
Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI): Climate Tech CEOs & VCs
Climate tech & clean energy playbooks: CEOs, founders & VCs share fundraising, startup, career & life advice. Host: Dr. Chris Wedding. 5★ rating:
Each 45‑minute interview with world‑class clean energy CEOs, climate tech founders & investors unpacks:
• Capital raising (venture capital, private equity)
• Growth strategies in clean energy, batteries, carbon capture, and circular economy
• Founder mindset, must-read books & life wisdom
📬 Grab the" 5 insights in 4 minutes" newsletter → entrepreneursforimpact.com
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(Not investment advice.)
Latest episodes

Nov 4, 2021 • 42min
Leader in Zero-Plastic Online Grocery Shopping — Zuleyka Strasner, Founder and CEO of Zero
Led by Zuleyka Strasner, Zero is an online marketplace for sustainable groceries, home goods, personal items, and more, on its way to becoming the largest sustainability platform for consumers in the country.
Below are two excerpts from the podcast.
"If you had to start over, what are 1-2 tips you’d give yourself in order to be faster, more effective, and higher impact?
First, you have to trust in yourself. In a startup, you’re always dealing with some new problem or setback, but we have always, and without fail, found our way through them, as scary as it may have been at the time. The second tip is to be quick about what stays and what goes, whether it’s ideas, processes, or people. Holding on for too long doesn’t work."
"Do you have any requests, announcements, or final advice for our listeners?
Being a founder/CEO requires you to be many things to many people. Sometimes it’s the most rewarding thing in the world, and sometimes it’s the most difficult. The only path is to trust in yourself, and to listen to those around you — the people you hired (because they’re experts after all), your customers, and the people who support you, such as mentors and advisors."
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Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.
Our invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls.
Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.
Website: www.entrepreneursforimpact.com
Membership benefits: https://bit.ly/3l12Gyg
Sample Mastermind members: https://bit.ly/3ipSehS
Request more information on membership: https://bit.ly/3mj48eM

Oct 28, 2021 • 32min
Nature-inspired EV batteries — Virginia Klausmeier, CEO of Sylvatex
Led by Virginia Klausmeier, Sylvatex is a climate tech company utilizing sustainable chemistry & materials science to accelerate the shift to the electrification of transportation. We do this by massively increasing EV material production throughput while lowering the cost and carbon footprint of the biggest bottleneck in the lithium-ion battery, the cathode.
Below are two excerpts from the podcast.
"What are 1-2 tips you’d give yourself in order to be faster, more effective, and higher impact?
Don’t wait for the perfect time
There is always another way
Surround yourself with people who fill your bucket!
Learn to listen to your gut
Really learn to listen effectively"
"Driven by impact, we are unique because:
All our chemistry is biobased - Powered by plants!
We aim to create solutions that can integrate into the current traditional processes to make immediate impacts and evolve with the industry.
Our approach is to have the lowest cost and most efficient process so that economics drive adoption. As a result of our wild success is a massive reduction in the carbon footprint of batteries."
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Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.
Our invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls.
Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.
Website: www.entrepreneursforimpact.com
Membership benefits: https://bit.ly/3l12Gyg
Sample Mastermind members: https://bit.ly/3ipSehS
Request more information on membership: https://bit.ly/3mj48eM

