Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI): Climate Tech CEOs & VCs

Led by CEO Kristina Skierka, Power For All is a global coalition of 200 private and public organizations campaigning to deliver universal energy access before 2030 through the power of decentralized, renewable electricity. To learn more please visit their website. Below are two excerpts from the podcast.  Kristina spoke to Power For All's mission saying, "As our name suggests, our mission is to end energy poverty. When we were starting the company, it was very important to us to take a strong opinionated stance that energy access is simply a right that all deserve. There is no gray area in that." Kristina highlighted the company's belief in local changemakers as a catalyst to solving energy access problems saying, "First, we take the perspective that policy change needs to be driven by local change-makers. We feel that we can contribute to this process by supporting and upskilling these individuals, but it is ultimately their contribution that gets the work done. Enacting policy change is not glamorous. It often takes the form of showing up to a minister’s office at 8 AM and waiting to be seen at the end of the day around 4 PM and then making the case of how a specific policy change could unleash the development of energy access within a given country. The policy change process is one of persistence." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- 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 highly vetted, 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. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. 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.

Cofounded by Helen Bertelli, Women in Climate Tech provides free monthly programming to its hundreds of members and newsletter subscribers to facilitate the career growth of women fighting the climate crisis. The organization recognizes that the climate and gender equality issues are closely intertwined and is striving to solve both. She is also the Founder of Benecomms, a climate- and impact-focused marketing and PR firm. "We have a dual mandate at Women in Climate Tech," she said. "The first part of the mandate is to do whatever we can to serve our members — getting them jobs, facilitating financing rounds, and more. The second part of that mandate is to seek the largest scale of impact possible at which to do this work. Working in a system that is stacked against you can be soul-destroying work, and we want to change that underlying system." She said, "We formalized this group and then really launched more broadly in January of 2021. We have seen explosive growth with new subscribers and members joining every day. We provide monthly programming in the form of networking events, speakers, skill development opportunities. We are still trying various formats to learn what best serves our members, but at this point all of our programming is free, and we believe we’ve provided tremendous value to our early cohorts." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- 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 highly vetted, 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.  Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. 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.

Led by CEO Phil Croskey, MD Energy Advisors helps residential, commercial, government, and industrial clients reduce their energy cost and implement energy efficiency programs. To learn more visit their website. Below are two excerpts from the episode. Phil spoke about his upbringing saying, "I was born and raised in Cleveland Ohio in the 1970s in what, looking back on it, was a largely red-lined African American community. I’ll never forget the day my mother got laid off from her job at the hospital. Losing that job really hurt her, because a lot of her self worth attached to her professional life. From that moment on, I knew I never wanted to be dependent on a job, recognizing that they come and go." Speaking to the importance of investing in client education Phil highlighted an early customer experience, "I’ll never forget one of our early conversations with a large commercial real estate manager where we set up a meeting, explained how we could add value and reduce their electricity bill, and by the end, she stood up and thanked us for educating her in a manner that helped her better do her job. This was one of our earliest lessons in the value of investing in consumer education." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- 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 highly vetted, 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. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. 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.

Led by Sanchali Pal, Joro provides an app for automated carbon tracking to help consumers make better purchase decisions and offset their carbon footprint. To learn more check out their app in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Below are two excerpts from the podcast.  Speaking to the importance of solving your own problems Sanchali spoke about the origins of her interest in carbon footprint tracking, "I first became interested in the problem of tracking and managing carbon footprints, from my interest in reducing my own carbon footprint. I found a number of carbon calculators, but they were all static and required substantial data entry. I began by building my own carbon tracking model in an Excel spreadsheet that tracked the four major categories of food, travel, goods, and services, and home energy use. Over many years, these efforts helped me reduce my carbon footprint by 30% over four years. Nonetheless, after these four years, I began to realize that there was an increasing number of people who saw the world as I did and wanted to take climate action, both on the large systemic scale but also in terms of their own carbon footprints as a starting point." Sanchali noted the complexity of the carbon offset market saying, "Carbon offsets are tricky, and I learned this firsthand by trying to buy carbon offsets for my wedding guests. No offset project is perfect or without its flaws. We believe this reality necessitates a portfolio approach in the same way that no financially savvy individual bets all their money on a single stock. We recognize that there are risks and that each project operates on a different timeline. In addition, we consider factors such as permanence, additionality, biodiversity impact, transparency, and local community impacts." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- 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 highly vetted, 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. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. 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.

