Dr. Steve Davis is the head of Climate Science at Watershed . Watershed is a leading provider of carbon accounting software. They help large companies such as Walmart, Airbnb, Sweet Green, BlackRock, and many others measure, report, and reduce their emissions. They announced a $70 million series B financing on a $1 billion valuation co-led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins in February 2022. And Steve joined Watershed shortly after that in July 2022. Steve spent the last decade as a professor in the...
Jul 13, 2023•43 min
This episode is part of our Capital Series hosted by Jason Jacobs. This series explores 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 take a deep dive into the world of capital and its critical role in driving innovation and progress. Sebastian Heitmann is a partner at Extantia Capital . Extantia Capital is a platform to invest in breakthrough technology solutions that address t...
Jul 12, 2023•50 min
Dr. Scott Moore is the director of China Programs at the University of Pennsylvania , and the author of the book, China's Next Act: How Sustainability and Technology are Reshaping China's Rise and the World's Future . China is a complicated climate topic: on the one hand, China is the largest solar energy producer in the world and has the largest EV industry in the world, each of which rose from being nearly non-existent 15 years ago. On the other hand, China generates more than 60% of its elect...
Jul 10, 2023•50 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. Mark Martin is the regional director for advanced manufacturing for the Bay Area Community Colleges. He works with community college manufacturing programs to help build upon and develop innovative ...
Jul 06, 2023•37 min
This episode is part of our new Capital Series hosted by Jason Jacobs. This series explores 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 take a deep dive into the world of capital and its critical role in driving innovation and progress. Rob Day is Partner and Co-founder at Spring Lane Capital . Spring Lane Capital provides hybrid project capital with equity for small-scale sys...
Jul 05, 2023•58 min
Sara Harari is the Associate Director of Innovation and Strategic Advisor to the president at Connecticut Green Bank . Connecticut Green Bank was established in 2011 and was the first Green Bank in the USA, of which there are now dozens that are live or in formulation. They look to accelerate the green economy by using public dollars to catalyze private investment into clean energy and other environmentally positive solutions. CT Green Bank started with a focus on residential solar deployment, a...
Jul 03, 2023•50 min
Anastasia Volkova is the CEO and Co-founder of Regrow , which was named Fast Company 's number one most innovative company in agriculture in 2023 . They empower the world's largest brands such as Kellogg's, Cargill and General Mills to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across their supply chains. Their product began as a data and analytics offering to agronomists and farmers to help build a localized growing roadmap, identifying what crops to plant, what fertilizer and other inputs to use, how muc...
Jun 29, 2023•52 min
This episode is part of our new Capital Series hosted by Jason Jacobs. This series explores 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 take a deep dive into the world of capital and its critical role in driving innovation and progress. Temple Fennell is the Co-founder and Managing Partner at Clean Energy Ventures , an early-stage venture firm that funds disruptive capital-lig...
Jun 28, 2023•58 min
Michael Liebreich is the host of the podcast Cleaning Up , focused on leadership in the age of climate change. Michael was previously the CEO and founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. He has been involved with the organization for 20 years, still serving as a senior contributor. Michael also runs an advisory firm, Liebreich and Associates , focused on clean energy and sustainable development, and he's an advisor to the UK Board of Trade. All of this is just scratching the surface of Michael's...
Jun 26, 2023•1 hr 6 min
John O'Donnell is the Co-founder and CEO of Rondo Energy . Rondo is tackling the massive emissions problem of industrial heat. Almost everything around us requires heat to be made, from chemicals, to paper, to cement, to steel, and historically, nearly all of that heat comes from burning fossil fuels. Renewable energy is now becoming cheaper to procure than fossil fuels, but as we know, it's intermittent, and a factory needs access to heat for its processes when it needs it. So how do we harness...
Jun 22, 2023•1 hr 2 min
This episode is part of our new Capital Series hosted by Jason Jacobs. This series explores 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 take a deep dive into the world of capital and its critical role in driving innovation and progress. Melissa Cheong is the managing partner of Blackhorn Ventures . Blackhorn Ventures funds companies that are using technology to create unpreced...
Jun 21, 2023•43 min
Narendra Taneja serves as chairman of the Independent Energy Policy Institute, a think tank based in New Delhi, and is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. He presides over the World Energy Policy Summit and was president of the World Oil and Gas Assembly from 2001 to 2011. With expertise in energy policy, transition, geopolitics, governance, and energy security, Taneja is recognized as a powerful voice on energy and climate, especially in the context of th...
Jun 19, 2023•1 hr 7 min
Kate Henningsen is Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at Arcadia . Arcadia is a tech company empowering energy innovators and consumers to fight the climate crisis. Arcadia started as a way for consumers to gain access to premium renewable energy credits for their home energy consumption. They now claim to be the leading manager of community solar projects in the United States. They've expanded on that with the launch of the ARC platform in late 2021 and the acquisition of Urjanet in the spr...
Jun 15, 2023•52 min
This episode is part of our new Capital Series hosted by Jason Jacobs. This series explores 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 take a deep dive into the world of capital and its critical role in driving innovation and progress. Sandy Guitar is the managing director of HX Venture Fund . HX Venture Fund is a fund investing in venture capital funds and they are seeking t...
Jun 14, 2023•1 hr 8 min
This episode is part of our new 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. Brandon Smith is a wildland firefighter and the co-founder and CEO of the Forestry and Fire Recruitment Program . Brandon graduated with a Bachelor's from UC Berkeley in Interdisciplinary Studie...