Oct 21, 2021 • 45min
Climate Investor: $2 Billion for Deep Tech Climate Ventures — Dr. Eric Toone, CTO of Breakthrough Energy Ventures
Co-led by Dr. Eric Toone, Breakthrough Energy Ventures is a long-term VC investor — anchored by Bill Gates, Ray Dalio, and mission-aligned peers — that aims to build the new, cutting-edge companies that will lead the world to net-zero emissions.
Below are two excerpts from the podcast.
"The first decade of this century saw cleantech v1.0, which was pretty much a failure, so we wanted to do something different. The fund is a 20-year fund instead of a 10-year fund to more closely approximate the timeline for the development of technologies and businesses in this space. We have a very technical organization with around 20 people on the team who have doctoral degrees in chemistry, math, physics, and related fields. The idea was to bring a very technical group of people together to do diligence on these technologies. The first fund is fully deployed. We raised the second fund and started investing out of that at the beginning of this year. We have about 80 companies we’ve invested in across the globe."
"There's been an extraordinary amount of money that has entered this space over the last couple of years, and valuations that have gone through the roof. Eight of our companies over the past six months raised between $250-800 million, and we have a company that will likely raise over a billion dollars in its next round. Even at that level, it is still a drop in the bucket. Money in the whole sustainability space still accounts for single-digit percentages of all venture capital, and capital directed towards energy is less than 1%. It's gratifying to see the new capital in this space, but the investment is still way less than what's required."
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Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.
Our invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls.
Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.
Website: www.entrepreneursforimpact.com
Membership benefits: https://bit.ly/3l12Gyg
Sample Mastermind members: https://bit.ly/3ipSehS
Request more information on membership: https://bit.ly/3mj48eM

Oct 14, 2021 • 34min
Captured Carbon to High Value Products — Staff Sheehan CTO and Cofounder of Air Company
Co-led by CTO and Cofounder Staff Sheehan, Air Company is an investor-backed carbon-to-value innovator recognized by awards such as Time Magazine Invention of the Year, Fast Company World Changing Idea, and NASA Conversion Challenge.
Below are two excerpts from the podcast.
"Our technology is basically artificial photosynthesis. The only inputs to our chemical manufacturing process are carbon dioxide that we capture from point sources or the air, water, and wind and solar electricity. The only things that come out are alcohol products and oxygen gas. It sounds simple, but if it was easy then somebody would have done it before and climate change wouldn't be quite as bad as it is right now. It gets pretty complicated when you get down to the details."
"Air Company started out and is currently selling premium consumer goods at the top of their class using the alcohol that we produce from carbon dioxide. Our first product was vodka, which we make from carbon dioxide. Our vodka is in the market in New York City, and it won gold medals at the three largest blind-taste test competitions in the world. When the pandemic hit, our second product was launched, which we accelerated due to the sanitizer shortage that was happening in New York City. We call it Air Spray. It's an 80% ethanol hand sanitizer. We ended up donating 15,000 bottles to underserved communities and first responders during the pandemic. Then our third product is launching shortly. By the time this podcast airs, it may actually be launched, so we have another product that's coming out soon!"
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Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.
Our invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls.
Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.
Website: www.entrepreneursforimpact.com
Membership benefits: https://bit.ly/3l12Gyg
Sample Mastermind members: https://bit.ly/3ipSehS
Request more information on membership: https://bit.ly/3mj48eM

Oct 7, 2021 • 45min
The Biggest Kelp Company in the USA — Briana Warner, CEO of Atlantic Sea Farms
Led by Briana Warner, Atlantic Sea Farms is dedicated to making a powerful and positive impact on the health of our customers and oceans by creating craveable and innovative products made from sustainably farmed sea greens, all while expanding opportunities for Maine's fishing communities.
More about Atlantic Sea Farms:
"Good food should do good. At Atlantic Sea Farms, our kelp is never dyed and grown in the clean, cold waters of Maine. Use our kelp in place of any other green vegetable for a delicious umami kick and a boost of B12, calcium, and iodine. Think grain bowls, tacos, sauces and soups. And Kelp forests may remove 20 times more carbon from the atmosphere than land-based forests and help to mitigate the effects of ocean acidification." https://atlanticseafarms.com
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Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.
Our invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls.
Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.
Website: www.entrepreneursforimpact.com
Membership benefits: https://bit.ly/3l12Gyg
Sample Mastermind members: https://bit.ly/3ipSehS
Request more information on membership: https://bit.ly/3mj48eM

Sep 30, 2021 • 46min
Serial Founder + Former SpaceX Team to Revolutionize Engineered Wood — Josh Dorfman, CEO of Plantd
Led by Josh Dorfman, Plantd turns atmospheric carbon into low-prices, high-performance building materials using industrial hemp, an ultra-strong, fast-growing plant that captures over 3x more carbon than trees.
Below are two excerpts from the podcast.
"Most home builders are using a product called oriented strand board (OSB). We decided to build these, too, but to make them out of hemp. We think there are opportunities to make a better product, but it still looks and performs like the OSB builders use today. We're not going to ask builders to adopt an alternative building technique. We just want to slide into construction as it works today and to make it easy for people."
"I met Huade Tan, who is our co-founder and CTO, back in February. He spent six years at SpaceX before moving to the Research Triangle Park to start a new company. In parallel, I had been feeling frustrated with engineered wood, seeing the price go up while the quality declined, and I felt there had to be a better alternative. When I met Huade, we were supposed to talk about manufacturing. But I put this idea out there, and he thought it was interesting. His team at SpaceX had also been thinking about alternative biomass and within 20 minutes, we decided to go for it."
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Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.
Our invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls.
Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.
Website: www.entrepreneursforimpact.com
Membership benefits: https://bit.ly/3l12Gyg
Sample Mastermind members: https://bit.ly/3ipSehS
Request more information on membership: https://bit.ly/3mj48eM

Sep 23, 2021 • 51min
Climate Tech Investor: Seed-stage Sustainability Tech — Paul Straub, Co-founder of Wireframe Ventures
Led by Co-founder and Managing Partner Paul Straub, Wireframe Ventures is a pre-seed and seed-stage investor focused on technology benefiting people and planet, including impact ventures focused on climate change, synthetic biology, AI, automation, and zero-emission transportation.
Below are two excerpts from the podcast.
"For many years, my area of focus was around renewables, built environment, and things that were very traditional for cleantech. What's been great about Wireframe is that when we think about decarbonization, we are agnostic in terms of whether you're working in agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, or carbon removal and sequestration. There's an entirely open playing field from our point of view, and we're agnostic from a technology standpoint, too. We will invest in synthetic biology, computational biology, hardware, software, or business model innovations. We view those as great tools and what we care about is who is wielding those tools. We want to know what is the product capability and expertise of a founding team to actually put those tools to work towards the mission around climate. We think about the health of the planet or climate as being the primary objective."
"The most prominent climate tech companies right now are the ones that combine climate and SAAS. We see these kinds of uncapped valuations for SAAS businesses in general, but then add climate and all of the sudden it's just explosive in terms of the valuations. We've got a lot of software businesses that we’re backing. But there's also a lot of interest in carbon removal technologies, which is terrific because it is certainly needed, but it does feel like there are some echoes of the first cleantech boom. I'm trying to remain very open to what's going to work this time because things are very different. There's just an enormous amount of capital flowing into technologies that still have a lot of technical risks and still require project capital to scale. We certainly need some great solutions to remove carbon from the air, but it’s still a very early market."
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Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.
Our invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls.
Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.
Website: www.entrepreneursforimpact.com
Membership benefits: https://bit.ly/3l12Gyg
Sample Mastermind members: https://bit.ly/3ipSehS
Request more information on membership: https://bit.ly/3mj48eM

Sep 16, 2021 • 44min
Largest Forest Carbon Project in the US. — Max Nova, Co-founder of NCX
Led by Co-founder and COO Max Nova, NCX is a VC-backed net-zero pioneer using AI, remote-sensing, and robust forestry science to map all forest assets in the US, create the largest forest carbon project in the US, and build a marketplace of high-quality carbon offsets.
Below are two excerpts from the podcast.
"One of the things you'll hear a lot of people say is that this is a critical decade for the climate or climate action, and it's true. There are these commitments that go out to 2040 or 2050, but we have to start making progress now because the scale of the problem is enormous. We see a lot of our role at NCX is helping bring scale to bear on this challenge by being able to engage every landowner in the country, and one day the world. It's every acre every year. That's the kind of scale that we need to do and even forests won't be a silver bullet for this thing either."
"What's fascinating is that most of these Chief Sustainability Officer positions -- those making or catalyzing buy decisions for our carbon offsets -- did not exist a year ago, two years ago. Everybody is new. Everybody is trying to figure this out. Because it's a new role, there's tremendous diversity in how this is set up in corporations across a bunch of different sectors. Sometimes the Chief Sustainability Officer reports to marketing, sometimes they're part of the supply chain logistics group, sometimes they report directly to the CEO. It's fascinating to see in different companies how this position fits into the org chart because it reflects something about the organization's priorities and why they're making these commitments because there's not one reason. There's a lot of different reasons, both internal and external, that companies choose to make these commitments."
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Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.
Our invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls.
Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.
Website: www.entrepreneursforimpact.com
Membership benefits: https://bit.ly/3l12Gyg
Sample Mastermind members: https://bit.ly/3ipSehS
Request more information on membership: https://bit.ly/3mj48eM

