John Doerr on Sustainable Investments (Podcast)

book out that's really quite interesting. We talk about everything from crypto to Tesla UH to beyond Meat, to all of the opportunities that exist in order to help moderate and reduce carbon in the atmosphere, and the potential climate crisis that awaits us if we don't change our ways. So Dora is a venture capitalist. He invests money in order to generated return. These aren't just finger wagging b

green for green sake. He describes their venture fund, which they put nearly a billion dollars into it ten years ago and now it's worth over three billion UH. That's how successful the returns have been. He describes the climate crisis as a multi trillion dollar opportunity. Yes, we need to do something in order to make sure we leave our children and grandchildren a habitable earth. At the same time, there is a massive opportunity in everything from food to

electrical grid to transportation, on and on and on. It really is quite fascinating. Somebody like him sees the world from both perspectives. From the hey, we want to make sure we have a habitable place to live, but he can't take off his VC hat, and he sees just massive opportunities to do well by doing good. Uh. Really a fascinating conversation with no further ado. My interview with Clara Perkins John Dor. This is Mesters in Business with

Very Results on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is John Dor. He is the fame venture capitalist known for his work at Klina Perkins, Coalfield and Buyers. The venture capital firm operates thirty two funds. They've made more than six seventy five investments, including such early stage fundings for companies like Google, Twitter, Amazon, and too many others to list. Door still holds a substantial steak in his initial investment in Google. His most recent book is

Speed and Scale, An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis. Now, John Door, Welcome to Bloomberg. It's a thrilled to be here with you. Very thank you, and I'm thrilled to talk to you. Let's let's go back to the early parts of your career. Before we start to uh get get current, you originally joined into else because you couldn't land a gig as a venture capitalist. To tell us a little bit about that. So I came to Silicon Valley with no job, no place to live in incidentally,

no girlfriend. The lady I had been dating decided I was too persistent and dumped me. So I, Uh, my real goal was to win my way back into her heart and to join with some friends to start a company. I wanted to start a company, and I heard the venture capital had something to do with that. So I cold called all the venture capitalists and some of them returned my call in the mid seventies, and uh, they looked at my experience and uniformly concluded that I should

go get a real job. That was their advice. I remember Dick Cramley said, we just backed small new chip company called Intel. Why don't you of view for a job there? And I did, and uh lo and behold, unbeknownst to me, my former girlfriend in Holland now and

Holland Door had gotten a job at Intel. I got a job there, and when I arrived at first summer day, uh, I was surprised to see her there, and she was not happy to see me, so uh it took the rest of the summer to put our relationship back together again. But I loved Intel. It was a dynamic place. They just invented the microprocessor, and I seriously considered abandoning my graduate education in business as it turns out, to just

stay at Intel. But I returned there after graduating and worked for I guess four or five years helping democratized computing as to get microprocessors used in everything from traffic lights to defibrillators to nuclear residents, magnetic imaging systems. And uh, it was all because I've wanted to be part of new, rapidly growing companies. How did you work you away from Intel to venture investing? How would you find your way

to client a Perkins? Well? I got a phone call one day from a friend who said, Hey, John, I just finished interviewing uh for a job at a ventry capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Caufield and Buyers. It sounded to me like a law firm. I really didn't know them, but he said you should go interview there because what they want to add to their team is someone a younger, younger professional with a strong technical background, a good network

in Silicon Valley, and a passion for startups. I think you and they would make a great fit, so I didn't. They ran an ad actually in the Wall Street Journal for this position, which I didn't see, but I called up, I interviewed, and and got a job. There is an entry level professional, a gopher. I did everything, carried people's bags,

I read business plans. Uh. But there was one important condition that I had, and that is I made them promise that they would back me with my friends in starting a company if I went to work there, because honestly, I wasn't interested in venture capital, wanted to be an early eighties entrepreneur, and they had. They agreed to that and pointed out that they had backed other young partners

at Kleiner in writing business plans. Bob Swanson had written the business plan for Genentech that led to the whole biotech industry, and Jimmy Travig had done the same thing with Tandem computers. My current partner, Brooke Buyers, as a young partner at Kleiner, wrote the business plan for for hybrid Tech. So Eugene Kleiner and Tom Perkins were unusual, and I'd even say mythic or epic figures, and that

they had technical backgrounds. They had started their own companies and they felt that was part of what their venture capital firm ought to do. So here's the key question, how come you never left Kleiner Perkins. Why didn't you launch your own start up? Well, I did. They backed me in doing it. The first was one called Silicon Compilers.

