When we spoke with Greenland’s Foreign Minister Pele Broberg on his country’s efforts to secure greater economic and political self-determination from Denmark, he was very excited about a book that had just been released in Denmark that he believed could really change the conversation around Greenland’s relationship with Denmark. Our guest on this episode is Anne Kirstine Hermann, the Danish journalist who wrote that book, Imperiets børn (Children of the Empire), on Denmark’s attempts to absorb ...
Jun 27, 2022•50 min
In the spring of 2021, a controversial rare earth metals mining project proposed in Greenland thrust the island’s “kitchen-table economic issues” to the very center of the geopolitical stage. A snap election was called over whether to mine critical metals at the site, called Kvanefjeld—an election that resulted in a clear “no” vote from the Greenlandic people and ended decades of rule by the dominant Siumut Party. It is fair to say that this was a “No” heard round the world, ushering in a new co...
Jun 27, 2022•47 min
This is Part 3 of a five-part series, Polar Futures, produced by Investable Universe in 2021. When discussing the emerging Arctic economy, the focus is often on extractable natural resources, and how those are protected, exploited, or sustainably harvested. But what might be the ultimate resource—what has elsewhere been called, not without good reason, “the new oil”—is data, the fuel of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Our guest this episode is a pioneering innovator of that powerfu...
Jun 27, 2022•32 min
This is Part 2 Investable Universe's five-part Polar Futures series produced in 2021. The next-phase of the Arctic region’s economic evolution will be data-driven—and that brings new focus, new demands, and new opportunities for investment in the region’s telecommunications infrastructure network. Digital real estate—whether above ground through data centers or cell towers or under the icy surface of the Arctic Ocean—will be key to powering almost every other industry in the region. For perspect...
Jun 27, 2022•38 min
This is a special series produced by Investable Universe in 2021 as Polar Futures. For perspectives on the strategic challenges and opportunities in the new Arctic economy, our guest for Episode 1 was Ambassador Einar Gunnarsson, who served as one of the top Senior Arctic Officials during Iceland’s chairmanship of the Arctic Council from 2019-2021. He previously served as Iceland's Permanent Representative to the United Nations where he chaired the Third Committee of the General Assembly during ...
Jun 27, 2022•54 min
By 2030, there will be over 15 million tons of lithium-ion batteries ready for recycling, containing over $18bn just in the battery element cobalt. But while recycling seems like a no-brainer, current chemical-based battery recycling methods can leave a damaging and corrosive environmental footprint, not unlike extractive industry. It's a problem--but one that this week's guest is ready to solve. She is Megan O’Connor, Co-Founder and CEO of nTh cycle, a Boston-area startup that has developed a m...
Aug 23, 2021•18 min
Recovery from the economic impacts of covid-19 has meant supply chain bottlenecks, worker shortages and rising building costs to major cities around the world. Are these short-term supply hiccups, or longer-term threats to economic health? In this episode, John Robbins, U.S. Managing Director and North America Head of Real Estate at Turner & Townsend, which provides consultancy services to the real estate, infrastructure and natural resource sectors) shares insights from the firm's newly rel...
Aug 11, 2021•54 min
Entrepreneur-investor Will Zell has made a mark in technology, real estate and other sectors. In 2014, he co-founded manufacturing disruptor Nikola Labs, which was a spinout from Ohio State University that scaled with the aid of venture capital, where he remained as CEO from its establishment until the third quarter of 2020. Now having transitioned out of Nikola, Mr. Zell has set his sights on disrupting venture capital itself –his firm, Zell Capital, has created an SEC-registered investment veh...
Jul 30, 2021•47 min
With tens billions of venture capital money being directed at agtech startups in recent years, how different will farming and agriculture look a decade from now? Our guest this episode is Mary Friedrichsen Tangen, Vice President of Agriculture Strategic Initiatives at DTN, the U.S. based firm that provides commodity market analysis, hyper-local weather forecasts, and agronomic insights for guiding planting, growing and harvesting operations. Mary has more than 20 years of experience in SaaS and ...
Jul 01, 2021•31 min
...If you thought (as we did) that space ridesharing (a la SpaceX or BlueOrigin) was the end-all, be-all of the emerging space transportation and infrastructure sector, think again. An even newer market is emerging in the field of small-rocket launches--which offer satellite clients greater discretion over time and location--a subsector of the new space economy whose rise may be accelerated by the adoption of Ford-style assembly line dynamics. An undisputed pioneer in the field, Jim Cantrell, is...
