maniac in there as a host. Nick, Nick, was it not good? Or great?

SPEAKER_171: No, I actually all of the producers love love when you send suggestions because that makes our job easier for pitch because we already have a story to do. It's like art perfect. We're gonna I can even knock this out if I have some time Sunday night to get ahead of Monday. It's great.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. So this is the Sunday show. You're listening to this action on the Sunday show.

SPEAKER_17: All right, Molly, who do you have next on sustainable Sundays? Who's your interview today for sustainable Sundays? And why

SPEAKER_06: did you pick them?

SPEAKER_23: So I'm very excited, actually, because I'm interviewing Danny Kennedy, who is the CEO of New Energy Nexus, which is basically a global accelerator for companies and organizations and individuals who are focused on the big energy transition, right? Getting off of fossil fuels and electrification. And Danny is one of the people who really helped me understand the idea of climate solutions. He's been doing this forever. I think he had like Japan shooting harpoons at him when he was like in Greenpeace 30 or 40 years ago. He's a bonkers Australian. So look for a lot of F word. But he also is like profoundly optimistic about the brilliant people who are gonna do the hard work and come up with the technologies that are gonna get our butts out of this.

SPEAKER_132: He's basically got Y Combinator for climate change, sustainability. Yeah, exactly. He's got a lot of money from the state of

SPEAKER_137: California. He's in Oakland.

SPEAKER_17: Oh, perfect. Great. Awesome. So that would be a great collaboration. Maybe he has a great company that we can syndicate at some point.

SPEAKER_178: I think he could be some feedstock. Not gonna lie.

SPEAKER_02: Awesome. Well, I mean, that is it is a, as we say in the business, this is a team sport. So when you find a great collaborator, like I have in Sequoia, or with Saks and Chamath and other folks, you all of a sudden just start riffing between other capital allocators about companies, they're investing in ones we are and how can we collaborate to make them successful. And so that's, that's awesome. I can't wait to

SPEAKER_149: hear it. Let's hear the interview. Startups need a central hub to store information and collaborate on work more than ever. That's

SPEAKER_00: why right now I'm reading this ad read in my notion page where I have this week in startups, all the guest notes, all of the previous episodes, all the ad reads, everything is centralized in notion, as is my entire life at inside.com and my entire life investing in companies. That's why you need to try notion, especially in this new remote world. It's one place for notes, docs, projects, and everyday work. It goes well beyond a wiki. And when we went fully remote in March of 2020 notion became our internal knowledge bank. Here is one of my producers going through our pod notes page on notion, where we highlight the top lessons from past episodes, and we're going to ramp up our pod notes in 2022. So you can look at any episode of this week in startups and see all the lessons you can learn. Doing this in notion is so easy and they keep releasing new features. It's such a beautiful product. Every team from engineering to sales can work together seamlessly, and they have 500 integrated apps, including Google and slack. You collaborate in real time, and it tailors all the workflows to your needs. Hundreds of thousands of teams worldwide are already delighting their employees with notion. It's so great to have a right first culture. And then everybody feels like things are less chaotic because you're writing important stuff down and not losing all those great ideas for your checklist, etc. They have a worldwide community of millions of people creating templates and tutorials. Now you're going to find incredible templates for everything you're doing, whether it's a podcast or investing or building a product. The product is constantly improving. I can't say enough about notion. I really love the product. Go to notion.so and use the promo code twist to get $250 off their annual team plan. It's super affordable. Once again, notion.so and use that promo code twist TWIST. So you get that $250 during checkout. Great job notion. Love the

SPEAKER_187: product sincerely.

Jason Calacanis: So I'm super excited to kick off sustainability Sunday as we're calling it so far. Although Danny knows my secret plan is to eventually transition it to this weekend climate startup. My first guest here as baby climate investor and co host of this week in startups is Danny Kennedy, chief energy officer at new energy nexus. And for those of you who don't know, Danny's already been like a little bit of my guide. He's been my Yoda into the world of covering climate tech and climate solutions and then also into like making this leap into the

SPEAKER_166: investment side. Danny, thanks for thanks for being guest number one.

SPEAKER_193: Hey, I'm so excited. This is gonna be fun. And I can't wait to see what you do Molly. This is gonna be really cool. This week in climate startups is absolutely what we need now. So let's do this.