Sep 9, 2021 • 51min
Climate Tech Investor: Deep Tech — Derek Handley, Founder of Aera Ventures
Led by Founder Derek Handley, Aera Ventures invests at the frontier of deep technology and sustainability to accelerate the world to a better future. "Those who create breakthrough ideas the fastest will generate new markets, exponential financial returns and a better future for us all."
Below are two excerpts from the podcast.
"Everything I do now is related to some social or environmental issue. I had the chance to build an alliance of different CEOs around the world who were tackling the same question on different scales. I partnered with Richard Branson and was helping large-scale business leaders transitions with these issues. My wife and I then set up a small Charitable Trust. We didn't know what to call it, we end up calling an Aera. It means exactly what it sounds like; it's the Latin word for “era.” It's the root word for our time, our generation. The Foundation came first, and then we spun out different projects, and the venture fund is a project at the Foundation. It's a unique genesis story to build a venture capital fund from a charitable trust, but the mission was always to work on sustainability and climate."
"The space that I think is blue sky and most exciting is heavy industry. The problem is so big with cement, plastic, steel, chemicals, etc. We're looking for interesting companies in that space. Also, the intersection of climate and fintech is really interesting. I think “Okay, we have a banking system and a finance system that is trying to turn the ship to meet the climate issue.” I'm starting to dream that people might build entirely new banking institutions or financial institutions that are climate-focused and built for a sustainable world."
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Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.
Our invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls.
Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.
Website: www.entrepreneursforimpact.com
Membership benefits: https://bit.ly/3l12Gyg
Sample Mastermind members: https://bit.ly/3ipSehS
Request more information on membership: https://bit.ly/3mj48eM

Sep 2, 2021 • 49min
Robots for Smart Agriculture — Eric Adamson, CEO of Tortuga AgTech
Led by CEO Eric Adamson, Tortuga AgTech aims to raise agricultural margins and reduce hard human working conditions by delivering innovative robotic crop pickers to farmers throughout the world.
Below are two excerpts from the podcast.
"Our aim is to solve the farm’s hardest problem, which we view to be the crushing labor of manual hand harvesting by creating robotic crop pickers, which we believe will then fundamentally shift the rest of the industry because when you relieve the pressure point of the system everything else changes naturally."
"When we meet with farmers we never lead with the fact that we are applying four machine learning models to the decision of whether or not to pick a berry. Instead, we lead with a pick quality rate which is as good or better than any human. We also make an effort to demonstrate that we are listening to farmers and have listened to other farmers before them. I think this grounds Tortuga in the problem we are actively trying to solve."
Here is the transcript summary of the podcast:
https://www.entrepreneursforimpact.com/blog-interviews/eric-adamson-ceo-of-tortuga-agtech
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Entrepreneurs for Impact is the only private mastermind community for investor-backed CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. We’re on a mission to help “scale up” climate leaders supercharge their impacts, share best practices, expand their networks, and reach their full potential.
Our invite-only cohorts of 11 executives catalyze personal development and business growth via monthly meetings, annual retreats, a member-only Climate Investor Database, and 1:1 coaching and strategy calls.
Peer groups are led by Dr. Chris Wedding who brings $1B+ of investment experience, 50,000+ professional students taught, 25 years of meditation, an obsession with constant improvement, and far too many mistakes to keep to himself.
Website — www.entrepreneursforimpact.com
Membership benefits — https://bit.ly/3l12Gyg
Sample Mastermind members — https://bit.ly/3ipSehS
Request more information on membership — https://bit.ly/3mj48eM