Reclaimed lumber is the superpower building material you’ve never heard of (because we’re all up to date on our Rolodex of sustainable building materials, right?). Lumber, processed wood from trees, is a versatile and widely used building material known for its strength, durability, and workability. So why isn’t there more of it in our buildings? Well, as great as lumber is, usable lumber from our buildings only comes from a few places — in the USA, it comes mainly from the Northwest and Southea...
Jul 11, 2024•43 min•Season 1Ep. 190
Mycelium is an emerging decarbonized building material due to its sustainability, biodegradability, and strength. It is cultivated by growing fungal networks, also known as mushrooms. Mycelium-based products can be used for insulation, bricks, and packaging. Today, we have a ClimateTech Entrepreneur making waves with Mycelium. Ilya is CEO & Co-Founder of COMU Labs, bridging the gap between sustainability and affordability in furniture materials. They utilize fungi to transform agricultural w...
Jul 09, 2024•29 min•Season 1Ep. 189
Ashwin Salvi is the Co-Founder and COO of AtmosZero. They create electrified boilers to replace traditional fossil-fuel-burning boilers in industrial settings. Steam touches a huge amount of products that we, as consumers, use every day, and AtmosZero is helping decarbonize that. Today, Ashwin shares his story, and we discuss: How they solved the cost issue by making a drop-in replacement How they built their pilot at the same scale as their commercial unit The tradeoffs of building in stealth H...
Jul 04, 2024•58 min•Season 1Ep. 188
Today, we are talking to Toby Ferenczi from Granular Energy . In this electrifying (ha!) episode, we finally tracked down the elusive Toby Ferenczi, a man who juggles startups like they're hot potatoes. ⚡️ Toby educates us about the world of electricity transparency and trading. Did you know you can trade electricity like stocks? Neither did we! And it doesn’t exactly work like that…but it got your interest, didn’t it?? 🤔 From his days at Cambridge to co-founding Granular Energy, Toby has journ...
Jun 29, 2024•47 min•Season 1Ep. 187
Kevin Noertker is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ampaire, a developer of Hybrid Aviation Propulsion Systems to Decarbonize Air Travel Today. Currently they are scaling up their tech. Their tech is proven to reduce fuel usage by about 50% for small aircrafts (anything with a propeller). Today, Kevin shares his story and we discuss: Aerospace Engineer to Ampaire: His story of co-founding Ampaire. Addressing Existing Stock: Electric aircraft is the future, but their solution helps address the existing s...
Jun 22, 2024•54 min•Season 1Ep. 186
Chad Mason is the CEO and Founder of Advanced Ionics, a company that has designed a revolutionary electrolyzer. They did this by designing their technology from scratch. They are currently scaling up this innovative technology and plan to sell these units, known as stacks, either directly or through licensing agreements. Today, Chad shares his journey: Early Inspiration: How he first learned about electrolysis at age 5 on a farm in North Dakota. Career Path: The various steps in his career that ...
Jun 17, 2024•56 min•Season 1Ep. 185
Jesse Henry is the CEO and Founder of Heartland Industries, a company that produces drop-in pellets made of hemp fiber. These pellets are used as an additive to plastics. They reduce the weight and cost of the products, improve strength, and lower scope 3 emissions. It's a quadruple-benefit product. Today, Jesse tells us his story - how he started Heartland - how he's the 3rd generation to work in the fibers industry - how they landed BASF as a partner and investor - and he gives a lot of other ...
Jun 13, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 184
Rahul broke down the nitty-gritty of how 2150 built (no pun intended) a leading ClimateTech VC fund focused on decarbonizing the built environment. We talked investing, fund modeling, learning from general VC, FinTech in ClimateTech, & more. This was a VC-fundamental extraordinaire , and super informative for anyone looking to learn more about venture capital. AND let’s not forget, Rahul spent his holiday with us to do this. Cheers to him. Enjoy 🥳👏. --- 🌎 Want the full PodLetter? Go to ou...
Jun 10, 2024•51 min•Season 1Ep. 183
Marian Krueger comes to us with his experience investing in 120+ early stage CDR startups , and broke down what we should look for and what’s worth watching in the years ahead. He’s a leading expert in CDR having invested in Europe, which is the leading CDR ecosystem in the world. Sitting down with him as a blast, and for our US listeners, this episode is VERY timely with the Biden Administration’s first release on voluntary carbon markets , Enjoy 🥳👏. --- 🌎 Want the full PodLetter? Go to our ...
Jun 04, 2024•45 min•Season 1Ep. 182
Today, we speak with Arvin Ganesan, an ex-Obama-Admin EPA and ex-Apple Energy Procurement executive. His career is fascinating, from finance to Policy to Energy Tech CEO. He offers us a lot of insight into their technology, how it works, and specifically how it plays well with utility models of making money. Towards the end, he mentioned the unknown of the commercialization path. He pointed out that it's not important to pick a model of commercialization with a tech like this because so many var...
May 25, 2024•55 min•Season 1Ep. 181
Michael Kearney started off this podcast defending the political durability of the IRA…and he had us convinced. If that doesn’t have you hooked, I don’t know what will! Building for deeptech founders is HARD…like folding a fitted sheet hard. And that’s why we need someone like Mike to do it. Mike himself did his undergrad and Ph.D. at MIT, so he’s knows the MIT innovation ecosystem like the back of his hand (The Engine is an MIT spin-out). In between, he spent his time drawing power from the Sun...
May 21, 2024•57 min•Season 1Ep. 180
There are a few key things Climate Entrepreneurs should know. This guest brought up a bunch of them. It is incredible to see how successful they are in a crowded space. Today, he shared with us many of the things that helped them succeed. How to align all stakeholders in the sales process Building a product so simple the user can be up-skilled without specialized training Building a culture of pragmatism Speaking Return-on-Investment Enjoy today's episode, and let us know your favorite moment in...
May 18, 2024•42 min•Season 1Ep. 179
What do you get when you put Chris Rock, Timothée Chalamet, Greta Thunberg, & Marc Andreessen together? -- You get Tom Ferguson! The King of Water VC! (Warning! Tom is hilarious, so cancel your comedy cellar tickets because you won't need them) Today, we had the chance to speak with Tom, the founding partner of Burnt Island Ventures. They are the leading VC investor in all things water. They became this by compounding their network for years with some of the best water networks, including Im...
May 15, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 178
Allison Wolff | Vibrant Planet Vibrant Planet is basically bringing the tech knowledge from the early FAANG days and applying that to land tender and wildfire resistance. Their platform is a prioritization system for land management restoration by providing real-time scenario planning, monitoring, and reporting. These assessments can help with qualifying projects for conservation finance. Allison brings a rolodex of experience working with top companies on sustainability, including Google, Meta,...
May 09, 2024•51 min•Season 1Ep. 177
Recently, the MCJ Podcast experienced huge backlash for having Big Oil players on the show. This prompted us to bring back a past guest, Shaun Abrahamson from Third Sphere. ---- 🌎 Want the full PodLetter? Go to our substack to see the written content that supplements the audio interview. ---- Shaun last joined us on episode 136 to talk about Navigating the Climate Capital Stack and how to Design for Finance (especially in the context of hardware). Today we dive into two macro topics. #1 Partner...
May 06, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 176
Somil chats with Chinmay Malaviya and Charlie Depman, CEO and CTO of Ridepanda, expanding access and usage of e-bikes, e-scooters, and micro mobility through employer sponsored subscriptions. Chinmay and Charlie bring a lot of startup and industry experience and were able to speak not only about their growth but ALSO breakdown the technical designs that help them be successful in micromobility. We talked about: How Ridepanda offers benefits platform for employers to subsidize employee transporta...
Apr 30, 2024•50 min•Season 1Ep. 175
What if Investors Only Made Money if they *actually* helped save the planet? Welp... folks, we have the show for you because that's exactly what Planet A is doing. Somil and Silas speak with Jessica Burley, a Berlin-based investor at the fund. On top of learning how they are *actually* walking the talk, we found out how they use Carbon Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) in their investing due diligence process. Tune in to get the whole thing today! 🌱🌎 --- 🌎 Want the full PodLetter? Go to our subst...
Apr 28, 2024•55 min•Season 1Ep. 174
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) is a generational government program deploying $27B into clean energy projects across the US. But what is the bill really? Franz Hochstrasser is an expert in financing projects in low-income areas and has a wealth of experience working on climate for the government - both of which are KEY for GGRF. Franz started his career “giving his 20s” to the government, and with that doing some amazing work as the Special Advisor to the Special Envoy for Climate Chan...
Apr 24, 2024•33 min•Season 1Ep. 173
Somil chats with Vivas Kumar, CEO of Mitra Chem, the first lithium-ion battery materials manufacturer focused on shortening the lab-to-production timeline by over 90%, addressing the largest barrier to innovation: R&D and scale-up speed. Vivas was a phenomenal orator and if you take a second to learn about Mitra Chem, it’s easy to see why. By combining their knowledge of iron-based cathodes with an AI and data enhanced production capacity, they are able to manufacture quicker and more reliab...
Apr 22, 2024•52 min•Season 1Ep. 172
In this episode, Somil chats with Josh Knauer, CEO of ReSeed, bringing carbon credits directly from farmers to the market. They focus on the oldest form of carbon capture – vegetation. They support farmers in taking their protective and restorative farming practices, validating them, and then creating the mechanisms to sell those credits to interested parties. We talked about: His strategy to differentiate these credits compared to the rest of the market, What works for them, How he’s building a...
