Peet Denny

Peet Denny, the founding partner at Climate VC, which is a new venture fund investing in climate tech ventures, and the fund is based in the UK. Climate VC is planning to actually fund a hundred startups over the next three years.

In today’s episode, we discuss how he built his company from the ground up.

‍

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

• [00:55] Peet's personal background & journey
• [3:28] How the machine learning model works to track rainforest destruction
• [5:03] Climate VC journey and thesis
• [7:22] The SEISEIS fund impact on Climate VC
• [9:22] Peet's climate tech funding opinion
• [11:27] Peet's advice to climate tech founders currently fundraising
• [13:14] Climate tech startups space
• [16:05] Focusing on the promiseland not the problems
• [18:08] Biggest rules for success in funding a startup
• [20:12] Peet's Investment decision making process
• [22:04] Managing vision & division in a startup
• [23:20] Characteristics of a great founder and team
• [25:33] Peet's 10-year vision

‍

KEY LESSONS & QUOTES

• “Being quite on top of your game in understanding where your impact is coming from. And having the long term view of making that more and more sophisticated over time, will make it easier for you to raise money.” [12.11]
• “We wanna see a team that will just roll over all of the rocks in the road without breaking the pace.Typically founders are amazing problem solvers and that's why we love them and need them in our lives. ” [16.22]
• “ If a potential customer is excited about a product, then that's so much of the problem solved. ” [18:19]“If you look at a founding team as a team and not as a set of individuals, it doesn't really matter who you are as long as you're great in some way” [24:37]

‍

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Maiko: In today's episode, I speak to Peet Denny, the founding partner at Climate VC, which is a new venture fund investing in climate tech ventures, and the fund is based in the UK. Climate VC is planning to actually fund a hundred startups over the next three years. So is gonna be quite an active investor, especially in the UK landscape and is already quite active.

And you know, there's a few criteria, but one of the biggest ones is really to fund solutions that can have at least a 10 million ton CO2 equivalent impact per year. So like big ambitious solution, maybe also sometimes solutions that other investors are kind of shying away from, and maybe not patient enough for, so we'll talk about that in a second.

So prior to climate VC, Pete was a founder himself. He was an advisor to fast growing companies and the community builder. But we'll talk about that in a second. So first of all, welcome to the podcast page. Great to have you again. 

[00:00:52] Peet: Yeah. Thanks a lot. Thanks for having. It's nice to see you again. 

[00:00:55] Maiko: No, that's good. Yeah. We had you speak at the climate tech founder summit last year, which was great. That's how we initially met and good to have you on the podcast. And we'll have to summit again in November with like a thousand founders and investors. So we gotta speak about that one as well, uh, very soon, but let's start, with your personal story. So you've had quite a varied career, I would say, right? Like a lot. Different careers and skill sets and roles that you've been doing. So tell us a bit about your personal story. What was your journey towards venture? You haven't always been in venture and how did it all start with climate VC?

[00:01:30] Peet: Wow. How far back do I go? I suppose I'm a techie, but background, a software technologist, a been a CTO. I've been a founder. I've done a lot of consulting and I suppose it all started when, um, did my first startup in Paris in the 90s. Just at the height of the '.com' boom. And I've been alternating between startups and corporate life. I wasn't a very good founder.

Actually. We never managed to make it off minimum wage in this, uh, eCommerce startup that around for two years, I was snapped up by some Microsystems where they would literally hire anybody. So they hired me. That was really good for me, cuz they kind of set me all around the world, taught me the ropes and I got into deep software technology.

I've spent a lot of time consulting in financial service sector. I was CTO of FinTech, uh, a robo advisor where we kind of pioneered something quite novel in the way that you could use AI to give financial advice to people in the pension space. It was the first of its kind in the world. After that, I went back to consulting.

I started an AI consultancy. I was quite heavily involved in the AI scene in the Midlands. And that consulting took me to a couple of climate tech projects. One of which was using graph technology to try and discover the hidden sources of funding for deforestation. So who's causing deforestation. Who's paying for it?

Do they know they're doing it. So it's kind of the same tech that we were using to discover the Panama PAVs. It was that tech, but that was really the first time that I'd seen the climate emergency up close. And that's when they decided to put my 25 year career in, in tech, put it into that and then focus for the rest of my life on fighting climate change.

I took six months off to kind of explore what can I bring to the table? And it was at the end of that vision quest that I realized that early stage venture is where it's at The reason I arrived at that conclusion is because a lot of the solutions that we need are quite crazy and they're new and we need to innovate.

We need to innovate like dramatically. And at pace there's a lot of climate tech VCs in the world. Now there's, you know, last time I counted the 200, but a lot of them are focused on kind of laser stage on the safest stuff. So I thought right early stage venture, that's where I can show up. I reckon I can do that.

I know how many works. I've worked in the financial sector a lot. I've been in startups. I've been a founder, I've scaled a lot startups. This is where I'll show up. 

[00:03:28] Maiko: Amazing. I'm actually interested as a bit of off tangent, but I got quite curious when you mentioned the kind of machine learning model to discover who was like actually destroying the rainforest. It was right. Yeah. And like, how do it work? What did you uncover with that? I'd be curious to learn a bit more. 

[00:03:44] Peet: There are known bad actors in the world, aren't there? The agencies, they send reporters out into fields and they live there maybe undercover for a long time to discover who's got chainsaws and who's cutting down.

What, when they're there, when you see forest take a satellite photo, for example, and you see there was Virgin forest there last year, and now there's no Virgin forest. And a year later, oh, now there's Palm trees, right? That's um, deforestation to plant Palm trees. Now that's not illegal, but it's illegal under most circumstances.

So organizations will rent parcels of land, parcels of rainforest. And they're not allowed to deforest more than a certain percentage or small percentage, but there are this shenanigans that you can get up to, to encourage if you, as a company own this land, to encourage people to come in with chainsaws and chop the trees down to burn it.

And if that happens, Then you're allowed to plant EG Palm oil plantations on that land. So there's known bad actors, people who we know who were doing that. And what we were doing is bringing together multiple different data sets in all those data sets of here's a list of all of the companies in the world.

Here's all of their directors. Here's what else their directors in and those companies here's who else are directors in those companies? So we ended up with this gigantic graph of all of the companies and partnerships and directorships in the world, and then this other set of data, which we merged with.

Who are the known bad actors. And so then you'd see in this graph kind of structure, you'd see the very short hops where it's maybe only two or three hops from Cargill to Samsung, for example. So ownership that people were trying to hide through things like shell companies and so on. 

[00:05:03] Maiko: Oh, got it. Super, super exciting. Let's focus on climate VC and your thesis. Right. So I think. Last one or two years, we've seen a lot of new venture funds in climate tech. Obviously last year was interesting and crazy environment with lots of new funds being launched as well. Now this year is a little bit more challenging, but I'd love to hear from you.

Like why did you decide to start climate VC? And what's your thesis that makes you stand out versus other funds out there?

[00:05:30] Peet: I thought I need to devote the rest of my life to this. And if you're gonna do that, it needs to be worthwhile. Doesn't it? You know, I only get one shot at life. And I think the thing that I spend the rest of my life doing needs to be quite big and, and important.

You know, I'm not big and important, but, uh, I'd like to think that my life has meant something. And I remember being a tech conference where they were talking about climate change and they said, if you're gonna try and solve climate change, you need to be, aiming for at least a gigaton scale impact. So I thought, right, that's it.

That's what I'm gonna do. So then I was, I was looking for this means of doing it and this, this is where I thought if I personally do a startup, I literally bring no climate tech skills to the table at all. You know, I'm like a general purpose technologist so that after several steps ended up in venture.

So our, our goal is to only invest in things that we think can help us towards that number. And the rough breakdown is we wanna try and find 10 companies that will make it to the scale of being able to do 10 megaton. 10 megatons every year for 10 years, 10 companies, that's one gigaton. So that that's kind of the cornerstone of our thesis.

If there are three steps to our investment process, the first step is do we believe that you've got a clear path to 10 megatons that kind of rules out a lot of, you know, maybe most startups that we see and yes, cuz how we're unique. We're a climate fund where kind of common or guard off the shelf climate fund.

