Discover how Collaborative Fund backs for-profit & for-good startups — from $200M growth bets to 100 micro-investments fueling the next wave of climate innovation.
My guests in this episode are Sophie Bakalar and Tomás Álvarez Belón from Collaborative Fund.
Collaborative Fund is a 10-year-old VC firm investing at the intersection of for-profit and for-good, with a long-time focus on climate. Today, they’re investing in Series A- and B-stage startups from their $200M Collab SOS Fund. Through their Shared Future initiative, they're also investing $100,000 into 100 startups per year that come through top-notch accelerator programs like YCombinator, Activate, and AirMiners.
In this episode, we talked about the following:
- How they make investment decisions
- Lessons they’ve learned from past investment mistakes
- Tips for startup founders who are new at pitching to investors
- Two of their portfolio companies tackling cell cultured animal fat and smarter EV charging through software that recognizes the bottlenecks of the power grid
- The importance of distinguishing roles and responsibilities among founders
- Personal goals of ever greater simplicity in life
- Recommended sci-fi books to read
- The power of slow mornings
- And lots more
Hope you enjoy!
And give Sophie, Tomás, Collaborative Fund, and Shared Future a shout-out on LinkedIn or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people.
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Entrepreneurs for Impact is on a mission to help climate innovators grow faster with new investment capital, share best practices among peers, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.
Learn more:
- Climate CEO Mastermind Peer Groups — Our invite-only cohorts of 12 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls. Today’s highly curated Mastermind members represent over $8B in market cap or assets under management.
- Newsletter — A 3-minute weekly summary of climate tech, startups, better habits, and deep work.
Programs are led by Dr. Chris Wedding — 3x founder, $1B of investment experience, and Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill professor, with 60,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.