I became the full time CEO founder of that with Caltech professor Carver meat H. Then as I've worked with companies like Compact and Sun Microsystems that were growing really rapidly, I realized I was not at all qualified to advise these entrepreneurs. So I took another month leave of absence from Kleiner to run the desktop division of Sun, and

almost left Kleiner permanently to do that. But and I wanted to start a family, and she said, you know, you're doing this some thing and keeping involved in Kleiner. It's just not going to work. We have to make some choices here, and so I left my operating role at its son, but never gave up an interest in starting new companies and did that again at a later time with a company called at Home. You may remember that they standardized and commercialized the cable modem to access

the Internet. Before the at home venture, access to the Internet was really very slow, and cable modems swept the United States, and our company was key in making that happen. So so I like this quote from you. If you can invent the future, the next best thing is to fund it, And so I guess that helps to explain your move from sun Over back to Klina Perkins exactly. You know, it was Alan Kay, the chief scientists at Apple, who said the best way to predict the future is

to invent it. And well, I've made some inventions, their modest My my better fortune has been to find amazing entrepreneurs, identify them, and then help fund and accelerate their success. Quite interesting, Amazon, Netscape, applied material Citrix into a genentech e a sports compact, Slack, Uber, Square, Spotify, robin Hood. That is just an amazing, amazing list of startups that you guys were fairly early investors in. Any of them

stand out as as uniquely memorable to you? Well to two of the standouts have got to be Amazon and Google. Now alphabet because what are they there there two of the four or five most valuable companies in the world, and I think both of them have profoundly changed the way that we live, communicate, educate, and form conduct commerce

see the world. They both what they both have in common is exceptional founders and really strong management teams who have a sense of urgency and a focus on either large new markets or large existing markets that deserved and have benefited from disruption. So I remember when I was first offered a position at Kleiner Perkins. I told them that I thought it was kind of unfair that they would pay me to do the job that I would pay them for the privilege of working with these amazing

entrepreneurs and founders. So when you're thinking about putting money into Amazon in the mid nineties or Google in the late nineties, at any point in that process, are you thinking, oh, sure, these can become two trillion dollar companies soon. Well, I had no really good idea how big they could be, so um I put the question to Jeff Bezos and his response was, well, John, I don't know, but we're

going to get big fast. At the time, I kicked up something of a firestorm by proclaiming that the Internet had been under hyped. It might be the largest legal creation of wealth in our our lifetimes. But I was more clear and explicit with Larry Page when I met with him and Sergey, and I asked Larry how big Google would get. I'll never forget this, Verry, he responded to me without missing a beat, ten billion. I said, Just to test myself, I said, surely you mean market capitalization,

don't you. He said, no, John, I mean revenues. We're just beginning in the field of search, and you cannot imagine how much better it's going to get over time. And sure enough he was. He was more than right to say the very least. So so let's talk a bit about Google. You're known for introducing to both Larry and Serge your concept of okay RS, objectives and key results. What was the impact of that on Google? How did they respond to to your suggestion on come up with

objectives and come up with ways to measure your progress. So, for everyone in your audience, objectives and key Results or okay RS is a goal setting system that Andy Grove invented an Intel And that's because in the semiconductor industry, I'm a refugee from the semiconductor industry. You've got to get tens of thousands of people to get lines that are a millionth of a meter one micron wide exactly right, or nothing works, the chips fail. So you need exceptional discipline,

attention to detail, focus and execution. And so Andy came up with this system. I was so enamored of it when I left Intel. I took it everywhere I went from not nonprofits to startups to large companies. Uh, the Gates Foundation in the early days, for example, how they they were. They were very large nonprofit startup, an important

one of the planet. So I took Andy Groves system to Larry and Sergey, the founders of Google in the very early days, and I went through it with them and at the end of it asked them, so, guys, what do you think would you use this in in growing Google? And Larry it was, had no comment whatsoever. But Sergey, who was more rebulliant. I'd like to tell you, Barry that he said, we love this, We're going to

