Climate CEOs: Scaling Startups Climate Philanthropy: 2% Funding → Terraset Builds Carbon Market Trust (+ Ex-Twitter Tech Lead)
Discover how Alex Roetter is reshaping carbon removal financing with Terraset — combining advanced market commitments, donor-friendly transparency, & climate tech VC experience.
My guest is Alex Roetter, General Partner at Moxxie Ventures, Founder of Terraset, and former Head of Engineering at Twitter.
In addition, he came up with this great idea around which we teamed up together to launch Terraset, an anti-GHG 501(c)(3) for advanced market commitments in the carbon removal industry (CDR).
In this episode, we talked about the following:
- How philanthropy only provides 2% of its donations to tackle climate change, and only 3.8% of that small number goes to carbon dioxide removal (CDR)
- Why advanced market commitments (or AMCs) can help create market validation for CDR companies so they can get their projects financed
- How Terraset is similar and different from the $925M Frontier Fund, which includes partners such as Stripe, Shopify, Alphabet, Meta, and McKinsey
- The ways that Terraset makes it easier for donors to find trusted CDR projects to support, and receive a tax deduction in the U.S.
- The preseed and seed VC funding he provides at Moxxie Ventures, which focused on climate tech, as well as health tech, AI, and more
- Examples of the cool portfolio companies they’ve funded, such as BasiGo, an EV bus company in Nairobi
- Mistakes he has seen CEOs, including himself, make and how to avoid them
- Why environmental and social co-benefits in climate tech financing matter
- And lots more
Hope you enjoy it!
And give Alex a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people.
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