Jun 12, 2023•34 min
Dr. Julie Pullen is founding partner and chief scientist at Propeller , an early-stage venture fund focused on the intersection of the oceans and climate change. It recently announced that it had raised $100 million for its first fund. Coincidently, today (June 8) is also World Oceans Day, globally recognized by the UN as a day to foster public interest in the protection of the ocean and the sustainable management of its resources. Today's conversation is about the ocean, its critical role in re...
Jun 08, 2023•51 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. Rick Zullo is co-founder and general partner at Equal Ventures , a firm that is purpose-built to deploy technology across ...
Jun 07, 2023•57 min
Jessica Morse is the Deputy Secretary for Forest and Wildland Resilience at the California Natural Resources Agency . Our topic in this episode is wildfires, in particular, megafires . Jessica leads California's statewide response to wildfire resiliency. Since 2019, she has secured billions of dollars for wildfire resilience programs, such as community home hardening, forest fuel management (including healthy thinning and fuel break establishment), and watershed health initiatives. Jessica coord...
Jun 05, 2023•1 hr 6 min
McGee Young is the founder and CEO of WattCarbon . WattCarbon knows the hour-by-hour carbon intensity of the grid for every building in the USA, and it helps identify the real-time carbon savings of distributed energy resources, such as heat pumps, rooftop solar, and storage in commercial buildings. This empowers project developers to sell these carbon savings as building decarbonization credits to companies and organizations with net-zero commitments, helping to accelerate the adoption of these...
Jun 01, 2023•52 min
This episode is part of our new Capital Series hosted by Jason Jacobs. This series explores 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 take a deep dive into the world of capital and its critical role in driving innovation and progress. Amy Francetic is Managing General Partner and co-founder of Buoyant Ventures . Buoyant Ventures partners with early stage companies that can r...
May 31, 2023•1 hr 4 min
Michael Thomas is making a name for himself in independent investigative climate journalism. One of his earliest pieces saw him immerse himself in dozens of Facebook groups, organized around opposing local clean energy legislation. He used that exploration to pen a series on climate misinformation, which can be found on his newsletter at distilled.earth , and has recently started creating content on YouTube . He also created Carbon Switch, a Wirecutter-like guide to help people navigate home ele...
May 29, 2023•1 hr 12 min
Brad Hartwig is CEO and founder of Arbor , and today’s topic is BiCRS. No, not the people in black leather jackets cruising down the highway, but rather the acronym for the process of biomass carbon removal and storage, BiCRS. Arbor is developing a process that transforms organic waste from forest thinning to prevent wildfires. The company’s process converts the carbon in the waste into stored CO2, while also producing clean energy and freshwater as byproducts. Specifically, Arbor's process runs...
May 25, 2023•58 min
This episode is part of our new Capital Series hosted by Jason Jacobs. This series explores 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 take a deep dive into the world of capital and its critical role in driving innovation and progress. Hampus Jakobsson is General Partner at Pale Blue Dot , a seed-stage venture capital firm that backs the most exciting climate tech startups ac...
May 24, 2023•1 hr 28 min
Lori Lodes is the executive director of Climate Power , a strategic communications operation focused on building the political will and public support for bold climate action. It was founded going into the 2020 US presidential election and played a key role in establishing climate as core messaging pull through for the Biden campaign and Build Back Better agenda. Before stewarding Climate Power, Lori spent a handful of years in corporate communications at Apple. She was deputy director of commun...
May 22, 2023•47 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. Nathanael Johnson has spent the past 18 years as an award-winning journalist who has written features for Harper's Magazine, New York Magazine, Wall Street Journal, and produced stories for the like...
May 18, 2023•45 min
This episode is part of our new Capital Series hosted by MCJ partner, Jason Jacobs. This series explores 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 take a deep dive into the world of capital and its critical role in driving innovation and progress. Mohammad Barkeshli is the Vice President of Full Consequence Investing at Hall Capital Partners. Hall Capital Partners has a sing...
May 17, 2023•1 hr 11 min
Katrina Erwin and Glennys Navarrete are program managers at the CLEO Institute and co-hosts of the House on Fire Podcast . The CLEO Institute is a 501C3 nonprofit and nonpartisan organization, exclusively dedicated to climate education and advocacy. Founded in 2010, CLEO, which stands for Climate Leadership Engagement Opportunities, works with communities across Florida to build climate literacy and mobilize climate action. Katrina focuses on helping youth activists leverage their power most eff...
May 15, 2023•49 min
Henrik Langeland is the Co-founder and CEO at Enode . Enode is building digital infrastructure to enable a coordinated, smart, and flexible energy system. In particular, Enode's software API connects over 400 smart devices like EVs, solar panels, and thermostats, so that they can work together to help a home run as efficiently as possible, both within itself and as a node in a larger energy system. The idea of energy demand response relies on the ability of each node in an energy system to be as...
May 12, 2023•36 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. Will Tickle is a partner, senior investment advisor, and director of impact investing for Ballentine Partners . Ballentine...
May 10, 2023•41 min
Dr. Jay Taneja is an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and the director of the STIMA Lab (Systems Towards Infrastructure Measurement and Analytics) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Taneja is a world-class expert on the clean energy economy of Kenya, which is our topic for today's discussion. Kenya's story is fascinating from a clean energy and climate change perspective. The country has made remarkable progress in expanding electricity access, with renewab...
May 08, 2023•45 min