adopt it poleheartedly. Well, the truth of the matter is what he said was, we don't have any better way to manage this Google company, so we'll give it a try, which I took as a ringing endorsement because what's happened since then to this day, every Googler every quarter writes down her objectives and key results and publishes them for the entire company to see. And interestingly, they've never leaked. So there's a hundred and forty Googlers who are doing

this four times a year. They're graded, but at the end of each quarter they're swept aside because they're not used for bonuses or promotions. They serve a higher purpose, and that's a collective social contract to get everybody focused and aligned and and committed and tracking their progress to stretch for almost impossible to achieve goals. And I'm telling you this story because the same system that Andy Grove invented has now spread pretty broadly through the technology and

other sectors of the economy. And it's at the heart of this plan that we have called speed and Scale to deal with the climate crisis. Quite quite interesting. I'm I'm going to stick with some of the early investments that you made and and ask a really broad general question, how likely is it that a company you made an early stage investment in ends up looking like the company

you thought you were vesting in. Meaning how often do companies iterate or pivot into something totally different from what you thought you were getting involved with. Well, I was gonna say not often if it's totally different, But if

it's meaningfully different, that happens all the time. And that's why in the venture capital work that we do, it's so important to back to find fund and and build a relationship with the right people because the people in the quality of the team is going to affect how they pivot, how they adapt their their business plan to changing markets, changing technologies, changing opportunity. Very interesting. So you

mentioned Amazon and Google as just uniquely memorable startups. What about some memorable ones that you thought would work out that didn't or I know vcs love to talk about, Look how silly we are. We had an opportunity to invest in X and we passed and now excess fabulously successful. What stands out in that space, Well, the standout in that space is the bad decision we made to invest

in Fisker instead of in Tesla. And at at the time they had similar strategies, which was to enter the electric vehicle market with high end luxury, pretty expensive car and then to drive the costs of that vehicle down over time. Both companies were struggling to raise money. One of them had experienced the executive from the automobile industry, fundamentally a designer by the name of Henrik Fisker, as its founder and CEO. The other had Evon Musk, who

had no automo industry experience. But I was determined to reinvent every part of the automotive car, viewing it more as a machine to run software than a collection of of subsystems procured from the automobile industry. We made the wrong call, and the rest is history. That that Fisker, that first Fisker car, was just a gorgeous design, and at the time, Tesla was taking old Lotus convertibles and

filling them with laptop batteries. Between the two, it's pretty easy to see how the Fisker Um opportunity really looked more intriguing than Tesla did way back when. How typical is that for the world of venture It happens all the time, all the time. That's what makes the job of finding funding and accelerating the success of entrepreneurs hard, to say the very least. So there was just a new report that came out and said renewable energy in

the US has quadrupled over the past decade. So we're all good, right, there's nothing else to worry about with the climate. Oh I wish that was true. No. I came to this book, this project, this passion back in two thousand and six, when Al Gore's movie You Remember an Inconvenient Truth Shore and I took my family and friends to see it, and we came back for a dinner conversation, and uh, I went around the table to

see what people thought. When it came turned for my sixteen year old daughter Mary door, she said, I'm scared and I'm angry. He said, Dad, your generation created this problem. You better fix it, and very I was speechless. I had no idea what So I set out with partners of my Kleiner Perkins to understand the extent of the climate crisis, even hired Al Gore as a partner, and over time, over three funds invested a third up to a half of the funds total about a billion dollars

in some seventy climate ventures, most of which failed. And in fact, it's hard, it's very hard to grow a climate tech or green tech venture. It's pretty lonely in the early days of doing that, and we almost lost all of our investments. But we stood by these entrepreneurs and they produced companies like Beyond Meat or nd Phase or the Nest smart thermostats, and today are are worth some three billion dollars. But that was then. This is now.

I think what's important about now is we need way greater ambition and speed two avert catastrophic irreversible climate crisis. I mean, the evidence is all around us. We've we've got devastating hurricanes and floods and wildfires and and uh ten million climate refugees. H The I p c C says that if we don't reduce our carbon emissions by by fifty we will see global warming overshoot by more

than two degrees celsius nearly four degrees fahrenheit. And the Paris Accords, which were agreed to in twenty if we were achieving them, would still cause us to land head around two degrees celsius. The bad news is we're not close to achieving any of those schools. So the latest report from the u N said this is a code read problem. And and I also see all problems as opportunities.

Very I think this, this is going to be the greatest opportunity, human opportunity, social opportunity, economic opportunity of the century. So let's talk a little bit about that opportunity. You're talking the book about cutting emissions in half by and net zero by, and you reference six main areas of attack transportation, the electrical grid, food, protecting nature, cleaning up industry,

and then removing carbon from the atmosphere. Let's let's talk a little bit about each of those, because they're all quite fascinating. We were talking about Tesla. How quickly do we think that we're going to be passed internal combustion engines with a fully electrified transportation network. Well, that's a great question, and we can. I want to put this in context. Every year we dumped fifty nine gigatons of carbon greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere as if it's

some kind of free and open sewer. And so the book and the research behind it has built a plan in electrifying transportation and the other five for which each of the objectives has three to five key results. These are HANDI Grove Intel style, very measurable, specific steps in transportation. It says that electric vehicles will achieve parity price, performance

parity with combustion engines. In the US, it says one of two new personal vehicles purchased worldwide are electric vehicles by So, what I'm trying to say is this is a global plan. We've seen some nations of the world, some states like California, say they're going to ban the sale of internal combustion vehicles. And there's also key results for buses, for trucks, for miles driven, for airplanes in maritime.

And this whole plan is available for free. You can download it at the website speed and scale dot com. So it's it's pragmatic, it's ambitious, it's almost unachievable. It's a total of fifty key results for the world numeric time bound, and we've got to get after them all at once. We can't take turns. We're not going to achieve all of these very It's uh. But if we fall short on one, we can make ground faster in others. Now, I don't want to intimidate people by how big, how tall?

In order this is The book also includes thirty five stories from entrepreneurs and policymakers and leaders, innovators, leaders of indigenous tribes that describing their own words, their struggle, their successes, their their journey. H two two Change the World. One of my favorites is of across country team who got together to position to petition their their school district to go to cleaner buses. They were sick entirely running behind

diesel buses with polluted air. And it shows that something that I deeply believe, and that is we're fast running out of time. And and so yes, we need individuals to take individual action to eat less meat, use photovoltake solar, and buy an electric vehicle if you can afford it.

But I've really written this book for the leader inside of everyone, their inner leader, and that's their ability to influence others to act as a group, like this cross country team of runners in Maryland who uh got their schools are strict to adopt electric buses. But the book shows is that we can get this job done. But as I said, we're faster running out of time. So let's let's talk a little bit about that. By the way.

By the way, the bus discussions in the book are quite fascinating, not just because China leapt out to a big lead and have been very aggressively replacing diesel buses with electric buses. But you helped fund an entrepreneur in the US that's gone around and has done a great job getting cities to purchase electric buses. The transportation grid is clearly an issue, but as you point out, that's only six gigatons. A bigger issue is the grid, the

electric grid, which produces twenty one gigatons of emissions. Tell us about what we need to do to decarbonize the electrical grid. You're you're right. If we move to electric vehicles but we still use coal to generate electricity, we won't have reduced emissions. And the biggest opportunity is to decarbonize the grid and and and that's to take today's twenty four gigatons of emissions mostly from coal also natural gas to generate electricity, take that twenty four down to

three giga tons. So the first key result, the biggest of them, is to get our electricity from zero emission sources globally by and get it down to get an get that would save us sixteen and a half gigatons. Simply put, we need to move to renewable sources like wind and solar and invest in longer term, durable storage so that we have reliable energy when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining. So so let's talk

about that battery technology a little bit. We've seen a series of incremental improvements over time, but nothing has been like an order of magnitude improvement. Will we be able to get there soon enough? Do we need a Manhattan Project for batteries or are all those incremental improvements compounding and we'll get there eventually. Much much of the improvement that is needed in all these technologies is lowering their costs, and so of batteries today are still too expensive for

electric vehicles in India and in China. They're barely affordable in the US marketplace. And so the book tells the story of quantum escape. I'll disclose the public companies that I've invested in and serve on the board of. And an entrepreneur by the name of jag Deep Singh, and he is going for a quantum improvement in batteries to more than double their energy density. The energy density of a battery is how much energy you'll get out of

it for a pound of weight of a battery. And it's especially important in electric vehicles because the most expensive part of the vehicle is the battery, and it's the heaviest part, and you've got to use energy to move the weight around. So if you double the energy density of a battery, you can get a three or four times systems improvement in the vehicle itself. I'm I'm not expecting. I don't think anyone is forecasting in order of magnitude improvement.