Jason Calacanis: All right, great. We're doing it. Um, tell me. All right. So this is a you know, you don't you're the behind the scenes is that right before you and I started talking for the podcast listener, we had a segment that's like Molly's a baby VC. And I think we should sort of continue that conversation for both my selfish purposes, but also just this idea of like, so you want to be a climate tech investor because that's kind of a thing. Now that seems to be quite a

SPEAKER_166: trend. So would you say that's fair? Are you seeing that?

SPEAKER_199: Oh, sure. You know, last year was this banner year for clean energy generally, and

SPEAKER_200: it was also a banner year for early stage investing around the globe, you know, and a lot of that venture capital flew flowed into the clean energy segment. I think by the numbers, people were saying that it more than doubled from about 6% of deals done last year is more like 14% in the broad sort of climate sectors, if you will. Yeah. And, and, you know, that's, that's a great news story. But like I said, we need this week in climate startups every week because that's got to go from 14% to 50 and beyond. I think if we're really going to get the climate transition done in time.

Jason Calacanis: Well, tell us about that. You're part of this world. What happens at new energy nexus? You're a nonprofit, right? A global nonprofit.

SPEAKER_200: We are, but we, we invest funds and manage other people's money ranging from the state of California for whom we run a fund called the Cal seed fund, which is really gift capital grants into very early stage startups in California. Been doing this for 15 years in California. In other places, it may be actual equity invested. For example, in Indonesia, we have probably the largest early stage equity fund in Indonesia. We did seven deals last year over just over a million bucks, you know, not, not huge beer, but some gangbuster returns already because that country, like many Southeast Asian nations is popping on say solo. So five out of the seven deals were in the solar market. We run funds in India, in Africa and elsewhere, but, you know, also we do microfinance and lending licenses for very small beer relative to what your listeners are probably used to. So it's a very broad gamut of things we do to broadly achieve our mission, which is to support diverse entrepreneurs to drive the energy transition. We need more innovation and more involvement and engagement of communities, people getting the wealth and opportunities of this incredible energy transition

SPEAKER_193: as it arises so that they get behind it. That's basically our game.

Jason Calacanis: What kind of investments do you look for? Specifically clean energy? Yeah. I mean, we're in electricity rather broadly clean energy, I guess, because that's a pretty big

SPEAKER_206: right. It's no longer just sort of the renewable space. We're in climate tech is what it's being

SPEAKER_200: called in America in other markets, more generally clean energy in China, new energy. And, and, you know,

SPEAKER_193: for your listeners, just to remind us that's where the game is, you know, almost twice as much money spent last year and the renewable deployment game in that country than any other country. So new energy is the Mandarin for clean or renewable energy, by the way. Um, but we do electricity, mobility, ag, uh, the other industry sectors, a lot in the built environment, you know, good old fashioned energy efficiency, you know, the first fuel, one of our best deals closed on Christmas Eve was a company called Synergy Energy

SPEAKER_200: Solutions in Indonesia, where the, the built environment is just this, you know, building stock that's

SPEAKER_193: bleeding money because it's wasting electricity and air conditioning load. Right. And there's so many efficiencies that can be gained with a smart audit and retrofit firm. And they go in and do a pay as you save kind of contract with building owners and just make money for people. It's a brilliant business that we're happy to invest in. So, you know, we're across the spread. And as I mentioned, we run a microfinance lending license and, and a training for very grassroots entrepreneurs at the base of the pyramid in Uganda, where we're training mostly women to sell solar home systems and lamps and the like as products to displace dirty fuels, dung and wood and, and kerosene in their households, which saves them money too. So it is a very broad range of investments we're looking at, but in terms of your audience, I think Molly, you know, they'd be interested in the battery businesses we've got behind. That's how you and I first connected about the lithium industry. And Danny's the guy who told me about the whole

SPEAKER_211: lithium, the white gold rush.

SPEAKER_193: And look at that, you know, last year, that commodity was the biggest growth story in the world. Bigger than coffee, bigger than oil, bigger than anything, 400% year on year. So, you know, we're across the spread. I sometimes sound like a weird sort of salesman opening my jacket and saying, you know, which watch do you want to buy?

SPEAKER_215: Yeah. Isn't that like a Rolex knockoff for Indonesia, right? Which country? That's it.