But I suppose, what we as individuals bring to the table is that a we've been founders before. So we kind of know a little bit what it feels like. We know what makes a company that will fail. We've seen so many failure modes in our lives. We know the kinds of things to avoid. And I think I personally have got quite high tolerance for risk.

So we go out there and try and find companies that nobody else will give the time of data. We love that stuff. Um, we can kind of permit ourselves to do that because we make a lot of investments. So this year we make 30 investments. It's okay. That some of those actually crazy, I think that's really important because we need to be very innovative.

We need to innovate at. At scale, we need to try things that have never been tried before. And I think that's the purpose of venture capital. And for some reason, a lot of venture capitalists in this space are very timid. And I don't think now is the time for timidity. 

[00:07:22] Maiko: Love it. And you are actually set up as, S E I S E I S fund, which for anybody not in the UK as shortly set, a government scheme that gives investors tax incentives to invest in early stage companies.

That's probably a good summary of it. I'm sure you find that your LPs and your investors are really up for the ride, otherwise they wouldn't have invested, but did you find that was like a logical first step to raise the fund from individuals like that? Or what's the kind of their risk appetite you seem to be like really betting on the big bets that kind of have a massive impact, but sometimes some people are a bit more conservative as well, and maybe want to have the safe bets rather than big ones.

[00:07:59] Peet: I don't know if we've got any, anybody conservative in our LP base. 

[00:08:03] Maiko: You filter them out beforehand, I assume. 

[00:08:06] Peet: I think I just naturally filter, you know, people can tell I'm a bit of a risk thick and they're like, no, thank you, Pete Denny. I think the S E I S E I S regime kind of encourages you to try and raise money from exited founders.

Founders have already got like quite a tolerance for risk. The people that we've raised money from are either kind of independently wealthy. For some reason, they've recently exited a business or they've raised a lot of money through crypto. There's two themes. Let's start with the 33%. The 33% of our investors are like E I S, E I S is amazing, right?

If you live in the UK, you should totally be doing EIS, especially S E I S it makes it difficult for you to lose too much money. So it massively limits the downside. So 33% of the, of our investors are just like, don't even really care what you're doing here. Have the money. If all of the companies go bust, we get like quite a lot of our money back.

That's cool. But we've still got this potentially limited upside. 66% of them were of the kind of mindset that we've gotta do something about climate change. And this story you are telling Pete Denny that there's incredible people out there, we believe that. So I think I, I had a few examples in mind. I went out and said, here's the kind of incredible companies we're seeing.

Here's some that we've missed because we were signed off by the SA quickly enough. These companies could dramatically change the outcome of history. And before, you know, people write those checks. So we don't raise any money from institutions yet. I think that's gonna be a harder deal, but I think generally people are very inspired by the climate message at the moment.

[00:09:22] Maiko: Got it. And what's your view on the state of funding and climate tech? Again, I already said there's loads of new funds that have been launched in the last two years or so. It seems like loads of new money is streaming in as well, but I just had a discussion at dinner yesterday with a bunch of climate tech, founders and investors.

On like the general funding environment is cooling down a little bit, but right now valuations are going down across the line, especially in the us, obviously with public markets crashing, especially for later stage ventures that were like wanting to IPO. There's like a lot of pressure out there. How do you see your job?

Has it changed at all in the last few months or weeks? Or do you see climate tech funding still streaming in and being equally active as maybe last year. 

[00:10:03] Peet: I haven't got as much to compare this with, as other VCs might do, cuz this is my fund. We closed our first trench. We spent three months raising from November to February and now we're raising again.

So we don't have a lot of baseline to compare it with what we're finding is that there is a small, noticeable slowdown amongst the people. Who'd got a lot of their money from crypto that some of them are not returning our calls. understand. I think we're lucky to be in climate tech because there's so much money that has to be spent for kind of other reasons, you know, BlackRock have got, what is it, half a trillion to disperse into climate tech.

How do you go about spending that? You know, so they've got the kind of an allocation problem. I know some hedge ones who are pitching for a large chunk of that money and they're going for maybe half a billion. And if you raise half a billion of funding that you've then gotta deploy into climate tech, there's some pressure in there where, how are you gonna spend that?