And we've seen considerable lowering costs of batteries over time, but the quantum scape innovation, which is an all solid state battery, would be a genuine breakthrough. Let's let's talk a little bit about food, another key source of emissions. How can we become more efficient in growing the food, affecting the menu of what we eat, and reducing enough food waste to make a difference. But there's there's three

big things to do about food. The first is to reduce the meat and dairy in our diets, and I'm not saying cut them out entirely, but to replace some of that with delicious, healthy, plant based proteins. And the book tells the story of Beyond Me and the crusade of its founder his struggles. He mortgaged his house two lead the revolution in plant based protein. It turns out that there's a billion cows on the planet, and the

book tells you their story as well. If they were in nation, it would be the third largest country in terms of the emissions. The second big thing to do about food is to reduce food waste. Globally, of the food that we produce is wasted, and taking some straightforward measures, we think that can be reduced. Our goal is to reduce it to ten of the food that we produce, particularly when you consider the population will grow to ten

billion by the end of the century. Finally, we've got to get more efficient with how we grow food, and we can, for example, apply fertilizer much more are precisely with new technologies. All in all, the food sector is a way for us to reduce nine giga tons of emissions to two gigatons by or a net gain of seven out of the fifty nine gigatons that we've got to drive to zero. So we we spend a lot of time talking about beef and agriculture generally, but let's

talk about commercial fishing. What's the impact of our fishing practices on the health of the oceans and its ability to absorb carbon and reflect heat well. Over fishing, together with over drilling and over development, have released huge amounts of carbon from the ocean floor and life. And if we prevented the destruction of mangroves and other ocean life, we could prevent a gigat ton of emissions from entering the atmosphere every year. Our plan calls to eliminate deep

sea bottom trawling, which is an especially destructive practice. Bottom tralling releases one and a half giga tons of c O two equivalent emissions. It also calls for increasing the protection of oceans toy and I want to call out this is an area of climate ambition that Walmart is

staking out an important and powerful leadership position. Not only have they said they're going to have their supply chain to be carbon neutral by but they are going to preserve protect millions of acres of land and ocean water in the effort to become the first scale regenerative company. Really really interesting. So very often the average person listening to a conversation like this things, well, what can I do.

I'm just one person. What's the balance of responsibility between individuals on one side and government and institutions on the other. But what we need all the forces in our economy, in our society to come together and work on this. We need innovators, we need entrepreneurs, we need policymakers, we need investors. We need to hear more from impassioned youth. You know, in Gretta Thunberg was a single high school

student skipping school on Fridays. A year later, in in December, she'd organized a million person march in a hundred cities around the world, and specifically, she made the climate crisis a top two voting issue in the nations in Europe. Very it is not a top voting issue in the US. It's not a top issue in China or even in India. So we have work to do, and that's one of our accelerants the ways we get all this done faster, and that's the turn movements into specific actions. We really

need individuals to lead others in powerful ways. That's for example, employees pushing your employers to make net zero commitments, or shareholders and investors demanding changes in the boardroom it turns out that changing the light bulbs and eating less meat is important. But we've got to go further. We've got to change our laws or even our lawmakers in order

to avert this climate crisis. Quite quite fascinating. I want to talk about some of the things you've said in the book that apply everywhere, but are especially applicable to the climate crisis. Let's start with quote, it seems every dozen years we witness magical for exponentially larger waves of innovation. So so let's start first with climate. How and where are those waves of innovation coming that will help ameliorate

the climate crisis. Well, the innovations are happening on many fronts, materials, sciences, electro chemistry, biology. There the opportunity that the climate transition to a clean energy economy represents is the largest of our lifetimes. It's a bigger mobilization than even the effort of the Allies to defeat the Nazi axis in World War Two. You'll remember then we shut down for four years all manufacturing of automobiles and appliances and instead created