Jason Calacanis: What's to be, I mean, most of our investments here, right at launch and through the syndicate are going to be US based, but it still feels like a lot of those things. A lot of those opportunities are similar, right? Like when I look at solutions, it's like, it is boring old energy efficiency. You're the one who has said to me more than once that the silver bullet technology already exists and it's solar. Like, how do you think some of those learnings about the countries and the economies that are either trying to preemptively build renewable energy instead of dirty or replace it in some way? Like, how do we bring those lessons back here

SPEAKER_193: to find companies in the US? Well, yeah, one is just the smart replication of things. I mean, there's a few bits to unpack there and in the, you know, interest of the new investor coming into the space, I'd offer a couple of observations. One is that I don't think I would have said solar bullet, silver bullet with solar, but sort of silver buckshot, you know, there's going to be a number of things, but the big slug that sort of takes the animal down is probably the solar piece. PV is the one that, you know, according to the International Energy Agency at the end of last year, projected now to do 90% of new additions over the next five years to grids around the globe. You know, that's the train you want to be on. And the businesses that do that deployment are going to be, you know, in some places, sort of mom and pop shops growing up, growing large, doing three and 10X type stories. There are others that are going to do much more than that. The businesses that finance them, that provide the SaaS solutions to their smooth operation and engineering and execution, maybe even better multiples. So you want to work out how you're going to engage in that. But then there's also to your question about what the lessons are in the States, you know, how do you find the company that's going to take a rooftop solar to the commercial and industrial segment? No one's really done that in the United States. You know, there's all these big stories like Mosaic, which is doing, I think, one in five residential solar loans right now, and Sunlight Financial and Goodleap and these other companies that do the residential financing of the solar rollout that's happening and will ultimately touch 80 million homes in America. That's their total addressable market. And they've done about two or three, I think, at this point. So they've got a lot of headroom. But no one's done a sophisticated scaled version of that for CNI in America. So there are companies we're supporting like Orca Financial, which has just started to do that commercial and industrial segment. And it's a pattern recognition game, right? You know, people that were in at the ground floor on the solar leasing and solar loan business were involved with Mosaic and others are now migrating all that knowledge and institutional learning. And it's the classic serial entrepreneur trick and taking it into the CNI segment, which is almost as big as the residential segment. How many small shops and warehouses and distribution centers and you name it could go solar in America? Many tens of millions. And they will need to be financed. And the company that corners that and banks that is going to do really well. And then just to go back to the point you made about, you know, most of your syndicate is probably going to be looking at the US. I'd encourage you to, you know, challenge yourself about whether you can get comfortable with going outside the United States. You know, by the numbers, I think of that banner year we had in 2021 with venture capital flowing into climate tech, about two thirds of it, I think 65% was in the US. Well, the US ain't two thirds of the world, is it? Neither by population, nor economy, nor by energy transition. Like we talked about,

SPEAKER_200: the big numbers are happening in Asia. Why aren't we investing in Indonesian solar companies? There's going to be much better stories there in terms of growth. And it's because of prejudices we have about Indonesia and emerging market risk and whatever, but we've got to get over those in order to A, make the climate solutions happen at scale and contribute to those communities taking this on and succeeding. And B,

SPEAKER_193: if we actually want to, you know, ride this wave and take it all the way into the clam bake.

SPEAKER_229: You mean make a crap ton of money? That's what your LPs are going to want to do.

Jason Calacanis: I'm just trying to translate a little bit. Is it also more like from the baby investor sort of perspective, how much more complicated is it? Versus, you know, just being like we invest in US companies that are incorporated in Delaware. I wonder, like, what is it that holds people back? Like you said, it's sort of institutional bias. Is it, is it a risk factor thing? Is it literally

SPEAKER_193: paperwork? Yes, yes. And yes, I think. Um, and, and, you know, that's the work that has to be done. And, you know, unfortunately I would argue that, you know, and I don't consider myself a venture

SPEAKER_200: capitalist. As you said, we're a nonprofit doing this for a mission, which is, you know, very much about spreading climate solutions as quick as we can. Uh, I don't think venture capitalists love to

SPEAKER_193: do work, hard work, at least, you know, so if it's hard work to go work out, how do you invest in India

SPEAKER_200: or Indonesia or whatever, you know, oh, I've got to go recruit someone that speaks a different language and I've got to work out the legals in a different jurisdiction and I've got to repatriate my capital and do that stuff. Probably easier to just stay at home and take a bet on the next thing next door. So part of the challenge perhaps is to decide we're going to do the hard things, which include spreading the benefits of clean energy and electric mobility and the electrification of everything to

SPEAKER_199: everyone, which is 7 billion people outside our shores.

