Inevitable Ep 81: Matt Eggers, Investor & Company Builder at Breakthrough Energy Ventures
Today's guest is Matt Eggers, Investor & Company Builder at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a $1.1 billion, patient capital fund dedicated to building companies that will have a massive impact on greenhouse gas mitigation. He also serves on the Board of the Institute for Market Transformation.
Matt is a seasoned cleantech leader, investor and advisor with 20 years of experience delivering results in diverse companies. Matt’s recent past experience includes serving as a Vice President with Yardi Energy. He has also been the Vice President of Sales, North America for Tesla and the Vice President of Operations for Sunrun, a national leader in home solar power service operating in 11 states. His earlier experience includes leading the stack operations team and serving as Director of Product Management at the fuel cell company Bloom Energy. In that role he led development of the plan to massively scale manufacturing of Bloom’s core cell technology and developed the features and specifications for the second generation “Bloom Box.” Before Bloom, Matt worked for Genentech where he led the commercial launch of Herceptin Adjuvant, a breast cancer drug with over $1 billion in sales. Matt’s early career experience includes serving as an Associate at Morgan Stanley Venture Partners where he championed investments in biotech and enterprise software companies. Matt has a BS in molecular biology from Duke University and an MBA from Stanford University.
In today’s episode, we cover:
- Mission of Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) and its high-network individual investment model
- Success metrics anchored around half-a-gigaton carbon atmospheric reduction and financial return for investors
- BEV’s long investment time horizon (20 years)
- BEV’s investment criteria
- Pivot Bio, a portfolio company, addressing carbon emissions found in fertilizer
- 75F, a portfolio company, offering AI-driven software to drive efficiencies with HVAC systems
- Matt’s climate journey from a farm in Iowa to BEV
- Matt’s perspective on the climate problem and its multifaceted solutions
- Putting a price on carbon
- Inadequate funding in the climate space
- Disrupting the dairy industry’s carbon footprint via low-emission Casein
- The patience required with Climate Change investing (cf. traditional software venture investing)
- The role of corporate strategic investors and banks
- Policy developments at the municipality-level that factor in Climate Change and affect homeowners
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
- Breakthrough Energy Ventures: https://www.b-t.energy/
- “Additionality” with respect to carbon markets: https://resource-solutions.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/RECs-and-Additionality.pdf
- Conceptualizing a gigaton: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/07/01/meet-the-gigaton-the-huge-unit-that-scientists-use-to-track-planetary-change/
- Pivot Bio: https://www.pivotbio.com/
- 74F: https://www.75f.io/
- Genentech: https://www.gene.com/
- Casein: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casein
You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant