This episode is part of our new Capital Series hosted by MCJ partner, Jason Jacobs. This series will explore a diverse range of capital sources and the individuals who drive them. From family offices and institutional LPs to private equity, government funding, and more, we'll take a deep dive into the world of capital and its critical role in driving innovation and progress. Today’s guest is Sarah Hinkfuss , a partner at Bain Capital Ventures . Bain Capital Ventures is a multi-stage VC firm inve...
May 05, 2023•1 hr 13 min
This episode is part of our new Capital Series hosted by MCJ partner, Jason Jacobs. This series will explore a diverse range of capital sources and the individuals who drive them. From family offices and institutional LPs to private equity, government funding, and more, we'll take a deep dive into the world of capital and its critical role in driving innovation and progress. Today’s guest is Lucas Joppa , Chief Sustainability Officer and Senior Managing Director at Haveli Investments . Haveli In...
May 03, 2023•57 min
Today's guests are John Bissell and Rich Riley , co-CEOs at Origin Materials , a carbon-negative materials company that turns carbon found in biomass into chemical outputs. John co-founded Origin Materials as an undergraduate at UC Davis in 2008. Rich became an investor in Origin in 2010, and joined as co-CEO in 2020 after a successful tech career, including most recently as the CEO of the music startup Shazam, which he sold to Apple in 2018. So what kind of opportunity brought a wunderkind chem...
May 01, 2023•46 min
Scott Case is the CEO and Co-Founder at Recurrent , which provides EV battery reports for used EVs, helping consumers and dealers understand the residual health of the battery in a prospective purchase. Think of them as a Carfax report for EVs. New EV sales have boomed since the launch of the Tesla Model 3 in 2018. A year later, roughly 1% of new sales in the US were EVs. And in 2022, that number had increased to over 5%. The used EV market therefore logically will follow a similar trajectory, w...
Apr 27, 2023•49 min
This episode is part of our new Capital Series hosted by MCJ partner, Jason Jacobs. This series will explore a diverse range of capital sources and the individuals who drive them. From family offices and institutional LPs to private equity, government funding, and more, we'll take a deep dive into the world of capital and its critical role in driving innovation and progress. Today’s guest is Mark Robinson , Founder and Managing Director at WAVE Equity Partners , an impact investing firm that see...
Apr 26, 2023•57 min
This episode is part of our Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu . This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure. Today’s guest on Yin Lu’s Skilled Labor Series is Alana Guzzetta , a 15-year veteran of the concrete-making business. Alana started as an intern, worked her way up to being a lab technician, and now...
Apr 24, 2023•44 min
Today's guest is Jeff More , President and CEO of MineSense . MineSense provides real-time, sensor-based ore sorting and data analytics for mines. The company recently announced a $42 million Series E round led by JP Morgan's sustainable Growth Equity Group. MineSense technology platform includes a set of sensors that go into a shovel bucket, and at the moment of extraction, help identify the makeup of ore and rock with each new scoop. This helps mines reduce the amount of low-quality rock sent ...
Apr 20, 2023•42 min
This episode is part of our new Capital Series hosted by MCJ partner, Jason Jacobs. This series will explore a diverse range of capital sources and the individuals who drive them. From family offices and institutional LPs to private equity, government funding, and more, we'll take a deep dive into the world of capital and its critical role in driving innovation and progress. Today’s guest is Grant Mulligan , a Vice President at Alvarium Tiedemann (AlTi). AlTi is a global wealth and asset manager...
Apr 19, 2023•1 hr 7 min
Today's guest is Lucy Piper , Director at WorkForClimate . WorkForClimate is a not-for-profit that provides individual employees with clear step-by-step playbooks to help influence and accelerate a company's decarbonization initiatives. Lucy and Cody discuss how climate change can be an intimidating topic and pushing for change inside your company can be risky. And yet it's clear that if the world's corporations don't change quickly to reduce emissions, the effects will be worse. So how do we qu...
Apr 17, 2023•59 min
Today's guest is Trevor Best , CEO and Co-founder at Syzygy Plasmonics . Syzygy is rethinking how chemicals are produced and pioneering a new technology that energizes chemical reactions via light. Their photocatalyst technology came out of the lab at Rice University. Toward the end of 2022, the company announced a $76 million Series C financing led by Carbon Direct Capital and a number of significant strategies in the energy, oil and gas, and automotive sectors. During the episode, Trevor and C...
Apr 13, 2023•45 min
This episode is part of our new Capital Series hosted by MCJ partner, Jason Jacobs. This series will explore a diverse range of capital sources and the individuals who drive them. From family offices and institutional LPs to private equity, government funding, and more, we'll take a deep dive into the world of capital and the critical role it plays in driving innovation and progress. Today’s guest is Jacqueline van den Ende , founder and CEO of Carbon Equity . Carbon Equity pools capital to prov...
Apr 12, 2023•1 hr
Today's guest is Will Steger , an educator, activist, photographer, and polar explorer. Will is a prominent spokesperson for the preservation and understanding of the Arctic and is the creator of the Will Steger Foundation , which exists to educate and empower people to engage in solutions to climate change. Will was the fourth person ever to have reached both Earth's poles. He led the first confirmed dogsled journey to the North Pole in 1986. In 1989 and 1990, he led the first dogsled traverse ...
Apr 10, 2023•46 min
This episode is part of our Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu . This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure. Today's guest is Dylan Welch , Plant Manager at AMP Robotics . Dylan grew up in the foothills of California and Arizona, before going to school in Colorado. He’s had quite a non-linear career path. ...
Apr 06, 2023•37 min
Today's guest is John Kinney, Founder, CEO and Managing Partner at CleanFund . CleanFund specializes in PACE financing, an innovative way for property owners to finance public good improvements to their buildings, including clean energy, efficiency, and resiliency through their property taxes. CleanFund got its start in Berkeley, California in 2009 and initiated the first privately funded PACE transaction focused on solar power. Since then, PACE financing options have taken hold in dozens of sta...
Apr 03, 2023•42 min
Today's guest on the My Climate Journey Startup Series is Jack Morrison , Co-founder and CEO at Scythe . Scythe recently announced a $42M Series B round of financing led by Energy Impact Partners to grow and scale their product line of autonomous electric commercial lawnmowers. When discussing the need to electrify everything, we tend to focus on electric vehicles and home efficiency. But over the next 5-10 years most of us will be surprised by just how many things in our daily lives will move f...
Mar 30, 2023•38 min
Today's guest is Robert Piconi , CEO and co-founder at Energy Vault , which develops and deploys utility-scale energy storage solutions. The company's offerings include proprietary gravity, battery, and green hydrogen energy storage hardware technologies supported by a technology-agnostic energy management system software layer. They can deliver short- and long-duration energy storage with the goal of helping carbon-free energy be as cost-effective as possible at all times of the day and night. ...
Mar 27, 2023•54 min
Today's guest is Heidi Kujawa , founder and CEO at ByFusion . ByFusion is solving the global plastic waste crisis by turning unrecyclable plastics into building materials. Plastics are lightweight, durable, strong, low-cost, and built to last. Those qualities are fantastic in reducing the cost and weight of shipping and packaging items. And those qualities are equally terrible when it comes to waste. Not to mention, virgin plastics come from fossil fuels and are providing an increasing amount of...
Mar 23, 2023•37 min
Today's guest is Martin Wainstein , Founder and Executive Director of OpenEarth Foundation , a California-based nonprofit that creates and supports the deployment of open-source software at the intergovernmental level to further climate understanding and action. When we think of blockchain, our brains are mostly wired to think of cryptocurrencies and for-profit schemes. OpenEarth Foundation, however, is applying blockchain principles to United Nations-scale carbon accounting efforts to aid in th...
Mar 20, 2023•59 min
Today's guest is Megan O'Connor , CEO and Co-Founder of Nth Cycle . Nth Cycle uses a metals processing technology that allows battery manufacturers to convert lower-grade critical metals into EV-battery grade on-site. The company’s approach obviates large portions of cumbersome and dirty metal supply chains for crucial EV battery metals like nickel. Megan claims that Nth Cycle's technology can be applied to existing batteries just as it can be to newly mined ore, thus accelerating circularity fo...
Mar 16, 2023•49 min
This episode is part of our Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu . This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure. Today is Zach Gallant , Head of Maritime Operations at Fleetzero . Zach grew up in Maine and attended the Maine Maritime Academy after high school. He spent 15 years on board ships of all types and ...
Mar 13, 2023•35 min
Today's guest is Harry Tannenbaum , Co-founder and President at Mill . Mill developed a household bin that not only collects uneaten food but also shrinks and deodorizes it. The company’s solution aims to keep food in the system and prevent it from ending up in landfills or waste systems, which would otherwise generate significant emissions. Mill recently exited stealth and we're proud to be multi-time backers of the company through our MCJ Collective venture funds alongside other leading climat...