Led by managing director David Miller, Clean Energy Ventures is catalyzing investment in seed-stage climate tech companies with the potential to drive a 2.5+ gigaton reduction in carbon emissions. For more detailed show notes read the interview transcript here. Below are two excerpts from the podcast.  Speaking to Clean Energy Venture's approach to venture investments Miller said, "Clean Energy Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm. We are often the first institutional capital to invest in a company, often at the seed stage. We are always looking for companies with transformative potential that might not receive capital otherwise. In fact, we have created a metric to define the type of transformative impact that we are looking for. We aim to invest in companies with the potential to reduce 2.5 gigatons of GHG emissions by 2050. We recognize the importance of climate change and the limited time at our disposal. Nonetheless, as early-stage investors, more than anything else we invest in people. As a consequence of our people-first approach, we believe we are able to add substantial value in the form of mentorship and a hands-on investment approach from our entrepreneurial team members and venture partners." Miller highlighted the importance of the firm's screening methodology, saying, "My initial partners and I have been investing in climate tech companies for 16-17 years. These days we are seeing potential investments in hundreds of companies every year so the importance of screening is greater than ever before. Our screening process is simple and focuses on impact. We ask two questions. The first is how much emission reduction impact does one unit of your product drive, and how does it drive it? We recognize that the definition of the unit will vary across companies but we want to understand the impact on this granular level. The second question is how many units do you expect to deploy at scale? From there, we map the answers to these questions to an S-curve of adoption and calculate the area under the curve for comparison against our 2.5 gigaton benchmark." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- 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 highly vetted, 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. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. 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.

Led by Scott Frazier, Carbon America is a carbon dioxide capture and sequestration 'super developer' deploying existing off-the-shelf carbon removal technology while also developing its own proprietary next-generation technology. Carbon America was created to transform the carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) industry by lowering costs and rapidly increasing deployment.  Scott described Carbon America's approach to carbon capture sequestration saying, "Carbon America is an end-to-end vertically integrated carbon sequestration project development company. We think of the company’s evolution in three stages. In the first stage, we are using existing off-the-shelf carbon capture technology to remove CO2 in projects that we consider to be low-hanging fruit, such as ethanol or ammonia production plants. In the second stage, we plan to deploy proprietary technology, currently being developed in-house, for addressing less concentrated flue gas point sources. In the third stage, we intend to deploy ambient carbon capture technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. In this way, we are meeting the urgency of the moment and demonstrating our project development and management expertise while we develop and contribute unique technologies and approaches to the carbon removal space." Scott further highlighted his unconventional cleantech background, "I was originally trained as an aerospace engineer. After my schooling, I was fortunate enough to work on some of the space shuttle programs and then eventually transitioned to working on a really audacious project with Andy Beal [a finance billionaire and philanthropist]. Some of the facilities and projects that I and the team I assembled under Beal are being used today by SpaceX and Elon Musk. I think I learned an incredibly valuable lesson in audaciousness: If you keep it simple and break problems into their component parts, there is no reason that very difficult problems cannot be solved. After about four years working for Beal, I spent eight years working on a solar technology project and then transitioned to working on an energy storage application with the cofounder of Carbon America, Alex Lau [a real estate developer and cleantech super angel]." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- 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 highly vetted, 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. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. 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.

Led by CEO Kevin Schulte, GreenSpark Solar is a distributed solar project developer and contractor based in Rochester, New York. The company has consistently been one of Rochester's fastest-growing businesses and continues to expand to date with project development capabilities ranging from residential solar installations to commercial-scale projects for which the company provides engineering procurement and construction services. To learn more visit the company's website. Kevin summarized GreenSpark's business saying, "GreenSpark Solar is a certified B Corporation and solar energy development/installation company based in Rochester, New York. We do a variety of distributed solar projects ranging from residential projects, of which we will contract 150-200 deals this year, to small business projects, to larger-scale projects for which we have an in-house engineering procurement and construction team. We will do about 50 MW of those projects this year. At our core, we are builders, and we’re building solar at scale in the larger Rochester area." Kevin talked about his path to cleantech entrepreneurship saying, "I have always had the overarching intention of working for the benefit of others. I started college as a biotechnology and premed student with an interest in epidemiology. However, in my first college class, my professor showed a pictograph of the greenhouse gas effect. It immediately became clear to me that this was a very big problem that I wanted to work on. I changed my major and studied economics, public policy, and energy system design. After college, I sent a resume and cover letter to every company on the American Wind Energy Association webpage and got a job in the industry. In 2002 after a couple of years of working in the industry, my college friends and I decided to start a business. That business has evolved from a consultancy to the nation’s largest distributed wind installer, to a solar and storage company today." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- 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 highly vetted, 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. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. 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.