two sixty thousand fighter aircraft twenty battleships. It was it was a monumental effort dealing with an existential threat, and that same level of innovation and ambition is required to win in this climate campaign other areas of breakthroughs or innovations. I'm even becoming a believer that will see nuclear fusion that's the kind of clean energy that comes from the sun, practical within a decade. Concrete and steal that's carbon free,

long duration storage. The opportunities to reimagine and reinvent how we create, share, transmit, and use energy in every facet of our lives is as big an opportunity as we'll see in our lifetimes. So let's stay focused on that opportunity for a minute. This isn't a charity or or a foundation that's doing this for free, when when we look around there are actual venture investments that you've been

making successfully. All right, So you passed on Tesla, but somebody put money into Tesla, wind turbines, Solar Beyond Meat is now public company. You were an early investor into that. You're looking at this as more than just hey, we have to do this in order to make sure that we don't have runaway greenhouse effect and earth turns into venus and becomes uninhabitable. But there are also very legitimate

economic opportunities here also expound on those a little bit. Well, UH, there's no better example than Tesla, which has gone from a struggling company reliant on loans, thank you United States taxpayers, UH, to the seventh most valuable company in the world, and by some measures, Elon Musk is the most. This is the richest individual in the world. He took on huge risks and he delivered for his customers, at shareholders, his country,

and his planet. And the best of the work that Ellen has done is inspired, perhaps through fear, but certainly by example the rest of the automobile industry to accelerate their shift to clean and electric vehicles. So this is UH, I like to say, the mother of all markets. It's a monster market. Batteries alone, the batteries to move from internal conduct bustion vehicles to electric vehicles are estimated to

be four hundred billion dollars per year. Barry, for twenty years, we were going to we must recreate all the infrastructure that we use to power our planet. Let's talk about something we haven't gotten to when we were talking about those larger waves of innovation. Lots of folks are excited about blockchain and crypto and web three point oh, but when we look at things like bitcoin, it's a big energy hog. How do we reconcile all the wealth that's

being created there with it's massive electricity consumption. It's electricity consumption is not sustainable. And so we're going to have to move to clean bitcoin, green bitcoin. Uh and and we'll get there by regulation, if not by other market forces, I would predict today. I believe that bitcoin uses as much energy as the entire nation of Sweden. So Bitcoin, I believe is here to stay, but it it's we

can't peel it through dirty electricity. You mentioned concrete earlier, um and I also read the book that you want to um end single use plastics. What does the world's material science prom sus for replacing things in those spaces? How do you replace concrete? How do you replace single use plastic? Concrete is probably the hardest problem of all because in the production of the concrete you almost must create carbon emissions. Uh. We can reduce the energy used

to make concrete. There are some concrete innovations that absorb the CO two into the material, but that's an area where we need more innovation. What was your second area, single use plastics? Single use plastics. Uh. The plan calls for the banning and really the replacement of single use plastics, the banning of single use plastics and in general to replace plastics with compostable materials that can be recycled. And I am confident that with investment and hot for or

at work, we can get that done. So we haven't really talked about um pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. I get the sense from some people that they're expecting some technological magic bullet that's going to solve climate change. Tell us about how we can remove carbon from the atmosphere, and is there a magic bullet coming, you know? Our the Speed and Scale Plan calls for us to remove ten gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. I emphasize removed.

These will be giga tons of c O two emissions that we were not able to eliminate, we were not able to cut, we were not able to slash. There will be some uses of aviation fuels as an example, or or other stubborn carbon to approaches to this, one of which is two innovate around nature based ways of removing CEO two, for example, growing greater kelp forests in the oceans. But the other that has captured a lot of attention is called direct air captured or that's engineered

removal of carbon. Think of them as kind of mechanical trees and and this technology works today, but only at small scale. It it sucks the c O two out of the air. It requires a lot of electricity in order to do that, and so it's it's very expensive today. Some uh s per ton. If we've got to remove five giga tons per year at six dollars per ton, that's three trillion dollars a year, and it's hard to see how that's affordable. So entrepreneurs are hard at work

to lower those costs, and I hope they do. So. There's a quote I like from another venture capitalists who said venture capital, properly deployed, can solve the biggest problems, filling a void left by shrinking scientific ambitions of governments, foundations and international organizations. What are your thoughts on that approach. How crucial is venture capital to our future and can replace these other entities. Venture capital is crucial and it's

stepping up to the challenge. They will be an estimated thirty billion dollars invested of venture capital in climate technologies this year. Our plan calls for fifty billion this year. But venture capital is not going to get this job done on its own. We need government funded research and development to grow in the US alone to forty billion a year. Other countries have got to triple their funding.

We need project financing, We need philanthropic investing. Jeff Bezis's commitment of ten billion dollars to the Bazos Earth Fund is the largest philanthropic commitment to climate the climate crisis that we've ever witnessed or enjoyed. Uh. There's really four accelerators that will get this job done. One of them

is investing, another is innovation, the work of entrepreneurs. But I think the hardest are going to be to turn our movements into actions so we get the politics and the policy correct, because it's going to take a massive, collective, coordinated effort to achieve our ultimate okay are and that's to take fifty nine giga tons of emissions to net zero. That's an ambitious target. Uh. And if we miss that target, what are the ramifications we'll leave our kids and our

grandkids an uninhabitable planet. We'll see the Arctic sea ice surely melts away. We'll have the estimates are up to a billion climate refugees. There's ten million of them already. Hundreds of millions of people will start. It's uh, it's unthinkable, and so we must get this done. So so let me turn this back to to what's going on in the world of venture Now. When the early decades of your work at Clina Perkins was into a very friendly

I P O market, how much does timing matter? Broadly, meaning, hey, if if there's an exit available, if there's a big I p O market, that makes it more likely people whore gonna invest in these companies and have a successful exit. Tell us a little bit about timing. Well, you know, investors, myself included, will stop at nothing to copy success. So the timing of today's markets for climate technologies, whether it's Tesla or Ribban or better Batteries or beyond me, is good.

And I would say, in the long run is going to continue to be good because the size of the markets and and and the need, the economic need, the opportunity, and the planetary pressures. So if a younger venture capitalist or a newfound venture fund came to you and asked for advice. What would you tell them about this opportunity. Oh, there's so many different venture firms and the strategies. I would say to them that this is the greatest opportunity

of the twenty one century. Uh, that they should be strategic about their contribution. Is it to work with early stage entrepreneurs in removing technical risks, or at the other extreme, is it to be smart and sharp about project financing. But the the overall costs of the transition from a dirty fossil economy to a clean new energy economy is

four trillion dollars per year per year. That sounds like a big number until you compare it with the costs of dirty energy, the social costs, the disruption, the premature depths. One in five deaths are premature due to carbon pollution. Those come in at about ten billion dollars per year. So it's it's literally cheaper to save the Earth than it is to ruin it. Uh. And and there's just seems to be endless amounts of cash pouring into the

venture capital sector. Arguably it's never been higher. What are your thoughts on this? Does it worry you what, what's the driver of all this money slashing around? Uh. Some people say that that we're experiencing a bubble, a bubble and fintech or bitcoin or climate technologies. I see it very differently. I think it's a boom. And historically, whether it was the advent of transcontinental railroads or the automobiles, we saw booms which lead to full employment, over investment,

rapid innovation. And no, not all of those car companies survived, but I think the same will be true of the other fields of innovation. I think one of the things that gives me great hope is the power of human ingenuity. We got ourselves into this fix, and very I'm betting we're going to figure a way out. So what do you say to people who sort of pasture Silicon Valley's best days are are behind it? Do you have a response to any of those folks? Oh, I think they're wrong.

I think provided we deal with this existential threat, the climate crisis, and that is not guaranteed, but provided we do that and we get a reduction in the next decade, I think we're on track for a wonderful, prosperous, healthy planet. Can I tell you and I should have mentioned this earlier, but you know, I read a ton of books for the show, and I found the book really quite fascinating, and it's pretty obvious to me that an engineer was

behind this. There's just a lot of great slides and um charts and graphs, and it's not just all texted. Parts of it are narrative and parts of it are historical, and it reminds me of a well made slide deck. So um that I want to send you a bound version of the book if you'll email me your physical mailing address. There's one other thing, one other story I

might tell you about the book. I was talking the other day with the reader, a mom who told me that every night she takes two or three pages of the book and she reads them together with her daughter, and then they talk about together what that means for the world her daughter is going to inherit. And I thought, Wow, that's the use of the book I never imagined, and one one that I'm honestly proud of. How it looks like this was the work of a lot of different people.

How did you end up researching and writing this? We talked to a hundred different leaders in in the field policymakers, researchers, modelers, activists, UH and and from those selected some thirty five stories, we ended up with a thousand different data points we needed to verify and collected those into five notes which are in the book. And I did it with an amazing small team of three or four on the research

and writing staff. I'm I'm an engineer, as you know, and and so I'm I'm not so good with words, and I had the benefit of a writing team that helped make this much more readable. Well, well it shows you can see the book is a fast read. I sat down with a bunch of stickies and a highlighter and found myself just plowing through a chapter after chapter. It was. It was a relatively quick read and and very easy to put down and then pick back up again.

Each chapter is very distinct, and you've really laid out um a plan to UH prevent climate catastrophe from taking place. So thank you for that. But one thing I want to make sure your audience knows they can get a free infographic. It's a single poster sized piece of paper that has on both sides of it all the objectives, all the key results, all the measures and it's reassuring for people who are fearful that there is a plan and that if we do these things, we can find

a way to a habitable planet. That's what we've got to do. So I know I only have you for a limited amount of time. Let me jump to my favorite questions that I ask all of my guests, starting with tell us what you've been streaming these days? Give us your favorite Netflix or Amazon Prime or whatever podcast you're listening to. Well, so I haven't had time for streaming on netplace, doing research, reading books and papers on on on the climate crisis itself. But getting this word

out I've listened to. I started listening to a couple of new podcasts, John Hilman's Hell and High Water and Tim Ferris's Show, both of which I think have a distinctive imprint from their hosts. Tell us about your mentors who helped to shape your career. So the biggest influence in my life was my dad, Ludor, an engineer, entrepreneur,

and and hero. And I've been blessed by a number of mentors, perhaps most notable of them Andy Grove, and what I learned from him at Intel prompted me to write a first book called Measure What Matters, and that tells stories of a dozen different organizations using okay rs, which is what then I applied to the climate crisis. I will tell you Al Gore is a hero of mine. Ah. He's wonderfully resolute man who's impassioned, effective, and and and funny. He and I, he and I talked regularly about the

climate crisis. Tell us about some of your favorite books. What are your all time favorites and what are you reading right now? So my current reading, No Surprises, is largely around the climate crisis. I love Elizabeth Colbert's Under a White Sky, which described the climate futures. And two other books are How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates, a very accessible book, and a profile of a new profile of Winston Churchill called The Splendid and

the Vial two good recommendations. Uh, what sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad who wanted to pursue a career inventor investing. I would, I would say, to her gain experience as an entrepreneur. I repeat the advice that I was given early in my career, which was go get a real job in a real growing tech company and sharpen your skills in the real hard world of business knocks, and then take that experience to

help other entrepreneurs succeed. And our final question, what do you know about the world of venture investing today that you wish you knew forty years ago? I wish I knew forty years ago. How important the team is. The leadership of the team, the recruiting of the team, the growing of the team. Because in the end, it's it's more than large markets, It's more than than compelling technologies. It's teams who know how to execute well, really really

fascinating stuff. Thanks John for being so generous with you time. We have been speaking with John Dore. He is a partner at famed venture firm Climate Perkins and the author of the new book Speed and Scale, an Action Plan for solving our Climate Crisis. Now. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure and check out all of our previous discussions. You can find those wherever you find your favorite podcasts, iTunes, Spotify,

a cast wherever. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. Sign up for my Daily reads at rid Halts dot com. Follow me on Twitter at rid Halts. I would be remiss if I did not thank our crack staff that helps quit these conversations together each week. Michael Batnick is my head of research. A ticket Albron is our project manager.

Paris Wold is our producer. I'm Barry Bridhalts. You've been listening to Masters and Business on Bloomberg Radio.