Mar 09, 2023•1 hr 9 min
Today's topic is ERCOT ( The Electric Reliability Council of Texas ), and we have two guests. Eric Goff is President at Goff Policy , an infrastructure consulting firm focusing on ERCOT market energy transition issues. Eric serves as the sole representative for residential consumers in the ERCOT stakeholder process. Jaden Crawford is director of policy at David Energy , a modern energy retailer that operates in multiple markets, including Texas. David Energy is also an MCJ Collective portfolio c...
Mar 06, 2023•1 hr
Today, we have two guests, Sonia Kastner, Founder and CEO at Pano , and Bill Clerico , Founder and Managing Partner at Convective Capital . Both Sonia and Bill are keynotes in the emerging category of fire tech and in the subcategory of climate tech that's referred to as adaptation solutions, technologies that can help deliver resiliency in the face of an increasingly unstable planet. At Pano, Sonia is developing technology that creates actionable intelligence for wildfire management. They're de...
Mar 02, 2023•44 min
Today's guests are Ajay Kochhar , President, CEO, and co-founder at Li-Cycle , and Jigar Shah , Director of the Loan Programs Office at the United States Department of Energy . Jigar is a multi-time guest on the show and a friend of the pod, and he reached out to us to see if we'd want to record an episode discussing Li-Cycle's experience in applying for and receiving a conditional commitment from the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office for a loan of approximately $375 million to help Li...
Feb 28, 2023•1 hr
Today's guest is Carlos Araque , co-founder and CEO of Quaise Energy . Quaise is seeking to unlock the power of geothermal energy by drilling into deeper and hotter parts of the earth than ever, using microwave-based technology rather than traditional mechanical drill bits. Carlos has a fascinating background; he grew up in Medellin, Colombia, during the turbulent 1980s and 1990s, matriculated to MIT, and then found himself working in oil and gas for a while before transitioning to geothermal an...
Feb 23, 2023•1 hr 2 min
*This episode is part of our Skilled Labor Series hosted by MCJ partner, Yin Lu . This series is focused on amplifying the voices of folks from the skilled labor workforce, including electricians, farmers, ranchers, HVAC installers, and others who are on the front lines of rewiring our infrastructure. Today's guest is James Sedlak , who leads Operations and Community Engagement at Kodama Systems , a startup developing automated ways of thinning overcrowded forests and utilizing low-value biomass...
Feb 21, 2023•42 min
Our guests today are, Diego Saez-Gil of Pachama and Sam Gill of Sylvera , and we're talking about forestry carbon offsets. Forestry carbon offsets were designed as a financial tool to provide an economic incentive for landowners to make alternative decisions, to pay landowners to keep their forests intact in the case of deforestation avoidance credits or to reforest previously damaged land in the case of reforestation credits. The money for this economic incentive comes from large actors who can...
Feb 20, 2023•48 min
Today's guest is Oliver Gunasekara , co-founder and CEO at Impossible Metals . If we're to electrify everything, we need an order of magnitude more batteries and wiring. All of this requires metals including nickel, cobalt, lithium, manganese, and copper. More metals mean… you guessed it, more mining. Today's land-based mining practices are fraught with externalities that vary by material, but often include deforestation and land degradation, incredible amounts of water use, pollution via mine t...
Feb 16, 2023•52 min
Today's guest is Alex Blumberg , who is most recently the co-host of the climate change-focused podcast, How to Save a Planet . Alex was co-founder and CEO of Gimlet Media, which was acquired by Spotify in 2019. Alex has a history of unpacking incredibly complex systemic issues and making them digestible for mass audiences. Prior to Gimlet, he was co-host of the podcast Planet Money, which had its origins in unpacking the intricacies of the financial crisis of 2008 and the role of the housing ma...
Feb 13, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Today's guest is Peter Reinhardt , co-founder and CEO of Charm Industrial . This conversation was recorded as a live session during Climate Career Week , a series of talks, local meetups, and office hours designed to help people make the transition into climate-oriented work. Climate Career Week was organized by Climate Draft , Terra.do , Work on Climate , and MCJ Collective. Given the nature of the audience, today's conversation focuses heavily on Peter's own journey into founding one of the mo...
Feb 09, 2023•52 min