Led by founder Komal Ahmad Copia is striving to solve the world's dumbest problem in food waste and hunger by creating a platform to connect food oversupplied businesses with food-hungry nonprofits. The company is also developing predictive analytics tools to reduce food waste for restaurants and large food suppliers.  Komal summarized Copia's mission and business saying, "Copia is trying to solve “the world’s dumbest problem.” In a world with so much technology, innovation, and abundance, issues like hunger should not exist. The hunger problem is a logistics problem, not a scarcity problem. Copia is a platform that connects businesses with excess food to nonprofits that are in need at just the right time when these nonprofits can make use of donated food." Komal highlighted Copia's approach to scale saying, "We serve the United States and Canada. We have partnered with Doordash and Postmates, and we have created a webhook integration that automatically notifies a driver for one of these services when a business requests that food be picked up. These partnerships provide tremendous scale with 500,000 drivers throughout the United States, making us geographically agnostic." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- 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 highly vetted, 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. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. 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.

Led by CEO Josh Santos, Noya is bringing carbon-negative technology to market by retrofitting existing cooling towers to provide no-cost carbon removal technology to large facility managers. The company generates revenue by selling upcycled food-grade carbon dioxide to the beverage industry and has established revenue-sharing agreements with its facility manager partners. To learn more about Noya visit their website. Josh highlighted Noya's mission and capital-light approach to carbon capture and sequestration saying, "Noya’s fundamental aim is to combat climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by means of retrofitting existing infrastructure with carbon removal technology. The upfront capital costs of constructing new carbon removal technologies are substantial. Instead, our approach is to retrofit existing industrial cooling towers by adding a chemical blend into the water that sits within these towers. Consequently, this water becomes a sponge that sucks carbon dioxide out of the air. There are two million cooling towers in the United States so we have a lot of work ahead of us." Josh noted two key ingredients in Noya's pitch to facility managers, saying "It has been important to create incentive alignment and appeal to the inherent wants and needs of these facility managers. One of these needs is to improve the sustainability of their facilities. There has been a big push to implement LED lighting and address other forms of low-hanging carbon fruit, but ultimately there is a need to do more. Our retrofit offers a carbon-negative contribution to the larger push to meet sustainability commitments. The second aspect of this incentive alignment has been our business model which requires no capital or operating expenditure from the facilities that we retrofit. Instead, we finance the installation of the equipment and cover operational costs in exchange for getting access to these large carbon sinks. On the back end, we give facility owners 10% of the revenue that we generate from the sale of the consequent carbon dioxide concentrate." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- 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 highly vetted, 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. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. 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.

Co-led by Principal Amy Duffuor, the Prime Impact Fund invests catalytic capital into early-stage technologies with the capability to have a gigaton scale impact on carbon emissions.  Amy noted Prime Impact Fund's differentiated approach to venture capital saying, "Prime Impact Fund is a $50 million early-stage fund focused on pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds for companies with the potential to create gigaton-scale carbon emission reductions. All of our capital from limited partners is structurally more patient and flexible, or what we call “catalytic capital,” which gives us an advantage and opportunity to approach the problem a little differently." Amy highlighted some of Prime's early investments saying, "We have invested in 13 companies to date, and they really run the gamut. The first company that we invested in was Lilac Solutions, which is an extraordinary company that is doing great work in the lithium extraction space. Another portfolio company is Clean Crop Technologies that creates unique ionized gasses to increase food safety, reduce crop loss, and address food waste. This is important since agriculture is responsible for over 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and food waste alone is responsible for about 6% of emissions. The last one that I will mention here is Noon Energy which is a long-duration energy storage provider. Their low-cost battery is a carbon-oxygen battery driven by a proprietary catalyst that could replace peaker plants." Here is the transcript summary of the podcast. -- 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 highly vetted, 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. Here are membership benefits, and these are sample members. To request more information on membership, click here. 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.