So this is where we show up and say, we've got a plan to take 10 million of that off your hands. Every year. So from those investors who are kind of getting money from those pathways, we haven't really felt much difference yet. Valuations, thankfully at the higher end are starting to tail off. We were starting to see some that were ridiculous, actually.

And when we started to dig into it, speaking to the lead, the lead investors and stuff, how did you justify this? It's a great company. We love the founder. We love the tech. It's super exciting. It looked very sexy in our portfolio, but how did you come up with, you know, they'd say, ah, for us, it doesn't really matter big valuation.

Like this for us is not a lot of money and the founder asked for it. So we said, yes. So thankfully we're seeing less of that now. I think that's better for everybody. Really 

[00:11:27] Maiko: Got it. Is there any advice that you can give to founders in the climate tech space that are currently fundraising? Anything that they should watch out for at the moment?

[00:11:35] Peet: I think when we started, we heard from a lot of people who were advising us that, why are you going so hard on this 10 megaton thing? Why are you going so hard on being able to measure the impact? We just felt morally compelled to do it. Now it's interesting to see that is starting to be required by some sources of funding.

And we believe that we were amongst the first to be so rigorous and so harsh about our requirements in this. But actually we need to keep evolving what we're asking for, you know? So in terms of proof points that your model is not greenwashing proof points, that your impact is gonna be 10 megatons If you say it's gonna be 10 megatons in reporting in being in the right taxonomy, you know, declaring correctly, what it is that you're doing.

It's very encouraging to see, especially amongst our partners in Europe, that that is start to be required. So I think being quite on top of your game in understanding where your impact is coming from and having a long term view of making that more and more sophisticated over time, I think that will make it easier for you to raise money.

Cuz I, I do think there's a big mis-selling scandal about to happen in the kind of greenwashing space in the mid selling of carbon offset space. And we all wanna be keeping our noses clean when that reckoning comes. So I suppose that's, one point I think. 

[00:12:38] Maiko: Well, it's happening already in, in some ways, at least in the public markets.

I think Dodge bank just got a rate two weeks ago. Dodge bank has a rate booked in every week, I think generally, but they had one specifically on greenwashing and mischaracterizing their products and who knows allegations at this stage, but yeah, it's happening. And I mean, it's relatively obvious if you look at what gets labeled as ESG out there, and if you look at what it actually is, you really start questioning the label.

If you have like certain oil companies being labeled as ESG, because they do things 5% better than the competition that's yeah, questionable right? 

I'd love to cover another theme as well. In terms of the spaces within climate tech. Climate tech is such a big term that can include a lot of things from like hardware, youth invested in global O tech, which is like very engineering driven.

And they were on the podcast. Dan was on a podcast before, but then there's lots of software solutions. I think I've seen. It feels like hundreds of carbon accounting solutions by now. Uh, there's lots of stuff popping up, but it feels like certain spaces within climate tech almost have an oversupply of new startups being launched and certain spaces.

I don't see a lot in that may be my own bias, but how do you see the space at the moment? Do you see a lot of startups in certain types of solutions or what's the distribution roughly on the types of startups that you. 

[00:13:59] Peet: The carbon accounting thing and things like browser plugins that will calculate the carbon footprints of your shop.

I think those are like climate tech hello world. And I understand why there's so much of it. It's because quite a lot of the world has converted over the past couple of years to realizing, oh, wow, this is really serious. I need to do something. And we love that. That's amazing. We feel compelled to do something.

What do we do? That's the most obvious choice that is literally the one I want the hello world solution. So, but we do see a lot of that. That's completely over, over. He. I think the next thing that you see a lot of is anything to do with the big successful climate tech things that are happening already.

So wind and solar and EVs, what's the kind, the supply chain and the supporting things around the outside of that. That's very well subscribed. We were speaking to our fund of funds earlier and they deliberately wanna focus on things that are novel that are new. They're like us. They want to look for things which haven't been tested, which have got risk.

So they actively avoid anything to do with wind or solar. Cause that's kind, it's been here for like at least 20 years. What else? I've never said this on camera before, but I'm not as excited about the old protein space as I used to be. I was vegan for 18 months. I kind of downgraded to be mostly plant-based recently.

And I think I just, I started to get sick of this taste of alt meat. And I think what I've started to notice around the vegan community and stuff is similar. And so I, I think there's kind of like a, a. Now to see if we've just got this period of Goodwill, where people are willing to kind of give it a go.

And within that short period, the alt protein, community's gotta try and come up with something that doesn't taste. So uncanny valley, I'm actually quite bearish now on the alt protein. I think the world needs to just start eating more vegetables. The areas where it's underinvested is the more risky stuff, anything that carries risk, that's difficult to understand.

That's what we love. If we hear about something that literally, we've never heard of that idea before, and it sounds crazy, then we get on the phone straight away. 

[00:15:38] Maiko: I love it. I think your approach is very much in line with Jason Cal canister angel investor was talking about it. How he's usually thinking about let's assume they're gonna be successful.

How big could this be? How life changing, could this be rather than looking for all kinds of reasons, why it won't work? Because with any startup, if you do that, you are gonna always come up with a million reasons why it won't work, especially in this space, right? Like again, I mentioned O tech, you could come up with a million reasons why it won't work.

You're not gonna invest in actually breakthrough solutions. If you have that approach, is that kind of the mindset you follow? How do you kind of manage the fine line between overhyping something and getting too excited, but also like really seeing the promise in it, rather than just finding the things that may go wrong. 

[00:16:22] Peet: I think there's like a, an X factor in founders. You see a lot in founders and you don't see a lot outside of founders that uniquely qualifies them to be able to deal with problems. And so I, I could sit down and come up with a list of a hundred reasons why global low tech is gonna suffer, but I've watched Dan roll with the punches.

it's really quite inspiring to see, you know, things go horribly wrong and he doesn't even stop smiling. And then before, you know, he solved it through just being like a crazy miracle worker. That's a big thing of what we look for, actually the founding team. I know it's cliche to say, but we wanna see a team that we think will just roll over all of the rocks in the road without breaking the pace.

And I think if that's the case, it doesn't matter. It's kind of not my job anymore to kind of invent problems that could arise. It's nice that we can work through some stuff together. So, um, we're quite obviously quite interested in, in the financial side of things. And so one thing that. Some founders haven't thought of is how is the cost of capital gonna affect you as you go along?

You know, it's, it's useful to be able to raise things and get them on their radar. If you find the right team, that will kind of be able to solve all of the problems in the way. So as long as the impact is there, the potential impact as long as the market is there, as long as the team is incredible, that's mostly the boxes ticked.

I think. I'm a NOBE if I'm coming up with ideas in the meeting and that I'm saying I've pinched this off Alex GOK I was on a podcast with him earlier. He said, if, you know, if we're having a chat with a founder and within 10 minutes, I've come up with a question that they dunno the answers to like, oh, we've never considered that.

I think that's a bad sign, but typically founders are amazing problem solvers. And that's why we love them and need them in our lives. 

[00:17:47] Maiko: Yeah, and they really should be the experts at what they're doing, right? Like, no matter how sophisticated and educated you are as an investor, their founders should always be the best experts about what they're doing.

If they're not, I think that's maybe a little bit of a red flag. If you, if you know more after. Quick research on them. Got it. 

So for a first time, founder, that's starting out and is kind of raising their first, proper round for the startup. What are kind of like the biggest rules that you would tell them to optimize for success in their funding round?

[00:18:19] Peet: I'm naturally gonna say, make sure you've got like a credible story about where your impact is gonna come from. That's clear that I'm gonna say that. I think one thing we don't see enough of is where people have thought about, they think too much about the product and not enough about the company and a good sign of that is if they don't really know who their customers are gonna be.

I get what it's like, you can work with this idea and you think this could solve this amazing problem, but it's not really about the problem and the product, which is the solution. It's not really about that. It's about your customer. It's about, who's gonna buy it off. You have you spoken to them. And I think this is the fundamental thing that everybody should be doing.

I hear this quite a lot. So your EG, your product is gonna capture methane from water. Like cool. Who's gonna buy that meat then off you and. I dunno it. So it could be, and then they give you a list of things that it could be now. I dunno what it could be. I wanna know what it's gonna be, where are you gonna start?

And you might be wrong about it, but you having gone out and spoken to people and they're like, oh my God, I'd love to buy X from you. Or we've really got this problem. You know, I think that's so important. And in our due diligence, we do ring up potential customers and ask them why they're excited about this.

Because if a potential customer is excited about a product, then that's so much of the problem solved.

[00:19:19] Maiko: So you're basically doing some customer development and see for yourself and how it resonates with their potential customers. 

[00:19:25] Peet: Yeah, that's been worth so much to do that unless you're in, into some super deep tech where really there's a deep engineering or scientific question that needs answering.

I think that's probably the next most important thing is where's your market. Who's gonna buy this off you and how are you gonna go to market? And, uh, we get to paraphrase. Jeff Goldin, we get so tied up in, can we do this? Can we solve this problem? Can we build this product? We get so excited about the product that we forget about.

It's not product, it's a business. We gotta run the business. How are we gonna sell the. Next thing I suppose is storytelling. That's kind of, can you get people who are actually quite critical, excited about it? And, um, the MUN will say this, that you mobile say really great things about your, about your company, but I try and surround myself with pretty cynical people.

cause I'm, I'm such an optimist. I need cynical people to say, listen, Pete is 500 reasons why that's a terrible idea. And then I can work through those 500 reasons. 

[00:20:12] Maiko: Wow. Okay. So you do have like some checks and balances to not go overboard completely. So how do you do it when in the investment process, you're coming up with a thesis on why you're investing in a startup.

Why do you believe in them? And then do you try to challenge it in those conversations with the cynics around you? Or how does it work in terms of your decision making? 

[00:20:33] Peet: So we, we see hundreds of startups. We've got our thesis set up as a keyboard shortcut so we can type thesis and understand. Then it'll give us like all thesis in like a paragraph. And our interns can go through and check this company. That's just coming cold. Doesn't meet this thesis. And so many of them we can write out of that. There's more companies to deal with than we'll ever be able to invest in. So then we, if somebody in the team is excited about one of the things in, in that list, then they'll bring it to, you know, our pipeline meeting and we'll talk about it and we'll defend it.

So any anyones that haven't been rejected. In our pipeline meeting, we'll discuss as a team. And often it's the case that there'll be one or two companies in there that somebody on the team is really excited about. And then they will be pitching that company. This is still way, way, way upstream with the actual process, but maybe that's some useful insight into how do VC's triage their deals.

I'm an intuitive thinker, but I've come from kind of a decision science background and I'm keen to bring like a more quantitative way of working into our methodology. But I, I still believe that this intuition is a useful thing. You know, thinking fast thinking, slow kind of thing. 

The next step is we've decided we quite like the look of this. Let's speak to the founders. So we get, we get the horn to, to the founders. And it it's in that meeting that we'll kind of get a feel as if do we wanna take it further or not from then on, it's kind of down to the founder to prove to us, where's your 10 megatons? Where is it? You know, we're all sitting there with our arms folded because it's really important that they get this right.

And often this takes lots of back and forth because they'll send us stuff and it's just either we'll immediately see, there's no way that that's stem mega, Amazon. That's not credible at all, or there'll be some back and forth where they have to go away and do some more calculations. So our job is to kind of mark their homework rather than do the homework ourselves.

[00:22:04] Maiko: Got it. And I've been part of these rooms of making investment decisions as a scout with, backed, but also when I was part of Wayra and we were making investment decisions, and I think sometimes this dynamic happens of maybe one or two of the team are really excited about a startup. And then the rest of the team kind of starts voicing all kinds of concerns.

How do you manage that? Like taking the concerns seriously, but also still being driven by your conviction into something and then taking the right decision in the end. 

[00:22:35] Peet: Well, um, I'm a big fan of Ray Dalio. I read all of his stuff. He paint quite an aspirational picture of where, how I want art or fun to run, which is that everything should really be data driven.

So I think the enthusiasm is super useful. The kind of heuristics, the good feeling is really useful, but we do need to be able to explain that to ourselves. And so that's why I'm was trying to say, you know, if I say, man, I love this founder. I love this founder. Then people challenge me. Why do you love him?