Jun 15, 2021•50 min
Attacks on critical U.S. infrastructure, from small but potentially lethal attacks on municipal water systems to this spring's Colonial Pipeline hack, have increased in frequency and severity. Amid calls for more robust defense of critical infrastructure--and current enthusiasm for infrastructure investment overall--is current technology capable of identifying potential cyberattack liabilities days, weeks or even months before a hacker might exploit them? In this episode, we talked to Tom Miller...
Jun 09, 2021•27 min
California's OHMConnect has a cool take on smart energy: the company's mobile platform, which functions like a "virtual power plant," pays users to curtail electricity use during peak demand periods, incentivizing them through fun flash events held during "OHMHours." With recent initiatives including a California-wide intercity competition to find the state's "Energy Saving Superhero" and a partnership with Google to bring the platform to NEST users, OHMConnect is connecting consumer behavior pa...
Jun 04, 2021•35 min
Last year's covid-related market dislocations made gold shine as the preferred "flight-to-safety" trade. This year, with vaccination rollouts proceeding in many countries and bringing economies closer to a new normal, there's still a solid case for gold (any idea why...?). Our guest this episode is Wade Guenther, Partner at Wilshire Phoenix Funds, who brought over a decade of experience in the exchange-traded fund (ETF) industry from firms like Horizon and Global X, to Wilshire, which recently r...
May 24, 2021•27 min
Solutions to global issues like climate change and energy transition, and the advancement of emerging fields like quantum computing and ethical application of AI are being revolutionized as we speak...by the very young. This episode features Nadeem Nathoo, co-founder of Canada's TKS, or The Knowledge Society, a 10-month accelerator program for students around the world aged 11-17 who want to pursue disruptive innovation and exponential technologies. Beyond just radical homeschooling, TKS is like...
May 13, 2021•58 min
Investable Universe takes a minor detour in this episode: while we've talked about tokenization and digitalization of real assets on several podcasts, this time we're talking about the realization of digital assets. That's one way of conceptualizing NFT's, non-fungible tokens. Is there a future for institutional investment in digital assets, and are NFT's purely a fad or a foretaste of the future of asset digitalization? Futurologist Ben Way is a multi-hyphenate tech entrepreneur and venture inv...
Apr 30, 2021•32 min
Why hasn't the United States embraced the potential of geothermal energy like other countries have? This question vexed Kathy Hannun, former engineer and executive at Google X, the "moonshot" innovation lab at Alphabet. So she founded Dandelion Energy, the home geothermal startup that just received a $30 million Series B venture capital round, led by Bill Gates's Breakthrough Energy Ventures. Kathy Hannun has been recognized as one of FastCompany's Most Creative People in Business and as a Leade...
Apr 19, 2021•39 min
As the global economy transitions to renewable sources, along with new applications in fuel cell batteries, in electric vehicles, and rocket fuel, the hydrogen energy market is expected to top $208 billion in value by 2027 ($130 billion just in the U.S.) with the potential to create 700,000-plus jobs, according to some market estimates. This episode's guest is Raghu Kilambi, CEO and CFO of PowerTap Hydrogen, an emerging company that partners with fueling networks to install hydrogen fueling stat...
Apr 12, 2021•26 min
Are boom times ahead for the global graphite market? An essential component in EV batteries and energy storage, in smart materials and Internet of Things applications, in water treatment in lightweight composite materials used in aerospace, and in biomedical devices, graphite has been deemed so critical to the 21st century supply chain—as a battery metal and so much else--that it has been officially designated a strategic critical mineral by the United States. In this episode, Bharat Parashar, C...
Mar 30, 2021•45 min
A 2020 report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers (cited by MIT Technology Review) found that from 2013-2019, early-stage venture capital funding in green technologies rose from $418 million to $16.1 billion – an increase of more than 3,750% during the period, or 3 times the growth rate of VC investment into artificial intelligence, which has also been identified as a critical emerging industry. Have company valuations risen too far, too fast? And what does it mean for the energy transition and for priv...
Mar 17, 2021•35 min
Sukhi Jutla is co-founder and COO of MarketOrders, which has developed and scaled a highly practical and relevant retail application for blockchain in the precious metals industry, connecting midstream with downstream in the U.K.’s billion-dollar market for gold and diamond jewelry. The company helps independent jewelers to access gold and diamond inputs from global suppliers quickly, efficiently and more cheaply. In 2018 she was named one of the Top 100 European Digital Pioneers by the Financia...
Mar 12, 2021•33 min
We recorded this episode just over a week after a near-collapse of the Texas power grid following an unusual winter storm that was, in many respects, a “perfect storm” of weather, market, energy and infrastructure factors. As Texans continue to recover, five members of ERCOT, the non-profit corporation that operates the Texas power grid, have resigned. But questions remain about the nature of Texas’s energy market structure, about weatherizing the state’s energy infrastructure, and whether this ...
Mar 03, 2021•38 min
Cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance are approaching more mainstream adoption, and presenting new challenges to financial sector integrity as well as national security. On this episode, we talk with Dan Doney, CEO, Co-Founder and Lead Architect of Securrency, a firm that provides coin-agnostic security logistics for cryptocurrency transactions. Doney is a recognized industry expert in artificial intelligence (AI), software architecture, cybersecurity and dynamic pricing. He is also a forme...
Feb 26, 2021•45 min
The future is here...and it's pressurized! American entrepreneur and inventor Matt Villareal leads a pioneering company, Infinite Composites of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which designs, develops and manufactures liner-less composite pressure vessels for high-pressure gas storage used in aerospace, aviation, transportation, and oil and gas. Mr. Villareal holds 6 patents in the field of high pressure and cryogenic gas storage for space exploration and sustainable transportation and has collaborated on multi...
Feb 23, 2021•31 min
In recent years, the number of publicly traded companies has sharply contracted, while startups have tended to stay private for longer. One key reason why venture capital-funded companies have been able to delay their public market debut has been the presence of the secondaries market, where investors can buy and sell holdings in privately held firms. In this episode, we talked to Christian Munafo, Chief Investment Officer of Liberty Street Advisors and manager of the SharesPost 100 Fund, a clos...
Feb 05, 2021•30 min
Creativity doesn't stop after age 30. Gary Griffiths is a former U.S. Navy nuclear submarine intelligence officer and longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur who's launched a new VC fund, Wisdom LLP, that invests in disruptive startups by mature, non-traditional entrepreneurs: and particularly, military veterans--and offers a new twist on the traditional fund model to address LP risk. In this episode, Griffiths talks about his fund's belief that the best management experience is gained through wins...
Jan 29, 2021•37 min
Gold was one of the market winners of 2020 (with one of the lowest drawdowns over the course of the year), aided by a heightened risk environment, low interest rates, and strong price momentum, factors that show no signs of de-materializing anytime soon in 2021--not even with Bitcoin adherents making a counter-appeal as a safe haven asset. We talked to Juan Carlos Artigas, Head of Research at the World Gold Council, which provides timely insights on the gold market including drivers of demand, s...
Jan 26, 2021•45 min
Over the past year(s), farmers have navigated not just the challenges of covid-19, but also a tough environment for trade and tariffs with foreign agriculture trading partners, a contentious U.S. election whose outcome will have effects on farm policy, and the disruptive technological forces that are shaping the future of farming. Brian Philpot in CEO and Principal Owner of AgAmerica Lending, one of the largest non-bank agricultural lenders in the United States. Brian himself is also a value inv...
Jan 22, 2021•27 min
What does the ability to buy, sell and trade houses (or fractions of houses) online say about the way Americans are thinking and acting around housing decisions? While institutional funds have taken significant stakes in U.S. residential portfolios in recent months (especially in the Sun Belt), a broader segment of investors can invest using online platforms like Roofstock. For perspective on the U.S. housing market outlook, online real estate disruptors, and Roofstock's growth trajectory, we ta...
Jan 15, 2021•30 min
Real estate and venture investor Rahim Amidi has a success story straight out of Hollywood...and Palo Alto. One of the founders and principal managers of the Amidi Group of Companies, a privately held business conglomerate based in Los Angeles, since 1980 Mr. Amidi has leveraged his expertise in startups, manufacturing, and international trade across multiple industry verticals, primarily real estate and technology. Today, the Amidi Group owns and manages more than 1 million sq. ft. of real esta...
Jan 12, 2021•32 min
Economic effects of the covid year 2020 have been expressed in a variety of ways in commercial real estate, with sectors like hotels and brick-and-mortar retail struggling, while industrial and last-mile real estate has continued to attract large institutional investors, pushing valuations ever higher. Heading into 2021, perhaps it's time for a more nuanced view from a long-term, value-oriented contrarian investor. Jonathan Needell, President and Chief Investment Officer at California's Kairos I...
Dec 31, 2020•26 min