Jason Calacanis: And if you do that in advance, there it's, there's a little more impact to be made, right? Like you've have talked about how obviously there are big changes that need to be made in big industrial country. I mean, the U S isn't 65% of the world population, but it's like the number one or two

SPEAKER_193: polluter, right? Well, historically number one by a country mile, you know, we're the most historical responsibility, but going forward into the 21st century and we're a fifth of the way through that, by the way, we're not more than 10%. I think we're less of the pollution problem.

Jason Calacanis: It was like a weirdly shocking statement. And I don't know why that fifth of the way through

SPEAKER_193: thing made me feel like we need to hurry up. People forget that. Yeah. The puck has already sort of gone to Asia. The, the, the world's economy by the numbers is bigger in Asia than the United States, you know, the population obviously, and the growth story, like the, the emerging demand, the economic activity is not in Europe or Japan. They're declining and the States are sort of flat. And where we're going to see energy demand grow is again,

SPEAKER_200: these populations like a, a Nigeria or an Indonesia where it's going to five, seven X or something like that. You might get, you know, incremental growth in energy demand for all of these services that we're selling in energy and in climate tech solutions, but you're going to get big multiples

SPEAKER_193: of those things when you have a hundred to 300 million human populations going from almost no use of electricity to use of electricity like you and I have. I mean, sorry to geek out, but

SPEAKER_200: the average Indonesian uses a thousand kilowatt hours per annum per capita or something in that ballpark.

SPEAKER_193: You and I are probably doing 10,000. They're going to do five or six or seven as they electrify their

SPEAKER_200: motorbikes, they get more air conditioning, they get more online, they do all the things that we take

SPEAKER_193: for granted. If that is built out on coal and diesel, which is the current strategy for that country, then climate change is bait. So good news is Indonesia's thousands of islands strung along an archipelago that is sitting on the equator, perfect for solar and storage and some other renewable solutions. It's a two wheel vehicle platform country. You know, they've stopped buying cars because they can't fit them on their islands and crowded cities anymore. They're going to electrify all that and they should do that with clean energy. That's a story that, you know, an investor should go make hay with and get involved.

Jason Calacanis: Well, yeah, I mean, it sort of sounds like if, you know, in my brief travels through this world, which are not that brief, I mean, I've certainly been covering this industry a long time. It's quite clear if a venture capitalist is actually interested in a hundred X or a 500 X return, you're describing those opportunities right now, right? Yeah. And another little more paperwork,

SPEAKER_251: Danny.

SPEAKER_193: I'm sorry, but the wonderful people, I mean, you know, we've got an investment manager for our equity fund, which is housed in Singapore, but in Indonesia. And she is, you know, effectively a first time out, first time money manager doing incredible work, you know, with the deals we've made, the co-investors are incredibly happy, you know, and as I said, we've already seen great returns with, you know, what's a really small little pocket. I was going to give you another sort of tip, if you will, which is, you know, just as there's unrealized opportunities because of the herd mentality, you know, VCs tend to move in packs as it were. So I think you would have seen those numbers from PwC that over the last five years, say 60% or more of the sort of early stage investing has gone into mobility, right? Makes sense because that was where a lot of innovation was coming sort of post the real

SPEAKER_200: build out of solar and wind and the growth of batteries, which is good for electricity and mobility. And, and also makes sense because Tesla was sort of skyrocketing during that time. And so everyone wanted to sort of get on that gravy train. But, you know, in the climate tech space, mobility

SPEAKER_193: is, I don't know the exact number, but I think it's like 16% of the emissions profile. So you have a disproportionate allocation of capital going into the sectors that are actually causing the problem. Yeah. I think that the, the, the, the top five sectors, uh, that generates 80% of emissions are getting 25% of venture. So, well, what are those? That's one of the things I want to do in our remaining

Jason Calacanis: time is like break down, you know, this problem into some of its component parts. So like, right.

SPEAKER_193: Where should we be manufacturing heavy industry? You know, how do we, how do we clean that stuff up?

SPEAKER_200: Yeah. You know, and, and, and great startups in our portfolios, like in third derivative, cane and energy solutions, a bunch of really smart furnaces, the whole hydrogen sector is sort of addressing that, um, bunch of deals there, uh, built environment. You know, we talked about this, but again, you know, lots of cool companies, um, doing work like block power or radiator labs in New York, you know, that could really just transform. Let's like break that down even more. When you say

Jason Calacanis: built environment, you're talking about how do we transform? There's actually a move afoot, which I've noticed people talking about decarbonizing their homes. Like, is that what you mean? And obviously, but extending that to business and that can be anything from electrifying a building, like replacing your gas stove with your, you know, let's be like super specific. Cause I feel like when somebody talks to me about decarbonizing their house, they're saying like, oh, I'm getting a quote that's more than the cost of the house to, you know, take it, rip out all the HVAC, put in electric, rip out all the appliances, put in electric, get solar, get a battery. Like I hear that. And I'm like, I think there's a hundred businesses in there.

SPEAKER_206: Yeah. And there's a really one big roll up of a business, which makes that easy and elegant for the

SPEAKER_200: consumer to do. Like, you know, because that just sounds like a consumer nightmare trying to manage

SPEAKER_262: 10 different contractors. I think so far it is. Right. And it would be like, Exactly. So, Super impactful.

SPEAKER_193: You know, point of sale online solution to make that easy and branded and sexy and fun. That company's off to the races. Whoever nails that one in America is going to do well, right?

SPEAKER_264: Call me if you're out there.

SPEAKER_193: Okay. Hey, yeah. So that's a great example. Yes. You know, the built environment breaks into many niches and, and each of those is a giant industry opportunity of its own, right? So yes, residential retrofits as we electrify everything, switching out gas cookers with induction stoves. Who's going to handle that? Who's going to make a better induction stove, et cetera, et cetera. Seriously. That isn't like- So there's all sorts of businesses.

SPEAKER_266: $2,700.

SPEAKER_193: Right. And, and, you know, who's going to train people how to use them well, you know, turn it into a cooking fad or something or other. I don't know. There's all sorts of innovation and entrepreneurship to be had around that phenomena in middle America. But then the built environment also goes into other legacy buildings that are housing stock, you know? So Manhattan, you know, these hundred year old buildings with hundred year old

SPEAKER_200: radiators that leak gas and money, like nobody's business, you know, what are we going to do to switch them out? The factories of America, the distribution warehouses of Southern California, the, you know, you name it, there's, there's 101 stories that need treatment by innovative entrepreneurs. Yeah.

SPEAKER_193: And, you know, enough said on that other than, like, watch this space and look at our portfolios in CalC, third derivative, clean fight in New York. We've got plenty of companies trying to address those things. Then of course there's mobility, but, you know, not just the obsession with the four wheel platform, private car, which yes, Americans have sort of created their personal identities around, but is not a, how most of humanity moves. Like, you know, and in a country like India, 85% of vehicle miles traveled are in rickshaws. Yeah. Three wheel vehicles, you know, like who's electro fitting those? I don't know whether you've heard this phrase, electro fitting, but the sort of, the poor man's.

SPEAKER_269: Oh my God, I love that. Electro fitting.

SPEAKER_193: Well, you know, great company, you know, plug one, shift EV, the guy in, out of MIT, but Egyptian, gone to Cairo, where there's a hundred thousand compact little minivans. I think Andreessen Horowitz is in this deal, that you can just switch out with a $10,000 kit from China and turn into an electric vehicle. And it extends the life of the chassis. It takes its operating cost to a fraction of the engine that it had in it. And you turn this fleet of a hundred thousand vehicles into, you know, from a rattling, smelly, polluting problem for the fleet manager into a much more efficient, low cost, clean, less troublesome solution, you know, and, and how many fleets

SPEAKER_270: super annoyed because he thinks he invented that idea. I got a lot of, uh, like, what if you could

SPEAKER_114: just send people a kit to their house to turn their cars into electric? And I'm like,

SPEAKER_203: can I give him a tip? I, no one's done that yet to me for marine transportation. You know,

SPEAKER_193: there's hundreds of millions of humans that move about coastal and river waterways with putt-putts and dumb diesel tanks and pay through the nose to refuel and all that. And hey, a hot swappable battery at the dock and a cool electric motor, they'd be much better off. It's the same benefit, you know, total cost of ownership, less moving parts, less maintenance and operation cost. Let's do this. Let's just transform marine electrification. Let's do a, this weekend startups call out for, you know, marine electro fitting winners.

SPEAKER_273: Yeah. Hit us up. Because we can totally do that now.

SPEAKER_274: This is fun. You've got to have me back. I want to do this again.