And we we've got this model to kind of measure them against, I think it's nine different variables. So what's their T-shaped. How good is the fit between their experience and the impact that they're trying to have. What's their hot spa. How brazen are they to go out and kind of make things happen? That, that actually a bit cheeky.

And so we've got nine things like that. And we challenge ourselves to listen to that challenge. It's not enough to just be excited. We need really need to build to back our excitement with cold hard fact. 

[00:23:20] Maiko: Super interesting. We're almost out of time. And so I guess the question that you get very often I assume is just like the characteristics of the best founders that you've seen, what is kind of makes a great founder and a great team.

And is there any advice that you can say, okay, you should be looking for these type of things and work towards being that type of person or developing your skill set in that way. Anything you can say. on that 

[00:23:44] Peet: That's a deep philosophical question that especially, can it be made or a, you know, do you need to be born a founder?

You don't need to be born a founder, but maybe your life to this point is all training to be a founder. And most people by, by this point in their lives, by the time that they're in their twenties, their life choices may have already decided whether they've now got the constitution for it. The world shouldn't be filled with founders.

Most people shouldn't be founders. The world would be terrible if everyone was founders. And so it's nothing to feel bad about if you're not a founder, but how can you tell if you are a founder? I think optimism is a really big one. How do you deal with failure? Can you deal with constant failure? can you just keep going?

Are you dogged? You know, can you keep going that that's a very important quality. I think the ability to make shit happen I mean, we all dream about this ideal circumstance to work in. I've worked in some very kind of bureaucratic or even pathological organizations where it really wasn't enjoyable. I hate like most founders, I hate kind of red tape, but if you're in that kind of environment, you still manage to make things happen.

Maybe you're a founder. So there's some qualities which I think they're not innate, but they are developed over many years. I think then there's another thing, which is what do you contribute to a team? So teams, right? That's a lot easier thing to talk about because teams are compositions of people. And if you look at a founding team as a team and not as a set of individuals, then it doesn't really matter who you are, as long as you're great in some way, then you can find people to kind of where their complexities.

Compliment your cavities. And I think that's where things like carbon 13 can sometimes work really well where you've got people who they're aren't scientists, they don't come with a great idea. They don't have something which is their life's work, but still they massively know how to make things happen.

And when I see that magic where two people are fitting together like Lego, that's where I get excited. I think teams are more important really than individuals. 

[00:25:18] Maiko: Yeah. That's a really good one. Yeah. And the context matters so much. I think I see it in my own career, but also with other people that I know is like in some context and some teams, I think I have been performing terribly and, you know, I don't wanna blame the team for my own performance.

But like in other context, suddenly it's worked really well and it's just the flow of the team and how it works together. So really good advice there. Last question to you is in 10 years from now, how does the world look like if climate VC succeeds 

[00:25:49] Peet: uh, I like that. I like that question. So I think there's two paths before us.

One's pretty dark. The other one is if we want us to pull off this climate emergency thing and we won't have done that by 2032, we won't have done it by then, but we should be well, well, well, on our way, if we do that, the world will kind of look a lot different in many ways, which are better. And in some ways, which are probably humbling, depending on where you're from.

I think the world is gonna be more equitable It has to be more equitable if we're gonna pull this off. And what that means is that the people of Tonga and Soto may and Chad, their standard of living will have gone way up but our standard of living may have diminished a bit. You know, we we're gonna have to do a reset on the things that we really value.

And if we really love spending time with our family and out in nature and eating clean, wholesome, local food, Having great education then. Cool. Our life is gonna be great. If we look kind of going out to nightclubs and having big yachts and having a big posh car and having 12 houses, then I think our lives are not gonna be the kind of things that we enjoy anymore.

But if you kind of look at the kind of people who are trying to fight climate change and the things that they're interested in, the kind of extra benefits that they're bringing to the world, they're often by mistake solving some of the other SDGs as well. So there's gonna be more clean water. There's gonna be better education.

There's gonna be more women in boards. Uh, you. The future's bright from that perspective. I think if we pull this off, we've still got everything left to fight for. 

[00:27:03] Maiko: Amazing love that. That's a great sentence to close with. Thanks very much for making the time PED see you soon.

‍