Apr 18, 2024•59 min•Season 1Ep. 171
Each year, about 1 billion pounds of chemicals are sprayed on crops in the US alone - globally, that number is around 5.6 billion. Our guest today is AgTechLogic, and they are solving this problem. They do this by helping Farmers retrofit their existing machinery with precision sprayers that use computer vision to identify weeds and spray only on the weeds in a concentrated way that kills the weeds and won't overlap with the crops. Today, nearly all farmers use broadcast spraying, or spraying ev...
Apr 15, 2024•50 min•Season 1Ep. 170
Are you curious about what happens to solar panels when they are no longer usable? Maybe your crazy uncle's statements from last Thanksgiving about how solar doesn't work are still echoing. Well, look no further. Today, we are speaking with Adam Saghei, Founder of WeRecycleSolar, and we are discussing the end of life for solar panels. How circular can we make the supply chain? What can OEMs learn about their products' end-of-life? What is the REAL lifespan of a solar panel? How is this reality a...
Apr 03, 2024•53 min•Season 1Ep. 169
In this episode, I sit down with Mike Jackson, Managing Partner at Earthshot Ventures. Earthshot Ventures calls themselves carbon generalists and invest from Seed to Series B. They mainly invest in software and “stepchange” hardware with a preference to double down on existing portfolio companies. Mike’s story is great because of how intentional he has excelled at every stage and in multiple sides of building in climate. He is a successful founder from cleantech 1.0, a rockstar investing even be...
Mar 31, 2024•53 min•Season 1Ep. 168
In this episode, we actually have a bit of a flashback for you – I sit down to chat with Tiya Gordon, co-founder and COO of It’s Electric, creating curbside EV charging specifically built for cities. Before I even go into what we talk about, I’d like to shout out what Tiya has done in the few months since recording this episode in December: She was part of the Green Economy Action Plan, a landmark green jobs plan for NYC Has appeared on NPR, Was awarded the 2023 Top 10 Innovator award for Transp...
Mar 26, 2024•51 min•Season 1Ep. 167
In this episode, Somil chats with Logan Grizzel, partner at MUUS Climate Partners, the climate tech venture capital arm of MUUS & Co. investing at the convergence of decarbonization and technological innovation. This episode probably broke the quotable clip record we have – Logan was a great mix of knowing how to communicate his thoughts and genuinely having such unique insight having worked on alternative fuels at Toyota, then going into grid strategy and now spending time as a Climate VC, ...
Mar 22, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 166
What happens when successful CleanTech 1.0 founders step up to the plate again? Anza happens and it's magical. Today, Somil & Silas are interviewing Mike Hall, a Co-Founder of Anza, a company they spun out of Borrego, his and his brother's first venture. At Borrego, they developed software to streamline and improve the way they chose which solar panels to use for projects. Realizing this was a problem for everyone, they spun it out in 2023 and were off to the races. Enjoy this episode with a...
Mar 19, 2024•52 min•Season 1Ep. 165
In this episode, Silas and Somil chat with Ryan Gilliam, CEO of Fortera, a company focused on paving the way to zero CO2 cement backed by leading investors including Khosla Ventures and Temasek. What makes Fortera so exciting is that they’ve successfully raised all the way to their Series B, making them one of not many later stage companies in climate. We talked about his experience fundraising, the ins-and-outs of their tech, how to win over customers, his experience working with project develo...
Mar 14, 2024•52 min•Season 1Ep. 164
Today, we are speaking with a representative of the legendary Rockefeller Foundation. For those unaware, this foundation is one of the oldest well-organized institutions of its type and has been responsible for a massive number of efforts over the past 100 years. Our guest is Thomas Belazis, Director of Innovative Finance. He runs their Climate & Impact Investing arm. Some of the notable things we cover today are... Their $1bn Climate and Net Zero Commitments How they end up unlocking a lot ...
Mar 11, 2024•53 min•Season 1Ep. 163
**Check out the new takeaways section at the end of the episode!!** In this episode, Somil and Silas chat with Zecca Lehn, GP of Responsibly Ventures, backing U.S. PreSeed startups in both Social and Sustainable Tech. He uses the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a guidepost for his investments. We breakdown the specifics of his investing thesis including what is “customer love” and what it means to be ethical in investing, Zecca is especially good at using data and data reporting – we ...
Mar 07, 2024•57 min•Season 1Ep. 162
Fast fashion is destroying the world. Imagine if we could make threads that are fully recyclable ... over and over... Well, that's what Oliver Shafaat is trying to do with Sci-Lume Labs. They use agricultural feedstock, and are using low-heat methods so they aim to be able to achieve cost parity. What they are working on is difficult, but would be world changing. Enjoy the episode! 🌱🌎 --- 🌎 Want the full PodLetter? Go to our substack to see the written content that supplements the audio inter...
Mar 05, 2024•42 min•Season 1Ep. 161