Jason Calacanis: We're totally going to do this again. I love it. All right. Well, I'm going to ask you one last question until our next time, which is this, what, where do you fall? And I mean, I obviously know the answer to this, but it seems clear that there are going to be these kind of like two buckets of investing, probably as a result of the like leftover fear from, you know, the, the green, what was it, the green investing boom of the early 2000s. But there's this question about like meat space investing versus everybody thinking, well, maybe there's a SaaS solution for this, which there clearly are like people talk a lot about the lack of metrics and data. And I'm sure there are a million business opportunities there. But there's also built environment. There's also, you know, hard infrastructure that that investors are a little scared of. So you're asking me, what, where do I

SPEAKER_277: fall on hybrid workplaces? Is that I'm saying that, like, I think there are going to be a lot of,

Jason Calacanis: yeah, that was a lot of words. That's my fault. I think there are going to be a lot of brand new climate tech investors who are going to come to this space and go hardware is difficult or basic science is really hard or built infrastructure is very complicated. And there are a million different regulations. Maybe I should just find a SaaS solution for climate instead. And what's your

SPEAKER_206: advice? You know, it is true that there are a lot of investors that want to chase those easier pieces

SPEAKER_193: of this. And, you know, I'm guilty of this. Like my first business that I started was the company that pioneered remote solar design, which was a software solution to the problem of truck rolls going out

SPEAKER_200: to houses to do the engineering quotation drawing. You know, we just didn't want to spend that money to just get a quick and dirty sketch at the time. Now it's the best way to do it. And it's ubiquitous.

SPEAKER_193: We use satellite and photographic, aerial photographic images to do the design engineering across the solar industry. So software can help and software will help and is in, you know, other

SPEAKER_200: charging infrastructure and other pieces. And there are great investments to be had there.

SPEAKER_193: But I think you won't obviously solve it all. And you won't chase down all the deals if you stick with that thesis. You know, there are hard things to be done and people have to do it. It's often these really innovative blends of hardware software, like the full stack stuff. You know, like one of my favorite companies is out of Australia called InfraVision using drones

SPEAKER_200: to do line stringing on high voltage transmission, which is pretty remarkable tech. But it also starts getting into the sort of grid enabling technology solutions, which is a software problem around how you route electrons around grids. You know, you might have heard that news story over the winter break that there's a solution in the Northeast that could get, you know, 60% more juice out of the grid with dot just because we don't use it fully. But if you can be smarter about it, then you can run more traffic through the streets effectively. However, to be smarter about it, you have to have intelligence on the wires, you have to have systems and sensors and stuff and that all reported back and InfraVision are really doing amazing things with drone technology in order to build that intelligence and that capability on a, you know, an incredibly old bit of kit, which is the American grid, for example.

SPEAKER_193: So I think, you know, that's if you're a software investor wanting to get into climate tech, you know, maybe that's your entry point is those bits that bring the intelligence layer into the hardware layer, which is ultimately what we're talking about. I mean, you know, last thought for me, Molly, for you and this entry is don't give up on this. This is not going away. This tide turned over the last year or so and has sort of started to rise and people are realizing, you know, it's gone from 6% to 14% of venture capital and it is going to go to bigger and bigger numbers because it is what the world needs. And venture capital was invented to try to do hard things and solve big, hairy problems.

SPEAKER_200: And that does mean we are going to have to get better at doing not just software and SaaS solutions, even though those businesses might be legit and make a good return and a fast buck. But we're also going

SPEAKER_193: to stick with the other ones. A bit like, you know, digitization, when we think about it, you know, way back in the 90s, I think when you first started reporting on tech, was all about, you know, how it's going to disrupt all these categories. And then there was disappointments and waves of hype and speculation and stuff. But now we do realize digitization really has crept into every corner of the globe and has disrupted every segment from media to music to whatever and is now in every geography. And so too, that's going to happen with low cost electricity from clean energy. That's, it's not

SPEAKER_200: just electricity in the grid and spilling into mobility and making our cars cheaper, better, faster. It's going to be making our buildings smarter and better to live in. It's going to make our industry more efficient and profitable. It's going to make our lives and everything better. And investing in that is your mission, if you choose to accept it. Danny Kennedy, Chief Energy Officer at New Energy

Jason Calacanis: Nexus. I could probably like go on all day, but that's such a beautiful place to end that I just

SPEAKER_19: have to call it. Well, Danny, you can find at New Energy Nexus. And then where do we find you on Twitter? If people want to hit you up with this, all the ideas we've thrown out today. Danny K's fun.

Jason Calacanis: B-A-N-N-Y-K-S-F-U-N. He is really fun, you guys. I am at Molly Wood. If you want to hit me up with your climate tech startup idea and Molly at launch.co is where you can find me because I'm doing this, guys. I'm doing it.